The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  After a Miss Trudy McNab faints on the floor and her head accidentally plops on a batch of full vials that Mr. Homolka hasn’t yet refrigerated, my Washington Red Blood career is over. Trudy gets some shards of glass in her eyes and somebody’s blood gets in there too, and before you know it she loses her sight, which doesn’t seem to be coming back.

  A district supervisor is summoned to supervise.

  “Why is someone so young performing in an official capacity?”

  People are not so litigious in those days, but there’s no doubt Miss Trudy McNab’s lawyer wants compensation to make the rest of her life less miserable.

  I’m the one who’s blamed. My mother, to save her cherished unblemished record of continuous devoted service, does not defend me or point out that Trudy couldn’t possibly have fainted and bonked her bean because of me. A scapegoat is needed and I’m it. “There’s also a legal technicality involved,” Stephen tells me. “You’re underage. If the fault can be pinned on you, you can’t be sued. Blind she may be, but she’s got less ground for a lawsuit. And there’s no law preventing ARB from allowing you to help.” I want to write Miss McNab a letter saying how sad I am for her, but Stephen says I mustn’t.

  I feel abandoned by Rivka. I miss my Saturday bloodmobile. I work up the courage to ask, “Momma, do you think I was guilty somehow?”

  “Of course not, darling. It’s just the way Washington works. I’ve found you something else just as helpful. I’ve heard the most awful news from Miss Theodora Von Lutz, who has confided in me that American Red Blood has had a secret meeting and determined that Negro blood will not be collected. Isn’t that awful! And to make matters worse they have also determined at their International Headquarters in Geneva not to confront or even in any way allude to the horrible things that Rabbi Chesterfield says the Germans and Mr. Hitler are doing to our people. I don’t know what the world is coming to. I’m not sure I can continue working in this field. Miss Von Lutz says I must not despair. That it’s just the way the world works. Miss Von Lutz is certainly plugged into the right sockets. Now, I have a lovely new volunteer job for you! I was talking to Rabbi Chesterfield and we have pulled a rabbit out of his hat.”

  * * *

  The day I’m meant to be bar mitzvahed is the day I learn where David is.

  When Rivka asked me a few years before if I was ready to begin my Hebrew lessons, I put up a stink expecting her to insist, which amazingly didn’t come. That I just wouldn’t do it didn’t seem to bother them at all.

  I had made the monumental philosophical decision that I don’t believe in God the night Uncle Hyman fucked me, stuffing the pillow over my mouth and silencing me with threats. I still remember that feeling, not so much of being fucked, because I’ve been fucked many times since, symbolically, literally, with both pleasure and pain, but of being both checkmated and being silenced, being forced to participate in an act against my will. I remember lying there, a child, with my smelly uncle snoring on top of me, my ass sore, some kind of fluid—his semen? my blood?—trickling down inside my thighs, and thinking, What kind of world is this that allows such things to happen? I felt older than my years, very old. How can there possibly be a God watching over this and me?

  I said earlier I date my desire to become a doctor from that day and night with Uncle Hyman. It was a decision that grew slowly as piece by piece it was building up.

  But I have to go to Sunday school anyway, even though I think it’s a joke. I’m shipped off each week to Washington Jewish so I can be thrown in with all those richest kids in the city. Thumbing my nose, I pride myself on a new rebellious act every few weeks or so. When the ark that holds the sacred Torah is opened and everyone’s supposed to stand up, I stay seated. When a teacher’s back is turned, I sneak out to Murphy’s Five and Dime across the street and return blowing my just-purchased bubble gum or looping the loop with my new yo-yo. When I am finally caught, I’m called up in front of Rabbi Chesterfield himself, more than ever looking and sounding like a phony Ronald Coleman rip-off in flowing robes, in his study lined with signed photographs of world leaders. Now he has a radio program to tell his opinion of world events. Philip goes for a walk when Rivka insists on listening to it. “He’s the first Jewish leader broadcast coast-to-coast!”

  Rabbi Chesterfield leans back in his enormous leather swivel chair and asks me why I’m behaving so badly.

  “I don’t believe in God.”

  He rocks a few times, nodding to himself, and he twirls slowly around in his chair.

  “Can you tell me why? On the basis of what information?”

  I realize he doesn’t remember me or my interaction with his dead son. I shake my head no. Now I’m not even sure he knows I’m the son of his prized teacher.

  “Well, we shall discuss this further when you are older. You may return to class.”

  My announcement elicits nothing more remarkable. I’m not struck dead or otherwise smitten. The rabbi does not broadcast my momentous news to the Jerusalem home front. After a while, tired of my rebellious acts, I just sit through temple activities bored out of my mind. When the time comes for those Hebrew lessons to prepare me for my bar mitzvah and I refuse, Rivka’s only fear is that the news will kill Grandma Libby. “Don’t tell her,” I say. “She lives in Los Angeles. How will she ever find out?”

  “Are you suggesting I lie to my own mother?”

  When thirteen arrives so does Grandma Libby’s bar mitzvah present. It’s addressed to Daniel and David Jerusalem. It comes by special delivery. I open the door and sign my name for the parcel. I rip it open. Inside is a letter and a dirty strip of canvas cloth with a yellow Star of David on it.

  Rivka comes home from work looking very tired. I show her Grandma’s letter, afraid it may make her fall apart. But when you think Rivka is going to do one thing, she doesn’t. She is presenting a stone jaw and a tough face.

  Grandma Libby’s letter (written for her by Uncle Hyman, evidently presently peddling his wares on the West Coast) says, “I send you this because today you are men and men today must fight. The world is more awful now than ever I remember. I send you this awful thing so you always remember and make your grandma proud as I always am of you and always will be. More than ever you must be good Jews and fight for your people. Do you know what this is I send you? It is an armband from the camp at Todstadt, worn by a Jewish little boy just like you, Daniel and David, who was sent into the gas chambers to be exterminated. The rabbi from our shul brings this back from a conference where rabbis from all over the world discuss this terrible problem. They kill us and kill us. But with bar mitzvah men like the two of you I never lose hope.”

  I go walking by myself along the banks of the creek—the Masturbov River it’s called, a stream barely a foot wide and dry most of the year—viciously kicking pebbles with my feet, feeling increasingly chained to this culvert and this town and this life. In the eyes of the Jewish religion, I should officially be a man now, but I haven’t been bar mitzvahed. Is a bar mitzvah some sort of passport without which you can’t be a man? If so, it isn’t fair. Either you’re a man or you’re not a man. I do not feel like a man. And I do not feel like I am surrounded by men in our house. How many years has David been away by now? I have to count on my fingers. Six years? We certainly don’t hold family remembrances of him on our birthday. I start thinking about Lucas and Stephen. They have been so silent and passive all these years. I am really kicking the shit out of the pebbles in the culvert now. I am furious with my brothers. I am furious with everyone and everything.

  When I had declared my atheism to Philip, he looked at me as if I were a crazy person and he had no idea where I sprang from, “certainly not from my loins.” Loins is a new word for me. And he sits down and turns on the radio, shaking his head. “He’s not my son. He’s not my son,” he mutters. This is not a new refrain to me. I am used to it. I thought I was used to it. I thought I didn’t care if I was his son or not.

  “He’s your son,” he announces to Riv
ka, who’s preparing dinner as I return home from my pebble-kicking.

  “What are you talking about? He’s your son, too.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s your son.”

  The dirty armband with its wrinkled Star of David is still laid out on the dining room table where I’d opened it. I go to my room and write another letter to David.

  “You know we don’t know where to send this!” Rivka yells, crumpling up my letter when I bring it back and hand it to her silently. She runs into the living room, where Philip sits inebriated by one of his baseball games, in near-dissolution because his team is losing. He always takes it personally; he yells at the team and he yells at the Philco just like he yells at me. “Philip, I can’t take it anymore,” she cries, in a voice more pained than usual. “You must tell him! You must tell him something!”

  “Leave me alone,” he says in Yiddish. They speak Yiddish when they don’t want “the kinder” to understand, which of course by now we do, at least the basics.

