Cambridge

  Annemarie gave us presents. For my mother, a cake plate from Ginori shaped like a tray and made of heavy, creamy porcelain painted with fabulous—as in nonexistent—birds and insects. For my father, a silver-and-boar-tusk shoehorn as long as his forearm. For me, a tiny blue enameled box in the potbellied form of a pirate’s chest, “for your treasures, Child,” she said.

  “Come back, come back,” said the farmer and his wife and Annemarie and Alessandro and Fulvio, all standing by the gate waving the Italian good-bye that beckons toward you instead of pushing you away. “Come back, come back.”

  We never did.

  Returned

  Back in Cambridge with an English accent and still wearing my leather-tied Italian sandals, I was an exotic third grader for a warm week in September until I was displaced by a late arrival, a girl just home from India, where her father had been years in the diplomatic corps. She wore silver ankle bracelets that jingled when she walked. The teacher asked her to bring Indian things—saris and brass pots and incense sticks—to class and tell us all about her faraway knowledge. I was irritated at first; I too had faraway knowledge, like how to kiss statues and redecorate crumbling villas and use a chamberpot. But I didn’t want to share my secrets, so I was happy enough to keep a low profile.

  I was no longer going to the public school across the street with its cold brick halls and the asphalt playground I’d flown over from England to visit at night. My parents had put me into the most progressive of the progressive schools in town, on a hill beyond the big intersection on the way to Watertown. One-story gray bungalows, tidy lawns and little winding paths, low-growing threadleaf maples and ornamental plum trees were supposed to make it child-size and comforting. But I could see right away that it was bogus. Woodworking and bookbinding and maypole dances concealed, not very well, the usual Cambridge atmosphere of competition and compulsive ranking of everything and everyone. In England the pressure had been to conform. Here the pressure was to excel.

  I missed my old brick school, where, with no effort, I’d been at the top of the class. But that was over. My long, agonizing apprenticeship in failure had begun.

  Either my failures in England didn’t count or I’d been then (only a year before) innocent enough to feel that my failures were successes, proofs of being special. Now there was no way around it. I wasn’t special, I was just lame and slow, unable to get into the spirit, unwilling to apply myself to whatever it was. Unable as well to stick up for myself, the way I’d done in England when I’d told Miss Gravel that cavemen were boring and I was going to read instead.

  I hid out in my surroundings, which didn’t have any expectations or demands of me. In winter I watched the constellations creaking around in the cold Cambridge sky. In spring I made grass villages in the backyard for the ants to crawl through and poked at beetles with sticks. At school I sat on the banks of the pond and hoped for frogs. There were still enough fireflies back then to catch a bottle full on a summer night. Mostly, though, I rode my bike.

  On my bike I perfected my love for Cambridge. This house here with a hydrangea vine clambering all over the front porch, and that one next to it where the stone wall had fragmented from years of freeze-and-thaw, and the little red one with the back garden, and that one I couldn’t really see because of the high privet in front. And the street that made me cry: Gray Gardens East. Gray Gardens West, on the opposite side of Garden Street, didn’t have the same effect. East was quiet, motionless, as if it were a photograph and not reality; West had bustle. I saved my ride down Gray Gardens East for the end of my circuit, so I could anticipate the overflow of feeling it was going to provoke and thereby intensify it.

  I’d turn on to Gray Gardens East and my throat would thicken. The stillness, the dry leaves rattling in an otherwise-undetectable breeze, the small, shuttered houses quietly waiting for nightfall and their owners’ return, the yellow lights and muffled voices that, on those brave autumn evenings when I dared to ride at early dark, I could see and hear faintly through curtains and walls—from all this I constructed a monument to an imagined, safe little life I’d never had and was never going to have. I’d stand there straddling my bike and mourning the loss of a completely invented past.

