My Old Neighborhood Remembered (2 page)

My aunt and uncle were deaf-mutes. They were the heads of household. One or another of my aunt and uncle's children also lived there from time to time. My mother, my older sister, and I lived as boarders in the apartment. My father had disappeared into another life before I was five and I was never to see him again. The move to the building from the east Bronx to the west Bronx was traditional. Nothing else about our family was.

In 1941, we moved into the building on Field Place. I can recall some shadowy images from the previous apartment on Tiffany Street. Other people also lived there. My sister, Jackie, older by six years, later told me they were boarders themselves. And I have fleeting shadows of memories of another apartment and perhaps the presence of someone who must have been my father, but I cannot say I really remember him or anything about him.

My mother, who was in all respects heroic, out of what was likely shame — it couldn't have been easy to have the only divorce in the neighborhood in those days, maybe one of the few in the Bronx — never got her story straight with me about my father until I was about twelve. Their divorce was made official by my father who filed papers in 1944, I eventually learned. The situation was similar to — as the writer, Lois Gould, once described — “a Jewish divorce.” Defeated by The Depression, she said, some Jewish men, feeling disgraced for not being able to provide for their families, simply disappeared. Our situation was similar to that, but not exactly. My father apparently lost his job in the economic hard times, tried to operate a retail store and couldn't succeed, and having begun to pile up debts, fled New York. He stopped in the South and called my mother and asked her to come there with my sister and with me. My mother later explained she decided that if she joined him she would be always running and she declined. Her uncle, a successful small businessman, intervened. My aunt and uncle were asked to take us in, hence, the tenement building on Tiffany Street, and then Field Place.

When I was 26, I received a phone call from my father, the first time I had heard from him since he left. I was angry and the call went nowhere. Several years later, when I had become a father myself, I hired a private detective to find him. I wanted to get that phone call back. I thought now that I was a father we might have had something in common. I was told by an aunt who lived in Los Angeles and who once had known my father, that he was last seen somewhere in the Los Angeles area. With the help of the private detective, I learned he had worked as a bartender, had been living with a woman in El Monte in Los Angeles County, had used several aliases in his life, did not have any other children, and had died six years earlier.

People aware that I wrote the novel,
Kramer vs. Kramer
, and who assumed I must have been writing with emotion because of my own divorce were making the wrong assumption. I was never divorced. My sensitivity to the material was because my parents were divorced and I grew up never knowing my father.

I attended elementary school P.S. 33 on Jerome Avenue near Fordham Road. When I think about the place it seems to have had its own underscoring, “Do you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man, do you know the muffin man that lives in Drury Lane?” which we sang and skipped to while a teacher played piano.

The school building was classic collegiate gothic, a slanted green roof with a courtyard, the design replicated in schools throughout the city. “Who do you think you'll get?” was the anxious question preceding each school year, the teachers running true to form, the same teachers there year after year, the strict ones, the nice ones, the mean ones, and as their reputations preceded them, so did they behave with few surprises.

We were at least thirty to a class, dutiful children. We carried fear along with our books. I can nearly summon that old knot in my stomach worrying I might be called on, worried I might be caught for doing something bad, and be told I was, heaven forbid, suspended.

The classrooms were hot and steamy in winter, the heat rattling through the radiators. As summer approached they were still hot, but clammy. You were obliged to bring a handkerchief and buy or make book covers for your books. The worry was your family would be quarantined if you got chicken pox, and you did get chicken pox, and they weren't quarantined.

At one point I was pulled out to attend a special class for stutterers, about six of us in the group who were told to read aloud to get our stuttering under control, an affliction that came as a surprise to me when I was told I was so afflicted. I might have stuttered, I can't remember. More likely I had too much to say in too much of a hurry. Or maybe not. After a while, I had done well enough to be excused from attending the class.

The school assemblies featured sturdy little children carrying flags in those days of heightened patriotism. Good George Washington was in full view in the auditorium in the ubiquitous reproduction of a Gilbert Stuart portrait.

Music appreciation was taught in groups in the auditorium as the phonograph played and we memorized, “This is the symphony that Schubert wrote and never finished . . . ” We gathered leaves in the fall and they were labeled and placed on colored oak tag and taped to the class windows, the leaves gathered mainly from St. James Park, a fair-sized park located north of P.S. 33. I wrote a novel,
The Old Neighborhood
, and placed much of the action in that Kingsbridge Road neighborhood rather than my own because it fit the needs of the story. A woman, confusing fiction and nonfiction, wrote a letter to me and said she liked the book, but that she knew all the boys from the neighborhood and I must have changed my name for professional purposes.

We bought model airplane kits in a hobby shop near P.S. 33 owned by a Mr. Bess, American fighting planes, enemy planes. Some of the models required paper and thin sticks glued together and were rather elaborate, the balsa wood models easier for me. I was dreadful at this, even my balsa wood models were a mess, looking even worse when painted.

“Now write the numbers that you hear in the second column. Thur--ee, four.” We were fearful of the hearing tests as we looked around the room when we could no longer hear numbers to see if anybody else was still writing.

Betty Suhr, will you forgive me? When I was sitting behind you, I stuck your pigtail in my inkwell.

Before ballpoint pens, the desks had inkwells and we dipped our wooden pens with metal pen points into the ink-wells to write. We went through elementary school with ink stains on our fingers.

Oak tag, mucilage, deportment, fractions. Someone who was to always struggle with math in school, I am not thrilled to remember there came a day in elementary school when we started to learn fractions.

We were taught “tolerance” as to the beliefs or the nature of others. “Tolerance” was better than “intolerance,” still, something short of “acceptance.” To drive the point home we were shown repeatedly,
The House I Live In
, a short film with a message song starring Frank Sinatra. That would be the boyish bobby-soxers' Frank Sinatra, not the rakish Nelson Riddle Frank Sinatra.

