My Mother's Son (Part 2)
When my family came to the United States in the 1950s, during the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, America was at the height of McCarthyism and the "red scare," a time in which most Americans lived in breathless dread of "communism." They believed that "communists" (who they perceived as sinister evildoers with ungodly motives, who would stop at nothing to achieve their dastardly aims) were everywhere, lurking in every shadow, hiding behind every chair and under every bed, stealthily working to undermine and destroy the "American way of life" (meaning capitalism).
Being English, and therefore not given to flights of irrational thinking, my mother found it hard to countenance all the fuss and fear. To her, it was laughable. She remembered a young man from her street back in England who was a communist, a person she had benignly regarded as eccentric but harmless, and she saw it as foolish when she heard one of her American neighbors describing someone as being "a little pink." Although Americans liked to boast and brag of their mighty strength as a nation, it seemed that they were thrown into a scare by anyone who did not fit cleanly into the mainstream. Most Americans, in truth, were base cowards, pitiably afraid that the rest of the world was out to get them.
My mother was aggrieved by the virulent racism that she observed in the United States. When she was growing up in England, she had been a stalwart fan of black American entertainers such as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine, Nellie Lutcher, and Nat "King" Cole, and she was appalled at the monstrous extent to which black Americans were badly treated in their own country. As a toddler, I was startled by my first sighting of a black person, when I happened to see a black man, a garbage collector, as he went about his business, emptying the waste can in our side yard. I ran inside to my mother, who explained to me, kindly and patiently, that there was no reason to be afraid of someone with dark skin.
Living in a white suburb, I did not see many black people. The elementary school and the middle school that I attended had no black students at all. My high school had only one black student. Most white Americans blithely took it for granted that they were entitled to have the upper hand in all spheres of human activity, which ensured that any person who had the misfortune to be less than thoroughly "white" was kept down, at the lowest rung of the human ladder, never being allowed to move upward. Unbridled prejudice was the malicious foundation of American life.
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During our first years in California, when I did not yet have any siblings, I was with my mother for most of the day, from the moment I woke up in the morning to the moment I went to sleep at night. I was always more inclined toward my mother than I was toward my father. She was an attentive mother, keeping me close by her side, taking me with her when she went shopping and ran other errands.
One of my earliest memories, going back to when I was two or three, is of being in a department store with my mother and clasping the hand of a person standing near me, mistakenly thinking that it was my mother's hand. I instantly became afraid when I saw that I was holding the hand of someone I did not know, but my mother soon rescued me from my predicament. We were quite happy together in those years, and because I was not an unruly child and rarely gave my mother any trouble (aside from the time that I got hold of some matches and, acting on my boyish curiosity, used them to start a small fire in our front yard), she rarely had cause to discipline me.
Because my mother was English, she was a frequent consumer of tea, drinking at least three or four cups a day. Most of the Americans who knew my mother regarded her partiality for strong tea, with milk and sugar added, as endearingly quaint (or, as they were more likely to put it, "cute"), but they were astonished, and even slightly alarmed, when they saw her drinking a cup of hot tea during the heat waves that were common in the San Francisco Bay Area. They would ask her why, under such warm conditions, she did not prefer to cool herself with a tall glass of iced tea, not knowing that to my mother, iced tea was a strange, unappealing beverage. Americans themselves were useless at making a proper cup of tea. They believed that merely dipping a tea bag into a cup of tepid water, for a fraction of a moment, was good enough. To my mother and to me, the inevitably weak brew that Americans offered for consumption was unpalatable and unacceptable.
In the late 1950s, my maternal grandmother, whom I knew as my Nanna, came from Warrington to visit my family in California, staying with us in our home for several weeks. I was thrilled at the chance to spend time with her. The two of us used to take long walks together, sometimes walking to the drug store (which she referred to as the "chemist"), many blocks from our house, where she would buy me a chocolate bar. Although she never expressed an overt view in my hearing, and, as a guest, would not have wished to speak out of turn, it appeared to me that, overall, she did not hold a good impression of America. Throughout the remainder of my childhood, I wrote to her in England several times a year, using my best longhand, thanking her for the gifts that she sent and asking about life in Warrington. I treasured her replies.
