I asked Mother why the Y required nudity in swim class and she asked the Y, and they told her it was so the instructor could better observe the boys’ leg movements. This satisfied her. To me, it felt like pure humiliation. I spent the next three weeks traversing between the library and WCCO, and at the end of July, one day at Twin Lakes, when Mother asked me to swim for her, I walked out in water up to my armpits and pantomimed swimming and that satisfied her.
I did not bother my parents with my problems—did not complain about the Darwins or the tormentor who made fun of my green teeth— didn’t ask permission to ride my bike into the city—never ever confessed to feeling sad or troubled—I kept my troubles to myself. Mother had the little kids to worry about without me adding to her problems. This did not strike me as peculiar. It still does not. Shut my mouth; put a lid on it. This worked pretty well for me. Keep moving. If you feel sad, get on your bike and ride. Don’t get fascinated by your problems. Tomorrow is a new day. I still feel this way.
10
The Trip to New York City
I PICKED STRAWBERRIES FROM OUR strawberry beds, tithing some into my mouth, same with raspberries. I read in a book that men on their way to fight at Gettysburg picked strawberries and ate them before going over the hill to die. I burned our trash in a wire-frame incinerator and put an empty whipped-cream aerosol can that said Danger: Do not put near flame into the fire and watched it explode. A dump truck drove along 77th and dumped asphalt scraps from a shingle factory on the road and the cars driving by pressed the pieces into somewhat solid pavement. New houses arose near us, yellow and green and pink ramblers. Trucks hauled rolls of sod that men spooled out to make lawns. Skinny saplings were planted and watered with a hose. The mail van came by around noon.
One day I heard my parents arguing in the kitchen about a trip to New York City. Uncle Lew’s neighbor Mrs. Palmquist asked Dad if he could drive a Pontiac to New York and put it on a ship to Germany for her son-in-law, a captain in the Army, and this struck my dad as an excellent opportunity. My mother didn’t see it that way. She was wary of Mrs. Palmquist for whom Dad did some carpentry and who fixed him lunch and sometimes he quoted her interesting opinions, which made Mother jealous. She felt that the father of six young children should not go gallivanting off alone on a vacation and she was wary of the fact that Dad planned to visit two young women, Nancy and Betty Kirkwood, who had befriended him back in his Army days in New York—young Christian women, yes, indeed, both now married, but nonetheless. Mother was jealous, and she informed Dad that he would be taking me along on the trip on general principle, as a ball and chain. He was not happy about this, but he knew she was right. It was wrong to leave her with the house, garden, children, nobody to help her. She nominated me because I was spending time down by the river with bad companions. I monitored the discussion closely. He argued that the city was dangerous, what with hoodlums like Lucky Luciano and Legs Diamond, shootings, street gangs, people getting shoved off subway platforms into oncoming trains, the danger of contagious disease in crowded places, he mentioned the dread word “polio,” but Mother held firm. No Gary, no trip. And so it was decided. Dad was gracious in defeat. Mother bought me a mustard-colored shirt and matching pants for the occasion.
He and I got in the brand-new Pontiac on an August morning and headed east through Wisconsin on two-lane roads, I sat with the map on my lap, holding my hand out the window like an airplane wing to feel the lift of the air, and I read from the Federal Guide book I got from the library.
7m SE of Pepin is the village of Lund, site of the log cabin built by Charles Ingalls in the early 1870s, which became the setting of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. The cabin still stands as part of a granary.
Four-lane roads looped around Chicago and we made it to Sandusky, Ohio, the first night and Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the second, spent a morning examining the log huts in Washington’s winter encampment, then plunged into the city through the Lincoln Tunnel. On the trip out, I was surprised at how Dad, so reserved at home, liked to chat up waitresses. How’re you doing today? Good. That apple pie sure looks good. You wouldn’t happen to have some cheese with that, would you? Apple pie without the cheese is like a hug without the squeeze. And the old waitress in the hairnet chippered up at his greeting. I was even more surprised by his excitement at seeing New York again and how he became almost effusive with Nancy and Betty and their husbands. He was a new man in New York. His Brethrenly solemnity disappeared, and he became a man about town, eager to mingle in the crowds, the traffic, the bright lights, eager to see the sights.
