In my white shirt and tie and my short pants held up by attached suspenders, I stood by my mother’s side leaning my elbows on the table and indolently eating a cookie. She combed her fingers through my blond hair and I shook my head as a horse shakes his mane.
“Give him to me if you don’t want him,” Mae said, who was an unmarried woman. She winked at me. Unlike my round-armed mother, Mae was skinny. She wore thick eyeglasses that made her eyes small. And she smoked cigarettes, which my mother did not do. With her elbow crooked, Mae held the cigarette between her index and middle fingers and she pointed it at the ceiling.
“Oh, we like him now all right, I suppose,” my mother said. She pulled me up on her lap. “Now that he’s here, we’ll keep him.”
More than once my mother had told me that I was a mistake. What this meant I both knew and did not know, in that way children have for getting just enough of the sense of something not to want to pursue it in detail. The idea that I was not expected or striven for did not injure me, however. I felt assured of my mother’s love, as troublesome as I may have found it.
“He’s always been difficult,” she said proudly. “Full of surprises, from the day he was born. A breech birth no less.”
“An acrobat,” Mae said.
“I’ll say. Except the acrobat didn’t walk till eighteen months. And you remember the trouble I had weaning him?”
“Maybe now that he’s a big four-year-old fella he’ll take it easy on you,” Mae said, smiling at me through the smoke.
At that moment the doorbell rang, and in anticipation of my first guest I wriggled out of my mother’s arms, slid my arched spine over her knees, and landed on the floor under the table, and crouched there. “Aren’t you going to answer the door?” my mother asked. But I had no intention of doing that; I only wanted to hide.
The day was momentous, but parties were mixed blessings. You got presents, all right—pick-up sticks, or crayons, or flat boxes of modeling clay in many colored strips—but they were the lesser presents of party admissions. And we all had to sit at the table with ridiculous pointed paper hats, and paper plates and noisemakers and popping balloons and pretend to a joyful delirium. In fact, a birthday party was a satire on children directed by their mothers, who hovered about, distributing Dixie Cups and glasses of milk while cooing in appreciation for the aesthetics of the event, the way each child was dressed for it and so on; and who set us upon one another in games of the most acute competition, so that we either cried in humiliation or punched each other to inflict pain.
And it was all done up in the impermanent materials of crepe paper, thin rubber and tin, everything painted in the gaudy colors of lies.
And the climax of the chaos, blowing out the candles on the cake, presented likely possibility of public failure and a loss of luck in the event the thing was not done well. In fact, I had a secret dread of not being able to blow out the candles before they burned down to the icing. That meant death. Candles burning down to the end, as in my grandmother’s tumblers of candles, which could not be tampered with once lit, memorialized someone’s death. And the Friday-night Sabbath candles that she lit with her hands covering her eyes, and a shawl over her head, suggested to me her irremediable grief, a pantomime of the loss of sight that comes to the dead under the earth.
So I blew for my life, to have some tallow left for the following year. My small chest heaved and I was glad for my mother’s head beside mine, adding to the gust, even though it would mean I had not done the job the way one was supposed to, with aplomb.
Grandma lived in the room next to mine. She was a desiccated, asthmatic little woman who wore high-laced shoes and all manner of long old-fashioned dresses, and shawls, usually black. She lived a very private life, which made me wary of her. She stayed in her room for hours on end, and often came out in such a thoughtful, brooding state as not to notice what was going on around her.
She was very slender and tiny with delicate features. But her face was all wrinkled and her complexion was sallow. She wore her long wavy grey hair neatly braided and coiled when she was feeling well, and uncombed and flying when she was unwell. Like my mother, she had the palest blue eyes. But they looked at me, these eyes, either with great smiling love and animation, or with no recognition in them at all. I never knew on any given day whether Grandma would know and love me, or stare at me as if she had never seen me before.
