UNCLE Allen moved us out of Newark and up to Belleville in 1932. I liked Belleville. There were big grassy lawns and streets canopied with trees. We lived on the first floor of a two-family house across the street from Public School Number 8. The landlady lived on the second floor. Aunt Pat detested her for being a landlady. The propertied classes ranked high in Aunt Pat’s catalogue of natural enemies.
Coming in from play one evening at dusk, I heard Aunt Pat shouting in the kitchen.
“She’s got her nerve!”
Uncle Allen tried his customary soothing refrain. “Calm down now, Pat. Just calm down.”
“Calm down! Not with that thing on the front door! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Allen! What are the neighbors going to think?”
I tiptoed outside to see what terrible thing was on the front door. In fact there were two front doors side by side. One opened directly into our parlor, the other opened onto a staircase that led up to the landlady’s quarters. Our front door looked the same as always, but fixed to the landlady’s door was a large head-and-shoulders portrait of a genial-looking man with hair parted down the middle.
There was printing under the picture. I could read easily now. My mother had spent so much time teaching me to read that the principal at P.S. Number 8 had agreed to let me skip second grade and go on to the third, which didn’t satisfy my mother, who thought I should have been skipped at least to the fourth. Reading the material under the picture gave me no trouble, but I couldn’t understand why it should anger Aunt Pat.
It identified the man in the picture as Herbert Hoover. It said something to the effect that he should be reelected. I studied the picture carefully and was impressed by the gentleness of Herbert Hoover’s expression. He had round, chubby cheeks that reminded me of babies. He certainly didn’t look like a man to make your blood boil. I went back in the house, where Uncle Allen was trying to focus Aunt Pat’s mind on making supper.
“How can I cook with that damn thing on the front door?” she cried.
My mother was sitting at the table smiling and enjoying the excitement. As meekly as possible, I asked her, “What’s wrong about Herbert Hoover?”
“Great mother of God!” cried Aunt Pat. “You poor child!” And she told me what was wrong about Herbert Hoover. He was destroying America, that was one thing wrong about him.
“Now just a second, Pat—”
But Uncle Allen’s plea for calm was lost in the gale. People were starving because of Herbert Hoover. My mother was out of work because of Herbert Hoover. Men were killing themselves because of Herbert Hoover, and their fatherless children were being packed away into orphanages—Aunt Pat’s dread of orphanages made this the worst offense of all to her—because of Herbert Hoover.
“Now, Pat, be fair—”
“I’ll be fair. I’m going to tear that thing off the front door.”
She was in motion now. Uncle Allen stepped between her and the parlor. “You can’t do that, Pat. It’s her house. She has a right to put up a poster if she wants.”
“We pay the rent that keeps her, it’s our house too,” Aunt Pat roared, but for the first time she seemed ready to defer to Uncle Allen’s sense of what was right.
Seeing that he had averted a crisis for the moment, Uncle Allen adopted the foxy-grandpa style he sometimes used when he wanted to win a point by persuasion. Taking a toothpick out of his vest pocket, he chewed it thoughtfully for the longest while, a gesture we all recognized. He was thinking; he had an idea aborning. When all was silent, he smiled a canny smile and spoke in his deepest down-home southern drawl.
“Waal, Pat, I’ll tell you,” he said. “Down in Lancaster Court House where I come from, we always liked to settle things peaceable. Kind of keep the blood cool, y’know. I remember one time old Mr. Charlie Nickens had a fight with a fellow down there whose cows kept getting into his orchard”—Uncle Allen remembered nothing of the sort. He was making it up out of the whole cloth, hoping to get Aunt Pat soothed sufficiently to get on with making the chipped-beef gravy for supper—“and old Mr. Nickens swore he was going to shoot the next cow he caught in there eating his apples off the ground, because he fed those apples to his hogs, you know. But I had a better idea. ‘Lord, Mr. Nickens, you don’t want to shoot that man’s cows,’ I told him. ‘A hole in the fence is a two-way street. If his cows come over to your side, why don’t you encourage your hogs to go over to his side and wallow around in his vegetable garden?’ I think that’s what we ought to do about Mr. Hoover out front.”
