Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  The joke was on him. Someone was—the woman who’d had to be told on the bus why everyone else was agog. A tall, thin, elderly woman, her face heavily powdered . . . only why was she running after him? And undoing the latch on her purse? Suddenly his adrenaline advised Zuckerman to run too.

  You see, not everybody was delighted by this book that was making Zuckerman a fortune. Plenty of people had already written to tell him off. “For depicting Jews in a peep-show atmosphere of total perversion, for depicting Jews in acts of adultery, exhibitionism, masturbation, sodomy, fetishism, and whoremongery,” somebody with letterhead stationery as impressive as the President’s had even suggested that he “ought to be shot.” And in the spring of 1969 this was no longer just an expression. Vietnam was a slaughterhouse, and, off the battlefield as well as on, many Americans had gone berserk. Just about a year before, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been gunned down by assassins. Closer to home, a former teacher of Zuckerman’s was still hiding out because a rifle had been fired at him through his kitchen window as he was sitting at his table one night with a glass of warm milk and a Wodehouse novel. The retired bachelor had taught Middle English at the University of Chicago for thirty-five years. The course had been hard, though not that hard. But a bloody nose wasn’t enough anymore. Blowing people apart seemed to have replaced the roundhouse punch in the daydreams of the aggrieved: only annihilation gave satisfaction that lasted. At the Democratic Convention the year before, hundreds had been beaten with clubs and trampled by horses and thrown through plate-glass windows for offenses against order and decency less grave than Zuckerman’s were thought to be by any number of his correspondents. It didn’t strike Zuckerman as at all unlikely that in a seedy room somewhere the Life cover featuring his face (unmustached) had been tacked up within dart-throwing distance of the bed of some “loner.” Those cover stories were enough of a trial for a writer’s writer friends, let alone for a semi-literate psychopath who might not know about all the good deeds he did at the PEN Club. Oh, Madam, if only you knew the real me! Don’t shoot! I am a serious writer as well as one of the boys!

  But it was too late to plead his cause. Behind her rimless spectacles, the powdered zealot’s pale-green eyes were glazed with conviction; at point-blank range she had hold of his arm. “Don’t”—she was not young, and it was a struggle for her to catch her breath—“don’t let all that money change you, whoever you may be. Money never made anybody happy. Only He can do that.” And from her Luger-sized purse she removed a picture postcard of Jesus and pressed it into his hand. “‘There is not a just man upon earth,’” she reminded him, “‘that doeth good and sinneth not. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.’”

  HE WAS sipping coffee later that morning at a counter around the corner from the office of the investment specialist—studying, for the first time in his life, the business page of the morning paper—when a smiling middle-aged woman came up to tell him that from reading about his sexual liberation in “Carnovsky” she was less “uptight” now herself. In the bank at Rockefeller Plaza where he went to cash a check, the long-haired guard asked in a whisper if he could touch Mr. Zuckerman’s coat: he wanted to tell his wife about it when he got home that night. While he was walking through the Park, a nicely dressed young East Side mother out with her baby and her dog stepped into his path and said, “You need love, and you need it all the time. I feel sorry for you.” In the periodical room of the Public Library an elderly gentleman tapped him on the shoulder and in heavily accented English—Zuckerman’s grandfather’s English—told him how sorry he felt for his parents. “You didn’t put in your whole life,” he said sadly. “There’s much more to your life than that. But you just leave it out. To get even.” And then, at last, at home, a large jovial black man from Con Ed who was waiting in the hall to read his meter. “Hey, you do all that stuff in that book? With all those chicks? You are something else, man.” The meter reader. But people didn’t just read meters anymore, they also read that book.

