Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (7 page)

Our days might have seemed shapeless to an adult, but to us, there seemed a definite rhythm to our activities. When we began to tire, we played potsy, a form of hopscotch, on the sidewalk, leisurely jumped rope, rolled marbles, played jacks, or flipped cards against the stoop to see who could come closest to the bottom stair without actually hitting it. After lunch on steamy afternoons when there was no baseball game in progress and no one to take us to the beach, we would jump through the spray of one of the sprinklers which were constantly watering our precious lawns, or lounge on blankets in the shade of a favorite tree for games of Go Fish, Monopoly, and Chinese Checkers.

In the late-afternoon sun, we set up our Kool Aid stands, strategically placed to catch our fathers as they returned in twenty-minute intervals from work, rounding the corners with jackets over their arms as they walked down our street, their faces glistening with sweat, anxious, we thought, for the refreshing drinks we were glad to sell them for the price of a nickel. As my father approached,
trying, usually without much success, to maintain a professional demeanor, I would hand him a cup and happily receive the coin he placed in my palm. Soon the summons would come from the front doors of the houses, and we would race in to dinner, not because we were hungry, but in the hope that if we finished quickly enough we could reassemble for another hour or so of play before the encroaching dark put an end to our day on the block.

The small section of Southard Avenue that lay between St. James and Capitolian was my world. Our street, unconnected to any major thoroughfare, and lined by large maple trees which cast a cooling shadow on our activities, was our common land—our playground, our park, our community. If an occasional car passed, we would stand aside, waiting impatiently for the intruder to leave our domain. If we never thought of our neighborhood as safe, that was because it never occurred to us that it could be otherwise—except, of course, for the weed-choked hovel on the corner where the strange and fearsome “Old Mary” lived.

The house in which I grew up was modest in size, situated on less than a tenth of an acre, and separated from the neighboring houses by the narrowest of driveways and a slender strip of grass. For my parents, however, as for other families on the block, the house on Southard Avenue was the realization of a dream. My family had moved to Rockville Centre from the crowded streets of Brooklyn in the late 1930s, early pioneers of that vast postwar migration which was to transform America into a nation of suburbs, and bring to once-bucolic Nassau and Suffolk counties a population as large as that of sixteen of the forty-eight states. Here they would have a single-family home, a private world for themselves and their children, which they could make their own—furnish, repair, remodel—something
which only a few years before had seemed the prerogative of the impossibly affluent. They took visible pleasure in every room, the gabled roof, the small enclosed porch that looked out onto the street, the breakfast nook that stood in an alcove off the kitchen, and most of all in the tiny front lawn amid which our house was set. They had land, grass, soil of their own. The great American ambition.

From the front, my house looked narrow and cramped, standing so close to its neighbors that it seemed more like a row house than an independent structure. But on summer nights, when I would lie on the strip of grass that separated us from the Friedles, it seemed to tower above me, its softly lit windows and striped awnings like the side of an ocean liner. My father lovingly tended our lawn as if it were the grounds of an ancestral estate. Every weekend in the summer, he and almost all the fathers could be found outside in their shirtsleeves mowing the small patches of grass, rooting out the occasional weed, planting flowers along the margins of the driveways.

R
OCKVILLE
C
ENTRE
was home to about eighteen thousand people when I was born, and the population expanded each year until every vacant lot was filled. In contrast to Levittown and other mass-produced suburbs that emerged overnight in the postwar era, our town had been incorporated as a village in the nineteenth century. A century-old Village Hall was set in a green square with a Civil War cannon near the front door. Mature oaks and maples arched over our streets, and our village boasted a variety of housing and a diverse population that many other suburban towns did not enjoy. Old houses mingled with the new: Victorians, Tudors, and Queen Annes stood side by
side with newly built split levels and ultramodern ranch houses. The majority of the population was white, as was typical of the suburbs, though more than nine hundred African Americans lived in a neighborhood at the western end of town.

Unlike more affluent modern suburbs, whose fenced homes are encircled by large ornamental lawns, the houses on my block were clustered so close to one another that they functioned almost as a single home. We felt free to dash in to any house for a snack from the mother-in-residence, race through the side door in search of play-mates—except for my own house, where my mother’s need for tranquillity was respected, making it not only the quietest but sometimes the loneliest house on the block. Since all the families were bringing up children at the same time, babysitters were rarely necessary, for we could usually stay at each other’s houses. If one of the mothers was sick, there was always a neighbor or older sister to take her child to school or to the beach. Clothes, bikes, and roller skates were routinely handed down from the older children in one family to the younger ones in another. For me, there was a special benefit in the clustered structure of our block. For the lives within these homes, the stories of each family, formed a body of common lore through which I could expand the compass and vividness of my own life.

The position of our houses determined the pattern of our friendships. Not only did my best friend, Elaine, live next door to me, but her bedroom was directly across the driveway from mine, less than twenty feet away. When we were five, we strung a clothesline between pulleys by our windows and attached a can that allowed us to exchange notes long after our bedtime had passed. When our lights went out, lying on my side facing the open window, barely able to hear my parents talking downstairs, I knew that
Elaine was just across the way, in her own bed, facing toward me. Content that everyone was in the proper place, I went to sleep.

Six months older than Elaine and one year ahead of her in school, I learned to read before she did. My mother later told me I had begun deciphering the letters on our soup cans and cereal boxes several months before the day I picked up a book she had read to me many times and read it back to her. Suspecting I had memorized it, she handed me another book to read. I went through it slowly, page by page, reading so loudly that I sounded as if I were addressing an audience of hundreds instead of one. From the moment I read those first paragraphs to my mother, I was obsessed not only with reading but with reading aloud. Everywhere we went, I insisted on reading every sign and billboard along the way. “Why are you doing this?” Elaine asked. “Oh, you’ll understand someday,” I replied. “Once you start reading, you can never stop.”

The books I read filled my imagination, multiplying my daydreams, allowing me to supplement my own collection of stories, previously drawn mostly from my family and my neighbors, with characters and events far removed from the realities of Southard Avenue and Rockville Centre. As I did with the lives of those around me, I could incorporate the people of fiction, even of history, into my own life, make them real, change them, the malleable instruments of my own desire and longing.

I moved from my mother’s reading of Kipling’s tale about the baby elephant to my own reading of Little Toot, the story of the small tugboat with the candy-stick smokestack, who came, as I did, from a family of seamen. When I read about
Little Toot
’s father, Big Toot, the fastest tugboat on the river, and his Grandfather Toot, who breathed smoke and told of mighty deeds, I pictured my uncle Willy
and my grandfather Ephraim standing proudly at the helms of their ferryboats, navigating their ships expertly through the tricky currents of the waters surrounding New York and New Jersey. Because all my uncles and grandparents were dead, I had to find some way to keep their memories alive. By fusing what little I knew about their personalities into the characters I liked in the stories I read, I was able to surround myself with the large, vibrant family I always wished I had. And when Little Toot saved the stranded ocean liner and made his family proud, I imagined that someday I would do something that would bring me to the attention of my grandparents in heaven.

Elaine was at least six inches taller than I. I admired her intelligence, and her daring, envied her thick, curly hair and, most of all, her boisterous family. Although most of the houses on the block, including my own, were inhabited by nuclear families, Elaine lived with her brother, mother, father, grandmother, and great-grandmother—four generations in a single home. On Sundays their house filled with cousins from the city who felt entitled to share in the good fortune and Sunday dinner of the first relatives who had made it to the suburbs.

