The Hue and Cry at Our House

by Benjamin Taylor

  The Taylors, Roosths, Goldbergs and Bocksteins had lived at close quarters with these horrors. Wherever the influence of the Klan was strong, race hatred shaded over into ethnic and religious hatreds. More than once as a boy my father had been pelted with rocks and called “Christ killer.”

  At Blues for Mister Charlie, as on other theatrical occasions, I felt misgivings pass between my parents. Should they have taken me along? But they always took me along. In Fort Worth they’d taken me along to see Sally Rand’s fan dance. (The one exception had been two years earlier in Las Vegas when they went to something called the Folies Bergère—Folies Brassiere, I thought they’d said. An image arose of statuesque ladies cavorting in plain white bras like Mom’s. We were staying at the Desert Inn. An on-staff babysitter, devout enough to carry a Bible in her handbag, had looked after me that evening. I remember how she got lost in her devotions, then popped her head up to say, “Let’s look at TV!” as if she’d found the idea in Scripture.)

  On summer nights my parents liked taking me to the drive-in. While they watched Blackboard Jungle, my first movie (I was three) or, that same year, The Man with the Golden Arm, my second, I slept on the backseat under an afghan knitted by Little Bubbe. When I was ten they’d taken me to see Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson in Long Day’s Journey into Night, also at the drive-in, for which I stayed awake. The one visual memory I have is of a morphine-addled Hepburn when she howls, with a smashing of crockery, “I hate doctors!” Beset by dope addiction, alcoholism and tuberculosis, the Tyrone family was not a tribe I could recognize, familiar though the configuration was: mother, father and two boys with a big age gap. The Tyrones had torments bred in the bone. We’d merely suffered a calamity. They were the luckless version of ourselves, who we’d have been if doomed by trouble, which we were not. Everybody who’s seen O’Neill’s play remembers the impersonation of family happiness that they manage to sustain for the first five minutes. Reflecting on my own family story now that it’s over—which was what O’Neill was doing when he wrote his “play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood”—what impresses me is how unbowed my mother and father were, how fit for life, how flinty, even, how determined to get more than the usual five minutes.

  • • •

  Our New York theatergoing in 1964 was overhung by a recent embarrassment. A couple of Broadway producers had ventured as far as Fort Worth in search of backers for a musical life of Sophie Tucker, with music and lyrics by Steve Allen and starring an actress slated for megastardom, Libi Staiger. Like my own parents, Robby’s had been lured in. It was how he and I came to be so interested in Sophie. Given that she’d been the biggest entertainer of her day, given that she was still alive to promote the show, given Steve Allen, Mom and Dad thought they couldn’t lose. They were longing for a taste of the big time. A cousin of Mom’s in Dallas lived off the proceeds of her little stake in The Music Man. Why shouldn’t such a thing happen to us?

  Sophie opened and closed at the Winter Garden in one week. It has the distinction of being not just a bomb but a preeminent bomb. (At Joe Allen’s restaurant on West Forty-sixth, where posters of such costly disasters line the walls, Sophie has pride of place.) One year later a musical about another homely girl in vaudeville, starring another young woman slated for megastardom, rang all the bells and made its investors very rich. The night we saw Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl at the Winter Garden, Mom and Dad were finally laughing about having put their money on the wrong Ziegfeld sensation. But when, a few months later, those same producers approached the folks about a new show—based on the life of ill-fated film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, whose trial for the wrongful death of a tootsie had riveted America—Dad hit the ceiling. “What next?” he bellowed. “A musical about Adolf Hitler?” We never touched show business again.

  • • •

  One sweltering afternoon stands out as vividly as any matinee or evening performance: Dad took me to see the old Penn Station, on which demolition had begun some months earlier. This was before the age of implosion. Buildings of such size were dismantled over the course of months or years.

  What vindictive hand or eye dared frame the subterranean mess that was going to replace it? The great architectural historian Vincent Scully used to tell his students at Yale that whereas you strode into the old soaring light-filled Penn Station like a prince, you nowadays scurried through the new one like a rat. Those wanting to see the wondrous place as it was can do no better than watch certain movies. In The Seven Year Itch, Tom Ewell packs his wife and son off to Maine from there. In The Palm Beach Story, Claudette Colbert grabs the train to Florida for a quickie divorce. Best of all for Penn Station admirers is Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, in which you get a real grasp of the lost building’s noble concourses and coffered vaults.

  How my father loved whistling on two fingers for a taxi, as he did that day at Thirty-first and Eighth. How he loved surprising Jewish cabdrivers—a lot of them still were at the time—by switching from drawling East Texan to idiomatic Yiddish. The romance of New York was strong in Dad and he would sometimes muse on a metropolitan life for us. More practically, he thought he’d have better opportunities if we moved north. A powerful man on Wall Street, Joseph S. Gruss, had taken us under his wing. After Tommy’s brief stint on the night shift of that plastics plant, he was in no time a summer apprentice at Mr. Gruss’s investment firm on Broad Street and living in the Navarro, a residential hotel on Central Park South. What a transformation! The old bar of Lava soap, six months later, wasn’t even worth remembering. And I think it may have been on Mr. Gruss’s recommendation that Dad took one of the few real financial risks of his life, a large position in Communications Satellite Corporation on its initial public offering. The company’s stock price, like the products it made, went into outer space.

  Was it on account of this, rather than my rhabdomyosarcoma, that our suite at the Plaza gave onto Central Park and we dined at ‘21’ and the Colony? Along with the keys, change, pillbox and penknife jingling in his pocket, Dad held there our bright future. “Sol Taylor, from Fort Worth, Texas!” he’d say, putting out his hand to everyone, even to Joe Louis, whom we spotted on Madison Avenue: “Meet my boy, Joe! Son, meet the Champ!” From June 2, the day of our arrival, COMSAT, as the company was called, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Daddy was cock of the walk that month and showed me New York as if he owned the place. Because I was sick. Because we were in the chips.

  His position in COMSAT amounted to a fraction of one percent of the company, about half a million 1964 dollars. The stock shot up and split, up and split, up and split once more. I lived from that time with the assurance of money, which made me ignorant of where it came from and reckless in my use of it. “How’s about I give you your inheritance in loose bills?” Dad proposed when I went away to school. “That way you can throw it from the rear platform of the train.”

  I believe the master plan I worked out in those weeks—as mesmerized then by the future as I now am by the past—was that I’d make good on my father’s pipe dream and come back to Manhattan to stay. And as a man that’s what I did, with, alas, no better idea of the value of a dollar than I’d possessed eating bouillabaisse at the Cub Room in 1964.

  • • •

  The one place I had known “nigger” to be flung around was in the pages of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, recommended by Mrs. Westbrook. It was the summer reading I’d brought to New York.

  Having come through the explosion of a steamboat boiler, Huck is fawned over by Aunt Sally. “Good gracious!” she says. “Anybody hurt?”

  “No’m,” says Huck. “Killed a nigger.”

  “Well, it’s lucky,” says Aunt Sally, “because sometimes people do get hurt.”

  That most violent of American words is scrawled all over our history. Huckleberry, as good a boy as any of us will ever know, has no way not to use it. In the sharecropping Texas and Louisiana my gr
eat-grandparents and grandparents immigrated to, it was as universal and unquestioned as it had been in the antebellum Missouri of Mark Twain’s boyhood. Nor is it going anywhere. “Antimacassar” and “furbelow” may have fallen out of use, but “nigger” will not. It is invasively rooted in the civilization that gave rise to it and will flourish till the end.

  Lionel Trilling, my teacher at Columbia in 1975, the year of his death, wrote this about Huck: “To read it young is like planting a tree young—each year adds a new growth year of meaning, and the book is as little likely as the tree to become dull. So, we may imagine, an Athenian boy grew up together with the Odyssey. There are few other books which we can know so young and love so long.” What struck me most at eleven, and stayed with me longest, and for reasons not far to seek, was the episode in which, for a bit of fun, Huck leaves a dead rattlesnake on Jim’s pallet. By the time Jim comes to bed, the dead rattler’s mate has arrived and bites him on the heel. Jim instructs Huck, who has promptly killed the second snake, to cut off its head, skin it and roast a piece of the meat, which Jim eats as a homeopathic measure. While his foot and leg balloon with venom, Jim drinks himself delirious from Pap Finn’s jug. Only after four days and nights does the danger pass. Then Huck and Jim head downriver on their island of safety, their talismanic raft. “The fifth night we passed St. Louis, and it was like the whole world lit up.”

