Portnoy's Complaint (7 page)

“They’re not dungarees, they’re Levis.”

“It’s Rosh Hashanah, Alex, and to me you’re wearing overalls! Get in there and put a tie on and a jacket on and a pair of trousers and a clean shirt, and come out looking like a human being. And shoes, Mister, hard shoes.”

“My shirt
is
clean—”

“Oh, you’re riding for a fall, Mr. Big. You’re fourteen years old, and believe me, you don’t know everything there is to know. Get out of those moccasins! What the hell are you supposed to be, some kind of Indian?”

“Look, I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in the Jewish religion—or in any religion. They’re all lies.”

“Oh, they are, are they?”

“I’m not going to act like these holidays mean anything when they don’t! And that’s all I’m saying!”

“Maybe they don’t mean anything because you don’t know anything about them, Mr. Big Shot. What do you know about the history of Rosh Hashanah? One fact? Two facts maybe? What do you know about the history of the Jewish people, that you have the right to call their religion, that’s been good enough for people a lot smarter than you and a lot older than you for two thousand years—that you can call all that suffering and heartache a lie!”

“There is no such thing as God, and there never was, and I’m sorry, but in my vocabulary that’s a lie.”

“Then who created the world, Alex?” he asks contemptuously. “It just happened, I suppose, according to you.”

“Alex,” says my sister, “all Daddy means is even if you don’t want to go with him, if you would just change your clothes—”

“But for what?” I scream. “For something that never existed? Why don’t you tell me to go outside and change my clothes for some alley cat or some tree—
because at least they exist!
”

“But you haven’t answered me, Mr. Educated Wise Guy,” my father says. “Don’t try to change the issue. Who created the world and the people in it? Nobody?”

“Right! Nobody!”

“Oh, sure,” says my father. “That’s brilliant. I’m glad I didn’t get to high school if that’s how brilliant it makes you.”

“Alex,” my sister says, and softly—as is her way—softly, because she is already broken a little bit too—“maybe if you just put on a pair of shoes—”

“But you’re as bad as he is, Hannah! If there’s no God, what do shoes have to do with it!”

“One day a year you ask him to do something for you, and he’s too big for it. And that’s the whole story, Hannah, of your brother, of his respect and love …”

“Daddy, he’s a good boy. He does respect you, he does love you—”

“And what about the Jewish people?” He is shouting now and waving his arms, hoping that this will prevent him from breaking into tears—because the word love has only to be whispered in our house for all eyes immediately to begin to overflow. “Does he respect them? Just as much as he respects me, just about as much …” Suddenly he is sizzling—he turns on me with another new and brilliant thought. “Tell me something, do you know Talmud, my educated son? Do you know history? One-two-three you were bar mitzvah, and that for you was the end of your religious education. Do you know men study their whole lives in the Jewish religion, and when they die they still haven’t finished? Tell me, now that you are all finished at fourteen being a Jew, do you know a single thing about the wonderful history and heritage of the saga of your people?”

But there are already tears on his cheeks, and more are on the way from his eyes. “A’s in school,” he says, “but in life he’s as ignorant as the day he was born.”

Well, it looks as though the time has come at last—so I say it. It’s something I’ve known for a little while now. “You’re the ignorant one! You!”

“Alex!” cries my sister, grabbing for my hand, as though fearful I may actually raise it against him.

“
But he is! With all that stupid saga shit!
”

“Quiet! Still! Enough!” cries Hannah. “Go to your room—”

—While my father carries himself to the kitchen table, his head sunk forward and his body doubled over, as though he has just taken a hand grenade in his stomach. Which he has. Which I know. “You can wear rags for all I care, you can dress like a peddler, you can shame and embarrass me all you want, curse me, Alexander, defy me, hit me, hate me—”

The way it usually works, my mother cries in the kitchen, my father cries in the living room—hiding his eyes behind the
Newark News
—Hannah cries in the bathroom, and I cry on the run between our house and the pinball machine at the corner. But on this particular Rosh Hashanah everything is disarranged, and why my father is crying in the kitchen instead of my mother—why he sobs without protection of the newspaper, and with such pitiful fury—is because my mother is in a hospital bed recovering from surgery: this indeed accounts for his excrutiating loneliness on this Rosh Hashanah, and his particular need of my affection and obedience. But at this moment in the history of our family, if he needs it, you can safely bet money that he is not going to get it from me. Because my need is not to give it to him! Oh, yes, we’ll turn the tables on him, all right, won’t we, Alex you little prick! Yes, Alex the little prick finds that his father’s ordinary day-to-day vulnerability is somewhat aggravated by the fact that the man’s wife (or so they tell me) has very nearly expired, and so Alex the little prick takes the opportunity to drive the dagger of his resentment just a few inches deeper into what is already a bleeding heart. Alexander the Great!

