thousands of freight cars stretching back so far toward Harpers Ferry that you could never see the end of them. And flanking the tracks on the far side, a metropolis: Brunswick had electric light bulbs, telephones, radios. Rich people lived there. Masons, for heaven’s sake. Not just Red Men and Odd Fellows and Moose such as we had around Morrisonville, but Masons. And not just Masons, but Baptists, too—genuine dress-to-the-teeth-and-give-yourself-fancy-airs Baptists.
Three of my uncles lived there: Uncle Tom, Uncle Harvey,and Uncle Lewis. They were expected to come back to Morrisonville and sit on Ida Rebecca’s porch too, but only on Sundays. As citizens of Brunswick, they had crossed over into a world of Byzantine splendor.
Brunswick had a department store and a movie house. There was a street stretching for two or three blocks lined with stores, including a drugstore where you could sit down at a round marble-top table and have somebody bring you an ice-cream soda. There were whole blocks of houses jammed one right up against another, the blocks laid out in a grid pattern on hills steep enough to tire a mountain goat.
Uncle Harvey lived with his wife and daughter at the crest of one such hill. He was one of God’s favored people, a locomotive engineer. I was in terror that he might try to engage me in conversation. When he heard a train whistle echoing off the valley below, I goggled in admiration as he produced his big railroad watch, studied it coolly, and announced, “The three-fifty-four’s running five minutes late today.”
My Uncle Tom worked as a blacksmith in the B&O yards near Harpers Ferry. That was a good job too. Though he walked the four-mile round trip to and from the shop daily in sooty railroader’s clothes, Uncle Tom was well off. His house contained a marvel I had never seen before: an indoor bathroom. This was enough to mark Uncle Tom a rich man, but in addition he had a car. And such a car. It was an Essex, with windows that rolled up and down with interior hand cranks, not like my father’s Model T with the isinglass windows in side curtains that had to be buttoned onto the frame in bad weather. Uncle Tom’s Essex even had cut-glass flower vases in sconces in the backseat. He was a man of substance. When he rolled up in his Essex for Ida Rebecca’s command appearances on Sunday afternoons in Morrisonville, wearing a white shirt and black suit, smoking his pipe, his pretty red-haired wife Goldie on the seat beside him, I felt pride in kinship to so much grandeur.
Lewis, Ida Rebecca’s youngest son, also thrived in Brunswick, at the barbering trade. Though scarcely twenty-five years old, hehad his own shop and called by appointment on the Brunswick ladies to cut their hair at home in the new boyish bobs and sometimes, according to people envious of Uncle Lewis’s reputation for gallantry, to render more knightly service. Uncle Lewis was my first vision of what male elegance could be. He had glistening black hair always parted so meticulously that you might have thought he needed surveyor’s instruments to comb a line so straight. Thin black sideburns extended down to his earlobes in the style cartoonists adopted as the distinguishing mark of high-toned cads. With a high gloss on his city shoes, in his crisp white barber’s smock, he wisecracked with the railroad men as he presided in front of a long wall of mirrors lined with pomades, tonics, and scents. I admired him as the ultimate in dandyism.
On those magic occasions when my father took me to Brunswick, the supreme delight was to have Uncle Lewis seat me on a board placed across the arms of his barber chair, crank me into the sky, and subject me to the pampered luxury of being clippered, snipped, and doused with heavy applications of Lucky Tiger or Jeris hair tonic, which left my hair plastered gorgeously to the sides of my head and sent me into the street reeking of aromatic delight.
After one such clipping I climbed a hill in
Three of my uncles lived there: Uncle Tom, Uncle Harvey,and Uncle Lewis. They were expected to come back to Morrisonville and sit on Ida Rebecca’s porch too, but only on Sundays. As citizens of Brunswick, they had crossed over into a world of Byzantine splendor.
Brunswick had a department store and a movie house. There was a street stretching for two or three blocks lined with stores, including a drugstore where you could sit down at a round marble-top table and have somebody bring you an ice-cream soda. There were whole blocks of houses jammed one right up against another, the blocks laid out in a grid pattern on hills steep enough to tire a mountain goat.
Uncle Harvey lived with his wife and daughter at the crest of one such hill. He was one of God’s favored people, a locomotive engineer. I was in terror that he might try to engage me in conversation. When he heard a train whistle echoing off the valley below, I goggled in admiration as he produced his big railroad watch, studied it coolly, and announced, “The three-fifty-four’s running five minutes late today.”
My Uncle Tom worked as a blacksmith in the B&O yards near Harpers Ferry. That was a good job too. Though he walked the four-mile round trip to and from the shop daily in sooty railroader’s clothes, Uncle Tom was well off. His house contained a marvel I had never seen before: an indoor bathroom. This was enough to mark Uncle Tom a rich man, but in addition he had a car. And such a car. It was an Essex, with windows that rolled up and down with interior hand cranks, not like my father’s Model T with the isinglass windows in side curtains that had to be buttoned onto the frame in bad weather. Uncle Tom’s Essex even had cut-glass flower vases in sconces in the backseat. He was a man of substance. When he rolled up in his Essex for Ida Rebecca’s command appearances on Sunday afternoons in Morrisonville, wearing a white shirt and black suit, smoking his pipe, his pretty red-haired wife Goldie on the seat beside him, I felt pride in kinship to so much grandeur.
Lewis, Ida Rebecca’s youngest son, also thrived in Brunswick, at the barbering trade. Though scarcely twenty-five years old, hehad his own shop and called by appointment on the Brunswick ladies to cut their hair at home in the new boyish bobs and sometimes, according to people envious of Uncle Lewis’s reputation for gallantry, to render more knightly service. Uncle Lewis was my first vision of what male elegance could be. He had glistening black hair always parted so meticulously that you might have thought he needed surveyor’s instruments to comb a line so straight. Thin black sideburns extended down to his earlobes in the style cartoonists adopted as the distinguishing mark of high-toned cads. With a high gloss on his city shoes, in his crisp white barber’s smock, he wisecracked with the railroad men as he presided in front of a long wall of mirrors lined with pomades, tonics, and scents. I admired him as the ultimate in dandyism.
On those magic occasions when my father took me to Brunswick, the supreme delight was to have Uncle Lewis seat me on a board placed across the arms of his barber chair, crank me into the sky, and subject me to the pampered luxury of being clippered, snipped, and doused with heavy applications of Lucky Tiger or Jeris hair tonic, which left my hair plastered gorgeously to the sides of my head and sent me into the street reeking of aromatic delight.
After one such clipping I climbed a hill in
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