“Thirty.”
“That’s a nice suit you got on—summery.”
I feel the sweat pouring down me. His eyes are triumphant.
“You look good,” he continues. “Where you living— the Village?”
My father sweeps over and says, “Don’t be nasty, Nat.”
“Me nasty?”
They stand around me, waiting to take turns. My father leads me out.
When I leave him, I go to the library. On the subway, a man leans closer and closer to me and coughs in my face. “What are all those books for?” he says. “Who are you? You’re not gonna tell me you really read those books? WHO ARE YOU?”
“Beat it, Pop,” I say carefully.
“Pop? POP? I’m a lawyer of the city of New York, and you call me Pop? Who are you anyway? You show-off.”
The train comes to my stop, and I hurry off.
“Pop? POP? Give me your name, you phony. You nobody. With a pile of books you’ll never read. Who do you think you are?” He shouts at me, jabbing at my shoulder as we walk along the subway path beside the tracks. I stop. Another train is coming, and I want to push him off into the tracks. I start to run. “You better run. You better run. Ha ha! That’s right, RUN. RUN.”
I tumble up the steps into the heat of Cooper Square.
I have moved into a sublet apartment on Saint Mark’s Place. The stout old Russian woman next door smiles at me and locks her husband out. I hear his cries at all hours. I walk up and down Saint Mark’s among the freaks and heads, and I panic in the crowds and the heat.
A few blocks away is the girl, and the apartment we lived in together for five years. Six flights up, the three rooms, the barred windows. It was a beginning. Thinking about it on Saint Mark’s Place, I weep, and write about the girl. I sit in the charcoaled broiling Tompkins Square Park where there is no refuge from the sun, and try to get with the relaxed freaks around me—no use, I am too old, or too shy, or too critical, and my scrutinizing eye makes them angry. The rock band blasts away—people are swaying in the heat. I find the music uninteresting and too loud.
I go back to the Saint Mark’s apartment, furious and lonely, and write more about the girl.
An old girl friend discovers me. She is married to a skinny Latin businessman, and lives on Park Avenue with their baby. She finds me at the theater, and is amazed at my situation. “You’re still in SCHOOL?” she says. “In VANCOUVER?” She goes on like that, and I know better, but I agree to see them because they are the first people to have invited me.
The Latin mixes cocktails for us on the breezy balcony. She says, “So you’re going to CAMP in August?”
I bristle. “Writers’ colony.”
“Writers’ camp?”
When we’re alone, she says, “It must take a lot of courage to do what you are doing.”
When I am alone with her husband, he says, “At thirty, some of us take a nine-to-five job. Others are artists, and take a chance.”
On the balcony, we discuss Fellini, et al. She whispers that her husband plans on more babies, but that this one is the last.
She has a brilliant idea. She is bored. Why not have a party of all MY friends at THEIR country house? She would so like to meet interesting, creative people.
Near the end of the month, we set the date. I round up a few friends, or near friends. It doesn’t mean much to me, but as the day gets nearer, it means more.
The morning of the day comes, and no message from them. I call, and there is no answer. I reach them at five. They have forgotten.
I inform my friends.
She calls me the next day. Her husband, she says, is furious at her. It was she who was supposed to remember. She begs me to come out for the weekend.
I hang up, and July ends.
The next evening at Wechsler’s, he has another notion. His daughter, Tammy (how can a growing girl live up to a sweet name like that—Tammy Hitler, paging Tammy Hitler), has written a piece of creative writing about Israel. Impressionistic, sort of. Wechsler calls Tammy: “Go get your creative writing, Tammy.” She brings back fifty-two pages. I know what it will be like: oranges grow and flowers bloom in the once barren desert. Wechsler looks at his only daughter lovingly. Her favorite novel, he says, is Howard Fast’s My Glorious Brothers. Tammy sits down beside me. She is ten years younger than I am, very sweet, and fresh. Wechsler never takes his eyes off her. Wechsler stands up, crosses the room, and joins us on the couch.
