In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (12 page)

The lessons continued, however, in the same manner, day after day. April and May vanished easily enough, but June was tough on Douglas. So many things to do. Yet, despite the lack of time and weeks of wet weather he had perfected a curve ball that would give Ted Williams nightmares. Douglas was anxious to hold the stitching and slice down hard, then watch the ball act crazy as it nicked the strike zone of the makeshift batters’ cage he had set up behind the coal shed. Zaida would never understand why he fidgeted on the smooth bench, suffering each minute away from the pitcher’s mound.

“
Boray, p’ree, ha-gofen
,” Zaida said, completing the prayer over wine.

And that triggered Andy. He threw his Parker against the stove, the writing tool separating into its component parts. The tubular rubber well sizzled on the iron monster that raged even though it was June. First the odor of burning rubber, then the hiss of the ink as it evaporated in little puffs of blue smoke. The words flew from Andy’s mouth as if someone were inside throwing them out.

“What a dumb old man. Not just dumb, stupid. Dumb you can outgrow. Stupid is for life. To sit and read that damned gibberish all day and smoke those stinking cigars after. And where the hell does it get him? A moron, a nitwit. Oh, God, if anyone is up there, strike me dead right now if this is what I’ve got to look forward to. Even hell is better than stealing eggs from under chickens’ asses.”

Andy stood up from his chair and choked the thin arms of the rocker, a little more bowlegged than usual. He looked as if he felt awkward, like standing in a crowd while everyone else was seated. He sat down, too, and stared at the stove.

And that triggered Douglas, that and the airless, heated kitchen, compounded by Zaida’s gruff monotone.

“Goddamn you, old man, let me alone. Stop torturing me. I can’t wait until you’re the hell out of my life.”

After Douglas had finished he realized that he was doing the shouting and not Andy. He grew dizzy, glanced at Zaida’s face and tried to read it as he never had during Andy’s wildest assaults. The old man looked at him with elephant eyes, narrowing one of them. It happened so fast that it almost didn’t happen at all. Zaida quickly returned to the page.

Instead of returning there, too, Douglas looked at Andy. He expected a big-brotherly smile, a secret signal of acceptance in their exclusive society of atheists and shakers of authority’s rotten foundation. It shook Douglas when Andy rose slowly, was about to say something, hesitated and walked to them. Looking concerned, Andy placed his hand on Zaida’s shoulder. Without glancing up the old man patted Andy’s hand and continued the lesson. The boy, confused, sought answers in Andy’s face.

“Kid, you ever do that again and I’ll kick your ass out of here so fast it’ll take a week for the rest of you to catch up.”

Andy’s jaw looked as if it had been nailed shut and his eyes raked Douglas with the kind of intensity that might melt cast iron. There were no further outbursts from either end of the room for the rest of the summer.

Arlene took her seat on the high wooden chair close to the register. She sent Douglas a cold-fish stare that evaporated his reverie. He grew busier. Eggshells he had saved were the first thing he threw into a fresh coffee urn. They absorbed the fusel oil that gave coffee its bitter taste. It was one of Phil’s secrets that he shared with his protégé.

This time Andy took a prune danish with a fresh cup from the fresh urn, and traded glances with Arlene, slowly, carefully. She looked for Douglas’s eyes before submitting to Andy’s. Slowly she crossed and uncrossed her legs while sending the tip of her tongue along her upper lip. Douglas ignored everything while Andy, drinking her all in, missed nothing.

It became busy in the store but Andy was oblivious to the afternoon crowd. He had retreated into the sanctuary of himself.

It was almost nostalgic for Andy to sort things out, to piece together internal and external history and remember how it was politically in Sullivan County before the Japs attacked. A time of clean and simple issues. Capitalism was corrupt and in an advanced state of decay; labor was saintly. Every liberal worth the price of the
Nation
knew that the South was one big lynch mob and only the Soviet Union held high the beacon of freedom and democracy in the world. It was so deceptively simple then that he must have been simple-minded not to doubt it. Politics and simplicities—they never really go hand in hand.

He remembered how his across-the-road neighbors, the Ostermans, had shaped his thoughts at the beginning of the forties. Nice people, most thought. Lilly and Paul Osterman raised eggs, like everyone else, to survive, but they practiced Marxism to live. Country Marxists are different from city Marxists, Andy soon learned. The urban variety were sharp-tongued, strident. They moved at a rapid pace. They were always having meetings, strike committees, protests, fund-raising rallies; they had little time for nonsense. Their country cousins, Lil and Paul, were the friendly smile, sit-awhile-and-have-a-cup-of-coffee, what-do-you-think-of-the-rotten-weather kind of Marxists. They oozed friendliness the way maple trees exude sap in the spring. And they caught flies by the droves—himself, Douglas, and the top ten percent of the high school graduating class. Meetings at their house were always large, noisy affairs. Glasses clinking, a fire eating up pine knots, voices warm and friendly. Hayseed politics. Who’s who in Sullivan County and nobody important queuing up for Lilly’s deep-dish apple pie which was always prelude to supporting the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—those American idealists who fought the Fascists in Spain—or the setting up of a committee to organize the steam laundry or the hotel workers, or some other neglected group.

The Ostermans probably thought they had struck oil with him. He remembered brooding, being noticeably dissatisfied. And he was already going out with Delilah O’Brien, one of the colored girls who emptied the giant tumblers at the laundry. It was a baby step in Lilly’s lithe and seductive mind from sleeping with Delilah to the struggle for racial equality.