“I don’t get it,” said Aunt Pat. I didn’t either.
“We’ve got a front door too,” Uncle Allen said. “It’s a two-way street. Instead of tearing down her Hoover poster, why don’t we get a Roosevelt poster and stick it up right alongside hers on our own door?”
Aunt Pat was delighted with the idea. She headed for the door.
“Where are you going, Pat?” he asked.
“To talk to the Dunleavys,” she said. “I want to find out where to get a Roosevelt poster.”
“Can’t it wait till after supper?”
It couldn’t. Aunt Pat headed out to canvass the neighbors. The Dunleavys, the O’Connells, the Quinns, the O’Learys. They were all rabid Democrats. One of them would guide her to the source of Franklin Roosevelt posters. We had no telephone; telephones were luxuries for the rich. She traveled from neighbor to neighbor in search of someone wise in the mechanics of politics and came back with the address of a storefront campaign office where posters were available free.
The office lay a mighty distance, down on Washington Avenue, and we had no car. Cars were also luxuries for the rich. That was all right; Aunt Pat would walk.
“Supper,” Uncle Allen pleaded.
My mother could cook the chipped beef, Aunt Pat said, and have it ready on her return.
“It’s dark,” Uncle Allen said. “It’s too far to go alone.”
By now I was totally involved. I too wanted to save America from Herbert Hoover. I wanted to defeat the landlady upstairs who lived off Uncle Allen’s money. Above all I wanted to be part of the excitement. “I’ll go with her,” I cried.
Off we went. The walk seemed endless, the trip back even longer, but when we returned and Aunt Pat taped the picture of Franklin Roosevelt to our front door I forgot exhaustion. I felt like a hero of liberty. I had discovered the joys of politics. If I had lived upstairs with the landlady I would probably have become a hard-money Republican, but chance had put me on the lower level where the Depression stirred such passion that even a child could not resist. In my first venture into politics, I became a Roosevelt Democrat.
I was much too young to sense what the Depression was doing to people like my mother and Oluf, or to realize what a heroic feat Uncle Allen was performing simply by keeping us all fed and sheltered. Having known nothing but hard times, I had no sense of the hopes that were being destroyed or the fear in which adults lived or the defeat my mother felt at Oluf’s farewell words, “I am lost and going and not interested in anything any more.”
If anyone had told me we were poor, I would have been astounded. We ate well enough. There was always a bowl of oatmeal at breakfast, a bologna sandwich for lunch, and a cup of coffee to wash it down with. For supper the standard menu was chipped-beef gravy on bread, or macaroni and cheese. Canned salmon sold at eleven cents a can, and Aunt Pat splurged now and then and served fried salmon cakes. At Sunday dinner, the big meal of the week, we feasted on chicken and might even have dessert if Uncle Allen was in the mood to make sweet-potato pudding. This treat he produced by mashing a sweet potato to pulp and adding sugar, vanilla extract, and evaporated milk.
By 1933 I was free of the melancholia that had made me so miserable in Newark, and I was full of contentment with Belleville. With so many idle hours at her disposal my mother was focusing all her schoolteacher’s energies on perfecting the education I would need to make something of myself. As a result I was always well ahead of most of the class at school and basked in a steady flow of A’s and gold stars. I think she was already preparing me for the day when Oluf would secure our future and I would be sent off to college.
When this hope came crashing down that summer, I was totally unaware that anything terrible had happened to her. It had been a year or more since I had last seen Oluf. I knew nothing of what had been growing between them in the mails. I had forgotten Oluf existed, and when he ceased to exist for my mother, too, she gave me no outward sign that her life had come to another turning point.
