My Mistake (2 page)

Every summer is absolutely enchanted, endless—until it ends.

 

In New York, I've learned to turn the dial on the veneered wooden boxy radio we have—a dial set against a lit-up, canvas-colored rhomboid—and one Saturday morning, I find a station in New Jersey, WAAT, that plays an hour of country music. I discover T. Texas Tyler and Ernest Tubb and Kitty Wells and Roy Acuff and of course Hank Williams. My mother comes into the living room one morning and finds me sitting on the floor listening to Ernest Tubb—probably “Soldier's Last Letter.” “What on earth is that caterwauling?” she says. She says it not in true horror but with her characteristic demure bemusement. She also sincerely wants an answer. WAAT broadcasts a polka hour before the country-music program, and I like that, too—it seems equally “real” in a way that I can't then understand. But it also sounds pretty watery next to “Blood on the Saddle.”

 

Five

 

In the “Fives” at the Little Red School House, the very progressive private school on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, a new boy arrives. Walter Brooks. He's black and can sing “Cincinnati's Dancing Pig” well. When I get home from school, my mother asks me if Walter has arrived. I say yes. She says, “He's the Negro boy, I think.” I say, “I don't know. I forget.” Many years later, it occurs to me that our teachers' asking Walter to sing “Cincinnati's Dancing Pig” from time to time smacked a little of minstrelsy.

Little Red is in fact filled with Little Reds. Our Principal, Randolph Smith, comes close to being subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Or he actually is subpoenaed. The kids from the parochial school on the southwest corner of Bleecker and Sixth Avenue throw fluorescent light bulbs at us as we march to and from the playground around the corner on Houston Street. They are hoping to kill us with the poison gas said to be inside the bulbs.

 

Seven

 

As we march to and from the playground in the fall of 1948, we live up to the parochial-school kids' worst opinion of us by chanting a chant for Henry Wallace for President—a chant we seem to know osmotically, from the pink air we all breathe. It goes something like this:

 

Dewey is in the outhouse crying like a baby.

Truman is in the doghouse, barking like crazy.

Wallace is in the White House, talking to a lady.

 

Eight to twelve

 

Every summer at Enge's Guest Camp a truck drives around the long circular driveway and along the paths that lead from one cabin to another blasting out a fog of DDT, a common anti-mosquito practice. Some other kids and I run through the fog for the fun of disappearing and reappearing. We try not to breathe the stuff in, but we don't try all that hard. Is it this—or the cigarette smoking all around me and then
by
me; or the city air, which leaves particulate soot on our windowsills in New York; or the exhaust from cars and trucks when, almost twenty years later, I spend two summers as a toll taker on the New York State Thruway; or bad luck; or punishment for my sins—that I started paying for at sixty-six, when I was first diagnosed with lung cancer? One man at the Guest Camp, a financial guy of some kind, plays gin rummy all day under a plume of smoke from the monstrous cigar he keeps plugged in his mouth. He has a constant tic of moving it back and forth, from one side to the other, like a horizontal windshield wiper. Sometime later, he is sent to jail for embezzlement.

There is a zinc icebox beside and below the raised back porch of the Guest Camp's lodge, which overlooks the lake. Once a week or so in the summer, an ice truck delivers two huge slabs of ice—five feet by three feet by one foot—that the driver and Enge's waiters wrestle into the box with gigantic black tongs. Like a monster's two snaggled incisors. At the bottom of the icebox is a drain for the runoff. The men release the first slab a foot or so above the bottom of the icebox, and the impact of ice on zinc sounds mortal. Enge and the cook and the waiters store some perishable food in there. You open the top of the icebox by means of a rope and pulley, and there is butter and bacon and beef and broccoli. If I jump up and grab the rope high enough, it lifts me off the porch as the top goes down. I am that skinny, from that early illness. That's what Dr. Mandel says.

