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Title: Stern
Author: Bruce Jay Friedman
Release Date: October 6, 2021 [eBook #66477]
Language: English
Produced by: Tim Lindell, Graeme Mackreth and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STERN ***
_a novel by
BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN_
STERN
_Simon and Schuster_
_New York · 1962_
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION
IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM
COPYRIGHT © 1962 BY BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN
PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.
ROCKEFELLER CENTER, 630 FIFTH AVENUE
NEW YORK 20, N.Y.
SECOND PRINTING
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 62-16385
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE BOOK PRESS, BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT
To My Darling Ginger
_Prologue_
[Illustration]
One day in early summer it seemed, miraculously, that Stern would not
have to sell his house and move away. Some small blossoms had appeared
on one of the black and mottled trees of what Stern called his Cancer
Garden, and there was talk of a child in the neighborhood for his son,
a lonely boy who sat each day in the center of Stern's lawn and sucked
on blankets. Stern had found a swift new shortcut across the estate
which cut his walking time down ten minutes to and from the train, and
the giant gray dogs which whistled nightly across a fence and took his
wrists in their mouths had grown bored and preferred to hang back and
howl coldly at him from a distance. A saintlike man in brown bowler
had come to Stern with a plan for a new furnace whose efficient ducts
would eliminate the giant froglike oil burner that squatted in Stern's
basement, grunting away his dollars and his hopes. On an impulse, Stern
had flung deep-blue drapes upon the windows of his cold, carpetless
bedroom, frustrating the squadron of voyeurs he imagined clung
silently outside from trees to watch him mount his wife. And Stern
had begun to play "Billy One-Foot" again, a game in which he pretended
his leg was a diabolical criminal. "I'll get that old Billy One-Foot
this time," his son Donald would say, flinging his sucking blanket to
the wind and attacking Stern's heavy leg. And Stern, whose leg for
months had remained immobile, would lift and twirl it about once again,
saying, "Oh no, you don't. No one can ever hope to defeat the powerful
Billy One-Foot."
It was as though a great eraser had swept across Stern's mind, and he
was ready to start fresh again, enjoying finally this strange house so
far from the safety of his city.
* * * * *
After leaving the home-coming train on one of these new nights, Stern,
a tall, round-shouldered man with pale, spreading hips, flew happily
across the estate, the dogs howling him on, reached his house, and,
kissing his fragrant, long-nosed wife deep in her neck, pulled off a
panty thread that had been hanging from her shorts. He asked her if
anything was new and she said she had taken their son Donald about
a mile down the road to see the new boy she'd heard about. When the
children ran together, the boy's father had stopped cutting his lawn,
pushed her down, and picked up his child, saying, "No playing here for
kikes."
"What do you mean he pushed you down?" Stern asked.
"He sort of pushed me. I can't remember. He shoved me and I fell in the
gutter."
"Did he actually shove you?" asked Stern.
"I don't know. I don't remember. But he saw me."
"What do you mean he saw you?"
"I was wearing a skirt. I wasn't wearing anything underneath."
"And he saw you?"
"I think he probably did," Stern's wife said.
"How long were you down there?"
"Just a minute. I don't know. I don't want to talk about it any more.
What difference does it make?"
"I didn't know you went around not wearing anything. You did that at
college, but I thought you stopped doing that."
Stern knew who the man was without asking more about him and was not
surprised at what he had said. The first Saturday after they moved in,
Stern had driven around the sparsely populated neighborhood, smiling
out the window at people and getting a few nods in return. He had then
come to this man, who was standing in the middle of the road. The man
had taken a long time getting out of the way, and when Stern had smiled
at him, he had tilted his head incredulously, put his hands on his
hips, and, with his shirt flopping madly in the wind, looked wetly in
at Stern.
Stern had held the smile on his own face as he drove by, letting it get
smaller and smaller and sitting very stiffly, as though he expected
something to hit him on the back of the head. On one other occasion,
Stern had driven by to check the man and had seen him standing on his
lawn in a T-shirt, arms heavy and molded inside flapping sleeves,
his head tilted once again. And then Stern had stopped driving past
the man's house and, through everything that happened afterward, had
blacked the man out of his mind. Yet he had waited nonetheless for the
day his wife would say this to him.
* * * * *
There was half an hour of daylight remaining. Stern's son flew to
the top of a living-room bookcase and said, "Get me down from this
blazing fire," and Stern climbed after him, throwing imaginary pails
of water on the boy, and then swept him down to administer artificial
respiration. They saw Popeye together on television, Stern's wife
bringing them hamburgers while they watched the set. When he had eaten,
Stern said he was going to see the man, and his wife for some reason
said, "Be right back."
He did not take the car, wanting the walk so he could perhaps stop
breathing hard. On the way over, he kept poking his fingers into his
great belly, doing it harder and harder, making blotches in his white
skin, to see if he could take body punches without losing his wind. He
hit himself as hard as he could that way but decided that no matter
how hard you did it to yourself, it wasn't the same as someone else.
As he hit himself, a small temple of sweetness formed in his middle;
he tried to press it aside, as though he could shove it along down to
his legs, where it would be out of the way, but it would not move.
The man's house was small and immaculately landscaped, but with a
type of shrub Stern felt was much too commercial. It might have been
considered beautiful at one time. A child's fire wagon stood outside.
Stern walked past the house, near to the curb, and then walked on by
it, stopping fifty yards or so away in a small wooded glade and ducking
down to do some push-ups. He got up to nine, cheated another two, and
when he arose, the sweetness was still there. He saw that he had gotten
something on his hand, either manure or heavily fertilized earth. He
wiped it on his olive-drab summer suit pants and kept wiping it as he
walked back to the man's house again, past it, and on down the road to
his own.
His wife was scrubbing some badly laid tile on the floor of the den,
pretending the deep crevasses didn't exist. She was a long-nosed woman
of twenty-nine with flaring buttocks and great eyes that seemed always
on the edge of tears.
"Can you remember whether he actually shoved you down?" he asked her.
"Whether there was physical contact?"
"I don't remember. Maybe he didn't."
"Because if there was physical contact, that's one thing. If he just
said something, well, a man can say something. I just wish you had
something on under there. I didn't know you go around that way. Don't
do it any more."
"Did you see him?" his wife asked.
"No," said Stern.
"It doesn't make any difference," she said, continuing on the tile.
_Part One_
It was a lovely house, seated in the middle of what once had been a
pear orchard, and yet it had seemed way out on a limb, a giddy place
to live, so far from the protection of Stern's city. Mr. Iavone, the
real-estate agent who had taken Stern and his wife to the house, said,
"If you like this one, it's going to be a matter of kesh. Tell me how
much kesh you can raise and I'll see what I can do." Mr. Iavone was a
grim, short-tempered man who had been showing them selections all day,
and when they finally drove up to this one, Stern felt under obligation
to buy some house, any house, since Mr. Iavone had spent so much time
with them. Golden children began to spill out of it, and the one that
caught Stern's attention was a blinking woman-child with sunny face and
plump body tumbling out of tight clothes. Stern, had his life depended
on it, would not have been able to tell whether she was a woman or a
child. Iavone, in an aside to Stern, told him that the girl-woman was
the reason the Spensers were selling the house, that she had taken to
doing uncontrollable things in cars with high-school boys, bringing
shame to Mr. Spenser, her father, who was in data systems.
The house had many rooms, a dizzying number to Stern, for whom the
number of rooms was all-important. As a child he had graded the wealth
of people by the number of rooms in which they lived. He himself had
been brought up in three in the city and fancied people who lived in
four were so much more splendid than himself.
But now he was considering a house with a wild and guilty number of
rooms, enough to put a triumphant and emphatic end to his three-room
status. Perhaps, Stern thought, one should do this more gradually. A
three-room fellow should ease up to six, then eight, and, only at that
point, up to the unlimited class. Perhaps when a three-roomer moved
suddenly into an unlimited affair he would each day faint with delirium.
While Stern examined the house, Mr. Iavone sat at the piano and played
selections from Chopin, gracefully swaying back and forth on the stool,
his fingers, which had seemed to be real-estate ones, now suddenly full
of stubby culture. (Later, Stern heard that Mr. Iavone always went
to the piano for prospective buyers to show he did not drive a hard
bargain. Actually, his favorite relaxation was boccie.)
Mr. Spenser, a man with purple lips and stiff neck, who seemed to Stern
as though he belonged to a company that offered many benefits, walked
around the house with Stern, clearing his throat a lot and talking
about escrow. Stern listened, with a dignified look on his face, but
did not really hear Mr. Spenser. Escrow was something that other people
knew about, like stocks and bonds. "I don't want to hear about stocks,"
Stern's mother had once said. "It's not for our kind. Not with the way
your father makes a living. There's blood on every dollar." Stern was
sure now that if he stopped everything and took a fourteen-year course
in escrow, he would still be unable to get the hang of it because it
wasn't for his kind. Still, he felt very dignified walking around a
house with a data systems man and talking about escrow. Mrs. Spenser
invited Stern and his wife and child into the kitchen and brought out a
jar of jam.
"Did you make that in this house?" Stern asked.
"Yes," said Mrs. Spenser, a skeletal woman Stern imagined had been worn
down by her husband's dignified but fetishistic lovemaking requests.
"This is quite a house," said Stern.
The price was $27,000. Someone had told Stern always to bid $5,000
under the asking price, and, adding on $1,000 to be nice, he said,
"How about $23,000?" Mr. Spenser muttered something about expediting
the escrow and then said OK. Stern's heart sank. He had been willing
to go to $25,000, and his face got numb, and then he began to tingle
the way he once had after taking a one-penny sharpener from the
five-and-ten and then waiting by the counter, unable to move, to get
his Dutch Rubbing from the store owner. Getting the house as low as he
had, he felt a great tenderness for Mr. Spenser; he wanted to throw
his arms around the stiff-necked man, who probably knew nothing of
Broadway plays with Cyril Ritchard, and say, "You fool. I just got
two thousand dollars from you. How much could you get paid by your
company, which probably gives you plenty of benefits but only meek
Protestant salaries? Don't you know that just because a man says one
price doesn't mean that's all he'll pay? You've got to hold on to those
two thousands, because even though you're a churchgoer you've got a
glandular daughter who'll always be doing things in cars and forcing
you to move to other neighborhoods, pretending you're moving because of
oil burners or escrow."
Mr. Iavone left the piano and said to Stern, "I see we have nice people
on both sides. Would you like to leave some kesh now?"
"I want someone to see the house," said Stern.
"But you've already talked price," said Mr. Iavone. He grabbed his
coat and slammed the top of the piano. "You bring people out, you're
a gentleman with them, you spend the day," he said, "and you wind up
holding the bag. You think they're nice people.... I closed three
million dollars' worth of homes last year."
"I've always lived in apartments and I want someone I know to look it
over. Then I'll buy it," said Stern, but Iavone slammed shut the front
door. Mr. Spenser cleared his throat, and Stern was certain that the
next day he would tell the other data systems people in his company
about the tall, soft man who had come out, talked price, and then left
without buying, the first time this had ever happened in the history of
American house-buying.
"I think I'm just going to take it without doing any inspecting,"
said Stern. "Sometimes it's better that way." Mr. Spenser called back
Iavone, who came in and said, "I knew there were nice people on both
sides. If we can get the kesh settled, we'll be on our way." There was
much handshaking all around, and Iavone played a jubilant march on the
piano.
* * * * *
The closing was held several weeks later in the office of Mr. Spenser's
attorney, a polite man whose barren office had only one small file
in it. Stern felt a wave of pity for this attorney whose entire law
practice could be squeezed into that little file cabinet. He wanted to
say to him, "Stop being so polite. Be more aggressive and you'll have
larger cabinets." Stern's own attorney was Saul Fleer, an immaculate
man with clean fingers, who took out a little pad when he met Stern
at the station and, writing, said, "The train was eighty-nine cents.
I enter every penny right in here." Stern and Fleer had cokes, Fleer
paying for his own and then writing "$.05" on the pad.
At the closing, Mr. Spenser and his wife sat upright, close together,
their arms locked as though they were about to defend a frontier home
together. Their marriage was a serious one; this was a serious, adult
matter; and at such times they locked arms, sat upright, and faced
things together. They blended in with their polite lawyer, and Stern
had the feeling they paid him in jellies.
Stern thought Fleer drove too hard a bargain and cringed down in his
seat each time Fleer, pointing a clean finger at legal papers, shouted
at the Spensers' attorney, "You can get away with this out here. If I
had you back in the city, you wouldn't try anything like this." Stern
wanted to tell Fleer not to yell at the man, that he had only a small
file.
On the matter of who should pay a certain fifty dollars, Fleer said,
"I'd like to see you try a trick like this in the city."
Iavone said, "You put a gun right to my head. I have three million
dollars' worth of closings a year, and this is the first time I've ever
had a gun put to my head."
He walked out of the room, and, after a while, the Spensers, arms still
locked, rose grimly and followed him, as though their property had been
erased by an Indian raid. Their attorney, smiling politely, walked out,
too. Stern wanted to be with them on the side of politeness and marital
arm-linking and not have an attorney who waved fingers at people and
was from the city.
"Do I have the house?" he asked.
"You saw what happened," said Fleer, stuffing papers into a briefcase,
his face colored with anger. "They're strong out here. I'd like to get
them in the city." Then Stern, because he didn't want Iavone to fall
under his yearly three million, because the polite lawyer's tiny file
touched him, and because he felt vaguely un-American, whispered, "I'll
pay the fifty." Fleer said, "Aagh," and threw up his hands in disgust.
Stern went to the staircase and, in a cracked voice, hollered, "Mr.
Iavone." The papers were signed, and immediately afterward Iavone began
calling him "Stern" instead of "Mr. Stern." At the end of the closing
Mr. Spenser handed over the key, and Stern, who had always lived in the
city, suddenly became frightened about being away from it. He wondered
with a chill whether he really did want to live "out here."
* * * * *
Later that afternoon, he drove to the house with his wife and child
and, as if to certify his possession of it in his own nonlegal way,
Stern, in suit and tie, rolled from one end of the wide lawn to the
other while his wife and child shrieked with joy. The boy had large
eyes and a strange, flaring nose, and his looks changed; in the bright
sun he seemed pathetically ugly, but then, coming swiftly out of a
sleep, or by lamplight, hearing stories, his face seemed tender and
lovely. Stern, standing on the lawn now, made up a game right on the
spot called "Up in the Sky" in which he took his child under the
armpits and swung him first between his legs and then up in the sky as
far as he would go. On the way down once, the boy said, "Throw me up
high enough to see God."
"How does he know about God?" Stern asked, a little chilled because he
wasn't sure yet what God things to tell the child and hadn't counted on
it coming up so early.
"A little girl on Sapphire Street where we used to live," said Stern's
wife.
"God can beat up a gorilla," said the little boy as Stern flung him
skyward. Stern threw him up again and again, once with viciousness, as
though he really did want to lose him in the sky so that he would not
have to figure out what to tell him about God.
A stab got Stern in the bottom of his wide, soft back then and he
dropped to his knees and said, "Everyone on the giraffe." His wife and
child got on, Stern becoming excited by the heat of her crotch. He
went across the lawn carrying them, but there was a strained frivolity
about the game. He wanted someone to see him, and when a car drove by,
he smiled thinly, as if to say, "We're home-owners. See how much fun
we always have and how we fit in." But when the one car had passed,
there was no one left to show off for; in the distance there was a
bleak, lonely, deserted estate, where once a man named Bagby had each
Sunday skidded through the snow in a horse-drawn sleigh, entertaining
his grandchildren. Stern went inside his house and walked from room to
room, giving each one a number and hollering it out aloud as he stood
in the center of each. "I always wanted a lot of rooms," he said,
clasping his long-nosed, great-eyed wife to him. "Now look how many
I've got."
* * * * *
After moving in officially several days later, Stern hired a trio of
Italian gardeners to prepare the elaborate shrubs for summer--two old,
cackling, slow-moving ones and a fragrant and temperamental young man
who spoke no English but had worked on the gardens of Italian nobility.
The old men made straight borders along their flower beds, but the
young man did his in curlicues, standing off after each twirl and
making indications of roundness in the air with his hands. Their price
was three dollars an hour, and as they moved along Stern began to worry
that they weren't working fast enough. He saw the shrub preparation
costing him $800, leaving him no money for furniture. Stern wanted to
tell the young man to stop doing the time-consuming curlicued borders
and to do straight ones like the old men to keep the bill down. But
he was afraid to say anything to a handsome young man who had worked
on the grounds of Italian nobility. Stern watched the gardeners from
inside the house, ducking behind a curtain so they wouldn't see him.
He hoped they would hurry and perspired as the dollars ticked away in
multiples of three. The old men rested on their rakes now, poking each
other and cackling obscenely at the handsome young man as he made his
temperamental curlicues. Then Stern lost sight of the young man and
imagined that his long-nosed, great-eyed wife had inhaled his fragrance
and dragged him with a sudden frenzy into the garage, her fingers
digging through his black and oily young Italian hair, loving it so
much more than Stern's thinning affair, which fell out now at the touch
of a comb.
But the young gardener was making tiny paths in the backyard rock
garden, and when he and the two cacklers were paid and had left, Stern
called his family together and said, "We've got paths. I'm a guy with
paths." Even though they were narrow and largely decorative, Stern
insisted his wife and child walk in and out of the paths with him, the
whole child and half his wife not really fitting and spilling over onto
the grass.
* * * * *
That night, Stern gathered his wife and son to him and they sat on the
front steps of the house, Stern feeling the stone cold against his
wide, soft legs, bare in Bermuda shorts. They watched it get dark, felt
the air get dewy and unbalancing. "This is the best time," he said, as
though he had lived ten thousand nights in houses, analyzing all the
various hours of the day for quality before settling upon this one as
the best. The night made him feel less jittery and isolated. Whatever
bad was out there would wait until the next day. He had his boy on his
lap and his wife's hips against him and he was sitting on stone steps.
He might have been in the city with a thousand families all around him,
ten minutes from his mother's three rooms. As he sat on the stone, a
fire truck screamed to a halt before his house and a man in a fireman's
uniform raced across his lawn to the steps. The man was small and
had low hips with powerfully thick legs. Stern, walking through meat
sections at supermarkets, had always wondered who bought the pork butts
and ham hocks, strange cuts of meat Stern would never consider. It
seemed to Stern that this man was probably someone who ate them, and,
instead of making him undernourished, their gristle and waste went to
his legs and perversely made him wiry and powerful.
"We're having a firemen's ball," the man said. "Do you want to go? The
twentieth of this month."
Stern smiled in what he thought was home-owning folksiness and said,
"We can't make it that night. I'm sorry."
The fireman wheeled on his trunklike legs and ran apishly back to the
truck.
"You were wrong," his wife said. "Everyone buys tickets. Nobody really
goes. You just give them the money."
Stern, in Bermudas, ran across the lawn, shouting, "I'll take two after
all," but the truck had already screamed off, and Stern heard a voice
yell "Shit" into the night.
"My first thing in this town," said Stern, "and I've got an enemy."
He put his great, soft body on the stoop against his wife's hips,
not at all comforted by the night now, and imagined his house with
all its rooms burning to the ground, his child's hair aflame, while
thick-legged firemen, deliberately sluggish, turned weak water jets on
the roof, far short of the mark.
The Spensers had failed to tell Stern to spray the area, and, a month
after he moved in, a caterpillar army came and attacked the grounds.
When Stern first saw the insects, he said, "I'm going to get them,"
and went out to the lawn and began to flick them off the shrubs and
then step on them when they were on the ground. But there were huge
wet clumps of them on everything, and he called the spray company.
"It's too early to get after them," the man said. "If you get at them
too early, you just waste your spray. You've got to wait till they're
sitting up perky." Stern waited a day and then called again; another
voice answered and told him, "It's too late. You missed the right time.
They're in there solid now."
"The other man in your place said to wait," Stern said.
"I'll rap you in the teeth you get smart," the voice screamed. "I'll
come right over there and get you. You want to make trouble, I'll give
you trouble all right."
Stern bought some chemicals in a store and said to his wife, "I know
there are billions, but I'm going to get every one of them. This is
our house." He went to work on a beautiful mountain ash tree first.
There was little of it showing; the tree might as well have been one
large wet caterpillar. Stern sprayed at it for an hour, until his
hands were broken with blisters, but only a few caterpillars fell, not
really from the potency of the chemical but simply because they lost
their balance and got washed off. They were hardy when they touched the
ground and Stern knew they would find their way back to the tree. He
stopped spraying, and in a few days the caterpillars had left and Stern
and his wife were able to see that they had attacked in a funny way,
eating approximately half of everything, half of each bush and half of
each shrub. In front of the house stood a wild cherry tree, lovely and
fruitful on one side, black, gnarled, and cancerous on the other. The
plants never went back to normal, and since it was too massive a job
to replace each one, Stern and his wife learned to approach them only
from certain angles, ones from which they looked complete, and pretend
they were whole shrubs instead of half ones. Stern was sickened by the
diseased shrubs; it was not so much their appearance that troubled him
but the feeling that he had betrayed a sacred trust. "The house has
been standing here for thirty years with whole shrubs," he said to his
wife. "We're in it a month and there are halves."
* * * * *
There was, too, the dog escort problem. The house was somewhat isolated
from transportation conveniences, and to get to the railroad station
each day (where he left for his job in the city), Stern had to cross
the huge, long-deserted estate old man Bagby had once skidded across
in a sleigh. It was spread out over eighty acres and took Stern
twenty-three minutes each way, much too long a walk to be brisk and
refreshing. The train ride then would be an hour and six minutes, which
meant that Stern would be traveling roughly three hours each day. When
they had first considered the house, his wife had said, "Take the ride
once. It may be too long. See how you like it." But Stern had answered,
"I don't want to know about it. I love the house. If I take the ride, I
may not like it and we'll never live in this house. I love this house
and I don't want to know about any rides."
The estate was a lonely, windless, funereal place, terribly quiet,
with many odd little buildings, and for the first weeks of walking
its length Stern made it his business to investigate a different one
of them each morning. On one such morning, he climbed the watchtower
and stood on the second floor, looking out of the cracked windows onto
huge, rolling lawns and at bushes that had holes in them, seemingly
torn out at random by large fists. Stern wondered how the estate was
when it was new, and then he walked over to the main estate building.
On an impulse, he poked his elbow through a weak door panel and
looked around innocently in the clear morning as though he, too, was
surprised at all the commotion. Able to open the lock now, he waited
till the echo had quieted and went inside the estate building, sweating
hard, and then climbed the winding steps to the second floor. Doing
everything in a hurry, he stood first in the elegantly constructed
floor tub of the main bedroom and then went out to the circular
balcony, extended his arms, and hollered, "Throw them to the lions,"
to imaginary throngs below. Then he decided to take something. The
rooms seemed empty, except for a packet of newspapers tied with string.
Stern worked a single paper loose and, tucking it under his arm, walked
swiftly down the stairs. He smelled coffee burning and then ran out
the door and kept running all the way to the train, running so hard
he got a pain in his chest. He did not look at the dusty newspaper
until he was in the coach. It was dated 1946, and its recent vintage
somehow spoiled the whole estate for him; he never went into any of the
buildings again. In any case, it was not the walk through the estate
each morning that troubled him so much as the walk back at night.
At the farthest corner of the estate area, near the train, stood a
loosely scattered group of houses in a heavily wooded thatch. They
seemed at one time to be part of the estate and were still being
lived in. In darkness each night, Stern had to cross this cluster of
houses. There was no easily defined road in the area, and since it was
not a real community, the only light was from an occasional window;
Stern had to walk through using a pocket flashlight and not really
sure whether he was on someone's property. On the second night of his
estate-crossing, it was not quite so dark as it was to be later on, and
Stern was able to see two thin, huge dogs vault a fence that encircled
one of the houses and make for him with a whistling sound. They skimmed
through the night and came to an abrupt halt at his feet, their gums
drawn back, teeth white, both dogs reaching high above his waist. One
took Stern's wrist between his teeth, and the two animals, hugging
close to his side, walked with him between them, as though they were
guards taking a man to prison. Stern went along with them, not crying
out, not really sure he could cry out. The houses were fairly far off;
it would take a loud cry to reach them, and Stern was certain only old
people lived in them and wouldn't be able to make out voices in the
night. He tried not to perspire, having heard you showed your fear
that way, but he wasn't able to tell whether he was or not since it
was chilly. They walked a quarter of a mile with him that way, hugging
him tight on both sides, until the dog released his wrist, which was
soaking wet; then both turned and went back, trotting swiftly through
the night. The next day, Stern bought a penknife in the station, but
when the dogs vaulted the fence that evening, he was taken aback by
their speed and the whistling sound. He remembered hearing once as a
child that you should never draw a blade unless you really meant to
use it. Deciding the blade was probably too short, he succumbed meekly
and allowed the lead dog to take his wrist again. There didn't seem to
be anything he could do. He had heard too that you could break a dog's
back with a swift judo chop on the spine, and he took his wrist out of
the dog's mouth and tapped it lightly on its leathery back, but the
dog made a sound and he put his wrist back. He thought of walking up
to the house from which the dogs came, but he was certain the animals
were trained to kill all people who passed through the fence and would
get him in the throat before he reached the door. The houses were in
a vague sort of grouping, not in any definite town or area, and there
didn't seem to be any way to get close enough to the dog-protected
house to see its address. The following day, Stern tried to guess what
the address might be and called a number on the phone. An old woman's
voice, hearing his, hollered, "Crumbie, crumbie," and hung up. There
didn't seem to be any special police to appeal to; nor was Stern sure
an ordinance was being violated. He was afraid of the police and did
not want to call them anyway. He pictured the police in the section
to be large, neutral-faced men with rimless glasses who would accuse
him of being a newcomer making vague troublemaking charges. They would
take him into a room and hit him in his large, white, soft stomach. So
each night he continued to walk slowly through the estate, waiting for
the dogs, almost a little relieved when they finally whistled to his
side, never really sure they wouldn't decide one night to kill him in
a muffled place where there would be no one to pull them off. He saw
himself fighting silently in the night with the two gray dogs, lasting
eight minutes and then being found a week later with open throat by
small Negro children. Certain he would be killed, if not by the dogs
then because his white, soft body did not seem capable of living past
fifty, he called a broker one day and doubled his insurance.
* * * * *
There was no one to complain to. No one who could help Stern with that
kind of problem. His only neighbor at the new house was an ancient man
with a thin chest who was always being placed and arranged in different
positions. He would be placed in the sun and then shifted to the shade
when the heat got too intense for him. Then he would be moved inside
and placed before the television set, great care being taken not to
jostle him. In the wintertime he would be shifted to a train going to
Virginia, where he owned a small farm. Stern later heard that once he
touched down in the South, he would leap spryly out of his wheelchair
and rarely be seen in daylight without two plump-chested young girls at
his side.
One bright day, the man sat vegetablelike in a folding chair, having
recently been placed there by his wife. Stern, in a shining burst
of weekend hope, had run out of doors with a two-pronged shovel and
was loosening the earth around one of his half shrubs, hoping that
the sun's warmth would get through to it and make the cancerous
side blossom and start to flourish. Across a low fence, he saw his
thin-chested neighbor and told him about the dogs. "They wait for me
each night," he explained. With frail wrists, the man drew from his
wallet a commissioner's badge and said, "I was very powerful when I
had my health. I was able to get stop signs put up. Forget the dogs.
I'll take care of them. Do you want to get me around a little to the
east...." Stern shifted his neighbor around, hardly able to suppress
his joy; he was thrilled to have commissioner-type power on his side
and wanted to hug his neighbor's thin chest with delight. Actually
he was a little afraid of him now, convinced that as a onetime
commissioner he had weapons nearby and probably knew judo holds, ones
you could deliver despite a thinness at the wrists. Stern looked
forward to swift action, but the dogs continued to slip through the
night to Stern's side until he decided the man had done nothing after
all. To get any action out of him, Stern imagined his neighbor would
have to be carried to the police station and placed before the chief.
The man's wife was of little help. A short woman who wore loose-flowing
Alpine dirndls, she had a garbage problem and was always carrying a
bagful out to a wire basket in front of her house to burn it. "I don't
know where it all comes from," she would say to Stern as she made her
endless pilgrimage to the basket. Often, on her way back for another
load, she would see Stern across the fence, working silently to bring
life back into his halves, and say, "I can remember when your house was
really beautiful." Once she invited Stern and his wife into her own
home. She took them into the kitchen and said, with arm extended, "This
is my kitchen." Then she took them into the living room and said, "This
is my living room," and so on through the house. She pointed to her
husband, who had been placed in front of a fishbowl, and said, "This is
my husband." Then she bid them goodbye, saying, "There was a time when
your house was so lovely." She never asked them in again.
Since the summer had been cruel to him, Stern looked forward to cold
weather, when he would at least not have to bother with neighbors
and to face the half shrubs each day. In the winter your shrubs were
not supposed to be beautiful, and Stern watched with delight as the
grass faded and the leaves dropped and his half shrubs fell in with
the bleakness as though their black cancer shapes were the fault of
the cold and not a caterpillar miscalculation. The snow came on fast
that first winter. One night it built up to eight-inch drifts and was
still dropping heavily when Stern, in low-cut Italian rubbers, left
the train. The dogs did not clear the fence, hanging back instead to
make cold choking sounds at him in the night--as though aware that the
snow would make them clumsy, unable to terrorize Stern. He was halfway
across the estate when the snow piled up knee-deep and stung its way
into his eyes. He bent his great back, lowered his head, and shuffled
into the wind; when he had walked far enough to get to his house and
still could see no lights, he knew that he had lost his way. A great
pain pounded through his nose, and he could not feel his face or catch
his breath. With no knowledge of the stars, he saw himself making an
endless circle in the snow and then falling silently asleep in a drift,
to die of frostbite yards from his new home. The wind and snow flew at
him with bitterness and his face seemed to belong to a stranger. He was
unable to go further and stopped, defeated by the wind, not after a
forty-day trek from Point Barrow, but twenty minutes from his commuter
train. Feeling ridiculous, he sat down in the snow, but then he quickly
became frightened and shouted "Get me!" into the night. He napped that
way for a moment, and when he awakened things were not too much better.
He urinated in the snow, feeling giddy and dangerous in this white
place more private than a thousand bathrooms. When the wind hit him in
his open fly, he imagined himself freezing up swiftly, breaking off
with a quick snap like winter wood, and he withdrew quickly with drops
remaining. Then, pulling his collar together and making a serious face,
he bent to the snow again, as though, by being very businesslike about
it and pretending he knew exactly where he was going, the fates would
somehow carry him to his door. Later, he came out of the estate, not
opposite his house, but in a new part of town. He had to walk three
steep hills to his house, but then, turning a corner, with everything
wet upon him, he saw it suddenly, as though through a curtain drawn
open quickly. It was bathed in frosty light and all its diseased half
trees and shrubs were cloaked with mounds of jeweled snow. It was an
enchanted candy house, the loveliest in all the world, and Stern,
standing wide-hipped and breathless as though beneath a spell, enjoyed
what was to be his finest moment of the winter.
Stern thought that in the cold weather he would turn his thoughts
inside to family and home, creating a handsome interior that would make
up for the cancer garden. He would then lead visitors swiftly through
the mottled shrubs, entertain them in interior splendor, and rush them
out under cover of darkness. The paint-store owner delivered gallons
of paint one Saturday morning, and then, when Stern raised his brush
to deliver the first dab, the owner hollered, "Don't paint." Stern
lowered the brush and the man continued to shout: "Never paint. Lay
your brushes aside and, for Christ's sake, don't paint. You paint and
you're a fool. Uh-uh. No painting, don't paint, _never paint_." And
then he lowered his voice to a whisper and added, "Until you're _ready_
to paint." He then imposed a long list of conditions which would have
to be met before it would be all right for Stern to paint. "Scrape your
walls, scrape your floors, paper your halls, drape your dainty pieces,
test your tones, check your temp, dress properly. But, for Christ's
sake, don't paint. That is, until you're ready to paint."
