Obviously, my father was not a man who could sustain the force of such affection. When he was gone, my mother prepared to live wholly, as she said, for the only beings life left to her, my brother and me.
XIV
The first night that my father was gone, my mother moved my brother’s cot and mine into her bedroom, which was at the back of the house. For the first time, we locked the front door. Until then, it had always been open all night. My mother also locked our bedroom door and we helped her move a heavy bureau against it. I do not know just why my mother felt that my father’s departure might be a signal for marauders to swarm in. Nor do I see that his permanent absence (after all, he had often been away a good part of the night) greatly changed the balance of forces in event of an invasion. But I was naturally impressed by these precautions. I found it more difficult to fall asleep and I woke up more easily.
Sometimes, in the dark, my mother would suddenly ask: “Are you awake?” Often it turned out that we were. Then she would say: “Listen)” We would listen tensely, more alarmed by my mother than by anything we heard, though the old house was full of noises. Soon my mother took to keeping an axe in the closet. “A woman with an axe,” she said, “is a match for any man.” In that somewhat uneasy atmosphere, I began to take a knife to bed with me. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would feel to make sure that it was still under my pillow. I always put it away carefully in the morning. My mother never knew that I had it.
There were no streetlights in those days. One night, we heard a woman’s terrified screams quivering in the dark, almost under our windows. My mother sat up in bed and screamed in sympathy. “Scream!” she shouted to us and screamed again herself. It was a hold-up, the only one I recall in that community.
After that, my mother moved the axe under her bed.
XV
Every week, my father sent us eight dollars for living expenses. At the time and place, it was possible to manage on eight dollars, and my mother was a good manager. But, as a child, I knew that we were poor. I knew it by direct experience. Perhaps my mother felt that she was stared at in the village, for I did most of the family shopping.
One of my mother’s ways of managing was to charge things at the stores. “Charge it,” I would say as casually as possible, with increasing embarrassment when I knew that the unpaid bill was big. Sometimes, the baker’s wife would whisper with him before letting me have a loaf of bread. Sometimes, a storekeeper would say: “Tell your mother, no more credit till the bill is paid.” Once an angry woman leaned over the counter and sneered at me: “Your mother is a broken-down stagecoach.” In times the bills were always paid, but I knew a good deal about the relations of the poor man and the shopkeeper before I read about them in Karl Marx. Of course, the shopkeepers had bills to pay too.
We were never hungry. Rutabagas were very cheap then and a big one would last us several meals. We also ate a good deal of pea soup and a great deal of spaghetti and rice. I grew husky on a diet that would scandalize a dietitian.
Fuel was sometimes a problem. We used to keep a sharp eye out for new houses building. After the carpenters had gone home at night, we would fill burlap bags with beam and board ends. My brother and I could each manage one bag. I have seen my beautiful and slender mother, plodding through the dark, with a heavy bag of kindling slung over each shoulder. Sometimes we picked up coal along the railroad tracks.
To eke out our living, my mother began to bake cakes for sale. I would go out and hustle orders. The next day I would deliver the cakes. In summer I peddled vegetables. I also developed a regular route for eggs. My mother had an incubator in the attic. Through the glass door, at hatching time, we could watch the wonder of chicks breaking the shell. Sometimes my mother had to take a hairpin and help the chick chip the egg.
When the first of these chicks grew big enough, I went out and got orders for dressed broilers. Then my mother told me to go and kill the first chickens. The thought of hurting anything so helpless and foolish was too much for me. I said: “I can’t.” My mother did not even answer me. She took a sharp knife and pressed the handle into my hand. “I will not have any man in this house,” she said fiercely, “who is afraid of blood.” I knew that she was thinking of my father.
I caught a chicken. I sat down with it in the coop, stroked its feathers and tried to quiet its alarm. It was a sunny day. It was the thought that from the bird’s bright eye that world of light must now fade that unnerved me. Why must I darken it? So that the live, free creature could pass through the bowels of a gross person? It made no sense.
I tied the chicken’s legs and hung it, head down, from a nail, and as quickly and as mercifully as I could, severed its head. The knife fell as if gravity had jerked it from my hand. Then I hid.
In hiding I had these thoughts, in other words or phrases, but substantially these thoughts. Something in me, the deepest thing that makes me what I am, knows that it is wrong to kill anything. But there is something else—a necessity—that forces me to kill. I have the strength to overcome the feeling in myself against killing, and I am proud that I have it for it is part of what makes me a man. All right. As a man, I will kill. But I will kill always under duress, by an act of will, in knowing violation of myself, and always in rebellion against that necessity which I do not understand or agree to. Let me never kill unless I suffer that agony, for if I do not suffer it, I will be merely a murderer. This was one of the decisive moments of my boyhood.
I came out of hiding, cleansed the knife in the ground, took it in the house and laid it down in front of my mother. I have always been grateful to her for handing it to me in the first place. For years, I was the family butcher. My brother never killed anything. I never killed anything, and never kill anything today, without suffering the same ordeal.
