The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  “Are you unhappy and lonely too?” I ask him.

  “Shhh. Go to sleep. We’ll talk about it some other time.”

  “Yes. Some other time.”

  So it’s now been said out loud. We have harsh, unloving parents. Children aren’t supposed to hate their parents, but we do.

  I have just one great terror: that I’ll never be able to leave this place, that Masturbov Gardens is where I’m meant to be, that I’ll never get away, that my dreams will never be anything but dreams.

  As I reread this so many years after living it, it doesn’t seem all that sad, does it? Not so wretchedly sad that you want to take these kids in your arms and chastise the parents with a sharp word before embracing them, too, for the sadness of whatever happened to them. No, we just fought back and they fought our fighting back, so it was like following the ball in a tennis match. No sympathy is required, only attention: keep your eye on the ball. Why am I trying to sell myself this version of what is so less truthful than the truth?

  * * *

  Lucas has the middle name of Standing. Neither Rivka nor Philip will tell us where it comes from.

  Does it occur to Lucas and Stephen and me that the number of unanswered questions we are living with is mounting up?

  Evidently we’re not on very solid ground with our last name either.

  My father’s mother, my grandmother Zilka, throws out her husband, Philip’s father, whose first name was Teddy, when she catches him in bed with another woman. This happens when Philip is a little boy, and he never sees his father again. Grandma Zilka throws out Teddy’s last name, too, whatever it was, and goes back to her maiden name of Jerusalem. She is another relative of Cousin Abe’s mother, Yvonne. Jerusalems, it would appear, are everywhere. Philip won’t discuss this either. When Philip courts Rivka, there is concern in the ghetto community that all is not right with the genealogy side of things. Zilka’s actions are not unknown, and there are those who have been waiting a long time to see that she is punished for her spirited defense of herself so long ago. There are Jewish councils that meet late at night just to discuss problems like this. Family names must be honorable and honored, especially in this New World. You have to be careful. You don’t want to roast in hell. Zilka is the one out of a hundred who said go shove it in your face. “My son wants to marry the Rivka, he marries the Rivka, no matter what kind of trouble you make up. You want worse? He never existed, the husband, his father! I make him up. A bad dream. Philip was born by—what do the goyim call it?—immaculate conception.”

  Philip marries Rivka. He loved her. He did. We kids discover and devour hidden love letters, full of his outpourings, all written before any of us were born. Now we see no displays of affection, only constant dissatisfaction and disappointment. Rivka says he takes after his mother, whom we, as little boys, much against our will, are required to visit once a year in her dark rooms over her grocery store in the Northeast.

  From the first time I look up at her until the day I look down at her in her coffin, Grandma Zilka makes me uncomfortable. A large woman, tall (how did Philip turn out so short?), heavy, lumbering, endlessly unsmiling, hair knotted tightly in a severe bun, clumpy thick-soled shoes, and heavily laced layers of stiff dresses smelling of her aging body and the conflicting odors of what I call “Jewish things”—stuff she sells downstairs, gefilte fish, salmon and lox, and varieties of pickles and herrings—overlaid with the wafts of her own medicinal unguents and ointments she swears she can’t live without. She is a cacophony of odors.

  She is always, every minute, terrified of death. That her heart might stop beating. Her eyes stop seeing. Her feet fail to carry her bulk. She drinks canned carrot juice with such a strong belief that it will preserve her eyesight that perhaps it does. Even in her coffin they can’t close her eyes.

  The other woman Zilka finds Teddy with is a Negress and she is sitting on Teddy’s cock, which is larger, according to Aunt Grabele, than Zilka recollects it ever being for her. Like Hamlet behind the arras, she watches the performance from behind a screen as the Negress, evidently most adept with her mouth and her hands and her vagina, simultaneously intones imprecations of “some native sort” while she sprinkles aromatic spices around and about, all serving, again according to Aunt Grabele, who by the way is Philip’s sister, who told me all this after Zilka’s funeral (she hated her mother because Grabele was the girl and Philip and an older brother named Fedel, who is news to me, had, at her expense, whatever there was of Zilka’s love), to arouse Teddy to tremendous heights. “And she was not only a shvartze but a cleaning shvartze who only twenty minutes before had been down on her hands and knees scouring out the toilet with Old Dutch Cleanser.”

