J. D.
*
AT TEN OF NOON, Sam Marten hitched his way out of the taxicab, trying as usual to open the door with one hand, hold his briefcase in another and reach for his wallet with a third. Having only two hands, he found it a difficult job and, again as usual, he thudded his knee against the cab-door and found himself still groping uselessly for his wallet when his feet touched pavement.
The traffic of Madison Avenue inched past. A red truck slowed its crawl reluctantly, then moved on with a rasp as the light changed. White script on its side informed an unresponsive world that its ownership was that of F. Lewkowitz and Sons, Wholesale Clothiers.
Levkovich, thought Marten with brief inconsequence, and finally fished out his wallet. He cast an eye on the meter as he clamped his briefcase under his arm. Dollar sixty-five, make that twenty cents more as a tip, two singles gone would leave him only one for emergencies, better break a fiver.
“Okay,” he said, “take out one-eighty-five, bud.”
“Thanks,” said the cabbie with mechanical insincerity and made the change.
Marten crammed three singles into his wallet, put it away, lifted his briefcase and breasted the human currents on the sidewalk to reach the glass doors of the building.
Levkovich? he thought sharply, and stopped. A passerby glanced off his elbow.
“Sorry,” muttered Marten, and made for the door again.
Levkovich? That wasn’t what the sign on the truck had said. The name had read Lewkowitz, Loo-koh-itz. Why did he think Levkovich? Even with his college German in the near past changing the w’s to v’s, where did he get the “-ich” from?
Levkovich? He shrugged the whole matter away roughly. Give it a chance and it would haunt him like a Hit Parade tinkle.
Concentrate on business. He was here for a luncheon appointment with this man, Naylor. He was here to turn a contract into an account and begin, at twenty-three, the smooth business rise which, as he planned it, would marry him to Elizabeth in two years and make him a paterfamilias in the suburbs in ten.
He entered the lobby with grim firmness and headed for the banks of elevators, his eye catching at the white-lettered directory as he passed.
It was a silly habit of his to want to catch suite numbers as he passed, without slowing, or (heaven forbid) coming to a full halt. With no break in his progress, he told himself, he could maintain the impression of belonging, of knowing his way around, and that was important to a man whose job involved dealing with other human beings.
Kulin-etts was what he wanted, and the word amused him. A firm specializing in the production of minor kitchen gadgets, striving manfully for a name that was significant, feminine, and coy, all at once—
His eyes snagged at the M’s and moved upward as he walked. Mandel, Lusk, Lippert Publishing Company (two full floors), Lafkowitz, Kulin-etts. There it was—1024. Tenth floor. O.K.
And then, after all, he came to a dead halt, turned in reluctant fascination, returned to the directory, and stared at it as though he were an out-of-towner.
Lafkowitz?
What kind of spelling was that?
It was clear enough. Lafkowitz, Henry J., 701. With an A. That was no good. That was useless.
Useless? Why useless? He gave his head one violent shake as though to clear it of mist. Damn it, what did he care how it was spelled? He turned away, frowning and angry, and hastened to an elevator door, which closed just before he reached it, leaving him flustered.
Another door opened and he stepped in briskly. He tucked his briefcase under his arm and tried to look bright alive—junior executive in its finest sense. He had to make an impression on Alex Naylor, with whom so far he had communicated only by telephone. If he was going to brood about Lewkowitzes and Lafkowitzes—
The elevator slid noiselessly to a halt at seven. A youth in shirtsleeves stepped off, balancing what looked like a desk-drawer in which were three containers of coffee and three sandwiches.
Then, just as the doors began closing, frosted glass with black lettering loomed before Martens eyes. It read: 701—HENRY J. LEFKOWITZ—IMPORTER and was pinched off by the inexorable coming together of the elevator doors.
Marten leaned forward in excitement. It was his impulse to say: Take me back down to 7.
But there were others in the car. And after all, he had no reason.
Yet there was a tingle of excitement within him. The Directory had been wrong. It wasn’t A, it was E. Some fool of a non-spelling menial with a packet of small letters to go on the board and only one hind foot to do it with.
