by Louis Begley
I had to go to another class after the lecture and said goodbye to Henry and Sue as soon as we left Sanders. But Henry and I met for lunch at the Union. With her identity confirmed, I thought he would have finally spoken to Margot. He seemed startled at the idea and told me that he certainly hadn’t. His plan was to continue to lie low. In fact, he had already gotten Sue to promise never to mention to Margot his name or his interest in her. It was my turn to be surprised. I asked how this squared with wanting to declare his undying love from the moment he first saw Margot.
It doesn’t, he fired back. I told you the stars weren’t aligned. It was a dumb thing to think and a dumb thing to say, but at least I was smart enough not to do anything of the sort. I don’t want to be humiliated.
Archie and Henry hadn’t yet reequipped themselves at Keezer’s. When Henry confirmed my hunch that his wardrobe was a problem, I let him feel my exasperation. Had he not yet realized that so far no one had rejected him because of the way he was dressed?
How would you know? he replied. Disdain is something you feel in your bones. I know what I feel in mine.
After a pause he said, The immediate problem is whether I should stop seeing Sue. She’s very affectionate and nice, but Margot and she live in the same dorm, they spend their time with the same girls. I want to avoid complications. I think I have to drop her—very gently.
I made no comment.
We finished lunch and walked back to the dormitory. On the way he started to tell me what he had learned about Margot. The gist of it was that her parents were rich and elegant enough to be featured regularly in fashion magazines. They were said to know everyone who was famous and important. This made them the subject of a good deal of talk among the other girls at the school and their parents. The details were interesting. Margot’s father had been an important banker in Amsterdam before the war. Most people seemed to know he was a Jew. However, the mother was a real American; that is to say she wasn’t Jewish. According to school lore, Mr. Hornung had “bought” her when she was a cabaret singer performing at the Pierre, and Margot was born five months later. Both events were café society news in the New York tabloids even though Mr. Hornung had taken his bride and child back to Holland. He was no fool. Already in 1938, he began transferring his capital and his collections to New York. Then, in June 1939, the family, accompanied by the English nanny who was still with the Hornungs, tranquilly sailed to New York aboard a Cunarder and were reunited with the money and the art. They moved into their present apartment on Park Avenue in time for Margot to go to school that fall. According to Sue, the apartment was like the Frick Collection. Mr. Hornung made a second fortune on Wall Street, which may be the reason they hadn’t moved back to Amsterdam.
I sensed it, Henry said, as soon as I saw the mother, I sensed what kind of people they are. None of them would give me the time of day, no matter how I was dressed. I’ll have to make Margot my long-term project. In the meantime, I’ll stay away. Don’t want to screw it up.
I agreed that the mother was glamorous. But was that a reason for a Radcliffe freshman—a Jewish or half-Jewish one at that—to refuse to go out with a Jewish undergraduate she had already tried to pick up? Just because her parents were loaded and knew Picasso and the Windsors?
Henry said, You can’t really be that stupid.
I didn’t take offense, but our conversation was over. Henry had to go to the library to read a book that was on reserve. However, we returned to the subject of the Hornungs that evening and in the days that followed. As we talked, I learned, in bits and pieces, the war story that Archie had wanted to hear. Henry spoke reluctantly, and I believe that if his mind had not been fixed on Margot he wouldn’t have said so much.
Apparently, Henry’s father had not been really rich before the war; he had been merely very well-to-do, on the scale of successful Jewish businessmen in Poland, one that, Henry stressed, was different from the scale valid in Holland or elsewhere in Western Europe. Poland was a poor country, he insisted; “rich” or “well-to-do” there wasn’t the same as for instance in London. The family business was the export of foodstuffs, especially Polish hams, which were a major producer of revenue for the country, and arts and crafts and decorators’ wares like kilims. There were also investments in real estate in Krakow, where they lived. Mr. White had obtained a law degree and was about to begin the obligatory lawyer’s apprenticeship when his father died. As the only son, he had to take over the business. His choice of bride was conventional in the extreme. He married the daughter of the leading Jewish lawyer, also very well-to-do, and received a handsome dowry, including an apartment building on a good street within the walls of the old city. She had finished her own university studies, in Polish literature, and, when Mr. White sought her hand, was planning to obtain the higher degree required for teaching in state secondary schools. That project came to nothing, in part because eleven months after the marriage Henry was born. Running my father’s household took up all her time, said Henry, even though she had a staff of four or five. The new family like the parents was too well placed, too respectable, and too Polish in speech and habit to have suffered in daily life from the campaign of insults and indignities directed at Jews beginning with the coming to power, after Marshal Pilsudski died, of a right-wing nationalistic and anti-Semitic regime. That had to wait for the arrival of the Germans.
Krakow became the seat of the German government of Poland, and there was no delay in requiring Jews to wear the yellow star, or in the establishment of the ghetto in the old Jewish quarter called Kazimierz. Before that happened, however, his mother’s parents fled to Zakopane, in the Tatry Mountains, where it had been their custom to spend the summer months, always at the same hotel. The owner had agreed to hide them. Henry’s parents never found out exactly where or how they were hidden; the general idea had been that they would be out of sight and earshot—therefore out of danger—in a cottage outside Zakopane belonging to that man. Did he eventually tire of harboring Jews? Did he sell them to the Polish police or directly to the Gestapo? Did a neighbor denounce them? None of his father’s inquiries after the war elicited answers he could trust. He did hear that a Jewish couple that could well have been his in-laws was taken to the Gestapo building in Zakopane before Christmas of 1942 never to be seen again. The hotel keeper himself died in 1943, apparently of pneumonia; his family had moved away. The father found it troubling that the man should have died of a natural cause; it suggested treachery on his part. If he had been denounced for harboring Jews, in all probability he would have been shot.
The road to safety followed by Henry’s parents was similar, but it did not end in disaster. His mother’s old Latin teacher at the gimnazjum—he explained that this was Polish high school—one Pani Maria, a remarkable woman who during her youth had been involved in the Polish socialist independence movement, spontaneously offered to take Henry and his mother into her house on the outskirts of Krakow and hide them until the end of the war, which she didn’t doubt would end in Germany’s defeat. No less impressive than her courage and generosity were Pani Maria’s scholarship and literary attainments. She was the author of the best Polish translation of Horace’s Odes and Epodes. What she proposed seemed practical: she was widowed, living alone, with no relatives near Krakow. There was no need to fear the interference or indiscretion of visitors, and the house had a room that had always been shuttered. She would block it off. Pani Maria thought that if they were very careful the thing could be done. But she would not agree to take in Mr. White as well. She freely admitted that her decision was not rational. Quite simply, she believed that her nerves couldn’t bear the presence of a second adult in that room behind a concealed door. Henry’s parents didn’t think they could get her to go back on that position. It was better to find another hiding place for Mr. White. He had a manager who had worked in his firm for many years, with whom he had always had excellent relations. The man hesitated, his wife had to be convinced, but finally he agreed to take in Mr. White. Mr
. White didn’t wait to be asked: as soon as the man said yes, he signed over to him the ownership of the firm, the buildings he and Mrs. White owned, and every other asset to which title could be transferred. The manager said, Don’t worry, if we survive, we will sort this out fairly. They shook hands on it. The real difference between the hiding places was that Mr. White had to live in the cellar. The manager had small children as well as the wife; it was impossible to stop strangers from coming into the house.
Anyway, Henry said, we did make it through the war, and when the Russians chased the Germans out of Krakow, we staggered into the street like people who had been trapped in a mine. Out of all our family we alone had survived.
I was shaken by the story, and by the manner in which he told it: matter-of-fact and somehow dismissive.
What happened next? I asked.
When? After the war? We lived in Krakow for a while, in our old apartment, which had been taken over by Germans who had left in a hurry. It wasn’t necessary to evict any Poles, and the Germans had left our furniture in place. The man who saved my father’s life agreed to give him enough money to live on and to back him in some deals on the black market. They split the profits. It was a good arrangement. After a while, my father was doing so well that he was sorry to leave the business. Pani Maria—I loved her more than anybody—died of the flu followed by pneumonia. Then the summer was over and it was time for me to enter the gimnazjum. All I knew was Polish literature that I read with my mother, and Polish composition, and the Latin and German that I did with Pani Maria. I crammed and passed. There was a chance to buy some kind of visa that allowed us to get out of Poland and into Belgium. My father jumped at it. From Belgium we went to New York. There was one thing my father hadn’t signed over. That was the firm’s bank account at the Morgan Bank in New York, and, by reason of some prewar Polish tax requirements, it was in his own name. So we had a little money, after all, and in the end we were able to settle in Brooklyn.
I hesitated, but because the experience was unimaginable I let myself ask what it had been like to live hidden in a blocked-off room for three years.
What do you suppose? he asked. Do you want to know whether we used a chamber pot and who took it out and when? Or how we washed? Or how we quarreled? I won’t tell you.
I apologized for the question and returned to how he had caught up with his studies. I said I understood about the Latin and the German. But the rest? The English?
I’ve told you, he said, I crammed. What I don’t know, I fake. I have a good memory. Anything I can read in a book stays with me. But, he said, not everything is in books. As you’ve observed, I can’t throw a ball. I don’t know how to climb trees either. Chances are that I never will.
I continued to insist—in retrospect beyond the point of obtuseness—that nothing he had told me should be a barrier between him and Margot. The war robbed you and your parents of lots of things, I said, and you have suffered a lot. The Hornungs should understand that better than anyone.
True enough, he allowed, in the abstract. But practically speaking, none of this is about what we were before the war, or what happened during the war. It’s about what we are now. We have become a different species. What is my father’s business? He has a little factory in East Brooklyn making curtains, upholstery, and stuff like that. He invests in little rental buildings. He learned some English before the war. You’ve heard him on the telephone. My mother is just the same. You can only get so far from where you start. Our starting line is in East Brooklyn. Have you ever been there? I don’t recommend it. Until last year, we lived in an apartment there that was a real hole. Two small bedrooms—no bigger than my room here—a dark ugly living room, and an ugly kitchen. With a nice view of the air shaft. Now we have a big house that’s all right, in Flatbush, a quiet part of Brooklyn full of orderly middle-class Jews. My parents’ friends are like us. They’re all former this or former that. What distinguishes most of them from us is that they got here before the war and so didn’t have to hide in a cellar or behind someone’s armoire. Some have more money than my father, some in fact have a lot, but what does it all add up to in relation to people like the Hornungs? Zero. You made a face when I said Margot’s family and my parents are different species. All right: I give up that metaphor. Have another one. Right now Margot and Margot’s parents are way up at the top of a tree. We’re way down at the roots. But that’s the one tree I will learn to climb. Otherwise, there is no point in my being here.
I wish I could say that after that exchange I stopped debating with him. But I didn’t. I explained how where you lived and how much money you made were much less important than who you really were, inside. That, I said, was the difference between America and Europe. As I pontificated I was dimly aware that I was making an argument that I could not have sustained if the subject had been my own situation. Certainly, my parents were, on the scale of the Berkshires, of a very good family, and at the time I had more respect for Lenox and Stockbridge gentry than experience has shown they deserved. Therefore, except for the small issue of my not being my parents’ biological child, it shouldn’t matter that their reputation was stained and that their spendthrift ways and those of their parents before them had ensured that they would be dismally poor in comparison with my father’s very rich first cousin and employer. That cousin with his spotless name and all the good a good name brings. Yes, there was the all-important country club to which his family and mine both belonged, where we came into frequent, uneasy contact. The cousins, however, belonged to other clubs, to which my parents couldn’t aspire, and lived altogether differently. Could anyone in his right mind in Berkshire County consider my father and my father’s cousin social equals? I knew that the answer was no, but the answer hurt. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, to be judged on my own merit and also get all the help I could get from my name, even though it was a name that, for all the legal adoption procedures, I couldn’t convince myself was legitimately my own. All the same, in Berkshire County and, perhaps, beyond, it was nicer to be called Standish than Nowak or Mahoney.
