Growing Up (16 page)

That was the end of another of the Colonel’s plans.

Rebuffed from the west, he began hatching a scheme to ship Uncle Charlie south. Baltimore was the new place he had in mind, but this would be a more complex operation. It involved moving my mother, Doris, and me to Baltimore too. Uncle Hal had an idea to accomplish that. If he could establish a lumber company for himself with a branch office in Baltimore, he could encourage my mother to move and take Charlie with her by making her an officer of the company.

Baltimore—there was the solution. But to form his company he would require capital. The necessary sum, he thought, was about $150. Where could such a sum be found?

In my mother’s bank account, of course. She was now earning better than $12 a week at the A&P Laundry and had been banking a little of her income for the past three years. Willie was also sending her money. Yes, she had money in the bank, all right. Perhaps as much as $150. That money was the key to everybody’s future happiness. Pat and Allen could be free at last, Hal’s new lumber company could spring into being, Uncle Charlie could be shipped south to start a productive life—if only Lucy could be persuaded to take her $150 from the dead hand of thrift banking and convert it into investment capital.

He began talking to her again about Baltimore. “It’s time you and the children had a home of your own,” he said.

He knew what her weakness was.

O
FTEN
, waking deep in the night, I heard them down in the kitchen talking, talking, talking. Sitting around the table under the unshaded light bulb, they talked the nights away, reheating the coffee, then making fresh coffee, then reheating the pot again, and talking, talking, talking. I would lie on my daybed half awake listening to the murmur of voices, the clatter of cups, the splash of water in the sink, the occasional burst of laughter, the warning voice saying, “Hold it down, you’ll wake the children.”

Now and then I could make out a distinct phrase or two. “Lucy, remember the time old Mr. Digges …?” This was Uncle Charlie addressing my mother. “—reminds me of the time the cops arrested Jim over in Jersey City.” This was Uncle Allen retelling a story I’d heard many times. Uncle Hal’s mellow drawl would come in: “—so I didn’t do a thing but tell that dirty scoundrel, ‘Man, don’t you ever try—’ ” And I would drop off to sleep again, lulled by the comforting familiarity of those kitchen sounds.

At New Street we lived on coffee and talk. Talking was the great Depression pastime. Unlike the movies, talk was free, and a great river of talk flowed through the house, rising at suppertime,
and cresting as my bedtime approached before subsiding into a murmur that trickled along past midnight, when all but Uncle Charlie had drifted off to bed, leaving him alone to reheat the pot, roll another cigarette, and settle down with his book.

If my homework was done, I could sit with them and listen until ten o’clock struck. I loved the sense of family warmth that radiated through those long kitchen nights of talk. There were many chords resonating beneath it, and though I could not identify them precisely, I was absorbing a sense of them and storing them away in memory. There was longing for happy times now lost, and dreaming about what might have been. There was fantasy, too, which revealed itself in a story to which they returned again and again, about the time Papa made his wonderful trip to England in search of the family’s great lost fortune.

Nothing I heard in the kitchen astonished me more than the story of the great lost fortune, for if the story was true it meant that we were all rightfully entitled to be rich. I heard it told over and over again until I knew it thoroughly. How the Robinson family—Uncle Allen’s family, my mother’s family,
my
family—descended from a fabulously rich old Bishop of London back in the time of Marlborough and Queen Anne. How the bishop had willed his fortune to his Virginia kin, and Papa was the direct descendant.

For some reason—they were always vague on this point—nobody had got around to collecting the fortune from England until two hundred years later when Papa thought of it and went to England to recover it.

“How much do you think it was worth, Allen?” Aunt Pat asked one night when the story was being retold.

“Probably a million dollars in today’s money,” he said. “It would have been sitting there for hundreds of years just accumulating.”

“More like fifty or sixty million,” Uncle Hal said.

“Well, it’s all water over the dam now,” my mother said. Of all of them, she was the least inclined to mourn for life’s might-have-beens. “If the Lord meant me to be rich, he’d have made me
rich,” she told me when I commiserated with her once about the great lost fortune.

