My friends from the block were like an extended family: me, Eddie and Eileen Rust, Elaine Lubar, Marilyn Greene, Elaine Friedle, Ginny and Judy Rust.
ON SUMMER MORNINGS, my father would come downstairs dressed in his three-piece suit, glance at the gold pocket watch that was attached to his vest with a slender gold chain, kiss my mother and me goodbye, and leave for work. From the window I watched him greet the other men on our block as they walked to the corner to catch the bus for the short ride to the train station, where, every few minutes, an engine whistled, the platform quivered, and one of the seventy-five daily trains swallowed up a new group of commuters for the thirty-eight-minute ride to Penn Station that had made suburban living possible. Now, the fathers departed, our neighborhood, like some newly conquered province, belonged to the women and children.
At my mother’s assenting nod, I dashed next door to fetch my best friend, Elaine Friedle, and together we gathered up our gang, upward of a dozen children roughly our age, and began our day’s activities. After breakfast, our energy at its height, we raced our bikes down the street, with playing cards clothespinned to the spokes to simulate the sound of a motorcycle, challenging one another to see how many times we could circle the block without holding on to the handlebars. Carelessly discarding bikes on the nearest lawn, skate keys dangling from multicolored lanyards around our necks, we zipped past each other on roller skates, throwing up our hands and shouting in the sheer exuberance of our performance. Then it was on to our endless games of hide-and-seek. My favorite game was ring-a-levio, in which the players on one team would crawl carefully up to the protected circle, hoping to free an imprisoned teammate, and would dart away with a squeal if intercepted by one of the opposing team’s guards.
My friends from the block were like an extended family: me, Eddie and Eileen Rust, Elaine Lubar, Marilyn Greene, Elaine Friedle, Ginny and Judy Rust.
The house in which I grew up was modest in size; for my parents, however, it was the realization of a dream.
Our days might have seemed shapeless to an adult, but to us, there seemed a definite rhythm to our activities. When we began to tire, we played potsy, a form of hopscotch, on the sidewalk, leisurely jumped rope, rolled marbles, played jacks, or flipped cards against the stoop to see who could come closest to the bottom stair without actually hitting it. After lunch on steamy afternoons when there was no baseball game in progress and no one to take us to the beach, we would jump through the spray of one of the sprinklers which were constantly watering our precious lawns, or lounge on blankets in the shade of a favorite tree for games of Go Fish, Monopoly, and Chinese Checkers.
In the late-afternoon sun, we set up our Kool Aid stands, strategically placed to catch our fathers as they returned in twenty-minute intervals from work, rounding the corners with jackets over their arms as they walked down our street, their faces glistening with sweat, anxious, we thought, for the refreshing drinks we were glad to sell them for the price of a nickel. As my father approached, trying, usually without much success, to maintain a professional demeanor, I would hand him a cup and happily receive the coin he placed in my palm. Soon the summons would come from the front doors of the houses, and we would race in to dinner, not because we were hungry, but in the hope that if we finished quickly enough we could reassemble for another hour or so of play before the encroaching dark put an end to our day on the block.
The small section of Southard Avenue that lay between St. James and Capitolian was my world. Our street, unconnected to any major thoroughfare, and lined by large maple trees which cast a cooling shadow on our activities, was our common land—our playground, our park, our community. If an occasional car passed, we would stand aside, waiting impatiently for the intruder to leave our domain. If we never thought of our neighborhood as safe, that was because it never occurred to us that it could be otherwise—except, of course, for the weed-choked hovel on the corner where the strange and fearsome “Old Mary” lived.
The house in which I grew up was modest in size, situated on less than a tenth of an acre, and separated from the neighboring houses by the narrowest of driveways and a slender strip of grass. For my parents, however, as for other families on the block, the house on Southard Avenue was the realization of a dream. My family had moved to Rockville Centre from the crowded streets of Brooklyn in the late 1930s, early pioneers of that vast postwar migration which was to transform America into a nation of suburbs, and bring to once-bucolic Nassau and Suffolk counties a population as large as that of sixteen of the forty-eight states. Here they would have a single-family home, a private world for themselves and their children, which they could make their own—furnish, repair, remodel—something which only a few years before had seemed the prerogative of the impossibly affluent. They took visible pleasure in every room, the gabled roof, the small enclosed porch that looked out onto the street, the breakfast nook that stood in an alcove off the kitchen, and most of all in the tiny front lawn amid which our house was set. They had land, grass, soil of their own. The great American ambition.
From the front, my house looked narrow and cramped, standing so close to its neighbors that it seemed more like a row house than an independent structure. But on summer nights, when I would lie on the strip of grass that separated us from the Friedles, it seemed to tower above me, its softly lit windows and striped awnings like the side of an ocean liner. My father lovingly tended our lawn as if it were the grounds of an ancestral estate. Every weekend in the summer, he and almost all the fathers could be found outside in their shirtsleeves mowing the small patches of grass, rooting out the occasional weed, planting flowers along the margins of the driveways.
