The Times is running a new feature in the Thursday Home section, “Domestic Lives,” in which writers — novelists, so far as I can tell — revisit the scenes of their youth. I don’t know how long the series has been running, but I noticed it for the first time last week, when Kevin Baker went back to Rockport, Massachusetts, and wrote warmly if ambivalently about the town. “Rockport, as a good town should, showed me the way out when I was young and I seized those invitations.” This week, Francine Prose revisited her childhood home, a big house in Ditmas Park, a once-grand part of Brooklyn. She was welcomed by the Grenadian family that owns the house now, but only to enter the living room, not the rest of the house. She left with ambivalent feelings as well, although in her case these were attributable to the work of time. In any case, both pieces surprised me with the realization that I’ve grown very detached from my own childhood. 

This feels like a side-effect of grandfatherhood: It’s Will’s childhood that’s interesting now. But it’s easy for me to feel that way, because my own childhood was not interesting — or, rather, it was interesting in a lot of unpleasant ways. I was an odd little boy and I felt that this made me a bad little boy, because oddness was not appreciated in the Fifties, not at all. I have never entirely gotten over the feeling that there is something deeply wrong with me, wrong at the core — and all the worse because I’m untroubled by it. If the atmosphere in my parents’ house had been religious, I suppose I’d simply feel like a sinner. Instead, I feel like a deviant, and nothing makes that sense of deviance sharper than the idea of returning to Bronxville. 

It’s hard to talk about an unhappy childhood without seeming to blame somebody, and I’ve long outgrown any desire to complain about my parents. I reserve my complaints for the adoption racket that placed me with them. I don’t mean that somebody at the Foundling Hospital made a bad choice. It’s rather the system itself, which encouraged everyone involved to simulate the appearance of natural bonds. “We couldn’t love you more if you were really ours,” they were told to say. I don’t think that it took long for my mother to fear that she didn’t mean it. She could never have produced such a strange little boy — such a critical little boy. 

From an early age, I thought that our house could have been much nicer, and I often said so. I hated my own room, which was furnished with what was supposed to be manly, Southwestern-themed oak; I thought it was tacky. So I hung out in the basement and played with my train sets (which were always pathetically juvenile — I have never lusted after anything with my eyes the way I did the amazing layouts in Model Railroader). Or I wandered through the undeveloped forest across the road, telling myself stories about building a house for myself in the middle of the woods. This house would be small and neat, like the ones in the mural of New Amsterdam that hung on the wall of the den, over the sofa. I would live either in the basement, with a high window at sidewalk level, or in the attic, in a cosy dormer. (This is how I spent my time, instead of tossing balls of one size or another at other boys.)

My dreams of snug corners didn’t mean that, for the time being — until my new town with its canals and squares occupied the vacant lots — I wouldn’t prefer to live in a larger, more imposing house, preferably one with columns along the front. Eventually, the appeal of columns paled beside that of a rambling late-medieval manor house, like one of the impressive exemples of faux-Tudor architecture that clustered in the triangle made by Masterson Road, Elm Rock Road, and Studio Lane. Not that I’d have wanted to live in one of them, though, because they were in Bronxville. 

I don’t want to complain about Bronxville, either. But the thought of living there is so horrifying that it almost stops my heart. Let me just say that I have every reason that Bronxville’s is still the kind of community that it was when I was a boy, and that I could never live in such a community. Not ever. Which is what makes the essays by Kevin Baker and Francine Prose so interesting. They can write about their childhoods more or less equably. I have a hard time keeping mine from sounding like a Dickensian nightmare. Which it wasn’t. But I’ve long since fallen into the habit of associating the good memories with “who I am proud to be today,” and all the bad ones with “childhood.” I can’t go back, because I’ve turned the past into a dump. 

So, even though I grew up in one of the most affluent and comfortable spots on earth (I do not exaggerate), I think that my grandson is a great deal luckier to be growing up a block away from Tomkins Square Park in Alphabet City, a neighborhood that my parents wouldn’t think much of even in its current semi-gentrified condition. Manhattan life never appealed to either one of them; they knew that the island was home to a lot of strange people, people whom one wouldn’t know, people odd enough to enjoy being alone in the middle of a crowd. In creaky old Yorkville, I have found something that i never had when I was a little boy. I’m inclined to call it “privacy.” 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2011 at 6:00 pm.