She gave me her have-you-been-up-to-somedevilment look.
“I didn’t do a single thing wrong!” I said…. “This is still my week to be good and sweet. I haven’t forgotten.”
Her face opened wide enough to catch the sunshine. “I’m mighty pleased to hear it. ’Cause before this week is through, your mamma and daddy gonna recognize your natural sweetness and give you some back, and then you gonna return even more and—”
“Maybe so,” I interrupted her, and she went back to putting bed sheets through the wringer, understanding that I didn’t want to talk about them anymore.
Patty’s grandfather and grandmother also try to shelter Patty from their daughter and son-in-law, praising her on the family’s brief visits and giving her money to buy books. (Patty’s grandmother reacts with anger when Patty tries to refuse the gift, having been told by Pearl not to take anything. “But my mother said—” “Your mother!” A deep crease appeared on one side of her mouth. “This is not for your mother to know!”)
But Patty’s father’s cruelty has a deeply disturbed side, one that frightens even her mother, Pearl, and the townspeople, whose acceptance of Jews has been hard-won, when her father releases it. When Patty hits a car with a rock by mistake and cracks the windshield, her father releases one of his all-too-common assaults:
At his temple a vein was pulsating like a neon sign…He pointed a single quivering finger at me. “If you don’t come here this instant I’ll give you a beating you’re never going to forget.”
…Fingers crossed, I stepped through the opening in the hedge to stand soldier-straight before my father.
“Closer!”
One foot advanced before a hand tore against my face, sending me into total blackness.
We never learn exactly why Harry is so angry, but we do know that his violent release is a horrifying effort to stamp out the individuality that Patty possesses without even thinking—her inability to participate in the town’s casual racism, her rejection of the insipid nonthinking demanded of her, her curiosity, her giving spirit. Does Harry fear that Patty’s outsiderness will upset the family’s already tenuous position in the town’s hierarchy? The only other minority, a Chinese greengrocer, has been chased out already: “Our boys at Pearl Harbor would have got a lot of laughs at the farewell party we gave the Chink,” comments the sheriff, to which Patty’s father laughs weakly. Meanwhile, the black residents of the town, like Ruth, who live in “Nigger bottoms,” are subject to a constant level of seemingly banal persecution.
It is her parents’ refusal to love Patty—to even recognize her—that puts her in the way of Anton Reiker, the POW who, like Ruth and Patty’s grandmother, finds much in Patty to respect and like. When Jenkinsville becomes the site for a POW camp housing German prisoners, Patty, who is so open to the outside world that she instinctively waves at the prisoners, is disappointed by the ordinary nature of the crew: “In the movies war criminals being hustled off to prison would be dramatic. But in real life it didn’t seem all that important. Not really a big deal. My stomach growled, reminding me it must be nearing lunchtime.”
When she meets Anton at her father’s store (the prisoners, put to work picking cotton, are brought in to buy straw hats), she is further confused by how different he is from what she has been led to expect:
…He was looking at me like he saw me—like he liked what he saw.
“I’ll take the one you choose,” said Reiker. He placed six yellow pencils and three stenographic pads on the counter. “And you did not tell me,” he said, “what you call these pocket pencil sharpeners.”
“He was so nice. How could he have been one of those—those brutal, black-booted Nazis? “Well, I don’t think they actually call them much of anything, but if they were to call them by their right name they’d probably call them pocket pencil sharpeners.”
Reiker laughed and for a moment, this moment, we were friends. And now I knew something more. He wasn’t a bad man.
Like Ruth, who likes to learn each new word from the dictionary along with Patty, or her grandfather, who praises her letters to the editor, her grandmother, who gives her money to buy books, and even Charlene Madlee, the reporter who helps Patty when it all comes crashing down, Anton is a seeker of knowledge, not a rejecter. (You can actually mark who will be Patty’s friend simply by who is interested in words.) But Patty is right: Anton Reiker, the son of a historian who mocked Hitler and a devoted gardener from Manchester, is hardly the kind of conscript Himmler dreamed of.
So, when Patty finds him stumbling along the railroad tracks, having escaped from the camp, she takes him in, not caring what might happen to her family, who are, after all, a far greater danger to her than he could ever be. Even Anton, like some reverse Anne Frank, now housed, clothed, and fed by Patty, is perplexed—then amused—by the absurdity:
His mouth came open. “Jewish?” An index finger pointed towards me. “You’re Jewish?”
I thought he knew. I guess I thought everybody knew…. As I nodded Yes, my breathing came to a halt while my eyes clamped shut.
Suddenly, strong baritone laughter flooded the room…“It’s truly extraordinary,” he said. “Who would believe it? ‘Jewish girl risks all for German soldier.’ Tell me, Patty Bergen—“his voice became soft, but with a trace of hoarseness—“why are you doing this for me?”
It wasn’t complicated. Why didn’t he know? There was really only one word for it. A simple little word that in itself is reason enough.
“The reason I’m doing this for you,” I started off, “is only that I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
Unfortunately, it ends about as badly as you could expect (if you’d like not to know, stop reading now), with Anton dead, shot by the FBI, and Patty in juvenile detention—more estranged from her family than ever, having humiliated them in the eyes of Jenkinsville, the larger Jewish community, and America as a whole beyond reason.
But it’s exactly this gross reaction to a small crime—trying to help another person in need—that shows Greene’s point: it is dangerous to have a mob who can only react to a global bogeyman, not the person.
America sees a traitor—Patty only sees a man in need, a friend, someone who is no more an acolyte of Hitler than she is. And who is a worse traitor—she, or the man who beats his own daughter? Anton risks his life to come out of hiding to protect her from a beating—her father can’t even protect her from himself.
But in the end, this does not matter, Bette Greene’s work is stunning not only for its tragic proportions, but for the revelation of the great complexities of love and cruelty. When Ruth sees Anton run out, she finally accepts that Patty’s refusal to hate will always put her in harm’s way, just as her own protection of Patty will soon cause her to lose her job:
“I want you to tell Ruth the truth about something. You hear me talking, girl?” I nodded Yes.
“You tell me who is that man.”…“The man is my friend,” I said at last.
Ruth sighed like she sometimes does before tackling a really big job. “He’s not the one the law’s after?
Not the one from the prison camp?”
“Yes.”
Her forehead crinkled up like a washboard. “You telling me, Yes, he’s not the one?”
“No, Ruth, I’m telling you yes. Yes, he’s the one.”
Ruth’s head moved back and forth in a No direction. “Oh, Lord, why you sending us more, Lord? Don’t this child and me have burden enough?”
But Ruth also knows that Patty wouldn’t be Patty if she could refuse Anton’s friendship, and she also knows that Anton gives it back in kind: “That man come a-rushing out from the safety of his hiding ’cause he couldn’t stand your pain and anguish no better’n me.” Patty—and Ruth, and Anton—all have a funny kind of courage that is never recognized, the kind that never gets anyone the kind of medals brandished by the soldier herding the POW prisoners into the truck. Like the Jews in the concentration camps, they’re not persecuted f
or what they do—they’re persecuted for what they are. But somehow, however much they are hated, they are still not people who can hate.
BOOK REPORT
The Pigman
By Paul Zindel 1968
Senior Moments
Now, I don’t like school, which is what you might say is one of the factors that got us involved with this old guy we nicknamed the Pigman. Actually, I hate school, but then most of the time I hate everything.
I’m glad nowadays that therapists and master’s-in-teaching programs are here to minister to the maladjusted amongst us, but I’m not sure I love what they’ve done for literature. It’s not that the notion of the dysfunctional family has disappeared—obviously we are beset by a new indie film about the crushing complexity of family life set to a charming soundtrack every other week, with attendant guitar line gesturing toward some sort of plot. But Paul Zindel, former high-school teacher and avatar of a certain stretch of miserable adolescence, knew both plot and teen peril. In his garbage heap of a world, adults, pressed into a stratum of pure misery, wait calmly for the crush to descend on their children, who have little but their mordant wit and a fast-dwindling sense of good to hold it at bay.
