The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “Sure,” I said. “I don’t care.” In everything that followed there was this sensation of my being picked up and carried somewhere.

  · · ·

  It was four miles from the farm to Olinger; we entered by Buchanan Road, driving past the tall white brick house I had lived in until I was fifteen. My grandfather had bought it before I was born and his stocks went bad, which had happened in the same year. The new owners had strung colored bulbs all along the front doorframe and the edges of the porch roof. Downtown the cardboard Santa Claus still nodded in the drugstore window, but the loudspeaker on the undertaker’s lawn had stopped broadcasting carols. It was quite dark now, so the arches of red and green lights above Grand Avenue seemed miracles of lift; in daylight you saw the bulbs were just hung from a straight cable by cords of different lengths. Larry Schuman lived on the other side of town, the newer side. Lights ran all the way up the front edges of his house and across the rain gutter. The next-door neighbor had a plywood reindeer-and-sleigh floodlit on his front lawn and a snowman of papier-mâché leaning tipsily (his eyes were x’s) against the corner of the house. No real snow had fallen yet that winter. The air this evening, though, hinted that harder weather was coming.

  The Schumans’ living room felt warm. In one corner a blue spruce drenched with tinsel reached to the ceiling; around its pot surged a drift of wrapping paper and ribbon and boxes, a few still containing presents—gloves and diaries and other small properties that hadn’t yet been absorbed into the main stream of affluence. The ornamental balls were big as baseballs and all either crimson or indigo; the tree was so well dressed I felt self-conscious in the same room with it, without a coat or tie and wearing an old green shirt too short in the sleeves. Everyone else was dressed for a party. Then Mr. Schuman stamped in comfortingly, crushing us all into one underneath his welcome—Neil and me and the three other boys who had shown up so far. He was dressed to go out on the town, in a vanilla topcoat and silvery silk muffler, and smoking a cigar with the band still on. You could see, in Mr. Schuman, where Larry got the red hair and pale eyelashes and the self-confidence, but what in the son was smirking and pushy was in the father shrewd and masterful. What the one used to make you nervous the other used to put you at ease. While Mr. was jollying us, Zoe Loessner, Larry’s probable fiancée and the only girl at the party so far, was talking nicely to Mrs., nodding with her entire neck and fingering her Kresge pearls and blowing cigarette smoke through the corners of her mouth, to keep it away from the middle-aged woman’s face. Each time Zoe spat out a plume, the shelf of blond hair overhanging her temple lifted slightly, so emphatic was her politeness. Mrs. Schuman beamed serenely above her fur coat and rhinestone pocketbook. It was odd to see her dressed in the trappings of the prosperity which usually supported her good nature invisibly, like a firm mattress under a homely bright quilt. She was a prime product of the country, a Pennsylvania Dutch woman, who loved feeding her sons, and imagined that the entire world, like her life, was going well. I never saw her not smile, except at her husband. At last she moved him into the outdoors. He turned at the threshold and did a trick with his knees and called in to us, “Be good and if you can’t be good, be careful.”

  With them out of the way, the next item was getting liquor. It was a familiar business. Did anybody have a forged driver’s license? If not, who would dare to make one? Larry could provide India ink. Then again, Larry’s older brother Dale might be home and would go if it didn’t take too much time. However, on weekends he often went straight from work to his fiancée’s apartment and stayed until Sunday. If worst came to worst, Larry knew an illegal place in Alton, but they really soaked you. The problem was solved strangely. More people were arriving all the time, and one of them, Cookie Behn, who had been held back one year and hence was deposited in our grade, announced that last November he had become in honest fact twenty-one. I, at least, gave Cookie my share of the money feeling a little queasy, vice had become so handy.