ROCKVILLE CENTRE was home to about eighteen thousand people when I was born, and the population expanded each year until every vacant lot was filled. In contrast to Levittown and other mass-produced suburbs that emerged overnight in the postwar era, our town had been incorporated as a village in the nineteenth century. A century-old Village Hall was set in a green square with a Civil War cannon near the front door. Mature oaks and maples arched over our streets, and our village boasted a variety of housing and a diverse population that many other suburban towns did not enjoy. Old houses mingled with the new: Victorians, Tudors, and Queen Annes stood side by side with newly built split levels and ultramodern ranch houses. The majority of the population was white, as was typical of the suburbs, though more than nine hundred African Americans lived in a neighborhood at the western end of town.
Unlike more affluent modern suburbs, whose fenced homes are encircled by large ornamental lawns, the houses on my block were clustered so close to one another that they functioned almost as a single home. We felt free to dash in to any house for a snack from the mother-in-residence, race through the side door in search of playmates—except for my own house, where my mother’s need for tranquillity was respected, making it not only the quietest but sometimes the loneliest house on the block. Since all the families were bringing up children at the same time, babysitters were rarely necessary, for we could usually stay at each other’s houses. If one of the mothers was sick, there was always a neighbor or older sister to take her child to school or to the beach. Clothes, bikes, and roller skates were routinely handed down from the older children in one family to the younger ones in another. For me, there was a special benefit in the clustered structure of our block. For the lives within these homes, the stories of each family, formed a body of common lore through which I could expand the compass and vividness of my own life.
The position of our houses determined the pattern of our friendships. Not only did my best friend, Elaine, live next door to me, but her bedroom was directly across the driveway from mine, less than twenty feet away. When we were five, we strung a clothesline between pulleys by our windows and attached a can that allowed us to exchange notes long after our bedtime had passed. When our lights went out, lying on my side facing the open window, barely able to hear my parents talking downstairs, I knew that Elaine was just across the way, in her own bed, facing toward me. Content that everyone was in the proper place, I went to sleep.
Six months older than Elaine and one year ahead of her in school, I learned to read before she did. My mother later told me I had begun deciphering the letters on our soup cans and cereal boxes several months before the day I picked up a book she had read to me many times and read it back to her. Suspecting I had memorized it, she handed me another book to read. I went through it slowly, page by page, reading so loudly that I sounded as if I were addressing an audience of hundreds instead of one. From the moment I read those first paragraphs to my mother, I was obsessed not only with reading but with reading aloud. Everywhere we went, I insisted on reading every sign and billboard along the way. “Why are you doing this?” Elaine asked. “Oh, you’ll understand someday,” I replied. “Once you start reading, you can never stop.”
The books I read filled my imagination, multiplying my daydreams, allowing me to supplement my own collection of stories, previously drawn mostly from my family and my neighbors, with characters and events far removed from the realities of Southard Avenue and Rockville Centre. As I did with the lives of those around me, I could incorporate the people of fiction, even of history, into my own life, make them real, change them, the malleable instruments of my own desire and longing.
I moved from my mother’s reading of Kipling’s tale about the baby elephant to my own reading of Little Toot, the story of the small tugboat with the candy-stick smokestack, who came, as I did, from a family of seamen. When I read about Little Toot’s father, Big Toot, the fastest tugboat on the river, and his Grandfather Toot, who breathed smoke and told of mighty deeds, I pictured my uncle Willy and my grandfather Ephraim standing proudly at the helms of their ferryboats, navigating their ships expertly through the tricky currents of the waters surrounding New York and New Jersey. Because all my uncles and grandparents were dead, I had to find some way to keep their memories alive. By fusing what little I knew about their personalities into the characters I liked in the stories I read, I was able to surround myself with the large, vibrant family I always wished I had. And when Little Toot saved the stranded ocean liner and made his family proud, I imagined that someday I would do something that would bring me to the attention of my grandparents in heaven.
Elaine was at least six inches taller than I. I admired her intelligence, and her daring, envied her thick, curly hair and, most of all, her boisterous family. Although most of the houses on the block, including my own, were inhabited by nuclear families, Elaine lived with her brother, mother, father, grandmother, and great-grandmother—four generations in a single home. On Sundays their house filled with cousins from the city who felt entitled to share in the good fortune and Sunday dinner of the first relatives who had made it to the suburbs.
On Sunday afternoon I would race over to Elaine’s house to join the animated conversation and bustle which my own house lacked, to observe as the Friedles and their relatives played Canasta, gambled for pennies, smoked, drank cocktails, listened to music, and danced. I would twirl on the cushioned bar stools in their finished basement, which seemed the height of luxury living, with its large, Formica-topped bar, and watch delightedly as a model train went around the counter and the eyes of a small mechanical man turned red while he raised a drink to his mouth. I listened eagerly to the flow of words, joined in the laughter and chatter, and tried to imagine what it might be like in my own house if I had grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, or a mother whose health did not require a placid, less crowded way of life.
The two “old ladies,” as we called Elaine’s grandmother and great-grandmother, would sit in chairs on the Friedles’ front lawn, shouting friendly greetings to the children as we played, telling us stories, gossiping with the neighborhood mothers. The tales they told lured us backward in time to the British colony of Jamaica, in the West Indies, where Elaine’s great-grandmother, Amelia, the daughter of Scottish emigrants, was born. Married young, she had eight children, including Elaine’s grandmother Valerie, who was widowed shortly after Elaine’s mother, Dolly, was born. During the Great War, Amelia’s husband left Jamaica to find work in America, promising to send for his family as soon as he was settled. When no word came after six months, Amelia, together with her widowed daughter, Valerie, and her four-year-old-granddaughter, Dolly, embarked on a boat for New York to find her husband. After a few fruitless months, they discovered he had moved in with another woman and had no intention of reunion with the family he had left behind. It was not easy for the three women to make it on their own; Elaine’s mother, Dolly, could remember slipping on wet urine in the hallway of the New York tenement where she grew up.
