His father soundlessly formed a word with his lips and then repeated it with a distant creak of breath so that Teddy heard the word “Wonderful.” Then his father said something else, which after a second of trying to understand Teddy made out to be Italian words, “La bella professoressa.”
There were languages in that long sallow head—mazes of books, of dead men’s words and the mazy tracks they had left in the dust. Teddy had often stood in his father’s book-lined study, feeling dwarfed and oppressed. When they had tried to sell the books to raise money, nobody wanted them, not even the Princeton Seminary. His father’s long pale head, its fine hair fanning from the semi-transparent top of his pink skull onto the bleached pillowcase, lay there like a giant egg—the egg, it occurred to Teddy, from which he had somehow hatched. He tried to put the weird thought behind him—people coming out of one another like segments of a telescope. His father and he were two entirely different people bound together only by a name and an unspeakable mutual pity. Since the man couldn’t talk beyond a whisper or two, and the boy couldn’t think of enough to say, Teddy began to read him the Paterson Evening News, which would be sitting on the porch when he came home from school in his knickers and billed cap and high-top button shoes he had walked so much in that the damp and cold came through their thin soles. He would get himself a glass of milk and an oatmeal cookie if there were any in the bread tin and read his father the headlines and more of the article if he indicated it roused his interest. The local news, the obituaries and murders and threatened strikes and marriages, interested him less than the international developments in the wake of the Great War—monarchies overthrown, millions starving, red revolutions in Russia and Berlin and Hungary, New Jersey’s own President Wilson like a grim worn ghost of high ideals trundling his message of peace and forgiveness back and forth to Europe and being hailed as a hero to his face and behind his back outsmarted by foreigners like Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Roosevelt, Teddy’s namesake, died, and then Wilson broke down on a tour across the United States begging the Senate to approve of the League of Nations. Lenin formed the Third Communist International; Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks formed United Artists, their own film company. Father was especially interested in this item and made Teddy read every word, and also an item about a horse called Sir Barton that for the first time ever won something called the Triple Crown, and another on the sports page about Jack Dempsey beating Jess Willard, who had taken the title from a black man called Jack Johnson four years earlier. Father whispered close to Teddy’s ear, “Never should have had it. Big bum. They hounded Johnson till he took a dive in disgust.” Steelworkers in Indiana and coal miners in Pennsylvania went out on strike and rich men called Frick and Carnegie died, but Father was most interested in an item saying that astronomers had observed light bend around the sun during a solar eclipse, confirming some German’s theory of relativity. “Relativity,” Father pronounced for Teddy, when he tangled his tongue over the word. “The universe is getting stranger. I was told it would.” And then it was a new decade, and drinking was illegal all across the nation, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer accused the IWW of causing the railroad strike as part of an international conspiracy and vowed war upon “the moral perverts and hysterical neurasthenic women who abound in communism.” His father faintly rasped, “Had the Wobblies prevailed in Paterson, we’d have a different country.” Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were married in a Hollywood dream come true, and Europe twisted and turned with coups and riots and little wars, and the Democrats at their convention put up James Cox and another Roosevelt, and Bill Tilden became the first American man to win at Wimbledon, and the amendment entitling American women to vote was ratified, but with no women present at the ceremony. And Father, Clarence Arthur Wilmot, slipped away one night, one of the first cool nights at the beginning of September, just died without a sound so they found his body like a beautiful perishable statue in the morning, all of a stiff pale piece—his spirit had slipped through their fingers, his and Mother’s and Esther’s, as if to spare them any further trouble. Yet there also was in his silence a rebuke, blaming them for having been unable to reverse the trend that had carried him off like an unmoored boat on an outgoing tide.
