He turned around. On the porch his mother and father were saying goodbye to the man who was such a big shot. The man shook his father’s hand, tipped his hat to his mother, and went down the steps. His parents watched the man until he disappeared around the corner.
He wondered where the man lived. The man talked the way his father talked, but he was no friend of his father’s. Fathers talked to each other in big words. Of course, he understood that it was about ways of making things better for working people. But what did the talk do to all the houses—it seemed to him that the talk should do something to the houses, but it never did. The houses remained unmoved. The apartment houses rising like steps along 173rd Street from Eastburn Avenue up to Weeks. The private red-brick houses along Eastburn. The hills of houses all around. Only the schoolyard, like a big square pit, had no houses.
Daniel waited for his mother and father to see him and call to him. His father’s sleeves were rolled up and his mother was in her stocking feet. They turned, and went back in, his hand on her shoulder.
Daniel climbed the fence as high as he could, which wasn’t very high. Not even a jump from the ground. It was a chain link fence, and the mesh made diamond-shaped holes. In these holes you had to place the toes of your shoes—he knew the technique all right, but he couldn’t do it yet. Hanging on the fence, he looked back across the street. He had an odd house. It was the only house on the whole street unattached to any other. There was an apartment house on one side, and a row of private houses on the other. All the other houses were made of brick, but his was dark green asphalt siding, notched in squares to make it look like brick, but which fooled nobody. You could pick at it and pieces would snap off like linoleum. At the corners of the house it curled up.
It was the way the wind could sweep up the hill over the schoolyard right at his house and, during a storm, actually make the inside wall near the front door wet, that alarmed him sometimes. The sky here offered no protection, it was too open. There was an unguarded feeling, a sense of vulnerability to the sky around your shoulders and the back of your neck.
And if the house was no protection, that was truly terrifying. Except now with Grandma dead, it would be better. She would not be grabbing him around the neck to give him a penny. She would not have her fits and curse at him. He didn’t have to wonder whether today would be a day she would love him, or a day she would hate him. The baby would have her room now; and he would have his room all for himself. There would not be that dying madwoman old grandma who the day she died he saw naked. She was very white and her hair was combed out on the pillow, and she did not look like an old lady. Lying on the bed naked while the doctor listened to her heart. He saw it just for a second as he walked by her door into his room. A whiteness.
He thought of Williams. Crossing the street, he went around to the side of the house, down the alley to the side door where Williams lived in the cellar. He was being brave, but really he didn’t think Williams was there. When he opened the door, his eyes were not used to the darkness, and by the time he saw Williams, the super had already observed him. And in that voice of murder and menace, so deep that it sounded like singing, Williams said, “What you want?”
The cellar smelled of ashes, of dust, of garbage, and of the green poison in the corners for the mice and roaches. There was also the smell of Williams which filled the basement like its weather, which terrified him—an overwhelming burning smell which proved that Williams ruled in the cellar, that even though his family lived in the house, the cellar belonged to Williams. It was the smell of his constant anger.
I was fascinated by everything he did. He could fix anything. I didn’t know whether he was an old man or a young man. I couldn’t tell. He was very tall and strong, but his fuzzy hair was grey. He was powerful, but he walked slowly, with an effort. Whatever he did was monumental. Shoveling coal—I remember him shoveling coal. It would be summertime. He wore no shirt under his overalls. The coal truck with its chain wheels would back up to the curb in front of the house; the driver would leave the motor on to power the uptilting bed, and climb over the back gate of the truck and sit astride it as it tilted more and more dangerously. Then he’d pull a lever and out would spill the coal with a fearful clattering to the sidewalk, where Williams waited with his shovel. Williams would begin his work while the truck was still there, and would be at it long after the truck had left: diminishing that gigantic mountain of coal shovelful by shovelful, heaving the coal from the pile into the wheelbarrow. When the wheelbarrow was full, he’d plant the shovel in the coalpile and take the barrow down the alley in his slow, torturous, gigantic way. And a few minutes later, bring it back empty and grab the shovel again. Scrape and rattle—that was the sound. The scrape of the shovel on the sidewalk, the momentous silence as the coal flew through the air, and then the rattle of the coal in the wheelbarrow. Williams always shoveled from the bottom, a technique puzzling to a child also puzzled by the transfer of flame from the bottom of one candlewick to the top of another.
