The next weekend, putting her hopes in a change of scenery, she arranged for a Hotel driver take herself, my brothers, and me to her parents’ house in Atlantic City. The trip coincided with the Democratic Convention beginning August 24th, so instead of requesting time off I persuaded Fred to let me cover it.
In reality there was nothing to cover. It was like a stadium with no game, endless cheering for invisible home runs, and I could barely see anything from the back of the hall, just rollicking, placard-waving delegates. Only the belief that all this bedlam was a rally against the warmongers made it tenable. Time rover Sam Halpern, my pal from Bunny’s soirées, had warned us, under a bright moon at Grossinger Lake, that prognosis was an illusion; beneath their guises Goldwater and Johnson were the same man. “People say this is a crossroads election,” he announced. “I don’t think so. I think it’s a charade. And we are fools to allow it.”
Paul Stern had proposed as much at Phi Psi. The years would prove them right.
Bitty Wood was also in town for the Big Event, and one night he picked me up and drove us to a nightclub where we sat at a table listening to jazz. The comedian Dick Gregory sneaked up and startled Bitty by embracing him from behind; then, after much laughing and riffing, accepted his offer to take the empty seat. The two men traded lyrics back and forth.
“Something big’s coming down in Philly,” said Gregory. “The people is angry.”
“Amen, brother. Amen.”
I couldn’t believe that a kid from Grossinger’s was privileged to be in their company. But Bitty put his arm around me and said, “He’s my man.”
If the heart of human existence is sheer terror on one side, the power of the Magician on the other (and real politics in the ghettos, Bitty Wood), then what are thousands of people cheering and brandishing their banners for? I sat up past midnight writing these thoughts to Lindy and sent them off—Atlantic City postmark.
Our letters crossed. There was one waiting for me at the Hotel. She was delighted I got to go to the convention and wanted more of an account. She was seeing the married man, a fellow reporter. She wrote. “He’s the star of the Rocky Mountain News city room. I’m the only girl city-side, so this is a daring and foolhardy affair to try to hide. There’s also the risk my parents will find out.” She told me not to worry about her.
I went out driving at night—rural catacombs, closer and closer to Silver Lake as if drawn by Chipinaw. In droves along the roadsides were camp counselors—guys and gals my age hitching back to their jobs from an evening off. I zoomed past in my ridiculously pretentious car. Buddies waiting tables at the Hotel had told me that picking up hitchhikers was a good way to meet girls, so I summoned my courage one night and stopped alongside a female cluster. I took three of them back to their camp, five miles of small talk. The one called Diane, the prettiest, was spunky enough to ask me to invite her to Grossinger’s “or better still, Amherst Homecoming weekend.” I meant to get her Bronx number but lost my chance. The camp’s owner was waiting at curfew by the gate. He looked at the license plate, quizzed me, then proclaimed, “No son of Paul Grossinger is going to have anything to do with my girls. [Pause.] Give my regards to your father, young man.”
I did, and he loved it. He was still telling the story decades later, guffawing, “No son of Paul Grossinger…. ” So the locals knew his scuzzy reputation.
I got out of there so fast that the wheels of the Lincoln spun dirt. That was mortifying too, as if I were intentionally showing off. The takeoff, plus the owner’s salutation, deterred me from reconnecting with Diane. When I finally found my nerve, the camp had closed for the season.
Another night I came to a moonlit meadow where, as Chipinaw tots, we had gone for haywagon rides. I turned the car around by pulling onto the shoulder. My headlights, crashing through branches, illuminated a field. I stared into its nocturnal waterglobe, a vista as crisp as a tarot card. In front of me hung a gigantic web, the stony silhouette of its maker at the center. This was a focal rune, startling for its clarity—trumps are rarely dropped so explicitly into the world.
I had come to a warp in my own fabric. I knew that spider. His placement was a marker, as indeterminately recognizable as the crack between ceiling and wall had once been. It was an omen from a more complicated landscape or from an impersonal intelligence. I read the dichotomy of my life in him: terror or revelation, I had to choose. He made that offer neutrally, a signature at the crossroads. What preference has a spider, after all, what axe to grind except ballast in his gossamer strands? Trump eleven, sword and scales—on one side the Wheel of Fortune, on the other the Hanged Man.
