PART 4: EXILE

I had been an unusually self-reliant ten-year-old. An only child, in a family that moved around a great deal, I was accustomed to spending time alone, reading voraciously, making myself a salami sandwich or frying myself an egg when I got hungry, answering the phone and taking messages for my parents, which I dutifully transcribed, asking the caller to repeat the call-back number if there was one. Starting earlier that year, my parents decided that a sitter was not necessary when they went out for the evening. I could take care of myself, they believed, and I believed it too. All I required of them was that they should leave me the number where they could be reached in case of emergency, and that my mother should call me to say goodnight around nine o’clock. Nothing sentimental like blown kisses; just a mutual reassurance of the status quo. “Hello, darling, we’ll be home in a couple of hours. See you in the morning. Sleep tight.” When I hung up, I would conscientiously brush my teeth, wash my face, and go to sleep. But on this particular Christmas Eve, I home alone and they at some party or other, the phone didn’t ring at nine o’clock – or at ten. At first I was simply annoyed; I couldn’t start my final routines until that telephonic goodnight had been delivered. But I wasn’t worried; I could always call them. Finally, I decided to do that, in order to remind them of their responsibilities. I went to the pad next to the phone where they wrote the number at which they could be reached – and it was blank. By eleven, I was worried sick. I went to bed, but lay there with my eyes open until midnight, by which time I was in a panic. I was all alone – in the huge dark city, in the universe. There was no one else to call. Well, that wasn’t true; the Jaffes lived below us, but though I knew Jane well, what could I say to her parents? That my parents left me alone? What could they do? Go out and look for them? To distract myself, and doubtless to express my anger, I opened all my Christmas presents, scattered beneath the tree in the living room. I had gotten everything I wanted – a new pencil sharpener, a draftsman’s compass, a model plane – but I took no pleasure in them. I fantasized that my mother and father were lying dead in the street, run over by a taxi or murdered by thieves. What would happen next? The police would come to the address on Dad’s driver’s license sometime the next morning, but how would I survive until then? At 3:30, I heard my parents’ footsteps on the stairs to our landing. I flung open the door and burst into tears. “Where were you?” I shouted. They looked at each other, amazed. “You didn’t call me! You didn’t leave the number!” My father was the one who tried to calm me; when at last he got me into bed, I could hear him arguing with my mother in their room next door. It seems to have been her fault, her abnegation of duty. “Oh, stop it, Sally!” my father said angrily, in a tone I’d never heard before, to some defense she made. “The poor kid is here all alone, crying his eyes out.” That made me feel ashamed, as if I should have and could have dealt with the situation as an adult would: assumed that it was far more likely that both their chores had simply slipped their minds than that they’d been the victims of a gruesome double homicide. But I wasn’t an adult, and the veneer or maturity that had enabled our family’s arrangement simply slid off me, leaving me shivering and helpless. After that night, I found that I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie in bed for an hour and then start calling for them. “This is ridiculous,” my mother would say. “Close your eyes and just let yourself relax,” but it didn’t work; memories of Christmas Eve kept coming back. Over the next year, they still left me alone when they went out, though of course they were scrupulous about keeping me informed of their whereabouts, and often, both of them would call to check on me. On these nights, I didn’t even try to go to sleep until they got home. A lifelong, habitual insomnia had begun, my bed itself – with its neat coverlet, plumped-up pillow and folded-down top sheet became the focus of what would now be called post-traumatic stress syndrome. I still sleep better if I’m not folded between two sheets, but rather under some loose blanket or comforter. I can nap almost anywhere in the daytime – on planes and trains and cars, on couches, on deep chairs – but not in bed. I’m very sensitive to noise at night – to taxis honking and garbage trucks groaning, to the dinging of elevators in hotel corridors when they stop at the floor of whatever hotel we’re staying in. But I’d rather sleep in a hotel room than in someone’s guest room, where I can’t complain if, say, there’s a grandfather clock nearby that chimes every fifteen minutes all night long. There was such a clock in my wife’s parents’ house in Grand Rapids, and the first thing I did when we visited was still it, along with the cuckoo clock in the