Growing Up (18 page)

I envied his skill at manipulating women. When he was eleven he was already a seducer of women. In the schoolyard at recess one day Nino and Jerry took me aside for thrilling news: Frankie had made a date to kiss Katherine Filler after school in Belleville Park. Katherine was no wanton trull but a lean chestnut-haired beauty, and smart to boot. It was Katherine, not I, who was the smartest person in school. That this beautiful brilliant creature could offer herself for kissing was more than I could believe. I marveled that Frankie even had the nerve to ask her. Nevertheless, it was the honest-to-God truth, he whispered to me as we lined up to go back to class. He had asked and she had said yes. She would meet him at four o’clock that afternoon on a park bench in a secluded grove where the kiss would take place.

Nino and Jerry had asked if they could watch, and Frankie had said yes. I could watch too, he said. Well before the agreed time, the four of us arrived at the rendezvous point.

“I don’t think she’d go for it if she knows you guys are looking,” Frankie told us while we all hovered over the bench. “It’d be better if you hide in the bushes.”

There was good cover in the bushes. Nino, Jerry, and I burrowed in to wait. After a while, sure enough, Katherine came along the path and joined Frankie at the park bench. They didn’t speak a word. Katherine sat down and Frankie sat beside her. Still not a word out of either one of them. They sat very still for what seemed a long time, then Frankie abruptly placed an arm around her shoulder, and she turned to face him and offered her lips. A second later she rose and walked briskly away.

We hadn’t been able to see from our position whether the kiss had actually happened, but when Frankie told us it was safe to come out, he swore it had.

“What’s it like? I asked.

“It tastes like chewing gum,” Frankie said.

I admired Frankie’s courage but was shocked that a nice girl like Katherine would engage in lovemaking. In the movies women were always making love, but I never thought of movie women as real. The things they did had no connection with life as I knew it. The idea that a real girl of my own age, a girl I’d always admired, might actually want to make love—that was a revelation hard to absorb.

The one phase of my education my mother had not pressed vigorously was sex. How, after all, could a woman take the man of the family aside and tell him about the birds and the bees? With her old-fashioned Protestant views of life, sex was not a subject civilized people discussed openly around the house. It was hard enough for a father to explain these things to a son. For a mother of her character it was simply impossible.

I heard in school from friends whose parents had told them about sex, and I had picked up enough information about it to realize it would be terribly embarrassing to have to listen to an explanation from my mother. I dreaded the possibility she might try. When she called to me from another room, as she often did, and said, “Come in here, Russ, there’s something I want to talk to you about,” I was in terror that this was the awful moment when she was going to tell me about sex.

I was saved by Aunt Pat’s brother, a young man named Jack
who lived in Hoboken but came to New Street frequently for visits of two or three days. “Uncle Jack,” I called him, and I admired him outrageously. He was dark, handsome, athletic, and led a life, I thought, of romantic swashbuckling. He had boxed professionally in preliminary three-rounders over in Hoboken and told me he was billed as “The Hoboken Tiger.” He’d taken me to Hoboken a couple of times and introduced me to people he knew on street corners, suggesting they were dangerous men. He’d thrilled me by saying, after we’d passed the time with one such street-corner bunch, “Those guys are killers.”

Aunt Pat cautioned me not to believe anything Uncle Jack told me, but I admired him anyhow.

“Uncle Jack is really tough, isn’t he?” I said one day.

“He’s not tough, he just needs a shave,” Aunt Pat replied.

This was probably true, for he usually did need a shave, and about this time he had given up boxing and was trying to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door on commission.

An evening when he, my mother, Aunt Pat, and I were in the kitchen, the conversation came around to a neighbor who had just had a baby. I made the mistake of saying something that indicated I was curious about where babies came from. Uncle Jack looked at my mother.

“Doesn’t he know about
that
yet?” he asked.

No, she said, she hadn’t gotten around to
that
yet.

“Why don’t I take him upstairs and tell him?” he suggested.

She must have felt an immense sense of relief. “I think it’s about time somebody did,” she said.

