Modern American Memoirs (8 page)

It was on 98th Street, across from the tall long sinister stone wall on which the Third Avenue El trains came to rest, that I began to know I would never get to America. Though I learned in the kindergarten on 96th Street, among the many other English words that I taught my brother with a prissy, powerful passion, that I lived in America, it was not the America promised me in Warsaw or by the chocolate sweetness of my father's mouth. There were no sacks of candy and cookies, no dolls, no perennial summer that meant
America. America was a stern man whose duty it was to cure us of being the cosseted spoiled little beasts our mother and her idiot sisters had allowed to flourish. At the far remove of decades, I can understand how infuriating it was for this indulged semibachelor to be saddled with a wife and two noisy children whom he hadn't the courage to abandon nor the wish to live with. Nothing to do but mold us with speed and force into absolute obedience, to make his world more tolerable and, I often suspected, to avenge himself on us for existing.

It was his habit to take a constitutional after dinner every night, a health measure he clung to all his life, as he clung to the bowel-health properties of the cooked prunes he ate every morning. One autumn twilight, when my brother was about four and I five and a half, we walked down 98th Street, toward Third Avenue, I averting my eyes from the tall black wall that deadened the other side of the street. Somewhere on Third Avenue we slowed at a row of shops, one of them a glory of brilliantly lit toys. Carefully, deliciously, my brother and I made our choices. He wanted the boat with big white sails to float in the bathtub or maybe the long line of trains that ran on tracks or maybe the red fire engine with a bell. I chose a big doll whose eyes opened and closed and a house with tiny beds and chairs and a clothes wringer in the kitchen. Or, maybe, the double pencil box crammed with coloring pencils, serious school pencils, a pen holder, and three pen points. As my brother lilted on in gay covetousness, the wariness that was already as much a part of me as blue eyes and wild blond hair made me suddenly turn. It was night. There was no mother, no father, on the dark street and I didn't know where we were. Feeling my fear, my brother turned, too, and began to cry heartbreakingly—no imperious shrieks for attention now, this was deep sorrow, the sorrow of the lost and abandoned. I felt, too, the cold skinlessness, the utter helplessness, the sickness of betrayal. I wanted to cry but I must not. As in the heavy rooms of my later dreams, as on the ship when we were separated from our sick mother, I told him not to worry, I would take care of him. Look—I wasn't afraid, I wasn't crying. By the time—and I cannot possibly estimate its length because the overwhelming fear and the effort to control it filled all dimensions—my mother burst out of a doorway to run to us, I had become, in some corner of my being, an
old woman. It didn't matter that she hugged and kissed us and that my father carefully explained that it was merely a lesson to teach us to walk with him and not linger. I held them to be bad strangers and would not talk to either for days.

My brother sloughed off the incident, as he did many others; I remembered and judged, accumulating a sort of Domesday Book on my father's deeds. He sensed and feared it, and it was that fear on which I battened, the tears he could not make me shed freezing as an icy wall between us.

Writer Russell Baker was born in Loudoun County, Virginia, the son of a stonemason and a schoolteacher. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University, he began his career as a journalist for the
Baltimore Sun.
Now his “Observer” column for the
New York Times
runs in hundreds of other newspapers; it won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1979. He won another Pulitzer Prize for his popular memoir
Growing Up (
1982
).

Growing Up
touches on his own life almost glancingly. His subsequent memoir
, The Good Times (
1989
),
covers his years of marriage and parenthood
.

In 1931, his mother, Lucy Elizabeth Baker, was a young widow. With her son and daughter, she moved to Newark, New Jersey, to live with relatives. The Depression was on; she could not find a permanent job
.

 

from G
ROWING
U
P

M
y mother brought us to Newark in January 1931. The stock market had collapsed fifteen months earlier, but though business was bad, Washington people who understood these things did not seem alarmed. President Hoover refused to use the scare word “recession” when speaking about the slump. It was merely “a depression,” he said. Nothing to panic about. Good times were just around the corner.

My mother intended to live with her brother Allen a few months until she could find work and rent a place of her own. Allen was twenty-eight, five years younger than she, and blessed with the optimism of youth. He was shocked when she arrived in Newark without Audrey and scolded her gently for breaking up her family.

“Three can starve as cheap as two,” he told her.

Uncle Allen had no intention of starving. He had left school in tenth grade after “Papa” died and had worked since he was fourteen
years old, moving from job to job and always improving his income, and he was now confident he could cope with whatever lay ahead.

The daily news stories of deepening hard times did not unnerve him. For Uncle Allen the truly hard times seemed all behind him. He had been a day laborer in a Virginia sawmill crew, fished in New England waters aboard a commercial trawler, jerked sodas in a cigar store, and sold groceries over the counter in Washington. In his early twenties he had moved up to a suit-and-necktie job as a salesman in New York.

