The summer of ’56 I went, as usual, to Chipinaw, this time as a prep-school-student-to-be. We were expected to have read at least four books of our choice from a Horace Mann assigned list, so I arrived with instructions from my mother that I be given time off for the task, the precise exemption I had long sought. Taking advantage, I packed not only the required David Copperfield but two other Dickens novels, Martin Chuzzlewit and Our Mutual Friend, and bought the complete Sherlock Holmes rather than the recommended Casebook.
I lived that summer in fog along the Thames, unravelling John Rokesmith’s multiple identities and accompanying Martin Chuzzlewit from America to England. Whole nineteenth-century realms passed through me as I lay in the grass, beyond the stridency of games.
Bunk 14’s regular counselor, Bernstein, had to leave for an undisclosed emergency mid-August—or maybe it was that we ran him ragged. He was a legendary disciplinarian who had sought the glory of whipping us into shape. But Bernstein was no match for our chutzpah, wits, and arrays of water traps and disappearing and reappearing objects. We left him apoplectic.
An older guy was hired from off campus and put in charge of Bunk 14. Rumor was that he was an escaped convict and they had found him hitchhiking. Probably not, but it fit his m.o. He carried a mean-looking knife, drank straight from a bottle of hard liquor, and cursed us with four-letter words. He didn’t care about our keeping things neat—a tip-off that he was not Chipinaw stock—though he liked to order us around like slaves. He raided our secret food caches and, at meals, ate many of our portions too. He also invited kids to reach in his pocket while he lounged on his bed and feel a special treat he had there if anyone was hungry.
Nothing close to this redneck had ever happened at Chipinaw. In retrospect, I can’t imagine how the anally fastidious management slipped up or recall why we didn’t report the dude’s malfeasances: I mean, a weapon, alcohol, pedophilia. I guess we thought we had lost all credibility by then.
At breakfast one morning after our usual allotment (when French toast was on the menu) of eight pieces was deposited on the table, Ralph grabbed the platter and, in a deft scoop of his fork, stabbed four, leaving the rest for us to divide. I didn’t care much for Chipinaw French toast—and I had stayed mostly out of Ralph’s way—but this was an over-the-top psycho and I was incensed that he should have been put in charge of us. When the platter reached me, there was one piece left and one more person to go after me. I handed it back to Ralph and said, “Here. Maybe you didn’t get enough.” There was a hush as he surveyed me with wild eyes.
“Stand up!” he screamed. That was the supreme embarrassment in the Chipinaw dining room—public reprimand. I sat there. “Stand up!” He rose and pointed at me. The cavernous room had turned silent. Jay and Barry were staring in horror.
“Stand. Up!”
I complied more in fury than obedience and, with a quick swat of my hand, turned over the pot of hot coffee on him. He let out a howl and dove across the table at me. Three other counselors wrestled him to the ground. “I’m going to kill him,” he screamed. “The little bastard, I’m going to kill him.”
Despite the incident they left him in our bunk. I got only sporadic sleep after that, waking in starts, staring across the murk at his quiescent hulk, wondering if he was asleep or just pretending, and where the knife was (if not tucked under the covers with him). But I made it through the final week to the banquet alive (in some alternate reality I was murdered and Chipinaw was front-page headlines). All that last day we packed our clothes in trunks. I felt so much frenzied energy I could barely contain it: I didn’t have to sleep there another night—our beds were stripped, our cubbies bare. Deliverance!
Near the end of the after-dinner awards ceremony, cars arrived to collect us: me, Jay, Siggy, Jay’s cousins from the girls’ camp, and Barry. No imagined escape by flying saucer was more thrilling or exotic. We were lights moving along back roads toward the Emerald City. Everything was charged, intricate, weird—billboards gateways to welcoming universes.
I had dreams of Horace Mann before I went there. Hiking up marble steps, I passed between pillars fronting a Greek temple. As I entered, it turned into a large industrial building. Once inside, I could find no classrooms, only hallways through which crowds of people rushed. I saw no kids either, just preoccupied adults carrying papers and books.
My mother took me to Saks Fifth Avenue and had me fitted for an entire wardrobe of sports jackets, ties, slacks, and shoes. As at Chipinaw accouterings, I was only an incidental mannequin to the deliberations of a woman and a salesman, as though they were deciding how some abstract child might look if he were properly attired. I could barely imagine attending a boys’ academy where jackets and ties were required and the teachers had to be addressed as “Sir,” so I felt like an impostor in these expensive duds.
On the evening before the first day of Horace Mann my mother and Bob marked the occasion by taking me out to dinner at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. He spoke with his familiar adman flamboyance: “I hope you appreciate where you’re going. This is your chance to join the archons of our society.”
“I don’t think he realizes how much work it will be,” my mother inserted.
I was silent; I already feared the worst. “This is his last free night,” she continued, staring at me, “for six years!”
“Don’t be ghoulish,” Bob chided.
Lying in bed on the eve of a new life, I tried to grasp what was happening. Why had they even admitted a boy who barely made it through P.S. 6?
Awakened by Bridey’s cheery 6 a.m. summons—“New school for the lad, rise and shine”—groggily I pulled pins and tissue paper out of a shirt and, before the bathroom mirror, knotted a red-and-brown striped tie. Trepidation warred with suspense, layers of sleepiness stirring remembrances in nausea-like aftertastes of breakfast: the dragons of Blueland, Flash Gordon at the Martian court. My mind kept supplying guises of stern, unsmiling masters like the signers of the Declaration.
I glanced at the harlequin child in the mirror. Six years! I didn’t think I could do this for a week.
