Timebends (21 page)

Our furnace also meant a lot to me. It was mysterious. We were never sure of precisely how to bank it to keep it from going out overnight, so I deeply loved the fire when blue flames played evenly over the whole bed of black coal rather than licking at one corner and leaving whole areas of it dead and ashy, a condition you knew was going to spread and spread until the fire went out and you were left with all that perfectly good coal, which had to be rescued from the ashes piece by piece.

I loved to see the coal truck backing up to the house and the driver setting the chute through the cellar window and then tilting the truck body so that the coal slid into the bin with a satisfying and even warming and tasty whoosh. With a full bin we could keep warm for a long time.

It was thrilling to go down to the cellar at about four in the morning and, opening the furnace door, find that it had not gone dead in there, that this time I had mastered the mystery of banking the fire for the night. Then, walking the block and a half to my job at the bakery with my woolen skating socks pulled up over my mackinaw sleeves, I would feel that the family was secure and safe.

The baker was a friendly but worried overweight man who breathed hard. From a list scrawled with a stubby pencil whose point he was always having to sharpen because he leaned on it too hard, he inscribed addresses on each brown paper bag he had packed with rolls, bagels, and rye breads in various combinations to suit each customer. I curled the bags shut and carefully stowed them in the immense wire basket hanging over the front wheel from the heavy delivery bike's handlebars. In spring or fall it was glorious riding down the silent empty streets past the sleeping houses; you could almost hear the people breathing in their beds. Despite my newly explosive sexuality, I did not yet imagine them making love. I simply did not think of it. Stopping, I would carefully lean the bike against a lamppost, with a flashlight find the right bag for that house, and gently lay it on the back porch near the kitchen door. When it rained I would find some sheltered place for the bags; a few of my customers set out lidded wooden boxes.

On winter mornings the temperature was sometimes around zero at that early hour, and cats would follow me in troops, desperate for the heat of my body, rubbing urgently against my trouser legs and howling imperatively up at me, sending chills up my back with their accusations.

There were mornings when Ocean Parkway, six lanes wide, was entirely covered with ice as unblemished as a frozen country pond, and occasionally there would be a taxi playing on the otherwise deserted road, jamming on the brakes to make the car spin happily over the glaze. At about half past four one such morning, I saw two cabs waltzing around like this trying to come as close to each other as they could without crashing. Sometimes it was nearly impossible to keep my balance on the ice, and I would have to walk the bike for the entire route. One time it toppled over and all the bags spilled out of the basket and opened, shooting naked bagels skidding like hockey pucks over immense distances into the darkness, rolls and rye breads fanning out over the sidewalk and into the road. I had to find them with my flashlight and then try somehow to match the bags' swellings with the right number of bagels, rolls, and breads. By the time I got back to the bakery the phone was already ringing, with people demanding to know what they were supposed to do with four rolls and two bagels when they always got three of each. The outrage in their voices leaped out of the receiver and I feared for my job, but the baker forgave me.

As it had been in childhood, my bike was my solace, my feminine, my steed of escape carrying me forever toward some corner around which would suddenly appear the magic of myself at last, mere ectoplasm no more. One day I found myself straddling the bike and watching a big round-robin handball game against the wall of Mr. Dozick's drugstore. Four boys were playing doubles, and a dozen others were standing around cheering or offering screams of advice or quietly conspiring to lay somebody's sister or trying to figure out how to steal penny candy from Mr. Rubin's store or, failing that, how to go on a militarily disciplined Boy Scout camping trip up to Newburgh. I sat on the bike's saddle, absorbed in the game and all the conversations at the same time, while beneath this level of murmuring excitement ran the ever present anxiety about my and my family's future.

By the fall of 1932 it was no longer possible in our house to disguise our fears. Producing even the fifty-dollar-a-month mortgage payment was becoming a strain, and my brother had had to drop out of NYU to assist my father in another of his soon-to-fail
coat businesses. There was an aching absence in the house of any ruling idea or leadership, my father by now having fallen into the habit of endlessly napping in his time at home or occasionally looking at me and asking, “What do you think you're going to do?” With my life, that is. What I would dearly have loved to do was to sing on the radio and become a star like Crosby and make millions. In fact, by the time I graduated from high school, I already had an agent of sorts, a squat, cigar-smoking neighborhood character named Harry Rosenthal, who peddled songs to publishers and sometimes got singers jobs in clubs.

