“College must have been very different for you.”
“Than high school?”
“Than it was for me, is what I meant. I mean from a social standpoint primarily.” He put a cup of coffee on the table for her, then straightened up. “In terms of being Jewish.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well, we’ve talked about college being just an extension of high school for the kids who went to U.B. and went on living at home. In terms of being Jewish, Cornell was just an extension of high school for me. All my friends were Jewish. I just went out with Jewish girls. I was in a Jewish fraternity.” He walked halfway across the room, turned, put his hands on his hips. “What’s interesting is that I never questioned any of that. I don’t think I felt any real prejudice against gentiles or that they were prejudiced against me. Of course overhearing my parents and their friends, but that was something that applied to older people. I didn’t feel personally affected by it. But I took it for granted, that while I would be friendly with non-Jews in the sense of being on good terms—”
“That it would never go further than that.”
“Exactly. I wonder when it started.”
“In the womb?”
“No, a little later than that.” His voice was serious.
“For me it was when I finished grade school and entered high school. There were certain activities that were separate before then. Boy Scouts and dancing class, because those were activities that were centered around the temple.”
“And Sunday school and Hebrew school.”
“Well, obviously those were centered in the temple. Oh, I see what you mean. They were still activities that set us apart. That’s true enough. But the big thing was high school. Before then you didn’t pay any real attention to who was Jewish and who wasn’t in terms of who your friends were. Then one morning I got up and went to Bennett High, and there were fraternities for us and fraternities for them, and there was no cross-dating to speak of and if a Jewish girl went out with a gentile boy she got a reputation—”
“And if a Jewish boy went out with a gentile girl it meant she put out, or why else would he bother with her. That was really the way we thought, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “And because of the way we thought, it wound up being true. Self-fulfilling prophecy. You knew what you were getting into, so when you went ahead and did it anyway—”
“Uh-huh.”
“We’re missing the eleven o’clock news.”
“I don’t really care, do you?”
“Well, there were a couple of baseball games tonight, but I don’t really need to know who won them. No, I’m enjoying this conversation. You know what’s funny? That we’ve gone this long without having it. I wonder how it all started?”
“The conversation?”
He shook his head. “The separation, the way it begins for real at the high school level. Oh, I know the answer, come to think of it. It’s how society prevents intermarriage. Let them be close until they’re old enough to take an interest in each other. Then keep ’ em apart.”
“Like in the South?”
“Oh?”
“Negroes and whites in the South. White and colored kids play together in their cradles, they’re the best of friends and nobody thinks anything of it. I never even saw a colored person who wasn’t somebody’s maid until I went to high school, and how many Negroes were there at Bennett when I was there? I think three.”
“Well, there has been some changes made since then, Sapphire. You wouldn’t recognize the place these days.”
“So I understand, but don’t let me miss my point. I grew up in the North and never had any colored friends, but in the South they play together from infancy as a matter of course, and then there’s complete and total segregation the minute they go to school. Not high school, of course. Kindergarten or first grade, whatever it is. They have the segregated schools and as soon as they go to them they stop speaking to each other; It’s not that extreme here in Buffalo between Jews and gentiles—”
“Hardly.”
“But it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”
“Well, I wonder.”
“What’s the difference, Mark? It’s just one of degree.”
“Maybe.” He refilled their coffee cups and brought in a plate of cookies. “Tell me about Bryn Mawr,” he said.
“About Bryn Mawr. Okay. Perched on the Main Line just north of the teeming metropolis of Philadelphia, the esteemed college of Bryn Mawr—”
“Come on. Were there many Jewish kids there?”
“There were enough. Don’t look at me like that, I don’t understand the question. I never counted, for God’s sake.”
“But you weren’t friendly with any of them.”
“I was friendly with a few. I wasn’t close with any. There weren’t many girls I was close to, Jewish or otherwise. Look, some of the Jewish girls tended to hang out together. They did terrific ethnic things like joining the Hillel Society at Haverford and having a seder every year with an actual rabbi to preside over it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I didn’t say there was.”
“No, you didn’t, did you? Did your friends have the same attitude you did? That maintaining your Jewish identity that way was a dull Mickey Mouse thing to do?”
Her mouth snapped open and she almost spoke. But the words stayed bottled up. She put one hand over her stomach. For a moment her brain filled with the sudden unbidden image of a baby with its umbilicus wrapped around its throat but the image flashed away as abruptly as it had come.
She was not sitting over coffee with Winkie and Dana, not now. She was not at the Greek’s or the Dive. Nor was she at the bar of the Kettle or San Remo or the Riviera. She was in her apartment on Kenmore Avenue, with her built-in kitchen and her Danish furniture and her casement windows, and words could no longer be spoken without having been weighed first. The automatic responses were safe, whether they’d been learned or were inborn, but before fresh conversational ground could be broken one had to consider. One heard the words first and then one spoke them.
“I’m sorry, Andrea.”
“What for?”
“It was just the tone you used, it got my back up.”
“It’s nothing.”
“What are you looking for, a cigarette? Here?”
“Thanks.”
Let it drop now? He would probably follow her lead if she wanted.
But she said, “I felt more Jewish there.”
“Sure, because of the contrast. I never felt whiter than when we went to that jazz club on William Street. I wouldn’t say I was uncomfortable exactly. Maybe I was uncomfortable but on top of that I was aware of being Caucasian in a way I’m usually not.”
“That’s just part of what I meant. There was more.”
“Oh?”
“I felt more aware that I was Jewish but at the same time I felt less Jewish.”
“You lost me.”
“Because being Jewish was something that made me unique in my particular group of friends, so I was aware of it, but once you get past the fact it stops mattering because I was the same as they were and felt the same way—”
She went on a bit, talking as much to herself as to him, talking perhaps to Winkie more than to either of them. And when she stopped talking he assured her that he understood what she meant. She wondered.
There was clean linen on the bed. She lay under the top sheet letting her eyes accustom themselves to the darkness. He drew back the sheet, slipped into bed beside her. She turned toward him, suddenly breathless, and when his arm went around her she felt herself rocked by a great wave of relief, relief from a tension she had not consciously felt.