Modern American Memoirs (7 page)

For her sake I have regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it. But on my own account I would not have missed it—could not have missed it and be who I am, for better or worse. How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know? Who ever came more truly face to face with beauty than a boy who in a waste of characterless grass and burnouts came upon the first pale primrose on the coulee bank, or on some day of great coasting clouds looked across acres of flax in bloom? Why, short of exile, would anyone ever submit to the vast geometry of sky and earth, to the glare and heat, to the withering winds? But how else could he have met the mystery of nights when the stars were scoured clean and the prairie was full of breathings from a long way off, and the strange, friendly barking of night-hunting owls?

There may be as good ways to understand the shape and intensity of the dream that peopled the continent, but this seems to me one good one. How does one know in his bones what this continent has meant to Western man unless he has, though briefly and in the midst of failure, belatedly and in the wrong place, made trails and paths on an untouched country and built human living places, however transitory, at the edge of a field that he helped break from prairie sod? How does one know what wilderness has meant to Americans unless he has shared the guilt of wastefully and ignorantly tampering with it in the name of Progress?

One who has lived the dream, the temporary fulfillment, and the disappointment has had the full course. He may lack a thousand things that the rest of the world takes for granted, and because his experience is belated he may feel like an anachronism all his life. But he will know one thing about what it means to be an American, because he has known the raw continent, and not as tourist but as denizen. Some of the beauty, the innocence, and the callousness must stick to him, and some of the regret. The vein of melancholy in the North American mind may be owing to many causes, but it is surely not weakened by the perception that the fulfillment of the American Dream means inevitably the death of the noble savagery
and freedom of the wild. Anyone who has lived on a frontier knows the inescapable ambivalence of the old-fashioned American conscience, for he has first renewed himself in Eden and then set about converting it into the lamentable modern world. And that is true even if the Eden is, as mine was, almost unmitigated discomfort and deprivation.

 

I saw the homestead just once after we left it to go back into town in the bitter fall of 1919. In the spring of 1920 we came past it on our way to Montana and camped in the shack for one night. We did not even take the boards off the windows or roll up the canvas blinds, but went about in the familiar, musty place, breathing the heavy air, in a kind of somnambulism. Our visit was not meant to change anything, or restore for an instant the hope we had given up. We merely passed through, picked up a few objects that we wanted, touched things with our hands in a reminding way, stood looking from the doorway down across the coulee. My brother and I walked up the pasture and saw where a badger had been busy, but did not get out our traps. Our pasture fence was banked high as the posts with tumbleweed blown in from the next farm, two miles west. Our own fields were growing, in addition to spears of volunteer wheat, a solid mat of Russian thistle that by fall would be bounding and rolling eastward ahead of the frolic winds, to scatter their seed broadcast and lodge eventually in someone else's fences. The gophers that our wheat had allowed to increase prodigiously, and that our traps and poison had kept artificially in check, would thrive a year or two on whatever wheat volunteered in old fields, and then shrink gradually back to a population in balance with the hawks, owls, coyotes, badgers, and weasels that lived on them. And our house would begin—had already begun—its process of weathering and rusting and blowing away.

When we drove away we closed the gate carefully on our empty pasture, shutting in shack and privy and chickencoop and the paths connecting them, hooking shut three strands of barbed wire around the place we had made there, enclosing our own special plot of failure from the encroaching emptiness. We congratulated ourselves that it was such a tight, firm fence. Wandering stock couldn't get in and camp in the chicken house, or rub anything down scratching
off winter hair. We told ourselves that some day we would be back. We memorized the landmarks of five years.

But we knew, we all knew, that we wouldn't be back any more than the families of our acquaintance who had already left; and I imagine we obscurely felt that more than our personal hope had died in the shack that stayed in sight all the time we were bumping down along the field to the border. With nothing in sight to stop anything, along a border so unwatched that it might have been unmapped, something really had stopped there; a crawl of human hope had stopped.

As we turned at the Line, headed for the country road that began at Hydro, we could still see the round roof of the shack lifting above the prairie north of us. There was nothing else in sight up there but empty prairie. My mother drew in her breath and blew it out again with a little laugh, and said the words that showed us how such a departure should be taken. “Well,” she said, “better luck next time!”