We delivered the Pontiac to a dock in Brooklyn and took a taxi to Manhattan, my first cab ride, and got a room in the Aberdeen Hotel on 32nd and Broadway, where he had been quartered with other Army postal workers during the war. A sergeant had made them march in formation from 32nd to the Post Office. “It was pretty ridiculous,” he said. But his war years had been enjoyable. “People treated us like heroes,” he said. “Free tickets to things, free meals.” Free tickets to what? “Shows,” he said. My Brethren dad had attended Broadway shows, women with bare legs dancing, high kicks, jazzy tunes. This was a revelation. Now he seemed to be in no rush to get home. We went to Radio City Music Hall and saw the Rockettes dance and jugglers and a trained dog act followed by a movie. (“This is a secret between you and me,” he said.) We rode the Cyclone at Coney Island and ate chili dogs, rode the Staten Island Ferry and the subway, packed with people, many of them speaking foreign languages. We took an elevator to the 86th-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building, where Dad pushed me into a little recording booth and told me to say something to my mother. The door closed. He put quarters in a slot. People stood staring at me, waiting. A red light flashed on, and because I could think of nothing else, I sang a verse of “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” and recited John 3:16. He showed me the magnificent Post Office with columns and the inscription (“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night . . .”) where he’d spent the war sorting mail for the Army, and I loved the words (“. . . stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”), but what was so surprising to me was the thought that the war had been very pleasant for him, entertaining even. It was not what I’d been taught in school, that soldiers made heroic sacrifices. My dad had enjoyed a wonderful time, admired for his uniform, free tickets to shows. I was stunned.
Four days in New York, threading our way through oncoming crowds, Dad holding my hand. I thought, He does not want to lose me. Because he loves me. This had not been so clear to me before. It was very companionable. I still think of this sometimes in New York, that this is where once I felt close to my dad.
We stayed our last night with Don and Betty in their Brooklyn apartment, one bedroom, a kitchen alcove, a small living room with a round claw-foot dining table. We sat down for supper, and Don asked me to say grace, and I looked pleadingly at Dad who explained that I was shy and he prayed instead. Dad and Betty reminisced about the fun of the war years, shows they’d seen, parties, and Don was quiet. It was a hot night in Brooklyn—and hours later, when they went to bed, Dad lay on the couch and I lay awake on the floor. I could hear Betty and Don laughing in their bedroom ten feet away, and then it sounded like she was crying and he was grunting from physical exertion. Dad said, “Let’s go for a walk,” and we got dressed and walked to a candy store and bought cream sodas. They were very cold. The man behind the counter was a hunchback with orange hair; he chomped on a cigar and wore a yellow silk vest. Dad and I perched on the curb at the corner and drank the sodas. Across the street, in a park, families sleeping on sheets and blankets spread out on the grass, hundreds of people, little kids nestled against their mothers, and on the benches around the perimeter men sat smoking and talking in the dark. An encampment on a hot night in Brooklyn.
We walked back to Don and Betty’s and Dad spread sofa cushions on the fire escape and we lay down, five stories in the air, headlights passing below, th
e elevated train rumbling a block away. I could see the escape was designed with the last segment of stairs suspended twenty feet above the sidewalk, too high for an intruder to jump up and reach, suspended so that someone descending would lower the stairs simply by walking down them. Your weight would carry you gently to the sidewalk. Dad fell asleep and I lay awake, listening to him snore. I got up from the cushions and I dared myself to go down the stairs, though I knew it was a bad idea. I went down a flight, and two, and a man walking below looked up and said something I didn’t understand. He seemed to be inviting me to come down, but I didn’t understand the words. I considered descending—it was exciting to contemplate—what would happen? Where would we go?—But I climbed back up and lay down, curled against Dad, who did, after all, love me, and then I woke up and it was morning.
We rode the Greyhound back home in time for Brethren Bible conference at Lake Minnetonka, and my aunts asked me about New York and I told them about some things, but not the Rockettes or the fire escape. At the end, after the Sunday night gospel meeting, the Saints stood and sang their hymn to the Rapture:
Then we shall be where we would be,
Then we shall be what we should be.
Things that are not now nor could be,
Soon shall be our own.