Dolly was still in her teens when she met and married George Friedle, a descendant of German immigrants, who had also grown up in a tenement in New York, and whose rapid rise in the world of banking to the position of vice-president of Public National Bank had allowed him, shortly after the Second World War, to move to the suburbs, to his “dream home” on Southard Avenue. And when the family moved to Rockville Centre there was no question but that Dolly’s mother and grandmother would accompany them.
The old ladies had brought their folk knowledge with them from Jamaica. When you get married, they instructed Elaine and me, no wedding pictures should be taken, or ghosts will join the ceremony. And on your wedding night, you must keep a set of knives under the bed to ward off the evil spirits. Although we paid careful attention to these strictures, not wanting ghosts or evil spirits at the ceremony which we knew was sure to come, of more pressing concern to six-year-olds was the revelation that three knocks on a door signified death. For some time after being so instructed, I would knock on a friend’s door twice, and then stop, trying to gauge how much time had to elapse before the counting could begin again without danger. The precepts were meant to enlighten and amuse, rather than frighten us, for the old ladies were always gentle, with an unerring eye for sadness in a child. If one of us seemed out of sorts, was hurt by our friends, or was left out of a game, they noticed at once and invited us to come into the house to share a bowl of ice cream.
BASEBALL LOYALTIES in our neighborhood were divided between the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants. As earlier immigrants had brought their ethnic bonds with them to America, the settlers of suburbia had, for the most part, carried their baseball fidelity from their borough of origin—Yankee fans from the Bronx, Giant supporters from Manhattan, and, of course, the devotees of the Dodgers from Brooklyn. In each home, team affiliation was passed on from father to child, with the crucial moments in a team’s history repeated like the liturgy of a church service. Over time, each team and its fans had taken on a distinct identity, a kind of stereotype into which the features of the team and the characteristics of its followers were molded to produce an exaggerated caricature. The Yankees were the “Bronx Bombers,” whose pinstriped uniforms signified their elite status, supported by the rich and successful, by Wall Street brokers and haughty businessmen. The Dodgers were “dem Bums,” the “daffiness boys,” the unpretentious clowns, whose fans were seen as scruffy blue-collar workers who spoke with bad diction. The Giants, owned since 1919 by the same family, the Stonehams, were the conservative team whose followers consisted of small businessmen who watched calmly from the stands dressed in shirts and ties, their identity somewhat blurred, caught, as they were, between the Yankee “haves” and the Dodger “have-nots.”
For all of us, the love of baseball was personal and familiar. We spent hours arguing about, among other things, who was the better catcher: steady Dodger Roy Campanella (right) or short-armed swarthy Yankee Yogi Berra (left).
To me, however, each team was signified by a member of my small community. The Giants were my parents’ friends the Goldschmidts, the Rickards down the street, and, most of all, Max Kropf and Joe Schmitt, the butchers around the corner at the Bryn Mawr Meat Market. Loading me down with huge shinbones for my small cocker spaniel, Frosty, they would mock my Dodgers. I would pretend to be angry, but the truth was I loved going into their shop, the feel of the sawdust under my feet as I moved from the muggy August heat into the cooling air of their enormous refrigerator with sides of beef hanging from the ceiling. Most of all, I loved the attention I received, especially when they called me “Ragmop” in honor of my unruly reddish-blond hair. These Giant fans were not dressed in ties and jackets, but wore white aprons, smeared with blood and marrow. Although I tried not to stare, my eyes were often drawn to the rounded stubs of the two fingers Max had cut off while slicing meat. When he caught me looking, he would hold up his hand as if the wound were a badge of honor. “See, Ragmop, this is what happens if you want to be a butcher.”
The Yankees were represented by the Friedles, and especially Elaine, who was as devoted to her team as I was to the Dodgers. Since the two teams were in different leagues, our rivalry was muted during the summer months, only to peak again during those frequent Octobers when the Dodgers and the Yankees met in the World Series. She could not understand my idolatry of Jackie Robinson, while I, in turn, heaped scorn on her admiration for the shrill, wiry Billy Martin, the Yankee second baseman known for his quick fists and timely hitting. She would frequently take out her scrapbook of Billy Martin clippings to prove her point—how many hits, his latest batting average, his exploits in the field. How she could compare the tiny, pugnacious Martin to the noble Robinson defied my comprehension. Her enthusiasms and knowledge seemed all the more remarkable since her father, also a Yankee fan, did not encourage her love of baseball, taking her brother, Gary, to games and leaving her at home with the claim that she could never sit through an entire game. Finally, at the age of eight, she exploded in a tantrum of outraged anger, and he agreed to take her, choosing a doubleheader to prove his point. I can still see her look of delight and triumph when she returned to tell me she had loved every minute, and had demanded they stay until the last out of the extra-inning nightcap.