Occasionally, my mother would arrange her lunch hour and take me to lunch at Thompson's Cafeteria near P.S. 33. This was a treat, to be taken out to eat lunch in a restaurant.

To the boys, the girls were not alien, they were like us with the same school experiences, the same fears, except they were girls. We played tag with them in the yard. They were our elementary school classmates, friends. Like Cecelia Klein who, when we were grownups, sent me a photocopy of the page I inscribed in her 6th grade graduation souvenir book, “Good luck ya dumb cluck.” Then many of us went to all-boy and all-girl junior high and high schools and we were separated from a manageable social arrangement to a place of distance. I still haven't recovered.

I was in 3rd grade on June 6, 1944. We were released early from school to go to our respective houses of worship where D-Day services were being held to pray for the safe return of our fighting men in the invasion of Allied forces at Normandy. I went to a service at the Jacob H. Schiff Center near Fordham Road and joined with the other solemn children and adults in collective apprehension and hope. We 3rd graders didn't get adults to accompany us to those houses of worship. We just went by ourselves directly from school. These were our neighborhoods. We moved about them freely.

In 5th grade, our class drew an emotional bully as the teacher. She continually berated us for being stupid and sloppy in our habits and nowhere near the excellence of her daughter, close to our age, attending another school, whom she constantly held up to us. I hope things worked out for that girl. I did something really dumb one day and this teacher came down on me. When she wasn't looking I pocketed a ball she had taken away from one of my friends in the class and left on her desk. I seized it surreptitiously and gave it back to him. This is pure elementary school theatrics — the teacher told us she was going out of the room and the ball was to be returned to her desk in her absence, and if not, someone was going to get in serious trouble. I didn't like this teacher and I was tired of her bullying and I wasn't going to give in to her, not realizing in my 5th grade naivete that she knew I had snatched the ball.

She came back in, saw the ball was not there, walked directly to me and said I was the one and my mother was going to have to come to school. My mother come to school? My mother was working. My mother couldn't come to school.

It was agreed at home that for my conduct problem, my sister, who was a high school student, would come to school instead of my mother. And she did and it was embarrassing, the boys whistling at her as she came in, the fact that I couldn't even get a parent to show up. Well, that was in
my
mind. I was officially labeled a bad boy in the eyes of this teacher, on the road to suspension if I didn't mend my bad boy ways.

The teacher, let's call her Mrs. S____. We'll give her a break on the name. Mrs. S____ liked to repeat a story about a World War II soldier who had been in her class. He was told in battle, “heads down,” and he put his head down because he learned in
her
class how to listen, and others didn't, and a bomb exploded and they were all killed, but he wasn't because, yes, he learned in
her
class how to listen.

I once attended the opening of a recreation center in St. James Park and addressed a group of P.S. 33 students who were brought there for the opening ceremony and I told them that I had attended their school long, long ago, and that I remembered having a really mean teacher. “Who? Who?” a couple of them called out. I declined to answer, but afterward a woman came up to me and said she was a teacher at P.S. 33 and had attended the school herself. “Was the teacher Mrs. S____?” “Yes,” I answered. “I knew it!” she said. “She was so mean.”

The mean ones, the strict ones, the nice ones were, by and large, career professionals. Many of our teachers came to teaching during The Depression. With the scarcity of jobs then, teaching was considered secure with decent pay. The approved occupation for intelligent women from the lower to middle class was to be a teacher. For intelligent men of their social class, for Jews and other minorities, corporate jobs were not available to
them
. Some of these men also gravitated to teaching. When we came through as school children in the 1940s and 1950s, they were there in place for us, these professionals — intelligent, conscientious people who might not have been teachers at a later time. Eventually, they phased out, they retired, people who became teachers because prejudice and economic conditions prevented them from being anything else. They were a unique generation of teachers. We children, not economically privileged, were privileged to be taught by them in in those schools.

Even with Mrs. S______, when she passed us on to 6th grade, we were ready for 6th grade.

In 1997, I heard from Richard Kobliner, a former classmate and friend from the neighborhood, who had become a teacher himself in the New York City public schools system and was active in education circles. He somehow assembled a rough list of names and addresses of the P.S. 33 6th grade graduating class of June 1947, and a lunch was planned in a midtown Manhattan restaurant for the fiftieth anniversary of our graduation. He later explained some might have been confused and thought the reunion was just for our particular class, not the entire grade. Even at that, about thirty or so people came. A few brought their spouses. We were all in our early sixties. We were having difficulty trying to identify anyone, then when you looked at a name tag what clicked in was a face of a 6th grader.

We talked among ourselves and brought each other up to date as people always do at a reunion. Then we went around the room and we spoke to the group at large about something specific we remembered from the time when we were in school together. We probably hadn't thought about it in decades. I certainly hadn't. A theme emerged. We were children of the home front during World War II.

On December 7, 1941, I had just turned six years old and sat on the living room floor drawing primitive pictures of the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the best of my understanding. On September 2, 1945, when the Japanese formally surrendered, I was a couple of months shy of ten years old. In going from six to ten my range of comprehension evolved through these war years, as had that of my classmates, to a somewhat older child's sense of what it meant for the nation to be at war.

The war was embedded in our day to day life, the home front war all around us, the daily war news in the newspapers and on the radio, the weekly war reports in the news-reels, the shortages, the rationing, the posters, “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” the people in uniform, the air raid wardens with their helmets and arm bands, the bunting in store windows, the parades along the Grand Concourse, the patriotism, the propaganda, the cartoon images of Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini.