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By Root 353 0

was Southampton, which was a half-hour’s drive on Route 27, and I almost died of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. The way Mom told the story was that I was delirious and dying on the couch while Dad was reading the New York Times. He came across an article about Rocky Mountain spotted fever and my symptoms matched up, so Mom found a clinic nearby that she could take me to and ran me down there and the doctor said I had the highest fever they’d ever recorded and reassured my mother that if she had waited another two hours to bring me in I would have died. From this near-death experience I gleaned that reading the New York Times will save your life. Doctors, well, who knows how effective they are, but newspapers, newspapers can save your goddamn life. “Thank God your father was reading the Times this morning. You might have died.”

My parents may have finally realized it was time to get out of the East End, though, when, the second year there, I was moved up to fourth grade halfway through third grade due to apparent intelligence. If the schools were so bad as to be skipping me ahead grades, we needed to get out of town and quick.

One year in New York turned into the Thomas Wolfe quote. We had now been in New York for two years with no plans to go home again to St. Louis anytime soon.

We did not crawl back to St. Louis penniless, on our hands and knees, as Nonnie had predicted. We did not see Nonnie “very soon,” as she had said that day at the car. We did not return to St. Louis and live in her house when she died, as was her will. Mom was thinking about a job for Dad. We were moving to Westchester.

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BOURGUIGNON

BRONXVILLE, NEW YORK, is a squalid little square mile in lower Westchester, twenty-eight minutes to midtown on the Metro-North, with a seedy downtown of Tudor flower shops and stores where pink corduroys for fathers can be purchased. Up near our house was a wasteland of country clubs and manses where lowlifes like the Kennedys once lived. As my dad put it, “People had some dough.” But we were in our own little financial microclimate in the bullish Bronxville. We survived on the interest of the writer-proof trust fund that Nonnie had set up. (A mis-trust fund?) The interest we got every four months wasn’t enough for a family of six people without eating disorders to live on. But this didn’t seem to faze Mom and Dad. They bought a five-bedroom house, a shell our mother called it, in one of the most expensive towns in Westchester. Nothing was in tip-top condition—if rats bother you it might not suit your tastes—but everybody had her own room and it was in a new town where Dad hadn’t told anyone to fuck off yet. Bronxville was chosen for its good public school, and my parents figured they could ignore the anti-Carter bumper stickers in exchange for this. The plan was that Dad was going to get a job, a real job, and he did.

His brief stint in the world of the Manhattan-bound 8:02 was as a speechwriter for William Paley, founder and chairman of CBS, for six months. My dad had an office at the CBS Black Rock building and worked regular hours. He got a little yellow Puch moped that he rode to the train station in his Brooks Brothers suits in the morning and left at the station to ride home at night, until one day some kids stole it and set it on fire.

When he was working for Paley he was boxing a night or two a week at Gleason’s Gym near Madison Square Garden. He took lessons from this old trainer named Sammy Morgan who had trained a lot of good boxers, like welterweight Stanley “Baby” Sims in the ’40s, and a Capuchin priest, and Miles Davis, who apparently was also a good boxer. My dad would bring Sammy back to Bronxville, surprising my mom with this old trainer with his gigantic beat-up boxer’s nose and his smelly dogs. After dinner Dad would interview Sammy for a piece on boxing he was going to send to The New Yorker. My mother was happy during the yellow-moped year. Or the yellow-moped six months. It was the first time since my dad was a reporter at the St. Louis Review that he was