My friend Ted, who is, of course, an engineer, has organized his own rich life into decades, and by doing that has managed to get it into the 4900 character limit imposed by his alma mater, MIT. Since I was a liberal arts student at Cornell, Columbia, and Syracuse, always majoring in literature, it has never occurred to be to organize my life in...decades. It's linear, but it works. Let's see if I have the patience to do this; I usually burn out pretty quickly at left brain tasks.
1940'a - Washington Heights, opposite Fort Tryon Park in Manhattan. Lived upstairs from Carol and Barbara Lindeman, whose mother died of breast cancer and whose father had a frightening German accent. I used to play in the park after school, and I do remember taking my underpants off with Herbert Satzman and Robert Rudko in a cave in the park so we could compare accoutrements. We were probably in third grade, and although I doubt that this was traumatic, since we were all friends, I do still remember it, so it wasn't trivial.
We lived in a two-bedroom apartment, and I shared a bedroom with my brother Brad, who was over three year younger, and whom I found to be a major annoyance. Among other things, his life was full of vaseline and Desitin (he must have had diaper rash), and when I used to try to diaper my stuffed rabbit like my mother diapered Brad, things got really ugly. I ended up throwing that rabbit into the Hudson River one Sunday in disgust. I think that might have marked the end of my childhood. Or of my desire to be a mother.
New York in the 40s was very safe in my memory. I walked around the corner to our elementary school, PS 152 with all the other kids in the neighborhood. Although my mom walked me the first day, after that I was on my own. I also was allowed to cross the street and play in the park at a very early age, even though the street was Broadway. The subway was at the end of the block, and at somewhere before the age of ten, when we moved to Riverdale, I got on the subway with my girlfriends Margo, Joann, Melissa and Joy and we went down to Wollman Memorial Ice Skating Rink in Central Park. We skated, bought french fries (they were awesome--real potatoes) and went home again on the subway.
Under our window, which looked out on Broadway, a man with a horse cart often called out "I cash clothes." I think you gave him your old clothes and traded for cash, but our family never did that.
Here's what it is like to grow up in New York City during and after World War II. Our world was our neighborhood. We had a hair salon, a bar, and a soda fountain on the first floor of our building, and we used those services. The gas station was on the corner. Jewish Memorial Hospital, where I was born, was on the other corner, and our apartment building was between them. Fort Tryon Park was across the street, In 1944 there was a big blizzard, and we hung out at home for days, playing in the mounds of snow outside.
Around the corner was the synagogue. It was Orthodox, and it's probably why I am not a Jew today. My father belonged to it and attended in a casual way, but my parents were upwardly mobile (my dad was an entertainment lawyer) and we weren't really attached to it. The neighborhood was full of German-Jewish immigrants who were profoundly touched by the War and the Holocaust, but we didn't make a big deal of them. Apparently Henry Kissinger also grew up in Washington Heights, my neighborhood, but I was slightly north in Inwood. Inwood struck me as a little less ethnic, although in my class the overwhelming majority of kids were Jewish. Here's what I remember: we had one black kid, Leigh Edwards, who travelled from Harlem to our school for our gifted classes. And we had one Puerto Rican kid, Camillo Marquez. I have warm memories of both of them.
Also around the corner was the butcher, the bakery with its wonderful charlotte russe, and the fruit store.
Although I don't remember my mother shopping (maybe she sent Dilcy) she must have bought everything separately and walked home with it.
I took tap dancing lessons, ballet (for a very short time), and art lessons. Miss Irwin, a piano teacher, came to our house once a week, but I hated the piano lessons. I was a tomboy, and I wanted to play in the park with Herbert, Robert, Richard Kintzler (I had a crush on him) and Peter Lubrecht, whom I still know. If I knew they were in the park, I'd slide past Miss Irwin, off the piano bench, before the end of my lesson to run and join them. I actually knocked her over one week, and my mother had to apologize for me.
I wasn't easy for my mother, but my dad was my ally. He knew I was different, he believed in being different, and he encouraged my outlier behavior. When my mother complained that she couldn't get me to learn how to do dishes, my father said "she will never have to do dishes." He let me read at the dinner table and, I now realize, undermined my mother's discipline.
My mother was hopeless. Although she wanted to have children, she nearly died having me (long labor) according to her, and I don't think she ever wanted me after she had me. I was a lot of work. Very early on I knew I was smarter than she was and could split my parents. She used to come after my brother and me brandishing a coat hanger, but she was chicken to use it on us and we always knew it.
However, I do remember the phrase "wait until your father comes home," and I remember my father chasing me around the twin beds in our rooms trying to pretend to spank me. He actually hit me pretty hard on my thigh, by mistake, and it turned red. I started to cry, and he was as horrified as I was.