The Yankees also had fervent followers in the Lubars and the Barthas, who lived across the street. Elaine (“Lainie”) Lubar’s birthday was the day after mine, and her mother would host a joint birthday party to spare my mother the clamorous assemblage of our friends. Only by dint of their cabana at Lido Beach, a symbol of affluence on our block, did the Lubars fit the typical image of the Yankee fan. When Lainie and I went to the beach together, I would race from the car to their family cabana—little more than a concrete hut with striped awnings and deck chairs, but to me, an oasis—where soft drinks were stacked in the refrigerator, and we could sit together for lunch, take a shower after swimming, and put on dry clothes to avoid spending the car ride home in sticky bathing suits on sandy towels.
The most memorable of our neighborhood Yankee fans was Gene Bartha, because of his peculiar dog-walking ritual with Clipper, the family sheepdog. Apparently, Clipper had originally been trained to relieve himself on newspaper in the house, for Gene was obliged to carry a paper with him and intermittently place several sheets on the sidewalk as they walked along. I was walking beside him one night when he mistakenly laid down on the sidewalk the sports page, which had a photograph and lead article on Yogi Berra. Seeing what he had done, he snatched it away from Clipper just in time, deftly replacing the sports page with the front page.
The ultimate aristocrats in the neighborhood—the family with the largest lawn—should, by rights, have been Yankee fans, but the Greenes, like the Rusts and our family, were staunch Dodger fans. The Greenes’ home was the only one on our block with a side yard as well as a front yard. I would play with Marilyn, the youngest of their three children, turning cartwheels on their soft grass, lying on my back to divine the shapes of different animals in the clouds, and feeding the rabbits they kept in a hutch on the corner of their lawn. The Rusts’ loyalty to the Dodgers followed the more typical pattern. A large Catholic family with five children, the Rusts had carried their allegiance with them when they moved to Long Island from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. And, of course, in Flatbush, my father had literally grown up with Ebbets Field, his devotion to the Dodgers so intertwined with his own biography that my sisters and I could no more have conceived of rooting for another team than of rooting against him.
For all of us, the love was personal and familiar. We spent hours arguing about whether Duke Snider, Willie Mays, or Mickey Mantle was the best center fielder. The handsome, smooth-fielding Duke Snider was the most consistent home-run hitter of the three, but Mays had a balletic grace and a joyful fury, while the switch-hitting Mantle had the greatest raw power and speed. Who was the best announcer: Russ Hodges, Mel Allen, or Red Barber? Who was the better catcher: Roy Campanella, steady behind the plate, unequaled in calling pitches, but a streaky hitter, or the short-armed swarthy Yogi Berra, the most dangerous hitter in baseball in late innings? Was Pee Wee Reese, the “Little Colonel,” who held the Dodgers together, a better shortstop than Phil Rizzuto, who led the American League in fielding? And which team had the better double-play combination: the Dodgers with Reese and Robinson, or the Giants with Alvin Dark and Eddie Stanky, whom we called “Eddie Stinky”? For support, we each mustered our own statistics and anecdotes. We carried on our arguments on the street, in the corner stores, and in each other’s homes. If no minds were changed, we took great pleasure in our endless debates and our shared love for the sport.
OUR NEIGHBORHOOD LIFE converged on a cluster of stores at the corner of our residential area: the drugstore and butcher shop; the soda shop, which sold papers, magazines, and comics; the delicatessen; and the combination barber shop and beauty parlor. The storekeepers were as much a part of my daily life as the families who lived on my street. When I entered the drugstore for a soda, or went into the delicatessen to buy some potato salad for my mother, the proprietors would greet me by name and, if not occupied, indulge my relentless curiosity. Since the families who operated these stores also owned them, their work was more than a job; it was a way of life. The quality of the goods they sold was as much a manifestation of their pride and self-respect as my father’s lawn was to him. The personal services they provided were not motivated merely by a desire for good “customer relations” but by their felt relationship to the larger community which they served and looked upon as neighbors. For our mothers, these neighborhood stores supplied all the goods they needed in the course of an ordinary day, and provided a common meeting place where neighbors could talk, trade advice, and gossip as they relaxed over an ice-cream soda or a cup of coffee.
The soda fountain at the corner drugstore, where I helped Doc Schimmenti make ice-cream sodas for the triumphant Little League team.
The sign in St. James Pharmacy, appropriately located on St. James Place, promised “prescription services, reliability, Breyers ice cream, and prompt delivery.” But owner “Doc” James Schimmenti gave much more than the advertisement promised. Fastidiously dressed in a white jacket with a white short-sleeved dress shirt, bow tie, and dark pants, Doc was neighborhood nurse and doctor combined. If one of us scraped a knee, he would bandage the cut. If someone got a splinter, he would extract it. When he printed prescription labels, he put his home number on the front so that his customers could call at any hour if they had a question or needed a refill. He was known to deliver as far away as Garden City and as late as 3 a.m. Even on holidays, he was always available. He was so beloved in our neighborhood that we affectionately joked that the store was named for him—St. James—rather than the street on which it stood.
