Читать книгу Strange Paradise - Grace Schulman - Страница 11

Jerome Schulman, who was thirty to my twenty-five, was born in Brooklyn, in Manhattan Beach near Sheepshead Bay, the second of two brothers. Their house was a short walk from the ocean, where they swam mornings before breakfast. Jerry was a young achiever, winning honors in high school and college, from class valedictorian to Phi Beta Kappa. His older brother, Edward, persuaded their parents to allow Jerry to go to Brown University, which they’d initially refused because of its distance from home. Jerry’s further training was as smooth as education can be: medical school at New York University, interning at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, a residence in internal medicine at Columbia University, New York State Boards in internal medicine. A promising young physician, he treated his patients with compassion. However, he dreamed of a career in science, to the anxiety of his parents, Polish immigrants who wanted both sons to be established doctors in their new country.

Wanting to do influenza research, he was not, at first, as promising a virologist as he was a doctor. Science was harder. And yet in 1957, a few months before we met, he gave up medical practice for scientific inquiry, the road he would take for the rest of his working life. Among the reasons he gave me, the one I best understood was his ambition to save more lives than he could by treating patients who, he said, either got well or didn’t. “You were lucky, but Asian influenza has killed great numbers of people, and some of them looked like us.” His emphasis on the words “killed” and “save lives” bespoke the value he placed on human existence, a principle that was to govern my thoughts.

When we met he was working in laboratories at Cornell Medical College, then a part of New York Hospital, and at the Rockefeller University. He worked under Dr. Walsh McDermott, who developed antimicrobial drugs for the treatment of tuberculosis, and who, with his wife, Marian MacPhail, an editor at Life magazine, became supportive friends. My only qualm was that before I’d met them, Marian had invited Jerry to meet a series of single women she worked with at Life. One evening they dined with us in my apartment on Jerry’s fine beef stroganoff, which he served on the table he’d steadied by attaching stout wooden legs. I’d borrowed folding chairs for the occasion. They had me play the guitar, and I did, fumbling with the strings. After that dinner, Marian no longer invited Jerry without me.

Jerry’s work with Drs. McDermott and René Dubos bolstered his dedication to science. From 1968 to 2006 Jerry maintained an active laboratory at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where he conducted pioneering studies in influenza research.

One of them resulted in his discovery of the uniqueness of the Hong Kong influenza virus, which he had succeeded in differentiating from the previously prevalent Asian viruses. Hong Kong strains alone had killed an estimated one million people worldwide.

Like Jerry, I was born in Brooklyn. My parents lived uneasily with my mother’s family in what I’d one day call the old house until my father’s career got its start. My maternal grandfather was David Freiberger, a lawyer who founded a poetry reading series for poets from Israel, then called Palestine, at his local yeshiva. He’d arranged the passage of writers like Nathan Alterman, who camped at the Freiberger’s home while in the United States. Years later, I was to think of his series as premonitory when I organized readings at the 92^nd Street Y.

When David was a child, his family came to America from Hungary penniless, in search of free schools. One of twelve brothers and sisters, he attended classes in Manhattan. To save money, he walked a mile and back each day from their Lower East Side tenement to N.Y.U.’s School of Law. He married Florence, who came from a Jewish family that had resided in New York for several generations, and yet still they tried to make their old world new. They collected antiques—a silver mug, wineglasses, a Sheraton cabinet—which were held dear because they’d been owned by other Americans. In that respect, they shared affinities with the seventeenth-century Dutch burghers who commissioned Terborch portraits of their families sitting before precious objects: a spinning wheel, a crystal ewer. Florence’s dreams of handing down her acquisitions through the ages stopped with me. I was not one for owning things. While I scanned museum cases for the look of rare cerulean plates, I served meals on unbreakables.

