When I was seven, I ran home from school every day so I could watch Batman foil one of the criminals who routinely plagued Gotham City. As often as not, Batman didn’t have to do anything because his bungling foes got caught up in their own schemes at which point Batman, played by the inimitable Adam West, would turn to his youthful sidekick and say: “Hoist with his own petard!”
I fell in love with the word “petard” and hoped to hear it in every episode. I had my own youthful sidekick, my brother Abe who was two years younger, and I took to calling him a “petard” which I pronounced with a long “e” to rhyme with the word “retard”, a word which it was acceptable to say at the time, not so much anymore. “You’re such a peetard,” I’d yell as I hit him or shoved him or abused him in any number of ways that should have inflicted lasting trauma. Once, I kicked him so hard in the ass I almost lodged my foot up his rectum. The blow launched him across the lawn where he writhed and screamed, and when our mother came running out the front door in what my memory presents to me as a day-glo coloured apron but was more likely a drab cloth tied with fraying strings, and when she asked what was going on, I told her that I was Batman and I’d just hoist Abe with his own peetard. Abe pulled himself up from the weedless lawn—weedless because Dad had sprayed it with Roundup so his boys could horse around on the best lawn—and ran into the comforting arms of his mother notwithstanding the fact that everybody knows how, in real life, both Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson didn’t have mothers because they were orphans. We liked the idea of being orphans, but not the inconvenience.
Unbeknownst to me, my mom had a graduate degree in comparative literature. I say “unbeknownst” not because it was a big secret but because, at the age of seven, I had no idea there was such a thing as comparative literature. It was only later that I began to appreciate how my mom was really smart and that it must have been a drag to spend her days with a pair of idiots like Abe and me. Years later, she maintained it was her choice, a matter of love, yada, yada, yada. But I don’t believe her. I think she felt pressured by her in-laws to be a proper stay-at-home mom. Or maybe it was social pressure—staying at home signalled that your man was such a good earner he generated great wads of surplus income; it was important to send such a signal so you could feel better than your neighbours. Or maybe it was something wafting in the air—like the residue that floated through the screen door each time Dad sprayed the lawn.
My memories of my mom from that time are vague, like the black and white images shot on the Kodak Instamatic my parents gave to me for my seventh birthday, square prints before we ever had Instagram, blurred and blown, but grafted to the times like sandals to the Roman Empire or plague to medieval Europe. However, there was one distinctive feature lodged in my memory: my mother had horn rimmed glasses that drew to sharp points far beyond the sides of her head. I associate those glasses with my mother’s assiduous reading habit. When she worked in the kitchen, dusting the counter with flour so she could roll out dough for cookies or for one of her phenomenal strawberry rhubarb pies, she’d be looking to her left, to a book splayed on a tilted stand, and I assumed it was a cookbook telling her what to do next. It wasn’t long before I’d established my own assiduous reading habit and could decipher the spines for myself: my mom was cooking by rote while she scanned pages from Boccaccio or Dante or Chaucer.
So when I told my mom I was Batman and had just hoist Abe with his own peetard, she caressed Abe’s tear-stained cheek and said, “Oh, you boys are so funny. I don’t know who this Batman fellow is, but I do know something about Hamlet. And it’s not peetard but petard—short “e”—by the way.”
I probably had the only mom in the neighbourhood who actually knew what a petard is and could tell me where Batman swiped the expression from. (Mom would kill me for that dangling preposition, but she’s not here to police me, is she?) Mom said Batman was worse than any of the bad guys he was trying to foil because he engaged in plagiarism which, in her books, was just about the worst thing a person can do. “Imagination! Inspiration! Originality!” and she tapped her head before laying out what would prove to be the first of many lectures on Shakespeare and etymology and, later, as she began to devour contemporary French philosophy, critical theory.
