Leaving Brooklyn Read online

  I must have pledged for the drama of it, for I was almost bound to be rejected. I can reconstruct, if not quite remember, how I felt: yes, even the misery of rejection would be more welcome to her than stale corridors and gym suits and teachers. It would be something she could feel, and a kind of knowledge beneath the surface, too. For misery drew me then, as more complex and instructive than settledness, or even happiness. Pledging for the sorority would also ease my mother’s doubts about the acting class. I am sure I—the girl—would have thought of that.

  Above all, settled meant “settling for,” as in making the best of a bad bargain, such as one’s life, or as my parents had settled without question for the damaged goods brought to them from the hospital nursery. That settledness, that passivity in the face of circumstance, led me to the office of the contact lens doctor.

  AN EVEN GREATER postwar novelty than contact lenses was television, that most powerful lens. People regarded it as dwarf movies, and it was viewed in the dark. We were among the last on our block to succumb, and our living room took on a perpetual gloom, a cloak of grief. Farewell to light. We lived—all of Brooklyn did—like cave families who sat around sighing in the dark until the accidental discovery of fire.

  From the flickering eye of the room beamed the image of the man my father called “the pig,” in fuzzy black and white on the evening news, marbly eyes darting, shoulders hunching, spit gathering at the corners of his mouth, while my father, stretched out on the red couch, ground his teeth audibly, gnawed on his cigar, and said, “Somebody’s going to get that bastard one of these days.”

  This was Joseph McCarthy, the senator, and he did resemble a pig, with his balloony face and small mean eyes and snout. He moved like the larger sort of pig or ox, too, a boar or buffalo, rolling his cylinder of a body about in one unarticulated chunk, great shudders rippling down from his shoulders. Savagery had frozen on his face, vindicating my mother’s warnings. When he confronted his prey his lips glistened with the foam of condensed rage and his cheeks and eyes exuded a brutish ardor, like pigs’ faces when they make ready to fall on the orts and peels heaped in their trough.

  “But what is he doing?” I asked when it began. I was in junior high and had been warned that chaos leads to communism.

  “Oh, he just wants power. Power mad. It’s not even communism. Ego.”

  This was confusing. It had to be communism; that was all everyone talked about, especially Miss Kuznetzov in History class.

  During a commercial, my father explained that power was the ability to use and exploit and even destroy other people for your own purposes, you merely had to find a timely pretext, and while unfortunately that was what the world was all about, power and greed, in this case it happened to be unconstitutional. It was precisely for madmen such as this one that we had a constitution. Law was a curb on passion. Without it where would we be. And so forth.

  It was the first time I had heard anyone openly suggest the world spun on an axis of passion, with power and greed its poles. The living room darkened. I closed my good eye and it grew darker still, splintering into implications. Was there no real goodness, then, in human nature? Was all our civilized behavior contrived, induced by artificial constraints? If left to our true desires, would we be savages? All the secrets I felt and hid began to throb: what might I find myself doing if these secrets demanded freedom and expression? How could my father have uttered such thoughts in our own living room, where the very walls, listening and fathoming, might collapse in rebellion—what law decreed they must stand forever and shield us?

  Worse, these notions were not entirely unfamiliar—they had the trembling, shadowy echo of things deeply known, the kind of knowledge Socrates claimed is inborn and waits, dormant, to be fired into life by the bellows of inquiry; or the kind of knowledge Wordsworth says we forget from infancy as shades of the prison house begin to close, though these shivery recollections of mine were hardly the billowy glories of the infinite that trailed Wordsworth’s cherubs.

  But in Brooklyn! It was everything Brooklyn kept at bay, the very reason for Brooklyn’s existence.

  My mother entered from the kitchen and sat down to watch. My father was grumbling at the screen again.

  “What is it?” she said. “Oh, him again.”

  She couldn’t know, I decided. She was Brooklyn’s spokesman. Through her, Brooklyn said we must be good because it was good to be good, we were made to be good and would be happiest being good, we must only stop doing what we liked and listen instead to our elders, who knew what good was.

