The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  * * *

  Rivka tells us that Rabbi Chesterfield has called his staff of teachers together to announce “everything is now more spiritually challenging than ever.”

  Thus Lucas and Stephen and I must go to Sunday school every week without fail. No more visits to other rabbis. No more “I don’t feel like it.” “This is not the time to test God’s patience,” Rivka warns us in that tone that says don’t test hers. Tibby Chesterfield’s suicide has joined David’s disappearance as a subject we don’t discuss. Then Donald Shapp across the street accidentally kills his father by hitting him on the head with a golf club for coming home in uniform and announcing he’s going off to war. And then Karl Adroita immolates himself in the boys’ toilet of Franeeda Elementary School after he hears that a favorite cousin of his in Chicago did the same. Soon there’s nothing we can’t and won’t talk about. A psychoanalyst specializing in children opens an office on Connecticut Avenue downtown.

  I put Tibby’s photo on my bureau. It’s a wan face, too young for melancholy but terribly glum. No one else likes to look at him, so he doesn’t last long on the bureau top.

  Young men start champing at the bit, ready to go. But until war’s declared they’re like a bunch of runners waiting for the gunshot before the start of a race. It’s amazing nobody’s saying, “What’s the hurry?” That’s certainly what they’d say now. Why are we so ready for war? Doesn’t anyone remember the last one? We can hardly wait! We’re so cooped up we’re ready to explode.

  Before we know it, of course, it comes. It’s just there. It’s happened. It’s happening. I don’t remember the president’s famous speech. I don’t remember Pearl Harbor. I just remember one day we’re not at war and one day we are. My cousin Barry comes back with one leg only months after he signed up. I meet him at the bus stop to help him find our building. I pretend I don’t notice anything as he hobbles slowly with his canes, dragging his stiff artificial leg. He went off to war so talkative and smiling, and now he’s staring wordlessly at the ground. Rivka talks endlessly throughout dinner, trying every trick in her repertoire to put him at his ease. Out of nowhere she suggests I sing a song. I never sang a song to her or anyone else. It’s a painful meal. Barry’s bitter and sour he got shot so fast. He’s failed and he believes everyone else thinks he has too.

  Rivka takes to inviting “tragic cases” home to dinner. Wounded soldiers whose wives left them for another man or disappeared because they couldn’t face a husband with only one arm or leg. Blind young men with their attendants, worshipful nurse’s aides mooning with cow eyes, saintfully grateful to be doing something “for the war effort.” One soldier, Bradley Purvis, marries one of these young women and they move next door on Mordecai Avenue. I watch them grow older over the years. He has a twin brother who’s also blind now, who comes to visit with his own wife. The two brothers walk down Mordecai Avenue holding hands, being led by their adoring beloveds. Where is David? Oh, where is my twin?

  One thing the war brings to our home is a sense of its coziness. What with Rivka’s tragic cases and Philip appearing to be a bit more important because his work is keeping him “even busier” and Boston not mentioned and Lucas and Stephen sleeping at home because their friends’ mothers now say things like, “Don’t you have your own bed to sleep in, young man? There’s a war on and your parents need you,” our little apartment actually seems warm and full.

  It’s become increasingly difficult for kids to play games. Shouting “Bang, bang, you’re dead!” isn’t much fun after Cousin Barry loses his leg. I beg Rivka to let me help her but she won’t. “You’re too young to work on the bloodmobile.” She’s in charge of a growing number of them, deploying them daily to different “collection points.” Her “quotas” keep getting increased “and I keep meeting them!”

  Claudia is the first to peel off from our gang and say she no longer wants to play in the excavations for the new buildings going up faster than ever. Day by day she is more beautiful. Her black hair is clipped even shorter around her scalp like a cap. Her sweaters reveal two blossoming breasts. Sometimes I find myself looking at them like a traveler who wants to go back to a spot he visited years ago to see if he feels the same about it. How had I felt? How did I feel now?

