Cullin Mitch - The Post-War Dream

The words of a Jewish liberal — Hollis had thought — spoken at a Sono-ran oasis populated mostly by Baptists who, like Debra, zealously bought Kleenex, chicken tenders, melatonin, and Saint-John's-wort in bulk; they were the knee-jerk opinions of a cynical man who had more than once referred to himself as the Tin Robot God, because of the large collection of rare 1950s Japanese windup toy robots he had amassed over the years. Still, Hollis pointed out, their kind of escape wasn't anything new; and Lon, too, remembered well enough the suburbs of their younger years, the developments expanding for miles and miles from overcrowded city centers — updated army barracks, voguish, economical, affordable, and available to those returning as boyish veterans from distant battles.

“Fought a war too,” Hollis said. “Glad I'm living anywhere, if you want to know the truth.”

“Fair enough,” Lon said, shrugging his shoulders, his face now darkened by the evening. “I'm sure William Levitt would be proud. That bastard isn't spinning in his grave, I'm positive of that.”

They brought their arms behind their heads. Hollis scanned the sky for stars, but only succeeded in finding the full moon hanging above the desert. Lon farted and, at almost the same instant, sighed to himself before rising to retrieve another beer.

During the course of that summer, the subject of William Levitt had occasionally worked its way into their conversations, invoked by Lon who always uttered the famous housebuilder's name with a disparate mixture of reverence and contempt. But while Hollis and Debra had actually lived in a Levittown during the mid-1950s, Lon and his wife never did; his oldest brother, Joseph, however, had known Levitt, the two having become acquainted as sailors at the end of World War II. “My brother honestly felt that that guy heeded our best wishes, our fundamental needs and desires.” So the story Lon was quick to tell concerning his brother and Levitt — the story he was prone to repeat with increasing degrees of hyperbole — went something like this:

Drunk one night from tequila shots yet clearheaded about what the future required, Levitt was surrounded by other Seabees at a bar, wondering aloud, “What's wanted when this war is done? You want a car. What else? You want that nice house. That's right.” Beg, borrow, or steal the money, he urged them all before the night was finished, and then build and build. “Build for yourself, return to civilian life and build for those like yourselves. Our country is a bountiful pasture, we're so blessed. Go build!” From that night on, Joseph imagined Levitt as an avatar of noble plans, considering him to be someone touched by a great vision — someone who was so much more than a fellow sailor, more than just the industrious child of Russian Jewish immigrants.

After the war a handful of men joined Levitt, among them Lon's brother: converts like Christ's apostles, coming back to a homeland which was desperate for rooftops. They, too, lamented the housing crisis, scouting the countryside for suitable property to develop. Wearing gray flannel suits, they struggled up hillsides and gazed across open fields; they recoiled at the sight of trolley cars being sold as homes in Chicago, the antiquated brown-stones and packed apartment buildings, the undisturbed plains and bucolic meadows. They acquired their own machines to get the job started, burrowing under the land, bulldozing the soil into a uniform flatness; it was Levitt's decree: seventeen thousand new homes built on Long Island, the largest housing project in America; seventeen thousand reasonably priced dwellings, twenty miles from New York City.

“The will of mass production,” Lon has called it. “The General Motors of the housing industry.” And, as it happened, Levitt ruled benevolently as that general of the General Motors of the housing industry, triumphantly sweeping all the pieces from the Monopoly board, catching them and grasping them in a fist, and then sprinkling them like identical box-shaped seeds over the terrain — from Long Island to the outskirts of Philadelphia, turning potato farms into sprawling Levittowns; his homes never once varied, each floor plan design was exactly the same — seven color selections, trees spaced at twenty-eight feet (two and a half trees per house); every home was adorned with a stove, a refrigerator, a Bendix washer, and an Admiral TV.

“You don't have to tell me,” Hollis said. “We were there, we know.”

“How long did you stay?” Lon asked.

“Almost six years in Philadelphia, I guess. Then my job brought us on out to the West Coast.”

“Six years, huh? That long?”

“Really, it wasn't so bad. Pretty ideal for newlyweds, actually. We'd put off any thoughts of starting a family unless we could buy a house of our own. Luckily, we found a Levittowner for around ten grand — before that we were stuck in a cramped little apartment on South Broad Street in Hamilton. In fact, that first house felt like a piece of heaven to us.”

It was, Hollis had believed at the time, appropriate modern living for modern lives. Although the commandments were inflexible and absolute, the deeds unwavering: lawns must be mowed every week, laundry could only be hung on rotary racks and never on clotheslines. But most of the residents flourished adequately and multiplied in number; they had willingly entered Levitt's dream without any reservations and thereafter occupied that dream until it became a pervasive reality, as did their newborn children and, eventually, their children's children; this was William Levitt's vision, Lon asserted, this was the future he bequeathed — subsequent generations would know little else besides variations of that expansive, indistinct world of his. Yet, Hollis interjected, there was one man who had rebelled in his own way, who — amidst the many other ticky-tacky homes of Levittown, Pennsylvania — had taken it upon himself to mount a 16”? 12”? 16” gargoyle statue above his porch awning: the stone-chiseled grotesque existing as a unique expression of singularity, so much so that families from other streets hiked blocks out of their way just to stand on the sidewalk, pointing and marveling at it.

“That man wasn't a Hollis by any chance, was he?”

“It's possible,” Hollis said, grinning in the light of a full moon.

And it was enough to bring laughter, an incredible guffaw bursting from Lon — such a contagious racket was created, instantly penetrating Hollis's woolly belly button, working its way up to his throat: two balding, hysterical Buddhas, sunburned and intoxicated with something other than just beer, two deck chairs shaking with hilarity on a summer's night. Hollis wouldn't conceive of that inevitable frost, that swirling snowfall, winter; he wouldn't yet feel the cold devouring the heat, that swelter which had nourished his garden while he vacationed inside or near his hut. Nor would he be prepared for the laughter to stop, to trickle into an uneasy silence — a hush made more formidable by the nighttime and Lon's then motionless form.

But Hollis had experienced his rowdy friend's sudden silences before, had glimpsed Lon's squinting, insolvable stare in broad daylight (bloodshot eyes peering above rooftops, aimed for a while at the vacuum of blue sky). Those momentary lapses, he concluded, were probably the result of too much beer and too much heat; for the cumulative aftereffect of both alcohol and Arizona sunlight remained potent even when dusk had passed, capable of inducing a lethargic, insensible state at any time. It was a kind of stupor Hollis associated with gratification, a lulling sensation he had also felt in country club sauna rooms (wrapped naked inside a woolen blanket following a good massage, the sweat oozing like sap from dilated pores). And, indeed, Hollis relished the silent minutes — surveying the backyard or gazing toward the sky — thinking nothing whatsoever, his mind free of preoccupation, his body warm and relaxed. Only with Lon's vague mumbling did conversation resume — ”Oh, well. What a life, huh?” — the same words often slurred and spoken as a sigh.