It was lost all right. After making inquiries in London, Papa was told it had “reverted to the Crown” and become the property of King and Empire.

“Reverted to the Crown, my eye!” Aunt Pat snorted.

None of them doubted that the family fortune had been finagled into English bank accounts by British connivers. The British were heartily disliked and distrusted at New Street. Uncle Charlie spoke for all when he said, “Those dirty cusses are always out to hoodwink an American.”

My excitement about the great lost fortune was dampened by Doris when, grousing one evening about having to sell magazines, I said, “If Mama’s father had got the family fortune, I wouldn’t have to work.”

“You don’t believe that baloney, do you?” she replied.

I quit believing it then and there. No nine-year-old girl was going to beat me at skepticism. After that I always smiled inwardly when they started talking about the great lost fortune, and for the first time I began to feel superior to them in a small way. The tale of the great lost fortune was only a minor ingredient in their talk, though. Usually I listened uncritically, for around that table, under the unshaded light bulb, I was receiving an education in the world and how to think about it. What I absorbed most deeply was not information but attitudes, ways of looking at the world that were to stay with me for many years.

Sometimes their talk about the Depression was shaded with anger, but its dominant tones were good humor and civility. The anger was never edged with bitterness or self-pity. Most often it was expressed as genial contempt toward business, labor, government, and all the salesmen of miracle cures for the world’s ailments. Communists were “crackpots” and “bomb throwers.” Father Coughlin and Huey Long were “rabble-rousers.” The German-American Bund with its Nazi swastikas, “a bunch of sausage stuffers.” Benito Mussolini, “the top Wop.” Not even the New Deal escaped. In Belleville, men on the government’s W.P.A.
payroll were usually seen leaning on shovels. The initials W.P.A., Uncle Allen said, stood for “We Poke Along.”

Besides politics, they talked about movies, philosophy, and morals. Methods for banking a coal furnace. How to outwit the electric company by putting in meter “cheaters.” About their high-school Latin teacher, Professor Brent, who’d known Woodrow Wilson. About Wilson himself, who was “a good man, but an idealist.” About the rotten deal Herbert Hoover had given the boys who fought in France. They debated the relative merits of crooners—Bing Crosby v. Rudy Vallee. They spun humorous tales about relatives long dead. Argued about baseball. Joked about Roosevelt’s “brain trust.” Reminisced about the time ancient Aunt Henrietta was mistaken for a ghost by two carpenters and scared them so badly they jumped out the second-floor window.

They also talked about Cousin Edwin who had made something of himself in a big way.

“I hear Edwin’s making $80,000 a year,” Uncle Allen said one evening. “I always knew he’d amount to something. Edwin had sort of a way about him.”

“Edwin was the worst tease I ever knew,” my mother said. “And mean! He could say the meanest things to you.”

“Edwin had plenty of nerve though,” Uncle Allen said. “Did you ever hear how he got his first newspaper job? It was a paper in Pittsburgh, I think, and Edwin went in for an interview with the editor. The editor looked at him and said, ‘Young man, how do I know you’re not a damned fool?’ And Edwin said, ‘That’s a chance we’ll both have to take.’ They gave him the job on the spot.”

Edwin was their first cousin. Though he’d grown up near them in Virginia, they hadn’t seen him in twenty years and didn’t expect ever to see him again. He had achieved success on the monumental scale. “Edwin’s no more going to visit his poor relatives than I’m going to walk on water,” my mother said.

“You’ve got to realize, Lucy, Edwin’s a big man,” said Uncle Allen, who had no envy in him.

By New Street measures, Edwin was a big man indeed. Since
1932 he had been managing editor of the
New York Times
. I was only slightly impressed. I had seen the
New York Times
. Uncle Allen loyally bought it every Sunday because it was Edwin’s paper. It was the dullest excuse for a newspaper I’d ever seen.

“Why doesn’t it have any funny papers?” I asked one Sunday after declining Uncle Allen’s offer to look at it.

