Burning the Days Read online

  A schoolmate and I, in his apartment one afternoon, were making drawings of what an undressed girl might be like. Neither of us had ever seen one, or even a drawing in a book. Picasso’s etchings came much later, Rodin’s Iris, naked trunk, one leg askew, and we had never heard of Courbet. The art of photography was nascent.

  There was another, closer friend who lived one block away and whose life was in large part governed by his mother’s career, a mother I rarely saw. She was a pianist and gave concerts at Carnegie Hall. Her son, Alec, was blue-eyed and somewhat rumpled, the tongue of his belt hanging down. We played alone in his room. Everyone was invisible in that family: Nadia, his mother, closed off and practicing behind curtained glass doors; his older brother, who was already in college and had a regime to strengthen the lungs—four steps inhaling while walking, four steps breathing out, then the next block, five, and so forth.

  Alec’s room was at the rear of the apartment. We wrestled on his bed in the late afternoons, the door closed, the sound of the piano disregarded and faint. The room looked out on a courtyard seven or eight stories below and faced other dull, anonymous windows. One ordinary afternoon as the light was fading we noticed a figure in another apartment not far away, a floor below and close by because the building was in the shape of a “U.” It was a young woman, quite alone. The room in which she moved back and forth—a bathroom—was brightly lit and the top half of the window was down. In our room the lights had not been turned on, and concealing ourselves to watch, we sank to our knees.

  She slipped the sweater she was wearing over her head, passed from sight and a moment later returned, unfastening her brassiere. I recall the incredible brilliance of her flesh, the blinding nakedness, and the despair when she passed from view. We said not a word to one another. We waited in absolute silence. It was the hour of twilight. That empty box of illumination was more compelling than any stage. As if in obedience she returned. I simply could not see her enough nor, I knew from the first instant, retain what I had seen.

  No hunter at dawn, no assassin or searcher, ever felt greater joy. She walked before us, turned, tied back her hair. She leaned forward slightly to remove the last of her clothing and then stood, sacred and incomplete, looking down at something, probably a scale. I cannot imagine the weight of that immortal substance. It had no weight. It was made of glory. Then, abruptly, she stepped away to an invisible shower or tub. She departed, that is, from this earth. I had never, till then, faced the paradox of a dream vivid to the point of ecstasy yet destined to vanish.

  Dazzling as it was, it was also commonplace. Everyone knew of it, as we did then for the first time.

  ——

  From a woman who was selling them door-to-door in about 1930, my mother had bought a six-volume set called My Bookhouse. The covers were dark green and tortoisey, with a large inset illustration, a beautiful lady in white, perhaps, with long hair and a crown of yellow and golden water lilies. I had other children’s books but none I devoted myself to more. The reading was graduated from volume one through six, and though I disfigured the first two, by volume three I was treating them with respect. I knew many of the stories by heart, “The Fisherman and His Wife” by the Grimm brothers, and “The Honest Woodsman” who was offered first a gold, then a silver ax-head to replace the one he had lost but refused them, saying his was only steel, and was rewarded with all three.

  There was Dickens, Byron, the Bible, Tolstoy, folktales from many nations, and poems. The texts may have been somewhat modified, softened—I think I realized it even then—but only as regards those things too brutal for young readers. The word “out,” for instance, was omitted from a sentence in which a cruel woman cut out a sparrow’s tongue, leaving the sensitive child with the impression that the tongue had been slit. The books were richly illustrated. In volume four or five was Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West.” It was four pages long. I knew every word, and every detail of the illustrations. The hero of the poem, the colonel’s son, slender and dashing, wore a pith helmet with a white cloth wrapped around it and had a lanyard on his pistol. He may have been confused in my imagination with the Prince of Wales, who was the darling of the times.

  The ballad centered around an epic hoof-drumming chase. A colorful outlaw—I met him later in Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, lame and untamable—with a band of men has stolen a horse from the British garrison on India’s northeast frontier. The horse, moreover, a mare, is the colonel’s favorite. The colonel’s son, a troop commander, sets off in hot and lone pursuit. In a treacherous pass he at last catches sight of the mare with the bold thief, Kamal, on her back and a relentless race begins. He has fired once, he has fired twice, but the whistling ball went wide … even Tolstoy later described bullets’ gay sound. Day fades. Hooves pounding, they ride through the night. His horse nearly spent, the colonel’s son falls at a water jump and seeing this, Kamal turns back, knocks the pistol from the fallen rider’s hand, and pulls him to his feet. There, face to face they stand and, after exchanging threats, confess to the bond that is now between them, rivals who have given all. Their code is the same, and the qualities of manhood they admire. They take a sacred oath as brothers and Kamal dispatches his only son to serve henceforth as bodyguard to his foe. Belike they will raise thee to Ressaldar, he predicts, when I am hanged in Peshawur.

  I did not invent any games for the poem or pose before the mirror as one of its figures; I only stored it close to my heart. In the end, I suppose, I found the poem to be untrue, that is, I never found an adversary to love as deeply as a comrade, but I kept a place open for one always.

