The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (2 page)

After some research, I found the perfect hiding place in the farmhouse attic. My grandfather lived on the same farm, and he grew his own tobacco. The attic was where he cured it, so that it smelled of ripening tobacco and a sour-salty tang of heat. But that wasn't the marvelous thing about it. The truly marvelous thing was that in a corner of the attic was a treasure-trove of old pulp magazines, hundreds of them.

Only a few were science-fiction magazines. Quite a lot were Westerns or queer things like
 
submarine stories and sports magazines, but many were golden. Someone had been a big fan of Frank Munsey's old
Argosy
, then a weekly pulp magazine selling for a dime, each issue packed with half a dozen shorts and installments of four different serials. And what serials! Borden Chase novels about sandhogs digging the Holland tunnel. Eight-parters about adventure in ancient Greece or Rome. I knew nothing of history, but I knew a good story when I read one, and these stories awakened my interest in the classic ages in a way that nothing in school ever did. (I have no doubt that in the long run I owe the fact that I am the
Encyclopedia Britannica's
source for the Roman emperor Tiberius to those old pulp novels.) Derring-do among Soviet collective farms and in American steel mills. Medical adventures with Dr.
 
Kildare. Exploration of
 
every corner of the Earth. The literary style was peremptory, and someone was getting hit over the head on every page, but they were
grand
. And among them was the occasional pure vein of science fiction. I read A. Merritt's
The Moon Pool
up in that attic, with the temperature a hundred and four under the eaves, and Ray Cummings and Otis Adelbert Kline, and I only stopped when someone dragged me away. Or when the sun went down. The house had neither electricity nor running water, and after dark there were only limited options. You could sit in the kitchen by the kerosene lantern and listen to Whisperin' Jack Smith on the battery radio. Or you could go to bed.

So in the two years from age ten to twelve I managed to read every scrap of science fiction I knew to exist: every back issue of
Amazing
and
Wonder
and
Astounding
, most of
Weird Tales
, all the books I could find in second-hand stores, friends' homes, and the children's section of the library; everything. My head was popping with spaceships and winged girls and cloaks of invisibility, and I had no one to share it with.

The house we lived in when I was ten was at 2758 East 26th Street in Brooklyn.

A few months ago I did a nostalgic thing. I was driving to Kennedy Airport in my rented Avis car, about to catch a plane to Budapest and, astonishingly, with an hour or two to spare. On impulse I got off the Belt Parkway at Sheepshead Bay, hunted around, and found that very house, the first time I had seen it since I left it forty-five years earlier.

When we lived there, the house had been of the style called "semidetached," which meant that it shared a common building wall with the next-door house on one side. It wasn't semidetached any more. The house next door had been neatly amputated, sacrificed to the building of the Belt, but 2758 was still there, a corner house now, and not really looking very old.

The whole neighborhood was much changed. When New Yorkers say that, what they generally mean is that the blacks and Hispanics have moved in. That isn't so, but it is all built up now. In 1930 it wasn't like that. Most of one side of the big block was an actual farm devoted to growing Italian tomatoes. One of the best things I found to do on late summer nights was to steal and eat them by the pound, fresh off the vine, warm, powdery with some no doubt damaging chemical residue on their skins, but delicious beyond any tomato I have tasted since.

I thought of knocking on that door and asking to look around. But I have no recollection of what the house was like inside. I know which room had to be my room—the back one on the second floor—because I can remember spying out that window into the bedroom of the house across the driveway. But I don't know what the room looked like.

Beyond the house I remember spying into was a vacant lot where we once dug an underground clubhouse. Beyond that was another semidetached house inhabited by a family named Abbot. They had been family friends for years, before either of us lived on that block, and remained so through countless moves of both families until we lost touch in World War II. Griffith and Daisy Abbot were British-born and kept ties to the homeland. Every week or two they received packets of Papers from Home in the mail, mostly children's weeklies like
Puck
, primitive color-comics about Robin Hood and about somebody named Val who adventured around the English countryside in a "caravan." When the five Abbot kids were through with them, I inherited them, and puzzled in my ten-year-old way over this strange language that seemed to be English but sometimes wasn't. We all played street games like Green Light and King of the Hill. We played other games, too. In one of them we decided to hang somebody—I suppose the game was Rustler and Posse, carried out to its logical Saturday-matinee conclusion—and I was given the starring role. My mother caught sight of what was going on out of the kitchen window and came storming out just as the noose was stretching my neck. On the far side of Sheepshead Bay, reached by a wooden pedestrian bridge, was Oriental Point and a small, primitive, very probably polluted bathing beach. It was about half an hour's walk, and we all walked it over and over again all through the summers. I saw my first dead man there. He was a very ripe one, two weeks drowned and hauled up on the beach pending someone's coming to take him away; I almost stepped on his chest, being busy woolgathering at the time. He smelled. Out along our own side of the bay, in the general direction of Queens and Long Island, there was not much between our house and the new Floyd Bennett Field except tidelands and bulrushes. They were marvelous to roam around in. You could get lost in a minute, and see nothing made by man for an hour. Now they are all high-rise apartments, built on God-knows-what foundations.

It was a nice place to be. But the money ran out, and we could no longer pay the rent on the house. In the winter of 1931 we moved into a tiny apartment downtown.

The words "the money ran out" cannot be understood in the context of the 1970s as they were in that quite different ambience of 1931.

Nearly half a century later, money never quite runs out. I don't mean there are no poor people any more. Of course there are, and enough squalor and misery to stock a planet. But when trouble strikes in the 1970s, there is one additional option. You can surrender to it. You collect unemployment insurance, or you go on welfare; if you're evicted, some bureau picks you up and finds you a place to live; if you're sick, there are agencies to pay your doctor bills. In 1931 you could not surrender because there was no one to give up to. You could find a soup kitchen to get something to eat. But no one would keep your family together, and no one would pay your rent.

