“That’s his idea of a joke!” Ira countered.
“A joke? May a stroke fell him. Fortunately, his present boss is a goy, a Bohemian, a decent man, and the patrons are largely goyim. If he had a Jewish boss, and they should come to quarrel, your father would throw crockery at him. Hasn’t he already flung a water pitcher through a mirror? But before goyim he quakes, so he behaves a little.”
“All right! All right, Mom! Save it for some other time.”
“The wonder is I’m not crazy,” she persisted obdurately. “Who wouldn’t go crazy serving such a sentence as I’m condemned to serve living with him? And to the stranger”— she suddenly shifted mien—“he’s a model of meekness. Inoffensive. Tender as a mulberry.”
“I know!” Ira flared up, shouted: “For Christ’s sake, I know!”
He slumped down in his chair, scowled. “If only I’d got away from here and gone to Cornell when I had a chance!”
“Noo, it’s an old story.” It was Mom’s turn to pacify. “Pray, pay no attention. It’s an old story. Nothing to become distraught over.” She came over to the table and sat down.
“No, but you do.”
“Pay no attention. Beside, today is the Shabbes bay nakht, and on the eve of the Sabbath, serenity and peace should hold sway — don’t you know?” Her irony wasn’t lost on him.
“Yeah. Shabbes bay nakht or not, I could kill the sonofabitch.”
“Go, don’t be foolish.” Mom tried to keep her tone light.
“I could. Not only for what he’s done to you, for what he’s done to me. Was there ever such a mean, stingy, screwy little louse. I can’t figure him out, that’s all. You know what? He’s a child. He’s a lunatic.”
“Noo, tockin, tockin.” A tremendous sigh shook her. “What can you do? A loafer he is not. A gambler he is not. He works, he provides. On whose earnings would you have gotten this far into college?”
“On your skrimping you mean, on your quarter a day, the stipend of your miserable allowance. I know the guy. He gives and begrudges, he promises and withholds. It’s the goddamnedest thing, the way he keeps changing his mind. It’s the way he offered to pay my first-year expenses in Cornell, and then reneged. I didn’t want to go anyway. So what the hell was the difference? He would have paid Minnie’s way through college, though.”
“Well, she’s his favorite. A father, a daughter, don’t you know. But your father he still is.”
“Yeah, that’s about all. Tell me one thing, will you — before he comes home: why the hell didn’t you leave him? Now that I’m old enough to understand these things, it would have been better for all of us, for you, for Minnie, for me. I remember his throwing coffee in your face — I still remember it was coffee with milk in it—café au lait it’s called in French. Why the hell did you stand for it? And Minnie and I sat under the table crying when you came to blows — on Essex Street or Henry Street, there on the East Side when he was out of work. Why didn’t you leave him? What the hell made you hang on to the louse? This is America.”
Her face sagged as her heavy fingers stroked the weave of the tablecloth. “Indeed it is America. And I with two children in it, not much more than toddlers. To whom should I turn? Were my father and mother here? No. Nor my kin? Not even one. Not Moe, not Mamie. No one. Believe me, were even Moe here, things would have been different.”
Her features changed, almost as if a ripple passed across them, reflecting some kind of inner debate, an envisaging. “A man like Moe — Morris, my stout, hearty brother. But he had still to arrive in the new land. Then to whom would I turn? If I had clasped my children to me and fled, then to whom and where? A word of English I didn’t know.”
“Well, but it was all Yiddish, all around you. What do you mean?” Ira challenged. “You didn’t need English.”
“You don’t understend. And the shame and the fright? Alone and timid. Well, I had one landsfrau, Frieda — I had more, but I knew only the way to Frieda’s. Did I know the way through streets? I knew only the way to Frieda’s, and she already had consumption. So what other remedy, except to cling to Chaim, to bow the head and cling to my husband?”
“Oh, hell.”
“Verfallen,” she said. “It’s all in the past. Meanwhile I have an ausgestudierteh son.”
“Yeah, ausgestudiert. What I’ve learned you wouldn’t believe. I’d have been a hell of a lot better off, a lot more independent, a lot tougher, if I’d had to go to work like the other kids on the block, after they graduated from public school—”
“But I didn’t want that, a crude toiler for a son. Never!” She raised her head in unflinching, indomitable opposition. “When the midwife placed you on my breast, I blessed you, and I vowed I would have a son schooled in the nobility of the mind.”
“Yeah?”
“And that was the least he owed me, no? A pittance more to further your education. Minnie’s he needed no urging — and as if in spite, fate prevented her. Alas, he’s a peculiar man. There’s no knowing him: one minute he’s proud that you attend college — he brags to the other waiters that he has a son in college — the next minute he chafes at the expense. You’re a never-ending burden; you earn nothing; your idleness is fostered at his cost.”
“Mmm.”
Maybe Freud was all wrong. The confused smattering Ira had picked up about Freudianism jiggled in conjecture. Freud was wrong with his theory of the father’s urge to castrate the son because of sexual rivalry for the mother. The old boy had got it wrong, Ira speculated sardonically. He himself had whet his piece on his sister, had grown up ravening to get in her every chance he had, and even though her dating had made her off limits for several years now, he desired her nonetheless.
It always would hold him, lure his fantasy. Maybe that was the form the Freudian hypothesis about the supposed rivalry of father and son for the mother took. Who the hell knew. Damn. The whole thing was irrelevant anyway, wasn’t it? The relevant insight might be the inherent resentment of the son by the father because of economic reasons. The parent had to support his offspring, as in Ira’s case, had to provide for him a long time before he could expect a return — maybe never get one. Hence the resentment, which Freud translated into sexual rivalry for the mother.
Oh, it was goofy, both views. What about the female child, the daughter? She had to be supported too, until she could contribute her share to the domestic economy of the family, but she contributed early, and wasn’t resented as much — and maybe brought in a fat purchase price at marriage. . They could always drown them, as they did in China. Cut the balls off boy infants, drown the girl infants, sell the boy infants as eunuchs.
The West did neither, of course; neither did Jews. So where did that leave him? With aimless moorings, aimless moonings. One could as easily exploit that selfsame economic resentment of father toward son, and the subsequent sense of guilt on the part of the son toward the father, as the seminal, seminal, yeah, as the seed-need for substantiating that guilt by guilty act, really endowing guilt with justification, as you could by Freudian means. Hail Karl Marx. Maybe the guys in the ’28 alcove had a point with their economic determinism.
The notion elated him: as if he had made a discovery, like — well, say like Copernicus accounting for the motion of the planets, of the solar system, a damned sight better than old man Ptolemy, more simple, more sensible, too, dispensing with all the swarming, silly epicycles.