“Will you take Tammy’s manuscript with you to Vancouver and let her know what you think of it?” he says.
I think of Vancouver, and all I can remember is rain, and my one-room apartment with a bridge table, one chair whose wooden legs keep failing off and I keep screwing back, a lamp, a television set, a bookcase, a bed, and dust. Yes, I say, I will take his daughter’s manuscript back with me. Wechsler leaves us.
I am talking with Tammy, but hear rumbling noises and look up.
“We were in Seattle in June, 1965,” his wife is saying.
“July,” says Wechsler.
“June. I remember distinctly.”
“Well, we can verify it with my correspondence—”
“June. June.”
“Oh, mommy and daddy are getting into one of those again,” Tammy says to me.
I look up, fascinated. Wechsler seems unperturbed. “The Jewish Buddha,” a patient in group once called him. Wechsler had smiled.
I suddenly think that I have never discussed sex with Wechsler. There are certain subjects you cannot bring up with certain kinds of people, even if they are psychiatrists. Oh, I mentioned it to him on occasion, but the atmosphere became charged, or so I thought. But then, why did he never bring up the subject himself.I remember standing in the book stall at Harvard Square, looking at a copy of High Heels magazine. There was a story, “Lucky Merv,” about Mervin Spott, whose dream wife kept in her closet high heels that were all the colors of the rainbow. How ridiculous, I thought, but why was my pulse pounding? I never told Wechsler.
The rest of the evening is spent on Jewish subjects: arguments about the Torah, Philip Roth as a Jewish anti-Semite. Wechsler has another suggestion for me: that I teach the Jewish novel in Israel. He gives me a pencil and paper. I am writing down names and addresses of professors in Israel, and stacking pages of notes on top of Tammy’s creative writing. I scribble industriously, look serious, and sip Manischewitz wine which makes me high with the Librium I had taken before coming.
I ask about members of the group I was in six years before. I hear my voice uneven with feeling, and I am surprised. I look at Wechsler, and I see that he is not. There is the same gentle smile that a long time ago I thought was mocking me.
The group had lasted only six months for me, as Wechsler was going to Israel for a year. The patients were in a panic; some were booking flights to be near him. I had only been seeing him for a year, and I could not understand why they were so upset.
An old woman in the group had stood up and said, “Fear! Fear! When I think back now, I know that my entire life was motivated by fear. Why? Why? Why?” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “And I am not free of it to this day! Not to this very day!” Her arms moved up and down fiercely.
I had listened to her words, and thought it could have been said better.
The old woman had not gone to Israel, but several members of the group had.
Within two months, I had arrived in Jerusalem.
At the kibbutz where I worked, Wechsler had come to see me with his wife and a tubby, younger Tammy. “You came a long way to see me, Bruce,” he had said.
From the time of the decision to go to Israel, on the flight, in the months before that day, I had never thought of that.
In the living room, Wechsler is saying good night to me and inviting me to a private session the following morning. I say good-bye to his wife, and to Tammy. I gather up Tammy’s opus and the useless pages of notes about teaching in Israel. Wechsler closes the massive door behind me.
My
father is waiting up for me at the motel. He is lying on his back on the bed, watching television. He tells me to shut it off.
“I saw Henry Gold tonight, Bruce. What a character. When we were kids, I was so poor I didn’t even have marbles. Henry did. I would go over to his house and we would play. But before he would let me leave, he would count the marbles.”
A few months ago, my father mailed me a baby picture of myself, bundled up in a carriage on an apartment rooftop. “I have cherished this for twenty-nine years,” he wrote me.
Now my father comes, as always, to his central thesis. “I’m so lucky, Bruce. You think I’m miserable. But I’m not. You are. I have my apartment. In the afternoon I go to the stockbroker’s. In the evening I eat in the cafeteria. What more can I ask? I have good, loyal friends. You don’t have any friends, do you?”
“God damn it,” I shout at him. “I don’t want to hear this shit. Do you know I could recite word for word what you’re going to say, I’ve heard it so many times? Don’t keep telling me about how your lonely, miserable life is so great. It makes me so sad I want to cry.”