Sadly, the education of women was not among David’s urgencies. From her early years his daughter, Marcella, who would become my mother, wrote poems in notebooks. Her only encouragement was the leather-bound volumes on her parents’ shelves, notably Oliver Goldsmith’s verses and the King James Bible. Her wish for formal learning met with light-hearted dismissal. Florence, who was inclined to move whenever her living quarters required repainting, found houses near schools for boys, rather than for girls, requiring Marcella to walk far, alone, to classes. When David moved wife and daughter to the Azores in his post as a legal consultant for a Portuguese pineapple factory, his two sons remained in college at home. Marcella, my despairing mother, was taken out of high school to join her parents abroad. Much later she continued her education at Columbia University’s School of General Studies. However, to her lasting regret, she never matriculated for a degree. And only when it was time to fill out my own college applications did she shamefully confess that she was never allowed to finish high school.

David’s sympathies were ample. As a lawyer, he visited convicts he did not know in Sing Sing prison, bringing gifts and offering to contact their relatives. In Portugal, he befriended the factory owner’s son, and brought him to live with the family in America. So, too, he indulged his sons. But Marcella strained under his harness.

When David and Florence returned to Brooklyn, they were not prepared for Marcella’s errant new love, and less so for her declaration to wed. My parents met at a party, which was acceptable, though her choice was not. My father, Bernard Waldman, a Polish Jew, was cultivated by stays in Germany and in England. In Berlin he trained as an actor at the Reichersche Hochschule für Dramatische Kunst, performing odd jobs for tuition, and received a graduation certificate signed by the conservatory’s director, Friedrich Moest. In England in 1919, he found occasional work as an actor while waiting for a ship to take him to America. He boarded the R.M.S. Berengaria second class, on December 29, 1922, and did recitations from Ibsen to subsidize his passage. In New York, he gathered a little group of actors called the Gotham Players, in a studio at 51 West Twelfth Street, and produced plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, and a newcomer, Alice E. Ives.

He was an actor out of work when he met my mother. He studied law at City College, was graduated, and passed the bar exam, but gave that up soon after. “I’d imagined pleading before the bar, and it wasn’t like that. It was about settling out of court.” When my parents eloped, in 1928, he started an advertising agency at David’s urging. “If you marry that actor, you’ll live in terrible need,” my grandfather reportedly had said. At his agency my father took to graphics, and to designing posters like those he had seen in the London Underground. His love for the theater remained undiminished: he and my mother took me, from age seven, to see plays with actors such as puckish John Garfield as Peer Gynt and vivacious Helen Hayes as Queen Victoria. My earliest theater memory is of an actor ranting as King Lear. I was drawn to the mistreated king when, in the storm scene, he touched his head for a crown no longer there. Then, seeing the swords clashing for his throne, I suddenly thought they were real. I cried softly for Lear, and my father passed me his handkerchief. His smile told me that he was not concerned but amused. I’d been transported.

My mother worked for his agency, writing fashion copy for magazine advertisements. She complained of her anonymity as she sat typing phrases in the back room. The job was never to nourish her gift for writing poetry, but it consumed her, using her wordsmithing skill. And in her surroundings, it was common for married women to adapt, like her crony Harriet Trilling, sister of Lionel, the critic and novelist. Harriet was a trained soprano who gave up her career to assist her husband, Roland Schwartz, a dentist with an office in our building. When she spoke I heard anger in her gentle tones.

My mother’s diversion was wordplay. She would teach me “lion” from “dandelion” and read from Shakespeare while reminding me that I was born on his birthday. On her manual typewriter, she showed me how to type my earliest poems and kept them in her own three-ring notebook. One Saturday I memorized a Hopi rain prayer I’d read in one of her books, and chanted it so that we could stay at home and play words. In serious moments, she taught me to cherish independence, a woman’s best hope of survival. “You can do whatever you want—if you don’t give in to someone’s view of who you are.” She was to repeat it, changing the wording, but with the same emphasis.

