Epilogue

The Internet has made the world a much smaller and highly connected place. Already, I have heard from two people who grew up with me in the old Bronxville neighborhood. They must have Googled "Bronxville," and the series popped up.

I heard first from MaryAnne Denniston. She and her two brothers, Buddy and Tommy, lived on Meadow Avenue, close to the spiked bridge across the creek. Then I heard from Joanie Gagan, who was our nextdoor neighbor. They filled me in on the other kids and where they are now, some of them still living close by.

Was it really a half century ago that we played Hide and Seek in our back yard? They mention names and places in their e-mails, and long-forgotten things crawl out of their hiding places, and it seems like just yesterday.

Bronxville Dats, Part 12

I go back to Millard Avenue almost every day. Not physically, of course, because it is 400 miles away. I go back there in my imagination because it is the street of my youth.

All of my big ideas - the good ones and the silly ones - seem to start on the pavement of that wide and shady boulevard and to sprint down the middle of it before sprouting wings and taking flight.

My family lived on Millard Avenue from 1958 to 1962, just enough time for a youngster to collect enough vivid images to last him a lifetime. Ours was the house where 500 tulips and two huge dogwoods bloomed in the spring, the house covered with roses in summer. Ours was the yard in which kids played Red Light, Green Light past dusk.
On Millard Avenue, right in front of our house, was home plate: a manhole cover with iron lettering in a semi-circle that read, "CITY OF YONKERS." The next manhole cover up the street was second base. We marked first and third on the curbstones with chalk, and that was our stick ball field.
"Car coming!" someone would tell, and we would stop the game and move out of the way.

I can see so clearly in my memory even the flotsam along the curbs and at the storm grates: acorns, Good Humor wrappers and sticks, bits and pieces of exploded firecrackers, the seed pods of maple trees.

Sometime after the incident at the abandoned villa, I sat on the curb on Millard Avenue one summer afternoon, contemplating the debris between my sneakers. Here was a mortified and miserable 11-year-old boy who had just pieced together the mysteries of life. Now that I knew how babies were made, finally, how could I ever face my parents again? How could I ever look into their faces without thinking of their disgusting and shameful behavior?

I walked up and down the street, cut across the field, crossed the spiked bridge over the creek and into the meadow, alone. Somehow, in the heat of that awful day, I found the strength to face the facts of life, and a life made more complicated by them.

I am grown up now, to say the least, and face the miserable realities of life almost every day. I find the strength to deal with them by going back in my mind and taking that walk again.
This was my Bronxville neighborhood, and this was my street.
The street of my youth.
The thread of my life.

THE END

Bronxville Days, Part 11

Kids who grow up on farms know what the score is early on. They see horses acting up in the field, know how little horses are made, and figure out at a young age that people reproduce in roughly the same way.
Kids who grow up in the city, or in suburban towns like Bronxville, don't have that insight. And a kid like me, who was pretty dense to begin with, and spent much of his time and mental activity in his own dream world, was pretty much clueless about sex.

At 11, I honestly thought that women became pregnant automatically when they reached a certain age or situation in life. I was vaguely aware of sex but thought it was just unnatural, filthy shenanigans engaged in by criminally-minded teenagers.

I liked girls and had liked them from earliest memory. By age 11, we were going to boy-girl birthday parties and playing kissing games, but I don't think it ever occurred to me then that there could be things more pleasurable to do with girls than kissing.

Then one Saturday afternoon, one of my classmates and I rode our bikes north of town to the abandoned villa. Up a steep hill overgrown with wild rose and sumac was a house long ago given up to the elements. It had been a sprawling, two-story house with white stucco walls and a red tile roof. All the windows had been broken; saplings grew from the gutters, the floors were covered with broken glass and leaves and gravel that had once been mosaic tiles. We loved to walk through these ruins and imagine what life had been like there so many years earlier.

