And Hilda looked at me, startled, blinking in surprise, as if, once again, she’d forgotten I was in the room.
3.1. That first night back in the city, at my mother’s suggestion, we spent at my childhood Harlem home, which my mother still owned, up at 2250 Seventh Avenue and where Brother sometimes lived above my father’s old funeral establishment. We slept on the couch (really a double-width daybed with a bolster along the back on which, when I was not yet three, I’d been first allowed to hold my baby sister, newly returned from the hospital. I began to cry from seeing the furniture among which I’d lived till I was fifteen covered with dust and practically unmoved since my family had left the place, the hand-carved boat I’d been given for my twelfth birthday askew in its stand before the fireplace, its sail torn and fallen over the jib, the same drapes still at the back windows, heavy with the dirt of four years, while Marilyn tried to comfort me.
We left before five in the morning.
Just after dawn, again on the Lower East Side, we threw ourselves into more cleaning, straightening, and fixing, sleeping on the floor over the next few nights till some friends, Randy and Donya (my musician friend Dave’s and his young wife’s roommates), who lived up near Columbia University, loaned us a daybed.
3.2. One of Marilyn’s old boyfriends, a Puerto Rican graduate student at NYU, some years my senior, named Rick, dropped by with a wedding present for me: half a dozen dried peyote buttons. “You should try it, Chip. I really think you in particular would get something out of these. You’re an interesting kid.” I put them, in their small brown paper bag, in a glass dish at the side of one of the kitchen shelves, where they remained, untouched, more than a year.
3.3. A day later, Dave and his wife threw us a combination house-warming and rent party, during which we collected some twenty-eight dollars in a zinc pail tied to the living room light cord toward the exorbitant fifty-two-dollars-a-month rent. That week I wrote an English paper for Dave on the first three pages of Finnegans Wake. He didn’t have time to, as he was composing a new piece involving twelve instruments that, through the course of it, played all twelve notes of the scale at once — save one, the single and silent tone moving through the insistent cacophony, making an absent melody. The piece was premiered at a Hunter College concert of new music. I believe I helped out a few times at rehearsals. (And the paper earned him, he later told me, the only A+ in his English class.) I didn’t make the concert. But I remember walking beside the wire fence along Houston Street’s overgrown half lots, now to, now from, the bocce courts at the Second Avenue subway station where, in shirtsleeves and gray fedoras, the elderly Italian men (and even some Ukrainians) cracked their big wooden (and small aluminum) balls into each other’s, through the autumn, while I pondered the implications of this musical piece that was, theoretically, music’s inverse.
A trip to the New York City Rent Commission brought up a building inspector who brought down our rent to forty-eight dollars, on account of the substandard plumbing — and earned us the landlord’s undying detestation and, a few weeks later, an invasion of plumbers and carpenters, who tore holes in our kitchen and bathroom floor, through which we could see into the apartment below, and holes in our kitchen wall, through which, a few days later, we could look at the new copper piping.
3.31. A couple of weeks before we rented our apartment, on one day The Daily News carried a story of a house just down from ours in which a rat had gnawed the head off a baby and, on the next, the tale of an apartment building across the street where some juvenile delinquents murdered a neighborhood cop. They’d hauled a concrete paving block up to the roof. Then, down in the hall, one kid blew a police whistle. When the cop ran up to the doorway to see what was going on, the others, looking down over the roof’s edge, dropped the block on him.
3.32. A couple of weeks after our marriage, my uncle, Judge Myles Paige, invited us up to his summer home in Greenwood Lake, where we spent the Labor Day afternoon nearby at another uncle’s home (Judge Hubert Delany), down by the lake itself, in a bevy of relatives and old friends of my family, while a cousin inveigled us to go water skiing.
And our friends, Dick and Alice, living then in the Van Rensselaer Hotel in the Village, besides taking us out to innumerable restaurants over those early months (I sometimes wonder if we would have survived without them), carried us off to a postwedding celebration at Palisades Amusement Park, where we all rode the Ferris wheel and roller coaster to calliope music above the waters at Jersey’s edge.
3.4. In the Grand Concourse apartment, set about with flowered chairs and sofas under transparent plastic covers, we commenced our ritual Friday night dinners with my shrill, brilliant, bewildered mother-in-law. In the first half dozen dinners of overdone roast beef and frozen lima beans, great blocks of silence would give way to sudden volleys of snippy insults — those directed to me I’d simply laugh at. Occasionally Marilyn would burst into tears. Sometimes the two of them would argue. Often I found it easier to try and make peace between them than to let things go to their natural, awkward, angry ends — which only involved more insults. Then Marilyn would bite back the perfectly-called-for hostilities she felt she could not express in anything but uncomfortable anger.
Sometimes Hilda would snap at me to “stay out of it.” But more and more often, over the year, she would declare that, as I tried to translate both mother and daughter for one another and pull them somehow together, I was a better child to her than her own, that I understood more than her own child about what she felt, that I was easier to talk to and loved her more than her own daughter — till I told her what she was saying, was, one, untrue and, two, reprehensible.
From somewhere Hilda had gotten the (perfectly true) idea that I was a homosexual. But now and again, in the midst of dinner, she would lean over to her daughter and whisper loudly behind her hand, “He’s a homosexualist, isn’t he?”
Marilyn would frown and say, “Mother …!”
I would ignore it. Indeed, these innuendos were so gratuitous — so “off the wall,” as a later generation would put it — that I don’t believe I’ve ever felt less threatened by what were so clearly attempts to embarrass and slander.
Often the butt end of the roast beef would return with us to East Fifth Street.
We visited my own mother much less frequently, and at no fixed intervals. But Marilyn and I both found the visits far more pleasant; and most of the time when we left, Mom would slip me twenty, thirty, or sometimes fifty dollars — which would often mean survival for the next week or so.
Once, on Fifth Street, a school friend dropped in to visit us, whose mother was a teacher who occasionally worked with Hilda, and we heard a strange story: Hilda was telling her friends that the Friday night dinners were what was allowing us to survive. Indeed, she’d even question what my family was doing to help the young, struggling couple. In terms of money, the few hundred dollars my mother gave us over our first year together had already exceeded anything Hilda had given us by a factor of thirty or forty. But after a moment’s surprise, I found myself overcome with a wave of sympathy for her, realizing that who was being allowed to survive was she. Hilda really hoped to keep open, if not a line of communication (for the conversation at those dinners resembled communication less than that of any other social situation I’d ever been in), at least the possibility for such a line. And now I, who’d been on the verge of suggesting we terminate these awkward and unpleasant Friday nights, began to urge Marilyn — who was thinking along the same lines — to give them a few weeks more. Still, especially in those first months, when dinner was over and Marilyn would get ready to return with me to the Lower East Side, again and again Hilda would seem tragically surprised, as if she finally expected that, this time, her daughter would stay home where she belonged.