My Mistake Page 2

  The guests are mainly Jewish, the sons and daughters or grandsons and granddaughters of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Their names are Mishkin, Goldberg, Leonard, Friedman, Cohen. They are doctors and lawyers and accountants and garment-industry types and schoolteachers. Moving up very fast, many have left their Brooklyn accents behind, but they’re always dropping Yiddish words and phrases into their conversation, the most exotic, to me, being something that sounds like machataynista—which evidently denotes what an in-law on one side of a married couple is to an in-law on the other. A husband’s brother’s wife, say, to a wife’s sister’s husband. These Jews—so complicated. When my WASPy cousins from my mother’s side of the family—my Aunt Priscilla Grace and her children—drive over from Milton, near Boston, to visit, they seem a different species altogether, with their Brahmin accents, untroubled brows, and apparent lack of complexities. (Later, I learn that they have their own problems, of course.) The guests have a wonderful time in this very basic camp setting, dancing, swimming, canoeing, drinking (before dinner; no alcohol at the tables on the long porch), going to Tanglewood to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to Jacob’s Pillow for the dance festival.

  I get to go back up to the farmhouse with Readie and sleep in the back room over the kitchen. Mike and I take our .22 rifles into the woods and shoot at birds and squirrels. We sit at the “family table.” We swim for hours on end, playing water tag with the white float as a safe base. We are privileged and doted upon, partly because many guests want to get closer to my uncle, who is so charismatic and sociable. I get to lie on the lawn at the farmhouse and wait for the mailman to deliver the previous day’s New York Times, which has the baseball box scores from two and even three days before that, so that reading them is like time travel. I live in the Yankees’ past.

  Do you believe—or remember? There was no television. So what was there? Charades, Scrabble, poker, canasta, gin rummy, backgammon, parlor games of all kinds, at camp and at the farmhouse. Someone who doesn’t know the game goes out of the room for a few minutes, and Enge gives us The Principle: We’re all to answer yes-or-no questions as if we’re the person to our left. I always try to have a woman on my left. Enge has written two small Sentinel paperbacks about such party games: “72 Surefire Ways of Having Fun” and “The Life of the Party: 67 Ways to Have Fun.” That’s 139 ways to have fun. And we sing. Camp songs, union songs, songs from the Spanish Civil War—“Freiheit!” is my favorite—American folksongs of all kinds. And Enge begins to teach me to play the guitar. And conversation—so much talking, arguing, laughter. At home in the Village, when I am nine or ten, we rent a television set for a week or so to watch the World Series. It’s almost as big as a refrigerator and has a black-and-white screen the size of a Chiclet. That’s it for TV.

  Friends and relations surround me and Mike, in the country and in the city. The dinner table at the farmhouse and in the Village, especially during the autumn, often has ten or fifteen people sitting around it—uncles, cousins, friends—all declaiming and arguing, usually about politics, with loud denunciations of government and capitalism. This is where I learn my deep and nearly reflexive distrust of those in positions of power. The fine points of doctrine escape me, but generally: You can’t trust them.

  Despite a kind of built-in anxiety, almost surely the legacy of that same early-infancy, largely isolated hospital stay, I find the world enchanting, thick with point-making and sensations and love, love especially from Readie. Readie says to Enge no, she can’t do work for him and look out for me and Mike at the same time. “He has some nerve, that man,” she says when he tells her to hang his laundry on the clothesline behind the house. “Your uncle is a trying case and a case to be tried,” she says. “Just because I’m black!” When the sheets are on the line, I run between them, inhaling sunshine and Tide and imagining that these are a ship’s sails. When we’re a little older, Readie takes on the care of the child of one of her sisters who can’t care for him herself. He is two or three, and his name is Raymond, and now he comes up to the farmhouse with us, and my brother and I regard him as a sort of mascot.

  If I make coffee for Readie, she says, “I want it black, just like me. But you don’t have to make it. Slavery days are over. Someone just ought to tell your uncle. He don’t seem to know.”