Stern and his wife set all the paint in the corner of the room and
waited until the ideal day came along, but it never did, and they
gradually lost interest in painting. It was decided they would get
rolling by laying tile, and Stern's father sent Crib, an ageless Negro
with great strength in his wrists, to help them lay it, his services
a moving-in gift. Stern's father, a small, round-shouldered man who
always wore slipovers, had worked most of his life in a shoulder pad
concern for his brother, Uncle Henny, expecting to be made a partner
or to take over when Henny, a coronary patient, passed on. When Henny
did expire, however, the business went instead to a distant nephew who
had always worked in civil service positions, and Stern's father had
to continue in a subordinate position, his life more or less gone up
in smoke. Crib, a sweeper and handyman, had supported Stern's father
for head of the business, almost as though it had been an election, and
now, years later, remained a faithful supporter of his.
"He a fair man," Crib once said to Stern. "And nobody cut a pad like
him. No waste." And Stern's dad, in turn, spoke with admiration of
Crib's great strength. "He must be about ninety, but he's some strong
guy. You ought to see what he can lift."
Crib appeared early one morning, wide nose parched with cold, slapping
himself as though he had come all forty miles on foot, and Stern,
who had a special feeling for all Negroes, hugged him in a show
of brotherhood. He raced upstairs to rouse his wife and bring her
downstairs, long-nosed and cranky, so she could fix some bacon and eggs
for the Negro. To make Crib feel at home, Stern howled with laughter as
his father's friend made such remarks as "It too cold for ole Crib out
here."
When Crib had cleaned his plate of eggs, Stern asked if he wanted some
milk to wash them down and Crib, with a wink, said, "That ain't what
I want." Catching on, Stern filled up a tumbler with rye and Crib
drained it, smacking his lips. "_That_ what I want," said Crib slyly,
and Stern howled with laughter once again. "Now ole Crib fix you up,"
said the Negro, rising and going to the tile. He rolled his sleeves
back over his great wrists, and Stern felt that even though tremendous
power would not be needed to lay the tiles, it was comforting to have
it on tap anyway. Crib spent the morning on his knees, measuring and
arranging and muttering, "Ole Crib forgot his tile cutter." Stern
silently placed a variety of sandwiches and another tumblerful of
rye on a loose tile near Crib, and in the evening, when the job was
finished, Stern's wife had a roast ready. Later, Crib went back to
inspect his work, shaking his head and saying, "Crib wish he bring his
tile cutter." Stern gave him twenty-five dollars, hugged him tightly,
and saw him off, thinking for a moment how wonderful it would be if he
could have Crib out there with him, using his great wrists to fight
Stern's enemies, police in rimless glasses and short, powerful-legged
firemen. "You made too much of a fuss over him," said Stern's wife,
and Stern replied, "He's a saint. We were lucky to get him." A day
later, the tiles buckled, and Stern had to put books, _A Treasury of
the World's Great Classics_, about the room to hold them down. When the
_Treasury_ was removed, great crevasses remained between the tiles and
Stern's wife said, "We really needed him."
"We got him for nothing," said Stern. "It's not a bad job. Nobody gets
tile exactly right."
But the crevasses made them suddenly lose interest in fixing up the
house. They left the paint cans in the corner of the living room. The
floors remained bare of carpeting, the windows without drapes. They
took to ducking down when passing open windows in the nude, to avoid
being spotted by cars. Upstairs, in Stern's bedroom, the color scheme
remained Mr. Spenser's winter-green selection, and inferior artwork
whipped up by the golden Spenser children still hung about the walls.
At this point, all of the sweetness seemed to drain out of Stern, a man
who had once played a thousand inventive games with his son, Donald.
There were no young children in the neighborhood for the boy to play
with, and often, with the air clear and sun out full, the boy would
sit alone on the front stoop, stroking a blanket, shaking quietly and
trying to rock himself to sleep at the height of day. "Why do you
need a blanket?" Stern would ask, and his son would answer, "I don't
know." And Stern, in early morning, jittery and uncertain, an endless
pilgrimage in front of him, would kneel at his wife's bed and say, "For
Christ's sake, see that he has activities."
"What am I going to do out here?" she would answer, and at night, when
Stern had gotten past the dogs, he would find his son standing in the
middle of the lawn, holding his blanket as though he had been there
all day, waiting for Stern to come back. So Stern, his stomach bursting
with guilt, had made up games. A favorite had been "Butterfly Hand,"
in which Stern's quiet, fat hand would suddenly begin to flutter and
wiggle. "It's turned into a butterfly," Stern would say to his son
as it flew about the room. "There'll be no controlling it now." The
hand would then go still and Stern would lift his son above his head,
the boy's arms extended, for a bout of "Airplane," carrying him with
droning sounds about the room and then bringing him in for tabletop
landings in "San Diego." Top game of all was "Billy One-Foot," in
which the boy would fight an all-out battle with Stern's leg, "Billy
One-Foot, the toughest of all fighters."
They had endless thumb fights, too, but now Stern could no longer
muster spirit to play the games. He would sit cold and heavy in an
empty room, and when the boy said, "Let's play Billy One-Foot," Stern
would pat him on the head and say, "Billy One-Foot is sick now."
Occasionally, he would swing his boy round the room in a circle,
clamping his own eyes shut in an effort to black out a vision of
himself heaving the boy headfirst against a stone wall, forever ending
thoughts of God and blankets and other children.
He had always found it amusing that his wife was lax about managing
things. "You think you can get away with carelessness because your
behind is beautiful," he would say, and clasp her surging buttocks.
But a banister was loose that winter in their bare and windy house. It
fell into no special category of repair--neither carpentry nor stairway
work--and when his wife was slow to have it attended to, Stern took to
shocking her with vivid accounts of what would happen because of her
inaction: "Your son will fall, and perhaps when you see him at the
bottom of the stairs with his head open, you'll realize the importance
of having it fixed" or "A slight push on top and he'll be at the bottom
dead." And Stern imagined such a scene, his son with cleaved skull and
Stern unable to cry convincingly. Once, a childhood friend named Ruggie
had gone to climb a fire escape and given Stern his dog's leash to
hold. Stern purposely let go the leash, and the dachshund ran a mile
before it went beneath a speeding car. Ruggie then came back carrying
the dog in a dumb march, the dachshund's body staining his sleeves,
to put him some place, while Stern watched, frozen to the ground. Now
Stern imagined himself with his son's smashed body in his arms, going
dumbly outside to put him someplace, too. He imagined a scene in which
he was putting all the dead boy's toys in a box but continually finding
new ones as years rolled by.
Stern's wife, too, became sullen, mostly about having no friends. For
a while, a distant cousin of Stern's named Barbie visited and served
as a companion to her. But she centered everything, the food in the
middle of plates, flower vases in the center of tables. She even put
Stern's son in the exact center of the couch as he watched television.
Stern's wife finally wearied of her because of having to listen to her
constant teen-age questions. Though she was far out of her twenties,
she would ask Stern's wife, "Do you think it's sinful to allow petting
on a first date?" and "Will I lose Phil if I don't let him go as far as
he wants?" When she left, Stern's wife had no one, and when he asked
her about this, she said, "I don't need anyone," and this infuriated
Stern. "You've got to have friends," he screamed at her, and then he
had a picture of all three of them, his wife, his son, himself, sitting
on the lawn, sucking blankets, shaking and trying to rock themselves to
sleep.
He had met his wife at college after being rejected by a young girl
with musical voice and tangles of blond hair who acted in Arthur Wing
Pinero plays, doing deep, curtsying walk-ons that made Stern weak in
his middle. He had scrupulously avoided taking the blond girl to bed,
preferring to think of her as "not the kind of girl you do that with"
until, disgustedly, she refused to see him, telling him, "Someday
you'll understand." A week later, he met his wife, a girl with great
eyes and shining black hair and no music in her voice, and, after an
anecdote or two to establish his charm, he went with her to a blackened
golf course and, with clenched teeth and sourness, drove his fat hand
through her summer-smelling petticoats and, as she moaned "God no,"
kissed her and tried not to think of curtsies. Later that first night,
he went into her a little, and they both froze and clung to each other.
Stern at that time boarded off campus with a trembling old ex-bass
fiddle player who sat each night wearing truss-like old-man belts and
gadgets and twanged his instrument in the basement. The old man was
not particularly nice to Stern. He feigned munificence by asking Stern
to have glasses of milk but actually used him as a sourness tester.
At night, while the old man sat in his bands and trusses, Stern would
spirit the petticoated girl into his room, undressing her swiftly
and then tasting and biting her, going at her with anger and closed
eyes to drive away all traces of Victorian curtsies. She was the only
daughter of a man who had missed great opportunities as a baseball
executive and now lived with silver tongue and failing eyesight in an
Oregon apartment. Her mother was Hungarian, had lost three children in
infancy, and spent her time crocheting bitterly, dreaming of three dead
sons. Lean of funds, they had sent the girl, with heavy trunk-loads of
petticoats, for a single year of college and then no more. She dated
constantly, afternoons and evenings, an endless succession of boys.
Stern asked her what she did on these dates and she said she'd kissed
most and allowed some to "kiss her on top."
"You're the only one from New York I've known, and you're different,"
she said to him. "You care for different things. The others just care
about being a good dresser."
Psychology interested her, but she mispronounced words, and it bothered
Stern, a man who waded without joy through classics, that she had never
tried Turgenev. She had total recall of her childhood and, her voice
filled with pain, she told Stern tales that failed to move him. "I had
twelve birds, and each time I got to love one, my parents would get
rid of it. I'd come home and see it not there and look all over and
then I'd realize that they'd given it away. They'd just give me enough
time to love it, and then it would get out of the cage and make on the
floor and my father would say, 'It's a filthy animal,' and give it to
a girl friend." She was aware of her long-nosed beauty and would say
to Stern, "You should have seen me at eight. I tapered off a little
up through ten, but at eleven my face would have killed you. I don't
even want to _talk_ about my face at thirteen. I was really beautiful
then, really something." She complained much of her childhood ordeals,
telling Stern, "My mother never gave me sandwiches, even though she
knew I would have loved them. She'd give me what was inside, and even
the bread, but not sandwiches." Most of the time she would listen to
Stern, though, sitting with great and shimmering eyes as he told of
New York; and when he was finished, she would say, "You really are
different. You're not interested in shoes or dancing. You're the most
different person I know." Their talks were only bridges, and when it
seemed to Stern they had put in enough time at it so that he could
feel they legitimately interested one another, he would begin to kiss
her and bite her and stroke her and undress her and examine her while
she stood or sat calmly, great eyes shining, and let him explore her
body. When he touched her a certain way they would fly at each other
and she would do a private, nervous, whimpering thing beneath him. They
clung to each other all over the campus, and sometimes she came to his
room with nothing beneath her summer dress. She would wheel about him,
nude and happy, while Stern feigned calmness and watched her with held
breath as though it were a scholarly exercise. Then his loins would
go weak and he would sail at her and bite her thighs too hard. He did
crazy, tangled things to her, thinking he would break her frail body,
but when he had finished she would come to him with great eyes wide,
scrape his neck with her nails, and ask him to "be a man again." One
night, after finding the very middle of her in a new way, he called her
later, trembling, and said, "I shouldn't have done that to you. Let's
not do it again." But they did it again the next night in his room and
the fiddler opened the door, his elasticized old-man gadgets dangling,
and caught them at it. Stern, in an action he could not explain,
carried her, without a word to the old man, out the window and to the
garden below, and they never did that thing again.
They parted for a year. She stayed in Oregon, and Stern, heavy with
guilt as he stole a final bite, flew to New York in search of girls who
knew Turgenev. A great singing freedom came over him, but the closest
he came to a Turgenev lover in the following weeks was a divorcée's
daughter who lived in midtown, tossed her hair, ate exquisitely, and
said often, with appealing phoniness, "Perhaps I'll sleep with you.
Perhaps I shan't." Mostly for Stern it was a time of long and lonely
calls to Oregon while he tried to see how long he could stay away. One
night her phone voice said, "The funniest thing. A Venezuelan wants
to marry me. He has two children, but he says he'll leave them. I just
thought I'd tell you." Stern flew with nausea to Oregon in bad weather
and saw her at the airport, her great eyes lovelier than before, the
Venezuelan at her side. They did an intricate Latin dance for Stern,
and she said, "Look what we do together. We're always dancing." Stern
excused himself to vomit in the men's room, but when he emerged he
pretended to be confident and the Latin took his leave. In a hotel
room, she said, "You're losing your hair," and Stern said, "I don't
understand this Venezuela bit."
"I enjoy his company very much," she said, and Stern, a vomit swiftly
coming on, feigned coolness one last time and said, "I'm packing." She
let him fold his T-shirts and then put her head deep into his lap and
said, "I've been so lousy bad," and he knew he was bound to her for a
hundred years.
* * * * *
Now, together with her in this house, it was as though a small, cold
jail cell of steel had dropped out of the sky, encircling Stern's
heavy body, surrounding his movement. He tried to free himself of it;
he bought his son a trampoline. The boy saw it and said, "Daddy, put
a rope in the sky so when I jump I'll be able to catch it and stay
up there. Maybe God will catch me. God has the biggest muscle in the
world." Weekend afternoons, Stern would watch his son jump sturdily on
it, feeling this would build his body and protect him from banister
falls. One day, the two of them heard a shot and a long crinkling of
glass and saw a boy of about eighteen fly by in the street, as though
he had been fired from a gun, and land on the concrete street, his arms
stiffly at attention, a soldier still marching. Fingers had broken off
him, and his face had swiftly turned black. Riding a motorcycle, the
boy had jumped a traffic light on the corner next to Stern's house and
collided with a speeding car, which had hit him head on. Stern took
his son inside, not offering to be a witness, although he had seen the
accident and knew the motorcycle boy was in the wrong. He just held his
son tightly and kept him inside the rest of the winter, feeling the
more the boy's bones grew sturdy on the trampoline, the greater chance
he would be shot out of a cannon onto the concrete.
At the end of March that year, Stern went to cover his son at night
and saw that the boys head had swelled to twice its size. Stern kissed
the dead side while his wife called a doctor, who said, "You've never
called me before. I don't come in the middle of nights unless you're
a regular patient." Stern said he would call the man and rehearsed
the things he would say to him, that he had no right to call himself
a doctor, that he was a peasant son of a bitch, that if he wasn't a
doctor he would be selling diseased poultry to housewives. What kind of
a man was he who could go to sleep while a child's fever rose and his
face grew large and moonlike? He got on the phone and said, "I want to
tell you that I know what you said to my wife. You wouldn't say it to a
man." The doctor repeated what he had said, and Stern choked, "It's a
shame."
They called a second man, Dr. Cavalucci, hesitant because of his home
remedies. When Stern's chest had been inflamed or his wife's fingers
had curled in shock, Cavalucci, the doctor, a soft, youthful man, wary
of pills, had chuckled and begun, "Now I know this is going to sound
funny, but you know those shopping bags you get at the supermarket?
If you take one of them and breathe deeply into it for half an hour,
you'll get to feeling better." His treatments always involved shopping
bags or typewriter ribbons or old shoe polish cans, "the kind you
open with a penny, brown, preferably." And he would always begin his
instructions by saying, "This is going to make you feel silly, but...."
That night he touched the heavy side of the boy's face and said, "I
don't have one for his case. I'm taking him in." In the ambulance,
Stern held the child, but now he kissed the good side of the face,
afraid of what was inside the bad one, and ashamed of himself for
feeling that way, and finally kissing lightly the bad side, too. He
said to the doctor, "Anything I've got. Anything I own. Just make
him better." But he felt as though he were giving a performance and
wondered how many other men had said the same thing. The hospital had
long corridors and Stern had heard it was good but needed grants.
Inside, a cluster of young men gathered round the child, and when
Cavalucci said they were all fine specialists, Stern wondered if he
should be calling in men from Europe. When Stern was a child, a cousin
of his had once fallen in love with a dying girl, and Stern remembered
hearing that he had done everything for her, even to the point of
"bringing in men from Europe." The phrase "men from Europe" had stuck
with Stern, and he wondered how you went about getting them. It seemed
so hopeless, standing in the children's ward now, just to go to the
phone and get some of them over, and yet he felt that if he were a
real father he would stop at nothing and bring several across. The
doctors talked near the child, and when Stern asked what they were
doing, Cavalucci said that two of them didn't want to go in and disturb
the area and one did. Stern asked which one wanted to disturb it, and
Cavalucci pointed him out. He was the surgeon. When the conference
broke up, Stern glared at him but was afraid that now the man would
push home his view and not only disturb the area but also try risky,
tradition-breaking techniques. They waited round the clock while the
live part of the face took food, and then Stern and his wife went
home awhile and ate veal cutlets. They looked at each other after
every bite, and when they had finished, Stern said, "He's lying there,
his face as big as a house, and I just ate veal cutlets and kept them
down." And then Stern wondered whether to call Winkel and whether
Winkel still took cases and could come, because in his heart he still
felt that all other doctors would be wrong except Winkel.
* * * * *
As a child, being sick had not been altogether a bad time for Stern.
He would lie in his mother's bed and listen to radio shows all day,
and then at night, when his fever rose, he would pull up the covers
and wait to hear his father's whistle down the street, meaning he
was back from work. A minute or so after the whistle, his small,
round-shouldered father would stand at the bedroom door and say,
"Jesus Christ ... hmmph ... oh, Jesus Christ," and shake his head
sympathetically. Then, the first night of the sickness, Winkel would
come, his hulking body supported by reedlike legs, and thump gravely
at Stern's chest and back with thin, businesslike fingers. He liked
cherry sodas, and Stern's mother would always have one ready for him
after he finished up and washed his hands. She was a tall, voluptuous
woman with dyed blond hair who wore bathrobes whenever Stern was sick.
"Do you know what I would do for that man?" Stern's mother would say
after Winkel had left. "I owe him my life. He's some guy." Stern's
mother would then send Winkel a pair of tickets for the opera. When
Stern got older, he would say, "But you paid him for coming," and his
mother would answer, "You can't really pay a man like that, can you?
You've got a lot of growing up to do." Winkel was always grave and
unsmiling with Stern, and once when Stern had a stubborn pimple above
his eye, Winkel squeezed it with what seemed to Stern like hatred
and said, "Love sweets, don't you?" Though Winkel later specialized
in gynecology, he continued to treat Stern in his teens, and Stern's
mother said, "I thank my lucky stars ten times a day I have a man like
that. You have a man like that, you don't need anyone else." Nine out
of ten of Stern's boyhood friends were planning to become doctors, and
there was a time when Stern considered the idea too. His mother told
Winkel and the doctor said, "Why doesn't he ever come up and talk to
me? All the other boys come up and we have long talks." Stern did not
like the sound of those long talks and never went up. He knew a little
about chromosomes and Ehrlemeyer flasks, but he could not imagine ever
filling up a long talk with Winkel. Later, when Stern went to college,
he heard that Winkel had gone on to great eminence, giving talks on
television. "I can still get him, though," his mother would say. "I'm
the only one he'll still come to." Winkel had been married to a woman
whose frugality supposedly made him insane. Driving from Newark to the
opera one night, Winkel and his wife, so the story went, had gone off
the road and into a tree, the windshield shattering and glass getting
into Winkel's head. With half an hour remaining to curtain time, his
wife left him in the car, forehead red, hands locked about the wheel in
shock, and went to redeem the tickets. Weeks later, he ran amok while
performing an appendectomy and cut two deep crosses in his kneecaps
with a scalpel. Now he sat in a room, his practice gone, coming into
the street only for occasional cherry sodas. Stern knew what his mother
would say if Stern suggested that Winkel come look at his son. "Even
with half a mind he knows more than anyone else. Do you know how big
that man was? And I can still get him, too. He'll come to me in two
seconds if I want him, no matter how crazy he is."
The swelling disappeared mysteriously one morning, and in a few days
Stern, with a leaping heart, was able to carry his son into his car and
back to the house. He kept his nose deep in his son's neck and marveled
that some good had come out of the sickness. He had finally been among
people in this bleak town, nurses and doctors and visitors in the
halls. A day later, he spotted a blossom on the cancer side of the wild
cherry tree--and there were other things, too, that happened quickly. A
new stop sign on Stern's corner, one that would prevent motorcycle boys
being shot out of cannons; a shortcut across the estate; a plan to kill
his boiler; and a new attitude on the part of the dogs.
And then, of course, a week afterward, the man had said kike and looked
between his wife's legs.
* * * * *
There were only three other occasions on which Stern and his wife
discussed the kike man. One occurred the very next night when Stern,
still in his topcoat, caught her wrists around the oven and said, "I
just want to see how it happened."
"What do you mean?" she said.
"I want to get a picture in my mind of what it was all about. Get on
the floor and show me exactly how you were. How your legs were when you
were down there. It's important."
"I wont do that," she said, breaking through to clean the oven.
"I've got to see it," said Stern, grabbing her again. "Just for a
second."
"I'm not going to do anything like that. I told you to forget it."
"I'm not fooling around," he said, and, taking her around the waist, he
threw her to the kitchen floor, her jumper flying back above her knees.
"You crazy bastard," she said, flicking a strip of skin from his nose
in a quick swipe and getting to her feet.
"All right, then--me," said Stern, getting on the floor. "My topcoat's
your dress. Tell me when I'm right." He drew the coat slightly above
his knees and said, "This way?"
"I'm not doing this," his wife said. "I don't know what you want me to
do."
"Were you this way?" he asked. "Just tell me that."
"No," she said.
He drew the coat up higher. "This?"
"Uh-uh," she said.
He flung the overcoat back over his hips, his legs sprawling, and said,
"This way?"
"Yes," she said.
Stern said, "Jesus," and ran upstairs to sink in agony upon the bed.
But he felt excited, too.
On the weekend, several days later, as Stern unloaded cans of chow mein
from the supermarket, his wife said, "He has big arms."
"Who?" Stern asked, knowing full well who she meant
"The man," she said. "The man who said that thing."
"Oh," Stern said. "What do arms mean?"
The third and final time was when they sat one day beneath a birch tree
while their son dug a hole in the dirt to China. The kike man drove by
in his car and Stern's wife said, "I hate that man."
"You're silly," Stern said.
* * * * *
The man's house lay at a point equidistant between Stern's and the
estate. Since Stern did not want to pass the man's house on foot
anymore, he took to driving his car back and forth to the estate each
day, leaving it at the estate edge each morning and picking it up at
night. Once he was in his car at night, he had a choice of either
driving directly past the man's house or taking a more roundabout route
that avoided the man's house altogether. Each night, as he boarded the
train, he would begin a struggle within himself as to which road to
take. The roundabout road presented the more attractive view and Stern
told himself there was no earthly reason why he should have to pass up
the nicer scenery along this road. The houses were much handsomer and
made Stern feel he lived in a more expensive neighborhood. Stern would
start off along the finer road, but when he had gone fifty yards, he
would throw his car into reverse, back up, and go down the road that
led past the man's house. It was much shorter this way, of course, and
Stern told himself now that distance should be the only consideration,
that if he took the roundabout road, he was only doing it to avoid
having to look at the man's house and was being a coward, afraid that
the man would pull him out of the car and break his stomach. On the few
occasions when he did follow the roundabout road all the way home, he
would walk past his wife and son and lie in bed, sinking his teeth into
his top lip. On most occasions, however, he drove right past the man's
house, going very slowly to show he knew no fear. His license said,
"Driver must wear glasses," and Stern could not drive well without
them, but when he went past the man's house he slipped them off to
present a picture of strength, squinting for sight so he could stay on
the road. Past the house, he would duck down and slip them on again,
shoulders hunched in such a way that if the man was looking after
Stern, he would not see the glasses.
One night Stern drove by and saw the man's son, who would have been
his own son's friend, digging in the dirt beside the curb. From that
night on, Stern drove very close to the curb, imagining that he would
suddenly speed up, catch the boy on his bumpers, and then go the
remaining mile in seconds, disappearing undetected into his garage.
And then he pictured a car fight in which the man would get Stern's
boy, following him onto the lawn and pinning him against the drainpipe,
while Stern, waiting upstairs, held his hands over his ears, blocking
out the noise. The man would then, somehow, pick off Stern's wife in
her kitchen and then drive upstairs and finish off Stern himself,
cringing in his bedroom. Another night, Stern forced himself to examine
the name on the man's mailbox. _De Luccio_. He looked it up in the
telephone book that night and saw that there were eighteen others in
the town. Even if he were to defeat the man, an army of relatives stood
by to take his place. He wondered who he could pit against them and
came up only with his married sister who lived in narrow circumstances
above a store in San Diego. Once she had helped him in a snowball
fight, and back to back they had done well together, until the action
speeded up and ice balls began to get her in the breasts. "Stop it;
she's a girl," Stern hollered, but a heavy ball split her brow and down
she went, making a yowling, nasal sound. But she'd been game, standing
firmly in the snow, puffing, blowing the hair out of her face, panting
like a puppy. He imagined her now, back to back with him against the
eighteen heavy-armed De Luccios, standing game as a puppy, until they
all began to beat her breasts and easily knock her to the ground. Who
else might have stood off the De Luccios? When alive, perhaps his Uncle
Henny, the shoulder pad tycoon, a man of iron grip who'd been gassed in
WW I. Once he had disarmed an aged knife wielder on a moving city bus.
Uncle Henny would know how to handle the man. Stern could not see a
picture of it in his mind, but he was sure that Uncle Henny would have
been able to use his gassed lungs and steel grip to fend off the De
Luccios.
His own father? There had been another De Luccio long years past, an
orphan boy of supple athlete's body and golden hair who had kept Stern
in terror for several years. The orphan would appear suddenly in an
alley with a great laugh, fling Stern against a wall, lift him high,
and drop him down, steal his jacket in the cold, and run away with
it, come back, and punch Stern's eyes to slits. Stern never told his
parents, afraid the orphan boy would come up to his three rooms, force
his way in, and kill Stern's small father. One day, Stern stood talking
to his father on the street when the orphan boy appeared, running a
comb through his great piles of hair. "Who's that?" asked Stern's small
father. "You know him, don't you?"
"Sort of," said Stern, his heart freezing.
"I think it's Rudy Vallee," said his father.
Others against the De Luccio army? How about his mother-in-law, the
Hungarian woman? Stern's wife told him that once, as a little girl,
she had been abused by a teacher and her Hungarian mother had gone to
school and spat upon the antique teacher's face. Once, in an argument
with his great-eyed wife, they both had sunk low and Stern had said,
"Your mother didn't spit on the teacher. She peed on her." He saw her
now against the De Luccios, slowly moving forward, peeing and spitting
them backward until they turned on her and pummeled her old woman's
stomach.
Stern took note of every detail of the man's house, a new one
registering each night as he drove by. A television aerial. This was
good. It meant the communications industry was getting through to the
man, subtly driving home messages of Brotherhood. But he imagined the
man watching only Westerns, contemptuously flicking off all shows
that spoke of tolerance. Stern saw himself writing and producing a
show about fair play, getting it shown one night on every channel,
and forcing the man to watch it since the networks would be bare of
Westerns.
Empty beer cans in the garbage pail. Excellent. Enough of them, taken
over a period of years, would bloat his belly and deprive his arms of
power. Stern wondered how much beer it would take to run a man down
physically. He felt good on nights when entire cases sat atop the
garbage pail and depressed when only a few scattered cans appeared.
The man's car was of prewar vintage, neatly shined and proudly kept,
and as Stern drove by in his more recent Studebaker he thought to
himself, "Maybe it's an economic thing. He resents my having a newer
car and a bigger house. I'll take him inside and show him my empty
rooms and he'll see how foolish he is, and then we'll be friends."
And other times, Stern was glad he had a newer car. He wanted to say
to the man, "Think kike things and be stupid and you'll always have
an old car. Act enlightened and have a new one." One night he saw the
man's wife walk to the gutter to shake a broom--a stocky, square,
and graceless woman whose hair was without color. Stern imagined the
pair at night, coming together for a graceless, hulking lay, and for
a second he felt tender toward the man. There had to be gentleness in
him. Once he must have had to come to this hulking woman and court her
with kindness and modesty, kike thoughts the furthest thing from his
mind. But, on the following night, Stern took in a sight that made his
throat turn over. As he drove by, the man was looming up in front of
him, standing, hands in pockets, on the lawn and wearing a veteran's
organization jacket. It meant he had come through the worst part of the
Normandy campaign, knew how to hold his breath in foxholes for hours at
a time and then sneak out to slit a throat in silence. He was skilled
as a foot fighter and went always with deadly accuracy to a man's
groin. Stern pictured him at veteran beer parties, drawing laughs with
stories of the kike who'd moved in down the way a mile. He'd probably
had one in his outfit, a thin and scholarly dark fellow who'd slowed
down campaigns. No amount of brotherhood shows would ever make a dent
in his veteran's jacket.
Frightened of the jacket, Stern realized that he had never really
seen the man's face, that he knew only the heaviness of his arms, an
inclination of the head, and a certain wetness at the mouth. A mailbox
lay opposite the man's house, and one night Stern saved a letter
and stopped his car on the corner near the box. His glasses off, he
inflated his chest for an appearance of power, flexed his soft arms,
and trotted to the mailbox, where he slipped in the letter, and then,
facing the man's house now, trotted back to his car. Stern, his glasses
on the seat, could see only that the man was hooked over his car engine
and that, as he trotted back to the car, the man came out of his hook
and inclined his head. But, trotting as he was, Stern could make out no
details of the man's face and remained in ignorance of his features.
Another night the man was nowhere in sight and Stern's eyes fixed
on the license plates of his car, the two first letters registering
"GS." For some reason, Stern, though he looked at the plates for
several nights running, could not commit the numbers to memory. But
he remembered the letters and made up a organization they might have
stood for, Guardian Sons, a group of twenty who sat around on Monday
nights and cackled over kikes. Each time Stern saw a prewar car with
"GS" letters he was certain it was the man, just coming from a meeting,
his glove compartment filled with leaflets. He seemed to see such cars
everywhere. Driving past the man's house, he wondered whether he might
be able to steal back in dead of night and destroy the car, dismantling
the wiring, and then make it back to his own house undetected. Or
could police always pick up evidence of footsteps and tire tracks? And
was the man a light sleeper, nerves sharpened by combat, waiting coiled
and ready to leap forward and slit throats with commando neatness?
On clear weekend days during that summer, Stern was able to look
straight down the street as far as a mile or so and make out the man
playing softball in the road with neighboring boys. On such days, Stern
would go back inside his house, his day ruined. And often, inside the
house, he would think about his Jewishness.
* * * * *
As a boy, Stern had been taken to holiday services, where he stood in
ignorance among bowing, groaning men who wore brilliantly embroidered
shawls. Stern would do some bows and occasionally let fly a complicated
imitative groan, but when he sounded out he was certain one of the old
genuine groaners had spotted him and knew he was issuing a phony. Stern
thought it was marvelous that the old men knew exactly when to bow and
knew the groans and chants and melodies by heart. He wondered if he
would ever get to be one of their number. He went to Hebrew School, but
there seemed to be no time at all devoted to the theatrical bows and
groans, and even with three years of Hebrew School under his belt Stern
still felt a loner among the chanting sufferers at synagogues. After a
while he began to think you could never get to be one of the groaners
through mere attendance at Hebrew School. You probably had to pick it
all up in Europe. At the school, Stern learned to read Hebrew at a
mile-a-minute clip. He was the fastest reader in the class, and when
called upon he would race across the jagged words as though he were
a long-distance track star. The meaning of the words was dealt with
in advanced classes, and since Stern never got to them, he remained
only a swift reader who might have been performing in Swahili or Urdu.
He had two teachers, one a Mr. Lititsky, who concentrated on the
technique of wearing yarmulkes and hit kids with books to keep order
in the class. He had poor control over the classroom and would go from
child to child, slamming an odd one here and there with a textbook and
saying, "Now let's get some order here." By the time he had some, the
half hour was up and there was time only for a fast demonstration of
how to slip on a yarmulke. Outside, some of those slammed with books
would say, "If he does that again, I'm going to hit Lititsky in the
titskys," always sure to draw howls of laughter.
His other teacher was a black-eyed beauty from the Middle East named
Miss Ostrow who told stories of Palestinian oases, referring to
Palestine over and over as "the land of milk and honey," while Stern
listened, unable to see why a land filled with those commodities should
be so desirable. Miss Ostrow was beautiful and wore loosely cut Iraqi
blouses, and Stern loved her, although he preferred to think of her as
American-born and not to dwell on her earlier days in the Palestinian
date groves. She cast him as the wicked Egyptian king, Ahasuerus, in
a Purim play and, until the date of the play, called him "my handsome
Ahasuerus." One day, after school, she caught Stern in a crowd in front
of a drugstore and embarrassed him by standing on tiptoe and waving,
"Ahasuerus."
