Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  “I don’t know.”

  “They promised me a job as a sportscaster if I didn’t admit to the D.A. about how the thing was rigged from the day it started, how even that little girl they had on, age eleven and in pigtails, they gave her the answers and didn’t even tell her mother. They were going to put me on TV every Sunday night with the sports results. It was all arranged. So they told me. ‘Al Pepler and the Weekend Roundup.’ And from there to broadcasting the Yankee home games. What it came down to was that they couldn’t afford to let a Jew be a big winner too long on ‘Smart Money.’ Especially a Jew who made no bones about it. They were afraid about the ratings. They were terrified they would rub the country the wrong way. Bateman and Schachtman, the producers, would have meetings about things like this and talk about it together till all hours. They would talk about whether to have an armed guard come on the stage with the questions, or the president of a bank. They would talk about whether the isolation booth should be waiting on the stage at the beginning or whether it should be rolled out by a squad of Eagle Scouts. They would talk all night long, two grown men, about what kind of tie I should wear. This is all true, Nathan. But my point is that if you study the programs the way I have, you’ll see that my theory about the Jews is borne out. There were twenty quiz shows on three networks, seven of them in action five days a week. On an average week they gave away half a million bucks. I’m talking about true quiz shows, exclusive of panel shows and stunt shows and those do-good shows, where you could only get on if you had palsy or no feet. Half a million bucks a week, and yet over the bonanza period, from ’55 till ’58, you won’t find a single Jew who won over a hundred thousand. That was the limit for a Jew to win, and this is on programs where the producers, nearly every single one, were Jews themselves. To break the bank you had to be a goy like Hewlett. The bigger the goy, the bigger the haul. This is on programs run by Jews. This is what still drives me crazy. ‘I will study and get ready, and maybe the chance will come.’ You know who said that? Abraham Lincoln. The real Lincoln. That was who I quoted from on nationwide TV my first night on the show, before I got into the booth. Little did I know that because my father wasn’t governor of Maine and I didn’t go to Dartmouth College, my chance wasn’t going to be the same as the next guy’s, that three weeks later I’d be as good as dead. Because I didn’t commune with nature, you see, up there in the Maine woods. Because while Hewlett was sitting on his ass studying to lie at Dartmouth College, I was serving this country in two wars. Two years in World War II and then I get called back for Korea! But this is all in my book. Whether it’s all going to get in the musical—well, how could it? Face facts. You know this country better than anybody. There are people that, as soon as word gets out that I’m working on what I’m working on with Marty Paté, who are going to put the pressure on him to drop me like a hot potato. I wouldn’t even rule out payoffs from the networks. I wouldn’t rule out the F.C.C. taking him aside. I can see Nixon himself getting involved to quash it. I’m supposed to be a disturbed and unstable person, you see. That’s what they’ll tell Marty to scare him off. That’s what they told everybody, including me, including the parents of my stupid fiancée, including finally a special subcommittee from the United States House of Representatives. That was the story when I refused to go along with being dethroned for no reason after only three weeks. Bateman was practically in tears from worrying about my mental stability. ‘If you knew the discussions we have had about your character, Alvin. If you knew the surprise it has been to us, that you have not turned out to be the trustworthy fellow we all so believed in. We’re so worried about you,’ he tells me, ‘we’ve decided to pay for a psychiatrist for you. We want you to see him until you have gotten over your neurosis and are yourself again.’ ‘Absolutely,’ Schachtman says. ‘I want Alvin to see Dr. Eisenberg. I see Dr. Eisenberg, why shouldn’t Alvin see Dr. Eisenberg? This organization is not going to save a few lousy dollars at the expense of Alvin’s mental stability.’ This is how they were going to discredit me, by setting me up as a nut. Well, that tune changed fast. Because one, I wasn’t going in for any psychiatric treatment, and two, what I wanted was a written agreement from them guaranteeing that first Hewlett and I fight to a draw for three consecutive weeks and then I leave. And one month later, by popular request, a rematch, which he would win by a hair in the last second. But not on the subject of Americana. I was not going to let a goy beat a Jew again on that, not while the entire country was watching. Let him beat me on a subject like Trees, I said, which is their specialty and doesn’t mean anything to anybody anyway. But I refuse to let the Jewish people go down on prime-time TV as not knowing their Americana. Either I had all that in writing, I said, or I would go to the press with the truth, including the stuff about the little girl with the braids and how they set her up too, first with the answers and then to take a dive. You should have heard Bateman then, and how much he was worried about my mental condition. ‘Do you want to destroy my career, Alvin? Why? Why me? Why Schachtman and Bateman, after all we’ve done for you? Didn’t we get your teeth cleaned? Sharp new suits? A dermatologist? Is this the way you plan to pay us back, by going up to people in the street and telling them Hewlett is a fake? Alvin, all these threats, all this blackmail. Alvin, we are not hardened criminals—we are in show business. You cannot ask random questions of people and have a show. We want “Smart Money” to be something the people of America can look forward to every week with excitement. But if you just ask random questions, you know you would have nobody knowing the answer two times in a row. You would have just failure, and failure does not make entertainment. You have to have a plot, like in “Hamlet” or anything else first-class. To the audience, Alvin, maybe you are only contestants. But to us you are far more. You are performers. You are artists. Artists making art for America, just the way Shakespeare made it in his day for England. And that is with a plot, and conflict, and suspense, and a resolution. And the resolution is that you should lose to Hewlett, and we have a new face on the show. Does Hamlet get up from the stage and say I don’t want to die at the end of the play? No, his part is over and he lies there. That is the difference, in point of fact, between schlock and art. Schlock goes every which way and couldn’t care less about anything but the buck, and art is controlled, art is managed, art is always rigged. That is how it takes hold of the human heart.’ And this is where Schachtman pipes up and tells me that they are going to make a sportscaster out of me, as a reward, if I keep my mouth shut and go down for the count. So I did. But did they, did they, after telling me that I wasn’t the one to be trusted?”

