Blue Genes Page 10

  Eight times a year, Tony and I took that train between Putney and New York. We grew physically and intellectually. On vacations, Tony and I did things together, but seldom at school, where I continued to inquire if he had had enough to eat, gotten enough sleep, wanted to go to the soccer game. I was still trying to reassure myself that he, too, wouldn’t get sick and abandon me, that I knew where he was at all times. He, however, found the attention anything but gratifying and sought out boys his own age for company. In my eighth-grade year, he was no longer there, having moved up from Hickory Ridge to Putney, three miles away. I had to find friends to supplant him.

  I gravitated to Tom Russell, whom we called Rusty, with his golden hair falling constantly across his freckled face, stocky legged, running across the soccer field, or taking off—soaring—into the air from the ski jump. His parents had moved the family to India when he was very young, and he and his sister grew up attended by amahs and watching cobras drink milk from straw bowls. It was the era of the Raj, and when the Rockefellers came visiting their Standard Oil domain, Tom’s father (who was their manager for India, Burma, China, and Ceylon) showed them around. The war came; Tom, his sister, and their mother were sent home. Somewhere in Ceylon, Tom’s father got killed by the Japanese.

  Tom would sit, cross-legged, his calves bulging under the strain, clutching a dog-eared paperback close to his chest so we couldn’t see the pages, and read to us, the hungry looks on our faces telling him how much we wanted him to go on.

  She came towards me, her breasts heaving. “I want you,” she said, letting her dress fall noiselessly to the floor.

  The book snapped shut. Rusty heaved himself up out of his cramped position and went to play soccer or sun himself in back of our dormitory. The book was put away in a Chinese puzzle box that my other roommate and I could never open. I don’t know why we allowed ourselves to be toyed with like that, but then, we were only twelve years old, and it’s not hard for one preteen with lots of worldly experience to fool another.

  It wasn’t until the end of the year that I finally got a glimpse at that book. It was a Penguin edition of The Scarlet Pimpernel, and the closest there was to a seduction scene was in the name of the book. But there was something about Tom, about his seductive voice, his unbearable masculinity, that made the story believable, and every time he “read” us excerpts, our mouths watered, our tiny penises rose beneath our sheltering hands, and we begged him for more. I suppose it was natural, then, that I should have fallen in love with Tom, natural for me, that is, a boy whose brother didn’t pay him much attention, who made him feel small.

  Not that I ever let on, of course. We were chaste and platonic as could be, much as my mother apparently had been with Frances Berwanger. And soon, when Tom and I both went up to Putney, I began to focus on girls. Soon, too, because he was a superb baseball player, Tom would be taken up by the boys one or two classes ahead of us. He became very close to Tony, and the three of us would occasionally vacation in New York or go to a ball game.

  ______

  IN THE SPRING OF 1945, as the war wound down (I was ten, Tony twelve), we got word at Hickory Ridge that Dad had remarried. The new wife was a tall, stunning redhead named Ruth West who worked in advertising at J. Walter Thompson. She had a daughter, Piri, from her first marriage.

  I was elated. This would mean we had a new mother, someone to look after us and give us what we’d been missing for four years. Tony was more cautious. This was our father’s new wife, not necessarily a new mother for us. I don’t think he was actually eager to have a new mother. His experience of the old one had been less than stellar. I was eager for a reincarnation.

  In some ways, this characterized a major difference between us. I was hopeful (though not always optimistic) that life could take a wonderful turn for the better, almost magically. Tony was confident that nothing could create good outcomes except hard work, diligence, and attention to detail. If mine was a fantastical way of looking at the world—one that was bound to have many disappointments—his would leave him disenchanted before the battle even began.

  For that summer’s vacation in 1945 we all settled into a house in Larchmont, a suburb of New York City. It was the first summer we had not gone to camp or stayed with Missy, and I thought it might prove to be the beginning of a permanent structure for our disjointed lives. But the only permanence was the house itself, one of those fake-English, half-timbered buildings on a quiet side street.

  The summer is memorable for two things: Tony and I actually spent lots of time together, riding bicycles down the back roads to Mount Vernon, taking tin cans and newspapers to the collection dump “for the war effort,” and trying to get used to the idea of a sister and a new mother.

  But the big event occurred when Tony discovered Jack, a boy his own age. Not only did Jack engage in the wartime practice of collecting tin cans and tinfoil for the government to do whatever it did with such stuff, but he loved baseball. Why did he love the game? Because his father was the lawyer for the radio station WINS, which broadcast the Yankee games.

  If a fairy godmother had come down and given Tony three wishes, they could not have been more exciting or fulfilling than the next thing that happened.

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to go meet Mel Allen and sit in the radio booth, would you?” asked the cherub from down the block.

  Allen was the Southern-born “voice of the Yankees.” He had a deep, mellow tone and was someone who could describe the minutiae of activity on the field without once losing sight of the larger picture. I remember hearing him tell in great detail how a particular pitcher was preparing to throw, and realized even then how Allen’s use of words entranced Tony.

  The trip to Yankee Stadium was a triumph for Tony. Jack’s father procured four tickets to the next game. Tony, Jack, Jack’s father, and I went. At the appropriate moment, we went up to the broadcast booth, met Mel Allen, sat in the booth, got autographs, and went back to our seats. The Yankees won. The Sox lost. It was not the first game Tony had been to, but it was one of the most memorable. Tony adored baseball, but he loved the descriptive power of words, too. Mel Allen, with his roaring “How about that!” when something startling or exciting or devastating happened during a game, was the stuff of myth and history and had given baseball radio the power to generate images.

  My brother’s relationship with baseball was intense. In later years, after he had shut me out of his amateur playing, I think he regretted that I knew so little about it. When we attended games at Yankee Stadium, he was constantly bewildered and slightly angered by the fact that I didn’t understand arcane subjects such as the infield fly rule.

  “Jesus, Kit, if you don’t know that one by now, you’ll never learn it.”

  Years before, Proctor had reserved for Tony the supreme privilege of learning how to throw a baseball and how to hit. Once Tony had gotten the rudiments of the game, he badgered Proctor to take any and every spare moment from household duties to engage in practice. Above the Rosedale Avenue garage was Proctor’s bedroom. There, he had a radio and listened to ball games whenever he could. Tony was allowed to go there, listen with him, and learn the rudiments.

  As a player, Tony learned to throw fast to second for an attempted double play. And while, as I’ve suggested, he was not especially agile or talented, his fierce interest in the game put him on teams. At Putney, where baseball was a hardball, interschool game, he didn’t make varsity until his senior year. By then, he was already filled with the statistics and jargon of baseball, and in some ways I don’t think it really mattered to him whether he played on the Putney team or not. He had already experienced the big time—in the broadcast booth, and in his mind.

  He would write about baseball only occasionally, but in my view one particular exegesis of the sport is an example of his writing at its best, because it gets into his personal thoughts and feelings. It’s in a collection called Birth of a Fan, in which the editor, Ron Fimrite, put together a bunch of writers who wrote
about how and why they became enamored of sports. In a piece titled “Surrogate Family,” Tony spilled his emotions out onto the page, revealing for the first time how important it was for him to listen to baseball on the radio.

  For years, Tony and I had no permanent home, no family fire-side. In place of that—as he saw it—there was that first radio, stashed in Proctor’s bedroom, and then another old radio, in the workshop of Putney’s carpenter, a tall, grizzled Vermonter named Tom Morse. There, as Tony and his friends pretended to do what were called “work jobs” in the spring afternoons at school, they listened to the Red Sox and the Yankees duke it out on Tom’s radio, twisting the antenna this way and that to get the signal clear. In his essay, Tony spelled out the relationship of those players and the listeners to him: they were the family he never had, the brotherhood that could exist; the power of the bat and the ball, the swift throw, the clean out, the sense of manhood. It was a world free from women who might either abandon him or—as with Missy—try to rule with a fierce hand.

  To Tony, sliding home was not metaphor but reality. A “home run” was what he ached for, and Tony found it in Tom Morse’s workshop. As he would write in “Surrogate Family”:

  Baseball reaches something deep inside me, stirring the guttering embers of memory and feeling. It keeps me in touch with the time when it was far more than a game or a pastime, but a buttress to my self-esteem, a substitute family, a cooling balm for my pain, a secret pleasure to my ear, a goad to my richest fantasies.

  If baseball was his family, then the players were his siblings. He met few of them, but he tried to emulate them in the games he and his friends played at school. There, at the plate or in the field, Tony would pretend to be DiMaggio or Rizzuto or half a dozen other players, keeping up a babble of pseudo-baseballese, trying to hit like his heroes, trying to field like a Yankee.

  Initially, I lacked the kind of surrogate family Tony had, and I felt that void deeply. But gradually I would turn music and theater into a kind of family.

  I learned to play flute in the orchestra; I sang in the chorus; I built sets and played roles in the school dramas. For those who have never done these things, it is perhaps too flip an idea to say that fellow players in an amateur musical event or play can be “family.” But for me—and for many others—playing the roles of adults, and singing the works of Bach and Brahms, put all who participated in a separate and special world. We are brothers and sisters in that world of performance. We love one another for the support we receive and give; we mourn the end of the event. No wonder so many actors in Hollywood fall in love with their co-stars.

  Then, too, for me, there was the unconscious substitution of the audience for that precious audience of one I had experienced and loved as a boy of four and five. It took me years to understand these dynamics, but the sustenance they gave me was inestimable. Later still, I would use the work I did in film and television as a way to create a “family.”

  WHATEVER TENSIONS EXISTED BETWEEN TONY AND MYSELF, living with Missy during vacations meant creating an alliance with him. There was no other way to survive the day-by-day, minute-by-minute scrutiny from our grandmother. Clean clothes, hot baths, teeth brushing: all were in Missy’s purview, even as we grew to the age of embarrassment and desired privacy.

  My grandmother lived in the Alwyn Court, a thirteen-story building later added to the National Register of Historic Places. She had moved there after her husband’s death in the early 1930s to be closer to Mother. The building had once had only a series of floor-through apartments for very rich New Yorkers. It was rumored that the twelfth floor, where Missy had a five-room apartment, once held a fifteen-room dwelling for the Roosevelts.

  The entire facade of the building, which was finished in 1909, is covered in ornate carvings. Huge salamanders (the emblem of Francis I, an art connoisseur and patron during the French Renaissance) flank flowers, faces, and other curlicues. I remember huge, heavy glass doors, mounted in ornate cast-iron decorations, and a doorman, Andy, a heavyset man with a large goiter on his neck that got bigger and bigger over the years. The day elevator man was Henry, a very kind person, to whom Dad gave $5 every Christmas, and toward whom I felt guilty for years because I had denied him a bite of my candy bar when he asked for it. I thought he was kidding, but he was really very hungry. He told Missy, who reprimanded me. With me, guilt lasts a long time.

  On the twelfth floor, the elevator opened up on a hallway that went three-quarters of the way around the floor, surrounding a large courtyard. My grandmother’s apartment, just at the left as you got off the elevator, opened on a large foyer with a huge Italian wooden buffet that she had bought in Italy on one of the family’s grand tours. A tiny closet of a kitchen lay directly ahead, but through another doorway lay the large and light-filled living room, painted a dainty blue. A fake fireplace centered the room. The grand piano (which I now have) occupied one corner, while a beautiful eighteenth-century breakfront desk took up part of a wall. To the rear of the apartment, Tony and I had a big bright bedroom, fronting on the sunlit avenue, with our own bathroom. Furniture in this room was in blond Scandinavian style. Missy’s bedroom was even larger, also light blue, with a couch, bureau, dressing table, and double bed. And, of course, her own bathroom. At the time, she paid $175 per month.

  Missy lived off income from various investments left to her by her mother. She could afford a cleaning woman, a laundress, and a cook at various times during the week. The apartment was always neat and clean.

  Coming home to this luxurious environment from the cold northland was pleasurable and exciting. We took baths in a huge tub, with enormous amounts of hot water pouring out of the spout, a vivid contrast to the once-a-week baths we were allowed at Hickory Ridge, with rusty water dribbling into the tub. The dinner Anna Fuchs prepared for us each time we returned from school was a classic, served with flair: roasted lamb, English muffins slathered with butter, roasted potatoes, avocado salad, and a rich coffee mousse dessert. It’s safe to say my culinary tastes—limited though they were at first—developed at Missy’s table.

  Missy planned all our events. She fed us three meals a day, drew those hot baths, bought our clothes, sent us to bed, let us (or did not let us) listen to the radio programs that also fed us, chastised us for language and other disruptions of the moral code. She taught me to sing, accompanied me on my flute. In short, she attempted to do all that a mother and father would or should do.

  But we had to pay for those luxuries by living with a woman who didn’t know how to deal with two little boys—and certainly not with adolescents.

  Tony called Missy the Queen of Daintiness, not because of her movements, but because she required us at all times to be polite, clean, and quiet, though not too quiet. If she kept her voice down, it was only to emphasize matters or to keep people from overhearing. Often I heard her say “colored people” in a whisper, though no one but Tony or I might be around to hear. But one of her grandchildren, my first cousin Lisa, was constantly chastised by Missy for being too quiet.

  “Speak up, dear,” Missy said, “you want to be heard.”

  Missy was always heard. She asked for, and received, what she wanted. In restaurants, she would demand that the piped-in music be lowered to inaudible; dinner rolls were to be returned to the kitchen to be heated (she never ate the soft inside, tearing it out to eat the crust only and saying that was better for us); and if food was not to her liking, it was not paid for. In our mother’s house-hold, servants had been treated well. In Missy’s, they were tolerated.

  Missy was quiet and calm on the surface, though this may have been nothing more than a depressive overlay. If she was angry, she didn’t raise her voice, but simply looked sad and hurt. The only time I saw my grandmother do something truly joyful was when a famous racist Southern senator died. She had gone to the door to get the newspaper and discovered his death in the headlines of the Herald Tribune. Dancing a little jig, she said, “Mr. Bilbo died.” It was out of character, and it never ha
ppened again. But it did set some of the political tone for us: both Missy and Dad were lifelong liberal Democrats.

  My grandmother wasn’t terribly smart. And she wasn’t much fun to be with. She had lots of money, gave generously to many charities, including the ACLU, and knew how to gather people around her. A violin teacher came once a month to play sonatas with her. Miss Dring came every week to give piano lessons. Others came for bridge, or for lunch. Some of her friends were intellectuals, and it has always been a puzzle for me that they put up with her imperious nature and with her lack of interest in serious books and serious discussions. Perhaps she dragged them into her net the way she had encouraged us to depend on her.

  So while Missy was a difficult encounter, she was our protector and our governess. We had a certain obligation to obey, or at least to listen.

  This posed a dilemma for us. For years we were directly under her aegis. It took many years before Dad began to fulfill the promise of being a full-time father. He lived at the Langdon, while Tony and I used Missy’s apartment as our home when we came back from school for vacations. We were expected to report our comings and goings to her and to be back in her apartment at bed-time. I always obeyed; Tony did not. I got teased for being fanatically obedient to her wishes. But it made me feel secure to be the obedient little boy.