Part I No Television; Vitalis
Three months
(As told by Theareatha Rogowski, who took care of me and my brother, Mike, three years older, while my mother worked at Fortune magazine and my father worked, usually fecklessly, as an exporter.)
Danny, you was so sick. You couldnt keep anything down. Or it would be the other end. You looked like a little bunch of sticks with a bellybutton. They had to take you to the hospital. Your father said to me, “Readie, say goodbye to Danny. You wont be seeing him again.” But I knew you was going to be all right. I just went and prayed that you would be all right and I knew you would be, but you was in that hospital for two months. We couldnt even visit you for more than an hour each day. Thats the way it was back then.
Two and a half
I am playing in the driveway of my uncle Enges house in New Marlborough, Massachusetts. My father, Robert Owen Menaker, is the youngest of seven. His siblings are George Menaker (no middle name), Frederick Engels Menaker (Uncle Enge—“rhymes with mange,” he likes to say), William Morris Menaker, Peter Lavrov Menaker, Nicholas Chernechevsky Menaker, and Leonard Aveling Menaker. Their parents, Solomon and Fannie Menaker, came from Vilna and Odessa. They never married, out of a conviction that marriage was a form of oppression by the state. (More than half a century later, among Uncle Enges papers, I was to find an essay about my grandfather by a visitor to his textile plant. “I know not what exact philosophy this gentleman of the people follows, but he treats those who toil in his factory with the greatest respect and financial rectitude,” the visitor wrote. “There can be no doubt that he is a man of the people, and the fire of Revolution burns in his eyes.”)
Enge owns a Guest Camp on Lake Buel, a few miles from his farmhouse. Its mainly for parents of the boys who go to Uncle Petes camp, To-Ho-Ne, just north of the Guest Camp. To-Ho-Ne is the camps Native American name. It means “Here will we camp.”
The driveway of the farmhouse. Its summer, and Uncle Enges rust-colored Chow-mix, Timmy, is looking out for me. Im sitting on his back, pouring dirt and gravel over his head from a small tin bucket. I see a car go by slowly and pull into the grass parking area across the road from the house. A nice-looking man with wavy gray-and-brown hair gets out, crosses the road, and starts up the driveway.
He stops in front of me. “Where is your father, little boy?” the man asks me.
“In Souse America,” I am said to have said. (I clearly recall the moment but not the content of the dialogue; my parents will tell me about it later—many times, and with amusement.)
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Yes. Hes twavelin.”
“Why isnt he here?”
“Hes workin.”
“Are you sure he isnt here?”
“Wait!” I say. “You are my father.”
Four
Joe is mixing cement for my uncle in the farmhouse driveway. Hes pouring water from a bucket into a tub. Joe is Joe Rogowski, a Polish immigrant laborer with almost incomprehensible English, who works for Enge in the summer and has taken a liking to Readie, who watches out for me and Mike up here while my parents stay in New York. They visit on weekends. How Joe landed here I have no idea. He leaves the tub of cement for a few minutes, and my brother, Mike, seven, tells me I can help Joe by picking up the bucket and pouring more water into the cement mix. I do that. Joe comes back, gets furious, and spanks me—the first and last time I have ever been spanked. Readie is very angry at him. “Dont you ever hit my baby, Joseph Whateveryournameis,” she says.
Even while I am being spanked, and am crying, I am fascinated by the two half-fingers on Joes right hand. He cut the other halves off while using a power saw.
Later, Joe is sitting on the porch while my uncle and some friends are talking about traveling. My uncle says, “Its true that the last mile home is the longest. When I get to the train station in Great Barrington, it seems to take forever to get up here to the farm. And then theres so much work to do when I get here.”
“No such ting wongis mywis,” Joe says.
“What are you saying, Joe?” Enge says.
“I say no such ting wongis mywis.”
This continues to be a puzzlement. Enge asks him again what hes trying to say.
“You say wast my to chouse is wongis. No such ting wongis mywis.”