You might expect that when my dad got home from work that evening, I ran to him screaming, “Dad, Dad, Mom just ruined Batman.” In fact, the opposite was true. Mom brought Batman to life in a way that none of the other kids in the neighbourhood could ever access. They watched it on their crappy black and white TV sets and I watched it in larger-than-life three-dimensional wide-screen wonder.
Hamlet wasn’t just using the figure of a bomb under the ramparts to describe how he sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths; he was also telling a fart joke.
Mom explained to Abe and me that a petard is a bomb. Back in the olden days of castles and ramparts and moats and whatnot, people would put a bomb under the foundation of a wall, say, and bring the whole thing down so they could storm the castle and kill the king. It wasn’t the explanation that captivated us; it was the illustration. Mom went to the grocery store and bought cans of pop and Mentos then took us in our bathing suits to the sandbox in the back yard where we built an elaborate sand castle with enough room underneath to position a can of Coke. She placed plastic toy soldiers (they were modern American soldiers which prompted a later lecture about anachronisms) on the ramparts, then dropped Mentos into the Coke and blew the whole thing sky high. Mom pointed to the toy soldiers: “See how those Vietnam boys got blown into the air?” We nodded. “Well, they were hoist with their own petard.”
Abe and I spent the next hour rebuilding the sand castle, blowing it up with our homemade petard, and rebuilding it all over again. That bought Mom some time to read another couple stories from the Decameron and maybe make dinner if she remembered. But here’s the kicker:
Mom explained how Shakespeare was a smart guy who knew how to say one thing and mean something else. The simplest example of that is the pun. She asked me to pretend stab her with a sword then enacted Mercutio’s death scene in Romeo & Juliet where her dying words were: “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” She looked up at us from the floor: “Get it?” For a moment, she had forgotten that we were five and seven and had no idea what she was talking about. We did enjoy watching our mother die on the living room shag, though. And mom had the consolation of two sons who, when they attained the appropriate age in their natural cognitive development, repeatedly ruined dinner by turning the conversation into a “worst pun” contest. “Pass the peas.” “No, I will not appease your desire for peas.” “Did you clean your room like I asked?” “No, I’m suffering from roomatism.” And so on until we reduced her to tears of frustration.
The point is that, even in the case of the petard, Shakespeare probably meant more than one thing at the same time. Hamlet wasn’t just using the figure of a bomb under the ramparts to describe how he sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths; he was also telling a fart joke. When you hoist yourself with your own petard, you’re blasting your chair with enough force to launch your ass skyward. Mom made a massive raspberry and jumped into the air and Abe and I got the giggles. Later, when I tried to explain all this to my grandmother (mom’s mother-in-law), the elderly woman drew her dry lips into a tight rictus and scowled. That was the first time I had an intimation that not all mothers are made the same and I was probably one of the luckiest kids around.
There are those who didn’t really know her (and I include my grandmother in their number) and so would dispute my intimation, especially after she tried to enact the Mercutio scene for real, not with a sword but with pills, a handful scattered across the glass-topped coffee table, and got herself carted off to the hospital for the next few months. They said she was being selfish. They said she was taking the easy way out to avoid her duties as a wife and mother. They said she was abandoning us boys while she got to go off and indulge herself with psychotherapy and all that self-actualizing nonsense.
While mom was away, I stopped watching Batman. It bothered me that the caped crusader and his faithful sidekick didn’t have moms. I tried to carry on like a superhero without a mom, but I couldn’t. Batman never cried, but sometimes I did. Batman never felt guilt, but a lot of the time I worried that maybe it was my fault mom ended up where she did. And the whole mess weighed on me so I could barely make it to school in the morning. If mom’s detractors—and there were a lot of them—had watched Batman, they might even have said she was hoist with her own petard, as if she’d done all this to herself. As a matter of strict causation, she had done this to herself. Yet all these years later, with mom and dad both gone, and Abe dead two years now after a protracted struggle with colon cancer, strict causation strikes me as an overly legalistic way to view life’s strange unfolding.
There was a petard. Yes. But viewed so long after the fact, I find it hard to say that it was mom who planted it.