  Claudia’s father, Mr. Webb, is making a fortune removing government wastepaper. It’s turning out to be an enormous contract. You see trucks all over that say “The Webb Company.” Empying wastebaskets seems like such an isolated small task until you realize how many wastebaskets there are in the government. (That’s what it’s all called, where all our fathers work, collectively, “the government.”) The Monument says so much paper has never been removed before on such a grand scale. The Monument’s never heard of Mr. Webb and wonders who he is and where he comes from. Philip says, “They make Claudia’s father sound suspicious. That isn’t fair.” The emptying of wastebaskets is a sensitive matter because valuable information might fall into enemy hands. Mr. Webb’s built big furnaces way out past the Bladensberg dumps to burn everything up. In a few years’ time, just as Hitler’s marching into someplace else and the Webbs have moved into a grand mansion in the District, Mr. Webb will be arrested for not burning all the wastepaper. He’s invented a method of turning paper into cardboard and he thinks he’ll be congratulated, but instead he’s accused of profiteering. His lawyer gets him off by saying he has a bad heart, which is news to everyone. By then Mrs. Webb has redecorated the mansion that the Monument calls the “House of Cardboard,” but Rivka says, “It’s on the right side of town and they’re living in it, so it doesn’t sound so cardboard to me.” Philip naturally takes this as a criticism of his own earning power: “So I should come up with some great idea and break the law?” Lucas points out to Pop that “not so long ago you thought Mr. Webb was innocent until proven guilty.” Stephen mumbles that Philip wouldn’t know how to break the law even if he wanted to.

  No, I don’t remember all that much optimism.

  The Webbs used to own a huge house in the Northeast before Claudia was born; they were forced to give it to the archdiocese when Mr. Webb bought the bus company and raised the fares so high nobody could afford them. He was threatened with prison for that, too. “He sure gets a lot of opportunity to cheat and break the law and live so high off the hog,” Philip complains when he sees Mr. Webb in his Cadillac, its backseat packed with clothes they’re moving. “Mrs. Webb has always hated living in Masturbov Gardens,” Rivka says. Mrs. Webb has never been Rivka’s favorite since the time she tried to pull Claudia away from playing with me and the Schwartzbach sisters and Claudia screamed at her, “You go to hell!” The sisters, shy girls from France and very polite, were shocked but I thought it was great. Imagine having the guts to yell at your own mother like that. Mrs. Webb just stared at Claudia, with an icy coldness that said she hated her daughter, then turned and left us, but not before we all heard her spit, “Why must you always play with Jews?”

  “Imagine talking like that,” Rivka says when I report to her. “And with Mr. Hitler killing so many of us.”

  Yes, the enemy is now personified and his name is Hitler, and his secret is out now, at least in this house.

  Mr. Schwartzbach, or Monsieur Schwartzbach, gets transferred back to France. They haven’t even been in Masturbov Gardens for very long. Everybody promises to write. I wonder what will happen to them.

  Mordy and I are the only Jews in our gang. Dodo, Arnold, Billy, and Orvid are Christians. Mordy’s very rich, but not the rest of us. Money’s difficult for Rivka to discuss with us. She won’t talk about it when we boys wonder why some fathers are making money and our father is not. I know she wants too much for us that we can’t afford. In the dark through the bedroom walls you can hear her saying, “There simply isn’t enough coming in, Philip. I simply cannot make ends meet. You are very lucky to have a wife who knows how to stretch a dollar. Why do you constantly criticize me for having a paying job that helps us make ends meet?” Lucas is determined to make tons of money. I have day
dreams too, but they’re usually about how to spend it.

  It’s after Rivka says things like this privately to Philip that he’s apt to haul off and slug me. I’ll have bought a comic book he doesn’t approve of, or a new fountain pen. “You have absolutely no consideration for money and how hard your mother and I work to put food into your mouths!” Slam slam slap clang ouch. I refuse to cry. Fred, you told me this is exactly what happened to you with your father. Well, my list of the world’s grievances against us was certainly growing.

