I remember once sitting in Austin, Texas, with the fine poet, my friend Audre Lorde (who wrote a remarkable memoir, Zami). We were in a Holiday Inn that had at the top one of those restaurants that revolved—a fad of the time. We were looking down into the neighborhood of working-class or poor families, and Audre remarked that living in places where people had little houses and little yards was better than living in the downtown areas of cities. I agreed, thinking of my Detroit neighborhood. At the end of every block loomed dilapidated apartment houses where some of my friends lived, or housing projects, but most of the neighborhood was composed of what were called bungalows, tiny houses, or two-and four-family frame houses. Detroit has a wet climate and the sand must be fertile, as it is here on the Cape, for if a house burns down, within a couple of months, a jungle of greenery grows in its place. Nature is avid to take back any available space. When I was a child, the streets of Detroit were lined with huge elms and an occasional oak. It gave me a vision of an alternate city of green over the grim and hostile streets. If my father cherished the minute front lawn, my mother grew vegetables, herbs and flowers in the only slightly bigger backyard. She used every inch she could pry from his vision of green lawns.
Early on after we moved into that tiny house, my uncle Danny lived with us. Maybe he had got into trouble in Cleveland; maybe he was just out of work. He and my brother were only two years apart. My grandmother Hannah had eleven children before she finally left off childbearing, at fifty-three. Danny was the last child and the only one she had the leisure to spoil. He was an anarchist and believed in the power and virtue of the working class; he loved jazz and had a huge collection of records. He was the coolest of my uncles. Danny and my brother Grant gambled together, ran after women, borrowed money. When they had any money, they lost it immediately or spent it on loud clothes and louder women. I loved but never wanted to emulate them. But I thought them both the handsomest men alive.
The first cat I remember was Whiskers, a gray tabby. My mother named all the cats. Danny brought home two bunnies he had won in a card game. They lived down in the basement until they chewed the insulation off the washing machine. Whiskers would wait on the ledge by the furnace and then pounce on one of the rabbits and ride him. Sometimes he would chase them, and sometimes one or both of them would chase him. I also remember the little raisiny turds they dropped all over the basement. Like most little kids, I was fascinated by shit.
The rabbits were shipped off to Lucy and Lon, where, for all I know, we might have eaten them. I was far more involved with Whiskers. The cats of my childhood were not long-lived. They were all males, never altered, never taken to the vet and usually put out at night. They got in fights, they were hit by cars, they fought with the huge rats that inhabited the alleys. Boys shot them with BB guns. My mother was wonderful at nursing hurt animals, but it would never have occurred to her to try to prevent those injuries.
I am enormously fond of the writings of M. F. K. Fisher and was flattered and honored that she liked my novel Gone to Soldiers. However, when I read her memoir of her cat who was finally torn apart by other male cats when he could no longer defend himself, I could not help wondering what was with all those women of the older generations who insisted on leaving male cats intact until they were killed. It reminds me of guys who identify with the size and power of their dogs. When I was faced with that situation for the first time, with Jim Beam, Ira and I were sentimental and waited too long to have him altered—a lapse we were to regret the rest of his life. To this day, I will find some object in the house that stinks of male cat piss, and remember Jim Beam, who expressed himself on it. But somehow to that earlier generation, the sexual adventures of a male cat were more important than his health, well-being, or even his life.
