DONALD
I didn’t actually flunk out of City College, although I was called before the Dean—the late Dean Morton Gottschal. He said I would have to improve my grades or I would be out. But I wasn’t ready for a full-time college career, I knew that. I quit City and enrolled in night school and went to work as a messenger at Warriner during the day. I wouldn’t go back to school full time till after the war, when I racked up straight A’s and got my degree in two and a half years. At Warriner I made twelve dollars a week, not fifteen, as you said, although I could hope to supplement that with what I could clip on the expense account. You’d charge for a bus ride, a nickel, but you walked—that sort of thing. You walked fast. I didn’t feel I was cheating. They paid me nothing. I worked hard, I did what I was supposed to. Maybe they paid so low because they knew all messenger boys padded the expense account. But anyway I worked all day and then went to night school. I was still seventeen and a half. I was a kid. I’d always worked. I started working for Dad when I was thirteen or fourteen. I know I was that young because I couldn’t go to lunch myself, he had to take me. I still wore knickers. Now, maybe eighteen, I was keeping the family going. Dad had lost his store, he was out of work, and my crummy twelve dollars was keeping the household in food. I turned my pay envelope over to Mom every week. I was the breadwinner. I was very disturbed by that. It didn’t last long, a couple of months till Dad got a job as a salesman with Home Appliance Distributors. But it wasn’t good. I was tied down to them, I was doing what he should have been doing. Mother always complained about not being given enough to run the household, although there was never any time when we didn’t have food or clothing or were threatened with eviction. But that was the big problem in the family, never having enough money. We all lived with that idea, it was the thirties, it conditioned everything—teenage kids were expected to help out, there was no question about it. But it was getting to me, I suppose. Harvey Stern, whom I’d known since first grade, had found out about an interesting opportunity. The Signal Corps was accepting applications for a civilian trainee program. They taught you how to be a radio operator, how to transmit and receive in Morse code, work a transmitter, repair radios, all of that; and they paid you besides. When Dad got his job at Home Appliance and began to bring money into the house, the folks didn’t need my salary anymore. The great thing about this job was that it wasn’t even in New York, it was in Philadelphia. Harvey and I went down and took the exam and a few weeks later we were told we had passed, and we were hired. We would live in a dormitory there and study radio and get paid and be on our own. So that was a big break for me. The folks gave me permission, it seemed the wisest course for several reasons. We all knew I would be drafted. When the time came it would be better to enlist. If I had experience in radio, I could hope to get a technical rating in the Signal Corps.
So I was free. I was leaving the house. I would not come back for several years, until after the war. I went down there and started to live for myself. It was a remarkable feeling. In Philadelphia we met some girls and went to bed with them. That was the first time for me. Life was speeding up. Everyone believed war was coming, nobody knew how or why, but everyone felt it. People wanted to live and enjoy themselves while they could. It was a strange feeling living for myself, on my own, with nobody to tell me what to do, and with nobody’s welfare to worry about except my own. I did well in the Signal Corps school, in fact I finished first in my class. I was a very good radio operator. I bought my own bug. That’s what the telegraph key in its modern form was called. It was semiautomatic. You could transmit faster than you could with an old-fashioned key. We each had our bug and developed our sending styles so that they were as recognizable to other operators as our handwriting or our voice. I wanted to go into the Signal Corps when I enlisted and become a radioman on airplanes, I wanted to get an assignment to the Army Air Corps, which is what the Air Force was called then, it wasn’t a separate branch, it was part of the Army. The word “radioman” had glamour attached to it. You were on the leading edge of technology. I thought I was getting out, getting away from that intense family life we lived, I couldn’t have realized it or articulated it but we were all too close and everything was terribly intense. There was no letup. Partly it was everyone’s struggle for survival, partly it was the enormous difference in the personalities of Mom and Dad. Dad went off in all directions, he was full of surprises, some of them were good, some not so good. But it kept everyone on edge, Mother especially. You know, once I was