by Philip Roth
provoked in his father by the shocks “that befell his loved ones.” But even if I
had thought to bring his letter with me and had rattled it in his face, the
Swede would have eluded his own writing as effortlessly as he’d shaken off his
tacklers on that Saturday fifty years before, at City Stadium, against South
Side, our weakest rival, and set a state record by scoring four times on
consecutive 1 pass plays. Of course, I thought, of course—my urge to
discover
a substratum, my continuing suspicion that more was there than what I was
looking at, aroused in him the fear that I might go ahead and tell him that he
wasn’t what he wanted us to believe he was…. But then I thought, Why bestow on
him all this thinking? Why the i appetite to know this guy? Ravenous
because once upon a time he
I
said to you and to you alone, “Basketball was never like this, Skip”? Why clutch
at him? What’s the matter with you? There’s nothing here but what you’re looking
at. He’s all about being looked at. He always was. He is not faking all this
virginity. You’re craving depths that don’t exist. This guy is the embodiment of
nothing. I was wrong. Never more mistaken about anyone in my life.
39
Let’s remember the energy. Americans were governing not only themselves but some
two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan. The war-crimes
trials were cleansing the earth of its devils once and for all. Atomic power was
ours alone. Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted; in an
explosion of self-assertion, auto workers, coal workers, transit workers,
maritime workers, steel workers—laborers by the millions demanded more and went
on strike for it. And playing Sunday morning softball on the Chancellor Avenue
field and pickup basketball on the asphalt courts behind the school were all the
boys who had come back alive, neighbors, cousins, older brothers, their pockets
full of separation pay, the GI Bill inviting them to break out in ways they
could not have imagined possible before the war. Our class started high school
six months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the
greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history. And the upsurge
of energy was contagious. Around us nothing was lifeless. Sacrifice and
constraint were over. The Depression had disappeared. Everything was in motion.
The lid was off. Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it
together. If that wasn’t sufficiently inspiring—the miraculous con-
40
elusion of this towering event, the clock of history reset and a whole people’s
aims limited no longer by the past—there was the neighborhood, the communal
determination that we, the children, should escape poverty, ignorance, disease,
social injury and intimidation—escape, above all, insignificance. You must not
come to nothing! Make something of yourselves!
* * *
Despite the undercurrent of anxiety—a sense communicated daily that hardship was
a persistent menace that only persistent diligence could hope to keep at bay;
despite a generalized mistrust of the Gentile world; despite the fear of being
battered that clung to many families because of the Depression—ours was not a
neighborhood steeped in darkness. The place was bright with industriousness.
There was a big belief in life and we were steered relentlessly in the direction
of success: a better existence was going to be ours. The goal was to have goals,
the aim to have aims. This edict came entangled often in hysteria, the embattled
hysteria of those whom experience had taught how little antagonism it takes to
wreck a life beyond repair. Yet it was this edict— emotionally overloaded as it
was by the uncertainty in our elders, by their awareness of all that was in
league against them—that made the neighborhood a cohesive place. A whole
community perpetually imploring us not to be immoderate and screw up, imploring
us to grasp opportunity, exploit our advantages, remember what matters.
The shift was not slight between the generations and there was plenty to argue
about: the ideas of the world they wouldn’t give up; the rules they worshiped,
for us rendered all but toothless by the passage of just a couple of decades of
American time; those uncertainties that were theirs and not ours. The question
of how free of them we might dare to be was ongoing, an internal debate,
ambivalent and exasperated. What was most cramping in their point of view a few
of us did find the audacity to strain against, but the intergenerational
conflict never looked like it would twenty
years later. The neighborhood was never a field of battle strewn with the bodies
of the misunderstood. There was plenty of haranguing to ensure obedience; the
adolescent capacity for upheaval was held in check by a thousand requirements,
stipulations, prohibitions—restraints that proved insuperable. One was our own
highly realistic appraisal of what was most in our interest, another the
pervasive rectitude of the era, whose taboos we’d taken between our teeth at
birth; not least was the enacted ideology of parental self-sacrifice that bled
us of wanton rebelliousness and sent underground almost every indecent urge.
