My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  The Jewish Family Services arranged for my mother to have Meals on Wheels, so she could have nourishing food delivered to her. They also sent a nurse to come in a few times a week to care for her, as well as a psychiatric social worker to evaluate her once a month. The psychiatrist advised me to make “other preparations.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  In my search for the lost money orders, I found among the papers in her kitchen drawer the name of the cemetery and the family plots that were still vacant. In the Yellow Pages I located a funeral parlor in the Bronx, visited it a week later, and made the arrangements for my mother’s coffin.

  The funeral home had tried to sell me something very elaborate, with velvet cushions and brass handles and very expensive, durable wood. I opted for the most simple pine box, wondering while I did it if I was not being mean. But then I thought, Don’t be a fool—be realistic. No box will protect her from rotting away. Yet the feeling that I had wronged her has never left me.

  My mother remained another year or so at her apartment. We spoke on the phone, although sometimes it was difficult to find out how she was. She often talked about things that had happened fifty years earlier.

  “I was beautiful,” she said, “and many men were after me, but they had no charm at all.”

  One day, the social worker called to tell me that Madelyn had been transferred to a nursing home. They weren’t sure if she would be able to ever return to her apartment. Nevertheless, I continued paying the rent in the event she could live at home again. I gave the social workers all the particulars of the funeral parlor.

  I had gone to teach in Paris and lived in a large, sun-filled apartment in Neuilly overlooking the Bois de Boulogne. My mother and my old life in the Bronx seemed very far away. But of course that was an illusion because the Bronx lived in me, as did my mother.

  One late afternoon the social worker from the Family Service called to say Madelyn had died and was to be buried in two days.

  “I suppose I should fly back for the burial.”

  “If that makes you feel better.”

  I didn’t know what I felt. I thought about how Camus’s character Meursault had reacted to the news of his mother’s death. But that was only an intellectual ploy to numb my grief, a kind of alchemy to transform my mother’s death into a literary event.

  I knew no one in the world who had known her. Then I remembered that my former wife, Simona, had been very fond of her. I took a chance and asked if she could go to the funeral.

  Some days later Simona phoned me back. “I went,” she said. “There was no one there, not even a priest.”

  I remembered how I felt seeing my grandmother’s coffin lowered into the earth and I again felt that despair, picturing my mother’s casket slowly being let down into the grave. Now Madelyn was in the earth beside her mother and her father in Woodlawn Cemetery, where a plot was waiting for me. I thought: I’ll eventually join all of them unless I find a better solution, like immortality. Until then, it comforted me to think I would spend eternity in the same woodsy cemetery where Herman Melville was buried.

  Rimbaud in the Kitchen

  The Bronx, Pelham Parkway North, 1952

  Elizabeth Charon, her husband, and their two sons lived in a large two-bedroom on the upper floor of the building across our small courtyard. It was James, the younger son, who, when we were boys, without any prompting or cause, threw a stone at me, hitting close to my left eye and leaving there a small white scar, like a knife cut. Thinking it made me seem tough, I boasted to girls in school that I had been in a knife fight over a poker game, the kind I had seen in Westerns and gangster films. The brothers took after neither their father nor mother. They never read a book voluntarily, and they mocked me for doing so. “What’ya reading now, four-eyes?”

  I had had a crush on Elizabeth since I was eight, before I even had my first conscious sexual feelings, and now at sixteen, when we became friends some months after I dropped out of high school, I dreamed of her with all of my burning teenage lust. I would see her walking purposefully with a book under her arm, on her way, I imagined, to some glamorous place or on some important mission. But then, on another day, she changed pace and moved like a cat taking its time to a bowl of milk. I masturbated thinking of her. Then I felt guilty whenever I passed her in the street, sure she knew the things I did to myself under the sheets at night dreaming of her.

  Elizabeth was universally disapproved of in our building. “Where is she always going alone at night?” I heard our upstairs neighbor ask.

  “It’s not my business,” my mother answered, adding, “With such a handsome husband, why go anywhere?”

  “She even goes to Paris without her husband and leaves the boys alone with him. What kind of woman does that?” the neighbor snapped.

  One spring Saturday, I saw Elizabeth sitting on a bench in the Bronx Park. She was reading, turning the pages slowly and then quickly, as if she and the book were the whole world and no world else mattered. I wanted very much to know what book so absorbed her while also thinking how beautiful she was. She caught me in my stare; she smiled and called out: “You’re my son’s friend, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am,” I said, not mentioning that we disliked each other, that he called me a fruity bookworm.

  “Do you like books? Other than the ones you have to read at school.”

  “Of course,” I said, and nervously began to name a few books I loved. “I like especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Razor’s Edge.”

  “I have others you may like,” she said. “Come by for coffee, or a glass of wine. Just ring my doorbell and see if I’m free.”

  A glass of wine with an older, sexy woman who read books: What in the world was more European—more grown-up—than that? Did she know that I was only on the way to sixteen—and that I drank wine only at family meals on Sunday at my uncle Umberto’s house?

  A week later I crossed the courtyard into her building and rang and was let in. My heart did several quirky skips before I reached the fifth-floor landing, where she was waiting at the open door.

