Samuel looked up at her from the floor. “Helping my little Doris.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake.”
“You look so cute when you get angry.”
She kicked him. He did not move away.
VI
Samuel had this certain look, or gleam in his eyes sometimes, that came and went. You knew something was cooking when it was there. On the subway, he would stare at a girl’s shoes and that gleam was there. At first I thought I was imagining it, except that I had to keep tapping his shoulder to tell him we had reached our stop. I was only dimly aware of what he was doing. We never talked about it.
VII
About this look of Samuel’s: “That look,” Doris would say. Samuel would laugh then, devilishly, or giggle. He had that look one day when he said, “Bruce, I feel it is time for us to take a more active part in the struggle.” A picture comes to mind of that period, a picture of Samuel in my scrapbook in a Lincoln Brigade demonstration. The picture turned up in the Daily Worker. A line of demonstrators was grimly walking up and down, glaring at the photographer. Except one, who was grinning and waving and flashing a V sign.
On a momentous day, Samuel and I visited the home of the chairman of the Far Rockaway branch of the Communist Party, Dr. Hyman Bernhardt. Bernhardt, a broad-shouldered, solid man with curly red hair, greeted us at the door with dancing, suspicious eyes. He ushered us in. He stared at my briefcase. “What a lovely briefcase,” he said, and took it from me. We had known him for several months.
His hands roamed over it. “May I look inside? It’s so handsome.”
“Yes.”
His hands roamed through the briefcase as he went on talking to us. “Very nice indeed,” he said, and handed the briefcase back to me.
He introduced us to his wife and daughter, and took us into his private study. “Two cracked ribs,” he said, nodding.
“What?” I said.
“My daughter, Naomi. Two cracked ribs. She never told me. A doctor friend informed us. In the Washington demonstration.”
“Wonderful,” Samuel said.
Dr. Bernhardt looked sharply at him. “Yes … that too. But that is quite right, Sam. Wonderful in what it reveals to us of the determination of the youth.”
On the wall there was a picture of Stalin, and underneath it a quotation from Brecht: “They say that we are evil. But we are the end of evil.”
“You’re a writer, Bruce. My wife and I saw a play by Tennessee Williams the other night. What magic that fella has … what magic. It was … excellent. And the marvelous revolutionary anger of Kowalski. In my youth, I traveled the South, organizing the party. He knows the South. My eighth book, incidentally, on black slavery will be issued by the Red Hammer Press in March. It demonstrates, I think, indubitably, the incredible, scientific superiority of the blacks of that day in their terrible bondage. I don’t know if you are acquainted with my work …”
He paused.
We both said we certainly were.
“… but I have endeavored to pierce the lies and … dare I say … the deliberate, disgusting, and scurrilous myth perpetrated by the white Southern oligarchy that the blacks accepted their situation. The scholarly research that I devoted to this book was not easy. One can do many things with so-called facts. Therefore, in this book, my thesis: that one black slave out of three not only revolted against their slave masters, but called them ‘the man’ … and toward each other …”
He lowered his voice. “Toward each other, these fine, brave men, in celebration of their blackness and in their extraordinary revolutionary awareness, these men … addressed each other … as … comrade.”
He paused, walked across the room and looked out the window. “Comrade … that word of fraternity and brotherhood, one hundred years ago … that is my discovery, and I trust that despite the blackness and cowardice of these days of fear, the book will be passed from house to house, that it will be known and help to ignite the fires that will sweep this country …
“Yes. They are with us … but they are still afraid. Tennessee Williams …”
“Really?” I said.
Bernhardt let it hang in the air. “Faulkner, Hemingway, Frost … they are waiting. I can feel it. Here, in the quiet streets of Far Rockaway, the masses also wait. I go to my office at headquarters daily. I climb the stairs, push open the door. Not a soul comes in. But I remember when those rooms were filled with people. A special room for babies and children. Cookies. Cakes. Games. Those people are waiting. They are angry. But now they will be joined by their black brethren and topple those detestable vermin in the capital.”
