My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  I spent my days sleeping and reading books my mother brought me from the local library. I loved Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Sometimes I fell asleep holding a book, not wanting to leave the adventures I found there. I liked Tom for his troublemaking but preferred Huck because he was the more sincere. I was sorry that Huck had a brutal father who had abandoned him. Mine had done the same, but he raced lobsters.

  Antibiotics were not yet in general use, and I was given sulfa drugs with the hope that I would recover without damage to my heart. It took a year to get well but I was left with a heart murmur, restricting me from a fully active physical life. When, finally, I was ready to return to school in the fall, my grandmother walked me there slowly and with many stops along the way. Sometimes, when she left me at the school entrance with all the healthy kids running about while I was slowly mounting the stairs, she rushed up and said, “Ti voglio assai.”

  She looked so old now and so bent in her black getup that I worried about her all day, and if she was even a few minutes late to take me home, I worried that with her cataracts she had fallen into a pothole or tripped on a crack in the sidewalk, as she had twice before.

  I was the tallest in class and was seated in the last row by the huge window facing the street. I had no friends among the students and I did not know this teacher, Mrs. McCarthy, an Irishwoman with red cheeks and a ruler that never left her fist. She was stern and distant.

  The teacher called on me and I did not answer.

  “Come to the desk,” she said, “and explain to everyone why you are so special that you are exempt from doing your homework like everyone else.”

  To my teacher’s amazement, I remained in my seat. The class went silent, waiting for the teacher to erupt. But she did not and said instead, “We’ll take care of this later.”

  When the day was over, she took me aside and said she wanted to phone my father and mother and needed the number—there was none on record.

  “We don’t have a phone,” I said. She turned reddish, slapped me, and said, “Lying is the road to criminality. Now go home and write two hundred times ‘I am a liar’ and set it on my desk tomorrow morning.”

  I nodded, my face burning from her injustice. I never told my mother what had happened and I did not write the two hundred lines. Now I was the Fred who let his books stay untouched on the shelf, who stared out the window at home and in school, and who not only did not write but who hardly spoke.

  At the first deep snow of the winter, I rose up from my seat and stood by the window. The teacher said nothing and the class continued as if I were not there. I stared at the mounting snow and saw no way that my grandmother could walk through the drifts to bring me home. But then a greater worry: What if my father, should he have missed me, should he have decided to come back to his family, he who had never done so before, suddenly wanted to come pick me up in his old rattling Ford. How would he find me in all the blinding snow? I needed to get my coat so I could stand outside on the school steps so that he would not miss me. I went to the closet and searched for my coat. The teacher came and took me by the arm and marched me back to my seat.

  I opened my notebook and started to make drawings. Eyeless men and women. Horses without legs. Houses without windows. I sat in my coat, drawing until the final bell.

  I lived in a sleepy haze that nothing could shake. My grandmother was more affectionate to me than ever. When I returned from school, she would have waiting for me a few-days-old chunk of semolina bread to have with caffè latte, coffee and hot milk, my favorite thing in the world other than pizza. Afterward, we two sat by the radio and listened to my programs, even if she understood only a few words.

  One morning, even before I had my coat off, my teacher sent me upstairs to the principal’s office. She was Miss Middleton, a small woman with glasses, fiery red hair, and a soothing, sweet voice. She asked me about my home life and what I enjoyed doing. “Reading,” I said, and told her of my love for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson—Kidnapped, especially. I told her that I liked to draw with colored pencils.

  “Do you like your mother?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “That’s all right. We don’t have to love everyone all the time.” She smiled, and that made me like her.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I think you are a very bright boy.”

  I was too embarrassed to say thank you. She came from behind her desk and said, “We shall see each other again.”

  I put out my hand, as my father had taught me to do. She shook it and held it firmly. Her perfume clung to me all day and I missed its embracing, mysterious aroma when it finally vanished into the ordinary air.

