by Louis Begley
So far as Henry’s wanting to pass was concerned, although he had come clean with me, I thought that probably he preferred to have other people think he was a Gentile. That was his business. I didn’t admire the impulse but certainly wouldn’t hold it against him. I doubted that Archie would either. How Henry would manage it, ducking answers about his accent and his past without some serious lies, was another matter, but that too was his business. It occurred to me in this connection that I was doing a bit of passing myself. What else was it when I let people take me for my parents’ son, with all the advantages that being a Standish instead of a Nowak or a Mahoney entailed? True, the situations were different. Standish was my name, and I had no other. Still, to claim that Henry and I were comrades in arms wasn’t much of a stretch.
It was probably a week later, over dinner at the Freshman Union, that we returned to what Henry called his Jewism. We had been able to find a table for two, and I felt that we could talk freely about these very personal matters. Enough so for me to ask him whether his parents were right. Was he trying to get away from being a Jew?
There is no such thing, he answered. You are born a Jew and you die a Jew. Hitler proved it.
I said that wasn’t true. Jews converted—I cited the example of the New York Jews at my school, who I believed had converted. Anyway, they came to chapel. Or perhaps it was their parents or grandparents who had converted.
You see—he laughed—they might as well not have bothered. You think they’re Jews anyway.
He wasn’t wrong. I told him that there was a less direct approach. To be precise, right after we met him, Archie and I had wondered whether he was trying to pass. Henry got red in the face, and I feared that our conversations, and perhaps our friendship, were coming to an end. But he answered me very calmly. It’s a fact, he said, that I derive no benefit from being Jewish, or any pleasure. It almost got my parents and me killed. A fact that doesn’t inspire me to believe in God. It makes me deny him and wish that I weren’t one of the chosen, that I hadn’t been thrust at birth into this monstrous trap. All the same, so long as there are people who care whether I am a Jew pretending to be a Gentile, I have to remain a Jew, even though inside I feel no more Jewish than a smoked ham. If the question is asked, I’m obliged to say that I’m a Jew—unless the consequence is ending up in a concentration camp or dead. I consider it a debt of honor, an odd one for someone like me, who doesn’t believe he owes anything to anybody. Otherwise I’ve no intention of making a show of being Jewish.
I wasn’t sure I understood and must have looked perplexed.
I’ll give you an example, he said. When you, Archie, and I met I didn’t think I had a duty to say, Hello, hello, I’m Henry White, a Jew. Or to wear a yellow star. I did that, in Krakow.
I told him that was really absurd.
Is it really? What would it have taken for you and Archie not to suspect me of trying to pass? If not a yellow star, then a yarmulke or side locks? Should I have a business card that says on it “Jew”? Or Untermensch—that’s German for subhuman. Incidentally, most of the fights I have with my parents now are about what I’m doing to show that I am a Jew. When I told them about you and Archie, the first thing my mother asked was, Why don’t you have Jewish roommates? I said that I hadn’t picked you; it just happened. That didn’t satisfy her. She said, You could have asked to room with someone Jewish. Sure, I replied, but I didn’t, and why should I? I don’t think you want to hear the response to that crack. Her next line of attack was: Do they know you are Jewish? I said I wasn’t sure, but if they’re intelligent enough to be at Harvard they should be able to figure it out, and if they can’t, all they have to do is ask me. You want to hear my mother’s reply? She said that maybe they’re too polite. That really broke me up and I reminded her that you, and maybe Archie as well, have spoken on the telephone with her and my father many times. Does she think that having heard them you have concluded we had come over on the Mayflower? Then, I confess, I turned cruel. I said that if she and my father had wanted to leave no doubt that we were Jews, they shouldn’t have changed our name. If it were still Weiss, you’d have to be a total moron to think we weren’t Jews. Yes, she and Father changed our name after we came here, as quickly as they could. The official reason is that White is an accurate English translation, and everybody knows how to spell it. That’s obvious nonsense; there is nothing unusual about Weiss, certainly not in New York. But to answer your interesting question, no, I’m not trying to pass, but I know that some people don’t immediately think that I’m Jewish, and I do nothing to disabuse them. Part of it is my name; part of it is that I don’t look especially Jewish. But the false impression usually doesn’t last long. Because of my accent, mostly they ask where I come from, as Archie did. When I say I’m from Poland, and that I was there during the war, those who have an idea of what went on there may well say to themselves, He can’t be Jewish; otherwise, he’d be dead. He must be a regular Catholic Pole who changed his name from something like Wilczuk, and they leave it at that. That’s when I wish I were called Weiss or, better yet, Cohen or Levin. There would be no such confusion. People couldn’t say I was trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The subject wouldn’t have to be discussed. But the people who get fooled are a minority. Either they aren’t curious or they don’t want to seem nosy. A regular American will follow up with something along the line of: How did you survive? Then the fat is in the fire. In case you’re interested, I knew I wasn’t fooling you and Archie, and I wasn’t trying. That you thought I was is another matter. It hurts. But I don’t blame you.
