Upper Bohemia Page 7

  11 The City

  Our mother liked to explore different parts of the city. No matter what we did with her, she always made it seem as though no one had ever done such a thing before. Every month or so we would take the subway down to Chinatown, and I would struggle to eat with chopsticks at whichever restaurant our mother decided must be good because it was crowded with Chinese people. The Chinese people looked well fed, which surprised me, because whenever Blair and I did not want to eat Brussels sprouts, our mother would say, “Think of the poor starving Chinese!” I imagined digging a hole so deep that I would come out in China. In a picture book there was a Chinese girl with a pigtail and a round face like mine. She lived in a green valley surrounded by rice paddies. I wished that I could crawl through the tunnel I had dug and, just for a day, I could be her friend.

  After lunch we wandered through the streets, ducking in and out of shops that sold Chinese novelties like paper dragons whose tails and heads were attached to sticks. When you pulled the sticks apart the dragon became long and colorful. My favorite thing to buy was a closed clamshell that I took home and put in a glass of water. In a few hours, it opened up and paper flowers grew out of it. A miracle. In my room, I had other more permanent toys—marbles, jacks, a spinning top, a hobby horse, and my fuzzy animals: Dumbo, the squishy elephant, and Buttoneyes, my brown musical bear that my father’s mother gave me.

  On Easter, we always went to Harlem. The children in the Easter parade had such enviable party dresses with lots of tulle, ribbons, and ruffles. The women wore fantastic hats—lavender, yellow, robin’s-egg blue. Going to Harlem was like going to another country. I hoped that we blended in, but I don’t think we did. My mother didn’t mind at all.

  Every week or so our mother took us to the Metropolitan Museum. She was good about it. Instead of heading straight up the wide marble staircase in order to look at European paintings, she took us first to the Egyptian section where we looked at mummies and tried to picture the dead body inside the wrappings of off-white strips of cloth. From there we went to see the room of Medieval armor with its enormous warrior on top of a gigantic horse. For all her effort to keep us interested, when my mother finally got to the rooms of nineteenth-century French painting and stood for a long, long time in front of each Cézanne, I scuffed my shoes along the polished floor and acted as though I wasn’t looking at anything.

  Every year we went to the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Sometimes I got frantic. If I looked at the tightrope walker or the tiny car out of which countless clowns emerged, I would miss the elephants with their ponderous but eloquent walk. I was so slow at seeing things. Blair could watch all three rings at once. Our mother bought us each a toy that consisted of a circle of tin painted red and blue and attached to a handle. When you pumped a lever on the handle the circular shape whirled around like a windmill and made sparks.

  One year I got to go to the ballet twice. I had already been to a ballet with my mother when, one night, she woke me up and told me to quickly get dressed. Fuller Potter had an extra ticket for Swan Lake, my favorite ballet. I sat next to Mary Barton, but for once we didn’t talk. Both of us were fixated on the swan. I followed the swan’s movements with my own muscles. I leapt and spun and pointed my toe toward the sky. I felt tall, thin, and beautiful. Leaving the theater, I walked with my toes pointing outward. I wondered if anyone noticed that there was a ballet dancer inside of me.

  Our mother never worried that something bad might happen to Blair and me. We were allowed to go out when it was already dark and walk a block and a half to the stationary store at the corner of Eighty-Fourth Street and Lexington. Here, with money that George or our mother gave us or that came from the tooth fairy, we bought candy, Neccos for me and for Blair, who had grown-up taste in foods, licorice. If we had enough money, we bought trading cards. With friends I traded away my boring cards or the cards for which I had duplicates for cards I didn’t have. The most popular cards were called Pinkie and Bluey. Pinkie is a 1794 portrait by Thomas Lawrence of an eleven-year-old girl with a pink sash. Bluey is Thomas Gainsborough’s 1776 The Blue Boy, a portrait of a handsome young man dressed in blue satin. The next most sought-after cards had images of famous racehorses.

