Timebends (14 page)

I suppose my sallies into Harlem began a pattern of retreating into myself when the competition had overwhelmed me. As I coasted through Harlem on my bike, everything between 110th and 145th seemed under my control, for when I turned a corner into a new block the one behind me was wiped out of mind and I kept riding into the future forever, practicing a defiant loneliness—that cousin of revolt—blindly groping for the beginning of the lifelong voyage toward myself. Years later would come a dream of a long procession of praying people, my relations, imploring the heavens as they slowly progressed, and when I saw with amazement that the leader was me as a teenager, I fled—my departure noticed by none of them. Even early on I noted with my blood, so to speak, that when Moses climbed up the mountain to receive the Law from God, he went alone, without his brother, his wives, or a committee, and when I stretched out on the carpet with
The Book of Knowledge
and the etching of Dickens circled by the vignettes of his Oliver Twist, Mr. Pickwick, Little Dorrit, and a dozen others, the main marvel was their having come
out of his head, with no need of anyone's help.
The time would come, long years later, when I rebelled against such lonely grandeur and the cult of the
autonomous hero-author, but not yet—I still had all I could do to create him.

Had I been asked before the age of thirteen whether I was happy—but of course no one would as yet have conceived of asking such a question of a child; if he had escaped diphtheria, scarlet fever, polio, pneumonia, tuberculosis, blood poisoning, deep ear infections, and all the other lethal diseases, he was lucky and hence happy—but had I been asked, I would have been astonished that my opinion mattered. Life might be frustrating, but it was exciting, and people in general seemed not to be bored. It was partly that progress was always in the air but also that to do anything at all still required so much effort. All day Saturday the kitchen was dense with steam from the enormous tin tubs boiling the laundry on the stove as Sadie or my grandmother or my mother or all of them by turns pushed a long round wooden staff into the water to keep the clothes stirred. Then the heavy linen sheets had to be carried to the lines on the roof to dry and carried down to the apartment again for pressing with irons that had been heated on the stove. On Fridays my mother would make the noodles, which I enjoyed draping over the backs of the wooden kitchen chairs to dry. Then she was chopping three or four kinds of fish to make gefilte fish. Before vacuum cleaners, the carpet had to be periodically rolled up, carried to the roof, and beaten mercilessly. Women were always leaning out of windows to wash them or crouching under the piano to polish its legs. For refrigeration the iceman had to bring cakes of ice up on his shoulder from his horse-drawn wagon in the street, and he was always showing up too late, when the butter was melting, or too early, when there wasn't enough room in the ice compartment for so large a cake, and Sadie always had to follow him, muttering Polish curses, down the foyer to mop up after he had dripped all over the floor. Icemen had leather vests and a wet piece of sackcloth slung over the right shoulder, and once they had slid the ice into the box, they invariably slipped the sacking off and stood there waiting, dripping, for their money.

People did not merely buy a chicken but went to the butcher's, looked over the live beasts in their slatted cages, and pointed to an unfortunate, and as the butcher reached into the feathered hysteria and gathered a pair of legs in one hand and with a twist of the knife slit an artery and hung the bird for plucking, a small boy was profoundly entertained. It was even better when he could help point out a swimming pike or carp or flounder in the water tank and make sure it was the one the net caught. And the thump of the
club on its head, the scaling of the sides, the scissor snipping off fins and tail, the silvery knife slicing up the belly and the entrails plopping out—it was all so deftly done that it secured the world. There was even something satisfying in being sent at the last minute before the store closed for some fresh horseradish and seeing the vegetable man toss two or three second-class roots back in the bin before picking out the one he seemed to love most, which he then ground up, sometimes permitting the boy to turn the crank. These transactions took up time, and involved life and death and transformation—like this long white root turning into a mushy pulp that flung out a gorgeous, eye-tearing smell. Pickles had to be selected from the barrel they floated in, and choosing the right ones involved the spirit of decision, just as at the fruit stand—since no one expected an absolutely unblemished apple or pear or cherry—a lot of feeling and calculating went on as to exactly how spoiled the innards would turn out to be.

