Burning the Days (2 page)

He went on and on. He knew intimate details, some a bit mixed up, like a man whose pockets are filled with scraps of paper. His name was Quinton; he worked in a post office and was called, I learned later, the Historian, derisively, as if his passion were useless and even embarrassing. As if it were an attempt to try to be of some importance. “You went to Horace Mann,” he said. “The football coach was Tillinghast.”

In fact, the football coach was a bandy-legged, graying man named Tewhill. Tillinghast was headmaster. I felt it was a minor error.

There is your life as you know it and also as others know it, perhaps incorrectly, but to which some importance must be attached. It is difficult to realize that you are observed from a number of points and the sum of them has validity.

His wife was begging him to leave me alone. I was astonished at what he knew. “Forty-four State Street. That was your grandmother’s house, right? She served you lentil soup and steak when your father brought you to visit—he hired a cab once a month.”

The run-down frame house on the corner with cement steps going into the yard, and the unvarying meal of which I was fond, on a square table in the kitchen, followed by the hour afterwards when, with nothing to do, I sat on the back steps while my father talked to his mother, telling her of things he was doing and comforting her, I suppose. The driver sat silently waiting in the cab.

My father and I made these journeys together. My mother never came. Up the West Side of Manhattan along the river, vacant Sunday morning, looking out the window, the endless drab apartment buildings on one side and in the distance, gleaming, the new George Washington Bridge. Cigar smoke, fragrant and sickening, fled past the top of the glass near my father as he sat musing, sometimes humming softly to himself. Over the driver’s radio came the impassioned words of the fervent anti-Semitic priest who broadcast every Sunday, Father Coughlin. His repeated fierce phrases beat against me. These were lean times. The driver was earning five dollars for the trip, including waiting for two hours before taking us back. It was a different driver always, the cab hailed on the street and quickly hired.

We passed beneath the great fretted tower at the east end of the bridge, always significant to me since the time my father said a restaurant had been planned for the very top of it. There was an elevator within the steel framework and we had once gone up in it, perhaps in my imagination, even the Olympian view.

The Hudson was the river of my youth, the river of sunset and
wedding cake dayliners, my own river though I never so much as felt a drop of its water on my hand or brow. I had walked across the bridge more than once, leaning over the railing to look down at the dark water an infinite distance below, sometimes lucky enough to see a white excursion boat plow past, its sunny upper deck filled with chairs like an auditorium with the roof gone. Once a year in a long line towards the sea the fleet lay at anchor, cruisers named for distant cities and broad battleships later sunk at Pearl Harbor. From somewhere along the shore, launches took you out to visit them. I had gone several times, climbed the steel ladders and stood beneath the tremendous guns. The crew in their white, wide-bottomed trousers, the manly officers, the wooden decks—it was something of which to be proud, the sole defense of the innocent and unarmed republic in which I was born.

On the far side, above the green bulk of the Palisades, was another landmark, a nightclub called the Riviera—a gambling club I had heard, Le Corbusier–like and modern—that at one time burned to the ground and was rebuilt. It was related through its owner to an order of earlier, legendary places, the Silver Slipper, Cotton Club, and others.

By roads then familiar we drove on, through grim Sabbath neighborhoods, my father towards the end telling the driver how to proceed, exactly where to turn, until we drew up beside the familiar two-story house. My grandmother, thin-faced and sad but for the moment smiling, came to the kitchen door. She lived with my great-grandfather, a fearsome old man in his eighties from the
shtetls
in Poland, unshaven and foul-smelling—it was probably incontinence—who mostly remained upstairs. Jacob Galambia was his name, probably a concoction given to him by an immigration officer. Columbia, the neighbors called him. He and my grandmother had come down from Canada, and she had gone to night school to learn English after her marriage and the birth of her children. What her father’s livelihood had been I don’t think I was
ever told. He was too ancient to be affectionate and the cruel scratch of his beard burned my face. My father was polite but paid him small notice.

