4. I’ve often asked myself why Marilyn and I married. At different times I’ve given myself different answers. Since age ten or so, I’d known my major sexual preferences were homosexual. Through my adolescence, as I’d explored this personally difficult (as all sex is) and socially confused (as most sex is) situation—at least as it awaited young people in the fifties, who then had little chance of any parental support—Marilyn had been among my few confidantes, as I’d soon become one of hers for her own heterosexual explorations.
But who were we, this Jew from the Bronx, this black from Harlem?
In many ways, neither of us was typical of the image the preceding sentence evokes—yet the truth it tells, under its bipartite interrogation, is necessary for any understanding.
Where had we come from?
How had we come together?
For all new marriages, I suspect, afford their moments of retrospection and account taking, their late-night hours, their hours at early dawn, when we survey and choose among the elements of the past that have, most likely, brought us to the present—as much as does a month spent in a mental hospital.
5. When I was three or four, for about a year a woman had a room with my family, right behind the one where my sister and I slept. It was separated from ours by double doors that rolled thunderously into the walls. A relative of my mother’s gentle brown-skinned father, she’d come up from Virginia and was only starting to work in New York City as a nurse.
Her name was Margaret White.
In memory she is large, dark, somewhat messy, with a torrential laugh like endlessly breaking glass. In my mother’s recollection she was a heavy, helpful, generous woman who doted on me and my younger sister. But for me her onslaughts of laughter and affection were the symbol of everything irrational and maniac—even more so than my father’s outbursts of anger; indeed, the two worked together to exacerbate all childhood terror.
From the other room, in the early afternoon, my father would call:
“Margaret, what are those children doing in there?”
My mother’s name was Margaret, too. She was a small woman, born in New York City, firm-voiced, quiet, and light enough to pass for white, as was my slim, six-foot-one father, though both were adamant about never doing so.
My father, from the other room, was certainly calling my mother; not Margaret White.
There was no real ambiguity, save at the level of the signifier—as a wholly later tradition might say. But was it possible, I wondered, as on an autumn evening I drifted to sleep, while Margaret White’s generous cackle spilled from the kitchen to roll back through the darker rooms, that my mother was, somehow, really Margaret Black? Or that something as solid as Margarets or mothers could harbor a secret splitting—or doubling—signaled by this duplication of names?
5.1. As a child, I was fascinated by science and math. Like so many kids of those years, I’d made crystal radios and wound high-frequency coils and designed primitive computer circuits to play nim and add numbers in binary notation. I looked up various topics of mathematics on my own and, in my manner, tried to study them. The private, progressive Dalton School I’d attended since I was five didn’t actively dissuade me—and called that lack of dissuasion encouragement. I wrote plays and tried to write novels, and was stunned, at eight, when a classmate, a girl named Gabby, wrote a beautiful letter from the hospital in the form of a rebus, illustrated with words and pictures cut from magazines (… Life [the colophon from a Life magazine] here in the Hospital [the word cut from a piece of letterhead stationery] is no Bed [picture of a bed] of Roses [picture of a bunch of red roses]. …), and died; and learned how to do splits and cartwheels from Wendy and memorized The Raven and Jabberwocky and Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics with Priscilla; and—after seeing a high school production of it one week and the next an Old Vic presentation at the ancient Metropolitan Opera House, with Robert Helpmann as Oberon and fiery-haired Moira Shearer as Titania, with impossibly ornate sets and a wonderful, obscenely homoerotic Puck—learned long slabs of A Midsummer Nights Dream with Peter; and The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—because Sue-Sue, in the high school division, told me Eliot was impossible to understand and I’d show them—and read science fiction novels with Robert and Johnny; and borrowed Priscilla’s Mad comic book to read in the boys’ john, cover to cover, and called her nightly to ask her how were things in Afghanistan; and read Robert E. Howard and drew maps of imaginary lands; and listened to Tom Lehrer records with my friend Mike, who, like Johnny and Robert, was an inveterate nail-biter and was the one other kid from Dalton who would also be going on, with me, to the Bronx High School of Science.