working in the store when it was at the Hippodrome, and, you remember, Dad kept these record catalogues on the counter by the cash register, catalogues, and invoices, all that sort of paperwork. And stuck among these one day I found a photograph of a woman. A very glamorous woman, it showed her head and shoulders, it was a formal portrait theatrically lit. She had long hair flowing over her shoulders, which were bare, she was wearing some sort of costume, I suppose she was some kind of singer, I don’t know why I thought that. But, anyway, in ink at the bottom she had written, To Dave, Always. And it was signed Irene. I didn’t say anything, but I was enraged. I found it unforgivable that he was fooling around. He was the kind of man to fool around, to philander. He was errant. He had a wild streak in him. He was generous to us and we all lived together as a very close knit family relying on one another, and that was all true, but he had his secrets and they came out of the same part of his character that made him dream big impractical dreams that he couldn’t realize. I mean he was a scrapper and he kept us going somehow. But something really broke for me when he accepted my messenger’s salary for Mom’s allowance. Why didn’t he say something about that? Why didn’t he say he’d pay me back? Why didn’t he say he’d keep an accurate record, and account for every dollar and make sure I got it back when he was on his feet again? But he didn’t. And Mom came to depend on me. I mean I think of it now, I started working very young, I always did something, I was always trying to get ahead, get myself a summer vacation by putting together a band with my friends. That wasn’t a bad thing to do, at age sixteen, posing as a nineteen-year-old professional musician. Where did I learn that enterprise? It was part expediency, of course, partly the spirit of the time, but I had some drive to bring to it that was all my own. Dad was a good model in one way—he didn’t like working for anyone else, he liked to be on his own, he had ambition, he was always cooking up deals, even though most of them didn’t come through. But that would have impressed me. He was a good salesman too, and knowledgeable about what he sold. Even though he wasn’t really the hustling salesman type, he had a refinement about him that would not let him hard-sell. But he was never satisfied to be what he had chosen to be. Do you know what I mean? You could not define him by what he did. There was no security in him of definition. You could never imagine his finding one thing to do and making a success of it and not try to do anything else. I don’t think he ever found what it was that would make him say, “This is me, Dave Altschuler, and I am forty-eight years old and I live at such and such address and I do such and such for a living and I am satisfied with my life and my work.” You couldn’t pin him down. And the funny thing is I thought I was getting away from him. And what did I go and do but get into a radio business of another sort, just like my father, riding the airwaves for a living.
TWENTY-FIVE
I still had my Heinz pickle pin from the World’s Fair; lots of people had them, there was a currency in these things and some kids didn’t care for them, they went from hand to hand; and so I now had not only the Heinz pickle but the Planters nut company’s Mr. Peanut, who wore a top hat and monocle, and I had a DC-3 charm from the aviation exhibit. I found out that my friend Meg’s mother had a job at the World’s Fair, although she didn’t say doing what. But as a result Meg made me a present one afternoon of a full-color map of the Fair, and it was the kind of map I liked, with the drawings of the buildings in three dimensions, and in color, as if you were looking down from an airplane, but it was like a cartoon too, with little flag
s and people walking, and the very clear overhead view showed you immediately where the attractions were and named each one right on the roof. Meg had already been to the Fair several times and was able to tell me what was good, I got a hang of the layout this way, and by studying the map carefully—it had an index, which located things for you by means of a simple grid, A to K and 1 to 7—I was able to plan just how I would go about seeing the Fair, where I would start, and the best way to proceed, step by step, until I felt that I knew what to do, I could see everything I wanted to see and not become confused or miss anything. That had been a worry of mine.
It was peculiar living in the house without Donald, it was not the same as his being away for the summer, I felt the distance of our ages keenly, that I was a boy and he was now a grown man. Somehow I had not kept up to my original rate of lagging behind. When he did come home from Philadelphia for a weekend, I found I was shy, I didn’t know what to say. And he was reserved too, he asked me about school as if he didn’t remember what it was like.
