Burning the Days (5 page)

History was a required course for all six years, and the American history teacher was a Mr. Martin, another titan, white-haired, commanding, with chalk dust on a habitual blue suit. He was in the habit of correcting term papers while listening to the radio. It would be hard to say exactly what one learned from him. In addition to history he instructed in a version of anthropology, personal hygiene, and morals. “Never swallow it” was one of his admonitions—he was speaking of phlegm, but the wiser boys in back tittered. This brought up what he knew was a constant preoccupation. “Keep your mind off the subject as much as possible” was his droning advice; “disease isn’t worth it. The worst thing is the books,” he cautioned. “They’re much worse than the pictures.” His classroom was on the side of the building facing the athletic field where early in the morning, before class, we played a game without rules, often damaging to clothes, called rip-ball, one against all, one darting hare against the trailing pack until he was exhausted or brought down. It was the field on which I recall Kerouac in shoulder pads and cleats, stocky and hard-running in
games against Peddie and Blair. In football uniform, short-legged, he seemed a kind of thug. He would drop back to handle punts and, catching them, go like the wind.

The school, Horace Mann, was in Riverdale, the northern suburbs of the city. Its tone was essentially Anglo, there were only boys, and the overriding ethic was that we were responsible for our own destiny and for fulfilling our obligations to society. There was none of Büchner’s or Ibsen’s determinism, the doctrine that acts have resistless causes. We were not what unknown forces made of us but rather what we made of ourselves. In the mornings, in the auditorium, we sang “Men of Harlech”—“would you win your name in story?”—and, as the school was affiliated with Columbia, “Roar, Lion, Roar.”

What effect this had, I cannot say. I was a decent student and lagging athlete, an unknown at track and substitute on the football team. I remember a youth of friendship and no foreboding, though miles away, in Europe, war had already started. Not far from where we lived, in Yorkville, they were showing German propaganda films,
Sieg im Westen,
and later,
Feldzug in Polen,
and women in the lobby of the theater held out cans collecting for German War Relief.
Battle’s distant sound.
We sympathized with the British, naturally, and read with excitement, in newspapers that no longer exist, of the trapping by British cruisers of the pocket battleship
Graf Spee
in a South American estuary. Inspired, we invented our own warship game, brilliant as only schoolboys could make it, with complex rules for movement, engagement, damage, and resupply, maneuvering fleets of slender model ships on the bare wooden floors of apartments in endless fights, often with diagrams and accounts written up afterwards, word of it passing down, so that years after, people who had never seen but only heard of it asked to have it described.

Kerouac was only one of the postgraduate students, “ringers,” brought in every year to man the school teams. Older, less fine,
with faces already showing the shadows of manhood, they were the heroes of the school and at the same time outsiders. I never spoke to any of them; there was nothing to say. A year or two ahead of us, they drank beer, carried their books carelessly in one hand, and knew how to drive. Kerouac astonished us by submitting stories to the literary magazine, for a ringer an utterly unconventional act. He never came to the magazine’s offices, however. That would have been too out of character.

The athletes had girlfriends, usually back in the small towns they had come from. We had girlfriends ourselves or, rather, knew girls. Some attended the sister school, Lincoln, some were their friends, a loose coterie of New York girls, well-off for the most part, closely watched over by their parents. They lived in the Seventies, Eighties, or Nineties, some more distant, one beauty in a building with an iron fence in the West Sixties. At school dances in the city on Saturday night a portion of them were likely to appear, and there were parties on Park Avenue with fruit punch in the dining room, the rug rolled back, and parents out of sight in a distant bedroom or at a movie.

The ennui of those parties, the schoolboy sophistication and dancing in darkened rooms. There were no passionate moments or slamming of doors. We did not have love affairs at that age. There were no notes from fifteen-year-olds that said,
I love you. I will give you anything.
Such notes as there were were teasing or clever. As boys we dreamed of the prescription
quantum vis,
“as much as you please,” but there was never that. Nor were there many real couples. It was all too formalized and familiar.

I carry within me, however, the memories of those girls, the last of a breed, their freshness and animation, their refusal to be lured. I pass the buildings where they lived, where they live, those who went away, who married, the one who didn’t, the one who went insane.

