Growing Up (3 page)

Representing the
Saturday Evening Post
was one of the weightiest honors that could be bestowed in the world of business, he said. He was personally proud of being a part of that great corporation.

My mother said he had every right to be.

Again he studied me as though debating whether I was worthy of a knighthood. Finally: “Are you trustworthy?”

My mother said I was the soul of honesty.

“That’s right,” I said.

The caller smiled for the first time. He told me I was a lucky young man. He admired my spunk. Too many young men thought life was all play. Those young men would not go far in this world. Only a young man willing to work and save and keep his face washed and his hair neatly combed could hope to come out on top in a world such as ours. Did I truly and sincerely believe that I was such a young man?

“He certainly does,” said my mother.

“That’s right,” I said.

He said he had been so impressed by what he had seen of me that he was going to make me a representative of the Curtis Publishing Company. On the following Tuesday, he said, thirty freshly printed copies of the
Saturday Evening Post
would be delivered at our door. I would place these magazines, still damp with the ink of the presses, in a handsome canvas bag, sling it over my shoulder, and set forth through the streets to bring the best in journalism, fiction, and cartoons to the American public.

He had brought the canvas bag with him. He presented it with reverence fit for a chasuble. He showed me how to drape the sling over my left shoulder and across the chest so that the pouch lay easily accessible to my right hand, allowing the best in journalism, fiction, and cartoons to be swiftly extracted and sold to a citizenry whose happiness and security depended upon us soldiers of the free press.

The following Tuesday I raced home from school, put the canvas bag over my shoulder, dumped the magazines in, and, tilting to the left to balance their weight on my right hip, embarked on the highway of journalism.

We lived in Belleville, New Jersey, a commuter town at the northern fringe of Newark. It was 1932, the bleakest year of the Depression. My father had died two years before, leaving us with
a few pieces of Sears, Roebuck furniture and not much else, and my mother had taken Doris and me to live with one of her younger brothers. This was my Uncle Allen. Uncle Allen had made something of himself by 1932. As salesman for a soft-drink bottler in Newark, he had an income of $30 a week; wore pearl-gray spats, detachable collars, and a three-piece suit; was happily married; and took in threadbare relatives.

With my load of magazines I headed toward Belleville Avenue. That’s where the people were. There were two filling stations at the intersection with Union Avenue, as well as an A&P, a fruit stand, a bakery, a barber shop, Zuccarelli’s drugstore, and a diner shaped like a railroad car. For several hours I made myself highly visible, shifting position now and then from corner to corner, from shop window to shop window, to make sure everyone could see the heavy black lettering on the canvas bag that said
THE
S
ATURDAY EVENING POST
. When the angle of the light indicated it was suppertime, I walked back to the house.

“How many did you sell, Buddy?” my mother asked.

“None.”

“Where did you go?”

“The corner of Belleville and Union Avenues.”

“What did you do?”

“Stood on the corner waiting for somebody to buy a
Saturday Evening Post.”

“You just stood there?”

“Didn’t sell a single one.”

“For God’s sake, Russell!”

Uncle Allen intervened. “I’ve been thinking about it for some time,” he said, “and I’ve about decided to take the
Post
regularly. Put me down as a regular customer.” I handed him a magazine and he paid me a nickel. It was the first nickel I earned.

Afterwards my mother instructed me in salesmanship. I would have to ring doorbells, address adults with charming self-confidence, and break down resistance with a sales talk pointing out that no one, no matter how poor, could afford to be without the
Saturday Evening Post
in the home.

I told my mother I’d changed my mind about wanting to succeed in the magazine business.

“If you think I’m going to raise a good-for-nothing,” she replied, “you’ve got another think coming.” She told me to hit the streets with the canvas bag and start ringing doorbells the instant school was out next day. When I objected that I didn’t feel any aptitude for salesmanship, she asked how I’d like to lend her my leather belt so she could whack some sense into me. I bowed to superior will and entered journalism with a heavy heart.

