by Mark Merlis
I came home after the service yesterday, because I’d already canceled my Friday class last week to go to Baltimore and didn’t think I should miss it again. Martha said it was okay, she had Mickey for company, they’ll be back Sunday. Mickey has missed a whole week of geometry and whatever else he studies--I don’t know what, geometry is the only thing he ever needs help with. The only thing I can’t help with.
I never knew Jonathan’s father, either. He died a couple of years before Jonathan and I met, so I never had the fun of seeing him make Jonathan whine. In the only photograph Jonathan had, or maybe the only one he chose to keep, his father was one of those bald men who looks like an alien of superior intelligence, and what they used to call “dapper,” a sort of semitic parody of Bertie Wooster, down to the boutonniere and the spatterdashes. With a thin-lipped, scoffing sortof smile that belied the optimism or credulity that led him so often into affairs that were, Jonathan said, uniformly disastrous. “Affairs” meaning not dalliances but small deals, investment opportunities disclosed at the deli over a platter of latkes and involving, perhaps, an odd lot of furs of questionable provenance, vacant land right next door to some promised public improvement, a new kind of paper clip.
In between affairs he sold insurance—the little burial policies with weekly premiums. Jonathan used to tag along when his father made the collection rounds, trudging up the endless stairs of tenements on Delancey or Rivington. He always used to tell about one time when a little boy answered the door and recited, “Mamma says she’s not home.” A shaky enough living, and more than once after a failed venture Moshe Ascher had to go to some relative and borrow enough to make up the premium receipts he had lost.
This was practically all Jonathan ever said about him. One other thing: his first language was Russian, not Yiddish, and on the ship he taught himself English from a Russian/English phrasebook. Jonathan brought this up a number of times over the years, as if it summed up something important, something that set Moshe Ascher apart from everybody else in steerage, and that would go on setting the Aschers apart in the Bronx.
Jonathan had even less to say about his mother. She died in the influenza epidemic when he was six and Bernie was three. He remembered that she was blonde—from some ancestral Cossack, as he said, I hope in a forbidden tryst and not a rape. And she was “pretty,” that was the word he used. Could a six-year-old have thought his mother was “pretty”? I mean, is that what he would remember? Maybe: it is a six-year-old’s word, which must have encapsulated for him all the beauty and comfort of the world.
I scarcely remember what my mother was like when I was six, but of course that is because I remember what she was like when I was forty. While Jonathan carried a single image of a woman who was embodied Eden. Then gone, and Jonathan and his brother shuttled among various aunts and cousins, sometimes together, sometimes apart. Until they came to roost, ages eleven and eight, apparently no longer requiring any sort of substitute mother, in their father’s bachelor apartment. From this, I guess, Jonathan’s willingness to do anything—even go down on me twice a day, as opposed to about twice in twenty years—to hold our contentious household together for Mickey.
So that he could listen to little Mickey jerking off and imagine—what? Sucking him, something worse? Over the next couple of years I was away so much, taking care of my mother. If I had known about Jonathan I would have stuck my mother in a home, I would have stayed here and guarded Mickey day and night.
October 3O, 1966
Martha and Mickey got back from Baltimore on an early train; if she was able to get Mickey up at seven on a Sunday morning, they must both have had plenty of Martha’s mother. Luckily my trick, who will be nameless here because I never actually heard his name over the din at the Dubois, had had plenty of my company and was gone at first light, didn’t even hang around for coffee.
Martha went to our room to unpack; Mickey, still in his glen plaid suit, sat down in the living room. And absurdly pretended to read the Sunday Times Magazine, just so he wouldn’t have to talk to me.
“You should check out the school ads in the back pages,” I said. “All kinds of military academies. We’ll pick out one that will make a man of you.”
He looked up, startled, as if I were seriously threatening to send him away to one of those institutions for the relicts of failed marriages. Now that I had his attention, I asked if he wanted to go out to breakfast. He shook his head, but Martha had overheard. “Yes, you two go to breakfast. I have a lot of errands.”