I grew up much closer to my mother’s family than to my father’s. For one thing, my mother and I were Jewish, and my father was not. There was a lot of intermarrying in the extended Bunnin family, and while my grandmother, who gave me my religious education, did not like that, she couldn’t do much about it. My father’s family was casually and relentlessly anti-Semitic, so neither my mother nor I was ever easy with them. We were always waiting for the next little insult. We were always being observed to see if we would do something Jewish like crucify somebody in the backyard. If my mother or I ever laughed, or raised our voices, or used our hands in talking, there was a look that would pass between them that would silence us, as if we had been pushed under a glass bell. They never missed an opportunity to serve ham to us. My mother would eat it politely, although of course she never cooked it, but I would not. My grandmother had trained me too well. I remember no animals in the Ebensburg narrow brick house where my father grew up and his two maiden sisters lived. I do remember that my great-aunt Jane who was Scottish had two Scotty dogs and a husband fifteen years younger. She went about the extended family visiting, for it was understood she would leave her fortune to the relatives who pleased her best. She was always on the move with her doting husband, from best bedroom to best bedroom. She made clear what she liked to eat and to drink, so was served roast lamb, roast beef and Scotch whisky or dark ale. I liked the Scotty dogs, who ran exuberantly through the houses of relatives who detested animals. It wasn’t until she died at ninety that the family learned there was no money at all. The two of them had been living on the relatives, enjoying life together. A consummate con woman. I admired her. So did my mother.
The most shameful thing I ever did in Ebensburg was when I was eight, when I fell in love with a wooden doorstop in the shape of a swan. I had seen swans at the Detroit zoo. I thought it beautiful. I wanted it. Finally I asked my aunt Grace for it. She refused, in some annoyance. I still wanted it, so I stole it and hid it in our suitcase. I was, of course, discovered. My mother was furious. I was a born criminal, obviously, and I had shamed her before the goyim. I still wanted it, but now I knew I would never have it. How passionately I was in love with that white swan doorstop. Yet I was deeply ashamed, because I had shamed my mother.
Bert Bernice Bunnin Piercy was a small intense woman whose coloring I have: black hair, dark eyes, pale slightly pinkish skin. As I age, I look more and more like her. She had tremendous energy and a wild dramatic imagination. She was a wonderful mother to a young child. Somewhere in the books she consumed constantly she had learned that mothers should play word games with their children to develop their verbal skills. When she was giving me my bath, she would choose three words and I would have to make up a story using them. She would constantly test my powers of observation. We would play mental hide-and-seek. We would imagine ourselves walking down a familiar street and I would have to list every building and describe it. Wonderful games: I had all her attention then.
She loved toys, something she’d never enjoyed. I had a small mostly secondhand wardrobe of shabby ill-fitting clothes, but many toys acquired at yard sales. Our tiny yard had swings, a teeter-totter and lawn furniture. Sometimes the aunts gave me dolls, sometimes a book. Grandma could not give me anything that cost money, but she could take scraps of worn-out clothing and tablecloths and turn them into clothes for my dolls. My dolls were clothed in dresses Mother or I had worn in their previous guise. They were the envy of girls who had more and fancier dolls.
I had a dollhouse, two stories, very simple and covered with some indelible scribbles from the child who had owned it before: but I adored it. I was given for my birthday wooden stick figures of a mother, father and baby from the dime store, but I had quite enough of the nuclear family. Instead, I had an army of little china animals my brother’s first wife, Isabelle, had given me in an Easter basket, not understanding we did not celebrate Easter. I cherished the animals, who lived out their elaborate and ongoing adventures in that dollhouse. I learned to keep the stick family sitting here and there, so that when my mother would inquire what was going on, I could break from the real action and point to them. She thought it weird that I would invest my imagination in animals, but I vastly preferred them. The
leader was Captain Kitty, a small gray and white china cat I still keep on my vanity table, with her boyfriend, Terry the Spaniel. In addition, there were two other dogs, Dorothy and Bruce; a rooster, a chicken and two bunnies. All had names, personalities and ever more extensive histories. I made furniture out of dominoes at first but gradually acquired little pieces from the dime store. My first novels were composed in my head about the adventures of Captain Kitty. I do not remember the name of a single doll I had, but I remember the names of all the china animals that inhabited my dollhouse.
