Soon after my sister Debby was born, Mommy took a job running the New York office of the Fontainebleau Hotel, which was starting up in Miami Beach. The position was offered to her from old Grossinger connections, though it helped that she could say the name in flawless French from her childhood in Paris. She answered the reservation line downtown in an office all day, then from an extension at home up to bedtime. Her representation of the resort became her life’s calling, as she made the booking of rooms into a thespian art, entertaining guests with gossip and intrigue, the sounds of which filled our apartment.
In her office at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street she thrived on the flurry of paperwork and ringing lines, rushing between file cabinets and a patron on “hold.” Her voice commanded a five-person suite. By comparison with the second-rate males demoted from Florida, she was witty and vivacious—in charge, though I realized years later, paid a third of what they were. I watched their baffled looks as she exchanged insights and ironies or twinkles of the eye with her brassy blonde assistant Helen.
Over the years the Fontainebleau office was my favorite place to visit her, for she was convivial and almost normal there, a different woman, more likely to order me a hamburger from downstairs than to harangue me over some truancy. Yet I recognized the brittleness and instability of this mood and never let down my guard.
Back at home, she reverted to a one-woman totalitarian regime. We were an odd blend of a superstitious shtetl clan addicted to shouting, browbeating, and rampages, and a household from Dickens in which every slight or insult was weighed meticulously, then leveraged back, its ante adjusted for fullest effect, petty honor more important than charitable conduct or even common sense.
There was something in my mother’s nature that kept permanent tally of wrongs done to her. Transgressions and encroachments on her dignity were the most important things in the world—they held the mythic significance of the Ten Commandments and trials of Job. She was the embodiment of tribunal, revenge, and retribution, despite fancy proclamations to the contrary, so we were quarantined from anyone disloyal to her. When I first heard the phrase “iron curtain,” I imagined that it originated with us and was applied to the Soviet Union later.
She and Daddy lived at a breakneck pace, catching their shared cab downtown in the morning, arriving home for dinner exhausted, often conspiring a mile a minute against some “total idiot” or bickering with each other.
Their arguments were endemic, for they bore an unsettlable vendetta between them too. As children we had no notion of the issues but read its prodrome: irreversible throbs of resentment and exploratory salvos cascading into full fusillades. Like brushfires, the irritant might smolder a while, then germinate anon from tense, suppressed voices in their room. Mommy would escalate from hollering to screeching to paroxysmic fits beyond delineation. Daddy would come running out of the room, her chasing after him with a purpose. She threw books, ashtrays, and other objects. If the skirmish spilled into the kitchen, she might pick up dishes, silverware, even kitchen knives, once actually wounding him with one. Yet, as Jonny and I would joke, it was lucky she didn’t have much of an arm. He would go right to the elevator and disappear, either for hours or days.
The time he was injured he locked himself in the bathroom and wept. She brought iodine and bandages to the door and seemed genuinely distraught at the damage she had caused, though she resumed yelling as soon as he emerged.
I wished we could somehow just be friendly, trust each other, that I could feel safe and happy. But things were too complicated for that. I couldn’t trust my own feelings, let alone those of the others. I didn’t love my brother, so why would any of them love me?
Living in such a milieu was not just piddling harassment by a neurotic scold or hysterical Jewish-American Princess. If she had been shallow or superficial, everything would have been easier. We would have laughed behind her back, humored and ignored her. But she had much bigger plans for us. From her bottomless web she conducted a dirge for the annihilation of happiness forever, like the whole of nature struggling to be born after a thousand years of winter. And no certainty it would.
Episodes like following the wrong lady out of the fish market or missing a school wagon that never came stand out as myths, yarns to be retold and savored years later, because they were hilarious and absurd. If anything, they were comic relief to a macabre regime—fey outcroppings of moods with minor reprisals. The real anguish formed beneath the vaudeville, a sense of gloom and impending disaster, a constant reminder to stop acting bad when we knew we couldn’t.
