I could not subscribe to whatever value it was that plunked me down, semiannually, at S. Klein’s. She hated it too, or so she said, but she went about her preparations to leave the house with an energy that suggested happy anticipation. It was possible for us to communicate sensibly sometimes but not when she wouldn’t admit her true feelings. So I knew all was lost, I was helpless before impending disaster, and nothing could console me, neither the long trip in the subway in which I got to stand at the window next to the engineer’s cab nor the promise of lunch out. I went immediately into my passive-resisting sulk, in which my feet didn’t seem to work properly, my wrist had to be held and I was by this means shaken and yanked forward, shoe-tips scuffing the sidewalk, or dragged in a kind of sideways lurch and stumble, all the way to the 174th Street subway station.
“Walk properly, Edgar,” she would say. “You want me to leave you behind? Don’t think I wouldn’t! Oh, you foolish boy, who do you think I’m doing this for? You grow out of things as soon as I put them on. Do you know how lucky we are to have a few dollars? Other children wear castoffs and they’re happy to have them.”
If I persisted she would say, “I warn you, my patience is wearing thin,” and give me a particularly vehement yank. I always admired my mother’s metaphors. Even as they were familiar to me from much usage, they held up nicely. Patience wearing thin was very fine. A little later she would say, “If you don’t walk like a human being I’m going to knock the spots out of you.” That was good too, although I never quite understood the etymology of it. Some people had freckles, but I didn’t, and, of course, chicken pox and measles brought spots, but no one would beat a sick child and expect to cure him in this manner, not even my mother. Besides which the phrase was out of you, she didn’t say I’m going to knock the spots off you, she said out of you, and so that was totally mystifying. I had seen her pounding pillows or shaking blankets out the window before laying them across the windowsill; maybe it was a dust metaphor. Not that I had much time to reflect on it, because there followed almost immediately the ultimate assurance: that I would be murdered in cold blood. I never had the leisure to think about that one. Uttered in a voice loud enough to make people on the street turn and stare, it meant that unless I wanted to be physically abused, I had no recourse but to give in and allow myself to be pushed through the turnstile.
But I would not forgive her. To walk out of a brisk autumn day into a Klein’s fall sale was an unimaginably perverse act even for an adult. Greeted by blasts of hot air whooshing up through the floor grates between the outer and inner doors, we passed into a harshly lit wasteland of pipe racks and dump bins hung and piled with every conceivable kind of garment for every gender, age and shape, from infants and toddlers to boys, young misses, juniors, men and women. And every single one of these garments seemed to be undergoing the imperial scrutiny of the released population of an insane asylum. Some sort of frenzied mass rite was taking place, the Flinging of the Textiles. As if in a state of hypnosis, my mother immediately joined in while I held on to her, for my life. Wriggling and elbowing her way through communicants three and four deep around a counter of sweaters, say, or scarves, she immediately began tossing them up in the air, just as everyone else was, altogether creating a kind of fountain of rising and falling colors. She did this for a while and, shaking her head to show her dissatisfaction, fought her way outward into the great flow of wandering shoppers passing across the ancient wooden floors of the place like a tumultuous migration of buffalo, hoofbeats thundering on the plain, only to find another counter to stop at and press her way toward so as to go through the same fountaining behavior all over again. Little by little as we made our way on this endless pilgrimage I slowly peeled off my clothing, like a foreign legionnaire stumbling under the merciless heat of the sun over dune after dune, my hat first, then my mackinaw, then my sweater. I held on to these items in some attempt to keep from losing them, but it was a law of life at S. Klein’s that even as you were establishing loyalties to new items of apparel your old ones tried to flee from you in a kind of poltergeist of moral rebuke. Time after time I would find the cap or the sweater gone, or the jacket slipping away from me. I’d have to buck the current to find my hat under someone’s foot—dangerous work: if I slipped and fell it was sudden death, there was no question about that. Or I’d find the sweater in the hands of some other mother looking around with a compassionate and pitying expression on her face for the owner; and then I’d have to thank her and suffer my mother’s smiling theatrical scolding for the sake of this woman. And on we’d pass, driven like ceremonial dancers to the plink plink of those odd bells peculiar to department stores and to hortatory shoppers’ advisories delivered like sermons over the public address systems. Stock clerks in grey jackets pushed and spun wheeled bins of clothing through the crowd with brutal élan, like the drivers of Dodgems in an amusement park. Long lines of people wound through corridors and around counters well out of sight of the cashier posts to which, arms filled with piles of ticketed clothes, they had committed themselves. And mothers were telling children to stand still and children were hanging on to their mothers’ skirts and coats, and they were whining and dribbling snot from their noses, and staring at one another in slack-mouthed fascination. And people were shouting, and the occasional clerks who could be seen were denying customers whatever satisfaction they sought, and my mind was being obliterated by this population, everyone desiring in competition what we desired; I felt they were multiples of us, we had disintegrated into thousands of restless constantly moving people, a fun-house mirror of enraged and threadbare gentility, and these masses were sending up a great planetary music, harsh and dissonant like a sea wind, and it was blowing me away, eroding me, chunks of myself were flying off, soon I would be no more than a grain of sand. And then that would be swept up.