We were not alone that day. When we came up through the jungle, we saw a couple of girls, sitting on the concrete railing on the portico, sharing a cigarette. We tried to ignore them, but one of them yelled, "Hey, you, c'mer!" We did not recognize them. They were not from our school and looked a little older. They must have been from Tuckahoe.
We traded the usual insults and my friend and I turned away from them to do our exploring. But they followed us. We split up, and they split and followed us still. I was not comfortable. Had these been boys, they would have been picking a fight. The girl following me was acting tough, but she was not looking to fight. She was teasing me, telling me what goofy-looking hair I had, what ugly sneakers. And then she said, "I bet you'd like to feel me up."
I screwed up my face as if I'd just smelled a dead animal. "No!" I said. "Who'd want to touch you?"
"Well, I wouldn't let you anyway," she said.

A little later, the other girl said she had to get home and they left, and my friend and I walked around the back of the house, not saying much. Those girls were gone, but something heavy, like dread, still hung in the air. I didn't understand what had happened that day, why I had felt anxious and afraid and angry and excited. Only later would I realize that my dream world had started to crumble.

Bronxville Days, Part 10

My long newspaper career had its start back in 1960, when I signed on as a carrier for the Herald-Statesman, Yonkers' daily afternoon paper. I'd pedal over to Ellison Avenue after school, pick up my bundle, fold my papers into "tomahawks," and load them in the twin baskets straddling my rear wheel. Then I'd fly down the sidewalk, flinging the folded papers at the front doors of my customers. A perfectly thrown tomahawk would smack against the door waist-high, then fall open, front-page up, on the doormat.

The money was good, for 1960. With tips, my profit was usually $7 a week. Combined with my 50-cent-a-week allowance, I had all the money a boy could need for Mad Magazines, baseball cards, punk, ammo for my pea shooter, caps, rubber spiders, Top Cat figurines, comic books, decals, Hostess cupcakes, bottles of 7-Up, yo-yos, handlebar streamers, spaldeens (those pink balls we used for stickball), balsawood gliders, candy bars, model cars and glue.

The job also made it possible to indulge in some of the luxuries available in Bronxville Proper: banana splits at the ice cream parlor, bowling, orange rickies at the drugstore soda counter, and the movies. For 50 cents, we could spend all of Saturday afternoon in the theater, watching cartoons, a newsreel, Three Stooges episodes and the main feature.

Life was so uncomplicated for a boy of 11, soaring free on his bicycle, when he wasn't being dragged off by his mom to dancing classes and piano lessons. But it would all get complicated soon enough.

Bronxville Days, Part 9

The main building of Public School No. 8 was built in 1896, a fortress of steel and stone and brick. The long halls, smelling of milk, floor wax, vomit and sweeping compound, were lined with tall, windowless doors and transoms. I remember most the gymnasium/cafeteria.

When the weather was nice, we had our gym class on the playground or ran wind sprints on the street at the rear entrance to the school. But in winter and on rainy days we were in the gym, performing exercises that no school district would ever allow now. I imagine that after so many ruptured spleens and broken arms, someone probably decided that forcing grade-school children to perform on the pommel horse and parallel bars was maybe not such a good idea. Ditto for climbing the rope to the top of the gym and slapping the girder to which it was attached. I get a knot in my groin just thinking about that now.

The girls dreaded gym class the most, and it's no wonder. They were required to wear gym suits: clownish white costumes that billowed at the hips; that, and also to be humiliated in relay races and dodge ball.

Every so often, there would be a dance in the gym – a sock hop, our parents called it, even though they didn't make us take off our street shoes to protect the gym floor. Girls had to wear party dresses, and boys were required to wear sport coats and ties. I was peculiarly fashion-conscious for an 11-year-old, and my idea of looking cool was white athletic socks. My parents refused to allow me to leave the house dressed up as I was in anything but black socks, so I had to hide my while socks in my pockets and change into them on my way to the dance.

Dancing with girls was exciting, although I was a little too young and a little to dense to understand why. My mother had forced me to take dancing lessons at Mr. Barclay's School of Dance, so I could do a mean fox trot and cha-cha. But I preferred the slow box step, to the sound of the Fleetwoods singing "Mr. Blue," when I could touch the crinkly material around a girl's waist and feel her soft, damp hand within mine, and smell her shampooed hair and wonder why all of that seemed suddenly so interesting.

Bronxville Days, Part 8

Student self-esteem must have been a concern to educators even back in the 1950s, because all of a sudden "F" disappeared as an option for teachers marking up report cards at Public School No. 8. A's, B's, C's and D's were left untouched, but F's, which stood for "Failure" (or maybe "Flunky") had to go. F's were replaced with I's, which stood for "Improvement needed."

