Did it happen at all, the clambake?
Not according to Mama. When I asked her about it, she developed trouble with her hearing aid. When I managed to get through to her, she wrinkled her whole face at me and said, “Clambake? What clambake? Are you crazy? What could we eat at a clambake? You’re remembering wrong. Maybe Reuben Brodofsky had a clambake, in that garden of his all full of weeds and tin cans. He was nothing but a goy, and she was worse. They would eat anything. Cats, rats, dogs. We never had a clambake.”
My sister Lee has been carrying on about the clambake for decades, so I reported this to her. She became so mad that she smoked; I mean, literally. She was off cigarettes, but she marched to a bureau, unlocked a drawer, and yanked out a pack of Camels. She lit one as though setting fire to the Reichstag. Gray smoke jetted from her nose.
“Mama said wha-a-AAT?” Half a growl, half a scream.
“Mama says there never was a clambake.”
Lee dropped to the sofa, gesturing to Heaven with both arms for patience to endure. She smoked in silence, staring at the air, gnashing her teeth. Lee does take on about these long-past things.
“Do you remember much about it?” I ventured.
“Remember? I remember everything.”
Chain-smoking until her ashtray overflowed, Lee reminisced wrathfully about the clambake, quite a graphic description. Let me point out that Lee loves seafood. Clams, oysters, lobsters, shrimps, scallops, frogs’ legs—you name it; if the thing lives in water and doesn’t have fins and scales (only the finned and scaled creatures are kosher) then that’s for Lee, mmm! Mind you, it’s not my business what Lee eats. That’s between her and, as they say in show business, the Man Upstairs. She keeps a kosher home, goes to a temple on the High Holy Days, and loves seafood. Let her live for a hundred twenty years, leaving a trail of clam shells. I am only pointing out that for obvious reasons she hoards the memory of that clambake.
So where are we? You can believe Mama’s denial that it ever happened at all, nothing wrong with that; except that, as Lee said at one point, Mama revises history like a Soviet encyclopedist. Not that she needs to, on this matter. She and Pop were young immigrants, after all, struggling with the riptide of change that pulled down Uncle Yail. What was so terrible about an experiment with seafood? Let the record show that Mama enters a general denial. I’ll give my version, which is much like Lee’s.
***
The clambake was the first annual outing of the Fairy Laundry employees. By then, after several moves to ever-larger quarters, the firm had made the big jump from hand laundry to steam laundry. Pop bought the required heavy machinery on credit. In a space vacated by a Woolworth five-and-ten-cent store those machines now tumbled, groaned, hissed, clanked, roared, spewed foam, belched steam; oily pistons thumped back and forth, driven by huge flywheels; and workers in starchy white smocks fed wet wrinkled stuff into satanic contrivances, which vomited neat piles of smooth laundry. The place was perpetually clangorous and vaporous, perpetually stank of chlorine, soap, and dirty underwear, and perpetually streamed foamy water in concrete gutters, splashing and slopping on the slippery floor.
Papa liked to take me around the laundry, show me the machines, explain in shouts how they worked, and introduce me to the employees, who tended to yell brutishly at each other in foreign tongues. Few seemed to be Jewish. I remember a fat girl who worked at a thing called a mangle, which sucked in and flattened sheets and towels, and in my view threatened to suck in and flatten me. A bird flew into the store when I was there, and this fat girl deftly caught it in her hands. With friendly pantomime, she offered to let the boss’s son have the bird. I eagerly nodded; whereupon, to my thunderstruck horror, she seized huge shears, spread the paralyzed bird’s wings, and crunch, crunch, clipped the feathers. I see, as I see the paper on which I’m writing, those shears cutting bloodily through those brown wings, while the girl chatters in German or Polish, and the bird stares at me with frightened bright eyes. I am a wildlife fanatic, and for all I know it traces to that moment. But I wander. My simple point is that for such non-Jewish workers a clambake was in order. They could eat seafood, or whatever they pleased.
The clambake took place at Orchard Beach, in a big white house on a lawn. At low tide on Orchard Beach, where we often bathed in summertime, I’d seen lots of clams. But eat them? I’d as soon have eaten the driftwood. Now there at this long table, in this big white house—which in fact smelled very like the Dickeys estate orphanage—Fairy Laundry workers were eating and drinking and joking in a great noise; and I saw wire baskets full of clams, popped open like dead men’s mouths, exposing white rubbery-looking lumps at the center. Left to myself, and feeling hungry, I tried poking at a lump with a fork. The prongs rebounded as though I had tried to spear a tennis ball. I tried forking it out of the shell. It wouldn’t come.
