The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  * * *

  Herman takes a screaming Yvonne out of the house and puts her in a nursing home where she is sedated and kept in a locked room. He returns to Scribbs Place and sets fire to his home, starting in the attic and rushing from room to room with ignited wands of Hebrew newspapers and Hebrew prayer books and Hebrew tallises and tefillins, and anything connected to his religion that he can lay his hands on, torching everything as if propelled by some evil spirit. By the time he reaches the ground floor he is barely able to see the front door to get out alive. Oh yes, he wants to get out alive. He is not going to give God the satisfaction of destroying him, no sir. The house is a bonfire, a conflagration so huge and billowing and noisy in its whooshings and groanings that it sounds like a rage from heaven. But he can’t leave yet. There is some unfinished business here, with God, for God in some profound way has possessed him and owned him and has now double-dealt him in a way his mind cannot unravel. Instinct, not premeditation, takes him to the basement, where he unpadlocks the room and stands for a moment staring maniacally at the overflowing shelves, almost toppling under the weight of row upon row of jars of all sizes filled to their screwed-on-tight metal lids with snippets of pale pink baby boy flesh. Above and around and beside him the howlings and slurpings of the inferno grow louder and nearer as Herman’s temple is consumed. For a moment he thinks he will just sit down and perish here. Where else is there to go? What else is there to do in life? At least he can die among the trophies of his calling as the God who guided his hand so crudely and indelicately when in his nervous chutzpah he dared to circumcise his own firstborn son now takes him, too.

  “There is no sin in this!” Nate Bulb has tried to tell him over and over through all these years since Herman performed that bris on his own son. “Where? Where in what book of the Holy Law do you find this prohibition?”

  “It is in the Vernah, or the Vishnah, or the Mersh … I know I have read it. I know it!”

  And even though Nate reads cover to cover the Vernah, the Vishnah, the Mershnah, he cannot find any reference to such a sin.

  “I cannot find it, I cannot find such a prohibition, you are wrong!”

  “What do you know about how to read the Holy Words! You are not even a Jew.”

  And since this is true, and since no one but Herman and Nate know it, and since Nate’s masquerade certainly crosses the border into its own questionable regulations of sendek-dom, the argument ends here.

  Herman watches his jars explode around him from the heat. There it is! He takes in his hands the only small bottle left, the one containing the fragment of his son, this Emmanuel, this Emmanuel now dead. Is his firstborn son now burned up at his feet? Did Nate get him to Onkel? Are these his ashes floating in the air, looking like pieces of black curled tissue paper? Is this Emmanuel now so dead there is nothing left of him but this piece of his tiny penis? His foreskin. He pours all the preservative out of the bottle and holds the tiny bit of skin in the palm of his hand, moving still, as if it has its own life, its scriggly unevenness a taunting reminder of his own ineptitude. As if it is saying to him, I will not die; you must be punished; you must go through life atoning for this.

  So Herman washes the piece of foreskin clean of the formaldehyde in the laundry sink. He puts it in his mouth and he sucks on it, to absorb … what, he doesn’t know. Strength? He doesn’t want to be strong anymore. The poor child’s spirit? He loathed the weakling. Atonement? Never. Atone for what? I was misled! I was hoodwinked! He chews the skin. Tough though it is, he chews it until it is mush, then spittle, then saliva, then nothing but the taste of bitter rue, and then he swallows it as he walks from the ashes of his house and out onto the front lawn, where he collapses in a fever. With one last horrible gasping whoosh of combustion, Herman’s temple collapses to earth behind him. The last tiny bits of what is left in his mouth of his firstborn son now slide into his gut forever.

