Her shame forbade her the lights of Broadway. Refinement was important to my mother. To be a lady, to look it and dress it, to carry herself with pride, dignity … How could she go to the theater, where even during the Depression—especially during the Depression—people dressed up, women wore their best? The ladies in the orchestra, decked out in the latest fashions, perhaps some of them designed by but not affordable to my mother, would spot Rhoda in the second balcony in her shameful frock and snicker to let her know that she didn’t dress properly for the occasion.
“Heartbreak, it’s heartbreak, Sonny Boy.”
A fall from grace in the second balcony. It could not be tolerated.
So we didn’t go to Broadway. Instead, I took myself to the Windsor Theater on Fordham Road in the west Bronx, where shows, having finished successful runs, tried out before going out on tour with their second companies, road companies.
The Windsor, a nice enough, run-down, rococo five-hundred-seat house, was built in the 1920s, a time when the Bronx was coming into its own for Jews from the Lower East Side and Yorkville with the drive and chutzpah to move to the suburbs. And the Bronx back then was—remarkably—a suburb.
But not in my time or my psyche. The Bronx was as near to being a slum as I could put up with. I didn’t want to live there. Not from birth, not ever. I ranted within against the very existence of this misplaced, misbegotten birthplace where I could barely breathe, where I couldn’t be me, where I couldn’t stand the person who was me.
It was a mistake. I wasn’t meant for these parents. I wasn’t meant to be Jewish. I was Episcopalian, or whatever that church was where movie stars dressed up to go in MGM movies. Not Warner Brothers—too Irish Catholic. I couldn’t identify. I was born to be one of the MGM lot and to sound like Ronald Colman or David Niven. I was born to be English.
But I was trapped where I was until twenty-one, the magic age I had picked when not only would I be old enough to vote, I would be old enough to escape. And my mother could not legally stop me.
The truth actually was that I could have escaped a hundred times in a hundred different ways. And it never dawned on me. Others, my age and younger, took the No. 6 Lexington Avenue line that stopped at the El station a block from our apartment building. Kids my age—girls!—got on the subway in groups or alone. Yes, at twelve and thirteen, alone, and traveling down to 125th Street, where they changed trains to the No. 2 or 3, which took them in two stops to Times Square. Where everything a boy who was taught to love theater by his mother and who was taught to love popular music (Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey and Charlie Barnet) by his big sister, everything I craved to be out of the Bronx for, would have been at my fingertips. All in a twenty-minute train ride.
But no! If I got on one of those trains by myself, I would get lost. Without my mother or sister or a group of friends, it would be my end. I would never be heard from again. At times when nevertheless I was tempted to face the challenge, I became dizzy with nausea.
It was safer to go to the Windsor. The Windsor I could get to by trolley car. Two trolley cars. The route was infinitely more complicated, required more walking, circling around from one trolley line to another, longer waiting. But by the time I reached my destination an hour later I was okay—because I hadn’t left the Bronx. The Bronx was safe. If I stayed in the Bronx, I’d live. If I wandered into Manhattan, I’d be killed. Why? Who? What? Street gangs? A falling building? A bomb on the subway? I didn’t dare ask; asking questions could kill me.
My mother never suggested I do the sensible thing and take the subway downtown into the heart of Manhattan. This was where she went virtually every day of my childhood, down to the Garment District on Seventh Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street, to sell her fashion sketches door-to-door, to designers and manufacturers at three dollars a pop. My mother was courageous in regard to herself, taking a chance on the train five days a week, but her son she watched like a hawk. “Don’t!” was her watchword. Danger lurked. It was out there, everywhere, waiting for me. “Be careful, Sonny Boy.” And oh, was I. More careful than if I were my own mother, carrying the baby me in my arms.
I treated myself as breakable. I must have been one of the few boys in the history of the Bronx who lived through an entire childhood without a bone fracture. I was cautious, vigilant, understood that automobiles and trucks existed to kill me. But they’d have to catch me first. I ran, not walked, across streets. Red lights, I knew, were a ploy used by drivers to put me at ease so that if I walked, not ran, in front of them (thus making myself an easy target), they would run me over.