He looked downcast. It’s all right, Henry, I told him. There is no problem between you and me. Or between you and Archie. I’m sure of that.
He brightened at that, and we talked about courses and movies until the end of the meal and as we walked through the Yard to the dormitory. Once we were in our living room, however, he said he wanted to continue the conversation we had begun.
You’ve let the genie out of the bottle, he told me. You might as well know, he continued, that my mother isn’t only interested in whether you or Archie or anyone else I know realizes that I’m a Jew, and, if so, how they found out. Keeping me from leaving home—literally or metaphorically—is a more complicated undertaking. You see, they’re good parents in their own way. They want me to have a roof over my head and nice clothes, provided my mother picks them. And, of course, an excellent education. They’re willing to make financial sacrifices for that, but so far none has been needed. High school was free, and I have a scholarship here. Naturally they want me to succeed, and they want me to have all the right opportunities. But there is a limit. I’m not supposed to fly too high. Dickens might have said I mustn’t try to rise above my station. That’s a big unarticulated anxiety. Partly it’s prudence. We lost everything in the war, and they don’t want me to crash. They’re always worried about money, even now that my father is doing well in business. I understand that. The other part is the fear that if I fly high and remain up there in the higher sphere, that too will tempt me to leave them. So, the other big issue about you and Archie is whether you’re rich. If you are, maybe I shouldn’t be spending so much time with you, and maybe you shouldn’t be my best friends. You might give me big ideas and teach me bad habits. I’ve told them that I don’t think an army colonel makes as much as my father, and that you don’t strike me as rich, though I’m only guessing. Just the same, you might as well know it: in White family shorthand the two of you are Henry’s rich Gentile friends.
Stop, I said. I can tell you right now that my parents aren’t rich though they certainly wish they were.
He examined me with an air I took to be skeptical. My mother wouldn’t necessarily believe you. By the way, she thinks you’re very polite in a standoffish Gentile way. Lukewarm, she calls it.
I didn’t know what to say or whether I should say anything. Henry had gotten very flushed and was staring at me. Finding the silence uncomfortable, I told him that I liked my co
nversations with his mother.
Bullshit, he replied. How could you?
I got up from my armchair and went to the toilet. When I returned he said, Forgive me, I am sorry I got so worked up. Let me try to explain. The current refrain is why don’t I seek out my own kind instead of hanging out with you and Archie and God knows what other high-society Gentiles. For instance, there are some nice services in Boston I could go to on Friday evenings. One of my father’s big customers has a son at Tufts who attends. Go meet him, stay for dinner, and get to know nice Jewish girls. I say to my parents that I’ve never gone to Friday services in my life before, and I don’t see why I should start now, in Boston. You should understand that I don’t think for one minute that my father believes in God. On the other hand with his angina he doesn’t want to say he doesn’t and take chances on what happens after he’s dead. Also, both he and my mother are one hundred percent conventional. Some of my father’s customers go to a synagogue not far from us. So he goes too, on High Holidays, and he and my mother fast on Yom Kippur. To be more precise, they pretend to each other that they’re fasting. I’ve had to go to the synagogue with my father. Each of those expeditions was humiliating. There I was, not because I believed but because I had been dragged. I wouldn’t mind so much if my parents were religious. But my mother, who makes the most fuss, has no religion, unless you accept as a religion the myth about how it was before the war when we were a family of good Jews. I have no memories of our having been good Jews at home in Krakow. Perhaps the war has crowded them out. It doesn’t matter: as I keep telling them, if they had wanted me to be observant, they would have had to be sincerely religious and observant themselves and have provided me with that Jewish home she’s always carrying on about. They aren’t and they didn’t: I’m being badgered to go through the motions of a ritual I don’t believe in. I’ll leave that sort of stuff to the Grand Inquisitor.
The mention of the Karamazovs, whose appearances in his conversation were frequent, cracked me up. All right, he said, what I really mean, and what I tell them when I’m really worked up, is that I can’t seek out my own kind because I don’t know who they are. Maybe there are no such people. I’m not sure that I’m like anybody else. I won’t pretend that I am.
For a moment I pondered the possibility that he was trying to say he might be queer. I didn’t think he was—not just because he was so obviously attracted to girls. I just didn’t think so. At the same time I was reminded once more that he really was a good deal like me, one difference being that his problems were more obvious and could be blamed mostly on being Jewish.
So what do you intend to do about finding out? I asked.
Nothing, he said. Everything. I am going to remake myself in the image I carry inside me.
