Almost a Family Read online

  Ben had been a bootlegger during Prohibition, according to his wife. Afterward, among other things, he became a lumber salesman, and with his gift of gab, he once sold Atlantic City an entire new boardwalk. And so he was in and out of the money, usually depending on how well he had done at the track. He carried in his pocket a wad of bills, thick as my leg, circled by a rubber band. He dressed like a boulevardier, with Panama hats, white linen shirts, and, if memory serves, alligator shoes. Stories about how he kicked over the traces as a youngster were legion in my mother’s family. Once, he placed a condom inside the church Bible early on a Sunday; flustered, the minister held it up before the congregation, then matter-of-factly asked Ben Choate to repair to his office after services. Ben played hooky during two complete years of high school; he had swiped a stack of blank report cards from the school’s administrative office and filled them out the requisite three times a year, taking care not to give himself suspiciously high marks and sometimes including censorious remarks about his comportment. He spent those years in a pool hall and learned to play well enough to become a hustler, though I don’t know if he ever made serious money at it. I do know that he was the best I’d ever seen. We once took him to the basement of the Westport YMCA, where the rougher crowd of teenagers hung out playing pool, and after suckering them in, he ran both tables. Leaving there, mounting the back stairwell into the sunshine, I felt like a sidekick to Jesse James. Ben called me “Shrimp Boats,” in deference to my size, after Jo Stafford’s hit song. I was half pleased, half mortified by that—like many of Ben’s doings, it evoked ambivalence. My size was the one thing I was most self-conscious about, though there was a kind of relief in the honesty of being called on it.

  As Ben aged, he never grew up. I recall the thrill of riding with him at the wheel of his red convertible, watching the speedometer rise ten, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty miles an hour over the limit. More than once, he let us steer. On one occasion, the police siren that introduced “Gang Busters” on the radio came on; he turned it up full volume, pushed the pedal to the floor, and streaked down the highway as cars pulled over on both sides to let us pass. In Philadelphia, where he lived, he was something of a legend. One exploit was particularly famous: He stole a policeman’s horse while the cop was grabbing a drink at a bar on Drury Street, signed the register of a hotel room, took the horse up in the freight elevator, and left it there. On my visits to Philadelphia, I used to accompany him on his rounds of the bars, and it was like walking through the door with Hickey in The Iceman Cometh. Most of the bars were seedy. In one, the bartender encouraged me to pick a quarter off the bar. I looked at Ben and he nodded. When I touched it, it wouldn’t move. I circled my fingertips around it, and suddenly an electric shock coursed through my fingers and shot up my elbow, jolting my shoulder and rattling my teeth. I saw the bartender move his hand from a buzzer behind the bar. Everyone laughed and I felt humiliated. Even more, I resented that Ben, who should have protected me, had used me as a straight man for another one of his jokes.

  At least once, Ben brought one of his dubious acquaintances to our house. I remember the man vividly because he looked like a thug but had a certain charm. Ben introduced him as a professional soccer player and, to prove it, asked the man to raise his pants leg. When he did, we saw scars and gashes and black spots of mangled shinbone. My mother seemed much impressed by this stranger.

  In thinking about Ben, I can’t imagine that she believed he would ever make an acceptable father substitute. She probably thought his visits injected a dash of mad adventure into our lives—which they certainly did—and that this was all to the good. She might have imagined that he was too outrageous for us to model ourselves after him, ignoring the truth that children sometimes assemble a Frankenstein’s monster of what they want to become by picking bits and pieces of the people around them.

  Ben married a southern belle with luxuriant hair, high cheekbones, and a soft accent. Her name was Dixie. He met her at a supper club near an army base in Texas. Years later, long after he died and after she had outlived two subsequent husbands, she remembered fondly how he had kept his cap on during that first meeting to disguise his baldness. She never got over him, despite all the heartache he caused her. “I was crazy ’bout him, darlin’,” she said, “though you know he had his mean side.”

