Growing Up (22 page)

The salesman agreed. Gary Cooper, he said, looked especially good in double-breasted suits. He produced one. I tried it on. It was a hard fabric, built to endure. The color was green, not the green of new grass in spring, but the green of copper patina on old statues. The green was relieved by thin, light gray stripes, as though the designer had started to create cloth for a bunco artist, then changed his mind and decided to appeal to bankers.

“Well, I just don’t know,” my mother said.

Her taste in clothes was sound rather than flamboyant, but I considered the suit smashing, and would have nothing else. The price was $20, which was expensive even though it came with two pairs of pants, and upon hearing it I said, “We can’t afford it.”

“That’s what you think, mister,” she said to me. “It’s worth a little money to have the man of the house look like a gentleman.”

In conference with the salesman, it was agreed that she would pay three dollars down and three dollars a month until the cost was amortized. On my attenuated physique, this magnificent, striped, green, double-breasted suit hung like window drapes on a scarecrow. My mother could imagine Gary Cooper’s shoulders gradually filling out the jacket, but she insisted that Bond’s do something about the voluminous excesses of the pants, which in the seat area could have accommodated both me and a watermelon. The salesman assured her that Bond’s famous tailors would adjust the trousers without difficulty. They did so. When finally I had the suit home and put it on for its first trip to church, so much fabric had been removed from the seat that the two hip pockets were located with seams kissing right over my spine.

My mother was dazzled. With visions of a budding Gary Cooper under her wing, she said, “Now you look like somebody I can be proud of,” and off to church we went.

She was a magician at stretching a dollar. That December, with Christmas approaching, she was out at work and Doris was in the kitchen when I barged into her bedroom one afternoon in search of a safety pin. Since her bedroom opened onto
a community hallway, she kept the door locked, but needing the pin, I took the key from its hiding place, unlocked the door, and stepped in. Standing against the wall was a big, black bicycle with balloon tires. I recognized it instantly. It was the same secondhand bike I’d been admiring in a Baltimore Street shop window. I’d even asked about the price. It was horrendous. Something like $15. Somehow my mother had scraped together enough for a down payment and meant to surprise me with the bicycle on Christmas morning.

I was overwhelmed by the discovery that she had squandered such money on me and sickened by the knowledge that, bursting into her room like this, I had robbed her of the pleasure of seeing me astonished and delighted on Christmas day. I hadn’t wanted to know her lovely secret; still, stumbling upon it like this made me feel as though I’d struck a blow against her happiness. I backed out, put the key back in its hiding place, and brooded privately.

I resolved that between now and Christmas I must do nothing, absolutely nothing, to reveal the slightest hint of my terrible knowledge. I must avoid the least word, the faintest intonation, the weakest gesture that might reveal my possession of her secret. Nothing must deny her the happiness of seeing me stunned with amazement on Christmas day.

In the privacy of my bedroom I began composing and testing exclamations of delight: “Wow!” “A bike with balloon tires! I don’t believe it!” “I’m the luckiest boy alive!” And so on. They all owed a lot to movies in which boys like Mickey Rooney had seen their wildest dreams come true, and I realized that, with my lack of acting talent, all of them were going to sound false at the critical moment when I wanted to cry out my love spontaneously from the heart. Maybe it would be better to say nothing but appear to be shocked into such deep pleasure that speech had escaped me. I wasn’t sure, though. I’d seen speechless gratitude in the movies too, and it never really worked until the actors managed to cry a few quiet tears. I doubted I could cry on cue, so I began thinking about other expressions of speechless amazement. In front of a hand-held mirror in my bedroom I tried the whole range of
expressions: mouth agape and eyes wide; hands slapped firmly against both cheeks to keep the jaw from falling off; ear-to-ear grin with all teeth fully exposed while hugging the torso with both arms. These and more I practiced for several days without acquiring confidence in any of them. I decided to wait until Christmas morning and see if anything came naturally.

Christmas was the one occasion on which my mother surrendered to unabashed sentimentality. A week beforehand she always concocted homemade root beer, sealed it in canning jars, and stored it in the bathroom for the yeast to ferment. Now and then, sitting in the adjoining kitchen, we heard a loud thump from the bathroom and knew one of the jars had exploded, but she always made enough to allow for breakage. She took girlish delight in keeping her brightly wrapped gifts hidden in closets. Christmas Eve she spent in frenzies of baking—cakes, pies, gingerbread cookies cut and decorated to look like miniature brown pine trees and Santa Clauses. In the afternoon she took Doris and me to the street corner where trees were piled high and searched through them until she found one that satisfied our taste for fullness and symmetry. It was my job and Doris’s to set the tree up in the parlor and weight it with ornaments, lights, and silver icicles, while she prepared Christmas Eve dinner. This was a ritual meal at which the centerpiece was always oysters. She disliked oysters but always ate them on Christmas Eve. Oysters were the centerpiece of the traditional Christmas Eve supper she remembered from her girlhood in Virginia. By serving them she perpetuated the customs of Papa’s household.

She did not place her gifts under the tree that night until Doris and I had gone to bed. We were far beyond believing in Santa Claus, but she insisted on preserving the forms of the childhood myth that these were presents from some divine philanthropist. She planned all year for this annual orgy of spending and girded for it by putting small deposits month after month into her Christmas Club account at the bank.

That Christmas morning she roused us early, “to see what Santa Claus brought,” she said with just the right tone of irony to
indicate we were all old enough to know who Santa Claus was. I came out of my bedroom with my presents for her and Doris, and Doris came with hers. My mother’s had been placed under the tree during the night. There were a few small glittering packages, a big doll for Doris, but no bicycle. I must have looked disappointed.

“It looks like Santa Claus didn’t do too well by you this year, Buddy,” she said, as I opened packages. A shirt. A necktie. I said something halfhearted like, “It’s the thought that counts,” but what I felt was bitter disappointment. I supposed she’d found the bike intolerably expensive and sent it back.

“Wait a minute!” she cried, snapping her fingers. “There’s something in my bedroom I forgot all about.”

She beckoned to Doris, the two of them went out, and a moment later came back wheeling between them the big black two-wheeler with balloon tires. I didn’t have to fake my delight, after all. The three of us—Doris, my mother, and I—were people bred to repress the emotional expressions of love, but I did something that startled both my mother and me. I threw my arms around her spontaneously and kissed her.

“All right now, don’t carry on about it. It’s only a bicycle,” she said.

Still, I knew that she was as happy as I was to see her so happy.

I
was fourteen when my mother began keeping company with a man she’d met at Uncle Harold’s. It was strange to think of her “dating,” because she hadn’t gone out with men, except for me and my uncles, since Oluf’s time. Still, I saw nothing ominous in it. They went to the movies occasionally and stopped at the ice cream parlor afterwards. Sometimes they brought back ice cream for Doris and me. Now and then they went to play cards with Aunt Sister and Uncle Harold, and drank cocoa. His name was Herbert Orrison, but my mother suggested I call him “Herb.” He worked for the B&O Railroad and was financially well fixed, or so I judged from the evidence of his sporty 1934 Chevrolet and the fact that he always wore a suit, white shirt, necktie, and gray fedora when he came calling.

It never occurred to me that Herb was courting. I would have been alarmed if I’d thought so. Wasn’t I long established as “the man of the family”? A competitor was inconceivable. I was also too deeply engrossed in myself to pay attention to peripheral people like Herb. It was the summer of 1939, and just before Labor Day the German army had invaded Poland and World War II was
under way in Europe; but though I delivered the news every afternoon, even World War II seemed far away. I was hopelessly mired in the agonies of adolescence and too filled with inner uproar to sense the menaces that Herb and Adolf Hitler posed to my security.

Under my mattress was a heavily thumbed copy of
Spicy Detective
magazine which I’d recovered from a trash can while delivering newspapers. With racing pulse I read and reread stories in which some rock-jawed detective caught glimpses of milky white thighs through wisps of lace or embraced some “luscious tomato” and felt her bosom heaving hungrily against his chest. In every story there came a maddening moment at the very height of the bosom-heaving when some terrible distraction occurred—the luscious tomato was shot dead in the detective’s arms, for example, leaving me to imagine what might have happened if the killer had been a few minutes late arriving on the scene. I hated these killers whose untimely interruptions ruined the sexual drama, and my imagination was on fire with guesses about what might have been.

My suffering was increased by my certainty that no tomato would ever let her luscious bosom heave against my chest. In the presence of girls I had paralyzing seizures of blushing embarrassment. I was in misery about my physical shortcomings. I was too skinny. My hair wouldn’t stay combed. I couldn’t dance. If a girl smiled at me I blushed and turned away, pretending not to notice her, powerless to smile back, incapable of speaking a single word.

My secret passion was Laraine. She hadn’t much bosom to heave. Never mind. My appetite for her was not carnal but pure. She had glistening dark hair that swept to her shoulders, great blue eyes, and a manner so gentle and ladylike that it was impossible to imagine her bosom ever heaving against any boy, including me. She lived along my newspaper route and, I believed, shared my inner passion. Several times she looked me straight in the eye, fluttered her lashes, and gave me a dazzling smile. Always I pretended not to notice and stared past her.
I was in high school and reading
The Idylls of the King
, and under Tennyson’s influence I began to think of Laraine as a damsel to be rescued by a knight. I reveled in fantasies in which I was that knight. I didn’t wear armor, though. It was not horses that interested me, but airplanes, and so in my daydreams I wore pilot’s goggles and a flowing white scarf and flew in an open cockpit in pursuit of lascivious devils who had kidnapped Laraine and were flying her to secret hideouts to have their brutal way with her. In these fantasies I always arrived in the nick of time and, after beating her kidnappers senseless, was always offered a kiss in reward. Always I refused it. Our passion was too pure to be defiled by kissing.

One day, needing to feel my beloved’s name on my lips, I made the mistake of speaking it to Doris. In the most uninterested manner I could manage, I asked Doris, “Do you know a girl named Laraine?”

“You’re not having anything to do with Laraine, are you?”

“Come on, you know I don’t go for girls.”

“Well stay away from Laraine. She’s a cafe trotter.”

This was staggering. My glistening damsel of the glorious eyes—a cafe trotter!

I didn’t know what a cafe trotter was—I’d never heard the term before, never heard it afterwards, and never knew where Doris acquired it—but it sounded dreadful. I imagined my sweet fourteen-year-old Laraine late at night, after I was sound asleep, traveling the smoke-filled saloons of southwest Baltimore and permitting her bosom to heave against the chests of reeking beer drinkers. It was my first taste of the suffering a man invites by loving a treacherous woman.

This was only one of the many miseries that kept me too occupied with myself to see the menace of Herb. There was also my absorbing fear of public embarrassment. When my mother sent me to the drugstore with instructions to buy milk of magnesia one day, I dawdled for an hour before daring to enter the store. Milk of magnesia was a laxative. Laxatives had to do with bowels, and bowels were embarrassing. If I walked in and asked for milk of magnesia, everyone in the store would turn and stare at me, I thought, and start thinking about my bowels. It was painful to contemplate such humiliation. Finally, at the counter, waiting for
the moment when no one else was in earshot, I spoke to the clerk in a whisper: “A bottle of milk of magnesia, please.”

“What’s that?”

To me he seemed to be roaring. A little louder I said, “A bottle of milk of magnesia.”

He produced it, and I handed him money, and he gave me change, but I couldn’t let it go at that.

“It’s not for me,” I said.

“Not enough for you? You want the bigger bottle?” he roared.

“No, no. I just said—this bottle—it’s not for me. It’s for somebody else.”

He eyed me curiously as I slunk out, certain that he would now report my purchase to the whole neighborhood.

There wasn’t much that could be done about my cadaverous physique except avoid all situations that required me to take off my shirt. This meant never going to beaches or swimming pools, which became impossible after I entered high school. I was appalled the first day there to discover it had an Olympic-size pool and required all students to take swimming instruction. I was doubly stricken to learn that everyone was expected to swim buck naked. There was no getting out of it either. The idea that my fellow students—it was an all-boys school—would now see me in all my skinniness and laugh about me behind my back was enough to make me ponder suicide. Instead I chose humiliation. When we were all lined up nude at the edge of the pool, nobody pointed at me and laughed, but I was certain that everyone was busily counting my plainly visible ribs. I spent so much time in swimming class worrying about my boney profile that despite four years of instruction in that pool I never learned to swim a stroke.