To Hazel’s knowledge, Zack had never spoken so passionately about anything before, except music. He was leaning his elbows onto the table clumsily so that the lighted candles wavered, screwing up his face in a way that reminded Hazel horribly of Jacob Schwart.
Her son! In hurt and chagrin Hazel stared at him.
Gallagher said, trying to joke, “Zack, I had no idea! What a budding theologian we have in our midst.”
Zack said, stung, “Don’t condescend to me, ”Dad,“ O.K.? I’m not somebody on your TV show.”
Now Zack was Gallagher’s legally adopted son sometimes he called Gallagher “Dad.” Usually it was playful, affectionate. But sometimes with a twist of adolescent sarcasm, like now.
Gallagher said quickly, “I don’t mean to condescend, Zack. It’s just that discussions like this make people upset without enlightening them. There is a similarity between religions, isn’t there, a kind of skeleton in common, and like human beings, with human skeletons-” Gallagher broke off, seeing Zack’s look of impatience. He said, annoyed, “Believe me, kid, I know. I’ve been there.”
Zack said sullenly, “I’m not a kid. In the sense of being an idiot I’m not a fucking kid.”
Gallagher, smiling hard, determined to charm his stepson into submission, said, “Intelligent people have been quarreling over these questions for thousands of years. When they agree, it’s out of an emotional need to agree, not because there is anything genuine to ”agree‘ about. People crave to believe something, so they believe anything. It’s like starving: you’d eat practically anything, right? It’s been my experience-“
“Look, ”Dad,“ you aren’t me. Neither one of you is me. Got it?”
Zack had never spoken so rudely in the past. His eyes glittered with angry tears. He’d had a strained session with his piano teacher that day, perhaps. His life was complicated now in ways Hazel could not know, for he kept much to himself, she dared not approach him.
Gallagher tried again to reason with Zack, in Gallagher’s affably bantering way that was so effective on television (Gallagher now had a weekly interview show on WBEN-TV Buffalo, a Gallagher Media production) but not so effective with the boy who squirmed with impatience and all but rolled his eyes as Gallagher spoke. Hazel sat forlorn, lost. She understood that Zack was defying her, not Gallagher. He was defying her who had taught him since childhood that religion was for those others, not for them.
Poor Gallagher! He was red-faced and breathless as a middle-aged athlete grown complacent in his skills who has just been outmaneuvered by a young athlete whom he has failed to take seriously.
Zack was saying, “Music isn’t enough! It’s only a part of the brain. I have a whole brain, for Christ’s sake. I want to know about things other people know.” He swallowed hard. He shaved now, the lower half of his face appeared darker than the rest, his short upper lip covered in a fine dark down. Within seconds he was capable of childish petulance, good-natured equanimity, chilling hauteur. He had not once glanced at Hazel during the exchange with Gallagher nor did he look at her now, saying, in a sudden rush of words, “I want to know about Judaism, where it comes from and what it is.”
Judaism: this was a word never before spoken between Hazel and Zack. Nor even the less formal words Jews, Jewish.
Gallagher was saying, “Of course, I can understand that. You want to know all that you can know, within reason. Beginning with the old religions. I was the same way myself…” Gallagher was fumbling now, uncertain. He was vaguely conscious of the strain between Hazel and Zack. As a man of the world with a certain degree of renown he was accustomed to being taken seriously, certainly he was accustomed to being deferred to, yet in his own household he was often at sea. Doggedly he said, “But the piano, Zack! That must come first.”
Zack said hotly, “It comes first. But it doesn’t come second, too. Or third, or fucking last.”
Zack tossed his crumpled napkin down onto his plate. He’d only partly eaten the meal his mother had prepared, as she prepared all household meals, with such care. She felt the sting of that gesture as she felt the sting of the purposefully chosen expletive fucking, she knew it was aimed at her heart. With quavering adolescent dignity Zack pushed his chair back from the table and stalked out of the room. The adults stared after him in astonishment.
Gallagher groped for Hazel’s limp hand, to comfort her.
“Somebody’s been talking to him, d’you think? Somebody at the university.”
Hazel sat still and unmoving in her state of shock as if she’d been slapped.
“It’s the pressure he’s under, with that sonata. It’s too mature for him, possibly. He’s just a kid, and he’s growing. I remember that miserable age, Christ! Sex-sex-sex. I couldn’t keep my mind on the keyboard, let me tell you. It’s nothing personal, darling.”
To spite me. To abandon me. Because he hates me. Why?
She fled from both the son and the stepfather. She could not bear it, such exposure. As if the very vertebrae of her backbone were exposed!
She was not crying when Gallagher came to comfort her. It was rare for Hazel Jones to cry, she detested such weakness.
Gallagher talked to her, tenderly and persuasively. In their bed she lay very still in his arms. He would protect her, he adored his Hazel Jones. He would protect her against her rude adolescent son. Though saying of course Zack didn’t mean it, Zack loved her and would not wish to hurt her, she must know this.
“Yes. I know it.”
“And I love you, Hazel. I would die for you.”
He talked for a long time: it was Gallagher’s way of loving a woman, with both his words and his body. He was not a man like the other, who had little need of words. Between her and that man, the boy’s father, had been a deeper connection. But that was finished now, extinct. No more could she love a man in that way: her sexual, intensely erotic life was over.
She was deeply grateful to this man, who prized her as the other had not. Yet, in his very estimation of her, she understood his weakness.
She did not want to be comforted, really! Almost, she preferred to feel the insult aimed at her heart.
Thinking scornfully In animal life the weakest are quickly disposed of. That’s religion: the only religion.
Yet she’d returned in secret several times to the park where the man in soiled work clothes had approached her and spoken to her.
My name is Gus Schwart.
Do I look like anybody you know?
Of course, she had not seen him again. Her eyes filled with tears of dismay and indignation, that she might have hoped to see him again, who had sprung at her out of nowhere.
How it had pierced her heart, that man’s voice! He had spoken her name, she had not heard in a very long time.
My sister Rebecca, we used to live in Milburn…
She’d looked up Schwart in the local telephone directory and called each of the several listings but without success.
In Montreal, and in Toronto, where they’d traveled in recent years, Hazel had also looked up Schwart and made a few futile calls for she had the vague idea that Herschel was somewhere in Canada, hadn’t Herschel spoken of crossing the border into Canada and escaping his pursuers…
“If he’s alive. If any ”Schwarts’ are alive.“
She began to be anxious as she had not been anxious before the earlier competitions reasoning He is young, he has time for now her son was nearly eighteen, rapidly maturing. A taut tense sexual being he was. Impulsive, irritable. Nerves caused his skin to break out, in disfiguring blemishes on his forehead. He would not confide in his parents, that he suffered indigestion, constipation. Yet Hazel knew.