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I was deemed by most grownups who knew me, including my own father, to be an "overly sensitive" child. I was, indeed, a sensitive child: lacking in confidence, apprehensive by default, and prone to tearfulness when under duress. My father had a nasty temper, and his repeated admonition (perhaps "threat" would be a more appropriate word) to me was, "Stop crying, or I'll give you something to cry about!" My mother would try to speak up on my behalf, but my father usually overruled her, dismissing her objections and saying that she was being "too soft" with me.
In addition to being "overly sensitive," I was also a picky eater, which my father addressed by forcing me, every evening and against my mother's wishes, to sit at the dinner table until all of the food on my plate had been consumed. Sometimes I would still be sitting there on my own, with unwanted servings of cold food on the plate in front of me, sullenly resisting my father's will, nearly an hour after they both had finished their meal and left the table. With each petty affront, each spiteful assault on my dignity, my father was teaching me to despise him, and by extension, to despise every form of male authority. Once I had seen through my father, seeing through other men came easily to me.
My paternal grandparents lived in an upstairs apartment in San Francisco, on a street near the entrance to Chinatown. When I was young, we frequently drove across the Bay Bridge to visit them, and I used to stay with them for a few weeks every summer. I was never at ease being around them (they were coarse people, not given to serious thinking, and much too "American" for my liking), but I loved San Francisco, which made it enjoyable for me to stay with them. At night, I slept on a couch in their living room. The couch sat in front of a bay window that was usually left open on summer nights. As I fell asleep, I could hear the fall of footsteps on the sidewalk below, the wail of sirens in the distance, the groan of foghorns on the bay, and other nocturnal sounds of the city. I never saw my paternal grandparents again (or any of the uncles, aunts, and cousins from my father's side of the family) after my father and my mother obtained a divorce. Many years later, I heard that my grandfather had gone off the rails, becoming a hopeless alcoholic and ending up alone in a downtown flophouse.
I was an only child for more than six years. My mother suffered a miscarriage several years after my birth, and then, in 1960, my younger sister (whose name I was allowed to choose) was born. Although I had become accustomed to being an only child, I did not object to having a sibling. I was happy to take on my new duties as a "big brother." In 1961, my younger brother (who was named after the priest that my mother had known in Warrington, who was killed in World War II) was born, making us a threesome of siblings.
My sister and my brother, having been born in the United States, grew up as Americans, while I, having been born in England, had always thought of myself as being English. Neither of them ever took any interest in the English half of our heritage, which, although not a problem when the three of us were children, did lessen my closeness to them as we all got older, resulting in a kind of partition in our family, with them firmly on the American side and me firmly on the English side, and my mother trying to act as a go-between. As my siblings and I grew out of childhood, they assimilated the American mentality more and more, while I strove, more and more, to keep that mentality at arm's length. They both became strangers to me, and I became a stranger to them, and so it has remained ever since.
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Every weekday in the 1960s, in the early evening, I watched as all the fathers in our neighborhood, my own father among them, came home from work, looking as if their souls had been drained out of them. On weekends I would see them in front of their houses, where they busied themselves by mowing their lawns, pruning their shrubbery, and washing their cars. I saw those men and their lives of drudgery, and thought, "Will I have to do that when I'm a grownup?" The fear of someday being assigned to lead that kind of life filled me with queasiness. I did not want to suffer the wretched misfortune of the male adults that I observed: stuck on a treadmill of servility, slaving year after year to make someone else wealthy, with no escape until they were old and tired.