My mother and I had fought this battle almost as long as I could remember. It probably started even before memory began, when I was a country child in northern Virginia and my mother, dissatisfied with my father’s plain workman’s life, determined that I would not grow up like him and his people, with calluses on their hands, overalls on their backs, and fourth-grade educations in their heads. She had fancier ideas of life’s possibilities. Introducing me to the
Saturday Evening Post
, she was trying to wean me as early as possible from my father’s world where men left with their lunch pails at sunup, worked with their hands until the grime ate into the pores, and died with a few sticks of mail-order furniture as their legacy. In my mother’s vision of the better life there were desks and white collars, well-pressed suits, evenings of reading and lively talk, and perhaps—if a man were very, very lucky and hit the jackpot, really made something important of himself—perhaps there might be a fantastic salary of $5,000 a year to support a big house and a Buick with a rumble seat and a vacation in Atlantic City.

And so I set forth with my sack of magazines. I was afraid of the dogs that snarled behind the doors of potential buyers. I was timid about ringing the doorbells of strangers, relieved when no one came to the door, and scared when someone did. Despite my mother’s instructions, I could not deliver an engaging sales pitch. When a door opened I simply asked, “Want to buy a
Saturday Evening Post
?” In Belleville few persons did. It was a town of 30,000 people, and most weeks I rang a fair majority of its doorbells. But I rarely sold my thirty copies. Some weeks I canvassed the entire
town for six days and still had four or five unsold magazines on Monday evening; then I dreaded the coming of Tuesday morning, when a batch of thirty fresh
Saturday Evening Posts
was due at the front door.

“Better get out there and sell the rest of those magazines tonight,” my mother would say.

I usually posted myself then at a busy intersection where a traffic light controlled commuter flow from Newark. When the light turned red I stood on the curb and shouted my sales pitch at the motorists.

“Want to buy a
Saturday Evening Post?”

One rainy night when car windows were sealed against me I came back soaked and with not a single sale to report. My mother beckoned to Doris.

“Go back down there with Buddy and show him how to sell these magazines,” she said.

Brimming with zest, Doris, who was then seven years old, returned with me to the corner. She took a magazine from the bag, and when the light turned red she strode to the nearest car and banged her small fist against the closed window. The driver, probably startled at what he took to be a midget assaulting his car, lowered the window to stare, and Doris thrust a
Saturday Evening Post
at him.

“You need this magazine,” she piped, “and it only costs a nickel.”

Her salesmanship was irresistible. Before the light changed half a dozen times she disposed of the entire batch. I didn’t feel humiliated. To the contrary. I was so happy I decided to give her a treat. Leading her to the vegetable store on Belleville Avenue, I bought three apples, which cost a nickel, and gave her one.

“You shouldn’t waste money,” she said.

“Eat your apple.” I bit into mine.

“You shouldn’t eat before supper,” she said. “It’ll spoil your appetite.”

Back at the house that evening, she dutifully reported me for wasting a nickel. Instead of a scolding, I was rewarded with a pat
on the back for having the good sense to buy fruit instead of candy. My mother reached into her bottomless supply of maxims and told Doris, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

By the time I was ten I had learned all my mother’s maxims by heart. Asking to stay up past normal bedtime, I knew that a refusal would be explained with, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” If I whimpered about having to get up early in the morning, I could depend on her to say, “The early bird gets the worm.”

The one I most despised was, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” This was the battle cry with which she constantly sent me back into the hopeless struggle whenever I moaned that I had rung every doorbell in town and knew there wasn’t a single potential buyer left in Belleville that week. After listening to my explanation, she handed me the canvas bag and said, “If at first you don’t succeed …”

Three years in that job, which I would gladly have quit after the first day except for her insistence, produced at least one valuable result. My mother finally concluded that I would never make something of myself by pursuing a life in business and started considering careers that demanded less competitive zeal.

