Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  Rose loved Archie even better here, in person, humiliated in front of all these Jews. She felt defiance on his behalf, on behalf of the marvelous innocent resolve that kept the man bumbling forward. He missed his friend Stretch and death bewildered him and yet he found a way to stand there with his foot continuously in his mouth and not flee or begin weeping.

  Archie Bunker was, truly, a newborn in the disguise of an aging hard hat. Rose found herself plunging ever deeper into the maze of his charismatic stupidity. And then he finished, and with no one to help him picked his way down from the chapel’s riser. “Shalom,” he said quietly, glancing at the casket as he passed it, and in his awe at having spoken the alien word it was as if Rose was hearing it for the first time.

  Yes, Archie. We have a word for what you want to say to your friend Stretch, a word that doesn’t exist in any other tongue and you wouldn’t use it if it did. You’d think it was a Commie word and you wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. For what was “shalom”? Not merely “peace.” “Completeness”? Maybe. “Reciprocity”? Maybe that, too. But also “hello,” “goodbye,” and even “good riddance.” “All men are brothers, yes, have it your way, now get out of my face, I’ve got a more important destination.” Perhaps truly for the first time Rose felt the abjured power of her Judaism, its sway over the lumpen American mind. Before the onset of the beliefs that had split her from the Jews, Rose was already part of an international conspiracy. Yes. The stateless and ironical People of the Book. Behind all prejudice against Jews lay trepidation and wonder, exactly like that she now glimpsed in Archie.

  When the episode was over, her television switched off, Rose had to lay on her bed trembling. Was it possible, what happened at the funeral? Could she make such contact a second time?

  Once upon a time, Rose’s every footfall on pavement had been a tick on some moral clockface, each encounter a turn of some screw, every polite silent nod of the head burdened with shame in several directions—I’ve got my eye on you, buddy, so don’t imagine it’s you who’ve got your eye on me! You may appear an upstanding so-and-so to your present cronies but I recall who you used to be seen with in 1952—me! In the Prisoners’ Dilemma of neighborly recriminations, Rose played the warden, jangling keys in the corridor, holding everyone’s confession in her breast pocket. Having gone from the party before the party was smashed, never saying how last-second excommunication spared her part in the mass contrition, her authority deriving from who-knew-where. Rose bore nothing more than an arched eyebrow for her badge, her affiliations—with cops, librarians, local pols—as impossible to deny as to explicate. A somersault, from subversive to block-watcher! For Rose, to exit her kitchen and walk to Greenpoint Avenue was to set sail, beneath prophetic colors sooted by a century of remorse. Her banner: lost causes better than any cause that could ever have won. Dragging history’s cloud, she’d cover the area for miles, causing witnesses to shudder and fall silent.

  Personal grief was another thing entirely. It humbled her to the ground-level gossip of the Gardens. Wearing the mourner’s black was unsuitably pitiable, no banner at all. She caught scurrilous echoes even in the hush her old comrades cobbled together just long enough for her to pass on the sidewalk. The glue of political paranoia dried to dust and blew away, and paranoia turned out to be the last thing holding her sense of the neighborhood together. What remained was a bunch of harmless old people gossiping about Florida and death—of the two destinations, Rose couldn’t say which was worse. The younger inhabitants, for whom Sunnyside was merely a locality in which they’d settled, didn’t know her at all.

  In her exhaustion, Rose no longer buttonholed, no longer demanded introduction to each new face that appeared—a momentary lapse that became a landslide into anonymity. As she awarded her customary silent treatment to those she’d known for decades, and was unable to forge a connection to these young couples who’d likely respond with uncomprehending politeness, a gulf yawned on the sidewalk between Rose and any other human. The radical basis that had made Rose’s indignation an idealist’s warrant had become difficult to recall, even for her. Lacking warrant, she took on a disconcerting resemblance to a bitter old lady. Silence once loaded with admonitory implication was now mere silence. If, spooked by glance or gesture from this lonely figure, a newcomer troubled to ask, the answer came: So sad, her only daughter was murdered in South America. Or, more caustic: A hopeless case. A Red. The husband ran in the forties, the daughter tried Manhattan but that apparently wasn’t far enough. To find a man to touch her, she resorted to a schvartze, and even he tiptoed away. Any other woman would have raised the orphaned grandson, but no. The boy was shipped off to Pennsylvania instead, into some cult.

