SEVENTEEN
H
appy with my brother’s accomplishment I was slow to think of the result—that he would be gone for the whole summer. I would be alone with my parents. Things were changing, and, as usual, in the spring, a season I was beginning to appreciate as the mysterious menacing time of the cycle, I became uneasy. Almost in confirmation of my feeling, we were told that we had to move. Our landlords, the Segals, who lived above us, had sold the house. The people who had bought it, German refugees named Loewenthal, wanted the ground floor for themselves. The Segals had been genial friendly landlords, generous with the heat in winter. The new owners were a dour couple, not gracious at all. My father said they lacked style. There were arguments about painting the upstairs apartment and replacing the antiquated refrigerator with the gas cylinder mounted on top of it, and, after we moved upstairs, about the piano playing and even the noise we made walking across the floor. I didn’t like their daughter either, a small, skinny dark-haired child, a spy and a snitch who whispered in her girlfriend’s ear as I walked by. On a particularly raw day when my mother asked Smith to put some more coal in the furnace, Mrs. Loewenthal stopped him and told my mother to wear a sweater if she was cold.
My mother declared to me that German Jews, even newly
arrived ones, were arrogant and heartless. We were descendants of Eastern Europeans, a more natural, more humane people, who knew what suffering was. “They thought they were Germans,” she told me, “and look what’s happening to them now. With their snobbish highfalutin ways. You’d think, barely getting out with their skins, they would change.”
But the apartment upstairs was clean and light. I looked down at the backyard now from a safe distance, I was above the clothesline strung across to the back fence, and the sheets on washdays flew in my mind like pennants below the king’s tower. From the corner of the window of my room in the back I could see over our side yard and through a tantalizing window of an alley to a rhomboid of green grass in Claremont Park. The whole apartment did seem smaller. Because of the front stairs there was one less room. On the other hand, with Grandma gone and Uncle Willy moved to Manhattan, the family had shrunk. In some way the new light in these rooms illuminated for me the degree of our family’s struggle. The Sohmer upright had to be hauled upstairs by piano movers with block and tackle hanging from the roof; the piano came in through the living room window. That was exciting, but I saw now the chips in the lacquered mahogany I hadn’t seen before. My parents’ bedroom furniture with its romantic olive color and frieze of rosebuds looked old and scratched.
A
t P.S. 70 we were now deemed of an age to be sent once a week to the below-ground swimming pool, a vast chlorinated cavern of tile, where first the boys and then the girls were set to swimming if we could, or taking instruction in waving our arms and holding our breath. The boys’ teacher was old Mr. Bone, the Poseidon of the place. He didn’t speak, he roared. His deep voice bounded over the water in echoes of itself. He was the school’s swimming coach and lord of this underworld, a fat bald
man with steel-rim spectacles who wore a white cotton undershirt stretched taut over his enormous belly, and white ducks and rubber sandals. He also had a gimpy leg. But that he was fit we all understood by the size of his arms, rounder and thicker, even, than my father’s. And that he was dedicated, there was no question—he spent his sunless life down here, whereas we had to endure the pool and showers only once a week.
The girls were instructed by his associate, Mrs. Fasching, as skinny as he was fat, with red hair curling from under her bathing cap, and in a black-skirted swimsuit, which successfully hid her person except for the freckled legs and arms. It was common knowledge that the girls wore bathing suits to swim, while we did not. Even during their showers they wore suits, which seemed unjust. How could you take a real shower while wearing a bathing suit? Brown soap was available at each position, big hard cakes of it, and if we were not seen by Mr. Bone to be adequately scrubbing ourselves, he would warn, in that voice like a whale’s call, that we had better get to it properly or he would come into the shower and show us how.
That weekly visit to the realm of water tested my courage. I was not ready to swim and didn’t care to shower in public. There was no air to breathe down there, only a fetid mist that seemed to turn to oil on your skin. It did no good to tell Mr. Bone you had had a bath the night before, or that you bathed at home twice a week: under the shower you went. And it’s true, for some children the P.S. 70 shower was the only water they saw from one week to the next. It was because of those same children we had to endure health checks in the nurse’s office, where our scalps were examined for lice and ringworm. The nurse also turned up the children who were discovered to need eyeglasses. It was my mother I always went to for explanation of the complexities of money and class. “Some children are from families too poor to have their own doctors,” she said. “They don’t come from good homes and school showers are the only water they see. They are the same children who need to stay in school for lunch because there is no lunch waiting for them at home.”