“My grandma died,” Daniel said, standing by the door. Williams rose from his cot, so incredibly gigantic that he had to stoop slightly to avoid bumping his head on the pipes running along the ceiling. He lumbered toward Daniel, and Daniel tensed himself to run. But Williams grabbed two empty garbage cans near the door and carried them to the darkness of the cellar back near the coalbin. Then he came back and took two more of the cans, lifting them by the rim as if they weighed no more than paper cups. When Williams tended to the garbage cans, they rattled and crashed as loud as thunder. In his own room upstairs, Daniel sometimes heard the cans crashing around under his feet like a storm under the earth, like a storm that would raise the foundations of the house. Now he held his hands over his ears.
Williams slept on a cot without sheets. Next to his bed was an orange crate on its end, with an old wooden radio, shaped like a wishbone, on top of it. Daniel’s father had given Williams the radio. The radio was connected by a cord to the light fixture in the ceiling. The light was on. Inside the crate were Williams’ clothes, except for his suit which hung on a hanger from a pipe. Also Daniel saw a bottle of whiskey. Williams drank whiskey and got drunk. As he looked at the bottle with his hands over his ears, Williams passed into his vision and sat down on the cot, and took a drink from the bottle.
Williams stared at the floor. “This one trip she ain’t comin’ back,” he said. “She really run away this time.”
“She was crazy,” Daniel said boldly.
Williams looked at him out of his red, murderous eyes. “Not crazy as some.” Daniel understood he meant his mother and father. Now he could hear the footsteps, the murmuring voices of the people visiting upstairs. “She was God-crazy,” Williams said. “Nobody believed like she did. Nobody.” He took a cigarette butt from behind his ear and lit it with a kitchen match struck with his thumbnail. He did this with great deliberation.
“You don’t know nothin’,” Williams said. He looked at the ground between his big feet, spread apart. “Wasn’t so crazy that she didn’t live longer than I goan. You know all those times she run away? Sometime it was just to stand inside that door there,” Williams said pointing right at Daniel. “They go chasin’ up and down the blocks, and she standin’ right where you are.” He began to laugh, a deep laugh that leaped over its long silences, jumping in slow motion from one sound to another. “Sometime she swept up around me. Took a broom and swept the dust,” Williams said. “Sometime she brought me tea in a glass.”
Daniel could see that: she drank tea from a glass. She boiled the water herself so that no one could poison her. The glass, an old memory glass of which there were many, was set in a saucer. She broke a cube of sugar with her fingers (she had strong fingers—he couldn’t snap a sugar cube that way), put half of it in her mouth and sipped the tea through the sugar. Sometimes she put jelly in the bottom of the glass and stirred it around. Her pale blue eyes would squint as she sipped the hot tea. At such times, if she found him watching her, she regar
ded him with equal curiosity, a shrewd, keen judging look, neither mad in her anger, nor mad with her love. She would just look back at him.
“You pretty dumb,” Williams said.
“I am not.”
“Afraid of that poor old Jew lady.”
“I am not.”
“She the class in the house,” he said, making a motion toward the ceiling with his head. “Yessuh. I believe I’d gone to her funeral if it was up to her.”
“But she’s dead.”
“She’d have the super to her funeral.”
“But she’s dead.”
“G’wan!” Williams suddenly roared. He raised himself from the cot. “Get outta heah!”
Daniel ran, his heart in his throat. He ran up the alley, the bright sun hurting his eyes. He looked back to see if Williams was chasing him. He ran into the house, past all the people in the living room, and he ran upstairs. He passed her door to get to his room. He stopped. Her room was unchanged. A mahogany bed and matching bureau. Her cedar hope chest, and her tin of asthma grass half burned away. He could still smell her. Down in the kitchen was a memory glass flickering like the kind she used to light. If she was dead, why could he still smell her? Why was the light still burning?
He ran into his room and slammed the door.
The baby woke and began to cry.