  The funeral occurs when I am going through puberty. My body’s doing things to me I don’t think that I want done to it, I’ve refused to be bar mitzvahed, and I wish David were here to discuss all of this. I tried to ask Aunt Grabele about him and how their lessons were going. “What lessons? I’m not teaching any David how to sing!” is her reply, which makes as little sense to me as I figure my questions do to her. I’ve never heard some of the words, certainly never imagined any of the acts, that Aunt Grabele, with much relish, is now getting off her chest. Aunt Grabele lives in Worcester, a town of such distant-sounding dissonance that when she ventures forth from it for one of her rare visits, she seems utterly exotic. A divorcée three times, a dilletantish teacher of “classic voice” to whatever budding opera singers Worcester might be home to, she too is tiny, and from such a large mother! Teddy Whatshisname must have been a shrimp. She is petite and dresses always in navy blue, with white gloves always on her hands, the actual skin of which evidently no one is meant to touch.

  What happened to her husbands? She doesn’t know. Where is Fedel?

  “Who?”

  “Fedel. Your brother.”

  “Oh, him.”

  She doesn’t know. Goodness, how people lost people in those days.

  “Your grandma Zilka waited until your grandpa Teddy and the shvartze reached orgasms, which were loud and explosive and in her bed. Her husband lay there, still inside the colored woman. From behind the arras, Zilka made her entrance, a butcher’s knife in her hand—a cleaver, the kind that hacked the kosher meat to pieces, still sharp from the grocery—swinging it, aiming to bring it down on just that space between the couple where Teddy would be dismembered for life.”

  We are sitting in a morose antechamber at Pecker’s Funeral Parlor. Grandma Zilka is laid out in the adjoining room. For all I know, at thirteen, she’s looking straight at us from Heaven and listening to her daughter run her mouth. Zilka’s few friends are dribbling in to pay respects; she was not well loved by the neighborhood because she refused credit and the people are poor. The sobs I hear are Philip’s. I’ve never heard my father cry. My brothers are not here. As usual they’ve found reasons to be elsewhere. Once again I’m the only one to show up.

  I watch my father crying over his dead mother, to make sure those choking gasps are his. Rivka’s eyes are dry and her expression stoic. Aunt Grabele continues, not missing a beat. “Just in time Teddy pops out, flops over, and the cleaver slashes the mattress, releasing a crescendo of goosefeathers. The Negress runs naked out into the streets—we still lived downtown in the Northwest, a shul to the left, a shul to the right. Neighbors stand outside looking in, riveted, as the husband runs through the house evading the hatchet his wife has reclaimed, slicing the air in fury and in the general direction of his dingus, which is now swinging, dangling, bobbing wildly up and down. Suddenly Mama hurls the weapon again! It strikes the cornered husband and fells him. It opens a huge gash in his stomach. His insides are slithering out. He lies on the kitchen floor, bleating in terror, his hands trying to hold everything in. He screams at Zilka to get a doctor. She roars with laughter. He screams at neighbors to call the police. He screams at God to get ready for him. Mama just lets him scream. She goes into our bedroom down the hall and grabs your ten-year-old father—I, of course
, am left behind to fend for myself—and yanks him back to observe the kitchen floor. ‘Say goodbye to your papa.’ Still yanking Philip, she goes outside to address the neighborhood, first putting on an expensive hat. ‘I pray I killed him. He screwed another woman in the very bed this son of mine was born in.’ All the women cluck-cluck sympathetically. Zilka with Philip and me then walks over to the Northeast, where some Jews have staked out another little neighborhood, and sees a corner store for rent, with some rooms above it. Here she opens and runs most successfully until yesterday a grocery store of her own. She’s died a rich lady. Now let’s see who gets the gelt.”

  “What happened to the shvartze?” I ask, having kept track of the cast of characters.

  “The shvartze? What happened to your grandfather?”

  “Okay, what happened to him?”