kitchen, as they shook their heads at my complicated New York neurosis. My father was more sympathetic than my mother to my new difficulties. A week later, on New Year’s Eve, my mother went alone to whatever round of parties they’d been invited to, and my father took me to the movies -- King Solomon’s Mines, with Stewart Granger. But for them to socialize apart was hardly a long-term solution. Boarding school was. There, I would never be alone at night, and would eventually adjust. Equally important, I wouldn’t be loading them with guilt every time they walked out the door and looked back at my stricken face. So I was sent away. There were educational alternatives to the toxic Joan of Arc on the UWS: John Kennedy Jr. had attended both St. Bernard's and Collegiate; there was Calhoun and Columbia Grammar and Dwight. How to explain, then, the fact that over my strenuous, even hysterical, objections, I was shipped off to a private boarding school? And not to one of those privileged citadels that automatically regurgitated you into an Ivy League college. My parents who hadn’t grown up in the Northeast, had probably never heard of Choate or Exeter or Taft. In any case, I found myself enrolled in the seventh grade at The Edgewood School, in Greenwich, Connecticut, which they had chosen solely on the recommendation of Toby Carr, who had gone to that obscure institution since grade school, and was not in her senior year. Toby would “look after me,” as my mother put it, though in the event, like any 17-year-old girl, she had many more important things to do than baby-sit me – she was the girlfriend of the quarterback, and was applying to college, both of them more absorbing pursuits keeping tabs on me. What no one realized was that Edgewood was foundering. Toby’s was probably the last class composed of functioning people that graduated from it. The headmistress was an elderly lesbian whose partner supplied most of the funding, but apparently she was running out of money and interest. A large percentage of its students were either from broken homes or foreign families that needed to park their children somewhere for a few years. There were three brothers from Venezuela; a sad, thin boy from England who got picked on and another short, shy boy from Bermuda; a couple of Mittel-Europeans whose English was shaky, and a leavening of mid-westerners. I was the only New Yorker and the only Jew – and though there was no overt prejudice, this was a fact of which I was subliminally aware throughout my five years there. As its endowment declined, so did the school’s enrollment; desperate for income, they must have accepted anyone who applied. But the shrinking continued; in my class, there were eleven students, and only 32 in the whole high school. The place closed its doors the year after I graduated.                                 Edgewood’s main building, previously a private residence owned by C.W. Post             By the time I was a junior, academics were almost nonexistent, and I learned nothing during the five years I spent there except what I taught myself, with the exception of mathematics. Edgewood had a great math teacher, but he died midway through trigonometry and most of the other faculty were misfits in a school for misfits. Mr. Eliott, my ninth-grade English teacher, worked in a pizzeria downtown weekends and nights, supplementing his income by pretending to teach literature. He was fond of referring to the Neoclassic era, but he called it the “Pseudoclassic era,” and he pronounced “pseudo” as “passwadio.” He never forgave me for correcting him in class. Mr. Corrington (English, Grade 11), thin and gay, had been trying for twenty years to earn a Master’s at Columbia; I ran into him on Morningside Heights when I entered grad school, and he was still there when I left with my Ph.D eight years later. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, there was one way in which Edgewood was just the right school for me.  Because there were so few students, everybody participated in everything. There was a huge athletic field, probably two acres in area, which had room for a baseball diamond and a football field. In the winter, it could be flooded, and the weather was usually cold enough to turn it into a gigantic glassy rink on which we could play hockey. There was also an indoor basketball court, though the ceiling was so slow that you couldn’t shoot jump shots on the proper rainbow arc. I was the center on the basketball team, which meant I was giving away two or three inches to my opponents when we played, and invariably lost to, other schools. I was a fairly competent first baseman, hitting .319 my senior year, but our coach – who had been a minor-league pitcher – never noticed, let alone corrected, my basic throwing problem: I gripped the ball along the seams, instead of across them, and most of my did what two-seam fast balls do when major leaguer pitchers throw them – break down and to the right, making them hard to catch.                