My childhood was a mix of abundance and penury. Once we lived on oatmeal for three weeks; to go to the doctor for my anemia was too expensive; yet I had a box full of toys and my father had an elaborate electric train set, erected every winter in the basement. It was bought used, but he was always adding to it. He loved playing railroad engineer. For a time, my brother worked on the real railroad and was in the Brotherhood. My childhood was in the era of the romance of trains, their plaintive hooting, their promise of other places, the excitement of big formal bustling stations. My mother’s relatives arrived on trains and my brother departed for the marines and came back on furlough. Four blocks away three busy sets of railroad tracks ran. In my older childhood, I hung around those tracks. I imagined leaving on a train, hopping on like a hobo and traveling, traveling. It was not until my last year of high school that I learned this was the Detroit Terminal Railroad that ran no place but around Detroit.
My father making the switchman emerge from his little house and wave his lantern, creating bridges out of odd parts left over from his work, turning the transformer high to race fast and crash on the curves, that was my father boyish and grinning. When I could play with him, we got on well. Playing cards was another time he was jolly with me, for I could remember the cards and the rules of the games they regularly played with friends: hearts, Michigan, rummy, canasta, pinochle, poker. It was a skill he could appreciate, and I had a great need to please.
My father seemed tall to me in my childhood. Certainly he loomed over my mother, who was four ten. He was probably five eight or nine. He had gray eyes. I remember his hair as silver although I know it was brown in my childhood, but, unlike my mother’s, it turned early. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and smoked incessantly. The scratch of a match and his smoker’s cough were the first sounds I heard in the mornings. He had a favorite chair where he sat wreathed in smoke, reading the newspaper slowly. Sometimes he smoked a pipe and always he smoked cigarettes. Except for poker, he did not gamble much, but he liked to drink and held his liquor well. He preferred beer or rye whiskey, sometimes bourbon. My mother liked only wine, which she made of whatever she could find to ferment: sour cherries, elderberries, Concord grapes.
Mother had a great capacity for joy, stunted by her life. She had enjoyed school, but was taken out halfway through the tenth grade to go to work. The histories of my mother’s two earlier marriages do not belong to this memoir, but I knew what a hard time she had throughout her life, and I could see how little she was getting in the present. She could enjoy fully and passionately the flowers of her plot, playing with the cats or me, getting dressed up when they went out, traveling, staying in hotels or tourist cabins or cottages we rented for a week, seeing her family, learning all the secrets of the neighbors and telling them to me. I was the repository of her past, the previous husbands and boyfriends never to be alluded to in my father’s presence, the complicated tales of her family, the local scandals, complaints about my father. She poured her emotions, her fantasies, her resentments into me. An intensely nosy child, I was always asking why, far more often than was pleasant to anyone around me, but I was at least a good listener. I was an obnoxiously curious child, always into everything, always poking and prying and asking impertinent questions. I loved to sneak into the room and listen to neighbors telling her their troubles. I still am that child. I eavesdrop on the conversations of strangers in restaurants, in airports and supermarkets. I drive my husband crazy with questions sometimes; but I am still a good listener and I still keep secrets.
The most mature person I knew was Grandma, Bubbeh, Hannah Levy Adler Bunnin. Actually Adler should come last. After my grandfather’s murder, his head bashed in by thugs hired by the owners of the bakeries where he was organizing a union, a few years later she married again: the owner of a shoe store. He lost the shoe store in the Depression and died soon afterward. Grandma did not talk about Adler. He had been a compromise and a disappointment. She talked only of her first husband, my grandfather. He was the love of her life and caused her the greatest pain, for he was not faithful. He was a radical and irreligious, a deracinated Jew from St. Petersburg; she was the daughter of a shtetl rabbi from Lithuania. Like my parents’, it was a marriage of passion between ill-matched lovers.