So he was trapped and acted it. Not a word, all the way to Second Avenue--he didn’t even ask me for a Pall Mall.
“You mad at me?” I said.
“No.” In a clenched treble: “Why would I be mad at you?”
“You tell me.” Nothing. “You know, your mother and I always had one rule. If you’re mad you’ve got to say why.”
“Oh.” We were stopped for a light. He looked at me and said, evenly, “I didn’t know you had rules.”
This was pretty good. “Just the one,” I said. Not even one, really; Martha never said why she was humming.
We got to Rappaport’s. Mickey had matzo brei and two entire bagels plus a two-dollar side order of salmon--I guess he would have ordered caviar if they’d had it, just to make me sorry I’d forced him on this expedition. I only nibbled at half a bagel, and I don’t share Martha’s gift for babbling, so I was left for some minutes just silently watching him eat.
I glanced around and it seemed that the room was full of fathers watching their sons eat. Some were lecturing, others looked envious, as if thinking back to when they could fress like that without heartburn. Some just gazed sadly at their darlings, who wouldn’t look at them, who had mysteriously grown away and who would be saying good-bye as soon as Daddy was finished paying for college and maybe dental school.
At the back of the restaurant, a kid was mopping--the owner’s nephew, or just a kid with a Sunday job. Mickey stared at him while we stood in line at the cashier’s desk. I wonder what Mickey thought. Lucky me, I get to eat salmon while this poor kid has to mop. Or: lucky him, he’s out on a Sunday morning doing something on his own, not trapped with his father. Both things, maybe. I can almost remember how it was, his age or just about, poised for grown-up life and at the same time scared, wanting to be a kid forever.
When we were out on the street I said, “So what is it you’re mad about?”
“I don’t know.” This was possibly true. Maybe the definition of adolescence is that it starts getting hard to say why you’re mad.
I thought it had to be about the stains on my knees. Could he really not know how they were acquired? I wasn’t sure. If he’d grown up in Hell’s Kitchen, maybe, or Harlem: then he’d have a pretty good idea what some men do together. But in the world we’ve made for him, the caged bourgeois childhood where the only grown-ups are Mom and Pop and his teachers and, every so often, the creepy old refugees who come to the house for cocktails? Did he have any idea?
We walked along in silence for a while. I looked at our shadows, mine only a little longer than his now. Down there on the sidewalk were the silhouettes of two jaunty young men, side by side, buddies. Perpendicular to these guys were a sagging fifty-four-year-old and his mad-about-something son.
“You didn’t care about Grandpa,” Mickey said at last. “You didn’t even go see him.”
“Jeez, is that it? He didn’t want to see me. He never liked me.”
“He didn’t? How come?”
Of course Norman had a million reasons for not liking me, including my politics and my looks and maybe some suspicions about what I did on my knees. “Because I--” I was going to give the simplest answer, because I’m a kike, but I realized just in time how much that would hurt Mickey. Being half a kike himself, having to wonder what his beloved Grandpa felt about that. “Why do you think?” I said.
He stopped walking. From his glance I guessed that he required a Pall Mall as an aid to meditation. This being supplied, he s
aid, “I guess you guys had different ways of living.”
“That’s for damned sure.” As Keats said of Milton: life to him would be death to me.
Mickey grinned, but only for a second. “He kind of thought I should live his way. You know, the normal way.” This said blandly, with no apparent insinuation about my particular brand of abnormality.
“Is that how you think you should live?”
“I don’t know. I guess Mom wants it, too.”
“She wants you to be like your grandfather?” I’m afraid my tone made him reel a little.
“She just means go to Warwick and stuff. Maybe be a lawyer.”
That sounded like his grandfather to me. All he’d have to add would be the little drinking problem, which I’m sure counselor Mickey could acquire easily enough. “Well, whatever you want,” I said. Forgetting for a second that we were talking about what Martha wanted.
“You don’t want me to be like you?”
“You think the world needs two of me?” I said.
We laughed. I was so happy to have made him laugh that I didn’t think--not till just now--that maybe he did want to be like me, needed to know how.
