by Herbert Gold
My Own Father, Who Are Not in Heaven
Pascal's Wager can be interpreted as suggesting that there would be nothing lost if one believes in God and He doesn't exist, but a lot lost if God happens to exist and one doesn't believe. Pascal was French, ironic and uneasy. He wanted to maximize his chances for a cozy afterlife in a place something like the Tuileries gardens in Paris. On a good day.
William James took the Wager in a more American direction. God may not exist, heaven may not exist, the chances are they don't. But what does it hurt to believe? Folks seem to need belief, and not just folks but also William James. Faith makes a person feel better. Boston is cold; the winter is black in Cambridge. The evidence for belief as comfort is persuasive. And if God really presides up above, a person would be in better shape after death, with a chance to enjoy eternity. Reach for stars; why not?
William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience is a long sigh of relief. He was subject to depressions. Now he felt better.
My father had his own response to Blaise Pascal and William James. He died in Cleveland in his nineties, but he was once a boy in Kamenetz-Podolsk, escaping to America because he didn't want any timeless village life and also didn't want to be drafted into the Czar's army. At age thirteen, he lit out for the territory ahead, westward across the mountain-high waves of the Atlantic to where he could determine the truth of the one sentence he had learned in English: “There's gold in the streets of New York.” I used to tell him that if he had only taken the name Streets instead of Gold, I would be tall, blue-eyed, and blond.
What he was looking for, and what he found, was freedom from doctrine, freedom to define his life for himself. American freedom was his spiritual need.
On one of my last visits to Cleveland during his ninety-fourth year, he greeted me by thrusting a letter into my hands. It was addressed to him from my cousin, the Reverend Herman Rothblatt, who had been born again, that is, Born Again, while in art school. (Perhaps, as a Jewish lad, this was something like being born for the first time after an erroneous twenty years in this vale of tears and overconsumption of sugary treats.) The letter said, “Dear Uncle Sam: Now that you are about to die, isn't it time for you to accept Jesus as your personal Savior?”
“What's this? What's this? What's this crap?” my father asked.
I didn't need to discuss Pascal or William James with Dad. Without knowing anything about French Jansenism or American Pragmatism, he had already come to his own answer, which I might call Sam Gold's Wager.
In later years, the Reverend Herman Rothblatt discovered a cure for cancer, but after I neglected to invest in his Hong Kong–based startup company, we seem to have lost track of each other.
My father made a certain impression on his world. He then diminished and died. But lives on in memory.
9
Edward J. Pols
My only friend remaining from the wartime U.S. Army, the last one I kept in continuous contact with, has died. Ed Pols, Edward J. Pols, taught philosophy at Bowdoin College, but when I first met him we were both in a military intelligence program, he learning German, I learning Russian. He was already married to thoughtful and gentle Eileen, proud of his good Catholic rearing, and like me a consumer of the cookies left on trays in Army mess halls. When we were both punished for non-cookie-related offenses with 48-hour weekend K.P. instead of being allowed off the base, I tried to look on the bright side of having my hands eaten by strong soap while I scratched at pots with G.I. Brillo-like Brillo. “Well, at least this is an experience. We can learn from it.”
I was thinking it would deepen my soul, sharpen my prose, make more poignant my verse.
He answered: “An hour of this experience would suffice.” He had already studied the pre-Socratic philosophers. I was eighteen, he was a few years older. All the Brillo adventure deepened, soulwise, was my compassion for myself.
In due course, the fighting stopped in Europe and Ed was the officer in charge of a detachment based in Berlin, traveling through the occupied lands, tracking down art treasures looted by the Nazis. Because his team had to deal with Soviet forces, they needed a Russian interpreter. He sent me word: Would I like to be part of the art recovery effort?
Would I! I was burning to see some sort of useful action before shipping out to make contact with the Soviet armies scheduled to drive into China against the Japanese when the Americans landed from the Pacific. In addition to learning Russian, I spoke a bit of French. I also hoped to unearth French treasures, such as any delicate Fifis in wooden clogs who might come dawdling in my path. I knew a song, “Viens, viens, dans mes bras / Je te donne du chocolat.”
My orders were on the way. One morning the captain in charge of our little group of Russian interpreter-translators strolled over to stand nearby and observe my activity. His arms were crossed in his usual expression of exasperation. He was in his impeccable tailored uniform with the dashing red cavalry scarf dashingly draped over his dashing shoulders. I knew Ed's request had descended through channels to him. After a while, he crooked a finger at me. Come here, soldier. I approached and saluted.
The U.S. Army in its occasional wisdom during a great war tried to filter out incompetent officers, sending them where they could do less harm. Captain Collins was of this select group, shifted away from possible severe damage to run a group of military intelligence trainees, making sure we buttoned and dressed according to the rules, kept our shoes shined and bedding tight, didn't roll up our khaki sleeves on or off duty, and expressed proper respect for marginal-I.Q. commissioned officers.
“Gold,” he said icily, “I suppose you know a request has come from the German field of operations…” He paused.
“Yes, sir.”
“… a request to assign you to a special detachment in Berlin.”
“Yes, sir.”
He glared until I lowered my eyes. “And I'm sure this is an assignment you would enjoy…”
I had the good sense, or maybe the bad sense, to say nothing. A flicker of pleasure crossed the face of Captain Collins, not a smile but a dashing cavalry version of a happy grimace, a twitch of one corner of a stern, stalwart, low-I.Q. commissioned ROTC mouth. He was enjoying himself as my own nineteen-year-old self sweated, sleeves correctly rolled down and buttoned. Once he had caught me out without correct sleeves and threatened me with a court-martial, although I wasn't sure this was a capital offense. “… enjoy more, rather preferably, than serving as previously designated the uniform you somewhat sloppily wear.”
I decided not to say “Yes, sir.”
“However,” he said, “I have declared you essential where you are, Private.”
Where I was at that moment was off to the side of an improvised volleyball court on a level grassy stretch of the Cornell University campus. We had been sent there to refresh and improve our grasp of Russian. My Russian was already well refreshed, well improved. That morning our little group of Military Intelligence trainees was playing essential volleyball in Russian. I was not allowed to go to Berlin.
A few years after the war, as a young professor at Bowdoin, Ed Pols suggested me as a candidate for an English instructor-ship. The college invited me to Brunswick, Maine. On the one hand, I needed a job (wife, one baby, another on the way); on the other hand, I wasn't sure I wanted to move to Maine; but on the third hand—in this matter, as in others, exceptions must be made to the rule that folks generally have only two hands—my dear friends Ed and Eileen were there. Unfortunately, the resident poet, a Maine institution, argued that they already had enough New York Jews on faculty. If he had pointed this out to me personally, I might have informed him that I was a Cleveland, actually Lakewood, Ohio, Jew.
In the darkness of age, I hope not to rage against the dying of the light; rather, to find a lantern. But will it run out of batteries? At this stage, I see the past not as mere nostalgia but as part of the present. Therefore: my new wife and I are in Boston; Ed and Eileen drive down from Maine to visit with us… It was the time of
the flower explosion in San Francisco and America; the Age of Aquarius was the permanent year. Tourists, we four chose to celebrate our meeting with an elegant lunch at the Ritz-Carlton hotel.
It was not the Age of Aquarius at the Ritz-Carlton maître d's desk. Professor Pols, his wife, and the newlywed Golds were turned away. My hair was rather long, but that was not the problem. Melissa was wearing a miniskirt. Her long legs were the problem.
Later, Eileen wrote an epic poem to celebrate the joy of being denied shrimp Creole at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston because of the skirt of my bride, a recent Radcliffe graduate whose mother's maiden name, Cushing, was that of a well-known family in Boston. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,” was how I explained the maître d's expulsion of us from lunch. I borrowed the comment from King Lear.
My lantern finds corners of pleasure that relieve loneliness in the long passage through time when Melissa, Eileen, and Ed are all absent.
