“David, you are a pew-et,” Professor Vyvyan Finkel insisted, as we drank champagne in his apartment, toasting my success the day after Oliver Obverse opened. (That was how “poet” came out, in his ultra-British diction.) “A true comic pewet. You can be the Mark Twain of the theatre! The American Molière! Mark Twain too was a pewet, you know, an unappreciated prose pewet. You are a pewet, David.”
All this, from a man who seldom gave an A, who himself wrote sardonic essays and verse for Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly! Professor Finkel was a most imposing man, very tall, very lean, with thick graying hair and an enormous craggy nose. A demanding lecturer, a murderous marker, Professor Finkel had already taken quite a shine to the witty if pimply young Vicomte de Brag, but his admiration for Oliver Obverse was almost disorienting. Then Bob Greaves stunned me by remarking, after congratulating me on Oliver Obverse, that he thought I should be the next editor of Jester; after all, I had done the most work on the magazine, and I was a very amusing fellow. This was mighty decent and unexpected of Greaves. Was he feeling the impact of Roosevelt? We were in the famous first hundred days of the New Deal: the bank holiday, the Brain Trust, the fireside chats, the repeal of Prohibition, that whole carnival of swift gaudy change; and possibly a Jewish editor of Jester seemed in the spirit of the times.
Anyhow, elected I was. When I told this to Peter Quat, as we walked and chatted in Central Park, he made an exceptionally frightful face. “Ha ha! So it finally happened, hey? They couldn’t come up with a Deke who could read and write.” His eyes rolled in a fine frenzy. “Well, well, well! End of an era. The Dekes give way to the kikes. Sorry I missed it by two years. Congratulations, Vicomte.” Peter had gone to work for Harry Goldhandler at fifteen dollars a week; good pay in those days, but he was bitter and ungracious about it, and about most things. He had not even come to see Oliver Obverse, which hurt me.
As junior year ended, I was spending much time with Vyvyan Finkel at concerts and plays, and in his bachelor apartment too, listening to Beethoven records and talking about my future as a comic pewet. Vyvyan made all kinds of genteel passes at me, I realize now, but at the time I thought he was just being warm-hearted, or possibly moved by the music. Once a stiff ex-Briton dropped his reserve, I figured, that must be the friendly Anglo-Saxon attitude. Anyway, I became very fond of him, and of Beethoven, and of the notion of becoming the American Molière.
Much the same thing, though in reverse, happened to me around that time with Eleanor Kraft, the petite daughter of the Fairy Laundry’s lawyer, Mr. Theodore Kraft, a grim rich West End Avenue type. Eleanor was a flaming Communist, with braided fair hair and a big bosom. One evening we were together on a sofa, and Eleanor was saying that Roosevelt was a reactionary featherhead, his New Deal pure economic applesauce, and revolution was around the corner. As a shot of cowpox protects against smallpox, so exposure to Aunt Faiga had long ago immunized me to all Marxist carrying-on, and meantime there was this bosom, obtrusive under a russet cashmere sweater. So to vary the monotony I grasped at the nearer bump. Eleanor Kraft went right on excoriating Roosevelt, allowing my hand to stay where it was. No other reaction. I was dumbfounded. What next? I had no idea. All my dates with Dorsi Sabin had been useless as field training.
Still, as things stood I had then and there escaped the iron grip of adolescent gravity. I was in orbit, so to speak, with all systems go. What were your feelings at this historic moment, Commander Goodkind? Please speak into the microphone. Well, frankly, I was embarrassed. I was not smitten with Eleanor and had no great carnal urge to proceed. To reduce any embarrassment on Eleanor’s part, though she was not showing any, I started arguing, and threw some right-wing jargon at her. Eleanor zestfully returned a torrent of talk from the New Masses, while I felt her here and there, and she paid me no more mind than I ever did to Vyvyan Finkel. This sort of thing went on for some months before petering out. I remember little of it except that first orbital pass. I took Eleanor to dances and the theatre, but the nub of the matter was political contention on a sofa; the agitprop by Eleanor, the fondling by me.