An Italian guy who drives a fruit-and-vegetable truck around to the various camps and resorts on the lake pulls into the circular driveway behind the lodge once a week or so. He holds up a plum and says, “It's-a beautiful, Engie—juss-a like-a youself.” Enge is in fact ugly, in a handsome way. Short, slender, with a large bald head (baldness from exposure to mustard gas in the First World War, he tells me) and very big ears and quite a nose—he resembles some portraits and statues of Cervantes and even more closely some images of Cervantes's creation, Don Quixote. And Gandhi.

On weekends Enge calls square dances in the lodge. He sits in a chair on top of a table with a primitive microphone and speakers that carry his voice around the big room.
I
put the chair on the table.
I
turn the amplifier on.
I
manfully hand Enge's accordion up to him.
I
know that he will call out “Four couples! Four couples!” to start things off.
I
know all the steps and dances—the allemandes, the do-si-dos, the grand right-and-lefts.
I
know gents to the center and break 'er down. I help new dancers when they get tangled up in complicated figures. I know how to swing my partner, usually three or four times my age, with one hand on her shoulder, one of her hands on my shoulder, and our other two hands clasped under the bridge. I know that at the end of a set, Enge is going to sing, slightly suggestively, “Take her out, you know where. / Take her out and give her air.” Sixty people or more dance on weekend nights. Sometimes there are squares in the card room and library, off the big room. Sometimes there is a game of Rock Crusher (oh, I know what that means), a form of high-low poker, going on at a table in the corner of the big room. Sometimes a CPA guest is adding columns of figures at that same table in between hands, amid the din and dancing, adding them so fast—running a pencil down the columns almost as fast as he would be if he were just crossing them out—that I can't believe it.

The guests are mainly Jewish, the sons and daughters or grandsons and granddaughters of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Their names are Mishkin, Goldberg, Leonard, Friedman, Cohen. They are doctors and lawyers and accountants and garment-industry types and schoolteachers. Moving up very fast, many have left their Brooklyn accents behind, but they're always dropping Yiddish words and phrases into their conversation, the most exotic, to me, being something that sounds like
machataynista
—which evidently denotes what an in-law on one side of a married couple is to an in-law on the other. A husband's brother's wife, say, to a wife's sister's husband. These Jews—so complicated. When my
WASP
y cousins from my mother's side of the family—my Aunt Priscilla Grace and her children—drive over from Milton, near Boston, to visit, they seem a different species altogether, with their Brahmin accents, untroubled brows, and apparent lack of complexities. (Later, I learn that they have their own problems, of course.) The guests have a wonderful time in this very basic camp setting, dancing, swimming, canoeing, drinking (before dinner; no alcohol at the tables on the long porch), going to Tanglewood to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to Jacob's Pillow for the dance festival.

I
get to go back up to the farmhouse with Readie and sleep in the back room over the kitchen. Mike and I take our .22 rifles into the woods and shoot at birds and squirrels. We sit at the “family table.” We swim for hours on end, playing water tag with the white float as a safe base. We are privileged and doted upon, partly because many guests want to get closer to my uncle, who is so charismatic and sociable.
I
get to lie on the lawn at the farmhouse and wait for the mailman to deliver the previous day's
New York Times,
which has the baseball box scores from two and even three days before that, so that reading them is like time travel. I live in the Yankees' past.

Do you believe—or remember? There was no television. So what was there? Charades, Scrabble, poker, canasta, gin rummy, backgammon, parlor games of all kinds, at camp and at the farmhouse. Someone who doesn't know the game goes out of the room for a few minutes, and Enge gives us The Principle: We're all to answer yes-or-no questions as if we're the person to our left. I always try to have a woman on my left. Enge has written two small Sentinel paperbacks about such party games: “72 Surefire Ways of Having Fun” and “The Life of the Party: 67 Ways to Have Fun.” That's 139 ways to have fun. And we sing. Camp songs, union songs, songs from the Spanish Civil War—“Freiheit!” is my favorite—American folksongs of all kinds. And Enge begins to teach me to play the guitar. And conversation—so much talking, arguing, laughter. At home in the Village, when I am nine or ten, we
rent
a television set for a week or so to watch the World Series. It's almost as big as a refrigerator and has a black-and-white screen the size of a Chiclet. That's it for TV.