  * * *

  1REX REDUX

  Rex Sterling Tuten (1913–1977)

  I didn’t see Rex again until thirty-one years later, when his brother, my uncle Perry, phoned me from Columbus, Georgia, saying my father was dying in a hospital in Jersey City, New Jersey. He said, “Fred, I think you should go see him and say good-bye.”

  “He never cared about me or my mother when he had the chance. Why should I care about him now?”

  “I think you’ll regret not going,” he said. “Anyway, I know you’re a Catholic, and I think you should practice forgiveness.”

  “Thank you for calling, Perry. Very thoughtful of you,” I said.

  Dooley Worth, my girlfriend, urged me to go, saying that whether I forgave Rex or not, I would regret not going.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said. And we went.

  There were four persons in the ward; all were sleeping and looked half-dead. I recognized Rex immediately. He had not changed a day since he left us, suitcase in hand. I looked at him for a long time, amazed at how youthful he was. He opened his eyes and in his gentle, soft, Southern voice said, “How are you?”

  “How are you?” I said.

  “I’m dying.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “A Catholic priest came this morning to give me last rites.”

  “But you’re not a Catholic. Why would a priest come?”

  “I was married to a Catholic woman once.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “You’re a doctor, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m your son from that marriage.”

  He turned away for a few moments, and when he faced me again, his eyes were swollen with tears. He said, “Anyway, I had a good life.”

  “I’m glad you did, Rex.” I astonished myself by my familiarity, but could not bring myself to say “Dad” or “Father.” Calling him by his first name made me feel that we were now somehow equals.

  “What have you been doing with yourself?” he asked.

  “I’m a writer,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. Well, you know, if I ever get out of this thing, we should get to know each other.” He reached over to the nightstand and took a pack of Camels from the top drawer. “Light one for me, please.” I did, with the strike of a wooden match. Immediately, two of the patients in the adjacent beds cried, “Smoke, smoke!” I rushed to put the cigarette out in the bathroom. When I returned, I asked, “Is there anything else I can do for you, Rex?”

  “Yes, I would love some Chinese food, but they won’t let me have it here.”

  He looked very tired; his eyes kept fluttering. “I have to go to sleep now, but come again soon,” he said. I went downstairs to the waiting room and said, “Dooley, please come upstairs and see him. I need a witness that this really happened.”

  He seemed deeply asleep, but as we approached his bed, suddenly he opened his eyes.

  I said, “Rex, this is my girlfriend, Dooley. She wanted to meet you.”

  He extended his hand. She took it. He held it, smiling, for a long time. Finally he said, “I’m very pleased to meet you. I’m a bit sleepy now, but come again soon. You hear?” He held on to her hand as if he would never let go, until finally she gently withdr
ew it.

  When we got to the street, Dooley finally spoke to me. “You’re sexy, but your father! I understand exactly what your mother felt. I would have gone off with him in a second.” That hurt. Even while dying, he has power, I thought.

  Years later, I wrote a novel, Tallien: A Brief Romance, in which I intercut the history of a young French revolutionary, Jean Lambert Tallien, with my father’s story when he was a radical during the Great Depression. In the novel I imagined my father’s deathbed scene in a rooming house, where his friends had taken him from the hospital and indulged him in his last wishes.

  I wrote in purplish prose: “In the foreground of a room in a rooming house in Jersey City, New Jersey, Rex’s corpse, yellowish, mummified, stiff as a laundry brick. In the background, an ashtray of dead Camels, the ashes of dead stars. In the receding lines of infinity, little white paper cartons of Chinese food and gnawed spare ribs sprinkled along an avenue leading toward a sky where hopes take refuge.”

  First Love and Icarus

  The Bronx, P.S. 96, 1948

  The following week I took a battery of IQ tests that the principal had ordered. I did so well that I was transferred to a Special Progress class, where I learned about the Greek myths and was taught how to use pastel sticks and watercolors. We numbered only sixteen in the whole class and sat four at a desk, like a life raft on a friendly sea. My classmates were bright and courteous. “May I borrow your pencil?” one asked, instead of grabbing it off my desk. My father would have loved them.

