CHAPTER 12

Tuckahoe

I met Evie in 1942. It was very romantic with the war on. I left the HNOH at seventeen, and I’d been on the outside for a while already—four years living with my mother in the Bronx and four years on my own—when I went down to Baltimore for radio school. I was hoping a radio technician’s degree would get me into the Army Signal Corps, so I headed south and rented a room in one of those Baltimore row houses with the marble steps. My landlords, the Bravermans, were Yiddish-speaking shopkeepers who took in boarders to help put their son through medical school.

The first few days were terribly lonely. I was no longer a little boy in a row of iron cots, but I felt the same heartache. I had lived by myself off and on and that was swell, but this was different. I was among strangers. At breakfast the first morning, I met the son, Nat, who barely looked up from his newspaper. I cleared my throat. “I’m sure glad this coffee’s strong, because I’m gonna need it. Today is my first day of school.” I spoke with childish enthusiasm, an attempt at humor. “At 25 years old, I should be out of school by now,” I said.

Nat put down the newspaper. “What school?” he said.

“Radio technician’s school. They hold their classes over at Boy’s Tech.”

“No kidding? Boy’s Tech?” Nat said. “I’m at Johns Hopkins.”

Heat spread up my neck the second the little shit opened his mouth. “Very nice,” I said.

“I study a lot,” said Nat. “So I ask boarders to keep noise to a minimum.” He wiped his mouth and got up to leave the table. “Good luck at radio school.”

Right away, I started sleeping with the daughter. Shirley was about as sharp as a marble, but fairly companionable. Mr. and Mrs. Braverman seemed oblivious, but I liked pissing off their son the doctor. Then I met the little sister, who’d been away at the shore. I had just heard the news about the Nazis goose-stepping into the Nile Delta, and my thoughts had been somber riding the streetcar back to the Bravermans. As soon as I let myself in the front door, wild shrieks and bursts of laughter rang out, shattering the normally quiet household. Footsteps pounded overhead. A door slammed. I joined Shirley in the living room. She said her sister was back. The radio was on, an Emerson in a walnut cabinet I admired.

“How many tubes does this thing have?” I asked.

“How would I know?” said Shirley. Her lousy mood had nothing to do with the Nazis. It was the secretarial-pool supervisor who chewed her out for being five minutes late. The stairs creaked and I glanced up to see a girl coming down in a skirt and blouse, bobby sox and saddle shoes, chestnut hair tumbling over her shoulders.

“This is my sister, Evie,” Shirley said.

The sister swayed to the swing orchestra on the radio, then caught herself when she saw me, and laughed. It was hard to tell her age. She had the bright eyes and glowing skin of a child, while nicely filling out her blouse. “So you’re the new boarder. Do you like candy?” she said.

“What are you, crazy?” I said. “Who doesn’t like candy?”

“Wait here.” She bounded up the stairs, and then clomped down again holding a small white box. “Salt water taffy? St. James. From the boardwalk in Atlantic City.”

“Why, thank you, Evy.” I picked strawberry and put it in my jacket pocket for later.

“Not Evy.“ She scowled. “My name is not short for Evelyn. It’s pronounced Ee-vie with a long “e.” Evie is the diminutive of Eve.”

“Ah. The diminutive of Eve. So where have you been, Eevie?”

“Atlantic City, where do you think?”

“Right,” I said. “Hence, the salt water taffy.”

“Are you British?”

“I hail from New York City. The Bronx.”

“I think you use British expressions to hide your Bronx accent,” she said.

“Really? Is that so?” I couldn’t believe how frank this smart-aleck girl was. “Who are you, Sigmund Freud?”

“Leave her alone,” said Shirley. “She’s just a kid.”

“I’m not a kid, Shirley. I’m sixteen.”

“Sixteen. Very grown up,” I said. “I like your bobby sox.”

Evie looked down at her white socks and then up at me. Her cheeks flushed. “They’re not bobby sox,” she said quietly. “They’re anklets.”

Ordinarily, Shirley was an indoor type, but egged on by Evie she agreed to a double date biking in Druid Hill Park. Evie’s date Bernard was home for the weekend, from Princeton, no less. We cycled along the winding lanes toward the botanical gardens and parked our bicycles under a tree. I watched Evie run ahead in white shorts, her long legs making great strides as she led us to the conservatory. Shirley plodded heavily up the hill, while I fought the urge to leave her behind, and Bernard, too. “When I’m old enough,” Evie said when we caught up, “if the war’s still on, which I hope it won’t be of course, I’m joining the WACs.”

“You’re kidding,” Shirley said.

“I’m not kidding. I want to see the world, fight the fascists. Why should I be left out because I’m a girl? I would have gone to Spain with the Lincoln Brigade if I’d been older.”

“I wanted to go to Spain, too,” I said.

“Why didn’t you?” said Shirley.

“Yeah, you’re the right age and you’re male,” said Evie. “What was your excuse?”

“Christ, you’re so direct,” I said. Her words stung, but I tried not to be thin-skinned. “My excuse?” I said calmly. “I’d just left the orphanage, come home to live with my mother and support my family.” I noticed they weren’t criticizing Bernard for his college deferment.

“I’m sorry,” said Evie. “That’s a valid reason.”

“Thanks for the reprieve,” I said. “It’s a valid reason, but hardly romantic.”

“Romantic? You Clyde? I thought you were the big realist,” said Shirley.

“You’re a realist? You don’t say,” said Bernard.

“I’m a realist about men and women,” I said. “The romance of politics is another story.”

“Clyde doesn’t believe in love,” said Shirley.

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Evie.

“She gets that from her Communist club,” Shirley said.

“What, Evie? You don’t believe in love and romance?” said Bernard.

