Barnegat Bay - 4. Chapter 4

Compared with my parents, Claire’s were still very well off. And my grandparents didn’t live in a big house on the main street like Claire’s family. They had a smaller house, a couple of blocks away. And when there were empty rooms, my grandmother rented them.

I also wasn’t the kind of city doctor Claire may have thought, and I didn’t plan to become one. I had a tiny office on the ground floor – which is to say three steps down – of a brownstone on West 82nd Street, midway between Amsterdam and Columbus. It had a small waiting room I barely used – because I mainly made house calls – and a slightly larger consulting area. Behind that was a windowless store room I used to sleep in, and since there was really no kitchen, I walked three blocks to my parents’ apartment almost every night for dinner.

They liked having me there. I’d gone to college in Rochester, med school in Baltimore, and did my residency in Cleveland. I was the oldest of three children, and the one my mother felt she knew least. “It’s like getting you back,” she said, though I knew she didn’t always like what she saw.

“She has expectations,” my father counseled, though I knew that already. “Don’t let them get in your way. But don’t get in their way, either.”

He knew from experience that my mother’s expectations were often more interesting than his own. My parents met when Mom was teaching elementary school, and Dad was studying accounting. He was also working as a bookkeeper, and they’d met at a Christmas office party.

He’d grown up in the Bronx, which was divided in several ways, but often by money. His family was less poor than others, but religions also separated people, along with race. Even some girls and boys were kept apart at school.

My mother grew up on Barnegat. That’s always more accurate than saying Point Pleasant Beach because the town’s so small that no one really stays inside its limits. Mom helped at the branch of her father’s bakery there and helped her mother do summer work for the rich people – cooking, baking, and sewing. My grandmother somehow managed to do all that plus work – though not regularly bake – in the bakery while raising five children. Two others had died before they were three.

Like me, my mother was the oldest, and she went to – as she always told us – “terrible schools.”

“Why terrible?” my sister, brother, and I would ask.

“Because they didn’t know any better. Because education wasn’t important. Because – especially in that isolated area – even men barely finished eighth grade, and women often didn’t get that far.”

“You were different, weren’t you?”

“Oh, yes.”

She was fierce about that.

The main way she learned was by constantly borrowing books from my grandmother’s summer employers and from their friends. “I couldn’t depend on the ‘as terrible’ library,” she insisted. “They never spent any money on books.”

“What did they spend it for?” we asked.

“A nicely impressive building – you’ve seen it. I mostly went there for the quiet.”

Still, she’d gone all the way through twelfth grade, and after graduation, she went to normal school in Newark for two years. That was enough to let her to teach first grade in the city.

“That was the best place,” she told us. “The money they paid male teachers everywhere was horrible – so it was even worse for women. But New York’s salaries were less awful.”

She’d met my father when they were both twenty-one, and they’d dated for two years before they were secretly married. After that, they continued to live apart and had to hide their marriage for another year-and-a-half because married women weren’t permitted to teach.

“That was completely unfair, of course,” she instructed us. “But the well-meaning, righteous, and well-educated men thought they needed to protect their unformed children and their delicate morals.”

“Ha!” my sister, brother, and I all said at that point – in familiar imitation of our mom. It was a frequent childhood story and our well-ingrained reaction.

After that year-and-a-half of hidden marriage, during which Mom almost inevitably got pregnant, she was forced to quit – she’d finally begun to show too much, after doing her best to hide it for almost six months. “By that point, I wasn’t going to fight,” she admitted. “I was happy to go home to Barnegat, relax a little, and have my healthy baby.”

Then, unexpectedly, we stayed at Barnegat. For one thing, it didn’t cost us anything to live, though it meant Dad was only with us from Friday nights to Sunday evenings. The rest of the time, he lived in a furnished room. He was also lucky to have two days off every weekend because, in those days, many offices worked from early Monday to Saturday noon. Dad balanced his lost half-day by bringing bookkeeping work with him. And my grandparents accommodated us because even smaller houses were bigger then. So they could always squeeze in more family.

As I grew up, my cousins and I played all day and into the evenings on the sandy streets and beaches. During the week, my mother spent some nights in the city with my dad, but I was always well taken care of. She also taught some local children privately. It wasn’t normal for middle class married women to work, especially if their husbands could support their families.

“But I knew how bad the schools were, and I could be very persuasive.” Besides, she liked to teach.

Soon after my brother was born – he was five years younger than our sister, and she was five years younger than me – we’d moved back to New York. We had a series of increasingly larger and better apartments but never bigger than two bedrooms, and I almost always slept on the couch. Eventually, we landed near West End Avenue and 83rd street, not quite on West End, but close enough to pretend. Even that wasn’t Riverside Drive, with its view of the Hudson.

