The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (5 page)

My dream of
away
remained fervent, however satisfied I actually found myself at Newark Rutgers, which was situated a little beyond the city’s commercial district at the “historic” end of the downtown streets, about a twenty-minute bus ride from my corner. It felt invigoratingly grown-up to be downtown not as a kid going to the movies with his friends or a boy out to Sunday dinner with his family or a lowly stock clerk mindlessly pushing a rack around S. Klein’s, but as the owner of spanking-new textbooks, with a businesslike briefcase (for his lunch) and a pipe in his pocket that he was learning to smoke. It appealed to my liberal democratic spirit to be taking college courses in a building that had once been a brewery and to be seated there alongside Italian and Irish kids from city high schools that had been foreign, unknowable, even unnervingly hostile to me when I was attending a neighborhood school whose student body was more than ninety percent Jewish. I considered it a kind of triumphant liberation to have been drawn into the city’s rivalrous ethnic society, especially as our liberal-arts studies were working—in my idealistic vision—to elevate us above serious social differences, to free from cultural narrowness and intellectual impoverishment the offspring of Weequahic’s Jewish businessmen as well as working-class boys from the Ironbound district. Casually making friends over paper-bag lunches with gentile classmates who had graduated from Barringer and South Side and Central and West Side—boys who previously had been nothing more to me than tough and generally superior adversaries in intercity sporting events—made me feel expansively “American.” I hadn’t any doubts that we Jews were already American or that the Weequahic section was anything other than a quintessentially American urban neighborhood, but as a child of the war and of the brotherhood mythology embodied in songs like Frank Sinatra’s “The House I Live In” and Tony Martin’s “Tenement Symphony,” I was exhilarated to feel in contact with the country’s much-proclaimed, self-defining heterogeneity.

At the same time, I knew that if I remained in our five-room flat on Leslie Street, living and studying in the bedroom that I had shared since earliest childhood with my brother, there would be increasing friction between my father and me, simply because I could no longer truthfully account to him, or to my mother, either—though she would never dare ask—for my weekend whereabouts or my Saturday-night hours. I was quite tame, a good, responsible boy with good, responsible friends; I couldn’t have been more dutiful and well mannered, and lacked anything resembling unconstrainable impulses; but I was also strong-minded and independent, and if my father were to challenge the ordering of my private life, now that I was a college student, I would feel suffocated by his strictures. I had also outgrown the family dinner table and was as impatient as any rapidly maturing adolescent with my parents’ conversation, but the main reason that I wanted to get away from home for my sophomore year was to protect a hardworking, self-sacrificing father and a devoted but determined son from a battle that they were equally ill equipped to fight.

My mother was really no problem. As soon as my brother and I started giving genuine signs of burgeoning independence, she had relaxed the exacting, sometimes overly fastidious strictures that had governed our early upbringing and began to be mildly intimidated by our airs of maturity; in a way she fell in love with us all over again, like a shy schoolgirl this time, hoping for a date. It was a rather prototypic kind of movement, I think, for the mother to go from nurturing her sons to being a little afraid of them and for the sons to move out of their mother’s province at thirteen or fourteen. Sandy—born when she was twenty-three, a pretty, very innocent young woman in a penniless marriage whose own girlhood had been rigorously overseen by a stern, tyrannical father—seems as a child to have felt more constrained by her vigilant mothering than I ever did, though he, no less than I, found more than a little sustenance in the inexhaustible maternal feeling that visibly instigated and tenderized that conscientiousness. Still and all, he may well have endured a more inflexible regimen, more assiduously imposed, than what befell me, coming five years later, after she’d had the education of raising him and when my father’s weekly Metropolitan paycheck had begun to mitigate their financial anxieties. To me, at eight, nine, and ten, home had seemed just perfect, but that was no longer so at sixteen and I wanted to get away.

