The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

by Tom Wolfe

  “I wasn’t planning on having a nanny at first,” Charlotte says. “Robert’s father offered to pay for it so we could have one—you know—but I didn’t want to do that, and I didn’t want to have anybody else around the house all the time, and I was going to be independent about this and that, blah-blah-blah. Then there was this very funny day, right after we moved here, and I decided to take Bobby down to the playground in Central Park, down at 77th Street.”

  So she just put Bobby in the baby carriage and wheeled him on down. You go in the entrance at 76th Street. It was a Monday, Charlotte believes, because they had just finished moving in on the weekend. And here was this nice playground, and all these nice little children, and all these nice ladies sitting around those benches around the edge. She knew most of them were nannies because they had on white uniforms, but others just looked like sort of these aging women at a country weekend or those women who stay back in the living room and they are just sitting there talking when you go out to go sailing. Anyway, she came rolling in with Bobby in the baby carriage and bygod she had never been so frosted out in her life! They stopped talking when she came by, they started whispering, nudging, giving her the most malign looks, it was unbelievable!

  “Well, now I know why, but then I just didn’t know what was going on,” Charlotte is saying. “You see, the nannies have this very set social hierarchy. The English nannies rank highest and maybe the French, all depending, but anyway, they are very cliqueish. Irish nannies try to act British. The German nannies are accepted if they’re old enough or confident enough. But the poor Negro nannies, they haven’t got a prayer, I don’t care what they’re like. There is just an absolute color bar, and the poor Negro nannies just have to sit off by themselves. But there is somebody—and I can tell you this from first-hand experience—there is somebody lower than the Negro nannies, and that is a mother who brings her own baby into the 77th Street playground. I mean it! At least the Negro nanny has probably been hired by a reasonably good family. But a mother who has to bring her own baby into the playground is absolutely nothing!”

  The only time a mother can go in there is on Wednesday, the nannies’ day off. So all the mothers go in on Wednesday and talk about the nannies. It’s the uppermost thought in their brains. So there Charlotte was that time in a pen full of nannies. And that was not nearly the end of it. She had the wrong kind of baby carriage. It was white. It was too shiny. The wheels were too heavy-looking. It was made in America. They looked at the thing the way people look at Cadillacs or something.

  “The only acceptable one is this Brabingham,” says Charlotte. “It’s a very old make. They have to be shipped in from England. It costs a fortune. They’re dark blue with all sorts of fine hand work, you know, and, oh, I don’t know, all these little touches here and there. I don’t know what we did with ours or I’d show it to you.”

  Lord, the nannies are absolutely dictatorial about what you have to buy. Charlotte remembers that first day, when she went into the playground by herself, there was this poor little girl, about six, who came in with her nurse. The nurse was a colored girl. Neither of them knew a thing, poor dears. The little girl saw these other little girls her age, and, oh, she wanted to go play with them. Her little eyes lit up like birthday candles in her little buttery face and her little legs started churning, and there she was, the original tabula rasa of joy and friendship. Did they let her have it! Rather! The first girl she came up to, Carey K———’s little girl, a real budding little bitch named Jennifer, if you wanted Charlotte’s frank opinion, just stared at her, no smile at all, and said, “My shoes are Indian Walk T-strap.” Then another little girl came up and said the same thing, “My shoes are Indian Walk T-strap.” Then Jennifer says it again, “My shoes are Indian Walk T-strap,” and then they both start whining this at the poor little thing, “My-shoes-are-Indian-Walk-T-strap!” And the little girl—all she had done was come into the playground, to try to make friends, with the wrong shoes on—she’s about to cry, and she says, “Mine are, too,” and little Jennifer starts saying in that awful sarcastic sing-song kids pick up as one of their early instruments of torture: “Oh-no-they’re-not—your shoes are garbage!” So the other little girl starts saying it, and they start chanting again, and the little girl is bawling, and the colored girl can’t figure out what’s going on—and the other nannies, Jennifer’s nanny, all of them, they’re just beautiful, as Charlotte remembers it.

  “They just sat there through the whole performance with these masks on, until their little terrors had absolutely annihilated this poor kid, and then they were so concerned.