Of the confused, brief period that followed, Teddy remembered mostly Esther, as if Mother, being the widow, encased in a black that included glittering square black stones that had appeared on her wrists like manacles, was too hot with life’s dangerous essence, its hidden lava of disaster, to look at. Now twenty-five, Esther had been working for five years in the offices of Weidmann Silk Dyeing Company, ever since the upsurge in wartime orders had revitalized the company. A little strike by the dyers’ helpers in 1919, for a raise and an eight-hour day, had been easily defeated. Esther wore her skirts ten inches off the ground, according to the latest Paris fashions. She was like Father in her tall thin physique and she smoked cigarettes, but not in the house, where Mother could smell them. Esther knew that Teddy smoked, too, on the way back from school, and didn’t tell. He and she seemed guilty spies crossing the enemy lines into the real, bustling, indifferent world and sneaking back into the terrible defeated hush of the house after Father’s death: his room and bed, day after day, unchanging, unslept-in, though sometimes in the middle of the night Teddy awoke as if Father’s cough had punctured his sleep—a dry, dragging cough that used to start timidly and become louder and more frantic, as if he were trying to dig out something jagged and tenacious stuck between his vocal cords. But the house was silent. Paterson at night was silent, but for a lone car purring past and the tiniest trickle of music from a gramophone in the neighborhood and, if Teddy listened hard enough, the faraway roar of the Falls merged with the muffled clatter of the mills weaving breadths of silk all through the night shift. These sounds had formed the undercurrent of his life, in this city crowded in a loop of the river at the foot of Garrett Mountain, and now there was talk of leaving. Modest as it was, the house was too much for them to carry, on the slim pickings of her cleaning and sewing, Mother said, and Jared’s charity, and Esther’s slender salary—for who was to say how much longer Esther would be with them? The thought of Esther marrying put a gleam of sad merriment into her berry-black widow’s eyes, even though Esther waved the thought away with a brusque disgust that was more and more her mannerism. “As long as dear Clarence was here,” Mother went on, in that sugary voice that had something pathetic about it now, an outmoded appeal to gallantries being swept away by the world’s quickening, nervous pace, “we had to hang on, so as not to disturb him, but now it’s not fair to Jared, to ask so much to make our ends meet. He’s a young man on the rise in New York City, and he needs nice things to wear. He mustn’t keep living in that boarding house, with its dubious characters. He needs his own apartment, with a doorman, and to belong to a club, to associate with the calibre of people he must deal with.” As to exactly what that calibre was, or what Jared’s enterprises were beyond collecting other people’s rent, she was purposefully vague. She didn’t want to know. Unlike Teddy, Jared had reached that age when young men could have their secrets. “I’ve been getting the nicest letters from your Aunt Esther, down there in Basingstoke.” Basingstoke was the small town in Delaware, a few miles north of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, where Father’s sister and her chirpy, rosy-faced husband, Horace Truitt, lived in a big house right in the middle of town, with a long backyard that when the Wilmots visited in the summer had seemed to Teddy sleepy and sinister, full of droopy-limbed hemlocks and tall flowers like chains of soft bells strung together. Horace, who had been a chemist for the Du Pont Company and who had retired early on the strength of the shares he had been privileged to buy before they soared during the war, took care of the gardens; his especial pride was what he called a gazebo, wooden and eight-sided and freshly painted white and reached by a path winding through flower beds, even though just over the fence there was a busy street of less ample and picturesque homes called Lo
cust Street, and in another block the downtown, which had shaped itself to the river. On its trips there in summer, the family would drive in Uncle Horace’s Hupmobile through miles of marshes to get to the beach, a strip of sand bent around a rocky point where the Delaware became wider than a normal river but still narrow enough so that you could see individual trees in the forested shore of New Jersey on the other side. Teddy was always excited when he got there, by the smallness of everything in Delaware and the hovering salt tang of sea air, promising something to happen that couldn’t happen at home; by the third day he became bored and cranky, seeing that it wasn’t going to happen, and missing his own room, with his stamps and baseball cards and model airplanes and view of the neighborhood’s windows; sometimes he saw Deborah Levi in her slip, but she always moved out of sight before coming back dressed in her nightie. “Well, she solemnly maintains that, ever since Horace”—Mother hesitated; Uncle Horace had run away, a few years ago, with another Basingstoke woman—“did his unforgivable deed, she’s rattling around in that place and would like nothing better than if we would come stay with her for a time, until we can find a place of our own. Everything costs less down there, and it would be so healthy for little Teddy to get away from the mills and the rough element they attract.”
