An American Childhood Page 5

  If in that snowy backyard the driver of the black Buick had cut off our heads, Mikey’s and mine, I would have died happy, for nothing has required so much of me since as being chased all over Pittsburgh in the middle of winter—running terrified, exhausted—by this sainted, skinny, furious redheaded man who wished to have a word with us. I don’t know how he found his way back to his car.

  OUR PARENTS WOULD SOONER HAVE left us out of Christmas than leave us out of a joke. They explained a joke to us while they were still laughing at it; they tore a still-kicking joke apart, so we could see how it worked. When we got the first Tom Lehrer album in 1954, Mother went through the album with me, cut by cut, explaining. B.V.D.s are men’s underwear. Radiation makes you sterile, and lead protects from radiation, so the joke is…

  Our father kept in his breast pocket a little black notebook. There he noted jokes he wanted to remember. Remembering jokes was a moral obligation. People who said, “I can never remember jokes,” were like people who said, obliviously, “I can never remember names,” or “I don’t bathe.”

  “No one tells jokes like your father,” Mother said. Telling a good joke well—successfully, perfectly—was the highest art. It was an art because it was up to you: if you did not get the laugh, you had told it wrong. Work on it, and do better next time. It would have been reprehensible to blame the joke, or, worse, the audience.

  As we children got older, our parents discussed with us every technical, theoretical, and moral aspect of the art. We tinkered with a joke’s narrative structure: “Maybe you should begin with the Indians.” We polished the wording. There is a Julia Randall story set in Baltimore which we smoothed together for years. How does the lady word the question? Does she say, “How are you called?” No, that is needlessly awkward. She just says, “What’s your name?” And he says, “Folks generally call me Bominitious.” No, he can just say, “They call me Bominitious.”

  We analyzed many kinds of pacing. We admired with Father the leisurely meanders of the shaggy-dog story. “A young couple moved to the Swiss Alps,” one story of his began, “with their grand piano”; and ended, to a blizzard of thrown napkins, “…Oppernockity tunes but once.” “Frog goes into a bank,” another story began, to my enduring pleasure. The joke was not great, but with what a sweet light splash you could launch it! “Frog goes into a bank,” you said, and your canoe had slipped delicately and surely into the water, into Lake Champlain with painted Indians behind every tree, and there was no turning back.

  Father was also very fond of stories set in bars that starred zoo animals or insects. These creatures apparently came into bars all over America, either accompanied or alone, and sat down to face incredulous, sarcastic bartenders. (It was a wonder the bartenders were always so surprised to see talking dogs or drinking monkeys or performing ants, so surprised year after year, when clearly this sort of thing was the very essence of bar life.) In the years he had been loose, swinging aloft in the airy interval between college and marriage, Father had frequented bars in New York, listening to jazz. Bars had no place whatever in the small Pittsburgh world he had grown up in, and lived in now. Bars were so far from our experience that I had assumed, in my detective work, that their customers were ipso facto crooks. Father’s bar jokes—“and there were the regulars, all sitting around”—gave him the raffish air of a man who was at home anywhere. (How poignant were his “you knows” directed at me: you know how bartenders are; you know how the regulars would all be sitting around. For either I, a nine-year-old girl, knew what he was talking about, then or ever, or nobody did. Only because I read a lot, I often knew.)

  Our mother favored a staccato, stand-up style; if our father could perorate, she could condense. Fellow goes to a psychiatrist. “You’re crazy.” “I want a second opinion!” “You’re ugly.” “How do you get an elephant out of the theater? You can’t; it’s in his blood.”

  What else in life so required, and so rewarded, such care?

  “Tell the girls the one about the four-by-twos, Frank.”

  “Let’s see. Let’s see.”

  “Fellow goes into a lumberyard…”

  “Yes, but it’s tricky. It’s a matter of point of view.” And Father would leave the dining room, rubbing his face in concentration, or as if he were smearing on greasepaint, and return when he was ready.

  “Ready with the four-by-twos?” Mother said.

  Our father hung his hands in his pockets and regarded the far ceiling with fond reminiscence.