  “No,” said Zuckerman.

  “You can say that again. Three weeks, and that was it. They cleaned my teeth and they kissed my ass, and for three weeks I was their hero. The mayor had me into his office. Did I tell you that? ‘You have placed the name of the city of Newark before the whole country.’ He said this to me in front of the City Council, who clapped. I went to Lindy’s and signed a picture of myself for their wall. Milton Berle came up to my table and asked me some questions, as a gag. One week they’re taking me for cheesecake to Lindy’s and the next week they tell me I’m washed up. And call me names into the bargain. ‘Alvin,’ Schachtman says to me, ‘is this what you’re going to turn out to be, you who have done so much good for Newark and your family and the Marines and the Jews? Just another exhibitionist who has no motive but greed?’ I was furious. ‘What is your motive, Schachtman? What is Bateman’s motive? What is the sponsor’s motive? What is the network’s motive?’ And the truth is that greed had nothing to do with it. It was by this time my self-respect. As a man! As a war veteran! As a war veteran twice over! As a Newarker! As a Jew! What they were saying, you understand, was that all these things that made up Alvin Pepler and his pride in himself were unadulterated crap next to a Hewlett Lincoln. One hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars, that’s what he wound up with, that fake. Thirty thousand fan letters. Interviewed by more than five hundred newsmen from around
the world. Another face? Another religion, that’s the ugly truth of it! This hurt me, Nathan. I am hurt still, and it isn’t just egotistically either, I swear to you. This is why I’m fighting them, why I’ll fight them right to the end, until my true story is before the American public. If Paté is my chance, then don’t you see, I have to jump for it. If it has to be a musical first and then the book, then that’s the way it has to be until my name is cleared!”

  Perspiration streamed from beneath his dark rain hat, and with the handkerchief Zuckerman had given him earlier he reached up to wipe it off—enabling Zuckerman to step away from the street-corner mailbox where Pepler had him pinned. In fifteen minutes, the two Newarkers had traveled one block.

  Across the street from where they stood was a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream parlor. The evening was cool, yet customers walked in and out as though it were already summertime. Inside the lighted store there was a small crowd waiting at the counter to be served.

