Back Then (9 page)

Wayne's compliment, such as it was, set me to thinking about the human order in this New Mexico wilderness as it related to my own feelings of belonging. I lived in a cabin on the edge of a vast national forest bounded by the Sangre de Cristo range. Possibly no one had ever walked or ridden over much of this land, not even the Indians. Like many other parts of New Mexico it had remained unexplored for centuries and so “belonged” to no one, meaning, I supposed, that I had as much a right to be there as anyone.

“Every continent,” D. H. Lawrence wrote, “has its own great spirit of place.” For me the spirit of place in New Mexico was far more life altering than that of Europe when I got there several years later. Among the books I brought with me to New Mexico was Matthiessen's monumental study of “art and expression in the age of Emerson and Whitman,”
American Renaissance
. I also brought Alfred Kazin's
On Native Grounds,
a work of discovery and appropriation: a Jewish writer—outsider—son of immigrants, raised and educated in Brooklyn, doing his reading at the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street—laid claims to American literature as his own “native grounds,” despite the incongruities.

Henry Adams, anti-Semite and supreme representative of the American social and political patriciate, became the darling of Jewish critics and biographers, perhaps because they fell in love with their tormentor, believing they understood him on a higher, more tolerant plane than he understood himself. They were dazzled by his brilliance, fully as dazzled as Adams himself. The same process of appropriation, maybe even Eucharistic ingestion and incorporation, transformed another
monstre sacre
of American letters, Henry James, whose antipathy to Jews was at least as pronounced as Henry Adams's. Leon Edel, a Jew, wrote a landmark biography that in effect made Henry James his property, and for a while, until it was stolen, Edel wore the novelist's gold signet ring. Even preferring to ignore James's comments on “a Jewry that had burst all bounds” and effected “the Hebrew conquest of New York,” I felt sickening dismay the first time I read
The American Scene,
his account of a return visit to his native country in 1904. In one appalling chapter he described the denizens of the Lower East Side—my grandparents, Sir!—as belonging to “the nimbler class of animals in some great zoological garden.” They were “human squirrels and monkeys,” glass snakes, worms, ants, a “swarm” of insects, and “fish of over-developed proboscis.” And yet, as they had done with Henry Adams, Jewish writers like Edel made love to Henry James, enfolded him in their own emerging literary tradition, and emboldened others—like me—to tread on “native grounds.”

By the 1950s—at least in New York, Chicago, and on the West Coast—Jewish writers and intellectuals no longer skulked in the alleys of American culture. There was even some danger, given the historical precedents of fifteenth-century Spain and twentieth-century Germany, that Jews as a group may have become too successful and perhaps ought to keep their heads down. They were conspicuous in areas like entertainment, book publishing, “communications,” and even the academy, especially in previously off-limits English and history departments. Writers like Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Allen Ginsberg challenged the traditional WASP hegemony in American letters. These writers weren't descended from what Emerson had called “the establishment,” the pantheon of American letters. Not without opposition they created their own mainstream along with a literary language, this one with a Yiddish and vernacular substrate, that was as formative as the language of Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway.

One night, over drinks in a Montauk, Long Island, restaurant, Philip Roth entertained Annie and me with an imitation of Prince Sadrudin Ali Khan, publisher and chief patron of the
Paris Review,
speaking at the magazine's annual award ceremony. Roth indicated a dignified hush and then drew out the prince's precise upper-class articulation when he spoke and, in an unintended context of comic incongruity and delicious irony, presented “The Aga Khan award for short fiction, to Phee-leep Roth for ‘The Conversion of the Jews'” (one of the stories in
Goodbye, Columbus
).

My pride in belonging to a stubborn, perdurable people had come slowly, along with the recognition that, like the color of my eyes, this was for life, a membership nonelective and nonresignable, and that one had better make the best of it. Jewish collective survival over the millennia, against all odds and all reason, even gave me a faint intimation of impersonal immortality.

CHAPTER 3

As one of two brotherless sisters,
I was skittish around boys. For two years I went to City and Country, a progressive school for boys and girls on West Twelfth Street, an institution my father plucked me from after he found out that I hadn't, by the age of eight, learned to read. After that, I went to the Brearley School, a polite and venerable all-girl establishment, then on to two female colleges. Until late in my teens I found men, like raw clams and fast sports cars, something of a novelty, something of a risk.

I was twelve when my periods began, and it was my mother who discovered this before I did. Superstitiously uneasy with her, convinced that she could navigate and chart the chaos of my mind, it dismayed but didn't surprise me that she saw the blood first, as I undressed in front of her, having been sent home from school early with a stomachache. But even before I became a “woman” I existed in a state of heated infatuation with boys. One evening as I sat next to one of these on a piano bench—behind us stood half a dozen formal wedding portraits within silver frames—talking with his eagle-eyed parents, the edges of our shoe soles touched, and I felt a rush of desire so violent it nearly knocked me off my perch. I mentioned my eagerness to cuddle and smooch to no one; it was my secret, kept even from my sister, Doris, who had a way of worming almost anything out of me. Whenever I met a new, good-looking boy (for I had definite standards) at my cousin's house in South Orange or my friend Carol's in Woodmere, Long Island, I couldn't wait to feel his tongue inside my mouth, his member tight against my pubic bone—under layers of clothing—and the melting of the bones in my legs. Most often, I ended up dizzy, loose in the knees, from these baby encounters. I had never seen a live penis.

My passion for movie stars—Ronald Colman, Tyrone Power, Macdonald Carey, Gary Cooper—was not a mere schoolgirl crush on two-dimensional idols but throbbing, stomach-churning, heart-stopping lovesickness. I collected pictures of these and other actors, cutting them from movie magazines and attaching them with thick white library paste to the pages of an album I hid on a shelf in my closet under my ski pants and showed to no one.

