The Candy Apple

Mid-September in New York City is still summertime. We hated going back to school, sweating in our shirts and ties, our woolen trousers itching our legs. The warm, sweet, wet smells of Park Slope Brooklyn poured in through the opened classroom windows. Teachers taught from the front of the room, and we tried to pay attention, but the summer vacation was too recent a memory to let go of, and besides, it was still summer. Sensations and impressions from the two-month summer idyll had to be gotten rid of in pieces and sections, much like we peeled the sunburned skin from our skinny arms. Eventually our skin would be pasty white, and we would be back in school, waiting for Christmas, but not yet.

We were fortunate to live in Brooklyn New York, in the late forties and early fifties; fortunate for many reasons, not the least of which was the near certainty that the Dodgers would be in the World Series. Unfortunately, it was also certain that, although they would acquit themselves well, the Dodgers would lose to the New York Yankees. So we suffered, not only from itchy pants, but also from oft-fulfilled premonitions of sadness and defeat.

After school, we streamed out into the heavy, brown summer air filled with exhaust of the cars, trucks, and buses that roared past the school building all day long. We ran home, changed our clothes, and ran up to Prospect Park, where the first precursors of fall were found. A smell, not the hot grassy smell of the meadows and lawns, or the plain hot smell of the summer sun as it waved up from the soft black asphalt parking areas and hex block walks, but a tangy aroma of shade, cool breezes and fallen leaves. Not everywhere, only in the cloistered areas around certain water fountains and under bridges near the Big Lake. When we noticed that smell, we knew that the summer was dying.

In Prospect Park we played variations of baseball. The variations were a function of the number of us that wanted to play. We had versions of the game for any number of participants from two on up, although the lower numbers usually prevailed. Both teams were the Dodgers who always won. I suppose the reason for this was that because of the match-up we chose, we never had to play the Yankees. I suspect that if one of the teams had declared itself to be the Yankees, it would have won.

After yet another Prospect Park World Series, won by one of the Dodger teams, we would walk back down the hill (Park Slope does indeed slope) eat our dinners, watch TV, scratch at our homework, bathe and go to bed. The windows would still be open and a warm, monoxide breeze would flow into the bedrooms bringing rich, vulgar sounds and smells of a Brooklyn night at the mid point of the 20th century. Drifting off to sleep, we dreamed of summer vacations past. To children our age, the next summer lay across a gulf of time so vast as to be unfathomable. So, we thought about Christmas. That was easier to grasp.

By early October, when the dreaded inevitability of the Yankee triumph had come and gone, fall would arrive. For each of us it had a different signature event, for me it was the candy apple.

Please understand that, while my family was not well-to-do, in my childhood I wanted for very little. During the apple season, I consumed more than a few candy apples. One of them, however, was special, it was the candy apple that put summer away, dulled the ache of another Dodger loss, and most of all started me thinking of Thanksgiving, which precedes Christmas. This particular Candy Apple was delivered in a unique manner, always the same each year.

Back then, there were such things as ice cream parlors. Not some chain of stores like Friendly, or Dairy Queen but a place owned by a family with a fountain and stools and tables and mirrors on the walls and a counter where you could buy things to take home. In Brooklyn, ours was called Newman’s. Many debates were held over the relative merits of Newman’s ice cream versus that of Schrafft’s. Schrafft’s belonged to Manhattan, and like the Yankees, could not possibly be associated with a family. Even though Schrafft’s had a restaurant in Brooklyn, and even though, for many years, my mother got up, got dressed, and took the subway to “the City”to work as a waitress at Schrafft’s, Newman’s was special. It was ours. In addition to ice cream, Newman’s sold candy, and in the fall, candy apples, and that is where I got mine. Perhaps Schrafft’s had candy apples as well, but that would have been irrelevant. Let me tell you why.

