From the front, my house looked narrow and cramped, standing so close to its neighbors that it seemed more like a row house than an independent structure. But on summer nights, when I would lie on the strip of grass that separated us from the Friedles, it seemed to tower above me, its softly lit windows and striped awnings like the side of an ocean liner. My father lovingly tended our lawn as if it were the grounds of an ancestral estate. Every weekend in the summer, he and almost all the fathers could be found outside in their shirtsleeves mowing the small patches of grass, rooting out the occasional weed, planting flowers along the margins of the driveways.
ROCKVILLE CENTRE was home to about eighteen thousand people when I was born, and the population expanded each year until every vacant lot was filled. In contrast to Levittown and other mass-produced suburbs that emerged overnight in the postwar era, our town had been incorporated as a village in the nineteenth century. A century-old Village Hall was set in a green square with a Civil War cannon near the front door. Mature oaks and maples arched over our streets, and our village boasted a variety of housing and a diverse population that many other suburban towns did not enjoy. Old houses mingled with the new: Victorians, Tudors, and Queen Annes stood side by side with newly built split levels and ultramodern ranch houses. The majority of the population was white, as was typical of the suburbs, though more than nine hundred African Americans lived in a neighborhood at the western end of town.
Unlike more affluent modern suburbs, whose fenced homes are encircled by large ornamental lawns, the houses on my block were clustered so close to one another that they functioned almost as a single home. We felt free to dash in to any house for a snack from the mother-in-residence, race through the side door in search of play-mates—except for my own house, where my mother’s need for tranquillity was respected, making it not only the quietest but sometimes the loneliest house on the block. Since all the families were bringing up children at the same time, babysitters were rarely necessary, for we could usually stay at each other’s houses. If one of the mothers was sick, there was always a neighbor or older sister to take her child to school or to the beach. Clothes, bikes, and roller skates were routinely handed down from the older children in one family to the younger ones in another. For me, there was a special benefit in the clustered structure of our block. For the lives within these homes, the stories of each family, formed a body of common lore through which I could expand the compass and vividness of my own life.
The position of our houses determined the pattern of our friendships. Not only did my best friend, Elaine, live next door to me, but her bedroom was directly across the driveway from mine, less than twenty feet away. When we were five, we strung a clothesline between pulleys by our windows and attached a can that allowed us to exchange notes long after our bedtime had passed. When our lights went out, lying on my side facing the open window, barely able to hear my parents talking downstairs, I knew that Elaine was just across the way, in her own bed, facing toward me. Content that everyone was in the proper place, I went to sleep.
Six months older than Elaine and one year ahead of her in school, I learned to read before she did. My mother later told me I had begun deciphering the letters on our soup cans and cereal boxes several months before the day I picked up a book she had read to me many times and read it back to her. Suspecting I had memorized it, she handed me another book to read. I went through it slowly, page by page, reading so loudly that I sounded as if I were addressing an audience of hundreds instead of one. From the moment I read those first paragraphs to my mother, I was obsessed not only with reading but with reading aloud. Everywhere we went, I insisted on reading every sign and billboard along the way. “Why are you doing this?” Elaine asked. “Oh, you’ll understand someday,” I replied. “Once you start reading, you can never stop.”
The books I read filled my imagination, multiplying my daydreams, allowing me to supplement my own collection of stories, previously drawn mostly from my family and my neighbors, with characters and events far removed from the realities of Southard Avenue and Rockville Centre. As I did with the lives of those around me, I could incorporate the people of fiction, even of history, into my own life, make them real, change them, the malleable instruments of my own desire and longing.
I moved from my mother’s reading of Kipling’s tale about the baby elephant to my own reading of Little Toot, the story of the small tugboat with the candy-stick smokestack, who came, as I did, from a family of seamen. When I read about Little Toot’s father, Big Toot, the fastest tugboat on the river, and his Grandfather Toot, who breathed smoke and told of mighty deeds, I pictured my uncle Willy and my grandfather Ephraim standing proudly at the helms of their ferryboats, navigating their ships expertly through the tricky currents of the waters surrounding New York and New Jersey. Because all my uncles and grandparents were dead, I had to find some way to keep their memories alive. By fusing what little I knew about their personalities into the characters I liked in the stories I read, I was able to surround myself with the large, vibrant family I always wished I had. And when Little Toot saved the stranded ocean liner and made his family proud, I imagined that someday I would do something that would bring me to the attention of my grandparents in heaven.
Elaine was at least six inches taller than I. I admired her intelligence, and her daring, envied her thick, curly hair and, most of all, her boisterous family. Although most of the houses on the block, including my own, were inhabited by nuclear families, Elaine lived with her brother, mother, father, grandmother, and great-grandmother—four generations in a single home. On Sundays their house filled with cousins from the city who felt entitled to share in the good fortune and Sunday dinner of the first relatives who had made it to the suburbs.
On Sunday afternoon I would race over to Elaine’s house to join the animated conversation and bustle which my own house lacked, to observe as the Friedles and their relatives played Canasta, gambled for pennies, smoked, drank cocktails, listened to music, and danced. I would twirl on the cushioned bar stools in their finished basement, which seemed the height of luxury living, with its large, Formica-topped bar, and watch delightedly as a model train went around the counter and the eyes of a small mechanical man turned red while he raised a drink to his mouth. I listened eagerly to the flow of words, joined in the laughter and chatter, and tried to imagine what it might be like in my own house if I had grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, or a mother whose health did not require a placid, less crowded way of life.
The two “old ladies,” as we called Elaine’s grandmother and great-grandmother, would sit in chairs on the Friedles’ front lawn, shouting friendly greetings to the children as we played, telling us stories, gossiping with the neighborhood mothers. The tales they told lured us backward in time to the British colony of Jamaica, in the West Indies, where Elaine’s great-grandmother, Amelia, the daughter of Scottish emigrants, was born. Married young, she had eight children, including Elaine’s grandmother Valerie, who was widowed shortly after Elaine’s mother, Dolly, was born. During the Great War, Amelia’s husband left Jamaica to find work in America, promising to send for his family as soon as he was settled. When no word came after six months, Amelia, together with her widowed daughter, Valerie, and her four-year-old-granddaughter, Dolly, embarked on a boat for New York to find her husband. After a few fruitless months, they discovered he had moved in with another woman and had no intention of reunion with the family he had left behind. It was not easy for the three women to make it on their own; Elaine’s mother, Dolly, could remember slipping on wet urine in the hallway of the New York tenement where she grew up.
Dolly was still in her teens when she met and married George Friedle, a descendant of German immigrants, who had also grown up in a tenement in New York, and whose rapid rise in the world of banking to the position of vicepresident of Public National Bank had allowed him, shortly after the Second World War, to move to the suburbs, to his “dream home” on Southard Avenue. And when the fam
ily moved to Rockville Centre there was no question but that Dolly’s mother and grandmother would accompany them.
The old ladies had brought their folk knowledge with them from Jamaica. When you get married, they instructed Elaine and me, no wedding pictures should be taken, or ghosts will join the ceremony. And on your wedding night, you must keep a set of knives under the bed to ward off the evil spirits. Although we paid careful attention to these strictures, not wanting ghosts or evil spirits at the ceremony which we knew was sure to come, of more pressing concern to six-year-olds was the revelation that three knocks on a door signified death. For some time after being so instructed, I would knock on a friend’s door twice, and then stop, trying to gauge how much time had to elapse before the counting could begin again without danger. The precepts were meant to enlighten and amuse, rather than frighten us, for the old ladies were always gentle, with an unerring eye for sadness in a child. If one of us seemed out of sorts, was hurt by our friends, or was left out of a game, they noticed at once and invited us to come into the house to share a bowl of ice cream.
