Timebends (7 page)

But a cop could also be a hero; between waves of cars, the young one directing traffic on the corner of 110th and Lenox would retrieve and, lefthanded, throw back batted balls that got past us into the street. Occasionally somebody hit a hard high fly out his way, and Lefty would race after it, causing awesome squeals of brakes and the delightful swerving of cars on broad 110th. He could be crude, but the New York cop was also your friend in need whom you were instructed to ask for a nickel in case you lost your fare on some voyage. Their gallant troops of twenty or more horses passing by left knobs we had to move aside in the afternoons to make paths for our marbles, the much valued immies, which we knuckled along the curbs, coming upstairs later with frosty cheeks and the invigorating smell of manure on our hands. Horses still pulled the milkman's wagon and the iceman's, and once in a while we would stand mystified watching their lengthening erections as they waited for their masters in front of the apartment house, their eyelashes softly opening and closing like underwater coral fans.

Most of the time anguish was absorbed into the games that came around with each changing season, but something happened now and then that could burn your insides. Because Kermit had a library card, I too had to have one. When I was enrolled in school and entitled to join the library near Fifth Avenue on 110th, I finally walked into the place one hot spring afternoon. It was so dark and cool in there, like no other place I had ever been, and the pink-cheeked lady leaning over her polished mahogany counter spoke in such a funereal whisper that something supernatural seemed to be present, something sacred that must not be disturbed by ordinary tones of voice, and so I stood on tiptoe as close to her ear as possible and whispered back the answers to her questions. My name, my address, my age, school, my mother's name—Augusta. At this something began knotting up inside my belly; no one had ever called her anything but Gus or Gussie, so I was already telling
a kind of untruth, donning a disguise. Now the lady asked my father's name. I had not expected any of this, thinking I was simply going into this place to happily claim my rightful card, the same as my brother had done. It was going to be my turn not to be a baby anymore. Looking up into her blue eyes, I could not bring to voice my father's so Jewish name, Isidore. I was paralyzed, could only shake my head. “What does your mother call him?” I was trapped. The smile went from her face, as though she suspected me of something. My cheeks were burning. “Izzie” being impossible, I finally managed “Iz.” She looked puzzled. “Is?” she asked. I nodded. “Is what?” I rushed out into the street, and I am sure that within minutes I was back with the gang playing ring-a-levio or banging a ball against a building in a game of stoopball.

I was six the year I entered school, and I could not, myself, ever have heard an anti-Semitic remark. Indeed, had I thought about it at all, I would have imagined that the whole world was Jewish except maybe for Lefty the cop and Mikush. Through those short years on the floor studying peoples' shoes, the lint under the couch, the brass casters under the piano legs, my skin had been absorbing some two thousand years of European history, of which, unbeknown to me, I had become part, a character in an epic I did not know existed, an undissolved lump floating on the surface of the mythic American melting pot. To use the latter-day jargon, I had already been programmed to choose something other than pride in my origins, and this despite my father's seemingly confident authority and his easy way with police and yelling cab drivers and even Mr. Mikush, who could put the fear of God into a brown bear. From my father some undefinable authority emanated, perhaps because his great height, fair skin, blue eyes, square head, and reddish hair cast him as an important Irish detective. Holding his hand, I often saw him simply pause at an alleyway and with his blank look disperse a crap game. He assumed without thought that he would be well served in restaurants, where he need hardly lift a finger to attract a waiter, and he never hesitated, but without fuss, to send back a dish that wasn't right. Knowing his past, I could never understand where this baronial attitude came from. He even had a way of listening that without any show of skepticism would cause the speaker to stop exaggerating. His open, relaxed stare, blue-eyed and innocent, brought blushes to the faces of people unsure of themselves. It would have astonished him to be credited as some kind of moral force—if indeed he could have understood such an idea. Life was just too hard to allow most people most of
the time to act unselfishly, least of all himself. Nevertheless, his minority anxiety had moved into me, I am sure, though among his very few words of advice only one sentence explicitly conveyed it. We were passing an automobile accident on 110th Street, my hand in his and my brother on his other side. When we both pressed forward to see what had happened, he drew us back and steered us gently on, saying, “Stay away from crowds.” That was all. It may have been enough.

