American Childhood (7 page)

Now in the embarrassing Cadillac we pulled up in front of our house. From the capacious row of jump seats Amy and I were delivered—suntanned, cheerful, covered with poison ivy, and in possession of suitcases full of new green and purple dresses—to our mother.

The rivalry between our mother and Oma was intense; it was a long, civilized antagonism. Our mother had won the moral battle—we children were shamed, for instance, by Oma’s bursts of bigotry—but Mother fought on for autonomy, seeking to prevent our being annexed to Oma’s big tribe of Louisville Germans. When I was a baby, Oma had several times hauled me downriver to Louisville for Christmas as a prize; Mother put a stop to it.

If Oma had a great deal of shockingly loose money, we had, we fancied, good taste. Oma had a green-and-blue blown-glass sculpture of two intertwined swans, full of bubbles; we had a black iron Calder-style mobile. Oma had a servant and a companion. We had help. Our “help” shared our drinking glasses. At our parents’ parties, friends ate lasagna and danced; at our grandparents’ parties, guests ate sauerbraten and went to the theater.

Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues. We thought we were grander than Oma morally, that she was
bigoted and vain, quite as if we ourselves were neither. Actually it was her taste we most deplored. We thought that merely possessing a gaudy figurine was a worse offense than wholeheartedly embracing snobbery. We could not see how clearly she saw us, two small children just about to start prep school, who enjoyed the fruits of her family’s prosperity, and who had barely peeped beyond Pittsburgh. She never said a word against our mother. But like our mother, she never gave up the struggle, even, apparently, after she suffered a stroke—for after her stroke she earnestly asked our father from time to time, “Have you ever thought of marrying?”

He pressed her freckled hand. Of course we loved her.

It was not, in retrospect, a fair fight. For at our house, we were all so young.

W
E HAD MOVED WHEN I WAS EIGHT
. We moved from Edgerton Avenue to Richland Lane, a hushed dead-end street on the far side of Frick Park. We expanded into a brick house on two lots. There was a bright sunporch under buckeye trees; there was a golden sandstone wall with fireplace and bench that Mother designed, which ran the length of the living room.

It was into this comfortable house that the last of us sisters, Molly, was born, two years later. It was from this house that Father would leave to go down the river to New Orleans, and to this house that he would return early, from the river at Louisville. Here Mother told the contractor where she wanted kitchen walls knocked out. Here on the sunporch Amy tended her many potentially well-dressed dolls, all of whom were, unfortunately, always sick in bed. Here I began a life of reading books, and drawing, and playing at the sciences. Here also I began to wake in earnest, and shed superstition, and plan my days.

Every August when Amy and I returned from the Lake, we saw that workmen had altered the house in our absence—the dining room seemed bigger, the kitchen was lighter—but we couldn’t recall how it had been. I thought Mother was a genius for thinking up these improvements, for the house always seemed fine to me, yet it got better and better.

This August, the summer I was ten, we returned from the Lake and found our shared room uncannily tidy and stilled, dark, while summer, the summer in which we had been immersed, played outside the closed windows like a movie.
So it always was, those first few minutes in an emptied room. They made you self-conscious; you felt yourself living your life. As soon as you unzipped your suitcase and opened the window, you broke the spell; you plunged again into the rush and weather.

While we were gone, Molly had learned to crawl. She pulled herself up and stood singing in her playpen on the flat part of the front lawn; the buckeye boughs stirred far overhead, and waved over her round arms their speckled lights.

Usually when it was hot the family swam at the distant country-club pool. Now that we were back from the Lake, all that resumed—a nasty comedown after the Lake, to whose neighborhood beach I had gone alone, and where we were all kids among kids who owned the beach and our days. There, at the Lake, if you wanted to leave, you simply kicked the bike’s kickstand and sprang into the seat and away, in one skilled gesture like cowboys’ mounting horses, rode away on the innocent Ohio roads under old, still trees. At the country club, you often wanted to leave as soon as you had come, but there was no leaving to be had. The country-club pool drew a society as complex and constraining, if not so entertaining, as any European capital’s drawing room did. You forgot an old woman’s name at some peril to your entire family. What if you actually, physically, ran into her? Knocked her off her pins? It was no place for children.

One country-club morning this August, I saw a red blotch moving in a dense hedge by the club’s baby pool. I crept up on the red blotch in my cold bathing suit and discovered that it was a rose-breasted grosbeak. I had never seen one. This living, wild bird, which could fetch up anyplace it pleased, had inexplicably touched down at our country club. It scratched around in a hedge between the baby pool and the sixth hole. The dumb cluck, why a country club?

Mother said Father was going down the river in his boat pretty soon. It sounded like a swell idea.