  I was seated beside Marilyn, a girl with blond braids and freckles who spoke in paragraphs. She read poetry and recited lines to me like “Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.”

  “Who is Ernest?” I asked, playing dumb. Marilyn drew with crayons and colored pencils and painted in oil at home, she said, adding, “I’m going to start smoking French cigarettes when I turn thirteen.” She was fond of kissing me on the cheek when the teacher’s back was turned and she put notes in my hand: “I almost love you.” I was twelve but knew already that I was in love with her. “I love you all the time,” I wrote back. Everything about her was cheerful, her face always sunny. She told me that her name meant Sunday in German. I said: “You warm me like the sun. You shine like the sun.”

  Our teacher, Miss Kaplan, was plump and childlike. She spoke to the window and often giggled in the middle of a sentence she never finished. Marilyn said that Miss Kaplan wore wigs.

  “Have you not noticed, Freddy, that one week her hair is red and one week black and one week a crazy-looking strawberry blond?” I had not noticed.

  “I see no one but you.”

  “Where do you get that stuff, Fred?”

  “My father,” I said.

  “He sounds great.”

  “He is great.”

  One morning Miss Kaplan stopped at each table to review our homework. I’d written about Icarus and how he had flown too close to the sun, melting his waxed wings and falling to earth. The moral, I had written, was “Do not aim higher than what is possible.” My script, some letters small and some giant, fled the page for no apparent reason.

  I was afraid that she would mock my scrambled writing.

  “That is very wise, what you wrote, Fred,” she said. “But I notice that you write like Icarus himself. All the words flying off the edge of the page.”

  I had no answer, but I knew she was pleased with me and I was proud. Marilyn said, “He’s a genius, Miss Kaplan.”

  “You all are,” she answered, “but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to work your hardest.”

  A week later, I was sent to the principal’s office. I was afraid I had done something wrong and that I would be returned to the “dummy class,” as my classmates called it. Miss Middleton was behind the desk, her hands folded—a bad sign?—but she smiled and said, “Are you happy in your new class?” I saw the ax fall, expecting her next line to be “Maybe you’d be happier where you were?”

  “I want to stay here, please.”

  “Why not, Fred? After all, I hear you are doing so well.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I’m told you wrote a little essay about Icarus.”

  I thought she was going to ask if I had copied it from a book. Instead she said, “And that you thought the moral was to not fly too high in life.”

  “Yes, not get hurt. Not make people jealous of you.”

  “Who taught you that?”

  “My grandmother.”

  “Fred, what do you want to do when you are older?”

  “I’d like to be a writer or an artist or get a job in the post office.”

  “You can do or be anything you want,” she said.

  She walked me to the door. “I’d like to meet your parents one day.”

  “It’s hard for my mother to take time off from work,” I said. “And my father works far away.”

  “Oh? Where?”

  “In Greece,” I said, imagining the slides of Ionic and Doric columns that Miss Kaplan had shown us.

  “Is that why only your mother signs your report card?”

  “Yes.”

  “Try to remember this, Fred: Always be with older people who can help you.”

  I took the stairs, each step slowly, wanting to keep the warmth of her good-bye.

  When I returned to class, Marilyn came right up to my face and asked, “What are you going to do this summer, Freddy?”

  I did not want to tell her that my mother had found me a delivery-boy job with Marty, our local butcher. I had known him since childhood, when my grandmother and I shopped there for chopped meat and got free soup bones. My mother and the butcher had arranged to have a portion of my weekly salary deducted from what we owed him on credit. I was excited to have some money on my own to help my mother, and to be the man of the house, as my father had asked.

