Old Neighborhood
Authors: Avery Corman
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A Novel
Avery Corman
For Matthew and Nicholas Corman and for Anne and Moses Cohn
CHAPTER 1
T
O BE TEN YEARS
old in 1944 was to know one’s place in the war effort, to collect scrap paper for the scrap paper drive, save Minuteman war stamps, and memorize the silhouettes of enemy aircraft, then crouch on the roof of a building at twilight hoping to spot a Stuka before it could strafe the neighborhood.
We lived in the Kingsbridge Road-Grand Concourse section of the Bronx in a red brick building on Morris Avenue. Flamingos caroused on the wallpaper in the lobby and art deco nymphs were painted on the elevator door of “Beatrice Arms,” named for the landlord’s wife, Beatrice. The building’s most distinguished citizen was The Dentist, who had an office on the ground floor, the smell of ether lingered in the lobby.
My best friends were Arthur Pollack and Jerry Rosen. We were in class 5-1 at P.S. 86, our teacher, Miss Brenner, was a humorless woman in her forties, her hair pulled into a tight bun in the back. The war had helped her organize an educational philosophy, she went from elementary school teacher to pre-induction officer.
“Stand up, Steven R. Hup-hup! At attention!”
We were children of the homefront. I had just downed my sixth German Focke-Wulf of the morning in my composition book. I rose at attention to the snickering of my classmates, some of whom had been sinking U-boats.
“I said, ‘Hands folded on desks,’ did I not?”
“Yes, Miss Brenner.”
“That does not mean ‘Hands writing in notebooks,’ does it?”
“No, Miss Brenner.”
“I am going to tell you of an incident that cannot be repeated sufficient times.”
The Foxhole Story. Again! Arthur Pollack produced a comic groan and Jerry Rosen began to giggle.
“Stand up, Arthur P. And you, too, Jerry R. At attention!”
The giggling in the class was now widespread.
“Stand up, class 5-1. All of you, at attention!”
Miss Brenner had the entire class on its feet as she told her favorite war story.
“The infantry squad was in foxholes near the enemy lines. A rifle shot was heard. The officer yelled, ‘Heads down!’ Some were slow to respond. Others did not respond at all. Everyone was killed. Except for one man. That man
did
respond. That man put his head down quickly. That man was Corporal Howard Reese, a former pupil of mine, who learned in
my
classroom how to follow instructions. And he lived. And the others died. He wrote to tell me this. And that is an important story. You are to listen to your teacher.”
Then she said, in case anyone had missed the point:
“Or maybe one day you will be in battle and not know how to listen.”
Suddenly, this time in the telling, she noticed a problem with the story line. She rushed to add:
“That means girls, too. You could be combat nurses.”
Arthur, Jerry and I were kept after school for being weisenheimers. We had to write on the blackboard thirty times, “I will not be rude and inattentive,” a heavy punishment which kept us out of the first stickball game of the afternoon.
Jerry lived in my building, his father was Rosen’s Dry Cleaning on Kingsbridge Road. Arthur was the rich one among us, his father worked in Manhattan for a printing company, and Arthur owned electric baseball. We were Yankee fans, my favorite player was George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss, who led the American League in batting in 1945 with a wartime average of .309. His picture was pasted to the wall above my bed, along with my collection of Dixie Cup covers with scenes of “Our Branches of Service in Action.” I listened to Yankee games on the radio, the road games re-created in the studio to the sound of the Western Union ticker: “Grimes hits a high fly” … tick … tick … tick … “It’s down the left field line” … tick … tick … “It’s” … tick … tick … tick … tick … “A foul ball.” Time was suspended in these reports, which came in from such exotic places as Cleveland and Chicago.
My parents, Sylvia and Bernard Robbins, had moved to this neighborhood from the Lower East Side the year I was born. They came north by subway to a new social position in their lives, to an area with parks and elevator buildings. My father had been hired as an assistant manager of a men’s haberdashery store on Fordham Road. Six feet one with reddish hair, he was slightly stoop-shouldered, as if he were embarrassed to be taller than his neighbors. My mother was small and fair with fragile features, a woman who attempted to manage her responsibilities as she perceived them—to run the household and be informed. Our family and The Dentist and his wife were the only people in the building to read
The New York Times,
not held in high regard in the neighborhood, as it did not have horse-racing tips or the comics.
My father, 4-F because of a heart murmur, was an air-raid warden, out on the streets during blackouts. In his work, after ten years in the Bronx, he was still an assistant manager in the haberdashery, which meant that he was but a salesman entrusted to use the cash register. He was extremely low-keyed in business. The store manager told my mother, “He’s too nice.”