All Hebrew School led up to the Bar Mitzvah and the singing of the
Haftarah. Stern, who had a good voice, took to trilling occasional
high notes in his practice Haftarah rendition, and the Haftarah coach
would say, "No crooning." On the day of his Bar Mitzvah, Stern sang
it flawlessly and his mother, afterward, said, "You had some voice. I
could have fainted."
"Yes," said the Haftarah coach, "but there was too much crooning."
* * * * *
No great religious traditions were handed down to Stern by his small,
round-shouldered father. He was self-conscious on the subject, and a
favorite joke of his was to create some outrageous supposition, such
as "Do you know why we're not allowed in the Chrysler Building after
eleven at night?" When Stern or his mother would answer "Why?" Stern's
small dad would say slyly, "Because we're Jews," mouthing the final
word with great relish and pronouncing it "chooze." Stern's mother
would then double up with laughter and Stern would join in, too. A bad
punster whose favorite gag word was "homogenize" ("I homogenize saw
you on the street last night"), Stern's small dad had great fun with
such phrases as "orange Jews" and "grapefruit Jews." When Stern would
say, "I heard that, Dad," his father would say, "Yeah, but I'll bet you
never heard prune Jews."
Stern considered Passover the biggest holiday of the year, and on the
first night of the celebration Stern and his parents traditionally
attended a Seder in the back-room apartment of his Aunt Edda's hardware
store, which was closed for the holiday. (After the final prayers, Aunt
Edda switched on the lights of the store and each of the Seder-goers
put in a large order for hardware items, which Aunt Edda furnished them
at cost.) A small, dark-haired woman with tiny feet, Aunt Edda was much
revered by the other members of the family, and Stern's mother often
referred to her as a "saint" and then added, "Even though she's got
more money than God." When Stern walked into Seders, Aunt Edda would
run to him on tiny feet, clasp his arm, and say, "I want to tell you
something," after which she would stare into his eyes, hold his arm
for a long time, and then say, "You're some darling boy." Aside from
arranging the Seder, Aunt Edda's main function was to thrust her tiny
body into the center of the Seder fights that broke out annually. One
of the main antagonists was Stern's Uncle Sweets, who presided over
the ceremonies--a wild-haired man with giant lips who was involved
in clandestine Chicago rackets and once, bound hand and foot, had to
climb out of a lake in southern Illinois to save his life. Stern was
proud of him and referred to him as "my bookie uncle." He took Stern
and his parents to restaurants, always ordering meat pies and picking
up the checks; outside a seafood villa once, a hobo had asked him for
a handout and Uncle Sweets had put a penny in his palm and offered it
to the man. When the hobo went to get it, Uncle Sweets had doubled
up his palm and driven his fist into the man's nose, spreading the
nose across the hobo's face with a sloshing sound Stern never forgot
and leaving the man in the gutter. Stern's father said, "Hmm," and
his mother said, "Oooh, Sweets is some bitch," with an excited look
in her eyes. Uncle Sweets, wrapped sacredly in embroidered shawls,
presided over the entire ceremony with thick lips and heavy lids,
pounding his chest, quaffing wine, and singing long passages with the
sweet full voice and passionate fervor of an old choir boy, as though
this was his one night to atone for all the mysterious goings-on in
Chicago. Challenging him each year and breaking in with his own set
of more militant chants was Stern's Uncle Mackie, squat, powerfully
built, burned black from the sun, a Phoenix rancher who flew in each
year for Seders and to have mysterious medical things done to his
"plumbing." An eccentric man who had once chased Pancho Villa deep
into Mexico at General Pershing's side, Uncle Mackie, when asked about
his health, would bare his perfect, gleaming teeth, double over his
bronzed, military-trim body, and croak, "I feel pretty lousy." Early
in the evening, he would take Stern around the waist, pull him close,
and whisper confidentially, "I just want to find out something. Do
you still make peepee in your pants?" And then he would explode with
laughter, until he checked himself, held his side, and said, "I've got
to do something about the plumbing." He continued the peepee inquiries
long into Stern's teens. When the Seder began, Uncle Sweets would take
long difficult passages to himself, which gave him an opportunity to
hit high notes galore, but soon Uncle Mackie, warming to the Seder,
would break in with great clangor, doing a series of heroic-sounding
but clashing chants that seemed to have been developed outdoors in
Arizona. Before long, Uncle Sweets would stop and say to him, "What the
hell do you know? You shit in your hat in Phoenix." And Uncle Mackie
would fly at him, saying, "I'll kick your two-bit ass through the
window." At this point, Aunt Edda would seize both their wrists, say,
"I want to tell you something," pause for a long time, looking from
one to the other, and then say, "You're both darling boys." The Seder
would then continue uneasily, much tension in Uncle Sweets' choruses,
Uncle Mackie continuing with much vigor but directing his efforts to
another side of the room, as though trying to enlist a faction to his
banner and start a split Seder. Stern wondered who he wanted to win in
a fight, his bookie uncle or the peepee man who'd gone in after Pancho
Villa. At the same point in every Seder, Stern's father would arise to
do a brief prayer, reading in a barely perceptible whisper and in a
strange accent Stern had never heard in Mr. Lititsky's class. He read
uncertainly, flashing his teeth as though charm would compensate for a
poor performance; others at the Seder would root him on, hollering out
key words, while Stern stared at the floor, ashamed of his father's
uncertain whispers and wishing he had a militant chanter for a dad.
Toward the tail end of the Seder, Stern and his cousin Flip would
sneak off to the bedroom, get a dictionary, and look up dirty words,
such as "vulva" and "pudendum." They would then open their flies and
compare pubic hair growths, Flip's always being further along since he
was six months the elder. They would generally emerge in time for Uncle
Gunther's entrance. A onetime Hollywood bit player who had done harem
scenes in silents, Gunther worked a lathe in a ball bearing factory,
drank heavily, and was always striding into speeding cars. Tension
generally built throughout Seders as to whether he'd make it this year;
when he did show, there would be great relief that he hadn't gotten
caught on a fender. Aunt Edda would fix him an abbreviated Seder meal,
and when he had finished it, the others would begin to confer gifts
upon him in deference to his lowly lathe job. Uncle Gunther would wave
them off disdainfully, saying, "What do you think I am," and finally
race out the door and into the street, with the others behind, still
thrusting forth their gifts, a crumpled twenty-dollar bill from Uncle
Sweets, advice on life from Uncle Mackie of the Far West. Stern's small
father would always take off an item of clothing, a vest or belt, and
holler, "What do I need it for, you fool," at the fleeing Gunther, who
would stop after a while, collect the items, and allow himself to be
ushered back to the store, defeated; there, Aunt Edda stood waiting for
him, holding sets of pots and pans and the uneaten Seder food, wrapped
in packages and tied with string. And thus the curtain would come down
on another religious holiday.
* * * * *
The most religious person Stern knew was his grandmother, who opened
the neighborhood synagogue each morning at five-thirty in cold weather
or warm. In arguments with friends as to whose grandmother was more
religious, Stern would weigh in with "Mine _opens_ the damned
synagogue," and he would generally walk off with the honors. A woman
of indeterminate age with long silver hair kept in a bun, she lived
out her last years in a small flat in a house near Stern's apartment
building, which she shared with another grandmother. Since her own
flat faced a back alley and had no front windows, she would come and
spend most of the day in Stern's apartment, where she could sit at
the window, look out, and see light and people. Most of the day she
prayed, bowing and singing softly and wetting the pages of her prayer
book as she slapped them along. She wore coat sweaters and had long
breasts that hung down to her waist; Stern, horrified by them, wondered
nevertheless what old women's breasts were like--yet hoped he'd never
have to look at a set. When she was finished praying, she would look
out the window and spot other grandmothers and laugh at them all for
having crooked feet. Stern's father teased her, and whenever he spotted
another old lady in the street, he would say, "There goes one of her
buddies. Don't worry. She's got a whole mob of them organized." Her
mind slipped and she buried bits of food around Stern's apartment, a
piece of lettuce here, a slice of orange there, under sofa cushions
and behind vases. When Stern's father found one, he would say, "She's
got enough buried to feed an army. Probably got a load of money, too."
Stern was going to high school during this period, and when he got home
each afternoon, she would be waiting with the daily newspapers, asking
Stern to explain the headlines to her since she knew little English.
No matter what they said--"Strike to Tie Up Pier" or "Cold Weather to
Continue"--she would take them to be an accounting of one of Hitler's
misdeeds and would heap curses upon his head. Her eyesight was poor,
and in the evening, when the light faded, it fell upon Stern to take
her home so she would not be hit by cars in crossing the several
streets on the way to the flat. Stern did not care for the job and
would say, "I don't want to be walking with grandmothers." Since her
wind was short, it took an agonizingly long time to get her back each
night. She would grip his arm, they would walk thirty paces or so,
and she would ask him to stop so she could catch her breath. During
the stops, Stern would shuffle his feet and say, "Are you ready?"
Sometimes, with his grandmother on his arm, he would pass friends in
front of a bowling alley and he would say, "This is my grandmother,"
as the friends watched the pair creep by. When Stern came home from
summer camp one year, he said to his mother, "Where's Granma?" And she
said, "She's gone." Stern said, "What do you mean?" And his mother
said, "She's not here any more. She went in my arms when you were
away." People never died in Stern's family. They were either "gone" or
they "went" or they "were taken." Stern said, "I see," and went inside
and cried into a pillow, sorry he had laughed at her Hitler curses and
wishing he could take her to her flat one more time, giving her long
rests on the way. He wondered, too, whether anyone would ever "go"
in his arms and, if they were an old person, what it would be like,
whether their breath would be bad and whether the air would go out of
their long breasts--and then he punched himself in the eyes to rid
himself of such thoughts.
* * * * *
And so Stern loved a bowing grandmother and sat through Seder duels
and could race with furious speed through books of ancient Hebrew;
but there was little God to his religion. When Stern went to college
in Oregon, even the trappings fell away. He told the people he met at
school, "I don't care much about being a Jew. There's only one thing:
each year I like to go and hear the Shofar blown on Rosh Hashanah.
It sort of ties the years together for me." And it was true that
for a while Stern's last concession to his early Jewish days was to
stand outside synagogues each year and listen to the ram's horn. It
was as though listening to the ancient sound would somehow keep him
just the tiniest bit Jewish, in case it turned out someday that a
scorecard really was kept on people. One year he didn't go, however,
and then he rarely went again, even though he kept using that "ties
the years together" line when he met new girls and needed impressive
attitudes. Before Stern met his wife at college and lived with the
old man of dangling pelvic supports, he stayed in a boardinghouse of
Jewish students, where the air was thick with self-consciousness.
One of his two room-mates was a tall graceful redheaded boy with a
monotonous voice that sounded as though he were in a telephone booth.
His personality was limited, and since he seemed to have only one joke
(When someone asked him for a match, he would answer, "Sure, my ass and
your face"), he became known as "Gordon One-Gag."
"I've got lots of jokes," he would protest from inside his booth, to
which Stern or the other room-mate would say, "Nonsense, One-Gag,
you've only got one gag."
Stern's other room-mate was a small, flabby ex-Navy man named Footsy
who had motherly-looking breasts and a large fund of anal jokes
developed on shipboard. There grew up among the three a jargon and
patter, all of which hinged on Jewishness. The motherly Navy man might
suddenly arise during a study period, hold his stomach, and leave the
room. "Where are you going?" the redhead might ask, to which Footsy
would answer, "I can't stand the Jewishness in the room," bringing
forth howls of amusement. Or Stern might make a remark about the
weather, to which the Navy man would say, "How Jewish of you to say
that." If Stern were to utter a pronouncement of any kind, one of
his room-mates would invariably retort: "Said with characteristic
Jewishness." Long imaginary dialogues were carried on between the
redhead and the Navy man in which the redhead was a job applicant and
Footsy was an employment director, reluctant to hire him. Finally,
Footsy, prodded to explain why, would say briskly, "Well, if you must
know, its because of certain minority characteristics we'd rather not
go into," and all in the room would break up laughing. The Navy man
would often do a storm trooper imitation, in which he got to say,
"Line dem opp against the fwall and commence mit the shooting," and
a boy down the hall named Wiegel who had sick feet would come in and
do another German officer, saying, "Brink in the Jewish child. Child,
ve eff had to execute your parents." The redhead would try Mussolini
in his last days, but Footsy, the Navy man, would say, "Stick to your
one gag." Footsy would lie in bed for hours twisting lyrics of popular
songs to get Jews into them: "Beware my foolish heart" became "Beware
my Jewish heart," "Fool that I am" turned into "Jew that I am," and
"I'm glad I met you, wonderful you" emerged "I'm glad you're Jewish,
you wonderful Jew." Stern chipped in with a full lyric that went (to
the tune of "Farmer in the Dell"):
The Jews caused the war.
The Jews caused the war.
We hate the Jews
Because they caused the war.
On occasion, the president of the boardinghouse, a short boy with
quivering old-man jowls, would appear in the room and say, "These
things aren't funny," after which Footsy would poke Stern in the ribs
and whisper, loud enough for all to hear, "He's being _very_ Jewish,"
and the president would stomp off, jowls in a rage.
Although much dating was done by the social club, little attention
was paid to the girls of the single Jewish sorority, who wore the
traditional campus skirts and sweaters but who seemed somehow an
acne-ed, large-shouldered parody of the brisk, blond girls of the
gentile sororities. Only sick-footed Wiegel took out what Footsy
described as "laughing, dark-eyed beauties." When Wiegel announced that
he'd booked another for Saturday night, Footsy would say, "But she's a
pig," to which Wiegel would answer, "Yes, but you've got to date the
pigs to get to the gentile queens."
Before dates, the redhead, all dressed, might stand before Stern and
say, "Check my hair."
"Fine," Stern would say.
"Suit?"
"Excellent."
"Check me for Jewishness."
"Reject," Stern would say, and all would become convulsed. Footsy would
then bare a womanly breast and say, "Here, One-Gag, practice on this
little beauty." After dates, all would compare how they had done, in
crisp, codelike sum-ups.
"Knee and conversation," the redhead might say, and Stern would add
he'd gotten "elbow and upper thigh." Footsy, who took out homelier
girls, would generally have come through with "outside of bra, heavy
breathing, and an ear job." Then Stern and the redhead would get into
their beds, turn out the lights, and listen to Footsy do a high-pitched
imitation of an imaginary date being seduced by any one of the
room-mates. "Oh, Gordon, you're very cute, but I can't possibly do any
screwing. I'll take off my panties, but you've got to promise there'll
be no screwing. You promise?" Footsy's voice was so convincing and the
girl so appealing that Stern and Wiegel (who often came in late at
night for the imitations, rubbing his sick feet) would beg him to do
another, substituting _their_ names.
Going along with the Jewish comedy routines, Stern began to call
Footsy, his motherly, good-natured room-mate, "Little Jew." In the
morning when he woke up, he'd say, "Morning, Little Jew," and after
classes he would ask, "How's Little Jew getting along?" It sounded good
on Stern's tongue, nice and comfortable. He said it in two syllables,
and it came out "Gee-yoo," and when he said it, he would bare his teeth
and get a disgusted look on his face, which he felt would add to the
irony and comic effect of the routine.
It was fun to say, and he began to call Footsy "Little Gee-yoo" at
every possible opportunity, making terrible faces and then poking
Footsy in the ribs with a laugh. It made him feel fine to keep saying
it. One day the three room-mates were on their way to the ice-cream
parlor where gentile girls hung out after class. Each time a group of
girls walked by, Footsy would say to the redhead, "Tell them your one
gag, One-Gag. That'll have them swarming all over us." And Stern would
say to Footsy, "What did the little Gee-yoo think of that group?" At
the ice-cream parlor, Stern held the door for Footsy, saying, "You
first, Little Gee-yoo," and Footsy turned and said, "No more."
"What do you mean, Little Gee-yoo?"
"Don't call me that any more."
"The Little Gee-yoo doesn't like to be called Little Gee-yoo. Little
Gee-yoo. Little Gee-yoo." It felt so good that Stern said it a few more
times.
The three were inside the ice-cream parlor now, and Footsy said, "If
you keep doing that, I have something I'll call you."
"There's nothing, Little Gee-yoo. Nothing at all."
"All right, Nose. What do you think of that? I'll call you Nose.
Hello, Nose. Hello, Nose." With tweed-skirted gentile girls listening,
he began to scream out the name--"Nose, Nose. Hello, Nose. What do
you say, Nose?"--until Stern, thin-faced and large-nosed at the time,
flew out of the door and down the street, the cry following him back
to the boardinghouse. At night the room-mates did not speak until,
finally, Stern said, "OK, I won't call you the name if you don't call
me 'Nose,'" to which Footsy nonchalantly said, "All right." To break
the tension, the redhead said, "Let me tell you my one gag. Does anyone
have a match?" And Footsy said, "Save it." There was a strain between
Stern and Footsy from then on. One day Stern inadvertently called him
"Little Gee-yoo" again and added, "I'm sorry. It slipped out." Instead
of overlooking it graciously, Footsy said, "That's all right, Nose."
"I said I didn't mean it," Stern apologized.
"That's all right," said Footsy. "You're getting one for one."
At the end of the semester, the room-mates decided that they would
separate and Stern went to live with the old man who wore elastic
gadgets on his groin.
* * * * *
In the Air Force, Stern, recently married and swiftly packing on hip
fat, felt isolated, a nonflying officer in a flying service, at a time
when the jets were coming in and there was no escaping them; the air
was full of strange new jet sounds and the ground reverberated with
the throb of them. Somehow Stern connected his nonflying status with
his Jewishness, as though flying were a golden, crew-cut, gentile
thing while Jewishness was a cautious and scholarly quality that crept
into engines and prevented planes from lurching off the ground with
recklessness. In truth, Stern feared the sky, the myriad buttons and
switches on instrument panels. He was afraid of charts with grids
on them, convinced he could never master anything called grids, and
he was in deadly fear of phrases like "ultra high frequency" and
"landing pattern." He had a recurring dream in which he was a fighter
pilot, his plane attended to by a ground mechanic who resented Stern's
profile for spoiling the golden, blue-eyed look of the squadron. Each
day the mechanic would stand by, neutral-faced, arms folded, while
Stern, able to check his plane only peremptorily, took off with heavy
heart, convinced wires had been crossed and would split his aircraft in
mid-flight. Stern, who traveled to distant bases to do administrative
Air Force things, rode once to California as a guest on a general's
luxury B-17, sitting alone in the bombardier's bubble and feeling over
Grand Canyon that he had been put in a special Jewish seat and sealed
off from the camaraderie in the plane's center. After eight hours of
self-control, Stern felt the plane shudder and then hang uncertainly
for a moment as it circled a West Coast Air Force base. He spread a
thin layer of vomit around his bubble and then kneeled inside it as the
plane landed, the pilots and other flying personnel filing by him in
silence. Cowardly Jewish vomit staining a golden aircraft.
Stern lusted after the tiny silver wings that said you were a pilot,
and once, in a Wyoming PX, he ducked his shoulders down and slipped
on a pair, crouching as he did so that no one would see, holding his
breath as though each second might be his last. Then he took them off
and walked quickly out of the PX, feeling as though he'd looked under
a skirt. A great eagle sat atop the cap of every Air Force officer,
flying or nonflying, and there were those in small towns, ignorant
of insignia, who thought each Air Force man was a pilot clearing the
skies of Migs above Korea. One day on Rosh Hashanah, Stern, shipped for
a two-week tour to Illinois, walked into a small-town synagogue, his
khakis starched, his brass agleam, as though he had scored a dozen
flying kills and now sought relaxation. He'd draped a tallith round
his shoulders and stood, stooped with humility, in the last row of the
temple, mouthing the prayer book words with all of his old speed. One
by one, the congregation members, who seemed a race of Jewish midgets,
turned and noticed him, and Stern, aware of their fond glances, sent
forth some low groans and did several dipping knee bows he remembered
from the old days. He did this to cheer them on further and to make it
all the more marvelous that he, a man of the sky, took off precious
flying time to pray in strange synagogues. Within minutes, the rabbi
called him forward and began to heap honors upon his head. Not only
was he allowed to read from the Torah but he got to kiss it, too, and
then to escort it in a march around the synagogue. Ordinarily only
one such honor was dealt out to a congregation member, and then only
upon the occasion of a new grandson birth or wedding anniversary. The
Torah back in its vault, Stern walked humbly to his seat, aware of the
loving glances the tiny Jews kept shooting him. Wasn't it wonderful? A
Jewish boy. A fighter. A man who had shot down planes. Yet when there's
a holiday he puts on a tallith and with such sweetness comes to sit
in synagogues. And did you see him pray? Even in a uniform he reads
so beautifully. Stern loved it, and when they shot him glances, he
responded with religious groans and dipping bows and as much humility
as he could summon. When the Shofar had blown, they clustered around
him, touching him, telling him what a handsome Jewish boy he was,
saying how wonderful it must be to fly. They knew Jewish boys did
accounting for the Army. But Stern was the first they knew who flew in
planes. Dinner invitations were flung at the savior, and Stern, silent
on his nonflying status, his lips sealed on the subject of his new
bride, chose an orthodox watchmaker who did up timepieces for major
league umpires and had a large and bovine unmarried daughter named
Naomi. When Stern had finished dinner, he was left alone with the girl
in a parlor that smelled of aged furniture, unchanged since it had been
brought across from Albania after a pogrom. The light was subdued and
Stern, belly bursting with chopped liver and noodle pudding, swiftly
got her breasts out. They were large and comfortable ones, the nipples
poorly placed, glancing out in opposite directions and giving her a
strange, dizzying look. Stern fell upon them while the girl settled
back in bovine defeat, as though she were able to tell from the sucks,
greedy, anxious and lacking in tenderness, that nothing of a permanent
nature would come of this, just as nothing ever came of her father's
synagogue dinner invitations. She curled a finger through Stern's hair
and seemed to think of the procession of dark-skinned boys who had been
at her chest, wondering when a serious one would appear and want to
wrap them up forever.
Stern stayed at her breasts like a thief, dizzy with adulterous glee.
They were large, his wife's were small, and he stored up each minute as
though it were gold. For hours he stayed upon her, expecting an exotic
perfume he'd dreamed about to cascade from her bosom. The off-balance
arrangement of her nipples prevented him from plunging on further; he
was afraid there would be equal strangeness beneath her skirts. Then,
too, the room smelled old and religious and Stern imagined himself
piercing her and thereby summoning up the wrath of ancient Hebraic
gods, ones who would sleep benignly as long as he stayed above the
waist. She lay beneath him with cowlike patience while the night went
by, and then Stern rose, said, "I have to go back now," and flew out
of the house, reeling with guilt, a day of flying heroism beneath his
belt and four hours of capacious bosom-sucking engraved in his mind
that no one could ever steal.
* * * * *
Stern, a non-flier in a flying service, yearned for Air Force comrades
but had only friends. There were two of them, non-fliers, with
parasitic functions like those of Stern. One was Neidel, the Jewish
captain, a finance officer who made furtive afternoon calls to grain
market brokers, picking up $20,000 in barley one day, dropping it
in wheat the next. A regular officer, Neidel, pockmarked and in his
forties, had never married for fear of having to divert money from
soybean futures. Stern occasionally had lunch with him in Neidel's old
car, telling him of gentile girls from college while Neidel sweated and
wolfed down economy coleslaw sandwiches he had prepared in the bachelor
officer rooms. Stern's other friend was Kekras, a Greek who had failed
in jets. Once lean and blond, he drank heavily now and seemed a parody
of gentile fliers, his hair grown long, his khakis soiled, his face
swelled up with beer. Kekras burped a lot, said next to nothing, but
was a great admirer of strength, and Stern got rises out of him only
with apocryphal anecdotes of Charlie Keller, ancient Yankee outfielder.
"He could carry seven baseballs in one hand," Stern would report, and
Kekras would shake his head and say, "What a monster."
"Some said he could even grab eight of them in his prime."
"Jesus," Kekras would say.
"I once saw him outside of Yankee Stadium," Stern would add. "He had
the bushiest eyebrows I'd ever seen on a man, and you should have seen
his arms. They hung down to the ground like an ape's."
"What a horse," Kekras would say, grinning and shaking his head with
affection. "What an ox." And Stern was thrilled that he was talking
intimately with a gentile man of the air, even though a cast-off,
heavy-lidded one whose senses were too dulled for the new jets.
Stern felt like a thief throughout his Air Force tour, a sponger and
a parasite, a secret vomiter masquerading in suits of Air Force blue
with great heroic eagles perched atop his garrison cap. "I'd feel more
comfortable wearing a different kind of uniform than the fliers,"
he'd tell Kekras, while the Greek burped and wondered whether Dolph
Camilli's wrists were larger round than those of Johnny Mize. Only one
brief moment did Stern feel in the Air Force and not an unwanted guest
in a hostile house, each month taking money that should have gone to
fliers.
* * * * *
On temporary duty in Wyoming one night, Stern had taken a seat at a bar
in the officers' club next to a buxom woman quickly labeled a "hooker"
by the bartender--"one of the worst I've seen in this club." Stern,
who felt he'd married prematurely, now prowled tormentedly after women
on his tours about the globe, keeping mental track of every loveless
caress, every conversation, every female contact, as though only when
he'd grabbed a certain number of breasts, stroked a certain number of
thighs, racked up a magic number of sleepings would he be able to relax
and be married. Bracelets of lines ringed the woman's neck, and she sat
enclosed in a circle of cheap perfume, but the bourbon quickly got to
Stern and turned the perfume into something desirably earthy, the neck
lines into lovely chevrons of sophistication. Stern imagined taking
her to his staff car, stripping off her undoubtedly worn and tragic
underwear, and allowing her to entertain him with slow and worldly acts
of love, and then returning quickly to the bar, possibly with an easily
cleared up disease upon him, but one delicious notch closer to his
magic number of sleepings. Stern sidled close to the woman, an offer of
a drink on his lips, when a romantic voice behind him rang out: "Come,
woman, and drink my wine. I have need of company and you seem much
woman to these eyes." The hooker wheeled on her seat, said, "Scuse me,"
to Stern, and joined the one who had called out--a husky middle-aged
man with much blond hair curled romantically down over his forehead and
with deep lines burned in his face. He was wearing civilian clothes and
talked in a bleary-eyed, outrageously romantic way, rising gallantly
for the hooker and telling her, "Woman, you're a rare one and you've
wisdom in your smile." When the hooker took her seat, the romantic man
shouted to Stern, "Let the Jew join us, too. I'll not close our circle
to the Jew." Stern's face froze at the bar, but he came over and said,
"What do you mean, Jew?" And the man slapped his shoulder and said,
"Let the Jew sit and take wine with us." Stern, oddly at ease, sat down
with the pair, uncomfortable only because the man was talking so loud.
"Your company is good, woman," the romantic man said, leaning back and
drinking deeply. "Big Jew, you warm me with your presence." He called
Stern "Jew" and "Big Jew" each time he spoke to him, and he called the
hooker "woman," endowing her with a universal quality, and Stern felt
a nice feeling of camaraderie sitting and drinking with the pair, the
romantic gentleman who might have been an aging soldier of fortune and
the wise and silent hooker who had been to many places and stayed with
a legion of men. He felt as though he was in a small bar in Macao,
among scarred people with grave crimes in their past, at the world's
end now, saying only bitter, philosophical things and waiting to die.
Ava Gardner a must for the film version. The romantic man, indeed,
_was_ a kind of soldier of fortune, a civilian flying instructor
assigned to the Air Force. He had trained a small group of Israeli
pilots during the Arab-Israeli war, and he had glowing things to say
of Israeli skills. "You Jews fly well, Big Jew," he said to Stern, who
exulted in his words. "You fly a good plane, and my hat is off to the
flying Jew. I'll drink to you, Big Jew. You do well in the sky."
"I don't actually fly myself," Stern said, but the romantic man waved
him off and said, "Big Jew, you fly a deadly plane. Drink deep with me.
The woman drinks well, too."
The romantic gentleman went on extolling the virtues of Jewish pilots,
and each time Stern insisted that he himself was no flier, the man
said, "Let the Jew be silent and drink with me as a man of the sky."
A major Stern knew from the headquarters office came over with his wife
then and stood alongside the table as the gentleman cried out, "The Big
Jew is a modest man. Come, Jew, and tell us of your courage."
"That's disgusting," said the major's wife, and Stern said, "He's not
saying it the way you think." But then, for the sake of the new couple,
he turned to the middle-aged soldier of fortune and said, "Quit that.
Don't keep calling me that." The gentleman said, "I've tasted too much
of wine," got to his feet unsteadily, and walked out of the club, the
hooker supporting his arm. The couple sat beside Stern, but as soon
as the middle-aged gentleman had gone, Stern wanted to call him back.
He wanted to say to the couple, "You're wrong. He wasn't saying 'Jew'
like you think. He was saying _Big Jew_. _Tall_ Jew. He saw me as the
strong and quiet Jew in a brigade of international fighters. I might
have been the Big Swede or the Big Prussian, but I was the Big Jew, the
quiet, silent one with bitter memories and a past of mystery, a man you
could count on to slip silently through enemy lines and slit a throat,
the one with skills at demolition who could blow a bridge a thousand
ways, brilliant at weaponry, a quiet man with strong and magic hands
who could open any safe and fix an exhausted aircraft, fly it, too, if
necessary. Send the Big Jew. He knows how to kill. He'll get through.
He says little, but no one kills a man better, and it is said that when
a woman has been to bed with him she will never be loved better as long
as she lives."
Stern wanted to say these things to the major and his wife, just as
now, ten years later, he wanted to go out of his house and say to the
man who'd kiked his wife and peered between her legs, "You've got me
wrong. I'm no kike. Come and see my empty house. My bank account is
lean. I drive an old car, too, and Cousy thrills me at the backcourt
just as you. No synagogue has seen me in ten years. It's true my hips
are wide, but I have a plan for thinness. I'm no kike."
But Stern said nothing, continuing to drive hunched and tense past the
man's house, until one night he saw a line of giant American flags
flying thrillingly and patriotically from the man's every window. At
that moment a great flower of pain billowed up within Stern's belly,
filling him up gently and then settling like a parachute inside his
ribs. He nursed it within him for several weeks, and then one evening,
warming tea at midnight by the gas-blue light of the ancient kitchen
stove, an electric shaft of pain charged through Stern's middle and
flung him to the floor, his great behind slapping icily against the
kitchen tile. It was as though the kike man's boot had stamped through
Stern's mouth, plunging downward, elevator-swift, to lodge finally in
his bowels, all the fragile and delicate things within him flung aside.
_Part Two_
Stern's doctor sent him first to a man with a forest of golden curls
named Brewer who took pictures of his belly. Brewer had said, "Come
very early; it's the only way I can get a lot of people in," and when
Stern arrived, he filled him first with thick, maltlike substances,
then put him inside an eyelike machine, and, taking his place on the
other side of it, said, "Think of delicious dishes. Your favorites."
Stern was barefooted and wore a thin shift; the light in the streets
had not yet come up and his eyes were crusted with sleep. "I may be
sick," he said. "How can I think of delicious things? All right, eggs."
"Don't fool around," said the man, squinting into the machine. "I've
got to get a lot of people in. Give me your favorite taste temptations;
otherwise the pictures will be grainy."
"I really do like eggs," Stern said. "Late at night, when I've been
out, I'd rather have them than anything."
"Are you trying to make a monkey out of me?" the man screamed, darting
away from the machine. "Do you know how many I have got to get in
today? _You give me your favorites._" He flew at Stern, fat fists
clenched, blond curls shaking, like a giant, enraged baby, and Stern,
frightened, said, "Soufflés, soufflés."
"That ought to do it," said the man, his eye to the machine again. "I'm
not sending out any grainy pictures."
A week after the stomach pictures had been taken, Stern sat alongside
an old woman with giant ankles in the outer office of Fabiola, the
specialist, and it occurred to him that he would hear all the really
bad news in his life in this very office; there would be today's and
then, at some later date, news of lung congestions and then, finally,
right here in this very room with the wallpaper and leather couches
that seemed specially designed for telling people hopeless things, he
would get the final word, the news that would wrap up the ball game
forever. The woman beside him sorrowfully tapped her feet to an obscure
Muzak ballad and, although Stern knew it was cruel, he could not help
passing along his observation.
"This is a room for bad things," he said. "All the bad news in your
life you get right here, right to the very end."
