The Nice Old Man

When I was five, just before my brother was born, I lived with my mother and father in Passaic, New Jersey, on Meadow Avenue.  I remember it as a big house with a glassed-in porch that my father used as a studio.  It had one of those crunchy cinder driveways at the end of which stood two huge old maple trees whose roots had heaved up the sidewalk slates around them. At the other end stood a garage that smelled of oil, gasoline and dust.  I can remember frightening my mother half to death by wheeling my baby brother up and down the driveway in his carriage at breakneck speed, both of us laughing wildly.  But mostly I remember the kitchen because I used to read to my mother while she did her ironing there and because it had wallpaper that looked like ivy growing up forever on a trellis which I found fascinating for some reason. I went back only once just to see what the old place really looked like and was shocked.  It hadn't improved with age.  I'm sure you've all had a similar experience.  It wasn't the place I remembered.  That place is gone now.

When I was a kid I thought it was a palace but it was really just a sagging old duplex covered in gray ersatz-brick tarpaper in a gray neighborhood between the abandoned gray mill and the gray river.  I thought, "Jeez, kids really don't need much, do they?"  They don't.

I used to walk to kindergarten from this place, "The House on Meadow Avenue," as it was always referred to in family conversations.  The school, which has since been condemned and demolished, was only four blocks away, just past the mill, but it seemed like miles to me when I was five.

My mother took me by the hand the first couple of times and showed me what corners to turn, how to cross the streets, and where not to linger.  The loading dock of the mill was one of the places where not to linger.  I figured that one out all by myself.  It was too interesting!

On the way home, on one of those safely-in-mother's-hand days, we stopped along the way to talk with my Uncle Hank who worked at the mill.  It was lunch-time and many of the workers, including Uncle Hank, were sitting on the edge of the loading dock.

I remember seeing them lined up with their legs dangling over the edge of the dock talking, laughing, jostling each other and chewing their bologna sandwiches.  There were bright explosions of sparks and loud clanging noises behind them in the dark of the mill. 

My mother and I seemed to attract a lot of attention from these men despite the wondrous things going on behind them in the mill of which they appeared to take no notice whatsoever.  They all knew her, of course.  She used to sing for the USO during the war and had won some small fame as a "looker." Maybe she thought it was her singing they admired.  Maybe they did. I always thought my mother was beautiful, too.

My mother made a bee-line for Uncle Hank and asked him to look out for me on my way home.  He did this quite dutifully, most days.  Often he'd share his lunch with me while I sat on his lap and took in all the eye-popping things that happened inside the mill and listened to the men talking.  He did this until shortly after I met "The Nice Old Man."

One day as I was walking to school kicking up piles of leaves with my Buster Browns an old man in a shabby gray suit stood at the corner where I needed to cross the street.  He smiled as I came toward him, showing ruined teeth.  He held a dirty hand out toward me, calling me softly by name.  It was big and rough.  Black lines arched under the nails and filled in all the creases.  He smelled of tar, vinegar, tobacco and alcohol.  His face was a sagging, sallow net of wrinkles.  I took his hand because he had amazing blue eyes not because he knew my name.  He was like some big, rumpled, smelly angel.  We walked to the front door of the school together, hand in hand.  He'd go no further than the school steps. "Go in. Go in," he said.  By the time I got up the steps to the doorway he was halfway down the street looking back at me and gesturing for me to go through the door.

From then on, almost every morning for I don't know how long, he met me at the corner and crossed the street with me, delivering me safely at the school door.  At noon he'd be sitting on the school steps waiting for me and would walk me as far as the corner of the mill, just a block or two from home.  I didn't realize it at the time, but if my Uncle Hank was in evidence he'd stop at the corner and watch me walk on toward the mill and lunch on my Uncle's lap. 

I don't recall that "The Nice Old Man," as I'd come to describe him to myself, ever talked with me.  He'd only speak my name softly and hold out his hand for me to take in the morning so we could cross the street together.  In the afternoon, one hand at the back of my neck, he'd push me gently in the direction of my Uncle Hank saying, "Go on now.  Go on now."

I heard him raise his voice only once.  That was the day he greeted my Uncle Hank from the corner where he always left me.  "Hey, Hank!" I heard him yell and he waved.  My Uncle Hank looked away.  My Uncle Hank never noticed The Nice Old Man.

The next day I was surprised to see my mother standing near my Uncle Hank at the mill when The Nice Old Man and I arrived at the corner.  The men who ate lunch with my uncle were standing in a little knot above them on the loading dock watching us come toward them.

My mother ran down the sidewalk toward us and yanked me away from The Nice Old Man.  It hurt my arm.  She pushed the man back away from us roughly and screamed at him "You stay away from him, you son-of-a-bitch!  Don't you ever come near him again!"  I remember every word to this day because my mother never swore and hardly ever raised her voice.

The Nice Old Man took a step or two back from my mother.  I'd never seen her so angry before, and seldom since.  "Amy, please," he said almost in a whisper.  "No!" my mother screamed again, "You get back where you belong and leave us alone!" He reached is hand out toward me.  My mother shoved me behind her back and slapped it away.  "Get away.  Did you hear me?" she hissed at him. 

I had never seen her like this before.  It frightened me.  I began to cry.  Something very bad was happening that I didn't understand but I was sure it was my fault.

I could see that The Nice Old Man had tears in his eyes, too.  My mother stood there between us shaking, standing her ground.  The Nice Old Man turned and walked away quietly.  I could see his shoulders heave.  I knew he was crying, too.  I began to cry even harder.

"Come back!" I wailed.  My mother put an arm around me and crushed me into her side.  "Shhhhhhh.  Shhhhhh.  It's OK, it's OK." she kept saying over and over again.  But it wasn't OK.  I never saw The Nice Old Man again.

Years later I learned from my Uncle Hank that The Nice Old Man was my grandfather.  He was a wino on skid row in Passaic when he greeted me on the way to kindergarten that fall.  I was his first grandson and the only one he ever knew.  He was stabbed by another wino while being robbed of pocket change several weeks after my mother ran him off.  He bled to death in an alley, alone.

According to my mother, my grandfather had a professional position at a big drug company which he lost during the Depression.  He had eight children to feed and was lucky to find work as a dairy delivery man with the company that used to deliver milk to his house.  Apparently, he knew the president of the company somehow.  He took to drinking soon after he began delivering milk probably because he considered it degrading or something.  I guess he just couldn't cope.

My mother says that on many days all the family had to eat was what was left over from his delivery runs.  The company president let him take what was undelivered home to the family. 

Most weeks he'd drink his paycheck.  Eventually he took to slapping my grandmother around when she complained about this.  When he began abusing my mother and the other children my grandmother kicked him out.  He made several attempts to straighten up but sank deeper into alcoholism each time and finally wound up on skid row.

So my mother ran him off when he tried to walk me to school.  I suppose she was afraid he might hurt me as he'd hurt her years before.  I don't know.  She won't talk about it to this day.

But all my memories of my grandfather are of "The Nice Old Man."