Angry with my father, my mother confronted him at the dinner table.
“What salesman should be called nice? They should be saying you’re aggressive!”
“Some of these salesmen—they’ll sell you anything,” he answered, defending himself, turning to me. “Even clothes that don’t fit. I can’t do that.”
He did not advance in his work or earn the money that others did, but he was honest, the word in the neighborhood was that people respected him. So he was retained in his job by a succession of store managers he never replaced.
Our apartment was decorated modestly, bare wood floors, mahogany pieces, wing chairs and a greenish tweed couch in the living room. The prized piece was our push-button console radio, an Emerson, purchased on time. Some families in the neighborhood went to the Catskills or to Rockaway for the summer, as my mother was given to remind my father. On Sundays we went to Orchard Beach by bus. They argued often over money. I pretended not to listen. My mother never took a job to help the family income because in the neighborhood wives did not work, unless the husband was in the army or dead. Neither the husband nor the wife would have approved of the woman working. This was cultural, a given, in the same way that troubled couples, as my parents were, never got divorced. As I think back, thirty-five years later, remembering that besieged couple and the tired man who was my father, it is astonishing to me that I am an older man now than my father was then.
A major day arrived in my life. Not only did I have permission to go with Arthur to the RKO Fordham for the children’s show, five cartoons, a Pete Smith, a chapter, plus the double feature, not only did I have spending money for candy, but afterward we were going to Liberty Bell Bridge and Arthur was planning to let me “go halfies” on his ringing of the bell. A facsimile of The Liberty Bell was erected on the Grand Concourse in front of the Loew’s Paradise Theatre and anyone who bought a war bond could step up on the bridge and ring the bell for freedom. I had not yet been able to save enough for a bond in my war stamp book, but Arthur had rung the bell twice before. A bonus for the bell ringers was to look inside a captured two-man Japanese submarine which was part of the war bond display. When the movies were over we ran to the Paradise, then holding Arthur’s bond together, we walked up on the bridge and rang the bell—pals for victory. We peered into the submarine and were intrigued by how small and sneaky the submarine looked. I was momentarily encouraged to change my favorite branch of service from the Army Air Corps to the Navy so I could sink Japanese submarines with depth charges from my destroyer.
In the neighborhood, the sense of participation, of being part of a nation at war, was palpable. People placed white flags with blue stars in their windows to signify a man in uniform, sometimes a double star for two men, or a gold star for a man killed. It was a working-class neighborhood divided between Jews and Irish Catholics. Tommy McPheeley, a stickball friend, said that he liked me even though the Jews killed Christ. I asked how he knew that—since I did not know myself—and he said, “Sister Theresa told us.” So the idea was being taught in the parishes in the 1940s, and Sister Theresa said so, and she was a Sister, which seemed to be documentation of some kind. But the religious issue generally was set aside during those years, Jews and Catholics were in the Big Fight together and on the killing of Christ it was acknowledged that, at the very least, the event was pre-war.
On June 6, 1944, D-Day, the schools closed early and we were asked to attend one of the special afternoon services being conducted in local churches and synagogues to pray for the safe return of Allied servicemen. The radio had announced that many would die in the fighting, that it was the biggest battle of the war. I walked with Arthur and Jerry to the Jacob H. Schiff Center near Fordham Road. I was nervous as we entered the synagogue, we were supposed to pray and I had never prayed. The synagogue was crowded with children who had been released from school, women from the neighborhood, and the elderly. The rabbi began the service with a news bulletin, the first beachheads were secure. A children’s choir sang hymns in Hebrew and the rabbi recited the Lord’s Prayer in English, which was momentarily reassuring, since I had heard it in school. Then came the moment I was dreading. He asked the congregation to pray. I closed my eyes and began to imagine bodies being blown out of the water by enemy mortar fire, blood trickling out of the sides of mouths of soldiers in trenches, bayonets ripping into stomachs, planes streaming into mountainsides, pilots’ bodies burning—images reinforced by dozens of war movies, now embellished by my imagination and the ominous quality of this day, that I was released from school on the day of the biggest battle of the war, that many would die in the fighting, that I was to come here to this strange place, ignorant of the rules, and that my prayers—whatever praying was, whatever God was—had been asked for, and the deaths frightened me. I was ten years old and I wanted the war to stop. The romantic adventure of the war ended for me on this day. No longer did I draw pictures of P-38s and German planes in my books. The war had exhausted my capacity for militant fantasy.