On entering the drugstore, one encountered an old-fashioned soda fountain on the right, with six black stools that twirled around. To the left of the door there were greeting cards and a small bookshelf that held the lending library where my mother rented current best-sellers. On cold winter days, I could come in to warm myself on the grate which heated the store before venturing out again. Two wrought-iron tables with matching chairs were usually occupied by people drinking sodas and waiting for their prescriptions. The shelves held cigarettes and cosmetics; the counter at the center of the store contained a dazzling display of penny candy. In the rear of the store, Doc ground the powders, poured the syrups, and counted pills to fill prescriptions.
Doc, his wife, Josephine, and the four children who made up his close-knit Italian family worked in the store, tending the fountain, unpacking cartons, or operating the register. On nights when the Little League team that Doc sponsored was playing, the entire family was pressed into action. Doc had promised his players that, whenever they won a game, and they won regularly, he would open the drugstore and treat them all to free ice-cream sodas.
Early one evening, I walked past the store just as the triumphant team was filing in. Doc beckoned me over, and asked me if I might help with the crowd of ballplayers. Unsure of my abilities, but unwilling to miss this splendid opportunity, I walked to the soda fountain with an air of pretended confidence. With Doc guiding me, I pulled the long handle that drew the carbonated water, pushed the short one to add the syrup, and mixed in the cold milk. Finally, with a metal scoop dipped in steamy hot water to soften the hard ice cream, I added two scoops of vanilla or chocolate ice cream and a dab of fresh whipped cream. After the first few sodas, Doc, satisfied, moved away, and I was on my own. My nervous uncertainty drained away as I saw the sodas being swiftly consumed without complaint. I made eighteen sodas that night, handing each one over to one of the boys with a smiling “Here you are,” in imitation of Doc Schimmenti himself. When the boys left, I raced home gleefully, holding the dollar I had been given for my work. “And he even paid me,” I said to my father that night as I recounted my exploits in soda-by-soda detail.
The butcher shop next to the drugstore, home to my baseball rivals Max and Joe, boasted the best cuts of meat and the freshest vegetables in the entire area. Max, taller and thinner than Joe, was never without his ragged Giant cap as he stooped over the butcher block whistling opera tunes while he cleaved the meat. I was a regular in the store, even when I was only six or seven, for I would do the shopping when my mother wasn’t feeling well. Armed with her list, I would watch as they hauled down a huge slab of beef or side of lamb and carried it to the butcher block to be cleaved and cut into steaks, short ribs, or lamb chops. After the meat was cut, they would turn me over to Artie, the vegetable man, who would pick the choicest fruits and vegetables from the display he had made that morning.
When I came in they would often tease me that I had been fast asleep long after their workday had begun. Before dawn, Max would drive to the Bronx Terminal Market, on the Harlem River near Yankee Stadium, to pick out the day’s meat and vegetables. “Take me with you,” I would beseech him. “Let me see what you’re doing while I’m asleep.” Finally, he agreed, discussed it with my mother and one Saturday morning, picked me up in his truck just before three. My mother had furnished fresh coffee cake, which we devoured as we made our way into the Bronx. Perched on the high front seat next to Max, I began my customary interrogation. Had he always wanted to be a butcher, how had he gotten started, where had he come from? He told me he had arrived in the United States from Germany during the Depression, sponsored by his uncle Ottoman in New York. When he reached the city, however, things were so difficult that his uncle had no work for him. He saw an ad for a position in a North Shore butcher shop and walked twenty-five miles to Long Island to ask for the job. Though he knew nothing about cutting meat, he persuaded the owner to take a chance. Eventually, they became partners. From that shop, he moved to the store in Rockville Centre.
It was almost 4 a.m. as we approached the sprawling labyrinth of the Bronx Terminal, then the largest wholesale food market in the world, occupying thirty-two acres, stretching from 149th Street to 152nd Street and called a “terminal” market because it was the end of the line for runs from farms to the city. Although it was still pitch-black when we pulled up to the long brick warehouses, there were so many people gathered around the illuminated counters that it seemed like midday. Fruits, lettuce, celery, and broccoli were displayed in wood-and-wire slotted crates, which were discarded as they emptied. Kids would come at day’s end, lug off the discarded crates, and, with old roller skates, fashion homemade scooters. Firmly clasping Max’s hand, I walked with him for nearly an hour as he picked out what he wanted, and then stood beside him as he loaded it into the back of the truck. Soon we were back on the road, heading east toward home, just in time to see my first sunrise.
For me, each store was a treasure house of lore about the varied lives of the people of my community. I marveled that for Carl and Edna Probst, the husband-and-wife team who ran the delicatessen, unlike my own parents, there was no separation of the workplace and the living place, no division which forced the woman to stay home with the children and the man to spend his working day in the city, away from his family, his leisure time away from his place of work. I imagined that when I grew up I would enjoy a similar marriage—my husband and I would work side by side, day after day, waiting on people, making potato salad, and slicing cold cuts.
Whenever I entered the delicatessen I was greeted by the blended odors of good cheese, cold cuts, and pickles. In contrast to the neon lights and wide corridors of modern supermarkets, the delicatessen was small and narrow, with dark wooden shelves that resembled library stacks, packed from floor to ceiling with colorful cans instead of books. Because the shelves were so high, long-handled clippers were needed to reach the hard-to-get items. When the store was not crowded, Edna and Carl let me manipulate the clippers myself, positioning the arms around a box of cereal or a can of Campbell’s soup, squeezing the grip to tighten the clippers, and then lowering the container to a point where it could drop into my arms.
