Crackpot, page 34
Danile heard the reports of one or two friends who could hardly praise highly enough, and his imagination, ever on the alert for the extraordinary sign from above, was much exercised by this unusual boy. He was particularly keen that his friends should describe the appearance of the young man in detail, and was the first in his synagogue to put forward the daring hypothesis that somewhere in the world the Almighty must be preparing a champion, destined, the sooner the better, to engage and vanquish this new fiend of Europe, this German Hitler, who was threatening to destroy the Jews. The threat was old; we had survived it before, but the danger was ever new, for we were never prepared for the fact that these barbarians meant what they said. The Books showed that Jews had always fumbled, and vacillated, and were weak of spirit, and that their hero must struggle through error and hardship and death with his people, and teach them to re-dedicate themselves to life. Danile never had the actual temerity to say it, but he wondered, yearningly, who this young stranger could really be. He would have liked very much to share the honour of saying his prayers in the company of the young man, but he did not know the way to the Old House, and was loath to put anyone to the trouble of leading him. He waited wistfully for someone to offer to take him to a service with the prodigy, particularly since he had been active and daring in their speculations together, and though he even brought himself to hint, sighingly, that he would like to hear the boy just once, the others did not seem to catch on. It was not their fault, really. If he had asked right out someone no doubt would have taken him, but since he himself was a faithful member of the minyans of his synagogue, and had even been known to crawl out of a sick bed to make up the number, for Danile had begun to suffer from chest infections, particularly in the winter time, not surprisingly in that draughty shack, it did not easily occur to them that he might be spared for once to go elsewhere.
But the Almighty sees where men are blind. It so came about that one of Danile’s fellow congregants was actually present at the Old House, when a man came hurriedly up from yet another little synagogue. They were short a man, he explained. Could they borrow the pisher? Since, what with the addition of one or two guests who had come precisely to pray with the pisher, the Old House congregation had well over their minimum complement, they could not very well refuse, and David went off with the suppliant, leaving several disgruntled visitors who thus lost the opportunity to pray with him, and could not follow him because such a mass discourtesy might leave the Old House short again.
There followed a small epidemic of “borrowing the pisher,” and David, never quite catching on to how it came about that he was always being rushed off to another synagogue, developed, in a short time, a wide acquaintance with the synagogues in the neighbourhood, and with any number of friendly elders, before the men of the Old House caught on to what was happening. Meanwhile David tried to recruit another spare man or two from among his friends, to come to the rescue of these dying congregations. But the boys, especially Ralphie Popoff, Scion of Happy Family and supposed Best Friend, razzed him mercilessly about his newly revealed piety, and he hated himself for giving away what he hadn’t even realized should have been a secret, and even worse, for trying to appease their laughter. “There’s nothing wrong with doing them a favour.”
Why couldn’t he simply say, “I BELIEVE, SO fuck off you slobs!” Because he didn’t know what he believed, when it came to that. He just enjoyed. By this time the hard-core congregation of his home base had worked out a simple method to resist piracy. The minute a hurried stranger appeared, as many men as necessary of the home congregation detached themselves from the group, and hastened, each with his own way of making obvious his sudden, desperate need, bent double or scissor footed, out of the Temple of Prayer. Their fellows were thus able to point out perfectly truthfully, that they too were short-handed.
But David’s enthusiasm had begun to flag. He had to admit that there was logic on Ralphie’s side. Right after prayers, even on Saturday, he scooted out to deliver his papers. That made him a Hypocrite, as Ralphie kept telling him gleefully. For a time he thought he might improve his spiritual position by making one of the congregation in body, but refusing to pray. But when he tried to keep quiet someone would nudge him, and motion to someone else standing by. “Louder, he wants to hear how the younger generation can pray.” So David figured finally, what the hell, if it pleased them. Anyway, he didn’t care if he was a Hypocrite. He couldn’t really believe that God was such a sorehead. But it made it easier, later on, when he began to hang around and think more about hard loving the dames, and how to get money, and what was it all about anyway, for him to skip services, first of all on Saturdays, and then, if he was going to skip the holiest day of the week, well, it wasn’t such a big thing to stay away more and more.
