Stonewall (4 page)

When his two children were born, Abraham was so determined to avoid giving them traditional Old Testament names—indeed, he disliked his own name, preferring to be called Eddie—that he simply looked at the shipping schedule in the newspaper and chose from the list of ships arriving or departing. Fortunately for his daughter, a Danish freighter, the
Karla Dane
, was docking on the day she was born, so she was spared being called Lusitania for the rest of her life—or, God forbid, Queen Mary.

Abraham's mother, Becky, was the only grandparent Karla got to know at all well. Becky had come to the United States with her parents in the late nineteenth century to escape the pogroms in Russia. On their way across the Atlantic, their boat had sunk and they had
had to spend several days in a rowboat. The experience left Becky frightened of water for the rest of her life—and caused her to forget where precisely in Russia she had come from. Or so she claimed. For whatever reasons of her own, she refused to talk about the old country. She spent her life raising children and cooking food in the back of the saloon her husband owned.

Not that Karla ever learned much more about her mother's family. “It was like a wall of silence,” Karla later said; “my parents never spoke about the past. They were very closemouthed.” The sum of what she was told about her maternal grandmother was that she had been born in the United States; and about her grandfather, that he had been born in Austria and had run a fruit stand in Brooklyn before retiring.

And it was only as an adult that Karla discovered that her own exceedingly beautiful mother had had, as a teenager, a first marriage. Rhoda had fallen deeply in love with a fellow student at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn; though told he had a “rheumatic heart” and only a short time to live, she had insisted on marrying him. In a desperate effort to save her young husband, Rhoda took him to Florida, where he soon died. To compound the tragedy, his family blamed her for his premature death.

For the rest of her life, Rhoda would be a deeply unhappy woman: frequently ill and barricaded in her room; known as quarrelsome and difficult. She waited until she was thirty to remarry and then chose Abraham, whom she did not love, because it seemed as if he would be a good provider. Abraham, at five feet two and nearly two hundred pounds (“He had been brought up on sour cream,” Karla later quipped), wasn't physically attractive and, though forty, had never married. But he was a bright, jovial, good-tempered man, if inclined to be stubborn. (Stubbornness, Karla says, “is almost like a disease in my father's family.”) Abraham was apparently in love with Rhoda but later, perhaps to cover his pain at the unhappy union, would joke that he had married her because she was thin and he had wanted to give his kids a fighting chance.

Abraham was a hard worker. He had dropped out of school at age twelve to help out in his father's saloon, had thereafter been a truck driver, and had then—at the time Rhoda met him—gone to work at his uncle's dunnage company on the docks. In those years, dunnage firms handled the bins and containers in which all overseas freight was shipped; Abraham's job was to count and haul lumber.
It was backbreaking work, and life on the docks could be dangerous—he was shot at least once—but his salary was enough to support his mother and two sisters.

He and Rhoda were married in 1942. Their son, Paul (Karla thinks maybe her father was reading a list of Christian saints on the day he chose her brother's name), was born in 1943. Karla was born four years later—during a blizzard that trapped her father and brother in a Long Island railroad car for twelve hours while her mother was in labor in a hospital (an ordeal that they all frequently reminded Karla of in later life). Neither parents nor siblings got along well. Karla insists that throughout their childhood her brother had precisely three expressions: “Shut up,” “Drop dead,” and “Get out of my room.”

Abraham and Rhoda were more talkative—or rather, argumentative—with each other, but not much more friendly. They dealt with each other primarily through evasion (a childhood friend of Karla's reports that all she can remember of Rhoda is a closed door). With Rhoda taking to her bed for long stretches and Abraham working seven days a week on the docks (though he was decidedly interested in his children when he
was
present), Karla might well have suffered severe emotional deprivation had it not been for the timely appearance of Nene.

Nene (a nickname her brothers and sisters had settled on when they couldn't pronounce “Lulubelle”) was a black woman in her late twenties hired by the Jays as a live-in maid when Karla was four. Nene was married, but her husband was older, liked to drink, and could be abusive, so Nene (who had no children of her own) welcomed the live-in job. When she arrived, Karla was still sleeping in a crib, and she had a lot of trouble adjusting to the bed that Nene now insisted on. But Karla had no trouble at all getting used to Nene herself. She was a warm-hearted, loving human being of immense goodwill, with a wonderful sense of humor, a great smile, and a happy laugh. Nene, unlike Rhoda, was never depressed—indeed, she was the only person who could get along with Rhoda, which she accomplished by simply shrugging at her angry outbursts. Small and slim, Nene was agile and energetic, but always slowed her quick pace so that young Karla could keep up without effort. Nene became, in essence, Karla's primary parent.

Nene's passion was baseball. At every possible opportunity, she would take Karla to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers play (Paul rarely came along; he was a sickly child, afflicted with asthma). The first thing Karla remembers reading is baseball scorecards, which she
and Nene (who couldn't read well) would pore over. Karla loved Ebbets Field more for the peanuts than for the baseball, but she was a good-natured, uncomplaining child who felt absolutely content as long as she could be with Nene. “It never occurred to me as a small child,” Karla would later say, “that I was not going to grow up black like Nene. It never occurred to me that we were different. I did get some strange looks, though, after I started elementary school. I sounded like the only black kid in an all-white school.”

Karla was also lucky in having a wonderful aunt (by marriage) living two houses away from the Jays in Flatbush. Aunt Betty, nicknamed Queenie, had been a vaudeville singer, had married several times, cursed like a truck driver, told dirty jokes, had a raucous sense of humor, and sang at all the family gatherings—usually accompanied by her dachshund, Judy. Queenie had no patience with the notion of a woman learning her proper, antiseptically limited, place. Not only did she drive a car—which was then highly unorthodox for a woman—but she played touch football with the boys in the street, and thought nothing of jumping in to rescue Paul when, as happened often, he fell prey to the other kids in the neighborhood. Betty was, like Nene, a rescuer by nature—and Paul and Karla needed all the help they could get.

If Karla took her optimistic good nature from Nene, she showed, like Queenie, an early impatience with traditional female roles. As far back as she can remember, Karla was called a tomboy. Queenie told her that she had been a tomboy, too, and to pay the label no mind. But everybody else kept nervously reassuring Karla that she would “outgrow it.” Many years would pass before she would be able to define fully what “it” was, but what Karla knew early on was that she would rather be playing punchball with the boys in the street than jumping rope or playing house with the little girls.

Karla's mother was decidedly disappointed in her. Though ill and withdrawn during much of Karla's, childhood, Rhoda would rouse herself to clean the house (obsessively, over and over: “Jewish women,” Queenie would sardonically say, “cleaned as a substitute for sex”); to prepare an occasional gourmet meal (Nene usually did the cooking); to play an occasional game of canasta; and, above all, to shop. Rhoda liked dressing well almost as much as she liked a good bargain, and with a true shopper's fanaticism would return over and over again to Loehmann's famed bargain store to watch hawk-eyed until the price fell to the lowest possible level. She later admitted that she spent money to get back at her husband, whose earnings had
begun to slip. Along with buying herself clothes, Rhoda would periodically bring home pretty little Ginny or Barbie dolls for Karla, and a proper doll carriage to carry them around in.

Karla wouldn't go near the dolls. But nothing could discourage Rhoda from continually adding to the collection, not even the insistent way Karla would unceremoniously dump the dolls from the carriage and install her beloved, battered teddy bear in their stead. Her best (and lifelong) friend, Jessica, on the other hand, adored the dolls and good-natured, generous Karla let her play with them to her heart's content. That annoyed Rhoda still more. “She simply couldn't see from behind her own eyes,” Karla later said. “She saw this child she wanted to have. This child was not me.”

If Karla's tomboyishness alienated her mother, it did not isolate Karla in the neighborhood; the role, she later recalled, “wasn't all that unacceptable”—in Flatbush, anyway. Her cheerful nature helped make her popular. Though she was given to playing practical jokes and pranks, there was nothing malicious or mean-spirited about her. She would never hurt anyone intentionally, and she disliked physical fights; but if she never started one, Karla, who was strong and knew it, usually finished it. Her Flatbush neighborhood was essentially middle-class Irish, Italian, and Jewish, but it grew rougher as she grew older, and by the time she was ten she had joined one of the proliferating gangs as its sole female member. They used an abandoned shed behind a bakery as a clubhouse, and periodically fought other gangs in the neighborhood—but nobody then had guns, and serious injury was rare.

Though Karla preferred to run rather than fight, she did get into a fair number of brawls. She was once attacked by a group of girls and burned with cigarettes, and another time a girl ripped open the back of her leg with a compass. When one of the neighborhood boys hit her in the face, Karla smacked him back—and broke his jaw. When another little boy came after her, she got him in a leg lock and cracked several of his ribs. Her disposition was friendly, but from an early age, Karla proved a tough, stoic little kid, a determined survivor.

Karla's athletic ability also contributed to her acceptance, especially since her skill was marred by clumsiness. She was good enough at running and at punchball to join the boys in the street, yet a puzzling lack of depth perception made her terrible at touch football and stickball; all this made her an accomplished, likeable klutz rather than an awesome superwoman. She fell down so often and got so many
scratches and cuts that her father at one point started good-naturedly calling her Stitch.

Most of her awkwardness was due to extreme nearsightedness that for a long time went undiagnosed; if she bumped into a wall, her parents simply ascribed it to her being “the worst clod who ever walked the earth.” When she started public school in Brooklyn, she was given an eye test, but when the technician pointed to the chart and Karla said she couldn't see anything, it was thought that she was “clowning around again.” That, combined with poor reading skills, got her put in a class for slow learners—a nightmare experience which lasted some four years and from which she barely escaped in time to make up for lost skills.

Her class of mostly delinquent, emotionally disturbed children (as adults, a number of them ended up in Dannemora prison) was considered unteachable. At the beginning of every day, the reluctant teacher assigned to them would put lists on the blackboard which the children were told to memorize; in one column were the characteristics of a “good citizen,” such as cleanliness; in the other were those of a “bad citizen,” with special emphasis on “communism.”

The children were thought too stupid to learn their own names, so each was assigned a number. Karla's was 36. She became so used to responding to it that at home Nene could sometimes get her attention only by calling out “Thirty-six!” When it finally was discovered that Karla's vision was 12,000/300, and she won a transfer to a regular class, she found herself way behind the other kids. But once she did begin to read—as a fourth-grader—she turned to books avidly: Because of her nearsightedness, she had never developed any alternative interest in television.

Starting at age five, Karla was sent away summers to Camp Swatonah in the Catskills; Abraham thought it wise to give her a break from family squabbling. Rhoda was usually too ill to visit, but Nene and Abraham came up periodically to check on how Karla was doing. They needn't have worried. She took to camp immediately, never felt a twinge of homesickness, and went back happily every summer until she was twelve. She was mystified at the kids who would cry for their parents and mope miserably around the bunk. The only time Karla cried was at the end of the summer—when she had to go home.

She had terrible crushes on the female counselors. “It was my first awareness,” she later said, “that I was gay,” though at the time, of course, she lacked that descriptive vocabulary. The counselors were
mostly Southern teenagers with stark “duck” haircuts, and in retrospect Karla has little doubt that most of them were lesbian. All she knew at the time was that when she first saw these women, she said to herself, “I am more like them than I am like my mother or even Nene.” “I knew I was different as a little kid, but when I saw these counselors I knew I was like them in some fundamental way. I had no words for it. I don't know whether I defined it as being athletic or what, but I felt an immediate identification with them.”

But when—aggressive little kid that she was—Karla tried to crawl into their beds, she scared them half to death; they'd respond, at most, with an affectionate wrestle/cuddle before quickly kicking her out. Karla had better luck with her fellow campers. They were in and out of each other's beds constantly, and Karla was able to expand considerably on her growing knowledge of the female body and sex organs—knowledge she had begun to accrue at home by enticing the neighborhood girls to let her play doctor with her brother's toy medical kit.