He had a snapshot of himself standing in front of a car with his arm around a dark-haired girl in a belted wool coat and they were both smiling at the camera. Behind the car was a red brick building, which was the apartment house where he lived.
And then as time went on Donald came home less and less on the weekends and the house was very still. I couldn’t seem to make the noise to fill it up, even when I asked a friend over. When I came home from school my father would not be there, of course, he worked now for a distributor, selling appliances to stores around Manhattan. As often as not my mother would be out shopping, or doing work for the Sisterhood, and so I would be alone in the house. I would have instructions from my mother to turn on the light under the three-sided iron pot in which she baked potatoes. Or there would be some change for my ice cream. Alone in my house after school, I sometimes became desolate. On one afternoon of rain my mother was late coming back and I began to imagine she had been hit by a car. Maybe she had fallen on the subway track. I cried. I don’t know why her absence affected me so.
When she came home I hugged her, which made her laugh with surprise.
There was some sort of chastened peace between my mother and father having to do with the changed circumstances of our lives. Donald would be called into the Army if war came. That was very much on their minds. And then this new job of my father’s had done something to his spirit. He had not worked for anyone else for many years, he had become used to being his own boss, he did not easily acclimate to his setback. On the occasions when I stayed home from school with one of my colds I saw that he did not leave the house eagerly. He found excuses not to leave, he would clean up the kitchen or offer to do some shopping for my mother before he left for work. He claimed that, as a salesman calling on accounts, he had to give the stores time to open their doors and get going on their day. This reasoning did not persuade her, she felt he was losing out to his competitors. But my father could not be budged, he took a long time over breakfast and then washed all the dishes, and then even on the way to the subway stopped to do errands.
He was not attentive to me, at home he read the newspaper or listened to music. He was thoughtful. He was always a robust man but now seemed to be stolid and portly and losing his joy of things. I would not think of mentioning the World’s Fair to him. Nor to my mother, who was out of sorts most of the time and afflicted with various aches or pains. Her shoulder was giving her trouble, she had some sort of inflammation of the shoulder and sometimes wore her arm in a sling. She rested on the sofa a lot; she could not easily play the piano with her bad shoulder.
And then I was told that we would be moving out of our house. The reasoning was that, with Donald not living at home anymore, the three of us didn’t need such a large place. The landlord was intending to raise the rent when the lease was up, and it just wasn’t worth the money.
My mother had found just the apartment for us and she took me to see it while it was being painted. It was up on the Grand Concourse. She met me after school. North of 174th Street, Eastburn Avenue became a hill. We trudged up Eastburn past apartment houses of the walk-up variety, four or six stories around small courtyards and with dingy front halls. Our new house was at the top of the hill where Eastburn met with the Concourse and also 175th Street—a six-story edifice of ocher brick triangularly shaped to the corner it was on, like the famous Flatiron Building in Manhattan. My father had made this comparison by way of encouragement when he knew I’d be going to have a look.
The apartment was on the second floor, one flight up. You entered a narrow windowless corridor that led into a foyer. The foyer opened in one direction into the living room and in the other to a small kitchen and dinette. A painter was on his ladder in the kitchen. A second painter was doing the bathroom next to the dinette. Then down another narrow hall, exactly at the triangulated end of the building, was the bedroom. There were three big windows, one on each wall. We overlooked the stop where we had always waited for the bus going up the Concourse to my grandma and grandpa’s house.
“You see,” my mother said as I looked out the window, “it’s a wonderful view. When there’s a parade on the Concourse you can stand here and see the whole thing. Everything’s so light and airy. You’re not much farther from school than you were. A nice wide street, with trees, the Grand Concourse. This is the place to be. We’re very lucky.”
