October 5, 2012--Chapter 10: Uncle Ben's Books

A Battle of the Books raged within my family.  Not the Ancients versus Moderns as in Jonathan Swift’s version, but over sexual orientation.

To be specific, this fight was being waged in my grandmother Zazlo’s house on Bedford Avenue. On one side was Uncle Ben; on the other, everyone else.  

I was up for grabs.

Grandma Zazlo was not a stereotypically nurturing Jewish Granny type.  For example, I do not remember her ever serving food. Black coffee, yes, but soup, no.  And as a result we visited only occasionally.  The equation seemed to be, no food, no visits.  But still I loved going there and tried to convince my parents that it seemed unfair to visit the Malones more often than the Zazlos. In truth I was not so much interested in inter-family equity as I was perversely fascinated by Grandma Zazlo and her life, which was so different than I was used to at the more traditional Malones.  She even insisted that I call her Annie, ignoring the Grandma part.  Though when visiting Annie we needed to eat in advance, I feasted on the uninhibited things that were routine in her house.  

She was better known for her prowess with poker than housekeeping, chain-smoking Camels, cursing casually, and having a bark of a voice that could be heard all the way to Avenue U.  And best of all were the things about which she held court.  She must have already been in her sixties and yet was the only adult I knew who talked openly and enthusiastically about sex.  Up to that time all I knew about sex was what I gathered from stolen glances in The Stork Didn’t Bring You, hidden among a shelf of Sam Levinson’s books of Yiddish stories in Aunt Tanna’s house; and of course from the Street.  

One of Annie’s favorite stories was about how her niece Gloria, who she claimed with considerable delight was now more interested in women than men, one time in Miami got involved with a gangster who wanted to turn her into one of his “girls.”  With a burst of smoke-filled laughter, which signaled to me it was time to get her more coffee, Annie told how that nogoodnik she was seeing threw her out after he was done with her and how Gloria couldn’t make a living on the street because she was such a “skinny wretch like you’ve never seen,” and the next thing you knew she was back up north living with “you-know-who” in New Jersey.  “Who lives in New Jersey?” Annie would ask of no one in particular, answering her own question, “Nobody!”  I did not know who that you-know-who was but hoped to meet her one day.  Maybe at Annie’s, which is one of the reasons I was so eager to visit at least once a month.

An additional pleasure was to be allowed to join a gathering of Annie and her children, most especially if it included my father’s sister Madeline and brother Ben.  I wasn’t banished to another room, as I was at the Malones, when the adults gathered to talk in whispers.  With them, where I was enfolded and made to feel secure, I was used to seeing family as so loving, caring, responsible, self-denying, and morally and ethically conforming that an hour at Annie’s was an liberating alternative to all the pressure that being a part of such an exemplary version of family required.  In addition to wanting to learn how to be “good,” I was eager to gather notes about how to be transgressive. As my friends on East 56^th Street put it—less a sissy and more a man. 

And there was yet one more attractive feature of being included in Annie’s world—on the Malone side of the larger family, life was seen to be all about the children.  To fulfill the promise of America, it was up to the children, my cousins and me, to behave ourselves and work hard so that we would “do better” than our parents.  We represented hope and possibility in this, still for my immigrant family, inhospitable land.  

Nothing was too much for them to do for us, to sacrifice for us.  Especially to sacrifice, which to them additionally bore the weight of Old Testament sanction.   It was not just about going to medical school. It was also about the preservation off the Jewish people.  And my generation understood what was at stake.  Lest we forget, we were reminded of our responsibilities every Passover and Rosh Hashanah. 

But to be with Annie, it was refreshingly clear, liberating even, to perceive that not only didn’t she care at all about her own children, she had even less use for me and her other grandchildren.  In fact, the only thing she appeared ever to want from me was to keep her coffee cup filled and her ashtray emptied.  Which I did enthusiastically because this was as adult a responsibility as was available to someone as sheltered and worried about as I. 

Aunt Madeline and Uncle Ben, well into their forties, remained unmarried and lived at home with their mother, Annie.  I was too young and truly unaware to think much about Ben and Madeline’s unmarried status, even though they were the only adults I knew who were single.  It was represented to me by my mother as evidence of what good children they were: in spite of Annie’s lack of interest in even the concept of children, they lived with her so they could take care of her.  They were held up as a model to me of what it meant to be a good child, even a version of how my own future role would look—not unmarried of course, but as a devoted son who would make an equivalent sacrifice when my own parents required it.   

Uncle Ben was a schoolteacher at a time when virtually all school teachers were women, but in my obliviousness even that didn’t seem worth noting.  And the fact that Madeline had the beginnings of a moustache and bigger biceps than mine also didn’t register. 

A typical visit went something like this— 

We would avoid arriving at a time when food might be an issue.  Though the house had a perfectly respectable front stoop and grand entrance on tree-lined Bedford Avenue, there was a modest side door we always used that led from the alleyway directly to what for other grandmothers would be the eating area next to the kitchen.  It was from the head of that foodless table that Annie presided.  I never saw her seated anywhere else—never at the dining room table (which is where her all-night poker games took place), nor in her formal living room where the overstuffed sofa and side chairs where sheathed in clear plastic.  She alone among us never once got up to go to the bathroom or for any other purpose.  There she remained, elbows drilled into the tabletop—ashtray, cigarettes, and matches to her left; lipstick-smeared coffee cup to her right. 

