(The women liked invasions—up to a point.)
O
NE DAY
he came home, mysterious, exalted, hatted and suited, roseate, handsome, a little sweaty—it really was summer that day. He was exalted—as I said—but nervous toward me, anxious with promises.
And he was, oh, somewhat angry, justified, toward the world, toward me, not exactly as a threat (in case I didn’t respond) but as a jumble.
He woke me from a nap, an uneasy nap, lifted me out of bed, me, a child who had not expected to see him that afternoon—I was not particularly happy that day, not particularly pleased with him, not pleased with him at all, really.
He dressed me himself. At first he kept his hat on. After a while, he took it off. When I was dressed, he said, “You’re pretty sour today,” and he put his hat back on.
He hustled me down the stairs; he held my wrist in his enormous palm—immediate and gigantic to me and blankly suggestive of a meaning
I could do nothing about except stare at blankly from time to time in my childish life.
We went outside into the devastating heat and glare, the blathering, humming afternoon light of a Midwestern summer day: a familiar furnace.
We walked along the street, past the large, silent houses, set, each one, in hard, pure light. You could not look directly at anything; the glare, the reflections were too strong.
Then he lifted me in his arms—aloft.
He was carrying me to help me because the heat was bad—and worse near the sidewalk, which reflected it upward into my face—and because my legs were short and I was struggling, because he was in a hurry and because he liked carrying me, and because I was sour and blackmailed him with my unhappiness, and he was being kind with a certain—limited—mixture of exasperation-turning-into-a-degree-of-mortal-love.
O
R IT WAS
another time, really early in the morning, when the air was partly asleep, partly adance, but in veils, trembling with heavy moisture. Here and there, the air broke into a string of beads of pastel colors, pink, pale green, small rainbows, really small, and very narrow. Daddy walked rapidly. I bounced in his arms. My eyesight was unforced—it bounced, too. Things were more than merely present: they pressed against me: they had the aliveness of myth, of the beginning of an adventure when nothing is explained as yet.
All at once we were at the edge of a bankless river of yellow light. To be truthful, it was like a big, wooden beam of fresh, unweathered wood: but we entered it: and then it turned into light, cooler light than in the hot humming afternoon but full of bits of heat that stuck to me and then were blown away, a semiheat, not really friendly, yet reassuring: and very dimly sweaty; and it grew, it spread: this light turned into a knitted cap of light, fuzzy, warm, woven, itchy: it was pulled over my head, my hair, my forehead, my eyes, my nose, my mouth.
So I turned my face away from the sun—I turned it so it was pressed against my father’s neck mostly—and then I knew, in a childish way, knew from the heat (of his neck, of his shirt collar), knew by childish deduction, that his face was unprotected from the luminousness all around us: and I looked; and it was so: his face, for the moment unembarrassedly, was caught in that light. In an accidental glory.
S
OMETIMES
in New York, I can create a zone of amusement and doubt around me by saying I was a Boy Scout.
I am forty-four years old now, bearded—I suppose I have a certain personal ambience that makes Boy Scouthood unlikely.
I don’t think it’s my fault.
I w
A
s a Boy Scout in 1942. I was about five seven, newly grown from five two or three; I was temporarily deformed, with short squat legs and feet that were nearly square—the arches had grown but I still had a child’s toes. I had other physical anomalies of that sort: big knees and stick-like thighs.
My balls had dropped; my prick had started to grow—it was about five inches, not particularly thin, large for a child’s—it was still growing.
I was by some standards of measurement the smartest child in the state of Missouri. I was, am, Jewish and had been very ugly and was still, as well as deformed, but I was slowly turning, slowly showing a pale, transparent physical quality, which in the suburb where I lived at that time was called “cute”—it didn’t mean cuddly: it meant interesting—I think. My ears stuck out: I had them pinned back when I was in college, grown tired of the problem posed when one’s appearance lies about what one is like. My father had heart trouble and was something of an invalid; he dabbled in the black market—there was a war and rationing.
My mother was mentally unwell. I mention these things because they made up my social position.
The Boy Scout troops I knew about were, each one, attached to a church—or a temple; I don’t believe synagogues bothered. Each troop had a social rank according to the social rank of the church or temple that founded it.