Perhaps as karmic redressment for the failure to employ me as a Russian interpreter in postwar Europe, plus the failure even to achieve shrimp Creole at the Ritz, I was invited to participate in a conference on “The Foundations of Cultural Unity” at Bowdoin College. Gathered there were Nobel Prize scientists, a Texas philosopher-bureaucrat, a Harvard psychologist, a painter, a novelist, a poet. For the word “conference,” I would prefer the more accurate term, “foundation-supported boondoggle.” On an early morning hike into town, Henry Murray, the Harvard psychologist, aged close to ninety, offered me an apology for his continuing vivacity. “I stand on my head every morning. And I think. It keeps the blood from coagulating, and then the things that come up push ideas and blood through my arteries.”
“It seems to work,” I said.
“And the veins. You think there's a muffin store open this early? I don't diet.” He took a deep breath. “I enjoy this Maine air either way, on my feet or upside down.”
It was working. The boondoggle provided me with a valuable foundation-supported stroll with Henry Murray.
I continued to keep contact with Ed and Eileen Pols as they aged, she gradually slipping from her sly amusement at the ways of the world into Alzheimer's and silence, Ed continuing his youthful enthusiasm for philosophy, the traditional verse he wrote, his college. When he developed cancer, he still sounded like the intense and boyish basketball player I remembered. When he was supposed to die, he didn't. But then, finally, around the time he sent me a new sheaf of poems about “our” war, he did die.
My last friend from those three years in the U.S. Army. From now on, I have to do my own remembering.
As long as my friends from the War are young, I can be young. As long as my friends from the postwar bohemian migration to Paris are young, I'm young. But they're not anymore, except for those who found the way to be forever young by dying early. Still, growing old seems only a threat, a rumor.
I first met Ned Rorem, composer and diarist, during that pre-Beatnik crusade of ambitious would-bees who boarded the ships bound for France and Paris, “capital of hope and paradise of misery.” He was a handsome, smiling person, marked for stardom, a charmer, an escort for le Tout Paris and le Tout Demimonde, smooth of skin, sparkling of smile, boyish of profile. Everyone but a few sullen killjoys expected him to become a world-famous composer, everyone was sure of it, except for those mealy jealous rivals who muttered that he would end up merely well-known.
My ritual, when we meet over the years since, is to say, “You're still a promising young lad, Ned, so maybe I can be, too.” We were born the same year.
When we happened to meet at an arts festival at Ball State University in Indiana, his home state, he told me that the local museum had acquired portraits of early American presidents and the local newspaper headlined the news: WASHINGTON AND JEFFERSON HUNG BY BALLS.
In recent years there have been tribute recitals of Ned Rorem's art songs, described as valedictory events. I need to see him again to ask: Aren't you still the boy genius of the art song profession? Aren't we still hanging out among the Gauloise Bleu and Gitane smokers at Saint-Germain-desPrés? And what about those aquiline social ladies from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré who present their hawk noses in profile as soon as a Leica appears? If we only misbehave within the strict limits prescribed for artistic young Americans, these ladies or one of the cologned gentlemen may invite us for a weekend in the ancestral country château which the German occupants were too courteous to damage. (Ned from Indiana, this is Herb from Cleveland calling.)
Unlike Mason Hoffenberg, eventual coauthor with Terry Southern of the novel Candy, my colleague in the more Left Bank implantation of would-bees, Ned Rorem practiced survival by upper-Bohemian Paris propriety. Mason preferred to practice New York con, selling hashish to existentialists thrilled by having an American dealer. He got extra francs and extra credit for his product. I accompanied him to the Hôtel de Seine where a famous philosopher bought a stash at an inflated price. Mason winked at me (Pay attention!) during this successful mission. “Fucking snob thinks it's genuine marijuana imported from Harlem,” he told me over cheese and a baguette at the nearby café La Palette. Mason's treat.
