The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (6 page)

But this self-consciousness should not be exaggerated; I’m sure that to Miss Blake, during my Bucknell interview, my mother seemed nothing more or less than perfectly agreeable and ladylike.

My father, a fit and solid-looking man of fifty, with thinning hair and rimless spectacles, wore a dark business suit with a vest and looked like someone who himself sat behind a desk and interviewed applicants, as indeed he frequently had done while reorganizing the unproductive staff at the Union City office. He certainly was not uneasy being inside a university building for the first time. The turnabout in his fortunes (and ours) had renewed his prodigious energies; between that and his almost palpable pride in me and my scholastic success, he radiated an unpolished, good-natured confidence that stirred my own pride but that, I felt certain, was killing my chances for a Bucknell scholarship. Had he been an embarrassment (and of course beforehand I feared he might be), had he tried too hard, setting out to sell Bucknell on what a good boy I was or telling Miss Blake about the progress made in America by our vast array of relatives, we could, in fact, have been in better shape for seeming that much cruder. As it was, the picture we presented, of a self-made, enterprising, happily cohesive and prospering family, convinced me that I was doomed. I’d get into Bucknell, all right, but for lack of funds I wouldn’t be able to enroll.

Later that day Marty Castlebaum took us on a tour of the university grounds and around the charming tree-lined streets leading to the main shopping thoroughfare, where we had rooms for the night in the Hotel Lewisburger. Not since I’d been to Princeton with my Uncle Ed had I strolled around a town where people actually lived in houses dating back to the eighteenth century. On a tiny green near his fraternity house there was a Civil War cannon that Marty daringly told my parents went off “when a virgin walks by.”

It was the campus that most beguiled me: ivy-covered brick buildings sparsely set amid large trees and long, rolling lawns. On “the Hill,” at the heart of the campus, the windows of the men’s dormitory looked beyond cornfields and pastures to the Lycoming hills. There was a clock in the cupola of the men’s dorm that chimed on the hour, an elegant spire atop the new library, a student hangout that Marty familiarly called Chet’s (though a sign identified it as The Bison), and a dormitory called Larison Hall, where that girlfriend of his had her room. Scattered about the campus and on streets down from the Hill were a dozen or so manorial-looking buildings with facades inspired either by English stately homes or by colonnaded plantation dwellings; here lived the fraternity men. In all, it was an unoutlandish little college town of the kind I’d seen before only in movies with Kay Kyser or June Allyson, not so much subdued or genteel, and certainly not posh or gentrified, but instead suited for the coziest, most commonplace dreams of order. Lewisburg emanated an unpretentious civility that we could trust, rather than an air of privilege by which we might have been intimidated. To be sure, everything about the rural landscape and the small-town setting (and Miss Blake) suggested an unmistakably gentile version of unpretentious civility, but by 1951 none of us thought it pretentious or unseemly that the momentum of our family’s Americanization should have carried us, in half a century, from my Yiddish-speaking grandparents’ hard existence in Newark’s poorest ghetto neighborhood to this pretty place whose harmonious nativeness was proclaimed in every view.

My parents turned out to have been as impressed as I was, though probably less by Bucknell’s collegiate look than by our enthusiastic guide, a Jewish boy from our block who seemed to them, as he did to me, to be thriving wonderfully in this unfamiliar atmosphere. After dinner in the hotel restaurant, when Marty had left for his dormitory and we were in the elevator on our way up to bed, my father said to me, “You like it, don’t you?” “Yes, but how can we afford it if they won’t give me a scholarship for September?” “Forget the scholarship,” he told me. “You want to go here, you’re going.”

I sat up late at the little desk in my room, a stack of hotel stationery at the ready for recording my “thoughts.” I replayed over and over the conversation with my father in the hotel elevator, adding a line of my own that I would not have had the self-control to say to him face-to-face but that I was able to write freely and exuberantly on a sheet of the Lewisburger’s paper. I felt a buoyant sense of having survived the worst while preserving unimpaired the long-standing preuniversity accord that would seem to have made us an indestructible family: “And now we won’t have to have that terrible fight—we’ve been saved by Bucknell.”