Had I known precisely what her trouble was, it might have helped to remove some of the terror of her in my mind. My mother only told me what a sad hard life she had had. She had lost two children many years ago. And the year before I was born, her husband, who would have been my grandfather, had died. In this view Grandma’s behavior was appropriate. But then why did she insist that my mother taste everything she put before her on the table? Grandma would not eat anything if my mother did not taste it first. She believed my mother, her own daughter, was trying to poison her. She sat with her hands in her lap and stared at her food. So now, whether Grandma was feeling that way or not, my mother tasted everything conspicuously before she served it. And she did that with everyone, even me. She sipped from my glass of milk and set it down before me, a practice I came to regard as normal.
Sometimes, when everything was all right, Grandma helped my mother with the cooking. In fact, she was a good cook, and knew things my mother didn’t know. “Oh Mama,” my mother said, “why don’t you make your wonderful cabbage soup.” I could tell my mother loved Grandma—she lost her self-assurance when Grandma was not well. She worried about the old woman terribly. She could not get her to go to a doctor. My father was kind to Grandma, but was not around her enough to worry about her. Donald, I suspected, was as shy of her as I was, though he tried not to show it. He sometimes gave Grandma his arm so that she could descend the front steps more easily when, the weather being mild, she was persuaded to get some air. Grandma negotiated steps the baby way, bringing both feet together on each level.
She spoke mostly in the other language, the one I didn’t understand. When she felt all right she blessed me and kissed me on the forehead and produced pennies from her change purse and pressed them into my hand. “For a good boy,” she said. “So he should buy something.” She pulled me to her, and with my face lodged in her skeletal shoulder she muttered an instruction to God as to the good health He must always assure me. Since these love words were in the other language, as her curses were on her bad days, they made me similarly uneasy.
I knew the name of the other language: Jewish. It was for old people.
Grandma’s room I regarded as a dark den of primitive rites and practices. On Friday evenings whoever was home gathered at her door while she lit her Sabbath candles. She had two wobbly old brass candlesticks that she kept well polished. She had brought them many years ago from the old country, which I later found out was Russia. She covered her head with a shawl, and with my mother standing beside her to keep the house from burning down, Grandma lit the white candles and waved her hands over the flames and then covered her eyes with her wrinkled hands and prayed. The sight of my own grandma performing what was, after all, only a ritual blessing seemed to me something else—her enacted submission to the errant and malign forces of life. That an adult secretly gave way to this sentiment I found truly frightening. It confirmed my suspicion that what grown-ups told me in my life of instruction was not the whole truth.
Grandma kept her room clean and tidy. She had a very impressive cedar hope chest covered with a lace shawl, and on her dresser a silver hairbrush, and comb. There was a plain slat-back rocking chair under a standing lamp so she could read her prayer book, or Siddur. And on an end table beside the chair was a flat tin box packed with a medicinal leaf that was shredded like tobacco. This was the centerpiece of her most consistent and mysterious ritual. She removed the lid from this blue tin box and turned it on its back and used it to burn a pinch of the leaf. She applied a match and blew on the leaf as my brother blew on punk, to get it started. It made tiny sputte
ring pops and hisses as it burned. She turned her chair toward it and sat inhaling the thin wisps of smoke—it was a treatment for her asthma. I knew it helped her breathing, and that it was scientific, having been purchased from Rosoff’s Drugstore on 174th Street. But the smell was pungent, as if from the underworld. I didn’t know, nor did any of my family seem to know, that this medicinal leaf my Grandma burned was marijuana. Even had they known, it would have held no significance, since it was readily and legally available without prescription. But to this day the smoke of grass produces in me memories of the choking harsh bitter rage of an exile from the shtetl, a backfired life full of fume and sparks, like a Fourth of July held in an open grave and projecting on the night a skull’s leer and a clap of crossed bones.
