“I won’t remember this. Here,” I said and handed him a pad and pen we keep by the telephone. “Write down the ingredients for me.”
“Yes, yes. For you, grandfather.”
I watched him write it:
C-U-C-U-M-B-E-R
“I have a good idea!” I said to the kids. They gathered around, holding tight to their balloons. “Before we send our balloons up to heaven, why don’t we each make a wish?”
“Yeah! A wish! A wish!”
“Will it come true?” one boy asked very earnestly.
“If you tell me your wish, I’ll write it on a piece of paper and maybe when it gets up to heaven an angel will see it and read it.” I was far out on a limb now. I had only meant to slow things down while keeping them interested. “Like, my wish is for D on his birthday. I want him to grow up big and strong and have a good life.” I wrote “A Good Life for D” on a small piece of paper, rolled it up, tied it in the ribbon of the balloon, and let it go. We watched it rise. The adults stopped their conversations and watched, too. “Now me!” said a girl of five or six. “I want a girl baby cousin!” I wrote it and we launched it.
“Me! Me! I want a Xbox!” a boy said, bringing me his balloon. I asked him if he wanted to make a different wish, for something that would make life better. “A Xbox! A Xbox!” he insisted. I wrote it as the first drops fell from the sky and we sent his balloon up into the rain. Soon it was coming down hard, the adults scrambling from their chairs to herd the kids indoors.
“No, Mommy! No!” the boy cried. He sat down. His mother dragged him up by the arm as he twisted and yelled, “No, Mommy!” looking at the sky. “My Xbox! My Xbox!”
“Child, what are you talking about? Hush up that nonsense right now and get in that house.”
In the steamy house he huddled in the corner, arms crossed on his chest, sulking and glaring at me as if I’d played a cruel trick on him. Later on, talking with Veronica, I learned that the boy’s father is a quadriplegic, the result of a drive-by shooting that left him with a severed spinal cord, and I wondered what, in the childhood realm of magical thinking, that Xbox meant to his son: the sky must have seemed awfully low to that boy, the future so close that it hardly existed.
Sometime during that downpour, Smithy and the young woman slipped away without a good-bye.
My father died later that same week. The last e-mail I received from him suggested that Kathi might want to call my cousin Elizabeth, who had been successfully treated for breast cancer. He sent along her e-mail address and phone number.
When I first began to think about having gone to that film with my father, the question that seemed obvious was, of course, Why would a grown man—my father was twenty-nine at the time—take a five-year-old child to see such violence? And even though that’s a good place to start, it presumes a great deal. It is unlikely that my father knew the content would be so graphic. War films to that point were not realistic and violent portrayals of battle. Especially during the war, Hollywood refrained from portraying the horror and gore that Attack! did not shy from. I also wonder if he had any idea at all that the film would be disturbing to me: his first-born, I was the only five-year-old he had ever known. The youngest in his family, he had absolutely no experience caring for a child. Otherwise, perhaps, he would have broken the film’s spell, gathered our things together, and taken me out of there. These things matter. They must be considered. In those days my father was a counselor and coach at the Boys Club, where he was saturated in his all-male world of leather and liniment, wrestling mats, boxing rings, basketball courts. I think that he couldn’t wait for me to be old enough to stop being a child and be a boy, or a “young man.” None of this would have been conscious or intentional on his part.
Palance was my father’s favorite actor. “He’s from Hazleton, up the coal regions,” he always said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder as if the coal regions were right behind him. The actor was in fact from Lattimer, a neighboring town in Luzerne County, site of the Lattimer Massacre of 1897, in which sheriff’s deputies killed nineteen striking miners and injured forty-nine others. My father’s people were from “up the coal regions.” My grandfather, born in 1890, had been a “breaker boy,” which meant that he went to school until he was ten, and then into the mines, where he spent his boyhood on a wooden bench in the colliery, beside a coal chute twelve hours a day, breaking coal into lumps of somewhat uniform size, and chipping away slate, shale, and other impurities with a hammer. My grandfather’s entire coming-of-age took place in the mines. He grew into an apprentice, a journeyman, and then a master miner with his own crew. My grandmother was a miner’s daughter. Together they began their family in a company house, buying from the company store, trying to stay a step ahead of the systemic and deliberate local inflation that trapped so many, managing to save a little money. When my grandfather narrowly survived a mine explosion that killed the members of his crew, losing his hearing in the process, my grandmother had had enough and insisted he forsake mining. They moved to Allentown, where my father was born, and they opened a small bread store there while my grandfather’s hearing was slowly restored.