Luckily for Danile, though, during that period before the congregation of the Old House set into effect their counter pisher poacher plan, he got his wished-for opportunity to pray in company with the young man. He was profoundly moved by the experience, and repeated more than once, both to himself between prayers, and later on to his friends, “We will hear more of him. Yes, we will hear more of him.”
He was full of the young stranger when he came home for breakfast, and described in detail to the half-listening Hoda the quality of his voice in prayer, a certain youthful musicality of enunciation, yet with definite timbre, which marked him indubitably as one who was born to pronounce the Holy Words. “We are far too prone,” opined Danile, “as we grow older, to hear or to imagine evil sounds all around us, sounds hard to distinguish, indefinite, indefinable, hemming us in and arousing in us a terrible fear.” He, Danile, had himself often been subject to such fear, a terror that welled up in him, from nothing, of nothing but the sounds of the world around him, teasing him horribly. Of course this was foolishness, and he wouldn’t dream of even mentioning this childishness to Hoda, but for the fact that through all of these indefinite and unaccountable imaginings, these untonguable questionings that are roused up in us by the noises of life, The One Above sends down to us every now and then, to reassure us, one pure note.
“You should have been there, Hodaleh. You know how sometimes you grumble and I say to you, ‘Surely the world can’t be that bad,’ and you say, ‘Yes it can, Papa, it is.’ You would have felt your answer this morning. We will hear of him again. There was not a man in the congregation who didn’t agree. Suddenly, we were short of a minyan, Saturday morning, too, when our synagogue is never short. Somebody ran to beg their pisher, you should excuse the expression; that’s what they call him. And when he arrived our men suddenly began to appear, from nowhere, and some of their wives, too, chattering in the woman’s section, more than one usually hears. I didn’t know they were planning this. There was such a crowd, almost like for a visiting cantor from Europe. But he didn’t pay any attention; he just went quietly about his prayers. The only thing was, he left right after he was through, before anyone could stop him. I would have liked to exchange a few words with him.”
“With whom?” said Hoda. “What sounds?” Her wandering attention had been caught by something he had said about sounds that bothered him. Did he mean in the house? Was he talking about her and her clients? Long usage had dulled her concern about the possibility of Daddy finding out what she did for a living. It somehow didn’t seem so important after all these years that it had been going on. It seemed incredible that after all these years Daddy would suddenly know, and it would still be important to him. If you hadn’t seen someone for a long time, and you suddenly found out he’d died fifteen years ago, did you feel the same grief you’d have felt if he had just died in your arms? She was a grown woman now and had been making a living this way for half her lifetime. No, the climate of feeling had changed in that time; or was it simply that her own feelings had changed, had dulled, somehow? Though the gestures of filial piety had not diminished they had become, with the passage of time, more perfunctory. She said “yes Pa,” and “no Pa,” ungrudgingly, but half the time she did not hear what he was saying, perhaps because she felt as though she knew already what he was likely to say on just about any occasion. Sometimes she felt a little guilty for taking him so for granted that it might seem almost as though she were dismissing his importance. But maybe, as she told herself when she woke up guiltily, on occasion, from her reverie, and found she hadn’t heard a thing he was saying, maybe it was just that he was so much a part of her that she didn’t have to pay so much attention; he was like her thoughts that went on by themselves and she hardly knew she was thinking them either. She felt better to think that; she didn’t really have to listen all the time to what she had heard before; all she had to do was suit her response to the tone of his voice, and he was contented.