"I can't think now," she said, tapping away. "Not with these feet I
can't."
Stern felt ashamed when he was called ahead of the giant-ankled woman,
but then it occurred to him that perhaps her ankles had always been
that way and were not swollen and enfeebled but sturdy with rocklike
peasant power. Perhaps within her there raged fifty years more of
good health; Stern was being called first because he was much further
downhill, the slimness of his ankles notwithstanding.
Fabiola was a tall, brisk man who wore loose-flowing clothes and lived
in the shadow of an old doctor whose practice he had taken over, the
famed Robert Lualdi, a handsome, Gable-like man who had been personal
physician to Ziegfeld beauties. Somewhat senile and in retirement now,
the elderly Lualdi, nevertheless, would drop in at odd times during
the day, often while examinations were in session, put his feet on
the young doctor's desk, and reminisce about the days when he had a
practice that was "really hotcha." Once, when Fabiola was examining a
young woman's chest, the old man had come into the room, pronounced her
breasts "honeys," and then gone winking out the door. The interruptions
kept the young doctor on edge, and he had developed a brisk style, as
though trying always to wind things up and thereby head off one of the
elder doctor's nostalgic visits. He was holding the pictures of Stern's
stomach up to the light when Stern entered, fingers dug into his great
belly, as though to prevent the parachute within from blossoming out
further. "You've got one in there, all right," said Fabiola. "Beauty.
You ought to see the crater. That's the price we pay for civilization."
"Got what?" Stern asked.
"An ulcer."
"Oh," said Stern. He was sorry he had let the doctor talk first; it
was as though if he had burst in immediately and told Fabiola what
kind of a person he was, how nice and gentle, he might have been able
to convince him that he was mistaken, that Stern was simply not the
kind of fellow to have an ulcer. It was as though the doctor had a
valise full of them, was dealing them out to certain kinds of people,
and would revoke them if presented with sound reasons for doing so.
Political influence might persuade the doctor to take it back, too.
Once, when Stern had been unable to get into college, his uncle had
reached a Marine colonel named Treadwell, who had phoned the college
and smoothed his admission. Stern felt now that if only Treadwell were
to call the doctor, Fabiola would call back the ulcer and give it to
someone more deserving.
"Look, I don't think I want to have one of them," Stern said, getting a
little dizzy, still feeling that it was all a matter of debate and that
he wasn't going to get his point across. "I'm thirty-four." When the
doctor heard his age, he would see immediately that he had the wrong
man and apologize for inconveniencing Stern.
"That's when they start showing up. Look, we don't have to go in there
if that's what you're worried about. We get at them other ways."
"What do you mean, go in there?" said Stern. Going in there was
different from simply operating. He had a vision of entire armadas of
men and equipment trooping into his stomach and staying there a long
time. "You mean there was even a chance you might have had to go in?"
"I don't see any reason to move in," said Fabiola. The old doctor
opened the door then and, with eyes narrowed, said, "I knew I heard
some tootsies in here." He limped in rakishly and took a seat next to
Stern. "Excuse me," he said, "I thought you were a tootsie. My office
was always full of 'em. The real cheese, too."
"I think I may be pretty sick," Stern said, and the old man rose
and said, "Oh, excuse me. I'll be getting along. Well, boys, keep
everything hotcha. Any tootsies, you know who to call.
"Hotcha, hotcha," he said, and winked his way out the door.
"Look," Stern said, leaning forward now. "I really don't want to have
one." He felt suddenly that it was all a giant mistake, that somehow
the doctor had gotten the impression he didn't mind having one, that it
made no difference to Stern one way or the other. This was his last
chance to explain that he really didn't want to have one.
"I don't see what's troubling you," said Fabiola. "You'd think I'd said
heart or something."
"Maybe it's the name," Stern said. "I can't even get myself to say it."
It sounded to Stern like a mean little animal with a hairy face. _See
the coarse-tufted, angry little ulcer, children. You must learn to
avoid him because of his vicious temper. He is not nice like our friend
the squirrel._ And here Stern had one running around inside him....
"I can see all of this if I'd said heart," Fabiola said, beginning to
write. "All right, we'll get right at her. We can do it without moving
in."
"Don't write," said Stern, searching for some last-ditch argument that
would force Fabiola to reconsider. The writing would make it final. If
he could get Fabiola to hold off on that, perhaps a last-minute call
from Colonel Treadwell would clear him.
"I wear these tight pants," Stern said. "Really tight. I think the
homosexuals are influencing all the clothes we wear, and it's silly,
but I wear them anyway. I can hardly breathe, I wear them so tight. Do
you think that might have done it?"
"No," said Fabiola, filling up little pieces of paper with furious
scribbles. "You've definitely got one in there."
Once, on a scholarship exam, Stern had gotten stuck on the very first
question. There were more than four hundred to go, but, instead of
hurrying on to the next, he had continued for some reason to wrestle
with the first, aware that time was flying. Unable to break through
on the answer, he had felt a thickness start up in his throat and
then had pitched forward on the floor, later to be revived in the
girls' bathroom, all chances of passing the exam up in smoke. The
same thickness formed in his throat now and he toppled forward into
Fabiola's carpeting, not quite losing consciousness.
"I didn't say heart," Fabiola said, leaning forward. "I could
understand if I'd said heart."
Helped to his feet, Stern felt better immediately. It was as though
he had finally demonstrated how seriously he was opposed to having an
ulcer.
"I think we ought to bed this one down for a while," the doctor said,
writing again. "I know an inexpensive place. Can you get free?"
"Oh, Jesus, I've really got one then," said Stern, beginning to cry.
"Can't you see that I don't want one? I'm thirty-four." Fabiola stood
up and Stern looked at the doctor's softly rising paunch, encased in
loose-flowing trousers, and wondered how he was able to keep it free
of coarse-tufted, sharp-toothed little ulcers. Fabiola's belly had a
stately, relaxed strength about it, and Stern wanted to hug it and
tell the doctor about the kike man, how bad it was to drive past his
house every night. Then perhaps the doctor would call the man, tell
him the awful thing he'd done and that he'd better not do it any more.
Or else Fabiola would ride out in a car and somehow, with the stately,
dignified strength of his belly, bring the man to his knees.
"It's a little place upstate," said Fabiola, leading Stern to the door.
"The way you hit the floor I think we ought to bed it down awhile.
They'll be ready for you in about three days."
Stern wanted to protest. He wanted to say, "Wait a minute. You don't
understand. I _really_ don't want to have one. I'm not leaving this
room until I don't have one any more." But the situation had become
dreamlike, as though a man was coming for his throat with a razor and
he was unable to cry out. "I just didn't want this," he heard himself
say sweetly.
In the corridor, the old doctor winked at Stern and said, "You boys
have a couple of tootsies in there?"
"I'm awfully sick," Stern said, and went out the door.
* * * * *
Crying in the street, Stern hailed a cab and gave the Negro driver, a
scholarly-looking gentleman, his office address. "I've just been told
I've got something lousy inside me," Stern said, still crying. "Jesus,
how I don't want to have it in there."
"Cut him out," the man said, shaking his head emphatically, as though
he were crying "Amen" at a good sermon. "He an ulcer, cut him out an'
throw him 'pon the floor. He very strong, but you throw Mr. Ulcer 'pon
the floor, you see how he like that. I got an uncle, he cut one out, he
live to be fifty-four."
Stern wanted to tell the man that fifty-four was no target to shoot
for and that there'd be no cutting, either. He wanted to say that he
thought the man's advice was terrible, but he was afraid the Negro,
outwardly scholarly, had once fought as a welterweight and, irked,
might quickly remove his horn-rims, back Stern against a fender, and
cut him to ribbons with lethal combinations. When the cab pulled up,
Stern said, "I might try cutting it out," and tipped the scholarly
Negro handsomely.
* * * * *
At a drugstore counter near his office, Stern took a seat three stools
down from the owner, Doroff the druggist, a loose and boneless man
whose body seemed made of liquid and who appeared to be flowing rather
than leaning against the counter. He was talking to a slender girl with
long, impossibly sensual legs who twisted and untwisted them as Doroff
asked her where she ate certain types of food. "Where do you gopher
Chinese?" Doroff asked, and when she answered, he made a negative,
fishlike face and said, "Uh-uh, the only place to go in this city is a
little spot named Toy's on Fifty-third. Where do you gopher French?"
He kept asking her the restaurant questions, and no matter what her
answer, he would shake his head in fishlike disapproval and tell her
the only good place to "gopher Indian" or to "gopher Italiano." Each
time he filled her in, she would spring back suddenly, as though
kissed, crossing and uncrossing her legs with glee. Stern hated the
fishlike Doroff for always having cute girls on stools beside him,
girls who were much too appealing for the boneless druggist, and it
broke Stern's heart to see this one reacting to him with such delight.
He had fears that one night the two of them would "gopher Spanish" or
"gopher German" together and that before she knew what happened the
boneless Doroff would be floating up against her, getting to enjoy
the length of her twisting legs. He wanted to say to her now, "What's
so great about him knowing restaurants? Is that something to get
excited about? Yours are probably as good as his. You'd never know it
to look at me now, but if I weren't so upset, I could really tell you
worthwhile things. I could tell you of Turgenev."
The man who had come for Stern's order was a paunchy, gray-haired
counterman who had the impression that Stern was in on things, had
inside information on deals and intimate goings-on. He was always
asking Stern questions impossible to answer, such as "So what's going
on?" and "How'd you make it today?" No matter what Stern's answer, he
would wink deeply and shake with laughter. In sober moments, he would
say to Stern, "I'd like to get out of here. You hear of anything doing
around, let me know." He asked Stern now, "So how'd the racket go?"
And when Stern said, "Usual," he let out a hysterical bellow and said,
"You really got something going, don't you?" He asked Stern then, "So
what'll it be?" And Stern, who felt he had a thousand pounds above his
belt, said, "Milk. Warm it. I've got something going on inside me." One
of Fabiola's papers had said to drink milk, and Stern was anxious to
get some down, picturing a warm flood of it streaming past his throat
and pacifying temporarily a hairy, coarse-tufted angry little animal
within him that squawked for nourishment.
"No warm," the man said. "You have to ask the boss."
Doroff had overheard the exchange. He had had fights with Sterns boss,
Belavista, down the street, and now he said, "All right on the warm. Is
that what you get working for Belavista? Ulcers?" Doroff's use of the
plural form brought a flood of tears to Stern's eyes. Ulcers. Fabiola
had spoken of only one, and now he pictured a sea of them fanning
out inside him. The girl giggled and Stern knew that he had lost all
chances to get at her legs. He rose, his body hooked in a curve of
pain, and whispered, "I've only got one," and then flew through the
drugstore muttering, "Where do you gopher this, where do you gopher
that." He wanted to holler out "_Where do you gopher shit?_" but he was
certain Doroff would call out a number, sixty-two, and a drugstore plan
would go into operation in which all eight countermen would loyally
spring over the grill and trap Stern against the paperback books,
hitting him in the stomach a few times and then holding him for a
paid-off patrolman.
* * * * *
Stern, who wrote the editorial material on product labels, traveled
eight floors upward to his office now, where he was greeted by his
secretary, a tall, somber girl with gently rounded but sorrowful
buttocks. She had lost both parents beneath a bus, and although she
served Stern with loyalty, she placed a dark and downbeat cast upon all
events.
"I've got something lousy in me and I've got to go away," Stern said.
"Tell Mr. Belavista I want to see him. I've got to get wound up here so
I can get out."
"What is it?" she asked. "The worst?"
"No, it's not the worst," Stern said. "But it's lousy and I'd rather
not have it in there."
"Things like that take a long time to get cleared up," she said. "All
right, do you want the bad news now?"
"What do you mean, bad news?" Stern asked. "All right, give it to me."
"The mail hasn't come yet and you've got someone who's been waiting on
the phone."
"Is that it?" Stern asked.
"Yes," she said.
"That's not so bad," said Stern. "Why do you have to make everything
sound so terrible?" She walked away and Stern studied her buttocks,
rising easily beneath her black skirt. On any other girl, they would
have been appealing, but he could not detach them from what he knew
about her and they seemed as a consequence downbeat and sorrowful;
touching them would have been reaching into a grave.
Stern picked up the phone and the voice said, "Loudon here. I've got
something you're going to want and I'll only take a second."
"Something lousy happened to me," said Stern, "and I'm not doing any
business. I just want to get wound up here a minute."
"I'll just be a second. Here it is. Hamburg has become the wickedest
city in the world. Each year thousands of tourists troop there to
visit its sin spots and to be fleeced by B-girls who know every trick
of the trade. Strippers along the Reeperbahn go further than in any
city in the world and, if you know the right places to go, _further_.
Outwardly having no bordellos, Hamburg actually has many, and although
its prosperous citizens pretend to have no knowledge of its wickedness,
scratch the surface of any old-time Hamburgite and he'll direct you to
the door of an establishment where flourishes the oldest profession in
the world. That's about it. I go on from there detailing with anecdotes
some of the more sordid practices in this bawdy city, which has
replaced Paris as Europe's mecca of sin. What do you think?"
"What do you mean?" Stern asked.
"That's it. I want to do an article of say six thousand words on it for
you. I can have it ready in two weeks."
"I do labels," Stern said. "For consumer products."
"You don't think you can work it in?" the voice asked.
"I do labels," Stern said. "And I don't feel good."
Stern chewed Fabiola's stomach pills and waited for his only assistant,
Glover, to end his phone conversation. A tall, yellow-haired man who
frowned continually, as though the sun were in his eyes, Glover spent
hours on the phone each day, exchanging anecdotes with an elaborate
network of friends. Glover viewed all people and listened to all
remarks with pursed lips and then assigned them a rating that seemed
to have been arrived at by a Board of Good Taste, staffed by witty,
wafer-thin, impeccably dressed men whose job it was to continually
evaluate behavior. Glover was their branch representative in Stern's
office. When Stern commented on the summer heat, Glover would pause,
purse his lips, and say, "You may not know it, but you've just made
one of the seven best weather remarks of the season." His ratings were
enervating to Stern, as when he prefaced an item of gossip by saying,
"There are only five people in America who would appreciate this story.
You're one of them." Stern wanted to tell him to spend less time on the
phone, but he was afraid Glover, his body trim and supple from ballet
exercises, would first fly at him in an effeminate rage and then pass
along the episode to the Board, which would adjudge Stern "one of the
three crudest men in America."
"I've got to tell you the season's funniest tapered slacks anecdote,"
Glover said, entering Stern's office. "I'm passing this on to only four
friends of mine."
"I'd like to listen, but I can't now," Stern said, certain the Board
would get immediate notification of his conduct. "I've found out I've
got something in me and I've got to go away for a while."
"_Growing_ in you?" Glover asked, slightly amused. Stern was aware that
"one of the three funniest sickness descriptions of the summer" was
taking form.
"No, just in there," Stern said. "I'm not sure what it's doing." Stern
had the feeling that ulcers would be frowned upon by the Board as being
dirty, Jewish, unsophisticated, only for fat people, and he was careful
not to identify his condition. Only dueling scars and broken legs
suffered while skiing would receive high grades.
"Anyway," Stern continued, "I want you to take over and keep the labels
coming." He turned his head away and said, "Long telephone calls aren't
good. You might keep them short."
Glover's face swiftly filled with color. He darted toward Stern's desk
with vicious ballet grace, shrieked, "_I do my work_," and Stern,
frightened, whispered, "Then make long ones," and went past Glover's
coiled body to Belavista's office.
* * * * *
Waiting outside his boss's suite, Stern felt a growing flatness and
wondered suddenly whether Dr. Fabiola wasn't perhaps deceiving him and
planning to "go in" after all. Stern had a memory of a glum morning
long ago when he had worn a starched shirt and been brought in a taxi
at dawn to have his tonsils removed. He had gone along sweetly and had
not cried, feeling that something would come up, the hospital would be
closed, or someone would discover his tonsils were really fine after
all; but when he arrived, serious men had undressed him and brought a
giant cup down over his face while he struggled and clutched at the
air. Stern imagined himself sleeping at Fabiola's rest home and men
stealing into his room at night with the same smothering cup.
Stern looked in now at Belavista, a middle-aged man with giant feet
and large, wood-chopping teeth. He was born in Brazil, and the natural
charcoal of his face was reinforced by frequent visits to Rio de
Janeiro. Belavista had $3,000,000, and it was upsetting to Stern that
there was no way to tell by looking at him that he had that much money.
He might have been a man with $300,000 or even $27,500, and Stern felt
that if you had millions, there ought to be a way for people to tell
this at a glance. A badge you got to wear or a special millionaire's
necktie.
Stern felt that if you had that much money, you ought to fill up every
minute with $3,000,000 things, ones you couldn't do if you didn't
have that much money. During conferences with Belavista, Stern found
it unnerving to think that they were both spending minutes of life
together in exactly the same way, despite the fact that his Latin boss
had spectacular sums of money and Stern had only $800. When Belavista
ordered a rare tropical fruit salad for lunch, it depressed Stern. It
would come from a fine restaurant and the fruit would be of gourmet
succulence, and yet it was within the reach of people who had only $300
in the bank.
Belavista was the only multimillionaire Stern had ever known, and
in his presence Stern trembled with awe and barely heard his words,
studying everything about him instead. He would look at his pants
and think, "Oh, Jesus, inside those pants is a three-million-dollar
behind, and yet the fabric can be only so soft and fine." When
Belavista made a vigorous motion or even walked about the room, it
would occur to Stern that he was risking a heart attack and should, if
possible, always sit in chairs and not move a muscle. And yet Stern had
once seen Belavista race swiftly toward a train and dive between its
doors, prying them open to get aboard. Stern decided that was really
the difference, that was what had made him millions. And if people had
all their money and possessions taken away and everyone had to begin
all over, the men who plunged daringly toward closing train doors would
survive and soon have fortunes again.
Belavista was a gentle man, and Stern often told others, "He's like
a father to me." Childless and divorced, Belavista lavished all his
attentions on two six-year-old Brazilian nieces, listing them both
as corporation directors and sending them expensive gifts. A company
joke was that for a Christmas present he had once given each of them a
division of IBM. Stern pictured a day in which Belavista would put his
arm around him and say that his nieces were foolish, that he had always
wanted a son, and would Stern consider accepting a third of the label
business, leading eventually to complete control? And then Stern, all
considerations of wealth aside, would have a father who leaped bravely
for closing train doors.
He went in to see Belavista now and yearned for the man to put his arms
around him and take him back to his many-roomed house and keep him
there, protecting him from the lake man and eventually calling for his
wife and boy.
"Something's come up," Stern said. "I've got to go away. They found
something inside me and I have to get it taken care of."
"I'm sorry to hear that," the Brazilian said. "What is it?"
"An ulcer," Stern said. "It just showed up in there."
"Does it nag at you around here?" Belavista asked, pointing between his
ribs.
"Yes," Stern said. "That's where it gets you."
"Uh-huh," said Belavista. "I know. I've got it all right." He hollered
out to his secretary, "Make an appointment for me with Dr. Torro."
"I know," said Belavista. "Gets you around the back, too, a little."
"A little," Stern said. "You feel as though a baby with giant inflated
cheeks is in there."
"I know, I know," said the boss. "I've got it. I'm sure I've got the
same thing." He shouted to his secretary, "Make sure it's for today,"
and then said to Stern, "I've got it, all right. I've got the same
thing."
Stern felt a tiny bit of resentment now. It was as though he had
finally come up with something that Belavista, with all his millions,
could not have, and yet here was the man trying to horn in on Stern
and get one too, a finer and richer one. Now Belavista rose and said,
"All right, here's what I'm going to do for you," and Stern felt such
a thrill of excitement that he had to hold on to his boss's desk.
There were those who said that Belavista was a selfish and shrewd man,
but Stern had always told them, "I don't see it. He comes through.
He's always been very nice to me." Stern was certain Belavista had
been waiting for a moment of crisis, a special time to make certain
announcements about Stern's future. And now Stern, near tears, wanted
to hug him in advance and say, "Thank you. Oh, thank you."
"I'm continuing your salary," Belavista said.
"That's wonderful," said Stern. "It will ease my mind." And then he
waited for the list to continue.
"For as long as it takes. I don't care if it's three weeks."
"That's really nice," Stern said. He looked with humility at the floor,
as though he expected nothing more.
"You've been pretty good around here and I want to play fair with you,"
said Belavista. "I've thought it over, and that's the way I'm going
to handle it. I'd like to chat some more, but I've got an appointment
I can't break. So look, take it easy, get your mind off things, and
everything around here will be all right."
"It's amazing the way something like this just happens to you," Stern
said.
"That's right," Belavista said, tapping his foot, and Stern, aware that
he was keeping him from doing million-dollar things, said, "I'll be
rolling along now."
"OK, guy," said Belavista, and Stern left his office, the parachute
blowing up big and painful inside him. Once, when someone at college
had made fun of Stern for being from Brooklyn, Stern, whose father had
made a little extra money at that time, enough to buy a car, had said,
"My father can buy and sell you," to the boy. Now, hating his boss, he
wanted to say to him, "My father can buy and sell you." If Belavista
then pinned him down on the actual worth of his father, Stern would be
vague and say, "He made a lot of money in the shoulder pad business."
It was late in the afternoon when Stern got back to his desk, an
unsettling and nauseating time; each day at this time Stern would have
to face going home and, at the end of his trip, driving past the kike
man's house. He would do things, try to distract himself, talk to
people and force jokes, but no matter what he did, he would eventually
have to leave the safety of his office, where even Glover's pursed lips
and his secretary's downbeat buttocks were comforts, and ride home to
the kike man. Each night he would buy his newspaper at the station,
sit among groups of hearty men, and when one named "Ole Charlie" told
a drainpipe anecdote, Stern would raise his head and guffaw at the
punch line as though he understood, that he was riding home to a faulty
drainpipe too, and that bad drainage was his major concern in life
also. And then Stern would bury his head in his newspaper and turn to
an important section, like maritime shipping, and look very serious,
making an almost physical effort to blend in with the men alongside
him, as though if he looked exactly like them, he would become exactly
like them, speeding home to drainpipes and suburban pleasures. But
then, as his stop grew nearer, a panic would start in his throat. The
maritime section would become a blur and he would think how nice it
would be to go one stop too far on the railroad and get off in a new
place, where he could go to a home fully furnished with Early American
chairs, a wife educated at European schools, neighbors named "Ole
Charlie," and a street devoid of kike men.
At his desk now, Stern thought that perhaps tonight he would send
his wife to tell the kike man to stop everything, to stop tormenting
him, because Stern now had an ulcer. He was not ever to hit Stern
in the stomach and do anything to his family, because you don't do
those things to a man if he's got an ulcer. Not if you wear veteran
jackets and fly flags from every window. You're a man of fair play.
Stern imagined the man hearing the ulcer news and muttering something,
perhaps snickering wetly; but he would never fling Stern's wife down
again and peer between her legs. You don't do that to a man's wife
if he has an ulcer blooming in his belly and you're supposed to be
American and fair. Stern thought how much better it would be if he
had lost a leg or gone blind. Then the man would certainly never
do anything to him again. If he were blind, that would be complete
protection for Stern's wife and child. At a meeting, the man might tell
with a giggle of the blind Jew in the neighborhood, but it would be
hands off Stern's wife and child. Perhaps, though, Stern had it all
wrong. Perhaps the man's commando training would prevail. Never give
up an advantage. If you blind a man; but there is still life inside
him, jump on him and snuff it out. And Stern imagined himself tapping
sightlessly past the man's house, his wife and child flanking him. The
man would spot them, walk slowly forward, then gather some speed, put
Stern out of commission with a judo chop, kick his child in the crotch,
and then get his wife down to stab her sexually, and, worse, get her to
wriggle and whimper with enjoyment beneath her conqueror while Stern
thrashed blindly in the street.
Stern sipped milk now, got his desk in order, and thought of leaving
the container in the center of his desk so that others would find it
the following day and be consumed with heartbreak at the tragic symbol.
At his desk, Glover spoke with pursed lips to the Board, and Stern
imagined suddenly with fright that the moment he left for Fabiola's
rest home, Glover would resign from the Board, renounce all effeminate
mannerisms, marry immediately, and move into a split-level, thereby
becoming attractive to Belavista. When Stern returned, his ulcer
vanquished, Glover would be sitting at Stern's desk.
* * * * *
Stern's one Negro friend, Battleby the artist, came in then with
sketches for Stern's labels and began immediately to fill Stern in on
all his latest activities. A bearded Negro intellectual, he behaved
as though his paintings were the major concern of all Americans and
people walked the streets in a sweat, chafing to get late details on
his career. When someone else in a room was speaking, Battleby felt
threatened and would sweat and fidget, tugging at his collar and
gulping deeply for air until the person stopped; then Battleby would
swallow deeply and say, "They have some pen-and-inks of mine over at
the West Side Gallery, and a Guggenheim director said I'm one of the
eight best young Americans in casein."
Battleby sat down now and said to Stern, "Here are the sketches. I'm
doing something new with ceramics that an art editor has said promises
to be one of the real technical contributions to the art world. You
know my far-out comic strip? Well, the syndicate says if I can sharpen
the punch line just a little, I have a good chance of selling it to
them. The nudes are going quite well. I can sell almost as many as I
like. I may teach a course this summer at Polytech in techniques of the
French moderns."
For a moment Battleby seemed to forget his next achievement, and when
Stern leaned forward to say something, a panic flew into Battleby's
eyes and he began to fidget and sweat and tap his feet until he
remembered and choked out the next line. "Showing. A showing. If I can
come up with twenty-six canvases by September, there's a gallery on
Madison that wants me. They once had an original Braque."
He plunged on in this style, and in a way Stern wanted him to continue
all night, because he knew that when Battleby stopped, he would have
to put on his jacket and go to the train. He wanted, though, to stop
Battleby and talk to him about the kike man, but he was afraid to
cut him off for fear of being thought anti-Negro. Because he was so
embarrassed about his cowardice, he never really talked to anyone
about the man down the street, and Battleby seemed a good person to
talk to. Who could he repeat it to? A bunch of people up in Harlem? As
Battleby went on about his achievements and the people who thought his
work was fine, Stern wondered if he could get Battleby to stop being
an intellectual for a second and tell Stern some special Negro things
about kicking prejudiced people in the guts. He liked his friend's
work, though he thought that Battleby used too many browns, tossing
them in inappropriately for ocean scenes, and that the paintings, if
inhaled, would even smell a little Negro. He had a strong interest in
Battleby's work, and yet another of his reasons for having Battleby
as a friend was that down deep he felt he could count on the Negro to
hide him from the police in a teeming Harlem flat if ever he were to
kill someone. He hoped, too, though he could never suggest this, that
Battleby would one night furnish him with supple-bodied Negro girls of
Olympian sexual skills who would scream with abandon when Stern bit
them gently. And now, as Battleby droned on, he even dared to hope
that when he told Battleby of his predicament, the Negro would fling
off his horn-rims and fill an open-cab truck with twenty bat-carrying
Negro middle-weights, bare to the waist and glistening with perfect
musculature. Then Battleby would drive them at great speed to Stern's
town to do a job on the man down the street, the pack of them entering
the man's house swiftly and letting him have it about the head.
The next time Battleby paused for breath, Stern said, "I don't feel so
good. I've got to go away for a while. Look, we never talk, but I've
got to talk to someone. Something happened to me out where I live. A
guy did this to me because I'm Jewish. You probably run into a lot
of Negro things. We never talked about stuff like this before, but I
thought we could now."
Battleby fidgeted on his chair and gulped for air, blinking at Stern
incredulously, as if to say, "You don't understand. The conversation is
about me. I talk about things that have happened to me, and I don't get
into other things."
Battleby said: "I've got some crucifixion oils I'd love for you to see.
Real giant things with a powerful religious quality. I don't see how I
was able to come up with them."
"No, I mean it," Stern said. "I have to talk to someone. What happened
is that this guy got my wife down and looked inside her legs and she
wasn't wearing anything. This is no fun for me to say, believe me. Then
he said kike at her, and the worst thing is I never did anything about
it. My kid was standing there. I walked over, but I didn't do anything,
and now I'm sick and have to take off for a while. You probably run
into a lot of Negro things like that."
A change seemed to come over Battleby now. It was as though he'd been
hoping Stern would never get into personal affairs, but now that he
had, he wasn't going to let his old friend down. He took off his
glasses, wiped them, and began to gulp and shake his head, as though
what he were about to say was so true and real he could hardly get
it out. Then, in a voice that had all the patience and tolerance of
an entire race of long-suffering Negroes, he said, "You have got to
abstract yourself so that you present a faceless picture to society."
"We all do," said Battleby, shaking his head and replacing his
horn-rims. "Every one of us do."
Stern, puzzled, but afraid that if he asked for elaboration, Battleby
would find him anti-Negro, said, "All right. I'm going to start doing
that thing right away."
"Good," said Battleby, rising to leave. "I'll call you as various
things on me come up." And Stern, heartsick that he had not asked
about the truckload of middle-weights, watched the heavy-necked Negro
intellectual fly down the hall.
Talking to Battleby, Stern had not thought about his stomach, but
now he touched it tentatively and a cloudburst of pain washed upward
from his feet and filled his ribs. It was as though a sleeping ulcer
had been annoyed and now waited within him, angry, red-eyed, and
vengeance-seeking. It did not seem possible that such a large mass of
terribleness could be cleared up without "going in," and Stern was
certain Fabiola was wrong after all. He imagined a scene in which a
thin-lipped gentile surgeon would deftly slice down several layers
inside him and then, after furtively looking about to see that no one
was watching, reach in and pluck out fistfuls of things Stern vitally
needed. The gentile would then sew him up, leaving Stern four more
years of life, in order to avert suspicion.
He finished a container of milk, leaving it slightly crushed and
forlorn in the center of his desk, and then walked slowly to the train
station, stalling, hoping that something would happen, a minor car
accident perhaps, that would eliminate his having to go past the kike
man's house. Girls streamed by in the street with lovely unsettling
bodies, and Stern imagined the eyes of a good one suddenly meeting his
with instant understanding, the two of them going silently to her room
to make love, and Stern, by the sheer violence of his thrust, passing
the ulcer down through his stomach, out along his organ, and into her
belly, where the girl would somehow accept it with more strength than
he had been able to.
On the station platform, Stern stood next to two tall, starched,
elderly men, both of whom looked like entire organizations in
themselves. First one, then the other would make a hearty, obvious
observation about the train system, delivered in a deep, resonant,
corporational voice, and then both would chuckle with warm, folksy
helplessness at the remark. When the train pulled in, leaving the car
door a few feet from where they stood, one said, "Looks like that
engineer went and missed us again," and the other jabbed him in the
ribs and said, "He sure did," and then both laughed with heartiness.
The first one said, "Guess we better get our seats before they're all
gone," and the second said, "Else maybe they'll raise the price now,"
and then both howled and patted each other on the back. They took
seats behind Stern, and one said, "Sure gonna miss these old rides when
I take m'vacation." The other said, "Gonna have yourself a little fun,
are ya'?" He dug the first in the ribs, and then both slapped their
knees. The train was late getting started, and Stern thought he would
join in and try one of their obvious remarks. He wheeled around and
said, "Looks like we'll never get out of here." The pair looked at him
with hostility.
After the train started, the men began to read newspapers, one of them
holding his in such a way that the edge of it cut into Stern's neck,
chafing it as he turned the pages. Stern wanted to turn around and ask
the man to hold it another way, but he was sure the man would rise and
make a speech to the other passengers about Stern, unveiling him as
a Jewish newcomer to the train, editor of sin-town stories. He would
first warm up the audience, getting laughs from some obvious but folksy
remarks, and then deliver his denunciatory speech with confidence and
authority, as though he were speaking to a board. He would then turn
the floor over to Stern, who would begin a sophisticated anecdote, get
confused, and finally slink down wordlessly in his seat, the sin-town
editing charge unrefuted, while other gentiles in their seats applauded
derisively and shouted, "Hear, hear; fine speech." He made irritated
shrugs with his neck, hoping the man would get the idea, but the paper
edge remained against his neck. Stern finally wheeled around, but when
his eyes caught the other man's unblinking gaze, he looked upward, as
though his intention had been to examine the car ceiling.
