Fear of Success

An account of my life to age twenty. 1935 to 1956. A recollection of people, places and events arranged according to where I was in the world, from Birmingham, Michigan to crossing the International Date Line. A geography of my youth.

Part 2: Moving On, Making Do and Part 3: Back Matter are still in progress.
All copyright © 2009 by Don Anderson

CAUTION: If you choose to read my story on paper please DO NOT simply press "print" because you will use far more paper and ink than you intend. Instead, copy and paste as much as you want to read into a word processing program, make it the size and style you like and then print.

To Brughild Nina Holzer who helped me begin. To the 1990’s regulars at the San Francisco Writers’ Workshop who encouraged me. To friends who read parts of my first efforts and offered useful suggestions: Karen Hildebrandt, Pat Koren, Marlene Lee, Eva Miller, Joe Quirk, Bob Siegel, Tony Tepper, Joe Weiss.... And to Claudia who, year after year, graciously indulged my folly.

“One writes in order to discover meanings by expressing them.”
Jean-Paul Sartre

The past has measure, the future scope—each contending with the other to make sense of the present. My present: ambling along at the fore of an ever-lengthening past and looking ahead at an ever-dwindling future is increasingly occupied with remembering. Fear of Success is a story made from those recollections. A chronicle, made from all and only my own persistent memories. Memories that have hung around and ripened for as many as seventy years. Comfortable memories. Nothing new—though occasionally one I haven’t seen for a while pops up and gives me a startle. Friendly, often mundane recollections that awaken easily into consciousness whenever stimulations stir their shallow resting place. Though my memories are covered lightly, I seldom find them whole. Their scattered parts often want gathering. Rumination that I enjoy and often indulge.

As a storyteller my allegiance is to each and every memory. Just as I see it now. Even as it may have been altered over time. And even if accused of have remembered wrongly I stand by my own version. The familiar version that unites me with my past, maybe reflects my future and complements my present. Thus, in rumination I enjoy a comfortable harmony with my own peculiar evolution. A harmony that doesn’t want research. Research might jumble or even tarnish its composure. For it is not the past events of my life that enrich my present, but rather their presence now as my memories. The events are long gone but my memories remain. Each with a history of its own. Each true unto itself. Some perhaps favored and flavored with a trueness tainted by frequent revisiting and enjoyment. As they have become, so they are. And each memory kindles now pretty much the same emotion that the event did then.

Since memories are my subject it’s not surprising that I should hold some ideas about the nature and process of recollection. Let me try to explain how memory, at least my own, seems to work: When I recall someone or something from my past, my mother for example, what comes to mind are a collection of little pictures. Sketchy little thumbnails: she holding an open book and reading to me; the familiar frame of her hair; she standing on tip-toes looking down into her Graflex camera, her smooth-stockinged calves well shaped; or holding her hand to her mouth to shield emotion, laughter or tears; she wearing a circle-skirted black and white cotton summer dress, her belted slender waist—she was pretty; flirty; then her droopy eyelids, droopy first with cares later with age, like my own droopy old eyelids in the mirror. Each little picture suggests another and another until I become distracted or tire from the effort. The images don’t come together in my mind as a portrait but just float around as disconnected vignettes that drift in and out of focus. They become a coherent reminiscence only if I make them into a story—the making of which wants mindful reflection and then saying or writing. Putting into words. So, there it is: my idea of how memory works and how my memories become a story. Minds are mysterious and exposition isn’t my strong suit, but that’s what I think.

Fear of Success is a long story made from all my memories. Great and small, common and rare. All gathered together just for the purpose of telling them. All have found a part to play. They are my plot. As I composed, I endeavored to neither embellish nor censor but simply to record and sometimes reflect. I have tried always to be candid yet never to trade on confession. Sometimes to explain. Never to add fluff for continuity or convention. I have changed no names. To do so would offer little shelter to anyone unless I also pretended circumstances and then my story would be one of imagination rather than of remembrance. I suppose there might be some comfort in concealment—camouflage might even encourage a more compelling story. But the task I set myself refuses it. Besides, I don’t like secrets—without which we might better understand and tolerate other and even ourselves. If my story causes anyone embarrassment, I am sorry. I harbored no malice.

In my subtitle, Memories From... is deliberate. Memories Of might suggest I have attempted a Life and Times . That was never my ambition—nor am I capable of it. I wanted simply to write an authentic American memoir using only recollections from my own past life. No research. An interior memoir. Outwardly our lives seem to vary with their circumstances; but seen from within all our lives are more or less the same. Every American’s story is not mine, but mine is everyone’s. I am a story. (The older I become the more story and the less I.)

Birmingham

“There is no vanity in supposing that even one’s own early life may have interest for others. Most of us must have wondered about the making of those we meet.”
A. A. Milne

The daily births column of The Detroit News was headlined, “These Babies Belong to News Cradle Roll.” There followed a picture of me, a handsome infant, with a caption below: “Donald Kenneth Anderson, 12170 Wark Ave.” Kenneth after my father—but Donald after whom? I never knew. I wouldn’t like Donald. It had an un-ordinary sound to it—too refined—foreign—British. I wanted a regular American name. Don wasn’t much better. The D often got swallowed by the on —the o of which was somewhat like one of those upside down e’s, a schwa I think, with no clear sound of its own. Don was weak. Often mistaken for Dan or John or Ron and sometimes even Tom. But Don I remained. Wark Avenue, on the other hand, located in North-Central Detroit, was later renamed Santa Rosa Drive. Certainly a nicer sound than Wark. But there must have once been a Mr. or Mrs. or Miss. Wark and I wonder why he or she lost his or her street.

In the newspaper Cradle Roll, following my own, were the names and addresses of several other Detroit babies born that same day, February 4, 1935, but none of the others was so fortunate as me to have his or her photo published. My picture was probably taken by Preston Sweet, a portrait photographer of considerable local reputation for whom my mother sometimes worked as a retoucher. There is, however, some confusion attaching to this Cradle Roll business. I have dealt with this uncertainty at the end of this chapter, where the clipping itself is reproduced. Something for the diligent reader to anticipate. My mother had a knack for getting things published. Over the years she got dozens of her own photographs and stories and articles printed in Detroit’s News and Free Press, in several suburban weeklies and in various family and special interest magazines. Her photos were pleasing and her stories wholesome. Her skill in getting things published was an accomplishment that I didn’t appreciate until long after she had died. When my own lack of similar achievement was undeniable.

When I was older my mother told me I had been born in Detroit’s Women’s Hospital and that we had had a normal delivery. I came to wonder about this. Women’s sounded common, like a charity hospital—a hospital for women in trouble. Without means. Where unwed girls brought forth unwanted babies. Where babies born in hovels or bus stations might be left in baskets on the doorstep. Foundlings. Might I too have been an orphan but for some last minute change of heart? My mother never actually said any of these things but there was something in the way she spoke of my arrival that suggested my life had begun unplanned. Perhaps unwanted. I wondered if starting out entirely among women, especially troubled ones, might disfavor a boy child? Silly, we’re all born in the company of women. Well anyway, I later wished I had been born in Henry Ford Hospital—and grown up to speak of it with a slightly deeper voice.

I wondered too, was my arrival so routine as my mother made out? Again, her telling hinted of something untoward. In those days breech births, the use of forceps and Cesarean deliveries reflected poorly on the mother. Irregularities that might later manifest as adolescent behavior problems. Such were the kind of social and psychological anomalies about which my mother liked to speculate. And encouraged in me. Generally, however, as regards others. But maybe these were veiled allusions to us? And what about being born on a Monday? Fair of face? The first day of the week. Did that mean anything? Time to get moving? A self-starter? Not me growing up. Less not-so as an adult. Years later I sometimes made my own calendars with Mondays first because it seemed silly to begin each week in the middle of the weekend. Our two days of rest should not be divided, but come together as a reward.

My mother claimed she had wanted no anesthesia to ease our delivery. She was a health-food nut and didn’t approve of drugs. But despite her protests, she was given aether, or maybe something else to induce twilight sleep. It was the custom. In those days doctors were often autocratic, more in the habit of giving orders than entertaining a silly girl’s eccentric wishes. My mother didn’t trust medical doctors. She said they often took liberties with unconscious patients—like the removal, simply for good measure, of one’s appendix when an opening had already been made to deal with some other innard. She believed no organ was truly vestigial. For her own ailments, which over the years were few, she preferred home remedies or, in a pinch, the attention of an osteopath or chiropractor. Holistic care, she said, was best.

My father, as suited both the times and his personality, did not attend my birth. Few fathers did back then. As it was a Monday, he went to work—expecting to be called when I had arrived and told if it was cigars for a boy or candy for a girl that he needed to buy. Or maybe it was cigars for men and candy for women regardless of the newborn’s gender. But then he wouldn’t need to wait? I don’t think the sexing of unborns had been perfected so neither parent knew what to expect and I don’t know what either hoped for.

I was circumcised. My mother was doubtful of the benefit but again, in 1935 mid-America, it was the custom. Most new penises, except those attached to the sons of old fashioned immigrant Catholics, were routinely tidied up. I don’t know about my father’s. I don’t remember ever seeing it. Surely I did, but I don’t recall. My mother said she was certain the cutting hurt—that even in our first moments we knew pleasure and pain. Years later she wondered if my infant brain might have associated the encircling sting of circumcision with my still fresh memory of being squeezed through her birth canal. Instead of feeling gratitude for my freedom I might blame her for delivering me into the cold cutting hands of men. To grasp circumcision as a punishment for venturing forth. A punishment I might internalize. Perhaps, for example, as a fear of success. Or worse, a fear of reengaging the female grip. Causing me troubles later on with women and love. My mother was a speculating person. A habit she passed on to me. As a young man I wondered: if she had let me keep my little prepuce might I have become a better lover? Giving and getting greater pleasure? Well, at least lint wouldn’t collect under my foreskin to encourage the growth of some unpleasant fungus.

In Detroit, February 4, 1935 was cloudy and cold: below freezing all day. I read this many years later in a microfilm edition of The Detroit News. Which was about the only research I did outside my own head for writing Fear of Success. I read on that microfilm, white words against a black background, that in Antarctica Admiral Byrd was making preparations to return home from Little America. My mother admired Admiral Byrd. She once told me that he insisted that each member of his expeditions, democratically including himself, must have exactly the same portion of food at every meal. Consequently, she said, a very large man in his party starved to death. Despite this unfortunate consequence, she thought the Admiral’s stalwart resolve was admirable. After all, the deceased was no one special, except for his size, and Admiral Byrd was, well, admirable. He stuck to the rules—no matter what. Outwardly I disagreed with my mother about the ethics of Byrd’s behavior—even accused her of making it all up. But inwardly I wasn’t so sure. Sure about what? The fairness of fairness? Maybe fairness wasn’t always fair. Fame, fair, fortune, fate—my thoughts were unclear. I thought she confused things on purpose.

Also on February Fourth, in Flemington, New Jersey, Charles Lindbergh, dismissing any celebration of his thirty-third birthday, sat through the twenty-fourth day of the “Trial of the Century.” The jury heard expert testimony as to whether or not the ladder allegedly used by the kidnapper was strong enough to have supported the accused Bruno Hauptmann, a quite large man, even while carrying the stolen Lindbergh child. Years later in an account of the trial I saw a photo of the ladder. A makeshift affair at best, knocked together out of what looked like scrap lumber. My mother said that Hauptmann was a scapegoat. That the authorities were desperate to convict and would readily execute an innocent man before going empty handed and embarrassed. I thought her sympathy for the uneducated immigrant was at odds with her admiration for Lindbergh, for Admiral Byrd, for their class in general and her usual disdain for the unwashed. She told me that after the trial had ended, and a proper time passed, that she called Lindbergh, who meanwhile had moved to Connecticut, and told him I had been born on his birthday. Charles, also born in Detroit and also his mother’s only child, was polite and thanked mine for her call.

When I was ten or eleven my mother read to me from Lindbergh’s account of his solo Trans-Atlantic flight. She laid emphasis on a passage that told of guardian-like phantoms who visited the cockpit of the “Spirit of St. Louis” as Lindbergh flew just above the waves off the Irish coast. She wanted me to sense the mystery of such enigmatic events as sometimes occur in the lives of great men. I argued that Lindbergh’s brain was more likely a victim of sleeplessness. I often argued with my mother just to annoy her. Besides, I didn’t like being compared to her hero—whom even then I was beginning to suspect was somewhat of a fraud. Recently, thumbing through a library copy of Lindbergh’s We, I tried to find the phantoms in the cockpit passage but I couldn’t. Maybe my mother had ad-libbed—to have a talking point about appreciating the spiritual dimensions of life. Well, no matter. She admired Colonel Lindbergh even more than Admiral Byrd—even after Lindbergh fell from public grace for his stand against America entering the war with Germany. Which seems odd. Didn’t she think him insensitive to the plight of her England? She said Lindbergh was intelligent and physically attractive but emotionally stunted. Which maybe that explained his technocratic and Aryan bigotry. She said his mother had been a cold fish and his father overly stern, which together explained why Charles was so bullheaded. She believed also that Lindbergh had married wrong—above his station. That Anne Morrow’s higher social rank and rarer sensibilities were detrimental to Charles’ self esteem. That’s why he liked to travel so much—to escape her—coming home only from time to time to father another child. My mother thought that someone less privileged than Anne, someone more psychologically like herself, even herself in fact, would have known better how to guide and comfort the Lone Eagle when he had flown off course and was at loggerheads with all the rational world. My mother judged it a woman’s duty, and an honorable duty, to bolster her man’s ego because men’s egos needed bolstering if they were to overcome mediocrity. Years later it occurred to me that she might have better applied her bolstering skills to my father’s ego instead of letting their marriage fall apart. But then I probably didn’t have a very clear idea of how they did, and didn’t, manage with each other. Nor do I even now.

My mother spoke so often about Lindbergh that later I sometimes pretended that I myself was his stolen child. That the kidnapping was a hoax. That Charles had secretly taken me from Anne, whom he didn’t trust, and given me to my mother, whom he did, and that someday the truth would be revealed and I would come into something grand. I didn’t then realize that Charles Jr. had been kidnapped three years before I was born. Oh well, at least I would need to answer to Charles, just as bad as Donald, and Chuck was worse.

I was born in the middle of Aquarius and influenced, someone later told me, by a Gemini sun and the moon moving into Pisces. I have never taken an interest in astrology. My mother did. She read her horoscope every day and in later life she had her chart done by Carroll Righter, “Astrologer to the Stars” (the Hollywood stars), who wrote of her: “You will touch any task with a universality of approach, because the effort of your soul is to identify itself with large and broad concepts.” Both my mother and her mother also read the palms and tea leaves of their luncheon guests. But these were entertainments, more to claim attention for themselves than to predict futures.

I don’t know to what extent my parents suffered because of the Great Depression. I was too young to suffer. I don’t think my father was ever out of a job and my mother had free-lance work as a photo retoucher. She told me that before she married she kept her savings in the Dime Savings Bank. When Roosevelt, whom she thought too common to be President, let the banks close my mother’s little savings were frozen. However, the Dime Bank later made good on ninety percent of her account even though many other and larger banks paid back little or nothing. She thought she had been pretty smart. I didn’t very well understand what she was talking about but I thought that “Dime Savings Bank” was a silly name for a grown up financial institution.

Sometime in 1936 or ‘37 our family moved from Wark Avenue in Detroit to 16221 Berkshire Road in the town of Birmingham—then a modest, almost rural suburb of Detroit—now a rich and precious one. It is from Birmingham that I have my earliest memory: the memory of a mark made by the front tire of my tricycle in the sun-soft street tar at the front of our little bungalow. Suburban bungalows were common back then, at least the word was, but I don’t hear of them anymore. I was three. Three seems a pretty early age to claim a memory from, but I’m certain about this because we moved to Ferndale in 1938. I know this for sure because I have an old snapshot from my mother’s photo album captioned, “Don + Nancy 10/14/38,” and Nancy was my neighborhood playmate in Ferndale. Besides, in Ferndale our street was properly paved and had a curb, whereas in Birmingham it was makeshift macadam and hadn’t a curb. And I’m sure the Birmingham memory is truly my own, not something someone told me, because it recalls such a private experience. I saw the tire mark. No one saw the mark for me. And I trust visual memories most because I can always bring them back and they always look the same.

Even now, over sixty years later, I can picture the imprint of my bicycle tire on the unbroken skin of the warm black puddling tar. Not the actual design, I couldn’t draw it on a piece of paper, but the impress of it: the sunlight defining the lustrous black shoulders of the mark’s shallow relief. Furthermore, even to this very day, if I sit and pretend a tricycle-riding position, and look down, with unfocused eyes, between my knees, then an even larger scene appears somewhere inside my brain: the tricycle wheel itself, spokes, the fender, my skinny legs in short pants and my sandaled feet on the pedals. If nothing interrupts I can even mentally back away and see this little scene from an objective point of view—as I sometimes encounter myself in dreams: the white veranda of our house is on the right and I on my tricycle am just to the left of the scraggly strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the street. The grass is uneven along its edges and there is no curb in the way of my peddling out onto the warm macadam. While I have visited it numerous times, this old and fragile image and won’t stand much scrutiny. If I look too hard or too long it vanishes into the blind spot of my eye—as do starry points of light in a dark night sky.

I have two other memories from Birmingham. One even more fleeting and the other is perhaps from later on. I remember the Iceman: his steel tongs biting into an immense block of ice as he hefted it high against his splotchy wet leather apron to slide it into the upper compartment of our icebox. The other is of opening a white picket gate onto the flagstone path that led through the grassy flower-bordered yard to the door of my pediatrician’s medical office. Dr. William Lloyd Kemp, who saw his patients in rooms at the side of his white-painted colonial-style house. The house, garden and his offices were dignified but not pretentious—as was Dr. Kemp himself, to whom my mother continued to take me long past when I was sure I should have been done with a baby doctor. So this flagstone path memory may be from some later visit to Dr. Kemp—after we had moved to Ferndale.

Our next-door neighbor in Birmingham was a German lady who kept goats and who gave me beer to drink on her front porch. My mother disapproved. I can almost see myself on the steps leading up to the neighbor’s porch—but only clearly enough to now call it a memory of a memory. From another neighbor’s yard I was chased by a fierce chicken and ran home crying. But the beer drinking and chicken flight stories are not true memories but more reconstitutions of tales my mother told. When I got older, she changed my fowl adversary from a chicken to a large rooster and left out the tears—at least if I was present to be embarrassed by her telling. She seldom let veracity interfere with the theatrical possibilities of her stories. For several years after we moved from Birmingham to Ferndale my mother continued to visit the German lady to buy goat’s milk, which she believed to be more healthy than cow’s. I wouldn’t drink it—more because of the smell than the taste. She always urged me to try her health-nut fancies but never insisted.

My father, Kenneth Carl Anderson, was born July 13, 1908 on a farm near Stratford, Ontario, Canada. When he was thirteen his family moved from the farm into town. About the time he finished high school, the family moved again, this time to a farm three miles east of Stratford on the road to Shakespeare. My grandfather, William, was Scotch, “Scots,” my father would correct me, and my grandmother, Caroline, was German—both were born in Canada to newly immigrant parents. My Aunt Irene, in her family chronicle, said someone recalled that w hen Willie came courting Carrie her mother would meet him at the door and call back into the house, “Carrie, Carrie! Cum il de huh, for thine Willie is duh!” My father had five brothers and two sisters. For years I thought there were eleven siblings because some were known by two names and I counted them twice. I held onto that false belief even in the face of being corrected. Maybe I needed to aggrandize—exaggeration made a better story.

Uncle Alex was the oldest and became one of Stratford’s most prosperous farmers. The the first to raise sheep. Uncle Bill said all the other farmers thought sheep unprofitable and smelly but they were wrong about profits. Alex married Netty, a high-class town girl. Eva (called Aunt Nayne), Harold (called Uncle Frank) and Uncle Herman all moved to Detroit in the nineteen-twenties, took up city occupations, married and became US citizens. Uncle Clarence (called Butcher—but only by adults) farmed outside Stratford and owned a meat market in town. Aunt Bonnie married a city fellow named Ken Beemer and moved to Niagara Falls. We called them, “Bonnie and Beemer.” Beemer sold insurance. Uncle Bill, the youngest, married Irene Yoward and took over the Anderson family farm where I would later spend several of my childhood summers. When she was in her eighties Aunt Irene wrote an Anderson/Yoward Family History. It mostly had to do with who lived where, when, and the names of their children, grand children and great grand children. This is what she told about my father:

“Kenneth, Ken, was at home attending business college when Grampa and Gramma Anderson came out to the farm on the old Forest Road. He farmed until he went to Detroit in 1927. Ken married Pat Maddick, who was a photograph artist. Donald was born in 1935. Some time later they were divorced. Donald used to spend summers with us on the farm. He is now in San Francisco.”

I remember only one story that my father told of himself. Surely there were more and you would think I would remember some. But I don’t. Anyway, he said that as a young man he went with Uncle Frank to the Michigan State Fair in Detroit where each paid a quarter to see a naked lady. Following Uncle Frank, my father put his head through a hole in the canvas of the naked lady’s sideshow tent. From inside someone grabbed him around the neck and held him fast while a fat Negro woman performed a brief shimmy that ended with her bare buttocks pressed to my father’s face. Uncle Frank had gotten the same treatment but gave no forewarning, which was what my father seemed to think was most remarkable. Frank had tricked him. It seems as if this story is really about Uncle Frank and so I remember none my father told about himself. I mustn’t have been interested. Now all I have are my own memories of him, which don’t amount to much, and the things my mother told about him.

Moved to Detroit, my father worked as an outside salesman for a printing paper wholesale house named Beecher, Peck and Lewis. Later this name would echo in my mind as: Beat-Yer-Pecker-And-Lose-It. Partly due to the indelible evils of masturbation, but probably more because the phrase itself amused me. However, I kept this amusement to myself for fear of the suspicions that might follow from my odd sense of humor. Anyway, my father knew all about printing paper: antique, calendared, coated; book, cover and text; long grain and short; and he could even explain basis weight, the logic of which has forever escaped me. At home I was always well supplied with drawing paper, pencils and miscellaneous office supplies. Several times I visited my father at work in the Beecher, Peck and Lewis office warehouse building on West Jefferson Avenue near downtown. He claimed to be their best outside salesman and there was a chart on the wall to prove it. Everyone liked him. A nice guy. Cordial but modest. Not a blowhard. He was attractive to women. Less on account of handsomeness than because he was attentive and put them at ease. He took an interest in girls and women. Just as I would. We cultivated a comfortable, just friends, appeal. We talked their talk in a way that was flirtatious yet sincere, but not presumptuous—because we were shy. My father was tall and trim, balding, had a large Adam’s apple and a prominent nose. My much-younger half-sister, Frances, would remark many years later that in my middle age I looked very much like my father as she remembered him in his. He was well mannered, bowled with a good average on the company team and kidded with the Negro warehousemen at work. He told me you could always get the best of a black man in a fight by stamping on his instep—that they all had bad feet. “Jigs” he called them, and he referred to Jews as “Hebes.” Using both epithets less out of malice than custom. Everyone did. He wanted always to appear regular and used the language common among his associates. He held his true opinions close. He didn’t like to argume or to explain himself. He was hard to pigeonhole.

When I was seven my father was fired from Beecher, Peck and Lewis for punching another salesman—who then tumbled down some stairs and broke his arm. The other man, drunk at a company party, had said something rude to one of the office girls. He stood up for her. Later, when my mother told me this story, she seemed to judge that he, by then her ex-husband, had been somewhat of a coward for punching a drunk. She even suggested that he did it more to impress the ladies than to avenge a wrong. The incident was hard to imagine. My father was neither a drinker nor a fighter—not even confrontational. Always inclined to side with the underdog against a bully but seldom to take much action. He was sometimes caustic but seldom mean. Probably at the office party he was tipsy and, being defensive, lost his temper. That’s how I am too. Defensive. Quick to anger. And just as quick afterwards to recognize I had done or said something dumb.

I don’t recall that my father ever punished me—certainly never physically. Later, as a teenager, I would suffer several brief groundings for some vile behavior on my part—but even then only at my stepmother’s urging. On the other hand, I don’t recall that he often praised me. I grew to admire him but he wasn’t my hero. Looking backwards, and accounting for different times and circumstances, I think I have become much as he was. We both enjoyed our private occupations—more doers than talkers and always busy with something: he with papers brought home from work, improvements to the house and yard, helping a neighbor—me with reading, hobbies, drawing pictures and writing this story. I learned from him, and also from Uncle Bill during my summers on the farm, how to get things done with whatever was at hand or easily come by. To make do and move on. We all three appreciated a job well done under the circumstances. Especially when we had done it alone and often when self-satisfaction was our only reward.

My father’s favorite flower was the geranium, hardly more than a weed. He kept them year round in window pots. He took little interest in religion although I do remember that he read me a few bedtime Bible stories: David and Goliath, Daniel in the lion’s den—stories of humble boys who overcame great challenges.

My mother was born September 3, 1908 in Torquay, now Torbay, on the coast of Devonshire in the south of England. “Devon,” she would say. England seemed to be a place of place names—often several for the same place.

Patience Elizabeth Maddick. Grown up she said Patience was a silly name. She went by Pat and signed Patricia to serious papers. My mother told me she was a happy child and favored by their father over her older sister, Hilda, and younger brother, Sam Jr. Sam senior was an engineer who had something to do with the building or repair of ships. He was also a musician and a chess player and his own father was a championship walker. I didn’t know if that meant he walked fast or far, but presumably it was in the company of other champions. On Sunday afternoons several men came to my mother’s house to play chess and everyone else had to be quiet.

Just before the Great War the Maddick family moved from Torquay to Chatham, a seaport east of London on the Thames River. Shortly after that my grandfather was accused of giving or selling something about submarines to the Germans: “Plans,” my mother said. He was arrested and held in detention for the duration of the war. My grandmother, Maud (Matilda?), divorced him, I suppose because of the scandal, and no one in the family ever saw or heard from Sam senior again. My mother made a visit to England in the 1960’s and tried to track him down but she either couldn’t or discovered that he had died. My mother didn’t deny that her father had done as he was accused by the government but she thought him less a quisling than a gullible tinker—misguided by his own admiration for German technocracy.

My Aunt Hilda, dictating to her granddaughter Karen in 1992, remembered her own and my mother’s childhood a little differently:

“My father, Samuel Waldon Maddick, was considered a member of the upper class. He was a musician, first violinist in an orchestra, and an inventor. He was a vegetarian and he invented something for military use that he tried to sell to the British. They weren’t interested so he went to the Germans. He was considered a traitor and arrested. He escaped twice. I think I was his favorite because I was the oldest. Once when he escaped he tried to take me with him.

My mother’s family were also members of the upper class. Although she did not have much money after my father left, she insisted that her children, Pat, Sam and I, have the proper upbringing.

Second Cousin Karen told me that this dictation, to help her with a genealogy assignment in one of her college classes, was the only time that Aunt Hilda ever spoke to her about the family’s history. My mother often complained that neither Aunt Hilda nor Grandma would talk about their life in England. They said it was idle to dwell on the past. My mother, being younger and having a storyteller’s bent, wanted to know about her family and about the England of her childhood. Wanted to add to her own memories. She resented the silence and chill that met her inquiries. However, all three did agree about their “Upper-Class” line of descent: one ancestor was claimed to have been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria and Grandma claimed that the meagerness of her own and her children’s circumstances after the Great War were undeserved. Actually, she did pretty well with coming to America and finding a devoted second husband but probably she would have preferred to remain in England with a life and partner a bit higher on the social scale. Nevertheless, she made do and pretended she had done as she pleased. She was a haughty and somewhat cold and condescending woman.

During the Great War, my mother was still in school but Hilda had quit to help Grandma support the family with the sewing and knitting of things for sale. My mother complained that for as far back as she could remember both Grandma and Hilda were always busy with handiwork and she resented what she believed to be the exclusiveness of their shared occupation. They were almost as sisters and she, left in charge of little brother Sam, felt like a stepchild. My mother recalled that during a nighttime air raid they all went to the cellar for safety. She was cold and afraid and wet her pants. Grandma scolded her sharply and my mother said she felt utterly shamed and unloved—more by the scolding than her incontinence. She wept for wanting consolation instead of censure. My mother first told me this story in the nineteen forties when I was still a bed-wetter and when we had our own, though hardly threatening, air raid drills. I saw sad tears well into her eyes as she remembered. When she was seventy she wet herself again because of a stroke that came in her sleep. Ashamed, she tried to hide the evidence from me. When I discovered her accident she wept and once again recalled her mother’s harsh treatment of sixty years before.

My mother left school at fourteen and went to work in London as a photographer’s assistant. In 1924 her sister Hilda married an American steamship steward, Winifred Harris, and sailed for the United States. Two years later Grandma, my mother and young Sam followed. My mother’s British Passport describes her as, “Five ft., seven in., grey eyes and brown hair, Profession: Business.” The “Photograph of bearer,” is of a quite beautiful seventeen-year-old with an engaging smile—someone who liked liked having her picture taken because she was confident the result would be flattering.

Within months after their arrival in Detroit, my grandmother married Hilda’s father-in-law, Elvin Harris. Thus creating yet another entanglement for my mother to resent. Hilda was both Grandma’s daughter and daughter-in-law-by-marriage. In 1929 Hilda’s husband died and later that same year eighteen-year-old Sam was killed in an auto accident. Hilda and her daughter Margaret moved in with Grandma, Grandpa Elvin and my mother. Sam’s death left my mother with no family ally and feeling quite powerless against her mother and sister’s mutual alliance, which she felt more and more denied her. An exclusion she claimed to suffer of all her life. My mother believed that truly she was the more loving and loyal daughter and resented her mother’s disinterest and want of affection. And loathed her sister because Hilda was favored and didn’t seem to care one way or another. Her bitterness often barely concealed. My mother said it was an unhappy time. She hadn’t, however, the wherewithal to live alone and no doubt became increasingly anxious to marry and escape.

Many years later, after my mother died, Aunt Hilda found among her papers a first-person story in which an elder daughter—Hilda, thinly disguised—murdered her mother with poison. I suppose my mother had written the story to vent her resentments and tell the world, albeit too late, that Grandma had preferred the wrong daughter. And to punish Hilda for having abused the favored status she enjoyed. I never saw the story because Aunt Hilda was so outraged she had her grandson, John, burn the entire box of manuscripts, letters, and clippings in which she had found it. Of course the story was fiction, Grandma died a natural death at ninety-nine. But my mother did believe that Hilda was an evil person. A witch with witchy extra-natural powers. She imagined that Hilda, tired of the burden of their mother’s burdening existence, had actually willed the old lady to death—a final testament to the strength of the bond between them. My mother also claimed Aunt Hilda was so cold and calculating that she kept in her bedroom a poison pill she would someday use to take her own life. Further evidence of how wicked, though perhaps brave, Aunt Hilda must be.

Here, from one of my mother’s surviving and less inflammatory stories, is a kinder version of grandma’s passing:

“I soaked a clean linen cloth with water and pressed it to her lips when she no longer could take nourishment. She was living in a world of her own now, a world where I could not follow. Quietly, she remained in this state until her last breath came and peace overtook her. I knelt at her bedside, weeping, glad we were alone together at the end.”

I think this account pretends events that never really took place. What I recall is that Grandma died at Aunt Hilda’s house and that my mother wasn’t there. Nevertheless, her story continues with a reminiscence of sorting through Grandma’s belongings:

“Here was a faded, milky brown picture of me, as a baby, sitting on mother’s lap, under a tree that was exploding with spring blossom, cherry? apple? The picture blurred as tears came to my eyes. Did my memory reach back, subconsciously, to that day? The setting so pastoral, the baby so secure on her mother’s knee. I wiped my eyes. Where were the blessings and securities of yesteryear? I am a grown woman with a marriage and two children behind me, yet I was crying over an incident in my childhood, so far away, yet never quite forgotten.”

I wondered why my mother wrote, “…two children behind me.” Was she remembering the abortion I think she had when I was just a toddler? That’s still a mystery. Maybe not an abortion but rather a brother or sister given up at birth? No one to ask now. Maybe “two” was just an embellishment to benefit her story

My mother was tall, slim, attractive, and attentive to the details of her appearance. With a little orangewood stick she pushed back her oil-softened cuticles to show off the moons of her nails and she used a short white pencil to lighten their manicured undersides. For years I recalled clearly that she left her fingernail moons unpainted when she wore red polish. But surely that’s a false memory—no one left her moons unpainted. I didn’t consider how silly it would look. She bought few, but always good quality clothes from Sax Fifth Avenue and Peck & Peck and wore them for years. I remember a tight-curly black lamb’s wool coat and a short fur jacket that had mink’s heads and tails that clasped together in front. In the early nineteen-thirties my mother had occasional work as a fashion model. She liked to dress up. She liked to flirt with handsome, virile men. “Vital,” she called them—the kind of men who might endorse health food products. She was, I’m sure, quite artful in how she either encouraged or turned aside their efforts—demurely either way.

I don’t know how my parents became sweethearts. My mother’s stepfather, Grandpa Elvin, had his own print shop and my father was an outside paper salesman so maybe it was through having business with Elvin that my father met my mother. She told me that during their brief courtship my father often stopped in the morning at Grandma’s house, honked his car horn and drove her to work. Once when she wasn’t ready on time he left her behind. She said it was a selfish act.

When my mother discovered she was pregnant, she and my father were quickly and secretly married. An obliging minister, Rector Henry E. Ridley, Episcopal, performed a very private ceremony and kindly backdated their marriage certificate so the newly-weds could pretend to the world that they had secretly eloped the month before. However, Rector Ridley slipped up. The certificate showed, “Married Saturday the Fifteenth of May, 1934.” But the Fifteenth of May was a Tuesday. Many years later my mother, perhaps wanting to put the record straight, lined out “Fifteenth” and “May” and wrote above, “Sixteenth” and “June,” which then put the Saturday right. Ashamed I suspect not only of her earlier deceit but also of having lacked the courage to be forthright with her family. Aunt Hilda, of course, figured it out and, eventually, so did Grandma. But Grandma never acknowledged knowing—except to later conjecture that my being conceived out of wedlock might explain why I got into so much trouble as a teenager.

On May 12, 1935 the same Rector Ridley baptized me. “Christened” my mother would say. Three godparents are shown on the certificate. The first was Lillian Woodrow, a friend of my mother’s whose husband owned a wallpaper shop in the Fisher Building. They were well off. Mrs. Woodrow was a handsome woman whom I remember wearing soft velvety black scoop neck dresses and a string of pearls. My mother told me all about pearls: fine oyster pearls from Asia, cultured pearls, mother of pearl and fake pearls made of library paste. When I was angry with my mother I sometimes wished her dead so that rich warm Mrs. Woodrow would take me in as her Godson. But then maybe Godparents didn’t really take in their charges—maybe being one was just a Christian nicety. My other two sponsors were Reves Porter, a work friend of my father’s, and Wm. Conroy, of whom I never knew anything.

After her death, I was surprised to discover from my mother’s papers that the ubiquitous Rector Ridley had also baptized and confirmed her. In1928. Surely she had been christened as a child in England. Maybe this second baptism, at age twenty, was her way of telling God she had grown up and moved to America. My mother believed in an English God—one who took a personal interest in her. A wispy, hidden in nature and beauty, kindly God that reading Rupert Brooke brings to mind. When I was a child she abandoned the Episcopalians for Christian Science because of her interest in health foods and dislike of medical doctors. But later she returned to the fold. It was, after all, almost Church of England. The “Twenty Third Psalm” was her favorite bible verse and Palm Sunday her favorite service—though she seldom went to church. Her favorite color was green. Green was my favorite too, and we both preferred cats to dogs.

Growing up I was never aware of any sexual activity between my mother and my father or, after they divorced, with any of her numerous boyfriends. I can’t even remember any displays of physical affection. Later on, I supposed that while she might sometimes welcome men to her bed that she didn’t much enjoy carnality. I couldn’t quite imagine her giving way to the physical abandon of intercourse. Wanting to perhaps, and often succeeding as a seductress, but seldom taking much pleasure in consummation. She was cautious about her body—wary of exertions and excitements. Her back gave her trouble and she always knew, though it was not confirmed until she was sixty, that her heart had a murmur. And while she often flirted with manly men, it was the more refined and reserved variety that she more often engaged. My father and her subsequent boyfriends were all rather bland and unassuming fellows. Good looking and interesting in one way or another—but none seemed very ardent. In the horoscope he charted for her, Carroll Righter wrote: “You are acutely aware of the limitations of the flesh, of the height of your desires and the wide gulf which exists between intention and performance.” In her fifties, my mother wrote to me of herself:

“You see I have never been able to love, except perhaps you, as a tiny baby. The pattern in my case is one of continually rejecting. I find emotional security in being unloved and unwanted. Perhaps this little garden where I write represents me: The trees blossom in the spring, but there is no fulfillment, the little hard green apples are falling off the tree already, no one sprayed it so there is no edible fruit—but the blossom was beautiful.”

When she was seventy and down in the dumps after a stroke, my mother told me she had, “never enjoyed satisfying sex,” and that her marriage to my father was, “… a failure”—for which she mainly blamed herself. She went on to wonder if she was a lesbian—seeming to regret that the question had come so late. Maybe it was just an idle lament of unhappy old age when satisfaction and happiness seemed beyond even recollection.

After my mother died, I found among her papers the beginning of a diary. It was from 1975, when she was age 67:

“Saw Kahoutec [the comet] for a few seconds and it was gone. Called George—He was pleased and asked me out tonight—said to stop by his apartment—yesterday was given Surrogate Wife by John. Got home at 10 read till 1:30—pure pornography. Called George—we must have just missed each other last night. Wants to see me tonight but I wasn’t interested—besides the book provided a vicarious experience—not necessarily with George—could have had such a one last week with Noel and regret I didn’t—I have the regrettable habit of not grasping an opportunity. I didn’t seem to want to put down my innermost thoughts yet that could be what a diary is for.”

Pretty racy stuff for a sixty-seven year old. (Transcribing the above passage I am aware of my mothers inclination to dash—maybe it is from her that I got the habit.) I guess I think my mother’s interest in sex was more mental than physical. She was a daydreamer. She was also a spiteful gossip, about the sexual exploits of others, and most especially about Aunt Hilda whom she once accused of having seduced my father. Perhaps during that brief time when my mother left him and me in Hilda’s care. Who knows—no one now. Aunt Hilda, in the reminiscence she dictated to her granddaughter Karen, said, “During the late 1930,s Pat left Don and Ken for a while and I helped take care of them.” Had my mother run off with another man? Maybe it was during this truancy that she got pregnant the second time—an unplanned complication and the reason for her never quite acknowledged abortion or second child. As I grew up and learned these bits of information I sometimes imagined not only that I might have been unwanted, but even that I had an orphaned sibling. Why, there be any number of other family secrets that hadn’t come to light. But I never learned more. Probably most of us have similar wonderings. I didn’t dwell on them and didn’t ask many questions. In general I thought most of my family were a silly bunch and I didn’t look for entanglements when my main task in life seemed to be getting free from them all.

Well, regardless of any neglect of my infant self, real or imagined, my mother must have early on decided to stick by me. My childhood memories are mainly against a background of her love and encouragement. Later, as a teenager, I would be unhappy and a disappointment to us both. She would blame herself. As she also would for all the mistakes in love and occupation that she was certain I made over and over again as an adult.

That’s what little I know of my parent’s lives and now recall of my earliest years—before my own assortment of persistent memories began to thicken and accumulate. In 1938, we moved from Birmingham, bucolic and quaint, to Ferndale, working class and plain. My mother would have preferred to remain in Birmingham because of the quiet, the trees, the birds and the superior cut of its people. Over the years, she made and kept up friendships with several Birmingham families, and she contributed now and then to the weekly Birmingham Eccentric. In her sixties she did live there again, in a tiny attic studio in the old part of town. She said Birmingham reminded her of her happy childhood in the south of England.

These pictures are from a hodgepodge photo album and scrapbook that my mother put together over many years. When it came to me after she died it was in pretty bad shape so I reassembled the pictures and clippings onto new pages. I kept everything in the same order, which seemed no order at all, and copied the captions just as she had written them. Here, the captions I have put in quotes are my mother’s. Any thing more is my own contribution.

“Mr. Gardener—Chess Tournament.” I guess that one of the chess players is Mr. Gardener and the other is my grandfather, Sam Maddick, of whom I never saw any other picture. Who was Mr. Gardener?

Left: My Grandma and Grandpa Elvin from about the 1960’s. Right: Taken about 1915. I can see the resemblance of seated Patience to my adult mother but not so with Aunt Hilda, center. I never knew Sam.

Left: My mother from her 1926 British Passport. A beautiful young woman of seventeen who looks to me as if she might have greater ambitions than to work as a photographer’s retoucher and marry someone so ordinary as my father. Right: A portrait of my mother at age 29 taken by Detroit photographer, Preston Sweet. Her face looks a bit lopsided. Maybe it’s just the lighting. She always knew what to do with her hair. A good hairdo is something I notice.

Left: A clipping from The Detroit News Cradle Roll column. Right: A contact proof from a 5 by 7 negative. Probably taken by Preston Sweet, a portrait photographer for whom my mother worked as a retoucher. Doubtless, the same image. My mother’s caption under the contact print says, “Don 3 months.”

Some history: I acquired my mother’s scrapbook after her death in 1982. Both the above clipping and photo were in it but I didn’t notice any difficulty.

More history: In 1995 I made a trip Detroit to visit the several towns and neighborhoods in which I had grown up. A nostalgia visit to spur the writing of Fear of Success, which I had begun a few years before. I also visited the main library and looked at a microfilm copy of the February 5, 1935 edition of The Detroit News. That’s where I got the weather, Admiral Byrd and Charles Lindbergh news items I put into this first chapter of my memoir. Bits of local color. I also looked at the Cradle Roll column and wrote down: “In the newspaper Cradle Roll, following my own, were the names and addresses of several other Detroit babies born that same day, February 4, 1935, but none of the others was so fortunate as me to have his or her photo published.”

A mystery: Do I look like a Cradle Roll baby—the day following my birth? Handsome and unwrinkled! Holding my head up!!

Could I be mistaken about what I saw on my 1995 visit to the Detroit library when I looked at the February 5 th edition of the News? I must have also found the Cradle Roll picture as I expected because I already had the clipping. And I can still see in my memory that column of a dozen or more other names, the un-pictured babies, listed along with me. Did I fudge something? I don’t think so. It was my rule to not make up anything just for a better story. If the Cradle Roll clipping was from another date how did I know where to look for it? If the Cradle Roll editor got her or his information from hospital reports or birth registration records where did the picture come from? Or if parents sent the information to the newspapers, why three months later? Run-of-the-mill babies like me would have been news only when they happened. And, if later, why only my picture?

My Michigan birth certificate says I was born on February 4 th 1935. If that record is true how could there be a photo of me as a three-month old in a February 5 th copy of The News? If not, then why put me in the Cradle Roll three months later? And anyway, why would the Cradle Roll editor include a photo of any wrinkly infant unless it was born of famous parents?

So, if the photo is of me and it did appear in the February 5 th edition of The News then clearly I wasn’t born on February 4 th as I have always believed. Or even in 1935! Could my certificate be an altered one? Made for adopted or illegitimate babies to protect them or their parents from embarrassments? The true record sealed? Were my parents, the authorities and even the Cradle Roll editor all in cahoots? Not likely. Well, if the photo did appear in The News three months after I was born then maybe that explains it. But why the wait? Why was I news then? And why in The News when my mother preferred The Free Press? How did I find the Cradle Roll column? And how would one research such things almost seventy years after the fact?

Well, I’m pretty sure who I am now and who I have been as far back as I can remember. If was I someone else before, why was I never told? It’s confusing. My mother wasn’t above keeping secrets. Remember, only at seventy-something did she confess to having convinced her preacher to back-date her marriage certificate by a month and then pretending that she and my father had eloped. Maybe this whole newspaper clipping thing is a puzzle she left behind to amuse me.

Probably there is a simple and logical explanation that I just don’t recognize. To figure it all out I guess the first step would be to go back to the Detroit library and make sure of what is or isn’t in the February 5 th edition of The News. Maybe check The Times and Free Press as well. And find out about sealed birth records. But I really don’t know when I might do all that. Probably I won’t. Maybe the mystery is more interesting than its solution.

Here is another photo of me from my mother’s album. “2 Yrs” is her caption. And a second newspaper clipping. Maybe from a local Birmingham, Michigan paper, where we had moved to. Cousin Margaret sent me this clipping in 2001. All these public notices! My mother must have been anxious for the world to know me. But was it really the me I’ve come to know and love?

Left:“2 Yrs.” Maybe a birthday picture. I can remember the red humming top I hold in my lap—but probably from some later time. It doesn’t seem likely that at age two I would have been able to make it spin and hum. Right: Another photo from the same sitting. I was a cute baby and toddler.

Two pictures from our front yard in Birmingham. Left: “2 years.” My expression and stance have a Charles Lindbergh likeness that I’m sure was not lost on my mother. Right: “Birmingham 2 years.”

Above: My mother, seated left, and Aunt Hilda. My mother kept only two other pictures that include her sister. Both group pictures, and neither kept, I think, to remember Aunt Hilda. Maybe she liked this photo because it showed Hilda in an unflattering pose and because she thought their postures and the vertical lines in the background emphasized the separation between them. She liked “psychological” photos.

When my Second Cousin Karen, Hilda’s grand daughter, saw this picture and read my above caption she wrote: “I remember the day of the photograph and I don’t remember them seeming distant to each other that day. I fact, I remember them laughing a lot. Although it doesn’t look it, my Grandma [Hilda] was smiling there. Of course, she was a more reserved person and her smiles didn’t show as much as Pat’s. It may be an unflattering pose but Grandma often sat that way …leaning to one side, legs crossed, with her cigarette/ashtray to her other side. Of course I’ve never thought about this before but I think this had something to do with the smoke. She always had to have those smokeless ashtrays around to avoid getting smoke in her eyes.”

Well, maybe so, but I’ll guess my mother saved the picture for the reasons I’ve imagined.

“I have a way of looking back on things of long ago as if they were of this moment.”
Murasaki Shikibu

The layout of our lower flat on Webster Street in Ferndale, Michigan remains in my mind like a faded, partial floor plan—the kitchen and my parents bedroom torn away. My own bedroom was at the back with one window onto the driveway, east, and another looking north into the back yard. The bed that had come with me from Birmingham was a step up from a crib but still had a safety rail along part of each side. Later I got bunk beds and slept on the bottom. In our backyard there was a sandbox (wherein my friend Nancy’s little brother David hit me on the head with a toy, metal shovel), two large trees and three long clotheslines with wooden poles that were used to prop up their sagging middles when the ropes were loaded with wet laundry. In winter the clothes sometimes froze stiff but still they got dry. How did they dry if they were frozen? My mother said it was just one of those things. Each spring she and my father stretched our living and dining room rugs over all three clotheslines and we took turns swatting the dust out of them with a curly wire rug beater. We didn’t have an electric vacuum cleaner, just a push and pull carpet sweeper.

Ferndale was flat, working class and white—few rich and few poor. There were many large oak trees and on most blocks several lots were still vacant. We lived on Webster Street from when I was three until half way through third grade, from 1938 to1943. Our house number was 340. I thought Three-Four-Oh should be in the middle of the third block west of Woodward Avenue, which divided both Detroit and Ferndale into East and West sides. But no, our house was in the middle of the first block west of Woodward. Later I learned that Webster did extend east of Woodward for three blocks where it dead-ended at some railroad tracks but I didn’t think that’s where the numbers began. Even if they did, then the three hundred block should have been east of Woodward Avenue. Unless the very first house was numbered simply 1, and that didn’t seem likely. Muddle. And Ferndale house numbers didn’t even begin with a new hundred at each cross street. There was no logic to any of it. Webster Street ran parallel to and three blocks north of Eight Mile Road, the borderline between Ferndale and Detroit. Eight Mile Road was also called Baseline Road, but only on maps—not on street signs. A fact little known even among adults. No one ever said, “Baseline Road.” Which name, I learned later on, had something to do with surveying and boundaries. No one else seemed to care. Chesterfield was the next street south of Webster and Chesterfield was my father’s brand of cigarette.

We lived in the lower of two flats that belonged to Aunt Nayne, my father’s older sister: dark red brick, upper and lower front porches, doors and the driveway to the right as I looked at the house from our sidewalk. For years I had trouble remembering the order of compass directions and I used this mental picture to help me: face the house, that’s north, then east is to the right because that’s where the East Side began at Woodward Avenue, so west is to the left. We thought the West Side of Ferndale was the better side and years later when I lived with my father and stepmother we thought the West Side of Detroit was superior. My Aunt Irene’s “Anderson/Yeoward Family History” says that Aunt Nayne and my father owned the Webster Street flats jointly but I remember the house as belonging only to Aunt Nayne. I don’t think my father could have saved enough money to buy property. Aunt Nayne was a widow and lived upstairs with her boyfriend Willy. My mother said Willy was coarse and drank too much beer so we didn’t have much to do with Aunt Nayne and we didn’t like Willy at all. I have no recollections of Aunt Nayne, neither good nor bad, and only one of Willy. He and my father had an angry shouting match on the front porch steps because Willy refused to donate the rubber floor mats from his car to help with the war effort. The war hadn’t yet begun for America but things were heating up and being a good American was important to my father. I don’t recall that our family ever suffered greatly from wartime rationing. My father had a “B” gasoline sticker because he used our car for business and we often had bacon for breakfast when others complained they didn’t.

