New Moon (13 page)

Our expedition took us to the riding stables to see the horses; from there we ran up and down the ski slope, goofing off in improvised skits as we headed to Jay’s bungalow.

In the morning my cousin called me on the house phone and invited me back. With mitts, bat, and ball, we trooped to the playing field. As we swatted fungos to each other I was amazed at how many grown men showed up with gloves and joined us kids. One guy remarked that Jay smacked the ball like a major leaguer. He did. I loved to spot his whacks in the sky, mark their zenith, and stalk the arc of their descent.

I stayed a week the first time at Grossinger’s. I didn’t see much of Uncle Paul, who was hardly ever home, or Jay, who returned to the City the next day but, once I realized I was free to go where I wanted, I explored the grounds: a boy with a dog named Boy. Up beyond our house, I collected old license plates along dirt slopes at the edge of parking lots. Once Boy knew what I was looking for he found some great ones, sniffing Mississippi and Georgia out of garbage. Then we took the bus to the Lake and followed a brook to a small waterfall. There we waded among fish and tiny frogs, turtles of varying sizes sunning on rocks so that I could reach down and lift their shells, my pants pulled up over my knees, the collie muddy and splashing.

That night, surveying my caked clothes, Aunt Bunny summoned me into a bathtub with Michael. I was astonished when we were handed two cans of shaving cream. It was part of the ritual—constructing our own floating castles, shooting lather all over each other. When we left, there were three fizzed-out canisters and foam
running down the walls. Now that was a real bath!

Each day for lunch I returned to the family section among my new relatives. As they encouraged me to sample the menu, I became more courageous. In the course of a week I overcame my squeamishness and tried all manner of mixed and “touching” foods: mushrooms and noodles, lima beans and groats, fruit with beef, ice-cream cakes with lime and bing cherry sections separated by chocolate bread, raspberry parfaits, fluffy cheesecakes. We ate nothing like this stuff at home

As I walked the lobbies, everyone seemed to know who I was. Strangers greeted me by name and expected enthusiastic responses. I watched a comedian named Lou Goldstein play Simon Says with guests. As he tricked his victims into doing things to which Simon didn’t first say okay, he made jokes in Yiddish and English, embarrassing them further, and to increasing gales of laughter fooled them yet again while their guard was down because they thought the dupery was over. In the next lobby, people sat at tables playing Scrabble with stacks of dollars in little piles beside them. Someone I didn’t know called me over and asked me if I could make any words from his rack. His opponents grumbled and laughed.

“Currying favors with the boss!” a bejeweled lady said.

I told him that “gaze” would get his “Z” on a triple letter score.

“That’s my buddy for you.”

One afternoon Aunt Bunny took Michael and me in her car off the grounds to a miniature golf course with animal statues, windmills, and tunnels, each to putt a colored ball through. Then she bought cotton candy for us. I had never seen a toy golf course or eaten fluff from a silver drum. That night I had my first pizza and saw my first drive-in movie. Life in paradise was becoming more and more real.

Perhaps I
could
get away with a whole different identity.

The next day the director of the nightclub found me at lunch and made a promise; then he kept it by showing up at Uncle Paul’s after dinner. He took my hand and led me back to the Hotel, through a tiny door near the kitchen into a dark space, then into a room of levers and costumes. From there I could watch the show backstage.

I stood alongside the curtain, while dancers, a singer, and then a comedian passed me going to and from their acts. Wreaths of bluish smoke rose into the spotlight from an invisible audience that periodically burst into applause. Everything was so extravagant and close, the adult performers vivid and intense, the stagehands purposeful and alert, the tap dancers sweating in their tuxedos, the lady singer in a giant pink poofy dress, her face a painted doll, her voice bigger than her body. I had never been to Broadway, but here it was, before my eyes. I didn’t have to identify or understand this adult world. I was allowed to be part of it.

Departing in an uproar of laughter, a comedian named Joey Bishop gave me a pat on the fanny and asked me to remember him to my father: “Tell him I brought down the house. Don’t forget!” Then he kissed my cheek and twisted my ear.

Two nights later I got taken to a booth where a technician taught me to turn the translucent rings over the spotlight. While dancers were performing onstage, I changed their landscape from blue to purple to lemon yellow.

