The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  * * *

  Vanished, ha ha ha. Vanished, she says. We reckless ones do not vanish. We may take a break now and then, just for you to let your guard down. Not everyone was dying from the flu. They just thought they were.

  ONCE MORE INTO THE BREECH

  Another soiree at Mary Harriman’s. She cares so much. They do go on and on, her teas. Mary loves to invite people over to discuss how to get rid of other people. Someone tried to schedule the discussion to include “Why does Henry Ford hate the Jews so much?” Someone gets up to report that 120,000 Jews have passed through Ellis Island. Mary wishes she could remember every guest’s name, but she can’t, not anymore, but then everyone appears to be bringing someone else now, and while she has a big house, and has already opened her connecting second living room to manage the overflow, still and all she is wondering if future meetings should be held in a larger venue. Ianthe, still game for being the only one with an opposing view, chirps out with her growing ability to bring irony and humor to the fore (“gallows humor” it will be called one day). “If Henry put half as much energy into his automobile factory as he did into promoting hatred of the Jews and their elimination, he would encounter no competition whatsoever.” Of course no one gets the joke, much less the irony, and Ianthe wonders, as she always does, if she should continue to traipse up from Washington for any more of these things. But today she learns that Mr. Rockefeller personally sends a report that he has donated almost half a million dollars to German researchers and $317,000 to build, in Germany itself, an institute for race biology. “A young Kraut scientist by the name of Josef Mengele, still wet behind his perfect ears, has come to extend his country’s personal thanks,” Ianthe notes in her own notes. (After World War I everyone starts taking notes.) “He speaks with the aid of an interpreter. He himself is from the Max Planck Institute, which elicits applause. Mengele reports that John D., ever on the alert, has placed in charge one Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, and everyone here ooohs and aaahs when hearing his ‘famous’ name; Verschuer is evidently already promising ‘a total solution to the Jewish problem.’ ‘We are sterilizing up to 5,000 per month. Mr. Hitler sends his regards and thanks. He is most impressed with your work and what he is learning from you.’ A new face claims to be visiting from Michigan, which now boasts of having 875,000 members in its chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. He claims that Mr. Ford is commencing a ninety-one-part series, ‘The International Jew: The World’s Problem,’ for publication in his newspaper and for anyone else who wants to read it.”

  This new face, a nice-looking fellow, Mary thinks, teaches at Yaddah and reports that the university’s president, Lawrence Lowell, is determined to cleanse the school of shameful homosexuals. “A secret nest of them has been discovered and so far three of them have been so shamed they have taken their own lives, and seventeen of them have resigned from the school, before they could be officially expelled, of course.”

  “Fancy that,” Ianthe pipes up. “We must send a letter of official thanks to Larry Lowell for doing our job for us.” She realizes that, once again, no one gets her joke when her words receive applause.

  Jeshua Brinestalker has sent his regrets and Mr. Odemptor appears to have died. When Mary is about to adjourn the meeting and direct everyone toward her tea and petite cucumber thingees in the adjoining smaller salons, one Henry Gerber, a man with a face and composure that indicate he has been through a lot, speaks up about Henry Ford. “We never did fully discuss this man and his activities and whether they are useful to your cause or not. Why exactly does he hate Jews so much, all Jews, and with such passionate obsession? Is there anyone here who would like to speak to that?” No one there wishes to speak to that. Mary wonders how that Gerber chap got in. She never quits marveling about the wonders of democracy.

  But the rush for Mary’s famous finger thingees is on.

  SOMETHING TO DO WITH TRUTH

  I want to get back to Doris and bring Abraham Masturbov front and center, because Mordy will be one of our central characters, indeed one of history’s more important ones as well, and Abe’s his father. Abe also wants to be Doris’s husband, and … well, let me try to tell it in a little better order. It’s really Lucas Jerusalem who’s the expert on Abe’s story. Over the years it’s been Lucas who’s told Daniel Jerusalem many of the little bits and pieces that are put together here. I may be going back further than necessary in laying out the backstory, but if this is the prime complaint against me, I shall remain consistent to my belief that all is better than less than all. (Sorry, Dame Hermia. I remind you once again that this is my history of the plague.)

