A decade: the lifespan of a salamander; the time it took for the Flavians to put up the Colosseum and for Odysseus to make it back to Ithaca; the statutory period during which the IRS can collect on unpaid tax, after which a jubilee is decreed and the debt is canceled . . . Just about a decade prior to the autumn I’m recalling, the State of Israel was founded. In that minuscule country halfway across the globe, displaced and refugee Jews were busy reinventing themselves into a single people, united by the hatreds and subjugations of contrary regimes, in a mass-process of solidarity aroused by gross antagonism. Simultaneously, a kindred mass-process was occurring here in America, where Jews were busy being deinvented, or uninvented, or assimilated, by democracy and market-forces, intermarriage and miscegenation. Regardless of where they were and the specific nature and direction of the process, however, it remains an incontrovertible fact that nearly all of the world’s Jews were involved at midcentury in becoming something else; and that at this point of transformation, the old internal differences between them—of former citizenship and class, to say nothing of language and degree of religious observance—became for a brief moment more palpable than ever, giving one last death-rattle gasp.
In retrospect, the disparities between Pale of Settlement Jews and German Jews, for example, or between Litvak Jews and Hasidic Jews, can seem ridiculously minor; they can seem egoistic, egotistic, petty and vain, matters of custom, cuisine, or even just wardrobe, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist and substantially define people’s lives: “der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen” is Freud’s famous phrase, which you don’t need more than kleinen German to puzzle out, or more than kleinen pride to be disturbed by.
I bring all this up to introduce my parents, and Edith’s parents, not necessarily in that order—with them, you always had to be sensitive to the order.
Love is generally a one-to-one affair and mortal, but hatreds tend toward immortal typologies, with each change of identity becoming translated into more relevant terms, so that the Old World distinctions between my Ukrainian/Russian Jewish parents and Edith’s Rhenish Jewish parents became, in the New World, secularized rivalries between the Bronx and Manhattan, the Grand Concourse and Upper Broadway; mass-transit v. Cadillacs; no days off v. Lorelei vacations and half the year in Florida.
To this day, the transmogrification of ancient feuds remains the primary process by which immigrants nativize: to renew a conflict is to acculturate.
Marxists might explain the Blum/Steinmetz antipathy in class-struggle terms, the tension between workers and owners: the Blums (my father a garment-cutter, my mother a garment-presser) made the garments and the Steinmetzes provided the cloth; Edith’s cousins were into textiles, her parents into trimmings. Capitalists, meanwhile—capitalists such as both sets of our parents actually were—might explain the antipathy culturally: my parents tacked up calendars and cranked the radio; Edith’s parents hung oils and bowed the cello.
Or my mother-in-law, Sabine, did, while my father-in-law, Walter, just paid for it, out of the piles he made supplying buttons and snaps and clasps to the trade, also zippers, studs, and shanks, hook-fasteners for bras, and elastic bands for socks and underwear. Sabine had gone to work for him as his receptionist and quit as his wife, went into psychoanalysis, and was eternally training to become an analyst herself, at some semi-accredited psychoanalytic institute run by a Balkan émigré out of a closet off the Bowery. When the Balkan declared her ready—if he’d ever declare her ready, which he ultimately didn’t, before his stroke—she’d go into practice on her own and every time she talked about that prospect, it was usually in terms of her future office, where it would be located (what neighborhood, building, floor), and how it would be decorated (“Oriental”). She fancied herself an expert in fashion, design, and culture in general, and while her taste was good enough, she had the bad taste to work too hard at it. She’d talk about concerts in terms of how expensive the tickets were and how much better her seats were than her friends’. She’d talk about art in terms of how much Walt had bid at auction and who against. She liked sharing her opinions, which were properly those of the critics she read: Pollock wasn’t interested in how you felt when you looked at it but how he’d felt when he’d made it; with bebop, the very act of listening became improvisation. When she told this to my parents, after one of Judy’s grade-school plays, they thought she was talking about some Polacks from Poland? Bird was a bird, easy enough, but Diz was a dog and Monk a cat? Back in the city, she liked to take Edith to “bistros” and “brasseries” uptown and make her order in French. She had in her this drive to know everything, at least to know everything new and not be caught out, and Judy had this cruel trick where she’d ask her grandmother whether she’d heard, say, the new Levi Woodbury “Concerto for Harp,” or whether she’d seen, say, the new exhibition at the Peggy Eaton Gallery, and Sabine would answer sure, of course, though neither existed: Levi Woodbury was the longest-serving Secretary of the Treasury of the Jackson administration and Peggy Eaton was the scandal-ridden wife of John Henry Eaton, Jackson’s Secretary of War—I hadn’t known that Judy had picked up these and other names from me until she used them to skewer her grandmother.
Judy . . . maybe the one commonality that both Edith’s parents and mine would acknowledge was their love for her, which they expressed through the same question incessantly asked: who loves you more . . . Oma and Opa? Bubbe and Zeyde?
It was because of this competition that our holidays were vexed. Not spiritually, but logistically. We had to split our time, the tradition being to spend each night of a holiday with a different set of parents and alternating the order year to year: one year first-night supper at mine, second night at Edith’s; the next year first-night supper at Edith’s, second night at mine. I’m convinced this is the reason why the rabbis made all the major Jewish holidays last not for one night but two, at least in the Diaspora—to ensure that the Steinmetzes and the Blums wouldn’t have to mix like spoiled meat and rotten dairy.
Rosh Hashanah 1959, Edith and I decided to inaugurate a new tradition: we weren’t going back to New York. This year, our second up at Corbindale, we were staying put and we’d invite our parents up, doing so with the presumption that faced with the prospect of having to drive up from the city or even carpooling together and having to eat their meals and sleep together under the same roof for two consecutive nights, both sets of parents would decline, leaving myself, Edith, and Judy to hold our holiday in peace, observing it, or more likely not-observing it, however. Sure, we’d miss the Manhattan-moments of our down-Hudson hajjes, like trying to fit in a Broadway show, or—this was my preference—browsing for books along Fourth Avenue, when it was still Bookseller’s Row, or along upper Fifth at Scribner’s and Brentano’s. But the effort just seemed too much. We didn’t have it in us, especially given how fresh our memory was of our visit the year before, when we’d just gotten ourselves settled and established in the new house and unpacked all our boxes and started school, only to turn around and haul back to the snarled city from whence we’d come. That had been exhausting. And though this year wasn’t quite as frantic—after all, this year we weren’t moving cross-state and upending our lives—Edith and I wanted to set a precedent, despite Judy’s protestations: “All summer I’d been looking forward to going back to the city and now you’re finking out? After I made all these plans, I’m supposed to tell the only friends I’ve ever had, sorry, I won’t be coming east for West Side Story, count me out for The Miracle Worker with Patty Duke as Helen Keller who at least was born deaf and blind, whereas I’m being made that way by my own parents who’ve turned into total totalitarians?”
“At least Helen Keller couldn’t talk,” I said.
“At least Mao admits he’s a dictator.”
Edith sighed. “They’re not your only friends, Judy. You shouldn’t say that. You’ve made so many new ones here. What about Mary and Joan and the girl from the literary annual who liked your poem about the lunar surface—aren’t they your friends? What would they say? You shouldn’t put them down. And what about Tod Frew, who walks you home after every rehearsal? Is he your friend or is he more than that?”
Judy threw up her hands and cried, “Fascists,” and though Edith wavered in the decision, I held my ground. I put my foot down. Both my feet. I planted them in the soil. Corbindale was where we lived now, Corbindale was our home, the new magnetic center of the Blumian universe and our city-relatives would have to get in orbit and realign. It was time to prioritize the immediate family, the conjugal unit, the hearth. So we picked up the phone—I had Edith pick up the phone—and declared: All roads lead to Corbindale and you’re invited.
But only Edith’s parents accepted. My parents passed.
We’d been expecting both sets to pass—I kept repeating to myself in appalled incomprehension—but Edith’s had agreed and mine had refused and despite my getting involved now by calling my parents myself and coaxing, they wouldn’t reconsider and were even, it struck me, enlivened in their recalcitrance by this unexpected opportunity to distinguish themselves.
“I’ll let your father explain,” my mother said, after I’d worn her out with my entreaties, and my father was losing patience and snatching at the phone.
“You want to know why we’re not coming?” he said. “I’ll tell you why, professor. It’s because unlike your wife’s parents, we’re not ashamed to be Jews. And on Rosh Hashanah, you know what Jews do?”
“They get together with family?”
“No, professor, they go to shul. And can you tell me where is the shul in Corbinville?”
“Dale. Corbindale.”
“Ville, dale, who cares? There is no shul, did you ever think about that?”
“About shul? No, I admit I didn’t.”
