I want to remember another time when I was happy, and it comes back.
Uncle Leon. Uncle Lee. He treated me like his special pal … his only pal. We spent nearly every Saturday morning together. He stuttered around grownups, but never with me—except for that one time I would rather forget, even now, nearly forty years later. Uncle Lee taught me to drive, bought me chocolate frozen custard, and he taught me “prestidigitation.” Each Saturday we drove to Nedicks for hot dogs and orange drinks. I drank too fast and accidentally burped one time, so Uncle Lee burped, too. After that, a burping contest was a regular feature of our Saturday mornings.
We drove through Central Park in his shiny black 1956 Cadillac, and went to Central Park to ride the huge carrousel decorated with monkeys wielding sticks of dynamite, threatening to blow up the merry-go-round, and everything else. Those laughing monkeys almost took even my child’s sense of anarchy a bit too far; their crazed expressions both drew me in, and frightened me. But Uncle Lee was there when I got scared, sitting on a park bench nearby, watching. He had his own charmed, black-mane horse called Lucky, and Lucky seemed to smile every time I passed him and stretched up for a brass ring. Uncle Lee tipped his grey homburg towards us.
Afterward, we drove to Gramsie Lerner’s on Central Park West, and I played with Gramps. We played Pisha Pasha, and watched Charlie Chan and Bulldog Drummond movies. Then, after Gramsie made me a snack, I spent the night in Uncle Lee’s room on the twin bed right next to his, and the next morning, we watched the sun rise together. I saw him hang his toupee on the phrenology head beside his bed, and remove his truss. We showered together the next morning in the steaming glass stall, which felt like a space capsule, and we sang “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” together as loud as we could. In the steamy shower stall, I felt safe, and completely invisible to the rest of the world. Our screaming voices reverberated like thunder against the glass as the song built to its inevitable, but wonderful conclusion:
Oh, the bear went over the mountain …
To see what he could see.
On Thanksgiving morning, I got up at 5:00 a.m. to watch the Parks Department men set up wooden horses to control the crowds along Central Park West during the Macy’s Day Parade. Watching from Gramsie’s second floor window as they set up in the dark was almost more fun than the parade, although nothing beat the time Woody Woodpecker slammed right up against Gramsie’s window. Around five-thirty or six, Gramsie made breakfast: a tuna fish sandwich stuffed with O&C Potato Stix on white bread, sliced into quarters with the crusts cut off. I drank my milk out of a shot glass and zoomed around the living room in a special red car with pedals. No rules.
Gramps treated me like a young prince. (He used wonderful, old-fashioned words like, “dast” and “dassent.”) “You dassent touch that knife, Henry; it’s much too sharp!” Even eating an apple with Gramps was magic. He peeled an apple without ever breaking the skin—not once. I watched the skin of the apple curl like a snake sunning itself, slowly wrapping around into a circle in the ashtray alongside one of his big cigars. When finished, he folded his golden pocketknife with the initials JNL, and put it in his vest pocket. I wanted to peel my own apple, but Gramps said, “You dassent, Henry.” So, I listened. But, when Gramsie went out shopping, Gramps relented. He covered my hands with his huge peasant ones, and tried to teach me to peel an apple like he did. The operation had to be kept secret, he said, because Gramsie would be “mad as hell” if she found out. But no matter how hard I concentrated, my peel always broke, usually four or five times on a single apple. Even so, when he put the pieces of my skin in the ashtray alongside his, my failed attempts looked like baby snakes curled up beside their grandfather. Now, looking back, those times with Uncle Lee, Gramps, and Gramsie, they were my safe haven. There, I was loved and spoiled, like all grandchildren should be.
Gramps cheated at cards, too. When I caught him looking at my hand in the beveled edges of the mirrored card table, I started crying. But Gramps told me he only did it so that I would catch him! He did it to teach me an important lesson—that the world is full of shysters and cheats. “You dassent ever gamble,” he told me. We didn’t use money; we used a special stash of red poker chips Gramps kept in an old cedar box that still smelled like his huge cigars.