I had a high, steady tenor voice, “slightly Irish” in Rosenthal's judgment and not bad for ballads, especially Irving Berlin's stuff. But these were songs I thought made me sound like Eddie Cantor, who sang part-time, in my opinion. In the months to come Rosenthal would take me into Manhattan on the subway, to the Brill Building on Broadway near Fiftieth Street, the heart of Tin Pan Alley, to get me auditioned for singing jobs. On each floor there were tiny cubicles with upright pianos where a songwriter could play his new song for a publisher, and the sounds intermixed through the skimpy partitions so that in any one cubicle you heard everything going on everywhere on the floor. In the midst of this pandemonium I tried to sing some tender ballad by my favorite, Lorenz Hart, before a harried, droopy-eyed man to whom I was not even introduced, so lowly was my position in this world. I could hardly hear my own voice, and I was scared and sang badly and in the middle of the number wondered what I was doing there. No, this did not feel like me, but Rosenthal nevertheless managed to arrange a fifteen-minute radio show of my own on a Brooklyn station—without pay, of course. A blind pianist was provided, an aging man whose strangling emphysema was probably being broadcast along with my singing, and whose arthritic fingers could strike chords but few individual notes, so cemented were his joints. Covered with cigar ashes, his half-dozen hairs wetted down for the occasion and combed laterally across the top of his head, he seemed moved by my singing, and after our second program—which turned out to be our last—he advised me to bill myself as “The Young Al Jolson,” which I thought might be reaching a bit, though not outrageously so.

But I was already at the end of my singing career. At sixteen, for the first time in my life, I found my brain translating the song lyrics into reality, and they embarrassed me when I realized with some amazement that almost every one of them implied the attempt of
a man to make love to a woman. Here I had been innocently throwing my heart into these sung poems without the remotest idea of their having any meaning at all—they were simply sweet sounds to carry my voice and might as well have been in another language—when I was really singing to a girl, no less, and saying, “If I had a motion picture of you-oo …” It was simply intolerable and closed my throat forever, at least as an aspiring professional, and by the time I could make use of the ideas behind those lyrics I had all but lost my voice.

Like most abrupt turnings in the path of life, my introduction to Marx that day outside Dozick's drugstore came out of an absurdly unexpected moment, and it has frozen in my memory to the stillness of a painting. The brick wall of the store was being pounded by the ball, the bane of that mild, unoffending man's existence, for not only was his large store window occasionally hit, but he also had to give out free glasses of ice water from his fountain. Dozick was tiny, with thick eyeglasses and a piping voice, and was too kind to refuse thirsty boys. Finally, in desperation, he had his soda fountain removed altogether, and when that failed he put up a big six-by-ten-foot metal sign advertising bottled Moxie, the popular soft drink. The sign stuck out of the wall several inches and if struck would deflect the ball, ruining a shot, but we quickly learned to play around it quite expertly as though it weren't there at all. Of course when a ball did hit it, the sign resonated, bringing Dozick out of his door on the run to plead with us to stop, simply stop hitting the sign for God's sake, and we always apologized and tried to play more accurately. On top of all that he had to sew up our wounds, complaining right through some fairly intricate emergency operation that he shouldn't be doing it. “I am not qualified!” he would cry out when some bloodied boy staggered in from the street, as my brother once did after chasing a ball and putting his head through the side window of a passing Ford, nearly severing his left ear. Almost twenty years later Dozick would write me a note of appreciation for
Death of a Salesman,
doubting that I would remember his name, as though it were not engraved an inch deep in my brain, especially after watching him sew up Kermit's ear as he lay flat on Dozick's desk in the back of the store. (Right next door was another tiny Jewish man, Mr. Fuchs, who ran a minuscule tailor shop. For a dollar he would let out your trouser bottoms and insert a gore that made the cuffs as wide as your shoes; a lot of sewing went on in that block.)