In the basement on Webster Street there was an electric washing machine with a wringer. My mother fed the wet washed clothes between the wringer’s two rubber rollers to squeeze out the rinse water. The rollers were supposed to pop apart if anything too thick got between them. A safety feature. She told me about a woman who caught her breast in a clothes wringer. Her story was supposed to be risqué but it made me wince. I imagined myself being wringered: my flesh bursting and jets of blood squirting from my finger tips. But then it wouldn’t work that way—I couldn’t be wringered down my arm unless I had gone all the way through feet first. I didn’t like her to tell me such stories. Her mention of breasts embarrassed me and I didn’t want to think about someone else’s pain—especially to what I imagined was a tender part. Our next-door neighbor took in washing for money and she had an electric ironing machine called a mangle. What if someone got caught in that! Her pretty daughter for example—squeezed and cooked all at once. Ugh. In our basement, on a high window-ledge, there were cans and bottles of bluing and bleach and starch and a box of soap with an orange and blue bull’s eye centered on the capitol O of “Oxydol.” And on the ironing board my mother kept a decoupage clothes-sprinkling bottle that Cousin Margaret had made for her as a Christmas gift.

A large round coal-burning furnace stood at the center of the basement and its long heating ducts, wrapped with white insulation, reached out and up under the ceiling like the arms of a giant mummy. There was a dusty black coal bin too with a clanky prison like metal door. The basement could be a frightening place on a dark winter afternoon when a fire was growling inside the furnace.

Upstairs at the fireplace end of our living room my mother’s photo retouching hood sat on a folding card table. It was a box-like affair about two feet on each side and made from stiff cardboard with a black paper covering. Light from a bulb inside the hood came through an inclined window of translucent glass to illuminate the large sheet-film negatives my mother worked on. Coming from below, the light and shadow made her face look a little spooky. She explained the difference between translucent and transparent, knowledge I liked, and taught me to read a negative: black is white, clear is black. She used a tiny brush dipped in reddish-brown “opaque” to block out unwanted pinholes of light and a broken-in-half double-edged razor blade to pick away black specks that shouldn’t be where they were. With needle-sharp mechanical pencils she smoothed wrinkles and softened blemishes on the faces of Preston Sweet’s sitters. Preston Sweet was a portrait photographer for whom she had worked since before I was born. In 1942 The Agfa Diamond photography magazine published a letter from my mother in which she advocated a new lighter style of retouching. One that allowed for “...qualities of character that must be preserved in the negative.” But then she hedged: “Women, though, much more than men, may be retouched to soften or remove lines and wrinkles.”

I have even now one of my mother’s mechanical retouching pencils: dark green painted wood with “Made in Bavaria,” stamped on its shank and a red celluloid cap. The long graphite leads she used came in flat paperboard boxes; each lead nestled in its own groove of a thin wooden tray. My mother selected a lead by hardness, slipped it into her pencil, and cinched the brass collar that held it fast. Every few minutes she twirled the lead to a sharp point against a pad of fine sandpaper attached to a small wooden paddle, which she then banged into a metal wastebasket to get rid of the dust. She used a large round glass to magnify the faces she improved upon. Sometimes I got to use it to examine things like the presidential portraits on paper money and my own fingerprints. And on sunny days to burn little holes in bits of paper and wood. My mother was good about letting me use her grown-up things and mostly I was good about taking proper care of them. I still have her magnifying glass too.

I liked to draw and my mother encouraged me. I drew a picture of a squirrel-like animal with a very long thick tail folded up over its back and stretching all the way to its nose. My mother thought this squirrel picture especially imaginative and kept it for many years. When I was older she explained that the tail was a phallic symbol—and laughed about my having produced such a robust male emblem at so tender an age. I didn’t like it when she laughed about things that had to do with her being an adult and me just a child. It was condescending. Sex things especially. My mother always remembered to take food for the squirrels when we went to a park or to the zoo. There were hundreds of squirrels at the zoo. From our picnic blanket we watched their sportive chasing across the lawns and around the trunks of trees. She said the males were fighting over girl squirrels. I saw that they were indeed snapping fiercely at each other’s scrotums but we didn’t talk about that.

I was a very fair-skinned child and each summer I got sunburned. Once so badly that Dr. Kemp was called in all the way from Birmingham to treat me. He wrapped me in gauze soaked with chilling calamine lotion and joked about me looking like a mummy. My mother and I called calamine lotion “Shakewell” —because the label boldly admonished, “Shake Well Before Using.” “Here Honey, let’s put some more Shakewell on.” I didn’t like her to call me Honey. Swaddled in gauze and crusting calamine lotion, I spent two uneasy days in bed with the room darkened to a yellow-brown because the window shade was drawn against the sun. Every so often the shade billowed into the room to admit a small breeze and a gentle swell of brightness. My mother told me the story of my very first sunburn: in our Birmingham bungalow she put my crib next to a window, raised the sash and covered the opening with Cellophane. Cellophane because she had been told that window glass blocked the sun’s ultraviolet rays with their healthful vitamin D. But she underestimated the autumn sunlight, left me too long exposed and I burned. She told it as a funny story, laughing at her own foolishness

For two weeks in winter I had measles. Every child got measles for two weeks in a childhood winter—and German measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, and mumps. Old-fashioned contagious milestones, now long since vanquished by baby shots. It was important to get these diseases over with when you were young. Especially mumps, because if you were a boy and didn’t get them until after your voice had changed, then the mumps, whatever they exactly were, could settle in your testicles with serious complications. Dr. Kemp was called to examine my measles. He ordered rest in a darkened room and tacked a yellow quarantine placard to our front door. For fourteen days I flopped around the living room in my pajamas while my mother sat in her corner and retouched. When I needed her she came to the big red couch and read to me. Some of our neighbors said “sofa,” and some, “davenport.” My mother had brought “couch” from England and kept it, along with numerous other old-world usages, to distinguish herself from the masses. To resist the leveling of the melting pot. Many of her little emblems of refinement seemed gulfs of difference that set us apart from regular people. An apartness I didn’t want. Though on Webster Street, I too said couch. Both because my mother did and because, in that particular, I thought both sofa and davenport were affected. Now most people seem to say couch.

On our couch, with the thin January sunlight coming in through the window over her left shoulder, which direction she said was best for one’s eyes, my mother read to me the poems of A. A. Milne: from When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. She enjoyed reading rhyme and one of our favorites was “Pinkle Purr:”

“Tattoo was the mother of Pinkle Purr,
   A little black nothing of feet and fur;
   And by-and-by, when his eyes came through,
   He saw his mother, the big Tattoo.
   And all that he learned he learned from her.
   ‘I’ll ask my mother,’ says Pinkle Purr.”

There were some confusing things about this poem. I was unsure of who was who? I didn’t think “Pinkle Purr” was the right name for a boy kitten, especially one who grew into, “An enormous leopard” nor was “Tattoo” a proper name for a mother cat. But, regardless, I loved being read to on the big red couch in winter by my own big Tattoo, who afterwards returned to her retouching hood in her corner by the fireplace. When I was older I asked for stories from the Winnie the Pooh books—stuff more boyish than poems. My mother read them all many times over. I especially liked stories with rough and tumble Tigger in them. She cautioned that Tigger was not one of the original animals that Christopher Robin had loved so much: Pooh, Piglet and Rabbit. Tigger, she said, had come along later—more to further the success of the author than to please his child.

I had a Pooh bear of my own—a simple “English” one with coarse bear-like fur. Once my Pooh got wet in the bathtub and then had his back singed because my mother left him too long drying against a furnace pipe in the basement.

Several years later my mother told me that when Christopher Robin Milne had grown up he complained of not getting a fair financial return from his father who had, after all, realized his great success through writing about him,Christopher. However, my mother was not very sympathetic. Christopher, she said, was only the inspiration and model for Milne’s stories—was not himself an artist entitled to royalties. It was Alan, the father and creative writer, whom my mother cherished. Alan Milne, as she understood him from his autobiography, was educated, cultivated, eccentric and successful. Just such an artist as she hoped I might become—in an American version.

But I grew up ordinary. More like Alan Milne’s description of his bland brother Ken. More like my own father, also Ken. When my mother was old and fuzzy-minded she sometimes got us all mixed up. She called me, “Ken” and my older son, “Don”—muddling him with me, me with my father and all of us with her notions about Alan, Christopher and Kenneth Milne. Over the years she so concerned both herself and me with Milne and his writings that I sometimes felt as if he had been a participant in my upbringing.

When I was grown up and read to my own children I was once again charmed by A. A. Milne’s writing and, like my mother, I preferred the poems to the stories. Maybe because they were so sentimental—and because they hadn’t, as had the story characters, been made so winsome and weary in Hollywood.

Of course, my mother read me other books. In particular I remember Munro Leaf’s Noodle: about a dachshund’s wish to be a different size and shape, his visits to the zoo, and final decision to stay as he was. We argued about the pronunciation of dachshund—she for something German sounding and me for dash hound. We also liked Ferdinand the Bull whose storybook mother asked him: “Why don’t you run and play with the other little bulls and skip and butt your head about?” But Ferdinand shook his head, “I like it better here where I can sit just quietly and smell the flowers.” My mother explained that it was easy to misread that last line, to get the just ahead of the sit: and read just sit quietly, instead of “sit just quietly,” which mistake changed the sense from pensive to idle. She liked to savor—urging my appreciation. She assured me, just as Ferdinand’s mother had assured him, that she wanted me to be like the other little bulls, to skip and butt my head about, but also to sometimes, “sit just quietly and smell the flowers.” My mother’s favorite flower was Lily of the Valley.

I had a wooden Ferdinand of my own. When he came to me he was attached to a little cart with red wheels. I removed the cart and wheels so that Ferdinand could stand on his own four feet.

When I was four my parents bought me an assortment of large unpainted wooden blocks—the kind you see in nursery schools and kindergartens. Joe Johnston, a friend of my mother’s, made them in his basement carpentry shop. My mother told me that she and I, when I was still a toddler, had lived for several months with Joe and his wife, Fanny Belle. It must have been during the time when my parents had their troubles—that time when Aunt Hilda said she helped my father to care for me. But wasn’t I with my mother at the Johnstons? Maybe bouncing back and forth? Later I felt my mother knew more than she said. Actually, I don’t recall that she ever said anything. Maybe I just picked up suspicions from overheard conversations. It seemed as if both my mother and Aunt Hilda knew something unsavory about the other but neither spoke of it directly: Hilda because she thought it all silly and my mother perhaps because it embarrassed her. Things to stew about. Affairs and abortions. Mysteries for me to later speculate about … perhaps rather than abortion there had been an adoption … did she live with Fanny Belle because she was pregnant … with a half-sibling? Were or weren’t there secrets. Maybe all my imagination—trying to add interest to a humdrum family—suppose I’ll never know—I didn’t really take a great interest.

Fanny Belle as I remember was a plump and sunny person full of domestic cheer. From her ironing board she led her family in happy song while they shared after dinner clean-up chores. There were two Johnston children, a boy and a girl. The girl was well behaved. The boy, however, was often unruly and when he acted up Joe shut him in a closet. My mother disapproved. Such harsh punishment, she said, especially because it was administered by the father, might cause the boy, whom she said was not well adjusted anyway, to become an invert. Regardless, both of the Johnston children turned out OK. The boy, homosexual or not, even distinguished himself in some way. Which way, I also never knew. My mother then claimed she had always known he would excel, despite his father’s punishments and her earlier fears for him.

On Webster Street I played with my blocks on the red Persian rug under our dining room table. The table was one of our finer possessions. It had a thick maroon fold-up pad on top to protect its mahogany veneer from spills and hot serving dishes and over that it wore a cream colored open-work spread that hung down to surround a private place for my make-believe. The rug had a geometric scheme that suggested formal relationships and the modular blocks encouraged balanced constructions. My mother thought she recognized a talent for architecture, which she later tried to encourage by reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead to me. In addition to forts and palaces, I also built ships. My mother took a picture of one. It looks good even now.

In winter I was allowed to assemble the track of my electric train in our living room. I used my blocks to make roads, bridges and tunnels. My train was a Lionel. The heavy cast metal steam locomotive was very realistic. It had eight drive wheels, a working headlight and a cowcatcher. A cowcatcher, my father said, wasn’t really to catch cows but to clear debris, maybe including cows, from the track ahead of the engine. My train had half a dozen cars, one of which was a yellow gondola. I liked the car but not the name. It sounded foreign and I didn’t know for sure if it was gon´-do-la or gon-do´-la. There was also a car that carried logs. When it rolled over a special length of track, I could press a button to tip it sideways and dump its load. If I held the button down as the car went by fast then the logs got thrown out and scattered all around, which was thrilling but not very realistic and sometimes caused a derailment. World war was close upon us and my train included a red flatcar with an electric searchlight for spotting enemy planes. At first it didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the cars but war play gradually invaded my imagination and so it did. I didn’t like Lionel track because it used an unrealistic center rail to complete the electric circuit. American Flyer trains came with more authentic looking two-rail track. But my mother said that Lionel trains were of better quality. I argued, even though I knew she was right. American Flyers were tinnier all around.

On Webster Street our driveway consisted of two concrete paths spaced the proper width for car tires. Out front, grass grew between these tracks but along side the house there was a stretch of sandy dirt where I and Nancy, my first friend on Webster Street, played with toys and kitchen utensils. When my mother came from the house to check on us, Nancy told her that she could see my penis. I think she had told me first but, not knowing what to answer, I ignored her. She advised my mother to either put me in underpants or to not dress me in shorts. I was less troubled by Nancy’s sighting than resentful of the patronizing manner in which the two of them discussed me. As if they were equals and I was hardly there. And I was angered when my mother later on told the story as anecdotal evidence that girls were more grownup than boys. Nancy’s candor and my shy silence. Many years later, when I was off somewhere in the Coast Guard, my mother wrote to me of a chance encounter with Nancy, who was then married to a student at the University of Michigan. Nancy was charming and beautiful and had a new first baby. In my mother’s report I sensed a wistful, “It might have been you she married.” Well, I doubted that—after all Nancy was a year older and far more, “mature.” Nevertheless, I indulged in my mother’s fancy. I pictured Nancy as a lovely young woman with long dark hair … pushing a stroller under the campus trees … taking our baby out for fresh air while I pursued my architecture studies in the academic quiet of our collegiate love nest.

My other girlfriend on Webster Street was very petite and everyone, even her mother, called her Mouse. Mouse’s family was poor. Her little brother was always grubby and their cottage, next door to our house, was careworn. The sidewalk in front was pushed up by the roots of a big tree to make a bump. I drove over this bump again and again in my wagon and on a borrowed Irish Mail. As fast as I could, trying to tip myself over for the thrill of crashing. Showing off for Mouse. I liked Mouse but my mother didn’t encourage our friendship. Nancy was the kind of better-bred girl my mother supposed would bring out the best in me, whereas Mouse was common. Mouse was more the kind of girl I would later choose for myself—or be chosen by, and whom my mother would scorn after our match or mismatch had been made.

I saw Mouse once again—long after we had moved from Webster Street. I was home on leave from the Coast Guard and visiting with my grandparents, who then lived in Ferndale. Mrs. MacDonald from up the street stopped in to say hello. Her son, Robert, who had been my friend in fifth and sixth grades, was with her and Mouse was with Robert! His fiancé! She was lovely. Very petite. Smiling and cheerful in a frilly white summer dress with puffy little sleeves. All prettiness like a fluttery garden moth. I couldn’t take my eyes from her. We all laughed because even grown up she was still called Mouse. Robert seemed grown up too. He gave me his business card—an insurance salesman. I envied Robert his lovely bride to be.

I remember only a few boys from Webster Street and none of them well: Nancy’s brother, David, but he was younger; a boy who lived across and up the street who had a lot of toys that he couldn’t take from his front porch; and an older boy named Bill who bullied the rest of us. I can’t picture any of them now as I can still see Nancy and Mouse. We boys were allowed to play on either side of the street and in several vacant lots: mostly cowboy and Indian stuff and army fighting games. We wrestled and cursed and swore and then punished each other’s foul language with punches to the shoulder—or thigh if the shoulder was protected. One punch for each bad word was our rule. We cussed each other just for the fun of it, laughing defiantly despite the penalty. There was another boy, whom we didn’t much like, who swore so much it seemed he had no reason other than wanting to be held down and enjoy our hurting him. My mother said he needed attention. He was a little goofy and we pounded him all the harder because of it. This goofy kid lived directly across the street from our house and in his back yard there was a birdhouse at the top of a tall pole: a miniature colonial mansion painted white with blue trim that had apartments for at least a dozen wrens.

I spent a night at Nancy’s house and slept in a big bed with her little brother David. David dared me to swap sucking each other’s penis. I was apprehensive. David was younger than me but children with older sisters seemed to know more about such stuff. He went under the covers and took my penis into his mouth. I was very uneasy. He didn’t do anything. I don’t recall if I got an erection. Was I old enough? What if he bit me? He didn’t. That was it. It was my turn. I wouldn’t do it. David said it was OK but I could tell he thought I was a baby.

My mother was a health food nut. Zealous about vitamins and chewy bread; raw sugar and wheat germ; clean tongues and firm bowel movements; and blowing our noses one nostril at a time—never a hearty double barreled honk that might damage the tiny blood vessels in our nostrils. She urged me to always rinse my mouth after eating and we argued whether spitting out the rinse, her view, or swallowing it, my view, was best. She often cooked what I thought was health-nut fare, but she did her best to make it tasty. For breakfast, she gave me oatmeal, or full-size shredded wheat biscuits drenched with boiling water, drained and served with raw sugar and a large dollop of butter. And sometimes Canadian bacon with butter-fried eggs. She spooned the sizzling butter onto their sunny-side-up yolks that whitened on top as they firmed—slightly for her, medium for me. For weekend lunches she made butter and watercress sandwiches on whole wheat bread cut into triangles with the crusts trimmed away. On fair days we often ate in the back yard. I don’t remember my father at breakfast or lunchtime, though he must have been there on weekends. Sundays anyway. Probably he worked Saturdays. Most people did. I do recall that he sometimes read the Sunday funnies to me.

For a time, my mother was a vegetarian. Both because she thought it healthier and because meat was rationed. She encouraged my father and me to join her with fairly tasty meat substitutes but she didn’t insist. When rationing ended we all went back to being omnivores. She decided, after all, that meat was easier to digest than grains and legumes because the vegetable source of the nutrients had already been pre-processed by the animal. Something like that. My mother urged me to rest for twenty minutes after lunch and dinner to let my own body digest whatever I had eaten. She said my hard working stomach needed blood to do its job and I shouldn’t deny it by running about. I mostly scoffed at her theories—but followed her lead. Years later I read that George Bernard Shaw, after ninety years of unswerving vegetarianism, was kept alive in his final days on liver extract (ugh!) because it was easier to digest. When word got out, lots of England’s sissy veggie-socialists castigated him for deserting the cause. I, in my sixties, awakened to the error of my own appetites and gave up eating the flesh of all sentient beings. For good—their good and mine.

Before going to bed on Webster Street I often got milk-toast: a slice of lightly buttered toast on a saucer, softened with a little warmed milk. Eaten with a fork. A “ milk-toast” was my mother’s term for a timid fussbudget. She meant someone like Casper Milquetoast who appeared daily in the newspaper on a features page, not with the comics. I didn’t know about Casper. I thought “milk-toast” was just another of my mother’s eccentric expressions that set us apart from others. I later quit eating milk toast, even though I liked it, because I thought it was baby food.

When she used Borden’s Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk in a recipe my mother always left the dregs in the refrigerator for me to discover. After breaking the skin that had formed over the smaller hole in the top of the can I sucked the cold sweet syrup from the larger. Both holes were made with a church-key that left a sharp-pointed triangle of tin curled down into the can. My mother warned me never to poke my tongue into the hole. She told of a man whose tongue became impaled on just such a sharp point inside a beer can. His tongue swelled and he couldn’t get free. I said it was swole, but she proved me wrong. The more the man struggled the more stuck he became and the can had to be cut away by a fireman. When she told the story I could almost feel the throbbing pain in my own tongue. I was always very careful with the condensed milk can. And later with pop and beer cans.

Sometimes I helped my mother blend reddish orange food coloring into a bowl of stiff greasy white oleomargarine. It was hard to get an even yellow color. Our wrists and fingers tired and we took turns. She said the dairy lobby blocked the sale of pre-colored margarine. That they did it out of greed. Later white oleo was sold in a plastic bag with a tiny red bubble in one corner that looked like a blood blister. You popped the bubble with a pinch and then kneaded the bag to get a uniform yellow tint. Almost a butter color, but still the taste was lard-like.

For a time my mother worked outside our house and I stayed with a busybody baby sitter in Royal Oak. My mother asked her for a daily report on the condition of my stool—to monitor the state of my health. I did my best to foil them both. I tried to flush the toilet before the prissy sitter got her chance to examine my product. She scolded me but I hated her snooping and wouldn’t desist. It was embarrassing for both of us. She complained to my mother and they gave it up. If my mother were still around I’ll bet she would see something deep in this: that my present lack of enthusiasm to present my drawing and writing products to the world now is seated in her past prying into my first products—instilling a subconscious fear of having them denigrated.

It was an anal era. Rectal thermometers for safety and accuracy and enemas to reduce a fever. My mother gave me an enema in our bathtub. She put a towel-wrapped board in the tub to protect me from the cold porcelain. The enema was terrible. My tender bowel painfully distended with tepid water that flowed through a red rubber hose from a red rubber hot water bottle that she held above me. The higher she held it the greater the pressure. A lesson in hydraulics. I wept and my mother quit the torture. There were no more enemas. She found gentler ways to restore my balance. In a bathroom cabinet there was another red rubber bottle, but with a differently shaped black celluloid nozzle at the end of its hose. My mother said it was only for her.

When I was six my tonsils were removed. A common procedure. Tonsils and less often adenoids. I didn’t know what adenoids were but they sounded vile—something to do with the earaches of sickly children. I was glad to keep mine. Not have people talking about them. For my tonsillectomy I was given æther, my mother said that was the proper spelling, and as I fell asleep I dreamed of a team of mighty horses marching through a stand of golden grain that parted before them. The grain grew from the round top of a giant millstone that had a geometric design carved on its face. Bas-relief. A term I later learned but thought affected and couldn’t pronounce with comfort. The stone turned slowly to the right as the horses tramped unswerving to the left—always on top of the turning wheel, always through the parting grain. After the surgery, I stayed two days in the hospital eating lukewarm soup and Jell-O and ice cream until I could pass the toast test. Swallowing toast was proof that my throat was healed and I ready to go home.

At bedtime I often suffered from pains behind my knees—growing pains we called them. My father massaged the back of my legs with Absorbine Jr., which went on cool but became warm and tingly as he rubbed it in. To sooth his own aches, behind the knees just like mine but not called growing pains, my father used Sloan’s Liniment. But Sloan’s Liniment was too strong for me. Sometimes my father read to me and afterwards he sat in the dark and stroked my forehead. “Stroke me,” I asked. I wasn’t afraid of the dark in my own room but I liked having him or my mother sit with me until I had slipped over the threshold into sleep.

In our living room on Webster Street my father and I boxed with big red boxing gloves. I don’t know why. I wasn’t a fighter and neither was he. Maybe because Joe Louis was in the news. The Brown Bomber was a Detroiter also. My father’s glasses got bent and we all felt bad. I got a bloody nose and cried. My mother said something about no rabbit punches because they were damaging to the kidneys and we all laughed about the silly idea of boxing rabbits wearing rabbit sized boxing gloves. And then something about my solar plexus and that was funny too.

When I was seven my father and I sat outside on the front steps of Webster Street with an orphan boy whom my mother had proposed to adopt. Maybe she hoped to make amends for that mysterious abortion she either did or didn’t have when I was two or three. My father took no stand either for or against adoption, just as he had probably neither condoned nor condemned the mysterious “abortion.” He went along with whatever he thought would please my mother—an attitude almost calculated to displease her. She wanted discussion and partnership. Regardless, on the front steps my father wasn’t very friendly to my might-be brother so I guess he didn’t really want him. He chided the orphan because he couldn’t tie his own shoes—comparing him to me who was a year younger and could. I was embarrassed to be held up as an example. Later at the supper table, when the boy blew his nose on a linen napkin, my father was again unkind. We always used linen napkins, never paper.

My mother had found this particular boy a few weeks before when she was taking pictures to illustrate an informational brochure about his orphanage. He caught her eye through the camera lens. She showed me all her orphanage photos and described the cottages where the boys lived. It sounded nice. Institutional living appealed to me. I imagined there would be comforting routines and easy fellowship without taxing relationships. No bothersome parents. But maybe too little privacy and too much noise. I don’t remember how I felt about having an adopted brother but we didn’t go through with it and the boy was sent back.

For several years, beginning when we lived on Webster Street and continuing after we moved to West Troy, I spent a month of each summer at Uncle Bill’s farm near Stratford, Ontario, Canada. It was the Anderson family farm. The farm my father might have got half of had he not, as a young man, chosen instead to settle in Detroit. My parents drove me to the farm—a three-hour trip by way of the Blue Water Bridge connecting Port Huron, Michigan with Sarnia in Canada. Half way to Port Huron we passed the sulfur springs near Mount Clemens, held our noses against the rotten egg smell and almost made almost crude jokes about flatulence. Crossing the bridge, my father often sang a few lines from “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” His favorite sister was named Bonnie and she lived in Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side, where the very water we were then passing above would plunge into Lake Ontario on its way to the ocean.

At the immigration station my father showed his US naturalization certificate with pride. It was an important document, thoughtfully protected in its own black leather wallet. My mother, however, always and, I was quite sure, on purpose, found she had “forgotten” her papers at home and so told the officer she had been born in Boston. “Born in Boston,” was supposed to explain her English accent. An accent she otherwise pretended she didn’t have—yet was always pleased to deny when someone noticed she did. She enjoyed playing parts. Her coy deceptions embarrassed me. My parents usually spent a night at the farm and then returned to Detroit, leaving me with Uncle Bill, Aunt Irene and Cousins Dan, Marion and Margaret.

Uncle Bill’s farm was a wonderful place. Three hundred sixty acres I thought, but later learned from Aunt Irene’s Anderson/Yeoward Family History that it was only half that. There were fields of wheat, barley, oats, and hay, rows of potatoes, fallow fields used as pasture and a kitchen vegetable garden. There were green John Deere farm implements with funny names like disk, harrow and drill, that got pulled behind a team of horses. And later by a new red Massy-Harris tractor with iron lug wheels. After Cousin Dan’s fingers were badly scraped between the wheel lugs and the tractor fender, Uncle Bill got rubber tires. The tires were filled with water rather than air to make the tractor heavier. There were eighteen milk cows, four working horses, several pens of pigs and twenty head of cattle. Uncle Bill simply said, “Cattle.” Maybe because head-of-cattle was American cowboy talk. He didn’t think too well of the United States and we tried not to call me an American. They all said Canada was just as much America as the United States. But there really wasn’t a good alternative. Sometimes they said, “Yankee,” but not of me because it was a scornful expression. I thought Canadians made too much fuss about all of this “American” stuff and my mother explained it was because they had an inferiority complex—just as Americans felt inferior to the English. Canadians, she said, thought that by our calling ourselves “Americans” we believed the whole continent was ours and that we allowed Canadians to have their own place only if they used a lesser name for it. Silly.

The farm included a pond, a small wood, “The Bush” they called it; a yellow brick house and a red barn—both with lightening rods at their peaks; and two unpainted machinery sheds with a two-hole out-house in between. It wasn’t two-hole because people were expected to use it in pairs. Rather, the large hole was for adults and the smaller one for children. But Dan and I often sat together. We took turns using the larger hole that required a greater attention to balance. There were spider webs down inside the pit, lots of flies and sometimes yellow jackets. I don’t recall how the pit got emptied. Most outhouses were little stand-alone sheds. When the pit got full it was covered up, another was dug and the shed moved atop. But Uncle Bill’s outhouse was always in the same place. A mystery.

I loved the farm. I was made to feel as if I belonged there. Of an evening, driving a wagon team of horses, Uncle Bill sometimes sang:

“I went to the animal faire
   The birds and the beasts were there
   The big baboon, by the light of the moon
   Was combing his auburn hair, hair, hair.”

And sometimes he added something about my hair being auburn—and then tousled it. I felt special. It wasn’t until many years later, when my daughter, Elizabeth, learned that same song in nursery school, that I realized it was beasts and not bees who were at the animal faire. When Uncle Bill sang for us I guess the formula of birds-and-bees was already stuck in my mind and I couldn’t hear the sts of “beasts.”

Uncle Bill was short and almost fat in his blue bib overalls. He had a sharp nose, thin sandy-brown hair and an ulcer. He couldn’t eat tomatoes. He was a cheerful man and seldom bossy. Gentle for a farmer. Though once in anger he threw a pitchfork at the rump of a balky horse. I was appalled and angry but I didn’t say anything because he might answer with something sharp. I sometimes felt sorry for the animals but I didn’t want to be made fun of—chidden about them not being city pets. The horse, though it bled a little, didn’t make much fuss. It was one of two Texas Broncos that Uncle Bill had bought by mail—sight-unseen. When they arrived at the farm the broncs bucked and kicked around in their delivery truck and broke one of its doors. One of them eventually learned to work with other horses, but the second bronc never did and got sold again. The horses didn’t have names. They were called by whatever distinguished them: “the old gray” or “the roan.” Only the dogs had names.

Aunt Irene was strong, smart, and a caring wife and mother. She had a sturdy youthful figure and a handsome fresh face. She was a faultless cook in her kitchen and a hard worker in the barn and fields. During my first summers on the farm, she had only a wood-burning stove. When she was dressed for town Aunt Irene showed off her good looks and feminine charm with an ingenuous guile. She liked to tell that men sometimes whistled at her or that someone had mistaken her for Cousin Margaret’s sister. My mother told me that Aunt Irene had once been my father’s girlfriend. But then quit him for Uncle Bill. I wondered if my father still had a crush on Aunt Irene. Maybe Uncle Bill was wary of him when we visited the farm. When she was in her eighties, Aunt Irene wrote of her own youth:

“I started high school in New Hamburg. Sometimes we walked the seven miles from New Hamburg to home in Shakespeare, hitch-hiking when possible. Sometimes we got a ride part way with one of the pupils who drove a horse and cutter. In the fall of 1924 I started attending Stratford Collegiate and lived with Aunt Lottie Pequegnat. Mother never regained her health and died early in 1925. I would go home [to dad’s] on Friday, often to find he didn’t come home over the weekend at all. He was, I know now, very lonely, but I only felt my own loneliness at the time.”

Aunt Irene’s story suggests that as a teenager she had been pretty free from adult supervision. Yet she somewhere learned all those wifely things that farm girls needed to know. She became my standard of womanly virtue—as many men employ the memory of their mothers. Grown up I often said things, both in jest and sincerely, like, “This gooseberry pie is delicious, almost as good as Aunt Irene’s.” Not that I was often served gooseberry pie and have the opportunity.

I was sent to Uncle Bill’s farm both to bolster my character and because a summer companion was wanted for Cousin Dan. Each morning Uncle Bill got us up by yelling, “Boys!” up the stairs. I was expected to do the same work as Dan. He was a year younger than me, but his being my host and knowing more farm lore leveled our footing. We got along well. Dan was a slight and wiry boy, had Uncle Bill’s blue eyes and sandy hair, and was sure to become a farmer. He was inclined to reserve and caution but my bolder city ways and talk enlivened him and on account of my being there Dan was given summer freedoms he might otherwise not have enjoyed.

Cousin Marion was three years older than Dan and Cousin Margaret three years older than Marion. Two comely girls. Margaret did fewer barn chores and less fieldwork than Marion, but more in the house and kitchen. She had boy friends and Uncle Bill yelled at them from an upstairs window if, after coming home from a date, they kept Margaret too long in their cars.

Marion was more like her mother. A good-looking tomboy. She liked working outdoors and playing rough and tumble with Dan and me. Several times I slept with Marion in her double bed and once she teased me with some small sportiveness under the covers. But it was only tease. Marion had a farm-girl’s clear understanding of the facts of life, which were still bird-and-bee puzzles to me. I slept with Marion because I was still an occasional bed-wetter and my mattress in Dan’s room was damp from the night before. On mornings after I had slipped up, Aunt Irene hung my bedding to dry from an upstairs window. The billowing sheets were an embarrassment but no one teased me. Probably because my mother had warned that censure would only aggravate the problem. None of the farmhouse windows had sash weights and if you forgot to prop a window open it slammed down with a bang. On every sill there was a stick for the purpose.

When I spent my summers on the farm, Aunt Irene’s father, Gramp, lived there too. He was old and wrinkly-thin, wore baggy bib-overalls and didn’t talk much. Gramp did his share of the work, slept in his own bedroom, sat in his own kitchen corner rocking chair, and drove his own Model T Ford to town on weekend evenings.

Twice each day, morning and evening, there were barn chores to be done. Before breakfast Dan and I and a dog brought the cows in from pasture. “Co-co-cobaas! Co-co-cobaas!” That’s how we called them. But they didn’t need much encouragement to come in and get their swollen udders emptied. We were not to let them run because some of their milk would squirt out and be wasted. Sometimes I rode on a Jersey cow that I called Brownie. Uncle Bill said she was red but she looked brown to me. Each cow knew her own milking stall and went directly to it. Brownie’s was the first stall on the house side of the barn and she was always first to be hooked up to one of the two electric milking machines. Four suction cups, each with a rubber sleeve gripped the cow’s teats. I, and maybe Dan too, wondered how it might feel. But only wondered. Besides, neither of us was of a size to find out and it might be dangerous. Each cow had two undeveloped teats—maybe in reserve in case another was injured. Because the milking machine didn’t get all her milk each cow had to be finished by hand. I never quite got the hang of it—pulling down while closing my fingers from index to pinky instead of pinky to index the way I was naturally inclined. When Uncle Bill sat down to empty an udder, he rested his forehead against the cow’s flank. Aunt Irene turned and rested her cheek. If I squatted along side her three-legged stool and asked, she would squirt a foot-long stream of warm cow milk directly into my open mouth.

In the milk-shed at the end of the milking stalls, Aunt Irene poured buckets of new milk into the yard-wide stainless steel bowl of the separator where it got spun around into a sculpted white whirlpool that was so smooth it seemed motionless. Cream came from one spout while milk poured from another. I didn’t understand why the milk and cream separated. Centrifugal force? The same force that kept it in an upside-down pail when I swung it fast over my head. Anti-gravity? Maybe it was centripetal. But none of that explained why the cream came out one spout and the milk out another. Finished, Aunt Irene put tops on the steel milk cans, set out dishes of foam for the barn cats and sloshed the separator clean with buckets of water. Wet and shining. A dairy truck came by an hour or so later to pick up milk from both that morning and the evening before. The milk-shed had a peculiar smell: sweet, just on the edge of sour. Even in the heat of summer afternoons it was cool there. From a nail in the ceiling a sticky brown flypaper curled down into its little round paper box. There was flypaper in the kitchen too. I didn’t like flies but I didn’t like to see them struggle against a slow sticky death. Like tar babies. It took a deft hand to unfurl and hang flypaper without making a gluey ball that must be thrown away.

After milking, the cows were turned out to pasture. Dan and I hurried them past the hay field so they wouldn’t stop to munch alfalfa through the fence. Alfalfa could stick in a cow’s windpipe and make her bloat. I saw one once—a Holstein lying on her side and all puffed out like a giant black and white frog. Uncle Bill was able to clear her throat with his fingers and she didn’t croak. Dan said that Holsteins gave the most milk but Jerseys the richest. Barn chores ended with cleaning up the manure gutters that ran along behind the stalls, feeding the horses, pigs, and chickens and gathering eggs. Marion usually got the eggs. Some chickens sat on their eggs in little roosting boxes and you had to reach under them to get the still warm eggs. They didn’t seem to mind giving them up. Some laid their eggs in out of the way places and we had to hunt for them. If an egg got broken the chickens crowded around and ate it.

At the bottom of the three steps up to the farmhouse veranda, there was a metal blade set in concrete where we scraped the mud and manure from our rubber boots. We left them all in a row just outside the door. We washed our hands and faces at a basin and hand pump on the inside porch just behind the kitchen. There was a cistern in the cellar that was filled from a well between the house and barn. If you were the first to wash you had to pour a little water down the throat of the pump to prime it—if last, you left some clean water in the basin for the next prime. If you forgot, then someone would need to go down to the cistern and get a pitcher of water for the purpose. The towel was thin and always damp. After supper in the evening all the same barn chores were repeated and when we came back to the house Cousin Margaret would have put out a kettle of hot water to mix with cold for a better wash-up. It pleases me to remember these little routines.

On weekdays Dan and I worked outdoors. Sometimes it was tedious: cleaning pigpens or the henhouse or clearing brush or hoeing weeds between long rows of potato plants. Sometimes Uncle Bill let us work with him. We drove horses from a wagon or the stone-boat, repaired fences and gates, and pulled stumps. He taught us to steer the tractor pulling the harrow and later to plow a straight furrow. For Cousin Dan the work was an apprenticeship—for me it was summer recreation and character development. I did learn from Uncle Bill to figure things out and get them done—whatever needed doing.

In August a half dozen long days of hard work were given over almost entirely to bringing in the grain harvest. Uncle Bill cut the ripe barley, oats and wheat with a tractor drawn harvester that bundled the stalks of grain into sheaves, tied the sheaves with scratchy binder twine and dropped them back onto the stubbly field. The rest of us, Aunt Irene, Gramp, Dan and I, Marion, and sometimes even Margaret, followed behind in pairs with pitchforks and made stooks. A stook was three or four sheaves stood on their cut ends and left leaning together to dry. Like stacked rifles. You had to work in concert with your partner, forking, lifting and standing the sheaves against one another just right so the stook didn’t fall over. I liked to work with Aunt Irene because she knew best how to ballance my lack of finesse and if a stook did fall over she just laughed and we tried again. At the end of these long days, which sometimes resumed even after supper and evening chores, there was often a happy ride in from the fields on a horse drawn wagon. We bragged about how hard we had worked and sometimes sang silly songs.

A week later, when the grain had dried, several men from neighboring farms arrived for threshing, each with a wagon and team of horses. These men and Uncle Bill worked long days together for two weeks, moving from one farm to the next until all their harvests were in. The huge galvanized metal threshing machine moved with them. They owned it all together but except during harvest time it was kept in Uncle Bill’s machinery shed. Out in the fields the men pitched the dry sheaves of grain up onto the wagons. Aunt Irene and Marion worked on top to build a balanced load. When it was heaping high the horses pulled the wagon back to the barn and struggled up the earthen bank into the upper level where the threshing machine was waiting. The thresher was powered by a long eight-inch wide black fiber belt that stretched to the power take off of the tractor parked fifteen feet outside the barn. The tractor engine droned on hour after hour, speeding up and slowing down with the strain, as the sheaves of grain were pitched from wagonload after wagonload into the throat of the threshing machine. The long belt, installed with a twist, slapped together as it ran its course between the tractor and the thresher. Standing by the tractor I watched the shiny metal splice in the belt as it raced toward me, whipped around the power take-off drum and shot back toward the barn. Sometimes the belt worked its way a bit over the edge of the drum as if it might slip off. It never did. Even though there was no rim to hold it in place, the belt always got back to where it belonged.

Inside the barn, grain poured out through an opening at the side of the threshing machine and down a chute into the grain cribs. As fast as the grain piled up under the chute it had to be shoveled to the back of each crib. The grain shovels were all wood, even the scoop. Dan and I and sometimes Gramp shoveled grain. During a breather while an empty wagon was backed out of the barn to be replaced with a loaded one I sometimes poured a tiny portion of grain from hand to hand, blowing away the little remaining dust and chaff, and then ate the pulpy, almost milky new wheat. The threshing machine had a big yellow paddle-fan that blew the straw and chaff through a long metal pipe up onto the straw mow above the chicken house at the back of the barn. Dan and I and Gramp worked there too. It was hotter than anywhere else. The straw came fast and had to be forked into the corners of the mow. The air filled with chaff and dust that made our sweat prickle and our spit black. It was the worst job.

When the inside straw mow and the grain cribs were full, the threshing machine was moved out to a pasture. There, at the side of the thresher, we caught the grain in burlap sacks. As they filled to their tops the bags became almost too heavy for Dan and I to keep them upright. Then, at what seemed the last moment, one of the men pulled the sack away and tied it off. Dan and I started another before any grain spilled onto the earth. The straw and chaff were blown to the other side of the threshing machine where a great straw stack slowly grew up from the ground. Over the next year the cattle would pull and chew at it and rub all around its base until it took on the shape of a giant mushroom. Whatever was left in early spring would be plowed back into the earth.

On threshing days Aunt Irene and Cousin Margaret served huge dinners and suppers of meat, vegetables and potatoes to our family and the half-dozen neighbor men. Every chair in the house was pulled up to the green-painted oval kitchen table, made longer than usual by both its leaves. The chair legs were reinforced with a crisscross of twisted wire to hold them strong under the weighty men. There was soft white store-bought bread, the kind of bread my mother never served, with butter that Aunt Irene herself had churned. Everyone filled and refilled their glasses from pitchers of milk. My mother said adults couldn’t properly digest milk—that we drank it only because the dairy industry pressured us with their false advertising. I don’t remember either coffee or tea at Aunt Irene’s table. For desert there were fresh baked pies. Afterwards, we all rested for twenty minutes to settle the heavy mid-day fare. Uncle Bill lay on his cot in a corner of the kitchen, Gramp snoozed in his rocking chair, and the neighbor men lounged outside on the veranda. When Uncle Bill got up it was time to go back to work and everyone followed. After a long afternoon, hotter than morning, we sat again to a supper hardly lighter than the noon dinner. Again the men rested, but for not so long, and then returned to the fields and labored until twilight. Aunt Irene, Dan, Marion, and I did the evening barn chores and sometimes helped again with the last hour of threshing. Cousin Margaret cleaned up the kitchen. When Uncle Bill’s grain was in the men and machines moved on until every neighbor’s harvest was finished. Dan and I and Aunt Irene, Marion and Margaret remained at home to what ever was needed there.

Haying time also filled several long days. But the work was not so hard as the grain harvest and there was less urgency about it. The first cut came early in summer and the work was more in the fields than in the barn. Quieter too: no tractor or threshing machine. The hay mower did make its own clippy-clink-clank noises, scaring rabbits into their burrows, but it was pulled by horses. Riding on the mower with Uncle Bill, we heard the horses snort and fart. But we didn’t use that word. Uncle Bill didn’t even approve of my speaking of “cow-pies” or “cow-flops.” “Manure,” he said. The new cut hay had a pungent green smell—fragrant compared to the dusty dryness of harvested straw. After mowing, a horse drawn side-rake tumbled the cut hay into long windrows that were left drying in the field. There was an abandoned dump-rake in the machinery shed and Uncle Bill told me how it worked. I liked knowing. I liked knowing the odd names of farm things like “whipple tree” and “clevis hitch”—names I still remember though I can’t recall what the objects looked like. In a corner of the shed there were two scythes left over from when Uncle Bill’s father had cut hay by hand. Gramp still used one of them to cut the hay left standing in the corners of the fields where the mowing machine didn’t reach.

Only after several days could the new-cut hay be brought into the barn. Uncle Bill said that green hay in a haymow would heat up as it dried and might catch fire. Spontaneous combustion. I was doubtful. When it was time, two horses drew a wagon and the tall forward-leaning mechanical hay-loader astride the rows of dry hay. The hay-loader had a clanking traveling rack that forked hay from the ground, carried it high, and tumbled it forward onto the wagon. There we shaped the hay into an enormous loaf that looked just like those in old English landscape paintings. Then the hay-loader was unhooked and left in place while we drove the load of hay in from the field, up the outdoor bank and into the barn. There, the overhead hayfork lifted it in great bundles from the wagon up onto the haymow. Gramp’s job was to walk up and down the bank guiding a single horse that pulled a rope to hoist each forkful of hay straight up to the barn peak and then along a track to one side or the other over the hayloft. When it was in the right sideways position, one of us pulled a second rope back and forth to set the bundle swinging and then yanked a trip rope to drop the hay just where it was wanted. The better the drop, the less work it took to fill the sides and corners of the mow. Once or twice Uncle Bill let Dan or me ride up to the barn top with a fork load of hay, swing with it, and drop with a bounce into the haymow below.

On some afternoons between haying and harvest Dan and I were left alone and idle. We splashed around in the muddy pond and got bloodsuckers on our legs. We explored the bush, had sword fights with prickly Scotch thistles, stamped our boots into sloppy cow-pies, and threw dry road-apples at starlings perched on a tattered scarecrow. Starlings were bad birds but swallows, killdeers and swifts were good. There were also cowbirds who hopped about under grazing cows. They too were good. Out by the Old Forest Road we placed pennies along the railroad track. The engineers and firemen waved us away but we stood a stood as close to the track as we dared—thrilling to the tumult of the steam engine and the rushing clickety-clack of boxcars, flatcars and tankers. Under the wheels of hundred-car freight trains the pennies got flattened into paper-thin cauliflower shapes and scattered along the roadbed. Afterwards, from half a mile down the track the fading whistle gave back the hot stillness of a summer afternoon.

With Marion, Margaret, and Aunt Irene, Dan and I sometimes picked gooseberries and raspberries from bushes along the road. We kept count of the Labbatts Beer Trucks that passed far off on the highway. They were easy to spot because they had a peculiar teardrop shape and were painted a very bright red. Back at the house we sat on the veranda and shelled peas or snapped beans and talked idle talk. They all pronounced the t in often, said “zed” instead of “zee” for alphabet z. And they spoke of “pecks” of fruit and “rods” of distance. We picked dandelions from the lawn and held them under each other’s chins to discover who liked butter the most. Before a summer storm the maple trees that bordered the front yard turned their gray-backed leaves against the wind and shivered. Margaret said to count the seconds from when I saw lightening to when I heard the thunder—one second for each mile to where we could see the rain was already falling. In the evening we caught fireflies and held them glowing in our cupped hands. On the few rainy days of summer, we sat in the dining room that was never used for dining, but only for sewing and table games. There was also a fancy curtained living room that held its furniture in readiness for infrequent special visitors.

On Saturday mornings we drove into Stratford. We stopped to visit with Uncle Clarence at his butcher shop. He joked with Aunt Irene about the extra wartime ration stamps she got on my account and I felt important, as if I was paying my way. We went to the creamery to get paid for the milk their truck had picked up each morning at the end of our lane. In the homogenizing room I saw whole milk shot from jets against a shiny steel wall—smashed into an irreversible blend. At home my mother never bought homogenized milk. She said it wasn’t so good for me as regular. For the little she used herself she preferred raw un-pasteurized. I said it would make her sick. What about Louis Pasteur and Madam Curie? (Or was she someone else?) My mother said “nonsense, don’t you drink raw milk at Uncle Bill’s?” At the front counter of the Stratford dairy we bought ice cream cones. US currency exchanged with Canadian for a few cents extra on the dollar and I always got back more change than Dan or Marion. The dairyman teased me about my Yankee good fortune. On Saturday evenings Dan and I took baths in a galvanized tub placed on the kitchen floor. Hot water was drained from a big holding tank behind the wood-burning stove. Margaret and Marion and then Gramp had taken their baths earlier and Uncle Bill and Aunt Irene would take theirs later. After I had been two summers to the farm, Uncle Bill had an inside bathroom built upstairs, an electric pump installed at the well to put the water system under pressure and a water heater put in the cellar. And Aunt Irene replaced her wood-burning kitchen stove with an electric oven and range.

On Sunday mornings we sometimes went to church but it was more for show than to benefit our souls. The family who lived on the farm next to ours never went to church and sometimes even did field work on Sundays. A Mr. Schlotzhower (maybe misspelled) owned the farm next to that and “Schlotz” wasn’t married, which some thought peculiar. There were occasional Sunday afternoon get-togethers with other aunts and uncles and cousins. Elizabeth, one of Uncle Clarence’s daughters, was my favorite—a skinny-pretty tomboy who wore glasses. I liked girls who wore glasses because their eyes looked bigger. In 1991, when Aunt Irene sent me her Anderson/Yeoward Family History I right away looked to see what Elizabeth had done with her life: “… never married ... a teacher in London, Ontario ... adopted a child, Tina.” That was all. At those Sunday gatherings Another family sometimes joined us. Second cousins maybe. The farmer was called “Windy” but I never knew why. Uncle Bill sometimes made fun of Windy because he wasn’t a very successful farmer.

On Sunday afternoons Dan and I were free to play. We lassoed pigs in their pens and rode on them—shouting out songs like, “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Don’t Fence Me In.” Once a noose got cinched too tight and the panicky sow turned blue in the face before we got the rope off. It was frightening. Uncle Bill would have been angry.

