The One-Star Jew: Stories

by Evanier, David

  She must have come upon the story, “My Mother Is Not Living,” in just such an accidental way, stumbled upon it or had it pointed out to her by an unsuspecting friend.

  “Have you traveled?” she said.

  “Just London. Have you?”

  Her face lit. “England, Italy, Spain, Singapore, Hong Kong. This shopping bag is from Hong Kong. I’ve turned your bedroom into an oriental room. Wait until you see it. Do you want to walk around Chinatown?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  “I love a day off like this. I guess I’m still a little girl.”

  I helped my mother on with her coat and we walked into the street.

  XIII

  It was unexpectedly cold out, and my mother noticed that I was shivering. She was disturbed about the light coat I was wearing.

  Her head bobbed as she looked into the store windows, and at the merchandise of the street vendors. We zoomed through stores of exotic Chinese ware. She barely paused at all. “They don’t have it,” she said as we walked out of a fourth store.

  “What?”

  “Seasoned pepper.”

  We walked down the winding side streets. She eagerly took in the sights and smells. “I like this better than a show,” she said. “It’s an adventure.”

  “So do I,” I said.

  She looked at me. “You do? Uh huh.” She nodded.

  She walked a few steps and stopped. “What’s that smell?” There was the aroma of coffee from a Chinese pastry shop. “Oooh!” my mother said. “Doesn’t that smell good? Just the right thing to warm us up.” She paused. “Maybe you don’t want coffee.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  We stepped down into the coffee shop.

  We sat at the counter. The elderly Chinese waiter was not over-joyed at our small order. “Make the coffee very, very hot,” my mother said. He began to pour the cream and my mother stopped him, taking the pitcher away from him. “That’s okay,” she said, “we’ll do it ourselves.”

  “It smells wonderful,” my mother said to the waiter, her smile making her face youthful. The waiter smiled back. In a moment he was back with another pitcher. “Maybe you like more?”

  “No, thank you.”

  He quickly handed my mother two napkins.

  XIV

  “I’m still pretty cold,” I said as we stood in front of the shop. “Maybe you’d like to keep shopping, and I’ll get going.”

  She pointed to her two empty shopping bags. “I guess I’m like my mother,” she said. “She always had a shopping bag in one hand and you in the other, Bruce.” It was true. I had rarely seen my mother during the day as a child. She had deposited me with my grandmother and taken off.

  I took my mother into my arms and said, “I’ll call you.” There was a pause and I saw her looking at me. Then I added: “I mean, not years from now. Soon.”

  Touching her cheek, I said it again.

  2

  CANCER OF THE TESTICLES

  I

  I had not seen Samuel for years, but his letters annoyed me. They were so melancholy, so sad. I couldn’t figure it out. In 1970 I returned to Manhattan for the summer and called him. “I’m double the size I was when you knew me; so is Doris. We eat all the time. Don’t you?” We made a date and I broke it—too depressing.

  Following that, several letters arrived. The contents varied, but always the same refrain: “So many things to say; we must get together soon; you have been a better and truer friend than I.” Puzzling to me, since I did not understand what we had to say to each other, and why I was such a good friend. First a letter came about the sudden death of his father from cancer. I remember Mr. Weintraub’s grocery store, Samuel’s Marxist stories and poems condemning his father for ringing up sales on the cash register and conveniently forgetting to put in a bar of soap, a can of soup, when packing the customer’s purchases in bags. The next letter told of the death of his mother from cancer. Then good news: his novel published. He inscribed it to me: “To Bruce—There were four people who thought I might be a writer. You were one of them, and your confidence and friendship were very important to me, during dark, difficult days. Sam.”

  Not true, unfortunately—I never believed in Sam as a writer. I hope the other three did. I read his book which was, in a strange, unreal way, about black power. All the attitudes were proper, and, if set down more convincingly, might have netted Sam a home in Scarsdale, a sale to Hollywood, a livelihood. But true to Sam’s writing style as I remember it, everything was tone-deaf: a black’s afro was “crunchy”; his lips “like accordion folds.” What emerged incessantly, everywhere, was the theme of masturbation. The characters could not keep their hands off themselves, no matter how militant. Everyone: the beautiful blacks, the fuzzy liberals, the reactionary dogs … at every free moment was settling down with a wad of toilet paper. It was uncanny in such a short, serious and shadowy book. And while it was not well written, it had an authority; there was no doubt that here was something the author really knew about.

