Quarrel & Quandary

by Cynthia Ozick

  They might as well have been dreaming of taking off in Buck Rogers’ twenty-fifth-century rocket ship. The cost of the lot was a stratospheric $13,500, unchanged from the Boom of 1928, just before the national wretchedness descended; and that figure was only for the land. After that would come the digging of a foundation and the construction of a building. What was needed was a miracle.

  One sad winter afternoon my mother was standing on a ladder, concentrating on setting out some newly arrived drug items on a high shelf. (Although a typical drug store stocked several thousand articles, the Park View’s unit-by-unit inventory was never ample. At the end of every week I would hear my father’s melodious, impecunious chant on the telephone, ordering goods from the jobber: “A sixth of a dozen, a twelfth of a dozen …”) A stranger wearing a brown fedora and a long overcoat entered, looked around, and appeared not at all interested in making a purchase; instead he went wandering from case to case, picking things up and putting them down again, trying to be inconspicuous, asking an occasional question or two, all the while scrupulously observing my diligent and tireless parents. The stranger turned out to be a mortgage officer from the American Bible Society, and what he saw, he explained afterward, was a conscientious application of the work ethic; so it was the American Bible Society that supplied the financial foundation of my parents’ Eden, the new Park View. They had entertained an angel unawares.

  The actual foundation, the one to be dug out of the ground, ran into instant trouble. An unemployed civil engineer named Levinson presided over the excavation; he was unemployed partly because the Depression had dried up much of the job market, but mostly because engineering firms in those years were notorious for their unwillingness to hire Jews. Poor Levinson! The vast hole in the earth that was to become the Park View’s cellar filled up overnight with water; the bay was near, and the water table was higher than the hapless Levinson had expected. The work halted. Along came Finnegan and rescued Levinson: Finnegan the plumber, who for a painful fee of fifty dollars (somehow squeezed out of Levinson’s mainly empty pockets) pumped out the flood.

  After the Park View’s exultant move in 1939, the shell of Tessie’s old place on Colonial Avenue remained vacant for years. No one took it over; the plate-glass windows grew murkier and murkier. Dead moths were heaped in decaying mounds on the inner sills. Tessie had lost more than the heartless increase she had demanded, and more than the monthly rent the renewed lease would have brought: there was something ignominious and luckless—tramplike—about that fly-specked empty space, now dimmer than ever. But within its freshly risen walls, the Park View Redux gleamed. Overhead, fluorescent tubes—an indoor innovation—shed a steady white glow, and a big square skylight poured down shifting shafts of brilliance. Familiar objects appeared clarified in the new light: the chocolate-colored fixtures, arranged in unaccustomed configurations, were all at once thrillingly revivified. Nothing from the original Park View had been left behind—everything was just the same, yet zanily out of order: the two crystal urns with their magical red and blue fluids suggestive of alchemy; the entire stock of syrups, pills, tablets, powders, pastes, capsules; tubes and bottles by the hundreds; all the contents of all the drawers and cases; the fountain with its marble top; the prescription desk and its sacrosanct ledger; the stacks of invaluable cigar boxes stuffed with masses of expired prescriptions; the locked and well-guarded narcotics cabinet; the post office, and the safe in which the post office receipts were kept. Even the great, weighty, monosyllabically blunt hanging sign—“DRUGS”—had been brought over and rehung, and it too looked different now. In the summer heat it dropped its black rectangular shadow over Mr. Isaacs’ already shadowy headquarters, where vials of live worms were crowded side by side with vials of nails and screws.

  At around this time my mother’s youngest brother, my uncle Rubin, had come to stay with us—no one knew for how long—in our little house on Saint Paul Avenue, a short walk from the Park View. Five of us lived in that house: my parents, my grandmother, my brother and I. Rubin, who was called Ruby, was now the sixth. He was a bachelor and something of a family enigma. He was both bitter and cheerful; effervescence would give way to lassitude. He taught me how to draw babies and bunnies, and could draw anything himself; he wrote ingenious comic jingles, which he illustrated as adroitly, it struck me, as Edward Lear; he cooked up mouth-watering corn fritters, and designed fruit salads in the shape of ravishing unearthly blossoms. When now and then it fell to him to put me to bed, he always sang the same heartbreaking lullaby: “Sometimes I fee-eel like a motherless child, a long, long way-ay from ho-ome,” in a deep and sweet quaver. In those days he was mostly jobless; on occasion he would crank up his Tin Lizzie and drive out to upper Westchester to prune trees. Once he was stopped at a police roadblock, under suspicion of being the Lindbergh baby kidnapper—the back seat of his messy old Ford was strewn with ropes, hooks, and my discarded baby bottles.