One of my favorite ways to spend Grandma’s pennies came along Eastburn Avenue in the afternoons: Joe the Sweet Potato Man. He pushed a small unmarked cabinet on wheels. Inside the cabinet was a kind of oven of homemade design, the fuel being charcoal. Joe raised the hinged top lid and reached down practically to his armpit to withdraw one of his roasted sweet potatoes. He was an impassive man who wrapped himself in sweaters and coats, obviously scavenged, and a watch cap over which was a peaked khaki hat of rough wool. He wore old Army shoes, cracked and splitting. Over all his clothing he had tied a shoulder-to-ankle waiter’s apron not recently washed. This costume suggested great authority to me. With his large hands, dirt uniformly running under his nails, Joe slapped the potato on the cart, pulled an enormous knife from its wooden sheath and sliced the potato in half lengthwise. He then stuck the tip of the knife into a can and withdrew a slab of butter, which he inserted in a slit made almost simultaneously in the meat of the potato, and, after sheathing the knife, wrapped the purchase like a cornucopia in a torn half sheet of the Bronx Home News so that you could hold the potato and eat it without burning your fingers. For this golden, sweet, steaming hot feast I gave up two pennies. Another, and I could have the potato whole.
Joe went along his impassive way as, with dusk descending on the cold blue-grey sky over the Bronx, I sat on my stoop and ate his remarkable cuisine. It was not only something to eat but something to warm my hands against, as if I had plucked a tiny hearth from an elf’s house.
Sometimes when my mother was going shopping I went along so that I could spend my money at the candy store on the corner of Eastburn and 174th Street. Many different things were to be had for a penny, candies of various kinds, Fleer’s Double Bubble gum, or some shoe leather, which was what we called a pounded sheet of dried apricot, or Indian nuts that fell from the chute of a glass canister after you deposited the coin and twisted the key, or, what I usually went for, a shot-glassful of sunflower seeds poured into my hands by the proprietor.
I put the seeds in my jacket pocket and followed my mother from store to store as I cracked the shells one at a time between my front teeth and withdrew each seed with the tip of my tongue. I did this without missing a thing that was going on around me. In fact, the steady and relentless crunching of Polly seeds brought my gaze to sharp focus. One next to another, stores were built at street level in the sides of apartment houses. The street was astir with cars, trucks and horse-drawn wagons. It interested me that horses could, without any reduction in speed, raise their tails and leave a trail of golden dung.
The old Italian who repaired shoes managed to conduct his business without speaking English. His shop was a dark little basement store throbbing with the running motors and looped and slapping belts of leather trimmers and buffing wheels. Each wheel was stained with shoe polish of a different color. My mother held out a pair of my father’s shoes. “Heels and tips,” she said, and the old man, barely looking up from a shoe he clutched to his chest while he carved its sole to size, nodded and grunted something in Italian. My mother asked him the cost and when the shoes would be ready. She addressed him in English and he replied in Italian, and the negotiation was completed to everyone’s satisfaction. As we left he grabbed a handful of nails and put them in his mouth: he was about to attach the sole.
A few doors down was the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, where a man in an apron stood behind his wooden counter and ground up coffee to order and collected the items you asked for from the shelves behind him. If what you wanted—a box of junket, for example, or Cream of Wheat—was too high for him to reach, he grabbed it with a long pinching stick whose ends he could contract by squeezing the handle. The box flew through the air and he caught it. Then, with the purchases stacked in front of him, he wrote the cost of each on a brown paper bag with a small pencil he took from behind his ear and totaled the row of sums smartly, and then used the same bag to pack everything. I liked this store because of the coffee smell and the sawdust on the floor. I liked sawdust as long as it was dry.
In Irving’s Fish Store, the sawdust was often wet. Irving’s had a kind of swimming-pool atmosphere about it. The walls were bare of shelves. Everything was white. Two holding tanks of live fish were along the wall where the customer came in. Water ran in them continuously. Irving’s apron tended to be wet and red with fish blood. He was a big jovial man. “Hello, Missus!” he said to my mother as we walked in. He was scaling a big brown fish. Fish scales flew through the air, some sticking to his glasses like snow. “How are you, sonny boy?” he said to me. “I want some salmon, Irving,” my mother said, “but only if it’s not expensive.” Irving came around from behind his counter, took a short-handled net from the wall and ran it around the dark tank, where I could see the shadows of several fish slithering in panic. They looked elusive to me, but in a second or two Irving had raised one twisting and curling in the net and dripping water on the floor. “I saved this beauty for you,” he said to my mother. He slapped the salmon down on the counter and held it pressed against the wood block with one hand while with the other he banged it on the head with a heavy wooden mallet. The fish went still. I admired Irving’s fast hands. My mother turned away, but I watched as he sliced off the salmon’s head with one of his large knives, eviscerated it, washed it under the faucet, and sliced it up in steaks. I recognized the salmon now.