  Ben was a serious, unreconstructed, lifelong alcoholic. In reading my mother’s letters to my father shortly before the war, I learned that once she had ordered Ben to leave our house just as he was settling in for a long stay, because he was unable to go on the wagon. Often his delirium tremens were so bad that he saw snakes on the wallpaper and spiders climbing the baseboards to attack him. During these times, he sought refuge in his mother’s home in Philly, lying in bed upstairs, screaming, while she nursed him and brought him soup. He lived three blocks from her, and when I visited my grandmother’s, I often walked to his apartment. I never knew what I would find when I entered the door. Once, the phone was lying smashed in the center of the living room—he had yanked it from the wall connection in a rage—and another time, he was asleep on the couch, sitting erect, and his cat was curled up on top of his head, also sleeping, like a full fur Russian hat. Ben died in 1954, alone in a hotel room, of a heart attack. What killed him was alcoholism. At his funeral he lay in an open casket, bloated, makeup heavily pancaked on his cheeks, his neck swollen to twice its size. His eyes, which used to dance with mischief, were closed, and his face, once so vivacious, was sagging and as inert as a sack of wet clay. It was my first, horrifying look at a dead person, and I never forgot the sight, the final lesson in his lasting legacy.

  There was a period in which my mother had a suitor who lived with us. His name was Hub Cobb. I took to him, as did my brother. One afternoon, as he dropped the three of us at home and was about to drive off, he looked over at my mother and said, “Okay, I’ll give you a ring later.” I followed my brother up to his room, shut the door, and announced that they were about to get married. Stunned, he asked me how I knew. I explained that I had overheard the proposal. My brother demanded the details, and when I repeated the words I had heard, he laughed and told me I was mistaken—it was an everyday expression that didn’t mean what I had thought.

  Hub’s father was Frank I. Cobb, the fiery editorial writer who succeeded Joseph Pulitzer as editor in chief of the World and became Woodrow Wilson’s close friend and adviser. In 1912, Frank Cobb had purchased a run-down lumber and wheat mill in Weston, Connecticut, to obtain skating and swimming rights on its lake, and in 1936 it had been converted into the restaurant, Cobb’s Mill Inn, the place where my parents conducted their illicit courtship. All this, I found out later. At the time, when I was nine or ten, I just knew Hub as a powerful new presence in our household. He was a handsome, strong man with a head of blond curls, reminding me of Van Johnson (Battleground and The Caine Mutiny). Unlike Van Johnson, who was exempt from the military because of a car crash that left him with plates in his head, Hub had served in World War II. He held the dangerous and lonely position of tail gunner on B-17s and B-25s in the Pacific. Coincidentally, he was based for a while at Port Moresby, though after Barney was there, and later in the Philippines. During the Connecticut winter he wore a handsome leather flight jacket with creases at the elbows and collar.

  Hub was a full ten years younger than my mother, though I didn’t realize this back then. He didn’t really have a full-time job. His expertise was home improvement and he wrote various books and freelance articles as a do-it-yourselfer. That could have proved lucrative, tapping into the postwar boom in suburban home-ownership, but he didn’t seem to have much cash. He had already written one book, in 1948, How to Build Your Dream House, but, as I later learned, he had traded the rights to a mail-order publisher for four thousand dollars; it sold more than a million copies and he received no royalties. During these years, Hub was constructing his dream house, virtually alone. As a site, he chose a meadow in the deep woods across from the inn. To get there, we’d dr
ive our blue DeSoto down a dirt road so narrow that the branches would sweep the windows on both sides. Once in a while, we’d picnic there, breaking out deviled eggs, sandwiches, soda, and beer for the adults, overlooking first the foundation, then the ever-expanding wooden frame. One day we stopped going. My mother informed me in a low voice that the house had burned down. She was worried that if word got out it would hurt Hub’s reputation.