When we arrived, talking at the same time, she and Madeline would be the midst of an uninterruptible conversation about any number of familiar topics.  During this simultaneous expounding there was no listening whatsoever going on, just the two of them talking at each other at such a volume that the paint on the walls always seemed in danger of peeling.  

All the topics involved Ben—

Why he never spent money on anything except his summer trips to Mexico; why Ben refused to go to “real” doctors, insisting instead on using the HIP HMO which employed doctors from India and the Philippines, none of whom understood or spoke English; why Ben wasted so much time with his friend Mary Brady, who was at least two hundred pounds overweight, had nothing to say, “liked” women and was Catholic to boot; why Ben couldn’t ever seem to discipline his junior high school students who allegedly spent every classroom hour making fun of him; why Ben wouldn’t buy a new car, one with automatic transmission so that Madeline could use it whenever she wanted; why Ben  insisted, when painting the kitchen cabinets, on giving them fifteen coats of  Dutch Boy paint when anyone who knew anything at all about paint knew that just two coats would be enough; why Ben spent all his time when at home in the “sunroom” at the front of the house, always with his nose in a book or Consumers Report magazine, wasting his money on a subscription even though he never bought anything; and why Ben never said a word, literally not one single word ever.  

I didn’t have an opinion about the doctors or Mary Brady or his Filipino doctors, but I had a view about why he might not attempt to say even one word.  In fact, during years of visits (before Annie died of a sudden heart attack at 3:00 in the morning at a poker game, collapsing on her dining room poker table) I think I too never uttered one word while there.  Who could?  Though I did do a lot of listening.

Especially when relishing of Annie’s stories, which she told with gusts of laughter and coughing. My favorites were about her brothers Herman and Louie, particularly those tales about their annual escapades up at Saratoga Springs. How after raising money from family members to “invest” in betting on the horse races held there every August, accompanied by women other than their wives, they would disappear from sight for a few weeks and return under cover of darkness, penniless and bereft of female companionship, seeking shelter and a place to hide in Annie’s attic since some of the “boys” who loaned them money upstate were looking to be repaid with 25 percent interest. 

After a Herman-Louie story or two and a dose of Ben complaints--“Why did he buy auto insurance from Allstate; doesn’t he know they’re anti-Semites?”--I would slip away, as if anyone would notice, to join Ben in the sunroom.  I would find him there deeply involved with a book or the latest Consumers.  He had a two-foot stack of them piled immaculately on a table beside the two-seat sofa on which he sat.  And across from where he was seated were his books.  Like the stack of magazines they were also perfectly arrayed and alphabetically ordered. 

I would sit with him, on a stool near the small sofa, afraid to touch a book or magazine; even more afraid to utter a word.  He never looked up, never acknowledged my presence, never offered one word of his own.  During every visit, at some point I would join him and we would sit in the sunroom there together.  Saying nothing.  Him reading; me watching.  I am not sure what I wanted from him or how I endured that silence.  The only sound was when he turned a page.

Over time, with little to do, I began to pay attention to his shelves of books and read the titles—Guadalcanal Diary, Three Years Before the Mast, Robinson Caruso, The Stories of Sherlock Holmes, Tom Sawyer, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. 

Uncle Ben must have sensed this because for the first time in years he spoke to me.  Huskily he whispered, “It’s OK.”  

Understanding, I got up and approached the books.  I touched the spine of one, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.  It was OK, he indicated, I could remove it from the shelf.  I looked at it cover.  It was OK I could take it to my stool.  I sat with it on my lap.  It was OK I could open it.  I looked over at him.  It was OK I could begin to read.    

Ben watched me out of the corner of his eye, never turning to me, but signaling with a silent nod that it was even all right for me to take it home.

Later, when we left Annie’s, I hid the book in the folds of my winter coat to get it into my bedroom at home without it being noticed.  How I knew I needed to sneak it into my life in that stealthy way is something I did not understand at the time but soon became clear to me.  It was so absorbing, the story of Jimmy Doolittle and his boys as they managed to bomb Tokyo very early in the War, at great peril to themselves, having had just enough fuel to fly over the target and to crash land in Burma, it was so engrossing that I didn’t notice my father when one day he came home early from work.

Catching me with it, he bellowed, “What’s that and where did you get it?”  It’s not that I never read any books, but the ones I did were those my mother provided or I borrowed from the library.  What was different for my father about this one (and for me) was that this one was a book from his brother Ben. 

Because it was Ben’s, my father saw it to be infected.

A number of previously confusing and seemingly unrelated things I had been overhearing for years from Annie and Madeline and my father coalesced for me in that moment-- Ben’s passivity; his sensitivity; his meekness; his being a schoolteacher; his lack of manliness; and, above all, his singleness.  And if, to my father, his books were infected with that same essence of Ben-ness it meant that it was potentially catching.  My father wanted to prevent me from becoming infected with his books, just as he sent the family upstate during polio season to avoid our catching that contagious disease. 

But it was too late.  My immersion in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and the world that it and others like it opened to me was an infection I wanted to catch.  

A few months later, Annie died. 

Shortly after her death, from Mexico Danny appeared.  Then I realized the meaning of Ben’s summer trips.  As Ben’s “friend,” he became his “housemate.” The official story was that he had a room of his own--Annie’s--and slowly, as complicated as it was at that time and for the Zazlos, he became a part of our family.   

When Ben died, Danny called to see if I wanted any of Ben’s books.  I said, just one—Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.