What does it even mean, to be like me? Myopic bookworm, grass-stained cocksucker … But awake, anyway.
I don’t know how to teach him to be awake, if he isn’t already. I sidestepped. “You could be a doctor, like your Uncle Bernie.”
“Yuck. I can’t even stand to make a hamburger patty. How am I going to cut up people?”
“Well, I can’t tell you what to do.” He looked over at me--just for an instant the lost look I used to see on the faces of the JDs. If there wasn’t any grown-up to tell him what to do, how would he ever grow up himself? I deflected his imploring gaze with an inanity: “You look good in that suit.”
“Yeah?” He sucked in his lips, proud.
“Probably have to take it back to Barney’s pretty soon and get the cuffs let out. You’re really shooting up.”
He grinned. I can hardly remember being so young, when growing another inch is an accomplishment. What other accomplishments does he need? Certainly not to be a goddamned lawyer. But what else? Pretty soon he’ll be a big tall boy in a suit, men’s department next time, headed off to Warwick. Off, with Martha’s connivance, to life as an Axelrod.
I said in JD that grown-ups couldn’t answer the kids’ questions, that the only way to overturn the grinding gerontocracy we live in was for kids to find their own answers. I know I can’t tell Mickey how to live. And at the same time I feel so strongly that I need to get him out of that suit.
But then what would he wear?
Guilty, I guess. Certainly not of contriving to turn Mickey into an Axelrod. But he was half an Axelrod, as surely as he was half a kike. Perhaps I did nudge him in the direction of Warwick, as Daddy had always planned for him. Jonathan pushed just as hard for him to go to SLS, because faculty kids went for free in those days. But Daddy had left enough to pay most of the tuition, and Mickey said he had sworn to Daddy on his deathbed, et cetera.
I’m sure this didn’t really matter; Mickey was ready to go off to Sing Sing rather than spend his college years in our apartment, staring out his window at the same old ailanthus tree. None of it meant he had to follow through on the rest of Daddy’s dreams and become a lawyer. If I’d wanted another lawyer in the family I could have married one. But he had to do something. What wonderful plan did Jonathan have for him, that he should wind up as a JD? Or a George?
If Jonathan wasn’t going to change the world, what was wrong with standing back and watching Mickey turn into a normal grown-up who could live in the world he was given? There is that famous remark of Freud’s: that his job was to help his patients find their way to ordinary unhappiness. What was so reprehensible about that project? Why couldn’t we just have made Mickey unhappy?
November 5, 1966
Last night, Mickey emerged from his room wearing the damned suit and a little beauty spot of Clearasil on the left side of his patrician nose. I said, “What’s with the suit on a Friday night?”
He was busy admiring his hunk self in the mirror in the foyer. Martha answered for him. “He’s going to the Sadie Hawkins dance.”
“What’s that?”
Mickey said, “It’s like … the girls ask the boys out.”
Not fair. Boys are supposed to be humiliated by being picked last for the team. They shouldn’t, on top of that, have to worry about whether they’ll be asked to a dance. “So: a girl asked you?”
“A couple girls. I’m going with this one Sarah because she asked me first and I already said okay. Which is too bad because I like Nancy better.”
This is about as much information as he has ever voluntarily furnished about any event or activity. He is impressing on me that he is still a normal boy, not … whatever he has decided I am. Or maybe he’s just bragging that girls stand in line for him.
Martha went to bed with a mystery novel and I waited up. He got home around eleven, sweaty and disheveled. Sweaty from the calisthenic dancing--do the kids know they’re doing the same dances as Dennis O’Grady and Edouard? Disheveled perhaps from some off-the-floor maneuvers with Sarah or, if he got lucky, Nancy.
He answered my questions in monosyllables: taut ones, meaning he was in a hurry to get to his room. To meditate about how he got his hand under Sarah’s bra, or almost to the top of Nancy’s thigh. I guess other fathers would say, “That’s my boy, chip off the old block!” I guess other fathers wouldn’t be jealous.
