Not Dead Yet

by Herbert Gold

  3

  Lakewood, Ohio, 1930s

  A big boy named Jack lived in the house next door. In our house, I was a littler boy and my brother, Sid, was the even littler one who liked to tag along with me. Although the houses stood side by side in Lakewood, Ohio, only a driveway between them, Jack never played with us. Occasionally when we passed on the sidewalk, Sid and I dawdling our way home from Taft Elementary and Jack from the parochial school a few blocks away, he would shout, “Chrith Killerth!” with a spray of saliva flying from his mouth.

  I asked Mother what he was saying.

  “He'll grow out of it,” she explained, exercising her habit of answering the question she preferred to answer, rather than the one asked. Sid looked at me, trusting me to give him an interpretation, but I didn't have one. Did she mean he would grow out of his lisp or his accusation? I knew it was an accusation because of the shrillness of his voice, the specks of foam at his lips. When he whispered, if we happened to pass close to him, Sid wanting to take my hand but not daring to, it was no more agreeable.

  Jack's mother seemed to have no husband; Jack's father was invisible. There was a glassed-in perch on the roof of the McDonald house, and sometimes Mrs. McDonald, whom we took to calling the Old Crab, stared at our house even if our shades were pulled down. More often, she peered out toward Lake Erie, a few blocks away, beyond the streetcar line on Clifton Boulevard, which led into Cleveland. Since I didn't ask, Mother told me what she was looking for—her husband. He was a captain on a ship carrying iron ore and may have gotten off in Duluth. On Hathaway Avenue it was known that he had been gone for many years.

  At age seven or eight, in bed with the measles, feverish and itching, I was asleep one late afternoon when an open can of sardines came flying through the window. Jack had thrown it from the driveway alongside. Mother picked up the jagged can and cleaned up the mess of oil and fish, but the pungent stink of sardines lingered, sickeningly, until she finally took Clorox to the stains on the floor. I pointed out the streaks of bleach. She said “Meshuganeh,” and of course I didn't know if she meant me or the McDonalds, mother and son. She didn't explain and didn't bother to add an irrelevant comment, either. Crazy was in the air.

  Extreme remedies were required to wipe away the Christ-killer smells. Our neighbors’ battle against those who not only crucified their Savior but also mowed their lawn on the sabbath was unrelenting. Dad liked to garden on his day free of work in the Gold Bros. store; Officer Cecil wearily paid us another visit, explaining, “There's been a complaint…” From a pulled curtain, Mrs. McDonald's eyes peered out at the black-and-white police car at the curb. Politely, Officer Cecil stayed for one of Mother's oatmeal-raisin cookies and a cup of Nestlé’s instant coffee because he knew the Old Crab was watching, hoping to see the sabbath-desecrater dragged off to jail. Dad gave Officer Cecil a Christmas basket of fruit every year, but the policeman had sworn to do his duty. He saw that Sid was frightened by his uniform. He said, “Hi, sonny,” and patted his head. Since I wasn't frightened but curious, he treated me to a manly nod. Sitting down at the kitchen table to his cookie and coffee, he said, “Mr. Gold, I'm sorry, your truck starts up pretty noisy, maybe a tune-up… Mr. Gold, I'm sorry, if you could ask the kids not to run around so much in the backyard… Mr. Gold, about your lawn, you keep a nice lawn, but I'm sorry…”

  The Lake Erie boat captain never came home. Mrs. McDonald kept watch over us nearby more than she studied the lake four blocks away. My brother and I were growing up and so was Jack McDonald, forever a few years ahead of us. Occasionally he still bounced a tennis ball against our house at naptimes, but Sid and I stopped needing afternoon naps. The sardines were only a one-time suggestion from his mom. Sid and I got used to walking past the McDonald house without fear, although we averted our eyes and Sid moved closer to me. We didn't stop to stare and satisfy our curiosity about the mysterious mother and son.

  Once Dad remarked, “I never heard about no ore boat sank. Wintertime they close down the lake anyways. It's Siberia out there.” He made these weather observations to the world in general, expecting no reply, and then retreated into his chair to read Der Tag (The Day), a newspaper he received by mail from New York. “Ain't coming home, smart guy, that's all,” he grumbled.

