THE “OLD HOUSE” AND BEYOND

Ever since I first read - or perhaps my mother read to us - A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I think I knew that someday I would write about that place where I spent my first, green years, because the tree outside our window in that apartment was the same kind as the one that grew in Brooklyn: ailanthus, the tree of Heaven. Ours was in Spanish Harlem, but the point was that they could grow almost anywhere, did grow anywhere and everywhere, up through cracks in pavement or concrete, each small tenacious seedling capable, with the right nurturing of sun and nutrients, of launching itself four to five storeys into the air to dance with the lines of bright laundry outside our kitchen window.

I began to keep a journal when I was eleven, four years after we left the “Old House” to move to the cleaner, safer air and streets of the Bronx, by which time books had become the chief conveyors of magic in my life. But until I was seven, it was the images connected with the Old House themselves that held the magic, and each memory I have of the place is like a miniature lit from within, an illuminated treasure like those I later discovered in Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle, a fabulous fantasy dollhouse in a wing of the Field Museum in Chicago. Many of the memories come drenched in sunlight, as if light works its photographic alchemy to imprint images on the mind’s eye as well as on film.

My earliest memory is of sitting on the floor in a puddle of sunlight, watching my aunt Yvonne as she stood by the window using the ironing board as a changing table to change my cousin Timothy’s diaper. I must have been about three and a half. The image is laced with the sweet, pungent smell of baby poop, reminding me once again how the senses of smell and taste seem to have the power to evoke the most vivid memories of the past. There was the time my father woke us up in the middle of the night to watch the cat have her kittens: the memory is wrapped in the rich, buttery smell and warmth of their tiny bodies, damp with blood and licking. And I could swear that one year, on my mother’s birthday, like hummingbirds we actually drank drops of sweet, meadow-flavored nectar from the daffodils that my father bought her.

The Old House was a spacious, sunny, five-room railroad apartment, on the top floor of a five-storey walk-up. At the street end was a large front room - once no doubt the parlor - that had been Aunt Alison’s when we all still lived together; this, my mother says, became the drying room for diapers once we had the place to ourselves. The second room, which was my father's drinking buddy Larry’s until he moved out, had a window looking out on the airshaft between the buildings.

Next came the room where my brother Norris and I slept, that I mainly visualize as sun-drenched; here I recall being in the crib or playpen listening to classical music on the radio, which my mother could only sneak snatches of when my father wasn’t home, because he thought it was tripe - his fare was standards and Dixieland. This is also where Norris and I passed days of itchy companionship while sharing the mumps, measles, and chicken pox. Then, the living room, which contained a hearth with a mantelpiece but no real fireplace. This doubled as my father’s bedroom, because he stayed up so much later than everyone else. It also held a wonderful roll-top desk with intriguing racks of cubbyholes that I used to like to hide under. For some reason this desk is particularly linked in my mind with the tall image of my uncle Neal; perhaps I used it as a reading nook to pore over the brightly illustrated Russian books he gave me, or perhaps he discovered me there one day and lifted me up to toss me in the air the way he used to do.

Finally, at the back of the apartment, giving out onto the yard between the buildings, there was the kitchen, large and roomy, and home to the occasional cockroach or water bug, which I didn’t fear because my mother captured one in a mayonnaise jar to show us, introducing it as Archie from Archie and Mehitabel. In the night kitchen, my most vivid recollection is of perching on top of the tall refrigerator and consuming an entire box of Oreo cookies, making myself so sick in the process that I couldn’t bear to eat them for the next fifteen to twenty years. The daylight kitchen was where we once made ice cream from scratch from a mix, with a rich, custardy base rather like condensed milk, and where Norris and I showed off our fencing skills to a family friend, using the wooden Robin Hood and Little John swords my mother made for us.

While we lived in the old neighborhood, Norris and I didn’t go out much by ourselves. Though the other neighborhood children played in the street, I expect my parents thought it was too rough for us, as perhaps it was, since the one time I do recall our playing downstairs, some other child bopped my poor five-year old brother in the nose and made it bleed. But we went a lot of places with my parents, and even from within the apartment, we had a rich connection with the outdoors, and with the other inhabitants of the building, both real and imaginary. I loved living up high and looking out the windows to the street or yard below. Especially when I was very small, I liked to watch the garbage trucks devour the colorful (and from five storeys up, odorless) garbage fed to them by the garbage men, who naturally resembled zookeepers feeding elephants. And there was even still a junkman who used to come around in a horse-drawn cart, jingle bells on the bridle signaling his arrival.

On the roof, our neighbor Mr. Potrero kept flocks of pigeons, which would fly in great white wheels over the buildings. A few years later, in the Bronx, I rescued a fallen squab from the gutter and raised it, and it too would fly out every morning and return through the window every night, until one day I suppose it found a mate or a better deal, and didn’t come home. Through the window of the air-shaft room, we could see right into another neighbor’s apartment, and Norris and I watched this man with great interest, making up stories about him. We called him “Raoul,” a name that seemed sufficiently romantic and that our father had once longed to have.

