Less frequent visitors were the knife and scissor sharpeners who worked on the trucks with their noisy footpedal grinding wheels that sent sparks off the steel, sparks being to me the most suggestively volatile phenomena, so quickly self-consuming as almost not to exist; and peddlers wearing derbies who bought used clothes and carried them in enormous packs on their backs; and junk dealers who pushed two-wheeled carts piled high with newspapers and rags and flattened tin cans and broken chairs and beds and boxes of dishes; and men ringing doorbells to sell cartons of fresh eggs, or magazine subscriptions, or red paper poppies from the American Legion; and bearded men in black hats and black winter coats who came begging at the door with coin boxes and letters of credentials from yeshivas. “My God,” said my mother one day, closing the door after still another transient had rung the bell, “is there no end to this? When my father brought us to the Bronx when I was a little girl, he didn’t know the whole Lower East Side would follow.”
These itinerant peddlers, beggars and entrepreneurs were often unwholesome-looking or shabby or dirty and had dull blackened eyes from which all light had departed, but I don’t ever remember feeling threatened by any of them.
One day a Department of Public Works crew appeared to repair a pothole. Their truck carried tar pots and towed a two-wheeled cart that was a kind of stove for heating their asphalt. The stove made a roaring sound as it fired. The crew raised and dropped long-handled flat-irons to flatten the smoking asphalt fill. One of the workers wore a pin-striped suit and vest, and a grey fedora. He was dressed just like my father. But his suit was creased and dirty, and because he was warm his tie was loosened. His hat was pushed back. I was alarmed. I had hoped he was the boss, but the boss was sitting in the truck and reading the newspaper.
When the job was done, this man in the suit swung his long-handled tar iron over his shoulder, just like the others, and followed the truck up the street as it slowly went looking for the next pothole.
L
ate each spring a Parks Department traveling farm exhibit encamped in the big park, Claremont. With great excitement of her own my mother took me to see it one day. We crossed Mt. Eden Avenue and the Oval, and the other direction of Mt. Eden Avenue, and then we were at the foot of the park’s retaining wall of rounded stones. We raced up the flight of stone stairs. It was a huge wonderful park, with playgrounds and fields and tree-shaded paths. It was cool compared with the street. In a wooded meadow were the tents and trucks of the traveling farm. There was no gate, no entrance. Suddenly we were among the sheep and their lambs, cows and calves, horses with their foals, all of whom seemed to lend themselves in gentle patience to the touches of city children. Only an occasional bleat or whinny suggested they would rather be somewhere else. But the geese and ducks squawking about in clipped-wing panic would not let us get near them, which seemed to me a logical reaction, a mark of their intelligence, in fact. I was invited to hold a rabbit, which I did. Animals were warm. I touched a foal’s back too lightly and the hide twitched, as if I were a fly. A wooden pen, about the size of a sandbox, held a rippling of peeping chicks, as if a bright yellow flag of the sun was waving over the ground. Hay was played out to the animals in their pens; I smelled the hay, and the manure, and it was not entirely unpleasant, it was a forceful array of smells that alerted you, somehow, to an insistence on more life than you knew. Smiling suntanned young women in light green dresses lectured from the back steps of trailers. We were guided with our mothers’ blessings amid the animals in their fecundity, and invited to enjoy the reality of them, which I fervently did.
But the truest and most daring expeditions of spring were mounted by my father, whose restlessness drew us ever outward. Usually on Sundays he preferred to visit his mother and
father, my grandma and grandpa, who lived north of Kingsbridge Road on the Grand Concourse. But in this season he was too much with the fullness of himself and his good feeling to do the ordinary thing. And so one Sunday we went to the tennis courts on Morris Avenue and 167th Street—a good walk—and he played tennis first with my mother, hitting the white ball back and forth over the net, and later with Donald, whom he instructed in the forehand and backhand strokes. “That’s the way,” he said. “Good. Good one.” I was too small to hold the wood racket with one hand. When my turn came, I hit with it as if I held a baseball bat. I didn’t want to do it long because I was afraid of hitting the ball into another court and disturbing someone. “Don’t worry about that,” my father said. I thought he looked splendid in his white ducks and shirt and tennis shoes, his dark eyes flashing as he lunged this way and that to stroke the ball. It seemed effortless as he did it, he was always where the ball was. “You’ve got to bend your knees,” he said. “You’ve got to anticipate. Keep your side toward the net. Bring the racket back, and when you swing, follow through.” I was having too good a time to listen carefully. My mother played well; although she didn’t move quite as fast as my dad, she hit the ball smartly and it flew right back to him. She was not awkward as you would expect a girl to be. She wore a white dress and a sunshade tied around her hair, and white ankle socks with her shoes.
