This is part of a larger work in progress, “The Shadow of Desire,” a saga of three generations of Jews seeking love and freedom in America. It takes place in October 1962 on the first night of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That was the autumn of the radio.
It was a pocket-sized Toshiba transistor radio, with a black plastic body, a silver metallic speaker grille, and a semicircular panel dotted with red numbers from six all the way to 15, covering the AM dial.
The radio, which cost fifteen dollars, was my first big purchase, with money I’d saved from gifts for my twelfth birthday, and baby-sitting that summer in the Catskills for the two young sons of Rosalie and Paul, who every Saturday night bet on the trotters at Monticello Raceway. Rosalie’s hair was piled high like a bird’s nest, but with tinted blonde strands instead of twigs. Paul always wore a gray fedora with a bright red feather for good luck. When he won, he slipped me a couple of extra bucks as a tip. I probably owed my radio to the horses of Monticello.
When we bought it at Alexander’s on Fordham Road, my father stared at the round white “Made in Japan” sticker on the back. “I thought we won the war,” he said. “Now they’re selling us all this cheap crap.” I thought it was neither cheap nor crappy, but neither did he, really, since he often borrowed it when he sat with the other men on club chairs in front of our building listening to Yankees radio broadcasts during the waning days of that year’s pennant race. The orange tips of their cigars and cigarettes flared and dimmed like fireflies in the darkness.
For me, the radio was a portal to the alluring world of Teenaged America. Rock n’ roll, with its heavy, driving rhythms and sensual words I could feel but still not understand, was a secret code, an incantation, that opened the doors wide enough to give me a glimpse of a brand new existence I longed to share but lay just beyond my reach.
I took my radio everywhere-- to Natie’s candy store, the deli on Watson Avenue, the corner grocery when I bought things for my mom after school. I set it on the roofs of parked cars when we played stickball in the gutter. I even brought it to school one bright, sunny day in late September. We usually took recess in a far corner of the school yard, where nosy teachers didn’t go. I carefully mounted the radio on the round metal pipe, balancing it against the wire mesh fence, then turned the dial to Seventy Seven Double U Ay Bee See, and when the Top Ten played, even a couple of the cool kids, who were actual teenagers, came over to listen.
That year, late summer’s warmth blurred into early fall, and in the evening I sometimes listened to the radio while waiting for ice cream, the big hits drowned out by the Mister Softee truck’s shrill, high-pitched jingle.
Then, one Monday, the temperature dropped and my mother made me wear a jacket to school. That morning the TV news reported big troop movements in Florida amid speculation about another showdown with Fidel Castro. As I walked past the candy store, I saw the Daily News’ headline screaming “Crisis!” Our social studies teacher, Mr. Kantrowitz, told the class to watch President Kennedy’s address to the nation that night on a matter of “national urgency.”
My mother and aunts were clearing away the dishes after dinner, and the lingering smell of meatloaf, onions and potatoes wafted from the kitchen to the living room where we all gathered around the ancient RCA Victor TV. It had a screen that resembled a ship’s porthole set into a chipped mahogany console, a relic of the era of Milton Berle and “Your Show of Shows.”
The television had acted up often over the past year, and sometimes we had trouble getting a picture or sound. But my father refused to get a new one, adamantly denying it was because of the money. He insisted he had “fixed it” by jerryrigging some wires and twisted clothes hangers behind the back of the TV. “Nothing wrong with it. All it needs is a good zetz,” he’d say as he slapped some sense into the side of the console. Funny thing was, it usually worked.
On the small, round screen, President Kennedy sat at a bare desk with two microphones. A black-and-white American flag hung, motionless, over his right shoulder. His face was taut, his expression grim, bereft of the usual twinkle in his eye or multimillion-dollar smile. The quick wit of his press conferences was gone, too. He spoke very slowly and deliberately.
“Good evening, my fellow citizens,” he began.
“This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Kew-ber.”
“Within the pahst week,” he continued, his Boston twang becoming more pronounced, “unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.”
“Tsk-tsk-tsk,” my aunt Eva, who was short and skinny, clucked, shaking her head. Her knitting needles clicked as a swatch of lime-green wool emerged from her rapidly moving hands. My mother, who sat next to my dad on the love seat, reached out to the coffee table for a Pall Mall, which she lit with her eyes closed.
“Several of these include medium-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead for a distance of more than 1,000 nautical miles,” the president continued. “Each of these missiles, in short, is capable of striking Washington, D.C.”
Wow, that’s getting pretty close, I thought.
“Additional sites not yet completed appear to be designed for intermediate-range ballistic missiles capable of striking most of the major cities in the Western Hemisphere, ranging as far north as Hudson’s Bay.”