I was a little uncertain just whom I was jealous of. Mickey, because he is young and probably unquestioningly heterosexual and undoubtedly getting ready to rub one out in about three minutes flat? Or Nancy, who felt his urgent, postulant hand creeping up her thigh?
He escaped from me. His door closed, I imagined him behind it. Jacket off first, and tie. The shirt, a little damp. The clunky dress shoes, the trousers. He hung the suit and the shirt up carefully; the socks and at last the briefs he flung into the bottom dresser drawer. From the same drawer he got the towel and whatever he uses for grease. He turned out the light.
It was all I could do to keep myself from going to him, flinging open his door. Not to score another glance at his dick, but to see in the stele of light from the hallway behind me his sweet face: Mickey abandoned, mouth open perhaps, eyes half closed. I wanted to see Mickey giving himself up to pleasure. I wanted to hear his sharp breath.
November 9, 1966
At Faherty’s last night there was a debate over whether to watch wrestling or the election returns. I thought of pointing out that both spectacles were equally rigged but kept my mouth shut. I have learned that it is profitless to try to be witty at Faherty’s. Not to mention that half the patrons, those who have trouble drinking and breathing at the same time, probably don’t realize wrestling is rigged. This half prevailed, so we didn’t turn to the elections until the last blond-maned ape had taken his scheduled dive.
The Republicans have captured a lot of seats in the Congress. We were informed--by that vaudevillian pair of reporters I saw once at Villard’s--that this meant the Great Society was probably over. What with smaller majorities, plus all the money being sucked up by the war, Johnson won’t be able to finish national health insurance, college for everybody, all his other grand plans. All this will have to wait for his next term, assuming he can beat George Romney. Meanwhile, the sunbaked electorate of California has selected Ronald Reagan as governor. If we were going to start picking our leaders according to how they look with their shirts off, I would have gone with Buster Crabbe.
November 19, 1966
Martha went to the movies. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I decided to skip it: why pay two bucks to witness a lousy marriage when I get to have one at home for free? And Mickey had seen it already, with Sarah or Nancy. Not my idea of a make-out movie, but there’s no telling. I got pretty far once with a girl in the balcony of the Luxor, watching Lon Chaney play the Phantom of the Opera.
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Anyway, Mickey stayed in and, because it wasn’t a school night, he could have an hour of TV. I kept him company on the sofa and tried to read the new Styron book. Not because I wanted to very much, but because not reading the new William Styron would amount to confessing how life-cloudingly jealous I am of all his honors. Anyway-interesting, has anyone noticed this?--if the TV is on in a room, it’s very hard not to look at it.
The show was called Mission Impossible. There was a Negro and a blonde lady with complicated hair and a strange guy with bulging eyes, as if he had a thyroid problem. Mickey explained the premise. These people were the Impossible Mission Force, and each week they get a tape-recorded message about their next impossible mission. Who is this tape from? Mickey wasn’t sure. That sort of sums things up in this country: teams of operatives scuttling around, and no one knowing who the hell they’re working for.
Anyway, tonight’s mission turned out to be possible after all. A lot of actors pretended to shoot other actors, the Negro and the blonde lady exchanged some carefully non-flirtatious jokes, the show was over--and with it Mickey’s allotted hour. He looked over at me. I don’t really give a damn about the TV; the one-hour rule is Martha’s. If he could stand an hour of this pap, depriving him of a second hour wasn’t likely to send him to Dostoyevsky on the rebound. And at least he’d be with me, not locked in his room.
Mickey was wearing what he calls a ringer T-shirt, gray but with dark blue bands tight around his slender biceps-making him somehow childlike and virile at the same time. I had to look away.
The next show was called Gunsmoke, with a looming sheriff and a comic sidekick and a bar wench with a heart of gold. They haven’t changed this stuff since I watched it at the Luxor as a kid. All they’ve done is added sound. And commercials. I don’t think even Mickey was enjoying it much. Or he was enjoying it just because we have made TV a sinful indulgence; he would have sat rapt before a test pattern. I don’t know if Martha and I are unusually clumsy at this childrearing racket or if everybody’s stratagems backfire the same way.