Why was it that the more you knew a person the less you thought about him and even, in a way, the less you thought of him? Oh that’s just his old immigration story again, you thought to yourself, or even, Oh, that’s just his chest rattling again. I’ll have to give him steam tonight. Not like that first time he had got bronchitis and you had stayed up with him for nights and cried over his every breath. She could remember, dimly, a time when every word that Daddy spoke had been suffused with wonder for her. But that was when everything had been filled with promise, even, for godsake, the Prince of Wales! Oddly enough she had just been thinking of the Prince of Wales, wondering whether he had made anything of his life, wondering whether he had any regrets. She hadn’t thought about him for years, not really thought, that is. But now, for some reason it had come into her mind that he too hadn’t married, and was still hanging around. He went here; he went there. Was he still looking? She wondered what kind of things had happened, or for that matter hadn’t happened, to him as well. She wondered whether for him too there might not be some area of princely secrecy and sorrow, whether princes, too, can be short-weighted by life. She no longer imagined that she would have been able to converse with him very freely even had life somehow managed to throw them together. No doubt he was a victim of his class and his education, as the comrades suggested, and it would show in his politics. Maybe he was even practically a reactionary. Nobody ever tried to swing a truncheon at him for just wanting his rights as a human being. And yet, he too must have missed things. She pitied these princes in a way. Was the passing of possibilities so enormous, equally enormously painful to them? Was he too even now thinking, What have I done with my life?
What did Daddy mean when he talked about sounds? No, it was just about some kid going to be a cantor or something. It was a good thing Daddy had the synagogue affairs to concern himself with. It was nice when a kid had a special talent, and could become a great cantor, say. “Ya Daddy, I’m sorry I didn’t hear him too,” she hazarded, with obliging mendacity, because there was nothing she’d rather do these mornings than stay in bed and catch up on her rest, especially if she’d had a busy night. It was a nuisance dragging her mattress off and on the bed all night. But she still insisted on performing that noise-reducing ritual with her customers, though now she pretended to them it was because the coils underneath were so bad she was afraid of falling through or else, if something snapped, of somehow being skewered fore and aft simultaneously. When she explained it that way it put them in a good mood.
For a long time the thought that someone out there was interested in him, was maybe even watching him when he wasn’t aware of it, had made David feel all twisty inside. Sometimes, when he was outside just walking in the street, he’d stop and whirl around very suddenly, darting his eyes quickly every which way round; maybe he’d catch someone at it. The way people looked at him he could tell they thought he was crazy, flashing around that way suddenly, but he just had to do it. Sometimes he thought he had caught the person and he tried to hold her, appealing, willing her to admit it was she. But nothing ever happened. She just looked away, and maybe glanced quickly back once or twice, and then kept on looking away, and even when he walked after her a little way, she just walked faster, and once a lady turned around and said in an excited voice, “If you don’t stop following me!” Then the time came when he began to think more and more about the money, and what you could do with it, and how to get hold of it.
Mrs. Tize, of course, recognized the signs very early. They were so physical. Normally, when the time came, she sent the boys straight to Popoff, as she had had to do even in the case of his own eldest, the goat-like Ralphie, when she caught him pawing one of the kitchen help in the pantry. David too, when she saw that the age of heightened prurience was upon him, got the mandatory heart-to-heart from Popoff. He had also, because he was in some sense special to her, the privilege of Mrs. Tize’s lecture, which was normally reserved for the girls, and heard all about the dangers of interfering with oneself or with anyone else, to his initial puzzlement, because he didn’t know how it was possible to interfere with oneself, and as for anyone else, Tizey knew he minded his own business. It was only when she got to the birds and the bees that he realized what she was trying to tell him, and, young rascal that he was becoming, proceeded to goad her to a fury with his teasing.
