The One-Star Jew: Stories

by Evanier, David

  I didn’t answer.

  “How are you feeling, Bruce? How’s your sinusitis?”

  “I hate my job at Animals.”

  My father sighed, clamped his jaw shut, and then said, “Well, that I can’t help. Everyone hates their job. I always hated mine. In Bridgeport, I used to sit in the bathroom for hours, afraid to come out. What makes you think your job should be any different? What I went through, nobody will ever know …

  “I want to tell you the latest about Louie, Bruce. He’s so fat, Bruce. You know how he’s been taking the tickets at these singles dances we go to. He volunteered. It’s five dollars a week, but that isn’t the reason he does it. He likes the authority it gives him—taking the ticket, greeting the girls. A dentist, and so insecure. And he gets free drinks. With a few drinks in him, he loosens up. Stop me if I’m boring you with this. Louie got a phone call from the hostess of the party. She told him they would have to stop giving him free liquor. It was really their way of getting rid of him. After all, he doesn’t even take the tickets right. He gets flustered and lets people go through. Louie told me about this, and boy was he upset! He sent them a telegram offering his resignation! But then the days passed and he started thinking about it and decided he’d been rash. He called up, rescinding his resignation—sad, isn’t it?”

  “Dad, I’m quitting my job.”

  “You think it’s sad?”

  “I’m quitting my job.”

  There was a pause.

  “Uh huh. Going on welfare? Food stamps?”

  “I’m going to devote full time to my writing.”

  “You don’t have an honest bone left in your body, do you?

  “After all Animals has done for you. Medical benefits, pension, a month vacation—”

  “I want—”

  “You want, you want. We all want. I want. Everybody wants.”

  “I want to work at my writing.”

  “So keep your job and write when you can, like you’ve been doing.”

  “I can’t do that anymore, I can’t keep up that pace. It’s one or the other.”

  “Bruce, I can’t tell you what to do. You have a good job, security, you’re functioning better than I ever dreamed you could, and you want to throw it away. What will you do all day long— you’ll go crazy.”

  “I’ll be writing.”

  “You’ll have too much time on your hands, like me. You have no hobbies, like me. You can’t even dance, while I at least have learned to do the hustle. You just don’t want to work—”

  “I do want to work.”

  “You know what I mean. You want to do what’s pleasant, what you like. That’s easy. Everybody likes to do what’s easy. I would myself, but I don’t let myself. That’s always been your problem. Buying all those books. You’ll never get to read them. You like to write. That’s easy for you. The challenge is to do what’s unpleasant, what you hate. While I’ve denied myself my entire life. I could be having a ball—buying books, going to the theater and movies like you and Susan do. I could travel all over the world. Instead I’ve been saving it all for you.”

  “Oh, for Christ sake. You haven’t worked in thirty-five years!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Didn’t you retire at forty?”

  My father laughed. “Are you crazy?”

  “Well, what the hell do you call it? Sleeping until noon, moseying by bus into Manhattan to look at the stock exchange, dropping by to kibitz with the boys in the office, where you told me you took your afternoon snooze on the couch, then picking up your roast chicken and your yogurt and taking the subway home. Wasn’t that your goddamn routine? It still is!”

  “I’m seventy-four years old! I’m an old man!”

  “But you’ve been doing it as long as I’ve known you! And I want the time to work, for Christ sake.”

  “I worked like a dog, and for you! When I lived with your mother, I worked day and night, going into all those strange offices and houses. I cringed every time, knowing they didn’t want me. I was just a stranger to them, trying to sell them something they didn’t want. I died a thousand deaths, I was so shy. And this is the thanks I get. Coming home at 3 P.M. to pick you up from school when you were a little boy and take you home—”

  “You wanted my company.”

  “Who else did I have? You were my life, you were the only person I had, and you were so sweet then, you loved me.”

  I stood up. “I’m going home.”

  “You loved me when you were a little boy. You used to say, ‘Daddy, I love you more than anything in the world.’ I have your postcards and letters from camp. Here, I’ll show them to you, since you’ve forgotten everything.” My father rummaged through the desk and took out a stack of letters and postcards and held them out toward me.

  “Take them!” I took a postcard and saw all the X’s at the bottom of the card under my name.

  “You loved me then.”

  “I love you now.”

  I took my father into my arms.

  V

  I met my father for lunch in front of the Animals building at noon on the Wednesday after I had told him of my decision. As I walked toward him, I saw that he held money in his hands, glinting in the sun. He tried to jam it into my pocket. I moved away. “Take it! Take it!” my father shouted. “The dollar-fifty for lunch at the Automat last week; I forgot to compensate you for it. You know I never let you pay for our lunch.”

  My father again tried to shove the dollar and two quarters at me. “Take it! Take it! Take it!” A small audience of staff members of the magazine gathered to watch. The old man’s face was flushed with anger.

  I walked off. “Come on, goddamn it,” I said.

  My father hurried beside me, holding the money, aiming it at my pocket.