  “Fellow comes into a lumberyard,” he began.

  “Says to the guy, ‘I need some four-by-twos.’ ‘You mean two-by-fours?’ ‘Just a minute. I’ll find out.’ He walks out to the parking lot, where his buddies are waiting in the car. They roll down the car window. He confers with them a while and comes back across the parking lot and says to the lumberyard guy, ‘Yes. I mean two-by-fours.’

  “Lumberyard guy says, ‘How long do you want them?’ ‘Just a minute,’ fellow says, ‘I’ll find out.’ He goes out across the parking lot and confers with the people in the car and comes back across the parking lot to the lumberyard and says to the guy, ‘A long time. We’re building a house.’”

  After any performance Father rubbed the top of his face with both hands, as if it had all been a dream. He sat back down at the dining-room table, laughing and shaking his head. “And when you tell a joke,” Mother said to Amy and me, “laugh. It’s mean not to.”

  We were brought up on the classics. Our parents told us all the great old American jokes, practically by number. They collaborated on, and for our benefit specialized in, the painstaking paleontological reconstruction of vanished jokes from extant tag lines. They could vivify old New Yorker cartoons, source of many tag lines. The lines themselves—“Back to the old drawing board,” and “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it,” and “A simple yes or no will suffice”—were no longer funny; they were instead something better, they were fixtures in the language. The tag lines of old jokes were the most powerful expressions we learned at our parents’ knees. A few words suggested a complete story and a wealth of feelings. Learning our culture backward, Amy and Molly and I heard only later about The Divine Comedy and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and still later about the Greek and Roman myths, which held no residue of feeling for us at all—certainly not the vibrant suggestiveness of old American jokes and cartoons.

  Our parents reserved a few select jokes, such as “Archibald a Soulbroke,” like vintage wines for extraordinary occasions. We heard about or witnessed those rare moments—maybe three or four in a lifetime—when circumstances combined to float our father to the top of the world, from which precarious eminence he would consent to fling himself into “Archibald a Soulbroke.”

  Telling “Archibald a Soulbroke” was for Father an exhilarating ordeal, like walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. It was a long, absurdly funny, excruciatingly tricky tour de force he had to tell fast, and it required beat-perfect concentration. He had to go off alone and rouse himself to an exalted, superhuman pitch in order to pace the hot coals of its dazzling verbal surface. Often enough he returned from his prayers to a crowd whose moment had passed. We knew that when we were grown, the heavy, honorable mantle of this heart-pounding joke would fall on us.

  There was another very complicated joke, also in a select category, which required a long weekend with tolerant friends.

  You had to tell a joke that was not funny. It was a long, pointless story about a construction job that ended with someone’s throwing away a brick. There was nothing funny about it at all, and when your friends did not laugh, you had to pretend you’d muffed it. (Your husband in the crowd could shill for you: “’Tain’t funny, Pam. You told it all wrong.”)

  A few days later, if you could contrive another occasion for joke telling, and if your friends still permitted you to speak, you set forth on another joke, this one an old nineteenth-century chestnut about angry passengers on a train. The lady plucks the lighted, smelly cigar from
the man’s mouth and flings it from the moving train’s window. The man seizes the little black poodle from her lap and hurls the poor dog from the same window. When at last the passengers draw unspeaking into the station, what do they see coming down the platform but the black poodle, and guess what it has in its mouth? “The cigar,” say your friends, bored sick and vowing never to spend another weekend with you. “No,” you say, triumphant, “the brick.” This was Mother’s kind of joke. Its very riskiness excited her. It wasn’t funny, but it was interesting to set up, and it elicited from her friends a grudging admiration.

  How long, I wondered, could you stretch this out? How boldly could you push an audience—not, in Mother’s terms, to “slay them,” but to please them in some grand way? How could you convince the listeners that you knew what you were doing, that the payoff would come? Or conversely, how long could you lead them to think you were stupid, a dumb blonde, to enhance their surprise at the punch line, and heighten their pleasure in the good story you had controlled all along? Alone, energetic and trying to fall asleep, or walking the residential streets long distances every day, I pondered these things.

