Timebends (11 page)

Some cars had not only a chauffeur but also a footman to sit beside him in matching uniform, both looking stalwartly straight ahead. Their uniforms were often wonderful candy shades of lavender, chocolate, white, blue, as well as black. I loved talking to the chauffeurs as they awaited their bosses, and I hoped to be allowed to sit behind a steering wheel for a moment or two, or to get a glimpse of an engine. I was forever trying to find out how a car worked, but nobody would tell me, and I think this kind of trifling with me built a frustration that later made school so difficult, though for the opposite reason: it took forever for teachers to explain what I could have understood in a few minutes, and I would lose track and wander mentally and then have to rush to catch up. Sitting once as a very small boy in the front seat between my father and Uncle Abe, who was driving his Packard—the same Abe who as a boy had been sent to greet my father fresh off the
boat—I heard my father ask him how the car was running. “Oh, she runs beautifully,” Abe replied, and looking through the windshield down the blue surface of the long hood to the silver-encased thermometer sticking up from the nickel radiator, I envisioned a running woman attached to the car underneath, making it go. “Is there a lady in there?” I asked Uncle Abe, and he and my father burst out laughing, but of course they didn't understand how an engine worked either. Since obviously there was no woman in there and yet the car ran, I was left with its she-ness to account for its motive power, a living persona of its own. This ignorance around me of how anything worked made Sid Franks, with his analytical, scientific attitude, more and more useful to me, even necessary.

In the mid-twenties, whites were not necessarily vacating houses into which black and Puerto Rican families moved. It was by no means taken for granted that all of Harlem was to be a black ghetto—in fact it was inconceivable when some of the best restaurants in the city were doing great business on Seventh and Lenox and along 125th Street too. The Cotton Club, after all, was deep in black Harlem but largely patronized by whites. There was at least one Shubert Theatre on Lenox at around 115th, as well as other legitimate theatres scattered through Harlem playing what in effect were road company productions of the hits down on Broadway. My mother loved to drop in on matinees at the Shubert, and that was where I saw my first stage play, at about the age of eight, she and I alone, my brother probably too busy either studying or going to a dentist downtown where, among his other drudgeries, he was having braces put on his teeth. This was still a novel procedure and an extremely expensive way of discoloring one's teeth for life. My teeth were no less prognathous, but I was not the eldest son and to my great relief even then was not regarded as worth the money. If this put me down, it also freed me from Kermit's weighty responsibilities, which I had much respect for but no desire to share. Everything would climax at his bar mitzvah when the poor boy had to deliver the same speech in three languages, English, Hebrew, and German (still the classy language of culture), in order, I suppose, to declare my mother's contempt for the stupidity and arrogance of the Miller clan, who still imagined, even after so many of them were in my father's employ, that he was somehow their inferior. Kermit's speeches, while making them uncomfortably defensive
as they congratulated him, did not prevent them from turning to me and asking each other, as they always had, “Where did
he
come from?” This was a valuable early lesson in how not to belong, and one of the reasons why I resolved, about three times a month, to run away from home.

I was caught between Joan, who had clearly taken my place as chief baby, and my brother, whose stature I could not begin to match. Joan had also introduced a new element of competition between Kermit and me, for it quickly developed that two boys could not hold the same baby at the same time, and there were constant outbreaks of fighting between us, as there would be for years to come. Running away from home, a form of suicide designed to punish everybody, was an idea I had picked up from Oliver Twist, the only one of whose habits I could not hope to share was his holding up his empty bowl asking for “more,” a heartbreaking plea immortalized in the Cruikshank drawing; for me the problem was getting rid of the food they kept forcing on me. One of the greatest explosions occurred over my refusal one morning to eat the lumpy oatmeal served by our Polish-speaking maid, Sadie, who always gave us breakfast while my mother slept. She finally pushed my face into the hot cereal. The volume of sound from Sadie, who screamed in Polish, as well as my own screams, my brother's and finally my mother's—she had joined us in her negligee and rapped me on the head a couple of times while wiping my face—this concatenation of tonalities rearranged molecular structures in my brain that finally clicked into a plan to leave forever, to create vacant space where until now I had been in the house, to deprive them all of my unwanted presence.