They stuffed him with literature as if he were a Sunday roaster. The Ostermans had Moscow-leaning pamphlets on every conceivable subject:
Farm Cooperatives in the Soviet Union, Sex—The Leninist View, Hollywood and Fascism, The Hoax of the New Deal, The Capitalist Exploitation of Motherhood
. Andy wondered if there was a Marxist-Leninist way to move his bowels.

One Friday night, after a most difficult soiree, during which the patently simple had suddenly grown complex, hosts and guest mutually decided to give each other up. With malice and forethought Andy asked the smiling, well-fed, well-liquored audience of doctors, students, Negroes and housewives the definition of an act whereby two countries agree to divvy a third one situated between them. Before being shouted down he asked if they saw Comrade Molotov of the U.S.S.R. shaking hands with Von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, in this morning’s
Times
, both grinning like well-fed wolves.

“Obstructionist,” Paul screamed, spilling good Scotch on the couch, when he realized that Andy was rubbing their noses in the Russo-German Pact of 1939 that made a doormat of Poland.

“Opportunist,” a young woman shouted, whom Andy remembered from a Sunday picnic where she had openly nursed a baby.

Those two words were among the harshest in the Marxist lexicon, Andy knew, signaling his expulsion from a society in which he had never felt comfortable, anyway. He would just have to find something else to do with his Friday nights. A shame, he was making excellent progress with Lilly’s sister, a ravishing brunette he felt had been especially conscripted to keep his interest in Socialism high. But they were so smug, so sure that they had all the answers, so willing to bend when the breezes from Moscow blew. He just had to tweak noses. Looking back Andy realized that that night was the high point and the end of his political life.

Afterward he still signed petitions and donated small amounts, selectively, to Lilly, who took with a seductive smile. But he also bought Girl Scout cookies without feeling committed to their cause either.

From the enormous distance of the four war years Andy realized that after the Ostermans he had narrowed his sights. He had given up searching for large, powerful enemies in Washington, in corporate boardrooms, in foreign capitals, and settled for three at arm’s reach. Until the day he was drafted he believed that all that was wrong with the world lived in his father, his mother and his grandfather. There was plenty of evidence. His father, Ben, an elfish man who gave Andy his size and shape, had a blindly cheerful disposition that condemned him.

“So what? A hunnert years from now it won’t mean borscht.”

Translated that meant let it all pass: your life, your mind, your ambition. The hell with bettering yourself, getting the chickenshit off your shoes. Stay and get buried alive.

And Momma. The cow, he called her. She always wore her hair in a bun that came to a point. One of two answers to anything. Often chosen at random. Both totally unacceptable.

“It’ll be all right. You’ll see, you’ll see.”

Her second answer was performed in pantomime, a shrug of the shoulders with eyes closed, that infuriating thousand-year-old
shtetl
answer of resignment to whatever happened. To starvation and the sweep of a Cossack’s sword. To the torch of the Inquisition and fixed quotas for Jews in medical schools. She alternated dumb optimism with stupid body motions. Andy wanted more than that. This was 1941, the Fascists owned half the world; the other portion was in an uproar and he wanted more than one-night stands and discontented wives in awkward places.

But Zaida, his grandfather, received the most abuse in Andy’s post-Osterman days. Zaida was the triumph of religion over life, of the past over the present. He was the supreme example of what happens when one fraction of human experience rises up to smother all the others. Like the Bolsheviks in Russia, like the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages. Zaida had a long beard, wore dirty clothes and carried an Old Testament that appeared to be more an extension of his left hand than an artifact. Saints breed more misery than sinners, which is probably why many of them are martyred. Andy was unable then to forgive Zaida his saintliness.

As exorcism, when Zaida walked the two miles to a
shul
that he often prayed in alone, Andy recalled racing up and down the road with Delilah in the truck and waving vigorously to the old man. Zaida had ignored them as he inched home. When he had finally reached the farm and sat on the porch reading the
Rambam
, a cube of sugar between his molars, sipping hot tea from a glass, Andy had forty-miled it up the driveway, slammed on the brakes and leaped out of the cab like a lunatic, and bolted the steps to his room to change his perfectly clean shirt. While Zaida read and calmly sipped his steaming tea.

Then Delilah would honk three or four times and Andy would perform the same act again down the steps and off the porch. Both he and Delilah laughed when he popped into the cab of the truck, rocketed out of the driveway and disappeared in a cloud of dust and smoke. While Zaida had never taken his eyes off the page or spilled a drop.

Andy went to war the first week of the new year. The Selective Service Board, composed of a group of townspeople too old to fight, decreed that the farm could carry on without him. Andy was overjoyed. This answered prayers for a way out. He had a clear picture in his mind of mock-saluting Douglas from the bus and grinning at him before they pulled out for Fort Dix. Almost four years later he returned, wondering why he had been so anxious to go. It was hardly worth the trip, personally, except for liberating the concentration camps. That made the difference. That was the part of the war that changed him.

Zaida died while he was in England practicing for D-Day, Momma the week his platoon broke out of a German trap at Saint-Lô and Ben when they marched into Aachen. He attended none of the funerals, there being greater need for his presence elsewhere.

By 1946 his restlessness and anger were gone the way some allergies disappear by adolescence. Andy did not attach a label to it. Seeing men die in combat and fleeing civilians cut down in error were explainable things, but Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald were something else. A whole race, his, scientifically blueprinted for extermination because of some mad theory of inferiority. Contemplating that dwarfed all his ambitions, his drive, his restlessness. A general contentment to leave things as they were replaced it. Psychic paralysis, a clever friend said. He returned home and was glad to be there, happy to raise chickens and watch the seasons change. He often thought of Zaida and had his regrets. Those were his bad days. He wore the old man’s sweater with the protruding suspender marks when it was cold and didn’t mind the winds at all.