On Sunday afternoon I would race over to Elaine’s house to join the animated conversation and bustle which my own house lacked, to observe as the Friedles and their relatives played Canasta, gambled for pennies, smoked, drank cocktails, listened to music, and danced. I would twirl on the cushioned bar stools in their finished basement, which seemed the height of luxury living, with its large, Formica-topped bar, and watch delightedly as a model train went around the counter and the eyes of a small mechanical man turned red while he raised a drink to his mouth. I listened eagerly to the flow of words, joined in the laughter and chatter, and tried to imagine what it
might be like in my own house if I had grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, or a mother whose health did not require a placid, less crowded way of life.

The two “old ladies,” as we called Elaine’s grandmother and great-grandmother, would sit in chairs on the Friedles’ front lawn, shouting friendly greetings to the children as we played, telling us stories, gossiping with the neighborhood mothers. The tales they told lured us backward in time to the British colony of Jamaica, in the West Indies, where Elaine’s great-grandmother, Amelia, the daughter of Scottish emigrants, was born. Married young, she had eight children, including Elaine’s grandmother Valerie, who was widowed shortly after Elaine’s mother, Dolly, was born. During the Great War, Amelia’s husband left Jamaica to find work in America, promising to send for his family as soon as he was settled. When no word came after six months, Amelia, together with her widowed daughter, Valerie, and her four-year-old-granddaughter, Dolly, embarked on a boat for New York to find her husband. After a few fruitless months, they discovered he had moved in with another woman and had no intention of reunion with the family he had left behind. It was not easy for the three women to make it on their own; Elaine’s mother, Dolly, could remember slipping on wet urine in the hallway of the New York tenement where she grew up.

Dolly was still in her teens when she met and married George Friedle, a descendant of German immigrants, who had also grown up in a tenement in New York, and whose rapid rise in the world of banking to the position of vicepresident of Public National Bank had allowed him, shortly after the Second World War, to move to the suburbs, to his “dream home” on Southard Avenue. And when the family moved to Rockville Centre there was no
question but that Dolly’s mother and grandmother would accompany them.

The old ladies had brought their folk knowledge with them from Jamaica. When you get married, they instructed Elaine and me, no wedding pictures should be taken, or ghosts will join the ceremony. And on your wedding night, you must keep a set of knives under the bed to ward off the evil spirits. Although we paid careful attention to these strictures, not wanting ghosts or evil spirits at the ceremony which we knew was sure to come, of more pressing concern to six-year-olds was the revelation that three knocks on a door signified death. For some time after being so instructed, I would knock on a friend’s door twice, and then stop, trying to gauge how much time had to elapse before the counting could begin again without danger. The precepts were meant to enlighten and amuse, rather than frighten us, for the old ladies were always gentle, with an unerring eye for sadness in a child. If one of us seemed out of sorts, was hurt by our friends, or was left out of a game, they noticed at once and invited us to come into the house to share a bowl of ice cream.

B
ASEBALL LOYALTIES
in our neighborhood were divided between the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants. As earlier immigrants had brought their ethnic bonds with them to America, the settlers of suburbia had, for the most part, carried their baseball fidelity from their borough of origin—Yankee fans from the Bronx, Giant supporters from Manhattan, and, of course, the devotees of the Dodgers from Brooklyn. In each home, team affiliation was passed on from father to child, with the crucial moments in a team’s history repeated like the liturgy of a church service. Over time, each team and its fans had taken on a distinct identity, a kind of stereotype into which the features of the team and the characteristics of its followers were molded to produce an exaggerated caricature. The Yankees were the “Bronx Bombers,” whose pinstriped uniforms signified their elite status, supported by the rich and successful, by Wall Street brokers and haughty businessmen. The Dodgers were “dem Bums,” the “daffiness boys,” the unpretentious clowns, whose fans were seen as scruffy bluecollar workers who spoke with bad diction. The Giants, owned since 1919 by the same family, the Stonehams, were the conservative team whose followers consisted of small businessmen who watched calmly from the stands dressed in shirts and ties, their identity somewhat blurred, caught, as they were, between the Yankee “haves” and the Dodger “have-nots.”