He was short—scarcely five feet six inches tall—and spoke in a quiet southern drawl. After the men of Morrisonville, who were cut to the long-shanked mountaineer pattern and sat down to supper in overalls, he seemed to me the complete city slicker with his dapper manners and his white shirts with sleeve garters and detachable collars starched stiff as iron. I studied him in fascination as he polished his shoes each night after supper and inspected his suits for wrinkles and stains. He owned two suits, which was a sign of great wealth in my eyes, and pressed them on an ironing board in the basement every Sunday, with a gallon jug of benzine and a white cloth at hand to remove spots encountered along the way.

Like my mother, Uncle Allen believed that with hard work, good character, and an honest nature a man could make something of himself in spite of bad times, and he worked at the salesman's trade with total dedication. He had sold wholesale groceries in Brooklyn and cheap tobacco in Yonkers and Staten Island. An oleomargarine distributor gave him a chance to improve himself with a $25-a-week route in north Jersey and he moved to Newark, but after giving haven to my mother, Doris, and me, he went looking for something that would pay him even more.

The daily firings produced by the withering economy offered loopholes of opportunity for a young man who kept his eyes open. One night just before we arrived from Virginia, Uncle Allen called at the Newark plant of the Kruger Beverage Company to ask if they needed a salesman.

“I don't need anybody right now, but there may be an opening in the morning,” the sales-crew chief told him. This was Depression code talk. Uncle Allen had heard it before. Translated, it meant: “We're going to fire a couple of men later tonight and will need a
new salesman tomorrow who will do the work of both for less salary than we're paying either one.” The man suggested he come back in the morning to speak to the manager, and added a piece of advice: “And be dressed like you're going to your own wedding.” That evening Uncle Allen bought a pair of spats and put $5 down on a black overcoat with a velvet collar. Next morning he had a $30-a-week job selling carbonated beverages.

His optimism was more than matched by his wife's. She was a sassy, rambunctious New York girl he had met while living in Brooklyn. Aunt Pat was now twenty-four. They had been married four years and were as yet childless. Uncle Allen awed me with his cool elegance, but Aunt Pat I loved from the start. She and Uncle Allen were a study in the attraction of opposites. He was short, quiet, neat to the point of fussiness. She was big, noisy, and relished messy human combat. He was a country boy from Virginia with a southern drawl and a dry laconic wit, a Protestant whose family had been in Virginia since 1666 and produced several generations of colonial gentry. She was a New Yorker, half Irish and half Cuban, who had grown up in a Catholic orphanage and knew so little of country life that she proposed cutting the milk bill by buying a cow, keeping it in the backyard, and feeding it on scraps from the table. After her orphanage childhood she roomed in Brooklyn boarding-houses, working at a variety of jobs: waiting on tables in Wall Street lunchrooms, running an elevator at Gimbel's department store, working telephone switchboards.

What she and Uncle Allen had in common was the waif's childhood, but, instead of hardening them against the world, it had left them sympathetic to life's other losers. And so, cheerfully, on $30 a week, they took us in.

During those first weeks in Newark I was enchanted by Aunt Pat's ebullient city style. Morrisonville women were reticent and weary. Not Aunt Pat. The house rang to her cry of “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” which she uttered whenever something startled her, whether it was splashing grease, a neighbor's loud radio, or the landlord at the door trying to collect the rent a day before it was due. She was a full-time combatant in the battle of life and flung herself into it with zest, and when she encountered an enemy or a challenger she gave him “a piece of her mind.”

“They'd better not tangle with your Aunt Pat,” my mother would say, “because she'll give them a piece of her mind.”

Childless, she doted on children and rarely left the house without dragging Doris or me behind her to introduce us to the marvels of urban living. She hauled me with her to the corner delicatessen one day to buy three slices of bologna, and when the counterman gave her the wrong change she gave him a tongue lashing that had him whining apologies before she relented. Storming back to the house, flushed with satisfaction, she shouted back at me—I always seemed to be five feet behind and running to catch up with her—“You've got to give these cheap chiselers a good piece of your mind.”

It was Aunt Pat who first stirred my love of newspapers. A hopeless news junkie, she was powerless to resist when a newsboy came up the street yelling, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” Rushing onto the sidewalk, surrendering two pennies for the paper, she stood there staring in wonder at the wet black headlines.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she cried if the news was sensational enough, and when I asked what was wrong she patiently explained the news and why it was grave.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

“What's it say, Aunt Pat?”

“Somebody sent Dutch Schultz a red rose.”

Dutch Schultz was Newark's most notorious gangster. But a red rose?

“It means they're going to bump him off,” she explained. “When a gangster is going to bump off another gangster he sends him a red rose to warn him.” For days afterwards I waited for an “Extra” about the bumping off of Dutch Schultz, but it did not come in my time.

Days when there were no news sensations the newsboys lived by their wits. Rushing out with her two cents one day at the cry of “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” Aunt Pat unfolded the paper and studied the front page in puzzlement. There was no wet black headline, only the routine daily humdrum.

She shouted at the newsboy speeding off up the street.

