“Tie tac toe, two out of three?” the four-year-old said, sitting down beside us. Then he drew five bars across and four bars down. Jim redrew it for him. The boy considered. He said, “I see.”
The judge had quite a number of generous impulses. He gave himself full credit for each of them. He did not carry any of them out. As a result, he was often puzzled and aggrieved by the demands the people closest to him seemed to make upon him. Though he would be the last man in the world to ask for thanks, he could not understand why they were, on the whole, so damned ungrateful. His daughter, who was overweight, but for whom he felt considerable affection, seemed actually to fear him. When he found her reading the latest diet book, or doing calorie computations, he would point out to her that she was deluding herself: the problem was that she simply ate too much and exercised too little. When she avoided his eyes and, muttering denials, left the room, he would tell himself that she was at a difficult age. His moral vanity was great. When it was touched, he became dangerous. It is not at all uncommon for someone to arrive at a scene of brutality or injustice and, with a sympathetic murmur or heroic flourish, attack the victim. It happens all the time. It underlies the columns, for example, of Dr. Franzblau. But the particular consequence of his moral vanity was that when he did people an injury, he never forgave them. Never again.
The whole courtroom is filled with judges. Each one presides. Perhaps there will be a defendant today, although we are not sure. Scholars and intellectuals make bad jurors, I believe. Their attention span is short. They get bored with the point. They overvalue the original. A hunting dog is not an intellectual. There is a mystery in lawyers’ expressions. False and misleading statements, for instance. Always together. False and misleading. Can’t understand what the “misleading” is doing there. It’s always there. And I’ve found, I think, the strongest “or” in language anywhere. It’s the lawyers’ phrase: as he then well knew or should have known. Well knew or should have known. The strongest or.
Travelers by jet, like subway commuters, tend to arrive on board at the exact last minute. Intercity bus riders take their seats with lots of time to spare. I was the last, in fact the only, passenger on a special late-night bus from Miami to Key Biscayne. “Sister, be calm,” the driver said, as he drove through the darkness. “Jesus is up front here, with me.” One of those, I thought. The ride from Miami Beach to Key Biscayne has a drawbridge in it. The ride is long. “Are you nervous?” the driver went on. “You must be from New York.” I said nothing. He said, “Yes.” I said, “Yes.” A long silence. He repeated, “Yes.” He suddenly turned in his seat and offered me a battered red book. “Turn to page 324,” he said. There seemed no reason not to. I took the book and turned to page 324. “Read it aloud,” he said. What the hell, I thought. It wasn’t dark. I read aloud, what might have been a hymn. When the driver said the first few lines along with me, I thought it was because he knew them by heart. But it was clear he was dissatisfied; I was doing something wrong. I started reading lines, and pausing. He would say the next lines, in the pauses. It turned out that we were meant to read responsively. We did that page. I gave him back his book. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I have a glorious future. In this life or in the next, it doesn’t matter.” Pause. “Yes.” He asked why I didn’t go to church, or read the Bible, or learn to untamp the spiritual power. “Do you pray?” he asked. I said, sometimes. We drove a long time. “I pray twenty-four hours a day,” he said. When we had driven quite a lot further, he said, “Yes.” Then his voice fell. “Something tells me,” he said, “that we have missed our exit.” He turned the bus, crossed the divider and found the way.
“I’ve been doing tunes. I’ve been doing melodies. I’ve gone back to it,” the kind composer said. “After doing atonal music for twenty years.” I asked him what the equivalent of staleness to the point of witlessness in his field was, or whether, in music, such a thing exists. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Pitch fatigue.”
THE AGENCY
THE BOAT was old. The food was boiled. The berths were not sound. The passage took more than a week. The class in all cabins, on all decks, was tourist class. On the ninth day out of New York, the night before Cobh, there was, near the engine room, a talent show. A girl from Briarcliff tap-danced to a hymn. Three boys from Tufts played “Aloha-Oe” with forks on water glasses filled to various heights. A couple, returning to Bavaria after twenty years, sang “Du, du liegst mir am Herzen” seven times. A clerk from Albany did imitations, turning his back to the audience to compose his face before each one. A Scoutmaster from Tenafly rode his unicycle around the floor. The Bavarian couple’s daughter, having been at first reluctant to perform, sang an operatic German favorite, which translated, turned out to be “Fritz, Rejoice! Fritz, Rejoice! Tomorrow We Are Having Celery Salad.” And then an Indian student from McGill, who had boarded the ship at Montreal, slowly, deliberately wound a turban around his head. That was it. He did not win the prize — a pastoral scene in marzipan — but he gave one to think what talent is. Such an interesting conception of it did not come my way again until, years later, in a trench in the Sinai, an Israeli soldier, born in Yemen, chewed up and swallowed a razor blade to impress Yael Dayan.
That year, a Fulbright to Paris had somehow found his way to a band of street fighters in Budapest. A Florence Fulbright had died with a party of tourists he had been leading through the desert in Libya. The Americans were not staying put. Students on grants abroad lost permission to receive their checks by mail. Showing up to be paid kept them, once a month at least, in place. Back home, a group of students, driving a car across the country for its owner, whom they did not know (an agency made the transaction), sped for hours through the desert. It was nearly sundown. They had seen no other cars since noon. Then, in the distance, with the setting red sun just behind it, they saw a car, at the world’s edge, coming toward them. They laughed and kept driving. For several minutes, the two cars raced in their lanes toward each other. Drivers and passengers began to smile and wave across the desert. A few more seconds — laughing, shouting, waving — the two cars collided. There were twelve occupants in all, and none were dead when it was over. A seventeen-year-old boy regained consciousness in the air, caught and sustained by telephone wires. He was too startled to be scared. He climbed down the telephone pole rungs calmly. His arm was slightly broken. The others, only bruised, were scattered along several yards of highway. They picked themselves up gradually, looked at what remained of the two cars, shuddered, and sat down together.