It cost money to belong to a Reform temple: you had to have that extra money and be willing to enter on the confused clashing of social climbing and Anglo-Saxon mimicry and personal loneliness and religion as a set of tenets and questions about the secular, the fate of Jews, and the nature of guilt—such things as that—in the Middle West, among the cornfields. We had Sunday school and confirmation—nothing Jewish except the rabbi’s nose: it was the boniest, largest, most hooked nose I ever saw, ever in my life; he also used his hands a lot when he talked. He was reputed to be “a good speaker,” but I believe it was his nose and hands, his physical status as a Jew—I don’t remember him ever making a religious remark or showing any interest in anything to do with the spirit—that enabled him to force a salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a year, in 1942, from the Russo-Jewish magnates—well-tailored, quick-eyed, bad-tempered, secretive, restless, and clever—who ran the temple.
The rabbi was so jealous of a book called
Peace of Mind
written by a Boston rabbi, and which became a best seller, that he wrote a book called
Peace of Soul
—he wanted very much to be famous—and he had it printed privately and mailed to every member of the congregation in a plain brown wrapper with a bill enclosed: a married couple would be sent two copies and two bills, each bill being for three dollars.
We were members of the temple because my mother’s brother was on the board of directors. He was rich by local standards, and I was smart; and either he had a dim sense of community duty or else his two sons irritated him: he did not think his sons were smart. I thought they were smart enough. One wanted to be an artist and tried the arts, each in turn, and he insisted he was unhappy, which made his father very restless. My uncle was skinny. His other son was a perfect Anglo-Saxon except for a nose shaped like a peanut: that, too, displeased my uncle although this son was brave and athletic and likable enough; he did drink and spend a lot of money, and he wracked up the family Cadillac twice, once by crashing into the gatehouse that guarded the entrance to the enclave where my uncle had his house. Of that son, his mother said,
“He’s so brave: his jaw is wired shut and he never complains.” My uncle said his son was meshuggeneh, and to irritate him and the other one as they irritated him, he would praise me and “do things” for me such as send me to Sunday school or finance my entry into the Boy Scouts: not only finance it but insist the troop pursue me since I didn’t want to join. It seemed I owed it to Judaism and the war effort to be a Boy Scout.
The troop had a reputation for consisting of three types of boys—the refined, the would-be refined who would probably never get there (to refinement), and the wild ones, the crazy or tough ones, pugnacious or obsessive. I always thought refinement was a joke, all things considered, and do still, but some of those boys were very impressive, I thought: two of the older ones, who had remarkable, even tempers and never showed signs of cruelty or of pride except for expecting quietly to be dominant, spoke to each other only in Latin. Another boy knew entire Shakespearean plays by heart. And two of the boys would hum themes from a Brahms quintet—I couldn’t do things like that. But I was famous locally, and they were not. I was powerful at school and could force a teacher to regive a test that was unfair or unclear: not for my sake—my grades were always high; my average was sometimes given as 101—but for the sake of my classmates. Then, too, because of my foul tongue and for other reasons, the working-class kids at school, a minority, accepted me: I was a point where the varying kinds of middle-class children, the few rich, and the slightly more numerous poor met. There were two or three other children of whom this was true (including two political girls), but they were fine children and had not read Thomas Mann. I was considered a fine child because of my parents’ plight and the way I treated my parents, but there was something decidedly not fine about me, something anomalous and confusing; it is very unlikely but it is true that I was treated, on the whole, with respect; and so fineness was ascribed to me to resolve the anomaly and strangeness.
In those days, fine or “distinguished” families had a decided moral tone: social climbing had a moral cast to it—as in how much you gave to charity and how much charitable work you did—and this moral tone was refined: it included euphemisms such as “passed on” or “passed away.” It was my opinion as a child unable sometimes to crack the grownups’ code of talk that if someone will lie about what to call a fuck, they’ll lie about anything. Also, if you remember, eleven and twelve pre- and during puberty are particularly nasty, intellectual, realpolitik ages—at least for some kids, male and female. I had, decidedly, a moral rank,
a high one, but it was not based on the right things; however, people did not keep track, and they would have some vague sense that I
was
refined. Meanwhile the war blazed. I had enormous maps with flags; and I fretted over strategy, the quality of Allied war matériel and leadership—Churchill was a complete bust militarily—the problems of courage, and the daily and unremitting horror of what one translator of Proust calls “a bloody hedge of men constantly renewed.”
