The Hue and Cry at Our House

by Benjamin Taylor

  Tommy, a thrower of things when angry, comes home and throws his books against the wall.

  “What on earth?” says Mom.

  “I bet a hundred dollars and lost,” he says. “Playing pool. What’s Dad going to do?”

  Yes, what? I peeked out from my bedroom door. These dramas with Tommy frightened but also gratified. I, who’d never held a pool cue, was this evening good as gold; fearful of the coming storm, yes, but basking in my virtue too. A hundred dollars sounded to me like a ruinous sum. My moral condemnation was merciless. Tommy had proved himself no better than the deadly juveniles of Rebel Without a Cause. Dad would explode into one of his terrible rages—the Monster Mash, we called it.

  But no. His response to financial catastrophe was entirely rational. “I won’t have it spread around town that you’re a welsher.” That word was certainly new to me. “I suppose he pretended to have skills no better than your own.” A silence, with Tommy probably nodding. “Then started in with the fancy shots. I saw his kind in the Valley. Pool sharks, cardsharps. Must have spotted you the minute you came in. Phone him. Tell him to come right over. If he says no, tell him it’s the only way he’ll get his money. I won’t have you renege on the bet.” “Renege,” another new word. “We’ll settle it tonight. But I want to look this operator in the eye.”

  I was an earwitness to all that followed. The pool shark arrived almost immediately, was asked into the front hall and presented with a hundred-dollar bill from the roll of hundreds, fastened with a rubber band, that Daddy kept against unforeseen events up to and including nuclear war. He then distilled his loathing into a single sentence: “Never come near my son again.” The pool shark started to answer but Daddy cut him off with a martial “Dismissed!”—the only word on which he raised his voice all evening. I have hoped all my life for some occasion on which to bark that at someone, but doubt I’d bring it off so well.

  Tommy in his pool-hall phase.

  This little melodrama was owed to one on the big screen, The Hustler, Robert Rossen’s blockbuster of a few years earlier. Tommy had been seduced by Paul Newman as “Fast Eddie” Felson. And not he alone; the whole country saw a revival of interest in pool. New halls opened, among them the one on West Berry where my brother got ensnared. I believe that the very worst episode in father-son relations came a few months later when Dad spotted Tommy’s car at the forbidden place and went inside. And brought his firstborn out by the collar.

  • • •

  Tommy’s television tastes and mine didn’t usually match up. We did, however, agree on what to watch each Thursday evening at eight: The Twilight Zone, individual episodes of which we called Zones. I remember one in particular, “The Shelter,” in which a neighborhood of nice people turn into savages when they think the Bomb is heading their way. Everybody wants to break down the door of the one provident homeowner who’s equipped his house with a shelter. Turns out the Code Red is a false alarm, but not before all neighbors have behaved so badly that afterward they can’t look one another in the face.

  Anyhow, Tommy and I loved all Zones. The Wednesday six-thirty slot, though, presented problems in a house with only one working set. My own passion, The Patty Duke Show, ran on ABC and Tommy’s favorite western, The Virginian, on NBC. I was the younger and tended to get my way, so Patty it was. Tommy would taunt and hoot and snort as I watched, declaring that there was no such thing as identical cousins, the program’s ludicrous premise.

  In a photo of my brother at ten holding newborn me up to the camera, he is alight with goodwill. Was any only child ever a better sport about ceasing to be one? Occasionally he’d say: “Make like dandruff, flake off.” But mostly he liked taking me along with him. And telling people that both of us were left-handed and wasn’t that something? I see now that he wasn’t only being good, though good he was. I was a force multiplier. The little sidekick made the dashing lover boy even more attractive. Scores of beautiful girls cooed and fussed and petted my hair.

  He was much too large and glamorous to get to know, really, though he lived only one bedroom away. My most urgent question every afternoon when I got home from school was whether he’d be at dinner, as the evening meal was always so much more fun (and unpredictable) when my hero was there. I wasn’t his hero, of course. How could I have been, given the age difference? But he did view the two of us as confederates and at difficult moments would talk to me quietly, encouragingly, about better days to come. During one of these quiet talks he said the single most truthful thing about our mother anyone ever said: “She fights the battles we know nothing about.”