Lefkowitz. Still not right, though.
Again, he shook his head. Twice. Not right for what?
The elevator stopped at ten and Marten got off.
Alex Naylor of Kulin-etts turned out to be a bluff, middle-aged man with a shock of white hair, a ruddy complexion, and a broad smile. His palms were dry and rough, and he shook hands with a considerable pressure, putting his left hand on Marten’s shoulder in an earnest display of friendliness.
He said, “Be with you in two minutes. How about eating right here in the building? Excellent restaurant, and they’ve got a boy who makes a good martini. That sound all right?”
“Fine. Fine.” Marten pumped up enthusiasm from a somehow-clogged reservoir.
It was nearer ten minutes than two, and Marten waited with the usual uneasiness of a man in a strange office. He stared at the upholstery on the chairs and at the little cubby-hole within which a young and bored switchboard operator sat. He gazed at the pictures on the wall and even made a half-hearted attempt to glance through a trade journal on the table next to him.
What he did not do was think of Lev—
He did not think of it.
The restaurant was good, or it would have been good if Marten had been perfectly at ease. Fortunately, he was freed of the necessity of carrying the burden of the conversation. Naylor talked rapidly and loudly, glanced over the menu with a practiced eye, recommended the Eggs Benedict, and commented on the weather and the miserable traffic situation.
On occasion, Marten tried to snap out of it, to lose that edge of fuzzed absence of mind. But each time the restlessness would return. Something was wrong. The name was wrong. It stood in the way of what he had to do.
With main force, he tried to break through the madness. In sudden verbal clatter, he led the conversation into the subject of wiring. It was reckless of him. There was no proper foundation; the transition was too abrupt.
But the lunch had been a good one; the dessert was on its way; and Naylor responded nicely.
He admitted dissatisfaction with existing arrangements. Yes, he had been looking into Marten’s firm and, actually, it seemed to him that, yes, there was a chance, a good chance, he thought, that—
A hand came down on Naylor’s shoulder as a man passed behind his chair. “How’s the boy, Alex?”
Naylor looked up, grin ready-made and flashing. “Hey, Lefk, how’s business?”
“Can’t complain. See you at the—” He faded into the distance.
Marten wasn’t listening. He felt his knees trembling, as he half-rose. “Who was that man?” he asked, intensely. It sounded more peremptory than he intended.
“Who? Lefk? Jerry Lefkovitz. You know him?” Naylor stared with cool surprise at his lunch companion.
“No. How do you spell his name?”
“L-E-F-K-O-V-I-T-Z, I think. Why?”
“With a V?”
“An F.… Oh, there’s a V in it, too.” Most of the good nature had left Naylor’s face.
Marten drove on. “There’s a Lefkowitz in the building. With a W. You know, Lef-COW-itz.”
“Oh?”
“Room 701. This is not the same one?”
“Jerry doesn’t work in this building. He’s got a place across the street. I don’t know this other one. This is a big building, you know. I don’t keep tabs on everyone in it. What is all this, anyway?”
Marten shook his head and sat back. He
didn’t know what all this was, anyway. Or at least, if he did, it was nothing he dared explain. Could he say: I’m being haunted by all manner of Lefkowitzes today.
He said, “We were talking about wiring.”
Naylor said, “Yes. Well, as I said, I’ve been considering your company. I’ve got to talk it over with the production boys, you understand. I’ll let you know.”
“Sure,” said Marten, infinitely depressed. Naylor wouldn’t let him know. The whole thing was shot.
And yet, through and beyond his depression, there was still that restlessness.
The hell with Naylor. All Marten wanted was to break this up and get on with it. (Get on with what? But the question was only a whisper. Whatever did the questioning inside him was ebbing away, dying down....)
The lunch frayed to an ending. If they had greeted each other like long-separated friends at last reunited, they parted like strangers.
Marten felt only relief.
He left with pulses thudding, threading through the tables, out of the haunted building, onto the haunted street.
Haunted? Madison Avenue at 1:20 P.M. in an early fall afternoon with the sun shining brightly and ten thousand men and women be-hiving its long straight stretch.