“But … isn’t there also some kind of disillusionment because of the … oh … moodiness of Stalin?” I said, quickly adding, “Not that I believe the capitalist press.”
Dr. Bernhardt paced back and forth. “The man say dis, the man say dat. Well, de glory lies with de fool, not de mule. If I lie, let me die. Listen heah: don’t let nobody turn you ’round, heah? Samuel, Bruce? ’Cause on dat great gettin’ up mornin’, see, dat great big bright gettin’ up mornin’, when de trumpets blare, you are gonna be able to bare yo chest, I say bare yo chest, and dee-clare, and dee-clare, you be-lieved, you be-lieved. And you’ll get what’s comin’ to you. Oh yes, you will. ’Cause dem folks are talkin’ about concentration camps run by Stalin. By a Communist! DO YOU BELIEVE THAT? Man? That the Jews burned the Reichstag? WHATEVER they say, WHATEVER, you—will—beelieve that a Communist does NOT HURT PEOPLE. He don’t. HE DON’T! He LOVES people. And that is why, my dear comrades, that picture is on my wall, and will remain in its place. This is one fella who is not going to be moved. This is one fella who does not say one thing on Sunday and sell out to the New York Post on Monday! This is one fella who has written EIGHT books of which he does not repudiate ONE solitary word. ’Cause I stand here now and you see my shadow there on the wall. And when you leave this house you can know my shadow will still be on the wall, and NEXT week, and the week after that. And my library shelves will remain intact:Marx-Lenin-Stalin. Oh yes. There will not be a mysterious disappearance one night, and you say, ‘Where Stalin?’ and I say, ‘Who he? Never hearda that mother!’ No sir, no … my baby daughter’s cracked ribs …” He chuckled … “She believed something that I conveyed to her.”
He was silent for a moment. “The isolation has not been easy. I say to my wife: ‘Where are the people?’ When someone comes up to my office, I assume he is a spy. And he is. He is too eager to say yes. He fawns. He is a good eater. I watch him. Steak for lunch. What does he have for dinner? It’s a little disgusting to watch him munching away.”
There were tears in his eyes. “Who will carry on?” He looked away. Samuel promptly said, “Look, we give you our word.”
I tried to shake my head.
We departed with gifts of books by Dimitrov, Hikmet, Funaroff, Ernst Toller, and Stalin. As we walked through the streets, Samuel talked about the strength and affirmation he was finding in Marxism. I had thought Bernhardt’s daughter was very pretty, and felt sorry about her ribs. I wondered if it was worth it. But if I could get a date with her, I wouldn’t say so.
VIII
Samuel had a legendary friend, Emory, from college days. Emory had worked nights as a hotel clerk at a shady hotel in Boston; he was working on a novel; he was a flamboyant figure, “open to life,” as Samuel put it, although with “sexual confusions.” When I tried to pin Samuel down on Emory’s qualities, I found out that Emory had the most uncanny ability to capture, through mimicry and satire, the essence of the Jewish mother, and particularly his Jewish mother.
One wintry morning, there was a knock at our bungalow door. “Yoo-hoo, Mr. Weintraub!” a high voice called. Samuel jumped and rubbed his hands, flung open the door.
A fat, bespectacled, blinking Emory stood at the door, scarf flung flamboyantly around his neck. He said, in no particular order:
“Children are starving in India …”
“I’m only your mother, may your nose cl
ot …”
“What are you an Einstein, with all that hair? …”
“Eat your heart out, you little schnorrer …”
“Go to Ginsberg the robber, see if I care …”
Samuel sank to the floor in laughter. Emory sat down at the table, not pausing to take off his coat, his face red, his chest heaving: “Essen, my little kinder … a bissel schmaltz, if you please … stay away from the shvartze, they stink … do I know goyim? You can smell liquor from a mile away …
“So it’s your birthday. What are you gonna give me …?”
