by Philip Roth
I sat on the unused twin bed.
“You want to hear Mantovani?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Who do you like better, him or Kostelanetz?”
“It’s a toss-up.”
Ron went to his cabinet. “Hey, how about the Columbus record? Brenda ever play it for you?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
He extracted a record from its case, and like a giant with a sea shell, placed it gingerly on the phonograph. Then he smiled at me and leaned back onto his bed. His arms were behind his head and his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “They give this to all the seniors. With the yearbook—” but he hushed as soon as the sound began. I watched Ron and listened to the record.
At first there was just a roll of drums, then silence, then another drum roll—and then softly, a marching song, the melody of which was very familiar. When the song ended, I heard the bells, soft, loud, then soft again. And finally there came a Voice, bowel-deep and historic, the kind one associates with documentaries about the rise of Fascism.
“The year, 1956. The season, fall. The place, Ohio State University…”
Blitzkrieg! Judgment Day! The Lord had lowered his baton, and the Ohio State Glee Club were lining out the Alma Mater as if their souls depended on it. After one desperate chorus, they fell, still screaming, into bottomless oblivion, and the Voice resumed:
“The leaves had begun to turn and redden on the trees. Smoky fires line Fraternity Row, as pledges rake the leaves and turn them to a misty haze. Old faces greet new ones, new faces meet old, and another year has begun…”
Music. Glee Club in great comeback. Then the Voice: “The place, the banks of the Olentangy. The event, Homecoming Game, 1956. The opponent, the ever dangerous Illini…”
Roar of crowd. New voice—Bill Stern: “Illini over the ball. The snap. Linday fading to pass, he finds a receiver, he passes long long down field—and it’s intercepted by number 43, Herb Clark of Ohio State! Clark evades one tackier, he evades another as he comes up to midfield. Now he’s picking up blockers, he’s down to the 45, the 40, the 35—”
And as Bill Stern egged on Clark, and Clark, Bill Stern, Ron, on his bed, with just a little body-english, eased Herb Clark over the goal.
“And it’s the Buckeyes ahead now, 21 to 19. What a game!”
The Voice of History baritoned in again: “But the season was up and down, and by the time the first snow had covered the turf, it was the sound of dribbling and the cry Up and In! that echoed through the fieldhouse…”
Ron closed his eyes.
“The Minnesota game,” a new, high voice announced, “and for some of our seniors, their last game for the red and white … The players are ready to come out on the floor and into the spotlight. There’ll be a big hand of appreciation from this capacity crowd for some of the boys who won’t be back next year. Here comes Larry Gardner, bia Number 7, out onto the floor, Bis Larry from Akron. Ohio…”
“Larry—” announced the P.A. system; “Larry,” the crowd roared back.
“And here comes Ron Patimkin dribbling out. Ron, Number 11, from Short Hills, New Jersey. Big Ron’s last game, and it’ll be some time before Buckeye fans forget him…”
Big Ron tightened on his bed as the loudspeaker called his name; his ovation must have set the nets to trembling. Then the rest of the players were announced, and then basketball season was over, and it was Religious Emphasis Week, the Senior Prom (Billy May blaring at the gymnasium roof), Fraternity Skit Night, E. E. Cummings reading to students (verse, silence, applause); and then, finally, commencement:
“The campus is hushed this day of days. For several thousand young men and women it is a joyous yet a solemn occasion. And for their parents a day of laughter and a day of tears. It is a bright green day, it is June the seventh of the year one thousand nine hundred and fifty-seven and for these young Americans the most stirring day of their lives. For many this will be their last glimpse of the campus, of Columbus, for many many years. Life calls us, and anxiously if not nervously we walk out into the world and away from the pleasures of these ivied walls. But not from its memories. They will be the concomitant, if not the fundament, of our lives. We shall choose husbands and wives, we shall choose jobs and homes, we shall sire children and grandchildren, but we will not forget you, Ohio State. In the years ahead we will carry with us always memories of thee, Ohio State…”
Slowly, softly, the OSU band begins the Alma Mater, and then the bells chime that last hour. Soft, very soft, for it is spring.
