New Moon (18 page)

The fox was followed by a Lou Goldstein–narrated ice show culminating with championship barrel-jumping—a speed skater building up momentum and then leaping over fifteen or sixteen
cylinders in a row, landing with a screech and spray of snow to great applause. I was wide-eyed and proud.

Often I stopped at Joy Cottage for an hour or so to keep Grandma company. I was an attentive audience for tales of her odyssey: how she came to America a poor girl, studied hard, learned English, and became God’s custodian of the land. She taught her life as if a proverb of a Biblical character rising above hardship. It was tedious and redundant, but I liked listening politely. I remembered that it was an honor just to be there, and a rare chance to represent my mother well.

Although the contrast between our upbringings couldn’t have been more definitive, Grandma Jennie imbued me with a sense of deeper affinity, as if we were two unique members of the Grossinger family. “Our success should have bred vision and generosity among our own,” she lamented; “instead it has bred envy and greed. You have suffered like me, so you understand this.”

Near the end of each stay she splurged anew on gifts for me, Jonny, and Debby. I got a blue and white Magnavox record-player with sequins on the case, then a tape recorder. Jonny got a set of battery-operated motor cars. Debby got the thing she wanted most—a full cowboy suit with a hat, a holster, and two pistols. Even Bridey was rewarded with a set of jeweled brooches.

“If they try to hurt you,” Grandma proclaimed, “we will still shower them with kindness.”

During one visit my offhand comment about the Yankees led Grandma to recall a treasure she had kept for years and she summoned the maid to go to her safe for it. Wrapped in a piece of pink velvet in a box, it was a baseball autographed by dozens of famous old-time players, including Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. She displayed it, rewrapped it, and then handed it to me. “Save this for your children. They can remember me by it.”

I returned to New York with these wonders, time and again surpassing everyone’s hopes, which should have made my homecomings welcome events. It didn’t. Though appreciated, the largess was regarded with suspicion, my mother adopting a familiar wryly querying tone as if to say, “What’s all this?” when surely she knew.
They could never quite acknowledge me as their benefactor because they believed
they
deserved what
I
seemed to have acquired without earning, not only the merchandise but the prestige that went with it—Daddy and Mommy because they had made Grossinger’s what it was (and Grandma was only using me as their messenger), Jonny because he was the real champion.

In New York I became Richard Towers again. His life was beads strung on a thread: bittersweet days at P.S. 6, Phil and our gang at Bill-Dave, sessions with Dr. Fabian, hardball with Jonny and Bob in the Park. It was walks around the reservoir, me pushing Debby in a stroller; dinners at Grandma Sally’s apartment after she and Uncle Tom moved back to New York—Grandma demanding strict manners and polite speech, Jon and I enraging her (and embarrassing our mother) by goofing off, Grandma calling us “insolent” and “impudent,” so we made up an insolent, impudent ballad about her. It was seders on the Lower East Side with Daddy’s sisters and their husbands and cousins during which our mother, as much an outsider as us, flashed Jonny and me snickers of contempt for the clannish performance, as we were compelled to recitations of
Ma nisthtana ha-laila ha-zel …”
and then had to find the dumb matzoh. It was daydream planets and outer-space adventures (I never enacted the spaceship fantasy at Grossinger’s. It didn’t belong there). It was epic battles between Jon and me followed by brittle reconciliations; long Monopoly afternoons while rain beat on the window … buying the light blue of Connecticut and red of Kentucky and putting houses and hotels on them.

Stormy days were especially cozy with their myriad lush layers, drips and splashy tires leaving wet aliases on the sidewalk—the City double with melting colors, as my forehead pressed foggy spots on cold window glass. And time oozed past, molecule by molecule.

Phil’s father took us to a batting cage in Long Island. A mechanical arm slowly climbed to the top of its arc, then snapped forward, flinging a zip of a pitch. We had chosen “slow,” but only fastballs hissed by, the pellet sailing above my bat every time. Then, like Little Johnny Strikeout, I got the knack. We batted toward long nets
with hits marked on them. Saying that we should go for swatting one out of Yankee Stadium, a feat never accomplished even by Mickey Mantle, Phil launched shots into the “home run” twice. I hit a double.

