That was all right with me; it didn’t cost much, and they sometimes held group exhibitions of painting and sculpture—awful afternoons of tea and sponge cake, of heavily creaking wooden floors and clustering ladies in funny hats—at which a small, old, finger-smudged piece of my mother’s sculpture might win an Honorable Mention.
“And you see, it’s only recently that they’ve let sculptors into Pen and Brush,” she explained, far more often than necessary. “It was always just writers and painters before that, and of course they can’t change the name of it now, to include the sculptors, but we call ourselves ‘the chiselers.’” And that always struck her as so funny that she’d laugh and laugh, either trying to hide her old teeth with her fingers or, later, happily displaying the gleam of her new ones.
I met almost nobody of my own age during that time, except by hanging around Village bars and trying to figure out what was going on; then once I was taken to a small party and met a girl named Eileen who turned out to be as lonely as I was, though she was better at concealing it. She was tall and slender with rich dark red hair and a pretty, bony face that could sometimes look warily stern, as if the world were trying to put something over on her. She too had come from what she called a “shabby-genteel” background (I had never heard that phrase before and added it at once to my vocabulary); her parents too had been long divorced; she hadn’t gone to college either; and, again like me, she earned her living as a white-collar employee. She was a secretary in a business office. An important difference here was that she insisted she liked her work because it was “a good job,” but I imagined there would be plenty of time for talking her out of that.
From the beginning, and for the whole of the next year, we were hardly ever apart except during working hours. It may not have been love, but we couldn’t have been persuaded of that because we kept telling each other, and telling ourselves, that it was. If we often quarreled, the movies had proved time and again that love was like that. We couldn’t keep away from each other, though I think we both came to suspect, after awhile, that this might be because neither of us had anywhere else to go.
Eileen wanted to meet my mother, and I knew it would be a mistake but couldn’t think of an acceptable way to say no. And my mother, predictably, didn’t like her. “Well, she’s a pleasant girl, dear,” she said later, “but I don’t see how you can find her so attractive.”
Then once when Eileen was telling me about a boring middle-aged man who lived in her building, she said, “He’s been on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it, that he’s come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work. I mean he’s an art bum, like your mother.”
“An art bum?”
“Well, you know. When you fool around with it all your life, trying to impress people with something that isn’t really there and never really was—don’t you think that’s tiresome? Don’t you think it’s a waste of everybody’s time?”
From old loyalty I tried to defend my mother against the art-bum charge, but it came out weak and lame and overstated, and there might have been yet another quarrel if we hadn’t found some way to change the subject.
Some mornings when I’d come home after daylight, with barely time to put on a clean shirt for work, my mother would greet me with a tragic stare—and once or twice she said, as if I were the girl, “Well, I certainly hope you know what you’re doing.” Then one evening late in the year she went into one of her uncontrollable rages and referred to Eileen as “that cheap little Irish slut of yours.” But that wasn’t really so bad because it enabled me to get up in a disdainful silence and walk out of the place and shut the door, leaving her to wonder if I would ever come back.
That winter I came down with pneumonia, which seemed only in keeping with the general run of our bad luck. And during my recovery in the hospital there was a time when my mother and Eileen, who had skillfully avoided each other until then, found themselves riding in the same elevator and came into the ward together for the afternoon visiting hour. They took chairs on opposite sides of the high steel bed and made hesitant conversation across my chest, while I turned my head on the pillow from one to the other of their remarkably different faces, the old and the new, trying to muster appropriate expressions for each of them.
Then Eileen pulled open one side of my hospital gown, peered beneath it, and began massaging the flesh on my ribs with her hand. “Isn’t he a nice color?” she inquired with a bright false trill in her voice.
“Well, yes, I’ve always thought so,” my mother said quietly.
“Do you know what the best part is, though?” Eileen said. “The best part is, he’s the same color all over.”
And it might have been funny if my mother hadn’t chosen to take it in silence, slightly lowering her eyelids and lifting her chin, like a dowager obliged to confront an impudent scullery maid; all Eileen could do was put her hand back in her lap and look down at it.
I was released from the ward a few days later, though not before a mild and conscientious-looking doctor lectured me on the virtues of adequate nutrition and regular hours. “You’re underweight,” he explained as if I didn’t know it, as if being skinny hadn’t been a terrible source of embarrassment all my life. “And you’ve had several lung ailments, and your general physical type suggests a susceptibility to TB.”
I didn’t know what to make of that as I rode home on the subway with my grubby little brown paper bag of toilet articles, but I knew it was something that would have to wait. For now, and for God only knew how long a time to come, there were other troubles.
And the most dreaded, the worst conceivable trouble came within a month or two, one warm night in Eileen’s apartment when she said she wanted to break off with me. We had been “courting”—her word—for a year, and there didn’t seem to be any future in it. She said she was “still interested in other men,” and when I said, “What other men?” she looked away and made some enigmatic reply that told me I was losing the argument.
