My Mistake (3 page)

No one shows up. I feel panicky and cold and sweaty. Where is he? Fifteen minutes go by. Trembling, I find a cop and tell him the situation. He asks if I know my family's home phone number. CHelsea 2-4685. He calls and my mother answers. Somehow it's all worked out, and the cop takes me up the wide stairs to where my father is still waiting. He apologizes to me for the confusion, and I begin to calm down, but he also finds it surprising that I was so frightened. “Did you really think I had abandoned you?” he asks. Again, the bemusement, and a sense that my brother and I are perhaps less cherished than provided for, but this is at least partly the style—almost the vogue—in middle-class parenting of the Forties.

 

Ten

 

My brother and I are always fighting—“roughhousing,” my parents call it. Mike beats me up a lot. I spend much of the year in a headlock. But I am a genius teaser, an unremitting critic of his asthma and flat feet.

We cut the heads off wooden matches and then use a wire cutter to snip off the heads of pins. We force the blunt end of the pins into one end of the matches, use an X-acto knife to put slits in the other end, put paper “fins” in the slits, and then hurl these tiny missiles at each other. When thrown correctly, the pinpoints go through clothes and sting the target nicely. We have a rule: No aiming above the shoulders. My mother discovers us at this sport, is horrified, and forbids us to ever play it again.

I don't know if our rivalry is unusually intense, but it is
our
rivalry, and I can't imagine any other brothers' competition being fiercer. It is like a project, an enterprise that we feel obliged to sustain. We are, after all, competing for the greatest prize in the history of the world—our mother's love and attention.

Despite the sibling mayhem, I feel safe at home on West 4th Street. I can go about the city, or at least the Village, alone, but if I go more than three blocks away and find myself in a place I don't recognize, a blanket of cold terror begins to settle around me, and I retreat.

And when the family drives to Uncle Enge's house in the country together, my father and brother sit in the front seat and begin talking about being lost, to tease me, but I don't know they are teasing—they fool me every time—and that same cold terror comes over me. They can't have any idea how cruel this is.

And there is terror of an abstract kind: arithmetic books. 6+3 was easy. 6+7. Doable. 58+174. I could handle that. But farther ahead in this year's arithmetic book impossibilities lurk. Multiplication, long division, and especially division in which the number outside the house is bigger than the number inside the house. How can that possibly make sense? Mike shows me his math book; it has problems that look like division with nothing at all outside the house—just a
V
with a bar extending to the right and a number underneath. “Square roots,” Mike says. “You'll never be able to understand them, because you're an idiot.”

Near our brownstone on West 4th is a movie theater that all the kids in the neighborhood call The Dump. I won't go there without my brother, but when we do go, it is a wild kind of fun. The Dump shows W. C. Fields shorts, Buck Rogers serials, cheesy Western features. It
is
a dump. It is mayhem in there. Almost all boys. Kids shout out curses, throw soda at each other, get into fights. The management seems not to care. Maybe there is no management—maybe someone has designed The Dump as a cave of childhood disinhibition. The admission price is seven cents. By some group unconscious agreement, you get a nickel from your parents and beg the other two cents from passers-by: arithmetic in action.

 

My school report from Little Red says what it has always said, from kindergarten on: There is some praise of my intelligence and abilities but it's followed by something like, “Danny is an anxious child who continues to prefer fantasy play to organized games and sports. He is preoccupied with being ‘right' all the time, which makes his insecurity all the more evident.”

 

In fourth and fifth grades I have a titanic crush on a blond girl, one of the few non-Jews in the class (thus beginning a romantic pattern for my Oedipal half-Jewish self). She is the daughter of a respected actress. I try to sit next to her in class, and she looks at me with distaste and moves away. But one day, when we are playing Spin the Bottle in someone's apartment, I spin the bottle and it points at her. She's clearly exasperated but says, “Come on,” and leads me to the small bedroom where everyone closes the door and kisses—or pretends to, as I am sure is going to happen now. But no. She says, “Do you want to do this right?” I stammer something and she pushes me down on the bed and lies on top of me and kisses me and moves her hips against me. Then she says we have to go back, leaving me close to comatose with pleasure and bafflement, and a cigarillo erection.

