September 1973
Sandra telephoned this morning at nine A.M. Israel time. I guess she forgot that she would be startling us awake at three in the morning. I heard her voice as in an echo chamber, “Hello, hello—it’s me, Sandra!” Then the line went dead.
Jan and I sat up in bed, pretending we weren’t shaken, waiting for another ring. The Palestinian terrorists are on a rampage lately, blowing up Israeli buses, tossing grenades into marketplaces, and the like. They took over a school, too, recently, and killed some kids before the army got in, rescued the rest of the kids, and finished off the terrorists. And there our daughter sits in the Fields of Peace, right at the corner of the Gaza Strip and Sinai.
It was a damned long ten minutes before the phone rang again. Jan pounced on it. No problem. Sandra is fine. She has simply decided to postpone her graduate work for a year, and stay on there. She has talked to her department head at Johns Hopkins and has his okay. She hasn’t changed her mind about Israel one whit, she assured us, but the material for the thesis keeps opening up. She is on to something, and doesn’t want to scamp it.
I spoke to her and asked what she thought of the terror raid on the school. She hesitated, then said that most of the deaths were the army’s fault, they botched it; and that anyhow, no such things would happen if Israel would give back the territories. I didn’t argue, though before Israel won the territories, such things happened much more often. Sandra was then entering her teens, and falling in and out of love once or twice a month, which absorbed her attention. She has since mastered world affairs, and has nothing but contempt for my opinions. As for my working for the President, she has now and then hinted that I may be criminally insane. I thanked her for keeping us informed and asked her to give Abe Herz my regards. With an indistinct hostile mutter, she rang off.
There’s nothing we can do about Sandra. At twenty-one she is off on her own steam. Nor, indeed, have we had much to say about her doings since she was seventeen. The power of our purse over her is nil. We tried that once. She merely went and got herself a job as a nighttime receptionist in a Boston restaurant. When we visited the place and saw all the horrible leers she was getting in her tight low-cut yellow dress—in my view the place was patronized entirely by rapists, sadists, voyeurs, and other assorted male sickies—Jan and I caved in and restored her allowance. No, let Sandra do as she pleases.
What troubles me about that phone call, beyond the chronic Sandra puzzle, is the thought of the terrific changes that have engulfed the world since my Columbia days. That was when Lee went to Palestine. By boat and train, it took her a month. Today you get on an El Al plane, have your dinner, read a book, grab a snooze, and there you are in Tel Aviv. We chat with our daughter, over there in the Holy Land, as though she were in her Wellesley dorm. Mark Twain described the land as a plague-ridden stony waste of ruins, and now it’s as full of cars roaring on highways through lush green orange groves, farmlands, and vineyards, as Southern California; which indeed it is getting to resemble far too much. Of what interest, I’m wondering, can all that pile of pages about Columbia, the Columbia of forty eternal years ago, possibly be?
Columbia still looks almost the same. They’ve plugged up one side of South Field with a big new library, and stuffed in yet another building where the tennis courts were. That’s about all. The whole mise-en-scène of my childhood has vanished—Aldus Street, Camp Eagle Wing, the Fairy Laundry, the Minsker Synagogue, Townsend Harris Hall—all gone, gone with the wind, gone like Twain’s Mississippi of steamboats and slaves. But Columbia stands, and Mark Herz and Peter Quat are still part of my life. Last year I went to the Columbia commencement, because Mark got an honorary degree and spoke at Class Day. There was Alma Mater still holding out those gilded arms, and I sat in a back row on South Field, feeling like a character out of The Time Machine; especially when an occasional youth in a yarmulka ambled by.
Well, let’s come to a decision here. I’ll cut the Columbia stuff to ribbons, just give you a glimpse of my college years and race on. I can’t entirely skip Columbia. Not possible. For what was our Yisroelke doing, living in a Central Park South hotel suite on his own at twenty-one, and squiring around an enchanting showgirl? Answer: he became a gagman. And how did the Minsker Godol undergo such a bizarre metamorphosis? Answer: through working for Harry Goldhandler, the gag czar. And how on earth did that come to pass? Answer: through my encountering Peter Quat and Mark Herz at Columbia.