There was goose flesh on Ron’s veiny arms as the Voice continued. “We offer ourselves to you then, world, and come at you in search of Life. And to you, Ohio State, to you Columbus, we say thank you, thank you and goodbye. We will miss you, in the fall, in the winter, in the spring, but some day we shall return. Till then, goodbye, Ohio State, goodbye, red and white, goodbye, Columbus … goodbye, Columbus … goodbye…”
Ron’s eyes were closed. The band was upending its last truckload of nostalgia, and I tiptoed from the room, in step with the 2163 members of the Class of ‘57.
I closed my door, but then opened it and looked back at Ron: he was still humming on his bed. Thee! I thought, my brother-in-law!
The wedding.
Let me begin with the relatives.
There was Mrs. Patimkin’s side of the family: her sister Molly, a tiny buxom hen whose ankles swelled and ringed her shoes, and who would remember Ron’s wedding if for no other reason than she’d martyred her feet in three-inch heels, and Molly’s husband, the butter and egg man, Harry Grossbart, who had earned his fortune with barley and com in the days of Prohibition. Now he was active in the Temple and whenever he saw Brenda he swatted her on the can; it was a kind of physical bootlegging that passed, I guess, for familial affection. Then there was Mrs. Patimkin’s brother, Marty Kreiger, the Kosher Hot-Dog King, an immense man, as many stomachs as he had chins, and already, at fifty-five, with as many heart attacks as chins and stomachs combined. He had just come back from a health cure in the Catskills, where he said he’d eaten nothing but All-Bran and had won $1500 at gin rummy. When the photographer came by to take pictures, Marty put his hand on his wife’s pancake breasts and said, “Hey, how about a picture of this!” His wife, Sylvia, was a frail, spindly woman with bones like a bird’s. She had cried throughout the ceremony, and sobbed openly, in fact, when the rabbi had pronounced Ron and Harriet “man and wife in the eyes of God and the State of New Jersey.” Later, at dinner, she had hardened enough to slap her husband’s hand as it reached out for a cigar. However, when he reached across to hold her breast she just looked aghast and said nothing.
Also there were Mrs. Patimkin’s twin sisters, Rose and Pearl, who both had white hair, the color of Lincoln convertibles, and nasal voices, and husbands who followed after them but talked only to each other, as though, in fact, sister had married sister, and husband had married husband. The husbands, named Earl Klein and Manny Kartzman, sat next to each other during the ceremony, then at dinner, and once, in fact, while the band was playing between courses, they rose, Klein and Kartzman, as though to dance, but instead walked to the far end of the hall where together they paced off the width of the floor. Earl, I learned later, was in the carpet business, and apparently he was trying to figure how much money he would make if the Hotel Pierre favored him with a sale.
On Mr. Patimkin’s side there was only Leo, his half-brother. Leo was married to a woman named Bea whom nobody seemed to talk to. Bea kept hopping up and down during the meal and running over to the kiddie table to see if her little girl, Sharon, was being taken care of. “I told her not to take the kid. Get a baby-sitter, I said.” Leo told me this while Brenda danced with Ron’s best man, Ferrari. “She says what are we, millionaires? No, for Christ sake, but my brother’s kids gets married, I can have a little celebration. No, we gotta shlep the kid with us. Aah, it gives her something to do!…” He looked around the hall. Up on the stage Harry Winters (né Weinberg) was lead
ing his band in a medley from My Fair Lady; on the floor, all ages, all sizes, all shapes were dancing. Mr. Patimkin was dancing with Julie, whose dress had slipped down from her shoulders to reveal her soft small back, and long neck, like Brenda’s. He danced in little squares and was making considerable effort not to step on Julie’s toes. Harriet, who was, as everyone said, a beautiful bride, was dancing with her father. Ron danced with Harriet’s mother, Brenda with Ferrari, and I had sat down for a while in the empty chair beside Leo so as not to get maneuvered into dancing with Mrs. Patimkin, which seemed to be the direction towards which things were moving.
