“The PW—Vince Piker is his name—he won’t bother you much. He’s harmless. Meanwhile you can keep your C.P. connections, nobody will know the difference.”
Collins stood at the door, umbrella in his hand. “Gotta run, Bruce.”
I decided to deliver my dollar money order in person at the offices of Proletarian World, the day after I made the telephone call in which I carefully spelled out my name.
The Piker family lived in a run-down apartment on Ninth Avenue and Twentieth Street. When I rang the bell, Vince Piker called down, “Is that Bruce Orav down there?”
“How did you know?”
He came bounding down the steps and put his arms around me. A red-faced, friendly man, he seemed saturated with alcohol.
“How did I know?” he said. “We’ve been talking about you all day! Come on up and meet the other comrades.”
His wife and daughter were seated in the living room. The daughter was cute. “The way you called up, unafraid, ready to step forward in the name of the revolution, so positive sounding. And now that I see you, what a hot little Red you are! This is my wife, Sophie Cannelone, and my daughter, Iris Callaghan. She heads the youth and women’s cavalry division.”
The phone rang. When he returned, Vince said, “Guess who that was? Eugene Collins, and he was calling about you! I told him you were here, and he was delighted. Told me about your civil defense trial—excellent class action. You are a hot little Red, aren’t you?”
I handed Vince the money order, and he was moved. He showed it to his wife and daughter. “Well, comrade, I don’t like to have to take money from you. I know what the struggle is like out there, trying to earn a day’s bread in the factory while the bosses rob you blind.”
I left as soon as I could. They all stood in the doorway looking at me fondly, Vince staggering a little. I continued to send them dollar money orders with my name in large letters and they mailed me their newspaper and party literature. But to my surprise, they did not call me or bother me in the slightest after my visit that day.
I thought about the draft board constantly. When I neared the army recruiting booth on Times Square, I crossed the street so that they could not see me through the window. They would spot me, see the hate snarling out of my eyes, and propel me through the door and ship me to Korea. They would ask to see my 1-A draft card. At night I would walk up to the booths; they fascinated me. I wanted to throw a rock through the window. But even at night, they were dangerous; what if a silent camera was taking pictures of me, or what if a piece of paper with my name on it fell out of my pocket? I spit into the street at the thought. They would find the piece of paper, they would trace me, knock on my door, see my hate, and kill me. I wasn’t sure what frightened me more: combat, or having to live in army barracks, taking showers in the nude, wet towels snapped at my ass by crackers, hiding all traces of myself. I was even self-conscious if I walked into an Irish bar, and would hide my book under a Daily News or in a paper bag, the way Grinaldi had taught me. Of course they would kill me in the barracks—a dark Jew Communist with tortured eyes—I’d go first, a pistol shot in the night or the day—an accident, jovially agreed to by all races and creeds.
The draft board summoned me to a hearing on my petition for draft exemption as a conscientious objector. I read the letter over and over again; I looked up the signature on the letter in the phone book—LaRue—and wondered if I should disguise my voice and wake him up at 3 A.M. every night.
The hearing wasn’t at Whitehall Street, but in the forties in Hell’s Kitchen. I stopped off at the porno shops on the way. Death made me horny. I looked at the women in leather with whips and my prick hit the wall. I carried Gandhi’s book on non-violence, my statement of conscientious objection: “I Choose Life,” and a saintly expression on my face. But there was time to kill, and there were porno shops on every block in the area. I was confused; I looked away from the ghost faces of the shop proprietors who stood up on raised platforms staring at me.
