Authors: Rick Gekoski
‘Granny’s in there,’ I would whisper.
‘What’s she doing?’
‘Nothing.’
Ricky! Ruthie! Will you go to sleep right now!
There was a tiny third room, hardly more than a cupboard, where
die schwarz
would sleep. Each summer a young coloured woman, supplied by an agency in New York City, would spend the summer
in the bungalow, tidying, cleaning and washing up. Granny was frequently exasperated with the help, unsure whether they made life easier or harder. What the poor girls made of it is almost
impossible to imagine, and none of us even tried to. The demands of running a kosher kitchen were incomprehensibly arcane to most of them. ‘
No
,
no
!
You don’t serve the
butter when there is meat on the table
.
And you don’t use these dishes with the meat
.
How many times do I have to tell you
?’
An imposing woman grown plump in later life, granny had a noble bosom and a bottom that stuck out, a rolled mop of grey hair and an anxiously inquisitive expression on her round powdered face
that suggested that the worst was yet to come. My major encounters with her were about food: did I finish my lunch? Had I eaten too much fruit, or too many cookies? Taken all of those candies? Was
I a little feverish? Had I done a BM? The spectre of the enema bag loomed. I was
fine
. In tacit acknowledgement of her obsession with anal functioning, my girl cousins, sister and I would
periodically inspect each other’s bottoms as we ducked behind a bush or tree. ‘Hey!’ Uncle Freddie would yell over to us, ‘if you want to show cookies go somewhere
else!’ We did. Showing cookies was better, even, than eating them.
I avoided Granny Pearl as best I could. Unlike Poppa Norman she knew nothing of baseball, or making things in the garage workshop, or polishing the Caddy. I adored being with him, watching and
helping, or playing ‘catched’um-missed’um’ with a softball in the garden. He’d played semi-pro baseball, and had a catcher’s stocky body, with a thick and hairy
torso, short legs, low centre of gravity. He loved Friday nights, shedding his elegant suit and colourful tie when he got to Huntington, spending the weekend puttering round the bungalow. He was
great value in short spurts, but tired of the company of children quickly. You could make money out of that. ‘First one to fall asleep gets a nickel!’ he’d offer. Even in the
afternoon I was happy to feign sleep, though I quickly raised the ante to a quarter.
I was the only one of the children who was able to climb the posts of the low white picket fence that surrounded the bungalow, along which poppa placed pots of trailing geraniums, to lever
myself up on to the roof. I could overhear the grown-ups talking on the back porch, only they rarely said anything interesting, and when it was, it was likely to be in Yiddish. But I knew that
granny’s vocabulary –
narishkeit, ganif, mishigas, meshuginah, shlepper, chutzpah, kvetch, tsouris
– demarcated the myriad ways in which life could try and disappoint.
Hidden behind the sloping roof line, I was as invisible as God with a handful of sugared almonds. One time I vanished sufficiently from the collective memory and was allowed to lie up on the
roof as the light faded, and the moon came up. In the slow darkness the fireflies’ bottoms glowed like embers descended from the canopy of stars. The honeysuckle odour sharpened as the air
cooled, and I looked upwards at the meaningless immensity. I felt alarmingly diminished, and reasoned that surely it must end, somewhere. In a wall perhaps? How high would such a wall have to be?
How thick? What above? Beneath?
I never repeated the experience. It was too unsettling. I decided to domesticate the roof instead. Often I’d take a cushion from the porch, and a book to read to ward off the silence of
those infinite spaces. What did I read? It is hard to remember. Early things always are, you may be thinking. But childhood reading, for an American child of my period, is difficult to recall. To
remember an American reading childhood you have to engage in manifold acts of recovery of what is almost irretrievably lost.
This was not true for English children of the same time, at least for the middle and upper-class ones. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century England had produced a body of
children’s literature – from Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll through the great period of high Edwardian whimsy: Barrie, Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame – that became the
lingua franca of an English childhood. It was impossible to grow up as an English child in the first half of the twentieth century without reading – indeed without owning – copies of
the Alice and Pooh books,
The Jungle Book
,
Peter Pan
, the Beatrix Potters,
The Wind in the Willows
, as well as various
Famous Five
s or
Just William
s.