***
Time, September 1930, just before the college year starts. Scene, the Columbia gymnasium, where some four hundred freshmen are crowding into rows of wooden seats to take placement tests. Behind me, an amazed and displeased baritone bellow: “Iggy! What are you doing here?” I turn.
Towering over me, looking down at me with distaste—rather like Gulliver at a sassy Lilliputian on his palm—is Monroe Biberman. He looks taller and more pimply than Cousin Harold. He has the bluish jaws of one who shaves twice a day; indeed, he was already shaving his upper lip when we were collaborators. At all points he is dressed like a college-movie extra: obligatory contrasting jacket and slacks, woolen blue-and-red tie, dirty white shoes. I am only dimly aware of dress as yet, but I can recognize the fashion-plate effect, though I have no idea where one buys such clothes; certainly not at Michaels’.
“Hi, Monny.” After all, we are now Columbia men together, aren’t we? Formerly I called him Monroe, but he was always “Monny” to those Arista fellows.
“So! It is you. I’d know that suit anywhere.”
The purple suit, of course. I take no offense. In this sea of giant strangers, I’m delighted to find an old acquaintance, though he too is now so huge. Happily I blurt the first thing that comes to mind. “I thought you were going to Harvard.”
A black look crosses Biberman’s face. He takes this as a riposte for the remark about the purple suit, for his next words—I remember this snatch of dialogue all too well—are uncalled for. “How the hell did they let you in here?”
And I in my obtuse innocence accept this as joshing, and adopt his vein. “God knows. I was in Group Four. Somebody sent me the wrong letter by mistake, I guess. What happened, Monny, didn’t you get into Harvard? I thought it was all set.”
“Decided I’d rather stay in New York,” Biberman snarls down at me. “I was in Group One.”
“I suppose your brother’s pretty disappointed,” I say—again, I swear, meaning no offense. Biberman’s brother goes to Harvard. Monny had an early interview there, and afterward spread the word around school that he was in. Biberman’s expression changes, suggesting Frankenthal’s old Dracula look. He turns on his heel, goes off, and sits down. I think of following him and silting beside him—after all, us Townsend Harris guys should stick together—but where he puts himself there is no room for me.
Columbia College must have been as thoroughly ruined for poor Biberman when he spotted my purple suit as Longfellow Avenue was for Mama when the men showed up with Bobbeh’s sauerkraut. I daresay I embodied his rejection from Harvard. Monny had been president of Arista, and managing editor of the yearbook and the Stadium. He lived on Park Avenue, below Ninety-sixth Street. Why didn’t he make it into Harvard? Peculiar place, Harvard. Cousin Harold’s son Kris just got admitted to Harvard. Kris has bright wavy red hair down to his shoulders, he does a lot of sky-diving, and he stands on his head two hours a day. There is nothing he hasn’t smoked, except possibly tobacco. He intends to practice child psychiatry, and—but I wander. No time for that.
Waiting in the wings are Peter Quat and Mark Herz.
***
“Iggy!”
Biberman again. Two months later. Same displeased tone. I have seen very little of him. No doubt he is having trouble, as I am, adjusting to the staggering load of work. We are in the Varsity Show rehearsal room on the fourth floor of John Jay Hall, where all student activities are centered. Freshman aspirants for the daily newspaper, the Spectator, are crowding into the big barren cork-floored room. Biting on a big new black pipe, Biberman sends up a column of blue smoke and red sparks, and growls at me through the conflagration, “What are you doing here? The call is for guys with previous experience.”
“I edited the Camp Maccabee Menorah,” I reply.
Biberman casts his eyes up to the ceiling, in despair at my imbecility.
Yet we are both accepted. Everybody is. We soon learn why. Freshmen serve as printer’s devils, carrying the day’s copy downtown to the plant on the Bowery, and then staying up all night, amid the rattling linotype machines and the thumping presses, to help a senior editor get the paper out. It is rough going. The freshman candidates dwindle in a month to about ten. Biberman hangs on. So do I.
It is easier for Biberman. He can ride the subway from his home to the printing plant in twenty minutes. I have to forgo my dinner, stay downtown, and subsist on tuna fish or peanut butter sandwiches, for I am still eating by the rules; or else I must travel to the North Bronx for a hot meal, and return all the way downtown to the press, and at dawn ride back to Pelham for a few hours’ sleep.
