You Are My Heart and Other Stories Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also by JAY NEUGEBOREN

  Dedication

  You Are My Heart

  Here or There

  A Missing Year: Letter To My Son

  Comfort

  The Debt

  Summer Afternoon

  Make-A-Wish

  Overseas

  The State of Israel

  The Turetzky Trio

  Lakewood, New Jersey

  Copyright Page

  Also by JAY NEUGEBOREN

  NOVELS

  Big Man (1966)

  Listen Ruben Fontanez (1968)

  Sam’s Legacy (1974)

  An Orphan’s Tale (1976)

  The Stolen Jew (1981)

  Before My Life Began (1985)

  Poli: A Mexican Boy in Early Texas (1989)

  1940 (2008)

  STORIES

  Corky’s Brother (1969)

  Don’t Worry About the Kids (1997)

  News from the New American Diaspora (2005)

  NON-FICTION

  Parentheses: An Autobiographical Journey (1970)

  The Story of STORY Magazine (Editor, 1980)

  Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival (1997)

  Transforming Madness: New Lives for People Living with Mental Illness (1999)

  Open Heart: A Patient’s Story of Life-Saving Medicine and

  Life-Giving Friendship (2003)

  The Hillside Diary and Other Writings (Editor, 2004)

  For Eli and Jennifer

  TWO DOLLAR RADIO is a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry.

  We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.

  You Are My Heart

  It took three of us to move the sewer cover once we’d pried it up. Then the question was—who was going to go below and get the ball. Everyone looked at me, and I shrugged as if it to say: No big deal. Back then I was the kind of guy my friends would brag about because I’d take just about any dare—jumping onto the tracks in a subway station and waiting until the last second, a train bearing down on me, before vaulting back onto the platform, or, taking a running start, leaping from one rooftop to another—the gaps ran from five to ten feet—of four-, five-, and six-story apartment buildings.

  This was 1953, in Brooklyn, and it was Olen Barksdale, my best friend that year, who volunteered to hold me upside down by the ankles. We were playing stickball in the P.S. 246 schoolyard on a cool Saturday afternoon in late October, and the sewer—a drain, really, that we used to mark third base—was one I’d been down before.

  Olen and I were on the Erasmus basketball team together—he was a senior and I was a junior—and he’d been Honorable Mention All-City the year before when we’d made it to the quarterfinals of the city championships at Madison Square Garden. Most days after practice we’d take turns walking each other home, and a few nights a week, when our homework was done, we’d meet and take walks along Flatbush Avenue, usually winding up in a cafeteria, Bickford’s or Garfield’s, where we’d talk about everything—not just basketball, but personal stuff: about our families, and girls we liked, and why I did the crazy things I did, and, most of all, about how much we wanted to get away from our homes, and what we’d do with our lives someday after college when we were on our own in the world.

  My dream, ever since I’d read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, was to become an architect. I was good at drawing and loved making model airplanes—I had a big collection of World War One and Two fighter planes—SPADs, Fokers, and Sopwith Camels; Messerschmitts, Flying Tigers, Spitfires, and Stukas—and not just the kind you carved from balsa wood, but the kind with rubber bands inside the fuselage, tail to propellor, that you wound up so that the planes would actually fly. You made the planes from what we called ‘formers’—thin, round or box-like pieces of balsa in which you cut slots with razor blades so you could install toothpick-like stringers and struts that gave shape to the planes, and over which you pinned tissue-thin Jap paper you glued down and painted with dope. I also spent a lot of time drawing imaginary houses, complete with floor plans, and during the previous year I’d begun making models of some of them.

  Olen’s dream was to become the first person in his family to go to college, after which he intended to play pro basketball while attending medical school. That way, when he retired from the pros he’d already be a doctor, like Ernie Vandeweghe of the Knicks, and could afford a house like those most of the doctors we went to had, where your family lived on the top floors and you had your office on the ground floor, and where, most of the time, your wife was your nurse or assistant.

  1953 was also the year I became the only white person singing in the choir at Olen’s church, The Barton African Methodist Episcopal Church, and this happened not because of what he did when he held me upside down in the sewer—though that had something to do with it—or because of any dare, but because of how much I came to love the music, and—more—because I fell in love with Olen’s sister Karen.

  Despite all my bravado, Olen knew I was pretty scared when I did the things I was famous for. He was a very quiet guy—I think I was the only guy at school, black or white, he’d ever exchanged more than a few sentences with—so that when I crawled over the edge of the sewer, belly first, and one of the guys yelled out “Geronimo!” and I pushed off, I was surprised to hear Olen call down to me that the sweat was making him lose his grip, and that rats in the sewers had a real thing for Jewish noses. Did I know about this Jewish kid, naked and blindfolded and with a huge erection, who ran full blast into a brick wall? “Yeah,” someone answered, giving the old line, “I heard he broke his nose.”