  Oh, the horror of this story is not over. The new son, Abraham Masturbov, has been left by both his father and mother and his nurse, abandoned in the midst of these burning hallways and rooms and corridors and the seven (or is it eight or nine or seventeen or thirty?) bathrooms. Not for the first time in his life, Abraham Masturbov, close to death, in death’s immediate vicinity, must save himself. Abraham Masturbov, barely brissed, in his swaddling clothes, is tossed from his layette in the building’s turmoil and falls into a cold porcelain bathtub imported at great cost from Ninsky, where no Jew could ever afford such a heavy tub, so heavy that it sinks slowly down, floor by floor, through the weakened timbers, to the very foreskins’ storehouse in the basement, to land on top of his brother’s black skeleton, now fleshless, with its scorched collar of death. No, Nate Bulb did not get Emmanuel to Onkel. What indeed has happened to Nate Bulb? The infant Abraham Masturbov lies on top of and in the middle of this incendiary horror.

  There. There is Nate Bulb, awakening from some bad dream, his head bruised and bleeding, arising from under fallen timbers and stumbling to grab and save the infant and exit with him, just in time.

  * * *

  Yvonne emerges several years later from the nursing home, more silent, more taciturn, a white-haired shriveled woman of thirty-five or so.

  During these several years, Herman Masturbov has become the richest Jew in the District of Columbia, and perhaps in this New World. He owns—oh, what difference the numbers or the adjectives, he owns and owns, everywhere, here, there, outlying, suburban, in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia. People in this New World will live anywhere.

  No more the mohel, now he carves up the city itself. He hates God now. No, he doesn’t hate Him. He no longer believes He even exists. Herman believes only in evil, and the devil, and the triumph of hate in this New World, no different from the Old World that Jews ran from so fast, in both of which, it is now perfectly clear, God, after such devotion, after such sacrifice, mows you down in your own tracks.

  My own precious son!

  No more holy words come to his lips, nor smiles of kindness or neighborliness to his face, nor deeds of generosity toward anyone anywhere.

  He has been punished for something, and he will never know what that something is.

  He had been a good Jew and he had tried to do the good thing and still he had been punished.

  Well, he will not lie down and submit. His hands have been too cruelly slapped. Like some petulant child who grabs his marbles and runs to play another game, Herman does just that.

  The house Abraham Masturbov grows up in is Herman’s second palace, grander, more elaborate, and uglier than its ancestor. This one is out on Sixteenth Street in an area owned mostly by Herman and now becoming most fashionable as this country and its capital city start the long run-up toward World Wars I and II. He does not build this one himself. No, he will never do that again. He buys it from a “developer,” a new breed of men who build buildings in groups, on speculation, gambling that at a particular moment in time there will be a man to buy a particular house just like it is. Herman knows this house is the ugliest he’s ever seen. That’s why he buys it. If the first house weighed a ton, this one weighs ten. It is a monstrosity of red brick and white brick and tan brick with pillars and porte cocheres and caryatids and turrets and minarets and arches and dormers and tidbits of styles from all around the globe and all of architectural history, borrowed haphazardly and ineptly whipped together. It’s a gross blight on this neighborhood, his very own neighborhood, and he knows that once he’s in it everyone around him will want one just like it.

  Yvonne utters no opinion.

  “Any room you want,” he tells her.

  She nods. She climbs to the top floor—the house inside has as many architectural nightmares as outside, stairways up and down and back and forward, rooms tall and odd and paneled, or bare, and all the way up on the fifth floor is one tiny room, no more than a cell, stuck in a minaret, and into this she goes, and shuts the door in her husband’s face.

  And so continues the hell on earth of H
erman and Yvonne Masturbov.

  * * *

  After several years in his new house of silence and ugliness—he has furnished the place with greater reckless monolithic tastelessness than the last—Herman decides once more that he must have another son. It is a practical decision. He owns too much now. He must train someone to increase it even more after he is gone. He is fucking not a woman but a city and a country, and his seed, as the Vernah had said when last he read it, must never cease to multiply. There must be Masturbovs forever.

  And Abraham is so quiet, so withdrawn as to be almost invisible. He does not seem to be a son to whom a father can bequeath such an inheritance. He rarely speaks, particularly to Herman. Learning Yiddish or Hebrew is of course out of the question, as is any religious education. Besides, the child refuses to go to school, refuses to be taught by anyone except Nate Bulb, refuses to have friends. No one would know that his intelligence is superior, but for some testing done on him by strange new doctors specializing in communicating with the mind. Because he is so quiet Herman thinks his son is soft. Herman would call him a mama’s boy but for the fact that Yvonne is not interested in him at all. Yes, Herman, who is after all a businessman who knows when it is time to cut his losses, decides the time has arrived for another son.

