Then I roared: “Ira Pushkov, what’s the matter with you? Dope! Mr. Hilton told you five times already, don’t come in till Lester points to that star the second time.”

  “Ach, Clara,” my father asked, “what does she do there till six o’clock she can’t even put the plates on the table?”

  “Christmas,” said my mother coldly.

  “Ho! Ho!” my father said. “Christmas. What’s the harm? After all, history teaches everyone. We learn from reading this is a holiday from pagan times also, candles, lights, even Hanukkah. So we learn it’s not altogether Christian. So if they think it’s a private holiday, they’re only ignorant, not patriotic. What belongs to history belongs to all men. You want to go back to the Middle Ages? Is it better to shave your head with a secondhand razor? Does it hurt Shirley to learn to speak up? It does not. So maybe someday she won’t live between the kitchen and the shop. She’s not a fool.”

  I thank you, Papa, for your kindness. It is true about me to this day. I am foolish but I am not a fool.

  That night my father kissed me and said with great interest in my career, “Shirley, tomorrow’s your big day. Congrats.”

  “Save it,” my mother said. Then she shut all the windows in order to prevent tonsillitis.

  In the morning it snowed. On the street corner a tree had been decorated for us by a kind city administration. In order to miss its chilly shadow our neighbors walked three blocks east to buy a loaf of bread. The butcher pulled down black window shades to keep the colored lights from shining on his chickens. Oh, not me. On the way to school, with both my hands I tossed it a kiss of tolerance. Poor thing, it was a stranger in Egypt.

  I walked straight into the auditorium past the staring children. “Go ahead, Shirley!” said the monitors. Four boys, big for their age, had already started work as propmen and stagehands.

  Mr. Hilton was very nervous. He was not even happy. Whatever he started to say ended in a sideward look of sadness. He sat slumped in the middle of the first row and asked me to help Miss Glacé. I did this, although she thought my voice too resonant and said, “Show-off!”

  Parents began to arrive long before we were ready. They wanted to make a good impression. From among the yards of drapes I peeked out at the audience. I saw my embarrassed mother.

  Ira, Lester, and Meyer were pasted to their beards by Miss Glacé. She almost forgot to thread the star on its wire, but I reminded her. I coughed a few times to clear my throat. Miss Glacé looked around and saw that everyone was in costume and on line waiting to play his part. She whispered, “All right …” Then:

  Jackie Sauerfeld, the prettiest boy in first grade, parted the curtains with his skinny elbow and in a high voice sang out:

  Parents dear

  We are here

  To make a Christmas play in time.

  It we give

  In narrative

  And illustrate with pantomime.

  He disappeared.

  My voice burst immediately from the wings to the great shock of Ira, Lester, and Meyer, who were waiting for it but were surprised all the same.

  “I remember, I remember, the house where I was born …”

  Miss Glacé yanked the curtain open and there it was, the house—an old hayloft, where Celia Kornbluh lay in the straw with Cindy Lou, her favorite doll. Ira, Lester, and Meyer moved slowly from the wings toward her, sometimes pointing to a moving star and sometimes ahead to Cindy Lou.

  It was a long story and it was a sad story. I carefully pronounced all the words about my lonesome childhood, while little Eddie Braunstein wandered upstage and down with his shepherd’s stick, looking for sheep. I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated. Eddie was too small for that and Marty Groff took his place, wearing his father’s prayer shawl. I announced twelve friends, and half the boys in the fourth grade gathered round Marty, who stood on an orange crate while my voice harangued. Sorrowful and loud, I declaimed about love and God and Man, but because of the terrible deceit of Abie Stock we came suddenly to a famous moment. Marty, whose remembering tongue I was, waited at the foot of the cross. He stared desperately at the audience. I groaned, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The soldiers who were sheiks grabbed poor Marty to pin him up to die, but he wrenched free, turned again to the audience, and spread his arms aloft to show despair and the end. I murmured at the top of my voice, “The rest is silence, but as everyone in this room, in this city—in this world—now knows, I shall have life eternal.”

  That night Mrs. Kornbluh visited our kitchen for a glass of tea.

  “How’s the virgin?” asked my father with a look of concern.

  “For a man with a daughter, you got a fresh mouth, Abramovitch.”

  “Here,” said my father kindly, “have some lemon, it’ll sweeten your disposition.”

  They debated a little in Yiddish, then fell in a puddle of Russian and Polish. What I understood next was my father, who said, “Still and all, it was certainly a beautiful affair, you have to admit, introducing us to the beliefs of a different culture.”

  “Well, yes,” said Mrs. Kornbluh. “The only thing … you know Charlie Turner—that cute boy in Celia’s class—a couple others? They got very small parts or no part at all. In very bad taste, it seemed to me. After all, it’s their religion.”

  “Ach,” explained my mother, “what could Mr. Hilton do? They got very small voices; after all, why should they holler? The English language they know from the beginning by heart. They’re blond like angels. You think it’s so important they should get in the play? Christmas … the whole piece of goods … they own it.”

  I listened and listened until I couldn’t listen anymore. Too sleepy. I climbed out of bed and kneeled. I made a little church of my hands and said, “Hear, O Israel …” Then I called out in Yiddish, “Please, good night, good night. Ssh.” My father said, “Ssh yourself,” and slammed the kitchen door.

  I was happy. I fell asleep at once. I had prayed for everybody: my talking family, cousins far away, passersby, and all the lonesome Christians. I expected to be heard. My voice was certainly the loudest.

  The Contest

  Up early or late, it never matters, the day gets away from me. Summer or winter, the shade of trees or their hard shadow, I never get into my Rice Krispies till noon.

  I am ambitious, but it’s a long-range thing with me. I have my confidential sights on a star, but there’s half a lifetime to get to it. Meanwhile I keep my eyes open and am well dressed.

  I told the examining psychiatrist for the army: Yes, I like girls. And I do. Not my sister—a pimp’s dream. But girls, slim and tender or really stacked, dark brown at their centers, smeared by time. Not my mother, who should’ve stayed in Freud. I have got a sense of humor.

  My last girl was Jewish, which is often a warm kind of girl, concerned about food intake and employability. They don’t like you to work too hard, I understand, until you’re hooked and then, you bastard, sweat!

  A medium girl, size twelve, a clay pot with handles—she could be grasped. I met her in the rain outside some cultural activity at Cooper Union or Washington Irving High School. She had no umbrella and I did, so I walked her home to my house. There she remained for several hours, a yawning cavity, half asleep. The rain rained on the ailanthus tree outside my window, the wind rattled the shutters of my old-fashioned window, and I took my time making coffee and carving an ounce of pound cake. I don’t believe in force and I would have waited, but her loneliness was very great.

  We had quite a nice time for a few weeks. She brought rolls and bagels from wherever the stuff can still be requisitioned. On Sundays she’d come out of Brooklyn with a chicken to roast. She thought I was too skinny. I am, but girls like it. If you’re fat, they can see immediately that you’ll never need their unique talent for warmth.

  Spring came. She said: “Where are we going?” In just those words! Now I have met this attitude before. Apparently, for most women good food and fun for all are too much of a good thing.

  The sun absorbed July and she said it again. “Freddy, if we’re not going anywhere, I’m not going along anymore.” We were beach-driven those windy Sundays: her mother must have told her what to say. She said it with such imprisoned conviction.

  One Friday night in September I came home from an unlucky party. All the faces had been strange. There were no extra girls, and after some muted conversation with the glorious properties of other men, I felt terrible and went home.

  In an armchair, looking at an Art News full of Dutchmen who had lived eighty years in forty, was Dorothy. And by her side an overnight case. I could hardly see her face when she stood to greet me, but she made tea first and steamed some of my ardor into the damp night.

  “Listen, Freddy,” she said. “I told my mother I was visiting Leona in Washington for two days and I fixed it with Leona. Everyone’ll cover me”—pouring tea and producing seeded tarts from some secret Fiatbush Avenue bakery—all this to change the course of a man’s appetite and enable conversation to go forward.

  “No, listen, Freddy, you don’t take yourself seriously, and that’s the reason you can’t take anything else—a job, or a—a relationship—seriously … Freddy, you don’t listen. You’ll laugh, but you’re very barbaric. You live at your nerve ends. If you’re near a radio, you listen to music; if you’re near an open icebox, you stuff yourself; if a girl is within ten feet of you, you have her stripped and on the spit.”

  “Now, Dotty, don’t be so graphic,” I said. “Every man is his own rotisserie.”

  What a nice girl! Say something vulgar and she’d suddenly be all over me, blushing bitterly, glad that the East River separated her from her mother. Poor girl, she was avid.

  And she was giving. By Sunday night I had ended half a dozen conversations and nipped their moral judgments at the homiletic root. By Sunday night I had said I love you Dotty, twice. By Monday morning I realized the extent of my commitment and I don’t mind saying it prevented my going to a job I had swung on Friday.

  My impression of women is that they mean well but are driven to an obsessive end by greedy tradition. When Dot found out that I’d decided against that job (what job? a job, that’s all) she took action. She returned my copy of Nineteen Eighty-four and said in a note that I could keep the six wineglasses her mother had lent me.

  Well, I did miss her; you don’t meet such wide-open kindness every day. She was no fool either. I’d say peasant wisdom is what she had. Not too much education. Her hair was long and dark. I had always seen it in neat little coiffures or reparably disarrayed, until that weekend.

  It was staggering.

  I missed her. And then I didn’t have too much luck after that. Very little money to spend, and girls are primordial with intuition. There was one nice little married girl whose husband was puttering around in another postal zone, but her heart wasn’t in it. I got some windy copy to do through my brother-in-law, a clean-cut croupier who is always crackling bank notes at family parties. Things picked up.

  Out of my gasbag profits one weekend I was propelled into the Craggy-moor, a high-pressure resort, a star-studded haven with eleven hundred acres of golf course. When I returned, exhausted but modest, there she was, right in my parlor-floor front. With a few gasping, kind words and a modern gimmick, she hoped to breathe eternity into a mortal matter, love.

  “Ah, Dotty,” I said, holding out my accepting arms. “I’m always glad to see you.”

  Of course she explained. “I didn’t come for that really, Freddy. I came to talk to you. We have a terrific chance to make some real money, if you’ll only be serious a half hour. You’re so clever, and you ought to direct yourself to something. God, you could live in the country. I mean, even if you kept living alone, you could have a decent place on a decent street instead of this dump.”

  I kissed the tip of her nose. “If you want to be very serious, Dot, let’s get out and walk. Come on, get your coat on and tell me all about how to make money.”

  She did. We walked out to the park and scattered autumn leaves for an hour. “Now don’t laugh, Freddy,” she told me. “There’s a Yiddish paper called Morgenlicht. It’s running a contest: Jews in the News. Every day they put in a picture and two descriptions. You have to say who the three people are, add one more fact about them, and then send it in by midnight that night. It runs three months at least.”

  “A hundred Jews in the news?” I said. “What a tolerant country! So, Dot, what do you get for this useful information?”

  “First prize, five thousand dollars and a trip to Israel. Also on return two days each in the three largest European capitals in the Free West.”

  “Very nice,” I said. “What’s the idea, though? To uncover the ones that’ve been passing?”

  “Freddy, why do you look at everything inside out? They’re just proud of themselves, and they want to make Jews everywhere proud of their contribution to this country. Aren’t you proud?”

  “Woe to the crown of pride!”

  “I don’t care what you think. The point is, we know somebody who knows somebody on the paper—he writes a special article once a week—we don’t know him really, but our family name is familiar to him. So we have a very good chance if we really do it. Look how smart you are, Freddy. I can’t do it myself, Freddy, you have to help me. It’s a thing I made up my mind to do anyway. If Dotty Wasserman really makes up her mind, it’s practically done.”