In New York I was the bad guy; here I was a virtual prince.

During the week Aunt Bunny never said anything sarcastic. She got angry sometimes, but it was a word or glance, then on to the next thing—no threat of punishment on the horizon, no subterfuge, no comeuppance anywhere.

After breakfast one morning, as I was setting out with Boy on an adventure, a publicity man in a suit arrived at our door and announced that he was taking me to visit my Grandma Jennie. I put Boy back inside and stood ready. As we paced briskly, he described what a wonderful, generous woman my grandmother was. “She can’t wait to meet you.”

Jennie Grossinger lived in Joy Cottage, a deluxe bungalow down the hill from my father’s. Passing alongside a small garden, I was directed through a glass door, My guide departed, but a maid was waiting and led me from the foyer down a series of hallways. I encountered an obscure apothecary aroma. It reminded me of soap balls and vitamin stores selling Tiger’s Milk. She opened the last
door on the right. Grandma Jennie sat in a gold bed in a rose-colored room. “Richard!” she exclaimed, throwing open her arms, her face breaking into a bountiful smile. “Welcome home.”

Home? I searched my memory as though I should remember this—and in a way I did.

Grandma was an older blonde woman with a strong, intelligent face. I knew that she was famous. Even Bob Towers spoke well of her. I was flattered that she was my relative and, at her invitation, returned to see her on my own the next day. As I sat on the corner of her bed, she initiated a serious, wide-ranging discussion, wanting to know everything about me. I felt like someone who had been rescued from another planet or awakened from a long amnesia.

Grandma not only wanted to find out what I was learning in school but had patience for me to demonstrate arithmetic and recite tales of the thirteen colonies. Unlike most others at the Hotel who regarded me only as Paul’s son without a past, she had an interest in my other family, including Jonny and Debby. “I want to hear how everyone’s doing,” she declared. When presented my mildest version in deference to her age and stature she urged me to have sympathy for my mother. “Her father was taken ill when she was very young and she was left alone in a boarding school in Paris. Her mother treated her very badly. She is married to a difficult man. I’m so sorry she takes this out on you, but you must be forgiving and rise above it.” I promised to try.

On the day I left for home she sent me to the canteen to buy the most luxurious presents I could find for my brother and sister—“and I mean the finest,” she said. “Price is no object”—so I picked out games, dolls, and stuffed animals. She also arranged for smoked salmon and honey cakes to go back with me for my mother and Daddy. “This way,” she remarked drily, “they’ll treat you better.”

In a sober end to a summer’s ramble that began with uneaten peanut butter and jelly and “99 Bottles of Beer,” Joe drove me back to New York. As I watched country turn into outskirts of tenements, I grew morose and teary. Strange neighborhoods became familiar blocks, and streets that had once been second nature looked derelict and
dreary. I was returning to a city no longer home.

In the elevator at 1235 I found it hard to greet Ramon or look him in the eye. The contrast between his surliness and the affability of the Grossinger’s staff was too painful. My mind raced as I girded myself for my arrival upstairs. My mother was waiting to retrieve what was left of my soul.

I expected her to be furious, so I tried to camouflage my mood. But she still had her Chipinaw smile and seemed unusually gay and glad to have me back. In fact, she stayed up late in the living room and told me tales of her own time at Grossinger’s, how slim and handsome Paul was then, how she fell in love with him, how much they wanted a boy like me. She described the jobs she had held, recounting in a childlike voice how she stood behind the front desk as Mrs. Grossinger and, just like Aunt Marian, welcomed guests. She asked me about staff people who were still there from her time. Most of them I had met, and I was able to report that they remembered her and sent their regards.

During those initial weeks back I talked openly from habit of being at Grossinger’s, as I considered that in my fresh outlook my mother might be an ally too. I told her about my problems at school, my frustration with Jonny and, when that seemed to go well, my adventures with Michael, James, and Boy. She heard it all with a show of great empathy. “I know how you feel at Grossinger’s,” she said to me. “I was overwhelmed the first few times. It was like fairyland. I never wanted to leave.”

Then one evening as a family quarrel intensified, I tried to act both sympathetic and blameless, to appease our mother’s rising anger while keeping my poise, a ruse I had never tried. I was now “Richard from Grossinger’s,” not “Richard the Rogue.” Mommy caught the drift at once and blurted out, “Save that crap for your Uncle Paul. It doesn’t work here.” Her abrupt reversion startled me.

