My grandmother wore a hearing aid and would enter the living room to say good night after she had cleaned the kitchen, my grandfather having never left the couch. “I’m signing off for the evening,” she would announce, and head toward a bedroom down the hall from where my grandfather slept. The walls of her room were lined with massive stacks of books and other personal effects belonging to my peripatetic uncle Charles, who used this as a storage room. My grandfather slept in the other bedroom, and those nights with him created the most indelible images of my life. There was a window looking down an alley along the rear of the building. A cat my grandfather had named Two-Eyed Tilly, with eyes of different colors, would cry, and he would put food for her on the windowsill. I lay next to my grandfather in silence, while classical music or some talk show played on the radio. He was on my left, smoking. As he raised a Chesterfield to his mouth, a long ash extended from the bright orange cherry. When he drew from the cigarette, the glow would illuminate his prominent nose. The room was filled with beautiful antique furniture: an enormous armoire, a marble-topped console, a full-length dressing mirror in a handsome hand-carved frame. My father’s family had a future once, and lost it under unusual circumstances. On a table near the sill were two busts, one of Shakespeare, another of Jefferson. Shakespeare stared at me. Jefferson stared at Shakespeare. In the air filled with the voice of Barry Gray and a cloud of smoke, the cat went off to bed. My grandfather would extinguish his last cigarette and swing his legs to the floor. The bathroom was fifteen feet down the hallway, but he’d reach for a chamber pot and piss into it, something he’d do two or three more times during the night. I lay there, frozen. If I tried to break that granitic silence, my grandfather would simply yawn and say, “Sleep now, my boy.” He always called me “my boy.”
Lean, tall, bald, and always with a twinkle in his eye, my grandfather was Alexander Rae Baldwin Sr. My father was junior. I was the third. But three Alecs were one too many, so I was called Xander Baldwin, or Xan for short. The oldest son of an oldest son in an Irish Catholic family is often slotted to become a priest. (I actually considered it, but one look at Miss Cebu, who taught sixth grade in Unqua Elementary School, and I realized I wasn’t cut out for celibacy.) One day, my grandfather and I were entering his apartment when his neighbor passed by us in the hallway. He was a rummy-Irish, forty-year-old bachelor who lived with his mother upstairs. “This your grandson?” he croaked, his face thick with whiskers and missing a few of his teeth. “Yes, Joe,” my grandfather said, managing a smile and quickening his search for the keys. Joe handed me a sweet, and I took it. “Here’s a penny candy for the boy,” he said. My grandfather closed his hand tight around mine that held the candy. “Very kind of you, Joe. Give my best to your mother.” We entered the apartment, and my grandfather closed the door and suddenly spun me around. He yanked the candy out of my hand. I was flabbergasted, searching for an explanation. “Taking candy from a man like that? Never been married! No children!” As I did with most things my grandfather said, I walked around muttering it again and again for the rest of the day, like it was a line from one of the classic films I loved. “Never been married! No children!” All the while, I never quite understood what it meant.
In the years I knew him, my grandpa was a bright if somewhat typically racist white New Yorker of his day. He was both a philatelist and a numismatist to the limited degree that he could afford. Traveling across the United States, either gambling at racetracks or pursuing a job offer, he would enclose a note to me and post it with a First Day of Issue stamp. Or, from Brooklyn, he would find out where a First Day Cover was being issued and, like all everyday stamp collectors, he’d send the post office there a self-addressed envelope, with a note to me inside and the money to buy the stamp. The envelope arrived in, for example, Independence, Missouri, prior to the issuance. To his home was mailed the canceled stamp, marked “First Day of Issue.” These “First Day Covers” were collectors’ items.
He collected coins and placed them in numismatic books, each one a case with individual sleeves. They held liberty dollars, buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, and the “wheat penny,” as we called it, which was replaced with the Lincoln Memorial after that monument was constructed. To this day, when I handle pennies, I search for “wheats” and collect any I find. I could never speak to what the value of the coin collection was, but one would assume that each book, filled with only the finest quality of these collectibles and arranged so carefully, had to be worth a significant amount.
One summer day when I was around thirteen, a couple of years after my grandfather died, I went to the home of a friend and colleague of my dad, Joe McPartlin. Joe was a teacher who did things differently from my father, meaning he had other income, outside of his teaching position, and he took his wife and family on what I imagined were fancy vacations. While they were away, I gathered their mail and cut the grass. One Saturday, I finished late and headed home as the sun was going down. As I pushed my mower along the road, I caught an older man staring at me. He yelled, “You cut grass, sonny?” I told him that I did, and as he approached, he asked my name and if I was from the neighborhood. “Alexander Baldwin,” I said. He stared at me and said, “You related to Alex Baldwin, the Brooklyn DA who was indicted in the fur rackets case?” I went white. After I muttered something to him, I ran home, and my father and mother were there. When I explained what had happened, my father became very quiet.
“Get the box,” he told her. Down from a shelf in the back of her bedroom closet came a small cardboard box from which my father removed a stack of newspaper clippings, mostly from the old Brooklyn Eagle. The story they told explained how my grandfather had been an assistant DA in Brooklyn when he was indicted for taking a bribe. He was acquitted, but during the trial and the subsequent commission hearings conducted by John Harlan Amen, my grandfather was disbarred. What had been a comfortable home and lifestyle for his family was washed away. They moved from a better area of Brooklyn to the more racially mixed and run-down Fort Greene. He became an income tax preparer. He began to drink heavily, drinking his way down to Florida, where he ran a parking concession at the Hialeah racetrack. Apparently my grandmother soldiered on and raised her three sons on her earnings as a nurse, without a husband around much of the time.
According to the mythology of my family, my father’s mother was canonized. In everyone’s heart, my grandmother was a saint, thoughtful, loving, kind. These two people were more important to me and created more warm memories during my childhood than almost anyone. And then, the next big change came.
Death comes into children’s lives in dramatic ways, or quiet, more ordinary ones. The first important death in my home came in hushed tones and shadows. One night my mother gathered us up, maybe all six of us, and dropped us at the home of my neighbor and best friend, Kevin Cornelius. I was ten. In the other room, my parents spoke quietly and gravely. Then my dad was gone. My grandfather had gone into a hospital in New York for an angioplasty, and my grandmother had fallen down on the stone steps at the hospital’s entrance while visiting him. She fractured her skull, was in a coma, and died four days later. The hospital advised that my grandfather not be informed right away, as he was in a cardiac recovery unit. After the first two days, it became unbearable and my father told him.