Assorted Prose (20 page)

This broad crescent of woods is threaded with our walks and suffused with images of love. For it was here, on the beds of needles under the
canopies of low pine boughs, that our girls—and this is later, not boyhood at all, but the two have become entangled—were rumored to give themselves. Indeed, I was told that one of the girls in our class, when we were in the ninth grade, had boasted that she liked nothing so much as skinny-dipping in the dam and then making love under the pines. As for myself, this was beyond me, and may be myth, but I do remember, when I was seventeen, taking a girl on one of those walks from my childhood so (then) long ago. We had moved from town, but only ten miles, and my father and I drove in to the high school every day. We walked, the girl and I, down the path where I had smashed so many branches, and sat down on a damp broad log—it was early spring, chilly, a timid froth of leaves overhead—and I dared lightly embrace her from behind and cup my hands over her breasts, small and shallow within the stiffness of her coat, and she closed her eyes and tipped her head back, and an adequate apology seemed delivered for the irritable innocence of these almost forgotten hikes with my parents.

The road that came down into Shillington by way of the cemetery led past the Dives estate, another ominous place. It was guarded by a wall topped with spiky stones. The wall must have been a half-mile long. It was so high my father had to hold me up so I could look in. There were so many buildings and greenhouses I couldn’t identify the house. All the buildings were locked and boarded up; there was never anybody there. But in the summer the lawns were mowed; it seemed by ghosts. There were tennis courts, and even—can it be?—a few golf flags. In any case there was a great deal of cut lawn, and gray driveway, and ordered bushes; I got the impression of wealth as a vast brooding absence, like God Himself. The road here was especially overshadowed by trees, so a humid, stale, cloistered smell flavored my glimpses over the wall.

The cemetery was on the side of a hill, bare to the sun, which quickly faded the little American flags and killed the potted geraniums. It was a holiday place; on Memorial Day the parade, in which the boys participated mounted on bicycles whose wheels were threaded with tricolor crêpe paper, ended here, in a picnic of speeches and bugle music and leapfrog over the tombstones. From here you had a perfect view of the town, spread out in the valley between this hill and Slate Hill, the chimneys smoking like just-snuffed cigarettes, the cars twinkling down on Lancaster Avenue, the trolleys moving with the dreamlike slow motion distance imposes.

A little to one side of the cemetery, just below the last trees of the love-making woods, was a small gravel pit where, during the war, we played at being guerrillas. Our leader was a sickly and shy boy whose mother made him wear rubbers whenever there was dew on the grass. His parents bought him a helmet and khaki jacket and even leggings, and he brought great enthusiasm to the imitation of war. G.I.’s and Japs, shouting “Geronimo!” and “Banzai!,” we leaped and scrambled over boulders and cliffs in one of whose clefts I always imagined, for some reason, I was going to discover a great deal of money, in a tan cloth bag tied with a leather thong. Though I visualized the bag very clearly, I never found it.

Between this pit and the great quarry on the far edge of town, I lose track of Shillington’s boundaries. I believe it was just fields, in which a few things were still farmed. The great quarry was immense, and had a cave, and an unused construction covered with fine gray dust and filled with mysterious gears, levers, scoops, and stairs. The quarry was a mile from my home; I seldom went there. It wears in memory a gritty film. The tougher section of town was nearby. Older boys with .22s used the quarry as a rifle range, and occasionally wounded each other, or smaller children. To scale its sides was even more dangerous than walking along the top of the poorhouse wall. The legends of love that scattered condums along its grassy edges seemed to be of a coarser love than that which perfumed the woods. Its cave was short, and stumpy, yet long enough to let you envision a collapse blocking the mouth of light and sealing you in; the walls were of a greasy golden clay that seemed likely to collapse. The one pure, lovely thing about the quarry, beside its grand size, was the frozen water that appeared on its floor in the winter, and where you could skate sheltered from the wind, and without the fear of drowning that haunted the other skating place, the deep dam. Though the area of ice was smaller, the skaters seemed more skillful down at the quarry: girls in red tights and bouncy short skirts that gave their fannies the effect of a pompon turned and swirled and braked backward to a stop on their points, sparkling ice chips sprinkling in twin fans of spray.

Near the quarry was the Shillington Friday Market, where the sight of so many naked vegetables depressed me, and the Wyomissing Creek, a muddy little thing to skip pebbles in, and the hilly terrain where, in those unbuilding years, a few new houses were built. The best section of town, called Lynoak, was farther on, more toward Reading, around the
base of Slate Hill, where I sometimes sledded. It was a long walk back through the streets, under the cold street lights, the sled runners rattling on the frozen ruts, my calves aching with the snow that always filtered through my galoshes. This hill in summer was another place my parents hiked to. The homes of the well-off (including an amazingly modern house, of white brick, with a flat roof, and blue trim, like something assembled from the two dimensions of a Hollywood movie) could be seen climbing its sides, but there was still plenty of room for, during the war, Victory gardens, and above that, steep wilderness. The top was a bare, windy, primeval place. Looking north, you saw the roofs of Shillington merge with the roofs of other suburbs in a torn carpet that went right into the bristling center of Reading, under the blue silhouette of Mount Penn. As Shillington on the south faced the country, northward it faced the city.

Reading: a very powerful and fragrant and obscure city—who has ever heard of it? Wallace Stevens was born there, and John Philip Sousa died there. For a generation it had a Socialist mayor. Its railroad is on the Monopoly Board. It is rumored to be endeared to gangsters, for its citizens make the most tolerant juries in the East. Unexpectedly, a pagoda overlooks it from the top of Mount Penn. This is the meagre list of its singularities as I know them. Larger than Harrisburg and Wilkes-Barre and Lancaster, it is less well known. Yet to me Reading is the master of cities, the one at the center that all others echo. How rich it smelled! Kresge’s swimming in milk chocolate and violet-scented toilet water, Grant’s barricaded with coconut cookies, the vast velveted movie theatres dusted with popcorn and a cold whiff of leather, the bakeshops exhaling hearty brown drafts of molasses and damp dough and crisp grease and hot sugar, the beauty parlors with their gingerly stink of singeing, the bookstores glistening with fresh paper and bubbles of hardened glue, the shoe-repair nooks blackened by Kiwi Wax and aromatic shavings, the public lavatory with its emphatic veil of soap, the hushed, brick-red side streets spiced with grit and the moist seeds of maples and ginkgos, the goblin stench of the trolley car that made each return to Shillington a race with nausea—Reading’s smells were most of what my boyhood knew of the Great World that was suspended, at a small but sufficient distance, beyond my world.

For the city and the woods and the ominous places were peripheral; their glamour and menace did not intrude into the sunny area where I
lived, where the seasons arrived like issues of a magazine and I moved upward from grade to grade and birthday to birthday on a notched stick that itself was held perfectly steady. There was the movie house, and the playground, and the schools, and the grocery stores, and our yard, and my friends, and the horse-chestnut trees. My geography went like this: in the center of the world lay our neighborhood of Shillington. Around it there was greater Shillington, and around that, Berks County. Around Berks County there was the State of Pennsylvania, the best, the least eccentric, state in the Union. Around Pennsylvania, there was the United States, with a greater weight of people on the right and a greater weight of land on the left. For clear geometrical reasons, not all children could be born, like me, at the center of the nation. But that some children chose to be born in other countries and even continents seemed sad and fantastic. There was only one possible nation: mine. Above this vast, rectangular, slightly (the schoolteachers insisted) curved field of the blessed, there was the sky, and the flag, and, mixed up with both, Roosevelt.

We were Democrats. My grandfather lived for ninety years, and always voted, and always voted straight Democrat. A marvellous chain of votes, as marvellous as the chain of Sunday-school-attendance pins that vibrated from Pappy Shilling’s lapel. The political tradition that shaped his so incorruptible prejudice I am not historian enough to understand; it had something to do with Lincoln’s determination to drive all the cattle out of this section of Pennsylvania if Lee won the Battle of Gettysburg.

My parents are closer to me. The events that shaped their views are in my bones. At the time when I was conceived and born, they felt in themselves a whole nation stunned, frightened, despairing. With Roosevelt, hope returned. This simple impression of salvation is my political inheritance. That this impression is not universally shared amazes me. It is as if there existed a class of people who deny that the sun is bright. To me as a child Republicans seemed blind dragons; their prototype was my barber—an artist, a charmer, the only man, my mother insists, who ever cut my hair properly. Nimble and bald, he used to execute little tap-dance figures on the linoleum floor of his shop, and with engaging loyalty he always had the games of Philadelphia’s two eighth-place teams tuned in on the radio. But on one subject he was rabid; the last time he cut my hair he positively
asserted that our President had died of syphilis. I cannot to this day hear a Republican put forth his philosophy without hearing the snip of scissors above my ears and feeling the little ends of hair crawling across my hot face, reddened by shame and the choking pressure of the paper collar.

Roosevelt was for me the cap on a steadfast world, its emblem and crown. He was always there. Now he is a weakening memory, a semi-legend; it has begun to seem fabulous—like an episode in a medieval chronicle—that the greatest nation in the world was led through the world’s greatest war by a man who could not walk. Now, my barber has retired, my hair is a wretched thatch grizzled with gray, and, of the two Philadelphia ball clubs, one has left Philadelphia and one is not always in last place. Now the brick home of my boyhood is owned by a doctor, who has added an annex to the front, to contain his offices. The house was too narrow for its lot and its height; it had a pinched look from the front that used to annoy my mother. But that thin white front with its eyes of green window sash and its mouth of striped awning had been a face to me; it has vanished. My dogwood tree still stands in the side yard, taller than ever, but the walnut tree out back has been cut down. My grandparents are dead. Pappy Shilling is dead. Shilling Alley has been straightened, and hardtopped, and rechristened Brobst Street. The trolley cars no longer run. The vacant lots across the town have been filled with new houses and stores. New homes have been built far out Philadelphia Avenue and all over the poorhouse property. The poorhouse has been demolished. The poorhouse dam and its aphrodisiac groves have been trimmed into a town park and a chlorinated pool where all females must sheathe their hair in prophylactic bathing caps. If I could go again into 117 Philadelphia Avenue and look out the rear windows, I would see, beyond the football field and the cinder track, a new, two-million-dollar high school, and beyond it, where still stands one row of the double line of trees that marked the Poorhouse Lane, a gaudy depth of postwar housing and a Food Fair like a hideous ark breasting an ocean of parked cars. Here, where wheat grew, loudspeakers unremittingly vomit commercials. It has taken me the shocks of many returnings, more and more widely spaced now, to learn, what seems simple enough, that change is the order of things. The immutability, the steadfastness, of
the site of my boyhood was an exceptional effect, purchased for me at unimaginable cost by the paralyzing calamity of the Depression and the heroic external effort of the Second World War.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had. My environment was a straight street about three city blocks long, with a slight slope that was most noticeable when you were on a bicycle. Though many of its residents commuted to Reading factories and offices, the neighborhood retained a rural flavor. Corn grew in the strip of land between the alley and the school grounds. We ourselves had a large vegetable garden, which we tended not as a hobby but in earnest, to get food to eat. We sold asparagus and eggs to our neighbors. Our peddling things humiliated me, but then I was a new generation. The bulk of the people in the neighborhood were not long off the farm. One old lady down the street, with an immense throat goiter, still wore a bonnet. The most aristocratic people in the block were the full-fashioned knitters; Reading’s textile industry prospered in the Depression. I felt neither prosperous nor poor. We kept the food money in a little recipe box on top of the icebox, and there were nearly always a few bills and coins in it. My father’s job paid him poorly but me well; it gave me a sense of, not prestige, but
place
. As a schoolteacher’s son, I was assigned a role; people knew me. When I walked down the street to school, the houses called, “Chonny.” I had a place to be.

The elementary school was a big brick cube set in a square of black surfacing chalked and painted with the diagrams and runes of children’s games. Wire fences guarded the neighboring homes from the playground. Whoever, at soccer, kicked the ball over the fence into Snitzy’s yard had to bring it back. It was very terrible to have to go into Snitzy’s yard, but there was only one ball for each grade. Snitzy was a large dark old German who might give you the ball or lock you up in his garage, depending upon his mood. He did not move like other men; suddenly the air near your head condensed, and his heavy hands were on you.