Remise

I know two things about the joyous day of my birth. The first is that my mother died. The second is that my father said it was not an even trade.

The year was 1929. The month was February. My mother's name was Abigail.

"She was a wisp of a thing. Didn't have good birthing hips," my grandmother on my father's side told me. "The poor thing died from a hemorrhage and a loss of blood. It's what your father gets for marrying a Jew. Simply one step away from a nigger." For a long time I thought hemorrhage was a demon that came into this world when I was born and carried my mother away.

My father corrected me on this point. He said, with his finger in my chest, "No demon killed her, boy. You did."

My grandmother named me. "Your mother wanted to call you Chaim. But Chaim's too Jewish. We're not Jewish," she said. "We're good, God-fearing, Anglicans. Not a bunch of horn-wearing devil worshipers." She said this curling her lips, baring her teeth, and scraping the air with her arthritic fingers. She chose Cedric instead, after my great-great-grandfather, who, she claimed, fought with the British during the War of 1812. It figures I was named after a man who fought on the losing side. My grandmother's the one who lost out in the end though, because people called me Cid early on and with a last name like Wymann, I was always assumed to be a Jew anyway. They say you are born a Jew on your mother's side so my grandmother couldn't stamp that out of me. Nor could all the demons in her Anglican hell. Though I have to give her credit - she tried.

My grandmother's name was Tait Maddie Wymann. People called her Maddie, or Mad Maddie under their breath. Later, I found out her name meant 'maiden who brings joy.' I had a good laugh over it for I could never picture those flabby, dry, wrinkled legs luring any man's pecker to her, although eventually I figured out that she had conceived my father.

"You have the face of a villain," my grandmother told me when I was four. "An imp and a villain. You'll roast in hell before all is done."

I don't remember what I looked like when I was four and I've got no pictures to remind me. Today, at the age of seventy-four, I can see that my grandmother had the right of it. The hair that remains on my head is bone white, cut short and prickly. My eyes are gray. My nose has two great bumps. The one in its center is from a pommel hit that connected while doing The Long Ships in 1965 with Widmark and Poitier. The second, higher up, is from two Newark thugs who caught me napping when I was fifteen. It bears a scar that runs across its ridge and travels down my right cheek - four inches of raised, white skin.

My father's name was Theodore but he went by the name of Teddy. I used neither of his names nor called him father. I only spoke to him when he spoke to me, and usually kept my responses to, "Yes, sir," or "No, sir." This left me with Mad Maddie Wymann and her demon pulpit for most of my youth. The three of us lived in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, in an attached house with a second floor and an unfinished basement, neither of which we used. We were three long blocks from the elevated train, the Flushing Corona Line, twenty minutes from Manhattan. Sunnyside Gardens was a planned neighborhood, placed there with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt - what they called at the time a bedroom community. The trains reached out from Manhattan and brought the bedroom communities into the fold of what we called the city. My father bought the house with pension money from my grandfather, a Brooklyn brewery worker who had died two years before I was born, crushed by a beer truck that lost its brakes on Pineapple Street. His death provided a fifteen-hundred-dollar down payment which allowed my father to buy himself a way out of Hell's Kitchen.

"No more toilet in the hall, sharing with the micks and kikes," my grandmother was fond of saying. The private bathroom in our house was her shrine and no place for the poor-aimed piss of a child.

In those days Sunnyside Gardens was a community of simple brick attached houses with gardens to their sides and rear. Sunlight, grass, and shade replaced Manhattan's shadow, concrete, and noise. Maddie told me my mother loved the greenery. The grounds reminded my father of her, so he hated them.

My father worked as an illustrator for a small advertising agency on Madison Avenue designing posters for, "Millions now 'take it easy' on washday using Rinso Suds," "Give a man Snider's Catsup," and "Best coffee I ever tasted, with or without caffeine - Kellogg's Kaffee-hag Coffee." He stayed late most nights at work and on the weekends slept off his love affair with the bottle behind his closed door.

In the summer of 1931 he was offered a job by a man named Disney to work on a follow-up cartoon to a feature called "The Skeleton Dance." The film was a "silly symphony," a term my grandmother used to good advantage.