Relics of an unspeakable crime occupied every nook and cranny, reminding us of sins that could neither be uttered nor expiated. Their bleak profundity and ritual mourning imbued every gesture. They fed the ambient light, the seams between rooms, the dishwater, the taste of Sugar Pops and Frosted Flakes, the sound of “Some Enchanted Evening” in the living room: “Once you have found her, never let her go”—another song that meant not only exactly what it said but something it couldn’t say.
At unpredictable times Mommy seemed inundated by feelings of tenderness for us; she would address us with giddy appreciation. She’d tell funny stories and display an uncanny memory of all the good things we ever did. Where had our Mummsy Wine been hiding? Why did we not know that she was keeping track of our virtues too.
But even as she eulogized, she was challenging us to doubt her, pleading with us not to make a false move because then we would be responsible for the return of winter. Her cheerfulness was so fragile that we never completed an episode without an onset of suspicion. “What’s wrong? Why won’t you tell me?” We knew it couldn’t last.
No description of my mother does her justice because her reality contained so many other layers and anomalies. She wasn’t unhappy as much as she was inconsolable. She met us with a fierceness and vengeance that had no object, merely a longing to set things right in a condition in which something incredible was expected of all of us that we could never enact … and then at times she could be so gay we followed her like the pied piper, this woman who turned men’s heads on the street. She must have held in her mind a magnificent object, a requiem big as the sky, a kaleidoscope of all the songs Irving Berlin ever wrote, one “Easter bonnet/girl that I marry/white Christmas,” but no way to meet her there, no way to get into her imaginary paradise.
Sometimes it will all come back in a flash of déjà vu: the walk to the barbershop, the color of light against a particular building at a time of day, Michel with his scissors, the hair all around us on the floor … how I woke in the middle of a winter night, shivering, trying to hold the lost tendril of a dream, wet bedsheets clinging to goose bumps in lost watches of the night. I lay in damp warm islands diminishing slowly to ice. Getting toasty was my whole existence as I shivered against the clammy flannel.
Finally, I roused myself, spread my sheets and blankets on radiator pipes, and lay atop them in imaginary summer, aromatically steaming them dry, until sun itself rose through city stone—first light blending with vapors from my own body.
I will feel the melancholy of then, suspended in a sorrow I will always have. I did not minimize the pain later. I simply engorged it. I changed it into something else, as I changed—into a numb, flattened ache so that now I remember mainly how desolate it was. Nothing will ever feel that old way again because, back then, I imagined that my range of feelings and possibilities was the world. I had no reason to suspect it would ever be different, that I would be paroled. And I adhered to it like a penitent because it also held mystery, depth, and wonder of my own being.
The things I did during childhood do not seem as important to me as the overall mystery of it. I went from one event to another, as the Buddhists say, like a drunken monkey. Toys, games, comics, candy bars—these are what we are raised on in the West, and in much of the world they are considered the acme, worth rewriting history for.
Years later I look back on that childhood with dismay. What did I learn compared to peasant
children in China who worked the farms and raised food for villages? What about the self-sufficient offspring of the Eskimo and other northern tribes? From the beginning they are taught where they are, the habitats of plants and animals, and how to find their way home in a blizzard. If they have spooks, the tribal elders gather for a ceremony to honor and release them. Alien forces are named and addressed respectfully; they are not allowed free rein in a child’s mind. A boy is given his own totems, the wind to ride.
In 1950s New York City we were raised in an arcade without a sense that our survival was provisional. In place of spirit release, we had doctors, churches, synagogues—stand-ins for the power of the cosmos, its capacity to transform and heal.
Behind the scattered memes and memories of childhood, a vast incomprehensible fog envelops my life. I can create names for that fog, but they are intellectual constructs. The original sadness was an ocean. It wasn’t only sad; it was sensual and rich, and I swam in its eternity—a planet of waters as large, in scale, as the lake into which The African Queen plunged in the movie. It too had lightning and demon cruisers. There was no opposite shore to that lake, but childhood was the process of sailing there anyway. Fear was my guardian, but fear was the same as timelessness—unrelinquishable, impenetrable.
