Closets

Our fifth floor apartment in the Bronx, at 1610 Mahan Avenue, had two bedrooms, a foyer, a kitchen, and a living room. It also had three closets. My father had his closet at the end of the foyer. Every article of clothing that he owned was in that closet. My mothers’ closet was where the foyer turned toward the bathroom. All she owned was in her closet. The third closet, the closet in the “hall”, where the foyer began, was a kind of community closet that held a variety of household goods and Grandmas’ coat.

Mom used her closet as her dressing room. (She and my father slept in the living room on fold-out sofa). She would open the closet door to block the foyer and have a full four square feet all to herself. Dad just got dressed in the foyer in front of his closet (and whoever happened to be walking through the foyer). I have many memories of walking out of our bedroom (my two brothers and I slept in the one of the two bedrooms) in the wee hours of the morning on the way to the bathroom, and seeing my father getting dressed in the foyer, getting ready to go to work.

My brothers and I did not have closets. We had dressers. In those days, a dresser was a horizontal closet that held every thing that could be squashed into its’ drawers. This included winter coats, gloves, hats, and scarves. As boys growing up in the Bronx, Mom countered the invasion of motorcycle jackets and levis by adorning us with scarves and three quarter length mackinaws. Neither my brothers nor I were ever mistaken for Marlon Brando in the Pelham Bay area of the Bronx.

Dads’ closet was a miracle of consolidation. It contained his fire department uniforms as well as his shoes, boots, fishing gear, shirts, and tools. Boys that grow up on farms in the country must have felt about their fathers’ workshops and barns the way we felt about Dads’ closet. It was a mysterious place that that had leathery smells and hinted at a sense of what it would be like to be a man someday.

Moms’ closet was a private place that only Mom was allowed to enter. Although my brothers and I would occasionally peek into Dads’ closet, we wouldn’t dream of looking into Moms’ closet.

Grandma lived with us and the door to her room was always closed when she wasn’t home (she worked all day as a baker at the Williamsburg Savings Bank in Brooklyn) and my brothers and I rarely got a glimpse into her room. She used the closet in the hall to hang up her coat when she came home from work, but the rest of her clothes were in her room somewhere.

Our kitchen had large cupboards. Cupboards in the Bronx were “kitchen closets”. Kitcheny stuff would take priority in the cupboards. But ultimately, anything that could fit that in those cupboards that couldn’t be stored anywhere else wound up in them.

The closet doors had glass doorknobs and about 50 coats of paint that gave them the aura of gates to special domestic sanctums. The closet doors were portals to the mysterious essence and sensation of what our parents were. Somehow, Mom and Dad seemed to emanate from their closets each day. How they would smell, what they would look like, and how they would behave on any day, all seemed to be somehow stored in their closets.

The apartment defined the contour and space of the world we grew up in. The closets were the loci of that space.