XVI
Those years when my father lived away from us were happy years for my mother. Perhaps they were happy for my brother and me too. Without my father, our home, though divided, was tranquil, and we experienced a new sense of freedom, which made us realize for the first time how heavily my father’s chilling presence had weighed upon us.
We were poor, and there was something humiliating in the knowledge that it was an unnecessary poverty—that my father was earning a good salary, which he did not share with us. But there was exhilaration in the knowledge that our own efforts could make our poverty comfortable and even enjoyable. My mother, my brother and I were a tightly knit unit. Completely engrossed in our own lives, we shut out the world. My mother enjoyed the proud sense of being equal to any challenge life made of her.
Our simple life never dragged, for my mother’s energy and imagination were continually passing from one absorbing interest to another. There was the time that my mother began to suspect the presence of petroleum under our backyard. We promptly wrote to the Interior Department, asking for advice as to how best to tap this subsoil wealth. We waited impatiently for the reply, which rather dashed us, for it said that oil could not possibly exist under the soil formation of Long Island. I do not believe that my mother ever quite regained her confidence in the Interior Department.
Often these interests developed as a result of something my mother had read. From time to time, she would read an article about ranching in Montana or Idaho, states that she knew and loved. On such occasions, she would decide that our manifest destiny lay in homesteading (there were still free lands in those days). She would describe our future life in vivid detail. My brother and I would be wildly excited by the prospect of living in primitive health among coyotes and range cattle, and the promise that simply by working a tract of land for a few years, it would be ours. We would write to the Government (again the unfortunate Interior Department, I believe) for details. Then the land fever would subside or take a new turn.
Once we were going to buy one of the Thousand Islands. The shadow of pines fell across our fancy and we could hear the St. Lawrence sliding past our island. That time we wrote to the Canadian Government and lear
ned that the Thousand Islands were of all shapes and sizes and some of them were, indeed, for sale. Nothing could have been more jarring than that prosaic fact. We hastily dropped the Thousand Islands.
From time to time, my mother would decide to go back on the stage, and my brother and I would begin to prepare for a future of all-night train trouping and sleeping in wardrobe trunks. Once she even went so far as to have a set of theatrical photographs made (rather shocking to my brother and me, since they showed our mother with much more shoulder than we were accustomed to around the house). For a short time, my mother made the rounds of producers and theatrical agents. During that flurry, we met some of her stage acquaintances. On the whole, we were rather pleased when nothing came of it.
Once, in mid-winter, our mother concluded that our musical education was neglected. She decided to buy a phonograph. Since there was no other way to do this, she used the winter’s coal money for that purchase. We had central heat by then, so that it was necessary to drain the pipes and radiators, shut off the rest of the big house and sleep (and otherwise live) in the kitchen. We placed the phonograph in the kitchen too, where, clumped around the coal range, we could listen to Alma Gluck singing “Musetta’s Waltz,” Caruso singing Ridi, Pagliaccio and Clarence Whitehill singing Wotan’s Abschied. Unfortunately, not all the radiators had been completely drained, and those burst.
The saddest of such excitements, and the most persistent, was the one about buying a farm. It came up nearly every year. It was the one that touched me closest and it always ended in disappointment. But while the back-to-the-land mood was on us, we would send for Strout’s farm catalog and make active plans to take advantage of the remarkable bargains it offered. It was always just a matter of “come spring” until my brother and I would be milking our own cows and slopping our own pigs. But when spring came, we never went.
By degrees, I sensed, as a boy, that behind my mother’s enthusiasms there was a restlessness, and behind that, a strain of that unhappiness that I recoiled from as a small child. Unlike my brother, who all his life confided in his mother, and had few secrets from her, I was always aware of an intangible point beyond which I could not confide, not because I wished to be secretive, but because I wished to be myself. It was precisely my deepest and most personal thoughts that I withheld and it was precisely these that my mother needed as a pledge of affection. This implicit reserve, which became more pronounced as I grew older, and in adolescence began to lunge tactlessly against the tender mesh in which her affection sought to hold me, wounded her deeply. It was one reason why she abruptly shifted the weight of her affection and her hopes for the future from me to my brother.
XVII
In those years, certain miscellaneous people faded in and out of my days with no apparent meaning, like strangers we see walking down a road, and scarcely glance at, because there is nothing to tell us that they will come back to spread their shadows on our lives. In those years, too, I heard or observed certain things that seemed irrelevant in themselves, as a child growing up in a war listens to his parents talk about it, not knowing that it is the war in which, when he is old enough, he will lose his life. I first heard of the revolution in those days.
Peddlers marked our calendar. Like the birds, each had his season for arriving. The broom man came in the early spring; he had spent the winter tying his straws. The honey man always came in the fall, with a heavy tub of clammy comb balanced on a thick pad on his head. The flower man came in May; my mother always bought from him a flat of bellis daisies, of which she was very fond and which always died.