  Quakers aren’t a cult? Well, you’re entitled to your opinion.

  At least among the embittered Jews slugging shopping carts down refrigerated aisles the Holocaust ladies could roll up their sleeves and show you the numbers inked on their arms. Rose needed a tattoo reading “Premature Anti-Fascist.”

  Listen, I once forced a Wobbly to sit down and talk calmly to a Kropotkinite. It may mean nothing to you but worlds hung in the balance at that particular moment in time.

  Amid these ruins, and between invitations to funerals, Rose walked, and walked far, into the Witness Protection Program of Greater Queens. Somewhere at the intersection where Forty-Seventh Road crossed Sixty-Fourth Terrace on its way to Seventy-Eighth Place and beyond, she should be able to lose herself by immersion among the numberless humans living, without recognition or mercy, within the incomprehensible system of numbered pavements. The people, the people—it was with the people that she’d begun, as a sixteen-year-old who dared contend with her father at the Passover table. If this is a night for asking questions, let me add another: What makes Jewish slavery more compelling, at this late date, and knowing all we do, than any other of mankind’s present versions of enslavement? Weren’t we all people? It was to humankind, living under the false divisions our notions of race and creed had imposed, that she’d dedicated herself. And yet such dedication had led to her disastrous estrangement, not only from her father and his Judaism but from humankind. In obedience to her insight she’d drifted into Soviet-dictated cells half populated by FBI. She’d emerged with a nervous system wired to grasp the world as an arrangement of systems, institutions, ideologies. Now she thought: Enough with policemen and city councilmen! Enough with mayors—you might as well revere the pope! You invested power in any human man, a Jew even, only to see him seduced and corrupted, and in Manes’s case to see him unmistakably also headed off a cliff. Considering how Rose possessed a greater intelligence and a stiffer spine than any number of men under whose implausible authority she’d wasted most of her life, it was sobering to think she’d maybe been spared such fate only by happenstance of her sex. Rose Angrush Zimmer had never been elected to anything larger than the Queensboro Public Library board, there to sit, sole woman among judges, priests, and morons of commerce, barely getting in a word for every paragraph of oration she’d been made to absorb. She could as well have been emptying their ashtrays, slicing poppy-seed hamantaschen.

  It was only her womb that had relegated her to where she now felt she belonged, in the ranks of history’s losers: the People. She’d scoffed at the word feminism a hundred times when Miriam had proposed it as a description of Rose’s life. Now add this little twinge of regret to the incomprehensible loss, that she should come to see her own life from Miriam’s point of view too late for anything but a conversation with her daughter’s ghost, on the telephone that didn’t ring.

  Facing the ultimate loss, the death of an only child, a Jew would customarily renounce God. That renunciation, Rose had achieved decades before.

  Therefore, renounce what?

  Materialism.

  It was in this spirit that Rose walked now, repentant of patrol, now holding herself above no possible solace, and in this spirit that she veered into Kelcy’s Bar seeking something other than mercy from the sun blazing on her
head and an icy Coca-Cola with a slice of lemon, though she certainly sought those things. It was in this spirit that she again migrated, by the voodoo of longing, into Archie Bunker’s world. For Kelcy’s was Archie Bunker’s bar, located, according to the credit sequence, on Northern Boulevard. Why should Rose not arrive there?

  Out of the glare of the tavern, her eyes adjusted slowly, so he resolved from an outline that could have been that of a small circus bear in a porkpie hat: Bunker, seated alone, nursing an afternoon whiskey.

  Rose inched between the jukebox and pinball machine, to take a place at the bar. Summoning her fullest hauteur, she took a paper napkin from a pile and daubed at her brow. The five or six men scattered there—two at the bar’s corner, heads bent in mulling conference with their drinks, others at the small round tables, marooned on the saw-dusty floor—lowered their eyebrows, tamped their curiosity. Bunker greeted Rose with a subvocal grunt. The bartender shifted to face her with a pleasant wordless expectancy.

