The Butler's Child

by Lewis M. Steel

  * * *

  Born in Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital in 1937, I was brought home to a luxury apartment building called the Beresford, on the corner of Central Park West overlooking the Museum of Natural History. Lorenz Hart, the lyricist who, with Richard Rodgers, created some of the best-loved musical comedies ever produced on Broadway, lived in the apartment next to ours. German governesses took care of my brother and me. Seeking more space and perhaps “the gentility” of Manhattan’s East Side, we moved to a new apartment building on Park Avenue.

  Summers during those pre–World War II years were spent at my grandparents’ mansion in Rye, on Long Island Sound. My grandfather kept his luxury yacht tied to the estate’s dock on one side, and my father his speedboat on the other.

  My mother liked to say that I was a handful. I heard countless times about how I would chew on the curtains if my crib was placed close to the window, and more generally how I kept the nurse busy. Unlike my brother, who was the picture of health, I was less than robust. I had asthma, which meant I needed a lot of monitoring. Decades later my mother would tell my sister-in-law that she was the only one who loved me as a child.

  My poor health may explain to some extent why I have so few memories of Rye. My only concrete recollection is a particular Fourth of July night when the fireworks scared me. After the war started, my grandparents sold the Rye mansion. Major gave his yacht to the Coast Guard, a story I remember because, like his chance to buy the Yankees franchise, it entered family legend.

  The next stop was Crail Farm, a sprawling 250-acre property in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Hendersonville, North Carolina. Years later I was told that Major wanted the place as a fallback in the event Germany attacked New York City.

  At the age of four in North Carolina, I went to kindergarten at a Catholic school run by an order of French nuns. Being sick with asthma during much of the damp winter, I had to repeat kindergarten. I was absent so often during the two years I went to that school that each time I went felt like the first day all over again, except a little worse. I was always the new kid who came to class and watched the other kids laugh and play. The nuns tried hard to be nice and get me involved, but I remained outside the circle.

  Tenant families lived on the farm and worked it, growing crops and raising animals. They were white. I only knew where two of the farmers’ houses were, but I never went inside them. I remember thinking vaguely that those homes were off-limits. Except for my brother, John, and Junior, a farm boy who was ordered to stay away after biting me, it was just grown-ups and ancient Appalachian foothills and the farmers, who rarely talked to me. When my brother and parents went horseback riding, the loneliness seemed endless. I felt like an alien wandering around in a strange land, terrified of every new sound and yet scared my reaction might set off one of those asthma attacks that made me feel as if every breath I managed to pull into my lungs was the last.

  My father hired a young black man named Bill Rutherford while we were at Crail Farm, and he would continue with our family as a butler and all-around man until he died many years later. He was about the same age as my dad. Two women also worked for us—also black. They did the cooking and cleaning. In the evenings after dinner, all three disappeared to a gloomy-looking shack in a grove of towering pines behind the house.

  From his very first day working for us, Bill made me feel happy. He was always smiling and ready to play with me, taking the time to lift me in the air or muss my hair no matter what else he was doing. That was part of his job, I suppose, but to me it felt like a lot of attention—more than I was used to.

  It wasn’t long before Bill was drafted into the navy during World War II, and got assigned to the Seabees. My father offered to match whatever part of his pay he sent back, and Bill followed through.

  When my father himself was drafted, John and I went to live with Major and Bessie in Miami Beach, where they had an estate that looked out over the Atlantic from the spot where either the Fontainebleau or the Eden Roc now stands. In faded photographs of my brother and me in our monogrammed linen shirts, with our hair combed just right, we look like little princes.

  I went to a public school in Miami Beach for a while, before being sent to another Catholic school, where the nuns were harsh and dogmatic. I’ll never forget my first day, when the teacher told the other children not to mind me: “That little boy in the back doesn’t say his prayers because he’s Jewish,” she said, as the children craned their heads to see the strange addition to their class. “You see, he doesn’t believe in Jesus Christ.”

  There was murmuring, little hands and faces registering the information as I looked at my shoes pretending I wasn’t the center of attention.

  Shortly before my father returned from serving in the Army Air Corps somewhere in the Midwest, we moved back to New York City. I was seven, so my parents enrolled me at the neighborhood public school, PS 6, where both my father and my Grandma Bessie had gone. The class I landed in skipped forward because of wartime overcrowding. Because I had difficulty learning to read, my parents got me a tutor—the wealthy always knew how to make sure their children had every advantage.

  Bill must have returned from the Seabees to work for my parents at about this time, but it is hard for me to remember as I can’t even recall him or even my father being gone. Nor do I remember when Lorraina joined Bill. I knew she came from North Carolina, and I think her sister worked at the Crail Farm house. I was told they were married, but I never knew when and where. All I really knew was that I was happy to have both Bill and Lorraina around.

  When John and I got into it, Bill was my protector—or at least that’s how it seemed to me, though keeping the peace was in his interest, because if we wrecked the apartment it would only mean more work for him. A giant of a man in stature, no one was gentler. Bill was dignified, and so was his wife, Lorraina. They seemed to be part of each other—Lorraina tiny and beautiful, Bill big and kind. She cooked and cleaned while he served and did the heavy lifting. They were like a second set of parents. I used to love whiling away hour after hour in their matchbook-size room off the kitchen, just hanging out.

  Lorraina had her own children from another marriage—a boy named Duby, and Sister Baby. My father had a stepfather, so I knew how that worked, but it was a different situation because his father had died, so there was never an issue about where he was going to live. But I had no idea about the man Lorraina had those kids with. I remember wondering who the father was when Lorraina mentioned Duby and Sister Baby. I imagined them living with their father or Lorraina’s family in North Carolina. I do know that Lorraina missed her children because she said so. Even so, on a day-to-day basis she was more my mom than theirs. From time to time John and I talked about who took care of Duby and Sister Baby, but neither of us had the life experience to get very far in those conversations. There was something unreal about the way Lorraina and her kids lived compared with the way we did. I couldn’t imagine being in their shoes. It seemed sad, but at the same time their life was abstract, and I didn’t stay in those moods for a very long time. Over the years Lorraina brought Duby and Sister Baby to our apartment when they were very little. Those visits made the situation even harder for me to fathom.

  When I asked my mother and father how Lorraina could live away from her children, I remember vague replies, as if I was asking something that was out of bounds or made them feel uncomfortable. I got the impression that I shouldn’t think too much about things like that.

  Seared into my brain, however, was the way my mother used to talk to both Bill and Lorraina as if they were children, using a high-pitched and condescending voice she used with no one else except servants. Her words escape me now, but not the feeling.

  When I was ten years old, I came down with rheumatic fever. Being bedridden for a month brought my time at PS 6 to an end. I was enrolled at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx for the seventh and eighth grades to make sure I would be ready for Culver Military Academy in In
diana, where my brother had just started. To this day I am not sure why we were sent there.

  * * *

  Not exactly fitting in but always trying: That was my experience of childhood. I struggled and thought I had to prove myself. Being sick a lot of the time served only to amplify those feelings. The sole upside to being sick was that I got to spend more time with my mother, who was at her best when I was ill. She would play cards with me and help nurse me back to health. That summer my parents rented a lakefront house in Maine. We had lots of guests and, of course, Bill and Lorraina. By the end of our time there, I was in pretty good health.

  Riverdale Country School was a hard slog of trying to make friends with kids who had known one another for a long time, and keeping up with the demands of the teachers. The school was a bus trip away at the outer reaches of the city, on a hill near the large homes of the wealthy. Still in recovery mode, I was behind the curve on the sports field. To make things just a little more difficult, I was nearsighted, and my parents had no idea. It took about a year before I complained and got glasses. In most other ways Riverdale was okay. There were no tough kids to avoid as there had been at PS 6. The message was that we were members of the elite, a select group who went to one of the city’s finest private schools. I am almost certain there was not a nonwhite face on the campus—not among the students, faculty, administrators, or clerical workers. Maybe not even among the maintenance men and service people. Peering out of the bus windows on the way to Riverdale from Park Avenue, we saw black people as we traversed Harlem. It seemed as if they were contained in a separate world with garbage-strewn streets and sad-looking tenements all stuck together and falling apart. To us Harlem was a dangerous place that was best to pass through as quickly as possible. It was a foreign world, a hostile territory that existed between the well-maintained buildings that comprised my worlds at home and at school. As we rumbled toward Riverdale, however, we were safe and protected. With the 1948 presidential election approaching, we sang, “Dewey’s in the White House, Truman’s in the ash can!” Everyone seemed to be a Republican back then.

  * * *

  Grandma Bessie presided over Friday-night dinners for the Levy clan in a private dining room at the Park Royal Hotel on West Seventy-Third Street, where my great-grandparents, Moe and Esther, lived. Bessie’s sisters and brothers and their families always showed up. Moe and Esther were kosher, but as far as I could see there was little religion among the Levy offspring. Family members gossiped that one of Bessie’s brothers, Ralph, married a Catholic and the son of her sister Dee married a Protestant, which was another thing to talk about.

  John and I received no religious training, and our family never went to temple, but that didn’t seem to matter. My father’s brother, Carl, had been captured during the war in the Battle of the Bulge and put in a concentration camp with other Jewish soldiers. He came home weighing eighty pounds. So even though we always had a Christmas tree and Easter-egg hunts, I knew we were Jewish and that there were people out there who really didn’t like us. Without being taught, we learned that being Jewish was something that mattered.

  Uncle Ralph’s Catholic wife as well as my aunt Dee’s daughter-in-law looked more or less as if they might be “one of us,” and they were friendly enough, but still, when it came to the family they were outsiders, which meant they weren’t part of the inner circle that got to sit at the dinner table where the family congregated on Friday nights after they were switched to the Hampshire House, the exclusive Central Park South hotel–co-op where my grandparents lived.

  Bessie’s sister Ruth Leeds and her husband, Al, who called me Blackie (which I hated), were sometimes there. On other evenings they would come after dinner, with their daughter, Helene, and her husband, Ross Newhouse.

