The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  They no longer sat around the table hollering and commiserating, drowning out his mother, who said little more than “Murray—enough,” while busying herself with serving food, and Aunt Lillian with her watery eyes, who cried, “But what about the Jewish commitment to integration?” before blowing her nose and excusing herself. Those people no longer sat there at his father’s table, but only his mother was dead; the others had merely stopped coming. They’d moved out to Mattapan and Sharon and, in one case, Newton. But even if they hadn’t moved, or even if his father had moved along with them, Murray Cantowitz had stopped observing not only Shabbos but all of the holidays, even the High Holy Days, and there was no longer any God-given reason to gather together.

  Murray Cantowitz had adored his wife. Ed, even as a child, had known his father was the kind of man who had enough love for only one person in this lifetime, and his mother was that one person. When he lost his wife, Ed’s father had also lost whatever decency she had inspired. At first people said his incessant bitterness made sense; it was the grief, poor man. But after about six months they said nothing, because they stopped coming around, and Ed, age sixteen and then seventeen (what a birthday that was), was left alone with him. No Shabbos, no God, no mother. Only studying. Because he was—thankfully, although he’d never thought to be thankful about it—seriously smart and could leave this house and this town and never come back, propelled by the sheer force of his studying. He pictured his marks and his scores like the fiercest Kraut-bombing warplane—the North American P-51 Mustang—lifting him up to where he could see their building far below, until he was too far away to even tell the difference between the tenement where he had spent his youth and all the other tenements in Dorchester.

  His mother had looked like an Italian film actress, with thick black hair shot through the front with a dramatic white streak. She moved slowly in the morning, regardless of how big a rush his father insisted he was in, no matter how early Ed needed to be at school. It was because of his mother that he’d attended Boston Latin, after one of his determined Irish teachers marched over to the Cantowitz home one spring afternoon and suggested—after impatiently refusing a cup of tea—that if Mr. and Mrs. Cantowitz did not pursue Boston Latin for their son, then Edward was sure to become bored and superior and make a mess of his life. His father had only scoffed, wondering aloud what Ed had done to both impress and annoy his teacher, but Mrs. Dora Cantowitz had taken Mrs. Patty Delany’s words to heart and made sure her son took the necessary steps to follow his teacher’s advice. No one would have mistaken his mother for an intellectual, but she had also been an elementary school teacher for a few years before marrying Ed’s father, and she had a fierce, if sentimental, regard for education. She had been a beloved teacher, one whose students, years later, wrote her appreciative—nearly amorous—letters. After reading a letter aloud to Ed and his father, she would place it in a blue folder, kept on the top shelf of her modest but mysterious closet. Ed was jealous of these children; how could they have known her back then? Back when she was Dora Markov being courted by Murray “the Curl” Cantowitz, welterweight?

  She’d seen him buying an orange at the fruit stand and said, “Good luck with your next fight!” the way kids did at the time. “It’s gonna be a tough one” is what he supposedly replied. “Sure would be nice to see you in the crowd.” “Oh,” Dora had demurred, “my mother would never allow it.” “I’ll tell you what,” said Murray. “See this orange? I bet you I can peel this orange in a perfect circle without even nicking the skin. If I can do that, you come to my fight. Leave your mother to me.” They leaned against a liquor-store window as Murray unpeeled the orange and asked Dora for her arm. He squeezed a bit of the juice onto Dora’s outstretched wrist. “Better than any perfume,” he declared, and—as his mother used to say, quite cryptically—she was finished.

