An American Childhood Page 6

  “No, higher, I should think. But not now.”

  Mary climbed from the couch. She was thin, sallow-skinned, full of love, quick to laugh. She always wore her white uniform. By choice, she rarely came to the beach. I asked her how long it would be until dinner. She looked at her black watch. Two hours, she said. You kids. How was the water?

  Mary was forty-five, to Oma’s sixty-five. She had lived with them twenty-four years. Almost all of her family, she told me, had died one day during the 1918 flu epidemic; her parents and most of her brothers and sisters had died one after the other in the house. Both at the Lake and in Pittsburgh she had a room and a private bath; over the bed hung a crucifix, the most bizarre object I had ever seen. Of Mary’s Catholicism, Oma used to say, with a tinge of admiration, “She’s stubborn.”

  Mary and Henry ate in the kitchen. We ate on the enclosed porch. From the porch we could see the tall fir trunks on the back lawn, and the lake below and far down the cliff, and the lake beating in waves over the stones and up onto the sand, and blurring offshore with the sky.

  Oma settled in for a phone call. She combed her wet hair and shaped its waves with a freckled forefinger. She sat to her Florentine leather desk, by the tall living-room windows. I joined my grandfather at the Cleveland Indians game; Amy rolled around bored on the floor. I could hear Oma. She placed the call with the operator and apparently got a busy signal, for she hung up, called the operator, and shouted that she’d like to try again. There was a silence. Then she lost her temper. “But I just told you. I’m calling Marie Phillips in Pittsburgh—I just this minute finished telling you. Have you already lost the number I gave you?”

  Oma had grown up an only child, in some luxury. There was something Victorian about her. Her grasp of the great world was slender. She believed that there was not only a telephone operator assigned to her, but also a burglar. She and my grandfather had Cadillacs, one at a time. She referred to the car as “the machine”: “Henry is coming around with the machine.”

  At the Lake, Oma wore cotton sundresses and low-heeled sandals. She relaxed there; we all did. She barely resembled the formidable woman she was in Pittsburgh the rest of the year. In Pittsburgh, she dressed. She wore jewelry by the breastful, by the armload: diamonds, rubies, emeralds. She wore big rings like engine bearings, and vast, slithering mink coats. She wore purple and green silk, purple and green linen, purple and green wool—dresses, suits, robes—and leather high-heeled pumps, which drew attention to her long, energetic legs and thin ankles. She looked imposing. She looked, we at our house tended to think—for how females looked occupied most of females’ attention—terrible. We were all blondes; we disliked purple, we disliked green, and were against the rest of it, too.

  American Standard Corporation started as a plumbing brass foundry in Louisville, Kentucky. Oma’s grandfather, Theodore Ahrens, came over from Hamburg, Germany, in 1848 and opened that foundry, which kept growing. The family kept holdings in the firm. Our grandmother was not ashamed that she was German. Amy and I were ashamed of being one-fourth German because of her (never guessing that our own mother, whose hatred of things German was an ordinary part of family politics, was in fact half German herself).

  I thought Oma was brilliant to have accepted the suit of Frank Doak. He was an uncommonly kind and good-natured man. Oma had met him in 1914, while she was visiting Pittsburgh cousins. He was from an ordinary Scotch-Irish family so devotedly Presbyterian they forbade looking at the Sunday funnies. (William Doak had immigrated from Ulster in 1848 with a cargo of woolens. He wrote home depressed that the socks weren’t selling well. The name Doak was a corruption of McDougal.) Oma had been a spoiled, fun-loving, red-haired beauty; our grandfather handled her with the same solid calm that is reputedly so effective on racehorses.

  By the time I knew him, our grandfather was a vice-president of Pittsburgh’s Fidelity Trust Bank. He looked very like a cartoonist’s version of “vested interests.” In fact, he almost always wore a vest, and a gold watch on a chain; he was short and heavy; he had a small white mustache; he smoked cigars. At home, his thin legs crossed under his belly, he read the financial section of the paper, tolerant of children who might have been driven, in the long course of waiting for dinner, to beating their fingertips on his scalp.

