Читать книгу The Story I Am - Roger Rosenblatt - Страница 22

From the Unpublished Memoir Unaccompanied Minor

The best days are the first to flee, said Virgil. But before they do. . . . The birthday party when I was six, and, after blowing out the candles, singing every word of “Blue Skies” for my small, bewildered guests. At age four, sitting at the concert grand beside enormous Miss Jourdan, the editor and novelist who lived upstairs with Miss Prescott, the Columbia University librarian, and Miss Cutler, the ceramicist. Playing “The Blue Danube” and “Londonderry Aire” by ear. The ladies’ squeals of delight. Accompanying my dad on rounds, and winding up at the counter at the drugstore on Twentieth and Park, the two of us hunched over ham sandwiches and black-and-white sodas. Tracking earthworms in the park. Riding an inner tube in Long Island Sound, straight to Portugal. Pears in a wooden crate. A horse’s neck, as he is about to take a jump. The sea captain’s house in Chatham, with the ship’s wheel in the living room. Snow piled like cake frosting on my bedroom windowsill. A road under a hard blue sky, and, though you cannot see it or smell the brine, the sea it leads to.

And my mother, having returned home from teaching junior high English in a school on Hester Street. And her mother, Sally, lounging around our gothic museum of an apartment in the late afternoons while I, the apple of their eyes, deployed brightly painted British soldiers in the Charge of the Light Brigade on the green bedroom carpet. My grandmother, whom I called Giga, big face, black hair, singing “Look for the Silver Lining.” And my mother brandishing a shawl, strutting around the bedroom, like Mae West.

And my mother’s father, Joachim, whom I called Patta, getting off the Third Avenue El, and coming to our house from his sign-painter shop in the Bronx, and sitting at the end of my bed to tell me stories. I was five. And the night he sat there saying nothing, and I waited eagerly until finally he said in his pea-soup accent, “This time, you tell me a story, Raagh.” And I: “But, Patta, I don’t have a story to tell.” And he: “Tell me something you did today.”

So I told him about Mrs. Morris, who took a bunch of the neighborhood kids to Palisades Park that afternoon, and all the wonderful rides we went on, and the go-carts, and the Ferris wheel and the waterfall, and the little pond, which I stretched to the size of a lake, and the live alligator with two teeth, one gold, one silver, that chased me up a hill into a cave, where I hid beside a black bear, the two of us sitting very quietly, burying our faces in cardboard cones of cotton candy. And I saw Patta’s look of amused attentiveness, in which I also saw the power of words. And I loved what I saw.