Ah! No such thing as longest miles. Quite right. But the real understanding—what I know now, at seventy-two—is how unusual it was for Joe, the handyman, to sit in on our discussions. He felt welcome. He was welcome. Enge has told me that my grandfather Solomon, who for a while ran a textile factory in New Jersey on Socialist principles, always had workers at the family table. The Workmens Circle awarded him a trophy cup, which sits on a shelf in my uncles house, which will, many years in the future, be my house.
My parents send my brother and me up here to the country with Readie to escape the polio epidemics in the city and also, as I will learn later, so that they can live it up. At the end of this particular summer, I go home to Barrow Street, in Greenwich Village, and I see footprints on the ceiling. I ask my father whose they are, and he says, “Your mothers.” I ask how they got there, and
he says, “When your mother has a little too much to drink, she can fly.”
Every summer is absolutely enchanted, endless—until it ends. In New York, Ive learned to turn the dial on the veneered wooden boxy radio we have—a dial set against a lit-up, canvas-colored rhomboid—and one Saturday morning, I find a station in New Jersey, WAAT, that plays an hour of country music. I discover T. Texas Tyler and Ernest Tubb and Kitty Wells and Roy Acuff and of course Hank Williams. My mother comes into the living room one morning and finds me sitting on the floor listening to Ernest Tubb—probably “A Soldiers Last Letter.” “What on earth is that caterwauling?” she says. She says it not in true horror but with her characteristic demure bemusement. She also sincerely wants an answer. WAAT broadcasts a polka hour before the country-music program, and I like that, too—it seems equally “real” in a way that I cant then understand. But it also sounds pretty watery next to “Blood on the Saddle.”
Five
In the “Fives” at the Little Red School House, the very progressive private school on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, a new boy arrives. Walter Brooks. Hes black and can sing “Cincinnatis Dancing Pig” well. When I get home from school, my mother asks me if Walter has arrived. I say yes. She says, “Hes the Negro boy, I think.” I say, “I dont know. I forget.” Many years later, it occurs to me that our teachers asking Walter to sing “Cincinnatis Dancing Pig” from time to time smacked a little of minstrelsy.
Little Red is in fact filled with Little Reds. Our Principal, Randolph Smith, comes close to being subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Or he actually is subpoenaed. The kids from the parochial school on the southwest corner of Bleecker and Sixth Avenue throw fluorescent light bulbs at us as we march to and from the playground around the corner on Houston Street. They are hoping to kill us with the poison gas said to be inside the bulbs.
Seven
As we march to and from the playground in the fall of 1948, we live up to the parochial-school kids worst opinion of us by chanting a chant for Henry Wallace for President—a chant we seem to know osmotically, from the pink air we all breathe. It goes something like this:
Dewey is in the outhouse crying like a baby.
Truman is in the doghouse, barking like crazy.
Wallace is in the White House, talking to a lady.
Eight to twelve
Every summer at Enges Guest Camp a truck drives around the long circular driveway and along the paths that lead from one cottage to another blasting out a fog of DDT, a common anti-mosquito practice. Some other kids and I run through the fog for the fun of disappearing and reappearing. We try not to breathe the stuff in, but we dont try all that hard. Is it this—or the cigarette smoking all around me and then by me; or the city air, which leaves particulate soot on our windowsills in New York; or the exhaust from cars and trucks when, almost twenty years later, I spend two summers as a toll taker on the New York State Thruway; or bad luck; or punishment for my sins—that I started paying for at sixty-six, when I was first diagnosed with lung cancer? One man at the Guest Camp, a financial guy of some kind, plays gin rummy all day under a plume of smoke from the monstrous cigar he keeps plugged in his mouth. He has a constant tic of moving it back and forth, from one side to the other, like a horizontal windshield wiper. Sometime later, he is sent to jail for embezzlement.