A day later, rushing to intercept Jonny and me in argument, she seized the opening she had been waiting for: “Get away from him, Jon. He’s got other favorite brothers he plays with now.” I burned with shame and guilt. Then she began to bait in a mocking, singsong voice, “Now go tell on us to your Auntie Bunny.” Jonny and
Daddy stared darts, while Bridey stood suitably stolid beside them. For months, in fact years, afterward, if I appeared too cheerful, she snapped, “Where do you think you are, Grossinger’s?”

She had lured me into confession and then used my admissions as proof of my disloyalty. Dr. Fabian had warned me about just such a trick.

I turned myself into a hardened outsider, giving them nothing. Mommy had the appropriate taunt for that too: “He’s only a boarder here, so he’ll be treated like a boarder now.”

One day when Dr. Fabian took a phone call, I pulled down a fat volume that had tantalized me from a distance,
The Interpretation of Dreams.
On his return he was pleased with my interest so, at our next session, he made me a gift of the Modern Library edition and showed me how you could find single dreams in it in italics and then go to Freud’s interpretations of them. The slant of the dream letters acknowledged the power of symbols. Viennese ballrooms and museums of antiquities were transformed by the master’s interpretations. Umbrellas and pianos—and a particular straw hat of a peculiar shape (its middle piece bent upward, its side pieces downward, one hanging lower than the other)—became penises; laboratories revealed the situation of treatment; animals represented people or were transformed by puns into events. There were symbolic “puddings,” “dumplings,” “trellises,” “chapels,” “donkeys,” “Turkish embroidery,” “horse-drawn cabs,” and “Kings of Italy.”

I struggled with this book for years, never flagging in my goal to understand it, especially difficult parts like “The Dream-Work” and “The Psychology of the Dream-Processes.” Initially these were blocks of impenetrable text.

Mommy succeeded in reducing my time with Dr. Fabian by appropriating one of his two days for Hebrew School. Now I only went to the Village on Friday afternoons with Neil’s replacement, a tall, thin lady with a wart on her forehead named Jo. On Wednesdays I had to attend a ghastly joint called Ramaz. Uncle Paul was no help on the matter. Since he ran a kosher hotel, he agreed that his
son should attend a Jewish institute.

Men in yarmulkes taught the Hebrew alphabet and language and lectured us on the new state of Israel. We read a primer about a pioneer family on a kibbutz and were regaled with recitals from the lives of Jewish patriots, tales of their prowess against their enemies—language lessons imbricated. My teachers boasted shamelessly. I heard how Jews made the deserts bloom, brought civilization to the Holy Land, that Arabs were dummies or criminals.

It was supposed to be religious training and, during spells of sanctimony, God
was
invoked under His Hebrew name Yahweh. Yet Yahweh was more an afterthought than our focus—someone who had to be acknowledged to legitimize the enterprise. What would Hebrew School be without God?

Every so often our teacher would glance skyward or toward the horizon as he paid tribute to … what? A Zionist archangel, a magical person, who once created the universe out of nothing and later appeared in Moses’s burning bush? Yahweh was a Superman-like mover of stars, and he could be alternately a strict biblical king or an incredibly nice guy; but his masculine persona was essential because you had to get along with him, be on his good side, form a personal relationship with him. You couldn’t concede him to thunder and wind or creative intelligence.

He became a tyrant I could dismiss even though I was Jewish.

I continued to imagine my own God somewhat along the lines of the aliens who gave me my spaceship—a supernatural chaperone who watched over me, heard my prayers, and helped me when he could. My guardian wasn’t as imposing or brusque as Ramaz’s Yahweh; yet he was dignified and forgiving. I found intimations of him in the starry night, the crashing waves of Long Beach, or even Mel Allen going crazy during an eighth-inning rally—that inimitable fusion of epiphany, wonder, and awe. He was in the room with the double closets, promising me implicitly that important things remained unchanged and he would abide like the Yankees and the Milky Way. While I didn’t presume to conflate him with Yahweh, a Being just as ineffable and omniscient held my universe together. I see his vague shape over my childhood even now.