My Life as a Man (6 page)

And then, after the eight weeks of infantry training followed by eight more at MP school, he was assigned as a clerk-typist to a quartermaster unit at Fort Campbell, in
the
southwestern corner of Kentucky, sixty miles east of Paducah, eight thousand east of the land mines. Lucky Zuckerman! Beneficiary of one of those administrative errors by which doomed men are suddenly pardoned, and the happy-go-lucky are, overnight, earmarked for death. These things also happen every day.

Zuckerman could type only with his index fingers, and he knew nothing about filing or making out forms, but fortunately for him, the captain in charge of the supply room to which he was assigned was so pleased to have a Jew around to bait—and that too has been known to happen—that he was willing to make do with an inept assistant. He did not—as the inept assistant continuously feared he would—report the error in classification that had sent Zuckerman to Fort Campbell instead of to his bloody demise in
the
mud behind a brothel in Seoul, nor did he request a replacement for him from personnel. Instead, each afternoon before departing for the links over by the air base, Captain Clark would tune up for his game by driving cotton golf balls out of his office in the direction of the cubicle occupied by the clerk-typist manqu
é
. Zuckerman did his best to look unperturbed when the golf balls glanced off his shirt.
“
On target, sir,
”
said he with a smile.
“
Not kwat,
”
replied his superior, all concentration,
“
not kwat
…
”
and would continue to swat
them
out through the open door of his office until at last he
’
d found the mark.
“
Ah, they we go, Zuckuhmun, rat on the nose.
”

Sadistic bully! Southern bigot! Zuckerman left the supply room at the end of each day bound for the office of the adjutant general, where he intended to bring charges against Captain Clark (who, for all he knew, held secret membership in
the
KKK). But since actually Zuckerman was not even supposed to
be
in Kentucky, but had been allocated for destruction in Korea (and might wind up there yet, if he gave Clark any trouble), he invariably saw fit to suppress his indignation and proceed on over to the mess hall for dinner, and
then
on to the post library, to continue to read his way through the Bloomsbury group, with time out every hour or so for another look at the day
’
s bawdy letter from the teenage debauchee he hadn
’
t been able to bring himself to relinquish quite yet. But, oh Christ, was he mad! His human dignity! His human rights! His
religion!
Oh, each time a golf ball caromed softly off his flesh, how he seethed with indignation
…
which isn
’
t, however (as Private Zucker
man well knew), the same as running with blood. Nor is it what is meant in literature, or even in life for that matter, by suffering or pain.

Though pain would come to Zuckerman in time—in the form of estrangement, mortification, fierce and unremitting opposition, antagonists who were not respectable deans or loving fathers or dimwitted officers in the Army Quartermaster Corps; oh yes, pain would enter his life soon enough, and not entirely without invitation. As the loving father had warned him, looking for trouble, he would find it—and what a surprise that would be. For in severity and duration, in sheer
p
ainfulness,
it would be like nothing he had known at home, in school, or in the service, nor would it be like anything he had imagined while contemplating the harrowed, soulful face of Virginia Woolf, or while writing his A+ honors paper on the undercurrent of agony in her novels. Only a short time after having been shipped by providential error—his last big dose, as it turned out, of beginner
’
s luck—to the rural American southland instead of the Korean slaughter, adversity was to catch up
with
the young conquistador. He would begin to pay
…
for the vanity and the ignorance, to be sure, but above all for the contradictions: the stinging tongue and the tender hide,
the
spiritual aspirations and the lewd desires, the softy boyish needs and the manly, the
magisterial
ambitions. Yes, over the next decade of his life he was to learn all that his father might have wished Dale Carnegie to teach him about humility, and then some. And then some more.