  Before Blair and I left the stationary store, we checked out the latest comics. One time I really wanted a paperback joke book, but I didn’t have enough money, so I just took it and walked out. Blair and I were halfway back to Eighty-Fifth Street when we heard the store owner coming after us. I threw the joke book into a dark doorway. When the store owner reached us, my hands were empty. After he returned to his store, I grabbed the book and we ran home.

  After that, I decided that stealing was too dangerous. The only other time I stole something was from a friend of my mother’s, Lotti Bruel. In her house in Cornwall, Connecticut, she had a tiny ashtray decorated with many different colors of enamel. It was so beautiful. I knew my mother would like it, so I put it in my pocket and took it home. My mother told me it was wrong to take other people’s things, and she made me give it back. I had to walk through the swampy woods to Lotti’s house all alone, trying not to think of the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood.” As long as you look straight ahead and never look behind bushes to see what’s lurking there, you can refuse to be afraid. When Lotti came to the door, I quickly handed her the ashtray, said I was sorry, and raced out into the pine trees where no one could see me.

  My mother rarely got angry. I do not think that she paid close enough attention to get mad, but one day Blair told a lie and our mother was furious. I was scared and sad for Blair, but at the same time sort of glad. Probably Blair had said that she hadn’t done some bad thing that she actually had done. Quite often Blair blamed me for things. As I listened to our mother’s harsh words, I decided to be a good girl and never to lie. For a little while after this I believed that my mother loved me best.

  Perhaps the amount of freedom our mother gave us was not unusual in the 1940s. Still, I wonder about her letting Blair and me go to the movies alone on weekends. She would drop us at the Trans-Lux movie theater, which I remember being on the southwest corner of Eighty-Fifth Street and Madison Avenue. This was a huge treat, but I suspect it was a way of getting rid of us for a couple of hours. Before the movie began, there were newsreels about the war. After the newsreels, there was always the same brief film about soldiers raising the American flag on a flagpole on top of a small hill. The audience would stand and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Next came previews. In one of them I saw a man wearing dark clothes and black gloves walk into a park and squat behind a bench. Scary music warned me that something bad was about to happen. It did. Another man came and sat on the bench and a minute later two gloved hands came up from behind the bench and strangled him. After seeing this preview, I always slept with my sheets and blankets pulled up over my neck.

  Another thing that our mother let us do was to go to Central Park alone. Most often we went to the Eighty-Fifth Street playground just two and a half blocks away. But late one afternoon Blair and I decided to go to Mother Goose playground. We had to go down Fifth Avenue to Seventy-Second Street and then walk through Central Park until we came to an oval fence made of tall black metal bars. Usually this playground was full of uniformed nannies and well-dressed children, but when Blair and I visited, it was empty except for a woman with a baby carriage who was getting ready to leave. Something was wrong. A playground with no children feels desolate. Even the statue of Mother Goose riding a goose at the playground’s far end looked forlorn, and the swings made long black shadows on the pavement.

  Having come all this way, Blair and I thought we had better have a little fun. We spent a few moments on the seesaw. Because Blair weighed so much more than me, she had to sit halfway up her side of the seesaw. I was always afraid that she would get off without warning me and I would go crashing to the ground. This had happened a few times. It didn’t really hurt, but I hated the surprise.

  The jungle gym was my favorite. I could do somers
aults at the bottom—once I chipped my front tooth doing that. Climbing to the top made me feel nimble and courageous. I got there before Blair, and I looked down and sang the words that she liked to sing to me: “I’m the king of the castle, and you’re the dirty rascal!” I was up there feeling regal when I noticed a man outside the playground holding on to the fence bars and watching me. “Ah,” he said. “I see you can climb all the way to the top!” I was enjoying his admiration of my climbing prowess when I heard Blair’s urgent voice saying, “Hayden, come down immediately!” I refused to relinquish my power. Instead I watched the man as he moved sideways, always facing me. It was getting dark. His hands went slowly from bar to bar as if he didn’t want Blair and me to notice that he was moving toward the playground entrance. Blair stood at the bottom of the jungle gym shouting for me to come down. Finally, I heard the fear in her voice, and I realized that the man was a kidnapper. I climbed down and ran behind Blair to the exit. We got there just before the man did and we kept running all the way out of the park and across Fifth Avenue. It was a relief to hide in a group of people waiting for the uptown bus. My heart was beating so fast I couldn’t talk. Blair had saved us. How lucky I was to have an older sister. When we got home and told our mother that we were almost kidnapped, she was unimpressed. Her unconcern made me feel silly. Maybe we just invented that he was a kidnapper. But I could tell from Blair’s solemn face that we had been in danger and that our mother either refused to believe it or she didn’t care.