  She kissed me on both cheeks. She smelled of lilacs. She was barefoot, in jeans. I thought I could see her nipples pressed against her T-shirt. The living room was three times the size of mine, and bright sunlight filled the clean windows. Unlike my place, all the furniture was intact: no chair or table with a broken leg bound with electrical tape, no lamps with torn shades. Paintings of rooftops with orchards of TV antennas were hung in the spaces between the floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

  “They’re very beautiful. So realistic!”

  “My husband’s work,” she said. “Why doesn’t he just take a photograph?” she added, leading me into the kitchen.

  She had made a pot of espresso in an old-fashioned napoletana, and while we were waiting for it to brew, I looked too long at her nipples. She caught me and smiled. I turned away to study my empty coffee cup.

  “Do you like girls?”

  “I love girls.”

  “That’s too bad. My brother, the opera lover, would like you.”

  “I’m sure I’d like him since he’s your brother,” I said, pleased with what I thought was a sophisticated answer.

  “Have you ever read Rimbaud?” Elizabeth asked. “You burn like him.”

  She disappeared for a minute and returned with Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. “For you,” she said. It was the slender New Directions edition that, with five or six other books, I took with me wherever I moved later in life.

  She read me a passage in French. It sounded beautiful.

  “It’s great,” I said.

  “So you speak French?”

  “I plan to learn it because I’m going to live in Paris and be a painter.”

  “An artist! Wonderful. You will love it there, Fred, and you’ll never want to come back.”

  “My mother says you’ve been to Paris.”

  “Yes, but nev
er for long enough,” Elizabeth answered, with a make-believe sigh.

  The doorbell rang, and her sons crashed into the kitchen, sending me dirty looks. They were in muddy baseball uniforms, and the younger had a streak of blood down his nose. They had just returned from a game; the other team had tried to cheat, so they got into a fight. “Guess who won,” James said. They grinned and swung their bats and poked them toward me.

  “Stop it,” Elizabeth said, in a deep voice that scared them and even me. They withdrew without a word. She grew silent, brooding. Then she brightened up. “Visit me again. Come when we can really talk. And let me see your paintings one day.”

  That would be the day, I thought, imagining myself toting my paintings of chairs, a cot, and black streets up to her apartment and having her glance at them and, without a word, showing me to the door.

  But I did visit her again, and often, pacing myself so as not to seem avid for her attention, her beauty, her sophistication. One day, she lent me the novel I had seen her reading on the park bench, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.4

  “Let me know what you think,” she said. I had wanted to like it because she did, but I couldn’t follow the story. I did not even understand if there was a story, but there were passages of intense, shadowy beauty that made me wonder what new world I was in. I also tried to make sense of Joyce’s Ulysses, another book she gave me, holding it out like a treasure.

  “This is the one, Freddy. This is the alpha and omega of literature. This is all novels rolled into one.”

  The book left me baffled, although I knew there was something extraordinary going on in Joyce’s ocean of words, and I felt special just trying to fathom them. What was wrong with me that I failed to have a clue to what anything in it meant or was supposed to mean?

  “How’s it going with the Joyce?” she asked from time to time.

  “Just great,” I said, with feigned enthusiasm.

  She was the guiding mother I had wished for. She was also the woman of pure sensuality over whom I was spending loads of sperm under my sheets at night—afternoons, too.

  I liked to think that she saw me as the son she had wanted, instead of the two louts living under her cultured roof, but, whatever the reason, I knew she liked me and liked my wanting to be an artist and to live in Paris.

  “But one is never alone in Paris,” she said when I asked if I would be lonely there, not knowing a soul. “An artist like you will make friends in a week. And I have some people there for you to meet. But brush up on your French.”

  I was ashamed to tell her that I had not yet made an attempt to learn the language. Somehow I believed that by some magic I would start speaking French once I was in Paris.

  We sat in her kitchen—her favorite place—and over coffee talked about novels and poetry. I liked Whitman and his singing in ordinary language, his love for the human body and its beauty. I treasured his embrace of the vast expanse of life, his finding miracles in it everywhere. He spoke to my heart, I told her.

  “He’s easy to like,” Elizabeth said. “Like Ravel, when you’re young. But Whitman won’t last when you grow older.”

  “Then I’ll never grow older,” I said.

  I knew that I would and she would, too. Would she one day outgrow her need for me? And where would I be then, without her?

  * * *

  4PARIS AND NIGHTWOOD YEARS LATER

  Perhaps it was Elizabeth who drew me to any woman I saw reading, and to be curious to know what she was reading, snobbishly gauging her beauty to her taste.

  Once, fifteen years later, when I finally made it to Paris, I saw an elegant woman in a café fixed on a book. She was at the same café table and with a book over the following five days. Finally our eyes met, and she smiled. I took the courage from that smile to approach her and ask in my most polite way, and in my crippled French, what she was reading.

  “Nightwood,” she said, showing me the cover. “And you?”