  She was from truly poor Russian Jews; Cossacks had murdered her father while he was working in the fields outside Kiev, and her newly pregnant mother had somehow cobbled together enough money to get a passage to America with her sister’s family. They had all raised this American-born daughter for something better than a welterweight, no matter how promising Murray Cantowitz’s career looked at the time, and Dora had retained that idea that she was meant for better things, even after she had made her choice. She was a snob about manners and grammar and was prone to expressions like I would never stoop so low and I never cared for her. And she was superstitious. With all of her manners, she was not above throwing salt over her shoulder even while eating in a restaurant (which she generally treated with great seriousness) or spitting three times in the middle of the street if she saw a black cat or stepping on the foot of a person who’d mistakenly stepped on hers, nor would she utter the word cancer—even after it ravaged her body, even as she prayed for death itself—for fear of taunting the disease.

  By age seventeen, there was no Shabbos, no God, no mother, but there were, finally, girls. After all of that time spent wondering over what they wanted, what they liked, it was finally clear: Girls liked grief. They liked when, after admitting that, yes, it was still difficult to talk about his mother, Ed became so sad, so overwrought, that his desire approached desperation. They liked how he gripped their hair and faces and breasts as if he were suddenly terrified that they, too, might drop dead. And if they weren’t going to die in that moment, Ed made them feel that they would one day, and that Ed would, too, that they all would die, every last citizen of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, and that they—a girl and Ed Cantowitz—they were breathing (Can you hear my breath? I can hear your heart. Feel that. Come closer; no, closer), they were alive. It was as if Ed, with his recent status of mourner, had been given permission to act out each year of pent-up sexual frustration and, with this permission, his very own seduction style had emerged. If he’d been more of a cynic, he might have called it the Death Threat, as if it were a new dance; he might have boasted of his technique to the guys at Sam’s, who placed bets on the number of spares in a bowling game and played pool on one of the eight backroom tables on any given night. He might have bragged to the boys who won their cigarettes during poker games, boys with no one waiting at home for them, making sure they weren’t ruining their precious young lives. But Ed wasn’t that kind of cynic. Though sometimes he played pinochle until he couldn’t see straight and none of his hard-earned money from working for his father remained, he wasn’t that kind of boy. It was true that at some point he’d become conscious of what he was doing with these girls and began performing just a bit, but by then he was too grateful for his success to return to behaving with any measure of self-control. His mother would have called these aspiring young gamblers and such boasting low class, and he’d loved his mother without reservation. They had joked around together in their pajamas up until the very end—Ed lying at her side under rosebud-patterned sheets, under ugly blankets crocheted by the Sisterhood, while his father cursed doctors on the phone by day and friends in the kitchen by night. “Why didn’t you have more children, Ma?” Ed had asked her once (only with hindsight did such a question seem cruel), as he dared to imagine a world with only his father for family. “Oh, Eddie,” she’d said. “Who was going to come after you?”

  Ed’s thrill with girls was not about conquest, but it was a thrill and as real as his very real fear of dying. Which was, of course, exacerbated when he was that close to a girl, because he felt like he really really really didn’t want to die. Not when such happiness was possible.

  There was Marla with the red sweater, who offered him a turn on her new bicycle, to take a spin through Franklin Field. They coasted down a hill and into a patch of sunlight. He told her he hadn’t kissed anyone since his mother died. It was so easy; it was true. To feel her small lips parting, her squat hand in his hair, to tumble down behind the oak trees. When she left that summer to be a counselor at a girls’ camp, he spent the better part of a Sunday wandering through the zoo, because taking a good look at the monkeys could usually chee
r him up, but nothing did the trick until Peggy asked him the time in front of the antelopes and the camels. Peggy had been quick about it; the word efficient came to mind. Then one day Carol sold him an orange Popsicle. Carol had watched him lick the Popsicle and told him when she got off work, slipping him another Popsicle free of charge. Sarah Jane was covered with mosquito bites and was going mad with itching when she came into Twinies, where he was buying his father cigarettes. These were neighborhood girls; he had seen them all before, but he wasn’t sure where. It could have been anywhere—the Wall on the High Holy Days amidst a sea of teenagers angling to show off their best-dressed selves, or maybe the Chez Vous roller rink, where he would’ve no doubt been too busy looking at their legs as they laced up their skates to remember their faces; he could have seen them while waiting on line to buy candy or comics. But never had he imagined how these girls—the very same ones who bought their parents Geritol at Twinies and challah and half-moons at the bakery and chatted with the cobbler about which shoes were theirs even when their ticket was nowhere to be found—would follow him to secluded spots or in some cases (Peggy!) lead the way. When he’d told his story of grief and loneliness, each one had offered him such succor. Sarah Jane had heard of him—heard that, though he was smart, some people worried he’d get into trouble now that his mother was gone. Marla had told him to lay his head on her thighs. She had stroked his head and said there, there as if he wasn’t full of anger and hunger but instead was only a girl from her camp, someone longing for home.