No! There’s more here than just adolescent resentment and Oedipal rage—there’s my integrity! I will not do what Heshie did! For I go through childhood
convinced
that had he only wanted to, my powerful cousin Heshie, the third best javelin thrower in all New Jersey (an honor, I would think, rich in symbolism for this growing boy, with visions of jockstraps dancing in his head), could easily have flipped my fifty-year-old uncle over onto his back, and pinned him to the cellar door. So then (I conclude) he must have lost on purpose. But why? For he knew—I surely knew it, even as a child—that his father had done something dishonorable. Was he then
afraid
to win? But why, when his own father had acted so vilely, and in Heshie’s behalf! Was it cowardice? fear?—or perhaps was it Heshie’s wisdom? Whenever the story is told of what my uncle was forced to do to make my dead cousin see the light, or whenever I have cause to reflect upon the event myself, I sense some enigma at its center, a profound moral truth, which if only I could grasp, might save me and my own father from some ultimate, but unimaginable, confrontation.
Why did Heshie capitulate? And should I?
But how can I, and still remain “true to myself! Oh, but why don’t I just try! Give it a little try, you little prick! So
don’t
be so true to yourself for half an hour!

Yes, I must give in, I
must
, particularly as I know all my father has been through, what minute by minute misery there has been for him during these tens of thousands of minutes it has taken the doctors to determine, first, that there was something growing in my mother’s uterus, and second, whether the growth they finally located was malignant … whether what she had was … oh, that word we cannot even speak in one another’s presence! the word we cannot even spell out in all its horrible entirety! the word we allude to only by the euphemistic abbreviation that she herself supplied us with before entering the hospital for her tests: C-A. And
genug!
The
n
, the
c
, the
e
, the
r
, we don’t need to hear to frighten us to Kingdom Come! How brave she is, all our relatives agree, just to utter those two letters! And aren’t there enough whole words as it is to whisper at each other behind closed doors? There are! There are! Ugly and cold little words reeking of the ether and alcohol of hospital corridors, words with all the appeal of sterilized surgical instruments, words like
smear
and
biopsy
… And then there are the words that furtively, at home alone, I used to look up in the dictionary just to
see
them there in print, the hard evidence of that most remote of all realities, words like
vulva
and
vagina
and
cervix
, words whose definitions will never again serve me as a source of illicit pleasure … And then there is that word we wait and wait and wait to hear, the word whose utterance will restore to our family what now seems to have been the most wonderful and satisfying of lives, that word that sounds to my ear like Hebrew, like
b’nai
or
boruch
—benign!
Benign!
Boruch atoh Adonai,
let it be benign!
Blessed art thou O Lord Our God,
let it be benign!
Hear O Israel, and shine down thy countenance, and the Lord is One, and honor thy father, and honor thy mother, and I will I will I promise I will—
only let it be benign!

And it was. A copy of
Dragon Seed
by Pearl S. Buck is open on the table beside the bed, where there is also a half-empty glass of flat ginger ale. It’s hot and I’m thirsty and my mother, my mind reader, says I should go ahead and drink what’s left in her glass, I need it more than she does. But dry as I am, I don’t want to drink from any glass to which she has put her lips—for the first time in my life the idea fills me with revulsion! “Take.” “I’m not thirsty.” “Look how you’re perspiring.” “I’m not thirsty.” “Don’t be polite all of a sudden.” “But I don’t
like
ginger ale.” “You? Don’t like ginger ale?” “
No
.” “Since when?” Oh, God! She’s alive, and so we are at it again—she’s alive, and right off the bat we’re starting in!