But my mother strode on. The more the scene whirled around us like a roaring inferno of human pretensions, the more steadfast she became, taking this and that, discarding one thing for another, and so gradually accumulating what she had come for. And somehow she would find some haven, some alcove, perhaps on a higher floor, where the population was thinned out and the atmosphere was quieter; and we would encamp and examine what we had. Her technique was to take from the racks several things of each kind—several shirts or coats or pairs of knickers or sweaters—and try them all on me to see which were best. So now I endured the Try-On. “Try this,” she would say, and a pullover would come down over my head. “No, it’s too small, try the size larger,” and off would come the pullover and down come another. My role in this rite was to lift my arms on command or lower them, to endure having my head swaddled for terrifying moments in a sweater until she had found the neck hole and brought me back into light. I would have to turn around and have things held up to my back, and turn back around and have them held up to my front, or, most hideously of all, repair to some grim cubicle and behind a flimsy curtain that anyone might open, take off my pants and try on new ones. There is a kind of exhaustion that comes over you in the Try-On that is like no other. It is as if having been turned into a hothouse vegetable you have now gone into vegetable decline, or wilt. “Stand up straight, Edgar, how can I tell if something is right if you slump this way.” But at this point of the ordeal it was not resistance I was offering, or intransigence, or any willfulness of any kind, because I had none; I was without volition, like a marionette whose strings are slack.
Somehow we would go through everything and come up with the selection. And then would come the Standing on Line, and lo, I was one of those miserable little children hanging on to their mothers and staring at the other beings their own size, or conspicuously ignoring them, as we moved with agonizing slowness to the register. Except that now I was sound and whole again, my mother’s triumph in her purchases having reestablished in my soul the conviction that we were, after all, special human beings in all this mob, with our own secrets and superiorities. “This sweater is a wonderful buy, and it’s just t
he right size, you’ll be able to wear it with the sleeves turned up, and grow into it and wear it some more. And you’ll like the knickers. They’re made of the finest wool, I think they made a mistake and underpriced them, they were the only ones in the whole store. Isn’t it lucky they fit? Maybe I’ll take it in a bit at the waist and then let it out when it needs it.” And so on. Without doubt, she had done it again, found in this emporium of rags and seconds, and badly made and cheap clothing, just those few things that were worth buying.
And we would get out of there and find a luncheonette or a Nedick’s and I would have a grilled cheese sandwich and an orange drink, and she would have a cup of chicken noodle soup; and I’d be miraculously restored, my eye keen for New York and its excitements, which usually came to a point as a new Flash Gordon Big Little Book at the newsstand. We took the Lexington Avenue IRT home, a subway in Manhattan that ascended into the light just south of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and then rocketed along northward on elevated tracks over Jerome Avenue. I sat next to her in this train, whose seats ran under the windows all the way down the side of the car, and leaned against her, my tormentor and redeemer, as she sat in her stolid thought with her ankles crossed and the Klein’s bags gathered on her lap. I drew up my knees and read of the latest depredations of the wily Oriental despot Ming the Merciless, ruler of the planet Mongo, and of Flash Gordon’s tough, resourceful, but sportsmanlike response. I liked Flash, and Dale, his girlfriend. They flew about the heavens in rocket ships without wearing much of anything, but they never caught cold.