We hosed out the litter carrier that was suspended from an overhead track that ran behind the animal stalls. One of us got in and the other pushed him fast all around the barn and then outside where a tripper tipped the rider out onto the manure pile. Mostly straw—not messy. I had shuddery visions of Dan or me getting our fingers caught between the wheels and the overhead track. Upstairs in the barn we swung on the hayfork rope in long loopy arcs and dropped somersaulting into the hay. Barn Swallows flew back and forth from their nests. We made hideouts in the corners of the haymow and called them Oteys. The last summer I went to the farm we smoked cigarettes in our Oteys, and worried about fire.

Dan and I slept on two iron cots on either side of his tiny upstairs room. A long string from the pull-chain of the overhead light was tied to the head of Dan’s bed. Dan got to “close” the light. Another funny Canadianism. We slept with the door open by two or three inches and when Dan closed the light several vertical bars of bright and shadow appeared on his wall. Each bar was an inch or two wide, about five feet tall, and bent in the middle where the wall met the half-gabled ceiling. These bars of light were a mystery. I thought about them often, both at the time and for years after. Surely they were made by light from the hallway chandelier and maybe the banister poles had something to do with it. But how could there be several bars of light when the door was so little open? I never got out of bed to investigate.

I went once to Uncle Bill’s farm for a week in winter. The animals stayed inside and their bodies kept the lower barn moisty-warm. The windows were covered with fern-like patterns of frost. Out back the composting manure pile exhaled a small fog. Upstairs in the chicken house the lights were kept on day and night both for heat and to encourage the birds to lay more eggs. Except for morning and evening chores there wasn’t much work to do. Dan had gotten a pair of skis for Christmas and we took turns bumbling down the side of a snow-covered straw stack out in a pasture. We watched Uncle Bill castrate young pigs. He used a utility knife and a pair of pliers. I don’t remember any sewing up—just some red disinfectant that Uncle Bill painted on each wound with a brush. There was a fair amount of squealing but the piglets didn’t seem to hurt for long. We saw one of the horses bumping around in his stall with a huge erection. It was like a fire hose—and steamy. I told Dan that one of my Ferndale friends claimed there had been an English princess who had sex with horses: she lay on a bench and the horse, held in some kind of cradle, was lowered down onto her. Neither of us thought it was possible.

One morning a large truck came to the farm and a dozen cattle were prodded into it. We followed the truck to the town of Kitchener. Named, no doubt, after Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. The same Kitchener who later butchered the Boers in South Africa. After a cold wait in an outdoor pen, Uncle Bill’s cattle were marched up a long covered ramp to a second story door at the side of the slaughterhouse. They did a lot of mooing. As they entered the building they were killed. I didn’t go inside but Dan did. He told me a clamp was put around each animal’s neck and then a man hit its head with a sledgehammer. Right between the eyes. Right where they liked to be scratched.

Years later I read something about cows having dark brains. Probably all animals have dark brains compared to humans. But surely even the dark brains of Uncle Bill’s cattle, as they climbed the slaughterhouse ramp, must have understood in some dim way that they were to be killed. Maybe they smelled the blood. I thought they made so much noise because they were afraid—afraid as I would be, but in a darker sort of way.

I spent my last two summers on Uncle Bill’s farm after we had moved from Webster Street to West Troy. For my next-to-last visit my father and I took our first airplane ride. From Detroit to London, Ontario. I threw up as we landed and he almost did too. That year my father stayed on a day or two at the farm. He worked more with Dan and me than with Uncle Bill. “Man and boy!” How glad he was that he had moved to Detroit. Farming was not for him. For my last summer in Stratford I was allowed to take the train alone to London, where Uncle Bill would meet me at the station. He wasn’t there when I arrived so I lit up a cigarette on the platform. Then, there he was. I thought he saw me smoking but we both pretended he didn’t.

In retrospect, my memories of summers on Uncle Bill’s farm seem to extend my childhood backward in time. I traveled not only from town to country, but also from the bustle of wartime Detroit back into a milieu of habits and customs from an earlier rural generation—when driving a horse, doing for one’s self, churning butter, and making soap were common activities. Years later when I recalled my summers on the farm I envied what I imagined to have been the balance and proportion of Uncle Bill’s and Aunt Irene’s lives. Her family history does recount some hard times: the Great Depression, the infant death of twin boys, and the scarcities of wartime. But I think she and Uncle Bill seldom had cause to doubt the certainty of their circumstances and providence. They lived their lives where they had been born and became successful on their own terms and by their own efforts. Grown old, they gave the farm to Cousin Dan and retired to a house and garden by the Old Forrest road where Dan and I had placed our pennies on the railroad track years before. Where even Uncle Bill might have placed his pennies when he was a child.

At the end of each summer I always brought home a small bag of just harvested wheat. My mother boiled it for our breakfast. A tiny bowl of tender wheat with cream on it. It was very chewy.

In 1999 I sent a draft of these “Uncle Bill’s Farm” pages to Aunt Irene. She wrote back in a strong round hand—she was ninety something—that while she enjoyed reading it she thought my imagination had got the better of my memory. Maybe she was being modest because of the flattering things I had written about her. Maybe she remembered differently. Well, they are romantic memories because Uncle Bill’s farm was a romantic place for a city boy to spend his summers.

At home in Ferndale, in February 1940 when I had just turned five, and before my first summer at Uncle Bill’s farm, my mother started me in kindergarten. Most children began school in September, but there was always an odd class that started mid-year and then continued, ever out of step, grade after grade. I didn’t do well in school. My mother regretted starting me before I was ready. Half finished with third grade in June of 1943 I still hadn’t learned to read and I couldn’t spell my own middle name—one n or two? I didn’t like school. Grown up, I couldn’t remember the school’s name, or the name of any teacher or classmate, or any incident from the three and a half years I spent there. Save one: a fuzzy recollection of being struck on the wrist by a baseball bat during recess. I guess I was standing in the wrong place. On a visit to Ferndale after my mother died I found the school still in use. It’s name was Taft Elementary and, “Learning By Doing,” was engraved in the stone lintel above the front door.

The day we moved from Webster Street my friend Bill, the neighborhood bully, taunted me with name-calling: “Anderbum, Anderbum.” I was angry and challenged Bill to combat on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb in front of our house. I charged into his outstretched fist, hurt my nose, turned away, and cried. That was my first, last and only fistfight in over seventy years.

I looked forward to our new home-to-be on West Troy. A new neighborhood. Still in Ferndale but different.

As before, the captions in quotes are my mother’s from her photo album. Added comments are my own.

Left: 340 Webster Street in 1994. The lower front porch was not enclosed when I lived there but otherwise it looks familiar. Right: “Don + Nancy, 10/14/38.” It must have been an Indian summer day in our Ferndale back yard. Both Nancy and I look pretty well fed.

Left: “D 4 years,” from the contact proof of a 5 by 7 negative. Right: In our living room with my Ferdinand the Bull—the two of us sitting just quietly to smell the flowers.

Left: Me posing with the Sunday comics and wearing my father’s glasses. This photo appeared full-page in the Sunday rotogravure magazine of one of Detroit’s three daily papers. Right: Me at the controls of my Lionel train. The puzzling yellow gondola car is just approaching the curve. Both photos taken by my mother with her big Graflex camera when she was just getting started as a photographer.

Left: A temple-like building I built with the blocks made for me by Joe Johnston—my mother had visions of me as an architect. Right: A ship made from the same blocks.

Left: Me, Dan, Margaret and Marion on the lawn at Uncle Bill’s farm about 1943. This print is a half-tone Velox so it must have been screened for reproduction—maybe in a Stratford newspaper. Right: Uncle bill and Aunt Irene with one of their great grandchildren—taken in 1987—not as I remember them from the '40's. Aunt Irene sent me both these photos.

Left: Dan, behind, and me rolling tires along the lane leading from the Old Forrest Road to the farmhouse. Right: Dan and me from a few years later. It looks as if I have a plaster cast on my wrist. I’ll guess my mother took both of these but neither was in her scrapbook. I got them many years later from Aunt Irene.

“What was in his mind seemed to mean so little. It was the world outside his mind, the world he felt he couldn’t encompass that meant much.”
Paul Scott

In 1943, when I was eight years old, we moved from Webster Street to 1597 Troy Avenue West. West Troy. Still in Ferndale and only a mile and a half from where we had lived on Webster Street. But different: smaller houses, mostly wood rather than brick and more vacant lots. Ours was a white frame bungalow hardly larger than the one we had rented in Birmingham. Webster Street had reflected Detroit. West Troy faced a suburban, almost rural landscape. The quiet of summer afternoons was often defined by the distant refrain of pounding hammers where a new house was being built and at twilight the barking of dogs seemed to drift in from very far away. There were open fields to the north and beginning two blocks west was a thin wood called the Peat Swamp. Older boys said there were mushy places in the swamp that sucked like quicksand—deep enough to take you under if you were really short. It was common lore that if the peat caught fire it could never be put out. The burn would smolder under the surface and then flare up again, months, or even years after the last time flames had been seen.

On Webster Street, I had known little more than my own block and the short way to school. From West Troy I would explore and become familiar with a greater neighborhood: the fields north of Nine Mile Road, the Peat Swamp and even the shopping district, almost a mile away, where Woodward Avenue and Nine Mile crossed—dividing Ferndale east and west, north and south.

One of Ferndale’s major Westside streets was named Livernois. My mother said how people pronounced Livernois, like Illinois, separated the refined from the rude. She then mispronounced it herself, on purpose, and joked about just what sort of noise a liver might make. She made the same joke time after time and every time she laughed in the very same way—a laugh I thought affected—and then went on to recite:

“What sort of noise annoys an oyster?
A noisy noise annoys an oyster!”
And laughed her silly laugh again.

When some quip or riddle amused my mother, like, “What’s black and white and read all over?” she told and retold it all too often. She delighted in funny words. Words like: piffle, smidgen, pithy, and incognito. When I said, “pooy” she corrected me with “phooey.” I pronounced genuine with the accent on, `wine just to annoy her and later when I learned hyperbole I rhymed it with bowl for the same reason. Even to annoy anyone at all. Actually I had trouble remembering, from one rare opportunity to the next, which way was correct. Just a few years ago I said “hyperbowl” at a dinner party and even as I spoke I knew I had remembered wrong. No one corrected me. I wanted to correct myself or make a joke but became confused. Too shy. I was sure that everyone at the well-educated table knew the proper pronunciation. They didn’t want to embarrass me. I felt patronized and defensive. Then someone jokingly asked, “Is that anything like a salad bowl?” That gave me an opportunity to reclaim my dignity but I couldn’t rise to it because I was befuddled. Later I put together a clever response around Super Bowl—but what good is later?

On West Troy my mother said that the company magazines to which she sometimes submitted articles were called “house organs.” Said so with an arch nod to the possible vulgar association of organ. She said, “Bother!” when she had misplaced something and then exclaimed, “Eureka!” when she found it. My mother often entered “squibs,” “blurbs,” and “jingles” in radio and magazine marketing contests and sometimes she won. She said advertising etiquette held that an ad must never disparage the product of a competitor. Times have changed. She taught me that irregardless was wrong, a double negative, and we listened for it on the radio. She didn’t like, so? as a question or, how come? in the place of, why? Later I read somewhere that, why? is a causal question, whereas, how come? is an evolutionary one. Proximate versus historical. If, at the end of a meal, anyone said, “I’m done,” my mother chided with, “How do you know … stuck yourself with a fork?” And then correct them, “Turkeys are done, people are finished.” She thought the drift away from inflammable and toward flammable, as a word of warning on gasoline trucks, was a lowering of the language. I countered, though not to the point, that gasoline trucks were required to drag a chain along the roadway to ground any build up of dangerous static electricity. This seemed odd because the chains, skipping along the concrete, made lots of sparks. Weren’t sparks dangerous? I haven’t seen a gasoline truck dragging a chain for many years.

My mother used lay and lie properly and also few and less: “Few peas, less honey.” And when she sat to a meal and found peas on her plate, she often recited:

“I eat my peas with honey,
   I’ve done it all my life.
   It makes the peas taste funny,
   But it keeps them on the knife.”

She couldn’t recite many rules of grammar, nor ever could I, but grown up I was always pleased to come across some odd point of authority that proved her English usage, and mine as I got it from her, to have been proper. Even if uncommon. She claimed that England’s English was more modern, more highly evolved, than American English. A position I later read was true—that England’s was simpler than America’s. I can’t think of an example except that I think the English place no period after Mr and Mrs and maybe use fewer commas and thats. Does evolution seek complexity? Revolution simplicity? One parenting the other? Vice versa was one of her favorites too.

My mother also offered more practical bits of wisdom: rinse your hair with cold water to close the pores of your scalp, especially in winter, and in winter wear a hat, because we loose most of our body heat from the top of our heads. I didn’t believe the “most” part. She also said that warm water put in an empty ice cube tray would freeze quicker than cold. I was sure that was false. Nevertheless, it comes to mind every time I fill a tray with cold.

Our house on West Troy was a white frame, gable roofed bungalow of five small rooms. I believe my parents bought the house because in my mother’s mind their divorce was brewing and she wanted a secure situation for herself and me. It would be the only home, ever, that she didn’t rent. I had a tiny bedroom at the back and my parents slept in a larger one up front. In between was a cramped bathroom with horrid gold-flecked black linoleum flooring that curved up at the base of the walls and continued to waist high. The tub was partly enclosed by a flimsy partition with a keyhole-shaped opening to step through—a Moorish touch. On the sink, there was red Life Buoy soap for my father and me, white Ivory, “Ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredth’s percent pure,” for my mother’s face, and pale green Cuticura for her hands. Radio ads for Life Buoy ended with a deep male foghorn-like voice saying, “Beee-Oooh,” because BO was what Life Buoy was supposed to prevent. At the kitchen sink we kept gritty black Lava soap for really grimy hands. There was a living room that looked out onto the back yard, a dining room and a large window enclosed front porch. Except for the bathroom it was a light and airy house.

On a living room wall my mother hung her print of “Arabesque,” a painting by Marie Laurencin of a young woman, a guitar and flowers—done in pinks, whites, pale blues and greens. My mother displayed this picture wherever she lived from before I can remember until she ended up in a nursing home. She said “Arabesque” was a “pastel” and I thought she meant the artist had used pastel crayon. Later I learned that most of Laurencin’s paintings were oils so maybe my mother’s “pastel” referred to the softness of the picture’s colors. Probably she explained all this, and more than once, but I forgot in protest against her lecturing. She wanted me to know about things like pastel and pastels and that white came in an endless variety of tints. I liked knowing, but I didn’t like being told—especially a second time if I suspected her of assuming I hadn’t got it already.

A very large oak stood between our own and the Finnish lady’s house next door to the west and in our front yard we had a catalpa tree. The oak dropped acorns and leaves and the catalpa strew both leaves and long brown beans all over the lawn, which in summer it was my job to cut and in the fall to rake. We never said autumn. I don’t recall the Finnish lady so well as I do her beautiful blond daughter, about twenty, who sometimes sunbathed in their back yard with very little on. My mother later took the daughter’s wedding photos. A lovely bride. Seven fruit trees stood around the perimeter of our back yard and a Concord grapevine grew on wires from side to side to screen a small vegetable plot at the very back. We got there through a lattice-work arch. My mother loved our little park. On sunny mornings she looked out on it and sang, “Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day….” Her singing embarrassed me because she put so much gusto into it—as if for an audience much larger than just the two of us. Sometimes she sang “Old Man River” in a faux Paul Robeson baritone that, to me, was absolutely mortifying. When our plum tree died she had someone pull the stump and install a tetherball: a tennis ball inside a little net bag that hung by a rope from the top of a metal pole. We batted the ball back and forth with rackets. I didn’t like it much. No one else had a tetherball. It seemed yet another of my mother’s eccentricities that set us apart from regular people. The word itself, tether, sounded foreign to me. Nevertheless, most of my friends like to play it. My mother often beat me, which was easy because she was taller.

She really was an oddball. She spoke of autogiros and dirigibles when others said helicopters and blimps. We didn’t have houseplants because she said it was dangerous to sleep in rooms with foliage that consumed oxygen in the dark. I think I learned later that, to the contrary, plants give off oxygen at night.

A year after we moved to West Troy, my mother had an extension added at the back of the house. A photo darkroom and a work area where she trimmed and mounted and mated her prints. Portrait photography had pretty much become her full time occupation and that’s how she would earn our living after she and my father separated. Our living room was her studio. For each sitting she set up her flood lights and a bench for her sitter, behind which she placed a portable backdrop of stretched gray monk’s cloth—like burlap but softer. I liked knowing about monk’s cloth—especially that it wasn’t so itchy as I had supposed cloth for a monk ought to be. Probably monks and their ilk only pretended it was rough so as to appear more pious and longsuffering. My mother’s big black Graflex camera was mounted high on a wooden tripod. She liked shooting down at her subjects, with them looking up. A flattering angle she said. Especially for women—not looking up their noses. Men she was more inclined to shoot straight on—to give them a more distinguished and commanding appearance. But most of her sitters were women. She stood on a chair in her stocking feet and with a black cloth over her head peered down through the camera hood to the ground glass stage on which she focused and composed her picture. On tiptoe, her nylon stockinged calves were full and smooth—sexy. The floodlights heated the room and our cat often came in to warm himself. Sometimes he got included in a picture because the sitter took to him. Occasionally my mother photographed people in their own homes and once in a while she did a wedding or commercial work for publication but mostly her subjects were individuals who came to our house. She also continued to do retouching at home for other photographers.

My mother took lots of pictures of me despite my being self-conscious and balky. One of many that she kept in her album shows me at age seven or eight wearing an army cap and laughing hilariously. I had just farted. My mother liked the picture because I looked so exuberant—had lost my grip on the studied reserve she thought I over indulged. She said I was insecure with spontaneity. Always the analyst. She liked to show the picture and tell what we had found so funny. But delicately because she seldom used vulgar language. Our word for flatulence was, blow. “Did you blow?” Of course we giggled, it’s hard to not laugh about farting, but we didn’t say it. We didn’t even say burp for belch. I’m still funny about coarse language—and the more so because it’s become so common. My mother and I shared another big laugh over an advertisement for a “Little Giant Safe.” I said I wanted one. “What would you keep in it?” “Little giants!” We thought little giants was very funny.

Under our West Troy house there was a half-basement. The rest was a sandy crawl space where I sometimes played with cars and trucks, despite my uneasiness about snakes and spiders. There was also a dingy coal bin. Once a month in winter a coal truck backed into our driveway and sent its bituminous load down the coal chute with a dusty roar. Bituminous? Soft coal. My father said furnaces more modern than ours used coke. The grumbling furnace kept the basement warm and dry. My father installed an electric stoker, a long screw-like apparatus that slowly fed coal into the fire from a hopper, which he needed to fill only twice a day. In summer the basement was cool.

On a Saturday afternoon when my mother was out, I hammered a row of round-top poultry staples part way into the workbench and then pushed a .22-long rifle bullet into each little arch of wire—snug to the rim. I squeezed a bead of Testor’s model airplane glue just behind the half-dozen shells and lit it with a match. When the .22’s got hot they exploded. Bits of cartridge flew around the basement, but not with much force. I had expected the lead slugs to shoot forward against the opposite wall, but of course they didn’t because there was no barrel to confine the explosion and guide the bullet. It was an exciting but disappointing experiment. Sometimes there was really nothing better to do than to toss a handful of .22’s into the furnace or to write D O N, or some crude word, on the concrete floor with model airplane gas, light it and watch it burn. Once with heightened anxiety because I had used too much. Model airplane engines used white gasoline, which was said to be much more volatile than leaded automobile gas. It was supposed to be mixed with glycerin for some reason. I can still remember the glycerin smell. In my head I got glycerin confused with castor oil, which was given to bad or sick children, never me, and, I once read, to make criminals and war prisoners confess.

Most Michigan roofs were steep, so that heavy damp snow would slide off, but the center portion of our roof had an unusual shallow pitch. However, our attic wasn’t insulated so the snow quickly melted and made a row of very long gnarly icicles along the eave across the house front. They were low enough to break off and employ for whatever mischief might come to mind. In summer I often played on our near flat roof between the two side gables. It was a good slope for racing toy cars and from behind one of the gables I could spy on the beautiful blond Finnish girl if she were sun bathing in the next-door yard. Or shoot BB’s. Not at her. Once I lay flat on my back and with my Red Ryder BB gun I shot a blue jay directly above me in the branches of the oak tree. The bird fell dead to the roof with a thump. Right next to me. It didn’t even flutter. There was a blob of very thick, very crimson blood on the side of its head. I hadn’t wanted to kill it and I tried to cry but couldn’t—maybe because I had no audience. There were lots of birds in Ferndale. Winter cardinals and summer robins; wrens, blue jays and swallows; sparrows, blackbirds and crows. My mother delighted in sighting the first of each kind as they arrived in their season. Cardinals were her favorite. In winter she put out birdseed in a feeder with a roof to keep off the snow and tied a ball of suet to a branch of one of our fruit trees. She liked summer sparrows too, but in a condescending way, as she might favor people less attractive than herself. I think there are now far fewer birds about than when I was a child. Probably people and pollution are driving them out. Maybe I’m just being sentimental.

On West Troy in summer, a knife-and-scissors man came around every Wednesday. He pushed a wooden barrow with a big round whetstone at its front. To sharpen things he sat and turned the stone with a foot treadle—like an old fashioned sewing machine. Water dripped from a hole in a tin can hanging above the stone. My mother said he looked like Jonathan Jo in the Ernest Shepard illustration for one of A. A. Milne’s poems. So that’s what we called him, “Jonathan Jo.” She often gave him things to sharpen—and water for his tin can. She liked having tradesmen come door-to-door—as they had in England. There were also a Saturday morning vegetable truck with open sides and a canvas awning, an afternoon and evening Good Humor ice cream man who announced his approach by jingling a string of bells, and a horse-and-wagon junk man with an ahoo’ga horn who came by on Fridays to pick up household discards. We called him the “Sheeny man.” I didn’t know that sheeny was an unkind epithet for a Jew. (Iwas going to say “we didn’t know …,” but I can’t speak for my mother.)

On Sunday mornings a street vendor came by on footcalling out, “News, Times, Free Press!” He was a grown man who sold copies of all three papers in case you wanted more than what your regular newsboy had already delivered—more news about the war overseas and our hardships at home. Of Detroit’s three dailies my mother preferred the morning Free Press as the most cultured. The afternoon News had the largest circulation. The Times, also afternoon, was the workingman’s newspaper and she took no notice of it. My father and I liked the Sunday Times for its funnies. Our favorite was Smokey Stover. Smokey and his fellow firemen drove around in curious little two-wheeled cars and there were tiny framed pictures on the firehouse walls whose tiny, tiny subjects interacted with the main characters of the comic. The puzzling slogan, “Notary Sojac!” could always be found somewhere in each strip. On another page, Little Orphan Annie patrolled her neighborhood to protect the morning peace of war workers still asleep after their arduous graveyard shifts. A rowdy unpatriotic boy wearing a red and white striped shirt came along and made a racket. Annie ordered him to stop. But he wouldn’t, so she silenced him with a commando punch to the Adam’s apple. Little stars danced around the boy’s head to show that Annie’s punch had taught him a lesson. My father had a large Adam’s apple and so would I.

During the first two years of the war, my father worked at Vickers, a factory where airplane engines were made. He must have had an office job because I don’t remember seeing him in work clothes. Or maybe he was an inspector who helped ferret out Gremlins—worker’s careless mistakes that sabotaged the war effort. My father was also a volunteer air raid warden. When the sirens announced an enemy attack drill, he put on his warden helmet and armband and patrolled our block to see that no light escaped from any house. If your house didn’t have a room equipped with blackout curtains you had to turn off every light until the all-clear sounded. My mother and I stood outside and watched the searchlight beams sweep the night sky.

As the war continued, more and more houses in our neighborhood displayed a small window banner to announce that a family member was serving in the armed forces. Each star on the banner stood for one soldier or sailor—a gold star told that the serviceman had been killed in action. On our dining room wall we had a world map with colored pushpins poked into it that followed the progress of the several European campaigns. The conflict with Japan seemed remote. It was Churchill and then Eisenhower’s war we cared about. My friends and I studied the silhouettes, as seen from below, of both friendly and enemy aircraft. They were printed on pieces of cardboard that came in cereal boxes. But in the skies above Ferndale, Michigan there were few airplanes of any kind to spot. When one did come by we never had our cards and after the fact we couldn’t agree on what we had seen. Except for P-38’s, which we never saw, they all looked pretty much alike. On Thursdays we bought victory stamps at school and stuck them into narrow pocket size booklets. When your book was filled, $18.75, you turned it in for a twenty-five dollar War Bond, which wouldn’t mature for ten years. Thursday was also the day to avoid wearing yellow because some boys said yellow on Thursday meant you were a fairy. I didn’t know much about fairies. Maybe they were like gremlins—bad for the war effort. In our schoolbooks and on walls and fences we wrote, “Kilroy Was Here,” and drew the funny little Kilroy picture—two hands and a face peering over a fence. A symbol of allied liberation—that the Yanks had arrived. For two summers, my father tended a plot in a community Victory Garden several blocks from home. Another war effort. Grow your own because canned goods were needed by the troops overseas. Next to the Victory Garden was a park where I watched grown men play Donkey-Ball. They used an extra large softball and both fielders and base runners rode on donkeys. They got off to bat and to pick up the ball but otherwise had to ride from place to place. It was a pretty slow game.

In 1944, my father tried to join the Navy but was rejected for medical reasons, 4-F. Shortly afterwards he was hospitalized with an eye problem. The hospital was way out on East Jefferson Avenue near the Belle Isle Bridge. My mother told me that during the nineteen-twenties, Harry Houdini, bound with chains and locks, had jumped from the Belle Isle Bridge and plunged through a hole in the winter ice that covered the Detroit River. Harry disappeared for twenty minutes. The anxious spectators were sure he had drowned—swept down stream by the current. But Houdini survived. After freeing himself from his chains he swam to the surface, where he found pockets of air between the river water and its ceiling of ice, and made his way back to the opening where he had jumped in. I wasn’t sure I believed all this—especially his being in such cold water for so long. It gave me the shivers. The Belle Isle Bridge was also where the 1943 race riot began. My father said that during the uprising he was pulled from his car at a stoplight and punched in the nose. He also told me he once saw a man throw up over the Belle Isle Bridge railing and that the man’s false teeth fell into the river.

When we visited my father in the hospital, he lay in bed with a white bandage wrapped around his head that covered both eyes. We held hands while we talked. The diagnosis, my mother later told me, was syphilis. My father hadn’t known until the Navy induction doctors rejected him. Then he looked into it. In the hospital near the Belle Isle Bridge, he was given electric shock treatments. It’s hard to believe that electric shock was thought to be a cure for syphilis. My mother said there was a lot of medical nonsense going around—doctors doing just as they pleased and using the war effort to excuse their bungling and excesses. She said my father looked so awful after each session that she insisted they be stopped. She was very angry about all of it. Maybe it wasn’t even syphilis. And if it was why hadn’t the Navy doctors told her? She too might have it—even me. She said the shock therapy was stupid and the hospital doctors were quacks. My mother didn’t ever like MD’s and for her own ailments she consulted only homeopaths and chiropractors. After a few weeks my father was back home. Cured or misdiagnosed I never knew. Nor did I ever understand what his eyes had to do with any of it. He wore the same glasses as before he went into the hospital.

Some time after the mysterious syphilis episode, but not because if it, my parents separated. I was nine, and nine, my mother said, was the worst age for a boy to lose his father. Nevertheless, she wanted to be on her own and was earning enough as a photographer to support the two of us. My father was out of work. I don’t know why. Maybe health problems—maybe the economy was going sour. Uncle Bill and Aunt Irene took him in on their farm for a few months. Then he found a job as a caretaker at a Christmas tree farm near Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit. I guess that was the low point in his working life. He lived in a small house trailer parked in a muddy clearing among the trees. I saw him on some weekends. Once a boy came to the trailer door and asked, “Can the kid come out and play?” My father embarrassed me by telling the boy that I was not a kid—that kids were young goats. Nevertheless, he let me go out, and later allowed the boy to come in—after we took off our muddy rubber boots. One Saturday morning my father took me to the Vernor’s bottling plant at the foot of Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit. We sat at a long green and yellow tiled counter—green and yellow were the Vernor’s company colors. We drank Cream-Ales: tall tumblers of Vernor’s each topped with a float of real cream. Through a glass wall behind the counter we watched a room full of stainless steel machinery convey an endless supply of green and yellow bottles as they were filled, crowned, inspected and dropped into cases. A crown, the counterman explained, was the proper term for what most people called a bottle cap.

In winter, my father offered to take me ice fishing on frozen Lake St. Clair but my mother didn’t think it was safe. I was relieved. It didn’t sound safe to me either. Especially as the fishermen built little campfires to warm themselves. I wondered why the fires didn’t melt the ice under their embers and fall into the lake. Regardless, the idea of hunching in the cold behind a windbreak and watching a bobber through a hole in the ice wasn’t appealing. It didn’t seem the sort of thing my father would enjoy either. He said that fish didn’t mind cold water—that they could even live through the winter frozen in ice. I believed this for years until an aquarium store clerk advised me that the most humane way to dispatch a sick goldfish was to freeze it. In summer, my father took me to a Tigers’ baseball game at Briggs Stadium. I remember it was a double-header against the Chicago Cubs. But how could that be? Only during the 1945 World Series did the Tigers play the Cubs, and surely, there was no double-header in the Series.

Weekend visits with my father often ended with me, and maybe him, feeling sad. I blamed my mother for divorcing him, him for leaving her, and myself for something—I didn’t know what. Once when he dropped me off he complained to my mother that I didn’t seem very happy. She said I was. He said he never heard me whistling. I said I did too whistle. Their bickering upset me. After he left I cried and yelled at my mother. Actually, whistling was never my habit. On those infrequent occasions when I caught myself in a little tune I remembered what my father said. Several years ago, my supervisor at work, wanting to add a little serendipity to my performance evaluation, wrote, “Whistles while he works,” and I remembered again.

My father had been attentive to me as a little boy and never harsh. I missed him. But I was also proud to be on my own with my mother. It was bold for just the two of us to take on the entire world. Sometimes she worried about catastrophes like the water heater exploding and shooting through the roof like a rocket. I said common sense things to reassure both of us and she pretended I had eased her concern.

A year after my father moved out he moved back in. Maybe my mother thought she had made a mistake—maybe because he was still unwell. They didn’t sleep together. An older woman came in as a chaperone and shared my mother’s bedroom. My mother actually used that word, “chaperone,” which sounded like someone who cared for children. My father slept on a rollaway bed in the dining room. The chaperon was a grumpy person and didn’t stay long. Then Cousin Margaret moved in to satisfy my mother’s need for respectability. Margaret was still in her teens, wasn’t getting along with Aunt Hilda and had quit high school to take a sales job at Crowley’s Department Store downtown. Each morning she left for work with her lunch in a brown paper bag. I thought Margaret was pretty and at sixteen she seemed very grown up. I liked having her there because she was cheerful and always nice to me. In a letter she wrote just a few years ago Margaret remembered my shooting her in the leg at close range with my BB gun—and me not seeming at all remorseful. But she was nice about remembering. To me niceness remains pretty important—despite a growing common sentiment that smartness, strength of character and assertiveness are of greater importance. I once told one of my daughter’s kindergarten teachers that I would remember her as, “Adelina the Nice.” She said she would prefer something more valiant. I didn’t argue. Nice seemed the highest honor.

To mark their reunion my parents drove together to London, Ontario to choose a set of Wedgwood china. My mother kept her seldom used Wedgwood behind glass on the shelves of a mahogany secretary—our finest piece of furniture. The desk part of the secretary had several pigeonholes and two secret compartments disguised as decorative cabinetwork. We kept our supply of postage stamps in one of the secret drawers.

I was with my father when he bought a ring for my mother. My recollection, somewhat cloudy, is that he bought the ring at a glass-topped jewelry counter in a Cunningham’s drug store. A drug store seems unlikely so maybe it was a department store—but I remember the store colors: green and white, which were Cunningham’s colors. My father didn’t seem very joyous as he made his purchase. Maybe he suspected that nothing would come of it. Nothing did. My mother decided against whatever plans they may have made and my father moved out again. She said she regretted the whole business: marriage, separation, reconciliation, change of heart—all of it. She felt sorry for him, for me, and for herself. Nevertheless, she didn’t want my father back and divorced him in court on grounds of mental cruelty. I thought cruelty had to do with meanness and that my mother had been the meaner. So why was he blamed? She explained that “ grounds” and “ mental cruelty” were simply legal conventions and that the wife almost always sued so as to get alimony and child support. Nevertheless, I judged her cruel and my father the victim. But then maybe he really didn’t care one way or the other—had just gone back and forth at the end of my mother’s tether—content to be either pulled in or let go. My mother said he was wishy-washy. Unable to make decisions. Maybe so. I don’t recall they ever had an argument—and only one hearty laugh: when we ran out of gas on the way to a costume party and my father had to push the car in his George Washington outfit.

After my parents divorced, I sometimes felt as if I had lost them both. My father because he was gone and my mother because I blamed her for his leaving. A distance developed between my mother and me that hadn’t been there before. It was as if loving either meant denying the other so the safe thing was to show little affection at all. Years later I speculated about the effect of all this on who I had become as an adult. Was it because I had been denied the model of a man in the house that I didn’t learn to be confident and unafraid among boys? And then, denied the Oedipal challenge, did I miss out on learning how to contend for a woman’s affection. The prettiest girls would go to the strong of heart. I would wait to be given a nod. To tender affection only when I was sure of requital. Otherwise I hung back—smitten but afraid. Or moved along to another place to stand and wait. Because I lived alone with my mother during my “formative years,” as people called them, I acquired my opinions, intuitions, and prejudices almost entirely from her. Even as I resisted her sway. Yet, even though his influence was slight, I became in demeanor and in manners and in how I saw myself in the world, more like my father: plain, bashful, and introverted. Not ambitious. Inquiring but seldom persistent. Unsure of how best to engage in the competitive scramble of whatever milieu surrounded me. I stood to the side. When teams were chosen for games and sports I hoped to be picked sooner than later but affected indifference. Mostly I was called somewhere in the middle. I wore a attitude of coolness. And by that armoring I often denied myself a full engagement in adventures and associations that I truly coveted. Grown up I would love, be faithful to and defend each partner in her turn. And my children and step-children—at least when they were young. But attachments to other adults, even to my children when they were grown, would be unenthusiastic. Little encouraged. There was a song that included lyrics something like, “…got along without you before I met you, I can get along without you now…,” which might well have been written for me. I didn’t want to do without and seldom did but always figured I could.

When I was of age I joined the Cub Scouts—but reluctantly and only when my mother agreed to become the Assistant Den Mother. I liked my blue uniform but I worried that neighborhood boys who were not Cubs might make fun of me. I wore it only at meetings—coming and going as invisibly as possible. As a Cub Scout project I made a letter holder for my father. With a coping saw, I cut two elephant profiles from plywood, glued and nailed an L shaped shelf between them and painted the whole thing gray. My father liked the letter holder and kept it for many years on his desk at home, always stuffed with mail. He named it “Gray Elephants” and with some pride he told people that I had made it just for him.

Another Cub Scout project was wishing well ivy pots made from one pound coffee cans. The can, two wood uprights, and a little gabled roof were nailed together, wrapped with brown string, and shellacked. Planted with ivy, the wells looked quite nice and I planed to make a bunch and sell them. However, after completing three I lost interest. My mother kept one and I gave the others to Grandma and Aunt Hilda. Despite my mother’s urging, I didn’t go on to Boy Scouts. Wouldn’t. I couldn’t memorize the Boy Scout Oath. She made me practice reciting but I kept forgetting, became embarrassed in front of her and refused to go on with it. She was disappointed. I didn’t care—Boy Scouts was dumb. Instead my neighborhood friends and I bought real army stuff from surplus stores and went on our own hikes and bivouacked without bossy leaders and dumb lectures to strengthen our characters. On our own we explored most of Ferndale, parts of The Peat Swamp and the adjoining sparse towns of Oak Park and Pleasant Ridge, which included the Detroit Zoo. We took an all day hike way east of Woodward on Eight Mile Road—out to where there were farms and orchards. I had filled my army canteen with pop and when I opened it for lunch sticky cola shot out all over me. In vacant lots and from the roof and back yard of my house we had reckless BB gun wars that no scoutmaster would ever have sanctioned.

I made a lot of model airplanes on West Troy. All kinds: solid, stick, and plastic. Both flying and shelf models. Fighters, bombers and my favorite, seaplanes. My mother encouraged me to read the printed instructions and to make each model look like the picture printed on the box it came in. She thought learning to follow directions was important and that having the model turn out well was good for my ego. She didn’t seem to understand that the model shown on the box had been made by an adult with a shop full of fancy tools and that even then the photos were probably retouched. Sometimes I did follow the plans, sometimes not, but either way I mostly felt good about the result—even if unconventional. If I made a construction mistake I could usually turn it to some advantage. When I was disappointed with how a model turned out, or just got tired of it, I took it to our roof, lit it afire and sailed it down into the yard. A moment of thrilling wartime realism. My mother favored Strombecker all-wood solid models—some bunk about the challenge and satisfaction of working with natural materials. But Strombecker models needed more sanding and fitting and finishing than I had tools and patience for and the results weren’t very realistic. I did, however, like making balsa wood stick models, which also took a lot of time and careful work. I thought it was balsam wood and argued with my mother about it and wouldn’t even look at the dictionary entry she offered as proof. Covering the fuselage and wings with tissue and getting it stretched taught with smelly airplane dope was a challenge. I liked to see the evidence of my structural handiwork under the taught skin. And then to dress the surface with the decals that were a part of the kit. Some kits came with several sets of decals to signify different nations and sometimes I put on a few extras.

I built one U-Control flying model and bought a McCoy model engine to power it. I attached the engine to our basement workbench and got it running in place. It made a lot of noise. I think my McCoy was a diesel. Instead of a spark plug and ignition system, more complex and problem prone, diesel’s used a simple glow plug. Regardless, running my McCoy on the work bench was as close as it ever got to lift-off. I did mount it my plane but rigging the U-control apparatus was beyond me. I needed more help than my mother could give and my father had moved away. He had no place where he could help me ready my plane to fly. Maybe that was a relief for both of us because I didn’t think he knew very much about models. Even though my plane never flew it looked pretty good and I was proud of my effort. My mother took its picture. My father did take me to several Saturday afternoon U-control flying meets. Most of the planes had been built and were flown by boys older than me and even by grown men. I liked watching them speed around, especially the stunt planes that could loop the loop. For years afterwards when I heard the undulating whine of a U-control plane off in a field somewhere I felt an urge to become a model maker again.

To help with my model making, I saved twenty-two dollars and bought a Dremel Moto-Tool—a high-speed hand-held drill with lots of different drilling, cutting, routing and grinding attachments. According to the information sheet glued to the inside top of its wooden box, my Moto-Tool turned at 22,000 rpm. I told this to my orthodontist but he disputed it. He said that the speed of his dental drill was not even a quarter what I claimed for my Moto-Tool. So what? I believed the Moto-Tool people. Once in a careless moment, the almost paper thin blue-steel saw blade of my Moto-Tool sliced deep into the end of my left hand ring finger. I felt it touch the bone. But there wasn’t much blood and it hardly hurt. It was a very clean cut, maybe because the blade turned so fast. No stitches. The scar left me with a distinctive fingerprint.

To supplement her income from picture taking my mother decided let out our front bedroom. She made an accommodation for herself with a rollaway bed and dresser behind a folding Chinese screen on our glassed-in front porch. Our room-and-boarder was a woman named Leah Russell. Leah was a war worker recently arrived in Detroit from Tennessee. A tall skinny blond. Just twenty, almost gaunt, almost pretty. My mother took a picture of Leah wearing a cute little heart-shaped hat and it was printed in The Detroit News on Valentine’s Day. Leah was fun—young and perky. We had pillow fights in our pajamas. Wrestling about with her was exciting. She made sly sport of my little erection. An amusement. My mother, probably wanting to save me from embarrassment, said it was time to stop the pummeling and go to bed. I was disappointed to quit.

Sometimes Leah helped with supper. She was a very different kind of cook from my mother. She peeled the potatoes before boiling them, whipped them creamy white with milk and served them as smooth white hills on our plates with little pools of melting butter in dents on their tops. They were delicious. My mother boiled potatoes whole. Better for us, she claimed, because most of a vegetable’s vitamins and minerals were right under the skin. Her mashed potatoes were yellow, lumpy and had bits of peel in them. After Leah had moved away, my mother, despite her health-nut habits, sometimes cooked peeled creamy-white mashed potatoes just for me. We called them “Leah-Potatoes.”

Leah had a boyfriend who was also from Tennessee. Together they took me for a long summer weekend to visit the Russell family farm near Knoxville. It was an all night drive. Leah had a large family who were dirt poor and looked right out of a LIFE magazine pictorial about Appalachia: nephews who wore overalls without underwear and neices in dresses made from flower sacks. The younger children didn’t even wear shoes. The Russells carried drinking water to their house in buckets filled from a spigot at the mouth of a cave a hundred yards away. The cave had a spring-fed lake in it. When we walked there the boys told me to watch out for copperheads. Copperheads, they said, smelled like watermelons—or maybe it was cucumbers. I neither saw nor smelled any copperheads. One of the boys showed he could swing a bucket of water around and up over his head without spilling a drop. I showed him I could do the same. I had learned how at Uncle Bill’s farm. I said it was the force of the spin that kept the water in the pail but he was more interested in showing that he could do it with a fuller bucket.

On Saturday evening we went fishing with a dozen of Leah’s family and friends. The men stood in the river where it ran shallow and clear over a gravelly bottom, lured the fish with little carbon-arc lamps and then shot them with .22 rifles. They used flashlights to night-blind bullfrogs so they wouldn’t jump and then stabbed them with long three-prong spears. Later there was a fish fry on the riverbank. The cut off frog’s legs danced around on a sizzling hot sheet of metal supported on rocks over a wood fire. “Still alive!” someone said. I wouldn’t eat them. Back at her parents’ farm, Leah and her boyfriend and I and the younger children slept on straw in the barn.

In Tennessee I smoked my first cigarette. One of Leah’s nephews gave it to me outside the water cave. Leah found out and scolded us both, but she didn’t tell my mother.

When we got back to Detroit, Leah announced that she and her boyfriend had been married for over a month. That’s why they had gone to Tennessee—to tell her family. Leah laughed at my surprise. Didn’t I know they couldn’t have slept together in the barn if they weren’t married? I didn’t get it.

Leah moved out of our house to live with her new husband and my mother returned to her own bedroom.

Grandma and Grandpa Elvin (who was never simply Grandpa but always “Grandpa Elvin” because he was a step-grandfather) lived with Great Uncle Willie who was Grandpa Elvin’s older brother. Besides Elvin and Willie there was another brother, Clement, who lived down the street. I don’t remember Clement; he was just an old-fashioned name in the grown-up’s conversations. They pronounced it Clem-ent, like the Pope, not Cle-ment like the street in San Francisco. Many years later Cousin Margaret corrected me: Clement was not Grandpa Elvin’s brother but his nephew. She said Clement was a bore and a braggart but that she often played with his daughters, Dorothy and June. Cousin Margaret was seventy-seven when she told me this and she went on to boast that she right then had three boyfriends: one who took her dancing during the day at a senior center, another who took her to dinner and dancing on weekend evenings at an Elk’s Club lodge and another who was somewhat infirm but who called her several times each day to gossip. Margaret’s boasting was OK because she made a joke of it. Uncle Willie’s big brick house was on Morrell Avenue close to downtown Detroit, near West Grand Boulevard and just a few blocks from where a huge majestic iron stove stood silver and shiny-black on a grassy knoll in front of the Detroit Stove Works. Uncle Willie’s doorbell had a butterfly-shaped handle that you twisted to make the ring. We seemed always to visit Grandma and Grandpa Elvin on gloomy Sunday afternoons and the frilly-shaded indoor lamps were always lighted. Uncle Willie always wore a suit and always sat in his own chair in his own corner of the living room. He seldom said anything because he was nearly deaf and couldn’t follow the conversation. When Uncle Willie died I went to my first funeral. It was the only time I saw Uncle Willie out of his chair but he was still wearing his suit. It was a rainy day.

Grandma was very old, seventy-four when I was ten. She was frail, bird-like, chattered constantly and was always treated as if she were a special guest—even in her own home. She too had her own chair in her own corner of the living room where she sat and sewed patchwork quilts. I didn’t think her quilts were very well made because she took such big stitches but Aunt Hilda found buyers for them. I guess they had a folksy handmade charm. Ranged along the living room walls there were shelves and bureaus and cabinets where Grandma kept dozens and dozens of drawers, trays, tins and boxes of sewing things: buttons, spools, stays and snaps; pins and needles stuck in fancy pin-cushions; corks, beads, rickrack, and lots of oriental knick-knacks. Grandma was “Edwardian.” She liked things “Chinee” and “Japonee.” She laughed a silly high laugh very like my mother’s, and she lived to be a month short of ninety-nine. Her name was Maud but I never heard anyone say it. Not even Grandpa Elvin. Years later my mother wrote of Grandma: “She never allowed Grandpa Elvin into her bedroom. Even when she was sick he could only stand at the door and ask how she was.” My mother complained that Grandma and Aunt Hilda never talked about anything of substance but just chitter-chattered above the busyness of their quilting and knitting. That’s pretty much all I remember about Grandma. Beyond her collection of knick-knacks she was too old to interest me.

Grandpa Elvin was a printer and had his own letterpress shop. I can just remember it: two large platen presses, several cabinets of California Job Cases filled with type, buckets of pi in the corners and inky paper clutter everywhere. Grandpa Elvin showed me how to set type in a hand-held composing stick: the letters upside-down and the words reading from right to left. He also taught me long division and how to play checkers. He sometimes gave me a little advantage but generally he played as if I were his equal—and generally he won. To the contrary, my mother, who taught me chess, usually let me win. I liked to win. Unless her patronizing was blatant and then I complained. Once, needing to attend something else, she wound up a game in a flourish and I was angry. Both because she was so cavalier about her victory and because her being able to whip me so easily made my own past winnings a sham. My mother thought checkers was a simple game and that Grandpa Elvin was a simple man. Kind and generous, but simple. Unlike her real father, Sam, who had been a talented musician and a champion chess player. One Christmas Grandpa Elvin gave me a bible. A fancy “Red Letter Edition” in which all the words spoken by Jesus were printed in red.

In his eighties, Grandpa Elvin took up painting. He used opaque watercolors and copied illustrations and advertisements from magazines: landscapes, interiors, bathing beauties, cars and buildings—whatever caught his eye. Sometimes he even painted directly on the magazine page, changing things to suit himself. I have one of his pictures, a rural scene that reminds me of Uncle Bill’s farm because of a triangular green pasture like the field out by the Old Forrest Road. I also have a painting, copied from a photograph my mother took of Grandpa Elvin and Grandma standing on the front lawn of our house on West Troy. I used to think that Grandpa Elvin painted the West Troy house picture, but he didn’t and I don’t know who did. When Grandpa Elvin was in his nineties my mother took a photograph of him standing at his easel in the back yard—as if he were painting from nature. The picture was published in the Ferndale weekly newspaper along with my mother’s story about him, which didn’t acknowledge that really he copied from magazines. After Grandpa Elvin died my mother threw away most of his pictures. She shouldn’t have. They had folksy charm that lots of people might have appreciated. Primitive. I kept a few, including one of a bathing beauty with a quite peculiar, almost grotesque face. But all were lost in the turmoil around my second divorce—all except the landscape that reminds me of Uncle Bill’s farm. Actually, I think my angry wife threw out a bunch of my belongings, including Grandpa Elvin’s paintings. But then it was she who had arranged to have my boys frame the farm and house paintings, which otherwise might now be gone with the rest.

In his youth Grandpa Elvin had been quite an adventurer. In the 1890’s he tramped around the American West and even prospected for gold in Alaska. Dolly, his daughter from his first marriage, still lived in Fairbanks during the 1940’s when we were on West Troy. Dolly was married to a man named Virgil Brewer whom my mother had once met and didn’t care for. We had a glamorous photo of Dolly, showing off her pretty legs, in an Old West dance hall costume. My mother said Dolly had been a vaudeville dancer—maybe even burlesque. I wrote several times to Aunt Dolly, wanting letters from a glamorous relation in a far away place, but she wasn’t very good about answering. In her old age, Aunt Dolly, who had separated from Virgil and pretty much lost her mind, moved to New York City where she lived with her boyfriend in a furnished room. Aunt Hilda traveled to New York to check up on Dolly. She discovered the boyfriend was also crazy, but that together they were managing. While she was there Aunt Hilda cut away an old wig that Dolly’s hair had grown into and said she found a nest of cockroaches in the tangle. My mother thought the “Authorities” ought to be called but no one knew who the Authorities might be or how they might help. Aunt Hilda argued that Dolly and her boyfriend were doing OK on their own and should be left alone. My mother said Hilda was uncaring, but then she hadn’t even gone to visit. I don’t know what happened to Aunt Dolly.