In the end, it made no difference what I said. Henry laughed and laughed.
VI
I NOW REALIZE that all three of us—Henry, Archie, and I—used the word “Jew” with restraint, holding it gingerly with two fingers far away from the body, as though it gave off a bad smell. It was an embarrassing word to utter in polite company, especially if a Jew was present—unless, like old Gummy, you were telling jokes about Weisberg, Goldberg, and the like. In that respect it was not unlike “homosexual,” or some of the less antiseptic variants in use at Harvard: queer, fairy, queen, pervert, faggot, fruit, and pederast. Nevertheless, I was certain that Henry had told Archie he was a Jew or else had otherwise brought it out into the open. I was far from sure that they had ever spoken about the war. One reason would have been Archie’s dislike of what he called heavy conversations. His first instinct when he saw one coming was to run or hide. When that was impractical, he would assume an expression of great seriousness, cock his right ear as if not to miss a word, and, in a couple of minutes, bring the audience to a close by some more or less British injunction to buck up coupled with an offer to have another serious chat very soon. A brisk slap on the back or a squeeze of the arm just above the elbow might follow. It wasn’t that Archie lacked compassion; on the contrary, I believe that he shrank from hearing other people’s troubles because they affected him so very acutely. Very little by way of verbal communication was needed for Archie to take measure of anyone. I was sure that after two months of living with Henry at close quarters he doubtless knew all he wanted to know about him; the mechanics of the White family’s survival and immigration to Brooklyn would have fallen into the category of matters better left alone. He would have heard Henry out if that had been what Henry wanted, but he wouldn’t inquire. I had not forgotten that it was he, not I, who first realized that Henry was a Jew, and a Jew who didn’t much care to be recognized as such. The interest he expressed
hearing Henry’s story someday had been, I now understood, nothing more than a polite formula. I had also moved toward the view that Archie’s take on Henry’s Jewism was fundamentally correct: the stuff about always being ready to admit that he was Jewish, if someone asked, and to volunteer the information in appropriate cases added up to little more than the determination not to be caught in a humiliating lie.
Occasionally I thought that I should tell Henry the best policy would be to make clear that he was a Jew as soon as he saw the question coming. I never did. Everything concerning Jews—a subject to which I had devoted little thought before—was too complicated, and Henry’s responses were unpredictable. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I was no good at predicting. For instance, not long after he told me that he was Jewish, I asked whether he had seen Gentleman’s Agreement. He nodded. When I asked what he had thought of it, he said that he had liked Gregory Peck and his clothes, the fine apartments, the house in Connecticut, and the restaurants. I replied there was a lot more to the film than the props. The message it sent was important. He shook his head and said, It’s a bottle of aspirin for you and others like you. I protested again. His answer was that Gregory Peck is a Boy Scout on a camping trip. The business of his pretending to be a Jew was like sleeping out in the woods and getting bitten by mosquitoes. On Sunday evening he gets to go home to a hot shower and pancakes with maple syrup. It’s Gregory Peck’s friend, the John Garfield character, he continued, who has to go on being a Jew and dealing with Jew haters. What’s that like? If you want to know what it’s really like to be a Jew, let Shylock tell you. Listen to him while he spews out his rancor and hatred. That, Henry said, is a genuine statement of the Jewish condition. Let Shylock tell you.
