A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  I know why I did poorly as a student in such subjects as chemistry and mathematics, both of which I found boring and confusing, but to receive mediocre grades in English upset me very much because I did pay attention in class and I was interested in the subject—and, to make matters worse, my failure to excel in English gave impetus to my father’s argument that my true talents might someday be realized in my capacities as a tailor.

  I was his only son. I was his main hope as the inheritor of his business, as a follower in this craft that had been pridefully practiced by some elders in his family since the era of Napoleonic rule in southern Italy. And so as my schoolboy journalism continued to absorb most of my free time, and as my academic standing in my junior year fell below the level required by our principal to earn his recommendation for college-entrance consideration, my father became more insistent that I sit for a few hours a week in his workroom practicing certain rudiments under his guidance, such as how to cut and secure a pair of trouser cuffs, and how to make buttonholes, and how to baste the inner lining of a jacket. At the very least, he explained, tailoring was “something I could fall back on.” He also tried to reason with me while repeating an offer that, in my darkest moments of self-doubt, I must admit held a modicum of appeal.

  “Wouldn’t you like to live in Paris after you’re out of high school?” he would ask. All that was required of me, I knew, was to occupy a guest room in the Paris apartment of an older Italian cousin of my father’s who had left their village for Paris as a tailor in 1911, and who now owned a thriving shop on the rue de la Paix where I could work as an apprentice. I had also been told that this cousin’s clientele included General Charles de Gaulle, several French film directors and performers, and other prominent people who my father hoped would convince me that there was a glamorous side to the tailoring profession. But I knew from watching my father at work that tailoring was tedious, time-consuming, and physically demanding, and that it often brought considerable pain to his back muscles and fingers. He made each suit stitch by stitch, avoiding the use of a sewing machine because he wanted to feel the needle in his fingers as he penetrated a piece of silk or wool and moved at a worm’s pace along the seam of a shoulder or a sleeve. If whatever he did deviated from his definition of perfection, he would pull it apart and do it again. He hoped to create the illusion of seamlessness, to attain artistic expression with a needle and thread. Much as I admired his aspirations, I was never tempted to become a tailor, and yet I listened respectfully whenever my father alluded to my possible apprenticeship in Paris—which he did more than once after my diligence and weeks of work on my term paper had earned me only a B-minus.

  I tried to defend myself as my father shared my disappointment with the grade. My teacher’s standards in English were not necessarily relevant to my future in journalism, I insisted. My research indicated that the great Adolph Ochs had begun his career without encouragement from his English teachers—he, too, had been an average student, one whose intelligence and talents became apparent later in his life. He had started out in journalism as a floor sweeper on a small newspaper in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was also convinced, although my reasoning was based on emotion, without a shred of evidence, that my English teacher’s assessment of my classroom work was influenced by personal factors, such as the fact that she privately loathed me, or at least disapproved of me, and thus graded me harshly. The B-minus was not the lowest mark I had received in her class. I got mostly C’s, sometimes D’s, and once—after I had misspelled Shakespeare’s name twice in an essay on Hamlet—an F. She wrote notes of explanation across the front page of each student’s composition. On mine, she criticized me constantly for writing sentences that were “too wordy” and “indirect,” and sometimes she underlined sentences in red ink and wrote in the margin a single word: syntax. This word might appear two or three times on the same page with exclamation points: syntax! syntax! syntax! Although I looked up the meaning of the word in different dictionaries, I was never entirely sure how it related to what was wrong with my grammar, and yet I was reluctant to approach her. I felt intimidated by her in ways that I did not when in the presence of other teachers. I had transferred to this public high school after eight years in parochial school, and my immediate reaction to the new building was liberating. Here the faculty members were predominantly Protestant, and they were definitely less strict and oppressively virtuous than the nuns I had known. In this particular English composition class, however, I felt even more indecisive and detached than I had years before in parochial school, where my main concern had been in keeping my distance from the big Irish boys in the schoolyard who often ganged up on Italian-Americans during recess. In those days we constituted a small minority within the larger minority of Irish Catholics on this Protestant-governed island of Ocean City, founded in 1879 by Methodist ministers. But my teacher in this English composition class had all but reduced me to thinking that I was foreign-born, that English was my second language. My position on the student newspaper and my bylined articles in the town weekly and sometimes in the Atlantic City daily, articles that then represented my sole claim to whatever capabilities I possessed, never drew a word of encouragement from my teacher, nor did she even mention them to me in private before or after class. I could not believe that she never saw them in print, or that she remained silent about them because they were not pertinent to my work in her classroom. No matter how low her opinion of journalism might have been, nor how little regard she might have had for those editors who considered my articles publishable, her omission in this situation surely was connected to some personal dislike of me, I repeatedly told myself, although beyond this I did not know what to think. Or rather what I did think only added to my frustration and bewilderment. I think that in a strange way—strange to everyone except the kind of teenage boy I was in that time and place, a pimply-faced sixteen-year-old in the apex of ignorance and wonderment about women—I was in love with her.