  Zuckerman was tall, but not as tall as Wilt Chamberlain. He was thin, but not as thin as Mahatma Gandhi. In his customary getup of tan corduroy coat, gray turtleneck sweater, and cotton khaki trousers he was neatly attired, but hardly Rubirosa. Nor was dark hair and a prominent nose the distinguishing mark in New York that it would have been in Reykjavik or Helsinki. But two, three, four times a week they spotted him anyway. “It’s Carnovsky!” “Hey, careful, Carnovsky, they arrest people for that!” “Hey, want to see my underwear, Gil?” In the beginning, when he heard someone call after him out on the street, he would wave hello to show what a good sport he was. It was the easiest thing to do, so he did it. Then the easiest thing was to pretend not to hear and keep going. Then the easiest thing was to pretend that he was hearing things, to realize that it was happening in a world that didn’t exist. They had mistaken impersonation for confession and were calling out to a character who lived in a book. Zuckerman tried taking it as praise—he had made real people believe Carnovsky was real too—but in the end he pretended he was only himself, and with his quick, small steps hurried on.

  AT THE end of the day he walked out of his new neighborhood and over to Yorkville, and on Second Avenue found the haven he was looking for. Just the place to be left to himself with the evening paper, or so he thought when he peered between the salamis strung up in the window: a sixty-year-old waitress in runny eye-shadow and crumbling house slippers, and behind the sandwich counter, wearing an apron about as fresh as a Manhattan snowdrift, a colossus with a carving knife. It was a few minutes after six. He could grab a sandwich and be off the streets by seven.

  “Pardon me.”

  Zuckerman looked up from the fraying menu at a man in a dark raincoat who was standing beside his table. The dozen or so other tables were empty. The stranger was carrying a hat in his hands in a way that restored to that expression its original metaphorical lustre.

  “Pardon me. I only want to say thank you.”

  He was a large man, chesty, with big sloping shoulders and a heavy neck. A single strand of hair looped over his bald head, but otherwise his face was a boy’s: shining smooth cheeks, emotional brown eyes, an impudent, owlish little beak.

  “Thank me? For what?” The first time in the six weeks that it had occurred to Zuckerman to pretend that he was another person entirely. He was learning.

  His admirer took it for humility. The lively, lachrymose eyes deepened with feeling. “God! For everything. The humor. The compassion. The understanding of our deepest drives. For all you have reminded us about the human comedy.”

  Compassion? Understanding? Only hours earlier the old man in the library had told him how sorry he felt for his family. They had him coming and going today.

  “Well,” said Zuckerman, “that’s very kind.”

  The stranger pointed to the menu in Zuckerman’s hand. “Please, order. I didn’t mean to obtrude. I was in the washroom, and when I came out I couldn’t believe my eyes. To see you in a place like this. I just had to come up and say thanks before I left.”

  “Quite all right.”

  “What makes it unbelievable is that I’m a Newarker myself.”

  “Are you?”

  “Born and bred. You got out in ’49, right? Well, it’s a different city today. You wouldn’t recognize it. You wouldn’t want to.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Me, I’m still over there, pounding away.”

  Zuckerman nodded, and signaled for the waitress.

  “I don’t think people can appreciate what you’re doing for the old Newark unless they’re from there themselves.”

  Zuckerman ordered his sandwich and some tea. How does he know I left in ’49? I suppose from Life.

  He smiled and waited for the fellow to be on his way back across the river. “You’re our Marcel Proust, Mr. Zuckerman.”

  Zuckerman laughed. It wasn’t exactly how he saw it.

  “I mean it. It’s not a put-on. God
forbid. In my estimation you are up there with Stephen Crane. You are the two great Newark writers.”

  “Well, that’s kind of you.”

  “There’s Mary Mapes Dodge, but however much you may admire ‘Hans Brinker,’ it’s still only a book for children. I would have to place her third. Then there is LeRoi Jones, but him I have no trouble placing fourth. I say this without racial prejudice, and not as a result of the tragedy that has happened to the city in recent years, but what he writes is not literature. In my estimation it is black propaganda. No, in literature we have got you and Stephen Crane, in acting we have got Rod Steiger and Vivian Blaine, in playwrighting we have got Dore Schary, in singing we have got Sarah Vaughan, and in sports we have got Gene Hermanski and Herb Krautblatt. Not that you can mention sports and what you have accomplished in the same breath. In years to come I honestly see schoolchildren visiting the city of Newark—”

  “Oh,” said Zuckerman, amused again, but uncertain as to what might be feeding such effusiveness, “oh, I think it’s going to take more than me to bring the schoolchildren in. Especially with the Empire shut down.” The Empire was the Washington Street burlesque house, long defunct, where many a New Jersey boy had in the half-light seen his first G-string. Zuckerman was one, Gilbert Carnovsky another.

  The fellow raised his arms—and his hat: gesture of helpless surrender. “Well, you have got the great sense of humor in life too. No comeback from me could equal that. But you’ll see. It’ll be you they turn to in the future when they want to remember what it was like in the old days. In ‘Carnovsky’ you have pinned down for all time growing up in that town as a Jew”

  “Well, thanks again. Thank you, really, for all the kind remarks.”

  The waitress appeared with his sandwich. That should end it. On a pleasant note, actually. Behind the effusiveness lay nothing but somebody who had enjoyed a book. Fine. “Thank you,” said Zuckerman—the fourth time—and ceremoniously lifted half of his sandwich.

  “I went to South Side. Class of ’43.”

  South Side High, at the decaying heart of the old industrial city, had been almost half black even in Zuckerman’s day, when Newark was still mostly white. His own school district, at the far edge of a newer residential Newark, had been populated in the twenties and thirties by Jews leaving the rundown immigrant enclaves in the central wards to rear children bound for college and the professions and, in time, for the Orange suburbs, where Zuckerman’s own brother, Henry, now owned a big house.

  “You’re Weequahic ’49.”

  “Look,” said Zuckerman apologetically, “I have to eat and run. I’m sorry.”

  “Forgive me, please. I only wanted to say—well, I said it, didn’t I?” He smiled regretfully at his own insistence. “Thank you, thank you again. For everything. It’s been a pleasure. It’s been a thrill. I didn’t mean to bug you, God knows.”

  Zuckerman watched him move off to the register to pay for his meal. Younger than he seemed from the dark clothes and the beefy build and the vanquished air, but more ungainly and, with his heavy splayfooted walk, more pathetic than Zuckerman had realized.

  “Excuse me. I’m sorry.”

  Hat in hand again. Zuckerman was sure he had seen him go out the door with it on his head.

  “Yes?”

  “This is probably going to make you laugh. But I’m trying to write myself. You don’t have to worry about the competition, I assure you. When you try your hand at it, then you really admire the stupendous accomplishment of somebody like yourself. The patience alone is phenomenal. Day in and day out facing that white piece of paper.”

  Zuckerman had been thinking that he should have had the good grace to ask him to sit and chat, if only for a moment. He had even begun to feel a sentimental connection, remembering him standing beside the table announcing, “I’m a Newarker myself.” He was feeling less sentimental with the Newarker standing back beside the table announcing that he was a writer too.

  “I was wondering if you could recommend an editor or an agent who might be able to help someone like me.”

  “No.”

  “O.K. Fine. No problem. Just asking. I already have a producer, you see, who wants to make a musical out of my life. My own feeling is that it should come out first in public as a serious book. With all the facts.”

  Silence.

  “That sounds preposterous to you, I know, even if you’re too polite to say so. But it’s true. It has nothing to do with me being anybody who matters. I ain’t and I don’t. One look and you know that. It’s what happened to me that’ll make the musical.”

  Silence.

  “I’m Alvin Pepler.”

  Well, he wasn’t Houdini. For a moment, that had seemed in the cards. Alvin Pepler waited to hear what Nathan Zuckerman made of meeting Alvin Pepler. When he heard nothing, he quickly came to Zuckerman’s aid. And his own. “Of course to people like you the name can’t mean a thing. You have better things to do with your time than waste it on TV. But I thought, as we’re landsmen, that maybe your family might have mentioned me to you. I didn’t say this earlier, I didn’t think it was in order, but your father’s cousin, Essie Slifer, happened to go to Central with my mother’s sister Lottie way back when. They were one year apart. I don’t know if this helps, but I’m the one they called in the papers ‘Pepler the Man of the People.’ I’m Alvin the Jewish Marine.’”

