Marian Plumsteel

Poor Stuart Little! A quick snap of the blind has sent it clear to the top and Stuart, crushed inside, is now distinctly uncomfortable, invisible to his parents; the cat Snowball, keeping mum, has helpfully laid out his clothes and walking stick next to the mouse hole in the pantry implying that he has deserted the family to join his own kind. I sympathized. How often had this happened to me when I was dusting. Of course, I was much too big to be lifted off the ground, but I could hear the sound, feel the suddenness and fear of having done irreparable damage, the frustration of being unable to return to the normal peace of a Saturday morning, to being a good girl doing my chores without being asked. If only I could leap for the round pull and yank it down. Stuart’s parents are heartbroken; Snowball paces; what will happen now?

Rereading Stuart Little, mentioned last time, has led me to think of monsters: the child as interloper, aberration, object of ridicule and disgust, like Jane Eyre or Heathcliff. Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel. Regan and Goneril come to mind and with them Lear’s lamentation: how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child. The boy in The Snow Queen who becomes unmanageable when a piece of glass lodges in his eye; Kafka’s Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into some monstrous kind of vermin; a teenage killer in the contemporary film We Need To Talk About Kevin. I’ve put this film on my Netflix list, but will I have the courage to watch it? Mismatched, misplaced, misshapen, born under a caul or malevolent prophecy, bastard, changeling, wild child, step-child, adoptee, neglected orphan, they tumble out, Edmund and Oedipus, bad seed and ugly duckling, as though the writers of these stories have tapped into primal fears best left to myth, to fairy and horror tales. 

In the beginning, Stuart, a mouse born into an ordinary New York family, resembles none of these terrifying children. His parents make haste to accommodate him with a bed made from a cigarette box, a doll-size toothbrush and bar of soap, a small hammer with which to whack the bathroom faucet his mouse paw cannot turn. They go so far as to change mouse to louse in The Night Before Christmas to avoid demeaning their son. For his part, Stuart dives down a fetid drain to retrieve his mother’s ring, rolls lost ping pong balls into view and, risking deafness, unsticks a piano key. A bit of a show-off, perhaps, no more. But is there a child who has not been naughty, who has not been bad? There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. And when she was good she was very, very good, but when she was bad she was horrid. In our house, when I was very young, this little girl was called Marian Plumsteel. “What? Is Marian Plumsteel here?” She seemed to come out of nowhere, taking me and my parents by surprise with her crying, whining, sulking and pouting, bouncing a ball when she had been told not to, disturbing the neighbors downstairs, willful, vengeful, mean. Tricks up her sleeve, this thief with my name, a tough customer. I hated her. The truth of original sin crept up on me as I discarded alternatives. She was no sister, or cousin, or friend, or guest of mine, certainly. I was Marian Plumsteel.

I can imagine the raised eyebrows at this child-rearing technique possibly disturbing, even destructive, to a developing psyche. On the other hand, I believe it fits famous child psychologist Bruno Bettleheim’s theory, put forward in The Uses of Enchantment, that fairy tales, though expressive of anger, violence, and cruelty, far from being harmful to a child’s development, are a necessary part of education because they give shape to the child’s own evil thoughts and help him or her imagine a happy ending. I can remember the energy with which I hated Marian Plumsteel, how passionately I wished her gone. How long did it take me, I wonder, to figure out that I alone could make her go away? Thus did autonomy, again essential according to Bettelheim, point the way to a happy denouement: good behavior. Ernst and I, without much thought, introduced David and Sirene Plumsteel to our children with mixed results. David quickly seized power, but Sirene was angry at us. We, her bad parents, were the cause of misery.

Marian Plumsteel was a hand-me-down, a revenant, the ghost of the aunt I was named after, my father’s sister, killed in her late twenties in an automobile accident six years before I was born. She too had been called Marian Plumsteel long ago, in North Dakota far away. There was mitigation in this for me because I was glad to be named after someone my father had loved, and still loved, very much, my mother explained. His sister’s death had upset him like nothing she had seen or known. Marian Plumsteel pulled me closer to my father, but closer, too, to the rumbling associated with his family. By rumbling I mean dissatisfaction, deprivation, discontent. Separation, divorce, alcoholism, abandonment, sorrow, guilt, and shame. Career moves, foolish and erratic, made on impulse. I mean raised voices in the living room, which my sister and I were not supposed to hear because we were supposed to be asleep. Even soft and tender voices coming from my parents’ bedroom across the hall merged into rumbling, suggesting worlds which lay beyond us, world upon world, I should say, of sex and novels and foreign languages and the theater, camembert cheese and cocktails and smoking too much, international commerce and being on the dole, fluctuations in the flour market, the poor house and being your own boss. D.H. Lawrence perfectly captures the continuous whispering heard by all children (see Henry James’ What Masie Knew) and especially by Paul in his short story, The Rocking Horse Winner: There must be more money! There must be more money! Yet nobody ever said it aloud. The whisper was everywhere, and therefore no one spoke of it. Just as no one ever says: “We are breathing!” in spite of the fact that breath is coming and going all the time.

In due course, as my mother was fond of saying, Marian Plumsteel, having served her purpose, disappeared. Marian Shaw, both self and ally, model and rival, took hold. On the 90^th Street subway platform, in my brown bowler hat and gray spring coat with epaulettes and brass buttons, my sister’s hand in mine, I have an anxious, worried look; my mother, in another photograph, needs a haircut, is no longer stylish as in earlier days of her courtship and marriage. In due course, she had given up her job as a social worker to raise two demanding children. She was our playmate, our plaything. We twisted her head back and forth on the pillow, “Look at me, Mommy, look at me!” There was drudgery in the filthy basement where she did the laundry and on the tarred rooftop where she shoved an apple basket heavy with sodden clothes through a trap door, coming out into a wind swirling with litter and dust. First the depression, then the war. Now, in due course, this: a husband with a troubled past, apprehensive and high strung, who took the phone out to save money, who handed her fifty dollars once and fled down the stairs, who took on the personae of characters in books he read, who came home tight one evening to chase away her sewing circle, who had bounced from J. Berlage and Almendinger, small import-export firms, to Pillsbury Mills, but still wasn’t getting ahead. I don’t know what the matter was exactly, but when people ask me why we moved to Haiti, as they often do, I put it down to rumbling, to restlessness.

While riding his outgrown rocking horse, Paul, in Lawrence’s story, discovers he can predict winning horses at the track; his gift is real, but erratic, and his frenzied zeal to provide for his selfish, unloving parents, kills him. There must be as many stories of bad parents as of bad children and a little of both in each of us, no doubt. Some critics find that Regan and Goneril seek no more than vengeance on a pompous, spoiled, and bossy father, who paid them no attention when they were little. Even Lear’s adored Cordelia will not cater to him, say she loves him outright. I have read that Bruno Bettelheim, too, with all his theories, failed as a father, was accused of child abuse in his practice, died a suicide. In our apartment, the rumbling was no more than a low hum, discontinuous and hard to follow. I felt it here and there, wondered if they were getting a divorce, and fell asleep again. Just as often, I registered the high notes, the lifting of spirits that came with the tutor and red Portuguese grammar books as my father prepared for a trip to South America as interpreter for Philip Pillsbury, president of the company. To us, Phil Pill.

Lace tablecloths, ice cream suits, palm trees and wooden shutters, ice buckets, dark women with shoulder pads and curly hair, and one of the customers is a bit pudgy, and so is Phil Pill, but my father looks handsome, relaxed and smiling, making hand gestures, his long legs stretched out, showing a bit too much sock, perhaps. And from Recife in February, 1948, he writes of touring the red light district in Belem with Phil whom he hasn’t yet dared to call by his first name. They indulged in a beer. An innocent abroad, he notes that Brazil is a man’s country, that American and English girls look pasty; more attractive are those of mixed race to be found, he adds significantly, in all the best hotels. I think back to a time almost before my own when air travel was still unusual for middle class people, when over the airwaves for the first time came mambo and rhumba, Latin songs like Besame Mucho and Perfidia, and everyone knew Carmen Miranda from the movies. Like Fred Astaire, my father was flying down to Rio. To Recife, Belem, Fortaleza, Sao Paulo, Venezuela and Surinam. In photographs, he brought it all back to us, in purple-veined shells and red paper flowers, in dolls with black and brown skin with baskets on their heads, in a lustrous alligator bag for my mother, in the dizziness of pronouncing Parimaribo, treasure spilling out of suitcases into a winter night in Queens. My sister and I, allowed to stay up late to welcome him home, were wearing our quilted bathrobes, new at Christmas I remember. My father returned from South America full of pep, as he liked to say. Our car might be full of pep on a given day. Or not. But pep was in the mix now: in a heap of trinkets, in the power of speaking in foreign tongues, in the glamor of being called Mel, Portuguese for honey, in the good money a Pillsbury agent could make, in a vision of the future somewhere out of this world.

