Growing Up (24 page)

It was Herb’s second marriage. His first had been brief and ended in divorce. I didn’t know why. Aunt Sister told, me his first wife was a woman who “liked a good time too much.” Herb was not the good-time sort. For him a lively evening was a game of cards at a friend’s house, followed by a cup of cocoa or a dish of ice cream. Then it was home to bed so he could rise refreshed when the B&O called him to duty. Living entirely for his work, he avoided all frivolity which could jeopardize his dream of becoming an engineer. He had no children from his first marriage, and his own Spartan childhood provided him no clue to the troubles awaiting him in trying to play the father to a fourteen-year-old like me.

The day Herb moved into Lombard Street with us I set out on one of those campaigns of silent resistance of which only adolescents and high-spirited nations under conquerors’ occupation are capable. I gave no spoken sign of my dislike. I was too cunning for that. My policy was to ignore him as completely as possible. Without saying a word that could possibly offend him, I would let him know that so far as I was concerned, he did not exist. There were a hundred ways of doing this.

In meal conversations I addressed myself only to my mother or Doris, always managing to omit him from the circle. When he interrupted to say, “Pass the potatoes,” I passed the bowl silently without looking at him while continuing to talk to my mother and Doris. When he addressed me directly with some pleasant remark about the food, such as, “Isn’t that the best applesauce you ever tasted?” I murmured, “It’s all right,” or “Not bad,” and without looking at him began speaking to my mother on some subject I knew would shut him out of the table talk.

It galled me that my mother should be married to a man with so little schooling, a man who licked the point of his lead pencil
when struggling with the simplest mathematical calculation, a man who had never heard of Cicero, Virgil, or Shakespeare, a man who read nothing but the sports pages and moved his lips silently while trying to puzzle out some unfamiliar word in the baseball news. It was easy in those supper-table conversations to let him know how dense I thought he was. Cunningly, I started hundreds of conversations in which I knew he would be hopelessly lost.

One night, to my mother: “I’ll bet you don’t know the difference between a bicameral and a unicameral legislature.” She did know of course, and I knew she would, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that Herb didn’t know, probably didn’t even know what a legislature was, and my aim was to make him feel the depths of his ignorance, to let him know that he was not worthy of my attention.

The cunning lay in making him miserable without resorting to open insult. This would have given him justification for hitting me, and I knew that, big and powerful as he was, he could snap me like a string bean if given a good excuse to use corporal punishment. He must have wished often that I would give him that excuse, but I was too clever. My technique was aimed at withering his soul without giving him the slightest excuse for a refreshing outburst of violence.

He not only tolerated me with saintly patience, he also tried to befriend me. He knew I was rabid about baseball. Both of us were. One Sunday morning at breakfast he said, “Let’s the two of us go over to Oriole Park and see the double-header this afternoon.”

Nothing could have made me happier than a trip to Oriole Park, but not with Herb. He wasn’t going to worm his way into my heart that easily.

“I’ve got too much homework,” I said.

One evening, knocking at my bedroom door, then sticking his head in when I said, “Come in,” he grinned and said, “I’m taking the car out for a little ride; you want to come along?”

“I’m too busy,” I said.

“I’ll teach you how to drive her,” he said.

This was the ultimate temptation, for I desperately wanted to learn to drive, but I refused to succumb. “I’m too young to drive,” I said.

“Well, why don’t the two of us just walk over to the Arundel Ice Cream store and get ourselves a sundae?” he suggested.

I turned my eyes back to the book, pretending to be studying, and said, “I’ve got too much work to do,” and kept staring at the book until I heard the door close behind him.

Herb had an oddly stiff walk; his upper torso tilted forward slightly from the hips with his back stiffly arched, as though he were afflicted with a lifelong backache. When he was not around I entertained Doris with what I thought were hilarious imitations of his bent and painful posture. Doris looked on Herb with more compassionate eyes. “If you’d spent your life shoveling coal into a steam engine you might walk funny too,” she told me.

Unrepentant and amused by my ability to caricature Herb’s walk, I did it one day for my mother’s benefit. She was furious.

