“You haven’t answered my question.”
“It wouldn’t be useful, Dad. The best thing now is to put the story in the mail and send it back to me—and try to forget it.” My suggestion triggered a light sardonic laugh from my father.
“All right,” I said sharply, “then don’t forget it.”
“Calm down,” he replied. “I’ll walk you to the bus. I’ll wait with you.”
“You really ought to go home. It’s getting cold.”
“I’m plenty warm,” he informed me.
We waited in silence at the bus stop.
‘They take their time on Sundays,” he finally said. “Maybe you should come home and have dinner. You could catch one first thing in the morning.”
“I’ve got to go to Quahsay first thing in the morning.”
“They can’t wait?”
“I can’t,” I said.
I stepped out into the street to watch for the bus.
“You’re going to get yourself killed out there.”
“Perhaps.”
“So,” he said, when at last, in my own sweet time, I came back up on the curb, “what do you do with the story now? Send it to a magazine?”
“It’s long for a magazine. Probably no magazine will publish it.”
“Oh, they’ll publish it. The Saturday Review has put you on the map. That was a wonderful write-up, a terrific honor to be chosen like that at your age.”
“Well, we’ll see.”
“No, no. You’re on your way.
The Saturday Review
never sold so many copies in North Jersey as when your picture was in it. Why do you think everybody came by today, Frieda and Dave, Aunt Tessie, Birdie, Murray, the Edelmans? Because they saw your picture and they’re proud.”
“They all told me.”
“Look, Nathan, let me have my say. Then you can go, and up there at the artists’ colony maybe you’ll think over in peace arid quiet what I’m trying to get you to understand/If you were going to turn out to be nobody, I wouldn’t be taking this seriously. But I do take you seriously—and you have to take yourself seriously, and what you are doing,
please
. You can catch the next bus! Nathan, you are not in school any more. You are the older brother and you are out in the world and I am treating you accordingly.”
“I understand that. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t disagree. That’s what it does
mean
.”
“But from a lifetime of experience I happen to know what ordinary people will think when they read something like this story. And you don’t. You can’t You have been sheltered from it all your life. You were raised here in this neighborhood where you went to school with Jewish children. When we went to the store and had the house with the Edelmans, you were always among Jews, even in the summertime. At Chicago your best friends who you brought home were Jewish boys, always. It’s not your fault that you don’t know what Gentiles think when they read something like this, but I can tell you. They don’t think about how it’s a great work of art, they don’t know about art. Maybe I don’t know about art myself. Maybe none of our family does, not the way that you do. But that’s my point. People don’t read art—they read about people. And they judge them as such. And how do you think they will judge the people in your story, what conclusions do you think they will reach? Have you thought about that?”
“Yes.”
“And what have you concluded?”
“Oh, I can’t put it into one word, not out here in the street. I didn’t write fifteen thousand words so as now to put it into one word.”
“Well, I can. And the street isn’t a bad place for it. Because I know the word. I wonder if you fully understand just how very little love mere is in this world for Jewish people. I don’t mean in Germany, either, under the Nazis. I mean in run-of-the-mill Americans, Mr. and Mrs. Nice Guy, who otherwise you and I consider perfectly harmless. Nathan, it is there. I guarantee you it is there. I know it is there. I have seen it, I have felt it, even when they do not express it in so many words.”
“But I’m not denying that. Why did Sidney throw that redneck off his ship—?”
“Sidney,” he said furiously, “never threw any redneck off any ship! Sidney threw the bull, Nathan! Sidney was a petty hoodlum who cared about nobody and nothing in this world but the good of Sidney!”
“And who actually existed, Dad—and no better than I depict him!”
“Better? He was worse! How rotten he was you don’t
begin
to know. I could tell you stories about that bastard that would make your hair stand on end.”
“Then where
are
we? If he was
worse
—Oh, look, we’re not getting anywhere. Please, it’s getting dark, it’s going to snow—
go home
. I’ll write when I get up there. But there is no more to say on this subject. We just disagree, period!”