That's me, first row, far right. I still have that glove; I use it when I play catch with my grandson. In the print shop, I learned to set moveable type from the California case, lock it up into a page, and print it on one of the ancient, hand-fed presses; I had a thriving little stationery business going for a while, with my parents’ friends as customers. In the pottery studio, I learned to throw on a wheel under the guidance of Mr. Sullivan, the kind and patient arts and crafts teacher. I had no talent for this, but I could sing and act a little, and the music teacher, Mr. Howe, knew how to stage an operetta and even straight plays. So My Edgewood transcript looked great: valedictorian, twelve varsity letters, the leads roles in both Gilbert and Sullivan and Shakespeare, president of the student government – but with so little competition, how could I not succeed? To the faculty, I was the star of the school, but I had little in common with my classmates, and the friendships I made didn’t survive graduation. The teachers must have been aware that the school’s reputation among institutions of higher learning was a joke, but they nevertheless wrote enthusiastic letters of recommendation on my behalf to Harvard, Yale, Swarthmore and Cornell. Hah! The first three saw through the charade of my high school education, but fortunately, perhaps because of my College Board scores and carefully crafted essay, Cornell thought I was worth the gamble. In Ithaca, my sterling high school record  in academics was quickly exposed: I got an F on the first college test I took. It took two years for me to learn how to study, three before I made Dean’s List. I could hardly hold my own in intramural sports, let alone make a varsity team, and I was never called back after auditions for parts in plays. What I should have done was aligned myself with the Cornell Widow, the humor magazine, or at least with the campus newspaper, but preferred to concentrate on fiction – which proved a dead end – in my creative writing classes. Edgewood’s tuition was probably minimal but still, the black hole of my parents’ finances invites a question. It was a given that though we kept up appearances, we were far less comfortably off than many our family friends on the West Side, as a glance at any of their apartments on Central Park West or Riverside Drive made clear even to me.  I eavesdropped on many sotto voce arguments about money behind the closed bedroom door, and though I couldn’t make out all the words, the anxious tone was clear enough. Yet, apparently, there was enough in the family coffers to pay Edgewood’s fees, whatever they amounted to, and also to send me to summer camps: Menatoma in Maine when I was 9, Robinson Crusoe in Massachusetts when I was 11, and Shaker Village Work Camp in the Berkshires when I was 15. This last sounds like a reformatory, but it was actually a reclamation of one of the few remaining Shaker communities, founded by a collection of New York socialists for whom the Shakers represented an early experiment in communal living. Doubtless the place was on the Attorney General’s list, along with many other pinko groups. But it was a lot of fun. There, at last, I found my cohort: bright kids from left-leaning New York families who were interested in sports and movies and sex but who also read book and talked about social issues. They were the forerunners of the counter-culture, who planted the seeds of radicalism that flowered a few years later on college campuses. And the staff largely consisted of private-school teachers who not only umpired softball games but introduced us to politics, chess, and classical music (every night we rehearsed the singing parts of Bach’s 4th cantata, under the direction of Hal Aks, a composer and music teacher who had founded the Interracial Chorus (which was certainly on the AG’s list.) We visited both Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow. Every morning, in workshops, we made Shaker crafts under the direction of actual Shakers, who were very old and about to disappear because the sect was celibate and was having great difficulty finding converts to fill their thinning ranks. in the afternoons we did what all summer campers did: played sports, went sailing and canoeing, but in the evening, after rehearsal, couples slipped away to make out and probably, in some cases, actually have sex; the camp didn’t believe in close supervision, and many of these campers had been raised in very permissive homes. So there was quite a bit of action, considering we were only in our mid-teens and this was the 1950s, but as usual, I was the young boy who didn’t really appeal to girls my age or older. Sending me there was the best thing my parents ever did for me. I think I assumed that when I was shipped off to Greenwich, I was being punished for something without being told what it was – like Joseph K. in The Trial. It certainly wasn’t my long-past fire-bombing of the landlord, and