to another Catholic school, where the nuns were harsh and dogmatic. I’ll never forget my first day, when the teacher told the other children not to mind me: “That little boy in the back doesn’t say his prayers because he’s Jewish,” she said, as the children craned their heads to see the strange addition to their class. “You see, he doesn’t believe in Jesus Christ.”
There was murmuring, little hands and faces registering the information as I looked at my shoes pretending I wasn’t the center of attention.
Shortly before my father returned from serving in the Army Air Corps somewhere in the Midwest, we moved back to New York City. I was seven, so my parents enrolled me at the neighborhood public school, PS 6, where both my father and my Grandma Bessie had gone. The class I landed in skipped forward because of wartime overcrowding. Because I had difficulty learning to read, my parents got me a tutor—the wealthy always knew how to make sure their children had every advantage.
Bill must have returned from the Seabees to work for my parents at about this time, but it is hard for me to remember as I can’t even recall him or even my father being gone. Nor do I remember when Lorraina joined Bill. I knew she came from North Carolina, and I think her sister worked at the Crail Farm house. I was told they were married, but I never knew when and where. All I really knew was that I was happy to have both Bill and Lorraina around.
When John and I got into it, Bill was my protector—or at least that’s how it seemed to me, though keeping the peace was in his interest, because if we wrecked the apartment it would only mean more work for him. A giant of a man in stature, no one was gentler. Bill was dignified, and so was his wife, Lorraina. They seemed to be part of each other—Lorraina tiny and beautiful, Bill big and kind. She cooked and cleaned while he served and did the heavy lifting. They were like a second set of parents. I used to love whiling away hour after hour in their matchbook-size room off the kitchen, just hanging out.
Lorraina had her own children from another marriage—a boy named Duby, and Sister Baby. My father had a stepfather, so I knew how that worked, but it was a different situation because his father had died, so there was never an issue about where he was going to live. But I had no idea about the man Lorraina had those kids with. I remember wondering who the father was when Lorraina mentioned Duby and Sister Baby. I imagined them living with their father or Lorraina’s family in North Carolina. I do know that Lorraina missed her children because she said so. Even so, on a day-to-day basis she was more my mom than theirs. From time to time John and I talked about who took care of Duby and Sister Baby, but neither of us had the life experience to get very far in those conversations. There was something unreal about the way Lorraina and her kids lived compared with the way we did. I couldn’t imagine being in their shoes. It seemed sad, but at the same time their life was abstract, and I didn’t stay in those moods for a very long time. Over the years Lorraina brought Duby and Sister Baby to our apartment when they were very little. Those visits made the situation even harder for me to fathom.
When I asked my mother and father how Lorraina could live away from her children, I remember vague replies, as if I was asking something that was out of bounds or made them feel uncomfortable. I got the impression that I shouldn’t think too much about things like that.
Seared into my brain, however, was the way my mother used to talk to both Bill and Lorraina as if they were children, using a high-pitched and condescending voice she used with no one else except servants. Her words escape me now, but not the feeling.
When I was ten years old, I came down with rheumatic fever. Being bedridden for a month brought my time at PS 6 to an end. I was enrolled at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx for the seventh and eighth grades to make sure I would be ready for Culver Military Academy in Indiana, where my brother had just started. To