“I see,” I said in that shocked clarity with which we perceive the truth instantaneous and entire out of the very astonishment that refuses to acknowledge it. “Just as you now cannot be sure of any roof you belong more than half under, you figure there is no housetop from which you might not as well begin to shout it. Is that it?”
Something was trying to tell me something. Watching him turn off on the road—and that not only with the ostensible declaration of vagabondage but already its very assumption, attaining as though with a single footfall the very apotheosis of wandering just as with a single shutting of a door he had that of renunciation and farewell—watching him turn off on it, the road, in the direction of the Permisangs’, our nearest neighbors, I thought Wait; no; what I said was not enough for him to leave the house on; it must have been the blurted inscrutable chance confirmation of something he already knew, and was half able to assess, either out of the blown facts of boyhood or pure male divination or both.
“What is it you know?” I said springing forward over the delicate squalor of the snow and falling in beside the boy. “Does any man come to the house to see your mother when I’m away, that you know of?” Thinking We are mocked, first by the old mammalian snare, then, snared, by that final unilaterality of all flesh to which birth is given; not only not knowing when we may be cuckolded, but not even sure that in the veins of the very bantling we dandle does not flow the miscreant sniggering wayward blood.
“I get it now,” I said, catching in the undeviating face just as I had in the prim back and marching heels the steady articulation of disdain. “Cuckoldry is something of which the victim may be as guilty as the wrongdoers. That’s what you’re thinking? That by letting in this taint upon our heritage I am as accountable as she or they who have been its actual avatars. More. Though the foe may survive, the sleeping sentinel must be shot. Is that it?”
“You talk funny.”
Mother-and-daughter blood conspires in the old mammalian office. Father-and-son blood vies in the ancient phallic enmity. I caught him by the arm and we scuffled in the snow. “I will be heard,” I said, holding him now as though we might be dancing, my voice intimate and furious against the furious sibilance of our feet in the snow. Thinking how revelation had had to be inherent in the very vegetable scraps to which venery was probably that instant contriving to abandon me, the cold boiled despair of whatever already featureless suburban Wednesday Thursday or Saturday supper the shot green was the remainder. “I see another thing,” I panted, cursing my helplessness to curse whoever it was had given him blood and wind. Thinking He’s glad; glad to credit what is always secretly fostered and fermented out of the vats of childhood fantasy anyway (for all childhood must conceive a substitute for the father that has conceived it) (finding that other inconceivable?); thinking He is walking in a nursery fairy tale to find the king his sire. “Just as I said to you ‘You’re no son of mine’ so now you answer back ‘Neither are you any father to me.’ ”
The scherzo of violence ended as abruptly as it had begun. He broke away and walked on, after retrieving the toy he had dropped and adjusting his grip on the suitcase which he had not, this time faster and more urgently.
THE last light was seeping out of the shabby sky, after the hemorrhage of sunset. High in the west where the fierce constellations soon would wheel, the evening star in single bombast burned and burned. The boy passed the Permisangs’ without going in, then passed the Kellers’. Maybe he’s heading for the McCullums’, I thought, but he passed their house too. Then he, we, neared the Jelliffs’. He’s got to be going there, his search will end there, I thought. Because that was the last house this side of the tracks. And because something was trying to tell me something.
“Were you maybe thinking of what you heard said about Mrs. Jelliff and me having relations in Spuyten Duyvil?” I said in rapid frantic speculation. “But they were talking about mutual kin—nothing else.” The boy said nothing. But I had sensed it instant and complete: The boy felt that, whatever of offense his mother may or may not have given, his father had given provocation; and out of the old embattled malehood, it was the hairy ineluctable Him whose guilt and shame he was going to hold preponderant. Because now I remembered.
“So it’s Mrs. Jelliff—Sue Jelliff—and me you have got this all mixed up with,” I said, figuring he must, in that fat sly nocturnal stealth that took him creeping up and down the stairs to listen when he should have been in bed, certainly have heard his mother exclaiming to his father behind that bedroom door it had been vain to close since it was not soundproof: “I saw you. I saw that with Sue. There may not be anything between you but you’d like there to be! Maybe there is at that!”