I knew my geography, and that definitely included the Bronx. My father cleared his throat and reached for a Chesterfield.
“…The presence of these large, long-range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass destruction constitute an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas.”
All at once, the picture on the TV flickered and the sound sputtered. “Oish! Not now!” my other aunt Rae exclaimed.
My father leaped out of the love seat and rushed to the back of the old console. There he squeezed the wires, tightened a couple of screws and jiggered the makeshift coat-hanger antenna he’d concocted. But the picture wobbled even more and the sound got even shakier.
“Didn’t we talk about getting a new—" my mother started, but quickly put a Pall Mall to her lips instead.
“Can’t you see? I’m fixing it!” my father said, his voice rising. He shook one wire and squeezed another between drags on his Chesterfield, but the picture grew fainter and the sound even feebler. Finally he gave his trademark “zetz” to the side of the console, but he had run out of miracles: Instead of being resuscitated, the old RCA Victor, like a horse that had run too many races. finally died.
“What are we going to do now?” Rae asked, as my mother sat silently smoking her Pall Mall.
The thought came to me in a flash. I hurried to my bedroom, grabbed my transistor radio, mounted it on top of the moribund TV console and stretched its antenna to its full length. I turned it on and spun the dial until the president’s voice came through, resolute and clear.
“Well, at least that radio’s good for something besides all that horrible music he listens to!” said Rae, the self-appointed family truth teller, tossing her wavy brunette hair to one side. Sitting next to her, Eva smiled and the clicking of her needles slowed as she turned towards my mother.
“Doesn’t this remind you of the times we used to listen to FDR’s fireside chats with mama and papa?”
My mother, who was in no mood for nostalgia, didn’t reply, just kept smoking her Pall Mall and staring straight ahead to where the TV picture should have been.
“But now, further action is required,” the president—Kennedy, not Roosevelt—resumed. “We will not risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from that risk.”
The living room was dead silent, except for Eva’s tsk-tsks, which almost rhymed with the clicking of the knitting needles.
“It shall be the policy of this nation,” President Kennedy said, his voice rising, “to regard any missile launched from Kew-ber against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union against the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response against the Soviet Union.”
“Ay-yi-yi! There’s going to be war!” Rae exclaimed.
“Rae, SHA!” my mother practically shouted. “You’ll upset the children!”
Upset the children? I was already terrified. But then I turned to my brother, who was frowning and blinking his eyes.
“Daddy,” he said slowly, his voice husky and shaking, “are you going back into the Army?”
“Ha!” my father replied. “Served three and a half years in the South Pacific. I’d say Uncle Sam got his pound of flesh from me!”
But my brother was still frowning.
“No, son, I’m not going back in the Army,” my father said.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see my mother, pinching her burning Pall Mall between her fingertips, cast a wary glance my way. But I kept staring at the broken TV and my radio, over which President Kennedy was still delivering the bad news.
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She came to us as usual that night to tuck us in at bedtime and to do what she always did on nights like this—try to protect us from the worst the world could throw at us. She spoke softly, in her calmest voice, and she smelled of Pall Malls and the lemon and lilac of Arpège by Lanvin, which my father had bought her for their last anniversary.
“You know, boys,” she said, “when we were growing up, we lived through some terrible things—Pearl Harbor, the Depression, the war. We’ll get through this, too, OK?”
Then she smiled, hugged us, told us she loved us, and kissed us both on the cheeks. The softness of that kiss lingered long after she left the room. But so did my worries.
My eyes followed the spectral, silvery patterns on walls and ceiling cast by the cars on Evergreen Avenue as they moved through street lamps and moonlight. But when they passed, I noted, they left behind only darkness.
That summer I’d read a book about how the FBI had caught the Soviet spies who had stolen the secrets of the atomic bomb. It said today’s hydrogen bombs were 20 times more powerful than the atom bombs that had laid waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just one could destroy the Bronx; two or three could wipe out all New York City. And we and the Russians had hundreds of them pointed at each other.
As silence enveloped the street outside, I recalled the book’s description of the Bomb’s impact. First there would be a flash a thousand times brighter than lightning. Then, a fireball would rise, unleashing waves of heat and more light flashes. The blast that followed would instantly turn cars, buildings, cats and dogs, and everybody within two miles into nuclear dust, and then would come a firestorm that would burn up all the oxygen in the air.
Finally the mushroom cloud of smoke, dust, and infernal orange and vermilion fire would rise almost serenely in the darkening sky, spreading nuclear fallout like a Biblical plague, making it impossible to eat, drink, or even breathe. Nothing, I thought, would survive.