  “I’m not sure yet. Maybe I’ll get my seaman’s papers and ship out.” I liked saying “ship out” for the grown-up sound of the thing. The father of one of my neighborhood pals was a minor official in a seamen’s union and had promised us both such papers when we turned eighteen.

  “I’m going to Paris. With my parents, of course. Have you been?”

  “One day, I’m sure.”

  “Maybe you can visit us this summer?”

  “Yes, maybe.”

  “Ask your parents. I’m sure they will let you go. And you can stay with us.”

  “I’ll ask,” I said.

  On the last day of school I walked her home. She lived not far from me but in a better section of the neighborhood, in a large building facing the Bronx Park. It was after three and hot for a June afternoon. We went in the building’s cool lobby and sat on a soft blue sofa with not one stain.

  “Don’t make such a sad face, Freddy.”

  “And you don’t cry,” I said.

  She kissed me on the lips and rushed to the elevator and waved good-bye before the door closed.

  I waited for her letters and soon they came, one after another, sometimes two in a day. Light blue aerograms bearing huge stamps with a beautiful woman’s face.

  “I feel very grown-up in Paris. Even my parents treat me differently. They send me down to the corner bakery every morning to bring back a baguette and croissant—rolls to you!—and never worry if I’m a bit late. We sit at a wooden kitchen table with a window to a beautiful park and drink coffee with hot milk in big bowls—not in cups like we Americans do. Everything is beautiful in Paris. When we grow up, we will go and live there and be artists together.” She asked me to swear on it. I swore, in two letters the same day.

  Some of her aerograms had ink drawings of bridges over a river, of cafés with people sitting outside under an awning. “I’m in a café on my corner where my parents let me come alone and I’m drinking un express,” she wrote. The page was spotted with brownish flecks. “Can you smell it?” Another letter: “The museums here are BEAUTIFUL. Van Gogh, do you know his paintings? He is the best artist in the world. H
e makes me dizzy with happiness.” She ended with: Tu me manques and Bisous. I had to ask a French neighbor, Mr. Morin, who had fled Paris from the Nazis, to tell me what those words meant. He did, smiled, and added, “You are a lucky young man.”

  Earning My Keep

  The Bronx, Pelham Parkway North, circa 1948–1949

  Marty the butcher was a giant with thick leather shoes and a bloodstained apron. “Get rid of those sneakers,” he said on my first day at work. “Wear shoes with heavy leather in case a knife falls on your foot. I haven’t got time to take you to the hospital.” He wheezed all day, his lungs chilled from his goings and comings in and out of the walk-in meat locker.

  “Sonny, this is no life,” he said.

  I washed the display windows with ammonia, wiped and dried them with newspapers. At day’s end, I scrubbed down the cutting stalls with a wire brush; I swept the floors and sprinkled them with fresh sawdust. But most of the time I rode the store bike with fat tires and no gears and a huge wire basket on the handlebars; I pedaled fast in the July heat to deliver the packages of lamb chops and steaks while they were still cold from the fridge.

  Sometimes I was given a tip of soda bottles in a bag for me to cash in; once I got a whole dollar from an old woman for also bringing the garbage down her five flights. Sometimes I got nothing, and I’d ride home angry and feeling cheated and sorry for myself. Otherwise, I liked the job, the freedom of riding the bike all over the neighborhood all day, and I loved the tips heavy in my pockets.

  After a round of deliveries and before returning to the butcher shop, I’d bike to Louie’s luncheonette, drop coins down on the counter, and order anything I wanted, a Lime Rickey and a juicy hamburger with greasy fried onions, or a thick chocolate milk shake and a side of sizzling french fries. I felt very American eating this stuff and wished my grandmother would make hamburgers like the Americans did and not embed them with Italian parsley and pine nuts. At the week’s end Marty gave me chopped meat to take home and paid me ten dollars, keeping ten for what we had owed on the credit. I could keep all the tips. “You’re a good boy,” he would say, and called me tatala and other Yiddish things, all to say that I was an OK boychik.