  How Readie got to us I don’t know. She was born in South Carolina, had many half-brothers and half-sisters, ate clay when she was little, she was so hungry, and picked cotton along with the rest of her family. She can barely write. Where she got her enormous warmth and affection and good sense from I also don’t know, but I’m grateful for it in my mind every day, including this minute, at seventy-two, sitting once again in the farmhouse, when the memory of being able to so completely count on her makes me feel safe, protected by her love and vigilance, no matter what comes next.

  If this picture of Readie bears a close resemblance to Faulkner’s Dilsey and other, similar literary black nannies, there’s no help for it. For this is what she is like, at least for Mike and me. As we all grow older, I will come to appreciate her for her robust humor and her keen insights into the ways my family worked and didn’t work and her iron will about controlling—and refusing to dwell on—her diabetes. And then I will see, sadly, that she is becoming a hoarder in her small public-housing apartment in Chelsea, perhaps owing to her poverty-stricken childhood. But as children, Mike and I regard her as the safest refuge from our troubles and a sensible check on our bad behavior.

  So I had two mothers. My mother and Readie. Readie called me and Mike “my babies.” She had, essentially, adopted us, as she adopted Raymond. And as my wife and I were later to adopt two children, our cynosures. I had two fathers, too. Well, three, actually. My father taught me to drive—lessons continued later by my brother—but usually, because of his handsome and charming immaturity, he sat in the back seat of my family much of the time. He may have worked better in the world than I knew, or know, but I didn’t, and don’t, know it. He was a nice guy. Drank a little too much, and when he did so, sometimes, mortifyingly, offered back rubs to my and my brother’s girlfriends. Lived in my mother’s shadow, dwelled on his failures. But still a charming and often spontaneous person. Then there was Enge, who began teaching me guitar, taught me square dancing, games, a little Yiddish, how to bid for eggs at a farmer’s auction in Hillsdale, how to oil a rifle, how to make blintzes, how to oil a wood floor, how to tell a story. Then there was Mike, who provided me with some of the guidance and sternness I needed at home. There will be more fathers in my life.

  I think that some of us have more than one mother and many if not most of us, especially boys, have more than one father.

  Nine

  From time to time, I see protectiveness underneath Mike’s bullying, as when a friend and I spend a little too much time in the bathroom together and Mike figures out what’s going on in there and puts a stop to it. He needn’t have worried—I am passive and basically uninterested. Obliging. But he is looking out for me. He and Readie.

  With my great but hidden anxiety, I take the train by myself from Great Barrington to New York—to Grand Central Terminal, in the middle of the summer. I have a dentist appointment in the city. My father will meet me at the information booth at Grand Central. The train comes in on the lower level. I wait at the small information booth there, while, as it turns out, my father is waiting for me at the main booth on the main level.

  No one shows up. I feel panicky and cold and sweaty. Where is he? Fifteen minutes go by. Trembling, I find a cop and tell him the situation. He asks if I know my family’s home phone number. CHelsea 2-4685. He calls and my mother answers. Somehow it’s all worked out, and the cop takes me up the wide stairs to where my father is still waiting. He apologizes to me for the confusion, and I begin to calm down, but he also finds it surprising that I was so frightened. “Did you really think I had abandoned you?” he asks. Again, the bemusement, and a sense that my brother and I are perhaps less cherished than provided for, but
this is at least partly the style—almost the vogue—in middle-class parenting of the Forties.

  Ten

  My brother and I are always fighting—“roughhousing,” my parents call it. Mike beats me up a lot. I spend much of the year in a headlock. But I am a genius teaser, an unremitting critic of his asthma and flat feet.

  We cut the heads off wooden matches and then use a wire cutter to snip off the heads of pins. We force the blunt end of the pins into one end of the matches, use an X-acto knife to put slits in the other end, put paper “fins” in the slits, and then hurl these tiny missiles at each other. When thrown correctly, the pinpoints go through clothes and sting the target nicely. We have a rule: No aiming above the shoulders. My mother discovers us at this sport, is horrified, and forbids us to ever play it again.