A conductor around the same age as the two men came and stood next to
them, swaying in the aisle, and one of them said to the other, "He's
sure got the racket, don't he?" The second one howled and said, "Betcha
he's got a little snort in his pocket for you if you ask him," and
then both rocked with laughter as the conductor shook his head in mock
exasperation and said, "You guys are great kidders."
It was stuffy in the train, and Stern could not get his window open.
He opened his belt all the way, as though to give the ulcer more room
and comfort, but it seemed to swell and spread out, as though it would
occupy any amount of space it was given. Stern felt uncomfortable and
remembered suddenly that Fabiola had told him always to be on the
lookout for a black coffee-grounds substance if he should have occasion
to vomit. This thought, combined with the stuffiness and the paper in
his neck, nauseated him; he was hemmed in by a small lady who glittered
blindingly with jeweled ornaments. "I think I've got to get out of here
and vomit," he said to her, getting up and making his way past her
knees. "Why didn't you think of it before?" she said, shifting herself
in annoyance. "You're halfway there." Stern got out into the aisle ant
asked the conductor, "Which way to vomit?" The conductor considered
the question a long time, then shook his head and began to walk to one
end of the car. The two men stuck their heads in their newspapers, as
though Stern had violated his twentieth rule since the trip began and
was past all comment. He followed the conductor to the platform between
cars. The conductor pointed to a corner of the tiny platform and said,
"Vomiting's done in there on newspapers. I'll get passengers out the
other way."
"Can I begin now?" Stern asked, not wishing to violate any vomiting
protocol. Without answering, the conductor walked back into the car.
Stern realized he had no paper and returned to the smoker, where he
asked a man for some. "I'm not feeling so hot," he said, and the man
said, "All righty," and gave him a section he had already looked at.
Stern spread it out in the corner of the between-cars platform and
tried to vomit neatly and with as little fuss as possible. It occurred
to him before he started that perhaps he might vomit forth the ulcer
and then kick it off the platform, rid of it forever, but then he went
ahead, and when he was finished, his stomach remained bloated with
pain. He searched the floor now, looking for coffee grounds, but there
was no trace of any, and in a sense he felt a little disappointed. He
remained on the platform with the newspapers, guarding the area, as
though to prove he didn't want to evade responsibility. He remained
crouched next to the newspaper, and he wondered what happened to people
who died on the between-cars area. Did they have a special procedure
for getting them off the train? Were they taken off on stretchers,
keeping up the ruse that they were still alive, or were they simply
carried off in special body bundles?
When the train stopped, the conductor diverted people in Stern's car to
the other exit and then came back to Stern. "I guess you can go now,"
he said. "Try and do this before starting out or after getting there."
"All right," Stern said, and walked off the train, relieved that he did
not have to go through a special trial for vomiters and that he was
still allowed to use the train.
The sun was going down as Stern got into his car, and he wished now
that there was some way to let the kike man know that this was a day in
which he had just vomited and had gotten official confirmation of his
ulcer and that, just for this one day, it was all to stop. He was to
stop hating Stern and Stern was to be allowed to just put the man out
of his mind. He was to be allowed to ride home just like any other man
coming home to his family.
In a way, though, the ulcer that raged within him and the train
vomiting seemed to release him and give him a tiny flutter of courage.
He drove toward the man's house with the feeling that he had been
given the ulcer and had vomited in humiliation on a train and now
there was little else that could happen to him. Once, when Stern was
young, his mother had bought a corduroy jacket for his birthday and
he had worn it in the street. The orphan boy, who had tormented and
bullied him for months, swept down suddenly and tore the jacket from
Stern's body, slipping into it himself and then dancing around in it
tantalizingly, beyond Stern's reach. A coldness had come over Stern
and he had advanced toward the boy with poise and self-control and
said, "Give me that jacket." The onlookers had said, "Are you crazy?
He'll crack your head." But the orphan boy, startled by Stern's show of
resistance, had taken off the jacket and said, "Here. Can't you take
a joke?" And Stern had put the jacket back on and then slipped into
the old relationship, in which the bigger and stronger boy tormented
and bullied him, knocking him against buildings, blackening his eyes,
picking him up, and slamming him to the ground. Now, as he drove past
the man's house, the feeling of control returned for an instant and he
slowed down. He thought that he would walk into the man's house, take
off his coat, and say, "Just wear this coat. I dare you to wear it. My
mother bought it for me." And then, if the man put on the coat, Stern
would somehow be able to crush him with a blow, battering his head
through his living-room window. But then Stern thought, "What if he
declines to wear the coat, grins wetly, and simply drives his fist into
my ulcer-swollen belly, actually breaking open a hole in it?" And so
Stern drove past the man's house, his hands shaking at the wheel.
Outside his house, with the dark coming on fast, Stern walked across
the lawn, kicking furiously at fallen pears and crying through his
nose. He did this for a long time, and he was not without the thought
that perhaps it would help; he would be heard, someone would be
touched, and when he dried his eyes, there would be no ulcer.
His wife had gone for the day, leaving the child in the care of a
baby-sitter, and when Stern paid her and sent her away, he saw that his
parents had driven out unexpectedly.
* * * * *
Stern's father was a small, meticulously dressed man whose years of
cutting shoulder pads had made him terribly precise about details.
Whenever Stern, as a boy, began the new side of a quarter-pound stick
of butter that had been started on the other side, his father would
slap his hand and say, "That's no way to do it. I can't understand
you." He spent a great deal of time after meals scooping up bread
crumbs with a precise rolling motion of the knife, not stopping until
he had gotten every last crumb. His teeth were his best feature, and
whenever he passed a mirror he would draw back his lips and try several
varieties of smiles, practicing broad ones and quick, spontaneous
grins. He had a special thin, six-note whistle, which Stern as a boy
had always listened for late at night; it meant he was home, and Stern
would watch him from the window, a small man, walking jauntily, on his
way to the three-room apartment to practice a few quick grins before
the mirror and then sit down to eat a meal with factorylike precision.
Stern had not fancied the idea of having a small father, but one day
he had seen this compactly built man point his nose up at a towering
motorman on a crowded subway train and say, "Ah, button up or I'll dump
you on your ass." The nose he had thrust up in the motorman's face
had a jagged scar along its bridge which fascinated Stern. Whenever
his father practiced grins, he would also check the scar, stretching
it for a good look. Stern liked to run his finger along his father's
nose scar, gently, as though it still might hurt. One day his father
told Stern the scar had been given to him by two soccer players in
a strange neighborhood who had suddenly lashed out and knocked him
unconscious. The friends of Stern's father had gone looking for the men
with steel piping but never found them. Stern liked that story and told
it to people all the time, enjoying it when he could say, "My father's
friends went looking for the guys with pipes." Stern wished he had
friends who would do that for him.
When Stern's father had failed to inherit the shoulder pad business
from his brother Henny, he had simply continued on as a shoulder pad
cutter, smiling surreptitiously into mirrors, and seemed not to have
realized that his whole life had gone down the drain. He did describe
his brother Henny's death often, however, acting it out in vigorous
pantomime. "They just found him sitting in a chair," he would tell the
listener, "like this," and then he would let his knees bend a little,
his arms sag at his sides, and pop his eyes, letting his tongue hang
grotesquely from his mouth.
When the business dream had faded, however, Stern's mother had never
recovered. It meant she could never own a home in Saint Petersburg
and decorate it in Chinese modern. She had been a tall, voluptuous
woman with much nerve. When Stern was young, she would just hail cars
on the street instead of cabs, and then she and Stern would jump into
them that way with whoever was driving. In restaurants she would grab
celebrities and hold them by the sleeve, hollering across to the
embarrassed young Stern, "I've got Milton Berle" or "I just grabbed
Bob Eberle." After the business debacle, she aged swiftly and began
to drink. She tried furiously to cling to her youth and did little
dance steps all the time, humming to herself and executing them in
subways, in bars, on the street. When she was with Stern in restaurants
or anywhere in public, she would look at a strange young man and say,
"He's for me" or "I could make him in ten seconds." Stern would answer,
"I don't get any kick out of hearing things like that." The phrase
"make" sickened him. He didn't want to know about his dated mother,
with her slack, antique thighs and dyed hair, doing old-fashioned
things with strange, dull men.
* * * * *
They waited in the house for him on this day, Stern's father in a
slipover sweater, his mother in toreador pants, and they had brought
along Stern's Uncle Babe, a thin man with giant Adam's apple who had
spent much of his life in mental institutions. Married to a concert
violinist and thought to be of modest circumstances, he had attended
a recital one evening and run amok, certain there were poison gases
in the air. When police subdued him, he was found to be carrying
bankbooks showing balances of a million dollars. Stern had childhood
memories of visiting him in frightening institutions, bringing him
boxes of pralines, his favorites, and then seeing Uncle Babe led out in
institution clothes, which were always too large. Stern would sit and
smile at his uncle on a bench, and then, on the way home, his mother
would say, "He has some head. As sick as he is, he can tell you smarter
things than people on the outside."
Now, Stern's mother led forth Uncle Babe and said to Stern, "Look who I
brought out for you. Uncle Babe. You always loved him."
Stern hugged Uncle Babe with great tenderness, as though to make
up for all the wrongs done to him by heartless institutions, and
Stern's mother said, "Get him to tell you about the market. To this
very day, he has some head." Stern sat alongside his Uncle Babe and
the conversation took the usual course. Uncle Babe would make a few
statements about the financial world, too generalized to be put to
any moneymaking use, and then would slide into a monologue about the
difficulty of getting a decent piece of fish, various smells in the
air, and how certain shirt fabrics itched your skin.
"He has some head if you can only keep him on the right track," said
Stern's mother.
After a while, Stern arose and said, "I can't listen to anybody any
more. I've come home today with an ulcer."
Stern's mother said, "I don't believe it."
Stern said, "I've got one, all right. With a large crater. In two days
I have to go to a rest place for it. It hurts right now."
"That's what I needed," Stern's mother said, puffing at a cigarette. "I
don't have enough. That's the perfect extra thing I need to carry."
Stern's father, standing small and round-shouldered, shook his head
gravely and said, "You've got to take care of yourself. That's what
happens. I've told you that and I've told you that."
Uncle Babe leaned forward, staring widely, and said, "I like a piece of
fish on a night like this, but I don't like the way it smells."
"I'm going to have a drink," said Stern's mother. "And I don't need any
comments either. Do you know where I'd be if I wasn't able to take a
little drink?" She swallowed some Scotch from a shot glass and said, "I
don't have any reason to drink, do I? No reason in the world."
"Maybe I'll just go upstairs and lie down," Stern said. "It hurts
plenty inside me."
"I'm not going to worry about it," Stern's mother said. "I can't kill
myself. I've had disappointments in my life, too. Plenty of them. I
could tell you plenty."
"I am not interested in people's disappointments," Stern said. "My
stomach hurts me."
"All right, so I said something wrong," she said. "Look, darling, stay
downstairs awhile. Maybe it'll make you feel better. Talk to your Uncle
Babe. You love him. You know his head."
"Maybe we could all use a little music in our systems," she said,
instructing Stern's father to bring in a small accordion he carried in
the trunk of his car. As a boy, Stern had sung at home to his father's
accordion playing. His voice was not bad, and his mother had once taken
him to a talent agent, who'd had Stern sing into his ear and then
rejected him for poor head tones. But Stern's mother was rhapsodic over
his voice, and now, as Stern's father played some warm-up trills, she
sank into a chair and said, "Sing for me, darling. It'll make us all
feel better."
"I'm not singing anything," Stern said.
"All right, don't sing for me, sing for your Uncle Babe," she said.
"He's never heard your voice, and he's come all the way out here. He'll
faint when he hears you."
"Jesus," Stern said. "I'm thirty-four." But when his father played an
old ballad, he began to come in with the words.
"That voice," his mother said. "The same voice. I could die."
When he reached the bridge of the song, Stern said, "I'm not doing any
more of this. I told you about my stomach. Doesn't anybody realize my
stomach hurts? I've got a goddamned ulcer. I have to go away to a home."
"_Don't_ sing," said Stern's mother. "What am I going to do--put a
bullet through my head? I only had an idea. I thought it would be good
for everybody." Stern's father continued through the song, as though
respecting a show-business tradition that no matter how adverse the
circumstances, all numbers are to be completed. Uncle Babe leaned
across to Stern's mother and said, "Listen, did you take a look at my
shirt? I don't like the feel of it. It doesn't feel good on my skin."
"The crazy bastard doesn't even hear the music," said Stern's mother.
"He's in a world of his own."
Stern's father wound up the ballad with an elaborate trilling effect,
and then Stern's mother said, "Isn't your wife home when you have an
ulcer?"
"She doesn't know about it yet," said Stern.
"She ought to be home if you're not feeling well," said Stern's father.
"I said she doesn't know. Listen, none of this is doing me any good.
I'm going upstairs on the bed. I'm going to a home in a few days, and
I've got to stay quiet until then. Nobody upset me about anything."
He went upstairs, and when his stomach touched the bed, it seemed to
puff up with pain like great baby cheeks and he had to roll over on his
back to be comfortable. A car moved into the driveway and he went to
the window and saw his wife hop out, come around and kiss a man through
the driver's window, and then run into the house. Stern got back into
bed. She was downstairs for a while, and then she ran up the steps and
knelt beside him and said, "What happened?"
"I've come up with an ulcer and there'll be some kind of institution in
a few days."
"Oh, that's not so bad," she said, her great eyes wide, kissing his
wrist. "You'll fix it right up in a few days."
"No, I won't," said Stern. "It's a big thing and it'll be in there for
a while. I may have to be away for a long time."
She was wearing a tight jumper that hugged her flaring thighs snugly;
the crease of her underwear showed through, and Stern had a sudden
fear that she had just thrown on her clothes in a great hurry.
"Where were you?" he asked. "I thought you don't go anywhere out here."
"I went to a modern dance class today for the first time," she said,
her eyes shimmering with warmth. "I thought it would give me an
interest."
"But I've come home with an ulcer," Stern said.
"I didn't know that," she said.
"Who was the one in the car?"
"José," she said. "The instructor. He picks up the students and takes
them home."
"I saw a kiss," said Stern, a slow and deadly beat beginning against
his stomach walls, as though fists inside him were pleading for
attention.
"Oh, that's just a thing he does, like show business. It was nothing."
"But I saw tongues," said Stern.
"No, you didn't," she said. "I can't help what _he_ did. I didn't use
my tongue."
"Oh my God, _then there was a tongue_."
Stern's mother and father came up to the room, followed by Uncle Babe.
All three stood in the doorway.
"That's some place for a wife to be when there's a sickness," said
Stern's mother. "Out of the house." She downed a shot of Scotch and
said, "And they wonder why I take a little drink."
"I'll be where I want," Stern's wife said, and his small father came
forth, shoved his nose into her face, and said, "You'll be home with
him."
Uncle Babe came into the room, eyes wide in the pale glare of the
single bedroom lamp, and said, "I smell gas; open the window,
somebody," and Stern had a picture of himself, thin and unshaven,
sitting in oversized clothes on the bench of one of Uncle Babe's
institutions, waiting for his son and wife to visit him, the boy
carrying a box of pralines for him, his favorites. The fists within him
stepped up the rhythm of their beat, and Stern began to roll from one
side of the bed to the other, hands tight around his stomach, as though
to keep it from falling apart. "Call Fabiola," he said in a whisper.
"Tell him no two days. I've got to go tonight. Oh, please, tell him
I've got to get started tonight."
* * * * *
Fabiola told Stern of pills that would take him through the night and
said he would arrange space at the home for the following morning.
Stern awakened blinking to an agonizingly warm and lovely summer day.
But the summer fragrance unsettled him; on such days his son would have
to stand without playmates, sucking a blanket on a barren lawn, and
Stern would at some point have to stand outside and perhaps see the
man a mile down the road. Dark and dreary weather made Stern rejoice,
because on such days there was no shame in staying inside the house,
where it was safe. Down deep at the center of him there was a small
capsule of glee that he was going to the home on this day; if dark
and terrible things happened then to his family, he could not be held
responsible. How could he prevent them if he was away in a home?
The midnight driveway kiss nagged at him now, and he reached for his
wife as though to nail her down, to stake a claim in her during his
absence, to mark her, change her in some way so there would be no
smoothly coordinated backseat tumbles with José during his absence.
She watched him like a great-eyed fourth-grade girl, but then her eyes
closed, her skin became cold, and she clung to him with a nervous,
clattering whimper, doing a private, rising-up kind of thing. He went
at her with a frenzy, as though by the sheer force of his connection
he could do something to her that would keep her quiet and safe and
chaste for two weeks, but when he fell to the side he saw with panic
that she was unchanged, unmarked, her skin still cold and unrelieved.
"Can you be a man again, my darling?"
"No," Stern said. "I've got something inside me. I've got to get up to
that home. Listen, can you give up that ballet thing when I'm away?"
"No, I don't want to. It's the first thing I've had."
"OK, then," he said. "But no more tongues. Can't you drive home by
yourself?"
"He drives the students home. The kissing is just a show-biz thing.
Can't you be a man one more time? I'm going to have to jump on a
telephone pole."
"I don't want you to say things like that," said Stern.
* * * * *
Outside, on the lawn, it occurred to Stern that he had never seen his
house during the week at this precise time of day. It was eleven in the
morning, a time when he was usually at work for two hours. He had gone
to work on schedule for many years, and in his mind he had felt that
if he ever stopped and stayed home one day, or left his job entirely,
he would die. And yet here he was, standing on the lawn, looking at
his home, and he was perfectly alive. Perhaps that was it, he thought;
perhaps all he had to do was to stop work for one day and see that he
could live and he would not have gotten the ulcer. His son came out and
said, "How long will you be away?"
"A little while," Stern said.
"I can't wait for a little while," the boy said.
"I'll be back soon."
"I can't wait till soon. Listen, do you know where we are?"
"Where?" Stern said.
"In God's hand; right on his pinkie, as a matter of fact."
"Who teaches him God things?" Stern said to his wife.
"The baby-sitter. She's inside."
Stern said, "She shouldn't." He wanted to go inside and tell her to
discontinue the God information, but he was afraid she would come after
him one night with a torch-bearing army of gentiles and tie him in a
church.
Stern's wife drove the car, and as they passed the man's house down
the street Stern ducked down and made himself invisible, as though he
did not want the man to know of his triumph. Stern was certain that if
the man knew he had put Stern in a home, he would fly a dozen flags
thrillingly from every window.
On the highway, Stern watched his wife's knees, apart as they worked
the pedals; he imagined her dropping him off at the home, then going
immediately to a service station and allowing the attendant to make
love to her while her feet kept working the pedals so that she could
always say that she had driven all the way home without stopping. She
pulled into the driveway of the Grove Rest Home in the late afternoon
and Stern, saying goodbye, squeezed her flesh and kissed her through
her dress, as though by getting in these last touches he could somehow
ward off the gas station attendant.
_Part Three_
A giant picture of a somber, bewhiskered, constitutional-looking man
hung in the reception lobby. Stern took this to be Grove himself. The
lobby was a great, darkened, drafty place, and as Stern passed the
picture he instinctively ducked down a little, certain that Grove, in
setting up the home, had no idea people such as Stern would be applying
for admission. As Stern stood before the reception desk he expected an
entourage of Grove's descendants to run out with clenched fists and
veto him.
A tiny, gray-haired nurse looked up at him and said, "What can I do for
you, puddin'?" Stern told her who he was.
"Of course, dumplin'," she said, checking her records. "You're the new
intestinal. I'll get Lennie out for you. Does it hurt much?"
Stern said he'd had a bad night and asked what the rate was. She said
three dollars a day. "That includes your three meals and your evening
milk and cookie."
Stern had been ready to pay ten dollars a day and felt ashamed at
getting it for so little. She said, "Everyone pays the same rate, crumb
bun," and Stern said, "I'll donate a couch later when I get out."
A tall, handsome Negro with powerful jaw muscles came out on steel
crutches, moving slowly, adjusting clamps and gears as he clattered
forward. He was pushing a baggage cart, and he threw his legs out one
at a time behind it, as though he were casting them for fish.
"This is Lennie," said the nurse. "You'll like him. He's a sugarplum.
Lennie, this is Mr. Stern, your new intestinal."
"Very good," said the Negro. "Bags on the cart, Mr. Stern. Patients to
the left of me as we walk."
"I can handle them," said Stern. The Negro's jaw muscles bunched up,
and he said, "Patients to my left. Bags on the cart."
Stern, afraid of his great jaw muscles, tossed his bags on the cart,
and the Negro began to clatter forward, clamps and gears turning, leg
sections rasping and grinding out to the side, one at a time. Stern
fell in beside him, hands in his pockets, feigning a very slow walk, as
though he, too, took days to get places.
"Are you originally from New York?" Stern asked. "I just came from
there and it's funny, but the last guy I saw was a Negro artist friend
of mine."
"There'll be no dinner," said the Negro, sweat shimmering on his
forehead as he pushed the cart, looking straight ahead. "That's at
five. You're late for milk and cookie, too. One lateness is allowed on
that, though. Did the nurse furnish you with milk and cookie?"
"No," said Stern.
The Negro's jaw muscles tightened again, and he glared violently at
Stern. He released the cart, turned around after much shifting and
switching of gears, and began to make his way back to the nurse.
Stern walked several steps behind him. When the Negro got back to the
reception desk, he asked the nurse, "Did you give this intestinal milk
and cookie?"
"No, I didn't, old stocking," said the nurse.
"That's what he claim," said the Negro, freezing Stern with another
glare. Once again he shifted gears, arranged clamps, tugged and yanked
at elaborate mechanisms, and finally turned and walked complicatedly
down a dark ramplike hall, Stern falling in beside him. The darkness
was dropping swiftly; parallel to the ramp and off in the distance were
the blinking fights of a building that seemed to be set off by itself,
deliberately isolated. Crowd sounds were coming from it, as though from
a bleachers group that had remained long after a ball game.
"Is that where were going?" Stern asked the Negro.
"You're not to go there," he said. "That's Rosenkranz, where mentals
are to be taken. And you're not to be social with attendants at Grove,
such as myself."
He looked straight ahead as he took his zigzagging, clanking, spastic
steps, and Stern was somehow convinced that this man was doing the most
important work in the world. That there was nothing of greater moment
than being the attendant for intestinals and being in charge of baggage
carriers. Despite his complicated legs, he seemed a terribly strong man
to Stern, who felt that even were he to flee to the Netherlands after
a milk and cookie infraction, getting a fifteen-hour start, the Negro
would go after him Porgy-like and catch him eventually. He wondered
if somehow he might not be able to enlist the Negro and his great jaw
muscles to fight the man down the street. He saw the man knocking the
Negro down seven or eight times and the Negro disgustedly wiping off
his clean intern's jacket, making clamp and gear adjustments, and
then, handsome face serious and determined, great jaw muscles bunched,
coming on to squeeze the life out of the kike man's throat.
They came finally to the end of the ramp and to a two-story dormitory,
which Lennie identified as Griggs. He pointed to a room right inside
the entrance and said, "One is not ever to enter the staff room. There
is to be a line outside for medicines and, later, for milk and cookie.
There'll be no leaving the grounds either; otherwise, strict penalties
will ensue."
Stern's room was on the second floor. It took double the usual number
of gear shiftings and fastener slidings for the Negro to mount the
stairs, and when he was up there his jaw muscles were lumped enormously
and his white intern's jacket was soaked. Stern said, "Thank you for
all your trouble," and the Negro, after opening the room door, said,
"One is to obey all rules here on the premises."
Stern's room was long and thin and rancid, as though aging merchant
marine bosuns with kidney difficulties had spent their lives in it. A
small middle-aged man with a caved-in chest and loose pouches under his
eyes sat on one of the two beds in the dim light and said, "Hey, what's
this?"
"What?" asked Stern.
The man had arranged his hands in a tangled way, as though he were
scrubbing them, and was holding them against a lamp so that a clumping,
knobby shadow showed against the wall.
"I don't know what that is," Stern said.
"See the dingus? See the wang-wang?"
"What do you mean?" Stern asked.
"You know. It's sexeroo. Screwerino."
Stern looked at the shadows again and, as the man manipulated his
fingers, Stern thought he could make out a rough picture of a pair of
sexual organs in contact.
"That's pretty good," Stern said.
"Check these," the man said, pulling a medallion out of his T-shirt and
beckoning Stern closer. Stern looked at it, a carving of a lion and a
deer, which turned into a pair of male and female genitals when tilted
at an angle.
"See the dingus? Can you see the wang-wang? You want to hold it and
fool around with it awhile?"
Stern actually wanted to get a better look at it, but he said, "No,
thanks. I'm just getting in here and I want to take it easy. I'm going
to just lie down and not do anything for a while."
"I got that last set from a guy carved them in prison. Listen, do you
want me to do another one on the wall? I can do blowing."
"I just want to lie down here," said Stern, "and take it easy the first
night. I have some things on my mind."
Stern got down on the bed and thought again about the man down the
street. He imagined coming home and finding out that the man had moved
away, unable to make his mortgage payments. Or that he had developed
a lower-back injury, so that the least motion would cause him agony.
Stern saw himself running over with extended hand and showing the man
that he would not take advantage of him, that he would not fight him
in his weakened condition, that Jews forgive. He wanted opportunities
to demonstrate that Jews are magnanimous, that Jews are sweet and hold
no grudges. He pictured the man's boy falling down a well, and Stern,
with sleeves rolled up, being the first to volunteer to work day and
night digging adjacent holes to get him out. Or the man's child being
stricken with a rare disease and Stern anonymously sending checks to
pay the medical bills but somehow letting the man know it was really
Stern. And then he saw himself and the man becoming fast friends from
that point on, Stern inviting him in to the city to meet Belavista,
showing the man he didn't mind his work clothes. But mostly he wanted
the back injury, and clenched his fists and squeezed his eyes hard, as
though just by straining he could make it happen. If only there was
a way, he thought, that he could pay to make it happen--even a large
figure like $8,000, which he would work off at $10 a week.
His room-mate asked, "Do you mind any farting?" And Stern said, "I
don't have any views on that."
"I cut loose a few," said the man, "but I wanted to ask, because I know
a lot of the younger ones object."
The room was thick with the smell of merchant marine sheets, and Stern
sat up, touching his stomach to see whether it had gotten any better
since he had come to the home.
"I've got something in here and I wonder how long I'm going to have to
take to get it out of here," Stern said.
"I've got the weakness is all that's wrong with me," said the man.
"I've had it ever since I left the circuit. I did comedy vignettes. I
used to get fifty-two straight weeks in those days, but snappers killed
me off and I can't work any more. You see, I never used many snappers,
maybe three a night. What I'd do is work around m'crowd, futz them
along a little, nurse them, slowly giving them the business, and then,
maybe after twenty minutes, I'd come in with m'snapper. I'd use maybe
three a night, four tops. Nowadays the new ducks throw them out a mile
a minute, no futzing in between, just one after another. Anyone who
books you wants you to shoot out a million snappers before he'll even
consider you. Well, I just couldn't change my style, and now I've got
the weakness."
"I don't know what to say to any of that," Stern said. "I'm just here
to get rid of something I've got in here."
"Suck what?" said the man.
"What do you mean?" asked Stern.
"That's one of them. One of my old snappers. I'd ask a Saturday night
bunch if they had any special song requests, and when they hollered out
a few, I'd take my time, do a little business with m'feet, and then say
to them, 'Suck what?'"
The room seemed to have gotten narrower, and Stern was afraid that
someone would seal him in with the merchant marine sheets and the old
actor.
"I'm just going to go out and get the feel of the place," Stern said,
getting up from the bed.
Stern walked outside in the hall and got his first look at the half
man. Starting with his neck and going all the way down his body, about
half had been cut away. In the shadows, with a handkerchief around his
neck and a violin in his hand, he made a beseeching sound at Stern. His
voice seemed to come from some place a foot away from him and sounded
like a radio turned on a little too loud and tuned in to a small,
dying station in New Jersey. Stern walked ahead, his face frozen, as
though he did not see the man, and on the way down the steps he heard
an off-key violin melody played with sorrow and no skill, muffled by a
closed door. Stern wondered whether at some future date, when halves
started to be taken out of him, he too would be farmed off to a home to
sit unloved in the shadows and play a tortured violin.
Downstairs on the front porch a scattering of people talked beneath
a great insect-covered bulb. An old man, gray-haired, draped over a
wooden banister like a blanket, winked deeply and called Stern forward.
In the weeks to come, Stern was to see him clinging insect-like against
poles, draped over rails, propped up against walls, but never really
standing. Whenever the people at Griggs moved somewhere as a unit,
to meals or to the outdoor stadium, the strongest would always carry
Rooney, who weighed very little, and see that he was perched or
propped up or laid comfortably against something. His main concern was
the amount of money great people had or earned, and his remarks were
waspish on this subject. He poked Stern in the ribs and said, "Hey,
the President don't make much dough, does he? I mean, he really has to
hustle to scrape up cigarette money." He chuckled deeply and, poking
Stern again, said, "You know who else is starving to death? Xavier
Cugat. I mean, he really don't know where his next cuppa coffee's
comin' from." He became convulsed with laughter. "He goes to one of
them pay toilets, he's got all holy hell to scare up a dime. Jesus," he
said, choking with laughter and poking Stern, "we wouldn't want to be
in his shoes, would we? We sure are lucky not to be Cugie." He started
to slip off the rail and Stern caught him and propped him up again.
"Thanks, kid," said Rooney. "All them guys are starving, you know."
A tall, nervous, erupting teen-age boy was on the porch, pushing back
and forth in a wheelchair a Greek youth who Stern learned had had a leg
freshly cut off in a street fight. A blond nurse with flowering hips
passed by and the Greek boy said, "The last day I'm going to jazz that
broad. They're going to let me out, see. That's when I tear-ass up the
steps and catch her on the second floor and jazz her good. I going to
jazz her so she stays jazzed."
"Where are you tear-assin'?" said the tall boy. He combed his blond
hair nervously with one hand as he pushed the wheelchair. "You got one
leg gone."
"Shut up, tithead," said the Greek boy, concentrating hard. "I jazz
her. Then they come after me and I cut out to Harlem. I cut out so they
never find me."
"Where you cuttin'?" asked the tall, nervous boy. "You can't cut
nowhere."
"You're a tithead," said the boy in the wheelchair.
Stern approached the pair and the tall, blond boy said, "How are you,
fat ass? Jesus," he said to the boy in the wheelchair, "you ever see
such a fat ass?"
Stern smiled thinly, as though this were a great joke and not an insult.
"I've put on a little weight because of something I've got inside me,"
he said. "It certainly is a lovely night."
The tall boy erupted in violence. "You trying to be smart or something?"
"What do you mean?" said Stern in panic.
"Talking like that. You trying to make fun of us?"
"Of course not," Stern said.
"What did you say lovely for? We're just a bunch of guys. The way I see
it, you think maybe you're better than the rest of us."
"It's just a way to say something, is all," said Stern.
The boy was a strange mixture, exploding with rage one minute and
lapsing into a mood of great gentleness the next. The latter quality
took over now, and he began to pour out his thoughts, as though he
might never have another chance to talk to someone so smart he used
"lovely" and wasn't even showing off. It was as though the occasion
called for conversation only on the highest level.
"I've got bad blood," he said, the violence gone. "I couldn't get into
the Army with it. I work on high wires, you know. I'm the only one who
don't use a safety harness. You know, I'll just swing from one wire to
another. The guys see me, they flip out. I'm not afraid of anything.
You get killed; so what? Then my blood gets lousy and I have to stay
in bed three months, six months, I don't care. I just like to have
freedom. A bunch of us guys was sitting around at Coney Island eating a
plate of kraut and the man comes over and says it's time to close and
takes away my plate of kraut. He didn't say it nice or anything. Right
away he's stepping on our head. So we really give it to him and run the
hell out of there. I hit him with the whole table.
"But you see what I mean?" he said with an overwhelming tenderness, as
though Stern were his first link with civilization and he wanted Stern
to interpret his position before the world. "A guy has to have freedom.
The whole trouble with everything is that there's always somebody
stepping on your head when you're eating a bowl of kraut."
"Sounds pretty reasonable," said Stern.
"Are you sure you're not trying to show us up?" the boy said, erupting
again and taking Stern by the collar.
"No," Stern said, imagining the boy hitting him with a table.
"You're all right," the boy said, the gentleness returning. "I'll bet
the only reason you have a fat ass is because you're sick, right?"
"That's why," said Stern.
"Maybe one night--George, you, and me--we all go downtown to get some
beers."