"What kind of man makes a 'silly symphony?'" she'd asked. "His head's not on right and neither will yours be if you follow him." The new cartoon was to be a tale of seven dwarves and a princess. My grandmother told him, "You're out of your mind. There's no money in cartoons. It's the Depression and you have a job here in New York - a good one. Don't be a fool and leave it."

The following year my father lost his job at the advertising agency. I still laugh when I think of that. It's the Wymann luck, the poor bastard.

After that my father did freelance work with a partner in Manhattan, where they shared an office. He drew in pen and ink the designs for the inside lids of cigar boxes and for advertisements of women's hats for manufacturers like Knox the Hatter. By the time I was four the partnership was over and he'd moved his drafting table into the small back room of our house, next to my bedroom. This was unfortunate for me because he used his fists to speak. He was a small man who wallowed in self-pity and when he wasn't either wallowing or hitting, he was out with the Irish drinking and getting into fights at Kilkarney's, a local saloon off of Skillman Avenue. What he was like before I came into the world, I don't know. My mother left no diary, no letter, nothing, to tell me. I had only what remained of him.

One night when I was four, my father brought me home three metal knights on horses as a gift. I played with them upstairs, on the floors of the empty rooms. They fed my imagination. Inside my head the knights fought to the death atop their snorting steeds. Their hooves kicked up the earth of the endless field that I made of the wooden floor as they charged each other again and again.

There were other children living in the houses around our common courtyard and gardens but I only knew them from the view of my bedroom window, where I'd watch them play and eavesdrop on their conversations. One boy lived next to us so I at least knew him by name - Tomik Kopecky, a Czech whose father was a limousine driver. He had four sisters whom I never saw, but sometimes I heard them laugh from the room next to mine. The house to the other side was empty.

I did a lot of chores. Maddie, having been a grade school teacher, home-schooled me. By the age of four, I was doing homework and housework six days a week. I spent a lot of time washing the floors of the empty rooms on our second story. There was no time for playing, but I could read, write passably, and do my times tables by the age of six.

The day I had to myself was Saturday. For as far back as I can remember, on Saturday afternoons Maddie left me alone with my father. He spent the time behind the closed door to his room, the sound of his snores the only thing I had to let me know he was actually there. Maddie told me that she went to church services in Manhattan at the Church of the Holy Communion on Twenty-third and Sixth. It's called the Limelight now and is used as a club by the kids and freaks in the Village. Back then it was an Episcopal Church. "I'm going to the Episcopal church services on Twenty-third," was all Maddie would say, and she'd be out the door.

"I thought you was angrykin not pissycopal?" I asked her once. She slapped me and said, "There's no Anglican here, so I make do. It's better than going to some papist house of the serpent." For a while after that I let her church services lie.

The only other thing that broke the monotony of lessons and work was the occasional paper I borrowed from my father. He bought The New York Times every day and collected a pile of them outside his bedroom door. On Fridays, when he and Maddie were asleep, I would take the top copy back to my room and spread it out on my bed like a road map to the world. Reading them became like a puzzle to me, a game that I could play late into the night. I always made sure to return the paper to its place outside my father's door before I went to sleep.

Besides the paper there were few outlets left to me to learn of the outside world. There was no television in 1935 and the single radio in our house was my father's to play with and no one else's. He listened to the news or sometimes to the fights late at night after he'd come home. I remember once watching him through the crack in his bedroom door as he listened to the Braddock-Baer fight. I'd seen the headlines in the paper and watched the boys in the courtyard squaring off for a pretend fifteen rounds. The fight was at the Madison Square Garden Bowl on Forty-fifth Street and Northern Boulevard – practically in our back yard, just the other side of the Sunnyside Yard of the Pennsylvania and Long Island Railroads. My father smoked one cigarette after the other, carefully pinching them between his index finger and thumb until they were finished. Then he dropped them to the bare wood floor and stepped on them with a turn of his shoe. When the announcer shouted that Braddock had won the title on a decision, my father cursed and looked up. He saw me watching him and slammed the door in my face.

My grandmother neither read the paper nor listened to the radio. She listened, instead, to the religious dirges that echoed inside her head.

The first important year of my life was 1935. I was six years old for most of it. What occurred that year changed my life forever.