The “breaker boys” are usually credited with starting the rebellion that gave rise to the United Mine Workers union and the subsequent strikes that resulted in the massacres at Lattimer and elsewhere. These boys, hard as the anthracite that blackened their hands and faces, were also the most visible and shocking example of the child labor practices of the time. Their plight galvanized activists and politicians to write the nation’s first child labor law in the early years of the century, a law that was overturned by the Supreme Court, which ruled that children had a “right to work.” In fact, it was only when the Great Depression resulted in adults competing for those jobs that legislation placing restrictions on child labor was passed.
I recall sitting quietly with Bobby in my grandparents’ living room with my father and uncles while my mother, grandmother, and girl cousins remained in the kitchen, cleaning up after supper. Impossible to remember what the men talked about—although I was thirteen when my grandfather died, these memories, which seem to have rolled themselves into one big representation, are from earlier. I know because Bobby is with me and he is not in a wheelchair. The overarching feeling, for which the deference and respect of his four sons is the only evidence I have, was that my grandfather was a very important man. I thought he was the governor of Pennsylvania probably, but maybe of the whole world, because that’s how my father always addressed him. “Howdy, Governor,” he’d say.
Or maybe I was impressed by the simple fact that he sat in his chair by the window and did not rise when my grandmother greeted us at the door. You went to him at the beginning and end of every visit; he did not greet you or see you out. There was a reason for this: my grandfather’s legs had been shattered in a fall from a scaffolding, and it was hard for him to rise, get his two canes securely in hand, and get going. He wore high-top leather shoes for support. At least once I saw his bare leg, a shiny purple, swollen as a sausage about to burst. Reasonable as it therefore was for him to stay put, to me as a boy it lent him the air of a chieftain, especially with my father and uncles, all grown men, seated before him. Whatever the topic, they always seemed to be reporting to him.
It goes without saying that he didn’t drive. Because we lived closest, my father was often the one to drive him to appointments. I recall one time we were driving along Front Street, by the river, near the two breweries and the slaughterhouse. It was poor. It smelled poor. It looked poor. It was chaotic, ragged, broken. Concrete steps crumbling away to gravel; screen doors rusted and torn. An immigrant neighborhood, port of entry to Allentown, it was Greek, Hungarian, Polish then, with some Syrians and Ukrainians, too. Riverfront Park with its three baseball diamonds, its bathhouse for swimming in the river, its basketball and handball courts, cushioned the length of the neighborhood. It was playing in that park, the smell of hops and barley thick in the air, along with the stench of fle
sh becoming meat, that forged forever in my mind a connection between poverty and slaughter.
We crossed the tracks into an area called Trout Creek, into the “colored” neighborhood, more row houses, with here or there a lot filled with rubble. I gawked from the rear window of the car. There seemed to be a lot of people hanging around. It seemed crowded, uncomfortably so, and quiet, very quiet, as we passed by. Silent blank stares.
“Damn niggers breed like rabbits,” my grandfather said, “they’d just as soon slit your throat. You keep that window rolled up back there and your car door locked if you don’t want your throat cut.” It took me both hands, panicked, to roll up the window.
It has taken me much of my life to roll it back down.
Could my grandfather have believed this? Could he not see the overcrowding for the confinement it was? And was this fear a twisted sort of empathy, an acknowledgment and understanding of the rage he imagined seething in that neighborhood?