Now like a dentist forced to ruin sound enamel to reach decayed I had to risk telling him what he did not know to keep what he assuredly did in relative control.
“This is what happened on the night in question,” I said. “It was under the mistletoe, during the holidays, at the Jelliffs’. Wait! I will be heard out! See your father as he is, but see him in no baser light. He has his arms around his neighbor’s wife. It is evening, in the heat and huddled spiced felicity of the year’s end, under the mistletoe (where as well as anywhere else the thirsting and exasperated flesh might be visited by the futile pangs and jets of later lust, the omnivorous aches of fifty and forty and even thirty-five to seize what may be the last of the allotted lips). Your father seems to prolong beyond its usual moment’s span that custom’s usufruct. Only for an instant, but in that instant letting trickle through the fissures of appearance what your mother and probably Rudy Jelliff too saw as an earnest of a flood that would have devoured that house and one four doors away.”
A moon hung over the eastern roofs like a phantasmal bladder. Somewhere an icicle crashed and splintered, fruit of the day’s thaw.
“So now I’ve got it straight,” I said. “Just as through some nameless father your mother has cuckolded me (you think), so through one of Rudy Jelliff’s five sons I have probably cuckolded him. Which would give you at least a half brother under that roof where under ours you have none at all. So you balance out one miscreance with another, and find your rightful kin in our poor weft of all the teeming random bonded sentient dust.”
Shifting the grip, the boy walked on past the Jelliffs’. Before him—the tracks; and beyond that—the other side of the tracks. And now out of whatever reserve capacity for astonished incredulity may yet have remained I prepared to face this last and ultimate outrage. But he didn’t cross. Along our own side of the tracks ran a road which the boy turned left on. He paused before a lighted house near the corner, a white cottage with a shingle in the window which I knew from familiarity to read, “Viola Pruett, Piano Lessons,” and which, like a violently unscrambled pattern on a screen, now came to focus.
MEMORY adumbrates just as expectation recalls. The name on the shingle made audible to listening recollection the last words of the boy’s mother as she’d left, which had fallen short then of the threshold of hearing. “… Pruett,” I remembered now. “He’s going to have supper and stay with Buzzie Pruett overnight.… Can take a few things with him in that little suitcase of his. If Mrs. Pruett phones about it, just say I’ll take him over when I get back,” I recalled now in that chime-counting recapitulation of retroactive memory—better than which I could not have been expected to do. Because the eternal Who-instructs might have got through to the whiskey-drinking husband or might have got through to the reader immersed in that prose vertiginous intoxicant and unique, but not to both.
“So that’s it,” I said. “You couldn’t wait till you were taken much less till it was time but had to sneak off by yourself, and that not cross-lots but up the road I’ve told you a hundred times to keep off even the shoulder of.”
The boy had stopped and now appeared to hesitate before the house. He turned around at last, switched the toy and the suitcase in his hands, and started back in the direction he had come.
“What are you going ba
ck for now?” I asked.
“More stuff to take in this suitcase,” he said. “I was going to just sleep at the Pruetts’ overnight, but now I’m going to ask them to let me stay there for good.”
1950
WOODY ALLEN
NO KADDISH FOR WEINSTEIN
WINSTEIN lay under the covers, staring at the ceiling in a depressed torpor. Outside, sheets of humid air rose from the pavement in stifling waves. The sound of traffic was deafening at this hour, and in addition to all this his bed was on fire. Look at me, he thought. Fifty years old. Half a century. Next year, I will be fifty-one. Then fifty-two. Using this same reasoning, he could figure out his age as much as five years in the future. So little time left, he thought, and so much to accomplish. For one thing, he wanted to learn to drive a car. Adelman, his friend who used to play dreidel with him on Rush Street, had studied driving at the Sorbonne. He could handle a car beautifully and had already driven many places by himself. Weinstein had made a few attempts to steer his father’s Chevy but kept winding up on the sidewalk.
