My Life as a Man
Page 10
But I am too humiliated to do either. The country may have changed, I have not. I did not know such depths of humiliation were possible, even for me. A reader of Conrad’s Lord Jim and Mauriac’s Therese and Kafka’s “Letter to His Father,” of Hawthorne and Strindberg and Sophocles—of Freud!—and still I did not know that humiliation could do such a job on a man. It seems either that literature too strongly influences my ideas about life, or that I am able to make no connection at all between its wisdom and my existence. For I cannot fully believe in the hopelessness of my predicament, and yet the line that concludes The Trial is as familiar to me as my own face: “it was as if the shame of it must outlive him”! Only I am not a character in a book, certainly not that book. I am real. And my humiliation is equally real. God, how I thought I was suffering in adolescence when fly balls used to fall through my hands in the schoolyard, and the born athletes on my team would smack their foreheads in despair. What I would give now to be living again back in that state of disgrace. What I would give to be living back in Chicago, teaching the principles of composition to my lively freshmen all morning long, taking my simple dinner off a tray at the Commons at night, reading from the European masters in my bachelor bed before sleep, fifty monumental pages annotated and underlined, Mann, Tolstoy, Gogol, Proust, in bed with all that genius—oh to have that sense of worthiness again, and migraines too if need be! How I wanted a dignified life! And how confident I was!
To conclude, in a traditional narrative mode, the story of that Zuckerman in that Chicago. I leave it to those writers who live in the flamboyant American present, and whose extravagant fictions I sample from afar, to treat the implausible, the preposterous, and the bizarre in something other than a straightforward and recognizable manner.
In my presence Eugene Ketterer did his best to appear easygoing, unruffled, and nonviolent, just a regular guy. I called him Mr. Ketterer, he called me Nathan, Nate, and Natie. The later he was in delivering Monica to her mother, the more offhand and, to me, galling was his behavior; to Lydia it was infuriating, and in the face of it she revealed a weakness for vitriolic rage which I’d seen no evidence of before, not at home or in class or in her fiction. It did not help any to caution her against allowing him to provoke her; in fact, several times she accused me—afterward, tearfully asking forgiveness—of taking Ketterer’s side, when my only concern had been to prevent her from losing her head in front of Monica. She responded to Ketterer’s taunting like some animal in a cage being poked with a stick, and I knew, the second Sunday that I was on hand to witness his cruelty and her response, that I would shortly have to make it clear to “Gene” that I was not just some disinterested bystander, that enough of his sadism was enough.
In the beginning, before Ketterer and I finally had it out, if Lydia demanded an explanation from him for showing up at two P.M. (when he had been due to arrive with Monica at ten thirty in the morning) he would look at me and say, fraternally, “Women.” If Lydia were to reply, “That’s idiotic! That’s meaningless! What would a thug like you know about ‘women,’ or men, or children! Why are you late with her, Eugene?” he would just shrug and mumble, “Got held up.” “That will not do—!” “Have to, Lyd. ‘Fraid that’s the way the cookie crumbles.” Or without even bothering to give her an answer, he would say, again to me, “Live ‘n’ learn, Natie.” A similarly unpleasant scene would occur in the evening, when he arrived to pick Monica up either much too early or too late. “Look, I ain’t a clock. Never claimed to be.” “You never claimed to be anything —because you’re not anything!” “Yeah, I know, I’m a brute and a slob and a real bad thug, and you, you’re Lady Godiva. Yeah, I know all that.” “You’re a tormentor, that’s what you are! That you torture me is not even the point any more—but how can you be so cruel and heartless as to torture your own little child! How can you play with us like this, Sunday after Sunday, year after year—you caveman! you hollow ignoramus!” “Let’s go, Harmonica”—his nickname for the child—“time to go home with the Big Bad Wolf.”
Usually Monica spent the day at Lydia’s watching TV and wearing her hat. Ready to go at a moment’s notice.
“Monica,” Lydia would say, “you really can’t sit all day watching TV.”
Uncomprehending: “Uh-huh.”
“Monica, do you hear me? It’s three o’clock. Maybe that’s enough TV for one day—do you think? Didn’t you bring your homework?”
Completely in the dark: “My what?”
“Did you bring your homework this week, so we can go over it?”
A mutter: “Forgot.”
“But I told you I’d help you. You need help, you know that.”
Outrage: “Today’s Sunday.”
“And?”
Law of Nature: “Sundays I don’t do no homework.”
“Don’t talk like that, please. You never even spoke like that when you were a little six-year-old girl. You know better than that.”
Cantankerous: “What?”
“Using double negatives. Saying I don’t do no—the way your father does. And please don’t sit like that.”
Incredulous: “What?”
“You’re sitting like a boy. Change into your dungarees if you want to sit like that. Otherwise sit like a girl your age.”
Defiant: “I am.”
“Monica, listen to me: I think we should practice your subtraction. We’ll have to do it without the book, since you didn’t bring it”
Pleading: “But today’s Sunday.”
“But you need help in subtraction. That’s what you need, not church, but help with your math. Monica, take that hat off! Take that silly hat off this minute! It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and you just can’t wear it all day long!”
Determined. Wrathful: “It’s my hat—I can too!”
“But you’re in my house! And I’m your mother! And I’m telling you to take it off! Why do you insist on behaving in this silly way! I am your Mother, you know that! Monica, I love you and you love me—don’t you remember when you were a little girl, don’t you remember how we used to play? Take that hat off before I tear it off your head!”
Ultimate Weapon: “Touch my head and I’ll tell my dad on you!
“And don’t call him ‘Dad’! I cannot stand when you call that man who tortures the two of us ‘Dad’! And sit like a girl! Do as I tell you! Close your legs!”
Sinister: “They’re close.”
“They’re open and you’re showing your underpants and stop it! You’re too big for that—you go on buses, you go to school, if you’re wearing a dress then behave as though you’re wearing one! You cannot sit like this watching television Sunday after Sunday—not when you cannot even add two and two.”
Philosophical: “Who cares.”
“I care! Can you add two and two? I want to know! Look at me—I’m perfectly serious. I have to know what you know and what you don’t know, and where to begin. How much is two and two? Answer me.”
Dumpish: “Dunno.”
“You do know. And pronounce your syllables. And answer me!
Savage: “I don’t know! Leave me alone, you!”
“Monica, how much is eleven minus one? Eleven take away one. If you had eleven cents and someone took away one of them, how many would you have left? Dear, please, what number comes before eleven? You must know this.”
Hysterical: “1 don’t know it!”
“You do!”
Exploding: “Twelve!”
“How can it be twelve? Twelve is more than eleven. I’m asking you what’s less than eleven. Eleven take away one—is how much?”
Pause. Reflection. Decision: “One.”
“No! You have eleven and you take away one.”
Illumination: “Oh, take away.”
“Yes. Yes.”
Straight-faced: “We never had take-aways.”
“You did. You had to.”
Steely: “I’m telling you the truth, we don’t have take-aways in James Madison School.”
Sulky, bewildered: “I don’t understand you.”
“Monica, you’re a developing girl, even if they do dress you up like a kewpie doll on Sundays.”
Righteous indignation: “This is for church.”
“But church is beside the point for you. It’s reading and writing—oh, I swear to you, Monica, every word I say is only because I love you and I don’t want anything awful to happen to you, ever. I do love you—you must know that! What they have told you about me is not so. I am not a crazy woman, I am not a lunatic. You mustn’t be afraid of me, or hate me—I was sick, and now I’m well, and I want to strangle myself every time I think that I gave you up to him, that I thought he could begin to provide you with a mother and a home and everything I wanted you to have. And now you don’t have a mother—you have this person, this woman, this ninny who dresses you up in this ridiculous costume and gives you a Bible to carry around that you can’t even read! And for a father you have that man. Of all the fathers in the world, him!”
Here Monica screamed, so piercingly that I came running from the kitchen where I had been sitting alone over a cup of cold coffee, not even knowing what to think.
In the living room all Lydia had done was to take Monica’s hand in her own; yet the child was screaming as though she were about to be murdered.
“But,” wept Lydia, “I only want to hold you—“
As though my appearance signaled that the real violence was about to begin, Monica began to froth at the mouth, screaming all the while, “Don’t! Don’t! Two and two is four! Don’t beat up on me! It’s four!”
Scenes as awful as this could be played out two and three times over in the course of a single Sunday afternoon—amalgams, they seemed to me, of soap opera (that genre again), Dostoevsky, and the legends of Gentile family life that I used to hear as a child, usually from my immigrant grandmothers, who had never forgotten what life had been like amid the Polish peasantry. As in the struggles of soap opera, the emotional ferocity of the argument exceeded by light-years the substantive issue, which was itself, more often than not, amenable to a little logic, or humor, or a dose of common sense. Yet, as in the scenes of family warfare in Dostoevsky, there was murder in the air on those Sundays, and it could not be laughed or reasoned away: an animosity so deep ran between those two females of the same blood that though they were only having that standard American feud over a child’s schoolwork (the subject not of The Possessed or The Brothers Karamazov but of Henry Aldrich and Andy Hardy) it was not impossible (from another room) to imagine them going about it with firebrand, pistol, hanging rope, and hatchet. Actually, the child’s cunning and her destructive stubbornness were nothing like so distressing to me as Lydia’s persistence. I could easily envision, and understand, Monica’s pulling a gun—bang bang, you’re dead, no more take-aways— but it was imagining Lydia trying to bludgeon the screaming child into a better life that shocked and terrified me.
Ketterer was the one who brought to mind those cautionary tales about Gentile barbarity that, by my late adolescence, I had rejected as irrelevant to the kind of life that I intended to lead. Exciting and gripping as they were to a helpless child—hair-raising tales of “their” alcoholism, “their” violence, “their” imperishable hatred of us, stories of criminal oppressors and innocent victims that could not but hold a powerful negative attraction for any Jewish child, and particularly to one whose very body was that of the underdog—when I came of age and began the work of throwing off the psychology and physique of my invalid childhood, I reacted against these tales with all the intensity my mission required. I did not doubt that they were accurate descriptions of what Jews had suffered; against the background of the concentration camps I hardly would dare to say, even in my teenage righteousness, that these stories were exaggerated. Nonetheless (I informed my family), as I happened to have been born a Jew not in twentieth-century Nuremberg, or nineteenth-century Lemberg, or fifteenth-century Madrid, but in the state of New Jersey in the same year that Franklin Roosevelt took office, et cetera, et cetera. By now that diatribe of second-generation American children is familiar enough. The vehemence with which I advanced my position forced me into some ludicrous positions: when my sister, for instance, married her first husband, a man who was worthless by most anyone’s standards (and certainly repulsive to me at fifteen, with his white shirt cuffs rolled back twice, his white calfskin loafers, his gold pinkie ring, and the way he had with his well-tanned hands of touching everything, his cigarette case, his hair, my sister’s cheek, as though it were silk—the whole effeminate side of hooliganism), I nonetheless berated my parents for opposing Sunny’s choice of a mate on the grounds that if she wished to marry a Catholic that was her right. In the anguish of the moment they missed my point, as I, with my high-minded permissiveness, missed theirs; in the end it was they of course who turned out to be prophetic, and with a vengeance. Only a few years later, at last a free agent myself, I was able to admit that what was so dismal and ridiculous about my sister’s marriages wasn’t her penchant for Italian boys from South Philly, but that both times out she chose precisely the two who confirmed, in nearly every detail, my family’s prejudice against them.