  From almost every room at the Lake house, you could see Lake Erie and its mild shore. From my bed as soon as I woke, I gauged the waves’ height: two inches, three. The waves disintegrated on the big beach; from the high cliff where our house stood, their breaking sounded like poured raw rice. By afternoon, the waves were two or three feet high. They seemed to rattle the glass porch windows; they broke on the long beaches like seas. On the horizon we saw ore boats—lakers—bringing iron ore east from the Masabi ore range near Lake Superior. Ships had been carrying iron ore bound for Pittsburgh across Lake Erie since the time of Carnegie and Frick. Sometimes a dusting of ore washed up or blew up on the sand beach. It lay in scalloped windrows, as did the powdery purple garnet grains after storms.

  Canada, we knew, lay across the Lake. Many times I planned to run away to Canada; I would lie on the canvas raft and paddle with my hands. Instead I took up bicycle exploring. I rode a bicycle all morning for months, for years. I saw apple orchards, nurseries, and cornfields.

  The land I toured mornings on a bike was flat and fertile. The Ohio settlers had a crazy way of clearing this land of forest. Father told me about it one night after dinner (our parents visited the Lake every summer). The pioneers, he said—the Scotch-Irish, German, and English pioneers—came in and sawed halfway through the trunk of every tree they wanted to fell, every tree in—was I to believe this?—several acres. Then when a wind came up they felled some big trees at the forest’s upwind edge, and those trees took the whole forest down, just knocked those half-cut trees before them like dominoes. I laughed—what a good idea. Father laughed. When you saw through a tree trunk, he said, the first half is a lot easier than the second half. They never had to saw through the second halves.

  I rode past cantaloupe stands and truck farms planted in tomatoes. I rode past sandy woods and frame houses with green shutters and screened porches full of kids. I played baseball with some of the kids. I got a book on birds, took up bird-watching, and saw a Baltimore oriole in an apple orchard. I straddled my bike in amazement, bare feet on the cool morning road, and watched the brilliant thing bounce singing from treetop to treetop in the sun.

  I learned to whistle; I whistled “The Wayward Wind.” I sang “The Wayward Wind,” too, at the top of my lungs for an hour one evening, bored on the porch, hurling myself from chair to chair singing, and wondering when these indulgent grandparents would stop me. At length my grandfather looked up from his paper and said, “That’s a sad song you’re singing. Do you know that?” And I was amazed he knew that. Did he yearn to wander, my banker grandfather, like the man in “The Wayward Wind”?

  Afternoons we swam at our own beach. When Grandfather joined us I stared at the skin on his legs. It consisted of many scaly layers of fragile translucency, which together appeared bluish. On it, white starbursts appeared at random, and red streaks were visible somewhere inside. The stars and stripes forever. The skin on Oma’s legs was similarly translucent; the freckles seemed to float flat just below the first few layers.

  I found a beachful of neighborhood kids to swim with; I came home only to eat. Evenings Amy and I played cards with Oma and Mary on the porch, or, when we were younger, we colored in coloring books with Oma. Oma was a tidy hand with a crayon. She fought with us over the crayons as an equal. The big woodland silk moths banged at the glass walls beside our bare shoulders under the lamp.

  We left the Lake by rising at three, eating the last of the sweet cantaloupe by lamplight, and driving through horse-and-buggy Mennonite country back to Pittsburgh. We retraced one of the routes the old Indian traders had used in the 1750s, back from the Lake Erie country to the Forks of the Ohio, where they could load up on trinkets and, pretty soon, buy a d
rink. In Pittsburgh, Oma would go back to work. Although she claimed never to have worked, in fact she and a partner directed the Presbyterian Hospital gift shop as volunteers full time for twenty years. And in Pittsburgh this year, Amy and I would start new schools.

  Now in the embarrassing Cadillac we pulled up in front of our house. From the capacious row of jump seats Amy and I were delivered—suntanned, cheerful, covered with poison ivy, and in possession of suitcases full of new green and purple dresses—to our mother.

  The rivalry between our mother and Oma was intense; it was a long, civilized antagonism. Our mother had won the moral battle—we children were shamed, for instance, by Oma’s bursts of bigotry—but Mother fought on for autonomy, seeking to prevent our being annexed to Oma’s big tribe of Louisville Germans. When I was a baby, Oma had several times hauled me downriver to Louisville for Christmas as a prize; Mother put a stop to it.