 

Eleven

 

We've moved from the Village to Nyack, New York, two-fifths small-town white Protestants, two-fifths recent immigrant families and “ethnic”—blacks, Italians, Irish—one-fifth Wonder Bread commuters. My parents can no longer afford the tuition at Little Red. I am in sixth grade at the Liberty Street School, and how could it be more different from Little Red? It couldn't. Desks in rows? No circles of chairs for discussion?
Grades?
A black kid saying to me, “Give me yo lunch money, white boy”? Bullying of every other kind? Lunch money itself? Fierce Darwinism on the playground. Softball with no gloves? The word “nigger”? A girl who “likes” me? Jeannie—she's cute. Wait! Another one! Katie—very blond, very pretty. They're friends. They want me to go with them to the movies up on Main Street on Saturday. They buy me popcorn. They both hold hands with me.

Mrs. Delaney, my teacher, and her husband are visiting my family for dinner. (We live in a white stucco house across from a convent, with a fine view of the Hudson River.) Mrs. Delaney makes it clear that she is Anglo-Irish rather than Irish-Irish. She says to my parents in her soft, semi-Southern accent, “It's so good to have Danny in our class—a real American boy.”

“American?” my mother says.

“Well, I mean a real American. Not Italian or Greek or anything like that. And then there are all the Negroes.”

In fact, although my mother is indeed a “real American”—Mary Randolph Grace, descended from the aforementioned William the Conqueror (according to a silly, self-published vanity book,
Fitz Randolph Traditions,
written by a maiden aunt)—she helped found the Newspaper Guild. And my brother, Michael Grace Menaker, and I are the “real-American” half-Jewish atheist sons of a father who is or at least was a member of the Communist Party and whose own parents never married, and whose last name is a corruption of the Hebrew name of a clan of rabbis. Neighbors in Nyack have complained of my bringing Negroes home to play with after school. One of them, Maurice, is too old and big for sixth grade, but he serves as my bodyguard against the bullies who have threatened me as a matter of routine.

The one thing that seems to bother Mrs. Delaney about me is that I am the only boy in the class who has long hair—that is, who doesn't have a crewcut. One day, she calls me up to the front of the room and asks me to sit in a chair facing the other kids. She starts to braid my hair. Everybody laughs and I duck away from her and go back to my desk. Not only do I not mind what has just happened, I enjoy it.

 

One of the first questions other kids in Nyack ask me is “What church do you go to?” I have never known anyone who went to church or even to synagogue except my New York dentist, Dr. M. Joel Friedman. He once invited my family to Passover and I had to read a passage from whatever it is that you read from. I had made my parents swear that I wouldn't have to read. But I did have to. There were maybe forty people spread across two adjoining rooms, and each reader used a microphone. When it was my turn, instead of “the sacred hand of Israel,” I read “the scared hand of Israel,” and everyone laughed. I was humiliated.

In Nyack, I don't care to talk about my half-Jewishness when asked the unprecedented church question. There are only two or three Jewish kids in my class, as opposed to the ninety per cent at Little Red, and they and their families keep somewhat to themselves. I have never met anyone who goes to the Methodist church, so I say “Methodist.” My mistake. This satisfies my interrogators for a while. But later on, when I am best friends with the son of the Dutch Reformed minister (I steal money from his family's house when they are away), my friends find out that my claim to churchgoing Methodism isn't true. I'm in tight enough by then to survive this mendacity.

 

It's recess, and while running around the playground at the Liberty Street School, I fall and break my arm. I'm taken to Nyack Hospital and my parents show up and I have surgery to set my arm. Sometime later I find myself lying up in the air, looking down at my body in a hospital bed and at my parents and my brother, who is fourteen, gathered around the bed. Above me, the ceiling dematerializes and I turn my head around to see—I swear to you—a great white light, forming a tunnel, leading up and away into a glorious realm of existence far superior to the one below me. I can see indistinct figures within the light, and they are beckoning me in dulcet tones to join them. It's tempting, but somehow I understand that it isn't time to go there yet. So I turn myself over in mid-air, so that I am floating on my back, and I slowly and reluctantly descend toward the bed. I fit perfectly into my body, and I wake up. For the first time I can remember, I feel great happiness and great sadness at the same time. How can that be?