I could never have appreciated how obscure we were. A poor family in the Bronx, too hot in the summer, and too cold in the winter. I thought we were big time. I thought we were important people. I thought the world really revolved around my family. We had this way of understanding everything. There was nothing my father could not explain. And even if it was bad, we always knew what was happening. It was a terrible strain, but I began to understand that it was worth it. We had no modesty, any of us. We were fierce in our self-importance. We were really important to ourselves. Our lives were important and what happened to us was important. The day’s small plans and obligations engrossed us. Going to school. To work. Shopping. To the meetings at night, to the recurrent meetings. It was all terribly important. And so when they were taken away, one after the other, and I next saw them on television or a moment of their faces in the newspaper, it was like the world had finally agreed to what I always knew—that we were important people. Recognition was just. It was more than just, it was unsurprising.
But where we lived always seemed to me the essence of obscurity. In the Bronx connected apartment houses fill each city block. Six or seven stories high they line the streets mile after mile. Kids grow up around doorways, on stoops, in courtyards. And in the dark lobbies with their tile floors, and maybe a brass elevator door and a fake old English chair. One block after another. Miles of apartment houses with their halls of cooking smells and their armament of garbage cans at the curb. From the prominence of our little wooden house on Weeks Avenue I could see around the amphitheatrical schoolyard ranks of apartment houses. Beyond my sight I knew there were more Bronx hills, more apartment houses interspersed every fifteen or twenty blocks with a purple castle of a school just like mine. It was a kind of comfort. Because our vulnerability in this unusual rotting wooden house on the precipice of this schoolyard street was not so great then. We were different enough not to suffer the obscurity of Bronx architecture. But surrounded by it, we were protected from worse things—storms, fireballs, the marches of ants, floods from the sky—nothing in this part of the world being worth such energy, such destruction. I had it all worked out. The people of the Bronx were beaten. So why bother to destroy them. So why bother with us who lived among them, telltale crimsoning life in our cheeks and life in our eyes. My mother lighted the façades of these houses with her personality. As we walked past them, they were lit in her revulsion. Clutching my hand and pushing the carriage, hurrying up past the stacked tombs of those houses whose sight she bore in hatred and in fear—as if by not walking fast enough we would be contaminated by the life inside them. Rochelle had a profound distaste for the common man. Her life was a matter of taking pains to distinguish herself from her neighbors. Maybe that’s why we lived where we did. Who chooses the home, the wife or the husband? We faced no apartment house but only the sky over the schoolyard. The only neighbors were to either side of us and so it was a half-populated street to begin with, and with half-neighbors who faced the same way and at whom we did not have to look. I knew a few of them. My parents were known to all and friends to none. Maybe it was partly the shame of Grandma spinning out of there at odd moments of the day or night, with her wild hair and Yiddish curses, but I doubt it. The public spectacle did not bother Paul that much, I remember him laughing one time as Grandma went by the store on 174th Street and shook her fist at him as she walked past the window. And there was a customer in there, too. Besides, in those days, just after the war, people were still familiar with untranquilized misery. There were more freaks on the streets than you see today. I remember one guy named Iggy who was a macrocephalic and staggered along with the kids following him, staggered along smiling under the weight of his head. He was reputed to be a mathematical genius and nobody knew his age. He was said to be older than he looked.
The fact was Paul and Rochelle did not choose their friends by accident. People did not become friends simply because they were neighbors. My parents associated only with interesting people. That was her phrase. Respect was to say of someone that he was an interesting person. The dentist was interesting. The furrier. The subway change clerk. The fiddler. The teacher. The welfare worker. These people were interesting. They were not doomed by their shabby apartment buildings. They were not imprisoned by their miserable wages. They were not conditioned to accept slavery. Their minds were free. They had ideas. They met and discussed and contributed money to a dream future. Together like a flock of soft-throated birds they were beautiful to one another, strutting around each other, displaying the plumage of their species, trilling out the key word-cries of this very articulate race of birds that were like the ritual wisdom of their ancestors. They kept each other warm.
Oh yes, Lawd. Oh yes, complacent lawd.
Let’s see, what other David Copperfield kind of crap.
