My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  John pulled out a book from the shelf, Kafka’s The Trial in hardcover. “Let me know if you like this,” he said.

  “I’ll give it back when I finish,” I promised.

  “It’s a present. Or pass it along if you like, Fred. That’s what books are for.”

  The doorbell rang, and John smiled like a happy kid. Anita, his wife, walked in. She had long black hair and olive skin and she flashed me a warm smile. I had a crush on her already.

  “John told me we’d have a guest,” she said, “but I didn’t know it was Tony Curtis.” I was embarrassed but flattered, since Tony was the current rage among the neighborhood teenage girls. Not only was he “gorgeous” and a “dreamboat,” he was one of ours, a Bronx boy.

  Anita turned to Elizabeth. “But maybe he’s more like Brando. What do you think?”

  “More like Rimbaud, I think.”

  Feeling bold, I chimed in: “Maybe you can fix me up with your sister?”

  “Come over for dinner,” Anita said. “Let’s find out what’s in your head first, then maybe I can dig up a girl your own age.” She kissed me on both cheeks, sending me to the clouds.

  Anita and Elizabeth disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me with John, face-to-face on our sling chairs. “Women,” he said with a sigh. “What would our world be without them, Freddy? Or Dostoyevsky? But I’m sure you know that.”

  I nodded and made a note to read Dostoyevsky.

  Elizabeth and Anita soon returned, but Elizabeth was anxious to leave and rushed into making our farewells. Anita was tearful; John somber. The three hugged and kissed and then went into another round of the same. John gave me a strong handshake and a pat on the shoulder.

  “Come over again and let me see your paintings whenever you like.”

  I wanted to say more than thank you: I wanted to say how grateful I was for showing me a little of his life, the life I had dreamed of, one of books, music, art, and a beautiful woman—the artist’s life. But instead I said, “Thank you, I would like that.” I was happier with the idea that John wanted to see me again than with the prospect of showing him all of my ten clumsy paintings.

  Elizabeth was silent on the bus ride back home. I wondered if I had made a fool of myself and had disappointed her. Finally, four stops from our station, she took my hand and said, “I wanted you to meet John and Anita before I left for Paris.”

  “Great. Bring me back some Henry Miller books, please.”

  “That may be a long time away, Fred. I’m going for good. But I wanted to leave you in good hands. I know they both like you. I knew they would.”

  I was stunned. “What do you mean, ‘going for good’? You’re never coming back?”

  “Of course, for visits, and the boys are always welcome to visit me on holidays, maybe even a week or two over their summer vacation.”

  We stepped off the bus and made for home. I was in grief, and I dragged along. But Elizabeth was in her speed mode.

  “I’ve got much left to do before I leave. I haven’t even started packing yet.”

  “Don’t leave,” I said, seeing my father, suitcase in hand, disappearing toward the subway station.

  We stopped in the courtyard. She turned to me. “Freddy, I’m in love. He’s Parisian.”

  “Is he an artist?”

  “A Joyce scholar, and a man I’m in love with and want to be with while there is time left to us both.”

  “I see,” I said, seeing nothing but that I would be left all alone with my dreams and ambitions, and with no one to feel that they, and I, were valuable.

  “Maybe one day you really will,” she said.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Do you know who finally convinced me to leave? John.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Not convinced me, but he told me what I wanted to hear. That he would leave Anita and live in the street rather than stay in an unhappy life. That freedom was everything in the world. He should know, Freddy.”

  “Why?”

  “Let him tell you, Fred.”

  I thought I caught a glimpse of her large, sour-faced husband peering down at us from the window. Then the light went out.

  “I will miss you,” I said, in my most brave way, masking, I hoped, the little boy I was. Soon, like my father who had left and Mr. Anderson who had died, Elizabeth would also be gone.

  I came home to find my mother staring at the blank face of the TV.

  “Mom, don’t you know how to turn it on?” I asked jokingly.

