Burning the Days Read Free Page A

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    In old age, widowed, Sylvia went mad. In her daughter’s house she would rise in the middle of every night to pack, and in the end got on a train alone at three in the morning. She was settled afterwards in a small apartment but people were robbing her there, she complained. A woman had gotten in and stolen everything, her money, checkbook, keys. She had once again called the police.
    “How did she get in?” my mother asked.
    “She got in.”
    “But the door was locked and just had a new lock put on.”
    “She came through the ceiling,” Sylvia explained calmly, “the thieving whore.”
    The money and keys were found stuffed under a sofa, together with underclothes. The checkbook was wedged behind the back leg of a chest.
    They went walking for an hour afterwards. Sylvia was calm and lucid. She had the vast patience of the insane. Her daughter refused to look after her. Her sisters, by means of long bus rides, took over the task.
    ——
    We lived in New York from the time I was two years old, first in a rented room in some woman’s apartment on Ninety-eighth Street, then a few blocks away in our own apartment on West End Avenue, a wide, faceless street of middle-class families. My father had built some houses, without much profit, in New Jersey. In New York his ambition found its place.
    In the city that first took shape for me there were large apartment buildings stretching as far as one could see in either direction. On the side streets were private houses, many of which had been divided into rooms. Along Riverside Drive stood unspoiled mansions, stranded, as if waiting for aged patriarchs to die. In thebleak back courtyards men with grinding wheels sometimes still appeared, ringing a bell and calling up to housewives or kitchen maids for knives and scissors to sharpen. Nature meant the trees and narrow park along the river, and perhaps one of the rare snowstorms, with traffic in the streets dying and the silence of the world wrapping around. Newsboys, so-called though they were men, often walked along late in the day shouting something over and over, Extra! Extra!, someone murdered, something collapsed or sunk. A block away, around the corner, the police suddenly formed in front of a brownstone and sealed off the street expecting a gun-fight with a famous criminal they had cornered, Two-Gun Crowley.
    Still, I was allowed to walk to school alone, beginning with the first or second grade, and to play outside afterwards. The classrooms were presided over by invincible white-haired women: Miss Quigley—perhaps it was she who taught me to read—Miss McGinley.
    We sat in rows according to merit, the best pupils in front. Marks were given monthly in both schoolwork and conduct. We were made, a little later, to stand and recite poems from memory. A kind of anthology was thus provided and from it one learned the heroic language.
    Much of childhood remains everlastingly clear, the first telephone number, the name (Tony) of the feared elevator man, the pure sound—when I lay in bed bored and sick—of the key in the apartment door, which meant my mother was returning at last with the book, mostly pictures, I so wanted.
    Looking back, it can be seen that my life was an obedient one. I was close to my parents and in awe of my teachers. I had no crude or delinquent companions. The tyrannical doormen, Irish and Italian, together with the superintendents, undershirted men with strange accents, were my only enemies. There was no heaven but there was a nether region with dark basement corridors and full ashcans where I feared to go. I was a city child, pale, cared for, unaware.
    ——
    I barely remember that first apartment, in which we lived for years. The streets outside are clearer to me, the children’s group I was enrolled in, run by a young woman whose pleasant features I cannot quite make out and who was called Mademoiselle, the friend named Junior who lived in what I could see were lesser circumstances on