I hurried home to tell my mother. When Donald came home he said he had seen the ship too. He had still been in school for some special exam and had looked out the window and seen her. Everyone taking the test and the teacher, too, had run to the windows. “We should get a model of the Hindenburg,” he said. “We should save up and get it.”
And then in the evening she crashed. We did not hear the radio broadcast describing this, it was the hour for The Answer Man and I Love a Mystery. But then a news bulletin came on. At the mooring tower in Lakehurst, New Jersey, she had caught fire. She collapsed, the steel twisting and curling up like paper. I could not imagine something the size of a flying ocean liner going up that way. Many people had died. They fell out of the sky in flames. I didn’t understand how it could happen. “You see,” Donald said patiently, “airships are really lighter-than-air ships. They couldn’t fly unless the gas inside the balloon weighed less than air. You see that, don’t you?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“The gas they use is hydrogen, because its density is so much less than the density of air. On the other hand, it’s a very volatile gas, which means it ignites easily. That’s what happened. Maybe someone lit a cigarette. I don’t know, it might even have been static electricity.” I was impressed with his explanation. So was my mother. She beamed at him. He was taking chemistry at Townsend Harris. He had a chemistry set in a wooden box—not a toy but a real set, with vials of powdered chemicals stoppered with corks and their scientific names on the labels, and beakers and test tubes, and rubber hoses and clamps and measuring spoons, and a little scale with two dishes.
I did not think of the dead people, I thought only of the fall of the Hindenburg. My mother had said she was a German ship, sent over by Hitler for his own glory, and that if those people had to die she hoped they were Nazis. But none of that mattered to me. All I could think of was that the ship had fallen out of the sky. They were not supposed ever to touch land, they were tethered to tall towers, they were sky creatures; and this one had fallen in flames to the ground. I could not get the picture of that out of my mind. In the Saturday cartoons, one, about Popeye, showed Popeye’s ship sinking. He swam away and the ship stuck its nose up in the air and went straight down, like a knife, making a funny glub glub sound and sending up a stream of bubbles. But a real ship going down, I knew, was a terrible sight, like a great animal fallen; she would lie on her side, or maybe turn upside down, and go under by degrees, faster and faster, creating a terrible whirlpool in the sea as she went. My father had told me he had once seen newsreels of an ocean liner foundered on a beach in Jersey. She lay in flames on her side. Even on water ships could burn. Everything around me was going up and down, up and down. Joe Louis hit Jim Braddock and Braddock went down. I had seen paintings in books of knights fallen from their horses, or horses fallen, and in King Kong there was the terrible shaking of the earth by the falling of the great dinosaurs in battle. And, of course, Kong himself had fallen. Just recently I had seen an old man in the street suddenly drop to his knees for no reason at all, and then topple to one side and sit on the sidewalk leaning back on one elbow, and I had found that terrifying. In bed, trying to sleep, I imagined my father stumbling and crashing to the ground, and I cried out.
EIGHTEEN
Of course I fell all the time, but that was different. I lived in proximity to the pavement, in front of my house I knew the topography of the stoop and the cement sidewalk, and the cracks in the sidewalk and the chips in the grey blocks of the curb. I had a best friend now, Bertram, who lived a block away on Morris Avenue and took clarinet lessons. He was short, and tubby. I directed our games. Pretend I’m this. Pretend you’re that. Pretend I say this and you do that. The latest serial in the movies was Zorro, a kind of Lone Ranger in black with a black horse, and in our games I was Zorro and Bertram was everyone else in the cast. I was more agile than he, and therefore the hero. We had laths we had found in the ash can which we used for swords. Bertram, in our duels, represented many soldiers or a whole posse, and I’d no sooner stab one of them and see him fall, than another would pop up and challenge me. I leaped up on the stoop, I raced past him down the brick stoop and jumped to the ground. I fell and dueled with Bertram while on my back. He danced around me. Our game was a long-running serial and took us down the alley and into the backyard. Here, as Zorro, I now had the daring to climb the stone wall patched with cement that divided my yard from the back of the apartment house on the other side of it. The wall held up a rotting wooden fence that tilted over it and impeded passage. The cement was cracked and crumbling. Colonies of brown ants lived in the holes. My friend couldn’t quite handle this wall. I raced along my dangerous parapet and he ran alongside, below me, in the yard. Loyally, he huffed and puffed. He could never win these adventures because I was always Zorro. He died and died again. He might, during our dueling, touch me with the end of his sword and say he’d gotten me, but I always insisted it was a flesh wound even if his sword hit me square in the middle of the chest. He’d try to argue but I’d draw him back into the duel, lifting my sword, nicking him and dancing backward with a merry laugh. He’d start to chase me and we’d be back in it. Truly we were not playing. It was understood life was cheap. People fought. Blood flowed. Honor and justice were at stake. We went on with it hour after hour. The invention was endless. I told him what to say, then I answered. We replayed the scenes when I thought of something better. The dirt and grit of crushed stone was embedded in the flesh of our palms. Our eyes glistened from exertion, our cheeks were red. Once or twice a day Bertram cried real tears and I was close to them. When we reached some grim exhausted end to all this, with someone’s mother calling, dusk sending a chill down our sweated backs, we emptied our pockets of the things we had collected in the course of the day’s adventures—clothesline, flinty chips of rock, empty cigarette packages, ice cream sticks—and went each to our home.
