When it was finished, we walked without talking until we came to a small waterfall. We climbed up beside it to a ledge and sat down and smoked again.
“Nice spot,” I said.
With a heavy sigh she lay down in a patch of sunlight. “Yes.”
“You shouldn’t quit, Allis.”
“He may be right,” she said quietly. “Allis Greenberg may indeed be a flop as a poet. It was just the way, the awful way, he told me.”
“Ah, well—”
“You live in New York, don’t you?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yes. May I call you Cato? Cato—”
I said, “America, especially the American South, was very big on things and names Greek and Roman. Cato was a high-toned name they gave to some slaves. In Rome, there was a Dionysius Cato; nobody knows anything about him. There was a Valerius Cato, no relation to our Catos, who was a poet—used hexameter. Of the real Catos there was the Elder who was also the Censor. He fought against Hannibal, Third Punic War. His son, Marcus, was a soldier and a consul, and then his son, Marcus, Cato the Younger.” I paused to smile at her. She smiled back. “He was a Stoic. Fought against Spartacus. Being fair was his undoing, but that was said to be an old family trait. This Cato sided with Pompey against Caesar and when Caesar won the battle of Thapsus, Cato committed suicide out of a sense of fairness for having deserted Caesar in the first place. His death was considered courageous and noble. He was the last Republican to stand against the dictators. That’s about all I can tell you about Cato, which you may call me.”
She laughed, flashing gray-green eyes at me. “Jesus, you sound like an encyclopedia.”
I laughed too.
We sat there several moments without saying anything, until she, stirring, her body telegraphing that she was going to ask something, said, “What makes one a writer?”
I tossed a twig over the ledge into the waterfall. “I don’t know and I don’t think I ever will.”
“Ummm,” she said.
“Allis. I’d like to invite you to a picnic this afternoon, right here, with wine and cold cheeseburgers.”
“I think,” she said, “we can get tuna fish sandwiches instead of cold cheeseburgers.”
8
Oh, God, Allis says, when we enter the funeral parlor.
She does not like to be near death or close to where it is being lamented. She remembers her father and sometimes, even now, thinks that she hastened his death by her marriage to me. I never listen to such rationalizations. He was going to die when he was supposed to die, and our marriage altered the schedule of that event not one bit. But it causes her to watch Mack very carefully so that she can anticipate any leaning toward his becoming religious. Her father was a practicing Jew.
Many of our friends, themselves atheists, have been confronted by their children, who have wished to join or attend churches and synagogues, as if to vault the religious void created by their parents, who believed that working intellect was quite enough.
Yes, Allis tries to anticipate. She has closed her mind to the probability that our son, if he chooses to become a Jew, will be the kind of tolerated Jew, if he is lucky, that Sammy Davis, Jr., was. Mack is not now, nor will he ever be, if I read him correctly after these twelve years of his life, a song-and-dance man. Although she realizes it very well, Allis does not wish to believe that Jews know how to say nigger.
I protect my sons. I kick ass when it comes to my sons, for I do not want them to be so hurt that that hurt can be converted into self-destruction. I won’t tolerate it.
I apply the principle of vaccination—giving a little of what you may get in larger doses, fatal doses—in order to build up immunity. I told this son, Mack, when he was younger and asked about things:
You are and will be, to many different kinds of people, just a nigger. What you think of, and what you do for, yourself is the important thing. Got it?
Got it, but—
What?
Why do all the black kids call each other ah, er—that name?
Huh? I was thinking of a ditty I’d heard him sing to himself in his room:
A fight! A fight!
A nigger and white!
If the nigger don’t win,
We’ll all jump in!
He said, Why do they?
I guess they don’t have much respect down deep for themselves or each other. Maybe they haven’t been talked to by their parents.
They called me that.
Ah, I say, well.
Aren’t you gonna say anything?
They call me that, too, when they think.
You?
Yes.
Shit!
