The Baker

by Paul Hond

  Praise for THE BAKER

  “[Hond’s] power is considerable.… The Baker makes you want to go out and get a really good loaf of bread—the kind you stick your thumbs into and rip apart, the kind that gets flour and moist crumbs all over you. That’s a testament to the book’s high heat, and to Hond’s promise as a novelist.”

  —Newsday

  “The Baker is a stunning debut from a writer bound for a big literary future. Hond has a gift of expression, an eye for the nuances of life and an insight into the workings of the mind that make for a novel of real social significance.”

  —Brisbane Sunday Mail (Australia)

  “Hond illuminates the long-standing tribal tensions and accords between blacks and Jews, and in a fast-paced series of Dickensian plot twists, he shows the increasing interdependence of their griefs and hopes.”

  —The New Yorker

  “A bright Beaujolais of a book: fresh, optimistic, and sophisticated enough to satisfy on many levels.… An upbeat examination of love, loss, and father-son bonding.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “An absorbing work of social realism … [Hond] writes insightfully of racial and social attitudes, and the efforts of individuals to resist pressure to think in—or fall into—stereotypes. One puts down this novel with the feeling of having shared in the lives of some very real, quietly decent people.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Hond probes black-Jewish relations in a crime-ridden urban neighborhood with an emotional depth, lyricism and power that signal an auspicious debut.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “From a new bard of Baltimore, a striking novel about marriage, class, and bread making inside of the city’s last neighborhood bakeries.”

  —Glamour

  “[Hond’s] boldness works.… What career may await so skillful a turner of plot, and listener to speech, and unraveler of emotion? … In the best sense, this is an old-fashioned novel.… Save your first-edition copy of The Baker.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “It’s no overstatement to say that The Baker is a deeply moral book, and not just because it is willing to take on critical social issues. It is, rather, because of that rare quality we find so often in Malamud: the all-encompassing compassion for the novel’s characters. We come to know these people, we mourn the distortions wrought by personal and social history. The novel’s compassion builds our own.… [A] wonderful first novel.”

  —Forward

  “Hond’s novel chronicles, with heartbreaking authenticity, the growing mistrust between blacks and Jews.… The richness of this novel lies in its vision of reconciliation and repair. Hond, though only thirty-two, has much to teach us.”

  —The New York Jewish Week

  “There is much here to please and amaze.… Hond is able to reach accurately into a complex spiritual terrain well beyond his years.… Plot and subplot knit together with effortless-looking ease to a resolution that is satisfying but credible, affirmative but unforced.”

  —The Independent (Raleigh-Durham)

  “A rich, deep first novel about a man’s redemption at midlife. Endlessly powerful writing in a tight, painful story.”

  —Jewish Journal (Los Angeles)

  “A likable, sweet-natured, compassionate first novel. There’s much to like in it, not least the kindness and maturity of its young author’s vision. All the characters are well rounded, fully explored, given their due. Difficult and complex racial themes aren’t reduced to stereotypes, which, given most contemporary books and films on the subject, is itself a small miracle. To put it bluntly, Paul Hond has the chops.… The Baker is an impressive debut, and Paul Hond is definitely a writer to watch.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Hond is a talented writer … an astute observer of explosive racial territory.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “What impressed me most about Hond’s writing was his ability to create accurate, real descriptions of such diverse areas as inner-city Baltimore and the back alleyways of Paris … a brilliant use of descriptive prose.”

  —Bookwire

  “(An) ambitious, altogether captivating first novel … Hond’s vision is as rock hard and uncompromising as the streets surrounding Mickey’s bakery.… The Baker is a triumph of the human spirit in what many regard as decidedly unspiritual times.”

  —Hadassah Magazine

  “Paul Hond’s first novel is a big, fragrant loaf of a book bursting with nourishing insights on fatherhood, marriage, race and class relations, the quest for artistic fulfillment—and bread. They’re weighty themes, but Hond rises to the occasion.”

  —Adelaide Advertiser (Australia)

  “Hond walks the delicate line between liberal doctrine and exploration with the assurance of a high-wire acrobat. He manages to be honest about racist fears and stereotypes without coming across as racist himself, and to be idealistic without seeming naive or dogmatic.… The tension is derived from the characters’ inner debates and their relationships. That gives the book its emotional impact, and, combined with the language and Hond’s vision of personal and political reconciliation, is more than enough reason to read it. It does not need to be qualified as a “good first novel.” It stands not just as a wonderful beginning, but a powerful and moving book in itself.”

