Mosaics: a memoir of childhood

Pastoral

In 1944, at five years old, I was packed off for a two-month stay in Camp Onota in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. I hadn't even started school yet, and found the abrupt separation from my parents, who visited me only once that summer, very painful. I could scarcely restrain my tears in front of the other boys as the train pulled out of Grand Central Station. In 19461 was shunted off to another camp, which was willing to take my four-year-old brother. This "work camp" required the boys to do filthy farm chores. On one depressing evening, I slithered around in the mud, attempting to feed the chickens and clean their coops. Most of the counselors had been brutalized by the war and imposed military discipline--punishment included hanging from the lintels by our fingertips--on the terrified small children.

But I came to like camp, where I was taught sports and allowed to play them from morning to night, and I was always glad to escape the domestic violence. We returned to Camp Onota during the summers of 1947 and 1948, and then moved to the much better Camp Winaukee (most of the camps had Indian names) on Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire. We'd travel overnight by train in two-berth compartments (no more tears at the station), and then rush to secure a bed in the cabin that was farthest from the toilet. The camp had a mainland for younger boys and an island, reached by motorized barge, for the older ones. On trips to the nearest town, Center Harbor, or to the tourist resorts in the White Mountains, I looked down on the local rustics, so different from the sharp New Yorkers. We'd file out of the yellow school busses, invade the gift shops, and, though all the boys were rich, steal everything in sight. When we returned to camp we'd get a stern lecture from the head counselor and have to hand in all the booty th at hadn't already been eaten.

The boys were sophisticated and went to good private schools, and many of them later entered the learned professions. As their successful parents--heads of corporations like Seagrams and Magnavox--drove up on the visiting weekend, the counselors parked a hundred Cadillacs in the front rows and hid the less impressive cars (we had a Pontiac) behind them. When I visited my summer friends during the school year, I was astonished by their mansions, boats, and luxurious way of life. Rube, complaining about the camp fees, paid them in quarterly segments; Judy's erratic behavior prevented me from asking friends to stay overnight.

Confident of my abilities, I accepted as my right the special treats and privileges given to the good athletes and best-looking boys. (I never suspected the sexual motives of the grown-up counselors who later came to visit me in New York.) We picked on the unattractive and unathletic: the weak, the weird, and the fat boys with tiny cocks and bails. A chubby, snout-nosed boy actually bribed me to stop calling him "Porky." I enjoyed cruel and elaborate pranks. I arranged for one camper who (though Jewish) had buck teeth and an Oriental cast to his features, and was called "The Nip," to receive a weekly newspaper written entirely in Japanese.