After the last day of school Bertram and I had all day to fight it out. But then his mother took him away for the summer to a cottage in the Catskills. Donald left for his job at the Paramount Hotel. My father was away at work most days and nights, and so my mother and I were each other’s companion a good deal of the time. Once, I reflected, our house had been full and something was always going on. Now there were just the two of us and it was not much fun.
My mother sat at the window of the sun parlor and looked out. I understood it was not something she preferred to do. It was what she did. She sat there, with her arms on the windowsill. Sometimes she drank a cup of coffee, sometimes a cup of tea. She was not so strict with me. I could stay out after supper. The exact hour of my bedtime was not now of the utmost importance to her, perhaps because I didn’t have school in the morning and could sleep late, perhaps because she had other things on her mind. I took advantage of the situation readily enough. I listened to programs that would have been unthinkable during the school term: Gang Busters, the crime-story show written by Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, which came on at ten o’clock; The Kraft Music Hall with Bing Crosby and Bob Burns, and even Jimmy Fidler’s Hollywood Gossip at ten-thirty. Adding these to my regular shows, which I had won from hard and protracted negotiations—Easy Aces, and the Chase and Sanborn Hour with Charlie McCarthy, and The Royal Gelatin Hour with Rudy Vallee, and the Green Hornet, of course, and Jack Benny, and Eddie Cantor, Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, Horace Heidt and his Musical Knights, plus all my afternoon adventure shows—I pretty much had free rein with the airways. Listening to a full day’s radio programs exhausted me, but it was a nervous sort of exhaustion, lacking real physical discharge, and my limbs hurt and my mind clamored. Bed at night was a stale place, the pillow grew clammy despite my plumping it and turning it so that I could feel its cold side. I reheard bits and pieces of the radio programs in my mind. I concentrated on the serials. I analyzed how they achieved the realistic sounds of horse hooves at a gallop, airplanes in dogfights, chairs breaking over people’s heads, creaking ropes at quayside in mysterio
us Oriental ports, and so forth. Mostly I imagined the geography I had been taught, the backgrounds of these programs being barely indicated by a descriptive line, or a remark in the story or a trace of a sound effect, but which shone in my mind in colorful detail. There was a West, there was a vast deep sky to fly, there was the Orient, there was Europe, and dangerous seas between. Occasionally I realized that the pillow under my head was one of the very malefactors who populated these exotic realms; somehow he had gotten to the Bronx. I wrestled him, punched him, grunting and grinding my teeth in appropriate fashion; sometimes it looked as if he had me, but with my last bit of strength I flung him from me up into the air, and took him out with one beautiful sock as he came down.
Oddly, on those rare evenings when my father was home some discipline was reinforced. He felt most of the shows I liked were trash. “You’d be better off reading a book,” he said, although he knew I read books all the time. He himself listened to the news commentators, like H.V. Kaltenborn, although I couldn’t see why he did, they irritated him so. He turned them off in anger when he could no longer stand what was being said, but he always tuned in again the next time.
The only program the whole family could agree on was Information Please, the quiz show in which the questions were really hard and the board of experts who answered them were really learned. The joy of the show was in hearing questions asked the answer to which no one could possibly know, and then hearing one or another of those fellows answer in a shot, and make it all sound simple. Each of them had fields of expertise the others did not, and altogether it was pretty hard to trip them up. If you did, if the question that you sent in did stump the experts, you were awarded a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. We all sat and listened to this program. Sometimes, if the subject was music or politics or history, my father guessed the answer before the experts did.
I loved it when the three of us all did something together. If my mother and father were fighting, our going out and doing something was the way they called a truce. Everyone could be angry and not talking, and I would nag each of them in turn until I got them up and out, my father going along with what he pretended was my mother’s idea, and my mother pretending it was my father’s. But it was mine. I’d get them to the movies this way. Going to an air-cooled movie on a hot evening was a necessity. It didn’t even matter to me what the films were, my mother seemed to like love stories and musicals, my father dramas. I would sit through Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy singing to each other just to be cool and just to know that in the dark on either side of me sat my parents and that they might actually talk to each other afterwards on the way home. Most times they did, but sometimes even the evening out wouldn’t do any good; I would have heard my mother laughing during the movie, but when we came out she still wouldn’t talk to my father. Sometimes my father fell asleep during the movie, sometimes when he was restless he went out for a while. He knew how to leave the movie house and go have a soda or smoke a cigar and then get back into the theater without paying another admission. I myself would never try that.
His business was not good and this seemed to make him quieter and more serious. He did not bring home surprises as often.
My one reliable friend this summer was the little girl Meg, whose family, like ours, had no vacation planned. I played potsy with her in the Oval if I had previously checked to see no boys I knew were in sight. This was a girl’s game of hopping around in numbered boxes and it was quite easy. You threw your skate key or something into a particular box you had to reach, and if it stayed in, you hopped and jumped your way over to it, picked it up while standing on one foot, reversed your direction without touching a line, and hopped your way back. Certain boxes had to be avoided if the other person had previously claimed them. Sometimes it got complicated. My mother thought Meg a sweet child, that’s what she called her, a sweet child, although she was critical of her name.