FOURTEEN
I suppose I was at this time in the second grade. I was becoming more aware of my mother’s unhappiness, in part because it was more explicit. Before going to work one morning my father put in her hand two fifty-cent pieces. He left and she sat down at the kitchen table. “With this,” she said, indicating the coins, “I am expected to maintain a family, keep a house running, put food on the table.” She was a strong woman but she wept easily. I patted her. She washed clothes using a washboard angled into the laundry sink in the kitchen. Her arms went up and down in the suds. “I used to have the most wonderful maid,” she told me. “When you were an infant. A woman from Jamaica, Carrie was her name. She adored you, took you out in your new carriage and would shoo anyone away who got too close. Carrie guarded you as if you were the Prince of Wales.”
Coming home from school, now I often smelled cigarette smoke, which told me my mother’s friend Mae was visiting. Mae worked as a bookkeeper part time, in the mornings. It was the best work she could find. She lived with her old mother and father around the corner and got out of the house in the afternoon by visiting her friend my mother. But my mother had also come to rely on Mae, who listened to her concerns, injecting a question here or a wry comment there. Mae sat leaning forward, with her legs crossed and her hand with the cigarette up in the air. She was totally attentive and sympathetic. I liked the sound her stockings made when she crossed her legs. She understood that I found her attractive and would pinch my cheek, but not so that it hurt, or rub her hand in a circle on my back. One evening she was wearing a silk see-through blouse with a lace bow at the collar. Her shoulders and arms were visible and also her brassiere. “What are you looking at, Buster?” she said with a laugh.
I heard a lot when my mother talked to her friend Mae. “I have exactly three dresses that I wash and iron and wash and iron,” my mother said. “And I will go on washing and ironing them until there’s nothing left. I haven’t bought a stitch of clothing in years. And he plays cards. He knows we need every penny and he plays cards.” Mae shook her head. My mother wondered where the rent was coming from. She was jealous of her mother-in-law and her sisters-in-law. “Whenever he has a spare moment he’s with them,” she said. “And they’re always asking him to do things for them, as if he had no responsibilities of his own. They like things wholesale. Does Frances, who lives in Pelham Manor in a beautiful home and sends her sons to Harvard, need things wholesale?”
I remember hearing my mother say something that I felt like a sudden weight in the chest: “He keeps the store open till nine—all right, he may have to—but what does he do then? He comes home at one, two in the morning. Where has he been? What has he been doing! I’m struggling here all by myself, trying to keep things going…. And when he is home he runs to Mama.” She had stood now, I was in the hall just outside the doorway to the kitchen. She paced back and forth, “I’m a good wife,” she said. “I can make do with nothing. I’ve got a good mind. I know what’s going on in the world. I know music. I’ve kept my figure. I don’t think I’m all that bad a person to be with.” Her voice broke and she was crying, which brought me forward into the doorway. My mother’s back was turned to me and she had lifted the corner of her apron and was dabbing her eyes. Mae, seeing me, said with a wink, “Well, that’s a pretty kettle of fish.”
On a Saturday my mother decided that we would go downtown and visit my father in his store. “And we’ll get him to take us to the Automat for lunch,” she said. She put on her blue hat, a sort of Robin Hood model, which she set on her head at an angle and checked in the mirror. “Do you think it looks smart?” she asked me. I said it did, it looked very smart. She was wearing her grey wool dress with a belt and shoes that she called pumps. She tucked her purse under her arm and we were off. We were taking the Sixth Avenue subway. Our station was at 174th Street, where it tunneled under the Concourse. We walked past my school and turned left and went along past the shoemaker, the Daitch Dairy, the bakery. Mr. Rosoff was in the window of his drugstore and waved to us and smiled. Ahead was the dark enormous arch of the Grand Concourse overpass. The Sixth Avenue line ran north and south under the Concourse, and so from the 174th Street tunnel we actually had to walk up to get to the subway platform.
