“She’d be flattered.”
“Sure she would…. Anyhow, I don’t have her phone number or address.”
“Call the camp office, dummy. What have you got to lose? If she doesn’t want to go you’re back where you started.”
“But what should I invite her to?”
“You know the answer to that. Invite her to a ballgame. Get tickets from the office.”
When she made the suggestion I was sure there was no way I would do it. She said it too facilely, without any appreciation for the outrageousness of such an act. After all, she hadn’t viewed the consequences of my mere dance with Tina.
But she had opened Pandora’s box. It was a simple, gutsy plan, and it had the advantage of avoiding another unrequited fantasy. It was also vintage Grossinger’s—bold, daffy, overflowing with hope.
I evaded the gadfly for days, but it wouldn’t let me off the hook. Finally I phoned the Kenmont office and asked for Jill’s number. That was hard enough to accomplish gracefully, without bolting and hanging up while the secretary was searching.
Until the following morning I kept it in my pocket like a stolen gem, trying to enjoy it before it was rendered void. Then at nine-thirty I dialed quickly so that I wouldn’t stop myself. I listened to the line ring and ring, mesmerized, every few seconds jolting myself to cognizance of what I was doing, preparing for her voice … and when it continued ringing I was totally relieved.
I grabbed my novel and headed to the pool. After the legendary buffet—turkey, tongue, blueberry tarts—I hiked to the staff field and joined a group of Puerto Rican staff hitting and fielding fungos while they shouted in Spanish.
I played at being the kid from Grossinger’s that whole day, as I pondered my daring gambit. Observing myself in the role took nothing away. It was a great all-time ploy.
I waited until evening. The phone rang, twice, three times … suddenly a click … and her voice.
“Hello.”
“Hi. This is Richard Grossinger. Do you remember me from camp?”
“Oh yes … and how are your Yankees?”
“Okay, I suppose.”
“Do you go to ballgames now that you’re out of camp?”
“No. I’m not in New York….” And eventually: “How would you like to go to the Yankee-Cleveland game this Saturday?”
“Hmmm, this Saturday? Let’s see … I’m busy. How about next Saturday?”
“They go on the road Monday.”
“Oh, no! I’d really like to.”
“There’s one other chance. How about October 2nd? It’s a Sunday, the last day of the season. And who knows how many home runs Maris may have by then.”
“True, true…. Sunday the 2nd is fine with me.”
We set a meeting place and time (her apartment at noon) and I hung up the phone. I went tearing out the front door and ran around the house twice before rolling into the tomato patch. I lay there in the leaves, thanking them for being what they were, the sun too.
“I told you it would work,” Aunt Bunny said.
“It’s because she likes baseball.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
I returned to the City with new hopefulness, and my final year of Horace Mann began. I had Virgil, Honors European History, Honors English, Mr. Ervin’s writing seminar, and advanced algebra.
My mother and I seldom spoke beyond trifles. As the years had amassed in their unruly stack, we developed a protocol, a tacit truce. After all, I was getting A’s and B’s at school and acting more or less like a gentleman. It was clear that I had done something unforgivable once—that could never be pardoned—but she couldn’t keep lambasting me for the same crime, so we based our relationship on a presumption of my guilt as we performed a masquerade of amnesty: a stilted cordiality of house arrest. We hung on its fulcrum, two trapeze artists, unable to look at each other, yet, while falling away, stretching the tension between us to the boundary of our existences.
She was my mother, which Aunt Bunny, however wonderful, could never be. There was something about this woman, her scarred, craggy landscape, that grounded my life in hers and made her inalterably real. She got there through grief and pain, she was joyless and spiteful; yet I imbued her even as I fought her. I can’t remember her ever hugging me with good will or saying a kind word without an agenda. But she touched bottom. Through her I gauged where my own depth and texture went, how I was put together. Without her I had no ambit or shape.
Richard Grossinger, son of PG, was a flicker in the dusk. Richard, son of Martha Rothkrug Towers, was the cartilage of my being.
