The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  DR. SISTER GRACE: No, you biddy bitch, he learned it from me.

  ORGANIZED, SANCTIONED, LEGAL, ACCEPTABLE MURDER ON THE WAY?

  In 1904 the Carnegie Institute for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, opens. Its mission is to document human defects. It begins by establishing the Eugenics Record Office, another of those mysterious places that want to accumulate lists of names. It wants to ascertain the inherited (and hence transmissible) backgrounds of all Americans producing or presenting questionable evidence of absolutely anything unhealthy, “separating the wheat from the chaff.” They are interested in bad blood, defective strains, unhealthy everythings and anythings so that these can be nipped in the bud of all present and future generations. They are much more sophisticated than the Tally Office, indeed managing to accumulate many thousands of index cards on ordinary Americans, from which to pounce on those bloodlines worthy of being removed. Hold on to the image of “index cards.” They will come back to haunt us, or should.

  As a point of interest, Mary Harriman’s daughter, also named Mary (who founded the Junior League, that safe harbor and refuge for wellborn gentile white women), donated seventy-five acres in Cold Spring Harbor for this Eugenics Record Office; the land came with a house that contained a fireproof storage addition for all these index cards. Hundreds of young women from Radcliffe, Vassar, and Wellesley, joining young men from Harvard, Cornell, Oberlin, Hopkins, and of course Yaddah, flock here as trainees, going “into the field” to collect all this information for all these cards about all the sick people they can locate. Among other things, they study albinos, the insane in institutions, the Amish, juvenile delinquents, and the feebleminded, also institutionalized. More than two hundred and fifty young people would participate in this training and fieldwork. Identify those defective family trees and kill their bloodlines! The unfit are so, well, unfit to live among us. Terms like “euthanasia” and “lethal chamber” are heard louder in this land of The American People.

  How in God’s name did we come to this? What means “eugenics”? Stay tuned. Among those in attendance at their first board meeting are seven members of the Society of the Pocahanti. They are all important people in government and industry, and, naturally, religion. Do you even remember who/what the Pocohanti are? Stalwart, true Americans with noble lineages that they trace back to George Washington is who and what they are. No unhealthy chaps among this lot. And they want to keep it this way. They are pledged to keep it this way, all one hundred of them. They know that Teddy Roosevelt is timid on social issues, and has great difficulty defining exactly what his mission should be, particularly with reference to Negroes and immigrants such as the Chinese and Japanese swarming the West Coast like ants (though Teddy, “to the chap’s credit, believes them all ‘inferior’”), and he might like women a whole lot, but he won’t make any stab at keeping them at home and the divorce rate much lower than it is. The guy’s too conflicted, with double standards all over the map. Why are we in Cuba, tell me? What do we want with Guam and Puerto Rico and, God help us, the Philippines? All of them are a recipe for genetic disasters as big as hurricanes and typhoons. Genetic is a word coming into lots more usage, whatever it means.

  That new guy running NITS, Dr. Robert Grant Mellow, he’s a Pocahanti. Garibaldus Mortimer Winthrop, the dean of Washington’s National Episcopal Cathedral, is one, too. Terrence O’Dwyer of New York’s St. Patrick’s is one, of course. A new member is Ralph Zwait, whom Teddy just made head of the Department of Agriculture to run his new Pure Food and Drug Act. A lot of people being poisoned by all kinds of quack medicines out there, not to mention that rotten meat out of Chicago, and we can’t have any of either. Lots of things we can’t have any more of, and Teddy, even with his big stick, is slow on the uptick. Otherwise we’re still mainly a bunch of old farts with a lot of time on our hands looking for something to do, and this eugenics stuff sounds spiffy and right up, or down, our alleys. And Long Island, well, a lot of us live there on the North Shore, so it’s convenient to home. Getting harder for a lot of us to travel, you know.

  Besides the Pocahanti there are representatives from Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller and … well, we don’t want to give too much away while this whole business is still … firming up.

  * * *

  In these intervening years I have learned a lot. I have learned that my skills were not yet good enough to infect enough people to make an out-and-out plague, which has always been my desire, indeed my calling, indeed my salvation, for without it I would eventually die. I had to learn by piggybacking along with other carriers, other destructive agents, to learn how they do it. Epidemics of smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, dengue fever, Mombasa actoid, typhoid of course; the list is quite long and it has been disappointing to me that so much of my time has been wasted hiding inside other conditions. I have always wanted to stand on my own.

  I am uncertain whether I can explain to you why my particular set of features has been so slow in felling larger populations. I was quite surprised myself. Just when I thought I had got going, with several outbreaks in 1723, for instance, in Marenga, Brazil, or in 1860 on Fruit Island, or in 1887 in Malta, or especially back in 1600, in Virginia itself, something happened, or did not happen, to allow widespread infection. I think it has something to do with the “patient load” (as I heard it called). One or two or half a dozen or even several hundred are not enough to start anything big. I suspect many thousands are needed. I keep my eyes open for an outbreak of something in which several thousand are ready and waiting all at the same time, and not just one at a time, which is usually the case with most “growing” epidemics while they get really going. I am very hopeful about a new facility being planned for the wilds of Idaho, where they will be investigating how to eliminate certain populations.

  Fruit Island was my biggest lost opportunity. For want of more experience on my part, the patients escaped my grasp and grip.

  THE BLOODS

  Poor and orphaned, Herman Masturbov grows up in that Southeast section of Washington where all the Orthodox Jews live. He grows up to be a smart businessman who accumulates many highly profitable enterprises before his death at the relatively young age of sixty.

  In the earlier years of his wretched marriage, he is also Rabbi Chaimoff’s mohel, the man who performs the ritual circumcision of baby boys born into the Jewish faith.

  This is a calling just as holy as Herman’s duty to make money, money that means freedom from the oppression of the gentiles who have hated him and all like him since time began. Poppa Yissy and Momma Truda were murdered by the tsar or the Cossacks or some other gentiles before they could even get on the boat to America to be free of them. In Washington, where his cousin passes Herman off to another cousin, Herman lives with half a dozen more “cousins” before, at sixteen, he finds and marries Yvonne Jerusalem, yet another cousin, and they settle down to the various challenges he has put to himself. Herman believes that being a mohel will bring him a spiritual return lacking from his important secular investments in land and more land, always more land. He is reaping so many rewards from the New World’s earth that he feels an urgent need to give, to do something that will make him truly blessed in God’s eyes.

  Herman is as obsessed with making money as his second son, Abraham, will be. In this regard Abe will definitely inherit from his father. (No one remembers if Yissy was so ambitious for worldly goods. In Russia there was little opportunity for Jews to get them even if you were energetic and ambitious. In Russia dreaming was all.) In America, Herman comes to believe in a more tangible God, one who might actually make things happen, but still one who must be thanked and that is that. Abe’s God, before He abruptly disappears, will be more erratic and unreliable. That is often the difference between fathers and sons, between the Old World and the New, between those who serve unwaveringly and those who, having got what they want, no longer even cross their fingers.

  When Rabbi Chaimoff’s longtime mohel is removed under a cloud of
shame (allegations of latent sadism or possible sexual excitement), Herman pesters young Rabbi Chesterfield, Chaimoff’s assistant, for a chance to audition. Rabbi Chesterfield (who will become, and with that name it is better that he does, the Reformed rabbi by the time that sacrilegious sect is truncated from the tribe and more firmly established and Abe’s son Mordecai is ready for his bar mitzvah) finally gives Herman the nod. Herman, who has been practicing secretly on tiny kosher salami and pointed baby turnips and carrots, must now perform in front of a rabbinical board, twelve bearded men—no, eleven, because Chaimoff shaved when he moved into his big brand-new Northwest shul, no more Southeast storefront shul for him, and already way over budget—who are merchants as well as rabbis. You cannot make a living from God alone, although Chaimoff, who will become famous with a coast-to-coast Sunday radio program, is on his way.

  A mohel is judged by exacting standards. Cutting nice and even. Not too much and not too little. No visible blood or gore. The baby stops crying fast. There is no permanent scar. He doesn’t drop the baby, bawling or not. All the guidelines specifying millimeters, instruments, decorum, what you do with the blood, the skin—not only those dozen rabbis are judging but the most famous mohel in America, Schlitz (this is not his real name; no one knows his real name; and no one knows why no one knows his real name), comes down from the Lower East Side of New York, which has never happened before. Herman had gone to New York for lessons from Schlitz, who is very difficult to locate, which means, according to Schlitz, that when you find him, God must want it to happen.