Uncle Jack looked at me gravely. “Go upstairs,” he said. “There’s something I want to talk to you about alone.”

I went. I was in a dreadful state of mind. The awful moment had come at last. I was going to be told “the facts of life.” That was how everybody referred to sex—“the facts of life.” Nobody ever called it “sex.” To call it “sex” was to talk dirty. Upstairs I dropped onto the daybed to await the worst.

Uncle Jack was slow in arriving, and, when he finally did come up, he didn’t seem to be too easy in his own mind. He looked
at me and then walked across the room and looked out the window. Then he paced silently for a minute or two.

Finally: “You think the Giants can win the pennant this year?” he asked.

“Well, they’ve got Carl Hubbell, who’s the best pitcher in the League, and if Mel Ott hits .350, and if …”

And on and on I went in a happy torrent of arcane baseball speculation.

“Yeah,” Uncle Jack said, “but it don’t make any difference who wins in the National League because nobody’s going to beat the Yankees in the World Series.”

“Don’t be so sure. Who’ve the Yankees got as good as Mel Ott?”

“They’ve got Lou Gehrig, they’ve got Bill Dickey, they’ve got this kid DiMaggio, they’ve got …”

We were slowly exhausting baseball. Uncle Jack went back to the window and looked out again, then turned to face me.

“Look here,” he said, “you know how babies are made, don’t you?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well that’s all there is to it,” he said.

“I know that,” I said.

“I thought you did,” he said.

“Sure,” I said.

“Let’s go on back downstairs,” he said.

We went downstairs together.

“Did you tell him?” my mother asked.

“Everything,” Uncle Jack said.

I could have fainted with relief. Uncle Jack probably felt the same way. So did my mother, I’m sure. That was my formal sex education. My informal education had begun the afternoon in Belleville Park when I discovered that girls were wantons willing to sneak away to shaded glades to be kissed. It was to continue for many years to come, but not in Belleville.

My time in Belleville, where I was happy and made good friends and learned that adults were also flawed, was coming to an
end. Uncle Hal, who needed my mother’s capital to help fund his projected lumber company, had her mesmerized now with the prospect of “a home of our own” in Baltimore.

Yes, she told him, she was dying to get out of Belleville, and Baltimore was the place that called her, Baltimore was the place of possibilities she remembered from her childhood. When she was a girl in Virginia, Baltimore had always been the great city at the end of the steamboat trips Papa took from Merry Point. Papa and Mama had been married in Baltimore. Once or twice she had ridden the steamboat with Papa to Baltimore and walked among those glittering lights and swirling crowds holding Papa’s hand and gaping at the wonder of it.

Now there were people she knew living in Baltimore. Several of my father’s people, people she had known in Morrisonville, had made the Depression migration from farm to town and found work in Baltimore. Among them was my father’s sister. My mother had always liked her. Her name was Selba, but no one had called her by that name since her infancy. The only daughter among twelve sons, she had been “Sister” from earliest childhood and seemed to have no other name. To me she was “Aunt Sister.” My mother had twice taken the Greyhound to Baltimore to visit Aunt Sister. They found they liked each other. Aunt Sister was particularly fond of Doris, and during the past two summers my mother had sent Doris to Baltimore to spend vacations with her.

Uncle Hal designed a plan to catch my mother’s fancy. She would move Doris, me, and Uncle Charlie to Baltimore. Aunt Sister would find an apartment for us. With Uncle Charlie to handle the household chores and look after Doris and me, my mother would be free to take a job temporarily. Uncle Hal would go to Richmond and set up his company funded with her capital. He would make her an officer of the company; her income from the investment would supplement her other earnings until the company generated enough profit to let her quit working. After the lumber business began to prosper—Easy Street.

To start his company Uncle Hal wanted her to put up $100 from her bank account. She wasn’t totally credulous about Uncle
Hal’s ability to put us on Easy Street. A student of human frailty, she probably knew deep in her soul that he was one of life’s losers. Still, she wanted that “home of our own” so desperately. She took a huge gamble. If he was asking for $100, she reasoned, he could probably make do with $75. That’s what she gave him.

