A Fledgling of L'Amour

Well, A Hell of a lot of water has flowed down the Danube since I was a boy, and I often sit and speculate about what could possibly have happened to all of the people whom I had known during those long lost years in the Vienna of my childhood.

I dare say the sudden transference from that life to the New York of my adolescence was perhaps the most shattering single event of my whole existence. The immigrant's traumas are like the aftereffects of a second birth, only nobody swaddles or feeds you or gives a damn what really happens to you. Believe me, it's quite a bit of something. The wonder of it is that anybody ever manages to survive it with even a small fragment of sanity left at all.

A couple of weeks after I'd landed in the United States I made a friend, a boy who lived on the same block with me and whose name was Walter Portson. His people had come out of Scandinavia somewhere and had brought Walter along when he was just a few months old. He was really a decent kid and he tried to do his best to help get me over the most awkward stages of my foreignness. I liked him a lot and we kept track of each other for quite a number of years. In fact, we went on waving to each other in a friendly way even over long distances, until when he finally died, in 1939, and his widow, Mildred, asked me to come to his funeral.

Well, anyway, during those first few weeks of our acquaintance he did his tactful best to wise me up – to lift me out of the darkness of my greenhorn status and to make me as acceptably American as everybody else.

"Let's play ball," he said to me one afternoon. "Let's buy a ball and play catch."

"Fine," I said.

So the both of us went into a most unmemorable stationery and candy store and for three cents we bought a ball.

Come to think of it, that stationery store wasn't so unmemorable after all. I can remember that one hot day I walked into its characterless dinginess and said to the old man behind the counter, "Please give me a small chocolate soda."

"What flavor?" he said.

So, you see, he didn't actually live for nothing, since after half a century I can still recall his peculiar condition.

By the way, this ball that we purchased was called Bully Boy, and its name was stamped right on its unresilient exterior in black ink. I noticed at once that there was an absolutely leaden weightiness about this ball of ours and when I tried to bounce it off the sidewalk it just lay there like a dead bull-turd.

Now, let's get this thing clear.

Boys in Europe hardly ever played ball at all. They played soccer, of course, avidly and passionately, and, once in a while, just to oblige a particularly attractive girlfriend, we'd even condescend to toss a few rubber balls around with them, in the park somewhere, but you may believe me, those balls of theirs didn't even have the vaguest resemblance to anything like Bully Boy.

Those balls in the old country were called Salon Ballen, and they were about the size of a full-grown cantaloupe and most of them were decoratively pasted together out of red and black strips of latex. They were not too tightly filled with air either, and when they bounced off anything they went "boing," ever so softly, like a dowager's bosom that (continued on page 164)Fledgling of L'amour(continued from page 79) has accidentally come into momentary collision with a marquetry table.

Well, my friend Walter was standing about 30 feet away from me when this ball game of ours began and without a word of warning he suddenly hurled this Bully Boy straight at me. Luckily, I was always rather agile in those days, because if I hadn't gotten out of the way of that missile he would probably have nailed me right up against the wall of the house in front of which I had taken my stance.

After a while, he showed me a small leather-covered mattress that fitted awkwardly over your hand and with which you were supposed to catch these deadly projectiles. I can assure you that I realized then and there that my days of Austrian daydreaming were definitely over, once and for all.

A country in which children were encouraged to hurl Bully Boys at each other required a posture and an attitude for which certainly nothing in my past had properly prepared me. Yes, sir, if a mildly disguised rock was considered an amiable plaything in this new land of mine, I had better readjust my sights and my bearings and learn to get a hell of a lot tougher than I had ever imagined I need be.

But ball playing wasn't the only startling novelty I encountered right off. There were lots of other surprises and astonishing contradictions waiting to be assimilated by me.

For instance, I was enormously puzzled by the kids I came to know later on in school, because a good many of them who were already 15 and 16 years old were still so confoundedly ignorant on a subject like sex. If the matter ever came up at all, they just sniggered like a bunch of half-wits, and even the more intelligent ones among them became obviously quite embarrassed.

