“Well, this does it!” All sweaty, Peter Quat burst into the suite, waving a letter and a tennis racket, waltzing around the room and then handing me the letter. “I’m quitting. Now.”
The publisher was not exactly offering to buy Mother’s Milk, Peter’s fragment of a novel, but his letter did say that if the rest of the book lived up to the promise of the beginning, he would be interested. Peter Quat’s multitudinous admirers may wonder at a title of his that they haven’t come upon; but the fact is, Mother’s Milk was eventually rejected by nineteen publishers. Peter wisely shelved it.
The book was a youthful first effort, a steamed-up memoir of a summer he spent in Mexico. The central character, a lady schoolteacher of forty or so from Minnesota, is on a tour, and meets a college senior vacationing in Taxco. At first she seems a dried-up wistful prude, but she soon turns into a prophetic Quat foreshadowing of the heroine of the film Deep Throat. Old Peter broke fast from the starting gate. However, all that part was pretty tiresome, and certainly much ahead of its time. Ulysses was barely legalized then, and considered red-hot reading. The funny scene in the Tijuana whorehouse which closes Deflowering Sarah was, in an early crude version, the start of Mother’s Milk, and the best thing in it. Peter Quat usually salvages his good stuff, sooner or later.
Anyway, Peter packed up and left that same weekend, to hole up in his father’s cottage in Maine and work on Mother’s Milk. So ended abruptly our years of collaboration and living together. His parting words were much in the Quat vein. His eye fell on a porcelain cat from Hong Kong that Bobbie had given me, sitting on my desk. “Well, at least I’m seeing the last of that frigging Chinese dust-catcher,” said Peter, and he picked up his suitcases and departed.
That same week I ran into Mark Herz at a Jester reunion dinner, and he looked so gaunt and seedy, and ate the leathery roast beef so hungrily, that I figured he might be wanting employment. He said he was interested, being dead broke. The furrier uncle had recently sold his business, and Mark was on his uppers, though promised an eventual fellowship at Berkeley. Harry Goldhandler was skeptical of my notion of recruiting Mark, but said he would talk to him. Mark came when Goldhandler was very grumpily eating breakfast. A comedy program the night before had flopped, the stock market was down, and Henny Holtz’s audience rating was up. The main trouble, however, as Boyd managed to whisper to me, was the Alaskan gold mine. Klebanoff was in town again.
“Pass the shit,” Goldhandler said to Boyd, pointing to a platter of scrambled eggs. Mark winced and glanced at Mrs. Goldhandler, who sat placidly smiling beside her pretty little daughter. Goldhandler had had another, less severe heart episode and was no longer eating fried matzoh with his pork sausages, just plain scrambled eggs. He was taking it hard. He asked Mark only a few perfunctory questions. His face was as gray as the stubble besprinkling it, he had lost more teeth, and though he was thirty-seven, Mark would have believed me if I had said he was fifty.
“Well, Finkelstein,” Goldhandler said to me later in the office, while Mark waited downstairs, “it’s up to you. Bright guy, but an amateur.”
“Let me try Mark,” I said.
Klebanoff came into the office just then, a burly bewhiskered man in corduroys and a sweater. “Good news, the syndicate has come through,” was his gravelly greeting.
Goldhandler’s tired face lit up in a surprised gap-toothed smile. He dismissed me with a nod. “Terrific! Really? When did this happen?”
“I talked to Juneau this morning. None of us have to put in another cent. What happens after this—” As I went out, Goldhandler was listening to Klebanoff with the beaming look of Zaideh reading aloud Uncle Velvel’s letters about his legal successes.
“I thought you said he was amusing,” Mark remarked as we walked downtown.
“He was in a bad mood.”
“Oh, come on, Dave, honestly. ‘Pass the shit!’ The man’s a barbarian.”
“You don’t want to do this?”
Mark walked along in silence, in that peculiar hitching gait of his, almost a lope. He wore the old brown tweed jacket of Columbia days, patched at the elbows and frayed at the sleeve ends. “I’m in no position to pass it up. I just don’t know if I can be of any use to you. Anyway, I’m counting on that fellowship, so it will only be until the summer.”
Mark moved into the suite, and went to work on gags. It was an awkward situation. Here I was, ever so junior to the Man in the Iron Mask, yet making more money, and in charge. The Man now had a job by my sufferance, and was living in a luxury suite at my cost, for I refused his offer to contribute to the rent. Nor was he much of a joke-writer. He was a university wit, and there is a difference, of which he was well aware.
