3.5. Usually, those Friday nights after dinner, we walked down the Grand Concourse through the Bronx, across the 149th Street Bridge, along Seventh Avenue, then by Central Park West, finally to cross Forty-second Street and turn down Sixth Avenue, all the way to Eighth Street and across town through Tompkins Square Park, on down Avenue B by the RKO theater facing the public school — the ancient movie palace already slated for demolition.
And once, a few days after the second or third Friday, a moving van arrived from Hilda with a bunch of furniture — most of which was broken beyond use even for our tenement apartment and had to be thrown out. But two or three pieces (a red easy chair, a small phone table, some dishes whose designs had been all but scoured off with steel wool) joined the bricks and boards that made up our bookshelves, the bridge table from my mother, the daybed from Donya and Randy, the wooden four-drawer file cabinet purchased for an exorbitant twelve dollars from a secondhand business furniture warehouse on Delancey Street, to become part of our furnishings.
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4. I’ve often asked myself why Marilyn and I married. At different times I’ve given myself different answers. Since age ten or so, I’d known my major sexual preferences were homosexual. Through my adolescence, as I’d explored this personally difficult (as all sex is) and socially confused (as most sex is) situation — at least as it awaited young people in the fifties, who then had little chance of any parental support — Marilyn had been among my few confidantes, as I’d soon become one of hers for her own heterosexual explorations.
But who were we, this Jew from the Bronx, this black from Harlem?
In many ways, neither of us was typical of the image the preceding sentence evokes — yet the truth it tells, under its bipartite interrogation, is necessary for any understanding.
Where had we come from?
How had we come together?
For all new marriages, I suspect, afford their moments of retrospection and account taking, their late-night hours, their hours at early dawn, when we survey and choose among the elements of the past that have, most likely, brought us to the present — as much as does a month spent in a mental hospital.
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5. When I was three or four, for about a year a woman had a room with my family, right behind the one where my sister and I slept. It was separated from ours by double doors that rolled thunderously into the walls. A relative of my mother’s gentle brown-skinned father, she’d come up from Virginia and was only starting to work in New York City as a nurse.
Her name was Margaret White.
In memory she is large, dark, somewhat messy, with a torrential laugh like endlessly breaking glass. In my mother’s recollection she was a heavy, helpful, generous woman who doted on me and my younger sister. But for me her onslaughts of laughter and affection were the symbol of everything irrational and maniac — even more so than my father’s outbursts of anger; indeed, the two worked together to exacerbate all childhood terror.
From the other room, in the early afternoon, my father would calclass="underline"
“Margaret, what are those children doing in there?”
My mother’s name was Margaret, too. She was a small woman, born in New York City, firm-voiced, quiet, and light enough to pass for white, as was my slim, six-foot-one father, though both were adamant about never doing so.
My father, from the other room, was certainly calling my mother; not Margaret White.
There was no real ambiguity, save at the level of the signifier — as a wholly later tradition might say. But was it possible, I wondered, as on an autumn evening I drifted to sleep, while Margaret White’s generous cackle spilled from the kitchen to roll back through the darker rooms, that my mother was, somehow, really Margaret Black? Or that something as solid as Margarets or mothers could harbor a secret splitting — or doubling — signaled by this duplication of names?
5.1. As a child, I was fascinated by science and math. Like so many kids of those years, I’d made crystal radios and wound high-frequency coils and designed primitive computer circuits to play nim and add numbers in binary notation. I looked up various topics of mathematics on my own and, in my manner, tried to study them. The private, progressive Dalton School I’d attended since I was five didn’t actively dissuade me — and called that lack of dissuasion encouragement. I wrote plays and tried to write novels, and was stunned, at eight, when a classmate, a girl named Gabby, wrote a beautiful letter from the hospital in the form of a rebus, illustrated with words and pictures cut from magazines (… Life [the colophon from a Life magazine] here in the Hospital [the word cut from a piece of letterhead stationery] is no Bed [picture of a bed] of Roses [picture of a bunch of red roses]. …), and died; and learned how to do splits and cartwheels from Wendy and memorized The Raven and Jabberwocky and Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics with Priscilla; and — after seeing a high school production of it one week and the next an Old Vic presentation at the ancient Metropolitan Opera House, with Robert Helpmann as Oberon and fiery-haired Moira Shearer as Titania, with impossibly ornate sets and a wonderful, obscenely homoerotic Puck — learned long slabs of A Midsummer Nights Dream with Peter; and The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock — because Sue-Sue, in the high school division, told me Eliot was impossible to understand and I’d show them — and read science fiction novels with Robert and Johnny; and borrowed Priscilla’s Mad comic book to read in the boys’ john, cover to cover, and called her nightly to ask her how were things in Afghanistan; and read Robert E. Howard and drew maps of imaginary lands; and listened to Tom Lehrer records with my friend Mike, who, like Johnny and Robert, was an inveterate nail-biter and was the one other kid from Dalton who would also be going on, with me, to the Bronx High School of Science.
And in the afternoons, after swimming, my nose still sharp with chlorine, my ears still wet, I left the ten-story red-brick school building just off Park Avenue to take the bus home to the three-story private house well above 110th Street — Harlem’s southern boundary — in which my father’s funeral home filled the first floor, with Mr. Onley’s Grocery Store just to our left and Mr. Lockley’s Hosiery and House Paint Store to our right, as every morning I left that house, in my early years to be driven, and later to wait on the corner for the No. 2 bus, to transect that boundary once again: in social terms a journey of near ballistic violence, carried out each day in more or less indifferent silence.
5.2. Surprisingly to some, I had a comparatively religious upbringing. My father was a vestryman at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church; its brown and black brick parish house held the Sunday school I went to each weekend. Many of my friends on the block were Catholic and went to St. Aloysius’s around on 132nd Street, a church which both my friends and my parents told me that I, as a Protestant, must never enter. On one or another forbidden trip “around the corner” I looked through the open, green plank door, next to the Catholic school (its tan cornerstone, set higher than my head, proclaiming its laying date a whole uncountable decade ago in 1940), and between the church entrance’s ornately spiraled columns set back among the rectangular pilasters (red brick, white stone, the rising helices of glassy cobalt leaves) I saw more flowers, more candles, more sculptural decoration, all in much lighter colors, than one would ever find in our church — that edifice that seemed at once bigger, more serious, with its plain facade, darkly-colored stone, deeply brown wood, curved brass fixtures, all slanted through with dusty light from the stained and vaulted panes in the windows along the wall, windows much higher than the ones at the back of my father’s ground floor chapel.