“I’ll leave it entirely up to you, Bart,” my mother said when he asked if she had any instructions for our tutoring. “I know you’ll do wonders with them.”
A small table was moved into our bedroom, under the window, and three chairs placed around it. Bart sat in the middle so that he could divide his time equally between Edith and me. Big, clean, heavy brown envelopes arrived in the mail from the Calvert School once a week, and when Bart slid their fascinating contents onto the table it was like settling down to begin a game.
Edith was in the fifth grade that year—her part of the table was given over to incomprehensible talk about English and History and Social Studies—and I was in the first. I spent my mornings asking Bart to help me puzzle out the very opening moves of an education.
“Take your time, Billy,” he would say. “Don’t get impatient with this. Once you have it you’ll see how easy it is, and then you’ll be ready for the next thing.”
At eleven each morning we would take a break. We’d go downstairs and out to the part of the courtyard that had a little grass. Bart would carefully lay his folded coat on the sidelines, turn back his shirt cuffs, and present himself as ready to give what he called airplane rides. Taking us one at a time, he would grasp one wrist and one ankle; then he’d whirl us off our feet and around and around, with himself as the pivot, until the courtyard and the buildings and the city and the world were lost in the dizzying blur of our flight.
After the airplane rides we would hurry down the steps into the studio, where we’d usually find that my mother had set out a tray bearing three tall glasses of cold Ovaltine, sometimes with cookies on the side and sometimes not. I once overheard her telling Sloane Cabot she thought the Ovaltine must be Bart’s first nourishment of the day—and I think she was probably right, if only because of the way his hand would tremble in reaching for his glass. Sometimes she’d forget to prepare the tray and we’d crowd into the kitchen and fix it ourselves; I can never see a jar of Ovaltine on a grocery shelf without remembering those times. Then it was back upstairs to school again. And during that year, by coaxing and prodding and telling me not to get impatient, Bart Kampen taught me to read.
It was an excellent opportunity for showing off. I would pull books down from my mother’s shelves—mostly books that were the gifts of Mr. Nicholson—and try to impress her by reading mangled sentences aloud.
“That’s wonderful, dear,” she would say. “You’ve really learned to read, haven’t you.”
Soon a white-and-yellow “More light” stamp was affixed to every page of my Calvert First Grade Reader, proving I had mastered it, and others were accumulating at a slower rate in my arithmetic workbook. Still other stamps were fastened to the wall beside my place at the school table, arranged in a proud little white-and-yellow thumb-smudged column that rose as high as I could reach.
“You shouldn’t have put your stamps on the wall,” Edith said.
“Why?”
“Well, because they’ll be hard to take off.”
“Who’s going to take them off?”
That small room of ours, with its double function of sleep and learning, stands more clearly in my memory than any other part of our home. Someone should probably have told my mother that a girl and boy of our ages ought to have separate rooms, but that never occurred to me until much later. Our cots were set foot-to-foot against the wall, leaving just enough space to pass alongside them to the school table, and we had some good conversations as we lay waiting for sleep at night. The one I remember best was the time Edith told me about the sound of the city.
“I don’t mean just the loud noises,” she said, “like the siren going by just now, or those car doors slamming, or all the laughing and shouting down the street; that’s just close-up stuff. I’m talking about something else. Because you see there are millions and millions of people in New York—more people than you can possibly imagine, ever—and most of them are doing something that makes sound. Maybe talking, or playing the radio, maybe closing doors, maybe putting their forks down on their plates if they’re having dinner, or dropping their shoes if they’re going to bed—and because there are so many of them, all those little sounds add up and come together in a kind of burn. But it’s so faint—so very, very faint—that you can’t hear it unless you listen very carefully for a long time.”
“Can you hear it?” I asked her.
“Sometimes. I listen every night, but I can only hear it sometimes. Other times I fall asleep. Let’s be quiet now, and just listen. See if you can hear it, Billy.”
And I tried hard, closing my eyes as if that would help, opening my mouth to minimize the sound of my breathing, but in the end I had to tell her I’d failed. “How about you?” I asked.
“Oh, I heard it,” she said. “Just for a few seconds, but I heard it. You’ll hear it too, if you keep trying. And it’s worth waiting for. When you hear it, you’re hearing the whole city of New York.”
The high point of our week was Friday afternoon, when John Cabot came home from Hastings. He exuded health and normality; he brought fresh suburban air into our bohemian lives. He even transformed his mother’s small apartment, while he was there, into an enviable place of rest between vigorous encounters with the world. He subscribed to both Boys’ Life and Open Road for Boys, and these seemed to me to be wonderful things to have in your house, if only for the illustrations. John dressed in the same heroic way as the boys shown in those magazines, corduroy knickers with ribbed stockings pulled taut over his muscular calves. He talked a lot about the Hastings high-school football team, for which he planned to try out as soon as he was old enough, and about Hastings friends whose names and personalities grew almost as familiar to us as if they were friends of our own. He taught us invigorating new ways to speak, like saying “What’s the diff?” instead of “What’s the difference?” And he was better even than Edith at finding new things to do in the courtyard.