By 1950, we were saying good-bye to the Empire State building and the Statue of Liberty, to the lions in front of the Library. For it was not as though we had not made conquest of East Side, West Side, Battery and Bronx. We got haircuts at Best and Company on Fifth Avenue, picked out dolls we wanted for Christmas at Macy’s on 34^th Street, stood cold in line to see the organ rise from the pit and the Rockettes on stage at Radio City, opened compartments with nickels at the Automat, sampled leaf-shaped, chocolate-covered cookies at Rumplemeyer’s. My father and I, since it was my luck to be the right age when he felt most cooped up in the apartment, had skated on the ice in Central Park and in the shadow of Atlas at Rockefeller Center, ridden a bicycle–built-for-two like Daisy in the song, made a record in Times Square, explored the Museum of Natural History and the Met, where we saw the original of our Renoir copy, Madame Georges Charpentier et Ses Enfants. On the promise of kittens, as many as we wanted, I was willing to throw it all away: sidewalks, bright lights and speed, department stores with whizzing pneumatic message systems, elevators with uniformed operators, going up, going down, my nose pressed against perfumed sable and mink. Without complaint, I gave up pizza and doughnuts, lamb chops and Idaho potatoes, Technicolor and television, hot running water, my winter coat in soft tweed with maroon velvet collar and iridescent lining, my New York accent, my very self.

Kafka and E. B. White persuade us of the intrusion of strangeness into ordinary lives through an even-handed profusion of detail: Gregor Samsa is both cockroach, his plated body and pathetic legs fluttering in the air, who cannot turn over, and middle-European traveling salesman with cloth samples to prove it, parents and sister cowering in the next room, a seductive picture of a young woman on his bedroom wall. Stuart Little may be tiny and vulnerable, a mouse complete with tail and whiskers, but he is a New Yorker through and through. Dapper, with fine blue suit, pocket handkerchief, and walking stick, he traverses a familiar Manhattan landscape where doormen stand in front of apartments, garbage scows plow the East River, miniature sailboats compete on a lake in the Park. When Gregor can no longer participate in their bourgeois routines, his parents isolate and torment him (his father is particularly brutal) until he weakens and dies. But Stuart, presumed dead, is released from the window shade by his human brother George who piously pulls it down out of respect. Stuart moves on to new adventures, yet he remains in my mind a thankless child who leaves home without a thought for his devoted parents, bound to fret over and miss him. Even Snowball, who refrains from killing Stuart for this reason, calls himself a guest in the Little household. My father, too, was a thankless child. As a teenager and young man, he played his divorced parents off against each other, dropped out of college, ran off to New York and later to Haiti. His father and sister were dead by then; his mother, whom he never saw again, died poor and lonely in Seattle.

My parents were 47 and 44 when we left New York, not young by the standards of the time. They had been married for 17 years when they decided to burn their bridges, as my father puts it, leaving a secure job with a pension plan for the dubious rewards of self-employment in an unstable and mysterious black republic in the Caribbean Sea. From Port-au-Prince where he was looking for a house to rent, swallowing advice from Howat, dour Scotsman and retiring agent who got him down, suffering intestinal upset, worrying about expenses, discovering Haiti’s unique charms, my father sent letter after letter, urgent to the point of hysteria, contradictory as to what documents to secure, what to bring, what not to bring, enough to drive my mother crazy. He tells her he doesn’t know what the temperature is, that thirty-five centimes is seven cents, that she should slip him some sleeping pills. But above all, his letters tell how much he wants and needs her. Park the kids, he writes, concocting a fantasy in which they could spend a month alone together in a hotel making up their minds. Please write me every day or two if you possibly have time, and I will do the same.

Are happy families all alike, as Tolstoy declares in the first sentence of Anna Karenina? Insofar as they are able to tolerate risk, welcome strangers, absorb the natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and create elastic love, I believe they are. My sister and I would live to see the gutted building, now a museum, a crater on the banks of the Mississippi, formerly Pillsbury Mills. But for a brief golden time, we were going to be daughters of its agent in Haiti, ti blancs with freckles, aliens, stingy and ugly; we were going to learn to swim and to speak French. It was going to be a wonderful life.

Again After Pamuk: The Inside Story

In the anteroom to the lobby at 3760 88^th Street, Jackson Heights, New York, is a mat to wipe feet on and a row of shiny brass mail boxes. The key my mother uses to open ours seems magical to me, the feel of it, impossibly flat and thin. The lobby has a kind of faded, spacious grandeur, one or two benches covered in maroon or red velvet, dark polished floor. No one sits here, no one hangs out.  In the center is the Super’s apartment, imposing, up a couple of steps; the building’s two wings open dim and cavernous on either side; there are two hidden sets of stairs, twin elevators. We seldom visit the “other” side, but our pediatrician, Dr. Lally, has his ground floor office there, my friend Phyllis lives there, and Anita Seitz and her son Kevin. Is there a Mr. Seitz? I have an idea they are divorced. The Graves family lives there too. I have seen Bob, back from the War in his uniform, know Kitty and their daughters Margaret, who sometimes babysits, and Eleanor, my age. They gave us our cat, Velvet, a male with white paws, but I just assume he is a girl cat because I am a girl. It was exciting to pick Velvet out from the litter of gray Maltese kittens, the floor streaked with sunshine, and one was called Buttons because of three white spots on her stomach, but we rejected the one with six toes.

To get to our apartment, we must turn right. By we, I mean the four of us, Melville, Marguerite, Marian, and Libby (Elizabeth) Shaw, in any combination, and I jumble the years (1944-1949) and our ages deliberately in this memory. On our way to the elevator we pass the Sullivans and the Abells. The white marble stairs under which bicycles are stored without locks are faster, but they are cold and uninviting. My father sings and whistles in the elevator. He talks to people, even to people he doesn’t know, and once a woman tells him I look like Veronica Lake. It’s the way my blond hair is falling over one eye, not because I really look like this movie star who is not one of my favorites. She is too knowing, too sexy, not one my mother admires, Barbara Bel Geddes, for example, or Myrna Loy. Smoothly we ride past the second floor, where Penny Ingles lives, and the Reynolds family. Owen is older, but I play with Bebe, short for Beatrice, who will become a nun; little Patricia is my sister’s friend. And here we are home again, as my father often says when we return from some excursion to apartment 3M.  Mrs. Fisher, as nosy and pushy as my mother says she is, lives across the hall with her seldom seen husband and teenage daughter Evelyn. Silent, shadowy, black-haired Evelyn, wherever she is, dead though she may be, I thank her for her gift to me of a book she no longer cared about, my first Beverly Gray mystery. Next door to us lives Josephine Kaiser, a retired nurse from upstate, who gives off a powdery smell masking something else, who puts her dresses on inside out. Kyky is a dear friend and help to my mother, though she goes overboard when she tells us she will get sick and die if we don’t learn to pick up our room. Kyky is the best kind of babysitter who checks on us and goes home, telling us to knock on the wall if we need her.

We enter the foyer, kitchen to the right, a longish hall. Here is the coat closet and another with shelves where Christmas and birthday surprises are kept; here is the telephone table with its bright glass knobs, red cloth on top. From here we can backwards somersault to the end of the living room where the Christmas tree goes, or reenact endlessly the opening scene of Little Women (1949) in which Jo (June Allyson) leaps over a fence, in our version a small stool which belongs in our bedroom. The neighbors downstairs, who never have names but are always the Neighbors Downstairs, complain about this and about my mother’s running the sewing machine at night to make clothes for us and our dolls, about her letting every child in the neighborhood in to play, but my mother holds her head high. This is one of her expressions, one of her ways. Shy and self-conscious as a girl, she has by now developed remarkable presence, my mother.

On fair days, the living room is bright with windows at the far end, a burgundy couch, and flowered upholstery on the wingback chair. The living room is where we read and are read to, where we pretend with Let’s Pretend, and the red head of Mary Queen of Scots rolls on You Are There; where radiators bang and hiss in winter, where we listen to the Nutcracker Suite with words that will never leave my head; where Little Women continues, and I perfect falling to the ground gracefully, though not without noise, as I play Amy’s (Elizabeth Taylor in a blond wig) part in Jo’s melodrama: Roderigo! Save me, save me! In the living room on Saturday nights we listen to Frank Sinatra, always begging for five minutes more on the Hit Parade where Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco, while my mother rolls up our wet hair, glorified by Halo, on mismatched socks, softer to sleep on than curlers. On nights like these, I am unaware of any restlessness, of any sense that my parents might wish to spend their Saturday evenings in a different way, out to dinner and a local movie, say, or rattling into Manhattan for a night on the town. And I explain to myself that they couldn’t afford it, or at least not often, banishing the thought that Ernst and I were less contented with, less devoted to family life than they were.

But, of course, when my grandparents come to visit, they take them out for Chinese, not worth ten cents for a carload, my grandfather says, and to see the musical Oklahoma, which belongs to us because that’s where my mother’s parents live, where she grew up, went to the University, majored in English, flunked swimming, and snickered at jokes about being hit on the Oval, OU’s answer to a quad. Soon after, I can walk to privies in the rain, lust after fat, pink, pretty girls who go about as far as they can go. I can practice saying no, being in love, or being dead like poor Judd, his fingernails clean at last. It’s a revolving stage, our living room, never more than now, revolving in my mind. It fills with cigar smoke and Spanish when my father entertains Escobar, a big customer from Venezuela, who arrives with dolls we name Esther and Annabelle for my sister and me. Small cocktail parties sometimes after Libby and I have gone to bed, but in the morning we sample the dregs, fishing out maraschino cherries, what luck, becoming adventurous, tipsy. The Graves family comes for an evening. Glowing lamps, bowls of peanuts, tomato juice for the children, but I am being punished. I imagine the scene in the dark from my bedroom. I see it all, it’s better than being out there. I find peace of mind in pretending and fall asleep happy.

