My parents associated only with interesting people. People did not become friends simply because they were neighbors. The fact was Paul and Rochelle did not choose their friends by accident. The fact was Paul and Rochelle did not choose their friends. He was reputed to be a mathematical genius and nobody knew his age. I remember one guy named Iggy who was a macrocephalic and staggered along with the kids following him, staggered along smiling under the weight of his head. There were more freaks on the streets than you see today. Besides, in those days, just after the war, people were still familiar with untranquilized misery. The public spectacle did not bother Paul that much, I remember him laughing one time as Grandma went by the store on 174th Street and shook her fist at him as she walked past the window. Maybe it was partly the shame of Grandma spinning out of there at odd moments of the day or night, with her wild hair and Yiddish curses, but I doubt it. My parents were known to all and friends to none. The only neighbors were to either side of us and so it was a half-populated street to begin with, and with half-neighbors who faced the same way and at whom we did not have to look. Who chooses the home, the wife or the husband? We faced no apartment house but only the sky over the schoolyard. Her life was a matter of taking pains to distinguish herself from her neighbors. Rochelle had a profound distaste for the common man. Clutching my hand and pushing the carriage, hurrying up past the stacked tombs of those houses whose sight she bore in hatred and in fear-as if by not walking fast enough we would be contaminated by the life inside them. As we walked past them, they were lit in her revulsion. My mother lighted the façades of these houses with her personality. So why bother with us who lived among them, telltale crimsoning life in our cheeks and life in our eyes. But surrounded by it, we were protected from worse things-storms, fireballs, the marches of ants, floods from the sky-nothing in this part of the world being worth such energy, such destruction. We were different enough not to suffer the obscurity of Bronx architecture. Because our vulnerability in this unusual rotting wooden house on the precipice of this schoolyard street was not so great then. Beyond my sight I knew there were more Bronx hills, more apartment houses interspersed every fifteen or twenty blocks with a purple castle of a school just like mine.
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From the prominence of our little wooden house on Weeks Avenue I could see around the amphitheatrical schoolyard ranks of apartment houses. Miles of apartment houses with their halls of cooking smells and their armament of garbage cans at the curb. Kids grow up around doorways, on stoops, in court yards And in the dark lobbies with their tile floors, and maybe a brass elevator door and a fake old English chair. Six or seven stories high they line the streets mile after mile. In the Bronx connected apartment houses fill each city block. It was more than just, it was unsurprising.īut where we lived always seemed to me the essence of obscurity. And so when they were taken away, one after the other, and I next saw them on television or a moment of their faces in the newspaper, it was like the world had finally agreed to what I always knew-that we were important people. To the meetings at night, to the recurrent meetings. The day’s small plans and obligations engrossed us.
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Our lives were important and what happened to us was important. It was a terrible strain, but I began to understand that it was worth it. And even if it was bad, we always knew what was happening. There was nothing my father could not explain. We had this way of understanding everything. I thought the world really revolved around my family. A poor family in the Bronx, too hot in the summer, and too cold in the winter. I could never have appreciated how obscure we were.