  “ ‘Now, Jennifer, you mustn’t tease, you know. Mustn’t tease.’ The whole time, of course, she was just delighted over how well Jennifer had learned her lessons.”

  The nannies dictate that kids have to have Indian Walk shoes. They have to get their hair cut at this and that hotel. And clothes! Charlotte gives up on clothes. There is no such thing as knock-about clothes in the nanny’s entire rubric of life. There is all this business about herringbones, Shetland weaves, light flannel, heavy flannel, raw silk even, Danish sweaters. The only thing that saves even the wealthiest family from total bankruptcy is that the kids start going to school and watching television, after which they demand dungarees and their tastes in general deteriorate medievally. Until then, however, the nannies have all picked Cerutti on Madison Avenue, and so all the kids go trooping off to Cerutti for clothes.

  “Of course,” says Charlotte, “there’s this place in England the nannies really prize. They get practically emotional over it. There’s a photograph of the Duke of Windsor as a baby, on the wall, and it’s signed, something like, ‘Best of luck to my dear friends, Sincerely, Edward, Duke of Windsor.’ Do you see why they love the place? The message, naturally, was written by his nanny. So here is the nanny mafia speaking through the throne of England!”

  A nanny will do anything to get you to go to England, just so you can get to this damned store.

  “Robert, you know, is always handling these bond transfers, for the Swedes, and he goes off to Stockholm, for the Belgians, and he is off to Brussels—everywhere, for some reason, except England. If the Black Widow doesn’t let up, I swear he is going to crawl in there on his hands and knees one day and ask to be sent to London. I’m only kidding about that. Actually, Robert is rather level-headed about Mrs. G———. It’s me who—well, these are formidable people. They have power. I’m sure some of these people, like the party caterers, for example, wine them and dine them. They ought to, if they don’t….”

  The phone rings and Charlotte wheels around again, those alabaster shanks still crossed, locked, silken, glistening. She twists around in the chair to pick up the phone.

  “Hello, Robert … Well, all right … I suppose so … that’s fine … I guess that’s fine … All right … Good-bye.”

  She untwists and faces me again, looking kind of blank. “That was Robert: He’s been talking to his father about the party …”

  And out in Central Park, in the 77th Street playground, within the leafy stockade, amid a thousand little places where the sun peeps through, the nanny mafia rises and stretches and the Black Widow tucks little Bobby’s bangs—one thing in that family has gone right, anyway—up under his eight-piece Shetland herringbone cap, matching his four-button coat, to be sure, takes him by the hand and heads for home, the white brick tower, the tacky Louis chaises and the gathering good news.

  Part 5

  Love and Hate New York Style

  Chapter 17

  Putting Daddy On

  PARKER WANTS ME to go down to the Lower East side and help him retrieve his son from the hemp-smoking flipniks. He believes all newspaper reporters know their way around in the lower depths. “Come on down and ride shotgun for me,” he says. Parker has a funny way of speaking, using a lot of ironic metonymy and metaphor. He picked it up at Yale twenty-five years ago and has nurtured it through many lunches in the East 50’s. On the other hand, he doesn�
��t want to appear to be too uneasy. “I just want you to size it up for me,” he says. “The whole thing is ridiculous, except that it is just as pathetic as hell. I feel like I’m on my back with all four feet up in the air.” Parker says his son, Ben, suddenly left Columbia in his junior year, without saying anything, and moved to the Lower East Side. Parker speaks of the Lower East Side as the caravansary for flipniks. Flipniks is his word for beatniks. As Parker pictures it, his son, Ben, now lies around on the floor in lofts and four-story walkups on the Lower East Side, eaten by lice and aphids, smoking pot and having visions of the Oneness of the hip life.

  I think Parker is a casualty of the Information Crisis. The world has had a good seventy-five years of Freud, Darwin, Pavlov, Max Weber, Sir James Frazer, Dr. Spock, Vance Packard and Rose Franzblau, and everything they have had to say about human motivation has filtered through Parker and all of Parker’s friends in college, at parties, at lunch, in the magazines and novels they read and the conversations they have at home with wives who share the same esoterica. As a result, Parker understands everybody’s motives, including his own, which he has a tendency to talk about and revile.

