American Childhood (18 page)

T
HE BOYS WERE CHANGING
. Those froggy little beasts had elongated and transformed into princes and gods. When it happened, I must have been out of the room. Suddenly here they all were, Richie and Rickie and Dan and all, diverse in their varied splendors, each powerful and mysterious, immense, and possessed of an inexplicable knowledge of arcana.

The boys wandered the neighborhoods now, and showed up at girls’ houses, as if by accident. They would let us listen to them talk, and we heard them mention the state legislature, say, or some opinion of Cicero’s, or the Battle of the Marne—and those things abruptly became possible topics in society because those magnificent boys had pronounced their names.

Where had they learned all this, or, more pertinently, why had they remembered it? We girls knew precisely the limits of the possible and the thinkable, we thought, and were permanently astonished to learn that we were wrong. Whose idea of sophistication was it, after all, to pay attention in Latin class? It was the boys’ idea. Everything was. Everything they thought of was bold and original like that. While we were worried about sending valentines, they were worried about sending troops.

Plus their feet were so big. You could look at the boys’ sheer physical volume with uncomprehending astonishment forever. Had the braces on their teeth been restraining their very bones? For look at them. You would never tire of running your wondering eyes over the mystery of their construc
tion, so plain, and the mystery of their bulk, and the mystery of their skin, and even their strange boxy clothes. The boys.

We ran, we fancied, to sweetness, we girls. The boys, as we got to know them, were cynical. They addressed each other out of the corners of their mouths in cryptic staccato phrases, all clever references to that larger world wherein they dwelt and where we longed to go ourselves. If you got to know them, apparently, they would tell you about their teachers at Shady Side Academy—teachers my own father had studied under, but about whom, alas, he could come up with precious little.

We girls chafed, whined, and complained under our parents’ strictures. The boys waged open war on their parents. They cursed their fathers, and disobeyed them outright. (“What can they do? Throw me out?”) Was this not breathtakingly bold? The boys’ pitched battles with their parents were legendary; the punishments they endured melted our hearts.

Each year as we rose through the grades, dancing school met an hour later, until one year it vanished into the darkness, and was replaced by, or transmogrified into, another institution altogether, that of country-club subscription dances.

The engraved invitation came in the mail: The Sewickley Country Club was hosting a subscription dinner dance several weeks thence. Each of several appropriate country clubs, it turned out, gave precisely one such dance a year, at a time that coincided with boarding-school vacations. I knew Sewickley children, having opposed on playing fields their school’s ferocious field hockey team. The old village of Sewickley had come to prominence late in the nineteenth century when some families quit their grandparents’ mansions on Fifth Avenue and moved in a body to that green and pleasant land. They zoned it to a fare-thee-well and furnished it with a country club, a Presbyterian church, and a little expensive school. Now they were asking us to a dinner dance.

We showed up at our own country club in pale spaghetti-strap dresses and silk shoes, to board a yellow bus in the
snow. There we all were: the same boys, the same girls. How did they know? I wondered which of those remote country-club powers, those white-haired sincere men, those golden-haired, long-toothed, ironic women, had met on what firm cloud over western Pennsylvania to apportion and schedule these events among the scattered country clubs, and had pored over what unthinkable list of schoolchildren to discuss which schoolchildren should be asked to these dances they held for what reason. If you were part Jewish, would they find you out, like Hitler? How small a part could they detect? What was at the end of all this novitiate—solemn vows?

We dined that night in faraway Sewickley, at long linen-covered tables marked by place cards. Our shrimp cocktails were already at our places. We were like Beauty in the castle of the Beast: that is, I, at least, never laid eyes on the unknown adult or adults who had presumably invited us, designed and ordered the invitations, secured a room and a band, and devised the menu. There were some adults against the walls, all dressed up, who ignored us and whom we ignored.

My dinner partner was a fragile redhead from Sewickley, a Paulie—from St. Paul’s School—whose hulking twin sisters had several times mown me down on the hockey field. From him I learned that some girls my age voluntarily played golf. Like many of the boys, he was good-natured, polite, somewhat cowed, and delicately handsome. One was not, however, thank God, required to fall in love at a subscription dance, although it had been known to happen.

We ate chicken breast in velvet sauce on ham. We ate wild rice, tomato aspic, and, as a concession to our being in fact children, hot fudge sundaes or green peppermint parfaits.