One evening when I was eleven I brought home a short “composition” on my summer vacation which the teacher had graded with an A. Reading it with her own schoolteacher’s eye, my mother agreed that it was top-drawer seventh grade prose and complimented me. Nothing more was said about it immediately, but a new idea had taken life in her mind. Halfway through supper she suddenly interrupted the conversation.

“Buddy,” she said, “maybe you could be a writer.”

I clasped the idea to my heart. I had never met a writer, had shown no previous urge to write, and hadn’t a notion how to become a writer, but I loved stories and thought that making up stories must surely be almost as much fun as reading them. Best of all, though, and what really gladdened my heart, was the ease of the writer’s life. Writers did not have to trudge through the town peddling from canvas bags, defending themselves against
angry dogs, being rejected by surly strangers. Writers did not have to ring doorbells. So far as I could make out, what writers did couldn’t even be classified as work.

I was enchanted. Writers didn’t have to have any gumption at all. I did not dare tell anybody for fear of being laughed at in the schoolyard, but secretly I decided that what I’d like to be when I grew up was a writer.

M
Y
mother’s efforts to turn poor specimens of manhood into glittering prizes began long before she became my mother. As the older daughter in a family of nine children, she had tried it on her younger brothers without much success. When she married she had tried it on my father with no success at all.

Her attitudes toward men were a strange blend of twentieth-century feminism and Victorian romance. The feminism filled her with anger against men and a rage against the unfair advantages that came with the right to wear trousers. “Just because you wear pants doesn’t mean you’re God’s gift to creation, sonny boy,” she shouted at me one day when I said something about the helplessness of women. Of a man vain about his charm with women: “Just because he wears pants he thinks he can get through life with half a brain.”

The unfair advantage bestowed by pants was a lifelong grievance. As a girl of sixteen she denounced it while arguing the case for women’s suffrage in her 1913 high school debate. “Women do not ask to be placed on a throne as goddess or queen,” she said. “They are content to be equal. At present they are only half-citizens
Is the right to vote to be not a matter of right or justice, but a mere matter of pantaloons?”

She was so pleased with the phrase that she underlined “pantaloons” twice on her script before concluding: “A noted man once said to a young man starting out to practice law, ‘Young man, espouse some righteous unpopular cause.’ That is just what I have been called upon to do, and whether I win or lose, ‘I had rather be right than President’—and perhaps, when women shall have won the ballot, some one of the Lancaster High School girls will be both right
and
President.”

And yet some part of her did want to be queen. Her modern feminist passion for equality was at war with her nineteenth-century idea of women as the purifying, ennobling element of society, special creatures who ought to be protected and treasured as precious assets of civilization. She wanted the equality, but she also wanted to be a lady. Somewhere she had picked up the tyrannical spirit of the ladies of the Mauve Decade and, like them, looked upon men as naturally brutish creatures whose licentious and lazy instincts could be overcome only by the guidance of a good woman. “Behind every successful man you’ll find a good woman” was another favorite in her storehouse of maxims.

Her model of male excellence, the paragon of manhood against whom she measured all other men, was her father. “Papa,” she always called him.

Poor mythic Papa. As I was growing up, my mother loved to tell me about the happiness of her childhood days, and I loved to listen, for I knew only the ruined and colorless landscape of the Depression, and her talk evoked beautiful pictures of a world that was bright and sunny. When she spoke of it, I saw her as a little girl in a great Virginia country house. Sleek horses and fancy buggies, roaring fireplaces in the autumn, summer romps through the woods with carefree brothers, her “Mama” playing hymns on the piano in the parlor on Sunday nights. In that world, Tuesday mornings brought no soul-crushing bundle of
Saturday Evening Posts
. Then she inevitably came to the part that always began, “Now Papa was a real gentleman …” and my interest faded.
Though he was my grandfather, I couldn’t abide him being such a splendid man, and knew I could never match him in quality. I took my revenge by shutting him out of mind. It took years for me to care enough to look into the Papa matter. A surprise awaited. The fact was, Papa had not made anything at all of himself. He had tried hard enough, no doubt about that, but he had failed disastrously.