The Visible Man

in Shenandoah

Our family reunions were always Spencer reunions, pilgrimages to where my mother and her four sisters were raised. Though married and reluctantly scattered across the Midwest, they still preferred to think of themselves as Spencer girls. In the peace and familiarity of Danville, Illinois, it must have seemed possible to my mother and my aunts to recover a portion of their youth, or at least to recall it with a complacency which transformed it into a legend. A bulging, ominous scrapbook containing the testimony of their legends lay conspicuously upon a coffee table in my grandparents’ living-room. When opened, the musty fragrance of its pressed and yellow contents created the almost palpable intimacy in which the Spencer sisters would forever dwell.
The rear of the scrapbook contained wedding and birth announcements; the Spencer sisters were willing to make that much concession to the faint rumbling of time. And successful children, those who did honor to their mothers, were rewarded with a seat at the dining-room table during supper. Nancy, the oldest cousin, won her place among the adults when she became the first of us to graduate college. Cousin Dick enlisted in the Marine Corps and always filled his chair with a crisp and gleaming uniform. Rita Fay, though not yet twenty, married a rich Indian law student with a future in politics (there is still talk of her glorious six-layer wedding cake: there was a layer for each of the Spencer sisters and her family, and the loftiest layer was shared by the newlyweds and our grandparents) and claimed her seat. Other cousins quickly followed: Bob became an doctor, Phil taught physiology at a Michigan university, and Michael, although “lost” for a time while “messing with motors” finally found the “the right girl” and practiced optometry in a Cleveland suburb. I remember his mother, my Aunt Sarah, bringing his shingle to a family reunion to remove any doubt of his, or her, success.
And so, at the prodigious age of 12, I decided to secure a seat at the large dining-room table with a demonstration at the next family reunion of my ability in science. My love for science had begun a few years earlier with the Soviets’ first venture into space. I purchased a small telescope, read the accompanying pamphlet, and watched the moon and stars long after my parents thought I was sleeping. For a birthday I received a microscope set and scrutinized a wide assortment of objects: talcum powder and hairs and wings pulled from flies. For purely scientific reasons I would masturbate onto a slide to analyze sperm. I saw none, but the mess didn’t prevent repeated attempts.
Gradually, I became fascinated with detail rather than mass, and by training myself to observe scrupulously I learned to discover new aspects of familiar objects. Some entire designs were revealed in seemingly inessential characteristics.
During that summer I continued to study plants and insects. My father helped me convert the basement storeroom into a small laboratory that I quickly cluttered with fundamental experiments; red ink crawling up celery stalks, mold growing on water-soaked bread. I watched Mister Wizard regularly on television although I was never allowed a chemistry set. “Why, it’s every day,” my mother told when I asked for one, “that I read about some little boy that blows off his hand while messing with that stuff.” My pleas were ineffective. The word of mothers, in this family at least, is absolute.
That autumn, however, my interest in science diminished. Finding diversion under a microscope became increasingly difficult, bug catching grew tedious, and since chemistry was prohibited, my experiments were limited. And so, out of boredom, provoked by a line spoke by Mister Wizard, my attention focused on the human body, “the most marvelous and complex of all scientific achievements.” I made the acquaintance of the Visible Man.
He was only a plastic model of a man, one foot high, but nothing since has consumed more of my interest and care. I assembled the major internal organs from the esophagus to the tip of the large intestines with a hundred plastic parts and glue. By reading the instruction manual while working on each piece, I learned the organ’s function, which juices it secreted, and even the problems encountered if that organ failed to function properly. With the best set of plastic model paints, I painted each piece the exact hue of the living organ: the liver was painted a rusty brown, the gall bladder green, and the lungs a milky pink. After the pieces dried I placed them in the chest and torso cavity of the skeleton, but each organ could still be extracted separately from the Visible Man and examined. I surrounded the skeleton and organs with a transparent shell of a man’s body standing upright, legs spread slightly, arms to the side, thumbs outward–the “anatomical position of vulnerability,” as the instruction manual explained, “a position most conductive to inspection and introspection.” Among the lessons the Visible Man taught me was to avoid, at least in certain situations, that position entirely.
My final step was painting an elaborate system of veins and arteries on the Visible Man’s transparent shell. It was a project demanding my entire concentration, but after placing the completed work in its stand and inspecting the bones and organs and that network of bloodlines, my model proved an affirmation of Master Wizard’s word. And so, with the Visible Man safely in his box and cradled in my arms, my mother, father, and I left for the next family reunion where I would display to my relatives not merely the complexities of the human body but the product of my own creation.