Mack! Mack. But I got it together here, you know, respect. How could I be Mack Douglass’ father and not respect myself?
Glenn, of course, long ago passed through the crucible that fires the soul and sears the brain far darker than the color of his skin. And Alejo, pobrecito Alejo! There, growing up, he had not even the rind-bitter solace that many others were being called Moros, too. Like grains of sand, from one end of the world to the other, these hurts grow together in a mighty, universal desiccation of all that composes life. I cry that I could not hold Alejo’s hand while talking gold into his blackness.
Mack seemed to be occupied with some heavy thought. His eyes searched my face as though all his previous examinations, the hundreds of thousands of them, had failed to reveal what he now sought.
What? I respond to Allis, her sudden stopping on the carpeted floor.
She inclines her head toward a placard.
PAUL KAMINSKY (CUMMINGS) PARLOR 3
We head down the softly lighted hall to Parlor 3. This makes me … She breaks off.
I know. Death feels very close to her now. Me. Close to me, because we were the same age, Paul and I. I say, C’mon. I don’t think that, and you’re almost my age.
That’s the furthest item in her mind. Allis, although I may not be there, is determined to see her grandchildren, Mack’s kids. I have no doubt that she will live until then, however long it takes. And she should.
The box is all.
Unadorned, it sits alone on a foot-high stage. We walk softly into the parlor, glance about, then slide into an aisle. Rabbi Kaminsky sits apart from Betsy and the kids. Well, he does not know them.
Rushing down the stairs so long ago, Paul’s father seemed like a huge man—taller, broader, more ferocious-looking. Now, he seems to have been melted down by a long, searing process. This, then, is the man who, in Paul’s fiction, his early fiction, was the socialist, Harry Bridges’ confidant.
He looks like Paul, Allis whispers.
Yes, I say.
I wonder about my own father, his golden smile, his stinking cigars. I didn’t love him and I didn’t hate him; I did not really know him. His advice to me when I reached my fourteenth birthday was that I should get me some rubbers. He was three years too late.
I wonder how it felt to freeze to death while drowning. I hope he was snocked, unable to feel anything. When I think of him, I think of Malaparte’s descriptions of soldiers frozen to death in Lake Ladoga, staring sightlessly up at him while he stood on the surface of the iced-over water. It must have been like peering down at specimens from a horrible epidemic. I know that in the first second of plunging into freezing water, the sensation that flashes through the legs is one of instant, gratifying warmth. What a marvelous machine the body is. But then the machine quits and the materials of which it is composed go the way of all matter in that situation.
What? Allis asks in a whisper.
Nothing, I answer. I had sighed.
Paul’s father stands; the parlor stills. He moves slowly to the coffin. He straightens, and his eyes, a weary shade of blue behind his bifocals, look out disconsolately at the rows of people, then slide down to the coffin. He leans upon it, his fingertips like small rays emerging from the blackness of the cuff of his jacket. The fingertips begin to tremble, and I am Paul feeling my father’s ancien
t fingers trembling upon my pine box. How out of joint …
It is strange how in his grief Paul’s father reminds me of Graenum; I can almost measure the accumulations of weariness because of deeds half or undone, realizations met far too late to do anything about them.
“Hah!” he said when I entered his apartment in the ILGWU Houses. “Medowitz tells me that you want to marry a Jewish girl. So!”
We shook hands. He was all in black, save for a white shirt opened at the neck and a gray sweater with a hole in it under his jacket. His yarmulka was cocked crazily on both the back and side of his head. He looked up at me, for he was a small man, studying, his hands resting easily in his pockets. “Are you a revolutionary?”
The question gave me pause; then I said, “Some people think so.”
“And you?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Come, let’s have a drink.” He led me by the elbow across the room and poured thick, silvery slivovitz into two small glasses. He knocked his back. I did the same. He filled the glasses again and we sat down.
“Mr. Douglass, let me ask you—the girl’s father?”
“He won’t see me.”