  We walked to the Fifty-seventh Street Horn and Hardart. It was one of the last remaining Automats. As a boy, I had loved them. My father and I had eaten almost all our meals at them. Now they were empty and abandoned, the flies hovering over the food. A tiny woman, her face frail as a skull, her eyes hollow, sat all day at the middle table, her booted foot marking time. I tried not to look at her. The wall behind where we sat boomed and shuddered as we talked; the employees in the kitchen were clattering dishes. One of them kept screaming, “Rack and ruin!”

  After a moment, my father said, “Bruce, I read a very interesting story the other day by Somerset Maugham. It was about a young man who was very dedicated to art. He wants to be an artist, you know? A pianist. Despite his father’s opposition, he quits his job and goes to live in an artist’s garret, practically starving to death. For years he practices on the piano. Guess what happens?”

  “I don’t expect a happy ending,” I said.

  “How did you know, Bruce? Have you read the story? At the end, the young man realizes, after years of practice, that he has stubby fingers! He will never be a great pianist. And he shoots himself.”

  My father smiled peacefully and settled back.

  Now my father took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and dangled it in front of me. I knew what it was. “The premium on the life insurance policy is due again, Bruce. Three hundred and fifty-four dollars.”

  My father waited for my response.

  I gritted my teeth, and said, “Lot of money.”

  “It is a lot of money. And I’m not doing any business anymore. I’m not sure I can keep it up much longer. Should I give it up?”

  “Dad, we go through this every six months.”

  “Well, I’m serious. You’re not showing any sense of responsibility.”

  “Give it up.”

  “Well, I may.”

  “Give it up. Don’t give it up. Have it your way.”

  “You resent my bringing this up,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know how to tell you.”

  “Try.”

  “It shouldn’t … be spoken about.”

  “How wou
ld you know I was paying it?”

  “My God, I know by now.”

  “It’s not easy for me to raise this sum of money. Nothing’s coming in anymore. I’d like a little appreciation.”

  “You’d have it if you didn’t ask for it.”

  “I don’t understand,” my father said. “I just want a little pleasure from it, but you won’t give an inch. You deny me the least satisfaction.”

  We walked down Fifty-seventh Street together.

  “I really do appreciate it, you know,” I told my father, who looked at me in pained puzzlement, kissed me, and walked off shaking his head.

  VI

  I imagined what would happen when the members of the staff of Animals heard the news of my resignation. At first they would be terrified for me. I seemed sweet to them, I guessed. They would hang around my cubicle, expecting to hear of extenuating reasons—mental crack-up, fatal disease. Then, as they realized what I had been concealing from them, and that I did not have an excuse, they would come to dislike or hate me. Small talk would cease. The personnel office would work overtime to end my medical coverage as quickly as possible.

  I was terrified, walking off a cliff, my dollar value over, my father’s generosity in danger.

  VII

  On the last day at Animals the staff gave me a farewell party.

  After the last good-byes, I said good night to the Irish guards at the door, who shook my hand.

  Well, I thought, I had certainly been wrong about the staff’s resentment—and my thoughts of the guards being ordered to accidentally shoot me seemed absurd.

  These thoughts had hovered on the fringe of my mind—additional reasons for not quitting: the guards … my father contriving to have me arrested in his anger at my freedom … my father and mother getting together, boiling, conferring on how to nab me.

  Now that I had quit, I saw I had no reason to be afraid. My father was on his best behavior, elaborately polite, fearful of permanently alienating me. Only in the off moments did unpleasant conversations occur. One morning I woke my father up in Brooklyn by ringing the doorbell. My father muttered at the door as he let me in: “I thought there was a chance you’d have a best-seller sometime. That’s dead, huh?”

  I sat down without answering. “Let me tell you the dream I was just having, Bruce. It was about a crippled dancer.”

  14

  JOLSON SINGS AGAIN

  I

  “Jolson was never any damn good as a singer,” said Billy Eckstine recently. Well, fuck you, Mr. B.

  Well, maybe so. Ersatz, yes. I was—am—one of the millions of little Jewish boys who dreamt of him: our rabbi, Moses, Judaism. On one knee in the living room grimacing: “Rosie, you are my posie”—Jewish boy athletics. Running, jumping, flying through the air. October 24, 1950: Jolson dead. The New York Post is still in my scrapbook, yellowing pieces of the blintze wisdom of Max Lerner (“Campus Morals Today: Twenty Part Special”) and Barry Gray and James Wechsler.

  Now my Protestant stepson Danny is into other shit: the Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix.

  Danny—seventeen—is waiting for a sign, a stairway, a flash, road, star, and he is sure it will come—as I stood at seventeen behind the apartment house, in the courtyard, with Esther, beneath the stars, in the moonlight, on concrete, near grass in a backyard closed off to us by a wire fence. Esther is holding a cat (for that is the snapshot); she is wearing a white, men’s shirt tied in front, her soft midriff is bare; she wears jeans cut off hillbilly style. She is wearing thick fifties lipstick, and smiling. I can taste her.

  I am sure that Danny would have loved her very much.

  A ghetto love, by a peeling radiator next to a fire escape; an upright piano.