  I waited a long time to write Samuel about the novel, and then suggested who might like it. I compiled a list of people I did not respect. Samuel wouldn’t know it, and he would respect them himself, and they really might enjoy the book.

  During an interim period there was a letter from Samuel’s brother, Moshe, from Montreal. Ten pages handwritten on newspaper, crumpled and hard to decipher. Moshe was now twenty-six, eight years younger than Samuel. I thought of him, a kid of seventeen, singing freedom songs badly in Washington Square. He’d heard I was starting a magazine, and in the cool, lovey-dovey hip lingo of those days he said he was enclosing his fine poems, that I might use them or tear them up or merely keep them, but that he hoped they would make me “happy and content.”

  I remember a day in 1960—we are all at Coney Island in Samuel’s car. I am singing softly to myself the World Youth Freedom song. Samuel shushes his wife Doris and Moshe. He puts his hand on Moshe’s shoulder and says, “Listen.” There is silence. “Bruce,” he says to me, “sing louder. You have a beautiful voice.”

  That is how truly tone-deaf Samuel was, and is. No one, ever, has praised my singing. No one has ever had reason to. That day in the car, Moshe listened, said “Yeah, yeah” to Samuel and joined me with his guitar. I felt my voice rising in strength, believing with them, and sang all the way into Manhattan.

  Another time, another day: Samuel mentions a hit song by the McGuire Sisters. The refrain goes: “May you find someone to love, as much as I love you.” He says, with a twinkle and a smile, “Bruce, I’ll bet you love that song.”

  Embarrassed and taken by surprise, I admit it. “How did you know?”

  He turned to Doris. “You see? I know, Bruce. It’s fine … it’s good that you’re like you are. Don’t be embarrassed.”

  I must have been between girls at the time. Samuel had taken to analyzing me, explaining he had never seen me as a person before, but, as he put it, as “a giant.”

  A long silence after the letter about the book. A letter came from Samuel when I had hepatitis last year. “Oh no,” I said to my wife. “What can it be this time? He must have cancer.” We laughed.

  I put the letter away for days. Not because I thought that. I placed it between pages of books, in cubbyholes, in drawers. I opened it one day: “I have cancer of the testicles,” Samuel wrote me.

  II

  In 1960 I was working as a typist at an encyclopedia firm. I shared a cubicle with a concert pianist named Arthur. Arthur was in his midtwenties and he spent three months of the year as a reservist in the army. Arthur was a type almost extinct today—extremely well-adjusted, friendly open eyes beaming through horn-rimmed spectacles, his fingers flying over the typewriter keys, his coffee breaks fifteen minutes to the second, respectful, on the ball. Did he like the army?

  �
�Sure! We all have to do it, don’t we?”

  “But you’re an artist.”

  He glanced nervously over the rim of our cubicle.

  “You’re not a sour apple, are you?” he said.

  God, he was happy. He cleaned his fingernails, he had a girl who kept him in line. He was living proof that the artist could be a good citizen, devoid of nasty thoughts and incendiary attitudes.

  He had me pegged. “You’re the first to go on your coffee break and the last to leave it,” he said, tapping his fingers. “I like my work. I like my girl. I like the army. You’ve been late to work every morning this week.”

  “What kind of music do you play anyway?” I asked him.

