Nevertheless Page 3

  My grandmother wore a hearing aid and would enter the living room to say good night after she had cleaned the kitchen, my grandfather having never left the couch. “I’m signing off for the evening,” she would announce, and head toward a bedroom down the hall from where my grandfather slept. The walls of her room were lined with massive stacks of books and other personal effects belonging to my peripatetic uncle Charles, who used this as a storage room. My grandfather slept in the other bedroom, and those nights with him created the most indelible images of my life. There was a window looking down an alley along the rear of the building. A cat my grandfather had named Two-Eyed Tilly, with eyes of different colors, would cry, and he would put food for her on the windowsill. I lay next to my grandfather in silence, while classical music or some talk show played on the radio. He was on my left, smoking. As he raised a Chesterfield to his mouth, a long ash extended from the bright orange cherry. When he drew from the cigarette, the glow would illuminate his prominent nose. The room was filled with beautiful antique furniture: an enormous armoire, a marble-topped console, a full-length dressing mirror in a handsome hand-carved frame. My father’s family had a future once, and lost it under unusual circumstances. On a table near the sill were two busts, one of Shakespeare, another of Jefferson. Shakespeare stared at me. Jefferson stared at Shakespeare. In the air filled with the voice of Barry Gray and a cloud of smoke, the cat went off to bed. My grandfather would extinguish his last cigarette and swing his legs to the floor. The bathroom was fifteen feet down the hallway, but he’d reach for a chamber pot and piss into it, something he’d do two or three more times during the night. I lay there, frozen. If I tried to break that granitic silence, my grandfather would simply yawn and say, “Sleep now, my boy.” He always called me “my boy.”

  Lean, tall, bald, and always with a twinkle in his eye, my grandfather was Alexander Rae Baldwin Sr. My father was junior. I was the third. But three Alecs were one too many, so I was called Xander Baldwin, or Xan for short. The oldest son of an oldest son in an Irish Catholic family is often slotted to become a priest. (I actually considered it, but one look at Miss Cebu, who taught sixth grade in Unqua Elementary School, and I realized I wasn’t cut out for celibacy.) One day, my grandfather and I were entering his apartment when his neighbor passed by us in the hallway. He was a rummy-Irish, forty-year-old bachelor who lived with his mother upstairs. “This your grandson?” he croaked, his face thick with whiskers and missing a few of his teeth. “Yes, Joe,” my grandfather said, managing a smile and quickening his search for the keys. Joe handed me a sweet, and I took it. “Here’s a penny candy for the boy,” he said. My grandfather closed his hand tight around mine that held the candy. “Very kind of you, Joe. Give my best to your mother.” We entered the apartment, and my grandfather closed the door and suddenly spun me around. He yanked the candy out of my hand. I was flabbergasted, searching for an explanation. “Taking candy from a man like that? Never been married! No children!” As I did with most things my grandfather said, I walked around muttering it again and again for the rest of the day, like it was a line from one of the classic films I loved. “Never been married! No children!” All the while, I never quite understood what it meant.

  In the years I knew him, my grandpa was a bright if somewhat typically racist white New Yorker of his day. He was both a philatelist and a numismatist to the limited degree that he could afford. Traveling across the United States, either gambling at racetracks or pursuing a job offer, he would enclose a note to me and post it with a First Day of Issue stamp. Or, from Brooklyn, he would find out where a First Day Cover was being issued and, like all everyday stamp collectors, he’d send the post office there a self-addressed envelope, with a note to me inside and the money to buy the stamp. The envelope arrived in, for example, Independence, Missouri, prior to the issuance. To his home was mailed the canceled stamp, marked “First Day of Issue.” These “First Day Covers” were collectors’ items.

