Childhood Fears

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It always seemed to me my childhood terrors, when they started, were connected with my father for we were extremely close when I was young. First there was an idyllic period--a honeymoon., if you like. For instance, once, when I was about five or six, he took me to Westchester, to the site of the apartment house he was building with a partner. I still see a staid and pretty village, an excavation which would become a tall, six-story apartment house and my father looking thoughtfully at a roll of blueprints held in his hand. I remembered it many years later on one of our excursions to the Brooklyn Museum when I saw the statue of an ancient Egyptian overseer studying a length of papyrus.

In another memory, I am enthroned upon the closed lid of the toilet seat watching my father shave as I did every morning in those days before I went to school. He leans against the sink in his underwear--boxer shorts, the material so fine I can almost see through it, and tank top. He catches my eyes in the mirror, waves his razor before his lathered face and pauses to recite "Sweet Afton/loveliest village of the plain..." and Antony's speech to the publicans, lowering his voice, going down the scale with perfect sarcasm when he comes to "...and they were all honorable men..." so that even the child I was, knew he was thinking of someone he didn't like. It was probably at this time that I was taught to recite the poem "If daddy hadn't married mommy/daddy might have married me." to an audience of women who came to play Mah Jong with my mother, interrupting cries of "One bam!" or "Two crack!" to listen, applaud and laugh so hard, one or two announce they have peed in their underpants.

A flood of images takes me back to the laughing father whose broad shoulders I often rode far above the heads of adults. He is the one who picks me up and tosses me carefully in the air, the one who takes photographs of me, of me and Vera, the housekeeper, of me on a pony. 'But this father turns into the one whose angers fell upon him like a plague. Later I knew the plague was called the Great Depression. When I was older I also realized how much my father's life had changed when instead of the real-estate entrepreneur he had been he found himself behind the counter of a liquor store in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn that my mother's father had bought for him.

Because of conservative business practice my grandfather escaped the worst of the disaster and I suppose he wanted to help his son-in-law too. Instead he dealt him a blow from which the younger man never recovered. My handsome, elegant father who went to work straight from the eighth grade dreamed of night school and becoming a lawyer. Two things interfered with those plans. First, the New York State judge who promised him a recommendation for law school was indicted for bribery and other misdemeanors on the very day my father received his application. And when the stock market crash came he had no choice but to stand behind the counter of that liquor store in the most anti-Semitic part of Brooklyn where in '39 and '40 the German-American Bund held rallies complete with a swastika-draped platform and jack-booted men wearing Nazi uniforms, goose-stepping and making Hitler-like speeches.

It was soon after these experiences that my father's rage became legend. For example, once when I fell off my tricycle, he took it and hurled it down five flights of stairs. This is not my memory but one of a series of tall tales about my father told by Vera. According to her, the dark, never-to-be-visited bottom of the back stairwell of our apartment house was piled high with debris from our lives; the small illicit Christmas tree she once bought for my sister and me that I knew he had flung somewhere in his wrath, the tricycle from which I fell--even the toy puppy dog whose beaded eyes I took apart and then stuffed up my nose, lay there.

Although I knew most of her stories weren't true, I had a real memory of my own that revealed the frightening and puzzling transformation of my father from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. I was given a little gold ring with a tiny ruby chip by my father's father for my seventh birthday. This present made me feel proud and guilty at the same time. I knew my father disliked his father because of the old man's tyrannical temper. On the other hand I loved the ring. When I turned it so the ruby caught the light, it flamed up like a small sun. I soon had the habit of twisting it tirelessly and one night only a week after it was given to me, I awoke thinking my finger was on fire. I shrieked and after what seemed like hours there was a light beside the bed and my father leaning over me. I showed him my hand, now swollen and purple, the little gold ring embedded in the flesh. He rushed in frantic haste to the bathroom with me in his arms. They were having a party and through tear-blurred eyes I saw many faces gathered outside the door and heard the counseling of many voices.

"Call the doctor. She could get gangrene!"

"Put ice on it."

"Use soap. Lots of soap. That will do it."

While my father leaned in fury over the offending ring, his face a death's-head of sunken cheeks and pinched nostrils, rocking back and forth like a rabbi exorcising a dibbuk, my mother bathed the livid finger and rubbed it with soap. Finally the ring slipped off. Though my hand was red and raw, the throbbing had stopped. My father seized the ring and threw it into the trash basket standing next to the sink. I can still see the little ruby like a drop of blood amidst the cotton balls and an old squeezed-out tooth-paste tube.

Soon it got to the point where I couldn't tell the difference between his fears and mine. After all his flinging and shouting -- anybody's anger, and I became paralyzed with fright, a small rabbit caught in the beam of a flashlight. Nausea, stomach knots, car-sickness, vomiting before school became everyday occurrences. Now I was afraid of scissors, knives, the thunder of the elevated train I saw from my window, fire and street-corner boys--not to mention tricycles, bicycles and dogs. While still only a child I began a partial withdrawal from the world; that is to say I curled up on my bed with a book as often as I could. My father would do the same years later, when the full array of his fears fell upon him like his angers and he lived at home like a wounded beast; coming home earlier and earlier, hanging around all week-end before the television set in his robe. Eventually, I came to understand the aura of suffering he carried around with him was real. What I didn't know was that it wasn't my fault.

Yet, Borough Park, the small section of Brooklyn in which we lived was hardly the proper setting for the disquiet growing around me. It was, in fact a peaceful, small village. The red-brick houses on my street had stoops and flower-boxes overflowing with red and pink geraniums. There were six-story, brick apartment houses with stiff rows of privet hedges running across the front of the building and a long strip of alley leading to the basement down which children would skate. Each building had a tar roof where the wash was hung in sweet-smelling rows. I was permitted to play with clothes pins there and could smell the acrid, melting tar mixed with laundry soap and wet clothes. In spring fat maple buds fell under the trees with a soft plopping sound and generously gave off a country odor when we ground them under our heels or marched in clownish circles, heads back, the little double-winged seed pods perched precariously on the bridge of each nose. Ice wagons and milk wagons were horse-drawn then and the dancing rhythms of their hooves clattering slowly along the paved street are still strong in my ears. The ice-man staggered under the weight of an iceblock melting into the sweat that ran down his back and stained his shirt. From time to time the junk man would sway by on the top of his loaded cart. The tinkling bell and his cry of "I cash clothes! I cash clothes!" added to the music of the streets.

For contrast, there was the German-Jewish family of nudists who lived in the house across the street from our apartment house. ("Some Jews!" my mother exclaimed.) Their mother was a physician who brought health fads and the assimilated style especially in the area of body-worship, from Germany. There were many jokes around the family table about them even though every once in awhile someone would say "Shush, der Kinder," whenever my face revealed a certain avidity for details no matter how much I tried to hide it. Because that family cavorted around in the altogether without bothering to shut the blinds, a small crowd gathered outside their gate in the evening when the men came home from work. As for me, I fervently wished our apartment was on the ground floor so I could see them too. Perhaps it was due to the dark and frightening things in my life; things that happened but were never talked about, that I longed to see something stripped down to the skin and out in the light.

I needn't have worried. Soon--as if I were possessed with powers of telekinesis -- real events and demonic occurrences, phenomena ranging from the truly catastrophic to the bizarre became commonplace. Even a trip to the market with my mother was not free of a sinister influence. One day I found myself next to my baby sister's stroller under the awning on one side of the public market while my mother was inside shopping. I was a little out of sorts because for the past hour or two I had been zooming down the streets of Boro Park hanging on to the bars of my sister's carriage, positive I was about to take off into the air as Mary Poppins would do a few years later. The big hair ribbon I wore in those days had filed with air and I could feel the wind tug at it as if it were a sail. My mother who had the build and temperament of a racing car--all speed and impatience, did her shopping as though she were running the Indy 500. Just as suddenly the whole mechanism could come to an abrupt halt if she met a friend. They would talk for what seemed like hours while I stared at the top of my sister's curly head, exposed adult knees or ringed fingers and brilliant red nails resting on the bars of the carriage.

Finally we arrived at our original destination, the public market, only my mother was inside while I was left outside leashed to my baby sister's stroller as though I were a pet dog. I thought of what I was missing; butter, thick and yellow, lying in a refrigerated case lit up like a stage, the pungent odor of smoked whitefish, pickles soaking in brine. My mouth watered just thinking bout it. Besides my grandfather was builder and landlord of this place and I loved the little stir of excitement that had been directed toward me until I got hitched up to my sister. "How's the little doll?" and some white-aproned man wearing a straw hat or yarmulke would lean over the counter to hand me a slice of pickle or a piece of whitefish. Instead I now stared with perverse resentment at the ripe apples and oranges piled in pyramids around us. This was the main shopping street. It stretched to the horizon where I could dimly make out pushcarts filled with sweaters and shirts, fish and fruit, blouses and coats, hats and shawls--assorted objects hawked by tired, grouchy people with gnarled and wrinkled hands smelling of pickled herring, onions or garlic. Although I was told my grandfather once had a cart of his own, I couldn't picture the dapper man I knew with his handsome wool coat, fur collar, pince-nez and malacca cane as part of that sad, bustling world.

Somewhere along that street stood my Uncle Chaim's bakery where I could always count on something -- a Charlotte Russe, perhaps. Uncle Chaim was a big, round, jolly sort of man who always wore a white apron and a high white hat which made him look like the pieman a child could meet while going to the fair. Thinking of Uncle Chaim and the cake running over with fresh whipped cream made me impatient and I hopped up and down on one foot until I realized we were not alone. Another child standing across from us under the other awning was staring at me. He had yellow teeth, pimples and an oversized head. A finger explored his nose and felt around inside the nostril. I glared angrily at him, trying to get him to stop this disgusting activity when suddenly I heard a small "pop" -- like a tiny explosion. I saw that a light bulb which had formerly been attached to the awning was sitting on top of his head like a broken egg while blood poured down his face. For a moment we were transfixed; it had come so silently. Then I felt my head to see if something had happened to me too. Before I was given a chance to marvel about fate, he let out a scream which I soon joined to keep him company. Then the mothers ran out followed by the whole store, some women in curlers, coatless men in white aprons. Soon everyone was open-mouthed looking at the boy or screaming too. His mother dragged him to the drugstore across the street while blood ran in rivulets down his face, over his ears and down the back of his head and I was left with another frightening image blazed into my skull.

One day I was on my way back to school after lunch holding the hand of a schoolmate whose mother, our neighbor, was conducting us there. I dragged my feet as usual for I hated school and had good reason. I was a poor student due to an unnatural inability to add, subtract, multiply and divide in my head. To make matters worse my classmates had the habit of waiting for me at the corner just before my house on the day I flunked an exam. When they saw me they would shout "Stupid got a zero! Stupid got a zero!". Although this was undeniably true, I usually rushed upstairs praying my mother wasn't home yet, hadn't heard the news from my tormentors, for I certainly had no intention of telling her. If, together, my parents were like those god-like pairs, hurling thunderbolts of displeasure, then, alone, my mother was the great goddess in whom the powers of creation and destruction existed side by side. Those Friday morning mental arithmetic tests drove me to a panic days before the event and when they came I could not even hear the questions. Still, that terror-filled hour every Friday accomplished one good thing; desperation taught me invaluable sins of lying, stealing report cards from the mail and artistic reworking of important parts of the report.

So I had a lot on my mind at that time, although it all got knocked out of my head by subsequent events. It must have been early spring because every time I think of that day I see colorful cotton dresses and remember an unaccustomed sense of lightness. While waiting with my companions to cross at the corner I saw that a girl in the class below me was across the street, waving to someone on my side. I hated this girl. Her parents spoke with an accent and she herself was fat and had what looked like bosoms much too soon. Her chest jiggled when she ran as it was doing now for just before I turned my head away I saw her race into the street to join the friend to whom she was shouting and waving. Seconds later I heard the sound of brakes screaming then a human scream. When I looked again the girl was lying before the huge rig with her head split open. Her brains lay spattered in the road, blood flowed brilliantly into the gutters and trickled slowly into the sewer.

"Come," said the neighbor-woman impatiently as she deliberately turned her daughter away from the terrible scene. "You don't want to see this."

I shook her off and continued watching like a scientist collecting data for a thesis shuddering before the uncanny power that brings buried violence out into the world.

