World's Fair (2 page)

I might have been daunted by his example, and the view I had through him of everything I had to learn, except that he had the generous instincts of a teacher. One day I was with our dog, Pinky, in front of our house on Eastburn Avenue, when Donald came home from school and put his books down on the front stoop.

He plucked a large dark leaf from the privet hedge under the parlor window. He placed the leaf between his palms and cupped his hands to his mouth and blew into the gap formed by his adjacent thumbs. This produced a marvelous bleat.

I jumped up and down. When Donald made the sound again, Pinky began to yowl, as she did also when a harmonica was played in her presence. “I want to try,” I said. Under his patient instruction I chose a leaf like his, I placed it carefully on my palms, and I blew. Nothing happened. He arranged and rearranged my little hands, he changed leaves, he corrected my form. Still nothing happened.

“You have to work at it,” Donald said. “You can’t expect to get it right away. Here, I’ll show you something easier.”

The same leaf he had used for a reed he now split in half simply by pressing the heels of his palms together and flattening his hands.

My brother was very fine. He wore the tweed knickers and
ribbed socks and shoes with low sides of a young man. A shock of straight brown hair fell over one eye. His knitted sweater was dashingly tied by the sleeves around his waist and his red school tie was loosened at the knot. Long after he had taken our maniac dog into the house, I conscientiously applied myself to the tasks he had set me. Even if I couldn’t get the hang of them right away, I knew at least what had to be learned.

D
onald was like my mother in applying himself resolutely to the demands and challenges of life. My father was a different sort. I thought he got to where he was by magic.

He would let me watch him shave because I rarely saw him except in the mornings. He came home from work long after my bedtime. With a partner, he owned a music store in the Hippodrome, a famous theater building on Sixth Avenue and Forty-third Street in Manhattan.

“Good morning, Sunny Jim,” he said. He had noticed early in my life that each morning I woke smiling, an act of such extraordinary innocence that he had ever since commented upon it. When I was a baby he lifted me into his arms and we played a game: he puffed up his cheeks like a hippopotamus and I punched the air out, first one side of his face, then the other. No sooner was the job done than his eyes went wide and his cheeks refilled and I had gigglingly to do it all over again.

The bathroom was lined in squares of white tile and all the fixtures were white porcelain. An opaque crinkled window seemed to glow with its own light. My father stood in the diffuse sunlight of the white bathroom after he had partially dressed—shoes, trousers, ribbed undershirt, suspenders looping off his flanks—and brought his shaving soap to a lather in its mug. Then he applied the lather to his face with an artful slopping of his shaving brush.

He did this while humming the overture to Wagner’s
The Flying Dutchman
.

I loved the scratchy sound the brush made on his skin. I loved the soap as it turned from a froth to a substantive lather under his rubbing. Next, he held taut from its hook on the wall a long leather strop about three inches wide, and upon this he wielded his straight razor back and forth with a twist of the wrist. I failed to understand how something as soft as leather could hone something as hard as a steel razor. He explained the principle to me, but I knew it was just another example of his magic powers.

My father did sleight-of-hand things. He could appear to remove the top joint of his thumb, for example, and then put it back. Behind the screen of one hand, you’d see the thumb of the other come apart and then the space between the two halves. Like all good tricks, it was horrifying. He’d lift the thumb off and then put it back with a little twist, and hold it out for my inspection and wiggle it to assure me that it was as good as new.

He was full of surprises. He punned. He made jokes.

As he shaved, here and there tiny springs of blood quietly leaked through the white foam and turned pink. He did not seem to notice but simply went on shaving and humming.

After he had rinsed his face and patted it with witch hazel, he parted his shiny black hair in the middle and combed each side back. He was always well barbered. His handsome pink face shone. He smoothed his dark moustache with the tips of his fingers. He had a thin straight nose. He had vivid sparkling brown eyes that sent out signals of a mischievous intelligence.

Assiduously he applied the lather remaining in his shaving mug to my cheeks and chin. In the medicine cabinet was one of my wooden tongue depressors; every time I required a visit from our family physician, Dr. Gross, I was given a new one as a present. My father handed me a depressor so that I could shave.

“Dave,” called my mother as she rapped on the door. “You know what time it is? What do you
do
in there!”

He grimaced, ducking his head between his shoulders, as if we were, both of us, naughty boys.

My father always made promises as he went off to work.

“I’ll be home early tonight,” he told my mother.

“I have no money,” she said.

“Here’s a couple of dollars to tide you over. I’ll have cash this evening. I’ll call you. Maybe I can pick up some things for dinner.”

I pulled on his sleeve and begged him to bring me a surprise.

“Well, I’ll just see what I can do,” he said, smiling.

“You promise?”

Donald was already at school. When my father left I’d have nothing to look forward to, so I watched him to the last second. He was portly, though trim enough in one of his suits with the vest buttoned tight. He checked the knot of his tie in the mirror in the front hall. When he set his fedora on his head at the stylish angle he affected, I ran into the parlor so as to be able to see him as he came out the front door. Down the steps he skipped, and turning to wave, and smiling at me as I stood in the parlor window, he strode off down the street in that brisk jaunty gait of his. I watched him turn the corner and from one moment to the next he was out of sight.

