My cousin Jody knew that the world radiated on the point of Croton-on-Hudson. Every time I visited him, Jody would remind me that Croton was “the most important railroad station between New York and Poughkeepsie,” a fact that seemed all the more impressive because of the ability to gauge achievement in such a way. Croton had one-of-a-kind destinations like Silver Lake, where there was a rope swing and a legendary undertow; Pop Burger’s general store with its glorious toy section; and the dark, creepy house that, suburban myth had it, inspired the ghoulish eye of Charles Addams, inventor of Gomez, Morticia, Cousin Itt, and the other members of the Addams Family. It was difficult at times for me to see how New Haven could possibly compete. In ways, it couldn’t. We had no organized sports leagues for seven- and eight-year-olds that I knew of, so when I heard about Jody’s flag football games on Saturdays and saw him wear the colors of the Chemical Engine team in baseball games down at the field by the Duck Pond, I found it easy to remember the names of left-handed-swinging Greg Mulhall and his other teammates, could describe their abilities with as much proficiency as Jody could.
My cousin and I had been raised to consider one another brothers and there was nobody I more looked forward to seeing. During my visits to Croton, we read The New York Times sports section on the kitchen floor together and then all day we played cowboys and Indians outdoors and Ping-Pong in the attic, hunched for hours over his long work table in a cloud of paint thinner and glue assembling plastic model tanks and airplanes, listened to country music on his radio. He was a fan of Dolly Parton, C. W. McCall, and later the teenaged Tanya Tucker, and, because of him, so was I. At a certain point we taught one another tennis, and from then on we played together on the town courts, long sessions never observed by anyone, so that we alone knew one another’s games, an intimacy I treasured. At night, though there was a free bedroom for me, I always slept on the floor of his room in a sleeping bag, perpendicular to his bed, my head facing him, the better to discuss the day just passed, reviewing the highlights for what seemed like hours.
Three months older, Jody played with me as his equal, though we weren’t considered equals by anybody, especially me. He was a grade ahead of me at school, lived in a bigger house, had superior sneakers—our family’s first Red Ball Jets, and then our first Adidas. On the table beside his bed there was a sign that said “Think,” which puzzled me, for he didn’t seem to need to be told; he was an acclaimed student. When we were eight, his sister, Liesi, came into the family. As soon as she reached an age where she was beginning to speak, I remember my cousin and I competing to get her to say the name of our favorite New York Met—the pair of us on our knees before her, I imploring “Tom Seaver! Tom Seaver!” he calling “Bud Harrelson! Bud Harrelson!” and her tiny, alert head swiveling back and forth in sparrow-eyed bafflement until the sudden inevitability of “Bud!” I also remember when the demonstration of what he was learning in boxing lessons prematurely ended with me knocked across the room “by a left!” as right-handed Jody exulted. On the day we got to be in a hay wagon, we had to stop our hay fight and get out because he was sneezing and wheezing so much, and I wished I was allergic too. At the table, he would engage the grown-ups in their discussions of current political and scientific events while I silently forked my food, revering him.
Croton was also, of course, Susi. Susi had a strange ability to know what I was thinking. When Jody talked of inviting one of my friends from New Haven to his birthday party in Croton, I speculated that the friend would not be able to travel so far, suggested that Jody needn’t bother, and then Susi interrupted, yelling at me for “selfishly” wanting my friend for myself, which was true. She could be imperious, not only with me, but also, I saw, with my Uncle Tony, goading him about the sometimes indolent way he walked through life until he cried out in pitched manly outrage, “Goddamn it, Sue!” and then would come a loudly slammed door, after which the house would get very still. At first these spats upset me because I was sure the marriage was done for. But over time I saw the way the anger would subside, doors would open, small gestures of reconciliation would be made, then sheepish words, then hugs and tears, and life would play on. Theirs was my chance to see a lasting marriage, the way it functioned in and out of harmony, touching a spectrum of emotions requiring tending, compromise, reassurance, and adjustment. During one of those early Christmas celebrations in Croton, Susi and Tony each opened a package to discover that they’d given one another the same book, Erich Segal’s Love Story, a moment of hilarity that became memorable when we saw how moved Susi was by the coincidence.
In 1970, she and Tony left the Little House and bought the Big House, an abject, gone-to-seed Greek Revival white manor house all but falling down the hill behind it. The Big House became Susi’s creation. She restored it room by room, putting care into every switch, floorboard, and tile, not to mention the wing chairs, dowelbacked benches, etchings, and gold-plaited lamp tassels she carried home from the thrift shops she trawled after her duties were done for the day working with troubled children at Phelps Memorial Hospital. It was as though by will alone she could rehabilitate people and things—see them back into life at their best advantage, such as the tiny, cramped second-floor chamber at the rear of the house, which became elevated as the Pink Room.
Like my mother, Susi often had an embroidery needle in her hand, and looking at their work you could see the two sisters, my mother’s creations pretty, technically precise, primary, and my aunt’s bobbins holding rougher threads that she sewed at unlikely angles in browns, olive, orange, burnt reds, milky pinks and yellows. Somehow she achieved opalescence from dull colors.