During dessert the band straggled in and set up by the freezing French doors to the terrace. The band was an unmatched set of bored men in dark suits and red carnations. The only bands that counted in our book were Lester Lanin’s and Eddy Duchin’s. These men, as at all subscription dances, were merely locals: a drum, a bass, a piano, a clarinet. Their boredom, and the possible death of their musical ambitions, and the probable complete disregard of everyone with whom
they had dealt over this engagement, unless they had had the good fortune to run into my mother, had drained all the expression from their faces. Sometimes, though, on a jitterbug or a Charleston, you could pry a wink out of the drummer.

The band struck up, not surprisingly, “Mountain Greenery.” This frenzied sequence of notes had been our cue conditioned since we were ten. We danced.

There were boys here from far away—not only from familiar Fox Chapel and expected Sewickley, but also from Ligonier, that pretty village in the distant mountains where the Mellons lived. There were older boys here, who had already been to deb parties. And there were some very tall boys—some of ours and some of theirs—whose shoulders rose above our heads like those few lone trees which burst through the canopy in a rain forest. Although these big boys’ status was as great as their stature, they rarely smiled or relaxed, but instead looked worriedly around over our head-tops, frowning, earnest, always at the edge of a wince.

“Isn’t he cute?”

In the densely carpeted ladies’ rooms we all hurried. We didn’t meet each other’s eyes in the long mirrors.

“Which?”

“Which what?”

“Which is cute?”

It was always one of the wincing giants who was cute. We ran combs through our hair and pounded back along the labyrinthine club corridors to the dance floor. Yes, very cute.

One blond, sharp-toothed boarding-school boy, a famously witty chess player, was wearing patent-leather pumps. On his feet, that is, where his shoes should be, he was wearing low-slung, dainty, shiny pumps, like ballet practice shoes, with satin bows at the toes—and he carried it off. Thus I learned yet again that more things were possible in the world than I had dreamed. He and a friend had driven a car through the snow to this dance. The friend was a sarcastic boy, narrow-skulled and overbred as a collie, who said
he hung around in the Hill District. The Hill District was Pittsburgh’s cruelest and coolest black ghetto, where more babies died than anywhere else in the United States. Up on the Hill, he went to whorehouses. Was this not bold, evil, original? Our own boys would never think of that.

I had sat near these two at dinner. They had traveled. From their boarding school they had walked, loose, in the towns of Connecticut, and knew them well enough to dismiss them. I danced with each of them. How light the blond boy’s shoulders felt! With what smooth disdain did the blond boy lead me walking beside him four steps before he pulled me in again to him, as easily as if my arm had been the bowline of a boat!

And we were buoyant when we danced, we two, were we not? Had he noticed?

This light-shouldered boy could jitterbug, old style, and would; he was more precious than gold, yea, than much fine gold. We jitterbugged. There was nothing flirtatious about it. It was more an exultant and concentrated collaboration, such as aerialists enjoy—and I hope they enjoy it—when they catch each other twirling in midair. Only the strength in our fingertips kept us alive. If they weakened or slipped, his fingertips or mine, we’d fall spinning backward across the length of the room and out through the glass French doors to the snowy terrace, and if we were any good we’d make sure we fell on the downbeat, snow or no snow. For this was, at last, rock and roll. We danced in front of the band; I wished the music were louder.

The last dance was slow; the lights dimmed. The light-shouldered blond boy moved me over and across the golden dark floor and in and out of his arms. He released me and caught me, slowly, and turned me and spun me, and paused on the odd long note so I had to raise a leg from the hip to keep us afloat, and I held him loosely but surely for the count of four, amazed.

He was bare-handed, as were all the boys at these dances. We retained our white cotton gloves. It was easier now to imagine his warmth, the heel of his naked left hand on my glove. But it still required imagination. The thick cotton
stretched flat across the dip of my palm like a trampoline; it repelled the bulge of his hand and held away his heat.

“Keep your back straight,” my mother had told me years ago. “Don’t let your arm weigh and drag on a boy’s shoulder, no matter how tired you are. Dance on the balls of your feet, no matter how tall you are. Chin up.”

The drummer stretched in the dark and rubbed the back of his neck. He began packing up, retaining, however, his brushes for “Good Night, Ladies,” at whose opening bars we all groaned.