Born in Poland, Kate Simon immigrated to New York City when she was four, as a steerage passenger with her mother and younger brother. Her father, who had made the journey three years earlier, was a shoe designer; her mother was a corsetiere
.

Simon earned her B.A. at Hunter College, then worked for the Book-of-the-Month Club
, Publishers Weekly,
and Alfred A. Knopf. She reviewed books for
The New Republic
and
The Nation,
and wrote personal, urbane, and witty travel guides to New York, Paris, London, and Rome. It was as a memoirist, however, that she showed the fullness of her literary gift
.

This is a section of Simon's first memoir
, Bronx Primitive
(1982)
.
A second volume
, A Wider World,
appeared in 1986, and a third
, Etchings in an Hourglass,
in 1990
.

 

from B
RONX
P
RIMITIVE

W
hen my brother was born, I was eighteen months old. My father, for whom I was still searching, had been in New York for six months. Our Warsaw apartment turned dark, the singing stopped. It need hardly be said that I was jealous, felt abandoned, unloved, coldly shadowed while the full warm light that was mine now circled him. It cannot have been that my grandmother and aunts and mother suddenly stopped loving me, and I might in time have grown interested in him, beginning with the gallant way he peed, upward in a little shining arch, out of a finger in a peculiar place. But he was a very sick child and the household alternated between sad, quiet staring and frantic dashing to rescue him from death. His head was bright, alert, and very large compared to the arms and legs that would not develop beyond thin, boneless ropes. He was a classic picture of the rachitic famine child who still tears the heart of the newspaper reader, the television viewer. We were
not too poor to buy the food he needed; it was simply unavailable, grabbed up by the military for its soldiers. My mother took the baby from doctor to doctor, all of whom gave her the same short answer: “All this child needs is a steady, normal diet.” Because her food intake was meager, the milk she gave him was insufficient; my aunts scoured the city, offering large sums for an orange or two, an egg, a pint of milk, with no success. I grew thin and listless.

The last doctor my mother saw in Warsaw, made blunt by the misery he could not remedy, shouted at her, “Leave the boy, he's going to die anyway. Take the girl to America while there's still time. Or do you want to sit with two dead children in this graveyard city?”

We left for America. My brother was two and a half, a babbler in several languages, a driven entertainer and flirt. His arms and hands were weak but usable, his legs not at all; he moved with amazing, mischievous rapidity by shuffling on his behind when he wasn't being carried. I was four, grown silent and very capable. I could lift him to the pot, clean him, and take him off. I could carry him to bed and mash his potato. I knew where he might bump his head, where he might topple, how to divert him when he began to blubber. It was a short childhood. I had my first baby at not quite four, better trained in maternal wariness and responsibility than many fully grown women I later observed. At four I also knew one could intensely love and as intensely hate the being who was both core and pit of one's life.

The month-long journey across devastated Europe to reach our ship, the
Susquehanna
, in Rotterdam remains with me as snatches of dream. I am sitting with my brother on my lap, in a room full of heavy dark furniture that I have never seen before. I am telling him that our mother went to buy food and will be back soon. I hope that she will come back, but I'm not sure; over and over, in every dark dream, I am not sure. I don't say this to him but wonder what I will do, where we will go, if she doesn't come back, as our father didn't. I continue to talk to him. We'll soon be on another choo-choo train and then the big, big ship that will take us to our father in America. He is silent in these dreams, his face old, serious, as if he were listening to the fears under my bright optimistic patter.

The next vision is actual recollection: a long cobbled quay marching into a world of water, more water than I had ever imagined. On the side of the quay a stall at which a woman shining with smiles and sweat stands frying small cakes. My mother buys three and hands me one. I expect it to be sweet and it tastes like fish. The vomit leaps out of my mouth, down my clean dress, and into the cracks around the cobblestones. What do they do in this place to girls who vomit on their streets? Will they keep me off their ship? The pink sweaty lady washes it away with a bucket of water. My mother thanks her in the Dutch she has picked up, I say my best Polish thank you, my smarty brother dazzles her with a “
Merci beau-coup
” someone had taught him on a train, and we go to look for the
Susquehanna
, my mother carrying my brother and one big valise and I two big bundles.

