Burning the Days Read online

  “He had a linen factory,” replies my aunt.

  “He was a brewmaster.”

  No, no. They argue on about him and the uncle, the dentist or photographer, who came to visit in the early 1900s but didn’t like America and went back to Europe.

  “To Frankfurt,” my aunt says.

  “Moscow,” corrects my mother.

  The tree is only dimly outlined, the arbor consanguinitatis. Their father as a youth lived with his grandmother because his parents were divorced, and he was sent to America because of some business with the serving girl. And so, blindly, he escaped the wars and the wave of unparalleled destruction that came with them. In America he married a woman whose mother, my great-grandmother, had been married to a Polish prince named Notés.

  “A prince?”

  “Maybe he was a general,” my mother concedes. “Anyway he was important.” In her seventies she was still handsome and haughty, woe to the unsuspecting waiter or shopgirl. A stylish charcoal portrait done when she was in her forties—fine features, faint rings below the eyes, long graceful neck—was still very close to her appearance. She read the newspaper every day, including all the advertisements. Each day she walked two miles.

  My mother first saw my father, a photograph of him, at any rate, in the newspaper. She was eighteen. Later, entirely by chance, they were introduced. Her parents liked him very much, her mother especially. They were married in Baltimore in 1924. It was in the morning. They came back to Washington and had lunch and the new groom left for New York to go back to work. He returned a month later.

  I was the only child, born early on a June morning of the hottest day imaginable and delivered by a doctor who I later fantasized might have been William Carlos Williams—the time and location are about right—but who was in fact named Carlisle. The evening brought relief from the heat in the form of a terrific storm. I would like to think I somehow remember it and that my love of all storms proceeded from that first one, but more likely I was sleeping, wearied from the passage, my young mother—she was twenty-one—weary too, but immensely happy for everything that was over and all that lay ahead. Thunder shook the windows, the rain rattled down. The year was 1925, the hospital, Passaic General.

  Among my other uncles, one owned a factory that made acoustic materials. This uncle, Maurice, was tall and sardonic and had a waxed moustache. At one point he also had a racy convertible, a Cord, parked, in my memory, at an angle to the curb on the street in New York where we lived, a crosstown street, then as now exceptionally wide. He was an engineer of some kind. He and my aunt Sylvia had met in Atlantic City, but the factory, which failed in the Depression, was near Philadelphia and it was there that they lived. They had a house, a maid, cars. They went away every summer. The sisters never visited, they hated him so.

  “He never really did anything after 1932,” my aunt said of him.

  “A lowlife,” my mother commented.

  In old age, widowed, Sylvia went mad. In her daughter’s house she would rise in the middle of every night to pack, and in the end got on a train alone at three in the morning. She was settled afterwards in a small apartment but people were robbing her there, she complained. A woman had gotten in and stolen everything, her money, checkbook, keys. She had once again called the police.

  “How did she get in?” my mother asked.

  “She got in.”

  “But the door was locked and just had a new lock put on.”

  “She came through the ceiling,” Sylvia explained calmly, “the thieving whore.”

  The money and keys were found stuffed under a sofa, together with underclothes. The checkbook was wedged behind the back leg of a chest.

  They went walking for an hour afterwards. Sylvia was calm and lucid. She had the vast patience of the insane. Her daughter refused to look after her. Her sisters, by means of long bus rides, took over the task.

  ——

  We lived in New York from the time I was two years old, first in a rented room in some woman’s apartment on Ninety-eighth Street, then a few blocks away in our own apartment on West End Avenue, a wide, faceless street of middle-class families. My father had built some houses, without much profit, in New Jersey. In New York his ambition found its place.