We groaned because we had to part and lacked the words to manage it smoothly. We groaned because we had to ride back through the snow for an hour and a half with our boys on a bus, and we never figured out how to conduct ourselves on this bus. Were we to kiss, or sing camp songs?

“How was it?” my mother asked the next morning. She lowered the Sunday paper she’d been paging through. How was what? I could barely remember. Someone’s father had picked us up at our club and driven us another hour home. I didn’t get in till after two. Now it was Sunday morning. I was dressed up again and looking for a pair of clean white cotton gloves for church. So was Amy. If there was such a pair, I wanted to find it first.

“How was it?” she asked, and then I remembered and began to understand how it was. It was wonderful, that’s how it was. It was absolutely wonderful.

T
HAT MORNING IN CHURCH
after our first subscription dance, we reconvened on the balcony of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church. I sat in the first balcony row, and resisted the impulse to stretch my Charleston-stiff legs on the balcony’s carved walnut rail. The blond boy I’d met at the dance was on my mind, and I intended to spend the church hour recalling his every word and gesture, but I couldn’t concentrate. Beside me sat my friend Linda. Last night at the dance she had been a laughing, dimpled girl with an advanced sense of the absurd. Now in church she was grave, and didn’t acknowledge my remarks.

Near us in the balcony’s first row, and behind us, were the boys—the same boys with whom we had traveled on a bus to and from the Sewickley Country Club dance. Below us spread the main pews, filling with adults. Almost everyone in the church was long familiar to me. But this particular Sunday in church bore home to me with force a new notion: that I did not really know any of these people at all. I thought I did—but, being now a teenager, I thought I knew almost everything. Only the strongest evidence could penetrate this illusion, which distorted everything I saw. I knew I approved almost nothing. That is, I liked, I adored, I longed for, everyone on earth, especially India and Africa, and particularly everyone on the streets of Pittsburgh—all those friendly, democratic, openhearted, sensible people—and at Forbes Field, and in all the office buildings, parks, streetcars, churches, and stores, excepting only the people I knew, none of whom was up to snuff.

The church building, where the old Scotch-Irish families
assembled weekly, was a Romanesque chunk of rough, carved stone and panes of dark slate. Covered in creeper, long since encrusted into its quietly splendid site, it looked like a Scottish rock in the rain.

Everywhere outside and inside the church and parish hall, sharp carved things rose from the many dim tons of stone. There were grainy crossed keys, pelicans, anchors, a phoenix, ivy vines, sheaves of wheat, queer and leering mammal heads like gargoyles, thistles for Scotland, lizards, scrolls, lions, and shells. It looked as if someone had once in Pittsburgh enjoyed a flight or two of fancy. If your bare hand or arm brushed against one of the stone walls carelessly, the stone would draw blood.

My wool coat sat empty behind me; its satin lining felt cool on the backs of my arms. I hated being here. It looked as if the boys did, too. Their mouths were all open, and their eyelids half down. We were all trapped. At home before church, I had been too rushed to fight about it.

I imagined the holy war each boy had fought with his family this morning, and lost, resulting in his sullen and suited presence in church. I thought of Dan there, ruddy-cheeked, and of wild, sweet Jamie beside him, each flinging his silk tie at his hypocrite father after breakfast, and making a desperate stand in some dark dining room lighted upward by snowlight from the lawns outside—struggling foredoomed to raise the stone and walnut weight of this dead society’s dead institutions, battling for liberty, freedom of conscience, and so forth.

The boys, at any rate, slumped. Possibly they were hung over.

While the nave filled we examined, or glared at, the one thing before our eyes: the apse’s enormous gold mosaic of Christ. It loomed over the chancel; every pew in the nave and on the balcony looked up at it. It was hard to imagine what long-ago board of trustees had voted for this Romish-looking mosaic, so glittering, with which we had been familiarizing ourselves in a lonely way since infancy, when our eyes could first focus on distance.

Christ stood barefoot, alone and helpless-looking, his
palms outcurved at his sides. He was wearing his robes. He wasn’t standing on anything, but instead floated loose and upright inside a curved, tiled dome. The balcony’s perspective foreshortened the dome’s curve, so Christ appeared to drift flattened and clumsy, shriveled but glorious. Barefoot as he was, and with the suggestion of sandstone scarps behind him, he looked rural. Below me along the carpeted marble aisles crept the church’s families; the women wore mink and sable stoles. Hushed, they sat and tilted their hatted heads and looked at the rural man. His skies of shattered gold widened over the sanctuary and almost met the square lantern tower, gold-decorated, over the nave.