In my neighborhood, I am tempted to say, “in my world,” because there was no difference, things mattered. Things defined people, and there was a lot of right and wrong in things. For example, a family was defined by the paper that they read. And when I say “they,” that is what I mean. The entire family read, and was defined by the paper. A Daily News family (ultra right wing) was distinct from a Daily Mirror (blue collar right wing), and was much different from a New York Times family (snobs). You bought your pork at Merkel’s Pork Store (“The Pork Store.” As in, “I’m going to the Pork Store for some chops, you want anything?”) The A&P sold pork as well as beef and lamb, and even though it was perfectly acceptable to buy a steak there, “nobody” bought pork there. They went to the Pork Store. (It always seemed to me that someone was buying pork at the A&P. After all, they kept on stocking it.)

The cigarettes your father and mother smoked, the brand of beer that they drank, things like that defined you. And they did not vary within a household. If your father smoked Luckies and drank Schaffer, and read the Post, then that is what he would do until something really important, like dying, happened to him. As a member of that family, you were expected to do likewise. It would never occur to you to do differently. I still reach for the Daily News when I am in New York, and if Rheingold Beer was available, I would drink it.

Post readers and Daily News readers got into some great fights. Ebinger’s was your baker unless you shopped at Cushman’s. Fights could break out over that too.

I had Lionel trains, with three rail track. In truth, no real railroad in the world has tracks like that. American Flyer trains had two rail tracks, more like the real thing. I was the kind of kid that always had to have everything right, just like real, but we were a Lionel house, and woe unto the kid who came visiting with his mother and said that he had American Flyer trains because he liked the realistic track better!

So the reason that it was irrelevant if Schrafft’s sold candy apple is that we did not go there for candy apples. We went to Newman’s for them.

There would come a day, mid October, not winter cold, but different from the day before. Sunlight now cooler, like ice crystals on the buildings, clouds scudding in the sky. Deep breaths burned the inside of your nose. Leaves had fallen and mixed with trash in the street. At home, the heat went on and the smell of the oil burner mixed with the faintly burned smell that the radiators made after a summer of collecting dust. At school the cubicles in the closets were covered with coats. Summer vacation now seemed far away. It was always on a day like this that my Grandmother would meet me at the door when I arrived home and announced that we were going to Newman’s for a candy apple.

Grandma dressed for the occasion. Normally she wore a housedress and a decrepit cardigan sweater with her hair wrapped in an old stocking covered with a hair net. But on candy apple day, she dressed as for an outing. A nice dress, shoes, coat and her hair wrapped in a turban. (I think I saw my Grandma’s hair twice in her entire life.) It was about a ten-block walk to Newman’s, along Seventh Avenue, out of my neighborhood.

The candy apples were kept in a low glass case by the cash register. They were standing upright, their little squared bottoms stuck to the white wax paper covering the tray on the shelf. I made my selection, (Grandma never had one, the candy stuck to her bridgework.) The man in the white pharmacist’s jacket ripped my apple from the wax paper and handed it to me, Grandma paid, thanked the man and we walked out of the store. Outside, on the corner of President Street and 7th Avenue, fall would officially arrive.

The problem was making the first bite. The circumference of the apple was, for many years, greater than that of my mouth and the candy covering was slippery, so with lips pulled back from my teeth, eyes tightly closed, and jaw set I made the attempt. There were hazards, the greatest of which was the possibility that the apple might part from the stick and fall into the street. This never happened, but I suspect that if it had, Grandma would have bought me another one. The greater tragedy was that the brittle candy covering would fracture and separate from the apple, leaving me with an apple on a stick. This did happen on occasion. Under these conditions, Grandma did not see the necessity of buying another since the apple was fine and I would get another one soon, so I would eat the apple and wait for the candy.

But when it worked! It was like biting into a light bulb. The candy shattered, filling my mouth with sharp shards that hurt my tongue and gums. The taste of the apple then flooded my senses. Standing on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk, I could taste the frost as it covered the apple orchards upstate. Musty farmhouses and barren corn stalks waving in the October wind blew through my mind. The first teasing flurries of the November storms dusted my cheeks.

Grandma took my hand, and we walked home, she clutching her pocketbook in her free hand and me with my candy apple in mine.

Fall had come.