Over precisely the issue that had been simmering since I’d begun college—my weekend whereabouts after midnight—my father and I did, of course, have the terrible fight, when I was home from Lewisburg for my first midyear vacation. And it was worse than I had foreseen, however banal the immediate cause. Along with my mother, my brother—who fortunately happened to be in from Manhattan, where he was beginning to establish himself as a commercial artist—made every conceivable effort to act as a peacemaker and, with an air of urgent diplomacy, hurried back and forth between the two ends of the apartment, where the two raving belligerents were isolated. And though, after two days of histrionic shouting and bitter silence, my father and I—for the sake, finally, of my desolated mother—negotiated a fragile truce, I returned to Bucknell a shell-shocked son, freshly evacuated from the Oedipal battlefield, in dire need of rest and rehabilitation.

*   *   *

A
N ATTRACTIVE WHITE
Christian male entering Bucknell in the early fifties could expect to be officially courted by about half the thirteen fraternities. A promising athlete, the graduate of a prestigious prep school, the son of rich parents or of a distinguished alumnus, might wind up with bids from as many as ten fraternities. A Jewish freshman—or Jewish transfer student, like me—could expect to be rushed by two fraternities at most, the exclusively Jewish fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu, which, like the Christian fraternities, was the local chapter of a national body, and Phi Lambda Theta, a local fraternity without national affiliations, which did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or color. A Jewish student who wished to take part in fraternity life but was acceptable to neither was in trouble. If he couldn’t bear being an “independent”—taking meals in the university dining hall, living in the dormitories or in a room in town, making friends and dating outside the reigning social constellation—he’d have to pack up and go home. There were a few reported cases of Jewish students who had.

The Jewish fraternity had nothing much that was Jewish about it except the wholly sanctioned nickname by which the members were identified, at Bucknell and at every other campus where there was a chapter of Sigma Alpha Mu: as easily by themselves as by others, the Jewish brothers were called Sammies. Had the fraternity been christened Iota Kappa Epsilon, people might not have tolerated Ikeys so readily, but no one seemed to have ever considered Sammies an even mildly stigmatizing label. Perhaps its purpose was prophylactic, preempting the attribution of diminutives less benign than this friendly-sounding acronym, which carried in its suffix only the tiniest sting. I, for one, never became accustomed to hearing it and never could say it, but probably I had been sensitized unduly by Budd Schulberg’s novel, which I’d read in high school, about the pushiest of pushy Jews, Sammy Glick.

Certainly the Sammy kitchen, where three meals a day were prepared for the sixty-five or so members, smelled more like the galley of a merchant ship than like the sanctum sanctorum of a traditional Jewish household. “Cookie,” the chef, was a local Navy veteran, a grim-faced, tattooed little man with a loose lantern jaw bearing a day or two’s dark stubble; he wouldn’t have been out of place frying onions on the grill of a back-road diner anywhere in America. Eggs with ham or bacon was the staple for breakfast, and pork chops and ham steaks showed up for lunch or dinner a couple of times a week—fare no different from what was served in the other fraternity houses and at the student dining hall. But you didn’t join the Jewish fraternity to eat kosher food any more than to observe the Sabbath, to study Torah, or to discuss Jewish questions of the day; nor did you join because you hoped to rid yourself of embarrassing Jewish ways. Most likely you came from a family, like my own, for whom assimilation wasn’t a potent issue any longer—if it had been, you wouldn’t have come to Bucknell to begin with or have remained very long. This isn’t to say that their Jewish parents would have preferred a university decree that these Sammy sons be allowed to join the otherwise Christian-dominated fraternities. No, in 1951 Sigma Alpha Mu suited everybody. The Jews were together because they were profoundly different but otherwise like everyone else.

As it happened, an opportunity to be the only Jew to pledge a gentile fraternity was offered to me when I arrived, as a sophomore, in September of 1951. I was rushed not only by the Jewish Sigma Alpha Mu and the nondenominational Phi Lambda Theta but also by Theta Chi. For reasons never entirely explained to me, Theta Chi had among its sixty-odd gentile members one Jew already, a senior with a gentile name and un-Jewish appearance who was also the fraternity president and who worked hard to entice me into the house, though my own name and appearance weren’t likely to fool anyone. I took the invitation seriously and during the rushing period ate there as a guest several times. If I was joining a fraternity—and I figured that penetrating student society as a sophomore outside a fraternity might be nearly impossible—then didn’t it make sense for me, with my democratic ideals and liberal principles, to capitalize on this inexplicable breach in a tightly segregated system?