  Me and Blair, Central Park, c. 1946

  12 Cornwall

  George and my mother’s friends, poet and playwright Montgomery (Monty) Hare and his wife, May, gave us permission to build a log cabin on their land in Cornwall, Connecticut. The piece of land my mother and George chose was about a ten-minute walk from the Hares’ house. You went past the Hares’ swimming hole, up along a ridge, and through a pine forest to a clearing in the woods. When the cabin was ready, we spent every weekend there.

  It must have been before the cabin was built that we camped in two tents near the future cabin’s site. After eating supper cooked on a camp stove, my mother put Blair and me to bed. In the middle of the night I woke up to find myself alone. I called out. No one answered. To keep bears and murderers away, I made sure that the sides of the tent touched the ground. I stayed completely still so as not to alert killers to my presence. At last a flashlight beam shone through the tent’s green mosquito netting. I heard excited voices and I started to cry. My mother explained that the war was over and to celebrate, they had gone on a hayride. Blair told me that there were lots of nice boys in the hay. There was singing and fireworks and doughnuts to eat. I was envious and angry. How could they have left me alone at night in the forest? My mother kept saying how wonderful it was that the war was over. I was too young to go on a hayride, she said. There were no other four-year-olds there.

  The log cabin that George built had one big room. Just off the living room there was a tiny alcove with bunk beds for Blair and me. The kitchen was part of the living room. All it had was a kerosene stove and a sink with a hand pump to draw water. My mother and George slept in the living room in a double bed covered with a soft Indian print bedspread. With bolsters placed against the wall, the bed also served as a sofa. There was no bathroom. We brushed our teeth in the kitchen sink, bathed in the Hares’s pond, and went outside to use a chemical toilet.

  Me, Cornwall, CT, 1946

  In Cornwall, when he said good night, George was affectionate, but since Blair and I were in the same room, he didn’t do anything more than tickle our backs. Before we went to sleep, Blair and I would tell ghost stories and play games that George taught us. One game was to squeeze your sister’s hand three times. That meant “I love you.” I was on the top bunk so I would hang my arm over the edge of my bed, and Blair would reach up. The second person answered with two squeezes meaning “How much?” The first person squeezed as hard as possible, meaning, “a lot.” I always squeezed as hard as I could, but I didn’t want it to hurt. A similar game consisted of knocking on the pine wall three times—“I love you.” The other person answered with four knocks—“I love you, too.” This I love you game would go on and on until we were too sleepy to knock. If I was the first one to stop knocking, I felt guilty. I wanted Blair to know that my love for her was bigger than a mountain.

  George made us a swing. He tied it to a high branch of a tree on the side of a hill so that once you got going, pumping as hard as you could, the swing would fly way out high above the ground. Sometimes I went so high that I was afraid the swing would keep going up and it would sail all the way around. Of course, that never happened. Blair liked me to do “run-unders,” which consisted of pushing Blair until she went high enough for me to run out under the swing without her legs bumping into my head. We also twisted the swing around and around and then let go and the swinger would whirl in circles, get dizzy, and fall off. The ground beneath the swing was full of wild strawberries. When we were tired of swinging, we sat on the ground and ate them.

  George acquired an army hammock. It was khaki green with a canvas roof and side walls with khaki green mosquito netting windows. He hung it in the woods about two hundred feet from our cabin. Blair and I sometimes spent nights there. It could be frightening because of wild animals, but we had flashlights and if we got too scared, we could run back to the log cabin. George even made us a tree house on top of a pine tree with lower branches that were easy to climb. I went there to pretend that I was alone in the world. Nobody could get at me. I could take care of myself.