  Our parents were both sympathetic to what professional comedians call flop sweat. Boldness was all at our house, and of course you would lose some. Anyone could be misled by poor judgment into telling a “woulda hadda been there.” Telling a funny story was harder than telling a joke; it was trying out, as a tidy unit, some raveling shred of the day’s fabric. You learned to gauge what sorts of thing would “tell.” You learned that some people, notably your parents, could rescue some things by careful narration from the category “woulda hadda been there” to the category “it tells.”

  At the heart of originating a funny story was recognizing it as it floated by. You scooped the potentially solid tale from the flux of history. Once I overheard my parents arguing over a thirty-year-old story’s credit line. “It was my mother who said that,” Mother said. “Yes, but”—Father was downright smug—“I was the one who noticed she said that.”

  The sight gag was a noble form, and the running gag was a noble form. In combination they produced the top of the line, the running sight gag, like the sincere and deadpan Nairobi Trio interludes on Ernie Kovacs. How splendid it was when my parents could get a running sight gag going. We heard about these legendary occasions with a thrill of family pride, as other children hear about their progenitors’ war exploits.

  The sight gag could blur with the practical joke—not a noble form but a friendly one, which helps the years pass. My parents favored practical jokes of the sort you set up and then retire from, much as one writes books, possibly because imagining people’s reactions beats witnessing them. They procured a living hen and “hypnotized” it by setting it on the sink before the bathroom mirror in a friend’s cottage by the New Jersey shore. They spent weeks constructing a ten-foot sea monster—from truck inner tubes, cement blocks, broomsticks, lumber, pillows—and set it afloat in a friend’s pond. On Sanibel Island, Florida, they baffled the shell collectors each Saint Patrick’s Day by boiling a bucketful of fine shells in green dye and strewing the green shells up and down the beach before dawn. I woke one Christmas morning to find in my stocking, hung from the mantel with care, a leg. Mother had charmed a department store display manager into lending her one.

  When I visited my friends, I was well advised to rise when their parents entered the room. When my friends visited me, they were well advised to duck.

  Central in the orders of merit, and the very bread and butter of everyday life, was the crack. Our mother excelled at the crack. We learned early to feed her lines just to watch her speed to the draw. If someone else fired a crack simultaneously, we compared their concision and pointedness and declared a winner.

  Feeding our mother lines, we were training as straight men. The straight man’s was an honorable calling, a bit like that of the rodeo clown: despised by the ignorant masses, perhaps, but revered among experts who understood the skills required and the risks run. We children mastered the deliberate misunderstanding, the planted pun, the Gracie Allen know-nothing remark, which can make of any interlocutor an instant hero.

  How very gracious is the straight man!—or, in this case, the straight girl. She spreads before her friend a gift-wrapped, beribboned gag line he can claim for his own, if only he will pick it up instead of pausing to contemplate what a nitwit he’s talking to.

  OUR FATHER’S PARENTS LIVED IN PITTSBURGH; Amy and I dined with them, rather formally, every Friday night until dancing school swept us away. Our grandfather’s name was, like our father’s, Frank Doak. He was a banker, a potbellied, bald man with thin legs: a generous-hearted, joking, calm Pittsburgher of undistinguished Scotch-Irish descent, who held his peace. Our grandmother’s name was Meta Waltenburger Doak. We children called her Oma, accenting both syllables. She was an imperious and kindhearted grande dame of execrable taste, a tall, potbellied redhead, the proud descendant and heir of well-to-do Germans in Louisville, Kentucky, who boasted that she never worked a day in her life. Our father was their only child.

  Every summer these grandparents moved to their summer house on the shore of Lake Erie, near North Madison, Ohio, and every summer Amy and I moved in with them for a month or two. With them also lived Mary Burinda, a thin woman who still carried a buzzing trace of Hungarian at the tip of her tongue, and who cooked and cleaned and warmly befriended both our grandmother and us; and Henry Watson, a Pittsburgh man who drove the car, tended the grounds, and served dinner.