  Saturdays, Hub drove into the city for a weekly CBS radio program on home remodeling. One time my bother and I were allowed to accompany him. We had to sit quiet as mice in a corner of the studio while Hub and an interviewer faced each other across a small wooden table with microphones. A red light told us when they were on the air. We had been cautioned to keep quiet, so when the light was on, I scarcely dared to breathe. During breaks, when a commercial ran, they wisecracked. Halfway through the program, something shocking happened. The interviewer threw a question at him and then, just as Hub was about to answer, reached under the table and grabbed Hub between the legs. Hub socked his hand away, all the while talking as if nothing was happening. At first, I thought the interviewer had gone crazy. Then I realized that he was trying to make Hub crack up on the air. He was horsing around. I felt outrage. How dare he do such a thing? Especially in the sacred “on the air” space of a studio—thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of people were listening. What would they think if they knew? Afterward, I didn’t ask Hub about it, but he seemed to think it was no big deal. When he left the studio, he shook the man’s hand and said he’d see him next week.

  Having Hub around was good because he fit my image of what a man should be. One spring afternoon we discovered a nest of copperheads under a rock beside a path to the woods. I was horrified—I often took that path, and I was terrified of snakes, above all copperheads, the only poisonous species indigenous to the area. While I watched from a safe distance, Hub moved the rock and killed them with a rake and an ax. When we discovered a nest of baby squirrels, he constructed a large hutch for them. We fed them until they grew up, but after they gave the whole household a serious bout of fleas, we let them go. Another time, he pulled into the driveway and ceremoniously opened the car trunk and lifted out a blanket. As we gathered around, he opened it, revealing a gift for each of us—a .22 rifle for Bob and a .22 single-shot rifle for me. He taught us to load and shoot, and after that we spent hours in the backwoods, knocking tin cans off logs and shattering glass bottles from twenty paces. Hub could also fix anything, and that was fortunate, because it seemed something always needed repair in our house. I liked to watch him and to hand him a hammer or screwdriver, slapping it into his palm like an attending nurse in an operating theater. He was casual and even-keeled. One time, after we had bombarded him with water bombs from the overhead lattice of our porch and he didn’t lose his temper, he bet my brother and me that we couldn’t make him angry—a dangerous wager to make with two young boys. We harassed him nonstop. We followed him, bumping into him. We tied his shoelaces, hung on his back, grabbed his legs. When he built a fire, we piled the logs around him, singing “Don’t Fence Me In.” Finally, he blew his stack, yelling at us. We demanded payment. “I’m not angry,” he yelled. He left the room and never did pay up.

  As far as we knew, Hub slept in a library room downstairs, where there was a studio bed. He and my mother were not overtly affectionate around us—at least I have no memory of them snuggling or kissing. But they were clearly a couple. Once, the four of us drove to the next town, Fairfield, to catch the dogwood trees in bloom. The trees were spectacular. In my mind’s eye, the image of that particular afternoon lives on, enhanced by the aura of time. Pink-and-white blossoms covered our windshield. They filled the air like snowflakes and piled up in drifts beside the road—a world of soft colors that to this day remains my template of natural beauty. On the way there, as Hub was driving, we passed a sign that said SLOW CHILDREN, and my mother remarked, “That doesn’t mean you, Hub. You’re not a child.” I understood the wordplay and thought her crack was the wittiest thing I had ever heard. I enjoyed the sensation of listening to the banter of two adults, of being a small part of a larger whole, a family on a Sunday outing, with blossoms floating through the air.

  I don’t know how long Hub lived with us, but I imagine it was longer than a year. One day I noticed that he was gone—on a trip, no doubt. I said nothing. Two days later, I began a project in the basement with Raisin’s help. Part of the foundation was a crawl space that could be reached by opening a door, and we began excavating the packed dirt to create a honeycomb of tunnels. On the third day, the basement light blew. I tried changing the bulb, but that didn’t do the trick. A short time later, I mentioned this to my mother and observed that it would be good to have Hub come back soon to fix it. She gave me a fierce look and exclaimed, “He’s gone for good! He’s not coming back. And I don’t want to hear his name ever again.” I lived up to her command. She didn’t hear his name again. And after that, we never talked about him, as if he had just dropped off the face of the earth.

  Odd—how memory works. Why do we remember some things, seemingly inconsequential at the time, after a lapse of decades? Why does our system of retention decide to record such events in a large file all its own, marked “Important”? Psychologists insist people retain memories if the memories attach themselves to deep emotions, even if they’re not exactly sure what the emotion is. I recall ten minutes spent one afternoon on Cape Cod more than fifty years ago as if it were a seminal event. I was about seven or eight, playing on a beach in Wellfleet, where my brother and I were taken in for several weeks by a wealthy Westport family who owned a cottage there.

