Three short pieces on this page. For longer stories click on A Fable or It's About Time or A Husband or An Outpost of Fiction or Gold in the Streets or Brother Roach
Driving east at twilight, traffic on the bridge suddenly jams up, slows, crawls a few feet and then stops in both directions. Two long strings of motionless vehicles stretch out on the narrow causeway, pricking the gathering dusk with white and red. As the sun slides into the sea, bridge lights open like night-blooming flowers, bathing the line in a yellow glow. Car lights wink out, a chain of fireflies retiring for the night. Men and women open their car doors, step out and stretch, reach up for the swiftly-moving clouds. Others lean on the railing, contemplating the dark green water. The wind rises and plucks whitecaps from the waves, as they ride towards the distant shore of the bay. Voices call to one another, blending with the queries of the seagulls.
Wait. Darkness grows and the human voices are subdued, a quiet drone beneath the slap of the waves. A woman at the railing turns to watch the light fading in the west, her white skirt dancing with the breeze. As the night thickens, each separate voice speaks, then closes in reverent silence.
Sleep. The clouds above turn gray, then as black as the surrounding night. Only a soft yellow nimbus marks where the bridge dreams with its cargo, rising and falling with the slow ancient pulse of the waves. A single beacon on the opposite shore is all that remains of human time.
After an eternity, a red light stabs the far end of the bridge and a siren keens across the dark world. Metal crunches as doors slam, engines growl, arcs of white spring out to lacerate the soft glow. Cars inch closer together, a shuddering beast contracting itself before a leap forward. The solitary woman climbs over the railing and jumps far out into the water. The waves unleash a spray of white foam.
This Sunday afternoon, as I write an appointment in my desk calendar, I see in small print in one of the boxes that T.S.Eliot was born in 1888 on this day in September. I feel a small shock of surprise, for he was alive when I was in college, and yet the calendar reminds me he was born in the Victorian era. And then I remember that I am sixty-one, probably as old now as Eliot was when he came to my college to read.
For the next couple of hours, as I finish various tasks, I mutter to myself some well-loved phrases. “Let us go then, you and I..." and "like a patient, etherized upon a table." In so many ways those lines begin, for me, the modern era in poetry -- the opening invitation to visit a life which has failed, so different from the poets of a generation earlier, who still hoped, still struggled with large views. And the famous opening image, grotesque and smelling of death. A quick calculation and I realize Eliot came to this voice at the time of the first World War. No wonder...
Suddenly I remember when I gave Saul for his birthday the recording of T.S.Eliot reading “Prufrock and Other Observations.” I was perhaps fifteen -- no, younger, because he and Ann had already separated by the time I was fifteen. Probably I was thirteen, when we were living outside Cambridge and he was in the graduate school of English at Harvard.
I suspect it was my mother who implanted the idea that I give my stepfather a birthday present. It was difficult for her that we didn't get along, and she hoped that a gift from me, especially one which showed I recognized his tastes, would help smooth things over, might establish us in an adult relationship, when we had so painfully failed as father and son.
I was excited to find the record. It was the beginning of that era in the 1950's when poets recorded their work on long-playing discs. Dylan Thomas was the most famous and I had been proud of the fact that I avoided the popular choice, knowing that for my stepfather and his friends, Thomas was not a poet in the same exalted rank as Eliot.
I stood in front of Saul as he unwrapped my present, eager for his praise. His face twisted as he looked the record jacket and he said "I was hoping it would be the Four Quartets." I felt humiliated, felt that I was supposed to know that Prufrock was passé, that the Four Quartets was the correct choice. Yet, how could I know? I hadn't read Eliot, I had only heard the name around the table when Saul and his friends discussed literature. My face burned. "Well, thank you anyway," he added, dimly aware from my mother's stunned silence that he had hurt me. I turned away and determined that I would not try again to reach out.
We begin life in a sea of hope, borne by dreams. Until human voices wake us, and we drown.
Lying in bed in the mornings, awakening slowly, I remember fragments from childhood.
My mother sang this rhyme to me, long after we had left England, because it included all the bells in the East End of London, where I was born.
I was a Cockney, she explained, because I had been born within the sound of Bow Bells.
Before the German blitz renovated the area, my street was in a slum called Mile End.
The only photograph I have from that time shows a decaying brick building, and myself, dressed in a one-piece tank suit, sitting on a deep windowsill about three feet off the ground.
I am perhaps 3 years old. My grandmother stands beside me, already stout as I remember her from later years. I smile also, my bare legs hanging free.
I don't remember anything from Fuller Street. My mother told me later it was filled with immigrant Jews. Her own mother had arrived in England before the First World War, escaping the pogroms which were sweeping Poland. She had married a carpenter from Cracow, another refugee, and they had set up an Orthodox household. My mother was born first, in 1915, followed by two boys and another girl.
Another photograph, my mother at the beach with friends. Posing for the camera, a line of girls all dressed in identical dark one-piece bathing suits. My mother has the high forehead which I inherited, her long fine hair spun out wildly around her head. She looks happy, shy yet eager. A couple of years after that photograph, she leaves school. Her tale to me later was that she had a scholarship to University, but the family was so poor that they required her income. By that time her father had died (of asthma, in his forties) and the family was on the dole.
In addition to office work, she threw herself into the political ferment of the era. Working for the Communist Party, she met my father. He was an organizer, an orator already well known on street corners. Unlike many of the CP leaders, he was working-class. His mother was a charwoman and his father a tram driver. They lived in poverty similar to my mother's.
My grandmother indulged my father when he was courting my mother, feeding him fish and chips, and rhubarb (I inherited the passion for both). Yet when they married in 1937, she refused to see him or her daughter, because he wasn't Jewish.
Then I came along in June, 1939, and Grandma softened. I was the first grandchild, and a sweet boy who charmed her. By then she was living with her remaining children in a house in Edgeware, northwest London. When the war started in September, she took in myself and my mother. My father went into the army, as did my two uncles.
My mother and my aunt worked for the war effort and were gone a lot. I have no memories of either of them during that time. I remember sitting in the kitchen during the evenings, watching my grandmother play solitaire (she called it Patience) and warming myself by the Franklin stove. That's how we passed the war years.