It didn't take me too long to discover the reason for all this. I found that, although the streets of our neighborhood were full of pregnant women and the cats and dogs of the town were feverishly fornicating all around us, the citizens of this great republic had decided, seemingly by common consent, that sex was, by and large, something secret and sordid, or that it was at best an extremely recondite ritual only clandestinely indulged in by some especially licensed initiates. Furthermore, it was considered the height of bad taste, and to a certain degree even dangerously antisocial, to discuss any aspects of sex with young people on any levels excepting from those thunder and brimstone platforms where the horrors of syphilis and gonorrhea were delineated with meticulous, clinical detail and properly anathematized before an audience consisting exclusively of males.

Women were not supposed to know about such things at all, and the belief was certainly held and widely encouraged that no decent girl would ever show curiosity about such subjects.

As Jimmy Durante would say, "Those were the conditions that prevailed."

I had had a much better break, of course, simply because European kids from the middle-class category to which I belonged could hardly get into their teens without knowing at least as much as the birds and the bees, even in those benighted times. I was also particularly fortunate because my sensible and loving parents had given me the chance to find out about the critical facts of life without having to obtain such information in its most degrading aspects from a foulmouthed slum urchin or some slavering, hydrocephalic farm yokel.

One day, when I was still extremely young, I recall that I introduced some aspect of sex as a conversational gambit. My mother, showing neither surprise nor indignation, took a pencil out of her sewing basket and on the back of a laundry pad, which happened to be lying on the table, she made me a drawing of an inverted bottle and told me, without the slightest embarrassment to either of us, that this, in a rather simplified form, represented a woman's uterus, in which babies were conceived. Briefly, she also outlined for me the particularly volatile and ambitious nature of the male spermatozoa and, when that short period of elucidation was over, I was possessed of a damned-sight more wholesome information on the subject of sex than most of the men and women who were graduating from high schools in New York City during some of those good old days.

I suppose these intimately personal questions have to be tackled according to the highly individual concepts of morality that happen to prevail within each family unit. However, there can be no doubt that in all matters pertaining to sex, the majority of people are bound to be influenced by the general climate of ethical prejudices and predilections that are sometimes dominant within a geographic community.

I witnessed a fascinating example of peculiarly national mores when I was living in France, some years ago.

My wife and I were staying in an apartment and, although we had a competent maid and had most of our meals at home, we had fallen into the habit of taking dinner, from time to time, in a pleasant little cookshop in one of the side streets near the Quai Voltaire. Since it was quite close to our home, we used to go there at least once a week and, after a while, we managed to be accepted on really friendly terms by the owners of this establishment, and even the poisonously parochial clientele showed a certain tolerant acquiescence toward our presence in their midst. We had reached a point where nobody gave any outward signs of astonishment when we appeared, and we were treated with the quiet, smiling civility which is so rarely to be found in Paris.

At any rate, one night when we dropped in for dinner, I noticed that at a conspicuously well-set table, almost in the center of the room, a rather strange-looking couple had established itself.

That is to say, the woman was certainly a total stranger, while the young man who sat facing her, a boy of 16 or 17 at the very most, seemed vaguely familiar to me; but it was not until after our soup course had been served that I finally managed to decipher his true identity. He was undoubtedly our neighborhood coaldealer's eldest son, but he was so elaborately smartened up on that particular evening that I could hardly believe it was the same boy.

His lady, who was constantly eying him with a certain proprietary demureness, was surely many years his senior and was, without any possibility of error, quite obviously a prostitute.

Now, please, let me clarify this seemingly cruel, categorical pronouncement, and permit me to elucidate it in terms of its exact sociological context. This female companion of Maurice's (that was the boy's name) was extremely pretty and unobtrusively well mannered, and, what's more, she was rather smartly but not too lavishly decked out for the occasion; her black suit and dark-green toque with its half veil would have seemed perfectly appropriate on any other well-dressed woman in the room. She ate and drank with evident relish but with the modest decorum one generally associates with orderly domestic circumstances.

And yet, I knew with absolute certainty that she was a professional prostitute because she had lacquered her nails with some sort of highly iridescent fluid and was wearing noticeably elaborate facial make-up. No woman of the French petty bourgeoisie would, under any circumstances, have worn such make-up, at least not during the period of time which is here under discussion. I'm talking about the year 1937, and I think that this state of affairs held true even until shortly after the close of the Second World War.

So, as I've been telling you, there they sat, almost in the middle of the room and all around them the local tradesmen and their wives were munching away at their veal cutlets and their lambs vinaigrette, and these simple delicacies were accompanied by various appropriate wines, as well as by crisp seasonal salads and fruits not too terribly prepossessing in their appearance, but which, nevertheless, gave off an unbelievable rich and appetizing fragrance.

