The One-Star Jew: Stories

by Evanier, David

  I had a final drink, stumbled out into the street, and ran into the Kentucky Fried Chicken store. I had to have something to eat. I actually felt less nervous tonight than usual with the street people around me—after all, if they touched me now, I would kill them.

  I paid for the chicken, took the box, and went down into the subway station. I looked down the tracks; nothing coming. I was almost alone; just one other person. I noticed I was talking to myself. I ate the chicken and tossed the bones out onto the tracks. “This is not happening to me,” I said.

  The train finally came. I had made a decision. I got off at Times Square and wandered down the street among the hookers and muggers, looking for a phone. A hooker in platform shoes and a blonde wig grabbed at my balls. I reeled away.

  There was a phone by the pinball machine in the arcade. I called my father in Brooklyn and woke him up. I told him what had happened and screamed at him, “I can’t take this, I can’t take this, I can’t take this anymore.”

  “Listen to me, darling,” my father said. “Bruce, listen to me. Everything is going to be all right. I will be there. Where are you? I want you to wait for me. We’ll go together to the police station.”

  “I’m not signing anything!” I screamed.

  “You don’t have to sign. I’ll sign.”

  We agreed to meet at Nathan’s on Times Square. It would take my father an hour—to dress, walk to the subway, and travel there. I walked around the Square and had another drink. Everywhere the landmarks were gone: Toffernetti’s had been where Nathan’s now stood, with its giant strawberry shortcake in the window and its organist; gone were the Paramount and the Automat off Eighth Avenue and the Laffmovie where my father had taken me every Sunday. In their place was violent porn, blank, sullen eyes, and red hats. A bodiless beggar: a head, shoulders, arms, hands holding pencils, scooted himself along the ground on a wooden platform with wheels. Immaculately dressed Moslems had set up a little table and were selling pamphlets; their hand-lettered sign said, “Whites, nothing you can do now.”

  As I stood in front of Nathan’s, there was my father coming toward me, nattily dressed, handsome, smiling, blowing kisses, walking his jerky walk, making his way in the neon lights among the killers: “Excuse me kindly, thank you, excuse me,” to my side. He hugged and kisssed me and said: “Just like old times, Bruce. Haven’t I always been there when you needed me? Just answer this question: Haven’t I? And you’re a man now, Bruce, you’re thirty-eight years old.”

  “I don’t want to sign anything. I don’t want any trouble. He’s not my son.”

  My father guided me into Nathan’s. “I want you to eat something first, bubby—”

  “I just ate—”

  “How about a roast beef sandwich, a knish, a frankfurter? You have to watch your cholesterol. The roast beef on a bun looks good. You used to love that at McGuinness’s.”

  I said I didn’t want to eat, and my father got angry. “Don’t upset me, Bruce.” He plunked down the sandwich on the table and I began to eat it. “Tell me the truth. Isn’t it delicious?” he said. “Anyway, at least I’m getting a chance to see you tonight, Bruce.”

  I put my hat down on the table.

  “Take that hat off the table!”

  “What?”

  My father bopped it off. I picked it up off the floor. “What should I do with it then?”

  “Put it on the chair, naturally!”

  My father shook his head at me. “You do that just to be mean, don’t you?”

  “Do what?”

  “Put your hat on the table. Just to mock me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  After a pause, my father said, “I learned a lesson I never forgot a long time ago. Maybe I never told you this, Bruce. Stop me if I’m boring you. I had a business appointment with a very important, successful executive. He ushered me into his office like a gentleman, and we began to talk.

  “I placed my hat on his desk in front of me. As we were talking, his son quietly walked over, without saying a word, picked up my hat, and placed it in the closet. I was so humiliated! It taught me a lesson I have never forgotten. When I was out on the street later, I remembered that I had forgotten my hat in the closet. Of course I couldn’t go back. The amazing thing is, I went back to that office for another appointment three months later. On my way out, I got my coat from the closet and looked up: there was my hat! No one had touched it.”

  “Did you take it?” I asked my father.

  “Of course! I grabbed it.”

  After I finished eating, my father took my hand and we walked across Times Square to the subway. “We’ve been through a lot together, Bruce. You know I wouldn’t let you down.”

  “I’m not going to sign anything.”

  “I’ll sign. I’ll assume all responsibility—”

  “But they’ll want to know who I am—” I screamed at my father.

  “They won’t want to know anything. Let me take care of it. They won’t even see you. You’ll wait outside the police station while I go in and get Danny. Now I want you to stop being so upset, Bruce. What would you do without me?”

  We weaved in and out among the crowds.

  “I DON’T WANT ANYTHING BUT I RESPECT YOU PEOPLE TREMENDOUSLY.” A black beggar had touched my father on the shoulder and my father stepped back in shock. “Come on, Bruce,” he shouted, and took my hand again. We hurried off, my father’s head bobbing up and down in fear. We went down into the subway.

  It was 2 A.M.

  III

  At the subway stop in Queens, we walked down the steps into the street. The subway station had a coal stove and a winding pipe going up to the ceiling. We walked in the pleasant night air. It was an old-fashioned, Irish-Italian neighborhood. After several blocks we spotted the police station in the distance, blazing in the dark night. My father went inside the station. I stood outside among the lolling cops. I saw through the window two young cops boxing with each other. I felt conspicuous, and decided to follow my father inside.

