Here, too, one would like to think one took what must have been some of the first steps ever taken by Bronx conservationists. In the part of the woods adjoining Woodlawn and extending to Jerome Avenue with its then cobblestoned roadway and trolley tracks and now Major Deegan Boulevard, there was a swamp which the borough engineer had decided to drain. We blocked the big ditches dug and sabotaged all the efforts made to dry up and fill in this ancient wetland where one hunted and roamed. As preservationists, we wore big paint pails held up on our feet to trudge in the mud, building dams to save this natural oasis of rats, black snakes and big vicious snapping turtles. And one supposed one helped, too, those hikers and mushroom hunters who on Saturdays and Sundays walked along the path on top of the Old Croton aqueduct and detoured into the woods to have their picnics and find their toadstools. These people somehow seemed so foreign, as indeed most of them were, having not that long ago, like my own mother and father, got off the boat from Europe.
My parents by buying new houses and not selling the old one became landlords and when I was twelve or so we moved again. Just a few blocks away to a somewhat more spacious street and to an older house. Having graduated from pranks like projecting unripe grapes in blowguns to smash unpleasantly smearing on car windscreens and folks’ front windows, I now, with the athletic boy up the block, started exchanging the wash hanging out on adjoining neighbours’ lines, or stuffing their backyard chickens in their bedroom windows, or spending Friday nights transplanting their entire gardens or smashing ripe tomatoes against their screens as they sat on their back porches playing games of bridge. Utterly appalling behaviour but at the time one thought justified by the constant dirty looks worn on neighbours’ faces. Nor did my conduct improve when I began my first self employed job delivering the Bronx Home News. My constant late or missed deliveries had folk forever waiting to glare or shake fists at me, which demeanour alas only confirmed my opinion that adults were simply no damn good.
But more profoundly and somehow always hauntingly close, casting a spell on one’s life, was the cemetery. Its lavish stone monuments peeking through the trees. And its acres full of tales. Told by the uncle at whom my brother and I threw the cheese and who later became employed there. Of the woman who nighttimes appeared hitchhiking in her flowing robes at the southern end of Webster Avenue. And when given a lift along the cemetery wall adjoining this barren roadway would alight at the northern cemetery gates and disappear. A local mildly deranged tearaway nicknamed the ‘Tombstone Cowboy’ often invited the reluctant rest of us to climb the formidable fence and spend a midnight maurauding in and among the mausoleums.
It was in this necropolis through the good offices of my father under whose jurisdiction the cemetery came in his work as the fire department building inspector that I got my first and last job. Cutting grass during a school summer vacation. My colleagues were mostly European immigrants, one an ancient Polish gentleman in his eighties who had toiled there for forty years. Another, an Italian, a squat swarthy bachelor, told me about Mussolini and every Saturday payday was the highlight of his life when he went back downtown on the train to his tiny room on the lower east side to play poker and drink wine with his cronies late into the night. And I’d always ask.
‘Is that all you do.’
‘Sure, that’s all I do.’
And of course, unappreciative of these most sensible words, there was also the usual consternation when I’d fill with grass cuttings their sweat drenched caps left drying on tombstones, and as the green shavings poured down their faces, I’d roar with laughter. To then drench them with sprinklers or tap them on the shoulder and disappear or jump out from behind graves as a ghost. Which set me to wondering who all these people were, locked up in their sumptuously vast mausoleums, stacked in there richer dead than I was alive. Some with names out of history books, others tycoons, or robber barons, admirals and explorers but most just plain prosperous citizens. And during my long bouts malingering, one wondered about the mystery of such lives which brought them so respectably here to repose in such comfort and splendour. Only many years later, having returned from Europe, did I learn that my unduteous grass cutting took place just fifty or so yards from Herman Melville’s grave.
One had read authors like Jack London and Howard Spring but my first vague literary awareness arose when, on top of another hill on East 238th Street under another maple tree, I heard the name James T. Farrell uttered, a writer who, I was told, wrote about life as it really was. The hot news came from the lips of a young gentleman with the splendidly simple name of Bill Pain, who wore a tweed jacket, grey flannels, white buckskin shoes, Oxford buttondown shirt and black knit tie and called my argumentative ethnic prejudices fascist. He nearly convinced one that words could be as effective as action in life. For previous to that my only serious brush with neighbourhood intellectualism was an attempt to start a local rival newspaper when my implacably patient route manager in his natty convertible Ford coupé finally hysterically exploded and severed my relationship with the Bronx Home News.
High school years made my Bronx expand. From the local Catholic grade-school of St Barnabas where we were tutored in the Gregorian chant and played handball and a chasing and tagging game, ringaleevio, in the schoolyard, to places easterly. Where beyond these strange bed spring fenced wastelands, my father once drove by the apprehended Lindbergh kidnapper’s house. And now one went kayaking in the sheltered sea of Long Island Sound and swimming at the man made Orchard Beach where my friends became lifeguards. Swarms of people coming up from the city’s lower east side on the hot summer days to sunbathe jammed on the imported sands, or to crowd in curiosity round someone dragged out drowned. While offshore barely a mile away was Hart Island in whose potter’s field half a million unclaimed bodies lay buried with the quietly eloquent epitaph ‘He calleth His children by name.’ Yet out here, too, were the spacious golf courses where, as I grew up, another uncle called Jim brought me with him to play golf. And City Island down whose quaint New England clapboarded streets one found fishing piers, yacht building yards and evening beer and clam chowder.
My daily excursion to Fordham Prep took me further south into the Bronx, to an area where the spacious boulevard of the Grand Concourse housed its modestly successful citizens and seemed like a giant spine to which this residential part of the borough clung. A nickel ride on the bus took one half around the cemetery and down to Bainbridge Avenue and across Gun Hill Road. One’s day either brightened or crushed by the eye recognitions from girls attending, as my sister did, the Ursuline Academy where I alighted and walked down Bedford Boulevard hill and along the edge of the Botanical Gardens to enter the university’s back gate. I knew who Edgar Allan Poe was but couldn’t imagine this magnificently maudlin minded man, as his young wife lay dying, ever walking near here in a countryside sprinkled with edible herbs and without the roaring Third Avenue elevated train or the thundering New York Central track.
Three years later I was duly expelled from Fordham Prep as a bad influence on the student body. For among my heinous crimes of attending in a pool hall under the elevated trains and taking lunch of beer and free appetizers in a nearby saloon, I also made efforts to found a fraternity of which I would be instant supreme brother master to whom all dues would be paid. But before I departed I did at least get to take my first encouraged steps in writing, concocting a spiritual visit to Westminster Abbey in which foggy European part of the world I had never been. And my mentor, a young apprentice Jesuit, pleaded on my behalf that a young man of literary gifts was being booted out whose name might be the school’s only claim to fame one day. I of course took this fact so much for granted that I never thanked for his efforts this idealistic, charming and dedicated gentleman.
The Bronx now became my stepping stone. To other adult city climes and places. Fordham Prep having brought me to painfully polite Saturday afternoon tea dances and on sentimental school June boat rides up the Hudson, also introduced me to downtown life in the city, when a sch
ool chum who admired my suicidal nerve in and out of the boxing ring invited me to show my stuff to Frank Fulham and Arthur Donovan, who presided in an historic room of fisticuffs overlooking the corner of Seventh Avenue and 58th Street. Following our daily boxing ring blood baths, we sometimes affluently in the same building wined and dined, and my friend told me that we were under the rich man’s yoke. The first of which I thought I felt one day driving Bronxwards with this young man’s father in a big bullet proof limozine in which sat another sombre gentleman in a black stetson hat whose face was saluted by police all along the roads. At a big dine and dance emporium there was a famous band practising and this darkly dressed man put a big diamond ring on a brightly dressed lady singer’s finger as she sat on his knee.
It was somehow that the great towering anonymous borough of Manhattan made that of the Bronx equally strange. Early evenings, heading east along Central Park South in its city glamour and glare, I went home by subway, with the crush of polyglot passengers thinning out at each stop north. The swaying train on its gleaming tracks roaring under Spanish Harlem to rise up thundering past the hundreds of stacked up blocks of apartment houses and their thousands of yellow lighted windows. The noisy abyss of the street below. The day time flashing glimpse of green of the baseball diamond down in the Yankee Stadium. The station stop with the Indian name Moshulu. Till in the nearly empty train one felt a curious loneliness descend as the last few folk made their solitary footfalls on the terminus planking to go down the steps glad of each other’s proximity to wait flanked by woods and cemetery for the bus to take them further north and home.
Following a six month sojourn at a spruce tree fringed coeducational public high school in Westchester called Roosevelt, where my academic pursuits were totally obliterated by the presence of a particularly attractive lady, I was promptly parentally steered back again to another exclusively boys’ school in the Bronx. Now heading in my new daily direction westwards of Woodlawn, poetry had entered my life. Which I recited to a friend I had persuaded to shortcut in the same direction with me to school. She had the marvellous name of Ann Henry. Daily reminding me of the only American history I ever remember, Patrick Henry’s impassioned declaration, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ Miss Henry’s large blue eyes were full of a smiling amused wonderment at my brash mispronunciations and whopping grammatical errors which even then I began to stubbornly insist was the way English should be written and spoken.
We met these frigid late autumn mornings along the Park at the intersection of 239th Street and Kepler Avenue and crossed through the fallen leaves of the first woods to the windswept uninhabited corner of Jerome Avenue and the cemetery. I reeling off tall stories plus my poems scribbled the night before, and she politely listening as we, sometimes with ice skates slung over a shoulder, strolled a snowy cinder path along this winding road down to Spuyten Duyvil Parkway past a frozen ‘Vannie’ Lake and the old Van Cortlandt mansion. I went to the pleasantly cosy little school of Manhattan Prep, tucked away serenely in an ivy clad quadrangle just up Riverdale hill while my intrepid friend coldly continued alone on her way to the College of Mount St Vincent further beyond on the banks of the Hudson River. And in this area of substantial houses and some splendid estates one found that no one ever called it the Bronx.
In my growing up world of New York City the word downtown, if it didn’t mean the excitement of horn blaring crowded streets and department stores, it meant an illicit tinged Manhattan and drinking Tom Collinses in the Hotel Astor, or kissing someone goodbye beneath the stone towering vastnesses of Pennsylvania Station. I early envied the people who lived behind their anonymous doors in those swank tall buildings with their nice square low ceilinged rooms. Of how hot water, just like some of their private incomes, came out of their faucets from some hidden source to pour soothingly down in their stall showers and not from one’s own oil burner one heard leaping into action under the dining room floor. Or how their food came nicely wrapped, packed and full of preservatives and not as mine did out of our fruit cellar or fresh from my father’s gardens. And then upon my return to America after living away seven alienating years, the downtown city seemed a more grit laden shadowy manic place harassed by its endless streams of cars. My acquired materialistic Europeanized outlook had now made me conscious of the simplest of pleasures to be taken free of charge in my part of the Bronx. The privacy of its unused quiet residential pavements, its woods, zoo and the cloistered peace of its cemetery became encouragement to one’s legs and lungs and sagging spirits as I daily walked for miles. And I then first began to sing its praises to unbelieving ears.
By this suspicious time in American life, no one if they could help it was putting foot out of their cars, or eyes anywhere but on a television set. And there was the odd occasion when police squad cars were dispatched by mistrusting citizens to investigate that bearded man standing staring on the corner, but I continued to take my undisturbed novel writing reverie on this open land. Pondering as I did so the sombre stories come to pass of one’s growing up friends’ lives, many having moved to establish in bigger and better houses on bigger and better lawns. Their childhoods left behind to gather dust in this triangular little piece of one’s Bronx which I thought had begun to deserve its own small historic legend. Being part of somewhere so unsung, unknown and unclaimed by those who had lived there. Yet gaining its own Gothic aura just as mystic as a fog shrouded Westminster Abbey. With some of its sons now having made themselves at least felt on the vast unfeeling fabric of America. John Duffy, who composes music, Richard Gallagher, who catches criminals, C. Donald Kuntze, an eminent gynaecologist. Plus my own brother T.J., painter, composer and engineer, who still, after everyone has fled, alone holds out in that old white house on the top of that hill in the uttermost northern Bronx.