  She was silent for a few moments. Then she let it all out. She had lost her job, months ago. She tried to make do with her unemployment checks, but they quickly ended and were never enough to live on anyway.

  “I even used up all your share of the money for expenses, but it was not enough to cover the full rent.”

  “How much do we owe?”

  “Three months, and I got an eviction notice. Are you angry?”

  “No.” I was not angry; I was sick. Now I understood why she was always there when I got home from work and why she had left after me in the morning, saying her workday had been shortened.

  I now had to raid my savings to pay the current rent and the arrears in full, as well as take care of our living expenses until she found work. If she did not get a job soon, I would exhaust my meager savings and Paris would be out.

  I could not sleep even after I turned off the light. All that work I had done to save for Paris had been for nothing. Maybe I was never meant to go there, to be an artist there. Maybe I was meant to spend my life living with my mother, taking care of her until one of us died. John’s words about freedom spun in my mind: Why was he, as Elizabeth had said, the one to know best its meaning?

  Something I had read some weeks earlier welled up in my mind. I turned on the light and pulled out from under my cot a stack of the past ten issues of the New Yorker and read the table of contents of each. It was in a magazine from two months earlier that I found John Resko.

  Crime and Punishment

  The Bronx, Pelham Parkway North, 1952

  I had not matched the name with the man I had met, but the New Yorker profile was about John Resko. He had been raised in the Lower East Side and been a merchant seaman, and at nineteen had a wife and child to support. During the height of the Great Depression, he could not find a ship or work of any kind. In his desperation, on February 5, 1931, John and an older man, a seasoned criminal who had cajoled him into joining him, set out to rob a grocery store in the Bronx. The owner came at him with a broom. The older man slipped John a pistol and said, “Shoot him!” John shot and killed him, and was caught right out in the street. He was tried and sentenced to die in the electric chair.

  John had no criminal record, and many people from his neighborhood in the Lower East Side testified that he was a good boy who, for a moment, had gone wrong. The foreman of the jury said that Resko had been a tool “in the hands of a hardened criminal.” Appeals were made to the then governor, Franklin Roosevelt, who, only twenty minutes before John was to be walked to the electric chair, reprieved him. John was given a life sentence and packed off to Clinton prison in Dannemora, then called, for its harsh conditions and remote location, Little Siberia.

  There John began to make drawings of prison guards and convicts, and he eventually made oil paintings: scenes of men warming themselves over cans of fire in the prison yards, of men sitting dejectedly in their prison cells. Eventually he gained the attention of Carl Carmer, a noted author of the time who was interested in prison rehabilitation. Carmer was struck not only by John’s art but also by his intelligence and sweetness. He began the long work of getting him released from prison, enlisting a range of people, even Groucho Marx, to petition for John’s parole. After nineteen years, John was set free. He had painted a door on the wall of his cell, opened it, and stepped into his freedom.

  African Masks and a Lesson

  Manhattan, Carlebach Gallery, 1952

  It was a Saturday morning. The phone ra
ng. My mother called out from her bedroom, “It’s for you.” No one had ever phoned for me before except Hyman, my boss from work at the mailroom, to say there was an emergency, that the Saturday man had not shown up, and to ask me to come in and sort the mail. Extra pay.

  “Hi! Freddy, it’s John. Elizabeth’s friend.”

  “Oh! Sure.” I was nervous.

  “I’m going to the city this afternoon and thought you might like to come along.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’d go anywhere with you.”

  He laughed. “I bet not. But this is to an art gallery. I thought you’d like it.”

  We took the clattering Third Avenue El down to Fifty-Seventh Street. John was friendly, smiling but mostly silent all the way; I was, too, having no idea what to say to a man I hardly knew. I was relieved when we arrived in midtown, at Third Avenue, with its low- and high-end shops and dark bars. We walked to Carlebach Gallery, a nowhere-looking place under the shadow of the El. We had come all the way down to deliver John’s text for a forthcoming African sculpture exhibition at the gallery.5

  This was the first time I had ever entered a private art gallery; I always felt that such chic places were only for well-dressed, well-heeled, serious-looking adults. So I was uncomfortable walking in, even under John’s wing.

