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PARTISAN REVIEW
world, he'd gone off to die for. The toys or dolls we occasionally aban–
doned on the floor , or the table we occasionally put off setting told
him we were his moral enemies. And unwashed dishes, unmade beds, un–
cooked or undercooked meals confirmed that our mother was the major
"lumpen instigator" of our "lumpen lowlife ways."
The truth was our mother was not at all a major lowlife as yet, but
simply a distracted dancer with neither the organization nor inclination
to clean or cook. A poor girl with no father and a machine-operator
mother, she'd been a brilliant student and had won scholarships to
progressive boarding schools, where she'd discovered left politics and a
passion and talent for dancing. A poor boy, raised in a particularly vista–
less working class home that worshipped tidiness, thrift, navy blue, and
other markers of duty and order, our father fell in love with her for her
free spirit, which he thought he could capture through marriage, but
now condemned as so much "bourgeois self indulgence," vowing to
rout it out.
In the early years, as he raged on, she'd cuddle with us on the
couch, covering our ears to block his roars , making lion faces to amuse
or distract us - or if he looked like he meant business, lead us, with her
dancer's agility, in quick leaps and twirls to safety. Those years, even
when she was his target, she seemed somehow above the battle, half girl ,
half pixie, flying around in blue jeans, jumping one-arm over fences,
whistling through shapely unlipsticked lips, favoring candy and snacks
over meals, especially the large candies and hot-dogs at the neighbor–
hood movie theater, whose matinees she took us to every Saturday .
Meanwhile the other mothers in our Bronx neighborhood wore red
lipstick and rouge, dark sheathes over long corsets, and high-heeled
pumps or wedgies, meeting their husbands at the door with a rye high–
ball and a cup of salted peanuts while the meatloaf baked and the chil–
dren ate carrot sticks at the kitchen table.
At lunchtime, the children of P.S. 56 went home, except for us,
who, though poorer than most, would proudly meet our pretty mother
at Bob's, our favorite luncheonette. Here, huddled in a red leatherette
booth, we would wolf down
BL
Ts and fries, cheeseburgers, and malteds,
watching out the window as other kids marched dutifully home to
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and glasses of sad unflavored milk.
That is if our mother had a little extra cash from the modern dance
classes she taught for the Bronx Children's Dance Foundation to sup–
plement our father's erratic employment. If not, weather permitting,
we'd meet her in Mosholu Park for a picnic of sour cream, bananas, and
miniature marshmallows.
My earliest memories take place in that stretch of park across from
our house - with its ribbons of maple and dogwood, magnolia and lilac.