John Conlan, high-school student, is a blue-eyed, goodlooking career prevaricator who drinks too much and has a soft spot for any hint of enthusiasm, however hokey. (Planning a prank on yet another substitute teacher, he desists because the old guy is so excited about telling the students about commemorative stamps.) His friend Lorraine is obsessed equally with omens and psychoanalysis, worried about her weight, mildly in love with John, and equally given to ruminating about the destroyed adults around her:
I mean, take the Cricket for instance. I mean Miss Reillen. She’s across the library watching me as I’m typing this, and she’s smiling. You’d think she knew I was defending her. She’s really a very nice woman, although it’s true her clothes are too tight, and her nylons do make this scraaaaaaatchy sound when she walks. But she isn’t trying to be sexy or anything. If you could see her, you’d know that. She just outgrew her clothes. Maybe she doesn’t have any money to buy new ones or get the old ones let out. Who knows what kind of problems she has? Maybe she’s got a sick mother at home like Miss Stewart, the typing teacher. I know Miss Stewart has a sick mother at home because she let me mark some typing papers illegally and drop them off at her house after school one day. And there was her sick mother—very thin and with this smile frozen on her face—right in the middle of the room! That was this strange part. Miss Stewart kept her mother in this bed right in the middle of the living room, and it almost made me cry…. When I look at Miss Reillen I feel sorry. When I hear her walking I feel even more sorry for her because maybe she keeps her mother in a bed in the middle of the living room just like Miss Stewart. Who would want to marry a woman who keeps her sick mother in a bed in the middle of the living room?
The question for John and Lorraine: how are they going to grow into any kind of a life without the miserable specter of their parents—basically, death writ large—smack in the middle of it? When we meet them, there is no aspect of John or Lorraine’s life not entirely shadowed. Lorraine’s mother is a home nurse ministering to people who are dying, from whom she steals the occasional can of soup. Obsessed with making sure Lorraine doesn’t get loose with boys, she simultaneously reminds her she’s not very goodlooking. John’s father, whom he calls “The Bore,” and his mother, who is obsessed with deodorizing everything, are fonder of John’s older stockbroker brother, Kenneth, than they are of their incendiary younger son. “Be your own man!” his father tells him, in a typical exchange. “But for God’s sake get your hair cut—you look like an oddball.”
All of which explains why John and Lorraine are quickly drawn to Mr. Angelo Pignati, a man they befriend after prank-calling him as members of a fake neighborhood charity. As John says, the Pigman—so called because of his enormous collection of novelty pigs—is the absolute reverse of all the adults they know: not only filled with native good humor, but innocently trusting and loving of those around him in a world where the default mode toward them is antagonistic. The Pigman isn’t trying to be on their level or drag them down, he just delights in their company: “In fact,” says John, “the thing Lorraine and I liked best about the Pigman was that he didn’t go around saying we were cards or jazzy or cool or hip. He said we were delightful, and if there’s one way to show how much you’re not trying to make believe you’re not behind the times, it’s to go around saying people are delightful.”
This delightfully oddball friendship includes all kinds of activities John and Lorraine have never experienced: visiting baboons at the zoo, shopping for exotic foods at Beekman’s, roller-skating through department stores, playing pen-and-pencil shorthand psychology games meant to reveal one’s true nature. It’s a childhood compressed into a few months, one that John and Lorraine treasure: “One part of me was saying ‘Don’t let this nice old man waste his money,’ and the other half was saying, ‘Enjoy it, enjoy doing something absolutely absurd’—something that could let me be a child in a way I never could be with my mother, something just silly and absurd and…beautiful,” thinks Lorraine. John has an even more violent feeling of protection:
“John, turn your radio down.”
“John, you’re disturbing your father.”
“John, you’re disturbing your mother.”
“John, you’re disturbing the cat.”
“John, please do whatever you’d like. Make yourself comfortable. If you want something out of the refrigerator, help yourself. I want you to feel at home.”