Suddenly I rushed out of a shop. There was a bunch of Communist material I had forgotten about in my wallet and my pockets—evidence I hadn’t had time to burn in the toilet. I had stayed up all night burning Daily Workers and National Guardians and correspondence and books in the sink, the flames jumping toward me, then mashing the ashes and thrusting them into the toilet. There was no end to it. I ran out of matches by dawn and was still carrying three volumes of Stalin’s collected writings, a recording of Paul Robeson at Peekskill, a picture book of Red Army maneuvers published in Moscow. How could I have forgotten? The stuff was in my arms. There was only an hour left before the hearing. Looking casual, I stepped off curbs and dropped the stuff into the grates of sewers. The Stalin books were too thick. I retrieved them, the garbage and sewer water falling from them. In a shop hallway, I tried to tear them apart—the red leather binding wouldn’t budge. I cursed and just left them in the hallway and ran off.
I disposed of all the material. Ten minutes to the hearing. I hurried through the streets. I was confused. I tried to get it all together, to remember who I was as I entered the stone building of the Selective Service. Maybe I could be a Rabbi bop bop bop? Or a priest? Or a Hare Krishna Krishna? Or a superb tailor? Gandhi’s book was prominently displayed in my hand.
Six gray heads looked up from a conference table as I entered. Red faces, red eyes, gray suits. I smiled, beatifically. I folded my hands.
“What would you do if a madman with a knife attacked your mother?” they asked.
“Nothing whatever,” I replied easily with a smile.
The man who was asking the questions ruffled some papers.
“How often do you go to the Community Church?”
“What?” A hook there maybe, definitely; they knew, they knew, the Rosenberg rallies were held there.
They repeated the question.
“Never,” I said. How would they know I had been to the rallies—but they must know, but I wasn’t sure if in fact they were held there.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Have you read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness At Noon?”
“Yes I have. It’s a fine book.” A pacific answer.
“Yet you claim you don’t believe in resistance to totalitarianism?”
I paused. The bastard had a point, and not the kind I had expected.
“If you’ll read my statement—”
“We’ve read it.”
“I don’t believe that a violent answer to violence will ever bring peace, no. We have to learn to love all our fellow men, and answer hate with love.”
“And you never go to the Community Church?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Not that you recall. Do you believe in God?”
“In a sense, yes.”
They looked up. “What is your religion?”
“I was born Jewish.”
“What are you now?”
“I’m a member of the Wider Quaker Fellowship.”
“Do you believe in God?”
This was the crucial question, I knew. The law stipulated that no one was exempt who replied no.
“In a sense.”
“Do you believe in a Divine Being?”
I hesitated. The sweat was falling from me. “No.”
They looked at each other. “You realize your claim isn’t recognized then?”
“Send me to jail then. I won’t lie, and I won’t fight. Never. I’m a pacifist with all my heart. I believe in God as a force, an ethical, spiritual force for good. But I don’t see a face up there.”
A fellow with a sharp face on the left talked for the first time. “You mention in your statement the influence of a man named Silverzweig.”
I felt my fist tighten. “Yes.”
“Who was he?”
“He was my teacher.”
“What kind of teacher?”
“English teacher.”
“Did you ever take long walks with him?”
“No,
I—why do you ask?”
I looked up, saw the sneer and realized.
“You never took walks with him?”
“I never took walks with him. No.” I felt my face blush with shame for them. I felt cold. Their faces receded. I was ashamed of having given them my statement.
I was a liar maybe. Maybe I was a goddamned liar, since I hated them so much. But no lie of mine, I thought, was as ugly as their coal and iron selves.
They dismissed me.
4
THE JEWISH BUDDHA
My psychiatrist is crazy. I sit silently, nodding my head, while Dr. Wechsler talks about my teaching “The American Jewish Novel.” I could start, he suggests, with synagogues—why not call my local rabbi? I say mildly it would be difficult—the “Jewish” part of my novel is mainly references to food and neighborhoods. He nods, smiling, goes on—he knows what he is talking about. He is a handsome man—curly hair, a large, ingratiating face dark and perspiring—a square, broad body—and he is a kind man. For I am sitting in his office for a private consultation at no fee.