“Her mother?”
“Dead.”
He cocked his head and squinted one eye. “Why should you want to do this? What will the father do for you? A revolutionary should move on his own terms. You think if you convert he’ll like you?”
“Rabbi Gordon, I don’t know. I wanted to help Allis maintain her ties with her family.”
“She asked you to do this?”
“No.”
“You didn’t ask her to convert—what’re you, Christian or Muslim?”
“Nothing.”
He wagged a finger at me. “Where did you start?”
“I guess you’d call it Christian.”
“And now, you any kind of a religious man?”
“No, not in a religious sense.”
“Why not?”
“It’s all shit.”
“Ahhah,” he said, running an index finger back and forth across his lips. “Ahhah. Ahhah. Judaism too?” With a smile.
“Yes.”
“Would she want you to do this? It’s not like you were going to temple every Saturday when you met?”
“Rabbi—”
“Call me Graenum. What’s your first name?”
“Cato.”
“Cato? What kind of a name is that?”
“Roman.”
“Roman. I see, I see.” He looked puzzled. Where would I get a Roman name? He said, “But you were saying, about this Allis—”
“I think she would be pleased, not for her, but for her father. She happens to like her father. She always got along well with him. She has no other family except cousins and aunts and uncles, things like that.”
“But you don’t really want to do it, do you?”
“No.”
His laugh was soft. “There is a little—arrogance?—about it, eh? Well, comes the revolution,” he said in such a way as to make me think that not since he’d left Europe had he had any real faith in revolutions. “You’re a good fellow, I can tell.”
“How?”
“I’m a rabbi.” He laughed again and moved closer to me, tapped me on my knee. “C’mon, son, c’mon. You think if you convert, never mind your obvious lack of faith, he’s gonna love you? You can be the most famous writer in the world—Medowitz told me you’re a writer—the most famous, and you know something? Her father’s not gonna love you, ever.” Like an actor he held the level of his voice up, so that I waited for the next line. “And I don’t have to tell you why.”
He poured again, sipped and set his glass down, then tented his fingers. “If you want, I can give you a piece of paper that says you’re circumcised, take a drop of blood and all that—”
“I am circumcised.”
Graenum laughed loud and merrily. “Who isn’t these days? So tell your prospective father-in-law. My advice is this: Fuck it. Go to City Hall. Get married. Stay healthy, have children and prosper.” A weariness had entered his voice, edged with a rage that had worn out a long, long time ago. “I could give you nonsense, but this is a realistic world, my friend. If her father doesn’t like you now, all the Jewish papers in this universe will not help you. After all, we’re just like everyone else, no better, no worse. We are chosen just like all others. Go to City Hall.”
His teeth click. Paul’s father’s teeth click as he begins the service and I glance around in time to see Mark Medowitz slide into a seat.
O Lord, what is man that thou shouldst notice him?
The sight of Mark, whom I have not seen in at least a decade, shocks me. His beard and hair are white, though both are stylishly cut. I wonder if he is glad to be back in New York, away from television and back with print. Do I look as old? Probably not; we age well, we are always told.
There is choked anger in Rabbi Kaminsky’s voice. Allis, whispering the words along with him, looks quickly at him: What is mortal man that thou shouldst consider him? A tiny sob escapes him; we know what he is thinking. He pauses, his fingers now trembling upon the box the way fingers seek the frets on a guitar. They steady.
Man is like a breath;
His days are like a passing shadow.
Three rows in front of us an immense lady turns and smiles at me. I smile back. It is not until she turns away that I realize that she is Dorothea Blue-Sky, Leonard’s widow. I feel a slight warming in my member. Perhaps the reaction is very ancient, dating from the time that fat women were the most desirable; Venus of Willendorf, Ati of Punt.
The young man beside her glances back at me. He resembles both Leonard and Dylan Thomas. Leonard adored Thomas. Another glance. I imagine his mother’s whisper: “That’s Cato Caldwell Douglass.”