  The sewer was about nine feet deep, and Olen swung me back and forth like a pendulum so that my head was about three feet from the bottom and my hands were free to grab at things. The ball, a pink Spaldeen, was resting on a clump of rotting leaves, and as soon as I had it—the odors made my stomach pulse—I yelled at Olen to haul me up. Olen was all muscle, about sixfoot-three and two hundred pounds, with wide shoulders and huge hands, and I was only five-seven and a hundred and thirtyfive pounds soaking wet—and when he’d pulled me almost all the way out and I was bracing myself on the sides of the sewer to hoist myself up the rest of the way, he suddenly grabbed my left ankle with both hands and shoved me off again, letting me plunge back down to within a few feet of the bottom. I flailed away, my heart booming so loud I was sure the guys could hear it, but without letting go of the ball and without giving Olen the satisfaction of crying out.

  On the way home, I gave him the silent treatment, and he knew that when I did, nothing could make me be the one to talk first, so finally he gave in and put his arm around me, telling me he didn’t know what had gotten into him but that when he went to church the next morning he was going to ask the Lord for forgiveness. At first I thought he was kidding, and I almost said something about him asking God for a new brain while he was at it, but when I saw he was really feeling bad I didn’t say anything, and a moment later he asked if Jews were allowed to go to church and would I want to go with him in the morning.

  Sure, I said, and added that we weren’t like the Catholic guys, who had to get permission if they wanted to come to synagogue for our Bar Mitzvahs. He told me he wasn’t asking just because of what he’d done to me, but because it was going to be a special service where his sister Karen, who was my age, had a solo with the choir.

  The next morning I got up before my parents did, put on a white shirt and a tie and, my
good black dress shoes in my hands, tiptoed out of our apartment. Our street was quiet on Sunday mornings, with nobody going off to work or school, nobody yelling things down from apartment house windows, and only an occasional car going by. I sat on my stoop for a while after I put my shoes on, drinking in how peaceful things were—a rare moment for me because this was a period in my life when my parents were always checking up on me, my mother especially—wanting me to account for every minute of my life: where was I going, and who was I going with, and had I done my homework or brushed my teeth, and even wanting to know if I’d been having regular bowel movements. Both my parents worked, my father as a piece goods finisher in a dress factory (this was seasonal work, so he often spent long periods sitting around the apartment doing nothing, which drove my mother crazy), and my mother as a secretary for an insurance agent. I was an only child, and whenever the door to my room was closed she’d barge in without knocking and demand to know why I insisted on keeping the door closed and what I’d been doing during all the hours I was home alone.

  Subtlety was never my parents’ specialty, and though they never actually said anything against Olen, they’d say that they couldn’t understand why, with all the choices of people I had to be friends with, I chose to spend so much time with a shvartze.

  I had a pretty nasty temper in those days, and I’d yell at my parents that they were narrow-minded bigots who wanted to run my life for me. Were they going to choose my wife for me too some day? When my father was around and I said things like that, he’d whack me across the cheek, open-handed, yelling at me that I was an ingrate and a no-good, and the two of us would go at each other for a while. The angrier my father and I got, though, the calmer my mother became.

  “Well, I always say the best way to judge a person’s character is by the company he keeps,” she would declare, adding that she certainly had nothing against Negroes, and that Olen seemed like a perfectly nice young man, although how could she tell since he never said anything besides hello, goodby, and thank you, and—who knows?—maybe the way my parents objected to him was part of the reason I was so determined to stick to our friendship.

  Olen was a terrific ballplayer, but he wasn’t the best player on our team that year. Our best player was a red-headed Irish kid named Johnny Lee. Johnny’s father was a cop and his mother was a schoolteacher, and Johnny was not only first team All-City but, according to The Sporting News, a pre-season pick to make first team high school All-American. He was also an Honors student with dozens of colleges recruiting him, and the word was that he was going to go to an Ivy League school, probably Yale or Princeton.

  He was almost as quiet as Olen—they were about the same size and build, with Johnny being leaner and an inch or so taller—and according to The Brooklyn Eagle, having the two of them work in tandem made us odds-on favorites to win the city championship. Although Johnny didn’t have Olen’s raw strength or open court one-on-one moves, he was a better rebounder, with a real nose for the ball, and he was a much better shooter. But then, there was probably no player in the city who was a better pure shooter than Johnny. In practice once, he hit eighteen straight jump shots from the right corner, and then followed with thirteen straight from the left corner before he missed. And he’d never leave the gym until he’d made twenty-five consecutive foul shots.

  Most of the time Johnny would play in the middle, and Olen would roam along the baseline from one corner to the other, though they’d switch sometimes and Olen would move into the pivot. Even though Johnny often had to play against guys taller than he was, he had quick moves and such a soft touch, including a phenomenal fade-away jump shot, that eventually, in college, where he played at all five positions, sportswriters began calling him “The White O” after Oscar Robertson, who was probably the best player in the country during those years, and who, like Johnny, could play any position on the floor.

  This was a time before college and pro basketball teams were dominated by black players—the first black player in the NBA, Chuck Cooper, didn’t come into the league until the fall of 1949, more than two years after Jackie Robinson had joined the Brooklyn Dodgers—and it was a time before there were a lot of seven footers playing, so it wasn’t unusual for guys Johnny’s or Oscar’s or Olen’s size to play center. A few years before there had even been a player from the West Coast named Johnny O’Brien who was my height, or maybe an inch or two taller, who played in the pivot and had been an All-American.