Starting when I was eleven, I had so many boyfriends that, lest I forget any, I kept an up-to-date list in a notebook, placing a star-shaped mark alongside the names of those with whom I had shared great kisses. Sex with these youths was passionate but chaste, maybe more passionate precisely because for years, until I was seventeen, “nothing happened.” Lust was stalled at a notch or two below orgasm and so my appetite was never appeased. We “necked,” we “petted,” we jabbed our fully clothed bodies rhythmically against each other, but we never went “all the way”; home runs were out of the question, pregnancy being roughly equivalent to a death sentence.

Constantly on the prowl, juices on the simmer, I was about as steady as a trayful of champagne flutes on a North Atlantic crossing in February. I rated handsome far higher than character, temperament, sense of humor, intelligence, or communications skills. It didn't matter if they preferred Batman comics to the poetry of William Butler Yeats, my boyfriends had to have regular features, sited symmetrically, strong chins and brows, lean bodies, good posture. They also had to be graceful and adept at ordering food from a waiter, paying and tipping a cabdriver, and knowing which shoes to wear when. Raised in a household where being Jewish was a silent reality rather than an imperative, I made little distinction between Jews and gentiles—except that gentiles were more likely than Jews to have the physical style I required.

The following is a sampling of the men I dated, considered, and eventually parted from.

Bert. I was in my senior year at Brearley when we met at a party. He was twenty-five and a devout Jew. A buyer in the management training program at Macy's department store, Bert was a Yalie and a former marine who had been through boot camp at Parris Island as well as some shooting action that he never talked about. Bert lived with his mother and brother in a two-room apartment in the east fifties, a “good” address. The only two windows in this place gave out on a filthy air shaft; it was in constant dusk. Bert's mother, a fragile neurasthenic, slept on a fold-out couch in one room, the two men in twin beds in the other. The kitchen was a hot plate, a tiny refrigerator, and a sink. Although on their uppers, they pretended to be rich; Bert's mother was desperate for him to marry a girl with money. His brother, Andrew, also a veteran of the war in Europe, suffered from mild shell shock and was unemployable.

“Bert,” Wellesley, 1948.

Bert wasn't merely handsome; he had the gloomy good looks of an actor playing a doomed prince, and not necessarily a Jewish prince; he could have passed for the offspring of almost anything but Asian or Nordic lineage. He wore flannels and tweeds, cordovan shoes, black knit ties. His thick shiny hair was so black it was blue, like Prince Valiant's. I was in love with him chiefly because of the way he looked and because his melancholy suggested—mistakenly—both depth and an inquisitive, playful mind. Claiming to be protecting my virginity, he insisted we have oral sex.

Bert wrote catchy song lyrics that he and Andrew sang while a third man, a friend, accompanied them on the guitar and also sang. They were better than “amateur” but never seemed able to find the right door to open, the door leading to the garden of worldly success. I went away to Wellesley and languished there for an entire semester, writing to Bert every day. Letters from him came back in a tiny, exact hand, stuffed with new lyrics. I talked to him several times a week from the pay phone on the ground floor of the off-campus house where I lived with twelve other freshman. My romance with Bert occupied a good deal of talking space in this mandatory family. An ex-marine, an older man, his gorgeous picture on my bureau, sitting on a stone wall somewhere, looking seductively at the photographer. To most of my “sisters,” few of whom had gone out with anyone more exciting than the boy next door in Kentucky, Tennessee, California, Texas, Bert was an exotic.

Sometimes Bert made me feel terrible and I couldn't understand why, since we were in love. He told me I was too fat; he called my father a tyrant; he scolded me for the absence of religion in my life; he criticized exuberance and repeatedly told me to stop acting like a baby. His piety was a constant surprise because he was so intent on climbing the social ladder that led to largely Christian territory. How could he be a Jew and be accepted by those who lived there at the same time? Once he took me to Sabbath services in a cramped East Side synagogue off Lexington Avenue, where I sat with the women. The arms of the rabbi's wife were covered with black silky hair, like a man's; I couldn't take my eyes off her arm where she had draped it over the pew in front of me.

Agreeing with most of Bert's estimates of my worth, my family, my appearance, and my failure to act more maturely, I was determined to transform myself into the girl he seemed to think I could be—without ever asking him what about me didn't need fixing. He said we should get engaged and I agreed, liking the sound of it. “I'm engaged to be married.” After Bert paid me a weekend visit—in a borrowed car—my housemates—without being asked—told me I was much too cheerful and nice for him; they said he was gloomy and possessive, a grouch. It was pointed out to me that during the two and a half days he was there I hardly said a word. “He's a jerk, you deserve better,” they told me. I was sure they didn't know what they were talking about, they hadn't, as I had, bothered to unpeel the top layer and see the wondrous person that lay beneath.

When it came to Bert, my parents made no attempt to hide their distaste. My mother said, “He sulks,” “He's a nar-sist.” My father said, “He won't look me in the eye. He's shifty-eyed.” There were things they could have added aloud but which they transmitted silently, such as Bert was poor and worse: he was a Russian Jew. Having convinced themselves that Bert was the ghost of Henry James's Morris Townsend, with his greedy eyes on the heiress's fortune, they declared a covert war on my romance.

One night after we had been going together long enough for my parents to realize that Bert wasn't simply another of my two-week flings, he phoned me at Wellesley, an expense he saved for emergencies. “Your father is having me investigated. He must be crazy. What does he think I am—a criminal?”