Recently I was driving through Vermont with a friend, a German painter and photographer. I didn’t know her well. Letta and I were both month-long residents of an artists’ community, the Vermont Studio Center. Every so often she asked me to pull over so she could take a photo: of a covered bridge, of a tumbledown barn, of one of those sun-filled valleys that suddenly opens up around a curve in the road. Sometimes, a little unsure of her English, she would ask me if she was using a word correctly. “Do you say in English ‘transverse’? This piece that goes across the top?” She had just taken a picture of a covered bridge. “Ah. So. I think this transverse must have been once a very tall tree.” Other times, I could tell I had used some colloquialism that threw her. She asked how my work was going.
I told her the writing was slow, that I had the feeling I needed more information. I said I was trying to understand how my grandfather became such a racist. I wanted to understand him in the context of his time and place. I didn’t think his lack of education had much to do with it, I said. Certainly I have met many educated racists. I wondered if it stemmed from competition for mining jobs. I figured that as freed slaves moved north in the decades following emancipation, they affected the labor market, perhaps at a time when workers were beginning to organize successfully. I said I was looking into that, but that I wasn’t sure. I knew from my researches that the Ku Klux Klan was quite strong in Pennsylvania in the early years of the twentieth century, but my grandfather, being the son of Catholic immigrants, would more likely have been a target of their hatred, so I was barking up the wrong tree there. I said I was trying to understand the attitudes of the time and place in which my grandfather was steeped. “It’s very puzzling to me,” I said. “My family liked to tell stories of my grandparents inviting the homeless to their table for a meal during the Depression. Clearly none of their hungry guests were black. I just can’t grasp his hatred and fear. I’m trying to understand where it came from.”
Letta was silent long enough that even though the road was winding I turned my head to try to read her, prepared to clarify if I’d used an expression she didn’t understand. She was glaring down at the camera she held with both hands in her lap. Her chest was heaving. I glanced back at the road, steered.
“This is nonsense!” she blurted. “I’m sorry, Richard, but I have heard these excuses, all of them, for the whole of my life. This is nonsense! The times. The circumstances. A person always has a choice: you either respect people or you turn them into the other. My parents were both Nazis. They were Nazis! There are no excuses. There is always a choice.” She brought her knuckles to her mouth and stared straight ahead. I looked back at the road just in time to stay on it.
I wanted to protest but I could not disturb the silence that had filled the car in the wake of her vehemence. I wanted to argue that a person is shaped by his or her times as a tree is shaped by the weather, and that in fact the kinds of trees that grow in a place are determined by the climate. But I drove along, hugging the curves, wondering instead about analogies, about whether and when they turn into excuses, and I couldn’t say a word.
I remember my grandfather’s wide silk neckties. After my grandfather died, my father gathered them up and hung them in a clump on a hanger in the bathroom closet. They were my grandfather’s pride, the coup de grâce of his sartorial elegance. I have no idea if his clothes were fashionable, only that my grandfather loved to dress in a suit and a fedora with a white silk lining. I think about it now and imagine my grandfather in front of a mirror, knotting one of his extraordinary ties, saying to himself, “Not bad for a breaker boy, by God, not bad for a coal cracker.” The ties were nearly six inches wide and embroidered with birds, butterflies, and flowers that might more likely adorn a kimono or a Mandarin robe. I remember studying them, trying, before I had any tastes to exercise, to decide if they were beautiful or garish, vibrant or too loud. “Don’t be fooled,” my father said. “These are bound to come back in style. Just you wait and see.”
What I’ve been told is that my grandfather fought in World War I. But I don’t know anything about that, and growing up I knew little about that war. When my grandfather played his cherry wood Edison Victrola for me, with the little handle to wind the turntable, I heard:
Over there! Over there!
Send the word, send the word to beware.
The Yanks are coming,
The Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming everywhere.
Over there! Over there!