At my urging we sat in the first car so I could stand at the window at the front end of the car right next to the motorman’s cab. The train clattered through the black tunnel. The stanchions flashed by. The train headlamps cast light on the rails ahead that looked to me like two continuously shooting stars. Up ahead the next station came into view as a box of light. Closer and closer it came and suddenly the white tiles of the new station blazed forth, everything was bathed in brilliance, and we were grinding to a halt but still whizzing past the people waiting on the lighted platform. The engineer knew where to stop according to the number of cars in the train. In Manhattan at 125th Street, we became an express all the way down to Fifty-ninth. This was the best part of the trip, passing the lighted stations from the middle track, the lights rippling by, the train going so fast it rocked from side to side, banging against its own wheel carriages.
“Hello, young man,” my father said when we walked into the store. Several customers were at the racks of sheet music, two were talking to Uncle Willy in the back. Lester waved at my mother. He was selling someone a radio. My father was unpacking a carton of ukuleles behind the counter near the front door. “We’re having a run on these,” he said. I sat down behind the counter to try one for myself. They were not serious instruments, I knew, because they were sold up here rather than in the back, where the horns and banjos and drums were. I asked my father where Donald was, because on Saturdays Donald worked at the store.
“He’s out on a delivery,” my father said.
My mother said to my father we were hoping he would take us to lunch. “That is entirely possible,” he said. He was waiting for some calls. There was a man at Carnegie Hall he might have to meet. “Wait awhile and we’ll see,” he said. He did not like to be pinned down. He answered the phone and went to the back to check on some stock. Up and down the walls behind the counter were rows and rows of record albums, with dark green spines and gilt lettering, thick, heavy albums of operas, symphonies, which I hesitated to withdraw because I didn’t want to break anything. Lester had sold a small radio. He saw the customer off and came to the cash register and counted several bills carefully; then he rang open the register and put all the bills in
side. Then he removed a bill and put it in his pocket and closed the register. He found my mother looking at him and smiled. He adjusted his tie and patted his hair. Clearly he knew he was handsome. He took his hat from a hook behind the counter. “Tell Dave I had to go out. I’ll be back in a while.”
My mother had been reading some sheet music. “Did you see what Lester did?” she said to me. I had not known how to tune the ukulele properly, I could not peg the strings taut. Other people came into the store. My father moved around constantly, he was on the go. Every time the door opened the street noise flowed in as if cars and buses and thousands of pedestrians were about to come into the store. As suddenly as it had started, the sound stopped. I felt safe behind the counter. “I’m hungry,” I said to my mother.
“We’re waiting for your father,” she said. This was a very familiar situation. He had said neither yes nor no.
When my mother spoke up he said, “You run ahead and get a table and I’ll be there shortly.”
“While we cool our heels?” my mother said. “Not this time.” We sat and waited. Somehow my father needed pressure applied. He could not be counted upon except when pressured.
Finally, at a quiet moment, Uncle Willy said to my father. “For God’s sake, Dave, I’m here and Lester will be back in a few minutes. Take your family to lunch.”
The Automat was on Forty-second Street, a great glittering high-ceilinged hall with murals on the walls and rows and rows of tables. I dropped three nickels in a slot, I worked the little knob next to the glass door, and the sliced cheese and boloney sandwich on white bread was mine. One nickel got me a turn of the chocolate milk lever. This was quite fine. My parents had soup and bread and coffee. Strange people sat all about. Some of them peered at us: a little old woman with odd bumps on her face, wild red hair and a crocheted hat, and several men with unpressed clothes and stubble on their chins. The lady in the change-making booth rang the nickels on the marble counter. The busboys slapped the trays together. Because there were three of us, we thought we’d have a table to ourselves, but it was crowded and a man sat down at the fourth chair and ate his lunch from his tray. He wore his homburg tilted back on his head, he had on a dark shiny suit with cigarette ash rubbed into the lapels, his shirt collar was creased and dirty. All hunched over, he ate spaghetti and sucked in the strands like Charlie Chaplin, with little Hooping noises.
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