BASEBALL LOYALTIES in our neighborhood were divided between the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants. As earlier immigrants had brought their ethnic bonds with them to America, the settlers of suburbia had, for the most part, carried their baseball fidelity from their borough of origin—Yankee fans from the Bronx, Giant supporters from Manhattan, and, of course, the devotees of the Dodgers from Brooklyn. In each home, team affiliation was passed on from father to child, with the crucial moments in a team’s history repeated like the liturgy of a church service. Over time, each team and its fans had taken on a distinct identity, a kind of stereotype into which the features of the team and the characteristics of its followers were molded to produce an exaggerated caricature. The Yankees were the “Bronx Bombers,” whose pinstriped uniforms signified their elite status, supported by the rich and successful, by Wall Street brokers and haughty businessmen. The Dodgers were “dem Bums,” the “daffiness boys,” the unpretentious clowns, whose fans were seen as scruffy bluecollar workers who spoke with bad diction. The Giants, owned since 1919 by the same family, the Stonehams, were the conservative team whose followers consisted of small businessmen who watched calmly from the stands dressed in shirts and ties, their identity somewhat blurred, caught, as they were, between the Yankee “haves” and the Dodger “have-nots.”
Elaine Lubar and me posing after a pony ride. Below: For all of us, the love of baseball was personal and familiar. We spent hours arguing about, among other things, who was the better catcher: steady Dodger Roy Campanella (right) or short-armed swarthy Yankee Yogi Berra (left).
To me, however, each team was signified by a member of my small community. The Giants were my parents’ friends the Goldschmidts, the Rickards down the street, and, most of all, Max Kropf and Joe Schmitt, the butchers around the corner at the Bryn Mawr Meat Market. Loading me down with huge shinbones for my small cocker spaniel, Frosty, they would mock my Dodgers. I would pretend to be angry, but the truth was I loved going into their shop, the feel of the sawdust under my feet as I moved from the muggy August heat into the cooling air of their enormous refrigerator with sides of beef hanging from the ceiling. Most of all, I loved the attention I received, especially when they called me “Ragmop” in honor of my unruly reddishblond hair. These Giant fans were not dressed in ties and jackets, but wore white aprons, smeared with blood and marrow. Although I tried not to stare, my eyes were often drawn to the rounded stubs of the two fingers Max had cut off while slicing meat. When he caught me looking, he would hold up his hand as if the wound were a badge of honor. “See, Ragmop, this is what happens if you want to be a butcher.”
The Yankees were represented by the Friedles, and especially Elaine, who was as devoted to her team as I was to the Dodgers. Since the two teams were in different leagues, our rivalry was muted during the summer months, only to peak again during those frequent Octobers when the Dodgers and the Yankees met in the World Series. She could not understand my idolatry of Jackie Robinson, while I, in turn, heaped scorn on her admiration for the shrill, wiry Billy Martin, the Yankee second baseman known for his quick fists and timely hitting. She would frequently take out her scrapbook of Billy Martin clippings to prove her point—how many hits, his latest batting average, his exploits in the field. How she could compare the tiny, pugnacious Martin to the noble Robinson defied my comprehension. Her enthusiasms and knowledge seemed all the more remarkable since her father, also a Yankee fan, did not encourage her love of baseball, taking her brother, Gary, to games and leaving her at home with the claim that she could never sit through an entire game. Finally, at the age of eight, she exploded in a tantrum of outraged anger, and he agreed to take her, choosing a doubleheader to prove his point. I can still see her look of delight and triumph when she returned to tell me she had loved every minute, and had demanded they stay until the last out of the extra-inning nightcap.
The Yankees also had fervent followers in the Lubars and the Barthas, who lived across the street. Elaine (“Lainie”) Lubar’s birthday was the day after mine, and her mother would host a joint birthday party to spare my mother the clamorous assemblage of our friends. Only by dint of their cabana at Lido Beach, a symbol of affluence on our block, did the Lubars fit the typical image of the Yankee fan. When Lainie and I went to the beach together, I would race from the car to their family cabana—little more than a concrete hut with striped awnings and deck chairs, but to me, an oasis—where soft drinks were stacked in the refrigerator, and we could sit together for lunch, take a shower after swimming, and put on dry clothes to avoid spending the car ride home in sticky bathing suits on sandy towels.
