The One-Star Jew
Stories
To my Dini,
Robert M. Ravven,
Daniel Menaker,
and my father, Seymour Evanier
CONTENTS
1 THE CREATOR OF ONE-FINGERED LILY
2 CANCER OF THE TESTICLES
3 SELECTIVE SERVICE
4 THE JEWISH BUDDHA
5 MY RABBI, RAY CHARLES, AND SINGING BIRDS
6 THE MAN WHO REFUSED TO WATCH THE ACADEMY AWARDS
7 A SAFE ROUTE ON EIGHTY-THIRD STREET
8 THE ONE-STAR JEW
9 THE LOST PIGEON OF EAST BROADWAY
10 THE PRINCESS
11 8:30 TO 10:00 P.M.
12 THE ARREST
13 A SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY
14 JOLSON SINGS AGAIN
About the Author
1
THE CREATOR OF ONE-FINGERED LILY
I
I read recently of the arrest of a forty-year-old man—a bachelor—for having a Librium pill in his pocket without a prescription bottle. The police handcuffed him, took him down to the station, stripped him, booked him, brought him before the judge. The judge fined him and slapped him in prison for three months.
Now the man is suing the police and the courts for humiliating and embarrassing him. It turned out he was on his way to see his mother, whom he visited once a week. It was his—or her—birthday, I don’t remember which.
When I read of this, I had not seen my mother in twenty years.
I sympathized with that man. If I were visiting my mother, I thought, I certainly would take a Librium along—and probably without the bottle, just as he did.
A question: why did the police notice this fellow on the street, decide to frisk him? What was so extraordinary about him? Did he look so menacing? So pathetic? Was it an impulse of malice or sadism on their part? Was he wiggling his ass, thumbing his nose at them—this forty-year-old bachelor? It hardly seems likely. It must have been his utter dejection, misery, and loneliness. And sure enough—there, ensconced in his pocket, the little green and white pill to lighten his load, to help see him through. Aha! they got him in the nick of time.
II
1956. I am sixteen years old.
I am lying in bed with my mother, thinking about my girl friend, Judith. “Rub noses, like pussycats,” my mother says. Catching my thoughts, she asks: “Why do you run around with that slut!”
The bed is perfumed—it is the bed my mother and father shared for a time. I feel chills as my mother rubs noses with me. “You’re limited,” I tell her. “God, I hate it when you’re snotty,” she replies.
Across the roof, there is Judith, but it is as if there were barbed wire between us.
Why does my mother make me think of concentration camps? Nothing written, nothing said, makes them as real for me as my mother does. If she can exist, so could the camps.
One day I said to young Doctor Greenblatt, the bachelor attached to his own mother: “My mother hits me—”
“How dare you?” he shouted, “you ungrateful little creep, you serpent, your mother struggles night and day for you!”
I trembled, but I was not really surprised. I felt sorry for the young doctor. My unexpressed sympathy, my silence, galled him—his face got redder and redder. He would burst. The sight of my tense, sad face was unbearable to him. “Get out of here!” he shouted. Now I no longer visit the doctor, but I still visit the unusual patches of garden and greenery in the courtyard of his apartment house, and think of him when I am there.
The others—the neighbors, the social worker my father brought me to—their faces glaze over if I try to tell them about my mother. They let me know it is a terrible thing I am saying, and forgive me by not listening to me. “Someday,” they say as one, “you will regret—”
III
When people ask me about my mother, I say, “My mother? She is not living.” One of my finest stories is called “My Mother Is Not Living.”
My mother called me at work one day a year ago. We had not seen each other, or spoken, for twenty years. She did not have my address most of that time, for I forbade my father to give it to her.
During the phone call, my mother wished me a happy birthday, asked me how I liked my job, and said she would like to see me. I felt my pounding heart. She spoke in a slow, lulled way, and I could tell she had sedated herself for the phone call. I thanked her for calling, and said I would think about seeing her.
I have used my father as a guinea pig for my stories and poems most of my adult life. He is an excellent subject, always willing to cooperate with me (although the smirking profile I wrote of him when I was on my honeymoon in San Francisco in 1970 was done from memory). I have written portraits of him that showed him demonic, arrogant, sad, crazy, silly, mean, ridiculous. I wrote of one particular facial expression of his I know very well: Ever since I was a child, whenever I have done something that shocked my father, he sits bolt upright, pops his eyes, looks aghast, and sticks his fingers in his mouth. He carries a copy of this description of him in his wallet and whips it out to show to strangers.
Each time I finish a story about him, I say that I have gotten my father out of my system.
While I have also revenged myself on my mother in my work all these years, it has all been done from afar. I have had the satisfaction, however, of knowing that she read some of my stories about her. I was too afraid of her to confront her up close.
IV
1956. Today when my mother stood by the window, I wanted to push her out. I can’t. She is a victim too. And it would mess up my life.
Her flashing eyes when she hurts me: THAT is difficult to understand. “God, you’re ugly”—comments like that. And to my father: “I hope you drop dead, you son of a bitch.” So many enemies—the grocer, neighbors, Negroes, rock and roll (“dirty music”), even the antique dealers she coos with—Carlo and Enrique—smiling her head off and flashing her teeth—as soon as they close the door, she snaps, “Wop assholes.” I don’t think they are even Italian. Categories of Jews (her people): the good—the rich; the creeps—those who are honest or poor, the German refugees from Hitler who “have no class,” or the immigrants with traces of Yiddish and the old country. She does like a few cute little old ladies. She stares at the exiting blonde in the elevator who is wearing a fur coat and says to me: “She’s just a Flushing broad who will never make it to Park Avenue.”
In the closet my mother keeps her school books—Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Jacob Wassermann, “Europa,” Dorothy Thompson, Ibsen, her college yearbook, the school newspaper where she did her writing. I read what the other students wrote to her in the yearbook.
She is waiting for me to be drafted into the army. Why? “It will make a man of you,” she says. “You think it’s you against the world, kiddo. Everybody’s wrong and you’re right. They’ll knock some sense into you.” She pauses and adds, “Hair like an idiot.” I ask her: “Do you want me to get killed?” She doesn’t reply. She has a certain honesty, no doubt about it.
V
I decided to return my mother’s call of eight months ago. I dialed her number. She instantly recognized my voice. I asked her how she was, and she told me she’d had an operation during the summer. I did not ask her what had been wrong: it seemed like the question of a hypocrite.
I said I would like to see her and suggested we meet in Chinatown.
“I didn’t know you liked Chinese food,” she said. “We have something in common.”
After a moment she said, “How will you recognize your old mother?”
“Will you wear a feather?” I said.
She roared. We set the date and the time.
VI
From the moment I picked up the phone, the hatred of my mother seemed to disappear. When I had contemplated meeting her in the past, I was afraid I might strike her, that she might strike me. Those thoughts have left me.
On the day of our meeting, I deliberately chose a tie to wear that was not too spectacular. My reasoning was that if I looked too good, my mother would devise ways to try to destroy me, or take my money (I have none) away from me.
I placed a Librium in my pocket and set out for Chinatown, where she would be waiting on the corner of Mott and Canal Streets in front of the Carvel store. I did not take the Librium.
VII
1954. My mother is in her happiest, most animated mood. She has snagged her hairdresser Ricardo into the house, into the bathroom, especially to do her hair for her at home. The price—a steal. He adores her hair. She says she can’t help but be complimented.
She bustles about, racing through the halls. Ricardo is waiting in the bathroom. She brings me in and introduces me. “What a handsome young man!” he says. “Why don’t I cut his hair too, Rosie? Won’t charge you a sou.”
My mother is ecstatic. “Cut it so he don’t look like a Commie.” She laughs to show she’s kidding.
She closes the door while Ricardo does her hair. Streams of giggles and laughter.
When she comes out, she asks me, “How do I look?”
“Beautiful,” I say. She is not satisfied. “What else?” She looks at me tensely, her smile gone. I don’t know what to say, and look for a clue from her. She turns away.
“Ricardo’s ready for you, Bruce,” she says in a moment.
Ricardo is standing in the brightly lit bathroom, beaming at me. He is cutting the air with his scissors.
He talks all the while I settle down. He places a towel over my shoulders and begins. In a minute I feel a tickle on my penis. I start. It stops. I feel another tickle. I look up in astonishment and shock. “Cut that out!”
“Hmmm hmmm—you have beautiful hair, young man—”
I feel the tickle again. I jump up and run out. “Bruce!” he calls.
I hear a shout. My mother follows me and storms into my room. “What the hell is going on! Are you going to embarrass me?”
“He touched me-on the-on the-penis.”
“Get back in there,” she hisses.
“He touched me—”
“You’re imagining it, Bruce, that’s all. I’m telling you nicely: GET IN THERE. Don’t you ruin my day.”
“No.”
She goes into the bathroom. She returns after a moment.
“All right. I talked to Ricardo. He’s amazed. He doesn’t know what you’re talking about, and he promises he won’t do it again.”
“What?”
“What do you mean what? Bruce I’m warning you. Get in there.”
I go back inside. Ricardo is beaming, laughing, and chatting at once. He is also whistling.
I sit down tensely. “There we are!” He again places the towel over me.
Within a minute he puts his hand on my penis.
I jump up, run out of the room. As I leave the house, I shout, “God damn it,” and slam the front door with all my might.
I run for a long time, crying aloud.
VIII
On the corner of Mott Street, I saw my mother first. She looked much older. She is sixty-two years old. She had always prized her beauty.
She did not recognize me. “Rosie,” I said. I kissed her. When she smiled, she looked as I remembered her. A very pretty woman. She wore a clasp in her hair, a gray dress, a brown cloak. She carried oriental shopping bags. She still walked her quick little steps on her short legs and high heels.
We sat down in the corner of the Yun Luck Rice Shoppe. “So what have you been doing?” she said.
IX
1954. Surely there is somewhere to go, to get away from all this. I look around corners, in new neighborhoods where gardens will lead me to new friends. There is a house with a well in the garden, and I wonder if I should knock at the door.
Lighted windows. Behind them are girls who will kiss me, families to welcome me. There are people who read books, who do not shout and curse, who do not hate everyone.
When it rains, the streets are filled to overflowing with water. Some of the kids make rafts, and I want to sail on the rafts, away from this. I dream that when I am not there, the kids are actually sailing on the rafts. But in the daytime I never see them doing so.
I like those dark, rainy days; with the streets turned into rivers, I feel as if I can see far away. The world has been stopped, and cleansed. At night in bed, I sail away.
X
She spoke in the small, childlike voice with the Bronx twang I remembered.
She touched my wedding band: “My married son!” She asked me the first name of my wife.
She asked what I liked to do in New York. I mentioned the theater and films.
“What about opera?”
“No, not opera.”
“Somehow I thought you would like opera. What about ballet?”
“No.”
“Uh huh,” she said.
On my mother’s face are years of hard work and struggle. The last time I saw her, she was still a secretary, supporting herself since throwing my father out of the house.
She has been teaching Junior High for eighteen years: Bronx, Far Rockaway, Manhattan, Crown Heights, getting up at six in the morning. I was startled to hear her mention receiving “a little welfare” when she had been in the hospital and out of work for seven months when teachers were being “excessed” out of the system.
She brought me up to date on the neighbors: “Kaganovich, the fat man across the hall, just lost half a leg. Gunzenhouser died of cancer. Farber, the Frankfurter King, lives in Palm Beach. Lance Stone, he was your age, is fabulously successful in television or movies. Or maybe finance. People ask me about you—”
“You like teaching?” I said.
“No. But I like decorating the classrooms. That’s fun. And I get many compliments for that. I was doing that this past week, and the principal said, ‘What about the bulletin board?’ So for the typing class, I have the kids draw these signs: ‘More Tap, Less Yap’ and ‘Don’t Be A One-Fingered Lily.’ I have a kid do a drawing of Lily at the typewriter with just one finger. They like that, they get a kick out of it.”
“You made them up yourself?” I asked.
“Yes.”
She said, “I miss my old job.”
“As Rothbaum’s secretary?”
“Sure. Look, the Schrafft’s wagon came twice a day: in the morning and the afternoon. And there was color TV.”
“What were you in the hospital for?”
My mother looked away. “I had an operation.”
“What kind?”
“Woman’s troubles. They began with your birth, Bruce. It goes back a long way.”
“I never knew that.”
“Bruce, you remember Eva Stern, my best friend? We gabbed on the phone day and night.”
“Sure.”
“She died. I was her only friend at the end.”
“What was wrong with her?”
“Mental. Valium and alcohol. Her daughter Shirley had an auction of her furniture. But first she said to me, ‘What do you want? You can use some of these things. I’ve heard about your apartment. And they mean nothing to me.’ So I took the chandelier and the mirror. Eva had fallen against the mirror and broken it during one of her states. I spent $1,000 to fix it. She always asked me about you.”
After a moment my mother said, “Effie died too. She was in and out of asylums. She always asked me about you.
“Some people can’t keep their heads together,” she added.
Eva and Effie were my mother’s two best friends from childhood.
XI
“Maybe you’ll come over to the house for dinner with your wife—what’s her name again?”
“Susan. Sure we will.”
“What do you like to eat?”
“Whatever you enjoy making,” I said.
“I’m a good cook. You’re so skinny, Bruce. Herbie eats like a horse.”
“Who?”
“Herbie. He’s a boy your age—a little younger, thirty-one I think. Still a bachelor—I’m looking for a girl for him. He was teaching at the same school in the Bronx. When I need to go places by car, sometimes he drives me. So I cook him dinner.”
“Doesn’t he have a mother and father?” I asked.
“Sure. But he says his mother can’t cook roast chicken like me.” She giggled. “He knows I’m seeing you today.”
XII
“I won’t mention that story, ‘My Mother Is Not Living,’” my mother said. I saw a peculiar expression on her face, and realized she was trying not to cry. “Or why we haven’t gotten together for so long. We won’t go into that, I promised myself. Bygones are bygones.”
I nodded.
My mother mentioned that another teacher had pointed out my name and address in a writers’ yearbook five years ago, and asked her if it was me. In such ways, I realized, she had gleaned tiny bits of information about me over the years. They added up to very little, almost nothing at all. I had sworn my father to secrecy about my movements and whereabouts, and he had followed my instructions with unusual care. Perhaps it was because I had said, “I don’t trust myself. If I see her, I don’t know what I would do.”
She must have come upon the story, “My Mother Is Not Living,” in just such an accidental way, stumbled upon it or had it pointed out to her by an unsuspecting friend.
“Have you traveled?” she said.
“Just London. Have you?”
Her face lit. “England, Italy, Spain, Singapore, Hong Kong. This shopping bag is from Hong Kong. I’ve turned your bedroom into an oriental room. Wait until you see it. Do you want to walk around Chinatown?”
“Yes, sure.”
“I love a day off like this. I guess I’m still a little girl.”
I helped my mother on with her coat and we walked into the street.
XIII
It was unexpectedly cold out, and my mother noticed that I was shivering. She was disturbed about the light coat I was wearing.
Her head bobbed as she looked into the store windows, and at the merchandise of the street vendors. We zoomed through stores of exotic Chinese ware. She barely paused at all. “They don’t have it,” she said as we walked out of a fourth store.
“What?”
“Seasoned pepper.”
We walked down the winding side streets. She eagerly took in the sights and smells. “I like this better than a show,” she said. “It’s an adventure.”
“So do I,” I said.
She looked at me. “You do? Uh huh.” She nodded.
She walked a few steps and stopped. “What’s that smell?” There was the aroma of coffee from a Chinese pastry shop. “Oooh!” my mother said. “Doesn’t that smell good? Just the right thing to warm us up.” She paused. “Maybe you don’t want coffee.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
We stepped down into the coffee shop.
We sat at the counter. The elderly Chinese waiter was not over-joyed at our small order. “Make the coffee very, very hot,” my mother said. He began to pour the cream and my mother stopped him, taking the pitcher away from him. “That’s okay,” she said, “we’ll do it ourselves.”
“It smells wonderful,” my mother said to the waiter, her smile making her face youthful. The waiter smiled back. In a moment he was back with another pitcher. “Maybe you like more?”
“No, thank you.”
He quickly handed my mother two napkins.
XIV
“I’m still pretty cold,” I said as we stood in front of the shop. “Maybe you’d like to keep shopping, and I’ll get going.”
She pointed to her two empty shopping bags. “I guess I’m like my mother,” she said. “She always had a shopping bag in one hand and you in the other, Bruce.” It was true. I had rarely seen my mother during the day as a child. She had deposited me with my grandmother and taken off.
I took my mother into my arms and said, “I’ll call you.” There was a pause and I saw her looking at me. Then I added: “I mean, not years from now. Soon.”
Touching her cheek, I said it again.
2
CANCER OF THE TESTICLES
I
I had not seen Samuel for years, but his letters annoyed me. They were so melancholy, so sad. I couldn’t figure it out. In 1970 I returned to Manhattan for the summer and called him. “I’m double the size I was when you knew me; so is Doris. We eat all the time. Don’t you?” We made a date and I broke it—too depressing.
Following that, several letters arrived. The contents varied, but always the same refrain: “So many things to say; we must get together soon; you have been a better and truer friend than I.” Puzzling to me, since I did not understand what we had to say to each other, and why I was such a good friend. First a letter came about the sudden death of his father from cancer. I remember Mr. Weintraub’s grocery store, Samuel’s Marxist stories and poems condemning his father for ringing up sales on the cash register and conveniently forgetting to put in a bar of soap, a can of soup, when packing the customer’s purchases in bags. The next letter told of the death of his mother from cancer. Then good news: his novel published. He inscribed it to me: “To Bruce—There were four people who thought I might be a writer. You were one of them, and your confidence and friendship were very important to me, during dark, difficult days. Sam.”
Not true, unfortunately—I never believed in Sam as a writer. I hope the other three did. I read his book which was, in a strange, unreal way, about black power. All the attitudes were proper, and, if set down more convincingly, might have netted Sam a home in Scarsdale, a sale to Hollywood, a livelihood. But true to Sam’s writing style as I remember it, everything was tone-deaf: a black’s afro was “crunchy”; his lips “like accordion folds.” What emerged incessantly, everywhere, was the theme of masturbation. The characters could not keep their hands off themselves, no matter how militant. Everyone: the beautiful blacks, the fuzzy liberals, the reactionary dogs … at every free moment was settling down with a wad of toilet paper. It was uncanny in such a short, serious and shadowy book. And while it was not well written, it had an authority; there was no doubt that here was something the author really knew about.
I waited a long time to write Samuel about the novel, and then suggested who might like it. I compiled a list of people I did not respect. Samuel wouldn’t know it, and he would respect them himself, and they really might enjoy the book.
During an interim period there was a letter from Samuel’s brother, Moshe, from Montreal. Ten pages handwritten on newspaper, crumpled and hard to decipher. Moshe was now twenty-six, eight years younger than Samuel. I thought of him, a kid of seventeen, singing freedom songs badly in Washington Square. He’d heard I was starting a magazine, and in the cool, lovey-dovey hip lingo of those days he said he was enclosing his fine poems, that I might use them or tear them up or merely keep them, but that he hoped they would make me “happy and content.”
I remember a day in 1960—we are all at Coney Island in Samuel’s car. I am singing softly to myself the World Youth Freedom song. Samuel shushes his wife Doris and Moshe. He puts his hand on Moshe’s shoulder and says, “Listen.” There is silence. “Bruce,” he says to me, “sing louder. You have a beautiful voice.”
That is how truly tone-deaf Samuel was, and is. No one, ever, has praised my singing. No one has ever had reason to. That day in the car, Moshe listened, said “Yeah, yeah” to Samuel and joined me with his guitar. I felt my voice rising in strength, believing with them, and sang all the way into Manhattan.
Another time, another day: Samuel mentions a hit song by the McGuire Sisters. The refrain goes: “May you find someone to love, as much as I love you.” He says, with a twinkle and a smile, “Bruce, I’ll bet you love that song.”
Embarrassed and taken by surprise, I admit it. “How did you know?”
He turned to Doris. “You see? I know, Bruce. It’s fine … it’s good that you’re like you are. Don’t be embarrassed.”
I must have been between girls at the time. Samuel had taken to analyzing me, explaining he had never seen me as a person before, but, as he put it, as “a giant.”
A long silence after the letter about the book. A letter came from Samuel when I had hepatitis last year. “Oh no,” I said to my wife. “What can it be this time? He must have cancer.” We laughed.
I put the letter away for days. Not because I thought that. I placed it between pages of books, in cubbyholes, in drawers. I opened it one day: “I have cancer of the testicles,” Samuel wrote me.
II
In 1960 I was working as a typist at an encyclopedia firm. I shared a cubicle with a concert pianist named Arthur. Arthur was in his midtwenties and he spent three months of the year as a reservist in the army. Arthur was a type almost extinct today—extremely well-adjusted, friendly open eyes beaming through horn-rimmed spectacles, his fingers flying over the typewriter keys, his coffee breaks fifteen minutes to the second, respectful, on the ball. Did he like the army?
“Sure! We all have to do it, don’t we?”
“But you’re an artist.”
He glanced nervously over the rim of our cubicle.
“You’re not a sour apple, are you?” he said.
God, he was happy. He cleaned his fingernails, he had a girl who kept him in line. He was living proof that the artist could be a good citizen, devoid of nasty thoughts and incendiary attitudes.
He had me pegged. “You’re the first to go on your coffee break and the last to leave it,” he said, tapping his fingers. “I like my work. I like my girl. I like the army. You’ve been late to work every morning this week.”
“What kind of music do you play anyway?” I asked him.
He got edgier and edgier about me. I felt I was his conscience. I felt I was everybody’s conscience. He wanted no part of it. The only thing I was sneaky about was the army. They were breathing down my neck. I had so many plans going for avoiding it that I couldn’t keep up with myself: A) Radicalism. B) Pacifism. C) Mental Illness. D) Criminality. E) Homosexuality. F) Flight to Cuba. G) Near-sightedness. Each stance required a different behavior pattern, and I couldn’t make up my mind. I visited Communist Party headquarters, grinning and waving at the cameras I knew were hidden all over the building. Once inside the building, a comrade spotted me and started to call out “Bruce O—” “NO NO NO!” I screamed, looking around for microphones, “HA HA HA! HI HOW ARE YOU.” On the way out of the building, I placed my hands in front of my face as a shield. By the time I got to the Automat nearby I was breathless and terrified. I went back to my room, dug up a stack of Daily Workers and burnt them in the toilet. It took hours.
I had chosen, at that point in my life, a psychiatrist to go with my life style. Dr. Harold Jackson was black, left-wing, and short. He had a house in Greenwich Village, he was friendly with Langston Hughes and dabbled in poetry himself.
There was no real difference between sitting in Dr. Jackson’s waiting room and sitting in his office. This took me about a year to figure out. He would greet me in the waiting room and chat about politics, weather, restaurants, nutrition, exercise. I would charge into his office, sweating with neurotic symptoms, and wait to get down to business.
Chuckles, frowns, bits of philosophy wafted through the air.
“I can’t breathe!” I said. “My father—my mother—that bastard at the office—” I tried to get it all out; there was only an hour.
Dr. Jackson looked at his fingernails, clucked his tongue, paused, and finally said,
“Let me ask you this, Bruce—”
I strained forward. “Yes?”
“Are you … shall we say, tense?”
Gobbling for air, I said between gritted teeth that I was.
“I thought so. Many of my patients are. Tense, anxious, nervous. Do you frequently feel this way—”
“Yes—”
“I must confess … I rather thought so …”
“I want to go to Cuba.”
“Oh?”
“I can’t breathe here; the capitalists have seen to that all right. I don’t exist—I’m just a writer, that’s all. A useless commodity. Those army bastards are just waiting to kill me. Who will know? I’ll be dead before I’ll have had the chance to be alive—to live, to publish my book. Wiped out, like a spot on the wall. No way. No way. Will you help me?”
“Certainly!”
“You will?” I leaned forward. “I was thinking of a freighter … or a plane via Moscow—”
“Now, now, Bruce, travel to Cuba is forbidden!”
“That’s why I thought Moscow first …”
“I think, Bruce, that life … sometimes … has its gray moments. I want you to know that I, too, have sometimes, oh, fits of … pique … now and then when things don’t go just as I might have planned. Do you know about the Club Valhalla?”
I stared at him.
“The Club Valhalla, Bruce, is very pleasant. Singles mingle there. They have the most charming dances, and, heavens, all sorts of fun things. Why don’t you give them a jingle and see if the rates have gone up? They were most reasonable when I went there.”
“But I don’t want a bourgeois dating club—”
Dr. Jackson laughed. “Oh my no, they’re most serious. They’re quite mature politically, I can assure you.”
“But about Cuba—”
Dr. Jackson looked sad. “Yes. This country’s attitudes toward that valiant land are so silly. You can’t even get a good Havana cigar.”
He ushered me out, smiling, cheerful. He was black, he was radical. I saw him on the streets of the Village with blonde girls who towered over him. He looked up at them, grinning, and patted them on the ass.
III
I met Samuel on a coffee break at the encyclopedia. He had an owlish look, very pleasant. He was an assistant editor, twenty-eight years old. I was simmering; he was placid. I slipped him a copy of the Daily Worker. After work, he was waiting for me outside. “Come home, meet my wife, Doris.” I traveled on the subway with him to Brooklyn.
They were opposites. “Doris, meet a radical, a poet, a fine thinker, and a dear friend, Bruce.”
She was tiny and flat-chested. “Take it easy, Samuel. How do ya do?”
“This is wonderful coffee, Doris. Doris is a fine cook. Wait, you’ll see, Bruce. And a wonderful little wife. Sitting here like this, I can tell, Bruce, we’ll be good friends. I didn’t know there were any radicals left. Doris’s mother, Hilda, organized the steel workers. She’s still there in Bedford, Massachusetts, in her little house. I laughed at her ideas. But when you talk about them, I begin to understand—”
“It’s instant coffee, Sam,” Doris said. “Take it easy.”
“But tell me this, Bruce. What about the Soviet Union? Isn’t it a drab, poverty-stricken place?”
Samuel sat at my feet with his coffee, looking up at me.
“The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—” I began.
“Doris, turn the lamp the other way. There. Look at his profile. Did anyone ever tell you that you have a Greek profile, Bruce? Go ahead, I was interrupting.”
“—is the first land of Socialism. Surrounded on all sides by enemies, mistakes were made. But I’m sick of all this crap! Corrupt? Treehouses! Honeymooners live in treehouses! That’s how corrupt it is. And Stalin was a reader of Tolstoy!—”
I was inspired by the dimmed lighting, Samuel at my feet, their quiet, rapt attention.
We talked through the night. “This has been very fine. I can’t tell you, Bruce, how you’re opening our eyes. I have an idea. Sleep here tonight. Tomorrow we don’t go to the capitalist cockroaches’ office. We continue talking. You’ll educate us. We’ll learn. This is fine. Isn’t it, Doris? This is really fine.”
She stared at Samuel. “Are you crazy?”
He laughed and grinned. “No, no, I’m serious. I feel Bruce knows. I have that feeling. I don’t think I’m wrong.”
“He can sleep here, of course, but tomorrow you work.”
He patted her on the head. “Little Doris. Isn’t she sweet, angry like that? It’s good to express anger, Doris. And to express love too. It’s very good. It’s time we began to let go.”
I slept on a couch that night. There was no sexual action from the bed. Only later would I discover that after three years of marriage, Doris and Samuel had accomplished an historical feat equal to Lenin’s five-year plan:
Doris was a virgin.
Samuel, also.
IV
December in Far Rockaway. It was very cold, the wind whipping against our wooden cottage, the sea spray on the windows. The boardwalk was deserted, the steeplechase and the merry-go-rounds closed. Once, long ago, the Jewish workers considered summer weekends in Far Rockaway a big deal; then came the borscht belt; then the Concord and the Riviera and Las Vegas. Our bungalow was where the workers used to come in summer. Clustered among hundreds of other wooden shacks, all of them vacant, we now lived, Samuel, Doris and I, in the two rooms, for thirty dollars a month. We had an electric heater, blankets, our Marxist texts and pictures of Lenin.
People in the neighborhood found us. Even though it was 1960, once a week a horse-drawn wagon stopped at our door: the milkman. Cards were left from representatives of Father Coughlin, Frederick’s of Hollywood, the Police Gazette, a committee to drive the British out of Palestine.
Samuel had quit his job and we lived on unemployment insurance. He was very, very happy.
At night we huddled around the fireplace, freezing. “Talk, Bruce,” Samuel would say.
“What about?”
“Anything is fine. Really, Bruce, you have a way of saying things. Doris agrees with me. Or sing for us. Or read us your poetry or stories. Anyof these things would be fine. Tell us about when you were a little boy and your father took you to the Palace to see all the old-time performers like Belle Baker—”
“But I already have—”
“I would like to hear it again. Or about being a writer. What it means to you to be a writer. I would like you to go into that again. The way you would sneak up the stairway to the roof with your first girl friend. Doris likes the way you talk about that. Or your intuitions about Stalin’s innate kindness and decency. Or the venal behavior of the Trotskyites.”
I talked on into the night, and sometimes I thought that Doris was pressing her thin body against mine in the candlelight. I was between girl friends. I pressed back.
V
During the first months, at night I listened for stirrings from their bed across the room. There weren’t any. Doris vomited a lot, and sometimes he told her happy stories about their present situation: adult fairy tales. “Baloney,” was Doris’s response.
Samuel had a thing about shoes. I watched him hasten to put Doris’s shoes on for her. “Samuel, what the hell are you doing?”
Samuel looked up at her from the floor. “Helping my little Doris.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake.”
“You look so cute when you get angry.”
She kicked him. He did not move away.
VI
Samuel had this certain look, or gleam in his eyes sometimes, that came and went. You knew something was cooking when it was there. On the subway, he would stare at a girl’s shoes and that gleam was there. At first I thought I was imagining it, except that I had to keep tapping his shoulder to tell him we had reached our stop. I was only dimly aware of what he was doing. We never talked about it.
VII
About this look of Samuel’s: “That look,” Doris would say. Samuel would laugh then, devilishly, or giggle. He had that look one day when he said, “Bruce, I feel it is time for us to take a more active part in the struggle.” A picture comes to mind of that period, a picture of Samuel in my scrapbook in a Lincoln Brigade demonstration. The picture turned up in the Daily Worker. A line of demonstrators was grimly walking up and down, glaring at the photographer. Except one, who was grinning and waving and flashing a V sign.
On a momentous day, Samuel and I visited the home of the chairman of the Far Rockaway branch of the Communist Party, Dr. Hyman Bernhardt. Bernhardt, a broad-shouldered, solid man with curly red hair, greeted us at the door with dancing, suspicious eyes. He ushered us in. He stared at my briefcase. “What a lovely briefcase,” he said, and took it from me. We had known him for several months.
His hands roamed over it. “May I look inside? It’s so handsome.”
“Yes.”
His hands roamed through the briefcase as he went on talking to us. “Very nice indeed,” he said, and handed the briefcase back to me.
He introduced us to his wife and daughter, and took us into his private study. “Two cracked ribs,” he said, nodding.
“What?” I said.
“My daughter, Naomi. Two cracked ribs. She never told me. A doctor friend informed us. In the Washington demonstration.”
“Wonderful,” Samuel said.
Dr. Bernhardt looked sharply at him. “Yes … that too. But that is quite right, Sam. Wonderful in what it reveals to us of the determination of the youth.”
On the wall there was a picture of Stalin, and underneath it a quotation from Brecht: “They say that we are evil. But we are the end of evil.”
“You’re a writer, Bruce. My wife and I saw a play by Tennessee Williams the other night. What magic that fella has … what magic. It was … excellent. And the marvelous revolutionary anger of Kowalski. In my youth, I traveled the South, organizing the party. He knows the South. My eighth book, incidentally, on black slavery will be issued by the Red Hammer Press in March. It demonstrates, I think, indubitably, the incredible, scientific superiority of the blacks of that day in their terrible bondage. I don’t know if you are acquainted with my work …”
He paused.
We both said we certainly were.
“… but I have endeavored to pierce the lies and … dare I say … the deliberate, disgusting, and scurrilous myth perpetrated by the white Southern oligarchy that the blacks accepted their situation. The scholarly research that I devoted to this book was not easy. One can do many things with so-called facts. Therefore, in this book, my thesis: that one black slave out of three not only revolted against their slave masters, but called them ‘the man’ … and toward each other …”
He lowered his voice. “Toward each other, these fine, brave men, in celebration of their blackness and in their extraordinary revolutionary awareness, these men … addressed each other … as … comrade.”
He paused, walked across the room and looked out the window. “Comrade … that word of fraternity and brotherhood, one hundred years ago … that is my discovery, and I trust that despite the blackness and cowardice of these days of fear, the book will be passed from house to house, that it will be known and help to ignite the fires that will sweep this country …
“Yes. They are with us … but they are still afraid. Tennessee Williams …”
“Really?” I said.
waiting