On the other hand, she told me, some of my teachers were getting quite rich. “They’ve kept their jobs in the middle of the Depression,” she said. “They have done quite well on their salaries. Prices have gone down and they can afford things no one else can who hasn’t that security. Some of them are buying cars and houses. They’ve become landlords.”
I appreciated this information but found it of no use in dealing with my fear of swimming underground. There was one exercise in which we boys were sent into the pool to hang with our hands on the pool’s tiled rim while we let our bodies drift backward and then kicked our feet. Since that didn’t involve putting my face underwater I could handle it all right. But we were a string of fifteen or so boys along the edge at intervals of three or four yards, and some of us were inevitably in water that we couldn’t stand up in. My friend Arnold was next to me and he lost his grip and went under. I looked for Mr. Bone, but he was down at the end of the line yelling at someone. Arnold came up gasping and went under again and was flailing, so that he was putting himself farther and farther from the edge. He was getting out of reach. His arm came up. Letting go the edge with one hand, I grabbed his arm and pulled him toward me and put his hand on the tile. Arnold came up red and sputtering and spitting water. His eyes were red. We looked at each other, too terrified to acknowledge the seriousness of what had happened. You came up, you went down, you took in water like air, and in a few quiet moments you could die.
T
he schoolyard, also, was a realm of mythic dimensions. It was the site of games and ceremonies of enormous meaning. It was an immense yard fenced in chain link. The Eastburn Avenue end was level with the street, but since 173rd Street went uphill, the Weeks Avenue end was a couple of stories below street level. On
Sunday mornings I watched grown-up Softball games with such towering Ruthian hitters as could power the ball from home plate, at the Eastburn Avenue end of the yard, over the fence atop the concrete wall two stories high a block away. I rarely played in the yard after school, it was too vast, an enormous concrete plain with that high fencing around it and beyond the fence the attached apartment houses looking down through their windows. I always thought of windows as eyes, I always saw animate intelligence in them; I saw cars that way too, cars had faces when you saw them from the front, they had eyes and noses and mouths with teeth.
On a school day a Chevrolet coupe ran up the sidewalk on Weeks Avenue and knocked a woman through the chain link fence atop the high wall. With her bag of groceries she fell the two stories to the schoolyard below. She had been carrying bottles of milk. They had broken and the milk spread in pools about her body. Then her blood seeped into the milk. The front half of the car stood pushed through the fence, its wheels hanging over space and spinning. One of the children happened to be at the window of our classroom. She cried out. Everyone, including the teacher, ran to the window. I saw the thing in that moment of peace and stillness when the disaster has occurred but not yet resounded.
Then all at once the street was in a commotion. I heard a scream. Cars screeched to a halt. My teacher ran out the door to the principal’s office. As we watched, the mixture of milk and blood spread over the concrete. In moments people were running from every direction, as if the street had never been empty and the event had occurred in front of an audience. Our teacher had called the police, but others had too. Two green-and-white police cars arrived. Police attended to the driver. Then one of the cars raced down 173rd Street to the Eastburn entrance of the yard. The police drove right into the yard. An ambulance from Morrisania Hospital came. This was our morning’s class. The ambulance could not get into the schoolyard, and so the two attendants in white came on the run. They examined the
woman, she was quite still. They put her body on a stretcher and put a blanket over it. It lay there while police and doctors consulted. Then the attendants carried the body to the ambulance. I watched the woman’s arm, which had slipped off the edge of the stretcher: it bobbed in rhythm with the unhurried pace of her stretcher bearers.
All of us jostled about the windows and looked. I felt the vibrancy of the heated bodies around me.
