Among my other uncles, one owned a factory that made acoustic materials. This uncle, Maurice, was tall and sardonic and had a waxed moustache. At one point he also had a racy convertible, a Cord, parked, in my memory, at an angle to the curb on the street in New York where we lived, a crosstown street, then as now exceptionally wide. He was an engineer of some kind. He and my aunt Sylvia had met in Atlantic City, but the factory, which failed in the Depression, was near Philadelphia and it was there that they lived. They had a house, a maid, cars. They went away every summer. The sisters never visited, they hated him so.
“He never really did anything after 1932,” my aunt said of him.
“A lowlife,” my mother commented.
In old age, widowed, Sylvia went mad. In her daughter’s house she would rise in the middle of every night to pack, and in the end got on a train alone at three in the morning. She was settled afterwards in a small apartment but people were robbing her there, she complained. A woman had gotten in and stolen everything, her money, checkbook, keys. She had once again called the police.
“How did she get in?” my mother asked.
“She got in.”
“But the door was locked and just had a new lock put on.”
“She came through the ceiling,” Sylvia explained calmly, “the thieving whore.”
The money and keys were found stuffed under a sofa, together with underclothes. The checkbook was wedged behind the back leg of a chest.
They went walking for an hour afterwards. Sylvia was calm and lucid. She had the vast patience of the insane. Her daughter refused to look after her. Her sisters, by means of long bus rides, took over the task.
—
We lived in New York from the time I was two years old, first in a rented room in some woman’s apartment on Ninety-eighth Street, then a few blocks away in our own apartment on West End Avenue, a wide, faceless street of middle-class families. My father had built some houses, without much profit, in New Jersey. In New York his ambition found its place.
In the city that first took shape for me there were large apartment buildings stretching as far as one could see in either direction. On the side streets were private houses, many of which had been divided into rooms. Along Riverside Drive stood unspoiled mansions, stranded, as if waiting for aged patriarchs to die. In the bleak back courtyards men with grinding wheels sometimes still appeared, ringing a bell and calling up to housewives or kitchen maids for knives and scissors to sharpen. Nature meant the trees and narrow park along the river, and perhaps one of the rare snowstorms, with traffic in the streets dying and the silence of the world wrapping around. Newsboys, so-called though they were men, often walked along late in the day shouting something over and over, Extra! Extra! someone murdered, something collapsed or sunk. A block away, around the corner, the police suddenly formed in front of a brownstone and sealed off the street expecting a gun-fight with a famous criminal they had cornered, Two-Gun Crowley.
Still, I was allowed to walk to school alone, beginning with the first or second grade, and to play outside afterwards. The classrooms were presided over by invincible white-haired women: Miss Quigley — perhaps it was she who taught me to read — Miss McGinley.
We sat in rows according to merit, the best pupils in front. Marks were given monthly in both schoolwork and conduct. We were made, a little later, to stand and recite poems from memory. A kind of anthology was thus provided and from it one learned the heroic language.
Much of childhood remains everlastingly clear, the first telephone number, the name (Tony) of the feared elevator man, the pure sound — when I lay in bed bored and sick — of the key in the apartment door, which meant my mother was returning at last with the book, mostly pictures, I so wanted.
Looking back, it can be seen that my life was an obedient one. I was close to my parents and in awe of my teachers. I had no crude or delinquent companions. The tyrannical doormen, Irish and Italian, together with the superintendents, undershirted men with strange accents, were my only enemies. There was no heaven but there was a nether region with dark basement corridors and full ashcans where I feared to go. I was a city child, pale, cared for, unaware.
—
I barely remember that first apartment, in which we lived for years. The streets outside are clearer to me, the children’s group I was enrolled in, run by a young woman whose pleasant features I cannot quite make out and who was called Mademoiselle, the friend named Junior who lived in what I could see were lesser circumstances on the side street but who owned something unthinkable, a huge dog, a German shepherd.
We had neither dog, cat, nor family gatherings. My father had friends, usually one or two at a time, and I remember them, the homely, bald-headed builder with steel-rimmed glasses, the city judge, and others, large, jovial men with crushing handshakes and a confident air. Some owned cars. Usually when I saw them they were on their way to or coming back from playing golf.
My mother had friends, as well, Ann, Harriet, Eileen, Rose. Afternoon women. Perhaps they went to lunch. All of them were married, but their husbands, with one or two exceptions, I rarely saw. The women were warm and easy, pleasant to be around. They were still in their twenties, with silken legs and bright smiles. Perhaps they went dancing in the evening. My parents never did and seldom went to parties.
I knew nothing, really, of the lives of these women. I was a little boy, a kind of pet. I did not even know, in most cases, where they lived. I was sometimes put together with their children, but friendships did not result.
In New York in those days, the endless days, you were shaved each morning in a barbershop; suits and shoes came from De Pinna, and mistresses from women who worked in the office or the garment district. At least this was how my father and his closest, lifelong friend, a cousin, Berry, lived. Handsome though completely bald, Berry was a bachelor who had been a boxer in the navy. He lived in a residential hotel near the corner of the park and unselfconsciously wore a beret. Seated at my father’s funeral, expressionless and faithful, he had unexpectedly burst into tears as the coffin was lowered, crying my father’s name. “George,” he sobbed, “George …”
My father was rising in the world. He was usually in a good mood, singing a song as he dressed—“Otche Chornia” was one he particularly liked, “Dark Eyes.” He made up words of his own, knowing only the first few, “Otche chornia, I prekrasnia …” Often he was gone in the evening, on business. There were arguments. With me he was friendly, affectionate, but not in any true sense intimate. Childish things were beneath him, and he was indifferent to athletics. I never felt the absence of love, only of his interest. My mother may have felt the same.
As long as I can remember he was self-involved. Even as he walked down the street he was seeing only occasional things while thinking. One thing he was certain of: he would succeed. Pieces were already falling into place, he was gaining a reputation and meeting important men. He introduced me once to Jack Dempsey, the dark-jawed champion who in those days was the image for the sport, stalking, lean. My father had arranged a lease for him and they were on good terms. Dempsey must have been in his early forties when I met him and more popular even than he had been in the ring when, humming a deathsong to himself and punching powerfully to its rhythm, he had brought down giants, Willard and Firpo, in fights that became legend. He was big, with the cheekbones of an Indian. His hands were enormous and strong. I was ten or eleven years old and remember him towering above me. I would be bigger than Dempsey, my father told me when we walked away. I would have a left like his. Pal, he used to call me. Then his mind went off to other things, various prospects and dreams.