The mosaic caught the few church lights—lights like tapers in a castle—and spread them dimly, a dusting of gold like pollen, throughout the vast and solemn space. There was nothing you could see well in this rich, Rembrandt darkness—nothing save the minister’s shining face and Christ’s gold vault—and yet there was no corner, no scratchy lily work, you couldn’t see at all.

It was a velvet cord, maroon, with brass fittings, that reserved our ninth-grade balcony section for us. We sat on velvet cushions. Below us, filling the yellow pews with dark furs, were the rest of the families of the church, who seemed to have been planted here in dignity—by a God who could see how hard they worked and how few pleasures they took for themselves—just after the Flood went down. There were Linda’s parents and grandparents and one of her great-grandparents. Always, the same old Pittsburgh families ran this church. The men, for whose forefathers streets all over town were named, served as deacons, trustees, and elders. The women served in many ways, and ran the Christmas bazaar.

I knew these men; they were friends and neighbors. I knew what they lived for, I thought. The men wanted to do the right thing, at work and in the community. They wore narrow, tight neckties. Close-mouthed, they met, in volunteer boardrooms and in club locker rooms, the same few comfortable others they had known since kindergarten. Their wives and children, in those days, lived around them on their visits home. Some men found their families bewildering,
probably; a man might wonder, wakened by reports of the outstanding misdeeds of this son or that son, how everyone had so failed to understand what he expected. Some of these men held their shoulders and knuckles tight; their laughter was high and embarrassed; they seemed to be looking around for the entrance to some other life. Only some of the doctors, it seemed to me, were conspicuously interested and glad. During conversations, they looked at people calmly, even at their friends’ little daughters; their laughter was deep, long, and joyful; they asked questions; and they knew lots of words.

I knew the women better. The women were wise and strong. Even among themselves, they prized gaiety and irony, gaiety and irony come what may. They coped. They sighed, they permitted themselves a remark or two, they lived essentially alone. They reared their children with their own two hands, and did all their own cooking and driving. They had no taste for waste or idleness. They volunteered their considerable energies, wisdom, and ideas at the church or the hospital or the service organization or charity.

Life among these families partook of all the genuine seriousness of life in time. A child’s birth was his sole entrée, just as it is to life itself. His birthright was a regiment of families and a phalanx of institutions which would accompany him, solidly but at a distance, through this vale of tears.

Families whose members have been acquainted with each other for as long as anyone remembers grow not close, but respectful. They accumulate dignity by being seen at church every Sunday for the duration of life, despite their troubles and sorrows. They accumulate dignity at club luncheons, dinners, and dances, by gracefully and persistently, with tidy hair and fitted clothes, occupying their slots.

In this world, some grown women went carefully wild from time to time. They appeared at parties in outlandish clothes, hair sticking out, faces painted in freckles. They shrieked, sang, danced, and parodied anything—that is, anything at all outside the tribe—so that nothing, almost, was sacred. These clowns were the best-loved women, and rightly so, for their own sufferings had taught them what dignity
was worth, and every few years they reminded the others, and made them laugh till they cried.

My parents didn’t go to church. I practically admired them for it. Father would drive by at noon and scoop up Amy and me, saying, “Hop in quick!” so no one would see his weekend khaki pants and loafers.

Now, in unison with the adults in the dimness below, we read responsively, answering the minister. Our voices blended low, so their joined sound rose muffled and roaring, rhythmic, like distant seas, and soaked into the rough stone vaults and plush fittings, and vanished, and rose again:

The minister was a florid, dramatic man who commanded a batch of British vowels, for which I blamed him absolutely, not knowing he came from a Canadian farm. His famous radio ministry attracted letters and even contributions from Alaskan lumberjacks and fishermen. The poor saps. What if one of them, a lumberjack, showed up in Pittsburgh wearing a lumberjack shirt and actually tried to enter the church building? Maybe the ushers were really bouncers.