By sliding and slipping from railings to banisters, Rooney had attached
himself to a pole close to the trio. "You know who don't have a pot to
piss in?" he said. "The guys who run this place. They don't eat good at
all, do they?" he said, chuckling deeply and clinging to the pole like
a many-legged insect.
The little staff room inside the front door lit up now, and from
within, behind a counter, the Negro attendant said, "Line up for
bandage and pill. Staff quarters are not to be entered."
The porch people lined up outside the staff room, Rooney sliding and
clinging along as the line moved. The old actor had come downstairs
and was standing alongside a dark-haired woman with sticklike legs
and a thin mustache. Her head was covered with a kerchief and she
tittered shyly as the old actor whispered things into her ear. He was
very courtly toward her, making deep, gallant bows, and Stern wondered
whether he had shown her any medallions. Stern stood at the end of
the line next to a paunchy, middle-aged man who introduced himself as
Feldner. "You're an intestinal, I hear," the man said. "I had what
you had, only now I'm in here worrying about something else. You're a
pretty smart boy. I heard you say lovely to those kids. What do you do?"
"I write labels for products," said Stern.
"I worked the casinos all my life," said the man. "All over Europe,
lately the Caribbean. But I was always betting on the wrong rejyme. I'd
put my money on a rejyme, see, and then I'd be working a table, making
my three clams a week, when bingo, a plane flies over, drops a bomb,
and we got no more casino. Once again Feldner's got his money on the
wrong rejyme. One rejyme in South America give me an ulcer, what you
got. But now I'm worrying about something else. How'd you like to write
a book about a guy who always bet his money on the wrong rejyme?"
When Stern's turn came, he saw that the Negro, inside the staff room,
had taken off his intern's jacket. He had great turbulent shoulder
muscles, and Stern wondered what his legs looked like, all fitted up in
their contraptions.
"Bullet got me in the high ass region," he said, his back to Stern,
preparing Stern's medication. "Pacific. It pinched off a nerve and
caused my legs not to move."
Stern welcomed the sudden intimacy and said, "You get around fine. I
never saw anyone handle things so smoothly. When I was a kid, I used to
go up to the Apollo on Amateur Night in Harlem. You'd see some really
fine acts there. That's where Lena started, and Billy Eckstine." He
put his foot inside the door and the Negro turned swiftly, jaw muscles
pumped up with rage, and said, "There is not to be any entering of the
staff room."
Stern said, "All right." He was the last one in line, and when he had
swallowed his medicine, the Negro lowered the staff-room light and
Stern went upstairs. On the top step the half man was waiting for him,
a bandage around his neck. As Stern approached, he flung open his
bathrobe in the shadows and said, "Look what they did to me," his voice
coming from a static-filled car radio on a rainy night. Stern pushed by
him, making himself thin so as not to touch him, closing his eyes so as
not to see him, not daring to breathe for fear he would have to smell
the neck bandage. He got into his narrow room and shut the door tight
and wondered whether the half man would wait outside the door until
he was sleeping and then slip into bed beside him, enclosing the two
of them in his bathrobe. The old actor was wheezing deeply and Stern
got between the damp merchant marine sheets, wondering whether Fabiola
hadn't made a mistake in sending him to this place where he had to look
at half men, as though to get a preview of horrors in store for him.
He touched his middle and, disappointed that the great globe of pain
still existed, began to pat it and knead it down, as though to hurry
along the treatment. As always, his last thoughts before dropping off
to a nightmare of sleep were of the man down the street. It struck him
as unfair that no matter how many pills he put inside his stomach, no
matter how gently he rubbed and patted it, no matter how healthy he
got at the Grove Rest Home, he would still have to go home and drive
past the man's house twice a day. The man would still be there to start
Stern's belly swelling again. How unfair it was. Couldn't bodies of
medical people be dispatched to tell the man that Stern was receiving
treatment, was getting better, and he was to leave him alone and not
bother his wife and child, otherwise Stern would crack with pain once
more? Bodies of medical people with enforcement powers. Couldn't Grove
send a group of envoys of this nature on ahead of him before he got
home, so the man would know?
* * * * *
Stern awakened the following morning to a sweetly cool summer morning,
and waiting to welcome him was the actor, standing barefooted in a
great tentlike pair of old actor's underwear, sequined in places,
gathering the folds of it into his stained pants, and rubbing his
meager arms.
"Got to get the pee moving," he said. "What did you think of my doll?
That's good stuff, boy. Gonna get me some of that stuff."
Stern said she was very nice and dressed quickly. The old actor, still
rubbing his arms, said, "You ought to try this. Nothing like it to get
your wang-wang in shape."
Downstairs, on the porch, the Griggs people stood around silently
in the dewy morning, and when Stern and the actor arrived, they all
began a dumb march to the dining room, a broken parade led by the
tall, erupting boy with the boneless, insect-like Rooney in his arms.
Carrying Rooney was a privilege that went to the strongest of the
group. After them came the Greek boy, wheeling along furiously, saying,
"Wait up, fuckers," and then the main body, followed finally by the
half man, old-fashioned toothache towel around his neck, radio-croaking
to the wind. In the dining room he took a table by himself. Stern sat
with Feldner and a small, scowling man who kept invoking the power of
his labor union. He tried a roll, found it hard, and said, "I don't
have to eat a roll like that."
"Why not?" Stern asked.
"I belong to a powerful union."
Later, when his eggs were served, he said, "Union gets you the best
eggs in the country."
Stern ordered some cereal. When he took a spoonful, Feldner stopped his
hand and said, "You can't eat that."
"How come?" Stern said.
"Not in the condition you're in," he said. "I had what you got. You're
a nice kid, but it would tear you up."
"I get to eat cereals," said Stern. He buttered some bread and Feldner
said, "Are you trying to commit suicide? I told you I had what you got.
I been all over the world, in every kind of country. You're in no shape
to eat that."
"I have a different kind of doctor," Stern said, eating the bread but
wondering whether Feldner's doctor wasn't better than Fabiola.
"There's only one thing you can eat with what you got," said Feldner.
"What's that?" Stern asked.
"Hot stew. The warm is what you need. It warms you up in there and
heals everything up. The way you're eating, you're dead in a month."
"I have a doctor who says bread and cereal are all right," Stern said,
but the pain ball seemed to blow up suddenly beneath his belt and he
wondered whether to call Fabiola and check on stew.
At the next table, the old actor made courtly, charming nods at the
mustached stick woman. When she turned to blow her nose, he stuck a
fork up through his legs, poked Rooney, who clung to a chair next to
him, and said, "Hey, get this wang-wang."
At Stern's table the sullen, scowling man said, "They don't take
oddballs in my union. Any crap and out you go." Finishing his meal,
Feldner patted his lips and said, "You better be careful, kid. I know
what you got in there. You can't go eating shit. You get the hot of a
stew in there and you'll see how nice it feels. I know. I'm worrying
about something else, but I had what you got."
At the meal's end, the half man, who had sat alone, eating swiftly and
furtively, got to his feet and began to gather everyone's dirty dishes
and stack them in piles.
"It's always the worst ones who are the nicest," said the plump
dining-room waitress. "It was that way at Mother Francesca's, too."
Stern had been aware of the half man eating alone, had felt his eyes,
and at one point had been compelled to go and sit with him, staring
right at his neck bandage and saying, "Don't worry. I'll sit with you.
In fact, I'll stay with you until the last half is taken away." He felt
that maybe if he sat with the half man, someone would sit with _him_
later, when he himself began losing halves. But on his way out of the
dining room, when the half man looked up at him, he ran by frightened,
as though he didn't see him.
Outside, the old actor grabbed him and, pointing to the mustached woman
up ahead, whispered, "I'm going to get me some of that. That's real
sweet stuff. You got to work it slow when you're handling one of them
sweet dolls."
* * * * *
Stern stayed five weeks at the Grove Rest Home, and during this period
the pain balloon that had crowded tight against his ribs began to
recede until he was able to fasten the snaps of his trousers around his
great girth. On some mornings during these weeks he would awaken and
for an instant feel he was at the New Everglades, a mountain resort
where he often spent summers as a child with his mother. Those summers
days he would get up early and run down to cut a purple snowball
flower for his mother to wear, wet and glistening in her hair, at the
breakfast table. They were lazy, wicked times, and since he was the
only young boy at the resort, he spent them among young women, playing
volleyball with them, doing calisthenics, and staring fascinatedly at
the elasticized garments they kept tugging at as the material crept
below their shorts line. Afternoons he would lie in the bottom of a
boat while his great-breasted mother, wearing a polka-dotted bathing
suit that stared at him like a thousand nipples, rowed across the
narrow resort river to the hut of a forest ranger who lived in the
woods opposite the resort all year long. Stern hunted mussels in the
shallow river water alongside the hut, and when his mother emerged from
the hut she would say to him in the boat, "A hundred girls at the hotel
and I'm the only one can make him." To which Stern answered, "I don't
want to hear anything like that." Later, in the afternoon, Stern would
sit at the resort bar with his mother, taking sips of her drink while
his mother told the bartender, "That doesn't frighten me. I'll give him
a little drink at his age. It's the ones that don't get a little drink
from their mothers you have to worry about."
The men around his mother at the bar told dirty jokes to her, and one
afternoon one of them, holding his palms wide apart and parallel, said,
"Baby, my buddy here has one this long, so help me." His mother folded
up with laughter on her barstool, and Stern, suddenly infuriated, hit
the man in the stomach to protect her. His mother pulled him back and
said, "You can't say things to his mother. He'll kill for her." Later,
getting ready for dinner, Stern's mother would take him into the shower
with her and he would stare at the pathetic, gaping blackness between
her legs, filled with a terrible anguish and loss. Then he would
rush down to cut another flower for her and, in the coolness of the
evening, begin to feel very lush and elegant, as though no other boy
in the world was having as wicked and luxurious a time as he, the only
boy in a grown-up resort. His mother would tell him, "You're growing
up too fast. You know more than kids ten years older than you." And
later in the year, at school, Stern would tell his friends, "Boy, do I
know things. Did I see things this summer. My mother isn't like other
mothers. She just doesn't go around acting like a mother." And yet,
with all the panty glimpses on the volleyball court and the barroom
sips of drinks, the dirty jokes and the nervous showers, what did he
actually know? It remained for a busboy in back of the resort kitchen
to tell him about the sex act. Stern couldn't believe the actual
machinery and said, "Really?" and the busboy said, "Yeah. When you put
it in them, they get a funny feeling up their kazoo."
The Grove Rest Home had the sweet summer coolness and the proper
fragrance, but it was a parody of a resort, with all its facilities
torn and incomplete. Stern heard there was a small golf course and
borrowed clubs one morning, setting out to look for it. He tramped
the length of the institution and finally spotted a flag in the
center of some tall weeds far beyond the kitchen. A bald man with a
thick mustache stood alongside the single hole of the golf course,
hands locked behind his back, puffing out his cheeks and flexing
an artificial leg in the style of a British colonel surveying a
battlefield. He said he was an electrician. A hot wire had fallen on
his leg and sheared it off. His main difficulty had been in dealing
with his grown son, who couldn't get used to having a one-legged
father. "I told him you get older, these things happen, but he wouldn't
buy it and kept spitting on the floor." The man spoke with a thick
Brooklyn accent, but when he was silent, flexing his leg, he took on
an amazingly autocratic demeanor, a British colonel once again. "Are
you playing?" Stern asked him. "No, I'm just standing next to the hole
here."
The golf course was a broken, one-holed, weeded one, and Stern's days
at the Grove Rest Home seemed weeded and broken, too. There were no
scheduled activities, and between meals Stern passed the time in the
library, reading peripheral books, ones written by people who had been
close to Thomas Dewey and others about Canada's part in World War II.
The only newspaper available was a terrible local one devoted almost
entirely to zoning developments, but Stern waited for it eagerly at
the front door each night, pacing up and down until it came. He looked
forward, too, to "milk and cookie" each evening at seven, which was the
nearest thing at the Home to a special treat. One night, when he was
in line for his refreshment, the mustached woman squatted down on the
front porch and began to urinate, throwing her kerchiefed head back
and hollering, "Pisscock, pisscock." Gears clanking and grinding and
seemingly slower than ever, Lennie came out from the staff room and
made for her, finally getting there and carrying the woman, screaming,
up to her room. Later, Stern learned she had been taken to Rosenkranz.
In the room that night, the old actor said, "I really liked that doll.
She was sweet stuff, I mean really sweet. Too bad she got the mentals.
When she gets out of here, I'm going to get me some of that stuff, you
wait and see."
Most of the climactic events at Grove seemed to take place on the
porch during "milk and cookie." Another night, the scowling union man,
two places ahead of Stern, fell forward and died. The patients made a
circle around him, as though he were "it" in a sick game, and Rooney
hollered, "Give him mouth-to-mouth." Afraid he would be called upon
to do this, Stern said, "I'll get someone," and ran wildly into the
field beyond the building, making believe he was going through the
proper procedure for handling recent deaths. He came back after a few
minutes to look at the union man on the floor. It was the first dead
person Stern had seen, and the man did not look sweet and peaceful, as
though he were asleep. He looked very bad, as though he had a terrible
stomach-ache. No one had done anything yet, and the half man was now
standing in the circle, croaking, "See what happens. See." It was as
though he was allowed to stand with the others only on occasions such
as this, a thing he knew all about. Finally Lennie arrived, stern and
poised, and leaned over the man. "This is a death," he said coolly,
and Stern thought to himself, "Why did Fabiola send me here? How can
I possibly be helped by seeing guys dying and half men? He made a
mistake."
Yet, despite the wild urination and the curled-up dead man, Stern's
pain diminished gradually. Sometimes, when he sat in the fields on
endlessly long afternoons, waiting for the days to pass, he would probe
his middle cautiously, as though he expected to find that the ulcer
had only been playing dead and would leap out at him suddenly, bigger
than ever. But the circle of pain had grown small and Stern thought how
wonderful it would be if the kike man was getting smaller too, if when
he got back to his house, he could find the man completely gone, his
house erased, all traces of him vanished, as though he'd been taken by
acid or never existed.
* * * * *
One morning, late in Stern's stay, word spread that two industrial
teams were coming to play baseball for the patients at the Home. There
was much excitement, and Stern felt sorry for those shriveled people
whose only fun had been at YMCA's and merchant marine recreation
parlors. Not one had ever seen _My Fair Lady_, and it was small wonder
they looked forward with such delight to a clash between two industrial
teams. In early evening, the night of the game, Stern took his place in
the dumb march formation and walked to the field, poking his belly and
feeling around for the pain flower. It had been replaced by a thin,
crawling brocade of tenderness that seemed to lay wet on the front
of his body and was a little better than the other. But he wondered
whether the ulcer might not roll forth in a great flower once again, at
the first trace of friction, and then he would have the two, the flower
and the brocade. He was aware that in just a few days he would have to
go back to the kike man. What would happen if he merely drove by once,
saw the man's great arms taking out garbage cans, and felt the flower
instantly fill his stomach, one glimpse wiping out five weeks at the
Grove Rest Home? And what if it went on that way, five weeks at Grove,
one glimpse at arms, another five weeks at Grove, arms, until one day
the flower billowed out too far and burst and everything important ran
out of him and there was no more?
Stern walked behind the tall, sputtering, explosive boy, who led the
march with Rooney in his arms. "You know who we ought to take up a
collection for?" Rooney asked Stern as the Rest Home people took seats
in the front row of the small grandstand.
"Who's that?" asked Stern.
"Yogi Berra," cackled Rooney. "I understand he's down to his last
thirty-five cents." The tall boy poured him onto a bench in the front
row and he clung gelatinlike to it, saying, "That Berra doesn't make
ten bucks the whole season," and shaking with laughter. Stern sat
between the tall, erupting young boy and Feldner. The boy, who was
alternately nice and violent to Stern, asked him, "Did you ever play
any ball before you picked up all that ass fat?"
"A little bit," Stern said. "And I'm not that heavy back there." He was
afraid of the boy's sudden eruption and wondered why the boy couldn't
be nice to him all the time. Violence was such a waste. It didn't
accomplish anything. Stern had to worry that the boy would suddenly
erupt and push him through the grandstand seats, maybe snapping his
back like wood. He wanted to tell the boy, "Be nice to me at all times
and I'll tell you things that will make you smart. I'll lend you books
and, when we both get out, take you to a museum, explaining any hard
things."
One of the teams represented a cash register company and the other
a dry cleaning plant, and as they warmed up, the old actor ran out
onto the field, stuck a bat between his legs, and hollered to the
grandstand, "Hey, get this wang-wang. Ain't she a beaut?" A tall,
light-skinned, austere Jamaican Stern thought might have been a
healthy-legged brother of Lennie was the umpire, and he thumbed the
actor back into the stands, saying, "Infraction," and then folded his
arms and jutted his chin to the sky, as though defying thousands.
In the stands, Feldner, in a bathrobe and slippers, shoulders stooped
from years of bending over crap tables, said to Stern, "We had softball
games when I was working under one of the Venezuela rejymes. You know
how long that rejyme lasted? Four days. I really backed some beauties.
That's how I got what you got."
Stern felt sorry for Feldner in his bathrobe, a man whose shoulders
had grown sad from so many disappointments, and wanted to hug him
to make him feel better. Once, Stern's mother, infuriated at having
her clothing allowance cut down by his father, had gone on a strike,
wearing nothing but old bathrobes in the street. This had embarrassed
Stern, who had turned away from her each time she had walked past him
and his friends. Now Stern wanted to embrace Feldner as though to make
it up to his mother for turning his back on her saintlike bathrobed
street marches.
Stern watched the men on the two teams pepper the ball around the field
and then looked at them individually, wondering if there were any on
either team he could beat up. They all seemed fair-skinned and agile,
and Stern decided there were none, until he spotted one he might have
been able to take, a small, bald one playing center field for the cash
register team. But then a ball was hit to the small player and he came
in for it with powerful legs churning furiously and Stern decided
_he_ might be too rough, also. He imagined the small, stumplike legs
churning toward him in a rage and was sure the little man would be able
to pound him to the ground, using endurance and wiriness and leg power.
A black-haired Puerto Rican girl came to sit with the tall, erupting,
blond boy. She helped a nurse take care of a group of feebleminded
children connected to the Home and Stern had seen her with a pen of
them, doing things slow-motion in the sun. From a distance she seemed
to resemble Gene Tierney, but up close he saw that she was a battered
Puerto Rican caricature of Gene Tierney, Tierney being hauled out of
a car wreck in which her face had gone into the windshield. She did
things slow-motion, in the style of the retarded children she helped
supervise. Sitting on the ground in front of the tall, blond, fuselike
boy, she said, "You promised we were goin' dancin'."
"Shut your ass," the tall boy said. "Hey, you want to hear one? Two
nudists, man and a broad, had to break up. You know why? They were
seein' too much of each other."
The Puerto Rican girl giggled and leaned forward in slow motion to
tickle the tall boy. Stern saw her as a Gene Tierney doll manhandled by
retarded children in temper tantrums, then mended in a toy hospital.
"Your sense of humor is very much of the earth," she said.
The tall boy introduced Stern to the girl. "This is Mr. Stern," he
said. "He's a swell guy, even though he's got a fat ass. I'm sorry, Mr.
Stern; only kidding. He's really a good guy. Real smart."
"Listen to this one," the boy continued. "I know a guy who was invited
out by Rita Hayworth. He was in her house at the time." The tall boy
erupted with laughter and the Puerto Rican girl tickled him again in
slow motion. Turning to Stern, she said, "He's a natural man. I'd like
to feel his energy coursing through my vitals." In the distance, Stern
had imagined her hips to be flaring and substantial, but actually
they had a kind of diving, low-slung poverty about them. She wore a
skintight blue skirt, and Stern wondered whether she hadn't worn it for
an entire year and was to wear it the next three until poverty-stricken
Puerto Rican underwear came bursting through its fabric. Still, the
combination of Latin eroticism and intellect flashes appealed to him.
It was a painful thought, and he actually gritted his teeth as it came
to him, but he had to allow it to come through. This tattered Puerto
Rican watcher of feeb kids was probably smarter than his wife, close
to what he'd really wanted. She probably knew undreamed-of, exotic
Puerto Rican love tricks. He could bring her lovely sets of underwear,
tighten up some of her poetic allusions, and make her the perfect
wife. He wished she was tickling him instead of the tall boy. Stern
smiled at the girl. He wanted to tell her he knew better jokes, smooth
situational ones, and if only she gave him a fair chance, several days
of intensive conversation, she would see he was a better bet than the
tall, corny boy. But he felt very old and heavy and was unable to speak.
"Got another," said the sputtering, fuselike, blond boy. "Would you
rather be in back of a hack with a WAC or in front of a jeep with a
creep?"
The girl dug her fingers hungrily into his ribs, saying, "You promised
we'd go dancin'."
"Eat shit," the tall boy said, brushing her aside. "You know," he said
to Stern, "I was once in bed for eight months. My kid sister took care
of me in a little room just big enough for the two of us. Every once
in a while my veins give out and I can't do anything. I don't give a
shit. You live, you live; you die, you die. Only thing I care about is
freedom and old guys not pushing you around."
The game had begun now, and the wheelchaired Greek boy had maneuvered
himself alongside the bench in the front row. He stuck his hand
under the Puerto Rican girl's dress and she cringed back against the
tall, grenadelike youth, saying, "I intensely dislike duos." Stern
wondered what would happen if he went under there, too. He envied the
wheelchaired boy. He'd gone under and nothing had happened. He hadn't
been hauled off into court.
The Greek boy stared out at the cash register company pitcher and said,
"He's a crudhead. I could steal his ass off. He makes one move to pitch
and I'm on third like a shot."
"What are you gonna do?" said the tall boy. "Crawl on your balls?"
"Shut up, tithead," said the Greek boy.
Feldner nudged Stern and said, "I used to like baseball, but there was
only one rejyme ever let us play." Then he hollered out, "Swing, baby,
swing; you can hit him, baby," as though to demonstrate to Stern his
familiarity with the game.
"See," he said, and Stern wanted to take him around and soothe him
for being a bathrobed failure who was worried about a mysterious new
something inside him.
Sitting in the grandstand now, feeling Feldner's warm, bathrobed bulk
against him, Stern, despite the tender sheet that lay wet against the
front of his body, felt somewhat comfortable and took a deep breath,
as though to enjoy to the fullest the last few days before his return
to the kike man. He was afraid of the charged and sputtering boy on
his left, afraid that in a violent, pimpled, swiftly changing mood he
might suddenly smash Stern back through the grandstand benches. Yet,
despite the grenadelike boy, Stern still felt good being at a ball
game among people he knew, broken as they were. He had cut himself off
from people for a long time, it seemed, living as he did in a cold and
separate place, and he thought now how nice it would be if all these
people were his neighbors, Rooney in a split-level, Feldner next door
in a ranch, and the old actor nearby in a converted barn. Even the
half man would not be so bad to have around, living out his time in an
adjacent colonial until the last half was taken away. All of them would
form a buffer zone between Stern and the man down the street. That way,
if the kike man ever came to fight him on his lawn, his neighbors would
gather on the property and say, "Hands off. He's a nice guy. Touch him
and we'll open your head."
Late in the game, a line drive caught the little bald cash register
outfielder in the nose and he went down behind second base with a great
red bloodflower in the center of his face. There were no substitute
ballplayers, and the austere Jamaican umpire, flipping through the
rule book, said, "Forfeit," jutting his chin toward the grandstand, as
though ready to withstand a hail of abuse.
"I'll run that coon the hell out of here," said the wheelchaired Greek,
waving his fist. "I come to see a ball game."
"That's right," said the tall boy, pimples flaring, beginning to
ignite. Suddenly, his face softened. He grabbed Stern's collar and
shouted, "We got someone. This guy here will play. Don't mind his fat
ass." To Stern, he said, "I didn't mean that. I know you can't help
it." He turned to the Puerto Rican girl and said, "Hey, a man brings
home a donkey, see. So all day he goes around patting his ass."
The girl smiled, showing salt-white teeth with only the tiniest chip
on a front one. She lay back, putting her head on the tall boy's lap
and waggling a leg lazily, so that a gleam of Puerto Rican underwear
caught the sunlight. "Boredom and you are ever enemies," she said to
the tall boy. "Please sneak out and take me dancin'." The others in the
stands were cheering for Stern now, and he stood up, afraid the tall
boy's pimples might sputter into violence again and also not wanting to
hurt anyone's feelings. It was easy to just start trotting out toward
the field. He fully expected to turn back with a big smile and say,
"I'm not going out there. Not when I'm sick." But he found himself
jogging all the way out to center field, unable to get himself to
return. Winded, he stood in a crouch, hands on knees, as though capable
of fast, dynamic spurts after balls. He hoped the Puerto Rican girl was
watching and would see him as being potentially lithe and graceful,
equal to the tall boy. Feldner ran out in his bathrobe and slippers and
said, "Do you know what will happen to you? With what you got? You play
and you're dead in a minute and a half."
Stern motioned him back, saying, "I'm not sure I have what you had.
Everyone's got a different kind of thing." But when Feldner turned
away, discouraged, Stern was sorry he had been harsh to a man in a
bathrobe.
From the stands, Stern heard the Greek boy shout, "You show 'em, fat
ass," and Stern hoped the girl would not think of him only as a man
with a giant behind. The austere Jamaican umpire checked Stern, looked
at his rule book, said, "Legalistic," and turned stoically toward the
wind.
The second hitter hit a pop fly to short center field, and Stern,
since childhood afraid to turn his back and go after balls hit past
him, joyfully ran forward and caught the ball with his fingertips, so
thrilled it had been hit in front of him he almost cried. He did a
professional slap forward and returned the ball to the infield, wishing
at that moment the kike man was there so he could see that Jews did
not sit all day in mysterious temples but were regular and played
baseball and, despite a tendency to short-windedness, had good throwing
arms.
A sick, reedlike cheer came from the torn people in the grandstand
after Stern's catch. At the end of the inning, he trotted toward the
dugout and heard the Greek boy say, "Nice one, fat ass, baby," but
he averted his eyes with DiMaggio-like reserve and sat on the cash
register team's bench. Feldner came over in his bathrobe and said,
"What did I tell you?"
"What do you mean?" said Stern.
"Look at yourself. You should see your face."
"I look all right," said Stern. "And I'm playing now." Sitting among
the lean, neutral-faced cash register team, he was ashamed of Feldner's
bathrobed presence and motioned him away. But, as Feldner left, Stern
again regretted his curtness and wanted to shout, "Come back. You're
more to me than these blond fellows."
Stern got to bat in the inning. Afraid the dry cleaning pitcher had
discovered his Jewishness and planned to put a bloodflower between
his eyes, too, he swung on the first pitch, hitting it on the ground.
Forgetting to run, he stood on the base path and actually squeezed with
his bowels, hoping the ball would get past the third baseman. When it
filtered through the infield for a hit, Stern hollered "Yoo" and ran
to first, sending home the runner in front of him and tying the score.
His team won in that inning and the patients gathered round him on the
field. "You clobber their ass, baby," said the Greek boy with genuine
sincerity, reaching up from the wheelchair to pat Stern's back. The
tall boy, with gentleness in his lips, the ticking in him fading, said,
"No fooling, you get around good. I mean, for a guy with a can like
yours." The Puerto Rican girl, still lying on the bench with gaping
skirt, said, "We're all goin' dancin' tonight. Either alfresco or in
my place. The group has much charm." Only Feldner had misgivings. "You
signed your death warrant out there," he said, and for a moment Stern
felt a bubble tremble outward inside him; he was certain he was going
to have to pay for his indiscretion by starting from scratch with a
brand new ulcer, slightly larger and a fraction more formidable than
his first. But the bubble fluttered and withered, like a wave breaking,
and the patients kept congratulating him. He had struck a blow for
sickness. As a reward he got to carry Rooney back to the porch for
evening "milk and cookie."
* * * * *
Late that night, the tall, blond boy and the wheelchaired Greek came
for Stern as he sat alone on the porch. The others had gone to bed and
the tall boy said, "We're meeting the kid with the boobs on the outside
tonight. I figure we get a few beers and, later, diddle her boobs."
"I take her upstairs and do some jazzing," said the boy in the
wheelchair.
Stern, flattered at being selected by the two, and not really sure how
to say no, got up from his chair, giddy and dangerous in the night.
The trio started down the corridor and then heard Lennie rasping and
clattering after them, a man with a machine shop going full blast below
his waist.
"There is to be no disobedience of the nighttime rules," he said, and,
as the boys turned to face him, Stern wondered which side he would be
on in a fight. He imagined Lennie standing against the wall, looking
patiently at Stern, while the tall boy bent his contraptions and tore
out his clamps and gears and the Greek boy hit him many times on the
head to no avail. Stern pictured himself watching this, frozen to
the side, asking Lennie, "Do you need any help?" And then Lennie, his
machinery mangled, finally turning from Stern with great calm and
slowly rising up, trunklike and great-armed, to hug the breath out of
the two boys, subduing them for the night.
As it was, the Greek boy merely wheeled around, saying "Coon fucker"
under his breath, and the tall boy, with great sweetness, said, "We
were just being happy with Mr. Stern for getting a hit with a fat ass."
The two boys returned to the dormitory, and as Stern walked after them,
the Negro stopped him and said, "There can be a little staying up later
sometimes. If authorities come, though, I didn't see you."
Stern said, "Thank you," but he felt very uncomfortable about the favor
and wanted to do a thousand quick ones for the Negro. He wanted to
tell him that if he ever got into trouble with the police, he could
hide in Stern's house, or if he ever wound up helpless and drugged on
Welfare Island, Stern would go take a taxi in the middle of the night
and cut through red tape to get him into a decent hospital. But the
Negro clattered off in a metallic symphony and Stern sat guiltily on a
chair, staring off at the winking lights of Rosenkranz. He stayed up
late, sucking in the dewy air, exulting in its freshness, aware there
were only a few days before his return to the kike man and yet thrilled
that there were those few days. He wished that he were clever enough
to stretch his mind so that he could turn those days into eternities,
fondling each second, stretching it, cramming a lifetime into it before
yielding it selfishly for the next one. Perhaps if he stayed on the
porch and stared at the night, pinned it with his eyes, he would be
able to hold it there and forever block out daylight. Across the field
he studied Rosenkranz and wondered whether at some future date he might
not himself be taken there, ulcer-free but a mindless urinator now,
squatting beside the others, filling the corridors with a giant stream
and cackling at the walls.
* * * * *
The following night, the three evaded Lennie and dashed drunkenly at
midnight across the lawn toward the main gate, the tall, blond boy
propelling the Greek ahead, as though the wheelchaired youth were a
wild street hoop. "We meet that coon fucker tonight," said the Greek,
his vehicle skidding across the wet grass, "he and me going to tangle
asses." Stern kept looking back over his shoulder at the main building,
as though he were a child running away from home, taking one giddy step
and then another but always remaining close enough to dash back and
say he was only fooling. He wondered what punishment Lennie would mete
out if they were caught--and could he protest it to a higher authority
without appearing to be anti-Negro? If Lennie made him stay in his
room, for example. Since there were only a few days left, he would
probably stay in there and let it go without fuss.
The tall boy suddenly released the wheelchair and flicked his body to
the top branches of a tree like a whip, swinging easily in the wind.
"Aren't I a crazy bastard?" he said from above. "That's what the guys
said when I was working on high wires. I never used a safety harness. I
don't care if I fall down and break my head." He swung from branch to
branch like a lean night animal and the Greek boy said, "I'm cutting
out. I don't want to do no stuff on trees. I want to do some jazzing."
"How you going to get up here?" said the tall boy. "With your bony ass?"
Stern wanted to tell him not to make fun of the young Greek's missing
leg, but the tree swings had intimidated him and he had no desire to
run up against the tall boy's explosive wiriness. Dropping easily to
the ground, the tall boy flung the wheelchair on ahead of him and
said, "Did you see me up there? Aren't I one helluva crazy bastard? I
don't care what happens to me."
Stern said, "You were very good up there," and the boy said, "But
sometimes everything stops in me. I lay in bed for six months and I
can't get out. My kid sister brings me soup. It's in my veins. That's
what I'm in here for."
There were no guards at the gate, but as they rolled toward it, Stern
had a sudden fear that Lennie had been watching them all along; the
instant they passed the gate, he would have them picked up in trucks
and initiate punitive measures.