  Part of what was sweet about the experience I concocted on Gray Gardens East was the feeling of being left out. It satisfied me to feel alien and neglected, and to play those feelings against a backdrop of charming little houses with combed, tended gardens. Not-having was a more powerful emotion than wanting or having. I didn’t want to live in any of those houses. They were all made of brick instead of being proper wooden New England houses. They were small and they were too close together, and their tidy gardens were too pinched for willow trees and grass tracts for ant villages. They had mean, mingy windows with fake leading and they had fake hobnailed doors. They were pretending to be English houses.

  And I was pretending to be an orphan looking wistfully in at a coziness I couldn’t be part of. The fakery of Gray Gardens East encouraged me in my self-deception.

  My bike was a black English three-speed, a Raleigh. It had a curved wicker basket set between the handlebars and a clasp like a huge paper clip over the back wheel, into whose maw I could jam something unbreakable, a jacket or a book. The gears made a lovely soft click when I shifted them, as I had to do to get up the hill between our house and the Bigelows’.

  Roger Bigelow was the only familiar item at school and probably the reason my parents had decided to send me there. He was short, wiry, pale-eyed, and pale-haired, and he smelled of the glue for model airplanes, in which he was saturated from his hours bent over kits in the basement. We were exact contemporaries—our birthdays were a week apart—and I couldn’t remember back to a time when I didn’t know him. He was a kind of brother, who lived up the hill. He had always been there, bullying me into model-airplane afternoons that made me stiff with boredom and letting me bully him into trying out one of my many inventions (like walking around in galoshes filled with cold water, a cumbersome but effective midsummer air-conditioning technique) or playing my favorite game, detective.

  The Bigelows’ house was jammed with furniture, which was in turn covered with rugs and blankets and piles of all sorts of things: books, mostly, but also half-finished crossword puzzles and Monopoly pieces and Ping-Pong balls and parts of model airplanes. The mantelpiece was crowded with statuettes and whorly shells and fragments of rusted ironwork. Stacks of magazines camped out along the staircase. A large fringed Oriental carpet draped over the piano made an under-the-piano world where two children could easily fit even though they had to share it with a slide projector, ten boxes of slides, several other Oriental carpets rolled up, and a few folded folding chairs. That house was the perfect place to look for something.

  The flaw with the detective game was that I didn’t always know what we were looking for. Roger objected to this.

  “How can we play it?” he’d say.

  “That’s part of it,” I’d tell him. “We’ll know it when we find it.”

  It was an excuse for rummaging through the treasure heap of the Bigelows’ life and stuff. Roger wasn’t interested, because for him these things were just the substance of the everyday, but it was the opposite of what I was used to and therefore enchanting.

  Our house was spare and bright and tidy. Piles were forbidden. My father hated what he termed “mess” (which included any evidence that two kids lived there), and my mother, who was an indifferent housekeeper, a literal sweeper-under-the-rug, didn’t want her modern aesthetic cluttered with just the sorts of things that occupied every flat surface in the Bigelows’ house.

  Murano glass ashtrays, for instance. In the living room alone there were at least six of them. A couple of dark-blue ones, one big and one very small, not even large enough for two cigarettes, and a red one of the sort that looked like sliced-open melons or lemons, thick outer skins that revealed an entirely different inner texture and color. Then one I particularly loved, whose inside was ora
nge and whose outside was green and where the two colors met there were gold-green nipples (it was hard to think of anything else they were like) popping out all around. It looked like a starfish. I wanted to smoke so as to be able to use it.

  It wasn’t only the objects, though they were fascinating; it was the idea of the mess, the confusion, the makings of a personality being on display that thrilled me. It was not okay for me to leave my schoolbooks on the kitchen table, but it was fine for Roger to leave the instructions for his new chemistry set on the black leather ottoman in front of his father’s favorite chair. I wanted to understand why this was so. I was looking for that, I suppose.

  Much of why had to do with Roger’s father, Abbott Archibald Bigelow number two, named for his grandfather, who had been a notable Luminist painter. Number one’s self-portrait, which hung above the piano, could have been of Roger’s father if he’d had a goatee and high-collared shirt. He had a walrusy mustache instead, and a polka-dot bow tie that was always askew.

  He was called A.A. and I loved him as I never loved either of my parents, because, of course, he wasn’t my parent, but also because he was the strangest, best person I knew. Certainly, at the age of eight I’d never encountered anyone the least bit like him. I didn’t know then that I never would. I remember in my twenties overhearing my mother say, Oh, A.A. is the most extraordinary person I know. This surprised me, since I’d thought he was my discovery and since what I loved him for when I was so young were mostly things I didn’t think would matter to my mother.

  One wonderful thing about him was that though he was quite tall, an inch or two above six feet, he was bendable and foldy and could in a second telescope himself into a size compatible with an eight-year-old’s. Another was that he didn’t change his tone or his bearing when he got down to child level. His voice was a low, soft rumble, chatty and relaxed, and his speech was punctuated with lots of mmms and hmms, a comforting bass line of encouragement.

  Roger, frustrated with something in the new chemistry set or a different kind of airplane, would say, “Papa, I can’t do it.”

  “Hmm,” A.A. would say. “Let’s see. Okay, I think I understand. It’s like this. Yes. That way. Okay. Mmm.”

  He also said Mmm and Hmm when we did dumb or even quite bad things, like empty out all the cabinets under the kitchen counter so as to use them as hiding places. This got him in trouble—as if he were a child too—with his wife, Ingrid.

  “But why didn’t you stop them?” she said. “Why?”

  “Mmm,” said A.A. “They were having fun.”

  “But it’s a mess.”

  “Well, nothing broke.”

  Roger must have inherited his love of puttering from his father, because A.A. was always coming up with a new craft for us to try. One year it was enameling. He bought a small kiln and a kit with glass sticks in dozens of colors and stacks of metal bowls and beakers for us to enamel. We—I, really, since Roger always preferred airplanes—spent hours in the basement enameling things. The Bigelow ashtray collection increased threefold, and my mother had to devote a shelf in the broom closet to hiding the enameled objects I brought home every week. Then it was mosaics. A.A. worked on his masterpiece, a mosaic coffee-table top, while I grouted larger-size, more manageable tiles into trays and trivets.

  We did decoupage and collage too, and then A.A. got excited by furniture-making. Table-making, mostly. He especially loved casters and put them on all the tables he made, which were low and square and had cubbies for storage. He’d paint them black, add casters, and sometimes tile the tops. He made a table for the television and a table for the record player and many tables to hold all the equipment that was necessary for enameling, decoupage, collage, tiling, and furniture-making in the basement.

  My idea of heaven was to sit in the basement on a winter afternoon, warmed by the big black tanks of the furnace and the water heater churning beside us, with the air tinged by one of A.A.’s many cigarettes and the nip of Roger’s glue. Sometimes Ingrid was running the washing machine, which added a cozy, moist vibration that stirred up all the inherent basement smells of chill and heat and dust and leftover paint and enamel. A.A. often tuned the radio to the broadcast of the previous night’s opera at the Metropolitan in New York, so we tiled to Tosca and Don Giovanni.

  Toward the middle of January, when the ice was firm, A.A. would take us skating on Spy Pond in Arlington. His skating outfit was a full-length black wool coat with a fur collar, an Astrakhan hat, and black leather gloves. Roger and I were in our red (mine) and orange (his) ski parkas and the detestable snow pants that all children in the Northeast wore until suddenly, in about 1960, they vanished. They were puffy without being warm, they were always dark blue, a color I hated, and they severely impeded movement, which wasn’t good for skating. The padding was good for falling on, though, as we often did because of the clumsiness enforced by the pants. If we went early enough in the season we’d skate on virgin ice, sometimes powdered with a skim of snow so fine and dry that just the breeze of skating toward it would blow it out of the way. Whirls of snow made a kind of paisley pattern around the edges of the pond, where the rushes and catkins had frozen into strange sidelong postures.

