by Philip Roth
Meanwhile, all the way from the outfield comes the badinage of one who in appearance is more cement-mixer than Homo sapiens, the prince of the produce market, Allie Sokolow. The pisk he opens on him! (as my mother would put it). For half an inning the invective flows in toward home plate from his position in deep center field, and then when his team comes to bat, he stations himself in the first-base coaching box and the invective flows uninterruptedly out in the opposite direction—and none of it has anything to do with any contretemps that may actually be taking place on the field. Quite the opposite. My father, when he is not out working on Sunday mornings, comes by to sit and watch a few innings with me; he knows Allie Sokolow (as he knows many of the players), since they were all boys together in the Central Ward, before he met my mother and moved to Jersey City. He says that Allie has always been like this, “a real showman.” When Allie charges in toward second base, screaming his gibberish and double-talk in the direction of home plate (where there isn’t even a batter as yet—where Dr. Wolfenberg is merely dusting the plate with the whisk broom he brings to the game), the people in the stands couldn’t be more delighted: they laugh, they clap, they call out, “You tell him, Allie! You give it to him, Sokolow!” And invariably Dr. Wolfenberg, who takes himself a little more seriously than your ordinary nonprofessional person (and is a German Jew to boot), holds up his palm, halting an already Sokolow-stopped game, and says to Biderman, “Will you please get that meshuggener back in the outfield?”
I tell you, they are an endearing lot! I sit in the wooden stands alongside first base, inhaling that sour springtime bouquet in the pocket of my fielder’s mitt—sweat, leather, vaseline—and laughing my head off. I cannot imagine myself living out my life any other place but here. Why leave, why go, when there is everything here that I will ever want? The ridiculing, the joking, the acting-up, the pretending—anything for a laugh! I love it! And yet underneath it all, they mean it, they are in dead earnest. You should see them at the end of the seven innings when that dollar has to change hands. Don’t tell me they don’t mean it! Losing and winning is not a joke … and yet it is! And that’s what charms me most of all. Fierce as the competition is, they cannot resist clowning and kibbitzing around. Putting on a show! How I am going to love growing up to be a Jewish man! Living forever in the Weequahic section, and playing softball on Chancellor Avenue from nine to one on Sundays, a perfect joining of clown and competitor, kibbitzing wiseguy and dangerous long-ball hitter.
I remember all this where? when? While Captain Meyerson is making his last slow turn over the Tel Aviv airport. My face is against the window. Yes, I could disappear, I think, change my name and never be heard from again—then Meyerson banks the wing on my side, and I look down for the first time upon the continent of Asia, I look down from two thousand feet in the air upon the Land of Israel, where the Jewish people first came into being, and am impaled upon a memory of Sunday morning softball games in Newark.
The elderly couple seated beside me (the Solomons, Edna and Felix), who have told me in an hour’s flight time all about their children and grandchildren in Cincinnati (with, of course, a walletful of visual aids), now nudge each other and nod together in silent satisfaction; they even poke some friends across the aisle, a couple from Mount Vernon they’ve just met (the Perls, Sylvia and Bernie), and these two kvell also to see a tall, good-looking, young Jewish lawyer (and single! a match for somebody’s daughter!) suddenly begin to weep upon making contact with a Jewish airstrip. However, what has produced these tears is not, as the Solomons and Perls would have it, a first glimpse of the national homeland, the ingathering of an exile, but the sound in my ear of my own nine-year-old little boy’s voice—my voice, I mean, at nine. Nine-year-old me! Sure a sourpuss, a face-maker, a little back-talker and kvetch, sure my piping is never without its nice infuriating whiny edge of permanent disgruntlement and grievance (“as though,” my mother says, “the world owes him a living—at nine years old”), but a laugher and ladder too, don’t forget that, an enthusiast! a romantic! a mimic! a nine-year-old lover of life! fiery with such simple, neighborhoody dreams!—“I’m going up the field,” I call into the kitchen, fibers of pink lox lodged like sour dental floss in the gaps between my teeth, “I’m going up the field, Ma,” pounding my mitt with my carpy-smelling little fist, “I’ll be back around one—” “Wait a minute. What time? Where?” “Up the field,” I holler—I’m very high on hollering to be heard, it’s like being angry, except without the consequences, “—to watch the men!”
And that’s the phrase that does me in as we touch down upon Eretz Yisroel: to watch the men.