The other side of the coin in the Great Depression was that the landlords were in as much trouble as you were. There were plenty of apartments to rent, and it was a buyer's market. To persuade you to take his apartment in the first place, the landlord would give you the first two months free; you paid the third month and moved after the fourth.

Or so my family seemed to do, in one year in which we lived in four different apartments. Our first apartment after 26th Street was in a high-rise just off Grand Army Plaza, with its livery stables and luxury flats. We made our way down Flatbush Avenue a few blocks at a time, winding up in a cold-water flat
*
on Dean Street, at the bottom of Park Slope. (Then things began to improve, and a year or so later we were back up at the top of the Slope again.)

Even in those years, the pit of the Great Depression, that part of Flatbush Avenue was a bustling, lively street, seamed with trolley tracks, lined with shops of all kinds. The merchants might have had trouble paying their rent, but they put on a busy front. There were three motion-picture theaters in that eight-block stretch, and they told the story of the Depression more clearly than the stores did. At the top of the hill, the Bunny Theater was open, but not as a theater; it had been turned into an indoor miniature golf course. At the foot of the hill, the Atlantic was shuttered, hoping for better times. The only one that was functioning was the Carlton, in between, and it wasn't prospering greatly. On Tuesdays they would let you in for nothing if you would drop a can of food into a bin to feed the hungry of the neighborhood.

None of the people I knew personally had anything to do with bread lines or baskets for the poor. They weren't "poor." They didn't think of themselves as poor, only broke. In the war for survival they were outnumbered and surrounded, but they had not surrendered (if only because there was no agency to surrender to) and they had not, yet, been wiped out. Of the totally defeated, I only encountered one, and him only at long range.

The shuttered Atlantic Theater was a nice place for a twelve-year-old to spend an hour or two on an idle Saturday, climbing the fire escape, four stories of strap-iron stairs and landings. From the top landing you could look down like a god on the people strolling Flatbush Avenue. I went there often. But on one Saturday, as I started up the stairs, I perceived that something was different. The top landing seemed to be full of cardboard cartons. I ghosted up the steps, silent as any kid stalking the strange, and saw that the top landing had been walled with flattened cardboard. Inside the room he had built, sitting on the floor, doing nothing because having nothing to do, was a white-haired old man.

When I say "the money ran out," what I mean is him. Even at twelve I could figure out his story. He was alone, and broke, and had nowhere to go. He managed to get one sparse meal on the bread lines every day, and he had the clothes he stood up in, and that was all. He had no other place to live. There were such things as municipal lodging houses, true. But there were an awful lot of penniless, hopeless, homeless men, and so the "munies" were full.

I tiptoed unseen back down the stairs to ponder this. For the first time in my life I was moved to charity. I took some eggs out of the icebox, hard-boiled them, put them in a paper bag, sneaked back up the steps, and left them for him. A day later I stole back and found a note he had left for me, penciled almost illegibly on a scrap of the paper bag: God-bless-you-unknown-stranger, and Thanks.

And a day or two after that his cardboard nest had been taken apart and carried away, and he was gone.

The thing about my friend of the fire escape was that there were so many of him. You saw him all over, thousands and thousands of him, in every city of the land. Younger versions of him shoveled snow, in their black dress shoes and double-breasted business suits—the only clothes they had to wear, and the only thing they could find to do. They prayed for snow. An inch of snow was a dollar's worth of shoveling. You saw him in his improvised huts, cardboard or sheet tin, in the parks and the vacant lots, whole communities of him. And he could be you. My own grandfather would have been one of him if there had not been my mother or my uncle to take him in.

The communities of homeless men were called "Hoovervilles," an honor our President did not like and had not sought. How much of the blame for the Great Depression belonged to Hoover, really? I tried to answer that question once, in a book that I worked on for several years, decades after the fact.
*
Hoover did not plant the seeds, they were sown over the boom years of the 20s, in easy credit buying and mad stock swindles. But he did nothing to respond to the crisis. Herbert Hoover was a decent, capable man, who boasted of his kindly, fatherly record of providing food for the needy in the battle-damaged Europe of World War I. He could not see the point of giving help to people who were merely out of work, and so history, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, assigned him the blame for the whole thing.

A few years ago I was on Long John Nebel's all-night radio talk show, and the conversation turned to the Depression. With great joy I plunged into an analysis of who had been at fault. I described Hoover's flat refusal to provide food or jobs for the needy, and his callous cruelty (or cowardice?) when he permitted MacArthur and Eisenhower to drive the bonus marchers away from their encampment on Anacostia Flats. I drew a picture of him as a frightened and closed-minded man who had neither the wisdom to see that fundamental change was needed nor the courage to admit mistakes, and as I was soaring through my peroration Long John passed a note to me across the studio table: "Did you know he's listening to you?" It was so. The dying ex-President didn't sleep well in his Waldorf suite, and it was his custom to tune in Long John on the radio by his bed through the long nights. That was a shock. I had been thinking of him as a symbol for so long that it had never occurred to me that he was still a living, hurting old man.

I had another shock, but a pleasant one, when I was writing my book on the Depression: I found a newspaper story about my friend of the fire escape, and a third of a century after the fact learned the end of his story. The beginning was just about what I had deduced. He had had a job, but the job closed; had money in the bank, but the bank went broke; had a room but couldn't pay the rent; and so the landlord turned him out and kept his clothes and workmen's tools (he was a carpenter) against the unpaid bill. The police found him on the theater fire escape and chased him away, but a newspaper reporter happened to cover the story. The publicity resulted in his getting admitted to a municipal shelter; so, in a sense, his story had at least a happy ending.