  Ruby had been disappointed in love, and was somehow a disappointment to everyone around him. When he was melancholy or resentful, the melancholy was irritable and the resentment acrid. As a very young man he had been single-minded in a way none of his immigrant relations, or the snobbish mother of the girlfriend who had been coerced into jilting him, could understand or sympathize with. In Czarist Russia’s restricted Pale of Settlement, a pharmacist was the highest vocation a Jew could attain to. In a family of pharmacists, Ruby wanted to be a farmer. Against opposition, he had gone off to the National Farm School in New Jersey—one of several Jewish agricultural projects sponsored by the German philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch. Ruby was always dreaming up one sort of horticultural improvement or another, and sometimes took me with him to visit a certain Dr. McClain, at the Bronx Botanical Gardens, whom he was trying to interest in one of his inventions. He was kindly received, but nothing came of it. Despite his energy and originality, all of Ruby’s hopes and strivings collapsed in futility.

  All the same, he left an enduring mark on the Park View. It was a certain circle of stones—a mark more distinctive than his deserted bachelor’s headstone in an overgrown cemetery on Staten Island.

  Ruby assisted in the move from Tessie’s place to the new location. His presence was fortuitous—but his ingenuity, it would soon develop, was benison from the goddess Flora. The Park View occupied all the width but not the entire depth of the lot on which it was built. It had, of course, a welcoming front door, through which customers passed; but there was also a back door, past a little aisle adjoining the prescription room in the rear of the store, and well out of sight. When you walked out this back door, you were confronted by an untamed patch of weeds and stones, some of them as thick as boulders. At the very end of it lay a large flat rock, in the center of which someone had scratched a mysterious X. The X, it turned out, was a surveyor’s mark; it had been there long before my parents bought the lot. It meant that the property extended to that X and no farther.

  I was no stranger either to the lot or its big rock. It was where the neighborhood children played—a sparse group in that sparsely populated place. Sometimes the rock was a pirate ship; sometimes it was a pretty room in a pretty house; in January it held a snow fort. But early one summer evening, when the red ball of the sun was very low, a little girl named Theresa, whose hair was as red as the sun’s red ball, discovered the surveyor’s X and warned me against stamping on it. If you stamp on a cross, she said, the devil’s helpers climb right out from inside the earth and grab you and take you away to be tortured. “I don’t believe that,” I said, and stamped on the X as hard as I could. Instantly Theresa sent out a terrified shriek; chased by the red-gold zigzag of her hair, she fled. I stood there abandoned—suppose it was true? In the silence all around, the wavering green weeds seemed taller than ever before.

  Looking out from the back door at those same high weeds stretching from the new red brick of the Park View’s rear wall all the way to the flat rock and its X, my mother, like Theresa, saw hallucinatory shapes rising out of
the ground. But it was not the devil’s minions she imagined streaming upward; it was their very opposite—a vision of celestial growths and fragrances, brilliant botanical hues, golden pears and yellow sunflower-faces, fruitful vines and dreaming gourds. She imagined an enchanted garden. She imagined a secret Eden.

  Ruby was angry at my mother; he was angry at everyone but me: I was too young to be held responsible for his lost loves and aspirations. But he could not be separated from his love of fecund dirt. Dirt—the brown dirt of the earth—inspired him; the feel and smell of dirt uplifted him; he took an artist’s pleasure in the soil and all its generative properties. And though he claimed to scorn my mother, he became the subaltern of her passion. Like some wizard commander of the stones—they were scattered everywhere in a wild jumble—he swept them into orderliness. A pack of stones was marshaled into a low wall. Five stones were transformed into a perfect set of stairs. Seven stones surrounded what was to become a flower bed. Stones were borders, stones were pathways, stones—placed just so—were natural sculptures.