I had had no food for hours. I don’t know where Mom and Pop were; I suppose as Boss and Mrs. Boss they were socializing, being good hosts. Nor do I recall where Lee was. I know I next found myself alone with a lobster, trying to eat it. Left and right the laundry workers were devouring lobsters with popping eyes, gustatory grins, and smacking lips. I turned the big red armored corpse here and there, looking for a place to dig in. Its stalked dead eyes, feelers, many hairy spider legs, and ragged claws disconcerted me, but I was getting ravenous, what with Pop’s employees all around me putting lobsters away like lamb chops. Where to start? I turned the lobster over. Its underside looked a bit more vulnerable, a sort of wrinkled greenish-white stomach. The shell resisted a push of the fork, but it did seem to give. I clasped the lobster firmly in one hand, and with the other jabbed the fork down as hard as I could. The stomach yielded. The fork plunged in. Greenish-white stuff squirted all over me, with a strong Coo Coo Clan smell. I gave up trying to eat the lobster.
After the meal the whole party moved to the lawn and lounged in the sun, eating ice cream and drinking soda pop, and that was all I had at that clambake. High on a white flagpole a big American flag fluttered in the sea breeze, and on the grass the younger men played ball, and there was dancing to a wind-up phonograph with a horn. Jake the drunk took me to the lockers down at the beach, for a dip in the sea.
Jake was a wagon driver and a friend of sorts. He rescued me in the snowstorm, you remember. Aldus Street was on his route, so I saw him often. When he came to pick up our laundry bundle, Mama would produce a brown bottle and pour Jake a shot glass full. Nobody drank from that bottle but Jake the drunk. Once I sneaked a taste. Wow! Fire and brimstone! I never went near it again. Jake always had a three-day beard, more or less, and his stubbly face was lean, old, and sad, except right after he tossed down that shot, when he would smile like a baby. Jake was Jewish. He had to be, he had an accent like my father’s. Anyway, he felt Jewish. I don’t know how else to put it.
Well, you know public beach lockers: sandy mildewy little plasterboard cubicles with a stool inside, hooks, and a lock. I guess we had a paddle in the surf, but when memory, like a badly cut movie, fades in again, we are drying ourselves in the locker, Jake and I, talking about nothing much. We fall silent, and through the plasterboard, from the next locker, we hear two boyish voices burlesquing Jake’s Yiddish accent. Half-dressed, we look at each other. His face is bitter, and peppered with gray and black stubble.
“Don’t pay no attention,” Jake says.
Through the partition, vaudeville Jew voices in singsong: “Ikey, dun’t pay no atten-sheen!”
Jake puts his fingers to his lips.
Silence on our side of the partition. On the other side some giggles. After a while we hear their door open and close. We finish dressing and comb our hair. When we emerge on the long wooden locker platform in the sunshine, we see them: two kids about Frankenthal’s age, in kneepants; ordinary street kids, standing a few yards off. As we head for the staircase, we hear singsong calls behind us: “Clip cocks! Clip cocks!”
Jake is holding my hand, hurrying me along. They follow us, their steps thumping on the boards. “Clip cocks! Clip cocks!”
“Never mind,” Jake mutters.
“Clip cocks! Christ killers!” Then, close behind us, “Ikey, dun’t pay no ’ten-sheen!”
Jake stops and turns, so do I. The kids are halted about ten feet away, grinning. In a voice such as I have never yet heard from a human throat, Jake roars, “GERRADA HERE,” taking a step toward them. The grins change to quick glances of cowed fear. They scamper off down the platform, out of sight. Jake puts an arm around my shoulder. We go up the stairs, across the lawn, back to the outing, where the Fairy Laundry people now sit around under the waving Stars and Stripes, singing to a concertina.
That’s how, and why, I remember the clambake.
Frankenthal’s Coo Coo Clan story was just a rumor, after all. Even the Loew’s Boulevard poster really proved nothing; mere movie nightmare, perhaps. Here was the thing itself, the first time I ran into it; the living voice of the Outside in broad daylight, in the pleasant salt breeze, the piping of a couple of kids in kneepants by the Orchard Beach lockers.