Just as I find it a great loss not to know my grandparents' first names, I feel deprived of what should have been an unforgettable sight: the big ship as it swayed on the waterfront and, later, the endless corridors, the stairs, the crowds of people, the disorder, the shouting, the weeping in terror, in relief, in joy, that my mother described. We were on the ship a full month, listed in steerage. I don't know where my brother and I actually stayed, however. As if our lives were designed to fill every requirement of the classic immigrant hegira, typhus raged through steerage, my exhausted mother one of the victims. We children must have been taken care of in some other part of the ship by strangers whom I cannot remember except as sensations of pleasure: an India rubber ball whose lovely colors played hide and seek with each other and the man who gave it to me, a slight man in a brown hat who limped. I searched for him for years after. A slight man in a brown hat who limped was the dream lover of my adolescence, a steady image through the short, searing crushes, the unbuttoned blouse and the frightened crawl of boys' fingers.

Knowing that there would be a long wait at Ellis Island, my father had equipped himself with a couple of Hershey bars to nibble on, and when he finally picked me up to kiss me, I tasted the chocolate and announced to my mother, “Our father has a sweet mouth.” It was frequently quoted as an example of my dainty, feminine grace, and only four years old, mind you. I have often
thought it was an act of propitiation: I am eager to love you; love me, please.

At Ellis Island we were questioned and examined by immigration officials and told our English names. Because my Polish birth certificate said “Jew-child Carolina” I was dubbed and registered as “Caroline,” a barbed-wire fence that divided me from myself throughout my school years. I hated it and would never answer my father when he tried to be fancy and American in public, addressing me by a name that belonged entirely to P.S. 58, P.S. 57, P.S. 59, to Theodore Roosevelt High School, to James Monroe High School, to Hunter College, not to me. How we got to Kate I don't know. My mother must have sought it out to keep as clear as possible the link to her grandmother Kaila, not realizing how intensely Catholic a name it then was. Being serenaded as “K-K-K-Katy, my beautiful Katy” was a flattering bewilderment until I realized it was not written for me and then grew bored and irritated with the repetition from elderly relatives. (As bored as I later became with their descendants and their witty greeting, “Kiss me, Kate.”) My brother, the master mimic, learned “K-K-K-Katy” immediately and learned, too—our weaponry of injuries that were deep and yet unpunishable was uncannily sophisticated—how much it annoyed me, and he sang it constantly to the admiration of the old uncles and aunts who never ceased to wonder at the speed with which he picked up English songs and the pretty, true voice on which they floated clear, loud, and incessant.

Instead of a city of silver rivers and golden bridges, America turned out to be Uncle David's flat on Avenue C in which my father had first lived when he came to America. We walked up several flights of dark stairs and knocked on a door pasted over with glazed patterned paper of connecting rectangles and circles in blue and red and green, whose lines I liked to trace with my eye while the others talked. That door led to a large kitchen with a round table in the center, a few chairs around it, and, off to a side, a brown wooden icebox. At another side, a shining black stove whose cooking lids were lifted by a clever long black hook when pieces of coal had to be added to the waning fire. From the kitchen ran a narrow dark alley with divisions that made niches for beds and then opened into a small living room at whose end there were two windows with views
of clouds and chimneys. Only once were we held to look down to the street below; never were we to try on our own, and we couldn't, so thoroughly were we watched by our entranced Uncle David, who looked like God and Moses and, more often, Old King Cole. He had a long white beard and puffs of white hair leaping from the edge of his skullcap and a magical skill of putting his finger inside his cheek and pulling it out to make a big popping sound. He laughed a lot, told incomprehensible stories about Italians whose only English was “sonnomabitz,” drank great quantities of tea, sipped from a saucer and drained through a cube of sugar held in his teeth. Everything about him was wonderful: the black straps and boxes he wrapped on his arms and forehead and the rhythmic bowing of his prayers when he was God; the fluttering old fingers and light touch of his gray carpet slippers as he paced a Chassidic dance when he was Old King Cole.