Intensity is always there. It becomes part of my childhood, like learning to walk and talk or losing baby teeth. It was there one Saturday afternoon when I was eight years old, waiting for my father to take me to the movies for the first time. It was the beginning of those long vigils in which leaning my head against the window pane, I would wait with hushed and horrible impatience every Saturday afternoon and every evening in the fading light for the sound of his key in the lock. Every Saturday afternoon my father and I would go to that place that came to be the holiest of holies for me, that cave of dreams -- Loews Boro Park. There we saw Little Women, Skippy (with Jackie Cooper), Captain Blood, Gold Diggers of 1933, 42nd Street, and Eddie Cantor in The Kid from Spain. It was the movies that sprung the trap. Without those charged and lover-like assignations for the Saturday matinee, my father could never have managed to draw me in, to teach me to hover over his every breath so that when he was in pain, I knew it; when he was happy I laughed; when he was anxious my stomach churned. Yet I knew that part of my feelings contained an obsequious form of gratitude. No one else had a father who spent so much time entertaining them. When I found myself sitting next to him in that dark and cavernous space where flashlight stars twinkled and ornate balconies where no one sat, were dimly lit,.I became aware that his strong presence was endowed with something I couldn't name. It left me tense and stiff, afraid to move my hands or shift my feet. I heard breathing, candy wrappers unwrapping and that peculiar and erotic smell of chocolate, soft drinks and human bodies pressed close together. At last there was a fanfare. The screen lit up, though it is awhile before images formed themselves out of the glitter to become recognizable shapes. There! A face--immense, flashing eyes, tendrils of hair escaping like garden snakes, a beauty spot that might be an insect. My stomach crawls. Her lips part. There is a graininess within the shimmer like photographs in the newspaper. A man appears. He takes the woman in his arms. Music plays. They dance--they sing. Suddenly there are many young women in bathing suits floating in a pool. They come together and form a pattern. The pattern breaks up, divides like germs on a microscope slide. I know this design must be a code I will never understand--like arithmetic. I hold my breath, try to keep my father from knowing how much I want to hide under the seat--how much I want to throw-up. I see his body stiffen with growing annoyance. He knows. We watch the serial from the back of the theater. A lion roars, lifts it's monstrous body to leap upon Tarzan. I scream. He takes me by the arm. We leave.

Now, even in the relative safety of my own room I waited for something to happen. Eating and sleeping violence I became like Dracula for whom the taste of blood only makes him want more and I went to sleep half-hungry for disaster. One night I opened my eyes to the sound of fire-engines in the street below, found the walls of my room rosy with flickering lights. Later, on the roof-top where people from our building had gathered to watch a huge fire demolish the apartment house across the street, I sat on the shoulders of the strong young woman who worked for us. Although I was eight or nine years old then, I was skinny and small-boned as a jockey. As I curled my fingers in her hair, smelled the soot and tar which had become soft from the heat of the fire and watched the flames climb high, die down, then roar like an express train, my heart was banging wildly in my chest with the combination of delight and terror I learned to adore at the movies. Near me, the other watchers gasped. Now the roof of the house across the way was ablaze and a tongue of flame reached out for us. We swayed back on indrawn breath. Hoses hissed and sparks glowed like fireworks in the darkness, while smoke-blackened faces of fireman appeared form time to time at broken windows. Their voices came to us on the wind. "Send the ladder here Joe. I'm going up." Great fire hoses poured tons of water on the inferno. Finally it was brought under control and we went back downstairs with the smell of smoke still clinging to our clothes while wind-driven ash-curls have dropped to dry like powder in our hair. After all the excitement I had trouble sleeping and because I had been so close to her body I missed Vera and was impatient for her to come back to the room we shared with my sister. When she finally appeared it was only to get into bed quickly and take off her clothes under the bed-clothes. At last, when I no longer expected it, she sat up, struggled with her brassiere and the white breasts tumbled out. They were very large and pendulous--a Niagara of whiteness cascading down her chest. I sighed and gripped my hands together as tightly as I could.

Eventually my childhood attachment to turbulence cooled down--took a breather that lasted until puberty--but not before a final episode. When I was about nine years old, details of the Lindberg baby's kidnapping had reached the ears of every child in America. Across the country, children dreamed of creaking fire-escapes and heard the snap of a ladder against the walls of their house--even when they lived in six-story apartment houses. Movies were full of the theme. One especially vivid scene from a film of that time comes to mind--a girl pulled struggling and screaming from the front seat of her father's open touring car while he stares in horror at the piece of her dress left in his hand and the kidnappers drive off with the little girl trussed-up in the back of their car. Now no child is safe; neither at home nor while out driving with her father. Even my sister, that terrific five-year old, sturdy and insensitive as anyone's kid sister--an inveterate perpetrator of derring-do, who is called dynamite by my parents and something just as admiring in Yiddish by my grandfather--is afraid. But then she knows a lot about violence--for I have shown it to her. No longer pretty, a terrible student and a klutz on the field, I am now called sourpuss by my mother. Put it all together and it's clear I no longer please the adults in the family. On the other hand I believe my sister has charmed them away through the magic of her skillful body and efficient mind. Because I failed kindergarten, I have been in the "dumb" class since first grade. On the other hand my sister is a whiz on skates and at five and a half was promoted to the highest first grade. Now she has twisted her plump and rosy little self around Vera's heart. When she steals other things from me besides members of my family, Vera always says "She's just a baby. Let her have it!" in a voice thick with a Bohemian accent and disgust. Can't she see I am only a child too? Sometimes blind with rage, I will, if we are in the bathroom where Vera supervises the washing-up, take the "baby" by the hair and in grotesque imitation of my father, gnash my teeth while I bang her head against the porcelain sink over and over again. Somehow I never seemed to damage her when I do it on purpose, the tangle of hands--Vera's intervening between ours--deflect my blows. On the other hand when we play on the bed, wrestling and tumbling, our games often end with her falling to the floor or being smacked against the headboard. Once she fell off the bed onto a chair with a jagged, broken back. The rough wood cut into her cheek and required many stitches to close. Now, all these years later, she still bears that scar.

One night, during this period in my life, my parents gave a New Years Eve party. It was only a few years since repeal of prohibition and drinking still carried the delicious air of the flask and the speakeasy. My father, who always loved a party, put away his fears and rages for the sake of friends who would have been shocked and surprised to meet him as Mr. Hyde. Though it was difficult to sleep in the midst of falsetto screams, raucous laughter and loud ragtime on the radio--I soon did. For that night at least, my father had become the laughing father of my earliest childhood. He had put us to bed with many jokes and our hysterical laughter, which eased me to sleep. Before I could even begin to dream, I was awakened by my sister who was crying in a loud and troubling way. In fact she was shrieking while the sounds of the party were mounting. It was an exercise in cacophony and at first I couldn't hear what she was yelling. Finally I understood her. She was screaming, "He's out there!"
"Who?" I asked still half asleep and annoyed." The kidnapper--and he's naked!" Oh boy, I thought, what a nightmare! Then I heard something too, sat up and saw a face at the window and someone banging on the frame rattling the panes. I could see the outlines of naked shoulders, like a demented prisoner frantically shaking the bars of his cell. My usual blur of panic took over and I could only sit up and try to join my voice to hers. Since she was screaming for two-it was ok. We waited so long for anyone to come that I couldn't help but remember other occasions when I would shout and shout but no one came, leaving me alone in darkness and in terror. Meanwhile the man or thing, for I was no longer certain it was human, kept beating on the window. Suddenly the door was flung open and a crowd of people burst in wearing paper hats, smelling of strong drink and laughing uproariously like a chorus of carnival people in the opera where the heroine is dying. Even my parents ignored my sister and me while everyone ran to the window, crowded around it laughing more loudly than before. My father who was wearing a top hat made of paper tilted at a rakish angle, looked young and happy while tears of laughter rolled down his cheeks. He had a cigar clamped between his teeth and resembled George Raft, was even walking with a gangster's slouch. He opened the window, stuck his head out, letting the cigar hang out of the side of his mouth, and said, "Okay wise-guy. You can come in now but don't try any funny business, unnerstan!" It was a perfect imitation of Raft or Edward G. Robinson. I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been so frightened and cold for it was freezing in the room and someone had pulled the spread off my bed to cover the man from the fire escape. When he stepped inside I saw it was the trickster of the crowd shivering in his underwear. This time the practical joker wasn't laughing, for they had stripped him and locked him out the kitchen window which shared the fire-escape with our bedroom. Now at last they were even with him for all those exploding cigars, the whoopie cushion and telephone calls in the middle of the night. Soon the room was empty, the adults had been too far gone to notice two terrified kids. My sister was till shuddering and sobbing under her breath while I wasn't feeling too good myself. So I declared an armistice and crawled into her bed where, like Hansel and Gretel, we both lay shivering in each others arms.