It would have taken a lot more courage—or foolishness— than most of us could
muster to disappoint their passionate, unflagging illusions about our
perfectibility and roam very far from the permissible. Their reasons for asking
us to be both law-abiding and superior were not reasons we could find the
conscience to discount, and so control that was close to absolute was ceded to
adults who were striving and improving themselves through us. Mild forms of
scarring may have resulted from this arrangement but few cases of psychosis were
reported, at least at the time. The weight of all that expectation was not
necessarily killing, thank God. Of course there were families where it might
have helped if the parents had eased up a little on the brake, but mostly the
friction between generations was just sufficient to give us purchase to move
forward.
Am I wrong to think that we delighted in living there? No delusions are more
familiar than those inspired in the elderly by nostalgia, but am I completely
mistaken to think that living as well-born children in Renaissance Florence
could not have held a candle to growing up within aromatic range of Tabachnik’s
pickle barrels? Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid
present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent?
Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the
immensity of the detail, the force of the detail,
the weight of the detail—the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your
young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re
dead.
* * *
Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously
gives undivided attention; that’s the unfiltered way meaning comes to children,
just flowing off the surface of things. Nonetheless, fifty years later, I a
sk
you: has the immersion ever again been so complete as it was in those streets,
where every block, every backyard, every house, every floor of every house—the
walls, ceilings, doors, and windows of every last friend’s family apartment—came
to be so absolutely individualized? Were we ever again to be such keen recording
instruments of the microscopic surface of things close at hand, of the minutest
gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrzeit
candles and cooking smells, by Ronson table lighters and Venetian blinds? About
one another, we knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who
ordered what on his hot dog at Syd’s; we knew one another’s every physical
attribute— who walked pigeon-toed and who had breasts, who smelled of hair oil
and who oversalivated when he spoke; we knew who among us was belligerent and
who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb; we knew whose mother had the
accent and whose father had the mustache, whose mother worked and whose father
was dead; somehow we even dimly grasped how every family’s different set of
circumstances set each family a distinctive difficult human problem.
And, of course, there was the mandatory turbulence
born of need, appetite, fantasy, longing, and the fear of
disgrace. With only adolescent introspection to light the
way, each of us, hopelessly pubescent, alone and in secret,
attempted to regulate it—and in an era when chastity
was still ascendant, a national cause to be embraced by the
young like freedom and democracy.
43
It’s astonishing that everything so immediately visible in our lives as
classmates we still remember so precisely. The intensity of feeling that we have
seeing one another today is also astonishing. But most astonishing is that we
are near-ing the age that our grandparents were when we first went off to be
freshmen at the annex on February 1,1946. What is astonishing is that we, who
had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened.
That the results are in for the class of January 1950—the unanswerable questions
answered, the future revealed—is that not astonishing? To have lived—and in this
country, and in our time, and as who we were. Astonishing.
This is the speech I didn’t give at my forty-fifth high school reunion, a speech
to myself masked as a speech to them. I began to compose it only after the
reunion, in the dark, in bed, groping to understand what had hit me. The tone—
too ruminative for a country club ballroom and the sort of good time people were
looking for there—didn’t seem at all ill-conceived between three and six a.m.,
as I tried, in my overstimulated state, to comprehend the union underlying the
reunion, the common experience that had joined us as kids. Despite gradations of
privation and privilege, despite the array of anxieties fostered by an
impressively nuanced miscellany of family quarrels—quarrels that, fortunately,
promised more unhappiness than they always delivered—something powerful united
us. And united us not merely in where we came from but in where we were going
and how we would get there. We had new means and new ends, new allegiances and
new aims, new innards— a new ease, somewhat less agitation in facing down the
exclusions the goyim still wished to preserve. And out of what context did these
transformations arise—out of what historical drama, acted unsuspectingly by its
little protagonists, played out in classrooms and kitchens looking nothing at
all like the great theater of life? Just what collided with what to produce the
spark in us?
