The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “Well,” I asked her, “did you have a good time?”

  She smiled and glanced down and made the small sound “Ch,” vestigial of “Jesus.” With absent-minded delicacy she stirred her coffee, lifting and replacing the spoon without a ripple.

  “Rather odd at the end,” I said. “Not even the host there.”

  “He took Ann Mahlon home.”

  “I know.” I was surprised that she did, having been sick in the bathroom for that hour.

  “You sound jealous,” she added.

  “Who does? I do? I don’t.”

  “You like her, John, don’t you?” Her using my first name and the quality of the question did not, though we had really—not counting parties—just met, seem forward, considering the hour and that she had brought me coffee. There is little further to go with a girl who has brought you coffee.

  “Oh, I like everybody,” I told her, “and the longer I’ve known them the more I like them, because the more they’re me. The only people I like better are ones I’ve just met. Now Ann Mahlon I’ve known since kindergarten. Every day her mother used to bring her to the edge of the schoolyard for months after all the other mothers had stopped.” I wanted to cut a figure in Margaret’s eyes, but they were too dark. Stoically she had got on top of her weariness, but it was growing bigger under her.

  “Did you like her then?”

  “I felt sorry for her being embarrassed by her mother.”

  She asked me, “What was Larry like when he was little?”

  “Oh, bright. Kind of mean.”

  “Was he mean?”

  “I’d say so. Yes. In some grade or other he and I began to play chess together. I always won until secretly he took lessons from a man his parents knew and read strategy books.”

  Margaret laughed, genuinely pleased. “Then did he win?”

  “Once. After that I really tried, and after that he decided chess was kid stuff. Besides, he’d used me up. He’d have these runs on people where you’d be down at his house every afternoon, then in a couple months he’d get a new pet and that’d be that.”

  “He’s funny,” she said. “He has a kind of cold mind. He decides on what he wants, then he does what he has to do, you know, and nothing anybody says can change him.”

  “He does tend to get what he wants,” I told her guardedly, realizing that to her this meant her. Poor bruised little girl, in her mind he was all the time cleaving with rare cunning through his parents’ objections straight to her.

  My coffee was nearly gone, so I glanced toward the sofa in the other room. Neil and the girl had sunk out of sight behind its back. Before this it had honestly not occurred to me that they had a relationship, but now that I saw, it seemed plausible, and, at this time of night, good news, though it meant we would not be going to Chicago quite yet.

  So I talked to Margaret about Larry, and she responded, showing really quite an acute sense of him. To me, considering the personality of a childhood friend so seriously, as if overnight he had become a factor in the world, seemed absurd; I couldn’t even deeply believe that in her world he mattered much. Larry Schuman, in little more than a year, had become nothing to me. The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of those Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.

  She offered me more coffee. When she returned with it, she sat down not opposite but beside me, lifting me to such a pitch of gratitude and affection that the only way I could think to express it was by not kissing her, as if a kiss were another piece of abuse women suffered. She said, “Cold. Cheap bastard turns the thermostat down to sixty,” meaning her father. She drew my arm around her shoulders and folded my hand about her bare forearm, to warm it. The back of my thumb fitted against the curve of one breast. Her head went into the hollow where my arm and chest joined; she was terribly small, measured against your own body. Perhaps she weighed a hundred pounds. Her lids lowered and I kissed her two beautiful eyebrows and then the spaces of skin between the rough curls, some black and some bleached, that fringed her forehead. Other than this I tried to keep as still as a bed would be. It had grown cold. A shiver starting on the side away from her would twitch my shoulders when I tried to repress it; she would frown and unconsciously draw my arm tighter. No one had switched the kitchen light off. On Margaret’s foreshortened upper lip there seemed to be two pencil marks; the length of wrist my badly fitting sleeve exposed looked pale and naked against the spiralling down of the smaller arm held beneath it.

  Outside on the street the house faced there was no motion. Only once did a car go by—around five o’clock, with twin mufflers, the radio on, and a boy yelling. Neil and the girl murmured together incessantly; some of what they said I could overhear.

  “No. Which?” she asked.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Wouldn’t you want a boy?”

  “I’d be happy whatever I got.”

  “I know, but which would you rather have? Don’t men want boys?”

  “I don’t care. You.”

  Somewhat later, Mohn’s truck passed on the other side of the street. The milkman, well bundled, sat behind headlights in a warm orange volume the size of a phone booth, steering one-handed and smoking a cigar that he set on the edge of the dashboard when, his wire carrier vibrant, he ran out of the truck with bottles. His passing led Neil to decide the time had come. Margaret woke up frightened of her father; we hissed our farewells and thanks to her quickly. Neil dropped the other girl off at her house a few blocks away; he knew where it was. Sometime during that night I must have seen this girl’s face, but I have no memory of it. She is always behind a magazine or in the dark or with her back turned. Neil married her years later, I know, but after we arrived in Chicago I never saw him again, either.

  · · ·

  Red dawn light touched the clouds above the black slate roofs as, with a few other cars, we drove through Alton. The moon-sized clock of a beer billboard said ten after six. Olinger was deathly still. The air brightened as we moved along the highway; the glowing wall of my home hung above the woods as we rounded the long curve by the Mennonite dairy. With a .22 I could have had a pane of my parents’ bedroom window, and they were dreaming I was in Indiana. My grandfather would be up, stamping around in the kitchen for my grandmother to make him breakfast, or outside walking to see if any ice had formed on the brook. For an instant I genuinely feared he might hail me from the peak of the barn roof. Then trees interceded and we were safe in a landscape where no one cared.

  At the entrance to the Turnpike Neil did a strange thing; he stopped the car and had me take the wheel. He had never trusted me to drive his father’s car before; he had believed my not knowing where the crankshaft or fuel pump was handicapped my competence to steer. But now he was quite complacent. He hunched under an old mackinaw and leaned his head against the metal of the window frame and soon was asleep. We crossed the Susquehanna on a long smooth bridge below Harrisburg, then began climbing toward the Alleghenies. In the mountains there was snow, a dry dusting like sand that waved back and forth on the road surface. Farther along, there had been a fresh fall that night, about two inches, and the plows had not yet cleared all the lanes. I was passing a Sunoco truck on a high curve when without warning the scraped section gave out and I realized I might skid into the fence, if not over the edge. The radio was singing “Carpets of clover, I’ll lay right at your feet,” and the speedometer said 81. Nothing happened; the car stayed firm in the snow, and Neil slept through the danger, his face turned skyward and his breath struggling in his nose. It was the first time I heard a contemporary of mine snore.

  When we came into tunnel country, the flicker and hollow amplification stirred Neil awake. He sat up, the mackinaw dropping to his lap, and lit a cigarette. A second after the scratch of his match the moment occurred of which each following moment was a slight diminution, as we made the long irregular descent t
oward Pittsburgh. There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. We were on our way. I had seen a dawn. This far, Neil could appreciate, I had brought us safely. Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a long trip; many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter. There was the quality of the 10 A.M. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility—you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element—and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state—as if you had made your life. And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me.

  January 3, 1959

  Philip Roth

  N MAY OF 1945, only a few weeks after the fighting had ended in Europe, I was rotated back to the States, where I spent the remainder of the war with a training company at Camp Crowder, Missouri. Along with the rest of the Ninth Army, I had been racing across Germany so swiftly during the late winter and spring that when I boarded the plane, I couldn’t believe its destination lay to the west. My mind might inform me otherwise, but there was an inertia of the spirit that told me we were flying to a new front, where we would disembark and continue our push eastward—eastward until we’d circled the globe, marching through villages along whose twisting, cobbled streets crowds of the enemy would watch us take possession of what, up till then, they’d considered their own. I had changed enough in two years not to mind the trembling of the old people, the crying of the very young, the uncertainty and fear in the eyes of the once arrogant. I had been fortunate enough to develop an infantryman’s heart, which, like his feet, at first aches and swells but finally grows horny enough for him to travel the weirdest paths without feeling a thing.

  Captain Paul Barrett was my C.O. in Camp Crowder. The day I reported for duty, he came out of his office to shake my hand. He was short, gruff, and fiery, and—indoors or out—he wore his polished helmet liner pulled down to his little eyes. In Europe, he had received a battlefield commission and a serious chest wound, and he’d been returned to the States only a few months before. He spoke easily to me, and at the evening formation he introduced me to the troops. “Gentlemen,” he said, “Sergeant Thurston, as you know, is no longer with this company. Your new first sergeant is Sergeant Nathan Marx, here. He is a veteran of the European theatre, and consequently will expect to find a company of soldiers here, and not a company of boys.”

  I sat up late in the orderly room that evening, trying halfheartedly to solve the riddle of duty rosters, personnel forms, and morning reports. The Charge of Quarters slept with his mouth open on a mattress on the floor. A trainee stood reading the next day’s duty roster, which was posted on the bulletin board just inside the screen door. It was a warm evening, and I could hear radios playing dance music over in the barracks. The trainee, who had been staring at me whenever he thought I wouldn’t notice, finally took a step in my direction.

  “Hey, Sarge—we having a G.I. party tomorrow night?” he asked. A G.I. party is a barracks cleaning.

  “You usually have them on Friday nights?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, and then he added, mysteriously, “That’s the whole thing.”

  “Then you’ll have a G.I. party.”

  He turned away, and I heard him mumbling. His shoulders were moving, and I wondered if he was crying.

  “What’s your name, soldier?” I asked.

  He turned, not crying at all. Instead, his green-speckled eyes, long and narrow, flashed like fish in the sun. He walked over to me and sat on the edge of my desk. He reached out a hand. “Sheldon,” he said.

  “Stand on your feet, Sheldon.”

  Getting off the desk, he said, “Sheldon Grossbart.” He smiled at the familiarity into which he’d led me.

  “You against cleaning the barracks Friday night, Grossbart?” I said. “Maybe we shouldn’t have G.I. parties. Maybe we should get a maid.” My tone startled me. I felt I sounded like every top sergeant I had ever known.

  “No, Sergeant.” He grew serious, but with a seriousness that seemed to be only the stifling of a smile. “It’s just— G.I. parties on Friday night, of all nights.”

  He slipped up onto the corner of the desk again—not quite sitting, but not quite standing, either. He looked at me with those speckled eyes flashing, and then made a gesture with his hand. It was very slight—no more than a movement back and forth of the wrist—and yet it managed to exclude from our affairs everything else in the orderly room, to make the two of us the center of the world. It seemed, in fact, to exclude everything even about the two of us except our hearts.

  “Sergeant Thurston was one thing,” he whispered, glancing at the sleeping C.Q., “but we thought that with you here things might be a little different.”

  “We?”

  “The Jewish personnel.”

  “Why?” I asked, harshly. “What’s on your mind?” Whether I was still angry at the “Sheldon” business, or now at something else, I hadn’t time to tell, but clearly I was angry.

  “We thought you— Marx, you know, like Karl Marx. The Marx Brothers. Those guys are all— M-a-r-x. Isn’t that how you spell it, Sergeant?”

  “M-a-r-x.”

  “Fishbein said—” He stopped. “What I mean to say, Sergeant—” His face and neck were red, and his mouth moved but no words came out. In a moment, he raised himself to attention, gazing down at me. It was as though he had suddenly decided he could expect no more sympathy from me than from Thurston, the reason being that I was of Thurston’s faith, and not his. The young man had managed to confuse himself as to what my faith really was, but I felt no desire to straighten him out. Very simply, I didn’t like him.