“And do you know, for all your smarts, where is the nearest shul to you in Corbinvilledale, professor?”
“No, I don’t. But I know you know and you’re going to tell me.”
“Do you hear that? He doesn’t know, your son the professor doesn’t know,” my father said, presumably to my mother but also, not inconceivably, to God.
Then he was back to yelling at me, “Of course I know, I looked it up. You’re not the only one who can look things up. The nearest shul to you is in Erie, Pennsylvania.”
By this time, it was too late to disinvite the Steinmetzes, according to Edith. They were coming alone, they were stooping to come; disdain was their brand of piety.
This wasn’t just the first time they’d be visiting Corbindale, this was the first time any of our parents would be visiting, and a decision had to be made about where to put them. Apparently, the place that made the most sense was my study, or so Edith said, since I already had an office at the College. My study was the house’s putative third bedroom, for the second child we were always delaying, and, until we made up our minds, Edith was saying, we should be using it for guests, who might least obtrusively be accommodated on a couch that folded out into a bed, like so, and she unfolded a glossy advertisement: Don’t just dream about that extra bedroom, get one for the price of a sofa . . . Hide-A-Bed, the hostess’s secret . . .
One was being delivered next weekend. That one, Edith indicated it with a cuticle. The model was called The Dromedary. But before she could explain why she’d ordered it with the optional Flounce and in a color called Abyssinian Khaki, I protested. I didn’t want her parents in my study; I didn’t want them messing up my papers, and I made such a show of resistance that Edith revised her offer: we’d put the new fold-out downstairs in the den, as a replacement for the old non-fold-out we’d brought from the Bronx, and she and I would sleep on it while her parents would take our bedroom (which Edith always referred to as “the master bedroom,” just like she called the downstairs bathroom “the powder room,” the side porch the “verandah,” and the yards “the lawns”)—this was her decision and it was final.
The day the hideous Hide-A-Bed arrived and the old cabriole couch was taken away—the site of so many bouts of our newlywed canoodling—Edith spiffed the kitchen and hoovered the diningroom and then, as if wanting to save the first sit on the camelbacked convertible for a calmer eve, or for someone who’d earned it, stood around in the den sorting through the broken-spined album into which she’d copied my mother’s recipes: she was going to make my mother’s brisket, she announced. That was how Edith was, always working in fulfillment of deals whose terms had never been stated. She was shrewd in her bargaining and might even have threatened the sanctity of my study only as an opening gambit, as a means of achieving her ultimate goals of getting some new furniture for the den and tucking her parents into our bed.
There was a knock at the door and, before I could get halfway downstairs, they let themselves in, Walter carrying two suitcases—two suitcases for one night—and Sabine, who wrapped me in scarves and a nimbus of bergamot perfume.
Walt, who had no free hand to shake, offered me the luggage instead. “What’s this? You keep your door unlocked?”
“Apparently, we do.”
“You’re sure that’s safe?”
“Safe so far. Anyway, we’re home.”
“That’s all the more reason to keep it locked. Anyone can just waltz on in.”
“Everyone here keeps their doors unlocked and no one waltzes. They also leave their bicycles out in their yards and their trashcans aren’t on chains. This isn’t the city.”
“This isn’t the city?” Sabine said, on her way to the kitchen to greet her daughter. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
By the time I’d returned from depositing their luggage upstairs, Sabine still hadn’t gotten over her startle. That, or she just reprised it now for my sake.
“Ruben, who is this? What have you done with my daughter?”
She pointed at Edith like accusing a witch, my wife conjuring hectically over cauldrons and pans.
“What’s cooking?” Walt said. “It smells delicious.”
Edith recited the dishes she was making and Sabine repeated them back to her in a rote remote voice as if she were baffled at having to choose the one edible dish from a menu that was otherwise venomous, lethal: brisket, kugel, tzimmes.
“You didn’t learn that from me,” Sabine said.
Edith warded her off with a spoon. “I know—they’re Ruben’s mother’s recipes.”
Sabine sniffed. “I’m glad your marriage has helped you to compensate for the domestic instruction I so deprived you of.”
Edith clattered the spoon inside a pot.
“And you have no one else here to give you a hand? You can’t possibly have done all this by yourself. You can’t possibly have.”
And Sabine narrowed her eyes, as if trying to find where the help was stowed, which pantry the maid had been folded into like a bed into a sofa.
Walt said, “How about giving us a tour?”
“I have to watch the noodles. Ruben can take you.”