I knew I had a point—she didn’t know any other men; still, she had a good point too. She wanted the freedom to be lonely again, to wait at her telephone until somebody asked her to some place where there would be other men, and then from among several candidates she would choose one. He would probably be older than me, and better-looking and better-dressed, with a few dollars in the bank and some idea of where his life was going, and he certainly wouldn’t have a mother on his hands.
So it was over; and for a little while, taking a tragic view of my situation, I thought I would probably die. I wasn’t yet as old as John Keats, another ill-nourished tubercular type, but then I hadn’t yet established any claim to genius, either, and so my death might well be poignant in its very obscurity—a youth consumed before his time, an unknown soldier mourned by no one, ever, except perhaps by a single girl.
But I was still expected to hammer out United Press copy eight hours a day, and to ride the subway and pay attention to where the hell I was walking on the street, and it doesn’t take long to discover that you have to be alive to do things like that.
One evening I came home and found my mother barely able to suppress the joy of something she had to tell me. For a moment of unreasoning hope, looking into her happy face, I thought the good news might be that she’d found some decent work, but that wasn’t it.
There was going to be an evening’s entertainment at Pen and Brush, she said, and a party afterwards. Each category of the club’s membership would present a humorous song or skit or something, and she had been chosen to do the turn for the sculpture contingent.
There was a mindless little commercial jingle on the radio then, advertising bananas. A girl with a South American accent would come on and sing, to a Latin beat:
I’m Chiquita Banana and I’ve—come to say
Bananas have to ripen in a—certain way …
And this was my mother’s parody of it, composed for the pleasure of the Pen and Brush ladies an
d performed, with bright eyes and a brisk little hopping around on the floor of our wretched home, for me:
Oh, we are the sculptors and we’ve—come to say
You have to treat the sculptors in a—certain way …
She was fifty-seven years old. It had often occurred to me that she was crazy—there had been people who said she was crazy as long as I could remember—but I think it must have been that night, or very soon afterwards, that I decided to get out.
I borrowed three hundred dollars from the bank, gave it to my mother, explained that I would make all the payments on it, and told her, in so many words, that she was on her own.
Then I hurried to Eileen’s place—hurried as if in fear that “other men” might get there first—and asked her if she would marry me right away, and she said yes.
“It’s funny about us,” she said later. “We’re nothing alike, we don’t really have any common interests or anything, but there certainly is a—chemical affinity, isn’t there.”
“Yeah.”
And on chemical affinity alone, it seemed, in a crumbling apartment at the quiet waterfront edge of the Village, we survived the summer of 1948.
There were times when my mother would call up in meekness and urgency to ask me for twenty, or ten, or five, until Eileen and I came to dread the ringing of the phone; then before very long she began to earn most of her own living. She was sculpting the heads for department-store mannequins on a freelance basis, working at home—at least there would be no more factory employment—but she wanted me to know that something much better might soon come through for her. She had learned that the National Association of Women Artists planned to hire an administrative and public-relations person. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful kind of job? There was no requirement that the person be able to type, which was a blessing, but the trouble was they would probably want her to work as a volunteer for a while before they’d put her on a salary. And if she had to spend several months working full-time there without pay, how could she get her mannequin heads done? Wasn’t it ironic how things never seemed to work out quite right?
Yeah.
Late that fall I was fired from the United Press—for general incompetence, I think, though that word wasn’t used in the cordial little firing speech—and there were a few tense weeks until I found work on a labor union newspaper. Then in the spring I was hired at Remington Rand, and so began my time of sloth and talk in that dry little glassed-in cubicle with Dan Rosenthal.
* * *
Once I’d learned not to tell him too much about myself, we got along very well. And it became very important for me to earn and keep his good opinion.
Much of his talk was about his family. He told me his father was a cutter in the men’s clothing industry and had “done a remarkable amount in the way of self-education,” but then he said, “Ah, shit. It’s impossible to say something like that without demeaning the man. You get a picture of some funny little guy hunched over a machine all day and then talking Kierkegaard all night. That’s not what I mean at all. Know something? When you’re close to someone, when you love someone, you can only make a goddamn fool of yourself trying to explain it. Same with my mother.”
And he was greatly proud of his brother, Phil, who was then in one of the several city high schools established for gifted students. “I ordered him,” he said once. “When I was seven years old I told my parents I wanted a kid brother and wouldn’t take no for an answer. They had no choice. So they came through for me, and that was fine, but the trouble was I hadn’t realized it’d be years before I could play with him, or talk to him, or teach him anything, or do anything at all with him, and that was hard to take. Still, ever since he was about six I haven’t had many complaints. We got a piano in the house and Phil was playing classical music in a couple of months. I’m not kidding. When it was time for high school he had his pick of the finest schools in the city. He’s still very shy with girls, and I think he worries about that, but the girls sure as hell aren’t shy with him. The damn phone rings every night. Girls. Just calling up to have a little time with Phil. Oh, son of a bitch, this kid’s got everything.”