By phoning the school my mother had gotten the names of two older students who lived in our neighborhood and arranged for them to teach me the route. I left Jon waiting for the Bill-Dave wagon at the 1235 canopy and proudly strode west across Park, then north across 96th Street to where a group of Horace Manners had gathered at the bus stop. My chaperones quickly identified themselves.
Boarding, we dropped coins into the driver’s box, then found seats along the rear window. There they taught me a game played with serial numbers on the transfers we had requested (but didn’t need). We raced each other to be the first to make our consecutive digits end up at ten by trying out sequences of addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, and squares until we landed on the decimal ten at the end (for instance, 71435 could hit the target as 7 squared minus 1 divided by 4 plus 3 minus 5). It would be months before we tired of this exercise (it now seems apropos that my first contact with Horace Mann was a cerebral math game). Meanwhile, Madison and Fifth flew by as we zipped into the Park through its tunnels to the less familiar West Side. After Central Park West came Columbus and Amsterdam, foreboding side streets before the years of gentrification. We disembarked next at commercial Broadway and plunged into the tenebrous IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit).
Purchasing fifteen-cent tokens from the lady at the booth, we bombed through the turnstiles to catch a pausing train. In later weeks I would simply flash my student pass at the agent as I opened the gate.
Barely beating the thud of metallic doors, we sat in contemplative silence as—stop by stop—the car filled with attendees of different schools, most of the further uptown arrivals having to stand. Then the train rattled out of the underworld onto stilts and wound above the northern city, emptying by portions onto streets in the 200s.
Horace Mann shared the last station with Manhattan College: 242nd Street—all off—the train emptying in a bustle verging on pandemonium. From there we hiked four blocks up a hill to 246th. (Unaccompanied on my second day, I overrated the age of Horace Mann upperclassmen, joined the wrong crowd, and ended up at an edifice resembling the temple of my dream.)
I was expected to report to Pforzheimer Hall, its sleek modern box hugging a slope below ivy-covered classrooms. Designated expressly for the Lower School, it was like an elongated space station with entry ports. We were its baptizers, which postponed the start of classes for a ceremonial ribbon-cutting. I was grateful for a few extra hours before any action was required other than getting my schedule from an alphabetical stack—no way to mess up yet. On the other hand, I had a full calendar card of classes in separate rooms—not one teacher for everything like at P.S. 6—and a new last name. This was getting serious!
We were each assigned a locker on the ground floor of Pforzheimer and given the combination to the lock on it. Mine was 22-36-10. I had no idea how to rotate the nob onto those numbers in such a way that the pins would drop. Arnie Goldman, alphabetically one locker to my left, taught me that you had to make a full circle and then, after lining up the black notches of each digit, reverse direction. Like a parent he put his hand over mine and turned it with me until I got the flair.
My first day as Richard Grossinger seemed an eternity among mobs of First Formers scurrying with and against traffic. Each teacher, though amiable, without fail warned that his course would take at least an hour’s homework every night and that we had better pay scrupulous attention to his lessons. “Every pearl of wisdom that comes from my ruby-red lips,” advised Mr. Allison in American History when asked by an earnest lad, “What are we responsible for, sir?” Maybe this was the end of freedom. But for one precious day I was snug and anonymous among the masses, no different from any other plebe. The second morning, lectures began in earnest.
Almost immediately I realized that I couldn’t maintain a folio of interplanetary adventures and stay alert. That had been true, of course, at P.S. 6, but I didn’t take the matter seriously there. The spaceship I launched in Miss Tighe’s class had an irresistible appeal. Here I was a new person, caught up: I didn’t want to slide back into truancy and forsake this exciting new world.
In a series of elaborately plotted installments I concluded my odyssey among the stars. That was no mean feat, for, though imaginary, the ship was an intricately conceived machine, each detail of its manufacture and function committed to memory. I couldn’t just expel such an object from myself. I had to unravel its history with the same care and credibility with which I had invented it.
To dismiss the craft and its adventures fliply—easy come, easy go—would have broken faith with my samaritans as well as the characters I had adopted over the years. They had been faithful companions and I would miss them.
I extricated myself by making the end of the narrative as meticulous and definitive as its beginning. While falling sleep those first nights of Horace Mann, I flew back to Earth and returned everyone to their lives. I needed the logic and maturity of a twelve-year-old to break a seven-year-old’s spell.
Sometimes the great vehicle crashed; sometimes it was returned to its makers; sometimes it was hurtled out of the Galaxy and swallowed into infinity; but it had to be put irretrievably beyond reach. Without a clean break, I risked relapse. Although I reclaimed the vessel briefly in later years, it would never again be real.
In jacket and tie, scrawling till my hand ached, I tried to capture the gist of recitations and blackboard demonstrations—arithmetic formulas, families of languages, parts of speech, the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. All around me in jackets and ties were fellow scholars, scribbling away. No one knew that Richard Grossinger had never been a scholar, that he was dressed like a gentleman for the first time, that he was really Richard Towers.
I was mostly cheerful, for I felt a respite from both the family hothouse and the premonition of a Horace Mann beyond reach. The math turned out to be no harder than what Mr. Hilowitz had taught me. General Language, English, and history were straightforward exercises in the roots of common words, sentence structure, and the laws of the Constitution. I regurgitated from heart the rules of parliamentary order. I learned how to diagram sentences: subject, verb, object in a horizontal row; vertical lines with hooks for adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions. I solved equations that had letters as well as numbers.
In Music I learned to identify composers and their symphonies. I loved hearing the anthems and guns hidden in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, the aroused skeletons of Saint Saëns’ bewitching-hour graveyard. Here again were symbols wrapped in façades. I even had Daddy get me Danse Macabre, my first-ever classical disk in its fancy cardboard wrapper.