One Thanksgiving when my mother was in the hospital, Edna and Carl invited our family to join them for dinner. Since they had decided to stay open in case any of their customers needed something at the last minute, they celebrated in the back of the store, setting out dinner at the big table where each morning they made the tuna and potato salads. When I walked through the decorated cloth curtain which separated the front of the store from the back, I was excited to find this back room as warm and personal as a home; a large wood stove and a small maple table made it cozy, as a kitchen should be on a cold Thanksgiving day.
The owners of the soda shop next door were not quite as friendly. We were convinced that Mr. and Mrs. Brand hated us. Mrs. Brand was short and fat, with bleached-blond hair and beady eyes. If we took too long in the comics section without buying anything, Mr. Brand, with hair like Brillo, took delight in kicking us out of the store. Their attitude brought out the worst in us. Over and over, we would call the store and ask in disguised voices if they had “Prince Albert in the can.” When they confirmed it, we would start laughing and say, ‘“Well, please let him out. He deserves to be free!” For maximum satisfaction one of us would be stationed in the store during the calls to watch Mrs. Brand screw up her prune-like face in anger at the third Prince Albert inquiry and retort, “No, we won’t let him out, but if we catch you, we’ll put you in the can!”
Nevertheless, the Brands made the best sodas in town, boasting more flavors than Howard Johnson’s, and their booths were large and comfortable. They had a son, Eddie, who also worked in the store. He always wore a bow tie, and we sensed that he wanted to be nice to us but was afraid to let his guard down when his parents were there.
I WAS ONLY two years old when the end of World War II signaled the often involuntary return of women to the homes they had left for the factories and shipyards of wartime America. The re-entry of millions of men into the work force, together with pervasive fear of a return to large-scale unemployment, was fertile ground for the growth of an ideology which sought to persuade women that work and education would destroy their chances for marriage and a happy home life. The media and pundits of the day instructed women that their only true fulfillment could be found as wives and mothers, that sexist discrimination was actually good for them, that the denial of opportunity was, in reality, the manifestation of the highest possible goals of womanhood. The president of Mills College argued that higher education could actually be harmful for women, since the total irrelevance of their studies to their destined roles as wives and mothers would only increase their frustration. If Rosie the Riveter, women pilots, and Women’s Army Corps members had been portrayed as the heroines of the forties, the heroines in the fifties were women who were wise enough to realize that work and marriage were incompatible and had renounced careers to raise a family. This reassertion of dying values worked, at least for a while. Women valedictorians who left the commencement stage to become suburban housewives were praised as paragons of femininity. A renowned concert pianist, Liz Eck, became a media darling, a credit to her gender, for her decision to leave the stage in order to tend her husband and mother her child. Grace Kelly gave up her dazzling Hollywood career to become a wife and mother, albeit with a principality thrown into the bargain. In Life magazine in the mid-fifties, Robert Couglan railed against “the disease of working women,” who insisted on ruining their children and their family life.
If my mother felt a conflict of desire between her own ambitions and her family, she never showed it to me. On the contrary, she took great pride in being a housewife and seemed to enjoy her inviolable routine. On Mondays and Wednesdays, Frank, the Dugan’s Bakery man, came with fresh bread, coffee cake, and cupcakes; on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the milkman, whose name was Ray, arrived at the back door with glass bottles of Evans’ milk, which came with a layer of cream on the top that had to be scooped out with a special spoon. On Fridays, the chime of a bell signaled the arrival of the iceman, with large rectangular chunks of ice held between sharp metal tongs; a second bell heralded the man who sharpened knives and scissors, the sparks flying from the grindstone against which he held the blade. We had a Monitor refrigerator in our pantry, a Bendix washer in the basement, and a pentagonal clothesline in the backyard where our clothes were hung out to dry. My mother presided over the myriad details of life, deftly orchestrating the well-being of our household to the rhythm of the seasons: storm windows went up and down, slipcovers were put on and taken off, winter clothes were stored with mothballs, summer rugs replaced winter rugs, and the awnings were put up and removed.
Because she was such a methodical housekeeper, my mother had plenty of time to read her beloved books, walk to the corner stores, or visit with neighbors. I never sensed that she was bored or lonely. She always took special pains to put on fresh lipstick and to comb her hair when she knew that my father was on his way home. As soon as she saw him coming down the street, she began preparing the Manhattan cocktails which they shared every single night of their married life as they sat together on our porch and talked about their day. She seemed to grow more vibrant as they talked, asking him questions about work, and listening with unwavering interest and sympathetic understanding. He in turn asked her what she had done, whom she had talked with, and what she had read. When, occasionally, I listened to them talk, I could sense their love for one another, which made me happy, though I felt jealously excluded from their conversation. Indeed, so special was their ritual cocktail hour that my father never drank another Manhattan after my mother’s death.
These repetitive days seemed fulfilling for my mother. But I could never be sure. I was unable to share her interior life as she shared mine, a barrier strengthened, I suspect, by her illness. She must have known that her heart was growing weaker each year and worried about how much longer she would live. Not wanting me to know her fears, she rarely talked about her illness, never revealing to me what must have been a continual preoccupation. Yet, despite the weakness and fragility of her body, my mother stamped her personality in every alcove and corner of every room.