He was the only one in the place who could tease her openly that way, and get away with it. Mrs. Tize felt, if uncomfortably, a special responsibility for the boy. For it was she who had dragged him from the closet on that unforgivable morning, she who had wrestled with him, holding him firmly to her with superior, adult strength, while she shouted orders, distractedly, to the other children to stay away and be off to school. It was she who had felt her breasts crushed by the storming, squirming, clattering-hearted little boy, and had weathered the battle through, thankfully, to his final exhausted whimpers. Though she had never really had the time or the introspective inclination to think about it very much, somewhere in her blood and bones Mrs. Tize had felt and recognized, during their struggle, the intensity of the little boy’s grief. It had left her with that uneasy feeling of particular responsibility for him, which she might have found irksome, considering all she had to do around the place, had the youngster, as he subsequently developed, not been a quiet, and until recently, withdrawn and largely undemanding boy. Mrs. Tize had little time for the whining and dependant type of child, and sent those gladly off to the Director, who so widely advertised himself in the community as the father of them all.
She was careful not to allow her partiality to become too obvious; in fact, if anything, she was more of a nag with him than with the others, treating him frequently to impassioned lectures which, when he was feeling particularly cheerful, he repeated with her, word for word, only getting just a little bit ahead of her with each word, so that in the end he had her racing through her own words to keep up with him, to the amusement of those foolish girls in the kitchen. Tizey’s passion for cleanliness and hygiene had long ago crystallized into set-pieces of oratory, into which she poured a good part of her emotional being. And once she was launched on one of her favourite little appeals it was impossible for her to stop herself in mid-career. She was like a toboggan going down an icy slope. It was maddening to have him racing, like her shadow, just that little bit ahead of her. Exasperating boy!
But though he teased her, David protected her too. Ralphie would have loved it, but he never told him of the lecture he had received on interference, that classy English version of jerking yourself off.
He didn’t tell Ralphie either, or anyone else, for that matter, how she had hung on to him once, when he had run crazy and wanted to break his goddam neck, and how she had squeezed and gripped him up against her great big tits. If Tizey knew how he remembered her that time, Chrise, she’d stick a toilet brush down his throat and scrub him inside and out. That was love; that time was love, the real McCoy, wrestling with her, all those tits, hundreds of them, all over him, pressing up against him and rubbing him all over while he fought and screamed and yelled and hurt and hurt and hurt. Funny how only long afterwards did he remember and cling to the memory of how those breasts had rubbed into him and soothed his hurt. That was love all right, that and not all those little green shoots of tenderness his heart had been putting out all his life, those delicate little tendrils of love that kept starting out in spite of himself, only to get chopped or crushed or ripped away, or were just left to wave around in the empty air till they turned all brown and curled up and folded into themselves with a dry little aching sigh, and flaked away. But she had stayed with him that time, old Tizey, had hung on to him, no matter what he did, that time when was so crazy with what he had seen that he didn’t even know what he was doing anymore. She stayed with him and hung onto him even though he was fighting her so hard and even trying to hurt her too, maybe. She had hung on till he was so exhausted he couldn’t struggle anymore, and he just gave up, and ended by hanging on himself, clinging to her, and even when he stopped fighting she still held on to him, just pressing him against her and rocking him a little; that was what he remembered most; he could still feel her all the way down, and she held his face against her soft breasts and wouldn’t even let him look up, not that he wanted to, not that he wanted to see anything any more; she held him and held him and held him in a dream of her holding him forevermore.
If only she knew how much he thought of that now, that hanging on, her straining with him, those warm, giving tits moving all over him as she struggled; if only she knew how often she interfered with him, old Tizey, Chrise, she’d take gas!
Trouble was, he couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t nice; like with your own mother. It wasn’t healthy. Like Ralphie said, if you don’t get rid of your load it goes bad inside you; the poisons go right to your head and you start thinking of all kinds of funny things, like ramming Mrs. Tize yourself and giving her what she needed. Maybe that was how it was with Mr. Limprig. Ralphie had decided long ago it wasn’t going to be that way with him. He had begun by blackmailing the older guys to stand him to free rides or he’d tell his old man. Then he went on to introduce the younger guys to nooky for what he called the modest fee of his company. You had to be a real little bastard, not just a born bastard, to work the angles like Ralphie. But he wouldn’t give Ralphie the satisfaction of knowing he needed an introduction. He’d work his own angle.