Because I love those men! I want to grow up to be one of those men! To be going home to Sunday dinner at one o’clock, sweat socks pungent from twenty-one innings of softball, underwear athletically gamy, and in the muscle of my throwing arm, a faint throbbing from the low and beautiful pegs I have been unleashing all morning long to hold down the opposition on the base paths; yes, hair disheveled, teeth gritty, feet beat and kishkas sore from laughing, in other words, feeling great, a robust Jewish man now gloriously pooped—yes, home I head for resuscitation … and to whom? To my wife and my children, to a family of my own, and right there in the Weequahic section! I shave and shower—rivulets of water stream off my scalp a filthy brown, ah, it’s good, ah yes, it’s a regular pleasure standing there nearly scalding myself to death with hot water. It strikes me as so manly, converting pain to pleasure. Then into a pair of snappy slacks and a freshly dry-cleaned “gaucho” shirt—perfecto! I whistle a popular song, I admire my biceps, I shoot a rag across my shoes, making it pop, and meanwhile my kids are riffling through the Sunday papers (reading with eyes the exact color of my own), giggling away on the living-room rug; and my wife, Mrs. Alexander Portnoy, is setting the table in the dining room—we will be having my mother and father as guests, they will be walking over any minute, as they do every Sunday. A future, see! A simple and satisfying future! Exhausting, exhilarating softball in which to spend my body’s force—that for the morning—then in the afternoon, the brimming, hearty stew of family life, and at night three solid hours of the best line-up of radio entertainment in the world: yes, as I delighted in Jack Benny’s trips down to his vault in the company of my father, and Fred Allen’s conversations with Mrs. Nussbaum, and Phil Harris’ with Frankie Remley, also shall my children delight in them with me, and so unto the hundredth generation. And then after Kenny Baker, I double-lock the front and back doors, turn off all the lights (check and—as my father does—double-check the pilot on the gas range so that our lives will not be stolen from us in the night). I kiss good night my pretty sleepy daughter and my clever sleepy son, and in the arms of Mrs. A. Portnoy, that kind and gentle (and in my sugary but modest fantasy, faceless) woman, I bank the fires of my abounding pleasure. In the morning I am off to downtown Newark, to the Essex County Court House, where I spend my workdays seeking justice for the poor and the oppressed.
Our eighth-grade class visits the courthouse to observe the architecture. Home and in my room that night, I write in my fresh new graduation autograph album, under YOUR FAVORITE MOTTO, “Don’t Step on the Underdog.” MY FAVORITE PROFESSION? “Lawyer.” MY FAVORITE HERO? “Tom Paine and Abraham Lincoln.” Lincoln sits outside the courthouse (in Gutzon Borglum’s bronze), looking tragic and fatherly: you just know how much he cares. A statue of Washington, standing erect and authoritarian in front of his horse, overlooks Broad Street; it is the work of J. Massey Rhind (we write this second unname-like name of a sculptor in our notebooks); our art teacher says that the two statues are “the city’s pride,” and we head off in pairs for the paintings at the Newark Museum. Washington, I must confess, leaves me cold. Maybe it’s the horse, that he’s leaning on a horse. At any rate, he is so obviously a goy. But Lincoln! I could cry. Look at him sitting there, so oysgemitchet. How he labored for the downtrodden—as will I!
A nice little Jewish boy? Please, I am the nicest little Jewish boy who ever lived
! Only look at the fantasies, how sweet and savior-like they are! Gratitude to my parents, loyalty to my tribe, devotion to the cause of justice!
And? What’s so wrong? Hard work in an idealistic profession; games played without fanaticism or violence, games played among like-minded people, and with laughter; and family forgiveness and love. What was so wrong with believing in all that? What happened to the good sense I had at nine, ten, eleven years of age? How have I come to be such an enemy and flayer of myself? And so alone! Oh, so alone! Nothing but self! Locked up in me! Yes, I have to ask myself (as the airplane carries me—I believe—away from my tormentor), what has become of my purposes, those decent and worthwhile goals? Home? I have none. Family? No! Things I could own just by snapping my fingers … so why not snap them then, and get on with my life? No, instead of tucking in my children and lying down beside a loyal wife (to whom I am loyal too), I have, on two different evenings, taken to bed with me—coinstantaneously, as they say in the whorehouses—a fat little Italian whore and an illiterate, unbalanced American mannequin. And that isn’t even my idea of a good time, damn it! What is? I told you! And meant it—sitting at home listening to Jack Benny with my kids! Raising intelligent, loving, sturdy children! Protecting some good woman! Dignity! Health! Love! Industry! Intelligence! Trust! Decency! High Spirits! Compassion! What the hell do I care about sensational sex? How can I be floundering like this over something so simple, so silly, as pussy! How absurd that I should have finally come down with VD! At my age! Because I’m sure of it: I have contracted something from that Lina! It is just a matter of waiting for the chancre to appear. But I won’t wait, I can’t: In Tel Aviv a doctor, first thing, before the chancre or the blindness sets in!