  The party was the party I had been going to all my life, beginning with Ann Mahlon’s first Halloween party, that I attended as a hot, lumbering, breathless, and blind Donald Duck. My mother had made the costume, and the eyes kept slipping, and were farther apart than my eyes, so that even when the clouds of gauze parted, it was to reveal the frustrating depthless world seen with one eye. Ann, who because her mother loved her so much as a child had remained somewhat childish, and I and another boy and girl who were not involved in any romantic crisis went down into the Schumans’ basement to play circular ping-pong. Armed with paddles, we stood each at a side of the table and when the ball was stroked ran around it counterclockwise, slapping the ball and laughing. To run better the girls took off their high-heeled shoes and ruined their stockings on the cement floor. Their faces and arms and shoulder sections became flushed, and when either of the girls lunged forward toward the net the stiff neckline of her semi-formal dress dropped away and the white cups of her brassière could be glimpsed holding in fat, and when one of them reached high her shaved armpit gleamed like a bit of chicken skin. An earring of Ann’s flew off and the two connected rhinestones skidded to lie near the wall, among the Schumans’ power mower and badminton poles and empty bronze motor-oil cans twice punctured by triangles. All these images were immediately lost in the whirl of our running; we were dizzy before we stopped. Ann leaned on me getting back into her shoes.

  When we pushed the cellar door open it banged against the newel post of the carpeted stairs going to the second floor; a third of the way up, a couple sat discussing. The girl, Jacky Iselin, cried without emotion—the tears and nothing else, like water flowing over wood. Some people were in the kitchen, mixing drinks and making noise. In the living room others danced to records: 78s then—stiff discs stacked in a ponderous leaning cylinder on the spindle of the Schumans’ console. Every three minutes, with a click and a crash, another dropped and the mood abruptly changed. One moment it would be “Stay As Sweet As You Are”: Clarence Lang with the absolute expression of an idiot standing and rocking monotonously with June Kaufmann’s boneless sad brown hand trapped in his and their faces, staring in the same direction, pasted together like the facets of an idol. The music stopped; when they parted, a big squarish dark patch stained the cheek of each. Then the next moment it would be Goodman’s “Loch Lomond” or “Cherokee” and nobody but Margaret Lento wanted to jitterbug. Mad, she danced by herself, swinging her head recklessly and snapping her backside; a corner of her skirt flipped a Christmas ball onto the rug, where it collapsed into a hundred convex reflectors. Female shoes were scattered in innocent pairs about the room. Some were flats, resting under the sofa shyly toed in; others were high heels lying askew, the spike of one thrust into its mate. Sitting alone and ignored in a great armchair, I experienced within a warm keen dishevelment, as if there were real tears in my eyes. Had things been less unchanged, they would have seemed less tragic. But the girls who had stepped out of these shoes were, with few exceptions, the ones who had attended my life’s party. The alterations were so small: a haircut, an engagement ring, a tendency toward plumpness more frankly confessed. While they wheeled above me I sometimes caught from their faces an unfamiliar glint, off of a hardness I did not remember, as if beneath their skins these girls were growing more dense. The brutality added to the features of the boys I knew seemed a more willed effect, more desired and so less grievous. Considering that there was a war, surprisingly many were present—4-F or at college or simply waiting to be called. Shortly before midnight the door rattled, and there, under the porch light, looking forlorn and chilled in their brief athletic jackets, stood three members of the class ahead of ours who in the old days always tried to crash Schuman’s parties. At Olinger High they had been sports stars, and they still stood with that well-coordinated looseness, a look of dangling from strings. The three of them had enrolled together at Melanchthon, a small Lutheran college on the edge of Alton, and in this season played on the Melanchthon basketball team. That is, two did; the thir
d hadn’t been good enough. Schuman, out of cowardice more than mercy, let them in, and they hid immediately in the basement, and didn’t bother us, having brought their own bottle.

  There was one novel awkwardness. Darryl Bechtel had married Emmy Johnson, and the couple came. Darryl had worked in his father’s greenhouse and had been considered dull; it was Emmy that we knew. At first no one danced with her, and Darryl didn’t know how, but then Schuman, perhaps as host, dared. Others followed, but Schuman had her in his arms most often, and at midnight, when we were pretending the new year began, he kissed her; a wave of kissing swept the room now, and everyone struggled to kiss Emmy. Even I did. There was something about her being married that made it extraordinary. Her cheeks burning, she kept glancing around for rescue, but Darryl, embarrassed to see his wife dance, had gone into old man Schuman’s den, where Neil sat brooding, sunk in mysterious sorrow.