I understood the reach of his life. I understood him as living by nature as a sojourner. He went forth and returned. He covered ground. His urges and instincts even on his one day off pointed away from home.

He rarely kept his word to return in time for dinner or to bring me something. My mother could not abide his broken promises. She was forever calling him to account. I saw that this did no good. By way of compensation he brought me things when I least expected them. A surprise surprised. It was a kind of teaching.

TWO

M
y mother ran our home and our lives with a kind of tactless administration that often left a child with bruised feelings, though an indelible understanding of right and wrong. As an infant I was bathed with brisk, competent hands and as a boy fed, clothed and taken through unpleasant events with strong admonitions to behave myself. I was not to express dissent. I was to stop the nonsense.

She was a vigorous buxom woman in her late thirties. A strong will beamed in her clear blue eyes. There was no mistaking her meaning—she was forthright and direct. She construed the world in vivid judgments. She felt strongly that even little boys bore responsibility for their actions. For example, they could be lazy, selfish, up to no good. Or they could be decent, kind, truthful, honest. However they were, so would their fate be decided.

All about in the air were the childhood diseases—whooping cough, scarlet fever, and, most dreaded of all, infantile paralysis. She believed children were at risk to the extent that their parents lacked common sense. “I saw that Mrs. Goodman at the Daitch Dairy,” she said coming in from her shopping one day. “Poor woman, I don’t envy her. Her daughter wears a brace on her leg and will for the rest of her life. She cried telling me this. But she let the child swim in public pools on the hottest days of the summer, so what else could she expect?”

Her stories dazzled me. Their purpose was instruction. Their theme was vigilance.

In the mornings, with my father and brother Donald out of the house, my mother threw open the windows, she plumped up pillows and quilts and laid them across the windowsills in the sun. She washed dishes and put clothes to soak in the laundry tub. She swept and ran the Electrolux vacuum cleaner. Everything she did was a declarative act. Her mastery of our realm was worth my study.

My mother wanted to move up in the world. She measured what we had and who we were against the fortunes and pretensions of our neighbors. That my brother and I were properly clothed; that my father was self-employed; that we paid the rent on time, the telephone bill, the electric light bill: these were the elements of a composition she wanted the world to understand as the quality of our family.

When she was ready to do her marketing, she changed into a belted dress and shiny black shoes and put on a straw hat whose brim she turned up on one side. A little ribbon ran around the crown. She applied red lipstick and went off with her pocketbook tucked under her arm.

At the end of an afternoon she sometimes rested on the sofa for a few minutes and read the newspaper. In contrast to my father, who held the paper open at arm’s length at the breakfast table, my mother, reclining, held the paper at the spine with one hand and slapped the pages left and right with the back of the other.

“I don’t trust that doctor,” she said of the physician attending the Dionne quintuplets. “He likes the limelight too much.”

In the evenings, after dinner, with everything quieted down, she sat in the living room and read a novel from the rental library while she waited for my father to come home. I sometimes watched her when she didn’t know it. After a while she would close the book in her lap, her legs would be tucked under her, and she would stare at the floor. She worried a lot about my little grandmother, who was sickly and had spells. But I think she worried mostly about my father.

My father was not a reliable associate, I was to gather. Too many things he said would come to pass did not. He was always late, somehow he would suppose he could get somewhere or accomplish something in less time than it actually took him. He created suspense. He was full of errant enthusiasms and was easily diverted by them. He had, besides, various schemes for making money that he did not readily confide to my mother. She seemed most of the time to be aroused to a state of worry regarding his activities.

When he was late my father was evasive, which seemed to justify her anger. He had a weakness for cards, I heard my mother tell her best friend, Mae. He liked to gamble and could not afford to.

I understood that my father seemed to elude my mother’s ideas for him. He did not comport himself appropriately, given the hard times we were living in. I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother’s.

The conflict between my parents was probably the major chronic circumstance of my life. They were never at peace. They were a marriage of two irreducibly opposed natures. Their differences created a kind of magnetic field for me in which I swung this way or that according to the direction of the current. My brother seemed to be more like my mother in his love of rules and a disposition for the proper doing of things. I, a quieter, more passive, daydreaming sort of child, understood my father with some sympathy, I feel now—some recognition of a free soul tethered, by a generous improvidence not terribly or shrewdly mindful of itself, to the imperial soul of an attractive woman.

My mother’s one indulgence was to play the piano, which she did with authority, as she did everything. She had paid for her own lessons as a girl by working as an accompanist for silent movies. She was very good. What I liked, when she sat down to play, was that her rigorous thought was suspended. Her expression softened and her blue eyes shone. She sat with her back very straight, like a queen, her arms outstretched, and she filled the house with beautiful music that I thought of as waterfalls or rainbows. She could sight-read any score placed before her. When Donald brought home a new lesson from the Bronx House Music School, he would ask her to play it through just to hear how it was supposed to sound.

Donald was up to “Für Elise,” by Beethoven. He had already mastered Schumann’s “The Wild Horseman.”

I expected someday to take piano lessons too. In the meantime I toyed with the keys, experimented with sounds, with the moods and feelings I could produce in myself by arranging my fingers on several keys at once and hammering away.