Life and Games in the West Bronx
Drexler, Rosalyn
My aunt and her friends played Mah Jongg in Van Cortlandt Park. They'd bring their card tables, folding chairs, beach chairs (the striped-awning kind), food, and ice-water, then settle in for the...
...I got through it...
...Sometimes we'd drive to a golf range where Uncle Moe would rent golf clubs and pails of golf balls and under his tutelage we'd hit the balls as far as we could...
...In the late 1930s it was like country up there...
...Once again my tastes were being formed, an education gained unawares...
...Along the highways into Manhattan, boys would hawk song sheets with the latest hits...
...Shirley and Ray were the proud possessors of a FALL • 1987 623 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS rare commodity, a hand-wound victrola...
...My handwriting was very poor and hers was beautiful...
...Beggars would come to the backyard singing for their supper, and we, the children, would be allowed to toss a few coins down to them...
...Mother had too much respect for the guy just because he was successful...
...A number of years ago I met Shirley in the subway while waiting for a train...
...I loved Ray, and later named my first child after her...
...I remember hiding behind such a bench to watch two of my friends make love: in those days that meant hugging and kissing, period...
...My mother had two sisters, both older than she...
...Solly had two brothers...
...people grew tomatoes in empty lots, and I and my friends'd roast spuds in the hot ashes of open fires...
...Mother really believed I'd be a star some day, so when my cousin Chico (cousin through marriage) of the Marx Brothers came to town to stay at the Warwick Hotel not far from Central Park South, Mom dressed me up to impress him...
...brought up on that kind of humor: the wordplay, the inspired non sequiturs, the irreverence...
...Our clotheslines were attached to the same pole, and we'd chat as we hung clothes out: I recall the creaky sound of the clothesline as it went around the pulley, and the smell of air and sun on the clothes...
...Imagine hundreds of drivers anxiously grasping their steering wheels, a song sheet propped in front of them, singing "Donkey Serenade," or "Indian Love Call...
...There are two to three million homeless in the United States: my mother and others like her, making sandwiches to share with the hungry who come to the door, would certainly die of exhaustion today...
...She was my first and only collaborator...
...Wintertime we'd go ice-skating on the lake...
...Mother asked me to sing for him...
...This was their crowd...
...she'd believed in his good intentions...
...It was very exciting, this hiding, and waiting in the dark behind some large object, or jammed behind the stairwell of a dimly lit hallway till one of us was discovered and tapped three times, to be "it...
...The park didn't have a highway to divide it yet and a path led down to the Van Cortlandt Park Lake, with benches at each side all along the way...
...I don't have too much up there," I said...
...I gave them rides and let them borrow song sheets, but still they hated me for my comparative affluence, and for that added bit of mobility afforded by my crummy bike...
...Milk came in bottles (Grade A and Grade B . . Grade A had more cream...
...Everyone must have been hot to sing, there were no car radios: what were they supposed to do while waiting for traffic to unjam, or for a light to change...
...Ray and me, we'd giggle together and run up and down the street for the pure physicality of it...
...So I smile and say/When a lovely flame dies/Smokes get in your eyes...
...She told me that Ray was in a mental hospital...
...Their mother was away somewhere . . . they said that she was sick...
...An egg man came once a week to sell eggs fresh off the farm...
...What a strain...
...So I did: "They say some day you'll find/all who love are blind...
...We'd play ring-a-levio too, where someone was "it," and the rest of us ran to hide...
...Mother said it was a mitzvah . . . blessed to give...
...And the iceman, with his calipers, holding a dripping piece of ice on his back (protected with an old piece of rug), would bring us the big twenty-five-cent block to put in the icebox...
...It looked like an entirely different culture, with the same poverty...
...She'd sit to the side watching, with me beside her...
...I especially enjoyed hearing the "Blue Danube Waltz," or Caruso singing an aria from "The Pearl Fishers...
...There was still dancing in the streets: the young continue to have spirit...
...He'd treat us to ice-cream cones, then we'd tootle through the park licking them, and enjoying the view...
...This influenced my work a great deal...
...There was an old-clothes man who came around to buy used clothes cheap...
...More often it gets worse...
...My hair was long and pulled back, my eyes blue, and my face was dimpled...
...My best friend in The Bronx was Ray...
...I believe I was almost thirteen, perhaps less...
...Sometimes I think about Ray, about meeting her and she's okay, and we're friends again...
...They'd bring their card tables, folding chairs, beach chairs (the striped-awning kind), food, and ice-water, then settle in for the day...
...q 624 • DISSENT...
...Afterwards we'd lunch at a nearby deli, and I'd order my favorite food: chopped herring salad with a big slice of challah, and a glass of sour milk...
...My rich Uncle Moe bought me a song sheet...
...Mother said that some day I'd be another Deanna Durbin...
...they'd push us screaming into the water, and then dive in and try to "duck" us...
...We ate cheap —matzo-brei three times a day: broken pieces of matzo added to beaten eggs and milk in a bowl, then fried in butter...
...We had an activity of our own: I'd tell her stories and she'd 622 • DISSENT MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS write them down...
...Well actually I was mortified...
...I didn't quite understand the words but became deadly afraid of falling in love and losing my sight...
...The winter cold would freeze the rain over, creating a ready-made lake for us...
...One good thing though, I was always taken to see the Marx Brothers films...
...but today it is only one step away from warfare in the streets, which has a drop-dead beat all its own...
...Even when we had very little ourselves, she'd make sandwiches for the people who came to our door asking for food...
...A scissors man came 'round to sharpen old knives and scissors for the housewives...
...I recently took a car trip through the East Bronx and the West Bronx...
...Rich Uncle Moe (he was in the wholesale coat-manufacturing business) would appear in his long gray car of foreign make to take our family for a ride through Crotona Park...
...Sometimes they'd put a record on it, open the window and lean out calling for me to listen...
...I wore a plaid dress with a high bodice and flared skirt...
...It was the Depression...
...that, and my first bicycle, which my father bought at a discount from my grandfather's second-hand store, made me the envy of my friends...
...The selection was "A Heart That Is Free," made popular by Deanna Durbin . . . a song way up in the high register...
...I saw the same green parks as a refuge from the granite gray of the streets, but no sense of leisure, unless an addict nodding out in the street is leisure, unless the homeless sleeping in doorways is leisure...
...Nothing stays the same, but it doesn't necessarily get better...
...Chico took me into another room supposedly to discuss my career, and felt me up...
...Obviously it was enough for him...
...Bathgate was the scene of the big outdoor market, where Mother bought me tiny doll clothes for my celluloid dolls, about a hand high with movable arms and legs and faces as cute as Betty Boop's...
...They were Russian émigrés who had found their niche in the West Bronx...
...She had a sister Shirley, a father who worked in chenille (he brought chenille bathrobes home with him...
...It embarrassed me...
...The first time I tried to ice-skate was in a back-lot on our block in the East Bronx, not far from Claremont Park...
...My mother, a shy person, wasn't included...
...We often communicated this way, shouting out the window...
...My "skates" were two wooden cheese boxes that I had begged from a salesman at Daitch's (in those days, a neighborhood dairy) on Bathgate Avenue...
...When we went to the city pool in Claremont Park...
...That was her way...
...All I had to do was study the lyrics on the song sheets...
...there was also a retarded brother whose main occupation was shredding paper and throwing it to the street from the fire escape...
...We had a crush on the same boy, Solly...
...Prepare for the big break...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
