JD (23 page)

“Oh. Okay.” He shook my hand, as the cab stopped for me he crossed the street and headed back toward the Alcazar.

As I sat back in the cab I thought: I have never in my life had an encounter as straightforward and natural and idyllic as those few minutes with a guiltless, polite, wise kid who was happy he had come twice and happy with his twenty bucks.

I got back to the house about eight-thirty, thinking I had beat the crowd. But Mickey and his cousin Emily were already there. Emily explained: “Grandpa's mostly asleep now, and when he's awake he--well, he knows his daughters, but he's not too sure who Mickey and I are anymore. So Mom and Aunt Martha figured we might as well come back. Did you eat already?”

“No. No, I went out for a while. I forgot to ask what Bertie cooked.”

“I'll go see,” Emily said.

Mickey was red-eyed. He had been crying for this man who'd always hated me. I went to give him a hug and realized he was staring at the knees of my trousers.

After dinner--a chicken fricassee amazingly like my Aunt Lucille's, which Martha has failed to replicate in almost twenty years of trying--we watched television for a while. Emily had turned it on, I couldn't very well forbid Mickey to watch. And it was certainly better to share this narcotic than try to make conversation. Martha and her sister got home, she packed Mickey off to bed while we had a couple of drinks. Nobody talked, everybody watched television with the most intense concentration--because if we took our eyes
off it we might have to say something. By the time I got to bed, Mickey was in his sleeping bag, asleep or doing a good imitation.

Of course I am wondering if Mickey knows enough about the world to figure out why Pop's knees were stained. I am also wondering, if I manage to get away again this evening, will I find George? Probably I won't get away, sounds like the old bastard is checking out. And if I did return to the Alcazar, of course I will never find George again. Not even “George.”

I was going to go home for a little lunch and then perhaps come back in the afternoon. But instead I find myself in the bar at the Waverly Hotel, sipping a Manhattan—saving the cherry for last, as if I were a little girl. I never drink in the middle of the day and have hardly ever sat alone at a bar at any time of day, because nice girls don't.

I am haunted by “George.” Why the quotation marks? He didn't owe Jonathan his real name or his real self—which Jonathan imagined he had discerned. I am not outraged exactly, I don't guess George was a mishandled altar boy, but I am awfully sad. Sad on all sides, the poor boy driven to the Alcazar and to old men, maybe by some need beyond money. Jonathan pathetically imagining that this encounter was an idyll. How thoughtlessly he paid the kid twenty bucks and concluded he was happy. Jonathan, heroic advocate for kids without a future, finding one who needed a few bucks. Maybe Ignaz was right, maybe all of Jonathan's politics was one long rationalization for his self-indulgence. He railed against the society that drained these boys' manhood, and then he knelt to catch the last drop.

I am left with the eternal question: did George's mother know? Suppose the barman's tale of a Pigtown culture, exotic as Tangier, was true: sons hustling as their fathers had before them? Then would a mother know, when her boy headed out the door, that he was off to get blown by a Jonathan? Was she pleased that he was making a few bucks? Or did she feel the futility of raising a son so that he could be eaten alive—one way or another, at the steel mill at Sparrows Point, unloading bananas at the harbor, loitering by the Alcazar. And then perhaps—as he was just a little older than Mickey—heading off to the
same war, joining Mickey in the democracy of the fallen. Even if George is alive, his mother must have known what I do: men devour their sons—or one another's sons, as Dennis O'Grady would have it. And we mothers just watch helplessly.

October 28, 1966

Back home now. I couldn't make any more entries in Baltimore, because after Norman died everyone was around the house all the time. It would have looked suspicious for me to be hanging out in his study.

Everyone was around the house, enacting what I take to be the Episcopalian equivalent of sitting shiva. There was practically no display of grief, whether because this is the way Axelrods do things or because Norman's passing happened so slowly and predictably. It was like a movie where you know the whole story five minutes after the opening credits and then just watch it drearily unfold.

The funeral wasn't until three excruciating days after he died. We were all trapped with one another in the steadily shrinking house. Martha's mother kept talking about which of her friends had/had not called, sent flowers, brought over yet another casserole made of chicken and cream-of-something soup. The day before the service the weather warmed up enough that brother-in-law Stuart took Mickey out to try to teach him golf. Mickey came back rolling his eyes, as any self-respecting Ascher would after three hours with Stuart. Meanwhile I taught Emily pinochle, but the game didn't last long, as she started beating me after about twenty minutes of instruction.

I set out for a little walk around the block. When I got back, an hour after dark, Martha was only mildly exasperated, even though she presumably guessed what I had been doing. Mickey, on the other hand, was plenty exasperated-- either because he had figured out how a grown man might get his knees dirty or, I hope, just because he thinks it was disrespectful of me to go out fooling around when we're all supposed to be in mourning. We ate one of the casseroles,
we watched TV, but all evening Mickey kept throwing disdainful glances my way, and he pointedly talked to anyone-even Stuart--except me.

I think I've been pretty good about not conveying to Mickey my loathing for the only Grandpa he's ever known. I only wish …

I was about to write that I wish he had known my father. Except that my father picked on me: well into my thirties he could still pluck just the nerve that would make me start whining in a voice a full octave higher than usual. So it is just as well Mickey never witnessed that.

Later that night, as I lay awake in the dark, I heard a little rustling noise from the sleeping bag. Evidently Mickey was able to suspend his bereavement long enough to release a bit of pent-up energy. It will certainly do him good, when he is off at college with an ever-present roommate, that he has mastered the art of silent self-abuse. The end was signaled by a tiny almost imperceptible sound, somewhere between a moan and a squeak. I closed my eyes tight and pictured George--tried to, rather, it wasn't George's image before me, so I stopped.

I came home after the service yesterday, because I'd already canceled my Friday class last week to go to Baltimore and didn't think I should miss it again. Martha said it was okay, she had Mickey for company, they'll be back Sunday. Mickey has missed a whole week of geometry and whatever else he studies--I don't know what, geometry is the only thing he ever needs help with. The only thing I can't help with.

I never knew Jonathan's father, either. He died a couple of years before Jonathan and I met, so I never had the fun of seeing him make Jonathan whine. In the only photograph Jonathan had, or maybe the only one he chose to keep, his father was one of those bald men who looks like an alien of superior intelligence, and what they used to call “dapper,” a sort of semitic parody of Bertie Wooster, down to the boutonniere and the spatterdashes. With a thin-lipped, scoffing sort
of smile that belied the optimism or credulity that led him so often into affairs that were, Jonathan said, uniformly disastrous. “Affairs” meaning not dalliances but small deals, investment opportunities disclosed at the deli over a platter of latkes and involving, perhaps, an odd lot of furs of questionable provenance, vacant land right next door to some promised public improvement, a new kind of paper clip.

In between affairs he sold insurance—the little burial policies with weekly premiums. Jonathan used to tag along when his father made the collection rounds, trudging up the endless stairs of tenements on Delancey or Rivington. He always used to tell about one time when a little boy answered the door and recited, “Mamma says she's not home.” A shaky enough living, and more than once after a failed venture Moshe Ascher had to go to some relative and borrow enough to make up the premium receipts he had lost.

This was practically all Jonathan ever said about him. One other thing: his first language was Russian, not Yiddish, and on the ship he taught himself English from a Russian/English phrasebook. Jonathan brought this up a number of times over the years, as if it summed up something important, something that set Moshe Ascher apart from everybody else in steerage, and that would go on setting the Aschers apart in the Bronx.

Jonathan had even less to say about his mother. She died in the influenza epidemic when he was six and Bernie was three. He remembered that she was blonde—from some ancestral Cossack, as he said, I hope in a forbidden tryst and not a rape. And she was “pretty,” that was the word he used. Could a six-year-old have thought his mother was “pretty”? I mean, is that what he would remember? Maybe: it is a six-year-old's word, which must have encapsulated for him all the beauty and comfort of the world.

