World's Fair (9 page)

EIGHT

I
t must have been that summer or not long after that my little grandma’s mental condition worsened. She took to running away. I was outside the house one afternoon when the front door opened and down the steps she came. She cursed and shook her fist at me. Her hair was uncombed. I backed away, but when she reached the bottom of the stoop she wandered off in the opposite direction, giving me the distinct impression that she had cursed me only because I was in her line of sight. She turned the corner at 173rd Street and was gone.

I ran and got my mother, who was at the laundry sink scrubbing clothes. She hadn’t even known Grandma had left. Wiping her hands on her apron, my mother ran after her. She found the old woman and brought her back, but that was only the first of several episodes in which Grandma, crying and calling curses down on our house, wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and ran off.

In her curses she suggested that it would be a good thing if cholera were to kill us all. My mother numbly translated for me when I asked her what was being said. Another eventuality Grandma hoped for was that a company of Cossacks on their horses would ride us down. My mother cautioned me not to take these remarks at face value. “Grandma loves us,” she said. “Poor Grandma doesn’t know what she’s saying. She’s remembering
her life as a little girl in her village in Russia, when these things happened. Cholera killed people when they drank water that was contaminated. The Cossacks were horse soldiers of the Czar, who mounted pogroms against Jewish settlements. She never forgot, poor thing.”

I understood and did not take Grandma’s madness personally. In fact, I tried to be friendlier to her when she was sane, to show her I loved her. I took to bringing her her tea in the morning when she got up. She liked that. My mother might look in on her to see that she was all right and then in the kitchen pour her tea for her in a glass, and put the glass in a saucer, with two cubes of sugar next to it, and in my two hands I would carry the glass of tea down the hall.

But now we all had this additional worry of Grandma disappearing at any hour of the day or night. We worried that she would be hit by a car, because she wandered in the street so intently involved with her inner rage that she paid no attention to cars. When Grandma fled, if Uncle Willy was home, he would go get her. He was the best at it. He sighed, and put on his shoes, and went out and followed after her with mild consoling words of the gentlest reproach. “Oh Mama,” he said, “come back, it’s getting chilly and you’ll catch cold. Come, Mama, no you don’t mean that, don’t say that, you know how sorry you feel afterwards when you talk that way. Come home,
Mamaleh
,” he said and held his hand out with the palm up, like a man extending an invitation to dance; and many blocks from Eastburn Avenue with her rage vented, and her curses cursed, she turned and allowed herself to be escorted home.

Naturally, the neighbors knew of our trouble. Children in the street got out of Grandma’s way, but were so fascinated they followed her at a safe distance. My mother’s mortification was intense. With Uncle Willy out in the middle of the street trying to lead Grandma back inside, my mother waited in the shadows beside the parlor window where she couldn’t be seen. She cried and shook her head and bit her lip. “What did I do to deserve this?” she muttered, not unlike Grandma. “God in heaven, what have we done to deserve this!”

And one night Grandma disappeared entirely and no one could find her. My father finally called the police. Hours went by. Nobody went to bed, not even me. Then a green-and-white police car pulled up to the curb in front of our house. Two policemen got out and opened the rear door, and gently assisted Grandma out of the car and up the front steps as if they were her footmen. She was quite docile. They told my father they had found her on a street bridge overlooking the New York Central tracks all the way over on Park Avenue.

T
here was some message to me in all of this that did not address itself to my rational being as a good boy. But all I knew consciously was that I was making mistakes of recklessness and getting into trouble. I was wild. I tore up my knees from running too fast and falling. My knees or my elbows recorded these events with scabs. I was rarely clear of them. One afternoon in my room I heard my brother coming home from school; I ran the length of the house down the hall to the front door. Donald was ringing the bell, I saw his shadow on the curtain; the door was glass-paned from its top to its bottom. Running, my hand outstretched for the doorknob, reaching, reaching, what could account for my excitement? Did I have something to tell him? Did I have some story about Pinky? Or was it only that I knew Donald coming home from school commenced the day’s action? My hand missed the knob and went through the glass door. I felt the slash of an inanimate evil. Without so much as the caesura of a drawn breath I was first shouting in joy, then screaming in shock. Pain tore through my hand, and the mess of my own red substance was on the curtain. My mother running from the back of the house, my brother calling her, the door opening, glass falling to the floor, I stood looking at my palm, blood pouring down my arm. Ripples of terror went through the community of my home, as each person had in turn to learn and respond to
the awful event. I was being tourniqueted, washed, soothed, but at the same time an investigative procedure had been initiated, my mother searching from my brother’s answers to her questions the possibility of his having been responsible for this event, while he defended himself righteously, loudly and adeptly, and my grandmother was with her hand on her cheek coming along down the hall and shaking her head and saying
“Gottenyu, Gottenyu
,” thus suggesting the cosmic forces once again assailing us all. Pinky was furiously barking, and Uncle Willy, awakened from a nap on his day off, was simply trying to get the news of how this had happened, since nobody had taken the time to stop and tell him. Eventually, from the center of all of this, sobbing fitfully as I stood, hand extended for the operation over the bathroom sink, and winced as my mother removed shards of glass with a tweezer, I nevertheless found an inner certitude and calm, perhaps in advance of my willingness to stop crying or feeling sorry for myself. Everyone stood around me and watched. Thus the element of performance added itself to my behavior and I realized the advantage to my small being—the smallest lowest ranking voice in the family, in constant attendance to any one of this pantheon of powerful creatures I lived with, each with a different strength and call upon my loyalty, each entitled to tell me what to do and how to do it—I could not fail to realize the power residing in me at this moment. I was an instrument of fearful prophecy. More than that, I knew I had found the weakness of their adult strength and resolution—that misfortune could reach them through me. Even my grandma was diverted to total attention.