“The girls at school make me sick with their swooning and childish fantasies,” Evie said. She kicked a pile of leaves into the air. “I’ve read Karl Marx. A wife is property. When a woman marries she’s sold into slavery.”

“Evie, relax,” said Bernard.

“I don’t want to relax,” she said.

I continued my affair with Shirley, but when I was done with class in the afternoons, I entered the house with only Evie on my mind. My body thrummed but I kept the volume low so I could hear Evie’s voice in the kitchen or on the second floor by the radio or the third floor where, due to unbelievable luck or possibly divine intervention, both Evie and I had our sleeping quarters. If I didn’t hear her when I came in, I went straight up to my room, stretched out on my bed, and waited for the door to open, the house filling with Evie’s warmth and laughter, her step on the stairs. Sometimes she’d knock and come into my room with a question about homework. Was Walt Whitman a transcendentalist? Could I help her locate Singapore on the map?”

“Singapore? You bet.” I leapt to her side.

“Thanks,” she said, holding open an atlas, offering the world.

My cheek grazed the top of her head and I inhaled her perfumed hair and tried to peer down her blouse, but she had it buttoned to a triangle of porcelain skin. Still I throbbed. I pointed to the Malay Peninsula. “I had a lady teacher who also didn’t know where Singapore was,” I said.

“You must think women are really dumb.” She clapped the atlas shut.

I withdrew a finger. “Au contraire,” I said, cradling my wounded hand. “I adore women. I worship them.”

“We don’t want to be worshipped.”

“No? What do you want?”

She tilted her head and her eyelids fluttered. I imagined her looking inward. Seconds passed. “I want to be known,” she said. “And understood.”

I let seconds pass on my side. “Don’t we all,” I said.

At first I didn’t give great importance to what was happening. It was a game, a fantasy. The usual lust for a young girl. But then I started to notice when Evie wasn’t home I was truly miserable, and when she was there I was happy. I continued my affair with her older sister, uncertain of whether I was a louse for doing so, or a prince for sparing Shirley’s feelings.

It was easy enough to find ways of being with Evie that would not arouse Shirley’s suspicion. I had only to suggest a number of activities in earshot of both girls to have the right girl volunteer, since Shirley was a killjoy and Evie was up for almost anything—walking for hours in the cold, running races, friendly wagers, silly songs. She told jokes in Yiddish and that colorful language coming out of her angelic mouth had me in stitches.

“You boost my spirits,” I said.

“They need boosting?” said Evie.

“Of course. I’m a stranger in your house. An outsider.”

“Der zaytiker. I hadn’t thought of it that way,” she said.

“Of course not. You’re not a snob.”

“Well, gee. Who am I to act superior? We take in boarders to make ends meet.”

“Who are you? You, my dear, are the daughter of a property owner.”

“Clyde, you should join the Party. You’re one of us and you know it.”

“I am. But I don’t want to be told what to do or what to think,” I said. Although, I thought, at that particular moment standing on the corner of North Avenue and Monroe Street in the frosty night watching the red bloom on her cheeks and the tip of her nose, she could have persuaded me to cut off my right arm.

The next night when I came back into my room after brushing my teeth and taking a piss, she was sitting on my bed. She put a finger to her lips, got up and closed the door, then leaned against it and pulled me to her. I kissed her but she had her lips pursed, teeth clenched. I laughed. “You kiss like a little girl.”

Her eyes flashed. “Then teach me to kiss like a woman,” she said.

Reader, I did. And then skillfully unbuttoned her blouse and kissed her innocent breasts.

She was too young, and Shirley’s feelings had to be considered, of course. But it was the brother, Nat, savior of the family, who was starting to get suspicious, so I tried to make friends. I lent him a book of short stories by Chekhov that I thought he’d appreciate as a fellow physician, and I invited him to the opening of Casablanca at the Hippodrome along with Shirley, Evie, Evie’s friend Shana, and my friend Chick Scheiner. The movie was so romantic and couldn’t have been more current. Roosevelt and Churchill were meeting in Casablanca the very same moment we were taking our seats in the theater. I had Evie on my left and Shirley on my right. Near the end of the picture when Laszlo says to Rick, “Welcome back to the fight, this time I know our side will win,” and the camera lingers on Ingrid Bergman’s face, I looked down at Evie and saw tears glittering on her cheeks. I wanted to pull her close and kiss the tears away, but I couldn’t, and I thought how being forced to hide our feelings from the others created a powerful kinship between us and the tortured lovers on the screen. I was moved by their sacrifice, and as I furtively held Evie’s hand in the darkened theater, it became clear that we were doomed. Evie was a child. I had to go away.

The radio course ended, I got my certificate, and I enlisted. After all my trouble, I wasn’t chosen for the Signal Corps. They put me with the Engineers.

Somewhere In England

3 April 1943

Dear Evie,

After several anxious weeks waiting to ship out to an unknown destination—in the army it’s always SNAFU, that is, Situation Normal All Fucked Up—and then two really trying weeks on a troop ship zigzagging across the Atlantic, we arrived safely. It’s really hitting me hard. I won’t see you again until the war is over. I believe in love now, because now I know for certain that I love you, and you love me, and to hell with the age difference, or whatever it is your small-minded family objects to about me.

I can’t tell you where we are—practically everything we do is a military secret. The other night I walked into the nearby town, and you can plainly see how low the standard of living is here. It’s an Army rule never to accept food when invited to a home, you may use up their entire week’s allowance.

A very rickety portable Victrola in the “Y” hut grinds out “As Time Goes By” on a well-worn record for me several times a day. I think of you constantly. Well, so long, darling. Regards to the family, and tell Shana to write.

All my love,

Clyde