The year with Mrs. Macarber and Miss Goldstein was my second attempt at sixth grade. My first time through was with Miss Cynthia Heinitz. She handed us our report cards on the last day of school, I was expecting my grades to be poor. But I never thought my report card would have more I's on it than "Mississippi." I couldn't get up the courage to give the report card to my mother, so I tossed it behind a pile of lumber in our garage.
That evening, when asked to produce it, I tried several approaches: "We didn't get report cards this period"; "Oh, yeah, we got them, but I must have dropped it on my way home from school"; "It must have fallen out of my pocket when I was sitting on the lumber pile"; and finally, after retrieving it from the garage, "That doesn't mean I failed, it just means I need improvement."

Mrs. Reilly, the principal, summoned my parents to the school, and then they sat me down and told me what I dreaded to hear more than anything: "You have to repeat the sixth grade."

Left back. Left back! How could I ever look any of my friends in the face again? They tried to comfort me. "You've always been the youngest and smallest in your class, and now you'll be with kids more your own age," my father said. "You'll make new friends," my mother added. "You'll have already done the work, so it will be easier the second time around."

That night, my mother came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed, brushed the hair from my forehead, damp from a tear-soaked pillow. "You'll get over it," she said.

And I did.

Bronxville Days, Part 7

Almost from that first day in late November when she had taken over the sixth-grade class, Miss Goldstein had begun to suspect that her predecessor's mental affliction had been worsened by the behavior of her students, that it was likely they had baited her, deliberately provoked her to fits of rage just for the theatrical thrill of it.
She was beginning to realize how cruel children can be. A sickening feeling came over her when she witnessed the way her students treated Katrina.

Pretty and a little plump, Katrina had long blond hair that she frequently wore in two braids. She almost never smiled and rarely looked up from her book, or her desk, or her feet. She seldom spoke, and when she did her words were barely audible. She would have gone unnoticed and unheard if not for her German accent.

Katrina was the target of merciless teasing. She could not utter a complete sentence without inciting a chorus of giggles. Boys would follow her down the hall, goose-stepping like Nazi soldiers. They would click their heels and say "Heil, Hitler!" all the time. She was excluded from all games and conversations. Her classmates shunned her.

What worried Miss Goldstein the most was the hate she sometimes perceived. It was not obvious, more like a chilling draft from a mysterious source. Did these students inherit animosity for a former enemy from their parents, many who fought against the Germans not so long ago? Although the war had been over for 15 years, Adolf Eichmann, the "architect of the Holocaust," had only recently been captured in Argentina by Israeli agents.

One day, just before Christmas vacation, Katrina was ill and did not come to school. Miss Goldstein took the opportunity to scold the class, and she did so vehemently and passionately. The effect was that the children felt mortified and deservedly embarrassed by their behavior.
Some of her classmates made promises to themselves to be especially kind to Katrina when she returned, but the child did not come to school the next day, nor the next. Then the long Christmas break arrived, and when they came back to P.S. 8 in January, Katrina wasn't there. Her father had been transferred to a job in another city, and the family had moved.

"I hope you're all very satisfied with yourselves," Miss Goldstein said. I hope you're very happy with how cruelly you treated that little girl."
Her stinging sarcasm was not necessary. The wound had been inflicted, and there was now no chance it would heal.

I still think about Katrina. I am haunted by the desperate sadness that I imagine was in her eyes, and by regret and my own guilt about the misery heaped upon her.

Bronxville Days, Part 6

Miss Goldstein had taken over a class of sixth-graders at P.S. 8 late in the fall of 1960, just after the sudden departure of Mrs. Macarber. The explanation at the time, at least around the schoolyard, was that the latter teacher had "flipped out," but that was not exactly the case. Her mental problems were more probably deep-rooted.

Mrs. Macarber had a thing about wasting paper. She encouraged her students to write on both sides of their composition sheets and to save pieces of paper with blank sides for "scrap." But as the school year progressed, desks began to bulge with the hoarded scrap paper. Our teacher began to insist that papers with even a few square inches of blank space be saved for future use. By November, she refused to allow anything to be put in the waste cans, not even used tissues. Eraser crumbs and pencil shavings had good second uses, she insisted. Her classroom became a recycling nightmare.