I noticed that Emory wasn’t laughing at all. His voice got more strident; he was breathless. Samuel pounded Doris on the back, and Doris said “Ouch!” He looked at me, laughing and pointing at Emory, and noticed that I wasn’t laughing. I was a little jealous of all the attention Emory was getting, and didn’t really think he was that funny. I hoped, though, that Samuel wouldn’t take out the red taillight that he had recently purchased. In the evenings, when I talked to Samuel and Doris before the fireside, Samuel would turn off all the lights and shine the red light gently on me.
Emory was standing up now, pounding the table and screaming:
“Eat, eat, you little pisser, with a face that the neighborhood shakes their heads at … don’t pull your putz, you’ll get a craziness in the head …”
“Ha ha ha,” laughed Samuel.
IX
It was the absence of sex that made you aware of sex with Samuel. It was the total absence of sex. He talked about his brother Moshe’s crush on a girl: “You should see Moshe, Doris. He has this very deep feeling about Judith, the daughter of the furrier. He said that he would like to do certain things with her, nuzzle her … things like that. I saw him pat her on the head Thursday morning. I really think … he feels affectionately toward her. I have a hunch he’s already kissed her … did you do things like that when you were his age, Bruce?”
“What things … nuzzle girls?”
“You know … display affection?”
“Fuck them?”
Samuel blushed. “You know. Drift toward each other … share things … foibles, tales, stories … like in a fairyland, a dreamlike sensation …”
“He said fuck them, Samuel,” Doris said.
Samuel changed the subject, but later on in the evening he came into my room and said he wanted to shake my hand in thanks for my “incredible honesty and spontaneity.”
“You are teaching us things, Bruce, and we are learning.”
“What am I teaching you?”
He shook his head. “—you extend yourself so that we may imbibe, and that we do. It is not wasted on us, believe me, Bruce. We are profiting from your experience, and your suffering—”
“I—”
“You are wiser than your years, Bruce. Because of you, I’m changing. I’m becoming revolutionary in every way. I feel my manhood pulsing and surging with every revolutionary step I take.” He paused. “I honestly feel, Bruce, that one day soon, I shall come to a climactic stand for the revolution.”
X
It was during those winter days of unemployment insurance and welfare checks, of picket lines and walks along the deserted boardwalk, that I made a suggestion that Samuel felt changed his life. I suggested that he see a psychiatrist.
It is hard to explain why this suggestion meant so much to Samuel. After all, I had seen dozens of them besides Dr. Jackson: all sizes, shapes, races and creeds. I knew their styles and their tastes and how to talk to them. In fact, I was running out of available ones. I would look new ones up in the Yellow Pages and imagine what they were like from the sound of their names. My father paid the bills. I found it hard to remember who said what: I remember that for some reason one of them had a bad back and was lying down on the couch while I was sitting on a chair. He said that what he really liked to do was sculpt and that his greatest pleasure came from banging away in the basement. The clearest idea I got of why he was a psychiatrist was that it allowed him to social climb. Since those days he has written a book on the joys of marijuana and is a desired guest at all parties.
I mention all this to indicate that my suggestion to Samuel was not the result of some deep sense of compassion for him, but merely what every person in therapy says to every person out of therapy: why are you not in therapy?
It was, however, a great moment in Samuel’s life. The gates opened. It was the beginning, too, of a friendship, and even of a business partnership: for Samuel eventually invested in a drainage corporation with Shmuel Goss, his psychiatrist. This corporation eventually went bankrupt, but that came later, long after Samuel had been treated successfully and had gone into the business world.
Shmuel Goss, like many psychiatrists, had a following: his patients. They thought he was extraordinary. Samuel added him to his gallery of greats, beside myself, Emory, the great satirist, and Hilda, “the Communist Rebel Lady” (this was a paraphrase of a description of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn as the “Rebel Girl” of the I.W.W.and bestowed on Hilda, who in fact was Doris’s mother. Hilda owned her own house in Bedford, Massachusetts, had once been expelled by the Communist Party, and made wonderful potato kugel).