  Because he didn’t know how to begin to reply, and probably because Pepler was perspiring so, Zuckerman heard himself ask, “What about an ice cream?” Of course, what Pepler would have preferred from Zuckerman was this: You were robbed, ruined, brutally betrayed—“Carnovsky”’s author commits his strength to the redress of Pepler’s grievance. But the best Zuckerman could do was to offer an ice-cream snack. He doubted if anyone could do better.

  “Oh, forgive me,” said Pepler. “I’m sorry for this. Of course you’ve got to be starving, with me talking your ear off and then eating half your dinner in the bargain. Forgive me, please, if I got carried away on this subject. Meeting you has just thrown me for a loop. I don’t usually go off half cocked like this, telling everybody my troubles out on the street. I’m so quiet with people, their first impression is I’m death warmed over. Someone like Miss Gibraltar,” he said, reddening, “thinks I’m practically a deaf-mute. Hey, let me buy you.”

  “No, no, not necessary.”

  But as they crossed the street, Pepler insisted. “After the pleasure you’ve given to me as a reader? After the earful I just gave you?” Refusing even to let Zuckerman enter the store with his money, Pepler cried, “Yes, yes, my treat, absolutely. For our great Newark writer who has cast his spell over the entire country! For that great magician who has pulled a living, breathing Carnovsky out of his artistic hat! Who has hypnotized the U.S.A.! Here’s to the author of that wonderful best-selling book!” And then, suddenly, he was looking at Zuckerman as tenderly as a father on an outing with his darling baby boy. “Do you want jimmies on top, Nathan?”

  “Sure.”

  “And flavor?”

  “Chocolate is fine.”

  “Both dips?”

  “Fine.”

  Comically tapping at his skull to indicate that the order was tucked safely away in the photographic memory that was once the pride of Newark, the nation, and the Jews, Pepler hurried into the store. Zuckerman waited out on the pavement alone.

  But for what?

  Would Mary Mapes Dodge wait like this for an ice-cream cone?

  Would Frank Sinatra?

  Would a ten-year-old child with any brains?

  As though passing the time on a pleasant evening, he practiced ambling toward the corner. Then he ran. Down the side street, unpursued.

  [1981]

  LAURIE COLWIN

  ANOTHER MARVELLOUS THING

  ON A COLD, RAINY MORNING in February, Freddie Delielle stood by the window of her hospital room looking out over Central Park. She was a week and a half from the time her baby was due to be born, and she had been put into the hospital because her blood pressure had suddenly gone up and her doctor wanted her constantly monitored and on bed rest.

  A solitary jogger in bright-red foul-weather gear ran slowly down the glistening path. The trees were black and the branches were bare. There was not another soul out. Freddie had been in the hospital for five days. The first morning she had woken to the sound of squawking. Since her room was next door to the nursery, she assumed this was a sound some newborns made. The next day she got out of bed at dawn and saw that the meadow was full of seagulls who congregated each morning before the sun came up.

  The nursery was an enormous room painted soft yellow. When Freddie went to take the one short walk a day allowed her, she would avert her eyes from the neat rows of babies in their little plastic bins, but once in a while she found herself hungry for the sight of them. Taped to each crib was a blue (I’M A BOY) or pink (I’M A GIRL) card telling mother’s name, the time of birth, and birth weight. Freddie was impressed by the surprising range of noises the babies made: mewing, squawking, bleating, piping, and squealing. The fact that she was about to have one of these creatures herself filled her with a combination of bafflement, dread, and longing.

  For the past two months her chief entertainment had been to lie in bed and observe her unborn child moving under her skin. It had knocked a paperback book off her stomach and caused the saucer of her coffee cup to jiggle and dance.

  Freddie’s husband, Grey, was by profession a lawyer, but by temperament and inclination he was a naturalist. Having a baby was right up his street. Books on neonatology and infant psychology replaced the astronomy and bird books on his night table. He gave up reading mysteries for texts on childbirth. One of these books had informed him that babies can hear in the womb, so each night he sang “I’m an Old Cowhand” directly into Freddie’s stomach. Another suggested that the educational process could begin before birth. Grey thought he might try to teach the unborn to count.

