The Cavern Under the "Hutch"

  

Murphy looked me in the eyes, grabbed the lapels of my school uniform jacket and pleaded, “You will not believe what I am about to show you!” Some afternoons I spent at Michael Murphy’s home after school until my Mom would pick me up. In the early sixties latch-key kids like us had free range to do just about anything our little hearts desired. Thankfully for all concerned, our twelve year-old hearts usually desired something involving a ball and speed.

            Why this day was different, I will never know but Murphy was poised to usher me into a ritual of manhood that most never experience – the full meaning of which I was not to even approach until almost a half a century later.

            Murph’s house stood at the end of Mohegan Place, a sleepy north New Rochelle street that cul-de-sac’d at the Hutchinson River Parkway. Leave It To Beaver homes on half acres lined the street and we played hardball catch without a thought of traffic bothering us. But that got old quickly. So when he invited me on a mysterious journey with him, I jumped at the chance.

            “So, where’re we going?”

            “Not far. But it’s underground. Right here in our neighborhood.” Everything Murphy said about this was with emphasis. His eyes enlarged. His mouth opened wide. His cheeks pulled back and his arms flailed.

            “Wow. Let’s go.”

            “OK, but you have to swear – swear that you will not breathe a word of this to any soul.” This was unlike my happy-go-lucky friend, Michael C. Murphy, and that got my full attention. He wasn’t the guy to take much too seriously. Oh, he was a good student and all, that but his light-heartedness was what attracted me originally. So all this swearing on a stack of Bibles was out of character.

            I held the three fingers of my right hand up in the well-known Scout sign. “All right,” I relented. “I swear. Now, can we go?” His eyes widened with a big tight-lipped smile.

            “Follow me.” We dropped our mitts on the lawn and off we went. “Gotta sneak through the Oliver’s back yard but they’re not home.” We darted down their driveway, past patio furniture out in the back and then through the hedges at the perimeter. We were heading toward the unseen parkway. I could hear the traffic now as we worked our way through the underbrush and out onto a bridle path, now named the Leatherstocking Trail. Murphy would glance happily over his shoulder periodically, in a “You are going to love this” look.

            Almost arbitrarily he stopped, looked the overgrowth up and down the highway side of the trail and stepped into a raspberry patch. “Are you kidding me, Daniel Boone?” I did my best to avoid the berry’s prickers but thankfully, it didn’t last long.  “There,” he barked. “Up ahead.”

            As the brush thinned a round culvert appeared, maybe six feet in diameter. We didn’t know then but the original Hutch ran right over it. Construction was started in 1921 and finished just before we entered World War Two. We ducked into the tunnel, careful not to get our feet wet on the trickling steam bed. “Almost there,” Murphy’s voice echoed through the old brick conduit. I could see he was straightening up and soon we were through. “Enter!” His voice echoed.

            I stepped onto bed of gravel and trap rock that was much newer than the mossy stuff that lined the old culvert. This was recently built, I thought. As I stood up straight I felt the large room expand in a sublime way. We both were a little giddy from it.  We had entered into a huge cavern, the basement of a new overpass of the parkway, that was easily thirty feet high. With the width of the four lanes above, it extended north to south maybe sixty feet between the arches that supported the road above. A big cement and gravel room – with reverberation to justify its importance.

“Cassone, I give you…” like a barker Murphy extended his right arm upward as he pointed to the far arched-wall, “…Matilda!”

            I was speechless. A twelve-year old doesn’t see things like this often and I knew intuitively that this was a special moment. For high on the southern wall of the gigantic concrete cavern was a crude, charcoal drawing of a voluptuous naked woman. And it was quite anatomically correct.  “Well?” My guide was intruding on my enjoyment but I did have to acknowledge him.

            “Uh, it…sure…is…” I stuttered, not knowing how to offer my feedback. “…beautiful.”

            “Beautiful?” Murphy was taken aback and clearly not getting the response he was looking for. “Of course she’s beautiful. That’s why I brought you here, dickhead.”

            “Yeah, of course.” Without taking my eyes of her, I ventured a pertinent question. “So, who else knows about this place?”

            He looked at me with all the earnestness he could muster and said very seriously, “You. Me. And the guy who drew her.” Proudly Murphy added, “I call her…Matilda.”

            “She” didn’t need a name in my book but that was Murph all over. And my obligatory “Why Matilda, Murph?”

            “Oh, I don’t know really. She struck me as a Matilda.”

            I got back to gazing. She was a fifteen foot-high outlined young woman with her arms proudly on her hips, daring you to look at her. Being twelve, all I could focus on were her breasts and quite bushy “lower area”. Years later I would recall her hair style, a Donna Reed flip. And her sardonic smile. Yes. Matilda was very sure of herself. But the detail of her nipples kept my eyes locked on this work of art.

            And it surely was a true work of art. The cave drawings of Lascaux in France. Giotto’s frescoes. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Why, even Keith Haring’s grafitti. Matilda was right up there with them. It spoke to me, in all my naiveté, with the power of any of the world’s great art. One man had ventured in to this secluded, almost hidden, place and etched upon the cave his experience with Woman. And it was good. And those nipples - they were so erect. “Is that how they look, Murph? The nipples?”

            Now Murphy hadn’t seen a real naked girl since his Mom breast-fed him but I let him be the “expert” and teach the un-informed, little old me. “Why, sure. Of course, but they are much pinker.”

            Like those paintings in old English castles where the eyes follow you where ever you go in the room, Matilda’s gaze had a grip on us. This Colossus Of New Rochelle would guard over us and we felt safe with mother Matilda.

            On our hike back we both said nothing, except repeating our vows to never reveal any of what just happened. I reveal it now, Murph, and I am sorry to break my word. But it occurred to me recently when a good friend’s ten year old had stumbled upon a porn site while doing his homework on his Mom’s desktop. It shook the poor unsuspecting kid to the core. He didn’t have the good fortune to be ushered slowly into the magnificent world of human sexuality with a cave drawing, a guide and an active imagination like I did. The world is different now. My parents said that to me and I am sure my grandchildren will say it to theirs.

            So I leave you all with this tale of a twelve year-old’s adventure in a Father Knows Best world where kids like us could wander off into the woods and find a Matilda, hidden in plain sight, beneath the dangers of the world rolling on constantly above. And return from the journey a couple of steps closer to becoming a man.

From a Tex Avery cartoon, 1953

 

© 2018 Chris Cassone