There was, in fact, a certain disinclination to explain rationally anything at all that might impinge on the sacred, even in the Hebrew teacher who came to the house a few days a week to tutor Kermit and me in preparation for our bar mitzvahs, still years off. This bearded ancient taught purely by rote, pronouncing the Hebrew words and leading us to repeat after him. In the book, the English translations of the passages from Genesis faced the Hebrew, but there were no English translations of the English: what did firmament mean? The worst of it was that when I spoke a passage correctly, the old man would kiss me, which was like being embraced by a rosebush. Once he leaned over and, laughing, gave my cheek a painful pinch and called me tsadik, wise man, a compliment whose cause I understood neither then nor later. I would have to pump up all my self-control to appear to welcome his furry arrival. The lessons were boring and meaningless, but my rebellion may simply have been caused by an undisciplined spirit: I hated piano lessons, too, or any set of rules that interfered with fantasies of magically quick accomplishment. When the violin suddenly became “my” instrument, as mysteriously and irrevocably as second base had become my position, my mother found a teacher who, poor man, loaned me a small violin to begin on. I found that a rubber ball would take a lively bounce off the back of it as well as causing all the strings to hum, and I went downstairs to use it as a tennis racket until the neck broke in my hand. My mother carefully laid the pieces in the case and returned the instrument, and I went back to walking in my sleep, which was far more interesting than studying. So the root of that choking fear that suddenly gripped me as I looked into the face of the kindly librarian is so deeply buried that I can only imagine I had been denying, quietly and persistently, what I surely must have been hearing from my position on the floor—stories, remarks, fear-laden vocal tones that had been moving me by inches into a beleaguered zone surrounded by strangers with violent hearts.
Mikush was doubtless one of those, the sole mythic enemy who had a face and a name, as far as I knew. But fears of Mikush sprang far less from mythic antagonisms than from the cat-and-mouse game all the boys in the building played with him on the roof. A favorite sport, of which my brother was a master, was to stand up on a parapet and leap across a shaftway to the other side over a drop of six stories. Terrified as I already was of such a drop from my sleepwalking experiences, I could not bear to watch Kermit standing tall on the parapet. Mikush was endlessly popping up out of the hatchway to chase us, not that he cared if one of us went into the abyss, but our heels made holes in the tar roofing material. “No touch-a roof!” he would roar as we dodged him and clattered down the iron stairway into the building. As we flew down into the lower stories, his Polish war yells echoed along the ceramic-tiled floors of the hallways.
Because he was a Pole, the Jews in the building had to believe he hated them just as his countrymen for the most part had in Radomizl, where pogroms and tales of pogroms were woven into the very sky overhead, and where only the Austrian emperor Franz Josef and his army kept the Poles, egged on by their insatiable priests, from murdering every last Jew in the land. But I nevertheless had an ambiguous relation of sorts with Mikush; I brought my badly bent almost-new bike to him after an experiment of no-hands riding banged the front fork into a lamppost in the park. He straightened it with his bare hands, a memorable feat of strength that I imagined no one else in the whole world was capable of. I must have had some faith in his goodwill toward me, Pole or no Pole; my fear of him was less than total. Such a relationship made it understandable, a decade or so later, that German Jews—even those who could afford to—did not immediately leave when Hitler came to power. Had we lived in Germany, Mikush would likely have been the Nazi representative in the building, but it would have been hard to imagine even Mikush, anti-Semitic as he undoubtedly was, going from apartment to apartment with a list of names and ordering us out into trucks bound for a concentration camp and death. After all, he had straightened the fork of my bike.
