Growing Up (23 page)

To make up for so many shortcomings, I flung myself furiously into the one thing I was good at, which was book learning, and found a little self-respect in the successful chase for high grades. In short order I developed intellectual arrogance. This was encouraged by the special program I was taking in high school, a four-year course for fast learners which, when completed, would supply me with enough credits to enter college at the second-year
level. There was no possibility of my going to college, of course. Not on my mother’s meager earnings. When she learned that the program was available, though, she insisted that I apply.

“At least you’ll get a year of college learning out of high school,” she said. “And who knows, maybe by the time you’re through with high school something may come along.”

Well, it was another opportunity to help me make something of myself, and she overlooked no possibility, no matter how remote. For me it meant early escape from the junior high school I hated; boys accepted in the program were freed from junior high after eighth grade and sent to do their ninth grade in high school. I leaped at the chance to change schools. If I’d known about the nude swimming I would have resisted. But then my mother would have forced me to apply anyhow. The school catering to us ambitious bookworms was called City College. Despite its name, which dated from the nineteenth century, when it had been a city college, it was merely a high school, though a very good one whose best graduates were equipped to enter the best universities in the country.

The program I entered was in the classical tradition. There was very little science, but by graduation you were expected to have mastered mathematics through elementary calculus. Grammar, rhetoric, and English literature were heavily emphasized, and the course included two years of German, three years of French, and four years of Latin, at the end of which we were expected to have read Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Livy.

This was a far world from the rough and tumble of junior high, where you could have your brains beaten out in the schoolyard, and I took to the rarefied scholarly air with gusto. The school was located an hour’s trolley ride from West Lombard Street in what seemed by comparison one of Baltimore’s snootiest neighborhoods. It was a mammoth gray stone structure topped by a huge gray tower, the whole thing sprawling across the highest hill in Baltimore like some grim Gothic fortress heaved up to shelter civilization from the Vandals. My classmates came from all sections of the city. Most, I soon discovered, were just as formidable
at the books as I was, and many were my betters at the grind. After the first year thinned our ranks of sluggards who couldn’t keep the pace, some twenty-five of us survived as a small elite cadre of scholars, and when I realized that I was good enough to keep up with the best I began to view myself with extraordinary respect. I also began to look upon the common masses of humanity with pleasurable disdain.

When Doris asked for help with her arithmetic, I tore up her solutions in disgust while enthusiastically explaining that she would never be able to master the mysteries of trigonometry. Worse, I began to punish my mother. For years she had been my tutor in everything academic, the eternal schoolteacher forcing me to learn to read when reading bored me, watching over my shoulder while I did my homework, encouraging me when I complained it was too hard. “Just calm down and think it through, Buddy. You can get it if you try.” And if I couldn’t in spite of trying, she had always sat down beside me and helped me do it.

In the past I had been in awe of her education, her year of college where she had read Shakespeare and learned Latin. In my first year at City, when we were reading Caesar and I was having terrible trouble, she sat beside me long nights at the dining-room table on Lombard Street and helped me solve the puzzles of Latin declensions and conjugations. She was good at Caesar. But now, as I moved on into Cicero and Virgil, I realized that I was leaving her behind. I was like a swimmer in deep ocean waters pulling away from someone too weak to keep up. Nevertheless, she wanted to stay abreast of me, and many nights she still took her seat beside me at the table hoping to be helpful.

“What’s the trouble, Buddy?”

“Cicero. I can’t get this passage here,” I said, showing her the book.

She looked at it silently for a long time, then tried to translate it. I knew her translation was far off the mark. Even my own, which was not very good, was better than hers. At this early stage I didn’t yet have it in me to hurt her, and so would nod and say, “Thanks, let me try it that way and see if I can work it out.”

Gradually she became glad to let me work out the Latin by myself, and I knew I was outdistancing her. The same progress took place in mathematics, and though she tried to help as she had always helped, her powers failed when we reached quadratic equations, and she left me to swim alone into trigonometry and analytic geometry. One of the oldest links in the chain binding us together had snapped. She was no longer my ultimate schoolteacher.

As my intellectual pride increased I began to take pleasure in the feeling that my education was superior to hers. For years I had heard about her year of college, her Latin classes, her schoolteacher’s art, and now I was pleased to realize that despite all that, she could no longer keep up with me. One evening I yielded to an evil impulse to show her how little Latin she knew.

In school we were then reading the
Aeneid
. In class that day we had translated a difficult passage concluding with the line
“for-san et haec olim meminisse iuvabit
.” After great difficulty and with much help from the teacher I had worked this out to mean, “Someday we shall recall these trials with pleasure.” While doing my homework that night I called her to the table and showed her the passage, pretending to have trouble with it. “You’re the Latin expert around here,” I said. “Can you translate this line for me?”

She sat down, took the book, and studied the passage, then began consulting the Latin dictionary. Knowing from my class that day how tricky the line was to translate, I was filled with inner giggles. Still, she made the effort, laboriously working out a couple of lines and getting them wrong and finally translating the last line to read, “Perhaps and this it will help to remember.”

“It doesn’t make any sense that way,” I said.

She was apologetic. “I never got up to the
Aeneid
when I was in school,” she said. I ignored this.

“Don’t you think it makes more sense this way?” I asked, and read the entire passage as the teacher had helped translate it earlier, concluding, “Someday we shall recall these trials with pleasure.”

“If you knew it already, why did you bother to ask me?” she said.

