New Moon (10 page)

On holiday weekends Daddy got his Mercury from the garage and took the whole family, Bridey included, into the countryside three hours to the Nevele. Our room was old-fashioned, with metal beds, fancy quilts, and a singing radiator. In the morning we accompanied our parents to the dining room where folded cloth napkins made goblets into tall birds alongside baskets of hot breakfast rolls and stacks of pancakes.

Daddy’s first order of business was to lead us into the back room to pay our respects to Uncle Ben and Aunt Marian, the owners. Their space was smoky and crowded, people crouching over ledgers. Like the operator of a saloon Aunt Marian rose to greet us with strong handshakes. She gave Mommy a long, concerned hug: “How are you, Martha dear?” Her husky Ethel Merman voice carried innuendos of both rivalry and solicitude. Marian Slutsky was a powerful statuesque lady—Daddy’s boss, Mommy’s confidante, a formidable rival to Uncle Paul. In her presence Mommy acted meek and seemed about to cry.

“She treats me like a dog,” she complained later to Bridey. “You’d think I was some sort of charity case. I used to be Martha Grossinger.”

“She acts like Queen Elizabeth,” Bridey concurred. “Someone ought to knock her off her high horse.”

Released to our designs, Jonny and I played in reeds where minnows darted past, occasional sunnies tantalized—fish too swift to
touch. We staged apple fights, climbed small trees, and collected horse chestnuts and rubber molds of cartoon characters from outside the pottery studio. Then we hiked with our parents through the forest to Nevele Falls. Eleven schoolteachers had discovered this site—the hotel’s name honoring their number spelled backwards. I loved to watch the water gather speed, spool white, and roar down rocks and explode in whirlpools. My brother and I threw sticks and bark into its stream.

When I look now at an old snapshot of us standing beside Nevele Falls, I wonder what became of our rubber boots and the toy gun lying on the ground. Jonny was asked to drop it for the photograph and tossed it aside unhappily because he wanted a cowboy look. They have almost certainly turned to pixels of gunk and rust and reentered nature untracked. They could be anywhere now—in the iron of someone’s blood or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the soil of Mars. But they still exist. Someday the photograph will undergo degradation too and return to the common pool.

At Ivy’s Store in the hotel lobby we bought puzzle books, baseball newspapers, and magazines and lay on couches reading comics and solving picture games while Daddy took forever in his business meeting with Aunt Marian. In a tall red chair under a mirror Bridey wrote to her family in fountain-pen script.

She told us she came from a land where there was fighting and that’s why she was with us. We accepted such history as another game board like our one of the Civil War with its bearded faces. It was sad, her having to be away from her beloved sisters and nephews, Margaret and Siobhan, Patrick and Jimmy. She awaited their letters, aerograms with foreign stamps, and, after perusing them slowly and sometimes tearily, told us about their achievements in the much stricter schools in Belfast.

Yet Bridey was delighted to be in America, and steak dinners and vacation trips made up a bit for her exile in our mayhem. She wore floral scents, and on Saturday nights policemen rang our doorbell to take her to dances in the Bronx. Jon and I pranced around her, teased her, loved her like a second mother, and included her in our prayers at night: “God bless Mom, Dad, Jonny, Deb, Bridey…. ”
Gradually, she became part of us, this stranger from
“the place where the dark morn sweeps down to the sea.”
She learned our secrets and was sucked into our cabal.

The third time Uncle Paul showed up after school he grabbed me from behind, calling out, “Richard the lion-hearted.” I was ecstatic, though I was anything but a lion.

He told the cabbie to make a U-turn and head uptown. We attended a brief business meeting, then caught another cab at rush hour. I thought he was sending me home but, to my astonishment, he said, “Yankee Stadium!” I had seen the Stadium only in the distance from a car. Now the colossus grew larger and larger until it towered before us, banks of lights gleaming against a violet sky. We passed the unlit Polo Grounds and crossed the Harlem River. Then we were in the crowd, entering through turnstiles, swathed in aromas of tobacco and fries.

We ate dinner at a restaurant in the ballpark where the manager knew Uncle Paul, addressing him as “PG.” After that we went to the souvenir stand where my father asked me to pick out anything I wanted. There was so much with “Yankees” on it I didn’t know where to begin. First I got a scorecard and a yearbook. Then I saw a pen-and-pencil set of wooden bats, the pencil the type that you put thin sticks of lead into, so I pointed to that. After Uncle Paul pulled dollars out of a wad in his wallet and set them down on the counter, I noticed black-and-white glossies of many of the Yankees—Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Gil McDougald, Allie Reynolds. It turned out that twelve came in an envelope—I wanted one of those too. Uncle Paul asked the man to throw in an autographed ball and an ice-cream cup. I carried my sack of treasures as he showed our tickets to an usher. We were led to our seats in the very first row behind the home-team dugout.

Floodbanks illuminated the green field and baselines. This was baseball’s real site and it was much vaster and more complicated than it seemed on radio or TV. You could look everywhere and see things happening. Players were warming up so close I sat transfixed. Then, to my horror, Uncle Paul stood and began calling out to
them. I didn’t think they would answer, but Eddie Lopat jogged over. “What do you think of this weather?” he asked Uncle Paul.

“Colder than a witch’s tit,” my father responded.

I was mortified.

Uncle Paul next coaxed the name of my favorite player—just to hear me say it—for he knew.

I mumbled the answer.

“Well, let’s get Gil over here.”

“No,” I protested, tugging at his sleeve to pull him away, but he was already calling. Finally he got his attention. McDougald jogged from his warm-up, glove in hand, and stood there with us by the railing. My heart was thumping as he asked Paul about his golf game and they talked about difficult holes and recent shots. This man had both everything and nothing to do with me and he didn’t even know it. I wanted him sent away before it was too late. I didn’t like mixing worlds, converting a baseball card into just another person. The longer I stood there and the more expressions of his I saw, the less he looked like Gil McDougald. Without the pinstriped uniform he could have been a Bill-Dave counselor.

Then I was introduced. “You play golf too?” McDougald asked.

“Gosh, no,” I thought, but I could hardly mumble an answer. It seemed inappropriate to tell him I played baseball.

Later some friends of Uncle Paul’s joined us in the row behind. “Sorry I couldn’t get you any closer,” he teased. They laughed and slapped his back. Then the three of them made bets on the game, Paul alone picking the Yankees.

In the eleventh inning Gene Woodling hit one high and far into the lights. I watched the ball disappear against the crowd. It was a meteor more than a cowhide I could hold in my hand or mind. Most of Yankee Stadium stood, and the roar grew and grew. I felt excitement all up and down me. There was no Mel Allen or Jim Woods, no words at all, just the actual din!

The men opened their wallets, and each gave a bunch of dollar bills to Uncle Paul. He folded them into a stack and handed it to me. “Your team won for me,” he said. I was as flabbergasted as gratified. This was my father—my hero.

I was put in a cab. Through swift darkness of the city I stared at streams of lights leading me home.

“The show-off,” my mother jeered the next morning. I knew I had been indulged, so it was almost a relief to have her put things in perspective. “Throwing money around, annoying ballplayers at the park where they have to play. What a big shot he is! Let him have to live with you. Disgust him with your antics. Pee in his bed. Leave him some dripping wet sheets. Then see how much he adores you.”

“The man’s a sloth,” Bob chimed in. “Everything was given to him. He doesn’t know how to work for a living. If he weren’t handing out free vacations, the players would have him evicted from the park.”

“Don’t try to talk sense to this kid. He’s so gullible he’ll believe anything. Just let him be seduced.”

“I know, Martha. There’s no point in reasoning. He sees what he wants to see.”

When I heard this I flushed in anger and shame. I felt naked before them, as though they read my mind. I knew I had betrayed family solidarity. I had valorized an outsider and accepted unwarranted gifts.

“Try the school of hard-knocks for a change,” Daddy said, “like the rest of us. No one’s out to do you a favor.”

“Paul Grossinger was born with a silver spoon,” Mommy added. She called him “a lazy bum, flaunting his parents’ wealth.”

Then Daddy compared him to the degenerate kings of England, adding that Aunt Marian had built the Nevele from her own sweat and blood. “No one gave her and Ben anything. The man is in the best business of all,” he concluded with a flourish, “the inheritance business.”

Uncle Paul’s friend Dr. Fabian likewise was a “no-good son-of-a-bitch who can’t hold down a job, a parasite living off other people’s money. What an excuse for a human being!”

This was our household patter with predictable strophes and refrains. We kept performing encores as if we hadn’t sung and danced it identically dozens of times already. It centered around exposing Uncle Paul and Dr. Fabian as collaborators to whom I was
selling Towers secrets, spies and enemy agents (like keyhole-peeping Nanny who, it turned out, was paid for by Uncle Paul too). By contrast they were laboring, devoted parents struggling to cover our bills and teach us about the world. This litany never seemed to grow old for them.

Part of me saw my parents’ side: I
was
out for myself at their expense. Their household was real; Uncle Paul was a cartoon.