  I hadn’t noticed this obstinacy in her character before. I had none in my own. Every weekday night after work she leaned thoughtfully on my desk, wearing for warmth a Harris-tweed jacket that ruined the nap of my arm. Somewhere out of doors a strand of copper in constant agitation carried information from her mother’s Brooklyn phone to her ear.

  Peering over her shoulder, I would sometimes discover a three-quarter view of a newsworthy Jew or a full view of a half Jew. The fraction did not interfere with the rules. They were glad to extract him and be proud.

  The longer we worked the prouder Dotty became. Her face flushed, she’d raise her head from the hieroglyphics and read her own translation: “A gray-headed gentleman very much respected; an intimate of Cabinet members; a true friend to a couple of Presidents; often seen in the park, sitting on a bench.”

  “Bernard Baruch!” I snapped.

  And then a hard one: “Has contributed to the easiness of interstate commerce; his creation is worth millions and was completed last year. Still he has time for Deborah, Susan, Judith, and Nancy, his four daughters.”

  For this I smoked and guzzled a hot eggnog Dot had whipped up to give me strength and girth. I stared at the stove, the ceiling, my irritable shutters—then I said calmly: “Chaim Pazzi—he’s a bridge architect.” I never forget a name, no matter what typeface it appears in.

  “Imagine it, Freddy. I didn’t even know there was a Jew who had such accomplishment in that field.”

  Actually, it sometimes took as much as an hour to attach a real name to a list of exaggerated attributes. When it took that long I couldn’t help muttering, “Well, we’ve uncovered another one. Put him on the list for Van 2.”

  Dotty’d say sadly, “I have to believe you’re joking.”

  Well, why do you think she liked me? All you little psychoanalyzed people, now say it at once, in a chorus: “Because she is a masochist and you are a sadist.”

  No. I was very good to her. And to all the love she gave me, I responded. And I kept all our appointments and called her on Fridays to remind her about Saturday, and when I had money I brought her flowers and once earrings and once a black brassière I saw advertised in the paper with some cleverly stitched windows for ventilation. I still have it. She never dared take it home.

  But I will not be eaten by any woman.

  My poor old mother died with a sizable chunk of me stuck in her gullet. I was in the army at the time, but I understand her last words were: “Introduce Freddy to Eleanor Farbstein.” Consider the nerve of that woman. Including me in a codicil. She left my sister to that ad man and culinary expert with a crew cut. She left my father to the commiseration of aunts, while me, her prize possession and the best piece of meat in the freezer of her heart, she left to Ellen Farbstein.

  As a matter of fact, Dotty said it herself. “I never went with a fellow who paid as much attention as you, Freddy. You’re always there. I know if I’m lonesome or depressed all I have to do is call you and you’ll meet me downtown and drop whatever you’re doing. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”

  The established truth is, I wasn’t doing much. My brother-in-law could have kept me in clover, but he pretended I was a specialist in certain ornate copy infrequently called for by his concern. Therefore I was able to give my wit, energy, and attention to Jews in the News—Morgenlicht, the Morning Paper That Comes Out the Night Before.

  And so we reached the end. Dot really believed we’d win. I was almost persuaded. Drinking hot chocolate and screwdrivers, we fantasied six weeks away.

  We won.

  I received a 9 a.m. phone call one mid-week morning. “Rise and shine, Frederick P. Sims. We did it. You see, whatever you really try to do, you can do.”

  She quit work at noon and met me for lunch at an outdoor café in the Village, full of smiles and corrupt with pride. We ate very well and I had to hear the following information—part of it I’d suspected.

  It was all in her name. Of course her mother had to get some. She had helped with the translation because Dotty had very little Yiddish actually (not to mention her worry about the security of her old age); and it was necessary, they had decided in midnight conference, to send some money to their old aunt Lise, who had gotten out of Europe only ninety minutes before it was sealed forever and was now in Toronto among strangers, having lost most of her mind.

  The trip abroad to Israel and three other European capitals was for two (2). They had to be married. If our papers could not include one that proved our conjunction by law, she would sail alone. Before I could make my accumulating statement, she shrieked oh! her mother was waiting in front of Lord and Taylor’s. And she was off.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39