“All right!” he said crisply, “all right!” But only, I knew, to defuse me for the moment.
“Dad, go home, please.”
“It won’t hurt if I wait with you. I don’t like you waiting out here by yourself.”
“I can manage perfectly well out here by myself. I have for years now.”
Some five minutes later, blocks away, we saw what looked like the lights of the New York bus.
“Well,” I said, “I’ll be back down in a few months. I’ll keep in touch—I’ll phone—”
“Nathan, your Story, as far as Gentiles are concerned, is about one thing and one thing only. Listen to me, before you go. It is about kikes. Kikes and their love of money. That is all our good Christian friends will see, I guarantee you. It is not about the scientists and teachers and lawyers they become and the things such people accomplish for others. It is not about the immigrants, like Chaya who worked and saved and sacrificed to get a decent footing in America. It is not about the wonderful peaceful days and nights you spent growing up in our house. It is not about the lovely friends you always had. No, it’s about Essie and her hammer, and Sidney and his chorus girls, and that shyster of Essie’s and his filthy mouth, and, as best I can see, about what a jerk I was begging them to reach a decent compromise before the whole family had to been dragged up in front of a
goyisher
judge.”
“I didn’t depict you as a jerk. Christ, far from it. I thought,” I said angrily, “I was administering a bear hug, to tell you the truth.”
“Oh, did you? Well, it didn’t come out that way. Look, son, maybe I was a jerk, trying to talk sense to such people. I don’t mind being made a little fun of—that couldn’t bother me less. I’ve been around in life. But what I can’t accept is what you don’t see—what you don’t want to see. This story isn’t us, and what is worse, it isn’t even
you
. You are a loving boy. I watched you like a hawk all day. I’ve watched you all your life. You are a good and kind and considerate young man. You are not somebody who writes this kind of story and then pretends it’s the truth.”
“But I did
write
it.” The light changed, the New York bus started toward us across the intersection—and he threw his arms onto my shoulders. Making me all the more belligerent. “I am the kind of person who writes this kind of story!”
“You’re not,” he pleaded, shaking me just a little.
But I hopped up onto the bus, and then behind me the pneumatic door, with its hard rubber edge, swung shut with what I took to be an overly appropriate thump, a symbol of the kind you leave out of fiction. It was a sound that suddenly brought back to me the prize fights at the Laurel Garden, where once a year my brother and I used to wager our pennies with one another, each of us alternately backing the white fighter or the colored fighter, while Doc Zuckerman waved hello to his few acquaintances in the sporting crowd, among them, on one occasion, Meyer Ellenstein, the dentist who became the city’s first Jewish mayor. What I heard was the heartrending thud that follows the roundhouse knockout punch, the sound of the stupefied heavy weight hitting the canvas floor. And what I saw, when I looked out to wave goodbye for the winter, was my smallish, smartly dressed father—turned out for my visit in a new “fingertip” car coat that matched the coffee-toned slacks and the checkered, peaked cap, and wearing, of course, the same silver-rimmed spectacles, the same trim little mustache that I had grabbed at from the crib; what I saw was my bewildered father, alone on the darkening street-comer by the park that used to be our paradise, thinking himself and all of Jewry gratuitously disgraced and jeopardized by my inexplicable betrayal.
Nor was that the end. So troubled was he that several days later, against the counsel of my. mother, and after an unpleasant phone conversation with my younger brother, who warned him from Ithaca that I wasn’t going to like it when I found out, he decided to seek an audience with Judge Leopold Wapter, after Ellenstein and Rabbi Joachim Prinz perhaps the city’s most admired Jew.
