good enough for the Dodgers? “You want to play the game,
play the game!”
My sister? A child, and sometimes vicious. My mother? She wants me to make leather bracelets. That leaves my grandfather, the dentist, the white-haired whizbang continental Marxist toothpuller, wearing a white jacket, out of Minsk, U.S.S.R., Brooklyn’s leading battler against foci of infection, Dr. Abraham Rockow, D.D.S.
My mother, the enemy, meets the camp train and kisses me softly and says, “Oh. By the way. We’ve moved.” A taxi takes us to Lincoln Place, near Grand Army Plaza, and a large apartment building of red brick. “We have seven rooms on the top floor,” my mother says. She shows me the living room, which leads to glass doors opening onto a tiny terrace. “Those are called French doors,” Olga says. “Now would you like to see your name in the
New York Times?”
“Who? Me? In the
Times?
Yeah, sure.” We walk to my parents’ bedroom in the strange apartment. I have never heard thehousehold so quiet. Olga reaches into a bureau, a chiffonier, she calls it, and shows me a clipping from the
New York Times. Rockow, Abraham, D. D. S., suddenly on June 30.
My name appears two lines lower in the agate type.
Beloved grandfather of Roger.
What he had called a little cough was a massive coronary.
III
The world is never again as it was before anyone you love has ever died; never so innocent, never so fixed, never so gentle, never so pliant to your will. But these are afterthoughts. Generations vie and the young recover swiftly, or believe they do. A few years later in the new apartment there is some horseplay and then Elisabeth, the Austrian maid, makes a lively proposition. “Would you like to watch me take a bath?”
“But.” Long indrawing of breath. “What? Sure.”
It is Saturday night. Emily is asleep. Olga and Gordon have gone to hear Dimitri Mitropoulos conduct the New York Philharmonic. From the black Air King in my room, the theme of the “Lucky Strike Hit Parade” blares, “All your friends are here to bring good cheer your wa-a-a-y.” Then, “And here’s number seven, still on the top ten: the Hit Parade orchestra brings you an exciting instrumental version of’I Hear a Rhapsody.’ “ That song? In a neighborhood schoolboy joke the druggist jumps a lady customer, who cries out, leading a chocolate malted to comment to the glass on its left, “I hear a rape, sody.” That song? That ridiculous song? And now?
“Well?” Elisabeth says. I cannot joke. My throat is dry. I nod. Elisabeth leads the way down a hallway into the kitchen, through a door into her small bedroom, which is tidy and painted white. She turns to face me and removes her dress and slip. She does not wear a brassiere. I stand motionless and gape.
Elisabeth removes her underpants and does not remove her dentures. The body is broad and functional. “Wow,” I say, finding my voice. “Wow, Elisabeth, you’ve got a build.”
“Ach.” She shakes her head, pleased. “I’m a woman, aren’t I?”
She bathes, puts on a rayon nightgown and shoos me off to sleep. In my own bedroom, I can hardly believe my fortune. Age germinates allure, and Elisabeth must be thirty-five. Two weeks later, my parents return to Carnegie Hall and Elisabeth invites me back to her bath. At thirteen I have a steady date. Elisabeth bathes. I watch. In my mind I prepare an arcanum of advances, but I cannot act. At length, out of boredom or bitchery, Elisabeth betrays me. She confesses to Donald the daytime doorman, a tiny man with wisps of white hair running down his neck. Donald wears buff uniforms and shouts at eight-year-olds playing catch in Lincoln Place.
“Ge-radda-here. Go backa shannytown.”
Thirteen-year-olds are not assaulted by the war whoop of Donald the Doorman. Most are bigger than he. This undersized tormentor of children not only became the repository of my secret, but with the terrible righteousness of menials, he recounts all that he has heard to