Outside, nervously planted on the couch, is my father. We are guests of the Wechslers for Passover. Passover! Soon we will go to services at Harvard. Surely this is a joke, a private whim; or is Wechsler cracking up? I have dreams of him announcing one day that he is giving up psychiatry, that he is becoming a rabbi and emigrating to Israel. Good-bye and good luck. But are these delusions? He has been to Israel two years ago, last year, he’s going again this year. He is there more than he is here in Boston. My thoughts are interrupted—I hear Wechsler speaking. “And then we were planning to move to Israel, but there are doubts, the hardships …” This is no dream. My eyes roam around the room: Judaica everywhere. When you’re crazy, the whole world is Jewish. Then I listen again to what he is saying: “… when you wrote me that you were at the writers’ colony, of course I was delighted and wanted to see you before you returned to Vancouver. So you’re going back to the frontier—” Oh my God, now he’s unwinding a map of Vancouver, his curious eyes scanning beautiful British Columbia. What is he so happy about? The frontier—it’s a city of rain and gray, you could go crazy there—put away that map, you optimistic … his lips are moving: “You’re not happy there?”
“No. The rain doesn’t end. Ever. And I have no money. I stand in the rain waiting for buses that creep up to the university—” I go on.
He nods. He understands, but keeps peeking at the map. What can you do with this man?
“Now that you are no longer in therapy with me, Bruce, of course I was hoping that our friendship would continue—” I listen closely, nodding at every word. It is what I have been waiting to hear for so long. For the silences between us while in therapy could have meant anything—but long before now he had stopped charging me—and when I called him after moving away from Boston, he was always there, ready to see me …
Although I am cracking and crumbling from loneliness and despair, I am listening now to every word. At the colony, I wrote well—crumbling, I wrote well about crumbling people.
He stands up, his huge frame as always curiously graceful, smiles, shakes hands: friends. Friendship in the twentieth century. And waves me into the living room.
In the living room teacups, honey cake, the Talmud, my father on the edge of his seat, Wechsler’s wife … and now entering the room, his daughter. “I have heard so much about you!” she says. “You know,” he says to her, “of Bruce’s writing fellowship—”
“Have a lot of rain here, Doctor?” my father says, smiling, cupping his ear and nodding in response to the answer that will come from Wechsler. But Wechsler doesn’t reply, goes on with the conversation with me and his daughter.
We plan to meet that evening for dinner and Passover services …
Back at the motel (across the street from Wechsler’s home) my father: “He didn’t even speak to me! Not once!”
“It isn’t true,” I say.
“All he did was talk to you. His wife was nice—she at least talked to me—but would he even answer my questions? That isn’t nice.”
I take two Libriums secretly in the bathroom. “Shut up!” I scream. “Can’t you see I’m cracking?” Without thinking, I bang my open hand against the wall.
My father quiets down and looks at me. “You go tonight. He doesn’t want me—”
I pull myself together, for with my father there is little choice.
“He does—” I comfort him.
“No—no—don’t mind me.” My father looks ahead, crimson. “Anyway, I hate services. Ever since my father made me sit through them when I was a boy. You go, Bruce. And calm down, kid.” He pats me on the shoulder. “Please.”
At Wechsler’s house, we prepare to leave for the ceremony at Harvard Hillel. Oh my God—Wechsler is fiddling with his prayer shawls. Trying to drape them neatly around his shoulders, getting them mixed up. I can’t believe it’s happening—I look away—I look back, he’s still fiddling.
His daughter doesn’t want to go. Neither does the Israeli friend who has dropped by: “I’m a hedonist,” says the friend.
“No more than I am,” Wechsler replies, laughing. I perk up my ears. I have never heard him speak in this way. What does he mean he’s a hedonist—he eats a lot of plums?
But then we are in the car: Wechsler, his wife, and me. In the synagogue, he still fiddles with the shawls. The services are good—simple, and sincere. I tell him on the way out they are the best I have ever been to.