Dim-witted as it may seem in retrospect—as much does, in my case—it was not until Ketterer and Monica came into my life that I began to wonder if I was being any less perverse than my sister; more so, because unlike Sunny, I was at least alert to what I might be up to. Not that I had ever been unaware of all there was in Lydia’s background to lend support to my grandmothers’ observations about Gentile disorder and corruption. As a child, no one of course had mentioned incest to me, but it went without saying that if either of these unworldly immigrants had been alive to hear the whole of Lydia’s horror story, they would not have been so shocked as was I, their college-professor grandson, by the grisliest detail of all. But even without a case of incest in the family, there was more than enough there for a Jewish boy to break himself upon: the unmotherly mother, the un-fatherly father, the loveless bigoted aunts—my grandmothers could not themselves have invented a shiksa with a more ominous and, to their way of thinking, representative dossier than the one their fragile Nathan had chosen. To be sure, Dr. Goebbels or Air Marshal Goering might have a daughter wandering around somewhere in the world, but as a fine example of the species, Lydia would do nicely. I knew this; but then the Lydia I had chosen, unlike Sunny’s elect, detested this inheritance herself. In part what was so stirring about her (to me, to me) was the price she had paid to disown it—it had driven her crazy, this background; and yet she had lived to tell the tale, to write the tale, and to write it for me.
But Ketterer and his daughter Monica, who as it were came with Lydia, in the same deal, were neither of them detached chroniclers or interpreters or enemies of their world. Rather, they were the embodiment of what my grandparents, and great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, had loathed and feared: shagitz thuggery, shiksa wiliness. They were to me like figures out of the folk legend of the Jewish past—only they were real, just like my sister’s Sicilians.
Of course I could not stand around too long being mesmerized by this fact. Something had to be done. In the beginning this consisted mostly of comforting Lydia in the aftermath of one of her tutorial disasters; then I tried to get her to leave Mo
nica alone, to forget about saving her on Sundays and just try to make her as happy as she could for the few hours they had together. This was the same sort of commonsense advice that she received from Dr. Rutherford, but not even the two of us together, with the considerable influence we had over her, could prevent her from collapsing into frantic instruction before the day was out and bombarding Monica with a crash course in math, grammar, and the feminine graces before Ketterer arrived to spirit her back to his cave in the Chicago suburb of Home-wood.
What followed, followed. I became the child’s Sunday schoolteacher, unless I was down with a migraine. And she began to learn, or to try to. I taught her simple take-aways, I taught her simple sums, I taught her the names of the states bordering Illinois, I taught her to distinguish between the Atlantic and the Pacific, Washington and Lincoln, a period and a comma, a sentence and a paragraph, the little hand and the big hand. This last I accomplished by standing her on her feet and having her pretend hers were the arms of the clock. I taught her the poem I had composed when I was five and in bed with one of my fevers, my earliest literary achievement, according to my family: “Tick tock, Nathan is a clock.” “Tick tock,” she said, “Monica is a clock,” and thrust her arms into the nine fifteen position, so that her white church dress, getting tighter on her by the month, pulled across the little bubbles of her breasts. Ketterer came to hate me, Monica to fall in love with me, and Lydia to accept me at last as her means of salvation. She saw the way out of her life’s misery, and I, in the service of Perversity or Chivalry or Morality or Misogyny or Saintliness or Folly or Pent-up Rage or Psychic Illness or Sheer Lunacy or Innocence or Ignorance or Experience or Heroism or Judaism or Masochism or Self-Hatred or Defiance or Soap Opera or Romantic Opera or the Art of Fiction perhaps, or none of the above, or maybe all of the above and more—I found the way into mine. I would not have had it in me at that time to wander out after dinner at the Commons and spend a hundred dollars on the secondhand books that I wanted to fulfill my dream of a “library” as easily and simply as I squandered my manhood.