When I was two months old, my parents moved to Manhattan, where I grew up at 20 West Eighty-Sixth Street, on a block that has not changed much in half a century. Revisiting now, I see only a few alterations: a bank; a Gap where our soda-fountain drugstore had been; and a copy center in place of the old florist. Otherwise, there are the same tall apartment buildings with doormen, one of them home, and the same white sandstone houses we erroneously called “brownstones.” On the side streets were truly brown buildings, private houses divided into apartments. In one of the white houses on our block was my “progressive” private high school, Bentley, now gone to a condominium.

Nature was Central Park, half a block away from our house. Before high school, I was allowed to go there only with an elder. I was an only child, used to being solitary, but when taken to the park I bounded for the crowded swings in the “little-children’s playground,” and later, for the roller-skating rink. I climbed what I fantasized were mountains set with diamonds, actually small rocks inlaid with mica. My grandfather, who had slighted my mother as a child, doted on me. He took me to the park, to the zoo, and to see Laurel and Hardy movies on Forty-Second Street. I lived for his visits, usually on Saturdays. “Don’t send her to school, I’ll teach her myself” was a plea my mother ignored, a tune she’d heard before.

At five years old, I came down with an infection of the eyelids that left me unable to see. There being no effective treatment in those pre-antibiotic days, the blindness dragged on into summer, fall, and winter. After trying useless remedies, my family resorted to warm-water soaks, which sometimes revealed daylight. Unfortunately, my parents were away: my father went to Hollywood periodically for a project he’d invented called Cinema Fashions, which would bring copies of dresses worn in movies to retail stores. My mother, whether bending to his wishes or fearing to shake her marriage, joined him. She was to write a story about a woman who watched her husband kissing a starlet. When I read it as an adult, I understood her early anxiety.

I was cared for lavishly at my grandparents’ in Brooklyn.

Two uncles taught me to “see” by feeling the textures of toys. I couldn’t get enough of my uncle Josh, who played Portuguese fados on the mandolin. My grandmother coaxed my appetite for meals, and brought me a chocolate-and-vanilla Dixie cup whenever we heard the ice-cream wagon’s bell-like tunes on the street. My grandfather read to me from The Folk Tales of All Nations, a book he inscribed to me in an arresting Gothic script, “To Grace Waldman from her grandfather, David Freiberger,” even though he knew I couldn’t read it. “Now comes the story,” he would read, and no one else could say it as he did. Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” was a favorite of mine, and he read it repeatedly in a wide range of tones. I remember those months as a seesaw of joy and sorrow, up for the attention I got, down for the parents I missed. Up for the relatives constantly at my side, down for the frustration of not reading for myself. Down with a bump for the passing of time. I could not tell the hours.

After nine months, I recovered. I woke one morning and cried aloud when I saw light come through the windows, saw the windows, saw my grandfather, saw the books he read from. I went to a public school in Manhattan, the first grade taught by Miss McGee. I did well, equipped with the words and numbers I’d been taught. But after being confined and attended by grownups, I was restless in the company of other children. “Works and Plays Well with Others” got me low marks. Thereafter, I acted the role. I found a friend, and we even skipped rope at recess, but the wish for solitude stayed on.

My grandfather died of a stroke when I turned fourteen. I was in Nags Head, North Carolina, on vacation from school with my uncle Josh’s then-current fiancée, Pepi. I’d talked her into it, secretly wanting to go there because I was taken with the drawl of a boy from the South. We had come from a swim when my father phoned and said, “Sweetheart, Pop died.” I reeled in disbelief—how could he die?—and we rode home on the train. My mother was hosting her aunts who burst into sobs at the sight of me walking in the door. My uncle Milton, who’d had a severe mental breakdown, wailed. The family went into such turmoil over the settling of my grandfather’s estate that Pepi, my Uncle Josh’s love, said she couldn’t tolerate the mess and disappeared.

