Let Me Finish (9 page)

W
HEN
I was growing up, the top floor layout of our East Side brownstone had some features of interest for a young boy. The bathroom was halfway between the front and back of the house—between my sister's better and larger bedroom facing Ninety-third Street and my own narrower chamber, with only one window as against her three. My window faced some discouraged-looking back yards with tall, laundry-line-bearing poles. (For some reason, Ninety-fourth Street between Park and Madison was run down, more like the blocks east of Lexington.) Sometimes I brooded about the unfairness of my room assignment, even though I knew that my backyard vista, with its closely adjacent tenement windows and noises—conversations and music and sometimes yellings and curses—was preferable to the staid street stuff on Ninety-third Street. Just below my window and to my right, I looked down on the jutting oblong roof over our own lower setback, with its second-floor pantry and, below that, a ground floor laundry room with stone tubs and slabs of yellow laundry soap. My father slept in the back, underneath me. One of his windows opened out onto that tarred half-roof; winter and summer, he left the window half open at night, so that our Boston terrier Tunney could go out there whenever he needed to, then hop back in and go back to sleep on his green cushion. There was a tall, full-scale mirror on one wall of Father's bedroom, and on Monday mornings I'd stop by there and find my allowance waiting on its narrow counter—fifty cents is what I remember but it must have been lower than this at some point and then more—and, lined up neatly next to it, ten dimes: my fare on the Fifth Avenue bus to school (on 123rd Street and Morningside Park) and back, for the week. The dimes would be swallowed up, one by one, in the conductor's portable receiver, which he proffered to each boarding passenger. There was an angled trough in the middle of it, and when you slipped your dime sensuously into the center slot the conductor would depress a key in the middle of his gismo and ring up your fare:
Tring!
Only Fifth Avenue busses, which ran both ways on the avenue then, cost a dime; everything else—trolleys, other busses, the subways, and the El—were a nickel.

When I went down into the subways or up to the Third Avenue or Second Avenue Els the nickel I dropped into the receiver box went clunking down, then stopped in a little illuminated box or gallery, with a window on its entering side. The window was a curved lens, which enlarged the image of the contained coin—an Indian chief on one side; a buffalo on the other—so that the IRT change-maker,
facing out from his locked cage, could check out the latest deposit from across the entrance space and make sure it wasn't made of tin or wood. The coin, particularly the Indian-head profile, stood out in there with startling clarity, with the shadows and highlights of bas-relief imparting a museum like purity to the object. Even then, in my boyhood, I understood that the mad-inventor cleverness of this rig, though in daily use in thousands of subway stations across the city, belonged to the ornate and whimsical past, and would not survive modernization. Then, sure enough, when the clean and zippy brand-new IND subway system opened in 1933, the light boxes were gone. This is probably why I associate the illuminated coin receiver in memory with El stations, not subways, and with the intriguing advertising signs that you studied on the risers of the iron stairs you climbed to reach platform level—alternating metal strips with the message "Ipana for the Smile of Beauty" in bright red, and "Sal Hepatica for the Smile of Health" in blue. Ipana was a toothpaste and Sal Hepatica (I guess) a laxative. In wintertime when you arrived, panting, at your station and opened the door, there would be the hot, close smell of the potbellied coal stove or kerosene stove that stood in one corner, and, waiting beside your turnstile, the lit-up latest nickel.

Something else was special to me about the dimes you needed for the Fifth Avenue bus. A dime was exactly the right width to fit the screws that held the enameled metal advertising strips across the width of the seat-back in front of you. The signs, a shiny white or blue, advertised Marlborough Cigarettes—still with that elegant "-ough" ending, back then—and also a sample from the Marlborough's "Distinguished Handwriting Contest," an upscale advertising campaign of its day. Heavier and classier than the lowly Ipana-Sal Hepatica boards, they were an object to cherish—and sometimes collect. On afternoons in winter when you were alone or almost alone on the upper deck on the homeward run, you could slip a dime into one of those screws and, with a slight effort, begin to unscrew it from the seat before you. There were eight screws, all told, and if you did this right, you could keep the treasure loosely in place until about 104th Street (I got off at Ninety-fourth), then swiftly finish the job, drop the screws in your pocket while holding the plate in place with your free hand, and, rising to depart, slip the narrow, three-foot prize under your coat. This was a winter caper: in summer even Bulldog Drummond would not have found a way to pull off the heist.

