World's Fair (10 page)

NINE

E
xtending from my mother and father were two family wings, unequal in strength, making our flight erratic. My grandma and grandpa on my father’s side were not people of means, living in a three-room apartment a few miles to the north of us. But they were whole, complete, they took pride in themselves and their children—my father being one of three, the others my aunts Frances and Molly—and they had clear views on most things. We rode up there on the red-and-black Concourse bus, which had a long engine hood and doubled rear wheels and spare tires chained to the back and torturously shifted gears. I enjoyed the ride, but once it was over, I had the visit to get through. Not that I didn’t love my grandma and grandpa; they were warm little old people who beamed at me and pressed food upon me, and kisses. But there was danger there.

My grandma liked to put out a lace tablecloth on the big dark table in their dining-living room. She served tea in her good china with its pale green and white sliced-apple motif, and also Uneeda crackers and homemade plum jam with cloves in it and a big cut-glass bowl of fruit, and a smaller bowl of pistachio nuts. Most often too we brought cake from a bakery. And everyone sat around the table and talked. My grandfather had a wonderful way of paring an apple, with his own pocketknife, so that the peel came off in one continuous strip. Sometimes, one or the other
of my aunts was there but without my cousins, who, like my brother, were old enough to get out of such visits. So there was nothing to do. I stared through the double windows into the courtyard. My grandparents lived in the back of a house, off the street, and I found myself looking at opaque lace curtains or drawn shades. I sat under the big table radio in the corner of the room next to my grandfather’s favorite chair and tried to find something interesting to listen to—not too easy in the middle of a Sunday afternoon when the New York Philharmonic seemed to be the brightest choice. Or I wound up the big console Victrola in their bedroom and put pennies or nutshells on the spinning turntable and watched them fly off. Sometimes I leafed through a picture book I had brought along, sometimes I browsed through my grandfather’s bookcase in the foyer beside the front door. He owned many books, some of them in Russian. They were stuffed in, every which way. Each shelf had its own glass door that lifted up from the bottom and slid back under the shelf above. But there were so many books the doors wouldn’t slide. From my grandfather I first heard the names Tolstoy and Chekhov. He owned sets too—uniform editions, such as
The World’s Great Orations
and the
Harper’s Picture Encyclopedia of the Civil War
. I liked to look at the steel engravings of the Army of the North doing battle with the Army of the South. Each scene was protected by the thinnest sheet of paper.

Another diversion was the dumbwaiter in the kitchen. My grandmother let me open the little door in the wall and poke my head into the black air shaft. Odors of ash and garbage rose on the cold black air. A thick rope bisected the column of darkness. I could pull on this rope and bring into view the wooden box on which the tenants delivered their garbage to the superintendent.

