Growing Up (26 page)

“If only something would come along so you could go to college …” became, “For somebody with grades as good as yours, Buddy, there must be some way of getting into college.”

Delicately, she spoke to Herb. She could push and haul Herb on matters of household management, but she could scarcely ask him to finance college for me. Grand though his income seemed after her years of poverty, it wasn’t big enough to put a boy through college without great sacrifice. There was also a question of taste. I’d done nothing to endear myself to Herb, and she knew it. What’s more, with his few years of elementary school education, Herb would have been flabbergasted by the suggestion that a healthy young man should idle away four years in college at vast expense instead of making his own way in the world as he had done.

Still, my mother did speak to Herb, and Herb listened sympathetically. She told me about it next day. “Herb says he thinks he can get you a job as a brakeman on the B&O,” she reported.

“Well,” I said, “railroad men make good pay.”

“Maybe something will come along before school’s out,” she said.

The idea of becoming a railroad brakeman entertained me for a while that winter. Any job prospect would have interested me then. I was becoming embarrassed about being one of the few boys in the class with no plan for the future. The editors of the high-school yearbook circulated a questionnaire among members of the senior class asking each student to reveal his career ambition. I could hardly put down “To be a writer.” That would have made me look silly. Boys of the Depression generation were expected to have their hearts set on moneymaking work. To reply “Ambition: None” was unthinkable. You were supposed to have had your eye on a high goal from the day you left knee pants. Boys who hadn’t yet decided on a specific career usually replied that their ambition was “to be a success.” That was all right. The Depression had made materialists of us all; almost everybody wanted “to be a success.”

I studied the yearbook questionnaire with deepening despair.
I wanted the yearbook to record for posterity that I had once had flaming ambition, but I could think of nothing very exciting. Finally I turned to my friend Bob Eckert in the desk behind me.

“What are you putting down for ambition?” I asked.

“Foreign correspondent,” Eckert said.

I loved it. It sounded dashing, thrilling. Unfortunately, it was so different, so exciting an “ambition,” that I couldn’t copy Eckert without looking like a cheat. And so, turning my mind to journalism, I ticked off other glamorous newspaper jobs and after a moment’s reflection wrote down, “To be a newspaper columnist.”

In fact I hadn’t the least interest in journalism and no ambition whatever to be a newspaper columnist. Though City College published an excellent weekly newspaper, during my four years there I was never interested enough to apply for a job, never knew where its office was located, and never cared enough to find out.

Having solved the problem of finding an “ambition” elegant enough for the yearbook, I returned to reality. Was I really sharp enough to make it in the retail grocery business? Should I become a railroad man?

Matters were at this stage in the spring of 1942 when I discovered my great friend and classmate Charlie Sussman filling out a sheaf of forms between classes one day. Sussman was a prodigious bookworm and lover of education. I admired him greatly for the wide range of his knowledge, which far exceeded mine. He understood the distinction between fascism and communism, subjects on which I was utterly ignorant. He was interested in politics and foreign policy, subjects that bored me. He listened to classical music, to which I was completely deaf. He planned to become a teacher and had the instinct for it. It bothered him that there were such great gaps in my education. Like my mother, Sussman wanted to improve me. He tried to awaken me to the beauties of music. “Start with Tchaikovsky,” he pleaded. “Tchaikovsky is easy. Everybody likes Tchaikovsky. Then you’ll discover the beauty of Beethoven and Mozart.”

Now, finding him bent over a strange batch of papers, I asked, “What’re you doing, Suss?”

“Filling out college application forms,” he said.

“What college are you going to?”

“Johns Hopkins,” he said.

I knew that Johns Hopkins was a hospital and produced doctors.

“I didn’t know you wanted to be a doctor. I thought you wanted to teach.”

“Hopkins isn’t just for doctors,” he said.

“No kidding.”

“It’s a regular college too,” he said. “What college are you going to?”