Several times Dan said he guessed he was about ready to move into a place of his own, and he asked me in a tentative way about rents in different parts of the Village, but these plans implied no difficulty with his family. It seemed rather that moving away was what he thought the world might now expect of him, in view of his age and education. He wanted to do the right thing.
Then one morning he called in to the office, hoarse with shock and lack of sleep, and said, “Bill? Listen, I won’t be in for a few days. I don’t know how many days. My father died last night.”
When he came back to work he was very pale and seemed to have shrunk a little. He said “fuck” a great many times in muttering over office problems; then after a week or so he wanted to tell me about his father’s life.
“You know what a cutter does?” he asked. “Well, he operates a little machine all day. The machine’s got an automatic blade, sort of like a jigsaw; the man takes maybe twenty-five layers of cloth—flannel or worsted or whatever the hell it happens to be—and he works the blade around through that whole stack of stuff according to some pattern, like maybe a sleeve or a lapel or a coat pocket. And there’s lint everywhere. It gets up into your nose; it gets into your throat. You’re living your whole life in fucking lint. And can you imagine a man of high intelligence—a man of high intelligence doing that kind of work for thirty-five years? For no better reason than that he’s never had time to be trained in anything else? Ah, shit. Shit. It’s enough to break your fucking heart. Fifty-two years old.”
Dan took up cigars that summer, always carrying a cluster of them in his shirt pocket, chewing and smoking them all day as he bent over his work. It seemed to me that he didn’t really enjoy them much—they sometimes drove him into coughing fits—but it was as if they were a necessary part of his preparation for the thick, premature middle age he had assigned himself at twenty-five.
“You know this guy in the office I’ve told you about?” I said to Eileen one night. “The artist? Dan Rosenthal? I think he’s getting into practice for being an old man.”
“Oh? How do you mean?”
“Well, he’s getting so—ah, I can’t explain it. I’m not even sure if I’ve got it right.”
She could seldom explain anything to me about people in her office, either. Our conversations often dissolved into admissions that we weren’t even sure if we had it right, and then there would be silence until a quarrel broke out over something else.
We weren’t an ideal couple. We had been married at ages we both now considered too young, and for reasons we both now considered inadequate. There were times when we could talk long and pleasantly, as if to prove we were good companions; still, even then, some of her speech mannerisms made me wince. Instead of “yeah” she said “yaw,” often while squinting against the smoke of a cigarette; she said “as per usual” too—an accounting-department witticism, I think—and instead of “everything” she often said “the works.” That was the way smart, no-nonsense New York secretaries talked, and a smart, no-nonsense New York secretary was all she had ever allowed herself to want to be.
Well, almost ever. During the previous winter, to my great surprise, she had enrolled in an acting class at the New School. She would come home breathless with what she was learning, eager to talk without any secretarial rhetoric at all; those were the best of our times together. Nobody could have guessed, on those nights, that this sweet student of the dramatic arts devoted forty hours a week to toiling in the office of a fabric manufacturer called Botany Mills.
At the end of the New School year all members of her class performed, for an audience composed mostly of relatives and friends, in a dusty old theater on Second Avenue. There were two- and three-character scenes taken from familiar American plays; other students had chosen to act alone, as Eileen did. She had picked something light but not insubstantial
—a long, subtle, self-contained monologue from Dream Girl by Elmer Rice—and everybody let her know she was wonderful to watch and to hear.
She did so well that night that the New School offered her a scholarship for the following year. And that was when the trouble began. She thought it over for a few days—there were long silences in the apartment while she peeled potatoes or worked at the ironing board—and then she announced that she’d decided to turn down the scholarship. Going to school at night was too tiring after a full day’s work. Oh, it had been all right this year—it had been “fun”—but to go on with it would be foolish: even if it was free, it would cost too much in other ways. Besides, nobody could learn much about acting from these little adult-education courses. If she really wanted to learn, in any professional sense, she would have to study full-time; and that, of course, was out of the question.
“Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why?’”
“Well, Jesus, Eileen, you don’t need that job. You could quit that dumb little job tomorrow. I can take care of—”
“Oh, you can take care of what?” And she turned to face me with both small fists on her hips, a gesture that always meant we were in for a bad one.
I loved the girl who’d wanted to tell me all about “the theater,” and the girl who’d stood calm and shy in the thunderclap of applause that followed her scene from Dream Girl. I didn’t much like the dependable typist at Botany Mills, or the grudging potato peeler, or the slow, tired woman who frowned over the ironing board to prove how poor we were. And I didn’t want to be married to anyone, ever, who said things like, “Oh, you can take care of what?”