An American Childhood Page 3

  The skin on my mother’s face was smooth, fair, and tender; it took impressions readily. She napped on her side on the couch. Her face skin pooled on the low side; it piled up in the low corners of her deep-set eyes and drew down her lips and cheeks. How flexible was it? I pushed at a puddle of it by her nose.

  She stirred and opened her eyes. I jumped back.

  She reminded me not to touch her face while she was sleeping. Anybody’s face.

  When she sat up, her cheek and brow bone bore a deep red gash, the mark of a cushion’s welting. It was textured inside precisely with the upholstery’s weave and brocade.

  Another day, after a similar nap, I spoke up about this gash. I told her she had a mark on her face where she’d been sleeping.

  “Do I?” she said; she ran her fingers through her hair. Her hair was short, blond, and wavy. She wore it swept back from her high, curved forehead. The skin on her forehead was both tight and soft. It would only barely shift when I tried to move it. She went to the kitchen. She was not interested in the hideous mark on her face. “It’ll go away,” I said. “What?” she called.

  I noticed the hair on my father’s arms and legs; each hair sprang from a dark dot on his skin. I lifted a hair and studied the puckered tepee of skin it pulled with it. Those hairs were in there tight. The greater the strain I put on the hair, the more puckered the tepee became, and shrunken within, concave. I could point it every which way.

  “Ouch! Enough of that.”

  “Sorry, Daddy.”

  At the beach I felt my parent’s shinbones. The bones were flat and curved, like the slats in a Venetian blind. The long edges were sharp as swords. But they had unexplained and, I thought, possibly diseased irregularities: nicks, bumps, small hard balls, shallow ridges, and soft spots. I was lying between my parents on an enormous towel through which I could feel the hot sand.

  Loose under their shinbones, as in a hammock, hung the relaxed flesh of their calves. You could push and swing this like a baby in a sling. Their heels were dry and hard, sharp at the curved edge. The bottoms of their toes had flattened, holding the imprint of life’s smooth floors even when they were lying down. I would not let this happen to me. Under certain conditions, the long bones of their feet showed under their skin. The bones rose up long and miserably thin in skeletal rays on the slopes of their feet. This terrible sight they ignored also.

  In fact, they were young. Mother was twenty-two when I was born, and Father twenty-nine; both appeared to other adults much younger than they were. They were a handsome couple. I felt it overwhelmingly when they dressed for occasions. I never lost a wondering awe at the transformation of an everyday, tender, nap-creased mother into an exalted and dazzling beauty who chatted with me as she dressed.

  Her blue eyes shone and caught the light, and so did the platinum waves in her hair and the pearls at her ears and throat. She was wearing a black dress. The smooth skin on her breastbone rent my heart, it was so familiar and beloved; the black silk bodice and the simple necklace set off its human fineness. Mother was perhaps a bit vain of her long and perfect legs, but not too vain for me; despite her excited pleasure, she did not share my view of her beauty.

  “Look at your father,” she said. We were all in the dressing room. I found him in one of the long mirrors, where he waggled his outthrust chin over the last push of his tie knot. For me he made his big ears jiggle on his skull. It was a wonder he could ever hear anything; his head was loose inside him.

  Father’s enormousness was an everyday, stunning fact; he was taller than everyone else. He was neither thin nor stout; his torso was supple, his long legs nimble. Before the dressing-room mirror he produced an anticipatory soft-shoe, and checked to see that his cuffs stayed down.

  Now they were off. I hoped they knocked them dead; I hoped their friends knew how witty they were, and how splendid. Their parties at home did not seem very entertaining, although they laughed loudly and often fetched the one-man percussion band from the basement, or an old trumpet, or a snare drum. We children could have shown them how to have a better time. Kick the Can, for instance, never palled. A private game called Spider Cow, played by the Spencer children, also had possibilities: The spider cow hid and flung a wet washcloth at whoever found it, and erupted from hiding and chased him running all over the house.

  But implicitly and emphatically, my parents and their friends were not interested. They never ran. They did not choose to run. It went with being old, apparently, and having their skin half off.

  THERE WAS A BIG SNOW that same year, 1950. Traffic vanished; in the first week, nothing could move. The mailman couldn’t get to us; the milkman couldn’t come. Our long-legged father walked four miles with my sled to the dairy across Fifth Avenue and carried back milk.

  We had a puppy, who was shorter than the big snow. Our parents tossed it for fun in the yard and it disappeared, only to pop up somewhere else at random like a loon in a lake. After a few days of this game, the happy puppy went crazy and died. It had distemper. While it was crazy it ran around the house crying, upstairs and down.

  One night during the second week of the big snow I saw Jo Ann Sheehy skating on the street. I remembered this sight for its beauty and strangeness.

  I was aware of the Sheehy family; they were Irish Catholics from a steep part of the neighborhood. One summer when I was walking around the block, I had to walk past skinny Tommy Sheehy and his fat father, who were hunched on their porch doing nothing. Tommy’s eleven-year-old sister, Jo Ann, brought them iced tea.

  “Go tell your maid she’s a nigger,” Tommy Sheehy said to me.

  What?

  He repeated it, and I did it, later, when I got home. That night, Mother came into our room after Amy was asleep. She explained, and made sure I understood. She was steely. Where had my regular mother gone? Did she hate me? She told me a passel of other words that some people use for other people. I was never to use such words, and never to associate with people who did so long as I lived; I was to apologize to Margaret Butler first thing in the morning; and I was to have no further dealings with the Sheehys.

  The night Jo Ann Sheehy skated on the street, it was dark inside our house. We were having dinner in the dining room—my mother, my father, my sister Amy, who was two, and I. There were lighted ivory candles on the table. The only other light inside was the blue fluorescent lamp over the fish tank, on a sideboard. Inside the tank, neon tetras, black mollies, and angelfish circled, illumined, through the light-shot water. When I turned the fluorescent lamp off, I had learned, the fish still circled their tank in the dark. The still water in the tank’s center barely stirred.

  Now we sat in the dark dining room, hushed. The big snow outside, the big snow on the roof, silenced our words and the scrape of our forks and our chairs. The dog was gone, the world outside was dangerously cold, and the big snow held the houses down and the people in.

  Behind me, tall chilled windows gave out onto the narrow front yard and the street. A motion must have caught my mother’s eye; she rose and moved to the windows, and Father and I followed. There we saw the young girl, the transfigured Jo Ann Sheehy, skating alone under the streetlight.

  She was turning on ice skates inside the streetlight’s yellow cone of light—illumined and silent. She tilted and spun. She wore a short skirt, as if Edgerton Avenue’s asphalt had been the ice of an Olympic arena. She wore mittens and a red knitted cap below which her black hair lifted when she turned. Under her skates the street’s packed snow shone; it illumined her from below, the cold light striking her under her chin.

  I stood at the tall window, barely reaching the sill; the glass fogged before my face, so I had to keep moving or hold my breath. What was she doing out there? Was everything beautiful so bold? I expected a car to run over her at any moment: the open street was a fatal place, where I was forbidden to set foot.

  Once, the skater left the light. She winged into the blackness beyond the streetlight and sped down the street; only her white skates sh
owed, and the white snow. She emerged again under another streetlight, in the continuing silence, just at our corner stop sign where the trucks’ brakes hissed. Inside that second cone of light she circled backward and leaning. Then she reversed herself in an abrupt half-turn—as if she had skated backward into herself, absorbed her own motion’s impetus, and rebounded from it; she shot forward into the dark street and appeared again becalmed in the first streetlight’s cone. I exhaled; I looked up. Distant over the street, the night sky was moonless and foreign, a frail, bottomless black, and the cold stars speckled it without moving.

  This was for many years the center of the maze, this still, frozen evening inside, the family’s watching through glass the Irish girl skate outside on the street. Here were beauty and mystery outside the house, and peace and safety within. I watched passive and uncomprehending, as in summer I watched Lombardy poplar leaves turn their green sides out, and then their silver sides out—watched as if the world were a screen on which played interesting scenes for my pleasure. But there was danger in this radiant sight, in the long glimpse of the lone girl skating, for it was night, and killingly cold. The open street was fatal and forbidden. And the apparently invulnerable girl was Jo Ann Sheehy, Tommy Sheehy’s sister, part of the Sheehy family, whose dark ways were a danger and a crime.

  “Tell your maid she’s a nigger,” he had said, and when I said to Margaret, “You’re a nigger,” I had put myself in danger—I felt at the time, for Mother was so enraged—of being put out, tossed out in the cold, where I would go crazy and die like the dog.

  That night Jo Ann alone outside in the cold had performed recklessly. My parents did not disapprove; they loved the beauty of it, and the queerness of skating on a street. The next morning I saw from the dining-room windows the street shrunken again and ordinary, tracked by tires, and the streetlights inconspicuous, and Jo Ann Sheehy walking to school in a blue plaid skirt.

  JO ANN SHEEHY and the Catholic schoolchildren carried brown-and-tan workbooks, which they filled, I knew, with gibberish they not only had to memorize, they had to believe.

  Every morning they filed into the subterranean maw of St. Bede’s, the low stone school attached to the high stone church just a block up Edgerton Avenue. From other Protestant children, I gathered St. Bede’s was a cave where Catholic children had to go to fill their brown-and-tan workbooks in the dark, possibly kneeling; they wrote down whatever the Pope said. (Whatever the Pope said, I thought, it was no prize; it didn’t work; our Protestant lives were much sunnier, without our half trying.) Every afternoon, authorities “let out” the surviving children to return to their lightless steep houses, where they knelt before writhing crucifixes, bandied racial epithets about, and ate stewed fish.

  One afternoon the following spring, I was sitting stilled on the side-yard swing; I was watching transparent circles swim in the sky. When I focused on them, the circles parted, as fish flew from a finger poked in their tank. Apparently it was my eyes, and not the sky, that produced the transparent circles, each with a dimple or nucleus, but I always failed to find any in my eyes in a mirror; I had tried the night before.

  Now St. Bede’s was, as the expression had it, letting out; Jo Ann Sheehy would walk by again, and all the other Catholic children, and perhaps the nuns. I kept an eye out for the nuns.

  From my swing seat I saw the girls appear in bunches. There came Jo Ann Sheehy up the dry sidewalk with two other girls; her black hair fell over her blue blazer’s back. Behind them, running back and forth across the street, little boys were throwing gravel bits. The boys held their workbooks tightly. Probably, if they lost them, they would be put to death.

  In the leafy distance up Edgerton I could see a black phalanx. It blocked the sidewalk; it rolled footlessly forward like a tank. The nuns were coming. They had no bodies, and imitation faces. I quitted the swing and banged through the back door and ran in to Mother in the kitchen.

  I didn’t know the nuns taught the children; the Catholic children certainly avoided them on the streets, almost as much as I did. The nuns seemed to be kept in St. Bede’s as in a prison, where their faces had rotted away—or they lived eyeless in the dark by choice, like bats. Parts of them were manufactured. Other parts were made of mushrooms.

  In the kitchen, Mother said it was time I got over this. She took me by the hand and hauled me back outside; we crossed the street and caught up with the nuns. “Excuse me,” Mother said to the black phalanx. It wheeled around. “Would you just please say hello to my daughter here? If you could just let her see your faces.”

  I saw the white, conical billboards they had as mock-up heads; I couldn’t avoid seeing them, those white boards like pillories with circles cut out and some bunched human flesh pressed like raw pie crust into the holes. Like mushrooms and engines, they didn’t have hands. There was only that disconnected saucerful of whitened human flesh at their tops. The rest, concealed by a chassis of soft cloth over hard cloth, was cylinders, drive shafts, clean wiring, and wheels.

  “Why, hello,” some of the top parts said distinctly. They teetered toward me. I was delivered to my enemies, and had no place to hide; I could only wail for my young life so unpityingly snuffed.

  THESE ARE THE FEW, floating scenes from early childhood, from before time and understanding pinned events down to the fixed and coherent world. Soon the remembered scenes would grow in vividness and depth, as like any child I elaborated a picture of the place, and as my feelings met actual people, and as the interesting things of the world engaged my loose mind like a gear, and set it in forward motion.

