Catharine Brody, "A New York Childhood," The American Mercury: A Monthly Review, v. XIV, no. 53, (May 1928): 57-65.

A NEW YORK CHILDHOOD

In spite of the cliché, there is no dearth of New Yorkers whose earliest memories are set in the midst of the city. But they seem to lack articulateness, and not only are there few records of a flavor recognizable by one who spent a not too long ago childhood in New York, but those few are invariably devoted to the doings of boys. One would never guess that there were also girls on the streets of New York twenty years ago, and that they, too, remember the songs they sang and the games they played.

To have the true flavor, one's early years must have been spent in close communion with the metropolitan sidewalks. Otherwise, I suppose, one might as well have been brought up in Chicago or Dubuque or on Main Street. And it was among the lower middle class, on the unfashionable East or the unfashionable West Side, that the sidewalks permeated most fully the lives of the children. The streets were the true homes of the small guineas, micks and sheenies, the small Italians, Irish and Jews, the only classifications that seemed apparent at that time. Sweets tasted better in the streets; a new dress waited for the verdict of the streets; a beating or a scolding faded in the noise of all the beatings and scoldings audible and visible through the many open windows on the streets.

Though there were insuperable obstacles of caste and religion to home visits between the three classes, in the streets they all met on fairly equal terms. Visiting the houses of friends was not a procedure in good taste, anyhow. It was even fraught with peril. The best plan was to go into the back-yard or stand on the front side-walk, depending on the location of a friend's house, and there holler lustily--not that this method itself lacked danger, for too prolonged shouts might bring a rain of mimicry and comment from neighboring windows and, once in a while, a rain of water! If all else failed, one could take extreme measures and face the unknown terrors of the girl friend's stairs. A timid rap on the door that closed off a generally mysterious domicile, a breathless murmur, "I want Jennie (or Mary, or Annunciata)," with the quick defensive addenda, "She told me to come for her."

Sometimes Jennie or Mary or Annunciata would be ushered out. Sometimes Jennie or Mary or Annunciata would sneak out, after an argument about dishes and babies and such things, clearly audible, if not always comprehensible. Sometimes the door would slam in one's face without further parley. But there was no such thing as gathering or playing in the house. One friend, indeed, I remember whose mother would permit us to play in the dining-room-parlor, among shadowy, draped plush furniture. But this friend's mother had been born in America and spoke English without an accent. To this day I have not got over my twinge of surprise at meeting a mother who spoke English perfectly.

Children who play on the streets have to take as full cognizance of the weather and the season of the year in their games as country children. We had no barns for rainy days, but we had dozens of hallways to play tag in. City snow seldom lasts long enough for sleighing and snowballing, but, on the other hand, we could roller-skate all the year round. If we could not throw [end page 57] snowballs, we could, on Hallowe'en [sic], watch our chance to chalk the backs of passersby with colored chalks. If we could not give dramatic performances in barns, we could, on Thanksgiving, dress in grown-up clothes and go up and down tenement-house stairs knocking at one door after another for pennies. We could not go into the woods hunting for the first violets, but on the day that the sidewalks bloomed with the chalked boxes and numbers of "potsies," on that day we knew that Spring had come.

II

Potsies, as I learned long after, since we never heard it called by any other name, is the New York version of hopscotch. The regulation hopscotch game requires a large, square box, marked on the sidewalk with chalk, and subdivided into six or nine parts. The object is not so much to throw the counter-a bit of wood or tin-into each part successively (this is easy) as to make the circuit of the parts on one foot, without touching the chalk-lines, and to skip over, still on one foot, boxes which others have won by their agility. But our game was a straggling performance of three pairs of twin boxes, connected by two central boxes. The field Jay long on the sidewalk instead of being square, and the feat was not only to hop on one foot, and, in time, to skip the preempted boxes, but to throw the potsy into the space free of chalk-lines in each box. As the boxes were much farther apart than in the square game, this required no mean skill.

Furthermore, we had to make the throwing and skipping circuit twice, nor could we choose any box for our own, as in hopscotch. We stood some distance away and threw the potsy over our heads into space. If it hit a box within the chalk-lines, that was our box. If not, we were out, and had to repeat the process next chance. So much depended on the potsy, on its being flat enough, heavy enough, but not too heavy, that it was carefully hoarded. The best potsy was a piece of tin box pressed double by many fingers and stamped flat by many heels.