“What kind of name is that,” she said.
“It’s short for Margaret,” I said. “But everyone calls her Meg.”
“Well, that’s no name for a girl, that’s a scullery maid’s name. I fault the mother.”
She did not look approvingly on Meg’s mother. I couldn’t understand why. The woman had always been nice to me, she was a pretty woman, slender, with short reddish-blond hair and a nice smile. She seemed always to be listening to a pleasant song inside her head. Her name was Norma. I knew this because this is how Meg addressed her, it was very unusual not calling your mother Mother, but Norma did not seem to mind. She had a good way of making a cold chocolate drink, she took a spoonful or two of cocoa, and added milk and sugar; then she crushed some ice cubes in a dish cloth with a hammer; then she poured the ice cubes into an Orphan Annie Ovaltine Shake-up Mug, which was a cup with a domed lid; and she shook it up till it was cold and served it with the crushed ice. “I’d make a good bartender,” she said. She did nice things like that.
They were not particularly well off, this family. They lived in a tenement house without an elevator, on the fifth floor, a long walk up. The stairs were dark, the hallways were tiled in little six-sided tiles, like a bathroom. Their apartment was small, but very light, since it overlooked Claremont Park at Monroe Avenue. In the basement of the building was a little grocery store with a window that looked up at the front sidewalk. In that store you saw people’s legs as they went by, as if they were chopped off in the middle. I sometimes went there for my mother.
Meg did not have her own room. There was only one bedroom, so she either slept in her mother’s bed or in the living room on the sofa. Things were broken down in the living room, the sofa’s springs were coming out the bottom, and a standing lamp with one of those upside-down glass shades to direct the light to the ceiling had a piece of the shade missing as if chomped out by something that ate glass. It was not a clean house by my mother’s standards. The bedroom was overpacked with things, bureaus piled with folded clothes and perfume bottles, boxes stacked in the corners, newspapers and junk everywhere. It was just those two rooms and a kitchen. On the kitchen ceiling was a wooden rack with clothesline strung up on it; you let it down like a shade by means of a rope attached to the wall, and you dried your clothes that way. So pink silk underwear always hung from the kitchen ceiling. There were roaches in the bathroom, and a red rubber hot-water bottle and a trailing enema tube hung from the shower rod over the bathtub. There was a bathroom tray for a cat, although Meg told me their cat had fallen out the window and died. I remember this apartment so clearly because I spent so much time there, especially on rainy days. It was interesting to me that from the mess of this house both Meg and her mother could come out looking so clean and nicely dressed, as they always did. Meg’s white summer one-strap shoes were always newly polished. She had very many of the latest toys and games. Of course, they would be of more interest to girls; she had several dolls, for example, including a Shirley Temple model complete with different outfits to dress her in. These were contained in a miniature trunk, just like the trunks people took with them on ocean voyages. Inside, on hangers, were a Shirley Temple nursing uniform with a red-and-blue cape of satin, a horseback-riding outfit with riding boots, coats, sundresses, shorts, and so on. Meg loved Shirley Temple. I myself could not abide her, but said nothing. I had seen Shirley Temple in just one movie—I knew that kind of spoiled girl. Buttery, overly cute, a teacher’s pet, a real showoff. Meg herself was not like that or I wouldn’t have been her friend. She was a serious, thoughtful child, very quiet and trusting. She never got mad and never left the game no matter how badly it was going for her. We were playing in the park one day and it began to rain. I went to her house and called my mother to let her know where I was. “You’re up there?” my mother said. “You come right home.” “But it’s raining,” I said. “It’s letting up,” she said. “This minute!”
When I got home I was angry. My mother said I was not to go into that house ever again and I said I would if I wanted to. She called me a foolish child. “But wh
at’s wrong?” I said over and over. “I will not discuss it,” she said. I had to reason this out for myself. I knew she liked Meg and never put up an objection when she came to our house. So it had to do with her house. Or her mother. In the mysterious way of our family conversation, whenever something was not quite right I was left in the dark about it, although smartly feeling its consequences. When my mother was angry at my father, I could never exactly pin down her reasons. It was like that. I would learn more by listening to them argue at night when I was supposed to be asleep. Now I eavesdropped on a phone conversation my mother had that evening with her friend Mae. Our phone was in the front of the house, and I was in the kitchen having supper. I heard just one phrase: ten cents a dance. I don’t know how, but I knew my mother was talking about Norma. I didn’t know what she meant, exactly, but it was such a weighted comment, delivered in her tone of moral authority, part disgust, part sarcasm, that I immediately decided it was unjust. I resolved to continue to go to Meg’s house. I was not willing in this case to accept the humiliation of being told what to do. My mother had a way of telling you what to do that left you with no honor. Once I showed her an advertisement on the back cover of a comic book, it was for an air rifle that shot BB’s. I wanted it and proposed to save up for it. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Stop bothering me with such nonsense.”