“No, what does it mean?”
“Any Underwriters number ending in nine means no hamburger allowed. But” —before she can protest—“for you I am not going to count it, and I’m giving you a brand-new broiler right this minute!”
“. . . because I know I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Darling, a woman looking like you can’t do anything wrong.” Now, producing a new broiler, he becomes grave. “But this is an improved model. With this one you can broil naked.”
“Are you crazy? I never heard of such a thing!”
He cuts her off, his grin turning familiar and relaxed. “I’m only kidding you, darling, because you make me so unhappy.”
With a half-smile, dizzy by now, she asks, “I make you unhappy?”
“Because you’re married.”
Now she catches on and gives him a soft slap on the cheek and shuffles off in her slippers, the new broiler under her arm.
One spring a few years later, returning from college, I passed the hardware store and saw Mr. Glick seated out front with a baby carriage beside him and a short, stubby woman, also red-haired, standing in the doorway And then, many years after that, I returned again, this time with a CBC film crew directed by Harry Rasky, who was making a documentary about me. Mr. Glick’s store was gone; the whole building had vanished, replaced by an apartment house that was already showing signs of age.
Merchants like Mr. Glick were spending a lot of time sitting out in front of their stores waiting for customers, but they were the lucky ones; wherever one walked For Rent signs were pasted across empty store windows, and there was hardly an apartment house without a permanent Vacancy sign on it. People were doubling up, married children returning to their parents with their own children. There were touch football games in the side streets between teams whose members were twenty or older, fellows with no jobs or even hopes for one anymore, playing the days away like kids and buying their Camels or Luckies one cigarette at a time, a penny apiece, from Rubin the candy store man on Avenue M. The normal rites of adolescent passage tended to be skipped over; when I graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1932, mine was by no means the only family that failed to show up for the ceremony, nor did I expect them to attend, I knew that with my education at an end I was but another new young man on the long line waiting for work. Anyway, with a master’s degree, as the saying went, you might get hired to sell ties at Macy’s.
If there was a national pastime I suppose it was hanging out, simply standing there on the street corner or on the beach waiting for something to appear around the bend. Evenings, before I had begun to feel embarrassed about any self-display, I’d be out there in front of Dozick’s drugstore with half a dozen others singing the latest hits, sometimes in competition with anyone else who thought he sang better (for a couple of pennies you could buy pirated mimeoed lyrics of the newest songs). After I had turned fifteen these competitions seemed childish, but I continued as one of the star comics of the gang, improvising inanities, doing imitations of the Three Stooges, who even then were on the verge of our contempt as idiotic shadows of the Marx Brothers. We always had a sandlot football team going, and one of our halfbacks, a giant with a heavy lower lip named Izzy Lenowitz, whom nobody dared tackle for fear of his bowling ball knees, would clap me on my thin back and implore me, “Oh, come on, Artie, enjoy us.” And with sufficient encouragement I would ad-lib a monologue that with a little luck might stay airborne for five minutes or more. Without plan or awareness of what I was doing, I had begun the process of separating myself: I was moving out of the audience to face them alone.
My mother and brother excepted, as I’ve said, I cannot remember a person in the neighborhood who willingly read a book, there being no practical reason for doing so. The boys on those blocks had other things on their minds; mainly how to get girls, those innocent victims of male lust—in my day specifically Mary Costigliano, already nearly thirty, with enormous breasts and just possibly feebleminded, who was reported to fall stunned and helpless before anybody who brought her a box of Whitman’s candy. True or not, this caused sniggers when she walked by, and occasionally she would stop in the street to scream at some insulting boy. I once walked into a basement to find our whole football team masturbating each other, which seemed to contradict a certain idealism that I thought the team stood for, not to mention that I was far too shy to join in Besides, I preferred my own private visions of women.