Because Mom continued to teach while I was at school, my sister and brother were sometimes taken care of by our older neighbor, Mrs. Tousak. “She isn’t as lucky as we are,” my parents explained. “So we let her earn a little extra by looking after you.” Mrs. Tousak was well-experienced, having already raised children of her own.

Still, we spent summers and holidays in Barnegat. My mother’s often steady, if sometimes unpredictable private teaching ended by June, and my father resumed mainly visiting us on weekends. At that time of year, my grandparents depended on having a houseful of paying guests, but two of my aunts and one of my uncles hadn’t moved far from home, so there were always houses for our families to be spread around. As long as the right kids sat down for dinner in their expected houses, our collective parents were happy.

And we always had boats. When you live on the water, there’s no reason not to. But they were small boats: rowboats, canoes, and – belying their names – amazingly slow speedboats, all shared. It wasn’t until after the Crash that I acquired one of my own. The “Oh, Me!” – properly named by an earlier owner – was a battered cabin cruiser, barely 26-feet long.

“I promise I’ll buy it back before the summer,” my med school friend had vowed, and I believed him and thought of the boat as a friendly, temporary investment. It just never worked out that way. He was always “momentarily dry on cash,” and though he politely, consistently apologized, I soon realized I permanently owned the thing.

While it was still in dry dock in Newark, I had some minimal repair work done for safety, then my med school friend and I cruised down to Barnegat. Neither of us really knew much about navigating that far from the beach, so we were possibly risking our lives. But we were both guys who seemed good at a lot of things, so we were foolishly trusting.

We followed the shore and after only one stupid delay moored at my grandparents’ dock. After that, I happily slept on the boat during the summers, instead of competing for a cot. And when I wasn’t at Barnegat, other relatives had the privilege of occupancy.

That summer, Al, Mike, and Larry occasionally jockeyed with my brother and cousins during the week. My sister was already married, and besides, she said she wouldn’t sleep on “that boat,” even if accompanied by her husband.

“It’s a cabin on the lake,” I tried to sell her. “Almost by the beach.” Nothing in Barnegat was more than an inlet away from that.

“A cabin can’t sink,” my sister replied, and everyone thought that very funny. I didn’t care. Even acquired cheap, the “Oh, Me” was the most valuable thing I owned.

Most of my relatives had survived the Crash with their jobs intact, and even before that – by the mid-20s – my mother had returned to teaching full-time. The war, the newly formed unions, and changing values had fixed some of the old, bad rules, and while waiting, my mother had worked for the women’s vote and finished her Bachelor’s degree.

“I love how it’s called a ‘Bachelor’s’” she’d say.

“Ha!” we all replied – though by then, we were already in our teens and twenties. My mother intended to finish her Master’s at Hunter, too, as some of her friends had, so she could eventually move up to administration. Everyone predicted she’d be a great principal, but it turned out she was very happy teaching high school Civics. She didn’t like the diplomacy of administrative work.

“There’s no way I could’ve continued teaching first grade as I got older. But high school is good. It lets me talk like an adult.” Meanwhile, my father had long since risen from being a bookkeeper to heading his own small accounting firm, and even with the Depression – with no children living at home – my parents were doing well.

I wasn’t worried about losing my profession in the economy because I’d specialized in pediatrics, and there would always be babies and, unfortunately, disease. I also did a lot of work for free – for people who absolutely promised they’d “pay me back, once we get through all this.” That almost didn’t matter. I was single, I was building a reputation, and I kept my expenses low. Plus, I was doing useful work – I could afford to be generous.

I largely worked in the area of the city I knew – 72nd to 116th streets, and Central Park West to Riverside Drive – though as the Depression spread, my borders tightened. I still went from 72nd to 116th streets, but people moved in from Central Park West to less gracious apartments along Columbus Avenue and from Riverside Drive and West End Avenue to Broadway and Amsterdam.

In Barnegat, my friends and family had started to call me Doc, and that was fine. I kind of hated my given name, Walter, which my father had long since explained was kind of forced on us – to honor one of his brothers who’d died of the flu soon before I was born. Maybe to balance that, growing up, I always had nicknames: Buddy, Junior, Shorty, Chappy. So Doc was an improvement. I might have preferred Walt but was never given the chance. And a welcome late growth spurt thankfully killed off Shorty.

I knew plenty of people at Barnegat, I made friends easily, and it wasn’t just because it was good for business. I never thought of them as “older friends” or “younger ones,” but at the beach, they were definitely younger. It went with the summers.

No one had expected me to get married until after I finished med school, but I’d acceptably extended that as I established my practice. “When the time comes, he’ll find someone,” my mother dismissed, sounding much like Claire’s dad, if for different reasons. And if Mom wasn’t worried, no one else seemed bothered. So I used that as another excuse.

