Our trouble had begun when I gave my father the manuscript of a story based on an old family feud in which he had played peacemaker for nearly two years before the opponents ended up shouting in court. The story was the most ambitious I had written—some fifteen thousand words—and, as I saw it, my motives for sending it to him were no less benign than those I’d had in college, when I mailed home poems for the family to read even before they appeared in the student verse magazine. It wasn’t trouble I was looking for but admiration and praise. Out of the oldest and most ingrained of habits, I wanted to please them and make them proud.
That wasn’t hard either. For years I had been making him proud just by sending along clippings for his ‘Tiles,” a voluminous accumulation of magazine and newspaper articles—including an unbroken series of transcripts of “America’s Town Meeting of the Air”—on what he called “vital issues.” Whenever I was home on a visit, my mother, who could repeat herself, would invariably remind me—with her own deeply satisfied look—of the thrill it gave him to say to his patients (after working them around to the vital issue on his mind), “I just got something in the mail this morning on that subject. My son Nathan saw it at college. He’s out at the University of Chicago. Straight A’s in everything. Went out there when he was sixteen—special program. Well, he saw it in one of the Chicago papers and sent it on for my files.”
Oh, what sitting ducks I had for parents! A son of theirs would have had to be a half-wit or a sadist not to make them proud. And I was neither, I was dutiful and thoughtful, and too excited with myself in flight to be ungrateful for the boost I’d begun with. Despite the flaming wrangles of my adolescence—weekend night hours, fashions in footwear, the unhygienic high-school hangout, my alleged but ceaselessly disavowed penchant for the last word—we had emerged from our fifty textbook scenes of domestic schism much the same close family bound by the same strong feelings. I’d slammed a lot of doors and declared a few wars, but still I loved them like their child. And whether or not I wholly knew just how extensive the addiction. I was much in need of their love for me, of which I assumed there was an inexhaustible supply. That I couldn’t—wouldn’t?—assume otherwise goes a long way toward explaining why I was naïve enough to expect nothing more than the usual encouragement for a story that borrowed from our family history instances of what mv exemplary father took to be the most shameful and disreputable transgressions of family decency and mist.
The facts I had begun my story with were these:
A great-aunt of mine, Meema Chaya, had left for the education of two fatherless grandsons the pot of money she had diligently hoarded away as a seamstress to Newark’s upper crust. When Essie, the widowed mother of the twin boys, attempted to invade the trust to send them from college to medical/school, her younger brother, Sidney, who was to inherit the money remaining in Meema Chaya’s estate upon conclusion of the boys’ higher education, had sued to stop her. For four years Sidney had been waiting for Richard and Robert to graduate from Rutgers—waiting mostly in pool rooms and saloons, to hear the family tell it—so he could buy a downtown parking lot with his legacy. Loudly—his way—Sidney proclaimed that he was not about to postpone the good life just so there could be two more fancy doctors driving Caddies around South Orange. Those in the family who detested Sidney’s womanizing and bis shady friends immediately lined up in support of the boys and their dignified aspirations, leaving Sidney with a phalanx consisting of his ill-used, timid wife Jenny, and his mysterious Polish tootsie Annie, whose scandalously florid
shmatas
were much discussed, if never once seen, at family weddings, funerals, etc. Also in the phalanx, for all it was worth to him, was me. My admiration was long-standing, dating back to Sidney’s Navy days, when he had won four thousand dollars on the homeward journey of the battleship Kansas, and was said to have thrown into the South Pacific, for the sharks to dispose of, a Mississippi sore loser who at the end of an all-night poker game had referred to the big winner as a dirty Jew. The lawsuit, whose outcome hinged on how exhaustive Meema Chaya had meant to be in her will with the ringing words “higher education,” was eventually decided by the judge—a goy—in Sidney’s favor, though within only a few years the Raymond Boulevard parking lot bought with his inheritance became such a hot piece of real estate that it was nationalized out from under him by the Mob. For his trouble they gave Sidney a tenth of what it was worth, and shortly thereafter his heart broke like a balloon in the bed of yet another overdressed bimbo not of our persuasion. My cousins Richard and Robert were meanwhile being put through medical school by their iron-willed mother. After she lost the lawsuit, Essie quit her job at a downtown department store and for the next ten years went to work on the road selling shingles and siding. So iron-willed was she that by the time she had finally bought carpeting and Venetians for the new offices leased for Richard and Robert in suburban North Jersey, there was hardly a working-class neighborhood in the state that she hadn’t left encased in asphalt. Out canvassing one hot afternoon during the twins’ internship, Essie had decided to spend an hour in an air-cooled Passaic movie theater. In her thousands of days and nights finding leads and closing deals, this was said to be the first time ever that she stopped to do anything other than eat and call the boys. But now residencies in orthopedics and dermatology were only just around the comer, and the thought of their advent, combined with, the August heat, made her just a little light-headed. In the dark movie theater, however, Essie hadn’t even time to mop her brow before a fellow in the next seat put his hand on her knee. He must have been a very lonely fellow—it was a very stout knee; nonetheless, she broke the hand for him, at the wrist, with the hammer carried in her purse all these years to protect herself and the future of two fatherless sons. My story, entitled “Higher Education,” concluded with Essie taking aim.
