New Moon (53 page)

She rallied at the prospect and formalized it the next day by promising to write “your Aunt Bunny a letter at once, thanking her and accepting her invitation.”

But then one afternoon, walking back from class, I saw people running with radios. President Kennedy had been shot, maybe killed….

I think now of Phil Kaufman’s movie
The Wanderers,
Richie the gang-leader at the end of his reign, aimlessly scouting Bronx streets, looking for a world that no longer existed, stopping in a crowd to gaze at a bank of TV sets in a store window—news clips of Dallas.

And, on the soundtrack, words written by a young black soul singer still working at his father’s luncheonette:
“Oh I won’t be afraid; / no I won’t be afraid…. ”

In the City in which I
didn’t
grow up—an esoteric moment, peeking from behind curtains into the obscurity of a new era….

Of Amherst itself that day I recall nothing.

On the mail table the next afternoon was Lindy’s letter:

I took a bus from Amherst to Grand Central Station and lugged my suitcase onto the uptown subway. Its soot had a distinctive railroad grime, the streaming throngs familiar too, anciently so. I could no longer pretend the char and sopor had nothing to do with me. I had become another of those adult travellers I had stared at as a child without comprehension. Their trance was the base mood of existence,
Molloy
and
Malone
in action, and it subsumed me as much as it did mass commuters returning to their apartments from a day at school or work. But I knew how to stand anonymously in a car packed with strangers, stabilizing shifts of gravity, how to make my way home without thinking. I wasn’t maudlin or tragic, just weary, a sense of being lost in a strange world, repining for more innocent times but not wanting to find out what was inside my mood. I was pleased just to be surviving, all the way to Central Park West.

My father had surprised and disappointed me by declaring, at the last minute, that I should spend this vacation with my mother, not out of empathy for her but because his house was allocated to other guests, my room included. My Thanksgiving had gotten downgraded in phases from a chauffeured trip to Grossinger’s with Lindy to a subway return to my natal household. I grumbled, then pleaded, but the deed was done. I imagined too that, after the summer’s dustups, I was not quite a welcome-home prodigal son.

I did have one small concession to look forward to. Aunt Bunny had promised to take me and my friend Paul to dinner on her way up to the mountains from the City.

Even in the short time I had been away, the Towers family had changed dramatically. After years of struggle, Robert Towers Advertising had found its metier. There were more potential clients than Bob could handle, and he plugged a host of new accounts, from local restaurants and clubs to hotels in Vermont and New Hampshire. Upgrades were everywhere: toasters, radios, lamps, drapes, cutlery. The living-room furniture had been re-covered and fitted with
plastic, making it uninviting to sit on. Bridey’s role had changed from nurse to housekeeper, as she worked daytimes through dinner, then took the subway home.

Jon was the big story. It seemed that, almost from the day I left, he had turned into a delinquent. The first sign was coming home late, then terrorizing his parents with tales of hopping onto the subway tracks and waiting until the train was in sight before climbing off. He was no longer doing well at Horace Mann—on probation for bizarre incidents like shooting at teachers with a water gun and throwing a rock through the auditorium window. He had been caught staging fights behind the gym. His compulsions, self-dares, and battles with ghosts had been raised to a fateful level, but no one seemed to seem to recognize the connection between a hand on a light bulb and subway chicken—their common theme of repetitive thoughts engendering self-destructive acts. Alone with my stepfather briefly in the kitchen, I encouraged him to find Jon a therapist.

“I should inform you,” he replied, “that your mother refuses to hear of it.”

In her Medusa stare I froze. All the strength and resilience I had gathered during the summer and at Amherst seeped out of me. She told me I didn’t look well, that I had lost weight. This was her oldest portent as well as her fallback position at transitional moments like these. It felt like a punch to the gut—sapping my energy and giving me the chills. She had had my number, always.