My father is straining forward in the bed, his eyes bulging.
“How can you say that to your own father? You’re the miserable one—”
“No! No!” I pound the wall with my fist. “Don’t give me that. I won’t have it, no more, you bastard—you’re the most frightened man I’ve ever known, and you’re my own father.”
When I stop, I look over and see that my father is weeping. “You cruel thing—”
He turns over on his side. He is wearing only his underwear. I walk over and touch his arm. He flinches and moves away. He is red in the face.
“Dad,” I say softly, “can’t you see that I am drowning?”
For the first time, I really tell him about the girl.
I read him a story I wrote about him as a young man courting my mother, marrying her, and about my boyhood. In the story, I imagine my grandfather, a man who wanted to be in vaudeville, ingratiating himself with my father by dancing on a table top.
My father listens to the story and says, “I was never as shy as you’re making me out to be.”
Then I read him the part about when he would sing me his favorite songs: “I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad),” “Buckle Down Winsockie,” and the song he once sang to my mother on a rare Sunday morning when the three of us were laughing in bed together: “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”
My father does not sing this night.
But we are friends again.
He jumps up in bed. “Bruce, remember Ben Alexander? I told him I was seeing you and he gave me a message for you. He said he doesn’t do it no more!”
“He said that? Again?” My father and I kicked our legs.
Ben Alexander, a fellow agent, was a man with a moustache, a dirty white shirt and tie. When I was seven or eight, we ran into him. He was stuffing an insurance circular into a baby carriage.
“Oh my God!” my father had said that day. “Do you see what he’s doing, Bruce?”
I absorbed my father’s attitude, and I barely spoke to Alexander. He never forgot it. For years after, he ashamedly gave my father a message for me: “PLEASE TELL BRUCE I DON’T DO IT NO MORE! NO MORE!”
My father always relayed the message to me.
Every time we ran into Ben Alexander on the street, he approached my father, shirt sticking out of his pants, and backed away when he saw me. Moving backwards, he said to my father in front of me: “Tell him I don’t do it no more!” Not looking at me, he turned and hurried away.
Then my father tells me about the agent who slept on the floor in the office and bought a piano for his alcoholic girl friend who beat him.
And about Melvin: “Bruce, tell me what you think about this. I went up to Grossinger’s and I was dating this lovely girl. I never liked her very much. Sheila. She had a trick knee. Then I saw on the dance floor Melvin, who I hadn’t seen in five years. His wife just had her left breast removed. Frankly I never much liked Melvin, Bruce. But I felt sorry for him. ‘Sheila,’ I said, ‘do me a favor. Dance with Melvin. His wife just had her left breast removed.’ So Sheila danced with him. Suddenly I look up and they’re dancing very close, and Melvin is kissing Sheila’s fingers. And she’s letting him! I couldn’t believe it. This goes on for half an hour. Then she has the nerve to come back to my table. I refused to talk with her. ‘What’s the matter?’ she says. ‘I felt sorry for Melvin,’ I said, ‘because his wife had her left breast removed. But I didn’t expect you to let him kiss your fingers like that.’
“So I never went out with her again. Can you imagine such a thing?”
I ask my father, “But how did you know that Melvin’s wife had her left breast removed?”
“THAT’S NOT THE POINT!” my father bristles.
Before we go to bed at 3 A.M., my father tells me never to hate. “I don’t hate anybody,” he says, “not even Melvin,” and turns over.
A few minutes later, he says, “Wechsler is a nice man, isn’t he, Bruce? Do you remember when his father died, and we read in the paper that he had been an insurance salesman?”
“I remember,” I say, and I suddenly do.