  Herman, a tower of a man with light reddish hair, not quite blond but almost, and skin so fair that he must avoid the sun (he is sometimes referred to as “Fikel duster fehl,” from a patois spoken in his native village of Grad and meaning roughly “piece of pound cake”), has no nervousness whatsoever that might make this fair skin blush. It is not as if he must perform on the baby of his neighbor. The tiniest infants born of the poorest Jews are used for these tryouts, sons of Jews who don’t have so much as an extra dime to slip the mohel as a token of thanks. Thus he can concentrate exclusively on the task at hand, without daydreaming, as poor mohels do, of the tip he will get from a grateful father.

  After his first audition circumcision Herman is asked to perform on three more poor screaming tots, understudies waiting just in case the first’s father is too busy hauling ice or rags to keep the appointment. On the conclusion of his fourth slicing, Schlitz takes Herman in his arms and embraces him, ritualizing the appointment. Now all the other eleven rabbis take Herman in their arms and kiss him too. Never before have all the judges plus Schlitz kissed a mohel. Perhaps five or six. Eight is the record as far as anyone can remember, and that is held by Schlitz himself after his secret performance on a son born to a United States senator who no one even knew was Jewish. Yes, all twelve kiss Herman, so supreme is his triumph. His hand, a nice-sized hand but which does not look like it has within it such grace, has an accuracy never seen before, particularly around the entire circumference, not an iota of slack overhang. Any Jewish man would be proud to have had such a fine job done on him in his infancy as Herman, from his very initiation, has accomplished, and it will not be long before every Jew in Washington wants Herman for his son or nephew or grandson or cousin visiting from somewhere. A successful mohel can bring in a lot of extra contributions to the building fund. Rabbi Chaimoff’s mortgages will be paid off quickly. Herman splits 50/50 with the rabbi, peanuts compared with what he is making in real estate.

  By now Herman is thirty-five. He already owns much of that vast empty acreage in what will be known someday as “the metropolitan area.” His wife, the beauty Yvonne, hair darkly sleek like a stallion’s mane and eyes hauntingly black like the sorely missed olives of Grad, has given him only one son, Emmanuel. That he has no second son and that the first is not the one he wants disappoints Herman beyond measure. Yvonne must give him another. He has tried but she has not complied. Why is she not successfully inseminated by him? After all, God guides him successfully to cut foreskins. Word of his being kissed by twelve rabbis has turned into myth: if you want your boy to be blessed for life, head for Herman. He has swiftly become the most famous mohel anyone can remember, more famous even than Schlitz. Rich parents from as far north as Newport and as far south as Charleston beg him to squeeze the foreskins of their kinder into his packed schedule. Desperate fathers slip him fat encouragements to ensure his availability even before their wives are pregnant. Soon he is working around the clock, or at least around the clock on those days permitted by the Vernah, which lays down strict rules governing mohels.

  Herman is growing more pious. The performance of his holy calling is giving him something akin to a feeling of saintliness. Every time he performs he feels he can touch the glorious tradition of his people throughout the centuries. He feels that close to God.

  By the time he is forty-five, he is slicing every free second of the day, and is richer than ever from his landholdings all reaching out and joining hands to make him one of the biggest landowners in the entire District of Columbia and the surrounding counties too, but he still has no second son from Yvonne. He finds that he can no longer perform sexual intercourse with her. In fact, he is ignoring her altogether, not that they have ever been close. Where they come from, husbands and wives are less friends and lovers than co-workers; if the house is clean and there’s food on the table and the tsar’s soldiers aren’t in the neighborhood, what’s to talk about?

  But something is wrong with Emmanuel. Herman considers his only son deficient in character, grace, skill, intelligence, and personality. That is what is wrong with him. Herman does not like this boy. So little does Herman think about him that he doesn’t even remember that Emmanuel means “God with us.” He wants another son the way a man with a brown suit decides one day he must have a blue one.

  How to reignite his libido again so that Yvonne can produce another suit? In all his life Herman Masturbov has never had trouble getting an erection.