  I don’t know if our rivalry is unusually intense, but it is our rivalry, and I can’t imagine any other brothers’ competition being fiercer. It is like a project, an enterprise that we feel obliged to sustain. We are, after all, competing for the greatest prize in the history of the world—our mother’s love and attention.

  Despite the sibling mayhem, I feel safe at home on West 4th Street. I can go about the city, or at least the Village, alone, but if I go more than three blocks away and find myself in a place I don’t recognize, a blanket of cold terror begins to settle around me, and I retreat.

  And when the family drives to Uncle Enge’s house in the country together, my father and brother sit in the front seat and begin talking about being lost, to tease me, but I don’t know they are teasing—they fool me every time—and that same cold terror comes over me. They can’t have any idea how cruel this is.

  And there is terror of an abstract kind: arithmetic books. 6+3 was easy. 6+7. Doable. 58+174. I could handle that. But farther ahead in this year’s arithmetic book impossibilities lurk. Multiplication, long division, and especially division in which the number outside the house is bigger than the number inside the house. How can that possibly make sense? Mike shows me his math book; it has problems that look like division with nothing at all outside the house—just a V with a bar extending to the right and a number underneath. “Square roots,” Mike says. “You’ll never be able to understand them, because you’re an idiot.”

  Near our brownstone on West 4th is a movie theater that all the kids in the neighborhood call The Dump. I won’t go there without my brother, but when we do go, it is a wild kind of fun. The Dump shows W. C. Fields shorts, Buck Rogers serials, cheesy Western features. It is a dump. It is mayhem in there. Almost all boys. Kids shout out curses, throw soda at each other, get into fights. The management seems not to care. Maybe there is no management—maybe someone has designed The Dump as a cave of childhood disinhibition. The admission price is seven cents. By some group unconscious agreement, you get a nickel from your parents and beg the other two cents from passers-by: arithmetic in action.

  My school report from Little Red says what it has always said, from kindergarten on: There is some praise of my intelligence and abilities but it’s followed by something like, “Danny is an anxious child who continues to prefer fantasy play to organized games and sports. He is preoccupied with being ‘right’ all the time, which makes his insecurity all the more evident.”

  In fourth and fifth grades I have a titanic crush on a blond girl, one of the few non-Jews in the class (thus beginning a romantic pattern for my Oedipal half-Jewish self). She is the daughter of a respected actress. I try to sit next to her in class, and she looks at me with distaste and moves away. But one day, when we are playing Spin the Bottle in someone’s apartment, I spin the bottle and it points at her. She’s clearly exasperated but says, “Come on,” and leads me to the small bedroom where everyone closes the door and kisses—or pretends to, as I am sure is going to happen now. But no. She says, “Do you want to do this right?” I stammer something and she pushes me down on the bed and lies on top of me and kisses me and moves her hips against me. Then she says we have to go back, leaving me close to comatose with pleasure and bafflement, and a cigarillo erection.

  Eleven

  We’ve moved from the Village to Nyack, New York, two-fifths small-town white Protestants, two-fifths recent immigrant families and “ethnic”—blacks, Italians, Irish—one-fifth Wonder Bread commuters. My parents can no longer afford the tuition at Little Red. I am in sixth grade at the Liberty Street School, and how could it be more different from Little Red? It couldn’t. Desks in rows? No circles of chairs for discussion? Grades? A black kid saying to me, “Give me yo lunch money, white boy”? Bullying of every other kind? Lunch money itself? Fierce Darwinism on the playground. Softball with no gloves? The word “nigger”? A girl who “likes” me? Jeannie—she’s cute. Wait! Another one! Katie—very blond, very pretty. They’re friends. They want me to go with them to the movies up on Main Street on Saturday. They buy me popcorn. They both hold hands with me.