There must have been sources other than the Dickens novel for the idea of running away; the notion was always in the air, along with the conviction that one was really an orphan. Since I resembled no one except, in a remote way, my mother, this made thrilling sense and explained why nothing I did came out right: I was laboring hopelessly under a prenatal prejudice that nobody would acknowledge, at least not to my face. I simply did not belong to this family. In pulp novels and movies and comic strips, boys left home with a notched stick from which hung a napkin containing all their earthly goods plus, probably, a sandwich. Such runaways disappeared for many years, finally returning under new names, rich, handsome, powerful, and magnanimously prepared to forgive their properly chastised parents. In the Horatio Alger stories—by no means a joke as yet—the solitary boy was generally, and certainly
in my mind too, a capitalist-to-be. The truculent desire for freedom of Huckleberry Finn seemed not a fantastic and literary creation but a realistic version of my own state of mind.

Instead of a raft I had only my bike, and for the Mississippi either Central Park to the south or Lenox Avenue and Harlem to the north. I chose Harlem. I left no note to embarrass me in case I changed my mind and decided to return home; besides, leaving with no explanation would hurt them all the more. Of course I had to finish school that day and didn't get home until a little past three, but there was still enough daylight left to put plenty of distance between myself and this hated house before dark. Sadie, whose kinky red hair stood up like springs, was boiling some linen in the kitchen, which made it impossible to secretly make myself a sandwich, so I casually asked her to make me one, which she was happy to do as there was nothing she enjoyed more than to see me eating. Folding the sandwich in a linen napkin, I made my way out, and in short order I was on the road. I had no notched stick, there being none on 110th Street, and to go into the park to cut one off a bush risked getting myself clubbed by a cop, so I hung the sandwich on the handlebars.

Runaway boys in stories were soon picked up and adopted by millionaires whose carriages had almost run them down, but the farther north into Harlem I got the less likely it was, I realized, that I would be running into rich people. I had never ventured beyond 116th Street before, except with my family, to eat in one of the restaurants on 125th or to attend a track meet along with my brother in one of the grammar schools uptown. Beyond a small apprehension as to what I would do once darkness fell, I felt no fear as I rolled along the side streets off Lenox Avenue winding my way uptown, even though I knew that between the black people and us there was supposed to be some foggy hostility. But I had had no conflicts with black kids in school. They seemed softer and quicker to react and readier to laugh than some other kids, especially the Puerto Ricans, who were tense and constantly chattering in their incomprehensible language. Still, one of my best friends was a boy named Carillo, whom I envied because he would be leaving school at twelve or thirteen to learn the glazier's trade. I would have loved to cut glass even while I felt superior as one of those heading for the “Academic” courses that led to college. The system was unabashedly class-conscious, which seemed perfectly natural and practical. Our myths were already in possession of our minds, our roles and even our costumes laid out into the far future. My one
caution as I coasted through Harlem was not to stray east of Madison Avenue, where the Italians lived. Unlike any other group, they were ferocious for some incomprehensible reason, always carrying a challenge. It would be possible to be knocked off my bike in East Harlem but not very likely west of Madison.

The farther uptown I went, the more black faces there were on the streets and stoops; there was a kind of crowdedness that one never felt downtown. I could not yet know that in this superdensity lay the secret of Harlem's degeneration into a slum. A few years hence, even my father would be angered that fine apartment houses all around ours were being “broken” by landlords renting single apartments to two and three black families. When we moved to Brooklyn in 1928, our landlord was happily planning to lease our six-room apartment to two families, thus increasing his take, regardless of the inevitable deterioration of the building.