  Jim never knows Huck has put the dead snake on that blanket. I think what captivated me was Huck’s private guilt, for I was a connoisseur of the emotion. It felt so good to be able to feel bad. “Look me in the eye!” my father would rage when trying to pry this or that confession from me. But my undiscovered trespasses were my treasure: venial bad acts a little; fantasized murders—spotless and undetectable—a lot. Everyone in Fort Worth ought to have feared for his life. At twelve I dreamed up mayhem in order to feel guilty, which in turn made me feel good. And took things to their logical conclusion. Everything was somehow my fault. Reading a few years ago that Alma Mahler believed she was responsible for the First World War, I understood completely. Such comprehensive guilt must have been what it took to cheer her up.

  We waited that summer in brutally long lines for the World’s Fair pavilions, tacky public-relations monuments to Westinghouse, Pepsi-Cola, General Motors, US Steel, Chunky candy bars, Johnson Wax, IBM, Eastman Kodak, RCA and so on. Did I care? I was not in Flushing Meadows but on a raft with Nigger Jim, reveling with Huck in his bad conscience. After all, he’s assisting a runaway slave, Miss Watson’s property. Jim says that once he gets to Cairo, Illinois, and is free he’s going to save up and buy his wife and two children. And if he can’t buy them he’s going to get an abolitionist to steal them. “It most froze me to hear such talk,” says Huck; but he concludes, on further reflection, that he’d feel just as guilty about handing Jim over as he does about harboring him: “—s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”

  Having written a letter denouncing Jim to Miss Watson, Huck tears it up and resolves to go to hell, where he can feel good about having harbored a runaway slave. Huck Finn, that situational ethicist, became my moral teacher, which he has remained. Trust your adulterated nature and do what comes handiest at the time. Huck’s greatest disciple, Ernest Hemingway, sets forth the same code: “What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.” For my ethics, this has served.

  • • •

  Offered the chance to have life over again from the start, I know I’d say no. Young again? When the greatest satisfaction has been getting older? Young for what? To endure again the thousand natural shocks? When what I want now is to earn my grave? I’ve picked it out and the plot is paid for. Henry James tells, in his story “The Next Time,” of a writer whom commercial success has eluded. The filigreed masterpieces of Ray Limbert are read by few. But then, through some blessing of old age, the siren voice of the market grows dim. He passes beyond ambition, lucky man; wakes up, amenable, “in the country of the blue,” and stays there “with a good conscience and a great idea.”

  My own conscience is a mixed affair, like everyone’s. But I believe it provides me with more occasions, marginally more, for feeling good about what I’ve done than for feeling bad. And like Limbert, I’ve got a great idea: to turn from trying to make this happen and that happen and have the future my way, and to bequeath myself instead to the sunlit, lavishly hospitable past, a country of the blue where I may bide what’s left of my time.

  Camp Indianola, 1964.

  | CHAPTER SEVEN |

  LAKE EFFECT

  Deep into the Alzheimer’s disease that would kill her in 2008 (as it had killed her father in 1970) my mother had moments of lucidity. The derelict circuits would briefly fire right and the articulate, reflective woman we had known would be suddenly among us again. In one of these interludes she told me that you really fall in love only once, which doubtless had been the case for her. These days I sleep badly and sometimes name in reverse order the forty-four Presidents of the United States, or else the twenty-six loves I’ve survived. Looking back across more than half a century, I see these as a chain of volcanoes, extinct by and large, though one or two still rumble. Mild commotions, very pleasant in the night.

  Danny Metzinger had been first in the sequence. My great summer-camp love, Dickie Lippincott from Shaker Heights, Ohio, came directly after. By the shores of Lake Mendota, outside Madison, Wisconsin, with its network of lakes, was Camp Indianola, a Jewish boys’ Shangri-la to which my parents sent me for four consecutive summers, starting when I was eight. Of the many things I thank them for, Indianola is near the top of the list. Unlike the other eight- and nine-year olds on either side of me in Cabin One that first summer, I could not be heard stifling sobs into my pillow after taps. Homesickness? My letters to Ranier Court were so disgracefully brief that my father finally wrote back in kind, saying: “We are fine too. Love, Daddy.” Indianola was a first parcel of the great world I craved. The grass was greener in Wisconsin, the trees statelier, the air sweeter. I lived near enough to the ground and was enough of a naturalist to be very interested in the crawling life, whose variety outshone our Texas specimens.

  Thus commenced my bill of particulars against home.

  Captain Steve, my junior counselor in Cabin One, introduced us to Debussy, whose “Engulfed Cathedral” transported me. The record player in Cabin One resounded also with Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique and Beethoven’s Seventh. Returning home with such elegant new knowledge, I was a nine days’ wonder to Mom and Dad, who enrolled me for piano lessons, an arduous season of which revealed no musical talent whatever.

  Indianola’s Native American motifs (not what anybody would have called them then) were widely standardized throughout the American summer-camp industry because of a single book, Recreational Programs for Summer Camps by H. W. Gibson. When I compare notes with former campers from other establishments, all testify to war paint, breechcloths, moccasins, tomahawks (one of which sits on my desk to this day), torchlight canoe races and the rest of it. But putting a hand to one’s mouth and saying “woo-woo-woo” was discouraged, to the credit of Chief Hank Woldenberg, owner of Indianola. At the climax of solemn campfires, after incantations and war dances, Chief, in a great headdress dragging the ground, would sweep into our gaze to deliver the benediction and send us, teary-eyed with camp love, to bed. “All is well,” went our hymn, “safely rest, God is nigh.” We wended our way with arms thrown over one another’s shoulders, like drunks.

  I remember “Calling Out,” a majestic night ceremony at the climax of our color wars—Greens versus Whites—in which certain older boys were inducted into an esoteric society called the Order of Secret Merit. OSM for short. I
n the far meadow where Chief convoked us—with any luck, of a starry, moonless night—some Indian brave of the OSM would shoot a flaming arrow into the ground before each of the initiates. Thus were they “called out” and led away in awful silence to the deep woods. I knew as little about all this as I do today about Skull and Bones or Porcellian, but pictured, in the vague first blush of eros, a bacchanalia with war whoops and breechcloths flung up into the trees and unmentionable hoopla till break of day. In reality, about an hour after taps the inducted boys—shaken up, ennobled, possessed of the mysteries—were delivered back to their bunks. At reveille they rose as men.

  It was in the summer of 1963, my third Indianola summer, when I was in Cabin Nine, that I met Dickie, who was in Ten. No boys like him in Fort Worth. Studying the planes of Dickie’s face or watching his loose-limbed gait, I couldn’t breathe right. He seemed to shed grace as he moved. I couldn’t hear enough of his voice, which had a hairline crack in it. Radiantly at home with himself, Dickie was a stranger to coarseness or bullying. When we chose sides for any game, he as our natural leader would favor of all boys me, among Indianola’s least coordinated.

  I walked one morning before breakfast into Cabin Ten to find him in tears and hiding his face. Poor Dickie had wet the bed. Why were we younger campers so inclined to do this? A common morning sight was sheets hung out. Surely the unfamiliar atmosphere was to blame, the lake effect. Watching Dickie sob and fend me off with a flailing arm, I felt something break in me. I was in love and knew it.

  All through the following school year I carried inside my shirt a snapshot of him in only his Speedo and Jack Purcells, and dreamed of our reunion in the coming summer of ’64. (This snapshot was in fact on my person when I shook the President’s hand.) Mom and Dad seemed unaware, but Mrs. Westbrook had noticed one day when I took it out to moon over. “Better put that picture away someplace where it won’t get spoiled,” she said, doubtless understanding more than I did about why I carried it. But I understood enough. As I saw it, Dickie and I were something like Dickie Loeb and Babe Leopold. But as good as they were bad. My Dickie and I would do wonders, not horrors. I was mad with excitement to be with him again.