The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  He has chosen everything. Yvonne was not consulted. He has no idea that everything he has purchased frightens her. Her life in the New World is in all ways overwhelming. She has been married some fifteen or more years by now, but it has all been one long endless night for her.

  When he has moved in, when he has put everything in its place, when Yvonne is given the tour and Emmanuel is told not to make a mess, Herman goes outside after midnight and by the light of the moon buries little pieces of foreskin in his back and side lawns. He wants to try out an idea. He has several shelves of filled bottles and over the next nights he plants them all. Then he orders shrubs and flowers and bushes to be planted in the earth. When the ones in front come up less healthy than the rest, he is convinced he knows the reason. He plants more foreskins in the front, too, and more bushes all around the house, though he is careful to look casual as he drops a dollop of skin into its hole in the earliest of hours. His krechas are soon a wonderment of nature’s hues and the talk of the neighborhood, where everyone walks by on Sunday afternoon. By the dark of night, way past everyone’s bedtime, Herman plops his foreskins into their earth. Fortunately, no one sees him. (Well, perhaps it is not so fortunate and it would have been better if they had.) They come by to compliment him profusely for such glorious results. Even the gentiles have heard of his success in slicing foreskins off the baby yids; perhaps he has some supernatural gift with gardening, too.

  One night there is a horrendous storm—almost a hurricane, the newspapers say—and all over town living things are ripped from the earth. Everybody’s land is pitted, sad limbs scattered everywhere. But Herman’s plantings remain rooted! Nothing’s toppled or untimely ripped. Everything survives. And Herman knows why.

  Thus he deduces that his discovery is useful for more than just growing little bushes. He can now ensure that his beloved Washington will stand forever. Because of him! The gratitude of a man made holy by his service to the Lord!

  Henceforth, whenever an important building is planned, Herman goes to the site after midnight and under the light of the moon plants in these earthly foundations pieces of his foreskin collection. Washington, great new portions of it, is just being built, rising from a small town to a small city. There are many excavations, many foundations. Herman cuts his swath wide. There is probably not a major building going up anywhere in our nation’s capital under which Herman does not plant a piece of penis.

  When he plants, Herman gets an erection. Night after night through many hours his penis stays hard as he plants and makes his home and his neighborhood and his city strong and proud and tall and unbending and everlasting. When he realizes what is happening in his own pants he talks to God. Yes, he talks to God now. “What is the meaning of this gift in my loins? Is it a sign, Lord, that You want me to make for You my next son?” He talks with familiarity, not in deference. God is his friend now. They are partners in all his enterprises, from circumcisions to nocturnal plantings to amassing krechas.

  Herman hears God answer in the affirmative. In the middle of a night on which his plantings seem particularly inspirationally placed and his erection is as hard as he can ever remember it, so hard that he practically falls over, Herman goes to Yvonne, who has her own upstairs room because she never sleeps well, and who is presently sewing a sampler. He takes her hand and pulls her gently downstairs and out into the warm night. He leads her into the backyard and sits her down on a blanket he has thoughtfully spread on the ground in advance. “Is this a picnic?” she asks him in Yiddish. “I haven’t made any deviled eggs. You always want your deviled eggs on a picnic.” This should be another warning to him that her intelligence is further along on its way toward the unreality that will become her permanent refuge, but it isn’t, nor had he noticed any earlier signs. “Stop talking about deviled eggs, my bride,” he replies to her in English. He lifts her skirts. He unbuttons his fly. The God who guides his hand in his circumcisions is now guiding his hand as it guides his penis, after so long an absence, into his wife. “What are you doing, my Herman?” she asks in bewilderment. “I have not put any eggs on to boil.” Then, as he pumps up and down, she asks him in the voice of a little girl, “How can I devil eggs for you if I have not put any eggs on to boil?” He tries to bring himself to climax quickly because she is smelling even more heady than he remembers.

  She screams. A piercing shriek, at a volume he cannot imagine possible from this small person. “If another Masturbov is forming in her at this moment,” Herman says out loud to God, “I shudder in apprehension that such geshreiing will mark him for life.”

  Abraham takes over ten months to be born. Almost eleven. No one remembers such a long pregnancy. This baby’s hair is a bright scarlet red.

  It is 1900.

  * * *

  Emmanuel has from an early age been introduced to the ceremony of circumcision, the bris. At first he is held up to watch. As he grows, he is allowed to assist his father and the sendek, helping to hold the infant on the little white pillows embroidered by some tante especially for this day’s event with the ancient design of good luck, the zohrt, the crossed horseradish and leek that symbolize bitterness. Then he is allowed to hand his father the instruments, like a nurse in an operating room, trying to slap them firmly into his palm the way he insists, and then, having graduated in that he has never once fainted or shown an aversion to blood or to the baby’s racking screams of pain, he is allowed to help pinion the teeny tiny penis itself as his father lowers the knife and slices away. Emmanuel is a careful observer. He learns which of the many knives his father might want, depending on lengths and widths and thicknesses and whether a slant must be carved in the flesh, and if so in which direction, because there are knives for all directions.