Games kept me busy—toys, comic books, movies, water guns—so that a yellow plastic Sorry! token or a green Pennsylvania Avenue card brings back the whole enchantment.
10
COLOR WAR
During fifth and sixth grades I remained a member of Bill-Dave Group and loyal friend and foil of Phil Wohlstetter. A list of our adventures would fill five volumes. Good old Phil—switch-hitting shortstop, platoon leader, Tom Quest himself. We shared the Yankees, the Hardy Boys, and a litany of cards, comics, and capers.
Most adults admired Phil’s spunk and irreverence and laughed at his antics, but to my mother he was a juvenile delinquent on the brink of big-time trouble—another in my legion of errors in character judgment starring Dr. Fabian and Aunt Bunny. Phil had been caught by Jessie in the act of stealing. He had talked me into throwing my undershirt out the window to win a bet with Jonny Wouk. He had led us on nutty detective ventures that brought the police.
Yet by fifth grade Phil was being tutored for prep school as if a newly discovered scholastic genius. Prior to that, he had been as much of an anarchist and goof-off as me, albeit with better grades. Now he lorded his status over me, quoting algebraic formulas to prove his ascension to seventh- and then eighth-grade math, spicing his sassy slang with new vocabulary. Miss Fitzgerald, our teacher, infuriated my mother by saying she wished some of my friend’s spark would rub off on me: “He’s just so energetic and creative.”
“If you follow her advice,” Daddy said, “you’ll end up in jail.”
“Daydream” was the word most often written on my report cards. That didn’t require much perspicacity from my teachers. But they thought I just didn’t pay attention; they had no idea what I was imagining. Beside such sagas, school hardly moved the needle.
I spent my summers at Chipinaw, ascending the row of bunks with Jay, Barry, and whatever three or four miscellaneous kids were assigned to our cabin. Some years we had “good” counselors who threw in with us. In Bunk 9 Sam Rosenberg spent what seemed like half his salary on food and prizes for his boys—he also gave up time-off during rest periods to serve as commissioner for our All-Star Baseball tournaments, arranging brackets and umpiring the matches. When we began fighting over Yankee, Dodger, and Giant farm clubs for our team names, he resolved the matter by making us pick other minor-league towns in Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska.
Bunk 12 saw us in constant strife with authority, punished for poor inspections and bad attitudes. As Jay, Barry, and I made improvisational horseplay and insubordination a way of life, we were deemed bad influences on our bunkmates. But it was our métier, for we were pretty much what the constabulary told us we were: goof-offs, lazy slobs.
Because I had a growing reputation as a prankster, Jay and Barry liked to egg me into providing entertainment: water traps over doorways, sometimes with dangling strings to tempt; unmaking beds and short-sheeting them so that the victim would be unable to get his feet down; conducting all sorts of unlikely movements of unlikely objects.
I could ill explain some of my demonic streaks. In the middle of one night, I collected a few baseballs, bars of soap, and loose moccasins from people’s cubbies, tiptoed through the bathroom, and tossed them over the divider into the next bunk, causing an impressive clatter of thuds and clunks, especially for the hour. I hadn’t known that I was going to this; the deed furnished its own impetus. Tearing back to my bed, I pretended to be asleep.
I repeated this bizarre disturbance twice more over the next week. The kids in the adjoining cabin were fired up to identify their nemesis and get revenge.
Jay, Barry, and I had a bunkmate that year even sloppier and more eccentric than me. His first name was also Richard, and he corrected mispronunciations of his last name Oranger so prissily that we contrived garbles of it. On my return to bed from the third enactment of my stunt, I pushed Oranger, covers and all, onto the floor before diving under my sheets. The lights went on, and soon our bunk was filled with O.D.’s and kids from next door (remember, O.D.’s were older campers with paid jobs, one of which was to oversee bunks after Taps).
“Well, if you don’t remember doing it, dammit,” said a frustrated O.D., “you must have sleepwalked.”
To my horror Oranger agreed.
Years later Jay and Barry were still telling the story. “And that’s why,” Barry would conclude ceremoniously, “you don’t see the Orangeman today.”
But I rued the cruel-hearted imp who incriminated a meek boy when he should have been his ally and friend. I had no more planned to push him on the floor than commit the crime in the first place; I just did it.
My pranks represented gaps in myself, when I felt more poignancy than I could bear and there were no other outlets. I vaguely recall that when I tossed the items over the wall the first time, I was responding to an evocative smell of toothpaste and soap near the sinks. Feeling equal parts attraction and repulsion, I acted rashly and resolved the matter.
At Chipinaw, nonconformity was my safety valve, mutiny my artform. I rebelled instinctively, going truant from activities like a dog slipping his leash. Not only didn’t I swim, I skipped other activities.
I played seasons of solitaire Roofball. In this game a Spaldeen was tossed onto a bunk roof, and it was either caught by me on the rebound for an out or it landed and then bounced (single … double … triple … home run … depending on how long it took me to chase it down). An irregular roof with peaks and vales was far more challenging than a stone wall. I learned the bumps, elbows, and slopes of the various bunks and used them as different home fields. The ball could be angled high so that it ricocheted back as a long fly ball, or I could attempt to fool myself (or an imaginary opponent) with spins, recoils off pipes sticking through the roof, rolls along seams, or even innocent sequences of bounces that either just hit or just missed the front lip. I cultivated these techniques as well for matches with friends during free play.
Counselors would announce our required activity, but I would be camouflaged between the back of a bunk and the woods. The grass was unmown there, the weeds often wet from dew. “McDougald into the hole … fields … throws … gets him!” I would toss the rubber pinky as high as I could, then back up like an outfielder against a wall, coil, and leap at the edge of the forest to meet the apogee of the ball’s arc off the roof, stealing a home run and falling into moist foliage. “There’s a long drive … Mitchell back … that ball is going … going…. ”
Sometimes they forgot to look for me, and I played through a whole period. More often I was herded to where I belonged, the daily regimen of games, hikes, lessons, and drills—softball, hardball, tennis, lanyards, volleyball, soccer, track, boxing, nature cabin, swimming, rowboats, canoes. These were relentlessly imp
osed, with meals, rest period, and meager slots of free time.
The worst were archery and riflery. I could barely hold the arrow straight while pulling on the giant bow or point it anywhere near large straw-stuffed bulls-eyes. I didn’t want anything to do with the rifle range’s gunpowder and empty shells, which we were warned not to touch because they could give us lockjaw, such a terrifying prospect that I kept moving my mouth and tongue while I routinely missed the entire paper target despite aligning the sights. These weapons were powerful and scary. Steel-tipped sticks and metal slugs that moved too fast to be seen but made ominous hisses, clanks, and holes didn’t belong in our unpredictable paws. I pictured arrows through chests and gunned-down young cowboys.
In retrospect, I estimate that my life at Chipinaw was twenty percent successful escapes, eighty percent conscription, but my extemporizations were richer and more memorable. It wasn’t that the regular activities were always awful and unpleasant, but counselors’ continual sanctimony and coercion made them feel like punishment rather than fun. There was zero recognition of the need to dawdle, laze, imagine, just stare. For me, playing hooky was intrinsic and visceral.
I made up another private game in which I would stand at the downhill edge of a long hangar-like building called “the armory” (which housed the crafts shop and theater) and fungo a hardball as far as I could, converting the adjacent landscape into a baseball zone with designated hits. I revised and nuanced this event over many a summer, as it settled into my most ambitious and reliable diversion.
Over the hedge in front of the girls’ dining room was a homer; before the hedge was a triple. Up to the end of the armory was a double. Past the midpoint of the stairs was a single. Everything else was an out.
New Moon Page 18