Mrs. McCarver had a thick head of hair, wavy and dyed red. She would often sit for minutes at a time at her desk, her furrowed brow resting in one palm while the other hand massaged the nape of her neck as we sat silently, awaiting instructions. Then she would suddenly leap to her feet and begin to accuse us of secretly using other waste cans in the building to dispose of perfectly good paper, and of conspiring against her. That's when the school board stepped in.

It did not take Miss Goldstein long to figure out that Mrs. Macarber's madness might have been hastened by her pupils. She found them to be spoiled, unruly and incorrigible, but that made them no different than any other sixth-graders. What bothered her most was an eerie sense that these students were much worse; that what flowed in her classroom was an undercurrent of cruelty.

Bronxville Days, Part 5

Building stuff. Sleeping out. These were our responses to boredom. Sometimes we would even build stuff to sleep in. We'd find large cardboard appliance boxes, tape them together, cut windows and doors in them, attach old sheets as awnings, then drag our sleeping bags into the makeshift mansion for the night.

Although the front yard with its rose and tulip beds was off-limits to us kids, my parents allowed us to do as we pleased in our back yard, which was not visible from the street. There we dug underground forts, built huge, unfloatable rafts and assembled rockets from cardboard storage barrels. I built a shack from old doors and sheets of plywood, covered it in tar paper to keep out the rain, and painted a skull and crossbones above the entrance. An extension cord from the garage provided electricity for a light and a radio. It was the perfect clubhouse and a place to camp out at any time of year, but it didn't last long.

One night in early March, four of us were spending the night in the shed. My father came out to say goodnight and told us to quiet down and not to leave the shed. But we did anyway. It was a mild night, but snow still covered the ground. We walked toward town, then climbed a hill and started lobbing snowballs toward passing cars below. The snowballs weren't having much effect, so we packed them hard and added gravel. One of the missiles scored a direct hit on a driver's-side door, and the car braked to a stop. We ran laughing back into the woods for a few minutes, then emerged again and resumed our assault.

Suddenly, something grabbed the collar of my coat, and I was yanked to my feet. The driver had stopped his car, then circled around and crept up into the woods and caught Jimmy Paulus and I by the scruff of our necks. The other two kids took off like startled fawns. The man dragged us down the hill and put us into the backseat of his Rambler station wagon, along with his own wide-eyed, terrified children. He made us tell him where we lived, then drove us to our houses, called out our parents and told them what we'd done.

The punishment I received was severe and wide-ranging. I was forced to rat out my fleet-footed friends. I was deprived of allowance and television and sleeping out for months. Worst of all, I was ordered to tear down the shack.

You'd think that would have been enough to teach me never to deceive my parents or do something really stupid like that again, but I was, regrettably, a slow learner.

Bronxville Days, Part 4

My mother held a match to the wine cork, which blackened and released a thin stream of dark, aromatic smoke. She held the cork until the black area cooled, then gripped my chin firmly, drew a mustache across my lip, darkened my eyebrows and added long sideburns.
"There you go, my little Mexican man," she said.

Fixing a sombrero on my head and draping a serape around my shoulders, she said, "You keep bundled up tonight, it's cold out there."
She put her hands on my shoulders and held me still for a moment, contemplating her creation.
"You're getting to be such a big boy. This stuff wouldn't even fit you last year. And I guess this will be your last trick-or-treat. You'll be too old for this next year."

The doorbell rang and I bounded downstairs. "You wait for your sister!" she yelled after me. "Aw, Ma, she's 8 years old, she can go herself," I said, but I knew it was of no use.
Jimmy was at the door, dressed as a Texas Ranger. Behind him stood two smaller children, one in a white sheet with holes cut for eyes, the other in a box with a cardboard disk for a hat – Speedy Alka Seltzer. "Sorry," Jimmy said. "My mom made me take them along.
My mother handed us brown paper grocery bags, and, kissing my sister on the forehead said, "Don't take this scarf off and stick close to your brother, and don't eat all the candy before you get home."