My grandmother had a cat named Blackie, who has appeared in my poems and in Gone to Soldiers. He was a gentleman, in disposition much like my Oboe, well mannered, affectionate, clean with a shiny black coat unmarred by a fleck of white. I admired him greatly. Seders were special at my grandmother’s, and Blackie always attended. My grandmother insisted he prayed, and she confided that when no one else was there, he ate with a knife and fork. I believed. It was no more wonderful than the stories she told of the golem, dybbuks, rabbis who could fly. My grandmother took me to shul, where I was perfectly happy behind the mehitzah with the old ladies who smelled of lavender and sweat and camphor, who fussed over me, who spoke little Hebrew but a great deal of Yiddish. I felt intensely cherished with my grandmother and her friends. In Grandma’s apartment, I learned to drink hot tea from a glass with a sugar cube clenched in my teeth, and there too I heard all the neighborhood gossip as well as fifty-year-old scandals and escapes. Some of the most intense pleasures of my childhood were listening to adults tell stories. I pieced a world together from these rich fragments.
We went regularly to Cleveland, where several of the Bunnins lived: Grandma, Aunt Ruth, one of my mother’s brothers, Frank, and his wife, Mickey, and Danny, his wife and then ex-wife and their two daughters. Uncle Frank and Aunt Mickey were interesting to me because they were childless and happy. They both worked and had a pleasant apartment and money enough to go off on trips for pleasure. My mother spoke of them with pity, as she did any childless couple, but I thought their life looked pretty good. Cleveland was a place I always felt welcome. Indeed, when I was twelve, I went to stay with Aunt Ruth—my mother’s youngest sister, also childless and a working woman—for a couple of weeks by myself, taking the Greyhound bus. Ruth was intermediate in age between my mother and myself. Sometimes she seemed almost a girlfriend. Sometimes she betrayed me and sided with my mother. We looked alike, as everyone in the Bunnin family did. They were a volatile lot, given to late phone calls to my mother full of trouble and excitement, given to unfortunate romances and hasty marriages, given to lofty plans, financial disasters, failed ventures. I admired Ruth. She worked, she wore slacks long before they were common. She was the only athlete in the family, putting her overabundance of energy into sports. A line of trophies stood in her living room. I don’t remember going with her to the bowling lanes, before she married and took up golf, but I remember being her caddie on the links. The game itself bored me, but my aunt never did. She was merry, lively, shrewd. She laughed easily and read mysteries. She had been told many times if she had a degree, she would have moved up in the navy. She had a civilian job and did extremely well at it. Whatever she did, she performed well. I strove to emulate that trait. She seemed far more focused to me than most of the rest of the Bunnins, and I already admired focus by late childhood.
She had RH-negative blood, as I do. Wanting children, she suffered a string of miscarriages. The negative factor was little understood then. Most members of that generation of Bunnins were childless by choice. Growing up with so many babies in such poverty turned off the desire to procreate. Danny had children—two families’ worth. My mother had my brother and me. That was it, except for my mother’s oldest si
ster, Rose (the stage name she took; her name was Rivka), who adopted a son.
They got married, they got divorced, they had affairs, they had adventures. Except for my uncle Harry, an unsuccessful magician who married a rich widow with four daughters, none of them owned much. Frank and Mickey were comfortable, but mostly when the Bunnins did well and were beginning to be solidly middle class, like Ruth, something came up. Her husband was abusive, and she left him for another man, left the middle class, left everything except Grandma, who was living with her by then—except for summers with us. The Bunnins talked a lot, about everything. They were full of laughter, of anger, they were sexy, they were smart, and they were usually in some kind of trouble. My mother would have a sudden premonition that something was wrong. Late phone calls. Whispers. Don’t tell your father, she would say to me, but Ruth is leaving Barney. Danny has run away from Lil. They gossiped about one another, they fought and made up, they told stories and they exaggerated and they swore unapologetically. How could I resist them? Why should I want to? They had wit and politics. When they were in a room, the air vibrated with loud laughter and put-downs and jokes. They had strong opinions about books and music and popular culture. Three of the uncles had been in vaudeville, and my mother’s two oldest sisters had been dancers in the Ziegfeld Follies, George White’s Scandals, even the movies. They ranged politically from Roosevelt Democrats to the anarchism of Danny and general left sympathies. Conversation never lagged. They told dirty jokes and acted out scenes from their lives, to wild laughter.