Timebends (8 page)

Miss Fisher had been the principal when my mother was a pupil in the same school. Holding me by the hand in the office, my mother seemed to blush in girlish shame as her onetime goddess said, “I do not understand, Augusta, how a fine student like you can have brought him up so badly.” Miss Fisher wore a lace net collar with little ivory stays that pushed into the flesh under her jaw hinges and kept her from bending her neck. It was hard to look up at her without grimacing with pain. She was white-haired and wore ankle-length skirts and white long-sleeved blouses with starched pleated fronts. Tears formed in my mother's eyes. “Kermit is such
a well-behaved boy,” the great lady went on, “and so quick in his studies …” I began crying too, already feeling the sting of my mother's hand on the side of my head and imagining the stars I was about to see, but worst of all was her face wracked with disappointment. What was the matter with me? Why was I like this? Dear God, please let me be good like my mother and father and brother! At times like this all life seemed like rowing forever through a sea of remorse.

Between my terror in the library and Miss Fisher's condemnation, I seemed to have joined some underworld of disapproved people. My father and brother lived well beyond the sparkling blue line of demarcation—they were wholly good—but placing my mother was not so simple. We had hardly gotten out onto 111th Street when she violently shook me, holding my wrist, gave me a clout on top of the head with her pocketbook, and then bent over me and screamed into my face, “What are you doing to me!” A double condemnation, since even at that moment I knew she wasn't condemning for her own sake—she adored everything I did—but as an agent for Miss Fisher and implicitly my father and Kermit and the whole United States of America. Thus it was even more painful for her to have to be cursing me when deep within her she thought I hadn't done anything very wrong. And so we were closer than ever as we reentered the apartment and I pretended deep remorse and she pretended black despair, and in a little while we both had some hot chocolate. Only then did a conspiratorial practicality enter her voice as she said, “Listen”—I looked up from my cup—“I want you to behave.” I said, “I'm going to,” and I meant it. And I did, for a while.

Of course there are models, avowed and surreptitious, that we mythologize and make into gods, and in enfolding their attributes into ourselves we muddy whatever character they may have really possessed. My mother's youngest brother, Hymie, was an extremely good-looking young man of no great intelligence or imagination, yet she so loved beauty in women and handsomeness in men that Hymie excited her more than any other relative. In the style of the times he knotted his tie very tight and small, and his collars were so tight that his skin overlapped them, and his hats were tilted over one eye, and when he laughed, his straight white teeth against his swarthy complexion flashed like lights. He had started a small factory to make artificial flowers and brought bouquets of them when he visited. Touching them made me feel itchy, but they were marvelous imitations.

One afternoon he appeared with a thin blonde woman wearing a black fur collar on a white coat, his beloved, he said, his Stella, whom my mother instantly, as I could see, disapproved of. She disapproved of all the wives of all her brothers. Myron's Minnie was fat and short and stupid and wore artificial fruits on her hats and was dumb enough to sleep with her own son just because he was sick with tuberculosis and needed comfort. My mother had never heard of Freud, but she knew there was something funny about this, something disgusting, in fact, and would go around imitating Minnie's whiny way of speaking, frowning intensely and narrowing her nasal passages to sound like a cat. Harry's wife was also far from what he might have had—they had all undervalued themselves in the spouses they picked. Betty had been a dancer in burlesque, and if her beautiful and buxom body was an understandable attraction for mild Harry, he might at least have found somebody more respectable. In fact, mild as he was, Harry had been crazed by this woman, enough to creep into his father's office one night to steal money from the safe.

My mother's dislikes, of course, were merely expressions of her sense of entrapment in her own marriage, and during the second half of her life—after the Depression had laid low every last hope of ever really changing her condition—all these women were transformed into her dearest and closest allies and friends. Minnie might go on sleeping with her son into his twenties, when he married, but her valiant support of her husband after he'd lost his money showed her to be a wonderful person, as the phrase went, and if Betty had danced practically or altogether naked in sleazy halls, her valor during the Depression and after the birth of her first child—a helpless mongoloid whose condition she interpreted as God's admonition, causing her to take up religion—showed that she too was a woman of seriousness and real quality.

Stella had been brought up in an orphanage, which my mother seemed to feel was somehow her own fault. She got Hymie alone one day and demanded that he not sink his whole life with this clearly unworthy mate, who, aside from her obviously bleached hair, was bony-looking and had big feet and hands, horse teeth, an enormous mouth, and a honking baritone laugh. Stella, she naturally assumed, must be pregnant, and when Hymie swore that she was not, the whole liaison became incomprehensible. How could so handsome a man marry an uncomely orphan, and one, moreover, who must be leading a pretty low life—why else would she be so vulgarly dying her hair? Unlike brother Moe, an introverted
man who seemed to search for me in my eyes and made me feel extant, Hymie paid me little attention, being too busy admiring himself in windowpanes or in the glass of the pictures on the walls. His narcissistic self-involvement was not different from that of his father, Louis Barnett, who in the worst months of the Depression, when every cent in his pocket came from my father, who himself had next to nothing, would still stroll down to the barber's every single week to get his little vandyke and mustache properly trimmed and powdered and his bald head sprinkled with perfume. Even the Italian barber thought his vanity a bit much.

Louis was hot stuff, and so was Hymie, but what Hymie had that nobody else did was the ability to shoot bird shot through his front teeth clear across a room while he went right on smiling. This talent must have been honed in the navy, where he had been surrounded with hunter types, of which there would not have been any in Harlem. Hymie's shooting gallery showed up at family celebrations. Both the Barnett and the Miller families were large, and just as a quarter-century later hardly a month would pass without a funeral, so now in the youth-time of this clan there were clumps of weddings and bar mitzvahs to attend. Women wore out evening gowns in those years. Hymie would enter the big ballrooms where these functions were held, his blonde and bony wife cheerfully yelling out her hoarse greetings and whispering things to the men that made them roar with laughter while the women looked at one another with the semi-grins of the left-out, and as he turned in all directions he would gracefully smile. Magically, an epidemic of what seemed to be fleas would erupt around him, with people brushing hands down backs of necks or across foreheads until pretty soon everybody in the ballroom was scratching as they danced or stood around drinking. My mother would rush up to Hymie and pound him on the chest yelling, “Stop it!” but he would plead innocence and kiss her and carry her off to dance, which she loved, and then, as they waltzed, he would smile at the other dancers, who would begin brushing fleas off their faces, driving her into a hysteria of protesting laughter. Hymie could pouch a whole palmful of bird shot in his cheeks, and his aim was perfect. He never hit an eye but did manage to penetrate ears at will, and of course once pinked, people had a tendency to start scratching other places as well. He tried teaching me his art, but I could never master it, so we settled for my learning to blow a fierce whistle with two fingers in my mouth, one of the greatest gifts anyone ever handed me, surely one of the most useful.

Hymie resembled George Raft, the actor-gangster, and I remembered him one afternoon some thirty years later when Raft walked onto the set of
Some Like It Hot
flanked by a few bravos, debonair with the inner tips of his eyebrows cranked up high, his protectors turning left and right with warning looks at any who might menace his life, dignity, or shoeshine. A purely social visit to pass a few words with Billy Wilder, the director of the film, and to eye Marilyn Monroe for a minute or two before turning around and leaving, as completely in charge of the entire world as he had been on his entrance. It was a kind of challenging saunter, as though his arrival had instantly created a situation of top- and underdoggery—much the style Sinatra and Mailer would later affect on entering a crowded room. Hymie had had no bravos to accompany him; he might have, one day, except that at the age of twenty-seven he walked into the drugstore around the corner on Lenox and 111th to order an Alka Seltzer, and when the pharmacist turned around to serve it, he found him lying dead on the floor.

My mother wore a black veil for his funeral and would not allow my brother or me to attend, it being too intimate a proximity with death, especially one so untimely and unjust. Twenty-four hours after the news, she still could not take a full breath without breaking into sobs. Her second young brother dead before reaching thirty. “That goddamned druggist,” she said, fixing the veil over her face as she looked in the mirror of her dressing table, “if he'd served him quicker he'd have saved his life . . .” Later she would concede, reluctantly, that it had probably been a heart attack and not the druggist's fault at all. Still, she could never after be at ease with the man, never again stayed in the store to chat, and she would send me alone to get a dose of sarsaparilla and castor oil, something he was delighted to watch me agonize over and finally drink. (She once also sent me down alone—I was seven at the time—to the dentist, a Dr. Herbert on the ground floor, at two o'clock in the morning when I got a sudden toothache. I rang his bell and he opened his door in his pajamas and looking down saw me in mine and almost without a word shuffled in his slippers into his office, where he turned on the light, motioned me to sit in the chair, took out a pair of forceps, asked, “Which one?” and following my finger, pulled it out. So rapidly did it all happen, with none of the preparatory reassurances and time-consuming, apprehension-feeding preliminaries, that I hardly had time to yell before I was out his door and ringing the elevator button to go back upstairs, where I found everybody fast asleep.)

Stella became a manicurist after Hymie's death, and as a year passed and another with no sign that she wanted to marry again, my mother came to love her deeply, quite as though her noble loyalty were demonstrated. In fact, Stella dealt with countless men in the barbershop and never married and said to me once many years later as I bent forward to get my neck hair cut, “Kid, there was one Hymie and that was it.” As they used to say, a tough broad. She never lost her loud, cynical, wide-mouthed laugh—as though what she was finding funny was the whole world. I lost track of her for decades, until one pessimistic late afternoon in 1961, walking down Broadway at Twenty-fourth Street, I saw a barbershop and was seized with the hopeful idea of a haircut. Looking in the window to check the place out, I was shocked to see what could only be Stella's back, slightly arched at a certain familiar angle of defiance as she conversed with a customer smoking his cigar while his few hairs were being trimmed. I walked in. She did not turn. Now I saw that she had her manicuring tray in one hand. Her hoarse voice, that exciting and embarrassing yappy sound. She had to be nearly seventy by now. My stomach went cold at the thought of her recognizing me. I had only recently separated from Marilyn and could not bear questioning on the subject, which I was sure would fascinate her, but neither could I walk away from one more meeting with Stella. The barber indicated the chair next to where she was standing. I sat in it and quietly said, “Stella?”

Forty years had passed since Hymie's collapse, and now my mother and all the other Barnetts—the only family she had ever had—were dead. And I became aware as she began turning toward me that in my resemblance to the Barnetts I was the last of the line she'd be likely to see. Her face as she turned showed an ironic readiness to banter with another customer, but when she saw who it was, there was a softening around her hard mouth, an instant's loving vulnerability that she quickly banished behind a tough grin. “Arthur,” she said, in a level, comradely voice. My clothes as usual were unpressed, and once again I was overdue for a haircut, so unlike the far worthier Hymie, a man of style and class, who would never be seen in public looking as stale as this. I found myself sharing her doubtless rekindled amazement at life's injustice that the wrong man had been allowed to survive. All the fascinated timidity I had felt in her exotic presence so many years ago returned, and I was at her mercy.

Which she instantly sensed, asking, “What're you doin' around here?” “Here” was a second-rate office area that successful people
fled at five o'clock. Naturally I could not be living in such a neighborhood, which at the time also consisted of seedy apartment houses and a few hotels ranging from ruined to rank.

“I live near here,” I said. Instantly the winds of my social descent went whistling past my ears as I plummeted into oblivion. “In the Chelsea Hotel.”

Her expressions moved through shock, disbelief, amusement, and finally a kind of pity. But at least I was not beneath her very interested notice; I was glad to see the shifting focus of her questioning mind—is he down, broke, hiding out, maybe off his nut? Her steady and absolutely unsentimental gaze humbled me. “I been readin' about it,” she said, referring to the recent breakup of my marriage. I nodded, acknowledging that we were both sitting in the same bath of life. “It's too bad,” she commiserated.