The Colonel instantly launched plans to proceed to Richmond and set up business. Before leaving, he sat in the parlor at New Street and wrote her his receipt for $75, “same to be invested by me, B. H. Robinson, in walnut timber, in the name of E. Baker & Co. of Belleville, N.J., which sum she is to receive …”

It went on and on, finally stating that if he died she was to receive “all proceeds” accruing to the company, “both gross and net.”

In Richmond he plunged into action by ordering stationery. The letterhead said:

There was no mention of E. Baker & Co. of Belleville, N.J., but my mother didn’t mind. She was too delighted about the prospect of “a home of our own.” Arriving home from the A&P Laundry one October evening in 1936, she wrote him:

“Russell just said to me, ‘Mama, don’t you ever get tired? You keep going all the time,’ and it’s certainly true, but I have lots of pep and I’m working hard because I feel as though I have something to work for now. I pray for you each and every day and I’m hoping with all my heart that you succeed for your own sake as much as my own. I’ve often said the happiest day of my life would be when I knew I had punched that old card in the A&P Laundry for the last time, and it begins to look as if that time is not so far distant. I’m hoping and praying we can go to Baltimore soon and have a home of our own once more. Oh, let it be soon!”

A month passed. Instead of an answer to her prayers, he wrote
saying he needed another $25. She wrote back apologizing but insisting she didn’t have it to send. By early December he had bad news. His plans had hit a snag. She would have to hold off the move to Baltimore, but she wasn’t to worry. It was just one of those delays you ran into in business. He still hoped to meet her in Baltimore early in January.

Her patience with him was already exhausted.

“I don’t understand your business,” she wrote, “but I really don’t see how you can hope to be able to go to Baltimore by the first of the year now. I have to do something and do it soon, so I’d like to know: if you don’t find out anything definite by Christmas, could you let me have the $75 by the first of the year so I’d know I could depend on it. I’m getting out of here by the first of the year if I live and nothing happens.”

Nothing happened in Richmond. He wrote her an apology. He was terribly pinched for money. Didn’t have the full $75 to send her, but here was a little something—$10. “Well, every little bit helps,” as she constantly said. And he hadn’t cleaned her out completely. She had held back some money in her bank account. That December she told Uncle Allen we would be moving to Baltimore at the end of January.

Uncle Allen found an amiable neighbor named Walter who owned a rickety flatbed truck and would move our furniture to Baltimore for $20. He arrived after work on a Saturday to start the loading. My mother, Doris, and I were to take the overnight Greyhound and get to Baltimore early Sunday morning. Aunt Sister had already put the deposit down on an apartment.

I was tremendously excited by the prospect of an overnight bus trip to a new city and a new home, a home of our own, and especially happy about being rid of my job with the
Saturday Evening Post
. I had taken a last roller-skate tour of the old town. Frankie, Nino, Jerry, and Carmen came to the house to say their good-byes while Walter and Uncle Allen loaded our things on the truck and tied a sheet of canvas over them. When the truck lumbered away we still had hours to wait until time to go to the bus station in Newark. I put on my good clothes—a man dressed
properly when he traveled—and stood outside the house eager to get away.

A few months earlier Aunt Pat had bought a badly used piano for a few dollars and put it in the parlor, on the theory that every civilized house ought to have a piano in the parlor, though neither she, Uncle Allen, nor Uncle Charlie played. I was standing on the sidewalk in the darkness when I heard piano music inside. Curious, because I’d never heard the piano played before, I went inside. Aunt Pat, Uncle Allen, Uncle Charlie, and Doris were sitting in the parlor, and my mother was at the piano wearing her dark suit and a small dark hat with a little veil that fell over her eyes, and she was playing “Rock of Ages.”

I hadn’t known she could play the piano. She wasn’t playing very well, I guess, because she stopped occasionally and had to start over again. She concentrated intensely on the music, and the others in the room sat absolutely silently. My mother was facing me but didn’t seem to see me. She seemed to be staring beyond me toward something that wasn’t there. All the happy excitement died in me at that moment. Looking at my mother, so isolated from us all, I saw her for the first time as a person utterly alone.