My mother having gotten me enrolled in high school a year before I had finished grammar school, I suffered under the curious idea that I was too young for everything, by about a year, and it was probably in order somehow to become mature that I managed, despite my thin, gangling body, to make the second squad of the Abraham Lincoln High football team as an end. I could run fast and snatch a ball with my long arms, but at a hundred and twenty pounds it was no joke being tackled by boys fifty pounds heavier. I dreaded the kick in the face when I tackled and had to steel myself to dive for a runner’s ankles, most of the time thankfully missing, but in one important scrimmage with our A-team I closed my eyes and flew at our number one halfback, a mean little bastard whom everyone considered to have a real football future. By some mischance I landed on his feet and brought him down with a bang that amazed him and even more me. As we were getting up he ground his cleats into my neck, but the longed-for opportunity to tackle him again never came up. Instead, catching a pass a few minutes later, I was tackled from the side and brought down with a ripped ligament that for many years thereafter clicked my knee into the bent position and prevented my leg from straightening without intense, tearing pain. Some eight years later, this injury would keep me out of the army.
I seem always to have known that I was a carpenter and a mechanic. At fourteen or fifteen I bought lumber with my savings from my bread delivery job—a painful twelve dollars accumulated from work that earned four dollars a week—and built a back porch for the little house on Third Street. For advice I first approached one of my two pioneer uncles who had moved their families to Brooklyn in the early twenties when the Midwood area was so empty they could watch their kids walking all the dozen blocks to the school across the scrubby flatlands. Manny Newman and Lee Balsam were both salesmen, and unlike us, they owned hammers with which they repaired things around their attached houses on their days off. But only Lee would lend me a hammer, since he did not take manual work seriously. Manny not only had a policy of never lending tools but would blatantly deny that he even owned a shovel, for example, when he knew I could plainly see it hanging on the wall behind him in the garage where in warm weather he liked to play cards with the neighbors in his underwear.
Lee Balsam, all kindness, had a soft voice and a bad heart that caused him to move meditatively and with deliberation. He improvised a porch design With me that worked pretty well except that, as I discovered only after it was finished, there was no connection between the porch and the house. Still, it lasted for two decades, only gradually creeping inch by inch away from the kitchen. It was my first experience with the fevers of construction, and I could not fall asleep for anticipation of tomorrow; and it was exactly the same one cold April in 1948 when I built a ten-by-twelve studio near my first house in Connecticut where I intended to write a play about a salesman. The idea of creating a new shadow on the earth has never lost its fascination. Since the implicit ambition of the middle class is to avoid manual labor, I have a hard time tracing the origins of my love for it as well as my respect for craftsmen.
In the twenties, when the Millers came out from Manhattan in their limousine to visit, the Newman-Balsam connected houses were flanked by only four other pairs, a line of little wooden homes with flat roofs and three-step stoops, surrounded by open flatland where tall elms still grew, and wild roses and ferns, and the grass was crisscrossed with footpaths that people used instead of the unpaved streets without sidewalks. With no stores closer than a couple of miles, they bought potatoes by the hundred-pound sack and canned the tomatoes the
y grew, and their basements smelled hauntingly of earth, unlike Manhattan basements with their taint of cat and rat and urine. Before moving to Brooklyn, both families had lived for years in cold upper New York State small towns and spoke with hard rural r ’s and a twang, in the women’s voices especially. They were different from New Yorkers in their smalltown rhythms of thought, their willingness to spend time sitting around just talking, and an untroubled self-acceptance as ordinary Americans, their Jewishness having somehow lost any power to separate them. Next door to them lived gentile families with whom they socialized intimately, and unlike the Manhattan Jews I knew, they never called in plumbers or roofers but did the work themselves.
It was Lee and Esther’s three daughters who, until they married and left, seemed to spend their lives with bandannas around their heads cleaning the little house and polishing the Nash and even scrubbing the stoop with soapy water. The Newmans did all these things too, but there was a shadowy darkness in their house, a scent of sex and dream, of lies and invention, and above all of contradiction and surprise.