I was still awake and all stirred up, formulating these questions
* * *
44
and their answers in my bed—blurry, insomniac shadows of these questions and
their answers—some eight hours after I’d driven back from New Jersey, where, on
a sunny Sunday late in October, at a country club in a Jewish suburb far from
the futility prevailing in the streets of our crime-ridden, drug-infested
childhood home, the reunion that began at eleven in the morning went ebulliently
on all afternoon long. It was held in a ballroom just at the edge of the country
club’s golf course for a group of elderly adults who, as Weequahic kids of the
thirties and forties, would have thought a niblick (which was what in those days
they called the nine iron) was a hunk of schmaltz herring. Now I couldn’t sleep—
the last thing I could remember was the parking valet bringing my car around to
the steps of the portico, and the reunion’s commander in chief, Selma Bresloff,
kindly asking if I’d had a good time, and my telling her, “It’s like going out
to your old outfit after Iwo Jima.”
Around three a.m., I left my bed and went to my desk, my head vibrant with the
static of unelaborated thought. I wound up working there until six, by which
time I had got the reunion speech to read as it appears above. Only after I had
built to the emotional peroration culminating in the word “astonishing” was I at
last sufficiently unastonished by the force of my feelings to be able to put
together a couple of hours of sleep—or something resembling sleep, for, even
half out of it, I was a biography in perpetual motion, memory to the marrow of
my bones.
Yes, even from as benign a celebration as a high school reunion it’s not so
simple to instantaneously resume existence back behind the blindfold of
continuity and routine. Perhaps if I were thirty or forty, the reunion would
have faded sweetly away in the three hours it took me to drive home. But there
is no easy mastery of such events at sixty-two, and only a year beyond cancer
surgery. Instead of recapturing time past, I’d been captured by it in the
present, so that passing seemingly out of the world of time I was, in fact,
rocketing through to its secret core.
For the hours we were all together, doing nothing more than hugging, kissing,
kibitzing, laughing, hovering over one another
· 45
recollecting the dilemmas and disasters that hadn’t in the long run made a damn
bit of difference, crying out, “Look who’s here!” and “Oh, it’s been a long
time” and “You remember me? I remember you,” asking each other, “Didn’t we once
…” “Were you the kid who … ,” commanding one another—with those three
poignant words I heard people repeat all afternoon as they were drawn and tugged
into numerous conversations at once—”Don’t go away!” … and, of course,
dancing, cheek-to-cheek dancing our outdated dance steps to a “one-man band,” a
bearded boy in a tuxedo, his brow encircled with a red bandanna (a boy born at
least two full decades after we’d marched together out of the school auditorium
to the rousing recessional tempo of Iolanthe), accompanying himself on a
synthesizer as he imitated Nat “King” Cole, Frankie Laine, and Sinatra—for those
few hours time, the chain of time, the whole damn drift of everything called
time, had seemed as easy to understand as the dimensions of the doughnut you
effortlessly down with your morning coffee. The one-man band in the band
anna
played “Mule Train” while I thought, The Angel of Time is passing over us and
breathing with each breath all that we’ve lived through—the Angel of Time
unmistakably as present in the ballroom of the Cedar Hill Country Club as that
kid doing “Mule Train” like Frankie Laine. Sometimes I found myself looking at
everyone as though it were still 1950, as though “1995” were merely the
futuristic theme of a senior prom that we’d all come to in humorous papier-mache
* * *
masks of ourselves as we might look at the close of the twentieth century. That
afternoon time had been invented for the mystification of no one but us.
Inside the commemorative mug presented by Selma to each of us as we were
departing were half a dozen little rugelach in an orange tissue-paper sack,
neatly enclosed in orange cellophane and tied shut with striped curling ribbon
of orange and brown, the school colors. The rugelach, as fresh as any I’d ever
snacked on at home after school—back then baked by the recipe broker of her
mahjongg club, my mother—were a gift from one of our class members, a Teaneck
baker. Within five minutes of leaving the reun-
46
ion, I’d undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of
sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinammon-lined chambers microscopically studded
with midget raisins and chopped walnuts. By rapidly devouring mouthful after
mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness—blended of butter and sour cream
and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar—I’d loved since childhood,
perhaps I’d find vanishing from Nathan what, according to Proust, vanished from
Marcel the instant he recognized “the savour of the little madeleine”: the
