My Young Life

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by Frederic Tuten


  Portrait of me as the aspiring aesthete at age fifteen and a half, meditating on the bridge over the Bronx River. What the Liffey was to James Joyce, the Bronx River was to me.

  I was sure that in a few weeks or even less I would master drawing from the model and then graduate to painting whatever I wished and in any way I wished. With that power I would reveal the beauty of everyday life, of men tired from a day’s work, asleep on the subway, their newspapers still in hand; of a mother and child laughing in a park; of my mother slicing bread on the kitchen table. Van Gogh’s beautiful letters, filled with a longing for beauty and truth in life and in painting, made me feel that his was also my longing and that art was a conversation with something higher than even beauty—maybe, as it was for Vincent, with God.

  Ideal Forms

  Manhattan, Art Students League, 1952

  One Saturday morning in September, I took the subway down to Fifty-Seventh Street off Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. In addition to my large sketchpad and batch of charcoal sticks, I carried with me a recent copy of the New Yorker. It represented Elegance and Sophistication; just asking for it at the newsstand made me feel special. I had stuffed it into my jacket pocket so that it would be seen when I got to the Art Students League, sure it would declare where I belonged in the world.

  Each station farther downtown brought me closer to my new life. The train, elevated until 149th Street, passed tenements through whose naked windows I saw unmade beds, broken chairs, all the visible dreariness of lower-middle-class life, even some steps lower than mine. But soon I would mingle with fellow artists and dreamers of beauty whose devotion to art elevated them above even the prospect of a life of poverty. There was no poverty where there was beauty, and all who created beauty, rich or poor, were equal.

  But once I got to the Art Students League building, my grand idea collapsed. I saw right away that I was not dressed properly for an artist. Everyone was wearing jeans, even the women. I was in my tight-fitting, two-year-old blue First Communion suit and blue suede shoes, white shirt, and plaid tie, and I was afraid that, regardless of the New Yorker in my pocket, the Bronx hick would reveal himself the moment he entered the classroom.

  I waited until the last possible minute, until I shamed myself into some courage, walked in, and took a stool among twenty students chatting at their easels. I got some puzzled but not unfriendly looks: Has this kid wandered into the wrong place? The room went still for a moment, waiting, waiting. Then a young woman rushed in and sat on a chair on a raised platform. My heart fluttered. She took off her robe . . . and was naked! Her skin was creamy white, her hair gleamed black and fell halfway down her back, her breasts full with pink nipples—like Marsha’s. I was sure I had turned cherry red and was sure that everyone in the room had noticed, including the model.

  In 1952, no one was nude on-screen, on-stage, or in the legitimate magazines. Sometimes, but not very often, I found photos of topless women from faraway, exotic places like Bali in library copies of the respectable National Geographic. Marsha had made sure she kept her panties on while I fingered her. Until the moment the model shucked off her robe, I had never seen a fully, completely, totally naked woman in real life.

  Everyone started to sketch very quickly; then the model changed her pose, her arms raised over her head, her breasts heavy and alone. I started to draw, not knowing where to begin. Before I could even outline the torso with ovals as I had learned from How to Draw from the Model, she took another pose. These were the quick warm-ups, but they were too quick for me. I teetered between embarrassment and shame.

  I had expected some preparatory instruction on how to draw the body, but there was none of that. Everyone but me seemed knowing and confident as they silently sketched. While I was still floundering, the monitor called for a break and the model put on her robe and disappeared. Some of the students passed by and glanced at my sketchbook, but I was too ashamed to let anyone see what I had done, and I quickly shut the pad with its scrawling lines, the alleged drawings.

  I followed some of the students up to the second floor, where everyone was smoking and chatting and laughing. No one spoke or glanced at me. I stood alone, lit a cigarette, and pretended to be concentrating on the nature of good and evil, the meaning of life and death, and Plato’s ideas of immortal, perfect forms. But my thoughts ran to how foolish, how stupid I was to come to that room without any previous training and with only a fantasy and desire to be an artist.

