Names from childhood — they were from camp and grammar school — were Dickie Davega, George Overholt, Neil Wald, Jamie Falk, and Larry Sloan, whom I recognized later in the pages of Marjorie Morningstar and whose sister was a showgirl, leggy and superior, moving haughtily past us.
We had moved to the East Side, to a large building, the Croydon, cleft by two deep courts along Madison Avenue. Here we occupied first one, then another apartment, remaining for years.
We had moved out of simple necessity, that of finding someplace less expensive, pausing for temporary stops in Atlantic City and a hotel on Central Park South owned by some acquaintances of my father.
My new school, one of the most highly regarded in the city, was just across the street, an old red-brick monument, since torn down but still visible, so to speak, in the form of London train stations. The neighborhood was well-to-do, the silk-stocking district, it was called, with a poorer section over towards the river, Yorkville, largely German and Irish. The school’s principal, white-haired and shapeless, was Emily Nosworthy, a woman of a kind that was once numerous — educated, unswerving, very likely unmarried. There were no schoolyard fights or scuffles in the hall, and the women beneath her were equally to be feared.
A schoolmate and I, in his apartment one afternoon, were making drawings of what an undressed girl might be like. Neither of us had ever seen one, or even a drawing in a book. Picasso’s etchings came much later, Rodin’s Iris, naked trunk, one leg askew, and we had never heard of Courbet. The art of photography was nascent.
There was another, closer friend who lived one block away and whose life was in large part governed by his mother’s career, a mother I rarely saw. She was a pianist and gave concerts at Carnegie Hall. Her son, Alec, was blue-eyed and somewhat rumpled, the tongue of his belt hanging down. We played alone in his room. Everyone was invisible in that family: Nadia, his mother, closed off and practicing behind curtained glass doors; his older brother, who was already in college and had a regime to strengthen the lungs — four steps inhaling while walking, four steps breathing out, then the next block, five, and so forth.
Alec’s room was at the rear of the apartment. We wrestled on his bed in the late afternoons, the door closed, the sound of the piano disregarded and faint. The room looked out on a courtyard seven or eight stories below and faced other dull, anonymous windows. One ordinary afternoon as the light was fading we noticed a figure in another apartment not far away, a floor below and close by because the building was in the shape of a “U.” It was a young woman, quite alone. The room in which she moved back and forth — a bathroom — was brightly lit and the top half of the window was down. In our room the lights had not been turned on, and concealing ourselves to watch, we sank to our knees.
She slipped the sweater she was wearing over her head, passed from sight and a moment later returned, unfastening her brassiere. I recall the incredible brilliance of her flesh, the blinding nakedness, and the despair when she passed from view. We said not a word to one another. We waited in absolute silence. It was the hour of twilight. That empty box of illumination was more compelling than any stage. As if in obedience she returned. I simply could not see her enough nor, I knew from the first instant, retain what I had seen.
No hunter at dawn, no assassin or searcher, ever felt greater joy. She walked before us, turned, tied back her hair. She leaned forward slightly to remove the last of her clothing and then stood, sacred and incomplete, looking down at something, probably a scale. I cannot imagine the weight of that immortal substance. It had no weight. It was made of glory. Then, abruptly, she stepped away to an invisible shower or tub. She departed, that is, from this earth. I had never, till then, faced the paradox of a dream vivid to the point of ecstasy yet destined to vanish.
Dazzling as it was, it was also commonplace. Everyone knew of it, as we did then for the first time.
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From a woman who was selling them door-to-door in about 1930, my mother had bought a six-volume set called My Bookhouse. The covers were dark green and tortoisey, with a large inset illustration, a beautiful lady in white, perhaps, with long hair and a crown of yellow and golden water lilies. I had other children’s books but none I devoted myself to more. The reading was graduated from volume one through six, and though I disfigured the first two, by volume three I was treating them with respect. I knew many of the stories by heart, “The Fisherman and His Wife” by the Grimm brothers, and “The Honest Woodsman” who was offered first a gold, then a silver ax-head to replace the one he had lost but refused them, saying his was only steel, and was rewarded with all three.
There was Dickens, Byron, the Bible, Tolstoy, folktales from many nations, and poems. The texts may have been somewhat modified, softened — I think I realized it even then — but only as regards those things too brutal for young readers. The word “out,” for instance, was omitted from a sentence in which a cruel woman cut out a sparrow’s tongue, leaving the sensitive child with the impression that the tongue had been slit. The books were richly illustrated. In volume four or five was Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West.” It was four pages long. I knew every word, and every detail of the illustrations. The hero of the poem, the colonel’s son, slender and dashing, wore a pith helmet with a white cloth wrapped around it and had a lanyard on his pistol. He may have been confused in my imagination with the Prince of Wales, who was the darling of the times.
The ballad centered around an epic hoof-drumming chase. A colorful outlaw — I met him later in Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, lame and untamable — with a band of men has stolen a horse from the British garrison on India’s northeast frontier. The horse, moreover, a mare, is the colonel’s favorite. The colonel’s son, a troop commander, sets off in hot and lone pursuit. In a treacherous pass he at last catches sight of the mare with the bold thief, Kamal, on her back and a relentless race begins. He has fired once, he has fired twice, but the whistling ball went wide … even Tolstoy later described bullets’ gay sound. Day fades. Hooves pounding, they ride through the night. His horse nearly spent, the colonel’s son falls at a water jump and seeing this, Kamal turns back, knocks the pistol from the fallen rider’s hand, and pulls him to his feet. There, face to face they stand and, after exchanging threats, confess to the bond that is now between them, rivals who have given all. Their code is the same, and the qualities of manhood they admire. They take a sacred oath as brothers and Kamal dispatches his only son to serve henceforth as bodyguard to his foe. Belike they will raise thee to Ressaldar, he predicts, when I am hanged in Peshawur.
I did not invent any games for the poem or pose before the mirror as one of its figures; I only stored it close to my heart. In the end, I suppose, I found the poem to be untrue, that is, I never found an adversary to love as deeply as a comrade, but I kept a place open for one always.
Of the cardinal virtues, it was fortitude the poem held high, perhaps with a touch of mercy. Fortitude, I saw, was holy. My life was too meager for me to know if I possessed it. I was white-skinned, sheltered. In the street I ran from gangs of toughs. Tunney, Dempsey’s most famous opponent, soaked his fists every day in brine to make them invulnerable, my father had told me, to toughen them, and it was in some sort of brine that I hoped to steep myself.
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