gat

Swissvale taught me also that Mother and Father were at war with each other—a sorry lesson to
learn at five. That the battles were over differences of culture which have no rational solution, I
couldn’t know. Each couple who tries to merge strong traditions, as my parents did, must accept
the challenge as vast, one not to be undertaken lightly or quit on easily. The voices of timeless
generations are permanently merged in offspring. Marriage is a legal fiction, but marriage in one’s
children is not. There is no way to divorce inside the kid’s cells. When parents war on each other,
they set the child to warring against himself, a contest which can never be won. It places an
implacable enemy deep inside which can’t be killed or exorcised, and from whose revenge there is
no escape.
I thank God my parents chose the middle road, the endless dialectic. Dad, the liberal thinker (even
though his party affiliation was Republican and his attitude conservative) always willing to
concede the opposition some points; Mom, the arch conservative even though her voice was
always liberal Democrat, full of prickly principles she was prepared to fight for, like Beau Geste,
to the bitter end.
For all the hardly bearable stresses this endless combat generated, their choice to fight it out for
fifty years saved me from even harsher grief. I love them both for struggling so hard without
quitting. I know it was better for sister and me that way; it gave us a chance to understand both
sides of our own nature, to make some accurate guesses about the gifts we possessed. It prepared
us to be comfortable with ourselves. I think they were better for the fifty-year war, too. Better
than each would have been alone.
[Interlude while the lump in my throat subsides]
I remember FDR on the radio in our postage-stamp living room announcing Pearl Harbor, eight
days before my sixth birthday. I remember the uneasy feeling I harbored for a long time over war
reports from the Far East that played out of the old Philco. I thought the Japanese would cut off
my hands because the war news said that’s what Japs did to prisoners.
The high point of the Swissvale years for me wasn’t the war or the phenomenal array of wax lips,
sugar dot licorice, Fleers Dubble Bubble, and other penny candies which seemed to vanish all at
once just a short time after the war ended, like dinosaurs. It wasn’t leaping from a high wall with
a Green Hornet cape streaming behind as I fell like a stone, scarring my knees for eternity. It
wasn’t even Marilyn herself. The hinge in all my years, separating what went before from all that
followed, was the night sister and I awakened to the shrieking contralto of Mother’s voice and the
quieter second tenor of Father’s, intermingling in the downstairs entrance hall.
I remember crawling to the upstairs landing bathed in shadows to find Sister already there. The
next five minutes were the closest we ever came to each other emotionally, the most important
experience we ever shared. Bootie was threatening to leave Andy if something important wasn’t
done. She was so upset that efforts to calm her down (so the neighbors wouldn’t hear) only
fanned the flames. With the hindsight of better than a half century, I’m able to conclude now that
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