Membership in Theta Chi certainly sounded more adventurous to a boy from the Weequahic section of Newark than slipping predictably in with the Jews. As for the nondenominational fraternity, whose unpretentious house on a back street was home to nearly a hundred young men, it seemed to me, after a quick appraisal, that the members I met were either innocently upright in their devotion to their principles or shy and socially a bit uncertain, boys who could indeed not have had anywhere else to go. I might have had this wrong, but I was struck by an air of charity and virtue about the place that was more purely “Christian” than anything I’d run into in a nominally Christian but essentially areligious fraternity like Theta Chi—something smacking a little of the goodness of the Salvation Army. Everything else aside, I believed I would need a slightly more profligate, less utopian atmosphere in which to realize even a tenth of the nefarious erotic prospectus that—as my father correctly surmised—I had been secretly preparing for years. The estimable goals of the Phi Lambda Thetas made the house too much like home.

At all costs my choice had to have nothing to do with my parents’ preference, since establishing my independence was the point of coming away. In a series of letters home I laid out the problem in a scrupulously maniacal presentation worthy of Kafka. Instead of replying instinctively to what must have sounded to them like so much foolish naïveté, they were sufficiently intimidated by all my pages to seek out the advice of the Greens, Jewish friends in the clothing business whose daughter had manifested a similar urge a few years earlier. The line they took over the phone wasn’t without wisdom: they said they wanted me to do what would make me “happiest.” If I thought I would be happier with boys whose backgrounds were unlike my own, then I should of course choose Theta Chi; but if in the end it seemed as evident to me as to them and to the Greens that I would be happier with boys like Marty Castlebaum, whose backgrounds resembled mine, then I should choose SAM.
They
would be happy, my mother told me—it was she, whose touch was lighter, who’d been assigned to speak for their side—with whatever choice was sure to make
me
happy … and so on.

Had I joined Theta Chi as their new Jew, the chances are that challenging convention might well have proved invigorating for a while and that discovering the secrets of this unknown community would, at the start, have yielded some genuine anthropological excitement. It probably wouldn’t have been long, however, before I found the exuberant side of my personality, the street-corner taste for comic mockery and for ludicrous, theatrical speculation, out of place in the Theta Chi dining room with its staid, prosaic, small-town decorum that had struck me as somewhat cornball. Probably my career as a Theta Chi would have been even shorter than my career as a Sammy was to be. I wasn’t afraid of the temptation to become an honorary WASP but was leery of a communal spirit that might lead me to self-censorship, since the last thing I’d left home for was to become encased in somebody else’s idea of what I should be. Eventually I came round to understanding that joining Theta Chi could wind up being a far more conformist act than taking the seemingly conventional course of being with boys from backgrounds more like my own, who, just
because
their style was familiar, wouldn’t have the power to inhibit my expressive yearnings. Coming from backgrounds like mine, a few of them might have similar yearnings themselves.

A few did—two, to be precise, both sophomore English majors: Pete Tasch, from Baltimore, and Dick Minton, from Mount Vernon, New York. Pete, who later became an English professor, was a very highly tuned boy with a strong strain of bookish refinement that set him apart not only from the regular fellows at the fraternity but even more blatantly from the kids calling to him for their Cokes and fries at the Sweet Shop, a local hangout where he clocked afternoon and evening hours in order to pay his living expenses. Dick, who eventually became a lawyer, was more unshakable, a straight shooter wholly without airs and with a very good brain, who listened to Beethoven quartets whenever he wasn’t reading. His intense cultural passions could have been shared by no more than a dozen students on the campus and by hardly anyone at the fraternity house. In the winter of 1952, a little over a year after I’d enrolled at Bucknell, we three resigned from Sigma Alpha Mu and gave our devotion instead to
Et Cetera,
a literary magazine that we’d helped to found and then took over, under my editorship in 1952–53 and the next year under Pete’s, with Dick as literary editor.