My grandmother hobbled busily about, she was a bent woman with glasses and thin yellow-white hair, which she kept parted in the middle, braided, and tightly coiled in a bun. Her eyes watered and her hands were palsied, but her afflictions didn’t seem to daunt her. She bustled around to great effect and never sat still. She was in charge. My grandfather by contrast was a
very slow-moving, slow-talking, gentle, slight man, with thick grey hair cut close; he was partial to a tan cardigan sweater, which he wore always over a white shirt and tie, brown pants and house slippers. He smoked odd oval-shaped cigarettes, Regents, which came out of a grey-and-maroon box. He liked me to press my palm against his and measure our hands; this was the way he kept track of my growth, he said. My growth was a matter of enormous pleasure to him. Invariably he was encouraged to find my hand had increased in size since our previous measurement. He patted me on the back of my neck. He was a retired printer. He had emigrated from Russia as a young man from the Minsk district—this had been the old country too of my grandmother. Apparently they had known each other as children, but only after they had come separately to America did they renew their acquaintance, conduct a courtship and marry. It was a matter only of momentary fascination to me to imagine my dear old grandfather Isaac as an erect black-haired young man, even younger than my father; to imagine him, for instance, lifting my father in his arms as my father sometimes did me. My father called him Papa. I did not dwell on these paradoxes. I think I did not entirely believe in them. Besides, my grandfather spoke so philosophically from such thoughtful distances of wisdom that no fanciful illusion could be maintained for very long about his being anything else but a grandfather. He told me that three times, in three separate presidential elections, he had cast his ballot for someone named William Jennings Bryan. Yet he was a socialist and came of a generation of enlightened Jewish youth who understood, as Bryan did not, that religion was a means of holding people in ignorance and superstition and therefore submissive to impoverishment and want. I did not really understand what he told me; but as he repeated these ideas and phrases over time, I was comfortable with their sentiments and was finally able to identify him as a critic of prevalent beliefs. He was in opposition—that I understood. In his bookcase were authors whose names were familiar to me before I knew who they were or what they stood for: Ralph Ingersoll, Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Herbert Spencer. Although my grandmother
was pious, and kept a kosher home, my grandfather was an atheist. He treasured a book by Thomas Paine called
The Age of Reason
, and used its arguments, and some of his own, to tease my grandmother and point out to her the absurdities and contradictions in her literal readings of the Old Testament. “‘My own mind is my own church,’” he said, quoting Paine. Yet, as she proudly told us even in her irritation with him, he had read the entire Bible many times and knew it better, God help him, the atheist, than she did.

So this was a substantive household, an establishment in history next to which my mother’s poor dependent half-mad Mama in her widow’s weeds was no match. Nor my hapless, self-effacing formerly famous uncle Willy. You had to go see my father’s mother and father. They had a home. They were progenitors not only of my father but his two sisters—the elder, my aunt Frances, and the younger, my aunt Molly. And each of these ladies in her way had much to contribute to my sense of this family’s complexity. My aunt Frances was married to a successful lawyer and lived in Pelham Manor, in Westchester County, a Christian community over the city line. Aunt Frances not only owned a car but knew how to drive it, which was quite unusual for a woman. When she drove she wore white gloves. She was very gracious and soft-spoken and naturally dignified, like my grandfather; her two sons were at Harvard. My father’s younger sister, Molly, by contrast had her mother’s earthy practical ways. Molly was in addition a comedienne, an irreverent, brassy, unkempt woman, as blowsy as her sister was well groomed, Molly smoked cigarettes, whose ashes invariably dropped on the bosom of her dress. She squinted in the cigarette smoke. She read a newspaper my father thought a terrible rag—the
Daily Mirror
—because its coverage of horse racing was the best in the city and because it featured a columnist, Walter Winchell, whom she adored. She played the horses, as did her husband, Phil, a cabdriver. They had one daughter, my older cousin Irma. When the whole family was gathered in my grandparents’ small apartment on a Sunday afternoon, the two old people spoke English with strong inflections of Yiddish, Frances spoke in the cultivated
tones of an upper-class Westchester matron, and Molly in a heavy Bronx accent. Somewhere in the middle of this mélange of styles and meld of social intention stood my father. His older sister had done well, and his younger had rebelliously married beneath her. His was the fate not yet decided. When it came to my father the stakes were high. He was the one son. Would Frances turn out to be the family exception or would Molly? It was not only his own destiny that was at issue but the final judgment still to be made of all of them.

How did I know this? On those darkening Sunday afternoons I only half heard the conversation. It would start quietly enough, filled with pleasantries, and then, almost imperceptibly, go bad. On this day my grandmother Gussie picked up my new hand-tailored camel tunic to examine my mother’s sewing. “Very nice,” she said, her eyebrows rising, her mouth turning down at the corners. “And lined too, no less. My daughter-in-law stops at nothing.”

Behind this remark was my grandmother’s penury. She took the position that my mother was impractical and careless with my father’s money. My mother knew this was untrue. It was a terrible slander and it hurt her deeply. It hurt her that my grandmother Gussie felt privileged to give her opinions as to the way my mother dressed her children, how she ran her house, and whether or not she took proper care of her husband. Though Grandma’s tone was sweet, her style was sly and indirect. She could bring my mother to tears, as she had now done. My tempestuous mother started to yell and my father told her to lower her voice. I looked for the pictures in books. I wound the Victrola and let the turntable spin. My grandparents maintained two goldfish in a bowl; I stared at the goldfish, studying their ways.

The visit was clearly over. My mother would not say good-bye. She put on my coat and buttoned it, and she took my hand and walked out of the door. My grandfather came after us in his slippers. “Rose,” he said in the hallway. “Forgive Gussie. That’s the way she is, she means no harm, she has the greatest respect for you.”

“Oh Papa,” my mother said. “That is not respect. That is not even civility. You are a compassionate, kind man, perhaps too kind.” She hugged Grandpa, and we went down the stairs to the lobby and waited for my father. She could not sympathize with whatever anxiety of universal judgment, or perhaps God’s, led my grandma on. The old woman made her regularly understand that she was not good enough to be married into this family, that she was not good enough for my father, that she was not what he needed.

I lived in the weather of my mother’s spirit, and at these times, after these visits, the sky grew black. My father came down the stairs and he was whistling, as he did when something bad had happened and he was trying to be cheerful about it. We stood in the dusk at the bus stop. “Why do you let her talk to me that way?” my mother said. “Don’t you care how I feel? Nothing I ever do is good enough, nothing is ever right enough. If I wash one of her dishes she will wash it after me. And you like that behavior. You like that viciousness. Never once have you defended me from dear sweet Gussie.”

But the argument between my mother and father didn’t really begin until they got home. Here the sight of the pathetic remnants of her own ancestry magnified the injustice she felt: Did anyone on my father’s side ever inquire about her mama’s health? My father’s whole and thriving family treated her like dirt and her poor mother like a social pariah. Did they ever invite Mama on a Sunday? Did they ever invite Billy? I went into my room and closed the door, but it was no good, it was too interesting. It was as if my father had caught my grandma’s point of view, just as my mother insisted.

But then he offered a criticism of my mother that I knew, in part, to be accurate. “You always think the worst,” he said. “You’re suspicious and distrustful.” She told him to go to hell. He called her a fishwife. Mythic realms were indeed the territories of these disputes. Ascriptions of good and evil flew back and forth like furies, like phantoms, to take shape as sweet truths or malign imputations. Truth hovered above everything waiting to alight, and as I grew older I saw that it never did anywhere, for
any length of time. I felt guilty that I preferred the company of my grandma and grandpa up on the Concourse to my sick little grandmother in the room next door. I sometimes saw my grandma Gussie as truly mischievous, jealous and up to no good. But I could not believe anything bad about any one of these people for very long, because they all seemed to love me so much.

TEN

I
n fact, love was what it was all about. However painful it might be, as sure as heat or freezing cold or storms were in the nature of weather, the daily tempest of my life among these elemental powers—the screams, demands, disagreements—was the nature of love. But they had their sly ways: I secretly grieved for the dark mysterious things my parents did in the privacy of their relationship. I didn’t know quite what these things were, but I knew they were shameful, requiring darkness. They were never referred to or acknowledged in the light of day. This aspect of my parents’ life lay like a shadow in my mind. My mother and father, rulers of the universe, were taken by something over which they had no control. How problematical that was, how unsettling. Like my little grandma with her spells, they were afflicted in the manner of some kind of possession, and then afterwards they seemed to be normal again. I could not talk about this to anyone, certainly not my brother. If he didn’t know about it he was lucky. The devastating truth was that there were times when my parents were not my parents; and I was not on their minds. It was not a subject to dwell upon. I resented the early hour of my bedtime, in part because it was earlier than anyone else’s bedtime, in part because it brought on that vast period of darkness when those things happened about which I had insufficient knowledge; I could only make do, like a detective
with the barest of clues, inaudible words, an indefinable sound of panic, a dim light, going on and off, all of it enfolded and obscured in my sleep-drugged state.