Only what about the dead girl back at the hotel? For she will have accomplished it by now, I’m sure. Thrown herself off the balcony in her underpants. Walked into the sea and drowned herself, wearing the world’s tiniest bikini. No, she will take hemlock in the moonlit shadows of the Acropolis—in her Balenciaga evening gown! That empty-headed, exhibitionistic, suicidal twat! Don’t worry, when she does it, it’ll be photographable—it’ll come out looking like an ad for ladies’ lingerie! There she’ll be, as usual, in the Sunday magazine section—only dead! I must turn back before I have this ridiculous suicide forever on my conscience! I should have telephoned Harpo! I didn’t even think of it—just ran for my life. Gotten her to a phone to talk to her doctor. But would he have talked? I doubt it! That mute bastard, he has to, before she takes her unreversible revenge! MODEL SLITS THROAT IN AMPHITHEATRE; Medea Interrupted by Suicide … and they’ll publish the note they find, more than likely in a bottle stuffed up her snatch. “Alexander Portnoy is responsible. He forced me to sleep with a whore and then wouldn’t make me an honest woman. Mary Jane Reed.” Thank God the moron can’t spell! It’ll all be Greek to those Greeks! Hopefully.
Running away! In flight, escaping again—and from what? From someone else who would have me a saint! Which I ain’t! And do not want or intend to be! No, any guilt on my part is comical! I will not hear of it! If she kills herself—But that’s not what she’s about to do. No, it’ll be more ghastly than that: she’s going to telephone the Mayor! And that’s why I’m running! But she wouldn’t. But she would. She will! More than likely already has. Remember? I’ll expose you, Alex. I’ll call long-distance to John Lindsay. I’ll telephone Jimmy Breslin. And she is crazy enough to do it! Breslin, that cop! That precinct station genius! Oh Jesus, let her be dead then! Jump, you ignorant destructive bitch—better you than me! Sure, all I need is she should start telephoning around to the wire services: I can see my father going out to the corner after dinner, picking up the Newark News—and at long last, the word SCANDAL printed in bold type above a picture of his darling son! Or turning on the seven o’clock news to watch the CBS correspondent in Athens interviewing The Monkey from her hospital bed. “Portnoy, that’s right. Capital P. Then O. Then I think R. Oh, I can’t remember the rest, but I swear on my wet pussy, Mr. Rudd, he made me sleep with a whore!” No, no, I am not exaggerating: think a moment about the character, or absence of same. Remember Las Vegas? Remember her desperation? Then you see that this wasn’t just my conscience punishing me; no, whatever revenge I might imagine, she could imagine too. And will yet! Believe me, we have not heard the last of Mary Jane Reed. I was supposed to save her life—and didn’t. Made her sleep with whores instead! So don’t think we have heard the last word from her!
And there, to cause me to kick my ass even more, there all blue below me, the Aegean Sea. The Pumpkin’s Aegean! My poetic American girl! Sophocles! Long ago! Oh, Pumpkin—baby, say it again, Why would I want to do a thing like that? Someone who knew who she was! Psychologically so intact as not to be in need of salvation or redemption by me! Not in need of conversion to my glorious faith! The poetry she used to read to me at Antioch, the education she was giving me in literature, a whole new perspective, an understanding of art and the artistic way … oh, why did I ever let her go! I can’t believe it—because she wouldn’t be Jewish? “The eternal note of sadness—” “The turbid ebb and flow of human misery—”
Only, is this human misery? I thought it was going to be loftier! Dignified suffering! Meaningful suffering—something perhaps along the line of Abraham Lincoln. Tragedy, not farce! Something a little more Sophoclean was what I had in mind. The Great Emancipator, and so on. It surely never crossed my mind that I would wind up trying to free from bondage nothing more than my own prick. LET MY PETER GO! There, that’s Portnoy’s slogan. That’s the story of my life, all summed up in four heroic dirty words. A travesty! My politics, descended entirely to my putz! JERK-OFF ARTISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR BRAINS! The freak I am! Lover of no one and nothing! Unloved and unloving! And on the brink of becoming John Lindsay’s Profumo!
