Elizabeth needed no prompting; she rose and recited. When it was over, the girls applauded—some boys did, too—but two or three expressed other ideas. “Liz,” one said, “come with me to the park and I’ll show you a plant you’ve never seen.” This was from Murray, who held his crotch all through class.
“Thank you, Elizabeth, very well done. Let’s approach this from another tack. What did Wordsworth intend and did he achieve his intention?” Mr. Anderson asked like a man about to fall asleep. He went to his desk and sat, staring at the ceiling. We looked about, wondering what had happened to him. But he soon came to attention and said: “What do you think, Fred?”
Tony wheeled about and gave me the finger. He was my hero, but he disliked me. He had threatened to beat me to death because a girl he liked had asked me, on the school steps, before his eyes, to carry her books home.
I hated this poem, too, but I liked Mr. Anderson because he always looked sad, because he worked so hard at being nice to everyone, because he was agreeable to even the most stupid and rude students. His kindness made him seem weak, and I hated that some students took advantage of that.
“I like Whitman, Mr. Anderson.”
“We all do, Fred.”
“He’s more direct, more down-to-earth,” I said. Then, not to make him feel bad, I added, “But I like Wordsworth, too.”
I had made notes in the poem’s margins: “Flowers do not ‘dance’ or ‘toss their heads.’ ” Wordsworth also wrote, “The waves beside them danced . . .” Do waves dance? “And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.” So, not only the flowers and the waves danced, but his heart did also.
“Is that all you have to say about this poem?”
“It’s full of clichés.”
“Such as?”
I wanted so much to blast this silly, banal poem, but I didn’t want to challenge a teacher I liked, so I said meekly, “Well, here, for example: ‘Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way.’ ”
“Clichés may be tired but they are often true and useful,” Mr. Anderson said.
“Yes, of course,” I said, as if I believed him, but I was afraid to say what I was really thinking: If this wasn’t a famous poem, you would not praise it and you would point out that it is full of useless clichés and contrived feeling.
Elizabeth could not restrain herself and shouted: “Wordsworth intended to show us the beauty of nature.”
“Yes, go on.”
“And the daffodils represent the beauty of nature.”
“May I ask if Wordsworth achieved his intention? Mary De Falco, do you have an opinion?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, what is it?”
“He did.”
“He did what?”
“He did achieve his intention.”
Hands went up again and Irene Mosca said, “There is great beauty in nature if we are open to seeing it. This poem expresses that feeling.”
The bell rang, the final one of the day and the week. Freedom. I strapped up my books and made for the door. Mr. Anderson nodded for me to come over to him. I pretended I was absorbed with the rows of photos of cactus and pyramids hung above the blackboard that Mr. Anderson took on his summer vacations in Mexico.
“Do you have a moment, Fred?”
“Sure. Is something wrong?”
“Does something have to be wrong to talk with you?”
“Of course not,” I said, half believing it.
“You seem very remote these days. Are you having any problems?”
“No problems.”
“Why aren’t you as active in class discussions as you once were?”
“I don’t have much to say.” This was ridiculous because I always had my hand up and my mouth blabbered away about the books I was reading outside of class, trying to make a brilliant point to impress Mr. Anderson.
He dropped some papers into his leather briefcase with the worn handle and ragged bottom and rose from his chair. He looked shorter than when he stood before the class. The collar of his whitish shirt was frayed, and a button was missing from his sleeve. The skin under his eyes was bluish.
“We should have a good talk one day, Fred.”
“What about?”
“I’m a little worried about you. You’re here but you’re not.”
We walked out into the corridor; it was seven past three by the hall clock and the students were thinning out. I saw Tony lurking by the exit door.
“I’m thinking of leaving school.” I had never told anyone about this before and I was a bit surprised to hear myself say it.
“I’m sorry to hear that. Does your family need your support?”
“Yes, but that’s not why.” I felt embarrassed to say the rest but he waited until finally I said, “I want to be an artist and live in Paris.”
“That’s a great idea. Maybe I’ll join you.” He was laughing, but he was not laughing at me.
“Do you really think it’s a good idea?”
“Well, yes and no. No because you should be responsible and finish school. Yes because you have a lifetime ahead of you and you should get the most out of it while you can. After all, it’s Paris and not the reform school, where, sadly, many dropouts end up.”
“Thank you,” I said, and added, “I love your class.”
He laughed again. “No you don’t.”
I started to protest, but he quickly added, “I like Whitman, too.”
He lit a Chesterfield, although we were still in the hallway. “Good-bye, Fred. Enjoy the weekend.” He waved and walked heavily, his shoulders stooped, to the parking lot.
I walked down the main steps into the afternoon of liberty and sunshine. Tony was there, waiting for me.
I stepped back as he approached. “You got balls,” he said, giving me a friendly punch on the arm.
Blindness
The Bronx, Pelham Parkway North, 1951
I took the road beside what was once a horse trail for a riding club up near Pelham Bay Park, which was green and had fancy Tudor- and Spanish-style private houses and seemed like another country, where no one spoke Italian or Yiddish. I passed the Institute for the Blind, with its black iron gates always shut and its mysterious, seemingly uninhabited old buildings in the middle distance. I had never seen anyone on the grounds and wondered if the blind were kept indoors so as not to go astray in the streets and maybe get hit by a car or fall down to China through an open manhole.
I wondered what it was like to be blind, and I thought that death was better. Not ever again to see the sky or a beautiful woman on the street or a movie or a painting or see a girl with her clothes off or see the ocean. I had never seen the ocean, only the tame Long Island Sound whose waters lapped the artificial Orchard Beach where my mother and grandmother and I had sometimes spent some summer hours under a grilling sky, my grandmother fully dressed in black, drawing attention and making me want to turn invisible.
The worst of all: to be blind and never again to see Marsha and her naked breasts with their pink nipple buds.
The Bracelet
The Bronx, Pelham Parkway North, 1951
Thinking of going blind and never again seeing Marsha or her beautiful breasts brought me to call her the minute I got home. She had not been in school for a week and her girlfriends explained: “She’s in bed with a bad cold.” Each time I had called, her mother said, “She can’t come to the phone, Freddy. I’ll tell her you called.” But this time she came to the phone after I heard her mother shout, “Talk to him, already!” The dog went wild with barking.
“Oh, hello.”
“Are you all better? Are you OK now?”
“Of course. Why shouldn’t I be?”
“You were sick?”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot.”
“Are you well enough to come over?”
“Sure.”
“Will you come over?”
“To do what?” And then, in a whisper: “Sex?”
�
�Yes, sex.”
“No.”
“Then come over and model for me.”
“No.”
I laughed as if she were joking, teasing me.
“OK, come over anyway.”
“I can’t, my boyfriend won’t like that.”
“Marsha, stop kidding. Come over.” I heard the pleading in my voice.
“Fred, you’re cute and a nice guy, but without a future.”
“Of course I have a future, to be an artist and live in Paris with you.”
“That’s what I mean, no future.”
“Who is this imaginary boyfriend?” I began to suspect she was not joking but still could not believe it was true. Why would she want another boyfriend, and where and when did she find one? I suddenly had a vision that she was seeing Tony Gavanti with his green pegged pants.
“What does it matter?”
“I guess it doesn’t,” I said. But it did matter, the world’s worth. “Is it anyone I know?”
“He’s the son of the butcher you deliver for.”
“Murray? Is that his name?”
“He likes to be called Morris.”
“Marsha, this is crazy. I thought we were going steady?”
“We were, even though you never got me a charm bracelet. But things happen.”
I felt myself sinking. “Well, things can unhappen, can’t they? I have your bracelet on order at the jeweler’s, with our names etched on a gold heart.” I had not done this at all, but I knew from my friend Arthur that that was the way it was done.
“It’s too late. Anyway, I’m doing you a favor. One day you’ll thank me.”
I heard her mother yell, “Get off the phone already! Suppose someone’s trying to call you?”
I got a little dizzy from all this and felt my chest collapsing and my voice shrinking, turning me into the boy of seven. I took a last chance. “This is a joke, right?”
“Let’s say good-bye, Freddy.”
“I’ll see you at school and walk you home.”
“I left school,” she said. “We’re going to live in Toronto. Morris has a job with his uncle there.”
I still didn’t completely believe her, but I clung to my last straw and played hard to get.
“OK. Good-bye, Marsha. Keep in touch.”
Now I would never see Marsha again or smell her dizzying perfume. Now and forever I would be stuck in the apartment with my mother and all the emptiness of that. I paced about the house in a daze. Finally, I left and wandered about until, as if by magic, I found myself in the Botanical Gardens, where I sat on a rock overlooking the bushes where Marsha and I had first made out. I was sure no one would ever have sex with me again until I was at least twenty-five or was married.
I returned home and started to paint but I felt nothing for it, not even for the smell I loved of the turpentine that I brushed into a little mound of zinc white. I thought about what to do and hit upon the plan of telling her we would get engaged and marry. We would have to wait a bit, because in New York State you had to be sixteen to marry. But if she wanted, we could marry in Kentucky, where fifteen was legal.
Bad News
The Bronx, Christopher Columbus High School, 1951
It was Monday again and I was in school again. In place of the usual noise, the shouts and curses, there was a stillness as green as the walls. Students and teachers glumly, silently milled about the hallway. Mrs. Knovac, the Spanish teacher, had a handkerchief to her eyes, and Miss Wexler, the biology teacher’s assistant, was crying; some students, too, especially Elizabeth, who paced the hall with tears flowing down her face. Elizabeth spotted me and rushed over.
“Oh, Fred! Oh, Fred! Mr. Anderson died.”
“No he didn’t.”
“Heart attack over the weekend.”
“Stop it. It’s not funny.”
“He was only thirty-two.”
“Thirty-two is old,” I said.
“You’re a jerk.”
The principal’s voice came over the PA system announcing that school was closing early; in fact, we could all go home now in honor of Mr. Anderson.
“Didn’t you love him, Fred?”
“Of course.”
“Not the way I do,” she said, as if she was angry with me. She turned and bolted away when she saw Tony approaching.
“Too bad about Mr. Anderson, huh?”
“Terrible,” I said, as the truth of his death began to sink in, along with the selfish feeling that he was the one teacher I believed cared about me. From now on, I imagined, I would be adrift, floating from one boring class to another for eternity.
“Take care of yourself,” Tony said. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“OK, see you.”
He took a few steps and stopped, turned about.
“I’m glad it wasn’t you who knocked her up.”
“Who?”
“Marsha, you prick, who else?”
The Paradise Movie House
The Bronx, Grand Concourse, 1951
The film An American in Paris opened in November 1951. I took the bus to Fordham Road and quick-walked to the Grand Concourse’s Loew’s Paradise Theatre to see it. I needed to see it. Was I not one day going to be an American in Paris? I sat in the rear of the theater in case I disliked the film—a musical with dancing was not for me—and wanted to make a quick exit. It was one p.m., and the house was half-empty, so my getaway would have been easy anyway. I stayed for the second screening. I would have stayed for the third, but it was Saturday, and I had promised my mother I would be home early for dinner so that she would not be alone.
The American in Paris, Jerry Mulligan, was an expat artist who lived in a room on the top floor above a café, whose jolly patron and his rounder, jollier wife loved the American and, it seems, let him live and eat on credit. Jerry painted in the open little streets of Paris, his colors golden and rich. He fell in love with a young, beautiful, mysterious shopgirl. Complications eventually do arise, but so what? By the film’s end, Jerry and his love run to embrace each other with a joy that would surely last forever.
More than anything I had read about artists in Paris, this movie convinced me that I had to get there before my youth was over. I was sure that, like Jerry, I would find a studio above a café, where I could live on credit—because clearly the French loved American artists and they cared more for art than for money. In Paris I would make great paintings and I would fall in love. It was George Moore again who had led the way or gave me the affirmation I needed to make my decision. “School,” he said, “killed the life and love of art.” I would not let it kill me.
Coffeepots and Apples
The Bronx, Pelham Parkway North, 1951
I was ready to quit high school at the then legal age of fifteen and a half, but first I needed my mother’s permission. She worried that without a high school degree I could never qualify to work in the post office or get any other secure civil service job. She was fearful, too, that I would soon slide into a life of crime—from high school dropout to the juvenile delinquent’s school of the streets and from there to the worse school of prison.
“Mom,” I said, “don’t worry. Paris will leave me no time for crime.”
She signed the release papers and set me free.
I found a job in the mailroom of the Sperry and Hutchinson Company, housed in two floors of an office building on Fifth Avenue, a short walk from Union Square. I sorted the mail with six other young men and two retired gentlemen, one a drunk, and I delivered from desk to desk, floor to floor, the correspondence that flowed in three times a day and once on Saturday. I earned fifty-two dollars weekly, and I calculated that by saving seventy-five dollars a month I would be able to afford the cheapest passage on the Holland America Line and have enough to live several weeks in Paris and until my paintings sold, even if they were perhaps not yet ripe for critical acclaim. I was sure that even penniless, like Jerry Mulligan, I would make my way.
At night, after work and after dinn
er and after my mother had gone to bed, I painted. I had moved from immortalizing the bedroom furniture to making renowned the kitchen with its white-and-red enamel-top table, the old white refrigerator, the old stove with an espresso pot on it, and the three chairs with red vinyl seats. Although everything in the kitchen was static, I painted in the mode of Van Gogh, with vibrating swirls and an impasto so thick that my little tubes of oil threatened to run dry.
I drank while I painted, cup after cup of strong black tea that sent me into exciting shakes—the artist’s ecstasy I was certain Van Gogh himself had known. I copied a line from Van Gogh’s letters and pasted it on the wall by my cot: “I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to confer by the actual radiance and vibration of our colorings.”
I was eager to expand my range beyond the still life and, like Van Gogh, paint living people the way that he had painted portraits of Joseph Roulin, his postman, and Adeline Ravoux, his innkeeper’s daughter, and other folk in his daily life.
My experience painting Marsha had taught me that I needed to learn how to draw the human body, the requisite for any serious artist. Even Picasso and Matisse had drawn from the model before they went on their own ways and changed the world. Drawing the nude was the foundation on which the artist’s range and power was built, and without that power I would always be limited to painting refrigerators and coffeepots standing beside bowls of flowers and apples.
I had tried to follow the instructions in my book, How to Draw from the Model, but I couldn’t get beyond the idea of making an oval for the head and then an oval for the torso, ovals for the thighs and the legs and two ovals for the arms. Somewhere in the middle of the torso there were cups for breasts. The book’s nude models, obscured in shadows, were of no help, either, and I thought, if I was ever to make progress, I would have to take a life-drawing class.
I signed up for a Saturday beginner’s life-drawing class at the Art Students League. They accepted me sight unseen for ten classes. I sent the monthly fee of twelve dollars in cash and waited for the receipt, which duly arrived with a class schedule indicating I was to be there every Saturday at nine a.m.
My Young Life Page 6