  He collected coins and placed them in numismatic books, each one a case with individual sleeves. They held liberty dollars, buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, and the “wheat penny,” as we called it, which was replaced with the Lincoln Memorial after that monument was constructed. To this day, when I handle pennies, I search for “wheats” and collect any I find. I could never speak to what the value of the coin collection was, but one would assume that each book, filled with only the finest quality of these collectibles and arranged so carefully, had to be worth a significant amount.

  One summer day when I was around thirteen, a couple of years after my grandfather died, I went to the home of a friend and colleague of my dad, Joe McPartlin. Joe was a teacher who did things differently from my father, meaning he had other income, outside of his teaching position, and he took his wife and family on what I imagined were fancy vacations. While they were away, I gathered their mail and cut the grass. One Saturday, I finished late and headed home as the sun was going down. As I pushed my mower along the road, I caught an older man staring at me. He yelled, “You cut grass, sonny?” I told him that I did, and as he approached, he asked my name and if I was from the neighborhood. “Alexander Baldwin,” I said. He stared at me and said, “You related to Alex Baldwin, the Brooklyn DA who was indicted in the fur rackets case?” I went white. After I muttered something to him, I ran home, and my father and mother were there. When I explained what had happened, my father became very quiet.

  “Get the box,” he told her. Down from a shelf in the back of her bedroom closet came a small cardboard box from which my father removed a stack of newspaper clippings, mostly from the old Brooklyn Eagle. The story they told explained how my grandfather had been an assistant DA in Brooklyn when he was indicted for taking a bribe. He was acquitted, but during the trial and the subsequent commission hearings conducted by John Harlan Amen, my grandfather was disbarred. What had been a comfortable home and lifestyle for his family was washed away. They moved from a better area of Brooklyn to the more racially mixed and run-down Fort Greene. He became an income tax preparer. He began to drink heavily, drinking his way down to Florida, where he ran a parking concession at the Hialeah racetrack. Apparently my grandmother soldiered on and raised her three sons on her earnings as a nurse, without a husband around much of the time.

  According to the mythology of my family, my father’s mother was canonized. In everyone’s heart, my grandmother was a saint, thoughtful, loving, kind. These two people were more important to me and created more warm memories during my childhood than almost anyone. And then, the next big change came.

  Death comes into children’s lives in dramatic ways, or quiet, more ordinary ones. The first important death in my home came in hushed tones and shadows. One night my mother gathered us up, maybe all six of us, and dropped us at the home of my neighbor and best friend, Kevin Cornelius. I was ten. In the other room, my parents spoke quietly and gravely. Then my dad was gone. My grandfather had gone into a hospital in New York for an angioplasty, and my grandmother had fallen down on the stone steps at the hospital’s entrance while visiting him. She fractured her skull, was in a coma, and died four days later. The hospital advised that my grandfather not be informed right away, as he was in a cardiac recovery unit. After the first two days, it became unbearable and my father told him.

  When Theodore Roosevelt’s mother died, he wrote, “The light has gone out of my life,” and that’s what happened to my dad, too. Years later, a therapist outlined something essential to me by piecing together my father’s history. He asked me to examine the period from the fall of 1967 to the fall of 1968. “In one year, your father turned forty and with that came all of the self-appraisals about what he had and had not achieved; as a progressive, he watched Martin Luther King and RFK get killed; next, his political nemesis, Richard Nixon, rises from the dead and is elected president; his mother is killed in a horrible, freak accident.” I saw my dad in a clearer light, one that explained why, up until his death in 1983 at the age of only fifty-five, my father was nev
er the same again.

  My grandfather was hospitalized in May of the following year. After another angioplasty to overcome the effects of all those Chesterfields and Ballantines, corruption hearings and general shiftlessness, my uncle Charles reported that his father, Alexander Rae Baldwin Sr., had died after eating a pint of maple walnut ice cream in his hospital bed, in direct violation of his doctor’s orders. He took an afternoon nap, moaned in midsleep, and died at age sixty-nine. My father sighed and said to me, “When both your parents are gone, you are an orphan.”

