Growing Up (31 page)

The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. My mother had written me almost daily since the day I left home. Her letters were mostly homey chitchat. News of a trip to Aunt Sister’s, a visit from Audrey, Doris’s progress in school, items about the latest trick of my baby sister, Mary Leslie. The letter she wrote the night after Hiroshima was no different. It would have given historians no clue that anything remarkable had happened the day before:

“Dear Buddy, This will have to be a little brief because I took Mary to the park and had a battle to get her to come home. She’s in seventh heaven if she can get over there and stand up on the big
swings like the older children. She informed me today that she is now a big girl, not a little girl anymore. …

“Herbert is now trimming the barberry bushes. There was a big softball game in the park, but I never watch them anymore because the players are all new, and I don’t know them. …”

And so on.

On August 8, two days after Hiroshima, I wrote her from Whiting Field.

“At this moment I am in a kind of fugitive status. I’m committing the most heinous crime in the Navy and, even now as I write, my hand trembles at the thought of the punishment if I am caught. I am cutting a captain’s inspection. They have these things every month or so as a sort of naval religious rite. The inmates all don their best straitjackets and stand at attention in the broiling sun for two hours. During this period, paunchy commanders roam leisurely through the ranks, attempting to catch people who’ve gotten their shoes dusty while coming through the deserts that surround the inspection field. After everyone’s best garments are thoroughly wilted and perspiration-soaked and several persons have fainted, the inspection is formally declared to be over and the daily routine begins. …”

And so on.

My mother’s letter on August 9, three days after Hiroshima, one day after the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, still ignored the atomic age.

“What’s become of my pal? I haven’t heard from you since last Friday. Yesterday I sent you a two-pound box of candy for your birthday and tomorrow I’m sending you by mail two books. One is a humorous book and the other, one of the best sellers. I hope you’ll enjoy them. …

“One of Doris’s pals from high school was over and spent the night and we all went to the movies this afternoon. The radio is blaring the news of Russia’s victories in her war against Japan. It sure is good news, as I’m sure it will shorten this war. Herb is in an unusually good mood this evening, and he wants me to go for a ride in the car. …”

And so on.

On August 9 the second atomic bomb was dropped at Nagasaki. Next night I wrote to my mother.

“Well, today, to all intents and purposes, the war ended. The feeling of extreme elation which I had expected, existed for a bare moment, then life subsided back into its groove and it was just another day. It seems like I’m pulling some monstrous joke on myself when I say the war is over, because I really can’t believe it. I didn’t expect it to ever end. …”

I didn’t confess that I hated the war’s ending. I knew she had been praying to God to save my skin; I could hardly tell her I was sorry her prayers had been answered. Instead, I composed an essay on peace so fatuous that it might have done credit to a professional editorial writer:

“Tonight, it’s almost like a miracle to think that nowhere on the entire earth is there one single, insignificant little war being fought. That is something utterly new in my lifetime, perhaps even in yours. Certainly, this is a strange new era loaded with immense latent possibilities. Let’s hope that we can make the most of this opportunity at least.”

These pieties were a shade premature, since the war had not quite ended. Still there was no hint in either my mother’s correspondence or mine that the arrival of the nuclear age interested us much. My mother, also excited about premature news that the war was over, had less cosmic things on her mind. The night after the Nagasaki bombing she wrote:

“I’m still hoping that you’ll go to college when the war is over and study journalism; that is, if you’re still interested in that kind of work. Don’t lose hope and get married at this stage of the game. Maybe there’s still something better in the cards for you. Swell advice from one who’s had the noose put on her twice, is it not?”

Eight days after Hiroshima, four days after Nagasaki, Emperor Hirohito, having determined that Japan must “endure the unendurable and suffer the insufferable,” ordered the Japanese to cease fighting. It was August 14, my twentieth birthday.