  Oma was odd about money. One ordinary summer afternoon at Lake Erie, I found a penny in the sand.

  “Money!” Oma said. “If you’ve found money, don’t touch it with your bare hands. You don’t know who has touched it.”

  My bare hands? Oma, Amy, and I had been swimming at the beach below the house when I found the penny. Now I was to bring it to Oma for safekeeping, and go wash my hands in the Lake as well as I could. This washing ought to hold calamity at bay until we could get to the bathhouse to take showers.

  Oma had told me that when she was in her teens, she had sewed rows of lace on her chemises, to bring her bust forward. It was hard to believe. By the time I knew her, her bust was enormous. Walking beside Amy and me up the path to the bathhouse, she cut an imposing figure: her legs were long and fine, her hips slender, her carriage erect. She wore her red hair short, in waves. Her face was round; her head was round and slightly flattened vertically, like Raggedy Ann’s. Her blue eyes were small, stubby-lashed; her nose was short and bulbous. The expression on her thin lips was sometimes peevish, sometimes doting.

  In the bathhouse Amy and I peeled down our bathing suits. Stuck to my belly skin, as if by suction, were flat bits of big Lake Erie sand—gray and smooth, like hammered dots. I pried them off with a fingernail. My buttocks were cold, my arms hot.

  We all stood in the women’s shower; we stamped our sandy feet on the shower’s cedar-slat floor, and turned on the water. Oma soaped her soft arms with the red sponge. When it was my turn to use the red sponge, I got sand in it. I washed myself down with soap and sand—a delicate operation on sunburned shoulders, a pleasingly rough one on poison-ivy-covered shins.

  Peering cheerfully down at me through the sharp strands of water, Oma said, “Have you washed your hands very well with soap?” She stuck her round head under the nozzle, screwed her eyes tight shut, and wagged her chin.

  I mistook bodies for persons, and admired Oma above all for her freckles. Also, she could float. She could float on her back in Lake Erie, she said, and read a book. Sadly, I never saw her perform this feat, for she was not so much of a reader that she felt the need of reading while bathing, but I often saw her float for long periods. Her vast tight abdomen rose in the air; her fingers joined over it. She could easily have held a book. Her small round head in its white rubber cap lay half submerged. From the shore I could see an expression of benignity or complacency on her features, features which had been rather bunched together, centered aroun
d her nose, by the tight bathing cap and its strap. She rocked over the little waves, calm as a plank. She wore white tennis shoes into the water, for our part of Lake Erie was bumpy with glacial stones. When she floated, her tennis shoes stuck straight up.

  From the bathhouse we climbed two flights of stairs to the house proper, a mid-twenties white frame house with five bedrooms and three bathrooms upstairs, and more on the third floor, where Henry Watson lived.

  Now Henry was pushing a mower over the back lawn. Politely he asked us how the water was; he didn’t like the water.

  Henry rarely wore his full uniform at the Lake; he wore only the heavy black pants, a white shirt, and suspenders. When he drove, he put on his cap. Famously, Henry loved summers at the Lake. He took pride in the cool lawns with their bluish, cylindrical grass. Mornings he cleared the horsetail beside the long path from the bathhouse. He washed the glass porch walls. He stood in the driveway up to his ankles in foam, a ridged black garden hose in his hand, washing the car. Vapor rose low from the hot asphalt driveway; it was warm in the nostrils, sweet, smelling of soft soap. Henry’s gold-rimmed glasses flashed.

  In Pittsburgh, during the rest of the year, Henry went home every night to the Homewood section. By day he waited at curbs while my grandmother tried on shoes. He served dinner, nightly, in his white uniform jacket. Here at the Lake he had one friend, another chauffeur, named Cicero. He slept on the third floor. On a kitchen counter was his drinking glass.

  Inside, Oma and Amy and I found Mary Burinda standing on the back of a flower-print couch. She held against a living-room window a curtain rod from which depended heavy, flower-print curtains. “Here, Mrs. Doak? Or lower?” Our grandfather was watching the Cleveland Indians on television in the same room. Henry would join him when he finished mowing.