  “Why does Uncle Al call me Blackie?” I remember asking my father.

  “He doesn’t mean anything by it,” my father told me. “You have dark hair.”

  Blackie was what someone might call a black man, and I didn’t want to be black. Black people lived in Harlem. Whatever my feelings for Bill and Lorraina, and regardless of their feelings for me, I had already internalized America’s racial hierarchy, and while I might never attain the same heights scaled by my fair-haired brother in that highly racialized scheme of things, I definitely didn’t want to be a black person who served people, had to work all the time, and went home to scary neighborhoods. I also didn’t like the thought of looking like black people because to me white was the only way to be. It was obvious: White skin was better than brown skin. Blond hair was better than dark hair. A narrow nose was better than a wide one. Uncle Al made it sound as if I were in the same league as a butler or a cook when he called me Blackie, and I wanted him to stop.

  It was a complicated problem for a boy to navigate; Bill and Lorraina were central figures in my childhood. But there it was. They were black and I was white, and I liked being white. It didn’t lessen my feelings for them, but I knew my color was better, and theirs marked them as lesser people. When Bill and Lorraina went off on Thursdays and Sundays after breakfast, I remember missing them terribly. As I grew older, my love for Bill and Lorraina took the form of thinking about them enough to wonder more about their situation, so I questioned my parents about the way they were treated. They invariably replied that “the help” had Thursdays and Sundays off, but it didn’t seem that way. Bill and Lorraina worked parts of those days, which meant they worked every day of the week.

  “That’s the way it is,” my parents said. “That’s how everyone does it.”

  Because I wanted Bill and Lorraina around as much as possible, I was easily reassured. But something seemed not quite right to me. That said, I was a kid, and my focus was on myself. I was generally able to hold on to a perceived injustice, real or imagined, only if it related to me, and even then, not always and not for very long. My brother the golden boy. Uncle Al calling me Blackie. The tough kids from the other side of the tracks. Whatever. I remembered those things—what it felt like to be the underdog. But I certainly did not make the leap connecting my perceived grievances to the much-harder-to-comprehend status of being black.

  * * *

  The racial hierarchy had become ingrained. I knew it from the microcosm of our relationship with Bill and Lorraina. They were in our apartment to help, and they were paid salaries. My mother had a buzzer placed strategically in the dining room, and she used it when she wanted the help to do something. The relationship was hazy to me as a child, but I understood the broad strokes. The job description for domestic help in our household, had one existed, would not have included “Love and be loved by Lewis.” They were there to work, and that was that. It was this divide between “the help” and me that provided my first introduction to the relationship between race and social hierarchy. Power was a birthright, which was manifested in the way my parents treated the servants. I suppose that—compared with some households—they did so gently and with everyone’s humanity mostly intact.

  I sensed that while Bill and Lorraina were completely available to my parents in their worker roles, their friendship and finer emotions were not. Those things had to be earned. I liked that thought, because they liked me. What I didn’t see then was the big picture, where being pleasant and helping my parents raise me was part of the job description. Years later I began to understand that the complicated love that existed between me and Bill and Lorraina—all three of us wired not to engage in it entirely, or not in an open, uncomplicated way—had a lot to do with my lifelong attempts to change the pervasive racial dysfunction in our society. The fact that I never did ask Bill and Lorraina how they felt about me, or my not telling them how I felt about them, and that we had to rely on the hugs that adults and children give each other has stayed with me all my life.

  * * *

  When I was about twelve, my father gave me a book about the French resistance which I think was called Paris Underground. Its heroes defied the Nazis to get downed flyers out of France. They were unde
rdogs, and I admired them. I imagined myself alongside them, a ragged crew fighting for something that mattered. I think my father intuited my rebel leanings and tried to be supportive. Soon after that book about the resistance, he had me reading Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense.

  My father’s interest in the renowned “Attorney for the Damned” was that of a spectator. The stories were great. Darrow’s cases were adapted into plays and movies, including Inherit the Wind and Compulsion. Darrow was a charismatic man who did important work—an American hero. I wanted to be a lawyer like him. I did eventually become a lawyer, though I wasn’t often associated with the sort of high-profile cases that were Darrow’s stock in trade. There was never a hanging tree outside the courthouse door when I served as counsel. With the exception of Hurricane Carter, none of my cases have been turned into movies. Like Hurricane’s, however, I tended to take on hard-to-win or unwinnable cases—though I never thought that way—and other cases because they held the possibility of breaking down racial barriers in the United States. I eschewed the interference of special interests—corporate or otherwise—whose objectives were antagonistic to the cause. (This was not true of Darrow, since he occasionally worked for big-money entities, but my financial situation let me be more of a purist.) While my path diverged from Darrow’s, his career blazed a trail for the kind of work that attracted me most. Like him, I came of age during the still-evolving uproar in America’s cities, which were exploding with the anger of people too long kept down. The Harlem I experienced as a child on the bus ride to Riverdale Country School ceased being contained. The tone and tenor of that outrage reached a fever pitch.