An American Childhood Read online

  Mother’s handsome father was the mayor. He was so well liked that no one in town voted for his opponent. He won a contest by writing the slogan: “When better automobiles are built, Buick will build them.” He and a friend journeyed to Detroit to pick up the contest prize. The trip was a famous spree; it lasted a month. He died not long after, at forty-one, when Mother was seven, and left her forever full of longing.

  Late at night on Christmas Eve, she carried us each to our high bedroom, and darkened the room, and opened the window, and held us awed in the freezing stillness, saying—and we could hear the edge of tears in her voice—“Do you hear them? Do you hear the bells, the little bells, on Santa’s sleigh?” We marveled and drowsed, smelling the piercingly cold night and the sweetness of Mother’s warm neck, hearing in her voice so much pent emotion, feeling the familiar strength in the crook of her arms, and looking out over the silent streetlights and the chilled stars over the rooftops of the town. “Very faint, and far away—can you hear them coming?” And we could hear them coming, very faint and far away, the bells on the flying sleigh.

  NEXT TO ONE OF OUR SIDE YARDS ran a short, dirty dead-end alley. We couldn’t see the alley from the house; our parents had planted a row of Lombardy poplars to keep it out of sight. I found an old dime there.

  High above the darkest part of the alley, in a teetering set of rooms, lived a terrible old man and a terrible old woman, brother and sister.

  Doc Hall appeared only high against the sky, just outside his door at the top of two rickety flights of zigzag stairs. There he stood, grimy with coal dust, in a black suit wrinkled as underwear, and yelled unintelligibly, furiously, down at us children who played on his woodpile. We looked fearfully overhead and saw him stamp his aerial porch, a raven messing up his pile of sticks and littering the ground below. We couldn’t understand his curses, but we scattered.

  Doc Hall’s grim sister went to early Mass at St. Bede’s; she passed our house every morning. She was shapeless and sooty, dressed in black; she leaned squeezing a black cane, and walked downcast. No one knew what Mass might be; my parents shuddered to think. She crawled back and down the alley.

  The alley ended at an empty, padlocked garage. In summer a few hairs of grass grew down the alley’s center. Down the alley’s side, broken glass, old nails, and pellets of foil and candy wrappers spiked the greasy black soil out of which a dirty catalpa and a dirty sycamore grew.

  When I found the dime I was crouched in the alley digging dirt with a Popsicle stick under one of the Lombardy poplars. I struck the dime and dug around it; it was buried on edge. I pulled it out, cleaned it between my fingers, and pocketed it. Later I showed it to my father, who had been until then my only imaginable source of income. He read the date—1919—and told me it was an old dime, which might be worth more than ten cents.

  He explained that the passage of time had buried the dime; soil tends to pile up around things. In Rome, he went on—looking out the kitchen window as I leaned against a counter looking up at him—in Rome, he had seen old doorways two or three stories underground. Where children had once tumbled directly outside from their doors, now visitors had to climb two flights of stairs to meet the light of the street. I stopped listening for a minute. I imagined that if the Roman children had, by awful chance, sat still in their doorways long enough, sat dreaming and forgetting to move, they, too, would have been buried in dirt, up to their chins, over their heads!—only by then, of course, they would be very old. Which was, in fact—the picture swept over me—precisely what had happened to all those Roman children, whether they sat still or not.

  I turned the warm dime in my fingers. Father told me that, in general, the older a coin was, the greater its value. The older coins were farther down. I decided to devote my life to unearthing treasure. Beneath my 1919 dime, buried in the little Pittsburgh alley, might be coins older still, coins deeper down, coins from ancient times, from forgotten peoples and times, gold coins, even—pieces of eight, doubloons.

  I continually imagined these old, deeply buried coins, and dreamed of them; the alley was thick with them. After I’d unearthed all the layers of wealth I could reach with a Popsicle stick, I would switch to a spade and delve down to the good stuff: to the shining layers of antique Spanish gold, of Roman gold—maybe brass-bound chests of it, maybe diamonds and rubies, maybe dulled gold from days so long past that people didn’t manufacture coins at all, but simply carried bags of raw gold or ore in lumps.