They were deeply moved by the imminence of the Second Coming, so many signs and portents all around. And I realized I did not wish for the Rapture. I wanted to grow up, get a driver’s license, a job, a girlfriend, and go back to New York and find the happy life Dad found there in wartime, which didn’t exist in Minnesota. Late that night, I walked out of the house and crossed the road to Fred Peterson’s cornfield to be alone with my thoughts. I had worked for Mr. Peterson, hoeing his corn, tedious work, and I dared myself to take my clothes off. A crazy thing to do, but I stripped naked and ran up and down the rows for the pleasure of leaves brushing against my body. It was sinful and I did it anyway. I could imagine Mother suddenly appearing and asking, “Why are you doing this?” Probably the answer is: Certifiable Insanity. Normal people do not do this. Nevertheless, it felt good. I ran a hundred yards to the end of the row and turned and ran back and did it again. A few porch lights in nearby houses, the stars overhead, the corn all around, and I was naked, and it felt good.
That summer, I was picking tomatoes with my older sister and I threw a couple of them at a pile of rocks by the incinerator to hear them splat and she reproached me for wasting good food and said, “I’m going to tell,” so I found a rotten tomato lying on the ground, mushy, filled with white organisms swimming around, and I picked it up, all smelly and liquidy, and there she was bending over and working, my industrious sister, her womanly hindquarters in the air, and before I could stop myself, the tomato was flying through the air and as it splatted on the seat of her pants I was dashing for the house, my sister in pursuit, and I slowed down to duck under the clotheslines and she leaped on me like a jaguar on an eland. I crashed to the ground and she was about to pound me and Mother called her name from the kitchen window and the good sister hissed at me, “You’ll be sorry for this someday,” and retracted her claws. Mother asked me why I would throw a tomato at my sister, and I said, “I didn’t mean to. It slipped out of my hand.”
Mother shook her head but said no more. She was busy. She had a little girl and two five-year-olds to look after. I was a free man. On my own, I had quit Boy Scouts, seeing no reason to learn semaphore code with wig-wagging flags or recognize weasel tracks from raccoon. And the Boy Scout Jamboree at the Minneapolis Auditorium was ridiculous. A couple hundred of us Scouts lined up naked in the basement to be sprayed with brown paint to make us Indians and red and white stripes painted on our faces and chests, all under the supervision of men in uniforms, some of whom later scrubbed us off in the showers. I found this very weird. I didn’t ask Mother’s permission to quit Scouts, I just stopped going. A great revelation: do as you wish and be prepared to make up a story. Nobody cared. It was a laissez-faire world: the word “parenting” did not exist then. Anyway, they were busy. I was free. I went to the library and because my mother had said disparaging things about Hemingway, I pulled him down off the shelf and had a look.
When I babysat at the neighbors’ on Saturday nights, I sent the kids to bed and scrounged around in ashtrays for cigarettes and lit one and took a couple puffs. Watching a movie on TV of high-society people twirling on the dance floor and drinking cocktails, a cigarette felt very stylish between my index and second finger, and the plume of exhaled smoke was dramatic in the mirror, I felt like a famous author.
Our family went to the State Fair every August, took a picnic, ate it on the grass by the Conservation building, but that year Mother was too busy, so Dad took Philip and Judy and me and gave us $3 apiece and set us loose at the foot of the Grandstand. I was eleven, I’d never wandered free in a big crowd before but I felt no fear. The Star & Tribune booth was nearby and Cedric Adams was chatting with a crowd of fans so I joined the crowd looking at the great man, balding, suit and tie, horn-rimmed glasses, his famous voice. He was rich, he chummed with Bob Hope and Arthur Godfrey, he had a big powerboat on Lake Minnetonka. He was smoking a cigarette and asking people about their hometowns, and I thought if he asked me, I’d step up and say that Anoka was the Halloween Capital of the World and that my family had been there since 1880, but he didn’t notice me. I wandered the Midway, watched the barker at the freak show tent bring out his wares, the Penguin Boy, the sword swallower all skinny and leathery, the lady snake handler with a boa constrictor wrapped around her, the Tall Man who looked rather sad, and Popeye who could pop his eyeballs out of their sockets, first one, then the other. I watched the couples holding hands, boarding the Ferris wheel. I looked at the big tent of the Harlem Revue with canvas posters of colored girls in their underwear and I knew that a Christian boy should not want to go in there, but I stood behind the tent hoping that a flap would open and someone of interest emerge. The stock cars roared around on the dirt track, clouds of dust, the low moan of the crowd when a car skidded into the retaining wall. I bought a hamburger, gazed at fish in tanks and giant swine. I found my way back to the parking lot beyond the enormous Lee coveralls hanging from a high wire and stood by our car, waiting, until the others returned. Dad said, “Are you okay?” as if I might not be, but I was. I liked being on my own, without family, nobody guiding, no cautionary advice. An interesting discovery at the age of eleven.