And always with a big smile so you knew he meant it.
That was the Pigman, and I knew I’d kill Norton if he tried to hurt the old man.
Yes, there is a bad thing, and it happens with Norton. You know how I am about the bad endings. But Lorraine and John aren’t bitter at their parents—“My mom is a very pretty woman when she has her long brown hair down,” Lorraine says, “and when she smiles, which is hardly ever. She just doesn’t look the way she sounds, and I often wonder how she got this way”—but they do, as Lorraine says, wonder how they got this way. If they could find out, maybe they could keep it from happening to them. There’s an important scene in the middle of the novel where Lorraine observes an attendant at the zoo:
The thing that made me stop going to the zoo a few years ago was the way one attendant fed the sea lions. He climbed up on the big diving board in the middle of the pool and unimaginatively just dropped the fish in the water. I mean, if you’re going to feed sea lions, you’re not supposed to plop the food in the tank. You can tell by the expressions on their faces that the sea lions are saying things like “Don’t dump the fish in!”
“Pick the fish up one by one and throw them into the tank so we can chase after them.”
“Throw the fish in different parts of the tank!”
“Let’s have fun!”
That’s Lorraine and John, looking for any sign of life from the adults around them on whom they depend not only for nourishment, but for love, interest, smarts, play—any sense of joy in the world. It’s not until they meet Mr. Pignati that they find it—and it’s only after losing him that they realize it’s up to them to create it again: “There was no one else to blame anymore—no Bores or Old Ladies or Nortons, or Assassins waiting at the bridge…. Our life would be what we made of it—nothing more, nothing less.” John and Lorraine want to avoid being crushed. But their roller skates are gone, and it’s just not certain that they can.
BOOK REPORT
Bridge to Terabithia
By Katherine Paterson 1977
Crossing Over
Ba-room, ba-room, ba-room, baripity, baripity, baripity, baripity—Good. His dad had the pickup going. He could get up now.
The life-changing friend is a standard trope of teen fiction, but rereading Bridge to Terabithia, it occurs to me that one does tire of the all-too-common morally bracing appearance of a Pollyanna (a
s in my beloved An Old-Fashioned Girl, or, you know, Pollyanna.) An outsider who is revolutionary purely because of her strangeness (The Secret Garden, Iggie’s House) is a great variation, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen, outside Bridge to Terabithia’s Leslie Burke, a character who manages to be both moral and strange—both wholly herself and wholly strange, and wholly a revelation to protagonist Jess Aaron.
Jess Aaron is a fifth-grader whose elbows are bumping up against both his own limitations and those of his outside life (insofar as a fifth-grader has an an external and internal life—but, you know, if anyone can make you understand how they do, it’s Katherine Paterson). The oldest boy in a working-class family with four girls, he’s a budding artist, which goes over poorly with his trucker dad (“‘What are they teaching in that damn school? Bunch of old ladies turning him into a—’”), as well as with the old ladies, in fact (“The devil of it was that none of his regular teachers ever liked his drawings. When they’d catch him scribbling, they’d screech about waste—wasted time, wasted paper, wasted ability.”) His mother, overwhelmed with his sisters, is too busy to pay much attention to him, but Jess, who’s asked to stand in as the man of the household when his father is gone to work in D.C., feels the loss of his father the most keenly:
Jess watched his dad stop the truck, lean over to unlatch the door, so May Belle could climb in. He turned away. Durn lucky kid. She could run after him and grab him and kiss him. It made Jess ache inside to watch his dad grab the little ones to his shoulder, or lean down and hug them. It seemed to him that he had been thought too big for that since the day he was born.
His new neighbor, the life-changing Leslie Burke, could not be more different. A transplant from D.C., child of noblesse oblige who’ve taken a house in rural Virginia because they’re “reassessing their value structure,” Leslie meets Jess in the meadow where he is practicing his running in anticipation of winning one of the lunchtime heats to make him the fastest runner in the school. Leslie’s comment, very far from typical girlish admiration, is, like herself, both artless and unwittingly incisive:
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