  In all this the boy is guided by the sendek, the assistant Herman hired, a big man with furry hands and arms huge from shoveling the dirt he sells to people who need holes filled out Blundenburger way. There isn’t much call for dirt, America is still filled with plenty of dirt, but Nate Bulb is a dedicated soul who, once he’s made his mind up to do something, does it unquestioningly and thoroughly, as he also does in helping Herman, a man Nate worships for his holy calling and business wisdom, a rare combination rarely seen. Although Nate was hired with the prospect dangled before him that someday he might replace Herman as mohel, both of them know this will never happen. Nate Bulb has huge hands, big clumsy paws whose thick graceless fingers could never cut well enough to please God. When he realizes Nate does not have the gift, Herman tells him so, but his sendek remains loyal to him nevertheless and is particularly good at watching out for Emmanuel. In the early years Nate tries to shield Emmanuel’s eyes when the gash is effected and the bleeding commences, but Herman won’t have it. He explains to them both, son and sendek, and quite movingly, that such shielding is itself a cruelty in that the truth is simple and beautiful: the pain and blood are there to remind us that from birth we bleed and suffer because of and for God, to earn his love. Emmanuel takes his father’s words very seriously, particularly this notion of God’s love all wrapped up with the sight and smell of lacerated skin and spurting blood. “Is that why my father does not look upon me with affection and fondness? Must I cause him pain for him to love me?”

  “Your father does love you,” Nate Bulb answers. “He is only testing you.” This is not something a growing boy can understand.

  Sometimes after a circumcision, when he is relaxing in the nice room provided by Rabbi Chaimoff for the parents of the baby, Herman reads to his son from the Code of Jewish Legal Ethics for All Occasions, which is always with him in his black bag along with his instruments, much as some parents read aloud to their children from Mother Goose or Grimm’s Fairy Tales. He reads it in Hebrew, of course. The boy has been tutored in Hebrew to proficiency. He is ten years old, eleven perhaps, maybe even twelve. No one in the household seems to be certain, because he is skinny and does not like to eat.

  Today’s selection is this: “An infant who dies before circumcision, w
hether within eight days or thereafter, must be circumcised at the grave, in order to remove the foreskin, which is a disgrace to all mankind, but no benedictions should be pronounced over this circumcision. The infant should be given a name to perpetuate his memory, and in the hope that Heaven show mercy upon him and include him in the resurrection of the dead. If he was buried without circumcision and there is no likelihood that the body has already begun to decompose, the grave should not be opened. Instead, a special offering must be given to God for His understanding in this error made on earth.”

  How does a young mind process this? How could he ever have learned enough Hebrew to understand this? Emmanuel’s young mind races with questions. What happens to the poor little baby who isn’t circumcised properly? Does God grant him peace? Or must he wander the heavens endlessly without a home, without a place to rest? Or must he go to hell? Why doesn’t his father tell him all of this in English? What is his father trying to tell him? He has disappointed his father in everything. Is this something he must add to the list?

  Almost from infancy the boy has had the habit of playing with himself; his own penis is of inordinate interest to him, which is understandable considering that the penises of the young are the single most important items of interest in his honored father’s life. As soon as he can bend over to locate it, he studies his carefully and objectively. When he is old enough to ask, he does.

  “Papa, who circumcised me?”

  They are in Herman’s gardens. Capacious weeping willows gracefully embrace the yard in their comforting arms. The prize yellow Prince of Russia roses are bigger than last year’s. (I know why, Herman thinks, smiling to himself.) When Emmanuel asks his question, Herman stops in his tracks and looks not at his son but out into the distance, his face stern with the sturdiest from his wardrobe of frowns.

  “You know that it is written in the Vernah that the mohel who circumcises his own son must be careful never to … it is so awful I cannot tell you.”

  And Herman turns away from his son, not having finished this sentence, which would have said: never to do it if he is nervous or his hand is shaking.

  This gives the boy the shakes: Why does Papa not answer me? He rushes to the basement and huddles in a far corner where he pulls down his pants to consider his growing penis, an act he’s performed many times here, rather than upstairs in his room. He is exceedingly well acquainted with his penis. But now there is a new penis belonging to this new Abraham screaming in one of the upstairs rooms. And there is to be a bris, baby Abraham’s bris, conducted, Emmanuel knows, by his father, assisted by Nate Bulb and Emmanuel himself.

  Once again, yet again, Emmanuel looks at it. It is such a funny thing. He doesn’t understand it more and more every day. Why does it have to be so squiggly and uncertain in its movements? It isn’t hard and firm like an arm or leg, which he knows are important. It lacks … spine. He wants to be friends with it as he wants to be friends with all the neighborhood kids, but neither seems to be working out. He is convinced that nobody likes him, even his own penis.

  The foreskin around his glans (of course he knows the proper names for all its parts) is not even. It looks like Yvonne’s skirts, which are too long in front and too short in back or the other way around. It’s very sloppy. He’s known this, but he’s not let himself think about it. Now he can ignore this fact no longer.

