In that ferocious and self-annihilating way in which so many Jewish men of his generation served their families, my father served my mother, my sister Hannah, but particularly me. Where he had been imprisoned, I would fly: that was his dream. Mine was its corollary: in my liberation would be his—from ignorance, from exploitation, from anonymity. To this day our destinies remain scrambled together in my imagination, and there are still too many times when, upon reading in some book a passage that impresses me with its logic or its wisdom, instantly, involuntarily, I think, “If only he could read this. Yes! Read, and understand—!” Still hoping, you see, still if—onlying, at the age of thirty-three . . . Back in my freshman year of college, when I was even more the son struggling to make the father understand—back when it seemed that it was either his understanding or his life I remember that I tore the subscription blank out of one of those intellectual journals I had myself just begun to discover in the college library, filled in his name and our home address, and sent off an anonymous gift subscription. But when I came sullenly home at Christmastime to visit and condemn, the Partisan Review was nowhere to be found. Colliers, Hygeia, Look, but where was his Partisan Review? Thrown out unopened—I thought in my arrogance and heartbreak—discarded unread, considered junk–mail by this schmuck, this moron, this Philistine father of mine!
I remember—to go back even further in this history of disenchantment—I remember one Sunday morning pitching a baseball at my father, and then waiting in vain to see it go flying off, high above my head. I am eight, and for my birthday have received my first mitt and hardball, and a regulation bat that I haven’t even the strength to swing all the way around. My father has been out since early morning in his hat, coat, bow tie, and black shoes, carrying under his arm the massive black collection book that tells who owes Mr. Lindabury how much. He descends into the colored neighborhood each and every Sunday morning because, as he tells me, that is the best time to catch those unwilling to fork over the ten or fifteen measly cents necessary to meet their weekly premium payments. He lurks about where the husbands sit out in the sunshine, trying to extract a few thin dimes from them before they have drunk themselves senseless on their bottles of “Morgan Davis” wine; he emerges from alleyways like a shot to catch between home and church the pious cleaning ladies, who are off in other people’s houses during the daylight hours of the week, and in hiding from him on weekday nights. “Uh-oh,” someone cries, “Mr. Insurance Man here!” and even the children run for cover—the children, he says in disgust, so tell me, what hope is there for these niggers’ ever improving their lot? How will they ever lift themselves if they ain’t even able to grasp the importance of life insurance? Don’t they give a single crap for the loved ones they leave behind? Because “they’s all” going to die too, you know—“oh,” he says angrily, “‘they sho’ is!’” Please, what kind of man is it, who can think to leave children out in the rain without even a decent umbrella for protection!
We are on the big dirt field back of my school. He sets his collection book on the ground, and steps up to the plate in his coat and his brown fedora. He wears square steel-rimmed spectacles, and his hair (which now I wear) is a wild bush the color and texture of steel wool; and those teeth, which sit all night long in a glass in the bathroom smiling at the toilet bowl, now smile out at me, his beloved, his flesh and his blood, the little boy upon whose head no rain shall ever fall. “Okay, Big Shot Ballplayer,” he says, and grasps my new regulation bat somewhere near the middle—and to my astonishment, with his left hand where his right hand should be. I am suddenly overcome with such sadness: I want to tell him, Hey, your hands are wrong, but am unable to, for fear I might begin to cry—or he might! “Come on. Big Shot, throw the ball,” he calls, and so I do—and of course discover that on top of all the other things I am just beginning to suspect about my father, he isn’t “King Kong” Charlie Keller either.
Some umbrella.
It was my mother who could accomplish anything, who herself had to admit that it might even be that she was actually too good. And could a small child with my intelligence, with my powers of observation, doubt that this was so? She could make jello, for instance, with sliced peaches hanging in it, peaches just suspended there, in defiance of the law of gravity. She could bake a cake that tasted like a banana. Weeping, suffering, she grated he own horseradish rather than buy the pishachs they sold in a bottle at the delicatessen. She watched the butcher, as she put it, “like a hawk,” to be certain that he did not forget to put her chopped meat through the kosher grinder. She would telephone all the other women in the building drying clothes on the back lines—called even the divorced goy on the top floor one magnanimous day—to tell them rush, take in the laundry, a drop of rain had fallen on our windowpane. What radar on that woman! And this is before radar! The energy on her! The thoroughness! For mistakes she checked my sums; for holes, my socks; for dirt, my nails, my neck, every seam and crease of my body. She even dredges the furthest recesses of my ears by pouring cold peroxide into my head. It tingles and pops like an earful of ginger ale, and brings to the surface, in bits and pieces, the hidden stores of yellow wax, which can apparently endanger a person’s hearing. A medical procedure like this (crackpot though it may be) takes time, of course; it takes effort, to be sure—but where health and cleanliness are concerned, germs and bodily secretions, she will not spare herself and sacrifice others. She lights candles for the dead—others invariably forget, she religiously remembers, and without even the aid of a notation on the calendar. Devotion is just in her blood. She seems to be the only one, she says, who when she goes to the cemetery has “the common sense,” “the ordinary common decency,” to clear the weeds from the graves of our relatives. The first bright day of spring, and she has mothproofed everything wool in the house, rolled and bound the rugs, and dragged them off to my father’s trophy room. She is never ashamed of her house: a stranger could walk in and open any closet, any drawer, and she would have nothing to be ashamed of. You could even eat off her bathroom floor, if that should ever become necessary. When she loses at mah-jongg she takes it like a sport, not-like-the-others-whose-names-she-could-mention-but-she-won’t-not-even-Tilly-Hochman-it’s-too-petty-to-even-talk-about-let’s-just-forget-she-even-brought-it-up. She sews, she knits, she darns—she irons better even than the schvartze, to whom, of all her friends who each possess a piece of this grinning childish black old lady’s hide, she alone is good. “I’m the only one who’s good to her. I’m the only one who gives her a whole can of tuna for lunch, and I’m not talking dreck, either, I’m talking Chicken of the Sea, Alex. I’m sorry, I can’t be a stingy person. Excuse me, but I can’t live like that, even if it is 2 for 49. Esther Wasserberg leaves twenty-five cents in nickels around the house when Dorothy comes, and counts up afterwards to see it’s all there. Maybe I’m too good,” she whispers to me, meanwhile running scalding water over the dish from which the cleaning lady has just eaten her lunch, alone like a leper, “but I couldn’t do a thing like that.” Once Dorothy chanced to come back into the kitchen while my mother was still standing over the faucet marked H, sending torrents down upon the knife and fork that had passed between the schvartze’s thick pink lips. “Oh, you know how hard it is to get mayonnaise off silverware these days, Dorothy,” says my nimble-tongued mother—and thus, she tells me later, by her quick thinking, has managed to spare the colored woman’s feelings.