“You’re doing it all,” he said to me after a couple of weeks. “I’m not contributing, and I feel like a leech.”
But I urged him to stay on. He did have funny notions, and it was useful to talk out the drafts with him. Though the Bobbie anguish had abated—I had found other girls, nobody like Roz Hoppenstein and none of consequence to this story—I did not yet want to live alone in April House. For one thing, I did not trust myself not to ask Bobbie back there, in a weak moment. Besides, Mark Herz was a mighty pleasant roommate after Peter Quat.
I haven’t complained here about old Peter, but now I can mention that he had been rather a trial to live with. For one thing I have never known a person who farted so much, or who so perversely regarded farting as an accomplishment, rather than a weakness. Peter would crow happily after letting an explosive fart, like a hen upon laying an egg. You can tell from his books that he retains some odd fixation on breaking wind. Also, he was very strange in the mornings. He would wallow around in the bedclothes for about two hours, singing snatches of old songs and giggling to himself. He would then get up and shave, laughing crazily and making sounds like “Breep breep! Poop de broop poop!” But he was not really merry. On the contrary, if I spoke to him before he had eaten breakfast and read through The New York Times, he would give me a frightful snarl, uncovering his teeth like an attack dog. You had to get used to Peter Quat. I’ve often thought that may be one reason why he keeps changing his women every couple of years, like cars. The girls may plain wear out.
***
Returning from a morning walk under the blooming cherry trees, I let myself into the suite and heard Yiddish being spoken a mile a minute; and it was nobody but Mark Herz talking! In the living room with him sat a bearded little man in a yarmulka and a plump gray-headed woman, who was mopping her eyes.
“Meine elter’n,” said Mark with a harassed look at me; that is, my parents.
Mark had never before used a Yiddish word in my hearing. Only because he had been a Beta Sig had I known he was Jewish. To the observances and holidays he had been indifferent; not hostile like Peter, not satiric, just blank; in this, as in speech, dress, and general air, a very Deke. His attitude toward all religion was like Vyvyan Finkel’s; totally detached, condescending, and cold. Vyvyan had called Mark “his best student ever” in comparative religion.
His father started to greet me in broken English. Mark abruptly interrupted, “Er farshteit,” that is, he understands; and he went on to me in Yiddish, “Can you lend me a hundred dollars?”
“Glad to do it, Mark,” I replied, same language.
The father said excitedly, “Why do you bother your friend? The bank will lend us the money, you only have to come home and co-sign the papers.”
Mark told his father he was not going to drag out to Coney Island to get involved with that bank again; he already owed too much there. I sat down at my desk with the checkbook. The mother asked me shyly how it was I knew the language. Hadn’t I been born in America? Answering her, I could not but note how halting my Litvak talk was, compared with Mark Herz’s natural Galician flow. He endorsed my check and gave it to his father, saying, “Now, Papa, you can bury Aunt Rose. My mother’s sister died this morning, Dave. A benevolent association is supposed to pay for her funeral and her grave, but the records are all messed up. The money isn’t forthcoming, and there Aunt Rose lies in a Far Rockaway funeral parlor.”
“Such a scandal, such a disgrace!” said the father. He put the check in his pocket and shook my hand. “You have a great mitzva. Burying the dead is a holy thing, and you’ve taken a part in our family duty.”
When Mark came back from seeing his parents to the elevator, he said, “Well, I guess that’s that. I stay on the job and work it off.”
“Your Yiddish is damn good,” I said in candid wonder.
Mark made a wry face. “It ought to be.” He rattled off in Aramaic, in perfect yeshiva chant, the start of the Talmud order Damages: “The major categories of damages are four: the ox, the pit, the grazer, and the fire-setter.” Then in his natural sardonic English: “I’m off to see Aunt Rose planted. That draft of the Fanny Brice skit is on your desk. I suspect it’s worthless.”
That night we were both typing away when Bobbie Webb telephoned me in tears and panic. This time it was no ploy, she was clearly distraught about her dog. Mark paid no attention to my conversation, though he gave me an odd glance as I went on trying to soothe her. On an impulse, when I hung up, I pulled out Bobbie’s picture—the one in my diary now—from under a lot of scripts in a drawer, and showed it to him.
“That’s her?” All he knew was that I had problems with a girl.
“That’s her.”
He shook his head over the picture. I put a bottle of scotch and glasses between us, and told him my story as we drank. It took a while.
“Question,” I wound up, “do I help her with the dog?”