  Myself with chickenpox, as photographed by Tommy.

  Tommy died on February 19, 2006, in a snowmobiling accident at Saranac Lake in upstate New York. My sister-in-law was grievously injured and we did not expect her to survive, though through bravery and fierce will she did. Mom’s and Dad’s own deaths began that day. I wondered if I was going under too. One night or more, blind with grief, I went to bed hoping not to wake up. A little poem by Langston Hughes ran on a loop through my head:

  Wave of sorrow,

  Do not drown me now:

  I see the island

  Still ahead somehow.

  I see the island

  And its sands are fair:

  Wave of sorrow,

  Take me there.

  All their lives my brother and father had helplessly rubbed each other the wrong way. I recall Tommy shouting in a rage: “One day I won’t be known as your son! You’ll be known as my father!” And this is what happened, in the world of finance they inhabited. I prefer to think that my brother’s life was whole, even if unfinished. What I mean is that everything he meant to do, he did. A realist tends to get the things he dreams of and my brother was one of life’s realistic dreamers and one of life’s ferocious workers. And now he sleeps on a bluff in Nantucket and can dream whatever he likes, with the whole of the Atlantic for his lookout.

  The last time I saw him was a month or two before he died. I was hurrying down Sixth Avenue on an errand. The crowd parted and there he was, in New York for the day, striding up Sixth on an errand of his own. We shook hands, marveling at the coincidence. Anybody would have thought us casual acquaintances. Then we went our separate ways forever.

  • • •

  In the spring of sixth grade Mrs. Westbrook had recommended a hard book to me. I opened it and read the first sentence: “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” Thus I discovered it was possible for a sentence to be a perfect window onto the world. I read on, even with a flashlight after being told to go to bed. The Pocket Books softcover is still with me after all these years and full of my marginalia: “I agree!”—“problems in Lima”—“like Aunt Bess”—“RELIGION”—“Where is Castille?”—and “Am lost here.” (In my eleven-year-old mind the Marquesa de Montemayor resembled Great-aunt Bess, who served pimiento-cheese sandwiches and gherkins on her screened porch and told how full her dance card had been back in Shreveport.)

  That The Bridge of San Luis Rey was a celebrated book I didn’t know or need to. Through Thornton Wilder I’d made the vital discovery: that what’s really going on in other people—up to then a conundrum—could be intimated in writing. So this was what they called literature. Had those five people really fallen from the hemp bridge into the abyss below? No, but their story was truer than factual truth. Armed with this understanding, I was on my way. I took to calling my bedroom “Peru.”

  Wilder says about the abbess Madre María del Pilar, who’s the heart of wisdom of his book: “Her plain red face had great kindliness, and more idealism than kindliness, and more generalship than idealism.” And glimpsing what it felt like to be the harshly dedicated abbess, I wondered about the harshly dedicated Thelma Westbrook, and wondered whether she saw herself in the abbess, and wondered whether I’d known for a moment what it
felt like to be one or the other of these stout-hearted women. Literature, starting with The Bridge, existed to convince me that other people were as real as I was.

  • • •

  That I was unusually privileged to live in a house with a wilderness in the backyard I did not know. “Down the hill,” as we called it, was my other world, my out-of-doors. Down the hill were all manner of flora and fauna. In spring the air was alive with milkweed silk. In early fall the ground would be covered with winged maple seeds. Clouds of gnats came and went. The seventeen-year cicadas burrowed up in the spring of 1964, climbed the trees, burst from their shells, filled the afternoons with chirring and died off six weeks later. A creek bed, usually dry, came fitfully to life after rain and you could strain crawdads and tadpoles from the piddling stream. I brought everything up the hill and into the house: doodle bugs, monarch caterpillars plucked from milkweed plants, the occasional horned frog. At garter snakes Mom drew the line.