  “Why, then,” said Zuckerman, relieved at last to have something to say, “you’re the quiz contestant, no? You were on one of those shows.”

  Oh, there was more to it than that. The syrupy brown eyes went mournful and angry, filling up not with tears but what was worse, with truth. “Mr. Zuckerman, for three consecutive weeks I was the winner on the biggest of them all. Bigger than ‘Twenty-One.’ In terms of dollars given away, bigger than ‘The $64,000 Question.’ I was the winner on ‘Smart Money.’” Zuckerman couldn’t remember ever seeing any of those quiz shows back in the late fifties, and didn’t know one from another; he and his first wife, Betsy, hadn’t even owned a television set. Still, he thought he could remember somebody in his family—more than likely Cousin Essie—once mentioning a Pepler family from Newark and their oddball son, the quiz contestant and ex-Marine.

  “It was Alvin Pepler they cut down to make way for the great Hewlett Lincoln. That is the subject of my book. The fraud perpetrated on the American public. The manipulation of the trust of tens of millions of innocent people. And how for admitting it I have been turned into a pariah until this day. They made me and then they destroyed me, and, Mr. Zuckerman, they haven’t finished with me yet. The others involved have all gone on, onward and upward in corporate America, and nobody cares a good God damn what thieves and liars they were. But because I wouldn’t lie for those miserable crooks, I have spent ten years as a marked man. A McCarthy victim is better off than I am. The whole country rose up against that bastard, and vindicated the innocent and so on, till at least some justice was restored. But Alvin Pepler, to this day, is a dirty name throughout the American broadcasting industry.”

  Zuckerman was remembering more clearly now the stir those quiz shows had made, remembering not so much Pepler but Hewlett Lincoln, the philosophical young country newspaperman and son of the Republican governor of Maine, and, while he was a contestant, the most famous television celebrity in America, admired by schoolchildren, their teachers, their parents, their grandparents—until the scandal broke, and the schoolchildren learned that the answers that came trippingly off the tongue of Hewlett Lincoln in the contestants’ isolation booth had been slipped to him days earlier by the show’s producers. There were front-page stories in the papers, and as Zuckerman recalled, the ludicrous finale had been a congressional investigation.

  “I wouldn’t dream,” Pepler was saying, “of comparing the two of us. An educated artist like yourself and a person who happens to be born with a photographic memory are two different things entirely. But while I was on ‘Smart Money,’ deservedly or not I had the respect of the
entire nation. If I have to say so myself, I don’t think it did the Jewish people any harm having a Marine veteran of two wars representing them on prime-time national television for three consecutive weeks. You may have contempt for quiz programs, even the honest ones. You have a right to—you more than anybody. But the average person didn’t see it that way in those days. That’s why when I was on top for those three great weeks, I made no bones about my religion. I said it right out. I wanted the country to know that a Jew in the Marine Corps could be as tough on the battlefield as anyone. I never claimed I was a war hero. Far from it. I shook like the next guy in a foxhole, but I never ran, even under fire. Of course there were a lot of Jews in combat, and braver men than me. But I was the one who got that point across to the great mass of the American people, and if I did it by way of a quiz show—well, that was the way that was given to me. Then, of course, Variety started calling me names, calling me ‘quizling’ and so on, and that was the beginning of the end. Quizling, with a ‘z.’ When I was the only one who didn’t want their answers to begin with! When all I wanted was for them to give me the subject, to let me study and memorize, and then to fight it out fair and square! I could fill volumes about those people and what they did to me. That’s why running into you, coming upon Newark’s great writer out of the blue—well, it strikes me as practically a miracle at this point in my life. Because if I could write a publishable book, I honestly think that people would read it and that they would believe it. My name would be restored to what it was. That little bit of good I did would not be wiped away forever, as it is now. Whoever innocent I harmed and left besmirched, all the millions I let down, Jews particularly—well, they would finally understand the truth of what happened. They would forgive me.”