  When the kissing subsided and Darryl emerged, I went in to see Neil. He was holding his face in his hands and tapping his foot to a record playing on Mr. Schuman’s private phonograph: Krupa’s “Dark Eyes.” The arrangement was droning and circular and Neil had kept the record going for hours. He loved saxophones; most of us children of that depression vintage did. I asked him, “Do you think the traffic on the Turnpike has died down by now?”

  He took down the tall glass on the cabinet beside him and took a studied swallow. From the side, his face seemed lean and somewhat blue. “Maybe,” he said, staring at the ice cubes submerged in the ochre liquid. “The girl in Chicago’s expecting you?”

  “Well, yeah, but we can call and let her know, once we know.”

  “You think she’ll spoil?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, won’t you be seeing her all the time after we get there? Aren’t you going to marry her?”

  “I have no idea. I might.”

  “Well then you’ll have the rest of Kingdom Come to see her.” He looked directly at me, and it was plain in the blur of his eyes that he was sick-drunk. “The trouble with you guys that have all the luck,” he said slowly, “is that you don’t give a damn about us that don’t have any.” Such melodramatic rudeness, coming from Neil, surprised me, as had his blarney with my mother hours before. In trying to evade his steady, wounded stare, I discovered there was another person in the room: a girl sitting with her shoes on, reading Holiday. Though she held the magazine in front of her face, I knew from the gaudy air of her clothes and from her unfamiliar legs that she was the girl friend Margaret Lento had brought.

  Margaret didn’t come from Olinger but from Riverside, a section of Alton. She had met Larry Schuman at a summer job in a restaurant, and for the rest of high school they had more or less gone together. Since then, though, it had dawned on Mr. and Mrs. Schuman that even in a democracy distinctions exist: probably welcome news to Larry. In the cruelest and most prolonged way he could manage, he had been breaking off with her throughout the year now nearly ended. I had been surprised to find her at this party. Obviously she had felt shaky about attending and had brought the friend as the only kind of protection she could afford. The other girl was acting just like a guard.

  There being no answer to Neil, I went into the living room, where Margaret, insanely drunk, was throwing herself around as if wanting to break a bone. Somewhat in time to the music she would run a few steps, then snap her body like a whip, her chin striking her chest and her hands flying backward, fingers fanned, as her shoulders pitched forward. In her state her body was childishly plastic; unharmed, she would bounce back from this jolt and begin to clap and kick and hum. Schuman stayed away from her. Margaret was small, not more than five three, with the smallness ripeness comes to early. She had bleached a section of her black hair platinum, cropped her head all over, and trained the stubble into short hyacinthine curls like those on antique statues of boys. Her face seemed quite coarse from the front, so her profile was classical unexpectedly. She might have been Portia. When she was not putting on her savage, pointless dance, she was in the bathroom being sick. The pity and the vulgarity of her exhibition made everyone who was sober uncomfortable; our common guilt in witnessing this girl’s rites brought us so close together in that room that it seemed never, not in all time, could we be parted. I myself was perfectly sober. I had the impression people only drank to stop being unhappy and I nearly always felt at least fairly happy.

  Luckily, Margaret was in a sick phase around one o’clock, when the elder Schumans came home. They looked in at us briefly. It was a pleasant joke to see in their smiles that, however corrupt and unwinking we felt, to them we looked young and sleepy: Larry’s friends. Things quieted after they went up the stairs. In half an hour, people began coming out of the kitchen balancing cups of coffee. By two o’clock, four girls stood in aprons at Mrs. Schuman’s sink, and others were padding back and forth carrying glasses and ashtrays. Another blameless racket pierced the clatter in the kitchen. Out on the cold grass the three Melanchthon athletes had set up the badminton net and in the faint glow given off by the house were playing. The bird, ascending and descending through uneven bars of light, glimmered like a firefly. Now that the party was dying, Neil’s apathy seemed deliberately exasperating, even vindictive. For at least another hour, he persisted in hearing “Dark Eyes” over and over again, holding his head and tapping his foot. The entire scene in the den had developed a fixity that was uncanny; the girl remained in the chair and read magazines, Holiday and Esquire, one after another. In the meantime, cars came and went and raced their motors out front; Schuman took Ann Mahlon home and didn’t come back; and the athletes carried the neighbor’s artificial snowman into the center of the street and disappeared. Somehow in the arrangements shuffled together at the end, Neil had agreed to take Margaret and the other girl home. Margaret convalesced in the downstairs bathroom for most of that hour. I unlocked a little glass bookcase ornamenting a desk in the dark dining room and removed a volume of Thackeray’s Works. It turned out to be Volume II of Henry Esmond. I began it, rather than break another book out of the set, which had been squeezed in there so long the bindings had sort of interpenetrated.

  Esmond was going off to war again when Neil appeared in the archway and said, “O.K., Norseman. Let’s go to Chicago.” “Norseman” was a variant of my name he used only when he was feeling special affection.

  We turned off all the lamps and left the hall bulb burning against Larry’s return. Margaret Lento seemed chastened. Neil gave her his arm and helped her into the back seat of his father’s car; I stood aside to let the other girl get in with her, but Neil indicated that I should. I supposed he realized this left only the mute den-girl to go up front with him. She sat well over on her side, was all I noticed. Neil backed into the street and with unusual care steered past the snowman. Our headlights made vivid the fact that the snowman’s back was a hollow right-angled gash; he had been built up against the corner of the house.

  · · ·

  From Olinger, Riverside was diagonally across Alton. The city was sleeping as we drove through it. Most of the stop lights were blinking green. Among cities Alton had a bad reputation; its graft and gambling and easy juries and bawdyhouses were supposedly notorious throughout the Middle Atlantic states. But to me it always presented an innocent face: row after row of houses built of a local dusty-red brick, the color of flowerpots, each house fortified with a tiny, intimate, balustraded porch, and nothing but the wealth of movie houses and beer signs along its main street to suggest that its citizens loved pleasure more than the run of mankind. Indeed, as we moved at moderate speed down these hushed streets bordered with parked cars, a limestone church bulking at every corner and the hooded street lamps keeping watch from above, Alton seemed less the ultimate center of an urban region than itself a suburb of some vast mythical metropolis, like Pandemonium or Paradise. I was conscious of evergreen wreaths on door after door and of fanlights of stained glass in which the house number was embedded. I was also conscious that every block was one bl
ock farther from the Turnpike.

  Riverside, fitted into the bends of the Schuylkill, was not so regularly laid out. Margaret’s house was one of a short row, composition-shingled, which we approached from the rear, down a tiny cement alley speckled with drains. The porches were a few inches higher than the narrow pavement. Margaret asked us if we wanted to come in for a cup of coffee, since we were going to Chicago; Neil accepted by getting out of the car and slamming his door. The noise filled the alley, alarming me. I wondered at the easy social life that evidently existed among my friends at three-thirty in the morning. Margaret did, however, lead us in stealthily, and she turned on only the kitchen switch. The kitchen was divided from the living room by a large sofa, which faced into littered gloom where distant light from beyond the alley spilled over a window sill and across the spines of a radiator. In one corner the glass of a television set showed; the screen would seem absurdly small now, but then it seemed disproportionately elegant. The shabbiness everywhere would not have struck me so much if I hadn’t just come from Schuman’s place. Neil and the other girl sat on the sofa; Margaret held a match to a gas burner and, as the blue flame licked an old kettle, doled instant coffee into four flowered cups.

  By the kitchen’s solitary window, overlooking a drab Alton street, someone who had once lived in this house had built a breakfast nook like a luncheonette booth, a yellow table between two high-backed benches. I sat in it and read all the words I could see: “Salt,” “Pepper,” “Have Some LUMPS,” “December,” “Mohn’s Milk Inc.—A Very Merry Christmas and Joyous New Year—Mohn’s Milk is Safe Milk—‘Mommy, Make It Mohn’s!,’ ” “Matches,” “Hotpoint,” “PRESS,” “Magee Stove FEDERAL & Furnace Corp.,” “God Is in This House,” “Ave Maria Gratia Plena,” “SHREDDED WHEAT Benefits—Exciting New Pattern KUNGSHOLM.” After serving the two on the sofa, Margaret came to me with coffee and sat down opposite me in the booth. Fatigue had raised two blue welts beneath her eyes.