My bedroom window was open a crack, and a chilly breeze blew in from the Bronx River. I shivered. In the distance, I heard one siren, then another. Must be police or ambulances, I told myself, just the soundtrack of the city. But tonight there were more alarms and they sounded louder than usual. Maybe they weren’t police cars; maybe they were…air raid signals! My God! The Russians were attacking us right now!
I sat up and slipped off the quilt. Should I turn on my radio to find out what was going on? I didn’t want to disturb my brother, who was sleeping peacefully in the twin bed beside me. Or maybe I should wake my parents. We could bring pillows and blankets down to the fallout shelter in the basement. But was there room for everybody in the building? Was it even open? How long would it take to remove all the bicycles and baby carriages people had stored there? And what would we eat? We certainly hadn’t stockpiled freeze-dried food like those people in Montana we’d seen on TV.
The sirens subsided and I could hear the hum of the El on Westchester Avenue, a long block away. False alarm! I thought, with relief, maybe now I can get some sleep. I let my head fall back on my pillow, then turned towards my brother’s bed.
A dappled patch of moonlight fell on his cheek. His mouth was slightly open and his chest rose and fell with the easy, gentle rhythm of children’s sleep. My dad had told him he wasn’t going back in the Army and that was good enough for him. How I envied his innocence! I wished I could be eight again, but realized I could neither unread what I’d read nor unlearn what I knew.
As the shadows settled into a static frieze on the walls, my eyes itched and my throat burned. Was I really going to die? At 12? Before my bar mitzvah? Would I never live to see the proud smiles of my parents as I read my Torah portion on the bimah of the Ward Avenue synagogue or celebrate with my friends at the reception? Would I never grow up to live the free life, the life that mattered, whose outlines I had only begun to sketch in my mind? Would I never fall in love or have a family of my own or (here I could feel myself redden) know what it felt like to make out or jerk off or even, as the older boys on the corner talked about in hushed voices, get laid?
The tears were coming fast now and I wiped them away with my dark blue gingham quilt that had bats, red-seamed baseballs and caps sporting the proud NY Yankees logo. If it happened, I thought, even Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford would die, too. Paul Newman and Tony Curtis; Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe; Lucy and Desi; Elvis; the Drifters and Everly Brothers; the Shirelles and Marvelletes, and every last one of the Beverly Hillbillies would be swept up in the mushroom cloud.
So would my mom, my dad, my brother, my aunties, the cousins we rarely saw, my friends at school, the kids on the block, and the grandma and grandpa I hardly knew but who were really old, so it wouldn’t matter so much anyway.
I tried to divert myself by thinking of funny things, like Three Stooges movies where mop-topped Mo slapped Curly’s bald head and called him a knucklehead or silly songs like the one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater or the itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie yellow polka-dot bikini that she wore for the first time today. I thought about summers in the country, sunlight flickering through trees, wet morning dew soaking the grass, air so fresh you could taste it, twigs crunching under my feet. But they were overwhelmed by another image—of a dark cloud hovering above me, flashing lightning and fire.
The chilly breeze penetrated the open sliver below the window, but my throat felt as dry as a hot desert wind. I sat up, put my slippers on, and padded through the dark foyer to the kitchen, then turned on the light. The clock on the wall resembled an orange tabby cat whose eyes were locked in a fixed stare and whose nose and whiskers framed a mouth set in a smile no real cat would ever have. The orange and white tail swayed like a pendulum, whisking each passing second into eternity. The clock read 1:17.
As I opened the cabinet and reached for a glass, the door creaked open. It was my father, in his worn striped blue and white bathrobe over a t-shirt and a pair of blue boxer shorts. Tufts of graying hair stuck out from both sides of his bald head and peeked above the v neck that only partly covered his chest.
“I saw the light on,” he said. “Everything all right?”
“Yea, dad, just getting some water.”
I filled my glass, and he took a step closer.
“Are you, um, worried?”
“No, dad, just thirsty,” I replied. I wanted to tell him what was bothering me, but I didn’t know what to say and didn’t think he’d understand.
“Good, son,” he said, and his shoulders relaxed. “Go back to bed.”
I heard the cat clock ticking. As he turned to leave, the words wouldn’t stay inside me anymore.
“Dad?”
“Yes. son?” he said, glancing back at me.
“Do you think you could ask the super to take the bikes and baby carriages out of the fallout shelter?”
He gave me a long look and put one hand on my shoulder.
“This is all just tough talk, son,” he said. “There’s not going to be a war.”
“You sure?”
He looked down and away, and when he turned back towards me, his eyes only partly met my gaze, which hungered for his certitude.
“Yes, son. Now go back to sleep.”
“OK, thanks, dad,” I said, but I was neither comforted nor reassured.
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