Fear Itself

ESSAY

by Carl Schiffman

          When I was no older than eleven, my grade school class made a visit to The Museum of the City of New York, which had a large exhibition about the Dutch settlement of what they called New Amsterdam, our own city, which the British conquerors renamed New York.
          I don’t recall the exhibition, but I know there were picture postcards for sale showing the street layout, the fort at the foot of the island, the wall farther north, the odd look of the houses, and a portrait of the last Dutch governor of the settlement or colony, Peter Stuyvesant, with his sword and his wooden leg. We were encouraged by our teacher to buy four or five of these cards, which probably cost a nickel each, and we also may have acquired a small booklet giving a brief history of the forty years of Dutch occupation.
          When we got back to class our teacher told us we were to prepare a “paper” about what we had seen, using the postcards we had purchased as illustrations for our text, pasting them in at the appropriate spots. We generally were not given homework at all or only what we could do in a couple of minutes before or after dinner, never anything as imposing as this “paper,” which we were given two weeks to finish and hand in.
          The mere fact of being given this assignment—independent of its actual content—was enough to throw an unhappy shadow over my life. I may not have been the laziest child in the universe, as I always seemed to have abundant energy for playing ball in the street or board games indoors, but the notion of work was alien to my life. If all work and no play made Jack a dull boy, I occupied the opposite end of the spectrum, where no work and all play tended to make mock of discipline.
          My grade school, which was used by the Hunter College teacher training program and was located on parts of three floors in the college itself in the East 60s, did not give number or letter grades on its report cards, but listed students’ performances as “outstanding,” “satisfactory,” “needs improvement,” or “unsatisfactory.” They did not limit their evaluations to academic subjects but rated personal characteristics as well, such as “works well with others,” “is generally cheerful,” and you can guess the rest.
          I tended to vary between the top categories on the academic side, but on the personal side, it was between “satisfactory” and “needs improvement” that I fluctuated, while in “sense of responsibility” I only rarely climbed from “unsatisfactory” to “needs improvement.” I truly did not understand what behavior of mine these low estimates referred to. This illustrated article on the ill-fated Dutch was my first assignment of any magnitude, practically the first homework I had ever been required to turn in, and my irresponsibility apparently preceded and foretold my failure.
          I did not stint on the necessary preparations. I bought a soft-covered three-hole folder, I transferred what seemed an adequate amount of three-hole paper to it from my loose-leaf, I brought my brown rubber-tipped bottle of mucilage home to glue the postcards in place once I had created the text to enfold them. I even acquired a label for the prepared space on the front of the folder on which I could print the title of the piece I was handing in, perhaps my name in modestly smaller letters beneath it. Once, that is, I had a title; or, more accurately, once I had written a paper that required a title.
          Days ticked by or pages fell from a rotary calendar but no progress accompanied their movement. I had played the afternoon away in the street, played the evening away with cards or a board game with my parents—Chinese checkers, anagrams, Parcheesi, all had their season, then Scrabble arrived and the alternatives vanished—or read or listened to a favorite show on the radio, my usual routine, but in any case my final bedtime came without one word about the Dutch having been put on paper. I had a folder with no title, all the blank pages I needed, and four or five postcards begging for placement.
          With no word to my parents, instead of going to bed, I carried the folder and glue and photographs and the museum’s booklet and two or three volumes of the Book of Knowledge—a children’s encyclopedia used chiefly until then to decorate the shelves of a breakfront in the living room—to the dining room table, its doors opening indecorously onto my parents’ bedroom, and settled down to work without the slightest hope my activity would pass unnoticed by my parents. I might have worked silently in my own room, turning my bed light away from the door the way I did when I wanted to go on reading after bedtime. But now I made no effort to hide myself. Perhaps I was slyly soliciting help. I certainly would have kept to my own room if I had even half-imagined the disaster that was about to strike.
          When my parents found me surrounded by my research materials, I tried to minimize the importance of the assignment, made it sound like a project the teacher had merely “suggested” we turn in, and that I had entirely forgotten about until I was already in bed about to turn off my light.