Back at the house I began pouring myself glasses of straight vodka. I put the Kweskin Jug Band on the stereo, Geoff Muldaur singing “Wild About My Loving”: “Well, sergeant, sergeant please, / women ’round here won’t let me see no peace.” I was probing the depth of the blues, my right to be this askew … and suddenly I was dizzy. I called out to Emma who thundered down the stairs: “Oh, Lordy, you damn drunk.”
I was glad she lingered. I could sense the periphery of an unforgiving cloud.
“You haven’t watched a single ballgame with me all summer,” she pouted. “You just fussing about girls. No wonder you drunk. You’ll be good and drunk till you forget about them dames, mind me.” I followed her back upstairs and collapsed on the floor before the Mets game. When it was over I stumbled into my room and fell into an amnesia-like sleep.
During my lunches with George von Hillshimer, he and I had talked about my brothers, in particular Michael because he was as academically marginal as many of George’s kids and had already bombed out of two institutions similar to Summer Lane. A victim of Grossinger’s with its vagrant lifestyle and lax parenting, Michael had little use for authority or schoolwork. By fifteen he was mired in a quirky combination of rage and slapstick, watching TV for days on end in his pajamas—cartoons to comedies to Westerns to “Little Rascals,” old movies all afternoon. I began to imagine Summer Lane as his salvation, a community acknowledging alienation without trying to crush spirit—and remarkably just down the road.
George was candid about his motives: if a Grossinger kid attended his school, it would not only generate some income but might get the County off his back. When I told Aunt Bunny, she was dubious but ultimately agreed to an audience. “I trust your judgment,” she said, “and we’ve run out of other options.” A few moments later her contrary voice spoke. “Unfortunately Summer Lane sounds much too far out for your brother. And bringing your father together with a man in a collar—that won’t fly. But call your friend, and we’ll see.”
I invited Reverend von Hillshimer to dinner.
I warned him about the deadly cocktail that would be served—Zionism and xenophobia. George pooh-poohed the matter—old hat to him. He was a professional firebrand and jangler of paradigms, seasoned anew in Mississippi. Confronted by a mere marshmallow resort he couldn’t reconcile himself to less than full triumph. Discounting the true longshot, he became megalomaniacal, rehearsing speeches he planned to deliver, getting ahead of himself to the spoils of success. Folks at Summer Lane were casting spells, doing rain dances. I had set in motion a fiasco I could no longer interdict.
I gave George directions. With a predatory smile, he promised not to wear a collar.
On the eve of the event I called the front gate and left word to let Mr. von Hillshimer through. At the appointed hour I paced the top of the hill, scanning for his car. Right on time the jalopy rumbled up the main drag and literally spat three times before exhaling beside a row of Lincolns and Caddies. George patted each of them on the fins and bowed to me. I grabbed his hand in delight.
Aunt Bunny seated him on one side of the table beside Michael, James and me on the other; herself and my father at the heads. Emma served salad as George introduced himself to my brother. He quizzed him about his present school and then began to describe Summer Lane. With tentative interest, Michael met his gaze and asked: “So how much work do kids hav
e to do at your place?” Before George could answer, my father interrupted.
“I should tell you, Reverend, I attended military academy myself in Peekskill and I don’t like regimented schools.” George started to respond, but PG raised his hand and asked to finish. He said that he and his wife had put together a list of schools for Michael to consider and he thought it best he stay within his own religion.
He lectured so long and imperiously that I cringed. It was clear that wasn’t going to give Summer Lane a chance.
I knew that George had a lot at stake and also that he would not stand being humiliated. I watched him lose and regain composure. When my father ran out of steam, the feral priest called up his reserves of energy and, with admirable restraint, answered all PG’s objections one by one. On a roll, he made extravagant promises, like that he would hire a rabbi of my father’s choosing. Then without waiting for a response, he turned to Michael and asked him what he was looking for in a school.