  In Seattle, far from me, where he is safe—Danny called from his father’s house and across the wires shouted, “I am reading Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew.”

  II

  Images of Danny:

  1. Trying to hold in his laughter: a sputter, then a cackle, hand over mouth. Looking at me to share it.

  2. Enduring my stare of hatred: cornered, his eyes trying to look straight ahead, darting about. His head rigid. Cool and frozen.

  3. Danny high tonight. Lit up, he shines like a polished apple. Susan is delighted with his good mood, not thinking about the Heinekens he has drunk through the late afternoon, or what he has smoked.

  He says an amazing thing to me in his slurred voice, beaming: “I want to be like you: wine, women, and song.”

  III

  My father, the other day, peeling an apple, finishes his childhood litany and adds something new:

  “One day my father came home loaded down with presents. This must have been in 1908. I was so excited I jumped up and down. He was so infuriated he smacked me—hard.”

  He pauses and looks at me. “I was a good boy. Why was he so mean?”

  IV

  Thirty-nine. Feeling tired and old. Rapping with the reaper. So that’s what it’s all about. The warts fall off my father’s face: I love him again.

  V

  Ghettoization. 1975. Manhattan. Bedroom, kitchen, Danny’s room in the back. Every time he stepped over the line, I banged the wall.

  1977. Lefrock Block. Taboo areas in the tiny apartment: the living room because it adjoined the bedroom, the kitchen because he banged around so much, the bathroom because I took hours in there.

  In the Israel Day parade, Danny and I marched hand in hand.

  VI

  Spring, 1978. Danny is expelled from school. I go to school to plead for him with the director. He will not relent, but will allow Danny to take his final exams. If he passes, he will get credit for the term.

  VII

  Summer, 1978. With our last breath, we move from Lefrock Block back to a tiny flat in Manhattan. Danny’s room is in the back. I know he feels he will be isolated in the apartment. I feel his thoughts and accusations.

  On the night after the move, we go out to celebrate. Danny is cool and sullen. I am high.

  “What is he so miserable about?” I ask Susan at the table.

  “Look, leave me alone,” Danny says.

  “We make this great move, and he’s miserable—he’s wrecking it.”

  I feel my face wrenched out of shape with fury.

  “He’s not.”

  “Oh, I see. Both of you. Well maybe I should just leave, so the two of you can enjoy your dinner—”

  “Oh, Bruce—”

  “Oh Bruce what? What? What am I saying? Isn’t he wrecking it? No, I’m wrecking it. Is that it?”

  “I wish you’d leave me alone,” Danny says. “I don’t want to fight you.”

  “Shit. That’s what it all comes to.” I bound out of the restaurant.

  I install a door in the Manhattan flat between the living room and the long hallway leading to Danny’s room. When it is built, I feel big about it. I summon Danny and say pleasantly and expansively: “I installed a door there, but I want you to know that when it’s open you can come in. When it’s shut, please knock. It’s not meant to shut you out, just give us some breathing space.”

  I look up. Danny is standing in the forbidden area staring at me. I hadn’t heard him come in. I am seated reading beside the open window, and know that he wants to push me out. I keep reading. Danny walks out of the forbidden area, back to his room where he lies on his bed on his back.

  If I were Danny, I would want to push me out the window.

  VIII

  The final summer that Danny lived with us. 1978: We suffer in the intense heat in the new miniscule apartment. Danny lies around in his room after the expulsion. When he comes out of the room, wearing only his undershorts, he has a stricken, pained look. His face is blazing red from the sun—his body red and peeling like an onion. He looks as if the top layer of his skin has been stripped away.

  He exercises with his barbells, drinks, reads High Times, and goes downstairs to buy joints.

  One day a butcher knife lies beside the
bed.

  Knives are stuck in the wall of his room; another knife juts out of the desk. On the wall: Laurel and Hardy, Groucho, W. C. Fields, rock groups.

  1972. Vancouver. Danny drops a lit match in a barrel of gasoline. His eyebrows are singed from the explosion.

  IX

  Father’s Day, 1978. I hand my father his annual tie. “Thank you,” he says, smiling, to my wife, Susan. He holds it, strokes it, and says again, nodding his head to her, “Thank you.”

  “Bruce got it for you,” she says.

  “It’s very nice. Thank you so much,” he says, looking directly at Susan.

  Danny looks at me sympathetically and dizzily shakes his head again and again, silently laughing at my father.

  My father’s reasoning, such as it is, goes like this: I have quit my job to write. Susan is the breadwinner. Even if I bought the tie, it is her money.

  X

  Summer, 1978. I am drunk. Danny, drunk, is making himself comfortable in the forbidden area. He is stretched out on the big chair in the living room, his feet up.

  “You haven’t done the dishes for days,” I say.

  “I’ll do ’em.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll do ’em.”

  “When, God damn it?”

  “Look, I said I’ll do ’em. I don’t want to hassle with you.”

  “You lie around all day drunk and stoned, you do nothing, you think nothing, while your mother sweats her ass off—”

  He puts his hands up: “I don’t want to—”

  “Now. You’ll do them now.”