  Abe meets Doris Hardware in 1925, on a business trip to Baltimore, where she’s living. He sees her on the street. She’s walking toward him. He wants her the minute he sees her, with a pain that takes him by surprise. He’s never associated sex or desire or attraction with pain. But then he is only fifteen years old—well, almost sixteen—and still a virgin. She has red hair, as does he, and she seems electric, radiating enormous confidence, in her walk, her looks, her clothing, which is of some new fashion, rolled-down stocking tops and skinny skirts that are made of shiny stuff like beads and strips of satin colored to match high-heeled shoes and sequined bags. She looks like everything modern and tomorrow, and she smiles at everyone and the day. She looks wonderful, she looks like she feels good, and she makes you feel good, too.

  Abe is walking down this street trying to make a few bucks searching for vacant lots. He’s a scout for his late father Herman’s old real estate associate, Goldowsky, a rich New York Jew who believes that his money can yield growth only away from New York, where all those other Jews, the nosy noisy ones, will see what Goldowsky is buying and beat Goldowsky to the punch. Goldowsky is a quiet Jew. He says there’s no room in New York for a quiet Jew to spread his wings and fly. All this means is that the past and present foundations of Goldowsky’s fortune are more suspect than those of others, which are often disreputable enough. Real estate is one of those businesses where much can be hidden. Goldowsky believes the future is “out there,” away from prying eyes. He would have moved south years ago but for his late wife, who thought the South wasn’t kosher.

  Goldowsky was also a good friend of Herman Masturbov. They were both members of the Council of Jews, big-deal Jews whose names are well-known. You don’t have to be rich to be on the Council of Jews. You have to have done something. Goldowsky did something. He built the synagogue for Jewish lepers.

  This was not so charitable as it sounds. (Not that charity affects your membership.) Six Goldowskys were lost in the Fruit Island massacre. Their descendants have convinced themselves that all the Fruit Islanders were lepers, and that this is why they were there, and why they were put to death. Well, Goldowsky is terrified that he is a carrier of the Goldowsky gene, that one day before he dies the gene will assert itself and announce, Bam! Goldowsky, you’re a leper.

  He owns a lot of land in Brooklyn and Queens. He thinks these are very ugly places, these “boroughs,” and even if they are profitable and people are slowly moving there to make him even richer, he isn’t proud of owning such ugly land, with belching fumes from plants processing this and that. Jews are supposed to feel good when they walk their land. Goldowsky doesn’t feel good when he walks Brooklyn and Queens. Goldowsky doesn’t like ugly things, although he is short and squat ugly himself, and knows it.

  The synagogue for lepers was really an accident. It’s a horrible story. One day his only son, Neil, writes him from the trip around the world that he’s been taking, forever, it seems to his father. He has met a wonderful woman and he wants to marry her. He says she is Jewish. Goldowsky, only recently elected an officer of the Council of Jews, is trying to live a life of higher consciousness. He senses immediately that God is finally blessing him. Neil has previously been nothing but trouble. Neil writes that he met Harriette in Hawaii and will pick her up on his return voyage and bring her home for the ceremony.

  Goldowsky undertakes to build a small syn
agogue, a jewel, to celebrate the happy news. He pulls out all the stops to build it before the couple returns. He builds this synagogue in Kretzky Fields, a swamp far out in Queens. He camps out beside it while it is being built. He won’t leave the vicinity. When it’s finished and consecrated by the chief rabbi, Goldowsky prostrates himself on the stone floor and won’t get up. He lies there for days with no food or water entering him and no elimination leaving him. Because he remains so still, and because he requires nothing, and because he is prostrate on the floor of a soon-to-be-consecrated holy place, he is thought to be in some sort of special and holy, if slightly irregular, communion with Yahweh. Please, God, Goldowsky is said to have prayed over and over, make him a good son. Make her a good wife. His own wife, Neil’s mother, disappeared mysteriously after he saw her gallivanting with another man.