  He got edgier and edgier about me. I felt I was his conscience. I felt I was everybody’s conscience. He wanted no part of it. The only thing I was sneaky about was the army. They were breathing down my neck. I had so many plans going for avoiding it that I couldn’t keep up with myself: A) Radicalism. B) Pacifism. C) Mental Illness. D) Criminality. E) Homosexuality. F) Flight to Cuba. G) Near-sightedness. Each stance required a different behavior pattern, and I couldn’t make up my mind. I visited Communist Party headquarters, grinning and waving at the cameras I knew were hidden all over the building. Once inside the building, a comrade spotted me and started to call out “Bruce O—” “NO NO NO!” I screamed, looking around for microphones, “HA HA HA! HI HOW ARE YOU.” On the way out of the building, I placed my hands in front of my face as a shield. By the time I got to the Automat nearby I was breathless and terrified. I went back to my room, dug up a stack of Daily Workers and burnt them in the toilet. It took hours.

  I had chosen, at that point in my life, a psychiatrist to go with my life style. Dr. Harold Jackson was black, left-wing, and short. He had a house in Greenwich Village, he was friendly with Langston Hughes and dabbled in poetry himself.

  There was no real difference between sitting in Dr. Jackson’s waiting room and sitting in his office. This took me about a year to figure out. He would greet me in the waiting room and chat about politics, weather, restaurants, nutrition, exercise. I would charge into his office, sweating with neurotic symptoms, and wait to get down to business.

  Chuckles, frowns, bits of philosophy wafted through the air.

  “I can’t breathe!” I said. “My father—my mother—that bastard at the office—” I tried to get it all out; there was only an hour.

  Dr. Jackson looked at his fingernails, clucked his tongue, paused, and finally said,

  “Let me ask you this, Bruce—”

  I strained forward. “Yes?”

  “Are you … shall we say, tense?”

  Gobbling for air, I said between gritted teeth that I was.

  “I thought so. Many of my patients are. Tense, anxious, nervous. Do you frequently feel this way—”

  “Yes—”

  “I must confess … I rather thought so …”

  “I want to go to Cuba.”

  “Oh?”

  “I can’t breathe here; the capitalists have seen to that all right. I don’t exist—I’m just a writer, that’s all. A useless commodity. Those army bastards are just waiting to kill me. Who will know? I’ll be dead before I’ll have had the chance to be alive—to live, to publish my book. Wiped out, like a spot on the wall. No way. No way. Will you help me?”

  “Certainly!”

  “You will?” I leaned forward. “I was thinking of a freighter … or a plane via Moscow—”

  “Now, now, Bruce, travel to Cuba is forbidden!”

  “That’s why I thought Moscow first …”

  “I think, Bruce, that life … sometimes … has its gray moments. I want you to know that I, too, have sometimes, oh, fits of … pique … now and then when things don’t go just as I might have planned. Do you know about the Club Valhalla?”

  I stared at him.

  “The Club Valhalla, Bruce, is very pleasant. Singles mingle there. They have the most charming dances, and, heavens, all sorts of fun things. Why don’t you give them a jingle and see if the rates have gone up? They were most reasonable when I went there.”

  “But I don’t want a bourgeois dating club—”

  Dr. Jackson laughed. “Oh my no, they’re most serious. They’re quite mature politically, I can assure you.”

  “But about Cuba—”

  Dr. Jackson looked sad. “Yes. This country’s attitudes toward that valiant land are so silly. You can’t even get a good Havana cigar.”

  He ushered me out, smiling, cheerful. He was black, he was radical. I saw him on the streets of the Village with blonde girls who towered over him. He looked up at them, grinning, and patted them on the ass.

  III

  I met Samuel on a coffee break at the encyclopedia. He had an owlish look, very pleasant. He was an assistant editor, twenty-eight years old. I was simmering; he was placid. I slipped him a copy of the Daily Worker. After work, he was waiting for me outside. “Come home, meet my wife, Doris.” I traveled on the subway with him to Brooklyn.

  They were opposites. “Doris, meet a radical, a poet, a fine thinker, and a dear friend, Bruce.”

  She was tiny and flat-chested. “Take it easy, Samuel. How do ya do?”

  “This is wonderful coffee, Doris. Doris is a fine cook. Wait, you’ll see, Bruce. And a wonderful little wife. Sitting here like this, I can tell, Bruce, we’ll be good friends. I didn’t know there were any radicals left. Doris’s mother, Hilda, organized the steel workers. She’s still there in Bedford, Massachusetts, in her little house. I laughed at her ideas. But when you talk about them, I begin to understand—”

  “It’s instant coffee, Sam,” Doris said. “Take it easy.”