  Like a black swan, A.A. circled us on the ice, hovering over our many tumbles. Even his skates were black—old cracked leather lace-ups inherited from his father, Eustace, along with the coat and the hat. His father had been a doctor, as was A.A. In fact, with the exception of the Luminist anomaly, it was a medical family for generations. Eustace had been a general practitioner in Kansas City. Kansas City, Kansas, or Kansas City, Missouri? I loved the idea that a city could be in both places at once. (It was Missouri.) Even better was that Eustace had died from psittacosis, which he’d caught from either a patient or a parrot, depending on who was telling the story.

  A.A. said he’d caught it from a patient.

  Ingrid said, “He caught it from a parrot.”

  I pictured Eustace in the long black coat with green feathers peeping out, coughing and coughing until he dropped over dead.

  “You can’t catch it from a patient,” Ingrid said.

  She was a doctor too, so it was hard to know which version was true. Ingrid and A.A. were both doctors, but in almost every other way they were different. Ingrid was small and nervous. She was always saying, No, no, no. A.A. was from the center of America, from an old-time Tom Sawyer–ish place with big trees and a big river. Ingrid was from Sweden. Actually, Ingrid was Viennese. Well, not exactly; it was complicated.

  Ingrid’s family was even more medical than A.A.’s. Her father and her three brothers were all doctors. The family started out in Vienna and then things went badly after the First World War so they moved to Sweden, where Ingrid was born. Technically, she was Swedish. This turned out to be important. Maybe immigration quotas for Swedes were more generous than those for Austrians or maybe all the Austrians scrambling to escape history filled their quotas in a flash—whichever it was, Ingrid got into America because she was the only one in the family with a Swedish passport.

  I loved it when she would tell the story.

  She was nineteen. First she flew to London, where she was going to get another plane to Finland. Maybe the plane was going to Saint Petersburg? Was it called Petrograd then? Leningrad? How little I can remember it, this story that when I was eight and nine and ten seemed like a fairy tale because of all the mishaps and the happy ending. At any rate, in London she boarded the second plane, which seemed very full. There wasn’t enough room for everyone to sit down. The steward stood near the cockpit and said: Is there anyone here who is not going to Berlin? This plane is going to Berlin and there are too many people on it.

  “That was lucky!” Ingrid would say at this juncture in the story. “Suppose the plane hadn’t been full. I would have gone to Berlin by mistake. That wouldn’t have been any good.”

  Ingrid did not go into detail about just how not good it would have been for an Austrian-Swedish Jew to arrive in Berlin at that
moment.

  So she got off the plane and got onto the right plane and went to Finland or Russia or the Soviet Union and then she got onto the Trans-Siberian Railroad and went to Japan.

  “And tell about the railroad,” I’d say.

  “The train had bunks,” Ingrid would continue, “but it had three bunks, not just two. I was on the top, top bunk. All there was to eat was potatoes and sour cream. We were on the train for ages.”

  “How long, Ingrid?” I’d ask.

  “At least a week. I think it was maybe for ten days. We had to keep stopping because of all the trains filled with soldiers heading to war, and we’d have to wait and not be in their way. Anyhow, everyone had diarrhea from eating sour cream three times a day. And I had to jump down from that top, top bunk with diarrhea all the time.”

  “But you got there, to Japan, right?”

  “Oh, yes, eventually we got there. Then we got on a boat that was going to San Francisco. We had to go that way because of the German submarines in the Atlantic. It wasn’t safe. That was why we were going on the Pacific. And then, two days out from Yokohama, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.”

  “And then?”

  “So then we didn’t know if we would be allowed to land in America. Because it was an enemy ship now. So we waited, and waited, because maybe we were going to go back to Japan. But they worked something out, and we went to San Francisco.

  “And that’s how I came to America,” she would say. She always concluded the story with those words.

  One reason I loved this story was that I was crazy for sour cream, and eating it all the time sounded great. Also, it vouched for the story’s authenticity. I knew that sour cream was Russia. My Russian grandmother gave it to me every morning, a bowl of blueberries suffocating in sour cream, in those summers when I’d been sent away from polio to spend two months with her in Atlantic City. Post-Salk, I no longer went there.