Timebends (6 page)

When I first heard—probably not until I left home for college—Jews referred to as “the people of the Book,” I mistook it to mean books in general rather than the Bible, and the description, complimentary as it was, was news to me. Brought up among Jews until the age of twenty, I could recall none but my mother who ever read anything. My friends' apartments on uoth Street had no books on the shelves, only knickknacks—porcelain ladies in eighteenth-century hoop dresses, figurines of horses, the Little Dutch Boy in wooden shoes getting ready to put his finger in the dyke, a bucket hanging over a well, perhaps a bust of Lincoln. Even my mother rarely bought a book, borrowing instead from the public library down the street near Fifth Avenue or, after our move to Brooklyn, for two cents a day from the Womrath Lending Library in the drugstore.

Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness. When I laid an open book face down, my brother would reprimand me; like a person, a book had a spine that could be broken.
The Book of Knowledge
came early into the house, and one page in it for the first time introduced me to the concept of a writer: a full-page illustration of Charles Dickens in profile, with oval vignettes of Mr. Pickwick and David Copperfield and the rest surrounding his head. My mother was already reading to us from
Oliver Twist,
and the notion amazed me that real people able to talk and walk and feel could come out of a person's head, for the fictional and life were merged in one wonderful mirage. I would not have questioned that
somewhere
Oliver did actually live.

Thirty years later, in the early fifties, I would visit the homes of longshoremen in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn while preparing a never-to-be-made film on waterfront racketeering, and the nearly total absence of books in those homes was not only disabling but almost spectrally strange.

Loyal as she wished to be to my father, speaking of him almost always with praise and respect—except when she helplessly lashed out at some clumsiness of his—my mother, I couldn't help knowing, also subverted him. She was a woman haunted by a world she could not reach out to, by books she would not get to read, concerts she would not get to attend, and above all, interesting people she'd
never get to meet. In effect, she had been traded into an arranged marriage within months of graduating
cum laude
from high school. But even such human barter could have its charms: she would laugh warmly as she told how “Grandpa and Grandpa Miller went into our living room and compared their account books. They were in there for hours, and finally they came out and”—how she laughed!—“said I was getting married!” The two clothing manufacturers were making sure that they had comparable assets, just as two landed barons might have done centuries earlier. Then, suddenly, her look would blacken as she clenched her jaws in anger. “Like a cow!” she would mutter, with my father often sitting there listening along with my brother and me, even nodding his head to confirm the story, so accepting was he of the unchanging tradition. Even so, my heart went out to him in his humiliation, however imperturbably he seemed to bear it; somehow it had become my job to distract them from their conflict, already a kind of artful acting.

But there were compensations for her. She could put her sons into the National and drive downtown with them behind the chauffeur to visit the Miltex Coat and Suit Company, where Papa, in shirtsleeves and vest, vastly tall and competent, manifestly in charge, showed us off to the rows of workers sitting at their machines, the clerks and the salespeople, many of whom were his overpaid relatives.

In the mid-twenties all was hope and security in this mammoth place, so dimly lit, with its immense rolls of cloth stacked on racks to the ceiling, and wonderful lumbering iron carts rolling past, which I loved to ride on, and a cavernous freight elevator, and in the front office men with sleeve garters and green visors over their eyes. The gazes of the help upon us were filled with respect and a kind of congratulation for being who we were, the sons of the boss and our clever and pretty mother. Here was the concord, the happiness I seem always to have been trying to press my parents toward—my father in his full power and she content with a mixture of glories, her admiration making him proud and strong, his strength keeping her safe. And besides, there was a world here—his workers and staff—to witness this ennoblement along with my brother's and my role in what became in my mind an orderly and primordial pageant. Such pleasures—not merely the oppressions—of hierarchy would one day be useful to understand. And the worms of paradox, too: even as she received all this goodwill with happy grace and near royal appreciation, I knew how she despised
the meanspirited, money-mad “cloakies,” Jews who cared for nothing but business. If my father escaped such definition by virtue of a certain loftiness she saw in him, he also came pretty close, dangerously so, I thought, since he was so ignorant of what she regarded as culture. It would take decades until I understood that his taste, if more naive, was finer than hers, more personal and authentic; his illiteracy was merciful, keeping him from worrying about what was in or out, stylish or old-fashioned, so that he could react simply and in a wholly human rather than media-washed way to what he saw or heard. A song, a show, a play, had to satisfy his sensuously utilitarian aesthetic no differently than his hats did. Art had to touch him. But of course “culture,” as with most American families, was the wife's affair, the men providing the wherewithal and the naps, and it never dawned on him that his opinion on anything artistic was even worth mentioning, as acute as some of his untutored perceptions were. His illiteracy set me in a conflict with learning for many years, since I so wished to be like him, and long before I knew anything about psychoanalysis I had to tell myself consciously that after all I was not him and was perfectly capable of memorizing some necessary text or passing an examination. To become a reader meant to surpass him, and to claim the status of writer was a bloody triumph; it was also a dangerously close identification with my mother and her secret resentment, if not contempt, for his stubborn incapacity with words.