She tells me how Rabbi Warshaw came and sat and talked with her for a whole half hour before—as she now so graphically puts it—she went under the knife. Wasn’t that nice? Wasn’t that thoughtful? (Only twenty-four hours out of the anesthetic, and she knows, you see, that I refused to change out of my Levis for the holiday!) The woman who is sharing the room with her, whose loving, devouring gaze I am trying to edge out of, and whose opinion, as I remember it, nobody had asked for, takes it upon herself to announce that Rabbi Warshaw is one of the most revered men in all of Newark. Re-ver-ed. Three syllables, as the rabbi himself would enunciate it, in his mighty Anglo-oracular style. I begin to lightly pound at the pocket of my baseball mitt, a signal that I am about ready to go, if only someone will let me. “He loves baseball, he could play baseball twelve months a year,” my mother tells Mrs. Re-ver-ed. I mumble that I have “a league game.” “It’s the finals. For the championship.” “Okay,” says my mother, and lovingly, “you came, you did your duty, now run—run to your league game.” I can hear in her voice how happy and relieved she is to find herself alive on this beautiful September afternoon … And isn’t it a relief for me, too? Isn’t this what I prayed for, to a God I do not even believe is there? Wasn’t the unthinkable thing life without her to cook for us, to clean for us, to … to
everything
for us! This is what I prayed and wept for: that she should come out at the other end of her operation, and be alive. And then come home, to be once again our one and only mother. “Run, my baby-boy,” my mother croons to me, and sweetly—oh, she can be so sweet and good to me, so motherly! she will spend hour after hour playing canasta with me, when I am sick and in bed as she is now: imagine, the ginger ale the nurse has brought for her because she has had a serious operation, she offers to
me
, because I’m overheated! Yes, she
will
give me the food out of her mouth, that’s a proven fact! And still I will not stay five full minutes at her bedside. “Run,” says my mother, while Mrs. Re-ver-ed, who in no time at all has managed to make herself my enemy, and for the rest of my life, Mrs. Re-ver-ed says, “Soon Mother will be home, soon everything will be just like ordinary … Sure, run, run, they all run these days,” says the kind and understanding lady—oh, they are all so kind and understanding, I want to strangle them!—“walking they never heard of, God bless them.”

So I run. Do I run! Having spent maybe two fretful minutes with her—two minutes of my precious time, even though just the day before, the doctors stuck right up her dress (so I imagined it, before my mother reminded me of “the knife,” our knife) some kind of horrible shovel with which to scoop out what had gone rotten inside her body. They reached up and pulled down out of her just what she used to reach up and pull down out of the dead chicken. And threw it in the garbage can. Where I was conceived and carried, there now is
nothing
. A void! Poor Mother! How can I rush to leave her like this, after what she has just gone through? After all she has given me—my very life!—how can I be so cruel? “Will you leave me, my baby-boy, will you ever leave Mommy?” Never, I would answer, never, never, never … And yet now that she is hollowed out, I cannot even look her in the eye! And have avoided doing so ever since! Oh, there is her pale red hair, spread across the pillow in long strands of springy ringlets
that I might never have seen again
. There are the faint moons of freckles that she says used to cover her entire face when she was a small child,
and that I would never have seen again
. And there are those eyes of reddish brown, eyes the color of the crust of honey cake,
and still open, still loving me!
There was her ginger ale—and thirsty as I was, I could not have
forced
myself to drink it!

So I ran all right, out of the hospital and up to the playground and right out to center field, the position I play for a softball team that wears silky blue-and-gold jackets with the name of the club scrawled in big white felt letters from one shoulder to the other: S E A B E E S, A.C. Thank God for the Seabees A.C.! Thank God for center field! Doctor, you can’t imagine how truly glorious it is out there, so alone in all that space … Do you know baseball at all? Because center field is like some observation post, a kind of control tower, where you are able to see everything and everyone, to understand what’s happening the instant it happens, not only by the sound of the struck bat, but by the spark of movement that goes through the infielders in the first second that the ball comes flying at them; and once it gets beyond them, “It’s mine,” you call, “it’s mine,” and then after it you go. For in center field, if you can get to it, it
is
yours. Oh, how unlike my home it is to be in center field, where no one will appropriate unto himself anything that I say is
mine!