You could buy goldfish for ten or fifteen cents apiece in Woolworth’s then, and one day we brought home three of them to keep in the fountain. We sprinkled the water with more Woolworth’s granulated fish food than they could possibly need, and we named them after ourselves: “John,” “Edith,” and “Billy.” For a week or two Edith and I would run to the fountain every morning, before Bart came for school, to make sure they were still alive and to see if they had enough food, and to watch them.
“Have you noticed how much bigger Billy’s getting?” Edith asked me. “He’s huge. He’s almost as big as John and Edith now. He’ll probably be bigger than both of them.”
Then one weekend when John was home he called our attention to how quickly the fish could turn and move. “They have better reflexes than humans,” he explained. “When they see a shadow in the water, or anything that looks like danger, they get away faster than you can blink. Watch.” And he sank one hand into the water to make a grab for the fish named Edith, but she evaded him and fled. “See that?” he asked. “How’s that for speed? Know something? I bet you could shoot an arrow in there, and they’d get away in time. Wait.” To prove his point he ran to his mother’s apartment and came back with the handsome bow and arrow he had made at summer camp (going to camp every summer was another admirable thing about John); then he knelt at the rim of the fountain like the picture of an archer, his bow steady in one strong hand and the feathered end of his arrow tight against the bowstring in the other. He was taking aim at the fish named Billy. “Now, the velocity of this arrow,” he said in a voice weakened by his effort, “is probably more than a car going eighty miles an hour. It’s probably more like an airplane, or maybe even more than that. Okay; watch.”
The fish named Billy was suddenly floating dead on the surface, on his side, impaled a quarter of the way up the arrow with parts of his pink guts dribbled along the shaft.
I was too old to cry, but something had to be done about the shock and rage and grief that filled me as I ran from the fountain, heading blindly for home, and halfway there
I came upon my mother. She stood looking very clean, wearing a new coat and dress I’d never seen before and fastened to the arm of Mr. Nicholson. They were either just going out or just coming in—I didn’t care which—and Mr. Nicholson frowned at me (he had told me more than once that boys of my age went to boarding school in England), but I didn’t care about that either. I bent my head into her waist and didn’t stop crying until long after I’d felt her hands stroking my back, until after she had assured me that goldfish didn’t cost much and I’d have another one soon, and that John was sorry for the thoughtless thing he’d done. I had discovered, or rediscoverd, that crying is a pleasure—that it can be a pleasure beyond all reckoning if your head is pressed in your mother’s waist and her hands are on your back, and if she happens to be wearing clean clothes.
There were other pleasures. We had a good Christmas Eve in our house that year, or at least it was good at first. My father was there, which obliged Mr. Nicholson to stay away, and it was nice to see how relaxed he was among my mother’s friends. He was shy, but they seemed to like him. He got along especially well with Bart Kampen.
Howard Whitman’s daughter, Molly, a sweet-natured girl of about my age, had come in from Tarrytown to spend the holidays with him, and there were several other children whom we knew but rarely saw. John looked very mature that night in a dark coat and tie, plainly aware of his social responsibilities as the oldest boy.
After a while, with no plan, the party drifted back into the dining-room area and staged an impromptu vaudeville. Howard started it: he brought the tall stool from my mother’s modeling stand and sat his daughter on it, facing the audience. He folded back the opening of a brown paper bag two or three times and fitted it onto her head; then he took off his suit coat and draped it around her backwards, up to the chin; he went behind her, crouched out of sight, and worked his hands through the coat sleeves so that when they emerged they appeared to be hers. And the sight of a smiling little girl in a paper-bag hat, waving and gesturing with huge, expressive hands, was enough to make everyone laugh. The big hands wiped her eyes and stroked her chin and pushed her hair behind her ears; then they elaborately thumbed her nose at us.
Next came Sloane Cabot. She sat very straight on the stool with her heels hooked over the rungs in such a way as to show her good legs to their best advantage, but her first act didn’t go over.
“Well,” she began, “I was at work today—you know my office is on the fortieth floor—when I happened to glance up from my typewriter and saw this big old man sort of crouched on the ledge outside the window, with a white beard and a funny red suit. So I ran to the window and opened it and said, ‘Are you all right?’ Well, it was Santa Claus, and he said, ‘Of course I’m all right; I’m used to high places. But listen, miss: can you direct me to number seventy-five Bedford Street?’ ”
There was more, but our embarrassed looks must have told her we knew we were being condescended to; as soon as she’d found a way to finish it she did so quickly. Then, after a thoughtful pause, she tried something else that turned out to be much better.