Twice a day a random cull of us rotated into study hall, a silent period during which the rest of our classmates were at a lesson. There we were expected to start our night’s homework.
Yanking me out of the academic spell were two hours of gym that capped each afternoon. At two o’clock the whole First Form straggled from separate classrooms in Pforzheimer to the campus walkway and around it into the basement of a gray fortress on the far side of the playing fields. There we were assigned a second set of lockers and ordered to get into sweat clothes pronto.
The gazes of our coaches, credentialed deliverers of male authority, bore right through cowed young scholars. Calling us by last name only, often preceded by a scornfully prolonged “Mister,” they explained that we would be issued instructions “just once, faggots, so you better get it on the first try.” After imparting each drill, they stood back with folded arms and squinched eyes to observe our renditions.
For weeks we strove to produce unachievable numbers of barbell lifts, sit-ups, and push-ups. Then we sparred with gloves and grappled on a mat. Our ensigns used each of these vocations to expose our bodies and attack our isolation, barking and calling us girlies or queers if we were timid or klutzy. Ducking behind more massive classmates, I prayed not to be noticed, not to have to wrestle, not to have my ragged sit-ups evaluated. But everyone took his turn and suffered an appraisal and unforgiving score.
I quavered through appearances in the spotlight, straining and kicking my legs to pull my frame up on jungle bars, warding off punches, jabbing out a glove in return, trying to get my arms around the surreal neck and legs of a huskier kid as we rolled in embrace on the mat, amazed I came out the other end of each gauntlet without some major breakdown or shame.
I showered, bought a snack from the subway cluster at the foot of the hill, and rode homeward on the El with my new friends.
After a month our P.E. group moved on to soccer, charging down an immense slope into Van Cortlandt Park where we squared off—vestiges of Bill-Dave in the autumn air as I dribbled and then kicked at the goal, volleys of oranged and reddened leaves gusting amid whistles from games near and far. My discarded past and unknown future balanced on a razor’s edge as Jeff Jones hit me in the clear, a brilliant pass across the field. “Go!” he shouted. “Go!” One of the two black kids in the class and a super athlete, he had inexplicably adopted me.
Nights and weekends were packed with homework. In terms of study habits I was crossing light years in months. I routinely started math and English in study hall or on the subway, getting basic stuff out of the way, building up a margin for protracted readings in history and General Language. Most nights I didn’t quit working until just before I dropped into bed.
I handed in assignments and weathered spot quizzes and tests. When Uncle Paul sent tickets for Daddy to take me to the two weekend games of the 1956 World Series it was a revisitation of a childhood abandoned long ago, but I went with him and Uncle Moe and we saw Whitey Ford and Tom Sturdivant pitch the Yankees back to even after they had lost the first two games at Ebbets Field. The next day while I was in class, my Chipinaw buddy Don Larsen tossed a perfect game. To miss such an event would have been unthinkable once, but now Yankee interdiction was as mandatory as discarding my spaceship. Horace Mann superseded everything that preceded it.
To my mind I did okay. I got plenty of things wrong, but I didn’t daydream and I basically understood the material. When the first report card came, however, it showed all C’s, except for a D in math accompanied by a probation report.
My mother was frantic; she thought I was close to expulsion and blamed herself for not paying enough attention to my study habits. She began scrutinizing me like a hawk. Her injunction to study merged with and gradually replaced her general outrage at me and gave her fresh ammunition for reprimanding me continually.
She had no idea of the actual scope of the homework or my progress. Yet she was sure that I was way behind and that the situation could be handled only by tight reins and constant threats. Becoming a caricature of an oblivious martinet, she judged me by one standard alone. As long as she saw me at my desk she was appeased. For years I was fixed in her brain as the single command to “get back to work”—no matter the time of day or circumstance. Horace Mann became my single identity to her. She forgot P.S. 6 and Bill-Dave as though they never existed. Even my apostasy at Grossinger’s and Dr. Fabian’s became peripheral matters.
I remember the famished rush from the last morning class to the cafeteria line; I can still taste those mushy piles of spaghetti in meat sauce (yummier than any version before or since), the filet of sole with a lemon slice on Friday, crisp, tangy, and delicious; a block of ice cream or scoop of jello for dessert—we were starving! After lunch we gathered at the bookstore to buy marshmallow bars kept in ice-cream lockers—so hard that chunks of them fractured like stone in our teeth, blends of chocolate frost and whipped mallow melting in my mouth together.
Before afternoon classes that late October a bunch of us stood in the path between buildings, trying to catch leaves off maples. Frigid squalls issuing from the sky dropped our prizes, singly and in swarms. Clad in requisite jackets and ties, we twisted and grabbed at fluttering golden and rouge figments, colliding with one another, stumbling and giggling as our apparel flew open and shirts got untucked. I played with a vengeance and, like a knuckleball catcher, was making one darting catch after another when a group of upperclassmen stopped to look.
I heard a whisper of “Fags!” A super-cool-looking guy, thin as a rail with pomaded wavy hair and lots of cologne, grabbed the arm of the kid next to me and pronounced through curled lips, “I just hate little queers.” No one played again.
One morning I awoke to see snow falling in the courtyard. I opened the window and put my fingertips in feathery fluff on the windowsill. Bridey had the radio on. They were reading a list of schools closed in the New York area. The names went on and on, Catholic schools and academies and colleges in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan. I wanted a snow day, a vestige from another time. “Adelphi, Hofstra, Horace Mann …”
I cheered aloud, as Bridey gave me a funny look, part amusement, part censure.