  Without this cozy, albeit urban-blighted, sanctuary to retreat to, without his mother available to support him or comfort him or simply to parent him, my father grew more and more withdrawn. Add to that the fact that he had six kids, all growing, all needing, all costing, and he chose to be around less and less during my early teens, taking any job at the school that would lengthen his day. Often my brothers and I would go up to the school and hang out with him during Saturday recreation programs, or “rec.” Rec was big with my father and especially Daniel and Billy, who could each play basketball six hours on end, against older kids, as if it were nothing. My dad volunteered for these assignments, which paid him next to nothing, to avoid going home. My parents’ marriage was pretty much done by the time I entered junior high school at age twelve.

  My mother was lonely. Without a comfortable home or money to go out and meet friends for lunch, without her own siblings nearby or any real connection to her husband, and, most important, without much spirit or vitality left after raising her large family, her social existence was confined to the telephone or my sister Beth and me. So I exploited that. An early acting assignment for me was to come to the kitchen table in the morning and confide in my mother that I was sick. She would scowl at me, in a perfunctory way. Then a strange thing would happen. A quick review of the day ahead would lead her to say, “Don’t ever ask me to do this again.” Knowing the drill, I would sit at the kitchen table, dressed for school. My father would enter, mutter some gruff good-bye, and go. Once we heard him driving down the street, it was straight to the couch, where we’d spend the day watching The Dinah Shore Show, Art Linkletter, Match Game, Divorce Court, Virginia Graham, Graham Kerr, The Outer Limits, Mike Douglas, just acre after acre of this stuff. This bizarre retreat lasted, off and on, for the three or four years from seventh through tenth grade. Eventually, isolating myself at home watching these meaningless programs presented a problem. I missed more school than I should have, to say the least. However, in the meantime, my lonely, virtually homebound mother only required that I join her on a trip to the laundromat, so that I might carry the seven or eight plastic baskets of laundry to be washed and dried, only to be added to the Great Laundry Mountain in her room. If it was Friday, my sister and I would drive with my mother up to the school where my dad worked, pick up his paycheck from the office, and then head to Jade East, a mock pagoda-style restaurant. Eating eggrolls with my sister and my mother while playing hooky from school was the greatest extravagance of my young life. My sister and my mother developed an unbreakable relationship, forging an emotionally incestuous bond that pulled me, or at least attempted to, into its wake.

  I could say that it was puberty that stifled my memory. However, I think it was just the deadness of my home and the loss of my dad’s attention. I can’t summon up a single memory of school from those two years. The seventh and eighth grade classes were held in a school far across town, which meant an interminable bus ride of forty-five minutes each way. The school bus was a rolling jailhouse of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds shouting tedious, vulgar dialogue. There wasn’t a well-delivered, witty line to be heard.

  My three brothers and younger sister were still kids, and thus either invisible or annoying. Beth was just beginning to run around with boys, though maintaining her innocence. The six of us were lost souls washed up on the shores of 32 West Iroquois Street, Massapequa, New York. Beth, Xander, Danny, Billy, Jane, and Stephen. Six pieces of driftwood, just bobbing through our neighborhood, without a current to carry us in any particular direction, passing time, trying to pass our classes, avoiding trouble, courting trouble, scoring points, telling jokes, drinking, smoking, always mindful of how little we had.

  One day, I was walking out of my house, headed to see some friends or ride my bike by myself, and I saw my brother Stephen up the road, bent over something. As I got closer, I could see he had a stick from a tree branch in his hand and was poking at a squirrel that had been crushed by a car. He looked incredibly moved for a kid who was eight years old. He just stared at the dead squirrel and ran the stick, gently, up and down its fur. “We have to bury it,” he said, still fixed on the dead animal. Then, he looked up and said, “Will you help me bury it?”

