Spilled Ink and a Broken Record

So far as I can tell, the only recording of my mother’s actual voice was a phonograph made in 1944 to send to my father in France during the War.  On it, she speaks for a while, enthusiastic, nervous, afraid to say what she really means, and then she hands the task over to me, four years old, hardly remembering who my father was, and I sing proudly the only song I then know, the rhyme learned at school that week, probably in the yard and not from the teachers.  It was a Kindergarten chant:

Inka dinka a bottle of ink

The cork fell out and you stink.

Years later, I learned from my father that when he received the record in the south of France, near Marseilles, France he went all around the army camps trying to find a phonograph.  He traded the cigarettes he didn’t smoke and the bottles of whisky he didn’t drink, bargained, wheedled, and finally found one he could borrow for an afternoon.  He listened to the voice of my mother and cried and laughed at the same time.  He was standing in the middle of the medical tent where he did his dentistry, with his friends around him—the major in charge, the assistant, and the jeep-driver who had brought the record-player over from another camp twenty miles away and had to get it back before dinner.  After my mother’s message—a medley of love and complaints about how lonely she was, how sick her father was, and how all the relatives weren’t helping out—I came on with a ridiculous song, so stupid I probably knew it myself as soon as the words were out of my mouth. 

But there was no going back.  She had put aside her pennies and nickels for a month.  She schlepped me through the subway all the way from her mother’s house by New Utrecht Avenue, Brooklyn,  where we lived during the War into the City (Manhattan) and up to Macy’s.  She paid ten dollars for a three-minute recording, and she wasted almost a whole minute saying, “Is the machine on? Do I speak now? Can I start again?”  Then she cried, laughed, and tried to say how much she loved him and missed him, and how life was unbearable without him, and how proud she was of me. 

What she didn’t really say, though, was that she was not well, that she felt faint all the time, and often she had to be driven home when she fell down in the street.  I knew in a way because so often strangers took care of me and policemen drove me home in their patrol cars.  My song was a substitute for all the things I couldn’t say because I was too young and because no one told me I was allowed and because whenever I went anywhere with my mother I was afraid she would fall down.

What I meant to say was, “Daddy, I love you.  Please come home from the War.  I need you.”  My mother’s father, before he started to die, made me a soldier suit, so when I walked in the street I could be a general and the real soldiers could look at all my medals and salute me and then I could know I was helping to win the War and get my father back soon to help my mother and not let me be so afraid. 

Maybe I also wanted to tell him I didn’t like the Kindergarten.  The other children were mean and didn’t let me play with the blocks.  I didn’t like the teacher because she told people to be neat and said I was a sloppy boy.  But once I did like Mrs. Rothenberg when she made a really bad boy sit under the piano after he hit a Negro boy on the head with a block and called him a bad name I am not allowed to say.  My grandmother told me that sometimes bad people also called us bad names and that was why my father had to go to the War to shoot them, even though he only fixed soldiers’ teeth so they could fight and kill the bad people.  My mother cried too much and she never told me true things like Grandma did.  I didn’t like bad people.  The teacher said I was sloppy and I knew that meant I was bad.  I was not as bad as that really bad boy who called the black boy a bad word and whose name I didn’t know.  I had no friends in school.

When my father heard the record of my mother’s voice and my song, he sat alone in his tent all evening and hardly spoke to anyone the next day, even while he was looking into their mouths and fixing their teeth.  He said later that it made him sad because sometimes he would look into the soldiers’ mouths early in the morning and then in the evening he watched them come back into the camp on stretchers and some of them were dead.  He had wanted the record to make him feel happy for a few moments.  Because others were in the room when he listened and they laughed, he laughed too, but he really wasn’t happy.  He never listened to the record again.  It was too painful.  Many years later when I was almost grown up I found it in a closet.  I listened to it and cried.  My mother was too sick to listen.  My grandmother and grandfather were dead by then.  When I heard my stupid song, I knew Mrs. Rothenberg was right.  Now, when I am an old man, older than my parents when they died, I am not so sure my song was so stupid.  But probably the record broke and was thrown away, so no one will ever know.