by Evergreen
"True. And writing isn't what you're asking about right now anyway, although it might well tie in, as your cousin says."
"You're avoiding an answer. What I want to know is, should I consider the offer?"
"Should you hurt my parents, you mean. That's what you're asking me, isn't it?"
"I'm sorry. It's not fair of me to expect you to be neutral, is it?"
"No, it isn't. Because I know what it will do to them. And still I know that you've a right to be somebody yourself, not just somebody's beloved grandson." Iris sighed. "So I guess I'll just have to throw the decision back in your lap."
Eric nodded soberly. "Only don't mention it, please? Not even to Uncle Theo. I need time to sweat this out myself."
"Not a word. I promise."
Just before Christmas he and Chris met again at the same place.
"I haven't made up my mind," Eric told him.
Chris was surprised. "What's the obstacle?"
"I keep thinking about Grandpa and Nana. He's had me down at the office telling everybody I'll be working there next year; he's even got my room set aside. She's bought Early American prints for the walls." And when Chris began a gesture, he went on hurriedly, "I know, you'll say it's my life and that's true, but it's a big decision and I can't make it in such a hurry."
"Listen," Chris said, "I want you to come in later this week. I'll get an appointment with the people here in New York for an inter-
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view. Then whatever questions you have they can answer and you won't be making the big decision just on my say-so. Only one thing—" he lowered his voice and glanced at the adjoining table, "when you give your name, spell it the way you used to, will you? Freeman? It's more American that way. I've told them that's your name."
"Why did you do that? What difference does it make?"
"It makes a difference. Take my word for it. Particularly in the Middle East, everything heating up between the Arabs and Israel."
"You mean that I shouldn't appear to be Jewish."
"Well, you aren't, are you? You were brought up an Episcopalian and you're my cousin. Who would think of asking whether you were Jewish?"
"I'm also Joseph Friedman's grandson."
"Of course, of course. But listen, Eric, it's a chilly, practical world and you've got to be practical to survive in it. I strongly advise you to play that side down for business purposes. Especially this business."
Eric grimaced. "Lousy. Dishonest. And worse than that, cruel."
"Why cruel? You aren't doing or saying anything hurtful. It's just a case of not saying something, a case of omission." And when Eric didn't answer, he added urgently, "Besides, aren't you forgetting the other side of yourself? Gran and Gramp and all the life you had with them?"
"Chris! You think I could forget them?"
"I certainly don't. And after all, it isn't as if you were a religious Jew. You haven't gone over to the religion, have you, Eric?" Chris asked abruptly.
"To tell the truth, I haven't any religion at all," Eric said. His voice sounded somber to his own ears.
"Well, that's the fashion these days, isn't it? So shall I make the appointment for this week or do you want to put it off till my next trip?"
"Put it off," Eric said. "As long as there's no hurry."
After leaving Chris he walked down Fifth Avenue toward Grand Central. Christmas lights in shop windows and out of doors rippled and streamed like moving water. "Adeste Fideles" clanged from a loudspeaker above the entrance to a department store. The citadel of Christmas, emporium of glitter, cathedral of twentieth-century America. The department store. He felt unusually depressed.
A bank advertised its loan service under the smiling photograph of a young couple admiring an expensive sports car. Was that the measure of contentment, the measure of a man, his ability to provide a sports car? Or a motorboat, a diamond, or any of the things for which people put themselves in hock? Worth his weight in gadgets, a man was.
Climb, forge ahead, acquire, be smart, even if you have to lie a little, even if you have to deny the truth about yourself to do it. Why not?
He began to walk faster, to breathe more deeply of the icy air. Morbid today, misanthropic. The world really isn't all that awful. Just my own personal riddle, needing to be solved. That's all it is.
If this offer had come, not from one of his mother's people, but from one of Grandpa's cronies, Mr. Duberman, let's say, or some other of the pinochle group, would it be much less of a problem?
He tried to imagine the scene, a party perhaps, everyone around a table crowded with crystal, with flowers, with silver platters and bowls of meats, half a dozen kinds of meats, half a dozen kinds of smoked fish, salads, molds and puddings, spicy condiments and pungent sauces, glossy, twisted loaves, fruit, cakes—
"Eat, here, pass the salad to Jenny, she eats like a bird—"
"If you don't taste that pudding you'll insult my wife," Grandpa would roar, and pile a ladleful of steaming noodle pudding on someone's plate.
Nana's bracelets would clash; she'd smile with pleasure and pride, diamond pinpoints flashing in her ears. * "Did you know that Eric will be going abroad next year?" Grandpa would inquire of the table at large. But everyone would be talking: on this side two of the men having a vigorous political argument; on the other side someone telling jokes, people crying with laughter. Grandpa would clink on a goblet with his knife and call above the noise.