After less than two hours we arrived at Grandma’s house, an enormous house in which even the persistent smell of preservatives had remained unchanged during half a century of Spencer occupancy. The house was always referred to as “Grandma’s house,” although Grandpa lived there too; the Spencer sisters acknowledged their love for their father, but if he ever made a decision about anything that occurred in that house, he announced it to an empty room.
Mother knocked at the door. My father and I remained there while she pranced to the porch window and looked in. She waved and rejoined as the door was opened by Aunt Betty who enthusiastically hugged and kissed her. Exclamatory questions, left unanswered, were exchanged as greetings. Aunt Betty ushered my parents into the living room where they were welcomed by other aunts and uncles and selected cousins as if they had just entered their own surprise party. More hugs and kisses were exchanged, and I quietly followed the back of my father’s coat.
But since affections weren’t allowed to die, attention did finally turn to me. I was fondled, interrogated about my health, and otherwise shown the measure of regard appropriate to a nephew who was recognized merely as a child of a Spencer sister. My name was confused–I was always too polite to correct that—and at the precise moment when that first waver of enthusiasm was felt, my parents and I were hurried off to the kitchen by a gaggle of aunts so that greetings could be renewed in the presence of Grandma and Grandpa. The three of us and all my aunts flocked around my grandparents who seemed, despite the commotion, only remotely interested.
The younger nieces and nephews were never present at our arrivals. They were either in the backyard or more frequently at cousin Norm’s, for one of the Spencer sisters lived within walking distance of her mother’s house. I asked an aunt the whereabouts of my cousins, was given a fleeting reply, and departed unnoticed except by my father who told me to be careful, have a nice time. I walked slowly down the porch steps and lingered by the banister, hoping that others would notice my absence and ask me to rejoin the festivities. They didn’t, but never once (since I was continually reminded of it) did I doubt the love these people had for me, and the concern, in their adoring hearts for my well-being.

The children were given an exact time to be home for supper, and together we returned joyous and perspiring. But invariably our return was hours too early, and so our mood dissolved to sobriety and even boredom as we huddled beside our fathers and fell asleep. An aunt would wake us some time later and hurry us, groggy and disoriented, to a table set up in the living room where we spent the first part of the meal in that irritable state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness.
Dessert was served. At the main table it was accompanied by a dark liqueur in a thin glass that several aunts sipped with long, hesitant faces. Others, reaching for a coffee in light porcelain cups, lounged on chair-arms in anticipation of the after-dinner hours. Soon the younger nieces and nephews would be encouraged to play on the front porch and wait, perhaps hours, for husbands to drag their wives home. I excused myself from the table before this, however, and stepped across the room to the baby grand piano on which I had placed the Visible Man. He was obscured by five large photographs of the Spencer sisters arranged upon a fraying silk coverlet inscribed Atlantic City Boardwalk 1940, as if the piano’s only purpose in occupying this enormous space was to provide a pedestal for these representatives of Time. The photos had dimmed to a pasty yellowish hue, and these faces were so different from the Spencer sisters I knew that I had to ask which sister was which, a question that always received an impatient answer from my aunts who denied that any change had ever occurred.
As I walked toward the dining room with the Visible Man in my hands I tried wetting my lips but the inside of my mouth felt as if I had finished a dozen saltines only moments before. My heartbeat heavily; I could hear it in my ears.
Mother saw me approaching. Her smile gave me confidence for it seemed to place absolute faith in my possibilities, as if she could foresee the admiration I would win from her sisters. I looked to my father for a similar reaction but he was distracted with uncooperative matches and a cigarette that dangled precariously from his lips. I thought the matchbook quivered for an instant, but Mother began speaking before I could be sure.
“I want you all to see something,” she addressed the table while tapping a glass with a spoon. The hilarity did not entirely subside, however. She mentioned specific names and repeated her request, all the while tapping her glass.
“What are you going to show us, Kathleen?” Aunt Helen asked, her eyebrows raised in mock alarm. “In front of the children?” She looked at me with an expression which pretended a desire to protect me. “Decency forbids!”
And with her exclamation the table’s commotion fell to a silence it had avoided all evening.
“I’m not going to show you anything,” Mother said to Aunt Helen. To the table she announced, “He is,” and she placed her hand upon my shoulders.
“Aaaaahh,” moaned Uncle Harry, “I’d rather you show us something, Kathleen,” and hilarity pieced together again, pounding the room with laughter.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing what he has to show us,” Rita said, a smile, like her dimple, tucked in the corner of her mouth. He brother Bob looked at her with alarmed, critical eyes. Rita noticed and replied to his reprimanding gaze. “Well, I wouldn’t,” she insisted.
An aunt retrieved several untouched liqueurs as if intending to clear the table.
“Estelle,” my mother said, “you can get that later. I want everyone to see this.”
Aunt Estelle sat down apologetically.
“It’s something he’s been working on for a long time,” Mother continued, “and he knew you’d all like to see it.”
Just as I stepped to the table Uncle Morry stood up, leaned aggressively on his fists and stared at me. “Who is this kid? Does he belong to one of us? Hey kid, who are you anyway?” He turned to Uncle Pete sitting next to him. “Who is this kid for Christ’s sake, Pete? Who is he?” They laughed together as Uncle Morry continued pointing and asked who is this kid, who is he.
“Morris, sit down, for heaven’s sake,” said his wife.
Uncle Morry stopped abruptly, slowly sank into his chair and said, “I just wanted to know who the child is, Betty.”
Then he exploded to his feet again, shouting, “Which reminds me, who the hell are you?” as he and Uncle Pete laughed louder and louder than before.
Mother let the joke exhaust itself before she spoke again. “He’s been interested in science for a long time now– ”
“Another doctor in the family,” someone said, and faces turned to cousin Bob who, with his wife cuddling against him, waved to the table in a casual way.
“Do you want to be a doctor too?” Bob’s mother asked me.
I told her I didn’t know.
“I mean,” she smiled, “to be a doctor like Bobby?” There was a tender insistence in her voice. I repeated that I didn’t know yet.
“You don’t know yet?” Uncle Morry shouted loudly. “Everyone in this family knows what he wants to be.” He turned again to Uncle Pete. “Who is this kid?”
“Let’s hear what he has to say, for God’s sake,” Nancy said, looking very tired.
“Thank you, Nancy,” Mother said.
“You’re welcome, Aunt Kathleen.”
Something tipped over at the end of the table and I watched my father sweep ashes and cigarette butts back into the ashtray with the heel of his hand. He looked very serious and never glanced up. Everyone at the table looked at him with such surprise that for a moment I think they believed he had flung the thing against a wall.
“He’s been interested in science for a long time,” my mother said, a hurried concern in her voice, “and he’s spent a great deal of time working on this because he thought you’d all like to see it.”
“Kathleen, we do want to see it,” Aunt Estelle said, looking at her husband. “Don’t we?”
Uncle Pete raised his eyebrows and nodded vehemently, denying any connection with a disturbance.
“All right then,” my mother said, looking about the table and giving me a final smile. The table was quiet, but when I placed the Visible Man, still in his box, before my grandparents, Uncle Harry made a trumpet noise through his cupped hands and said, “Take it away, what’s your name.” Uncle Morry slammed his hand on the table. Cups rattled as he and Uncle Pete laughed. Others, watching the uncles, began laughing with them, and in an instant I was completely forgotten.
I removed the Visible Man from his box and, placing him securely in his stand, adjusted my display. With an unspoiled napkin I polished his transparent casing to afford better vision of his interior and I secured particular organs after checking their extractability. I turned the Visible Man so that he faced my relatives, and standing there in his anatomical position, he slowly drew the glances of everyone at the table. I smiled down at him, confident of the fascination he compelled.
The room was quiet. I began.
“This piece of workmanship,” I quoted, verbatim, the instruction manual, “is called the Visible Man and, as you can see, is exactly that.”
I paused, giving them all the time they desired.
“What the hell is that?” Uncle Morry said in amazement. “It’s a doll. It’s a God damn doll! Sid,” he said to my father, who reluctantly looked up, “what the hell are you raising here?”
“It’s not a doll,” I said. “It’s something scientific.”
Cousin Bob leaned forward inquisitively. “Something what?” he asked. His wife nudged him in the ribs. “Ah, scientific.”
I spoke quickly, above the comments and the snorts of laughter, of how the Visible Man is a plastic representation of the interior of the human body through the epidermis, and how those thin red and blue lines were veins and arteries that carried blood to all parts of the body. I told them that all 206 bones were displayed and why the skull is shaped like a dome. I removed the detachable breast plate, exposing the inner organs, and explained why the rib cage encircles them and how well protected the heart is.