And in the afternoons, after swimming, my nose still sharp with chlorine, my ears still wet, I left the ten-story red-brick school building just off Park Avenue to take the bus home to the three-story private house well above 110th Street—Harlem’s southern boundary—in which my father’s funeral home filled the first floor, with Mr. Onley’s Grocery Store just to our left and Mr. Lockley’s Hosiery and House Paint Store to our right, as every morning I left that house, in my early years to be driven, and later to wait on the corner for the No. 2 bus, to transect that boundary once again: in social terms a journey of near ballistic violence, carried out each day in more or less indifferent silence.
5.2. Surprisingly to some, I had a comparatively religious upbringing. My father was a vestryman at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church; its brown and black brick parish house held the Sunday school I went to each weekend. Many of my friends on the block were Catholic and went to St. Aloysius’s around on 132nd Street, a church which both my friends and my parents told me that I, as a Protestant, must never enter. On one or another forbidden trip “around the corner” I looked through the open, green plank door, next to the Catholic school (its tan cornerstone, set higher than my head, proclaiming its laying date a whole uncountable decade ago in 1940), and between the church entrance’s ornately spiraled columns set back among the rectangular pilasters (red brick, white stone, the rising helices of glassy cobalt leaves) I saw more flowers, more candles, more sculptural decoration, all in much lighter colors, than one would ever find in our church—that edifice that seemed at once bigger, more serious, with its plain facade, darkly-colored stone, deeply brown wood, curved brass fixtures, all slanted through with dusty light from the stained and vaulted panes in the windows along the wall, windows much higher than the ones at the back of my father’s ground floor chapel.
I remember once, when I was seven, fearing, or even faking, becoming ill from the incense puffing in white whiffs from the censer swung by the dark young man in glasses and surplice walking in the aisle between the pews, while my tie and tight collar seemed to strangle me as I sat on the hard bench beside Dad.
I whispered, “… I think I’m gonna throw up!”
Annoyed, he took me from the church into the cold Harlem street.
But soon, either at St. Philip’s, or at St. Martin’s where the rest of my father’s family went, or at the little church in New Rochelle we attended when I visited Aunt Laura and Uncle Ed, some form of Sunday worship was part of my life.
Sunday school was tan walls and black-paneled wainscot, with a small front office to the right behind the dark Dutch door. Two steps led down here, three steps went up there—every room seemed to be on a different level. For at least two years my class was taught by Courtney—a brown, brilliant, socially concerned man with a balding head and great energy. When I was eight or nine, he put up with my attempt to duplicate Christ’s miracle of the loaves and fishes for my somewhat befuddled Sunday class. I tore apart the bread-and-butter snack we were served in the middle of the period. …
“I told you, you couldn’t do anything like that. Only Jesus could do that—that’s why it was a miracle!”
But what Courtney had said, of course, was: “No one would even try to do something like that today,” and I had immediately raised my hand:
“I could do it!” What I’d mean
t, of course, was: I could try. And without even vaguely expecting to succeed, try I had—though I don’t know whether I ever made the fine point clear. But the attempt had been for myself—not for anyone else. Surely it was possible to try the impossible—though by the end of my fumblings with crusts and butter, the crumbs on the maroon carpeting and dark floor planks, I’d learned that even to try was to endure a certain amount of incomprehension, to receive a certain number of giggles, and to court the derision of peers sitting in their cane-backed chairs and of whatever authority stood, arms folded, beside the black mantelpiece above the parish house fireplace.
When I was ten or eleven, Courtney was the first person to talk to us Harlem children about a young black minister, recently graduated from Harvard Divinity School (whose father had been a minister as well, Courtney explained) named Martin Luther King.
Whether I took it with my father (while my mother stayed home to fry fish, or fix gravied shrimp and bacon, or spoonbread, or shad roe and biscuits for Sunday morning breakfast on our return) or whether I took it alone, the walk to church was usually interrupted with a stop at Louis’s Shoe Shine Parlor. Just around the corner on 133rd Street, the parlor was a green-shingled enclosure with sliding doors, built out perhaps five or six feet from the wall on a stone slab set in the sidewalk. Inside, on a marble base, stood a high seat along the back wall, with four sets of red cushions and four pairs of brass footrests whose tops looked like the soles of baby shoes with a little dip on each to hook your heel. Multiple drawers and cabinets filled the space below.
A middle-aged black man who smoked cigars and wore a tweed cap and layers and layers of flannel shirts and vests with a threadbare suit jacket over them all, Louis (the “s” unpronounced) would shine, polish, and buff your shoes, while two or three other black men in suits, ties, and overcoats stood, depending on the weather, nearer or farther from the kerosene heater glowing behind its grill in the corner, talking about baseball or horse racing or cards or drinking or—if my father hadn’t come with me—women, till one would remember and Shush the others: “Don’t talk like that in front of the boy!”
Toes stinging from the pressure of the shoeshine rag that had tugged my foot left and right in its bite against the brass, I’d climb down and give Louis a quarter: fifteen cents for the shine, a dime for the tip.
“Thank ya’, suh’.” Louis would touch his broken cap visor. “Say hello to ya’ dad.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Thank you, sir.”
One of the men would open the sliding door with its glass windows (one pane cracked; another with a decal stuck to it advertising chewing tobacco): “You give my regards to your ma for me, now.”
And, with another, “Yes, sir,” I’d step out onto the sidewalk and, through a puff of my own breath gone visible, start across the street for the back of the church.
For years I never realized that it was not the front.
I sang in the choir for two seasons, first as a boy soprano, then as a tenor—though the long-promised and endlessly joked-over adolescent breaking of my voice never came: the switch between registers, which a year later left me a comfortable baritone, was gradual and painless. In the choir I learned, despite initial disbelief, that people really could sing directly from music—just by reading the dots and flags. Thanks to my violin lessons, I got so I could pretty much pick out vocally—or at least follow—my place in the harmony if there weren’t too many key changes. Rehearsals were in a room in the church basement on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, then again on Saturday afternoons. In the worn robe he wore for practice, Mr. Witherspoon would explain: “Now, if the boys will actually come in a half an hour early next time, then they can leave half an hour early. But please, ladies and gentlemen, work on your parts at home!” Then he would raise his eyes to the tin ceiling’s stamped green squares. “Well, that’s all for tonight.”
For a season I was an altar boy. And twice I was chosen to read the lesson for the day—though I could never understand what the point of a lesson was (those few Bible verses read from the pulpit to the congregation, the heavy ladies in veiled hats, the gentlemen with long brown necks above the blue or red or striped knot, four-in-hand or Windsor) if nobody ever explained it.
Then, at thirteen, I had a rather violent (for a thirteen-year-old) break with the church. After various meetings to discuss my crumbling faith, now in the still, sun-shot chapel with Father Scott, now at an autumn evening’s dinner, sitting beside the bright, quiet jukebox at a fried-fish restaurant with only four tables over on Lenox Avenue with Father Anthony, I refused to be confirmed—and upset my parents, if not the other ministers, who, till then, had been taken with my intelligence and dedication. My father in particular felt it would not do for Bishop Delany’s grandson.
But I had announced: I was going to become a Hindu—because Hinduism accepted all religions as equally valid. (In the sixth grade, down at Dalton, we’d read abridged versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata; I had been impressed.) Though I stuck to my guns and never took any sort of communion, it blew over as such things do. Perhaps because it represented a conflict never really resolved, it was easier to put both sides out of mind, so that for years my strongest memory of church-going was of sitting, in my suit and tie, in Louis’s wood-walled parlor, while the long rag dragged on my foot and the men pursued their loose, laughing, Sunday morning gossip.