  Then someone said, “I’m Molly. Come over and join us.” She was the model of a few minutes ago; she and other models in their robes were sitting and smoking in an alcove. “Isn’t he cute?” Molly said. “I spotted him in my class.”

  They laughed in a most friendly way and invited me to sit with them. I was choked with shyness, and I smiled like I’d been caught looking at the dirty postcards that my friends had filched from their parents’ bedroom closets. I squeezed between Molly and a tall redhead whose fiery pubic hair burned in an open space in her robe. I quickly looked away.

  “Why are you here?” one asked.

  “Do you have a steady?” another whispered teasingly. It seemed they had never seen someone as young as I in the life-drawing classes. The redhead said, “Did you come just to see girls get naked?”

  “Leave him alone,” Molly said, putting her arm around my shoulder. “He’s sweet.”

  “I want to learn to draw,” I said, in a voice as assured and grown-up as I could muster, but whose undertones shouted: “Please, leave me alone—I’m just a kid.”

  Before I could sink further, the monitor announced that the break was over and we all returned; Molly smiled at me as she went down the stairs. I was back at the easel and flustered, but thrilled by Molly’s attention. I wanted to make a great drawing to show her, to please her, to win her. The poses were longer, but that did not help me much. I was still scrawling unsteady lines. There was a faint rustling and a surge of excited electricity in the room. I looked up and saw a middle-aged man walking from student to student and sometimes stopping to comment on their work, sometimes giving only a nod. He was Ernest Fiene, the teacher, and he finally came over and examined my drawing. He stayed silent for a moment, then, pointing to the feet, said very loudly: “What are those she’s wearing?”

  “She’s not wearing anything,” I answered, baffled by his question.

  “Oh! I thought she was wearing galoshes.”

  There was some giggling in the room. He moved on to the next student.

  When class was over, a tall fellow in jeans and a sport jacket with elbow patches came by and said, “Don’t worry, feet are very hard to do. Hands, too.” That was kind, but did not make up for my humiliation. I would never be an artist unless I just splattered paint on the canvas with pretended anguish.

  All that night in my cot, I thought of Molly and her warm voice. I dreamed we were in Paris, in a sexy hotel room with heavy drapes letting in just a little line of light from the window. She was wearing nothing but my beret. She kissed me everywhere.

  A week later, Fiene passed me up on his review. In my fourth week he examined my drawing. I was humiliated that nothing had looked the way I wanted, that there was no relationship between my eye and hand. Molly’s full breasts hung like deflated party balloons, the feet belonged to a bear. Fiene, in a loud sotto voce, said: “Maybe you should try the still-life class.” No one laughed.

  During the break, Molly took me aside and said, “He’s a jerk. Everyone knows it.” Over the next weeks, the models grew used to me. By late October my novelty had worn off and they talked openly about their boyfriends and having sex with them. I was embarrassed, but, more than that, I was wounded when one whispered to Molly, “That Tony jerk of yours doesn’t deserve you.”

  Molly gave her a sharp glance, as if to stop her from saying more in my presence. But it was too late. Molly had a boyfriend and I was crushed.

  I returned to class a few more times, and then, despite the pleasure of sitting with Molly and the models d
uring the breaks and imagining myself an artist among women who love artists, I stopped going. My drawings were no better than when I started—worse, maybe, because now they were not only inept but a tragedy of disproportions. An arm might be the same length as a leg; hands were swelled to the size of footballs. I sulked around, carrying with me the weight of failure.

  On my last day, I told Molly I was leaving. She tousled my hair and said, “I’ll miss you, Fred.”

  I was yearning to give her a real, deep kiss, one that would tell her how much I dreamed of her and wanted to live with her forever. I was fighting back the tears. “Miss you, too, Molly,” I said.

  I left the building without looking back, walking quickly, afraid that someone from my class would see me crying. I melted into the crowd on the subway to the faraway land of the Bronx. Now I was just another high school dropout, and one without the excuse, the cachet, of being an art student with a fascinating future. I was an ordinary mailroom boy in an office with fluorescent lighting and rows of desks and clacking typewriters. All the same, over the following weeks I tried to cling to the idea of Paris because, even only if by osmosis, there, in the art-soaked streets where Van Gogh had walked, I would become the artist I was destined to be.

  In place of classes at the Art Students League, I added Saturdays to my work schedule and joined the extra income to my savings for Paris. I still browsed the secondhand bookstores and stalls along Fourth Avenue on my lunch hour, but I no longer bought books if I could help it, save for the occasional bargain, like a hardcover of In Dubious Battle, Steinbeck’s novel about the strike in the California orchards, for a dime. I found an ad for the most inexpensive passage on a Holland America Line freighter, and I calculated that, even with helping my mother pay rent and other expenses, I would have saved enough money in a year to book passage and to start my Parisian life. It never occurred to me to learn to speak French.

  My Mother’s Books

  Manhattan, Union Square Park, 1952

  At lunchtime, I would sit in a corner of the company’s cafeteria and read; in good weather, I would read on a bench in Union Square Park. I read on the subway. If there was no seat, I read standing up. I read: The Fountainhead, Journey to the End of the Night, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Under the Volcano, any book that I had heard or read was important, profound, edifying.

  After work, I went directly home to my mother. Without my grandmother there as a buffer, I saw my mother in a new focus. She wore too much dark red lipstick and had too much red rouge on her cheeks. A front tooth was missing, so I understood why she covered her mouth when she smiled. She was so vulnerable, so lonely that I wanted to love her, live forever with her, and work to make her happy—but at the same time I wanted to run, to escape to Paris or anywhere on this earth away from the Bronx and away from her.

  After some words about our day over a dinner of pasta and salad, she would go to bed to be with her novels. She liked Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, The Black Swan, and The Sea Hawk, and other such romances of high seas and swashbucklers, whose jackets typically featured a woman with bare shoulders bound to a mast and a handsome naval officer, cutlass in hand, fighting off a gang of leering pirates. I snobbishly let her know how mediocre and escapist her books were. “Why are you reading that trash, Mom? There are so many better books.”

  “I like what I like,” she said, half-apologetic, half-defiant.

  I had insulted her, and I felt guilty but also resentful, wishing that we could talk about important things and big ideas—Art and Life.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I love you.” I didn’t know how long it was since I had last declared that.

  “My son,” she said, “ti voglio bene assai.” She kissed me. “I know you will leave me, like your father.”3

  * * *

  3SONS AND LOVERS

  Madelyn Scelfo Tuten (1906–1984)

  Eventually, of course, I did leave Madelyn to live on my own. I phoned her a few times a week, and most of the time I was gloomy when I got off. Nothing had changed between us: we were still glued together. She had tried to sound cheerful, as if her life were going well, but her already small world was shutting down. Her sister had died; her brother-in-law, my uncle Umberto, had died; her niece, Jean, had moved to Westchester and her son, my cousin Harold, had died; and her nephew, Big Fred, my sweet cousin, had married and moved to Schenectady, and seldom came again to see my mother. She had no friends. She never had any.

  She was in and out of work as usual. She never asked me for money, but once I was working in the Welfare Department in 1964, I started sending her money orders of ten or twenty dollars. She would call to thank me, always adding, “I’d rather see you than have the money. I love you very much. Very much.”

  I hated traveling to the Bronx—it felt like dying, a little of my coherence, my autonomy draining away with each subway stop that brought me closer to Pelham Parkway. To avoid going back there, I arranged to meet her from time to time for lunch under the Macy’s clock on West Thirty-Fourth Street. She knew little of Manhattan and was afraid of getting lost anywhere out of range of what little remained of the garment center. In good weather, we went to a nearby Schrafft’s restaurant with its white-gloved women, middle-aged and older patrons, and deferential, seemingly all Irish waitresses. If it was raining or snowing, we’d lunch in the Macy’s café itself, where in its brisk atmosphere and the company of mostly younger, sharply dressed women she was ill at ease. She chewed with her front teeth; many others were missing or on the way out, and she took ages to swallow. I pitied her and hated myself for it.