It is a heartening knowledge that comes sooner or later to all children that they can achieve parity. I had seen time and again in the streets a child hurting himself and then being spanked by his mother for hurting himself—pain added upon pain, which seemed cruel or stupid until it became clear that the mother intuited the malign exercise of the child’s act. She was being hurt and so she responded in kind. My mother did not ever hit me for hurting myself, not having the sufficient distance from me or cynicism to do so; there was too fine an appreciation in
her for the eternal hazards given to consciousness, poor woman, here she was in the Depression, with her sick mother, her improvident brother, her two children, a yapping dog, and maintaining an entire family while in economic dependency to her unpredictable husband. To her my injury might save me from worse if it could be seen to be a lesson.

“All right,” she said, “stop that whimpering. It’s not so bad. Maybe you’ll know now not to run through the house like a maniac.”

I
n some emblematic measure of this sentiment my mother decided to tailor a wool suit for me. I endured many fittings before the thing was done. Early one afternoon of an autumn Sunday I emerged from our house all decked out in a camel-colored tunic and matched leggings and on my head a color-coordinated beret of dark brown. I could feel the grip of the elastic band on my forehead. The buttons on my tunic went all the way up to the neck, the top one tightly fastening the military-style collar. I felt contained. At the ankles of the leggings was a row of snaps, simulating spats. The leggings came down over the tops of my new tightly laced shoes of brown leather.

I rode up and down the sidewalks for a while on my tricycle. My father joined me a few minutes later and we had a catch in front of the setback garage doors next to our stoop. I lurched after the ball when I dropped it. I couldn’t move that well. Also I didn’t want to forget myself and fall and tear the new suit or get it dirty. As soon as my mother came out, we would head past P.S. 70, across 174th Street, and up the Eastburn Avenue hill to the Concourse, where we would take the bus to visit my father’s parents, my grandma and grandpa, who lived north of Kingsbridge Road. Donald was old enough not to have to go. It was a beautiful cold sunny day and I had to squint to see the ball coming at me. My father wore an overcoat open over his dark
double-breasted suit and tie. His hat was set at the usually jaunty angle. We were waiting for my mother and then would be on our way.

At this moment an itinerant photographer came around the corner and walked toward us with a box camera on a tripod over his shoulder, and with a small pony trailing behind him. My father’s face lit up. “You’ve got a customer!” he called, waving at the man, and from one moment to the next my day turned bad, as if the sky had suddenly filled with dark clouds.

I didn’t want my picture taken. I didn’t want to get on the pony. It was a shaggy dull-eyed thing and I could see the breath coming out of its nostrils. I knew immediately it was a badly used animal with a cynical spirit. But this was the kind of fortuitous event that made my father happy. Life declared itself in him. “It’s just the thing, just the thing!” he said. I disagreed. We exchanged views. The unctuous photographer felt privileged to join the argument on my father’s side, saying the pony loved to have children sit on his back. I knew his game. Finally my father could contain himself no longer. He lifted me under the arms and set me on the pony’s back, my legs split wide over the saddle. I felt the pony stomp and stir about. The saddle seemed to me loose and creaking. The pony whinnied and took a step or two. My father was holding one hand on my back and holding the reins with the other while the man busily set up his camera. I felt the shuddering animal life of the pony between my legs, I had never sat on a horse before and I would not stick my feet in the stirrups. “Get me down!” I shouted, and I put up such a fight, squirming and sliding and threatening to fall by my vehement twistings and kickings, that the pony started to clip-clop about, turning in circles on the sidewalk. The photographer now tried to soothe him, patting his neck and gripping his mane, and my father, holding me under the arms and not lifting me off, said, “You’re all right! Don’t you see you’re all right? This little pony is more frightened of you than you are of him. Stop shouting so, stop screaming, you’re all right, nothing to be afraid of, come on, you can do it, give it a try.”

There I was, buttoned down and collared in the tight, almost
suffocating fit of my mother’s vision, and my father was urging me to heights of daring and adventure.

I thought in my desperation of a compromise. I would permit my picture to be taken, but on my tricycle, not on the pony.

I still have that picture. My little hands clutch the handlebars. My feet rest on the block pedals of the oversized front wheel. I am in my matching jacket and leggings of stiff wool. The beret is only slightly askew. I am allowing my adorable self to be commemorated in his new outfit. I am a good-looking open-faced towheaded child and I am smiling as I have been instructed; but it is a tentative wary little smile, my deportment in life, ready to placate, appease, if that will work, but my foot on the pedal, ready to fly me away, if it doesn’t.

It wasn’t as if I weren’t eager to learn their ways and take the instruction I was given and assume my place in life. But each of my deities spoke from a different strength and to different aspirations. All around me was the example of passionate survival, but I could never be sure, as I held in me the conflicting arguments of how it was done, what was the margin for error, the tolerance for wrong moves.