There is a zinc icebox beside and below the raised back porch of the Guest Camps lodge, which overlooks the lake. Once a week or so in the summer, an ice truck delivers two huge slabs of ice—five feet by three feet by one foot—that the driver and Enges waiters wrestle into the box with gigantic black tongs. Like a monsters two snaggled incisors. At the bottom of the icebox is a drain for the runoff. The men release the first slab a foot or so above the bottom of the icebox, and the impact of ice on zinc sounds mortal. Enge and the cook and the waiters store some perishable food in there. You open the top of the icebox by means of a rope and pulley, and there is butter and bacon and beef and broccoli. If I jump up and grab the rope high enough, it lifts me off the porch as the top goes down. I am that skinny, from that early illness. Thats what Dr. Mandel says.
An Italian guy who drives a fruit-and-vegetable truck around to the various camps and resorts on the lake pulls into the circular driveway behind the lodge once a week or so. He holds up a plum and says, “Its-a beautiful, Engie—juss-a like-a youself.” Enge is in fact ugly, in a handsome way. Short, slender, with a large bald head (baldness from exposure to mustard gas in the First World War, he tells me) and very big ears and quite a nose—he resembles some portraits and statues of Cervantes and even more closely some images of Cervantess creation, Don Quixote. And Gandhi.
On weekends Enge calls square dances in the lodge. He sits in a chair on top of a table with a primitive microphone and speakers that carry his voice around the big room. I put the chair on the table. I turn the amplifier on. I manfully hand Enges accordion up to him. I know that he will call out “Four couples! Four couples!” to start things off. I know all the steps and dances—the allemandes, the do-si-dos, the grand right-and-lefts. I know gents to the center and break er down. I help new dancers when they get tangled up in complicated figures. I know how to swing my partner, usually three or four times my age, with one hand on her shoulder, one of her hands on my shoulder, and our other two hands clasped under the bridge. I know that at the end of a set, Enge is going to sing, slightly suggestively, “Take her out, you know where. / Take her out and give her air.” Eighty people or more dance on weekend nights. Sometimes there are squares in the card room and library, off the big room. Sometimes there is a game of Rock Crusher (oh, I know what that means), a form of high-low poker, going on at a table in the corner of the big room. Sometimes a CPA guest is adding columns of figures at that same table in between hands, amid the din and dancing, adding them so fast—running a pencil down the columns almost as fast as
he would be if he were just crossing them out—that I cant believe it.
The guests are mainly Jewish, sometimes the sons and daughters of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Their names are Mishkin, Goldberg, Leonard, Friedman, Cohen. They are doctors and lawyers and accountants and garment-industry types and schoolteachers. Moving up very fast, many have left their Brooklyn accents behind, but theyre always dropping Yiddish words and phrases into their conversation, the most exotic, to me, being something that sounds like machataynista—which evidently denotes what an in-law on one side of a married couple is to an in-law on the other. A husbands brothers wife, say, to a wifes sisters husband. These Jews—so complicated. When my WASPy cousins from my mothers side of the family—my Aunt Priscilla Grace and her children—drive over from Milton, near Boston, to visit, they seem a different species altogether, with their Brahmin accents, untroubled brows, and apparent lack of complexities. (Later, I learn that they have their own problems, of course.) The guests have a wonderful time in this very basic camp setting, dancing, swimming, canoeing, drinking (before dinner; no alcohol at the tables on the long porch), going to Tanglewood to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to Jacobs Pillow for the dance festival.
I get to go back up to the farmhouse with Readie and sleep in the back room over the kitchen. Mike and I take our .22 rifles into the woods and shoot at birds and squirrels. We sit at the “family table.” We swim for hours on end, playing water tag with the white float as a safe base. We are privileged and doted upon, partly because many guests want to get closer to my uncle, who is so charismatic and sociable. I get to lie on the lawn at the farmhouse and wait for the mailman to deliver the previous days New York Times, which has the baseball box scores from two and even three days before that, so that reading them is like time travel. I live in the Yankees past.