At this moment, in her defeat, however, she was already laying plans for another campaign, a longer, harder struggle to come up from the bottom without help from the sort of Providence Oluf had represented. In this long, hard pull, I was now cast as the central figure. She would spend her middle years turning me into the man who would redeem her failed youth. I would make something of myself, and if I lacked the grit to do it, well then she would make me make something of myself. I would become the living proof of the strength of her womanhood. From now on she would live for me, and, in turn, I would become her future.
The results of this decision began to appear immediately, though I was only vaguely sensitive to them. Since coming to New Jersey she and Doris and I had slept together, all of us in my father’s bed which she had brought from Morrisonville. That summer she put me out of her bed. “It’s time you started sleeping by yourself,” she said. After that I slept on a couch in the parlor.
She began telling me I was “the man of the family,” and insisting that I play the role. She took me to a Newark department store and bought me a suit with knickers, a herringbone pattern that must have represented a large fortune on her meager resources. But a suit and a necktie and a white shirt weren’t enough; she also insisted on buying me a hat, a junior-scale model of the gray fedora Uncle Allen wore.
“You’re the man of the family now,” she said. “You have to dress like a gentleman.”
The suit and hat were only for special occasions, of course. Like church. Men who wanted to make something of themselves went to church, and they went well dressed. Each Sunday she rolled me off the couch to put on the suit and accompany her to the Wesley Methodist Church on Washington Avenue. Her “Papa” had been a Methodist, and he had been a good man. She would start me out as a Methodist, and never mind that my father and all his people had always been Lutherans.
On the journey to church she instructed me in how a proper man must walk with a woman. “A gentleman always walks on the outside,” she explained, maneuvering me to the curb edge on the sidewalk. If in childish excitement I dashed ahead of her and ran through a door she called me back for another lesson in manhood: “The man always opens the door for a woman and holds it so she can go first.”
In her urgency to hasten me into manhood my mother did not neglect Doris, but I was aware that Doris was not expected to take up the heavy burdens someday that I was. It was enough for my mother to enroll Doris in dancing classes. Dancing was an asset for a girl. Eventually it might help her find the husband a woman needed for survival. Doris was taught the arts of housekeeping: washing dishes, setting the table, making beds, dusting.
It was at this time that my mother decided to acquaint me with work and obtained my job selling the Saturday Evening Post. In typical weeks my magazine sales earned me twenty-five to thirty-five cents. She took a dime of this to deposit in a bank account she had opened for me. “A man has to get in the habit of saving for a rainy day.” As “the man of the family,” I was expected to contribute another nickel in support of the household. The remaining ten or twenty cents was mine to squander on vices of my choice, which were movies, Big Little Books, and two-for-a-penny Mary Jane bars.
The making of a man, even when the raw material was as pliable as I, often seemed brutally hard without the help of a father to handle the rougher passages. There was the awkward problem of punishment. Small, not prepossessing, certainly not strong, she was wedded to the old saw “Spare the rod and spoil the child” and feared that unless my misbehaviors were corrected with corporal punishment my character would become soft and corrupt.
Before declaring me “the man of the family” she had never spanked me, and by that time, when I was eight, I was too large for spanking. It was her notion, picked up I know not where, that boys my age needed “a good thrashing” when they misbehaved. These she administered with my belt, often for what seemed to me like trivial offenses such as coming home late for supper because I was having a good time sledding on the hill. A man had a responsibility to meet his social obligations on time. Small as she was, she could still make the snapping belt sting when it lashed across my bared legs, but I hated the indignity of these beatings so much that I refused to satisfy her with a discreetly faked show of tears.
I had no real tears in me at that time. I hadn’t cried since my father’s death, not even on the day early in 1933 when my mother called me into the house and said, “I’ve got something to tell you now, and I don’t want you to cry,” and told me my grandmother had died in Morrisonville. In spite of my mother’s words I knew I was expected to cry for Ida Rebecca, but I couldn’t and didn’t even want to. If in playing I tore my knee on a nail or one of the boys straddled me on the ground and pounded my face with fists until I was spitting blood, I did not cry because of the pain. I found myself thinking, “This hurts”; or if I was being beaten in a fight, I stared at my assailant in silent rage, thinking, “Some day I’ll get you back for this,” and when it was over limped homeward dry of eye, holding a bloody nose.
My failure to cry during her “thrashings” enraged my mother, and I knew it. Tears would be evidence that I had learned the lesson. My sullen submission to her heaviest blows intensified her fury. If she had been a man she would have been able to make me weep for mercy, but because she was not, and because I did not weep, she struck all the harder.
I knew that faking the tears would gratify her and end the punishment, but I refused. The injustice and humiliation of being beaten rankled so powerfully that I deliberately accepted the worst she could deliver to show my contempt. Sometimes, to goad her with proof of my contempt, I gritted my teeth and, when the belt had fallen four or five times, muttered, “That doesn’t hurt me.” In these moments we were very close to raw hatred of each other. We were two wills of iron. She was determined to break me; I was just as determined that she would not.
In the end she was the one who always cried, and then, when she had flung the belt aside and collapsed on a chair weeping quietly, the anger and hatred instantly drained out of me, and, overcome with pity and love, I rushed to embrace and kiss her, saying, “It’s all right, Mama, it’s all right. I’ll never do it again. I promise, I’ll never do it again.”
Late that summer, after two and a half years of searching, she finally found full-time work. The A&P grocery chain ran a laundry in Belleville for cleaning and repairing their employees’ work clothes. She was hired to work a sewing machine, patching worn grocer’s smocks. The salary was $10 a week, and there was a piecework bonus for workers who exceeded their daily quota; by working at top speed she could raise her weekly pay to as much as $11. Coming home Friday nights from the laundry with so much money, she liked to share her pleasure with Doris and me. The salary was packaged in a small brown envelope. She sat at the kitchen table and showed us the envelope.
“Guess how much money I made this week?”
Then she poured the treasure on the table. It was usually in one-dollar bills and coin. To Doris and me a dollar was an unbelievable sum of money, and the sight of ten dollars all on one table left us goggle-eyed. So much wealth, and she let us count it. First Doris counted it, and then I counted it, and when we had finished my mother said, “That’s right—ten dollars and eighty-five cents. Now what do you think Mama should do with it?”
“Go to the movies,” was my usual answer.
I was teasing her with this spendthrift suggestion because I knew she was happy and would enjoy being teased a little, though there was always the chance she would accept the idea and take me down to Newark to one of the great first-run movie houses—Loew’s State or the Branford or Proctor’s—that charged twenty-five cents for admission.
Very little of it went for idle pleasures, though. Part of it she paid to Uncle Allen as her contribution to the common welfare. Part was earmarked for the bank to finance the next big phase of her long-term program. This was to establish “a home of our own” where she and Doris and I would at last live in independence from Uncle Allen’s charity.
“A home of our own”—that was her great goal. She talked about it constantly. If Aunt Pat and I crossed swords—and sometimes we did, for with my mother away at work all day Aunt Pat had the mother’s task of enforcing discipline—my mother said, “Just be patient, Buddy, and one day we’ll have a home of our own.”
Aunt Pat was also beginning to yearn for a home of her own. We had come into her house in the dawn of the Depression for what my mother thought would be a few months with Pat and Allen until she could rent her own place. Now, at the pit of the Depression, the few months had become three years, and the way the world was going it looked as if it might become fifty before Aunt Pat and Uncle Allen regained their privacy.
That winter, with the birth of their second daughter, their household expanded again. With his $30 a week and the few dollars my mother contributed from her salary, Uncle Allen was now supporting a wife and two baby daughters, his older sister, and his niece and nephew. Uncle Charlie was also with us now, and Uncle Charlie was jobless and penniless. There was more to come. Just around the corner was not prosperity, but Uncle Hal.