But Marten felt the haunting. He tucked his briefcase under his arm and headed desperately northward. A last sigh of the normal within him warned him he had a three o’clock appointment on 36th Street. Never mind. He headed uptown. Northward.
At 54th Street, he crossed Madison and walked west, came abruptly to a halt and looked upward.
There was a sign on the window, three stories up. He could make it out clearly: A. S. LEFKOWICH, CERTIFIED ACCOUNTANT.
It had an F and an OW, but it was the first “-ich” ending he had seen. The first one. He was getting closer. He turned north again on Fifth Avenue, hurrying through the unreal streets of an unreal city, panting with the chase of something, while the crowds about him began to fade.
A sign in a ground-floor window, M. R. LEFKOWICZ, M.D.
A small gold-leaf semi-circle of letters in a candy-store window: JACOB LEVKOW.
(Half a name, he thought savagely. Why is he disturbing me with half a name?)
The streets were empty now except for the varying clan of Lefkowitz, Levkowitz, Lefkowicz to stand out in the vacuum.
He was dimly aware of the park ahead, standing out in painted motionless green. He turned west. A piece of newspaper fluttered at the corner of his eyes, the only movement in a dead world. He veered, stooped, and picked it up, without slackening his pace.
It was in Yiddish, a torn half-page.
He couldn’t read it. He couldn’t make out the blurred Hebrew letters, and could not have read it if they were clear. But one word was clear. It stood out in dark letters in the center of the page, each letter clear in its every serif. And it said Lefkovitsch, he knew, and as he said it to himself, he placed its accent on the second syllable: Lef-KUH-vich.
He let the paper flutter away and entered the empty park.
The trees were still and the leaves hung in odd, suspended attitudes. The sunlight was a dead weight upon him and gave no warmth.
He was running, but his feet kicked up no dust and a tuft of grass on which he placed his weight did not bend.
And there on a bench was an old man; the only man in the desolate park. He wore a dark felt hat, with a visor shading his eyes. From underneath it, tufts of gray hair protruded. His grizzled beard reached the uppermost button of his rough jacket. His old trousers were patched, and a strip of burlap was wrapped about each worn and shapeless shoe.
Marten stopped. It was difficult to breathe. He could only say one word and he used it to ask his question: “Levkovich?”
He stood there, while the old man rose slowly to his feet; brown old eyes peering close.
“Marten,” he sighed. “Samuel Marten. You have come.” The words sounded with an effect of double exposure, for under the English, Marten heard the faint sigh of a foreign tongue. Under the “Samuel” was the unheard shadow of a “Schmu-el.”
The old man’s rough, veined hands reached out, then withdrew as though he were afraid to touch. “I have been looking but there are so many people in this wilderness of a city-that-is-to-come. So many Martins and Martines and Mortons and Mertons. I stopped at last when I found greenery, but for a moment only—I would not commit the sin of losing faith. And then you came.”
“It is I,” said Marten, and knew it was. “And you are Phinehas Levkovich. Why are we here?”
“I am Phinehas ben Jehudah, assigned the name Levkovich by the ukase of the Tsar that ordered family names for all. And we are here,” the old man said, softly, “because I prayed. When I was already old, Leah, my only daughter, the child of my old age, left for America with her husband, left the knouts of the old for the hope of the new. And my sons died, and Sarah, the wife of my bosom, was long dead and I was alone. And the time came when I, too, must die. But I had not seen Leah since her leaving for the far country and word had come but rarely. My soul yearned that I might see sons born unto her, sons of my seed, sons in whom my soul might yet live and not die.”
His voice was steady and the soundless shadow of sound beneath his words was the stately roll of an ancient language.
“And I was answered and two hours were given me that I might see the first son of my line to be born in a new land and in a new time. My daughter’s daughter’s daughter’s son, have I found you, then, amidst the splendor of this city?”
“But why the search? Why not have brought us together at once?”
“Because there is pleasure in the hope of the seeking, my son,” said the old man, radiantly, “and in the delight of the finding. I was given two hours in which I might seek, two hours in which I might find … and behold, thou art here, and I have found that which I had not looked to see in life.” His voice was old, caressing. “Is it well with thee, my son?”