  At last Neil returns. The daughter-in-law-to-be’s name is Harriette Slake. This is both an old Hawaiian name and an old Jewish Hawaiian name, Neil says. Goldowsky didn’t know there were Jews in Hawaii. Where did they come from? What kind of Jew would call himself Slake? Evidently, his son tells him, Slake, in the Pertoo dialect of the northern island where Harriette’s family settled, and where they now own much land, is a lucky name meaning “to cool or refresh by wetting or moisturizing,” which is why the Slakes changed their name from Grebetz when they first came to Hawaii.

  Harriette Slake is hideously ugly. Her skin is like the curdle on top of old cream. How could his only child bring him such a hideous living thing? Is this what his grandchildren will look like? Goldowsky returns to lying prostrate on his shul’s cold marble floor. God is not rewarding him. God is punishing him.

  No matter how long Goldowsky lies on the floor, Harriette doesn’t go away and Harriette doesn’t get any prettier and his son doesn’t change his mind. At least Neil is keeping her inside the house as they prepare for the ceremony. With no cosmic movement and no sign coming from God, Goldowsky finally gets up from the stone floor, brushes the specks of debris from his best-Jewish-tailor-in-the-city-made clothing, looks up at Heaven, and asks out loud, “Why did you do this to me?”

  He gives the bride away. The synagogue is filled for the first time. Harriette is heavily veiled. In the entire synagogue, only Goldowsky and his son have seen her face. (The dressmaker will talk! I must pay her off. And the shvartze cleaning lady! Who else?) All Goldowsky’s business associates and their wives ooh and aah over the lovely bride. The son, even though he is handsome, certainly a god next to his father, is shorter than Harriette. Why is he marrying such a tall woman? He is smiling happily. Goldowsky is saying to himself, God only knows what is going on inside his head! How can he shtup her tonight? How?

  The wedding is over. The guests are gathered for the breaking of glasses and the eating of food. Naturally, Goldowsky waltzes Harriette around. Out of deference to the bride there are young women in grass skirts doing the hula. He dances her around and around. He dances her faster and faster. She must be getting dizzy, because he is. He dances her out of the nitzvah. He dances her through the holy platkes. He winds up with her, alone, in the vitz.

  He strangles her dead. He puts her body in a waiting coffin. The coffin is spirited away by hired henchmen, into the dark night.

  Goldowsky walks back to the festivities, beaming like a new father.

  He takes out an envelope from his custom-made cutaway.

  “I must read to you a letter from Harriette. ‘Dear New Friends, I have an important confession to make to you. I am not Jewish. Since I did not wish to be condemned by God in this handsome new synagogue that was built by my kind and generous father-in-law, Mr. Goldowsky, I think it best to admit this important fact and bid you all goodbye until we meet again in Heaven.’”

  The son is beside himself. He suspects immediately that his father has tricked him and done an evil deed, even before the son could trick the father.

  For what the father does not know, even after he chokes her to death, is that Harriette was really a young man, and that she was so ugly because his face was made up poorly and the hairs yanked from his skin had brutalized his complexion. Only the sheitel, the wig that all orthodox women wear in public, had managed to disguise him under his heavy veils, which he wore unto his very death.

  Goldowsky believes his son will now return to being a son, that he will stop traveling to far-off places where there are Slakes, and come into the business like all sons are meant to do, particularly when there is so much money. But no, the son goes off, never to be heard from again. He had wanted very much to marry a man in a temple. Perhaps he has.

  “Who cares? Who cares?” Goldowsky asks himself many times over the years. “It was my bargain with God. I had to lose a dumb son or gain a hideous daughter.”

  This is why and how he comes to be so fond of Abe Masturbov, who is, no doubt about it, handsome and intelligent and ambitious and going places. Like a shipbuilder with a new craft, Goldowsky wants to send his vessel out into the stream to see if it floats. Soon Goldowsky can’t remember what his own son looked like.