  If Oma had a great deal of shockingly loose money, we had, we fancied, good taste. Oma had a green-and-blue blown-glass sculpture of two intertwined swans, full of bubbles; we had a black iron Calder-style mobile. Oma had a servant and a companion. We had help. Our “help” shared our drinking glasses. At our parents’ parties, friends ate lasagna and danced; at our grandparents’ parties, guests ate sauerbraten and went to the theater.

  Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues. We thought we were grander than Oma morally, that she was bigoted and vain, quite as if we ourselves were neither. Actually it was her taste we most deplored. We thought that merely possessing a gaudy figurine was a worse offense than wholeheartedly embracing snobbery. We could not see how clearly she saw us, two small children just about to start prep school, who enjoyed the fruits of her family’s prosperity, and who had barely peeped beyond Pittsburgh. She never said a word against our mother. But like our mother, she never gave up the struggle, even, apparently, after she suffered a stroke—for after her stroke she earnestly asked our father from time to time, “Have you ever thought of marrying?”

  He pressed her freckled hand. Of course we loved her.

  It was not, in retrospect, a fair fight. For at our house, we were all so young.

  WE HAD MOVED WHEN I WAS EIGHT. We moved from Edgerton Avenue to Richland Lane, a hushed dead-end street on the far side of Frick Park. We expanded into a brick house on two lots. There was a bright sunporch under buckeye trees; there was a golden sandstone wall with fireplace and bench that Mother designed, which ran the length of the living room.

  It was into this comfortable house that the last of us sisters, Molly, was born, two years later. It was from this house that Father would leave to go down the river to New Orleans, and to this house that he would return early, from the river at Louisville. Here Mother told the contractor where she wanted kitchen walls knocked out. Here on the sunporch Amy tended her many potentially well-dressed dolls, all of whom were, unfortunately, always sick in bed. Here I began a life of reading books, and drawing, and playing at the sciences. Here also I began to wake in earnest, and shed superstition, and plan my days.

  Every August when Amy and I returned from the Lake, we saw that workmen had altered the house in our absence—the dining room seemed bigger, the kitchen was lighter—but we couldn’t recall how it had been. I thought Mother was a genius for thinking up these improvements, for the house always seemed fine to me, yet it got better and better.

  This August, the summer I was ten, we returned from the Lake and found our shared room uncannily tidy and stilled, dark, while summer, the summer in which we had been immersed, played outside the closed windows like a movie. So it always was, those first few minutes in an emptied room. They made you self-conscious; you felt yourself living your life. As soon as you unzipped your suitcase and opened the window, you broke the spell; you plunged again into the rush and weather.

  While we were gone, Molly had learned to crawl. She pulled herself up and stood singing in her playpen on the flat part of the front lawn; the buckeye boughs stirred far overhead, and waved over her round arms their speckled lights.

  Usually when it was hot the family swam at the distant country-club pool. Now that we were back from the Lake, all that resumed—a nasty comedown after the Lake, to whose neighborhood beach I had gone alone, and where we were all kids among kids who owned the beach and our days. There, at the Lake, if you wanted to leave, you simply kicked the bike’s kickstand and sprang into the seat and away, in one skilled gesture like cowboys’ mounting horses, rode away on the innocent Ohio roads under old, still trees. At the country club, you often wanted to leave as soon as you had come, but there was no leaving to be had. The country-club pool drew a society as complex and constraining, if not so entertaining, as any European capital’s drawing room did. You forgot an old woman’s name at some peril to your entire family. What if you actually, physically, ran into her? Knocked her off her pins? It was no place for children.

  One country-club morning this August, I saw a red blotch moving in a dense hedge by the club’s baby pool. I crept up on the red blotch in my cold bathing suit and discovered that it was a rose-breasted grosbeak. I had never seen one. This living, wild bird, which could fetch up anyplace it pleased, had inexplicably touched down at our country club. It scratched around in a hedge between the baby pool and the sixth hole. The dumb cluck, why a country club?

  Mother said Father was going down the river in his boat pretty soon. It sounded like a swell idea.