Among those schoolmates who achieved some notoriety there is Julian Beck. Foppish and unathletic, he was the object of ridicule behind his back and was probably aware of it—he followed Cocteau’s dictum, whatever you are criticized for, intensify it. Bony-wristed, he floated through schoolboy theatrical productions, a long-nosed, fruity Hamlet, and fifteen years later, having abandoned a try at painting, he was director of an underground theater, metamorphosed into a visionary bringing a vivid and disturbing play,
The Connection,
to the stage. The theater was makeshift, up a narrow flight of stairs. I was astonished by the coolness of a play about drugs and failed to recognize its foresight, but it shone like a diamond. I met Beck several times afterwards but the level was superficial; in a real sense he declined to talk. He had stepped over me and was unwilling to be confronted on the old terms.

With Kerouac, though I never saw him again, it was the same. I recognized his photograph, sensitive down-turned face, in a bookstore window on the jacket of a thick first novel. It was
The Town and the City.
I read reviews of it after, filled with praise. By then I had tried to write a novel myself and failed. His was lyrical and repetitive and, to me, crushing. What he had done staggered me.

In an interview read later I saw the side of him that had been so unsuspected. He was asked about haiku and enthusiastically said, Yes! Then, before one’s eyes, he proceeded, like a man peeling an apple in one unbroken strip of skin, to compress an incident—a leaf blown onto the back of a tiny sparrow in a storm—into three succinct lines through trial and error, crossing out words in midair, so to speak. I remembered sitting in the classroom while a favorite teacher tried to kindle our interest in the haiku and its seventeen syllables, but the essence of it, large things evoked by small, was beyond us.

Richard Wooster was the teacher’s name. He was young and
had a wide, unnerving smile. Kerouac did not know him nor did Wooster, I think, know the swaggering Lowell boy. Among the teachers, Mr. Wooster was the one to whom I felt closest. When he went into the navy during the war he wrote to me as if to an equal. In the life after, I went to see him when I had published a novel. He was married by then and had four or five children. He was gray but still smiling. We sat in the living room of the large, disorderly house he no doubt had dreamed of. I meant him to see that his faith in me had been confirmed, but I am not sure what he saw—his smile was one of not quite remembering. His children had replaced me and life now crowded in. As if the school years had been a vine and something cut them and they fell.

——

My first duck I tasted in the dining room of a silvery apartment off Fifth Avenue. Across from me, aware of nothing remarkable, sat my friend. At the head of the table was his stepfather, Jonas Reiner, a large, humorous man who owned underwear factories, and at the far end my friend’s blonde mother, Ethel.

Of the mothers of friends, she was the most glamorous. She had the most aplomb and style. She was the daughter of a doctor who, when October 1929 came, called and asked, “Are you broke?”—she was twenty-five years old, married to her first husband, with two small children. She had five thousand dollars to her name and her bill at Bergdorf’s was four thousand eight hundred. “Yes,” she said, “are you?”

“Um, but I’ve been broke before and I hope to be broke again,” her father told her.

She was a regal figure to me, affected but smiling, her ash-blonde hair heaped on her head, the silk of her dresses whispering. I never saw her in the kitchen—there was a cook—or with a vacuum cleaner in her hand or even changing a shoe, legs crossed, slipping it off and putting on another. Perhaps there were weekend
mornings when, in a peignoir with fur cuffs she might scramble eggs to put on a breakfast tray and carry down the hallway to her husband. She suggested the sumptuous.

Her son, Wink, was my friend. As young boys, groups of us used to gamble in his room, playing cards. He sometimes brought out five- or ten-dollar gold pieces to prove that he was good for any run of bad luck. I had never seen a gold piece or known they existed. They were prophetic. In time, he became a stockbroker and had a seat on the exchange. Money rolled in. He had a beautiful, extravagant wife and a house in Westchester. That was after the war. We were, strengthened by roots that reached far back, close friends. I was at his wedding and later, godfather to his first child. The money I had in the 1950s he doubled and tripled for me, and I felt myself rising with him, though in a smaller way.

