New Moon (26 page)

Daddy marvelled at my increasingly sophisticated vocabulary at dinner, telling Jonny, “I hope you follow in your brother’s footsteps.” The worm was turning, just a bit.

But something else was happening too. From the car taking me to Grossinger’s for Thanksgiving, staring out at the moving landscape I imagined a long, invisible sword extending from the near wheel, shearing away fences, trees, telephone poles, bird baths, and houses.

What was
I
transforming with my scythe?

When Uncle Paul insisted I renew Hebrew classes that fall in order to be bar-mitzvahed I protested on the basis of too much homework. My mother ridiculed his fake holiness but told me to go through with it so as not to endanger his paying for Horace Mann and also because I would get expensive gifts from his clients. Pure bribery!

I was mortified at having to return to the Park Avenue Synagogue—I imagined I had outgrown it—but I took perverse delight in hiding my Latin grammar inside the Hebrew prayer book and memorizing declensions and conjuations while other kids chanted Haftorah selections. I eventually got caught, which led to a sermon forthwith about the barbarian Romans. When I rebutted from my knowledge of the ancient world, my teacher rolled his eyes away from the prep-school wise guy and directed his comments to the class, “This is what people mean when they speak of Jewish self-hatred. Some of the worse anti-Semites are our own Hebrew brethren.”

I am reminded of a story my half-Jewish grade-school friend Phil Wohlstetter—his mother was a Ziegfeld showgirl courted by a Jewish stockbroker—told me forty years later when we reconnected. After he spoke on behalf of the Palestinian cause at a public event in Seattle, a woman called him a self-hating Jew. “Only half of me is a self-hating Jew,” he retorted, “the other half is an anti-Semite.”

Well, back in 1957 there was a faction at the Park Avenue Synagogue who still believed I was an anti-Semite, or at least an infidel, and shouldn’t be bar-mitzvahed. “A miserable excuse for a Jew,” declared Mr. Liechtling, still the principal. Yet the fact of being Jennie Grossinger’s grandson outweighed being me. From the way that Liechtling went on, you would have thought that she was single-handedly responsible for turning the Negev into an orchard. His compromise was that I learned my Haftorah at home from the
cantor’s recording, assisted by a tutor from Yeshiva.

I could sound out Hebrew letters so, for a month and a half, I memorized my section of the service by singing it over and over with the prayer book in front of me. A bearded young student came three nights a week to correct my errors. He was relentlessly efficient, never once cracking a smile.

I couldn’t carry a tune nor was I a flawless phonetic reader of Hebrew, so I barely met the synagogue’s low bar. Then a week before the event, I composed a bland essay on the teachings of the prophet Isaiah, which was approved by a delighted Liechtling. “You came around,” he declared. “I’m impressed.” But I was just a Horace Mann student slumming, saddened to have given him false hope.

My bar mitzvah was the first among my contemporaries. On November 9th the Saturday morning after my thirteenth birthday, I arrived at 7 a.m. at the Park Avenue Synagogue to await the grand occasion in a state equal parts dread and relief. Gradually, the figures of my world streamed through the temple doors, each bearing a gift—a passage-of-life ritual belied by an extravagant commercial display. Envelopes with bonds, shares of stock, watches, leather-bound dictionaries and prayer books, even checks and cash piled up with Bridey beside the coatroom. Despite her calls of amazement I kept my distance, refusing to come look.

Once the service began, I sat on the dais in a throne-like object between Rabbi Nadich and the cantor. In a dark gray suit I felt less like a prospective man than a few sparkles stuck together in the semblance of a human doll, frangible enough to go flying in opposite directions. On cue Rabbi Nadich turned to me. I looked out over a congregation packed with relatives and friends and strode to the podium, a spy in the House of the Lord. There I stood beside the cantor, swaying nervously, as I
davened
from memory and phonetics.

It was a moment of truth before a substantial assemblage, so I regretted not being able to chant something meaningful like the history of the New York Yankees or the interpretation of dreams, even the planets and their distances from the sun. Instead, I droned an impersonation of Hebrew characters whose shapes matriculated before my eyes. After so many rehearsals, the fabled performance
was at hand, the assignment completed, tossed into the void. I imagined myself expunging this deed forever.