  He chuckles to himself as he climbs the five flights to Yvonne’s aerie one afternoon. It makes no difference that he’s never been up here since she closed the door in his face. It’s his house, isn’t it? Since he’s usually away all day she’s come to feel safe in the daytime. That’s when she sneaks out into the garden, he’s told. He wonders if she still smells and wears the same clothes. She has her food brought to her room, so how would he know? He throws open her door. Her room is neat and bright, painted white before white rooms are fashionable. She has only a narrow mattress on the floor, and a small rocking chair by the window, from which a view of the neighborhood can be seen. Here and there are a few items from Russia: a kerchief of her mother’s tacked to one wall; a miniature sewing kit that Emmanuel presented to her one year for her birthday, kept open and displayed on the windowsill, its tiny thimble and row of various needles, its dozen tiny rolls of thread the only bright colors in the room; a small bottle, tightly capped, in which she keeps her wedding ring as a reminder that she is not free, set by her pillow to see last before sleep and first upon arising: it breaks her heart to see this ring, for it is everything and it is nothing. You are my biggest mistake, she mumbles to it. She mumbles useless mantras to herself, too.

  She is lying down on the mattress. Her eyes stare at the ceiling. She looks like a corpse to him. How will he ever arouse himself sufficiently? She is thin and pale and white and gray and most unhealthy-looking. The neat spare whiteness of the room makes her look even worse. What is that smell? She stinks. She still stinks. She still wears the smelly black schmata she never takes off. Will she never be clean and smell nice for him again?

  He has prepared for this. He reeks of German cologne. He opens a window wide to the crisp afternoon breeze. She shudders as he sits down on the floor beside her. She has wondered how long it would be before he came to her again. He sticks his hand under her dress and pokes around in her vagina. He has not even said hello, how are you, it has been a long time. Her stench has already depleted the erection he carried with him up from his bedroom, where he looked at dirty pictures obtained for him by Nate. He begins to masturbate himself. He has not even removed his trousers, just yanked his penis out through the fly of his tweed suit, so coarse that it abrades the skin of his member. He tries to summon up the images of the women in their black lingerie, but he sees only Yvonne in black rags, a woman looking up at him with the eyes of a prisoner, eyes that say, Are you crazy? Is the world crazy? And answering yes to both. Somehow he gets himself hard. He throws back her dress. She wears nothing under it. He sticks himself into her, holding his breath lest her odor detumesce him. He pumps and pumps. He tries to recall when she was pretty. He tries to recall someone pretty he wanted to fuck sometime somewhere. He is pouring with sweat. She just lies there. She wishes she were dead. He finally feels something arriving. He ejaculates with a pain he’s never associated with this act, as if shooting through him is not semen but molten poison. He screams out, “Give me another son!”

  The son is a daughter and she is born dead. Yvonne births her on that narrow mattress with the help of Nate Bulb. She pops the baby out of her and she smiles when Nate tells her her daughter is dead.

  And so it is Abe who, like it or not, ready or not, will be raised to own the future. Rain or shine, each day, every day, he is driven by Nate Bulb to Herman’s office and subjected to an increasingly rigorous exposure to all aspects of money, its accumulation and management, to the ins and outs of real estate, negotiation, borrowing, selling, banking, all the tricks ganifs might put over on you if you don’t watch out. Because he loves what he is imparting, Herman is a good if impatient teacher. For the boy, there is not a moment when he doesn’t feel his father is saying to him, You are not smart enough. You are not smart enough to learn what I teach you but I teach you anyway. It is difficult for Herman to tell if his son is learning anything, or even listening. Like his mother, Abe is so muted in his facial and verbal expressiveness as to seem retarded. But he’s a listener. Even Herman finally sees this.