  In the city that first took shape for me there were large apartment buildings stretching as far as one could see in either direction. On the side streets were private houses, many of which had been divided into rooms. Along Riverside Drive stood unspoiled mansions, stranded, as if waiting for aged patriarchs to die. In the bleak back courtyards men with grinding wheels sometimes still appeared, ringing a bell and calling up to housewives or kitchen maids for knives and scissors to sharpen. Nature meant the trees and narrow park along the river, and perhaps one of the rare snowstorms, with traffic in the streets dying and the silence of the world wrapping around. Newsboys, so-called though they were men, often walked along late in the day shouting something over and over, Extra! Extra!, someone murdered, something collapsed or sunk. A block away, around the corner, the police suddenly formed in front of a brownstone and sealed off the street expecting a gun-fight with a famous criminal they had cornered, Two-Gun Crowley.

  Still, I was allowed to walk to school alone, beginning with the first or second grade, and to play outside afterwards. The classrooms were presided over by invincible white-haired women: Miss Quigley—perhaps it was she who taught me to read—Miss McGinley.

  We sat in rows according to merit, the best pupils in front. Marks were given monthly in both schoolwork and conduct. We were made, a little later, to stand and recite poems from memory. A kind of anthology was thus provided and from it one learned the heroic language.

  Much of childhood remains everlastingly clear, the first telephone number, the name (Tony) of the feared elevator man, the pure sound—when I lay in bed bored and sick—of the key in the apartment door, which meant my mother was returning at last with the book, mostly pictures, I so wanted.

  Looking back, it can be seen that my life was an obedient one. I was close to my parents and in awe of my teachers. I had no crude or delinquent companions. The tyrannical doormen, Irish and Italian, together with the superintendents, undershirted men with strange accents, were my only enemies. There was no heaven but there was a nether region with dark basement corridors and full ashcans where I feared to go. I was a city child, pale, cared for, unaware.

  ——

  I barely remember that first apartment, in which we lived for years. The streets outside are clearer to me, the children’s group I was enrolled in, run by a young woman whose pleasant features I cannot quite make out and who was called Mademoiselle, the friend named Junior who lived in what I could see were lesser circumstances on the side street but who owned something unthinkable, a huge dog, a German shepherd.

  We had neither dog, cat, nor family gatherings. My father had friends, usually one or two at a time, and I remember them, the homely, bald-headed builder with steel-rimmed glasses, the city judge, and others, large, jovial men with crushing handshakes and a confident air. Some owned cars. Usually when I saw them they were on their way to or coming back from playing golf.

  My mother had friends, as well, Ann, Harriet, Eileen, Rose. Afternoon women. Perhaps they went to lunch. All of them were married, but their husbands, with one or two exceptions, I rarely saw. The women were warm and easy, pleasant to be around. They were still in their twenties, with silken legs and bright smiles. Perhaps they went dancing in the evening. My parents never did and seldom went to parties.

  I knew nothing, really, of the lives of these women. I was a little boy, a kind of pet. I did not even know, in most cases, where they lived. I was sometimes put together with their children, but friendships did not result.

  In New York in those days, the endless days, you were shaved each morning in a barbershop; suits and shoes came from De Pinna, and mistresses from women who worked in the office or the garment district. At least this was how my father and his closest, lifelong friend
, a cousin, Berry, lived. Handsome though completely bald, Berry was a bachelor who had been a boxer in the navy. He lived in a residential hotel near the corner of the park and unselfconsciously wore a beret. Seated at my father’s funeral, expressionless and faithful, he had unexpectedly burst into tears as the coffin was lowered, crying my father’s name. “George,” he sobbed, “George …”

  My father was rising in the world. He was usually in a good mood, singing a song as he dressed—“Otche Chornia” was one he particularly liked, “Dark Eyes.” He made up words of his own, knowing only the first few, “Otche chornia, I prekrasnia …” Often he was gone in the evening, on business. There were arguments. With me he was friendly, affectionate, but not in any true sense intimate. Childish things were beneath him, and he was indifferent to athletics. I never felt the absence of love, only of his interest. My mother may have felt the same.