 

A particular Saturday morning's trip on the New York subways in the spring of 1933 finds me on a swaying, noisy northbound IRT Lexington Avenue Local with my school friend Kimmy Atwood. We are headed for the Bronx Zoo early in the day—there are kids and parents sitting on the straw seats around us with the same destination almost surely in mind—and Kim and I are silent with purpose. On my lap is a green steamer rug, carefully folded, and within it is Humphrey, my king snake, who lies comfortably enough within his cocoon. The primo reptile in my home collection of snakes, turtles, newts, fish, and mice—Tunney and our couple of kitchen cats don't count—he
lives in a grocery box cage in the cellar, with wire screening on the top and a pair of smoothly sliding glass panels in front, a design conceived and carried out by me. Inside, there's a water dish, a twisted small tree branch without bark, and a temporary brick, put there to help Humphrey rub free of his old skin at shedding time. This comes along two or three times a year, and leaves the creature with a shining new exterior, in place of his dim and dusty-looking old one. When the process is completed each tan or black or yellow-brown scale gleams clear, as though buffed with wax; it's as if Humphrey has traded himself in for a new Studebaker. This time, though, there's been a hitch. Each time Humphrey gets ready to shed his eyes become covered with a thick, semi-transparent protective skin or scale. This normally comes away with the shed, and can be seen interestingly in place in the wispy-dry inside-out remnants of old skin he's left in the corner of his box, but this time one of the scales is still in place, leaving him with a piratelike appearance. I test him with a waving finger and find he is almost blind on that side. Then I try gently to pry the scale loose but stop almost at once, fearing I'll damage the eye. It's time for professional help.

Kim Atwood was my snakiest friend at Lincoln School, a progressive temple where oddball student interests almost outweighed the curriculum. Any time I put my hand up in class and said that I needed a time to run a mouse trip over to Amsterdam Avenue, Mr. Tibbetts or Miss Barnes would smile and say O.K., fine, because they knew that this was part of Roger's naturalist thing. Forty-five minutes later I'd be back at my desk carrying a small cardboard half-pint icecream container by its handle, with Humphrey's bi-weekly dinner scrabbling around inside. Kim had some snakes and salamanders of his own, and we were both customers of the Ross Allen Reptile Institute, in Silver Springs, Florida. One winter morning Kim and I did a Snake Assembly in the Lincoln School auditorium, with live specimens. I recall holding up my midsize, unreliable Brown Water Snake (which had ridged, dull scales, just like a Rattlesnake or Water Moccasin) and saying, "This shy semi-aquatic snake, native to the swamps or lakes of our southeastern United States, is non-poisonous but in captivity is known to display habitual—
Ow!
"

In a class replete with young double-domes, self-assured eleven-year-old artists, and the offspring of Socialists or professors of economics, Kim was our absent-minded professor. On the occasional mornings in fourth and fifth grade when he didn't turned up for class we'd wait in happy anticipation—and then sometimes, sure enough, yell and clap our hands affectionately when the word came that, yes, he'd been nailed or grazed by another car. He had the habit of stepping out into the street from between parked cars while intensely absorbed in a comic book or a science magazine, and—
smacko!
I don't recall that he ever broke anything or ended up in the hospital. Smiling sheepishly, he'd turn up again in a day or two with a lump on his forehead or a bandaged knee. The Atwoods had money—his father, Kimball Atwood, Sr., or grandfather was a Florida grapefruit king—and for a week or two after the latest mishap Kimmy would be dropped off at school in the family town car, driven by a chauffeur named Norman, whom I later
got to know as a chain smoker and repository of dirty jokes. Kim and I became good pals, frequently visiting back and forth at our houses on weekends. I was invited out to the Atwoods' place in Islip, Long Island, and when I went away to Maine on vacation after fifth grade, the Atwoods took on my monkey, a Javanese Macaque named Mac, for the whole summer. A day or two after the transfer Mac escaped from the Atwoods' house and put in a lively afternoon scampering in and out of apartment houses and delicatessens near Amsterdam Avenue before being recaptured in a boarding house. Kim mailed me a little news clip about the adventure, cut out of a back section of the
Herald-Tribune,
with an attached note that read "Fame!"