In 1971, they both saw the film The Go-Between and argued about it. All of Susi’s sympathies were with the illicit, doomed lovers, while my mother was upset about their affair’s effect on the little boy whom they’d made their unwitting conduit. He was an overheated schoolboy, Susi said, drawn to their beautiful love and then selfishly ruining it. Heidi was shocked. He was a naive child, she thought, and they were the selfish ones, callously and irrevocably destroying his innocence.
There were only a few times I was alone with Susi. One of them found me sitting on her bed talking with her as she stood in front of her closet door mirror, inspecting herself in the work clothes she had just put on. Susi had long racks of costly clothes, and that day I noticed how sexy my aunt was in her crisply pleated navy blue skirt, spectator heels, and silk blouse, the thin, creamy fabric trembling over her full breasts. I remember the swish of skirt and stockings as she went through the door, leaving me alone in the room, slightly dizzy amid the stacks of newspapers.
She was not tall, but, wherever she went with her big, shining smile, she appeared tall, an inborn confidence that I misinterpreted also as peace of mind. I never knew that her blond hair was white beneath the bleach well before she was forty, and that the long nights she sometimes spent shut up alone in the Pink Room were because worry and trouble aren’t far from most doors, certainly not in my family.
My mother was an intense combination of fragility and force. After our Volkswagen Bug we owned a secondhand green Volkswagen bus. On a drive north to visit my grandparents in New Hampshire, I was such bad traveling company that my mother offered to let me walk the rest of the way if I couldn’t behave better. She’d said this many times before and I’d always known how she meant it. Now I decided not to know. “Okay, I’ll walk,” I said. My mother didn’t hesitate. She pulled the Volkswagen over to the side of the road and waited, eyes forward. I hesitated. “Go on, get out if that’s how you want it,” she said. We were on the outskirts of Winchendon, Massachusetts. I opened the car door, stepped onto the road. My mother started up the bus and pulled away. In my mind I had instantly become a wayfarer. I began to make assessments of the terrain I would cover. I knew that on the upcoming stretches of road, hardly any buildings were visible—only woods and the occasional roadhouse with a red and white Budweiser sign and a few pickups parked out front. I kept my head down, wondering what w
ould happen, how far I could walk before dark, where I would eat and sleep. Across the New Hampshire border there was a lot more forest before Francestown. Besides chipmunks, most of the animals I’d seen in New Hampshire were at a petting zoo called The Friendly Farm. Were there wolves in New Hampshire? I carried no money. It was dusty underfoot. I looked up and saw my mother moving at a crawl as traffic swerved around her. Fifty yards ahead of me, the bus stopped and I heard my mother shout, “Nicky, get back in this car right now.” I obeyed, and when the door closed, Sally, my mother, and I all burst into tears.
Driving home late one night from a visit to Croton, I awakened from a deep sleep in the backseat to the glow of the instrument panel all lit up with little sparkles of scarlet. There was a feeling of peculiar inertia; it took me a few moments to grasp that we had come to a stop on the expressway shoulder. Our engine had seized up. I was in the middle of an event.
To my left, traffic whined past, headlamps sweeping across us, too close and too bright. My mother had switched on her hazard blinkers and now sat quietly at the steering wheel, thinking. As a parent she was usually so sure that when she was unsure it amazed me. Sally, only three, slept on in the way back. Within the stationary bus I too was still, waiting to see what would happen. It was unnerving to be at rest amid so much motion. When no traffic went by, all was silent except for the back-and-forth tick-tick-tick of the hazards. Then a huge truck would come along making the bus shudder even after the truck had roared past, a small boat rocking on swells of a bigger one’s wake. After a while I canted my body away from the road and bent toward the window on the other side. Over the guardrail, the silhouettes of bulrushes and dark tree trunks fanned out before me and between the traceried lines of branches tiny lights shone in the distance. Suddenly my mother was touching me and awakening Sally and we were leaving the bus. “C’mon, kids,” she said, just the way she did at night in New Haven when it was time to get out of the car because we were home. We stood beside the guardrail as she locked up the bus. I was certain I was going to have to go into those woods. My mother picked Sally up, took me by the hand, and we began walking along the highway in the night. We walked for a long time, hugging the guardrail, until finally we came to an exit ramp. We turned up the incline. Nearby there were houses. My mother chose one with lamps on, climbed the steps, and knocked while I waited one step down, still holding her hand. A door swung open bathing us in sudden indoor warmth and an elderly voice inquired our business. Soon Sally and I were drinking orange juice in the kitchen as my mother spoke on the telephone, arranging with the AAA about the bus. In times of actual crisis, she remained utterly composed. As soon as we got home, she began saving up for a new red Dodge.
Thirty-five miles down the Hudson River from Croton was my father’s mother, Grandma Rebecca, in Manhattan. Every few months we drove south from New Haven to visit her. I used to experience a heightening of perception as our car crossed into Manhattan over the Triborough Bridge, passing under its gray-metal trestle towers—they looked to me like massive croquet wickets—and working our way along the East River Drive past an island of yellow buildings, a swooping aquamarine footbridge, plucky tugs nudging barges, a red fireboat, and then, after turning onto Fifth Avenue near my grandmother’s building in Greenwich Village, past a church that was constructed of layered brown stones the color of German chocolate cake.