Perhaps I was so unprepared, so surprised by my own terror in the library, because of what was to be a lifelong inability to believe that all reality was of the visible kind. We all are taught how to receive our experiences, and my mother, my prime teacher, saw secret signs of other worlds wherever she looked; she was talked to by people far away without benefit of telephone, and even by the dead. As with others so inclined, this gave her, I suppose, an enhanced sense of her importance in the scheme of things and helped make life more interesting. Whatever the cause, I had clearly put out of mind a certain childish recognition of infinite human brutality until suddenly the librarian seemed to challenge me to identify myself as a candidate for victimization, and I fled. I had been taught to recognize danger—even where it did not exist—but not how to defend against it. The dilemma would last a long time. The same quandary, and the effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimization, underlie the political aspect of my play Incident at Vichy. But as history has taught, that force can only be moral. Unfortunately.
For me, my mother’s mysticism set death lurking everywhere. It has prejudiced me against teaching children religion; too often God is death and it is death that is being worshiped and “loved.” If I learned early on how to disregard her dark and pessimistic surges, the fact was that they too often turned out to be prophetic. Her brother Moe, who had been a mule driver carrying ammunition up to the front in France, returned from a funeral with her one rainy afternoon, and as he sat on the pinkish satin Louis Something straight chair in the living room, she screamed and her hands flew up to her hair: he must immediately go out the apartment door and wipe a smear of gray cemetery mud off one of his heels lest it bring death to this house. They were beautiful brown calf shoes with a white bead around the seam between soles and uppers. He quickly left the living room, limping to keep the heel off the carpet.
In appearance, I would grow up to resemble Moe, a tall, thin man of great gentleness whose spirit the Great War seemed to have broken. It was as though in more than the physical sense he could never quite catch his breath. Even then I noted that joy never seemed to collect around him, even for his wedding there was no great party, no welcoming of his tiny wife, Celia, who was barely five feet tall. He was constantly bending to her as they walked, with one gentle hand against her back as though she were a child. Trying to get with the spirit of the twenties, he made it down to Florida to speculate in real estate, but his nerve soon waterlogged, his investment melting into the sea during a great land boom in which immense fortunes were made and innocents like himself fleeced. All Moe returned with was a nice tan that encouraged my mother to believe that his health was permanently restored, but he was soon back in the Veterans Hospital at Saranac Lake, where he died. The cemetery mud on his shoe could not help but cross my mind, and with it the lurking suspicion of some validity in the superstition. That only my mother knew the rules and regulations tended to leave me with all of the attendant apprehensions and none of the satisfactions of prediction—“I knew, I knew!” she wailed when we heard the news of his death.
It was the same when, out of a deep sleep in an Atlantic City hotel where we were spending the High Holidays, she suddenly sat up and said, “My mother died”—which she had, it turned out, and at approximately that hour of the night. Of course, her secret powers were not all negative and would as often send her into prescient highs of optimism, especially about me. I need only draw a straight line to hear myself praised as a coming da Vinci; my failures she simply swept aside as the fault of my teachers or a momentary fogging of my mind. This worked pretty well until Miss Fisher, the principal of P.S. 24, summoned her to a conference about my unruliness.
Miss Fisher had been the principal when my mother was a pupil in the same school. Holding me by the hand in the office, my mother seemed to blush in girlish shame as her onetime goddess said, “I do not understand, Augusta, how a fine student like you can have brought him up so badly.” Miss Fisher wore a lace net collar with little ivory stay
s that pushed into the flesh under her jaw hinges and kept her from bending her neck. It was hard to look up at her without grimacing with pain. She was white-haired and wore ankle-length skirts and white long-sleeved blouses with starched pleated fronts. Tears formed in my mother’s eyes. “Kermit is such a well-behaved boy,” the great lady went on, “and so quick in his studies …” I began crying too, already feeling the sting of my mother’s hand on the side of my head and imagining the stars I was about to see, but worst of all was her face wracked with disappointment. What was the matter with me? Why was I like this? Dear God, please let me be good like my mother and father and brother! At times like this all life seemed like rowing forever through a sea of remorse.