Her interest now was in how good a college I could get into, not because she pictured my leaving home to attend but because that was the next stage in the hoax we were perpetrating, my imitation of the career of her brother Lionel whom we had seen all of once. So that fall my father drove into the City with my adopted brother to take me on a trip to look at New England schools. Aunt Bunny had hoped that such exposure might inspire Michael to do his homework. It turned out to be a slapstick affair. With Uncle Paul’s one good eye keeping us (mostly) on the road, we crossed various mountain ranges, winding among Williamstown, Amherst, Dartmouth, and Middlebury. Michael and I kissed the ground each time on our arrivals, to PG’s chagrin.
With their bucolic quads, ivy-covered masonry, and rolling fields, these schools were on a scale as much above Horace Mann as Horace Mann had towered over P.S. 6. I could hardly believe I would be not only taking classes at one of them but living there. Something else I had never contemplated: it was the single payoff for all my hard work and high grades, the privilege to apply to elite institutions. Otherwise, studying for A’s was a dead-end game.
I knew that my grades made me a strong candidate, but my father decided to prove one of his choice maxims: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” At Amherst, which had the most majestic campus, he arranged for a prominent alumnus, a priggish shrimp of a Catskills attorney, to meet us at the Admissions Office and make his presence known. At Dartmouth, for a similar reason, we ate lunch with the football coach.
I was mortified by the Jewish lawyer and the coach, but Uncle Paul kept insisting that getting into these schools was a matter of connections. “This is America,” he said, “not communist Russia.”
“What about merit?”
“Lots of people have good grades. That doesn’t mean they get accepted.”
I wasn’t an informed shopper either. I was chasing scenery and a mood more than curriculum. My unequivocal first choice was Swarthmore, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. When I visited the campus myself by train, I felt as though I had found Blueland, long rows of trees and a small-village feeling. It was also the bohemian summer camp I had never been allowed to attend. I was hell-bent to apply and made it my first choice, but Mr. Gucker, Horace Mann’s Director of College Admissions, put on the brakes. He asked me to fill out the form for early decision at Amherst.
“Why? I’d rather just try Swarthmore.”
“Swarthmore is a second-rate school. You should at least apply to the best college you can get into. That way everyone ends up where they belong.”
So I did the paperwork, and on my seventeenth birthday I received an epistle with a dean’s inked signature, congratulating me on my acceptance. “What should I do now?” I asked Mr. Gucker the next day.
He had received a carbon, so had a ready answer. “Write a letter to Dean Wilson thanking him and say you look forward to attending in the fall.”
“But what about Swarthmore? I haven’t even applied.”
“Now you don’t need to.”
Everyone thought it was so great I got into Amherst that I allowed myself to feel good about it too. After all, it was a cool place to go. I imagined autumn meadows, New England farmhouses, wise girls at nearby Smith and Mount Holyoke.
Dr. Friend observed the whole process without comment. “I wanted to see what you would do,” he remarked afterwards. “I assumed you would pick Columbia because I did
n’t think you were in any shape to leave treatment. But you never even considered that or consulted me. You never considered that applying to Amherst was termination. I finally decided that getting you away from your mother was more valuable than any service I could provide.”
The Yankees held first place, and Maris kept hitting homers so that on October 2nd he had 60—he had caught Babe Ruth.
I put on my powder-blue shirt and a sports jacket and took the subway downtown to Jill’s. She was waiting casually by the awning and approached me with her winsome Kenwood smile: “So we meet again, Yankee fan.”
The October game, though meaningless in the standings, had a World Series flavor because of Maris, and we talked baseball and stats all the way to the Bronx as crowds increased stop by stop.
Jill was a dazzling blend of antitheses—a pretty girl and baseball. Those dual energies stirred different parts of me, bumping into each other without ever quite meeting. Eros and ERAs were radiating from a tall Keith-like girl with an almost jock swagger, spouting effortless baseball lingo. Pure oxymoron. Should I treat her like my baseball crony Jake or like seductress Karen? That was the easy part: after all, I could take turns and experiment, mix and match. The harder part was knowing whether to feel the self that hung out with baseball buddies, little at stake, or to feel the unabridged charge of an attractive girl. There too I vacillated, dipping in and out of energy fields.