  And finally Ruby commanded the stones to settle in a circle in the very center of the lot. Inside the circle there was to be a green serenity of grass, invaded only by the blunders of violets and wandering buttercups. Outside the circle the earth would be a fructifying engine. It was a dreamer’s circle, like the moon or the sun; or a fairy ring; or a mystical small Stonehenge, miniaturized by a spell.

  The back yard was cleared, but it was not yet a garden. Like a merman combing a mermaid’s weedy hair, my uncle Ruby had unraveled primeval tangles and brambles. He had set up two tall metal poles to accommodate a rough canvas hammock, with a wire strung from the top of one pole to the other. Over this wire a rain-faded old shop-awning had been flung, so that the hammock became a tent or cave or darkened den. A backyard hammock! I had encountered such things only in storybooks.

  And then my uncle was gone. German tanks were biting into Europe. Weeping, my grandmother pounded her breast with her fist: the British White Paper of 1939 had declared that ships packed with Jewish refugees would be barred from the beaches of Haifa and Tel Aviv and returned to a Nazi doom. In P.S. 71, our neighborhood school, the boys were drawing cannons and warplanes; the girls were drawing figure skaters in tutus; both boys and girls were drawing the Trylon and the Perisphere. The Trylon was a three-sided obelisk. The Perisphere was a shining globe. They were already as sublimely legendary as the Taj Mahal. The official colors of the 1939 World’s Fair were orange and blue—everyone knew this; everyone had ridden in noiselessly moving armchairs into the Fair’s World of Tomorrow, where the cloverleaf highways of the impossibly futuristic nineteen-sixties materialized among inconceivable suburbs. In the magical lanes of Flushing you could watch yourself grin on a television screen as round and small as the mouth of a teacup. My grandmother, in that frail year of her dying, was taken to see the Palestine Pavilion, with its flickering films of Jewish pioneers.

  Ruby was drafted before the garden could be dug. He sent a photograph of himself in Army uniform, and a muffled recording of his voice, all songs and jolly jingles, from a honky-tonk arcade in an unnamed Caribbean town.

  So it was left to my mother to dig the garden. I have no inkling of when or how. I lived inside the hammock all that time, under the awning, enclosed; I read and read. Sometimes, for a treat, I would be given two nickels for carfare and a pair of quarters, and then I would climb the double staircase to the train and go all the way to Fifty-ninth Street: you could enter Bloomingdale’s directly from the subway, without ever glimpsing daylight. I would run up the steps to the book department on the mezzanine, moon over the Nancy Drew series in an agony of choosing (The Mystery of Larkspur Lane, The Mystery of the Whispering Statue, each for fifty cents), and run down to the subway again, with my lucky treasure. An hour and a half later, I would be back in the hammock, under the awning, while the afternoon sun broiled on. But such a trip was rare. Mostly the books came from the Traveling Library; inside my hammock-cave the melting glue of new bindings sent out a blissful redolence. And now my mother would emerge from the back door of the Park View, carrying—because it was so hot under the awning—half a cantaloupe, with a hillock of vanilla ice cream in its scooped-out center. (Have I ever been so safe, so happy, since? Has consciousness ever felt so steady, so unimperiled, so immortal?)

  Across the ocean, synagogues were being torched, refugees were in flight. On American movie screens Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire whirled in and out of the March of Time’s grim newsreels—Chamberlain with his defeatist umbrella, the Sudetenland devoured, Poland invaded. Meanwhile my mother’s garden grew. The wild raw field Ruby had regimented was ripening now into a luxuriant and powerful fertility: all around my uncle’s talismanic ring of stones the ground swelled with thick savory smells. Corn tassels hung down over the shut greenleaf lids of pearly young cobs. Fat tomatoes reddened on sticks. The bumpy scalps of cucumbers poked up. And flowers! First, as tall as the hammock poles, a flock of hunchbacked sunflowers, their heads too weighty for their shoulders—huge heavy heads of seeds, and a ruff of yellow petals. At their feet, rows of zinnias and marigolds, with tiny violets and the weedy pink buds of clover sidling between.