  “But tell me this, Bruce. What about the Soviet Union? Isn’t it a drab, poverty-stricken place?”

  Samuel sat at my feet with his coffee, looking up at me.

  “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—” I began.

  “Doris, turn the lamp the other way. There. Look at his profile. Did anyone ever tell you that you have a Greek profile, Bruce? Go ahead, I was interrupting.”

  “—is the first land of Socialism. Surrounded on all sides by enemies, mistakes were made. But I’m sick of all this crap! Corrupt? Treehouses! Honeymooners live in treehouses! That’s how corrupt it is. And Stalin was a reader of Tolstoy!—”

  I was inspired by the dimmed lighting, Samuel at my feet, their quiet, rapt attention.

  We talked through the night. “This has been very fine. I can’t tell you, Bruce, how you’re opening our eyes. I have an idea. Sleep here tonight. Tomorrow we don’t go to the capitalist cockroaches’ office. We continue talking. You’ll educate us. We’ll learn. This is fine. Isn’t it, Doris? This is really fine.”

  She stared at Samuel. “Are you crazy?”

  He laughed and grinned. “No, no, I’m serious. I feel Bruce knows. I have that feeling. I don’t think I’m wrong.”

  “He can sleep here, of course, but tomorrow you work.”

  He patted her on the head. “Little Doris. Isn’t she sweet, angry like that? It’s good to express anger, Doris. And to express love too. It’s very good. It’s time we began to let go.”

  I slept on a couch that night. There was no sexual action from the bed. Only later would I discover that after three years of marriage, Doris and Samuel had accomplished an historical feat equal to Lenin’s five-year plan:

  Doris was a virgin.

  Samuel, also.

  IV

  December in Far Rockaway. It was very cold, the wind whipping against our wooden cottage, the sea spray on the windows. The boardwalk was deserted, the steeplechase and the merry-go-rounds closed. Once, long ago, the Jewish workers considered summer weekends in Far Rockaway a big deal; then came the borscht belt; then the Concord and the Riviera and Las Vegas. Our bungalow was where the workers used to come in summer. Clustered among hundreds of other wooden shacks, all of them vacant, we now lived, Samuel, Doris and I, in the two rooms, for thirty dollars a month
. We had an electric heater, blankets, our Marxist texts and pictures of Lenin.

  People in the neighborhood found us. Even though it was 1960, once a week a horse-drawn wagon stopped at our door: the milkman. Cards were left from representatives of Father Coughlin, Frederick’s of Hollywood, the Police Gazette, a committee to drive the British out of Palestine.

  Samuel had quit his job and we lived on unemployment insurance. He was very, very happy.

  At night we huddled around the fireplace, freezing. “Talk, Bruce,” Samuel would say.

  “What about?”

  “Anything is fine. Really, Bruce, you have a way of saying things. Doris agrees with me. Or sing for us. Or read us your poetry or stories. Anyof these things would be fine. Tell us about when you were a little boy and your father took you to the Palace to see all the old-time performers like Belle Baker—”

  “But I already have—”

  “I would like to hear it again. Or about being a writer. What it means to you to be a writer. I would like you to go into that again. The way you would sneak up the stairway to the roof with your first girl friend. Doris likes the way you talk about that. Or your intuitions about Stalin’s innate kindness and decency. Or the venal behavior of the Trotskyites.”

  I talked on into the night, and sometimes I thought that Doris was pressing her thin body against mine in the candlelight. I was between girl friends. I pressed back.

  V

  During the first months, at night I listened for stirrings from their bed across the room. There weren’t any. Doris vomited a lot, and sometimes he told her happy stories about their present situation: adult fairy tales. “Baloney,” was Doris’s response.

  Samuel had a thing about shoes. I watched him hasten to put Doris’s shoes on for her. “Samuel, what the hell are you doing?”