  Rivka’s always trying to impress on us that it’s Jews who have a special, heavier burden, “particularly now that we are being killed somewhere far away.” When she first says this, it’s news to us. Stephen doesn’t believe her. “It’s just another example of her never-ending know-it-all that makes me nauseated.” I, of course, believe the worst immediately. Avid listener to all tales, I press for more. She switches to one of her off-into-the-distance looks and says nothing. Then she admonishes us yet again to be even more grateful than we were before that we’re American, and alive. She stops peeling a carrot dead in her tracks. “I could be holding you in my arms as we are herded naked into a freezing cold warehouse and slowly gassed to death,” she whispers. What? What’s she talking about? Boy, this is big-time stuff. Where does she get her info?

  “They’re only stories. Why are you scaring us?” Stephen asks.

  “Rabbi Chesterfield has heard!”

  “Well, Rabbi Gribden says they’re only rumors and if we spread them it will only make Hitler angrier.” Since Stephen’s never been known for any interest in world events, much less Jewish ones, Lucas and I turn and look at him.

  “Since when are you hobnobbing with Rabbi Gribden?” Lucas asks. Like Lucas’s Rabbi Grusskopf, Gribden is a breakaway rabbi who split off from Rabbi Chesterfield to start his own temple. Unlike Grusskopf, he’s even more liberal than Rabbi Chesterfield, who himself is held by the old Jews to be so liberal he’s more gentile than Jewish. The three rabbis hate one another and take opposing stands on everything as a matter of course.

  “It is amazing that on certain topics there should be opposing points of view,” Rivka says, quite sensibly.

  Grusskopf is successor to the late Rabbi Martashevsky. After his death his old shul mysteriously burns down and all the most religious Jews feel homeless. To go to either Gribden or Chesterfield is anathema. Grusskopf does his best to carry on in a converted storefront. No one knows that he is presiding over the end of the old ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Washington.

  Since putting people into warehouses and turning on the gas is a pretty tall-sounding story, seriously topping “all the starving children in Europe,” Rivka lays on us that we have to eat our kale that she’s now growing “for the war effort” in her Victory Garden on the other side of the Masturbov River on land Abe has allowed his tenants to use. I do have strange bad dreams about what she told us, as if it’s more connected to me than I know. Philip, whose family roots are German, doesn’t want to hear about it. At least we think that’s his reason.

  You’d think that stories of the murder of Jews, or even rumors, would elicit an outpouring of concern, especially from the Jews for other Jews, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Most of the stuff on the radio and in the Monument is about how very expensive the war’s becoming and how everyone’s going to have to help pay for it. American Jews don’t want to be blamed for costing everyone money, just as homosexuals today don’t want to feel guilty, but do, every time a serial killer comes along who victimizes little boys. This may seem a strange comparison to insert right here, but at the time, in the woods not far from the American Red Blood office in Hykoryville, there was a small mass murder of little boys, some seven of them, all by the same person, a college student majoring in anatomy, “such a nice-looking young man,” as Rivka said when she saw his photograph in the papers.

  It was the face of a young man I’d met. He took me back to an empty apartment in Masturbov Gardens. He had the key. He said he and his family were moving in and we’d be neighbors. He gave me several comic books, embargoed from my life by Philip. (You, too, Fred! God, did all our fathers study at the same penitentiary?) How did he know I wanted them so much? All I had to do to get them was let him stick his finger up my anus. He said he was a medical student and was studying this part of the body. Courtesy of Uncle Hyman, I was an experienced hand in the anal penetration department. I let him and he had an orgasm. He pulled down his trousers and underpants and tried to make me suck his dripping penis, but I grabbed my comics and ran, or waddled, really, as I was pulling up my shorts at the same time. Yes, my list of homosexuals was growing longer.

  The murders were spaced over several weeks, during which time little boys in Franeeda County were practically quarantined at home, which didn’t make me feel any less guilty. Yes, I felt guilty for this drama, for these murders, for this murderer. Should I have spoken up after our meeting? If I had, would those other boys be alive?