“I don’t want to go way down there into the middle of nowhere,” he complained to his sister one night when he had still been awake, working in his room on a balsa-wood model of a Sopwith Camel—the struts and wires between the two wings were the fussiest part, and the machine guns that fired out right through the spinning propeller. Esther had come in from a night out with a man she knew from the Weidmann office, a sales representative who went to cities all over the Eastern U.S. Teddy came down to the kitchen, where he heard her getting a glass of lemonade from the icebox. She looked a little mussed and exasperated, there in the stark light of the kitchen, in a shimmering green dress that set off the gleams in her strawberry-blond hair, done up in a thick roll all around like Mother’s dark hair, though she talked of having her hair cut short—“bobbed.” Her dress had a tasselled belt low on her hips but slipped on over her head, he knew from having watched her when her door was ajar one time. It was a November night and she had worn a beaver-trimmed raglan coat she tossed with an impatient grimace onto a kitchen chair. Teddy could see in the hard light that she wasn’t exactly beautiful—too wiry, and too flat in front and behind, and her lips too thin and clever and impatient—but with her white skin and quick decisive gestures she was alive in a competent, hard, unapologetic way that dazzled him. He and his parents had this in common: they were all soft. The world pushed them around. “Why the dickens not?” she asked. “What’s in Paterson for you?”
“My friends.”
“Some friends. You never bring them back to the house.”
“There’s nothin’ to do here.”
She laughed, her quick laugh, surprisingly deep, a kind of bark. “As much as in most other houses, I expect. If there’s so much nothin’ to do here, what’ve you got to lose going down to Basingstoke? You need a change. We all do. Paterson has nothing left for the Wilmots. Basingstoke’s a lazy little town that’ll give us a chance to get our bearings.”
“Us? You coming with us?”
At his sudden intensity, her painted lips stretched in a thin smile, and she asked, “You want me to?” She moved closer to the kitchen door and opened it, so the smoke from the cigarette she lit would drift out through the screen door.
“Well, sure,” he said. “I don’t want to be stuck with two old ladies down there.”
“You’ll make friends.”
“They’re all rubes—don’t pull my leg.”
“Tedsy hon, I got a good job here. I got my gentlemen friends.”
“Yeah, I guess you do. Any you’re real sweet on? How do you like the guy you were with tonight? I saw him when you were heading out. He was too slick by half, if you ask me.”
“Slick is good, in his line of work. He could charm the skirt off a dressing table, like they say.” She held out her pack of cigarettes—Lucky Strikes, in that green bull’s-eye pack, and shook it. “Want one?”
As with Jared sometimes, he was being led out into deep grown-up waters. He took the Lucky, though, and lit up, and crowded closer to the screen door, so Mother didn’t get a whiff and come down. Maybe she wouldn’t come down. Maybe she cared less than he thought. Dad used to smoke not just his pipe in his study but sometimes a Sweet Caporal—“for medicinal purposes,” he once told Teddy with a wink. The inhaling felt like poking something rough down his throat. His head went light, as when he used to swing too high on the swings at the Sandy Hill Park playground.
Esther was saying, “Too slick, it could be. He makes a girl feel like she’s being sold a bill of goods. On the one hand you want to buy it, and on the other you don’t, you know?”
It wasn’t really a question; she was talking half to herself. Teddy nodded anyway, as if he did know. He smelled the perfume she had put on to go out and a little sweat, he supposed from dancing, and the smoke she exhaled, which was mixed with a sickly semi-rotten scent that he associated with empty squarish bottles you found on the cinder paths along the river, among the tall weeds. Hooch. Spirits. Illegal but that didn’t stop people. Esther lately wore a kind of squint, from typing all the time or smoking so much or just because she couldn’t look at the world wide-eyed any more. Father’s quitting his job had hit her just at the point when she might have gone to normal school and become a teacher. “Men,” she said, squinting over his head. “They’re all duds, in a way. I guess they can’t help it. But, Lordy, they’re a boring lot. It’s all ‘I did this, I’ll do that, me, me, me.’ Don’t grow up to be a man, Tedsy; you’ll be as boring as the rest.”
“Where did he take you tonight? To a speakeasy?”
“What do you know about speakeasies, big boy?”