Do you believe—or remember? There was no television. So what was there? Charades, Scrabble, poker, canasta, gin rummy, backgammon, parlor games of all kinds, at camp and at the farmhouse. Someone who doesnt know the game goes out of the room for a few minutes, and Enge gives us The Principle: Were all to answer yes-or-no questions as if were the person to our left. I always try to have a woman on my left. He has written two small Sentinel paperbacks about such party games: “72 Surefire Ways of Having Fun” and “The Life of the Party: 67 Ways to Have Fun.” Thats 139 ways to have fun. And we sing. Camp songs, union songs, songs from the Spanish Civil War—“Freiheit!” is my favorite—American folksongs of all kinds. And Enge begins to teach me to play the guitar. And conversation—so much talking, arguing, laughter. At home in the Village, when I am nine or ten, we rent a television set for a week or so to watch the World Series. Its almost as big as a refrigerator and has a black-and-white screen the size of a Chiclet. Thats it for TV.
Friends and relations surround me and Mike, in the country and in the city. The dinner table at the farmhouse and in the Village, especially during the autumn, often has ten or fifteen people sitting around it—uncles, cousins, friends—all declaiming and arguing, usually about politics, with loud denunciations of government and capitalism. This is where I learn my deep and nearly reflexive distrust of those in positions of power. The fine points of doctrine escape me, but generally: You cant trust them.
Despite a kind of built-in anxiety, almost surely the legacy of that same early-infancy, largely isolated hospital stay, I find the world enchanting, thick with point-making and sensations and love, love especially from Readie. Readie says to Enge no, she cant do work for him and look out for me and Mike at the same time. “He has some nerve, that man,” she says when he tells her to hang his laundry on the clothesline behind the house. “Your uncle is a trying case and a case to be tried,” she says. “Just because Im black!” When the sheets are on the line, I run between them, inhaling sunshine and Tide and imagining that these are a ships sails. When were a little older, Readie takes on the care of the child of one of her sisters who cant care for him herself. He is two or three, and his name is Raymond, and now he comes up to the farmhouse with us, and my brother and I regard him as a sort of mascot.
If I make coffee for Readie, she says, “I want it black, just like me. But you dont have to make it. Slavery days are over. Someone just ought to tell your uncle. He dont seem to know.”
How Readie got to us I dont know. She was born in South Carolina, had many half-brothers and half-sisters, ate clay when she was little, she was so hungry, and picked cotton along with the rest of her family. She can barely write. Where she got her enormous warmth and affection and good sense from I also dont know, but Im grateful for it in my mind every day, including this minute, at seventy-two, sitting once again in the farmhouse, when the memory of being able to so completely count on her makes me feel safe, protected by her love and vigilance, no matter what comes next.
If this picture of Readie bears a close resemblance to Faulkners Dilsey and other, similar literary black nannies, theres no help for it. For this is what she is like, at least for Mike and me. As we all grow older, I will come to appreciate her for her robust humor and her keen insights into the ways my family worked and didnt work and her iron will about controlling—and refusing to dwell on—her diabetes. And then I will see, sadly, that she is becoming a hoarder in her small public-housing apartment in Chelsea, perhaps owing to her poverty-stricken childhood. But as children, Mike and I regard her as the safest refuge from our troubles and a sensible check on our bad behavior.
So I had two mothers. My mother and Readie. Readie called me and Mike “my babies.” She had, essentially, adopted us, as she adopted Raymond. And as my wife and I were later to adopt two children, our cynosures. I had two fathers, too. Well, three, actually. My father taught me to drive—lessons continued later by my brother—but usually, because of his handsome and charming immaturity, he sat in the back seat of my family much of the time. He may have worked better in the world than I knew, or know, but I didnt, and dont, know it. He was a nice guy. Drank a little too much, and when he did so, sometimes, mortifyingly, offered back rubs to my and my brothers girlfriends. Lived in my mothers shadow, dwelled on his failures. But still a charming and often spontaneous person. Then there was Enge, who began teaching me guitar, square dancing, games, a little Yiddish, how to bid for eggs at a farmers auction in Hillsdale, how to oil a rifle, how to make blintzes, how to oil a wood floor, how to tell a story. Then there was Mike, who provided me with some of the guidance and sternness I needed at home. There will be more fathers in my life.
I think that some of us have more than one mother and many if not most of us, especially boys, have more than one father.