When one was six or eight and fond parents would not trust one to the traffic: with roller-skates, and one was bored with jacks, which is a sedentary game, potsies formed the mainstay of the afternoon and evening. Ring games and "London Bridge is Falling Down" were all very well for little children, but potsies could be played well on to the eleventh year, for it was a game at once of chance and of skill and strength, and no mere hop, skip and jump. It had advantages over skipping (jumping, we always said) rope. One could mind the current baby in its carriage by the stoop and still play potsies, One could, after strict injunctions to playmates, run an errand to the corner grocer for one's mother and still keep a place in the game.

Just before supper, which was any time the men of the family came home from work, a hail of bread and butter for the potsy players would descend from the windows and strike the heads of those nuisances of passersby who were always erasing the chalk-marks with their clumsy footsteps. A rain of bread and butter in pieces of newspaper, and sometimes pennies, screwed very tight in paper jackets.

We would often go up to supper with hands and arms decorated by what looked like the tattooing of prizefighters and other such celebrities. These tattooings were made with thin pictures, drawn on a system of dots and colored. The boys may have collected them. They probably came with cigars. From time to time we would manage to get some of them from brothers, and the proper thing to do was to spread the picture on one's hand, face down, moisten the back with the tongue or a few drops of water, and then rub it evenly. The tattoo-pictures would resist soap and water for a long time. Furthermore, they held the spice of danger. We always thought the colors might give us blood poisoning. [end page 58]

After supper, and after lessons were done, came the evening instalment of playtime, when the fortunate children ran down to the streets with pennies coaxed from the grown-ups. Then, if it were late Spring or Summer, each house, but more particularly the Italian and the Jewish houses, spilled its profusion of life into the streets-through the windows, from which matrons hung their fat breasts; on to the stoop railings, which were festooned with children; to the edge of the pavement cluttered with kitchen chairs and coveys of women; to the corners of the street decorated with soda-water stands under gas-jets and knots of serely bearded elders. Each house was flanked by garbage-cans which spilled their profusions in the same way--rotting profusions of reds and grays and yellows and blacks.

Here and there the Gentile houses stood aloof, of depressing red and brownstone smelting unaired rather than putrid, hushed behind their dingy curtains, hushed in their arid entrances, dark as midnight And here and there a saloon glared among them. Few sat before the Gentile houses and even the garbage-cans clustered at their sides were characteristically devoid of color and filled only with the dullness of gray ash.

Trolley cars clanked and there was the swish of whips, the clump-clump of plodding horses, a gabble of languages. But the little girls' ears retained none of the noise their noses none of the odors of rotting, their eyes only the fairness and easiness of the sky as it covered the edges of the houses foggily, like a tender blanket. They had met their girl friends and were skipping up

the street, arms linked, pennies clutched. If they were very young, they were chanting over and over:

How the barber-shop came in I can't imagine, except that the pole before it, swimming red, white and blue, might have reminded one of red, white and blue candy

If the children were older, they would raise their voices thinly, half song, half wail, in a folksong, the tune of which had somehow come from the lands where they sing the "Violetera." It was a genuine folk-song, expressing their hopes and their ambitions, their customs and their manners-and also their pronunciation of English:

A nickel was untold wealth and generally acquired according to the song's frank admission. But there were many things to buy for a penny, the regulation tenement-house allowance. In my day, there were square, flaky slices of halivah, which, unless you have tasted it, is indescribable. There were colored bricks of ice-cream between wafers. There were penny glasses of colored, fizzy soda water at the corner stands. There were, best of all, penny slices of pineapple and watermelon, red and yellow-white, neatly ranged and uncovered to the air, at the corner booths.

These last, and the seltzer bottles and the bottles of cold beer, kept under the moist kitchen sink, and the lurid soda water (three cents' worth in a pitcher was enough for the whole family) were the true signs of Summer.

Suddenly, from some dim lane or side street would come a swelling hum which hushed the girls and sent them close together. Boys marched down the center of the roadway, six abreast, carrying sticks like guns, led by one who walked backward in front of the rows, and the hum, drowning all the other noises, rose in a bass chant royal:

With fervent orderliness they marched, hypnotizing each other with the swinging rhythm, leaping apart now for a wagon, [end page 59] now for a street car, coming together again, happy when they traversed a foot or two of uninterrupted space. The girls stood close together, watchful. One of their instinctive fears was of the gangs, boys in the aggregate, all boys who were not brothers. The boys would chase them just for the fun of chasing them and frightening them; the boys stopped them on their way to school, stole their pencil boxes, dumped their books into wet cellars. At any moment there might be a foray. There were sighs of relief when the squad marched on.