  It was also a time before sit-ins and freedom rides, before voter registration drives and bombed-out black churches received national headlines—before everything we know as the civil rights movement had come into being: before the Montgomery bus boycott and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, before the Selma to Montgomery March and the March on Washington, before civil rights workers were murdered and governors stood in the doorways of schools to keep black children from going to classes with white children, and before riots destroyed black sections of cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, and Newark—before organizations like CORE, SNCC, SCLC, and the Black Panthers came into being, and before most of us had heard of people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X.

  And even though it was also a time when what was called de facto segregation existed in New York City the way it did in most of the country, North and South, you wouldn’t have known it from our neighborhood.

  About a third of the students in my elementary school, kindergarten through eighth grade, were black, which was about the same percentage as Jews (Irish and Italians made up most of the other third), and virtually all the black kids, including Olen, lived in a three square block section—about a ten minute walk from my house—where their families owned their own homes.

  Olen was the oldest of seven children, and he and Karen had come north from Georgia when he was in the fourth grade and Karen and I were in third grade. They came with their mother, grandmother, and brothers and sisters, but not with their father, and they moved into a two-story wood-frame house next to one owned by Olen’s aunt and uncle—his mother’s sister and her husband, who had five children, including the Tompkins twins, Rose and Marie, who were two years behind me. They also arrived with their Uncle Joshua, who pressed clothes in a dry cleaning store on Rogers Avenue, and it didn’t occur to me until years later, after I’d moved away from Brooklyn and had a family of my own, that Joshua had not been a real uncle.

  Starting in the fifth grade, Olen had a newspaper route in the mornings—he got up at five to deliver the papers—and from seventh grade on he worked after school, weekends, and summers delivering soda and seltzer, and he used to say that it was lifting the wooden cases and carrying them on his shoulders that had enabled him to build himself up so much.

  Olen’s mother, who worked as a cook in the lunchroom at P.S. 246—this was the elementary school Olen and his brothers and sisters went to with me—remembered that I’d had a reputation for being one of the smartest kids in the school, and about once a week she’d take me aside and make me promise to get Olen to study harder. Basketball was useful because it would get him into a college, but the main thing was for him to get his education. Before Olen was even fifteen months old, she told me, he could pick out any card you asked for from a deck, and where they came from in Georgia people used to gather around in their house to watch Olen do this. Nobody had ever seen a brighter boy baby, she said.

  Olen’s mother was usually in the kitchen cooking when I was there, and since a lot of what she made was fried in bacon grease and my family was kosher, the smells would drive me crazy, and when they did, Karen would delight in tempting me.

  “Oh come on and have just a little taste,” she’d tease, and she’d offer me a strip of bacon or a sausage patty or some fritters. “What do you think—that your God will strike you dead if you do?”

  I’d resist at first, but then Olen, Karen, and some of the others would get on me, and while they fried up thick pieces of brea
d in the grease, or passed a strip of bacon under my nose, they’d roll their eyes and smack their lips with pleasure.

  Mrs. Barksdale would tell her children to leave me be, but she’d laugh when she did. “Not eat bacon? Well, I can certainly see why you people are known for your suffering!” was one of her favorite lines, and it was usually the one that made me give in, and when I did—closing my eyes while Karen or Olen or one of their younger brothers or sisters put the food into my mouth—declaring that I was being force-fed against my will—they’d all hoot and holler in triumph.

  When I got to Olen’s house that Sunday morning in October, Karen was at the stove, and her hair, which was shoulder length and straight, was tied back in a lavender ribbon. The family was getting breakfast ready and Karen was working alongside her mother, both of them wearing aprons over their white dresses while they fried up sausage, bacon, cornbread, and flapjacks. “Let us pray,” Uncle Joshua said after we were all seated, and everybody clasped their hands and looked down while Uncle Joshua gave thanks to Jesus for His loving kindness, for the food we were about to eat, for all our provisions, for our health and salvation, for the gift of song He had given to Karen, and for the young man of—his exact words—“the Mosaic persuasion” that He had given to us in loving friendship.

  “That’s you,” Karen whispered quickly while everybody was saying “Amen,” and she said it without looking up, her hands clasped in front of her.

  Mrs. Barksdale and her mother left before we finished breakfast, and when we got to church they were standing on the steps with several other women, welcoming us and handing out programs. The church was made of whitewashed cinder blocks, with a big painted sign over the entrance, in red, white, and blue—“The Barton African Methodist Episcopal Church”—and above the sign, a plaster statue of Jesus on the cross, the statue bolted into what appeared to be a large porcelain bathtub that had been turned upright. The women were dressed in bright white dresses, wore turquoise-colored berets, sharply angled in front, that looked like the kind British commandoes used during World War Two, and had purple sashes across their chests, with patches that identified them as “Spirit-Led Women.”