  “Carlebach is a sweet guy,” John said. “You don’t have to be shy with him.”

  I wondered how John had sensed my anxiety, my fear of being found a kid under my rebellious artist’s pose.

  “Julius, this is the young artist I told you about,” John said, introducing me to the gallery owner, a kind-looking man. Most older people looked kind to me then because I had thought that life had made them wise.

  He shook my hand. “I hope we will see your work one day.” I was pleased, feeling puffed-up and just a step away from the door to a better world. But in my heart, I also knew that that door was shut to me because I was not a real artist but a pretend one. All the same, I mustered up my courage to say, in my most adult voice, a line I have never heard except in movies or on the radio: “Nothing would please me more.” That sounded so phony that I was sure John was embarrassed for me, maybe ashamed he had brought me there.

  Carlebach soon got to the business of the payment for John’s text. “Would a check be OK, John, or would you prefer cash?”

  John looked about and landed on an African mask and said, “Actually, I’d prefer this.”

  Carlebach flinched but, with a polite smile, said, “As you like, John. You always know the best ones.” He wrapped the mask in many sheets of newspaper, tied it, and handed it to John in a brown shopping bag. It was very quiet when we made our good-byes.

  John and I stopped at a nearby luncheonette for ham-and-egg sandwiches on rye toast and coffee. I had never had a sandwich like that, but I ordered what John ordered. John was silent, his hands folded. The sandwiches came fast and I started eating right away, but John was in a trance.

  “That’s one of the most beautiful masks I have ever seen. It’s worth much more than what he owed me for my work.”

  “That’s great, John,” I said, thinking he was pleased about the bargain.

  “Do you think so?” he said with a smile that suggested sarcasm. He finished one half of his sandwich and, with his head lowered, asked the waitress, “May I take the other half home, please?”

  “Sure, why not,” she said, whisking the plate away.

  “Sometimes I forget I’m not in prison,” John whispered. He drank his coffee in a dreamy way. “One day I would like to live in Manhattan and not have Anita working.” I sensed that what he said was not what he had been dreaming about over coffee.

  “That would be great,” I said, imagining how wonderful it would be to visit him in the exciting city and not in the boring Parkchester in the depressing Bronx.

  We left and strolled about until we paused at a shop. John asked if I thought Anita would like the red dress that was in the window. “I have no idea,” I said, feeling the less for having none. Then we started walking toward the subway, but before we got there John turned us back to the gallery, where Carlebach was sitting at his desk, staring at a Benin mask like a man in love. He seemed surprised to see us.

  John handed over the bag with the mask, saying nothing. Carlebach beamed. “You’re a gentleman, as I have always thought,” he said. He went to the rear and presently returned with an envelope, which John took without opening. They shook hands. We were again on the elevated, Bronx-bound.

  “I feel better now,” John said above the train’s screeches. “Who wants to go around feeling bad over an African mask?” Then a moment later he added, “Or over anything, if you can help it.”

  As we were approaching our stop, John said, “I’d invite you to dinner at home, but now I have enough to take Anita out and maybe catch a movie, too.”

  He took a twenty from the envelope and said, “Buy some good brushes.”

  I did not want to take the money, but I wanted to take it. It was a fortune. I did not buy the brushes. I gave my mother ten dollars and bought books with the rest on an excursion to Book Row. I found a book of poems and drawings by Kenneth Patchen for a quarter. John had told me about him: how Patchen hand-painted his own books. I read: “The stars go to sleep so peacefully.” Patchen was sentimental, but I didn’t care. His sentimentality had pain and love and feeling. So much feeling. To feel, to feel: What matters more than that?