Manny Newman was cute and ugly, a Pan risen out of the earth, a bantam with a lisp, sunken brown eyes, a lumpy, pendulous nose, dark brown skin, and gnarled arms. When I walked into the house, he would look at me—usually standing there in his one-piece BVD’s, carrying a hammer or a screwdriver or perhaps a shoebox filled with his collection of pornographic postcards—as though he had never seen me before or, if he had, would just as soon not see me again. He was a competitor, at all times, in all things, and at every moment. My brother and I he saw running neck and neck with his two sons in some race that never stopped in his mind. He had made two daughters and two sons: the eldest, Isabel, a real beauty despite her resemblance to him, and the youngest, Margie, a tender girl bedeviled by a pustular acne that kept her at home, sad but still bravely witty. But in that house even she dared not lose hope, and I would later think of it as a perfection of America for that reason—because something good was always coming up, and not just good but fantastic, transforming, triumphant. It was a house without irony, trembling with resolutions and shouts of victories that had not yet taken place but surely would tomorrow. Both boys could be Eagle Scouts and win all the badges and make their beds and clean up after themselves and speak often and gravely of the family’s honor and then, with Bernie Crystal and Louis Fleishman, go into Rubin’s candy store and distract him long enough to make off with his three-foot-high globular glass display vase filled with penny candy. Or spend weeks preparing a camping trip to Bear Mountain with the portentous gravity of explorers planning an expedition to the South Pole, and once up there, having followed every honorable rule of scouting, find an old whore in a local tavern and spend the night taking turns with her in the pup tent and in the morning cut her reward by half, figuring that as brothers they should only be charged one fee. Everybody envied them, especially Buddy, the eldest, who played baseball and basketball and football and got mentioned in the Brooklyn Eagle two or three times and took two hours to get himself dressed for a date, oiling his black hair and talcing his face and punching himself in the stomach and snarling into the mirror to peruse his teeth. Like his father, he was dark, but taller, and had Grandpa Barnett’s heavy shoulders, as did Annie, his mother, a most moving woman who bore the cross of reality for them all. People pitied her having to insinuate carefully to Manny that perhaps orange was not the right color to paint the house even though he had got a bargain on several gallons of orange paint in a fire sale on Fulton Street, all the while keeping up her calm, enthusiastic smile lest he feel he was not being appreciated. With the girls she could be more candid, naturally, as she worked year after year to guide them like leaky ships safely into the marital port, Margie with her depressing skin problem, and Isabel being tempted to give away too early what might more profitably be held back, at least for a while.
I actually spent no more than a couple of hours in Manny’s presence in my life, but he was so absurd, so completely isolated from the ordinary laws of gravity, so elaborate in his fantastic inventions, and despite his ugliness so lyrically in love with fame and fortune and their inevitable descent on his family, that he possessed my imagination until I knew more or less precisely how he would react to any sign or word or idea. His unpredictable manipulations of fact freed my mind to lope and skip among fantasies of my own, but always underneath was the river of his sadness. He and Annie were clucked over as hopeless people, but they were the most interesting to talk about, among other reasons because they were still in love. In fact, they had eloped against Grandpa Barnett’s wishes, and as big and broad-chested as she was, and as overweight now, with her gale of a laugh, her pink pockmarked face often reddening with the hypertension that would kill her at sixty, and he with his burnt Indian look, his head always half in some other world, they were still, even now, obviously bound to each other sexually. The great thing on New Year’s Eve was for eight or ten couples to sit at a riotous dinner down in that narrow Newman basement next to the coal furnace and wait for Manny to bring out his shoebox of postcards, but only after we boys were sent upstairs—as if we hadn’t examined each and every picture fifty times during the year, as Manny well knew. Like every social occasion, these parties finally turned into card games, and when Manny got bored he would curl up in Annie’s expansive lap and pretend to suckle, an embarrassment to her but not enough to make her stop him. That house seemed dank with sexuality, especially compared to ours or the Balsams’ or any other I knew of; ours were light and airy, while the Newmans’ was secretly obsessed, as though they were obscenely involved with one another—a fantasy of mine, of course.