I never did anything that adventurous again . I kept to myself and read my books, I ate what was on my plate, and I spoke when spoken to. Maybe, it occurred to me, my parents simply didn’t like me, didn’t want me around. But the real reason was probably that our apartment was simply too small for three people to live in comfortably. From a current real estate prospectus, I’ve obtained its floor plan: two bedrooms, a single bathroom, a living room, a kitchen/dinette and three closets shoehorned into under 800 square feet. We lived, almost literally, on top of each other. The competition for bathroom time in the morning was intense, and my father’s snoring sometimes woke me at three A.M. through the flimsy wall that separated the two bedrooms; you can imagine what it did to my mother, who sometimes slept on the living room couch.  And of course, the older and bigger I got, the more space I took up. Perhaps I was playing my phonograph too loudly; perhaps I pestered my father too much with incessant, inane questions (“Dad, if a triceratops and a stegosaurus had a fight, who would win?”); my dirty socks and underwater were always underfoot. Sending me away to camp could pass for an act of love; many parents protected their kids from polio by getting them out of town, and New York summers were hellishly steamy when the only escape was to an air-conditioned movie. But Mom and Dad could hardly have believed that consigning me to a school about which they knew next to nothing was a kindness or a benefit. And if the problem was indeed lack of space, why did they not re-allocate my tuition into renting a bigger apartment? The fact is that, for reasons I still don’t understand, all three of us lived a deprived life – especially my dad. Neither of my parents had any hobbies or pastimes that might have enriched their days, unless you count my father’s endless, futile attempts to interest a producer in one of the many plays he’d written, which now occupied two drawers of his desk in a corner of his bedroom. Other fathers bonded with their sons by taking them fishing or bowling; other families went on ski trips or traveled to Europe or the National Parks out west; other mothers played canasta, joined book groups, or became active in school affairs. Not mine. Every year or so my mother and I would take the train up to Montreal for a week to visit her sisters Eve and Rose and her brother Lionel, and twice, we went all the way to Saskatchewan in a Pullman car – three days and nights -- to the farm where my grandparents still lived. I loved the train rides and endured the relatives. Among them, these three siblings had produced only one child, my cousin Susan, and my aunts doted on me; Aunt Eve would loom scarily over me, saying “Oooh, I could just eat you up with a spoon!” The one I liked best was Aunt Eve’s Quebecois housekeeper Angela, who would take me to mass with her on Sundays at a cathedral on a hill overlooking the whole city.  My Dad never accompanied us; never, in fact, went anywhere. So absent was he from my Mom’s family that she never bothered to inform her parents when he died; they hadn’t seen him in twenty years, and they never came to New York, so what was the problem? After his death, Mom started living a more varied life, giving cooking lessons first to friends in her own apartment and later to larger groups in theirs, but what she did with her days when I was in grade school, I can’t imagine. Unlike the lives of kids today, crammed with extracurricular activities and recreations, I went to playgroup after school for a couple of hours and that was it. I was 60 when I finally stood on a pair of skis, a visiting professor at the University of Colorado. The subject of music lessons never came up. I was late learning to swim, and I had to teach myself to ride a bike. My parents’ lifestyle was minimalist in the extreme, and probably even more so after I wasn’t around much to share it.  But I negotiated a crucial escape clause from boarding school: I got to come home every weekend. Every Friday afternoon, I took a cab to the Greenwich station, a train to Grand Central, and my heart was always buoyed at the sight of the Chrysler building as I emerged onto 42nd Street. For the next two days, I would be free. Edgewood was like one of those country-club prisons you read about, a leafy campus surrounded by a chain link fence. There were no walks to take, movies to see, museums to visit, or sodas to drink, and though I now realize that it was the grounds of a lovely old estate, its sylvan beauty clashed with my then totally urban esthetic. When I was at P.S. 9, I would make my way after school into Riverside Park to the traffic roundabout where cars entered the Henry Hudson Parkway at 79th Street, but not to watch birds or admire plantings. There was a barred window on the pedestrian sidewalk that looked onto a fascinating dystopian world called the Hudson Rail Yards: a vast dark subterranean space a hundred feet below, filled with trains sitting on sidings or in motion, clanging and whistling, venting huge gouts of steam. The yards stretched for miles, partly underground but mostly exposed, all the way down the western side of Manhattan. I could stand there for an hour, watching the intricate movements of huge cars as they were assembled into trains by the switch engines.  