What that image might be and how it fit with Poland and the scars the war had left were a mystery. My attempts to probe, whether out of curiosity or compassion, got me only so far. The previous day when, having screwed up my courage, I asked him to tell me something about how he and his parents had survived the war was a good example. He had stared at me and said quietly, A nice lady hid my mother and me. A nice man hid my father.
IV
HENRY’S non serviam did not stand in the way of more conventional attempts at transformation. His principal mentor and accomplice was Archie. Archie’s disgust with the efforts of his mother’s tailor in Panama City endured unabated, as did his conviction that they gave him the “Don Ramón look.” All I need, he said, is a pencil-line mustache. A solution to Archie’s and Henry’s sartorial problems emerged when Archie discovered Keezer’s, a Cambridge establishment rich in university tradition, located in the town-and-gown no-man’s-land between Prescott Street and Central Square. One could buy there on the cheap, among many other props required for an undergraduate’s social ascension, well-cut secondhand tweeds, dinner jackets, and morning coats, often in fine condition. The Keezer brothers’ main suppliers were widows of newly deceased faculty members and alumni. A customer was welcome to trade in his own clothes, which is what Archie did with the Panamanian tailor’s creations. Whatever his view of their cut, the quality was so high that at the end of the transaction Archie owed Keezer’s nothing. It was his plan that Henry engage in the same sort of exchange; his clothes, although off the rack, were also of good quality. Unexpectedly, Henry balked.
I can’t, he said. When I go home, my mother will expect me to wear the clothes she bought for me. I’ll never hear the end of it if I tell her they’ve been sold.
They were at an impasse; without a substantial trade-in credit, Henry couldn’t pay for what Archie had picked out for him. Unwilling to accept defeat, he made Henry a loan, not a large sum, to be repaid over the balance of the school year. They invited me to the final fitting, Keezer’s being expert at even the most improbable alterations. Archie had done well. If clothes made the man, Henry now could pass for an undergraduate who had been to one of the right schools and knew how to dress.
The loan was a sign that Archie was going through one of his flush periods. They didn’t last long, but while they did, a good deal of cash was spent at the liquor store on Mount Auburn Street and at Henri IV, a French restaurant on Winthrop Street in vogue among the faculty and more affluent students as well as parents of undergraduates in Cambridge for the weekend. Archie was fond of rituals. One that he adopted that fall was having lunch on Saturdays at the Henri IV with Clara, a Wellesley freshman from San Salvador with whom he could use his excellent Spanish. It was also where he occasionally entertained a girl from a college in Back Bay known for courses in home economics and students with better bodies than brains. Getting her back to her dormitory by ten or eleven in the evening, the hour by which, depending on the day of the week, she had to be signed in, was easier than getting Clara back to Wellesley. He explained to Henry and me that Clara was very Catholic and brought up in the cult of virginity, so the likelihood of getting beyond what he had already attained—when they kissed she let him put his hand under her Pringle sweater and unhook her bra—was discouragingly small. For instance, Clara refused to go into his bedroom, whether or not Henry and I were around, although, if we weren’t there, being on the sofa in the living room was acceptable. It followed that we stayed clear of the dormitory until the end of parietal hours when Archie brought her over on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. She was also willing to park with Archie, after dark, on quiet Cambridge or Wellesley streets, or along the Charles. The only problem was that Archie didn’t yet own a car. He could borrow one occasionally, but these loans couldn’t be arranged often enough to satisfy him or, perhaps, even Clara, and so hardly accelerated his progress. Jeanie, the girl from the junior college across the river, was also Catholic, and Irish to boot, which lowered her in Archie’s esteem. Disrespect does away with many a barrier to conquest—in addition to acting as an aphrodisiac. On the afternoon of Jeanie’s second visit to our rooms—no suggestion was made that Henry and I withdraw to the Lamont while Archie and Jeanie were behind the closed door of his bedroom—they emerged holding hands, with only a minute or two to spare before girls had to be signed out. I’ve separated the boy from the man, Jeanie announced. Archie signaled assent and hustled her out. Being sensitive to manners and diction, he may have felt embarrassed by the form not to say the simple fact of her declaration, which Henry later told me he had found unbearably sexy. Before long, however, Jeanie’s availability—she thought nothing of coming to Harvard Square by subway, and never insisted that Archie take her back to Beacon Street even late in the evening—trumped the Salvadorean’s well-bred elegance and charm. Archie took to calling Clara only at hours when he knew she wouldn’t be in her dormitory, for instance when she had a class. He would leave a message that he had telephoned. Nothing more. Then he stopped calling her altogether. This tactic confused Clara. She took telephone messages seriously, thought they should be returned, and began calling our room to ask what was wrong. Archie never picked up the receiver; his instinct for avoiding calls he didn’
t want to answer was nearly infallible.