“You’re Brenda’s boy friend? Huh?” Leo said.
I nodded—earlier in the evening I’d stopped giving blushing explanations. “You gotta deal there, boy,” Leo said, “you don’t louse it up.”
“She’s very beautiful,” I said.
Leo poured himself a glass of champagne, and then waited as though he expected a head to form on it; when one didn’t, he filled the glass to the brim.
“Beautiful, not beautiful, what’s the difference. I’m a practical man. I’m on the bottom, so I gotta be. You’re Aly Khan you worry about marrying movie stars. I wasn’t born yesterday … You know how old I was when I got married? Thirty-five years old. I don’t know what the hell kind of hurry I was in.” He drained his glass and refilled it. “I’ll tell you something, one good thing happened to me in my whole life. Two maybe. Before I came back from overseas I got a letter from my wife—she wasn’t my wife then. My mother-in-law found an apartment for us in Queens. Sixty-two fifty a month it cost That’s the last good thing that happened.”
“What was the first?”
“What first?”
“You said two things,” I said.
“I don’t remember. I say two because my wife tells me I’m sarcastic and a cynic. That way maybe she won’t think I’m such a wise guy.”
I saw Brenda and Ferrari separate, and so excused myself and started for Brenda, but just then Mr. Patimkin separated from Julie and it looked as though the two men were going to switch partners. Instead the four of them stood on the dance floor and when I reached them they were laughing and Julie was saying, “What’s so funny!” Ferrari said “Hi” to me and whisked Julie away, which sent her into peals of laughter.
Mr. Patimkin had one hand on Brenda’s back and suddenly the other one was on mine. “You kids having a good time?” he said.
We were sort of swaying, the three of us, to “Get Me to the Church on Time.”
Brenda kissed her father. “Yes,” she said. “I’m so drunk my head doesn’t even need my neck.”
“It’s a fine wedding, Mr. Patimkin.”
“You want anything just ask me…” he said, a little drunken himself. “You’re two good kids … How do you like that brother of yours getting married?…Huh?…Is that a girl or is that a girl?”
Brenda smiled, and though she apparently thought her father had spoken of her, I was sure he’d been referring to Harriet.
“You like weddings, Daddy?” Brenda said.
“I like my kids’ weddings…” He slapped me on the back. “You two kids, you want anything? Go have a good time. Remember,” he said to Brenda, “you’re my honey…” Then he looked at me. “Whatever my Buck wants is good enough for me. There’s no business too big it can’t use another head.”
I smiled, though not directly at him, and beyond I could see Leo sopping up champagne and watching the three of us; when he caught my eye he made a sign with his hand, a circle with his thumb and forefinger, indicating, “That a boy, that a boy!”
After Mr. Patimkin departed, Brenda and I danced closely, and we only sat down when the waiters began to circulate with the main course. The head table was noisy, particularly at our end where the men were almost all teammates of Ron’s, in one sport or another; they ate a fantastic number of rolls. Tank Feldman, Ron’s roommate who had flown in from Toledo, kept sending the waiter back for rolls, for celery, for olives, and always to the squealing delight of Gloria Feldman, his wife, a nervous, undernourished girl who continually looked down the front of her gown as though there was some sort of construction project going on under her clothes. Gloria and Tank, in fact, seemed to be self-appointed precinct captains at our end. They proposed toasts, burst into wild song, and continually referred to Brenda and me as “love birds.” Brenda smiled at this with her eyeteeth and I brought up a cheery look from some fraudulent auricle of my heart.