But we have somersaulted past the kitchen. A quick list because otherwise I cannot bear it, leaving anything out, that is. The kitchen is where we open pheasants packed in smoking dry ice sent by hunters, our Oklahoma uncles; where my mother puts up a gate when she scrubs the floor, her hair tied up in a kerchief giving her a second set of pointed ears; where the enamel-topped table sits with its dangerous drawer full of knives; where the open dumbwaiter allows us to hear things and smell things going on in other kitchens; where the refrigerator is the icebox, round motor on top, raw liver inside for Velvet who refuses to eat cat food until he gets it; where we learn to cook scrambled eggs and bacon and baking powder biscuits by ourselves for breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day.  At dinner, we are not in the tiny dinette on the other side of the stove, bare bulb overhead, but in my father’s office with the exasperating secretary who does nothing but shrug her shoulders and Jean McGibbon, another one, but she’s in love with Charlie McVeigh. Paniagua, whose funny name means bread and water, says, He cannot come to the phone right now, he is answering a call of nature. He actually says that into the phone, in the New York office, in the export division of Pillsbury Mills, can you imagine? We can, we can! We know him, this crazy Cuban, who says embarrassing things on the telephone, and all the others who become real while my father prepares his baked potato, mashing it smooth in the skin with salt and butter and just enough pepper. But then we want it. It’s perfect, it’s a work of art, it really is. So he gives it to someone and starts over, but the other half is cold by now and will never be the same. The human garbage pail, he calls himself.

We sing as we do the dishes, my father and I. This is how it falls out, the way the family is divided: Libby is Mommy’s baby while I am Daddy’s girl. I stand on a stool, a dishtowel tied around my waist, as we make our way through the fight songs: Illinois, Wisconsin, Georgia Tech, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and more. My father and I are fellows, a couple of rambling wrecks, as we turn the ball around Chicago, crash on through that line of blue, pausing to breathe, rah, rah, rah, we are dead sure to win. It is all about honor and glory and soap suds sliding down slippery glasses, about happy hours and careless days coming to an end so suddenly now, just as they did when it was bath time followed by bedtime. Somehow we manage to steal it, that sliver in between. And like Columbia’s lion we roar, Naked, naked, five touch the kitchen floor! We are gleaming, my sister and I, damp still, and without a stitch, as we race, one behind the other, out of the bathroom, into the small space between the two bedrooms, through the living room, down the long hall, quick swipe of the black and white linoleum, back to the hall in reverse. And again. And again, shouting, Naked, naked, five touch the kitchen floor! 

How many times do we do this? Over what period of days, weeks, months? Are we two and six? Three and seven? Four and eight? And what about the accompaniment, the nameless march my mother sits at the out of tune piano to play by heart? The piano not good enough for the lessons we cannot afford. Why and when does this begin, and where is my father, because he is part of this scene, observing his escape artist daughters, his offspring, these savages. What can any of it mean? It’s a little embarrassing, a little too intimate, because we are grown up now. Like Adam and Eve, we have tasted the apple and know we are naked.

Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again. So thinks Mrs. Ramsey, mother of eight, in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Plaintive, guilty for having brought her children into life which she views as hostile, terrible, ready to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. And so it is. Mrs. Ramsey dies suddenly and young, as do two of her children, beautiful Prue in childbirth and Andrew, blown up in France during World War I. My sister and I are more than grown up, we are old. Old and lucky, but hardly unacquainted with the relentlessness of life. Once, though, as we chased through the house chanting nonsense, refusing to be stuffed into pajamas, to be human, we put a stop to it. I would not say with Woolf that we were happy. I’ve been happier since and hope to be again. But never so free, never again so connected, to my sister, to my parents, to everything in the room. To the copy of a Renoir which depicts us, two little girls in frilly dresses sitting on a sofa with their mother, only their dogs are lacking; to the phonograph, not long since the Victrola, to the music of Oklahoma and the Nutcracker Suite, to the sound of the cello in Rusty in Orchestraville, a birthday present from Peter Abell downstairs, the brittle 78s slipped safely now into their brown paper jackets, their album covers closed; to the wingback chair with its flowered upholstery, to the window sills I dust, to the round pull cord wound with thread, exactly like the one in Stuart Little, to the radiators and the fire escape, all part of our interior and permanent unity, all encoded in the war cry we will recognize as long as we live.

Read to, sung to. Only make believe I love you. It’s only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sky. Tucked in. The day is over, though many of our toys have not been picked up. They spill out of the closet onto the two child-size rocking chairs, table and stools, onto the floor. The room is too small for us, the closet and bureau drawers crammed with blouses with peter pan collars, with our jumpers, our leggings, snowsuits, and stocking caps, our cable knit sweaters, our dresses with puffed sleeves and sashes, with sailor collars and set-in yokes, trimmed with eyelet threaded with ribbon, with smocking and rick rack and applique, made of cotton, velvet, pique, and dotted Swiss. We have oxfords, red sandals, and patent leather Mary Janes, pocket books and shoulder bags, bowlers, berets, black watch plaid Scottish soldier’s caps with ribbons down the back, straw hats stiff-brimmed and floppy. We have organdy pinafores trimmed in lace in which we look like angels.  Shadows of the evening, bedposts, shape of a car, steal across the ceiling and, framed by my window, across an alley in another building, the last thing I see before I fall asleep is another family with two sisters just like us, but they must be older because they go to bed later, and they sleep in twin beds, not a double like ours. Every night their mother tucks them in. Every night she kisses them, first one and then the other, in their soundless, orderly room. This pantomime, this universal shadow play of lights being put out in apartment houses all over New York, has become for me the prayer we have outgrown, stopped saying: If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Thanksgiving Omelette

During our years in Jackson Heights, we exchanged Thanksgiving dinners with my parents’ old friends, Joe and Eleanor McMahon, and their expanding family. When it was our turn, we set up a table with extra leaves in the living room, but the McMahons lived in a spacious house in Malverne, Long Island, where children had rooms of their own, so we could spend the weekend. As I moved from five to six, to seven, and on up to ten, I made sure to observe closely and listen intently in order to fathom the inner workings of a family not my own. Jackson Heights mothers were not keen to let neighbors in; children were sent out to play. Standing in the hallway in front of a friend’s door, I had to make do with bad lighting, music from a radio, disembodied voices, cooking smells, not nearly enough to go on.

Eleanor McMahon came from Corning upstate and from money, or at least from people somehow superior to Joe’s who were not talked of. She had thin, fading red hair and a true humpback. This could happen to me if I failed to stand up straight. She was not soft and affectionate like my mother; something had soured her. And yet romance stirred the air, for my parents had known this couple since before either pair was married; Manhattan courtships were sometimes reviewed. While struggling in law school, Joe used to take Eleanor home on the subway, so tired that he often missed his stop to wake up at the end of the line, a long ride back to his own neighborhood in the middle of the night. This touching figure was somehow the same menacing Joe, an attorney for Republic Pictures with a photograph of himself astride Trigger, who shouted, “I’m taking off my belt,” at the slightest infraction, sliding the tip slowly back toward the buckle to prove it, who got angry every Thanksgiving because someone, my father perhaps, dared to ask for more turkey before he’d even sat down or carved a slice for himself.

The McMahons had four children: Mary Ellen, Tommy, Margy (Margaret), and Kathy (Kathleen). The reason for this was that they were Catholics who practiced something called the rhythm method which evidently didn’t work. I could see that my parents found four children excessive, the rhythm method ridiculous, but I was impressed with the seriousness of Catholic life. Mass was not something that could be skipped as our family might decide to go to Central Park Zoo instead of church, or simply to stay home and read the papers. Being a Catholic required thinking ahead as to who was going to which Mass and whether Tommy was on that Sunday as an altar boy; all four children were named for saints and would later take on another saint’s name; there was Catechism with its easy answers to weighty questions to be learned; Mary Ellen crossed herself and knelt to say her evening prayers, the ceiling in her bedroom dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars. Still, Catholics did not always behave well. Just look at the way they treated Rita Donnelly, a psychiatric social worker and close mutual friend. Rita, so lively, who had set their table on a roar by asking some blind date if he didn’t think the Mexican situation was simply fraught with interest, who was Mary Ellen’s godmother after all. Gone, stricken from their lives and from the sacraments, because she married a divorced man. No amount of hocus-pocus could make this right in my parents’ view. But then, my mother disapproved of Rita too, because she always introduced her child as her adopted daughter, a fact, but why call attention to it? It was bound to make Marjorie feel insecure, my mother thought, and didn’t say much for Rita’s profession.