She berated me for my grades, for time wasted goofing off at Grossinger’s, for the way I was dressed. She didn’t want to hear about new friends at Phi Psi. “They must not be much of an influence from your performance at school.” She rattled on about such matters willy-nilly until her harangue swerved into a litany of offenses I had committed against my brother. Jon’s change of character she pinned entirely on me—after all, he and I had become companions toward the end of my family residence and he had adopted
my
tarot cards,
my
magic talk,
my
poets. She accused me of corrupting him out of spite and rivalry and to get my revenge on her. Then she turned abruptly and marched into her room. No warmth or hug, not even hello—that would have been seen as compliance or capitulation.

The speech felt thoroughly rehearsed; I could tell that she had been long nursing this rhetoric, some of it probably since the day I left. It kept her own panic at bay.

At one point I inserted a tentative mention of psychoanalysis. With a fed-up look she replied, “One crazy kid is enough,” as though the logic of that were obvious.

Omens and traces were everywhere. Bridey glared for no particular reason. Bob and Jonny closed doors behind us; they didn’t want to be caught fraternizing with me. Debby would have nothing to do with me. Taciturn and unapproachable, she gave me a look that said, “We all know how terrible you are and, now that I’ve had time to think about it, I am not going to be taken in by you the way I was.” This had been my mother’s—and the household—story since before she was born.

In our room I regaled Jon about Amherst life: Tripp and Beckett, Phi Psi. He listened attentively; he was a more sober, taciturn kid, not interested in sports or grades anymore; he wanted wizardry and initiation. He had been going to Harlem clubs, listening to blues and gospel; his favorite singer was Sam Cooke, his favorite song, “Chain Gang.”

The tarot was hardly my doing. Times they were a-changing: he and his friends carried around Waite decks and were more superstitiously into the occult than Chuck and I had ever been. They expected the sky to break open any minute, different scenery to bust through. I was amazed at how adeptly he had taken my same journey and yet gone elsewhere.

He asked for reprisals of Chuck’s now legendary acts, particularly his destruction of dollar bills. He had heard of Bob Dylan but not yet encountered his actual music. Then he asked me to tell his current fortune, so I set down Waite’s Celtic Cross: plenty of wands and pentacles, the Moon and Hanged Man in prominent positions. Afterwards I put on my record of Dylan singing, “And A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Bridey peeked in from the kitchen, clearly offended. “Who is that singer?”

I told her, but she had never heard of him.

“Is he an old man?”

I said I didn’t think so. “He’s a songwriter. That’s probably him on the cover with the girl.”

“He has a terrible voice. He should get someone else to sing his songs.” And she returned to the kitchen, mimicking the lines in a lilting melody:
“Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son…. ”
as if it were from
Finian’s Rainbow.
“Hard Rain” is a long ballad, so she returned many times to check it out with the same baffled look.

The next morning I called my friend Paul at his parents’, then Aunt Bunny at the Plaza to confirm our three-way date—it was on. All day, however, a persistent snow fell. By late afternoon a near-blizzard danced helter-skelter down streets and avenues, bringing early dusk, Central Park blanketed in oxide. My stepmother called from a gas station; she was already across the George Washington Bridge on her way home. I was unable to reach Paul before he left for the subway, so I sat by the window watching the last vestiges of the Park vanish in twilight as street lights popped on.

My stepfather was the first to return from work, and he was excited to remember that I was visiting. When he heard my predicament, he extended an invitation. “What’s wrong with our having your cohort to dinner here? I’d like to meet some Amherst students, especially a Jewish kid from my own turf. Let your brother experience the Ivy League before he runs himself right out of competition.”

A half hour later the doorbell rang, and there was Paul, poking his way into a setting about which he had heard so much. He betrayed a clinical curiosity, as he shook hands with Bob and Jonny. Bridey greeted him from afar.

Worlds were colliding with misleading ease.

I quickly apprised Paul of the change in plans. He said, “Fine. We’ll do this instead.” Then he whispered, “I actually
want
to be your guest here tonight. I promise to take thorough notes.”

We sat in the living room exchanging anecdotes. Paul’s tales of his aunts and uncles set Bob rocking with laughter: “I know the guy exactly,” my stepfather rejoined. “No matter what you say, he’s the expert, he has it all.”

“Right,” Paul continued. “And every day he’s calling the patent office because he’s got a new invention, gonna change the world.”