If menace was not with me as I pedaled past 130th Street heading uptown, and if the few black people who paid me any attention seemed warm and affable, it in no way meant that I felt they and I were alike. Since I had had fights with white boys but never once with blacks and had never been robbed or threatened by them, I felt safer among them than in a white neighborhood where I was the stranger. But black people were mysterious nonetheless. For one thing, I found it hard to understand their speech and as a born mimic had often found myself exaggerating it comically. In the movies, of course, they were always stupid, lumbering creatures rolling their eyes in terror of ghosts but certainly never dangerous. This last was the perverse contribution of Hollywood to my image of the Negro—he totally lacked menace, a figure apart or beneath the white people. A rich friend of my father's had a Negro servant wear his new shoes to break them in, and I thought that as funny as he did.

On one of the streets above 130th I stopped to see why a small crowd of people had gathered, and saw a black man lying on the sidewalk with his head twisted toward a stream of dirty water flowing along the curb, his tongue stretching out to it. Someone said the word
gas,
and I thought he must have inhaled some from his stove inside his house and been made so terribly thirsty by the fumes. His red tongue was only an inch from the water, but nobody was helping him to get closer. They stood there quietly staring down at him, watching him struggle for a drink. I rode away under the overarching boughs of the trees, past the clean stoops and washed windows of the black people's houses, which looked no
different here than they did downtown, except that there were more people in them.

Remembering my sandwich, I stood straddling the bike and eating as dusk began to fall. I had forgotten my anger. At that hour the streets were filled with older black women shopping for dinner. So many of them were heavy and seemed to have painful feet. There were a lot of kids running around with no shoes on, not, I thought, because of poverty but because in the South where they came from they were used to running barefoot. Or so they had told me. Calmed by Harlem, I had a leisurely ride home, and by the time I got my bike parked in our foyer I was looking forward to meeting my mother again and finding out what was for dinner. The runaway linen napkin I slipped back into a drawer.

Nearly fifty years later, in the seventies, I left the campus of City College, where I had given a lecture, and found myself strolling alone on Convent Avenue on a lovely spring afternoon at about half past four. I had come close to this hill on my runaway bike ride. After my lecture, student actors had treated me to several scenes from my plays, and I had been surprised and moved by a remarkable performance of a scene from
A View from the Bridge
played by a Korean Eddie, a Jewish Beatrice, a black Marco, and a Chinese as his brother Rodolpho. The raw force of their acting was still with me as I walked away from the imitation Tudor campus where for about two weeks in 1932 I had tried to begin my night school education but had had to quit because I could not stay awake after eight hours on a job in an auto parts warehouse. My memories of City College were of falling asleep at a chemistry lecture, and once even while standing up in the jammed main library with an open reference book in my hands. Every seat in that immense library was filled, every space at the deep sills of the leaded windows where one could rest a book and write one's notes. I was among the late arrivals who could not even get to a windowsill. It was nearly midnight, and I had been up since six, had traveled an hour and twenty minutes by trolley and subway from Brooklyn to my job on Sixty-third and Tenth Avenue—where Lincoln Center would one day stand—and was now in Harlem trying to memorize facts about the Versailles Treaty. That was the night I returned the reference book to the librarian and walked out into the darkness knowing that I could not make it.

Now I was walking out of City College again, but this time enjoying the memory of the scenes I had watched and admiring that elevated area whose apartments provide some of the most striking
views of the city. I came to a corner and stood looking around for a sign of a taxi. There was remarkably little traffic, merely a car or two, and not many people on the broad streets either. My eye moved upward toward the clear, cloudless sky, and I noticed that in several apartment windows people, all of them black, were observing me. A group of four or five young black men in their early twenties came toward me, talking intensely among themselves. Seeing me, they went instantly silent, looks of near shock passing over their faces as they parted ranks to walk past me. I turned and saw them glancing back at me. What was up? Why was I such a curiosity? Now two middle-aged black women approached from the direction of the college. They were nicely dressed, neatly turned out, and smiled as they neared me.