There were many courts. I counted twelve. Around the entire compound was a fence of chicken wire. The courts were red clay and made the bottom of my socks red. The white lines were whitewashed on with lime and had to be redone by the court attendant because they were rubbed out by the players’ shoes.
My father was always rousing us up to do things. It was his idea to persuade his friend Dr. Perlman, the family dentist who lived in the apartment house across the street, and who owned a car, that the two families should have a picnic in the country. And so we did. I did not relish the drive sitting on my mother’s
lap in the back of Dr. Perlman’s black Plymouth. I didn’t know if it was true of all Plymouths, but it certainly was of Dr. Perlman’s, that it seemed designed to lurch and jerk and drift and lurch again but never to travel at a steady rate. Somewhere on the Saw Mill River Parkway north of the Bronx, my green color was noted, and I was dumped over the back of the front seat to sit up there with my father and Donald, the little front swivel window pushed out wide to give me the breeze.
But then we were out in the country, as far out as I had ever been in my life. The country was an endless pathless park. We were in a broad meadow of millions of buttercups. We ran races in the sun, Donald and I and the Perlmans’ boy, Jay, who was a bit younger than I but taller and stronger, which did not endear him to me. My father called the races with a newspaper rolled up as a megaphone and my beret on the top of his head. His vest was open, his jacket lay on the ground. My mother and Mrs. Perlman, a woman with a limp, and Mae Barsky, sat on blankets in the shade of a tree and set out the sandwiches and fruit and lemonade. Donald took home movies with our Universal camera. My father throws a ball at the camera. My father bats. My father stands facing Dr. Perlman, a big horse-faced man with rimless glasses, and he waves his arms in a hocus-pocus circle and points his two index fingers and Dr. Perlman disppears. Someone has produced ice cream and I am eating a Melorol happily, smears of it all over my mouth. I smile and wave at the camera.
This was a place called Kensico, an Indian name. The field we played in was at the foot of a high sheer bluff covered with bushes and trees and vines. The tracks of the New York Central ran along the top of the bluff. Trains came along, but they were so high above the meadow and the trees they seemed no bigger than toy electric trains. Whenever we heard the whistle of the locomotive, we stopped what we were doing and stood still in the grass before we saw it. And then it appeared, the tiny train, and we waved and the engineer, who was too small to be seen, blew his whistle in greeting.
B
ut the spring had its maniac leer, some dissolving smile of menace that I couldn’t quite catch sight of. The whole earth was pushing up, everything was turning out and open. My arms and legs hurt, and my mother told me I had growing pains. I thought I would rather not feel myself growing. I felt my heart banging and understood life as something that lived itself in you, an irresistible animating power that was mindless enough to go out of control, like the spring in a windup toy that without warning would run amok and bust itself to pieces.
A genial man from the neighborhood whose name was Ziggy walked past my house every day. His head was the size of a watermelon; the little features, including the tiny smiling mouth, were way up front. Ziggy walked with mincing steps, shuffling, his knees bent, his too-heavy head bobbing this way and that so that it appeared it might topple him over at any moment. Ziggy laughed and clapped his hands like a baby when he saw something that pleased him. My mother told me she’d heard he was a mathematical genius.
Even among children, people of my own ilk, there were some who didn’t act right or were tremblingly uncoordinated or had half-grown limbs or clubfeet. I knew a pair of twin boys my age—they came to my first few birthday parties; one was normally nasty and verbal, the other a saint of retardedness. They were identical twins and when little had sat side by side in one of those double strollers of brown wicker.
