CITY VOICES
FIRST PERSON FILE PHOTO/CHRISTINE PETERSON
Just a game RICHARD KLAYMAN
8
WORCESTERMAGAZINE.COM
J U LY 3 0 - A U G U S T 5 , 2 0 2 0
I
t was a long while ago, but there was once a square, made up of dilapidated buildings, two stories high, and stores where pickles, a deli, and two full service drugstores, and ice cream stools, waited for all that ails us. Did you have a square like this? More than several three-decker tenements danced all around us living, as my family did, in what was our spot. How about that: we had a front porch and a back porch, too! Uninformed about ourselves, unaware of how poor we were, dutifully, we went to school and, I suppose, that is were it all began to change. It was an Irish town, and all my teachers were Irish-Americans but this was where success seemed most to matter, and it did. We worked and worked at our lessons: got it wrong, got it right, and did it all again. It was our practice for a life that we hardly understood. Yes, practice was an end result. And we tried so hard to get the equation correct, to display our understanding of the scientific principles, of microbiology, and of all the angles that made up this world or whatever world might come; back to practice, once again. Then, somehow, at 10, my father died. And my brother was 9. But we were truly not alone. Thinking back, other’s fathers and mothers might have died, too, but no one I actually knew. Just the way it was, so we thought. We scrapped by, sort of like our own infantile pandemic. Just the way it was. We had no car, no one to drive us anywhere; we had no money, and there was nowhere to go. And we knew the square quite well, and we walked its streets and the tiny shops and we were adept. And we walked again. That was fun. It made up our day. Or maybe we took a bus. My mother paid a dime to ride the bus, but sometimes she would rather walk; again, so we were told. Sure, there were bikes to ride, balls to toss around, yards that had grasshoppers, peach and plum
trees to climb, and grapevines that invited us to eat our next doors neighbors grapes. And then, from someplace else, my mother saw that other kids had tennis racquets. She bought me one. “Just a game,” my mother said. “Just a game,” I repeated. “Can you play,” someone asked me the rest of my life? “Sure, I can play.” But maybe it was the house we lived in, to my brother Mel and my mother, too. Yes, we lived in a “third” of the house. That house, the three-decker, is where we shared ourselves with shopkeepers, laborers, factory workers, housewives, and all the other people, like us. It was an ancient three-decker and our home. Our three-decker had a place of tiny alcoves, tiny bedrooms and our linoleum kitchen floor, forever in search of wax. We lived on the bottom floor; an extended Irish family, living with Grandparents, and a married couple who occupied the second floor; and an African-American family lived on the top floor. Together, there were nine kids in the building. No one had a shower: just a tub. Everyone used the stairs to climb up and down, front and back stairs, as I explained. All rutted stairs to mark our lives, as though our lives of work and leisure kept us in rhythm with the cold, the rain, the heat; our little protective shell.
“Is that you, Eva,” the neighbors questioned when my mother returned home from shopping? A little woman, with longer arms from carrying all of her goods from one section of the square to our house, buying meats, various breads, and all the essentials of running a household. All in two bags, one in each of her longer, extended hands. Everyday, in two bags, she did all of this. “Is that you,” a voice from one of her neighbors could be heard, a call from some distant upper floor,
built by Frederick Law Olmstead we came to discover, just a crust of a park, something we cherished. And there were benches all around it, and a sprinkler system under the trees to keep all of us cool in the heat, and my mother sat over there. (Watching. Forever watching.) And we played near the sprinklers and my mother brought some towels to dry us off. And when no one was around we stayed there into the summer’s night and, later in the evening, we walked home before it got too dark. We were not alone. We were never really alone. But one day led to other days, and into a lifetime, and there out there in the street, somewhere was my mother and my younger brother and it made all the obup in the air, from a middle or top stacles of life just a stretch of our floor, way up high. life together. “Hi Eva!” “Was that the phasing of the And she waved, with a hand moon and the stars,” I asked? heavy from a short but extended Maybe both. arm, careful and attentive to the It reminds me now, how I must apartment which she bestowed her admit, of enjoying our starry gracious expression. nights. But we had hope, too. And we Richard Klayman, PhD., is Emerichatted on our steps, late into the tus Professor of History at Bunker summer evening; we offered inspiHill Community College and the ration to one another, and gave our author of the book, “The First Jew: counsel. Do not forget of our park. Call it Prejudice and Politics in an AmeriFerryway Green: Yes, it had a name, can Community, 1900-1932.”