Central Park was an ancient village, snow falling so rapidly I could barely see. As I clopped perfect footprints, I stared at figures materializing through veils. Fifth Avenue was bare of cars. A few people skied down the thoroughfare while others made snow statues and chased after the occasional lonely bus like a wooly mammoth. I wished I had a sled or companions for a fort and snowball fight, but I wasn’t that kid anymore.
The next day the sun shone on a new white world, and I rejoined my comrades on the subway, returning to Horace Mann as if from time travel to prehistoric Wales.
Naked in gym that winter we stood by the unheated pool while Mr. Mathaner demonstrated the butterfly and sidestroke. I sought radiator pipes along the wall, trying to avoid bumping into other bare bodies or scalding metal, my arms hugging my chest.
Mathaner blew his whistle, and we dove in a collective chlorine splash, thrashed to the other end, then got out, and jockeyed for positions near new radiators. “Mr. Grossinger!” Invariably he found me and re-demonstrated the stroke.
I jumped back in alone and strained to imitate his spiralling arms and muscled chest.
“Better! Now work on it.”
Through the entire period I longed for the steamy shower room … until at last I stood mesmerized in hot spray, spinning my body, letting the waterfall sweep down, cloud over my shoulders, touch every part of me. Ecstasy!
Nakedness was a rite in which we observed our own bodies changing in the mirrors of one another. Beneath the mask of our shouting and ribaldry we spied on classmates’ physiology, degrees of pubic hair and different-shaped penises. So many of them were already men, their basso voices booming, and yet I was becoming more of a man than I could admit.
In threadbare towels we raced across the stone of the locker-room, got somewhat dry (except hair), restored jackets and ties, gathered our books and papers, and headed down the hill to the ride home.
The subway bonded those of us who commuted from Manhattan—other classmates came by bus and car from Westchester and New Jersey suburbs. The train imposed a tempo and I learned its musical score. The symphony began with the harbinger of a massive metal object, a faint tremor followed by the deafening clangor of machinery wheezing to a stop. Our boarding stirred the adagio of transport: an opening clack and thump as the doors slammed shut, then the screeching sway of tracks between stations; how the snake lurched at each bend, where its drumroll quickened, where its bass ceased, where the string section whined, where the lights went out (once I caught on, I no longer got alarmed). Ultimately my group came to prefer the long express stops and breakneck speed of the older, sootier IND, which we called Renegade Insane Transit instead of Independent Subway System. We routinely switched from the IRT via the elevator at 168th Street, as some of my colleagues worked out exotic routes for evading a bus fare, including one that took us to the East Bronx where we stared down from the platform at Yankee Stadium, snow on its fallow field. From there we rode the Lexington Avenue express to midtown.
For a whole month we held a contest of “subway basketball,” shooting for the grimy vents above the windows with crumpled-up notebook paper. We got two points when the “ball” was sucked out into the tunnel. It felt a little funny making our shots in front of an incredibly tall schoolboy across the aisle because he was supposed to be a famous player. It was young Lew Alcindor in his Power Academy jacket, but I doubt he realized the game we were playing was basketball.
When I got home I consumed whatever was available. I made toast and then layered on gobs of apricot and grape jam, gnawed down half a pack of cream cheese from peeled-back aluminum, then devoured a combination of bananas, oranges, devil’s food cookies, chocolate-glazed or coconut-sprinkled Malomars, and two or three tiny boxes of Rice Krispies or Frosted Flakes. Later I got a light golden tan on slices of bread and coated them with melting butter. I alternated Arnold’s “vanilla” and Pepperidge Farm Whole Wheat. One night I ate seven bananas; another time I went through a loaf of Thomas’ raisin bread with Philadelphia cream cheese. I would sit at my desk, stuffing in vittles for my reward while I worked.
At quarter term, Woodshop supplanted Music, so I made a rough facsimile of a stool for Bridey and a birdhouse for Aunt Bunny. Impressed that the elderly teacher was missing three fingers, I was careful not to slip as I band-sawed along my pencil markings on a piece of plywood set in a vise. After two months, Woodshop students moved on to Theater Arts where we cast and put on a play about a talking caterpillar.
Because we would be expected to type all our papers in Second Form, I was put into class where I struggled to learn QWERTY and acquire nimble enough fingers not to keep hitting “Y” for “T” and “B” for “V.” Our machines were huge manual robots that took purposeful pounding to get text. I was the only one who didn’t have access to a typewriter for practicing at night so, after I got a D on my first exam, my mother brought home a monstrosity from work.
Twice a week the whole school gathered in the auditorium for Chapel at which we sang hymns and college songs. Words on a light tan background were projected onto a screen: “A mighty fortress is our God” and “Stand and drink a toast to dear old Maine.” Every so often Mr. Allison led us in a rousing version of “Give me ten men who are stout-hearted men…. ” The room resonated with male voices. I liked being in the midst of such robustness and I brought the songs home to the shower: “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing” and “To the Earth, to the stars, / to the girls who will love us someday!”
For the first time in my life I was free to come and go as I wished. No one knew where I was between the end of school and dinner, the subway having replaced the Bill-Dave wagon. Staying on the Broadway train three extra stops after school and getting off at 59th Street was a favorite alternative to going straight home. All three parental offices lay within four long blocks on 57th: the Fountainbleau at Fifth, the Grossinger’s New York agency between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh, and Robert Towers Advertising between Broadway and Eighth.