At Palisades Park with Bill-Dave I spent an hour one Saturday diagnosing a machine, a claw inside a glass case that, upon the insertion of a quarter, passed over watches, tiny cameras, rings, and other prizes. I longed to have one of those cute cameras so I tried it, but the metal snapped on air, then nothing came through the slot. Afterwards, I went inside a booth and, parting with my last dime, put my eyes in a goggle-cup and watched Woody Woodpecker flash by on cartoon cards. The process of animation was so compelling and accessible that I made my own show at home. As I flipped oblong cards, musical notes seemed to rise and fall from penguins playing trumpets. It was convincing enough for Bridey to ask for an encore.

In the winter we drove to the Nevele, my brother and sister wrapped in blankets beside me in the back seat, asleep. Signs across the Hudson shimmered at night like portals to fairy-tale duchies. The grandest one blinked remorselessly, “Spry for Frying, Spry for Baking”; others shone Maxwell House and Colgate; Pepsi Cola and Nabisco if we left by the East River—yellow, blue, and red beacons. Then the greater unknown….

I stared out into the Martian darkness, picturing the alien towns we passed, the tall, slender skaters on the Red Planet’s canals. As I bundled myself deeper and deeper, I turned us into a saucer and sailed beside Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

I remember outings on the Staten Island Ferry: the rumble of its motor, exploding foam under us, our retinue of gulls, Manhattan becoming an island in the distance, Mommy sitting with her eyes closed, her silver cardboard reflector open, trying to capture every last ember of sacred warmth.

I remember Daddy leading us in prayers as we lit the Hanukah candles:
“Vitzyvanoo, lihadlik nair….”
Then he told the story of the Maccabees and their magic lantern that kept burning after it ran out of oil. We spun dreidels with letters of the Hebrew alphabet and were read stories in which those letters came to life. Till bedtime
Jonny and I lay on the floor, watching wax collect in colored piles on the menorah as we bet on which candle would go out last.

On special Sundays we ate at one of Daddy’s restaurant accounts where the owner invariably came and interrupted our meal for a bout of corny hoopla. Between courses we were encouraged to tell stories from our week. Mine tended to be ironical and downbeat (Daddy called me droll). Jon was always triumphant, or outraged if anything went less than perfectly. Debby was a goofy comedienne. Daddy would entertain us with his rendition of the menu, sometimes offering insightful comments on our choices. One of his cues was the delivery of the rolls. “Martha, the way those three attack a bread basket you’d think they were just let out of prison. Hey, guys, this fella here loves a saltstick too. Save a couple.”

To our astonishment, we saw Mel Allen once at McGinnis’ bar after a Yankee loss. He looked sad, old, and a bit daft compared to how he appeared on TV. “He’s feeling no pain,” commented Daddy. To him that meant he was in his cups, but to us it meant that he was more than just a commentator of the Yankee games, he cared about their outcomes as much as we did and was drinking off a ninth-inning rally that fell one base hit short.

Sunday nights the family watched
Roy Rogers.
Pat Brady kicked his jeep. Jon and I chuckled, and Daddy let out a loud laugh: “They know how to entertain, son of a gun!” Then came
The Ed Sullivan Show.
Eddie Fisher sang, and Mommy was transfixed in rapture, as Daddy joined in, sometimes crooning the words one beat ahead, sometimes humming only the melody as if it were a synagogue service.

Later, during my bath, I would gather six or seven boats from the hamper and set them in the water with me. As I pulled my body away, the displacement set them moving. There was a tugboat and a motorless motorboat, a submarine that half-floated, half-sank, an ocean liner and its lifeboat, which raced separately, and my favorite, an old sailboat missing its sail, which I called
The African Queen
after a movie Aunt Bunny took me to.

In the opening heat the first one to reach the other end of the bathtub was the winner. Boats would “stick” together and separate;
some would move forward for a bit and then drift back. I was not supposed to affect the outcome; yet, as I slid around under them, their whole arrangement shifted, for I was a geography of islands, tides, and winds.