Grandpa Elvin had some cousins in Coventry, England and during the war I became a pen pal of one of their children, Colin P. Cashmere, a boy my own age. Being pen pals with children in war ravaged England was supposed to be cheering to them. Colin P. Cashmere and I exchanged several letters—mostly drawings of army tanks and fighter planes. Colin’s letters and drawings were always on a single piece of very thin paper that was then folded to become its own envelope—wartime stationery intended to save paper and mailing bulk. My mother called it “onion skin” but it really wasn’t—just thin. Colin and I started a game of checkers by mail but nothing came of it. Maybe because the war ended. I also corresponded with a second cousin on my mother’s side, Trevor Jones, who lived in Wembley, Middlesex. As with Colin P. Cashmere, Trevor Jones and I exchanged more pictures than words. I didn’t like writing Middlesex on the envelope—it was embarrassing somehow.

Aunt Hilda, who had been a widow since shortly after Cousin Margaret was born, worked at the Michigan Central Railway Depot in downtown Detroit. She always said “depot,” never station, and at work she was called Madeline, never Hilda. M was her middle initial but I don’t know if it stood for Madeline. Maybe she thought Hilda had a domestic or shop-girl ring to it while Madeline better suited a professional working woman. Hilda at home, Madeline at work. Both Aunt Hilda and Madeline chiefly wore purple and always carried very large purses. Madeline was the New York Central reservations supervisor on the afternoon shift. I went to visit her and took an elevator from the depot lobby to her upstairs office. An elevator run by a uniformed operator. And an elevator captain who decided when it was time for each lift to depart. Madeline’s desk, raised on a half-foot high platform, faced two rows of reservation clerks who sat on stools at upright telephone patch-boards with blinking colored lights and snaky black plug-in cables. The girls wore headsets and fingered through the dog-eared pages of dense time and fare schedules as they talked with callers. Aunt Hilda sat knitting at her supervisor’s desk and could always take as much time as she wanted to entertain me. The perfumed clerks fussed over me because I was Madeline’s nephew. I liked going to the Depot. The main concourse was grand, the ceiling was wonderfully high and the bustle of hurrying people echoed around me. I imagined being on my own and going to one of the destinations announced over the booming public address system.

Aunt Hilda lived in a tidy downtown apartment convenient to her job at the Depot. When we visited her Aunt Hilda’s boyfriend, Elmer, who wouldn’t be Uncle Elmer for some years to come, was always there. He had his own place somewhere and an absent spouse whom I vaguely understood was locked up in an institution. I wondered why Elmer didn’t get a divorce but no one ever talked about it. Later I learned that Elmer’s wife had been the midwife who delivered Aunt Hilda’s daughter Margaret, in 1926. So many odd connections. Aunt Hilda seemed to accept people just as they were so they all liked her and stuck around as friends for years and years. When we arrived at Aunt Hilda’s apartment Elmer always made cocktails. He never forgot to make pretend drinks for Cousin Margaret and me: Shirley Temples and Roy Rogers. He and Aunt Hilda often laughed about things I said. I thought one of her big purses looked like a canoe and they laughed at that. Aunt Hilda knitted at home just as she did at work. I sat on the floor in front of her chair and held a skein of yarn on my up-turned fingers while she wound it off and into a ball. My gaze followed her silkstockinged legs up under her dress. I thought my mother was the prettier sister but that Aunt Hilda was more glamorous. She was a very expert knitter and what things she didn’t give away to people who were getting married or having babies she sold to a buyer at Hudson’s Department Store in downtown Detroit.

Elmer was tall and good-looking in a leathery outdoor way. He worked as machinist in a tool and die shop. Every fall Elmer went deer hunting with a group of work friends. Once he offered to take me. I said I wanted to go, though really I didn’t, and thankfully my mother said I couldn’t. She thought there would be too much drinking and that it wouldn’t be safe. I did, however, go one November weekend with Elmer to visit his family in Terre Haute, Indiana. Elmer was a Hoosier. He took me out Saturday afternoon and we hunted squirrels with 410 gauge shotguns. Elmer said that truly the best way to take a squirrel was to “Bark it with a .22.” Which meant, he explained, that instead of shooting the squirrel itself, you hit the tree branch under its feet. The bullet crashing through the limb would stun the squirrel to the ground where you banged him on the head for a kill. Barking was best because squirrels were so small that you didn’t want to mess them up with bullet holes. And also because you wouldn’t, as we might for using shotguns, need to pick birdshot out of your teeth at the table. The stuff about barking squirrels might have been a hunter’s joke. I didn’t shoot a squirrel that Saturday. Maybe Elmer did, maybe not, but we did on Sunday eat squirrel at his mother’s table that included a few tiny pellets of lead that stuck in our teeth.

Cousin Margaret married a man named Egon, whom we all, except his mother, called Johnny. Johnny was in the army. When the war ended Johnny and Margaret rented a house on Lewiston Street, on the East Side of Ferndale. Johnny’s mother, Mrs. Hildebrandt, lived with them. My mother said Mrs. Hildebrandt was a pill and that Margaret was very long-suffering to have her in the house. Mrs. Hildebrandt mostly spoke German with Egon and ill of Margaret who was right there but didn’t understand a word. When we went to Cousin Margaret’s for Sunday dinner Johnny often played catch with me on the front sidewalk. Catcher to my pitching. Johnny was six-feet, four and had been a baseball player with the US Occupation Forces in Japan. He said the Japanese teams were very good.

When he was in Japan Johnny paid an artist to draw a pastel chalk portrait of Cousin Margaret from a photograph of her that my mother had taken. He sent the drawing to Margaret and everyone thought it was very good. However, when Johnny came home he decided he didn’t like the picture and he wouldn’t have it in his house. Margaret gave the picture to Aunt Hilda who kept it on her living room wall. My mother said Johnny disliked the picture because the artist had made Margaret’s eyes too slanty. She added that Johnny disliked the Japanese and he thought Margaret shouldn’t be pictured like one of them. When we visited Aunt Hilda my mother offered these anecdotal speculations to anyone who took note of the picture. Provided that Johnny wasn’t in the room. Her telling hinted at some concealment concerning the portrait, or Johnny’s personality, or his relations with the artist, or with Japanese women. Aunt Hilda countered that my mother’s guesswork was nonsense. In private, I thought my mother’s ideas were interesting but on the spot I agreed with Aunt Hilda. There was something about Aunt Hilda’s down to earthiness that appealed to me and I liked to curry her favor. Once my mother said I had hurt her feelings by siding with Aunt Hilda about something or other. She said I had done it just to be mean and that I should care more about her feelings—she was my mother. I did care. I believed she was the better person of the two and that probably many of her resentments toward Aunt Hilda were sound. But I continued to admire Aunt Hilda and, alone with her in conversation, I was sometimes disloyal to my mother.

Margaret and Johnny had four children: three tall boys and one tall girl. When the children were grown, Egon, who was no longer called Johnny, divorced Margaret, married a woman he worked with at Montgomery Ward, and moved to Orlando, Florida. Egon was the sort of man my mother found attractive: a strong silent type—but “vital.” However, she judged him neither a caring husband nor an understanding father—too rigid and too German. She thought Cousin Margaret was a simple and passive girl but she also often remarked how loving and patient Margaret was with her children. My mother admired in Margaret some strength of character behind her apparent selflessness—both of which qualities, my mother several times acknowledged, especially self-sacrifice, were rather wanting in herself. And, she might add, were lacking in me also. Margaret, in turn, was always kind to my mother even though she knew my mother thought her simple—and knew my mother knew she knew.

As my mother believed neither she nor I had a stalwart character I wondered if that’s why we were both so willful toward each other. Since we hadn’t much character to guide us we cultivated our will to keep on safe ground. And by that steady conscious denied ourselves a risky spontaneity that others seemed to enjoy. Maybe bunk.

My first friend on West Troy was Don Snyder. Don’s family lived next door, on the other side from where the Finnish lady lived with her beautiful blond daughter. Don was a year older than me. His father operated a small drayage business and several trucks were kept in their driveway and back yard garage. Various truck-driving and truck-repairing uncles often came and went. The Snyders were friendly and generous neighbors and all of them, including Mr. Snyder, played a musical instrument. But Mr. and Mrs. Snyder were beer drinkers and my mother thought them coarse. She said Don was a devious boy and not a good influence on me. He was pretty tough. Once, enjoying a cigarette while polishing his shoes on the back porch, Don was surprised by a truck-driving uncle coming up the outside steps. To keep from being caught Don crushed out his cigarette in the palm of his hand. He couldn’t even flinch, he said, because the uncle might notice. Don showed me the blister.

I spent a weekend with the Snyder family at their summer cabin. Don and I went out early Sunday morning for a smoke and to explore. We balanced our way across the top of a dam that spanned a broad creek. It was a daring feat. An inch of ice-cold water rushed over the spillway and pushed hard against our shoes. One slip would send us four feet into the pool below. On the other side we smashed the rear window of a beat up old car. I had never seen tempered glass shatter before—thousands and thousands of tiny sparkling pieces. I guess some of what Don and I did together was mischievous and often it was he who led the way—just as my mother had warned.

In winter I missed a strip-poker party at Don’s house where his younger sister Jean took off her blouse. Underneath she wore only a brassiere. I wished I had been there. I had never seen a brassiere with a live girl inside it and I would have liked to see Jean in hers. She was a tomboy and a little tough herself—but cute-tough. I couldn’t understand why she took off her blouse when she might have revealed less by removing her skirt. I figured she wore a half-slip. A boy who was there said she probably wanted to show off her tits but I didn’t think Jean was like that. I would have been more thrilled to see her bottom half in a short clingy slip than her top half in a bra. Unless it was a lacy flirty one and she probably didn’t wear those. Or, better still, her bottom half wearing just panties. I dreamed impossible dreams. Anyway, I hadn’t even been invited to the strip poker party because it was mostly Don’s older friends and because by then I had transferred to a private school and was more and more left out of neighborhood goings on. Probably I wouldn’t have played strip poker anyway.

That same winter Jean Snyder and I fell together on an ice pond and the point of her skate went right through my lower lip. A bunch of us were playing crack-the-whip and I was holding Jean’s hand when we went down in a tangle. There was some blood but it didn’t hurt much, maybe because it was so cold. I got two stitches and had a little scar for years.

Long after I moved from West Troy, I saw Don Snyder once again. He had quit high school, joined the Navy, and sailed around the world on an aircraft carrier. He was home on leave. We talked and had a smoke in his basement. Don played clarinet in the aircraft carrier band and made extra money aboard ship by giving haircuts. He had a plan for when he got out of the Navy: go to barber college, work two years for an established barber to get experience and save up, and then open his own shop in Ferndale.

Don also told me that just the day before my visit he had gone to the Michigan State Fair, been picked up by the sideshow bearded lady and that they screwed in her circus trailer. He said she didn’t really have a beard and was a great lay. Don seemed a lot more grown up than me and I envied him that. But I didn’t think I would have gone to bed with a circus lady, bearded or not. And I wasn’t at all sure how to behave with a “great lay.” She might laugh at my bungling.

Gordon Gobi lived up near the corner of our block and was always outside. He wasn’t allowed to have friends into his house. He didn’t even seem comfortable being in my house. Jack Logan lived across the street and a few houses down. His older brother, who was in the Army and very bossy when he came home on furlough, made wooden guns for us to play with but painted them red so they couldn’t easily be lost in either summer or winter. Stupid. Who ever heard of a red gun? Jack was proud of his bossy, stupid brother but I couldn’t understand why—maybe because I was an only child. Bob Latta lived directly across the street and had lots of toys but a bothersome little sister. He mostly liked to play indoors so he was sort of a foul weather friend. “Fat Latta” we called him. My mother liked the Latta family but I didn’t. Over time Robert Macdonald became my closest friend, in part, because our mothers were chummy and had similar ideas about progressive child-rearing. They let Robert and I camp out overnight in the Peat Swamp. We set up my army pup tent, dug a drainage ditch around it with our army folding trench shovels and circled the area with a rope to ward off snakes—just in case. We made a fire to heat water and the C-rations we had bought at an army surplus store. If things got rough we figured we could survive on boiled swamp water and hollyhock “cheeses,” though we were only a few blocks from home.

Except in winter, there was almost always at least one new house under construction in our neighborhood. These sites were seldom fenced and on weekends and in the evenings after the workers went home we neighborhood boys played guns and tag in the half-built houses. We raced around and balanced along the top of two-by-four new-framed walls and jumped from place to place. Sometimes a neighbor threatened to call the police and we ran off. When the workers were there we watched them do their jobs and saw how houses got built—from pouring the concrete footings all the way to the interior finish work.

In spring we played marbles. I was pretty good but hadn’t much staying power. I often lost my accumulated winnings with a grandstand shot. In general I wasn’t very competitive and boys who were overly earnest about games and sports annoyed me. I envied the homage they received but often they seemed stuck on themselves. I didn’t like rough-and-tumble sports. Not because of the roughness, I could take a few bruises, but because of the aggressive sweaty contact. Whatever the sport or game, I was satisfied if not chosen last for a team, to do better than some, make a few good plays and maintain my nonchalance. I got enough praise to realize I enjoyed it but I didn’t chase after it. I didn’t take risks. Looking bad after an obvious exertion could be embarrassing but if the effort had been casual my dignity was maintained.

In summer we played mumblety-peg on our front lawn with jack-knives. My annoyingly English mother called them penknives. The loser in mumblety-peg had to use his teeth to pull a wooden match driven flush into the ground—dirt, grass and all. Several times during spring and summer the Duncan yo-yo company sent out young men to demonstrate fancy tricks and sell yo-yos. We admired their skill. I learned that throwing a good sleeper and walking-the-dog were tests of a properly twisted string and that a properly twisted string was the key to success for all yo-yo tricks.

I, Gordon Gobi from up the street and another boy, who’s name I can’t remember, formed a club that met in an abandoned milk company cold storage locker on Nine Mile Road. Smoking cigarettes and digging foxholes and forts in the field behind the milk locker were our main activities. We smoked Luckys; eighteen cents a pack at the store, twenty from a machine; or Wings, wartime cigarettes that were only fifteen cents but didn’t taste so good. Once when I was digging inside one of our tunnels I became aware, not with my mind but in some intuitive, almost visceral way, that if the dirt caved in I could be buried alive. I felt a panic in my chest, crawled right out and afterwards was less adventurous. There was something deeply dreadful about tunnels. Probably people feel the same about mines and caves and dark holes in general.

A tomboy girl who lived nearby asked to join our club. Gordon and the boy whose name I can’t recall said she had to show she could touch her elbows behind her back. I didn’t get it. It was so we could see how big her breasts were. Knockers we called them. She didn’t exactly sport anything of a size to be called knockers but she wasn’t shy about showing what she did have. She held her tee-shirt tight across her chest so long I worried maybe more than just looking might be expected of us boys. Maybe down in a scary tunnel or inside the milk locker.

On Saturdays I often went with several friends to a matinee at one of Ferndale’s two movie theaters. Walking home afterwards we played out the action of the serials that carried over from one Saturday cliffhanger to the next. Shooting, fighting and swordplay with sticks. There was one Arabian Desert serial in which the Western hero demonstrated the power of his sword by cleaving smartly through a stout metal object. The sinister Arab anti-hero countered by tossing a filmy silk scarf into the air, which then fell lightly onto his slender blade and was neatly sliced in half. The Western hero, of course, eventually prevailed but I coveted a weapon like that of the evil Arab. That movie scene somehow encouraged a vague notion that Western was masculine, Eastern feminine, and Middle Eastern homosexual—a queer nascent mythology in my murky sub-conscious. Halfway home from the movie theater, we passed the haunted house at the corner of Nine Mile and Ridge Roads. It sat up on a rise—big, rangy, and rickety. Supposedly a crazy old man lived there and we did sometimes see a lighted window in the evening but we never saw him. We talked of sneaking into the house some night because there was probably a lot of money hidden there. Once at Halloween we actually did go up onto the porch and looked in several windows. But we saw no one and didn’t do any harm to the house.

The evening before Halloween was called Doorbell Night. We roamed the neighborhood bent on mischief. We soaped car and house windows with dirty words, tipped over trash cans and flower pots, made stink bombs from my mother’s discarded camera film and burned them under open windows. We placed paper bags of dog droppings on front porches, set them afire, rang the door bell and hid—hoping to see someone stamp out the flames—best of all with a slippered or stockinged foot. Some older boys said they put sugar in gas tanks but I didn’t believe them. Sugar was said to coat the cylinder walls with carbon and ruin the engine. The next evening, Halloween, we went in costume back to those same houses we had vandalized the night before and begged, “Help the poor,” for candy and pennies. I never heard of, “Trick or Treat,” until I was grown up. It seemed a tame compared to the mischief of Doorbell Night, which in stories told by uncles and older cousins had once included toppling over outhouses. Now children even recite “Happy Halloween”—not even a threat of mischief.

My mother bought me a Schwinn bicycle in used but good condition. I took it apart, painted it black but wouldn’t put the fenders back on. I had some trouble with the brake too. A New Departure Coaster Brake. The possible meanings of New Departure puzzled me. Departure didn’t fit with brake. I didn’t realize it was just a brand name. My mother said I had gone too far with my painting and customizing and that my bike didn’t look good. I argued that the result was just what I had intended. She said I was rationalizing a botched job, which infuriated me. Then she said my anger proved I knew she was right. She asked the opinion of my friend Robert Macdonald. Robert agreed with her but so what, he didn’t even own a bike.

Ruth Nicholson lived five blocks away on Hazelhurst Avenue. Ruth was tall, pretty, with long dark hair, and had lots of saucy energy. I rode over there after supper on my black fender-less bike. Lots of kids hung out at Ruth’s house—even more boys than girls. Maybe she liked it that way. We played kick-the-can in the street and spin-the-bottle on her front porch. Ruth and the few other girls kissed us boys quite earnestly. I was timid. Once there was even a game of Post Office. If the recipient identified the sender they went behind the porch glider to smooch. I was not a winner—maybe on purpose. Before Ruth, I had kissed only my mother and her grown up lady friends. Because of the almost fearsome pleasures Ruth and her girlfriends tendered to those with courage, I tried to enhance my attractiveness: peroxide to lighten my hair and lemon juice to bleach the babyish freckles on my nose and cheeks. But I never enjoyed more than a few awkward kisses on Ruth’s porch.

Jack Haley was a handsome, wholesome boy who lived across the street and half way up the block toward the Peat Swamp. One summer Jack and I made what we called, “Boing! Hearts.” They were for flirting with girls. We got the idea from those frolicking little hearts that hover about comic strip characters to portray love at first sight. Jack and I cut two grapefruit size valentine shapes from plywood, painted them red, attached each to a mattress spring and then the springs to belts, which we buckled around our chests. The idea was to keep the spring compressed under a loose unbuttoned shirt, then, by pulling a string from inside our pants pocket, to let the heart spring forward, Boing! to show a girl we liked her. But we were unable to fashion a release device that worked and had to content ourselves with wearing the Boing! Hearts already sprung out and dancing about before us as we walked along. Actually, I never used my Boing! Heart on anyone other than my mother, our roomer Leah Russell and Jack Haley’s older sister. My mother and Leah thought it was wonderful and Jack’s sister almost did. “Boing!” was also our neighborhood slang for the sudden erections that the presence of a pretty girl often provoked. We exclaimed, “Boing!” and then walked around with a stiff leg—pretending to have a giant hard-on that reached so far down one pant leg that we couldn’t bend our knee.

Jack’s sister was a beautiful blond teenager, almost out of high school and who had a summer job. She kept a sex book, maybe one of the Kinsey Reports, in her bedroom dresser. Jack and I read parts of it while she was at work. We even told her but she couldn’t do anything to us because her parents didn’t know she had the book. I was struck by a diagram that showed the days during a woman’s menstrual cycle when she most desired intercourse—just before and just after her period. I remembered, or perhaps mis-remembered, that chart for years because it puzzled me. I figured that a woman’s appetite for sex would be strongest midway between periods, when I supposed she was most likely to conceive. Wasn’t that what Darwin would say? My mother had told me a few things about natural selection and other reproduction stuff but I asked no questions. Surely the book’s author, Kinsey or who ever it was, wouldn’t be wrong. Something to think about. Over the years I would often ruminate about such puzzlements as “New Departure” bicycle brakes and the nature of female passion. Usually I was content to speculate and made little effort to discover the truth. If later I chanced upon some relevant information it was a pleasant surprise

As an early teen I thought older girls, beautiful blonds like Jack’s sister and the Finnish bride next door were the most desirable. Full-blown—like models and pin-up girls. But as I passed into and beyond middle age it was younger and younger girls who captured my interest. Another puzzlement I’ve never delved into.

After school on dark winter West Troy afternoons I listened to radio programs: Superman, Don Winslow, Challenge of the Yukon and Captain Midnight. As instructed by a solid-voiced announcer, I sent twenty-five cents, “in stamp or coin,” and two cereal box tops to get a code ring with which to decipher the secret messages broadcast at the conclusion of each Captain Midnight episode. At the Post Office I bought little cardboard folders with depressions in them that held various size coins snug so that no one would know there was cash in the envelope. I wondered what the Captain Midnight people did with all the stamps they got? Maybe they used them to mail back the code rings. My West Troy friends and I are probably about the last generation who cannot help remembering The Lone Ranger when we hear the William Tell Overture. There was even a William Tell Overture joke: something about a row of naked ladies who faced either back or front according to the melody:

In the evenings I, and sometimes my mother, listened to The Aldrich Family, The Shadow, and Suspense. Sometimes we listened to The Railroad Hour, light classical music that my mother wanted me to appreciate. I did enjoy it, without saying so, and often slipped into a romantic mood that such music seemed to invite.

For two months I took coronet lessons. I wanted trumpet. I wanted to play jazz like Louis Armstrong. I had gone to a Louis Armstrong concert at the Fox Theater downtown. On stage, Louis sweated a lot and when he wiped his brow with a handkerchief, he made a joke about hoping his Man-Tan wouldn’t rub off. Man-Tan was a popular sun-tan-in-a-bottle lotion—like shoe polish. I had never heard of a famous coronet player and I didn’t like its shape—too stubby. But the music teacher said coronet was a better horn to start with and my mother agreed. Practicing was more work than I was up for and the results were disappointing. I couldn’t even learn our first tune, “God Bless America.” The teacher was impatient. After only a few lessons I made a big stink and quit. For years afterwards I believed that my right index finger had become twisted from straining to reach the coronet valves. Evidence that I had suffered for my art.

I never took up another instrument except a jew’s-harp. I liked the tingle its twang gave my teeth. Now and then I twanged simply to annoy my mother. Some people called it “a jaw harp”—maybe because they thought jew’s -harp was offensive.

After I quit my coronet lessons, we kept the rented horn for two more months. Without benefit of instruction, I taught myself to play Taps. It was wartime and Taps had a military pomp that pleased me. I once blew taps out our front door at sunrise. Revile would have been a better choice but I only knew Taps. I was awake because I thought I heard a baby cry outside. I imagined a foundling in a basket on the Finnish lady’s doorstep and went to look. It was a cat. Cats and babies sometimes sound very much alike. Even to cats. I’ve seen them perk up their ears to baby cries—as if it might be one of their own. Anyway, since I was up, something urged me to take out my coronet and play Taps. My mother was annoyed. Neither she nor I were early risers. On dark winter mornings we sometimes got up so late that the milk left on our steps by the milkman had grown a two-inch neck of frozen cream pushing up from the neck of the glass bottle. The round cardboard cap sat on top like a little hat.

Years later, during my last week of Coast Guard boot camp, I was alone on evening guard duty when taps sounded and I remembered the early morning cat who had cried like an infant. I got all maudlin about growing up, leaving home, being on my own and wondering what the future held. And years after that I felt a similar sentimental ooze when I read From Here to Eternity—of Private Prewitt playing Taps at Schofield Barricks. Bugle calls are the very stuff of patriotic melt. Bagpipes too. My father liked piping. And was, as I, inclined to sentimentality. And, as I would be, careful to keep such feelings private.

My mother took me to as many cultural events as she could afford and I would agree to attend. The symphony once or twice; The Nutcracker and Swan Lake; several slide-show travelogues at the International Institute, and two Gilbert and Sullivan operas when the D’Oly Carte company came to Detroit. Maybe it was another company we saw and she only talked about D’Oly Carte: the best, she said. I thought it was a silly name. For weeks after seeing Pinafore, whenever I said “Never,” my mother sang back, “What, never?” and then, when I refused to play, she answered for me in a deepish voice, “Well, hardly ever.” We went to see Joe E. Brown. I said it was “Joey” Brown and lost a bet with my mother. She told me what she knew and felt about Marian Anderson and Maria Tallchief, whose name, I was sure, must be made-up because who ever heard of a woman Indian chief. We saw “Lost Horizon” at a movie theater and I had nightmares about an ancient monk’s stumpy leg bone that had peeked out from under his Tibetan robe. We sometimes went to the Newsreel where the latest Pathé News was repeated every half-hour all around the clock. My mother said that bums and hobos slept in the Newsreel Theater. She seldom took me to popular movies. She disliked Disney except for Fantasia and a nature documentary called, “The Living Desert,” which had a gruesome scene of a snake eating a rodent. When my mother ate raw carrots, she often spoke with a silly Bugs Bunny voice—“What’s up Doc?” We saw a performance of “Cyrano de Bergerac” and afterwards my mother went on at length about the metaphorical meaning of, “My white plume,” which line she spoke with dramatic measured. Many years later I saw a production of “Cyrano” in which “Panache” was substituted for “My white plume.” Maybe it was an effort to better translate Rostand but it didn’t work for me.

My mother said it was important for me to have these enrichments: child-size windows onto the classics of Western culture. Gilbert and Sullivan, Edmond Rostand, A. A. Milne, and even the Newsreel would stretch and temper my aesthetic discrimination and social awareness. When we went to Hudson’s Department Store she wanted me to appreciate the differences between quality and shoddy merchandise. Entering from the street I liked to go around twice in the revolving doors or pretend to get an arm or leg caught in the pinch. Inside we raced to whatever upper floor we were destined: she in an elevator against me sprinting up the escalators. I always won because she thought it was good for me to win. She made up things like the elevator having been extra full and stopping at every floor. She told me about a man’s head being cut off by a rising car whose doors hadn’t fully closed. The severed head rolled around on the elevator floor and people screamed. I wasn’t sure I believed that story but regardless we were each other’s best audience. In all the big downtown stores there were pneumatic tubes that ran every which way just under the ceiling and dropped down to ports at each cash register. My mother noted the spelling of pneumatic—like pneumonia. At their cash registers the sales ladies put checks and papers into foot long canisters and sent them shooting through the tubes to some out of sight location. Moments later the missile returned with an approval or maybe change for a large bill. I wondered how the canisters knew where to go and why they didn’t bump into each other. Every so often an electric chime sounded a combination of two or three bongs. My mother said they were code messages to floorwalkers about the presence of suspected shoplifters. Very occasionally, she took me to a fancy restaurant for lunch. I liked sitting among good-looking well-dressed women and to pretend we were of their station. My mother always looked and behaved as if she belonged but sometimes I worried her act was too contrived and that people might laugh at us, but probably she was pretty convincing. In conversation, especially with our social betters, she often said provocative things that drew attention to herself. I was embarrassed but she said conversation ought to be stimulating. That better people weren’t afraid to contend with one another and that faint-hearted chitchat about the weather, possessions and bargains was truly tiresome. She taught me how to help ladies with their coats, open doors for them and to give up my seat on the bus—especially to women with packages or babies. Later on I added the habit of lighting other’s cigarettes and clicking out the tip of a ballpoint pen as I handed it to a borrower. At home, my mother showed me how to pass scissors and knives, set a table, tip my soup bowl away from myself and to eat bacon with my fingers, the proper English way, even though common American etiquette taught otherwise. She said to bite only two rows of kernels from corn on the cob. I answered, “Two rows for girls, three for boys.” She went along because she was pleased I got the idea—and made a joke about kernels and colonels. I mostly assimilated the comportment she urged upon me, even though I thought some of it snobbish, and I accepted her version of the values that Western European Protestant culture had to offer.

Two summers in a row I went to Camp Mongotasee on Loon Lake. Mongotasee was a YMCA camp and the name had something to do with North American Indians. We boys were taken to camp in yellow school busses. It seemed like a long ride but recently I saw on a road map that Michigan has two Loon Lakes and that neither are more than an hour and a half distant from Ferndale. The first summer I stayed at Camp Mongotasee for two weeks, didn’t like it, and remember no more than that.

The following year, just two days before I was to leave for camp, my mother hosted an after-dark backyard party for me. Maybe because I was going away. Dressed in a witchy black outfit, she stood at our picket gate and greeted each guest with an icy handshake—a cold wet rubber glove. I was sure I was too old for that kind of stuff but my guests thought it was fun. At the party I kissed a girl. More than once. She encouraged me. We stuck together throughout the evening and she was among the last guests to be picked up by her mother. She seemed very mature and made me feel grown-up too. I loved her. I saw her again the following day and we exchanged school pictures—hers showed a pretty pageboy blond wearing a white blouse that was a little puffed out in front. A picture I could show with pride—that told I had a pretty girlfriend whose blouse made a puff. I pleaded with my mother to cancel my trip to camp. Surely such a sophisticated girl with a puff would think YMCA camp was for babies. But it was too late. I spent my last evening at home helping to sew nametags on everything and packing my trunk. My mother had bought salt tablets and new underwear for me. Salt tablets because the list of things to bring to camp said we would need them to replace the salt we lost due to perspiration. At home we used table salt that was not iodized because my mother said the iodine additive was a poison. When I heard about goiters she compromised by switching to sea salt, which she said had natural iodine. She warned me against drinking too much water right after exercise because I could get a cramp—even drown from the inside out. I didn’t believe it. The new underwear she had bought was “Fruit of the Loom” brand and the name bothered me. I was confused about what a loom was. I pictured something like a hammock. Were my private parts the fruit? Suported in a loom of fabric? I didn’t know any other boys who wore “Fruit of the Loom” briefs. Probably at camp they would all wear “Jockey” shorts and think me odd.

That second summer at Camp Mongotasee I had a grand time. I was skinny and Loon Lake was cold but I plunged in, overcame my shivers, and learned the basics of swimming. My mother hadn’t ever let me go to city swimming pools because I might catch polio. I wasn’t even allowed to go to movies during August, which was said to be the most hazardous month to be in crowds. At camp I also learned to paddle a canoe. We weren’t allowed to go alone out on the lake but because I was confident I mostly got to sit at the back and steer. From a rowboat, I caught two lake perch with my own casting rod and plugs. I cleaned my catch, had them cooked for me in the camp kitchen, and ate fresh fish for supper. Some boys said bluegills were better eating, but harder to catch. I didn’t catch any bluegills. I was fair at archery and good at Indian crafts: braiding lanyards, stringing beads, making feathered headbands and decorating birch bark scrolls. Then I discovered the rifle range and the thrill of shooting live rounds. After that I spent most of my canteen allowance on ammunition—.22 longs. No one used .22 shorts. They were cheaper but less accurate and said to foul the rifle bore. .22 long-rifle cartridges were supposed to be even better than longs but they weren’t sold at camp because they carried to far. Over a mile, boys said.

In my cabin I chose an upper bunk because I still sometimes wet the bed and I didn’t want anyone to find me out. I didn’t want anyone sitting on my bed anyway. During our after-lunch quiet time I lay along the edge of my bed, so as not to hinder the evaporation of the previous night’s leakage, and read Hardy Boys adventures. The weather was hot and my mattress had always dried by bedtime. Sometimes a boy’s bunk got short-sheeted as a joke. When he tried to slip under the covers, he could only go half way because the bottom sheet had been folded up in the middle and back over the blanket to look like the top sheet. I was never short sheeted. One afternoon two boys in our cabin had a jerking-off contest. I couldn’t believe anyone would masturbate openly. In front of ten spectators! But there they stood, flogging away. We were all sure, right from the beginning, who would win. He did. The boy who didn’t became desperate to show that he could at least ejaculate. He said he needed soap. We thought he wouldn’t. Then he did. But there wasn’t much stuff so we laughed at him. Boys warned that jerking off made hair grow from the palm of whichever hand you used. Sometimes one boy would whisper to another that jerking off made you deaf. When the listener said, “What?” we laughed at him. Some campers from an older boy’s s cabin claimed to sneak out at night, hike around the lake to a YWCA camp and make out with the girls. I didn’t believe them. I didn’t even believe there was a girl’s camp. I never saw any girls in boats on Loon Lake.

Most evenings at Camp Mongotasee there was a powwow with stories and skits and American Indian stuff. We gathered at dusk and sat on a large circle of logs around a fire pit. After some kind of phony invocation, a counselor hidden in a tree sent a wad of flaming rags down a wire, which in the near dark you could hardly see, smack into a stack of wood sloshed with gasoline, and our campfire burst into flames. We seemed to have no trouble pretending that this spectacle was more miraculous than it obviously wasn’t. I learned at Camp Mongotasee the best way to assemble an outdoor fire: lots of paper and kindling, then a hollow pyramid of sticks with each tier at right angles to the one below, leaving generous spaces for air. We learned that oxygen, fuel and heat were the elements of combustion. At the close of our evening gatherings, we sang camp songs and our chorus of voices was often stirring.

Sometimes after supper but before the powwow we played red rover or capture the flag. Lots of us—spread all across a large rolling tall-grass meadow out past the archery range. Boys appeared and disappeared in the twilight and our voices carried over great distances. Later, when I read in novels of the vast Russian steppe I pictured the red rover meadow at Camp Mongotasee. Of course, the steppe would be vaster, but reading of it always reminded me of camp.

I wrote home to my mother on a greeting card I had made that was hardly larger than its postage stamp. It was delivered. Now there are rules against that sort of thing. A certain size is required. My father and new stepmother, Dorothy, visited on a weekend and I was proud to show them around. I liked camp so much I asked to stay on for a second two-week session and my parents agreed.

I have another summer vacation memory from about the same age but I can’t quite place it. On an afternoon I rowed my mother to the middle of a small lake. Michigan has thousands of them. She became frightened when she realized how far we were from shore. She didn’t know how to swim more than a few splashy strokes. To justify showing off her trim figure in a bathing suit. I assured her I knew what I was doing, rowed a little further out to prove my courage, and then took us smartly back to shore. Quite grown up. Several years later my mother wrote a story about this episode for a magazine called The Christian. She titled the story, “A Mother Grows Up,” pseudo-named me David, enlarged the lake, and added a twilight breeze and choppy waves for drama. As the author, my mother used a pen name, Elizabeth, and she wrote: “A wind had blown up, and the little boat was tossing about. There was no sign of any help at hand, should we need it. I watched, frozen-faced, as David rode [s ic] expertly across the swells, his arms pulling the oars, back bending to the rhythm of the waves.” And so on. She concluded with something about a mother’s responsibility to recognize her son’s emerging maturity. And an awakening in herself to the even greater challenge of becoming the more confident adult that her growing-up young man wanted in his company. She was good at such heart warming stories.

One autumn on West Troy I bought two white mice and called them Whiff and Poof. After “The Whiffenpoof Song”: “Two little lambs who have gone astray, bah, bah, bah….” My mother encouraged whimsical names for pets and had probably planted Whiff and Poof for me to come up with myself. Rudy Vallee was her favorite crooner and he ended his evening radio show with “Whiffenpoof.” Whiff and Poof soon had a batch of babies—and promptly ate them. I hadn’t known to segregate the male from the nest of newborns. Before their next litter I added a secure nursery to the cage and the new babies, a squirming pile of pink grub-like creatures nursing at Whiff, or Poof, whomever was the mother, were not eaten. In a few days these numerous babies wore tiny white fur coats and not long after they themselves began to reproduce. By mid-winter there were eighty plus mice in four cages. I concocted a scheme to sell them to scientific laboratories but hadn’t the initiative to carry it forward. Some mice escaped. I made Mice-for-Sale signs to post on telephone poles. My mother wanted me to go door-to-door but I was too timid to approach people face-to-face. They might turn me down. I posted a few of my telephone pole notices, but only after dark, for fear of having to engage with some passer-by. More mice got loose. My mother arranged a few neighborhood adoptions and then we gave the rest, including Whiff and Poof, to a Ferndale pet store.

My mother took a picture of Whiff and Poof looking out through the wire front of the cage I had built for them. I still have the photo, and written on the back in my mother’s hand is a brief story:

“Once upon a time, there was a boy who had two white mice named Whiff and Poof. Christmas morning, the boy wanted to give his two pets something special. ‘What would Whiff and Poof like for breakfast?’ he asked his mother. ‘What about some bacon, mice do like a piece of bacon,’ she replied. So the boy took two small pieces of bacon to the basement where Whiff and Poof lived in a cage. ‘Look what I’ve got for you,’ he said, holding up the bacon, a piece in each hand. Whiff looked at him as if to say, ‘and look what we’ve got for you.’ Poof was too busy to notice anything but her sixteen baby mice that had arrived Christmas Eve. The boy counted them. Yes, there were sixteen in the litter. When he called his mother to come and look at the tiny wiggly mice, she said, ‘My goodness, I thought Whiff was a girl.’”

For some time I supposed that I had dictated this story to my mother. But probably, even though she surely encouraged my contribution, it’s pretty much her own. Her words pretending my tongue. For years I thought of myself as being one of the few people in the world who knew that mice preferred bacon to cheese. And without ever questioning if what my mother had said was true.

My mother and I always kept a pet, most often a cat. We liked dogs OK, if they were small, but we thought people who preferred cats were more intelligent and sensitive than dog lovers. Years later I was pleased to read somewhere that Ernest Hemingway, whom I then greatly admired, kept lots of cats at his house in Havana. We did have two dogs during the time we lived in Ferndale and, oddly enough, I remember each of them more clearly than any cat. The first was a playful brown and white wire-haired terrier that we got during our first spring on West Troy. When I returned from that summer’s vacation at Uncle Bill’s farm my mother told me the dog had been killed by a car. I was angry because she hadn’t said so in a letter. She said she didn’t want to spoil my vacation with bad news. I suspected my father had taken our wirehair to the pound. He hadn’t much liked the dog because it was barky. Later, after my father moved away, we had a black Scottish terrier but he was more my mother’s dog than mine. I don’t recall what we named our Scotty but my grandmother called him “Nigger,” which she once embarrassed me by so saying on the sidewalk out front with people going by. My mother said not to trouble Grandma about it because she wouldn’t understand.

The earliest night dream I can remember was about a horse—but caused by a cat. I dreamed that as I lay asleep in bed a very large dark horse slowly stretched his neck toward me, slowly opened his mouth, and then suddenly bit me between my ribs and my hip. I woke up yelling. A nightmare. In the morning, my mother and I figured it out: our cat coming in through the open bedroom window must have jumped on me right where I felt the horse bite. We believed that dreams took place in the instant of waking from them. Years later I learned, to the contrary, that dreams unfold slowly. But then how could I sluggishly compose my dream about the frightening horse before being startled awake by our pouncing cat? A mystery.

My bedroom on West Troy was always neat. I took good care of my possessions, especially items of sentimental value like gifts, things I had made, letters, pictures and books. But I wasn’t a collector. Grandpa Elvin once gave me one of his stamp albums but I never added much to it. I wasn’t interested in coins either except to stockpile one thousand 1942 wartime zinc pennies, which I kept in a small felt-lined wooden chest. This hoard also included several copper pennies that I had rubbed between my fingers with mercury until they were shiny silver. Lots of boys did it. You could break a thermometer to get the quicksilver or buy it at a drugstore. No one thought of it as poison. I’m not sure I do even now—not, at least, as we used it for silvering pennies. We used mercury in school science class to make barometers and to demonstrate something about menisci: curved one way for water, another for mercury. When I later cashed-in my hefty twenty rolls of zinc cents I felt as if I had suffered a loss. Their bulk weighed like a fortune compared to the ten-dollar bill I got from the bank teller.

On the wall over my bed, I hung three pin-up girls. Fold-out Petty and Vargas girls from Esquire and True magazines arranged one slightly lower than the other from left to right. They were a declaration that I was ready for women—even if uncertain among girls. The pin-up I best remember from my bedroom triptych was George Petty’s, “Sleepy Time Gal,” a luscious leggy blond in profile, wearing a brief diaphanous brown almost-nothing and bright red high-heeled shoes to match her lips, nails and telephone. Petty girls were always on the phone. My mother told me that “Sleepy Time Gal” was also the title of a popular song from the thirties: “Sleepy time gal, you’re turning night into day….” I didn’t like the interfering way she sang it, as if to make fun of my Sleepy Time Gal. Make her someone different from whom I imagined her to be. My mother said that Petty Girls, who always had disproportionatelylong legs, were more artistic than Vargas pinups, who’s more provocative sexiness she judged almost vulgar.

My mother worried that the private satisfactions my pin-up girls afforded me would squander energies better conserved and channeled into the development of my creative and social skills. She had read Freud and Otto Rank and believed that psychological maturation and artistic accomplishment required a sublimation of sexual energy. She didn’t condemn self-manipulation out of hand but rather as it might become a debilitating addiction. One that encouraged and rewarded indolence. She also feared that the illusory perfection of George Petty’s long legged beauties and Alberto Vargas’ hussies might seduce my introverted nature to prefer fantasy when I ought to be developing a healthy appetite for less than perfect but more genuine female attractions. She wanted me to have the confidence and courage, when the time came, to woo and win real live girls. Worst of all, she wanted to talk about it. But I was neither prepared nor willing to entertain her speculations. My private engagements with “Sleepy Time Gal” and her two companions were none of her concern.

Despite my mother’s cautions, jerking off was a frequent though carefully guarded pleasure and my obsession with perfectly airbrushed renderings of slightly clothed beautiful women and girls continued unabated. Boys born before my time had to be content with grainy photos of burlesque girls in the Police Gazette and amateurish renderings on the covers of magazines like Titter and Wink. And boys of the generation following mine would feed on slick full-color photographic Pets and Playmates with swelling breasts, parted thighs and bold beavers. However, I believe neither these later day extreme excitements-of-the-month nor the coarse strippers of the thirties were so corrupting as the coquettish picture-perfect pin-ups that I revered in my own youth. Even Playboy’s Girl Next Door with her pretty implausible proportions and finely retouched exterior seemed less exquisite than my beguiling aseptic Petty and Vargas girls—whose artistic perfection did not even hint at swarthy crevices, pungent smells or the grind and grunt of perspiring carnality. As we made love in my imagination these dazzling but docile figments neither squirmed nor squealed nor whimpered. They just were—perfectly, passively were. So then; did my so often and so easily pacified passion incline me to subsequently shrink from real sexual encounters with real girls and women? Because my shy adolescent appetite had always been privately gratified by the pliant passions of immaculate voiceless virgins? Well, as it would turn out, real live girls with perfect proportions, smooth unblemished sweet-clean surfaces, flowing hair (only on their heads), pretty pouty lips, pointy breasts and firm lifting buttocks seldom came my way. In fact I don’t remember any. Maybe one. Yes, very close to perfect she was.

Well, regardless of all such psychological traps and trappings, I did, with years and maturity gain courage and sufficient perspicacity to reach beyond boyhood fancies and I did, though somewhat belatedly, come to have a more or less average number of generally satisfying and often thrilling social and sexual adventures with authentic though imperfect, loveable yet altogether passion-rousing real girls—and even grown women. But still, just as my mother feared, the seductions of fantasy never fully evaporated. The satisfactions of fantasy were more easily realized than those of life. When I hadn’t a partner (not often) or when domestic sex had become tedious (more typical) I was often inclined to fall back on imagination to satisfy my urges. Or, lying with a less than perfect real life accomplice, to bolster my ardor with secret pinup fancies.

On West Troy, I and a boy who lived in the next block east traced pictures of girls and women from magazines. He was a Cub Scout friend. The den mother’s son. At a table in his basement we worked from swimsuit and underwear ads in ladies magazines. Sometimes we used carbon paper but more often we traced, which was harder but gave better results. Besides, with carbon paper our pencils left marks in the magazine that might give away what we were up to. I became a fairly good drawer, except for noses and hands, and could do a lot with even a staid corset advertisement. I especially remember a half-page bathing beauty leaning back on her folded knees with her hands placed behind on the sand. I lifted her from the sunny magazine beach, gave what I thought to be a sweet adolescent countenance, re-dressed her in a flimsy camisole and chained her to the floor of a dungeon. Struggling yet provocative. Her breasts reaching toward a spiked ball that swung menacingly above her on a chain. Something masculine and powerful to bait her latent lust—though neither sadism nor bondage ever much interested me. I was proud of my work and kept my graphite captive for several years.

Alone at home I traced many times around a brass letter opener in the profile shape of a woman’s legs and torso in profile. Some sort of promotional gimmick my father had brought home from work. I added arms and a head, which as a letter opener she didn’t require, and dressed her ever so slightly to my taste. In all my erotic doodling, I chiefly focused on buttocks, legs, and lingerie. Breasts, except maybe the firmest and freshest, were not so compelling. I was becoming what later on we boys would call “An ass man,” attracted to young, just developing girls with “All that meat but no potatoes.”

There appeared in the Sunday comics a seductive drawing of Dale Messick’s glamorous girl reporter, Brenda Star. Brenda reclining on a divan, her abundant orangy-red hair cascading over her bare shoulders, one knee lifting a split skirted gown to reveal her lovely thighs. I cut out the picture of Brenda and carried her around in my wallet behind its plastic ID window.

When I was twelve my mother got jobs for herself and me as actors in a short film that would be used to train Chevrolet dealers how best to sell more cars. The movie company was called Jam-Handy (maybe spelled differently), a name I thought unprofessional, almost silly, but my mother said Jam-Handy was highly regarded in the advertising world. In our movie, a real actor played the skillful salesman and we extras portrayed a family being convinced to buy a new Chevy. We were a father, a mother (mine), a son (me), and a daughter. The daughter was played by a girl named Miss. Crabtree. Miss. Crabtree was just a bit older than me—pretty, poised and almost plump. She wore a flowered dress and nylon stockings and her shapely shiny-smooth legs were very eye catching.

Each family member had one or two simple lines to speak. My mother, unable to contain herself, elaborated on hers and the director cut to do a re-take. I was embarrassed. I was sure Miss. Crabtree, and her mother who sat watching off camera, were serious about the girl’s acting career, thought my mother quite unprofessional. The second time through she ad-libbed yet again, but differently, and the director said he liked it. After the filming was over my mother tried to make friends but the Crabtrees were cool. Later we joked about their funny name but privately I long and longingly remembered the liquidy line of Miss. Crabtree’s silky calf curving up and back behind her knee in a lovely S. My mother said S curves were weak curves: feminine; French; recherché. And also that there were no truly straight lines in nature. Einstein had proved it with mathematics. But, after all, she added, hadn’t artists always known as much.

In summer my mother and I sometimes went to the Detroit Zoo for a picnic. It was just over a mile from home. The Zoo was landscaped with giant fake boulders that children were allowed to climb on. I found several places where the phony rock had broken away and I could peer into the dark almost spooky interior structure of steel bars and wire mesh. The elephants were my mother’s favorite Zoo animals. She told me about Bring-`Em-Back-Alive Frank Buck who captured all manner of wild beasts in Africa and Asia and brought them back in cages to western civilization’s zoos. At the ostrich pen she always laughed and said how the silly birds believed themselves safely hidden from danger if their heads were buried in the sand. I was sure they put their heads in the dirt for some other reason but I didn’t know what. There were giant tortoises at the Zoo and children were allowed to sit on them, and to ride if the tortoise so obliged. Some had initials and heart-and-arrow designs carved into their shells. My mother explained the difference between a tortoise and a turtle to anyone who looked as if he or she might be interested. And, when we got to their corral, how to distinguish camels from dromedaries, one hump or two—or maybe the other way around. There were pictures of either to be seen on packages of Dromedary brand dates and Camel cigarettes.

On one of our visits to the Zoo, we got caught in a steamy summer cloud burst. A pretty young woman, pushing her infant in an orange Zoo stroller, ran to where my mother and I had already found shelter under the roof of a snack pavilion. The woman’s dress was shrinking because of the soaking it got. The wet fabric pulled tight across her buttocks and breasts and I was excited to see her slip through the gaps between the straining buttons down her front.

My mother took the shrinking-dress woman’s picture. She said she might sell it to the Sanforized Company, the shrink prevention people, for their advertising. Sanforized ads featured people wearing startled expressions on account of a splitting zipper or a button popping off in public—humiliating things that didn’t happen to people who had remembered to look for the Sanforized label when they bought their clothes. But then Sanforized ads used artist’s illustrations, not photographs, so maybe it was only the rained-on-shrinking-dress concept that my mother thought she could sell. Not the photo she had taken. Or maybe she actually hadn’t taken a picture—only wished she had? Her stories, like mine, often became more story-like over time. I remember the shrinking-dress story when I get a glimpse of a woman’s lingerie between the buttons of her dress or blouse—usually with a surreptitious sideways glance while standing close on her left in an elevator. Then I invariably remember Fat Stuff from the “Smilin’ Jack” comic strip. Fat Stuff’s shirt buttons were always popping off into the mouth of a chicken who stood open-beaked at his feet. And then I wonder about the whole thing: would a summer rain really cause a dress to shrink—even in the 1940’s—even if un-Sanforized?

The tiny Ferndale Public Library was on Nine Mile Road, just east of Woodward Avenue. Dark brick outside with high ceilings inside and heavy rectory tables and wooden shelves with a cornice on top. The first book I remember borrowing with my own library card was The Black Tanker by Howard Pease—a Pacific Ocean adventure-mystery, which I then supposed to be very adult even if shelved in the children’s section. Child cardholders couldn’t check out adult books. That same summer I also read an Agatha Christie mystery, checked out by my mother, in which a bunch of island guests were calculatingly murdered: one of them by a large urn toppled from a wall above him. Years later I saw a movie version of the same story and anxiously awaited the plunging-urn execution. I also read The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne, which my mother recommended. I suspected she didn’t know good mystery from bad and was just puffing her favorite author. But I enjoyed the story. Many years after I saw Red House on somebody’s list of the Ten Best Mysteries and felt smug about my mother’s and my own good taste. The Ferndale Library circulation cards that were kept in paper pockets glued to the back cover of books documented the name of each borrower and his or her due-date. I liked to see their names and then to have my own added by the librarian when she replaced the card along with a due-date reminder slip from a little tray at her desk.

When my mother read to me on West Troy the armor I generally wore to feign autonomy slipped away and we were close. Reading to me was one of her stratagems for passing on ideas and values, which, if she offered directly, I might refuse. At home we had an illustrated book about American cowboys. Both the text and pictures were by Will James. My mother read the book to me but I remember only the drawings: cattle, horses, cowboys and Indians in romantic old-west settings. She also read me The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. A best seller. I liked the story and remembered it as being about Flag, a pet deer; Slew-foot a bad bear; Jody, a sensitive boy; and his gentle mother. There were sad parts and my mother and I shared some tearful moments. In conversation I once used “varmint” and my mother said it was a coarse word—that “critter” was better. I argued that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings had used varmint but my mother said she hadn’t and I couldn’t find any proof. Neither of us sounded the n in varmint. For a short while I called my mother “Ma,” as Jody had called his in The Yearling. But she didn’t care for Ma and I soon got over it because it wasn’t comfortable. I can’t really remember what I called my mother when we lived on West Troy. Sometimes it was “Pat” because I thought that was grown up but I wasn’t comfortable with that either. It wasn’t “mother” or “mom” because I thought them childish. Probably I simply spoke without any address. That’s how I often spoke. Even now. Sometimes people think I’m inconsiderate. They have to sort out to whom I’m speaking. Once at a gathering a rather forward woman called me on it—said with some sarcasm that she expected to be addressed by name. I was embarrassed. I think my habit had something to do with being shy—worry about mis-remembering names. Being embarrassed. Safer to just speak out in general and hope for the right person’s.

On West Troy we had half a dozen reproductions of watercolor paintings of Blackfoot Indians. We kept our Blackfoot Indian prints in their own portfolio, interleaved with tissue. We thought them special but none were ever framed or hung on the wall. My mother and I looked together at these portraits of ruddy and rugged but clean and unblemished Native American men and women. I wondered if they really had black feet—if not, then why were they so called? They wore ceremonial tribal dress and their expressions were severe. Actually, I’ve seen very few pictures of laughing or even smiling American Indians. Lightheartedness probably doesn’t come easily under harsh living conditions. Humor may be a product of Western Civilization. Of comfort and leisure. My mother and I understood very little about these Blackfoot Indians: neither about the individuals in our pictures, nor as a race or a tribe with a history of their own. There was some information on the back of each print but it didn’t interest us.

My mother had a friend named Mr. Leland, a tall thin old man who, along with his brother, had been an early automobile inventor and manufacturer. I think there was once a Leland car and maybe they made the first Lincolns—maybe Henry Ford bought them out. In his apartment Mr. Leland had a one-half-life-size bronze replica of Daniel French’s Lincoln Memorial statue in Washington, DC. My mother took photographs of Mr. Leland, of Mr. Leland with his bronze of Mr. Lincoln and of the statue alone—all in natural window light to create a meditative atmosphere. Mr. Leland also kept a brown squirrel and warned me against putting my fingers too close to the cage.

By means of our explorations among the Blackfoot Indian pictures, the Will James cowboy stories, The Yearling and Mr. Leland and his Lincoln bronze my mother hoped to inform herself, as an immigrant, and me, as a child, concerning the gist of America. In an article for The Detroit News, she wrote:

“I searched for America, the real America, for many years. I found some of it in books. I listened to the voice of America in the music of Stephen Foster and Gershwin. I found part of America in my next-door neighbors and I saw America in the character of Abraham Lincoln. I saw America plain.”

I thought her sentiments were somewhat insincere. She looked down on our neighbors, most of whom she thought coarse, and probably she judged American books and pictures and statues as little more than pale reflections of European culture. However, she did make use of them in her artistic endeavors and she did want to be, or at least to appear to be, proud of her adopted country—despite holding firm to her English heritage, about which she was always a bit snobbish. She believed that the success of industrial democracy diluted the European moral and artistic civilization that America’s better members struggled to establish and maintain. She didn’t embrace the visceral energy of working class Detroit, which she did, however, recognize was more truly at the heart of America than the storybook western frontier. She feared populism and democracy as threats to her aristocratic values. She wanted a place in the upper middle she thought she had been born into in England but then unfairly pushed out of by the unfortunate incident of her father being interned during the Great War. An episode she blamed her mother for mishandling out of selfish pride and to the detriment of their whole family.

I bought a Detroit Free Press newspaper route of thirty-five customers for twenty-two dollars. Boys bought and sold their routs under the casual supervision of benevolent truck-driving distribution managers who were like older brothers to them. I liked the idea of earning an independent income but in practice I didn’t do well. The Free Press was a morning paper and I didn’t like to get up early. My mother’s efforts to rouse me at five-thirty often failed, resumed as nagging, turned to anger on both sides and sometimes ended with tears. On the street I wouldn’t, not even at the very first, carry my customer route book because the older boys didn’t carry theirs. I didn’t want to appear childish. Consequently I came home with extra papers because I had overlooked one or two customers. We were already given two or three extras by the route manager, which we could sell to anyone on the street but I was too shy to hawk mine so, all in all, I often arrived back home with half a dozen papers that had to be thrown away. I got my Friday evening collections muddled and didn’t turn a profit. After two months of bungling my business had shrunk to twenty-some households and I sold the route at a loss to my friend Robert Macdonald—who added it to his own already large, thriving and adjacent route.

My only real success had been with folding the papers. Newspapers were not so fat as they are now and we delivery boys folded and tucked them tightly in on themselves. No rubber bands or plastic bags. We folded some before starting out and the rest as we traveled the route. A properly folded paper did not open when tossed onto a front porch—and it had to land under cover on rainy days. Not so hard when on foot but tricky if you rode a bike. Sometimes my mother helped me fold but I complained that she wasn’t so good as me. We argued about the pronunciation of paper route—I rhymed it with “out,” she with, “oot.”

After selling my route to Robert he often hired me to help him deliver the fat Sunday papers. I slept Saturday night at his house so he could be sure I got up on time and he paid me two dollars for helping. Afterwards Mrs. Macdonald fed us breakfast, including coffee, which I never got at home, and I got a free paper. The Sunday funnies regularly included a quarter page ad for Rocket Ball Point Pens—a new kind of pen that would write even under water. The picture showed a man in a deep-sea diving outfit making notes as he investigated a sunken wreck. The demise of the indelible pencil was at hand and the fountain pen would soon be become an ostentation.

Roberts’s mother, who liked to be called Mac, even by me, was a widow who owned her own house and had an adequate income without having to work. Maybe she was a divorcee, but either way Robert’s father was never mentioned. Mac and my mother became good friends. Mac was bookish: preferred Colliers to The Saturday Evening Post, and subscribed to The Christian Science Monitor. She and my mother thought themselves highbrows, looked down on lowbrows, but were suspicious of eggheads. Neither had a car. Both played solitaire when waiting for someone to take them out. My mother called it Patience and when she didn’t win, she rearranged the cards to give herself a second chance. Both my mother and Mac thought of themselves as moderate feminists and both belonged to the Ferndale chapter of Soroptimists, a business and professional women’s club: SORority plus OPTIMIST. In summer both women wore huaraches from Mexico. Health-nut shoes I thought. No one else wore them. I worried that such apparel eccentricities set my mother and therefore me apart from the mainstream. Robert and his mother seemed not to care.

My mother and Mac enjoyed telling, and retelling, silly anecdotes and off-color jokes: “A mugwump is a bird with its mug on one side of a fence and its rump on the other.” “Two Negroes calling up and down a staircase said: ‘Who dat?’ ‘Who dat!?’ ‘Who dat say dat last, who dat?’” And both women joined the chorus of snobbish complaints about Winston Cigarette’s unacceptable slogan: “Winstons taste good, like a cigarette should.”

They discussed Ogden Nash’s daily poem in The Free Press, read Bernard De Voto’s “Easy Chair” column in Harpers and listened to Edgar Bergen and Fred Allen on the radio. They appreciated clever stories by James Thurber and H. Allen Smith and serious books like Sinclair Lewis’ Kingsblood Royal. After reading which, my mother explained to me about octoroons—less, however, to inform my social consciousness than because she liked the word itself. My mother let me read H. Allen Smith’s Rhubarb, a story about the fractious cat-mascot of a baseball team. She forewarned me, however, against a naughty passage in which a woman was described as having a fine pair of “lung warts,” and she tisk-tisked about another character who referred to her underpants as “Step-ins.” She feigned concern about my being exposed to such risqué humor yet loved to carry on with her own silliness about such stuff as hoarding nail parings and naval lint in jars that these humorists traded on.

I myself read several books by another Smith, Thorne Smith, who also wrote racy humor but, according to my mother, of a kind inferior to that of H. Allen Smith. I, of course, argued that Thorne was the wittier Smith—but later, of course, I changed my opinion to hers.

Robert Macdonald and I put on a magic show. Our mothers had taken us to see Blackstone the Magician at a theater downtown and we were inspired. My mother helped us with our costumes and she encouraged me to practice and perfect my tricks—a precaution against the deflation of my ego by an overawing performance on Robert’s part. She often spoke of inflated and deflated egos and I imagined a bladder-like organ somewhere deep inside myself—susceptible to manipulation by others but not by me. Robert and I argued about a name for our performance company. I wanted “Ajax” but Robert thought Ajax was stupid. I wouldn’t give in. We voted. He wrote a one followed by dozens of zeros on his ballot and I filled my paper with nines. Robert claimed that my nines did not beat his zeros—that in fact he had one more vote than I did. I didn’t understand his argument but gave in anyway. I enjoyed being obstinate against sharper brains and then to give in as if I had never really cared. We performed our magic show in Robert’s basement before a dozen neighbors and friends who had each paid a dime to see it. Robert was the better showman but there was applause enough to please us both.

Most of the time my mother had a boyfriend, sometimes more than one. But each usually lasted less than a year before she tired of him. All were nice to me and I never felt much jealousy toward any. Gus Linder was one. A widower. Gus was the chief stationary engineer at the Fox Theater in downtown Detroit—the largest movie theater in the world he claimed. He took me on a tour and showed me the heating, lighting and air conditioning equipment, and the back stage machinery. I liked Gus but he was a fuddy-duddy and a cheapskate. When he discovered he had paid extra for the hood ornament on his new Packard he required the dealer to remove it, fill the mounting holes and repaint the front of the car. Gus and I played chess on a Sunday afternoon and my mother took our picture in concentrated profile with the game board between us. After Gus came Howard, another engineer. Howard took me once for a quiet game of golf. My mother attracted these men easily, carried on with them as she pleased, and then set them aside with little show of emotion. Some remained friends after the affair had ended, but usually not for long. I was never aware of her having sex with any of these boyfriends, nor ever saw much display of physical affection. But I suppose her hunger for sex was why she took up with them—and quite likely her tiring of their over taxing or inept response was why she replaced them so often. Always with yet another mild mannered man who was just as likely to eventually prove inadequate.

To her women friends, however, my mother remained loyal for many years. Her longest held friendship was with a woman named Ann Held. Ann was petite, pretty, cheery, and always busy. Birdlike. As Grandma might have been at Ann’s same age. Such gamine physiques and perky natures were the very kind that had and would most attract me—as they did my mother. Ann worked as a receptionist and office manager for an optometrist. For a time I thought the optometrist was Ann’s boyfriend, but later it seemed he wasn’t. He fitted me with my first pair of reading glasses and gave my mother a discount on the price. Several years later, I bought a second pair myself but refused the discount because I thought to pay full price was more grown up. Ann didn’t argue because she understood it was for her that I wished to appear grown up. Ann never married and lived alone in a tall downtown apartment building from where she frequently corresponded with my mother. Her long letters were always perfectly typed on flower-margined notepaper. My mother seldom chatted on the telephone. We had limited service and used the phone only for brief and important calls. Besides, we had a three-party line—two potential eavesdroppers. People didn’t choose their line partners—the phone company did. Once when Ann was driving my mother and me somewhere, she asked my favorite color for a car. I answered, “Gray, because it doesn’t show the dirt so much.” Ann laughed and said my answer was very clever. Her car was black and never showed any dirt at all.

Some years later my mother told me that Ann Held suffered from a phobia: that she would not eat grapes because grapes were like a man’s testicles. My mother added something about texture that I didn’t understood. I couldn’t imagine that Ann knew much at all about testicles, let alone their texture. My mother seemed to relish knowing this bit of tattle. But I supposed Ann had told her in confidence and I didn’t like her telling me. I had a boyish crush on Ann and didn’t want her tarnished. Especially by my own mother. And besides, I didn’t think my own mother should be telling me about testicles at all.

My mother and I went on a weekend vacation with Ann Held and a man. Maybe Ann’s boyfriend—maybe the optometrist. He did wear glasses. The four of us hiked along a wooded trail near Traverse City, Michigan to look at Torch Lake, reputed to be one of the most beautiful in the world and often compared with Lake Louise in Canada. On the way back we walked in pairs and my mother, with me, picked a sprig of white berries—something pretty to take away with us. When we had all gathered at the car, Ann’s gentleman friend recognized the berries as poison ivy. My mother threw the ivy aside with a small screech. Then, with her characteristic gesture of dismay, she put her hands to her face. The man pointed out how silly to spread the contamination. He got some gasoline on his handkerchief by tying it to a stick, which he then poked down into the car’s gas tank. My mother thought him very clever to know that gasoline would neutralize the poison and quite gallant to soak his hanky. But she would only wipe her hands, not her face. She fussed about the man’s concern. Too much even. I thought she was flirting with him at Ann’s expense. She didn’t later break out with any poison ivy bumps or itch.

I remembered our visit to Torch Lake years later when I read a short story about two women and their men who stood on a bluff overlooking a similar scene. One of these heroines observed the other absently sucking on her wedding ring and she speculated that the sucker’s subconscious desire was to melt the ring—and thereby to dissolve her lame marriage. I thought the speculator was a lesbian and wanted the sucker for herself. After reading the story, I several times took notice of a woman bothering her wedding band with her mouth and remembered the symbolism. Once it was in an elevator with a stylish young woman. I imagined telling her I knew what she was up to … she, amazed by my perspicacity, would confess … then invite me to become her lover. Farther along in that same short story, one of the women went on to liken a man’s penis to the ugliness of a raw turkey neck. This comparison shocked me—more due to its appearance in print than because of the image itself. Turkey necks and grapes!

I last saw Ann Held at my mother’s funeral. It had been many years but she looked almost as I remembered her. Still cute in her seventies. Afterwards, she sent me a long condolence—perfectly typed on flowery feminine stationery.

My mother took me to an orthodontist because my teeth were crooked and my bite bad. The dentist pulled four teeth and banded the rest—top and bottom. The bands, he claimed, were made of platinum and that platinum was the most precious metal in the world—more costly than gold. There were little hooks that poked into my cheeks and tiny round rubber bands to pull my lower jaw forward and strengthen the cut of my profile. My mother said I had an English chin. I was already self-conscious about my crooked teeth and English chin and the gaudy platinum braces were yet another cross to bear. Orthodontics was not common in the nineteen forties. Most people managed to masticate and socialize with less than perfect teeth. None of my friends wore braces. I became tight-lipped so as to not expose my platinum prosthetics. Well-intentioned people, insensitive to my embarrassment, were always after me to smile, which only made things worse. They probably thought I was jutting my jaw to look like Dick Tracy. Later there was even more: an ugly brownish-green plastic retainer gadget I was supposed to wear night and day except when eating. A foul monster that made my mouth sour and my speech peculiar.

I didn’t like my orthodontist. He was a stuffy know-it-all and accused me of not wearing my retainer and rubber bands. I lied that I did. When I missed appointments he complained all the more because he had charged my mother an especially low fee. I hated everything to do with the straightening my teeth. I skipped appointments more and more often and wore my paraphernalia less and less. After a year of frustration and recrimination, both the orthodontist and my mother gave up on me and the braces came off. Even though the job wasn’t finished. My final appointment was very sober: “... so close ... non-cooperation ... no other course to follow.” For me it was good bye and good riddance. Unencumbered, my teeth slowly crept back toward their old crookedness and my chin relaxed into its comfortable English profile. Years later, my daughter’s orthodontist told me that “weak chins” could not be improved upon with hooks and rubber bands. I wasn’t surprised. All that suffering for naught. I blamed both my mother and the orthodontist for permanently damaging my smile, forever pinched and insincere, forever uncomfortable with laughter and having my picture taken.

The orthodontist’s office was in the Broaderick Tower on Cadillac Square. While I hated visiting him, I did like going into central Detroit by myself. Being alone there stirred my imagination. In memory I have the plan of downtown a bit muddled now: Cadillac Square mixed up with Grand Circus Park where the city’s fan of commercial streets began. And my faulty geography is garbled with a clutter of nighttime dreams. Dreams of ominous empty streets among cavernous gray department stores; of a mysterious park that circled a tall covered bandstand with black filigree ironwork railings where I waited anxiously for the “grand circus” to appear. And these jumbled up with another recurring dream of the tall enigmatic Fisher building … reflecting warm winter sunshine onto a broad vacant sidewalk where I sat alone and wondering. Wondering what? Who was Fisher anyway? Radio and magazine ads for Buick and Cadillac cars always ended with, “Body by Fisher,” spoken in a refined voice or set in elegant type. Every year, Fisher Body sponsored a design competition for boys. You could either demonstrate your model making skill by reproducing an old-fashioned French horse-drawn carriage or show off your creative bent with a futuristic automobile design. The winner in each category got a prize or scholarship and was pictured in the newspaper with his model. My mother encouraged me to enter the contest but I was sure I didn’t stand a chance. It was plain to see that the winners had gotten a lot of help from a father or uncle, or shop teacher—whom in the news he thanked with false modesty—and who, in turn, denied having contributed more than encouragement. Bunk. In the center of the Fisher Building lobby there was a chrome steel “perpetual motion machine,” so my mother called it. Inside a glass enclosure, shiny ball bearings dropped ceaselessly one after another after another onto a slanted shiny steel stump from which they bounced up and through a rotating ball bearing journal and then into a hopper, from where they were carried by a conveyor chain up to the top of the glass case only to be dropped again. I always looked to see if there were any balls on the floor of the exhibit because of a miss. There never were.

After one of my orthodontist appointments I visited Hughes & Hatcher, an exclusive haberdasher in the Broadrick Tower lobby. Uncomfortable about leaving without making a purchase, I found myself paying four dollars for one pair of black socks. I had selected them not knowing their cost because establishments like Hughes & Hatcher were too classy to parade prices. Then, having engaged a salesman, I was unable to confess my naïveté. I paid as if I had money to burn. At home, my disbelieving mother said the socks were not only far too expensive but also too old for me—I should stick to argyles like everyone else my age. She said I must return them for a refund. I wouldn’t. I knew she was right but I would not invite humiliation. To spare me she said she would do it herself but changed her mind and allowed the socks as an indulgence—and a story for her to tell. Back then socks were sold in numbered sizes, which were not the same as shoe sizes. Because no one ever remembered his sock size there was always a chart available that showed the proper sock number for a corresponding shoe size. Overall I wasn’t much interested in shopping or in appearing fashionable but sometimes an urge to indulge in some elegance overcame me and I did something silly—like buying a box of expensive English Ovals cigarettes when I didn’t even like their taste. They were actually oval in cross section and each had a gold foil tip so the smoker didn’t get any bits of cigarette paper stuck to his or her lips.

I was never spanked by either parent. My mother may have slapped at me in anger a time or two, but never as a punishment. Once she smacked me on the back of the neck with a wet dishrag because I had said something hateful. She stood washing dishes at the sink and threw the rag across the kitchen. It hit me a perfect slap, just above the collar. I was stunned. My mother, despite her anger, laughed with delight at her direct hit and my adolescent outrage. I became so furious I wept and, of course, she apologized. My mother was a good shot and always enjoyed tossing things into garbage cans and wastebaskets.

Neither my mother nor I ever towel-dried the dishes after washing them. We let them drip-dry in the dish rack. She said that dishtowels spread germs and that in Canadian restaurants and bars their use was prohibited by health laws. I once helped my mother wash the walls and ceiling of our West Troy kitchen. She said it was best to wash walls from the bottom up, otherwise streaks would appear: “Wash up, paint down,” she advised. I left a small corner patch of ceiling untouched to show how dirty it had been and my mother liked to point it out to guests as evidence of my cleverness.

During the time we lived on West Troy school was my main misery. I didn’t do well. When we moved from Webster Street I was held back to repeat the second half of third grade. Since it was a new school, no one needed to know of my failure and I was spared any damage to my self-esteem. On the plus side, I was put in a normal September to June grade instead of remaining in an odd-ball February to February class. But still I didn’t do well. I didn’t like school. Of what took place inside Jefferson Elementary during third, fourth and fifth grades I remember nothing: not any teacher, nor any school friend, nor any event during three entire years. I do recall, on my way to school, watching two bald brothers, who always wore identical baseball caps, stamp their feet in icy puddles. I think they were deaf—twins maybe. They were in a special class—morons we called them. So I figured they didn’t care about having cold wet feet all day. My mother claimed people loose most of their body heat from the top of their heads so it was good that those bald boys wore hats. Coming home from school on a spring afternoon, I watched another two boys fight bare-fisted in a vacant lot. I kept my distance so as not get drawn into anything that might erupt along the sidelines.

My mother so worried about my poor academic performance and lagging social development that she took me to see a psychologist at the Palmer Institute. The Palmer Institute, which my mother claimed was a renowned center for the study of child development, was near the Detroit Institute of Art and the Main Library. A bigger-than-life-size bronze of Rodin’s “Thinker” sat on a large plinth outside the Art Institute. My mother several times commented on the sculptor’s artful choice to place Thinker’s right elbow on his left knee—always reminding that toilet jokes about Thinker were in poor taste. I liked the Museum’s interior garden court with its fountain and pool (later and unfortunately removed) and the Diego Rivera mural of the River Rouge Ford factory that went all around, floor to ceiling, on every wall. Further inside was the “Peasant Wedding Dance,” a painting by Pieter Brueghl, in which some of the men dancer’s codpieces were distended by giant erections. This erotic detail was often altered in printed reproductions. There was also a version of Füssli’s “Nightmare,” which made me recall by own nightmare of being bitten by a horse. Many years later I rediscovered, or perhaps discovered, that the Detroit Art Institute version of “Nightmare” is one with a little devil-like figure sitting atop the sleeping beauty—not a horse head version. Would I at that age have truly made the connection to my dream without the horse? Sometimes I wonder how much this story is writing itself without consulting my memory as conscientiously as it ought.

I wondered if the Palmer Institute had anything to do with the Palmer method of learning cursive writing: practicing lines and lines of identical loops. My own penmanship was not good. Subconsciously intended, so my mother speculated, to camouflage poor spelling and muddled thinking. I thought she was overboard but later considered her theory probable. Once I made a shopping list for her that included, “Two pencells.” “Pencils” she corrected. But what I wanted were two AA-size flash light batteries, commonly called “pen cells,” and I so enjoyed a small victory. I didn’t like the Palmer Institute psychologist. He was a cold fish. He gave me some pictures to interpret, puzzles to assemble, and an IQ test. I saw him twice but refused to continue. I accused my mother of judging me defective and my complaint stung us both. Neither she nor I could be told the results of my Palmer Institute IQ test because our knowing my score might somehow be detrimental to my ego. We were, of course, both certain it was high. My mother sometimes used this presumption against me—all the more reason for her to be disappointed with my accumulating failures. And once, trying to jolt me into making some particular effort, she said perhaps she had been wrong—maybe I wasn’t so smart after all. I was shocked.

Going home from the Palmer Institute on a Woodward Avenue bus my mother discovered a tiny spider spinning a web between her gloved thumb and forefinger. She held perfectly still and let her continue her work until we got off the bus at Nine Mile Road and then she gently flicked her off into a bush. She said that harming a spider brought rain.

For two and a half years, September 1946 until February 1949, I was sent to a prestigious private school for boys. Detroit Country Day School. My mother had me take the Country Day seventh grade scholarship exam, even though I had completed only fifth grade. I passed. When her deception was discovered she pretended to have misunderstood and convinced the headmaster, Mr. F. Alden Shaw, to let me enter as a sixth grader. My mother and F. Alden Shaw hit it off well. She flattered him with her good looks and English manners and said he was the very man to help her troubled boy find his way.

The Country Day boys were rich, from some of Detroit’s finest families, and they took no interest in me. They were driven to school in expensive cars. I both envied and loathed them. I and two other scholarship boys were picked up every morning, for a fee, by the school athletic coach. He was fat, pompous, patronizing, and drove a pre-war Chevrolet sedan. I despised him. On the way to school I could identify almost every car we passed by make, model and year but neither of the other two boys nor the coach seemed to know a Ford from a Cadillac. Dopes. For mid-morning snack, we Country Day scholars were served saltines and milk in a little vestibule with leaded windows by a cafeteria lady wearing an apron. At lunch we sat at refectory tables with our teacher at the head and minded our P’s and Q’s. I, of course, was expected to make friends with the few other scholarship boys but I didn’t like them either. And I was sure my sixth grade teacher hated me. She once, in front of the class, accused me of being sneaky because I returned so quietly from a trip to the lavatory. She claimed I had been listening outside the class room door and added some disparaging remark about my shoes—something about their being sneaky shoes.

The next year in Latin class some boys snickered when it was my turn to decline bonus: “boni, bono, bonum...” because boner was our word for an erection. The Latin teacher was a “Dr.” so and so. A prissy twerp about five foot four. He was also the Sub-middler football coach, which seemed absurd, but for some reason he could kick a football an amazing distance and we all admired him for that. The high point of my two and a half years at Detroit Country Day came at the beginning of eighth grade when I flipped Dick Agnew over my shoulder. Agnew was the all-around athlete of our class and in my opinion, an all around prick. We were in uniform and trotting out to football practice when Agnew jumped me from behind—no doubt to show off at my expense. But by some fluke of momentum and leverage I launched Agnew up over my head and he fell flat on his back in front of me. We were both astonished. Some of the other boys laughed at him. I was elated and kept on running to the practice field. Agnew had no chance to get back at me until it was too late.

I hated Detroit Country Day School. I don’t even like to write about it now. I made only one friend. Barry Branch. While Barry and I were grappling with the Country Day scholarship exam our mother’s became acquainted in the waiting room. The two women became fast friends and as a consequence Barry and I became fast friends too. However, Barry, whose mother hadn’t lied about his grade level, would be a year ahead of me at Country Day so our friendship was an after school affair.

Barry lived with his mother and stepfather in a large brick house at 2755 Woodstock Street in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood of Detroit. A mile and a half from where we lived in Ferndale. Pretty fancy I thought. It didn’t look to me as if Barry needed a scholarship. But he never acted superior in any way. I thought his name was silly but never said so except to my mother. Barry had his own room in the basement. That’s how he liked it—off by himself. His real father was a medical doctor in Flint, Michigan and Barry had a framed picture of Dr. Branch in his room with a little legend attached to it: “Our Founder.”

Barry was more or less my opposite: robust, confident and charming. He was barrel-chested and had a barely visible second pair of breast nipples about four inches below his normal ones. Ancillary, he called them. He had a large vocabulary and liked to teach me new words like ancillary and axillary and micturate, which particular lesson I ever after remembered when I saw a woman’s hairy armpit. First I remembered axilliary, then micturate and then something ancillary: that James Joyce once commented that an Irish girl is a species that micturates once a day, defecates once a week and menstruates once a month. Did Barry tell me that too? Funny how I remember dirty stuff. I don’t think Joyce would have said species. At fourteen Barry was reading books I had never even heard of: poetry, books about art and history and even philosophy. Ozwald Spengler and Marcus Aurelius. He read to me from his own copy of Krafft-Ebing and could even translate the dirty parts from Latin. He showed me how to fold a dollar bill so that the legend, “this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private” became, gal tender and private.

Barry was forever making lists: books to read, things to do, letters to write and resolutions for self-improvement. Always neatly printed—never in cursive. Even as an adult, a successful lawyer, he printed with large and small capitals. In the seventh grade Barry had his own subscription to Time and a collection of LIFE magazines going all the way back to the first issue, November 23, 1936, with a spectacular Margaret Bourke-White photo of Montana’s new Fort Peck Dam on its cover. For years I remembered it wrongly as a picture of Boulder Dam. Barry kept a file, alphabetical by artist, of hundreds of reproductions of paintings and sculptures—pictures that an uncle clipped from magazines and mailed to him. We shot baskets in his back yard driveway and Barry told me all sorts of stuff he knew. He liked to instruct and mostly I just took it in—sometimes pretending I already knew this or that just to maintain a balance. But Barry never made me feel dumb, even when we both knew I was faking. When he quizzed me about music all I could say was I liked Al Jolson but I couldn’t come up with any of his songs.

Barry gave me several books from his library. Serious stuff like The Rights of Man and Candide. Stuff that was mostly over my head but which I tried to read anyway. When I was older he sold me Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, a Museum of Modern Art picture book that I inscribed, “d. k. anderson 1953 purchased at a dada price from B.K. Branch.” I still have it. The illustrations included one of Füssli’s “The Nightmare” paintings. The one with that threatening horse of my cat-bite dream. The fact that another version of “Nightmare” hung in the Detroit Art Institute was something Barry didn’t know until I told him. These perhaps confusing memories about Füssli’s Nightmare pictures are the very kind that ought to be researched and made accurate. But that’s not my ambition, is it?

Barry despised his stepfather, Ted Hoover. “Hoover,” he called him. Barry’s mother, Alice, who went by Al, also called him Hoover, which my mother and I both thought rude. We called him Ted. Ted was an automotive engineer who worked as a high school drafting teacher. Al stayed home. I thought she had family money of her own. Alone with me, and once in front of his mother who didn’t object, Barry called Hoover, “FA”—short for Fat Ass. Barry said FA was a philistine. That when he sat listening to baseball games he broke wind without apology. Barry imitated him by lifting one cheek from the seat of FA’s favorite easy chair and mouthing a fart noise. Barry hated baseball and refused to talk about it. I liked baseball. I read a history of the Detroit Tigers and a biography of Ty Cobb and I talked with Ted about Tiger games and players. I thought having a good batting average like Cobb or George Kell was more important than being a home run hero like Hank Greenberg.

Ted and Al Hoover each had a Packard car. Ted’s Packard was a maroon sedan and Al’s was a baby-blue convertible with a white top. They kept their Packards side-by-side in their two-car garage. Before going out on winter mornings they warmed the inside of their cars with heaters. Small electric heaters that Ted had placed inside each car the night before and that were turned on from a remote switch in the kitchen. The kitchen had a built-in breakfast nook with red vinyl seating—like a restaurant booth. And there was a fancy toaster that didn’t have a lever that needed to be pushed down—just the weight of a slice of bread turned it on! Barry hated Packard cars. My mother claimed that Packard was an international car, respected in Europe where no one had even heard of Cadillac. Detroit people said Packard was the favorite car of Negroes. That Black families often lived in squalor so as to afford a maroon Packard sedan and enough gas to drive Saturday evening to a club and Sunday to church. When Barry turned sixteen and got a driver’s license he changed his opinion of Packard cars, especially of Al’s powder blue convertible.

During my two and a half years at Detroit Country Day School, and for several years afterwards, I often spent a weekend night at Barry’s house. He seldom came to mine. Barry told me stories about the Country Day boys. An iron spiral staircase led up from along side the stage at the end of the gymnasium to a small room that was reserved for upper classmen. They smoked in their clubroom and were occasionally caught smoking by Mr. Barlow—an English teacher, who had been sent to catch them. The boys were expected not to lie to Mr. Barlow because he was their social inferior but they couldn’t be asked to rat on one another so Mr. Barlow had to meet out demerits equally to all. I told Barry I wouldn’t have taken the rap for any single one of them. I bet none of them was as tough as my neighborhood friend Don Snyder who had crushed out a forbidden cigarette in the palm of his hand. Barry said the Country Day boys once compared penises in their clubroom and that Granger, an all-around manly fellow, had the largest. Thick, swarthy and wrinkled. I envied Granger his huge ruddy root—wrinkled no doubt to accommodate some great enlargement when fussed over by each of the many beautiful rich girls it would be privileged to please. Maybe already pleased. I loved rich girls. The idea of them. Of having them. Better looking than poor girls because they came from healthier stock and were better kept. They aged better too—often still sexy at an age when poor women looked worn out.

I told Barry about the jerking off contest I had witnessed at Camp Mongotasee. I bet the rich Country Day pricks didn’t do stuff like that.

My time at Detroit Country Day School was a glum interval in my already grayish growing up. After two years of poor performance my scholarship was cut to half. In eighth grade I became so despondent and made such a fuss about having to continue that my mother let me quit mid-year. She was having money problems and her half share of my tuition was a burden. She also had a disagreement with Headmaster F. Alden Shaw over how much she was to be paid for the senior portraits she had taken for the Country Day yearbook.

Being finished with Detroit Country Day School was a great relief—but also an embarrassment. Family and friends avoided talking about my failure. My mother explained it with a theory, “Fear of Success.” I don’t know if she made it up or if Fear of Success was a current notion in popular psychology. I scoffed at her theory but worried privately that there might be something to it. Over time, Fear of Success became a cliché by which she and I, separately and together, explained numerous of my hesitations and shortfalls. It had a ring of truth, like one’s daily horoscope—though really nothing to get a handle on.

Success was a tricky business. Not always its own reward. Often pregnant with a duty to go forward and succeed again—maybe at the expense of some more inviting prospect. Success seemed somewhat as a self-serving prize, fashioned and kept among themselves by movers and shakers who had once been privileged boys at the Country Day Schools of their own world. Why should I struggle for a place where I was unlikely to arrive and wouldn’t feel at ease if I did? I didn’t crave adulation of fine people as my mother seemed to. I accused her of faulting me for failures that were less my own than those of the world we lived in.

During our last year on West Troy I once or twice worked as a substitute pinsetter at the Ferndale Bowl. Setting pins was a hard job and sometimes dangerous. You had to be quick. The regular boys were tough. Some of them worked two lanes at once and told of bruises and even broken bones from flying pins. They also boasted of five-dollar tips stuck in the finger hole of a bowling ball because, even though injured, they had kept on setting so as not to take the edge off a bowler’s game. For a time I liked hanging out at the bowling alley, smoking cigarettes and feeling easy with the sturdy pinsetters—even though I didn’t belong there any more than with the boys at Detroit Country Day. I came home very late from the bowling alley and my mother was angry. She sniffed my breath and accused me of smoking. I wouldn’t even deny it. She smoked once in a great while at a party, just to show off, but she didn’t even inhale and her little puffs were phony. I was smoking regularly. Camels. I was turning bad.

In a model-building magazine I found a plan for making a tiny rocket engine from a CO 2 cartridge: one of those little metal bottles that gave the fizz to old-fashioned seltzer bottles. The article called for welding a flared tube-like combustion chamber to the back end of a spent CO 2 bottle with its end-plug drilled out. The bottle, stuffed with cotton and filled with gasoline, served as the fuel tank. The idea was to get the combustion tube hot with a torch; the tube would heat the bottled gas; the gas would shoot into the hot tube; ignite; blast forth—etc, etc. Mr. John D. Gordon, a man who had befriended my mother when she took his portrait, owned the Progressive Welder Company and he had one of his employees weld my rocket together. “Braze,” Mr. Gordon said, was the proper term. It didn’t get done quite right, a little out of alignment, and I never did get the engine to work. But I believed the fault was one of design, not because of the brazing.

One evening my mother and I went to a party at Mr. Gordon’s very large house in Grosse Pointe. When we arrived, Mr. Gordon gave me a small but expensive penknife with a blade that could be pushed out one-handed. In return he insisted that I give him a coin. I did, but didn’t understand why. My mother thought it was some kind of lesson in business. Later I learned that giving a coin in return for a sharp gift prevented any accidental severing of the friendship. Mr. Gordon’s wife didn’t attend the party because she was ill in her bedroom and John D. went upstairs several times to check on her. My mother thought Mrs. Gordon’s illness was feigned and that John deserved better than a sullen wife who wouldn’t share in his entertaining. My mother was pretty flirty with him. I didn’t like Mr. Gordon much, too full of himself, but I envied him his wealth. He even had a slot machine in his basement and gave me a roll of nickels to gamble with.

Mr. John D. Gordon was at the social level where my mother thought she belonged—where her English breeding would show well. But in America it was money that determined where one fit in and she had none. She was sometimes welcomed among the privileged because she was pretty and witty—but only as an accessory. I wondered if she slept with Mr. John D. Gordon. Late in the evening of the party several of us went to the Progressive Welder Company for a tour. The afternoon shift was working—fabricating spot welding machines to be used on factory assembly lines. We all looked green because, as Mr. Gordon explained, the overhead lights were mercury vapor lamps. I met and thanked the man who had brazed the CO 2 rocket engine for me.

By the end of 1948, my mother could no longer make a living at home as a photographer. She said she couldn’t compete with the men who had learned photography in the war and come home to open studios. She didn’t think they took very good portraits but everyone wanted to patronize veterans. Besides, the economy was slow and my mother was not a clever businesswoman. She got involved with a man named Leon who offered to help her open a proper studio. Leon was handsome in a smooth European sort of way and younger than my mother. He combed his dark hair straight back without a part. I didn’t like Leon. Maybe I was jealous. Leon put up some money to rent a storefront and the remodeling was begun. But the studio never opened and the partnership broke up. Maybe they had a lover’s quarrel. My mother said Leon cheated her, or at least that he hadn’t helped enough, and I think she ended up owing him money. Maybe that’s why we moved from West Troy—because she had to sell our house to pay her debts.

Left: 1597 Troy Avenue West. I don’t know when this picture was taken but the house looks pretty much as I remember it. Right: One of my mother’s portraits of me from about when we moved to West Troy. I think this is how she saw me—someone who’s wearing of a bow tie showed he would become different from the pack. The result of her dodging and burning at the enlarger to set me off from the background is almost halo-like and it looks as if she retouched away my right ear. My left ear, which seems to balance my bow tie, didn’t really stick out so much as it appears here.

Left: Me applying dope to the skin of a stick model British Spitfire. Right: The infamous Laughing Fart Picture that my mother took so much delight in showing to others—at my expense.

Left: The flying model that never flew. Before I installed the McCoy diesel engine. Right: Cousin Margaret from some years later but still much as I remember her from the 1940’s. Margaret recently wrote, when she sent me some pictures from her own album, that when she was young she thought I was a spoiled brat. And that all the attention I got from my mother, especially all the picture taking, was the cause.

Two party pictures. I am wearing a blond wig and checkered dress. Robert Macdonald is dressed as an Arab. Jack Haley, wearing what looks to be a bonnet, is behind him. I’ll guess that the dark long haired girl with beads is Ruth Nicholson and that the girl holding a fan is Nancy, invited from Webster Street.

Left: Ann Held. A picture probably taken in the 1960’s or ‘70’s. Right: Valentine photos of our boarder, Leah Russell, and my mother. As printed in a newspaper.

Left: Fooling around with Robert Macdonald (wearing beret)—maybe in preparation for our magic show. Right: Playing chess with my mother’s boyfriend, Gus Linder.

Left: Whiff and Poof in their cage. Right: Me in my Country Day School sub-middler football uniform. I made a fuss about her taking this picture because it was phony. I wasn’t much of a player—second-string center. She had to promise to not show it to anyone.

Above: Myself shortly before we moved from West Troy. This was how I wanted the world to see me.

At the beginning of 1949 my mother and I moved from our sunny Ferndale bungalow to the lower flat of a dark brick house on Virginia Park Avenue, about three miles from downtown Detroit. Of all my childhood places, our Virginia Park house number is the only one I can’t recall.
We took our Ferndale cat with us. “Tabby,” my mother called her in the cat-adventure tale she wrote for the Sunday Magazine of one of Detroit’s newspapers. At home I’m sure we called her something else, something more personal, but my mother thought Tabby would work better for a large audience. I’ve lost the story but I pretty well remember the plot: We let Tabby outdoors on Virginia Park and she promptly disappeared. My mother, certain that Tabby would head for her home in Ferndale, called the Finnish lady with the beautiful blond daughter who had been our West Troy next door neighbor and asked her to look out for our cat. I thought her silly but two weeks later the Finnish lady called to say that Tabby was there, meowing at the back door of our old house. A friend drove my mother and me to Ferndale to fetch Tabby, who was happy to see us and returned willingly to Virginia Park. She didn’t run off a again. In her story of Tabby’s amazing six-mile trip across the city my mother speculated about the various cat adventures a suburban feline might have along her way—and how she might have negotiated the surprises and dangers of the big city.

It is hard to believe our cat could have managed such a trip but truly she did. My mother explained in her story, and to me because I had been skeptical, that cats become attached more to places than people and have a remarkable sense of direction and navigation—little understood by science. She said we should have kept Tabby indoors until she understood that Virginia Park was her new home. I have always since given my own cats a day or two to explore a new house before letting them out—and then calling from the door every few minutes to help them get their bearings. I present this here as evidence that I did sometimes learn from my mother, even though I generally denied she knew anything worth paying attention to. I have told this story, and my lesson learned, many times over the years and often my listener said he or she had heard another cat adventure very much the same—but seldom one so astounding as our Tabby’s six-mile cross-town trek.

Virginia Park Avenue was in what had earlier been Detroit’s principal Jewish quarter. Dexter Avenue, several blocks west of our flat, was still a major shopping district for kosher products. The neighborhood had once been fairly fashionable but by 1949 its younger families had moved to the suburbs and left their parents in four-story corner apartment buildings within walking distance of Dexter. The houses in between were made into flats and rented to white factory workers who would also, in their turn, move to the suburbs and be replaced by Negroes. In the 1967 race riots the entire area would be looted and burned but in my time Virginia Park Avenue was tree lined and quiet. Though, to me, it seemed quite busy compared to Troy Avenue West in Ferndale.

Our urban flat had a living room, dining room, kitchen, bath and two bedrooms. Mine was the larger. With a white painted bookcase I partitioned my room into separate sleeping and work areas—I liked the idea of having an “office” for my books and hobby projects. I put a Post No Bills sign and my Petty and Vargas pin-up girls on the bedroom wall and my mother hung her print of Marie Laurencin’s “Abaresque” in our living room.

My mother took a daytime saleslady job in a downtown health food store but continued taking portraits at home in the evenings and on weekends. The big lead-lined army-surplus sink, which she had bought for the storefront studio that never opened, went into a makeshift darkroom in our basement. I sometimes helped her there. In total darkness she pulled exposed 4-by-5 negatives from their film packs, slipped them into stainless steel hangers and dropped those into black plastic tanks filled with DK-76 developer at a temperature of 68 degrees. My job was to gently agitate these developing tanks while her red wind-up Kodak timer ticked away the seconds. My mother explained the two kinds of black and white film, “Ortho” and “Pan.” One was better for women because it enhanced the warm colors, especially red lips, and the other better for men because it didn’t. There were notches along the edge of each sheet of film so its kind and speed could be identified in the dark. Only near the end of the process could she just briefly turn on a very dim red light to examine her work—maybe it was green—maybe either red or green depending on what kind of film was developing.

My mother’s professional strength, however, was not as a darkroom technician. She liked to dodge and burn and vignette to get some novel effect, or to superimpose images from two negatives onto one composite print, but her true interest and skill was in taking the picture: engaging her sitter and capturing an expression that would please both the subject and herself.

On Virginia Park our dining room was her studio. I took more interest in her picture taking than I had on West Troy. And in some of her sitters too: a young Hindu woman with a red dot on her forehead who was wondrously exotic in a delicate sari; an East Indian man, an engineer named Harry Ponkshe, who did not wear a red spot and who was briefly my mother’s boyfriend (Harry made conversation with me to curry her favor); and a winsome big-eyed six year old whose dreamy upturned face, framed in one of my mother’s scarves, got hung at a national photo show in Kansas City. A “babushka,” my mother called the scarf—a funny word for her to use. I even put one of my mother’s photos on my bedroom “office” wall. A double image of a good-looking young woman: dreamy and soft-sweatered in profile, then straight-on serious in her crisp uniform. A print that had been considered during the war for an American Woman’s Volunteer Service recruiting poster.

My mother said photographing women and children was easier than taking pictures of men. Men often brought a coat of armor to their portrait sitting, which, she speculated, was to protect their egos from the scrutiny of her camera. But she could usually charm these posers into letting go their defenses and then capturing an aspect both flattering and characteristic. She said the perfect moment was often just as the sitter relaxed from his self-conscious pose. Sometimes she only pretended to trip the shutter and then, a split second later, actually got the expression she wanted. She was engaging. She enjoyed entering, “vicariously,” she said, into the lives of her sitters—often people of privilege and wide experience. To enjoy, if only for the hour of picture taking, a relaxation of boundaries between her professional self and our social betters.

My mother considered herself a minor artist. Minor, because she believed her own talents, though more creative than many, were not profound, and because she judged photography itself to be a lesser form of expression than painting, which she compared it to. She believed that the greater share of creation brought about by mechanics, optics and chemistry lessened the value of the final product. In an article for The Birmingham Eccentric, “Photography—Is It Art?” my mother wrote: “By and large the dedicated photographer, even though he’s an artist, cannot command recognition of his work.” Recognition was her measure of success. She believed one should always aim for excellence in any endeavor but she also had a healthy appetite for appreciation. For admiration—especially of those she felt able to distinguish between true achievement and whatever was simply current. She hoped her minor artistic worth might someday be acclaimed and she was her own best publicist but her success was only local and fleeting. Many of her ideas about artistic stuff eventually became my own. I too would want approbation from high places—but, unlike her, wasn’t much good at seeking it. We both disdained being thought largish fish in a small-pond and would rather enjoy small notice in a large and sophisticated body. If only the mountain would come to us. My mother and I were sometimes judged snobs. And I guess we were. Snobs both individually and as extensions of the Western tradition we imagined was of the highest.

My mother never used color film because she thought the hues were garish. But she did sometimes tint her black and white prints to give women and girls a delicate blush, pink lips, and engaging eyes. A favorite, of both of us, among her photos was a sepia-tone print of a pair of a pair of her own worn out saddle shoes. A picture that said as much about time, tiredness and the value of craftsmanship as .… As what? I don’t know—art talk is always suspect.

My mother got me a Saturday morning job delivering groceries from our corner store to neighbors who had called in their orders. In a child’s red wagon I pulled loads of bagged provisions to nearby apartment buildings, got buzzed in, parked the wagon in the lobby because that was the rule, and lugged the bags up stairs or in elevators to old ladies who lived behind double locked doors. I didn’t like the old ladies because they were old, talked with funny Jewish accents and made me wait for my tip while they examined everything I had brought. I didn’t like pulling a little kid’s red wagon either—especially as I returned to the store and it was empty of any evidence of grownup employment. Other boys might think me simple-minded—maybe even challenge or laugh at me. To discourage such imagined humiliations I practiced a slouchy disinterested gait. After only a few Saturdays of finicky old ladies and sulky wagon pulling, I quit my delivery job. My mother was angry. She fretted about my fragile ego and said I ought to toughen up. I claimed it was her fault if I wasn’t tough. Wasn’t it the Little English Boy stuff she had encouraged that made me an outsider? I cried. It would be her own fault if I grew up a failure. She was hurt. She struggled with how much to demand of me and often erred on the side of indulgence.

I made friends with a boy across the street whose family was Greek. I was never invited into their house. This boy introduced me to the thrills of jumping railroad trains. We rode our bikes half a mile to a rail yard, waited out of sight for a slow moving freight, ran along beside it and swung up on one of the ladders at either end of each car. Aboard, we scampered along the roofs of rolling boxcars, jumping from one to the next like bandits in a western movie and inched along the catwalks of grubby black tank cars. Before the engine got going too fast we climbed back down a ladder, leaped forward with the motion of the train and hit the roadbed running so as not to be bowled over. Sometimes we stumbled and skinned our hands on the gravel but nothing worse. As we walked back to our bikes we speculated about the carefree lives of footloose drifters. In the rail yard itself we crawled under boxcars and pretended to be hobos riding the rods. But never under a moving train. I had read a story, John Steinbeck I think, in which a cruel railroad cop lowered between two boxcars a rope with a wrench tied to its end. The wrench slammed up and down between the roadbed and the underside of the speeding train and beat a vagabond out of his nest on the rods. Then he was cut to pieces by the wheels. My friend and I quit these rail yard capers after being caught smoking in an empty boxcar by a tough talking railroad cop. He threatened to call the city police, but let us off with a lecture.