It was just after the New Year. I sat near my bedroom window watching the snow float down onto the weeds that made up our portion of the back garden when my grandmother came into my room. I hadn't heard her come in behind me. I was daydreaming of playing snow castles and flying snowballs with the neighborhood boys I always watched but was never allowed to play with, when she grabbed me by the ear.

"What are you doing here, sitting around not doing your chores?" she asked, lifting me up off the chair with her gnarled hands, and onto my toes.

I slapped at her hand without thinking and she let go as if she'd been bitten by a snake. I turned to look at her. Her eyes and mouth were wide open.

"You hit me," she said. "You'll never do that again." Her hands clenched into fists and I knew what was coming. Usually I simply stood and took it, eyes almost closed and lip half bitten through. But when she reached for me this time – and she was quick for an old woman – I ducked, lifted her skirt, and slid through her open legs.

She screamed and chased me around the dining room table, but I was quick too. I'd never realized until that moment just how swiftly I could move. For what couldn't have been more than a minute, I dodged and slid, avoiding her claws. It was exhilarating. She finally gave up, her breath ragged in her throat, her eyes bulging.

"Are you all right?" I asked, stepping close. She boxed my ears and threw me in the closet until supper. Still, defiance had registered in my mind as a viable means of defense. I would never go completely back to my old compliant ways again. If she couldn't catch me she couldn't hit me. This would do wonders for me later when I learned to fence and my motto became "hit without being hit."

Later that day Maddie told me, through the closed closet door, that I could eat. I remember the smell of mothballs piled into the corners and the musty smell of my father's winter boots. Still, her potato soup overpowered the other smells and made my stomach grumble. When I heard the door unlock I pushed it open and saw Maddie at the kitchen table serving with a big ladle. I walked over to her but she ignored me. I climbed up onto my seat, leaned over my bowl, and inhaled. It was a poor strategic choice. She grabbed hold of me, pulled me off the chair, and dragged me to the stove, placing my hand over the flaming burner. "This is where blasphemers go - to the burning pits where sinners are buried up to their necks in pitch, alive but dead, alive but dead. And so you will be if ever you lay a hand on me again. Do you understand?"

The flesh on my fingers began to bubble. I nodded.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Yes, Grandmother!" I shouted.

"Good," she said and relaxed her grip. I pulled my hand away and ran. Later, she put butter on my blisters and wrapped them in gauze. I lost layers of skin at each unwrapping, but my hand, badly scarred, eventually healed. That was the first time I openly defied Maddie and it would be months before I did it again. Still, the opening shots of my war with Maddie had been fired.

The rest of 1935 was a year of watching and waiting. Then on December 28th, everything changed again.

It was the opening weekend of the motion picture Captain Blood, with Errol Flynn. At the time I knew little of Flynn or of movies other than what I'd been able to read in The Times "Amusements" section. But that Friday I'd seen a picture that captured my attention: a man with long hair holding a sword beneath the caption, "The Seas Run Red in the Wake of Captain Blood." Seeing that picture I knew I was ready to go to war with Maddie again.

On December 28th my father remained asleep when Maddie left for her weekly Saturday pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Communion. With Christmas only three days past, he'd been drinking heavily and I knew by the sound of his deep, long snores, that he would remain asleep far into the afternoon.

I opened my door and stole out into the living room, stepping carefully on the wooden floor, trying not to make the boards squeak. I can still see the sterile white bulbs and limp tinsel hanging from the small Christmas tree sitting beneath the large crucifix with Jesus and his bloody palms by the front door. Maddie didn't believe in gifts so even though we had a tree there'd never been anything underneath its branches.

I put on a light jacket and cap, opened the front door, spotted Maddie walking to the right, and followed her.