  Each afternoon I sat waiting eagerly for her to enter the classroom. She was a slender, blue-eyed blonde with a long-legged stride who held her head high and who often wore tight-fitting tweed suits that accentuated her figure. She was then in her early twenties, perhaps teaching teenagers for the first time, which might have explained why she seemed to be so high-strung, and at times timorous, and always quick in trying to assert her control over her students, who were probably only five or six years younger than she was. She had come to us as a substitute teacher, filling in for an elderly and ailing veteran of the faculty, whose longtime popularity with his students had been sustained by his generous nature in grading them—but, much to my regret, this gentleman with coronary problems was never able to regain his health and his presence in English composition class. He resigned shortly before the start of my junior year; and due to scheduling problems and other matters, the more experienced teachers who might have stepped in for him were not as free and flexible as was this lovely female newcomer to the faculty, who would soon become the source of my romantic fantasies and my grief.

  My difficulties began on the very first day of her arrival. Our class was scheduled to meet immediately following lunch. While most of us were chatting at our desks awaiting the arrival of our new teacher, my other schoolmates were leaning out of the open windows, calling to their friends entering the building from the street. It was a warm September day, and the breezes blowing across the nearby dunes carried the salty smell of the sea into our classroom, giving us a lingering sense of summer.

  As the bell rang and everyone hastened to their seats, our teacher entered, smiling. She said nothing as she surveyed the room. She wore a yellow short-sleeved linen dress; her blond hair was held back by a blue velvet ribbon; her face and arms were suntanned and, compared to the dowdy female faculty members whom we were accustomed to seeing, she glowed with the incandescence of a starlet in an MGM musical—and two boys seated on either side of me in the rear row began to whistle.

  She stiffened. Her smile disappear
ed. She quickly turned toward the back of the room, standing on her toes for a better look, and angrily asked, “Who whistled?”

  She seemed to be staring directly at me. I slid down in my seat, my head bent as I examined my shoes, a pair of penny loafers that I had polished the night before. I suddenly saw myself as the prime suspect, and if I did not quickly clear myself, and if word of this indescretion got back to my parents, it would be very embarrassing to them, especially to my father, my Catholic Legion of Decency-devoted father, the only Italian in our town who wore a suit and tie and was looked up to even by the Protestants. And yet I knew that I could not squeal on the two friends I sat between. One was the starting quarterback on our football team. The other was his favorite receiver. I always sat among the varsity players in the back rows of classrooms, it being among my perks as their chronicler and occasional spinmeister.

  “Who whistled?” she repeated.

  I continued to look down and did not glance sideways, which might have implicated my friends. The rest of the class in front of us also remained silent. As the seconds passed, I could hear the teacher’s feet tapping impatiently, and a few flies buzzing overhead, and the floor-creaking sounds of a desk shifting under the weight of a fidgety student. But the two culprits next to me remained perfectly still and soundless, not a muscle moving, it seemed to me, nor could I even hear them breathing. I was surprised that they did not finally stand up, tell the truth, and accept the consequences. What could she have done to them? The coach would have protected them. The season was just beginning, and they were essential to the team’s aerial attack. But they just sat in the classroom like the rest of us, blending in with the crowd, apparently fainthearted in the presence of this thin-skinned female teacher. This did not augur well for our forthcoming football season.

  “All right, let us proceed,” she then said with a sigh, although she seemed to continue to look at me. “It’s a sad but obvious fact that we have someone among us today who is unwilling to assume responsibility. But let this be a word of warning to all of you. If I ever catch anyone whistling, it will lead to your instant expulsion. Am I making myself clear?”

  There were nods and murmurings of agreement from myself and the rest of the students, including the football players.

  “This is a classroom,” she continued, “and here we will maintain proper standards of behavior.…”

  After more nods from the students, she stepped toward the desk at the front of the room, introduced herself after she had taken her seat, and then proceeded to outline what subjects we would cover in this English composition class that in the ensuing months would bring me so little joy.

  5

  THROUGHOUT MY HIGH SCHOOL YEARS AND DURING MOST OF MY boyhood, my parents made our home in an apartment above their store. The conversations my mother and father had upstairs usually involved things going on downstairs, and the ringing of the telephone and the doorbell was simultaneously heard above and below. The extra mirrors from the store that my father installed in our living quarters multiplied everything we saw, deflecting rather than reflecting any sense of intimacy and domesticity.