In Greenwich, there were hedges and trees. And when I reached my teens, New York had begun began to offer pleasures with which Edgewood couldn’t possibly compete. I had made a new city friend, Jeff Davidson, whom I’d known from summers spent on Fire Island, where his parents had a house, since I was 13. He was a year older, but infinitely more sophisticated, and I became his protégé. In all things, he led and I followed, His natural  mode of self-presentation was (and is) highly dramatic, and under his tutelage, I became a theater buff. One of our favorite activities, on winter weekend nights when I was home from school, was crashing plays. In those days – the mid-50’s – almost every Broadway play was three acts long, with two intermissions. We’d try to find someone who could  had seen the piece and could give us a synopsis of Act 1; then, respectably attired in our Brooks Brothers jackets and ties, we’d mingle with the crowd during the first intermission and drift back in with them. It wasn’t too much trouble to find empty seats, because we never tried for sold out hits of big musicals like Damn Yankees and Guys and Dolls. But we saw two-thirds of almost every straight play produced in New York for three seasons. There was no off-Broadway then; the black boxes in Soho where Jack Gelber and Edward Albee would remake the theater were six or seven years away, so what we took in was the standard stuff of the time, some of it pretty good: toward the ends of their runs, when we judged that we could cloak ourselves in invisibility, we sneaked into the original productions of William Inge’s Bus Stop, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Clifford Odets’s The Flowering Peach and Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy. We got caught only once, when we must have done something to call attention to ourselves; an usher barred our entrance to the St. James Theater and asked to see our ticket stubs. We tried to find another show that was still between acts, but when we passed the Schubert Theater, we heard someone call out from the box office, “Those are the two guys the St. James called about!” So we slunk home. During my junior and his senior years in high school, we spent many afternoons at Jeff’s apartment on 84th and Madison, and I was struck by how different the East Side was from my own neighborhood – much classier, though in an uninteresting way. There was nothing like the jumble of little shops that sold tchotchkes and stationery, none of the delis – Gitlitz, Zabar’s, Barney Greengrass -- and bodegas that offered the food that European emigrés and Latinos craved. Instead there were sedate antique stores, fashionable boutiques, expensive jewelers behind whose spotless glass windows sat rows of Patek Phillippes. There were virtually no movie theaters, which and I, addicted to filmgoing from the age of eight, thought of East Side boys as living a deprived life, but with an interesting companion, I discovered other ways of passing the time. Jeff gave me the mentoring I needed, instilling into my highly conventional personality a little shot of the subversive. He was (and is) by nature a crosser of boundaries. He loved to play tricks and pranks; he’d call someone up – usually an adult, a family friend or the assistant principal of his school -- and in an indecipherable accent he’d introduce himself with some outlandish name like Alfidio Obsiknik or Jaroslav Densidit and begin an uninterruptable monologue that didn’t quite make sense but sounded as if it did, until the victim hung up in bewilderment. I drifted with the current where Jeff swam against it, and I needed this tutorial in the arts of mild subversion. In the city, we horsed around in Jeff’s room, sometimes creating impromptu plays that we’d perform for his parents. Often they featured a wonderful prop – a mysterious object, belonging to Jeff’s father, that looked like a kind of black silk flying saucer until you pushed it from the inside, at which point it would make a popping sound and, like a caterpillar molting into a butterfly, it would become a top hat. You could do this by putting it on your head and pulling the brim down. “Behold!” Jeff would exclaim. “I am” (Pop!) “the Count!” And when I reached my teens, New York had begun began to offer pleasures with which Edgewood couldn’t possibly compete. I had made a new city friend, Jeff Davidson, whom I’d known from summers spent on Fire Island, where his parents had a house, since I was 13. He was a year older, but infinitely more sophisticated, and I became his protégé. In all things, he led and I followed, His natural  mode of self-presentation