  I tried to puzzle things out from Dad's grumbles, Mother's impatience, Officer Cecil's visits, the glaring eyes of Mrs. McDonald behind curtains pulled aside, the occasional rhythmic bounce of an old tennis ball against the side of our house. Putting all the evidence together, I came to understand that our family was the only one on Hathaway Avenue that didn't accept Jesus, we rejected Him, and as Father Coughlin advised, the money-changers needed to be driven from the temple; also the Sunday mowers from their lawns. Also, early-morning truck-starters with slow ignitions in cold weather should go back where they came from.

  The Black Legion, night riders out of Jackson, Michigan, was organizing its stalwart paranoids against race pollution. The white hood of the Kluxers was a Southern thing, below the class level of the sophisticates of Jackson, Grass Lake, and certain enclaves of outer Detroit. The Silver Shirts, led by William Dudley Pelley, wore a different color from the Nazi brown or Legion black because they were fighting the war on an all-American front. The German-American Bund marched in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and New York, and supported student exchange programs for American and German kids. (“I didn't see any persecution of Jews,” one returning scholar reported to our school assembly. “Of course, I didn't see any Jews, either.” There was laughter. There were only a couple of Jewish families in Lakewood, but everyone knew who they were.)

  From the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, Father Coughlin broadcast his anathemas in a resonant tenor, which echoed from most of the radios up and down Hathaway Avenue on Sunday mornings.

  “Mother,” I asked, “what's a shrine?”

  “Who shrine? What farkokteh shrine?”

  “Shrine of the Little Flower.”

  “Don't you have better things than why are you asking dumb questions? So are you ready for your lesson tomorrow, five prompt? I bought the piano, I pay her even if you don't learn nothing. If you don't practice, I'm gonna…” She paused, stymied for only a moment. When I didn't empty my plate, she reminded me of the starving Armenians who would be happy for it. But I knew there was no danger of sending the upright piano to any starving Armenians. “I'm gonna give it to Officer Cecil for his kid, plays good already.”

  From behind his copy of Der Tag, Dad said, “Irving in the store thinks that big mouth Father Cofflin makes sense. That's why Irving is nothing but my bookkeeper I don't fire because I'm sorry for a dummy and his wife.”

  Mother made a further contribution to family enlightenment. “Sam, sometimes your son is also a dummy. He left his glass of citrus on the table, didn't even drink it, for me to not let it go to waste. Don't he know these are hard times?”

  I knew, but wasn't telling.

  “He has problems,” Mother concluded, dwindling but doing a responsible parent's best to improve her eldest son's behavior in every way, from piano playing to not wasting. I was supposed to play “The Harmonious Blacksmith” at the recital, but was I ready? No.

  I picked up my copies of the Silver Shirt newspaper from the bundle regularly dropped at the entrance to Taft School. It didn't answer my curiosity about money-changers in the Shrine of the Little Father, but it informed me that President Roosevelt's real name was Rosenfelt. Around that time, Richard, my best friend since kindergarten—everyone has a best friend at that age—explained that I couldn't be invited to his birthday parties anymore because his mother thought some of the other mothers, those of girls, wouldn't let their daughters attend. Richard was still my best friend for stamp collecting, street baseball, and book reading. For his birthday, I gave him a copy of Ted Scott Across the Frozen North, latest in the Ted Scott, Intrepid Flyer, series we both collected.

  It was an interesting time to be the only family of our sort in the neighbo
rhood, our sort being money-changers and race polluters, with cloven hooves and horns cunningly hidden in our hair. The suddenly altering girls, finding strange growths on their own bodies with no warning from their mothers, could easily imagine, even if they couldn't see, the horns concealed in the pompadour I adopted from Dad. One of the girls, adventurous red-haired Donna, asked me to take off my left shoe so she could check my hoof. I refused, but she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek anyway, promising more when I grew up. Sex was ominous, Jews were ominous; since the first excited interest, so did the second. But it was too soon for me to think of this as an advantage.

  Something about the situation also interested the older boy next door. One afternoon, Mother and Dad at work in the store, as they usually were, Jack McDonald suddenly appeared at our front door, calling my name. I had just finished pouring glasses of milk for Sid and me; I'd opened a box of graham crackers. Jack was saying, “Hey! In there! Hey, how the heck are you?”

  “Okay,” I said cautiously.

  “Wanna see my house? Both of you?” He was wearing a brown corduroy lumberjacket and corduroy pants. His hands were in his pockets. His house was a mysterious and menacing presence, dark, the shades pulled down, the curtains drawn. Mother instructed us, “Don't look back,” when the Old Crab's face peeked at us from behind a curtain, searching out our sins. “Why not?” I asked, and Mother answered: “Hurt your eyes, dummy. Don't you have something better? Go practice, I wanna hear that Handel tune perfect.”

  After so many years, of course I wanted to see inside Jack's house. He stood there, legs spread, meatily smiling. “Come on. Sid, you can come, too. Mom took the streetcar to Cleveland, there's a sale at Higbee's. Won't be home till supper, earliest.”

  It was amazing that the Old Crab went shopping like normal human mothers. Sid was hanging at my heels, as usual. “Come on,” I commanded.

  As Jack moved upstairs, the Gold brothers behind him, his buttocks in brown corduroy wobbled a bit. He was thick and growing thicker. Sid and I were still children. The McDonald living room smelled of being closed off, with lace doilies on tables, scattered photographs of the absent ore boat captain, some with deckled edges, a giant metal cigarette-lighting machine with an open carton of Lucky Strikes alongside, and a heart-shaped twisted-silver frame containing a portrait of the Old Crab as a pretty young woman with bobbed hair wearing a wedding dress. Her groom stared gloomily into the camera.

  Jack slid the coffee table off to the side, leaving a wide expanse of carpet. “How about a rassle?” he asked. “Show you some a my special moves.”

  I was still thinking about the offer when he grabbed me around the neck. I struggled, thought of kicking, but worried that the Old Crab would find out I had kicked her son and would call Officer Cecil and then what trouble I'd be in. We fell to the floor, my nose buried in gritty carpet. I yelled, “Lemme go!” very loudly, “lemme go, lemme go!”

  Wrestling with Jack McDonald was no fun—the carpet burn, the sweat off his thick body, the tightness of his arm. But maybe wrestlers were supposed to grab and squeeze and hold and drive someone's nose into the floor.

  He let me up. Red-faced but smiling, his buckteeth outgoing and friendly, he said to Sid, “Okay, your turn. I'll teach you the great moves. I got moves you can't learn from those dummies at Taft.” He loomed over us. “I got expert-tiss.”

  My face must have revealed that we hadn't heard this word before, not even on the Fred Allen show, which brought big words to my radio experience.

  “Expert-tease,” he explained.

  Sid, smaller than I was, much smaller than Jack, didn't know what to do. He stood there waiting, his short pants hanging below his knees. He didn't know what was supposed to happen next, while I pretended, since I was nearly two years older than my brother, that this rassling was nothing new in my sophisticated life. We could learn some expert-tiss.

  “Come on, I'm ready,” Jack said. Sid put up his arms. “On your mark, get set —” With a distant smile on his face, still blotched red after his exertions with me, Jack just stepped into Sid, pinning his arms to his sides, and they fell together to the carpet. Had I looked as helpless as Sid did? They rolled on the floor, Jack grunting, “Okay, okay, rassle with me.”

  Then he was on top of my little brother, pressing hard. “Let me go,” Sid gasped. I cried out, “Hey! That's enough! Let him go!”

  A sudden smell like wet firecrackers arose in the closed room. I grabbed Jack's shoulders, trying to pull him off, but I didn't need to pull—he just fell off to the side and lay there, eyes shut but still grinning. The wet firecracker smell was sour; sweat, smoldering ashes, and Jack McDonald stretched out on the floor with a meaty goofy grin.

  “Come on, Sid, we're going,” I said.

  Neither of us spoke of the wrestling to our mother or anyone, not even to each other, and although it sometimes came to mind on the sidewalk in front of the McDonald house, I never asked Sid if he remembered it. When we glimpsed Jack, he never beckoned to us, never again invited us into his house, but also never again called us Christ-killers. We avoided looking at him.