  “No one ever knew.” Another one lost? “I’ll never forget the sight of him, on the floor, his innards guzzling out, the bloody blade Mama threw lying only inches away from his huge schlang.”

  “What’s a schlang?”

  “How old are you now? And you still don’t know what a schlang is? It’s your penis, your wee-wee, your wanger. Philip hasn’t told you? Of course not. He probably still doesn’t know himself. She’d better have left me some of that money. For the life of misery she made me live taking care of her all these years.”

  “But you live in Worcester.”

  “So? She sent messages. She almost killed me with her demands.” Then she asks me, “Do you know what your real last name is?”

  “What are you talking about? It’s Jerusalem.”

  “Is it?”

  That’s as much as she’ll say.

  * * *

  Just before we think he’s dying, Philip answers me as we stand around his bed, “We’re not Jerusalems.”

  We’re in a veterans’ hospital, Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, it’s mercilessly called. Because Philip fought in World War I he’s entitled to free care from his country. This is the only Washington hospital he can have it in. All around us are other old men dying. Or trying to. The place is monstrously steamy in the worst of the Washington summer heat. There’s dirt and dust everywhere. There are holes in everyone’s sheets, sheets that are rarely changed. The man in the bed on his right never stops wheezing and the man in the bed on his left is always trying to vomit. Philip introduces us to them both. “My friends,” he calls them. This from a man who never seemed to have any.

  “Then who are we?” Stephen asks him.

  Lucas and Stephen and I and Rivka are by his bedside. Lucas and Stephen are now successful lawyers, in partnership with each other and Sam Sport. I, after several false starts in other fields, am about to … well, let’s leave that for a while.

  “Our name is not Jerusalem.”

  “What is it, then?” Stephen persists.

  We all wait, suddenly rendered nameless, to be named anew. What are we? Who are we? What had been Philip’s last name?

  Three of his four sons are there, naked, waiting for clothes.

  “I don’t know,” Philip finally answers.

  “And Standing?” Lucas asks. “Where does my middle name come from?”

  Rivka looks like she knows more than she wants to know. I recognize this look if the others don’t. Philip gazes at Lucas’s hand, without taking it—which it would be nice if he did before he dies, to show at least one of his sons some visible affection—before saying, “Standing is a special name that was given to you for a special reason. Only David can explain it to you.”

  “Pop.” Lucas is trying to reason. “You can’t do this to us. If you know something we should be told, then you’ve got to tell us.”

  “David? Who’s David?” Stephen tries to make a joke. He can be really gross sometimes.

  But Philip’s eyes are somewhere else. He never was a dreamer, so far as I could see (how blind I was); since I’ve always been one, I thought I knew a dreamer when I saw one (how wrong I was). But now he has the eyes of a dreamer. Does dreaming come just before death? Does this new look in his eyes mean he is about to begin his journey, the one we are all frightened to take, the one we hope really is a journey to some safe place at last, where wishes come true and there is no agony and pain, no longing unfulfilled? For a second, in my naïve sentimentalizing, I feel sorry for him.

  He reaches no hand up to Lucas, nor to Rivka, who is biting her lips in distress, a distress I bet has more to do with practicalities: Should she move into a smaller apartment? Nor to Stephen. Nor of course to me.

  I take Rivka back to Masturbov Gardens. On the way home—we’re taking the requisite several buses, changing in dark neighborhoods, waiting for connections that year by year take longer to arrive—it begins to pour with rain. There are no trees or passenger shelters, we have no umbrella, and we stand there in this unknown neighborhood with midnight approaching and no choice but to get drenched. For the first time in our family’s history we have a little money, enough to afford a taxi at this late hour. Or one of my brothers could have driven us home; they both have cars. But despite the fact, or because of it, that Masturbov Gardens is a very long ways away, Rivka becomes the martyr as we leave Soldiers and Sailors Memorial. “You both go to your own lives. Daniel will take me home. We’ll take the bus. The long ride will give me time to think.” Is she expecting at least one of her sons to protest, to make a fuss over her, not to allow her sacrifice?

  “Good night, Mom,” said Lucas.

  “Good night, Ma,” said Stephen.

