It’s not often that I embarrass myself here at The Daily Blague. In fact, I can’t think of a precedent for the mortification that hit me a few minutes ago, when I discovered that I’d posted what I’d thought was only a draft. The squabble that Kathleen and I had about our spur-of-the-moment tour of Bronxville* last night wasn’t the main story, but it’s all that I wrote about.
To write the rest, I would have to sleep on the complicated feelings of visiting the place where I grew up. It is as familiar to me now (I discovered last night, even in the dark) as it was when I lived there, over forty years ago, but like the clubs that my parents belonged to it is very much a place that would never admit me on my own. I wouldn’t want to live there — I can say that with bottomless sincerity — but I feel that it behooves me to point out that the feeling of being an alien in Bronxville long preceded that of feeling that Bronxville was alien. Â
From the draft, which I’ve deleted all on my own.
We were in a Broadway state when we got home, each ready to accuse the other of total worthlessness. Looking back, I think that it’s kind of neat that we can do that. But not really. I hated feeling so estranged. Kathleen kept saying, “I just wanted to get home,” but it couldn’t have been just that. Could it? You watch: tomorrow, I’ll be asked to take down this entry.
I’m too used, I think, to feeling estranged, too ready to think that I’ve been rejected. I can thank a Holy Square Mile of smugness for that. Â
When we talked over last night’s disturbance, apologising for being overtired and a little bit drunk, respectively, I told Kathleen — and myself — that growing up in a very privileged suburb was the opposite of reassuring precisely because I believed its not-so-implicit message that the rest of the world was a rougher, more difficult place. As someone who knew that he was going to wind up out there in the rest of the world, I was acutely aware of lacking easy access to the skills that I would need, once I’d been ejected from the protected pod that posed, and still poses, as a charming old village.
So I spent my entire youth feeling guilty about not pursuing the hard access option. Pretty silly when you think about it. But in this country of old men, no alternatives.
* Don’t you love long footnotes? This is going to be one.
We were in Scarsdale for a graduation party. We’d decided on the regal mode of transportation: what some people in New York now call a “black car.” The cars — Lincolns, for the most part, but with the odd Lexus — are, indeed all black. We use them very sparingly, which only enhances the pleasure when we allow it. We could have taken a train to Scarsdale and then gotten a taxi, and the train is not unpleasant. But we could justify the rather monumental expense of a car service by its very rarity: the last time we hired a car on such terms, it was to take us to the very same Scarsdale address, for a Christmas party, and that time we had the car wait, well over an hour. Last night’s arrangements were far less luxurious, which is why Kathleen was pooped when the car to take us back to town finally showed up. Had the driver pointed his black car in the normal direction, toward the Sprain Brook Parkway, I probably wouldn’t have had the idea that came to me as we drove down, instead, Central Avenue — a boulevard worthy of Dante. As we inched along from light to light, it occurred me that, as we were already spending a ton of money, it wouldn’t add much to the cost to run through the neighboring village where I grew up. If Kathleen and I had words about this unilateral frolic & detour later on, it was because she had no way of knowing that I wasn’t really taking us that much out of the straight-arrow route home.We turned off Central Avenue onto Palmer Road, heading east. It was all so familiar that I had a hard time paying attention. Presently we passed my maternal grandfather’s last address (The Winchester), the building that I spend my early childhood in (The Wellington), and, crossing the Bronx river into Bronxville proper and dipping under the tracks and back up onto Pondfield Road, my paternal grandparents’ last address (The Towers). All of this apartment living in a suburb may seem surprising, and I expect that it’s peculiar to the New York Metropolitan Area, but in point of fact there are lots of people who want to live in the “country” without actually keeping up a house.We drove on down Ponfield Road, past the Post Office, until we came to Four Corners, the intersection with Midland Avenue that is garnished by (moving clockwise from the northeast corner) the Library, the Town Hall, the Dutch Reformed Church — in my day, no less a civic institution than the other three buildings — and Bronxville School (K-12, 650 students in the Sixties). We turned left at Midland and then sloped up the hill at Masterson Road. It was on this bit of hill that I understood, in the course of many private drives, the nature of automatic transmission. At Elm Rock Road, we turned up into the steep hill at the top of which our Gallagher cousins (the Willkie, Farr Gallagers) occupied their gloomily wainscoted Tudor manse. It was dark, but I could miss the elm trees that made the street a cathedral until Dutch Elm took them out. At the end of the road — Route 22, the White Plains Post Road — we jagged right and then left, onto Paddington Circle, where, at Number Four, I spent my teens.Paddington is a cul de sac, so we drove to the end, turned round, and then stopped in front of my old house, which was entirely dark. Too dark, if you ask me: abandoned. It had never struck me as a big house, because it wasn’t meant to look like a big house, but in the night light it looked like a cottage that had been bloated by an airhose. An addition, with a little dormer window, had been added over the den, next to my sister’s bedroom. The spruce tree that my parents planted and lighted up every Christmas had grown to positively ridiculous, Jack-and-the-beanstalk proportions.
I thought about the twins who lived next door. I thought about the girl who lived across the street, with whom I flirted as an innocent Don Giovanni — her windows rose at a split level above some yew hedges. I thought about Johnny L, the little boy whose hemophilia finally killed him a few winters after we moved off to Houston. We had a lot of fun, Johnny and I. He loved nothing so much as my tipping back his wheelchair and racing down the street, reckless as two banshees. He was all resistance, though, to my insistent attempts to get him to memorize (something that I hadn’t done) the Periodic Table of the Elements.
Then I got back into the car. At Route 22, we turned left and purred down to the Cross County. To tell you that nothing had changed in the past forty or fifty years, except for the cool comfort of the black car and the minor detail of my having recently turned sixty — it’s something, in the end, that I don’t know how to tell you. But it was only after all of this raw experience that the headaches imposed themselves. Â