  I am suddenly aware that I feel naked, that neither of my brothers is ever around when the gathering storms are, well, gathering, as I know, sure as shooting, one is gathering now. How do they know when to stay away? I wonder if they are leading double lives, having another family to go to so they can be fed and not have to get stomachaches from all the awful things going on in this family that are never talked about.

  “I won’t leave you alone! Doesn’t anyone have any consideration for me? I can’t take it anymore.” She uncrumples my letter and reads aloud a few lines. “I miss you and wish you were here. I’m going through such a tough time and I wonder if you are. You must be, because we’re two parts of the same whole even though Stephen says we’re not. It bothers me not to be sharing growing up with you.” Then she skips to the part about my puberty problems. “My body seems to be changing more than I want it to. Is this happening to you? No one has told me anything about any of this and I’m frightened a lot by these changes that seem to come out of nowhere.”

  “Give me that!” I lunge for the letter and grab it.

  Philip speaks. “Are you yelling at me to tell me that this sissy who lives with me in this apartment who doesn’t believe in God is afraid he’s becoming a man, or are you yelling at me because David is in a concentration camp in Germany where they don’t have daily mail service?”

  She lets out a piercing scream. Then she’s bawling, repeating over and over, “That’s not the way to tell him! That’s not the way.”

  Have I stopped breathing? In a concentration camp? Where they gas people to death? I stare at my parents in horror. My mother is blubbering. She reaches for me and I pull back instinctively and she stands in the middle of the room not knowing where to go, with her arms reaching out unplaced like some puppet on broken strings. In no way does Philip relinquish the ball game’s hold on him. “Shut up,” he says. “I can’t hear what’s happening.” Rivka goes and kicks the radio, the solid floor-model Philco, which doesn’t so much as burp. So she yanks out its plug. He sits there looking into space. Her foot hurts and she sits down to massage it.

  I stand in front of the low armchair where Philip sits in his underwear. I stand there glaring at him. “Tell me what!” I scream.

  He isn’t talking. He isn’t that kind of fighter. He’s never been a fighter. All he can do, and only when provoked by Rivka, is bully me. I hate him more and more for his passivity and his cowardice. Sitting in his armchair, the chair no one else is permitted to sit in, not that anyone ever wants to, and staring at the Philco as if waiting for it to resume beaming his ball game at him, any ball game, he’s pathetic to me. Whatever’s happened to David, I’m sure it’s Philip’s fault.

  Terror such as I’ve never known overtakes my body. I’m gasping for breath. I’m boiling hot but I’m shivering. Who are these two people in this room with me? I don’t know them. Aren’t they supposed to be my mother and father? Why is it hard to breathe? I have to run, but where? If I run to my bedroom, I’m still here. If I run out into the street, where do I run to next? I’m frozen to the spot.

  If I leave, how will I find out the truth about David? If I stay, how will I live with it? And them?

  I shake my mother. I grab her and I shake her in and out and back and forth. She stares at me in horror, her face comes closer and then recedes, only to return, like she’s swooping down on me on a roller coaster.

  “Stop it, stop it, stop it,” she says, not so loudly at all. “Obey me! I’m your mother!” she then cries out plaintively. “What are you doing to me?” Her words pierce a hole in my anger and we hug each other, crying into each other’s shoulder. “Mommy, Mommy, please tell me!”

  And we sit down on the sofa and she tells me. Some of it, anyway. When she starts to speak, Philip gets up and goes to the bedroom, only to emerge moments later, fully dressed. He leaves the apartment.

  “Your father was out of work for the longest time. He just couldn’t seem to find a job. It was the Depression. It went on and on. It wasn’t so hot for most people but it was particularly hard on professional people like lawyers. Who had any money to hire a lawyer, no matter how great the wrong? Finally, he read in the Yaddah alumni magazine about a classmate of his, a Mr. Standing, who owned a large Boston company that evidently made film, and even though it was the Depression, this business was booming. I thought, How could it be booming, people don’t have enough money to take pictures. But it was film for movies. Everybody was so poor and wretched that they spent their last pennies going to the movies. Movies made people laugh and feel good. They helped people escape. Philip wrote Mr. Standing a letter, not expecting much to happen. Lo and behold, after a few weeks, an answer comes. Yes, there is a job for a qualified lawyer, particularly one who, like Philip, speaks German. Mr. Standing’s company is partners with a German company. The salary is such and such and can Philip report to Boston for work on such and such? He doesn’t even want to meet Philip or interview him. So Philip packs his suitcase.