If life were nice—well, nicer—one would have Einstein’s katzenjammers, space and time for research, a number of anecdotes, nuances, but one is rushed. One has to forgo discussing the names of ranks in Boy Scouts, from Tenderfoot to Eagle Scout, and the Merit Badges, and the costume partly designed to mimic the uniforms developed by the British during the Boer War. There is the subject of Anglophilia—where
is
the Anglophilia of yesteryear?—and the equipment: where did those sleeping bags and axes and knives come from in wartime? Perhaps everyone had an older brother.
In small towns, social class is comparatively simple: the line is between respectability and the rest—if the small-town rich are not respectable, they are excluded. It’s more complicated in a city. The Scouts from the beginning had an origin in social class but with a built-in ambiguity: there were to be troops for poor boys to give them a chance at purity and so on; but the main thrust, I think, was to keep the middle class or upper middle class trained in outdoorsmanship for leadership in the Boer War. It was a junior paramilitary outfit designed to teach skills for guerrilla warfare in open plains—maybe in the woods. It was not up-to-date: the Scouts in my time were still doing Morse code and stuff with semaphores; and the walkie-talkie was already in use, and slang instead of codes (or so the papers said). Besides that, one
knew
about the army and social class, that the poor and Southern rednecks made up the troops, and they shot incompetent, cruel, hysterical, or snobbish officers in the back in battle—or so I was told—and how could we practice leadership if we had no rednecks, farmers, or working-class boys in the troop? These things worried me. I was told that as Jews we wouldn’t be given a chance to lead usually anyway, not even in the quartermaster corps. It seemed our refinement, as a troop, was slightly warped by competition toward other troops and was actually an exercise in self-righteousness expended in a vacuum.
I think a third of the boys in the troop were quite mad—some with unfocused adolescent rage, some with confusions, others with purity.
One boy, the son of an accountant and a very talkative mother, had a mania for Merit Badges, a silly giggle, acne on his back, large muscles from lifting weights, and a way of leaping from stillness into a walk like a two-legged horse that suggested to me considerable mental dislocation. Some boys were mad with slyness, some were already money mad, some were panic-stricken. There they were, lined up in the temple auditorium in their khakis, with axes in snap-on head holsters, or whatever, on their belts and sheathed knives and neckerchiefs and that damned sliding ring to hold the neckerchief.
I remember—not in great detail: this is not something I am going to present in the full panoply of reality—going on a fourteen-mile hike. Or was it a twelve-mile hike? I don’t remember, but you had to do it to pass from some rank—Tenderfoot?—to another—Second Class? Maybe. (You had to pass other tests, too.) This hike came quite early in my brief Scouting career before I created the scandal and furor in the troop by insisting that for my outdoor-cooking test I be allowed to use premade biscuit dough from a can—like a real soldier. “Do you hate Scouting?” one of the men who ran the troop asked me. I don’t think I did, but perhaps I did.
The hike had to be done within a certain length of time, and I think you had to run or jog twelve minutes and then walk twelve minutes, it was twelve somethings or other, twelve paces maybe (the injunction against self-abuse was on page four hundred and something of the manual). The route had been laid out on back roads in the country—roads built in the twenties for developments that weren’t built because the Depression came. They were concrete, mostly, and cracked, and grass grew out of them in spots. I had a new pair of shoes paid for by the uncle whose doing all this was—Boy Scout shoes. A slightly older boy—he was thirteen, probably, with a patch of pimples on one cheek, an exacerbated triangle of them, and then a few single ones on his forehead and chin—was to lead us, instruct us, keep us from cheating. Quiet-voiced, he bore the look of someone planed down and cautious from the skirmishes grownups wage, often for the sake of social climbing or in the name of happiness, in order to enforce what purity they can on their young. He had not yet outgrown his freakishness: he was too broad and short-legged and long-necked; he was less freakish than I was—I think he took on the final physical shape for the duration of his youth when he was fifteen. This boy’s eyes were extraordinarily blank, as if he had found childhood and youth to be a long, long wait.