  And as he looked at me, I thought, “He’s that squirrel. So am I. And all we have is today and the hope that we don’t get crushed by something. We have nothing. And everything seems so fragile.” We picked up the dead squirrel using two other branches like chopsticks. We dug the hole and buried it. I always remember how Stephen was very sensitive in that way when he was a kid.

  My father had no money to buy things, and thus no power to manipulate us by withholding those same things. The parents of other kids owned boats or second homes in some Connecticut woods (“Who the hell has the money for two homes?!”). There were finished basements with pool tables and jukeboxes and popcorn machines. Some parents also provided cash for skating, to go out to eat, to go to a movie or bowling, you name it. We had none of that. Deprived of these more effective means of disciplining a child, my father had only one card to play: the Fear Program. “What time are you going to be home?” he would say, smoldering in a way that I had never seen in a person, before or since. “Ten thirty,” I’d reply, my body stiffening slightly in a half wince. “You better be home by ten thirty or you know what’s gonna happen to you, don’t you?” In came the iron finger. This was his index finger (and you’d swear he had a thimble on the end of it) driven into your chest muscle. That was it: the stare, the iron finger, the genuine threat in his voice. We would reenter the house by 10:30. This was a man who had failed to broker or outright win the respect he wanted outside this door. He would be damned if he were denied it here.

  Even at a very young age, I already had a suspicion about how desperate my parents were financially. They were always receiving notices about the electricity or phone being shut off. The garbage carters would drive down our block on Monday mornings and skip our house, leaving a nonpayment slip in the mailbox: “Your service has been halted . . .” By the time I was twelve, a significant realization dawned on me. I understood that if I wanted money, if I needed money for anything, I’d have to go out and get it. Given the ever-looming shadow of the iron finger, selling marijuana or other drugs, as some enterprising kids in the neighborhood had resorted to, was clearly out of the question. At twelve years old, I’m walking the streets of my neighborhood with a bucket, an oversized sponge, and a bottle of dishwashing liquid. I’m soliciting people in their driveways and offering to wash their car for five bucks. (Or four. Make it three.)

  I’m the first squeegee man to hit Nassau Shores. My father saw that I needed a backer, so he bought me a lawn mower. God knows how. The deal was I had to give him a cut of my earnings till he was paid back. I cut eight lawns per weekend. That came out to forty bucks gross. Subtract half for my dad, plus gas and oil, and in the first summer I netted fifteen bucks a week. I was rich. By the following summer, the lawn mower was paid off and I was pocketing thirty a week. The more money I netted, however, the more these funds were subject to another form of taxation, which was my mother.

  These were times when it was like we were in a Cagney movie. I would come into our kitchen to find my mother staring out the window. I’d ask her what was wrong and she’d answer with a muffled “Nothing . . . nothing.” Then she’d cry. My favorite such scenario was when she would say that she had spent my sister Jane’s Girl Scout cookie money. The forty or fifty dolla
rs she was short was, uncannily, the amount of money I had in my pocket at that moment. And whoosh, out it came, she took it, no more tears. This happened countless times, and a powerful die was cast in these moments. For the rest of my life, I was enslaved by the belief that there were few problems that could not be solved by applying money or even more money.

  When my grandfather died, he left me boxes of the coins he had collected in, perhaps, fifty books. I was also given a simple gold signet ring that bore our common initials, ARB. One day, my sister asked if I would lend her my ring to wear on a date. I might have thought that request was strange, but I just handed it over, refusing to see anything odd. The next morning, she wasn’t home and I didn’t see her again until that night, when she looked at me strangely and said, in a matter-of-fact way, “I lost your ring. I’m sorry, but it must have fallen off my hand during the night and I’ve looked everywhere and it’s gone.” Her words and tone deflected any serious inquiry. Eventually, I learned it had been sold in some pawnshop. I went into my closet, which was filled with my clothes and sneakers. There I kept the coin collection, in boxes, under my guard. I had never assumed it needed protection, but some of the boxes were now nearly empty. No one had ever said a word.