On days that homework allowed, I liked to visit PZ, a longtime Grossinger’s employee who preferred to work in the City to be near his ailing mother. PZ (never Paul Zousmer) was a short Danny Kaye lookalike, a miscast journalist and unappreciated house historian who handled details of Hotel archiving in a cubicle stuffed with piles of old photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings.
PZ’s face always lit up when I arrived. I was not only a devotee of Grossinger memorabilia; I was a Grossinger myself and appeared in dozens of glossies and press clippings from the week of November 3, 1944, as a newborn, my mother and Uncle Paul both young and wide-eyed, holding me between them—the caption: “His Majesty, The King”: proof of my authentic origin.
A fiery CCNY grad named Bob Towers was another mainstay of the 1940s lexicon, pictured with golfers, ballplayers, and stage stars, often microphone in hand, a stage smile. In one, Uncle Paul and he walked arm-in-arm.
On the next block was a store called Photographic Fair where PZ went for film, equipment, and conversation. Our buddy there was a thin, balding clerk named Charlie de Luise who handed us expensive cameras from behind locked glass and helped me adjust their finely tuned dials for light and shutter speed. I wanted to be able to shoot close-ups and action photos, impossible with a fixed-lens box, and I particularly admired a Minolta with a two-thousandths-of-a-second shutter speed. PZ promised to hire me after school was out so I could earn the hundred dollars necessary to purchase it.
He also told me that Grossinger’s had accounts at Womrath’s (next door to Photographic Fair) and Colony Records (a few blocks southwest), so I would bring lists of desired items—science-fiction novels, astronomy and dinosaur books for the bookstore; 45s of the Kalin Twins, the Ames Brothers, and Paul Anka for the record shop—and charge them like at Milty’s canteen. Going to these stores conferred the Hotel’s aura and magic momentarily in the City, as I brought home a tangible smidgen of it in my hands.
Just before Christmas our routine at Horace Mann was halted by final exams, scheduled one or two a day in the gym. Their accrued tension was greater than a close game in late innings. All the way to 242nd Street we quizzed one another, intimidated by how much our comrades knew, trying to digest a few last facts right up to the door. Cartons were sliced open and bluebooks poured out. The basketball court was coopted by desks window to window.
Hearts thumping, we picked our tests from the correct stacks and took any seat along the sawdust-sprinkled floor. All grade levels were mixed, as students of different ages sat side by side in solitary contemplation of their quandaries. I scanned my printed pages with their finality of truth-telling runes, relieved by the familiar, chilled by inevitable surprises. Then, heart in throat, I began scribbling for dear life.
After exams Joe drove me to Grossinger’s. I arrived wanting to tell Aunt Bunny all about my new school but, to my surprise, found my brothers alone in their house. Our parents were vacationing in the Caribbean. The living room was a mess—liquor bottles and newspapers strewn on the floor. Michael filled me in: Beulah had gone to see a sick aunt, and Housekeeping had sent over a substitute maid who barely spoke English. “But she knows what that is,” he declared, pointing to the liquor cabinet. He led me on tour: “Empties in every room!” He threw up his arms in theatrical disgust.
When I encountered the lady, she was brandishing a mop and chased me out of the third floor, flinging a bottle at my retreat. It bounced crazily against walls and landed without breaking. This was great stuff, but it got even better! Soon she began throwing ashtrays and clothing down the stairs. I called the head of Housekeeping, but that was Grandpa’s sister, Aunt Rose, a tiny dynamo of spittle who had no use for children and was barely more sober than our guardian. She would scold Michael and me as if on cue whenever we passed her: “You goddamned kids, whatcha doing now? No good I betcha!” We’d purposely steer within view to elicit such a greeting.
This time she barked something unintelligible and hung up.
The three of us plotted. While the maid was at the liquor cabinet, we took a human-sized stuffed monkey, dressed it in Uncle Paul’s suit jacket and tie, and put him to bed in my room on the third floor. We spilled ketchup on his white shirt, knocked over some lamps, and led a string of knotted sheets from the bedpost out the window. Then we taped groans on the tape recorder and slid it under the overhang of the counterpane.
The odd noises engaged her curiosity. She edged her way up the stairs and across the hall, looked in the room, screamed, and went running back down and out the front door. We had gotten rid of her just the way Bugs Bunny would have!
Two days before Christmas our parents returned, and the next evening Michael’s teacher came to talk to Aunt Bunny about his problems in school. All that afternoon, in preparation for the visit, my brothers and I rehearsed Curley the Talking Caterpillar. As the two women sipped tea in the living room we appeared suddenly in costume and put on a semblance of the script. In one totally ad-libbed scene Michael ran around in a mustache and black derby, carrying a doctor’s bag, yelling, on respective circuits, “If you think I’m Groucho Marx, I’m not…. If you think I’m Walter Winchell, I’m not…. ”
This latter-day brother and I were connoisseurs of daffiness in general: leaving cryptic notes for a baffled Milty, hiding surprises in Jack Gallagher’s silverware drawers, doing parodies of fat, tongue-tied Uncle Paul, parading to the dinner table chanting, “The big baboon by the light of the moon … / And what became of the monk, the monk, the monk …?” Volatile friends, we were inseparable for days—building snowmen, racing sleds, riding Hotel buses into town to explore shops—but the Monk was unpredictably moody and, when he got furious at me, the worst insult he could think of was to call me by the name with which I had arrived years earlier as an outsider: “Go back where you came me from, Towers.” Yet how clean that was compared to layers of proxy warfare with Jonny!
My father was a Jekyll and Hyde character. In the City he was my gregarious, permissive savior, but at the Hotel he was strict and irascible, always checking to see if we were violating rules. He hated to spot us cutting through the kitchen or serving ourselves at the pantry: “You are never never to go in there again! We could lose our insurance!”
I was surprised how many of the staff were terrified of him: from old men who washed floors to directors of departments; even Irv Jaffee, speedskating champion; even huge Milty who would cringe if he were summoned to PG’s office. “Your father wants me, Richie,” he would say. “You suppose this is the end?” I assured him that Paul was a good guy and I would put in a word for him if necessary.
I tried not to notice my father’s threatening side, for on me, generally, shone his protective face and I was contained in his beneficent orbit.
Aunt Bunny told me one day, to my astonishment, that Michael and James were adopted; they came from non-Jewish families in Hartford, Michael was Italian, and James was lots of things, including American Indian. “Your father and I couldn’t have children,” she explained, “so our friend Dr. Krall arranged for us to get two very special boys. Paul didn’t want girls because he didn’t think he could deal with their teenage years, dating and all that. Pretty silly, but that’s your father.”
That I adored my non-blood brothers so much more than my blood one was an anomaly I took at face value. I didn’t need to know why.
As James got older he joined Michael and me in improvised adventures, some of them quite heedless. The three of us spent one entire morning rolling old automobile tires down the main hill, chasing alongside them—cars and pedestrians beware! It was equally reckless to collect golf balls from the road and woods around the course and then fungo them with a baseball bat into the unseen distance over the parking lot.
For afternoons across the grounds and in underground passageways we played hide-and-seek. The rule was, the mark had to keep moving. It would have been impossible to find a person who dallied in any of the thousands of closets, alleys, or guest rooms.
Inspired by a Baby Huey comic, we set out a lemonade and soda stand, mixing concoctions from kitchen storerooms and the canteen to sell to passing guests. Any fruit in seltzer was a soda. Any fruit mixed with sugar and water was an ade. We offered exotica like watermelon soda and boysenberry ade. Uncle Paul ended that venture quickly, but not before we had made almost twenty bucks.
Then we collected sections of picket fence, truck tires, pipes, and other junk from the various warehouses, garages, and maintenance shops and constructed our own miniature golf course in the backyard, digging tunnels and burying plumbing in them for the tiny ball to rattle through. Our four-holed citadel sat in the landscape for days. We had turned old fences into slotted conduits, elbow joints into underground changes of direction and level, dais decorations into obstacles.
You had to stand and admire it. PG didn’t. He made us tear it down at once, refusing to play even a hole. To him, just about anything we thought up was seditious in principle. On occasions like that he squared with my mother and I understood their primeval marriage. Passing me in the living room one day, he gave me a hard swat on the backside.
“What did I do?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but you must have done something!”
As often as Aunt Bunny and I talked about psychology, our lives, books we read, and characters at the Hotel, we rarely mentioned Uncle Paul. In fact, one odd aspect of my stepmother was how little she seemed to have to do with my father. They slept in the same bed, but I rarely saw them together in public, and I couldn’t imagine what they found to talk about. She tended to go to the nightclub alone and drink and dance. Once, Michael and I (with James in tow) sneaked over to see what she was up to. There she was, in red dress and jewelry, the center of much male attention, hoofing up a storm to a Latin band. We were sure she was drunk. “You kids go home,” she shouted. “Your mother’s entitled to party without being spied on.”
Grandma Jennie seemed to be running her own hotel. Because there was rancor in the family about it, my brothers were not encouraged to visit her and rarely did. Even Aunt Bunny had little to do with the world at Joy Cottage. It seemed peculiarly to have more to do with my other family.
Every night Grandma would work her way through the dining room, table by table, greeting each group of guests as if they were the dearest of friends. Because she was a celebrity they had seen on bread packages and television, grown men and women were thrown into a tizzy by her mere presence. Sometimes she would summon me to accompany her and be introduced. I would stand at her side trying to look appropriate, as she told them about Horace Mann. Grandma’s capacity for strangers was indefatigable.
My father ignored this hoopla around his mother as if it was happening in a dimension invisible to him, but I could tell he wasn’t happy. One night I heard him say in response to her doting attentions to a particular group, “Mother, they’re crooks; they’ve robbed us blind!”
And she answered, without irony or self-conscious sanctimoniousness, “Then we’ll turn the other cheek.” Pretty much the sort of thing she said to me about my mother and stepfather.
I sat on her bed, correcting diagrams of sentences her tutor had given her, telling her what I knew about prehistory and landscapes on Mars. It was pretentious but guileless. She urged me not to limit my vision to the Hotel but to move beyond it. “Your father is narrow. He doesn’t realize that our good fortune has come because of the way we’ve treated people and the largeness of our vision. We have been blessed, but we must continue to earn our blessings with good deeds.”
I could tell that she thought of Grossinger’s as a cultural institution more than a business. That gave my role as heir apparent a legitimacy, for I doubted I could conduct commerce like Uncle Paul.
Grandpa Harry was alienated from Grandma too. As the Hotel’s architect and contractor, he had his crew build a separate doorway onto his room so he could come and go without contact. In all my time there I never saw them together. He was usually out on the grounds at dawn and went to bed early. Visited in the late afternoon, he sat hunched before his TV, often watching boxing. Piles of birdseed lay around the stone slabs marking his entrance, bright jujubees in which a confab of sparrows, wrens, pigeons, and blue jays nibbled furiously. For years I thought Grandpa had spread them because he liked birds; it was the main civilizing aspect in my portrait of him. Then a chance remark led a bellhop to inform me that a room-service waiter did the honors and, though Harry G. had bawled him out for all the birdshit, the vested old-timer refused to stop.