  As long as I can remember he was self-involved. Even as he walked down the street he was seeing only occasional things while thinking. One thing he was certain of: he would succeed. Pieces were already falling into place, he was gaining a reputation and meeting important men. He introduced me once to Jack Dempsey, the dark-jawed champion who in those days was the image for the sport, stalking, lean. My father had arranged a lease for him and they were on good terms. Dempsey must have been in his early forties when I met him and more popular even than he had been in the ring when, humming a deathsong to himself and punching powerfully to its rhythm, he had brought down giants, Willard and Firpo, in fights that became legend. He was big, with the cheekbones of an Indian. His hands were enormous and strong. I was ten or eleven years old and remember him towering above me. I would be bigger than Dempsey, my father told me when we walked away. I would have a left like his. Pal, he used to call me. Then his mind went off to other things, various prospects and dreams.

  He had dealings with someone named Lignante, a charming man with European manners who had married a judge’s daughter. Lignante was building Hampshire House, a gleaming edifice on Central Park South, and my father lent him a large amount of money, seventy-five thousand dollars, with no collateral but against a promised share in the completed building. This was in 1929. The crash ruined Lignante, who eventually died in Italy. The money, a huge sum at the time, was never repaid. There were to be other calamities but none of such proportion.

  In my father’s papers when he died there was still the promissory note, almost the exact size of a check, that Lignante had signed. It was like the bundles of rubles I once saw in the bedroom trunk of a schoolmate, Azamat Guirey, whose mother was a Georgian princess and whose parents had fled Russia after the revolution. Despite all one knows, something clings to paper that once had value.

  ——

  As a boy I knew none of this. In the summer we went to the beach, Atlantic City, and stayed with my maternal grandparents: my mother, cousins, aunts, and I. Across the bright flatlands and bridges, the earth of the roadside losing its color, we drove, children in a separate compartment, the rumble seat, in back, hair blowing, arms waving in happiness. There was sea smell in the air and sun in the bedroom windows. The rhythm of life was set by adults but the carefree joys were ours.

  We played all day in the sand, down where it was smoothest, the green sea hissing at our feet. Not far offshore was the black wreckage of a small coastal steamer. We were unable to go near it but it is stuck there in memory, the sea swelling over it and then pouring away, the water dropping in sheets from its sides. A few years later, but not when we were there, the Morro Castle, a cruise ship, burned on the horizon nearby with great loss of life.

  The taste of early things lives on. In my mouth I feel the freshness of farm tomatoes and salt, the scrambled eggs my grandmother made, the unexpected gulps of sea. In my heart there remains childish love for those cousins, whom I saw only seldom and who later drifted away entirely.

  In the summers that followed I was sent to camp. Cordial men, the owners, brought a movie projector to the apartment during the winter to show baseball games, hilltop dining halls, and small boys diving from a six-meter board. With an unheard click of a switch the boys magically left the water, feet first, sailing up to stand on the board again. “We teach that, too.”

  The camps were always on a lake, a lake with leeches. The grass was worn and dry, the counselors not reluctant to fix character with praise or a fatal nickname. One night a week the flat wooden benches were arranged in a rectangle—the boxing ring—with spectators’ benches behind. You were chosen to fight once or twice during the summer. There in the opposite corner, skinny arms ending in oversized gloves, was the grim opponent. Sometimes the outcome was already revealed in his face, victory or certain defeat. Three rounds amid the yelling, the corner shouting instructions. The sting of the blows, especially in the face, brought shameful tears to the eyes.

  At High Lake, the first camp I went to, the most feared fighter was a husky boy with one arm. The right one was missing below the elbow. He would rush in and swing the rounded stump. I have forgotten his name, Miller, I think, but not the way the flesh was rolled tight at the empty end. It was like being hit with a club.

  At a second camp, in New Hampshire, where I went for three or four years, I was matched against my closest friend who had a temper, I knew. Royal Marcher was his name. He also had a glamorous red-haired mother and a younger sister whom we scorned but who made a surprising, sensual entrance into my dreams a few years after. Agile, assured, a few pounds lighter than I was, he sat in the other corner with a cold expression. When our eyes met it seemed he did not recognize me. The bell rang.

  We moved towards each other, large gloves raised, jabbing lightly, staring at each other from behind a right hand held close to the cheek. The jabs were from too great a range. They barely brushed the skin. Once in a while there was one more solid. I was watching for his possible anger as much as anything. I saw only a lean, inexpressive face.