On this particular day there were no accidents, and sunlight shone over the street as I straddled my bike watching the game while an older boy, whose name has long since left me, stood beside me explaining that although it might not be evident to the naked eye, there were really two classes of people in society, the workers and the employers. And that all over the world, including Brooklyn, of course, a revolution that would transform every country was inexorably building up steam. Things would then be produced for use rather than for someone's personal profit, so there would be much more for everyone to share, and justice would reign everywhere. No image remains of his face, only the certainty that he was already in college. Why had he picked me for this revelation? What clue had I given him that I was fertile ground for his amazing ideas? For I understood him instantly, and I remember giving up my turn to get into the game and saying to him, “Everything is upside down!”—meaning that in my family workers had always been a nuisance; necessary though they might be, they were always getting in the way of businessmen trying to make and sell things. Life's structure was so fixed that it was not only Grandpa Barnett, a Republican, who was full of indignation at this Roosevelt even presuming to contest President Hoover's right to another term—I felt the same way. The truth, I suppose, was that we were really royalists to whom authority had an aura that was not quite of this world.

It would be a long time before I understood anything of the spin my soul had been given by this anonymous college student. For me, as for millions of young people then and since, the concept of a classless society had a disarming sweetness that called forth the generosity of youth. The
true
condition of man, it seemed, was the complete opposite of the competitive system I had assumed was normal, with all its mutual hatreds and conniving. Life could be a comradely embrace, people helping one another rather than looking for ways to trip each other up. This day's overturning of all I knew of the world revolutionized not only my ideas but also my most important relationship at the time, the one with my father. For deep down in the comradely world of the Marxist promise is parricide. For those who are psychically ready for that age-old adventure, the sublimation of violence that Marxism offers is nearly euphoric in its effects; while extolling the rational, it blows away the restraints on the Oedipal furies, clothing their violence
with a humane ideal. Its impact brings to mind Jesus' direction to his disciples to turn away even from their parents in order to follow him, for it really is impossible to serve two masters, and in his words too there is a shadow of hidden parricide.

I had never raised my voice against my father, nor did he against me, then or ever. As I knew perfectly well, it was not he who angered me, only his failure to cope with his fortune's collapse. Thus I had two fathers, the real one and the metaphoric, and the latter I resented because he did not know how to win out over the general collapse. Along with a desire to help, I was filling with pity for him as first the chauffeur was let go and then the seven-passenger National went and the summer bungalow was discarded—as the waiting began for the past to return and the unreality of the present wound itself around us all like some dusty vine that had taken root in the living room carpet and could not be kept down for more than a day before it grew again. Never complaining or even talking about his business problems, my father simply went more deeply silent, and his naps grew longer, and his mouth seemed to dry up. I could not avoid awareness of my mother's anger at this waning of his powers; when a system fails, people will seek out each other's weaknesses to account for their troubles, just as ancient kings slew the messenger who brought evil news. It was my father who was our link to the outside world, and his news was bad every night. I must have adopted my mother's early attitudes toward his failure, her impatience at the beginning of the calamity and her alarm as it got worse, and finally a certain sneering contempt for him that filtered through her voice.

At the same time she was valiantly pitching in to save us all, cutting down on every expenditure and intelligently budgeting the household, which up to then had always been run by sheer chance. And finally, when her mother died and there was nothing left to keep us in Harlem, the move to Brooklyn, initially to an ample half of a two-family house with a broad closed-in porch and airy rooms, and then another step down, to the little six-room house on East Third Street that cost five thousand dollars and was bought with an enormous mortgage besides. There could hardly have been a cheaper way to live, but by 1932 she was having to charm the man in the bank on Kings Highway to extend one month's mortgage payment into the next. By the early thirties the last of her disposable pieces of jewelry had been pawned or sold, all but a diamond brooch of her mother's and a few wedding presents she refused to part with, as though to shed them would
have extinguished her last hopes, which, like the seeds for next year's crop, must not be eaten.