  One windy Saturday morning, after the Lake and before the new private school started, I hung around the house. It was too early for action in the neighborhood. To wake up, I read on the sunporch.

  The sunporch would wake anybody up; Father had now put on the record: Sharkey Bonano, “Li’l Liza Jane.” He was bopping around, snapping his fingers; now he had wandered outside and stood under the big buckeye trees. I could see him through the sunporch’s glass walls. He peered up at a patch of sky as if it could tell him, old salt that he was, right there on Richland Lane, how the weather would be next week on the Ohio River.

  I was starting Kidnapped. It began in Scotland; David Balfour’s father asked that a letter be delivered “when the house is redd up.” Some people in Pittsburgh redd up houses, too. The hardworking parents of my earliest neighborhood friends said it: You kids redd up this room. It meant clean up, or ready up. I never expected to find “redd up” in so grand a thing as a book. Apparently it was Scots. I hadn’t heard the phrase since we moved.

  I rode back to Edgerton Avenue from time to time after we moved—to look around, and to fix in my mind the route back: past the lawn bowlers in Frick Park, past the football field, and beyond the old elementary schoolyard, where a big older boy had said to me, “Why, you’re a regular Ralph Kiner.” Touring that old neighborhood, I saw the St. Bede’s nuns. I sped past them, careless, on my bike.

  “Redd up,” David Balfour’s father said in Kidnapped. I was reading on the sunporch, on the bright couch. “Oh, Li’l Liza!” said the music on the record, “Li’l Liza Jane.” Next week Father was going down the river to New Orleans. Maybe they’d let him sit in a set on the drums; maybe Zutty Singleton would be there and holler out to him—“Hey, Frank!”

  The wind rattled the windowed sunporch walls beside me. I could see, without getting up, some green leaves blowing down from the buckeye branches overhead. Everything in the room was bright, even the bookshelves, even Amy’s melancholy dolls. The blue shadows of fast clouds ran over the far walls and floor. Father snapped his fingers and wandered, tall and loose-limbed, over the house.

  I was ten years old now, up into the double numbers, where I would likely remain till I died. I am awake now forever, I thought suddenly; I have converged with myself in the present. My hands were icy from holding Kidnapped up; I always read lying down. I felt time in full stream, and I felt consciousness in full stream joining it, like the rivers.

  Part Two

  WE LIVED IN A CLEAN CITY whose center was new; after the war, a few business leaders and Democratic
Mayor David L. Lawrence had begun cleaning it up. Beneath the new city, and tucked up its hilly alleys, lay the old Pittsburgh, and the old foothill land beneath it. It was all old if you dug far enough. Our Pittsburgh was like Rome, or Jericho, a palimpsest, a sliding pile of cities built ever nearer the sky, and rising ever higher over the rivers. If you dug, you found things.

  Oma’s chauffeur, Henry Watson, dug a hole in our yard on Edgerton Avenue to plant a maple tree when I was born, and again when Amy was born three years later. When he dug the hole for Amy’s maple, he found an arrowhead—smaller than a dime and sharp. Our mother continually remodeled each of the houses we lived in: the workmen knocked out walls and found brick walls under the plaster and oak planks under the brick. City workers continually paved the streets: they poured asphalt over the streetcar tracks, streetcar tracks their fathers had wormed between the old riverworn cobblestones, cobblestones laid smack into the notorious nineteenth-century mud. Long stretches of that mud were the same pioneer roads that General John Forbes’s troops had hacked over the mountains from Carlisle, or General Braddock’s troops had hacked from the Chesapeake and the Susquehanna, widening with their axes the woodland paths the Indians had worn on deer trails.

  Many old stone houses had slate-shingle roofs. I used to find blown shingles cracked open on the sidewalk; some of them bore—inside, where no one had been able to look until now—fine fossil prints of flat leaves. I heard there were dinosaur bones under buildings. The largest coal-bearing rock sequence in the world ran under Pittsburgh and popped out at Coal Hill, just across the Monongahela. (Then it ducked far underground and ran up into Nova Scotia, dove into the water and crossed under the Atlantic, and rolled up again thick with coal in Wales.) There were layers of natural gas beneath Pittsburgh, and pools of petroleum the pioneers called Seneca oil, because only Indians would fool with it.