A girl named Jewel lived across the street and next door to the Greek boy. She was younger than me but more grown-up. Sexy. Jewel was redolent of everything that made a girl sexy. Fair and petite with an emerging fullness that tempted touching almost beyond control. Her posture and gestures made my fluids warm and twitchy in their vessels. Sometimes Jewel joined our street games but if an older boy showed up she stood off to the side as if she thought we were just kids. After Barry Branch got a look at Jewel he went on and on about how beautiful she was. “Voluptuous,” he said. We speculated about Jewel’s voluptuous “delta,” an expression Barry had picked up reading Pierre Louis’ Aphrodite. He sang, “Honey drips from the lips [something, something] between her thighs,” and said that every time he passed a Cunningham Drug Store he imagined cunnilingus with Jewel. I needed to look up Barry’s brave new word—which wasn’t easy because I was a poor speller. Barry pretended that Jewel was my girlfriend and said he was able to abstain from ravishing her only because of my prior claim. I was flattered by the conquest he invented for me.

Finished with Detroit Country Day School, I began the second half of eighth grade at Tappan Junior High, an inner-city public school that in its own way was just as uncomfortable as private school had been. The boys were tough and the girls were aloof. The Negroes were loud and called each other “Nigger.” I was afraid to acknowledge I even heard them say it. The teachers were remote. I felt as if no one even knew I was enrolled. I made only one friend at Tappan—a boy named Richard Keezar. Keezar was tall and thick, had a rough complexion and looked older than most eighth grade boys. He was on the basketball team. In a schoolyard brawl at recess, he joined with the Negro boys because some were his teammates. Afterwards he accepted his punishment stoically—and received no more than a token admonition because everyone recognized that Richard had joined the underdog on principle. He was admired all around.

Keezar asked me to meet him at a certain street corner on a Tuesday evening after supper. I did. He introduced me to the runaways—two boys our own age, thirteen, who had skipped out on their families in Tennessee and hitchhiked to Detroit. They were both bone-skinny and reminded me of Leah Russell’s dirt-farm younger brothers. One runaway was a shirttail relative and stayed with Keezar and his mother. The other was a tag-along who didn’t seem to have any home. He said he slept at Keezar’s apartment during the day when Richard was in school and his mother at work. What did he do at night? That first evening together we mostly talked and walked—getting used to each other. After an hour, the three of them consulted briefly in private and then Keezar asked if I wanted to be in their gang. They had decided I was OK. I said I did and we walked and talked some more. The gang’s modus operandi was to rob ladies of their purses in the early evening and then burglarize small stores and businesses later on. They hadn’t yet done much of either though the runaways pretended some experience in Tennessee. Keezar seemed to be experimenting. Not that he wouldn’t steal in earnest, but maybe more for adventure than profit. I asked if they ever raped women. I thought that raping women was the kind of fun we would want after a stressful burglary. I hoped to sound grown up. They said they didn’t. I felt as if had asked a dumb question. But they let it go.

Several evenings later we four met again and then divided into pairs to snatch purses. The tag-along and I did a lot of walking but found no likely victim. Keezar and the shirttail did better. On Linwood Avenue, they grabbed a purse from a woman who yelled a lot but they got away easily. The take was a little over five dollars, which Keezar kept for our treasury. We stuffed the purse with its remaining contents into a mailbox. A noble gesture. We hadn’t meant any harm, nothing personal, only to do as we must. Like Robin Hood. Then we walked and talked about who had done what: stalking, snatching, running apart and reconnecting—and about how loud the woman had yelled.

Our next crime, some days later, was breaking into a small faded green commercial building through a second story fire escape door. Inside, the place was pretty shabby. There was nothing we wanted so we dumped out some desk drawers, broke a few things and left. I took a few supplies: paper clips and staples, for my “office” at home.

On our third escapade, we entered a sausage factory on Dexter Avenue through an unsecured skylight on the roof. Pretty daring. In the company office, we found a large freestanding strongbox on wheels. It was painted shiny black and the door was decorated with gold scrollwork. With his ear to the door Keezar slowly dialed the combination lock and hoped to hear the tumblers drop. He didn’t. With closed eyes I tried to feel them drop with my fingertips. I said mine would be the most sensitive because my nails were always bitten to the quick. I had once seen a movie in which a safe cracker purposely filed his nails until they bled. It worked in the movie but not for me. We found a steel bar and tried force but only managed to turn back a corner of the strongbox door. We looked for other valuables but found none.

There were, however, hundreds of sausages suspended from rolling hooks on tracks attached to the ceiling. Lots of different kinds: from chains of links to giant bolognas. We gathered broomsticks and mop poles and mounted an assault. We beat the sausages with abandon. Scores of them. We slashed salamis and stabbed big fat lunchmeats. We sampled handfuls of sausage and spit out what we didn’t like. The runaways were not so enthusiastic about this wanton vandalism as were Keezar and I. Maybe stealing was one thing, carnage another—not very grown-up-burglar behavior. So we quit and left as we had entered through the skylight.

One afternoon while Keezar’s mother was at work I was shown the gun. Not just some home made zip gun, but a real .32 caliber revolver with a five inch barrel. Keezar kept it hidden in the bottom drawer of his bedroom dresser. I don’t remember knowing how or where Keezar got the gun. It was old. Some of the bluing was worn off and it looked to me as if the frame was slightly bent—as if the barrel was not quite aligned with the cylinder. I didn’t mention my observation. In turn we each held the gun, aimed it, and pretended to shoot. But we didn’t pull the trigger because Keezar said that pulling the trigger of an unloaded gun would damage the firing pin. I don’t recall there being any ammunition.

The four of us made plans to go to Tennessee. Maybe because Keezar’s mother planned to send the shirttail and tag-along back home. It wasn’t clear what we might do in Tennessee, but we would stick together—one for all, all for one. We decided on one last night of burglary so as to have more money for our journey. To better our chances of success we first spent an evening casing stores for ease of entry and the likelihood of finding cash. In conversation on the street, we used code words: “customer” for a store that looked promising and “bus” to mean a cash register or safe. We couldn’t risk having passers-by discover what we were up to. We decided on two customers. We would execute our burglaries in separate pairs, hide out until morning and then meet downtown at the Greyhound bus station.

The following evening I went to bed, waited until after my mother had gone to her room, took all my money, put a few things into a suitcase and slipped out the back window. I met my runaway and we put our stuff in the Greek kid’s garage across the street. At ten-thirty we went to the men’s clothing shop we had selected the night before. Everything looked OK. The rear of the store was on a dark alley and set in a car-length from the buildings on either side. We put electrician’s friction tape on the door window and broke it with a rock. No noise at all. The tape and broken glass came away easily and we let ourselves in. Nothing to it. However, once inside we were unable to open a second door leading to the front part of the shop where we supposed the cash would be. Foiled. We rummaged through boxes on the storeroom shelves. Each of us took a belt and several shirts. My shirts were white with pin stripes: one red, the other blue. That was it. We hadn’t selected any other customers and didn’t know where Keezar and his partner were so we went back to the Greek kid’s garage. We didn’t sleep—just sat on a storage platform above where the cars were parked and talked and smoked until daylight. Then we set out walking toward the bus station. We hadn’t gone three blocks when a police car passed, stopped, and the cops got out. I guess we looked suspicious: two thirteen year-olds carrying suitcases at five-thirty in the morning. The policemen questioned us, found the brand new shirts, put us in their car and took us to juvenile hall.

Each of us was grilled separately. My interrogator claimed my companion had admitted everything and that I had better do the same or else it would go hard for me with the judge. I was frightened and told him all I knew—even about the gun. It was a great relief to confess. The cop said he would notify my mother and lectured me about all the grief I was causing her. I didn’t feel very ashamed. His scolding got my back up. I felt more trapped than blameworthy. I was sent to breakfast where I reconnected with my runaway. We hadn’t much to say to each other. Later in the morning Keezar appeared. When we failed to show up at the bus station he decided to go to school and that’s where the cops arrested him—right in his classroom. It made quite a stir. They took him home to get the gun. Keezar said he told the police nothing—not even about the second runaway. My runaway swore he had not talked either. I was ashamed to have squealed and I lied about how much I had told. But how else would the cops have known about the gun? Keezar didn’t accuse me. Instead, he said manly things like how good it was that the tag-along had not been caught. He never was. When we were fingerprinted, I saw that the Moto-tool scar on my left ring finger showed up clearly. I was a marked man.

After lunch, we went to the boy’s gym. It was noisy and almost frightening. Keezar jumped right into a basketball game but the runaway and I sat on a bench and watched. I wondered when my mother would come to get me. At supper time we were marched down a hallway passed a line of delinquent girls and there was a lot of provocative banter back and forth. The girls were mostly Negroes and I was afraid one of them might say something to me and sure that anything I answered would be taken wrongly. After supper, we were taken back to the boy’s gym to see a movie. It was a war story about the North African desert campaign. The crafty Nazis attacked an Allied bivouac right after breakfast when our unsuspecting soldiers were at their morning toilet. A dirty trick. Later both sides ran out of water. The surrounded and outnumbered but very clever Allies pretended to have so much water that they could take baths and the parched Nazis, watching through binoculars, were tricked into surrender. During the show I got up and walked to a drinking fountain. A trustee grabbed me. Didn’t I know I couldn’t get up without asking? I said the movie made me thirsty. He took my voice to be sarcastic and banged me against the wall. My sense of fairness was outraged but there was no one to hear a complaint. However, my apparent defiance of authority won me a moment of celebrity among the other boys.

The following morning I was taken to a room and confronted by a probation officer, my father, my mother, and her lawyer friend, Mr. Nelson Shapiro. My mother was upset—where had she gone wrong? My father was disappointed with me and blamed my mother. Mr. Shapiro was there to get me out of jail and, after I had been admonished by the probation officer to keep my nose clean, he did. Keezar remained in juvenile hall for two weeks and the runaway for almost a month. Returned to school I enjoyed a bit of notoriety as Keezar’s sidekick.

At our trial, the judge looked down from his bench at Mr. Shapiro, my mother, my father, Mrs. Keezar, and the three of us criminals. A probation officer sat off to the side with his papers. Neither Keezar nor the runaway was represented by a lawyer. Several shopkeepers from Dexter Avenue testified against us. They submitted exaggerated accounts of stolen property and damage—even from establishments we hadn’t burgled. Keezar and I tried to dispute their testimony but the probation officer told us to be quiet. The shopkeepers were excused. Mrs. Keezar said they were Jews making a record for false insurance claims and we all grumbled about them. The judge seemed to agree. I wondered if Mr. Shapiro was offended. In my defense, he claimed I had been unduly influenced by Keezar. Mrs. Keezar was quick to point out that I was older than Richard. Mr. Shapiro admitted the fact but countered that Keezar both looked and acted more grown up than his actual years. The judge nodded agreement. The runaway was ignored. We were all three convicted of “B & E,” Breaking and Entering, a lesser crime than burglary. The judge gave us a lecture about keeping clear of the law and attending school every day. Keezar appeared stalwart. The runaway seemed disinterested. I managed to neither loose face with my comrades by showing too much remorse nor to offend the court with excessive conceit. Keezar and I got a year’s probation. The runaway was sent back to juvenile hall to finish his thirty days, then to be returned to Tennessee. No one, except Mrs. Keezar, seemed to care anything about him. After our sentencing the judge left the room and the runaway was escorted out. There followed a polite but unsmiling conversation among all of us—even including my stepmother, who had waited in the hall. An agreement was reached between my parents and approved by the probation officer: at the end of summer, I would move to live with my father and stepmother Dorothy, go regularly to school and attend church. My mother worried that I would forever be saddled a criminal but the P.O. said my record would be expunged at some future time because I was a child when I committed the crimes.

I visited my probation officer every other Wednesday after school. He advised me to read biographies. Sometimes Keezar was there, but often he had been excused for basketball practice. The PO approved of sports. When we did meet, Keezar and I found little to talk about. His experiments with crime were over and he was sure to become a varsity player in high school. I got back to being my generally indolent self and was more or less looking forward to living with my father and Dorothy at the end of summer. Things might be different.

A few years later Mr. Shapiro changed his name to Shapard—Nelson Shapard. My mother said that lots of Jews changed their names for business—so they wouldn’t be discriminated against. She said that Nelson hadn’t wanted to but that his wife, Eileen, insisted—so that their daughter could make a better marriage. I didn’t understand. Didn’t they expect their daughter to marry a Jewish man? Mr. and Mrs. Shapard and my mother remained friends for many years. When the daughter married, my mother took the wedding pictures—a beautiful bride and a handsome groom.

During an early dotage Mrs. Shapard made long phone calls to my mother complaining about Nelson and their daughter and son-in-law. My mother was sympathetic to Eileen but her true loyalty lay with Mr. Shapiro. After Nelson died, Eileen still called to complain about him. My mother said that she thought most women were happier as widows than they had been as wives and she couldn’t understand why Eileen continued to carry on.

Over the years, my mother cultivated several friendships with well-to-do Jewish families. She admired the culture and refinement of the adults, the cleverness of their children and the closeness of their families.

I was sent to summer school because I had gotten poor grades—and to keep me busy during the day while my mother was at work. She promised to buy me a wristwatch as a reward for my regular attendance—and for having no more scrapes with the law. Of that summer school session at Tappan Junior High I remember only a candy store and two girls. The candy store was a cave-like place attended by a foreign sounding man who lurked behind a dark counter in the back. He also sold cigarettes. The two girls were splendid. Best friends. I watched them walk together in the sunshine—holding their books to their breasts with crossed bare arms. One was tall and thin with long red hair and a long and forward-leaning neck, like Nefertiti. Her nose had a high bridge and her complexion was peaches. Her friend was petite and even thinner and had shoulder length shiny black hair cut to bangs in front. She had a heart-shaped face and I remember her name was Betty Kitsos. With each step, the two girls rose up on their toes in their pretty white flats, and the hems of their long, scoop-necked summer dresses seemed to float just above the sidewalk. They were as beautiful and weightless as sunbeams. I can see them even now—especially their dainty feet nested in soft white leather, the exquisite clefts between their toes just barely showing.

When summer school ended my mother bought me a Tissot wristwatch. French, she said—Swiss, I later learned. I was proud of my Tissot watch and kept it until I was twenty when I loaned it to Doc, a Coast Guard medical corpsman, who lost it during a rendezvous in the Philippine jungle with a woman known only as “Chan’s wife.”

In August my mother moved to a tiny apartment on Trumble Avenue, even farther downtown than Virginia Park, and I moved to live with my father and stepmother Dorothy on Stahelin Street. Way out on Detroit’s West Side. Almost in the suburbs. My mother and I had lived on Virginia Park for only seven Months.

Left: A contact print of the East Indian woman I was so attracted to when she sat for her portrait. The smeary white lines are grease pencil crop marks my mother made on the negative. Right: The photo-montage I hung on my bedroom wall on Virginia Park. Here, not from the actual print, but from a faded clipping as it appeared in a Ferndale Newspaper.

§§

“I want you to try and remember what it was like when you were young, when you were fifteen or sixteen …those days when even the little things in life could be almost too exciting to bear.”
Thornton Wilder

In August of 1949, when I moved to live with my father and stepmother, Detroit had pretty much filled to its limits. Their home on Stahelin Street was near the city’s western boundary. Beyond were sparse suburbs, small truck gardens, River Rouge Park and open space. Stahelin was pronounced with a long a to make clear it wasn’t Stalin Street and some people even sounded the silent h just to be sure. The landscape was flat, the trees young, and our neighbors were white, working class and comfortably regular—except in the nearby Herman Gardens Housing Project, where many were colored and all were poor.

9100 Stahelin Street was my stepmother Dorothy’s house: a four-room brick and frame box with rough stairs leading to an unfinished attic. It was one of a half dozen post-war floor plans that were repeated, except for a very few older houses, over and over, block after block. One among numerous similar tracts that continued on and on—all neatly ordered by a grid of commercial thoroughfares at every mile with a quasi business street half way between. 9100 was not a corner house. Detroit addresses didn’t begin with a new 100 at each cross street. Dorothy had bought the house with her first husband—a no-good, she said, who had treated her badly and was long gone. My father, shortly after he and Dorothy married, added a small sunroom off the kitchen, which made the house somewhat unique and perhaps seem more theirs and less hers. This knotty-pine paneled room was his home office: a file cabinet, winter geraniums in pots and a desk with the Gray Elephants letter holder I had made for him as a cub scout. Behind the house there was a square of lawn inside a boarder of flowery bushes, a small vegetable garden along the alley fence and a detached one-car garage. My father planted some shrubbery in the front yard and became quite proud of one evergreen that grew to an extreme height. Some of the neighbors thought it ought to be pruned but my father wanted to see what his tree would do on its own. When I visited Detroit in 1996, my father’s evergreen, still increasing twenty years after his death, had reached an enormous size.

Our next door neighbors to the north were a young husband and his good-looking blond wife. They kept to themselves and I kept my eye out for her—very pretty in summer shorts hanging out her summer laundry. At the corner lived the Titinsauer family. I’m not sure of the spelling but they pronounced it, Tit’-en-sour. At home my father and Dorothy called them “The Tits.” Mr. Tit was my father’s closest neighborhood friend. They shared tools and sometimes helped each other with home and garden projects and minor auto repairs. The wife did old fashioned things like caning vegetables and quilting. There were several “Tit” children—including a pretty daughter, Dorothy, a year or two older than me. I wished, for Dorothy’s sake, that the Titinsauers would change their name. Well, at least hers would improve when she married.

Moving to live with my father and Dorothy was supposed to be a new start for me and it did feel that way. I arranged my few belongings in the long narrow unfinished attic that would be my bedroom. A shirttail relative of Dorothy’s had been living there but he left to make space for me. With pencil, the man had drawn a panoramic mural on the still unpainted sheet rock walls: Antoine Cadillac and his settlers being welcomed by the Huron Indians at what would become Fort Detroit. There were chiefs saluting Cadillac, braves beaching their canoes and helmeted French soldiers sawing logs and building the fort. My father and I painted over these sketches and he built some shelves along the walls but the remodeling remained a work-in-progress and the room never felt truly my own. In one corner there was a sewing machine and a black dressmaker’s mannequin, fat to match my stepmother, and a lot of her other stuff was stored in the crawl-spaces under the eves.

My father was again working as a printing paper salesman but he didn’t earn much money. He drove a 1937 Ford coupe that he had brush-painted with white house paint. He joked that a white car was easier to find after a difficult sales call—except on snowy days. There were places where the paint had flaked away leaving patches of dark rust and my father and stepmother called the car, “Spots.” The two of them had pet names for lots of things. “Black Natives,” was their name for a relief sculpture of two Negro dancers on our living room wall. Dorothy’s friend, Mr. Currie, a lay leader at our neighborhood Methodist church labeled it, “Jumping Niggers.” Mr. Currie, especially, and several others of our family friends seemed crass compared to the kind of people my mother cultivated.

I spent part of a work day with my father as he made his business rounds. Maybe to help reestablish our relationship. He introduced me to printers and purchasing agents who showed me a polite though passing interest. When my father made his sales pitch he seemed a different person: a hail-fellow well-met—almost the kind of man he would have labeled a blowhard. His behavior with these potential purchasers seemed unbecoming. Not himself at all. I was embarrassed for us both. Afterwards, as we looked for where he had parked Spots, he made fun of his customers and light of his success or failure with them. “What a way to make a buck.” So it was. For extra money he worked in the evenings and on weekends for a printer friend named Mark. Sometimes at Mark’s shop on Five Mile Road but more often at home. Five Mile Road was also named Fenkell—several of Detroit’s “mile roads” had other names but most people didn’t use them. He did busy-work for Mark like hand collating printed forms and padding them with red glue. Dorothy sometimes helped with this tedious cottage industry. She also kept Mark’s business books and did his billing. Through Mark my father got a bargain on a second-hand letterpress and put together a print shop in our basement. I tried to help him with sliding the heavy press down two by fours placed atop our basement stairs. But even disassembled the press left little room for me to do much. Dorothy “oohd” and “aahd” at how strong he was. And he was, but more important he could figure out each best move step by step. He got his shop set up with type and all the necessary paraphernalia but little came of his efforts. Letterpress work was time consuming, costly and less and less in demand. He did some invitation, business card and numbering work that Mark handed off and several Sunday church bulletins. But mostly the press stood idle. It was still there years later when he died. Too heavy to get rid of.

I didn’t much like my step-mother Dorothy and couldn’t understand what my father saw in her. She wasn’t pretty and was neither a good cook nor a diligent housekeeper. She seemed smart and well informed but often behaved in a childish manner—as if she were helpless. She called my father, “Pops” and used silly baby words like “pinkle” for taking a leak. Her dinner specialties were casserole concoctions like Spanish Rice—hardly different from the same thing she could buy in a can. She was fat and went to TOPS, Take Off Pounds Sensibly, on Wednesday afternoons but every morning we had supermarket frozen sweet-rolls for breakfast. “For Pops,” she said, but served us all. My father did like pastries but I was sure he would have preferred a doughnut or toast with jam at a White Castle diner. Alone with the newspaper instead of with us. And able to enjoy a whole cigarette with his cup of coffee. Dorothy was ever after him to quit and he placated her by smoking only half and leaving the long butt in an ashtray for after supper. Of course, he smoked at work and in the basement at home doing jobs for Mark the printer. A bowl of Wheaties was probably all my father wanted for breakfast. Me too. And Wheaties remain my favorite dry cereal. One of the few brands that haven’t changed since I was a boy. I used to like my Wheaties with brown sugar but now I prefer to garnish them with Kretchner’s “Original Toasted Wheat Germ,” which also seems unchanged from when my mother served it. She ate wheat germ from a tiny bowl with cream. For me now it’s Wheaties with wheat germ on top—wheat on wheat. A morning tribute to both father and mother.

I don’t, however, ever crave Spanish Rice. I don’t recall much at all about Dorothy. I thought her weak-willed. I spitefully relished the radio popularity of, “I Don’t Want Her, You Can Have Her, She’s Too Fat For Me” and “Mister Five-by-Five.” I whistled them in her presence. It was easy for me to sneer. I and my father stayed pretty much the same size and shape no matter what or how much we ate. Maybe I resented Dorothy because she had replaced my mother. But then my mother had tossed my father out. I guess I wanted someone to blame for what I thought to be my undeserved unhappy moments. I judged Dorothy narrow. I couldn’t be fair to her.

Dorothy was generally kind to me but I was sure she thought me idle and low. She put up with a lot of my ornery behavior because my father was so wishy-washy and she didn’t want to put him in a bind. She accused me of smoking in my upstairs room and complained when I came late to breakfast with uncombed hair—or wouldn’t get up when she called. Once she stormed up the stairs in a rage and ripped the covers off me. Naked! At least on my stomach. I was mortified. All the more so because she didn’t even seem embarrassed. I guess I was a thorn: lazy, delinquent and probably a reminder of my mother. My mother who was skinny, better looking, a snob and had rejected my father, not he her, which made him leftovers.

Some years later my mother told me that Dorothy had telephoned late one night and accused her of having murdered my father’s second child. A call right out of the blue. Did Dorothy mean the child she had aborted a decade before? My mother was appalled. Both because Dorothy’s accusation was so hateful and because my father must have provoked it. How, so long after the fact, could he complain to Dorothy that he had been wronged—pretend other than his own complicity in a decision that had troubled my mother ever since but never seemed to have bothered him? My mother was pretty upset. I guessed, not then but later, that my father had probably confessed to Dorothy less to dishonor my mother than simply to share an intimacy with his new partner. I figured my father didn’t expect Dorothy would call my mother and when she did he probably felt sheepish about it. He always hated a fuss.

When Dorothy and I quarreled he tried to keep clear. If my behavior became outrageous and his anger got the better of him, he might yell, “No allowance,” or that I was grounded. But later he would regret his outburst and reduce my sentence. My dislike for Dorothy mostly expressed by sullenness but my behavior wasn’t generally mean—I did willingly tie the laces of her stubby saddle shoes when she was pregnant and couldn’t reach them herself. She had little feet. When I wasn’t allowed out in the evening, we three sometimes played Canasta. It was a good way for Dorothy and me to get over hard feelings. She had a little gadget we cranked to shuffle two decks of cards at once—four if we were playing Double Canasta. Sometimes we listened with my father to his evening radio shows: Sam Spade, Boston Blackie, Amos and Andy. He made fun talking like Catfish. On weekend afternoons he and I followed Hal Newhouser’s play-by-play of Detroit Tigers’ baseball games. Home games were broadcast only if the stadium was sold out.

Once in a great while my father did goofy things when he and I were alone: like steering the car with his knees, even around corners, or spinning it in circles on icy winter streets. Tricks that made me laugh. I’m sure he later on taught me to drive though I don’t remember the lessons. But most of the time we weren’t very close—not truly interested in each other. When I was a little boy he had been affectionate but in my teens we didn’t share many interests and he didn’t take much responsibility for my upbringing.

My half-sisters, Frances and Lois, fourteen and sixteen years younger than me, hardly touched my life. Nor I theirs. Lois wasn’t even born until after I had moved away from Stahelin Street to again live with my mother. On hot summer nights when Dorothy was pregnant with Frances my father complained he couldn’t get any sleep for all her tossing and turning. Several times she slept upstairs in my room and I slept in their double bed with him. Once, sure he had gone to sleep, I turned aside and masturbated. Ever so quietly so as not to wake him—tip-toeing into the bathroom when I could no longer contain myself. What if he had been awake? What would he think? Not much probably. And certainly he was too shy to say anything. Several times I baby-sat Frances when she was an infant. I used a table knife to pilfer money from her piggy bank for cigarettes. Once, looking at her while she slept I wondered how she might be used in some sexually satisfying way. My depravity was speculative. I was never moved to act on it.

In the fall of 1950 I enrolled as a freshman at Southfield Vocational High School. “Southfield Trade,” we called it. All boys. Most were there because someone had decided they wouldn’t succeed in an academic high school and ought to learn a money-making skill. Some because they were delinquents but not bad enough for reform school. I was somewhere in between—having done poorly in junior high and being on probation from a scrape with the law the spring before. My friend Barry Branch’s stepfather, Ted Hoover, taught the drafting shop at Southfield Trade and he had convinced my parents that learning to do something useful with my hands would help me through my troubled teens. And besides, Mr. Hoover would be there to look out for me. The school was on Southfield Road, an easy mile-and-a-half bus ride north of my father’s house, in a converted factory building with unpainted concrete walls and casement windows.

Drafting was the most prestigious shop program at Southfield Trade and the one I wanted but it began in tenth grade and I was just starting ninth. I had to take the prerequisites: one semester of Sheet Metal and another of Machine Shop. I don’t remember Sheet Metal but in Machine Shop I made a machinist’s hammer head. I carved it with a milling machine from a block of steel and made an opening for its handle with a drill press. That was the hardest part—drilling two holes side by side and then hand filing away the residue to make an neat rounded oblong. My machinist’s hammer turned out well. I didn’t, however, take the final step of case hardening it so my grade was only B. When I told my mother she said this shortfall was yet another example of my not finishing things. I was stung by her hasty indictment. She didn’t appreciate the hard work I had put into making the hammer head. She didn’t even know what case hardening was until I told her: heating the metal to cherry-red and then quenching it in oil. I said I could do that any time over the kitchen stove at home. Besides, I didn’t intend to actually use the hammer and case hardening would spoil its nice even color. It looked better as it was. She apologized for faulting me and acknowledged the challenge of making a neat oblong hole. Oblong was one of her pet words. I still have my un-case-hardened machinist’s hammer head and sometimes use as a paper weight—or to hold open a book on my desk.

When I moved up to drafting shop I did well. Mr. Hoover was encouraging and kind. He claimed that a good draftsman could expect to earn well over $200,000 in a lifetime career with one of the big-three automakers or a major tool and die shop. He told engineering anecdotes and challenged us to figure out the mechanics of a, “Two-way, three-color traffic signal using only one lamp.” It was one of those perpetual motion or squaring a circle kind of puzzles and whomever solved it, he said, could retire into a, “ Life of Riley.” Squaring circles and perpetual motion were beyond my ken but I did attempt several paper and pencil solutions to the traffic light problem—employing various combinations of mirrors and shutters.

At the drafting table I was neat and accurate. I kept my sleeves rolled up and my drawings clean without using too much pounce: eraser dust in a little cloth bag that we shook over our drawings. If you got too much pounce under your T square and triangles the pencil lines began to fade. I was proud of my work. I still have occasional urges to do a bit of mechanical drawing. We also learned to make blueprints in a little room off one corner of the drafting shop. I took my turn with a boy named Sacco. The window of the blue print room was kept open year round to vent the ammonia fumes. I wanted to close the window because it was cold but Sacco said no, “Keep your feet warm but your head clear.”

One of my friends at Southfield Trade School was a boy named Tucci. Tucci was short and dark. Italian maybe. The cc was pronounced ch. Tucci lived half-way down town in a tough area and he had the same street-smart edginess as the teenagers in my mother’s Virginia Park neighborhood. He was in second year machine shop and said some of the boys made knives, brass knuckles and even and zip-gun parts in class.

I met Tucci one weekday evening on a street corner near his house. We hung around outside a corner store and asked single men customers to buy beer for us. We had the money. One man complained to the store clerk and we had to move farther away. Then someone agreed. He was in the store a long time and we worried he might steal our money. He didn’t. Beer in hand, we met up with Tucci’s girlfriend and a girlfriend of hers and all four walked down an alley to the second girl’s family garage. We sat in her parent’s car: Tucci and his girl in front, I and mine in the back. Mine was cute. Cuter than Tucci’s. Her cuteness made me nervous because it probably meant she was experienced. I wasn’t. Right off, Tucci and his girl got busy kissing and necking on the front seat. Down out of sight. My girl and I smoked and drank beer. I couldn’t think of much to say. I put my arm up on the seat behind her. She rested her head back to trigger an embrace but I hadn’t the courage. I didn’t know the how of it. I might be rejected or, even worse, encouraged. Obliged to expose my naiveté. Her head touching my arm was probably just an accident. We had another cigarette, drank our beer and I bumbled along with small talk.

After a while another boy came into the garage. He was a little older and knew Tucci and both girls. We all talked for a few minutes. Then he asked my girl into a second car parked along side the one we were in. He wasn’t her regular boyfriend or anything but she went along. Tucci and his girl were finished with whatever they had been doing so the three of us talked a while and then left the garage without disturbing my girl and the new guy. Tucci walked his girl home and I took a bus to my father’s house.

The next day at school Tucci said I could have made out with the cute girl. She liked me. His girlfriend had said so. I answered with evasions: “I hadn’t felt like it ... too much beer ... jail bait….” Tucci said, “Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.” I felt dumb. In the car it really had felt as if she wanted to do something. But what? Exactly? First—and second—and third? I didn’t know. And I couldn’t imagine that pretty girls were sometimes showed the way to timid boys.

Not long after that, Tucci got arrested for something. A policeman came to school and I was called to the principal’s office because I was Tucci’s friend. I didn’t know anything. Mr. Hoover stood up for my character. The cop countered that I was still on probation from my juvenile transgressions of the year before. Mr. Hoover said he hadn’t known. I was surprised because I thought he was a fully informed participant in my moral rehabilitation. I felt bad—as if I had let him down. But later I figured he must have known—that he had pretended surprise to make a better case for me. The policeman and the principal told me to stay away from Tucci.

After a year in drafting shop at Southfield Trade, I transferred to Mackenzie High, the large comprehensive high school that all my neighborhood friends attended. Boy friends and girl friends. I wanted very much to be with girls.

But at Mackenzie I would quickly flounder from disheartened anonymity into dismal failure, and then drop out. I guess should have stayed at Southfield where I had done well. Where, even though my stay was brief, I had acquired some solid drafting skills. Skills that would serve me in good stead later on. So, for that, thanks to Mr. Hoover and Southfield Trade.

My first neighborhood friend was Gary White. His parents and Dorothy were acquainted through Church. Gary was a misfit who wanted a friend and I was new so our families encouraged us. Gary was a year older than me, big, strong, clumsy and never seemed to say or do the right thing. A bumpkin, my mother would have called him. Mrs. White was gaunt and nervous—a chain smoker. She was nice to me and I found her somehow appealing. There was no pretense about her. Mr. White was harsh, often yelled and sometimes hit Gary for what seemed nothing at all.

The Whites had a television set—the first I had ever seen in someone’s home. The screen was round, no bigger than a dinner plate and the blurry gray moving image was cut off at the top and bottom. On late August afternoons Gary and I pulled the living room shades to better see the picture and watched professional wrestling. Prompted by the combatant’s preposterous antics, he and I wrestled on the living room floor. Gary always got the better of me and was sometimes too rough. He didn’t know his own strength. Every few minutes his mother yelled from the back of the house for us to be quiet.

There in his darkened living room, Gary and I also experimented with lighting farts. I had learned from my father the curious fact that a fart would burn. At home he often lit his cigarette with a wooden kitchen match that he struck with a brisk whisk along his pants from hip to lifted knee. He joked about the danger of accidentally lighting a fart. He didn’t demonstrate but said it was something he had done in his youth—I could experiment for myself. He cautioned me to keep my underwear on to prevent a singe. Gary and I, in his living room with the shades drawn, dropped our trousers, lay on our backs, pulled our knees to our chests, lit matches, held them to our butts and farted. Little blue and yellow flames shot forth. Just like a tiny flame-thrower. We kept our underwear on as I had been forewarned. We couldn’t very well see our own flames—just each other’s. We laughed so hard we wept and Gary’s mother yelled from the back of the house for us to be quiet.

Dorothy and her first husband had been among the first members of the St. Andrews Methodist Church at the corner of Stahelin Street and Joy Road, a block and a half from our house. Dorothy continued to go occasionally, my father less often, and both mostly to set an example because I was expected to attend regularly as a condition of my probation. I did. I was welcomed by the minister and in September I became a member of the church youth group, the Methodist Youth Fellowship. I fit in easily. Despite being associated with Gary who was not well liked and tolerated only out of Christian goodwill. As I worked at cementing my own position in the group Gary’s behavior often embarrassed me. Mostly I was loyal to him, but sometimes not. Sometimes I wished he would stay home or shut up or at least not stick so close to me. And over that first winter Gary did drift away from me and from the youth group too. The following spring he ran away from home and joined a circus. Just like in a storybook. He wrote to his mother from cities and towns all around the country. After a year on the road, Gary came home, but just for a visit. He was still awkward but being on his own at age sixteen made him seem more like a man than a boy. Gary told me he operated a ride on the midway: put it up, greased it, collected tickets, ran it, took it down, and traveled with it. Pretty grown up stuff. His mother was proud of Gary and so was my father. After only a few days at home, Gary went back to his traveling circus job.

The St. Andrews Methodist congregation had come together only two years earlier. The members met in a temporary wooden chapel, along side of which the construction of a permanent red brick church building had just begun. The pastor was Reverend William D. Mercer, a man in his thirties—smart, well educated, congenial and open-minded. He had been installed over the objections of a reactionary faction led by my step-mother’s arch-bigot friend, Mr. Currie. Reverend Mercer’s mission was to oversee the erection of a fine new church and to bring together a substantial congregation. He hoped also to shepherd this gathering flock toward a tolerant embrace of post-war moral liberalism—without ever seeming to push too hard. Reverend Mercer fancied himself more of a thinker and religious scholar than the St. Andrews job truly required and he was supposed by many parishioners to be on his way up—someday called to a to a greater task. He showed me the Interpreters Bible he used in preparing his sermons. He said he got it when he was in college.

The church gossips said that it was actually Mrs. Mercer who was ambitious for the Reverend to ascend. She, Eloise, was an attractive and genteel woman of whom Reverend Mercer was proud. I thought her sexy: pleasingly almost-plump with curvy calves and full breasts. She was always fetchingly dressed. Eloise was said to be of a family higher on the social scale than that of Reverend Mercer and certainly above that of most St. Andrews Methodists. To some she seemed too polished and perhaps too little sympathetic to the spiritual needs of those in whose trust her position placed her. And maybe also lacking sufficient respect for issues considered important by the Ladies Auxiliary. Eloise, they gossiped, should be more dedicated to helping with her husband’s ministry—and not looking too bewitching about it either. I thought Eloise was fittingly devoted to her charming self and to her own family - especially two pretty little daughters, Melody and Merrily, who every Sunday morning came to church looking as if they had stepped right out of a magazine ad for Easter dresses.

I recall only one of Reverend Mercer’s sermons. It was about the value we ought properly to place on material possessions. The scripture was from Exodus: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass .…” Before expounding further, Reverend Mercer said something about the neighbor’s ass passage to curb any private sniggering that might taint his message. I was reminded of a movie I had seen, “Anatomy of a Murder,” in which the judge held up the rape victim’s panties, later to be introduced into evidence, and told the spectators to swallow their jokes so that the trial could proceed with dignity. Maybe Reverend Mercer had also seen “Anatomy.”

He preached ... he droned ... he lost me. I mused about ass ... about pieces-of-ass ... about my neighbor’s ass, the good-looking blond wife who lived next door to us on the north side … about pretty Dorothy Titensauer next door to her. I pondered the fine ass warming the pews ahead of me ... coveting the cheeks of fair Eloise in the first row left … even the pretty little bottoms of Melody and Merrily. Reverend Mercer moved on to talking about cars. In Detroit automobiles were serious possessions and the topic of endless boasting and conversation. He counseled us to care for our cars, to wash and polish them, but not to lavish inappropriate love upon them or to covet our neighbor’s newer model. From the pulpit, he even told an old joke about a rabbi who sawed an inch off his new car’s tailpipe before driving it home from the dealer’s showroom. It was this kind of liberalism that the malevolent Mr. Currie objected to.

My mother once attended a Sunday service at St. Andrews—despite it being my stepmother’s territory. Maybe to show off her slimmer good looks and more stylish clothes at Dorothy’s expense. She also presented herself to Reverend Mercer in his parish office. She wanted to become acquainted and to share her insights concerning my still stumbling development with he who was to lend a hand with my spiritual and social rehabilitation. She engaged him with a show of interest in theological matters and popular psychology. My mother was clever at marshaling even a small knowledge of another person’s expertise into a flattering conviviality. She could draw a man right out of his cladding by lauding what he most admired about himself. She even arranged to take portraits of Reverend Mercer and his family. To enable a closer examination of the man, whom she found attractive, and his charming wife and pretty little girls.

Her assessment of the Mercer’s marriage was akin to what she thought about Anne and Charles Lindbergh: the wife, being above her husband in social standing, was uncomfortable when required, by love and duty, to involve herself with the common people of her husband’s professional domain. Not so much on account of disdain but because she was unfamiliar with their occupations, habits and manners. However, my mother neither condemned Mrs. Mercer, nor Mrs. Lindbergh. In fact she admired both, but conjectured that neither wife was the best person to make the most of her husband. She, in the place of either, could do better and was sure that Reverend Mercer in her presence, and Col. Lindbergh in her fancy, could probably recognize as much. My mother enjoyed such speculations but she seldom took her meddling beyond idle flirtation.

The St. Andrews Methodist Youth Fellowship, the MYF, had been established less than a year when I became a part of it. I felt welcomed by the other youth and reasonably comfortable among them. We were a dozen boys and girls, all fourteen or fifteen, who got on well together and who pretty much remained best friends over the next three years. Few either joined or quit during our time. It was in the MYF that I found openhearted male confidants with whom to explore the enigmas of adolescence and where I discovered the delightful excitements of courting and falling in love with pretty teenaged girls.

All of us in MYF went to Sunday morning worship and most of us sang in the junior choir. The girls, facing us boys across the chancel, were lovely in their Sunday dresses. My self conscious and clumsy voice was encouraged by their fresh faces and flowering figures. Some Sunday mornings I even experienced flights of fancy. Despite my skeptical inclinations and disdain for the fervor of others, I was carried away with the romance of singing, the warm morning sunshine, the beauty of the girls and even the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Over the ensuing year I would occasionally experience that same leavening in the presence of certain pictures at the Detroit Art Institute; listening to Sunday afternoon classical music on the radio; watching Hedy Lamarr mooning about in “Extasy.”

Our MYF meetings were on Sunday evenings. After a prayer and some songs in the sanctuary, we gathered in the social hall where Reverend Mercer or our lay advisor, Mrs. Mosshammer, led a discussion on some timely spiritual or moral topic. Then there followed friendly socializing: Ping-Pong, table games, snacks, and small talk. At the end of the evening we boys walked the girls home—at first horsing around, then conversing, then pairing, and finally some of us even holding hands.

Shepherding a flock of female companions, for whom we pretended some responsibility, enabled us MYF boys to think and to talk among ourselves about the girls, and our hunger for them, in a more spiritual manner than simply to extol their cuteness and breast size. Pretty and pointy remained important—but not definitive. Our budding ideas about love and loyalty were considered, shared and argued. First among ourselves and then, at least haltingly, even with the girls. The Methodist Youth Fellowship became a haven in which we more or less awkward boys could engage the more or less indulgent girls in a relatively safe exploration and seasoning of our mutual affections. Fickle romances grew out of sheltered social events where we practiced conversation and the manners of polite flirtation. On Saturday afternoons at the roller rink on Warren Avenue I learned to touch and hold the girls with something approaching confidence and prideful possession. The thrill of it and the concentration needed to do it right were exhausting.

Our parent advisor, Mrs. Mosshammer, not herself a parent, was a handsome woman in her thirties with smooth nylon-stockinged legs and who often wore fashionable see-through blouses—see through to the straps and lace of her well filled satiny lingerie. I thought her sexy. Her husband was a businessman and an officer in the Navy Reserve. He was often out of town but a photo of him, very distinguished in his dress-blue uniform, sat on a table in the Mosshammer living room where we Methodist youth sometimes gathered for discussion. Mrs. Mosshammer was an indulgent adviser and allowed us boys to smoke. We were very respectful and when no ashtray was handy we tapped our ashes into the cuffs of our trousers or the cellophane wrapper we had carefully removed from a cigarette package. At one of these gatherings Mrs. Mosshammer chided me, affectionately I thought, about my overly serious demeanor. She said I should let myself go more often. I was on the floor and she in a chair next to the polished table where her absent husband was framed. The lamplight enhanced her allure and I wondered if she thought me more grown-up than the other boys. Perhaps she was even inviting something. I imagined staying behind when the others left and…. But of course, I didn’t.

Bill Waara was our MYF president. He was older, by just over a year, than his brother, Vern—both of whom had angular good looks and more than their share of self-confidence and conceit. Bill was the only boy among us expected to answer a religious calling, which expectation set him a step apart and above. Bill was generally deferred to as the moral and social standard bearer of our group. He and Reverend Mercer had theological discussions alone in the church office. I was envious. I daydreamed that I too might someday answer a summons to the cloth. Ministering looked pretty easy. One sermon a week and occasional counseling, weddings and sick visits Monday through Saturday. And pastors enjoyed the esteem of the women in their flock. Trusted to be alone with them and to plumb their souls and God knows what else. But, unfortunatly, I wasn’t inclined to reverence. I did participate in our youthful discussions about God and Christian behavior like not swearing, but not with fervor or true belief. While coarse language wasn’t my habit, I thought most swearing wasn’t so bad—but I did agree that we ought to abstain from saying, “God damn!”

Bill’s brother, Vern, half a year older than me, was not expected to become anything. He already was: the handsomest among us, the best sport and the most charming. Envied by boys and yearned after by every girl. Vern played his part well, swaggering about on slightly bowed legs in Levi jeans that seemed custom made just for him. His hair was always stylishly groomed. The picture virility and confidence.

On occasion I slept over at Bill and Vern’s house. Their father was a short and friendly man who worked on the assembly line at the River Rouge Ford factory and Mrs. Waara was a petite woman whom I found sexy. Yet their four boys, the younger two I hardly knew, were all tall. All the Waara family, I think the name was Finnish, took evening baths and lounged around afterwards in pajamas and robes. I kept an open eye for a glimpse of more of Mrs. Waara’s shapely legs than she intended to exhibit. She took a teasing interest in her two older boy’s adolescent obsessions with sex and popularity and encouraged their vain confessions of amorous frustration and conquest among the MYF girls. I remember being shocked when Bill told a roguish anecdote in front of his mother: “Shirley Temple swallowed a pin at age two, but never felt a prick until she was eighteen.” Bill said that Bob Hope had told the joke on the radio and that his show had been cut off for a few minutes immediately afterwards. I was shocked, not by the joke, but that Mrs. Waara allowed it and even seemed amused.

Bill and Vern shared a small upstairs room, a face-to-face double desk, and a double bed. I thought it strange for boys their age to be sleeping together but maybe there wasn’t room for two single beds. When I spent the night, I slept on a folding canvas cot. Upstairs and alone, we boys sometimes indulged in vulgar talk about tits and ass, six-a-nèuf, dry fucks, and tell-tale pecker tracks left on the back seats of cars. Bill joked that a policeman had caught him necking with one of the MYF girls in his dad’s car at night in River Rouge Park. The cop asked what they were doing, Bill answered, “Just talking,” and the cop quipped, “Put your tongue back in your pants boy, and move along.” It took me a minute to get the joke. We also had serious conversations about the virtues and shortcomings of the MYF girls and how best to woo those of whom each of us was immediately enamored. Both brothers told of wet dreams and complained of being wakened in their shared double bed by the other acting-out in his sleep. I never had wet dreams. But I claimed I did—both as evidence of my potency and to deflect any suspicion that I might jerk off so often that I had nothing left for an innocent release in my sleep.

Vern came down with what we boys called “blue-balls.” He showed off his swollen scrotum in the restroom of the gas station across the street from church—it was the size of softball and the blue-brown color of bruise. He said it happened because he got so worked up with his girlfriend, Helen, who refused to give him relief. Bill agreed that Helen was partly to blame. In general we called such girls prick-teasers but Helen was too respectable for that. I thought Vern’s complaint was phony—why couldn’t he just flog his root like the rest of us and be done with it? Bill made sure all the girls knew about his brother’s affliction. They were always each others best advocate. And Vern played for their sympathy like a wounded matador. He went bowling with the rest of us and winced around even more bowlegged than usual to show how rugged he was. The girl’s appeared to feel his pain but I thought their concern was fawning. I envied of their worry about Vern’s precious genitals. None of them thinking of mine—just as needy and surely just as potent. Sometime later I read in a “Believe It Or Not” kind of comic about a man in Germany whose diseased scrotum swelled to such an extent that he had to support it in a wheel barrow that he pushed around in front of himself. There was with a little drawing of the man and his barrow.

Bill was always up for adventue. For a year or two, we boys often went horseback riding on weekends. Bill and I more than the rest. We hitchhiked to a stable way out Northwestern Highway where we were allowed to ride in the open countryside. Even bareback, which way I rode only once because it felt so insecure. We came across a fire department crew putting out a brush fire. The firemen were worried about the extent of it so Bill and I tied up our horses and helped to swat out sparks and dig up bushes. It wasn’t a truly threatening fire but fierce enough that we could feel proud of our courage. When it was out, the firemanman in charge thanked us and took our names and addresses. A few weeks later each of us got a small check in the mail from the Oakland County Fire District.

Joe Thompson lived down the block from the Waara boys. Joe’s family had moved up from the South during the war and we called them hillbillies—but not in front of Joe. When I spent a Saturday night at Joe’s house, his mother served pork chops and biscuits with gravy for Sunday breakfast. Joe Thompson and Vern Waara were best friends though it seemed to me that Vern often used Joe as a foil. A role Joe seemed to enjoy since Vern was so popular and Joe almost a hick. Joe worried greatly about his appearance. Once he made a big fuss when someone ripped the little red “Levi’s” tag from the back pocket of his jeans. We all wanted to keep our red tags but in fun we sometimes tried to snatch them off each other’s pockets. It was no big deal—except to Joe. I wasn’t comfortable with some of the horsing around. Joe and Vern and sometimes Bill did a lot of goosing. I thought it was crude, especially in front of the girls. Once Joe lost a bet to Vern, the consequence of which was a blowjob. Joe paid up on a Sunday morning in the men’s room of the gas station across the street from church. In front of Bill, me and our friend Sandy Ross, Joe actually put Vern’s penis into his mouth. Just barely. That was it. He didn’t close his lips. We gave Joe a bad time because he hadn’t really satisfied the bet. But truly we hadn’t wanted him too because watching would have made us all uncomfortable. We would have had to think differently about Joe. There was a dirty song we boys sometimes sang among ourselves to the tune of “Stormy Weather”—“Don’t know why, I’ve got lipstick on my fly, sloppy blowjob, da da da.”