Mr. Theodore Kraft, coming on me and Eleanor in the parlor, would make a noisy approach, giving me time to unhand her and let her straighten up. I suspect he was hoping something would come of the shenanigans on the sofa. These he tolerated, clearly figuring that no girl was ever made pregnant by a hand on her bodice; and he gave me a summer job as an office boy. Hanging around with the clerks, I discerned that the cases they worked on were much like Talmud issues, except that a legal point which the Talmud would put in a diamond-hard line would be diffused in a brief over twenty pages. Sometimes I joined the discussions, the clerks treating me as a sort of mascot.
At one point Mr. Kraft called me into his office and said he could see I had a mind for the law. He would write a letter to the Columbia Law School admissions office, and would consider bringing me into the firm when I graduated. Then, in a more confiding tone, he said he worried a lot about what Eleanor, addled by her Communist nonsense, would do with a quarter of a million dollars. She would all too soon be inheriting at least that much, he confided, in view of his own terrible health. Mr. Kraft looked in the pink, and in fact he lived another thirty years. I do believe he was trying to give old Eleanor a paternal assist. No chance. Eleanor was an undefended bosom and a Marxist broken record, not a love. But I did find out that summer how much I liked the law. It was my game, my oyster. Vyvyan Finkel’s Molière talk faded to a pallid fantasy. I was going to be a rich lawyer like Theodore Kraft.
So despite putting out a Jester every month, I charged head-down through my senior year toward admission to law school, plugging and plugging for A’s. Then one day the Varsity Show alumni chairman dropped into the Jester office. No usable script had yet been submitted, he said. If I would please write one, the committee would undertake to produce it. Imagine! A short year ago I had leaped trembling at a telephone, to hear this withered little dentist speak as from a burning bush to say Oliver Obverse had been accepted. And now this! Mark Herz was out of town, so I called Peter Quat. He invited me to the San Remo apartment, and we worked up a plot for the Varsity Show. I wrote it very rapidly. It was called Pincus Forever, and it was pure Quat in vein.
Basic idea: Columbia is going broke in the depression. Along comes Mr. Abie Pincus of Pincus Pot Cheese, and he makes a deal to “sponsor” the university. Pincus commercials interrupt every lecture; the football team wears pictures of the pot cheese jars on its uniforms; the alma mater song becomes “Pincus Forever.” His daughter, Faiga Pincus, falls for the captain of the football team, Kelly O’Kelly. And so on. Well, between the Jewish and Irish jokes, the fun about a bankrupt Columbia, and the burlesque commercials, the thing did get laughs. In the writing, I romped along unself-consciously in the Quat style. Abie Pincus, his wife, and his daughter were in fact a scabrous lampoon of my own family. Mom afterward said bravely that Pincus Forever reminded her of Sholem Aleichem. Pop was silent. After Oliver Obverse he had remarked that I might consider becoming a writer. He said not a word about this show. Nothing, ever.
I took Dorsi to the opening night, fool that I was. There were no white orchids this time, but tea roses, and we went in my father’s old car. She was as bright-eyed, sweet-scented, and magnificently gotten up as she had been at the Oliver opening. In fact there was nothing the least bit different about her. She had always been the same. “So, you’re the Vicomte de Brag,” she had greeted me, and that was all I had ever been to her. She had never pretended otherwise. The dips and zooms of my hopes, the sinking spells, the dizzying exaltations, I had generated all by myself, with my infatuated roller-coaster ride around and around an inert object.
At her door, after congratulating me on the show, she said—by way of summing up a discussion we had had in the car—“Well, David, whether you become a writer or a lawyer, you’ll accomplish a lot, that I know. You’re gifted. Good luck.” With that, she shook my hand, awkwardly put her cheek to mine as though we were dancing, and slipped into her apartment; leaving me dazed, with a feeling on my cheek of a radium burn. Dorsi was not given to such bursts of wild passion.
***
I was admitted to law school. Vyvyan Finkel was desolate. “But David,” he mourned, “you’re a pewet. Lawyers are common as cabbages. Pewets are comets.”
“I won’t be an ordinary lawyer.”
“No, you’ll be another Morris Pelkowitz.” He had not mentioned Pelkowitz before. “Oh, yes,” he responded to my inquiry, “Morris was one of my best students, and now he’s on the Law Review. His papers were always so thorough, and so dull! You’re a corner-cutting scamp, David”—Vyvyan patted my knee, in arch reproof of my wicked ways—“but you’re never dull.”
“I’ll be glad to make Law Review,” I said.
“A pewet on Law Review,” sighed Vyvyan. “What a waste!”
Walking out of Philosophy Hall on that beautiful day late in May, I wandered the campus at loose ends. It was Shavuos. I had gone to the temple with Pop the night before. I had taken my very last exam that morning, in Comparative Religion. Vyvyan was a fine teacher of comparative religion, but I doubt he knew Shavuos from Shrovetide. I might have cut the exam, but that didn’t seem courteous to old Vyvyan, who had gone all out for me in Phi Beta Kappa’s smoke-filled room, without success. Pincus had taken its toll of my senior marks.
Now there was only commencement ahead. The vacant rows of yellow folding chairs already filled the sunlit plaza in front of Alma Mater. The campus wore a holiday aspect. The Barnard girls in light dresses, strolling arm-in-arm with shirt-sleeved students, all looked seductive. Springtime and freedom were in the air, an inchoate ache was in my heart, and that radium burn tingled on my cheek, or seemed to. I had to stop at the law school to pay an advance fee. The check lay in my pocket. I dropped into a chair near the gilded Alma Mater, which I had first glimpsed as an awed Bronx yeshiva boy. Last thoughts before the plunge.
“Davey, I know you want to get the hell out of here,” I heard Mark Herz say, “but commencement isn’t until Tuesday.” He sat down beside me, peeling tinfoil off a chocolate bar. “Lunch,” he said. He looked as though he needed it, skinny and hollow-cheeked, with knobby wrists sticking far out of a shrunken seersucker jacket. The old battered hat, a mere rag, was tilted on the back of his head. “I hear your show was a hit. Nice going.”
“Did you get that California scholarship?”
“Dunno yet. Why are you loitering here?”
“What do you think of my going to law school?”
“What’s there to think about?”
“Three more years of classroom drudgery. I’ve been going to school since I was five years old. Has Peter told you about Harry Goldhandler? Peter says I might be able to get a job with him.”
“I don’t know.” Mark hungrily ate chocolate. “Peter Quat, now, will never be anything but a writer. Never has had any other idea. He may fail, he may loaf, he may just live on Dad’s money when Dr. Quat dies, but he’ll write or do nothing. It’s life to him.” Mark looked at me sharply. “Are you asking my advice?”
“Yes.”
“Get a profession. Put money in your purse. If you’re a writer, it should burst forth one day. I suspect it will. Meantime you’ll eat.”
“Well, then, walk me over to the law school,” I said, unaccountably cheered up. “I have to check in.”
Outside Avery Hall, Mark offered me his bony hand. We held the handclasp, looking each other in the eye. Mark Herz had been perhaps my best encounter at Columbia, I thought, yet what did I really know of the Man in the Iron Mask? He lightly struck my shoulder. “Stay in touch, Godol.”
That startled me. Once when we had gotten drunk on needle beer, I had amused him by describing the Minsker Godol era of my life, but he had not referred to it since. Off he strode, down the brick walk outside Philosophy Hall, past the big bronze replica of Rodin’s Thinker.
***
One Columbia moment after that has stayed with me. The night after commencement, a very warm night, a block party is going on under the street lights in front of Alma Mater. To the music of a small college band, students in shirt sleeves are dancing in the gutter with their girls. Among them is Bob Greaves, doing all his smooth dips, slides, twirls, shuffles that he performed in white tie and tails; his left hand is stiff and high, but of course has no white kid glove on it. I have never seen Bob Greaves again, or heard what became of him; and I cannot tell you why, but in truth my long Columbia adventure fades out with that picture—Bob Greaves being ultra-smooth in shirt sleeves, in the gutter under the street lamps, a little ridiculous and a little sad.