The music always seemed a little fast, just like the early movies I sometimes saw on TV or the newsreels they still showed sometimes before movies. The records were as heavy as diner plates. It occurs to me now that this song is our real national anthem, or ought to be, embodying America’s true relation to the rest of the world.
I once asked my father if he had any idea what lay behind my grandfather’s racism. “Racism? Oh, hell, he hated everybody.” He picked up the remote to let me know this would be a short conversation, reached down, yanked the lever on the side of his chair, and reclined. “I stopped trying to figure my father out a long time ago.” And the look he gave me before he turned on the TV suggested that I ought to just grow up and do the same.
Impossible. My fascination, my obsession, with my father, with who he was and where he came from, what he thought, felt, and believed, has been constant throughout my life. At least since the day we walked out of the Allen theatre in a silence that lasted all the way home, I have wondered at him and the world as he understood it.
When I was nine, the American Legion baseball team my father coached won a championship, and instead of the traditional championship jackets he offered them a weekend trip to New York. I was the batboy so I got to go, too.
My father’s car, his first, was a black Pontiac that sounded like a machine gun if you drove faster than 25 mph. On our way there we had to stop several times to let the radiator cool and get water. One of the players in the car—we were traveling in a caravan with the other coaches and with one or two of the players who had cars—said something about pissing into the radiator and everyone laughed. I laughed along but wondered if that wasn’t a good idea since I had to pee and was afraid to ask if we could stop.
“We are under the river!” my father blurted as we entered the Holland Tunnel. Holland was a country, I knew from school, that would be entirely underwater were it not for the windmills and dikes that held back the sea, so the name of the tunnel made a nine-year-old’s sense to me.
The parking garage for guests of the Prince George Hotel was a huge machine that seemed to work something like a Ferris wheel. The attendant drove the Pontiac into a steel mesh cage, and another man pressed a button and sent the car up, up into the building until we couldn’t see it anymore, and several other cars in their cages came into view. I recall the smell of the garage, the exhaust fumes, the layers of grease and grime in the machinery, but there was nothing ugly about it; it seemed elegant to me and brilliant, my first understanding of the verticality of New York, which became
almost unbearably exhilarating looking uptown to Thirty-Fourth Street, where the Empire State Building, which my father claimed was one of the seven wonders of the world, stood in its impossible glory.
Everything was a wonder to me on that trip and there’s hardly a point in recounting the wide-eyed provincial kid arriving in the metropolis, but as we headed for Yankee Stadium that afternoon, I saw poverty more abject than any I’d seen in Allentown. Its hopelessness struck me with something like the vertigo I felt looking up at the skyscrapers of Manhattan, as if there were a pit exactly as deep as the Empire State Building. I saw kids my age, clothes shiny with grime, rags really, scrambling over piles of bricks in an alley, people hanging around doorways, leaning against walls, sitting on the front steps of buildings. Black people. I’d never seen so many black people. I was morbidly fascinated and wondered what was wrong with them; didn’t they know how to live?
All it took to ratify my parochialism, my naive self-centeredness, my—say it—my racism, was the black man I saw drunk on a subway platform; right under a sign that said No Spitting, he hawked up a green wad and—och-tooey!— spurt it on the tracks. Then he glared at me. He was disgusting, dirty, perhaps dangerous. I stepped close to my father. Soon we’d be at the ballpark where Mantle and Maris would team up to clobber the opposition, where my father had promised to “buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack” like the song he’d taught me when I was three.
“What a beautiful day for baseball!” My father pronounced as we emerged from the subway.
That afternoon, Mantle hit three homers in a double-header, one in the first game and two in the second. I don’t recall who the Yankees played.
We drove home at night; it was cooler and the radiator didn’t overheat. I sat in the back, hanging out the window, looking behind us at the skyline as it receded. Over and over, the song I heard everywhere during the weekend replayed in my ears, Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song”: Come Mister Tallyman, tally me banana. Daylight come and me wanna go home. When I could no longer see the skyline, I pulled my head back inside the car, resolved that I would live there one day.
Love and Fury Page 8