I didn’t care where “away” was—one college would do as well as another. All I needed were professors and courses and a library. I’d study hard, get a “good education,” and go on to become the idealistic lawyer I’d imagined becoming since I was twelve. Since none of my immediate relatives had ever graduated from a liberal-arts college, there was no one to point me in the direction of his alma mater. And because of the war and the postwar draft, the generation of college-educated younger men whose example I might have followed had disappeared from the neighborhood entirely; when they showed up again, they were veterans on the GI Bill who seemed vastly older and unapproachable. Our only real tutors were the ex-GIs—the rumba dancers and service-station attendants, the make-out artists, soda jerks, and short-order cooks—who had little to do but hang around and play pickup basketball with us. Under the bleachers of the playground they taught us how to shoot craps and to play five-card stud with change stolen from our mothers’ purses and our fathers’ trouser pockets; but as for college guidance, I knew I had better look elsewhere.

My brother had been a Saturday student at the Art Students League in New York during his high school days and, after his discharge from the Navy, spent three years at Pratt Institute. While I was finishing high school, he would come home from Pratt on weekends to set up his easel in the dining room and, over a thick layer of old newspapers, lay out his paints and his drawing materials on the dining-room table; sometimes he would leave behind copies of paperback books he’d been reading on the subway and the train home. That’s how, at fifteen and sixteen, I came to read
Winesburg, Ohio
and
A Portrait of the Artist
and
Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.
He drew from nude models, he had his own apartment, as a sailor he’d sat in bars where there were whores, and now he did quick, expressive pen-and-ink sketches of Bowery bums. But great as my admiration was for these achievements, Sandy’s mode wasn’t one I could simply emulate: his studies were preparing him for a career as an artist, while my talent, as described in the family, was “the gift of the gab.”

In grade school I’d been taken once by my Uncle Ed, a cardboard-carton dealer, to see a football game at Princeton. I had not forgotten the campus—either the green quadrangles or the evocative word—yet it would never have occurred to me to apply there. I knew from my uncle that despite the presence of Einstein, to whose house we’d made a pilgrimage, Princeton didn’t “take Jews.” (That’s why we’d rooted so hard for Rutgers.) As for Harvard and Yale, not only did they seem, like Princeton, to be bastions of the gentile upper crust, socially too exclusive and unsympathetic, but their admissions officers were revealed by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith to employ “Jewish quotas,” a practice that disgusted a patriotic young American (let alone a member of an ineluctably Jewish family) like me. A champion of the Four Freedoms, a foe of the DAR, a supporter of Henry Wallace, I detested the idea of privilege that these famously elitist colleges, with their discriminatory policies, seemed to symbolize. Though I don’t think I could have expressed this then in so many words, I certainly didn’t want to recapitulate, at Harvard or Yale, my father’s struggle at the Metropolitan to succeed with an institution holding a long-standing belief in Protestant Anglo-Saxon superiority. What’s more, if I couldn’t win a scholarship to Rutgers, how could I expect assistance from the Ivy League?

There were other colleges, anyway, hundreds of them: Wake Forest, Bowling Green, Clemson, Allegheny, Baylor, Vanderbilt, Bowdoin, Colby, Tulane—I knew their names, if nothing more (not even precisely where all of them were), from listening to Stan Lomax and Bill Stern announce the football scores on the radio Saturday nights throughout the fall. I read the names of these places on the sports pages of the
Newark Evening News
and the
Newark Sunday Call
and saw them on the football-pool cards that you could buy at the candy store on our corner for as little as a quarter. The football pool was illegal—run, my father told me, by Longy Zwillman and the Newark mob—but I began to buy the cards when I was about eleven and, with a couple of other neighborhood kids, started selling them on the school playground for the candy-store owner when I was thirteen, establishing my sole affiliation ever with organized crime. Through the pool I probably became familiar with far more institutions of higher learning than was the college adviser at the high school, who had suggested to me, when I admitted I might actually like to become a journalist rather than a lawyer, that I should apply to the University of Missouri. When I told my parents her advice, my mother looked flabbergasted. “Missouri,” my mother repeated tragically. “They have a great journalism school,” I told her. “You’re not going to Missouri,” my father informed me. “It’s too far and we can’t afford it.”