I would have been glad then to go back to work, but my teacher was too upset. She let us out a few minutes early for lunch. Everyone was talking about the accident. I went home the regular way but saw up on Weeks Avenue a crowd of children standing looking at the Chevrolet coupe, which had still not been extricated from the fence. The police were keeping them back. The schoolyard itself was closed off in case the car fell into it. When I arrived home my mother was on the phone; she had heard the news. She was quite shaken when she came into the kitchen, where I sat over my tomato soup and peanut butter sandwich. She knew the family. The dead woman was the grown daughter of a member of the Sisterhood of the synagogue. My mother sat down across from me. “Right there in the schoolyard where children play,” she said. She was pale. She ran her fingers through her hair. “What a terrible thing. How awful. That poor woman.”
Yet from my vantage point high over the schoolyard, in the sunlit classroom windows, I had felt not fear but enlightenment. Air was like water. You could fall into it. From this height the spectacle of the event was magnified, the whole field of circumstance could be seen. The human figures were small.
At night, before sleep, I remembered the arm of the dead woman bobbing up and down as she was carried in the stretcher, the hand limp, palm up, as if the dead arm were pointing to the schoolyard, indicating it repeatedly—so that I should not forget—as a place of death. For weeks afterward the stain of her blood was visible on the schoolyard ground, a darkening of meaningless shape on the sun-bleached cement.
I
found it very pleasurable to rub color comics onto waxed paper. You laid the waxed paper over the comic and rubbed back and forth with the edge of a ruler or a wooden tongue depressor. The color would attach to the waxed paper like a decal. It was never as vivid as the original but was all there, quite legible, the characters and the words they spoke. I had resumed another practice, soap carving, which I had learned from my brother. This required my mother’s cooperation because soap cost money. But if you could cadge a bar of white soap, you could work at it, shave away at it with a kitchen knife or a pocketknife, and carve animals or human figures. I made a man in a bowler hat. The shavings could be wet and molded into a kind of vestigial soap bar.
A peach pit could be hollowed out: if you did it right, and left the seed inside intact, you could make a real whistle. But it took a while. If you started in the summer you’d be finished in a year, because it was dreary work.
Donald was busy all the time, but I could still get him to help me build a model airplane, because it was really exacting work. He couldn’t resist. You taped the diagram to a table and then built the wings or fuselage, pinning the struts of balsa to the paper. You cut them to size with a single-edged razor blade, and then attached one strut to another with a drop of clear airplane dope. Predrawn templates of flat balsa automatically provided the curves. If I made a mistake and ruined a piece, Donald could make a template copy out of a blank piece of balsa scrap. When I had all the parts constructed—wings, fuselage, rudders and elevator—he took over the assembly and then the covering of thin colored paper.
I had my eye on one model advertised in a hobby company catalogue: it wasn’t just a plane, it was an airship. To me airships, or zeppelins, were the most amazing things in the sky. You
saw them occasionally from a distance. They were so big they could be seen even on the horizon. They floated gently, like clouds. They moved so slowly they were visible for a long time, as airplanes were not. One evening on the radio, the newscaster said that the largest airship ever built, the
Hindenburg
, was sailing from Germany to New York. Its route would bring it to the eastern seaboard over Long Island. It would head due west to a landing tower in New Jersey, which meant it would be visible over the city sometime in the afternoon. I might then be through with school. Yet I didn’t dream I would see it, it did not occur to me that something on the news would be something I would witness. I didn’t think of the Bronx as a place where anything happened. The Bronx was a big place with miles of streets and six-story apartment houses attached one to another, up hills and down hills it went, every neighborhood had its school like my school, its movie, its street of shops built into the sides of the apartment houses; it was tunneled with subways and bound together with trolley lines, and elevated lines; but for all of that, and for all of us who lived here, myself included, it was not important. It was not famous. It was not central to the world. I thought the
Hindenburg
would more naturally fly over Manhattan, which was central to the world. I talked on the phone to my friend Arnold, who lived in the apartment house across the street. Would his mother let us go on the roof after school? I thought from Arnold’s roof, six stories high, it might be possible to catch a glimpse of the
Hindenburg
way downtown, over Manhattan the next day, if it was flying at a high enough altitude.