Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (57 page)

The situation grew sourer: Momma went to a P.T.A. meeting; and she who considered herself smarter than most other people was overturned … insulted … beset: she was dressed in furs; she looked
fine;
but everything she was, everything she had accomplished in her life, was laughed at by the people there at the P.T.A. because of her attitude, her self-defense in the face of the putative intelligence newly discovered in a child she had adopted for his
looks.

Nonie’s tantrums, Daddy’s moods, Momma’s calculations. A joke. To me. I went on whirling. I refused to listen to
them;
I corrected them all the time; I
was
a smart aleck, as Daddy said. I trusted them to go on caring about me. I thought they had to be “nice” to me: I remember stamping my foot and saying,
“This is my home!”
and the way the three of them—Momma, Daddy, Nonie—looked at me when I said that.

T
HE TESTERS
and various people fought; they said, “We must prepare him—we must not lose time.… He doesn’t get at home from you … what he needs to—” Momma’s voice intervenes:” —become something in twenty years. Well, I don’t want to think about twenty years from now; it’s hard enough for me to plan for the next twenty minutes.”

Momma said to the outsiders, “Well, we’re his guardians and we don’t want that kind of life for him at all. Years of work and no fun—no, thank you. My husband and I have talked it over and we’ll talk it over some more, but we’re really interested in leaving the child alone. Also, there are other people in this house I have to worry about—you people have no practical sense.…”

She said, “We don’t want him pushed.”

She said, “Leave him alone—let him have a childhood.”

M
OMMA SAID
to a friend of hers about Nonie, “I don’t blame her for being upset—she was a very dull child, not popular, and she grew up late: she’s just getting her figure now, she’s pretty, boys are getting interested, the good years are just starting for her, people are starting to listen to what she has to say, and now this happens and everything that happens to her hardly seems worthwhile; she’s overshadowed, she’s not going to get to have any life. It’s not right. And it hurts her the way people talk about him and her and then they ask him things like he’s an oracle and they laugh at her and she was just getting her confidence. I don’t think it’s fair. Girls have a right to live, too. She was just getting to the point where she was far enough ahead of him she could be nice to him—now she hates him. Frankly, I don’t blame her. I hate him, too, sometimes—he’s impossible. She has only a few years like these years—why can’t the child wait? I promised his mother I’d give him an education and I will, but I don’t know what all those crazy people are talking
about. I think it’s better for him to learn how to fit in—with women especially—he’ll marry someday. I don’t want him to be a lonely man: Nonie and I have to have our lives, too. I know him—he’s not as smart as they say he is—he’s clever for a child, that’s all—he knows how to make himself liked. Let him stay in the background for a few years, let him grow up as a human being and get some good experience under his belt, I don’t intend to push him, let him be a child and enjoy himself, he can learn later.…”

She said, “Listen, I’ve known people who went off and became famous: I went with Gaynor Milton: he won an Academy Award for best supporting actor; he is one of the best-dressed men in Hollywood. He was always miserable—he had such an ego—he was very lonely: ask me, I’ll tell you. I wouldn’t wish that on the child. And I’ll tell you something: if he’s so smart, he’ll amount to something in good time— enough is as good as a feast: that’s an old saying and a true one, believe me.…”

She was sincere at times. She said to me, “I don’t think you know what’s going on, but maybe you do: you’re always watching. Listen, life is funny: I may be a bad woman—people have always said I was: I’ll tell you the truth: sometimes I think I am, but I don’t care; I don’t know why I have to make all the decisions: it won’t hurt you to be normal. Your father, Daddy, S.L., you love him, don’t you? He doesn’t like bookish people—he and I don’t really get along; we’re not suitable; but I made my bed and I’m going to lie in it: he loves you—it’s me he blames: he thinks he has no … right … to be your father … if you’re so damned smart:
if you love him, you’ll he sensible, listen to me, don’t ever show him you’re smart.…”

I didn’t believe Momma: I didn’t understand what she was saying—I felt that Daddy loved me—there were emotions in him; I see them when he puts me to bed, when he gives me a good-night hug and kiss—I was surer of him than of her.…

I didn’t understand any human issue—this was an enormous game.