“You should be looking for someone eight-or-ten years younger than you are,” Dad advised, though that wasn’t the case with him and Mom. When I gently pointed that out, he said, “It was different with us. We started having children earlier than you will. So you’ll want a wife young enough to have healthy babies.”

“I know just a few things about infants,” I suggested, openly amused. My father grinned right back.

“You know a few things about other people’s children,” he corrected. “And from studying your books.”

That could have been true. But it wasn’t worth an argument.

Still, I knew how to have fun in my understated way, and I was learning to be less disciplined as I got further from school. That often involved private parties, scattered throughout the city and in late-night speakeasies. And at post-midnight gatherings at the beach. There were times, well after Claire and Mary had gone home and the guys had fallen asleep, that I fell in with other friends.

But I was quickly becoming Claire’s home base for the summer, and everyone knew it. We weren’t holding hands and strolling the boardwalk – as I’ve said, Mary, or at least one of the guys, was always with us. But that was at night, and Claire evidently felt safer in public with me while the sun was up. She wouldn’t have gone out alone with me on my boat or borrowed her family car and taken us driving on county roads. But we could have lunch in town, at one of the summer hotels. Or we could go to the country club unescorted. We could even have gone to a movie if we wanted, though why spend beautiful summer weekends indoors? Plus, we held movies for rainy days, and that summer – untypical for Barnegat – there seemed to be plenty.

“Oh, how it rained when you were gone,” Mary told me one Friday night.

“It rained in the city, too,” I said, laughing. “We’re not that far away.”

We were walking from the station, and after I’d gotten off the train, I’d lightly hugged both Claire and Mary. That was permitted.

“Did you have our wind?” Claire asked. “It was almost a hurricane here.”

“Who can ever tell in New York? You hit certain corners, and it’s always blowing.”

“We were worried about our chimneys,” she went on. “My father had a man up on our roof.”

It wasn’t a challenging conversation, as none of ours ever seemed to be. Just as we never talked about work – mine or Mary’s – or any of the jobs Claire’s father might have let her do during the week. She also did volunteer work to fill her time or stretched on her shady back porch hammock and read.

“You never see her without a book,” Larry pointed out. “There’s even one in her purse at Jenkinson’s. What does she do with all of them?”

“Reads them, you nutcake,” Mike replied. “‘Stead of stacking ‘em up like you might – to see how high they’d go.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“You would if I bet you.”

“Then bet me. What’s it worth?”

They were always betting each other – because it was safer than a dare. But that’s about as far as it went. Because neither of them had money to follow through, and what little they saved, they’d rather spend on girls.

Claire must have had some luck persuading her father to do work, because when I occasionally stopped by her house, her mother would often say she was glad Claire was “Being social and staying away from those dusty lumber yards – she spends too much time in them.” Still, Claire and I rarely spoke about that, maybe because she thought no one was interested. Even so, and despite our lapses, we were comfortable together.

“Are you sure she’s not using you as a way out of Toms River?” Al once asked. It was another rainy day – a Sunday – the beaches were closed, and we were all waiting for a movie to start. Claire and Mary were on line for popcorn.

Al had asked quietly because we were standing in the lobby with Mike and Larry, and I answered without attracting their attention. To make sense of his question, I didn’t think Al was being jealous. It seemed more time-passing curiosity – and something I hadn’t come close to considering. I left that part out, but when I mentioned that Claire could as easily have done the same thing with him, he nodded and accepted that. Because Al was largely rational.

“I know you believe in what he’s doing,” I also once overheard Mary tell Claire, and it took me a moment to realize they were talking about me. “But could you really see yourself managing a doctor’s office for the rest of your life? Would that be the challenge you’re after? Because it could easily happen.”

“From what I’ve been told,” Claire said lightly, “his office could use a little organizing.”

“Who told you that?” Mary asked, and Claire laughed.

“Who else? His mother – the last time she was visiting.” Mom and Dad sometimes had Saturday lunch with Claire and me.

Claire and Mary had laughed at that, but Mary had gone on. “Still, is organizing your husband’s office really what you fought to go to college for?”

Claire had no answer for that, at least at that moment. Though she’d gone on, and it’s a good thing she didn’t know I was listening and couldn’t see me blush.

“He’s a darling man, Mary,” she insisted. “And you know we don’t meet a lot like that. He’s too good to pass by.”

“I absolutely agree,” Mary told her. “I can’t deny that in any way. But it’s still New York. And no matter how you try to ignore it, his family is still Jewish.”

Claire laughed again, this time much harder. Then she said, “Now that’s what I went to college for.”