I had got religion at summer camp, and had prayed nightly there and in my bed at home, to God, asking for a grateful heart, and receiving one insofar as I requested it. Inasmuch as I despised everything and everyone about me, of course, it was taken away, and I was left with the blackened heart I had chosen instead. As the years wore on, the intervals between Julys at camp stretched, and filled with country-club evenings, filled with the slang of us girls, our gossip, and our intricately shifting friendships, filled with the sight of the boys whose names themselves were a litany, and
with the absorbing study of their nonchalance and gruff ease. All of which I professed, from time to time, when things went poorly, to disdain.

Nothing so inevitably blackened my heart as an obligatory Sunday at the Shadyside Presbyterian Church: the sight of orphan-girl Liz’s “Jesus” tricked out in gilt; the minister’s Britishy accent; the putative hypocrisy of my parents, who forced me to go, though they did not; the putative hypocrisy of the expensive men and women who did go. I knew enough of the Bible to damn these people to hell, citing chapter and verse. My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. Every week I had been getting madder; now I was going to plain quit. One of these days, when I figured out how.

After the responsive reading there was a pause, an expectant hush. It was the first Sunday of the month, I remembered, shocked. Today was Communion. I would have to sit through Communion, with its two species, embarrassment and tedium—and I would be late getting out and Father would have to drive around the block a hundred times. I had successfully avoided Communion for years.

From their pews below rose the ushers and elders—everybody’s father and grandfather, from Mellon Bank & Trust et cetera—in tailcoats. They worked the crowd smoothly, as always. When they collected money, I noted, they were especially serene. Collecting money was, after all, what they did during the week; they were used to it. Down each pew an usher thrust a long-handled velvet butterfly net, into the invisible interior of which we each inserted a bare hand to release a crushed, warm dollar bill we’d stored in a white glove’s palm.

Now with dignity the ushers and elders hoisted the round sterling silver trays which bore Communion. A loaded juice tray must have weighed ten pounds. From a cunning array of holes in its top layer hung wee, tapered, lead-crystal glasses. Each held one-half ounce of Welch’s grape juice.

The seated people would pass the grape-juice trays down the pews. After the grape juice came bread: flat silver salvers bore heaps of soft bread cubes, as if for stuffing a turkey.
The elders and ushers spread swiftly and silently over the marble aisles in discreet pairs, some for bread cubes, some for grape juice, communicating by eyebrow only. An unseen organist, behind stone screens, played a muted series of single notes, a restless, breathy strain in a minor key, to kill time.

Soon the ushers reached the balcony where we sat. There our prayers had reached their intensest pitch, so fervent were we in our hopes not to drop the grape-juice tray.

I passed up the Welch’s grape juice, I passed up the cubed bread, and sat back against my coat. Was all this not absurd? I glanced at Linda beside me. Apparently it was not. Her hands lay folded in her lap. Both her father and her uncle were elders.

It was not surprising, really, that I alone in this church knew what the barefoot Christ, if there had been such a person, would think about things—grape juice, tailcoats, British vowels, sable stoles. It was not surprising because it was becoming quite usual. After all, I was the intelligentsia around these parts, single-handedly. The intelligentsium. I knew why these people were in church: to display to each other their clothes. These were sophisticated men and women, such as we children were becoming. In church they made business connections; they saw and were seen. The boys, who, like me, were starting to come out for freedom and truth, must be having fits, now that the charade of Communion was in full swing.

I stole a glance at the boys, then looked at them outright, for I had been wrong. The boys, if mine eyes did not deceive me, were praying. Why? The intelligentsia, of course, described itself these days as “agnostic”—a most useful word. Around me, in seeming earnest, the boys prayed their unthinkable private prayers. To whom? It was wrong to watch, but I watched.

On the balcony’s first row, to my right, big Dan had pressed his ruddy cheeks into his palms. Beside him, Jamie bent over his knees. Over one eye he had jammed a fist; his other eye was crinkled shut. Another boy, blond Robert, lay stretched over his arms, which clasped the balcony rail. His shoulders were tight; the back of his jacket rose and fell
heavily with his breathing. It had been a long time since I’d been to Communion. When had this praying developed?

Dan lowered his hands and leaned back slowly. He opened his eyes, unfocused to the high, empty air before him. Wild Jamie moved his arm; he picked up a fistful of hair from his forehead and held it. His eyes fretted tightly shut; his jaws worked. Robert’s head still lay low on his outstretched sleeves; it moved once from side to side and back again. So they struggled on. I finally looked away.