  If Herman had done such a sloppy job he would be ashamed of it. He would. Yes, he would. Emmanuel, still shaking in the basement, not far from the padlocked room where Herman keeps his bottles of formaldehyde and foreskins, can think of nothing else. My father circumcised me himself and he did a terrible job and he is ashamed of it, and of me, and all my life I will be ashamed too. I will have to hide. No one will ever be able to see me. No one will ever love me. My father made an error and I cannot go to heaven because God is punishing him for not following His commandments. God hates him and God hates me, too.

  And now my father is going to circumcise my new brother, his new son. What kind of father do I have? And he wants me to assist him at this bris! This cannot be right, for either of us!

  The youngster is getting himself into an awful state of terror from which there will be no exit, at least not in the time necessary to prevent him from writing Herman and Yvonne a note and pinning it to his shirt just over his heart and finding a rope in a corner of the basement and throwing it over a thick pipe traversing the ceiling and then standing on a chair and putting the noose around his neck and jumping off the chair and dangling there until he is dead from hanging in this fine home Herman has finally completed in Washington on Scribbs Place in this new best area where more and more of the rich Jews are now flocking to reside, pushing out the goyim, and buying their land from Herman himself, who has had foresight to buy so much in case it should become the place for Jews to live. Which it now is. For everyone but Emmanuel.

  “Dear Momma and Papa, I am very unhappy and I don’t want to live anymore. Goodbye forever, Emmanuel.”

  There is an earlier version, identical except for an additional sentence: “I hate you.” This note is found crumpled up in his small fist. It too is found, as is the body, by Nate Bulb, after the bris, which of course has taken place, with special blessings by Rabbi Chaimoff, and from the Elders of the Council of Drenel itself (which is what those now fifteen rabbis call themselves since they have organized), in the huge ceremonial room of the temple. The great Schlitz has come down to perform it as a gesture to Herman. No one misses Emmanuel. Afterward, at the big party in the palatial living and dining rooms on Scribbs Place, everyone is too busy drinking festive wine and eating celebratory food to notice the absence of a young lad whom no one ever noticed anyway.

  Nate Bulb goes to the basement to enjoy a secret smoke of opium, which he partakes of occasionally and which accounts for his quiet and benign composure. He leaves the festivities, walking silently through the room packed with guests, feeling the eyes looking at him: Who is this man who never speaks and whose hair is blond with a hue of red? Is he the father of the infant? Nate Bulb is not the father of the red-haired infant, but he finds himself strangely worried that no one will believe him and perplexed that anyone would think Yvonne desirable to him.

  Nate comes back upstairs and puts his hand on Herman’s arm. “What do you want?” snaps Herman, who is conversing with Schlitz, artist to artist, and is annoyed by the interruption. “Please come with me. There is a tragedy,” Nate whispers urgently, pulling Herman away and leading him furtively outside, where they circle to the rear of the house and enter the bowels through a recessed cellar door used by the men who bring in the wood and stack it in neat piles for the fires in the many fireplaces.

  It is dark inside the basement, and Nate takes Herman’s hand as if leading a small child. “What are you doing?” Herman snaps again but Nate will not let go. Slowly Herman’s eyes adjust. He sees. He sees the sack of fleisch swinging gently back and forth.

  “Oh my God, what have I done that You have forsaken me!” These are his words. Nate can never remember if they were uttered in Hebrew or in Yiddish. In whichever language, Herman screams so loudly that Nate is certain he can be heard throughout the house and throughout the neighborhood and by God Himself in heaven. Herman would scream louder but for Nate, who stuffs his fist into his mentor’s mouth and to this day bears his tooth marks.

  The father pulls out his pocketknife and cuts his son down and lays on the stone floor the body of the boy who should have been much bigger for his ten (or eleven or twelve) years.

  As he never did in the lad’s life, Herman talks to his son.

  “I say goodbye to you, Emmanuel. I was not a good father. I was a son too much to God. He would not let me have my own son. God has wronged me. God, You and I are through.”

  Then he sits on the cold floor and takes the dead Emmanuel in his arms. He rocks him back and forth. He caresses over him and cootchy-coos him under his chin and kisses his face over and over and over. Then he stands up, dropping his ho
ld on the boy. “Take him to Onkel,” he orders Nate, referring to the Jewish undertaker. He goes upstairs and announces to the guests, “Please may I have your attention. Please to go home. Please to leave my house. This is no longer a house God blesses. This is no longer the house of the mohel.” His eyes are burning with pain and fury and his face is covered with scarlet blotches so that he is both pale and flushed at the same time. He looks like a crazy man. The guests, many of whom are now very rich themselves, or on their way, have always thought this Herman a bit of a stranger, so proud, as if he were the only rich person intimate with God. These Jews look at him now and know that it is time for them to go.

  It will not be long before the word gets out not only that Emmanuel has committed suicide, a particularly unacceptable sin in Orthodox Jewry, but that Herman has forsaken his calling, and even worse, thrown God out of his house and his life. And from that day forward commences such a history of our nation’s capital as has never been told.