The evening often ended with a "mad." Tenement-house children have tricky, sensitive tempers, and no old-time social dignitary could be more alive to matters of etiquette. If a girl called for one day, one had to call for her the next. If certain girls accompanied one home another day, one had to accompany them home the next. Otherwise there was a mad. Getting "glad" again called for a vast outlay of tact, since, while both parties might be anxious to become glad, neither would make the first overtures. Sometimes the question of who would speak to whom first was decided by the old rhyme of "Eeny, meeny, meini, mo."

But we had found a better way. The mad parties lost their names and became A and B, thus protecting their pride by a supposed anonymity in case of rebuff. An intermediary would approach A and ask: "If B speaks to A, will A speak to B?"A would. Then she would approach B and ask, "If A speaks to B, will B speak to A? B would.

That being settled satisfactorily, A and B would be dragged face to face, with chins stiffly tilted and countenances of stone, by the intermediary. At a signal, they would raise their voices-both, together, at one time!

Still, the arrangement had an inevitable flaw which the cleverer girls soon discovered. After both had spoken, the question of who should continue the conversation still hung over them.

III

In the country, among children of our stratum, the boys would have chores and the girls would have cook and sweep from an early age. With us, the boys were quite free, and almost the only duty that devolved upon the girls was minding the current baby. Perhaps among the very poor the to-do about Little Mothers may have been justified, but I do not remember that baby-tending was a laborious task to us.

The babies came in baby-carriages. We parked the carriages, generally at the edge of the sidewalk and placed kitchen chairs or footstools alongside. There, while the hot Summer sun lay on the pavements, we would spend long, chattering, comfortable afternoons practicing an art which seemed to go with baby-minding.

Who does not remember those sofa cushions with the red, red roses and blue, blue violets blooming on them, smooth and natural as life, at least in intention? We embroidered them. Chain stitch, filling, the long stitches, the outline stitch, the cross stitch-our talk bubbled with such technicalities, and they were as familiar to us as movie stars are to children now. Embroidering was so much a part of my childhood that I can't remember at what age a girl first came into possession of a hoop, a workbag (we had bags, not baskets) and the other appurtenances, nor when she was first started on a piece of practice cloth, embroidering home-made roses, outlined in pencil, or simply chain-stitching an unimportant bureau cover. Our industry was not the result of motherly urging and teaching. It seemed to grow naturally out of imitation of the older girls and of our friends. What knowledge somebody's sister passed on or some embroidery genius picked up was shared by all. We "learned" each other.

There were vogues in the art. Just before I grew old enough to embroider roses, older sisters had spent time and effort in collecting the leather flags of all nations [end page 60] that used to come with cigars, and in fastening them together to form round and square and diamond-shaped cushions. Shortly after my initiation, the violently colored sofa-cushions went somewhat out of style, and a passion for embroidering underwear in pastels descended on us and lasted for a long time. What with scallops and French knots, one undergarment would use up a whole bright embroidery season, which began when we left off coats and ended when we put on coats. We did not wear much of our handiwork. It was usually frightfully wilted and one washing sufficed to show up all the imperfections.

There may have been children of the very poor who scrubbed floors, washed dishes, and helped with the family laundry to exhaustion. But except for the baby-minding, a settled chore, and sometimes the dish-washing, the mothers of the lower middle class passed over their duties reluctantly. Sometimes their dislike of help came from a passion for perfection which as beyond a child's talents, and which they had no time to impart, but usually, I think, it was caused by a sub-conscious determination to save their children from the clutches of that drudgery into which they had themselves fallen. To have scrubbed a floor for one's mother was a boast. When one had been permitted to press a few clothes, one carried the performance down to the street as an accolade. We used to compare notes on the ages when we had been first permitted to wash our own long hair. It was like a symbol of maturity, a recognition of growing sense and responsibility.