 

Kim and I were alone in the Atwoods' big Upper West Side house after school one afternoon when he came out of his parents' bedroom with a small oblong box in his hand. "Take a look," he said in an odd tone, and I looked and saw a strange, rubbery pink igloo, lightly dusted with powder. "You know what it is, don't you?" he said, and I nodded casually, although I didn't have a clue. "It's for—you know, for sex," he said—and at that instant we heard a key in the front door lock and Kim's mother's cheerful "Hello, anybody home?" He looked frantically this way and that and then dropped the thing, box and all, into the big wastebasket at the side of the magazine-table.

"Why, hello, Roger," she said, coming in to the room, with the day's mail in her hand. "How very nice to see you." I liked her—she was tall and always stylishly dressed—but felt at this instant as if our long and cheerful relationship
was suddenly poised above an abyss, with vultures lining up on the cliff face. Glancing through her mail, turning the odd envelope over to read the other side, she abstractedly and relentlessly advanced toward the fatal wastebasket, let drop some envelopes and advertisements there, and, pausing infinitesimally with her gaze on her own diaphragm, here in the living-room wastebasket, continued across the room without pause or fuss and asked if I wouldn't like some lemonade or milk or maybe iced tea, to go with Oreos.

I'm not sure if I yet knew the phrase
sang froid
at the time (I might have), but if I didn't it's a certainty that the first time I read it or had it explained the image of Kim Atwood's mother would have sprung shining into view in my mind: the Queen of Self-Possession, the helmeted goddess of cool.

 

Arrived in the Bronx, Kim and I hurried up the steps of the East Tremont Avenue subway station with our parcel, and walked quickly along Boston Road to the zoo entrance. I believe admission was free for school kids back then, but one way or another we were swiftly inside and headed for our destination. We knew the Bronx Zoo layout and most of the creatures in it by heart—just as we pretty much knew every floor and exhibit and vitrine at the Natural History Museum—but this time paid no attention to the tatty mountain goats, the motionless bison, and sleeping brown bears along our path. Arrived at the Reptile House, we gave not a glance to its stone crocodile and snake-head cornices and pointedly walked past the front door. Entering there, we knew, one first encountered the
babyish preliminary ponds full of turtles, lily pads and torpid minor alligators. The main room, inside, featured a large central cage, within which lay an enormous, always immobile African Rock Python—a palace-sized, rolled-up beige-and-tan carpet, representing the largest reptile species of all, even bigger than the black Giant Anaconda, from South America, which (in a universally-remembered factoid) could constrict and ingest a one-hundred-pound tapir for its semi-annual dinner. No one had to wonder what the zoo's own Rock Python would look like if unwrapped and dekinked to its thirty-four or -five foot length, thanks to an ancient photograph, familiar to every school kid in the greater New York area, that hung near its cage (or perhaps by the front door) and depicted a row of fifteen or twenty uniformed zoo employees staggering under the weight of the great, pulled-out specimen clasped in their arms. Within the perimeter of the snake house, Kim and I also knew, each exhibit had its own little crowd of fans, with the larger numbers always convened before the rattlesnakes, the bushmaster, the sleek and cold-looking black mamba, or the venom-smeared glass of some spitting cobras.

Passing up these pleasures, Kim and I proceeded in businesslike fashion to the employees' entrance, around to the right in back, where I rapped on the door. In memory, the door opens and I now ask "Is Dr. Ditmars in?" but second thought has led me to believe that I would never have been this naïve. Dr. Raymond L. Ditmars, the zoo's Curator of Reptiles, had become a naturalist superstar of his era, almost as famous as Dr. William Beebe, the Aquarium's ubiquitous fish guy. I'd heard Ditmars lecture once, and
had shaken his hand, but could not claim intimate acquaintance. I consoled myself with the reminder that a man of such importance, up to his ears with his expeditions and interviews, could not be expected to hang around the office all the time. In any case, I owned and had just about memorized his
Reptiles of the World,
a glorious, profusely illustrated essential text: the boy snake-owner's Koran and Talmud and Deuteronomy, rolled into one. Kim had his own copy, of course, and our frequent and extended snake conversations consisted largely of exchanged texts and photocaptions that we'd put to mind from this marvelous book, with heavy emphasis on the more lethal-looking or sounding species: the fer de lance; the eyelash viper; the rearfanged African boomslang, which sometimes manifested in bright green; the Gaboon viper, with the longest fangs on record and pale-tan leaf-pattern markings that cunningly mimicked the jungle floor of its equatorial Africa habitat; the unpleasant tic-polonga, of Ceylon; and of course our own diamond-backed rattlesnake, whose species name,
Crotalus horribilis,
popped up repeatedly in our chats.