Back Then (2 page)

A.B., late 1950s.

During
the 1950s we saw the city as if finding something unmatchable anywhere in the world. We took visitors from the South and Midwest to the Fulton Fish market, the meat, cheese, and flower districts, Eighth Street, the Bowery, the South Bronx's Hunts Point Market; Tottenville and the deserted outer beaches of Staten Island; Brooklyn Heights with its dazzling view of Manhattan and mingled odors of waterfront rot and roasting coffee beans; Times Square, advertising itself as “Crossroads of the World,” offering, in addition to first-run theaters like the Paramount and Roxy, cheap hotels, and Hubert's Flea Circus and Museum of Freaks.

Together—our first experiment in collaboration—we wrote an article (for
Barnard Alumnae Magazine
) about walks in New York. The piece's breathless tone conveyed our excitement as well as too much immersion in fashion magazine prose. Virgil-like, we guided our readers to Wall Street, silent and ghost-ridden on Sundays; the Baghdad of the Lower East Side with its compaction of bridal shops, tombstone makers, underwear peddlers, and Katz's delicatessen (order “corned beef on club”); the “pastoral quiet” of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. “For the West Bronx Walk,” we wrote, “take the 8th Avenue subway marked ‘Grand Concourse' but follow your whim to wander west toward Hunter College, south along Creston and Morris Avenues. Here you are in suburbia: the
tiny lawn, the well-tended hedge, the detached but neighborly villa. A little below Kingsbridge Road the city signs begin to thicken: delicatessens, bakeries, dressmakers, caterers. As you quicken toward Fordham Road, you're on your way to a supreme glory: Alexander's department store. There you will find more people per square foot finding better bargains per stretchable dollar than anywhere else on earth. It's likely that, overburdened with your own buys, you may have to call it a day.”

These wonders were new to us, natives who were beginning to respond to the city like recent settlers. But we were proud of skills that set us apart from these newcomers. We knew how to fold and read the broadsheet
New York Times
or
Herald Tribune
while standing in a crowded subway car; we found our bearings immediately, on automatic pilot, when we came up the station steps. We knew how to cross streets—against the lights, cutting corners, in mid-block, on the run, facing down drivers, waiting behind El pillars—always counting on the rabbit reflexes, peripheral acuity, and acquired immunity to danger that those who survived had possessed for years. We stood “on line” for buses and the movies, not “in line,” and said “Sixth Avenue,” never “Avenue of the Americas.” We weren't solicited by tour agents stationed along Fifth Avenue or horse carriage drivers by the Plaza. Maybe it was the way we walked—purposefully, hard-faced, looking straight ahead, and avoiding eye contact with strangers. If we carried cameras we hid them, so as not to be taken for out-of-towners. We could thread our way through crowds like the Artful Dodger.

J.k., 1950.

We were both children of privilege. We had gone to progressive schools in the city, then on to high schools grounded in a classical approach to education—a lot of memorizing and Shakespeare, an exhaustive application to history, literature, and the sciences. Both of us went away to college, majored in English, and, back in New York, found jobs in book publishing—a business (or profession) many young people with similar backgrounds and similar educational equipment hoped to enter. At night we headed downtown and to the Village to enter what, in the 1920s, would have been called “bohemia.” It was now inhabited by a new generation, turned on to grass and psychedelics, that called itself “hip” and “beat” and introduced “beatnik” into common speech. Both of us went into psychoanalysis.

Here, then, are some personal, occasionally parallel or overlapping, narratives of life in a particular time and place: New York City between the mid- and late 1940s, when we came of age, and 1959, when, parents of two, we moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and followed new careers: novelist and biographer. In writing
Back Then
we wanted to let people and events speak for themselves, within the framework of the period, and without benefit (or distortion) of hindsight, regret, and reconsideration. You won't, we hope, find us introducing a point of view that has been allowed to ripen and change in the intervening years. We've changed the names of a few of the people in our story.

Our habits, manners, language, attitudes in the 1950s were so different from what they are now that in some respects we could almost as well be writing about the era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Gibson Girl. The events of September 11, 2001, widened the chasm between back then and right now. Still, we've tried to convey some of the density and texture of private, social, and working life in the 1950s as the two of us, not altogether untypically, experienced it.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

Where we lived
in Manhattan had a lot to do with how my father, the person who made the hefty decisions in our family, chose to be perceived by the world beyond his front door. And this, in turn, had a lot to do with his profound and nervous reluctance to be identified as a Jew. His reluctance was the chain on which many of the beads of daily life chez Bernays were strung. Being Jewish was something we almost never talked about, just as we avoided the contagion of cancer, poor people, and sex. Naturally then, cancer, poor people, and sex took a tenacious hold on my imagination, hung there like a cat halfway up a tree. Oma Hattie,
my mother's mother, was one notch less inhibited than my parents about the subject of Jewishness; whenever she wanted to indicate that someone was Jewish she said, sotto voce, “
M
-
O
-
T
”—Member of the Tribe. It made my father wince whenever she said it. If I read his thoughts correctly, they were saying, “Why do I have to hear this? What does it have to do with me?” Oma Hattie was just as circumspect about malignancy—she wouldn't say the whole word but whispered its initial: “My friend Bessie was just operated on for
C
, poor thing.” People with
C
almost invariably died of it.

Each era earns its particular codes and proscriptions, some more demanding and painful than others, depending on the temperament of the times and the moral force of what has preceded it. As I grew up the language I spoke was heavily encoded, a condition due in part to my hothouse upbringing and in part to the period itself. Because my parents were born before the turn of the century (my father in 1891 and my mother in 1892), many of their regulations hung in suspension around us like the smell of something nasty. Not once did I hear my father or my mother say anything more freighted than
damn
and
hell
—and then only when, like Rhett Butler, they found themselves pushed to the limit.

I found it a constant challenge to decipher what someone really meant when they used this coded language, and since I wanted to believe what I heard, I wasn't all that adept at instant understanding. It took me a long time, for example, to understand that “Will you go out to dinner with me?” more often meant “I want to fuck you” than it did “Let's share a meal.” When I accepted a dinner invitation I didn't think I owed the man who had extended it any favors; often, he did. “Good friend” or “Great and good friend,” a staple of
Time
magazine euphemism, meant lover or mistress. A “long illness” might have been lengthy but it was also specific: it meant cancer. “Died suddenly” meant a suicide and “he was a confirmed bachelor,” homosexuality. “New Yorker” was the equivalent of Jew. When a woman said, “I have to go wash my hands,” you knew she was headed for “the little girls' room,” another euphemism. As for a girl's periods, they were known by many names: “the curse,” “the monthlies,” “falling off the roof,” and, inexplicably, “grandma's come to visit.” Your periods put you in a condition about which boys and men pretended to know nothing. The term “social disease” was code for syphilis or gonorrhea; they were both potential killers and, before antibiotics, often were. On the other hand, it didn't strike us as inconsistent that words like
retarded, crippled, foreigner, spinster,
and
old lady
were never disguised but were allowed to emerge starkly, like naked children at a picnic.

Our pervasive language code fortified the pretense that ours was a polite and well-regulated society—at least at its upper reaches. And along with this, “good manners” were passed more or less intact from one generation to the next, fortified by books of etiquette that changed very little from decade to decade. You knew how to behave in front of and talk to intimate, casual friend, and stranger alike.

When one of my boyfriends, a former sailor, inserted “abso-fucking-lutely” into an otherwise bland conversation, I was dazzled. “What did you say?” He repeated it. “Navy talk,” he said.

As a result of these taboos, the shock value of smutty language was as loud as an air raid siren. You could calculate the seriousness of a girl's determination to be “her own man” as much by the words she spoke as by how many guys she had slept with and which substances—and in what quantities—she poured, inhaled, or injected into the temple of her body.

If you can say any word any time you feel like it, it loses its bang; if you save it for the exact right moment it's going to do its job and rip through your adversary like a dumdum bullet. You tucked your list of precious forbidden words and phrases into your deepest pocket, fingering them as you might someone else's gold coins. And, like Russians under communism, like Aesop, we tended to tell our stories in altered form, hiding the truth in assorted disguises. Self-censorship is supposed to be dehumanizing, and perhaps, ultimately it is. But it forces you to be inventive and sly. You got away with something, you slid the true text past the censors as you sneaked absinthe past Customs; you slipped out the window when they thought you were in bed, sleeping; you had sex when they thought you were at a wedding shower.

My
father was a gilded creature, shimmering with a vanity that had as much to do with his forebears as it did his considerable brawn in the world of commerce and celebrity. He was Sigmund Freud's double nephew: a brother and sister, Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, had married, respectively, a sister and brother, Martha Bernays and Eli Bernays, in Vienna in the late nineteenth century. This kind of pairing was not uncommon then, especially among Western European Jews who, xenophobic and cautious anyway, were reluctant to marry outside their tight social circles. It happened, as well, at about the same time, on my mother's side of the family, when two brothers married two sisters. My father's parents were Eli Bernays and Anna Freud (after whom I was named). Almost every time I saw her in her Upper West Side apartment, surrounded by the smallest and dearest of what must have been a substantial collection of glassware, silver, and other gemlike household items, Anna would tell me, “Siggy was such a clever man.” My mother confided to me that even in old age Anna was still harboring a grudge against her brother because their father had sent her out to earn her living as a nursemaid even as he paid Sigmund's way through medical school.

My father was so proud of his blood connection to Sigmund Freud that he made sure everyone he met was aware of it by the end of the first encounter. A waggish New York newspaper columnist, who felt my father had exploited this connection—managing to insert “my uncle” into any conversation—called him a “professional nephew” in print. This probably didn't bother my father at all, because, in one sense, that's what he was. Working with his brother-in-law, Leon Fleischman, a founder of the publishing house of Boni and Liveright, my father had been responsible for the first translation and publication of a Freud book in the New World.

When I was a child the name Freud was only a sound, although my father gave that sound an ardent inflection like that used by the devout when speaking of the Divinity. I knew Freud was important; what he had done to deserve this didn't register with me until I was in my teens, when word of his unusual preoccupations had seeped down to the general populace. Whenever I was asked about my own connection to the fabulous mind doctor whom I never met, I got defensive: “It doesn't have anything to do with me.” Although of course it did and my great uncle knew it: to mark my birth Freud sent me, via my parents, a postcard headed “Prof. Dr. Freud,” upon which he had handwritten, “Welcome as a new output of life on the day great grandmother [his mother] was buried.” He signed it “Great Uncle Sigm.”

After leaving Austria in 1891, my father's father became an importer. The family—my father, four older sisters, and their parents—lived very comfortably in a brownstone in a neighborhood that eventually became Harlem. There was always money enough. My mother's father was a lawyer, taciturn and unsmiling—a disciplinarian with no shade of gray in his thinking. Both sides of my family were solid in a way that doesn't arouse much interest from the outside, their conflicts and dramas—if there were any—remained safely inside their skulls.