After dealing the cards and playing poker, Gramps’ fingers hurt, so he lit a candle and dripped molten wax on them. He said it helped his arthritis better than any medicine you could buy from the drugstore. I sat beside him, transfixed, as he dripped hot wax from a long, white candle onto his thick fingers. He never complained or cried the way I would have done when the wax dropped on his fingers. After the medicinal wax coated his fingers, he peeled it off slowly and then let me play with the remains. I rubbed it between my fingers until the wax was soft; and when Gramps wasn’t looking, I popped it into my mouth and chewed it like Juicy Fruit gum.
I remember the exact moment I heard about Gramps’ death. I was ten. It was on a Saturday night and I was sitting at home with Margaret, our maid, watching The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The phone rang and Margaret screamed. So I raced to the phone ahead of her and answered it. Mrs. Lopez, one of my parents’ friends, wished me “Condolences” in her heavy Puerto Rican accent. I hung up and had no idea what she was talking about. To me, “Condolences” sounded like “Congratulations.” And strangely, both words reminded me of those big red delicious candy apples coated with hard, red candy I would eat while ice skating at Wollman’s Rink in Rockefeller Center. So I thought it must be good news.
That night, my parents came home late, and they told me that Gramps had died of stomach cancer. Cancer! It was the first time I had even thought of death. My mother, although intelligent and with a Master’s Degree from Columbia University, told me that her little boy should only think “happy thoughts.” I guess that’s why she never said a word to me about Gramps’ disease. Finally, I knew why I hadn’t been allowed to stay over at Gramps and Gramsie’s house for weeks! And why Uncle Lee had not come to pick me up that morning like he promised. I cried and thought of my little pieces of apple skin alongside his unbroken, perfect one.
As long as Gramps lived, it hadn’t mattered what happened at home. But when Gramps died, he left a void that even Uncle Lee couldn’t fill. For one thing, watching movies or playing cards with Uncle Lee wasn’t the same. He couldn’t stay awake during Humphrey Bogart films, and he wouldn’t cheat me at poker, even when I begged him to. The best he could do was watch Abbott and Costello with me. And Gramps, he had thick fingers, smoked cigars, and wore double-breasted suits, which to me, made him look almost like Sidney Greenstreet, or George Raft. But Uncle Lee, his hands were pale and ivory white, and unlike my conversations with Gramps, talking to him was like talking to another boy my age. Or even younger.
Uncle Lee had actually been married once, to a Southern belle that Mom said came from a state that began with the letter “A,” but it didn’t last more than a week. Since then, he’d lived with Gramsie, and worked at MacLaren’s, the Men’s Wear business that Gramps owned in the Garment District.
As I grew older, I felt sorry for Uncle Lee with his truss, bicarbonate of soda, and ExLax (which I insisted on trying once, and found it didn’t taste nearly as good as advertised). I knew, too, that Lee had once been admitted to Harvard Law School, but was forced to drop out in his first year to help with the family business during World War II. He never went back. Mom did tell me, though, that Uncle Lee’s grades were even higher than Judge Brandeis’s, and his exam paper was still on display at Harvard, right next to that of the famous judge.
Sometimes when I stayed over at my grandparents’, I went to work with Uncle Lee the next morning. I helped cut trousers (Gramsie told me never to use the word “pants” in her house—it was the only thing that could make Gramps angry). I marked pieces of fabric with tailor’s chalk. I liked the feel of the soft, greasy, white chalk between my thumb and forefinger; it wasn’t at all like the dry, brittle chalk they used in school. That ch
alk squeaked and left a mess on your hands. This chalk was soft and smooth and shiny, like a baby seal’s fur.
For reasons I couldn’t understand, my father hated Uncle Lee. Once at breakfast, he spooned up a big mess of scrambled eggs from the bowl and held it above his plate. Then he dumped the eggs down on his plate, and announced that this was what his brother-in-law’s brains looked like. More awful still, he then shoveled a big forkful of eggs into his mouth and swallowed them all. After that, Uncle Lee became known at home as Scrambled Eggs.
My father asked if I could remember my younger brother’s bris. When I told him I couldn’t, he laughingly told me the story of how Uncle Lee was afraid of blood. So, when the Moyle’s knife bit into the foreskin of Bobby’s penis, he keeled over and collapsed right there in front of everybody. Lee’s toupee dislodged and no one wanted to touch it, so the maid had to pick it up—with silver ice tongs—as they carried him to a couch. That story made me tear up—I couldn’t bear to think of Uncle Lee on the ground with his toupee off and everyone laughing. I decided it was probably not true, but since it was one of the few times my father laughed, I pretended it was funny, and I laughed, too.