"You've heard about our Eric? You haven't heard?"
With amusement and tenderness he constructed the scene in his mind: the sudden silence, his grandfather's announcement, the cries of congratulation; his grandmother getting up to hug him, squeezing his head against perfume and warm silk; an old man gripping his hand.
"What a smart boy! A treasure! Joseph, Anna, a treasure of a boy-"
Of course they would shed tears because he would be going
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away; of course his great opportunity would have to be anywhere else but in the Middle East, where now, at the end of a second millennium, people of this blood were again being threatened with slaughter. Granting all that, he knew it would still not be such unacceptable pain as this return to his mother's people, reminding them again of their losses. He wondered suddenly how it must have been for his father, making the decision which was to take him from them for good.
Pain. How do you measure it? Doctors measure it in dols: much pain, middling pain, less pain. . . .
He went back to Dartmouth the following week, with graduation only five months distant, with no decision made and sure of nothing.
Great-uncle Wendell died in early April and was buried from the home which had been in his family since the first Guthrie had come to Massachusetts three centuries before.
Eric drove down from New Hampshire, meeting as he went the first uncertain gusts of spring that blew warm whenever the sun struck through the clouds. In spite of his errand he felt exhilaration as the car rolled between stone-walled fields, down aisles of elms on old main streets, past the white, square, ample houses of his childhood. He knew exactly how these houses would look inside, the corner cupboards flanking the fireplace in the dining room, the tall clock on the landing midway between floors. The shapes and patterns of Brewerstown.
When they came back to the house from the churchyard where the Guthries lay, the faces that gathered, faces of relatives and strangers, were familiar, too. How odd that you got used to other types and faces without real awareness of the difference and the change! Now suddenly he realized that he hadn't seen faces like these in a long, long time.
Generalizations were totally unscientific. There were almost as many exceptions as the rule, and yet he could know, here in this room, that he was not among his father's people. Less tension here perhaps, less animation, color, noise? No matter; it was different.
They were an unmistakable breed, these people, shaped narrowly and of a healthy toughness that went with hardy skills
like rough-weather sailing or cross-country skiing. The women, even those who weren't pretty, who had long, craggy faces, wore the marks of their kind: skirts and blouses, gold circle pins, a strong,
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no-nonsense manner. He would have recognized one of them if he had encountered her in Patagonia. He stood there watching the group around the coffee urn, listening to the crisp accents and gentle voices, feeling as if—as if he had just walked into his own home after a morning's absence. And quite suddenly he understood what it was that moved him so, in a way that was probably not entirely reasonable, that was just simply because—
Because they looked like Gran.
Chris was there with his wife and older boys. Chris's brothers were there also with young, pregnant wives.
Hugh came over to introduce Betsey. "I've heard you're going on an exciting venture with Chris," Betsey said. "We're all so delighted that you'll be together."
Eric flushed. "I haven't quite made up my mind," he answered.
Chris had come up behind them. "I don't know what you're waiting for," he said. For the first time he sounded impatient. "It's already April and if you want to come along you'll have to see the people in New York by the end of the month. I can't stall any longer for you, you know."
"I know."
"For the life of me I can't imagine why you don't jump at the chance!"
"I guess because it's for five years. One wants to be absolutely sure of a commitment like that."
"Well, don't think too long, that's all." Chris walked away.
Now Hugh introduced an old man who had been standing near •»the fireplace.
"Cousin Jed, this is Eric. You've never met, I think."
Eric took hold of a hard leathery hand, looked into a pair of concentrating eyes.
"I knew your mother when she was a baby. Never saw you, though. Never see much of my wife's family since she died. But I wanted to pay my respects today. I live over in Prides Crossing since I retired." He rambled, moving toward senility.
"I met your father once. Came to me for a job at the bank, I recall. Couldn't give him one, though. Depression, you know. No jobs. You look like your mother," he said abruptly. "A fine, pretty girl, your mother was. Died too young. Look at me, I'm eighty-seven."
Someone came and led him away to the coffee urn. Eric thought, All these people know more about who I am than I do.
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The thought caused a bleakness and at the same time a soft wish to reach out to them.
"Remember us," Gran said.
If I turn my back now and cut myself off that'll be the end, the final end. The old people are dying or dead. Chris will go away and when he comes back we'll be strangers. At least, there's a little something between us now, a little flame that can be fanned.
Arabia. Riding with Chris of that old, first life, into a new life. . . . Someone had put pine cones in the fireplace; the sweet, sharp scent of them sifted through the warm air. Fragrance and flavor, like those of Proust's madeleine, were potent instruments always; he could smell Maine's salty coves again and Brewers-town's gilt Septembers, its fires of fall. Oh, remembered places, remembered faces! Flesh of his flesh and quiet ways; Gramp's birds and a white horse grazing, and so much more. So much.
He found Chris talking at the far end of the room. He tapped him on the shoulder.
"Chris, I'll go with you," he said.
During the week of spring recess he opened his mouth a dozen times to tell his grandparents and closed it again, feeling weak and cowardly.
"I want to buy you a good car," Grandpa said. "The jalopy was good enough for a college boy, but you ought to have a better one now. So be thinking about what you'd like and we'll take care of it after commencement."
He said, "Why don't you take a month or two off before you start putting your nose to the grindstone? Drive out to California or something? Have a ball."
Nana said, "I was thinking, would you like me to fix up your room at the office or do you want to pick out your own things? Jerry Malone just refurnished, so maybe you'd like to take a look at what he bought for some ideas—"
Grandpa said, "You haven't seen the new shopping center* since we finished up, have you? How about taking a ride over with me? I have a couple of people to see there this afternoon."
Eric went along and strolled through the long expanse of malls, turns and alleys, up a level and down a level, marveling at the enormity of it all and trying to observe enough to make, later, the intelligent comments that would be expected.
But all he could feel was a pervasive sadness. So many aimless
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couples drifting through the afternoon with their children tugging at them, looking for amusement! Anxious men in lumber jackets, tired women with hair in curlers, wandering with their desires through mazes of stores piled with shoddy trash that they couldn't afford and didn't need! And Eric knew that if he were to express all that to his grandfather he would only stare in astonished dismay. They got back in the car. "Well, what did you think of it?" his grandfather asked. There was a sparkle in his voice. "It's a busy place, all right."
"Wait till you see what we're building in south Jersey. It's still only on paper but we expect to break ground in September. Maybe I'll let you work on it. I'll send you down with Matt Malone to get the feel of things. Matt's a smart boy. You can learn a lot from him."
Eric's left hand lay on the seat and suddenly his grandfather placed his own over it. He spoke very low, so that Eric could barely hear him and knew that the old man was embarrassed by his own emotion.
"For years I've envied Malone. It was wrong of me, I know. Thou shalt not covet. . . . But I did, all the same. All those fine sons to go into business with him! To carry on what he had built out of years of sweat, while for me it was all going down the drain. Into nothing, as if I had never existed. Until you came. I don't mind telling you, you've taken years off my shoulders. Or put years onto my life, however you want to say it. Do I make you feel uncomfortable, Eric? Forgive me this once, if I do."
"That's okay, Grandpa." My God, my God, how am I going to say it? With what words? Where? When?
On Friday evening his grandmother called him aside. "Eric, I want to ask a favor. Would you come to temple with us tonight? It's the anniversary of your great-grandfather's death and Grandpa has to say Kaddish for him." "Yes, surely, I'll go."
"Thank you, I'm glad. I know it's not your prayer, but still it will make him feel good to have you there."
He sat through the sermon not hearing it, heavy with the weight of his dilemma. He was aware from time to time of plaintive music, but only half aware. The name of Max Friedman was called in a long list of names; the sounding of its syllables made a small shock in his head and it came to him for an instant that the blood of that totally strange man—for if he were to be brought
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back to life what could they have to say to one another?—that strange man's blood was in him, nevertheless. The congregation rose. He felt the rustling and stood with them through the murmuring of several hundred voices all in unison. His grandmother's head was bowed, her hands were clasped, her face was serious. His grandfather's old hooded eyes were partly closed. He swayed as he held the prayer book but he was not reading it; he knew it by heart. They know I won't be saying this prayer for them, Eric thought. One of Aunt Iris' little boys will have to do that when they are dead. And yet I mean so much to them.
And now the blessing: "The Lord bless thee and keep thee; the Lord cause the light of His face to shine upon thee—"
Then "Good Sabbath," the people turning to each other in the neighboring pews, families, friends and strangers kissing or shaking hands.
"Good Sabbath." Joseph kissed Eric and kissed Anna; Anna kissed Eric and kissed Joseph.
They moved slowly in the press going down the aisle. Grandpa rested a hand on Eric's shoulder. He saw that his grandmother watched the gesture. He thought irrelevantly that her red hair was too youthful for the exp
ression that she wore. He looked at her while she looked at her husband's hand. Something was being weighed and balanced behind her thoughtful, clever face, something of delicate complexity, spun of unspoken things. He felt, he could almost touch, an emotion so tense that a move might shatter it, whatever it was: a question held back, a plea, perhaps, for which there were no words?
He knew then, in the throb of that instant, that he couldn't go.
"You're not angry, Chris?" he asked, when he had finished his story. They had met in New York for the purpose, so Chris had expected, of taking Eric to the interview.
"I won't allow myself to be." Chris smiled but his eyes were angry. "I'll just say you're rather young for your years, completely inexperienced and far too sentimental. You're like your—" he broke off.