  It must be her fault. She smells all the time now, it seems perhaps from her menstrual bleedings. That must be what makes it hard for him to become hard. He once gloried in the aroma of her blood, but that was when he was young, and before God gave him his (and His) gift. He does not have the courage to suggest to his wife that she up the number of her visits to the ritual baths.

  He notices one day that she is always wearing the same dress. Why does she not change her clothes? Or have her garments washed? The shvartze cleaning lady and the shvartze laundress tell him she refuses both. He has not noticed that he has stopped inserting himself into her and jiggling himself to a speedy orgasm before turning his back toward her and going to sleep, and he has also not noticed that she is relieved.

  Neither of them has noticed that Yvonne is not a woman much in touch with the world. She is a relic of another time and place where women worked very hard, with little time for filling the brain with questions, with answers, with knowledge from books or newspapers, with reasons or reason, where wives, and husbands too, were accustomed to falling asleep exhausted. She has nothing to do now. All day long everything is done for her that she once did herself. She is becoming more and more depressed.

  * * *

  Herman starts saving the foreskins. Secretly. Nobody sees him. One day he just starts doing this. Does he think it peculiar? No, he thinks it will prove useful. He does not believe in waste, in any of his businesses, in any of the buildings he is having built all over the place. All these foreskins from all these healthy kinder, they should prove useful. He will find a way.

  During the service, as usual, he covers them; but one day, when his assistant, who is called the sendek, reaches for the muss to dispose of it, Herman whispers emphatically that he himself will take care of this part of the ceremony from now on. Now after every service Herman extracts the little bits of foreskin, looking like twists of bloody lemon peel, and drops them into a tiny bottle filled with formaldehyde. In his basement he transfers t
hem to a larger bottle, which soon contains many foreskins. When he has a full bottle he starts another. He hides these bottles in a cavelike room in the back of the basement, way under the farthest reaches of his big house.

  Yes, Herman has built himself his first big house, moving from the Southeast to downtown Northwest, on Scribbs Place, near where Rabbi Chaimoff has built the first of the enormous Washington Jewish Congregation temples that will appear over the years, a palace to God—Herman’s house, that is, though there are many who compare the two, both in opulence and chutzpah—of a splendor even the least conservative Jew finds too showy. The rabbi’s temple has an organ more fit for a Loew’s movie palace, and a Star of David window high above the pulpit, made from stained glass with colors seen only in cathedrals. Herman’s just has a grand piano, though it is a Knoodorf made in Vienna by Beethoven’s piano maker, and his stained-glass windows were created by the Meister of Leinwort himself, huge panels that bathe the many hallways in vibrant rays as if God were shining through them, which Herman believes. The joyless cranks who criticize either edifice are countered by Rabbi Chaimoff, who states quietly and firmly that God now encourages such effusive, munificent outpourings or why else would He have scattered money and success upon them so abundantly, His long-suffering people who for so many centuries in so many lands under so many tyrants have been punished so harshly and forced to live such miserable paupers’ lives; surely they are entitled to relief. Exactly, Herman chimes in.

  Herman’s house is surrounded by land, which is unusual for downtown Washington. Space is expensive, neighborhoods are growing crowded, police protection is feeble, and buildings and their builders usually huddle together. That’s not for Herman. Russia was nothing but earth and none of it was his. Now he can walk around his land, 80 krechas down, 90 krechas across, a handsome piece of land. When the house is completed it takes up 17 drinels, even more than Rabbi Chaimoff’s new temple takes up. It’s four stories high, not counting the cellar, with cupolas from which you can see the White House. There are thirty-six rooms. There are seven bathrooms, each with a toilet. There is an attic for Emmanuel to play in, and rooms for servants to sleep in. There is brown shingling all over the outside and rich wallpapers of striped and patterned velour all over the inside. There are rugs from Nekustan and Verlystan and Stanostan and Perkistan, towns near Grad whose populace helped spark the pogroms that sent Herman fleeing to America. Herman and Yvonne cannot look down at the floor without recalling the wretched gentile weavers of Grad. He spends lavishly on heavy furniture: size and weight, bulk and heft guide his purchases, not grace, utility, comfort, or taste. If the sign of opulence is the heaviness of the load, the house of Herman Masturbov weighs a ton.