“Well, you certainly didn’t leave anything out, did you?”
Thus began my father’s critique on the Sunday I’d come to say goodbye before leaving for the winter at Quahsay. Earlier in the day, along with a favorite aunt and uncle and a childless neighbor couple—also called “Aunt” and “Uncle” by me since the cradle—I had partaken of our family’s traditional Sunday brunch. Fifty-two Sundays a year, for most of my lifetime, my father went out to the corner for the smoked fish and the warm rolls, my brother and I set the table and squeezed the juice, and for three hours my mother was unemployed in her own house. “Like a queen” was how she described the predicament. Then, after my parents had read the Newark Sunday papers and listened on the radio to “The Eternal Light”—great moments from Jewish history in weekly half-hour dramatizations—we two boys were rounded up and the four of us set off in the car to visit relatives. My father, long in contention with an opinionated older brother for the vacant position of family patriarch, generally delivered a hortatory sermon somewhere along the way to somebody who seemed to him to need it, and then we drove home. And always at dusk, before we reassembled around the kitchen table to observe the Sunday-evening rites—to partake of the sacred delicatessen supper, washed down with sacramental soda pop; to await together the visitation from heaven of Jack Benny, Rochester, and Phil Harris—the “men,” as my mother called us, went off for their brisk walk to the nearby park. “Hi, Doc—how are you?” So the neighbors we passed along the way always greeted my popular and talkative father, and though he seemed never to be bothered by it, for a time his class-conscious little boy used to think that if only there had been no quotas and he’d become a
real
physician, they would have greeted him as “Doctor Zuckerman.” “Doc” was what they called the pharmacist who made milk shakes and sold cough drops.
“Well, Nathan,” began my father, “you certainly didn’t leave anything out, did you?”
I was by then a little weary from doing my duty and anxious to leave for New York to pack for Quahsay. My brunch-time visit had now lasted the entire day and, to my surprise, had been marked by the comings and goings of numerous relatives and old family friends dropping by seemingly just to see me. Kibitzing, reminiscing, swapping dialect jokes, and munching too much fruit, I had hung around until the company began to leave, and then had stayed on, at my father’s request, so that he could give me his thoughts on my story. Portentously he said he wanted an hour with me alone.
At four that afternoon, in our coats and scarves, the two of us set out for the park. Every half hour a New York bus stopped just by the park gateway on Elizabeth Avenue, and my plan was to catch one after he’d had his say.
“I left a lot of things out.” I pretended to be innocent of what he meant—as innocent as when I’d sent him the story, though the moment he’d spoken in the house of giving me his “thoughts” (rather than his pat on the head), I realized immediately how mindless I had been. Why hadn’t I waited to see if I could even get it published, and then shown him the story already in print? Or would that only have made it worse? “Things had to be left out—it’s only fifty pages.”
“I mean,” he said sadly, “you didn’t leave anything disgusting out.”
“Did I? Didn’t I? I wasn’t thinking along those lines, exactly.”
“You make everybody seem awfully greedy, Nathan.”
“But everybody was.” -”That’s one way of looking at it, of course.” That’s the way you looked at it yourself. That’s why you were so upset that they wouldn’t compromise.”
“The point is, there is far more to our family than this. And you know that. I hope that today reminded you of the kind of people we are. In case in New York you’ve forgotten.”
“Dad, I had a good time seeing everybody. But. you didn’t have to give me a refresher course in the family’s charms.” But on he went. “And people who are crazy about you. Is there anybody who came into the house today whose face didn’t light up when they laid eyes on you? And you couldn’t have been kinder, you couldn’t have been a sweeter boy. I watched you with your family and with all our old dear friends, and I thought to myself, Then what is this story all about? Why is he going on like this about ancient history?”
“It wasn’t ancient history when it happened.”
“No, then it was nonsense.”
“You didn’t seem to think so. You were running from Essie to Sidney for over a year.”
“The fact remains, son, there is more to the family, much much more, than is in this story. Your great-aunt was as kind and loving and hard-working a woman as you could ever meet in this world. Your grandmother and all her sisters were, every last one of them. They were women who thought only of others.”
“But the story is not about them.”
“But they are part of the story. They are the whole story as far as I’m concerned. Without them there would be no story at all! Who the hell was Sidney? Does anybody in his right mind even think about him any longer? To you, as a boy, I suppose he was an amusing character, somebody to get b kick out of, who came and went. I can understand how that would be: a big six-foot ape in bellbottom trousers, clanking his I.D. bracelet and talking a mile a minute as though he was Admiral Nimitz and not just the nobody who swabbed the deck. Which is all he ever was, of course. I remember how he came to the house and got down on the floor and taught you and your little brother to roll dice. As a joke. I wanted to throw the lummox out on his ear.”
“I don’t even remember that.”
“Well, I do. I remember plenty. I remember it all. To Meema Chaya, Sidney was never anything but heartache. Little children don’t realize that underneath the big blowhard who rolls on the floor and makes them laugh there can be somebody who makes other people cry. And he made your great-aunt cry plenty, and from the time he was old enough to go into the street, looking for grief to give her. And still,
still
, that woman left him that chunk of her hard-earned dough, and prayed that somehow it would help. She rose above all the misery and the shame he had caused her—just like the wonderful woman that she was. ‘
Chaya’
means life, and that is what she had in her to give to everybody. But that you leave out.”
“I didn’t leave it out. I suggest as much about her on the first page. But you’re right—I don’t go into Meema Chaya’s life.”
“Well, that would be some story.”
“Well, that isn’t this story.”
“And do you fully understand what a story like this story,
when it’s published, will mean to people who don’t know us?”
We had by now descended the long incline of our street and reached Elizabeth Avenue. No lawn we passed, no driveway, no garage, no lamppost, no little brick stoop was without its power over me. Here I had practiced my sidearm curve, here on my sled I’d broken a tooth, here I had copped my first feel, here for teasing a friend I had been slapped by my mother, here I had learned that my grandfather was dead. There was no end to all I could remember happening to me on this street of one-family brick houses more or less like ours, owned by Jews more or less like us, to whom six rooms with a “finished” basement and a screened-in porch on a street with shade trees was something never to be taken for granted, given the side of the city where they’d started out.
Across the wide thoroughfare was the entrance to the park. There my father used to seat himself—each Sunday the same bench—to watch my brother and me play tag, yelling our heads off after hours of good behavior with grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, ordinary aunts and uncles—sometimes it seemed to me that mere were more Zuckermans in Newark than Negroes. I wouldn’t see as many of them in a year as I saw cousins on an ordinary Sunday driving around the city with my father. “Oh,” he used to say, “how you boys love to shout” and with one hand for each son’s head would smooth back our damp hair as we started out of the park and back up the familiar hill where we lived. “Any game with shouting in it,” he would tell our mother, “and these two are in seventh heaven.” Now my younger brother was knuckling under to the tedium of a pre-dental course, having surrendered (to my father’s better judgment) a halfhearted dream of a career as an actor, and I—? I apparently was shouting again. I said, “I think maybe I’ll just get the bus. Maybe we should skip the park. It’s been a long day, and I have to go Borne and get ready to leave for Quahsay tomorrow.”