Our last stop was Rosoff’s Drugstore, on the corner of Morris Avenue. Large glass jars of red and blue liquid stood on display in the window; what they were meant to suggest I had no idea, but I liked the way the sunlight went through them and lit the colors. Also on display was a brass mortar and pestle, whose function I understood because my grandmother had one just like it to use in the kitchen to pound nuts and seeds. There were also various mysterious items made of red rubber. Inside the store I breathed an atmosphere of sweet soaps and bitter medicines, rolled bandages and anodynes, sodas, salts and pungent tinctures. Along the walls were glass cabinets that went all the way up to the patterned tin ceiling. Mr. Rosoff reached the upper levels by means of a railed ladder, which he rolled along the wall. He climbed the ladder for the implement of porcelain or the bottle, box, packet or tin the customer called for. He was a tiny sweet-tempered man with a round face and a soft voice. He politely inquired about the health of everyone in the family, particularly my grandmother. He shook his head in sympathy as my mother told him. He wore a starched white short-sleeved tunic buttoned to the neck, like a doctor’s, and could offer such medical services as taking out things that had gotten into your eye—rolling your eyelid back and dabbing off the offending mote with a bit of cotton. He had done that for me.
My mother made a purchase, a box that Mr. Rosoff placed precisely in the middle of a sheet of dark green wrapping paper, which he had torn from a big roll on his counter. His pudgy hands flew about the box like bird wings and in a matter of seconds the green wrapping had been folded over, tucked in at the corners, triangulated at the ends, and tied around with white string from a spool hanging from the ceiling above his head. To break the string he looped it around each hand and gave a smart tug.
When we left I asked my mother what was in the box. She didn’t want to tell me. “It doesn’t concern you,” she said. But I persiste
d. I had no more Polly seeds and no more pennies. “What did you buy,” I said. “Tell me.” She strode along. “Tell me,” I whined.
“Oh stop it, they’re sanitary napkins. Are you satisfied?”
I was not satisfied because I didn’t know what sanitary napkins were, but I knew from her tone that I had used up my allotment of questions and so pursued the matter no further.
SIX
It was early spring when my uncle Billy came to live with us. He was an older brother of my mother’s, a gentle ineffectual man down on his luck. Claremont Park was beginning to turn green. Uncle Billy moved into Donald’s room, and Donald came down the hall to stay in my room, which was actually a bit larger. I was thrilled by this arrangement but Donald was deeply affronted. “It’s only for a little while,” my mother told him. “Till Billy gets back on his feet. He has nowhere else.”
Donald lay on his bed and threw a hardball toward the ceiling and caught the ball in his first baseman’s glove, one-handed. He did this over and over. Sometimes the ball hit the ceiling. A polka-dot pattern of black marks began to appear there. Sometimes the ball missed his glove and thudded on the floor and under the bed. I retrieved it for him.
Uncle Billy was a divorced man, something quite rare at this time, and he had the further distinction of having been a successful bandleader in the nineteen twenties. He was not insensitive to the disruption caused by his joining the household. Before he had finished unpacking his suitcase, he came into our room with a rolled cloth under his arm. His vest was unbuttoned. “You boys ever see this?” He gave the cloth a flap and spread it on the floor. It was a rectangular banner of purple velvet with gold lettering, all in capitals, and a border of gold. On the floor it was like a room rug. Before I could work it out Donald said, “‘BILLY WYNNE AND HIS ORCHESTRA.’”