But I knew what she felt. It was painful to me that she was making the best of things, finding reason to be thankful about this and that when I could tell she was miserable. We no longer had the means to maintain ourselves as we had. It was a degree of the seriousness of our decline that she would not articulate it. “The only thing is, we’ll be a little bit pressed for closet space,” she said. I liked my mother to be tough and realistic and to call a spade a spade, as she always had. As she went around now, pointing out why this tiny apartment would be such a wonderful place to live, I was truly glum. It felt as if you could barely turn around in it. I had never lived anywhere but in a private house near the park. The Concourse was a wide six-lane thoroughfare with pedestrian islands to help one cross, the outer lanes being for local traffic, the four inner lanes for express traffic. The pedestrian islands were planted with trees. Way over on the far side was an unbroken bank of apartment houses, north and south, as far as the eye could see. I didn’t know anybody who lived in them, or if there were any children.
When the move actually occurred, I was in school. That morning I had gotten up from my own bed in my own room as usual, I had my breakfast in the kitchen, where I’d always had it, the morning sun coming in the windows that looked on the alley, the old wooden table with the oilcloth, and the wooden chairs with the spoked backs, just where they’d always been in the middle of the large kitchen. On one wall the refrigerator with the cylindrical motor on top; on the other, the big enameled cabinet my mother called a “Dutch kitchen” with a slide-out ledge, lots of little closet doors and a flour sifter built in. “Here’s your lunch,” my mother said, handing me a paper bag. “Tuna salad sandwich, which you like, and an apple. Here’s ten cents for your milk. At the end of the day, don’t come back here. Come to the new apartment. Look both ways before crossing.”
I left the house walking over bare floors and through cardboard cartons of packed things. Pulling up to the curb was a moving van.
At the end of the school day, as instructed, I turned right as I came out of the schoolyard, crossed 174th Street, and took the long walk up the Eastburn Avenue hill to the new apartment on the Concourse. It felt strange. I kept turning around to look down the hill, I saw children coming out of school and going my old way home.
The door was open. My steps resounded on the bare floor. I found my mother sitting alone among many of our things, which now looked strange in these new rooms painted cream, the latest color, she had told me. She sat on the sofa and looked exhausted. She gave me a wan smile. She had managed the whole move herself, my father having gone off to work as I had to sc
hool.
In the new kitchen I drank my milk as I always had. The refrigerator was a new model with round corners and the motor hidden in the rear. White metal cabinets hung from the walls over the sink. Everything was very close together. The kitchen floor was little more than a space between the fixtures. It was all neat and compact. The kitchen was divided by partitions that came to my shoulders. The partitions created the dinette. We had a new oval table with a shiny, marbleized top and four matching chairs.
The modernity of everything was what we talked about; that and the reasonable rent and the concessions given by the landlord as a reward for our having moved in.
The new living room was filled to capacity with our upright Sohmer and sofa and chairs and lamps, and console radio and record player and carpet and end tables and knickknacks. Against the wall at right angles to the old sofa with its curved Empire back was a new square two-cushion sofa with high square arms that could be converted into a bed. My parents would sleep here. Gone was the olive bed with the frieze of flowers on the headboard. I would have the triangular bedroom looking out over the bus stop. There were two new single beds here. When Donald came home, he would share the room with me.
Each day when I returned from school I explored more of the neighborhood. The Concourse, I saw, was actually built along a ridge; if there were no buildings, if all the land were returned to early times, the Concourse would be a plateau overlooking valleys to the west—that would be Jerome Avenue—and, less precipitously, those to the east. The light was different on the top of the plateau. A bit colder. There were no green hedges or plots of grass. We were suspended one story above a great impersonal street, with a lot of sky visible, and the constant hum of traffic. Across 175th Street, on our side of the Concourse, was the Pilgrim Church, whose bell rang on Sunday. And directly on the other side of the Concourse and one block down, was the new Junior High School that I would be going to when I finished the sixth grade, at P.S. 70. And so my last connection with Claremont Park and with my old street and schoolyard would be gone.