So it seemed, an hour out of Athens.
Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Beer-She’va, the Dead Sea, Sedom, ‘Ein Gedi, then north to Caesarea, Haifa, Akko, Tiberias, Safed, the upper Galilee … and always it is more dreamy than real. Not that I courted the sensation either. I’d had enough of the improbable with my companion in Greece and Rome. No, to make some sense out of the impulse that had sent me running aboard the El Al flight to begin with, to convert myself from this bewildered runaway into a man once again—in control of my will, conscious of my intentions, doing as I wished, not as I must—I set off traveling about the country as though the trip had been undertaken deliberately, with forethought, desire, and for praiseworthy, if conventional, reasons. Yes, I would have (now that I was unaccountably here) what is called an educational experience. I would improve myself, which is my way, after all. Or was, wasn’t it? Isn’t that why I still read with a pencil in my hand? To learn? To become better? (than whom?) So, I studied maps in my bed, bought historical and archeological texts and read them with my meals, hired guides, rented cars—doggedly in that sweltering heat, I searched out and saw everything I could: tombs, synagogues, fortresses, mosques, shrines, harbors, ruins, the new ones, the old. I visited the Carmel Caves, the Chagall windows (me and a hundred ladies from the Detroit Hadassah), the Hebrew University, the Bet She’an excavations—toured the green kibbutzim, the baked wastelands, the rugged border outposts in the mountains; I even climbed a little ways up Masada under the full artillery fire of the sun. And everything I saw, I found I could assimilate and understand. It was history, it was nature, it was art. Even the Negev, that hallucination, I experienced as real and of this world. A desert. No, what was incredible and strange to me, more novel than the Dead Sea, or even the dramatic wilderness of Tsin, where for an eerie hour I wandered in the light of the bleaching sun, between white rocks where (I learn from my guidebook) the tribes of Israel wandered for so long (where I picked up as a souvenir—and have in fact right here in my pocket—such a stone as my guide informed me Zipporah used to circumcise the son of Moses—) what gave my entire sojourn the air of the preposterous was one simple but wholly (to me) implausib
le fact: I am in a Jewish country. In this country, everybody is Jewish.
My dream begins as soon as I disembark. I am in an airport where I have never been before and all the people I see—passengers, stewardesses, ticket sellers, porters, pilots, taxi drivers—are Jews. Is that so unlike the dreams that your dreaming patients recount? Is that so unlike the kind of experience one has while asleep? But awake, who ever heard of such a thing? The writing on the walls is Jewish—Jewish graffiti! The flag is Jewish. The faces are the faces you see on Chancellor Avenue! The faces of my neighbors, my uncles, my teachers, the parents of my boyhood friends. Faces like my own face! only moving before a backdrop of white wall and blazing sun and spikey tropical foliage. And it ain’t Miami Beach, either. No, the faces of Eastern Europe, but only a stone’s throw from Africa! In their short pants the men remind me of the head counselors at the Jewish summer camps I worked at during college vacations—only this isn’t summer camp, either. It’s home! These aren’t Newark high school teachers off for two months with a clipboard and a whistle in the Hopatcong mountains of New Jersey. These are (there’s no other word!) the natives. Returned! This is where it all began! Just been away on a long vacation, that’s all! Hey, here we’re the WASPs! My taxi passes through a big square surrounded by sidewalk cafes such as one might see in Paris or Rome. Only the cafes are crowded with Jews. The taxi overtakes a bus. I look inside its windows. More Jews. Including the driver. Including the policemen up ahead directing traffic! At the hotel I ask the clerk for a room. He has a thin mustache and speaks English as though he were Ronald Colman. Yet he is Jewish too.
And now the drama thickens:
It is after midnight. Earlier in the evening, the promenade beside the sea was a gay and lively crush of Jews—Jews eating ices, Jews drinking soda pop, Jews conversing, laughing, walking together arm-in-arm. But now as I start back to my hotel, I find myself virtually alone. At the end of the promenade, which I must pass beyond to reach my hotel, I see five youths smoking cigarettes and talking. Jewish youths, of course. As I approach them, it becomes clear to me that they have been anticipating my arrival. One of them steps forward and addresses me in English. “What time is it?” I look at my watch and realize that they are not going to permit me to pass. They are going to assault me! But how can that be? If they are Jewish and I am Jewish, what motive can there be for them to do me any harm?