After my recital on Isaiah, Judah Nadich seized the moment—his presentation of the implements of Jewish life to a bar mitzvah boy—for a canned sermon about their meaning and uses. Cringing inwardly, I held his solemn gaze—we were on stage.

Yarmulkes and
tallits
never felt to me like the sacred objects they are, power suits of magicians and shamans. They seemed more like clown costumes wherein others could ostracize us—yokes to the neuroticism of my Park Avenue culture and the entire grotesque Manhattan scene. For me, those straps of fancy leather and wooden blocks were baubles from the schul, a house that already assailed with waves of garish oils and aphrodisiac scents, with unspeakably dark desires and their just-as-unspeakable repressions. I wanted to throw them away with the fury of a horse bucking its gaucho. Our Hebrew names condemned us likewise to a strain of kinky exclusivity—mine had been Reuven at Ramaz, Selig for my bar mitzvah (my father preferred me to take an old family name—which was my middle name too—in place of the Hebrew approximation for Richard).

The elders never taught us that totem objects used properly confer a special view of the universe, its hidden planes and cycles, the very things I most sought; they never spoke of an Alcheringa or
sefirot,
Hebrew or otherwise. Instead, they prattled on about duties and pieties and their partisan Zionist Yahweh. Like counselors, teachers, and other assorted mentors of my childhood, they never said anything, about anything. Being Jewish was an honor and an obligation, quite enough for them.

I
was
a self-hating Jew. I never wrapped my body or head with the
tfilim
(I hid them in the back of the closet until they conveniently disappeared). By my defection I waived not only my initiation into my own Hebrew lodge but manhood in any kiva—as I would later realize—Hopi and Aranda lodges too.

After my bar mitzvah people gathered for a reception downstairs in the synagogue. Figures of my life milled with one another out of context—schoolmates, family, family friends. It was the first time
I experienced all my worlds together. Bridey, Jonny, and Debby had never laid eyes on Aunt Bunny, or Michael and James (and vice versa). I pointed them out to one another and presided over bashful introductions. All these people did not belong together; yet there was a banquet in progress, and I rushed from table to table, accepting congratulations.

It was utterly bizarre, for I had been two people: Richard Towers and Richard Grossinger. Now these figures and their retinues encountered each other across a quarantine of lives; but the time was too brief and thin to contain such a powerful manifestation. Meetings between strangers passed in a moment. No one but me had anything at stake.

Dr. Fabian attended; he gave me a box of half a dozen books on topics ranging from the great explorers and Greek antiquities to the quest for identity, an attached note saying that I was setting out on my own epic voyage. I acknowledged him throughout the day with glances and smiles, as he beamed his approval. But even Fabian could not initiate me into a sacred lodge.

To give the appearance of orthodoxy my father had purposely not hired musicians. Instead the Yiddish comedian Emil Cohen told jokes for an hour. Bridey, having drunk too much champagne, laughed uncontrollably, finally tumbling off her chair. Then Grandma Sally’s brother Mooney did a vaudeville routine he once performed professionally (as a fake stumbling busboy behind the startled actual waiters). “There he goes,” shouted Daddy, rising to his feet, “the old Moonbeam is back, in finest form!”

To add to my awkwardness among my friends, not only was there no band, there were no girls. Actually, there was one. My mother insisted on that; she wrangled Vicki Berle, the daughter of the comedian, to join a dozen boys on the dais. The presence of a celebrity did not make up for the lack of a real party and, once Emil Cohen began his patter, my classmates, having made their polite appearances, fled the disaster.

I felt the deepest pangs of loneliness, the one time everyone was there.

The subsequent bar mitzvahs of my friends were grandiose balls with bands, bars, and charismatic adults—handsome men, fashionable ladies, dancing couples. None were in synagogue basements; they were held in suites in midtown hotels or country clubs in Westchester. I either took the train or went in a carpool. There were numberless pretty girls my age and a bit younger (and older), crowds of chic, cocksure boys, surges of pop music as if the orchestra kept suddenly recalling a new tune and burst into commemorative acclaim. I remember walking down a hallway of mirrors, the sound fading into the distance as my mind supplied its lyrics:
“Non Dimenticar, though you’ve travelled far, / my darling…. ”
Nat King Cole’s ballad was profound beyond words, and the feelings it aroused in me were chilling and tender—snow on pine trees, liners crossing oceans.