There was never a lack of reasons to wonder on fate's capriciousness, and one of these was made clear to me in the 1920s when my mother remarked for the fiftieth time how stupid they had been in turning Bill Fox down for a loan back in 1915. It seems I had narrowly missed an entirely different life as the son of a Hollywood mogul, a fate ‘not worse than death, perhaps, but close. Fox, a former wool “sponger,” was having trouble raising capital to set up a movie studio in California and was scouring the garment industry for funds. To hear my father tell it, the reason for his difficulty was not hard to find—spongers were not noted for their honesty, the very nature of their trade practically inviting sharp practices. Woolen cloth had to be preshrunk before it was cut into garments. The manufacturer would therefore send his bolts of cloth to a sponger, who unrolled them over vats of steam. But who was to know how much a seventy-yard roll had really shrunk? Two yards, ten, fifteen? The sponger might report the truth, or then again he
might snip off a few yards and return a short roll to the manufacturer as a bad case of shrinkage. Belief in a sponger's word required a whole lot of faith, and here was one of them asking my father to invest fifty thousand dollars to make movies, and in far-off California, no less. By the time he got to my father, Fox had all but exhausted his garment business contacts and was offering a sizable piece of the company for this last chunk of cash he needed.

My father loved shows, and to actually meet a live actor would have overwhelmed him. He was tempted. But finally his good sense triumphed—he simply could not trust Fox and turned him down. It would have been inconceivable to him that afternoon, as he told Fox the bad news, that in not so many years he would be finding it hard to scratch up the price of a ticket to a Twentieth Century Fox movie. Had he taken the risk, I would have been raised in Los Angeles, never learned what I did in Central Park and the streets of Harlem and Brooklyn, been spared the coming Depression, and arrived no doubt at a different personality. On a trip to Poland many years later, I had a similar realization: had my grandfathers not decided before the turn of the century that there was no future for them in that country, I would not have survived to the age of thirty. Hardly a Jew was left in that part of Poland once the Nazi war machine had swept across its flat and dreary landscape.

But in 1918 and after, the atmosphere in our house denied that even war was the spiritual defeat it is and should appear to be. Of course I am speaking of my own sense of things as they trickled down to my homeland, the floor. I was three when the Great War ended, and if I was unconscious of my mother's worrying about her two brothers—Hymie in the navy, who never got to sea, and the other, Moe, who was gassed in France—I can still feel the aura of cheer and self-congratulation that the Armistice brought into the house. I am sure I heard my mother phoning all her sisters and friends, none of whom was likely to have read the newspapers, to announce the end of the war. She hated the Kaiser in a personal way, more or less the way she hated Mikush, the superintendent of our building, a Pole of depressing hauteur. We had to beg to get him to open a painted-in window, we knew he was breaking into the apartment when we were away in the summer, but without him no life was possible since he was the only human who could handle a tool or break open a trunk whose key had been lost, move the piano, and turn off the gas when one of the stove spigots got jammed in the open position. Unlike the Kaiser, Mikush had never
been defeated, so my mother could hate the Kaiser with the added satisfaction of imagining Mikush in his position, having to chop his firewood in Doom, Holland, exiled there for the rest of his life. The Kaiser's photo in the
Times
weekly rotogravure section was the signal that another year had passed—for some reason, on the anniversary of the Armistice he was inevitably shown chopping wood in Doom, a stolid-looking fellow with a pointy mustache, knickerbockers, high shoes, a short jacket, and the dead-eyed stare of a Doberman.