It seemed to me that parents had more fun than children at these Thanksgivings. Our parents could smoke and drink highballs and Manhattans; I don’t remember wine. They could indulge in sexual innuendo, snide remarks, inside jokes, gossip, religion, politics. Now in their early forties, they had their long-standing friendship and the past to fall back on, while my sister and I were outnumbered extras at best. The McMahon household was at once more chaotic, what with four rambunctious children and Joe’s belt about to come off, and more rigid than ours. Margy fell out a second story window; a large hole had to be cut in the bathroom door when Tommy locked himself in. But although Long Island felt less safe in some ways than Jackson Heights, I chafed under certain family rules to which I was very much unused. Mary Ellen and I stood for hours it seemed washing dishes; the other girls were all too young, and Tommy got away with murder because he was a boy. Exciting TV programs we were allowed to watch in the basement rec room might suddenly be deemed unsuitable, snapped off without warning, no arguments allowed. Orange juice and a bowl of oatmeal came first at breakfast. Only after these had been swallowed could any child have a piece of the round coffee cake with a hole in the middle, or one of the soft sweet buns with crumbs on top steaming in the covered metal warmer. The top was battered and the pastries from Bohak’s were nothing special, but desirous as I was I never tasted any, because I stubbornly refused to eat my, by this time, cold, lumpy, and truly disgusting oatmeal. My mother never rescued me, though she did pick my sister up off the floor where she had resorted to the cat’s dish. Muffy was a large tabby with a bell on her collar. No doubt she lived the promiscuous outdoor life our apartment-bound Velvet fancied for himself.

It was at one of these Thanksgivings in 1947 or ‘48 that Hamlet buzzed his way into my life. The grown-ups were all agog. The big city beckoned, which was something in itself according to my father, who sometimes grumbled that the McMahons had sold out to suburbia. Though I thought they were crazy, I loved the feeling, the arousal I sensed but couldn’t make sense of. The McMahon living room was alive with anticipation of a ham omelette, and only Melville and Eleanor would partake of this meal. Marguerite and Joe were staying home with the children. That was it. They went, they came back; we were home again the next day. I kept the mystery inside, never asked a question, and soon enough discovered what a fool I had been. In fifth grade, Hamlet was a movie with the handsome young Laurence Olivier, light on his feet in spite of his heavy burdens, and at last in high school a tragedy by Shakespeare. O, that this too, too solid (or was it sullied?) flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, I memorized, thinking that Hamlet was making rather too much fuss. Easy as it was to put aside the embarrassing omelette theory, I never let go of what I had no name for, what I could only call something electric, something else. It had to do with the scene in the living room, with Melville and Eleanor, Marguerite and Joe.

Fast forward to Idlewild airport, 1962.My mother and sister, on their way to El Salvador, flash their shiny black diplomatic passports. My father is waiting for them down there having gone ahead to take up his new post as Commercial Attache for the U.S. Embassy. Here, too, is Joe McMahon, somewhat subdued, bashful even, come to see my mother off. And here am I, observer and extra once again, not going with them because I have planned a trip around Lake Superior with some Shipley friends, to be followed by a summer waitress job at the Shepherd Tea Room in Providence, not entitled to a diplomatic passport since I am over twenty-one. It’s like old times, they’re drinking Manhattans, and that’s when I see that they were swingers avant la lettre, long, long before the word was coined, before the film Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice in which Ernst and I will see (two scant years after our elopement in 1967 at the end of the Summer of Love) versions of ourselves and our friends, much to chew on at Emilio’s on Melrose in the protagonists’ very booth. What I had detected long ago and still saw flickering in the airport bar was nothing more than a flirtatious undercurrent, an unconsummated sexual attraction and form of love – as good an introduction to Hamlet as any I can think of.

For love and lust, commingled and separate, real and imagined, sanctioned and illicit, in imagery and metaphor, in young and old, are everywhere in Hamlet. Doddering Polonius, in sympathy with what he perceives as Hamlet’s mad passion for Ophelia, remembers crushes in his youth very near this. He sends Reynaldo to spy on his son Laertes whom he suspects of whoring in Paris; his daughter Ophelia is more, he implies, than a green girl. Where indeed did she learn that filthy song? And why does the Queen give the long purples, which grow along the glassy stream in which Ophelia drowns, a grotesque phallic emphasis? When Ophelia, mindful of warnings from both father and brother that Hamlet is not serious, returns his favors, Hamlet advises her to head for a nunnery (slang word for whore house at the time), lays a terrible curse upon her chastity. In company, before the play within a play begins, he makes obscene cracks at her expense, which the poor girl counters gamely instead of accusing him of sexual harassment. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make love to their base employment, old Fortinbras is impotent, Claudius an incestuous beast who finds the Queen, in whom the heyday of the blood is far from tame, so conjunctive to his life and soul that he hesitates to make a move against the son she loves. On top of all this, there’s Hamlet’s so-called Oedipus complex, of which everyone has heard, enacted on the enormous bed which so often appears in the closet scene. 

Only Hamlet’s love for his father and his hesitant and tender expression of feeling for his friend and confidant Horatio, whom he wears in his heart of hearts, can be described as wholesome. Hamlet is the ultimate anti-Thanksgiving drama. Family and friends do not gather in Elsinore to celebrate a national holiday. They are summoned and, in the case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, paid to attend. Horatio alone makes a free visitation upon learning of Hamlet’s father’s untimely death and the remarriage of his mother to his Uncle Claudius which followed hard upon. Hamlet quickly learns that Claudius, whom his prophetic soul has always distrusted without quite knowing why, has murdered his father and usurped the throne, that Ophelia will have no more of him, that Denmark under Claudius is foul and rotten, a nation of drunkards with stomachs for war. Ungrateful Hamlet refuses the cheer and comfort offered by his mother and Claudius and retires to lament his fate: O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right!

Presumably, Claudius, the Queen, and their obsequious flatterers sit down off- stage to banquets, but Hamlet wittily suggests to Horatio that his mother’s hasty hook-up with Claudius was a good excuse thriftily to serve the cold leftover funeral meats at the marriage tables. This is the beginning of a barrage of food imagery, sometimes funny, but negative in the extreme. Hamlet’s father was poisoned during a peaceful siesta in his orchard. The life-giving garden of the earth has gone to seed, things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. A quick thumb-through of the text will uncover garbage, vomit, guts, gall, offal, carrion, a single indigestible nutshell, likewise an eggshell, exhumation through marble jaws, poison, curdled milk, candied tongues, vulgar salads, overfed capons, surfeit of  caviar, unripe fruit. Hamlet’s gorge would certainly rise at the American custom of eating and drinking too much at Thanksgiving. Rich, fatty foods and flab, associated in his mind with the lower animals, as well as with overweening power, greed, and lust, are abhorrent to him; he himself, he informs Claudius, dines not on the exotic crocodile he proposes to Laertes, but on air, the chameleon’s dish. Maggots eat their fill and multiply in Hamlet, as does Death. Polonius, dead, is at supper where a certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him, and young Fortinbras, last man standing next to Horatio, noting the pile-up of corpses at his feet, speaks of the feast Death can look forward to later.

I hope I haven’t ruined your Thanksgiving dinner. With luck, it will be fully digested by the time you read this. I do tend to be swept away by the many parallels I find between our age and Hamlet’s; each rereading confirms me in the thought that I am Hamlet, that Hamlet is Everyman in a text which contains the riddle of the world complete with answer key. Like Hamlet, we must leave the garden of childhood, separate from our parents, who surprise us with their sexuality, get divorced, remarry someone we don’t like, die and make us orphans. The world we inherit is corrupt, polluted with toxins, false friends, lovers who betray us, evil heads of state among other villains, and when we look at ourselves we may think as Hamlet does that, since we are the quintessence of dust, it would be better had we not been born. We howl and complain, grow self-absorbed and self-righteous, tell each other stories. We sink into depression and dementia, seek vengeance, take to drink, run mad, stab wildly in the dark (think WMD), become the enemy we seek to destroy, make cannon fodder of our children, commit self-slaughter.  At Thanksgiving, though, we pull ourselves together to get the dinner on. Under the holiday spell, we clean the house, buy flowers, bake pies, exchange recipes, invite people without partners or family in town (perhaps a little less than kin, but in spirit more than kind), make provision for food allergies, vegetarians, and raw foodists, pretend to like marshmallows on our sweet potatoes, welcome ethnic twists on old traditions, put up with in-laws, bores, and boors. So what if death is common, Thanksgiving seems to say, so what if that first feast with the Indians amid tough alien corn is more myth than history? Let’s hope they smoked together a peace pipe at least. Let be, says Hamlet at the end of the play. He says it twice.

Marguerite and Melville, Eleanor and Joe are dead now (Alas, poor Yorick!), their children scattered. As long as they were alive, I had news from time to time of Mary Ellen, who was never quite my friend. We tolerated each other, a good thing to learn how to do. I heard she got divorced and married a second time, which must have been painful to everyone. Mary Ellen was a prickly child; her sash was always dragging because she couldn’t stand to have it tied around her waist. Her father called her a lemon, but I have every confidence that Joe and Eleanor could not have cast her out whatever breach of Catholic doctrine may have been involved, just as I believe with Fortinbras, ascendant to the throne, that Hamlet, had he been put on, would have proved most royal. At those Thanksgivings with the McMahons, adjusting to foreign ways, decoding adult behavior, figuring out that Joe wasn’t really going to beat us, I felt my way forward into a larger philosophy; there were more things in heaven and earth than I could dream of.