The most memorable of our neighborhood Yankee fans was Gene Bartha, because of his peculiar dog-walking ritual with Clipper, the family sheepdog. Apparently, Clipper had originally been trained to relieve himself on newspaper in the house, for Gene was obliged to carry a paper with him and intermittently place several sheets on the sidewalk as they walked along. I was walking beside him one night when he mistakenly laid down on the sidewalk the sports page, which had a photograph and lead article on Yogi Berra. Seeing what he had done, he snatched it away from Clipper just in time, deftly replacing the sports page with the front page.
The ultimate aristocrats in the neighborhood—the family with the largest lawn—should, by rights, have been Yankee fans, but the Greenes, like the Rusts and our family, were staunch Dodger fans. The Greenes’ home was the only one on our block with a side yard as well as a front yard. I would play with Marilyn, the youngest of their three children, turning cartwheels on their soft grass, lying on my back to divine the shapes of different animals in the clouds, and feeding the rabbits they kept in a hutch on the corner of their lawn. The Rusts’ loyalty to the Dodgers followed the more typical pattern. A large Catholic family with five children, the Rusts had carried their allegiance with them when they moved to Long Island from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. And, of course, in Flatbush, my father had literally grown up with Ebbets Field, his devotion to the Dodgers so intertwined with his own biography that my sisters and I could no more have conceived of rooting for another team than of rooting against him.
For all of us, the love was personal and familiar. We spent hours arguing about whether Duke Snider, Willie Mays, or Mickey Mantle was the best center fielder. The handsome, smooth-fielding Duke Snider was the most consistent home-run hitter of the three, but Mays had a balletic grace and a joyful fury, while the switch-hitting Mantle had the greatest raw power and speed. Who was the best announcer: Russ Hodges, Mel Allen, or Red Barber? Who was the better catcher: Roy Campanella, steady behind the plate, unequaled in calling pitches, but a streaky hitter, or the short-armed swarthy Yogi Berra, the most dangerous hitter in baseball in late innings? Was Pee Wee Reese, the “Little Colonel,” who held the Dodgers together, a better shortstop than Phil Rizzuto, who led the American League in fielding? And which team had the better double-play combination: the Dodgers with Reese an
d Robinson, or the Giants with Alvin Dark and Eddie Stanky, whom we called “Eddie Stinky”? For support, we each mustered our own statistics and anecdotes. We carried on our arguments on the street, in the corner stores, and in each other’s homes. If no minds were changed, we took great pleasure in our endless debates and our shared love for the sport.
OUR NEIGHBORHOOD LIFE converged on a cluster of stores at the corner of our residential area: the drugstore and butcher shop; the soda shop, which sold papers, magazines, and comics; the delicatessen; and the combination barber shop and beauty parlor. The storekeepers were as much a part of my daily life as the families who lived on my street. When I entered the drugstore for a soda, or went into the delicatessen to buy some potato salad for my mother, the proprietors would greet me by name and, if not occupied, indulge my relentless curiosity. Since the families who operated these stores also owned them, their work was more than a job; it was a way of life. The quality of the goods they sold was as much a manifestation of their pride and self-respect as my father’s lawn was to him. The personal services they provided were not motivated merely by a desire for good “customer relations” but by their felt relationship to the larger community which they served and looked upon as neighbors. For our mothers, these neighborhood stores supplied all the goods they needed in the course of an ordinary day, and provided a common meeting place where neighbors could talk, trade advice, and gossip as they relaxed over an ice-cream soda or a cup of coffee.
The soda fountain at the corner drugstore, where I helped Doc Schimmenti make ice-cream sodas for the triumphant Little League team.