“Have you children ever heard the story of the first Christmas?” she asked. “When Jesus was born?” And she began to tell it in the kind of hushed, dramatic voice she must have hoped might be used by the narrators of her more serious radio plays.
“…And there were still many miles to go before they reached Bethlehem,” she said, “and it was a cold night. Now, Mary knew she would very soon have a baby. She even knew, because an angel had told her, that her baby might one day be the savior of all mankind. But she was only a young girl”—here Sloane’s eyes glistened, as if they might be filling with tears—“and the traveling had exhausted her. She was bruised by the jolting gait of the donkey and she ached all over, and she thought they’d never, ever get there, and all she could say was ‘Oh, Joseph, I’m so tired.’ ”
The story went on through the rejection at the inn, and the birth in the stable, and the manger, and the animals, and the arrival of the three kings; when it was over we clapped a long time because Sloane had told it so well.
“Daddy?” Edith asked. “Will you sing for us?”
“Oh well, thanks, honey,” he said, “but no; I really need a piano for that. Thanks anyway.”
The final performer of the evening was Bart Kampen, persuaded by popular demand to go home and get his violin. There was no surprise in discovering that he played like a professional, like something you might easily hear on the radio; the enjoyment came from watching how his thin face frowned over the chin rest, empty of all emotion except concern that the sound be right. We were proud of him.
Some time after my father left a good many other adults began to arrive, most of them strangers to me, looking as though they’d already been to several other parties that night. It was very late, or rather very early Christmas morning, when I looked into the kitchen and saw Sloane standing close to a bald man I didn’t know. He held a trembling drink in one hand and slowly massaged her shoulder with the other; she seemed to be shrinking back against the old wooden icebox. Sloane had a way of smiling that allowed little wisps of cigarette smoke to escape from between her almost-closed lips while she looked you up and down, and she was doing that. Then the man put his drink on top of the icebox and took her in his arms, and I couldn’t see her face anymore.
Another man, in a rumpled brown suit, lay unconscious on the dining-room floor. I walked around him and went into the studio, where a good-looking young woman stood weeping wretchedly and three men kept getting in each other’s way as they tried to comfort her. Then I saw that one of the men was Bart, and I watched while he outlasted the other two and turned the girl away toward the door. He put his arm around her and she nestled her head in his shoulder; that was how they left the house.
Edith looked jaded in her wrinkled party dress. She was reclining in our old Hastings-on-Hudson easy chair with her head tipped back and her legs flung out over both the chair’s arms, and John sat cross-legged on the floor near one of her dangling feet. They seemed to have been talking about something that didn’t interest either of them much, and the talk petered out altogether when I sat on the floor to join them.
“Billy,” she said, “do you realize what time it is?”
“What’s the diff?” I said.
“You should’ve been in bed hours ago. Come on. Let’s go up.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Well,” she said, “I’m going up, anyway,” and she got laboriously out of the chair and walked away into the crowd.
John turned to me and narrowed his eyes unpleasantly. “Know something?” he said. “When she was in the chair that way I could see everything.”
“Huh?”
“I could see everything. I could see the crack, and the hair. She’s beginning to get hair.”
I had observed these features of my sister many times—in the bathtub, or when she was changing her clothes—and hadn’t found them especially remarkable; even so, I understood at once how remarkable they must have been for him. If only he had smiled in a bashful way we might have laughed together like a couple of regular fellows out of Open Road for Boys, but his face was still set in that disdainful look.
“I kept looking and looking,” he said, “and I had to keep her talking so she wouldn’t catch on, but I was doing fine until you had to come over and ruin it.”
Was I supposed to apologize? That didn’t seem right, but nothing else seemed right either. All I did was look at the floor.
When I finally got to bed there was scarcely time for trying to hear the elusive sound of the city—I had found that a good way to keep from thinking of anything else—when my mother came blundering in. She’d had too much to drink and wanted to lie down, but instead of going to her own room she got into bed with me. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my boy. Oh, my boy.” It was a narrow cot and there was no way to make room for her; then suddenly she retched, bolted to her feet, and ran for the bathroom, where I heard her vomi
ting. And when I moved over into the part of the bed she had occupied my face recoiled quickly, but not quite in time, from the slick mouthful of puke she had left on her side of the pillow.
For a month or so that winter we didn’t see much of Sloane because she said she was “working on something big. Something really big.” When it was finished she brought it to the studio, looking tired but prettier than ever, and shyly asked if she could read it aloud.
“Wonderful,” my mother said. “What’s it about?”
“That’s the best part. It’s about us. All of us. Listen.”
Bart had gone for the day and Edith was out in the courtyard by herself—she often played by herself—so there was nobody for an audience but my mother and me. We sat on the sofa and Sloane arranged herself on the tall stool, just as she’d done for telling the Bethlehem story.