Growing Up (20 page)

If she was “practical,” though, Aunt Sister had none of Ida Rebecca’s sternness. Quite the opposite. Somehow in the 1920s the “flapper” spirit had seeped into Morrisonville and infected her with the licentiousness of the jazz age. She had rolled her stockings below the knee when it was flapper chic to do so and defiantly smoked cigarettes and chewed gum in front of her mother. Now in Baltimore she still smoked, chewed gum, and outraged Uncle Harold’s and my mother’s sense of decorum by crying, “Oh shit!” when provoked by some mishap in the kitchen. She enjoyed scandalizing my mother by taking her aside to tell the latest dirty joke. Off-color humor embarrassed my mother. Aunt Sister knew that, and embarrassing my mother tickled her as much as the joke itself.

Without children of their own, Aunt Sister and Uncle Harold had chosen Doris to love as dearly as the child they would never have. During the Belleville years they had twice kept Doris with them in Baltimore during her summer vacations. These summers Uncle Harold stuffed Doris with ice cream and watermelon, rode the Ferris wheel with her at street carnivals, and entertained her with stories of gigantic serpents he’d fought in tropical jungles and cars he’d rolled over at a hundred miles an hour on the highway without denting a fender or ruffling a hair on his head. They also arranged a reunion with Audrey.

Uncle Tom and Aunt Goldie had legally adopted Audrey after my mother surrendered her, but they had kept the promises made in Morrisonville when they took her away. They’d told her from the beginning that Doris and I were her brother and sister. To Audrey, Uncle Tom was “Daddy” and Aunt Goldie was “Mother.” When she was old enough to grasp such complications, though, they explained adoption and told her that Doris’s mother and mine—the woman Audrey called “Aunt Betty”—was her natural mother. They also encouraged her to know Doris and me in hope of creating a sense of family between us. With Audrey
growing up in Brunswick, and Doris and me living in faraway New Jersey, this was impossible. But Baltimore was more easily reached from Brunswick. When Aunt Sister and Uncle Harold, during Doris’s first Baltimore summer, suggested that Audrey come for a visit, it was immediately arranged.

Reports from Brunswick had it that Uncle Tom and Aunt Goldie treated Audrey like a princess, dressed her in clothes from the finest stores in Washington, kept her perpetually scrubbed and so thoroughly combed that she dazzled the eyes. It was said that Audrey even owned a fur coat to protect her from cold weather. Such were the stories that reached me in Belleville, at any rate, and Uncle Harold and Aunt Sister had heard them too. And so, to prepare for the great meeting, they flung themselves into the spit-and-polish task of making Doris shine.

This wasn’t easy, for Doris was at the age in which her favorite pastime was playing with mud. Aunt Sister had nicknamed her “Dirty.” The day of Audrey’s visit, they soaked Doris in a tub, washed her hair, swabbed out her ears, and scoured out under her fingernails. Her wardrobe consisted of plain, sturdy clothes my mother had bought for endurance rather than beauty. Aunt Sister laundered her fanciest dress and Uncle Harold polished her shoes to a presentable state. They finished off by splashing a little cologne behind her ears.

Doris was on the slight side, thin and not very tall for her age, with dark brown hair and dark skin inherited from her father, a pert upturned nose and an ear-to-ear grin that gave her the expression of a contented cat. My mother, who was not sensitive to such things, had never told her she was pretty. To my mother, physical beauty was not something that deserved compliments. You were born to be pretty, or plain, or ugly, and there was nothing you could do about it one way or the other. It wasn’t like making something of yourself, which took work and character. Uncle Harold’s gentler nature gave him a better understanding of a girl’s needs. That summer he’d begun telling Doris she was pretty, and she liked hearing it. Now, scrubbed and sparkling, combed and wearing her finest dress, she had never felt so beautiful.

The great moment’s arrival was announced by the doorbell.

“Look who’s here!”

It was Aunt Goldie. She and Uncle Harold exchanged greetings that Doris was too stunned to hear. She was staring at the most spectacular vision of elegance she had ever seen outside a movie palace.

“This is your sister, this is Audrey,” Aunt Sister was saying.

“Aren’t you going to kiss your big sister?” Aunt Goldie was saying to Audrey.

Doris scarcely heard any of it, or knew afterwards whether she had spoken herself, or whether Audrey had spoken to her. She was only aware of a humiliating sense of shabbiness and plainness. Staring at Audrey’s serene blond beauty, dazzling dimpled smile, and splendid dress and coat and shoes, Doris was overwhelmed by something close to shame. Now it seemed to her that Uncle Harold had been deceiving her, for compared to Audrey, she thought, she was not beautiful, nor even pretty.

In spite of this awful moment, the visit was a huge success. Though Audrey looked like a princess, Doris quickly discovered that she was only a sweet-tempered six-year-old eager to be liked and delighted to be with the big sister she had heard about so often and was determined to love. That day they became friends for life.

Uncle Harold, however, had seen and understood everything during those first moments when the door opened and Doris stared across the room at Audrey. Next evening he did not come directly back from work but dug into his wallet and went to West Baltimore Street to do some shopping. Arriving home, he called Doris in and handed her a box to unwrap. It held a new, brightly colored cotton bathrobe.

“You’re going to have pretty things, too,” he told her.

Doris’s heart belonged to Uncle Harold ever afterwards. Long after this time when he was young and she was a child, she was to discover that the ability of the true liar, which is the ability to lie to yourself, was not in him. He was to suffer a series of heart attacks so severe that only Aunt Sister and Doris were allowed at his hospital bedside. One night, trying to cheer him, Doris said, “
The doctors say you’re doing wonderfully. You’ll be out of here and up and around in a couple of weeks now.”

The true ability to lie was not in him. “You know it’s no use,” he said, which was the truth. He died two days later.

But that was in a time far beyond those years when he was showing me the pleasures to be had from setting imagination—even a limited imagination—free to play. To me he was the man playing Parcheesi and drinking cocoa in a two-room flat so close to H. L. Mencken, the man who infected me with the notion that there might be worse things to do with life than spend it in telling tales.

To me he was the man who could remember being born. He told me about it one night while Aunt Sister was out in the kitchen making cocoa. He could remember the very instant of birth. His mother was pleased, and the doctor who delivered him—Uncle Harold could remember this distinctly—said, “It’s a boy.” There were several people in the room, and they all smiled at him. He could remember their faces vividly. And he smiled back.

T
HE
thrill of a new life in a home of our own in Baltimore was short-lived. The only job my mother could find was selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. There was no salary, just commissions on her sales. There were a few weeks when she sold nothing and there was no pay.

Uncle Hal’s lumber company collapsed quietly in Richmond. He turned up at West Lombard Street to sleep on the couch and sell magazine subscriptions too. In accord with Uncle Hal’s master plan, Uncle Charlie had come to live with us as soon as we’d moved in. He handled the housekeeping while my mother and Uncle Hal were on the streets ringing doorbells, but he didn’t last long. The funerals down on the first floor were more than he could take.

Coming in from school one afternoon, I found him in low spirits over his coffee. A corpse had been delivered downstairs while I was at school. “Is something wrong?” I asked Uncle Charlie.

“They’ve got another one of those Goddamn stiffs downstairs,” he said, “and I can’t stand the smell of that shrimp.”

The landlord’s funeral activities were always marked by the
powerful odor of boiling shrimp. These were for guests who would be attending the wake. I had never eaten, seen, nor smelled shrimp. Until Uncle Charlie told me what the odor was, I’d thought it was something associated with the burial business, like the smells of candle wax, flowers, and after-shave lotion on the undertaker.

“They’ve been cooking it all day,” Uncle Charlie said. “I could tell what was up the minute I smelled it.”

Sure enough, an hour or two after the odor began to seep upstairs Uncle Charlie had heard the undertaker bringing another coffin through the front door.

“Are you scared having dead people in the house?” I asked him.

“Don’t be foolish, Russell. Dead people don’t hurt you. It’s the shrimp that get me down.”

A few days later Uncle Charlie took the Greyhound back to Belleville and was gone for good. Uncle Hal was not far behind. After a few months of pounding sidewalks, trying to talk his way into the parlors of suspicious housewives so he could spread his magazine samples on the floor and start his spiel, he heard of a promising business opportunity in Richmond, packed his bags, and went south.

I was too busy trying to learn the arts of survival in a big city to realize my mother was having a hard time making ends meet. On the third or fourth day at my new school I was authoritatively beaten up by a boy named Pete. It wasn’t gentleman’s combat such as I’d known in Belleville, but a savage, murderous beating. The playground at that school was a small fenced yard paved with brick. Pete flattened me on my back, straddled me and pounded my head into the brick with his fists while a hundred other boys, all strangers to me, cheered him on. My nose was bloodied, my lips split, my eyes blackened, and my face swollen for days afterwards. When a teacher finally pulled him off we were both hauled to the principal, who terrified me by threatening to expel us both from school if we were ever brought before her again.

Pete was not chastened. When we left the principal’s office
under orders to go immediately to our classes, he grabbed my arm and said, “Let’s go outside and finish this right now.”

“You already won,” I said.

“Come on, we’ll go outside and finish it,” he said.

I was horrified. He wanted to kill me and was willing to risk expulsion from school to do it. “No,” I said.

“Anytime you want to finish it, I’ll be waiting,” he said.

We went our separate ways to different classrooms. When I walked into mine the class had already begun. The teacher, a man admired by the students for his wit, interrupted the lesson to glance at me, then turned to the class and said, “Well, if it isn’t ‘Battling Baker.’ ” The class erupted in laughter. I hated that teacher, hated the school, and, above all, hated and feared the terrible Pete.

After that I felt like hunted prey. I feared that Pete was stalking me, looking for an opportunity to finish me off. I adjusted my habits to avoid him. At lunchtime I never went into the schoolyard, where he could trap me, but sat inside pretending to be absorbed in unfinished homework. I learned where Pete lived and was careful never to walk within two blocks of the place. I noted the route he walked to school and worked out another for myself that would keep me off his path. Even in areas where I felt reasonably safe, I developed the habit of knowing always who was behind me on the sidewalk and studying intersections ahead for the slightest hint of danger. Learning the same jungle moves that quarry use to avoid their predators, I was developing the reflexes necessary to survive in cities.

Soon I learned other dangers peculiar to city streets at night. At my twelfth birthday my mother had got me a job delivering the
Baltimore News-Post
and
Sunday American
. The
News-Post
was an afternoon paper, but the
American
didn’t come off the presses until long after midnight and had to be delivered before dawn on Sunday. Usually I set my alarm clock for two
A.M
. on Sundays and tiptoed out of the house to avoid waking my mother and Doris. It was always an eerie experience: streets dark and abandoned, silences so deep that I jumped in fear at the sudden screech of a cat.
Waking on one such morning, I felt lower in spirit than usual, for it was one of those times when we had a coffin in the downstairs parlor, and the funeral fumes, complete with the smell of yesterday’s boiled shrimp, lay heavily in my bedroom.

To brace my spirit for the moment when I’d have to pass the coffin, I headed back toward our kitchen for a glass of milk from the icebox. Flicking on the kitchen light, I panicked battalions of cockroaches and watched them skitter for cover behind the loosened wallpaper. After the glass of milk, I was still unprepared to brush past the dead houseguest, so I busied myself emptying the icebox pan and studying the blueprints for a balsa-wood airplane model I’d started to build on the dining-room table the night before. Thinking of airplanes was almost as pleasant as thinking of Christmas, for I was developing a lurid imagination and could lose myself delightfully by flying an imaginary Spad on the dawn patrol against the deadly Baron von Richthofen.

Charging my brain with the roar of aerial combat, I pocketed the wire cutters I used to open bales of newspapers and slung a long webbed strap over my shoulder. With the strap I could balance forty pounds of Sunday newspapers on my hip and walk easily. Down the stairs and into the first-floor hallway I went. The double doors to the landlord’s parlor were wide open. A dim orange light seeped into the hallway. I always tried not to look as I scurried past, but always did anyhow. This time I saw a mourner sprawled dozing in an armchair. The coffin was open. Its occupant, an elderly gentleman with a huge gray mustache, lay absolutely motionless.

Outside, the bracing cold air lifted my spirits, though there was nothing inspiring in the landscape. Baltimore was the dullest place to look at I’d ever seen. Miles and miles of row houses, all with red brick facades, flat rooftops, four or five marble or sandstone steps. It was a triumph of architectural monotony, illuminated at night only by dim little globes of light that came from gas street lamps. Still, it was always exciting to rip open the bundles of fresh newspapers and be the first in the neighborhood to know tomorrow’s news. Lately it had been more and more about
Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Stalin. The chanceries of Europe. War in the air, and so forth, and so on.