  “Coca-Cola with a slice of lemon, please.”

  “Pepsi okay?”

  “Pepsi.”

  “You ain’t gonna honor the occasion with an actual beverage?” interjected Bunker.

  “I’m sorry?” Rose said. Had she stepped out this afternoon in merry ignorance of yet another public holiday?

  “I just won a bet with my good friend Mr. Van Ranseleer here—he was sayin’ we wouldn’t get no women in here on no Tuesday afternoon. Since you won the bet for me, Mr. Van R. owes the rest of us a round, see?” This was directed, Rose saw, at one of the men at the bar’s end, who wore dark glasses indoors. “Yeah, that’s right, he’s blind. We was waitin’ for you to speak up so he’d know he was a loser. But don’t worry, he’s got more dough than the rest of us put together. So your, what’s it called, your Shirley Temple there is covered. But seein’ as how you honor us with your presence”—Bunker pronounced this witcher presents—“I was just suggestin’ there ain’t a law against a cold beer, in a spirit of celebreviation.”

  “Thank you, but I’m not a beer drinker.”

  “Pardon my assumption—but are you Jewish?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Well, you got to admit that you Jewish people aren’t known for big spending around a bar. No intents offended.”

  Rose considered this for a moment. “Is this impression of yours … more a matter of the drinking or the spending?”

  Bunker raised his hand as if halting a train. “Hey, Scotchmens is much worse.”

  “My name is Rose.”

  “Archie. Don’t worry, you is more than welcome in heres to drink Pepsi-Cola.”

  “I know you, Archie. I mean I’ve seen you before.”

  “Oh, jeez. Should I’d have recognized you?”

  “You wouldn’t remember, but I remember you. I was at Jerome—Stretch Cunningham’s funeral. I heard you speak.”

  A series of expressions crossed Archie’s face, inventorying the vast range of feelings available on the far side of anything remotely enlightened. Watching, Rose recalled her sense of entrancement that day at the funeral home. “Maybe that’s why I got the feeling you was Jewish,” Archie said, not untenderly.

  “Maybe so.”

  “Well, that loading dock never was the same without Stretch, I’ll say that.”

  “You’re the foreman—yes?”

  “For thirty-six years, but they gave me the golden wristwatch now. I got plans, though.”

  “What are your plans?”

  “You’re lookin’ at ’em.” He threw an arm wide and made a canny look to indicate that Rose had unwittingly entered a demesne or fiefdom.

  “To sit with your—” Rose skirted stooges and cronies, conscious of Archie’s sensitivities. “To pass the days among your friends here?”

  “Are you kiddin’? These losers? Nah, I’m buying this joint so’s I can pocket their money. I’m gonna expand it into a little restaurant, bust into the store next door—by which I mean the adjacent store.”

  “Yes—I understood you.” Rose again suppressed a laugh at his incompetent gallantry, a delicate bloom in a shit field.

  “I’m gonna make me a fortune.”

  Now that she’d found her way to Kelcy’s, Rose was able to journey back at will.

  Archie showed few signs of budging from his barstool, unless it was in agitated proclamation of the injustices done to “Richard E. Nixon.” The disgraced president had been the country’s last hope, according to Archie, who’d lower his voice sorrowfully to add, “But then we all turned on him, poor bastard.” Meeting censure from the regulars there at Kelcy’s—men whose faint liberal sentiments were legible only by contrast to Archie’s intolerance—he’d blow a raspberry or narrow his eyes and command: “Drink your drink there, and synchronize your tongues to silence.” Or, “Skip it. I ain’t got no time to, what do you call it, bandage words with you.” Then he’d resettle into the sulky pudding he’d been an instant earlier, behind his tumbler of blended whiskey. What implacability!

  And of what, or whom, was Rose reminded? Despite every sensible or humane opinion, also the English tongue, having been turned on its head? Her former self!