  “Don’t ask me, because I’m not going to tell you,” she warns us as she leads me toward the bus stop.

  And I am left to escort her home.

  She says not a word during the endless trip and downpour. Once, on the first bus, she reaches over and takes my hand and clutches it and runs her fingers skittishly over it, then sets me loose. I consider starting a conversation, but it’s almost as if I can feel her shake her head no. The connecting last bus comes, the rains continue, and we are back in Masturbov Gardens.

  The apartment is flooded. We left the windows wide open on this hot night, and now there are inches of rainwater over the entire living room floor. The thick dark gray chenille carpet purchased once upon a time for a bargain price at some “fine” store emits sopping groans when we cross it. The moment she surveys the damage, Rivka looks at me and speaks: “You never loved him.” Then, looking at the floor, she begins to cry. “It’s gone forever,” she sobs, wading through the water to study for damage at closer range various other items purchased on sale at other “fine” stores somewhere. Then she leaves me and changes her clothes and comes back looking like a cleaning lady, in a schmata and stockingless, and she gets down on her hands and knees with a bucket and sponge. I find some old clothes and join her. It’s almost dawn by the time she proclaims, “Enough.” No sooner does she empty her last pail and squeeze out her exhausted sponge than the telephone call comes. We stare at the ringing instrument. We know what has happened. We actually hug each other in fearful anticipation.

  Her tears return, becoming moans, then wails. Her cries for advice—“What shall I do?”—punctuate her gasps for breath. I try to comfort her, but she won’t allow it. “You never loved him,” she repeats, pushing me away. Her wails continue as the sun of another blistering day comes up.

  But her husband and my father is not dead. In fact, his doctor is sending him home.

  I take the buses and return to his hospital and attend to the details of his discharge and journey back with him to Masturbov Gardens by ambulance.

  I have written more about my father’s death in life than I have of my own beginnings. My father and I shared this earth, and share this story, for some thirty years yet to come.

  And our questions—Who am I? What are our names?—remain to be excavated. What fun!

  * * *

  Down near the bottom of Masturbov Gardens are the remains of a railroad track. They say Pearl White, the silent movie star, filmed several of her
cliffhangers here, the ones where she almost gets run over by the oncoming train that doesn’t see her tied to the rails. That movies were once made right here is very exciting to all of us kids growing up, Stephen especially. He likes to play director and order everyone around. He gets Lucas and me to pretend we’re criminals holed up in a bedroom while the cops are closing in outside. Lucas isn’t good at making stuff up. I’m an expert. “Sometimes I think I can imagine almost anything,” I boast. “I can imagine everything!” Stephen says. “Can’t you let the little guy win a round?” Lucas says to Stephen, frowning. “Why can’t you let me win one myself?” Stephen says. Suddenly it’s not a game of pretend. Lucas turns beet red because he doesn’t like to answer to anyone. Stephen’s almost as tall as he is now. Stephen’s gorgeous, like Clark Gable or Farley Granger, one of those dark-haired love gods. Lucas looks like Spencer Tracy, kind and trustworthy. “Aren’t you going to fight back?” Stephen keeps trying to bait him. Lucas starts to say something, but doesn’t. “Always so tight-assed,” Stephen says, shockingly. “Where did you hear that expression?” Lucas demands. “I get around.” “Where to?” Lucas asks quietly. Stephen doesn’t answer.

  These two—so different—plan to be law partners “when we grow up.” They’re the twins, really. They’re the ones joined at the hip. Stephen never lies to Lucas like he lies to everyone else.

  “Why should I tell the truth? It doesn’t make any difference.”

  “That’s a terrible thing for a lawyer to say,” I cry out.

  He never stops saying it, by the way, from then till now.

  * * *

  When I am a baby and young boy, my grandmother Libby is more my mother than my own. She loves me, holds me, tends me, while Rivka is out there taking care of the world, and she’s the one who not only tells me I’m strange but advises me to glory in my strangeness. Often I look up and find her looking at me, smiling. Then she says something to her daughter, if Rivka’s near, and Rivka translates: “She says it gives her pleasure just to look at you.” I run to be in her arms. She’s the only person I give pleasure to, so far as I know.