"They don't like you to go through this gate," Stern said, but the
Greek boy, wheeling right through, said, "I got to hop on something.
Then I'm happy." And Stern raced along after the pair. The three of
them traveled seven blocks in darkness, and when they came to a small
bar and grill the blond boy said, "I can taste that brew already. I
can't go no more than a few days without a few brews." The Puerto
Rican girl was waiting for them in a booth, and it seemed to Stern
that she was more like Tierney than ever, Tierney after a session with
two longshoremen who'd been paid to rough her up a little, not to kill
her but to change her face around a little. She wore a bulging black
sweater, and her paper-white teeth were chipped a little. Stern, drunk
with the danger of having run away from the Home, wondered what her
teeth would be like on sections of his body; perhaps they would nibble
erotically at him in the style of some primeval creature of the Puerto
Rican rain forests.
"And so ends my solitude," she said as the blond boy slid in beside her.
Stern, a weakened, dropping, off-balance feeling coming over him as
a result of her literary flourish, took a seat across the table. The
Greek boy swung close, chewing on his nails, examining the chrome and
red leather décor. "This place stinks," he said. "We got better places
in East Harlem."
"Get this," said the blond boy, poking the girl in the ribs and winking
at Stern. "You know what a kiss is? An upper persuasion for a lower
invasion." The girl pecked at his ear with her chipped teeth and said,
"Forever play the jester." The proprietor, a tall, toplike man who
looked out on the street as he spoke, came over and asked, "What'll it
be?"
"We're just in here nice," said the blond boy. "We came in here nice
and all we want to do is drink nice. Nobody bothers us, we don't bother
nobody. Right, Mr. Stern? Didn't we come in here nice?"
"Yes," said Stern, smiling at the man, feeling the air charge up and
wanting to stop whatever was about to happen. The brocade of tenderness
appeared suddenly to girdle his stomach. He was not sure he could
take any trouble, and he imagined himself collapsing and having to be
carried back to the Home by his two friends, the Puerto Rican girl
walking contemptuously behind, aware now that Stern had the least
romantic disease of all.
"Brews all around," the blond boy said, his mood suddenly sweetening.
When the proprietor returned to the bar, the blond boy squeezed the
girl's breasts and said, "How they hangin', doll?"
"Hey, George--motorboat," he said, waggling his head from side to side
against her breasts and making a droning sound in his throat.
"I don't go for that," said the Greek boy, eating deep down on his
nails and leaning forward on his wheelchair, as though watching a tense
horse race. "I like to do some real jazzing."
The girl sat patiently through this, running her fingers through the
blond boy's hair. "The physical side," she said to Stern, who nodded
back at her, his heart in his throat, as though he too considered
breast-nuzzling a bore.
The proprietor brought the beers and said, "Pay now." The blond boy
said, "Remember what I said when we came in? I said we're coming in
here nice. Nobody pushes us around, we don't do any bumping either. Now
you come over and you say pay now."
"It's a house rule," said the proprietor, staring out the window.
"Everybody pays now." Stern, the brocade tightening around his stomach
and wanting to do something, put down two dollars and the proprietor
took it. The Greek boy said, "You think you got such a hot place here.
This place stinks." He spit on the floor and the proprietor went back
to the bar.
"That's what I was telling you," the blond boy said to Stern with a
pleading compassion in his voice. "Nobody gives you freedom. You come
into a place nice, you know, and you just want a few brews, and look
what happens."
"He thinks just because he's got a fancy place he can give you shit,"
said the Greek boy. "I spit on his ass."
The blond boy's mood suddenly changed and he took hold of one of the
girl's breasts again. "Good set, huh, Mr. Stern?" And Stern nodded
sweetly in agreement, looking apologetically at the girl, as though he
was only going along with this line of conversation to be polite and
really never thought of such things.
"What about the dancin'?" the girl asked, looking over at the jukebox.
"Does my love feel a tango within him?"
"Dancing, shit," said the blond boy. He looked over at the proprietor,
who was rinsing glasses, and said, "He comes over here again, we get
him. You can be nice up to a certain point."
"He thinks he has a fancy place," said the boy in the wheelchair. "I'll
cut his balls."
Stern, his stomach pumping, wanted to say, "Wait. No fighting. You
have other things, but I have an ulcer, the kind of thing you shouldn't
get excited with. What if I get hit in it and get another new one?"
When the proprietor came over to the table, the blond boy arranged his
fingers like two donkey's ears and stuck them swiftly in the man's
eyes. The proprietor said, "I can't see now," holding his eyes, and the
Greek boy grabbed his hair and yanked the man's head down on his lap,
saying, "I ought to cut your balls." Then he held the man by the hair
in a bent-over position and the tall, blond boy began to kick at the
man's upper legs, the kicks making sharp, fresh cracking sounds, like
new baseballs off a bat. Stern, who had stood by doing nothing, wanted
to say, "Stop, you're going too far. The hair stuff wasn't so bad, but
now you can do spinal injury." But a current began snapping through
him and he looked for something to do. There was one other person in
the bar, a small man with a toothbrush mustache who was eating a heavy
soup. Stern ran over and grabbed him from behind, pinning his arms.
"I'm not in this," said the man.
"That's all right," said Stern, ecstatic over being in the fight, his
stomach free and easy. How wonderful it would be, he thought, if he
could be transported in this very condition to the kike man's front
porch, the current snapping through him, the same excited sweat in
his arms. He was certain he would be able to fight him and not feel
a single blow, and for an instant he thought of jumping in a cab and
speeding back to his house, gritting his teeth to preserve the mood.
The cab fare would be $150 or so, but it would be worth it. But what if
the current then began to fade, the sweat dry up, and he found himself
nearing the man's house with a growing fright, worrying about being hit
in the ulcer? He saw that he would have to get there instantaneously or
it would not work.
After many kicks, the proprietor said, "That's enough," and the blond
boy, as though waiting for him to signal with those very words, said,
"Let's cut," shoving his wheelchaired friend through the door. Stern
said, "I'm letting you go now," to the mustached soup eater and ran
out the door after the girl, looking back at the proprietor. He was
relieved to see that the man was standing; it seemed to him that only
when people were on the floor might there be police involvement. The
quartet ran through blackened, neatly shrubbed residential streets, and
Stern wondered how running was for the ulcer. Would jogging up and down
disengage it and cause it to take residence in another part of him? He
was suddenly struck by the incongruity of the quartet--a grenadelike,
blond boy with strange vein problems; a wheelchaired Greek; a heavy Jew
with ulcer-filled stomach; and a strange, Tierney-like girl who spoke
in literary flourishes. And yet they were comrades of a sort and he
was glad to be with them, to be doing things with them, to be running
and bellowing to the sky at their sides; he was glad their lives were
tangled up together. It was so much better than being a lone Jew
stranded on a far-off street, your exit blocked by a heavy-armed kike
hater in a veteran's jacket.
They slowed down after a while and Stern put his arm around the girl's
waist, as though he had been unable to stop and was using her to steady
himself. Her neck was wet from the exercise, and the pungent dime-store
fragrance of her hair brought him close to a delighted faint.
"Hey, you grabbin' my girl," said the blond boy, and, with a straight
face, whipped a blue-veined, grenadelike fist into Stern's ulcer,
stopping at the last possible instant and saying "Pow!" instead of
landing the blow. Then he threw his head back and howled, saying, "You
grab my girl, I got to give you one. Pow, pow, pow!"
"Suivez-moi to my petite habitat," said the girl, going up ahead of the
group. "And a young girl shall lead them."
Not sure whether further waist encirclements were permissible, Stern
walked beside her, and she said, "I used to work in a hardware store.
You meet a princely selection of spooks there, it being near the main
drag. One such spook came in one morning and said his friend wanted
to spend the evening with me for $140. I asked him where yon friend
was. He said he was across the street in a building watching the two
of us with a telescope and would come down if I assented. I replied in
the negative, of course. I'll entertain a man, to be sure, but not a
telescoping type. You do agree there are many spooks in this land of
ours." Stern, flattered that she had told him an anecdote, was not sure
what to reply and decided he would tell her about his ulcer, testing
her reaction.
"I've got something inside me. That's why I'm at the Home. I'm not sure
how all this running around will affect me."
"The shits," she said. "I know them. The shits are a chore." She
whirled around now and slid her fingers under the shirt of the tall,
blond boy. "Does the darling midnight fool feel a cha-cha within him?"
she asked. The blond boy took one hand off the wheelchair, tapped the
underside of her breast, and said, "Flippety-flippety. Hey, Stern, you
see that? Flippety-flippety."
The girl led them to the last house at the edge of a dead-end street;
a sign saying "Tina's Beauty Salon" was in the center of the lawn
alongside a thin and graceful tree. It had a white luminescent
stripe across the bottom of its slender trunk, making it look like a
thoroughbred horse's taped ankle.
"My queenly habitat," said the girl, and led them through the front
door and down a long corridor with lined-up rows of hair-drying
machines. She opened a door at the end of the corridor and guided them
now into a small, sparely furnished room with a single bed and one
wall papered with Broadway show posters. The lamplight within was
warm, making her features seem smoother and heightening the Tierney
resemblance; Stern, weakened now by the bulge of her black sweater, the
things she had been saying, and the show posters, wondered how it would
be getting a divorce, being bled financially, and starting up anew with
the Puerto Rican girl in this very room.
The girl flicked on a victrola, putting a finger to her lips, and said,
"I'm just a tattered tenant here." She closed her eyes and swayed to
the music as though it were a treatment; her body lagged a trifle
behind the beat, in the slow-motion style of the feebleminded children
she watched each day. Holding out her arms to the blond boy, she said,
"Step inside this delightful sound." The blond boy came over, pinched
her skirt, and said, "Check your oil." Then he pointed to the Greek
boy, who sat staring out at the stars, rubbing his hands as though
washing them in a sink. "Dance with George," said the blond boy. "Hey,
George, dance with the broad." The Greek boy, his back to the others,
a lawyer deciding a case, said, "I don't like dancing. I came out with
you to do some jazzing."
The tall boy suddenly grabbed the Greek's wheelchair and pushed it out
the door, saying, "I got an idea." Inside the beauty parlor room, he
picked up a cigarette holder, put on a hairnet, and sat beneath a hair
dryer. "Hey, look at me," he hollered back to Stern and the girl. "I'm
an old broad."
The girl closed the door and said, "Boredom sets in swiftly." Still
swaying to the music, she asked Stern, "What is your work?" Thrilled
by her sudden interest and loving the way she had asked the question,
Stern said, "Product labels. There's some writing to it, only not
literary." Dancing with closed eyes and lagging behind the beat,
she said, "Someday I, too, shall write a volume. I shall include the
sweetness and bile of my life." She stopped dancing now and said, "One
of the spooks at the hardware store asked me to do some modeling.
Bearded chap. Does figure work mean you work in the altogether, or does
one get to keep a doodad on?"
"I don't get into that in my work," said Stern. "I don't like the
sound of what you said, though. I have some friends who are legitimate
photographers."
She changed the record to a fox-trot now and, taking off her skirt,
said, "How would I look adorning magazines?"
Stern stopped breathing, and it suddenly came home to him that they
were only a mile or so from the Grove Rest Home and that he was
supposed to be undergoing treatment. He was certain that he would be
caught, and he tried to imagine what untold horrors would await him if
he were brought before the Home committee. At the very least they would
throw him out, marking his records so that he would be banned from
other rest homes when, at some later date, new illnesses came on. Then
he imagined one gentile on the committee smiling thinly and saying,
"No, no, let's let him stay," and then seeing to it that he was given
a daily allotment of tarnished pills so that his stomach sprouted an
entire forest of ulcers.
She put her hand on her hips in a terrible thirties pose and then took
off her sweater, saying, "Oh yes, the bosom culture; I'd forgotten."
Her breasts poured forward, capped by slanting, evil, Puerto Rican
nipples, and Stern had a sudden feeling that his wife, at that very
moment, sad-eyed and chattering with need, was hoisting her own sweater
above her head in the rear seat of a limousine, that there was a
strange sexual balance wheel at work, and that for every indiscretion
of Stern's his wife would commit one too, at best only seconds later.
Like a discharged mortar shell, the tall, blond boy, a salivated look
of rage on his face, charged into the room now and said, "Oh, you
lookin' at my girl's nips, eh?" He shoved Stern against the wall and
shot his fist at Stern's neck, stopping once again at the final instant
and saying "Fwot" instead of landing the blow. Then he became convulsed
with laughter, doubling up on the bed and howling, "I got you again."
The boy stood up then and kissed the girl's nipples with loud, smacking
sounds and said to the Greek, "Good set, eh?" Stern, feeling somehow
that the girl's breasts were going to get hurt, walked over to her and
said, "We were discussing something and she was demonstrating it." The
tall boy said softly, "Oh, that's all right. I just like to diddle her
boobs a little. George and me will take ten outside and kid around
with those dryers." Then, with increasing kindness, he said, "You know
the way you say things? Like what you just said? You were _discussing_
something. That's nice. The way you have of saying all the thoughts in
your head."
Stern noticed now for the first time that the boy's T-shirt had holes
in it, and he felt very sorry for possibly having taken something away
from him. What if his veins acted up and he had to spend six months in
a room, unable to swing from trees and make believe he was going to hit
Stern in the ulcer?
"We can all stay in here and play around," said Stern, but the blond
boy walked out, saying, "That's all right, Mr. Stern, sir." To the boy
in the wheelchair, Stern said, "You can stick around," but the Greek
youth, rubbing his hands, said, "No, I don't feel like it tonight. You
know, some nights you're just not in the mood for jazzing." He wheeled
himself out of the room, closing the door behind him, and the girl
put her arms around Stern's neck and said, "Sweet riddance. Now, my
knighted author, will you be with me on the highest of all levels?"
Minutes previous, when she had taken off her clothes, Stern had planned
merely to stare at her and fix her in his memory. Perhaps he would tap
her behind and feel her breasts in the style of the other boys and then
race back across the streets to the Grove Rest Home. It seemed to him
that somehow if he did more, the Home would definitely hear of it, his
treatment would be disrupted at an early stage, and he would be doomed
to walk the streets forever with a permanent ulcer blooming between
his ribs. And, of course, if he were to go further, within minutes
his own wife, skirt gaping and great eyes confident, would sink back
comfortably on the rear cushions of some strange convertible.
He waited for an outraged knock at the door, the clatter of Lennie's
machine-shop legs, but nothing came and he fitted his hands over the
girl's nylon-covered buttocks, thinking that he had never held a
Puerto Rican behind before and that maybe it _was_ a little different.
She took his ear between her chipped white teeth, as though she were
an animal pawing meat, and said, "Wondrous author of mine, explore
forbidden avenues with deponent thine."
She guided him to the bed, did a dipping thing to make herself nude,
and said, "Honest, do you think I'm sensitive?"
"Yes," said Stern, who loved the things she said.
She pulled him to her and said, "Then thrill my secret fibers." She put
a contraceptive on him and said, "Now, honey, don't spoil it. Really,
let's do a good one." It bothered Stern that she had the contraceptive
on hand, but he liked the way she managed it, and the idea of her
having one ready suddenly threw him into a frenzy. After a moment, she
whispered, "We are as pages in a book of sonnets. Really give it to
me." He said, "All right," and after a few seconds she rose and said,
a little irritatedly, "Oh, you thrilled me, all right. You really
thrilled me." She got into her clothes, and then the irritation passed,
and she perched on the bed beside him and said, "Such loveliness I have
never known." Her bare brown Puerto Rican knees excited Stern and he
wanted her again. He had loved the things she whispered to him and the
sting of her teeth pulling on his flesh like meat. "Tell me of your
literary prowess," she said.
The door opened and the blond boy came in and said, "We're tired of
sitting around out there."
Stern looked out in the corridor and saw the Greek boy's wheelchair
against the window. He went outside to him and found the boy crying.
"My leg is gone," he said. "I ain't got two fucking legs any more."
Stern took the boy's head against his waist and rubbed his neck, trying
to think of something to tell him. But there was nothing. What could he
say? That the leg would grow back again? "Some people have things even
worse than legs in their stomachs," he said finally. He wheeled the
boy inside the room, where the girl sat perched on the bed. The tall,
blond boy picked up an extra-long broomstick handle and said, "Hey,
George, let's give her a ride." He quickly slid the broomstick between
the girl's legs, and the boy in the wheelchair, getting the idea, dried
his eyes, wheeled close, and caught the other end, so that they had
her straddling the stick as though she were on a fence. They began to
lift her up and down on the broomstick, the two of them howling at
the ceiling, while the girl shouted, "Lemme off, you bastards." Stern
shouted, "You'll hurt her down there," but she looked so awkward, he
stopped loving her immediately. When she cursed at them, Stern looked
at her and said, "I can't do anything."
"Hey, Mr. Stern, keep her up there," said the blond boy, and Stern
took the Greek boy's end and tossed her up and down a few times,
saying, "I'm going to do this a little, too."
They finally let her down, and for an instant, straightening her skirt,
she smoothed her hair and pretended nothing had happened. "Let me tell
you further of my book," she said to Stern. But, after seeing her on
the pole, the thought of her terrible Puerto Rican writing disgusted
him and he said, "No literary stuff now."
She bent over then, holding her crotch, and said, "Ooh, you really
hurt me down there, you cruddy bastards." Stern felt good that she
had addressed all three of them, not excluding him, and it thrilled
him to be flying out of her apartment with his new friends, all three
howling and smacking each other with laughter at the pole episode. He
wanted to be with them, not with her. He needed buddies, not a terrible
Puerto Rican girl. He needed close friends to stand around a piano with
and sing the Whiffenpoof song, arms around each other, perhaps before
shipping out somewhere to war. If his dad got sick, he needed friends
to stand in hospital corridors with him and grip his arm. He needed
guys to stand back to back with him in bars and take on drunks. These
were tattered, broken boys, one in a wheelchair, but they were buddies.
They skidded across the lawn, wildly recalling the night's events.
The blond boy: "You see me kick that guy's ass? Pow, pow, pow!"
The Greek: "We almost ran that broomstick up the broad's kazoo, man."
Stern: "Did you see me hold that strong little guy at the bar?"
They split up at the main gate, each stealing back to his room
separately. "Tomorrow night, maybe we do some real jazzing," said the
boy in the wheelchair as they parted.
Exhilarated as he slipped past Lennie's darkened office, Stern,
approaching his room, felt his stomach and was surprised to find the
tapestry still prickling raw against it. Perhaps excitement is not good
for it, he thought--even good excitement. But it did not really bother
him, and it occurred to him for the first time that if necessary, by
God, he would live with the damned thing. He opened his door now and
saw the half man, bathrobe flown apart, toothache towel around his jaw,
sitting on Stern's bed. The sleeping actor's foot stirred momentarily,
tapping the edge of the bed in time to some forgotten vaudeville turn.
Stern wheeled around in a panic, wanting to flee the room until the
half man was out of there and his bed was scrubbed. He went out into
the hall, but the half man chased and caught him, gripping Stern's
wrist in a death vise. "Question," he radio-croaked in the dark hall.
"What?" asked Stern, his eyes closed so he would not see the half man,
not daring to inhale lest he smell his halves.
"You Jewish?" the man asked, croaking so close his mouth worked against
Stern's ear.
"Yes," said Stern, shutting his eyes until they hurt.
"Me, too," croaked the man, wheeling Stern around so that he had to
face him. "I'm Jewish, too."
It did not thrill Stern to hear this. It was no great revelation, and
it failed to touch him, just as the man's terrible violin playing had
not moved him either. He said, "OK," and freed his wrist, but as he
walked away a crumbling chill seemed to invade him, starting between
his shoulder blades and pouring through all of him. He turned and
kissed the man and hugged him and put his nose up against the man's
toothache towel, and then, perhaps using some of the courage he had
amassed that evening, embraced the man's bad side, too.
* * * * *
He had counted on firm handshakes and hearty good-byes, exchanged phone
numbers, pledges to continue friendships, and deep sincere looks in the
eye, but on the morning of his departure he found that the people at
Grove hung away from him. He was sitting on the porch with them, after
leading the dumb march back from breakfast with Rooney in his arms, and
he said to Rooney, "I'm all better and I'm going home today."
Rooney, who had been clinging to a pole and making waspish comments
about the wealth of horse owners, turned to Stern and said, "You didn't
say anything about that."
The old actor overheard Stern and said, "What did you come up for, if
you were only staying such a little time? That's really country, boy,
really country."
It was as though by getting healthy he had violated a rotted, fading
charter of theirs and let them down. He had come into their sick club
under false pretenses, enjoying the decayed rituals, and all the while
his body wasn't ruined at all. He was secretly healthy, masquerading as
a shattered man so that he could milk the benefits of their crumbling
society. And now he felt bad about not being torn up as they were.
"I didn't know you weren't that sick," said Feldner in his bathrobe. "I
had what you got, and I needed the warm of a stew in me every day for
two years."
"I may have to come right back," said Stern, trying to make the man in
the bathrobe feel better.
He went over to the charged-up blond boy, who was leaning on the young
Greek's wheelchair, and said, "Maybe you can take a run by my place
when you get sprung."
But the camaraderie of the wild evening was gone. "You weren't even in
here much," said the blond boy, and the Greek youth said, "Yeah, what'd
you come up here--to fool around?"
Only Lennie was consistent that morning. He had taken Stern's baggage
out of the room himself, and when Stern tried to help him, he said,
"No infractions on last days. There are patients who rupture before
check-out, and legal suits come about. Patients to the right as we take
baggage downstairs." At the bottom of the steps, he loaded Stern's
valises onto the baggage rack and walked intricately into his office.
"Final pill," he said to Stern, getting one ready in a little cup. When
the Negro handed him the pill cup, Stern stuck a folded-up five-dollar
bill in the pocket of the intern's jacket. His mother had always stuck
bills in the pockets of busboys and waiters and, after each insertion,
had said, "I never missed that kind of money. You should see the
respect I got for it." Lennie took the bill out of his jacket, examined
it, and put it back in his pocket. He started to turn around, but
then he changed his mind and asked Stern, "Anyone around?" Stern said
everyone was out on the porch, and the Negro said, "Come on in here
then," beckoning Stern into the forbidden office. "Have a seat," said
Lennie, locking them both in. He sat down himself, releasing gears and
switches, and then produced a loose-leaf notebook. He thumbed through
it, stopped at a page, and said, "The old actor guy. Guy you roomin'
with. He go around saying he got the weakness. He ain't coming out of
here. They been trying to get him ready for another operation, but
he too weak." He flipped the page and said, "Girl check in here two
days ago," referring to a young and pretty blond girl who had kept to
herself. "She says she restin'. Well, she got something in her from
intercoursin' with a man too big for her. Who else you want to know?"
"None of the others right now," said Stern, wanting to leave the room
but afraid to offend the Negro.
"That's all right," said Lennie, turning to another page. "Rooney, the
guy you carryin'. Bones softening up; nothing they can do on him. He
be here for the duration." He flipped again. "Feldner, the Jew fella.
He hit Casino. He gettin' out but ain't got no more'n a year." Without
referring to the book, he said, "The half guy you see stalkin' around.
He surprisin' everybody. He gawn be around when they all through."
The Negro ran through the other patients, while Stern made himself
small in his chair and tried to block out all sound. After the last
patient, Stern found himself putting another bill in the Negro's
pocket, as though he hadn't realized what he was getting and saw now
that he had underpaid.
A sweet and choirlike glow came over the Negro's face as he showed
Stern out of the office and began to push the baggage cart. All the
way to the administration building he blurted out secrets of the Home.
"Nobody know it, but they get tranquilizer every day," he said. "Guy
gonna die, we shift him to Room 12 so we can whip him out of there when
he go and not shake up no one."
And after each batch of secrets, Stern compulsively stuffed another
bill in the Negro's jacket, wanting him to stop and tell no others,
yet paying him for each pair. On the front steps of the administration
building, Stern saw his wife's car. The Negro, a little flustered,
strained for a climactic one and finally said, "Staff get to eat better
than the patients. We get better cuts of meat and all we want." Stern
let Lennie get his bags on the car rack and stuffed a final five into
his pocket.
"You didn't have to tell me any of those," Stern said, getting behind
the wheel and taking his last look at the Grove Rest Home. But then,
lest he hurt the Negro attendant's feelings, he said, "But thanks," and
swept out of the driveway.
* * * * *
"I thought I'd always have it in there, but the parachute is gone,"
Stern told his wife as they drove home. "It feels as though I have a
hot tablecloth around the front of me now, but it's better than the
chute."
She sat beside him with one tanned leg folded beneath her, her great
eyes glistening, wet with expectancy. She wore a cotton jumper, and
when Stern leaned over to kiss her, he saw that her blouse was loose
and he could make out the start of her nipples beneath her half bra.
It got him nervous, and he said, "Why are you wearing your blouse like
that? When you bend over, people can actually see the nipples. That
isn't any damned good."
"It isn't?" she said, teasing him. "Oh well, don't worry; it's only
when you get real close."
"None of that's funny," said Stern. "I just got out of the goddamned
place for my stomach. Do you still go to that dance class?"
"Oh yes," she said, sitting against the door, her eyes huge. "That's
what saved me when you were in there. First we dance like crazy and
then we congregate at the overnight diner on Olivetti Street. That's
the best part. You should hear one of the girls talk. Dirtier than
anything you've ever heard. She's a scream. Then José spins me home,
since he lives out our way."
"Is there any more of that tongue stuff?" Stern asked.
"Don't be silly," she said. "He kisses everybody. It's what they do."
She hung back against the door, her skirt above her browned knees,
and Stern wondered whether she had gone to bed with the instructor,
getting into tangled, modern dance positions with him. How did he know
she hadn't spent the entire five weeks of his sickness at endless,
exhausting, intricately choreographed lovemaking, flying to the
instructor seconds after she had deposited Stern at the Home? She
seemed curled up, contented, shimmering with peace, as though someone
had finally pressed the right buttons and relieved the dry, chattering
hunger Stern had never been able to cope with. Perhaps she had gone
to him in a desperate way, knowing that the instructor, however thin
of bone and feminine of gesture, would never allow her to be insulted
and would attack any offender with Latin fury. In any case, the secret
was locked between her warm thighs. He would never know what had gone
on, and he felt a drooping, weakened sensation and wondered why there
couldn't be a chemical test, a litmus paper you could hold up to women
to find out how many times they'd been to bed since last you saw them.
"Were having a recital and I've got to rehearse practically every
night. It saved me while you were away. I'd have gone crazy."
"I don't know about any recitals," Stern said. "I've got to have
everything easy on me. I don't want that thing coming back. I never
want to go back to any rest homes. If I go back there, I'm really
cooked."
At the Home, several days before Stern left, Rooney, hanging from an
overhead porch beam, had told Stern of a merchant seaman who had gotten
over an ulcer and who subsequently was incapable of being riled. "You
could stick it into him from morning till midnight and he'd just give
you a little smile and off he'd go like a contented cow." Now, as he
drove home, Stern, who had spoken sharply to his wife and had felt
the hot brocade tighten against the front of him, began suddenly to
follow the procedure of Rooney's man. He held the controls gently in
his hands, tapping lightly on the foot pedals and scanning the road
ahead easily, as if too vigorous a motion might topple his head from
his shoulders. He began to do things in a slow and mincing way, as
though he might be able to whisper and tiptoe through life, hushing his
way past death itself. At the tollbooth, he smiled meltingly at the
uniformed attendant, and when the man took his fifty cents, Stern said,
"Thanks a lot."
"Why did you thank him?" his wife asked.
"Why not?" said Stern.
Later, when they approached the outskirts of Stern's town, they drove
past small houses with neatly kept lawns and Stern nodded in a friendly
way to the people who stood outside them. He knew they were all
gentiles and he wondered what would happen in a pogrom. Which ones, if
any, would hide him and his family from the authorities? Probably quite
a few, he thought; ones that would surprise him. Probably the people
with the most forbidding gentile faces. Ordinarily they'd never have
anything to do with Stern, but if it came to a pogrom, with New England
crustiness they'd spirit Stern and his family off to attics, saying to
one another, "No one's going to tell us what to do with our Jews."
As they drove past the man's house, Stern held his breath and closed
his eyes for a second, as though there were a chance it might not be
there. He had been away five weeks, and perhaps part of his cure was
that the man's house would be swept away or that it would disappear as
though it had never been there, much like his vanished ulcer. But the
house stood in the same place, and Stern, as he drove by, inclined his
head gently toward it, as though he would face whatever horrors lay
inside with softness and gentle ways, melting them with his niceness.
As he neared his own house, he wondered fleetingly what he, the man
down the street, would do in the event of a pogrom. Would he startle
Stern by spiriting his despised Jewish neighbors away in his cellar,
hating pogroms as even more un-American than Stern?
In his house, Stern sat down in the easy chair of his sparsely
furnished living room and said to his wife, "Softly and easily. That's
how it's going to have to be. No noise. No upsets."
His son came out with a bandage on his elbow and said, "What's it like
to die?"
Stern said, "I'm not doing any dying for a while. But there'll be no
rough playing any more. Everything with Daddy is soft and easy. Where
did you get the cut? That's the kind of thing I don't want to get
involved in, but where did you get it?"
"I found it on me in the morning," said the boy, beginning to suck a
blanket.
Stern's wife, who had been boiling eggs for him in the kitchen,
hollered in, "There's one last thing you're going to get a kick out of
doing. The kind of thing you'll enjoy. I'll tell you about it later."
Stern started to eat the eggs, but they stuck in his throat and he
said, "What's the thing? I don't want to get into anything two minutes
after I'm back from a rest home."
"I wouldn't tell it to you, except it's the kind of thing you'll enjoy
taking care of. Some kids came by on a bike, older than him, and one
of them cut his elbow with a mirror and called him 'Matzoh.' I've been
furious, but I saved it for you because I know it's the kind of thing
you'll want to settle."
"He doesn't live around here, that bad boy," said Stern's son. "He's
just visiting someone here. I wish you'd make the boy die."
"Daddies don't make small boys die," said Stern. The brocade that lay
across the front of him began to heat up, and he pressed his fist deep
into his stomach and held it there, on guard lest another ulcer begin
to sprout forth and fill his ribs.
"Nobody seems to have heard what I've been saying," he said to his
wife, but then he clasped his son's head and said, "You're right; it
is the kind of thing I'd like to take care of." He took the boy to his
car, squeezing his hand, and for a second it seemed that the child was
really holding _his_ hand, leading Stern and protecting him. He drove
the car in a wide arc, as far as possible from the kike man's house,
and the child said, "You're going too far. The bad boy won't be around
here."
"You point him out to me," said Stern, the front of him on fire,
crouched over as though to give the flames less area to ruin. They came
to a cluster of seven boys who'd gotten off their bikes to rest, and
Stern stopped the car, gripping his son's hand for courage. He went
among them and said, "Someone said something to my son and cut him.
They said a dirty thing to him, and it had better not happen again."
"Don't make them dead," his son said. "They're not the bad boys."
Stern grabbed the collar of one of them, twisted him close, and said,
"I can really get sore, and when I do I can really start swinging. That
better not happen again."
The boy looked at him evenly, without fear, and Stern released him.
He must have been around twelve, and Stern wondered whether he would
remember and two years later, at fourteen, with his body shaping into
athletic hardness, come after Stern and pummel him to the ground.
Stern got back into the car with his son and, continuing in the arc,
he drove slowly through the streets and stopped alongside a small boy
with glasses and large feet who was walking next to the curb, carrying
books.
"Someone said something lousy to my son and cut him," Stern said from
the car. "I don't like the particular kind of thing they said."
"I'm not a little boy," said the book carrier. "I'm seventeen and
finishing high school I'm small and everyone thinks I'm a kid."
"Don't make him dead, Daddy," said Stern's son. Stern felt very sorry
for the small high-school student with his big feet, and yet he was
thrilled to find someone in the neighborhood who read books and wasn't
fierce. He wanted to invite him to his house and give him books, maybe
take him to New York to see Broadway plays.
"Come over if you're near my place," said Stern, and drove off.
"I think the bad boy is visiting over there," said Stern's child,
pointing in the direction of the house that darkened Stern's every
waking moment. Nonetheless, he knitted his eyebrows, bared his teeth,
and gunned the motor, as though, by going through the motions of
outrage, he would somehow become outraged and the momentum would carry
him right up to the man's front door before he had time to change his
mind. He raced toward the man's house, and yet, when he reached it, the
fraud of his facemaking became apparent to him and he continued on,
realizing that he had never intended for a second confronting the man.