He had been a precocious child. An intellectual. At twelve, he had translated the poems of T. S. Eliot into English, after some vandals had broken into the library and translated them into French. And as if his high I.Q did not isolate him enough, he suffered untold injustices and persecutions because of his religion, mostly from his parents. True, the old man was a member of the synagogue, and his mother, too, but they could never accept the fact that their son was Jewish. “How did it happen?” his father asked, bewildered. My face looks Semitic, Weinstein thought every morning as he shaved. He had been mistaken several times for Robert Redford, but on each occasion it was by a blind person. Then there was Feinglass, his other boyhood friend: A Phi Beta Kappa. A labor spy, ratting on the workers. Then a convert to Marxism. A Communist agitator. Betrayed by the Party, he went to Hollywood and became the offscreen voice of a famous cartoon mouse. Ironic.
Weinstein had toyed with the Communists, too. To impress a girl at Rutgers, he had moved to Moscow and joined the Red Army. When he called her for a second date, she was pinned to someone else. Still, his rank of sergeant in the Russian infantry would hurt him later when he needed a security clearance in order to get the free appetizer with his dinner at Longchamps. Also, while at school he had organized some laboratory mice and led them in a strike over work conditions. Actually, it was not so much the politics as the poetry of Marxist theory that got him. He was positive that collectivization could work if everyone would learn the lyrics to “Rag Mop.” “The withering away of the state” was a phrase that had stayed with him ever since his uncle’s nose had withered away in Saks Fifth Avenue one day. What, he wondered, can be learned about the true essence of social revolution? Only that it should never be attempted after eating Mexican food.
The Depression shattered Weinstein’s Uncle Meyer, who kept his fortune under the mattress. When the market crashed, the government called in all mattresses, and Meyer became a pauper overnight. All that was left for him was to jump out the window, but he lacked the nerve and sat on a windowsill of the Flatiron Building from 1930 to 1937.
“These kids with their pot and their sex,” Uncle Meyer was fond of saying. “Do they know what it is to sit on a windowsill for seven years? There you see life! Of course, everybody looks like ants. But each year Tessie—may she rest in peace—made the Seder right out there on the ledge. The family gathered round for Passover. Oy, nephew! What’s the world coming to when they have a bomb that can kill more people than one look at Max Rifkin’s daughter?”
Weinstein’s so-called friends had all knuckled under to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Blotnick was turned in by his own mother. Sharpstein was turned in by his answering service. Weinstein had been called by the committee and admitted he had given money to the Russian War Relief, and then added, “Oh, yes, I bought Stalin a dining-room set.” He refused to name names but said if the committee insisted he would give the heights of the people he had met at meetings. In the end he panicked and, instead of taking the Fifth Amendment, took the Third, which enabled him to buy beer in Philadelphia on Sunday.
WEINSTEIN finished shaving and got into the shower. He lathered himself, while steaming water splashed down his bulky back. He thought, Here I am at some fixed point in time and space, taking a shower. I, Isaac Weinstein. One of God’s creatures. And then, stepping on the soap, he slid across the floor and rammed his head into the towel rack. It had been a bad week. The previous day, he had got a bad haircut and he was still not over the anxiety it had caused him. At first the barber had snipped judiciously, but soon Weinstein realized he had gone too far. “Put some back!” he screamed unreasonably.
“I can’t,” the barber said. “It won’t stick.”
“Well, then give it to me, Dominic! I want to take it with me!”
“Once it’s on the floor of the shop it’s mine, Mr. Weinstein.”
“Like hell! I want my hair!”
He blustered and raged, and finally felt guilty and left. Goyim, he thought. One way or another, they get you.