Still, I liked Grandpa Harry. He made much of me and gave me fifty-dollar bills, a fortune back then—almost ten times the purchasing power of the same tender today—plus he talked so much like Elmer Fudd that in his company I felt transported inside a comic book.
In Grandma’s part of the house—all of it except that one room—I met the cliques of hangers-on my father stewed about: has-been singers, once-famous agents without clients, “doctors” (at least they were called “doc”), athletes in retirement, authors of religious books, cooks with foreign accents. I remember one-time boxer Barney Ross throwing his great arms around me like a mother and hugging me much too hard while singing a lullaby in Yiddish. Ostensibly he did public relations, but he seemed to reside solely in my grandmother’s house and PZ’s office.
To Grandma these were not freeloaders; they were gentlemen and ladies under her protection. Stray women with academic pretensions became her tutors, the only ones who actually lived in her house; the others stayed at the Hotel—for a weekend, a week, or months, depending on their situations. Collectively they made up Grandma’s salon, complete with two snapping Pekinese dogs and a mynah bird that shouted, “Ship ahoy!” and let out wolf whistles in the middle of parties.
Because Grandma invited so many diplomats, clergy, entertainers, and politicians to stay gratis, there were frequent cocktail parties at her house. I was usually the only child, once at a gathering for an ambassador from Israel, another time for Cardinal Spellman, then for the Lord Mayor of Dublin whose autograph I got for Bridey, along with a promise to reunify Ireland for her.
Aunt Bunny didn’t object to my introducing Michael to this scene. “Your grandmother’s quite the empress,” she said, “but she never accepted us the way she did your mother. You might as well be our Lewis and Clark.”
Soon Michael and I were making regular forays to Joy Cottage, goofing off at Grandma’s parties while collecting unexpected gifts and expressions of affection. The Monk would characterize these missions as “a quick twenty,” which is often what we got. Grandma was delighted by visits of the two of us, though it was strange that I should be my brother’s chaperone given that he lived so close to her.
I understood even then that the world at Joy Cottage was a mirage, Grandma’s admirers the leftovers of a previous generation, my mother’s era, which is why I was automatically embraced and granted stature there. Grandma’s graciousness and generosity, even if self-serving, were appealing. She upheld something I knew to be true—no matter how successful Grossinger’s was, the world was filled with sorrow and poverty, and that was far more important. She told me that she made certain that a portion of Hotel profits went to local orphanages—the car taking me home routinely stopped at one of them in New Jersey, bringing surplus food from the kitchen.
In New York I carried around coins for cups of beggars and cigar boxes of amputees on crate stools selling shoelaces. I even took up a collection at my family’s various offices for the amputee outside Carnegie Hall on 57th Street and brought a wad of bills and fistful of coins to where he lay among overcoats. As he looked up in astonishment, I froze and fled. He was muttering gratitudes and accolades, but I was running to the corner, then racing across the street at the first break in traffic. Something about this was terrible. He shouldn’t be thanking me. I shouldn’t be fleeing him. Yet I continued to feel ungrateful and insincere.
“God bless you,” shouted the blind man on Broadway as my money clanked in a battered tin cup he was shaking. I felt the same flush of confusion, the same urgency to get out of earshot. It was like when I rescued insects from puddles but didn’t wait to see them dry themselves and regain flight. I couldn’t bear the intimacy of a tramp’s gratitude.
Yet I never understood why my mother and Bob as well as Uncle Paul opposed me so adamantly in this charity. For my mother, giving away money apparently showed infidelity to the family because these people were strangers. “You don’t treat us half as well,” she complained, “as you do bums on the street.”
As for my father, once I was walking with him along Central Park South when a blind man with a muzzled dog approached us and I put some change in his cup. “You were just taken in,” he proclaimed, “by one of the oldest rackets in the world.” I silently bit at my lip, which disappointed him, so he continued, “I betcha he’s not even blind.”
“So what?” I told him.
“Isn’t that why you gave him money?”
I shook my head. “I gave him money because he’s sad.”
“When you grow up you’ll see that the world is full of crooks. You can’t make everyone rich and everyone happy and, if you’ve got, those that don’t are going to be looking for ways to take it from you. Remember that.”
But I saw only chestnut vendors in rags, beggars crouched in alleys.
I befriended a dishwasher at the Hotel canteen, a gentle old Hungarian named Ziggy whose shoes were so ripped that his feet were more out than in. I asked him about them, and he said his toes hurt so he had cut them open. I told Grandma Jennie.
“I can’t allow someone in my employ to be in that condition,” she exclaimed.
She had her driver take him to a podiatrist. When I met him next, he was wearing white therapeutic clogs. His eyes twinkled as he pointed down at them. Grandma was so proud of me that she told my father, but he wasn’t of like mind. He called me into his office and informed me gently but firmly that I should stay out of things I didn’t understand. He meant it as a joke, but it had a sinister air to it: “I can’t have you coming here if you’re going to tell Grandma about every employee who needs shoes. Because if you do we’re going to go bankrupt. She’ll reclothe the whole hotel and send everyone to the podiatrist.” He chortled. “That’s Mother for you.”
It wasn’t a joke to me: people were fired, and when I complained to my father, he was belligerent—it was none of my business. One day he would dispose of Big Milty too.
After the first term at Horace Mann it was not my mother who drove me. The competitive milieu of the school bccame my habitat. The fact that I nearly flunked all six years of grade school had lost all relevance: Richard Towers was a fiction and I no longer acknowledged his defects or disgrace.
I imposed an attractively spartan existence on myself, and the rest of the family was compelled to respect it. No one was allowed to interrupt my studying—and I was always studying. Finally I could ignore Jonny with impudence. I didn’t have to be a captive audience for his latest victories in the schoolyard or re-election as class president. I just excused myself from dinner early.