Our closest neighbors were Fidelia Pagan and her husband, Perfecto. (What union could be better than one between Fidelity and Perfection?) It was Fidelia who taught my mother how to cook beans and rice the Puerto Rican way, with onions, tomato sauce, aracao, which I later recognized as cilantro, and ajicitos, the little, slightly hot, but sweet green and red peppers shaped like Chinese lanterns.

I greatly envied the Puerto Rican girls because they got wonderful lacy white dresses for their first Communions, and wore them with white lacy socks and glossy black patent leather Mary Janes. When we walked down the streets that held shops that sold these dresses, they hung like wedding banners in a gorgeous array of pastels. There was no holiday or occasion for which we got special clothes; in fact, my father revelled in teasing us, rubbing it in: “Pore little atheists, no new Easter clothes!” My mother made it up to us a bit by taking us to the Spanish market and letting us suck on juicy, fibrous stalks of sugar-cane.

I had a set of books about different Indian tribes: Plains, Navahos, Hopi, and so forth, and I loved to play Indians - only later, once Norris and my cousin Timothy were old enough to play, did the cowboys enter the picture. With my best friend in kindergarten, Charles Miller, who lived in Stuyvesant Town, I jammed on the tom-tom. And for a neighbor who came over after school to play, I described the tepee, the horse-drawn travois, and the elegant white buckskin dress and moccasins, stitched with beads, of an Indian princess. “I’ll be ‘Morning Star’,” I said. “What name do you want?” “Oh,” she said, “I’ll be ‘Movie Star’.”

One year before Christmas, we went to Schlumbum’s, a wonderful candy store in the then-still-very- German neighborhood of the East 80’s, fully deserving of the name “Confectionery.” I remember it as huge and cavernous, like a forest, and filled with cases made of dark wood and glass that contained sweets of every kind. Among the most enticing were the marzipan: crimson apples, rosy peaches, brilliant green limes; but these never tasted as good as they looked, whereas the molded sugar lollipops, reindeer and Santas in deep translucent red and green, with fire at their depths, were delectable. This time we also got a gingerbread man, trimmed with white sugar icing. We brought him home and stood him on the mantelpiece, behind the sofa that converted into Fadder’s bed.

After a few days of seeing and smelling that spicy brown personage, the temptation grew too much for me. In the morning, while Fadder was still asleep, I managed to sneak around behind the head of his bed under the mantelpiece, a good foot above my head, and tried my best to reach up over the lip of the mantel to break off an arm or leg without waking him. I remember holding my breath with every twitch or sleepy murmur he made, but such are the vagaries of memory that I can’t for the life of me recall whether I ever succeeded in my cause, or gave up in frustration and fear that he’d wake.

It was this same mantelpiece that later brained me one day by falling right off the wall onto the bed where I was playing, bouncing and catching me a glancing blow “upside the head” that was enough to get me rushed to the emergency room with a concussion. But it was also what I always pictured when later reading Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, imagining a big mirror hanging above it, and myself climbing up and slipping through into the magical garden beyond.

My mother’s job at the Crow’s Nest generated another sort of Christmas memory. The merchandise that the company sold was mainly furnishings for boats that, naturally, came monogrammed with the boat’s name and insignia: door mats, bathmats and towels, flatware, pillow covers, etc. Over the years, our apartment became more and more heavily furnished with items rejected on account of misspellings, and for years we ate using forks and spoons labeled “Dinebat,” that were supposed to read “Dingbat,” off plates that read “Carolann” and sported nautical flags, from tables covered with placemats charting the deeps of Long Island Sound.

Just as Katherine Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story” embodied the Mainline aristocrat whose life is intimately connected with boats, so, in my mind, my mother (who much resembled Kate, by the way) represented Connecticut Yankee sea-lore, not only because of the Crow’s Nest but also from her tales of her Grandpa Baxter, who’d been a sea captain and sailed the China Seas. Actually, she herself grew up totally inland; but I was seduced by the Crow’s Nest’s imprinted Christmas cards, with their stylized silhouettes of sailboats at rest in a snowy harbor, all glittering white against a dark background, their only flashes of color the reds and greens of wreath, holly, and bobbing buoy lights.

Occasionally, Mommy would take me to work with her. I loved the office paraphernalia and the smell of grey steel and stationery, and could play secretary ecstatically with steno pads, file cards, and paper clips. And I was as intrigued as my mother by her tales of office politics among her bosses and co-workers. Best of all, we got to have lunch at everyone’s favorite kind of ‘50s-New York restaurant, the Automat: macaroni and cheese, baked beans, and custard, all in those wonderful brown pottery casserole dishes.

Even more special than going to work with my mother, though, were the few occasions when I went with my father - to rehearsals, that is. The one I remember was of Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice,” perhaps. Between scenes, a lovely lady whom I will forever think of as Elaine (as in the Lady of Shalott), dressed in a long flowing pale green gown and kirtle, took me by the hand to the basement canteen and got me a Coke from the vending machine, in itself a novel experience for me. In later years, both the song “Stranger in Paradise,” and the sight of a certain type of delicate, lace-winged insect, of the same shade of green as that gown, invariably recalled this scene to me.

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