5.3. Winters, sometimes, my father would take me down to the Washington Market (at the city’s edge, on Washington Street), and through the vast, skylit hangars, I would walk, occasionally holding his hand, over red tiles slung with wet sawdust—gone black if there was snow outside—and gaze at the glass-fronted cold-counters. A brace of pheasants hung by their feet behind three busy butchers. Three deer dangled from high hooks, still in skins and antlers. Blood congealed at their noses, a half dozen tweedy hares swung just enough to notice, over a counter of game, set about with brown baskets of quails’ eggs. At another, salamis and sausages and bolognas were slung from waxed ropes. At still another, in rounds and spheres, thin and white, yellow and thick, waxy or creamy or crumbly about dark flecks of mold, cheeses heaped a counter covered with green paper. Somewhere else someone in purple and white vended nuts and candies, just visible between the backs of the customers. Here, men in red hats sold soups from high black pots over iron rings of flame. There, my father and I edged up to slopping marble, where a white-smocked man with a knitted cap just resting on gray hair cropped army short knifed back the shells of cherrystones or littlenecks at your order, sliding them across to you to eat with wooden, twin-pronged forks and dunked in catsup seasoned from glass cruets of horseradish.
“Raw clams …?” my father said. “I like them. But I don’t know if you will. …”
“Yeah!” I tugged the arm of his overcoat (when I was seven) to stand on tiptoes. “I will!”
And did.
And split my second dozen with him, while he laughed and I wondered at the markety smell of the place that spoke of bazaars as vast as Asia.
We would walk through those buildings big as city blocks, it seemed, now in this one, now in that, the length of ancient stadia, beneath glass roofs underhung with jungle gyms of beams and girders. The great columns near the walls were painted black to the height of my head, then white on up to the skylights.
“You can get anything in the world at this market,” my father explained, on our first trip down. “Anything. I mean it. Anything in the world.”
I looked at the pile of gold and green boxes with writing in an unknown alphabet to one side of me and the great, tilted tray of ice on the other, on which the pink and gray flesh of an octopus stretched out its suckered legs among eight different kinds of fish. And I believed him—oh, I believed him, literally and completely, as a young mage knows magic is mighty. Firmly we pushed out the lead-glass doors, with the brass bar aslant them, onto the sidewalk and into the smell of Christmas trees, bound up and ranked on wooden racks. White and black men in jeans, high lace
d boots, and dirty jackets wheeled dollies piled with crates.
“Watch out now, Sam!” My father pulled me aside. “Pay attention, I tell you—you’re going to get yourself killed!”
Then he went off by the market wall, tiled in white and blue, where a vendor with a long maroon scarf hanging down the front of his tan coat stood by a hill of white boxes. Open, the top displayed bright Christmas bulbs.
And I wandered on to where flames glittered behind the feathery rust edging the holes in the side—and leaped, like orange cats above the black rim—of the oil drum at the corner.
Beside it, a workman as tall as Dad and a lot more muscular stood with his jacket open over a thermal undershirt, yellow hair clawing the gray collar, the ham of a hand cupped by his mouth, calling to the men unloading crates from the back of a truck under the highway. Firelight bronzed his jaw: orange played on the muscle there, moving to his bellowing and making it sandy gold. Looking like the young Burt Lancaster—or maybe Kirk Douglas—he called again, blinking eyes that, even in the deep, four-thirty blue beyond the rim of the overhead highway, were very, very light—hazel or green—between lashes as heavy as, and darker than, his hair.
I ambled toward him, watching without thinking—when he turned, reached down, grabbed my arm, and snatched me forward: “Hey, there, little fella’—!”
I reached out to stop myself falling, one hand against his jacket—stiffened with something that made it rough as canvas—and my other hand half against his belt and buckle (beneath the thermal cloth, hard and warm): “Watch it, now!”
I twisted around to see this guy—Chinese, I think—rolling his loaded dolly along, looking over at me and shaking his head, while the workman who’d pulled me out of the way steadied me.
I looked back, where he still held my arm—hard enough to hurt. His fingers were broad as broom handles and dirt gray, with knuckles big as walnuts. What astonished me, though I couldn’t have told you why, was that his nails were as badly bitten as Robert’s at school. (My heart pounded, but I couldn’t have said if it was the scare, or what.) He was a man four or five times my (or Robert’s) size, but his fingernails, though three or four times as wide, were no longer—from dirt-lined cuticle to grease-rimmed crown—than Robert’s wrecks, as though this adult had had the habit since infancy, so that they’d never been able even to approach the ends of his fingers.