  “Why stop there?” Freddie said. “Teach it fractions.”

  Freddie was an economic historian. She had a horror of the sentimental. In secret—for she would rather have died than show it—the thought of her own baby brought her to tears. Her dreams were full of infants. Babies appeared everywhere. The buses abounded with pregnant women. The whole process seemed to her one half miraculous and the other half preposterous. She looked around her on a crowded street and said to herself, “Every single one of these people was born.”

  Her oldest friend, Penny Stern, said to her, “We all hope that this pregnancy will force you to wear maternity clothes, because they will be so much nicer than what you usually wear.” Freddie usually wore her younger brother’s castoff shirts, Grey’s worn-out sweaters, and a couple of very old skirts. She went shopping for maternity clothes and came home empty-handed. She said, “I don’t wear puffed sleeves and frilly bibs and ribbons around my neck when I’m not pregnant, so I don’t see why I should have to just because I am pregnant.” In the end, she wore Grey’s sweaters, and two shapeless skirts with elastic waistbands. Penny forced her to buy one nice black dress, which she wore to teach her weekly class in economic history at the business school.

  Grey set about renovating a small spare room that had been used for storage. He scraped and polished the floor, built shelves, and painted the walls pale pink, with the ceiling and moldings glossy white. They had once called this room the lumber room. Now they referred to it as the nursery. On one of the top shelves Grey put his collection of glass-encased bird’s nests. He already had in mind a child who would go on nature hikes with him.

  As for Freddie, she grimly and without expression submitted herself to the number of advances science had come up with in the field of obstetrics. It was possible to have amniotic fluid withdrawn and analyzed to find out the genetic health of the unborn and, if you wanted to know, its sex. It was possible to lie on a table and with the aid of an ultrasonic scanner see your unborn child in the womb, and to have a photograph of this view. As for Grey, he wished Freddie could have had a sonogram every week, and he watched avidly while Freddie’s doctor, a handsome, rather melancholy South African named Jordan Bell, identified a series of blobs and clouds as head, shoulders, and back. Every month in Jordan Bell’s office, Freddie heard the amplified sound of her child’s heart, and what she heard sounded like galloping horses in the distance.

  Freddie went about her business outwardly u
nflapped. She continued to teach, and she worked on her dissertation. In between, when she was not napping, she made lists of baby things: crib sheets, a stroller, T-shirts, diapers, blankets. Two months before the baby was due, she and Penny went out and bought what was needed. She was glad she had not saved this until the last minute, because after an uneventful pregnancy she was put in the hospital at the beginning of her ninth month. She was monitored constantly. The sense of isolation she had cherished—just herself, Grey, and the unborn baby—was gone. She was in the hands of nurses she had never seen before and she found herself having long conversations with them. She was exhausted, uncertain, and lonely in her hospital room.

  FREDDIE was admitted wearing the nice black dress Penny had made her buy, and taken to a private room that overlooked the Park. At the bottom of her bed were two towels and a hospital gown that tied up the back. Getting undressed to go to bed in the afternoon made her feel like a child banished for a nap. She did not put on the hospital gown. Instead, she put on the plaid flannel nightshirt of Grey’s that she had packed in her bag weeks before in case she went into labor in the middle of the night.

  “I hate it here already,” Freddie said.

  “It’s an awfully nice view,” Grey said. “If it were a little further along in the season, I could bring my field glasses and see what’s nesting.”

  “I’ll never get out of here,” Freddie said.

  “Not only will you get out of here,” said Grey, “you will be released a totally transformed woman. You have heard Jordan say many times, All babies get born, one way or another.’”

  Grey and Freddie had met as children at school in London, where they, along with Penny Stern, were members of a small band of Americans. They knew each other practically by heart. When Freddie was exasperated, she pushed her lank, brown hair out of her eyes. When tired, she rubbed her face. When upset, she tightened her jaw. But Grey had never seen her so upset before. He held her hand. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Jordan said this isn’t serious. It’s just a complication. The baby will be fine and you’ll be fine. Besides, it won’t know how to be a baby and we won’t know how to be parents.”