by Sonia Taitz
Her father was right. Collum was a non-Jew, and not the classy kind that kept people like them out of country clubs. He was the kind that fixed things (like clogged sinks and carburetors), that made it possible for educated people to keep their nails clean. And he wasn’t Heathcliff, either. He was just a bum without a novel to make him look better. Collum would surely not understand the niceties of her world, the refinement and study that had gone into her people since they stood at Sinai and received the Law. And the commentaries, later. He wouldn’t even understand the Brontës, who made people like him look good!
And what was he doing now, on the ground, by the side door, slumped as though in a drug haze? Oh, well. That figured. He was just a sniveling, shaggy, BO-stinking boy, and he could drop dead, for all she really cared.
Judy stared at Collum as the school bell rang. He stayed where he was. Heroin, probably, she thought. Nodding off to his addictive drug, heroin, or horse, as the junkies called it. Or maybe just a big bottle of cheap booze.
“Hey!” she found herself shouting from the central staircase, as students ran up the stairs, passing her.
“You’re going to be late!” she shouted again. Her voice seemed high and ineffectual. Not the kind of voice that was meaningful to addicts bent on self-destruction.
Collum’s head was still down, and Judy now noticed that he held his hands over his face, blocking the world out. This is what happened in some homes, she thought, tutting with superiority. At the same time, there was nothing she wanted more than to be with him on his level, deep in those murky waters from which all trouble sprang.
The school bell was still ringing as she descended the stairs. Then it went silent, hovering in the air like a closed option, like the past that was now irretrievable. Silence and an open view of chaos ahead.
She walked over to Collum.
He seemed to sense her coming, letting his head rise a fraction, then settling it down again. He was beyond caring who saw him this way.
“What’s wrong?”
“Get lost, OK?”
“What’re you doing here? Go upstairs. Go to class.”
“No.”
“You’ll be late for school!”
“So I’ll be late. A lot of people are late. Now it’s my turn.”
“You’ll get a mark. You’ll spoil your record.”
“Boo hoo. A mark and a record.”
“You said your dad didn’t like it when you were marked late.”
Collum looked at her for a moment. He took his hands away from his face, lifted his eyes, and really looked at her.
Then Judy saw: a circle of dark purple around one blue eye. That eye was partly closed; the other stared out accusingly.
“What happened? You got into a fight?”
“Not exactly a fight. The outcome was pretty well known from the beginning.”
His diction was more educated than she expected. And the words—“the outcome was . . .” He was smart, just like her. He was sharp; he was deep. Her heart ached for him, a smart boy beaten by a brute.
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t fight. If I ever fought back, he’d—”
“Then who—”
“Who do you think?”
Smart as she was, Judy still couldn’t figure it out. Her experiences had, up to now, been utterly limited and bourgeois. Everything bad she’d ever heard about had happened elsewhere. Nothing to do with her current path. It wasn’t in the curriculum; it wasn’t in the homework. Collum was beaten, and there—right in front of her.
“A—a bully?” There were older kids in the school, notorious morons (and not college material) who would not be past giving someone a black eye. Usually, they left girls alone, and this was one of the many reasons that Judy rejoiced in not being male. All that rough anger, all the fists and bruises! Of course, the Jewish boys were not like that. But most regular boys had a secret knowledge of it—sought it out, almost.
Yes, she was learning a secret about life now. She knelt, as though in prayer. Now, their faces were close. She was panting, unsure, and exhilarated.
“Collum—didn’t you try to run away?”
“You’re really not getting it!”
“What?”
“I’ve heard about you. You’re richer than most of the kids in the school, different outfit all the time. What’s your last name? Pinker? Pinkstein or something?”
Judy felt herself assaulted in a new and unusual way. Her father had hinted about things like this. Jews being singled out, ridiculed for their names and how they looked. Worse than ridiculed.
“It’s Pincus. I’m not rich at all. Normal, middle-class, I guess, but not—”
“You don’t know what my life is like, or how ‘normal’ it is, so don’t go there, Pinkstein.”
“Pincus.”
“OK, whatever, Pincus.”
“No, I don’t know what your life is like. How would I?”
“Maybe I oughtta tell you. Do you want me to?”
“Yes,” said Judy, falling even more in love. Was that even the word? In a way, this entry into another person’s life—into a goyish boy’s life—wasn’t even a part of her. Judy left herself behind and stepped fatefully into a labyrinth.
As Collum spoke, she followed him into the heart of his painful, short life.
“My father is a drunk, OK? A stinking, drinking drunk. He works with his hands all day—that’s why his arms are nice and strong. He’s a housepainter, not the fancy kind of painter you might prefer, a housepainter—and all day long he’s at the bottle.”
“Does he know about Alcoholics Anonymous—” Judy might have been in a labyrinth, but she didn’t forget everything she knew. And she wanted to be helpful, after all.
“Yes, he knows about AA, you idiot! Oh my God!!”
“OK, I’m sorry. I just wanted to—no, go on with your story.”
“No,” he echoed, but his “no” was much more fearsome than hers could ever be. It was a wall that he could put up, and often did.
“This is too much for me right now,” he said, beginning to shut down. Beginning to get up and start walking again. Who cared where? Away.
“It’s not a story, OK? It’s not an essay for the school paper. OK?”
“No, I know it’s not a story! I’m so sorry. Please, please don’t stop.”
Collum wasn’t good with pleading. He could retreat into a pitiless place. He lived there most of the time. But he relented.
“Let me just put it into simple terms that even you might understand: my father beats the holy living shit out of me whenever he feels like it.”
“So your father gave you that black eye?”
“Oh, my God, you’re a genius! So it’s true!”
“What is true?”
“Jews are smarter than we are! Hallelujah!”
“How do you even know I’m Jewish?” said Judy, leery. Was this to be one of the “anti-Semitic incidents” her father always cautioned her about?
“That star you wear around your neck is a little bit of a giveaway.”
“My—my star of David? Oh, I got it for my bat mitzvah! You noticed? Yeah, it’s actually eighteen karat, so the color—”
“Look, I don’t notice shit like that, and I don’t care, but you’re standing over me, really close, so I’m actually getting a pretty good look at your chain and that Jewish star, your little bauble. I mean, it’s in my face, for God’s sake!”
While Judy was caught up with Collum’s clever verbiage (“bauble?”—she really had assumed he was not as bright as she), Collum noticed that she smelled clean, like golden Breck shampoo, and that she had a beautiful long neck that fell away into the hint of female breasts. He trembled, just a bit, and Judy felt it.
She touched the boy’s face with the tip of her finger. She followed its contours, forehead, wounded eye, piercing other eye, nose, mouth, chin. She was tender with him, and felt her own tenderness with a kind of reverence, not unlike religion.
A tear slid out of Collum’s hurt eye, and Judy wiped it. He looked at her, his lashes long and wet, as dewy as a spider’s web at dawn.
And then he got up, shook himself (and her) off, and raced into the school.
“What’re you gonna tell them?” she said, panting after him.
“About what? Oh, this? Fell on my loose shoelaces.”
“Well, they are usually loose.”
“Not that they notice. You’re the only one who’s noticed.”
“That’s because I love you so much,” she whispered to herself. Did her lips move? Did she actually say the words? It seemed so, because Collum’s face, turning back, told her that he’d heard her.
The House of Whitsun
Collum’s love was everything Judy had ever dreamed about. He showed it like a hero, in front of everyone.
They’d stood on the lunch line one day. Judy’s friends—her peer group, that is, were getting used to the fact that she was eating with this boy, this scruffy kid. All of them were good students, and planned not only to go to college, but to Princeton or Penn. There they sat, holding their skim milk containers up, sipping through a straw and then stopping the sips to gossip animatedly about her. They were leaning over, to and fro, as though whispering intently. Staring and sipping, sipping and staring. Then one of them came up to the line, sidled near her, and said, “This will not end well.”
She had actually said that, as though Judy and Collum were characters in some after-school special.
“Yes, it will,” said Judy, without turning her face.
“I just got up because my milk container happens to be leaking, but as a friend I have to tell you that you’re putting yourself in a bad situation,” said the friend. Her name was Nina, and although she was an A student, there were rumors that her parents did her homework for her. She showed no discernible intelligence during school hours.
“Oh, shut up, Nina,” said Judy, finally. “Get your moo-juice and mind your business.”
“Judy! That’s rude!” Nina froze. Her fears were confirmed; Judy was already going bad. She ran to her table as though running from danger, hand on her mouth, telegraphing shock.
Her friends gathered her in, resumed their whispering, staring at Judy and Collum as though they were Bonnie and Clyde.
“Where is the damned pie?” Judy bristled. The only reason she was on the line for this long was that the pie—her favorite dessert—had run out. Now she was forced to wait for a new batch to be laid out on the cracked ice.
“You go sit; I’ll get it,” said Collum.
“They won’t give you an extra piece for me,” Judy admonished.
“I’ll give you mine.”
He saw that she was trembling. The conflict had upset her.
“Let’s just go. I’m not hungry anymore.”
“We’ll just sit far away from them, OK, Judy?”
“Where? They see all. They know all. It’s unbearable!”
Collum had no idea that peer groups could hurt you like this. At this point in his life, his only friends were his older brothers. He spoke to no one in school except Judy. But he knew what to do.
The pies came out at that moment.
“I want you to dine on this in the presence of your enemies!” he said, swiping a slice off the ice and putting it on his tray. Judy loved these occasional moments of eloquence. Words, when they came to Collum, came to express emotion, loyalty, love.
When he spoke like this, she (the A student) was rendered speechless.
Collum took his tray and walked over to the whisperers. Judy followed.
They saw him approach: the mussy hair, the battered jacket, the shoelaces of his high-tops insecurely tied. The tray holding pie, and a gleam in his eye:
He spoke, with all the dignity he could summon:
“Any of you, any of you, makes a comment to my girl about me and her—about us—you’ll—I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” said a girl called Maddy (captain of the debating team). “Beat us up?”
“Just shows what a lowlife you are,” said her friend, Tiffney (who, despite her name, was a math whiz).