The expectation of eternal youth, like the expectation of eternal life, is a plan to slide up a slippery slope. Up doesn't normally occur in nature's flow. Immortality only lasts for a little while in the world of human fact; yet imagination, even ones of lyrical pessimism, struggles with the concept of non-being. The evidence of disappearance might seem to brook no argument. The notion of heaven suits some, answering their needs, supplying a future without argument, although sometimes depending on good behavior. Hell and the recently defunct doctrine of limbo are efforts to deal with the subject.
Heaven, hell, and the equivocation of limbo are of no help to me. I should fear becoming a sort of earth slug, deeply buried among the death of others, living off their remains and also off my own past. There's a limitless supply of past; the future diminishes. Of course, heaven would be a fine solution if it existed. In my dreams, I merely persevere. I fly over roofs, sometimes escaping pursuers, sometimes playing like a bird. When I wake, I try to decide if it was a nightmare or a thrilling and extravagant freedom.
I don't always know.
In the world of dailiness, there's a gloomy contradiction between the assumption of life variously persevering and the notice, which doesn't escape me, that others keep disappearing. If I followed that chipper command, “Live every day as if it's your last,” I'd spend the day in bitter complaint. Instead, what most of us do is live as if the living will continue until we hear the rattle in our throats. We don't detect it just now when we head for a breakfast of lightly scrambled eggs or we meet the direct gaze of a loved child or merely watch the urban hummingbirds busy in the tree outside our window.
Friends pass into mystery. I stare at their tracks in my address book. I can't bear to cross out the names, I leave them, I still remember telephone numbers. On a Sunday afternoon I go to the phone and start to press the keys for Sid, my beloved baby brother. No, that number in Cleveland doesn't answer. I stop. I think of Ed and Eileen Pols in Maine. I think, Ed, Eileen, and then I rummage in my head for someone I can still reach.
Grief is no fun; absence is not the best space to live in. Forgetting would be worse. Losses accumulate, a debt that someday, no matter what I do to postpone it, I'll have to pay with myself.
10
Advanced Sub-Acute Thinking
Craig Nebisher, an advanced-thinking prof with an even more advanced-thinking wife, which was how things sometimes went during the first swift blooming of the Women's Movement, took an initiative by joining his daughters for their Afro-Cuban dance lessons. It was what the absent mother would have done, had she not been absent. Other fathers merely watched on folding chairs, occasionally clattering to the floor if they dozed and slumped. Craig showed them up as the uptight, drag-ass parents they were. He wiggled to the beat of Afro-Cuban recordings. “Daddy! Please!” his daughters cried. “Daddy, you weigh a ton! Stop!�
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He compromised with his delightful progeny. He didn't stop, but resolved to lose weight, really do it this time, and in fact he believed the circumference of his haunches was diminishing. Caring for two daughters, cleaning house, making meals, helping with homework, washing tights in lukewarm water, using loving hands and soap and then letting the tights dry on towels, seemed to work haunch wonders he had previously been unable to work. He no longer looked so much like a beached whale, flopping to Afro-Cuban rhythms. He no longer packed tonnage, shaming his daughters. “My thunder thighs,” he told me, “I measure them with a tape measure…”
He left the sentence unfinished. Or maybe it was finished, but I expected more. He didn't want to boast in that obsolete macho way. He lowered his eyes. He widened his horizons downward. The Third World had so much to teach about rhythm, closeness to the soil, a quiverload of indigenous stuff, not to mention his personal discovery that Third World dances could do wonders for overgrown thighs. He demonstrated by pinching himself. “We were programmed to be hunter-gatherers,” he explained, “but the future is in nurturing.”
“In a better world,” I said.
“Hopefully.”
“One spouse at a time,” I both thought and said. He took no offense, such being the primitive habit of macho hunters and many gatherers, too.
Busy taking no offense, Craig remained silent for a moment. He eyed the rainbow epaulets that had been sewed onto my shirt by my wife. She liked to exercise her gift for irony. Although epaulets suggested military officers, epaulets made of rainbow ribbons suggested multicultural allegiances. The point, being unclear, could await further developments. Further developments followed.