The message of these was remarkably similar: life may be a little dangerous, but not very; energy is hardly required to combat such dangers; it pays to be shoulder-shruggingly loveable and
hapless. Think of Pooh or, indeed, of Bertie Wooster. If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, which supplied the manpower for the next generations of Empire, that Empire
was lost between the covers of
Winnie the Pooh
.
I have vague memories of Alfred Olivant’s
Bob, Son of Battle
(dogs),
Treasure Island
(parrots and hooks),
King Solomon’s Mines
(diamonds) and
Peter Pan
(fairies and crocodiles), but more particular ones of Franklin W. Dixon’s Hardy Boys series. The Hardy Boys books were great. There were loads of them, and you could talk about them to your
friends, even read them together. Everybody read the Hardy Boys. (Except girls. If you were a girl you read the Nancy Drew books instead. Boys never did that. Nancy Drew was stupid.)
The joy of the Hardy Boys series was not that the individual books were particularly exciting, but that there were so many of them. They were remarkably similar. The two brothers, Joe and Frank,
aged seventeen and eighteen and in all respects except hair colour indistinguishable, were boon companions and super sleuths, packers of one-punch knockouts, and energetic associates of their
father, an investigative police officer. They could solve any plot devised by a sneaky foreigner, and though frequently thwarted or even kidnapped, they never came to the slightest harm. Neither
did the foreigners: all they got was captured by our heroes, and sent off to the pokey, muttering, ‘Sacré bleu! Zese ’Ardy boys ’ave done eet again!’
It didn’t matter what books I read. The key was to be seen to be reading. If I wasn’t up on the roof, I would retreat to my room (‘
I’m reading and I need some peace
and quiet!
’) but I made sure to leave the door open. (‘
He’s reading and he needs some peace and quiet!
’) What I was reading was a
book
. It didn’t
matter what the book was, and I hadn’t the faintest idea that one might be better than another. But to garner credit, to be approved of, left alone, quietly commended, it had to be a book.
Comics wouldn’t do. Reading books gave the signal that intelligent life was going on: I didn’t merely read them, I displayed them like trophies.
I was an anxious boy. Before Ruthie was born we lived in a garden apartment in Alexandria, a suburb of Washington DC where my dad worked as a lawyer for the federal government, and wrote short
stories in his (little) spare time. When we went shopping, over the weekend, and needed to split up to pursue different tasks and purchases, I would insist on accompanying which ever parent had the
keys to the car.
It may have been in response to this anxiety that my parents sent me to a recently opened progressive school in rural Alexandria. Burgundy Farm Country Day School had been founded by a
cooperative of parents in 1946, and was based on Homer Lane’s child-centred principles of learning by doing. There was a motivated and engaged staff of young teachers who were called by their
first names, an outdoor swimming pool, goats and other farm animals wandering about. We pupils fed the livestock and helped in the general running of the farm, which was presumably intended to
establish some organic connection to the natural world. It left me with a life-long aversion to doing the chores, and any relations with animals unless accompanied by gravy and potatoes.
I called my parents Bernie and Edie. They were products of the 1930s: socially committed, progressive, anxious for the world to become a better place, partly by creating in their new family a
microcosm of a world in which everyone was treated with respect. Even children. My mother’s social work training at the University of Pennsylvania had included large doses of A.S. Neill and
Homer Lane, while my father would much rather have been a writer, university teacher, or psychoanalyst than a lawyer. He worked for the federal government’s Rural Electrification
Administration, and though he argued a case before the Supreme Court he never made much money. My mother was largely at home for the first few years with Ruthie, who’d been born in 1948. It
must have been a hard time financially, but neither of them ever complained of it, though mom occasionally joked about being footsore from selling World Book encyclopaedias door-to-door.
While she shlepped her books about I was having fun. There were very few set lessons at school, and children were encouraged to read whatever they liked, and to pursue what interested them most.
There were no exams, lots of play, handicrafts and painting, swimming and sports. It was the purpose of such an education to produce children who had their own voices, were not cowed by authority,
learned enthusiastically, related to each other generously, and played uncompetitively.
When, in 1954, we moved to Huntington, Long Island, I was barely aware of the reason: as the McCarthy era progressed and the House Un-American Activities Committee began to name and pursue more
and more ‘communists’, my father’s position in the government became increasingly untenable. Both of my parents had been ‘card-carrying’ in the 1930s, like many
intelligent young people with a conscience. It was only a matter of time before he was hunted down, humiliated, and fired.
Huntington was the obvious place to go. Poppa Norman and Granny Pearl were there in the summers, and their son Freddie, with his wife Eleanor moved there when he was demobbed from the Navy.
There were enough family contacts for my dad, once he passed the bar examination, to find a few clients in his new private practice. Mom could probably get a job at a local social work agency. It
would be tough for a while, but there wasn’t much choice.
Burgundy Farm aimed to instil self-reliance and confidence, but it certainly didn’t prepare me for the Huntington School System. I entered the fourth grade in Woodbury Avenue Elementary
School in the way many travellers enter obscure foreign parts, partly intimidated, but fascinated as well: what odd customs, what peculiar rituals. In the morning you pledged allegiance to the
flag, but I didn’t know the words, and was regarded with suspicion: was I some sort of communist? Sometimes there were drills in case of atomic bomb attack, but if you hid under your desk the
fall-out wouldn’t get you. Otherwise you sat behind the desk all day with about thirty (silent!) kids, while Miss Saul talked, and you wrote down what she said.
The class was studying Babylon, which I knew to be a town somewhere on Long Island. It sounded an interesting place. Apparently they had a lot of wars there, masses of treasures, and a king whom
everybody worshipped, or else. I raised my hand:
‘Please, Miss Saul. How long does it take to get there?’
I am not sure whether an entire class can guffaw, but I think that is what happened. They already knew I was different, and thus peculiar and not to be trusted. I was too good at maths, had read
an awful lot of books, but didn’t know anything about science, or, it was clear, history. After class, Miss Saul gave me a book entitled
Ancient Babylon
. I didn’t read much of
it, but it was annoying that they had to give it the same name as our local town.
We moved into a block of new apartments, where Ruthie and I shared a bedroom, but within a year, once dad’s practice had begun and a few clients rolled up, we bought a new house (for
$20,000, which was such a
lot
) on Brookside Drive. Only well-off kids lived in
new
houses; you could tell which kids were poor just by looking where they lived. My fourth-grade
classmate Judy Hackstaff lived in an enormous really old house, with a wrap-around front porch and peeling white paint, and funny towers like a haunted castle. It looked spooky and dirty to me, and
I felt sorry for her and invited her up to see our new house, so she could tell her parents how rich people lived.
Ruthie and I had separate bedrooms, there was a den and two living rooms, and a garden where mom could plant stocks and phlox – she loved bright and strongly perfumed flowers. All of the
other houses on the road were exactly the same – that was nice – only in different colours. But only ours had a cherry tree in the front, with yellowy-red cherries that weren’t
too bitter once you got used to the taste.
Ruthie and I fought over colours for our bedrooms: of the hundreds of choices we both wanted the same blue. (I wanted it first, of course.) There were tears, and she got the best blue, while I
settled for the next best. Somehow she also got the biggest bedroom, which I resented without coming to the conclusion, quite, that she was the favoured child. All it proved was that if you made a
big fuss you could get your way. We both got new beds with real foam rubber pillows, new desks, and got to choose prints for the walls from a museum shop. New, everything new. It was like starting
all over again. Mom and dad treated themselves, in the master bedroom, to a built-in unit behind the bed, which had a long bookshelf with louvred doors which, when closed, you could prop your
pillow against. It was painted the same colour (not blue, taupe) as their room, and looked, we all felt, distinctly ritzy. I admired it very much – asked if I could have one too – but
it hardly occurred to me, in those pleasure-hazed first months, to look at the books in it. Anyway, they didn’t look very interesting. They were fat blue and brown volumes, without even any
dust jackets to make them fit in with all that newness, hardly worth a glance.