  When he’s twelve Abe buys his first piece of property, in Blundenburger. Herman wonders why. It’s such a backwoods place. A year later it’s worth four times more. Herman buys some land there too, although Abe warns him not to. “I was lucky,” he tells his father. Neither smiles, although each would like to.

  “This is what you have always wanted,” Nate Bulb exults for Herman.

  “How do you know what I have always wanted?” Herman answers.

  Abe remains a peculiarly passive child. Even though he receives no parental love or affection or attention, he does what he is told, he learns what he is taught; he doesn’t complain; he dutifully makes friends with other rich Jewish youngsters placed in his path (to them he is the desired one, the one their parents command them to be pals with); but of course it is as if he is missing some piece of his insides, some piece that could turn him from the zombie with the crackerjack skills into someone with a heart. For a brief moment in time, Doris Hardware, still some years away from his arms, will be that missing piece. But he should only know now that Doris will be bound to fail him, as his destiny is bound to his birth, at the very beginning of this century, the new day that never quite dawns, and that before Doris, before any woman, there is always the matter of that most egregious missing piece, his mother, Yvonne.

  After the stillborn birth Yvonne begins to suffer from an outpouring of blood that suddenly begins to flow, slowly at first but then profusely, voluminously. It does not stop. Much to her surprise she finds that she is frightened. She thought she was waiting for death. Can it be possible that she is regressing to girlhood and periods? Old remedies exert their pull: she takes a taxi, after all these years, to the mikva, the ritual bath off South Capitol Street. Perhaps it is as simple as the God she has not been talking to is telling her anyway that her body simply must be cleansed. But it doesn’t work, and when she actually bleeds into the pool she is told to find a doctor and not to return.

  When she has the strength she goes out to look for such a doctor. But she can find no doctor who can explain her bleedings, not even her brother Israel Jerusalem, who in a few years is to be celebrated for his solving of the Mercy Hooker bleedings and is thus not yet able to tell his sister, “She had glause. You do not have glause. I need money to understand glause better. Do you think Herman would fund my research into glause?”

  When she has the strength she spends whole days going back to the old neighborhoods where the old doctors and midwives and shamans from Russia still live. She goes from door to door, begging for any scrap of information. She sometimes goes barefoot, because in Lastnavatnyia to walk barefoot endows the quest with an aspect of holiness and may improve the chance of suc
cess. A sign, a vertov, an omen that over there, there! lies help, an answer, gedugnenheit. Do you recognize my symptoms? she asks old women in the street. Rack your brain. Can you remember anything like this? Some think she has gone crazy, that at last Herman’s ill-gotten gains—and in these streets of poor Jews the money of all rich Jews is ill-gotten—have brought him this, a suffering abandoned bleeding shoeless wife. The ever-faithful Nate Bulb trails her at a discreet distance. Some of the old ladies she confronts say they’ve heard of such an affliction back in the old days, in the old country, in the Old World, in the past, but no, I don’t remember what to do about it. Most slam their doors in her face, even when they know who she is, the landlord’s wife, what has he ever done for us, but listen, be nice to her, a good deed toward her might give you … what? A free month? You are as crazy as she is. Down deep everyone is afraid she has some contagious disease. Plagues have come from less. Some pass on to her names of people who once mentioned … or might have … or could know … but of course know nothing when she finds them. She continues to bleed.

  After a while of shlepping to the old neighborhoods and finding no relief she gives in and succumbs to her mattress. She lies on her narrow pallet in the tiny turret room of this mansion in the best neighborhood in Washington owned by a husband worth by now tens of millions of dollars, maybe more, most likely more, yes, definitely more, and she hikes up her unclean schmata so she can rub her privates with thick Turkish towels and clean away the unclean bleedings no one understands. The stench she can’t clean away. The stench is awful. It’s hard to keep help, to find anyone who will even bring her food, much less remove the growing mound of towels drenched with blood. Sometimes the flows come before she can get a towel in place. She can’t clean herself up fast enough and there are puddles on the floor. The mattress is like a sponge. Once, when she passes out from weakness, the blood is unstanched for so long that it seeps through the floor to the room below, one of the maid’s rooms, so that the maid quits that very middle of the night.