In years that followed there came the life of men, evenings in uptown bars, confiding everything. I knew about his wife, his brother-in-law, his partners. We went to football games and to Mexico together. The welterweight championship of Mexico was being fought in a huge, ramshackle arena somewhere on the outskirts of Mexico City. We were in the second row with a woman we had met, a blonde who said she was the girlfriend of an ex—Chicago Bears football player. Had he lost a leg or been stricken with cancer? I don’t seem to recall. I do see the vast, surrounding sea of blackest hair, all of it male. There was not another woman in the place and, a little drunk, the one we were with shone like a beacon. The naked calves of the fighters danced level with our eyes and blood flew from cut faces in what seemed to be sheets. From the balcony, beer was being thrown and lighted newspapers. It was round five or six. The chaos was mounting.

“I have to go to the ladies’ room,” she said. We were packed close. The empty aisle rose towards the rear between banks of men. “I have to go to the ladies’ room,” she said again. “Who’ll come with me?”

Neither of us stirred. I watched as she made her way alone up the aisle, on high heels, her hips speaking clearly, it seemed, beneath the dress. She was the emblem of it all. Row by row every face turned to watch. I was sure we were not going to see her again.

We walked the dark streets afterwards, however, looking for a cab with her, few lights anywhere and unseen dogs barking.

At the cockfights we were drinking tequila and licking salt from the back of our hands. Wink had given up looking at the roosters as they were carried proudly around. He read the odds instead, written on pieces of board men bore through the darkness. He held out bunches of money, which they took nodding. It was pesos, it didn’t matter. The cabs were in pesos, the hotel, the wide boulevards skimming past. We were breathing the Latin air, drunk on altitude. The city was a galaxy. The girls came into the room and lined up, smiling. Their teeth were mostly bad. One was Cuban. I had never been to Cuba. We went there, the palms, her bare room with shutters, the pale streets at dawn.

Perhaps it all still exists. I have never been back. We drove to Cuernavaca, then to the sea. The beach was shadowed by the first great hotels. White-legged we walked along it. There was a slender brown woman in a black bikini; she could have been Mexican but was not. We sat and talked. She was a friend of the English playwright John Osborne and had a gold cigarette case with a persuasive inscription engraved in his own hand.

She may have had some of his money, as well, or perhaps someone else’s. She had bought a motorboat for the Mexican boy with whom she was living, so he could have a water-skiing business. We went to remote inlets in it and ate in beach shacks where there were only three or four plates but from somewhere were produced icy bottles of beer. We met in the evenings as well. The Mexican boy was always silent.

I caught sight of her several times afterwards in New York, once in the Veau d’Or with the cigarette case on the table near her plate. She appeared very urban and expensive, a long way from barefoot life. That period was ended. I wanted to know more about her, about Osborne and the past, but all of that she declined to reveal.

My friendship with Wink seemed indestructible and my attachment to his mother grew. It became love, not the love felt for my own mother but something grown-up and apart. It would be truer to say I returned her love, the warmth had first come from her.

During the war she lived in New York, where I often saw her while my own family was in Washington. Later she moved to an estate in Ossining. I forget the sequence of divorce from her husband and his becoming ill, but he grew gaunt and died. In Ossining she came in from the sunlight with a garden trowel in one gloved hand. There was a swimming pool, a sunken living room, a dog. Had I read
Tales of the South Pacific,
which had just been published, she asked? I
must,
she said. The war was over. We’d driven up to Ossining in a new car, perhaps Wink’s. His mother had had difficulty in forming his tastes and was turning her efforts towards me.

She also had a nephew, her admired sister’s son, Peter, who grew up more or less alongside us, plump and deceivable. His mother hoped he would go into medicine, but he had another ambition. After college he confessed it to Ethel: he wanted to have a gallery, he dreamed of art. She took him to dinner at the house of a famous dealer she knew, where Peter sat silently as the impossibilities of his choice were explained to him in detail, the near certainty of his not succeeding, and the sure disappointment of his mother. At the end he summoned his courage to say, “I’m not Dorothy’s son, I’m Ethel’s. I have the right to fail,” he added.