Why, then, do I stick it out? Well, for one thing, the night work turns out to be fun. I smell printer’s ink. I begin to smoke cigarettes. I come to know the deepest fatigue, and the wonderful surge of second wind that comes with coffee at two A.M. in an all-night diner, and a slice of greasy pie. (Made with lard? Oh, probably not.) Dawn turns the dirty windows gray. The Spectator comes off the press, with headlines I’ve improvised, pages I’ve helped the night editor to dummy up; and a line on the masthead, in boldface, Associate Night Editor for this issue: I. David Goodkind. Reward enough!
Jan persuaded me years ago to give up cigarettes. But if I light one now and jet smoke through my nostrils the way I did when I was fifteen—thinking that it made me look thirty—the sting in my nasal passages will instantly bring back the smell of the printer’s ink, the taste of the coffee, the greasiness of that pie (probably made with lard, I can concede now); and the exaltation of seeing my name, freshly printed and still damp, above the editorial column of the Columbia Spectator.
But the main reason for hanging on is none of that. It is the “Off-hour,” the daily humor column, a mix of wisecracks and light verse, alternately signed by two pen names: The Man in the Iron Mask, and PDQ. Very early on, Peter Quat’s name on the masthead catches my eye. There can’t be two fellows named Peter Quat. So that odd fish from Camp Eagle Wing is now a contributing editor of the Spectator! He must be PDQ, and I’m hoping this literary giant will remember me and be friendly.
I first catch sight of the great PDQ crouching in a blue overcoat at a corner typewriter reserved for contributing editors. I barely recognize him. The gaunt Bunk Eight misfit has become a young man. His face has lengthened, and the bones stand out. His head rests on his hand, and his forehead is clutched in two spread fingers, in creative agony. He sits up, pecks a few quick lines with index fingers, then falls back into the crouch. A showy performance, not unexpected from Peter Quat. His curly black hair falls down on his forehead when he crouches, yet two receding bays in his hairline already show.
I do not dare to interrupt the artist at work, but I am at the copy desk when he hands in his column. “Hi,” I venture with a humble smile, taking the yellow pages, “I’m Davey Goodkind.”
Peter Quat glowers blankly at me as though I have said something intolerably impudent, idiotic, and revolting; buttons up his overcoat and walks out. It seems my name has not rung a bell.
The Man in the Iron Mask is a junior named Mark Herz. He sends in his copy from the Beta Sigma Rho house, and it is midterm before I lay eyes on him. On a blizzardy day I come into the newsroom, shaking off snow, and espy somebody new at the contributors’ desk. He sits up straight, typing steadily with both hands. A stained battered brown hat, the crown pinched into a triangle, is tilted back on his head. A cigarette droops in his mouth. I stand staring until he turns and squints at me, through smoke curling up into his eyes. He has a round face, short brown hair, and his look is cold and thin-lipped.
I keep sneaking glances at him as I work at my own little story. He blue-pencils his pages briskly and drops them at the copy desk. “Thanks, Mark,” says the night editor. He begins laughing over Herz’s pages, as the Man in the Iron Mask puts on a very ragged duffel coat and chain-lights a cigarette. I am staring again, and Mark Herz shoots me a keen glance, his head sideways as he drags on his cigarette. He leaves, and I sit at my typewriter unaccountably stirred up.
***
Freshman year whirls by. No doubt I am acquiring an education: Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Milton, Dante, John Stuart Mill, Thorstein Veblen, and none of your little blue books, either, but ponderous tomes; and zoology, and psychology, and trigonometry, and French drama, and God knows what else. But all that is by the way. The main thing is “Off-hour.”
The Man in the Iron Mask and PDQ both accept contributions. I am in a hot race with Biberman to have a poem accepted. I have at last realized that Monny Biberman is down on me; not that I understand, but that seems to be the way he wants it. Well, as a Columbia freshman I may be a confused Bronx Jew, trying to get my bearings in this bewildering antechamber to the Outside; but man to man, I’m ready for Monroe Biberman. Let him understand, in due course, that he has taken on the Minsker Godol!
