Just Kids From the Bronx (22 page)

After four or five years we moved to what I thought was the Taj Mahal—a two-family house in Riverdale on Vinmont Road. It wasn’t large, but at the foot of Vinmont was the school with its baseball field, and that was like Disneyland. It was wonderful. And coming from a virtual tenement to a house, albeit a two-family one, I couldn’t imagine that it could get better. Especially with the ball field so nearby.

But it did get better. We then moved to a postwar modern fancy apartment building with a doorman not a half mile from where the other house was, on the other side of the school to which the baseball field belonged. So I wasn’t right down the hill from the baseball field but I was essentially right next to it, and in a beautiful apartment. And
that
was just wonderful.

We could also go everywhere on our bikes at any time of day or night to play ball. It didn’t matter. Midnight on a Saturday or eight a.m. One day, in this very beautiful fancy apartment, my parents came to my brother and me and said, “Great news. We’re moving again, to an even better place.” And my first question was, “How far is it from the baseball field?” Each time we moved up it was because my father got more successful in his business. He had a radio network and made a lot of money. Then, in the late 1940s, it was said that radio with pictures was better. So he went into the television business. His company produced some of the truly great shows of the 1950s.
Private Secretary. Ramar of the Jungle. Lassie.

His fortunes were definitely up when we moved into a house that was gigantic. Twenty or thirty rooms, four stories, a swimming pool, and acres of land. It was on Independence Avenue between 250th and 252nd Streets. Magnificent. Toscanini’s house was right down the street. It happened to be not quite as nice as our house.

When we had moved to our first house there was a cook-maid. When we got to this mansion, there were a few maids and a separate cook. And from this new house, most importantly, I could still get to the baseball field. It was magical. Baseball in the fifties was a religion. It was
the
religion. It’s what we did. The Bronx Bombers, the New York Yankees. At that time I also transferred from P.S. 81 to Fieldston, a private school that was also in Riverdale.

And as we got older my mother in essence said, “Riverdale is paradise.” It was such an amazing time because my mother, who was a highly educated and cultured woman, insisted that we have the advantages of what was available in Manhattan as well as having the freedom and relaxation of Riverdale. So every Saturday from my eighth to my thirteenth year, except in the summer, we went to Manhattan and, if the time was right, went to the Young People’s Concerts or a museum, had dinner, and then went to a show. Every Saturday. Every one. When we got to spring baseball season, there was a little tension, so it wasn’t every Saturday.

I was recently telling somebody a story about what a Saturday was like during the baseball season. There was a baseball field with no organized games. We got on our bikes and went there and went home at six or seven, having gotten there at eight or eight-thirty in the morning. We were there all day. The entire day. I can picture exactly where my mother was standing one Saturday when she said, “What’d you have for lunch today?” “
Lunch
?” So the mothers got together and said that they were going to make sandwiches for us. They did, but we never ate them. They sent us with a big picnic basket and the reason we never got into any trouble was that each of these ten or twenty mothers made the sandwiches for a different Saturday. So only about once a year did that mother’s sandwiches not get eaten.

But we did buy ice cream from Sam, the Good Humor man. Big thing was when Sam decided to stock soda instead of just ice cream. He was an entrepreneur. We also used our bikes to go to other places. One of the first Carvels was on the Riverdale–Yonkers border. Two for one on the opening Saturday. What we did—and only kids can do this—we went up, bought our two ice creams, finished them, got back in line, and ordered two more. Two for one.

Then the wheels fell off. When I was thirteen, my father went totally bankrupt. So we were evicted from our mansion. We then moved to Broadway, just north of the subway, where we were right across the street from Van Cortlandt Park. But the appeal of the park wasn’t as strong. We were also getting older and baseball wasn’t as important to us.

When my father went bankrupt that last time it was horrible. He was sixty or sixty-one and quite a bit older than my mother. He never really did anything more. Thinking about my father, probably during his lifetime before us he had seen fortunes come and go. Some people would’ve said,
I’m going to store it away for another day
. He said,
I guess I’m going to enjoy it while I have it
. When he lost money he was usually able to make it again, so maybe he wasn’t afraid of losing it. That might’ve been part of his thinking. When you’re a kid it is what it is and it’s not until much later that you try to reconstruct those things.

My mother, however, went from being a philanthropist, head of the women voters, a real activist, to having to work. She then became a program director or fund-raiser or something like that for the National Council of Jewish Women. It was really rough for us all. I reacted a lot to all these changes. These were formative years. Age thirteen from the richest kid on the block to the poorest. Kids are merciless. I wasn’t invited to parties. Kids made fun of me. Stuff like that. I felt ostracized. Father loses his money, friends are difficult, I say “piss off” to them. I had my own view of the rules. That’s a nice way to say it.

I had the stability of the family but had to deal with the vagaries of fortune, good and bad. I remember taking a test in biology. There were one hundred questions. I got them all right.
They’re going to think I’m a nerd.
There were the kids who were the brains and the nerds. And then there were the cool kids. It was a coed school. Puberty. I changed twenty of the answers to the wrong ones so that I wouldn’t be considered a nerd. I went home and I said to my mother, who by this time was well on her way to becoming a serious alcoholic because of my father and our circumstances, I said to her, “I have to get out of this school. I’m at a school where I’m afraid to learn and afraid of being picked on as the nerdy kid.” I went to the school and told them the same thing. Their response?
Whoopee! Are we excited. Get the hell out of here!
They were not unhappy to see me go.

To my mother’s credit she found an educational consultant. He said, “You should probably go to boarding school.”
Sign me up!
However, this consultant happened to be the dean of boys at Collegiate, and he also said, “You’re a great kid and I’m gonna see if we can make room for you.” And he made room for me.

In 2007 or 2008, I don’t remember who it was, but someone started this program to show how many successful people had gone through the New York City public school system. I guess there were four or five people who were honored. Matthew Broderick and Liam Neeson introduced me. (
They
were the ones the event organizers really wanted.) I was talking to them. “My last year in a New York City public school was in third grade,” I said. “Do you think I should tell them that?” “Don’t tell them,” was the answer. As part of that same program, I also went back to visit the school, P.S. 81. The last year I was in that school was probably 1956, which was about fifty years before. I had a car and driver with me and I said, “Do you have a couple of minutes?” Then we went behind the school to the baseball field—and I ran around the bases. I was little Bobby Sillerman from the Bronx again.

MAIRA KALMAN

Artist/illustrator, author

(1949– )

When I was fourteen or fifteen and someone asked where I was from, I would say I was a Bronx Bagel. I liked the alliteration, I guess, but I was a complete Riverdale snob. I think that’s because we were so close to Manhattan and to Lord & Taylor and the Bird Cage, the store’s restaurant. We also had a certain pride in being in this little enclave. For me, it was really like an enchanted land. Riverdale was Oz in a funny way. Well, we did also go to other places in the Bronx. Loehmann’s was Mecca. Literally Mecca. We also went to Stella D’Oro. That was my first experience with nonkosher food. I had a shrimp cocktail and I heard the angels singing.

My father’s whole family was killed in the Holocaust. There I was living in Riverdale and the lullaby is, “Never again,” coming from him in a most poignant and powerful way. He constantly told us stories about his family perishing. And that he went to Israel in 1939, joined the underground, and fought the British. My mother went there in 1932.

The people who built Israel had a tremendous sense of “We did something quite extraordinary, both by leaving our old lands and by coming to this new country.” So part of the pride that I had was clearly instilled in me by my father and my mother too. Another story that’s in my soul—one where my sister really thinks I’m insane—but to this day, to help me meet a deadline, I say, “What if the Nazis came, in, say, two hours, could I finish the work? If they were coming in, like, eighteen minutes, could I finish the work?” So somehow I use the danger of them coming into my safe place on Twelfth Street to help me with an illustration assignment. I do that all the time.

My parents were not the happiest couple. There was a lot of silence and distance. My father was a diamond dealer and would be gone half the year. He’d go to Belgium for diamonds. He’d go to Israel. He’d do whatever he was doing on his own, having a good time and wanting to be a player in a larger field. He was not interested in being at home. My mother never complained about him. There was just a tacit silence. He was gone, and we were doing our thing. And we had a lovely time. When I think about it, I think that his being gone was a relief from the tension. I don’t mean to imply that it was some kind of horrific household. Everything from the outside seemed quite reasonable.

Because of my father’s business as a diamond dealer, all these interesting characters from around the world would visit us. It was a small club in a way. They seemed very eccentric, but they were people who traveled the world, who dealt in these luxuries, in diamonds and jewels. They traveled well, they dressed well, they lived well. They also divorced frequently. It’s so odd. My parents didn’t have a good relationship, but they were very social and entertained a lot. They had a big circle of friends. There was a big crowd of other Israelis who were either stationed in New York for something or here on business. And there were relatives.

My mother opened up the world of culture to me. I had piano lessons with Mrs. Danziger and ballet lessons from Miss Nubert. My mother took me to the public library, and we read the books from A to Z. And every Sunday night we had Chinese food at Bo Sun. We became part of this cultural community in Riverdale. That’s one of the reasons I went to the High School of Music and Art, because I was a pianist. My mother never was forceful in saying, “You have to be something or you had to be ambitious.” It was just, “Here it is and do whatever you want with it.”

It was wonderful that my mother allowed me to daydream—and the daydreaming allowed me to become partially the person that I am. There was no sense of needing to analyze anything or understand anything. I just kind of lived.

I spent a lot of time reading in the park that has a huge statue of Henry Hudson in it. I had the time to develop, on my own, a sense of language and love of language and love of the word. Coming to America from Israel and learning a new language at the age of four was wonderful. And the fifties were an optimistic time. When I got older and I started writing more seriously, I thought,
Ugh, this writing is terrible. All that imagery!
I thought that there’s a way to express what I’m thinking in another way and I have to express myself. That was a given. There was no question like, “Well, what else would I do?” Saul Steinberg had a huge show at the time. And since I read a lot, I had looked at a lot of children’s books. I looked at images and I looked at writing and said, “Wait a minute. There’s something going on here.” Combining images and writing looked like it could be fun. The word “fun” was really important to me. I had felt like this tortured writer with angst—this adolescent with angst. I just wanted to have fun.

I’ve had occasion to go back to my old lobby in Riverdale to photograph the plants that are there now and to see the views, both interior and exterior. And to go back to Mother’s Bakery, where we used to buy our mocha cream cakes. When I did those things, I connected to moments of joy, pleasure, and self-confidence. A sense of well-being.

PART THREE

ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS, WE PRINT … THE GIFT IN THE RIVER

You had drugs going on. You had the gangs during that time. Everyone was doing their thing. So you became a graffiti artist. People were going to clubs, like hanging out on a Friday, dressing up, going to jams, but we dressed all dirty on Fridays, going into the subway. That was our mission. Our thing was subways.