“Yes,” Sabine said, putting an arm around me, putting both arms. “Let’s leave Edith to her hausfrau’s chores and dear Ruben will give us a tour of the establishment.”
Forget the campus’s mock-Goth charms and partially erected brutalist Students’ Union; forget College Drive’s quaint commercial strip of ye olde shoppes and grange; forget the half-kitschified craft-stands of the Seneca Reservation and the abandoned utopian pottery phalanstery and even the sappy forests sprawling between them reflected sepia-tinted in the rivers and lakes, my in-laws had no interest in anything in or around Corbindale—they had no interest in anything at all besides the house they were already in. This wasn’t because our house was particularly interesting architecturally, or even interiorly, but only because they knew how much it’d cost. They wanted to judge how well we’d made out. They wanted, especially, to judge me—the poor Yiddishy kid who’d married their daughter pretty much straight out of Stuyvesant, knocked her up, and then left for war (as they remembered it) . . . the scholastic prodigy and upstart who even with doctorate on the wall and published works on the shelf still could barely hold onto an associate post lecturing econometrics at CUNY while failing to get tenure (in their mind, there was a tenure position to be had there) . . . the economist who couldn’t make money (a figure as common as the historian who couldn’t make history) . . . the inveterate luck-bungler who, finally exasperated by his dwindling status and inability to make a dent in the city (which to them was the world), accepted the first tenure-track job he was offered in the middle of the barbarian wastes and absconded there with their daughter and granddaughter, blowing them “Upstate”—but really west, America’s direction—like the brittle fallen leaves of pathetic fallacy . . . This visit, then, was their chance for confirmation. Not for reassessment—the Steinmetzes didn’t do reassessment—but confirmation, that Edith had been unwise in her selection of mate and Judy unfortunate in her nonselection of father.
As I took them around the rooms—less like the lord of the manor and more like the lord’s last bastard descendant giving guided tours for tips—Sabine made little prying inquiries about the provenance of every lithograph and sampler; and the price of every estate auction antique, from the Chippendale buffet and tray-table, to the delicate, spindly-legged Shaker chairs, plainmade stick-stuff fitted together by some regional commune of unmarried ladies back in the coal-black nethers of the 1880s, $36 for the pair. Sabine picked these up, weighing their reedweight in her hands, but then she also tried to pick up the Hide-A-Bed and buffet and tray-table too, as if she were measuring our prospects of returning to the city by measuring the portability of our possessions. Walt, for his part, was in an improvements-mood, with a knack for finding every flaw, from some cracked molding in my study to the loose hatch and lacking rungs of the attic’s tug-down ladder. Upstairs, in the hallway just past Judy’s room, he bellied onto the carpet-runner to examine an open electrical socket and said Manuel could fix it, no problemo. Manuel would come up, he could do it all in a day and wouldn’t charge much. He’d been employed by the building for years and was considered very trustworthy. It took me a moment to realize that my father-in-law, a man who’d never offered me a red cent—not that I would’ve taken it—was offering to send the handyman employed by the co-op association of his apartment-building in Manhattan out to the farthest edge of New York State just to screw in a new plate for my electrical socket.
“And this is your room.”
“You mean yours,” Sabine said, poking at the bed where I slept with her daughter and then slipping off her ballet flats and settling down on it.
“Make yourself at home.”
“And you have your own bathroom?” Walt was curious.
“Yes.”
“So you don’t have to share with Judy?”
“No.”
Walt nodded and went inside and stood at the sink and twisted both taps. Then he went over and turned on the shower. Water shot and howled.
“Walt,” Sabine said. “Please don’t.”
Walt winked and closed himself in with the latch.
“He’ll be in there for a while.”
“He’s got a lot to think about?”
“No, he doesn’t, but he’ll be in there for a while.”
I made to leave but Sabine said, “Wait, sit down,” and patted a divot next to her on the bed, but I went to lean against the windowsill. “It’s a shame we don’t get the pleasure of having your parents up here with us, your mother’s recipes notwithstanding.”
“They like to go to shul. They like to pray.”
“They pray for you?”
“For all of us.”
Water growled from behind the bathroom door.
“I’m curious, your parents—are they separate-folks or sharers?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your parents, do they sleep separately or share a bed?”
“My parents? They share. At least they did when I was a child.”
“You know, our generation was the last in which couples slept in separate beds. I know it’s strange to think of me as being from the same generation as your parents, but it’s true. Ours was the last to sleep apart with the little nightstand between with all the little pill bottles.” She rolled over to jostle open the drawer of Edith’s nightstand and then rolled in the other direction to jiggle mine, making tiny inferring grunts at their emptiness. “Of course, poorer families never had that option; I bet that’s why your parents always shared and their parents before them. But my parents slept separately, as did their parents. They could afford two beds and back in Germany they even maintained separate bedrooms. I think they thought of it as French, but the reasoning behind it was English, Victorian in a way, which for a German Jew wasn’t a pejorative, but a compliment. The French believe in separation in order to have affairs. The women even keep separate quarters, boudoirs, but a boudoir is not a bedroom. It might include a bedroom, but it is not a bedroom so much as a chamber in which to have affairs and sulk about them privately. The British, however, believed in separation because sharing was dangerous, the proximity to another sleeper enabled the transmission of infectious diseases like pneumonia, flus, and colds, which back then were often deadly. I think my parents’ generation was also convinced that sharing, bedrooms and especially beds, resulted in an increase in sex, which in turn resulted in an increase in pregnancy, in an age unprovided with reliable birth-control. Though perhaps the infection-reasoning was invented to obscure the sex-reasoning by women of the past, frustrated at always being pregnant. Regardless, I find it disturbing, don’t you? To imagine that past generations didn’t think that a married couple could just as easily not be having sex in a bed that was shared?”
Squeaky loafers-on-tile sounds came from behind the bathroom door and a moment later a gaseous hiss was released and faded into the cascading. Sabine just lay on the bed, head up on the pillows, stretched out, staring straight up at the ceiling.
“Are you going to tell me how you are, Ruben? Are you going to tell me something personal?”
“I’m fine. I’m alright. Personally, I try not to think about the sex-lives of my ancestors.”
“And Edith?”
“What about her?”
“It’s not too much for her, handling all this domestic pageantry along with her responsibilities at the library?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I knew how difficult it was for me to work for Walt.”
“But she doesn’t work for me, she works for the school.”
“I just meant the proximity. You’re always bumping into each other, aren’t you? At school and then again at home, in bed. It must be claustrophobic.”
“She works in the back of the library, in the stacks.”
“And Judy? How is she handling the adjustment?”
“It’s already been a year.”
“It must’ve been quite a transition. Whisked away from her friends in the city, having to start a new life at a new school.”
“Same as Edith. Same as me.”
“But you’re not an adolescent girl. At least not physically. Edith tells me all these farm boys are asking her out.”
“I wouldn’t know. What did Edith tell you?”
“That all these farm boys are asking her out. To go pick apples or something. How symbolic.”
“I’m sure the apples they’re picking are apples. It’s not symbol season. Anyway, Judy mostly sticks to her schoolwork and college applications.”
“Of course she does. Getting into some college is her only way out . . . of living with her parents in a college . . . but I’m sure she’ll get into somewhere better.”
“She’s working hard.”
“With your help and some good recommendations . . . I was thinking of asking some people I know from some charity boards I’m on to write her some good recommendations.”
“I don’t know that’s necessary.”
“It’s not necessary, but I’m thinking of asking. Some people I know from the Union Club, the boards of the Met and Carnegie Hall. Anything to help.”
“It’s appreciated.”
“Let Judy appreciate it. She must be excited to leave. I know I’d be.”
“You know, the truth is, Edith and I rather like it here.”
“I think about you, Ruben, I think about all of you and try to understand your circumstances: as city-people alienated from the college-people, but certainly closer to them than to the non-college-people who are unsophisticated and toothless and spend too much time with animals. I wonder, do they even know how to read?”
“My neighbors or the animals?”
“Don’t misunderstand me, Ruben. I’m sure it’s a fine school you have here and, I’d assume, in many ways ideal for serious work. But then all the isolation and such that makes it ideal must make it absolutely unsuitable and even hostile to every other aspect of civilized life. Boredom is the absence of a city, as Verlaine said, or maybe Rimbaud. Without museums, without concert halls, you have to become your own entertainment.”
“When I lived in the city, I was bored sometimes too.”
The toilet flushed, with the sound of someone summoning up mucus to spit against a waterfall, and Sabine rolled her eyes at the unplastered bald-spot of ceiling just above her.