It was just after 6 o'clock, Monday, Oct. 31, 1960. A sliver of golden moon hung in the black sky. We shuffled down the walk, marched under the streetlight at the corner of Millard and Ellison and passed into the darkness, stumbling on the sidewalk, the cracks and buckled concrete reaching up to catch the toes of our shoes. We bounced like moths from lighted porch to lighted porch, shivering in the consuming black of night between them. Gusts of wind sent dry maple leaves skittering across the street like frightened animals and fanned an eerie red glow in piles of leaf ash at the curb. The obscure shapes of other children, their voices wafting on the breeze, passed us on the opposite side of the street.

We clambered up steps and rang bells and waited in the flickering orange light of jack-o-lanterns. Muffled noises, homey sounds of television, creaking floors and barking dogs came through the doors, which swung open, emitting the different smells of people's suppers. A woman held a bowl of Baby Ruths before us. Wait, she said. Let me guess who you are. She knew us all except Tommy Gagan, who had caught up with us along the avenue, wrapped from head to toe in strips of sheets like a mummy.

At another house, on a lonely stretch of Birchbrook Road, an old man extended a basket of apples in one hand and a bowl of pennies in the other. "Take a big handful," he urged. "Go on, dig in." Copper rained in our paper bags. We sauntered down the middle of the road, munching the apples and tossing the cores into the woods.

Halloween would never be the same after that night. For me, the spooky magic would be gone, replaced by mischief and hoarding from the candy mine of the Hotel Gramatan. And it wasn't too many years later that Halloween was ruined, buy sick people putting needles in candy bars and razor blades in apples, and by municipalities that replaced trick-or-treat with parties held not on Oct. 31 but on whatever day seemed convenient to adults, and by the adults who hijacked the simple observance and made it an opportunity to party.

Bronxville Days, Part 3

Maybe you've experimented with Google Earth on your computer. You type in an address and you zoom in from space to the exact spot on the planet you've selected and see it - perhaps the neighborhood of your youth – as a bird would, or more accurately, as a satellite does.

And so I visit our old house, at the corner of Millard and Ellison. The house and the whole neighborhood look pretty much as they did 50 years ago, except for the giant highway that now slashes through what used to be our wilderness to the east. I trace the streets along which I used to pedal my bike, past Public School No. 8, past the stationery store where we used to spend our money on Three Musketeers bars and baseball cards and Mad Magazines, past Gristede's Grocery, where we bought the white beans for our pea shooters, down onto Palmer Avenue, across from Sarah Lawrence College, where all those barefoot beatnik girls studied, and on to the Bronx River.
Surely, my parents must have been aware of how far I went on my bicycle, and which roads and busy intersections I crossed – without a helmet, I might add, as there were no such things in those days – on my way to town some two miles distant.

The river – more of a creek, really - was damned a few hundred yards upstream, and the pond was where my friends and I with bamboo poles fished on lazy summer days for bluegills and catfish.

I can smell it now, that memory: pond water, fish slime and earthworms. I can almost feel the sun on my shoulders, picture my scabby knees, watch my child hands, black under the fingernails, baiting the hook. I hear the rush of water over the dam, the barking of dogs taken for walks, the whoosh of cars on the nearby parkway.
This was happiness defined, being 9 or 10 years old and to have all this place as a playground, and to be without worry and fear, and to be so far removed from the ugly realities of life.

Bronxville Days, Part 2

Children do not invent bad behavior; they learn it from older kids. And we had our share of bad influences in the neighborhood.

Some of the tricks we learned were relatively harmless, like the Jar of Death. If you happened to have a really bad case of rotten-egg farts, we learned from Billy Higgins that you could capture and store one indefinitely in a tightly sealed peanut butter jar. The Jar of Death could then be taken to an appropriate event, like a birthday party, where its effect could be best appreciated.

Other stunts were downright stupid and dangerous. I knew better than to imitate two older boys who liked to stalk each other around the neighborhood with bows and arrows. The arrows had target tips but were still capable of penetrating flesh, which they did on at least one occasion, the victim proudly displaying his wound to all who would look.
I foolishly learned and practiced another stunt, though. In winter, when the streets were covered in snow and oil delivery to homes frequent, we would sneak behind a fuel truck as it was leaving a driveway and grab hold of the back bumper and slide down the street of the soles of our boots.