Mark just looked at me, musing.
“Well, Mark?”
“The student prince and the barmaid,” Mark said.
“What?”
“The oldest of old stories, Davey. Pure operetta.”
“I don’t follow you. Bobbie’s no barmaid, she’s a dazzling Broadway beauty, and I’m no student prince, I’m a wretched gagman.”
Mark poured very stiff drinks for both of us. “You’re the Minsker Godol.”
“Ye gods, I told you that only once, when we were drunk on needle beer. How can you remember?”
“Davey, I was a Godol.”
And Mark opened up and talked about himself and his family. He did it that once, and never again. Nor did he speak Yiddish again, not around me. Just that one night, the iron mask came off as we finished the bottle of scotch.
Mark was born in a Polish village outside Cracow, he told me. His father was the town shokhet, the kosher slaughterer. The family came to America when he was four, and his father started as a shokhet in Far Rockaway. But he was so embittered by what he considered irreligious fraud in the American kosher meat trade that he put away his knives, opened a candy store in Coney Island, and gave Hebrew lessons. He remained rigidly pious. Mark, for a while the apple of his eye, rebelled, left the yeshiva, and applied on his own for a scholarship to a Manhattan private school. The school took in a few poor bright boys to broaden its outlook and raise its average, and Mark was a natural for admission. He went through Columbia on scholarships, too. The fraternity waived his initiation fee. He never had any money at all.
His break with his father came over a triviality. Our Sabbath afternoon liturgy includes a long recital of sixteen psalms, beginning with Psalm 104; opening words, in Hebrew, Borkhee Nafshee, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.” The entire recital is therefore called by that name. Mark one afternoon neglected to say the sixteen psalms, and absorbed a beating; then deliberately refused to say them, and got another beating. Then he did say them, for the last time in his life. Next day he ran off to the flat of a married sister. She took him in, and it was years before he entered his parents’ home again. The father was now resigned to Mark’s apostasy, and even took a sour pride in his academic honors and awards, but they had never been really reconciled.
“So, due to Borkhee Nafshee,” I said, with a scotch-loosened tongue, “the world lost a Godol, and gained an out-of-work physics prof.”
“Not at all. I’d been sick of it all for a long time. Borkhee Nafshee is the greatest nature poem ever written, but my father made me detest the very sound of those two words. The lickings were a handy excuse to break free.”
“You don’t miss it?”
“Miss what?”
“Talmud? Bible? Yiddish?” Mark kept shaking his head. “It’s all meaningless to you? I’m not observant myself, but still—”
“You’ll be observant,” said Mark. “You’re just misbehaving.” He pointed a thumb at Bobbie’s picture. I laughed uncertainly and he went on, “You’ll see. You had a different upbringing. If my father had been wiser and kinder, I could conceivably be a very advanced Talmudist now and nothing else. A sterile pursuit, but I used to love it. He did me the greatest favor of my life, by beating me up for not saying Borkhee Nafshee.”
“You don’t believe? Not in anything?”
With a chilly stare, Mark poured himself the last of the scotch, half a glassful, and took a long gulp. “Believe? I know things. Not much, not enough, but what I know, I know.”
“What can you know about God?” I was drunk enough for such talk. “You either believe or you don’t.”
“You’re quite mistaken,” said Mark, somewhat slurring his words. “You can know almost anything about God, providing you put the right questions to Him. You have to learn how to put the questions, and they have to be accurate and airtight.”
Mark finished his scotch, hiccupped, and went on, “Now my father, for instance, doesn’t know that two atoms of hydrogen bind with one of oxygen to form a water molecule. Yet it’s God’s truth, and an important one. You don’t know it, either, Davey. You believe it, because you read it somewhere, or a teacher told you. I know it. I’ve put the question, and He answered, straight out. God will answer a high school boy. He asks only that you use common sense, pay very close attention to Him, not be sloppy, and count and measure correctly. God ignores sloppy questions. Sloppiness is the opposite of Godliness. God is exact. He is marvellously, purely exact. Theology is all slop. Moses gave the best answers you could get, three thousand years ago, and he was no theologian.” Mark stretched and stood up. “Christ, am I drunk. Poor Aunt Rose, I liked her. I’ll miss her. Good night. How was my Fanny Brice sketch, by the way?”
“I fixed it up some, and sent it to Goldhandler.”
“I see. You passed the shit. Well done,” said Mark. “And look here, you’ve got to help the barmaid with her dog. Noblesse oblige, prince.” He stumbled off to bed.