“In an environment like this—in an understimulated environment where the only stimulus besides your own blockage is the mediocrity of your colleagues—survival can be difficult. Ignorance is a subtler enemy than vulgar xenophobia. Because it’s the enemy within, requiring no demagoguery to stir it up. No uniforms. No rifles. Nothing incendiary. Just a job, a job title, a college. It’s latent in the college. You dedicate your life to knowledge and your society can only reward you by placing you in an institution. And yet the real tragedy is that you yourself regard this as a reward, being placed behind high stone walls in the midst of the woods, where you can’t hurt anyone, where you can only hurt yourself. Frankly it’s a miracle that not everyone has committed suicide.”
“Not yet.”
“Instead, they sleep with their colleagues’ spouses, they get into petty arguments over property lines, they nurture grudges like retarded children and impose their insecurities on one another’s time. They wave from their windows and chat across fences, they knock at the door and ask to borrow a pint of milk or a pinch of salt—they ask to borrow your wife or daughter—they can’t leave you alone.”
“You’re telling me that no one has adultery in New York anymore? Sabine, I’m disappointed.”
Sabine tucked to her side, to face me. “The same things happen everywhere. Infidelities and squabbling, pointless parties attended by pointless people who have only the slightest common contexts, and even those are mostly just narcissistic co-dependencies. But you leave a faculty meeting and you’re still in Corbinton.”
“In Corbindale.”
“And I leave an appointment of mine and find myself in a major world city, with all its allures.”
“And all its grime and crime and crowds, for which they keep jacking up the rent.”
From the bathroom came the soft screech of the toiletpaper roll being unwound, the metal dowel spinning in its socket.
“I think of you up here and become depressed, Ruben. I think of this house out in the woods and all of you huddled together inside like tattered gypsies around a single candle, talking to fill the silence and darkness and ignorance all around.”
I flicked the bedside lamp on and off. “We have electricity, Sabine, no need for candles, and as you can tell, we have running water too.”
“That’s not what I meant. I was speaking metaphorically.”
I turned and looked out the window. “Outside, I’ll tell you what I see. I see grass, not woods. Non-metaphorically. I see paved streets with cars on them and I see houses with antennas on their roofs that bring in the news from all over and wires connected to telephone poles so that if I wanted to right now I could call up Simone de Beauvoir and ask her about her boudoir; I could call up Jean-Paul Sartre and ask him, Monsieur Sartre, I’m here with my mother-in-law, can you please help me prove she doesn’t speak French, s’il vous plaît? And if that’s not enough evidence for you that we’re not ignorant hicks, you might want to check out where your daughter works. It’s a library and it even has books.”
“You’re agitated . . . she’s still working in the stacks and you’re agitated . . .”
I was tapping the pane, tapping it hard. “And next year, when Judy sends us letters from the college of her choice, which she’ll have gotten into without any assistance from you, Edith will make copies on the new copying-machine the library’s getting from Xerox and we’ll drop them from an airplane onto Central Park.”
“I didn’t mean to make you agitated, Ruben.”
“Then don’t.”
There were the wet sucking sounds of the toilet being plunged.
“When I mentioned ignorance, I was just referring to your work. All the extra assignments they’re making you do because you’re Jewish.”
I resisted the urge to turn. “What did Edith tell you?”
“Nothing much.”
I stood staring at the Dulleses’, the vacant tire-swing a hypnotic pendant in the wind, the leaves piled up for burning, and farther up the street, Judy slinking homeward, knapsack-hunched, kicking a pinecone listlessly.
“Sabine, whatever Edith told you, whatever you think she told you, it’s not accurate. I was just asked to be on a committee to consider the work of a Jewish scholar.”
“And what do you know about Jewish scholars?”
“Not much. But more than most up here.”
The plunger gave gasps like wet flatulence.
“You have to admit that this would never happen in New York,” Sabine said, “this kind of insult.”
“It wouldn’t happen because in New York there’s more than one Jew. And anyway, to my mind, the true insult has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. The true insult is to the school, the Department, and the candidate himself.”
“And you’ve told them that, I assume?”
My breath had fogged the pane, blurring Judy’s crossing. “It’s like talking to a window.”
“Ruben, you know what I think?”
I cuff-wiped the fog and faced her. “It doesn’t matter.”
From the bathroom came a final, definitive, throat-clearing flush followed by strong squealing pumps on the soap dispenser.
“I think whether you find it offensive or not, whether the request itself is intrinsically offensive, or whether something like intrinsic offense can actually philosophically exist—I think you’re still confused about the situation. If you decide to go and hire this Jew, they’ll say Jewish favoritism. If you decide not to go and hire this Jew, they’ll say you’re trying to avoid the appearance of Jewish favoritism. Wait. I know what you’re going to say, the decision’s not yours, it’s up to everyone. But while it might not be yours, the confusion is, and I think it comes from the fear of having another Jew up here to share the woods with. I think you’ve gotten quite used to being the only one and you’re afraid of losing that special status. With another Jew in town, you won’t be the pet anymore . . . you won’t be the mascot . . .”
“Thank you, Sabine, it’s a compelling interpretation, but I doubt it.”
Just as Judy came into the house—her door slam shaking Sabine into sitting upright—Walt came bounding out of the bathroom, fondling a towel.
“Judy’s back?” Sabine said. “That’s her?”
“Your towels,” Walt said, “they’re too rough.”
Judy’s voice, high, taut, pierced its way upstairs.
“Where’s the suitcase?” Sabine said. “Walt, the green suitcase?” And then she yelled, “Judy, come up and say hello already! Judy!”
“Feel this,” Walt said and handed me the towel. “That’s polyester, or some poly blend. I’d say 300, at most 350 grams. Sheets you count in threads, towels you count in grams. Rough like this, without the looping stitch that makes it absorbent—this tells me it’s a kitchen towel, not a bathroom towel. Remind me when I’m back in the city and I’ll get a guy to send you some cotton. A dozen top of the line plush terry, a dozen Egyptians. We can even do a monogram. Imagine it: a B, a classy B, embroidered, name the color.”
“Walter. The suitcases?”
“They’re here,” I said. “I put them in the closet.”
Judy flew to Walt who hugged her up off the carpet and passed her to Sabine who put lips to each cheek and stroked her hair. “You’re so beautiful.”
“Stop it, Oma. I’m not.”
“So beautiful, like an actress.”
“Please stop, Oma.”
I stood next to the open closet, pointing at the suitcases, “Which?”
Walt shrugged and Sabine said, “I told you already, the green,” and Walt picked up the green suitcase and plopped it next to Judy, by Sabine’s lacquer-toed feet.
“Walter, it’s a suitcase—you don’t put a suitcase on a bed where you sleep. You know how dirty suitcases are?”
“No. How dirty are suitcases? We put our stuff in them, how dirty can they be?”
“They’re clean inside and dirty outside, the opposite of you. Everybody knows this. Have you ever met anyone who cleaned the outside of a suitcase?”
“Have you ever met anyone who cleaned the inside of a suit case?”
“Put it on the floor,” and Walt complied.
Edith entered, like a bit player late to the stage: ruddled, flustered, batter-spattered apron trailing strings. A large house, a large consanguineous cast all massed in the same small room: was this theater or Judaism? Or just an unconscious attempt to bring the cramped city-apartment ambience back to our holidays?
“Did I miss it?” she asked.
I asked, “Miss what?”
Sabine, still grooming Judy, said, “We got you some presents.”
“Presents? For Rosh Hashanah?”
“Don’t be so pious, Ruben. Not for Rosh Hashanah, for her college visitations. Little presents for my big girl Judy. Outfits from the fall collections. I want you to look your best. I know you’re going to say that admission is based on your performance, but really, it never hurts to look your best.”
“Or to get straight A’s.”
Edith said, “Hush, Ruben.”
“Or a 1600 score on the SAT.”
Sabine said to Judy, “You’ll give us a fashion show, won’t you?” And then to Walt, “What are you waiting for? Open it up,” and Walt knelt down and unzipped the suitcase and opened its lid to the aftermath of an explosion: gobs of whiteness, a creamy sheen over darker fabrics.
Sabine shrieked—she leapt off the bed and, knocking Walt aside, squatted on her haunches and dug around inside the suitcase, pulling out clothes from it like she was pulling out tissues from a box to stanch a cry of mourning; dresses and skirts and blouses in sober blue-blacks and browns and pinks all splotched with milky white. “I can’t believe it,” she was plucking up the garments one at a time, “I just can’t goddamned believe it,” and holding each up to let it unroll from its folding and show its Rorschach stains before flinging it away. “They’re ruined. All ruined. That stupid goo must’ve leaked.”
“What goo?” I said.
Sabine said to Edith, “I told him to pack it separately.”
“You can’t pin this on me,” Walt said, rising from his cower. “I’m not the one who packed.”
“I told you when you put the suitcases in the trunk to be careful, but I’m sure you just tossed them in . . . and then coming into Jersey you hit that pothole . . .”
She held a haltered black sheath aloft from its hanger so that it unfurled like the scroll of an old hear-ye, hear-ye royal proclamation and a plastic tube fell out and I picked it off the floor and, holding it close—getting a whiff of its bleachiness—read its label: slimmer . . . trimmer . . . anti-bump . . . topical-use only, do not insert in nose . . .
Sabine said, “I’m so sorry, Judy. It’s that stupid nose cream your mother had me buy. I wanted to get all these outfits for your college visits, so I called your mother for your sizes, and she told me to also get this stupid special nose cream from this stupid special pharmacy all the way at the end of Chinatown between the bridges.”
Judy screamed, “Mom, you told them?”
“I didn’t.”
“Mom, how would they know unless you told them?”
Walt said, “It was actually an herb store. At the counter in the back, there were turtles and frogs.”
“Mom, how could you?”
“But when I got closer, they were just shells and skins. No turtles or frogs left in them at all. It was foul. Your friends sent you there? Or sent us there? I’ll tell you this: if my friends had sent me there, they wouldn’t be my friends for long.”
“Mom, I can’t believe it. Why?”
Sabine said, “Your mother was telling us you don’t like your nose and you’re trying to get them to pay for the surgery.”
“Seriously?”
“She said you were snoring a lot and had bad airflow.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Obstructed airflow, she mentioned, sinus headaches, sinus infections. And you’re having trouble smelling.”
“Which might be a boon,” I said, “because this gunk smells rather harsh.”
Judy ignored me, bored into Edith, “I can’t trust you with anything.”
Edith, softly, with a tremor, “Judith Leah Blum, you ask me to get you this cream they only sell in the city, so I ask your grandparents to bring it up. Tell me, how could I hide what it’s for? How could I hide who it’s for? Should I have said I want the disappearing-nose-lotion for myself? Should I have said it’s for your father’s nose?”
“I don’t need to tell you how to lie, Mom.”
“And I shouldn’t have to remind you to say thank you—how about that? How about a thank you? To Oma and Opa. This vanishing-nose potion was very expensive.”
“I’m sure it’s cheaper than surgery,” Sabine said.
“Which as long as she’s living under my roof,” I said, “I’ll make sure she’ll never get”—to my regret, that was my vow, and the moment it left my mouth, Judy ran out to the hall and into her room, banging the door.
“It’s a horrible surgery, just horrible,” Walt put in, defending me to the echo. “I want you should mark my words about this, Edith. A nosejob is one of those operations they tell a woman is safe, but it turns out that after, she can’t have a baby.”
“Enough, Dad. Nothing you do to a nose can affect your having a baby.”
“You’d be surprised, Edith. You’d be very surprised. And I bet those creams cause cancer. I bet they cause nasal cancer and don’t even work.”
Sabine said, “Is someone going to help me?” She was scrabbling around laying out the blemished garments on the carpet, appraising their damage.
I said, “Whatever it does to noses, it definitely doesn’t work on things not noses.”
“Ruben,” Edith said.
“What?” Walt said, “He’s right . . . Rube’s right . . . If it works, why should it only work on noses? If it works, why haven’t the clothes shrunk? Why isn’t the suitcase now like a suitcase for a munchkin from Oz? Or maybe the clothes when we bought them were gigantic and we used a giant’s suitcase like for what’s his name? King Kong?”
“Dad, please.”
“Buying shrinking creams like magic beans! Have I got a bridge to sell you!”
And then he farted.
“You’re a pig,” Edith shouted and stomped out of the room to stand in supplication outside Judy’s locked door. Sabine watched her go, then returned to salvaging the clothes, picking up a suit’s top here and a mismatched bottom there and smoothing them out atop the shag, in the process getting the now-hardening, pasty goop on her hands and face and I had the thought that if this miraculous solution were any solution at all, if it worked on anything more than merely noses, then all of this scene in front of me, all of these intruders in the drama of my house, would soon shrivel and wither away.
“What are you doing just standing there?” Sabine yelled. “Start wiping off the excess before it dries.”
I realized I was still holding Walt’s towel, so I underhanded it back to him shortstop-style, pure Pee Wee Reese, and went downstairs for more, for kitchen towels and paper towels, and it wasn’t until the landing that I noticed the redolence of char. I dashed into the kitchen, the stink of cream mixing with the stink of meat, the brisket ashen in my nostrils.