  While the apartment did have an adequate kitchen and dining area, I do not recall ever sitting down and enjoying a relaxing and satisfying home-cooked meal. This was due not only to the interrupting phone calls from customers but to the fact that my preoccupied parents rarely made the effort to shop properly for food even when they had the time to do so on weekends. My mother was one of the few Italian-American women of her generation who disliked being in the kitchen.

  She was a businesswoman, an entrepreneurial individual whose best customers were her best friends, and she entertained them in her boutique (dispatching me to get them sodas, tea, or ice cream from the corner drugstore) as if they were guests in her true and only home. Here she held private conversations with them, earned their confidence and trust in a way that sooner or later inclined them toward buying most of the dresses she recommended. The merchandise my mother featured catered to decorous women of ample figures and means. These were the ministers’ wives, the bankers’ wives, the bridge players, the tale bearers. They were the white-gloved ladies who in summer avoided the beach and the boardwalk to spend considerable amounts of time and money along the main avenue in places like my parents’ shop, where, amid the low humming of the fans and the attentive care of my mother in the dressing rooms, they would try on clothes while discussing their private lives and the happenings and misadventures of their friends and neighbors.

  The shop was a kind of talk show that flowed around the engaging manner and well-timed questions of my mother; and even when I was hardly taller than the counters behind which I used to pause and listen, I began to learn much that would be useful to me years later when I began interviewing people for articles and books. I learned never to interrupt when people were having difficulty in explaining themselves, for during such halting and imprecise moments (as the listening skills of my patient mother taught me) people often are very revealing. What they hesitated to talk about told much about them. Their pauses, their evasions, their sudden shifts in subject matter were likely indicators of what embarrassed them, or irritated them, or what they regarded as too private or imprudent to be disclosed. However, I later overheard many people discussing candidly with my mother what they had earlier avoided—a reaction that, I think, had less to do with her inquiring nature or sensitively posed questions than with their gradual acceptance of her as an individual in whom they could fully confide. My mother’s best customers were women less in need of new dresses than the need to communicate.

  Most of them were born of privileged Philadelphia families of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic stock, and they were generally tall and large-sized in a way typified by Eleanor Roosevelt. Their suntanned, leathery, handsome faces were browned primarily as a result of their devotion to gardening, which they described to my mother as their favorite summertime hobby. When one of these women came into the store, my mother was unavailable for phone calls, relying on my father or one of the employees to take messages, and while there were one or two women who abused her forbearance as a listener, droning on for hours, I was interested in most of what I heard and witnessed there. In fact, in the decades since I have left home, during which time I have retained a clear memory of my eavesdropping youth and the women’s voices that gave it expression, it seems to me that many of the social and political questions that have been debated in America since then—the role of religion in the bedroom, racial equality, women’s rights, the adulteries of public officials, the advisability of films and publications featuring sex and violence—I overheard in my mother’s shop during my elementary and high school years of the 1940s.

  My mother, born Catherine Di Paola on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy to parents originally from my father’s native village in Calabria, moved as a young girl into Brooklyn with her large family after her father had found steady work as the chauffeur and general factotum of a real estate developer in that borough. When my mother was twenty-one and employed as an assistant buyer in the dress department of Abraham & Straus, a store that had hired her after her graduation from high school, she met my father at a Brooklyn wedding in the mid-1920s that united one of her sisters to one of his cousins. Within a few years she and my father were married and residing in Ocean City, beginning a relationship of more than sixty years that combined their love and compatibility with their shared interest in wearing and selling fine clothes and their capacity to cover up their lives in ways that I might prefer to call mysteriously romantic but that as a youth I found troubling and confusing.

  There is such a thing as having parents who are too much in love, whose essential needs are so completely met by each other that no one else is essential to their well-being, including their own children. As a Catholic couple, they produced only two children, my younger sister and myself, and we grew up thinking we were in the way of our parents’ relationship, that our main function was merely to complete
the picture of their completeness, to accompany them to Sunday Mass and then stand beside them on the sidewalk, smiling while being introduced to their fellow parishioners, and later in the day to stroll with them on the boardwalk in nearby Atlantic City among the casually dressed crowds and roving photographers who usually mistook us (with our fine clothes and familial formality) for a family of visiting dignitaries from abroad, which is, I think, precisely the impression my parents wished to convey. After my mother had left Brookyn and my father had severed his ties to Italy, they reconstructed their lives together in a place where the social atmosphere differed greatly from anything they had previously known (an island mandated by prohibitionist Protestants who disallowed the sale of even a glass of wine), and yet here my parents were at liberty to associate with mainstream Americans without being surrounded by masses of immigrants who might confirm the worst early-twentieth-century stereotype of their countrymen as clannish, garlic-smelling laborers with dark-garbed wives and lots of aggressive children who were delinquent in school and destined to prosper only in the realm of organized crime.