Wapter had been born of Galician Jews in the slums adjacent to the city’s sweatshops and mills some ten years before our family arrived mere from Eastern Europe in 1900. My father still remembered having been rescued by one of the Wapter brothers—it could have been the future jurist himself—when a gang of Irish hooligans were having some fun throwing the seven-year-old mocky up into the air in a game of catch. I Had heard this story more than once in my childhood, usually when we drove by the landscaped gardens and turreted stone house on Clinton Avenue where Wapter lived with a spinster daughter—one of the first Jewish students at Vassar College to earn the esteem of her Christian teachers—and his wife, the department-store heiress, whose philanthropic activities had given her family name the renown among the Jews of Essex County that it was said to have in her native Charleston. Because the Wapters occupied a position of prestige and authority rather like that ac corded in our household to President and Mrs. Roosevelt, I used to imagine her, when I was a small boy, going around wearing Mrs. Roosevelt’s dowager hats and dresses, and, oddly for a Jewish woman, speaking in the First Lady’s awesome Anglified tones. It did not seem to me that, coming from South Carolina, she could really
be
Jewish. Which was exactly what she thought about me, after reading my story.
To approach the judge, my father had first to contact a lofty cousin of ours—an attorney, a suburbanite, and a former Army colonel who had been president for several years of the judge’s Newark temple. Cousin Teddy had already helped him to the judge once before, back when my father had gotten it into his head that I should be one of the five youngsters for whom each year Wapter wrote letters of recommendation to college-admission officers which—it was said—never failed to do the trick. To go up before Judge Wapter I had to wear a blue suit on a bus in broad daylight and men, from where the bus left me off at the Four Comers (our Times Square), to walk all the way up Market Street through throngs of shoppers, whom I imagined dropping in their tracks at the sight of me out in my only dress suit at that hour. I was to be interviewed at the Essex County Courthouse, in his “chambers,” a word that had been intoned to relatives on the phone so frequently and with such reverence by my mother during the preceding week that h may well have accounted for the seven visits I made to our bathroom before I could get myself buttoned for good into the blue suit.
Teddy had telephoned the night before to give me some tips on how to conduct myself. This explained the suit and my father’s black silk socks, which I was wearing held up with a pair of his garters, and also the initialed briefcase, a grade-school graduation present that I had never removed from the back of my closet. In the gleaming briefcase I carried ten typewritten pages I had written for International Relations the year before on the Balfour Declaration.
As instructed, I “spoke up” right away and offered to show the judge the essay. To my relief, his chambers had turned out to be one room, not ten—and a room no more grand than the principal’s office in our high school. Nor did the tanned, plumpish, cheery judge have the shock of white hair I had been expecting. And though not as small as my father, he still was easily a foot shorter than Abraham Lincoln, whose bronze statue you pass coming into the courthouse. He actually looked years younger than my own anxious father, and not half as serious. Reputedly an excellent golfer, he was probably either on his way to or from a game; that’s how I later came to terms with his argyle socks. But when I first noticed them—as he leaned back in his leather chair to flip through my essay—I was shocked. It was as though he were the callow, unworldly applicant, and I, with my father’s garters pulled tight as a tourniquet, were the judge. “May I keep this for now, Nathan?” he asked, turning with a smile through my pages of
op. cits
and
ibids
. “I’d like to take it home for my wife to see.” Then began the inquiry. I had prepared myself the night before (at Teddy’s suggestion) by reading through the Constitution of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, and the editorial page of the Newark
Evening News
. The members of Truman’s Cabinet and the majority and minority leaders of both Houses of Congress I of course knew already by heart, though before bed I had gone over them out loud with my mother just to help her relax.
To the judge’s questions I gave the following answers:
Journalist. The University of Chicago. Ernie Pyle. One brother, younger. Reading—and sports. The Giants in the National League and the Tigers in the American. Mel Ott and Hank Greenberg. Li’l Abner. Thomas Wolfe. Canada; Washington, D.C.; Rye, New York; New York City itself; Philadelphia; and the Jersey shore. No, sir, never to Florida.
When the judge’s secretary made public the names of New ark’s five Jewish boys and girls whose college applications Wapter would endorse, mine was one.
I never saw the judge again, though to please my father I had sent my sponsor a letter from the University of Chicago during orientation week of my freshman year, thanking him again for all he had done on my behalf. The letter I received from Wapter some seven years later, during my second week as a guest at Quahsay, was the first I knew of their meeting to talk about “Higher Education.”
Dear Nathan: