Closing Time (9 page)

In American mythology, these humiliating trips to the supermarket are the moment when the penniless child makes a solemn oath that when he grows up he will never go hungry, that he will construct a globe-spanning commercial empire and spend days on end sipping champagne on his well-appointed yacht, instructing Simcox to fetch Lydia and Gwyneth so they can play Chabrier duets on the pianoforte. But poor people do not dream in color. Poor children do not dream of Croesian wealth, triumph, vindication, or revenge. They dream of Cheerios.

Chapter 3.

Three things kept us going through these wilderness years: the Catholic Church, the generosity of the few relatives who did not abandon us in our time of need, and the public library. In recent times, it has become fashionable to attack the Church, as if everything would be going along swimmingly if the atheists were in charge. These attacks are often mouthed by celebrity heathens who are oblivious to the role the Church has long played in preventing the unfortunate from being swallowed up by the abyss. The Catholic Church kept my family afloat, partly through periodic infusions of cash, partly through the inspiration that pageantry-laden rituals can provide, but mostly through the superb education we received from the nuns who taught at Saint Bridget’s Elementary School.

Laughable to some, dysfunctional to others, mysterious to virtually everyone, nuns are in reality exactly what they seem: angels of mercy who have sacrificed their lives in the service of God and humanity. It was the nuns who taught us to read and write, the nuns who taught us the principal export of Bolivia, the nuns who explained the significance of the Dred Scott decision. It was the nuns, not the priests, who pointed the way out of the darkness; the nuns who made it clear that if you were born poor and you didn’t want to stay poor, you’d better know the principal export of Bolivia. When we were hungry children, wearing tatty clothes, living in a crummy neighborhood, the only way we could make ourselves feel special was by excelling at school. So we studied hard, and we excelled.

The physical structure of Saint Bridget’s church was fraught with symbolism, though I may not have realized it as a child. One day decades later, with light snow blanketing the City of Brotherly Love, I decided to take a sentimental journey back to the neighborhoods I knew so well as a youth. Driving through a shabby district of North Philadelphia, I noticed the church of Saint Edward the Confessor rearing up in the distance. This was the house of worship that stood just fifty yards from the house where my aunt Marge and uncle Charlie had once lived. I had forgotten how colossal Saint Edward’s was; it took up an entire city block. Back in olden days, when immigrants alighted from the trolley late at night, returning from brutal, poorly paid jobs that slowly broke them into pieces, the sight of those looming temples must have seemed exhilarating. Ordinary people built these parishes, they could remind themselves; immigrants built these parishes. And when immigrants caught a glimpse of those spires thrusting heavenward from what amounted to their very own neighborhood cathedral, they must have taken enormous comfort from the spectacle, knowing that, at long last, after another murderous day in the sweatshops, they were home. To working-class Catholics, Saint Edward’s wasn’t a church. It was a fortress. And Saint Bridget’s, blessed with the additional advantage of sitting on the side of a hill, played exactly the same role.

If I have any criticism of the Church during this dispiriting period, and admittedly it is but a quibble, it concerns the clumsy way charity was sometimes dispensed. Every few months, the nuns would ask children who were not poor to bring in cans of food to be distributed to the families of those who were. When the cans arrived, the labels would be peeled off to prevent the needy from grabbing the most desirable products and leaving behind the items no one wanted. A few days later, our parents would be ushered in to select a dozen cans without knowing what each one contained.

Several times when my father was out of work, my mother and I rendezvoused in the lunchroom and loaded up. For the next couple of weeks, she would boil some potatoes and toast some bread, then take out the can opener and peel open one of the donated objects. Whatever she found inside would constitute the main portion of our evening meal. If we were lucky, the contents might be pork and beans or spaghetti and meatballs. But more often than not, donors had bequeathed us canned asparagus, canned lima beans, or canned creamed corn. All of these, from the child’s point of view, were vile. Not until I was in my twenties did I learn that asparagus was a delicacy, not a repellent vegetable cultivated with the deliberate objective of taunting the poor. Creamed corn, by contrast, was a mushy perversion of the noble culture of maize bequeathed to the white man by the Indians, and lima beans I shall forever view as the handicraft of Beelzebub.

A mixture of astonishment and horror flooded across our faces the night my mother pried open a labelless can, only to discover a cluster of artichoke hearts within. We had no idea what artichokes were or what man or beast could possibly eat them, much less what kind of person thought that donating canned artichoke hearts to the needy was apt to lift their spirits. When people with no direct experience of poverty try to conceptualize it, they mentally array gaudy images of rats and defective space heaters and .38 slugs embedded in the walls. They never think of canned artichoke hearts, because people who have never been poor understand only the economic components of deprivation, not the symbolism that colors everything. When your father is an unemployed alcoholic and your mother has four children she can’t feed and may not even love, and there is no car and no TV and no telephone and no prospects, finding out that a stranger has donated a can of artichoke hearts to the cause is not likely to fill a child’s heart with joy. What’s next? A wheel of Camembert? A few strands of reindeer kidneys? Or perhaps next time the gentry will send along some cast-off top hats, ascots, and monocles so the starving kids can dress up as P. G. Wodehouse characters.

The second thing that sustained us as a family was the affection—not to mention the occasional infusion of cash—supplied by a handful of concerned relatives. Our relations were divided into two groups: those who came to see us during the four years we lived in the project and those who did not. The relatives who did the most to ease our pain through this doleful interregnum were my uncle Jerry, married to my dad’s sister Catherine, and my uncle Charlie, wed to Aunt Marge, another of those gentle, much-admired “aunts” who were actually my father’s cousins. Jerry and Charlie were the most important men in my life in those years, the father figures who provided inspiration at a time when I was losing interest in growing up to be anything like my father. Both were charismatic, somewhat eccentric men who did not have conventional nine-to-five jobs and whose influence on me was so powerful and enduring that it probably made it impossible for me to ever work at a conventional job, either.

My uncle Jerry was a salesman employed by the Philadelphia Gas & Electric Company. He worked hard, feared communism, hated taxes, and viewed Richard Nixon as a minor deity, even when Whittier College’s most celebrated alumnus was still only vice president. Uncle Jerry was the only Republican in the family; had he immigrated to Philadelphia from Ulan Bator, he could not have been more culturally estranged from the rest of us. Physically, he was a remarkable-looking man, though not in any positive sense. He had been blighted from birth by
Good Soldier Schweik
hair, bristly spikes that stuck up in the air even when he was submerged beneath the waves of the Atlantic. It was hair that made you look fat even if you were thin, hair that made you look old even if you were young. German in ancestry, he seemed determined to evoke an ethnic stereotype associated with another continent and another century, at a time that many German Americans were trying to play down their Aryan roots. With his pugnacious cheeks and prominent snout, he could easily have passed for a Prussian sergeant-at-arms delivering humiliating terms of surrender to Napoleon III at Sedan.

When the sixties arrived, an era when even the most conservative older men started experimenting with their appearance in a misguided attempt to look fashionable, Uncle Jerry refused to budge, unwilling to temper his lifelong commitment to the anachronistic. I suspect that his hatred of the hippies who would come along a few years later stemmed less from disdain for their excrescent politics and debauched sexual practices than from resentment of their fabulous hair—all those pony-tails and floppy British bangs. If there is such a thing as follicular predetermination, whereby an adult’s overall orientation in life is dictated by his hair, then my uncle’s fate was sealed early; with a look like that, he had no choice but to be a Republican.

Uncle Jerry was forever gadding about in a mammoth Oldsmobile or Buick convertible; he liked people to think he was loaded. He played billiards and he played pool; coming from upstate New York as he did, he said “pop” instead of “soda” and referred to me and my sisters as “pretty good coconuts.” He loved to play shuffleboard and he didn’t care who knew it. He also liked to banter with strangers, sometimes parking his car, dismounting, and crossing the street to congratulate a quartet of Negro ditchdiggers on their exemplary earth-removal skills. He would stand at the edge of the ditch with a perfectly ridiculous smile on his face and say, “Hey. That’s a pretty nice ditch you’re digging.” To a child, such behavior was unspeakably audacious, as children were taught at an early date to speak only when spoken to, and maybe not even then. The ability to initiate conversations with complete strangers was one of the things I loved about my uncle; he seemed to be on a first-name basis with everyone he came into contact with: bus drivers, waiters, grease monkeys, cops. What’s more, this promiscuous chumminess sometimes crossed racial lines.

Uncle Jerry was a man much given to dotty theories. He had convinced himself that the finest pizza in the tristate area was to be found in a flyspeck dive called Charlie’s, which was located in a run-down part of Trenton, New Jersey. We would later discover that Trenton consisted entirely of an intricate series of intersecting run-down neighborhoods; no one alive could ever recall a time when the state capital was anything less than forlorn. We suspected that, even when George Washington surprised the redcoats and their Hessian minions on Christmas night in 1776, Trenton had already fallen on hard times. Of these facts Uncle Jerry was ignorant, perhaps willfully. Many evenings, he would motor all the way across Philadelphia, scoop us up in his fancy car, and drive an additional thirty miles to Trenton just so we could chow down in his favorite pizzeria. He had been dining at Charlie’s since the late forties, when he first moseyed south from upstate New York, where good pizza was not to be found, and rented an apartment in a pokey little town called Morrisville, just across the Delaware River from Trenton.

To get to Trenton, you had to drive straight up Route 1 past a huge illuminated sign affixed to the bridge spanning the Delaware. The sign read TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES. Nobody had any idea what this cryptic, almost goofy, assertion meant, and nobody seemed to care. Thirty-five years later, riding the train to Philadelphia from New York with my mother, I would ask if she could explain the sign. She could not; Garden State pontine lore was never her forte. Overhearing our conversation, a conductor told us that the sign had originally read
WHAT
TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES but that the word WHAT had tumbled into the river years ago. The WHAT in the sign referred to Bayer aspirin, which had been manufactured in the Greater Trenton area for many years. The conductor maintained that the sign had dropped into the Delaware during the Second World War when Bayer, a German company, was taken over by the U.S. government. This was almost certainly not true. Nobody visiting Trenton ever seemed to draw any connection between the sign and the company, and the Bayer people must have wanted to keep it that way, for the WHAT, if it existed, never got dredged up and the sign remained as it was, preening incoherently in its incandescent inanity.

The way Uncle Jerry talked about Charlie’s, you would have thought it was a pasha’s feast, a cross between the Savoy Grill and La Tour d’Argent. In reality, it was just another pizza joint, a dank, malodorous hole-in-the-wall where the delights on offer were no better and no worse than the pizza we could have bought right down the street on any street corner in Philadelphia. Still, we didn’t fuss about his quirky tastes; it was a free meal and a carefree outing. These jaunts into the heart of central Jersey darkness weren’t about cuisine; they were about diplomatically giving us a day pass from the stockade, but doing so in a way that would not make my father feel insulted. Pizza had nothing to do with it.

Uncle Jerry was the only person in my family who dared to wear a fedora. His came complete with a chic, blood-red feather in the headband, and he wore it in a non-ironic fashion. He was from upstate New York, way up near the Canadian border, and irony never got there. His fedoras, needless to say, were natty; the nattiness of them was the stuff of legend. Men in natty fedoras were cut from a different cloth than ditchdiggers and pretzel-truck drivers; unlike them, Uncle Jerry did not have to report to an office or a store or a factory or a ditch every morning. Men in natty fedoras simply got into their cars, put the pedal to the metal, and hit the open road.

Occasionally, on Saturdays, Jerry would take me out on his sales calls. He did this because he liked my company—his adopted son, Jerry Jr., was still an infant—but also because he and his wife understood how important it was to get my sisters and me away from my father and the project, if only for an afternoon. They knew that things were going downhill; they knew about the ruinous drinking; they almost certainly knew about the beatings. These outings were my uncle’s way of tossing us a lifeline.