In the morning my father presses two expensive ties on me to give to Wechsler as a gift. I refuse. My father is furious. I leave him at the motel to visit Wechsler for the last time. I am deliberately early, and approach his house by a wide radius, circling around it. I pass through the spacious tree-lined streets, and walk down to the park where children play. Wechsler’s strength is so great that it extends to the streets around him: they have a serenity for me that I can never find in my own life. The houses are not the brownstones of the Boston I love; they are the solid, well-fed edifices of Brookline. Yet I feel that if Wechsler lives here, it must be all right.
And I keep trying to remember that I am here this morning not as a patient, but as a friend. I approach the house, and take a side glance at the screen door near the garage, the patients’ entrance, and stride up to the wide wooden door in front.
He waves me in, and we go into his office. He leans back in the swivel chair, looks at me, and smiles. He starts in on Israel, and I want to scream. He is asking me a question: would I like to listen to a news broadcast from Israel on the short wave radio?
He checks the time on his watch and says it is 6 P.M. in Israel.
We listen together to fifteen minutes of news. Produce prices in Haifa are holding steady. He nods, satisfied. I too nod.
He flicks off the radio. He watches me. All the time I have known him I have kept some secrets from him so as not to disappoint him. And yet I know that he has caught them all. I sift through all the subjects I want to pour out to him, eliminating the things I feel will trouble him. “Thomas Mann—” I begin. His eyes light up. What I forget is that this is a subject that makes me happy as well. And that he knows this.
I cannot hold back any longer. “Do you remember Sarah?” I ask him.
“Who?”
“Sarah. In group. I can’t forget the words she said to us one day. She said: ‘Fear! Fear! When I think back now, I know that my entire life was motivated by fear. Why? Why? Why?’” I clench my fists as I speak.
“Yes, I remember. It must have had a strong impact on you.”
“Not at the time. At least I didn’t think so. I didn’t understand it then, but now I know what it means. When do we get rid of it?”
He was silent for several moments, looking at me.
“Well, it varies. In your case, it has been receding for some time.”
“You think this is a temporary setback because of the girl?”
“Yes I do,” he says.
“So do I.” I take a deep breath.
I pause. There is one expression of thanks I can give him that I know will mean something, and I can give it: “You know, going to Israel changed my life. As I have become more of a writer, it has become interwoven with being more of a Jew. And I do no
t understand why.”
I say it passionately; yet it is so much what he wants to hear that I will never know if it is the truth or not.
He rises and we walk to the door. We shake hands.
“Visit us whenever you come back,” he says. “Next time why not stay here?”
I grin, and using a Jewish inflection I have always been too embarrassed to use, reply: “Why not?”
At the airport, my father is as taut and strong as a pretzel. He jolts back and forth with my bags, not letting me lift them because he is afraid I will get a hernia.
“Caroline—” he begins. My girl’s name has been enough to break me down all summer.
I say to him: “I saw Corie in Tompkins Square Park in July. She was doing what she wanted: smoking pot and cuddling a queer. She suddenly saw me and said, ‘You can’t change a girl by pouring a glass of water over her head.’”
I embrace my father, and stop to wave at the exit door to Vancouver.
5
MY RABBI, RAY CHARLES, AND SINGING BIRDS
I thought of my rabbi recently when my wife underwent a dangerous operation at Mount Sinai Hospital. (I call him my rabbi although I have not seen him for four years, since I left Vancouver, Canada … for no one has taken his place.)
During the day, in her hospital room, I had watched the doctor probing the hole in her neck. I closed my eyes, but opened them again, because it was her skin.
When I went back to our apartment alone at night, I couldn’t sleep, and I put a Ray Charles record on. When he sang “For Mama,” I lay in our bed and saw the doctor all over again probing Susan’s neck. Again, in the dark, I shielded my eyes and opened them.
I thought of my rabbi then, for he let us play a Ray Charles record at the beginning and the end of our wedding.
My wife is well now, and I think again of Rabbi Levine. We played the Ray Charles record one day at his home and asked his permission to use it at the wedding. It was during one of the conversion sessions he was conducting with Susan, whose parents were nonobservant Protestants. We had brought the record along and played it for him and his wife, Chickie.
The One-Star Jew: Stories Page 6