Yet I doubt that such fright as I showed the librarian had come from him, at least not mainly. Throughout his life he declined instinctively to sentimentalize Jews, unlike my mother, who tended to expect a higher sensitivity and even morality from them, thus being endlessly and angrily disappointed. He sometimes was impatient with these idealizing waves that would repeatedly rise and break over her, and even laughed and shook his head at her naiveté. But there was no discernible apprehension disturbing his air of quiet confidence. My mother's father, Louis Barnett, once instructed me never to walk under a large lighted cross overhanging the sidewalk outside a Lenox Avenue church; if by accident I did, I must spit when I realized what I had done, in order to cleanse myself. There was a certain mild fear of that particular cross after this, but mainly that it might break loose and fall down on me. Nothing of the theology or history behind such admonitions was ever mentioned, leaving them in the realm of superstition or in a kind of immanent symbolism of menace.

There was, in fact, a certain disinclination to explain rationally anything at all that might impinge on the sacred, even in the Hebrew teacher who came to the house a few days a week to tutor Kermit and me in preparation for our bar mitzvahs, still years off. This bearded ancient taught purely by rote, pronouncing the Hebrew words and leading us to repeat after him. In the book, the English translations of the passages from Genesis faced the Hebrew, but there were no English translations of the English: what did
firmament
mean? The worst of it was that when I spoke a passage correctly, the old man would kiss me, which was like being embraced by a rosebush. Once he leaned over and, laughing, gave my cheek a painful pinch and called me
tsadik,
wise man, a compliment whose cause I understood neither then nor later. I would have to pump up all my self-control to appear to welcome his furry arrival. The lessons were boring and meaningless, but my rebellion may simply have been caused by an undisciplined spirit: I hated piano lessons, too, or any set of rules that interfered with
fantasies of magically quick accomplishment. When the violin suddenly became “my” instrument, as mysteriously and irrevocably as second base had become my position, my mother found a teacher who, poor man, loaned me a small violin to begin on. I found that a rubber ball would take a lively bounce off the back of it as well as causing all the strings to hum, and I went downstairs to use it as a tennis racket until the neck broke in my hand. My mother carefully laid the pieces in the case and returned the instrument, and I went back to walking in my sleep, which was far more interesting than studying. So the root of that choking fear that suddenly gripped me as I looked into the face of the kindly librarian is so deeply buried that I can only imagine I had been denying, quietly and persistently, what I surely must have been hearing from my position on the floor—stories, remarks, fear-laden vocal tones that had been moving me by inches into a beleaguered zone surrounded by strangers with violent hearts.

Mikush was doubtless one of those, the sole mythic enemy who had a face and a name, as far as I knew. But fears of Mikush sprang far less from mythic antagonisms than from the cat-and-mouse game all the boys in the building played with him on the roof. A favorite sport, of which my brother was a master, was to stand up on a parapet and leap across a shaftway to the other side over a drop of six stories. Terrified as I already was of such a drop from my sleepwalking experiences, I could not bear to watch Kermit standing tall on the parapet. Mikush was endlessly popping up out of the hatchway to chase us, not that he cared if one of us went into the abyss, but our heels made holes in the tar roofing material. “No touch-a roof!” he would roar as we dodged him and clattered down the iron stairway into the building. As we flew down into the lower stories, his Polish war yells echoed along the ceramic-tiled floors of the hallways.

Because he was a Pole, the Jews in the building had to believe he hated them just as his countrymen for the most part had in Radomizl, where pogroms and tales of pogroms were woven into the very sky overhead, and where only the Austrian emperor Franz Josef and his army kept the Poles, egged on by their insatiable priests, from murdering every last Jew in the land. But I nevertheless had an ambiguous relation of sorts with Mikush; I brought my badly bent almost-new bike to him after an experiment of no-hands riding banged the front fork into a lamppost in the park. He straightened it with his bare hands, a memorable feat of strength that I imagined no one else in the whole world was capable
of. I must have had some faith in his goodwill toward me, Pole or no Pole; my fear of him was less than total. Such a relationship made it understandable, a decade or so later, that German Jews—even those who could afford to—did not immediately leave when Hitler came to power. Had we lived in Germany, Mikush would likely have been the Nazi representative in the building, but it would have been hard to imagine even Mikush, anti-Semitic as he undoubtedly was, going from apartment to apartment with a list of names and ordering us out into trucks bound for a concentration camp and death. After all, he had straightened the fork of my bike.

Perhaps I was so unprepared, so surprised by my own terror in the library, because of what was to be a lifelong inability to believe that all reality was of the visible kind. We all are taught how to receive our experiences, and my mother, my prime teacher, saw secret signs of other worlds wherever she looked; she was talked to by people far away without benefit of telephone, and even by the dead. As with others so inclined, this gave her, I suppose, an enhanced sense of her importance in the scheme of things and helped make life more interesting. Whatever the cause, I had clearly put out of mind a certain childish recognition of infinite human brutality until suddenly the librarian seemed to challenge me to identify myself as a candidate for victimization, and I fled. I had been taught to recognize danger—even where it did not exist—but not how to defend against it. The dilemma would last a long time. The same quandary, and the effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimization, underlie the political aspect of my play
Incident at Vichy.
But as history has taught, that force can only be moral. Unfortunately.

For me, my mother's mysticism set death lurking everywhere. It has prejudiced me against teaching children religion; too often God is death and it is death that is being worshiped and “loved.” If I learned early on how to disregard her dark and pessimistic surges, the fact was that they too often turned out to be prophetic. Her brother Moe, who had been a mule driver carrying ammunition up to the front in France, returned from a funeral with her one rainy afternoon, and as he sat on the pinkish satin Louis Something straight chair in the living room, she screamed and her hands flew up to her hair: he must immediately go out the apartment door and wipe a smear of gray cemetery mud off one of his heels lest it bring death to this house. They were beautiful brown calf shoes with a white bead around the seam between soles and uppers. He quickly left the living room, limping to keep the heel off the carpet.

In appearance, I would grow up to resemble Moe, a tall, thin man of great gentleness whose spirit the Great War seemed to have broken. It was as though in more than the physical sense he could never quite catch his breath. Even then I noted that joy never seemed to collect around him, even for his wedding there was no great party, no welcoming of his tiny wife, Celia, who was barely five feet tall. He was constantly bending to her as they walked, with one gentle hand against her back as though she were a child. Trying to get with the spirit of the twenties, he made it down to Florida to speculate in real estate, but his nerve soon waterlogged, his investment melting into the sea during a great land boom in which immense fortunes were made and innocents like himself fleeced. All Moe returned with was a nice tan that encouraged my mother to believe that his health was permanently restored, but he was soon back in the Veterans Hospital at Saranac Lake, where he died. The cemetery mud on his shoe could not help but cross my mind, and with it the lurking suspicion of some validity in the superstition. That only my mother knew the rules and regulations tended to leave me with all of the attendant apprehensions and none of the satisfactions of prediction—“I knew,
I knew!”
she wailed when we heard the news of his death.

It was the same when, out of a deep sleep in an Atlantic City hotel where we were spending the High Holidays, she suddenly sat up and said, “My mother died”—which she had, it turned out, and at approximately that hour of the night. Of course, her secret powers were not all negative and would as often send her into prescient highs of optimism, especially about me. I need only draw a straight line to hear myself praised as a coming da Vinci; my failures she simply swept aside as the fault of my teachers or a momentary fogging of my mind. This worked pretty well until Miss Fisher, the principal of P.S. 24, summoned her to a conference about my unruliness.