But now my father ran a Seventh Avenue funeral home.
He was a tall man, and a number of distant female cousins or young women friends of the family would confide to me, after his death, that they’d always thought him dashingly handsome. My father was also a very nervous man. My mother’s sister, Virginia, frequently put it: “If there’s any way to worry about it at all, don’t worry, Sam will find it.” His intense anxieties put a constant strain on my mother, and certainly on my sister and me — which, in my case, led to frequent arguments and general hostility.
For my twelfth birthday, my father’s best friend (another tall, good-looking black man), Bebe, made me a hand-carved sailboat. It was nearly two and a half feet long. Bebe had cast the keel in lead himself. The deck had been scored with burn lines from a soldering iron to suggest planking. The rudder was functional. Under the removable cabin, down inside, was a sponge to soak up any water that got into it; and its single mast carried the triangular sails, forward and aft, of a tall schooner. Indeed, the boat was not actually finished by April, though I was taken to see it, and there was a promise that, as soon as it was done, Bebe, my father, and I would go out to sail it in the lake in Central Park, below the walls and minarets of Castle Belvedere. A month or so later, on a Sunday morning with the boat, that’s where we were.
Bebe had never built a boat for sailing before, and even with the lead on the keel, the balance was not right. The moment it went in the water, the mast listed a good twenty degrees. My suggestion was to put a couple of rocks, which I dug up from the grasses beside the lake, down in with the sponge. It corrected the list till the mast was only about five or ten degrees off plumb. Then we began the endless adjusting of the sails.
All around us, people were sailing other boats — some with remote-control motors — easily and neatly. But beautiful job of carving that it was, Bebe’s boat would move out, turn sharply, come back, and bump the shore. Or if the breeze had any strength at all, the boat would simply turn on its side and drop its mast to the water. Bebe was an easygoing guy — all my father’s close friends had to be — and was sitting back while Dad sputtered and pulled at this string and that, and tried to tighten the other bit of slack. That’s when I looked up and saw the elderly man standing a few feet off, watching.
He was just about my height, was wearing a gray sweater, somewhat baggy pants, and cloth shoes. His white hair tufted from both sides of his head. He had a full, gray mustache, and he stood with a pipe held up against his chest in one rather slender hand. I recognized him immediately, from endless pictures in Life, in Newsweek, in Time. Now he stepped up, and when he spoke, the German accent confirmed what I was already sure of. “Excuse me,” he said. “Perhaps I can help give you a little hand?”
Without looking up, my father launched into an explanation of what, if he could just get … this thing here over there … he was trying … to do.
Bebe asked, “Do you sail boats?”
The man smiled and nodded.
“He built that one himself,” I said. “All by hand.”
“That’s very nice,” the man said with evident appreciation.
“It’s my birthday present,” I went on. “But they’re playing with it.”
“Ah!” The man laughed. He looked down over my father’s shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said. “If you will loosen the back sail there, you won’t have such a problem with the way it leans …”
My father looked up.
“May I …?” the man said.
A little flustered, my father said, “Well, all right … go ahead, if you want.”
The man knelt down at the boat. As soon as he took it in his hands, he frowned. “Oh,” he said, looking up at us. “Well, you do have a problem here. It really is just too top-heavy.” He sighed and loosened the sail anyway.
“That’s what I told him,” Bebe said, meaning my father.
“This probably won’t help then,” the man said, finishing his knot and standing, while the boat bobbed at the lake’s edge, “very much. But it certainly looks nice.”
“Thank you anyway,” I said and held out my hand. I was not going to let our visitor get away without a handshake. He took my hand firmly in his. “Thank you,” I said again.
The ritual once started, Bebe shook hands with him, and finally, standing, my father did too.
The man smiled, nodded, gestured with his pipe, and turned away. I didn’t think my father knew who he was, but I was sure Bebe had recognized him. But Bebe was looking over my dad’s shoulder again; and Dad was again squatting over the boat. I glanced back at the man, who was now thirty yards away and almost invisible through the park’s Sunday strollers.
“Hey,” I said, “do you know who that was?”
“Huh?” Dad said.
“That old guy?” Bebe asked.
“That was Albert Einstein!”
Bebe looked up, with a big frown. “Oh, no, it couldn’t.…” Then he strained to see through the crowd. “You know, it did look like him, some.”
“Not ‘some’,” I said. “It was him!”
Now my father was frowning, too. “What would Albert Einstein be doing in Central Park on Sunday morning, playing with boats?”
“I’m not kidding,” I said. “I know it was him. I’ve seen pictures.” And twenty years later I first read about the famous physicist’s hobby: model sailboats.
5.7. And at summer camp, where her mother was also working as a counselor, twelve-year-old Marilyn had a necking affair with a young man nineteen years old who worked there as a counselor. Suddenly and surprisingly, after a week or two, he stopped speaking to her. He all but pretended she didn’t exist. She was very hurt. Years later, telling me about it, she realized he probably thought he was some sort of pervert — perhaps he’d even received some sort of warning. At any rate, most certainly he’d realized he was in danger of losing his job.
5.8. The April afternoon of my twelfth birthday, I sat on the swing in my Aunt Virginia’s backyard in New Jersey, the barrel-thick oak with its circular green bench on one side, my cousins’ walk-in playhouse with its shaggy bark walls on the other. Beside the white garage, the basketball hoop on its gray backboard in front between the two roll-down doors, ran a green board fence. Somewhere beyond it, a jay yawed distantly, raucously. Leaves rustled. And I thought:
This is now. It’s my birthday. But this particular now will be gone in hours, minutes, seconds. Tomorrow it won’t be my twelfth birthday — where will I be on my thirteenth? And a year or five years or fifteen years from now it won’t be my twelfth birthday even more!
Elbows around the chains, gently swaying below the branch, I tried to absorb the moment in all its sensory detaiclass="underline" the worn place in the grass below the swing moving under my sneakers, the hollow blue broken up by branches overhead, the trimmed hedge ending down the slope beside the gravel driveway, the flicker of leaf-light on my khaki knees, the smell of suburban noon.
The night of my thirteenth birthday, I napped irregularly on the leather couch at Bebe’s, while in the back room Bebe and my father pulled one and another clumsy chord from the jazz guitar my father had just bought and which, in my acoustic purity, I wholly disdained. As I half dozed or lay listening, I thought:
I was right. It isn’t my twelfth birthday any more. And here I am, moving through that strange and incomprehensible place, unknown to me a year ago, that was — that is — the future: swing, jay, grass, gravel, and leaf-light, as well as the year between then and this, are, now, wholly the past.