  Unfathomably (Ed couldn’t help but think), Hugh didn’t seem to be making any move toward wherever it was that Hugh Shipley went on a Friday evening. They both still looked on as students rushed about in the twilight. Hugh lit up another cigarette.

  “So what’s on your agenda this evening?” Ed finally asked.

  Hugh shrugged. “You?”

  “When?”

  “Now,” said Hugh. “Where are you headed?”

  “I’m not sure,” Ed admitted. “Maybe go get a drink? You want to get a drink?”

  “Oh,” he said, stretching his fingers again, “I was actually going to see my father.”

  “Do you want to go see him?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Then I’d consider it carefully. Maybe you need a drink.”

  Hugh laughed. “You think I need to have a drink before seeing my father?”

  “Maybe. Maybe you do. How the hell should I know?” He sounded coarser than he’d meant to, coarser than he was, and as he cursed himself for how this so often happened, how he ruined whatever chance he had to be affable and winning, Ed suddenly saw something on the ground in the distance, a flash of light in the patchy grass, right where the girl had walked. As he crouched down to collect it, he prayed for a monogrammed brooch, a silver hairpin he’d need to return to the slightly cross-eyed, perfectly buxom girl, but it was only a smashed bottle cap, the label worn away.

  When he looked up and saw Hugh Shipley’s back to him, and when he heard him beg off while walking away before the night had even started, he vowed to pursue Hugh and keep him interested, at least for the next five minutes.

  “Hey, where are you going?” he called after him.

  After three years as a Harvard student and four years of no religion, Ed had—just a month ago—decided to say kaddish for his mother. He had made this decision solely because his mother had come to him in a dream. She’d sat on his bed in the room he shared with Stan Landau, his roommate since freshman year (that Jews were assigned only Jewish roommates should not have come as a surprise, but it just so happened that Stan was the perfect roommate). In the middle of the night, with the lights from the river shining through the curtains, with the heft of her former zaftig self weighing down the end of the bed, his mother had stared him down and said, “Just say it for me.” When he’d asked what she was talking about, she looked at him exactly the way she seldom had: brimming with disappointment. And so, though he’d had no intention of doing so perhaps ever again, or at least—more realistically—not so soon after the seventh and hopefully final infernal summer spent working for his father, laying steel pipes in the ground, Ed had gone home. He’d gone home for Yom Kippur. Of course the holiday had fallen on a day of lectures only days before his midterm examinations, and of course he’d had to give the professors a sufficient explanation, but he didn’t apologize. He approached his European history professor and explained the Day of Atonement as if not only this thin-lipped man but also the entire faculty at Harvard had been clamoring to understand. Ed told him, in the loftiest voice he could muster (a voice that he’d learned not from three years at Harvard but from his own dead mother), that the very word atone meant to be at one with God. Then he walked to Central Square in his too-short dark suit, picked up an egg-salad sandwich to eat before sundown, and took the Red Line. He tried not to feel afraid that something would prevent his return.