There was one peddler who came in midsummer. He was short, Jewish and had a cast in one eye. This gave me the uneasy feeling that he could watch me while he looked directly at my mother. But his smile was warm and simple. He traded enamel saucepans, which he carried strung on a cord over one shoulder, for old boots and rubbers, which he carried strung on a cord over the other shoulder. The saucepans usually turned out to have a small chip in the enamel which my mother always discovered after he had gone. But the idea of exchanging old lamps for new was irresistible.
One day, the peddler was standing outside our picket fence and my mother and a neighbor were gossiping with him over the gate. Talk got around to “hard times,” an expression which, like the word “panic,” had a scary sound.
The peddler said: “There is a terrible war coming between the rich and the poor. When it is over, there will not be any more rich people. Everybody will have the same.” Thus the tidings of the proletarian revolution came to Lynbrook. After he had gone, my mother and the neighbor continued to gossip over the gate about this grim prospect.
Years later, after I had joined the Communist Party, I saw the “rubber man” one day on an elevated train. He was sitting with his head down, as though lost in thought, with his pans and rubbers on the seat beside him. He looked much older and very tired. I recognized him with a start of nostalgia and the recollection that he had dropped the first tiny seed that had taken root in me. I went up to him and asked him if he remembered me from my boyhood. He shook his head and glanced away uneasily, as if he thought that I were a provocative agent. So I left him to his historic thoughts.
XVIII
About the only “family” we had, or even knew the names of, was my grandparents. I did not like either of my grandmothers, but my grandmother Whittaker was the one I admired. She happened in on us only at long intervals and always unannounced. She was always in transit, as if in perpetual flight from something. She had run in to New York from Chicago to shop for clothes. She was on her way across the continent or across the ocean (she sometimes spent a year or two in Paris). California was one of her more permanent addresses, and I knew her in those days as “the grandmother from San |ose” (as distinguished from “the grandmother from Philadelphia”). She had just lived through a California earthquake, and from her early descriptions I got my first impression of what happens when the underpinnings of a world give way, walls fall out in clouds of suffocating dust, chasms open in familiar streets through which the buried pipes writhe up like snakes.
She was a magnificent woman with a lofty forehead, wide-apart, commanding eyes, a crown of white hair and an imperial presence. Her speech was a flowing texture of precise and graphic English. Sometimes she would break into rippling French, in which she thought almost as easily as in English. It was she who first began to teach me to read French, using an old convent primer in which the mute letters were in hairline type.
The first time I remember my grandmother Whittaker, my mother was recounting to her in bitter detail the part which she believed my grandmother Chambers and her daughter (my Aunt Helen) had played in wrecking her marriage. Whenever my mother paused for breath, my grandmother would clinch each passage with one line of lilting disdain: “Oh, Mama, what people!”
She was a little formidable. I do not believe that I ever felt the slightest affection for her nor did she ever show the slightest affection for my brother or me. She never brought us anything from her travels, and, except for starting me on French, seldom took any notice of us. When we came in on anything she did not want us to hear (and that was a great deal), she would stop and say to my mother: “Les enfants.” We quickly learned that that meant “the children,” and that we were in the way.
Of course, this sketchy recollection is overcast by my later, more vivid image of her as a grizzled head, the woman with the knife, a gratuitous fury in the last years of our house.
XIX
“The grandmother from Philadelphia” was an entirely different character. No sooner had my father left us than my grandmother Chambers left my grandfather to fend for himself in Philadelphia and rushed to Brooklyn to rent an apartment and “make a home for Jay”—to make more trouble, according to my mother. From this Brooklyn apartment, she made frequent descents on our house.
I early had grounds for disliking my grandmother Chambers. I discovered that she was given to tantrums, hours of sobbing and weeping, which wer
e obviously fraudulent, but by which she managed to get her own way. Sometimes, when we were alone, she would urge me “just for fun” to say to my mother: “I love Grandma more than you.” I used to look at her silently at such times, but she was a tireless, surreptitious troublemaker and nothing feazed her. I had also learned (from my mother) that, when my father was a boy, she had made him sit all day in a chair, embroidering, until my grandfather discovered what was going on and smashed the embroidery frames in a storm of curses. I liked that scene, but I resented the indignity to my father.
An excellent dressmaker, she was obsessed with clothes, and seldom talked about anything else. She would spend an hour, describing down to the last buttonhole stitch what the woman wore who sat opposite her on the train. No interruption, no hint however broad, could stop her.
For years, I thought of my grandmother Chambers as the one absolutely brainless person I had ever known. And yet I have two curious memories of her.
I once discovered from something she said that my grandmother could remember the Civil War. Though she was a little girl, she had sat with a hundred older women, making bandages after the Battle of Gettysburg. Once or twice, I plagued her to tell me what those times were like, for I was already absorbed in history. She tried. She would begin. Then she would burst into tears (these tears were real). “I can’t,” she would say, “I can’t talk about the War.”
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