  A young child knows Mother as a smelled skin, a halo of light, a strength in the arms, a voice that trembles with feeling. Later the child wakes and discovers this mother—and adds facts to impressions, and historical understanding to facts.

  When she was in her twenties, my mother’s taste ran to modernism. In our living room on Edgerton Avenue we had a free-form blond coffee table, Jean Arp style, shaped something like a kidney, and also something like a boomerang. Over a heat register Mother hung a black iron Calder-like mobile. The mobile’s disks spun and orbited slowly before a window all winter when the heat was on, and replaced for me the ensorcerizing waving of tree leaves. On the wall above the couch she hung a large print of Gauguin’s Fatata te miti; those enormous rounded women, with their muscular curving backs, sat before a blue river in a flat and speckled jungle. On an end table she placed the first piece of art she ever bought: a Yoruba wood sculpture, a long-headed abstract woman with pointy breasts and a cold coil of wire around her neck.

  Mother must have cut a paradoxical figure in her modernist living room, with her platinum blond hair, her brisk motions, her slender, urbane frame, her ironic wit (one might even say “lip”)—and her wee Scotticisms. “Sit you doon,” Mother said cordially to guests. If the room was too bright, she asked one of us to douse the glim. When we were babies, she bade each of us in turn, “Put your wee headie down.” If no one could locate Amy when she was avoiding her nap, it was because she’d found herself a hidey-hole. Sometimes after school we discovered in our rooms a wee giftie. If Mother wanted a favor, she asked, heartrendingly, “Would you grant me a boon?”

  This was all the more remarkable because Mother was no more Scotch, nor Scotch-Irish, than the Pope. She was, if anyone cared to inquire, Pennsylvania Dutch and French. But the Pittsburgh in which we lived—and that Pittsburgh only—was so strongly Scotch-Irish it might have been seventeenth-century Donegal; almost all old Pittsburgh families were Scotch-Irish. Scotticisms fairly flew in the air. And Mother picked up every sort of quaint expression.

  She delighted in using queer nouns from the mountains, too. Her family hailed from Somerset, the mountain-county seat near Pittsburgh: Whiskey Rebellion country. They were pretty well educated, but they heard plenty of mountain terms.

  “Where’s the woolly brush?” “I need a gummy”—that is, a gum band, or rubber band. She keenly enjoyed these archaisms, and whenever she used one, she stopped
enthusiastically in midsentence to list the others: “And do you know what a poke is?” We did indeed.

  Her speech was an endlessly interesting, swerving path of old punch lines, heartfelt cris de coeur, puns new and old, dramatic true confessions, challenges, witty one-liners, wee Scotticisms, tag lines from Frank Sinatra songs, obsolete mountain nouns, and moral exhortations.

  “I’ll show him,” she’d say. “I’ll show him which way the bear went through the buckwheat. It’ll be Katy-bar-the-door around here.” “He’ll be gone,” Father would add wistfully, “where the woodbine twineth.”

  Mother woke Amy and me in the mornings by dashing into our room, wrenching aside the window curtains, cranking open our old leaded windows, shouting mysteriously, “It smells like a French whorehouse in here,” and dashing out. When we got downstairs we might find her—that same morning—sitting half asleep, crumpled-of-skin in her soft bathrobe, staring at her foot in its slipper, or even with her eyes closed. If we began to whisper, we soon heard her murmur affectionately if unconvincingly into her bathrobe collar, “I’m awake.”

  She moved vigorously, laughed easily, spoke rapidly and boldly, and analyzed with restless force. Her moods shifted; her utterances changed key and pitch. She was fond of ending any long explanation with the sudden, puzzling kicker, “And that’s why I can’t imitate four Hawaiians.” She stroked our heads tenderly, called us each a dozen endearing names; she thrilled, apparently, to tales of our adventures, and admired inordinately our drawings and forts. She taught us to curtsy; she taught us to play poker.

  Mother’s Somerset family were respectable Millers and good-looking, prominent, wild Lamberts. The Lambert women were beautiful; they married rich men. The Lambert men were charmers; they drank hard and came to early ends. They flourished during Prohibition, and set a dashing, doomed tone for the town.