Authors: Chaim Potok
Then a heavy silence moved swiftly through the crowd. The bald-headed man had risen and was now approaching the podium. He stood for a moment and looked out across the room, bathing in its silence. Then, in a tone that seemed to require no loudness to assert its authority, he began to introduce my mother. He talked of her dedication to the party, her skillful writing, her brilliant teaching, her remarkable courage. His quiet amplified voice seemed to push against the walls of the room. Then he was done
and he returned to his seat. There was respectful, subdued applause.
I watched my mother rise and walk to the podium.
Slowly and in a firm voice she thanked the people for coming to the meeting. Michael would have been so pleased, she said. She told about how she and my father had met in the twenties, how he had convinced her of the rightness of his views, how they had supported one another’s work for the party, how they had raised a child together, sacrificed together. Her voice quavered and she stopped for a moment. I looked around the room. All the crowd was rigid with silence. Overhead the happy cherubs and maidens played along the banks of their misty blue river, and along the walls strange birds and animals conjured up from some mythic bestiary gazed at the crowd from tall leafy trees and a lush green meadow. I looked up at the ceiling and thought about joining the cherubs in their play. What would it take? Only a small leap. That’s all. A small leap—and then the blue river and the cool water and the careless frolicking with the plump pink maidens. Then my mother said, loudly, in a voice I had never heard her use before, a tone so abruptly fierce with determination that I felt myself go cold, “In the name of my late husband, Michael Chandal, I pledge to you that I will continue to work for the party. I will continue to work for a better world. I will continue to work for a classless society and for the dream of Karl Marx. Long live the revolution!”
There was tumultuous applause. My mother returned to her chair. I looked up at her. Her eyes shone; a thin sheen of perspiration covered her flushed cheeks and forehead. Her face was expressionless. The bald man shook her hand. The applause continued a long time. Then the crowd burst into song. All stood at attention, singing.
Afterward we came down off the stage and people pressed densely around us. I thought I saw the tall, dark-suited figure of Mr. Dinn in the crowd. A woman moved across my field of vision. When I looked again he was gone.
Someone took us home in a car. I remember a dark river and a tall bridge and cobblestone streets and a wide parkway. I clung to my mother and smelled her warmth and the sweat on her face and neck. I fell asleep and woke later in my bed in the darkness of my room and heard the voices of my mother and Mr. Dinn. The room was cold. My bed was wet. A chill wind blew through the leafy branches outside my window. In the cellarway a cat wailed.
I said to my mother during breakfast the next morning, “What do you and Mr. Dinn talk about at night?”
She gazed at me wearily. “Don’t you ever sleep, Ilana?”
“Do you talk about Uncle Jakob?”
“Yes. And other matters.”
“Why did Papa die?”
“Why? I don’t know. He just did, that’s all.”
“Like my little brother?”
“Yes,” she said, after a brief pause. “Like your little brother.”
“I hate it when there’s no reason that people die. Will you do anything else for Papa?”
“What do you mean?”
“Will there be another memorial service?”
“No.”
“Nothing else?”
“What else do you want, Ilana?”
I didn’t know what to say and was quiet.
“Go get yourself ready for school,” she said. “I don’t want you to be late.”
I left her in the kitchen, looking down into her cup of coffee, and went to the bookcase in my parents’ bedroom and carefully searched the shelves. There was another bookcase in the living room and I looked through that one too. The book I wanted was not in my parents’ library.
I was late getting out of the house and ran most of the way to school and came late to class. My teacher said nothing. My classmates tried to avoid looking at me.
During the morning recess I went into the school library and
quickly scanned some shelves. After school I walked along Eastern Parkway and went into a large stone-and-glass building and climbed up a marble staircase. I waited awhile on line and then asked the librarian for a certain book.
She had white hair and metal-rimmed spectacles and gazed at me piercingly from across her desk.
“Who is the book for?”
I told her the book was for me.
“That isn’t a book for a little girl. It’s in the adult division.” I went home.
The next day after school I crossed Eastern Parkway very carefully, with the help of the lights, and walked some blocks to a bookstore. Inside I asked an old man with a lined face and a white mustache and heavy-lidded eyes if he could show me where to find a certain book.
“Why?”
I hesitated, my heart pounding. “To buy it.”
“Who for?”
“My mother,” I said.
He went over to some shelves and pulled down a book. Then he told me what it would cost.
I told him I didn’t have enough money.
He put the book back on the shelf. “Come back when you do,” he said.
The next afternoon I walked again down Eastern Parkway and turned into the library. I climbed the staircase to the adult division, went through wide glass-and-wood doors, and found myself in a vast hushed tall-ceilinged marble-floored room. Sunlight streamed through enormous vaulted windows onto long polished wooden tables and tall dark-wood bookcases. There were few people at the tables. I stood frozen for a long moment, awed by the silence and the light. It seemed a room without shadows, its furniture and books and reading lamps and catalogues starkly outlined by the brilliant sun. I stood very still. Coursing through me was the gently electric attraction of the books. I looked cautiously
around. The librarians were busy at their desks. I slipped easily past their gaze.
I entered the maze of bookcases. So many books! So many more stories than in the children’s section below! I did not know what to do.
Standing nearby, searching for a book, was an elderly man in thick glasses, baggy pants, and a sweater. I asked him where I might find
Nineteen-Nineteen
by Dos Passos.
“Hah?” he said, staring at me.
I repeated the question.
“I don’t know that book,” he said. “Why don’t you ask one of the librarians?” I said nothing.
“Who did you say is the author?” “John Dos Passos.”
“Try under P,” he said. “Wait. Dos Passos? Try under D. Maybe you’ll find it under D.”
I told him I couldn’t find the D’s. He told me where to look.
I found Dos Passos. I did not find the book. I went out of the library and walked quickly home.
I returned the following day. The book was not there. Nor was it there the day after.
The next day was Friday. I walked in a drizzle to the library and climbed the marble staircase and went past the long counter behind which sat the librarians, working at their desks. I went to the bookcase and searched the shelf and there was the book.
I took it from the shelf and held it and had no notion how to find what I was looking for. I began to turn pages and found a page marked contents. It contained a list of names and something called Newsreel and The Camera Eye. I kept turning the pages and looking at the names. I found nothing about a place called Centralia.
I went through the contents page again. The third name from the end was Paul Bunyan. I turned the pages and saw what I thought were newspaper headlines:
BAGS
28
HUNS SINGLEHANDED
and
GANG LEADER SLAIN IN STREET
and
REDS WEAKENING WASHINGTON HEARS.
I couldn’t understand why there were headlines in a book of stories. Was the book about true stories
and
made-up stories? How would I know the difference between them?
I found the page I was looking for and saw in large letters
PAUL BUNYAN.
I began to read.
“When Wesley Everest came home from overseas and got his discharge from the army he went back to his old job of logging.” I read very slowly. There were many words I did not understand. “In the army Everest was a sharpshooter, won a medal for a crack shot.” Some of the words were very long and seemed made up of two or more words. I couldn’t understand why a writer would put words together like that. I read, “Wesley Everest was a logger like Paul Bunyan.” I read about the Wobblies and the timber owners and Memorial Day, 1918, in Centralia and the way a group called the American Legion wrecked something called the I.W.W. hall, beat up everyone they found inside, and drove the rest out of the city. I read that the loggers hired a new hall and on Armistice Day, 1919, people broke through the door and there was shooting. Wesley Everest fired his rifle and ran for the woods. He was captured crossing a river and brought back to jail.
Then I read, “That night the city lights were turned off. A mob smashed in the outer door of the jail. ‘Don’t shoot, boys, here’s your man,’ said the guard. Wesley Everest met them on his feet. ‘Tell the boys I did my best,’ he whispered to the men in the other cells.
“They took him off in a limousine to the Chehalis River bridge. As Wesley Everest lay stunned in the bottom of the car a Centralia businessman cut his penis and testicles off with a razor. Wesley Everest gave a great scream of pain. Somebody has remembered that after a while he whispered, ‘For God’s sake, men, shoot me … don’t let me suffer like this.’ Then they hanged him from the bridge in the glare of the headlights.”
I read those last two paragraphs again. Then I finished reading to the end. “Nobody knows where they buried the body of Wesley Everest….”
I returned the book to the shelf.
My hands were shaking and I could not breathe. I slid past the suspicious gaze of a librarian and hurried down the marble staircase to the street.
It was raining. I walked beneath the trees, trying to take deep breaths. A queer heaviness lay upon my chest. The rain came through the leaves and fell upon the puddles on the sidewalks. Along the darkly glistening asphalt of the streets, cars moved cautiously, tires hissing. People scurried along beneath umbrellas. I needed to go to the bathroom. I turned off the parkway into a side street and could no longer control my trembling. The strange heaviness still lay upon my chest. Then I felt the flow of urine begin to seep slowly from between my legs and into my panties and down along the insides of my thighs. I stood under a tree in the rain and felt the hot rush flow outward. The street was empty save for automobile traffic. I began to run. I ran along the side street and then through the street where I lived and up the stoop and through the doors and up the staircase into the apartment.
The singing of the door harp startled me. My mother must have untaped the wooden balls before leaving for work. She should have told me she would do that. Why hadn’t she told me? I would have said not yet, I didn’t want music yet, it was too soon for me to be hearing again the singing of the harp.
In my room I removed my clothes. Naked, I went to the bathroom and washed myself. Peering down at the ridges and valley between my legs, I felt suddenly nauseated and thought I would vomit. I sat down on the toilet. After a moment the nausea passed. I returned to my room and put on fresh clothes. I did not know what to do with my wet underpants. I went into the kitchen and threw them into the garbage pail under the sink. They would be in the alleyway that night with the cans of garbage and the roaming cats. I lay on my bed and put my hand over my eyes. What had they done with Wesley Everest’s—? Paul Bunyan. What a sweet story that had been each time my father had told it to me. Tall Paul Bunyan, his huge ax, his blue ox. Through half-sleep I heard a great scream of pain and sat bolt upright on the
bed, shaking. I lay dazed in a sleep of exhaustion when my mother came home.
During supper that night I said, “Did Papa see what happened to that poor man Wesley Everest in Centralia?”
My mother coughed and put down her knife and fork and stared at me.
“I read it in a book today. About what happened to—” My mother broke sharply into my words. “I do not want to talk about that at the table,” she said. We ate in silence.
After supper I asked my mother, “Did they really do that to that man?” “Yes,” she said.
“How could they do that? What kind of people would do that?”
“Ilana, I wish you had not—” “Did Papa see them do it?”
She hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “He saw them hang him. But he was too frightened to tell anyone.” “It’s not a story?” “No, Ilana.”
“But it’s in a book that’s a story.” “It happened,” my mother said. “I’m scared, Mama.”
“Come here. Come to me. Let me hold you. Would you like to go to the movies tonight? Maybe there’s a funny movie playing in the neighborhood. All right? Ilana, tell me something. How did you find that book?”
I told her. She stared at me and shook her head; but she said nothing. Later we went to a movie but I cannot remember what it was. I closed my eyes during the Movietone News and put my hands over my ears—and suddenly understood what the word Newsreel meant in the book by John Dos Passos. Sitting in the cavernous darkness of that theater, with my eyes and ears closed against the horrors of the war on the screen, I saw inside my eyes
the words, “Wesley Everest was a logger like Paul Bunyan,” and the words, “Wesley Everest gave a great scream of pain.”
In the morning I walked to the synagogue and sat alongside the dividing curtain, peering through the distorting fabric at the boy who stood at the lectern leading the service, and then seeing him clearly through the tear in the ninon. The boy was becoming a bar mitzvah. Ruthie had told me about that. He was taking on all the obligations and privileges of an adult Jew. No, Ruthie had said in response to my question, girls didn’t become bar mitzvah, only boys. And she had giggled.
The synagogue was crowded. Cool air blew in through the open windows on the men’s side of the large room. I saw David and his father sitting together near the front of the room, watched them rise and say the Kaddish together and then sit down. No woman rose to say the Kaddish. I had noticed that over the weeks I had been coming here: no woman ever recited the Kaddish.