But that is another story, and one whose luridness makes the small-time southern Jew-baiter lofting cotton golf balls toward his nose, makes even seventeen-year-old Sharon Shatzky, performing for him on a gourd like a Pigalle whore at an exhibition, seem as much a part of his idyllic and innocent youth as that afternoon he once spent sipping tea and eating watercress in Caroline Benson
’
s garden. The story of Zuckerman
’
s suffering calls for an approach far more
serious
than that which seems appropriate to the tale of his ease
ful salad days. To narrate with
fidelity the misfortunes of Zuckerman
’
s twenties would require deeper dredging, a darker sense of irony, a grave and pensive voice to replace the amused, Olympian point of view
…
or maybe what that story requires is neither gravity nor complexity, but just another author, someone who would see it too for the simple five-thousand-word comedy that it very well may have been. Unfortunately, the author of this story, having himself experienced a similar misfortune at about the same age, does not have it in him, even yet, midway through his thirties, to tell it briefly or to find it funny.
“
Unfortunate
”
because he wonders if that isn
’
t more the measure of
the
man than of the misfortune.

No, I did not marry for conventional reasons; no one can accuse me of that. It was not for fear of loneliness that I chose my wife, or to have
“
a helpmate,
”
or a cook, or a companion in my old age, and it certainly was not out of lust. No matter what they may say about me now, sexual desire had nothing to do with it. To the contrary: though she was a pretty enough woman-square, strong Nordic head; resolute blue eyes that I thought of admiringly as
“
wintry
”
; straight wheat-colored hair worn in bangs; a handsome smile; an appealing, openhearted laugh—her short, heavy-legged body struck me as very nearly dwarfish in its proportions and was, from first to last, unremittingly distasteful. Her gait in particular displeased me: mannish, awkward, it took on a kind of rolling quality when she tried to move quickly, and in my mind associated with images of cowhands and merchant seamen. Watching her run to meet me on some Chicago street—after we had become lovers—I would positively recoil, even at a distance, at the prospect of holding that body against me, at the idea that voluntarily I had made her
mine.

Lydia Ketterer was a divorced woman, five years my senior, and mother of a ten-year-old girl who lived with Lydia
’
s former husband and his second wife in a new suburban housing development south of Chicago.
During their marriage, whenever
Lydia dared to criticize or question her husband
’
s judgment he would lift her from the floor—a massive man twice her weight and a foot taller—and heave her against the nearest wall; in the months following the divorce he abused her through her child, who was then six and in Lydia
’
s custody; and when Lydia broke down, Ketterer took the child to live with him, and subsequently, after Lydia had been released from the hospital and was back in her apartment, refused to return the little girl.

He was the second man nearly to destroy her; the first, Lydia
’
s father, had seduced her when she was twelve. The mother had been bedridden since Lydia
’
s birth, a victim it would seem of nothing more than lumbago, but perpetually weak unto dying. After the
father
fled, Lydia had been taken to be raised in the home of two spinster aunts in Skokie; until she ran off with Ketterer at the age of eighteen, she and her mother shared a room at the rear of this haven whose heroes were the aviator Lindbergh, the senator Bilbo, the cleric Coughlin, and the patriot Gerald L. K.
Smith
. It had been a life of little but punishment, humiliation, betrayal, and defeat, and it was to this that I was drawn, against all my misgivings.

Of course, the contrast to my own background of familial devotion and solidarity was overwhelming: whereas Lydia remembered a
th
ousand and one nights of rubbing Sloan
’
s liniment into her mother
’
s back, I could not remember a single hour of my childhood when my mother was incapable of performing the rites of her office. If indeed she ever had been indisposed, it seemed not even to interfere with her famous whistling, that continuous medley of
“
show tunes
”
she chirped melodiously away at
through
her day of housework and family chores. The sickly one in our home was me: suffocating diphtheria, subsequent annual respiratory infections, debilitating glandular fevers, mysterious visitations of
“
allergies.
”
Until puberty, I spent as much time at home in my bed or under a blanket on a sofa in the living room as I did in my seat in the classroom, all of which makes the disposition of my mother, the whis
tl
er—
“
Mrs. Zuckerbird
”
the postman called her—even more impressive. My
father
, though not so sunny in his indestructibility, and constitutionally a much more solemn person than my peppy peasant of a mother, was no less equal to the hardships our family endured: specifically, the Depression, my ailments, and my older sister Soma
’
s inexplicable marriages,
twice
to the sons of Sicilians: the first an embezzler and in the end a suicide; the second, honest in his business but otherwise
“
common as dirt
”
—in the Yiddish word, which alone seemed to carry the weight of our heartbreak and contempt,
prust.

We ourselves were not elegant, but surely we were not coarse. Dignity, I was to understand, had nothing to do with one
’
s social station: character, conduct, was everything. My mother used to laugh and make cracks about the ladies around who had secret dreams of mink coats and Miami Beach vacations.
“
To her,
”
she would say disparagingly of some silly neighbor,
“
the be-all and end-all is to put on a silver fox and go gallivanting with the hoi polloi.
”
Not until I got to college and misused the word myself did I learn that what my mother took to mean
the
elite—perhaps because
“
hoi polloi
”
sounded like another of her disdainful expressions for people who put on airs,
“
the hoity-toity
”
—actually referred to the masses.

So much for the class struggle as a burning issue in my house, or social resentment or ambitiousness as a motive for action. A strong character, not a big bankroll, was to them the evidence of one
’
s worth. Good, sensible people. Why their two offspring should have wasted themselves as they did, why both children should have wed themselves to disaster, is difficult to understand. That my sister
’
s first husband and my only wife should both have taken their own lives would seem to suggest something about our common upbringing. But what? I have no theories. If ever a mother and father were not responsible for the foolishness of their children, it was mine.

My father was a bookkeeper. Because of his excellent memory and his quickness with figur
es, he was considered the local
savant in our neighborhood of hardworking first-generation Jews and was the man most frequently consulted by people in trouble. A thin, austere, and humorless person, always meticulous in a white shirt and a tie, he communicated his love for me in a precise, colorless fashion that makes me ache with tenderness for him, especially now that he is the bedridden one, and I live in self-exile thousands of miles from his bed.

When I was the sickly, feverish patient, I felt something more like mystification, as though he were a kind of talking electrical toy come to play with me promptly each evening at six. His idea of amusing me was to teach me to solve
the
sort of arithmetical puzzles at which he himself was a whiz.
“‘
Marking Down,
’”
he would say, not unlike a recitation student announcing the tide of a poem.
“
A clothing dealer, trying to dispose of an overcoat cut in last year
’
s style, marked it down from its original price of thirty dollars to twenty-four. Failing to make a sale, he reduced the price still further to nineteen dollars and twenty cents. Again he found no takers, so he tried another price reduction and this time sold it.
”
Here he would pause; if I wished I might ask him to repeat any or all of the details. If not, he proceeded.
“
All right, Nathan; what was the selling price, if the last markdown was consistent with the others?
”
Or:
“‘
Making a Chain.
’
A lumberjack has six sections of chain, each consisting of four links. If the cost of cutting open a link
—“
and so on. The next day, while my
Mother
whis
tl
ed Gershwin and laundered my father
’
s shirts, I would daydream in my bed about the clothing dealer and the lumberjack. To whom had the haberdasher finally sold the overcoat? Did the man who bought it realize it was cut in last year
’
s style? If he wore it to a restaurant, would people laugh? And what did
“
last year
’
s style
”
look like anyway?
“
‘
Again he found no takers,
’”
I would say aloud, finding much to feel melancholy about in that idea. I still remember how charged for me was that word
“
takers.
”
Could it have been
the
lumberjack with the six sections of chain who, in his rustic inn
ocence, had bought the overcoat
cut in last year
’
s style? And why suddenly did he need an overcoat? Invited to a fancy ball? By whom? My mother thought the questions I raised about these puzzles were
“
cute
”
and was glad they gave me something to think about when she was occupied with housework and could not take the time to play go fish or checkers; my father, on the other hand, was disheartened to find me intrigued by fantastic and irrelevant details of geography and personality and intention instead of the simple beauty of the arithmetical solution. He did not think that was intelligent of me, and he was right.