For as far back as I can remember, she was the overseer of some project in our house: a change of wallpaper in the bedroom, new paint in the kitchen, a new slipcover for the couch in the living room. My father was the work force for all these projects: painting the walls, hanging the wallpaper, and building the rock garden that my mother planted. After working with figures all week long, he relaxed on the weekends by working with his hands, and took pride in the tools he had assembled over the years. We used to tease our parents that when they both got to heaven we could expect that the sky would be a different color each day, with Mother giving orders and Dad doing the painting.
For the most part, I was little more than an eager witness and cheerleader for these activities. One summer, however, when I was about six, my father rented a steamer to take the old wallpaper off the dining-room wall. Intrigued by this strange machine, I volunteered my services, and then, when my suggestion met little enthusiasm, I pleaded for a chance to try it. Reluctantly, my father gave me the steamer, and with a little yelp of enthusiasm, I proceeded to strip off the thermostat, to the stunned merriment of my father. The only housework I ever enjoyed was on the nights my father designated me the person to put away the dishes he had dried. While I stood by the cabinets, he threw the plates and the silverware across the room to my waiting hands. Though we lost a few dishes along the way, my father had managed to transform an otherwise tedious chore into a great adventure.
Every year, my parents had more money to spend, a prosperity shared by almost everyone in the neighborhood. Excitement infected the entire block when someone got a new refrigerator with a built-in freezer, an automatic washing machine, or a television set with a bigger screen. Critics have railed against the acquisitiveness of the fifties generation, but for our parents, who had lived through the Depression, the ever-expanding economy seemed like a miraculous cornucopia; they took nothing for granted, and approached each major purchase with a sense of awe.
THE SOLITARY EXCEPTION to the genteel circumstances of middle-class life in our neighborhood was the old woman who lived in the run-down wooden shack with peeling paint on the corner of our street, known to us only as Old Mary. She was dressed always in black, and she had only one leg. The tapping of her wooden stump as she hobbled down the street, muttering, her body hunched, her eyelids half closed, terrified the children of the block and sent us scurrying for cover. A look of anger invariably darkened her creased face, and her hands seemed to make vague menacing gestures.
Old Mary was the “bad witch” of our neighborhood, something straight out of the fairy tales we read. As we rounded her corner, we would retreat to the safety of the opposite curb and spy on her, trying to decipher her movements while we watched her dig threatening holes in the ground behind her shack. Our vision obscured by the tangle of weeds, raspberry canes, and briar that surrounded her property, we imagined that she was making those holes to dispose of children she had kidnapped and killed. Through one of her windows we thought we spied the outline of a skull, which we believed she had placed there as a warning.
We fed on our own fear, daring one another to dash into her yard and peer directly into her windows. A glimpse of the inside of her house would, we believed, provide evidence of her witchcraft. For each of these escapades we concocted military-style stratagems. One or two lookouts would back up the brave person who volunteered to make the run, ready to sound a warning at the first sight of Old Mary. No one was eager to do the job, but one summer day Eddie Rust finally volunteered. After swiftly crossing the street, he darted through the jungle of canes and weeds and had just reached the window of her shack when Old Mary suddenly appeared. She caught Eddie by the back of his belt, her face twisted in anger, her screams chilling even at our distance of twenty feet. For several very long seconds, we stood frozen on the sidewalk, before Eddie struggled free and we raced off down the street. She began chasing us with what seemed supernatural endurance for an old lady. Though our houses promised sanctuary, we were afraid to have her know where we lived, so we ran in the opposite direction. Every time we glanced back, she was there, the staccato thump of her wooden leg on the sidewalk amplified in our frightened brains. Long after we eluded her, we couldn’t stop shaking.
A few days later, I bounded down our front steps to find my mother standing on the sidewalk talking to Old Mary herself. I turned immediately to escape back into the house, but my mother’s voice aborted my flight. Beckoning me over with a smile, she presented me to Old Mary and waited expectantly for me to say hello. Eyes cast downward, my voice muffled, I managed a pathetic semblance of a greeting. My mother’s solicitous expression and friendly voice betrayed a disquieting familiarity as I listened to her inquire after Mary’s health. Mary asked my mother a question about her flowers, and in response my mother led her through our driveway to show her something in the rock garden at the back of our house. As I stood there transfixed, watching them walk alongside the house, I imagined that my mother pointed to my bedroom window. Now that Old Mary knew where I slept, there was nothing to prevent her from flying through my window during the night and spiriting me away.
While I was getting ready for bed, my mother came up to my room, and in a tone devoid of sympathy said, “I don’t understand what you’re so afraid of.” I felt trapped between the fearsome realities of Old Mary and my mother’s accusing tone. I did my best to relate how she had yelled at us and then chased us down the road. “And what provoked her to do this?” my mother asked. “I have no idea,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Is it possible that you were on her property and trampled her flowers?” “I never did,” I replied, stressing the “I” so that my response was not completely untrue.
Sternly, she told me that my behavior was unacceptable, that Mary was simply a poor, sick old woman who had come from the Ukraine and had never learned to speak English very well. In fact, my mother explained, she had lived on our block longer than all the rest of us. Originally, her house stood in the midst of the vacant lots on which all the other houses were eventually built. Even some of the adults, she admitted, complained about the condition of Mary’s house and the weeds that violated the rules of the game in the suburbs. “Age and poverty are not a sin,” she said. Unconvinced, I rejoined feebly that all the other kids felt the same way, which only further irritated her. That night, I couldn’t sleep; every shadow looked like a witch’s broom.