Mommy and Daddy grew so self-righteous about their opinion that they made an appointment with Dr. Fabian. I couldn’t imagine what would happen, but I hoped he would convince them of the value of what he did—after all, he was the acme of good sense. Apparently, they never gave him a chance; the whole time they were there they lambasted him for encouraging insolence in children. While gesturing angrily, Daddy smashed a lamp by accident. “I told Fabian to send me the bill,” he recounted later. “The sonofabitch!—he could afford it. The man cowered before me like a mouse.”

Dr. Fabian reported this event somewhat differently (in his version he hardly cowered). Still, I was astonished. How could they have been exposed so blatantly without anything changing?

I withdrew even more. For hours I sat by the window staring into the flow of activity along 96th Street. There was a melody to the thoroughfare: teenagers dashing, Puerto Rican women strolling, baby carriages, old men trekking from horizon to horizon, trucks and taxis, horns, every now and then a train bursting up from the tunnel. It held me in a kind of static contemplation beyond time or self.

The summer after we met as father and son, Uncle Paul decided that I should go to a camp near him, a place called Chipinaw. I told him my woes at Swago, but he assured me that no such things would happen. “I’m going to have a bear watching out for you. If you don’t have a great summer,” he swore, “he’ll spit in the owner’s eye.”

I smiled stoically.

“And then after camp you’ll come and stay with me at my hotel. It’s the biggest, fanciest place in the country. It’s better than a circus, a toy store, and a country club put together. What do you think of that?”

The bear was hardly convincing, so we dreamed up a code to evade any counselor spying on our phone calls: if I started telling him the names of moons of planets he would know something was wrong and come fetch me at once.

Bridey took me to Rappaport’s, an official campers’ outlet, on the West Side to be measured for the entire red and gray Chipinaw outfit: pants, T-shirts, sweat-clothes. It was the most exhaustive fitting I had ever undergone. Shirts and shorts piled up on our counter in mounds. The performing salesman kept directing me back onto the stool with jokes at my expense at which I refused to laugh.

“Why do you have to be so crabby?” Bridey snapped as we walked to the bus stop. “He was such a cheerful chap.”

But what did she know about these matters except that she thought he was handsome? It was too much activity, too much focus on my body, too much putting on and taking off for no
purpose. I felt anemic, about to dissolve, my eyes locked in their “I’m not here” position.

A week after second grade ended, Mommy brought me downtown in a taxi to the Port Authority (I heard it as “Port of Authority”) where the Chipinaw-bound bus was loading. In a bustle of departing children I kissed her cheek and burrowed aboard into the first empty seat by a window. As mean as she was, she was known territory; she
had to
take care of me. The owners and counselors were under no such obligation. Despite her repeated assurances (on top of those proffered by Uncle Paul), I knew, from firsthand experience as well as her glib tone, that she had no idea what went on at camp.

As a series of war whoops spread throughout the vehicle, the driver made a U-turn and headed back uptown. In the pandemonium I mainly tried not to get carsick. I watched unknown parts of the city turn shabby, then into countryside. I didn’t take the peanut-butter-and-jelly they handed out because I had never eaten such a thing, so I dozed off, imagining how the grape and nut cream might have tasted.

I was awakened by everyone singing. At first I didn’t understand. They went:
“Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall, / ninety-eight bottles of beer. / If one of those bottles should happen to fall, / ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall.”
Eventually I caught on and, as countryside and towns zipped by, I was one of the few who lasted till
“zero bottles of beer on the wall, / zero bottles of beer…. ”

It was late afternoon when our tires crunched into a gravel-filled lot and motion ceased. “Last stop, Chipinaw,” shouted a rising counselor. “We’re taking no prisoners, so everyone, alley oop!” We filed into air ripe with buzzing things. The smell was pungent and sticky, redolent of hay and manure.

I was in the youngest group, the Midgets—that was our name by contrast with Freshmen, the next youngest (I have no idea how long it survived into more politically correct eras). From the lot we were marched across the road downhill to one of four adjoining rooms located in the quadrants of a large cabin. Our individual beds jutted out from its walls. At their heads, cubby-shelves stretched above our reach. Already convened there was a noisy klatch of
parents who had toted their kids to camp by car and were helping them put away their stuff. I was pulled aside by a rotund, heavily perfumed woman who told me she was my Aunt Ruthie. “Here he is,” she called out. “I found Richie.” She clamped onto my hand and towed me to her son.

Jay had been coached because, after a surprisingly intimate hug, he took me under his wing, leading me from camper to camper: “Artie, this is my cousin Richie.” I shook hands. “Barry, I want you to meet my cousin Richie.” Then to me, “Barry’s my best friend, so you’re in with us.”

