My Father's Footprints (23 page)

On this day, however, for reasons I cannot fathom, I have him in the palm of my hand. He will tell people, for the rest of
his life, what a great Universalist Jesus I was. He will bring it up with me a couple of times a year, for the next thirty-two
years.

“You know, you were a great Jesus that time.”

“Yes, you’ve mentioned. Has anything else I have done ever impressed you?”

“You just had everything under control that day.”

Is he putting me on? I have no idea.

He’s not always easy to read on this God stuff. When I am five, he overhears my friend Ruthie Saphirstein tell me there is
no Santa Claus. He tells her—in a spirit of genial nihilism—that Moses was a fake. This is a joke, but it takes quite a bit
of smoothing over by my mother with the Jewish families in our apartment complex.

Is our fimly HaPPy? I bet this work is h(e)ard, is it?

It is. It’s very h(e)ard.

So h(e)ard, in fact, that we are not getting anywhere with anything. Boy, does he ever have a lot of time to spend with me.
Play catch? Go to the zoo? Bronx Zoo has Komodo dragons. Take a drive down there? See the dragons?

He is still funny. He is still in touch with little people.

At the real estate office, each phone has a row of buttons that light up in sequence as the lines are engaged. When the last
button lights up out of sequence, he has divined, it always means that someone has tried to call the Harte Volkswagen dealership
and has misdialed.

Once he figures this out, he makes a point of being the one to answer those calls.

“Ja?” he begins. And then, in a dreadful German accent, “Dis is der Black Forest Volksvagen Company.”

“Oh. I’m not sure I have the right number. Is this…”

“Ja!” And then he goes on at some length about the elves in the Black Forest, who make the Volkswagen parts with great care
and pride in their magic.

Then he tries to sell the hapless caller a Volkswagen kit for $750. He dilates upon the money-saving advantages, the easy-to-read
instructions, his willingness to lend the proper tools, and, of course, the everlasting gratitude of the elves.

He never sells even one kit because, near the end of his spiel, he reveals that the instructions, although easy to read, are
in German. I suspect he occasionally crosses a line and begins to believe there really is a kit for him to sell. Boundaries
are never his strong point.

Fourth grade. It is teacher conference day. I am home alone. Outside, the rain pours, cold and pitiless. The day hums with
bad portent.

My mother steps through the back door. She is a swarm of wet bees. She is a demon hissing steam.

She shows me the report card. Many Cs. She shows me where a D—a D!—in penmanship has been changed to a C, with the teacher
scrubbing off the epidermis of the paper to get rid of the letter written in ballpoint. The C is muddily inscribed on the
paper’s festering wound. The grade change has not been occasioned by a reappraisal of my penmanship but by her bullying of
the teacher. I have, in fact, D penmanship, but no child of hers is going to get a D. She says so. She will later find out
that Norman Mailer’s mother did exactly the same thing for him and imply that, unlike Norman, I have not quite held up my
end of the bargain by becoming an irreplaceable fixture in American culture.

“Why are you so lackadaisical?!” she demands.

I am cowering with fear and remorse. My mind is scrabbling frantically at this word. I don’t know what it means. I picture
a boy on a hillside. He has no daisies. His eyes are black holes of stupidity.

“I am embarrassed! I am ashamed that you are willing to be so mediocre.”

I don’t know this word either. I am blocked, stammering, stuck like Emperor Claudius on the first syllable of a reply.

“If you go on in this way, you will become a face in the crowd. You will go to junior high school and be a face in the crowd.
Do you want to be a face in the crowd?”

I picture heads bobbing in a school hallway. In my mental picture, the heads begin to lose their shape, wrinkling like apples
on the ground. The features of the faces blur into sameness. All of them come to resemble, vaguely, the little faces Señor
Wences used to draw on his hand. They are still bobbing, bobbing, spasmodically.

“Do you remember those men in the Bowery? When you were in first grade? That is what happens to people who become faces in
the crowd.”

Oh, God. Not them. Not those guys again. Help.

I must find out what lackadaisical means, what mediocre is. I must not be those things. I must not become a Face in the Crowd.
I must not join the incontinent throng of my brothers in the Bowery.

She is, of course, juggling many complicated feelings. She is angry at me, but her greater wrath is reserved for my father.
He is lackadaisical. He is letting himself become mediocre. He is no longer a remarkable boy. Our money is running quite low,
and now she is working full time to keep us solvent. Every day, the things that made us all special are slipping, slipping
away.

On me, her tirade works, from a somewhat ruthless perspective. I launch myself on a preposterous bends-inducing zoom to the
surface. Soon I am near the top of my class. If my zeal flags, there comes, unbidden, the image of me, dirty, ragged, shuffling,
unzipping my fly next to a green Pontiac. My zeal reestablishes itself.

As Peter denies Jesus, I deny my father. I deny my third grade self with the toy typewriter.

In seventh grade, I announce to my parents that I intend to become a lawyer. I am going to a private school now, with the
children of many lawyers. I can see how they live. In big, chunky, Tudorish houses with mullioned windows. I will forge for
myself a career based on certainty and reliability, not a bunch of goddamned elves. I will be the man in the Mustang convertible
wearing the double-breasted blazer and the striped tie, not the man sitting in the living room at 1:00
A.M.
in his boxer shorts scratching out dialogue on lined yellow pads.

My parents have pieced together some meager earnings and a scholarship to send me to this fancy school. They are hanging on
to their cars a few extra years and skipping a few restaurant meals so that I can be a remarkable boy. And what does this
get them? A son who cannot hide his own horror at the thought of becoming anything like them. A son who regards them as the
Elephant Couple, abject mutants. Let their cup pass from me.

In my defense, I am terrified. At night, I lie in bed and my face burns with the fear of the next day. My status at the school
feels so
much more provisional than everyone else’s. I am on some kind of existential probation and a slip could push me right into
the chute that winds through the school building and debouches into the Bowery, on Face-in-the-Crowd Street. And then I think
about the way my face is burning. It can’t possibly be good for me to have my face burn like that, can it? Probably, I am
making myself sick. I will die of Face-Burning Leukemia if I cannot get this under control.

Which thought makes my face burn hotter.

I lose my seventh grade grammar book. I cannot tell the difference between this and the early stages of heroin addiction.
Either slip could put me in the Bowery. What will happen? The Council of the Burning Face ponders this all night. I cannot
tell my teacher I lost the book. I cannot say “lost.” There must be some other word for what I have done. The night turns
into a long vocabulary exercise.

“Mr. Friedman?” I say the next day.

“Yes.”

“This is Sandy Watson’s grammar book from last year. He lives in my neighborhood. He let me borrow it.”

“Why?”

“I mislaid mine.”

I look at the teacher. A smile is tugging at the corners of his mouth. He knows what a serious boy I am. The care with which
I have chosen this word is not lost on him.

“Mislaid?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Does that mean you lost it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fine. Use Sandy’s. And try to find yours, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And don’t use words that way. Use words to say what you mean. Not to hide it. This is English class, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then speak English.”

But I have already discovered lawyerly locution, haven’t I?

This lawyer thing is no idle fancy. By ninth grade, I have fallen into the habit of spending vacation days at the courthouse.
Put on a tie, catch the bus, head downtown, watch some trials, take notes.

O! What is worse than a geek? A geek with designs.

I don’t require Perry Mason drama or James M. Cain heat. I don’t need sex-mad lovers and butcher knives. Nope. A run-ofthe-bench
liability case will suit me fine. I watch a trial in which the plaintiff has injured himself opening a defective soda bottle.
The bottle shatters in his grasp, ripping into his flesh. Could the plaintiff have contributed to his own tragedy by opening
the bottle in some inventive manner that does not conform to the healthy laws of human understanding? What are those laws?
I watch hours of testimony, as if the Scopes trial were unfolding before my eyes. Lawyers get up with church keys and pop
bottles. “Would you say it was more like this? Or like this?”

For this Tribunal of Mammon, I have traded in the Court of Pie Powder. I have sold my birthright, my kinship with fairies,
for a mess of pottage and broken glass.

I try to persuade myself that this is interesting. I am not a good enough lawyer to win the case. The soda bottle will never
be anything but a soda bottle, and the witnesses will never be anybody but who they were. The best of the lawyers I watch
have an imaginative flair, but, in the end, they keep their eyes on the ball. I daydream. Would you want a lawyer who keeps
a pied à terre in fairyland?

Ah, yes, the fairies. They beckon. They sing in my ear. And then, one day, they bring me a present.