          My parents saw through me in a flash. My father demanded to know exactly what the assignment was and when it was due, how long I had known about it. Was it ever since that trip to the museum I told them I had taken a couple of weeks ago? My mother fluttered around saying something like: “Well, can’t you do it now? Can’t you do it now?” Maybe she asked my father whether they could call in sick for me in the morning and I’d have the whole day to do the work in. My father brushed her off, called her a fool; he had started screaming at me for not being able to finish a simple task in two whole weeks. He was in his pajamas, my mother in a nightgown. I was afraid he was going to hit me, although he never had, not once. I could not remember his even drawing a hand back. But he had turned red, was gesturing wildly, throwing my poor soft folder around as though it were its fault for being empty.
          He grabbed the booklet from the museum, tore open each volume of the Book of Knowledge to the pages I had marked with scraps of paper, and asked why I hadn’t been able to do the simple task of transferring information from one place to another. What was the main thing I was supposed to be writing about? I mumbled something about the fort at the foot of the island and the wall along Wall Street that was supposed to keep the British or the Indians out, I forgot which. And my father screamed at that and began reading the text as though he planned to tear the words themselves off the page and paste them in my folder. By now, I think, my mother was crying in panic, fearful my father would hit me, fearful of my ability to survive the storm. She ran to the kitchen—I may be imagining this—to get me a glass of chocolate milk and some cookies to keep my strength up.
          The scene lasted for hours until my father had more or less dictated an acceptable text to me and my mother had cautiously and with excessive care, my father hovering over her efforts, pasted the postcards into place on the lined pages, making sure not the slightest trace of glue overlapped the card at its edges. When I stopped being afraid, realized I wasn’t going to be hit and that the volume of my father’s attacks on me had been diminished by his efforts to read and summarize the history of the defeated Dutch, my chief feeling—beyond sleepiness—was extreme bewilderment at my parents’ response to my undone homework. It went so far beyond the possible consequences of my telling my teacher I had nothing to hand in, that I had lost the postcards, or couldn’t buy the right kind of folder, whatever excuse I gave, and that I would be sure to hand in the report next week or tomorrow, sometime soon, and that I was sorry. She wasn’t going to shoot me and no fate much milder than that would seem to justify my parents’ panic.
          The report was finally finished at two or three in the morning, and I got up for school at the usual time the next morning. I have no memory whatsoever of what happened to that report beyond the night it was written. I may have thrown it out on the way to school and confessed to my teacher that I hadn’t done the work; more likely I handed it in to no reaction. I don’t recall the Dutch paper ever being returned to me or any comment or mark it may have provoked. Everything except that night with my parents was an anticlimax.
          My parents’ extreme fear and anxiety, though, with nothing I could see anywhere to warrant it, threw my whole carefree way of life into question. I was truly not used to doing anything for myself, beyond play, that demanded effort. I had no responsibility for any household chore or task. I did not make my bed or clean my room. I did not wash my clothes or put them away. I scarcely washed myself. My mother went on bathing me until I was at least eleven and may have stood over me at night to make sure I brushed my teeth. I may occasionally have bought something for my mother at the corner store with change wrapped in paper she threw down to me from our eleventh-story window into the street, yelling down what I was supposed to buy. On Saturday mornings, I bought the racing form for my father at the corner newsstand, hiding it from the neighbors, or perhaps from my mother, in the comic book or pulp magazine that was my bribe for the errand.
             The thought of asking my parents about the cause of their panic never occurred to me. My parents did not talk to me about themselves. They were mirrors held up to me endlessly showing me myself. I was the constant subject of their attention, my mother’s physical care, my father’s lectures, but their own lives were kept entirely to themselves. It’s difficult to believe how little about their lives apart from me I knew. I suppose all I cared about was the quality of the attention they gave me and whether I was allowed freedom enough to pursue my own pleasures. Their anxiety about Peter Stuyvesant did not lead me to think in any purposeful way about their lives. I was simply relieved when the dreadful night was over and I could go back to passing my classes with minimal effort.
          Two other childhood events are closely associated in my mind with the Peter Stuyvesant disaster. I’m not sure in what order these events occurred. They were related, in any case, and happened within that same year or two.
          The street we lived on, 111th between Broadway and Riverside Drive, was level and only lightly trafficked, ideal for New York City street games. Four of us, about the same age, who lived in the same apartment building, formed the core group for after-school and weekend play, even play after dinner in months when daylight lingered. Other kids from the neighborhood, public school classmates, frequently came by to play with us.