Before church we boys often met at the corner gas station to have a smoke, drink a pop and use the john to wet and comb our Ducks-Ass hairstyles. We used Wildroot Cream Oil to keep our DA’s in shape. To me, wild root conjured up a rampaging hard-on, but I never said so to the others. They might think something funny about me. Most of us, but not Bill, were cigarette smokers. Unfiltered regular size Camels. Once in a while Sandy Ross showed off with a Wolf Brother’s rum soaked Crooks cigar—they were squarish in cross section and had a crook in the middle. Both Sandy and I enjoyed our Cokes after pouring a handful of vending machine Spanish peanuts into the bottle— greenish glass shaped like a bust, waist and hips. With each swig, we got a few salty peanuts and peanut skins. Delicious. I still enjoy a Peanut Coke when I find a store offering both Spanish peanuts and Coca-cola in old fashioned bottles. Not often.

Often we went to the ice cream parlor next to the gas station. There were mirrors along one wall where we could admire ourselves and groom our hair again. We all complained about our hair growing too fast because there was something manly about fast growing hair. And we all worried about dandruff. Joe, Vern and I wore suits with long jackets and pegged pants. Mine was a powder blue gabardine one-button-roll—very wide at the knee and very tight at the ankle. Extreme. Almost a Zoot Suit. I didn’t, like Vern, have the physique to really pull it off and my mother said it was too loud. Suspecting she was right made me worry others might agree—and adamant that she was wrong. We wore dark narrow knitted ties with tie tacks. And Chukka-boots. The Chukkas had to be black but black boots were seldom stocked in the stores. I bought brown and dyed them black. My mother warned the dye would ruin the leather but I did it anyway and they turned out OK. We wore metal heeltaps on our Chukkas—not to save the heels but because it was stylish to click-clack as we stepped along. In the ice cream parlor we combed our hair yet again and adjusted the cuff links on our French-cuffed shirts. Pink shirts were in style. Pink shirt, powder blue suit, black tie. My cuff links were gold plated with a bold angular motif that my mother said looked as if Frank Lloyd Wright might have designed them.

Howard Smith, the proprietor of the ice cream store, watched our preening and primping and made off-color quips about us and the MYF girls. He told us about Spanish Fly but warned that too much could actually drive a woman insane. Howard wasn’t married and we thought he might be a homosexual. He told over and over again a joke about a bear sliding down a mountain. The punch line was, “What, no soap!” I never got it but I was sure it had something to do with copulation, masturbation or pederasty—something that wanted a lubricant. Howard didn’t succeed in the ice cream business and moved to Los Angeles. I wrote him a letter or two but he answered only once with a post card.

Dick Hook’s father owned Hook’s Jewelry and Watch Repair on Joy Road. Both Dick and his mother helped in the store. Each fall, when next year’s models were brought out, Mr. Hook bought a new Buick Roadmaster. Dick said that for two hundred dollars more they could get a Cadillac, but that his father didn’t want to show off. In the early ‘Fifties, Buick cars had a distinctive hood ornament, a teardrop projectile inside a chrome ring. The ring could be snapped off and given to a girl to wear as a bracelet. There were a lot of Buicks around with de-ringed projectiles on their hoods. It was even OK for a boy to sport a Buick ring if he stole it himself. But no one actually wore them because they were too bulky. None of us in the MYF ever stole a Buick ring. We boys did wear thick chrome metal ID bracelets and some of us had army dog tags. You could buy blank dog tags at surplus stores and have your own name and a made-up serial number embossed on them.

The Hook family lived in a larger house than any of the others of us and they had a ping-pong table in their basement. Dick and his mother practiced often and he was the best player in the MYF. A girl named Shirley Barr was thought of as Dick’s girlfriend though he didn’t seem to care much about girls. Shirley was slender, tall and shy. She came to MYF meetings only a few times. Tall thin girls were the kind I liked most but Shirley was so reserved I never supposed I might get anywhere with her. Dick and I took several ballroom dancing lessons at an Arthur Murray studio in downtown Detroit. We wore jackets and ties to our lessons. The other students were grown men. Mostly odd looking guys who were probably misfits. The instructors were properly dressed attractive young women who always maintained a friendly but formal distance on the dance floor. We didn’t always get the same teaching partner, probably by design. I hoped one of my partners, any one at all, would propose something more than fox-trotting but, of course, none did. Neither Dick nor I learned much about dancing. We were both too up-tight. When Dick finished high school he went to Elgin Community College in Elgin, Illinois where the Elgin Watch Company was located, to learn watch repair and jewelry merchandising. Just what everyone expected of him.

Dick belonged to DeMolay and sponsored Sandy Ross and me to become members. Sandy and I went to only two meetings. Too much mumbo-jumbo. At our second meeting Sandy and I each put a black marble into a little wooden box that was passed among us to vote on the installation of a new boy. The son of some big shot Mason. When the box was opened the adult master, or whatever he was called, gave us all a lecture on the seriousness of DeMolay. Voting was no joke. A second vote was taken and we did it again. One blackball was enough to keep the boy out. The master was angry and tabled the vote to the next meeting. Dick Hook disapproved but kept his counsel. Sandy and I said the boy would be admitted next month so what did it matter. The only good thing about DeMolay was going out to a restaurant with a group of Rainbow Girls after our meetings. They were lovely in their fancy formals. Like prom dresses. Made-up faces and bare shoulders. Most of us ordered shrimp cocktail. Elegant and affordable.

John Staley and Barbara, I’ve forgotten her last name, came to the MYF as a pair—already girlfriend and boyfriend. John was a friend of Dick Hook’s in DeMolay. I knew Barbara through her next-door neighbor, Dave something-or-other, who went to Southfield Trade School. Dave was a year ahead of me and in Auto Shop. Favored Auto Shop students were allowed to work on their own cars after class and Dave had chopped and lowered his Oldsmobile 88 hardtop coupe. He beefed it up with an Olds’ 98 engine and rumbling dual mufflers that were pretty bold. Back then the police actually concerned themselves with nuisance crime and used noise meters to measure the loudness of souped-up cars. Too loud and you got a fix-it ticket. Dave and his low profile Olds’ 88 were often challenged to a drag race at stoplights. He seldom bothered. It was already well known that he could beat anything around. He said he sometimes gunned his engine to get the other driver heated up and then, while the light was still red, popped his clutch—but just enough to jump forward a foot or two. The other guy, thinking the race was on, would shoot out into the intersection before he realized that the light had not changed. I didn’t really believe it—people would get killed. Dave installed an electric door lock on the passenger side of his custom Olds’ that was controlled from a switch on the driver’s side. He said it was to keep girls pinned down while he put the make on them. He claimed that he and several of his friends had once put the make on Barbara next door. Tied her wrists to her own bed frame and gang-banged her. He said he was first, he didn’t take sloppy seconds, and that Barbara had asked for it. I didn’t understand why she would have “asked for it,” and if she had, then why did they tie her up? I couldn’t imagine screwing anyone, tied or not—and no matter how good looking, while other boys stood around waiting their turn. Much less being second or third. I thought sex should be enjoyed privately. In the dark with affection and encouragement from the girl. I thought Dave was lying. Barbara always seemed pretty modest to me, though she did often wear stockings and sheer blouses. Sheer blouses were in fashion. But then Dave did tell his story openly—even though Barbara’s boyfriend, John, was pretty tough. And John’s father a Detroit cop to beat. Why didn’t John do something about it? This memory stuck in my mind less because it was true or false or about anyone in particular than because the whole idea of a gang-bang troubled me. Tough boys often talked about gang-banging someone or other—or wanting to. I didn’t get it. Probably they hadn’t ever screwed anyone at all and couldn’t even imagine it without having their friends around to encourage them.

At a party in Joan Perenboom’s basement, we boys pretended to brand some of the girls. Like heifers. We invited each victim in turn to come behind the furnace for the ritual. We showed her the brand: a piece of coat hanger bent into an old-west looking shape. Then we blindfolded her. One of us held the brand against a piece of ice for a minute and then touched it to the girl’s bare forehead. Mental suggestion plus the shock of icy cold metal were supposed to convince her that she had really been burned. It did. They all squealed. But when we branded Barbara she got hysterical. The other girls had played along but Barbara was so upset that John had to take her home.

From when I joined the Methodist Youth Fellowship until some time after my four years in the Coast Guard, Sandy Ross was my closest friend. Sandy was a year older than me and lived in Dearborn, a little over a mile from my father’s house. He was short. His parents were even shorter, five-two and four-eleven. They had grown up in Scotland as stepbrother and stepsister and neither of them, Sandy said, ever had girl or boy friend. They married young. Mrs. Ross kept house and Mr. Ross was a machinist at Ford River Rouge. He had once worked as a collier in Wales and said that his being short was an advantage because the mineshaft overheads were so low. Sandy’s older brother, Robert, was a jockey and his older sister, Janet, was married to a horse trainer. Robert was a first-class jockey but a heavy drinker. Once I went with Sandy and his parents to visit Robert in a sanatorium where he was drying out from a bout with DT’s. He said he saw rats. Sandy’s sister and brother-in-law had a daughter, Nancy, and despite frequent moves from track to track, and all the temptations thereat, they managed to hold together as a regular family. By all his family Sandy was hoped to become a businessman: not a factory worker, and definitely not anything to do with horse racing. He was a Fordson High School honor roll student and had a circle of friends in Dearborn, apart from us in the MYF, many of whom expected to become doctors and lawyers. Fordson was reputed to be the best public high school anywhere near Detroit. I went to a few Friday evening poker parties with Sandy’s Fordson High crowd. They were quick-witted boys who made jokes and puns that often went over my head. Drawing a bad hand, one said, “Balls!” Another jumped in with, “If I had two, I’d be King.” Sandy explained later. The same boy who said, “Balls!” was also a musician. Every so often he interrupted the game to play a tune for luck. I was pretty impressed with the Fordson bunch.

Sandy’s full name was James Alexander Ross. His mother said it was good luck if your initials spelled a word, like JAR. The nick name, Sandy, came from his sandy red hair, the same as his father’s, who was also called Sandy at work but not at home. They lived in a semi-basement apartment and all the windows looked out onto light wells. It was a little gloomy. Sandy was left-handed. His mother put teacups on the table with the handles properly oriented for left and right handed drinkers. All three Rosses put both salt and pepper on their muskmelon—cantaloupe they called it. I once went to a picnic gathering of their extended family and in-laws. I envied Sandy this large collection of friends and relations, like Rabbit’s in the Pooh stories, and wished my own family were more like his. They all seemed to think Sandy was special.

Sandy and his father read a lot. Mostly westerns. I tried a Zane Grey story but didn’t much care for it. The references to sage, manzanita, lupine and sorrel, and to geological features like buttes and moraines annoyed me. I had no idea what such things were and I didn’t want to consult a dictionary to enjoy a cowboy adventure. Besides, I could seldom remember a dictionary definition for more than a few minutes. Both Sandy and his father scored a new pocket book lengthwise along the spine with their thumbnails. So the glue wouldn’t crack when they opened it flat. And each marked the place where he quit reading by scoring the edge of the page. They both had redhead’s thick fingernails and kept them well manicured. Sandy said that nails grew faster if cut, slower if filed. My fingernails were thin and mostly chewed to the quick. Under Sandy’s sway, I took up caring for them. I shaped them as best I could and wore clear nail polish to discourage nibbling. It sounds kind of girlish but other boys also wore clear polish. The idea was that if you put a lot of time and effort into keeping your nails neat then you were less likely to absent-mindedly chew on them. We both kept the nail of our middle or “social finger,” Sandy’s left and my right, filed smooth and short so as never to irritate a girl’s delicate private parts when fondling her. Neither of us had a girl friend—nor the prospect of having one who might encourage such activity. But just in case. It was something to talk about. I soon lost interest in manicuring and resumed my nail gnawing habit.

Someone at Ford River Rouge gave Mr. Ross a book called, Proposed Roads to Freedom. A socialist polemic for working men. I borrowed it and what I understood was pretty persuasive. Socialism seemed to promise a more hopeful future than my mother’s conservative parroting, Barry Branch’s phony liberalism or the non-politics of my father and stepmother. Mr. Ross never offered to talk about the book or even asked for it back.

Sandy and I read literary stuff: the Studs Lonigan Trilogy, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hemingway and a bunch of Damon Runyan stories and Knock on Any Door. We made, “Live fast, die young and make a good looking corpse” our motto though none of those prospects seemed very likely for either of us. In one of the Lonigan stories a character vexed someone with the habit of whistling a long single note and I tried doing the same to annoy my stepmother. I daydreamed of growing up tough in New York City or Chicago. I would be a different person: adventurous, amorous, a hard guy sought after by girls—like the boys on the cover of The Amboy Dukes.

I often hitchhiked to Sandy’s house—one short ride south on Southfield Road and then another east on Warren Avenue. On a rainy Saturday afternoon a man who picked me up on Warren asked me how often I screwed my girlfriend. I was dumbfounded. Then said he bet I had a big dick and reached over to put his hand on my thigh. I was scared but not panicky and stepped out smartly at the next traffic light even though the car hadn’t fully stopped. I walked in the rain the rest of the way to Sandy’s house and told him how bold my escape had been.

Sandy and I spent a number of long and late evenings at a pool hall. Not a downtown joint with thugs, but a quiet parlor way out on Ford Road near Inkster. Mr. Ross took the bus to and from his afternoon work shift so Sandy often got to use the family car. We disdained 8-Ball as child’s play and struggled with rotation pool, keeping score with wooden counters strung on a wire above the table. We called the counters something that began with Q: quoins maybe. We practiced bank shots, English and “drawing” the cue ball into position for the next shot. Even jump shots. But the proprietor discouraged jumps for fear of our ripping the felt. We thought we were pretty good. On other evenings we drove around on dark empty streets in the warehouse districts of Hamtramck and Detroit’s near East Side. And down along the river at the foot of the city. We talked like Damon Runyan characters about truck hijackers and roscoes and heists and picking up broads at Black-and-Tan clubs. We took a late afternoon bus downtown and walked for blocks and blocks and had pie and coffee at a diner run by Greeks. We bought doughnuts in a shop with an automated machine that squeezed out and cut off little tires of dough and plopped them into a river of simmering oil that wound through a stainless steel channel behind the storefront window. The doughnuts puffed up and browned as they bobbed along and then were lifted out of the bubbling fat by a conveyor and dumped on a screen to drip-dry. We ate them warm, crisp and greasy. Once we both got jaywalking tickets for crossing Woodward Avenue in mid-block at rush hour. We peeked between pulled down blinds to watch effeminate department store window dressers drape naked mannequins. We laughed at a movie poster of John Dillenger because it showed the dead mobster laid out on a morgue slab and covered by a sheet with a big bulge in its middle—as if Dillenger had died with a giant hard-on. Once we came upon a dead man on the sidewalk who had been shot down only moments before. The police hadn’t even arrived.

In winter, Sandy wore the army surplus Eisenhower Jacket I had sold him. It looked good on him because he was short and broad shouldered. I hadn’t liked it because it left the small of my back uncovered. I hated to be cold in the small of my back. Just seeing a bent over street mechanic with his backside bare above the crack of his butt still makes me shiver. Hanging around on street corners, Sandy stood with his ankles crossed and his knees locked. I didn’t really understand locked knees but he said it was comfortable. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet while we talked and smoked. We each had a Zippo lighter and carried matches besides. We lit kitchen matches by snapping their tops with our thumbnails. We very rarely got burned but there was always the risk and it was awful when it happened because the burning sulpher stuck under your nail. Both of us could light a book match with one hand. It was before the match companies put the striker strip on the back of the book for safety. “Close Cover Before Striking” was printed on every book. With one hand casually pocketed, we flipped open the match book with the other, folded a match in half so the head met the striker strip, closed the flap behind the bent match and, with a thumb on top, we snapped the match head sideways and it lit—still attached to the book. We scoffed at any danger that the whole book might catch fire. We cupped the flame deep in our hands against the wind and always offered to light each other’s cigarette first. If someone was with us, we used a second matche because superstition had it that the third man on a match would die in a whorehouse.

Very late on a winter night we came across a great fire. Trucks and hoses and firemen everywhere. Everything covered with ice. Ice even on the firemen’s faces. I think it was Detroit’s City Hall burning. But I also remember a winter-fire-and-ice photo in a book of prize winning news pictures. Maybe it was the same fire. Maybe I’m confusing memories.

Sandy and I hitchhiked to Chicago. We followed US-12, Michigan Avenue, which was said to be longest street in the country. Named Michigan Avenue in every town it went through all across the state—maybe even into Chicago. It took us fifteen rides and sixteen hours to travel fewer than three hundred miles. On one stretch we huddled under a folded tarp on a flatbed truck. Another ride was very short. We climbed up front with a drunken long-haul driver who, as he shifted through the gears, said he was going to Cleveland. We told him he was headed the wrong way, got him turned around and then stood on the dark roadside with our thumbs out speculating if we should have let him take us farther. Every few hours Sandy called home person-to-person and asked for a phony party. By this ruse his mother understood, without having to accept the call, that we were OK. She was supposed to pass it on to my father. Sandy and I arrived in East Chicago at dawn. It looked like a tough area and we waited a long time for the first morning streetcar. We spent most of the day walking around in the Loop and along the waterfront and then, dead tired, checked into a big Sheraton Hotel overlooking Lake Michigan. We felt distinguished. The incongruity of hitchhiking and then staying at a fancy hotel appealed to our sense of daring. The following day we took a Greyhound bus home to Detroit.

On a Friday evening, Sandy and I drove in his father’s car to Toledo where his brother Robert was riding at Maumee Downs. Sandy was a cautious and courteous driver: he flashed the high beams to tell each passing trucker when his trailer was clear to pull back into the right lane. The truck drivers always blinked their running lights as a thank you. At the racetrack on Saturday morning, Sandy and I got to go into the jockey’s dressing room. It was exciting to be on the inside—to hear talk about wagers, drugs, batteries, and thrown races. Sandy and I made show bets on sure things and each won a few dollars. After the races Robert took us to a bar where racetrack people hung out. Sandy and I claimed to be eighteen and were served three-two beer. Everyone fussed over Sandy. Some said he would make a fine jockey and others advised him to steer clear of the ponies. I told Robert and his flashy girlfriend about a Damon Runyan story I had read in which a woman was described as being so depraved that she would go to bed with almost any one, “Even a jockey!” It was supposed to be funny, but neither of them seemed to get it. Maybe the bar was too noisy.

There was a condom vending machine in the men’s room of the noisy bar and I bought one for a quarter. Condom machines were not allowed in Michigan. I didn’t have any prospects for using my new rubber as intended but I wanted it for my wallet. They made an unmistakable circular welt in the leather that was an emblem of sexual prowess. Lots of boys carried them. But the telltale lump in my wallet troubled me. It might demand an explanation I wouldn’t be able to pull off. I used my condom to masturbate.

Janet Watson, one of three Janets in the Methodist Youth Fellowship, was the girl I fell for first—at a Halloween costume party in the old wood-frame St. Andrews chapel. I wore a dress and painful high heels borrowed from Gary White’s mother.

Janet was a pretty girl and as wholesome as a glass of milk. Her father was a Twin Pines dairyman with his own delivery route and a truck that he drove standing up both summer and winter with the sliding door open. I asked Mr. Watson how the Twin Pines coop worked and he liked my interest. Our MYF group often went roller-skating on Saturday afternoons. The girls were very becoming in their white skates and short skirts. Their waists were tiny and their bodies trim. I held hands with Janet as we went round and round and hoped we would become a couple. I longed to feel her tickle my palm as an invitation to something more. But Janet was not tickling—just keeping busy until someone else showed an interest in her. Bill Waara was the boy she wanted. She was thrilled when he took her for a spin—skating backwards and showing off.

One evening in Joan Peerenboom’s living room Janet and I exchanged a kiss. It was after a group of us had come back from driving around with Reverend Mercer to admire outdoor Christmas decorations in fancy neighborhoods. Janet had sat on my lap in the car. Titilating. Joan’s living room was dark except for the Christmas tree lights. Romantic. When we kissed I held Janet very close and as we separated she asked if I had a roll of pennies in my pocket. Someone laughed. I didn’t get it. If Janet did, she didn’t let on—she would have been embarrassed. Bill explained later, and laughed again at my expense. I wondered if the girls were making fun too. Years later, when I was able to tell the story as a joke, I embellished it with, “At least she could have said a roll of quarters.” Sometimes we boys did carry a roll of coins in our pockets. It was a tough guy pose: ready, in the unlikely event it became necessary, to give someone a knuckle sandwich with a fist full of nickels.

A girl named Pat Dennis came to our MYF meetings for a while. Pat lived almost in my mother’s downtown neighborhood and I don’t know how she found her way to St. Andrews. She was quite grown up and a beautiful girl—more than just pretty. But an outsider. During a Sunday evening movie in the church social hall Pat and I got tangled up and kissy with each other. When the lights came on suddenly we were caught in the act. Our MYF advisor, Mrs. Mosshammer, just smiled. Pat had so much aplomb that the other girls had to pretend they hadn’t noticed and wait till later to gossip. I was proud of my conquest and didn’t care what anyone thought. Smug because I was sure Pat was secretly desired by all the boys except maybe Bill, who judged her a hussy. None of us ever got her. I don’t think we or the MYF really interested her. Once Sandy Ross and I together took Pat to a movie. She sat between us and we each held a hand. For some reason my Country Day School friend Barry Branch was there too and sat in the row behind us. After the show, Pat showed a more lively interest in him than either Sandy or me.

Helen Wright was the prettiest of the regular MYF girls and the most grown up. She seemed already almost a woman—waiting for her years to catch up. She was Vern Waara’s girl friend—the prettiest girl for the handsomest boy. Sometimes she went out with other boys but only as friends, or maybe if she and Vern were quarreling. Janet Watson told me that Helen’s mother once caught Helen coming home from a date with her stockings in her purse. Helen explained that she had only taken them off to dance. Her mother believed her but said to never again come home like that because, no matter what she had been doing, it looked bad. Her father would be angry. Girls our age mostly wore long straight skirts, bobby sox and saddle shoes. My mother said Bobby sox and long skirts were a silly combination. Stockings were only for special occasions. Real nylons—in pairs. Panty hose hadn’t yet been invented, or at least weren’t common. Stockings were of great interest to me. Especially as they graced shapely legs like Helen Wright’s. I imagined tracing my fingers along their silky slipperiness up behind a girl’s knee, her thigh, over their slightly coarser tops (avoiding utilitarian garter snaps that might put me off) and on to trace the unimaginably velvet-smooth skin of her inner thigh just before the unimaginable thrill of touching her silky white panties. Impossible dreams.

Next door to Helen lived Joan Peerenboom. Joan’s family was Catholic but they let her belong to the MYF anyway. Joan was short, a little plump, and very much a sweater girl. For a brief time both Joe Thompson and I competed for Joan’s attention. There were discussions among the boys, and separately among the girls, about whom she ought to choose. Bill Waara warned that so much attention would go to Joan’s head and spoil her. Joan picked Joe. I was surprised because she made her choice right after a kissy-feely ride in the backseat of Rev. Mercer’s car coming home from Edgewater Amusement Park. I pretended not to care. I don’t think I did care but I didn’t like being rejected. Though truly she wasn’t my type. Not then anyway. Besides, even though she had chosen Joe, I was sure she really liked me best. Probably Joe’s supporters among the girls had convinced her I only wanted to make out and wouldn’t be true to her. Well, I could take that as a complement and not have to prove it.

Years later, Vern told me that he met up with Joan when he was in the Navy. Joan was a Wave. Vern said that Joan had grown up to be really really good looking and that they spent a passionate liberty weekend together. It seemed as if Vern eventually got them all—and he never failed to tell me the enviable details.

Donna Lawson had a pretty, happy face with a turned up nose—pert like Betty and Veronica’s noses in the Archie comics. Like her mother’s. I called it a ski-jump nose. Over the years I’ve noticed several mother-and-daughter pairs with ski-jump noses and I figure the trait is inherited. When she first started coming to MYF, Donna walked with crutches—metal ones with handgrips and clamps around her forearms. One of her legs was skinny and weak from a bout with polio as a child. During the years I knew her she had several operations, her leg got stronger, and she finally got rid of the crutches. Donna was very nice and sometimes I thought she liked me. I liked her too but was afraid of a friendship that would always need to be explained—afraid, simply enough, of her being a cripple. Once at a lake where a bunch of us had gone for a day of swimming, Donna stood knee deep in the water splashing at someone and her bathing suit slipped half off at the top. She had full breasts that really made you look twice. We boys speculated that they were over developed because of all the exercise she got walking with crutches. Bill Waara said Donna had probably slipped off her top on purpose to show off. I didn’t think so. The only MYF girl brave enough to wear a two-piece swimsuit was Janet Watson. She had a firm, skinny figure well suited to it. We boys made jokes about a suit so tiny it was no more than two band aids and a cork. In retrospect Janet’s suit was really quite modest compared to what one sees, or doesn’t, now.

Margie Mayo was my first real girlfriend. No one made fun of her name. I don’t recall that people even called mayonnaise, “Mayo.” I was fifteen and Margie fourteen when our romance began. We were near the youngest in the MYF and the last to pair up in a steady romance. It lasted for more than a year, less than two. Had the field then been more open, maybe neither of us would have chosen the other but we were both happy enough with our lot. Margie and I found each other interesting and attractive enough to fill hour after hour with conversation and the exploration of our own and each others emotions and urges.

Margie was an adopted only child but by her looks she might well have been her mother’s own. Her parents were older than most. Maybe that’s why they adopted. Margie’s father was a fat taciturn machinist who sat in his chair reading the newspaper or watching television and took little notice of me. Mrs. Mayo had thin orangey hair and was an active member and major gossip among the St. Andrews congregation. She seemed to like me OK though she sometimes urged me to show a little more ambition—to get a job after school and save up for a car of my own instead of always riding around with Sandy Ross. Probably she wanted more for her daughter than I seemed to promise

Margie was a strawberry blond, a little taller than average and had a nice figure. She filled her clear fair skin smooth and tight and had an open friendly face. A round face. Her nose had fat lobes, not from the front but more in profile. They pressed back into her cheeks. In photos I’ve seen, it looks as if Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s nose was like Margie’s—but not so pronounced. One of Margie’s clear blue eyes had a yellow wedge in it, like a tiny piece of lemon pie. A harlequin eye. You had to look closely to see it. I thought Margie was very cute in bobby-sox, saddle shoes, long straight skirts, and pastel sweaters—just a tiny bit funny looking because of her nose. She smiled and laughed easily.

Margie was modest but not shy. I was both. At an MYF picnic in River Rouge Park we spent a long time rolled up together in a blanket. We kissed. I fondled her tummy, first through and then under her blouse. Her navel seemed almost an opening and I teased it—probably to Margie’s near distraction. That evening, walking her home from church, to where we had all returned from the park, Margie asked why I had petted her stomach so long. I couldn’t say. I had been afraid to move my hand up to her breasts—afraid as much of encouragement as of rejection. I didn’t know how her breasts would feel—or how my touch would feel to her. I didn’t know how her brassiere worked. I had examined the hooks and eyes of my mother’s under things and they seemed tricky. Even if Margie had encouraged me, I was sure I couldn’t have unfastened her bra under a blanket. Not casually, as if I knew what I was doing. And I couldn’t be so direct as to ask her help. Yet walking home she seemed almost to be telling me it would have been OK—even that she would have liked it—maybe even undone things herself. What if she had? What then would have been expected of me? I stuck to her tummy. Margie said stomach. Initially I wrote abdomen because that’s what my mother would have said was correct. Then someone who read my first draft of this episode said I should use belly. I didn’t explain about my mother and abdomen and wanting to be correct. But belly was too slangy for me and for my idea of Margie. What Margie had was a lovely tense smooth tummy—with a tantalizing little belly button.

Margie and I continued in love. At every private opportunity we fumbled more and more into each others private places: snuggling in a deep nest on a hay ride; behind some bushes at a Boblo Island picnic; on the back seat of Sandy Ross’s dad’s car with indulgent Sandy alone up front because he had already dropped off his own date. I was utterly self-centered. Neither Margie nor I had any experience with requited passion and our lovemaking ripened with nerve splintering caution. Mostly Margie waited for me to make the moves because I was the boy. Sometimes she expressed concern about where we were headed. But in the excitement of our explorations her response was often more bold than my advance. We agonized because we were so seldom safely sheltered and had always to be ready to back away because of interruption. Margie’s mother was vigilant and didn’t hesitate to come looking when Margie was unaccounted for.

When I gave Margie a going steady ring Mrs. Mayo protested that it looked like a wedding ring. It was gold instead of the customary silver. She made Margie promise to wear it only on her right hand. Mrs. Mayo asked Reverend Mercer to talk with Margie and me about being so young and going too far, too fast. He counseled us in his study. He said he had seen us petting on a back pew of the empty sanctuary before an evening MYF meeting. I was quick with exculpation: where better to express our love than right there in God’s own house? It was an argument I remembered from reading Serenade, a novel by James M. Cain, in which the hero seduced a young Mexican senorita behind the alter of an empty church. Reverend Mercer admonished us to keep in mind that love was one thing and sex another—better left till marriage. Margie was mortified. She cried. After we left she told me, “No more making out, not even kissing, except to say goodnight on the front porch.”

But our resolve didn’t last. A few weeks later we found ourselves alone for part of a Saturday afternoon. Margie’s father had gone for the summer to work in Georgia and her mother was out shopping. We kissed and fondled on the sewing room couch and we rolled together on the sewing room floor. We bumped into the ironing board and the iron fell on us. After what seemed an age of groping and probing, we went to Margie’s bedroom. On her bed. Half undressed. Eyes closed; mouths meshed; I on top. Squirming. Half off her bed. But the mechanics were wrong. Margie’s shoes were still on her feet and her underpants still around her ankles. Regardless, I tried. She flinched. I balked. I didn’t know if I had hurt her or if she was piqued by my want of skill. Frustration and fear vanquished passion and confidence. My desire dwindled. It wasn’t going to happen. I apologized—not sure for what. I was embarrassed almost to tears. No father or uncle, no older brother, no friend, no anyone, had ever given me one bit of advice about any of this.
After a few minutes respite I wanted to start over with hugging and kissing. Margie didn’t. She said her mother would soon be home and it was time for me to go. I could tell she felt letdown. And wiser in the moment. I had been betrayed by my own libido. Ardor had abandoned me just when I wanted it most. From my father I had learned to flirt but no more than that—not how to conquer.

A few days later we tried again. Margie and her mother and their dog were to leave the following morning to spend a month with Mr. Mayo in Marietta, Georgia. I would care for their houseplants and yard and spent that last evening with mother and daughter getting my instructions. With everything arranged Margie and I said goodbye with a kiss at the door. I pretended to head for home. Margie was to sleep outside on her back porch. It was hot. I walked around the neighborhood until all their lights had been out for half an hour and then I sneaked to the rear of the Mayo house. The dog was suspicious but silent. Mrs. Mayo didn’t hear well but the very nearness of her bedroom was menacing—adding to my excitement. Margie and I closed quietly. Cautious in the dark. We whispered and petted and kissed. Margie pulled her pajama top up and I pulled the bottoms off—all the way off. I kept my own pants on for fear of being caught with them down. Margie’s body was awesome. Electric. In the dark I nuzzled and licked and sucked her sweet swelling succulent softness. How did I know what to do? I didn’t know anything. What did Margie? Girls followed us boys. Figured we knew how to proceed. Or maybe they knew and just let us discover for ourselves. I hardly recognize her parts. Tumescent, lippy almost polypy parts that both frenzied and frightened me. Parts that seemed almost to dissolve into a salt-sweet liquor of sensation. Was what I did thrilling or vexing? I tried to follow her responses. But truly I was lost. Her sweat stung my eyes. I hadn’t the faintest idea of what a female orgasm might feel or sound like—or what I should do if Margie had one—or didn’t. I knew nothing. Feared everything. The tension was explosive. There were noises in the house. I had to leave.

Years later I read this passage about Margie to the instructor of a beginning writing class. She said I should further explore these memories of my respect for Margie’s autonomy as a young woman. I couldn’t remember feeling anything like that. I wondered if the teacher was flirting with me. I felt flirty toward her. She had asked to meet with me, just she and I in the Student Union cafeteria, for this one-to-one critique of my work. Nothing came of it. Anyway, she had it wrong about my behavior on Margie’s back porch. It wasn’t respect I felt, but fear. Fear of being overwhelmed by my own passion—of being carried over the edge where regret was certain to follow success. Retreat would be impossible. I would be trapped. If I had entered the ecstasy the moment Margie would surely become pregnant. I didn’t think any of this. I didn’t think at all. I feared.

I wrote to Margie in Georgia almost every day. Long love letters on stationery with a large D.K.A. printed top-left in a descending staircase of showy blue script capitals. Stationery my mother had given me two years before. I folded my affections as my mother had taught me, so the sheets came out of the envelope ready in hand to be read. I wrote about my love and my desire and how I longed for her and wanted to do things with her. Sex things that I had more courage for on paper than in person.

Margie answered but less often and with less fervor. She told me about her new Georgia girlfriends. About going into Marietta in the evening. She said all the girls walked around the town square in one direction while the boys drove around in the other—looking them over and picking them up. I read between the lines. My heart sank. I was sure that Margie was looked over and picked up. And just as sure that in some Georgia boy’s daddy’s car or pick-up truck she got fucked by some lanky, freckled, redheaded cracker who didn’t care a thing about her. Didn’t love her. Just got himself some Yankee poon tang to brag about. Maybe that’s what she was ready for—and tired of waiting for me to figure it out.

A week before she was to return, Margie wrote that she didn’t want to go steady any longer—but we would still be friends. At home in Detroit, she asked to see the letters she had written to me. Then, instead of returning them, she gave me back all the letters I had written to her. And with them the gold going-steady ring. I was right about what happened in Georgia. She was ready and I wasn’t. That was it. Like the lyrics to On Top of Old Smokey: “I lost my true lover from a courtin’ too slow.” I had loved Margie with a great deal of feeling but not enough action. I loved her still. Margie, Margie: her fresh look, touch and smell, her youngness, her simple modesty. Even now I love her indelible memory. Yet I think I was relieved when she cast me aside. Relieved to be at loose ends again.

A few weeks later Margie had one single date with Vern Waara. Vern told me about it in great detail. He hadn’t even honored Margie with the comfort of the back seat—and he laughed about her bumping her head on the steering wheel. Vern pretended I wouldn’t care since Margie was no longer mine. But I could hardly listen to his account. I hated him. I wanted to smash him one but he was bigger and stronger than me and besides I had no claim on Margie. I thought she deserved better than Vern but maybe she didn’t care if he cared—only that he was handsome and knew the score.

After Margie cast me aside, Joy Fish was the only girl I really fell for before leaving home to join the Coast Guard. Joy came only occasionally to Sunday evening Methodist Youth Fellowship gatherings. She was a year older than me. Good-looking. I thought her sophisticated and charming. Joy was the finer cut of girl whom my mother, and the my-mother-in-me, hoped for as a beau. Different from Margie, who was the regular kind of girl whom the me-in-me always found for myself. I had prized Joy even when I was crazy about Margie and if she had encouraged me I might well have abandoned Margie without regret.

Joy’s parents were founding members of the St. Andrews congregation. Mrs. Fish had led the liberal faction that recruited young Reverend Mercer and she remained influential, though not very active. She thought herself a cut above the flock. She didn’t gossip. She read library books. Like Mika Waltari’s, The Egyptian, in which someone had sex with a dead body. She even let Joy read it. And Joy loaned the book to Sandy Ross and me but made us find the necrophilia part ourselves. Mr. Fish was a chemist. Joy told me her father had invented a, “Pill counter.” Counter confused me: I thought she meant a piece of furniture—a store fixture over which medicines were dispensed. Joy laughed at me—the counter was a gadget for counting pills into prescription bottles. Our misunderstanding and her laughter made me feel close.

Joy and I went for Chicken Cacciatore at an Italian restaurant on Joy Road—a coincidence of names. I guess because she was older she felt comfortable going out on a friendly date—just friends. I liked it being just the two of us—more grown up. Special. Finished eating, we sat talking and smoking in the cushiony, red-vinyl corner booth. I said my mother thought it was unladylike for a girl to grip a cigarette with her lips—she should keep hold of it with her fingers. Joy agreed—and then dangled a Pall Mall from her pouty lower lip. Unfiltered cigarette paper was porous and stuck easily to a damp or painted lip. One often saw a lady with a bit of white on her lipstick and of which she was quite unaware. My mother said to tell them because they would appreciate it. I often did—and enjoyed a moment of intimate surprise. Filter-tip cigarettes didn’t stick, but they weren’t yet common. Joy and I discussed the proper pronunciation: was it Pall Mall, or Pell Mell?” Their advertising always concluded with, “Where ever particular people congregate.” We practiced French inhaling—letting the smoke curl up from our parted lips into drawing nostrils—it was supposed to be sexy. I could blow smoke rings but Joy couldn’t and we laughed because she looked silly trying—which she probably wouldn’t have chanced with someone else whose passion she wanted to stir.

Joy told me about what she called, “Mung”: slimy stuff that came out if you beat the belly of a pregnant woman hanging by her thumbs. Silly. Where did she get such shocking things? She, who was almost plump, told me she hated to begin a diet because the first weight she lost was from her breasts. She said her grandmother told her she still got a thrill in bed when grandpa’s wrinkly warm butt pressed against her own. No girl had ever talked with me as Joy did. She joked about some dopey boys who called themselves the “Four-F” Club: “ Find ‘em, Feel ‘em, Fuck ‘em, and Forget ‘em.” She was outrageous. On the restaurant jukebox I played “Mid-Summer Night’s Virgil” and Joy laughed at me—“Vigil, silly,” she reproved, “Not Virgil.” Being laughed at by Joy was OK and Virgil became our song. If another customer played, “The Old Master Painter in the Sky,” Joy and I sang along quietly: “The old masturbator….”

Going home we walked and talked in the rain and I explained that the light reflected from gutter puddles looked like a rainbow because the oil slick was only one molecule thick—something to do with wavelengths and angstrom units—stuff I had read somewhere but didn’t really understand. Why then several colors—were some molecules fatter than others? Maybe it had to do with angles? I didn’t know. I thought about it for years but never really wanted the answers. On her front porch, Joy gave me a little thank-you kiss and I went home feeling mushy.

After high school, Joy went to Chicago to study drama at the American Academy of Art. Margie Mayo’s mother rumored that Mrs. Fish had sent her because Joy was pregnant—to have the baby and give it up for adoption. I didn’t believe it. After that first year Joy didn’t go back to Chicago and we were friends again. She introduced me to a paperback periodical called 7 Arts and gave me John Gassner’s Masters of the Drama to read. She told me about Stanislavskii and the Moscow Art Theater and about a director at the Academy in Chicago who made her lie down on his casting couch to audition for a part. I was troubled and jealous. Joy laughed and said the man was a homosexual. It seemed as if everything was OK in theater. And OK with Joy.

Joy took up with a neighborhood boy I didn’t much like. A good looking, lanky, smart-ass cowboy type who claimed to have once called a policeman a flatfoot right to his face and gotten away with it. The cowboy had two hangers-on: a big guy named Lyle, whom he called “Phial” and a little guy called “Asp.” Something to do with characters in Little Orphan Annie. Asp was claimed to have a vicious twisting bare-knuckle punch that would cut any adversary’s face to shreds. The cowboy and his gang had once harassed a neighborhood crazy man who in payback let them have it with a shotgun. For years afterwards, little pellets of birdshot slowly worked their way to the surface of the cowboy’s shins. He would pick one out and show it around to impress whomever was handy. Maybe the cowboy was the reason Joy didn’t return to Chicago—maybe even the reason she went in the first place.

Mrs. Fish told Sandy Ross she found some blood on Joy’s pillowcase. Sandy, who was also unrequitedly in love with Joy, told me. We were both outraged. Maybe the cowboy had hit Joy. Worse yet, maybe they bit each other while they were making love. I was sure that Joy would regret her affair with the smart-ass. But then, I had no standing to advise her.

I had a single date with another somewhat older girl who only sometimes came to MYF meetings. Nancy. Nancy had once been expected to become Bill Waara’s girlfriend, maybe because they were both older or because their families were church friends. But Bill lost interest. Nancy was the only girl at Mackenzie High who wore stockings and high heels to school. She was very proper. I took her to a nice restaurant where the women’s menus had no prices. While we waited for salad I feigned confusion about the order in which forks ought to be used. Nancy said I shouldn’t worry about such things. I felt as if she were condescending. I was just making conversation. Trying to be amusing. She didn’t have much sense of humor. Maybe she thought talking about manners was unmannerly. I liked being polite to ladies: holding doors, lighting their cigarettes, not showing the bottoms of my shoes. All that stuff. It was a way of flirting. Over the years I became less gallant. Women seemed to neither expect nor want it.

My friendship with Barry Branch continued. We got together about once a month. But I didn’t mix Barry with my MYF friends. I had different ways with each. Barry called me “Angelo” and we played at being tough guys, which pose wouldn’t have worked at all with my neighborhood companions. Barry did once or twice meet Sandy Ross and also Margie, whom he said was a, “knock-out.” He went on and on as if Margie and I were having a torrid sexual affair. His fabrications were so flattering I didn’t deny them. Barry got to use his mother’s baby-blue Packard convertible on weekend evenings and we cruised around town: drag racing at stop lights, trying to pick up girls, and yelling insults at groups of Jewish boys on Dexter Avenue. Not with any particular ill will but just to get a rise from them. Once four boys jumped into a car and chased us but the big Packard left them in the dust. When he wasn’t sporting about Barry pretended he was chauffeuring a mobster big shot. He could shift through the forward gears more smoothly than if the big Packard had an automatic transmission.

Barry and I picked up two girls at the Michigan State Fair. A willowy blond and a short brunette. Before we made our move, we agreed who would get whom: blond for him, brunette for me. After connecting and going on a couple of carnival rides we climbed up through the empty racetrack bleachers and sat on the grandstand wall overlooking the midway. We talked and put our arms around the girls. Barry’s tall blond lived in Ferndale and my short brunette was visiting from Pontiac. After dark we walked them to the blonde’s house and kissed them on the blonde’s front porch. Barry got way ahead of me. His girl seemed eager. I cautiously kissed my brunette and with innocent surprise remarked that she had, “A little moustache!” I knew, even as the words came out, that I had blundered. A faux pas, my mother would have called it. Embarrassment all around. The spell was broken. We dawdled about for a few minutes and then the girls went inside. Barry was annoyed. In self defense I said, “So what—they were just pick-ups.” Barry answered, “Sew buttons—we could have made out.” He said every girl was worth a best effort because you never knew how far she would go. He gave me advice: be casual, play it cool, hold hands lightly in her lap—then when you kiss her press gently into her thighs, as if you can’t help yourself. Don’t rush. When she gets hot then she’ll want you to feel her up good. Maybe even more.

Woodlawn Cemetery was only a block from Barry’s house. On a winter evening he and I went there and drank whisky from a pint bottle. We tried to topple tombstones but the few we could wiggle were hardly worth it and the larger ones wouldn’t budge. At the top of our voices we sang, “I’m a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer, a hellofa, hellofa, hellofa, hellofa, hell of an engineer ….” Despite that Barry maintained he hated engineers. Then, walking along Woodward Avenue we crooned, “Show me the way to go home, I’m tired and I want to go to bed ….” I hid the whisky bottle up the sleeve of my pea coat so no passing cop could see it. When I took a swig the whisky spilled up my arm. Wet and cold. We finished the booze and were drunk, I more than Barry. We went to the White Castle at Woodward and Eight Mile Road for chili. There were White Castles all over Detroit—little white tile hamburger joints with black trim and a square parapet on each corner. Barry said the chili would sober us up and it did.

Barry spent an occasional weekend and most of his summer vacation at his father’s house in Flint. Once or twice when Dr. and Mrs. Branch were away I visited for a day or two. Barry’s stepmother’s name was Alice, the same as his mother’s—but she wasn’t called Al. Barry said it was convenient for his father because he needn’t worry about getting his past and present wife’s names mixed up. I never met either Dr. Branch or Alice. Their house was big and fancy with a curved staircase that had a velvet rope handhold. The toilets were black and flushed with almost no sound. In their bedroom Dr. and Mrs. Branch had an extra large bed that adjusted with an electric motor. Like a hospital bed. Barry said it was a great attraction. He got girls into his parent’s bed to watch TV and then put the make on them. He laughed at this secret insult to his stepmother. Barry had a girlfriend in Flint but I never met her. In her photo, she was a cute blond cheerleader type. Barry said they once got so excited while screwing that she bounced him right off her living room couch onto the floor. I didn’t believe him but I imagined with envy the same thing happening to me. With her.

Barry had it all: brains, confidence, looks, money and girls. And I had my small place in Barry’s life—just as my mother seemed always to find her little niche in some circle of well-to-do acquaintances. She and I were comfortably grateful and they were generally gracious.

During the two years I lived on Stahelin Street my stepmother Dorothy’s father died. I wouldn’t attend the funeral because I thought myself beyond honoring death rituals. Several days after the burial, my father, Dorothy and I, along with Dorothy’s two sisters and brother, went to clean out the old man’s house. It was filled with books: hundreds, maybe thousands. Old and new—many of which looked as if they had never been opened. They were in glass-front cases, on makeshift shelves, in boxes and stacks—even strewn across the floor. I took one book: Jerome K. Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. Dorothy probably thought it a fitting choice. For years afterwards I supposed that Jerome K. Jerome was just that, an idle fellow who had written a single vanity book. But some years ago I discovered half a dozen Jerome K. Jerome volumes in the San Francisco Public Library, and even a biography of Jerome. They were old editions, nicely printed with lots of leading and wide margins. None had been checked out for years. The biography had an engraved frontispiece of scowling Jerome. I didn’t read any of them.

My father bought a tiny frame cottage on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie. Just east of Amherstburg, Ontario and a little over an hour’s drive from our house in Detroit. He got it very cheap from someone who owed him money. Years later I learned from reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin that Amherstburg had been a busy Canadian port of entry for runaway slaves. The cottage wasn’t much—a three room clapboard bungalow in pretty bad shape and nearly hidden by weeds, bushes and debris on a narrow lake-front lot. But my father imagined its possibilities and went to work realizing them. The cottage became a life-long project for him. Like Simon Rodia’s towers in Watts—a testament to steadfastness and the resourceful employment of materials found free or gotten at a bargain. My father repaired the cottage, improved it, and expanded it. He did everything himself. He was neither a large nor a burly man but he was strong and he knew, farmer-wise, how to use his body to advantage. After lake ice piled up on shore during a winter storm and knocked down the front porch he had the house pulled farther back from the waterline and placed on a new foundation. He built a sea wall and got a chemical burn from carrying creosoted posts on his bare shoulder. Inside the cottage, he built a giant fireplace in the front room—fieldstones mortared around a patented iron firebox with air tunnels for extra efficient heating.

On a few occasions I helped him: shingling the roof and a little bit with the fireplace and the sea wall. But I wasn’t much interested. One Saturday morning on our way to the cottage we almost ran over a cat that darted out into the road. My father swerved to a stop and we looked back to see it running along the roadside and apparently unhurt. My father was relieved. He told me he once accidentally hit a cat and it had made him sick to his stomach. I could see his eyes were wet with remembering and the emotion of the just passed moment.

Of our family, only my father really liked going to the cottage. Lake Erie was cold and grossly polluted. Dead fish often littered the beach. My stepmother and half-sisters preferred to visit Dorothy’s two sisters, Lois and Esther, who had comfortable homes on nice little inland lakes where there was good swimming and boating. Both aunts were fairly well off, both married to automotive engineers, and their children were well mannered and precocious. Lois, the older sister, seemed always to be mending bruised bodies, soothing souls and promoting harmony. Esther spoke ever so slowly, wore modest white satin blouses and had a mature yet vulnerable sexiness that I liked. Both their families raised Samoyed dogs and gave them names like Silverbell and Snowball. They were always nice to me but I thought they patronized both Dorothy and their brother Stewart because both had married poor and found themselves in less fortunate circumstances. And Dorothy had me in tow, a troublesome stepson, while Stewart had a wife who had gone mad, several children and a needy mother-in-law. I remember one of the engineer step-uncles remarked to me that when the economy sagged it was the Cadillac Car Company, where he worked, that laid-off its assembly line workers last and then hired them back first. A lesson: economic ups and downs are less harsh for those who can afford expensive cars.

As my half-sisters, Frances and Lois, grew older, they and Dorothy went to the cottage less and less often. But my father went more and more. For him, comfort and company were unimportant. It was the cottage itself that mattered—carrying his project forward. By the time Fran and Lois were in high school, my father spent most weekends and often one or two weekday evenings working at the cottage. He stayed the night and went in the morning from Amherstberg to his job in Detroit. I imagined he was relieved to be away from Dorothy and their two troublesome teenage daughters. He liked to be alone. Alone and working, then resting, then planning, and working again. Taking on a task that was almost too big, but knowing that one way or another he could do it. Without asking for help. I know that pleasure. I enjoy it as much as he did. He wasn’t often comfortable working close with other men. I learned that too.

In 1952, I moved from my father’s house to live one more year with my mother before enlisting in the Coast Guard. Although I kept up most of the neighborhood friendships I had made while living with him, my father and his family pretty much faded into the background. Maybe if he and I had more often worked together at the cottage we might have developed a deeper camaraderie. Maybe not. Neither of us seemed comfortable with more than cautious kinship.

I have few photos from my time on Stahelin Street. People didn’t take snapshots as commonly as they do today. (Yesterday actually—since the digital camera seems now to have ended the era of scrapbooks and drawers full of unsorted snapshots) And in particular, I as a teenager, disdained picture taking because it was my mother’s profession. The loss is mine. I would like to see again the faces and places from those teenage years.

Left: My step-mother Dorothy Zider before she married my father. Right: My father and Dorothy from about 1947 when they married. I once had a very nice portrait of my father that my mother took in the early 1940’s. He, wearing a hat and holding a cigarette with smoke curling up from its end. I lost it. I guess that tells something.

Left: My father and half-sister Lois from the late 1950's. Right: Lois, Father, Dorothy and half-sister Frances. Taken about 1968.

Left: My half-sister Frances (I wrote to her once, "Francis," and she corrected me, "i for boys, e for girls") from about 1967. Right: Lois from about 1969.

“I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia.”
Margaret Atwood.

When I was almost seventeen my mother moved from downtown Trumbull Street to a tiny upstairs flat in a red brick house at 9549 Rutland Avenue—a little over a half mile from my father and Dorothy’s house on Stahelin Street. The Trumble Street neighborhood was going downhill. She wanted to be closer to me so I would visit her more often but I don’t think she expected me to move in. But once she was within easy distance of my friends in the St. Andrews Church neighborhood it was only a short time before I asked to live with her again. I had spent two somewhat uncomfortable years with Dorothy and my father and I was ready to leave. I thought my mother would be easier to live with. But this year with her on Rutland Avenue would be the valley of my adolescence: dispirited and floundering about with few worldly satisfactions and little sense of direction. A bleak time—both living it then and recalling it now.

Rutland Avenue had lots of big trees: oaks and elms—and the substantial brick houses had generous yards both front and back. Much nicer than Trumble Street and a cut above Stahelin. However, my mother’s rent did not include use of the garden and her flat was hardly more than an attic. From half way up some of the walls slanted into the ceiling. She had a very small bedroom at the back, there was a skinny windowless kitchen in the middle and a front room shaped like a T. My mother hung her Marie Laurencin print and several of her own photographs on the walls and stacked her tripod and flood lamps in a corner. She still took an occasional portrait for a few long established clients. I set up my quarters behind a folding screen in one arm of the T-shaped living room: a narrow daybed, small dresser and a bookcase. The rest of the T remained a sitting and dining area for when we had company. When it was just the two of us we ate in the kitchen.

The house on Rutland was owned by a widowed policeman who lived downstairs with his daughter. She was in her twenties: handsome, full breasted and earthy. I imagined she harbored an affection for young boys and would delight in teaching me the techniques of making love. I schemed to leave the house when she might be coming or going so as to meet her at the front door. But I always chickened out for fear of not knowing how to break the ice. There was a popular song, “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home,” that I think both Nat King Cole and Johnny Ray had recorded. In one rendition the song went, “We start into pet, and that’s when I get, her powder all over my vest.” In the other it was, “... her talcum all over my vest.” Talcum suggested a more intimate engagement than face powder and it was the talcum version that accompanied my daydreams of passionate encounters with the policeman’s daughter. Daydreams they remained.

My mother worked downtown as a sales clerk in a cavernous and cheerless health food store. The display cases and even the packaging of most health food products seemed cheerless. She was on her feet all day and came home on the bus. Tired. First thing she took fifteen minutes to comfort her troublesome back by lying on the floor with her legs elevated on a slanting board. At work, my mother was engaging and knowledgeable. She flattered her customers and showed them just what they needed to feel better, look younger and live longer. When Gaylord Hauser visited to promote his line of products she flirted with him shamelessly. Hauser, who often appeared bare-chested in health magazine ads pulling a railroad car with his teeth or swimming against the tide, was just the sort of “vital” male my mother loved to dally with. I suspected that Hauser was a diet and fitness demagogue and that Gaylord was a phony name. He probably he had a good-looking forty-year-old health-nut admirer in every store he visited.

My mother was a true believer. She wanted herself, me, her friends and relations and everyone who was nice to have the benefit of good nutrition. She railed against empty calories, phony additives and harmful preservatives. When she could borrow a car or get someone to drive her, she bought our fruit and vegetables from suburban home gardeners who used organic methods. Each winter she had tree-ripened grapefruits shipped to us from Florida. Once a week a deliveryman brought us a five-gallon glass bottle of distilled water, which she used for drinking and cooking. I didn’t know any other person in the whole world who used bottled water and I always drank from the tap just be contrary. My mother never took aspirin; refused Novocain from her dentist, no matter how deep he drilled; disapproved of X-ray machines in doctor’s offices, fluoroscopes in shoe stores: and believed that adding fluoride in city water was harmful. She aligned herself with the fringy fruitcakes who claimed that fluoridation schemes were communist inspired and that Soviet fifth columnists might poison us all when we weren’t looking. I ridiculed her fluoride fears and looked at my foot bones in shoe stores with deliberate rebelliousness. We often argued about health food stuff. I questioned the motives of the vitamin industry. I said our hungry world depended on industrial agriculture, preservatives, and the global distribution of green-picked fruit. She said nonsense—that I was simply unwilling to entertain unconventional ideas.

My mother and I argued about lots of things. She pitted her patrician British values against what I believed were my egalitarian American ones. She claimed we Americans were a low culture as evidenced by our small talk always being about possessions, sports and the weather. In England, she said, even working people talked politics with knowledgeable civility. She claimed that our appetite for ice cream proved we were childlike. I countered with something I’d read about English people forever wanting a bit of chocolate. She argued that professional athletes were paid too much—that it took the sport out of sports. I said, what about movie stars? She said they were different because they had artistic talent. Well, what about athletic talent? I was determined to be contrary and we seldom came to any common ground. I pretended to be an independent thinker but often my arguments were thin. She liked to win and sometimes even attacked my motives or claimed some psychological shortcoming made me argue as I did. Mostly I couldn’t keep up with her because she was better read and had a quicker mind. Years later, I came to admit that I agreed with many of her ideas and cultural convictions and even, despite the problems of feeding the world’s hungry masses, that I preferred the taste of natural foods and distilled water to that of supermarket products and what came from the tap.

On weekday mornings I got up and ate breakfast with my mother. Seeing me up and about gave her some small confidence that I did intend to go to school and by feeding me she hoped to animate my resolve. Sometimes it worked, frequently not. I didn’t like school. After she left for work, I often went back to bed. I wore a pair of slippery gray rayon pajamas that encouraged indolence and awakened tumescence. Noises from downstairs prompted daydreams about sex with the policeman’s daughter. I jerked off. Then, wearied by my exertion, I slept until noon. Rejuvenated, I often indulged myself again. Once so depraved that I slaked my swelling with a thick raw pork chop into which I had carved a pocket for the purpose. For years I remember this base act when ever I saw stuffed pork chops on a restaurant menu. A tasty dish, especially if the stuffing was spicy. But stuffed pork chops no longer often appear. Tastes change. Back then on Rutland Avenue I wondered if girls masturbated with hot dogs. How much easier for a girl to find a penis substitute than for a boy to come up with something better than his own hand.

My adolescence was progressing poorly. Nothing at Mackenzie High interested me. There was no class or subject in which I did well. Even when I set out for school, hitchhiking to save the bus fare my mother had given me, often my only purpose was to hang out in a local soda parlor that was painted pink and white inside and out and called the Cream Puff. There was a Cream Puff clique of popular boys and pretty girls that I hoped to find my way into. I never quite made it. They were academic and snobbish and I was not up to snuff. From my year of spotty attendance at Mackenzie High, I recall only one teacher: an attractive young woman who told me she had never known such a poor speller. I had misspelled friend. “I before e,” she chided. From school or the Cream Puff, I often went to my father’s neighborhood and spent the evening with whomever I connected. Occasionally I ate supper with the family of a friend, occasionally at my father’s house, sometimes not at all. I returned home to my mother’s flat late in the evening and often needed to defend myself against her recriminations that I was wasting my life and so on.

During the summer following eleventh grade, I began a remedial English class. Half way through the session the teacher asked me to take a picture of the summer-school play cast for the student newspaper. I guess he was trying to engage me. My mother borrowed a real four-by-five press camera for me to use. Very professional looking. I wanted to carry the camera and flash gun to school in hand—casually, as I imagined a real news photographer would do. On assignment. Ready for action. The way jocks carried their helmets and shoulder pads. But my mother insisted I lug the camera in its bulky case. I wouldn’t. The case looked unmanly. We had a terrible quarrel. I wouldn’t give in but neither would she and we both cried. In the end I took neither the case, the camera nor the picture and, because I couldn’t face the teacher to whom I had promised a photo, I quit the summer program altogether.

My mother got me a part time job at the Progressive Welder Company—a favor from her friend, John D. Gordon, who owned the business. I worked Saturdays and two or three afternoons a week in the blue print room. My boss, Walter, was a handsome silent type who wore cowboy boots. His main assistant was a little guy with one leg shorter than the other and one shoe with a very thick sole. The few young women who worked at Progressive Welder often stopped at the Dutch door of our shop and chat with the cowboy. I envied the ease with which he charmed them, especially a flirty redhead who brought our paychecks.

On a Saturday morning at Progressive Welder I encountered one of the engineers in the men’s rest room. He was one of those cheeky odd balls who take the urinal next to your own even when another is free—just to make you uncomfortable. He asked if I had been masturbating in a toilet stall. I was wordless. He said that my having flushed the toilet so long before opening the stall door proved me guilty. I didn’t get it. He laughed at my embarrassment. I was outraged—how could he say such stuff? I was afraid he was a homo and maybe going to try something. I warned him but he just laughed again. The memory this discomfiture dogged me for years. In public rest rooms I always waited to flush the toilet until just before leaving the stall—feeling silly but unable to overcome my worry that some degenerate would once again confront me.

The Progressive Welder Company was two long bus rides from either home or school. I often arrived late and sometimes after school I never got there at all because I had connected with a friend who had something better to offer. The timekeeper had a talk with me on behalf of Mr. John D. Gordon. Walter stood up for me because when I was there I worked hard. But the pattern continued and John D. himself called my mother. I was too embarrassed to make any further excuses so I quit.

I was behind in school. Still in the eleventh grade and still disenchanted. I went less and less often to class. My counselor, Mr. Nester, a tall man who every day wore the same navy blue pin-stripe double-breasted suit, tried to get me back on track but I continued to cut. Finally, threatened with expulsion for truancy, I quit. I had worn out everyone’s patience. Childhood was squeezing me out. Into nothing at all. On a low note.

Sandy Ross and I decided to steal a car. Just to prove we could get away with it. We took a late afternoon Greyhound to Flint, sixty miles northwest of Detroit. We called for Barry Branch at his father’s house but were told that Barry was at his girlfriend’s. We went there. Barry hadn’t expected us and he didn’t want to leave his girl but we talked at the door and he encouraged our scheme. Sandy and I walked to downtown Flint and hung around in magazine stores and coffee shops until past midnight. Then we walked the neighborhoods for another three hours looking for the right car to make off with. We settled on a black 1942 Ford two-door sedan in excellent condition. The doors and the steering wheel were both unlocked and the ignition wiring was accessible behind the dashboard starter button. A pushover. The car was even parked on a hill. Sandy sat behind the wheel, put the car in second, disengaged the clutch, released the brake and we rolled noiselessly away from the curb. I held a quarter against the ignition wiring posts to make a connection and when we got up to speed Sandy popped the clutch. Away we went. After a few blocks, he stopped and we pulled off the ignition wires and twisted them together to make a better connection. We took turns driving to Detroit. Prudently within the speed limit. While Sandy was at the wheel, we passed a state police car going in the opposite direction. We worried the cop might suspect us because Sandy was so short.

We got to Detroit at sunrise and parked the car behind a small machine shop on Eight Mile Road at the very outskirts of the city. Right handed, to disguise his penmanship, Sandy wrote a polite note: “To whom it may concern …,” explaining that the car had been stolen and to whom it should be returned. With a P.S. apologizing for pulling off the ignition wires. There were some VFW papers in the glove compartment that gave the owners name and address. Both Sandy and I carried handkerchiefs and we wiped down every inside surface of the car that we might have touched and then the door handles after getting out. We boarded a city bus that sat idling on Lasher Road before the first run of the day and sat in the back congratulating ourselves on how neatly we had pulled off our caper. For the next two weeks, I worried off and on about being apprehended and hoped that the owner got his car back undamaged. We didn’t tell any of our church youth group friends what we had done.

At St. Andrews, I was elected vice president and president-elect of the Methodist Youth Fellowship. But I was loosing interest. Half way through my vice presidential term our advisor, Mrs. Mosshammer, quit under a cloud and some of us youth thought she had been forced out. We confronted Reverend Mercer but he stonewalled. The new advisors, Mr. and Mrs. Hall, were fuddy-duddy’s and wanted to be called “Mom and Pop.” I didn’t like them or “Mom and Pop” and was the first of our bunch to quit the youth group. Soon after the others also began to drift away and a younger set of Methodist Youth took our place.

Some connection of my mother’s got me a full time job downtown as a stock boy at Weinstein’s Jewelry. There were three Weinstein brothers: the oldest was always out of town buying stock; the second, Harry, who had hired me, was friendly; and Manny, the youngest, overwhelmed me with his blaring manner. I liked Harry and Manny was OK. Manny’s wife, Roz, was the office manager and bookkeeper. I didn’t like it when Roz told me to do things because I didn’t think she was a boss. My job was to unpack and put out stock and to feather dust the merchandise displays. Harry encouraged me to talk to customers and even to initiate sales but I was uncertain and diffident. On a Thursday evening I stayed late to help Roz replace the price tags on a whole bunch of watches—and then mark them all down to their original price for a discount sale on Friday. My prejudices about the business practices of Jews were reinforced but being trusted with such chicanery was exhilarating. Working friendly-close with Roz, full breasted and earthy, was heady. A few days later Harry admonished me for having my left hand in my pocket while I dusted a silver plate display with my right. He thought I ought to show a little more enthusiasm. I grumbled about not needing both hands to use a feather duster and sulked through the rest of that afternoon. I wouldn’t go back. I wouldn’t even call to say I had quit. My mother was angry. I became self-righteous. I claimed I had quit on principle: because Roz had made me change prices on the watches. My mother pretended to buy it—probably because it was easier blame the Weinsteins than to yet again balance my bungling behavior against my fragile ego.

My next job, and my last before joining the Coast Guard, was as a detail draftsman for a large architectural firm with offices in the Industrial Bank Building downtown. It was the first job I got all on my own and it paid an adult wage—two dollars an hour. I was employed by Victor Gruen Architects, AIA. I liked adding the “AIA” (American Institute of Architects) because it sounded distinguished. Victor Gruen, AIA pioneered the development of suburban shopping centers around New York City and the office where I worked had been set up to design Northland Shopping Center, just outside Detroit. Thus, I played an early if tiny part in hastening the ruin of Detroit’s downtown commercial center.

I liked having a real job with a big company in a tall building. I took an early morning bus downtown. The driver made change from a little coin dispenser strapped to the fare box. His fingers found the quarters and nickels and dimes without looking. I often stood so ladies might sit. I looked down into the passing cars hoping to see women drivers with their skirts hiked up. Once I saw a man’s hand fondling an uncovered thigh. Before going up to the office I stopped for a bagel and coffee where the architects got theirs. I was never absent or late. In the drafting room I was diligent and worked to the satisfaction of my mentor. I worked from notes to make detail changes to the architect’s drawings. Mostly to reflected ceiling plans, which showed how a ceiling would look if it were reflected from the floor: the acoustical tile pattern, the location of light fixtures, air ducts, sprinkler heads, and whatever decoration there might be. Even now I sometimes look up at the ceiling of a retail store and imagine it as a reflected plan. Once or twice I had lunch with some of the architects at the Brass Rail Bar and Grill. The Brass Rail was said to have the longest continuous bar in the world. Pastrami sandwiches were a specialty and I could even get a glass of beer.

One Friday, after a week with considerable overtime, I got a one hundred dollar paycheck. One hundred net—after taxes. I spent it that evening to buy a 1942 Ford two-door sedan very much like the one Sandy Ross and I had stolen in Flint, though not in such good condition. Mine was blue, the standard Ford lacquer blue that slowly oxidized toward a mottled gray. People said not to wash a car on a sunny day because it was bad for the paint. The total cost of my ‘42 Ford, including tax and license, came to a little over a hundred but the salesman took what I had and I drove off on a great wave of independence and pride of ownership.

In the very early morning of Wednesday, February 6, 1952, my mother and I listened on the radio to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. A late morning procession in England—five or six a.m. in Detroit. The announcer told that a light rain fell on the streets of London. For our breakfast, my mother cooked bacon and Scotch oatcakes—saucer-size oatmeal patties fried in butter and served with real Vermont maple syrup. We never used Log Cabin. We ate our bacon with our fingers because that was the proper English way. My mother maintained that to keep the bacon flat it should be turned several times as it fried, not just once or twice. And not using a bacon press. She added that English children were often fed raw bacon. What about trichinosis? She said being smoked made it safe—but added that one could get worms from eating raw string beans. I tried uncooked bacon only once. I wasn’t sure about her claim. Nor was I convinced about the beans. However, I remember her caution whenever I find a raw one in my salad.

From our kitchen radio the British announcer’s public school elocutions rose and fell with the rolling modulation of short wave radio—wireless the English called it. The undulations had to do with the radio waves being bounced over the earth’s curvature from the upper atmosphere. Later, in the Coast Guard, I learned that short waves, while shorter than those of domestic broadcast radio, were really quite long—at least compared to FM, TV and radar waves. I relished knowing that sort of thing. I knew about the F-1 and F-2 layers of the ionosphere merging at night to reflect AM and short wave radio signals. That’s why after sunset you could hear hams from Australia. And why long distance truckers could pick up the Grand Old Opera from Nashville, Tennessee on the AM dial from anywhere in the country.

My mother wept as she listened to Elizabeth’s coronation. Tears came to my eyes too. A mushiness brought on by the stentorian narration of noble pageantry and the sober triumphal music. There were other occasions when my eyes welled: a crowd intoning the Star Spangled Banner or a group of children sang campfire songs. The stuff of mass hysteria.

I went with Bill Waara, Sandy Ross and Dick Hook to see the movie, “Tales of Hoffman.” Misty music and underworld boating scenes. Half way through I left the theater and waited outside for the others. I said I had been emotionally overwhelmed—a swoon. Bill said I was showing off.

Barry Branch recommended I see Hedy Lamarr in “Extase.” I went alone to Detroit’s single art cinema and was thrilled to see beautiful Hedy; Hedy running naked through the woods; Hedy and the Woodsman making love; the stallion mounting his mare; the shimmering symbolic raindrop that slipped from a bit of phallic foliage into the trembling open throat of a lily. But I was disappointed to have seen naked Hedy only at a distance—nothing close up. I also went alone to see “Limelight” and was enchanted by the love of a young girl for an older man. Was that the story? Fantasy. I was ageing beyond the possibility of gentle love with tender virgins. Sad. I had missed the boat. The “Limelight” theme music lingered in my mind for years. In the library I dillydallied over romantic paintings in books from the oversize shelves. And at the Art Institute I lingered before nineteenth century paintings of dreamy girls in clingy gowns. My romantic fancy was shifting from voluptuousness to innocence.

Sandy Ross, who had an evening job as a copy boy at the Detroit News, told me about a picture that came in on the AP wire-photo line: a naked movie star, I’ve forgotten who, with a man’s face pressed between her parted thighs. I was dumfounded. I wanted to see it. I wanted, like Sandy, to work among real men sharing manly entertainments. I was in a muddled state.

Bill Waara went off to Adrian College with the idea to become a minister. I visited on a weekend. A pretty campus with pretty coeds. Bill told me about all the heady stuff he was learning. He said a man’s two most important life decisions were the profession he chose and the wife he took. He was thinking about both. I thought about neither. I had no steady girlfriend. My career ideas didn’t go beyond returning to work as a draftsman on Monday. After a year, Bill gave up on being a minister and transferred to the teacher’s college at Ypsilanti—which had recently renamed itself Eastern Michigan State College. A few students still wore “Michigan Normal” jackets.

Bill’s brother Vern had joined the Navy, been assigned to the aircraft carrier Hornet and sailed around the world. When he came home on leave he told of girls in every port and I believed him.

Barry Branch and Sandy Ross each went off to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I visited them too. They talked about utilitarian philosophy, the psychology of Harry Stack Sullivan and the unfamiliar ideas of various eminent scholars. They were moving on. Meanwhile, I took a remedial English class two evenings a week at Cass Tech High School in Detroit—where Charles Lindbergh’s mother had taught for many years. I stayed downtown after work and ate supper alone at a diner where coffee was still five cents a cup. To our teacher asking who knew such and such, I answered, “Me.” She corrected me kindly: I should have said “I.” .

Sandy Ross became discouraged at the U of M and quit. Everyone said it was a great shame because he had been awarded a full academic scholarship including room and board. Sandy moved back to Dearborn with his parents, took accounting classes in the evenings, and got a job keeping books for a fly-by-night trucking company that hauled salt from Detroit to somewhere in Indiana. He told me there was an immense salt mine that ranged deep under southwestern Detroit—second in size only to a mine in Soviet Russia. He showed me a picture of the Detroit mine from the rotogravure section of a Sunday newspaper: a steam shovel and truck looked like toys in one of its subterranean caverns. My mother liked to use the word “rotogravure,” she could even explain the process. I wondered if it would be cold or warm in the salt mine. Warm I decided—and exactly the same temperature year round. I remembered that Sandy’s father once said something like that about the coal mines in Wales—that they were warm because of being closer to the earth’s core.

Barry Branch didn’t do well at the U of M either. On a mid-winter evening of his freshman year he went out for a hamburger, returned to his dorm room and swallowed a hundred aspirins. He later said he believed the dose would kill him and that the hamburger was necessary to get his digestive juices flowing. Hmm? I had never heard of a successful aspirin suicide. Maybe the burger actually protected him—coating his innards with fat. Barry’s stomach was pumped at the university infirmary. He was deaf for two weeks. His MD father put him into a private mental hospital. Barry said he liked being there. He told the psychiatrists all sorts of outrageous lies and claimed a cute girl patient came to his room almost every afternoon to screw. When he was discharged from the nut house, Barry went to live with his father and stepmother. He attended Flint Junior College for a semester before going back to the U of M. I visited him one weekend and went to a party with a blind date. A Negro girl. She seemed comfortable enough with me but I didn’t know how to act. She was attractive but I was afraid to make advances for fear of something. What? I didn’t know. Complications, I suppose.

When he was fifty, Barry did take his own life—with a shotgun or maybe a slug from an antique Army rifle. He had become an avid Civil War enthusiast and traveled to various battlegrounds to participate in re-enactments of historic campaigns. Barry and I had lost touch but our mothers still corresponded. Barry’s mother, Al, was sure it was suicide but said that Barry’s wife maintained it had been an accident. Al said the wife was just covering up her guilt concerning Barry’s unhappiness.

I was eighteen. At the end of my unraveling teenage tether. Reduced to such low excitements as racing around alone at midnight in my ‘42 Ford: burning rubber at stop signs, reckless but afraid of the police, becoming sexually excited and even jerking off behind the wheel as I screeched around on quiet residential streets. I needed to move on.

I went to a Navy Reserve weekend open-house and visited an Air Force recruiting office. Neither seemed right. But if I didn’t join something I would soon be drafted into the army. I talked with a Coast Guard recruiter whose pitch convinced me. But I failed the physical exam—something wrong with my urine and I didn’t weigh enough for my height.

My mother sent me to a doctor who suspected a problem with my lymph. He put me in the hospital to biopsy a node from the back of my neck. I also had Kahn and Wassermann tests because she told the doctor my father had maybe had syphilis. My lymph was OK and I tested negative for social diseases. It seemed silly to remain in the hospital and against a nurse’s protestations I put on my clothes, called my mother, and went to the lobby to wait for her. The doctor found us there and said I should have waited for his orders but, after all, there was no reason to stay.

I returned to the Public Health Hospital for a second enlistment exam. The doctor told me I had good legs, which seemed an inappropriate complement. I later read in an astrology book that sound lower limbs were characteristic of Aquarians. But I was still underweight and my pee still too acid, or maybe too base, and the doctor said to come back in a month. As I dressed, a medical corpsman advised drinking lots of water before my next exam. Sandy Ross told me about a friend of his who was two pounds too light and half an inch too short to be hired as a Dearborn policeman. Sandy and some of his buddies fed this short lightweight six bananas for breakfast and carried him on a stretcher from his bed at home to a second exam at police headquarters. The bananas gave him the weight and he measured OK right after standing up because his spine hadn’t yet compressed. Before my third Coast Guard enlistment exam I drank a lot of water and ate several bananas. I passed.

Within a week, I was sworn in for a four-year hitch and on my way to boot camp at Cape May, New Jersey. I was glad to be leaving home and happy to be moving on. I never lived in or near Detroit again and I never much missed it.

Coast Guard

“Real remembering is being back in the experience itself. You remember pain with pain, love with love, one’s real best self with one’s best self.”
Doris Lessing

Looking backward, my four years in the Coast Guard, from August, 1953 to August, 1957 appear as a time of passage: of separation from home and youth; of challenge and growth; of getting a grip on myself. I was becoming what felt like being a man. Making my place in a world that was growing larger in my own time. A largeness I was able to engage with more confidence and enthusiasm because of my Coast Guard experience. This sounds rather romantic. It wasn’t all that heroic but from my own modest point of view it seemed rather grand. Had I followed some other path I would, of course, have grown up anyway—but probably with more painful twists and turns and not so well as it now seems I did. Had I remained at home my adolescent discontent would have become increasingly difficult to endure for both my mother and myself. And then, no doubt after some damage done, the draft board would have swept me away to a military experience more uncomfortable and less rewarding than a four-year hitch in the Coast Guard where my seasoning was sheltered, encouraged, channeled and mentored. A safe crossing in which to learn adult behavior and practice independence.

In the 1950’s the Coast Guard was different from the other branches. Mostly we did meaningful work rather than simply maintaining readiness. There was less chicken-shit drill. I enjoyed all four years and excepting a few minor disappointments and humiliations it was a happy time. I never felt myself a warrior but I was rather defensive when someone questioned if the Coast Guard was real military service. Well, to me it was a real something. Not easy to explain. But I was sure I was engaged in a solid and honorable vocation.

With three other young sailors-to-be, I traveled by train from Detroit to the Coast Guard Training Station at Cape May, New Jersey. One of the boys, a goody-goody whose father had had some influence with the Detroit recruiter, was put in charge for the trip. We played cards in the club car, smoked cigarettes, and swaggered about. The goody-goody cautioned against our using language too-bold.

At Cape May, we four joined several dozen other raw recruits to make up Baker Company. Our heads were shaved. We stood naked in a long chilly line to get a medical exam. Embarrassed but feigning nonchalance—and very careful to not bump into each other. Looking to see if others were looking. Discovering with relief that by and large all of our penises were about the same except a very few that were either really big or quite tiny. I was OK—average. Unsmiling medical men checked our eyes, ears, chests, throats, feet for flatness and said, “cough left” and “cough right” while pushing a rubber-gloved finger hard up behind our scrotums. We were TB tested, vaccinated, and probably scrutinized to see if any one got the hint of a hard-on in such close and fleshy all male quarters. We were issued skivvies, blues, whites, dungarees, and bedding—the mattress cover was called a “fart sack,” a sea bag to keep everything in and a ditty bag for toiletries. And finally, cardboard boxes to pack our civvies in, which the Coast Guard mailed back to our homes. Homes that would never again feel quite the same.

We got dog tags. My serial number was 309-824, which, in my small preoccupation with numbers, seemed propitious. My mother was born on September third, 9/3, and three, she said, was her favorite number—once adding that three was the male number. I didn’t want her to explain. I was born on February fourth and early on in life had chosen 4 as my lucky number—with 2 and 8, half and twice 4, subordinately special. So, right there in my serial number on the dog tag hanging from my neck was my mother, 309 before the dash, and me, 824 on its other side. Symbolic, I thought, of my having exchanged her nest and dependence for some degree of autonomy in a brave new world.

Our Company Commander was a Chief Boatswain’s Mate who proved to be fair and relatively easy going. We learned to make our beds; fold, roll and stow our clothes, drill in formation and tie knots. And later, the basics of sailing a small boat and how to shoot and field strip an M-1 rifle and a .45 caliber pistol. It all came easy. We also learned to field strip our cigarette butts: split off the paper and roll it into a tiny pellet to scatter with the tobacco so as to leave no litter. No one smoked filtered cigarettes. Few onerous tasks were required of us and only occasionally was the training rigorous. Never grueling. I had little trouble with calisthenics, obstacle courses, and climbing ropes and didn’t chafe under discipline unless I thought I had been singled out unfairly. Boot camp—even KP was OK. I liked feeding potatoes into a machine that peeled fifty pounds at once and to hose down the garbage area with high-pressure steam that sent everything skittering off into a drain.

Our Assistant Company Commander, a diminutive spit-and-polish First Class Ordnanceman named Villareal, was said to be a first class prick but we didn’t see a whole lot of him and mostly he didn’t live up to his reputation. Once, because we made too much noise after lights-out, he rousted all of Baker Company out of the sack and marched us around the parade field for half an hour. But even that seemed less a punishment than something special to write home about.

I was good at executing the manual of arms: standing at attention and snapping a rifle into various positions on command. Villareal had me help the few clumsy ones who had trouble with it and once asked me to drill those who had been selected to represent Baker Company at the Saturday morning parade ground eliminations. I didn’t volunteer to compete. I would have liked to win for Baker Company but wouldn’t chance losing and so pretended disdain for those who were gung-ho. At one Saturday morning inspection Baker Company was gigged by the reviewing officer because my shoes were not well enough polished. A single gig was no big deal. However, I protested the punishment and got us another gig for talking back to an officer. Because of my imprudence, Baker Company was denied the Friday night portion of a weekend liberty we had earned by our one-hundred percent participation in the Red Cross blood drive. A few guys said I was dumb to talk back but no one threatened retribution. Privately, I was pleased with the notoriety that speaking out got for me from a few others. I argued that polishing shoes was chicken-shit and should never require more than a reasonable effort. Nevertheless, to appease the resentful, I suffered an earnest lesson in spit-polishing. They said the shine should be so mirror-like that by positioning the toe of your shoe under a girl’s skirt you would be able to see a reflection of her underpants.

I got along well with the majority of recruits in Baker Company but I made no close friends and on the three weekends we were given liberty I went off by myself. Most of the others went home if it was nearby or stayed in South Jersey: Cape May or Wildwood, hoping to pick up vacationing girls. Some went to Philadelphia. I took the train to New York City. Someone had told me the Soldiers and Sailors YMCA was a cheap place to stay and in a good location. Outside Penn Station I consulted my map and hailed a taxi—confident of a short trip. After twenty minutes in the rear seat, I suspected I was being taken for a ride. The meter was going way up. I accused the driver of cheating me and he got huffy. We argued. At a stoplight I called out the window to a policeman and complained that I was being gypped. The taxi driver said I had given poor directions. Maybe I had—wanting to save myself from just what was happening. But he shouldn’t need directions. The cop took my part and told the cabbie to drive directly to the Y, which was only a few blocks farther on, and to charge me only two dollars.

In addition to cheap lodgings, the YMCA rented lockers to servicemen in which to store their civilian clothes, which we weren’t allowed to keep at boot camp. I didn’t want anyone to think I was a recruit sailor on liberty and right away I bought a pair of pants, a regular shirt, and some suede shoes. GI shoes, no matter what else one wore, were a dead give away—certainly to MP’s and probably, I imagined, to sophisticated New York girls. I did a lot of walking—walking and looking—especially at sophisticated city girls. New York was wonderfully new and grand and exciting—I wanted to know my way around as if I were a native. I discovered a bar with sawdust on the floor where, for the price of a beer, I could eat a free hard-boiled egg and pickled onions. The New York drinking age was eighteen and just being able to go into a bar made me feel pretty manly. I also found the Jewish delicatessen that one of the architects I had worked with in Detroit said served the world’s best Rubin sandwiches.

Over the course of my three New York weekends I went to the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan and an off-Broadway play. I rode the subway to Coney Island and strolled the boardwalk, came back to Manhattan and wandered around Greenwich Village until after midnight. I was too bashful to enter any of the noisy bohemian bars. I might be ignored. I stuck to the sidewalks. New York City traffic signals had only two lights, red and green—no yellow in between. At the change from GO to STOP, red and green were lighted together for a few seconds as the caution signal. I remembered the one-lamp, three-light traffic signal problem that Mr. Hoover had teased us with in drafting shop at Southfield Trade School. A two-light problem would probably be easier to solve but I didn’t try. City police rode around in green and white two-seater Plymouth coupes with disproportionately long rear trunks. They didn’t have a very serious police car look about them. If the cops arrested someone, I guess they had to call a paddy wagon to haul him away.

At the Recruit Training Center in Cape May, I coasted through my three months of boot camp without any serious scrapes. I went to the canteen in the evenings and occasionally to the library, a quiet refuge situated off the vestibule of the non-denominational chapel. Catholic boys got taken to mass in Cape May. Sundays were relatively idle. Sunday breakfast was always shit-on-a-shingle and Sunday supper always make-your-own sandwiches from cheese and lunchmeat, which we called horsecock, with a side of potato salad and fruit cocktail for desert. We suspected that the Sunday noon meal was the one they laced with saltpeter, probably in the mashed potatoes and gravy, in so we wouldn’t be so driven to jerk-off.

As seamen recruits, we were paid $72.00 a month in cash—enough for cigarettes, a few snacks, and occasional amusement. One month, every recruit on the base was paid entirely with two-dollar bills to demonstrate our economic impact to the Cape May business community.

I did well on all the boot camp drills and tests and at the end of our training I got near first choice of assignments. I chose Alaska, the least sought after destination. I wanted both to travel and to avoid sea duty on one of the East Coast weather ships that steamed around in the North Atlantic for weeks at a time. I didn’t want to be on a ship of any kind: cooped up in tight noisy quarters and seasick. I remembered sailing on Lake St. Clair as a boy, taken out by a business friend of my father’s, and being so sick I could only moan and vomit. My father was sick too. On a Coast Guard weather ship, there would be no relief. I took the further step of volunteering for isolated duty in Alaska because that almost guaranteed my assignment to a solid on-shore lighthouse.

Our final boot camp assignment at Cape May was guard-week. Four hours on, eight off—just like on ship at sea. I spent several lonely midnight-to-four a.m. watches in a tiny guard shack on the ocean beach. We weren’t allowed to smoke on guard duty because the cigarette glow might make us a target. For whom? I crouched down in the little shack and had one anyway. In the lonely dark I felt as if I had grown up quite a bit over the past three months. I had done well. I was ready to move on. Fairly confident I could make my way wherever I was sent and do whatever was asked of me—to act and be treated as a young man.

On my way to the West Coast I took a one-week home leave in Detroit. Bill Waara and I borrowed his father’s car to go to a Shakespeare play in Stratford, Ontario. Mr. Waara would use my ‘42 Ford for work. We stopped at my Uncle Bill and Aunt Irene’s farm for half an hour before going on to the play. My relatives couldn’t believe that after so many years I hadn’t planned a longer visit. I guess it was pretty insensitive. Even Bill thought so. I don’t remember what play we saw. Driving back to Detroit, Bill and I argued about intelligence. I maintained there were worthy dimensions of the human mind that IQ tests didn’t measure: like some liberality of spirit, or maybe breadth of vision that distinguished the wise from the merely smart. I sought gestalt, not knowledge. Bill said, bunk! What’s the significance of something, or anything, he argued, if it can’t be measured? I didn’t know. But surely there was a difference between those of us who enjoyed good fiction and those who read magazines—between art and knowledge. Knowledge alone gave us a false sense of wisdom. Maybe it just had to do with how people occupied their intelligence. Maybe mine wasn’t so hot but at least I directed it toward the right questions. Or at least questioning in general, rather than just accumulating answers. Values were what I valued. I said all this stuff even though it was muddled and I wasn’t so sure I knew what I was talking about. I wanted there to be something special about me—potential at least—even if un-measurable. But Bill’s logic undermined my certainty and shut me up. Later I decided he had simply didn’t get it. I was pleased to find myself more and more able to engage in what I imagined was thoughtful argument—bunk or not. I felt I was beginning to get a grip on my ideas about life and the world around me, and beginning to have some consistent line to my speculations. Nothing I could really pin down but something that seemed more or less the same from time to time. When we got back to Detroit, Bill’s father said that coming home from work my car had overheated and blown its radiator cap. Mr. Waara had almost crashed because the hood flew up on the road and he couldn’t see ahead. It was pretty funny the way he told the story and we all laughed.

When my leave was over I flew from Detroit to Seattle where I would spend the late fall and early winter at the Coast Guard Supply Depot on Puget Sound. Fresh recruits were not sent overseas, not even to Alaska, until they had been in the service a full six months. I found a bunk in the large half-empty barracks and spent my days at whatever task some superior thought fitting for an unskilled transient seaman apprentice. I swept and mopped, carried and shelved, scraped and painted, took my turns at KP in the galley and made the rounds during tedious four hour night-time security watches. On watch we carried a heavy round clock in a leather case. I think it was called a Detex Clock. At each of several locations there was a key chained to a little box. You twisted the key in the clock to make an impression on a piece of round paper that turned inside the Detex. I guess someone looked at the round papers each morning to see if punches were missing. To Detex any lapse of vigilance by the man on watch.

The supply Depot was a busy place. There were ships undergoing minor repairs and being outfitted to return to sea. Giant buoys lay dockside waiting to be scraped and painted and then taken by a tender to their proper positions along the coast. I didn’t like the looks of the buoy tenders: fat stubby ships that surely rolled sickeningly in rough water. Work on a buoy tender would be hard for a seaman apprentice like me—lots of being yelled at when you were cold and wet. And there would be watches to stand, day and night, under the critical eyes of grumpy boatswains mates. I didn’t want any of it. And I didn’t get any. During my entire four-year career in the Coast Guard I would manage to avoid ever going to sea. An accomplishment of which I was proud. In retrospect, however, I think that serving on a ship might have been an interesting experience. (One that would never again present itself.) But I would want to be at sea for only a week or two—and in calm weather.

In Seattle I made friends with a young seaman named Fred Beal. He was from Mill Valley, north of San Francisco, and his father was a Coast Guard warrant officer. Beal was a Storekeeper striker, an apprentice in his father’s specialty of purchase and supply, and he too intended to make a career of the Coast Guard. Beal was a homosexual. I had never known one before—not as a friend. He swore me to secrecy, made no sexual advances, at least none I recognized, and I didn’t worry he might. I was comfortable with Beal. Several evenings a week he went out to movies and to bars, gay clubs I guessed, though gay hadn’t yet that meaning. He said he was plotting an affair with a handsome young Samoan sailor at the base but I thought he was just hoping.

Beal read Variety every week and told me stories about movies and the theater and actors and actresses. He also spoke with confidence about politics and affairs of large and liberal scope. He gave me a book by Tallulah Bankhead and I enjoyed Tallulah’s accounts of hanging out with Democratic Party big shots. I learned from Beal, and from Tallulah, to more confidently venture with words my emerging, though still fuzzy, left-political ideas.

On Christmas Eve, Beal and I had a double date with two girls. Beal had relatives in Seattle and his date was a cousin. Mine was a girlfriend of the cousin who worked for the Union Pacific Railroad. I told her about my Aunt Hilda who was a reservations supervisor at the Michigan Central Depot in Detroit. The girl was very nice. At the end of the evening, we went to midnight mass at the Catholic Cathedral. The priest celebrating it must have been a bishop or better because he wore a tall pointy hat like a chess piece. The ritual was moving and my feelings toward the railroad girl were warm. After the mass, we walked around holding hands against the cold but I didn’t see her again.

After three months in Seattle I got leave to go home for a week before moving on to Alaska. I made a plane reservation for Saturday and on Friday evening I got plastered. I don’t remember where. I wasn’t old enough to get into bars. Maybe driving around with Beal in his car. After midnight I returned to the barracks falling-down, shit-faced-drunk. I couldn’t find my own bunk, flopped down on a bare mattress, started to spin, threw up on the floor and fell dead sleep. No one bothered me during the night but I was forcefully awakened in the morning and yelled at by a Chief Boatswain’s Mate who ordered me to clean up the mess I had made and then to swab, wax and buff the floor of the entire barracks. I was outraged. I had a throbbing pain in my head. Furthermore, I was technically on leave—on my own vacation time. I complained to the chief that I would miss my flight to Detroit. He told me to get to work. I mopped and waxed and buffed on an empty stomach. My head ached with arguments about the unfairness of my punishment but there was no one to hear them. I finished just in time to pack, get to the airport in a taxi, and catch my plane. I suppose the Chief knew I would make it. Probably he would have sent me off in time even if I hadn’t finished the floors.

On the way to Detroit, the airplane stopped at Great Falls, Montana. The temperature was twenty-three degrees below zero. The cold air felt hard and jagged in my lungs and the inside of my nose froze crisp as I walked between the parked airplane and the little terminal.

During my week at home, Bill Waara, his cousin Forrest Airhart, and I took three girls on a triple date to see a Detroit Redwings hockey game. Bill took his girlfriend Janet, the Janet he later married; Forrest, who was blond and slight, had a blind date named Dolores Dempsey; and I took my step-cousin, Nancy Zider. It seems odd that I asked Nancy. She and I had always gotten on well at family gatherings but there had never been anything between us. She was pretty, I guess she nothing better to do and I hadn’t anyone else to ask. The hockey game was dull and our seats were high up and behind a pole. After the game and getting something to eat there was a lot of driving to get everyone home. In the back seat, I put my arm around Nancy and we kissed. She had a supple inviting body and seemed vulnerable. But I was afraid to advance the moment. I worried about her being my step-cousin. What would our family think? Besides, I was leaving in three days and might never see Nancy again. We kissed again at her door, but just a kiss goodnight

Based on those few minutes of back seat fumbling and kissing I fabricated a daydream about Nancy that I carried on with for years. She and I swam in a nice warm lake—like where her Aunt Lois lived. Nancy was very sexy in her ever so slight bathing suit and we squeezed ourselves together, front to front, inside an inner tube. Floating thus, we hugged and kissed and squirmed and she wrapped her legs around me. Then a problem arose—of process: how, pressed tight together in the tube, to fondle her body and get our swim suits off? My arms couldn’t stretch around the tube, not even in imagination, and if I were to tuck them down inside what would keep me from slipping under water? Which might be a fun way to undress Nancy—but how would I breathe? These cerebral tribulations of buoyancy and breath always confounded the plot and my grip on the fantasy floundered. I never moved forward to a conclusion.

Bill Waara said our hockey-game triple date had been a classic mismatch: Nancy would have been perfect for Forrest and Forrest’s date, Dolores Dempsey, was just my type. I agreed. And Dolores, who was a student at Michigan State University, seemed to have liked me. I called and we made a date. I took a bus to East Lansing and we spent an afternoon and evening together. Dolores was a pretty, middle-class coed who should have been getting lots of attention from college men. I was puzzled by her interest in me: a high school dropout Coast Guard sailor at home on a few days leave. Maybe she was slumming. I liked her a lot. We had supper in a crowded off campus hamburger and spaghetti restaurant. I ordered a pitcher of beer for myself and a soda for her. I was only nineteen but the waiter didn’t ask. When Dolores finished her soda I filled her glass with beer and felt pretty suave. But in a moment the waiter took her glass away and said we would be asked to leave if I did it again. Not so suave. I swallowed my chagrin and left the beer pitcher half full. Dolores and I walked and talked our way across the dark wintry campus, exchanged kisses and photos at the door to her dorm, and promised to write soon and often.

From Detroit I flew to Seattle and then on to Sitka Island, Alaska. From there, I took a small two-engine amphibian to Ketchikan where the coastal mountains allowed only a narrow ledge for the town but no place for an airport. It was a very short flight and the splashy landing took me by surprise. Thrilling. Flying boats, seaplanes, amphibians, and float planes had been among my favorites when I made models as a teenager. I spent one night at the Ketchikan Coast Guard base and the next day was taken sixty miles south in a fifty-two-foot patrol boat to Tree Point Light Station at the southern-most tip of Southeastern Alaska.

Tree Point Light sat on a rocky verge of Alaska’s inland waterway. Exposed through Dixon Entrance to the stormy waters of the North Pacific Ocean. It was utterly isolated by miles and miles of chilly rain forest, rugged mountains and gloomy gray overcast sky. The nearest inhabitants were in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, thirty miles farther south. But it might as well have been a thousand because there were no roads. Not even trails. At least the lighthouse was situated on the mainland—a superior circumstance to finding myself perched on a pile of offshore rocks or, worse yet, unrelentingly seasick on a rolling anchored lightship. The rewards for serving one year at an isolated duty station would be threefold: it counted as sea duty for promotion, having some choice in my next assignment and thirty extra days of leave at the end.

Tree Point Light Station was built in the early 1900’s by the US Lighthouse Service but had been taken over by the Coast Guard sometime since. The light tower, right out on rocky Tree Point, was square white-painted masonry and not very high—nothing like the tall round towers seen on picture post cards. At its base were an engine room and a radio room. Two diesel-driven turbines generated electricity, which was stored in a bank of several dozen very large batteries. Like car batteries, except much larger and in tanks made of glass. Everything electric at Tree Point ran off direct current. Two hundred yards inland from the lighthouse, and sheltered from the ocean wind by a tree-covered hill, there were three six-room white frame houses and a smaller schoolhouse. Tree Point, when operated by the Light House Service, had accommodated three keepers, their families, and a schoolteacher for their children. A quarter of a mile around the point, at a small cove where the sea was deep right to the edge of the cliff, there was a boat house and a hoisting boom that swung out over the water. The hoist was used to lower and lift our motor launch fifty feet from the water to the boathouse deck. A narrow gage tramway and boardwalk connected the boathouse with light tower and our living quarters in between. Our drinking water flowed from a lake in the hills through a two-mile long wooden pipeline to a large cistern behind the houses. Every few months we walked its length and plugged leaks in the wooden pipe with tar and pegs. Maintaining Tree Point Light Station required quite a lot of work from us four Coast Guard enlisted men.

The officer-in-charge, the OIC, was a First Class Engineman named Mew: a short nervous misfit already the veteran of several years’ lighthouse duty in Alaska. He relished the autonomy of being an OIC. Married petty officers were allowed to have their families with them at light stations and Mew lived with his wife in the first of the three big houses. A pretty soft deal. Mrs. Mew was bleachy-blond, fortyish and seemed nice enough but Mew pretty well kept her housebound and didn’t let the rest of us have much to do with her.

The second house was occupied by Stanley Figel, another seasoned and oddball lighthouse sailor. Figel was a second-class Boatswain’s Mate and nominally next in command, but Mew gave him no authority at all. Figel was fat, lazy, and ill tempered. He despised Mew. While Mew was constantly busying about, Figel did as little as possible—and each was ever vexing the other. They seemed to thrive on their conflict.

I moved into the third house with a young Engineman Striker named Carroll Porter. I had never heard Carroll as a name for a boy. Carroll was an acutely self-effacing and freckled redhead from Savannah, Georgia. Apologetic even for being a Southerner. He hadn’t asked for an assignment in Alaska—just got last pick because he was the sort of person who always went unnoticed and never made a fuss.

Of us four, one was always alone on watch in the radio room—eight hours on, twenty-four off, around, around and around the clock, day after day. Whoever had stood the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. watch slept until noon, so there were only two of us in the morning and three after lunch to do all that was needed to keep everything in working order. Weekdays were given over to maintaining the lighthouse, the engine room machinery and the tramway, boathouse and hoist. Everything was antiquated and a lot of making-do was called for. In addition, we each had to take care of meals, laundry, and his own housekeeping. Twice a month the man on watch radioed a food order to the Coast Guard Base at Ketchikan. These supplies were then sent to us on the Prince Rupert mail boat, which stopped in the water a few hundred yards off shore where two of us met it in the motor launch. It was a treat to rendezvous with the mail boat because there were often women on board to have a look at. Once each quarter a Coast Guard supply ship brought us dry stores and fuel oil.

Our canned and dry goods were kept in a locked storage shed—locked by Mew against the plundering he feared from Figel. Carroll claimed to have eaten little but fried eggs, grits and pork chops during all his past six months at Tree Point. He didn’t cook. He grumbled that the unused portion of his food allotment went to Mew and his wife. Mrs. Mew did invite Carroll to Sunday dinners when Figel was on watch—maybe to make up the loss. I undertook to cook more properly for Carroll and myself, ordered our full share of supplies, and joined Figel in bickering with Mew over their fair allocation. Steaks, chops, chicken and meat loaf; along with rice, potatoes and canned vegetables were my offerings. My cooking skill was slight but we had a cookbook and I improved with the effort. I baked Bisquick biscuits and taught myself to make brown gravy from flour and drippings. Carroll was delighted. We couldn’t keep much fresh produce but I ordered and cooked a few vegetables and we had lettuce and tomato salads for several days after each food delivery.

Our kitchen range was an aged wood-fired stove that had been converted into a diesel fuel pot-burner. It didn’t get very hot and cooking times were long. In winter, we kept