Sixth grade was an idyllic year. Due to booming population growth, our class—Corinne, Billy, Elaine, Dianne, Judy, Rosemary, and all— rode the bus to Sunnyvale, a little one-room country school with a pond nearby and a hill around it. We left the Darwins behind; they simply disappeared from my life forever, a remarkable development, on a par with the polio vaccine, which came along the year after. We sat in ancient desks, and I learned that I was the only one who’d been to New York City. Not even our teacher Mr. Lewis had been. Corinne had been to Washington, DC, but I had New York all to myself. It was a big leap in status. I wrote a report about it and read it aloud to the class, about riding a train underground, a train crowded with many Negroes, Chinese, people speaking strange languages. The Empire State Building. Swimming in the Atlantic Ocean at Jones Beach. Sitting in the studio audience at Rockefeller Center for the NBC quiz show Beat the Clock with Bud Collyer. It was the first time I had amazing firsthand experience to offer to an audience.
There was some skepticism among the boys. Weren’t you afraid in New York? No, I was not. Yes, you were. I was not. Ha. Ha, yourself. It was a good year. That winter, we laced on our skates at recess and skated round and round the pond or we slid down the hill on cardboard and Mr. Lewis allowed recess to go on for an hour. Christmas decorations went up. We exchanged valentines. Without Darwins, there was no fighting. It was a perfect world and gym class included two weeks of dance instruction, and Mother sent a note to school: “Please excuse Gary from dancing for religious reasons.” Which I sent to a wastebasket. Would God, with all the cosm
os to worry about, really feel offended if I danced the polka? I learned to polka, dancing with the marvelous Karen Brown, and also the schottische and the Virginia reel. We laughed, we held hands, I put an arm around her waist and she put hers around mine.
I was the only Brethren in my class and I never told a soul. On a questionnaire, where it said “Religion,” I wrote Protestant. My tormentor who saw my green teeth asked what church I belonged to, and I hesitated and he said, “You belong to a weird one. I know about you.” I didn’t want to be weird. From the road, our Cape Cod house looked normal, the lawn mowed, the driveway paved with asphalt, the garbage can and incinerator in back where they should be. But there was our Ford Fairlane with the sticker on the rear bumper: FOR ALL HAVE SINNED AND COME SHORT OF THE GLORY OF GOD. People who saw it thought, “Stay away from those people, they’re odd.” In all the years I lived at home, I never invited a friend into the house for fear Mother would ask them if they had accepted Jesus as their personal savior. I didn’t want to be odd. I was curious about normality. I wanted a TV like other people did because at school, kids tossed out lines from favorite shows—“One of these days, Alice, pow, right in the kisser!”—and everyone laughed but me. Jack Benny and George and Gracie and Bob Hope were on TV, comics that Mother liked on radio, but out of respect for Grandpa Denham who felt that television was pernicious, we abstained even though he was dead. I sat in Sunday night gospel meeting, looking out the window at the family next door watching Ed Sullivan on TV as we listened to Brother John Rogers preach that the Last Days were at hand when Christ would come to take us home to heaven. Meanwhile, on TV, a man and a woman were singing about their love for each other. Brethren never spoke of romantic love, not in my hearing. I looked forward to romance. Our songs were about the necessity of suffering, being persecuted by the worldly, and looking forward to our reward in heaven. I wanted to enjoy life in the world with the least amount of suffering: I wanted to live a life of comedy.
That Time of Year Page 9