I had sat in Eddie Fisher’s box with schoolmates dozens of times; yet it was as though I had never been there before. Even Mr. Glazer kept his distance, as Jill and I chatted about Kenmont and classwork—she went to an all-girls’ private school downtown. She had nothing good to say about Asher except that he was cute. “He’s not someone I’ll be seeing anymore.” And then, mid-game, Maris came to the plate, took a ball, cleared his spikes with his bat, adjusted his uniform, took another pitch. Tracy Stallard threw again, Maris swung, and the ball sailed in a rising arc down the right-field line. As the Stadium recognized the moment, it erupted in a roar. Jill threw her arms around me, as we hugged and cheered.
In the digital era I have searched numerous videos of that moment without finding even a blur of fans and faces where we sat. Maris pulled the pitch to right and then set out toward first-base in his moment of triumph, yet at a pace and posture that showed respect and homage to the baseball gods. The camera tracked him on his circle of the bases, but the 109 seconds either follows him into a crowd of his welcoming teammates at the plate and then entering the home dugout or terminates its pan a fraction of a second before reaching our section behind the visitors’ dugout. Even in a time machine I could not go back to our first date.
Jill became a faithful phone-and-letter friend after that. We wrote and called crosstown about baseball and literature. She rooted for the Reds to beat the hated American Leaguers in the Series. When the Yankees won, she sent what she called “a humble note of congratulations.”
I invited her to another high-profile event—a sold-out concert by the Limeliters at Carnegie Hall for which I got tickets through Grossinger’s. Wry philosophical Lou Gottlieb, high-tenored Glenn Yarbrough (years later the voice of “Baby the rain must fall … ), and polyglot banjo fiend Alex Hassilev were my new enthusiasm; I had been trying to interest my friends in their songs all fall without success.
That night they belted out a repertoire from “There’s a Party Here Tonight” and “When I First Came to This Land” to “The Rising of the Moon” and “Morningtown Ride,” an occasional Spanish or Russian ballad and novelty song thrown in. Afterwards Jill called them “an intellectual blend of the Clancy Brothers and Kingston Trio”; she wasn’t going to let me know whether she approved, she was withholding judgment. We found a coffee shop and talked for two hours about the matter and Ibsen whom we were coincidentally both reading in school.
Soon I realized I didn’t have to dredge up big events; I could just ask Jill out. We went to Breakfast at Tiffany’s at a theater on Lexington and then Ibsen’s Ghosts on a small Greenwich Village stage. Every other week we checked the movie and theater sections and made our selection, conferring by phone as Saturday approached. Each time I would take the subway to her apartment, and from there we would hail a cab. After the performance we would have dessert at a restaurant and sit around talking about what we had seen. She considered herself an accomplished literary critic and thought I was undisciplined and far too psychological, so she challenged me on just about every symbol or interpretation I offered.
Sometimes we went back to her apartment and continued our discussion in the living room. If her mother was up she joined in. The three of us jabbered away for an hour or more. Then I came home late on the subway and let myself in the back door.
The early darkness of the Solstice approached from a direction I had never known. City lights danced, and I was nearly happy. The song from the movie carried the ambiance of my life: “Moon river, wider than a mile, / I’m crossing you in style, someday …”
Yes, she had been a “moon” figure from the first day I saw her with Asher. Even our initial point of contact was an outfielder named Moon.
In the shower I sang at the top of my lungs, trying to capture the precise resonance. Occasionally Bridey joined in from the hallway, trying to steer me back into tune: “ … my huckleberry friend…. ”
I remember Jill as Audrey Hepburn in the movie, curled on the living room sofa, blowing smoke in the air, conscious of each self-conscious motion she made. Part of me would be talking to her, and part of me would be looking at the remarkable girl: her face, her eyes, the curve of her breasts, her lips, her clothes, her pocketbook, her smooth legs, her fancy gestures, her womanly movements.
I could never forget what Asher said, though I detested him for it because Jill had become my best friend and his words were always in the way, goading me, telling me I somehow wasn’t as attractive or special as he was. His description was a maddening abstraction without connection to my own experience. Once, though, I took Jill’s hand in mine while we were walking. At first it felt ridiculous, too silly even to believe, but when she pressed my hand back I felt as though I held her entirely and was held by her as we walked along.
When I talked to subway friends, they were full of notions as to how to get started, but it was always the same advice adding up to nothing: “You know from that guy Asher she gives, so what are you waiting for?” They seemed concerned that I not lose my “big chance.” Such was teen world 1961—lingo and posturing, urban prep school notwithstanding.
One December Friday on getting home from school, I felt particularly gloomy and called my huckleberry friend. We had been out the past Saturday, so it was too soon to see each other again by our established pacing, but I wanted to hear her voice and took a chance. When I asked her how she was, she moaned, “Dreary Friday.” I was delighted—a soulmate. “Yes,” she said, “we should by all means go to the movies tomorrow night.”
All the next day I hung around the apartment doing homework distractedly, wishing I felt easy about her. I had become obsessed with what it would be like to kiss Jill. I imagined lying on top of her and making out, her long elegant frame moving with mine, her eyes, as ever, teasing, bewitching.
As often as I forced myself to squash the daydream, to render more lines of Virgil, I came unfailingly back to its reverie. My entire being balked at Latin conundrums. It wasn’t just that Jill combined all the fantasies I had ever had; it was that she was enough of a buddy I could imagine them coming true.
After the movie what had never happened happened as I had imagined it might. On her lead we went into her room instead of the living room. I sat in a chair, and she stretched out on the bed, back against the wall. I heard my hollow voice talking while my imagination was exploding. She was so exciting, smooth blouse over her breasts, thick teased red hair, adroit curl of her voice, alluring and friendly both. I tracked the growing lateness of the hour, getting later each time I glanced. In my mind all of time was draining away. I was numb with feeli
ng; I didn’t know what to do.
She began to show signs of getting up. I moved toward her, stood there. “What?” she said.
How could she not know? I made a gesture toward a simple kiss. She took a step back, looked at me bewildered, then said, “No.”
“Why?”
“Because it would ruin everything.”
Later—though in years—I thought that perhaps she was telling me it had always ruined everything, that she wanted this to be different. But I was raw and wild then, and I couldn’t bear the thought of Asher being allowed so easily, me not at all. That night when I left her I ran ten blocks down Fifth Avenue against a whipping wind, over and over screaming Emerson’s lines in my mind:
“I am the doubter and the doubt, / and I the hymn the Brahmin sings.”
… ran past buildings and storefronts until I reached apotheosis in myself, and exhaustion.
I never called Jill again.
4
GRADUATION
Senior year brought its own privileges. We sat in our fabled lounge and watched Amos ’n’ Andy and Bullwinkle Moose during first-period study hall.
Tim Moore playing sly George “Kingfish” Stevens with Ernestine Wade as his fiery wife Sapphire Stevens hadn’t been booted off the air by the NAACP yet, so we got to appreciate African American comedy at its fifties finest. Usually Andy Brown (played by Spencer Williams) came into some unexpected scratch, so Kingfish busied himself with schemes for how to relieve him of it. For instance on one occasion he sold Andy a cut-rate tour of the world—passengers had to travel blindfolded. As they strolled through Central Park, Kingfish announced, “Ah, I see the famous obelisk of Egypt.” When Andy wanted to take the blindfold off and look, Kingfish resorted to, “Ah, but I’m afraid that’s the more expensive tour and youse can’t afford it, son.”
In my favorite episode Kingfish decided to sell the newly affluent Andy a property, but the particular real estate hoisted on his unsuspecting friend was actually a piece of cardboard deployed on an empty lot, a photograph of a house with a cutout door on it. I don’t remember what gullibility led Andy to fall for such an overt deception, but he made the purchase. He then brought dim-witted Lightning to view his new domicile. The trouble was, whenever they tried the front door, they ended up in the backyard. After a number of such forays, Lightning was finally inspired to investigate further. Circumambulating the structure, he declared, “That’s one mighty thin house there, Andy.”
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