More and more, I make Daddy angry—he says I like to make a fool of him. Momma is desperate—almost tragic. He blames her (he will leave her). Daddy is not proud of me (he says he likes “ordinary kids who have good hearts”), and so I snub him—and then he gets angry and puffish: he thinks he can be disgusted and still put me to bed affectionately and get the affection he needs after he’s made me angry and miserable and embarrassed for him: I feel as if I dislike him a lot—how
can I hug him? Then his breathing gets loud. “Oh, you’re a real brat,” he says, “you’re a beaut.” The room is dark, it’s bedtime, he stands there.

But I began to be uneasy. I asked Momma if she liked me. She said, “Now, now, you know I love you—” I became vilely uneasy: that was the sort of thing that someone said when they were going to leave you, when they weren’t being honest. I preferred an obvious love clearly marked on someone’s face.

One could not play a game, a child’s game—play it hard—and keep one’s mind on one’s suffering at home. There was a peculiar mental thing that happened when it was time to go home, when you were called or when players started to disappear; or you were picked up by your mother and driven home: there was an alteration in the nature of time, of history, a change of scale, accompanied by an almost overwhelming sense of faithlessness and of longing which one could erase with the passion or the refinement of the hug one gave one’s parents when one got home. To home’s immensity. One had played, the game had ended: one had rushed along the sidewalk—or one dawdled—toward this other story.

Or in reverse, one ran away and played. One visited in neighbors’ houses. One never had to boast—the neighbors did it for me. One could turn in any direction and find a hero’s happiness.

The child, at home while his parents are getting ready for dinner, languishes on a porch glider, bending his back, among the cushions, unobserved; he is being giddily vain, spine-and-neck-and-one-leg-bent: he is
feeling
—or thinking—
he is very smart,
(
A LOT OF PEOPLE SAID SO
.) His feeling lay around him like peeled sheets of obtrusively royal raiment.

One’s blood raced, slowed, raced again; a mass of sprinters, caterpillars shoot along inside; caterpillars, invisible ones, crawl on prickling skin.

Another time, Nonie and I are laying out pads on the dining-room table:
oh, I remember that:
one half-smiles. She is being a child—or childish—out of bitterness, in a spasm of competition: she doesn’t dare advance into adolescence and leave the field of childhood to me.… One remembers the eyes of the girl, the feel of one’s own shirt, of buttoned cloth over one’s chest, the movement of one’s foot on the shifting pile of the carpet, the smells of the house, of dinner, of these expensively made pads. Nonie “knows,” she feels the presence of circumstances available to her, waiting for her if only I did not exist. But I do exist
in that room; the objects in the room include
my
eyes, my breath. She loves-and-hates me all the time, whereas I am largely indifferent to her or ashamed of her. I have won out for the moment.…

L
EILA DESCRIBED
my real mother as “a very fine woman.”

Leila said, “Your mother never had any luck—not any that lasted—and without luck what good did all her qualities do her?”

I really had forgotten my real mother. And that there was another family, other than the Cohns: my family—I remembered none of them. Then Leila and S.L. called in my real family, to share me with them, to share the responsibility, the expense, and perhaps the glory. Most likely, vengeance and a wish to handle me both were involved. Many of my real family were what Leila called “ignorant people”—unlettered, not very clean, violent (my real father had threatened to shoot S.L. if I wasn’t given back posthaste)—and no psychologist or referee was called in to oversee or advise—I was to be taught a lesson, I think.

After all, wasn’t Daddy, S.L., angry as a lover often is? Sometimes, perhaps always, people when they love you can’t really care what happens to you if it’s not going to be in their arms, so to speak, or give them solace.

Leila resisted and said the thing wasn’t a good idea. She mentioned future earnings, the dubious respectability of this enterprise, the social advantages of a bright son now, in the suburb where we lived. But Daddy was firm; he did not want to “steal” me, he said—and Leila’s sister and Nonie, of course, were fervently in favor of giving me to someone, anyone. I kept passing through rooms, or lolling idly in doorways, listening, and then being sent away, having heard scraps of argument, none of which I understood at all:
“real family,” “he doesn’t belong here,” “his father.
” I imagined no evil.

When I was told clearly that I was to see my “real father again,” it was by Leila and in front of company, where my pride would not let me show fear or consternation or anything but what a fine boy I was. What crap. By the time the company left, I was in a state. I knew something “bad” was happening. What did this mean, I asked. I don’t like it. I don’t want to do this, I argued.

S.L. took me on his lap and said in my ear that I would
love
my real father; he said my real father was “better-looking” than S.L. was, and that he, my real father, would “buy you ice cream and cake, all you can
eat, and lots of books, and all the toys in the world.” S.L. ran off at six in the morning of the day the meeting was to take place; and Leila would not let me meet my father in the house: “If I let him in, he’ll kill me; he has a terrible temper and he hates me.…” She
pushed
me out the front door and locked it. I went alone to the curb to meet my real father. I was too proud to have hysterics in the neighborhood, where I was so well known and admired. So I behaved bravely. But I was uneasy.

I had imagined that a “better-looking” man than S.L. would be taller than S.L. and have a craggier and more serious face, and gentler and clearer and more knowing eyes. My father, an ex-boxer, and currently a junkman, was short, broad, not clean, and he looked like an angry or ferocious, squirrel-faced
clown,
with sunken eyes, heavily shadowed and small, and almost no lips, and a small, misshapen nose. He spoke broken English, always in a shout. He could not read or write—he could not read street signs, for instance. He purposefully yelled at and threatened and terrified everyone he could—it was a joke and a matter of necessary ego to him.
His
father had been a scholar, so there was some psychological black magic, rebellion, at work in what my father was, in what he had become: “I killed t’ree men in
mein
life,” he said boastfully, menacingly, maybe apologetically as well. “You do what I tell you,” he said. He spoke only in a shout until one’s head rang; he said, “
YOU GOT TA LUV ME, I’M YOUR POP!
”

At first, uneasy as I was (at having been pushed out the front door and at not being able to guess what was polite in this case and what any of this meant), I wasn’t afraid of him but only uneasy, as I said: I thought him silly, like a clown, like the clown he resembled, and I did not feel any similarity or kinship. I felt some embarrassment, though. When he threatened to hit me if I did not call him “Pop,” I told him I would shout for help and tell the police I was being kidnapped; and there was enough difference in the way we looked for him to think the police would make trouble, and he gave in, he deferred to me on that.

He said his feelings were hurt, and I was too polite to say so what, but that’s what I felt.

He insisted on buying me clothes—he said the clothes the Cohns had given me were disgusting. I wanted to be polite. I let him buy me clothes and re-dress me; the clothes were ugly and itchy, and he wanted me to wear a hat that looked like a grownup’s: that was too foolish, I thought, and I refused that. He wanted me to have my hair cut and to start speaking Yiddish immediately—I think he intended me for the Chassidic
rabbinate, under pressure from his relatives, and to excuse his invasion of my life at this time as a rescue of me for God.

He had some relatives I liked—I later met them—but he also had a virulent, curse-hurling harridan of a sister. (She said to me years later, “You know what keeps me alive? Hate. I know how to hate.”) This harridan called down curse after curse on S.L. and Leila—death and rot, cancer and pain without end—and she threatened to curse me if I didn’t immediately love her and the rest of my new family, if I did not become “a real Jew” at once and stop loving the Cohns and wanting to go home.

I might have borne that, and even the smell of her house—dust and cabbage and animosity—but they kept speaking of my dead mother; and that meant a shaky grief and obstinacy that I could not and would not face but would endure with lessening strength. They spoke of what my “real” mother wanted me to do—from the grave—and of how much she had loved these two and loathed Leila. There was no real mother for me—only a skeleton rotting in the ground. If part of me remembered her, that part, too, found these mentions of the actuality of that woman insupportable; and then the threats these people made never to return me to the Cohns at all but to keep me forever mingled with that woman’s shadow, or rather with the shadow of the irreconcilable infant grief, and the fact that
they would not listen to me,
made me throw up. I couldn’t stop. This frightened me and them, and they took me home, but I was ill by then, genuinely ill, and out of my mind in a childish way. (I had lasted about ten hours.)