My mother had met him the year before, when she’d sought help in having one of her garden figures cast into bronze, to be “placed on consignment” with some garden-sculpture gallery from which it would never be sold. Eric Nicholson had persuaded her that lead would be almost as nice as bronze and much cheaper; then he’d asked her out to dinner, and that evening changed our lives.
Mr. Nicholson rarely spoke to my sister or me, and I think we were both frightened of him, but he overwhelmed us with gifts. At first they were mostly books—a volume of cartoons from Punch, a partial set of Dickens, a book called England in Tudor Times containing tissue-covered color plates that Edith liked. But in the summer of 1933, when our father arranged for us to spend two weeks with our mother at a small lake in New Jersey, Mr. Nicholson’s gifts became a cornucopia of sporting goods. He gave Edith a steel fishing rod with a reel so intricate that none of us could have figured it out even if we’d known how to fish, a wicker creel for carrying the fish she would never catch, and a sheathed hunting knife to be worn at her waist. He gave me a short ax whose head was encased in a leather holster and strapped to my belt—I guess this was for cutting firewood to cook the fish—and a cumbersome net with a handle that hung from an elastic shoulder strap, in case I should be called upon to wade in and help Edith land a tricky one. There was nothing to do in that New Jersey village except take walks, or what my mother called good hikes; and every day, as we plodded out through the insect-humming weeds in the sun, we wore our full regalia of useless equipment.
That same summer Mr. Nicholson gave me a three-year subscription to Field & Stream, and I think that impenetrable magazine was the least appropriate of all his gifts because it kept coming in the mail for such a long, long time after everything else had changed for us: after we’d moved out of New York to Scarsdale, where Mr. Nicholson had found a house with a low rent, and after he had abandoned my mother in that house—with no warning—to return to England and to the wife from whom he’d never really been divorced.
But all that came later; I want to go back to the time between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election and his Inauguration, when his head was slowly taking shape on my mother’s modeling stand.
Her original plan had been to make it life-size, or larger than life-size, but Mr. Nicholson urged her to scale it down for economy in the casting, and so she made it only six or seven inches high. He persuaded her too, for the second time since he’d known her, that lead would be almost as nice as bronze.
She had always said she didn’t mind at all if Edith and I watched her work, but we had never much wanted to; now it was a little more interesting because we could watch her sift through many photographs of Roosevelt cut from newspapers until she found one that would help her execute a subtle plane of cheek or brow.
But most of our day was taken up with school. John Cabot might go to school in Hastings-on-Hudson, for which Edith would always yearn, but we had what even Edith admitted was the next best thing: we went to school in our bedroom.
During the previous year my mother had enrolled us in the public school down the street, but she’d begun to regret it when we came home with lice in our hair. Then one day Edith came home accused of having stolen a boy’s coat, and that was too much. She withdrew us both, in defiance of the city truant officer, and pleaded with my father to help her meet the cost of a private school. He refused. The rent she paid and the bills she ran up were already taxing him far beyond the terms of the divorce agreement; he was in debt; surely she must realize he was lucky even to have a job. Would she ever learn to be reasonable?
It was Howard Whitman who broke the deadlock. He knew of an inexpensive, fully accredited mail-order service called The Calvert School, intended mainly for the homes of children who were invalids. The Calvert School furnished weekly supplies of books and materials and study plans; all she would need was someone in the house to administer the program and to serve as a tutor. And someone like Bart Kampen would be ideal for the job.
“The skinny fellow?” she asked. “The Jewish boy from Holland or wherever it is?”
“He’s very well educated, Helen,” Howard told her. “And he speaks fluent English, and he’d be very conscientious. And he could certainly use the money.”
We were delighted to learn that Bart Kampen would be our tutor. With the exception of Howard himself, Bart was probably our favorite among the adults around the courtyard. He was twenty-eight or so, young enough so that his ears could still turn red when he was teased by children; we had found that out in teasing him once or twice about such matters as that his socks didn’t match. He was tall and very thin and seemed always to look startled except when he was comforted enough to smile. He was a violinist, a Dutch Jew who had emigrated the year before in the hope of joining a symphony orchestra, and eventually of launching a concert career. But the symphonies weren’t hiring then, nor were lesser orchestras, so Bart had gone without work for a long time. He lived alone in a room on Seventh Avenue, not far from the courtyard, and people who liked him used to worry that he might not have enough to eat. He owned two suits, both cut in a way that must have been stylish in the Netherlands at the time: stiff, heavily padded shoulders and a nipped-in waist; they would probably have looked better on someone with a little more meat on his bones. In shirtsleeves, with the cuffs rolled back, his hairy wrists and forearms looked even more fragile than you might have expected, but his long hands were shapely and strong enough to suggest authority on the violin.
“I’ll leave it entirely up to you, Bart,” my mother said when he asked if she had any instructions for our tutoring. “I know you’ll do wonders with them.”
A small table was moved into our bedroom, under the window, and three chairs placed around it. Bart sat in the middle so that he could divide his time equally between Edith and me. Big, clean, heavy brown envelopes arrived in the mail from The Calvert School once a week, and when Bart slid their fascinating contents onto the table it was like settling down to begin a game.