“Dear Buddy,” my mother’s letter began that night, “On this
happy day I must write to you before retiring. All day we’ve been hearing the opinions of people on the street in different cities. The story which struck me was that of a newsboy on the street in Chicago. He said he was happy because some man had just bought an ‘Extra’ and given him a buck for it. This story brought back to my mind the day this war started in Europe. You were serving papers and well do I remember how I exhorted you to put forth your best efforts to capitalize on the big news. Now today as this war finally ends you’re a man of twenty years today, and I’ll bet it’s one birthday you will always remember. … I can tell you that your mother’s prayers were surely answered, for there’s never been a day since you left October 7, 1943, that I have not prayed the war would be over before you had to go overseas, so I feel that I truly should be thankful tonight that at last it’s over.”

A later generation with hindsight’s flawless vision understood very clearly that Hiroshima was a great and terrible moment in human history. The daily log of the war which my mother and I kept showed no such insight.

“I took Mary to the park. …”

“I am now cutting a captain’s inspection. …”

“Herbert is now trimming the barberry bushes. …”

“Yesterday I sent you a two-pound box of candy for your birthday. …”

A later generation, with hindsight’s infallible judgment, found the atomic bombing easy to condemn as a crime in which we had all connived, if only subconsciously. Neither my mother’s letters nor mine, however, indicated that we even realized anything very extraordinary had happened.

“I took Mary to the park. …”

“I am now cutting a captain’s inspection. …”

“There was a big softball game. …”

“And the daily routine begins. …”

“Herbert is now trimming the barberry bushes. …”

And so we drifted on, oblivious to history and the future’s judgment, lost in the small chaff of humanity’s humdrum concerns.

“… haven’t heard from you since last Friday …”

“… people who’ve gotten their shoes dusty …”

“… box of candy for your birthday …”

“… and the daily routine begins …”

M
IMI
did not fit my mother’s idea of “a good woman.” Because I knew she didn’t, it was a long time before I introduced them. Afterwards my mother said, “Mimi wouldn’t be a bad-looking girl if she didn’t use so much makeup.”

I hadn’t expected wholehearted approval of Mimi, but I’d thought she would at least be fair and agree with me that Mimi was a stunning beauty. Instead there was only a backhanded compliment—“wouldn’t be a bad-looking girl”—slyly poisoned with the remark about “so much makeup.” Decoded, it meant, “Not a good woman.”

I think my mother realized right away that in Mimi she was meeting her most formidable opponent since the time of Ida Rebecca. Maybe, watching me lead Mimi up to the porch at Marydell Road that Sunday, she caught a glimpse of life repeating itself as an ironic joke and dreaded what was to come. A lifetime ago Ida Rebecca had stood on another front porch and stared at her in disapproval when Benny led her up the steps in Morrisonville. That day she had been the unsuitable young woman threatening the family security of a disapproving matriarch. Now time had
played a trick and created a reversal of roles. Now it was my mother’s turn to play the disapproving matriarch while a foolish son brought her a dangerously unsuitable young woman.

My mother was more cunning than Ida Rebecca. From her own experience with Benny she knew how willful a son could be in the grip of passion, realized it was dangerous to mount open resistance, and sensed that guile and subversion would be the best weapons for the coming struggle. “Wouldn’t be a bad-looking girl” was the first insertion of a very sharp scalpel. “So much makeup” was the twist of the blade. I knew what she was up to, but it was effective. This was in 1946, when I was twenty and shared my mother’s belief in the “good woman.” Still, my feelings about Mimi were so complex that I was far beyond thinking of her as either good woman or bad. Enchanted by love, I thought of her as a woman so special she could not be catalogued. Now, though, my mother had resurrected the question. It was all very well to keep company with women who applied rouge and lipstick with a free hand, but were such women suitable for presentation to mothers? Could a man who wanted to make something of himself seriously consider marrying such a woman? Vanity fought with love for possession of my soul, and the battle settled into a prolonged stalemate that was to drag on for the next four years.