  I held back my surprise and my wanting to tell her how I had been introduced to the book when I was a boy years ago in the Bronx, a boy with a crush on a woman who resembled her, answering instead: “The Third Policeman, by an Irish writer. I’m not sure it’s translated.”

  “I have read it in English,” she said, adding, “I have wondered what you were reading all these days, and wondered if you were a simpleton.”

  She did not appear the next day or the days after, which I ascribed to my intruding on her privacy. I had become friendly with Marcel, the headwaiter, who said, “She comes here every spring and early fall for seven days and sits with a book, speaks to no one, and waits for no one. She is not French, and she is not English or American. She leaves extravagant tips above the service compris, so we don’t care how long she sits, even when we are busy. She drinks Kir Royale. Anyway, she is beautiful.”

  I imagined her world, and years later I wrote a novel, The Green Hour, inspired by her and also infused by the memory of Elizabeth.

  Trash Cans and Kafka

  The Bronx, Parkchester, 1952

  One day Elizabeth said, “You’re too isolated, Freddy. You should meet a real artist.” I thought she meant her husband, who hardly ever spoke to me and sent me icy looks, but that was not it: she wanted to take me to meet her friend, an artist who lived a little more than a half-hour bus ride away. She had spoken to him about me, and he was interested enough to invite us over.

  He lived in a small apartment in the huge, maze-like middle-income Parkchester housing complex. From the approach, I could not imagine that any kind of artist or anyone with a soul could live there in those buildings. I did not see a single tree or patch of green to lift the spirit.

  John Resko greeted us with a broad, welcoming smile, and that made me like him right off. We went into his small living room, where there hung two large paintings of garbage pails, gray with faint red lines trailing along their sides, standing in a flat, gray, anonymous field. They had a gentle sadness to them, garbage pails without friends or a street to belong to. I thought them beautiful and their sadness spoke to me, as I had always linked beauty with sadness, my mother being my earliest model.

  “Who painted them?” I asked. “They’re wonderful!”

  “I did,” John answered, like a shy boy.

  Five or six African sculptures and masks rested on a table set against the wall. I had only seen their likes in books, and here they were in real life. Elizabeth caught me staring and said, “John’s an expert on African art.”

  He laughed. “I’m more of a looter. African sculpture isn’t meant for museums or homes,” he said, “so I feel a little guilty having them here. After all, how would we feel if people had gone to a church and took the paintings off the walls and sold them in a marketplace far away?”

  “We have done that for centuries,” Elizabeth said.

  “What do you think, Fred?” John asked.

  “All art is beautiful,” I said, not knowing what I meant, but wanting to seem like I did.

  “No argument there,” he said, in a way that made me feel welcome.

  John went into the kitchen, giving me a moment to take in the room. Black scatter rugs on the wooden floor; four sling chairs, two red, two black; a phonograph player on a blond-wood credenza with a stack of LPs standing neatly in racks; and a bookcase my height, packed tight with hardcovers. No disorder, nothing broken or makeshift, everything clean. The walls looked freshly painted.

  I had thought that artists lived in a kind of deliberate anti-bourgeois mess, and here I found myself in a home neater than any I had ever before stepped in, even Elizabeth’s. I was not sure that John was a real artist.

  John returned with a tray of demitasse cups and a tall espresso pot, steam curling from the funnel, as it did in comic books.

  “My wife would like to meet you, but she may be late from work,” John said.

  “You’ll like her, Freddy, she’s beautiful,” Elizabeth said.

  I was miffed at being pegged as just a superficial boy who liked only
good looks, so I said, “I’m sure she’s intelligent, too.”

  John smiled. “Yes, and kind.”

  I felt profoundly grown-up sitting on a canvas chair and drinking espresso in a room of books and paintings.

  “Elizabeth tells me you’ve dropped out of high school,” John continued, “and that you’re an artist.”

  “Well, I want to be.”

  “He’s going to go to Paris to paint,” Elizabeth said.

  “That’s great. You’ll love it there.”

  “Were you there long?” I was excited. John had actually lived in Paris, so clearly his life in Parkchester was just a temporary circumstance and did not disqualify him as an artist.

  “In my imagination.”

  I quickly recovered from my disappointment when he added: “Have you read Kafka?”

  “Not yet, but I heard he’s great. I like Hemingway and Mark Twain and Melville, too.” I was happy that he was interested in me and, in the way that the self-absorbed young never wonder about the lives of the older, I never thought to ask anything about him.

  In a low voice, and in what sounded like an official tone, he said: “Ever been in trouble?”

  I thought he meant trouble with girls: Had I got one pregnant?

  He did not wait for my answer to add, “With the law?”

  I was surprised by the question, offended by it.

  “Not at all, ever.”

  “In my time,” he said, “we thought high school dropouts went to work in the factory or were sent to jail.” He laughed a warm, deep laugh. “I must be thinking of leaving grammar school.”

  I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about. Who ever drops out of grade school?

  “Anyway, Freddy, it’s Kafka out there.”

  “It’s Kafka everywhere,” Elizabeth said.

  John broke out into a laugh. “Oh, boy, how true.”

  I was left out of the joke. The only thing I knew about Kafka was that he was a man who wrote depressing books.