  Also down there, perched high in a cottonwood, were the bare remains of what had been Tommy’s tree house. Before I was born he’d appeared as Pud in the local community theater’s production of On Borrowed Time. The premise of this melodrama is too silly to explain (and too difficult). Suffice it to say that On Borrowed Time is about a preternatural tree possessing the power both to kill and to save. At one performance Tommy lost his footing and fell from a low branch when he wasn’t supposed to. Instead of crying he began to laugh and had to be shaken by one of the grown-ups onstage. It was a serious play, after all. Was this star turn what had made my daredevil brother want a tree house? He got it, a wonder of professional carpentry with a rope ladder you could pull up after you. That my parents, with their instinctive caution, would have let a harum-scarum boy have such an aerie, and get up to who knew what, and maybe fall—not harmlessly as in On Borrowed Time—remains a mystery.

  Tommy as Pud Northrup in On Borrowed Time.

  But all that was in illo tempore, before the advent of me. Peering into the crown of our cottonwood, all I could see of the now defunct tree house were a few cross-planks. Yet I held fast to the conviction that it would soon be restored and mine. Not a chance. With me Mom and Dad had turned against running such risks. There were enough contingencies down the hill in any case. The occasional bully from another neighborhood, for instance, whom I’d tell in a quavering voice to get off our land. And then there were the snakes—real ones, not green garters: bull snakes, which one needn’t fear, but once in a great while a water moccasin, copperhead or rattler. “Fifty-footers” these were called, meaning that fifty feet was as far as you got after one of them bit you. They mostly ate the rodent life and slept in the sun, but a lethal bite could have been my fate. I knew the story of a Fort Worth boy, a contemporary of Tommy’s, who’d been struck in the face by a diamondback and died.

  • • •

  Among my parents’ favorite friends were Lou and Dorothy Metzinger, whom we visited whenever in Houston. Their home was a citadel of high culture and their three children were exemplary: Susan, the beautiful and brilliant eldest; Anita, a classic middle child, happy to have made the team; and Danny, the apple of the eye, with whom I always had such good fun.

  Too good in the end. Danny had come to stay with us for a few days in the summer of 1963, about the time I turned eleven. All was going so well. An outing to the Botanic Garden, which we in Fort Worth imagined to be exceptional although it was not. An afternoon at the Amon Carter Museum with its collection of western art. (A little of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell went a long way with me even then.) A Saturday-evening performance of West Side Story at Casa Mañana, our mostly professional summer stock theater.

  “No substitute for exposure” was the old man’s motto. Taking it to heart in my bedroom once the lights were out, I slipped out of my pajama bottoms and instructed beautiful, perfect Danny to remove his too. After only a few minutes of ecstatic fumbling the lights were on and there Dad stood, glowering and gigantic in the doorway. He ordered Danny first to the living room for interrogation, then me. After I’d admitted in anatomical detail to every deed, he told me that Danny insisted we’d done nothing wrong at all. God damn me, I’d ratted us out.

  Next day, when the Metzingers arrived to pick Danny up, Dad behaved as if all were well; but I could see that his brow stayed knitted. Danny and I were involved in some sort of board game on the living room floor. Suddenly I stood up in a towering rage and shouted, “Cheater! Cheater!” The term “meltdown,” not yet standard, would have covered it. I was ordered to Peru, then ordered back five minutes later to say good-bye to the Metzingers. Knowing his son was blameless, Lou Metzinger tossed over his shoulder as they left: “Come visit us cheaters in Houston sometime.” I can imagine Danny saying as they sped away: “Please don’t leave me with those awful people anymore.” And Lou saying: “Don’t you worry about that, son.” Relations between the Metzingers and my parents were never the same. And it was my fault.

  Several years later I did see Danny again. By then we were teenagers, he very graceful and I—something else. “Remember that time you got so mad at me?” he asked with the best will in the world. And given my chance to apologize, I added fresh dishonor to old outrage by saying I had no idea what he was talking about.