“It is well, my father, now that I have found thee,” said Marten, and dropped to his knees. “Give me thy blessing, my father, that it may be well with me all the days of my life, and with the maid whom I am to take to wife and the little ones yet to be born of my seed and thine.”
He felt the old hand resting lightly on his head and there was only the soundless whisper.
Marten rose.
The old man’s eyes gazed into his yearningly. Were they losing focus?
“I go to my fathers now in peace, my son,” said the old man, and Marten was alone in the empty park.
There was an instant of renewing motion, of the sun taking up its interrupted task, of the wind reviving, and even with that first instant of sensation, all slipped back—
At ten of noon, Sam Marten hitched his way out of the taxicab, and found himself groping uselessly for his wallet while traffic inched on.
A red truck slowed, then moved on. A white script on its side announced: F. Lewkowitz and Sons, Wholesale Clothiers.
Marten didn’t see it.
CAROL CARR
Look, You Think You’ve Got Troubles
The delights of humor rest on fear and foible. Its best materials are insecurity, discomfort, frustration, hypocrisy, and nostalgia; its favorite tools are satire, ironic self-mockery, and exaggeration. It is both a foil and a shield, an effective armor against a hostile society.
Quite a bit of contemporary American humor takes its cues from Jewish culture, and Jewish humor—that particular blend of language, style, caricature, and profound alienation—becomes an important societal mirror. Spoken with the tongue of the outsider—the anti-hero—it has the sophistication of the urban middle class and the grit and pith of the ghetto. And it’s taken to heart. As Albert Goldman says, “Jewishness itself has become a metaphor for modern life. The individual Jew—the alien in search of identity—has become a symbolic protagonist.”
Jewish humor—a term, like science fiction, that is too broad and elusive to pin down—might best be defined by example. Take a nice Jewish cou
ple with a nice Jewish daughter who marries a Martian. He’s the ultimate goy, or is he? If love can conquer all, what then happens to tradition and law and culture and despondent parents? Let them be conquered while the reader settles into rocket ships and belly laughs. But watch out for that mythical assimilated Jew peeking around the corner. He’s grinning slyly and baring his chest.
J. D.
*
TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH, in the old days we would have sat shivah for the whole week. My so-called daughter gets married, my own flesh and blood, and not only he doesn’t look Jewish, he’s not even human.
“Papa,” she says to me, two seconds after I refuse to speak to her again in my entire life, “if you know him you’ll love him, I promise.” So what can I answer—the truth, like I always tell her: “If I know him I’ll vomit, that’s how he affects me. I can help it? He makes me want to throw up on him.”
With silk gloves you have to handle the girl, just like her mother. I tell her what I feel, from the heart, and right away her face collapses into a hundred cracks and water from the Atlantic Ocean makes a soggy mess out of her paper sheath. And that’s how I remember her after six months—standing in front of me, sopping wet from the tears and making me feel like a monster—me—when all the time it’s her you-should-excuse-the-expression husband who’s the monster.
After she’s gone to live with him (New Horizon Village, Crag City, Mars), I try to tell myself it’s not me who has to—how can I put it?—deal with him intimately; if she can stand it, why should I complain? It’s not like I need somebody to carry on the business; my business is to enjoy myself in my retirement. But who can enjoy? Sadie doesn’t leave me alone for a minute. She calls me a criminal, a worthless no-good with gallstones for a heart.
“Hector, where’s your brains?” she says, having finally given up on my emotions. I can’t answer her. I just lost my daughter, I should worry about my brains too? I’m silent as the grave. I can’t eat a thing. I’m empty—drained. It’s as though I’m waiting for something to happen but I don’t know what. I sit in a chair that folds me up like a bee in a flower and rocks me to sleep with electronic rhythms when I feel like sleeping, but who can sleep? I look at my wife and I see Lady Macbeth. Once I caught her whistling as she pushed the button for her bath. I fixed her with a look like an icicle tipped with arsenic.
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