  * * *

  5CARLEBACH GALLERY

  Carlebach Gallery specialized in African sculpture and Mesoamerican art. Julius Carlebach sold works to the famous American collector Peggy Guggenheim and had connections to the European surrealists, who were then living in New York, having fled from Hitler. Carlebach himself had escaped the Nazis in 1937 and started his gallery in New York in 1939. I only recently learned, much to my shock, that Carlebach died at the age of fifty-five from a heart attack. I had met him when I was fifteen and he was forty-two, which, to me then, seemed ancient.

  Carlebach was one of the few galleries then showing contemporary American art. There was such a little market for it then. Roy Lichtenstein’s first solo show was mounted there in 1951. These were paintings in a cubistic mode of Native American scenes and Old West motifs; it was some years before Lichtenstein became famous as a pop artist. When Roy and I became friends in 1964, we noted that we had missed meeting each other at Carlebach Gallery by a mere few months.

  Tattoos

  The Bronx, Parkchester, 1953

  I visited John as often as I could. Once or twice, he and Anita invited me to dinner: one thin hamburger on a plate, some boiled carrots, a glass of red wine, a slice of Italian bread. “John has to be careful what he eats,” Anita said. “The food in prison ruined his stomach.”

  “Maybe it’s been the food since I got out of prison.” John laughed. I joined in.

  Sometimes John and I spent an hour or two alone when Anita was still at work. There were so many questions I wanted to ask him.

  I was hungry with wanting to learn what adults knew about life, and the questions that I wished my father had been there to answer I now put to John.

  “Are you afraid of death?” I asked. John was in his black sling chair, me in the red. There was a big pot of espresso on the coffee table, which was also loaded with art books, only some of them from the library.

  “No, but I want to live.” He was smoking an unfiltered Camel cigarette and, imitating John, so was I. I had switched from Marlboro, which John found too anemic.

  “What happens after, John, are you afraid of that?”

  “There is nothing after.”

  A year earlier, I stopped going to church, stopped taking Holy Communion. As an experiment I took Communion without going to confession beforehand, just to see if, as I had been told, Jesus would strike me dead and thus prove to me his existence. I trembled at the altar, letting the sacramental wafer melt in my mouth, and waited for the bolt of punishment. By the time I got home, alive, I was sure that r
eligion was hocus-pocus. But maybe there was still God anyway.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Why are you worrying about it?”

  “Because it’s so painful to think that all this is for nothing. What’s the point of living anyway?”

  He laughed. “When you figure it out, tell me.”

  On the wall behind him there were large paintings of trash cans, different from the ones I had seen on first meeting him. The elongated red lines were a deeper red, like thin rivulets of blood. I wished I could paint the beauty of trash cans. By now I was painting very little and had started writing poetry instead. I suspected the poems were worse than my paintings, but they were not as costly to produce, a consoling virtue. Writing poetry let me still feel myself to be an artist and not a total failure sorting and lugging mail in a windowless office.

  I wanted to be like John as much as possible. When I told John I wanted to get a tattoo like his, a small blue star between his thumb and forefinger on his left hand, which he covered with his right when sitting and talking, he threatened that if I ever got one he would never speak to me again.

  “Apart from sailors, only hoodlums and gang members sport tattoos,” he said. “By the way, this reminds me: Have you started thinking about going back to high school?”

  “No, I’m not thinking about it at all, John.”

  “I have a high school equivalency diploma,” he said, “and it’s embarrassing to hang out with a dropout like you.” He was joking, but I was stung. “Go to Paris after you graduate,” he said. Paris seemed far away, and my dream of it and of being an artist was fading; but, mostly to please him, that fall, after a year away from classes, I returned to the death of a thousand cuts of formal education.

  Molly

  Manhattan, Art Students League, 1953

  Like an escapee from prison who cannot hold out in the wild, I, the big dreamer, the would-be adventurer in life, fled back to the safe slammer of high school. John had said that among the cons in Dannemora there ran a debate as to which was preferable, a hard prison with a short sentence or an easy prison with a long sentence. School was easy and long and, just as I had left it, boring, uninspiring, with hours of sitting and learning little.