There hadn't been much snow that year but there had been bad frost and freezing days. I hadn't thought to take my winter jacket, mittens, or scarf. The cold air was a surprise to me, as if I'd forgotten that anything existed outside of the view from my window. My knickers covered part of my legs but my knee socks had no elastic left and hung around my bare ankles, while the wind went right through my light jacket. I ran to keep up with Maddie as she walked at a quick-step up past Skillman and 39th Avenue to the elevated Lincoln Avenue Station on Queens Boulevard. I remember stopping to look up at the station. I felt the ground trembling beneath my feet as a train passed overhead. My grandmother disappeared through the station door. I ran to the door and tried to pull it open but I couldn't budge it. A man came up behind me and pulled it open. I followed him in and ran up the steps. I saw Maddie pay for her fare and push through the turnstile. I ducked under it and stayed close. Someone yelled, "Hey you!" but it was crowded and I easily got lost in the press of people. Standing on a bench on the platform I could see for what seemed like miles even though the platform was crowded. At one end of the tracks I saw a tall needle-like building that seemed to shoot up out of the city skyline.

"That's the Empire State building, son," said an old man sitting next to me.

At the other end of the tracks small patches of farmland dotted the horizon interspersed between new half-block-long garden apartment buildings and piles of construction. I looked north and saw Sunnyside Gardens. The giant Phipps apartment complex overshadowed it like a dark red tumor. The sudden view of my world made my jaw drop. I pictured my father, asleep on his bed, still pining for my mother, mouth open and snoring, pushing out and pulling in the blinds with each exaggerated inhalation and exhalation, and I laughed.

The train pulled up, wheels clacking on cold electric rails. The air seemed to crackle around me with electricity. I heard someone fart and giggled, then clapped a hand over my mouth. As the train stopped I jumped down off the bench and ran towards where I'd seen my grandmother disappear into one of the open mouths of the giant beast. I stepped across the gap between platform and car, and entered its belly. In the jostle of bodies I almost lost my grandmother. But then I saw, not far away, amidst the forest of men's pants and women's bare calves, her sagging black socks and swollen ankles. The doors closed and the car jerked forward a few times before its ride smoothed out. I grabbed hold of a pole and held on tight. Every time the train stopped I was thrown forward, then back, knocking into heavy coats and women's thick purses. A cracked coat button's jagged edge scratched my cheek. A barking voice seemed to come out of nowhere shouting the name of a street, and the doors opened and closed again. Maddie sat down on a bench. I pressed my face against the pole and lowered myself to the floor of the car. On my knees, I kept Maddie's sagging socks and swollen ankles in sight. The windows darkened as the train went below the earth. My ears popped and I had to shake my head to clear them. I thought Maddie had found me out and punished me by taking me down into the underworld, only the other people on the train didn't seem to be worried.

The voice barked again, "Times Square, last stop," as we came to a jerking, screeching halt.

Maddie stood and walked quickly out, passing through tunnels, around winding corridors, and up stairs. Finally I heard wind howling up ahead. A large sign above me said, "HOLD YOUR HAT," and all around me people grabbed with free hands for theirs. I held onto mine as a sudden gust of wind tried to tear it free. The light of day blinded me when we reached the surface and the packed crowd dispersed. I lost Maddie for a moment, then found her as my eyes adjusted to the light. She stood beneath a large, white marquee crawling with red letters. "Captain Blood," the letters said. The theatre was The Strand. I could see her face as she looked up at the marquee. Her cheeks flushed bright red against the pale white of the rest of her face. She was smiling and her hands, covered in black gloves, were clasped in front of her. She wore a large, gray, woolen overcoat that gave her figure a boxy shape. She seemed small beneath that sign, small but happy. I'd never seen her happy before - it surprised me. People were lined up alongside the building and off into the distance, puffing out frosted air in white gusts that hovered above their heads like clouds. But Maddie didn't seem to notice them as she looked up at the words in red.

Then she turned around, as if she knew I was there, and spotted me. Her smile disappeared. She pulled out her pocket watch and looked at it before she looked back down at me. Then she pointed one long finger and slowly curled it in. I walked towards her. She cuffed the back of my head as soon as I was in range, sending my cap flying to the ground. When I reached down to pick it up she grabbed my hair and twisted it so that my face angled up towards hers, then she relaxed her grip and pushed me towards the box office.

"I'm cold," I said.

"Then freeze," she replied.

She gave fifty cents to the cashier and bought two tickets, looking around quickly as if she were afraid she was being observed, then led me to the back of the ticket holders' line. Huddled between the thick fur coats of the women surrounding us I was at least warm. Some of the coats smelled of exotic perfumes and some tickled my nose with their fur while others stank of long, unwashed wear. There were children too, like me and older, with stained brown bags in their hands and dirt on their faces. They pushed and shoved each other while adults talked above them. I'd never seen so many people before.