So the Trustees of Ohio State were right in 1956 when they canned the English instructor for assigning Catcher in the Rye to his freshman class. They knew there is no qualitative difference between the kid who thinks it’s funny to fart in chapel, and Che Guevara. They knew then Holden Caulfield would found SDS.
I was born in Washington, D.C., but I remember no home before Weeks Avenue in the Bronx. We moved there in 1945 when I was four years old. Or maybe in 1944 when I was five years old. Of the war I remember some tin cans flattened for a “scrap drive.” The idea that bacon fat could be turned into bullets. An old man in a white helmet who was an air-raid warden. Seabees. I remember thick arrows with curving shanks stamped on maps in the newspapers and magazines. I remember the Four Freedoms. I remember what ration stamps looked like, and the stickers A, B or C on the windows of automobiles. I remember In Seventy-Six the Sky Was Red, The Bombs Were Bursting Overhead, and Old King George Couldn’t Sleep in His Bed, and on That Stormy Morn—Old Uncle Sam Was Born. I remember President Roosevelt riding up the Grand Concourse in an open car without a hat although the day was chill, and that he looked right at me in the crowd and we waved at each other. I remember the Red Army Chorus singing Meadow-land, a virile hypnotic song simulating the canter of horses. I remember studying the picture of the Red Army Chorus on the 78-rpm album, the smiling, deep-throated soldiers of a valiant ally. I remember the horses coming out of the distance bolder and bolder in a rising crescendo of militant brotherhood, storming my heart with their cantering nobility. I remember standing on the porch of our house on Weeks Avenue. It was a warm afternoon and I had scraped my knee on the sidewalk. My mother came out to tell me that an atom bomb had been dropped on Japan. I looked up in the sky over the schoolyard, but the sky was clear. I listened for the sound of the bomb, but the sky was quiet.
July–August, 1967,
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I was very careful with Phyllis. We lived in a state of convalescence, waking up each morning to find the marriage somewhat stronger but still in need of hugs and kisses and tender lovemaking. A self-conscious period of serious talks showed signs of coming to an end. In these talks she looked for a rationale to forgive me and I was able to help her find one. We tried to share responsibility for my actions. We considered me as our mutual problem. I was shameless. We did our family shopping together on Broadway, and some evenings that were particularly hot I took her to the movies and I held Paul in my lap as he slept and we watched the flick. Our apartment was unlivable on hot days. I spent thirty dollars american for a hassock fan. We live in two rooms on 115th between Broadway and Riverside Drive, right off the breezy Hudson, but you can’t tell if you look out the window. We’re in the back and we face the back of another apartment house. There are no breezes. You can hear rats in the walls. Phyllis in this time started to dream about moving out of New York. In the morning she walked me over to the library, holding my arm as I carried Paul. She would leave me at the front door of Butler and take Paul and walk off thinking happily about another day’s progress on my dissertation and how it would earn me the degree that would free us from New York. She imagined a small college out west where I would be willing to teach and she might even enroll as a student. It would be nothing like Columbia. No soot in the grass. I didn’t disabuse her. Perhaps she could summon up my dissertation, actually create it, just by imagining me here in the library. Why not, if her imagination was good enough?
One autumn day, with the wind slicing through the chain link fence around the schoolyard, and heavy grey clouds racking into each other over the rooftops of apartment houses, Rochelle went shopping with her son, Daniel, and her baby daughter, Susan. Daniel, as he was instructed, held onto the white wicker stroller his mother was pushing. It was an old summer stroller, with small, solid wheels and streamlined raindrop fenders like the wheelcovers on racing planes of the 1930’s, and a top that could swing back to let the sun in. Daniel himself had ridden in it when he was a baby. Now it was Susan’s. Rochelle had wrapped a blanket about the legs of the little girl and snugged it up to her chin. Daniel wore his mackinaw and a hunter’s cap with the earflaps pulled down. They were going to the butcher’s and then to the Daitch Dairy and maybe they’d stop in and say hello to their father in his store. I think this was in 1949 or 1950. I was seven or eight. Susan was about four. As we came down alongside the purple castle of a school and crossed Eastburn Avenue on 174th Street, and passed the shoemaker, Rochelle suddenly began to walk very fast, going past the Daitch Dairy, Daniel running to catch up with his hand.