Edith was in the fifth grade that year—her part of the table was given over to incomprehensible talk about English and History and Social Studies—and I was in the first. I spent my mornings asking Bart to help me puzzle out the very opening moves of an education.
“Take your time, Billy,” he would say. “Don’t get impatient with this. Once you have it you’ll see how easy it is, and then you’ll be ready for the next thing.”
At eleven each morning we would take a break. We’d go downstairs and out to the part of the courtyard that had a little grass. Bart would carefully lay his folded coat on the sidelines, turn back his shirt cuffs, and present himself as ready to give what he called airplane rides. Taking us one at a time, he would grasp one wrist and one ankle; then he’d whirl us off our feet and around and around, with himself as the pivot, until the courtyard and the buildings and the city and the world were lost in the dizzying blur of our flight.
After the airplane rides we would hurry down the steps into the studio, where we’d usually find that my mother had set out a tray bearing three tall glasses of cold Ovaltine, sometimes with cookies on the side and sometimes not. I once overheard her telling Sloane Cabot she thought the Ovaltine must be Bart’s first nourishment of the day—and I think she was probably right, if only because of the way his hand would tremble in reaching for his glass. Sometimes she’d forget to prepare the tray and we’d crowd into the kitchen and fix it ourselves; I can never see a jar of Ovaltine on a grocery shelf without remembering those times. Then it was back upstairs to school again. And during that year, by coaxing and prodding and telling me not to get impatient, Bart Kampen taught me to read.
It was an excellent opportunity for showing off. I would pull books down from my mother’s shelves—mostly books that were the gifts of Mr. Nicholson—and try to impress her by reading mangled sentences aloud.
“That’s wonderful, dear,” she would say. “You’ve really learned to read, haven’t you.”
Soon a white-an
d-yellow “More light” stamp was affixed to every page of my Calvert First Grade Reader, proving I had mastered it, and others were accumulating at a slower rate in my arithmetic workbook. Still other stamps were fastened to the wall beside my place at the school table, arranged in a proud little white-and-yellow thumb-smudged column that rose as high as I could reach.
“You shouldn’t have put your stamps on the wall,” Edith said.
“Why?”
“Well, because they’ll be hard to take off.”
“Who’s going to take them off?”
That small room of ours, with its double function of sleep and learning, stands more clearly in my memory than any other part of our home. Someone should probably have told my mother that a girl and boy of our ages ought to have separate rooms, but that never occurred to me until much later. Our cots were set foot-to-foot against the wall, leaving just enough space to pass alongside them to the school table, and we had some good conversations as we lay waiting for sleep at night. The one I remember best was the time Edith told me about the sound of the city.
“I don’t mean just the loud noises,” she said, “like the siren going by just now, or those car doors slamming, or all the laughing and shouting down the street; that’s just close-up stuff. I’m talking about something else. Because you see there are millions and millions of people in New York—more people than you can possibly imagine, ever—and most of them are doing something that makes sound. Maybe talking, or playing the radio, maybe closing doors, maybe putting their forks down on their plates if they’re having dinner, or dropping their shoes if they’re going to bed—and because there are so many of them, all those little sounds add up and come together in a kind of hum. But it’s so faint—so very, very faint—that you can’t hear it unless you listen very carefully for a long time.”
“Can you hear it?” I asked her.
“Sometimes. I listen every night, but I can only hear it sometimes. Other times I fall asleep. Let’s be quiet now, and just listen. See if you can hear it, Billy.”
And I tried hard, closing my eyes as if that would help, opening my mouth to minimize the sound of my breathing, but in the end I had to tell her I’d failed. “How about you?” I asked.
“Oh, I heard it,” she said. “Just for a few seconds, but I heard it. You’ll hear it too, if you keep trying. And it’s worth waiting for. When you hear it, you’re hearing the whole city of New York.”
The high point of our week was Friday afternoon, when John Cabot came home from Hastings. He exuded health and normality; he brought fresh suburban air into our bohemian lives. He even transformed his mother’s small apartment, while he was there, into an enviable place of rest between vigorous encounters with the world. He subscribed to both Boys’ Life and Open Road for Boys, and these seemed to me to be wonderful things to have in your house, if only for the illustrations. John dressed in the same heroic way as the boys shown in those magazines, corduroy knickers with ribbed stockings pulled taut over his muscular calves. He talked a lot about the Hastings high-school football team, for which he planned to try out as soon as he was old enough, and about Hastings friends whose names and personalities grew almost as familiar to us as if they were friends of our own. He taught us invigorating new ways to speak, like saying “What’s the diff?” instead of “What’s the difference?” And he was better even than Edith at finding new things to do in the courtyard.
You could buy goldfish for ten or fifteen cents apiece in Woolworth’s then, and one day we brought home three of them to keep in the fountain. We sprinkled the water with more Woolworth’s granulated fish food than they could possibly need, and we named them after ourselves: “John,” “Edith,” and “Billy.” For a week or two Edith and I would run to the fountain every morning, before Bart came for school, to make sure they were still alive and to see if they had enough food, and to watch them.