“Yes. I’ve stopped going to the regular synagogues because they’re so mechanical,” he says in the car as we drive through Cambridge.
I am silent as we drive back home. We arrange to meet again the next day. After honey cake and tea, I say good night and walk across the street to the motel.
The summer has not just been the writers’ colony … graduate school in Vancouver ended for the season in May. May, June, and July in Manhattan. August and September, the colony. Sleeping on my father’s sofa in the heat. Trudging Manhattan in my one gray woolen suit, sweat pouring down my face, looking for work. I am thirty years old. My father keeps handing me nickels, quarters, when we meet at the Automat at six o’clock for dinner. First, a job at the NAACP as a typist: hiding when a writer I know comes into the office. For we have published in the same places. If he were working for the NAACP, he would know (I think) it was temporary. But when I work for the NAACP as a typist, I AM a typist. My father introduces me to his friends as the typist, although, he says, I will soon be going to writers’ “camp.”
I rise higher in June: assistant box-office cashier at a theater. The full-time cashier, Bill Bird, is an out-of-work director in his fifties who keeps combing his hair in the reflection in the box office window. His own theater has burned down. He keeps talking about his “stepson.” He is not kidding; he has adopted a juicy adolescent. “I don’t have the certainty of judgment I used to have,” he tells me. He shows me scripts he likes. He is right; he has no judgment at all. I tell him my opinion; he never forgives me. He is, as people go, malevolent.
The high point of his summer comes when a famous aging playwright takes an ad in the Times to complain about the critical reception of a play he keeps rewriting; he sounds suicidal in the ad. Bird takes a pencil and paper, sits down in a corner, and carefully composes a letter to the playwright. The critics are nuts, he says; the play is beautiful; he, as a director, should know. Then he comes to the point: he is at the playwright’s disposal for directing his plays. He shows me the letter: it is obvious and hungry, but I don’t say so. I hate him for writing it, for adopting the boy he keeps calling over the phone and who, he eagerly announces to everyone, is cracking up.
Suddenly there is a crisis: a phone call. “Well, that’s just too bad. I’ve had her in my house and she has peed all over the tiles.” When he hangs up, he tells me that his mother is in a nursing home and the social worker wants him to take her back to his apartment. “The woman is helpless; I will not wash up her mess.”
>
The stepson runs aways from his apartment; the mother, somehow, has been moved in. He is combing his hair furiously. The city is hot; I am cracking; he is cracking; the playwright, in his air-conditioned suite, composes suicidal notes and pays to have them published in the Times.
One day, when someone inquires who I am, Bird says of me, “He is nothing.”
If I do not keep the job, I will have to accept my father’s quarters.
I am, as always, seeing a psychiatrist, at fifty dollars a week, paid for by my father. He is one of a line I have seen since leaving college in Boston and Wechsler six years before. In writing about him now, I cannot recall his name, although I can remember the names of janitors, teachers, and rabbis who have crossed my path twenty years ago. I recall his grimace.
Every day my father calls me at the theater.
I visit him in his office. He is part of what is called the “bullpen,” those insurance salesmen who do not produce enough business and do not have private offices. These men have known each other for twenty years. When one of them goes on a plane trip, the others hand him quarters and ask him to take out insurance policies on the flight. They handle each other’s suits in appraisal. When I come into the bullpen, they look me over. I know they have been informed of the psychiatrist and nothing else. My father likes to give the impression that he is carrying a heavy load.
I published a poem about my father in a well-known left-wing magazine six years ago. It was perfect for that magazine: ideological invective. It began: “My father sells insurance for death to people who have never lived …” My father carries that poem around in his wallet, and whips it out to show to everyone he meets.
The men in the bullpen gather around me, their eyes sharp. Those in their eighties are the cadaverous ones; they don’t have long to go, and they long for slices of flesh. One of them addresses me, but not by name. “How old are you by now, anyway?”
The One-Star Jew: Stories Page 5