After Pamuk: Street Museum, New York, Part I

This week, transported in a state of rapture to Istanbul circa 1975, I have been reading Orhan Pamuk’s novel, The Museum of Innocence. It is, on the surface, the story of a doomed love of Shakespearean proportions, of lovers in a repressive society who misread the nature of love, themselves, each other, and their circumstances. As the narrator Kemal readily admits, his love is obsessive to the point of tedium, incomprehensible to his family and friends, even to himself; yet he spends (wastes?) his life collecting and fondling objects tawdry, sentimental, and pathetic touched by or associated with his beloved Fusun. As Kemal builds his collection little by little, Pamuk displays to the reader the whole of Istanbul, its streets, food, restaurants, cinemas, its movie stars, the inner workings of its film industry, its seasons and vacation spots, its residents’ habits and habits of mind, its whore houses and funerals, all caught between Europe and Asia, between traditional Turkish wisdom and received ideas of the modern West.

I believe I write from an impulse similar to Pamuk’s in attempting to recreate my childhood in New York.  Certain details must not be lost. I must hoard and surround them. Pile it on, get it down. I must empty my pockets and do the laundry. Perhaps what I really want is to get rid of the past, to free myself.  At the end of her life, when she hardly knew what she was saying, my mother was preoccupied with a slight she had suffered, a put-down by the son of the dentist for whom her father was a chauffeur. This boy, this rich boy, thought himself superior because he had a Flexible Flyer, apparently state of the art for sleds in Des Moines, Iowa, 1913, and she did not. These two sleds, the Flexible Flier and her own red sled, my mother had been lugging around with her for some 90 years. What she needed was a place to put them, a museum in which they could be shown off, appreciated for what they meant to her and for their larger social, economic, even moral implications.

Pamuk’s literary conceit suggests that things and their meanings can be preserved in word artifacts if the collector is willing to take pains, even to devote his life to the gathering. Pamuk’s narrator treasures the very cigarette butts stubbed out by Fusun which many years later yet retain her scent, her gestures, even her mood on a certain evening. The task as he conceives it is daunting. Already, I have forgotten the name of the brat who taunted my mother. She pronounced it to me many times but, not seeing that it would be important to me later, I neglected to record it. No ideas but in things. Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost. Thus do such different writers as William Carlos Williams and Henry James encourage us to be collectors, and there is some comfort in the thought that it’s all there somewhere, though irretrievable, in our capacious brains.

How is it that a red sled persists in its obstinate existence, while my Manhattan address has been lost? Did I live at 252 E. 105^th Street where my parents’ wedding announcement tells me they were first at home?  Could the Open Stair Dwelling they spoke of with nostalgia have been so far uptown? Google keeps mum, refers me to an unromantic building code. With 3760 88^th Street, Jackson Heights, Queens, I must be content. Between Roosevelt Avenue, close at hand, and 37^th Avenue, a long block down, too far to see.  North and south mean nothing so long as I remember my name and address and can repeat Havemeyer 6-8420. But I am never lost because here is the whole of the world. Roosevelt Avenue, the elevated train rattling overhead, is the important intersection, the whistle-blowing policeman on the corner its guardian who “crosses” me on my way to P.S.89 and back from choir practice and Brownies at Community Methodist church, at dusk, in a haze of powdered sugar and raspberry jam, the last piece of the Linzer cookie purchased at Cushman’s bakery still in my hand. It is red light stop, geen light go as I learned very young to instruct my father in the car.

In the grim opening paragraph of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne sets down a prison, black flower of civilized society, he calls it. He also mentions church and cemetery as among the first concerns of settlers in their efforts to fend off the wilderness which lies beyond. I can recall no prison or police station in Jackson Heights, no graveyard. Instead our church members formed a garden club and for wilderness there was a vacant lot, one patch of earth, reserved for sledding or for digging holes, on which no cement had been laid down, no building rose. Denizens of Jackson Heights in the mid-to-late forties were not punishers, but indulgent getters and spenders, bent on post-war pleasures. From earliest days, I was aware of church and school, of Manhattan, the Bronx Zoo, Long Island, Jones Beach and Far Rockaway, New Jersey, and Connecticut, outliers all, not to be compared to Strom’s, out the double doors, turn right, walk to the corner, where I was sometimes sent for milk and bread, and once at least returned with nothing, possessed by a dream or some book I’d been reading.

Strom’s had salami and cheese, roast beef for sandwiches, free standing cutouts of long-legged blonds, Miss Rheingold contestants, maybe someday I could be one; the floor was crowded with cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schlitz; flies buzzed in summer and the screen door banged. Just opposite, across 88th street, was the Dinner Bell (why did we never eat there?) where women with baby carriages and strollers lined up to gossip. Left for a few minutes among them to mind my sister, I almost tipped her over by rocking the carriage vigorously back and forth from the tip of her pointed pink cap. Witches who were not my mother puffed up and scolded me; I was a bad girl, a bad big sister. And sometimes I was, but not that day. Around the corner on Roosevelt was Maxie’s: marble-topped soda fountain, squirts of seltzer, paper cone cups on metal stands, comics (forbidden), movie magazines, wax teeth and lips, Tootsie Rolls, Necco wafers, multi-colored or mint-flavored Lifesavers, gum drops, candies shaped like bananas, but pale orange and sickening, lollipops, Dixie cups and ice cream cones, Hershey bars, Mounds and Mars bars, Dentine and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum to be spit out. Did I want to look like a cow chewing her cud? Staggering choices. For pennies! And for a little more, balls of every size and kind, attached to paddles with elastic strings, tops, jacks, and tiddlywinks, toy cars and Kewpie dolls, trapeze artists made to perform by squeezing two sticks, pinwheels and yoyos sent spinning round the world or out to walk the dog. All, all to become boring, to be lost, broken, discarded, and forgotten, until their attraction renewed itself, and it was thrill to buy them all over again.

Next to Maxie’s was a bar, with bubbly stained glass windows, with stale reek of beer and whiskey, too dark to see what or who was in there even in the daytime when they swept the place out and washed the floor with ammonia. I knew my father stopped there sometimes on his way home from work, probably more often than I realized, and took me inside once when I was two years old. I could never quite get the tone in which he and my mother told how some Irishman had offered $2000 for me. There was pride in it and definitely the implication that the offer was tempting, also that this was an amusing story, though there was something wrong, even outrageous, about it. Sweet-smelling babies did not belong in bars; bars were under the radar. Back across the street, down Roosevelt on the other side, were the A&P, Gerstenhaber’s (skates, sleds, and bicycles), and eventually 82^nd Street, our subway stop and closest commercial center, busy with lingerie and dress shops, their mannequins wigless and naked between seasons. Here was Woolworth’s, the dime store, aisle after aisle of sewing kits, finger paints, pens and pads, pencil cases and erasers, costume jewelry, crayons, coloring books, and paper dolls, where less than desirable old men and ladies sat on stools that twirled spooning soup at the counter. Bakeries, a movie theatre, and Barricini’s, which my mother preferred to Whitman’s or Russell Stover’s, where she might or might not buy a box of chocolates lodged in crinkled cups, with cherries or other surprises inside, sometimes indicated by a gold wrapper, but my favorite was and remains a small roll of green marzipan, one end dipped in bitter chocolate.

The center of this world, though not exactly the center of the street, was 3760. Our apartment house had a marble stoop, a green awning, and a witty doorman named Al, another keeper of crossroads. He once reported to my mother that the “mule” had just left: my little sister dragging her umbrella, a fancy parasol with scalloped edges, behind her on her way to school. Al chased children off the stoop where we liked to put on and tighten our roller skates. He was certainly aware of, but pretended not to watch over the mob on the sidewalk and in the street, nearly free of traffic, in front of his building. Here I skated, graduated from tricycle to two-wheeler, pushed my doll carriage, heard the swish of the rope and learned to jump in from both sides, turned my leg over a bouncing pink rubber ball while inventing metric verses based on the alphabet. I played potsy (hopscotch) and Mother May I, Ring around the rosy and London Bridge is falling down, exchanged Trading Cards with my girlfriends. Big boys played stickball in the street and a game called something like catcha fliers up. They threw a ball against a narrow wall space free of windows, leaping into the air to keep it in play, but what else was involved, what was the point of this game, I never figured out. Dimly, I was aware of teenagers who towered and had spending money. Once a roomer at my friend Barbara Sullivan’s on the first floor treated us to a soda at Maxie’s. I never knew this young woman’s name or who she was exactly, but she gave me a treat I’ve never forgotten and vision into the future.

Down the street on both sides were more apartment houses, one after another. In one of these lived Susan Raderman who sat on a spiked fence and had to have stitches, fair warning to the rest of us. Dangers lurked; street cries echoed. Liar, liar, pants on fire! It’s a free country! Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Wanna make something of it?  Susan Raderman was Jewish and did not believe in Jesus Christ, but her family had the first television set on the block. Green upholstery, murky green square of screen, a funny smell I think was cabbage. I was on the right side, but barely, a Protestant who longed to be a Catholic. Belief had little to do with it. It was Penny Ingles one floor down who would wear nothing but blue and white until she was seven because her mother had made a vow dedicating Penny to the Virgin and, lo, she had emerged from dire infant illness a healthy child. Twin blue plastic crucifixes watched over her as she slept and over me once when I spent the night. I wanted it all—prayer and fasting, fish on Fridays, holy days of obligation, the rosaries and bridal veils, white dresses, new shoes, socks and handkerchiefs, the prayer books backed in mother-of pearl, First Holy Communion, Sisters and Fathers and catechism classes after school, sins venial and mortal. Howdy Doody had nothing of miracle or pageantry or solemnity to offer. He was a stupid puppet followed haltingly by honking Clarabell, a clown, mute and grotesque. More alarming were bands of boys who set up blockades to keep girls from the vacant lot, threw mittens and skate keys down the sewer, rotten eggs at Halloween. They soaped car windows, drew on the sidewalk with colored chalk. Snips and snails and puppy dog tails, that’s what little boys are made of. But still it was easy to linger late in spring after the Good Humor man had gone, taste of toasted almond on my tongue, alone suddenly in the dark. I was afraid of the boogey man, of the sudden flare of adult anger, of cracks in the sidewalk, of slipping off the parallel bars, of catching polio and being put in iron lung. I have almost no picture of that far-off boundary 37^th Avenue, but once a month I bravely walked to a bookstore there to buy another Beverly Gray mystery. Four weeks to a month, four quarters to a dollar. This was how I spent my allowance.

Sweet and bitter stuff of childhood – unremarkable, wondrous, eternal in its repetition, but always one and only. The sun came up on our street I found out when we left on a summer trip to New Hampshire at four in the morning. There it hung, glowing, enormous, red when it should have been yellow, too close. I cried out, was told of, and comprehended planetary revolution. On another day, again immediately in front of me, both of us under the apartment awning, was a white woman pushing a black baby in a stroller. When I stared too long, she began to holler that her baby wasn’t black, that its father was a Puerto Rican. She chased me up three flights of stairs and down the hall threatening to come back tomorrow with a knife. Like the sun, she hangs there, without preamble, without aftermath, for she never returned and I told no one about her, symbol of fear and shame, and now of doubt. Where was Al? Where was my mother? Did the woman leave her kid alone on the sidewalk?

It was better not to be black, not to be Jewish, television notwithstanding. I say black, but surely I would have thought in the language of the time, colored, or Negro.  It seems to me now that I did not think; I absorbed, I understood, acknowledged, accepted, as one does in a fast-moving film. Sometimes I say I grew up in Haiti because I remember the second half of my childhood better than the first elusive New York half. Because New York was my first theatre of loss. Turtles died and goldfish. The green paper kite I flew with my father in the vacant lot got stuck in a tree. We left it there, battered and torn, beyond our reach. Margaret the doll’s unstrung limbs lay still in the bedroom bureau drawer. Halloween candy on top of the piano turned gray, spoiled before I could bring myself to eat it. My best friend Phyllis moved to New Jersey. Balloons popped or, filled with hydrogen, flew up to heaven. Velvet the cat escaped to prowl starving for weeks through the tunnels and rafters in the bowels of our building. There was no thing, live or inanimate, not subject to accidental or willful destruction, and certain New York spaces became to me emblems of this idea. The sewer; the tiniest crack revealing the elevator shaft; the larger gap between subway train and platform where a shoe might drop off, a foot be wedged. Basement apartments looked like dungeons; someone lived there with bars on the windows, without air or light. Beneath our sidewalks was a filthy black pit, death to white gloves. There was spit and sweat. Steam came up through gratings, metal flaps concealed steps and lifts, manhole covers clanked. And at the end of the hall was the incinerator. Into this foul, stinking hell mouth went our beautiful wooden puzzle of the United States, because my sister and I had carelessly left its pieces, whose shapes were our delight to finger and identify, scattered on the living room rug.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. Cries and shouts, old clothes, old clothes, the hurdy-gurdy man talking to his monkey, wounding words flung about on the playground, street game jingles, my name is Alice and I come from Alaska or Alabama or Arkansas, and in my attic are alabaster apples. Polly put the kettle on, be on time! Lullabies and nursery rhymes, Valentines, Christmas carols (it was sleep in heavenly peace, not peas) popular songs and older songs my parents sang, their stories purposely told. Adult quarrels and conversation, direct and overheard. The hymns we sang at school and church, the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third psalm, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Star- Spangled Banner, My country ‘tis of thee, America the Beautiful, gem of the ocean. On my honor I will try to do my duty to God and my country. Hamlet says it: words, words, words. On the radio and in sermons, in resonant voices of announcers, in confidant advertisers, and in books, of course, read to me and by myself, stretching out by the time I was ten to a long list, some already faded, marred by baby scribbling. I whittle it down. I weed it out to see what is lasting, what remains constant in my mind. It was certainly in those New York days that I first felt the power of words. Not just to take me lands away, as Dickinson says, but as containers. God and country lived in words. After the fall, words become Humpty Dumpty’s province.

I stare hard at a picture of a baby propped against white pillows on a bed which seems to take up the whole room. I do not recognize myself. I am too new, too strange, starched and perfect in a long dress. My mother, who is looking at me, her back to the camera, is a stranger too. What I feel affection for is the bedspread, off-white with large red dots in straight lines evenly spaced. I run my hand along these dots, larger than polka dots, raised somehow or knotted. This bedspread followed us to Queens, but just now in the picture it is in Manhattan wherever it was that my parents took me home from Brooklyn Hospital. The bedspread knows.

 

Spanish Mind

What expression, common in Spanish, can be found in the English word socks?

I was going to begin with a long disclaimer, a list of my disqualifications to write on this subject,  an admission of flaws I see in my own arguments, and an acknowledgement that much of what I want to say is not unique to Spanish. I decided instead that a tease, the somewhat absurd riddle above posed by Señorita Unamuno, daughter of the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, my first Spanish teacher (Connecticut College, 1957), would be more appropriate. My pronouncements here are to be taken lightly; they are altogether subjective and without scholarly backing, fifty years’ worth of drifting thoughts, impressions, and ruminations provoked most recently by failed attempts on my part to encourage students I tutor to think in Spanish, or at least to contemplate what I call Spanish mind.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. (Genesis)

Se me cayó (he fell from me), was what she said when I got up there, nothing to quiet my racing heart. A thud overhead – I must have been cooking dinner. Infant David’s blood and bones on the tile, limbs broken, skull crushed. She denied it all. Conchy (short for Concepción) was young, pretty, passionate, ignorant and superstitious, pregnant, a prophetic dreamer, seamstress, and naive painter – also my live-in baby-sitter from El Salvador. No, no. Don’t give me that. You dropped him! I don’t know what I said. We were both agitated, but David was fine. The wind knocked out of him for a minute maybe but, made of rubber, he bounced. And Conchy was right, of course. He got away from me would be an acceptable translation. Babies are slippery, as anyone who has changed a diaper knows, and our table was make-shift, the not quite wide enough top of a built-in chest of drawers. Still, to the end of my days, she will have dropped him. Something (Anglo-Saxon? English? American?) makes me mistrustful of a language in which one cannot take full responsibility for dropping the baby or the ball. Dejar caer (to let fall) comes close but is not, to my mind, the same thing. Here was the Tower of Babel; it was 1971.

 As an English teacher, I am quick to advise Use the active voice – Rule 14 in The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White. Choose I took a trip to Boston, rather than the less vivid, awkward and wordy, a trip to Boston was taken by me. Spanish, however, encourages passive constructions like se me cayó, se me olvidó (it was forgotten by me). Sex, eggs, and travel may enchant or merely please me, but I cannot outright like them. English is all self-assertion, all I, I, I. I like, I want, I miss, I hurt. In Spanish, I, so often, like the other personal pronouns, buried in a verb, is diminished. In saying Me gusta, me hace falta, me da pena, I am less an actor than a victim of circumstance.

In Thailand, touching someone on the head, showing the bottom of one’s feet, and raising one’s voice are offenses a tourist must be careful to avoid. Though tempted to disobey, just to see what would happen when one of our guides knelt at my feet, I found these injunctions reasonable. When I first arrived in El Salvador, however, I was surprised at linguistic warnings. “If you see a Salvadoran eating,” my father said, “be sure to say buen provecho” (may it do you good). This made me nervous. Why should I intrude upon a stranger’s lunch? On the other hand, failure to speak up could brand me an ill-wisher or worse, a food poisoner. “Never say quiero (I want), always use quisiera” (I would like). Be gracious, undemanding. Assume a virtue, though you have it not.

Does the language we think in affect the way we think? Nature or nurture, chicken or egg? Questions endlessly puzzling, very likely unanswerable, but amusing to think about. Take the subjunctive, almost lost to, often hidden in English, but in Spanish pervasive. Do you have an opinion, are you going on a journey, meeting a train? Put up a red flag. To inhabit Spanish mind is to be drenched in doubt, to think at every turn of what we cannot count on, what we cannot know. English mind, on the other hand, proceeds with confidence and far less deference to others. Compare: espero que Roberto vaya, quieren que salgamos, saldré antes de que vuelvan with their English equivalents: I hope Robert goes, they want us to go out, I will leave before you arrive. Spanish beats a retreat from the present and the future to project instead an infinitude possibly retrograde to our desires; anticipate opposition, Spanish seems to say. Robert may not go to the party, we may never leave, you may never arrive. I can be certain that I am happy about the idea, but not that Maricela and Juan will marry. His parents can give him advice, but Diego may not take it. Even when the first clause in a sentence begins with I doubt or it is not certain, the second clause must be in the subjunctive creating double doubt; in Spanish, doubt feeds upon itself and multiplies. What good is probability if it must end in doubt? To speak Spanish is to cast into the void our emotions, wishes, hopes, expectations, exhortations, commands, and demands. The subjunctive, after all, is not a tense, but a mood, an attitude, time out of mind, like Keats’s Grecian urn: thou silent form dost tease us out of thought as doth Eternity.

The present subjunctive in Spanish is used in dependent noun clauses that mark events or states that the speaker considers not part of reality or of his/her experience. This, a quotation from The Ultimate Spanish Review and Practice (Gordon and Stillman, McGraw Hill), is the heart of the matter, the point at which grammar recedes and philosophy takes over. Spanish is in league with Plato, not Aristotle, with Berkeley, not Descartes. A shaving cut, that quick spurt of blood, can bring relief, but in Spanish it will be momentary. There in the next clause lurks the epistemological qualm. In Spanish, we will always be jousting with windmills like Don Quixote, lingering with Calderón de la Barca in a land of illusion where toda la vida es sueno, y los suenos suenos son (all of life is a dream, and dreams are only dreams), wending our way, across continents and centuries, to multiple levels of reality in the libraries and labyrinths of Borges, to the magical realism of Garcia Marquez’ Macondo, to the intense, haunted world of contemporary Spanish novelist Javier Marías. These writers, like Garcia Lorca, have el duende—imp, elf, fairy, goblin, ghost-- the mysterious, Dionysian, supremely Spanish dark bull of the soul.

 Where is Sancho Panza when I need him? A sidekick, a bit of comic shtick. Serf, peasant, flunky. Although I concede that Sancho and the Don are in some sense two sides of the same person (of the national character? of Cervantes?), Sancho Panza reminds me of the porter in Macbeth who serves more to deepen the tragedy than to relieve it. Looking for a more substantial counterweight, I summon  the prayer of St. Francis for its series of neat oppositions: where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is doubt, faith, and so on. With expressions of faith, Spanish is loaded: adiós, Dios guarde, gracias a Dios, ojalá! Primero Dios is my favorite. Literally, God first, God before all. But here I come full circle, for this is nothing more than fatalism, reliance on what I cannot see or know, at least not while in residence on earth. Faith, it turns out, is but a dream of heaven.

Does uncertainty breed humility? I think it may. To me, the simplest words of welcome in Spanish (pase adelante, come in) sound haughty and condescending—a great favor is being conferred. To be invited to use the intimate pronoun tú has something of the same flavor. Aurora Reyes (descended from kings?) from Nicaragua has been my housekeeper for twenty years or more, but we continue to use the more formal usted with which we began our acquaintance. We tread carefully lest one of us demean the other or presume too much. When I need to pass Aurora on stairs, I may not charge ahead, stepping on the vacuum cord, nearly shoving her out of the way with a perfunctory sorry, excuse me, or nothing; I must remember to say con permiso (with permission). Must I bow and scrape? In Spanish, I must. Perhaps this is why they are still lisping in Madrid, bowing and scraping to King Ferdinand I (1751-1825) of Castile. Salvadoran school boys study castellano, not español, but Italian is not called Tuscan. Americans do not pahk our cahs at Hahvad Yahd because JFK was president. Why do Conchy and Aurora work for me and not the other way around? When does self-effacement become self-abasement? I extend my sympathy to the people of Catalán battling to preserve their native tongue.

At the various embassy parties I attended while living in El Salvador in 1963, Latin American diplomats and military men with polished hair and shoes clicked their heels and kissed my hand, their strings of perfumed names, announcing paternal and maternal heritage, trailing behind them. Carlos María Bustamante de Los Angeles Herrera, a sus órdenes! For a thrilling moment, they were mine to command but, too young and inexperienced to tease or test them, I asked for no more than caviar and champagne. Passivity, ultra- sensitivity, exquisite politeness, consciousness of one’s position, inflated pride. Taken together, these “Spanish” qualities speak to me of politics, of hierarchy and authority, of a top-down society. To get rid of thee and thou implies equality among us, to emphasize I is to take control, to accept responsibility, to put oneself forward without fear of offense. English is sturdier than Spanish, rough and tumble, devil-may-care. But for democracy and freedom we suffer consequent losses. Intimacy in English is reserved for poetry and prayer; in almost eliminating the subjunctive, we give up niceness of thought, subtlety, precision, and diplomacy. We risk arrogance, foolhardiness. We neglect decorum, ride roughshod over beauty. On a visit to Madrid, I found the soft sound of the ceceo (lisp) more than attractive; the refrain, a las cinco de la tarde (at five in the afternoon), in Lorca’s famous poem about the death of a bull fighter, La Cogida y La Muerte (literally, The Goring and Death), cannot be heard properly without it. Indeed, the ceceo became irresistible, and I fell into it easily—not at all the speech impediment I had imagined.

Any foreign language, but Spanish in particular, is for me a flirtation, an encounter with an extravagant and wheeling stranger such as Desdemona found in Othello. All thrills at the beginning, this other, this sped-up and heightened learning, these miracles of equation and communication, mastery and power. Alas, this phase is never lasting. It’s always harder than at first I thought it would be. The other is intractable and profound. Though many things fall into place, there is always more to learn. I hit a plateau, the slog of marriage. Because most of the time I no longer have to, I stop looking up words. Guilt sets in, my purpose wanes. I settle for knowing in part, for getting by. To progress, I require immersion, smothering, which will not come my way again. I continue to study along with my students; I have occasions almost daily to speak, read, and write. But in spite of this, Spanish remains peripheral to my world, an extra, a luxury, an amusing indulgence, trivial in the end. How I would love to testify de mi alma, de mi vida, de mi corazón! But these are not my words. It is in English that I live and move and have my being

As I get older, I begin to accept that imperfection is the way of things, though English mind does not admit this readily. English has no match for the imperfect tense in Spanish, only approximations in such phrases as while I was doing my homework, we used to go to the beach every summer, we always spent Thanksgiving at Grandma’s. How odd this seems! As John Lennon said, Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans. The imperfect tense is designed to take into account the way two events in the past collided, a kind of continuous overlap in which one action is forever suspended as another becomes complete. This seems to me a mirror of life itself. So much in our experience is never finally over, as we sense a constant invasion of the present by the past, in waves, in images, in snatches of poetry and song.

 My live-in helper Conchy did not stay with us long; she hastened like one possessed to marry, to produce two daughters, Wendy and Nancy, to learn enough English to become a school receptionist, to move with her family to San Bernardino. Yet she remained with us as we remembered her anxiety over the fact that David had not been baptized, the pictures of the Virgin she pasted to the wall next to his crib, the halo of bottles she placed around his head so she could sleep late in the morning, the two pairs of scissors in the sign of the Cross on the floor to confound the Evil Eye. It would not surprise me to learn that she baptized him herself, or took him off to la iglesia Santa Inez when I wasn’t looking.  We slept and dreamed on her embroidered pillow cases, laughed, though appalled, at a weaning method she devised: a little Tabasco on a bottle’s nipple. We danced at her wedding and felt the potent mix of spiritual, material, and erotic impulses at her first daughter’s quinceañera.  She wrote her name on the insides of drawers and in other odd places; my granddaughter Farah now sits on the wooden chairs she painted with nursery rhyme themes for Farah’s child-father, Davicito. And Conchy thought of us. Shortly after Ernst died, having remained out of sight for years, she called, because the death of someone in our family had come to her in a dream.

Alive we are imperfect, incomplete; death itself is not an ending for those who live on. In 1992, as a kind of research for something I was writing, I tagged along on a trip to El Salvador with members of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena which, at that time, sponsored a sanctuary house for Salvadoran refugees. We toured the country in a darkened jeep, visiting settlements of people displaced by the civil war which was still going on. I think we dispensed some dollars and supplies, but the main idea of the visit was to show solidarity, to walk side by side, sleeping in hammocks, bathing in rivers, digging latrines, if only for a few days, to listen and take part in discussions. A woman standing in a cornfield is my most vivid memory of that trip. Me conformaba, she said. I got used to it, I adjusted, I conformed myself. To the killing of her husband and two sons, to the annihilation of friends, neighbors, home, and village. Over and done with in English, but in the Spanish verb, reflexive and imperfect, her struggle and grief continued.

What is the answer to the riddle of language which unites and divides us? Angle of vision, window to an inner world? Most of us have no choice but to live in the language we were born to. Spanish, dream infused and imperfect though it may be, is to its native speakers as mundane and familiar as a gum wrapper or a pair of socks. Eso sí que es!

World War II, Part Two Continued

Here at last in these true stories was my crash course in World War II and its consequences. I listened and learned. Saw, not as in a fiction or a dream, not in a textbook, but firsthand, indelible damage reverberating through surviving generations. Lack of empathy; guilt (o full of scorpions is my mind); paranoia (these things must not be thought after these ways; so, it will make us mad); heart trouble (literal and figurative); depression (full-on or dispersed in bouts as in Ernst’s case); cynicism, deracination, alienation, withdrawal, silence, and despair. It was not that Ernst’s most immediate relatives had experienced the worst. They were alive in Los Angeles after all. In America they had prospered and multiplied, making my family look poor and stunted. It was the kiss, the camera coming in for a close up, the casual intimacy of the horror intruding itself at a bris, Bar Mitzvah, or wedding – the bride and groom, giggling, fearful and embarrassed, suddenly fragile, swaying on chairs above the hooting crowd. At Purim or Passover, those bloodthirsty glad occasions where I, subversive, found myself thinking with pity of Haman’s ten sons hanged upon the gallows, or those innocent Egyptian infants not passed over by the angel of death. I was the enemy with my German looks. Fraulein, Fraulein, they called down to me, young men on a telephone pole on the Boul’Mich in Paris. In one European city after another, I was taken for Dutch or German. Rotwein oder weiswein? the shopkeeper asked me in Trieste. Rotwein, I answered, enjoying the masquerade, escaping quickly to avoid detection.