In his own home, Stern's wife asked, "Did you find him?" And Stern
said, "I don't want to do any finding. Don't you realize I just came
home from a Home a few hours ago?"
For one blissful second then, Stern's vision blurred and it seemed that
he had gotten it all wrong, that he had not been away at all, and that
he was to leave that very evening for a place where everything would
be made better for him. But then he caught the edge of a chair, his
eyes cleared, and he realized that he really had been away. The thought
that he had come back to find his situation unchanged was maddening.
It was as though he had been guaranteed that the treatment would heal
his neighborhood as well as his ulcer--and that the guarantee had
turned out to have secret clauses, rendering it worthless. The man was
still there. The hospital had not had him removed. His wife had not
somehow arranged to have him eliminated. His father had not gone down
the street to thrust his scarred nose up in the man's face. No hand
had reached down from the heavens and declared that the man had never
existed. He was still right there in his house, not even seriously sick.
Stern went upstairs, and as he sat on the edge of his bed he felt a
small spring inside him stretch and finally break, leaving his body in
a great tremble. He lay back on the bed, as though mere contact with
a bed could cure anything, but he could not quiet himself, and so he
dialed Fabiola.
"A brand new thing has happened," Stern told him. "There's a tremble
in me and I can't control it. The thing is, I've just come _back_ from
the damned rest home. Can you just come back from a place like that and
have something like this happen?"
"Yes," said Fabiola. "You'd better avoid tension or you're going to
wind up back there again. Remember that and call me if you get into
more trouble."
Stern got on his knees now, as though in prayer, clutching fistfuls of
sheet and trying to squeeze out the tremble. The bedroom windows were
darkening with night when his wife appeared, flinging off her shorts,
combing her hair, and saying, "I've got to go to rehearsals."
"Look," Stern said, "I'm going to ask you something, and I really have
to. I've got a new thing and I have to have you here. I'm not talking
about any ulcer but something really new and lousy."
"You mean you want me to give up the dancing? It's the only thing I
have out here."
"You don't know what this new deal is," said Stern. As though to
demonstrate, he began to take short, gasping breaths. It started as a
plea for sympathy, but when he tried to stop he found he couldn't and
he began to cry. "Let's get out of here. Oh, let's sell this house.
We don't belong here. You'll have to handle all the details. Oh, I'm
really in trouble now."
_Part Four_
It was a jangled, careening period that followed, and later he could
remember it only as a black piece torn from his life rather than a
number of days or weeks. He knew that it began trembling on the edge
of a bed at midnight and he remembered how it ended, but he could pick
out only single frenzied moments in between, as though it were all
down on a giant mural he was examining in darkness with an unreliable
flashlight There was no good part of the day for him during this
period, but it was the mornings that seemed the worst because there
were always a giddy few minutes when it seemed he was going to be all
right. But a dry, shriveling tremble would soon come over him, and it
was then that he had to hold on to things, as though to keep himself on
the ground. He held on to chairs and desks and he held on to himself,
always keeping one fist buried deeply in his side, as though to nail
himself down and join together the pieces of human spring that had
snapped within him. Going to work was a stifled, desperate time, and
there was at least one ride when, sealed up in the train, holding the
bottom of his seat with all his might, he thought he was not going to
be able to make it and said to the man next to him, "I'm in a lot of
trouble. You may have to grab me in a second." He remembered that the
man, who smoked a pipe and wore his hat down low, had hardly looked
surprised and said, "I'll keep an eye on you," and then gone back to
his _Times_.
He was certain, on these rides to the city, that he would lose his
breath and begin to bite things so that heavyset men, who'd been
college athletes, would have to sit on him in mid-aisle, pressing
his face to the floor, while conductors signaled on ahead to alert
authorities. Each time the train pulled in, Stern would race gratefully
to the street, sucking in hot blasts of summer air, stunned that he had
made it.
In his office, on these mornings, a motor, powered by rocket fuels,
ran at a dementedly high idle somewhere between his shoulder blades.
He could not sit and he could not stand, and he remembered his narrow
business room as a place to crouch and sweat and hope for time to pass.
A film seemed to seal him off from the others around him. Unable to
think, his mind an endless white lake, he touched papers and opened
drawers and felt pencils, as though by physically going through
remembered motions the work would get done. He did these things in
short, frenzied bursts, holding on to a table with one hand; it seemed
that someone was pulling him into the ground. At noon, his fist socked
deep into his stomach, as though to seal it like a cork, he would run
to a nearby park, where he would fling off his jacket, lie on his back,
and stick his face in the sun, praying that he might sleep or disappear
into the grass. Once he slept a long while in his office clothes, his
face burning up in the heat. He awakened at a crazy, magical time of
day, cool and grateful, the trembling stilled, and for a moment he
thought it might be over. But then the motor turned over quietly and
began to hum.
There was, too, during that period, a numb and choking fear of his
boss, Belavista, that formed suddenly and oppressed Stern. He crouched
within his office and gripped his desk and waited for the Brazilian to
call. The man's confident morning steps in the hall sent Stern looking
for a place to hide. The phone ring became a knife, and once, when it
was late and Belavista summoned him, he flew first to the bathroom
and locked the toilet stall. He could remember that later, in the
front office, Belavista had stood for a long time without talking, his
charred millionaire's face staring out of the skylight, while Stern
died in his tracks. Turning finally, he had said, "How are things going
in there?" And Stern, his tongue shriveling in his mouth, had said, "I
just can't," and had run to put his face up to the park sun, grunting
and squeezing his fists blood red, as though he could force and fight
his way into a sleep.
His house, once he had screamed "Let's sell," became a dirty and
infected place to Stern, and nights, returning home at a desperate
clip, he could remember running lightly across the lawn, as though he
did not want to make contact with the grass; lowering his head, so that
he would not have to see the outside walls; and failing to touch the
alien banister as he flew up to his bed, which was safe and clean and
would go with him to the new place. He spent evenings on his bed, the
cold sheets pacifying him, and he could remember a phone call after
dark in which a man's voice had moaned out at him, "I saw your ad about
the house. I don't want to know about anything but this: what kind of a
neighborhood is it? I mean, is it mixed? Oh, I don't want it to be all
my kind, but it's got to be half and half, a little of everything. I
can't tell you how important that part is." And Stern had moaned back,
"Oh, I know; I really know," joining the man in tears.
There was a time when the house seemed the key to it all, an enemy
that sucked oil and money and posted a kike-hating sentry down the
street to await Stern's doom. But then Stern imagined himself on the
twelfth story of a city apartment building, his house sold, sealed in
now by new kike men, with different faces, occupying the three other
apartments on his floor. He pictured himself high above the city at
night, clawing at the windows. And during what must have been a weekend
he told a solemn Swede who'd come to look the house over, "We have to
stay here and have changed our mind."
The Swede, his head among a forest of basement pipes, hollered down,
"Is it because I'm looking at the pipes?" And Stern said, "No, I'm too
sick to move," and gave his wife the job of evicting the man.
Late at night, as he clutched his sheets in the darkness, ideas seemed
to seize him by the throat, making him rock and cry and pray for sleep.
The deep hot valleys of his wife's body frightened him now, and he
could remember pulling her awake one night and saying, "You've got to
get out of that dance thing. I know you don't go to bed with people,
but the thought that you might is driving me crazy. I don't like to do
this to you, but it'll just be for now, while I'm going through this
thing."
"All right, I won't go to it any more."
"But that's not enough," he said. "What about every second I'm not
with you? It would be easy for you to just pull up your skirt for
someone. The second I leave the house. Or when you're just going alone
somewhere. I'd never know."
"I'm not going to do anything," she said.
"I know, but you could. You could just flip up your skirt and open your
legs and that would be it. It wouldn't take two minutes. And I don't
want any man's thing in you. What would I do if that happened?"
"Well, then, what do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. But it's always going to be that way, all our lives."
And he locked his hand around her wrist, as though only by holding
her that way could he prevent her from flying out of the room in a
desperate hunt for alien bodies.
He waited those nights for the trembling to stop, the engine to stop
pumping. There had always been an end to bad things before--fevers
dropped, homicidal dreams were chased by the dawn, and once, when
he was a boy, his arm, heavy with a great infection, had suddenly
fizzled and gone back to normal. But, now, it was as though he were
an automobile with a broken horn, doomed to blare forever in a quiet
residential neighborhood, all wiring experts having long been shipped
out of the country. Sometimes, writhing and wet on the sheets at
midnight, he would tell his wife, "I'm touching bottom," but it wasn't
really true. He seemed to be holding on to a twig, halfway down a
sheer, rain-slick mountain. How nice it would be to let go. But he
had only $800, and it would be eaten up quickly if he were put in a
sanatorium. He imagined himself in such a place at the end of three
days, the $800 gone, in a terrible panic, unable even to lie back and
be crazy with the other patients. And so he held on to the twig and he
clutched at people, too, pulling at men's lapels and women's skirts on
steaming city streets, telling them he was in bad trouble.
When it got so bad it seemed he'd have to smash himself against
something to make the trembling stop, he would take some stranger's
sleeve in the city and say, "I know this is going to sound crazy, but
I'm pretty upset here and wish you would just talk to me a second." It
amazed him that no one was perturbed by this. People seemed to welcome
the chance to exchange wisdoms at midday with a strangulating young
man. And Stern, no matter how banal their words, would attach great
and profound significance to them, adopting each piece of advice as a
slogan to live by. "I'm going to tell you something that's going to
help you, fellow," an elderly gentleman said to him. "I was in trouble
once, too, and I decided then and there never to give anyone more'n
half a loaf. You remember that and you'll never go wrong again." And
Stern said to him, "You know, that's right. I can see where, if you
follow that, you'll always come out right." And he went off, determined
to stop giving up entire loaves, convinced he had come up with the key
to his trembling. A Negro ice-cream salesman told him, "You got to
stop lookin' for things," and a retired jewelry executive, seized in a
restaurant, advised him against "letting any person get hold of you."
In both cases, Stern had said, "You know, you've really got it. I'm
going to remember that."
He recalled being in many places and then running, choking, out of
them. Once in a darkened, cavernlike restaurant, he ordered six
lunchtime courses and thought to himself, "This is the end of it. I'm
going to sit here like all the other men and eat, and when I leave this
table it's all going to be over." But the service was slow, he lost his
breath, and when the juice came, he gulped it down, threw out clumps
of dollars, and flew from the pitlike restaurant, clawing for air.
Another time, floundering across the hot city pavements, on an impulse
he plunged into a physical culture studio and signed up for a six-year
course. "I want to start right this minute," he said, and was shown
to a locker. In shorts, he went into the gym, where the only person
exercising was a great, bearlike man with oil-slick hair and huge,
ballooning arms. He said to Stern, "Come here. Were you in the Army?"
"I was a flier," said Stern.
"I took a lot of crap from a drill sergeant in the Marines," said the
man. "He'd stand out there, and the bullshit would come out of him in
quart bottles, but do you know the only thing that saved me?"
"What's that?"
"His arms. They weren't even sixteens. I've got eighteens, myself. He'd
stand there, and the shit would flow about how tough he was, but all
you'd have to do is look at his arms and it didn't mean anything. How
am I supposed to respect a man who doesn't have arms?"
"You can't," said Stern.
"Well, I'm going to do some arm work," the man said, and began to curl
a great dumbbell into his lap. Stern watched his arms expand and said,
"I can't seem to get started today." He dressed and then ran, gasping
and unshowered, for the daylight.
Once, when the sound of Belavista's slippered footsteps down the hall
sent him spinning into the streets, he ran into a telephone booth and
called Fabiola.
"This thing isn't getting any better," he said. "It's like I swallowed
an anthill. I'm jumping through my ass. You've got to send me to
someone."
"Psychiatry's up in the air," said Fabiola. "There's the cost, too.
Take a grain of pheno when you feel upset this way."
"I don't care about any expense. I don't think you know what's going
on with me. It isn't the ulcer any more. I'd take a dozen of those
compared to this new thing."
"All right, then," said Fabiola. "There's one good man. He's ten per
session, and he _has_ helped people."
"I really want to see him, then," said Stern.
The psychiatrist was a rail-thin man who talked with a lisp and whose
office smelled musty and psychiatric. It bothered Stern that he had
only one tiny diploma on the wall.
"Can it hurt me?" Stern asked.
"No," said the man. "Sometimes you dig down and come up with something
very bad, but generally it helps."
"There's probably something lousy like that in me," said Stern. "How
much is this going to cost?"
"Twenty a session."
Stern began to choke and said, "I heard ten. Oh God, I can't pay
twenty." He gasped and sobbed and the man seemed to panic along with
him.
"Maybe there's something about money," said the lisping psychiatrist.
"Some people think it's dirty."
"No, no, it's the amount. Oh God, don't you just want to _help_
people?" He got up, gasping, sucking in musty, psychiatric air, and the
psychiatrist, gasping and white, too, said, "Maybe you think money has
a smell. We could go into that."
"No, no," said Stern, "we're not going into anything. Imagine how
you'd feel expecting ten and then hearing twenty." And with that he
ran, crouching, through the door, with the panic-stricken psychiatrist
hollering after him, "You've got a money neurosis."
One night, when for an hour or so there had been no gathering
shriveling tremble inside him and it had seemed he might be done with
it, he remembered being in a cramped and sultry theater with his wife,
watching _Hedda Gabler_. He got through an act all right, but when
Hedda tossed the writer's book manuscript into the furnace, he stood up
in the stifling theater, shouted "Aye," and ran through the tiny exit,
where he sat on the curb and waited for his wife.
Toward the end of it, he went everywhere with his arms folded tightly
in front of him, as though he were naked in the snow. He bit down hard
on things then, whatever was available--the drapes, a coffee cup, the
corner of his desk--and yet there came over him, too, during this
time, a kind of wild and gurgling courage he had never had before.
Once, he ran with teeth clenched through a crowded train station, as
though he were a quarterback going downfield, lashing out at people
with his elbows, bulling along with his shoulders. One man said, "What
do you think you're doing?" And Stern hollered back, "I didn't see
you. You're insignificant-looking." When a cop stopped him for running
through a stop sign, Stern heard himself saying, "Is this your idea of
a crime? With what's going on in this country--rape and everything?"
It was a perspiring, released kind of feeling he had when he was at
his most desperate, and it gave him courage one day to seize a girl
in his building who had seemed unapproachable. Tall and blond, with
horn-rimmed glasses, she had a tight-skirted, whiplike body and spoke
with a shrill, slightly hysterical British accent. Stern saw her in
elevators for the most part, talking to a girl friend, a book on some
declining civilization always pressed against her high, intellectual
bosom. The word "problem" seemed to crop up in her every sentence.
"That's one of my problems."
"The man undoubtedly has a sexual problem."
Stern thought she was maddeningly intellectual and wanted to be with
her in her small, book-lined apartment, kissing her hair as she
discussed declining civilizations, spending long hours working out
sick, tangled sexual problems.
One day outside the building, he took her arm and said, "This is crazy,
but I don't know any other way to do it. I've seen you a lot in the
elevator, and I'm in pretty bad trouble now, and I wonder if you'd mind
my just walking along awhile with you."
"I have to meet someone," she said.
"I'm in pretty bad shape," Stern said, holding on to her arm. "I've got
a whole bunch of problems and I have to just tell them to someone."
"Yes," she said, freeing herself with a shrill little laugh. "But I
don't like men's hands on me."
At the tail end of it, with courage forming along the bottom of him
like vegetable shoots, it pleased him to make detailed and shocking
phone calls to his mother and sister.
"I actually chew on drapes," he told his mother at midnight. "I pull
at my skin and I won't have my job for long. I expect to go into an
institution and not come out of it."
"I haven't had that in my life?" she said. "I haven't had much worse?
I've had the same thing. You can't scare me."
"How would you like to see your son peeled off the fender of a speeding
car? It's going to happen, you know."
And to his sister, long-distance, he said, "Oh, it's a breakdown, all
right. Dying doesn't scare me in the least. It'll be in about a week
or so. They're going to find me in a tub. I'll bet you're amazed that
I can discuss it so calmly. Bet it really shakes you up to think it's
happening to your own brother, who used to tell all those jokes."
He expected that if it ever did end, it would peter out, with a little
less trembling and choking each day, but it surprised him by finishing
up abruptly in a quite unexplainable way after a talk with a Polish
woman who had come to clean his house.
Through it all, amazingly, he had never thought once of the kike man.
Sliding down the mountain, he had been too busy casting about for
things to clutch to think very much about who had pushed him. If the
man had stopped him on the street, Stern, hunched over, fists planted
in his waist to quiet the erupting, might have brushed on by and said,
"I have no time to fool around."
On the night that it ended, his wife had gone to the movies, and Stern,
a crawling, bone-deep shiver coming over him, had flicked off the
television set and found the Polish woman on her knees in the broom
closet. A small, pinched wrinkle of a woman, she seemed to have been
made from a compound of flowered discount dresses, cleaning fluid, and
lean Polish winters. She shook her head continually and muttered pieces
of thoughts, finishing none of them. Stern talked to her for two hours
and found her scattered, wise-sounding incantations soothing.
"You just can't," she said, rolling her head from side to side. "I mean
you just don't go around.... You got to just ... sooner or later.... I
mean if a man don't.... This old world going to.... When a fully grown
man.... Rolling up your sleeves is what...."
To which Stern said, "Oh God, how I appreciate this. I think I'm going
to be able to get hold of myself now. I really do. Sometimes you just
get together with a certain person and it really helps. I think I'm
going to be all right. And, you know, as long as I live, I'm never
going to forget this and the help you've given me. I really think I'm
going to be able to stop it tonight."
"Sure," said the woman, rolling her head from side to side. "Of course.
I mean you just ... you got to.... There comes a time...."
And that night, when Stern's wife came home, he said, "I think I'm out
of it." In bed, he relaxed his grip on the headboard, and then, just as
swiftly as it had come over him, it more or less disappeared.
* * * * *
He told someone in his office, "I had the mildest nervous breakdown in
town. I didn't miss a day of work. It was pretty lousy, but all of
a sudden you just come out of them." The two phrases "hanging on to
desks" and "jumping through my tail" had great appeal to Stern, and he
used them often to describe what had happened to him. He remembered
a hairless boy with moonlike jowls who years back had worked for his
company and had begun one afternoon to run into the water cooler. For
two years, the boy had disappeared, taking mute and vacant vacations
with his wife, renting clapboard houses and just sitting in them; Stern
remembered seeing him on the street, looking white and clean as though
someone had sponged him down. He looked up this boy's phone number now,
called him, and said, "I just came out of one like yours. No water
cooler, but I did a lot of hanging on to desks. I had to do it to keep
from jumping through my tail. What are you doing with yourself these
days?"
"Just sitting around," said the boy.
Stern had not thought of time or weather or clocks and dates and
punctual changes of underwear, and he was certain that great clumps of
dust had settled over his life; somehow, though, as he had choked and
skidded and clutched at people's arms, he had managed to mail things,
too, and pay dry cleaners. He expected to find his son making far-off,
wistful comments about "new daddies" he would like to have, and yet
the very first of the new evenings the boy tapped him on the shoulder
and said, "Now can we play?"--as though he'd been waiting for Stern to
finish tying a shoelace. "Yes," said Stern, falling to the floor. "I'm
down here on the floor trapped and the only thing that can get me up is
if someone touches a secret place on my ear three times and then taps
me with a banana." The boy followed instructions delightedly, and Stern
leaped up to shake his hand, saying, "Thank you for saving your daddy.
I now owe you one hundred giraffe tails."
Stern looked at a calendar and saw that it had all worked out fine,
ending on the first sharp and crackling day of October; now he would
be able to draw winter down on himself and his family like a shade,
huddling in his house and taking soups for strength. He had been too
agonized and out of breath to think about his stomach, and it amazed
him that it was not leaping with a fresh crop of ulcers; it seemed
to be doing all right, the glue holding firm on a cracked china cup.
Maybe that was the trick. Go into a tumbling, frenzied period and your
stomach simply wouldn't have time to concentrate on ulcers. The idea
was to set up small, diversionary troubles in other parts of your body,
way out on your fingers or inside your head. But what if now, with
things quieter, a new batch got under way?
He wanted to take the previous weeks in his hands, crush them down to
snowball size, and examine them close to a light bulb so that he would
understand them if they happened again. It seemed a time to talk,
finally, about dramatic central things, death and wills and horrible,
long-buried family crises from which lessons could be drawn. First
he called his insurance man, who said, "Before we go any further,
remember, you can't dictate from the grave." And then he called his
mother, telling her, "I really want to have a talk now. You don't know
what hell I've been through."
"I know what you've been through and, believe me, I could tell you a
few things. I could tell you things that would stand your hair on end."
"All right, tell me them then."
"Don't worry," she said. "I could tell you plenty. I could fill up
books if you really wanted to listen."
"Meanwhile you haven't said anything."
"Someday, when you're ready, I'll say plenty. Then you won't wonder
why I take an occasional drink. And then, years later, you'll tell
people, 'I had some mother.'"
He met his father for dinner in the city, and much of the conversation
had to do with the machinery of the meeting. "How long have you been
waiting?" his father said, outside the restaurant. "I thought I'd take
a cross-town bus, get myself a transfer, and then walk the extra two
blocks over to Sixth. If I'd known you were going to be early, I'd have
come all the way up by subway and the hell with the walking. How'd you
get up here?"
"I just got here," said Stern. "I want to talk over some things with
you."
Inside the restaurant, Stern's father kept grabbing the elbows of
waiters and customers, turning to Stern, and saying, "You know how long
I know this guy?" Stern would guess, and his father would say, "I know
this guy for seventeen years" or "We go all the way back to 1933,"
bobbing his head up and down, as though to testify he was telling the
truth, however astonishing the statement may have seemed.
During dinner, Stern said, "I went through a cruddy period. I don't
know what in the hell hit me."
"I heard," said his father. "You know how I feel about you, though,
don't you?"
After a while, his father said, "How do you plan on getting back? I
think, in your situation, your best bet is to walk over west and catch
a bus going downtown. Lets you off slightly north of the station. You
can duck down and walk the rest of the way underground or, if you like,
you can grab a cab. I haven't figured out how I'm going home myself...."
* * * * *
Often now, for the first time since it had happened, Stern was able to
see the bitter episode in his recent life for what it was: an ignorant
remark, a harmless shove, no one really hurt, much time elapsed, so
what. Yet, other times, the thought of it became unbearable and he
would try to shore up his mind against it. Then it was as though his
head were a leaky basement which Stern patrolled from the inside,
running over with plaster each time a picture of the man down the
street threatened to slide in through a crack. One night, the basement
leaked in so many places he could not get to them all.
He had come back after a short visit to what his son called "the
slippery houses," a group of high, slanted, darkening hill peaks, all
clumped together in a tilted village with cottages stuck on the sides
like canapés. "We ought to get out of our house and see what it's like
around us," Stern had said to his wife and son, but they had always
wound up taking a silent, peculiar drive to this one place. Their car
could barely make it up the hills of the careening village, and Stern
wondered what kind of people lived in such a strange, slanted place. It
seemed you would have to be lowered down to your neighbor's house, if
you wanted to do any visiting, and then hoisted back. He wondered what
kind of tilted lives the people inside the houses led, what kind of
wobbly activities they were up to, and whether they would come clinging
and suction-footed to the door if he rang the bell. In all the visits,
they saw only one person who lived in the village, a pointy-headed boy
of the sort who was always being sent to town with bread and cheese and
several farthings and then set upon immediately by rascals.
Back home after the drive that night, Stern's son asked him if
dinosaurs were good, and when Stern said, "There were all kinds," the
boy asked, "How about pirates? Were any of them daddies?"
"Some pirates were daddies," said Stern.
During his troubled, spinning weeks, Stern had often brushed by the
child, saying, "No elephants, no whale questions," and gone to hold
on to something or to lie somewhere in a sweat. Now, as though to make
up for his brusqueness, he held talks with the boy on an almost formal
schedule.
"I can remember being inside Mommy," said the child, taking off Stern's
shoe. "I knew about the Three Stooges in there. Now I'm taking your
foot's temperature. It's quarter past five."
During dinner, the boy said, "Were you ever a magician before you
became my father?"
"Right before," said Stern.
"Could you tear a Kleenex into a thousand pieces and then turn it back
into a whole Kleenex again?"
"I could do that one."
"Do you learn about the inside of soda at college?"
"I don't know," said Stern. "I don't know that. No soda now. No
pirates. I'm just going to sit here." He was eating an apricot dessert
then, and he began to breathe so hard he thought something would fly
out of his chest. "I've got to go out and get some air," he told his
wife.
"Is it all right for daddies to go out in the dark?" asked the boy, and
Stern said, "If they're very careful."
Outside, walking on leaves, Stern could not catch his breath and
wondered if he should call a cab. He saw himself walking all the way
to the man's house only to collapse, wordless and exhausted, on the
doorstep, having to be put outside near the garbage for someone to see
and take home. He thought it was unfair for him to be depleting his
strength in a long, cold walk while the man sat in a tasteless but
comfortable armchair, his forearms bulging after a day at the lathe.
When he had gone a few hundred feet, he thought of turning around and
telling his wife where he was headed or at least leaving a note on the
porch so that someone would know his whereabouts in case he wound up
cracked and bleeding, the life seeping out of him, yet completely out
of public view. He imagined people saying of him later, "The funny part
is they could have saved him if only they'd been able to find him in
time." He thought that perhaps he would find a man on the way, have him
stand by, and, as soon as Stern's head hit a pipe or something, speed
off to get an intern. The cold snapped about him now and seemed to have
made everything a little harder. There would be no soft earth to fall
into, and any contact at all with the ground would mean great, tearing
skin scrapes.
When he was halfway to the man's house, it crossed his mind for the
briefest instant that the fluids drained from the bodies of unconscious
people, and as a precaution against this embarrassment he stopped to
urinate in some leaves. He was worried about being completely unable
to talk when he got to the man's house, knocking at the door and then
standing there, cold and choking, while the man inspected him. He had
heard that if you did some physical exercise, tension would flow out of
you, and once, before an important job interview, he had run briskly
around the block. "Have you been running?" the interviewer asked,
and Stern said, "I didn't want to be late." The run had checked the
tension, but Stern had gasped incoherently through the interview and
come off poorly.
Now he began to jog a little through the leaves; when he came to the
man's house, he took a long time before actually setting foot on his
property, a move which somehow would have made the visit irrevocable.
He thought of just putting his heel inside the fence, crushing the
grass down a bit, and then going back home and getting his mind so
elastic and sophisticated he'd be able to see that crushing a little
grass was defiance, too. It didn't have to be face-punching. But when
he put one foot inside, he took another step, too, and then another, a
man going into a cold pool, and then walked the rest of the way to the
door at a brisk, routine pace, as though by walking routinely he could
turn this into a routine call.
There was a simple stone walk through some short grass and a step
leading up to a brown oaken door. He had expected the house to have
some memorable characteristics, symphonic music to play when he
actually set foot inside the fence. He knocked on the door and suddenly
shook with hope that the wife would answer and say she was sorry
but the man was attending a meeting of the Guardian Sons. It was an
election meeting to select officers who would be even more pinched and
thin-lipped than the old crew. He would say to the woman, "Your husband
said something to my wife and I want to say I know about it and he's
not getting away with it. You tell him that." Then he would be able to
go back home, his mission accomplished. After all, he had tried. It
wasn't his fault the man was not in.
The man opened the door and Stern blinked to see him better, startled
that although he stood only two feet away, he still could not really
make out his face. It was as though he were looking at the man through
an old pair of Japanese binoculars he had once bought. They were
expensive, but Stern had never quite gotten them adjusted right and
always saw things better with his eyes. He could see that the man was
shoeless, however; wore blue jeans and a T-shirt; and kept his head
cocked a little in the incredulous style Stern remembered so clearly.
The beer had taken some effect; he seemed a little heavier than Stern
recalled. His arms were about the same, perhaps a little thicker in the
foresection than they had seemed to be from the car.
"Are you the man who said kike to my wife?" asked Stern, happy he had
only short sentences to get out.
"I think I remember that."
"About a year and a half ago?"
"That's right."
"You shouldn't say that, and we're going to fight."
"All right. Let me get my slippers on."
Stern had not expected any delays, and when the man closed the screen
door he thought of how little insurance he had and wondered if he
could call out, "Excuse me just a minute," and run back to take out
another policy, then return. He wanted so bad to live he would have
settled right on the spot for being a bedpan patient all his life. If
only there were someone with whom he could enter into such a bargain.
The man came back and said, "Come on around back here," walking toward
the rear of the house, and Stern did not follow. He remembered that he
had not brought along an observer to run for an intern and wondered
if he could hail one now, not to stop the fight, but just to stand by
and watch it and know that it was going on. He thought that maybe the
man's wife was watching through the shades and, if Stern's head were
opened, _she_ would call for help, waiting first until he was almost
through. He wanted to stop what was happening, take the man aside,
and say, "Look, the important thing was for me to come down here. Now
that I'm here, there doesn't have to be any fight. I didn't think I
could make it, but here I am, and why don't I just go back now?" But,
instead, he followed the man to the backyard and said, "I don't know
how to begin these." The man paused a moment and then hit Stern on the
ear, a great freezing kiss covering the entire side of his face. The
lobe seemed to slide around a little before settling in one place, and
Stern was so thrilled at still being alive he jumped a little off the
ground. But then his joy was erased by a warm shudder of sympathy for
the man, who had been unable to knock him unconscious with the blow. It
was as though all those years at lathes, building arm power, had gone
to waste. More because it seemed to be expected of him than because he
felt anger, Stern tried to throw a punch in the smoothly coordinated
style of a Virgin Islands middle-weight he had watched on TV, but it
was as though a belt had been dropped over him, constricting his arms,
and the blow came out girlish and ineffectual. Lowering his voice
several octaves, as if it were he who had delivered the ear kiss, he
said, "Don't talk that way to someone's wife and push her," and only
after he had said it did he realize he had fallen into an imitation of
an old deep-voiced high-school gym teacher who used to say, "Now, boys,
eat soup and b'daders if you want your roughage."
"Shit I won't," said the man, and Stern said, "You better not," still
blinking to see the man's face. He saw his socks, though, faded blue
anklets with little green clocks on them. They were cut low, almost
disappearing into his slippers, and reminded Stern of those worn by an
exchange student from Latvia at college who had brought along an entire
bundle of similar ones. Now Stern felt deeply sorry for the man's
powerful feet, which were always to be encased in terrible refugee
anklets, and for a second he wanted to embrace them.
His ear began to leak now, and he walked off the man's lawn, not sure
at all how he had done. The hot flush of exhilaration that had come
with the punch stayed with him awhile, and yet when he had gone halfway
back to his house the cold flew into his shirt and rode his back and he
began to shake with fear of the man all over again. Inside his house,
his wife was sponging the dinner table and said, "What happened to your
ear? It's hanging all off."
"I had a fight with that guy from a year and a half ago. The one who
said the thing to you. I can't understand it. I was all right for a
while, but now I'm afraid of him all over again."
"That's some ear you've got," she said.
"Ears never worried me," he said. "I don't understand why I still have
to be afraid of the bastard. Come on upstairs." They walked to the
steps and his wife said, "You go first I don't like to go upstairs in
front of people." And Stern went on ahead, annoyed at being denied
several seconds of behind glimpses.
Upstairs, in his son's room, he looked at the six or seven children's
books on the floor. Pages were torn out of them, and Stern wondered how
the child was ever to become brilliant on so ratty-looking a library.
Once, in some kind of sheltering, warmth-giving act he really couldn't
explain, Stern had bought children's rugs and hung them all over the
walls. The boy had said, "Rugs on the wall?" And Stern had answered,
"Of course, and we put pictures on the floors, too. We eat breakfast at
night and get up in the morning for a bite of supper. This is a crazy
house."
Now Stern walked around the room, touching the rugs to make sure they
wouldn't fall on his son's face. Then he said, "I feel like doing some
hugging," and knelt beside the sleeping boy, inhaling his pajamas and
putting his arm over him. His wife was at the door and Stern said, "I
want you in here, too." She came over, and it occurred to him that
he would like to try something a little theatrical, just kneel there
quietly with his arms protectively draped around his wife and child. He
tried it and wound up holding them a fraction longer than he'd intended.
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