“There’re a lot of them now, all up in Riverside, tucked away in basements and so on. A couple of the Italian kids at school, they have brothers and fathers in the bootlegging business.”
“They shouldn’t make laws people have to break,” Esther said. She reminded him of Dad, saying that. They both knew things without even trying hard, and it made them vulnerable, like animals with feelers that stick way out.
He pleaded, “Won’t you be coming if we have to move? Please. Just for a year or two. You don’t want to stay here getting dragged to smelly speakeasies.”
“Don’t I?” she asked, squinting and exhaling upward, so her face was half-hidden, and cruel with that carelessness grownups have. They don’t care about you as much as it seems when you’re a baby; they care first of all about themselves, just like the baby does. Teddy felt his own face cloud, tears welling up somehow out of the giddy strangeness of smoking a sinful cigarette here in his own house, and being awake and talking at this late hour, and his sister acting so tough, like a tramp. The model of the Sopwith Camel he had left in his room with its cozy fumes of fresh glue was a piece of the innocence they were making him lose. She asked him teasingly, “What’s down there for me in Basingstoke?”
“Maybe you’d meet a nice man. A man who wouldn’t be so slick.”
“That’s pretty slick of you to say, little brother. You want to link me up with some crab fisherman or nice old tanner.” The town had an old tannery in its center, on the little river that managed a six-foot waterfall before it meandered out through the marshes to the sea. “Now that we’ve got the vote, you know, and collitch eddycations, we girls are supposed to have more on our minds than just catching some critter who wears a pair of pants.” When Esther dragged on her cigarette, her thin lips became even thinner—narrow sharp lines of incongruous red. She was talking to him now as if he was one of her man friends, clowning in that angular way she had, and that reminded him a little bit of Father, before he got so sad and when he was still jaunty. When Teddy thought of his father—visualized him in even the most glancing way—he ached inside, with a sluggish r
ubbing that tasted of shame. Esther was studying his attempt to hide his tears and said, “Seventeen, huh? And you still need to have your big sister hold your hand?”
It all had to do with what she had said earlier: growing up to be a man. He was soft now, he hadn’t grown his shell, and if he was left alone in a strange town with his mother and Aunt Esther he wouldn’t, or it would grow warped, in a way he couldn’t picture but could feel. He knew from school that he was cautious and underdeveloped: all around him in the halls and on the asphalt were the click and flash of real knives, real loves, boys and girls who really did it, kids equipped to play the real game, this game of manhood and womanhood and grabbing your piece of the world. He wasn’t equipped, he was still curled inward, collecting innocent things—stamps from foreign countries that gave pieces of paper the power to fly around the globe. The few friends he had at school would give him or sell him for a penny the stamps from their relatives in Europe, even Turkey and Syria, and new countries like Czechoslovakia and Lebanon. The passion of those tiny stamps in the intensity of their colors and engraving and words of unknown languages fascinated him, drew him in, to a safe small cave. Such papery fascinations had descended to him from Father. To become a man, whatever that was, he needed a little more time, a little more space, and his wised-up strawberry-blonde sister’s being with them in Aunt Esther’s spooky house down there in nowheresville would give it to him. Then she could come back to Paterson and catch a man who was slick but not too, a nice man in sales or management. He had never asked anything from a woman except his mother but now he was; he had matured more than he knew, for like those flashy swarthy boys at school who asked dirty things of their girls he was discovering that females like to say yes, and the more of a risk to themselves the yes involves the mysteriously greater is their wish to oblige. Esther stubbed out her Lucky Strike on the sole of her high-heeled slipper of green leather and cupped her hand waiting for him to stub out his so she could toss the two butts out the screen door over the fence of the Levis’ yard. Teddy could tell from the watchful gleam in Esther’s squint that he had amused her. “I’ll think about it. We’ll see what Mom has in mind. My job at Weidmann isn’t so great I have to cling to it like it was life or death. As to the guys around here—who wants to spend their whole life in Paterson? All the men talk and think about is when the next strike is coming and if the next turn of fashion from over in Paris will hurt silk sales and whether or not they should move the whole works over to the coal regions where the dopes are too scared to strike. Phooey to ’em, Tedsy. You’re my best buddy.”