 

Thirteen

 

At Uncle Enge's Guest Camp, I am the waiter for the children's table. These are the kids too young to go to the boys' camp. Or they're girls. I steal change from the little cup in the top drawer of the desk in the business office of the lodge and take it down the road to Gibson's Grove. I buy ice cream and candy and play pinball. The jukebox on the porch overlooking the lake sends Kay Starr's “Wheel of Fortune” out over the water day and night—you can hear it everywhere.

My uncle's partner, Glen, runs the business part of the Guest Camp. That he and Enge are a gay couple I won't realize for another year or two. Glen is tall and slender, from the Midwest, mild, pleasant, droll. He sings solos for the choir of the Methodist church in Great Barrington. I learn dozens of hymns from listening to him sing in the farmhouse, accompanied by Enge on the piano. “Beulah Land,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “In the Garden.” This last always makes me laugh, because a part of the first verse goes, “And the voice I hear / Falling on my ear / The Son of God discloses.” How Glen fetched up here I (once again) don't know. Later, when I am fifteen or so, a local teenager whom Enge has fired from his summer job accuses Enge and Glen of homosexuality. He says he has seen them having sex in their bedroom. State troopers pull up in the driveway. Charges are brought, and there is a trial. Enge's lawyer is Tom McDade, the ex-FBI man, now comptroller of General Foods, who has gotten to know my family because he was a counselor at Pete's camp for a few summers. Tom took a liking to my whole family, kept my father and Enge out of trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee, built a house nearby, and was godfather to Mike and me.

I don't attend the trial but am told that Tom asked the kid on the witness stand exactly how it was that he saw the act. The kid stumbled around. Tom asked if it was through the keyhole of their bedroom door. The kid said, “Yes! That was it.” Tom said, “But there is no keyhole in that door.” The judge dismissed the case.

 

I organize an “army” of the children I wait on, and we use sticks for guns and go on “raids” on the adults' cabins—no doubt often when they are taking a nap or trying to have sex. I love ordering the kids around, a nascent will to power that I never come to attain fully as an adult; it remains largely a matter of fantasy because I don't have the guile—or the temporary, conniving obsequiousness, or the genuine authority—necessary to get all the way up there. I will come close, though. Not bad. In my thirties and forties, I will begin to learn to hold down the insecure tyrant more securely, kowtow more, strategize, triangulate, navigate. It will always make me queasy, but it works, doesn't it? And it's necessary.

My “soldiers” at the Guest Camp desert, because young as they are, they get that I'm playing this game largely to boss them around. Same happened at Little Red, where I organized a “gang” on the playground. They all defected after a few weeks, and I was left to fume and wonder why.

 

Fourteen

 

I am sitting at the kitchen counter in our house in South Nyack. My mother arrives home from her arduous commute to the offices of
Fortune,
where she has become a legendary copy editor—an expert on grammar, usage, idiom. She was a Classics major at Bryn Mawr and knows Greek and Latin. She is beautiful—she always wears her brown hair in a bun, always acts in a somewhat flirtatious way, even with Mike and me, always makes an impression of effortless good looks. She says to me, “When I got off the bus I heard one Negro boy on a bicycle say to another, who wanted a ride, ‘Get the fuck up on the bicycle.'”

I have never heard her use this word before. She says, “I wonder what part of speech ‘the fuck' is in that sentence structure.”

She has already threatened to disown me if she ever hears me say “Tiffany's” again—instead of “Tiffany.”

Another evening, around the same time, she tells my father and brother and me, at dinner, of a researcher who burst into tears when she jokingly said to her that day, about a question of factual accuracy, “Let me know when you make up your alleged mind.” My mother asks, “Isn't it clear that I was just kidding?” Before she dies, suffering from metastatic pancreatic cancer, forty years later, she writes a last entry in her journal: “Is this what I get for feeling so superior my entire life?”