Timebends (22 page)

Had I been able to side with her wholeheartedly in her disappointment with my father, my course would have been straightforward and probably fairly painless. But I couldn't help blushing for him when she made him her target, since I admired his warm and gentle nature as much as I despaired of his illiterate mind. And her way was never straight and simple; she could veer suddenly and see with a blast of clarity and remorse that what had happened to him had happened to a man of a certain honor and uncomplaining strength. For love of me and all of us she divided us against ourselves, unknowingly, innocently, because she believed—as I was beginning to believe myself—that with sufficient intelligence a person could outwit the situation. Why couldn't he do that? Because his mother's selfishness had forced him to work before he was twelve so that he could lay his weekly pay on her dinner plate every Saturday night. She hated his mother—who continued to live two miles away in a great old Flatbush house, apparently knowing nothing of hard times—and through his mother womankind, which she saw as born to suck out the marrow of men, although there were exceptions depending on how she felt that particular day. There was no contradiction, in this or anything else, that fazed her; she could be moved to tears by her husband's endurance and dignified refusal to complain, and within an hour make a remark about his blockheadedness. One minute we must all pray for President Hoover, an honest Quaker who, after all, was as much a victim of the collapse as anyone else, and the next he was a son of a bitch who had no heart—imagine his still repeating again and again that prosperity was just around the corner, didn't he realize people were going absolutely
crazy
and that it was happening
now?
Real desperation was seeping in under the doors—by the end of 1932 there was the unspoken fear that we might even lose this chicken coop of a house. And then what?

It has often been said that what kept the United States from revolution in the depths of the Great Depression was the readiness of Americans to blame themselves rather than the system for their downfall. A fine dusting of guilt fell upon the shoulders of the failed fathers, and for some unknown number of them there would never be a recovery of dignity and self-assurance, only an endless death-in-life down to the end. Already in the early thirties, within a year or two of the collapse, the papers were reporting that in New York City alone there were nearly a hundred thousand people who had
been psychologically traumatized to the point where they would probably never be able to work again. Nor was it only a question of insufficient food; it was hope that had gone out of them, the life illusion and the capacity to believe again. America, as Archibald MacLeish would write, was promises, and for some the Crash was in the deepest sense a broken promise.

If Marxism was, on the metaphorical plane, a rationale for parricide, I think that to me it was at the same time a way of forgiving my father, for it showed him as a kind of digit in a nearly cosmic catastrophe that was beyond his powers to avoid. But the poor man had to be radicalized, had to concede that it was not his fault that he had failed, instead of answering my lectures with measly and ungainly facts that simply angered me more at his stupidity.

“But,” he would say, “if there's not going to be a profit …”

“Profit is evil, profit is wrong!” I would plead with him in my sixteen-year-old tenor.

“Yeah, but where's the money to do business? Who's going to pay for new machines when the old ones wear out, for instance? Or maybe you didn't have such a good year last year, you gotta have money to keep going till things pick up . . .”

The next time I would hear these counterpunching arguments was in China half a century later when they were trying to pick themselves up off the floor after the profit-hating decades of Mao Zedong.

But of course the Depression was as much an occasion as a cause of such father-son collisions. It would strike me years later how many male writers had fathers who had actually failed or whom the sons had perceived as failures. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway (his father was a suicide), Thomas Wolfe, Steinbeck, Poe, Whitman, Melville and Hawthorne, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky and Strindberg—the list is too long to consign the phenomenon to idiosyncratic accident. As different as these writers are, they share an ambition to create a new cosmology, not merely to describe the visible world around them. If they could, they would devise a new order of perception that would make the world all new, as seen through their eyes. If the Americans on such a list differ from most of the Europeans, it is in the absence of a grand vision of revolution, whether social or religious or political. Among the Americans, only Steinbeck, who matured in the thirties and experienced social struggle in the West, contains a political aspect and a sometimes revolutionary one. Indeed, no writer anywhere else seems to arrive on the scene in quite the American style—as though the tongue
had been cut out of the past, leaving him alone to begin from the beginning, from the Creation and the first naming of things seen for the first time. He is forever Cortez standing on the fabled peak, always Columbus on his heaving deck hearing across oceanic distances the first rumblings of an unseen surf upon an undiscovered shore. Writers in other places may casually drop the names of their youthful models, their Strindbergs and Tzaras, their Tolstoys or Waughs, taking for granted that there is honor as well as custom in continuing a tradition. But American writers spring as though from the ground itself or drop out of the air all new and self-conceived and self-made, quite like the businessmen they despise. It is as though they were fatherless men abandoned by a past that they in turn reject, the better to write not the Great American Novel or Play, but verily the First.

At the time it was beyond me to rationalize my feelings, but I knew that the Depression was only incidentally a matter of money. Rather, it was a moral catastrophe, a violent revelation of the hypocrisies behind the facade of American society. And that is why facts, for those who turned left—now as then—could mean so little. Nothing is as visionary and as blinding as moral indignation. Adolescence is a kind of aching that only time can cure, a molten state without settled form, but when at the same time the order of society has also melted and the old authority has shown its incompetence and hollowness, the way to maturity is radicalism. All that is is falsehood and waste, and the ground is cleared for the symmetrical new structure, the benign release of reason's shackled powers, which is what Marxism claimed to offer and still claims now. If it stood as the enemy of religion, it nevertheless engaged some of the very same sinews of faith within me, and it provided the same privileges of joining the elect that enthrall religious communities. The sleepers awaken, and their song is the voice of the future, and when it is required of them they will bring not peace but the sword. Two decades after that fateful handball game, when I was at the Salem Historical Society studying the record of the witch trials of 1692,1 could fairly hear the voices of those hanging judges, whom it was only possible really to understand if one had known oneself the thrill of having been absolutely right. In fact, I would probably not have been in Salem at all had I not found Marx in the midst of that handball game.

Once having experienced salvation, I would have become completely intolerable at home if anyone had had the decency to listen to me for very long, but my father had trouble staying awake, and
my brother, agreeing in principle, was too busy mobilizing himself to save our father, whom he had romanticized into a fallen giant. Kermit was intent on rebuilding the family fortunes, or at least as much of them as could be rebuilt before capitalism collapsed altogether, a by no means remote possibility when everyone knew that not radicals but the bankers' association had asked Roosevelt to nationalize the banks, the system having spun completely out of their control. It was certainly an odd one as revolutionary situations go in the twentieth century, but we were far from being alone in the way our minds moved along several planes of credulity at once. As it became clearer and clearer that this was not to be another recession like the one at the beginning of the twenties, and that Roosevelt's stirring rallying cries, while they called forth brand-new government agencies to absorb the worst of the emergency needs of the unemployed, were not visibly lifting production, the prospect of deep social change became less and less the subject of intellectual conversation and more the common property of almost everyone. Things simply could not go on this way. There is a limit to the time a ship can lie dead in the water before people start screaming and doing peculiar things to bring on the wind.

“Mr. Glick,” as he was usually called—not “Glick” or “Harry”—was the hardware store man who had the distinction of still being unmarried in his thirties. In Brooklyn, in this part of it anyway, everybody was married. But red-haired Mr. Glick, able-bodied except for his myopia, seemed content to live alone over his store on Avenue M frying his own fish and, when business was slack, sitting out front in a camp chair taking the sun and nodding to passersby with a wink and a barely perceptible ironic smile. His hardware business, probably because it involved repairing things, managed to survive on a block of failed, empty stores. I had already formed a deep connection to hardware and loved to hang around Mr. Glick, as did several other boys, especially Sammy the Mongoloid, who was probably Mr. Glick's closest friend. Sammy, also in his thirties then, knew every family in every house in those blocks of little houses, but not by name, only by phone number.

“D'ja hear about Dewey nine-six five five seven?”

“No, what?”

“She's getting engaged to Navarre eight-three two eight zero.”

Then Glick, putting on a dread look of scandal, would ask, “What happened to Esplanade seven-four five seven nine?”

“Oh, she hasn't gone out with him since I don't know when.”

“I heard different,” Glick would say, “I heard that Dewey nine-six five five seven's going with Navarre eight-three two eight
one
.”

“
One!
Three two eight one is a girl!”

“A girl! Since when?”

“Since always!”

Sammy began to look like he was about to cry, but Glick was remorseless and took these dialogues to the edge of their possibilities before backing away. Teasing made his day. Until I caught on I would always answer when I passed his store near Fifth Street and he asked, “Raining on Third Street?”

“No, it's just like here.”

“Well, that's nice.”

But women were like the ripest fruit to be savored as he slowly consumed their credulousness. The few stores on Avenue M formed a village with boundaries invisible to the stranger's eye but hard and fast nonetheless. The main occupation of that village was worrying, at least it was what occupied most people most of the time. There was a lot of shuffling along the sidewalk in bedroom slippers by people who hadn't the morale left to put on shoes when they went out for a paper or a can of sardines, and in the warm months housewives would go out in negligees and flapping housecoats, the sight of which set Glick off on flights of inventiveness that my friends and I reinforced by keeping straight faces.

A woman would come into the store carrying an electric broiler, which she would plunk down on the counter, announcing, “It don't broil.”

“What don't broil?”

“This. It don't broil, Mr. Glick,” she would say, drawing together her negligee.

“You cold? I could send up some heat, I own the building.”

“Cold? It's July!”

“You're so beautiful I nearly forgot. Now, what's the problem with this broiler, what do you mean it don't broil?”

“It don't get hot.”

Now looking deeply and attentively into her eyes: “And you don't know what to do if it don't get hot?”

“Listen, I'm talking about the broiler.”

“Absolutely, darling. Now, what did I tell you to do first thing if it don't heat up?”

“I did it, I plugged it in.”

“You plugged it in?” He leans closer to her chest.

“It got a little warm, but that's all.”

“Tell me, what were you wearing at the time?”

“What I was wearing! My clothes!”

“Good, because these broilers are very sensitive.”

“Well, I'm not going to cook with no clothes on.”

“You'd be surprised what goes on in the neighborhood. I've had women—I'm not going to mention names—you wouldn't believe it, but they come in here and tell me they're broiling without a stitch on.”

“Who're you talking about?”

“Now she wants to know who I'm talking about! Blondes! Brunettes! Black-haired!
Broiling naked in this neighborhood!”

“You crazy? I would never broil naked!”

“Well, that's good. Now tell me, what do you put in?”

“What do you mean, what I put in? Chops, a hamburger …”

“Did you say hamburger?”

“Yes, hamburger. Why?”

With immense sadness, shaking his head, he now turns the broiler upside down and points to the Underwriters Laboratory number. “You see here the number ends in a nine? You know what that means?”

“No, what does it mean?”

“Any Underwriters number ending in nine means no hamburger allowed.
But”
—before she can protest—“for you I am not going to count it, and I'm giving you a brand-new broiler right this minute!”

“. . . because I know I didn't do anything wrong.”

“Darling, a woman looking like you
can't
do anything wrong.” Now, producing a new broiler, he becomes grave. “But this is an improved model. With this one you can broil naked.”

“Are you crazy? I never heard of such a thing!”

He cuts her off, his grin turning familiar and relaxed. “I'm only kidding you, darling, because you make me so unhappy.”