It was true that Mimi was not promising “good woman” material. Besides using cosmetics, she lived alone, had no family, drank wine and whiskey, entertained men in her apartment, and sometimes touched her hair with bleach. Any one of these defects would have been enough to condemn her before my mother, but beyond these she had no prospect of ever making anything of herself. She had only a tenth-grade education and worked in a department store advising women what rouges, powders, pastes, lipstick, and eyeshadow suited their complexions. Even her name—Mimi—seemed unsuitable. “Good women” were not Mimi or Fifi or Lulu; they were Betty and Mary and Gladys and Lucy and Elizabeth.

She was also much too beautiful not to be suspect. Tall and slender, she had glistening hair the color of dark honey. When she
wore it loose, it fell to her waist, a very narrow waist which flared downward into a swelling generosity of curved lines of such subtle complexity that my heart often stopped a moment when I thought of them. She had the carriage of an empress: chin always high and proud, face composed and serene, gracefully sloping shoulders, her long back arched as nobly as if she’d been bred to wear necklaces of pearl.

A friend of mine, meeting her for the first time and seeing us quarrel over something petty and watching her stride off in anger, said, “My God, she’s beautiful! If you don’t treat her better than that, somebody’s going to take her away from you.”

I lived in rages of jealous fear that somebody would. Arriving very late one evening at a friend’s wedding reception, I went looking for her in the noisy crowd of drunken guests. We’d agreed to meet there, but I couldn’t find her. Searching the gallery—it was a hotel ballroom—I looked over the railing and saw her standing directly below. A man I knew casually had her in his arms, and she placed her hands behind his neck, offered her lips, drew his face down to hers, and gave him a wanton kiss. I raced downstairs, hauled her away from him, and took her back to her apartment.

There I accused her of treachery and betrayal. “You couldn’t be faithful for twenty minutes if I had to go out to the drugstore,” I said.

Since we weren’t married, she inquired calmly, why did I feel entitled to abuse her for kissing other men.

“Because there’s something fine between us,” I said. “Why do you want to destroy it?”

These were shopworn phrases I’d learned in the movies; this jealousy was such a shatteringly new emotion that I had no words of my own to express the pain. She laughed quietly. “Why do I want to destroy it? That’s good.”

“Well, why the hell do you?”

“Why don’t
you
want to get married?” she replied.

There were very good reasons why I didn’t want to get married to anybody just then, but I hadn’t the courage to tell her why I would never get married to her. I wanted her to know, though,
that marriage between us would never be possible, so I said, “For you and me, marriage isn’t in the cards.”

It was another corny old movie line, and she laughed at me for it, but she never forgot it nor let me forget I had said it.

Her full name was Miriam Emily Nash. She was two years younger than I by the calendar but many years older in experience of life. Born in Merchantville, New Jersey, she was the only child of a troubled marriage. Her father was a hard-drinking, perpetually broke ne’er-do-well who did unskilled labor in the Camden shipyard. Her mother was a devout Irish Catholic, awed by the priests, a faithful attendant at Mass, eating the fish every Friday, quick to distinguish evil from good. She hated liquor and what it did to her husband. When he went on a binge she locked the front door against him. Mimi’s earliest memories were of her enraged father drunkenly smashing the big glass window out of the locked front door to reach the lock inside. That happened often. On the first Christmas Eve she remembered, her mother spent the day building a toy garden under the Christmas tree and her father stormed in drunk at dusk and kicked it into ruins.

They moved a lot, living in shabby little houses in and around Camden. Mimi was eleven when her mother, who was an epileptic, suffered a severe seizure and was sent to the New Jersey State Village for Epileptics at Skillman. The child was left alone with her father, but not for long. He had often gone away for a week or more—where or why, Mimi never knew. He just “disappeared,” and now he “disappeared” again. When he didn’t return after several days, Mimi was taken in by a kindly elderly couple who ran the neighborhood grocery. Later she was sent to live with a family who knew her parents.

Her mother came home for a brief period and the family was reunited, and the old uproar with the whiskey resumed, and her mother collapsed and went back to the security of Skillman. The word from Skillman was that her mother would not return home in any foreseeable future. Which left her father with the problem of Mimi. He presented it to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which placed her in the Sheltering Arms, a
Camden “home” for orphans, foundlings, and battered or abandoned children.