Older kids would visit the city and buy firecrackers in Chinatown. They'd set off whole packs of these. One day Jimmy Paulus and I found several unexploded crackers and decided to put one into a hollowed-out tree stump with some toy soldiers and light it and see what happened. We did, and ran a few yards away and waited, and nothing happened. So Jimmy went back to the stump and looked in, and that's when it exploded.
Something flew into his eye. The next day, it was still red and his vision blurry, so he had to tell his Mom. His eye was permanently damaged. He had to get glasses.

We were just 9 years old. You could say that we didn't know any better. But we did, and I'll never forget the shame, the guilt and remorse of that incident. My parents didn't punish me. They knew it wasn't necessary. A lesson was learned, and for Jimmy, it was the hard way.

Bronxville Days, Part 1

We didn’t actually live in Bronxville, N.Y. We had a Bronxville mailing address, but the town itself was just one square mile, and the people who lived in that square - "Bronxville Proper," they called it - were either rich or old, or both. Bronxville was where our fathers got on the train to go to work in New York City. It was where we went to church: Episcopal, Congregational, Catholic or Dutch Reformed, your choice. It was where we went to the movies, and to buy model cars, and to eat banana splits and to ride our decorated bikes in the Memorial Day parade, and, if we weren't so lucky, to the hospital.

There was a tall building in the center of town – the Hotel Gramatan. It was where all the rich widows lived. It was a great place to go trick-or-treating. You could see the sign atop the hotel - made from red light bulbs - for miles. One night some teenagers got up on the roof and knocked out some of the lights so that the sign read, “HOT GRAMA.” I remember my mother telling a friend how hilarious that was, and then catching me eavesdropping, changed her mind and called it disgraceful vandalism.

Before moving to Bronxville, we had been Catholics. Back in West Haven, Conn., I remember going to classes taught by terrifying nuns. I don’t remember much about it, other than being told by them that someone named “Mary” was my real mother. I deduced from this that that woman in my house who raised me, “Irene” as she was called by others, was a fraud.

Anyway, for some reason when we moved to Bronxville, or near it, we didn’t go to the Catholic church but rather the big, fancy Episcopal one. In my twisted 9-year-old brain, I figured that we had been promoted.

I’ll never forget the humiliation my parents put me through in that church. I had worn my good shoes to school on Friday and changed into my gym shoes, then forgot to change back and left my good shoes in my locker at school.
“Get dressed for church, young man,” I was told Sunday morning. “But I can’t go to church today because I left my good shoes in my locker.”
The parents were tired of this excuse. “Then you’ll go in your sneakers,” they said.
I was inordinately fashion-conscious for a boy my age. The idea of dressing in a gray flannel suit and filthy high-top white Keds was repulsive.
They dragged me to church. I felt like a clown. I was mortified.
I never forgot my good shoes at school again.

A new story

Sunday was one of those rare occasions when I found myself with nothing to do. No unfinished projects to resume, no repairs to make around the house, no work in the yard to be done until the cool of the evening. The grass had been cut, the tailgate latch on the pickup truck repaired, a fresh batch of pesto prepared. Nothing left to do but sit and think, and to let the mind go back half a century and recall how a 9-year-old boy handled his idle time, inventively staving off boredom but often getting into mischief in the process.

Back then, we lived in a safe neighborhood that crawled with kids. In summer, particularly, we were wild from dawn to dusk, shooed from our houses by mothers too busy to plan our leisure time for us.
Did our parents think that we were always playing within a few block of home, or were they aware that our kid universe was much larger, the boundaries being as far as we could pedal our bicycles in half a day?

From age 9 to 12, I tested the boundaries of our neighborhood and of my parents’ patience. I did what all kids do, and what all kids shouldn’t do, and in the process, lost my innocence. It was a time of wonder and discovery. And then, it all ended rather suddenly, when our family moved north 20 miles to a neighborhood with no children, and I was alone. And after a year, I was sent off to boarding school, and a whole different universe of experiences.

So, this new series is about those last years of childhood, when our perception of the world around us begins to change. As always, please feel free to comment about your own experiences at this age.
We’ll call this one “Bronxville Days.” It starts tomorrow.