  Mrs. Delaney, my teacher, and her husband are visiting my family for dinner. (We live in a white stucco house across from a convent, with a fine view of the Hudson River.) Mrs. Delaney makes it clear that she is Anglo-Irish rather than Irish-Irish. She says to my parents in her soft, semi-Southern accent, “It’s so good to have Danny in our class—a real American boy.”

  “American?” my mother says.

  “Well, I mean a real American. Not Italian or Greek or anything like that. And then there are all the Negroes.”

  In fact, although my mother is indeed a “real American”—Mary Randolph Grace, descended from the aforementioned William the Conqueror (according to a silly, self-published vanity book, Fitz Randolph Traditions, written by a maiden aunt)—she helped found the Newspaper Guild. And my brother, Michael Grace Menaker, and I are the “real-American” half-Jewish atheist sons of a father who is or at least was a member of the Communist Party and whose own parents never married, and whose last name is a corruption of the Hebrew name of a clan of rabbis. Neighbors in Nyack have complained of my bringing Negroes home to play with after school. One of them, Maurice, is too old and big for sixth grade, but he serves as my bodyguard against the bullies who have threatened me as a matter of routine.

  The one thing that seems to bother Mrs. Delaney about me is that I am the only boy in the class who has long hair—that is, who doesn’t have a crewcut. One day, she calls me up to the front of the room and asks me to sit in a chair facing the other kids. She starts to braid my hair. Everybody laughs and I duck away from her and go back to my desk. Not only do I not mind what has just happened, I enjoy it.

  One of the first questions other kids in Nyack ask me is “What church do you go to?” I have never known anyone who went to church or even to synagogue except my New York dentist, Dr. M. Joel Friedman. He once invited my family to Passover and I had to read a passage from whatever it is that you read from. I had made my parents swear that I wouldn’t have to read. But I did have to. There were maybe forty people spread across two adjoining rooms, and each reader used a microphone. When it was my turn, instead of “the sacred hand of Israel,” I read “the scared hand of Israel,” and everyone laughed. I was humiliated.

  In Nyack, I don’t care to talk about my half-Jewishness when asked the unprecedented church question. There are only two or three Jewish kids in my class, as opposed to the ninety per cent at Little Red, and they and their families keep somewhat to themselves. I have never met anyone who goes to the Methodist church, so I say “Methodist.” My mistake. This satisfies my interrogators for a while. But later on, when I am best friends with the son of the Dutch Reformed minister (I steal money from his family’s house when they are away), my friends find out that my claim to churchgoing Methodism isn’t true. I’m in tight enough by then to survive this mendacity.

  It’s recess, and while running around the playground at the Liberty Street School, I fall and break my arm. I’m taken to Nyack Hospital and my parents show up and I have surgery to set my arm. Sometime later I find myself lying up in the air, looking down at my body in
a hospital bed and at my parents and my brother, who is fourteen, gathered around the bed. Above me, the ceiling dematerializes and I turn my head around to see—I swear to you—a great white light, forming a tunnel, leading up and away into a glorious realm of existence far superior to the one below me. I can see indistinct figures within the light, and they are beckoning me in dulcet tones to join them. It’s tempting, but somehow I understand that it isn’t time to go there yet. So I turn myself over in mid-air, so that I am floating on my back, and I slowly and reluctantly descend toward the bed. I fit perfectly into my body, and I wake up. For the first time I can remember, I feel great happiness and great sadness at the same time. How can that be?

  Thirteen

  At Uncle Enge’s Guest Camp, I am the waiter for the children’s table. These are the kids too young to go to the boys’ camp. Or they’re girls. I steal change from the little cup in the top drawer of the desk in the business office of the lodge and take it down the road to Gibson’s Grove. I buy ice cream and candy and play pinball. The jukebox on the porch overlooking the lake sends Kay Starr’s “Wheel of Fortune” out over the water day and night—you can hear it everywhere.