I had beaten my mother at her own game and won a haughty privacy.
Jonny was infuriated by this gambit. He tried to retaliate by ignoring me too, but I was a camel. I could go days, even weeks, without acknowledging his existence. No matter how loud he shouted or how often he imposed his body in front of mine I acted as though I neither saw nor heard him. Even if we came face to face I would step around him and continue on my way—a preoccupied student. Eventually he would attack, or tell on me, but I would pretend that he had been disturbing my homework. For once he became the recipient of parental scolding: “Don’t distract your brother when he’s studying.”
“I’ll get you for this,” he said. He continued to report every slight in detail as if a truant officer logging my demerits. Gradually our mother became suspicious of my devotion to schoolwork. Jon was ever her sweet baby while I was the incorrigible saboteur from the other family. Suit and tie (and HM maroon) notwithstanding, she knew I couldn’t have been turned so suddenly into a gentleman scholar. Finally she clawed her way through my ruses.
“He can’t stand that child being happy and successful,” she proclaimed. “He’s jealous and wants to squash the joy out of him.”
Bob glowered at me as though his eyes had just been opened. “Mental cruelty,” he said. “Is that what you specialize in, you silent instigator, you no good…. You’re a real needler aren’t you, a real tormentor behind our backs.”
They were right of course, but I couldn’t back off. Jonny was just too virtuous and boastful. I couldn’t accept his kinship. My revulsion for him—his style and mien—was an unyielding compass of my existence.
At P.S. 6 I had been a loner, but at Horace Mann I seemed to be friends to some degree with just about everyone in my Form. One group of intellectuals, more articulate and world-wise than me, held an informal symposium during lunch and between classes. I joined them as they bunched up in halls and the cafeteria, trying to be part of their confabs which favored Marxism, classical music, and abstract mathematics. The only topic on which I could offer expertise was symbols and dreams. Once I got up my courage and spoke, I was surprised I held their interest.
Thereafter I established myself as an authority on hidden meanings and produced them on cue, finding them in assigned books from My Ántonia to Martian Chronicles. I descried them as well in daily words and acts, in popular songs and beer ads, and I interpreted classmates’ dreams on request. No one thought that psychoanalysis was as substantial as Red China, set theory, or Bach—in fact, I was accused of capitalist sophism—still, it gave me a foothold among the intelligentsia.
I felt more comfortable with my buddies on the train. We gossiped about school and talked baseball, television shows, and subway routes. I was well into my second year before I realized that my friendships with these kids were suppositious. Boys in the train crowd maintained significant contact with one another on the outside, while I never engaged with any of them except en route to and from Horace Mann. I was still a child in that regard, participating in my family’s activities, their walks in Central Park and dinners out—and then I went to Grossinger’s every vacation.
I never thought of calling up my friends to see what they were doing, and it was inconceivable that I would invite any of them to our household, for we never had guests. During the whole of Horace Mann I think my mother’s brother Paul came to dinner twice, her legendary brother Lionel once (en route from Paris to Pittsburgh), my grandmother Sally maybe three times, my mother’s assistant from work (Helen) once, Bob’s pal Moe three or four times…. That was it except for a friend of Bridey’s picking her up. Our apartment was taboo, a sanctum where the privacies of the Towers family were carried out: the nuanced sarcasms, my mother’s facial packs, her early bedtimes, her “palpitations” (as she called her panics), our unabating derision of outsiders.
Not only would I have been ashamed to have anyone over, there was nothing to do at our place; our dramas occupied all the space. An outsider would not have gotten it. Even worse, we would not have known how to play our parts with strangers observing. There was no transition between private and public in 6B; it was all proscribed.
The Manhattan kids’ favorite hangouts were East Side coffee shops and movie theaters, carryovers from P.S. 6 and other grade schools. They talked on the subway about cute girls who frequented them, neighborhood parties on the weekends.
My mother was little help on the topic. In retrospect I see that she was relieved I showed no outward interest in girls. What caught her attention, though, were the mailings from Horace Mann about formal dances. She wanted me to have the right social connections and decided that my next step was to learn to dance. Against my wishes (though I secretly appreciated the opportunity), I was signed up for Saturday classes at Miss Viola Wolfe’s on Madison Avenue, to which I had to wear not only a full suit like at Horace Mann but white gloves. The elderly Miss Wolfe taught us the steps first by far-too-swift examples to mimic except clumsily. Then she clicked her metal cricket, an assistant dropped the needle onto a record, and we each had to pick a partner and execute a fox trot or waltz, later the lindy and cha-cha.
The moment of choosing a partner was excruciating. I would set my imagination on a pretty girl or a friendly face and try to end up beside her. But I never seemed to move fast enough—musical chairs again.
Each time, with unimportant variations, the dancing was the same. We stood facing each other but not really looking, and then put our hands on the indicated spots of the other’s waist and shoulders (an assistant checked us pair by pair). The music began, and we attempted to carry out the proposed choreography for its duration, as the assistant and Miss Wolfe walked around, correcting us.
Usually we alternated partners in a sequence, so I even got to dance with the ones I wanted, but it made no difference. I was a poor dancer and the wrong boy, to boot. Anyway, at Viola Wolfe’s the other person didn’t exist; there were only rules and steps. The partner was an accessory to the lesson. And yet the partner was everything—the look on her face, her scent, the cloth or velvety feel of her dress, the stiffness or grace of her body in the dance.
I was Pip at Miss Havisham’s mansion, with the bare longing of regret.