One windy Saturday morning, after the Lake and before the new private school started, I hung around the house. It
was too early for action in the neighborhood. To wake up, I read on the sunporch.

The sunporch would wake anybody up; Father had now put on the record: Sharkey Bonano, “Li’l Liza Jane.” He was bopping around, snapping his fingers; now he had wandered outside and stood under the big buckeye trees. I could see him through the sunporch’s glass walls. He peered up at a patch of sky as if it could tell him, old salt that he was, right there on Richland Lane, how the weather would be next week on the Ohio River.

I was starting
Kidnapped
. It began in Scotland; David Balfour’s father asked that a letter be delivered “when the house is redd up.” Some people in Pittsburgh redd up houses, too. The hardworking parents of my earliest neighborhood friends said it: You kids redd up this room. It meant clean up, or ready up. I never expected to find “redd up” in so grand a thing as a book. Apparently it was Scots. I hadn’t heard the phrase since we moved.

I rode back to Edgerton Avenue from time to time after we moved—to look around, and to fix in my mind the route back: past the lawn bowlers in Frick Park, past the football field, and beyond the old elementary schoolyard, where a big older boy had said to me, “Why, you’re a regular Ralph Kiner.” Touring that old neighborhood, I saw the St. Bede’s nuns. I sped past them, careless, on my bike.

“Redd up,” David Balfour’s father said in
Kidnapped
. I was reading on the sunporch, on the bright couch. “Oh, Li’l Liza!” said the music on the record, “Li’l Liza Jane.” Next week Father was going down the river to New Orleans. Maybe they’d let him sit in a set on the drums; maybe Zutty Singleton would be there and holler out to him—“Hey, Frank!”

The wind rattled the windowed sunporch walls beside me. I could see, without getting up, some green leaves blowing down from the buckeye branches overhead. Everything in the room was bright, even the bookshelves, even Amy’s melancholy dolls. The blue shadows of fast clouds ran over the far walls and floor. Father snapped his fingers and wandered, tall and loose-limbed, over the house.

I was ten years old now, up into the double numbers, where I would likely remain till I died. I am awake now forever, I thought suddenly; I have converged with myself in the present. My hands were icy from holding
Kidnapped
up; I always read lying down. I felt time in full stream, and I felt consciousness in full stream joining it, like the rivers.

W
E LIVED IN A CLEAN CITY
whose center was new; after the war, a few business leaders and Democratic Mayor David L. Lawrence had begun cleaning it up. Beneath the new city, and tucked up its hilly alleys, lay the old Pittsburgh, and the old foothill land beneath it. It was all old if you dug far enough. Our Pittsburgh was like Rome, or Jericho, a palimpsest, a sliding pile of cities built ever nearer the sky, and rising ever higher over the rivers. If you dug, you found things.

Oma’s chauffeur, Henry Watson, dug a hole in our yard on Edgerton Avenue to plant a maple tree when I was born, and again when Amy was born three years later. When he dug the hole for Amy’s maple, he found an arrowhead—smaller than a dime and sharp. Our mother continually remodeled each of the houses we lived in: the workmen knocked out walls and found brick walls under the plaster and oak planks under the brick. City workers continually paved the streets: they poured asphalt over the streetcar tracks, streetcar tracks their fathers had wormed between the old riverworn cobblestones, cobblestones laid smack into the notorious nineteenth-century mud. Long stretches of that mud were the same pioneer roads that General John Forbes’s troops had hacked over the mountains from Carlisle, or General Braddock’s troops had hacked from the Chesapeake and the Susquehanna, widening with their axes the woodland paths the Indians had worn on deer trails.

Many old stone houses had slate-shingle roofs. I used to find blown shingles cracked open on the sidewalk; some of them bore—inside, where no one had been able to look until
now—fine fossil prints of flat leaves. I heard there were dinosaur bones under buildings. The largest coal-bearing rock sequence in the world ran under Pittsburgh and popped out at Coal Hill, just across the Monongahela. (Then it ducked far underground and ran up into Nova Scotia, dove into the water and crossed under the Atlantic, and rolled up again thick with coal in Wales.) There were layers of natural gas beneath Pittsburgh, and pools of petroleum the pioneers called Seneca oil, because only Indians would fool with it.

We children lived and breathed our history—our Pittsburgh history, so crucial to the country’s story and so typical of it as well—without knowing or believing any of it. For how can anyone know or believe stories she dreamed in her sleep, information for which and to which she feels herself to be in no way responsible? A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside her skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life—the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives—as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

Outside in the neighborhoods, learning our way around the streets, we played among the enormous stone monuments of the millionaires—both those tireless Pittsburgh founders of the heavy industries from which the nation’s wealth derived (they told us at school) and the industrialists’ couldn’t-lose bankers and backers, all of whom began as canny boys, the stories of whose rises to riches adults still considered inspirational to children.