Between my terror in the library and Miss Fisher’s condemnation, I seemed to have joined some underworld of disapproved people. My father and brother lived well beyond the sparkling blue line of demarcation—they were wholly good—but placing my mother was not so simple. We had hardly gotten out onto 111th Street when she violently shook me, holding my wrist, gave me a clout on top of the head with her pocketbook, and then bent over me and screamed into my face, “What are you doing to me!” A double condemnation, since even at that moment I knew she wasn’t condemning for her own sake—she adored everything I did—but as an agent for Miss Fisher and implicitly my father and Kermit and the whole United States of America. Thus it was even more painful for her to have to be cursing me when deep within her she thought I hadn’t done anything very wrong. And so we were closer than ever as we reentered the apartment and I pretended deep remorse and she pretended black despair, and in a little while we both had some hot chocolate. Only then did a conspiratorial practicality enter her voice as she said, “Listen”—I looked up from my cup—“I want you to behave.” I said, “I’m going to,” and I meant it. And I did, for a while.
Of course there are models, avowed and surreptitious, that we mythologize and make into gods, and in enfolding their attributes into ourselves we muddy whatever character they may have really possessed. My mother’s youngest brother, Hymie, was an extremely good-looking young man of no great intelligence or imagination, yet she so loved beauty in women and handsomeness in men that Hymie excited her more than any other relative. In the style of the times he knotted his tie very tight and small, and his collars were so tight that his skin overlapped them, and his hats were tilted over one eye, and when he laughed, his straight white teeth against his swarthy complexion flashed like lights. He had started a small factory to make artificial flowers and brought bouquets of them when he visited. Touching them made me feel itchy, but they were marvelous imitations.
One afternoon he appeared with a thin blonde woman wearing a black fur collar on a white coat, his beloved, he said, his Stella, whom my mother instantly, as I could see, disapproved of. She disapproved of all the wives of all her brothers. Myron’s Minnie was fat and short and stupid and wore artificial fruits on her hats and was dumb enough to sleep with her own son just because he was sick with tuberculosis and needed comfort. My mother had never heard of Freud, but she knew there was something funny about this, something disgusting, in fact, and would go around imitating Minnie’s whiny way of speaking, frowning intensely and narrowing her nasal passages to sound like a cat. Harry’s wife was also far from what he might have had—they had all undervalued themselves in the spouses they picked. Betty had been a dancer in burlesque, and if her beautiful and buxom body was an understandable attraction for mild Harry, he might at least have found somebody more respectable. In fact, mild as he was, Harry had been crazed by this woman, enough to creep into his father’s office one night to steal money from the safe.
My mother’s dislikes, of course, were merely expressions of her sense of entrapment in her own marriage, and during the second half of her life—after the Depression had laid low every last hope of ever really changing her condition—all these women were transformed into her dearest and closest allies and friends. Minnie might go on sleeping with her son into his twenties, when he married, but her valiant support of her husband after he’d lost his money showed her to be a wonderful person, as the phrase went, and if Betty had danced practically or altogether naked in sleazy halls, her valor during the Depression and after the birth of her first child—a helpless mongoloid whose condition she interpreted as God’s admonition, causing her to take up religion—showed that she too was a woman of seriousness and real quality.
Stella had been brought up in an orphanage, which my mother seemed to feel was somehow her own fault. She got Hymie alone one day and demanded that he not sink his whole life with this clearly unworthy mate, who, aside from her obviously bleached hair, was bony-looking and had big feet and hands, horse teeth, an enormous mouth, and a honking baritone laugh. Stella, she naturally assumed, must be pregnant, and when Hymie swore that she was not, the whole liaison became incomprehensible. How could so handsome a man marry an uncomely orphan, and one, moreover, who must be leading a pretty low life—why else would she be so vulgarly dying her hair? Unlike brother Moe, an introverted man who seemed to search for me in my eyes and made me feel extant, Hymie paid me little attention, being too busy admiring himself in windowpanes or in the glass of the pictures on the walls. His narcissistic self-involvement was not different from that of his father, Louis Barnett, who in the worst months of the Depression, when every cent in his pocket came from my father, who himself had next to nothing, would still stroll down to the barber’s every single week to get his little vandyke and mustache properly trimmed and powdered and his bald head sprinkled with perfume. Even the Italian barber thought his vanity a bit much.