  When I did nothing but return his gaze, he spoke, in an altered tone. “You see, Sergeant,” he explained to me, “Friday nights, Jews are supposed to go to services.”

  “Did Sergeant Thurston tell you you couldn’t go to them when there was a G.I. party?”

  “No.”

  “Did he say you had to stay and scrub the floors?”

  “No, Sergeant.”

  “Did the Captain say you had to stay and scrub the floors?”

  “That isn’t it, Sergeant. It’s the other guys in the barracks.” He leaned toward me. “They think we’re goofing off. But we’re not. That’s when Jews go to services, Friday night. We have to.”

  “Then go.”

  “But the other guys make accusations. They have no right.”

  “That’s not the Army’s problem, Grossbart. It’s a personal problem you’ll have to work out yourself.”

  “But it’s unfair.”

  I got up to leave. “There’s nothing I can do about it,” I said.

  Grossbart stiffened and stood in front of me. “But this is a matter of religion, sir.”

  “Sergeant,” I said.

  “I mean ‘Sergeant,’ ” he said, almost snarling.

  “Look, go see the chaplain. You want to see Captain Barrett, I’ll arrange an appointment.”

  “No, no. I don’t want to make trouble, Sergeant. That’s the first thing they throw up to you. I just want my rights!”

  “Damn it, Grossbart, stop whining. You have your rights. You can stay and scrub floors or you can go to shul—”

  The smile swam in again. Spittle gleamed at the corners of his mouth. “You mean church, Sergeant.”

  “I mean shul, Grossbart!”

  I walked past him and went outside. Near me, I heard the scrunching of a guard’s boots on gravel. Beyond the lighted windows of the barracks, young men in T shirts and fatigue pants were sitting on their bunks, polishing their rifles. Suddenly there was a light rustling behind me. I turned and saw Grossbart’s dark frame fleeing back to the barracks, racing to tell his Jewish friends that they were right—that, like Karl and Harpo, I was one of them.

  · · ·

  The next morning, while chatting with Captain Barrett,
I recounted the incident of the previous evening. Somehow, in the telling, it must have seemed to the Captain that I was not so much explaining Grossbart’s position as defending it. “Marx, I’d fight side by side with a nigger if the fella proved to me he was a man. I pride myself,” he said, looking out the window, “that I’ve got an open mind. Consequently, Sergeant, nobody gets special treatment here, for the good or the bad. All a man’s got to do is prove himself. A man fires well on the range, I give him a weekend pass. He scores high in P.T., he gets a weekend pass. He earns it.” He turned from the window and pointed a finger at me. “You’re a Jewish fella, am I right, Marx?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And I admire you. I admire you because of the ribbons on your chest. I judge a man by what he shows me on the field of battle, Sergeant. It’s what he’s got here,” he said, and then, though I expected he would point to his heart, he jerked a thumb toward the buttons straining to hold his blouse across his belly. “Guts,” he said.

  “O.K., sir. I only wanted to pass on to you how the men felt.”

  “Mr. Marx, you’re going to be old before your time if you worry about how the men feel. Leave that stuff to the chaplain—that’s his business, not yours. Let’s us train these fellas to shoot straight. If the Jewish personnel feels the other men are accusing them of goldbricking—well, I just don’t know. Seems awful funny that suddenly the Lord is calling so loud in Private Grossman’s ear he’s just got to run to church.”

  “Synagogue,” I said.

  “Synagogue is right, Sergeant. I’ll write that down for handy reference. Thank you for stopping by.”

  That evening, a few minutes before the company gathered outside the orderly room for the chow formation, I called the C.Q., Corporal Robert LaHill, in to see me. LaHill was a dark, burly fellow whose hair curled out of his clothes wherever it could. He had a glaze in his eyes that made one think of caves and dinosaurs. “LaHill,” I said, “when you take the formation, remind the men that they’re free to attend church services whenever they are held, provided they report to the orderly room before they leave the area.”