  Now and then a praying mantis—a stiffly marching fake leaf—would rub its skinny forelegs together and stare at you with two stern black dots. And butterflies! These were mostly white and mothlike; but sometimes a great black-veined monarch would alight on a stone, in perfect stillness. Year by year the shade of a trio of pear trees widened and deepened.

  Did it rain? It must have rained—it must have thundered—in those successive summers of my mother’s garden; but I remember a perpetual sunlight, hot and honeyed, and the airless boil under the awning, and the heart-piercing scalliony odor of library glue (so explicit that I can this minute re-create it in my very tear ducts, as a kind of mourning); and the fear of bees.

  Though I was mostly alone there, I was never lonely in the garden. But on the other side of the door, inside the Park View, an unfamiliar churning had begun—a raucous teeming, the world turning on its hinge. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, there were all at once jobs for nearly everyone, and money to spend in any cranny of wartime leisure. The Depression was receding. On weekends the subway spilled out mobs of city picnickers into the green fields of Pelham Bay Park, bringing a tentative prosperity to the neighborhood—especially on Sundays. I dreaded and hated this new Sunday frenzy, when the Park View seemed less a pharmacy than a carnival stand, and my own isolation grew bleak. Open shelves sprouted in the aisles, laden with anomalous racks of sunglasses, ice coolers, tubes of mosquito repellent and suntan lotion, paper cups, colorful towers of hats—sailors’ and fishermen’s caps, celluloid visors, straw topis and sombreros, headgear of every conceivable shape. Thirsty picnickers stood three deep at the fountain, clamoring for ice-cream cones or sodas. The low, serious drug-store voices that accompanied the Park View’s weekday decorum were swept away by revolving laughing crowds—carnival crowds. And at the close of these frenetic summer Sundays, my parents would anxiously count up the cash register in the worn night of their exhaustion, and I would hear their joyful disbelief: unimaginable riches, almost seventy-five dollars in a single day!

  Then, when the safe was locked up, and the long cords of the fluorescent lights pulled, they would drift in the dimness into the garden, to breathe the cool fragrance. At this starry hour the katydids were screaming in chorus, and fireflies bleeped like errant semaphores. In the enigmatic dark, my mother and father, with their heads together in silhouette, looked just then as I pictured them looking on the Albany night boat, on June 19, 1921, their wedding day. There was a serial photo from that long-ago time I often gazed at—a strip taken in an automatic-photo booth in fabled, faraway Albany. It showed them leaning close, my young father quizzical, my young mother trying to smile, or else trying not to; the corners of her lips wandered toward one loveliness or the other. They had brought back a honeymoon souvenir: three sandstone monkeys joined a
t the elbows: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. And now, in their struggling forties, standing in Ruby’s circle of stones, they breathed in the night smells of the garden, onion grass and honeysuckle, and felt their private triumph. Seventy-five dollars in eighteen hours!

  No one knew the garden was there. It was utterly hidden. You could not see it, or suspect it, inside the Park View, and because it was nested in a wilderness of empty lots all around, it was altogether invisible from any surrounding street. It was a small secluded paradise.

  And what vegetable chargings, what ferocities of growth, the turbulent earth pushed out! Buzzings and dapplings. Birds dipping their beaks in an orgy of seed-lust. It was as if the ground itself were crying peace, peace; and the war began. In Europe the German death factories were pumping out smoke and human ash from a poisoned orchard of chimneys. In Pelham Bay, among bees and white-wing flutterings, the sweet brown dirt pumped ears of corn.

  Nearly all the drug stores—of the old kind—are gone, in Pelham Bay and elsewhere. The Park View Pharmacy lives only in a secret Eden behind my eyes. Gone are Bernardini, Pressman, Weiss, the rival druggists on the way to Westchester Square. They all, like my father, rolled suppositories on glass slabs and ground powders with brass pestles. My mother’s garden has returned to its beginning: a wild patch, though enclosed now by brick house after brick house. The houses have high stoops; they are city houses. The meadows are striped with highways. Spy Oak gave up its many ghosts long ago.

  But under a matting of decayed pear pits and thriving ragweed back of what used to be the Park View, Ruby’s circle of stones stands frozen. The earth, I suppose, has covered them over, as—far off in Staten Island—it covers my dreaming mother, my father, my grandmother, my resourceful and embittered farmer uncle.

  Lovesickness