  I could have been one of those dead little boys. Why was I spared? Was it destiny? Destiny was another of that era’s favorite words. Mr. Churchill was always talking about our rendezvous with it, and Mr. Churchill was as big a star in Washington as Clark Gable was in Hollywood. When The Underlying Condition is finally identified and gay men are terrified of being scapegoated, Arnold Botts, always a hisser, spits out overactively to some reporter on the evening news, “These sinners sent this destiny down on their very own sinning, sinful heads!”

  Of course, words like homosexual did not appear in newspapers, or issue from people’s lips. What words were used for us in those days? “Homosexuality,” as a distinct concept, didn’t appear until the late nineteenth century, and gay evidently became an underground code word in the 1920s, but what the world was calling us out loud for most of history is a mystery. Did I know what I was? Did I really have any sense, all of Uncle Hyman’s books and bookstores notwithstanding, of what my feelings amounted to? When I heard about the murdered boys, did anyone or any paper or any radio commentator say anything like “sexual pervert” or “sick fairy” to make me feel swell, like I’d found my name?

  In the Jerusalem household, the main outcome of the murders is that the ARB office in Hykoryville is closed “temporarily” and Rivka is transferred to District headquarters and given a raise, at least in authority. She’s now in charge of several bloodmobiles in the districts. She’ll be working directly under Miss Theodora Von Lutz, evidently a well-known name in government service, who is being brought back from her retirement, along with her sister Eurora. They are written up jointly in the Monument, which also runs their picture. They both look very forbidding. They had been involved in something called the Tally Office before their early retirement. “Everyone must give their blood so that the living may live,” Miss Theodora’s rallying cry, comes to be one of Rivka’s constant refrains. I told her she should have been in that photograph in the Monument too, and why wasn’t she?

  No, I don’t remember all that much optimism.

  Mostly it seems everyone tries to pretend there isn’t any world out there, to close out the bad and find a safer place inside. Everything is “home front” this and “home front” that, as if it’s a real and comforting place. We listen to the radio a lot to laugh; nighttimes are filled with comedians. There isn’t a real world after the evening news. While some of the war movies we sit through at the Masturbov are filled with dead bodies spewed all over beaches, others are filled with songs and dancing. Sailors sing a lot on the decks of their battleships, and this, at least, seems jolly. And we can all imitate fat, jovial Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” as if what she’s singing about is a big jolly presence like she is.

  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is an actual person, a palpable presence in our lives. He is our protector and he lives with us, even if he’s in that big White House downtown. Every kid no matter how dumb knows how to spell his entire name. We can identify his dog, and Mrs. Roosevelt, who is accorded a migh
ty reverence even though women think she’s a bit too pushy. Nobody knows about their bad marriage, or her lesbian girlfriend, or his lady friends, or his gay assistant secretary of state, or even his polio and crutches. God has no blemishes. The president and his city and his country and his government are all the same. “Does your father work for the government?” is invariably answered yes. There isn’t any other employer in town. We’re all told what to do and think and eat and no one questions a thing. We are all one big happy family, in spite of Mr. Hitler and Mr. Mussolini and Mr. Tojo—the cast of characters keeps increasing. We might be way out here in Franeeda County in Masturbov Gardens but—at last!—we’re now a part of Washington too.

  We’ve crossed over the District Line.

  * * *

  Mordecai Masturbov is the first person I know I want to fall in love with and have love me back. I want to touch him all over. He has skin like marble. He has skin like velvet. He has skin I desperately want to touch. He looks like the Greek statues in the Mellon Gallery downtown, which I pretend is where I live, walking regally down the majestic staircases in the empty mammoth halls, going into rooms to stare at Roman and Greek men with lost penises.

  I can’t remember the first time I saw Mordy. His father is our landlord, of course, and his grandmother Yvonne is a sister to Uncle Israel Jerusalem, the other sister being Grandma Zilka, who threw out her husband and took back her maiden name. So I guess Mordy’s been in my life all along. One day he just appears in my consciousness. Another day, in some boring class, I start doodling the letters of his name over and over in my notebook, the scrawls and curlicues taking over entire classes. And another day my constant thoughts about him start to hurt. I realize he isn’t thinking of me back, and I don’t know what to do about it.