  “Why don’t they just throw him out, then, if it’s unconstitutional?” I asked.

  “They will, they will.” My father grunted. “It’ll just take some time.”

  “But I don’t get it. Why do people sit there and answer?”

  “Because they’re afraid. Their jobs, their families. And they have good reason to be. Power is real. People are being destroyed right and left.”

  “Why do we just sit here, then? Why don’t we get up and do something?”

  “Do what?”

  “I don’t know. Sign a petition. Write to your congressman. Make a public statement.”

  “A public statement.” My father gave his characteristic sound—a sneering laugh, or laughing sneer—and relit his cigar. “A public statement. You go out and make a public statement and see what happens.”

  My mother groaned. “Oh, don’t tell her such things.”

  I often puzzled over how much she knew, or cared, about the world outside Brooklyn. She had certain icons she revered and praised when their names came up—primarily the Roosevelts, Eleanor as well as Franklin—but her reverence seemed inspired more by their characters than their politics, or, rather, she saw no possible distinction between the two. Otherwise her feelings were engaged when the evening news concerned personal disasters, when miners were trapped and their wives waited wretchedly at the entrance to the mine, or a prominent businessman was proven to be a racketeer and his innocent family wept, or an entire household was murdered in its sleep by a motiveless lunatic. Then she clicked her tongue and shook her head and wondered aloud at what was happening to the world, and at how human nature and moral fiber had eroded since her youth, when people had character and fed hungry strangers at the gate and you could leave your door unlocked at any hour.

  “If you tell her things like that,” she pursued, “next thing you know, she’ll go out and do it.”

  “Well, why not?” I said. “This is supposed to be a democracy. And you all sit here like sheep. What if it was one of your friends?”

  “It wouldn’t be one of our friends,” she said. “We don’t know people like that.”

  “I wish we did,” I retorted. She was right. There was no one worth accusing in this dead backwater, no artists, no communists, no adventurers, no one with a soul. No drama or upheaval could happen here where we languished on the periphery, in the shadows of the world. Even McCarthy was only a fat face on a flat screen, no danger. My body ached with boredom as potent as a drug injected into my veins.

  “Schmuck,” my father taunted the television screen. “Communists! Communists! You wouldn’t know a communist if he came and sat on your goddamn head.”

  I remembered the communists in The Saturday Evening Post illustration, rhythmically pounding their sticks on the bucket covering the victim’s head. McCarthy was pounding. And my father, if he had the power, would pound in return. Did the captured American in the story talk? Would I?

  “Communism,” my father shouted at the screen, “is a system of economic organization of goods and services! Communism is not a moral flaw!”

  “Shush, for God’s sakes!” warned my mother. “The walls are thin. They can hear you on East New York Avenue.”

  “Who!” He turned on her, ready to pounce. “Who’ll hear me? Rosenbloom? Schneider?” Our next-door neighbors.

  “They’re illiterate anyway. Let them hear!”

  “I give up.” She rose and started fo
r the kitchen. “For me it’s enough to live a decent life. I can’t take the problems of the world on my shoulders.”

  “So who asked you to?” he hurled after her.

  McCarthy disappeared, replaced by a commercial for Camel cigarettes. My father’s eyes gazed sullenly at the screen.

  “It’s very easy,” I remarked, “to yell at a television set.”

  “Oh, so you would do better, I suppose. The whole country is shaking with fear, the President doesn’t know what to do with him, and you would do better.”

  “I wouldn’t answer those questions, anyway. I’d tell him to go to hell. I wish I were up there.”

  I did. I yearned to be older, and so prominent in some field or other—acting or politics or journalism—that I was worthy of suspicion. McCarthy would accuse me and I would crush him by my intrepid performance. How dare you? I would answer with passion but dignity. How dare you ask me these insolent questions? My beliefs and my sympathies are my private affair, guaranteed by the Constitution. No one tells me how to think! The audacity! You have exceeded the boundaries of civil behavior. Moreover you’re nothing but a pig. Nothing but a pack of cards… I would fix him with the eye that saw the thing behind the thing, the essence behind the surface image, and since he was nothing but an image he would disappear, melting into his surroundings. This was what I was made for, this was my mission, not the life of a schoolgirl in Brooklyn.

  “Well,” said my father, “who knows? Maybe you would. I hope you would.”

  I was so accustomed to his sarcasm, I could so mechanically invert much of what he said, like a simultaneous translator, that I hardly grasped when he was in earnest. We exchanged a brief embarrassed look. “Audrey dear, do me a favor, will you? Go upstairs and bring me two Alka-Seltzers and a glass of water.”

  McCarthy’s was not the only crusade. As secret as his was flagrant was the crusade of Miss Schechter, the Geometry teacher. Miss Schechter held the passionate conviction that it was wrong and immodest for girls of thirteen to wear bras before, in her judgment, they were necessary. Padded bras and the ultimate, falsies, abetted this practice and must be extirpated wherever they were found. Her Savonarola eyes scanned the rows of seats, scrutinizing bosoms—it was an era of tight chartreuse and fuchsia sweaters—and lit on a daily suspect.

  Leaving the class with a difficult proof to work on, Miss Schechter marched the girl to the girls’ room.

  Children get used to things. At first there was pity for the victim, her trembling and pallor, our whispers and blushes; halfway through the term it was part of the geometrical routine, and even the boys lost interest and simply welcomed the break. Pride played its part too. No one could actively wish to be chosen, yet who could wish to be totally overlooked? What did she do in the girls’ room? What did she really want? I asked one of the Judys, a giggler and gossiper who had been picked several times. “She looks,” said Judy laconically. It must be beyond gossip.

  I would never know. I was safe, braless. The crucial lesson of Joseph McCarthy was lost on me. What a surprise to hear my name called.

  “But I’m not wearing a bra,” I murmured as I trailed down the corridor after Miss Schechter, striding along full of purpose.

  “We’ll see about that!”

  She opened the door and stepped aside so I could precede her. It was during class—no one else was there. We passed the three stalls and stopped near the frosted window. I backed off and leaned against the sink.

  “All right, let’s see.”

  I stared at her.

  “Raise your sweater.”

  I must have heard wrong. If I raised my sweater she would accuse me of a ghastly faux pas. With pursed lips, she gave a tiny jerk of her head upwards, and I had to allow what I had heard.

  I did it. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to refuse. I could defy McCarthy because he operated under well-known laws, but Miss Schechter was a teacher.

  It is another of those acts I have trouble, now, believing I did; I wish I were making it up or reporting from hearsay, appropriating the scene to make the narrative more telling. Perhaps I am, I hope I am. Once again, the line blurs between what happened and what I recall as happening.

  Impossibly, I raised my pink sweater to my collarbone and Miss Schechter, hands behind her back as if locked there by force of will, studied my incipient breasts. I felt the humiliation less than the stratospheric chill of impossibility. This was Brooklyn. School. I was a dreamer with a dream life. Despite what people think, dreamers are very clear about what is fantasy and what is reality—they have to be.

  I had nowhere to look so I looked at her face. Grim as always, frozen in grimness, it was an olive-skinned face with premature papery wrinkles stitching the parts together, nose carefully stitched to the cheeks, eyes carefully stitched into their sockets… The mouth was thin and grooved, like a cord. The chin quivered. I moved my eyes lower. She wore a non-descript brown outfit, a sweater and cardigan set. Her breasts, which I had never noticed before, were flat scallops of dough slapped onto her chest. I looked up again. Her black eyes gave off light.

  “All right,” she said finally. “Pull it down now, what are you waiting for!”

  “I told you,” I couldn’t resist saying, since I was good in Geometry.

  “I misjudged.” The stitches of her face loosened. “I should have known you were a decent girl, Audrey. But why are you squinting? Is something wrong with your eyes? Maybe you need glasses.”