Light shone in soapy water as I began the fourth heat, the one in which the winning boat had to touch the drain and then return to start. Only craft that had contacted the metal circle were in the running and needed to be kept track of.

Over the months, new entrants came and went—canoes and houseboats and barges—but
The African Queen,
paintless and rotted, stayed and held all the bathtub records.

The annals of my childhood embraced this dichotomy—Grossinger’s and New York. Jonny, Debby, Martha and Bob represented one jurisdiction; Aunt Bunny, Uncle Paul, Michael, and James the other—and never the twain did meet. It wasn’t that Grossinger’s was utopia and New York was hell. The City was my background planet, enthralling and tenacious in ways that the Hotel wasn’t: its dawns of stone shadows, its eves of glitter and clatter, the epic of the Yankees playing on its marquee.

Sometimes my two worlds strangely collided; for instance when maître d’ Abe Friedman’s nephew, a New York cabbie, recognized me on the street and screeched to a stop to say hello. He gave me and a startled Bridey a ride home with the grocery bags, refusing her offer of payment. I thought, as my heart outraced feelings that had no outlet in Towers Land, “See, Bridey, it’s more than brooches from Grandma Jennie. It’s real,
and it’s benign.”

One afternoon I came home from school to find that Yogi Berra had written me on the back of a postcard of the Grossinger’s ski slope, telling me to behave myself and do my homework! “We should get Yogi Berra here,” Bridey proclaimed, his name odd in her brogue. As my brother and I danced about, holding the card in the air, she said, “Maybe he could introduce some law and order before you wear your mother and me to death.”

The years in New York settle into a directionless flux, timeless
tangles of convergent themes: pennant races with the Cleveland Indians, World Series games against the Dodgers, Grandma Sally’s ashtrays full of hopjes candies that tasted like coffee, dinners with Uncle Paul, check-ups at Dr. Hunt, verbal cipher hunts with Dr. Fabian, bus rides up and down avenues, haircuts from my mother’s French barber on Madison, Bridey singing while she cooked. I would be feeling an outcast, longing for my other home when the world suddenly sank into its New York mood, not as banishment but with a kind of bone-chilling awe. Suddenly, from the kitchen would come the lilting soprano of Bridget McCann:
“It’s that old devil moon / That you stole from the skies. / It’s that old devil moon in your eyes.”
Then the sheer depth and texture of existence filled me.

New York defined the “me” who got to go to Grossinger’s. My brother Michael had always lived in paradise, so he didn’t understand it. I was willing to be sullen and brooding in my other life as long as I could return to my true abode. As Grandma Jennie said, “Welcome home.”

I kept her autographed ball in its box at the end of one of my bookshelves. I didn’t think about it much, so I didn’t notice at first when it was missing. Presuming Bridey had moved it while cleaning, I went to her. She shook her head and didn’t want to discuss it. Then Jonny said, “Ask Daddy.”

That evening, unaware of what I was about to invoke, I wondered if maybe Daddy borrowed it to show to a client.

“What do you mean,
your
baseball?” he exploded. “I brought those players to Grossinger’s. Without Bob Towers, you don’t have a baseball.”

“But where is it?”

“He doesn’t have to answer to you,” my mother said, giving me her most authoritatively threatening scowl. Jon and Debby stared grimly. “You are insolent!”

“One Sunday we didn’t have a ball,” Bob shrugged. “Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb signed a thousand of those, or every clubhouse boy in America signed them for them. What did you think? You had something special? Richard, that ball was a big nothing.”

I couldn’t believe what they were saying. They had played with
it, the last time I was at Grossinger’s. Now it was just one more dirty hardball.

“It serves you right,” my mother said.

It was never clear what she meant. Either it served me right for being at Grossinger’s or it served me right because it was never really my ball. Then Bridey arrived with our dinner plates, and no one mentioned it again.

That “old debbil moon” was everything we were and weren’t and, although Bridget McCann couldn’t have known, a Gaelic leprechaun inside her told us what was happening:
“Does that laddie with a twinkling eye / Come whistling by. / And does he walk away, / Sad and dreamy there / Not to see me there …,”
her brogue putting the pauses right where they belonged, where the shadow was, where light crept through. Rhyming outside, then in. Impossible hopes leaping from the abyss. Mysterious and profound. Melody and dirge.

