New Moon (24 page)

After exams Joe drove me to Grossinger’s. I arrived wanting to tell Aunt Bunny all about my new school but, to my surprise, found my brothers alone in their house. Our parents were vacationing in the Caribbean. The living room was a mess—liquor bottles and newspapers strewn on the floor. Michael filled me in: Beulah had gone to see a sick aunt, and Housekeeping had sent over a substitute maid who barely spoke English. “But she knows
what
that
is,” he declared, pointing to the liquor cabinet. He led me on tour: “Empties in every room!” He threw up his arms in theatrical disgust.

When I encountered the lady, she was brandishing a mop and chased me out of the third floor, flinging a bottle at my retreat. It bounced crazily against walls and landed without breaking. This was great stuff, but it got even better! Soon she began throwing ashtrays and clothing down the stairs. I called the head of Housekeeping, but that was Grandpa’s sister, Aunt Rose, a tiny dynamo of spittle who had no use for children and was barely more sober than our guardian. She would scold Michael and me as if on cue whenever we passed her: “You goddamned kids, whatcha doing now? No good I betcha!” We’d purposely steer within view to elicit such a greeting.

This time she barked something unintelligible and hung up.

The three of us plotted. While the maid was at the liquor cabinet, we took a human-sized stuffed monkey, dressed it in Uncle Paul’s suit jacket and tie, and put him to bed in my room on the third floor. We spilled ketchup on his white shirt, knocked over some lamps, and led a string of knotted sheets from the bedpost out the window. Then we taped groans on the tape recorder and slid it under the overhang of the counterpane.

The odd noises engaged her curiosity. She edged her way up the stairs and across the hall, looked in the room, screamed, and went running back down and out the front door. We had gotten rid of her just the way Bugs Bunny would have!

Two days before Christmas our parents returned, and the next evening Michael’s teacher came to talk to Aunt Bunny about his problems in school. All that afternoon, in preparation for the visit, my brothers and I rehearsed
Curley the Talking Caterpillar.
As the two women sipped tea in the living room we appeared suddenly in costume and put on a semblance of the script. In one totally ad-libbed scene Michael ran around in a mustache and black derby, carrying a doctor’s bag, yelling, on respective circuits, “If you think I’m Groucho Marx, I’m not…. If you think I’m Walter Winchell, I’m not…. ”

This latter-day brother and I were connoisseurs of daffiness in
general: leaving cryptic notes for a baffled Milty, hiding surprises in Jack Gallagher’s silverware drawers, doing parodies of fat, tongue-tied Uncle Paul, parading to the dinner table chanting,
“The big baboon by the light of the moon … / And what became of the monk, the monk, the monk …?”
Volatile friends, we were inseparable for days—building snowmen, racing sleds, riding Hotel buses into town to explore shops—but the Monk was unpredictably moody and, when he got furious at me, the worst insult he could think of was to call me by the name with which I had arrived years earlier as an outsider: “Go back where you came me from, Towers.” Yet how clean that was compared to layers of proxy warfare with Jonny!

My father was a Jekyll and Hyde character. In the City he was my gregarious, permissive savior, but at the Hotel he was strict and irascible, always checking to see if we were violating rules. He hated to spot us cutting through the kitchen or serving ourselves at the pantry: “You are
never never
to go in there again! We could lose our insurance!”

I was surprised how many of the staff were terrified of him: from old men who washed floors to directors of departments; even Irv Jaffee, speedskating champion; even huge Milty who would cringe if he were summoned to PG’s office. “Your father wants me, Richie,” he would say. “You suppose this is the end?” I assured him that Paul was a good guy and I would put in a word for him if necessary.

I tried not to notice my father’s threatening side, for on me, generally, shone his protective face and I was contained in his beneficent orbit.

Aunt Bunny told me one day, to my astonishment, that Michael and James were adopted; they came from non-Jewish families in Hartford, Michael was Italian, and James was lots of things, including American Indian. “Your father and I couldn’t have children,” she explained, “so our friend Dr. Krall arranged for us to get two very special boys. Paul didn’t want girls because he didn’t think he could deal with their teenage years, dating and all that. Pretty silly, but that’s your father.”

That I adored my non-blood brothers so much more than my
blood one was an anomaly I took at face value. I didn’t need to know why.

As James got older he joined Michael and me in improvised adventures, some of them quite heedless. The three of us spent one entire morning rolling old automobile tires down the main hill, chasing alongside them—cars and pedestrians beware! It was equally reckless to collect golf balls from the road and woods around the course and then fungo them with a baseball bat into the unseen distance over the parking lot.

For afternoons across the grounds and in underground passageways we played hide-and-seek. The rule was, the mark had to keep moving. It would have been impossible to find a person who dallied in any of the thousands of closets, alleys, or guest rooms.

Inspired by a Baby Huey comic, we set out a lemonade and soda stand, mixing concoctions from kitchen storerooms and the canteen to sell to passing guests. Any fruit in seltzer was a soda. Any fruit mixed with sugar and water was an ade. We offered exotica like watermelon soda and boysenberry ade. Uncle Paul ended that venture quickly, but not before we had made almost twenty bucks.

Then we collected sections of picket fence, truck tires, pipes, and other junk from the various warehouses, garages, and maintenance shops and constructed our own miniature golf course in the backyard, digging tunnels and burying plumbing in them for the tiny ball to rattle through. Our four-holed citadel sat in the landscape for days. We had turned old fences into slotted conduits, elbow joints into underground changes of direction and level, dais decorations into obstacles.

You had to stand and admire it. PG didn’t. He made us tear it down at once, refusing to play even a hole. To him, just about anything we thought up was seditious in principle. On occasions like that he squared with my mother and I understood their primeval marriage. Passing me in the living room one day, he gave me a hard swat on the backside.

“What did I do?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but you must have done something!”

As often as Aunt Bunny and I talked about psychology, our lives,
books we read, and characters at the Hotel, we rarely mentioned Uncle Paul. In fact, one odd aspect of my stepmother was how little she seemed to have to do with my father. They slept in the same bed, but I rarely saw them together in public, and I couldn’t imagine what they found to talk about. She tended to go to the nightclub alone and drink and dance. Once, Michael and I (with James in tow) sneaked over to see what she was up to. There she was, in red dress and jewelry, the center of much male attention, hoofing up a storm to a Latin band. We were sure she was drunk. “You kids go home,” she shouted. “Your mother’s entitled to party without being spied on.”

Grandma Jennie seemed to be running her own hotel. Because there was rancor in the family about it, my brothers were not encouraged to visit her and rarely did. Even Aunt Bunny had little to do with the world at Joy Cottage. It seemed peculiarly to have more to do with my other family.

Every night Grandma would work her way through the dining room, table by table, greeting each group of guests as if they were the dearest of friends. Because she was a celebrity they had seen on bread packages and television, grown men and women were thrown into a tizzy by her mere presence. Sometimes she would summon me to accompany her and be introduced. I would stand at her side trying to look appropriate, as she told them about Horace Mann. Grandma’s capacity for strangers was indefatigable.

My father ignored this hoopla around his mother as if it was happening in a dimension invisible to him, but I could tell he wasn’t happy. One night I heard him say in response to her doting attentions to a particular group, “Mother, they’re crooks; they’ve robbed us blind!”

And she answered, without irony or self-conscious sanctimoniousness, “Then we’ll turn the other cheek.” Pretty much the sort of thing she said to me about my mother and stepfather.

I sat on her bed, correcting diagrams of sentences her tutor had given her, telling her what I knew about prehistory and landscapes on Mars. It was pretentious but guileless. She urged me not to
limit my vision to the Hotel but to move beyond it. “Your father is narrow. He doesn’t realize that our good fortune has come because of the way we’ve treated people and the largeness of our vision. We have been blessed, but we must continue to earn our blessings with good deeds.”

I could tell that she thought of Grossinger’s as a cultural institution more than a business. That gave my role as heir apparent a legitimacy, for I doubted I could conduct commerce like Uncle Paul.

Grandpa Harry was alienated from Grandma too. As the Hotel’s architect and contractor, he had his crew build a separate doorway onto his room so he could come and go without contact. In all my time there I never saw them together. He was usually out on the grounds at dawn and went to bed early. Visited in the late afternoon, he sat hunched before his TV, often watching boxing. Piles of birdseed lay around the stone slabs marking his entrance, bright jujubees in which a confab of sparrows, wrens, pigeons, and blue jays nibbled furiously. For years I thought Grandpa had spread them because he liked birds; it was the main civilizing aspect in my portrait of him. Then a chance remark led a bellhop to inform me that a room-service waiter did the honors and, though Harry G. had bawled him out for all the birdshit, the vested old-timer refused to stop.

Still, I liked Grandpa Harry. He made much of me and gave me fifty-dollar bills, a fortune back then—almost ten times the purchasing power of the same tender today—plus he talked so much like Elmer Fudd that in his company I felt transported inside a comic book.

In Grandma’s part of the house—all of it except that one room—I met the cliques of hangers-on my father stewed about: has-been singers, once-famous agents without clients, “doctors” (at least they were called “doc”), athletes in retirement, authors of religious books, cooks with foreign accents. I remember one-time boxer Barney Ross throwing his great arms around me like a mother and hugging me much too hard while singing a lullaby in Yiddish. Ostensibly he did public relations, but he seemed to reside solely in my grandmother’s house and PZ’s office.

To Grandma these were not freeloaders; they were gentlemen
and ladies under her protection. Stray women with academic pretensions became her tutors, the only ones who actually lived in her house; the others stayed at the Hotel—for a weekend, a week, or months, depending on their situations. Collectively they made up Grandma’s salon, complete with two snapping Pekinese dogs and a mynah bird that shouted, “Ship ahoy!” and let out wolf whistles in the middle of parties.

Because Grandma invited so many diplomats, clergy, entertainers, and politicians to stay gratis, there were frequent cocktail parties at her house. I was usually the only child, once at a gathering for an ambassador from Israel, another time for Cardinal Spellman, then for the Lord Mayor of Dublin whose autograph I got for Bridey, along with a promise to reunify Ireland for her.

Aunt Bunny didn’t object to my introducing Michael to this scene. “Your grandmother’s quite the empress,” she said, “but she never accepted us the way she did your mother. You might as well be our Lewis and Clark.”

Soon Michael and I were making regular forays to Joy Cottage, goofing off at Grandma’s parties while collecting unexpected gifts and expressions of affection. The Monk would characterize these missions as “a quick twenty,” which is often what we got. Grandma was delighted by visits of the two of us, though it was strange that
I
should be my brother’s chaperone given that he lived so close to her.

I understood even then that the world at Joy Cottage was a mirage, Grandma’s admirers the leftovers of a previous generation, my mother’s era, which is why I was automatically embraced and granted stature there. Grandma’s graciousness and generosity, even if self-serving, were appealing. She upheld something I knew to be true—no matter how successful Grossinger’s was, the world was filled with sorrow and poverty, and that was far more important. She told me that she made certain that a portion of Hotel profits went to local orphanages—the car taking me home routinely stopped at one of them in New Jersey, bringing surplus food from the kitchen.

In New York I carried around coins for cups of beggars and cigar boxes of amputees on crate stools selling shoelaces. I even took up
a collection at my family’s various offices for the amputee outside Carnegie Hall on 57th Street and brought a wad of bills and fistful of coins to where he lay among overcoats. As he looked up in astonishment, I froze and fled. He was muttering gratitudes and accolades, but I was running to the corner, then racing across the street at the first break in traffic. Something about this was terrible. He shouldn’t be thanking me. I shouldn’t be fleeing him. Yet I continued to feel ungrateful and insincere.

“God bless you,” shouted the blind man on Broadway as my money clanked in a battered tin cup he was shaking. I felt the same flush of confusion, the same urgency to get out of earshot. It was like when I rescued insects from puddles but didn’t wait to see them dry themselves and regain flight. I couldn’t bear the intimacy of a tramp’s gratitude.

Yet I never understood why my mother and Bob as well as Uncle Paul opposed me so adamantly in this charity. For my mother, giving away money apparently showed infidelity to the family because these people were strangers. “You don’t treat us half as well,” she complained, “as you do bums on the street.”