“I’m not going to college.”

Sussman was shocked. Dropping his pen, he glared at me in amazement. “Not going to college?” He said it in outrage. He refused to tolerate this offense to education. “You’ve got to go to college,” he said. “Get some admission forms—they’ve got them downstairs at the office—and we’ll go to Hopkins together.”

That would be great, I said, but my family couldn’t afford it.

“Apply for a scholarship,” he commanded.

“What’s that?”

Sussman explained. I was astonished. It seemed that this college, of whose existence I had just learned, was willing to accept a limited number of students absolutely free if they could do well on a competitive examination. Sussman himself intended to take the test in hope of reducing the cost to his parents.

“I’ll get you a set of application forms,” he said, and he did. He was determined that education would not lose me without a struggle.

My mother was as surprised as I’d been. Just when she had begun to lose faith that something would come along, providence had assumed the shape of Charlie Sussman and smiled upon us. The day of the examination she stopped me as I was going out the door and kissed me.

“I’ve been praying for you every night,” she said. “You’ll do great.”

She’d been doing more than praying. For three weeks she’d worked with me every night on a home refresher course in mathematics, my weakest subject. Night after night she held the math books and conducted quizzes on geometry and algebra, laboriously checking my solutions against those in the back of the books and, when I erred, struggling along with me to discover where I’d gone wrong. Afterwards, when we were both worn out, she went to bed and prayed. She believed in prayer, in the Lord’s intercession, but not in the Lord’s willingness to do it all. She and I together had to help. The Lord helped those who helped themselves.

The examination was held on a Saturday in May. I hadn’t been to Johns Hopkins before, so I gave myself an extra hour against the possibility of getting lost on the streetcar trip to North Baltimore. My mother had written the directions and put them in my pocket, just in case, but the trip went smoothly, and when I reached the campus I was directed to a huge lecture hall reeking of chemicals. I was dismayed to find the hall filled with boys, each of whom probably wanted one of the few available scholarships as desperately as I did.

Unlike my mother, I had no faith in prayer. From early childhood I had thought of God as a cosmic trick player. Though I’d never told this to my mother and went to church regularly to please her, I’d grown up a fatalist with little faith. Now, though, as I counted the boys in the room and realized the odds against me, I decided it was foolish to leave even the remotest possibility untouched. Closing my eyes, I silently uttered the Lord’s Prayer in my head and, to leave no base untouched, followed it with the only other prayer I knew, the one my mother had taught me years ago when putting me to bed in Morrisonville. And so, as the examination papers were being distributed, I sat at my desk silently repeating, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep …”

At the end I improvised a single line of my own and prayed, “Dear God, help me with this test.” It lasted four hours.

My mother was waiting on the porch when I came back down Marydell Road that afternoon. “How’d it go, Buddy?”

“Don’t know,” I said, which I didn’t.

Two weeks crept slowly past and May neared its end. I had only three weeks left of high school when I arrived home one afternoon to find my mother sitting expressionless in the glider on the front porch. “You got a letter from Hopkins today,” she said. “It’s in on the table.”

“Did you open it?”

“I’m not in the habit of opening other people’s mail,” she said. “You open it and tell me what it says.”

We went inside together. The envelope was there on the table. It was a very small envelope. Very small. Hopkins had obviously decided I was not worth wasting much stationery on. Picking it up, I saw that it was also very thin. The message was obviously short and probably not sweet if it could be conveyed in such flimsy form. I ripped the end off the envelope, slid out a piece of note-sized paper, and unfolded it. I saw it was a form letter on which someone had typed a few words in the blank spaces. I read it to myself.

“Well, what does it say?” my mother asked.

I read it aloud to her:

“Let me read it,” my mother said. She did, and she smiled, and she read it again; then she said, “Herb is going to be proud of you, Buddy.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“Well, I always knew you could do it,” she said, heading for the kitchen. “I think I’ll make us some iced tea.”