“Because it’s a real newspaper,” he said. “All it prints is the news, and funny papers aren’t news.”

Cousin Edwin wrote a column on affairs of state which ran every Sunday in the
Times
. One Sunday Uncle Allen opened to Cousin Edwin’s column and beckoned to me. “Look here,” he said. “When you get your name printed there like your cousin Edwin you’ll be able to say you’ve made something of yourself.”

There, over a mass of gray print I read that great name set down in large bold type: “By Edwin L. James.” On Sunday afternoons, Edwin’s column was a leaden family duty that filled the parlor. Aunt Pat, bustling in from the kitchen, would ask Uncle Allen, “Have you read Edwin’s column yet, Dad?”

“Not yet. I gave it to Charlie.”

Uncle Charlie had always read it. My mother never had. “I’ll get to it later. Let Hal read it,” she said.

Uncle Hal, the sense of family obligation sitting strong upon him, would pick it up and after a paragraph or two say, “Edwin always had a good way of expressing himself,” and lay it down casually and say, “I remember the time Aunt Sallie brought Edwin over to visit Mama and …”

Then, interrupting his reminiscence, he handed the paper to Aunt Pat, saying, “Here, Pat, take it out in the kitchen with you and read it while you’re making dinner.”

“Oh, you read it first, Lucy,” Aunt Pat would say to my mother.

“I’m too busy right now,” my mother would say, “but don’t lose it.”

In this way Cousin Edwin’s column passed from hand to hand unread by all but Uncle Charlie, until, late in the afternoon, Uncle Allen settled himself in his favorite chair, opened the
Times
wide,
and began to read. If Doris or I spoke too loudly Aunt Pat said, “Sh, dear, Uncle Allen’s reading Edwin’s column.”

It was hard for me to see what Uncle Allen was doing behind the wall of newspaper, but I suspected there was little reading. One Sunday I watched the paper fall gently back over his face, then saw it rise and fall gently in rhythm with his breathing, and after a few moments heard a satisfied snore rumbling under the newsprint. Awakened by his own snoring, Uncle Allen let the paper fall to his lap and, seeing me grinning at him, gave me a small guilty smile.

“Edwin’s a big man,” he said, “but he sure can write some dull stuff.”

When my mother talked of me making something of myself, Cousin Edwin was one of the models of success she had in mind. Her childhood memories of Edwin were not formidable.

“Edwin James wasn’t any smarter than anybody else,” she assured me, “and look where he is today. If Edwin could do it, so can you.”

If she really believed this, I did not. I was eleven years old and consumed with timidity and a sense of my own incompetence. I attributed my success at school entirely to my mother’s schoolteacher insistence on good grades and her constant help with my studies. My career selling magazines had convinced me I had no future in business enterprises, and I had recently had a brief fling at music which had shattered my self-confidence.

A door-to-door salesman had come to the house one day selling banjo lessons at bargain prices. For a trivial sum, he told my mother, he would rent me a banjo and enroll me in a new academy of musical instruction being formed in the neighboring town of Nutley. My mother was not naive enough to imagine that music could lead to riches, but my business skills had been fully tested and found wanting by now, and it wouldn’t cost much to gamble on an outside chance. The salesman wanted a down payment of one dollar on the banjo rental. Lessons would be fifty cents each. Well, every civilized man ought to know a little something about music, she reasoned.

I took my rented banjo to the Nutley musical academy. It was a small single-family house. The rooms were empty except for two dozen folding wooden chairs. Eight or nine other students turned up, we took our seats, and a burly red-headed man sat on the parlor windowsill and illustrated the use of the banjo pick. It was a humbling experience.

I had expected the banjo to sound like a guitar. I knew what a guitar sounded like, because Aunt Pat listened every day to a radio show called “Tito Guizar and His Spanish Guitar.” I’d thought that after a few lessons in Nutley I’d be strolling around the house making guitar music and singing the way Tito Guizar did about Conchita, the fair senorita, and moonlight over Granada. Lessons were given once a week. After the first half dozen I knew the banjo and I were hopelessly mismated.