          We didn’t usually play for money. The exception to the no-betting rule and to the civility of our encounters was forced on us by a different group of boys, also from our apartment building, but three or four years older than we were and much larger and stronger. They would insist on playing without choosing sides the way we normally did, but just them against us and playing for money. It was more like extortion than play, but we were usually too intimidated not to go along.
          One day, I resisted one of the older boy’s demands that I join a game against him and his friends. Our apartment house had a canopy extending from the front entrance to the curb. The canopy was supported at the curb by two stiff metal poles, each additionally braced by a pair of flexible metal rods rising from the sidewalk. The older boy, my oppressor, had forced my fingers between these flexible rods and was squeezing the rods together with all his might to hurt me, while keeping the pole between us in case I tried to fight back. Just as the pain was becoming intolerable and I might have given up and agreed to play, my father in his fine suit and tie, and carrying his salesman’s leather sample case under his arm, came around the corner from Broadway.
          The boy, perhaps recognizing my father or realizing that any grown man walking past would disapprove, released me at once, and I ran instinctively toward my father, tried to tell him how the boy had been torturing me, but I burst into tears instead, probably the oldest age I ever cried like that, and expected his ever-ready anger to rise on my behalf and punish, if not physically assault, the boy who had been hurting me. But instead of saying a word to the boy, my father grabbed me hard by my arm and dragged me beyond the entrance into the front lobby of the building and then into the elevator upstairs to our apartment. Everything about him showed his fury at me for provoking the situation. He left me in the apartment to care for myself, never asked a word about what had happened. I had never felt such mingled shame and hatred. My father was too much of a coward to stand up to what might have been a fourteen-year-old boy. That, or he didn’t think I was worth fighting for. He dragged me away as though I had been at fault.
          The last of the three incidents for which I never demanded or was offered an explanation grew out of one of the rare outings we made as a family. Every Saturday afternoon, from the first famous time when I was six or so and ran screaming from my seat in fear of a cartoon character, until I was old enough to go to children’s matinees on my own, we made a ritual visit to one of the two local movie houses—the Nemo on Broadway and 110th Street, showing mostly RKO films, and the Loew’s Olympia three blocks down on 107th. They both showed double features and my father chose—with minimal consultation—which of the two we should see. We went whenever we felt like it, an hour or so after lunch, and walked in on whatever movie was playing at the time. I don’t know that we were exceptional in doing that.
          Because both my parents smoked and my glasses were insufficient to overcome my nearsightedness, we took the most expensive seats, the loges at the front of the balcony. We had gone to the movies as usual on a Saturday afternoon, to the Olympia. It must have been one of the milder days of spring or fall because I was wearing a light sports jacket, nothing particularly rich or dressy, probably something from the final markdowns counter at Orbach’s or Klein’s, but still not what I would wear afterwards to play ball in the street.
          In going up the stairs to the loges, I took off the jacket and passed it back over my shoulder to my mother to carry and put away on an adjacent seat while we watched the movie. It was only once the double-feature had ended and we were ready to leave that it became clear that my mother had never seen me pass back the jacket to her, that the jacket had disappeared. It was as though I had lost the Hope Diamond. My parents searched all the corridors and bathrooms, even the ones we’d never used; searched the areas around the seats, although the jacket had obviously never gotten that far; not only got the manager to continue the hunt, but went back to the theatre the next day, or maybe all the days of the next week or two, to find out whether anyone had found the jacket and turned it in. 
          I was stunned, not so much by my mother, whose tightness with money except when my father’s well-being was concerned had been known to me for years, but by my father’s seeming just as distraught as she. My father, whose clothing I was sure cost ten times as much as mine did, who gambled the equivalent of dozens of such jackets every day on the horses, who spent more money on the toiletries my mother bought for him at Macy’s—his special soaps and powders and aftershave—than she ever spent on a piece of  clothing for me in my life, my father was frantic and furious over what might have been at most, I don’t know, a $15 or $20 boy’s jacket, something I would have outgrown in six months or a year anyway, even if my mother moved the buttons and lengthened the sleeves.