We were unthinkingly familiar with the moguls’ immense rough works as so much weird scenery on long drives. We saw the long, low-slung stripes of steel factories by the rivers; we saw pyramidal heaps of yellow sand at glassworks by the shining railroad tracks; we saw rusty slag heaps on the outlying hilltops, and coal barges tied up at the docks. We rec
ognized, on infrequent trips downtown, the industries’ smooth corporate headquarters, each to its own soaring building—Gulf Oil, Alcoa, U.S. Steel, Koppers Company, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Mellon Bank. Our classmates’ fathers worked in these buildings, or at nearby corporate headquarters for Westinghouse Electric, Jones & Laughlin Steel, Rock-well Manufacturing, American Standard, Allegheny Ludlum, Westinghouse Air Brake, and H. J. Heinz.

The nineteenth-century industrialists’ institutions—galleries, universities, hospitals, churches, Carnegie libraries, the Carnegie Museum, Frick Park, Mellon Park—were, many of them, my stomping grounds. These absolute artifacts of philanthropy littered the neighborhoods with marble. Millionaires’ encrusted mansions, now obsolete and turned into parks or art centers, weighed on every block. They lent their expansive, hushed moods to the Point Breeze neighborhoods where we children lived and where those fabulous men had lived also, or rather had visited at night in order to sleep. Everywhere I looked, it was the Valley of the Kings, their dynasty just ended, and their monuments intact but already out of fashion.

All these immensities wholly dominated the life of the city. So did their several peculiar social legacies: their powerful Calvinist mix of piety and acquisitiveness, which characterized the old and new Scotch-Irish families and the nation they helped found; the walled-up hush of what was, by my day, old money—amazing how fast it ages if you let it alone—and the clang and roar of making that money; the owners’ Presbyterian churches, their anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, Republicanism, and love of continuous work; their dogmatic practicality, their easy friendliness, their Pittsburgh-centered innocence, and, paradoxically, their egalitarianism.

For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town. “Best-natured people I ever went among,” a Boston visitor noted two centuries earlier. In colonial days, everybody went to balls, regardless of rank. No one had any truck with aristocratic pretensions—hadn’t they hated the British lords in Ulster? People
who cared to rave about their bloodlines, Mother told us, had stayed in Europe, which deserved them. We were vaguely proud of living in a city so full of distinctive immigrant groups, among which we never thought to number ourselves. We had no occasion to visit the steep hillside neighborhoods—Polish, Hungarian, Rumanian, Italian, Slav—of the turn-of-the-century immigrants who poured the steel and stirred the glass and shoveled the coal.

We children played around the moguls’ enormous pale stone houses, restful as tombs, houses set back just so on their shaded grounds. Henry Clay Frick’s daughter, unthinkably old, lived alone in her proud, sinking mansion; she had lived alone all her life. No one saw her. Men mowed the wide lawns and seeded them, and pushed rollers over them, over the new grass seed and musket balls and arrowheads, over the big trees’ roots, bones, shale, coal.

We knew bits of this story, and we knew none of it. Odd facts stuck in the mind: On the Pennsylvania frontier in the eighteenth century, people pressed hummingbirds as if they were poppies, between pages of heavy books, and mailed them back to Ulster and Scotland as curiosities. Money was so scarce in the western Pennsylvania mountains that, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, people substituted odds and ends like road contracts, feathers, and elderberries.

We knew that before big industry there had been small industry here—H. J. Heinz setting up a roadside stand to sell horseradish roots from his garden. There were the makers of cannonballs for the Civil War. There were the braggart and rowdy flatboat men and keelboat men, and the honored steamboat builders and pilots. There were local men getting rich in iron and glass manufacturing and trade downriver. There was a whole continentful of people passing through, native-born and immigrant men and women who funneled down Pittsburgh, where two rivers converged to make a third river. It was the gateway to the West; they piled onto flat-boats and launched out into the Ohio River singing, to head for new country. There had been a Revolutionary War, and before that the French and Indian War. And before that, and
first of all, had been those first settlers come walking bright-eyed in, into nowhere from out of nowhere, the people who, as they said, “broke wilderness,” the pioneers. This was the history.

I treasured some bits; they provided doll-like figures for imagination’s travels and wars. There in private imagination were the vivid figures of history in costume, tricked out as if for amateur outdoor drama: a moving, clumsy, insignificant spectacle like everything else the imagination proposes to itself for pure pleasure only—nothing real, nobody gets hurt, it’s only ketchup.