  Of the cardinal virtues, it was fortitude the poem held high, perhaps with a touch of mercy. Fortitude, I saw, was holy. My life was too meager for me to know if I possessed it. I was white-skinned, sheltered. In the street I ran from gangs of toughs. Tunney, Dempsey’s most famous opponent, soaked his fists every day in brine to make them invulnerable, my father had told me, to toughen them, and it was in some sort of brine that I hoped to steep myself.

  ——

  It was my father who handled my sexual education. He did this by taking me to the family doctor, who had an office on Park Avenue with two exposures and an impressive desk. We sat, the three of us, and the doctor began by asking me—he wanted an honest answer, he said—if I played with myself. I did not understand. He then elaborated somewhat. “No,” I said, which was true. He seemed almost disappointed but nevertheless undertook to describe how life was created. The egg, he explained, could not produce a baby chick all by itself. Something else was needed. I sat listening though not certain what he was talking about. He had a rugged face and silvery, Airedale hair. My father—I remember him always as having a comfortable double chin—was dutifully listening too.

  The other thing that was necessary, the doctor continued, was a sort of kick to get the process started. He asked me if I knew what delivered this kick. He waited but I had no answer. The rooster, he explained.

  With this, for me, improbable picture now in place he proceeded, with great discretion, wearing surgical gloves, as it were, to describe the principle of the kick as it related to humans. I more or less understood but did not find it intriguing.

  I don’t recall what my father said as we left. He may have asked me if I had any questions I hadn’t wanted to ask in the office. I am certain my reply would have been no. With that, my father would have felt he had done what was expected of him.

  At birthday parties, sitting in a circle, we played spin the bottle. A boy spun it and the girl it pointed to he kissed, usually with embarrassment. I bent awkwardly across towards Regina, the dark-haired daughter of the Greek florist, or Gisela, frail and blonde. The kisses meant nothing. The girls were of an age when only their long hair and instincts distinguished them from us.

  In the last year of grammar school, a bright, curly-haired friend one afternoon asked me the same introductory question the family doctor had. This time I lied.

  “How many times?” he asked.

/>   Oh, I couldn’t count them, I said, and gave the first figure that came to me, modest but not, I felt, inconsequential, “Twelve or thirteen.” I was rewarded with a stunning revelation. “You know Faith?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I did it with her.”

  “You did?”

  “In her parents’ apartment,” he said. He added an indelible line, “She spread her legs so nice.”

  The brazen courage of it. It was unimaginable. He lived over near Third Avenue. She lived in a great, respectable building on Madison, a fortress. To this day it remains to me a kind of landmark. Over the years the city becomes filled with them, certain side streets, apartment houses on corners, hotels.

  What he had done with Faith, though I was amazed at the audacity, did not make me envious. I had no real appreciation of it. I saw its daring but I was unable to imagine its pleasure or even to fill the blank of what had led up to it. How did he happen to be in her apartment? In her room? What had he said to lead her—I could picture only abrupt refusal—to the act?

  Months later one noon, looking through the magazines in a cigar store, I came across a pamphlet with blue paper covers. Someone had placed it there, concealed behind a magazine; it was not part of the stock. The provocative title I have forgotten, but as I began to read I underwent a conversion. Within, described straightforwardly, was everything the doctor and my friend had failed to clarify, the method, the exact details, the physical sensation. The door had suddenly opened, barely, to be sure, but my involvement was intense. Holding the booklet down where no one could see it I read the pages again and again, and fairly trembling with discovery, like someone who has found a secret letter, I hid the precious thing where I had found it and left the store. I was going to try certain things, and all that I had read, in time, I found to be true.

  Years afterwards, at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in his seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice had the faint shrillness of age. “No, everything I’ve ever learned,” he said, “has come from books. I’d be in darkness without them.”

  I didn’t know if he was speaking of Balzac or Strindberg or even John O’Hara, to whom his sister had been married and from whose books one can learn a great deal, much of it unsettling, but in no particular order I tried to think of books that had instructed me, and among them, not insignificant, was the anonymous twenty-page booklet in blue covers that had described the real game of the grown-up world.

  ——

  Then as now, the best weeks of the year were at Christmas. In the corner of the living room was the dark tree beneath which, early in the morning, the presents could be found, unhoped-for things, a green electric train, huge and perfect, with doors to the long passenger cars that could be pushed open and a massive engine exactly like ones dwarfing the people on the platform at Penn Station.

  When I was older, thirteen and fourteen, we went to Washington at Christmas. There were the great vaults, filled with icy breath, of Union Station, the stone columns of the long façade, the wide avenues, and the Capitol swimming in light. My older cousin, who was a chess champion, and my uncle, large, broad-featured, and bald, were there to meet us. The house, in a modest neighborhood, was small but it was a house—there was a basement, a yard—which alone made it exciting. Snow was falling, the lawns were white, the brows and shoulders of statues, the roofs of snug homes. Snow was slanting through the air, the snow of the holidays with their many parties, at which I would be the youngest but somehow accepted by being an out-of-town visitor.