My grandmother’s building on lower Fifth Avenue was tall and white, with a semicircular drive in front, doormen dressed in livery, a lobby mural of old-fashioned Dutchmen sailing into New Amsterdam, and a mahogany elevator cab staffed by an operator. Her large apartment had lavish furniture and oil paintings on the walls, scrimshaw, silver candlesticks, a dining room floor surface of alternating big black and white chessboard tiles, and a view out the den window of a garden with a fountain in which basking cherub statues sent off exuberant streams of water from between their chubby, naked stone legs. Off the dining room was a bar stocked with unlimited ginger ale.
Most of our time was spent in the living room, which faced onto Fifth Avenue. Upon arrival we’d be ushered to the pair of couches near the window where we’d usually confront several members of my grandmother’s large family: perhaps her sister, Rachel, treated by my grandmother as her consigliere, or my grandmother’s brother, Ben, often called Ben the Doctor, once or twice even my father up from Washington. The all-points center of the room was a round coffee table with a black marble platter covered by a spread of carrot sticks, radishes, black olives, Jarlsberg cheese, and Sally’s and my favorite, marinated artichoke hearts, which we speared with tiny silver forks. There were crystal bowls of Jordan almonds, after-dinner mints in green foil, and Coffee Nips, which we weren’t allowed to touch until after the brisket that was warming in the oven. To rappel into all this plenty from where I’d come from was an unsteadying experience, and every time I entered my grandmother’s apartment I would have the sensation that it looked different from last time, a certainty that the rooms were much larger or laid out in fresh configurations—though nothing about it ever changed at all.
As we ate, my grandmother would ask us about ourselves. She was then a veteran prosecutor in the downtown Family Court, and part of what made her so likable was that for a tough professional woman she had a disarming capacity for admiration—a sweetness all the sweeter because it was unexpected in someone so formidably brisk and decisive. Her father, Max, had been a Polish immigrant street peddler on the Lower East Side for whom America had eventually worked out so well that to my grandmother, his oldest child, the United States was always “This wonderful country.” She aspired to feel pleased for herself, and for others, and a happy bulletin from me brought her sustained joy. I never met anybody more delighted by my good news. “That’s wonderful!” she’d say, employing her very favorite word, which, with her euphonious stress on the first syllable and mild old-neighborhood flattening of the second, came out wuuun-duh-ful. “Now sit down here next to me and tell me; I want to hear all about it.” Once the little triumph had been aired in full, she’d smile broadly and say, “We’ll have to celebrate.” Then she’d pour ginger ale into a wineglass and say, “We’ll pretend it’s champagne.”
In my grandmother’s bedroom, on the wall across from the big bed, was a sketched portrait of a rabbi, hairs billowing out from under his skullcap, his beard flowing in wispy tufts down to his robes. There was eventually something provocative to me about having a rabbi on the wall because my grandmother never talked about Judaism and gave me the impression that it was a subject that I should not ask about. If Jewish holidays were honored with family gatherings in those years, Sally and I were never included, as though our faith had been ceded to my Christian mother as part of the divorce settlement. To me, the Jewishness of my father’s side of my family was an ossicle, the smallest piece of their grand, multifarious selves. Unlike my mother, who in New Haven sent us to Sunday school at the Congregational church on Whitney Avenue, my grandmother, my father, and their relatives didn’t appear devout in any way that was evident to me. If there were services, feasts, or Seders, I never knew—was not invited. When I heard them mention “the holidays” it seemed like an old habit, such as spring cleaning—a necessary ritual of life, but not one anyone was interested in discussing. I had no idea then that back on the Lower East Side, although there had been a synagogue right next door, they never once went inside. Nor did I know that when anybody mentioned “the European relatives,” Max became hysterical. As for my grandmother’s mother, Sarah, of the murdered uncles and cousins, she said, “That’s the past and we don’t talk about the past.” An adult might have said their faith was form rather than belief; that the faith had, in fact, disappeared, leaving only a residue of custom. They had come here to start anew, to this crowded city where you could refashion yourself and become who you now wanted to be—could make the past vanish. My grandmother took to referring to herself as “a Yankee,” and her brisket she usually called pot roast. To me the implication was that New Wor
ld success was contingent on obliterating that Old Country past, that in New York life was a matter of present comportment. Years later, my well-dressed grandmother astonished me by blurting out, “I was never an offensive immigrant, not one you would look down on. German Jews looked down on Russian and Polish Jews, you know.”
“Who did Russian and Polish Jews look down on?” I asked.
Her face grew sad. “Ourselves,” she said.
As a child, I got the sense that to be a Jew was a matter of weary obligation, a source of shame and ambivalence—a weight that even helpful America couldn’t free you from. The best you could do was quietly accept it. I was glad I had another option. Later, when I was older, my grandmother said that she regretted I didn’t feel Jewish.
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