I had their attention! A few relatives had even bent forward to listen more closely. My cousins from the living room table drifted into the room during my introduction, listening with a curiosity I had anticipated and now savored. I continued to speak until Aunt Gertrude leaped from her chair and strained forward.
“He doesn’t have a pisher,” she said, a mixture of delight and terror on her face. “He doesn’t have a pisher!” she repeated, pointing to the Visible Man’s groin. Several cousins giggled, Bob’s new wife smiled pleasantly, but most at the table looked at Aunt Gertrude with more amazement than humor, as if she had written the family secret on a public washroom wall. She impatiently scanned the table with a mad smile.
“Daddy,” she exclaimed, sweeping the Visible Man from his stand and holding him an inch from Grandpa’s nose, “he doesn’t have a pisher!” Nervous laughter barely concealed whispers of ‘Oh no, Gertrude, oh no.’
“Damn it, Gertrude,” Uncle Morry yelled, “they can’t make dolls with pishers! And besides, your mother would never permit one of those things in the house!”
“Gertrude,” Uncle Chuck said, “it’s a model. It’s just a boy’s model,” he assured her grimly.
“Oh, I know,” she laughed defiantly, dropping the Visible Man to the table. “I know,” and she stood there, her eyes deep in her husband’s face.
“Could I see the heart?” Aunt Betty asked, and I removed several organs quickly, hoping her interest would divert the attention back to me. She accepted the heart as if it were a pinned butterfly.
A deep growling noise came across the table. Uncle Jos sat forward, a napkin tied around his neck and a knife and fork in each hand. “Gimme da guts,” he gargled in a rasping voice, “I wanna see dem guts dere.”
Reluctantly, I removed the large and small intestines and passed them to my mother, who I hoped could prevent him from further intrusions.
“My God,” Jos said when the organs reached him, “look at the guts on this guy.”
I explained that the small intestines along can be extended thirty feet.
“Yeah?” he said, a rise in his voice. “This guy must have to shit all day long.”
Everyone started laughing then, even my mother who took the pieces back from Uncle Jos, placing them in Bob’s outstretched hand. My father merely stared blankly.
“I thought this would be shaped like a heart,” Aunt Betty announced more to the table than to me. “It should be shaped like a heart,” she said, “like a Valentine heart heart. I may not know much about what’s inside someone,” and she placed the organ on the table and pushed it away like a grotesque bug, “but I know a heart when I see one.”
She sat down aggressively, and her manner challenged everything I could say afterwards.
But I did continue to speak. I extracted the Visible Man’s brain, and while it was passed carelessly about the table, I nervously explained the brain’s various lobes and the functions it plays in the body mechanics.
“Sara Bellman,” said Aunt Estelle, her hands touching her cheeks. “Betty, do you remember Sara Bellman?”
“Estelle,” Uncle Harry said flatly, “the child said cerebellum.”
“Sara Bellman. I haven’t heard her name in years. Mama, is her husband still in the hospital?”
“Her husband was never in the hospital,” my mother declared.
“He most certainly was,” Estelle protested. “He had a massive coronary in the East Side Bakery three days before Gary was born.”
“That was Ed Bailey,” Aunt Betty said. “Sara Bellman married that little shoe salesman from Peoria with the hearing problem.”
“Betty,” Aunt Estelle said suddenly, “I think you’re right,” and she sat down immediately.
By now my mother and Aunt Gertrude were in a passionate discussion about Ed Bailey, convincing themselves that Yes, they had sent a get-well card, when a terrible scream stopped everything in a single stroke. Uncle Morry slowly brought his hand from the seat of his pants and, opening his fist, revealed the brain of the Visible Man.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
“I’ve always said that’s where your brains are, Morry,” Uncle Pete said, but Morry paid no attention and slowly rubbed his seat.
My uncles fell silent as the aunts continued the more pressing matters of Sara Bellman and Ed Bailey. Bob chewed his wife’s wrist and Rita began clearing the table, avoiding pieces of the Visible Man that lay scattered about. Relatives disappeared slowly into the living room or the kitchen. I stared at the Visible Man; his plastic shell was empty now, and the painted veins and arteries were pronounced. And, after looking this way through the Visible Man, I noticed behind him, upon the coffee table in the living-room, the overstuffed scrapbook bursting with the tradition of the Spencer family. The Visible Man’s empty shell distorted the scrapbook until it was deformed, but I had no difficulty recognizing it.