Except for light switches nothing worked by pushing a button. The phonograph had to be wound, a lot of the cars had to be cranked, coffee was ground by cranking, too, and the hand still had uses beyond separating pieces of paper money and pointing. Transforming things by hand always bordered on the miraculous. I would spend months in school decorating a cigar box with the American eagle copied from the masthead of the Hearst paper. In the veneer of our phonograph I had carved with the point of a nail a picture of Nipper, the Victor Company's fox terrier trademark, and at the age of six, by attaching a set of baby carriage wheels to a wooden soapbox, I built a wagon I could ride, if not steer. A few years later in the basement of our little Brooklyn house I was laying out the plans for a glider when my father, who barely understood how to open a window—although he could expertly operate a sewing machine, a skill he had learned as a child—came downstairs and innocently asked how I was going to get my plane out of the basement. It was hard to accept, being grounded by a man who hadn't a clue about the principles of flight.

“I still feel—kind of temporary about myself,” Willy Loman says to his brother Ben. I smiled as I wrote the line in the spring of 1948, when it had not yet occurred to me that it summed up my own condition then and throughout my life. The here and now was always melting before the head of a dream coming toward me or its tail going away. I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead.

It was in my twenties that I felt old, that was when time was an abrasive wheel grinding me down. But it was not so much death I feared as insignificance. In 1940 I had hardly been married more than a week when I was off alone on a freighter touching the Gulf ports, and if my solo honeymoon seemed somewhat odd even to me, it also had a certain logic of the inevitable. Mary Grace Slattery and I stood on the fantail of the SS
Copa Copa,
a Waterman Line freighter about to cast off from a Hoboken pier; my parents, who had also come to see me off, stood nearby at the rail staring at the New York skyline. Mary and I had been living partners during the two years since our graduation from the University of Michigan, although I still kept my room in a decrepit rooming house on Seventy-fourth Street and Madison Avenue and she her shared apartment on Brooklyn Heights. I had outlined a play about a group of Germans in the South Pacific who under the pretext of exploring for minerals were secretly arranging to set up Nazi bases. I thought I needed to know something about ships and the sea, but
it was also my divided desire for settled order and a lust for experience that sent me off. Far too much of what I knew I had merely read about, and I was in a rush to meet life and my nature.

Before the war Brooklyn Heights was like a quiet, leafy village, and from Mary's windows on Pierpont Street one could watch the ships moving in all their stately mystery out into the world. I wanted to go, at least for a little while, and alone. In any event, her secretarial job in a publishing house would not allow her to accompany me. The longer we stood on that hot, sunny deck the stranger it seemed that I should be leaving now, even if only for a couple of weeks. But Mary trusted me more than I trusted myself; she had a stubborn integrity and once she had committed herself would countenance no qualms. She strengthened me with her clear-eyed support, and I loved her more in the leaving than if I had hung around merely dreaming of the sea. This early parting, like our marriage—and perhaps most marriages in our time—was a refusal to surrender the infinitude of options that we at least imagined we had. I would not yet have believed that our characters leave us far fewer choices than we like to concede.

There was a deep shadow then over intermarriage between Jews and gentiles, and still deeper if the gentile was Catholic. Mary had stopped considering herself a Catholic as a high school student in Ohio, just as I was struggling to identify myself with mankind rather than one small tribal fraction of it. Both of us thought we were leaving behind parochial narrowness of mind, prejudices, racism, and the irrational, which were having their ultimate triumph, it seemed to us, in the fascist and Nazi movements that were everywhere growing in strength.

There was no doubt in our minds that it somehow mattered in the world what we—or anyone—thought, and that our actions were perfectly accurate reflections of our inner lives. We enjoyed a certain unity within ourselves by virtue of a higher consciousness bestowed by our expectation of a socialist evolution of the planet. It was to be the last moment for such an inner order: when by siding with the inevitable victory of the new and just system, you bought a kind of righteousness ticket. Among its other benefits, it allowed you to suppress any contradiction that tended to cast doubt on socialism, and as important, upon your own motives or virtue.

In truth our god of Reason concealed an unacknowledged machinery as hieratic and otherworldly as any religion. For we shared with religions, which of course we despised as superstition, the
belief that the power to choose was entirely within us, and I even harbored the millenarian suspicion that with our generation history might have come to its end. On some exhilarating days the blind dominating power of habit and of culture itself seemed to be blowing away like a fog before the sunrise of our triumphant consciousness. Judaism for me and Catholicism for Mary were dead history, cultural mystifications that had been devised mainly to empower their priesthoods by setting people against one another. Socialism was reason, and now it was in fascism that the rank pools of instinct collected, with Hitler and Mussolini and later Francisco Franco reaching down to the dark atavisms within man to rule by unreason and war. It was the Soviet Union that upheld reason's light by doing what was best for the majority and by repeatedly calling for a pact of collective security that would join the West and Russia together against fascism. If the one-party Soviet system seemed doubtfully democratic, there was plenty of denial available to turn the gaze away (no less than there would be decades later for Castro's Cuba and, on the right, for the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina and Turkey). It was really quite simple: we had to hope, and we found hope where we could, in illusions, too, providing they showed promise. Reality was intolerable, with its permanent armies of the unemployed, the stagnating and defeated spirit of America, the fearful racism everywhere, the waste of everything precious, especially the potential of the young. And if Roosevelt was doubtless on the side of the angels, even he was merely improvising to fend off the day of complete collapse. All that could save us was harsh reason and socialism, production not for profit but for use.

The deck paint was getting tacky under the rising heat of the sun, and the bitter smell of hot steel repelled us. We kissed one last time, and my guilt at leaving was lessened by our having gone through a kind of testing the week before at our strange wedding in Ohio. And I had just sold my first radio play to Columbia Workshop, the prestigious CBS experimental series under Norman Corwin. It was a political satire called
The Pussycat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man
and would be broadcast while I was at sea. In this, too, there was a strange sense of power at being able to leave my voice, in effect, speaking in my absence. Still, there was the element of unacknowledged escape that I knew I would be carrying in my valise.

As sensibly progressive as we appeared to each other and to our friends, the wedding had dramatized how conflicted both of us
were inside. With our marriage decided upon, Mary soon asked, for the sake of her foolishly pious mother, that we marry in Ohio with a priest conducting the ceremony, though not inside the church. We would be not so much under the wing of the Church as only under one of its feathers. With a mother like mine I could easily understand Mary's wish to appease hers, and I agreed, all ritual and ceremony having already been consigned to our mutual mental museum.

Like my mother, Mrs. Slattery was a woman wasting away under customs she was forced to obey. Intelligent and sympathetic, she could see, for example, past the Church's support of Franco in Spain to the sufferings that the fascist rebellion had caused, and past her husband's fierce denunciation of Roosevelt's welfare agencies to the suffering they alleviated, but she found it necessary or advisable to adopt the profession of illness. Still only in her late forties, she had already perfected a wistful, rather elderly manner of referring to herself in the emotional past tense, as one whose remaining days were being counted on the fingers of God, her future a slippery chute, only slightly inclined, on which her body was sliding toward the grave, whose momentary darkness would receive her in a state of gratitude at the completion of her earthly trials. She was prodigiously repressed, had a shriek for a laugh—its utterance would bring a covering hand to her mouth while her other hand tugged at the hem of her skirt, drawing it over her knees. But she had intelligence: she was able to identify with people who were not Catholic. Stupidity, the want of empathic power, was reserved for Mr. Slattery, a retired boiler inspector for the city of Cleveland. Now living on a meager pension, he could identify only with the rapacious, the wealthy, and anyone in a uniform. He had fiddled around at the edges of a German-American anti-Semitic organization in Cleveland whose meetings he liked to attend, and I therefore must have been his bitterest pill, though he never let on lest Mary be lost to them altogether. While she had made it clear that she was bringing her bridegroom home for the wedding as a gesture of family reconciliation rather than out of any revival of her Catholic faith, Mary only gradually revealed what to her was doubtless of little importance but rather chilled me to learn. We would have to be given a special dispensation from Rome, no less, to carry out even the minimal ceremony that had been planned.