“Hey, Schwartzie, you see this kid here. Well, lay off ’cause he’s my cousin, and Barry and I’ll kill ya.”

Jay had a commanding presence and a reassuring rubbery fragrance. The largest kid my age I had ever seen, he acted like an adult, initiating clinches of greeting with other campers.

Our counselor, Larry Abelman, helped us make our beds, empty our trunks, and arrange our cubbies. Then he coined an identity—we were more than just Bunk 4 of the Midgets: we were the “Famous Five,” and we got private nicknames—mine was Sparky because the first night at dinner I told Larry the story on my favorite record, how Sparky heard the train engine talking through the clatter, complaining that its right rear wheel was coming loose—then persuaded the conductor to stop seconds before they would have crashed. “Well, then that’s
your
name,” he declared. “You can warn us about hidden dangers the rest of us don’t see.”

Every day, at the second bugle (the first being dream-curdling reveille), the whole of Chipinaw lined up for personal inspection and then flag-raising to the blast of a third clarion.

As we hiked to the mess hall in fog, wet grass clung to our sneakers, frigid dew finding its way through our socks. A few yards from the rickety door, oatmeal-cocoa steam wafted over us.

Camper-waiters brought out bowls filled with sections of orange, jugs of milk, and platters of pancakes and eggs. I surprised my bunkmates by consuming Rice Krispies straight from the box.

“Gad, he eats them dry.” I did; I considered soggy cold cereal yucky.

“That’s okay,” Larry joked. “Sparky’s a horse.”

I skipped the scrambled eggs but consumed half of the rye-bread basket, chewing the middles and then the crusts because they were different tastes.

After breakfast we were ordered to clean our bunk for inspection. I held the dustpan while Jay swept, but he was too rambunctious, so plenty of dirt and fluff landed in my face. “Hey,” I cried out, “quit it!”

“Ooops!” He wasn’t even looking, he was swinging for home runs.

As the Midgets’ head counselor scrutinized the room, he pointed out subpar regions for improvement; then we were led to the day’s first activity.

The venue varied. Some mornings we went to the crafts shop, where we threaded and tied thin colored plastic strips into lanyards, belts, and wallets. I liked selecting and cutting yellow, orange, blue, and red lengths from long rolls, and knitting various box, diamond, and cobra stitches into different-patterned snakes.

Sometimes we molded cups and statuettes out of clay, mud figures that turned to stone in the shop’s oven.

Other days we were assigned to archery, softball, nature, volleyball, and boating.

Chipinaw remains an indelible mandala: its mess hall on the hilltop beside the flagpole and O.D. shack. The letters, I later learned, stood for “On Duty.” The tiny cottage was an office for older kids who helped out around the camp.

At the bottom of the slope, twin rows of bunks ran along the forest. At a right angle to them was our Midgets’ hut followed by ten or so large tents on platforms for the Seniors and Waiters, a queue that turned the corner and ran briefly parallel to the bunks at hilltop. The infirmary stood behind the tents near the Midgets’ house. Beyond that was a fence separating Chipinaw from Camp Ge-Wah-Na across the woods.

We lined up every Friday in front of the infirmary for Aunt Mary, the nurse, to wash our hair. As we stepped forward one by one in turn, she poured green antiseptic from a jug and then ran a
quick icy nozzle against us, grasshoppers and sow bugs scurrying, my eyes riveted shut against a venom that might render me blind.

I had seen the skull-and-crossbones on the back of the container from which she poured her potion, had felt its sharp sting the first time it got into my eyes. In fact, I experienced the longest blind spell ever, unable to open them to see if they still worked or had been burned out by acid. My fright dissolved as a bleary focus came back, but adults were blunderers and could not be trusted.

The forest primeval was Chipinaw’s backdrop. Everywhere mowed fields ended, woods began with their denizens: cushions of green moss with tiny club-moss copses, beetles of different sizes, shapes, and speeds, clustering ferns, pale lichens on stone and bark, salamanders under rocks, centipedes and snakes that traversed the brush, their movements ending in camouflage. We explored this realm with the nature counselor.

His shack was a mournful, spooky place. It had the medicinal aroma of the infirmary but with gamy animal musk and an undertow of mineral slime. Frogs were gassed and, still throbbing, turned over on their backbones, their bellies slit to reveal iridescent innards and throbbing guts. Snakes caught by campers summers ago lay dormant in cages or as dried-out skins hung on walls among relics that included stuffed skunks, minks, and squirrels, pinned butterflies, fish skeletons, a fox skull, and a bear claw. Next to the shack was a cistern of standing water so green and dirty it seemed to drain to the bottom of the earth.