“I am going to visit Mary, and you’re coming with me,” my mother announced as I entered the kitchen for breakfast the next morning. I tried to protest, but her tone brooked no argument, so I followed her out of the house and down the block. As we approached the dirt path which led through the weeds to Mary’s door, I alternated between closing my eyes as a kind of protection, and observing every detail so that if I got out alive I would have a great tale to tell. We passed through the outer tangle of weeds that surrounded the house like a palisade, and I was stunned to see a magnificent garden. The place was a wilderness of gold and purple and violet. There were marigolds, giant zinnias, and daylilies, and a rosebush climbing up the walls of her shack filled the air with perfume. Now I realized what she was doing as we watched her stooped and digging in her yard.
When she came to her door in response to my mother’s knock that morning, Old Mary didn’t seem quite so hideous and menacing as before. Quickly, I glanced inside. There were no rugs or couches. Her cabin was dark and unpleasant. My eyes scanned the room for the skull we had seen through the window, long a fixture of our fantasies. It didn’t take long to find—a mannequin’s head, decked in a wig, was placed on the counter in front of the window. I turned back to look at the intricately patterned garden and suddenly realized why someone crashing in and trampling upon her flowers was so threatening to her. Our feared witch was simply a reclusive old lady, a remnant from another time and culture, minding her own business and cultivating a beautiful garden.
Two months later, Old Mary died. When the police came to her house, they found several hundred thousand dollars in cash hidden beneath some boards behind her toilet. No one ever figured out where the cash had come from, or why Mary had not used it to make her life easier. In short order, the bulldozers came and razed Old Mary’s shack, erasing the last visible reminder of the poverty from which all our families had escaped.
MY FIRST YEAR as a Dodger fan ended with a dramatic flourish as the pennant race between the Dodgers and the Cardinals came down to the final week. On September 21, 1949, with the Cardinals a game and a half ahead, the Dodgers arrived in St. Louis for a three-game series, including a day-night doubleheader. Second grade forced me to miss most of the first game, but I arrived home in time to hear the Cardinals, sparked by Enos Slaughter, rally in the bottom of the ninth to break a scoreless tie and win the game. Fortunately, the tide began to turn in the second game: Preacher Roe, so skinny that he looked like the schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, pitched a shutout to beat the Cards 5-0. The Dodgers convincingly won the third game with nineteen runs and nineteen hits, the kind of lopsided victory which delighted me far more than a tension-filled pitching duel. Trailing now by only half a game, the Dodgers went on to split a series with the Phillies and win two from the Braves. The two teams entered the last game of the season with the Dodgers on top by one. A Dodger victory would win the pennant, a loss would force a playoff.
In 1949, with the help of Robinson, Reese, Hodges, and Cox, the Dodgers won the National League Pennant on the last day of the season with a thrilling tenth inning victory.
I listened with both my parents to the final game, which took place on a Sunday afternoon at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. The Dodgers scored five runs in the third, but, by the bottom of the ninth, the Phillies had bounced back to tie the game at seven apiece. I couldn’t sit still. My throat felt so dry that it hurt, but I was afraid to leave the room. “Now you’re learning what it means to be a Dodger fan,” my father said. Then, in the top of the tenth, Pee Wee Reese opened with a single, which was followed by two more singles to score two runs, and the Dodgers held on to win the pennant. My father hoisted me up and twirled me around and told me that I was the good-luck charm that brought victory to our team. And so I believed I was.
Soon it seemed that everyone on our block had emptied into the street, laughing and joking and sharing the moment, for that Sunday marked a double victory for New York fans. Thirty minutes before the Dodgers won, the Yankees had clinched the American League pennant with an equally dramatic win over the Boston Red Sox. The Sox and the Yanks had come to the last day of the season tied for first, with identical records: the winner of the last game would win the pennant. Not since 1908 had pennant races in both leagues come down to the last day. New York took a 5-0 lead into the ninth, when the Sox rallied for three runs, but the Yankees held on to win their sixteenth and perhaps most hard-won pennant, since time and again in the course of the season they had come back from adversity, plagued by more than seventy-one major injuries, including the loss of Joe DiMaggio for half their games. In a moment of joyful truce, before we hardened into our partisan camps, prepared to collide once again in the World Series, Elaine and I hugged each other. Mr. Lubar and my father shook hands, Mr. Rust, Eileen and Eddie Rust’s father, patted Gene Bartha on the back.
After the spectacular pennant drive, the ’49 World Series proved anticlimactic. The Yankees took the first game when Tommy Henrich hit a solo homer in the ninth inning to break a scoreless pitching duel between Allie Reynolds and Don Newcombe. The Dodgers returned the favor in the second game with a 1-0 victory by Preacher Roe. After two such close games, however, the Yankees won the next three straight. Our dreams for a world championship in ’49 withered and died. My relationship with Elaine grew strained and suffered for weeks. It was that October that I first understood the pain, bravado, and prayer woven into the simple slogan that served Dodger fans as a recurring anthem: “Wait till next year.”