Louis was hot stuff, and so was Hymie, but what Hymie had that nobody else did was the ability to shoot bird shot through his front teeth clear across a room while he went right on smiling. This talent must have been honed in the navy, where he had been surrounded with hunter types, of which there would not have been any in Harlem. Hymie’s shooting gallery showed up at family celebrations. Both the Barnett and the Miller families were large, and just as a quarter-century later hardly a month would pass without a funeral, so now in the youth-time of this clan there were clumps of weddings and bar mitzvahs to attend. Women wore out evening gowns in those years. Hymie would enter the big ballrooms where these functions were held, his blonde and bony wife cheerfully yelling out her hoarse greetings and whispering things to the men that made them roar with laughter while the women looked at one another with the semi-grins of the left-out, and as he turned in all directions he would gracefully smile. Magically, an epidemic of what seemed to be fleas would erupt around him, with people brushing hands down backs of necks or across foreheads until pretty soon everybody in the ballroom was scratching as they danced or stood around drinking. My mother would rush up to Hymie and pound him on the chest yelling, “Stop it!” but he would plead innocence and kiss her and carry her off to dance, which she loved, and then, as they waltzed, he would smile at the other dancers, who would begin brushing fleas off their faces, driving her into a hysteria of protesting laughter. Hymie could pouch a whole palmful of bird shot in his cheeks, and his aim was perfect. He never hit an eye but did manage to penetrate ears at will, and of course once pinked, people had a tendency to start scratching other places as well. He tried teaching me his art, but I could never master it, so we settled for my learning to blow a fierce whistle with two fingers in my mouth, one of the greatest gifts anyone ever handed me, surely one of the most useful.
Hymie resembled George Raft, the actor-gangster, and I remembered him one afternoon some thirty years later when Raft walked onto the set of Some Like It Hot flanked by a few bravos, debonair with the inner tips of his eyebrows cranked up high, his protectors turning left and right with warning looks at any who might menace his life, dignity, or shoeshine. A purely social visit to pass a few words with Billy Wilder, the director of the film, and to eye Marilyn Monroe for a minute or two before turning around and leaving, as completely in charge of the entire world as he had bee
n on his entrance. It was a kind of challenging saunter, as though his arrival had instantly created a situation of top- and underdoggery—much the style Sinatra and Mailer would later affect on entering a crowded room. Hymie had had no bravos to accompany him; he might have, one day, except that at the age of twenty-seven he walked into the drugstore around the corner on Lenox and 111th to order an Alka Seltzer, and when the pharmacist turned around to serve it, he found him lying dead on the floor.
My mother wore a black veil for his funeral and would not allow my brother or me to attend, it being too intimate a proximity with death, especially one so untimely and unjust. Twenty-four hours after the news, she still could not take a full breath without breaking into sobs. Her second young brother dead before reaching thirty. “That goddamned druggist,” she said, fixing the veil over her face as she looked in the mirror of her dressing table, “if he’d served him quicker he’d have saved his life . . .” Later she would concede, reluctantly, that it had probably been a heart attack and not the druggist’s fault at all. Still, she could never after be at ease with the man, never again stayed in the store to chat, and she would send me alone to get a dose of sarsaparilla and castor oil, something he was delighted to watch me agonize over and finally drink. (She once also sent me down alone—I was seven at the time—to the dentist, a Dr. Herbert on the ground floor, at two o’clock in the morning when I got a sudden toothache. I rang his bell and he opened his door in his pajamas and looking down saw me in mine and almost without a word shuffled in his slippers into his office, where he turned on the light, motioned me to sit in the chair, took out a pair of forceps, asked, “Which one?” and following my finger, pulled it out. So rapidly did it all happen, with none of the preparatory reassurances and time-consuming, apprehension-feeding preliminaries, that I hardly had time to yell before I was out his door and ringing the elevator button to go back upstairs, where I found everybody fast asleep.)
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