Clearly I need a nom de plume for my witty stuff. I consider “D’Artagnan,” in Herz’s Dumas vein. That seems too straight. I bethink me of “The Vicomte de Bragelonne”; and in a great flash of inspiration, I hit on my immortal Columbia alias—the VICOMTE DE BRAG. Even nowadays, if I go to some Columbia affair, one or another bald paunchy wag will hail me with, “Hi, Vicomte,” and perhaps with vast wit add, “Comment ça va?”
Actually, Monny wins the sprint with six lines of doggerel, dully signed “M.B.,” about an adored female who turns out to be a cow. I have been pelting both columnists with poems left on the message board. Quat drops them, after a glance, in the wastebasket. The ones that go to Herz at the Beta Sig house vanish into a void. One day the Man in the Iron Mask himself saunters into the news room, looking very weary and shabby in his pinched sweat-stained hat and ragged duffel coat, from which his wrists redly protrude. He takes a poem of mine from the message board and reads it. I guess he feels my eyes burning at him; for though the room is full of fellows clattering at typewriters, he walks up to me.
“Are you the Vicomte de Brag?”
“Yes!”
“Not bad. Keep it up.”
A week later I break into his column with a ballade, a four-stanza French form with a tough rhyming scheme. My God, when I open the Spectator and see my poem there, taking up half the column, signed Vicomte de Brag! And a week later Quat runs a rondeau of mine! Life is beginning.
Next time I see Quat at his desk, I approach him proudly and declare, “Hi, I’m the Vicomte de Brag.” He gives me that same blank freezing stare. I add, “Uh, thanks for printing my poem.”
“Sword doesn’t rhyme with broad,” says Quat, “except in the Bronx.”
Wow.
For a long while after that I roll my r’s almost like a Scotsman, to mask my low origin. I’m self-conscious about that missing Bronx r, in fact, to this day, for I still tend to drop it when I talk quickly and naturally. Not that I really give a damn; but that barb the great PDQ stuck in me never has worked quite loose.
***
By the end of freshman year, the Vicomte de Brag is riding high in “Off-hour,” and M.B. has fallen silent. In no other way, however, have I outdistanced Monroe Biberman. On the contrary, he is the leading freshman candidate. He gets assigned to big stories. He becomes assistant theatre critic, sees plays for nothing, and writes snotty reviews in imitation of George Jean Nathan, the preeminent snotty critic. The editor of Spectator, Randy Davenport, a remote short dour Theta Xi, and the managing editor, a pallid Beta Sig Jew who really runs the paper, always in shirt-sleeves and a green eyeshade, both show favor to Biberman: smiles, praise, and exemption from lowly errands.
As, for instance:
One rainy blustery day in March, Randy Davenport emerges from his inner office, when only Biberman and I are in the news room. “You,” says Davenport, crooking a finger at me. “My mother is expecting this. Take it down to this address.” He hands me a bulky envelope. Why me? Why not Biberman? But it couldn’t possibly be Biberman. If I pronounced my r’s and lived on Park Avenue below Ninety-sixth Street, I might try facing Davenport down. This errand is not newspaper work. But Spectator is my life at Columbia, and Randy Davenport is the big cheese. As I struggle into my too-short yellow slicker, a relic of boys’ camp days, Davenport genially commends Biberman on his snotty demolition of Eugene O’Neill’s latest play.
The address is on West End Avenue, below Ninety-sixth Street. We are talking of forty years ago, when those handsome huge apartment buildings still had mostly gentile occupants. I take a trolley downtown, and trudge through the rain to Davenport’s address. A uniformed doorman under the canopy looks me up and down, taking in my yellow slicker, my wet head, the bulky envelope under my arm, and—I suspect—my Minsker Godol features.
“Service entrance over there.” He jerks a thumb at a side gate.
My reaction is from the gut. “I’m no errand boy. I’m a friend of Randy Davenport. This is for his mother.”
He opens the door for me. I get another head-to-toe inspection by the elevator man before he admits me to his car. A little gray-headed lady opens the Davenport door a crack, and peers out with one eye, pokes forth a bony hand, and takes the package without a word. Behind her, I can just glimpse a huge apartment and a stained-glass window in the foyer, before she shuts the door in my face.