Now he emerged from the hotel and walked up Eighth Avenue. Two men were mugging an elderly lady. My God, thought Weinstein, time was when one person could handle that job. Some city. Chaos everyplace. Kant was right: The mind imposes order. It also tells you how much to tip. What a wonderful thing, to be conscious! I wonder what the people in New Jersey do.
He was on his way to see Harriet about the alimony payments. He still loved Harriet, even though while they were married she had systematically attempted to commit adultery with all the “R”s in the Manhattan Telephone Directory. He forgave her. But he should have suspected something when his best friend and Harriet took a house in Maine together for three years without telling him where they were. He didn’t want to see it—that was it. His sex life with Harriet had stopped early. He slept with her once on the night they first met, once on the evening of the first moon landing, and once to test if his back was all right after a slipped disc. “It’s no damn good with you, Harriet,” he used to complain. “You’re too pure. Every time I have an urge for you I sublimate it by planting a tree in Israel. You remind me of my mother.” (Molly Weinstein, may she rest in peace, who slaved for him and made the best stuffed derma in Chicago—a secret recipe until everyone realized she was putting in hashish.)
For lovemaking, Weinstein needed someone quite opposite. Like LuAnne, who made sex an art. The only trouble was, she couldn’t count to twenty without taking her shoes off. He once tried giving her a book on existentialism, but she ate it. Sexually, Weinstein had always felt inadequate. For one thing, he felt short. He was five-four in his stocking feet, although in someone else’s stocking feet he could be as tall as five-six. Dr. Klein, his analyst, got him to see that jumping in front of a moving train was more hostile than self-destructive but in either case would ruin the crease in his pants. Klein was his third analyst. His first was a Jungian, who suggested they try a Ouija board. Before Klein, he attended “group,” but when it came time for him to speak he got dizzy and could only recite the names of all the planets. His problem was women, and he knew it. He was impotent with any woman who finished college with higher than a B-minus average. He felt most at home with graduates of typing school, although if the woman did over sixty words a minute he panicked and could not perform.
WEINSTEIN rang the bell to Harriet’s apartment, and suddenly she was standing before him. Swelling to maculate giraffe, as usual, thought Weinstein. It was a private joke that neither of them understood.
“Hello, Harriet,” he said.
“Oh, Ike,” she said. “You needn’t be so damn self-righteous.”
She was right. What a tactless thing to have said. He hated himself for it.
“How are the kids, Harriet?”
“We never had any kids, Ike.”
“That’s why I thought four hundred dollars a week was a lot for child support.”
She bit her lip, Weinstein bit his lip.
Then he bit her lip. “Harriet,” he said, “I … I’m broke. Egg futures are down.”
“I see. And can’t you get help from your shiksa?”
“To you, any girl who’s not Jewish is a shiksa.”
“Can we forget it?” Her voice was choked with recrimination. Weinstein had a sudden urge to kiss her, or, if not her, somebody.
“Harriet, where did we go wrong?”
“We never faced reality.”
“It wasn’t my fault. You said it was north.”
“Reality is north, Ike.”
“No, Harriet. Empty dreams are north. Reality is west. False hopes are east, and I think Louisiana is south.”
She still had the power to arouse him. He reached out for her, but she moved away and his hand came to rest in some sour cream.
“Is that why you slept with your analyst?” he finally blurted out. His face was knotted with rage. He felt like fainting but couldn’t remember the proper way to fall.
“That was therapy,” she said coldly. “According to Freud, sex is the royal road to the unconscious.”
“Freud said dreams are the road to the unconscious.”
“Sex, dreams—you’re going to nitpick?”
“Goodbye, Harriet.”
It was no use. Rien à dire, rien à faire. Weinstein left and walked over to Union Square. Suddenly hot tears burst forth, as if from a broken dam. Hot, salty tears pent up for ages rushed out in an unabashed wave of emotion. The problem was, they were coming out of his ears. Look at this, he thought. I can’t even cry properly. He dabbed his ear with Kleenex and went home.
Disquiet, Please! Page 28