“That’s just enough of that, Russell,” she said. “Herb’s been good to you, and I don’t want you making fun of him. Herb’s a good man. I want you to treat him right.”

Being hailed as “a good man,” Herb had my mother’s highest accolade, one she bestowed on very few. Papa had been “a good man,” even “a wonderful man.” Uncle Allen was “a good man.” So was Uncle Willie. Lately she’d begun to concede that Uncle Harold was “a good man” too. It wasn’t easy becoming “a good man,” but the few who succeeded were entitled to justice and were not to be ridiculed, even by a beloved son. In my mother’s world “a good man” was entitled to “a good wife.” Once Herb qualified for “good man” ranking, my mother wholeheartedly fulfilled her part of the contract. When the railroad phoned at three
A.M
. she rolled out of bed to make him a meal and pack his lunch. She baked the pies and cakes he loved, waged a gallant campaign against the cockroaches, kept the house spick and span, organized the household accounts, handled the bills, and even scowled at me if she caught me betraying my insolence.

Herb’s patience with me was superhuman. Maybe he learned
that patience as a boy doing the farm labor, bringing the money home to his relatives, and biding his time with dreams of the big locomotives. Maybe he just understood how deep a boy’s unhappiness could be. I don’t know. Much later when I was older and we came to know each other and I grew to like and respect him, we never talked about those adolescent tortures I inflicted on him, and I never raised the subject or tried to apologize. He was never much good at talk like that. If I’d tried it, he would have smiled and dismissed the subject with a wave of his big hand and said, “Aw!” and then, to change the subject, “How about that Willie Mays! Isn’t he something?”

Herb was finally elevated to the rank of engineer shortly after his marriage. He had no regular run but was subject to call at all hours of the clock. Keeping such irregular hours, he seemed perpetually tired. It was a constant struggle for him to get his rest. When the downstairs funeral wake turned noisy at ten
P.M
., Herb wandered out of his bedroom, miserable and hollow-eyed, complaining, “A man just can’t get his rest around here.” If he’d come in from work at suppertime, my mother would be in my room at six-thirty, asking me to turn off my radio, saying, “Herb’s trying to get his rest.” If Doris and I were quarreling on a Saturday afternoon, Herb would rise from his bed and interrupt us. “I’m trying to get my rest,” he pleaded.

One morning when he’d come in from work after midnight the phone rang at two
A.M
., the saloon-closing hour in Baltimore. Herb climbed out of bed, lifted the receiver, and found himself speaking to an unlikely caller. “This is Benito Mussolini,” the voice said. “It’s time to get up.”

It was one of the few times I saw Herb in a violent mood. He stormed out of the bedroom with a racket that woke me in my bedroom across the hall, and I stumbled out to investigate. Herb was standing in the hallway roaring, “Mussolini! Mussolini, my foot!” Herb never cursed; “my foot!” was the strongest oath in his vocabulary.

He was belting up his trousers for an assault on the landlord, whom he suspected of being the prankster since the landlord was
Lithuanian and “Mussolini” had spoken in a Lithuanian accent. My mother calmed him by pointing out that the landlord didn’t have a telephone, so couldn’t possibly have made the offending call. Herb pondered the logic of that for a moment, then let his rage dissolve into a grin. He wasn’t a man for smashing furniture when he was angry. “Mussolini,” he said to himself, shaking his head as if it had been a great joke after all. Then, loosening his belt and heading back for the mattress: “I’ve got to get my rest.”

He was the gentlest of men despite his strength. He asked only that there be a choice of two or three home-baked pies on the table for Sunday dinner and that household noise be held down while he was listening to radio broadcasts of the Washington Senators baseball games. He was hopelessly addicted to the Senators, a team of monumental incompetence on the baseball diamond. A Senators victory lifted him to ecstasy, a defeat cast him into the pit of depression. For Senators fans there wasn’t much ecstasy in life. Switching off the radio after the Senators had lost yet again, Herb looked like a man who’d glimpsed the afterlife and seen that Heaven was a fraud.

His only other vice was betting. Like most blue-collar Baltimoreans, he was a horse player, a $2 bettor placing phone calls to a mysterious and illegal bookie at the far end of a telephone wire. Once he was so thrilled by winning $40 that he told my mother about it. After lecturing him on the evil of gambling and admonishing him never to do it again, she demanded $35 of his winnings to put in the bank and let him keep $5. After that he kept news of his winning bets to himself.

Though he had a pint of rye whiskey concealed around the house, he used it rarely and then only for medicinal purposes. He worried a great deal about his innards and considered a nip of whiskey a curative for certain intestinal crises. At table he was a prodigious trencherman, capable of polishing off a huge mound of victuals, sending his plate around for a second helping of everything, and then finishing off with two varieties of pie rammed home with a slab of coconut or chocolate cake. I often saw him slumped in distress and moaning about “terrible gas” or heard him
in dead of night tramping dark corridors and calling to my mother, “Betty! Where’s the Bisodol?”

While I bullied him with subtle psychological torments, my mother took the direct approach and bullied him without finesse. Her natural instinct with a man was to push, and if he didn’t budge, to push harder. If he failed to push back, she leaned on him full force. Herb pushed back a little at first, but he wasn’t up to combat against a will like hers. When she discovered this, she took charge. She managed the bank account, handled his shopping, told him how she wanted him dressed for each occasion, and, in general, dealt with him very much as she had dealt with me all my life. At the very time I had begun to escape her control, Herb was becoming captive to it.

With wry humor, Herb began referring to her as “the Madam” in delicately mocking tribute to her authoritarian nature. One evening when the three of us were playing cards and I was winning consistently she became increasingly angry. She hated to lose at anything. It was a time when I enjoyed asserting my superiority over her, and I was having a fine time crushing her in hand after hand. After a half hour she excused herself briefly from the game. When she’d left the room Herb leaned across the table toward me, smiled a smile of great wisdom, and whispered, “Let the Madam win.”

“Let her win?”

“It’ll make her feel good,” he said.

I saw that though Herb knew nothing about Cicero or Shakespeare his wisdom was far larger than mine. This explained several obviously stupid plays he had made earlier in the game. A little happiness for her would lead to peace of mind for him, as well as for me, and putting the Madam in good spirits was well worth a loss at cards. It was the first time I let Herb teach me anything, and when finally she rose triumphant from the card table to make us coffee and serve cake the evening was a total success.

By the summer of 1940 Herb gave up his effort to be a father to me. He no longer needed a surrogate child. At the age of forty-six he was at last to have a child of his own. That November, three
days before my mother’s forty-third birthday, she gave birth to her fourth and last child. It was a girl. They named her Mary Leslie after Herb’s mother. Herb was launched on what was to be a lifelong career as doting father. My mother started all over again in the business of motherhood in which she now considered herself a skilled professional. This time, however, she had the resources to do things right, thanks to Herb’s steady income.

Her first goal was to have her own house. For this purpose she began pressing Herb with arguments why an apartment on Lombard Street was an unsuitable place for a baby. Herb was uneasy about this at first. Buying a house was an immense financial burden, even for a railroad man. My mother ignored his objections and began canvassing the mortgage market, then sat down with him and explained about monthly mortgage and equity payments. As always, she had her way. In the summer of 1941 Herb signed papers committing himself to pay the breathtaking sum of $4,700 for a four-bedroom house in a bosky dale on the western edge of Baltimore.

I was sixteen and in my last year of high school when we moved out of Lombard Street. Though I still hadn’t made my peace with Herb I was more than delighted to luxuriate in his new house. I’d never dreamed of living in such splendor. Besides its four bedrooms, it had a living room twenty feet long, a dining room more than ten feet in both dimensions, and a “sun parlor” that overlooked an expanse of green, tree-shaded parkland through which flowed a small stream. There was a front porch big enough to accommodate a glider. In the kitchen sat a gleaming white refrigerator that made its own ice cubes. I would never again have to worry about the icebox pan overflowing. The cellar floor was covered with blocks of inlaid linoleum tile. The house’s most magnificent feature, however, was the bathroom, with lavender fixtures, green wall tiles, and—wonder of wonders—a shower over the bathtub. For the first time in my life I could take a shower right in the house.