Part 4

Stern took note of every detail of the man's house, a new one registering each night as he drove by. A television aerial. This was good. It meant the communications industry was getting through to the man, subtly driving home messages of Brotherhood. But he imagined the man watching only Westerns, contemptuously flicking off all shows that spoke of tolerance. Stern saw himself writing and producing a show about fair play, getting it shown one night on every channel, and forcing the man to watch it since the networks would be bare of Westerns.

Empty beer cans in the garbage pail. Excellent. Enough of them, taken over a period of years, would bloat his belly and deprive his arms of power. Stern wondered how much beer it would take to run a man down physically. He felt good on nights when entire cases sat atop the garbage pail and depressed when only a few scattered cans appeared.

The man's car was of prewar vintage, neatly shined and proudly kept, and as Stern drove by in his more recent Studebaker he thought to himself, "Maybe it's an economic thing. He resents my having a newer car and a bigger house. I'll take him inside and show him my empty rooms and he'll see how foolish he is, and then we'll be friends." And other times, Stern was glad he had a newer car. He wanted to say to the man, "Think kike things and be stupid and you'll always have an old car. Act enlightened and have a new one." One night he saw the man's wife walk to the gutter to shake a broom--a stocky, square, and graceless woman whose hair was without color. Stern imagined the pair at night, coming together for a graceless, hulking lay, and for a second he felt tender toward the man. There had to be gentleness in him. Once he must have had to come to this hulking woman and court her with kindness and modesty, kike thoughts the furthest thing from his mind. But, on the following night, Stern took in a sight that made his throat turn over. As he drove by, the man was looming up in front of him, standing, hands in pockets, on the lawn and wearing a veteran's organization jacket. It meant he had come through the worst part of the Normandy campaign, knew how to hold his breath in foxholes for hours at a time and then sneak out to slit a throat in silence. He was skilled as a foot fighter and went always with deadly accuracy to a man's groin. Stern pictured him at veteran beer parties, drawing laughs with stories of the kike who'd moved in down the way a mile. He'd probably had one in his outfit, a thin and scholarly dark fellow who'd slowed down campaigns. No amount of brotherhood shows would ever make a dent in his veteran's jacket.

Frightened of the jacket, Stern realized that he had never really seen the man's face, that he knew only the heaviness of his arms, an inclination of the head, and a certain wetness at the mouth. A mailbox lay opposite the man's house, and one night Stern saved a letter and stopped his car on the corner near the box. His glasses off, he inflated his chest for an appearance of power, flexed his soft arms, and trotted to the mailbox, where he slipped in the letter, and then, facing the man's house now, trotted back to his car. Stern, his glasses on the seat, could see only that the man was hooked over his car engine and that, as he trotted back to the car, the man came out of his hook and inclined his head. But, trotting as he was, Stern could make out no details of the man's face and remained in ignorance of his features. Another night the man was nowhere in sight and Stern's eyes fixed on the license plates of his car, the two first letters registering "GS." For some reason, Stern, though he looked at the plates for several nights running, could not commit the numbers to memory. But he remembered the letters and made up a organization they might have stood for, Guardian Sons, a group of twenty who sat around on Monday nights and cackled over kikes. Each time Stern saw a prewar car with "GS" letters he was certain it was the man, just coming from a meeting, his glove compartment filled with leaflets. He seemed to see such cars everywhere. Driving past the man's house, he wondered whether he might be able to steal back in dead of night and destroy the car, dismantling the wiring, and then make it back to his own house undetected. Or could police always pick up evidence of footsteps and tire tracks? And was the man a light sleeper, nerves sharpened by combat, waiting coiled and ready to leap forward and slit throats with commando neatness?

On clear weekend days during that summer, Stern was able to look straight down the street as far as a mile or so and make out the man playing softball in the road with neighboring boys. On such days, Stern would go back inside his house, his day ruined. And often, inside the house, he would think about his Jewishness.

* * * * *

As a boy, Stern had been taken to holiday services, where he stood in ignorance among bowing, groaning men who wore brilliantly embroidered shawls. Stern would do some bows and occasionally let fly a complicated imitative groan, but when he sounded out he was certain one of the old genuine groaners had spotted him and knew he was issuing a phony. Stern thought it was marvelous that the old men knew exactly when to bow and knew the groans and chants and melodies by heart. He wondered if he would ever get to be one of their number. He went to Hebrew School, but there seemed to be no time at all devoted to the theatrical bows and groans, and even with three years of Hebrew School under his belt Stern still felt a loner among the chanting sufferers at synagogues. After a while he began to think you could never get to be one of the groaners through mere attendance at Hebrew School. You probably had to pick it all up in Europe. At the school, Stern learned to read Hebrew at a mile-a-minute clip. He was the fastest reader in the class, and when called upon he would race across the jagged words as though he were a long-distance track star. The meaning of the words was dealt with in advanced classes, and since Stern never got to them, he remained only a swift reader who might have been performing in Swahili or Urdu. He had two teachers, one a Mr. Lititsky, who concentrated on the technique of wearing yarmulkes and hit kids with books to keep order in the class. He had poor control over the classroom and would go from child to child, slamming an odd one here and there with a textbook and saying, "Now let's get some order here." By the time he had some, the half hour was up and there was time only for a fast demonstration of how to slip on a yarmulke. Outside, some of those slammed with books would say, "If he does that again, I'm going to hit Lititsky in the titskys," always sure to draw howls of laughter.

His other teacher was a black-eyed beauty from the Middle East named Miss Ostrow who told stories of Palestinian oases, referring to Palestine over and over as "the land of milk and honey," while Stern listened, unable to see why a land filled with those commodities should be so desirable. Miss Ostrow was beautiful and wore loosely cut Iraqi blouses, and Stern loved her, although he preferred to think of her as American-born and not to dwell on her earlier days in the Palestinian date groves. She cast him as the wicked Egyptian king, Ahasuerus, in a Purim play and, until the date of the play, called him "my handsome Ahasuerus." One day, after school, she caught Stern in a crowd in front of a drugstore and embarrassed him by standing on tiptoe and waving, "Ahasuerus."

All Hebrew School led up to the Bar Mitzvah and the singing of the Haftarah. Stern, who had a good voice, took to trilling occasional high notes in his practice Haftarah rendition, and the Haftarah coach would say, "No crooning." On the day of his Bar Mitzvah, Stern sang it flawlessly and his mother, afterward, said, "You had some voice. I could have fainted."

"Yes," said the Haftarah coach, "but there was too much crooning."

* * * * *

No great religious traditions were handed down to Stern by his small, round-shouldered father. He was self-conscious on the subject, and a favorite joke of his was to create some outrageous supposition, such as "Do you know why we're not allowed in the Chrysler Building after eleven at night?" When Stern or his mother would answer "Why?" Stern's small dad would say slyly, "Because we're Jews," mouthing the final word with great relish and pronouncing it "chooze." Stern's mother would then double up with laughter and Stern would join in, too. A bad punster whose favorite gag word was "homogenize" ("I homogenize saw you on the street last night"), Stern's small dad had great fun with such phrases as "orange Jews" and "grapefruit Jews." When Stern would say, "I heard that, Dad," his father would say, "Yeah, but I'll bet you never heard prune Jews."

Stern considered Passover the biggest holiday of the year, and on the first night of the celebration Stern and his parents traditionally attended a Seder in the back-room apartment of his Aunt Edda's hardware store, which was closed for the holiday. (After the final prayers, Aunt Edda switched on the lights of the store and each of the Seder-goers put in a large order for hardware items, which Aunt Edda furnished them at cost.) A small, dark-haired woman with tiny feet, Aunt Edda was much revered by the other members of the family, and Stern's mother often referred to her as a "saint" and then added, "Even though she's got more money than God." When Stern walked into Seders, Aunt Edda would run to him on tiny feet, clasp his arm, and say, "I want to tell you something," after which she would stare into his eyes, hold his arm for a long time, and then say, "You're some darling boy." Aside from arranging the Seder, Aunt Edda's main function was to thrust her tiny body into the center of the Seder fights that broke out annually. One of the main antagonists was Stern's Uncle Sweets, who presided over the ceremonies--a wild-haired man with giant lips who was involved in clandestine Chicago rackets and once, bound hand and foot, had to climb out of a lake in southern Illinois to save his life. Stern was proud of him and referred to him as "my bookie uncle." He took Stern and his parents to restaurants, always ordering meat pies and picking up the checks; outside a seafood villa once, a hobo had asked him for a handout and Uncle Sweets had put a penny in his palm and offered it to the man. When the hobo went to get it, Uncle Sweets had doubled up his palm and driven his fist into the man's nose, spreading the nose across the hobo's face with a sloshing sound Stern never forgot and leaving the man in the gutter. Stern's father said, "Hmm," and his mother said, "Oooh, Sweets is some bitch," with an excited look in her eyes. Uncle Sweets, wrapped sacredly in embroidered shawls, presided over the entire ceremony with thick lips and heavy lids, pounding his chest, quaffing wine, and singing long passages with the sweet full voice and passionate fervor of an old choir boy, as though this was his one night to atone for all the mysterious goings-on in Chicago. Challenging him each year and breaking in with his own set of more militant chants was Stern's Uncle Mackie, squat, powerfully built, burned black from the sun, a Phoenix rancher who flew in each year for Seders and to have mysterious medical things done to his "plumbing." An eccentric man who had once chased Pancho Villa deep into Mexico at General Pershing's side, Uncle Mackie, when asked about his health, would bare his perfect, gleaming teeth, double over his bronzed, military-trim body, and croak, "I feel pretty lousy." Early in the evening, he would take Stern around the waist, pull him close, and whisper confidentially, "I just want to find out something. Do you still make peepee in your pants?" And then he would explode with laughter, until he checked himself, held his side, and said, "I've got to do something about the plumbing." He continued the peepee inquiries long into Stern's teens. When the Seder began, Uncle Sweets would take long difficult passages to himself, which gave him an opportunity to hit high notes galore, but soon Uncle Mackie, warming to the Seder, would break in with great clangor, doing a series of heroic-sounding but clashing chants that seemed to have been developed outdoors in Arizona. Before long, Uncle Sweets would stop and say to him, "What the hell do you know? You shit in your hat in Phoenix." And Uncle Mackie would fly at him, saying, "I'll kick your two-bit ass through the window." At this point, Aunt Edda would seize both their wrists, say, "I want to tell you something," pause for a long time, looking from one to the other, and then say, "You're both darling boys." The Seder would then continue uneasily, much tension in Uncle Sweets' choruses, Uncle Mackie continuing with much vigor but directing his efforts to another side of the room, as though trying to enlist a faction to his banner and start a split Seder. Stern wondered who he wanted to win in a fight, his bookie uncle or the peepee man who'd gone in after Pancho Villa. At the same point in every Seder, Stern's father would arise to do a brief prayer, reading in a barely perceptible whisper and in a strange accent Stern had never heard in Mr. Lititsky's class. He read uncertainly, flashing his teeth as though charm would compensate for a poor performance; others at the Seder would root him on, hollering out key words, while Stern stared at the floor, ashamed of his father's uncertain whispers and wishing he had a militant chanter for a dad. Toward the tail end of the Seder, Stern and his cousin Flip would sneak off to the bedroom, get a dictionary, and look up dirty words, such as "vulva" and "pudendum." They would then open their flies and compare pubic hair growths, Flip's always being further along since he was six months the elder. They would generally emerge in time for Uncle Gunther's entrance. A onetime Hollywood bit player who had done harem scenes in silents, Gunther worked a lathe in a ball bearing factory, drank heavily, and was always striding into speeding cars. Tension generally built throughout Seders as to whether he'd make it this year; when he did show, there would be great relief that he hadn't gotten caught on a fender. Aunt Edda would fix him an abbreviated Seder meal, and when he had finished it, the others would begin to confer gifts upon him in deference to his lowly lathe job. Uncle Gunther would wave them off disdainfully, saying, "What do you think I am," and finally race out the door and into the street, with the others behind, still thrusting forth their gifts, a crumpled twenty-dollar bill from Uncle Sweets, advice on life from Uncle Mackie of the Far West. Stern's small father would always take off an item of clothing, a vest or belt, and holler, "What do I need it for, you fool," at the fleeing Gunther, who would stop after a while, collect the items, and allow himself to be ushered back to the store, defeated; there, Aunt Edda stood waiting for him, holding sets of pots and pans and the uneaten Seder food, wrapped in packages and tied with string. And thus the curtain would come down on another religious holiday.

* * * * *

The most religious person Stern knew was his grandmother, who opened the neighborhood synagogue each morning at five-thirty in cold weather or warm. In arguments with friends as to whose grandmother was more religious, Stern would weigh in with "Mine _opens_ the damned synagogue," and he would generally walk off with the honors. A woman of indeterminate age with long silver hair kept in a bun, she lived out her last years in a small flat in a house near Stern's apartment building, which she shared with another grandmother. Since her own flat faced a back alley and had no front windows, she would come and spend most of the day in Stern's apartment, where she could sit at the window, look out, and see light and people. Most of the day she prayed, bowing and singing softly and wetting the pages of her prayer book as she slapped them along. She wore coat sweaters and had long breasts that hung down to her waist; Stern, horrified by them, wondered nevertheless what old women's breasts were like--yet hoped he'd never have to look at a set. When she was finished praying, she would look out the window and spot other grandmothers and laugh at them all for having crooked feet. Stern's father teased her, and whenever he spotted another old lady in the street, he would say, "There goes one of her buddies. Don't worry. She's got a whole mob of them organized." Her mind slipped and she buried bits of food around Stern's apartment, a piece of lettuce here, a slice of orange there, under sofa cushions and behind vases. When Stern's father found one, he would say, "She's got enough buried to feed an army. Probably got a load of money, too." Stern was going to high school during this period, and when he got home each afternoon, she would be waiting with the daily newspapers, asking Stern to explain the headlines to her since she knew little English. No matter what they said--"Strike to Tie Up Pier" or "Cold Weather to Continue"--she would take them to be an accounting of one of Hitler's misdeeds and would heap curses upon his head. Her eyesight was poor, and in the evening, when the light faded, it fell upon Stern to take her home so she would not be hit by cars in crossing the several streets on the way to the flat. Stern did not care for the job and would say, "I don't want to be walking with grandmothers." Since her wind was short, it took an agonizingly long time to get her back each night. She would grip his arm, they would walk thirty paces or so, and she would ask him to stop so she could catch her breath. During the stops, Stern would shuffle his feet and say, "Are you ready?" Sometimes, with his grandmother on his arm, he would pass friends in front of a bowling alley and he would say, "This is my grandmother," as the friends watched the pair creep by. When Stern came home from summer camp one year, he said to his mother, "Where's Granma?" And she said, "She's gone." Stern said, "What do you mean?" And his mother said, "She's not here any more. She went in my arms when you were away." People never died in Stern's family. They were either "gone" or they "went" or they "were taken." Stern said, "I see," and went inside and cried into a pillow, sorry he had laughed at her Hitler curses and wishing he could take her to her flat one more time, giving her long rests on the way. He wondered, too, whether anyone would ever "go" in his arms and, if they were an old person, what it would be like, whether their breath would be bad and whether the air would go out of their long breasts--and then he punched himself in the eyes to rid himself of such thoughts.

* * * * *

And so Stern loved a bowing grandmother and sat through Seder duels and could race with furious speed through books of ancient Hebrew; but there was little God to his religion. When Stern went to college in Oregon, even the trappings fell away. He told the people he met at school, "I don't care much about being a Jew. There's only one thing: each year I like to go and hear the Shofar blown on Rosh Hashanah. It sort of ties the years together for me." And it was true that for a while Stern's last concession to his early Jewish days was to stand outside synagogues each year and listen to the ram's horn. It was as though listening to the ancient sound would somehow keep him just the tiniest bit Jewish, in case it turned out someday that a scorecard really was kept on people. One year he didn't go, however, and then he rarely went again, even though he kept using that "ties the years together" line when he met new girls and needed impressive attitudes. Before Stern met his wife at college and lived with the old man of dangling pelvic supports, he stayed in a boardinghouse of Jewish students, where the air was thick with self-consciousness. One of his two room-mates was a tall graceful redheaded boy with a monotonous voice that sounded as though he were in a telephone booth. His personality was limited, and since he seemed to have only one joke (When someone asked him for a match, he would answer, "Sure, my ass and your face"), he became known as "Gordon One-Gag."

"I've got lots of jokes," he would protest from inside his booth, to which Stern or the other room-mate would say, "Nonsense, One-Gag, you've only got one gag."

Stern's other room-mate was a small, flabby ex-Navy man named Footsy who had motherly-looking breasts and a large fund of anal jokes developed on shipboard. There grew up among the three a jargon and patter, all of which hinged on Jewishness. The motherly Navy man might suddenly arise during a study period, hold his stomach, and leave the room. "Where are you going?" the redhead might ask, to which Footsy would answer, "I can't stand the Jewishness in the room," bringing forth howls of amusement. Or Stern might make a remark about the weather, to which the Navy man would say, "How Jewish of you to say that." If Stern were to utter a pronouncement of any kind, one of his room-mates would invariably retort: "Said with characteristic Jewishness." Long imaginary dialogues were carried on between the redhead and the Navy man in which the redhead was a job applicant and Footsy was an employment director, reluctant to hire him. Finally, Footsy, prodded to explain why, would say briskly, "Well, if you must know, its because of certain minority characteristics we'd rather not go into," and all in the room would break up laughing. The Navy man would often do a storm trooper imitation, in which he got to say, "Line dem opp against the fwall and commence mit the shooting," and a boy down the hall named Wiegel who had sick feet would come in and do another German officer, saying, "Brink in the Jewish child. Child, ve eff had to execute your parents." The redhead would try Mussolini in his last days, but Footsy, the Navy man, would say, "Stick to your one gag." Footsy would lie in bed for hours twisting lyrics of popular songs to get Jews into them: "Beware my foolish heart" became "Beware my Jewish heart," "Fool that I am" turned into "Jew that I am," and "I'm glad I met you, wonderful you" emerged "I'm glad you're Jewish, you wonderful Jew." Stern chipped in with a full lyric that went (to the tune of "Farmer in the Dell"):

The Jews caused the war. The Jews caused the war. We hate the Jews Because they caused the war.

On occasion, the president of the boardinghouse, a short boy with quivering old-man jowls, would appear in the room and say, "These things aren't funny," after which Footsy would poke Stern in the ribs and whisper, loud enough for all to hear, "He's being _very_ Jewish," and the president would stomp off, jowls in a rage.

Although much dating was done by the social club, little attention was paid to the girls of the single Jewish sorority, who wore the traditional campus skirts and sweaters but who seemed somehow an acne-ed, large-shouldered parody of the brisk, blond girls of the gentile sororities. Only sick-footed Wiegel took out what Footsy described as "laughing, dark-eyed beauties." When Wiegel announced that he'd booked another for Saturday night, Footsy would say, "But she's a pig," to which Wiegel would answer, "Yes, but you've got to date the pigs to get to the gentile queens."

Before dates, the redhead, all dressed, might stand before Stern and say, "Check my hair."

"Fine," Stern would say.

"Suit?"

"Excellent."

"Check me for Jewishness."

"Reject," Stern would say, and all would become convulsed. Footsy would then bare a womanly breast and say, "Here, One-Gag, practice on this little beauty." After dates, all would compare how they had done, in crisp, codelike sum-ups.