week, except for the three families where the mothers were schoolteachers; their maids came every day and were like one of the family, or so the families boasted, overlooking the fact that the maids had families of their own. One other exception: the family next door to mine who had the snowball bush also had a live-in maid who did appear to live like one of the family. It was easy to forget that she cleaned and cooked while the family took their ease, because when her labors were done she ate with them and then sat on the porch and contributed her opinions to the neighborhood gossip. They had gotten her from the South when she was seventeen, they said with pride, and when her grandmother came up to visit her the grandmother slept and ate and gossiped with the family too, but whether she too was expected to clean and cook I do not know.
It was less a city block than a village, where of a hot summer evening the men sat out on the front porches in shirtsleeves smoking cigars and reading newspapers under yellow lanterns (there were seven New York City newspapers) while the wives brought out bowls of cherries and trays of watermelon slices and gossiped porch to porch, and we girls listened huddled together on the steps, hoping the parents would forget us and not send us to bed, and where one lambent starry summer evening the singular fighting couple on the block had one of their famous battles in the master bedroom—shrieks and blows and crashing furniture; in what was to become known in local legend as the balcony scene, Mrs. Hochman leaned out of the open second-floor casement window in a flowing white nightgown like a mythological bird and shouted to the assembled throng, “Neighbors, neighbors, help me, I’m trapped up here with a madman” (she was an elocution teacher), and my mother rose to her feet to go and help but my father, a tax lawyer, restrained her and said, “Leave them alone, they’re both crazy. Tomorrow they’ll be out on the street holding hands as usual.” And soon, indeed, the fighting stopped, and I wondered, What is love, what is marriage? What is reality in the rest of the world?
The daughters of families of our station in life took piano lessons and I took the piano lessons seriously. Besides books, music was the only experience capable of levitating me away from Brooklyn without the risk of crossing bridges or tunneling my way out. When I was about eleven I said I wanted a new and good piano teacher, for the lady on Eastern Parkway to whose antimacassared apartment I went for my lessons was pixilated: she trilled a greeting when she opened the door and wore pastel-colored satin ribbons in her curly gray hair and served tea and excellent shortbread cookies, but of teaching she did very little. So my mother got me Mr. Simmons.
He was a black man of around thirty-five or forty recommended by a business acquaintance of my father’s with a son allegedly possessed of musical genius, the development of which was being entrusted to Mr. Simmons. If he was good enough for that boy, the logic ran, then he was good enough for me. I was alleged to be unusually gifted too, but not quite that gifted. I thought it very advanced of my parents to hire a black piano teacher for their nearly nubile daughter; somewhere in the vast landscape of what I had yet to learn, I must have glimpsed the springs of fear. I was proud of my parents, though I never said so. I had known they were not bigoted but rather instinctively decent; I had known that when and if called upon they would instinctively practice what was then urged as “tolerance,” but I hadn’t known to what degree. As children do, I underestimated them, partly because I was just discovering that they were the middle class.
Mr. Simmons was a dark-skinned man of moderate height and moderate build, clean-shaven but with an extremely rough beard that might have been a trial to him, given his overall neatness. A schoolteacher, married, the father of two
It was less a city block than a village, where of a hot summer evening the men sat out on the front porches in shirtsleeves smoking cigars and reading newspapers under yellow lanterns (there were seven New York City newspapers) while the wives brought out bowls of cherries and trays of watermelon slices and gossiped porch to porch, and we girls listened huddled together on the steps, hoping the parents would forget us and not send us to bed, and where one lambent starry summer evening the singular fighting couple on the block had one of their famous battles in the master bedroom—shrieks and blows and crashing furniture; in what was to become known in local legend as the balcony scene, Mrs. Hochman leaned out of the open second-floor casement window in a flowing white nightgown like a mythological bird and shouted to the assembled throng, “Neighbors, neighbors, help me, I’m trapped up here with a madman” (she was an elocution teacher), and my mother rose to her feet to go and help but my father, a tax lawyer, restrained her and said, “Leave them alone, they’re both crazy. Tomorrow they’ll be out on the street holding hands as usual.” And soon, indeed, the fighting stopped, and I wondered, What is love, what is marriage? What is reality in the rest of the world?
The daughters of families of our station in life took piano lessons and I took the piano lessons seriously. Besides books, music was the only experience capable of levitating me away from Brooklyn without the risk of crossing bridges or tunneling my way out. When I was about eleven I said I wanted a new and good piano teacher, for the lady on Eastern Parkway to whose antimacassared apartment I went for my lessons was pixilated: she trilled a greeting when she opened the door and wore pastel-colored satin ribbons in her curly gray hair and served tea and excellent shortbread cookies, but of teaching she did very little. So my mother got me Mr. Simmons.
He was a black man of around thirty-five or forty recommended by a business acquaintance of my father’s with a son allegedly possessed of musical genius, the development of which was being entrusted to Mr. Simmons. If he was good enough for that boy, the logic ran, then he was good enough for me. I was alleged to be unusually gifted too, but not quite that gifted. I thought it very advanced of my parents to hire a black piano teacher for their nearly nubile daughter; somewhere in the vast landscape of what I had yet to learn, I must have glimpsed the springs of fear. I was proud of my parents, though I never said so. I had known they were not bigoted but rather instinctively decent; I had known that when and if called upon they would instinctively practice what was then urged as “tolerance,” but I hadn’t known to what degree. As children do, I underestimated them, partly because I was just discovering that they were the middle class.
Mr. Simmons was a dark-skinned man of moderate height and moderate build, clean-shaven but with an extremely rough beard that might have been a trial to him, given his overall neatness. A schoolteacher, married, the father of two
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