It was during Christmas vacation from Newark Rutgers that I got to talking to my Leslie Street neighbor Marty Castlebaum, with whom I’d had a genial, if not particularly intimate, friendship ever since grade school. Marty, who is now a physician in New Jersey, was something of a loner—a skinny, very tall boy, seemingly not so obsessed with sex or so romantically adventurous as my best friends. He was a good, quiet student with an enthusiasm for baseball, very much the product of a respectable, secularized Jewish family. The Castlebaums’ outward configuration—and household orderliness—resembled my own family’s: a highly competent and well-mannered mother, a hardworking, forthright father (a lawyer, however, and so a big vocational notch up from mine), and an older brother whom Marty strikingly resembled. Though there was something cheery in his temperate character I’d always liked, I found him more housebound than the boys to whom I was closest. If I remember correctly, Marty practiced the piano with real devotion, which in my mind may have separated him a little too much from those of us who counterbalanced good grades and courteous conduct with shooting craps on the sly and (against the unlikely possibility of being called upon to produce one) storing sealed Trojans in our wallets. His family lived even closer to the corner candy store than mine did, but Marty was only rarely to be seen hanging out in the back booths or standing outside by the fire hydrant where I would sometimes amuse the corner regulars with takeoffs of the school principal and the local rabbi.

Marty attended a small college of about 1,900 students whose name meant as little to me as Wake Forest or Bowling Green—Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t what he said about his studies that made me want to find out more but that he appeared to have absorbed there precisely the qualities that he’d been devoid of as an adolescent, the sort of poise and savoir faire that encouraged a boy to run for student-council president or to date the most popular girl in class. In only a matter of weeks this kid, whom I had thought of as being in the shadow of more intense, loquacious types like me, had developed a confident, outgoing manner that smacked of maturity. There was even a girlfriend, whom he spoke of without a trace of his old shyness. I was astonished: I was still on Leslie Street, keeping my father at bay by heeding high school rules of conduct, while Marty appeared to have entered adult society.

I couldn’t forget what he’d said about the girl: he would pick her up at her dormitory in the morning and they’d walk to class together across the campus. It wasn’t the romantic idyll that impressed me so much as the matter-of-factness. At this college called Bucknell, in less than a semester, Marty Castlebaum had become an independent young man sounding an independent young man’s prerogatives without shame or guilt or secrecy. At Newark Rutgers, I might be becoming more of a Newarker and an American but I couldn’t fool myself, even with the pipe and the Trojans, about feeling more like a man.

*   *   *

I
N
M
ARCH OF
1951 my parents and I made the seven-hour drive to Lewisburg, about sixty miles up from Harrisburg, in a farming valley along the Susquehanna River; it was a town of about five thousand people, situated at the heart of one of the most conservative Republican counties in the state. I was to be interviewed by an assistant to the director of admissions, a courteous middle-aged woman whose name I’ve by now forgotten. In her office Miss Blake, let’s call her, told the three of us that with my high school standing and my Newark Rutgers grades I’d have no trouble being admitted with full credit for my freshman courses. She was less optimistic about my receiving financial aid as a transfer student but assured us that I’d be in a better position to compete for a scholarship after having proved myself at Bucknell.

I was upset to hear that; part of the problem, I figured, had to do with my father’s promotion. Even though a big chunk of his salary still went to paying off his business debt, his earnings had increased measurably since he’d taken over as manager of the Union City office, and there had been no choice but to give the correct figure on my aid-application form. Yet, for reasons of pride and privacy, he forbade me to report the debt. To make matters worse, we didn’t look like a family in need. If anything, my mother, in a demure navy-blue dress, was dressed more attractively—though with no less propriety—than the assistant to the director of admissions; for jewelry she wore the little gold pin she’d been awarded after serving two terms as president of the PTA. She was forty-seven then, a slender, attractive woman with graying dark hair and lively brown eyes whose appearance and comportment were thoroughly Americanized. In fact, she was never wholly at ease except among Jews and for that reason cherished our part of Newark. She kept a kosher kitchen, lit Sabbath candles, and happily fulfilled all the Passover dietary regulations, though less out of religious proclivity than because of deep ties to her childhood household and to her mother, whose ideas of what made for a properly run Jewish home she wished to satisfy and uphold; being a Jew among Jews was, simply, one of her deepest pleasures. In a predominantly gentile environment, however, she lost her social suppleness and something too of her confidence, and her instinctive respectability came to seem more of a shield with which to safeguard herself than the natural expression of her decency.