was (and is) highly dramatic, and under his tutelage, I became a theater buff. One of our favorite activities, on winter weekend nights when I was home from school, was crashing plays. In those days – the mid-50’s – almost every Broadway play was three acts long, with two intermissions. We’d try to find someone who could  had seen the piece and could give us a synopsis of Act 1; then, respectably attired in our Brooks Brothers jackets and ties, we’d mingle with the crowd during the first intermission and drift back in with them. It wasn’t too much trouble to find empty seats, because we never tried for sold out hits of big musicals like Damn Yankees and Guys and Dolls. But we saw two-thirds of almost every straight play produced in New York for three seasons. There was no off-Broadway then; the black boxes in Soho where Jack Gelber and Edward Albee would remake the theater were six or seven years away, so what we took in was the standard stuff of the time, some of it pretty good: toward the ends of their runs, when we judged that we could cloak ourselves in invisibility, we sneaked into the original productions of William Inge’s Bus Stop, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Clifford Odets’s The Flowering Peach and Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy. We got caught only once, when we must have done something to call attention to ourselves; an usher barred our entrance to the St. James Theater and asked to see our ticket stubs. We tried to find another show that was still between acts, but when we passed the Schubert Theater, we heard someone call out from the box office, “Those are the two guys the St. James called about!” So we slunk home. During my junior and his senior years in high school, we spent many afternoons at Jeff’s apartment on 84th and Madison, and I was struck by how different the East Side was from my own neighborhood – much classier, though in an uninteresting way. There was nothing like the jumble of little shops that sold tchotchkes and stationery, none of the delis – Gitlitz, Zabar’s, Barney Greengrass -- and bodegas that offered the food that European emigrés and Latinos craved. Instead there were sedate antique stores, fashionable boutiques, expensive jewelers behind whose spotless glass windows sat rows of Patek Phillippes. There were virtually no movie theaters, which and I, addicted to filmgoing from the age of eight, thought of East Side boys as living a deprived life, but with an interesting companion, I discovered other ways of passing the time. Jeff gave me the mentoring I needed, instilling into my highly conventional personality a little shot of the subversive. He was (and is) by nature a crosser of boundaries. He loved to play tricks and pranks; he’d call someone up – usually an adult, a family friend or the assistant principal of his school -- and in an indecipherable accent he’d introduce himself with some outlandish name like Alfidio Obsiknik or Jaroslav Densidit and begin an uninterruptable monologue that didn’t quite make sense but sounded as if it did, until the victim hung up in bewilderment. I drifted with the current where Jeff swam against it, and I needed this tutorial in the arts of mild subversion. In the city, we horsed around in Jeff’s room, sometimes creating impromptu plays that we’d perform for his parents. Often they featured a wonderful prop – a mysterious object, belonging to Jeff’s father, that looked like a kind of black silk flying saucer until you pushed it from the inside, at which point it would make a popping sound and, like a caterpillar molting into a butterfly, it would become a top hat. You could do this by putting it on your head and pulling the brim down. “Behold!” Jeff would exclaim. “I am” (Pop!) “the Count!” I left Edgewood after graduation without a backward glance; I even skipped the party that one of the day students threw for us. So eager was I to put the place behind me that I forgot to say goodbye to Marie, who was what you might call my girlfriend. I took her to the senior prom, but that was pretty much all we did together except make out; she was the first girl I knew who opened her mouth when she kissed. I remembered her on the way to the train station with my parents in the taxi, and I suppose I could have demanded that we go back until I had attended to that detail, but I put it out of my mind for the next two years, when she sent me a tearful letter asking how I could have been so callous as the do a thing like that. I had no answer, so I never wrote her back. I haven’t kept in touch with any of my classmates, who scattered, and because the school was no more – it was taken over by a Christian Science school, called Daycroft, the following year – I couldn’t have located them if I’d wanted to. Toby had made lifelong friends during her years there, and many decades later, tried to put interest me in putting together a reunion of sorts for Edgewood grads, but I wasn’t interested, and it never happened.