From the tenement behind my backyard all sorts of urgent and enraged cries rose on the spring night. My room was in the rear of our house, just over the garage. The clotheslines were strung from tenement windows to the creosoted pole like the cables of a bridge. I saw things I wasn’t looking for, people in the lighted windows in their underwear, women pulling themselves out of their corsets. Prowling about, sometimes at dusk,
or on cold mornings of rain when everyone still slept, strange youths not from the neighborhood came vaulting over the fences into our yard. They climbed the retaining wall and disappeared. These were boys who hated boundaries and straight lines, who traveled as a matter of principle off the streets, as if they needed to trespass and show their scorn of property. They wore felt hats with the brims cut away and the crown folded back along the edge and trimmed in a triangle pattern. They wore undershirts for shirts and high-top sneakers without socks. They carried cigarettes behind their ears. Slingshots stuck out of their back pockets. They were the same boys who rode the backs of the trolley cars by standing on the slimmest of fenders and holding on to the window frames with their fingertips. They wrestled sewer covers off their seats and climbed down in the muck to find things. They were the ones, I knew, who chalked the strange marks on our garage doors.
I had noticed these chalk marks one day while in the yard. Donald and his friends were building a Ping-Pong table. It was to be a marvel of a table, hinged in the middle and painted regulation green with ruled edges. It was to rest on sawhorses. Donald and his friends were quietly and cooperatively building their table for a contentious Ping-Pong tournament full of shouting. I caused them to look up from their work by pointing out the sign on the garage doors. I wanted to know what it was.
I hadn’t expected their complete attention. They stopped what they were doing and stood and looked at the chalk scrawl. Donald stepped up and raised his arm, and used the sleeves of his sweater as an eraser. The other boys were equally solemn. They took the whole thing seriously. “It’s bad,” Donald told me. “Whenever you see one of these, make sure to erase it. Use your shoe sole, spit on it, rub it with dirt, do anything. It’s a swastika.”
My mother added to this intelligence later the same day. “The next time you see one of those boys you tell me,” she advised. “If you see someone who obviously is not from this neighborhood and doesn’t belong here, don’t stand around, but come inside and tell me. Or tell Donald. These boys think they’re smart. They’d like to be Nazis. They’re disgraceful. They carry
knives. They confront Jewish children and say they killed Christ. They rob. You come inside if you see them.”
And so my horizons were expanding. As I understood it, beyond Eastburn Avenue, on the far side of Claremont Park and down the hills, were the East Bronx neighborhoods, pockets of Irish and Italian poverty, that were the source of these depredations. These Irish and Italian neighborhoods were far below us, in valleys that rang with trolley-car bells and shook with the passing of elevated trains, where people lived in ramshackle houses with tar-paper siding amid factories and warehouses.
I had the good fortune to be living in this neighborhood, but its borders were not inviolate. That my house was of red brick, which I knew was essential from the tale of the three little pigs, evoked in me feelings of deepest gratitude. However, in bed at night, after the light was out, I heard outside in the dark sometimes the kicking over of ash cans, or a police siren, and then closer to my ear but somehow less audible, the breath of someone watching me. And in my sleep figures would loom in threatening gesture and just as suddenly recede into colored swirling points, as if I myself had been spread-eagled on a wheel spinning so fast that the colors melted together and became a target.
ROSE
O
nly now do I see that our lives could have gone in an entirely different direction. We were young and energetic. But little by little the two families were accepting us. The shock was wearing off. This began when Donald was born. Another generation! Donald was born at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Rockaway Beach. A Catholic hospital. The nurses there were lovely to me, the nuns. It was a wonderful hospital and they took everyone in, it didn’t matter to them. The only thing was the nurses wore habits and in the front lobby on the wall was an enormous gold cross, and in each room was a crucifix that was quite specific, with a painted Jesus on the cross. Well, you can imagine, when it was time for the birth my whole family traveled all the way from the Bronx, and for them the occasion was to be celebrated in the traditional way, with cake and wine and a little whiskey, so there were, in addition to my mother and father and sister Bessie and my brothers Harry and Billy, my aunts and uncles and cousins. Here they came dragging all the way from the Bronx, which was quite a trip then, nobody had cars, nobody could afford them, you took buses and the elevated train and then the real train, it took hours. And they had bags and shopping bags and gifts. And when they walked into St. Joseph’s and saw that big cross on the wall, they were stunned. One of my uncles, an extremely religious man, a ridiculous pompous man,
took one look and turned around and walked out and went right home—Aunt Minnie’s husband, Uncle Tony, he was English, he wore homburgs, he had a very high regard for himself. Then Minnie followed him, of course, she always let him lead her around, and one or two of the others, but my mother, a blessed dear woman, she and my father stayed, they were no less religious than Uncle Tony. The crosses on the walls were a profound offense to them, but they didn’t let it faze them, they knew what was important, and what was important was that they had a new grandson and that their daughter wanted them there.