  “You know how you and David never got along particularly well? You seemed to be the artistic one and he the opposite. You liked to pretend and he hated that…”

  I nod. When I would put on my little playlets in the privacy of our bedroom, David always looked embarrassed. He was too polite to say anything so I plowed on, hoping I could entertain him enough to overcome his disapproval, but I never did. Soon he ran out whenever I wrapped a towel around my head like Carmen Miranda or clomped around in Mom’s high heels or paraded in Lucas’s jockstrap pretending I was a big-deal athlete.

  For his part, by the age of four or five, like Dodo, David had a home chemistry set and could concoct every one of the formulas in the thick book that came with it. It wasn’t pretend to him. It was what his world was made of. I didn’t like the smells, but I enjoyed the magic, and I wanted him to enjoy my pretend games in return. But it was obvious that I embarrassed him more than he could bear. He was quiet by nature, so it took a while for this to sink into my consciousness: that he felt uncomfortable in my presence, that my own twin felt uncomfortable near me. When it did dawn on me, we started fighting. Some of what he was really feeling came tumbling out. He thought I was silly. Frivolous was the word he used, a word I’d never heard. Then he started using a word Philip used a lot. Sissy. That word I knew the meaning of. I hated sports and I hated that Philip monopolized the radio to listen to his endless contests, and I had the guts to say so, I am proud to recognize now. I think it was a pretty gutsy thing to say, “I hate baseball, I hate football,” knowing that I was flying in the face of all that in Philip’s mind defined a man. It wasn’t that I was siding with the feminine—Rivka was for both David and me a true pain in our asses, someone we jointly complained about, someone we knew from our earliest comprehension was much too busy to be our mother. If I was learning that I’m a rebel by nature, I was also learning that I enjoyed the role, and that David wasn’t like this at all. He had withdrawn from our world, and it seemed I was here to remind him of it.

  I
couldn’t stand those “sissy” implications, though, and I started fighting back. I’d short-sheet his bed or put some of his chemical stuff into his food so he’d piss blue. When he hit me for the first time, I started to cry. I ran out of the bedroom, I was so shocked, but I ran right back in and clobbered him with all my strength. We were both surprised by that—that I had it in me to do something like that at all, and he that I had it in me to do it to him. Things went from bad to worse after that and for months on end we didn’t say a word to each other, not one single word.

  No wonder he went away.

  For those who are always wondering if twins ever do it with each other, I offer only this: on that night when we were really fighting physically, I sucked his penis. Doesn’t that make me sound like the aggressor? Well, to this day I’m convinced he put it in my mouth. Why should we have been so angry with each other? We shouldn’t have been. In a concentration camp?

  My mother continues. “You used to sleep in the same bed together. Do you remember? In each other’s arms.” We did indeed. Once upon a time.

  “He started to cry when he saw Daddy packing up to go away. ‘I want to go with you!’ he sobbed. Your father and I held a conference and I said, ‘Why not? It would make life a lot easier for me,’ and you two weren’t getting on at all by then, you mustn’t forget that, so off David went with Philip. They always got along better. I have no idea why. You both always looked so alike to me.

  “He went to school there and Philip’s job was very interesting—wasn’t it, dear?” (This to a Philip she thought was still staring into space, traumatized by listening to her; hadn’t she seen him leave?) “And before you know it Mr. Standing was actually sending him back and forth to Germany. Imagine that. On a ship, a big fancy liner, back and forth, in a stateroom. Philip was his trusted assistant. He knew how to deal with the Germans in their own language and everybody on both sides appreciated it. There was no trouble because of Philip’s Jewishness. Why should there be? He was the emissary of an important American company. Soon he was even taking David over on his trips. We didn’t tell you for fear that you’d be jealous.