  He understands, for example, that he is now forty-six years old and close to becoming a vice-president of the agency and that at this particular age and status he now actually feels the need to go to the kind of barbershop where one makes an appointment and has the same barber each time and the jowls are anointed with tropical oils. It is as if Parker were looking through a microscope at a convulsive amoeba, himself, Parker. “I can’t go into any other kind of barbershop,” he says. “It has gotten so I have an actual, physical need to have my hair cut in that kind of barbershop.” He can go on like this about the clothes he buys, about the clubs he joins, the music he listens to, the way he feels about Negroes, anything.

  He understands why pot-smoking is sort of a religion. He understands Oneness, lofts, visions, the Lower East Side. He understands why Ben has given up everything. He understands why his wife, Regina, says he is a ---- ---- ---- and has to do something. Her flannel mouth is supposed to goad him into action. He understands everything, the whole thing, and he is in a hopeless funk.

  So here are Parker and I walking along Avenue B on the Lower East Side. Parker is wearing a brown Chesterfield and a Madison Avenue crash helmet. Madison Avenue crash helmet is another of Parker’s terms. It refers to the kind of felt hat that is worn with a crease down the center and no dents in the sides, a sort of homburg without a flanged brim. He calls it a Madison Avenue crash helmet and then wears one. Inevitably, Parker is looking over his own shoulder, following his own progress down Avenue B. Here is Parker with his uptown clothes and his anointed jowls, walking past the old Avenue B Cinema, a great rotting building with lions’ heads and shattered lepers’ windows. Here is Parker walking past corner stores with posters for Kassel, Kaplan, Aldrich and the others, plastered, torn, one on top of the other, like scales. Here is Parker walking along narrow streets with buildings all overhung with fire escapes on both sides. Here is this ripening, forty-six-year-old agency executive walking along amid the melted storefronts. There are whole streets on the Lower East Side where it looks as if the place had been under intense heat and started melting and then was suddenly frozen in amber. Half the storefronts are empty and there is a gray film inside the windows. Pipes, bins, shafts of wood and paper are all sort of sliding down the walls. The ceilings are always covered with squares of sheet metal with quaint moldings on them to make an all-over design, and they are all buckling. The signs have all flaked down to metal the color of weathered creosote, even the ones that say Bodega y Carnicería. Everything is collapsing under New York moss, which is a combination of lint and soot. In a print shop window, under the soot and lint, is a sample of a wedding announcement. Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Arnschmidt announce the marriage of their daughter, Lillian, to Mr. Aaron Kornilov, on October 20, 1951. This seems to deepen Parker’s funk. He is no doubt asking himself what sort of hopeless amber fix Lillian Arnschmidt and Aaron Kornilov are frozen in today.

  Parker sticks his head inside a doorway. Then he walks in. Then he turns around and says, “Are you sure?”

  “You said 488,” I tell him, “this is 488.”

  “Nifty,” Parker says.

  Here is Parker in the entryway of a slum tenement. Slum tenements are worse than they sound. The hallway is painted with a paint that looks exactly the color, thickness and lumpiness of real mud. Parker and I walk in, and there are three big cans of garbage by the stairway. Behind them are two doors, one to the basement apartment, one to the first-floor apartment, out of which two or three children have overflowed when the mother rises in the doorway like a moon reflecting a 25-watt light and yells something in Spanish. The children squeeze back, leaving us with the garbage and the interesting mud tableau. At some point they painted the mud color over everything, even over the doorbell-buzzer box. They didn’t bother to pull the wiring out. They just cut the wires and painted over the stubs. And there they have it, the color called Landlord’s Brown, immune to time, flood, tropic heat, arctic chill, punk rumbles, slops, blood, leprotic bugs, cockroaches the size of mice, mice the size of rats, rats the size of Airedales, and lumpenprole tenants.

  On the way up there are so many turns amid the muddy gloom, I can’t tell what floor we stop at. But Parker finds the door up there and knocks.

  For a while we don’t hear anything, but there is a light through the door. Then somebody inside says, “Who is it?”

  “Ben!” says Parker. “It’s me.”

  There is another long pause, and then the door opens. There in the doorway, lit up from behind by an ochre light, is a boy with a very thick head of hair and a kind of Rasputin beard. It is a strange combination, the hair and the beard. The hair is golden, a little red, but mostly golden and very thick, thatchy, matted down over his ears and his forehead. But the beard is one of those beards that come out a different color. It is red and stiff like a nylon brush.

  “Ah,” says Parker, “the whole scene.”

  Ben says nothing. He just stands there in a pair of white ducks and rubber zori sandals. He has no shirt on. He looks as robust as a rice pudding.

  “The whole scene,” Parker says again and motions toward Ben’s Rasputin beard.

  Ben is obviously pained to hear his old man using hip talk. He gives a peeved twist to his mouth. He is rather startling to look at, a little chunk of rice pudding with all this ferocious hair. Parker, the understanding, understands, but he is embarrassed, which is his problem.

  “When did all this happen?” says Parker. “The beaver. When did you grow the beaver?”

  Ben still just stands there. Then he narrows his eyes and clamps his upper teeth over his lower lip in the Italian tough guy manner, after the fashion of Jack Palance in Panic in the Streets.

  “Beaver is a very old expression,” says Parker. “Before you were born. About 1803. I was using a very old expression, from my childhood. Did you ever hear a song that goes ‘Alpha, beta, delta handa poker?’ That was a very hip song.”

  Then he says, “I didn’t mean that, Ben. I just want to talk to you a minute.”

  “All right,” says Ben, and he opens the door wider and we walk in.

  We walk into a sort of kitchen. There is a stove with all four gas burners turned up, apparently for heat. The apartment is all one room, of the sort that might be termed extremely crummy. The walls actually have big slags of plaster missing and the lathing showing, as in a caricature of an extremely crummy place. The floor is impacted with dirt and looks as if it has been chewed up by something. And off to one side is more of the day’s gathering gaffe: two more kids.

  They are both up against the wall as if they have been squashed there. One of them is slouched up against the wall in an upright position. He is a chubby boy with receding blond hair and a walrus mustache. The other, a thin, Latin-looking boy with miles of black hair, is right next to him, only he is sitting down on the floor, with his
back propped against the wall. They are both looking at us like the Tar-Baby or a couple of those hard-cheese mestizos on the road to Acapulco. There is a sweet smell in the room. The understanding Parker isn’t going to start in on that, however. Parker looks a little as if he has just been pole-axed and the sympathetic nervous system is trying to decide whether to twitch or fold up. Here is Parker in the net of the flipniks, in the caravansary.

  Nobody is saying a word. Finally Ben nods toward the chubby boy and says, “This is Jaywak.” Then he nods toward the boy on the floor and says, “This is Aywak.”

  Jaywak stares at Parker a little longer with the Tar-Baby look, and then he fans his lips out very slowly, very archly, into a smile. After what seems about eight or ten seconds, he holds out his hand. Parker shakes his hand, and as soon as he starts to do that, the boy on the floor, Aywak, sticks his hand straight up in the air. He doesn’t get up or even look at Parker. He just sticks his hand straight up in the air and waits for Parker. Parker is so flustered he shakes it. Then Parker introduces me. All this time Ben never introduces Parker. He never says this is my father. One’s old man does not show up in a brown. Chesterfield with ratchety pleas in his poor old voice, such as he wants to talk to you.

  “Well, take off your coat,” says Ben. But when he says something to Parker, he looks at Jaywak and Aywak.

  Parker keeps his coat wrapped around him like a flag and a shield. Parker can’t take his eyes off the place. Between the kitchen and the other part of the apartment is a low divider, like a half-wall, with two funny pillars between it and the ceiling. God knows what the room was for originally. In the back part there is another big craggy space on the wall, apparently where a mantelpiece has been ripped off. Some kind of ratty cloth is over the windows. It is not the decor that gets you. It is this kind of special flipnik litter. Practically every Lower East Side pad has it. Little objects are littered all over the floor, a sock, a zori sandal, a T shirt, a leaflet from the Gospel Teachers, some kind of wool stuffing, a rubber door wedge, a toothbrush, cigarette butts, an old pair of blue wool bathing trunks with a white belt, a used Band-Aid, all littered around the chewed-up floor. There is almost no furniture, just a mattress in the corner with a very lumpy-looking blanket over it. There is also a table top, with no legs, propped up on some boxes. Parker keeps gawking.