He flourishes in the morning …
It was Leonard who called to tell me that Paul had placed his novel, and when Paul himself reached me, two hours later, I was still angry: Why hadn’t Paul himself called first? Why had I been made to feel that it was Paul, Leonard, et al., against me? That had been very implicit in Leonard’s voice.
“So. I hear you had a good trip to Europe,” Leonard said. “And the novel and Bread Loaf and the anthology—we have a lot of catching up to do.”
“Are we in a race, Leonard?”
He laughed.
I asked, “How’s your stuff going?”
“It goes, like—it’s going.”
“Yeah. Poetry’s rough.”
“I’ll make it.”
A conversation like that is filled with holes—even the words don’t mean that much—and finally we quit; we would see each other at Paul’s that evening.
“How come I had to get the word from Leonard?” I said, when Paul called.
“He called?” The surprise in his voice was not genuine. “Aw, I meant to get to you sooner. Something came up.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Coopersmith, huh? What’s the advance?”
“Same as yours; three,” he said. His voice seemed to curve. “You’re coming over for the celebration tonight, aren’t you? You gotta.”
“Oh, I’m coming, I wouldn’t miss that, Paul. Can I bring a couple of people?”
“The more the merrier—if they bring booze.”
I called Allis. Would she be home later, much later? Yes. What time had I in mind? After midnight. Then I would be sleeping over? Yes, I said. That would be a good idea. Also, it would give her time to finish up some paperwork for her job at Cumer, Slate and Finch. Fundraisers.
I called Ike Plunkett and Amos Bookbinder, who were talking contract, and arranged to meet them at a bar uptown and from there go to the party.
I started walking; it was autumn, my time of year. The bar was one I knew would be hospitable to us, for the Upper West Side was not an altogether friendly neighborhood then. Amos brought gin and vermouth, Ike had Scotch, and I had gin.
“Coopersmith’s doesn’t pay three grand for a first novel,” Amos sai
d, midway through his first martini. “Paul lied to you. I can get the exact figure if you want.”
“No. What’ll you pay Ike?”
“Shall I tell him, Ike?”
Ike said, “Why not? It’s only money.”
“Twenty-five hundred and his is a small novel, sixty-five thousand words.” Mine had been a hundred thousand. The new one, as far as I could tell, would be longer.
“You know why your boy lied to you, doncha?” Ike said.
“Sure,” I said. “Shit, yes.” I turned away. I hated being put on the defensive, hated their smirks, because Paul was white and my friend. “It’s all so childish.”
Amos laughed. “But very, very old. You all’s concern should be whether or not they’re gonna let you go by John Whittington.”
How to describe those days when we all, occupied with the physical and psychological demands of running the race, as though we were charioteers in a Roman circus, mounted our machines, eyes fixed on the acclaim raining down from the Literary Establishment upon John Greenleaf Whittington? Or we could have been poised on our marks like Eulace Peacocks, Jesse Owenses, Ralph Metcalfes, Archie Williamses or Cornelius Johnsons, deep in the bowels of the Berlin Stadium, “American Auxiliaries,” awaiting the gun. Leonard had been right; there was a race and a race and a race, though we had not known, just as our counterparts a quarter-century before had not known until our race, the Chitlinswitch Special, was over, forgotten, done with; ours was only a heat. Whittington and two or three others were in the finals.
We sensed before we allowed ourselves to know that they had been sent to guard the approaches to the Pyramids from the other Africans who were always disembarking along the nearby Nile.
Perhaps it was Richard Wright’s sudden death in Paris that had created the race. Then had come the steady flow of rumor and disjointed pieces of information, and more than once I remembered what Sandra Queensbury would tell me. But not then. Not in the bar that night.
Then I felt as Ike did—he’d winked at me as though to suggest that Amos had just landed from another planet and obviously did not understand the situation, which was simply this: WHOever guarded the approaches was going to have to give way before us.
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