Uncle Lee picked me up at seven o’clock every Saturday morning, but never set foot inside our house until after my father left. He fingered the brim of his hat between his hairless hands, standing by the little table in our hallway, which was twisted into the shape of an enormous fish encrusted with real seashells. One particular Saturday, Uncle Lee announced it was “high time” I learned to drive. Where he grew up in Pennsylvania, all the boys drove tractors by the time they were eight, and girls knew how to drive by the age of ten or so. Girls! So, at age nine, I wasn’t really surprised to be sitting on Uncle Lee’s lap holding the steering wheel of his big, black 1956 Cadillac, whizzing through the deserted streets of midtown Manhattan.
A thin sheen of rain covered the streets, and I remember being a little scared—I wasn’t one of those daredevil kids who embraced danger—but it felt completely natural for me to be behind the wheel of Uncle Lee’s Cadillac. I was locked securely between his legs, clutching the bulky, scalloped ridges of the steering wheel, unable to reach the pedals as he helped steer. Then we stopped. He told me to wait outside in the car while he went into a novelty shop on Broadway and Times Square. He came back fifteen minutes later with something hidden behind his back. He had a surprise for me, he said, and unfurled a newspaper which read:
HENRY SCHVEY ELECTED PRESIDENT IN LANDSLIDE!
As he handed the paper to me, a thrill and feeling of absolute confidence and power shot up my spine. I knew I would be elected president someday. It was inevitable. That was how things were supposed to be. That’s how I felt around Uncle Lee.
At least until I ruined everything.
We’d driven all the way to Coney Island to ride the roller coaster. The minute we exited the coaster, Lee ran straight to the men’s room and threw up. There was a little blue feather tucked in the band of Uncle Lee’s homburg, and I remember him rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger, moaning as he ran to the men’s room as soon as we were allowed off the coaster. But after his stomach settled, we still went to Nathan’s for hotdogs and went to a penny arcade where I played skeeball for hours. Uncle Lee sat watching, like he did at the merry-go-round, tapping his capped, too-perfect teeth with one forefinger while I played. Sometimes he whistled, but more often he emitted a strange sound through his front teeth with no discernible tune.
Then it happened. We visited a magic shop on West 43rd Street on our return to the city. We’d been there together before; the owner knew Uncle Lee and even addressed him deferentially as “Mr. Lerner.” Uncle Lee said I could pick out several tricks. I found a whoopee cushion, and a plastic ice cube with a fly inside so it looked like a dead fly was in someone’s drink. I also found plastic vomit, which I would use on Margaret on a Saturday night after eating fudge and watching The Blob. But Uncle Lee liked different kinds of tricks, tricks that involved “prestidigitation” and “legerdemain,” words so odd I was certain he had invented them. While the man behind the counter showed me disappearing ink, Uncle Lee stood at the other side of the store, passing steel rings back and forth, forming a chain. Now the rings were separate, now they were linked again—how had he done it? Uncle Lee liked the magic store, probably more than I did. He never seemed to stutter there, even talking with grownups. As we were about to leave, I asked him for a pen that wrote in disappearing ink. But when he looked at his watch, he said, “Uh-oh, we’re late.”
“Late for what?” I asked. There was no such thing as late. Uncle Lee had taken me to a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium the previous year and we stayed through both games—even when the second game went into extra innings. I knew he was bored, but I pretended not to notice. I ate eight hot dogs. Eight! The game ended with Yogi Berra hitting a home run, and we celebrated by drinking Yoo Hoos, which had Yogi’s smiling picture on the bottle.
“Your p-p-parents might be worried.”
Of course, I knew exactly what he meant. My father might have returned from playing tennis, and would wonder where I was. When he found out I was with Scrambled Eggs, there might be a problem. I knew this, but told him I just wanted to look at more tricks. Uncle Lee said there was no time.
“But I really want to see that one, just that one. Pleeease.” Uncle Lee hesitated, shrugged his shoulders, and was about to relent just like I knew he would. Then, looking down at his Bulova, said, “We need to leave now.”
This made me furious. “What do you care? It’s Saturday.”
“We’re late.”
“You’re afraid, aren’t you?”
“Of what? Of course not.”
“Of you know who,” I spat. “If you’re not, why do you always wait outside our front door when you come to pick me up?”
“I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. You always wait out in the hallway by the fish table and never come in.”
“I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. Uncle Lee, why do you have to be such a fairy?”
As soon as I said it, God, I wish I hadn’t.
Uncle Lee grabbed the tricks, but one of the steel rings fell and bounced off the glass counter top, and rolled along the floor. He retrieved it and then grabbed my wrist hard and stomped out of the magic shop, his size thirteen wing-tipped shoes slapping the sidewalk.
When we reached the Cadillac, and even though I knew what the answer was going to be, I asked if I could drive home like he promised. Uncle Lee’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. Then he opened my door and said, “Get in.” Just like any other grownup. We drove home without a word.
I wanted to die. So, I banged my head, first softly, then harder and harder, against the window, thinking maybe the door would pop open, I’d fall out and get run over. I’d heard all sorts of stories from my grandparents about careless boys who drowned in rowboats in Central Park; people who fell to their deaths through the grating in front of grocery stores; or people who were tossed from moving cars because they had left their doors unlocked. I’d been warned not to step on manhole covers, or on the steaming grills above where the subway churned below. Things like that happened all the time to people in New York. Only now, when I wanted something really terrible to happen to me, it didn’t.
2.
After losing myself in dreams for hours in my father’s apartment, I decide to walk through the neighborhood of my youth. The air tastes of ashes. Somehow, the streets still smell like the inside of his apartment with its residue of Montecristo cigars, but it feels better to be outside. I circle the apartment building where I grew up at 86th and Madison, but can’t make myself go in. So I turn around and walk south along Madison Avenue. The first thing I see is the old Croydon Hotel, which is no longer called the Croydon. But this is where I used to buy myself tuna fish sandwiches and sour kosher dills, and where I bought a half-pound of head cheese for Gramps just days before he died. Most important, this is where I once punted a foo
tball so high it actually bent back the first letter O in the brass Croydon sign and remained that way for years, a testament to my unrecognized athletic prowess. That sign is gone now, leaving no trace of my achievement; but it makes me happy to see it anyway.
Gone too is the Madison Avenue Deli opposite our apartment building on the corner of 86th. I went there after tennis with my father, Dr. Friedman, and his son, Alex. I ordered stuffed derma with thick brown gravy and Cel-Ray soda, just to be like my father. I couldn’t believe they made soda that tasted like celery, or why anyone would want to drink it; but since he liked it, I wanted to try it. The soda tasted awful, but I liked the taste and grainy texture of the stuffed derma with its thick brown gravy, until Alex came over to me and whispered, “Don’t eat that—derma is skin! Intestines! You’re eating guts, half-wit!”
My father ate thick slices of tongue dotted with tiny papillae, or chicken schmaltz with seeded kosher rye bread and unsalted butter. Once I watched him smear bright yellow chicken fat over pale yellow butter at Grandma’s; I must have looked horrified, because Grandma said it was a special treat, and asked if I wanted some. My reply, thick with a thirteen-year-old’s sarcasm, “I’d rather have a plutonium sandwich on rye.” Nobody laughed.
I wander down Madison Avenue, and locate the buildings where my school friends, Pete and Ephraim, lived. Pete was a big, sturdy kid who swam breaststroke on the varsity swim team, but hurt his knee swimming and was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatters disease. Pete’s parents were psychiatrists, and suddenly, I again hear my mother screaming at Pete’s mom when she discovered that Mrs. Amsterdam had taken us to see Psycho for Pete’s thirteenth birthday. The year was 1960. I was not yet twelve; a year younger than the rest of the guys. My mother cried when she found out. She yelled on the phone for half an hour that Mrs. Amsterdam had ruined my life. There was one scene, where Norman Bates dresses up like an old woman, that did give me nightmares, but I never told my mother about it. Oddly, the thing that frightened me most was that the killer’s name—Norman—was the same as my father’s. Of course, there was nothing Mrs. Amsterdam could have done about that.
The Poison Tree Page 2