Friends and relations surround me and Mike, in the country and in the city. The dinner table at the farmhouse and in the Village, especially during the autumn, often has ten or fifteen people sitting around it—uncles, cousins, friends—all declaiming and arguing, usually about politics, with loud denunciations of government and capitalism. This is where I learn my deep and nearly reflexive distrust of those in positions of power. The fine points of doctrine escape me, but generally: You can't trust them.

Despite a kind of built-in anxiety, almost surely the legacy of that same early-infancy, largely isolated hospital stay, I find the world enchanting, thick with point-making and sensations and love, love especially from Readie. Readie says to Enge no, she can't do work for him and look out for me and Mike at the same time. “He has some nerve, that man,” she says when he tells her to hang his laundry on the clothesline behind the house. “Your uncle is a trying case and a case to be tried,” she says. “Just because I'm black!” When the sheets are on the line, I run between them, inhaling sunshine and Tide and imagining that these are a ship's sails. When we're a little older, Readie takes on the care of the child of one of her sisters who can't care for him herself. He is two or three, and his name is Raymond, and now he comes up to the farmhouse with us, and my brother and I regard him as a sort of mascot.

If I make coffee for Readie, she says, “I want it black, just like me. But you don't have to make it. Slavery days are over. Someone just ought to tell your uncle. He don't seem to know.”

How Readie got to us I don't know. She was born in South Carolina, had many half-brothers and half-sisters, ate clay when she was little, she was so hungry, and picked cotton along with the rest of her family. She can barely write. Where she got her enormous warmth and affection and good sense from I also don't know, but I'm grateful for it in my mind every day, including this minute, at seventy-two, sitting once again in the farmhouse, when the memory of being able to so completely count on her makes me feel safe, protected by her love and vigilance, no matter what comes next.

If this picture of Readie bears a close resemblance to Faulkner's Dilsey and other, similar literary black nannies, there's no help for it. For this is what she is like, at least for Mike and me. As we all grow older, I will come to appreciate her for her robust humor and her keen insights into the ways my family worked and didn't work and her iron will about controlling—and refusing to dwell on—her diabetes. And then I will see, sadly, that she is becoming a hoarder in her small public-housing apartment in Chelsea, perhaps owing to her poverty-stricken childhood. But as children, Mike and I regard her as the safest refuge from our troubles and a sensible check on our bad behavior.

So I had two mothers. My mother and Readie. Readie called me and Mike “my babies.” She had, essentially, adopted us, as she adopted Raymond. And as my wife and I were later to adopt two children, our cynosures. I had two fathers, too. Well, three, actually. My father taught me to drive—lessons continued later by my brother—but usually, because of his handsome and charming immaturity, he sat in the back seat of my family much of the time. He may have worked better in the world than I knew, or know, but I didn't, and don't, know it. He was a nice guy. Drank a little too much, and when he did so, sometimes, mortifyingly, offered back rubs to my and my brother's girlfriends. Lived in my mother's shadow, dwelled on his failures. But still a charming and often spontaneous person. Then there was Enge, who began teaching me guitar, taught me square dancing, games, a little Yiddish, how to bid for eggs at a farmer's auction in Hillsdale, how to oil a rifle, how to make blintzes, how to oil a wood floor, how to tell a story. Then there was Mike, who provided me with some of the guidance and sternness I needed at home. There will be more fathers in my life.

I think that some of us have more than one mother and many if not most of us, especially boys, have more than one father.

 

Nine

 

From time to time, I see protectiveness underneath Mike's bullying, as when a friend and I spend a little too much time in the bathroom together and Mike figures out what's going on in there and puts a stop to it. He needn't have worried—I am passive and basically uninterested. Obliging. But he is looking out for me. He and Readie.

With my great but hidden anxiety, I take the train by myself from Great Barrington to New York—to Grand Central Terminal, in the middle of the summer. I have a dentist appointment in the city. My father will meet me at the information booth at Grand Central. The train comes in on the lower level. I wait at the small information booth there, while, as it turns out, my father is waiting for me at the main booth on the main level.