  Many years after that, by which time Danny and I were middle-aged men, and other people’s troubles were finally telling a little on my selfish heart, came the news that his older sister, Susan, who’d read a one-act play I wrote at fifteen and offered constructive criticism and told me I had talent—that Susan had killed herself. And that a few years later Mr. Metzinger, who’d dealt with me as I deserved on the day of my horrible conduct—that Mr. Metzinger had shipped on a tramp steamer, died in unexplained circumstances and been buried at sea.

  • • •

  Now I’ve concluded middle age. How do I know, apart from the reckoning of years? Because what has vanished is so much more substantial than what is present. If I appear half absent to friends, it’s that I’m extremely active somewhere else—call it Peru—and in a terrible state of love for a world blown away like smoke and ash but to which I have the most precise and intimate access. “There is a land of the living,” Wilder writes at the end of The Bridge, “and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” On the day I vanish, down comes my bridge, down come my loves, unless I make words span durably where these mirages of memory waver and fade and are gone.

  Our parents, upon their engagement.

  | CHAPTER FIVE |

  FOREBEARS

  How different was Mom’s family from Dad’s! The Bocksteins, so musical, dressy, pleasure-loving and spendthrift. The Taylors, grim as Plymouth Brethren. Harry and Lena Bockstein’s Spanish colonial house on Windsor Place always smelled of baking pies. B.B. and Bertha Taylor’s house in Tyler smelled of Lysol. The Bocksteins were successful wholesalers of fruits and vegetables and, after the war, frozen foods, as well as distributors of Pearl beer, a premium brand of the time. They had works of art on the walls and went around in a Pierce-Arrow and had live-in servants. The Taylors ran a sad-sack grocery.

  Mom’s people—the Bocksteins and, on Little Bubbe’s side, the Goldbergs—had settled in Fort Worth and Shreveport, respectively, in 1904 and 1907, their passage from the Pale of Settlement paid by Jacob Schiff. This greatest of German Jewish philanthropists was alarmed by the glut of Yiddish speakers in New York and wanted to divert some of the floodtide of immigrants fleeing Poland, Belarus and other imperial Russian lands in the wake of pogroms—at Kishinev, Odessa and Białystok, to name the best-known among hundreds. Schiff’s Galveston Movement was based on the idea that Jews landing well away from the Northeast would found new communities of their own in the South and Middle West. This was how my grandparents and great-grandparents came to make new lives in such un-Jewish places. Bubbe Bockstein, née Goldberg, was born in 1896 in Pruzhany, a market town, then Russian, later Polis
h and now Belarusian, at the confluence of the Mukha River and the Vets Canal. Grandpa Bockstein, whom she would meet in Shreveport, had been born in 1886 and grew up in Sielce, forty kilometers northwest of Lublin.

  Grandpa Bockstein and Little Bubbe.

  Big Bubbe and Grandpa Taylor.

  Dad’s people, also beneficiaries of the Schiff munificence, were from the Podlaski region of northeast Poland. His father, Beshka Treszczanski—who in South Texas promptly became Bob Benjamin Taylor—was from Goniądz, a little town northwest of Białystok. Brainka Rutsky, whom he’d married prior to their departure in 1913—and who in Texas became Bertha Roosth Taylor, destined to perish with three of her granddaughters in the house fire of October of 1961—was from Korycin, two villages away.

  Bubbe Taylor’s parents, Tanchum Mayer Rutsky and Esther Kowalska Rutsky, had accompanied their daughter and new son-in-law to East Texas in 1913. (It was for Tanchum Mayer Rutsky that my brother, Thomas Malcolm Taylor, was named.) Bubbe Bockstein’s parents, Josef Goldberg and Celia Tzina Goldberg, née Bremmer, had settled in 1907 with their children in Shreveport. And a generation before them in northeastern Poland had lived Halel Treszczanski and Shlomo Rutsky, paternal great-great-grandfathers of mine, never in America and about whom I know nothing but their names.