“Have you noticed how much bigger Billy’s getting?” Edith asked me. “He’s huge. He’s almost as big as John and Edith now. He’ll probably be bigger than both of them.”
Then one weekend when John was home he called our attention to how quickly the fish could turn and move. “They have better reflexes than humans,” he explained. “When they see a shadow in the water, or anything that looks like danger, they get away faster than you can blink. Watch.” And he sank one hand into the water to make a grab for the fish named Edith, but she evaded him and fled. “See that?” he asked. “How’s that for speed? Know something? I bet you could shoot an arrow in there, and they’d get away in time. Wait.” To prove his point he ran to his mother’s apartment and came back with the handsome bow and arrow he had made at summer camp (going to camp every summer was another admirable thing about John); then he knelt at the rim of the fountain like the picture of an archer, his bow steady in one strong hand and the feathered end of his arrow tight against the bowstring in the other. He was taking aim at the fish named Billy. “Now, the velocity of this arrow,” he said in a voice weakened by his effort, “is probably more than a car going eighty miles an hour. It’s probably more like an airplane, or maybe even more than that. Okay; watch.”
The fish named Billy was suddenly floating dead on the surface, on his side, impaled a quarter of the way up the arrow with parts of his pink guts dribbled along the shaft.
I was too old to cry, but something had to be done about the shock and rage and grief that filled me as I ran from the fountain, heading blindly for home, and halfway there I came upon my mother. She stood looking very clean, wearing a new coat and dress I’d never seen before and fastened to the arm of Mr. Nicholson. They were either just going out or just coming in—I didn’t care which—and Mr. Nicholson frowned at me (he had told me more than once that boys of my age went to boarding school in England), but I didn’t care about that either. I bent my head into her waist and didn’t stop crying until long after I’d felt her hands stroking my back, until after she had assured me that goldfish didn’t cost much and I’d have another one soon, and that John was sorry for the thoughtless thing he’d done. I had discovered, or rediscovered, that crying is a pleasure—that it can be a pleasure beyond all reckoning if your head is pressed in your mother’s waist and her hands are on your back, and if she happens to be wearing clean clothes.
There were other pleasures. We had a good Christmas Eve in our house that year, or at least it was good at first. My father was there, which obliged Mr. Nicholson to stay away, and it was nice to see how relaxed he was among my mother’s friends. He was shy, but they seemed to like him. He got along especially well with Bart Kampen.
Howard Whitman’s daughter, Molly, a sweet-natured girl of about my age, had come in from Tarrytown to spend the holidays with him, and there were several other children whom we knew but rarely saw. John looked very mature that night in a dark coat and tie, plainly aware of his social responsibilities as the oldest boy.
After awhile, with no plan, the party drifted back into the dining-room area and staged an impromptu vaudeville. Howard started it: he brought the tall stool from my mother’s modeling stand and sat his daughter on it, facing the audience. He folded back the opening of a brown paper bag two or three times and fitted it on to her head; then he took off his suit coat and draped it around her backwards, up to the chin; he went behind her, crouched out of sight, and worked his hands through the coatsleeves so that when they emerged they appeared to be hers. And the sight of a smiling little girl in a paper-bag hat, waving and gesturing with huge, expressive hands, was enough to make everyone laugh. The big hands wiped her eyes and stroked her chin and pushed her hair behind her ears; then they elaborately thumbed her nose at us.
Next came Sloane Cabot. She sat very straight on the stool with her heels hooked over the rungs in such a way as to show her good legs to their best advantage, but her first act didn’t go over.
“Well,” she began, “I was at work today—you know my office is on the fortieth floor—when I happened to glance up from my typewriter and saw th
is big old man sort of crouched on the ledge outside the window, with a white beard and a funny red suit. So I ran to the window and opened it and said, ‘Are you all right?’ Well, it was Santa Claus, and he said, ‘Of course I’m all right; I’m used to high places. But listen, miss: can you direct me to number seventy-five Bedford Street?’”
There was more, but our embarrassed looks must have told her we knew we were being condescended to; as soon as she’d found a way to finish it she did so quickly. Then, after a thoughtful pause, she tried something else that turned out to be much better.
“Have you children ever heard the story of the first Christmas?” she asked. “When Jesus was born?” And she began to tell it in the kind of hushed, dramatic voice she must have hoped might be used by the narrators of her more serious radio plays.
“… And there were still many miles to go before they reached Bethlehem,” she said, “and it was a cold night. Now, Mary knew she would very soon have a baby. She even knew, because an angel had told her, that her baby might one day be the savior of all mankind. But she was only a young girl”—here Sloane’s eyes glistened, as if they might be filling with tears—“and the traveling had exhausted her. She was bruised by the jolting gait of the donkey and she ached all over, and she thought they’d never, ever get there, and all she could say was ‘Oh, Joseph, I’m so tired.’”
The story went on through the rejection at the inn, and the birth in the stable, and the manger, and the animals, and the arrival of the three kings; when it was over we clapped a long time because Sloane had told it so well.