Just Kids From the Bronx (9 page)

Author, photographer

(1933– )

We lived in a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. Mother, father, older sister, older brother, the mutt fox terrier Spotty, and me. We ate our meals, played cards and board games, did homework, and told jokes in a small area adjacent to the kitchen, called the dinette. I can easily picture my father sitting at the dinette table telling us one of his favorite jokes about these three American soldiers, lost and thirsty in the desert during the war. “Two of them called for ‘Water, water,’ and this Jewish boy called out—.” My father’s belly laugh drowned out the punch line even though it tried to gurgle to the surface.
What’s the punch line? What’s the joke? Please!
He’d manage to blurt it out, “Seltzer, seltzer.”

My parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe—Lithuania and Poland, or was it Russia? I never really understood when they told me that the borders kept changing according to the wars, with the winners taking this piece of land or the other. Tell me again where you were born? What language did you speak? Where did you go to school? Who were the Cossacks again? Why did they hate the Jews? What was a pogrom? With its details of shootings into houses and hiding in basements, our family history was both exciting and confusing to me. I was a kid from a Bronx neighborhood, a place where I could freely roam in the streets of our own mostly Jewish ghetto without fear of meeting up with some wild men on horses who with their guns and their hatred of Jews could kill me and my family.

My brother Harry was an avid builder of balsa wood model airplanes when he was a young teenager. The smell of the glue stank up the dinette as well as the rest of the apartment—and I loved it. I also loved the finished airplanes that actually flew once the rubber bands were wound tightly around their propellers. His warnings of “Don’t touch!” were words that I listened to, mostly out of fear rather than understanding. I had no idea how that anger might materialize, but Harry was ten years older than I was and I wasn’t going to test it either.

My mother, Jean, who was patient enough with the mess that we kids always left in the dinette, also wanted it to be unique and stylish. My father usually went along with her wishes. The dinette was wallpapered and decorated many times.
Simon, I think the room needs something new on the walls. Something cheerful. Maybe a flower pattern.
He hand-stencilled the walls with a repeated pattern of a drooping tulip with pink and white stripes.

On the windowsill of our well-decorated dinette was a small, wooden rectangular box filled with dirt. Originally, this box held a brick of orange American cheese sold by the pound and sliced to order in our local Allerton Avenue Appetizing store by the behind-the-counter man, Moish. If I’d politely ask Moish if he had an empty Breakstone’s cheese box, he would give me one or tell me to come back in an hour or maybe tomorrow. The box was a treasure: an indoor garden where my sister Shirley and I planted petunia seeds from packets we got from P.S. 76, our local public school. I wanted to water the seeds often because I was impetuous and impatient, unlike my mother and Shirley, who seemed to be able to wait forever for things to happen, like chicken to roast or a cake to rise or clothes to dry on the indoor bathroom clothesline. The petunias miraculously grew into cascading trumpets of pink, white, and purple, despite my sneaking in some extra watering when no one was looking. To this day, old-fashioned petunias are among my favorite flowers.

My mother’s sewing machine was also in the dinette. The word “Singer” stood out in bright golden letters across its black background. My mother was a skilled dressmaker who designed and sewed her own clothing and also earned money by sewing dresses for others. What was a skill and an asset for her was sometimes a curse for me.
Why is the machine so noisy? Why does she sew her own clothes into all hours of the night? Why does she have to make my clothes? Why can’t I buy them ready-made like Diana down the hall?
My feelings would erupt. The targets were my mother and her machine.

“Stop sewing.”

She’d try to placate me. “In a few minutes.”

“Stop now. I can’t think.”

No answer, except the rebuke from the incessant drone of the motor with the needle moving up and down, up and down, up and down. My mother hates confrontation. She ignores me. I storm out of the dinette crying. I slam the door to the one bedroom in the apartment.

It wasn’t just that I was most probably a spoiled brat, wanting what I wanted when I wanted it and often getting it. I was also hopelessly stuck, falling over and over again into the same muddy emotional rut as I watched my mother sitting, hunched over, sewing, while she sang or hummed under her breath. My knowing how she spent endless days and nights working as a housewife—cooking, cleaning, shopping, washing, clothing her kids, and being on call for whoever—became such a clear message to me not to end up like her.

Thankfully she had the immigrant’s dream. “This is America. Your life can be better than mine.” I can’t say I didn’t love her for that. I can’t say for sure, though, because I had no understanding of what love was.

Wearing beautiful clothing was important to my mother, but when she dressed up to go out the compliments she craved from my father weren’t there. Maybe it had something to do with the old country and the evil eye. Or maybe it didn’t seem manly to compliment. I never knew.
Simon, how do you like my new dress? How do I look?
She lived a life of silent and not-so-silent criticism from her loved ones without the counterbalance of positive words or understanding. I know that my father loved my mother in his own way, because when she died at age seventy his sadness included the sobbed words “I’ve lost my best friend.” It took me many years to realize that my parents had a marriage not unlike a lot of other parents’, especially immigrant parents at that time. Putting food on the table was primary. Open affection, friendship, and love were kept under wraps, maybe to be uncovered when the kids weren’t around.

My father was quiet, introverted, and insecure in most situations that were new to him. He was a commercial lithographer, but often he was the last one hired for a job and therefore the first one fired when work was scarce. A vicious cycle. He took solace from the pressures of his life with its unemployment and financial insecurity by playing cards with his friend Max from the third floor of our building and placing bets on horses with the local bookie. His dream was to make a small killing, not in the stock market or in the lottery like today’s dreamers, but at the racetrack.

My parents argued about money, but it was often one-sided. She told him that the household allowance he gave her was too little, and complained bitterly about his spending some of it betting on horses at Belmont Park racetrack. He’d retreat to the living room to silently read the newspaper. There even came a time when I, taking my mother’s part, wouldn’t or couldn’t talk to my father because of some disagreement or other. I wish I could remember the tipping point, but I can’t. That’s just what it was. A tipping point. An accumulation of the strain of parents simmering just below the boiling point, the lack of privacy and space, and the noise—amplified in my ears by my growing desires for independence.

In between my bouts of discontent were long periods of happiness. My friends were important to me, as were my babysitting jobs, which paid enough so that I could buy whatever a few carefully saved dollars could buy. I had also started taking clarinet lessons, an instrument I wanted desperately to play. Some of the more nosy neighbors would challenge me with their usual prying. “A girl playing the clarinet?” That always bothered me, but not enough to stop my working toward the goal of becoming a professional clarinetist. My teenage years were spent being in love with my instrument, my high school, my new friends there, and the freedom I had to travel to different parts of the city. That included going with my sister and her friends or just hanging out with mine. It was during those high school years that I started to go to concerts at Carnegie Hall. My horizon was expanding and I loved it.

Eventually my brother Harry married Norma, who lived in our building, and my sister Shirley married Carl, who lived in our neighborhood. The arguments between my parents petered out, coinciding with my father’s early retirement. By then I was totally consumed with the clarinet. The sound of the sewing machine became a distant background hum to my incessant practicing on the instrument, which, by the way, neither parent, both infinitely patient with me, ever complained about.

By the time I was in college the sewing machine had been moved from the dinette into the one bedroom, which my parents had reclaimed from Shirley, Harry, and me. The dinette, with a narrow cot pushed against one of its walls, became my bedroom. There was an eerie quiet in the apartment when I became the only child left there. I especially missed my sister, because I forgot to mention that I was a tag-along kid. Where Shirley went, I wanted to go, and most times did. By the time I was in high school we were the best of friends. When she married I felt a deep loneliness, but by then I was already in college, fulfilling my mother’s immigrant wishes without realizing it. “This is America. Your life can be better than mine.”

MICHAEL BRESCIA

Physician, cofounder and executive medical director of Calvary Hospital in the Bronx

(1933– )

We had a four-room apartment in a walk-up building. My three sisters, believe it or not, slept in one of the two bedrooms, in one bed. My parents had the other bedroom. I slept in the living room on what’s called in Italian a
branda
, a foldout bed, that was kept in the closet when it wasn’t used. It was great when one of my sisters got married because then there were only two sisters at home, but I still didn’t get a bedroom. At times there’d be conversations going on around me or my sisters would be entertaining their boyfriends on the sofa in the living room, while I’d be lying on my branda in the middle of the room.

The insulation in that room was bad. It was freezing in the winter, and we had no blankets to speak of. My father would put his heavy coat on top of me when he came home from work. That was my blanket. Other than that, there was only like leftover cloth and stuff that my grandmother brought over on the boat from Italy. The bedsheet was made from sacks that originally held rice that they stitched together. This was about as comfortable as sandpaper. I would’ve frozen to death if my father hadn’t given me his coat.

But I had no negative feelings because I didn’t even imagine how others might’ve slept. I felt very loved. My three sisters spoiled me as much as you could spoil any kid in the Bronx. I was this little prince when I was born, and to this day I’m very spoiled. When my dad was up in the morning, I could smell the coffee brewing even before I got out of bed. That was such a wonderful smell. Such a wonderful memory. There just was no room. We were stuffed into that apartment.

My dad was an extremely wonderful guy. He had no education, but he was determined to get himself a civil service job so that after the Depression he would be more secure. He was hit hard by the Depression because he was out of work a lot. He finally got a job with the Housing Authority and became a supervisor in one of the projects in 1938. His dream for me was to be a plumber.

He pointed out that it was complicated to change a pipe. At that time all the pipes were steam-fitted. He said, “Look, here’s Nick the plumber. Look at the car he drives! Look at the house he has! He always makes a living no matter what’s going on. And Mickey”—’cause he never had any great aspirations for what I was going to do with myself—“you gotta become a plumber, you gotta get a trade.”

I’ll confess that in P.S. 76 the teachers were anxious to get rid of me, to have me leave to go to Evander Childs High School. I was not a great student and spent lots of time with my friends in the streets. That changed when I went to high school.

I was challenged by this teacher, Mrs. Lubell. She looked at my IQ test scores and said that they were definitely not my scores. She wanted to know where I sat. Well, I sat next to my friend Menasha, who was smart. Mrs. Lubell was sure that my test was not on the up-and-up because she knew me as a pain in the neck. She thought that I cheated, that those high scores weren’t really mine. So I had to retake the IQ test and I suddenly found myself removed to another classroom, which was far more challenging, and Mrs. Lubell was my new homeroom teacher.

It was a bridge from my group of kids who I hung out with, who were totally unmotivated, to this other group who were motivated educationally. So I figured that I could sit in the class with the advanced kids but still have a leather coat, a ducktail haircut, and have lunch and hang out with the other guys.

I would do their book reports in the cafeteria during lunch. They’d get in line, and I’d say, “Tell me what the book was about.” Like tell me what the basic story was. And they’d say, “Well, it’s about this guy, he got shot and blah blah blah.” So I would construct a page of stuff having never read the book. And the guys I did it for, they very much respected me ’cause I helped them out. That meant that I got respect in the street. I also got girlfriends.