  (In a short while, there being no Jewish lepers in this neighborhood requiring a place to worship, this whole building plus an outbuilding becomes a small hospital. But with no money to support it or local politicians with any interest in it, it will be transferred to New York to become the acorn from which springs Rubin and then Table Medical Center, more important for our concerns. You want history; here is history.)

  In these earlier days of our country, there are many stories like these of Neil and “Harriette” and Abe and Doris. Men and women, often in the most unlikely combinations, meet and pick each other up and sleep with each other and marry each other, all within hours or days. It’s such a big country, everyone is in a hurry to catch up with an America that’s running ahead of all expectations. It’s endless and open and so promising, and anyone with half a dream wants to get started immediately now that the Great War is over.

  Besides, there may not be much time. People die young. There are always epidemics no one understands, coming out of nowhere, and natural disasters, too, and accidents, and of course wars. It may be the twentieth century, but life is just as mysterious and health just as ephemeral as it always was.

  Doris sees Abe seeing her and wanting her. She is twenty, and almost a virgin. She is so full of confidence that she usually scares young men away. Young men rarely have such confidence at that age, or for years later, indeed in many cases for their entire lifetimes. She has confidence galore and nowhere to put it.

  But Abe has confidence equal to her own. Her smile meets his smile, which has been infected by her so. She sees his confidence. She sees, too, that he is quite young. It doesn’t bother her. She is surprised to discover she feels maternal toward him. She wants to take him in her arms and protect him. These are new feelings and reactions for her. Oh, he is cocky, staring at her, then coming straight up to her, bowing, offering his hand, giving his name, which she doesn’t catch.

  “Miss, please, you … you are … you are most attractive to me.” And then he says quickly, “I know that must sound cheap.”

  “It’s honest,” she answers.

  “I’ll always be honest with you.”

  “Do you talk like this all the time?”

  “No.”

  “You’re very young.”

  “I’m young. And I’m poor. So far. But I have a future. I will be rich.”

  “Just like that?”

  “It won’t be just like that. Times are hard now. And will be for a while, I think. But I believe in myself.”

  “How do you know so much so young?”

  “Being with you is telling me what to say.”

  “What a combination of truth and malarkey you are!”

  “It’s not malarkey.”

  She laughs at herself for a moment because without even thinking about it she has boldly put her arm through his. Her new dress has streaks of red and purple beads sewn into streaks of yellow, which she thinks of as sunbe
ams, and she loves this dress and feels like flaunting herself to the world. That is what a lovely dress is meant to do, make you kick up your heels and toss back your hair. He is tall and strong, with bold features, nose, ears, brows, and an awful lot of that red hair that tumbles in all directions. He looks very winning. Yes, she will flaunt herself. Why not?

  Her family is in the West, in Denver, and in the outlying cow towns. They have sent her east to study, at Goucher in Baltimore, where a girl can learn without having her head filled with the kind of notions westerners think ruin anyone who goes too far east and/or north. She’s finished four years of study in two. She studied economics and wants to go into business. She was bored and boredom worked her harder.

  The Jew—she knows he’s a Jew, Baltimore is filled with Jews, even Denver has a few, and they seem exotic to her if for no other reason than that you aren’t supposed to like them—is handsome to her, certainly, but that isn’t his appeal. He has opinions. He’s strong. He can defend himself with his mind, in argument, in discourse. She approves. He sees all this.

  By the time Lucas knows the whole story, Abe looks upon him as more his son than Mordy. Funny how sons get switched around among various father figures, like clothes that are handed down from the rich to the poor and sometimes fit them better. Lucas, who’s been Abe’s lawyer for as long as he’s been a lawyer, has come to love Abe a lot, certainly more than Mordy, his own son, loves him. Mordy has trouble with love. Grandpa Herman’s fortune doesn’t help. Do all the Masturbovs have trouble with love?