Goss had a big body, a booming voice, the usual attributes. But it was new to Samuel. Goss was casual; he let patients meet each other and even overhear bits of each other’s conversation and gossip. He let it all hang out.
This was during the time that I moved out of the cottage. I had found a girl. Samuel told me, though, that Goss believed that “Everything was healthy in sex.” Shortly afterwards, Samuel somehow conveyed to me, amidst Victorian blushes and stammering, that his marriage was consummated.
It was during this time, too, that one night I stayed over with Samuel and Doris at the cottage. By some chance I had gone to the bathroom and when I came out, their bedroom door was open and a red light was shining over the bed. I saw Doris in knee-high black boots. Samuel was lying nude on the floor, and she was stomping on him.
XI
During the next ten years of my own anguished life, as I have said, Samuel has kept in touch with me, reminding me of what a good friend I had been to him.
I recently received another letter from Samuel.
Dear Bruce,
It sounds like it has been a difficult year for both of us, although we have both had our share of satisfying experiences as well.
All my medical examinations have proved completely negative and I really have gotten to the point where I don’t consider myself in jeopardy. I appreciated your concern.
I have in recent days been thinking of our friendship and I am strongly reminded of how much you helped me at a very critical time in my life.
Take care.
Sam.
I’ll conclude with a card received from Samuel some time back, on the birth of his child. It was a quote from Dylan Thomas:
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder; it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day …
I do not want to give the impression that my friend Samuel was always tone-deaf.
3
SELECTIVE SERVICE
Even when I ran into Grinaldi, my psychiatrist, seated on a bench with a pigeon on his head in Washington Square Park, or eating dinner in Bickford’s among the old men who lived in single rooms, he had an air of calm and certainty that reassured me. I saw him as a rebel. His phone number was unlisted and he was afraid of the authorities. He had no license to practice, but none was technically required. His psychiatric magazines were filched for him by friends and patients from libraries and medical waiting rooms. His life was a thin thread, but he carried it off.
I was almost eighteen. The draft board was breathing down my neck.
“When I came to this country from Sicily,” he told me during a session, “I ate out of garbage cans to keep alive. When
the Communists and the Jews tell me that man is basically good, I have to laugh—”
“The Jews,” I said. “Did you say the Jews?” My heart was pounding. Grinaldi’s face flushed and then he laughed. “Yes, the Jews.”
“I’m Jewish—I mean I’m not in a religious sense, I’m a pacifist and a socialist—but … I’m Jewish.”
“Yes, I know, Bruce.”
“You’re not anti-Semitic?”
Grinaldi laughed and shook his head. “Jesus,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“Take it easy, Bruce. A great many Communists are Jews. Everybody knows that. I’m stating facts. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg—”
“Are you in favor of capital punishment?” I stood up.
“God damn it,” he shouted, “will you get off your high horse, please? Just sit down and listen for a minute. You, Bruce, do not hear, do not see. You, Bruce Orav, argue and negate. You have the answers to everyone else’s problems but not your own. In short, Professor, A for intellect, zero for belief.”
“True, but you’re changing the subject—”
“I am not changing the subject. You said you were a pacifist—”
“Yes, I am—”
“Sure, and I’m a horse’s ass. What are you going to do about the army?”
“I’m not going!” I screamed. “Not in a thousand years!”
He popped two ice cubes into his scotch and downed it. He stared at me with a smile. “You don’t want to be a soldier?”
“NO!”
He smiled. “I think you’d make an excellent soldier. In fact, you’d make a terrific commanding officer.” He spoke slowly, and he leered at me.
“What—what the hell are you talking about? I’m non-violent—”
“You’re what?”
The One-Star Jew: Stories Page 3