And the night continued: we ate, we drank, we danced—Rose and Pearl did the Charleston with one another (while their husbands examined woodwork and chandeliers), and then I did the Charleston with none other than Gloria Feldman, who made coy, hideous faces at me all the time we danced. Near the end of the evening, Brenda, who’d been drinking champagne like her Uncle Leo, did a Rita Hayworth tango with herself, and Julie fell asleep on some ferns she’d whisked off the head table and made into a mattress at the far end of the hall. I felt a numbness creep into my hard palate, and by three o’clock people were dancing in their coats, shoeless ladies were wrapping hunks of wedding cake in napkins for their children’s lunch, and finally Gloria Feldman made her way over to our end of the table and said freshly “Well our little Radcliffe smarty, what have you been doing all summer?”
“Growing a penis.”
Gloria smiled and left as quickly as she’d come, and Brenda without another word headed shakily away for the ladies’ room and the rewards of overindulgence. No sooner had she left than Leo was beside me, a glass in one hand, a new bottle of champagne in the other.
“No sign of the bride and groom?” he said, leering. He’d lost most of his consonants by this time and was doing the best he could with long, wet vowels. “Well, you’re next, kid, I see it in the cards … You’re nobody’s sucker…” And he stabbed me in the side with the top of the bottle, spilling champagne onto the side of my rented tux. He straightened up, poured more onto his hand and glass, but then suddenly he stopped. He was looking into the lights which were hidden beneath a long bank of flowers that adorned the front of the table. He shook the bottle in his hand as though to make it fizz. “The son of a bitch who invented the fluorescent bulb should drop dead!” He set the bottle down and drank.
Up on the stage Harry Winters brought his musicians to a halt. The drummer stood up, stretched, and they all began to open up cases and put their instruments away. On the floor, relatives, friends, associates, were holding each other around the waists and the shoulders, and small children huddled around their parents’ legs. A couple of kids ran in and out of the crowd, screaming at tag, until one was grabbed by an adult and slapped soundly on the behind. He began to cry, and couple by couple the floor emptied. Our table was a tangle of squashed everything: napkins, fruits, flowers; there were empty whiskey bottles, droopy ferns, and dishes puddled with unfinished cherry jubilee, gone sticky with the hours. At the end of the table Mr. Patimkin was sitting next to his wife, holding her hand. Opposite them, on two bridge chairs that had been nulled up sat Mr and Mrs Ehrlich They spoke quietly and evenly as though they had known each other for years and years Everything had slowed down now and from time to time people would come up to the Patimkins and Ehrlichs wish them mazel tov and then drag themselves and their families out into the September night, which was cool and windy, someone said, and reminded me that soon would come winter and snow.
“They never wear out, those things, you know that.” Leo was pointing to the fluorescent lights that shone through the flowers. “They last for years. They could make a car like that if they wanted, that could never wear out. It would ran on water in the summer and snow in the winter. But they wouldn’t do it, the big boys … Look at me,” Leo said, splashing his suit front with champagne, “I sell a good bulb. You can’t get the kind of bulb I sell in the drugstores. It’s a quality bulb. But I’m the little guy. I don’t even own a car. His brother, and I don’t even own an automobile. I take a train wherever I go. I’m the only guy I know who we
ars out three pairs of rubbers every winter. Most guys get new ones when they lose the old ones. I wear them out, like shoes. Look,” he said, leaning into me “I could sell a crappy bulb it wouldn’t break my heart. But it’s not good business.” ‘
The Ehrlichs and Patimkins scraped back their chairs and headed away, all except Mr. Patimkin who came down the table towards Leo and me.
He slapped Leo on the back. “Well, how you doing, shtarke?”
“All right, Ben. All right…”
“You have a good time?”
“You had a nice affair, Ben, it must’ve cost a pretty penny, believe me…”
Mr. Patimkin laughed. “When I make out my income tax I go to see Leo. He knows just how much money I spent … You need a ride home?” he asked me.
“No, thanks. I’m waiting for Brenda. We have my cat.”