  Fronting the beach were large clay cliffs. Older boys would scale them, using handholds and footholds dug into the clay. I tried to climb them, got about thirty feet off the ground, looked down, and froze. I was petrified. I couldn’t go up or down. I cried out for my brother, who was on the beach below. He stood up, said something to two girls in the group. They laughed, and I was mortified. Eventually, he rescued me, climbing up and guiding me down by holding my ankles, but what I remember most is the laughter.

  Later that day an older boy, a teenager, joined us. He was friendly to us younger kids and protective, too, and he said he would be a “bodyguard” for my brother.

  “Me, too,” I insisted. “Will you be my bodyguard?”

  “Of course,” he said. “For you especially. I won’t let anyone get you.”

  Shortly afterward, we walked up to the road that wound along the cliff above the ocean. Cars were parked there. He sauntered over to one. “Let’s borrow it and take it for a spin,” he said, looking in at the ignition key. We jumped in and he started it. I sat in the rear seat, between two other older boys, enthralled by it all—the sense of protection, the larger boys around, the illicit thrill of taking the car. He drove up and down the empty road along the sea grass and the sand dunes and then, after half an hour or so, drove back to return the car. We piled out and went back to the beach. That was all. Nothing more happened. I have no memory of the boy’s name and no idea what he looked like, and I never saw him again. But it was a half hour that, for some reason, lives on forever in my memory.

  CHAPTER 8

  Myths die hard. I suppose that’s why I persisted in believing that I was living an ideal childhood despite growing evidence to the contrary. The truth was that the cracks were appearing in the façade, that somewhere along the line things were beginning to go wrong. Exactly when or why, I didn’t determine back then—nor did I try to. Quite the opposite: I resisted any such knowledge deep in my bones.

  Outwardly, much remained unchanged—at least at first. We still undertook the occasional family excursions on Sunday. We’d rent a rowboat at Captain Allen’s to go crabbing, meandering through the marshes with our lines baited and hauling up five-inch monsters whose pincers sent a delicious shiver up my spine. Or we’d pack a picnic lunch and head off through the woods to Devil’s Den, a swimming hole where the rocky
outcroppings next to a waterfall made perilous diving platforms. If it was a hot summer night and the phosphorus was up in Long Island Sound, Mom would take us for a midnight swim at the deserted public beach; the sweep of an arm or leg underwater would unleash a cascade of shimmering diamonds. If the Brooklyn Dodgers were playing in the pennant race or the World Series, she’d spring us from school and take us to Ebbets Field. And later, she’d let us go by ourselves, covering us with a note to the teacher explaining, should anyone object, that rooting for a baseball team in the championship could be more important than a day in a classroom for a well-rounded boy.

  She traded in our sedate DeSoto for a black 1939 Ford convertible. We kids rode in the rumble seat in the open air, feeling like royalty. Sometimes there were four of us outriders, two in the rumble seat and two seated above in the well for the collapsible top, facing into the wind like jockeys. I grew familiar with the underside of treetops all over town. Our drives included excursions with spontaneous detours: a stop for a Dairy Queen cone dipped in chocolate, or a round of miniature golf, or fresh corn at a pick-your-own farm. The car looked like a hot rod. More than once, we’d be pulled over by the police, who assumed a teenager was driving. They’d be surprised and embarrassed to find a respectable-looking matron behind the wheel.

  Mom also engaged us intellectually, not so much by introducing us to concerts or ballet but by recommending books and using conversation as a pedagogical tool. She loved a lively discussion and leaned into it, sitting on the edge of a winged armchair with her dress festooned between her legs, her eyes sparkling, holding a cigarette with a hooked finger of her right hand. She could be warm and understanding when that was called for, but mostly she expected us to meet high standards. If we fell short by someone else’s measure or failed by someone else’s lights, not hers, she defended us fiercely.