  For Rose had one of these, after so long: a former self. All she’d done was to ride the magic carpet of her darkened apartment’s couch, while the illuminated spotlight of the television’s tube transported her to Kelcy’s Bar, to afterward be whisked direct from Kelcy’s into dreamless, amnesiac sleep. In this she discovered freedom, like a painted figure who’d slipped out of a gilded frame, then tiptoed from the museum and into a nearby park.

  She’d become a—well, not a regular, not by the standard here. A returner, day after day, her presence barely noted by the others. Their taking her for granted was what Rose came for: to be fly-on-the-wall uncrucial, occupy no role whatsoever. Forty-odd years she’d dwelled, sometimes ruled, sometimes raged like a prisoner, in the Gardens, that urban farm she’d leapt at, in escaping the mud-baked trap of New Jersey. Then one day wandered into Kelcy’s Bar and discovered she’d been frozen into oppositional postures, stances at once as defensive as those of a crouching wrestler and as inflated and bogus as an opera singer’s.

  A former self, shed. Was she, then, at last, an anti-Communist? No. That Koestler stuff, The God That Failed, was as pompous in its way as its opposite. Another religion. She’d renounced nothing; ideals that had sustained her a lifetime still sustained her, because they weren’t ideological nor even really ideals. They existed in the space between one person and another, secret sympathies of the body. Alliances among those enduring the world. You found this where you found it, suddenly and without warning, at a certain meeting or protest. You’d then seek for a similar sensation, at the next hundred such meetings or protests, and be disappointed. It might be found at a pickle factory, in the pleasures of actual solidarity in labor. You found it at the counter of a White Castle, lunching on boiled eggs in a fraternity of those who’d sacrificed their hamburgers to soldiers’ rations. And now, at a boor’s tavern on Northern Boulevard. The century’s great comedy: that Communism had never existed, not once. So what was there to oppose?

  Rose existed. Communism, not so much. And for what did Rose exist? To talk and read and compel. When young, to fuck. Now, on her downslope, to talk and laugh at inanities and drink. She’d begun accepting the hospitality on offer at Kelcy’s, a whiskey and soda water now and again no longer refused, never mind the hideous flavor to which she’d never grow accustomed, never mind the occlusion to razor senses, to the trip-wire alertness on which she’d prided herself for years. No wonder no one trusted the Jews! The Jews refused to be stupid in this pleasant way, where certain lines blurred and dissolved, to form an automatic human amalgamation outside of capitalist exchange, of a kind socialists can only dream. How late in life to discover intoxication—but not too late. She’d tumbled from the party into civic purposes, civic institutions; she should have made for the first available alehouse. She should have let Miriam hand her a reefer,
the one and only time Miriam had tried. Dope was like feminism: a gift refused, an opportunity that died with her daughter.

  One afternoon Archie, resplendent surrealist poet, gave Rose’s secret mood a name. “Comraderism.” He’d been trying to name the feeling between himself and the others there, the men whom he lashed with insults when he wasn’t driving them into muttering perplexity at his baroque views on the Polish (“People of the Polack persuasion lean toward what you might call a certain lack of drive”), the Italians (“Packed into the subway like sardines we was, with no lights and no fans and me standing next to a three-hundred-pound Eyetalian, half of which was pure garlic”), and eschatology (“You liberals got more ways for the world to end than a dog has fleas”). Rose had grown to be an intimate of the tavern’s whole cast: the sepulchral Hank Pivnik, blinking into some unseen distance, perhaps toward his shell-shock’s Omaha Beach; Barney Hefner (“No relation to Hugh,” he said when he and Rose were introduced, “but we do share certain interests”); Van Ranseleer, the blind man with the dry wit; and Harry Snowden, the beleaguered bartender, who was readying himself against his best instincts to go into partnership with Bunker. For Archie’s dream was of scraping Kelcy’s off the window and renaming the tavern Archie Bunker’s Place.

  Right to do it, too, for the place was Archie’s. The various men who populated the bar were, despite any protestations to the contrary, in Archie’s pocket, under his sway, and Rose no less than any of them. More, she had the audacity to believe she was other than invisible to him, to think he might feel something for her. So that day when his stream of talk had led him blundering into the evocative word, she decided she might confess to him, make her stigma known in a humorous way.