And now, over so many years and three thousand heaving ocean miles away, looking back. Watching from a high rear bedroom window on East 236th Street, out across the stretches of Williamsbridge, Soundview and Clason Point to the nightly fireworks streaking the Flushing Meadow sky over the 1939 World’s Fair. Or on an outdoor stairs, seeing a bolt of lightning strike just above the head of my ducking father. The festive Labor Day parades, a band booming and blaring, bunting waving, floats passing, ice cream frozen in smoking dry ice and hot dog picnics had on these Indian hunting grounds and battlefields. My evening visits with a paper bag of sandwiches for my father at the old 233rd Street fire house as the alarm bells tolled repeating other far away fire alarms in the city. Being given a dime and a compliment of what a good boy I was and departing to see the light over his desk where he worked on his reports or wrote his poetry in a window which looked out over the cemetery. He died only a stone’s throw away. In a hospital converted from a building where my young close friend Alan Kuntze, before his own airforce pilot life ended in the last days of the war, went to junior high school and equipped me with my first three words of French.
‘Vous êtes stupide.’
He also tried to teach me a gentlemanly deportment over pineapple sodas and strawberry milkshakes. And to walk on the outside of girls along the street as I did with his sister Carol on those autumnal high school afternoons when the maple leaves were falling and the poly noses fell.
And one consoles oneself that perhaps one day the neighbours, who growled and swore seeing me come and go from my front porch, would convene to hold some redeeming ceremony, at which this borough’s former children who had made some small mark out in the rest of the world, and who were now unashamedly publicly admitting their origins, might now be welcomed back on some podium, while the assembled tax payers, whose gardens one once had desecrated, gave thunderous applause as one was ushered with bands playing to step up on a raised red, white and blue taffeta trimmed dais. To stand beaming in front of this cheering audience. Who no longer shook fists or sneered. But now proudly handed to one a radiant brass plated Bronx Oscar.
But alas, even with long buried sentimental memories awake I cannot see even a
s patient a man as my erstwhile Bronx Home News route manager, Mr Baumgartner, forgetting the stacks of free sample newspapers I daily slammed down the sewers, or my shouts of drop dead to the complaints of the paper’s many yeared subscribers. One felt they were the authoritarian oppressor who had to be chastened before one stepped from this modestly favoured little community to go out fighting in the world for fortune and to further enlarge a scandalous name. And when, just a few years back, I last walked on a Woodlawn sidewalk, I came upon a corner over one of my favourite sewers and found conspicuously scribbled in the cement two of my childhood friends’ names, written when time, alive only to one’s dreams, spent itself so carelessly, silently ticking away in the promise of endless leisure years yet left to live in the Gothic grandeur of my own romantic Bronx.
1983
An Expatriate View of America
Stretched on shady warm Mexican sand, I write this in the tropics by the Pacific ocean’s surf under pale green coconuts ripening high up in the sinuously waving arms of the palm trees. And hope to finish it, as I am presently doing, in a far away more northern latitude where a whole gang of strange bugs having a circus are not seething through one’s alimentary canal. As they have now recently ceased doing and I contentedly rewrite and watch the apple trees blossom and hear bird song in a midland Irish orchard with the rain gently falling from its grey tumbling source on this roaring green land. And I sit thinking, as I often do, of America. Where on that ancient continent and in that then hundred and fifty year old country, I was born fifty years ago in Brooklyn to be raised in the Bronx. And except for my first twenty years in the King of Cities, New York, I have been an alien nearly everywhere for most of my life.
J.P. Donleavy: An Author and His Image Page 5