I am speaking offhandedly of a great span of time. This great-grandfather had been born in about 1850. I was taken, a small boy who knew nothing of him, to visit. I may eventually look with some wonder upon a grandchild born in the year 2000 or after. A hundred and fifty years. Worlds have disappeared …

There was also, on this side of the family, a divorced husband—my grandfather—and an aunt, my father’s sister, named Laura. It was at her funeral, years after the monthly visits to my grandmother had ended, that the bard, let me call him that out of respect, confronted and overwhelmed me with his recital of my years. I had watched him being led away from me, like a saddened child.

——

In old age my mother and her sister, widowed and living together, sorted the past, their girlhood in Washington, D.C., where they were born, as their mother had been, the house on Upsher Street, their strict father, the relatives who became rich, the suitors. Major Sledge, who had been in love with Selma, the oldest sister, before the First World War. He was on the White House staff, a major
in peacetime,
they emphasized. He wanted to marry her and take her to Chicago. Their parents would not give permission. What became of Major Sledge? Neither of them knew.

Of the four sisters, Mildred, my mother, was the most beautiful, also the youngest and most willful. She had a lively girlhood—the dreariness came later—the dances at the country clubs, the embassies, she went to all of them; the Argentine embassy was the best.

“French,” my aunt corrected.

“No, the Argentine.”

They begin talking about the family again, identifying branches
on the tree of kinship. Their father had two brothers and a sister. One of the brothers was—

“A photographer,” says my aunt.

“No, a dentist.”

“I thought he was a photographer.”

My aunt, the second youngest, was blonde and liked to laugh. She had been married twice, for a long time to an unsuccessful lawyer who was my favorite uncle. She shined his shoes and made sure he had a haircut. His clientele was impoverished. Counselor, they called him. He drew up contracts and leases, occasionally he handled a divorce. Some of his business was trying to collect rents.

“Who’s there?” they would shout through the door.

When he told them they would yell, “Get out or I kick your ass!”

Short, a bit heavyset, expert at cards and tricks, he also played the piano and wrote songs. His hair was dark and thinning. His fingers were stubby, the backs of them and his forearms rich with silky black hair. He had gone to dental school—it was there he had met my aunt, at the college clinic, while fixing her teeth—but eventually he switched to another field of extraction.

His patience and playfulness made me love him. He and Frances had no children. I was their substitute. My mother and I would take the Weehawken ferry, wide with curved galleries for passengers on either side, the smell of tar and brine in the air, the deck rhythmically rising and falling. My uncle would be waiting for us on the far side in his car, a secondhand sedan. In those years there were factories along the river and farther up, perched on the heights, the sturdy framework of a great roller coaster in the center of an amusement park. We never went to the park but instead to one or another in a series of apartments in buildings of dark brick, often along a steep street. On a couch in the living room I sat entranced as coins which had disappeared with a twist of the fingers into thin air were pulled from behind my ear and aces rose magically to the top of a well-shuffled deck. The piano bench was
stuffed with his songs and the magazine rack, I once discovered, had nudist magazines hidden by the
Saturday Evening Post.

This marvelous uncle, when I was no longer a child and had gone off to school, came home one day complaining he was dizzy and was put to bed. He was sent to the hospital—“I don’t think they operated,” my aunt said vaguely—and a month or so later he ran off with his secretary. My mother, telling me the news, explained that he was ill, had a brain tumor, and had been taken to an asylum. In fact he and the secretary were in his mother’s house on the shore, though not long afterwards, perhaps in some way close to the invented story, he died. I do not know where he is buried.

Families of no importance—so much is lost, entire histories, there is no room for it all. There are only the generations surging forward like the tide, the years filled with sound and froth, then being washed over by the rest. That is the legacy of the cities.

“You know what Poppa’s father was?” my mother asks.

“He had a linen factory,” replies my aunt.

“He was a brewmaster.”

No, no. They argue on about him and the uncle, the dentist or photographer, who came to visit in the early 1900s but didn’t like America and went back to Europe.

“To Frankfurt,” my aunt says.

“Moscow,” corrects my mother.

The tree is only dimly outlined, the
arbor consanguinitatis.
Their father as a youth lived with his grandmother because his parents were divorced, and he was sent to America because of some business with the serving girl. And so, blindly, he escaped the wars and the wave of unparalleled destruction that came with them. In America he married a woman whose mother, my great-grandmother, had been married to a Polish prince named Notés.

“A prince?”

“Maybe he was a general,” my mother concedes. “Anyway he was important.” In her seventies she was still handsome and
haughty, woe to the unsuspecting waiter or shopgirl. A stylish charcoal portrait done when she was in her forties—fine features, faint rings below the eyes, long graceful neck—was still very close to her appearance. She read the newspaper every day, including all the advertisements. Each day she walked two miles.

My mother first saw my father, a photograph of him, at any rate, in the newspaper. She was eighteen. Later, entirely by chance, they were introduced. Her parents liked him very much, her mother especially. They were married in Baltimore in 1924. It was in the morning. They came back to Washington and had lunch and the new groom left for New York to go back to work. He returned a month later.

I was the only child, born early on a June morning of the hottest day imaginable and delivered by a doctor who I later fantasized might have been William Carlos Williams—the time and location are about right—but who was in fact named Carlisle. The evening brought relief from the heat in the form of a terrific storm. I would like to think I somehow remember it and that my love of all storms proceeded from that first one, but more likely I was sleeping, wearied from the passage, my young mother—she was twenty-one—weary too, but immensely happy for everything that was over and all that lay ahead. Thunder shook the windows, the rain rattled down. The year was 1925, the hospital, Passaic General.

Among my other uncles, one owned a factory that made acoustic materials. This uncle, Maurice, was tall and sardonic and had a waxed moustache. At one point he also had a racy convertible, a Cord, parked, in my memory, at an angle to the curb on the street in New York where we lived, a crosstown street, then as now exceptionally wide. He was an engineer of some kind. He and my aunt Sylvia had met in Atlantic City, but the factory, which failed in the Depression, was near Philadelphia and it was there that they lived. They had a house, a maid, cars. They went away every summer. The sisters never visited, they hated him so.

“He never really did anything after 1932,” my aunt said of him.

“A lowlife,” my mother commented.

In old age, widowed, Sylvia went mad. In her daughter’s house she would rise in the middle of every night to pack, and in the end got on a train alone at three in the morning. She was settled afterwards in a small apartment but people were robbing her there, she complained. A woman had gotten in and stolen everything, her money, checkbook, keys. She had once again called the police.

“How did she get in?” my mother asked.

“She got in.”

“But the door was locked and just had a new lock put on.”

“She came through the ceiling,” Sylvia explained calmly, “the thieving whore.”

The money and keys were found stuffed under a sofa, together with underclothes. The checkbook was wedged behind the back leg of a chest.

They went walking for an hour afterwards. Sylvia was calm and lucid. She had the vast patience of the insane. Her daughter refused to look after her. Her sisters, by means of long bus rides, took over the task.

——

We lived in New York from the time I was two years old, first in a rented room in some woman’s apartment on Ninety-eighth Street, then a few blocks away in our own apartment on West End Avenue, a wide, faceless street of middle-class families. My father had built some houses, without much profit, in New Jersey. In New York his ambition found its place.

In the city that first took shape for me there were large apartment buildings stretching as far as one could see in either direction. On the side streets were private houses, many of which had been divided into rooms. Along Riverside Drive stood unspoiled mansions, stranded, as if waiting for aged patriarchs to die. In the
bleak back courtyards men with grinding wheels sometimes still appeared, ringing a bell and calling up to housewives or kitchen maids for knives and scissors to sharpen. Nature meant the trees and narrow park along the river, and perhaps one of the rare snowstorms, with traffic in the streets dying and the silence of the world wrapping around. Newsboys, so-called though they were men, often walked along late in the day shouting something over and over,
Extra! Extra!,
someone murdered, something collapsed or sunk. A block away, around the corner, the police suddenly formed in front of a brownstone and sealed off the street expecting a gun-fight with a famous criminal they had cornered, Two-Gun Crowley.