  She smiles. “It’s grand to see you. I love you.”

  “You, too, Mom.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I hope you’re OK, Mom.”

  “Yes, I am, but I miss you.”

  We eat. She never finishes her meal and orders coffee midway. She sips it until it gets cold and then orders another.

  “This is cold,” she tells the waitress, as if the coffee had been brought to her that way.

  “Are you OK, Mom?”

  “There are mice in the apartment. They live in the kitchen.”

  “Can’t the super come?”

  “He says he will, but he never does. And I gave him ten dollars for Christmas.”

  After lunch, I walk her to the subway station where she had entered and exited since she left ninth grade to work in the garment factories to help support her mother and father. We kiss; I tried to avoid her lips but miss and she smears me with lipstick. She spits into her handkerchief and wipes it off.

  “Come back home. You can stay with me until you get married.”

  By the time she made her way down the stairs and had turned to wave, I already felt guilty for leaving her alone in her little Bronx apartment and angry that she makes me feel guilty for having left her. And I was crushingly sad for the sweet, lost, lonely person she was.

  As Madelyn grew older, she became increasingly discombobulated, disoriented, and unkempt. She had stringy, unwashed hair and a face plastered with makeup. She was overripe with perfume. Forgetful, too. She wondered why the waiter had brought her chicken potpie when she thought she had ordered the flounder. “Imagine that,” she said. “I would never order chicken.” But in fact she had.

  She was upbeat on the phone, like a woman still in love with the man who had jilted her and was pretending to be awash with suitors and rich with an active social life. But I knew that she seldom left her apartment. She phoned the butcher and the grocery store for delivery; she paid a boy in the building to bring her wash to the Laundromat. She never took a walk or went to a movie: I had bought her a new TV, but she said she disliked watching it alone. “It makes me feel like a shut-in,” she said.

  “What do you do all day, Mom?”

  “I like to sit by the window and listen to the radio and eat cherry vanilla ice cream with a few teaspoons of brandy in it.”

  “Do you still read in bed at night?”

  “I don’t
like these new books.”

  Years later, she phoned me in a panic. She was being evicted for failure to pay months of rent. I was shocked, since I had sent her money orders for the rent each month.

  “I paid it,” she insisted.

  But she had not. She had either lost or forgotten to cash a few of the money orders. I later learned that she had also given money to neighborhood kids who came by for a handout, and she had bestowed lavish tips to the delivery people. After I tried contacting other agencies for help, including Catholic Charities, a friend put me in contact with the Jewish Family Services in the Bronx. It did not matter to them that we were not Jewish.

  “We’re here to help,” the counselor said on the phone. I went to visit my mother with the service’s team of a nurse, a social worker, and a psychiatrist.

  The problem was clear the moment we walked in the apartment. It smelled of rot and filthy rags. Paper and plastic bags of garbage were piled up in the hall; some had holes where the mice had nibbled through. Two mice fled under the stove. Roaches had made the kitchen their palace and did not bother to scamper away.

  SOCIAL WORKER: How old are you, Mrs. Tuten?

  MOTHER [girlishly]: I’m thirty-five.

  PSYCHIATRIST [pointing to me]: Do you know who this person is?

  MOTHER: My son, who never comes to visit me.

  ME: I’m very sorry, Mom.

  MOTHER: But you will come now.

  ME: Of course, Mom.

  More questions, very gently asked. And then we left. We talked on the sidewalk, under the window where Marsha used to chat with me before our amorous strolls to the bushes on the hill that overlooked the fabled Bronx River.

  Psychiatrist: “Don’t be angry with your mother. She has dementia.”

  I was not angry. I was heartbroken for this poor, lost woman who also happened to be my mother. Heartbroken for her sad, shrunken life. Heartbroken that I was the only thing she had to keep her afloat and that I was helpless to keep her above water.

 

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