  That’s all. It was the long years of these same few thoughts that wore tracks in my interior life. These things were mine, I figured, because I knew where to look. Because I was willing. Treasure was something you found in the alley. Treasure was something you dug up out of the dirt in a chaotic, half-forbidden, forsaken place far removed from the ordinary comings and goings of people who earned salaries in the light: under some rickety back stairs, near a falling-down pile of discarded lumber, with people yelling at you to get away from there. That I never found another old coin in that particular alley didn’t matter at all.

  I WALKED. My mother had given me the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number. I walked and memorized the neighborhood. I made a mental map and located myself upon it. At night in bed I rehearsed the small world’s scheme and set challenges: Find the store using backyards only. Imagine a route from the school to my friend’s house. I mastered chunks of town in one direction only; I ignored the other direction, toward the Catholic church.

  On a bicycle I traveled over the known world’s edge, and the ground held. I was seven. I had fallen in love with a red-haired fourth-grade boy named Walter Milligan. He was tough, Catholic, from an iffy neighborhood. Two blocks beyond our school was a field—Miss Frick’s field, behind Henry Clay Frick’s mansion—where boys played football. I parked my bike on the sidelines and watched Walter Milligan play. As he ran up and down the length of the field, following the football, I ran up and down the sidelines, following him. After the game I rode my bike home, delirious. It was the closest we had been, and the farthest I had traveled from home.

  (My love lasted two years and occasioned a bit of talk. I knew it angered him. We spoke only once. I caught him between classes in the school’s crowded hall and said, “I’m sorry.” He looked away, apparently enraged; his pale freckled skin flushed. He jammed his fists in his pockets, looked down, looked at me for a second, looked away, and brought out gently, “That’s okay.” That was the whole of it: beginning, middle, and end.)

  Across the street from Walter Milligan’s football field was Frick Park. Frick Park was 380 acres of woods in residential Pittsburgh. Only one trail crossed it; the gravelly walk gave way to dirt and led down a forested ravine to a damp streambed. If you followed the streambed all day you would find yourself in a distant part of town reached ordinarily by a long streetcar ride. Near Frick Park’s restful entrance, old men and women from other neighborhoods were lawn bowling on the bowling green. The rest of the park was wild woods.

  My father forbade me to go to Frick Park. He said bums lived there under bridges; they had been hanging around unnoticed since the Depression. My father was away all day; my mother said I could go to Frick Park if I never mentioned it.

  I roamed Frick Park for many years. Our family moved from house to house, but we never moved so far I couldn’t walk to Frick Park. I watched the men and women lawn bowling—so careful the players, so dull the game. After I got a bird book I found, in the deep woods, a downy woodpecker working a tree trunk; the woodpecker looked like a jackhammer man banging Edgerton Avenue to bits. I saw sparrows, robins, cardinals, juncos, chipmunks, squirrels, and—always disappointingly, emerging from their magnificent ruckus in the leaves—pedigreed dachshunds, which a woman across the street bred.

  I never met anyone in the woods except the woman who walked her shiny dachshunds there, but I was cautious, and hoped I was braving danger. If a bum came after me I would disarm him with courtesy (“Good afternoon”). I would sneak him
good food from home; we would bake potatoes together under his bridge; he would introduce me to his fellow bums; we would all feed the squirrels.

  The deepest ravine, over which loomed the Forbes Avenue bridge, was called Fern Hollow. There in winter I searched for panther tracks in snow. In summer and fall I imagined the woods extending infinitely. I was the first human being to see these shadowed trees, this land; I would make my pioneer clearing here, near the water. Mine would be one of those famously steep farms: “How’d you get so beat up?” “Fell out of my cornfield.” In spring I pried flat rocks from the damp streambed and captured red and black salamanders. I brought the salamanders home in a bag once and terrified my mother with them by mistake, when she was on the phone.

  In the fall I walked to collect buckeyes from lawns. Buckeyes were wealth. A ripe buckeye husk splits. It reveals the shining brown sphere inside only partially, as an eyelid only partially discloses an eye’s sphere. The nut so revealed looks like the calm brown eye of a buck, apparently. It was odd to imagine the settlers who named it having seen more male deer’s eyes in the forest than nuts on a lawn.

  Walking was my project before reading. The text I read was the town; the book I made up was a map. First I had walked across one of our side yards to the blackened alley with its buried dime. Now I walked to piano lessons, four long blocks north of school and three zigzag blocks into an Irish neighborhood near Thomas Boulevard.

  I pushed at my map’s edges. Alone at night I added newly memorized streets and blocks to old streets and blocks, and imagined connecting them on foot. From my parents’ earliest injunctions I felt that my life depended on keeping it all straight—remembering where on earth I lived, that is, in relation to where I had walked. It was dead reckoning. On darkening evenings I came home exultant, secretive, often from some exotic leafy curb a mile beyond what I had known at lunch, where I had peered up at the street sign, hugging the cold pole, and fixed the intersection in my mind. What joy, what relief, eased me as I pushed open the heavy front door!—joy and relief because, from the very trackless waste, I had located home, family, and the dinner table once again.

  An infant watches her hands and feels them move. Gradually she fixes her own boundaries at the complex incurved rim of her skin. Later she touches one palm to another and tries for a game to distinguish each hand’s sensation of feeling and being felt. What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world’s skin ever expanding?

  SOME BOYS TAUGHT ME to play football. This was fine sport. You thought up a new strategy for every play and whispered it to the others. You went out for a pass, fooling everyone. Best, you got to throw yourself mightily at someone’s running legs. Either you brought him down or you hit the ground flat out on your chin, with your arms empty before you. It was all or nothing. If you hesitated in fear, you would miss and get hurt: you would take a hard fall while the kid got away, or you would get kicked in the face while the kid got away. But if you flung yourself wholeheartedly at the back of his knees—if you gathered and joined body and soul and pointed them diving fearlessly—then you likely wouldn’t get hurt, and you’d stop the ball. Your fate, and your team’s score, depended on your concentration and courage. Nothing girls did could compare with it.

  Boys welcomed me at baseball, too, for I had, through enthusiastic practice, what was weirdly known as a boy’s arm. In winter, in the snow, there was neither baseball nor football, so the boys and I threw snowballs at passing cars. I got in trouble throwing snowballs, and have seldom been happier since.

  On one weekday morning after Christmas, six inches of new snow had just fallen. We were standing up to our boot tops in snow on a front yard on trafficked Reynolds Street, waiting for cars. The cars traveled Reynolds Street slowly and evenly; they were targets all but wrapped in red ribbons, cream puffs. We couldn’t miss.

  I was seven; the boys were eight, nine, and ten. The oldest two Fahey boys were there—Mikey and Peter—polite blond boys who lived near me on Lloyd Street, and who already had four brothers and sisters. My parents approved Mikey and Peter Fahey. Chickie McBride was there, a tough kid, and Billy Paul and Mackie Kean too, from across Reynolds, where the boys grew up dark and furious, grew up skinny, knowing, and skilled. We had all drifted from our houses that morning looking for action, and had found it here on Reynolds Street.

  It was cloudy but cold. The cars’ tires laid behind them on the snowy street a complex trail of beige chunks like crenellated castle walls. I had stepped on some earlier; they squeaked. We could have wished for more traffic. When a car came, we all popped it one. In the intervals between cars we reverted to the natural solitude of children.

  I started making an iceball—a perfect iceball, from perfectly white snow, perfectly spherical, and squeezed perfectly translucent so no snow remained all the way through. (The Fahey boys and I considered it unfair actually to throw an iceball at somebody, but it had been known to happen.)

  I had just embarked on the iceball project when we heard tire chains come clanking from afar. A black Buick was moving toward us down the street. We all spread out, banged together some regular snowballs, took aim, and, when the Buick drew nigh, fired.

  A soft snowball hit the driver’s windshield right before the driver’s face. It made a smashed star with a hump in the middle.

  Often, of course, we hit our target, but this time, the only time in all of life, the car pulled over and stopped. Its wide black door opened; a man got out of it, running. He didn’t even close the car door.

  He ran after us, and we ran away from him, up the snowy Reynolds sidewalk. At the corner, I looked back; incredibly, he was still after us. He was in city clothes: a suit and tie, street shoes. Any normal adult would have quit, having sprung us into flight and made his point. This man was gaining on us. He was a thin man, all action. All of a sudden, we were running for our lives.

  Wordless, we split up. We were on our turf; we could lose ourselves in the neighborhood backyards, everyone for himself. I paused and considered. Everyone had vanished except Mikey Fahey, who was just rounding the corner of a yellow brick house. Poor Mikey, I trailed him. The driver of the Buick sensibly picked the two of us to follow. The man apparently had all day.

  He chased Mikey and me around the yellow house and up a backyard path we knew by heart: under a low tree, up a bank, through a hedge, down some snowy steps, and across the grocery store’s delivery driveway. We smashed through a gap in another hedge, entered a scruffy backyard and ran around its back porch and tight between houses to Edgerton Avenue; we ran across Edgerton to an alley and up our own sliding woodpile to the Halls’ front yard; he kept coming. We ran up Lloyd Street and wound through mazy backyards toward the steep hilltop at Willard and Lang.

  He chased us silently, block after block. He chased us silently over picket fences, through thorny hedges, between houses, around garbage cans, and across streets. Every time I glanced back, choking for breath, I expected he would have quit. He must have been as breathless as we were. His jacket strained over his body. It was an immense discovery, pounding into my hot head with every sliding, joyous step, that this ordinary adult evidently knew what I thought only children who trained at football knew: that you have to fling yourself at what you’re doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive.

  Mikey and I had nowhere to go, in our own neighborhood or out of it, but away from this man who was chasing us. He impelled us forward; we compelled him to follow our route. The air was cold; every breath tore my throat. We kept running, block after block; we kept improvising, backyard after backyard, running a frantic course and choosing it simultaneously, failing always to find small places or hard places to slow him down, and discovering always, exhilarated, dismayed, that only bare speed could save us—for he would never give up, this man—and we were losing speed.

  He chased us through the backyard labyrinths of ten blocks before he caught us by our jackets. He caught us and we all stopped.

  We three s
tood staggering, half blinded, coughing, in an obscure hilltop backyard: a man in his twenties, a boy, a girl. He had released our jackets, our pursuer, our captor, our hero: he knew we weren’t going anywhere. We all played by the rules. Mikey and I unzipped our jackets. I pulled off my sopping mittens. Our tracks multiplied in the backyard’s new snow. We had been breaking new snow all morning. We didn’t look at each other. I was cherishing my excitement. The man’s lower pants legs were wet; his cuffs were full of snow, and there was a prow of snow beneath them on his shoes and socks. Some trees bordered the little flat backyard, some messy winter trees. There was no one around: a clearing in a grove, and we the only players.

  It was a long time before he could speak. I had some difficulty at first recalling why we were there. My lips felt swollen; I couldn’t see out of the sides of my eyes; I kept coughing.

  “You stupid kids,” he began perfunctorily.

  We listened perfunctorily indeed, if we listened at all, for the chewing out was redundant, a mere formality, and beside the point. The point was that he had chased us passionately without giving up, and so he had caught us. Now he came down to earth. I wanted the glory to last forever.

  But how could the glory have lasted forever? We could have run through every backyard in North America until we got to Panama. But when he trapped us at the lip of the Panama Canal, what precisely could he have done to prolong the drama of the chase and cap its glory? I brooded about this for the next few years. He could only have fried Mikey Fahey and me in boiling oil, say, or dismembered us piecemeal, or staked us to anthills. None of which I really wanted, and none of which any adult was likely to do, even in the spirit of fun. He could only chew us out there in the Panamanian jungle, after months or years of exalting pursuit. He could only begin, “You stupid kids,” and continue in his ordinary Pittsburgh accent with his normal righteous anger and the usual common sense.