CHAPTER 33

He said those were happy times, so it must have been true, the years I was in elementary school, the years before the summer of love, before Nola Swenson. I remembered happiness, the feeling I had walking home from school on a windy day in March, coming around the corner holding onto a crayon drawing that was fluttering in the breeze. Were we ever a normal family, though? Dinner on the table at six o’clock. That was normal. He was a hardworking man, a homeowner, patriotic, a veteran, a breadwinner who wanted most of all to be able to support his family. He didn’t want to be like his father. He would not abandon his children. He gave up his dreams in exchange for a schoolteacher’s paycheck. It was only in Belfast that he ever felt like a real success. There he was not just a breadwinner, but a Fulbright winner. Imagine, Clyde and Evie Aronson invited to ship launchings, the Queen Mother’s garden party! He was interviewed on ITV and gave a lecture at Queens College on the Beat Poets.

Susan and I thought he was God. When we returned to the US, he continued his subscription to the London Observer to keep up with the news overseas. One day when the lilacs were blooming against the shingled house, he called us to the dining room table. “Susan! Joanna! Get over here!” I was drawn to the window, distracted by the pale purple flowers and the birds twittering in the bushes. “Pay attention!” he said. He flipped open the Observer magazine to the centerfold with a photo spread of four musicians from Liverpool, a place I was familiar with because the ferry from Belfast to England docked there. “You see these guys?” my father said. “You’re going to be screaming for them in a few months.” It was 1963, a year before the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. We looked at my father like he was daft. He was God, but we didn’t actually believe he could see into the future. “No, we won’t! You don’t know that about us.” We smirked and walked away. But my father could see into the future.

Big changes were coming. We learned for ourselves in 1965 when we drove to California to visit Uncle Harry, singing in the car the whole way: “See the USA, in your Chevrolet, America’s the greatest land of all!” In LA, girls wore bell-bottom pants like sailors, a fashion that wouldn’t reach Baltimore for two more years. Uncle Harry flashed hundred-dollar bills, paid for my mother to get her hair done like a Hollywood starlet, and treated us to prime rib and lobster. He’d been out of prison only a year, after being sent away for embezzlement. The word was dazzling and I thought his crime must have something to do with jewels.

Back at home we started the school year and my father, not flashy like his brothers, remained an earnest, dedicated teacher. Unlike Harry and Alvin, he paid his taxes. But he was no patsy, no rube. He became a leader in the teacher’s union, a position my mother surely envied. It was important work. There was a movement going on in the schools to abolish the college prep program at City College High School. The A-Course, as it was called, attracted bright boys, my father said, and gave the high school its prestige.

I noted that, as usual, boys got the best of everything. The words “bright” and “girls” were never even paired together. Before Brown v. the Board of Education, the bright boys at City were white boys only. Even after the landmark case, progress was slow. My father believed the A-Course program would light the way, encouraging integration by casting a wide geographical net, since City offered more than a standard neighborhood school. Most teachers were as desperate to save the program as he was, and this pitted them against some of the black leaders in the community who believed the A-Course was elitist and designed to exclude minorities. My father acknowledged that he’d never know what it was like to be black, but he chafed at being called elitist. “You don’t know hungry like I know hungry,” he’d tell his students.

When he practiced the speech he was to give to the school board commission, tears came to his eyes. He loved his school and he was certain his was the enlightened view. He stood before us in the living room. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I implore you. Keep the A-Course for the aspiring young boys of the poor families of this generation. Give them the opportunities that City College High School was able to offer the disadvantaged minorities of the past.”

“Hear, hear,” my mother said.

“Don’t reduce City College to the status of a neighborhood school, which given the present pattern of racial residence, must in a few short years become once again a segregated high school, completing the cycle begun in 1954 and thus effectively repealing the decision of the Supreme Court. Ladies and Gentleman, I urge you with all my heart to act now, to prevent a catastrophe that we will live to regret.”

My mother and Susan applauded. I cheered and whistled.

But the board said no. The A-course was racist, they said. The program was scrapped. A year later, in 1967, the membership of the teachers’ union went on strike demanding a voice in policy-making, as well as higher salaries. My father led his students singing City’s fight song, conducting with his cigarette baton from the back of a paddy wagon just before it carried him and Shep Levine, Bob Moskowitz, and several others to the city jail for picketing the school. They were defying a court injunction forbidding a strike. By 1968, barely two years after the A-Course program was scrapped, City was a segregated school again—all black instead of all white, but segregated just as my father predicted. With the A-Course gone, the eighteen rules of grammar went out the window. It was considered elitist. Shakespeare, too. The dedicated faculty was demoralized.

My father became irritable and moody. He grew cynical. He was easily enraged. He didn’t like it when I had supper at a friend’s house. He wanted me home. What’s wrong with our house? My cooking isn’t good enough? This was before Johnny, before Nola. I stayed home and he got angry when I wouldn’t eat the mashed potatoes my mother had plopped onto my plate. I was turned off by the lumps. He slammed his open hand on the table. “Eat those potatoes, goddamnit!” I took a forkful. “Don’t look at me like that, you snotty kid.” I gagged, then opened my mouth and let the lumpy blob fall onto the plate. He jumped up knocking his chair over. I jumped up and made a run for it, but he chased me down the hall whacking my back and shoulders hard before I got to my room and was able to close the door against him. My mother told me later she threw a shoe at him and hit him on the leg. After a few minutes, there was a knock at my door. My shoulder was throbbing. He stuck his head in. “I’m sorry,” he said.