“I thought maybe you could improve it,” I said.

“Improve it for yourself,” she said, and left the table.

Something else that had bound us together parted that night. It had been cruelly done, but I had issued my first declaration of independence from childhood.

How unprepared for independence I was, I did not realize until a few months later when I got in from school one afternoon and found she was out of the house. That wasn’t surprising, but when I’d delivered my newspapers and got back at six o’clock she was still away. “Where’s Mom?” I asked Doris.

“She and Herb went out somewhere,” Doris said.

That wasn’t surprising either. Maybe they would bring back some ice cream for supper. But they didn’t. She came back alone. She was dressed in her good suit, which wasn’t surprising. She usually wore her best when she went out with Herb. The surprise was the news she brought back. She said she and Herb had gone to Ellicott City that afternoon. Then she smiled at Doris and me and without further ado said, “Herb and I were married today.”

She said it in such a matter-of-fact voice. She might have been telling us that she’d been to the grocery and cheese had gone up a penny a pound. “Herb and I were married today.” She made it sound as though getting married were the most commonplace thing in the world. Nothing for Doris and me to get excited about. See? He didn’t even come home with her after the ceremony. Well yes, of course he would be moving in with us in a day or two. Doris would have to give up her bedroom and sleep on the parlor daybed until the house was reorganized. Still, everything would be the same, everything would go on as it always had with us, except now there would be a man to help provide.

I was too stunned to speak. At a single stroke, without being consulted, without a word of warning, I had been replaced as “the man of the family.” Our home, the home of our own which my mother had struggled so long to create, was no longer a home of our own, but a place in which a stranger I hardly knew would now be master. I had liked Herb well enough as an affable visitor dropping in occasionally with ice cream treats, but now my heart
closed against him. Because I was too dumbstruck to speak, it was Doris who asked the inevitable question.

“Does this mean I’m supposed to call Herb ‘Daddy’?”

“If you want to,” my mother said.

“I’m not going to call him Daddy,” I blurted. “He’s not my father.”

My anger must have shone in my voice and face. “Aren’t you happy for Mama’s sake, Buddy?” my mother asked.

“Sure,” I lied. “Only—”

“He won’t mind if you go on calling him Herb,” she said. “Now let’s have some supper.” And she went to the kitchen and began cooking, and afterwards she and Doris washed the dishes together as they always did, as though a wedding day were the most routine day in the world.

Herb moved in the following morning. That was the day the Depression finally ended for us. During the afternoon a man rang the doorbell and asked my mother where she wanted the telephone installed. Herb needed the phone so the railroad could call him at any hour. When the man left, we were living for the first time in our lives in a house that had a telephone. The age of miraculous household gadgetry had begun. After nine years of hard times we had arrived on the shore of a new age. We were no longer on relief, and for my mother, though youth was behind her, the world seemed to be bending finally to her dreams of the future. It was not my dream of the future, though. I was seething with resentment and anger, and soon I was embarked on a campaign of remorseless hostility against my new stepfather.

Herb’s first memory was of seeing his mother burn to death. That was in 1899. He was only five, the baby of the family, at home in a country kitchen with his mother on a June afternoon. She was doing something at the stove, something with kerosene. The child saw a brilliant flare of light. There was fire in her clothes flickering down the long full-length country woman’s dress fitted tightly at the throat, fire sweeping down to the wrists, the ankles. The screaming—he could still hear that forty years later.

He was taken in by relatives. When he was ten they took him out of school and sent him to work in the fields. He brought his pay home on Saturday night, a few coins, sometimes maybe a full dollar for the week’s work, and surrendered it to pay for his keep, and gradually he came to hate them and hate the drudgery.

It was not a fierce, rebellious hatred. He was a quiet boy, and inarticulate, and kept his thoughts to himself. There was a stolidity about him. He was full of silences and not much given to laughter or gaiety or outbursts of rage or rebellion. He could smile pleasantly enough. He was rather handsome, with thick, coarse black hair, a straight nose, broad jaw, broad athlete’s shoulders. He was going to be a big man. He had the heavy broad bones for it, thick muscular thighs, big cornhusker’s biceps and forearms.

The quietness masked a boyish impulse to do something romantic with his life. It was the age of the railroads. All over America boys lay awake in the night listening for train whistles echoing down long valleys and shimmering across the prairie. To boys imprisoned in lonely farms and dull backwater towns those whistles spoke of distant worlds where life was better. Lying in bed at night listening to those whistles, a boy could imagine the great locomotives thundering out to the ends of the continent and, at the controls, leaning out the cab window with his hair streaming back under the rushing wind, the ultimate figure of American romance: the locomotive engineer, the man who made the earth shake and walked in distant glittering cities. Herb dreamed of commanding those awesome engines, of leaning confidently out the cab window, of becoming one of the railroad knighthood.

Herb did join the railroad, though when he came to live with us he had still not made it all the way to the top; he was a fireman and had been for years. It was back-breaking labor which required shoveling as much as twenty tons of coal from the tender to the locomotive firebox for every run. The labor thickened a man’s arms, blackened his face, and wore out his back, but it was the final stepping-stone to the ultimate job. If you survived, and if enough engineers on the seniority ladder ahead of you keeled over with heart attacks or came down with tuberculosis or were scalded to
death in accidents, one day they would have to call you in and tell you that from now on you were going to be the man at the throttle. This was the stage at which Herb had arrived—waiting for the call—when he and my mother were married. He was forty-five years old. She was forty-one.