  —Aufbau

  “The Baker rises on strong characters.… The reader senses the author’s compassion for them … (A) straightforward look at the sometimes precarious race relations between blacks and Jews.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Paul Hond has written a searching, inquisitive, deeply mature book that illuminates and ennobles a spectrum of the human experience, from racism to friendship to love. His insight is carried on prose as original and incisive as that of any other writer I know. And his characters are as multidimensional, unexpected, and real as only a born writer can produce.”

  —NEIL GORDON,

  author of Sacrifice of Isaac

  “The Baker is a real achievement. Rich and intelligent, elegant and strong, Paul Hond’s prose and insight create a world that is both authentic and absorbing. This is an extraordinary first novel.”

  —ANN HOOD,

  author of The Properties of Water

  ALSO BY PAUL HOND

  Mothers and Sons

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and dialogue are imagined,

  and not intended to represent real people, living or dead.

  Any such resemblances are entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by Paul Hond

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House

  Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in

  Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  This work was originally published in hardcover

  by Random House in 1997.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hond, Paul.

  The baker / Paul Hond.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76963-3

  I. Title.

  PS3558.0466B3 1997

  813’.54—dc21 96-52566

  Random House website address: www.randomhouse.com

  v3.1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book could not have been written without the support, guidance, vision and expertise of many people. I am especially indebted to my family; to Henry Bean, Nanette Burstein, Ann Hood, Michael Mandel, Jean-Isabel McNutt, Jim O’Connor, and
Lynne Robertson; and above all to my editor, Jon Karp, and my agent, Barbara J. Zitwer.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Questions for Discussion

  About the Author

  1

  Mickey Lerner pressed his nose to the glass at the top of the front door. Where was Benjie? He’d run out this morning with his basketball—the day had been warm—but now it was past dinnertime, it was dark, it was cold. You had to be a fanatic to play ball on a cold autumn night, and Mickey would sooner deliver his son to an all-consuming obsession than think about what he might be up to, in these days before Halloween. Not that Benjie was capable of perpetrating the sort of vandalism you often read about this time of year—the slashed tires, the grave markers defaced and tipped over, the car windows streaked with eggs, with soap, the scattered bonfires; no. Not Benjie. He was crazy for basketball: his bedroom walls were covered with giant posters of ferociously airborne NBA stars, whose sleek young bodies and hateful scowls taunted Mickey, prompted a strange jealousy, made him stare and then turn away.

  Still, Mickey’d been proud as hell when the kid made the high school team in his sophomore year. It was a marvelous thing to watch—Benjie’s white face in the huddle, nodding at the coach’s instructions, his eyes full of an attentiveness that bespoke, Mickey thought, a firm and proper upbringing; here was a coach’s dream, a workhorse, the kid who set an example. On the court, though, it was another story: Benjie never did live up to his potential, or rather, the potential didn’t live up to him; and so it was a bittersweet moment when the coach plucked him from the bench and started him at guard in the final game of his career, a gesture of respect toward a lumbering senior whose previous appearances had come chiefly in the waning seconds of contests whose outcomes were not in doubt. Mickey was in the stands that night (he’d closed the bakery early just to be there), and as he watched his son get buried by a flashy black kid from Columbus—thirty-six points this kid scored, some kind of record—he was haunted by reminders of his first and only amateur fight some forty years earlier, at a small, smoke-filled arena in Dundalk.

  The ride home from the school had been pretty quiet. Mickey tried to put things in perspective. “My old trainer was a lot like your coach,” he said, a touch of humor in his voice. “Always left his guys in too long. I ever tell you about him? Lou Glazer?” In fact he’d been compelled to tell the Glazer story many times during the course of Ben’s career. But never, ever did he mention what happened in Dundalk. “Don’t let it get you down,” he told his son. “There’s more to life than a ball game.”

  Now he considered turning on the porch light to give Benjie a beacon, but decided against it, not wanting to encourage to his door the trick-or-treaters, who would be getting ready to make their annual assault. Twenty, thirty years ago, Mickey would have been prepared, would have gone so far as to fit his mouth with toy fangs and hand out bags of cookies, maybe even hunch his shoulders and laugh in a sinister way upon answering the door. Back then, the kids—a glittering, paint-smeared, sheet-covered dwarf race in sneakers—would fan out over the neighborhood, patrolling the alleys, their orange plastic baskets filled with candy that sparkled under the street lamps like the jewels of a vanquished people; and it was fun to play along, to frighten them as they wished to be frightened, or jump back in mock horror when they raised their little bloody hands and roared. These days, though, you’d get maybe a dozen kids all night, strictly chaperoned, looking victimized in their store-bought costumes; it seemed there were more parents on the street than kids, and you might well have a lawsuit on your hands if you actually scared one of the little creatures.