My otherness stood out in all directions: no money, no jewelry, no make-up or nail-polish, not coiffed by a hairdresser, no Hebrew, no Hungarian, no Yiddish. No. Not by any stretch. I woke up on trial in The Merchant of Venice: eyes, nose, internal organs, height, weight. I was hung in the balance and found wanting. People who looked like me had caused Ernst’s family untold pain; my presence in their midst exacerbated it.  Rumors that we were getting a divorce circulated; Ernst took the calls from various cousins at his office. His mother, he thought, was behind them. Fifteen, twenty years later, she called him herself. A gorgeous rich widow she’d found him, he should get a divorce. I and my no account adopted children could be paid off. We laughed and laughed, my heart in the grip of a fist. I remembered a plunge I made once from a sun-heated rock into Lake Superior, forgetting how cold the water would be.

Spit on the name of Jesus, Ernst was taught. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, who became a little child. Did they really do this, I wondered. Had he? Out the window at a bumper sticker? On passing a church, in the midst of conversation? Spit on the Inquisition, on the Crusades, on the Infallibility of the Pope. Spit on Hitler and his henchmen. Though not a believer then or now, I draw a line at Jesus. And I pick a quarrel with the book of Job. Among the blessings which the Lord bestows upon Job’s latter end are seven sons and seven daughters. But these, as I read the King James Version, are not the same sons and daughters he destroyed, while they were eating and drinking at their eldest brother’s house, in the first chapter. A goldfish, even one with character, can be replaced. A turtle brought home from the circus, dislodged  by the cat from the white enamel dish where he has been living happily for weeks, eating torn lettuce bits, crossing laboriously over his very own bridge, can, when found dead in the dust balls under the bed, be replaced. Even that naughty cat, Velvet Gown Sugar Plum Sugar Pie Shaw, can be replaced. But no person, living or dead, can be.  I was always careful on my way home from school. Step on a line, you break your mother’s spine.

A childish impulse, and wicked, but it was wormwood, wormwood. An inauspicious beginning for a newly married couple. Thank God, I thought then, Ernst wasn’t really one of them. He didn’t believe, he didn’t practice. Indeed, he was not a frog. Not even really a Jew. Did I go so far? I would not say so now.  Now that my own dead are mounting: grandparents, parents, husband, a lover, boyfriend G, seven members of my high school class of 49 girls according to my count so far, friends and friends of friends, two of my closest, both born in 1940. Ernst was a mensch, concerned with a Jew’s highest calling which is Tikkun Olam, an obligation to repair the world. Sometimes he found it necessary to turn a garment inside out. Never forget might become Always remember. Always remember that Moorpark spelled backwards is Kraproom. I quote him out of context, catch him in a jesting moment, in a characteristic lightning-quick response to a freeway sign, but spoken with such seriousness that I still plumb it for meaning. I believe it was, among other things, Ernst’s answer to religious rigidity, to rigidity in any form, orthographic included. In eating trayf, in sprees of drinking and spending, in earsplitting renditions of Jezebel, in his work as a sole practitioner taking on law suits no one else would touch, and in marrying me (he could have had a nose job or a trip around the world, two bribes proffered by his parents), there was something of Sir Toby Belch, who spurns Puritan virtue in favor of cakes and ale in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, who declares, I’ll confine myself no finer than I am. And even more of Falstaff. Not the cowardly Falstaff, but Falstaff the shape shifter and cheater of death.

No one dies in the Merchant of Venice which ends in the manner of Shakespeare’s comedies with three weddings. Yet there is no let up, no true meeting of hearts and minds. Bitterness and betrayal linger in Antonio’s loneliness as his friends pair off; in the mockery Shakespeare makes of courtship, more vanity and lusting after wealth than love; of marriage, as three intelligent women marry feckless men, as he subtly foreshadows trouble between Shylock’s daughter Jessica (who has eloped with her father’s money) and her Christian husband Lorenzo, although they might seem to bring opposing worlds together; of the law which permits the grotesque bond of flesh and bends to clever tricks of language; of the very quality of mercy, so eloquently invoked by Portia, only to be all but negated when she vengefully agrees to Antonio’s ruling that Shylock must convert to Christianity, thus supporting Shylock’s earlier claim that Christians, so like him in being made of blood, flesh, and bone, have taught him to revenge. The play exposes a chasm between a religious Jew and some nominal Christians which cannot be bridged, and beneath the fairy tale, as in a mirror, lie faults in friendship and kinship, in business and marital partnership, in relations between servant and master. This society, civil on the surface, is cruel and treacherous. Unjust. Uncivilized.

I longed, and still long, for some of Ernst’s chutzpah, for the force and radiance of personality, the access of compassion and generosity which would catapult me beyond resentment, denial, and the deep hurt I continue to feel on Ernst’s behalf. Which would allow me to see and know – Ernst’s father before the war, dark and dapper, sporting a mustache; his mother, spoiled and sexy, negotiating the muddy streets of Deutchkreutz in expensive high heels – as well as to be seen and known, as Saint Paul says we one day will and will be. I think Ernst longed for this too. Talk to them, ask questions, he urged, but this was beyond my imagining, and in time his parents, his brother and sisters, their wives, husbands and children, his many aunts, uncles, and cousins disappeared from our lives for months, even years at a time. Both we and they blew hot, blew cold; we met again, again, and again as though for the first time. His brother never looked me in the eye or spoke to me. Not once in twenty-eight years, though we sometimes found ourselves in the same room.

I never called Ernst a dirty Jew, as his mother said I would. He said a story I wrote was anti-Semitic. I said I didn’t think it was. Nothing came of this unless it was survivorship, a piece of gobbledygook foisted upon me by the Disney Cancer Center. It’s mine now; my name has been inscribed; I’ve been sent on my way with a list of club rules and required behaviors. To insure the best outcome. Nothing so raw as the Merchant; at Disney, an atmosphere of muted cheer prevails. I stick to facts on the ground. On October 16, 1967, with an insouciance I can no longer summon, I married Ernst Lipschutz, a second generation Holocaust survivor. For better and worse. The wonder is that Ernst’s break with his family did not poison our lives. In fact, we were happy. On balance. In the main. Our life was full of friends and furniture and rugs and paintings and children and movies and books and plays and work and travel and dinners in and out, full of noise and music and the neighbors complained.  It wasn’t survival, it was fun. Another suspect word, but it is the right one, not too heavy, though perhaps too light.

I have written about World War II and the Holocaust to show how events from which I was almost entirely disconnected, thought over and done with, seized me, made me complicit, though I was but a child and can remember almost nothing of that time. I’m surprised to discover that for this I am grateful. Amazed in the knowledge that the twentieth century is behind us, that my generation is wasting, yet in this small act of witness and remembrance, I am born again.

Coda

I began with Thomas Hardy, but will end with E. M. Forster who pooh-poohs doom and gloom. In Forster’s novels, death may be violent or sudden, but it does not stalk; coincidence is ordinary, not ominous. A chance meeting at the National Gallery in London between lovesick George and Lucy (now engaged to someone else), both recently returned from Italy where they met, is explained in the following way in A Room With A View: Looking at Italian art, there you are, and yet you talk of coincidence and Fate. You naturally seek out things Italian, and so do we and our friends. This narrows the field immeasurably we meet again in it.

Ernst met Dewitt Peters in 1971, on his first trip to Haiti. Peters, who founded the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince in 1944, and is generally credited with bringing Haitian artists to the attention of the world, was gone by then of course.  But here were two young men, though separated in time, connected in their love of Haitian art and in determination to make it better known. And here in the background once again was World War II, for Peters was a conscientious objector, one of a group of English teachers sent by the U. S. Department of Education to bolster Haiti at a time of isolation brought on by the Nazi submarine blockade.

On that same trip, Ernst and I visited Erich Meinberg’s mahogany factory looking for souvenirs to take home to our friends. We stepped in out of the glare, and the two men shook hands. You are a lantzman, Mr. Meinberg said. Like an electric shock, dazzling as sunshine, the word ran through me. My links to Mr. Meinberg fell away. He was a foreigner in Haiti, in business for himself like my father; my mother admired his wife with whom she drank tea and exchanged books and gossip at the Colony Club on Friday afternoons; his daughter was one of those children on the playground at Union School, known for her brains, a couple of grades below me, a friend. All negligible. I think I was jealous. Hardly betrayed, but certainly left out. Call me cousin, countryman, tribesman, fellow wanderer, secret sharer of suffering. Mon semblable, mon frère. It was as though Anne Frank had materialized and stood among us. It was cool in here, our noses full of sawdust; the orderly factory hummed and buzzed. Soon we had made our purchases and were back outside. In the broiling heat. In the blazing sun.

Haiti the Magic Island, Forster’s narrow field.