  Between rounds, close to my ear, the counselor who was my second instructed, “Use your left hook. He’s carrying his guard low.” I nodded. It was the summer when the first soft pubic hair was beginning to appear but childhood had not ended.

  The bell rang for the second round. Armed with expert advice I circled slowly to the right, poked out my left hand once or twice, and then swung a great looping blow with it. It landed with unexpected force squarely on his jaw. I saw him stagger, bewildered. “Again! Again!” I could hear them cry. I jabbed a few times and then hooked, hitting him solidly once more. He hid behind his gloves. Blood, forgetful of friendship, rushed to my head. I felt triumph but also betrayal. Royal kept away from me until the end of the round.

  In the third round, coached himself, more cunning, he held his right hand higher and threw some hooks of his own which I danced away from. The judges, aware of the verdict’s significance, called the fight a draw. We each had our pride and he, his temper.

  There were secret societies—honor societies, they were called—their proceedings unrevealed. Selection came at night, after taps. We lay in bed and watched the shielded flashlights move in an eccentric way around the bunk until, our hearts all beating, they stopped and someone was tapped, told to rise. There were no requisites to being chosen; it was according to some form of popularity, incalculable, really. That was a distinction beyond all others, even the medals and awards given out at the end of the summer. Certain boys were popular. They were the true avatars.

  It was at camp that one held in one’s palm the dainty red newts found in beds of thick moss, learned filthy songs pure from young mouths, heard strange viewpoints, and discovered the stars. There was the feel of rough wool blankets in the chill mountain night, the comfort of the simple unifying prayer Now I lay me down to sleep …, the bugle calls, competition, and raising and lowering of the flag on a tall wooden pole painted white. We took hikes of ten or twelve miles, arranged to end at a general store where there were cold bottles of a bitter New England drink called Moxie, and penny candy.

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p; There were abandoned farmhouses with fifty-year-old newspapers yellow on the floor, three-day canoe trips on vast northern lakes, and color week with its stirring songs taken from operas, Parsifal and Aïda, “Ten thousand strong, we sing a song, men of Orange …,” and concluding campfires with huge, crackling pyres of wood sending sparks swirling upwards, the camp having been divided from top to bottom into two groups that competed fiercely for the championship.

  There were phonographs and records, cameras shaped like a shoebox, sacred peeled sticks, and one weekend when cars came up the stoney road carrying parents for a visit. My father’s bathing suit had a striped top and he seemed a lone figure on the wooden dock when we went swimming together. He asked me nothing about baseball, where, one of the worst players, I stood in exile in right field, occasionally seeing tremendous fly balls soar up from the distant batter, reach their zenith and then, increasing their arc and speed, small, white, and deadly, begin to descend as I ran desperately back over the clumpy ground. He and my mother both urged me to learn to play tennis, though without great conviction since they did not play themselves. They sometimes, in later years, went out together onto the golf course.

  Names from childhood—they were from camp and grammar school—were Dickie Davega, George Overholt, Neil Wald, Jamie Falk, and Larry Sloan, whom I recognized later in the pages of Marjorie Morningstar and whose sister was a showgirl, leggy and superior, moving haughtily past us.

  We had moved to the East Side, to a large building, the Croydon, cleft by two deep courts along Madison Avenue. Here we occupied first one, then another apartment, remaining for years.

  We had moved out of simple necessity, that of finding someplace less expensive, pausing for temporary stops in Atlantic City and a hotel on Central Park South owned by some acquaintances of my father.

  My new school, one of the most highly regarded in the city, was just across the street, an old red-brick monument, since torn down but still visible, so to speak, in the form of London train stations. The neighborhood was well-to-do, the silk-stocking district, it was called, with a poorer section over towards the river, Yorkville, largely German and Irish. The school’s principal, white-haired and shapeless, was Emily Nosworthy, a woman of a kind that was once numerous—educated, unswerving, very likely unmarried. There were no schoolyard fights or scuffles in the hall, and the women beneath her were equally to be feared.