  In years that followed, I realized that my grumbling father probably was right. There was no news in Der Tag or the Cleveland Plain Dealer of the tragic sinking of a Lake Erie ore carrier bound for Duluth. I too became an inspector of texts. When my hormones flooded with the adolescent growth spurt, no doubt similar to the parochial school hormones of Jack McDonald, I understood that Lilith, a siren with long silky lashes, had sung her ancient songs to Jack's father and had drawn Captain McDonald to dash his ship against the rocks of adultery, perhaps as nearby as Sandusky. I was learning about life from books. Lilith steals the strength of men's loins while they sleep. The Old Crab couldn't compete with the cursed Hebrew first bride of Adam, fiery Lilith, who was so skilled at forcing pleasure upon the Captain. It was a bewilderment she also brought to me, awakening me regularly to dizzy crashings like those which marooned the Captain in Sandusky, Toledo, or perhaps ashore at the distant port of Duluth in fabled, glamorous Minnesota. Lilith promised him the secret of unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged. He gave it a try. Captain McDonald, husband and father, never returned to Lakewood, Ohio.

  The confusion of the times succeeded in confusing me despite my avid reading. The smell of my father's Sunday-mown grass when Officer Cecil came to our door, wearily suggesting, “Mr. Gold, I'm sorry, but you should do this maybe how about some other day?” The smell of the closed house next door. The smell of wet firecrackers, the smell of an open can of sardines smearing the floor of my bedroom. The smell of Lakewood, Ohio, in the 1930s.

  But in years that followed, I came to bless Jack McDonald as we passed silently on the sidewalk. Wonderment and gratitude flowed over me because he had taught me something it had been time for me to learn, that part of my job in life was to protect my brother. Of course I often failed at this, as brothers often do.

  4

  A Selfish Story

  “Daddy, were you in World War One or Two?” my daughter Ann asked me. At about the same time, a woman whom I considered as grown-up as myself told me that she remembered my war because she remembered the boots her father wore while washing the car. She was an infant on an Army post. And yet, for those who enlisted near our eighteenth birthdays in the early forties, the war is still immediate, our youth may be gone but not disappeared, even if time and history have rolled over us.

  In 1942, I embraced New York City. I had spent a year wandering on the road, hitchhiking, living through a fantasy of rebellion from Cleveland, part of it in the flops of the Bowery and Bleecker Street, but now I washed and scrubbed myself, turned seventeen and a half, and entered Columbia College. Morningside Heights was as far from my scrounging boy hobo days as any place could be; Irwin Edman, Lionel Trilling, and Mark Van Doren replaced the gamblers and shills on Key Largo, the enraged, oversteamed chefs in restaurant kitchens all up and down the eastern seaboard, the losers, wildballs, and predators of the risky America I had p
ursued. Having so much eccentric fun made me earnest. I grew toward being an adjusted misfit.

  The experience of college structure was brief. We freshmen, turning eighteen, believed we might finish our first year before going to war. During the autumn of 1942, the black winter, reluctant spring, we read Homer and Thucydides, piled into Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, and felt up the Barnard girls near the spiked metal fence on Broadway. We discussed our future silver wings, our marks-men's medals, our citations and press dispatches to come. We had no imagination for death, for our own inevitable future deaths, the death of everyone, and for the complicating fact that a certain proportion of these readers of bloody Homer and the wrath of Achilles would be dead early, very soon now, before the end of the war.

  The normal static of late boyhood interferes with the process of growing up, imagining mortality. Knowledge comes at moments in the flux and flow; a serious illness; the death of a parent. Sometimes even education can educate. By pure good fortune, one of these moments occurred during a lazy late-winter afternoon in Hamilton Hall; the steam heat was boiling, there was a smell of chalk in the air, a seminar on “Lucretius and Time” was occupying a group of solemn freshmen and our teacher, O. J. Campbell, a distinguished scholar of Shakespeare. Until this afternoon, I had not formed any close friendships at school, although I admired the mad Cuban of Hartley Hall, who ran naked up and down the corridors, and a boy with a Maine accent who wanted to be either a missionary in Africa or a dean at Bowdoin, and an irritable freshman from White Plains who felt misused because he was merely adopted into a rich family, not born to it. Jack Kerouac was on the football team, a popular jock. Having spent a year on the road, I felt cut off from him and the other middle-class youngsters making their way on squads and in clubs. I didn't even write for Jester, the college humor magazine, or the Spectator. I was a secret poet and journal keeper.