  Two cops approached us—the boxers. They were still jabbing at each other. They had beards and jeans. They were supportive, hip types. They said they were in charge of the case. “I’m Chaim and this is Pedro.”

  “Are you the father?” they said to my father, and told me my “brother” was inside. My father signed the papers.

  The two cops were very hip; they kept boxing and wrestling with each other. They fell to the floor and wrestled. My father and I waited.

  Chaim got up first and said, “Look, this is all bullshit. But we got to enter it. Your son got caught painting graffiti on a subway in the trainyard.” He moved closer. “Generally kids committing crimes like this—and I’m not assuming anything—are from broken homes with emotionally disturbing factors. The kids are trying to get attention—love—”

  Then we saw Danny standing there, not particularly upset, but solicitous, concerned.

  “How could you do this to your mother?” my father asked.

  Danny thought about it and shrugged. “I don’t know.” I knew Danny found it an irrelevant question. He hadn’t done it to his mother. He had done it to me.

  I could not bear to look at him.

  The trial date was set.

  IV

  The three of us walked to the subway. Danny led us, since my father and I had already forgotten the way.

  “Aren’t you ashamed?” my father kept asking Danny, holding my hand as we walked on the lamplit street.

  “Sure,” Danny said. “Yeah.”

  We waited at the station platform for the train. Danny kept trying to reassure us: that the train would come soon, that he knew the way back to Manhattan. My father and I held hands.

  Danny, getting no response, stood farther away from us. From a distance, he said to my father, “I hope you feel okay. I really feel bad about this.”

  At Times Square, Danny and I took the uptown train and my father took the train back to Brooklyn. I watched m
y father walking off. He was suddenly walking very slowly.

  Sitting side by side on the train, Danny and I did not speak.

  V

  Susan was operated on later that week. Looking up at me just before the operation, she had said, “Whatever happens, I will be happy, because I know you love me.”

  I wept and walked the streets.

  The operation took seven hours. Susan recovered completely.

  The doctor appeared and probed the open hole in her neck. Jesus. This is life. I am watching life.

  I watched, clenching my teeth.

  What might my own son have been like? Would he have looked like me?

  Only once have I seen a child who reminded me of myself.

  A little boy of four or five on the Greyhound bus with his parents. The mother was an obese Oriental. The father was a chunky, handsome, blonde man with a comb in his back pocket. The father made the child sit in his own seat adjacent to him across the aisle. The child looked like a cross between the two parents. I was seated behind them.

  The child tried to climb on his mother’s lap.

  The mother screamed, “I could kill that kid!” She lurched away, pushing him off.

  She hissed, “Don’t let him come near me. I’ve seen shit. Don’t tell me about shit, man, I’ve had it with shit.”

  The child tried again to climb on her lap. She pushed him away.

  The father put the boy back in his seat and gave him a bun to eat and a comic book: Archie Junior.

  The child gnawed at the bun, and kept peering at the mother. He had a sunny look that darkened when he looked over at her.

  The father reached over and stroked his son. “I hate that kid,” the mother said.

  The mother quieted down when the bus started to move. She purred and kissed the father on the lips, running her hand through his hair.

  The boy kept trying to join them. The father gently put him back in the seat, mediating between them. The boy looked at the other children on the bus. I watched him as he looked at them, then at their parents, observing their relationships. The boy watched hungrily. When the other children laughed, a laugh began to form on his face. He would begin to read his comic book, look around, look at me, and turn his head to stare at the other children again.

  When I looked up later, the boy was silently vomiting. His mother stared. His father took a paper bag and handed it to the child. When he finished, the child glanced at his mother guiltily.

  The father took the boy in his arms and carried him to the bathroom in the back of the bus.

  The hours went by. I could not bear to watch the child, and could not pull my eyes away from him.

  The mother did not speak to the child once. When she finally fell asleep, the boy climbed into his father’s arms and the father held him, cradling his head. The child slept, remaining in the same position, without moving, for the rest of the trip.

  VI

  I waited two weeks to tell Susan about the arrest. I seethed, waiting to tell her. I led up to it, and she could see how upset I was. “Something’s wrong,” she said. She asked me to lie down on her bed in the hospital room.

  “There isn’t room for the two of us,” I said.

  “I’ll sit on the chair,” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s okay, honey, I feel much better,” she said.

  I lay down on the bed.

  “I have a headache,” I said.

  “I’ll get you a cold cloth.”

  She laid a cold towel over my forehead, and sat down in the chair by the bed, waiting for me to speak.

  Looking up at her, I began. Slowly and dramatically, punctuating my account with little outbursts of outrage, I told her about the arrest.

  13

  A SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY

  I

  I was forty years old and I was about to quit my job. I would have to tell my father.

