1.
Once, before I was born, he’d belonged to the IWW –
Industrial Workers of the World. Though he’d had to shift his allegiance
sometime in the 1920s from the Wobblies to the AFL (American Federation of
Labor) in order to work at Lackawanna Steel, never did my Hungarian step-grandfather swerve
from his vehement and profane conviction that workers – (by which he meant men,
and men like himself) – should manage and profit from the “means of
production.”
That my swaggering barely literate grandfather John
Bush could imagine that steel foundries might be managed by someone like
himself, or indeed John Bush himself, was ever a source of amusement to my
realistic-minded father (who belong to the UAW – United Auto Workers); but my
father did not “argue politics” with my grandfather who was profane,
short-tempered, and derisive.
He was called by my father, not exactly to his face,
“the Brush” – for Grandpa’s steel-colored whiskers did suggest a stiff brush
that stood out from his jaws. You would not want to disagree with this man
whose grin of bared, badly stained teeth was a terror to behold. It was told of
him that as a blacksmith John Bush had routinely struck resisting horses on
their noses with his fists to subdue them, when he was shoeing them; he was
that strong, and seemed to have no idea of the limits of his strength. He was
graceless, obtuse, obstinate; he was a serious drinker (whiskey, hard cider
drunk from a jug slung over his shoulder); he chewed (Mail Pouch) tobacco, and
smoked cigarettes which he rolled hiimself with a crude device that left
tobacco-crumbs scattered in his wake, always underfoot in my grandparents’
kitchen; he swung a sledgehammer in a mighty arc with a grunt and a
just-perceptible swelling of the veins and arteries in his neck. Beneath bib
overalls stiffened with dirt he wore long underwear of a gunmetal-gray color,
that showed filthy at his wrists. You did not want to think how filthy, how
stained, the rest of that long underwear was. He washed his (filthy) hands with
a special grainy gray soap, 20 Mule Team Borax. (My mother cautioned me never
to wash my hands with this soap, that contained tiny bits of grit – “It isn’t
for a girl’s hands.”) He smelled powerfully – his tobacco-breath, with a smell
of rotted teeth; his unwashed body, a palimpsest of sweats. Yet, unexpectedly,
John Bush was a handsome man. He had dark, thick, tufted eyebrows and thick
wiry hair. His eyes were very black “gypsy” eyes. His thick mustache dropped
over his lips, his beard flared to mid-chest. His torso resembled a barrel
filled with something heavy and unwieldy, like spikes. He spoke heavily
accented broken English with a particular sort of vehemence as if speech, the
very effort of speech, were a sort of ridiculous joke. And he could be playful;
he could joke. His laughter mimicked the bellows of his smithy – sudden,
expansive, loud. Though he seemed too blustering to be much aware of anyone or
anything else he had a way of noticing a child who has been holding back, or
hiding; for you could not hide from Grandpa Bush, ultimately. The Brush would
find you.
Many times my grandfather dragged his calloused
fingers through my curly hair, and laughed at my fear of him. He tickled my
sides – a sensation indistinguishable from pain. How funny, to make little
Joyce run away whimpering!
My grandfather was not an abuser of children. Rather,
he was indifferent to a child’s feelings. He did not take notice of a child as
he did not take notice of an animal; at the most, he was angered by an animal’s
obstinate behavior, as by the behavior of horses he’d been hired to shoe; or,
he was amused by animals, as by the strutting of Mr. Rooster.
Do I remember my grandfather twisting off the head of
a red-feathered chicken? One of the panicked clucking hens? If I shut my eyes I
can see this hellish scene and so, it is better not to shut my eyes. It is
wisest to look away, into the distance.
There is relief, that the rough fingers are gone. And
yet, there is a sick sort of fear, that the rough fingers are gone forever.
2.
“My mother
says...”
Obliquely, with a shy smile, Cynthia would approach
me with these words.
My mother says
if you want to, you can come for dinner anytime this week and stay for the
night.
So that, if Cynthia’s invitation were to be rebuffed,
however unlikely this possibility, it would not be her invitation in fact but
her mother’s that was rebuffed.
Staying at the night at a high school classmate’s
house was for me an experience fraught with awkwardness, yet one that could not
be declined. It was with a tremulou sort of pride that I told my mother of such
invitations for I knew that she would be happy for me, if perhaps apprehensive
as well. When I’d been invited to a birthday party at the home of another girl
friend whose affable father owned a small parts manufacturing company in
Buffalo, my normally good-natured father had said, with a frown, “They sound
like money people.”
Money people. I had never
heard this expression before, nor have I heard it since. How callow it sounded,
how mean-spirited! Though I loved my father I felt a twinge of embarrassment
that he should think in such terms, crudely and cruelly reducing the complexity
of my several close friendships with girls who, despite the financial status of
their parents, were not unlike myself in crucial ways.
Yet it was always evident to
me, as to my parents, that the distance between Millersport and the suburb of
Buffalo to which I was bussed for high school was far greater than eighteen
miles could suggest.
My life had been altered irrevocably when the Niagara
County school district made a decision after my ninth grade year at North Park
Junior High not to continue bussing a half-dozen students from northern Erie
County to Lockport public schools, though we all lived much closer to Lockport
than to Buffalo. At once, by fiat, this quirk
of fate, that had seemed devastating to me at the time, brought me from a
mediocre public school district to a superior one in an affluent Buffalo suburb
in which high school students were prepared for major universities and
colleges. In Lockport, high school drop-outs were common and virtually no one
went to college; there, my fate would have been hope for a scholarship to
Buffalo Teachers’ College where I could prepare to teach high school in a
public school district not unlike that of Lockport. Without having been
transferred to this superior school district I could not have made my way to
Syracuse University on a New York State Regents scholarship, and from there the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, where I met Raymond Smith whom I would
marry in 1961; I could never have made my circuitous way to Princeton
University, still less to a writing career of substance; it is highly unlikely
that I would be writing this memoir now.
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