  His father was into a bottle of rye and barely acknowledged his presence. Forget about the fact that his father was drinking hard liquor after sunset on Erev Yom Kippur—that he drank at all was still a shock. Ed had been raised on the story of how, during Prohibition, his father’s uncle—a Brooklyn rebbe!—had been fond of making bathtub gin and how one fatal night he’d mixed the wrong proportions and the rabbi died from drinking bad gin. Ed had rarely seen his parents drink, aside from some Manischewitz on Friday nights and holidays, aside from a glass of sherry for his mother now and then, though he was starting to think that maybe his father had always drunk and had—before his mother’s death—simply done so in secret. The night after Ed’s mother was buried, after all of the mourners had gone home and the house was unbearably quiet, his father pulled a bottle of rye from below the sink and a glass from the cabinet above it. He sat down at the kitchen table, opened the bottle, and filled the glass exactly halfway. He betrayed no awareness that Ed was standing in the doorway, and his father drank from that glass as if the whole action—the retrieval of the glass, the exacting pour—was somehow inevitable.

  Now Murray Cantowitz hid nothing. There was piss coating the rim of the toilet seat and coarse hairs in the sink. Well, Ed thought, at least he’s shaving. The amber-colored couch coughed up clouds of dust when he sat down on it, and when Ed rose to get a start on quietly cleaning, his father yelled, “What’re you doing?” as if he were tearing the place apart. “Leave it!” And so Ed headed out the door to a different shul from where he’d been bar mitzvahed, to the shul where most of the old embittered congregants had relocated, having refrained from asking his father one last time if he wanted to come along.

  The night was chilly and clear, and as he became just another Jew walking toward the shul, he was stunned by how calm he felt, as if he were suddenly inside a recurring dream, where urgency was replaced by prescription. All he had to do was get from the street to the shul. All he had to do was say the kaddish. There was no reason to think any further than that; the dream didn’t allow for it. The sanctuary smelled like heavy breath, aftershave, and dense floral perfume. He opened a prayer book and felt its crumbling binding, sticking shut for a few final moments by old dried glue. Such humble materials for such supposedly holy words, and as much as he tried to hold the book together, out came the paper bits from the binding, out onto his trousers and reminding him of hay, which was a strange association, but once the thought was there he couldn’t stop it and all the men in their jackets and tallis looked not like men but like horses, stooped and obedient. Enveloped in a not altogether bad smell of age and thoughtful hygiene and this blameless equine image, he let himself rock back and forth, and the keening familiar melody took hold of him and the Hebrew came without thought. Everything over the last four years had been about thought. He stayed inside the shul until the very last prayer. When he’d made his way through crowds of familiar faces—the bearded and the shaved, the powdered and the rouged—and their questions, so many questions, not only about Harvard but about his unfortunate father, after he’d been ki
ssed and slapped on the back and when he was out the door and taking off his yarmulke, grateful to feel the air again, he saw Marla of the red sweater standing on the curb, evidently waiting for a ride. Without her red sweater she looked much more ordinary than he remembered and also, somehow, more appealing. He thought of saying hello, of asking what she was doing these days, if she still had that bicycle, but it was as if he’d turned into one of the horses he’d imagined while inside the shul. He watched in silence until saying hello became inconceivable, until a car pulled up and she looked both ways before getting in and taking off.

  For years he’d dreamed of the much-heralded mystery and majesty of shiksas. But now that he was surrounded by Radcliffe girls on a daily basis—adorable ginger freckles, startled blue eyes—now that he was no more comfortable talking to them but almost accustomed to their extensive knowledge of not only tennis and Europe and oystering on private islands off the coast of Maine but also Aristotle and Freud and Keynesian economics, goddamn it all to hell, here he was in front of a synagogue, nostalgic about Marla and all of the others, the girls he hadn’t called.

  —

  In Harvard Yard, Ed not only caught up with Hugh but within minutes he was buying drinks at Cronin’s. “To make up for my accosting you,” Ed had insisted.

  “You did kind of accost me.”

  “Yes,” said Ed, “and I’d like to make up for it.”

  “In that case I’ll have a whiskey as well.”