From the mountains,
To the prairies,
To he oceans, white-with-my-fooaahhh-mmm!
God bless A-me-ri-cuuuuhhhh!
My home, SWEET HOOOOOHHHH-M!
Imagine what it meant to me to know that generations of Maulsbys were buried in the graveyard at Newburyport, Massachusetts, and generations of Abbotts in Salem. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrims pride . . . Exactly. Oh, and more. Here was a girl whose mother’s flesh crawled at the sound of the words “Eleanor Roosevelt.” Who herself had been dandled on the knee of Wendell Wilikie at Hobe Sound, Florida, in 1042 (while my father was saying prayers for F.D.R. on the High Holidays, and my mother blessing him over the Friday night candles). The Senator from Connecticut had been a roommate of her Daddy’s at Harvard, and her brother, “Paunch,” a graduate of Yale, held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and ( how lucky could I be? ) played polo (yes, games from on top of a horse!) on Sunday afternoons someplace in Westchester County, as he had throughout college. She could have been a Lindabury, don’t you see? A daughter of my father’s boss! Here was a girl who knew how to sail a boat, knew how to eat her dessert using two pieces of silverware (a piece of cake you could pick up in your hands, and you should have seen her manipulate it with that fork and that spoon—like a Chinese with his chopsticks! What skills she had learned in far-off Connecticut!). Activities that partook of the exotic and even the taboo she performed so simply, as a matter of course: and I was as wowed (though that’s not the whole story) as Desdemona, hearing of the Anthropapagi. I came across a newspaper clipping in her scrapbook, a column entitled “A Deb A Day,” which began, “SARAH ABBOTT MAULSBY—‘Ducks and quails and pheasants better scurry’ around New Canaan this fall because Sally, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Edward H. Maulsby of Greenley Road, is getting in practice for small game season. Shooting—” with a gun. Doctor—“shooting is just one of Sally’s outdoor hobbies. She loves riding too, and this summer hopes to try a rod and reel—” and get this; I think this tale would win my son too—“hopes to try a rod and reel on some of those trout that swim by ‘Wind-view’ her family’s summer home.”
What Sally couldn’t do was eat me. To shoot a gun at a little quack-quack is fine, to suck my cock is beyond her. She was sorry, she said, if I was going to take it so hard, but it was just something she didn’t care to try. I mustn’t act as though it were a personal affront, she said, because it had nothing at all to do with me as an individual . . . Oh, didn’t it? Bullshit, girlie! Yes, what made me so irate was precisely my belief that I was being discriminated against. My father couldn’t rise at Boston & Northeastern for the very same reason that Sally Maulsby wouldn’t deign to go down on me! Where was the justice in this world? Where was the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League—! “I do it to you,” I said. The Pilgrim shrugged; kindly she said, “You don’t have to, though. You know that. If you don’t want to . . .” “Ah, but I do want to—it isn’t a matter of ‘have’ to. I want to.” “Well,” she answered, “I don’t.” “But why not?” “Because. I don’t.” “Shit, that’s the way a child answers, Sarah—‘because’! Give me a reason!” “I—just don’t do at, that’s all.” “But that brings us back to why. Why?” “Alex, I can’t. I just can’t.” “Give me a single good reason!” “Please,” she replied, knowing her rights, “I don’t think I have to.”
No, she didn’t have to—because to me the answer was clear enough anyway: Because you don’t know how to hike out to windward or what a jib is, because you have never owned evening clothes or been to a cotillion . . . Yes sir, if I were some big blond goy in a pink riding suit and hundred-dollar hunting boots, don’t worry, she’d be down there eating me, of that I am sure!
I am wrong. Three months I spent applying pressure to the back of her skull (pressure met by a surprising counterforce, an impressive, even moving display of stubbornness from such a mild and uncontentious person), for three months I assaulted her in argument and tugged her nightly by the ears. Then one night she invited me to hear the Budapest String Quartet playing Mozart at the Library of Congress; during the final movement of the Clarinet Quintet she took hold of my hand, her cheeks began to shine, and when we got back to her apartment and into bed, Sally said, “Alex . . . I will.” “Will what?” But she was gone, down beneath the covers and out of sight: blowing me! That is to say, she took my prick in her mouth and held it there for a count of sixty, held the surprised little thing there. Doctor, like a thermometer. I threw back the blankets—this I had to see! Feel, there wasn’t very much to feel, but oh the sight of it! Only Sally was already finished. Having moved it by now to the side of her face, as though it were the gear shift on her Hillman-Minx. And there were tears on her face.
“I did it,” she announced.
“Sally, oh, Sarah, don’t cry.”
“But I did do it, Alex.”
“. . . You mean,” I said, “that’s all?”
“You mean,” she gasped, “more?”
“Well, to be frank, a little more—I mean to be truthful with you, it wouldn’t go unappreciated—”
“But it’s getting big. I’ll suffocate.”
JEW SMOTHERS DEB WITH COCK, Vassar Grad Georgetown Strangulation Victim; Mocky Lawyer Held
“Not if you breathe, you won’t.”
“I will I’ll choke—”
“Sarah, the best safeguard against asphyxiation is breathing. Just breathe, and that’s all there is to it. More or less.”
God bless her, she tried. But came up gagging. “I told you,” she moaned.
“But you weren’t breathing.”
“I can’t with that in my mouth.”
“Through your nose. Pretend you’re swimming.”
“But I’m not.”
“PRETEND!” I suggested, and though she gave another gallant try, surfaced only seconds later in an agony of coughing and tears. I gathered her then in my arms (that lovely willing girl! convinced by Mozart to go down on Alex! oh, sweet as Natasha in War and Peace! a tender young countess!). I rocked her, I teased her, I made her laugh, for the first time I said, “I love you too, my baby,” but of course it couldn’t have been clearer to me that despite all her many qualities and charms—her devotion, her beauty, her deerlike grace, her place in American history—there could never be any “love” in me for The Pilgrim. Intolerant of her frailties. Jealous of her accomplishments. Resentful of her family. No, not much room there for love.
No, Sally Maulsby was just something nice a son once did for his dad. A little vengeance on Mr. Lindabury for all those nights and Sundays Jack Portnoy spent collecting down in the colored district. A little bonus extracted from Boston & Northeastern, for all those years of service, and exploitation.
IN EXILE
On Sunday mornings, when the weather is warm enough, twenty of the neighborhood men (this in the days of short center field) play a round of seven-inning softball games, starting at nine in the morning and ending about one in the afternoon, the stakes for each game a dollar a head. The umpire is our dentist, old Dr. Wolfenberg, the neighborhood college graduate—night school on High Street, but as good as Oxford to us. Among the players is our butcher, his twin brother our plumber, the grocer, the owner of the service station where my father buys his gasoline—all of them ranging in age from thirty to fifty, though I think of them not in terms of their years, but only as “the men.” In the on-deck circle, even at the plate, they roll their jaws on the stumps of soggy cigars. Not boys, you see, but men. Belly! Muscle! Forearms black with hair! Bald domes! And then the voices they have on them—cannons you can hear go off from as far as our front stoop a block away. I imagine vocal cords inside them thick as clotheslines! lungs the size of zeppelins! Nobody has to to tell them to stop mumbling and speak up, never! And the outrageous things they say! The chatter in the infield isn’t chatter, it’s kibbitzing, and (to this small boy, just beginning to learn the art of ridicule) hilarious, particularly the insults that emanate from the man my father has labeled “The Mad Russian,” Biderman, owner of the corner candy store (and bookie joint) who has a “hesitation” side-arm delivery, not only very funny but very effective. “Abracadabra,” he says, and pitches his backbreaking drop. And he is always giving it to Dr. Wolfenberg: “A blind ump, okay, but a blind dentist?” The idea causes him to smote his forehead with his glove. “Play ball, comedian,” calls Dr. Wolfenberg, very Connie Mack in his perforated two-tone shoes and Panama hat, “start up the game, Biderman, unless you want to get thrown out of here for insults—!” “But how do they teach you in that dental school. Doc, by Braille?”