After late-afternoon flag-lowering and dinner, we engaged in freewheeling games, Snatch the Club and Color Tag, a twilight gambol in which a blindfolded counselor would call out a color and everyone wearing it would have to run between poles without being caught by the other team. We played into early darkness.

Without sounds of traffic, it was hard to fall asleep, but when the crickets converged, I fell into their directionless call.

Across a narrow road along which flitted a rare car or truck were ballfields, archery targets, tennis courts, stables, and a rifle range. The meadows fanned out to more forest and Chipinaw’s farther
boundary with Ge-Wah-Na.

In the opposite direction at the end of a cobbly dirt path down a slope was a huge lake. We hiked there single file—moccasins and bathrobes required—towels about our necks.

It is a journey I still take in dreams. The woods are denser now, no longer uninhabited. As I leave the trail to scout, I discover its indigenous peoples:
tai chi
masters warming up next to builders of solar yurts, dowsers with willow twigs beside slabs of glowing quartz, ginseng- and shiitake-collectors in Mongolian robes. Their dwellings are wind and rain phenomena, rough facsimiles of huts and cabins. Deeper in are caves to antediluvian worlds, passes over cliffs to captured asteroids, massive amethysts in clusters. None of this did I glimpse in childhood, only pale intimations from which they later took form. I saw only pine cones amid leaves and dry needles, blueberry bushes and, once, a perfect navel orange said to have been left by the Cropsey Maniac, the mythical madman loose in those woods.

Toward the foot of the hill was our first outpost, the swimming counselors’ tent. Then came a wooden bathhouse overlooking a cat-tail marsh and a dock area demarcated into boats at anchor and swimming zones from shallow to medium to deep, formed by barriers of wooden “eggs” strung together (called lemon lines). We were expected to get into our still-damp bathing suits and gather in rows in our assigned spots. My bare flesh crawled, and my lips felt as though daubed in the powdery white paint that rubbed off the bathhouse if glanced against, the mere thought of which gave me goose bumps.

Midgets populated the shallows where we were taught to swim. Beyond, splashes of competitive water sports blended with medleys of shouts and squeals from older boys and lifeguard whistles.

I was the only one among the Midgets who failed to progress. I thrashed about in the water, picking up stones with my toes, making bubbles with my arms and legs. I didn’t consider swimming. I was satisfied to pretend while the more precocious of my bunkmates graduated to the intermediate and then into the deep end. It didn’t bother me, for I wasn’t a swimmer; I was a puddle creature.

There was plenty else to do on shore. I collected various sizes of rocks and stones and hurled them at trees, announcing strikes and balls depending on whether or not I hit the target. I often pitched a whole game of twenty-seven batters that way—all strikeouts and walks.

I skipped flat stones, counting their bounces: one, two, three, four…. Some of them made so many short skips at the end it was like a dotted line. I was thrilled to get those and tried to figure out which stones and angles made them. Then I tossed rocks of different sizes and shapes into the lake to hear their distinct plunks and hollow gulps as if the water were an ogre swallowing them. Some hit other stones and made a pleasurable tick or series of clacks. I floated sticks and bark and watched them travel beyond my reach. Edging along shoreline, I cracked open mussels and threw their goo into the shallows so that small fish gathered and tore it apart. Then I rinsed my hands.

I saw the rest of Chipinaw cavorting in blue water while I honored these drier rituals of my invention.

The view was mesmerizing. Crows travelled from tree to tree along the shoreline; darning needles buzzed over lily pads; frogs hopped from camouflage. Four other camps were visible. Ranger was as close as a stage set, its landscapes dotted with tiny figurines engaged in activities paralleling ours. Camp Ma-Ho-Ge and a more distant one whose name I never knew were panoramas of faint sounds and silhouettes, the farthest a mere vignette in a locket. Their universes were audible as faint recoils of near and far bugles and loudspeakers and an occasional staticky din of voices like an atmospheric displacement.

The Sea was called Silver Lake, but its name was equivocal; we called it alternately White Lake, Swan Lake, and Moon Lake. It was mostly just “the lake,” or Chipinaw Lake. At sea in rowboats we looked down through opacity and saw sunnies hanging, an occasional fleeting turtle or tadpole. It was a spooky darkness, portending the immensity in which one would drop if he fell overboard. Yet it was pregnant with possibilities of life: mysterious splashes, giant submerged logs like dragons. If we passed a vessel
from another camp, we stared at its occupants in awe as if they spoke a different language. The counselors, like Indian scouts, might greet one another.