  I had decided during a lunch hour break. I realized I did not care as much as I once did for the suffering of other people. It sprung to my mind—beggars were beggars; the elderly were just old; criminals were constituted that way; children were cunning; all blacks were anti-Semitic. Did I mean this? The day before I had watched my wife, Susan, pick up a twenty-dollar bill from the ground and go running after a woman with a baby tied crooked on her back who she thought had dropped it. Was Susan certain? I was surprised at her spontaneous action, and I was surprised at my own reaction to what my wife had done. Would I have given the woman the money? I wondered. Is this the way it went, sneaking up on you? “Slip sliding away,” sang Paul Simon. Libriums all day long, then alcohol. I had watched a colleague in the office, a man in his sixties, each day turn the newspaper first to the TV page, then the obituary page to watch for the deaths of friends.

  I had returned to my cubicle, exhausted from the hour.

  I had decided then to give notice.

  II

  “I want you to know, Bruce, that no matter what, my every thought was my love for you, day and night.” I read the rest of the death note my father had left on the desk. There was the usual information about the will, the stocks and bonds. My father was in the bathroom shaving. I had traveled out to his apartment in Brooklyn to tell him about my decision.

  When he came out of the bathroom, my father snapped up the note, folded it, and put it away in the desk. “I hope you didn’t read this, Bruce. You probably did, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. You need to know these things in case something happens.”

  My father was seventy-four and healthy. For many years there had been a ritual: roundabout instructions about what to do if he died. He had given me a key to a safe deposit box—and taken it back. Whenever he brought up the subject, I was embarrassed. “There’ll be plenty of money for you, Bruce,” he said as he closed the desk drawer. Was I supposed to smile? Shake my father’s hand in gratitude? Show despair? Wasn’t this supposed to be good news? I tried to keep my expression noncommittal— my father watched carefully. Then he told me about a file cabinet at his office where there was spare cash—two or three hundred dollars. “I used to keep thousands there—when I was doing a lot of business. But don’t worry—there’ll be plenty for you.” Then came a hasty roundup of more instructions, which I would need to write down to remember. But could I actually sit down and write out the information then and there? My father was still scrutinizing me. Suddenly he said, “Don’t look so interested, Bruce. I’m not leaving you so fast.”

  I did not tell my father my decision that evening.

  III

  My father had lived in a one-bedroom apartment since the divorce, in 1947, and had always had a Cadillac to greet the world with, and dapper shirts and ties—all purchased at a fraction of their cost. “The only thing that counts in this world is money,” he had repeated ever since I was a child. “Love, friendship— nothing lasts.”

  Money, and a smile. I had recently watched television with my father. We had seen a commercial about a denture cream that allowed the woman on the screen to “have her smile back.” “Isn’t that wonderful?” my father’s voice came from behind me in the darkness.

  I remembered driving alone with my father when I was a boy, the two of us singing “When You’re Smiling,” my father hitting the wheel as we sang. My father had talked constantly about the importance of smiling. A smile made people like you, and it didn’t cost anything. He sang to me at bedtime—“Smile, Darn Ya, Smile,” “There Are Smiles That Make You Happy,” “Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella,” and “Powder Your Face with Sunshine.”

  IV

  The following week, my father called me at my office at Animals and asked me to come out to Brooklyn. “Can you give me a little time?” he asked. “Not a chance, huh? No luck, huh? Are you so hopped up on your writing you can’t give your father a break?”

  “I’ll be over at eight,” I said. “I have something I want to tell you.”

  I sat across from my fa
ther in the living room and felt an old feeling—that once again nothing would be said.

  “Bruce, you aren’t listening to me. I have to give you my safe deposit key one of these days. We never really talk, Bruce. I feel you’re so far away. What’s your favorite TV show?”

  “I don’t watch TV.”

  “I was just watching a show about the rise of the Nazis. Tsk, tsk, tsk. It was expensive: parades, rallies, uniforms. Where did they get so much money, Bruce?”

  I didn’t answer.

  My father got up to put cheese in the mousetrap.

  “What do you do with your extra time?”

  “I write.”

  “I know that. I meant besides—”

  “Then why do you ask me such a question?”

  “I know you’re a writer. I’m very proud of you. I think your writing is terrific. You’re busy as a cockroach.”

  I began to think about the money: why couldn’t I have some of it now? Just how much was there? Even that letter of instruction was odd—the most concrete thing in it was the initial to look under in the file cabinet. Without the safe deposit key, how would I get in? Could my father read these thoughts of mine? How did they creep into my head? If something real was said between us, these thoughts would go away—but in the boredom, there they were.

  A real thing to say might be: Do you think of me as a cockroach? But my father would deny the matter any importance. He often said to me, “You’re the one who saw the psychiatrists; you have the understanding—so you should be the one to forgive.” (Yet my father, ten years ago, had seen a psychiatrist too—the one he suspected of tearing checks out of envelopes while he lay on the couch talking.)

  My father snapped his leather easy chair backwards and stretched out. Now he came to the books he was reading—usually biographies of Hitler, Nixon, FDR, Churchill, Goering, or Joe McCarthy, or the story of the tortured life of a famous writer. “I’m reading about Dostoevski’s life,” he said. “What a terrible existence! And his wife was a pretty young girl. What did she want him for? All great writers, all great artists, live such miserable lives. Are you a great artist?”