PG jumped back in. “Reverend, the matter has nothing to do with Michael; it’s Michael’s parents who are making this decision. If you have anything to say, please address it to me.”
I could barely keep myself from interceding. Here was a man of stature and achievement: a minister, a marcher for civil rights. He was soliciting Michael’s legitimate opinion. He shouldn’t have to be subjected to bullying and rudeness. I turned to Bunny for help.
“I’m afraid what happens to Michael is his father’s decision.”
“Do you agree?”
PG was glaring at me as she stammered, then found a tack: “I’m sure Mr. von Hillshimer’s school is excellent, but I don’t think it’s for your brother.” Ostensibly victorious, my father decided to lighten the mood with a series of jokes about his experiences with “men of the cloth.” Reverend George kept any subsequent thoughts to himself. He remained unruffled and polite.
No matter how angry I had been at my father in the past I had always thought of him as a decent person at core, reliable when the chips were down, even after he beat me. Now I saw a willful, spoiled child—a smug, self-aggrandizing autocrat—ordering around a black maid and, under the thinnest sham of civility, flaunting his wealth. A part of Bunny was wed to this man, irrevocably. She was no help at all. As for what Michael might have wanted—that got lost in the shuffle; they didn’t care about him having a voice.
We made it through the meal without further embarressments. After dessert I accompanied George down the stone path through the garden toward his car. We were silent most of the way as my mind raced for something to say. “This place is a menace, my friend,” he finally offered. “Leave quietly and by stealth or it will cannibalize you.” Then he bent over and collapsed on the lawn. I didn’t know what was happening; I thought maybe he was sick. I started to run back to the house for help. Then I realized he was actually rolling in the grass laughing. I was simultaneously startled and relieved. He pulled his body up to its full height in metameres like a giant cricket. “You’ll have to pardon me,” he said. “I was holding all of that in.”
I smiled nervously as I assured him it was okay. I apologized for my parents and for bringing him there with false hopes. “They were worse than I ever imagined.”
“So it wasn’t a bad evening,” he proclaimed with unpredictable cheeriness, “because you learned something.” He took a few more steps and, as we reached his vehicle, turned back to me. With a hard stare he added, “Forgive me, Richard, but at my father’s house in Germany your father wouldn’t have been fed with the hogs.”
I heard him say it, shook his hand, and waved to him as he drove off. Then it sank in. He knew, as did I, that he spoke as a German less than a generation after Hitler. He had reduced my father to a farm animal. I felt the coldness of his glance. I was a Grossinger too. Would I have been fed (or even denied service) with his father’s hogs?
Yet another part of me met him in brutal assessment. My father was not just a grumpy clown; he was an irresponsible boor, even a thug—I had to know that by now. I stood, looking out over his Hotel, the glowing glass cupolas of the indoor pool and faux Tudor façades of guest buildings, an iconic skyline. For virtually my whole life I had deemed this place a paradise, a haven and sanctuary. I may have mocked it or decried its elitism and lack of social conscience, but I considered it an important locale in the universe.
Now I realized it was nothing. It was the cheap passing vanity of Jewish peasants, arrogant and graceless in their fortune, oblivious to the Wheel of Fate whose turning brought them to this perch and could crush them in a tick, even as it had crushed far greater dynasties and nations.
Bunny’s panics returned big-time. She lay in bed trembling, grasping at the end table, the headboard, her pillow, anything. Then she tossed the pillows away and clutched the bottom sheet so tightly I thought it would rip. She was sobbing.
“Paul,” she cried to her husband, “I’m useless. Have them put me out of my misery.”
He indicated I should leave.
He wouldn’t let me see her later. “Not after the damage you’ve done. I told you two to stop talking. You just upset each other. She has enough problems as it is.”
A doctor came from New York and ordered her to be hospitalized. My father announced she would be “incommunicado.” “Indefinitely,” he snapped, as I watched her being bundled off into the Hotel car.