Inside the theatre both the cigarette smoke and the noise grew thicker. Maddie rushed me inside so we could get seats. We sat in the back row, surrounded by people, facing a large white screen. The seats folded down and sprang up when you got off them. There was an ashtray on the back of each seat in front of us. I could barely see above the people in the next row so I sat on my knees and slid back into the space between the seat and the back as the seat eased upward. With a little shifting around I found my balance. The overhead chandelier dimmed and music swelled from everywhere. A silver beam appeared above my head and split the darkness flooding the screen in front of us with light.

The newsreels came on first - a giant antenna, men in uniforms, bombs dropping, and airplanes that soared. I'd never seen an airplane flying before. Just when I'd gotten used to the images and sounds the screen went black and the music stopped. Then a different kind of music came on that grabbed my soul and wouldn't let go. Trumpets blared the opening of a musical score that I'd later learn had been written by Wolfgang Korngold. Crossed cutlasses and ships painted on stretched canvas filled the screen. Words splashed onto the ships in what seemed to me to be letters that stood hundreds of feet high, so big I thought they would fall off the screen and on top of me. Then the light disappeared and left the world in shadows. A horseman appeared, galloping through cannon fire, searching for Doctor Peter Blood. And then came Flynn, a man whose face the flickering projector adored. I forgot about my grandmother. I forgot about my father. I forgot about everything but the giants above me, their crashing cannons, their heaving ships and their clashing swords. It ruined me, for I've never experienced anything like it since.

I emerged from the theatre rubbing my eyes as I tried to adjust them to the lights of the lobby. My grandmother left me there and went to the bathroom. I stood on the marble floor, beneath the crystal chandelier that marked the beautiful entrance, and through squinted eyes stared at the winking lights above me. There was a commotion by the front doors and a group of men and women walked in - the men dressed in tight-fitting suits, dapper black tuxedos with tails, smoking cigars as big as zeppelins and carrying glasses of champagne. The crowd parted in front of them and they walked up to me. One man in particular, dark haired, clean-shaven, dark-eyed, with a thin, athletic look and supple movements, seemed to be the center of attention. He had a woman on each arm. Each wore a low-cut dress that shimmered like stars as they moved. He puffed on a stogie that wreathed his head in smoke. I was in their way and unable to move. The man in the center of the group looked at me and released the two women to either side. He walked up to me, bent down on one knee, and withdrew his cigar from his mouth.

"Do you know who am I?" he asked with a thick accent. His breath smelled like my father's. His hair was oiled and slicked back perfectly. His teeth shone.

I shook my head.

"Some day, how you say, when you are of bigger age, right? You will come to me and know who am I. This man, Flynn," he pointed with his cigar at the life-size poster above the popcorn stand, "they say he is great swordsman. He uses ... escrima, espada, up there, on screen. Not here, in, in hand." He took my hand and placed it in his. "See?" he said. "Hand not screen. Hand."

I nodded and shook his hand. He shook back, laughing. It was a strong grip for such a thin man.

A flash of light blinded me.

"Great shot," someone said.

I smelled something burning. When my eyes cleared, the man ... and the crowd of people around him, were gone.

"Do you know who that was?" a man in a worn doorman's tuxedo asked me from behind.

I turned around and saw a man, younger than my father, flexed in the same position Flynn had been when he swung his sword, knees bent, right arm forward, left arm curled up toward his ear. I shook my head.

The doorman lunged forward and I dodged. He laughed and pretended to swing an imaginary sword from side to side. "That," he said between thrusts, "was ... Aldo ... Nadi."

"Fesniv!" the manager yelled from the box office.

The doorman froze in front of me, sweat dotting his forehead.

"Fesniv!" the voice yelled again.

The doorman winked at me. "He just gave a fencing exhibition with Santelli and Costello at the Plaza Hotel. They say he's the greatest swordsman who ever lived."

"Greater than Captain Blood?" I asked.

I never heard him answer because Mad Maddie Wymann grabbed me by the ear and dragged me out into the cold.

Photo taken by Anthony Collins at a performance during The Early Show on CBS in November of 2004.