“Yeah, a thug. Just proves the point,” said Susanna, whose father was a local judge.
“No—I won’t hit you or anything. But you’ll eat your words. You’ll see that what you laughed at was true love.”
The girls fell silent for a moment. They were, after all, fourteen years old. That word had not been anticipated. “Love” was not a word that was commonly spoken in the lunchroom. Yes, people dated, they went out. And maybe they loved in their way, or said they did. But to throw it out like that, like a dare?
As the girls looked at Collum, he met their eyes, and each and every one of those girls fell in love with that blue-eyed, hard-staring, soft-staring boy.
And there was more.
“I LOVE her,” he said. He turned around, sure that Judy was behind him. And she was, tray in hand. Tray in his own hand, Collum swiveled his body and kissed her on the lips, a kiss so long and deep that she almost dropped her food. But nothing dropped but a bunch of jaws at the sharp girls’ table.
Collum let Judy go, and started walking. He claimed a table for the two of them. Judy ate the pie he’d gotten her. It was full of peaches. Hard to tell if they were fresh or not, but she didn’t care—they were sweet and moist.
That was their first kiss. It tasted like courage, love, patience, and good, juicy peaches.
If only Judy could have shown her father the actions of that day! Like a Maccabee warrior her Collum was, brave in the face of the enemy hordes. Holding his own against ridicule.
But of course, she could not bring Collum home, because her father would have asked many questions.
“Whitsun? What kind of a name is ‘Whitsun’?”
She would have had to say, “Jewish, of course.”
“Doesn’t sound so Jewish to me, and I do know a Jew or two.”
“No, it’s changed. His grandpa changed it from ‘Weinstein,’ on account of all the anti-Semites.”
The unreachable parts of her brain had made her wily.
“Into ‘Whitsun’? Such a Christian sound to it.”
“That’s how he fooled them when he came from Poland to this country.”
Now she had him. Her father would have liked to hear about this name crisis, about how a poor immigrant was forced to hide an identity because of fear of further suffering, but it was not in Judy’s nature to continue to betray someone she loved with ever-greater bold-faced lies.
Collum was braver. Judy met his entire family—father, mother, and two older brothers, Ryan and Rob.
Going to Collum’s home was like visiting another country. Judy’s home had books and magazines that one could find in normal bookstores and on magazine stands. Collum’s had “literature” in the form of crude pamphlets, black-and-white and stapled, strewn around in great piles that threatened to topple.
“My father is very certain in his beliefs,” Collum explained. “He likes others to share that certainty, so he does these mailings,” he added darkly, as they entered the ramshackle Whitsun homestead. It was a rainy afternoon, just after school. The exterior of the house was painted the darkest brown possible; inside, there were few lights lit, and the windows were heavily curtained. The effect was spooky and depressing.
The first time Judy visited, Collum had assured her that his father would be away for several more hours. His mother, Betty, who worked part-time as a substitute at a nursery school, usually came home at about this hour. Nursery school teachers were always catching something from the little ones, who were like petri dishes of viral infections, but Betty O’Dell Whitsun never caught anything.
“She’s a rock,” her husband would often say, but it wasn’t clear if he meant it as a compliment, because his tone of voice always carried a sneer of hatred in it. He might well have meant that she was the cornerstone of his life; it came out, however, as though she were as dull and insufficient as a gray piece o
f granite.
Betty had learned to deal with her husband, it seemed. When Judy imagined the sort of woman who had three teenage boys, at least one of whom was regularly beaten, and a husband who struck his children, she imagined a sort of victim type, head bowed in submission. Betty, instead, seemed sanguine. She sang as she walked about her house (before she knew they were there), and when she did not sing, she whistled.
From where Judy and Collum stood, at the threshold of the dark house, they could hear water running in the kitchen, and Betty trilling a song in which she provided both the call and the response:
Oh, ya can’t get to heaven,
Oh, ya can’t get to heaven
On Patrick’s nose
On Patrick’s nose
Cause Patrick’s nose
It grows and grows!!
“Hey, Ma!” yelled Collum. “I’ve brought a guest home for tea!”
“Hold on, now—what did you say? Is it my own Collum there?”
“It is, Ma, and I’ve brought someone home, so comb your hair and take off your apron!”
“Oh, she doesn’t have to—” Judy attempted.
“But I do have to, when it’s such a pretty girl he’s brought home with him,” said Betty, running out into the foyer to greet them. As she ran, she untied the strings of a soft-cotton floral apron, then used it to wipe her dewy brow.
“Oooh, don’t have boys, I tell you! You’ll always be washing and cleaning something!”
“This is Judy, Ma. I told you about her, didn’t I?”
“You did. Judy: the girl who is perfect as a new-bloomed rose.”
Collum and his mother were close. He was her youngest, after all, her baby boy. He felt good in her presence, and she in his. They had always been kind to each other, and no harsh surprises had ever ruined their expectation of mutual love and trust. All this Judy took in as she saw the way Collum and his mother looked at each other. She was glad he had someone like this in his life, and wanted his mother to like her, too.