“Hey, what's the big news?”

“Barney Google just shot Sparkplug,” the boy yelled back.

Barney Google was a comic strip character and Sparkplug was his racehorse, a stolid square-cut hay burner to whom Barney was
devoted. Aunt Pat eagerly opened the paper to the comic strips, then showed it to me. Sparkplug was as sound as ever, and Barney was chatting peaceably with him.

“Barney Google didn't shoot Sparkplug,” I said.

“No, dear,” she said. “Your Aunt Pat's been played for a sucker.” She laughed and laughed at that, and when Uncle Allen came home she told him the story and Uncle Allen laughed too.

Except for Aunt Pat, my transition to city life was a series of agonies. The apartment to which she and Uncle Allen welcomed us was in a declining row house on Wakeman Avenue. There was a kitchen in the basement, where we ate, and on the first floor a parlor and two bedrooms. Everything was slathered over in a depressing dark green paint. A brass chandelier hung from the parlor ceiling, and a naked light bulb illuminated two overstuffed chairs, a lumpy brown sofa, and a glistening black table on which sat an Atwater Kent radio. We had the use of a narrow backyard, enclosed by board fences, in which soil as hard as rock produced nothing but a sickly crop of weeds.

On my first day in Newark when I went out front to play and stepped off the curb, a car came within inches of killing me. The driver cursed me violently, leaped from his car, and carried me howling to the door. The screech of brakes had brought Aunt Pat on the run, and when the driver made the mistake of screaming at her, too, Aunt Pat gave him a piece of her mind and sent him packing, but days passed before I dared step out front again.

The sidewalk swarmed with streetwise children. One, a girl of ten or so, lured me into her house one afternoon by promising me a piece of cake. She towered over me and seemed authoritative and maternal, so I did not object when she said before I could have any cake she would have to take off my pants. Being only five years old, I still wore short pants, and since authoritative maternal women had been removing my pants all my life, I let her have her way. I was uneasy though when, having dropped the pants to my ankles, she stepped back and asked if I wanted her to remove hers, too.

I had the timid five-year-old's desire to be agreeable and must have said yes, for she was out of her underwear in a twinkling and standing before me with her petticoat raised to her shoulders. The passion that wakened in me was anger, for I knew then that she had
duped me. I knew then that her promise of cake was false, that there was no cake. She had promised it only to trick me into playing this silly girl's game. Angrily I buckled my trousers and hurried home to report the fraud to Aunt Pat. Aunt Pat smiled as I started to relate how I had been cheated, but the smile faded as I elaborated details.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she roared.

After that I was forbidden the sidewalk without supervision and sentenced to confinement in the backyard with Doris. I hated that backyard. I hated the ugly board fence, I hated the sickly weeds, I hated the stone and brick walls and dirty windows that glowered down at me when I searched for the sky, and I hated the laundry that dangled from the overhead clotheslines as far as I could see.

I especially hated the cod liver oil, a nauseating goo tasting of raw liquefied fish, which was spooned twice a day down my gullet and Doris's. It was good for us, it would ward off dreadful diseases, or so Aunt Pat had persuaded my mother. There were plenty of diseases. Scarlet fever, mumps, chicken pox, and whooping cough floated in the air. Polio was around too, killing and crippling. Every neighborhood had a child with a twisted stick of a leg encased in metal braces. Cod liver oil was the defense.

“It's good for you,” Aunt Pat declared sweetly twice each day, advancing into the backyard with her potion of bottled fish oil in one hand and tablespoon in the other.

“I hate it. It makes me throw up.”

“Be a good boy now. You don't want to get infantile paralysis, do you? It's good for you.”

It had the viscosity of axle grease. It did no good to gulp it down quickly, because it coated the lining of mouth and esophagus like a thick layer of glue. It did no good to vomit it up either. Aunt Pat did not become angry when this happened. She did not give me a piece of her mind, but simply poured another tablespoon full and smiled sweetly. “Come on now, it's good for you.”

The cod liver oil failed, and there was more misery. Both Doris and I came down with whooping cough. The Newark health authorities nailed a quarantine notice on the front door to warn the neighborhood against us. The whooping cough passed, but humiliation lingered on. The authorities forbade us to go outside without wearing broad yellow arm bands marking us as disease carriers.

I hated the yellow arm band that made me a figure of shame. Very soon I hated the entire Newark health department. This bureaucracy, for reasons still obscure, had decided that my posture was a disgrace and had to be corrected. Accompanied by my mother, I was hauled before bureaucrats and stripped naked, pummeled, poked, and photographed by white-clad posture experts. There were worried scowls from doctors, nurses, and photographers studying the photographs.

“Something has to be done about this posture,” the doctor said.

If not corrected immediately, well…Various consequences were mentioned. The most dreadful was “curvature of the spine.” A corrective gymnastic program was proposed: somersaults, headstands, backflips, vigorous exercise on the chinning bar, flying rings, parallel bars. These would straighten me up.