But my mother wasn't the biggest figure in my life as a child: Dilcy was. Dilcy was our maid, who either lived with us or came in by the day (she had a child of her own) and took care of us when my mother and dad were gone, which was often. During this time, my dad managed Pearl Bailey, Billy Daniels, Red Norvo, and Lionel Hampton. He was an attorney who had an office on Fifth Avenue, although I don't remember him spending a great deal of time there when I was little. Mostly he would go out with my mother to the jazz joints on 52nd Street or the Village at night, they'd get in at 3 or 4 AM when the clubs closed, and Dilcy would get me and Brad off to school.
My dad never went to work in the morning like other fathers. Instead, he went to work in the early afternoon, and stayed out half the night. He and my mother drank Manhattans in Toot's Shors, hung out at Lindy's and Sardi's and the Village Vanguard, Copacabana and Blue Angel. My dad was a friend of Barbara Walters' father. We weren't a part of his life, and my mother told us they had decided to put each other first, as we would grow up and go away and they would then be left with each other. I felt very rejected by this intepretation of their marriage, and that must have been how I became such a high achiever -- just trying to get a little attention from my parents.
He also never came to school, and never played games. Later I learned that he couldn't play games because he had rheumatic fever as a young man, and it left him with a weak heart. He wasn't supposed to exercise. And he went to the cardiologist, who was the general practitioner, very often to have cardiograms. In retrospect, in those days when you paid out of pocket for care, my father was followed much more closely than any patient is followed now. I went to the doctor's office with him on Saturday.
The doctor, Dave Markman (inventor of the flexible sigmoidoscope) was in the Bronx, and near my dad's mother, whom we would also visit. She didn't speak English, her house was dark and smelly, and I couldn't relate to her at all. When my dad spoke to her on the phone, it was in Yiddish, and although I tried to understand, I really didn't very much. My parents depended on this; they spoke Yiddish when they didn't want us to know what they were saying. It pissed me off.
That's where I met Michael Markman, who was the son of my dad's doctor. Dr. Dave had his office in the same building his family lived in. That was quite common in the era before large health care systems; we went to a dentist whose office was in the lobby of the building we lived in. Dr. Dave's kids were often in the office on Saturdays when they were young. His wife, Betty, ran the office. I played with Michael and Judy until the Markmans moved to Westchester. Then I lost touch with Michael until Tony Perkins brought us back together at AlwaysOn during the dot com era. By that time, Michael had been a comedian, a national brand manager for Apple, a rabbinical student, a TV writer and a host of very interesting things I wish I had known about. My mother thought he was a nerd, so once he moved to Yonkers she didn't encourage a friendship, although we both later went to Bronx High School of Science. If anything typified why my mother and I had nothing in common, it was her pre-judgment of people like Michael. She tried to mainstream me, but I was a geek.
The forties were both glamorous and horrible for my parents. My father had to get up in the middle of the night and bail out Billy Daniels when he got in a knife fight in a Harlem after-hours club, and help his clients get the rights to their own music from the big music publishing companies that cheated them. He helped integrate Las Vegas during this time; he made it possible for the black entertainers to live in the places they entertained in. He became very well-known, and in retrospect I think he also developed organize crime connections. At that time, organized crime and entertainment weren't that far apart.
My parents also traveled a lot to Las Vegas and Hollywood. In those days, you went by train, and my parents were often gone for a month, leaving me with Dilcy and some aunts and uncles on my mother's side. They stayed in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, hung out in Ciro's, and met all the stars. How did I know this? They brought home the matchbooks and the glasses. I hated it so much when they went away that I developed insomnia. I couldn't sleep and had what I now know were anxiety attacks. No one cared, except maybe Dilcy. When my parents came home and I told them I couldn't fall asleep, my father used to make me walk back and forth in the living room. "If you can't sleep, walk!" he'd say. I soon went back to bed, if only to read in peace.
My mother's father lived in our living room for a few months before he died, as did my mother's Uncle Willie. Nobody spoke English, and my mother kept me away from them. But she did take care of them; there were no nursing homes. My mother's mother had died of a brain tumor when she was 16, and my grandfather remarried someone my mom never accepted or respected, so we were pretty estranged from our relatives. And my mother didn't like the relatives on my father's side either; she thought they were all ne'er do wells and resented the fact that my dad lent (gave) them money to go into businesses over the years that repeatedly failed. One of my father's brothers especially was a failed entrepreneur -- he owned a string of bars. It mystified my mother that anyone could make a bar fail.
There was a fair amount of tension in my home over responsibilities for less successful relatives. While my parents were climbing, climbing in New York society, their own immigrant parents were left behind. I am amazed now at the lack of relationship between the first generation and second generation Jewish immigrants of the time, although I guess it's the same as what's happening now with the Latinos. The barrier seemed to me to be language -- and that has given me a predilection for favoring programs that make immigrants learn English. If they don't, their own children sooner or later reject them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment