Mosaics: a memoir of childhood

Human Shield

My mother stood at the top of the staircase, the tendons on her neck sticking out as she screamed abuse at my father. "Cheapskate! You won't spend a dime. You're ugly. You look like a turtle. Ugly, wrinkled turtle! You can't even flick. All you want is a blow job." She was hurling things down on him, whatever she could grab, with astonishing force. My father, standing his ground, held me up to shield himself from the storm of missiles. I was four years old. An ashtray, lighter, clock, vase, soap dish, tooth paste, cold cream, and framed wedding photograph ricocheted off the walls and off me--blood trickled down my bare leg--and smashed on the floor. I tried not to cry so I could hear what they were saying. "You lived a lie. That lifeguard on the beach," he shouted. Her pink satin dressing gown fell open, she tottered unsteadily on her square-heeled bedroom mules and tried to spit on him. Her saliva fell halfway down the stairs.

The staircase had flowered wallpaper, a worn brown carpet that left the edge of the steps exposed, and a varnished banister with white railings. My soft flesh did not give him much protection and did not prevent her from continuing to throw watches, sharp jewelry, and a table lamp down at us. It was worth wounding me, she felt, if she could also hurt him. Caught between a coward and a maniac, I was merely a thing, a pathetic target in a hopeless attempt to contain her rage. I remembered their words, though I didn't fully understand them. Later on, the elusive lifeguard--tanned, muscular, and on the scene before my time--took on a disturbing significance. If Judy cared nothing about me and Rube couldn't fuck, who did I belong to?

Imperial Guard

One of my grandfathers looked like Joseph Stalin, the other like Chiang Kai-shek. All my grandparents came from the medieval city of Vilna, a center of Jewish culture in the Russian Empire. They spoke with strong accents, but never told me about the Cossacks and pogroms that had driven them out of the old country, which they'd left in their early twenties at the turn of the century, nor about their early years as greenhorns in America. In childhood I was fascinated by the bits of the old world they'd brought with them, the Cyrillic letters printed on a passport and stamped on the neck of a gleaming samovar. Later on, I learned about their culture and way of life in photographs of the Jewish ghettos in Eastern Europe and in the novels of Isaac Singer.

According to family legend, "Chiang' s" brother became high rabbi in Manila. Other fables tied our dynasty to great athletes. The football star Sid Luckman was said to be a cousin, and my small but scrappy great-uncle Morris, whose forehead was dented when a car he was repairing fell on top of him, was supposed to have gone a few rounds with Jack Dempsey.

The reality was less impressive. My grandfather Abe Meyers, a cutter of coats in the garment district of New York, was five feet tall, bald, jaundiced in complexion and character. He was frustrated by his humble position in the world and had a ferocious temper. On Sunday mornings Rube would force my brother Ken and me to accompany him on the dreary ride to visit his parents in the Bronx. Judy, who hated and mocked them, never came with us. The linoleum floors of their hallway and kitchen were layered with Yiddish newspapers, the lamps and furniture in the darkened living room covered in cellophane and plastic.

We'd get a wet kiss from my musty grandmother Celia, a passive blob who'd endured a lifetime of Abe's tirades and tantrums, and (bending down) a painful pinch on the cheek from her tiny consort. There was nothing to do or say there, no meaningful contact. When I tried to talk about baseball, he replied: "Vy hit ball und rrrun?" After we had a glass of cherry syrup and seltzer water, sprayed from a soda siphon, and were bored to death, we'd begin to fool around in their small house. Abe would explode, stamp his feet and shake his little fists. He'd scream at us for destroying his property and peace of mind. Rube would calm us all down and it would be time to go home. In their mid-seventies Abe and Celia had a series of illnesses and heart attacks, were in and out of hospitals, and died slowly. Their lifetime savings and money from the sale of their house scarcely paid for their medical bills and funerals. My father resented Abe for mistreating Celia but, exchanging an evil-tempered father for a shrewish wife, assumed Celia's role and was victimized by Judy in our family.

My maternal grandfather was a vigorous man with coarse features, thick hair combed straight back in the Slavic style, and a long drooping mustache. My aunt always claimed that his striking appearance had attracted the notice of the military authorities and that he'd been chosen for the Russian Imperial Guards, an unlikely place for a short Jewish merchant. In America, he had a pushcart on the lower East Side and then a small grocery store in Summit, New Jersey. He died in 1937, two years before I was born, and I was named after him.