What did I feel then? Hard to say. Numbness, fury, relief I had escaped a similar predicament unscathed…. Transitions paralyzed me. At moments like this I turned into Martha, my mother’s alienation and narcissism my default state too. That quashed any nascent sympathy or tenderness. What I felt mostly was defiance. And selfish regard for my own survival.
This wasn’t my family, it never had been.
A week later I heard that Bunny’s “cure” was to be shock treatment followed by two months of hospitalization. Meanwhile PG had stopped talking to me. He didn’t seem to know I existed. Whenever he passed me he looked away. On one occasion, though, he stopped to acknowledge my presence with Emma and the Mets in the living room, asking, “How’s my communist son?”
“Okay, I guess.” I was moved to tears by this backhanded revival of his affection.
“What’s the score, are they winning for a change?”
Emma took up the volley: “They’ze havin’ a fine night, Mr. G.”
Just before I left for college—when I was most alienated from him, and he from me—he called me into his office and told me he had a surprise. I racked my brain for what sort of riddle this was. “Go down to the front of the Main Building,” he resumed with a deadpan grin. I would not have guessed in a million years. As he watched from his window, the head of Traffic handed me the keys to a small yellow car parked at the entrance. “It’s yours apparently,” the guy declared. “Ford Mustang.”
I had never heard of the model, but it was a cool-looking, racing-car-like object.
“You won’t be monopolizing the JG anymore, I guess,” my father yelled down.
I packed it for Amherst with my jugs and plastic tree, cans of twilight-blue paint, a discarded stained-glass lantern from the Nightwatch, and a bright lemon Mexican blanket I had bought in Greenwich Village. I loved the car’s new bowling-alley smell and the way the miles climbed into their first hundreds as I drove into Massachusetts. This was a magnificent, unwarranted gift.
I spent the days before school painting the walls of my room indigo. I made a temporary couch in the corner by draping my sunny coverlet over a mattress. Then, with screwdriver and electrical tape I put in an overhead stained-glass fixture by trial and error—my first light. “City boy no more,” I thought, picturing Mr. Borrig and Ramon there watching.
My aesthetics startled Marty when he arrived. “But I guess it’s okay. It’s, well, uh … different. I can live with it, I think. It looks a little like an oasis at sunset.”
As a junior I had to declare a major. English was the only practicable option left. In order to catch up on credits I signed up f
or seminars on Yeats, Faulkner, and Sixteenth-Century literature, plus a writing class, this one at Smith with a visiting novelist named Stanley Elkin.
Lindy called me as soon as she was back, and I sped over to Laura Scales. She sprang downstairs, vibrant and bubbly. We stared at each other; then she said, warily (as Lisa), “Hello, kiddo.”
We smiled, kissed quickly, and walked outside. I pointed to the car: yellow baby with a red, white, and blue LBJ/USA bumper sticker.
“What! They just gave that to you?”
I nodded, grinning.
“I hope it doesn’t spoil you,” she said.
I gave her a look of—how could you think such a thing?
“We can’t repeat last spring,” she interjected after a while. “I’m in love with Jim.”
He had left his wife and, in a month, would be moving to New York to take a new job with an advertising agency. From then on she would be seeing him regularly.
“I’m not really right for you and, by pretending, I’m making it hard for you to find an appropriate girl.”
“How do I fail?”
“I have no way of making it sound nice. He’s so much older. He’s a man.”
“What am I?”
“Not yet a man.”
“Can you wait?”
“It’s you who can’t wait. You think you’re in love with me now, but you’ll find so many nymphet girls who will fall at your feet you’ll forget I even existed. I don’t want to be around for that.”
“I won’t do that,” I insisted.
A cat came out from a yard and wound around her legs. “Maybe if I had a cat, I wouldn’t need to get married. You want to arrange that?” Girls were so mercurial and unpredictable. To me this was dead serious stuff.
After dinner I lingered in the car outside Laura Scales, asking perversely if she had slept with him. She avoided the question (“None of your business”), but I persisted, until she said of course she had. Long after she had gone upstairs I sat there in my funk, unwilling to start the car.
New Moon Page 60