I scarcely remember what my mother was like when I was six, but of course that is because I remember what she was like when I was forty. While Jonathan carried a single image of a woman who was embodied Eden. Then gone, and Jonathan and his brother shuttled among various aunts and cousins, sometimes together, sometimes apart. Until they came to roost, ages eleven and eight, apparently no longer requiring any sort of substitute mother, in their father's bachelor
apartment. From this, I guess, Jonathan's willingness to do anything—even go down on me twice a day, as opposed to about twice in twenty years—to hold our contentious household together for Mickey.

So that he could listen to little Mickey jerking off and imagine—what? Sucking him, something worse? Over the next couple of years I was away so much, taking care of my mother. If I had known about Jonathan I would have stuck my mother in a home, I would have stayed here and guarded Mickey day and night.

October 3O, 1966

Martha and Mickey got back from Baltimore on an early train; if she was able to get Mickey up at seven on a Sunday morning, they must both have had plenty of Martha's mother. Luckily my trick, who will be nameless here because I never actually heard his name over the din at the Dubois, had had plenty of my company and was gone at first light, didn't even hang around for coffee.

Martha went to our room to unpack; Mickey, still in his glen plaid suit, sat down in the living room. And absurdly pretended to read the Sunday
Times Magazine
, just so he wouldn't have to talk to me.

“You should check out the school ads in the back pages,” I said. “All kinds of military academies. We'll pick out one that will make a man of you.”

He looked up, startled, as if I were seriously threatening to send him away to one of those institutions for the relicts of failed marriages. Now that I had his attention, I asked if he wanted to go out to breakfast. He shook his head, but Martha had overheard. “Yes, you two go to breakfast. I have a lot of errands.”

So he was trapped and acted it. Not a word, all the way to Second Avenue--he didn't even ask me for a Pall Mall.

“You mad at me?” I said.

“No.” In a clenched treble: “Why would I be mad at you?”

“You tell me.” Nothing. “You know, your mother and I always had one rule. If you're mad you've got to say why.”

“Oh.” We were stopped for a light. He looked at me and said, evenly, “I didn't know you had rules.”

This was pretty good. “Just the one,” I said. Not even one, really; Martha never said why she was humming.

We got to Rappaport's. Mickey had matzo brei and two entire bagels plus a two-dollar side order of salmon--I guess he would have ordered caviar if they'd had it, just to make me sorry I'd forced him on this expedition. I only nibbled at half a bagel, and I don't share Martha's gift for babbling, so I was left for some minutes just silently watching him eat.

I glanced around and it seemed that the room was full of fathers watching their sons eat. Some were lecturing, others looked envious, as if thinking back to when they could fress like that without heartburn. Some just gazed sadly at their darlings, who wouldn't look at them, who had mysteriously grown away and who would be saying good-bye as soon as Daddy was finished paying for college and maybe dental school.

At the back of the restaurant, a kid was mopping--the owner's nephew, or just a kid with a Sunday job. Mickey stared at him while we stood in line at the cashier's desk. I wonder what Mickey thought. Lucky me, I get to eat salmon while this poor kid has to mop. Or: lucky him, he's out on a Sunday morning doing something on his own, not trapped with his father. Both things, maybe. I can almost remember how it was, his age or just about, poised for grown-up life and at the same time scared, wanting to be a kid forever.

When we were out on the street I said, “So what is it you're mad about?”

“I don't know.” This was possibly true. Maybe the definition of adolescence is that it starts getting hard to say why you're mad.

I thought it had to be about the stains on my knees. Could he really not know how they were acquired? I wasn't sure. If he'd grown up in Hell's Kitchen, maybe, or Harlem: then he'd have a pretty good idea what some men do together.
But in the world we've made for him, the caged bourgeois childhood where the only grown-ups are Mom and Pop and his teachers and, every so often, the creepy old refugees who come to the house for cocktails? Did he have any idea?

We walked along in silence for a while. I looked at our shadows, mine only a little longer than his now. Down there on the sidewalk were the silhouettes of two jaunty young men, side by side, buddies. Perpendicular to these guys were a sagging fifty-four-year-old and his mad-about-something son.