As fanatic as I was about sports, my ability was not to be compared to his sons’, and since I was gangling and unhandsome into the bargain I lacked their promise, so that when I stopped by I always had to expect some kind of insinuation of my entire life’s probable failure, even before I was sixteen. But this did not diminish the lure and mystery with which my mind unaccountably surrounded the Newmans. I could never approach their little house without the expectation that something extraordinary was about to happen in there, some sexual lewdness, perhaps, or an amazing revelation of some other kind.
No sensible person could take Manny seriously—he loved to clown—but it was hard to remain unmoved by him, I suppose because an inch below his mad imaginings people sensed the common suffering that in his case never healed over with the customs of indifference. If it was typical of him to look up at me from his casino hand, with his shovel hanging in open view just behind his head in the garage, and say, “I don’t have a shovel,” it was normal, too, and Lee and my father and whoever else was playing with him would never think of openly mentioning the obvious contradiction. Everyone knew that his solution for any hard problem was always the same—change the facts. And everyone took a certain delight in him, as though that was really what they would love to do themselves if only they dared. Beneath the general scoffing at him there was something like intense curiosity if not respect and envy for his crazy courage in turning away from the ordinary rules of sane intercourse. For me, I think, he also seemed to contain multitudes, subtleties of meaning and implication absent in everyone else; in his straightforward denial of owning a shovel, for example, he was actually implying the theme of his life, the competitiveness that drugged his mind. In effect he was saying, “Why don’t your father buy his own shovel? If he’s important enough to look down on me”—as he was sure conservative types always did—“then he’s got no call asking me to lend him a tool. Is he too high-class to own a shovel? Is he such a success that he can go around not even thinking of a shovel except when he desperately needs one, or his son does, and then he thinks you can just drop over and pick up mine? I’ve got money tied up in this shovel. So for the Millers I have no shovel.” But it went even further; in his mind’s eye the shovel hanging behind his head had really ceased to exist at that moment.
Of course I learned from my father and Uncle Lee and the other men in
the family to despair of Manny, but I could never keep my eyes off him either, nor could they. A gin game was only a gin game without Manny, half a dozen or more mildly bored people sitting around a table and talking in spurts about operations or pregnancies or the endless rain or lack of rain or who was likely to get elected or, above all, a fortune somebody had made or lost and how much Bing Crosby or Rudy Vallee made in a single week. But from Manny there was bound to come an assertion sometime in the first ten minutes, the announcement of a theme for the evening, like “Friend of mine in Providence tells me this Rudy Vallee guy broke all the records up there, they took in thirty million dollars in two nights.”
“Thirty million? ”
“Thirty million not counting matinees.”
And they were off, figuring the probable number of seats in the theatre and dividing that into thirty million … But mercy softened them before anyone would declare the outright absurdity of the take, and anyway Manny had changed the subject with some joke, along with a certain self-confessing psychic wink that charmed his listeners into wondering whether he was really serious after all, and he managed to finish a card game with everyone’s emotions having been stirred to outrage, laughter, and finally comradeship with this imp of a man who continuously slipped in and out of every category. Through it all, the fair skin of his wife, Annie, alternately flushed and paled as she dreaded and was relieved of the fear that he was making too much of a fool of himself, something she would have to pay for later, when with no audience to confirm his existence his agonizing uncertainty of identification flooded him with despair. If such black moods hung on, she would sit beside him all the way through New England in his little car, which in winter was barely kept above freezing by its primitive heater, and she would persistently talk him into sunnier thoughts. In those days, before the parkways and superhighways, he had to drive through every town, stop at every traffic light, and he carried a short-handled shovel in the trunk to dig his way out of drifts, since there were no snow tires as yet and many towns only plowed their roads once in a storm.
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