The rest of his household consisted of two middle-aged spinster daughters. Rachel was a plump, bustling, talkative woman who addressed us as her little sheep, which made us feel pathetic and affecting and sure we could get anything out of her—another candy and yet another—and we played her. In spite of her bounty and mushy vulnerability, I was afraid of her. She wore glasses so thick that her eyes were invisible behind concentric circles of shine. Though her cheeks were high-colored and her teeth strong and yellow, she looked like a mechanical woman, a machine with flashing, glassy circles for eyes. The third member of the household was completely apart from us and truly fearsome. Yentel (a name, I was later told, that derived from the Italian “Gentile”) was tall and gaunt, blind and deaf. She moved through the small apartment deftly, measuring her spaces with long, constantly moving fingers. She made the beds, pulling, smoothing, lining up the edges with her subtle, restless fingers. She shelled peas, she peeled potatoes and plucked chickens. While my brother sang and shuffled around Rachel and Uncle David, I watched her out of the corner of my eye. I didn't know what blind really meant; anyone who was so dextrous could not be entirely without vision and I was afraid she would see me staring at her if I watched her with my eyes wide open.

Though I was relieved of some of the care of my brother, I still had to be in charge many times. Uncle David and Rachel could keep
him from banging into Yentel and would prepare his food, but we had confusing language difficulties that I had to unsnarl when my parents went out, my mother wildly eager to see everything and now, particularly while she had such devoted baby-sitters. My brother and I spoke Polish, Uncle David and Rachel had been brought up in Yiddish with a few Polish words they no longer remembered accurately. When my brother sleepily mumbled “
Spatch
[sleep]” they briskly rushed him to the cold toilet in the hall, vaguely remembering a similar Polish word that they thought meant shit,
sratch
. Unable to explain, I resorted to rough pantomime: run into the toilet, shake my head vigorously, pull him, confused and weeping, off the seat, and carry him to one of the beds, where I dump him and his lush glorious howling, to let them take care of the rest. Conversely I had to watch for the suffused worried face and the shifting buttocks that they tried to settle in bed while he yearned for a toilet. The story of bed and toilet was frequently told in our household to considerable laughter; my brother and I were never amused, it gave us both anxious bellyaches.

Force-fed like a Strasbourg goose by everyone who looked at him, my brother began to strengthen and even to take a few tentative steps now and then. An early talker, his only strengths his brain and speech, he was prodigious at three. He might easily have learned to read but he preferred talk, preferably oratory. The first time we were taken out on a sled one winter afternoon, he declared when we came home that so small a child (as he) must not be taken out in snowy cold. People had to realize that a small body got colder faster, that snow was for animals with fur and not for people with skins. And so on and so on, in his adept combination of splashing guilt as he charmed. And how he could cry, high wide luxuriant wails to which his whole body danced, and to which everyone responded anxiously, except one time when we were taken on an elevated train and, at one station, a black man walked in and sat opposite us. I didn't know how to feel: maybe he was a charred man, darkened like wood in a fire and I must be sorry for him, maybe he ate coal, maybe he was some sort of monkey like those in a picture book and I should be afraid of him. While sorting it out, I admired the light palms of his hands against the dark backs, the big purple lips, and the wide holes in his nose. My brother shrieked in terror, scream
ing—in Polish, fortunately—“Take him away, take that black giant away! He's going to eat me! Kill him, Papa, kill him!” It was a crowded train; to give up our seats and move to stand in another car would have been foolish. My father slapped the small pointing finger and with his hand stifled the howling. The child thrust his head into my mother's armpit and, shuddering, rode that way the rest of the journey.

My brother's fear of blacks dispelled itself in the stellar entertainment we found on 98th Street, between Lexington and Third avenues where we had moved from the Lower East Side. At the top of the street there were three tall-stooped narrow tenements and below, running to Third, small houses with crooked porches. These were black houses and to us places of great joy and freedom. My brother was already walking quite well and we were allowed the street—I was always to hold his hand and watch that he didn't go into the gutter and see that he didn't get dirty and not to talk to strange men and not wander around the corner. We watched, at a distance, the black children fly in and out of their houses, calling strange sounds, bumping, pummeling, rolling, leaping, an enchantment of “wild beasts” my father never permitted us to be. The best of the lower street were the times when everyone, adults and children, marched up and down, carrying bright banners, and to the sound of trumpets and drums sang, “Ohlly Nohly, Ohlly Nooo. Bumpera bumpera bump bump bum, Ohlly Noooo.” Ohlly Nohly became our favorite rainy-day game, my brother banging on a pot with a clothespin, I tootling through tissue paper on a comb, high-stepping jauntily, roaring from hallway to kitchen to bedroom our version of a revival hymn that must have begun with “Holy Lord, Oh Holy Lord.” We never could reconstruct the bumpera bumpera words though we never forgot the tune.