Now, get this straight!

Everybody in that restaurant knew perfectly well that Maurice, the coal-dealer's eldest son, was about to have his first real sexual experience that very night. It was all so patently obvious that, somehow, I couldn't resist the notion that even the half-dozen children, sitting all around us, must have been completely aware of the true state of things.

And yet, let me say to the eternal glory of that little gathering assembled in that Parisian cooky-nooky, that nobody in that room, either by word or gesture, gave the slightest outward sign that anything untoward was about to happen. There was, I will admit, a certain submerged feeling of festiveness about the place. Indeed, an almost tangible vibration of communal good will seemed to emanate from that small gathering of average folk, and only very rarely was I able to catch some busily masticating matron casting a furtively appraising, sideward glance in Maurice's direction. However, I must insist that these subtle, visual reconnoiterings were completely bereft of even the slightest contamination of any sort of pruriency.

Later, while we were having our desserts, I discreetly consulted our waiter, whose name was Hilaire, about Maurice's impending splash into manhood. Since Hilaire had a little English, we conducted our soft-spoken dialog in that language.

"Yes," he said, "Maurice is going to be 17 in a few months and he has really been pretty restless of late. He is a very nice boy and very devoted to his family. He is doing all the paper work for his father now, and he is certainly a great help to him."

And that was that.

I could just imagine it all. I could imagine Maurice's mother at some time during the past few weeks complaining to the old man that the boy seemed unusually irritable and most uncharacteristically short-tempered toward everyone and that it might perhaps be a good notion to speak to the local padre about him. I could also easily guess the father's reaction to this suggestion and the knowing, fugitive smile that must have lurked about his grizzled mustache as he patted his wife reassuringly on the back.

"It will be quite all right, Marguerite," he had probably said to her. "I think I know what is wrong with the boy. He is a very good lad and I think all he really needs is just a little holiday. That is all."

I can also conjecture how, later on, papa had quietly given his son 300 francs, had playfully pinched him on the cheek and said to him: "Amuse yourself a little, my boy. It is spring and you are young only once."

I'd be willing to bet my neck that there was no more to it than that. The rest a French boy would easily know how to manage for himself. And since there was nothing dirty or underhanded in what was about to happen, Maurice saw no reason for being furtive about his actions, and so he had naturally brought his lady of the evening to the restaurant of his own neighborhood. Indeed, I don't think it was too farfetched to imagine that he would finally take her to the little Hotel Seville that was located close by, right around the corner from his home.

When Maurice and his companion were nearly done with their meal, the waiter suddenly approached their table and presented them with a fresh bottle of wine which nestled luxuriously in a napkin-draped basket.

Maurice looked at the waiter in evident surprise, upon which Hilaire pointed significantly to the far side of the room and said, "Monsieur Robillet sends you this bottle with his compliments and hopes you will drink to his health."

Maurice rose from his chair as Monsieur Robillet, a retired police official, half rose from his and, after the cork had been cleanly drawn, the two men smilingly lifted their glasses toward each other and drank bottoms up. The lady at the table had also taken a modest sip, and when Robillet was finished wiping his mustache he held up a freshly filled glass and said: "Good hunting, my boy!"

No more than that.

Maurice and his companion stayed long enough to finish half their wine and I noticed that Hilaire carefully wrapped up the bottle and placed it in the pocket of the young man's overcoat which was hanging on a clothes rack right near the cash desk.

At last, they rose to leave. In the doorway Maurice turned around and bowed to the assembled company, which responded by presenting faces of unanimously jovial encouragement. His lady-friend gave a smallish nod in the general direction of Monsieur Robillet and, after she had straightened out her escort's muffler with a gesture of almost maternal concern and protectiveness, they finally stepped, arm in arm, out into the soft Parisian night.

Well, maybe you don't care too much for this story. Maybe you are one of those lucky ones whose first sexual experience happened under idyllic circumstances – on a moonlit night somewhere, in a leaf-shadowed arbor, on moss-covered turf – while the nightingales were singing their little hearts out in the swoon-inducing fragrance of the nearby jasmine bushes. It may even be that the angel you were involved with was your childhood sweetheart, whose father owned a flock of oil wells and whose mother thought you'd make just about as ideal a son-in-law as she was ever likely to find.

I said maybe, didn't I?