20
20. In a poem written in 1985, Marilyn looked back on some of this time:
The argot of the times? We “knocked back drinks” at Dirty Dick’s — i.e., drank them. But a literal reading retains the suggestion of rejection. Does it matter that it was Shirley who made the “Vermeers,” not Simon? Or that it was Bigelow’s half a block north, with its all-night breakfast counter — not Whelan’s (which served no food)? Or that I have no memory at all of the card-sharp I might have brought home? Are these matters of meter or memory — and what is their intricate connection?
Such points do not matter for the poem. I have no problem recognizing it.
21
21. Some new friends we made that August included a couple who lived down on Fourth Street, Baird and Margie. Baird worked at the post office; Margie was a keypunch operator. Both were artists, though Margie, a comfortable blond from Mt. Eyrie, West Virginia, had the greater talent and the greater energy. Somehow we all managed to end up taking life drawing classes together in the basement of the Art Students League up on Fifty-seventh Street. And Marilyn now had a scholarship to one of the League’s painting courses, with Edwin Dickenson. Somehow we all spent a lot of time singing together, despite the fact that Marilyn couldn’t carry a tune. I started taking my guitar over to sing in the Village coffee shops during the evenings; another friend was a young dyke named Carol, who formerly managed a long, narrow coffee shop on Third Street, just west of MacDougal, the Cafe Elysée, where from time to time I’d go to sing and pass the basket among the tourists in the evening, sandwiched in between some of the singers I mentioned earlier. (Eventually Carol would write the lesbian column in The Matachine Newsletter, “Move Over, Boys.”)
22
22.1. My mother had a small summer house in the Beacon-Poughkeepsie area, just beyond a railroad crossing called Hopewell Junction. My father had designed the place — stolid, foursquare, compact — and supervised its construction before I was born. For years, throughout my childhood, we’d given an annual Labor Day party there, where a whole pig was split open and barbecued throughout the night, under the orange canvas tarpaulin held up with ropes and its four hickory poles, beside the cinderblock furnace that burned its hickory logs in the darkness. The party came after days of preparation, of pie baking, of coleslaw making, of corn husking, of general cleaning and window washing — Irving, my cousin Boyd’s best friend, traditionally came up for that job, to sit in his sleeveless undershirt and jeans, in the kitchen window, sweeping his crumpled newspaper (dark arms swinging back and forth) over the sun-shot glass, while light broke on the round lenses of his own glasses.
Labor Day weekend my cousins Dorothy and Boyd, Edward, Nanny, and Bill, Betty and Barbara, and attendant aunts and uncles were crammed in every corner of the attic, in every downstairs bedroom. And on Labor Day itself, near noon, the first car pulled up to park across the road over the old filled-in cesspool and disgorged the first of what, some years, would be as many as a hundred guests. On the backyard lawn by the ice- and soda-filled wading pool, in undershirt and apron, my Uncle Hap would whet his cleaver at the chopping block over the washtub full of pig parts and begin to hack up the barbecue —
Since my father’s death, though, the house had gone unused.
My mother decided she would make an effort to rent it out once we got to the first of the year.
“But you kids could go up and use it, if you wanted,” she told us, “while there’s still some good weather left. I really don’t feel like going, of course. But it seems a shame just to let it sit there.”
We decided that Edward (Nanny’s younger brother — though a couple of years older than I, and my closest male cousin) and I would drive up, open the house, turn on the water, check the electricity, do some cleaning, and see what was needed in the kitchen.
The following week, Nanny and Walter, Baird and Margie, Edward, Marilyn, and I would leave the Lower East Side for a weekend in the country.
A week before Labor Day, Edward got Uncle Ed’s car for a few days and we drove up to Hawthorne Circle and on across the aluminum web of the reservoir bridge, turned off on Carpenter Road, finally to cross the train tracks and, minutes later, the wooden bridge to the filling station by Kaplan’s Drugstore (its ice cream fountain, one of the few that still smelled like an ice cream fountain was supposed to, its comic book rack over the whole back wall; and Mr. Kaplan — always affable and accommodating as if he really were the thirty-five-year-old son of my fifty-five-year-old high school math teacher — the last white man we would see for a while) and on out to the house.
When we drove up the steep, quarter-mile driveway (the bulldozers, grating and roaring when I was seven, or standing silent while the drivers were off eating and I climbed up to the perforated metal seat, painted bright orange, and sat, gazing through the leaves into the sun), most of its cinder top washed away, I expected the house to look very small; the last time I’d been here my father was alive and we’d brought Louis, a compact, handsome, slow-talking kid from the General Grant Houses, who was in the remedial reading class I taught at the Community Center. He and my dad had ended up in a hot cherry pepper-eating contest, and I suddenly saw, for the first time, why someone not a part of the immediate family might think my father mild-mannered. (In the little country kitchen with its blue vinyl flooring, in his overalls, his heavy farm shoes, and his broken-brimmed painter’s cap, tall Dave, of near West Indian blackness, watched Louis and my father and shook his head: “You guys really gonna eat them things?” I saw Dave laugh.
(“Sure,” Louis said. “They good.”
(“They’re not bad,” my father said. “You want one?”
(“Naw …!” Dave declared.) But when Edward and I drove out of the trees and, through the windshield, I saw the foursquare A-frame on top of the grassy knoll, with its red brick chimney and its gray-and-black fake brick walls, it looked so much like I’d remembered, I was almost disappointed.
“Let’s go drive down to Dave’s,” I told Edward, “and get the keys.”
“Sure.” Beside me, Edward started the car again.
While we drove the dirt road, under the lowering branches, I wondered if we would find Dave, his wife Sugar, and his mother-in-law Dada sitting around the kitchen table, drinking beer and playing tonk, as they had so many summer evenings.
But only after I had gotten out of the car and was crunching across the gravel toward Dave’s screen door did some passing gossip of my mother’s, from more than a year ago, come back; Dada had died several years before.