They moved on to the
schnorrer,
the distant cousin who comes over every other night uninvited for dessert, and to make his suddenly pressing long-distance calls: “Just one more, please,” and then, “Oh, I forgot, I have another, but this one is
really
the last.”

Then Bob supplied his own cast of Lower East Side characters rife with what he called
schmegegge.
After that the topic shifted to Marxism and trade unions. I expressed surprise at hearing him in such lockstep with Paul’s radical politics.

“Richard,” my stepfather said, “you’re talking to an old labor leader, a supporter of the oppressed. I love anyone who rebels, who attacks the establishment. I’m an Allen Ginsberg fan. Now I’m a Bob Dylan fan. I’m an original Catskills rabble-rouser.”

When my mother arrived she was flustered, first by my presence—had she forgotten I was there?—then by the unexpected guest. She refused to look at Paul, let alone say hello. Instead she put her evilest eye on me as she continued into the kitchen where she greeted Bridey with gratuitously elaborate overtures. From there she hurried into the bedroom, removing herself from our company until making a late reappearance at the meal so that she had to be served one course behind.

I knew from instinct that she was on the verge of either a panic attack or a rage; I had seen that bi-fold mask many times, harbinger of some of our worst pogroms.

Paul was entertaining the family with accounts of Amherst and Phi Psi and, after being introduced to my mother, a greeting she acknowledged with a terse nod, not meeting his eyes, he continued his spiel. She cut him off at once and asked me why I was still here.

“Not at the meal,” Bob said. “Have your heart-to-heart later.”

“Would you rather I weren’t here so you could all talk behind my back?”

I felt apprehension but also a twinge of pleasure. I was watching our drama at last through an outsider’s eyes, playing the most famous scene in my life, one that had been repeated with variants back to the dawn of time: I knew Hamlet’s role, I knew the King’s lines, I knew the Queen’s responses, I knew the maid’s foil. I had played every version and motif of this tragedy or farce hundreds of times.
Which one would we enact tonight?

“We’re not talking about you, Martha. Paul was telling us about the Lower East Side—where I just happened to grow up. And Amherst—where he and Richard presently go to school.”

It seemed that right then everything would explode, but we proceeded without incident from that soliloquy to dessert. There was no more conversation; it had been effectively doused.

It was time for Bob to drive Bridey back to the Bronx. In a burst of desperately sanguine enthusiasm, he announced that he would pick up ice cream on the way home. “What do you folks want?

“Chocolate,” Debby said at once.

Bob responded with a line Paul never forgot, was still quoting twenty years later: “Chocolate? What’s wrong with vanilla?”

“Now that’s contrariness,” he chuckled back at school. “He asked the kid what she wanted and she told him.” For the rest of his time at Phi Psi Paul would smile at pertinent moments and insert, “Chocolate? What’s wrong with vanilla?”

My mother then demanded that Richard’s friend leave.

“He can’t have dessert with us, Martha? And you might dignify him with a name.”

“He wasn’t even supposed to be here. He was going out with Auntie Bunny.”

I couldn’t check my own surge of anger before I fell into exactly the snare she had slyly baited. “You can say her name without mocking it!”

I had lit the simmering fuse. My mother’s voice shot up several octaves, and she was breathing heavily. She began screaming at me for incidents going all the way back to childhood when—she proclaimed—I chose the Grossinger’s over her. Anyone could see I was a troublemaker—look at what I had done to my poor brother; look at the kind of vagabonds I brought home, the so-called friends I had now. She yelled at Bob, Jonny, and Debby, even as they sat there staring dumbly. She exhorted them to come to her support. But no one spoke. Medusa had paralyzed us.

“Go, all of you! Just get out of here!” When Bridey, who was virtually her temple maiden, stuck her head in from the kitchen,
my mother told her to leave too. She was planning to depart for the Bronx anyway, just not at that exact moment, so she had to run down the hall to retrieve her coat and purse.

The six of us stood in the foyer with expressions ranging from Debby’s icy stare to Bob’s grimly pursed lips. As we awaited the elevator my mother reappeared at the door and began shouting again. “You ingrates. You tramps. Go. Go. I don’t ever want to see any of you again!”