She had to do something ordinary, I suppose, or risk fainting with delight. We had helped ourselves, the Lord had helped us in return, and one of her wildest dreams had come true. Something had come along.

T
HE
United States had been at war seven months when I entered Johns Hopkins in the summer of 1942. Through most of my childhood there had always been war. War in Ethiopia. War in Spain. War in China. Dimly, I had been aware through all those years that worlds were burning, but they seemed far away. It wasn’t my world that was on fire, nor was it ever likely to be, or so I thought. Sheltered by two great oceans, America seemed impregnable. I was like a person on a summer night seeing heat lightning far out on the horizon and murmuring, “Must be a bad storm way over there someplace.” It was not my storm.

I’d just turned fourteen when Hitler and Stalin signed their nonaggression pact which cleared the European stage for World War II to start, but though I delivered the papers that told the story in gigantic headlines, I was baffled when a man bought one from me, glanced at the front page, and said, “So it’s war.” Wasn’t there always war someplace? What was special this time?

For me, World War II began a few days later as nothing more than a mild dispute with my mother. We woke that morning to a
radio blaring that the German army had marched into Poland. It was September 1, 1939, and we were still living on Lombard Street. It was one of those rare mornings when Herb was home for breakfast. “We’ll be in it before long, mark my words,” he said to my mother.

“This is England’s war. Let England fight it,” she said.

Why another German land grab in the middle of Europe should start a world war wasn’t clear to me. I seldom paid attention to news of politics, dictators, and treaties. My interest centered on baseball news, comic strips, murders, and hangings. Herb was better informed.

“We’re going to be in it before it’s over, you just mark my words,” he repeated.

This irritated my mother. She hadn’t forgiven the English for denying the great lost family fortune to Papa.

“We went over there once and pulled England’s chestnuts out of the fire,” she said. “This time let them stew in their own juice.”

Still four years shy of eighteen, I quickly calculated that the war would be over before it could take me. If it was a world war, I figured, it would last four years. The First World War had lasted four years, hadn’t it? I had the idea that four years was the standard length of world wars. My mother interrupted these calculations to talk business.

“You’ll be able to sell all your extras today, Buddy.”

I groaned inwardly. “Extras” were the excess newspapers left over after I’d served my regular customers. The
News-Post
always sent more papers than there were customers. It was a sly way of boosting circulation, since they billed me for the extras whether I sold them on street corners or not. Usually I threw them in the trash and took the loss, for when it came to salesmanship I was no less timid than I’d been during my
Saturday Evening Post
career. My mother let me get away with wasting the extras, on grounds that it was more important to spend time on schoolbooks than hawking newspapers. Now, though, she smelled war profits.

“Today you ought to be able to sell every paper they’ll send you,” she said.

I decided to forget I’d heard her. After delivering the first edition bundles that afternoon I went home as always to read until the second edition came off the truck. My mother was waiting. “Did you sell all your extras?”

I hadn’t sold one, hadn’t even tried.

“What kind of newspaperman are you? Take those extras up to the corner where people get off the streetcar and you can make some money.”

“Nobody wants to read about this Polish stuff.”

“For God’s sake, Russell, show a little gumption for once in your life. This is a world war. An idiot could sell newspapers today.”

School was to reopen next week after summer recess. “I think I’d better brush up on my schoolwork,” I said.

“Are you going to get out there and sell those papers, or do you want me to do it for you?”

She wasn’t bluffing. She had once gone out to collect overdue bills from the worst deadbeats on my route after I said it couldn’t be done, and she had come back with every penny they owed. I’d felt humiliated by that. Having your mother collect the bill was bound to cost you respect among your customers.

“I’ll do it,” I said, and went off to badger pedestrians with quiet murmurs of, “Newspaper? Like to buy a newspaper?” In spite of my languid sales pitch I was back home in fifteen minutes with every paper sold and a pocket full of coins.