Given the nightclub settings of these bar mitzvahs, I assumed that my glumness came from intimations of Grossinger’s and my wish to be there instead of in exile, to have grown up a real boy like the rest. All the way through P.S. 6, Chipinaw, and the early years of Horace Mann I met only one other kid with divorced parents. That was the fifties in a nutshell.

Dr. Fabian continued to push this interpretation, his theme of the tragedy of Martha and Paul’s disunion. It remained his preferred explanation for all my problems: other kids’ families were whole whereas I was a pariah in my own household; that’s why I felt so alienated and scared. Superficially it fit; it made logical sense—broken family, estrangement, separation, loneliness—but I resisted shoehorning into its script.

My bedwetting had pretty much stopped. Occasional relapses—awaking to an icy tang of wet sheets—were atavisms of an otherwise cured condition. Yet the thing was, I hadn’t a clue as to how I did it—or why. Dr. Fabian was sure he knew: he had touched the unconscious source and released its trauma. If so, it happened by hypnotic suggestion—a watchword wherein he bypassed me entirely. I knew that he didn’t just say, “Stop peeing at night!” That wouldn’t have impressed the keepers of my unconscious. But what exactly
did
he say or do? He had interpreted some dreams and made observations
about my parents’ divorce; how did that stop me from wetting my bed? If it was that easy, Nat Fleischer could have accomplished it in the Grossinger’s lobby.

So as not to risk subconscious saboteurs, I kept my doubts to myself, though I had long ago ditched the interpretation. Paul and Martha together would have been hellions. The mere thought of it gave me the creeps. I didn’t want that, even if it meant having always lived at Grossinger’s. There would have been no Aunt Bunny, no Dr. Fabian either. Grossinger’s wouldn’t have been Grossinger’s, not with Martha Grossinger ruling it.

My yearnfulness was remote and ineffable, as I watched kids from school dancing with unknown girls in a giant ballroom while the band played
“Somewhere, beyond the sea, / somewhere waiting for me….”

I came home late at night, let myself in, found my bed and sleep almost simultaneously, got up the next morning and did my assignments. I even translated the Bobby Darin song into Latin, complete with gerund. The clue in the embers was real, its guardians real—they had always been real, reaching out from incomprehensibly far away. And it wasn’t a clue at all; it was some other enigmatic thing:

“My lover stands on golden sands, / and watches the ships, / that go sailing….” (Mea amens in harena aurea stat, spectatque naves per mare cedentes.)

I stared out through darkening twilight over water towers atop buildings, the blown dust that was no longer organic let alone human:
“It’s far beyond a star; / it’s near beyond the moon.”

Not a salient trace, nary a semi-intelligible murmur…. Only those invisible cosmic rays.

It was a mistake, clearly, all of this. But at last I was calm, unafraid.

At school I fantasized that this kid Jeffrey, who commuted from Yonkers, would adopt me and I would come to HM with him every morning. His family, I heard, was having trouble paying the bills, so I imagined that the money from taking me in as a boarder would allow him to stay. I could share a room with him instead of that ruffian Jon. I was jolted each time I saw him in the flesh: his long thin face, black straight hair, odd tan coloring. It was him whom I missed and longed for, not some original unity of my parents. It
wasn’t that I wanted to be him, but I wanted to stand in relation to him. I longed to hold out a hand and set my fingers on his forehead. His very existence was the feeling I wanted inside myself.

These were not things I could tell to Dr. Fabian, but he sensed their existence. “You have to tell me what you’re thinking,” he would protest; “it’s the only way I’m going to able to help you.” I would agree in principle but never in deed. I merely pretended to be summoning deeper, truer thoughts—snippets of erotic fantasies, never their painful heart. Seeing him at my bar mitzvah after his appearance as a guest at Grossinger’s, I realized he was not special; just a man with a wife at a party, shaking hands, smiling, drinking stupid wine.

Before and after sessions I observed his other patients more closely and recognized myself as one in a line of patrons, each with his or her stories and symbols. I was nobody special, just another customer. One time, I forgot my coat and came back in off the street for it. A woman lying on his couch leaped to her feet in embarrassment. Dr. Fabian insisted that my return was from curiosity and my coat was not left by accident. But viewing another patient in his presence drove me deeper into my pod and I denied everything.