Right! I was there, but they never saw me. I loved them and was loyal even in my betrayals. But they excluded me from their creed.

The high crime of treason might have been reserved for me, but at another level, Jonny and I were egalitarian truants our mother reviled as an indivisible pair. We would be lying in bed, talking to each other against the rules, and suddenly she would burst in with a belt and start whipping us through the covers. “Do you realize what time it is?” We were supposed to be asleep.

An automatic alert was set in our minds for the sound of her approach. When we played sockball, we had a drill for hiding the paraphernalia instantly if we heard an ascending scale of footsteps.

In Victorian novels women are always fainting away, rushing to their chambers from emotional shock or constitutional excitement, a restorative at hand. My mother didn’t swoon, but her nerves and hysteria were a legendary factor that had to be reckoned with. We continually worried about vexing or upsetting her, inciting tremors and rages. There was no restorative against her rampages—pills and bitters didn’t go that deep.

Either preparing for a crisis or having just overcome one, she took to her bed for such long hours that we forgot she even lived there. Then from her room she would unaccountably subpoena me or Jonny or both of us for an interrogation or charge out on a foray, looking for misconduct: a toy left on the floor, unfinished dinner on someone’s plate. “You don’t have to like it, just eat it” was a common rejoinder to a familiar complaint. Putting uneaten meals into our milk was an infliction that originated with her.

In her untied bathrobe, hair askew, creams dabbed irregularly on
her face, Martha Towers would paw through the garbage looking for wasted food, crawl along the rug in her bathrobe, collecting evidence—telltale candy wrappers, crumbs, baseball cards, even dustballs. “There’s going to be a pogrom in this house,” she’d announce. Then, with swipes and shoves, as forceful as they were uncoordinated, she’d help pull games and cards out of closets and drawers and start “cleaning up,” which meant throwing out perfectly good stuff.

We were maddening to her, just about everything we did. Yet it was a paradox: I was bad and Jon was good, but we were
both
bad. Though he was a saint by comparison, together we were a debacle. Half the time I was singled out for blame and Jon was exonerated, but the other half—and it was much more than half—she bemoaned that she had been given two such beasts for children: “What did I do, Bridey, to deserve this?”

Beyond her idealization of Prince Jonny—either because he was the son of a man she claimed to love or because she regularly singled out individuals to valorize or defame for abstruse and perverse reasons of her own—she had no more use for him than she did for me, and no interest at all in who either of us was.

One rainy day Jonny and I were behaving so sillily in Novack’s Market that, as we were about to enter the fish store next door, Mommy stuck out an arm and insisted that we remain on the street while she shopped in peace. In our slickers and galoshes we leaned against the plate-glass window, staring at stacks of what used to be living creatures and lobsters crawling on crushed ice beneath the taxidermy of a giant turtle. Suddenly she burst back out at a tremendous clip, not even acknowledging us. She sure was angry. The drizzle had become a downpour, but it was impossible to catch up even to share her umbrella.

We followed her from Madison to Park, then up along Park in increasing sheets of rain. She had never let us get wet before, but she didn’t break stride. She turned into a strange building on Phil’s block of 93rd. We made the elevator just before its door closed. Only when she took off her rain-hat did we realize we had followed the wrong lady home.

Though we weren’t allowed to cross streets on our own, we had no choice but to hurry three blocks to 96th and stand outside the door waiting for Ramon to deliver our nemesis. She spanked us both, starting right at the elevator, but the worst part was afterwards when she just lay in her room crying. We didn’t know how to fix who we were or undo what we had done.

Once Jonny started kindergarten at P.S. 6, we were dispatched to school together in the Bill-Dave wagon. Usually we got off to a sluggish start and had to pick-up momentum through breakfast to make our transportation. Bridey was often shoving us out the door just as van was turning the corner of Park at 96th. “Hurry, you two,” she’d urge. “I know it must have left by now.” The cranky elevator would whine to a stop, sometimes as Bert was pulling up. Jon and I stood by its metal gate ready to dash, Ramon invoking his authority and ordering us back until he had officially opened the door. He usually introduced a slight pause, probably wanting to assert regency over those pesky kids or eavesdrop on another exotic punishment.

One morning the wagon didn’t come. Jon and I stood there in disbelief as the day grew old and we watched a stream of businessmen heading off to work, a sure sign we had blown it. We dragged ourselves back to the apartment to Ramon’s jests. “See, your mamma right! She told you, you gonna miss! She gonna beat you!”

She was getting dressed and startled to see us again. Saying not a word, still adjusting her collar with one hand, she herded us into her room and swatted with the nearest implement, an umbrella. We were grabbing each other and trying to get away under the bed, but she followed, slamming harder and harder.

During this improvisational beating, the phone rang and Bridey broke in.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Mrs. Towers, but that was Bill-Dave to say the bus had a flat tire; it’s on its way.”

Mommy was undeterred. “The way they dawdle at breakfast they would have missed it a hundred times if it came when it was supposed to.” And she continued smacking.

Jonny and I relied on Daddy for fun and activity, to get us out of the apartment. He was mostly good-natured and participated in household frays mainly to defend his pride, for Mommy liked to needle him. He put a special effort into our escaping on Sundays, for that was the day on which she was most volatile. Dr. Fabian called it a “Sunday complex,” saying that Freud himself had diagnosed the symptoms.

Most Sunday mornings in the spring and fall, Daddy took us to Central Park. We picked home plate by a tree, and he pitched while we alternated turns of ten swings. It felt almost major league to be stinging his overhand tosses or snagging the line drives of Jonny’s bat. As I ran across the grass and cut off a grounder, Daddy exclaimed, “Gil McDougald couldn’t have done it any better!”

Sometimes he orchestrated games, inviting Puerto Rican kids our age from their own fungo matches. These hoods with bright-colored Spanish T-shirts and early bling were dubious at first, like “Are you saying like what I think you’re saying, sir?” but an adult-chaperoned match with real positions and rules was a chance to shine they couldn’t turn down.

Daddy was always the pitcher, balancing the teams by playing harder for the losing side, applauding everyone’s plays as he umpired.

This was totally out of character for our family. We never talked to anyone; we crossed the street not only for large dogs but to avoid walking near the kinds of youths he was summoning over and telling, “Son, with that raw ability you’re going to be in the outfield next to Mickey Mantle in a few years.” On the way home, sweaty and content, we stopped at the drugstore for lemonade on crushed ice. I loved sucking the sweet citrus into my body, so cold it gave me a headache.

Other weekends we went on outings to Daddy’s advertising accounts downtown, stopping first at the Lower East Side apartment where his mother and father still dwelled, tiny brittle creatures like the spiders that Coyote found spinning cloth when he climbed the topless tree into the world of the ancestors. They were apparently friendly but almost motionless, and spoke to us in cautions and prayers. “You see what I came from,” Daddy would tell us in the
car. “I made it on pure spirit and guts.”

Our favorite client was a kosher delicatessen near their place. Abe Gellis, the owner, a short. stout man who looked like the ringmaster at a circus, would reach into every pocket of his floppy jacket and pants for stacks of flat cardboard which, when dropped in water, turned into colored sponges with ads for his meats. We came home with twenty or thirty of these and played with them for weeks—their magical expansion never losing its amusement value.

In our booth we were served roast beef sandwiches made of the pinkest, softest slices layered in the world’s largest, crispest kaiser rolls thick with poppy seeds, separate plates of fat, crispy french fries, bottles of Dr. Brown’s orange (“Do they make a sandwich here, Ricardo, Jonno, what do you say …?”), while the men smoked and talked business—Daddy’s booming voice a blend of charm and outrage as he serenaded all in earshot with tales of uptown (“The no-good sons of bitches! Abe, are you listening …?”), and made the Gellises millionaires times over with his promotional plans. Then he drove through the City singing Jolson and cursing the lazy good-for-nothings he had just courted.

Soon after my sister Debby was born, Mommy took a job running the New York office of the Fontainebleau Hotel, which was starting up in Miami Beach. The position was offered to her from old Grossinger connections, though it helped that she could say the name in flawless French from her childhood in Paris. She answered the reservation line downtown in an office all day, then from an extension at home up to bedtime. Her representation of the resort became her life’s calling, as she made the booking of rooms into a thespian art, entertaining guests with gossip and intrigue, the sounds of which filled our apartment.

In her office at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street she thrived on the flurry of paperwork and ringing lines, rushing between file cabinets and a patron on “hold.” Her voice commanded a five-person suite. By comparison with the second-rate males demoted from Florida, she was witty and vivacious—in charge, though I realized years later, paid a third of what they were. I watched their baffled looks
as she exchanged insights and ironies or twinkles of the eye with her brassy blonde assistant Helen.

Over the years the Fontainebleau office was my favorite place to visit her, for she was convivial and almost normal there, a different woman, more likely to order me a hamburger from downstairs than to harangue me over some truancy. Yet I recognized the brittleness and instability of this mood and never let down my guard.

Back at home, she reverted to a one-woman totalitarian regime. We were an odd blend of a superstitious shtetl clan addicted to shouting, browbeating, and rampages, and a household from Dickens in which every slight or insult was weighed meticulously, then leveraged back, its ante adjusted for fullest effect, petty honor more important than charitable conduct or even common sense.

There was something in my mother’s nature that kept permanent tally of wrongs done to her. Transgressions and encroachments on her dignity were the most important things in the world—they held the mythic significance of the Ten Commandments and trials of Job. She was the embodiment of tribunal, revenge, and retribution, despite fancy proclamations to the contrary, so we were quarantined from anyone disloyal to her. When I first heard the phrase “iron curtain,” I imagined that it originated with us and was applied to the Soviet Union later.

She and Daddy lived at a breakneck pace, catching their shared cab downtown in the morning, arriving home for dinner exhausted, often conspiring a mile a minute against some “total idiot” or bickering with each other.

Their arguments were endemic, for they bore an unsettlable vendetta between them too. As children we had no notion of the issues but read its prodrome: irreversible throbs of resentment and exploratory salvos cascading into full fusillades. Like brushfires, the irritant might smolder a while, then germinate anon from tense, suppressed voices in their room. Mommy would escalate from hollering to screeching to paroxysmic fits beyond delineation. Daddy would come running out of the room, her chasing after him with a purpose. She threw books, ashtrays, and other objects. If the skirmish spilled into the kitchen, she might pick up dishes, silverware,
even kitchen knives, once actually wounding him with one. Yet, as Jonny and I would joke, it was lucky she didn’t have much of an arm. He would go right to the elevator and disappear, either for hours or days.

The time he was injured he locked himself in the bathroom and wept. She brought iodine and bandages to the door and seemed genuinely distraught at the damage she had caused, though she resumed yelling as soon as he emerged.

I wished we could somehow just be friendly, trust each other, that I could feel safe and happy. But things were too complicated for that. I couldn’t trust my own feelings, let alone those of the others. I didn’t love my brother, so why would any of them love me?

Living in such a milieu was not just piddling harassment by a neurotic scold or hysterical Jewish-American Princess. If she had been shallow or superficial, everything would have been easier. We would have laughed behind her back, humored and ignored her. But she had much bigger plans for us. From her bottomless web she conducted a dirge for the annihilation of happiness forever, like the whole of nature struggling to be born after a thousand years of winter. And no certainty it would.

Episodes like following the wrong lady out of the fish market or missing a school wagon that never came stand out as myths, yarns to be retold and savored years later, because they were hilarious and absurd. If anything, they were comic relief to a macabre regime—fey outcroppings of moods with minor reprisals. The real anguish formed beneath the vaudeville, a sense of gloom and impending disaster, a constant reminder to stop acting bad when we knew we couldn’t.

Relics of an unspeakable crime occupied every nook and cranny, reminding us of sins that could neither be uttered nor expiated. Their bleak profundity and ritual mourning imbued every gesture. They fed the ambient light, the seams between rooms, the dishwater, the taste of Sugar Pops and Frosted Flakes, the sound of “Some Enchanted Evening” in the living room:
“Once you have found her, never let her go”
—another song that meant not only exactly what it said but something it couldn’t say.