In my high-school years at Bentley, I’d wander, usually alone, inside the Hayden Planetarium and the Museum of Natural History, both majestic structures near my home. In walking distance was the Ethical Culture Society, an angular, solemn-looking building where, on Sundays, I woke to the “faith without creeds” sermons of Algernon Black, the Society’s leader and a founder of the Experiment in International Living, a group for working abroad. In his sermons he asserted that you could do religious acts without going to a house of worship, a belief that still lingers in me.

At the Society I square-danced with a classmate, Alex Alland. One day he walked the mile home with me to Eighty-Sixth Street singing folk songs of Burl Ives, such as “Wayfaring Stranger” and “Black Is the Color.” Our class sang them on our field trip to rural Maryland, where we biked to 4-H youth clubs and met teenagers whose farm ways were very different from our city habits. To bridge the gaps, we sang Appalachian ballads. We all knew them.

I was not a diligent student at Bentley. My distraction was an older man. It began with a need for assurance. I’d been distressed by my size, thin as a blade and uncommonly tall. Even my exact measurement had the awkward sound of “five feet eleven and three-quarters inches.” I had to recite it often, because classmates asked my height even before they knew my name. My mother was concerned and let me know it. Teachers identified me as “that tall girl.” Feeling that way, I suffered when I saw Tenniel’s illustration of Alice in Wonderland, fallen down the rabbit hole and stretched out tall as a giant.

Once, at a school dance where girls wore satin dresses with suede pumps, I strapped on sandals with flat heels I’d pried off to be even flatter, the nails clawing through. I paled when the teacher thought up a game: girls would pile shoes in the center of a ring, and each boy would pick a shoe and dance with its owner. Stealthily I tucked mine under the heap of suede or patent-leather shells with curvy insteps, hoping that some prospective suitor might see through it to the me myself. But no, my ragged heelless sandal remained unclaimed. I was a poor version of Cinderella, with no prince in sight. And then I was done for: the teacher hoisted my elongated shoe above her head as though it were a dead centipede, demanding, “Whose is this?” No need to ask again. I ran home barefoot in the rain, skidding on wet pavement.

Everything changed at sixteen, when I met Robert, who was my senior by nine years and at least as tall, at my grandfather’s funeral. His straight, tan hair fell forward when he spoke, and he swept it back in the manner of Farley Granger, a movie star I’d seen in Strangers on a Train. He had just finished his medical internship, and I was charmed to learn that he was the son of the doctor who delivered me. Better still, I could meet him after school and brush past the girls who disparaged my height. Best of all, he’d read Lord Byron’s poems at Harvard, and could quote the whole first stanza of “She Walks in Beauty.” He took me to the movies and, once, to a play, Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, with José Ferrer. He called me his long-legged girl. And although it would take me years to have good sex, this was a caring introduction to it.

The little romance didn’t last long, but in the heat of it I found in the school library a book covered in worn gray cloth, an anthology of sonnets from Wyatt through Thomas Hardy. “I am a little world, made cunningly / of Elements” were lines that flamed and roared. While I wasn’t sure of their meaning, the sounds of the words, and their urgency, had me enthralled. It was snowing outside, the streets white, the people vanishing before ghostlike buildings, and what I held in my hands was feeling and thought clearly defined in black print. John Donne was a name I said over and over, as though wanting to talk with him. I showed the poem to a teacher who read it aloud to me. Next day she showed me how to construct a sonnet, and I wrote one a day for at least a year. As a senior, I sent the whole sheaf along with my application to Bard College, and was accepted despite my indifferent grades.

Those years were not unhappy, but restricting. There were tight rules for dress and social behavior, laid out as evenly as the geometric blocks. When I grew old enough to take the subway alone, I rode downtown to Greenwich Village. I walked on streets that curved and deviated and crossed themselves, West Fourth meeting West Fourth. I went to a café called the Figaro and sat at a table with an open chessboard waiting for players. I stared at the game my mother had taught me. A woman sat at my table, across from me. I wondered what to say to her. No need. Without a word, she held out a hand offering me black or white. I chose, and we began our moves. I was free.