Cars were dangerous, riding inside a car was dangerous. A car could crash and kill you. Subway trains could crash and kill you. Trolleys could crash and kill you. When these various monster modes of transit weren’t plotting to run me down, they were plotting to blow me up or crush me, kill me! “Take that for your laughable hubris! Your dreams of—CRUNCH!— glory!”
A trolley car had been the cause of my sister Alice’s broken leg. She had gotten off on Westchester Avenue at the Stratford Avenue stop early one evening. The tracks ran under the No. 6 Lexington Avenue El. A car, a Hudson, traveling uptown was in too much of a hurry to let Alice cross in front of it. Four steps off the trolley, she was run over. She was twelve.
Alice was rushed to Lincoln Hospital, a sick joke then, noisy, smelly, understaffed, overcrowded, overrun with cockroaches who were drawn to Alice the way cats are drawn to people who don’t like them. As she lay there immobile, they swarmed over her, filling her with a fear of bugs that lasted for years.
I visited in dread and nausea, sneaking in before and after visiting hours, smuggling in food, gifts, knickknacks prepared by my mother. I traveled by trolley, the very beast that spit Alice out in front of the Hudson. I endured my baby sister’s discomfort, isolation, confusion, and feelings of abandonment, told jokes in funny voices, made up stories to lift her spirits and mine in the vain hope of drowning out the all too obvious lesson of what happened to Feiffer children when they left the house to take public transportation.
Only walking was safe. I walked everywhere. It left me, I thought, in charge of my fate. I could pick the route, which was the safe street as opposed to the street where I’d surely be mugged. If I could avoid mass transit by walking a mile or more, then that’s what I’d do. Walking seemed to enhance who and what I was. It made me larger than life. Not that much larger, but any additional size, weight, and illusion of manliness was accepted with surprise and gratitude.
Sitting in the back of the house, in the cheap seats of the Windsor, made me larger than life as well. Actors, a long distance away, projecting to me in the rear or in the balcony, without mikes, a skill all actors possessed at one time. Declaiming, as they stood in severe outline, brightly lit against overdressed sets of living rooms infinitely nicer than mine, or of downtrodden street scenes, which looked glamorously and enviably shabby.
Willy Loman’s house in Brooklyn transplanted in two-story schematic outline to the stage of the Windsor was one of the more riveting sights of a lifetime. The stage designer—Jo Mielziner—supplied me X-ray eyes so that I could see the outside and inside of the house at the same time, observe through Willy’s walls into the heart of his family. Which turned out to be my family too.
“Pop, Pop,” Biff, the son, says, in this never-to-be-forgotten paraphrase from memory, “we’ve never told the truth for one minute in this house.” The line was staggering. This assault against Biff’s father … If only I had the courage (ridiculous!), I could have said that to my father. But unlike Biff in Death of a Salesman, I would have gotten nowhere. Because my father would have answered, “You’re full of hot air. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” End of confrontation, end of play.
What the Loman family taught me onstage at the Windsor was that Willy, who killed himself, wasn’t half the failure my father was, and Dave Feiffer was still going semistrong, reading his Lanny Budd novels and Les Misérables. And I, surely, was not destined to
go down the drain like Biff Loman. I was more like the neighbor’s boy. Bernard (what an interesting name), who was mocked for being a nerd by Biff, the jock. But he, Bernard, went on to become a big shot, a lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court. The truth revealed! I was Bernard!
Arthur Miller rose above all other playwrights to become my hero playwright. He surpassed Clifford Odets, the founding poet of left-wing Jews on the Broadway stage. Odets had been my first love among playwrights because he seemed to write diagrammatic versions of me and mine. I picked up every play of his I could find in the library, with the single exception, oddly enough, of his most famous work, Waiting for Lefty. No one wrote more recognizably about poor Jewish families: Awake and Sing! and Rocket to the Moon and Paradise Now. I loved them then and remember little about them now. Except for Odets’s voice, with its singular and unforgettable cadence, still resonating even now, years after Warner Brothers adapted it for their gangster films and dead-ended it into cliché. Warners’ took Odets’s benighted working-class immigrants and mobbed them up: Edward G. Robinson, Bogart, Raft, and, most particularly and brilliantly, John Garfield, who became the personification of the Odets hero as movie star.
Garfield was the first Jew to make it in Hollywood by playing an actual Jew. Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni played Italians, sometimes Mexicans, even Frenchmen. Well, Paul Muni was a trained classical actor: he could almost get away with French. But when Garfield played anyone but a Jewish kid from the streets, his audience of Jewish kids from the streets found it laughable—and something of a betrayal. Garfield, with that Bronx Odetsian rhythm to his voice, the caustic sentences, the singsong phrases seething with the injustices done him and the rest of us. Garfield was the one Bronx Jew Hollywood allowed. Chanting in a Bronx poetry of victimization. I identified.
And then Arthur Miller came along and became something Odets never became: the playwright as movie star. No one knew what Odets looked like. No one cared. But Arthur Miller emerged after Death of a Salesman as the socialist glamorous fighter for peace and justice. Roughneck and victim, intellectual and common man, a writer who not only spoke for us as Odets had done but was us. Like John Garfield. That was the wonder of Arthur Miller: he was our Julie Garfield playing a great playwright.
FEAR
Finally, in the uncertain way one moves or does not move forward, a decision had to be reached about this fear thing. If I was afraid of everything and anything, if that turned out to be my ever-present state of mind, if fear was as much a part of my essential self as drawing cartoons or being funny, how did I alter that part of me I couldn’t stand? And who gave the responsibility of doing something about this to me? I had no aptitude for taking charge. My life thus far had been ceding authority passively to others, and resenting them for it.
But what else was I to do? I was innately unqualified to take charge of myself—or anyone else. My sister Alice, for example: Only a few years earlier, when my mother would draft me to watch over and protect her, even if it was only for a half hour while she went shopping, I quaked inwardly at the perilous position she had put me in. I raged at the injustice of this imposition—to myself, of course. I didn’t dare show how I felt to my mother.
Didn’t the woman realize what she was getting me into? What if another kid picked on Alice and I had to defend her? I wouldn’t know how to do that. What if Alice was kidnapped off the street? It could happen. She was an adorable child. Of course, I knew what my response to the kidnappers would be. It would be to charm them so that they would kidnap only Alice and not me. And whom would my mother blame for this kidnapping, which by rights she should have acknowledged was her fault in the first place for putting me in charge? She wouldn’t have blamed herself; my mother never took the hit. I’d be blamed, yelled at for being helpless. But helpless was who and what I was. I couldn’t take charge of myself, much less my kid sister, this albatross around my neck who insisted on exposing me to me for the miserable coward I was.
Everything at home served to remind me of my cowardice. My mother and my sister Mimi, neither of whom I could stand up to; my father, whom I couldn’t stand up to even though the rest of the human race treated him with condescension; my sister Alice, to whom my mother consigned me as savior. Too much to ask! I had to get away!
My failure to cope was never off my mind except when I drew or when I read. Only under those circumstances could I escape the house while in the house. But escaping, beyond the realm of fantasy, escaping in fact, not fantasy, was more and more on my mind. The semicomatose state that drawing and reading put me in no longer was enough. It had become strikingly apparent that in order to go on living with myself I had to get away. From them. From myself. But stuck back in the 1940s, that pre-druggie age, without marijuana or cocaine to ease me off the premises, the conclusion set in that my only escape was to hit the road.
Under the prodding of Ed McLean, I had come across this fat tome in the library with a red, white, and blue cover: U.S.A. by John Dos Passos. It was not required reading in my school so of course I devoured it and was devoured by it. I discovered an America unknown to a first-generation Jewish boy from the Bronx. The vastness, the prairie, labor in its endless varieties and brutish romantic manifestations, the Wobblies, the vagabond life, hoboes riding rails … Riding the rails out West—the freedom, hopping onto a freight train. Escape!
Over by the Bronx River, a mile walk from our house, ran the tracks of the New York Central. High above the open tracks, I looked down from the refuse-laden lot that dropped beneath my feet into a narrow sixty-foot gorge, just wide enough for two sets of railroad tracks, one headed north toward freedom, the other south toward freedom. I could stand up there for hours watching trains go by, seeing myself perched perfectly to look down on these fast-moving open doors leading me out of my mother’s house into Oz.
I could imagine everything about riding the rails, except a destination. Scared to take the subway alone eliminated specifics. The name and location of a place, the distance—how dare I dream of a location hundreds, thousands of miles away when I couldn’t imagine myself on a seven-mile subway ride to Times Square? This fear I had was not going to be cured by naming a destination; one scary place was as good as another. And as inspired as I was by John Dos Passos, the romance of riding the rails out of the Bronx—I knew that was never going to happen. It wasn’t the means of travel, it was the going, the leaving, the getaway. So, if not in a boxcar, by what other means could I escape?
A few of my left-wing friends had started to hitchhike.
It seemed safer, certainly less inviting of disaster, if three or four of us hitched together, a mix of boys and girls I had gotten to know just out of high school. We were all members of the AYD, the American Youth for Democracy, a left-wing organization I joined in high school under the sponsorship of my sister the Communist. Mimi assured me that the AYD was “Progressive,” not Communist, extremely pink but not Red. In the thirties and forties these were known as Popular Front organizations, which, as far as Mimi was concerned, meant that I would now be more in line with “enlightened” political positions. I took my sister’s assurances at face value and with a grain of salt, ambivalence being my only honest political position. The Cold War was in recent full swing and all arguments from Communists and anti-Communist liberals sounded persuasive to me. I swayed from one position to the other, convinced that I was being thoughtful. Mimi made it clear that she saw my wavering as gutless. Her arguments, as always, sounded convincing. Certainly they intimidated me into a halfhearted membership in the AYD, in order to prove to her that I wasn’t what she openly and I, secretly, knew myself to be. But as I fell into line, I found a more personally persuasive reason to join. It was to meet girls.
The girls I met in the AYD were attractive and almost as forceful as Mimi. The boys I met—at least the one or two who became friends—were more diffident, enjoyed a good argument, and didn’t mind postponing a conclusion to achieve unity. With ample amounts of wry, satiric humor, kidding
as they shifted positions, they managed to be good at going along. If you were a young lefty in New York in the mid-1940s, there were certain stylistic givens. You were understood to like folk music (the Weavers), folk dancing (the hora), Eisenstein movies at the Stanley Theater on Irving Place (Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky), hitchhiking on weekends to Bear Mountain (camping out).
I was partially a dissident. I loved the folk music, the Weavers in particular. But Eisenstein films bored and irritated me. Alexander Nevsky, a movie many of my friends claimed to adore, I saw as a plodding, heavy-handed, dumb Western. With a good score by Prokofiev. Or was it Shostakovich? Mimi liked them both, so I paid attention.
Camping, too, gave me pause. The thing was, if you went camping it was understood by all that you slept in pup tents, tiny little one-person units that you had to put up yourself, meaning setting it up with stakes in the ground so that it looked like a pup tent and not like a misconceived assemblage passing itself off as soft sculpture. And it was out there in the country, in the open, as it were, outdoors.
My fellow campers on these weekend excursions included Bob Laurie, a former classmate at James Monroe who liked art, had ambitions to paint, was committed to a not overly serious left-wing politics, and laughed a lot at my jokes—the sort of companion I could hardly improve upon.
And then there were the two girls, fellow lefties our age who must have also thought I was funny or I wouldn’t have agreed to invite them. The thing about left-wing girls was that they weren’t like regular girls, certainly not the ones we had known at James Monroe. They weren’t girly or scary, that is flirtatious or, more to the point, intimidating. They acted more like boys than girls, which made them fun to be with, although you could never develop a real crush on one of them. They didn’t walk with swinging hips or run from side to side like real girls. They were more direct and less sexy. As smart or smarter than the boys and, unlike regular girls, they didn’t mind showing it. They were more earthy than regular girls, often seeming to have come right off the screen of the Stanley Theater in some Eisenstein film, to talk politics and books and to be companions to Bob and me as we hitchhiked to Bear Mountain.
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