  Harold, my cousin, was sixteen, a thrilling age: it meant that he could drive. The family car was a Plymouth. Off we went in the night to exciting addresses on streets he knew. We were from ordinary families but his schoolmates were from wealthy ones, some of them at least: boys who would be taken into large family businesses, and ravishing girls. There was one velvet-skirted brunette with whom I was infatuated. Gloria was her name. That first night she smiled at me. I could not believe I was talking to her or that a night or two later she remembered. I finally gave in to my cousin’s taunts and telephoned her. I was meant to ask her out. In a warm voice, No, she couldn’t, she said, she had already been asked, but would I call her again? I was ecstatic. I felt it was a triumph.

  There was sledding on a hill near the house, where we fell in with the just-blooming daughter of a Marine officer who lived nearby. Soon we were sharing a sled. I sat behind her, arms around her waist as we sped down to crash in the snowbanks, my hands having moved higher as if by accident and the two of us lying there for a minute before rising to hurry back up. Delirious rides, repeated again and again.

  Do you think she …? I asked my cousin uncertainly. Yes, he said, but seduction, despite the plans we made, proved beyond me. Instead, she and I drank hot chocolate in the kitchen, and when it was revealed there was no one else in the house, suddenly become cautious, she fled.

  The pleasure one might, all innocent, have had. The bare, chilly bedrooms of those years, the nights of aching in darkness. Was it meant to be otherwise? Not really.

  Colored by those Christmases, perhaps, others have all seemed to me exciting, like some glamorous invitation. It is romantic Christmas that seems to reign, Fifth Avenue Christmas with all the stores, faces shining in the cold, office-party Christmas with its abandon, Christmas in Paris in a postage-stamp hotel near Notre Dame, Christmas in Chamonix and the brightly lit casino, all of them somehow descended from the crowded young parties of 1938 and 1939.

  ——

  My teachers had all been women. In prep school they were men, born towards the end of the nineteenth century and graduates, largely, of Eastern colleges and universities. They were men of strong principles and prejudices. The Latin teacher, he and his subject both feared, was Mr. Nagle, a demanding, wry bachelor with gingery hair, inflexible habits, and a green fountain pen the cap of which he would ceremoniously unscrew to make a note. His humor, laced with scorn, and lofty standards made him a favorite. Automatic failure, he warned, for mispelling Nagle.

  History was a required course for all six years, and the American history teacher was a Mr. Martin, another titan, white-haired, commanding, with chalk dust on a habitual blue suit. He was in the habit of correcting term papers while listening to the radio. It would be hard to say exactly what one learned from him. In addition to history he instructed in a version of anthropology, personal hygiene, and morals. “Never swallow it” was one of his admonitions—he was speaking of phlegm, but the wiser boys in back tittered. This brought up what he knew was a constant preoccupation. “Keep your mind off the subject as much as possible” was his droning advice; “disease isn’t worth it. The worst thing is the books,” he cautioned. “They’re much worse than the pictures.” His classroom was on the side of the building facing the athletic field where early in the morning, before class, we played a game without rules, often damaging to clothes, called rip-ball, one against all, one darting hare against the trailing pack until he was exhausted or brought down. It was the field on which I recall Kerouac in shoulder pads and cleats, stocky and hard-running in games against Peddie and Blair. In football uniform, short-legged, he seemed a kind of thug. He would drop back to handle punts and, catching them, go like the wind.

  The school, Horace Mann, was in Riverdale, the northern suburbs of the city. Its tone was essentially Anglo, there were only boys, and the overriding ethic was that we were responsible for our own destiny and for fulfilling our obligations to society. There was none of Büchner’s or Ibsen’s determinism, the doctrine that acts have resistless causes. We were not what unknown forces made of us but rather what we made of ourselves. In the mornings, in the auditorium, we sang “Men of Harlech”—“would you win your name in story?”—and, as the school was affiliated with Columbia, “Roar, Lion, Roar.”

  What effect this had
, I cannot say. I was a decent student and lagging athlete, an unknown at track and substitute on the football team. I remember a youth of friendship and no foreboding, though miles away, in Europe, war had already started. Not far from where we lived, in Yorkville, they were showing German propaganda films, Sieg im Westen, and later, Feldzug in Polen, and women in the lobby of the theater held out cans collecting for German War Relief. Battle’s distant sound. We sympathized with the British, naturally, and read with excitement, in newspapers that no longer exist, of the trapping by British cruisers of the pocket battleship Graf Spee in a South American estuary. Inspired, we invented our own warship game, brilliant as only schoolboys could make it, with complex rules for movement, engagement, damage, and resupply, maneuvering fleets of slender model ships on the bare wooden floors of apartments in endless fights, often with diagrams and accounts written up afterwards, word of it passing down, so that years after, people who had never seen but only heard of it asked to have it described.

  Kerouac was only one of the postgraduate students, “ringers,” brought in every year to man the school teams. Older, less fine, with faces already showing the shadows of manhood, they were the heroes of the school and at the same time outsiders. I never spoke to any of them; there was nothing to say. A year or two ahead of us, they drank beer, carried their books carelessly in one hand, and knew how to drive. Kerouac astonished us by submitting stories to the literary magazine, for a ringer an utterly unconventional act. He never came to the magazine’s offices, however. That would have been too out of character.