  A friend, Blair, and me in Hare’s pond, Cornwall, c.1946

  The Hares’ pond where we swam every day was full of pollywogs and, near the shore, salamanders. We dumped our clothes on a stone wall, dragged inner tubes into the water, and floated with our bottoms under water. My mother had a favorite walk to a swimming place on the Housatonic River. We followed a narrow tar road past fields with cows. Normally I didn’t like walking, but this walk was full of pleasures—the rich brown smell of cow patties, wild irises that grew up all on their own. And there were daisies, so many of them that it didn’t matter if Blair and I picked a few and pulled their petals off one by one: “He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not…” If the last petal pulled was a “not,” I was sad, even though I was vague about whether it was Benny Potter or Johnny Myers who did not love me.

  In the opposite direction from the walk to the river was the walk to Lotti Bruel’s house. Part of this walk went through a swamp. We had to jump from hummock to hummock to avoid getting our feet wet. Even after I stole Lotti’s ashtray, she was kind to me. She baked German-style pastries and served them to us on little plates. We sat on her sofa and listened to the grown-ups talk. I didn’t understand a word they said, but I enjoyed the rise and fall of voices. It was like being in bed and listening to adults in the next room. Every muscle in my body went slack. My mind went slack, too. On the way home Blair and I stopped at the edge of the swamp and dug in the mud to make islands and canals and castles—a city where fairies might live.

  In Cornwall, I learned to ride a two-wheeled bicycle. Trying to keep up with Blair as we rode down a long, steep hill took all my courage. I was torn between wanting to dump my bike on the side of the road and wanting to coast downhill with the wind blowing my hair. George came home one day with a bright red three-wheeled motorcycle with a trunk on the back that had an arched chrome handle on either side. When he gave Blair and me rides, we yelped with joy and clung to each other while hanging tight onto those chrome handles. But after a while George went too fast and he didn’t stick to the road. The forest floor was bumpy, and once when I was alone, I screamed for him to stop because I was too small to reach both handles at the same time. He acted as though he had not heard. Finally, he slammed on the brake and told me I could find my way home.

  George had a pistol. He would go up to a clearing on a hill behind the cabin and practice shooting. I was impressed with his manli
ness, but the noise made me jump. Once George took me up to his shooting range and put the gun in my hands. It was cold and heavy. I didn’t like the feel of it, so I gave it back to him. Blair told me that with her he had insisted that she shoot the pistol. He showed her how to aim and to pull the trigger. She was nine or ten years old. From then on, she and I did not like guns.

  At night after supper we were allowed to read in the living room for a little while. We sat on the bed and pulled books down from the shelf that George had built above it. There were children’s books, but I already knew all the stories, so I took down a fat grown-up’s book and followed the lines of print with my finger. Almost every line had a word that I recognized—little words like “the” or “she.” Mostly I looked at the shapes of words. I pretended that I was actually reading. During one of these quiet times my mother heard a strange noise outside the door. She looked out and there was a skunk looking at her just as if he were an expected guest. Instead of screaming or slamming the door, she said, “Good evening, Mr. Skunk. Please go away.” And the skunk did.

  Getting to Cornwall on Friday afternoons was sometimes by car with our mother and George and sometimes alone by train. Whoever it was that put Blair and me on the train at Grand Central Terminal would ask the conductor to keep an eye on us. The conductor gave us each a coloring book and a pack of Crayola crayons. When the train began to move, it felt as if the walls around the tracks under Grand Central were moving and we were staying still. When I pressed my nose to the window, my breath fogged the glass and I wrote my initials and then watched the letters fade. Then I drew hearts. Blair had just taught me how to draw them, first one side, then the other, so that the heart’s two halves were equal. They faded, too. Riding out of Manhattan was always a shock. I looked into windows of apartment buildings where everything inside was gray or brown, even the people. They were poor. I was grateful that I did not live where they did.