  Does it seem shocking that no parents were told, that we protected them as we protected Miss Schechter? It simply wasn’t in the language. Besides, I thought my parents would no more question a teacher’s authority than a doctor’s. But I too misjudged. Sexual misconduct would have broken authority, in Brooklyn, as surely as scissors cut paper and rock breaks scissors.

  Miss Schechter gazed at my breasts as though they were the first on earth, a mutation, the way she might gaze through a microscope at a brand-new virus had she been a scientist, or upon an illuminating figure drawn on the sands of the Mediterranean had she been Euclid. (“Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare,” motherly Mrs. Gompers, the English teacher, recited to us in the afternoons, and everyone in Miss Schechter’s morning class erupted in giggles, to be chided for immaturity—“I certainly wouldn’t expect this from ninth-graders.”) Miss Schechter’s gaze made breasts and all their connotations arcane and rare, not ubiquitous: family heirlooms taken out of their locked case only on very special occasions.

  Her gaze reflecting the rarity of breasts haunts me to this day. When I walk along a European beach where the women lie with bare breasts like dozens of pairs of huge eyes in every shape and shade staring blank and quivering at the sun, I shudder and want to look away; like a prudish lustful child I want to cover them, toss an enormous blanket as I would over beautiful obscenities that can consume the retina. Oh, it’s only a passing shudder. I do it myself when I’m there, take off the top of the bathing suit—after all, if there’s anything I know how to do it’s how to conform. I never knew anything but doubleness; I never had the cozy expectation that what I feel and what I do should converge.

  Despite our silence, Miss Schechter’s passion saturated the air like humidity, sliding into our pores. The next term in First Aid, the ninth-grade girls spent six giddy weeks bandaging one another—splints, slings, tourniquets, knee bandages, head bandages—all at once grasping the tactile reality of bodies, the thickness of arms and the bony resistance of knees, the delicate trellis of the ribs, the damp of the inner elbow, and the tepid smell of skin and hair. We fell on one another in springtime hysteria, giggly and wild and drunk with the chance to touch and to know. Not a day passed without some girl murmuring, “Schechter would love this, wouldn’t she?”

  IT WAS CLOSE to ten-thirty as I started down the hall to my parents’ bedroom. I had to arrange to meet my mother the following day, for she was determined to accompany me to the contact lens doctor’s and had been anticipating the trip to Manhattan as though it were Co
nstantinople. Their room was dark, or nearly dark, the door closed. I paused. When I was small I used to barge in without warning, but now I was aware that they might be doing the things described in the book with the thick wine-colored cover, which I found under a pile of magazines in their bedroom when I was nine.

  For months I had kept the book beneath school papers in a night table drawer and would read it in bed—a kind of dessert after the Harvard Classics or the Little Leather Library—until I knew the best parts by heart. Then I put it back under the magazines, gone but not forgotten. A kindly, pedagogic book, it treated its subject as a procedure—unusual almost to the point of requiring apology—that could not be executed properly without instructions, like how to curtsey in the presence of the Queen of England, or what to do in a Tibetan religious rite; and also infinitely delicate and complex, like repairing the engine of a truck or performing brain surgery. It was a manual for first-timers: it called the man “the husband” and the woman “his bride.” His bride was a tender, timid creature who needed to be handled with the utmost care and solicitude. It was hard to gauge from the book whether his bride knew what her role was, or whether she had any functioning consciousness at all, since the text was addressed to the husband. His bride was a soft pet, something feathered and fluttery you could turn round in your hands, a bird that had lost all urge to fly.

  The husband was supposed to begin by kissing his bride gently, stroking her body and her breasts, and then carefully enter her, lying on top. This was the ideal. But in many if not most cases, the kindly instructor acknowledged – with a tolerance familiar to me from my mother’s tolerance of the chicken flicker’s cleft palate and the tolerance we were taught to feel towards people of other races—the bride might not be “ready.” In that event the husband was to take his bride on his lap, first removing or at least raising her nightgown, wet his fingers in his mouth, and gently spread the saliva over her genital area.