We had mostly lived in parts of the city given over to Jews and to the Irish, but at one time we moved into Harlem, way down East, and I went to a school where every other nationality was sunk in a welter of Italian names. These Italian girls shattered all our preconceived notions of amusement, and disrupted the play world of myself and of such of my companions as were not themselves Italian. It was the day of ostrich and willow plumes. The Italian girls would come to school shedding bits of gray and white and black, mostly black, feather. They were very stupid in school, but it made no difference. They had those bits of feather, used in some mysterious cult, which they would not explain to us and from which we were forever debarred.

After school, sometimes, we would walk up First avenue and peep through the dirty windows of small stores or wait for their doors to open and allow us a glance at the interiors. A dark dust of feathers, a few far-away tables and shadowy hands moving swift and intricate amidst the soft plumes. Once an Italian girl showed us how to tic two bits of feather. Thereafter, the collection and tying of the scraps became a favorite game, but we could never be as magically skilful as any Italian girl who chose to lend a hand. Feather-tying, by some promulgation of fate, had been preempted by Italian girls, and the shops were fearful heavens, before which we could only linger a few minutes and look. It was a great shame.

They were a cagy lot-these Italian girls. Later on, I made the casual acquaintance of a barber's daughters, who took to disappearing of mornings into a cellar which belonged to the barber-shop. There were four or five daughters, some small and some half-grown, and all would disappear, laughing and chatting, down this cellar, which we were sure would make a pleasant playroom. Sometimes they would permit bosom friends, also Italian, to join them. We on the outside had been fairly intimate with the younger girls, but now the attitude of our former playmates was so aloof that we dared not even question.

Lunch would be carried down to the cellar by their mother. Usually the girls would reappear late in the afternoon, climbing up the cool, dark stairs and looking interestingly pale but happy. There was no way of peeping into the cellar from the front, and in the rear, the windows were separated from the adjoin- [end page 61] ing yards by a high board fence. One day, however, we were all on hand when the girls came out of the cellar, bearing straw hats covered with artificial flowers, and affording us just one stealthy look at a worktable strewn with straw and flowers. They were making flowers, perhaps making the hats, too, and so disgustingly clannish were they that they would keep the game in the family!

None of us had heard of child labor. If we had heard, the occupation of these Italian girls would probably have struck us with just so much more awe and envy.

IV

Most of our time was taken up by school, but schooldays, despite the songs, are the least fruitful in memories. The most interesting part of school was the buying of school supplies at the start of the terms. We all had a mania for possessing the choicest pencil boxes, the greatest store of pencils and erasers, the most expensive notebooks. Each season the small candy and stationery shops would overflow with children in the wildest state of excitement over their supplies.

Except for problems in simple arithmetic, how to read and how to write (though not by the Palmer Method, so piously trained into us), I have forgotten everything the schools ever taught me. But the glamour of the lady teachers, shining on the East Side world, I shall never forget. I see them now, all fused and molded into one symbolic figure, in dresses that seemed always delicate and gracefully silhouetted, in great puffed sleeves, with a neck that always seemed long and arched, with a pompadour that always seemed to make the forehead lofty and noble. The symbol sits enthroned on a dais-platform before a desk. I see her putting a gentle arm around the shoulders of one of the prettily dressed girls, and giving her a white note to take to a friend in another classroom. I see her with the record book, stumbling over the syllables of awkward foreign names, repeated over and over, for her benefit by suffering, red-faced little girls. She seldom remembered them. If she remembered as much as a dozen of the names and faces of the children in her enormous classes, she was good. And when they passed out of

her class, they passed entirely beyond recognition.

Once we trailed the symbol to her home. She lived nearby in a brownstone house with lace curtains at the window, a fitting frame for her ladylikeness. And one of the girls was rumored to have had the teacher in for dinner. But this girl had a pull; she was the daughter of a once well-known Tammany chieftain. We were thoroughly aware of the power of the pull. We knew that it was not alone this girl's simple linen dresses and smooth Buster Brown hair (in that day most of us wore hideous colored made-over serges, merinos, or, for best, white needlework, lawn, net, with thin hair tightly braided and knotted with sleazy ribbons) that made her career an easy one of note-bearing and skipping classes and high marks and heading lines and being monitor. And we knew that it was certainly not her brains.

There were all sorts of clans and boundaries in school, not only of religion and nationality, but also based on pull, on the work one's father did, on the presents one could afford to give the teacher for Christmas. There is no more suffocating sense of inferiority than to come to school on the day before Christmas with a paper Christmas bell, bought for a nickel which has been sneaked from determinedly anti-Christmas parents, when other girls are bearing presents of handkerchiefs and perfume for the teacher. To do them justice, most teachers discouraged this gift-bearing, but it persists to this day, if in a more sophisticated form. We were not sophisticated, and we handed up the presents, one by one, flushing before the Presence and practically weeping with delight at her smile. And if a present were not worthy, what a guilty side-thrust, what a furtive glance of apprehension, what an agony of [end page 62] shame! Sometimes there were anxiously awaited surprises. Would the narrow closet where Teacher kept her hat and coat open to disclose standard boxes of hard candy and candy canes for each girl in the class?

There was another standard in the schools given over to the daughters of immigrants which had more justification. The chief thing, beyond all marks and studies, was to be clean and to have a clean head. It was a praiseworthy idea, but engineered with such lack of tact as to bring torture and tears to children penalized for the ignorance of their parents.

Nurse's day to inspect teeth and throats, but chiefly heads, came purposely at irregular intervals. The children would be droning their lessons, and there would be a hush and nurse would enter, cold, white, and detached to the children, though teacher, having nothing to fear, chatted with her pleasantly enough, All the children but the few bounded by certainty would turn their faces, silent and tense, to the white presence, and the insides of the little immigrants' daughters would begin to slide--slide--, their brows to wrinkle and their eyes to burn with the humiliation that might come.

Teacher called the roll, and the children marched up to the nurse in groups of five, before the whole class. If a child was clean, the nurse smiled and the child skipped to her seat. if not, the nurse shook her head, sometimes pursed her lips and sighed, Then even the boldest walked to her seat, bowed with eyes filmed at a humiliation which a child had to depend on others to avert, but which she, in herself, had to suffer. The class was supposed to study, but it heard every whisper, noted every hot check. Then these outcast children had to move their books to the back rows of desks where they sat in Coventry till the next nurse's inspection. And at recess they fell to the end of line.

It was all a highly necessary procedure. There was less excuse for the music and drawing lessons. The very mention of these hours recalls a fog of utter bewilderment and fatigue, horrid fat black notes without rhyme or meaning, staggering over the blackboards and over our notebooks; boxes, hideous small paper boxes that had something attached to them known as shadow and perspective; eternal oranges, with eternal state biscuits set beside them, and bowls whose tops were, for some ungodly reason, supposed to form ellipses at certain angles.

The music lessons had no connection with music-any more than the drawing lessons had any connection with the graphic arts. They were really singing lessons, and, in my day, the theory was that if you stood a child up in front of a class of thirty-odd snickering girls, with the incomprehensible black notes in front of her, that child would learn to sing in tune in spite of a naturally insignificant voice and an ear unused to music. Nor could we fake as in the other lessons. In the lower grades the regular teacher, who was a sort of maid-of-all-work, taught music and usually disliked the hour as much as we did. In consequence, the lessons effectively stopped many of us from taking the slightest interest in music for years to come.

When I went to high school, however, we worked out a fine method of defense against being taught to sing. The piano of the music-room effectively hid the teacher who played the accompaniment. Two large classes took their lesson at the same time in my high school, and naturally the teacher could not pay much attention to the individual girls. So, when a girl without a voice was called on to have her singing ability examined, she would simply stand with her mouth open, while a classmate more favored by nature performed in her stead. I guess we were supposed to learn how to read music, too, but only the girls who took piano or violin lessons outside ever learned that.

In high school our ingenuity also proved equal to the nuisance of the drawing [end page 63] lessons. We were healthy, growing girls and felt that our time would be much better spent in eating the good apples and biscuits, used as subject matter, than in drawing them. So, as soon as the instructor's back was turned, apples and biscuits would mysteriously vanish and keep on vanishing. We were taught how to print and how to make posters. Most of us forgot how to print and how to make posters with amazing promptitude.

A number of the high-schools were then just emerging from a chaos of classes on the upper floors of grammar-schools, and from old buildings downtown with nondescript classrooms that made a rigid discipline ineffective. It was a pleasant time. We learned how to jiggle that slack, curly schoolgirl giggle, rippling on and on into exhaustion, spreading over a classroom like an epidemic. We ate all through the classes, principally a weird sandwich, perfected by I do not know what generation of schoolgirls. It consisted of two rich chocolate biscuits of a special kind, enclosing one or two bars of milk chocolate of a special brand.

Best of all was the ride home from high school on the elevated at the rush hour. We were quite oblivious to the weary, immeasurably older people returning from work. The groups of schoolgirls insisted on standing on the platforms and were deaf to all efforts of the crowd, verbal and otherwise, to dislodge them. Against clerks and bookkeepers and salesmen and Italian laborers and factory girls they squeezed all together. They took deep breaths and shrieked Oh-Oh-Ohs whenever a new surge of the crowd pressed them still closer against the rails of the platform and the bosoms of the clerks. The train did indeed seem to them to be a schooner Plunging into the sea of the elevated tracks, between the overhanging shores of tenement-house windows and impromptu washings on iron fire-escapes. If they shut their eyes, they could almost feel the spray-that windy rush of motion as the train gathered speed. "Oo-ooh! We're packed like sardines!" And they began an intermittent giggle which lasted till they wiggled their various ways out at their stations.

The people in the train, who never looked it one another any more indeed that, do sardines flattened by machinery against each other in a tin box, all looked at these schoolgirls as with one eye. They looked at them with faint smiles like people trying to seize, before it dissolved in mist, a dream of which they now only wanted to remember that it had once been pleasant.

V

A metropolitan childhood would not be complete without the trips to Coney Island. There arc many accounts of visits to Coney Island, all with a note of falsity to the indigene, all written by people who nosed about the place, watching with detached eyes the spectacle of poverty in spangles. It is an altogether different matter to go to the Island from a tenement house, possessed of few or no standards of comparison; to go there in good faith and not to view the passing show with eyes alert for the amusing, the unpleasant and the pitiful elements of it. The synthetic amusements of Coney Island were expensive treats to us and accordingly prized and enjoyed. The beach itself was the place for a long-awaited holiday. One went to bathe and relax and eat lunch in the open. And one did so-whatever out-of-towners or slummers may think. After ritualistic preparation and in the face of fearful obstacles, one bathed and relaxed and ate lunch in the open.

On early Sunday mornings in Summer, when the light was lucid and the air still held a hint of refreshment, steps woke the pavements from delicatessen to grocer. These were the steps of women buying oranges and bananas and Wurst and ham and corned beef and crisp rolls with caraway seeds embedded in their points, and dill pickles and messes of stringy, cold sauerkraut, to make up into lunches. [end page 64] By the time the sun lay hot and exigent on the pavements, the steps were marching like an army, with bundles and suitcases to the elevated stations, the subways and the trolley lines, and the papers were prepared to count the crowds.

One was up and palpitating at dawn and trying to be calm in the face of the million untoward things that might happen to delay the party till the traffic crowds proved too arduous. An early start, a very early start, was important, And sometimes-most irrevocable of all accidents-there might be a block on the subway or the elevated; stations seething with people, no trains, nickels being returned, and men, women and children sadly walking home with their straw suitcases and paper bundles, to eat their Wurst and oranges in choking kitchens at home.

There was always a wait for relatives who had appointed to meet at a certain station. And no matter how early a party set forth, and no matter what transportation route it took, the crowds swarmed into the trains endlessly, using bundles and suitcases as battering rams, brought up short against foreign chests and unknown shirtwaisted bosoms. Plump arms that seemed to belong to no one in particular were tangled overhead in the straps like a forest of masts; children's heads were poked between legs, whimpering; white shoes were planted perilously. When the trains swayed, the tangled arms, planted feet and interchangeable bulk of bodies swayed as one, to this side and to that side. But the voices that screeched and chattered were many. "Oh-get off my corns!" "Wheee--packed like sardines!" "Phui-garlic!"

Many mouths smoked into other mouths and noses caught up the breath from other noses. Sweat fell like decadent dew and drenched armholes and foreheads, and women writhed in impossible spaces to wipe their children's noses. Held high in aching arms, babies yowled ferociously. Fights sprang up. And ever and again a bitter voice rose in complaint, carrying the crowd with it for a space, but at last stifled by the overwhelming docility of the crowd humor.

No matter how early one got to the Island, the lines outside the bathhouses gave one a sinking at the heart, especially the line at the Municipal Baths, a patient, tired file. There could not be room for more in this paradise, But after the crowds were released, after people had shaken themselves and expelled the air squeezed into them on the journey in a couple of long exhalations, they advanced with relentless hope in many directions.

There were private cottages whose owners rented out dressing and undressing privileges over the week-end for a quarter a head-and no waiting in line. Some relative always knew of such a cottage and led the way, past a parched park, the girls moaning that it was hot, that they were soaked, the men bowed under their suitcases, the children trying vainly to unwrinkle the moist, once starched needlework dresses.

The lower floor of the bungalow smelled like a sea-food shop. On one side, behind a curtain, the men undressed; on the other side, the women. There were hooks on the wall for clothes. On the porch, where some sodden bathing suits dried on the line and acted as a sort of coat-of-arms for the cottage, the party was reunited. The men wore faded, unbc1ted two-piece suits, the girls, dresses of black sateen just below their knees. Their hair, if pretty, was allowed to hang loose.

As they marched to the beach, as they drew near and sniffed of the chilled salt in the air, as they exposed themselves to the touch of a wide, burning sun, they gave little ahs and ohs of relaxation. And a child would be wrapped in astonishment at the number of little girls on the beach who were not little girls at all as you came closer but women with flowing curls and bare knees and short bathing dresses.

Not all of the party bathed at once. They took turns minding the old sweaters and the suitcases with the lunch, in a spot they had staked out for themselves. The [end page 65] yellow of the beach and the green of the sea were dotted with pinpoints of black like little flies, perched close together. And when a child lay down in the sand after shrieking tumbles in the water, she looked up at legs, bare, hairy legs and legs in dripping sneakers, that unceasing crossed over her feet, over her body, even over her face once in a while-an underbrush of legs. Lines of hairy legs, skinny legs, legs vigorous and muscled, trotting with the arms that belonged to the legs held on each other's shoulders against the blue sky, just trotting with absorption like a file of stallions, just kicking their limbs to one side and another for the sufficient joy of motion. Wet sand spattered against a drowsy face, eyes lidded by the heavy golden fingers of the sun, and the drowsy face was up, and crumbling balls of sand flew and prone figures roundabout sprang up and demanded to know why.

Then one sat dripping under a grown-up sweater and became replete with lunch, with the soda pop that fizzed in one so interestingly, with the mustached wienies that slid down so roundly. And when that was over, one stretched out, head on hands, and became replete with air and sun. The heads of the party touched feet outstretched above them; their feet touched heads outstretched below them, and the trotting people, the bull-like matrons with their broods, who insistently fought through the morass of heads and legs, were nuisances and treated as such. All about, lovers were lying close and prone on the ground and their friends were burying them, with many giggles, in warm sand, stacking the sand over their legs and backs, over their arms, heaping it over their bodies, till nothing but their heads close together showed, and they lay as rigidly patterned as Egyptian figures, so many effigies in sand.

It got harder to find clean sand, so many layers were pimpled with orange peel and bits of decayed bread. A late afternoon wind turned the grains into clammy, fine-ground stone. A grown-up had the bright idea, "Maybe we can beat the crowd; it's early yet. "

But it was always amazing how many people had had the same thought. The dressing-room in the cottage was littered with sand and wet where bathing suits had been wrung out. Women were rubbing the sand off their arms and bodies with damp towels. Stockings clung to half-wet feet, a girl sat and wept because she could not find her hat. Pins and rings had been stolen, and there was panting over corsets that simply would not lace, and the girls despaired of their hair and became friendly over lacings, and arms and throats showed red with sunburn.

On the return cars, everyone would be yelling, "Ouch, don't touch me! I'm burnt up!" These were open cars and each seat bulged with people. A child would have a glimpse of a street white with lights and black with men and women in serried, squirming, shrieking ranks. There was no time for the side-shows and the merry-go-rounds. It was essential to try to get home before the crowd, if home were to be reached without too much discomfort and at a reasonable hour.

The high sky twinkled its grouped planets sharply like the points of silver pencils. The car burst into song and moved and some wag shouted:

"All aboard for Canarsie!" (The lewd reputation of Canarsie at that time was something to snicker at.)

Then all the close-clasped lovers looked at one another and laughed with a loud excitement, unabashed, and the men alone crowed like salacious roosters, and the girls alone looked intently off into the distance.

The children had large eyes of surprise; and their little minds began to whirl like the dazzling carrousels as they swallowed everything, the sky and the stars, the songs and the calls, the unexpected laughter and the small smiles of constraint, the air that had made them sleepy and the sun under their skins-everything, for future digestion. [end page 65]