From the floor, the defeat of Imperial Germany meant Uncle Moe coming to visit with a black suitcase full of German marks in hundred-thousand denominations—totally valueless now, but my mother wanted to hold on to them just in case. He also brought a German helmet wrapped in brown paper and twine with its spear-point sticking out on top. Merely to touch and smell it brought images, such as I had seen in the press, of fields of dead men and frightening explosions. And to think that a living man who was now dead had worn this! The effect on me, quite naturally, was to make me dream of becoming a soldier and, with luck, going to war. I imagined the smell of earth and sweat in the inner leather headband of the helmet. Its rough exterior, rusting now, must surely have been covered by a fall of dirt from an Allied shell exploding. (“Allies”—what rolling waves of warmth and confidence in that word! How deep into our brains the suds washed, right down to floor level. Soon there would be
The Boy Allies,
kids' books ranging us in our short pants against the brutal Boche.) But the helmet was too large and slid down over my face, so I walked around holding it over my head with both hands until it dawned on me that I was being proud to be a German, a horrible idea. The last I saw of the helmet was when I opened a closet years later and it fell off a shelf and struck my shoulder, like the head of a dead man who had come back to reprimand me. It was also, somehow, Moe's head, for he had died by then of tuberculosis contracted in France, exacerbated by the gassing he had endured. But I had always known from my mother's tone of voice whenever she spoke of him that he was doomed to a short life. From France he had sent her Victorian stiff-upper-lip letters, “penned” rather than written, containing “lore” rather than stories; things of “great import” were “noted,” and he had “witnessed scenes not meet to speak of.” Writing in more or less the language one spoke was a sign of poor education and vulgarity. Uplift was the inevitable purpose of writing at all, and propriety the aim of any written style.

This was a concept handed down by the public schools. Even at P.S. 24 on 111th Street, we were at school in order to become ladies and gentlemen; we were not to read Whitman or Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis but Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth—writers who wrote English English. What was wanted was sanctified elegance and finish—why else would you be going to school? We were taught the discipline of the Palmer Method of handwriting, which required shaping each letter according to a pattern of prescribed height and width. As in old China, moral virtue clung to clear and good handwriting, a connection that opened new vistas of guilt, evil, and even civil disorder: one of the sure signs of a criminal disposition was crabbed and illegible writing. Good conduct, called deportment, was part of the curriculum, graded like arithmetic. Mornings began with an inspection of hands and fingernails and the shine of shoes, each pupil turning to face the aisle nearest him (two shared a seat in P.S. 24) as the teacher, most often an Irish spinster wearing a long dark dress and black shoes, with hair knotted in back in a bun, and smelling, if you were lucky, of cherry soap, and if unlucky, of laundry, turned each pair of palms down and slammed a steel-edged ruler across the knuckles of a dirty hand. With two in a seat there was a temptation to whisper, but that could get your head cracked against your neighbor's—the teacher would creep up silently from the rear, and then you'd see what we called stars for a moment or two.

Summoned to the blackboard, you would automatically gather up all your belongings—pen, pen wiper, blotter, notebook, galoshes, sweater—depositing them on the floor as you wrote and carting them back to your seat again. Nothing out of sight was safe, and this accounted for my confusion at my first Chaplin pictures, which so often showed him filching an apple from a fruit stand or a wallet from a pocket. I joined nervously in the laughter, for it was a doubtfully comic situation to me. When I was thirteen we moved to Brooklyn, and in James Madison High School, where my mother had talked them into admitting me a full term before I graduated from grammar school “so he can be with his cousins,” my first sight of kids leaving their stuff behind on their desks when they went to the blackboard was a powerful shock. Our P.S. 24 track team had all their street clothes stolen from lockers while they proudly ran in their shorts in a meet in Central Park. Foolishly roller-skating in the park alone one day at the age of seven or eight, I was ambushed by some Italian kids and would long remember the fist coming up fast to my nose as they held me down; then they ran off with my
skates. When I got home, my mother sighed and shook her head. The black and Puerto Rican kids, most of them first-generation migrants from rural places, were never feared as thieves. They were still shy and overawed by the city and the police, who swung the club first and asked questions later. Roller-skating in the park was prohibited, and if spotted by a strolling cop, you could expect to get knocked down from behind by his flying club, a technique some of them really had fun with.