          My father kept asking me how I could have passed the jacket back to my mother without looking. Didn’t I feel it falling? Didn’t I think to look back and see she’d gotten it? Did I realize I had probably just thrown it down the stairs for anyone to pick up? How could I have passed the jacket back to my mother without looking? And so on and around again.
          I had no reason to think my family was in financial difficulty. We had one of the better apartments in our building, on a high floor with views to the Low Library at Columbia University and the Gothic tower of Riverside Church. We rented a summer cottage for two seasons at the Rockaways. My father dressed like a prince, was trimmed and scented at the barbershop every week, spent six weeks or two months every winter—the Garment District’s slack season—in a hotel called the Admiral in Miami Beach, driving around in a Cord motorcar with sunburnt friends we’d never met, going to play the horses in person at Gulfstream or Hialeah. My mother’s stinginess was a character trait, not a statement about the family’s financial condition. Once again, I did not understand, and did not find myself in a climate, in a condition, in a circumstance, that allowed me to ask.
          You can’t imagine how little I knew about my parents. My father had come to the United States in 1928 in his late twenties, with English as his fifth language, behind Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and German. When I knew him, he spoke flawless and accentless English, did the Sunday Times crossword puzzle, played anagrams or Scrabble like a pro. He read and spoke only English. I never saw a foreign book in his hand, rarely heard a foreign word in his mouth. He did, once or twice a year when they visited us or we visited Freehold, New Jersey, where they owned a home, speak in Yiddish to my mother’s father and stepmother who spoke nothing else. But that was it.  
          I didn’t know my father’s parents’ names or whether or not they were still alive, whether he had brothers or sisters, where he had grown up or gone to school, what his life had been until his late twenties when he met my mother. He might have been born on the boat coming here. My mother cleaned and cooked and kept her own counsel. She worshipped my father who had married her when she was thirty-two. She had traveled to Poland as a companion to her own father when he returned to his native town to seek—and find—a second wife after his first wife died. And the husband my mother unexpectedly found on that trip was both an intellectual, a member of the “intelligentsia” he liked to say, and more importantly, turned out to be a good provider. He landed in New York on the eve of the Depression and soon found a sales job in “metal findings,” related to the garment industry, that carried him through the Depression and World War Two, and supported my mother and me in middle-class comfort. 
          When I was in my final year of junior high school, having skipped a year so I was just thirteen, two or three years after the incidents I’ve described above, with no great or pressing problem I can recall in my life, I ran away from home with a classmate whose reasons for flight are no more clear to me than my own. It was our intention to hitchhike to Canada and start new lives there. We did get as far as Boston, where we found a cheap hotel in Scollay Square, but then, studying a map, we realized Boston was out of our way, that we should have gone directly north and not so far east. We were confused about what to do next. Hitchhiking out of Boston seemed more difficult than hitching in. We were afraid of being picked up and questioned by the police. 
          We panicked and telephoned home after only two or at most three nights away. Our parents sent us money for the return. My friend’s parents sent him train and cab fare home. Mine wired just enough for a Greyhound Bus and subway fare. I don’t recall any discussion about my reasons for leaving, nor any punishment or changes in our life my flight provoked. I went on to win admission to Bronx Science, an elite high school, where my continuing resistance to homework had cruel impact on my marks. I sank, not without personal humiliation, but not troubling to hide my poor marks from my parents, toward the bottom of my class.
          Peter Stuyvesant had his guns at the Battery and his wall defending the north of the settlement, but when the British in 1664 sailed four powerfully armed frigates into the harbor, he abandoned any notion of violent resistance and surrendered New Amsterdam to the British. There was no combat; there were no deaths. And after the British took over and renamed the colony New York, the commercial life of the town went on just as it had before. Stuyvesant had avoided the useless suffering of a battle he knew he couldn’t win. New Yorkers, rewarding a timely surrender, eventually named a park after Stuyvesant, a high school, a huge housing development; they gave him the show I saw as a child at the city museum. 
          I might have learned, if I had done the reading for my homework, the wisdom of surrendering to a superior force. That was not a moral my young self would have subscribed to. I tried to run away first, and when I turned out to be too weak for that, stuck with the equivalent of a wooden leg, I fell back on guerilla warfare.