In May, 1963, when I was in the 5th grade, I was designated as a "gifted child" and was enrolled in a "state-supported program for academically-talented students." On a Saturday morning, I was given tests by a psychologist at the school office, to formally determine if I was eligible. My mother had doubts about the whole thing, worrying that being singled out from other children might put too much of a strain on me, and in hindsight, she was correct. (Although there was one benefit: along with the other "gifted" children, I was able to go on special field trips to museums and an opera.) My performance as a student tended to be halfhearted and erratic, and my teachers (who were aware of my "gifted" designation) told me, over and over, that I was "not trying hard enough" and should be "doing better," which left me with an unshakable feeling of having failed to fulfill my potential. I came to regard my condition as an "unusually bright" child as a curse. I spent most of my school days daydreaming, looking out the window of the classroom and wishing that I was somewhere else.
On Friday, November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a downtown motorcade in Dallas, Texas. I was at school when it happened, and heard the news during lunch, on a friend's pocket radio. My mother was at home when she heard about it, watching television as the first word of Kennedy's assassination was broadcast. When I got home from school, several hours later, my mother, who had looked up to Kennedy, was still watching the live reports, and was grief-stricken, as if a member of our own family had perished. The assassination changed her. She was never quite the same again, never able to hold as much hope for the world, or for herself, as she had when John F. Kennedy was President.
One of the things that my mother and I shared was a love of music. For my mother, Frank Sinatra (or "Frankie," as she called him) was the greatest of all singers. He had been the tuneful star of her younger years, her first musical heartthrob, and her dedication to him lasted throughout her life. When I was growing up, she played his records all the time. Even now, hearing the music of Frank Sinatra swiftly brings my mother to mind, conjuring a flood of remembrance in which I can see her listening to "My Funny Valentine," "One for My Baby," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "All the Way," and other timeless recordings, over and over. At those moments she was transported, carried away to another realm, completely overtaken by the rich, smooth sound of Sinatra's singular voice, as one of his LPs went round and round on the turntable of our record player. She liked other singers (Perry Como, Andy Williams, Robert Goulet, Matt Monro, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash), and she also had a longstanding fondness for big bands (Glenn Miller, whom she actually saw perform in Warrington during World War II, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw, Harry James, Count Basie), but in her eyes and ears, "Frankie" was beyond compare.
On the evening of Sunday, February 9, 1964, The Beatles romped through their first performance on American television, on The Ed Sullivan Show. My mother and I (both born near Liverpool, the hometown of The Beatles) were watching, part of an audience that comprised many millions of viewers, and we were unreservedly drawn to John, Paul, George, and Ringo, becoming fans on the spot. From that evening onward, The Beatles established themselves as the chief divinities, musical and otherwise, in my young life. In the summer of 1964, my mother and I went to the cinema to see The Beatles in their first film, A Hard Day’s Night, and my allegiance to the Fab Four was fully confirmed.
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Every week, my Nanna sent a package of British magazines and newspapers from Warrington, something for each of us (The Warrington Guardian, Woman's Own, The Beatles Monthly Book, The Melody Maker, The Beano, Princess Tina), which I always eagerly awaited. I was adamant that, even though I had been exiled to America, I would not lose my ties to the country of my birth, and I wanted to stay up to date with everything that was happening there. She also sent us a big package every Christmas, filled with candy, sweaters, scarfs, Dinky Toys, Beano annuals, and pop music annuals. I cherished everything that came from England.
Years later, in 1987, my mother and I returned to Warrington together, arriving in the middle of spring and staying through late summer, living in a rental house in Padgate, on Pinewood Avenue, near my mother's old family home on Bruche Drive. During those months, all the stories that I had heard from my mother when I was growing up came to life, day by day, as I learned to find my way around my native environs. We made visits, by bus and train, to Liverpool, Manchester, and Leigh. One Sunday afternoon we took a bus to the village of Daresbury, where Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was born. We also spent a cold, rainy weekend at a damp hotel in Llandudno, a seaside town in North Wales, where my mother had taken holidays in her youth.