  Mickey could hear the cry of Emi’s violin down in the basement; she’d been at it all day, and the scratchy, spooky sounds (Berg? Bartók?) were like an extension of his anxiety. In the last two months she’d either been on the road or sequestered downstairs, up past midnight and risen before dawn. Things had changed between them since the summer, he thought; she was avoiding him. Was he just imagining it?

  He went to the kitchen and finished cleaning up the meal he’d eaten alone—a Mediterranean salad made from the dregs of his garden, which had just yielded its last desperate fruits: gourd-shaped cucumbers, bulbous tomatoes nesting in dirt, skinny green beans curled like the fingernails of the dead; each one a bumper afflicted with a huge yellow-green unripeness. Mickey could be depressed by the final harvest, by the pallor and rubbery give of things, as though he were in some bumbling way responsible; so that while most people dreaded the steamy Baltimore summers and were happy to see them go, Mickey—brushing the dirt from a whopping, jaundiced eggplant, or examining the bent knuckles of a carrot—was always sad to inhale, in August, the first subtle change in the air, knowing that in a short time his little Eden would be dried up, and the big silken leaves from his neighbor’s sugar maple would sail onto his lawn, turning the whole yard red as blazes.

  The leaves. A beautiful sight on someone else’s lawn. On his own property it was like an attack, an invasion, and often he raked until it seemed he’d make the ground bleed. Only afterwards, the leaves bagged and set by the curb, would he realize that it was the beauty he resented, the carelessness of it, the way it revealed itself on its own terms and gave you only a short time to admire it. He did not like to be dazzled.

  And yet he rejoiced, each autumn, in the increased activity at the feeders out back, where he had learned to identify the birds that gathered there—cardinals, blue jays, starlings, chickadees—by song. A few summers ago he had even painted one of the feeders red to attract hummingbirds, though he had yet to see one. Perhaps he liked the birds because they came daily, without fail; they were reliable. And it was to their credit that they couldn’t be held in one’s hand and examined, like a bright dead leaf. There was nothing tragic about them.

  Mickey put the salad in the refrigerator. Benjie could have some later—a double-sized portion, seeing as how Emi wasn’t eating these days. Sometimes she’d get that way before a big concert—nerves, she said—though Mickey couldn’t help but feel, this time, that there was something more to it.

  He washed his hands, dried them on his trousers. What now? Maybe he’d take a walk over to the bakery and enjoy a little quiet among the oven and mixers before the bakers arrived for the night shift. He’d been doing a lot of that with Emi away—lurking in the dim tranquillity of his store, trying to cheer himself with the idea that he was, after all, a pretty lucky guy, that it was but an accident of birth that he ended up owning the place instead of being up to his elbows in dough at three and four in the morning like the men under his command.

  Silence downstairs. Was Emi taking a break? Mickey decided to drop in for a visit.

  He went to the basement door and knocked. “Emi?”

  “Come down,” she called.

  Mickey turned the knob. He’d always had the deepest respect for her privacy, and even now he could become physically aroused by breaking in on it.

  He went down the steps. “Em? You taking a break?”

  “A short one.”

  “Good.”

  She was seated in her chair, the bow in her lap. Mickey regarded her: dark hennaed hair pulled back
in a loose flimsy bun, cheekbones drawn up high, mouth turned slightly down at the corners. Her wide nervous eyes searched him, wondering what he wanted.

  Mickey walked over and stood beside the music stand. “Benjie hasn’t come home yet,” he said.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.” It pained Mickey to admit this; by a tacit arrangement prompted by Emi’s career, Benjie had become his father’s responsibility, and Mickey had long been too proud to share with Emi his parental concerns. But now, with Benjie out of school, and so unprotected from the world, Mickey felt a weakening of his resolve: he would need help—a young man’s life was at stake. “This morning he went out with his basketball,” Mickey said. “I haven’t heard a thing since.”

  “He’ll be fine,” said Emi, turning her eyes to her score. “He always is.”

  Mickey scratched his cheek; he wanted to trust in Emi’s words, but lately he’d been considering such remarks less a statement of a mother’s intuition than a glaring symptom of her indifference. How could she be so calm? But in the next moment there came a sound from above: the click of the lock, followed by the squeal of the door, the heavy footfalls on the stairs.

  Emi pretended not to notice—a rebuke of sorts, Mickey supposed. He laughed, feeling vindicated, as though Ben’s arrival, late and unexplained though it may have been, was evidence nonetheless of a solid rearing. He had at least come home after all. “Of course he’s fine,” Mickey said. “He’s eighteen. He’s indestructible.” And he himself felt invincible: he wanted to revel in this small acquittal, celebrate it with his body. He took a step forward, and was met by the end of the bow, thrust out like a sword at his belly.

  “Mickey.”

  “What?” Mickey said. He reached for her breast; the bow struck his hand.