Just One Catch (4 page)

One night at Grossinger's, “I met the girl,” Heller wrote in his memoir. Actually, he met the girl's mother, who then introduced him to the girl. “At a dance contest one night, my grandmother asked my father to be her partner,” says Heller's daughter, Erica. “They won the contest and a bottle of champagne and went back to my grandmother's table and met my mother, who was initially underwhelmed. My grandmother had [first] met him while they were checking in, and sensed something special” that might appeal to her daughter.

Shirley Held was a twenty-one-year-old redhead who loved to laugh and joke dryly, a quick, subtle wit. She was svelte, relaxed, and gorgeous. A product of Brooklyn, she now lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side with her parents, both of whom took to Heller immediately. Like everyone else, they were impressed with his officer's uniform. “They had each grown up very poor so they had no snobbery,” says Erica. “Dad was ambitious and had a plan.” The Helds liked the sound of that. Heller's plan was to pursue the writing for which his teachers had always praised him (he'd been considering this more and more seriously ever since co-opting his tent mate's typewriter in Corsica) and to begin by going to college to study literature, now that the G.I. Bill had put college within reach. To be a literary man was to be something quite respectable in the America of the 1940s, especially among well-read Jewish families, for whom the tradition of biblical study had instilled a reverence for language, and for whom achievement in the arts was a sign of intellectual accomplishment as well as successful assimilation into the culture. (Just a few miles from Grossinger's, at Grine Felder, a bungalow resort colony, Isaac Bashevis Singer had recently worked with his older brother, Israel, and a man named Zygmunt Salkin to reinvigorate Yiddish theater on American soil by staging plays and forming a conducive atmosphere for literary activity.)

Shirley's father, Bernard, whom everyone called Barney, was partner in a garment company on Seventh Avenue, specializing in ladies' sportswear. “He was very handsome, elegant, soft-spoken, a mensch,” says Erica Heller. Right away, he “loved my father.” So did his wife, Dottie, who wasted no time in pushing him toward her daughter. In the heady, urgent atmosphere of this Jewish retreat, with relief in the air after many years of war, but with Hitler still running loose in Europe, plans were made quickly, surely, and without fuss. For the Held family and Joseph Heller, it was love at first sight.

Dottie seized every opportunity to bring the young couple together, with help from the social director, also called the “tummler.” The word
tummler
is “derived from tumult-maker,” according to comedian Joey Adams, who once worked as a social director in the Catskills. It is “Castilian Yiddish for a fool or noisemaker who does anything and everything to entertain customers so that they won't squawk about their rooms or food.” Tummlers often worked as waiters. Between meals, they sang and danced, told jokes, mingled with the guests, and worked informally as
shadchans,
or marriage brokers.

Saturday nights gave tummlers—and, in this case, Dottie Held—plenty of chances to squeeze a girl and boy together in an air of carefree gaiety. At Grossinger's, Saturday nights were star-studded extravaganzas, featuring big-name entertainers like Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Alan King, or Eddie Cantor. Often, the hotel would engage a vaudeville troupe, and audience members would laugh at their own eating habits, speech patterns, professional anxieties, and sexual attitudes as parodied by the actors in skits that turned self-recognition into self-hatred, self-deprecation, and finally into gentle self-acceptance: the process, itself, a parody of the stages of assimilation, an acknowledgment of the confusion sparked by a desire to remain individualistic yet fit into something larger. This desire was, again, like donning and shedding a mask at the same time. Yiddish theater scholar Ellen Schiff wrote that vaudeville acts in the first half of the twentieth century always “included a whole variety of ethnic caricatures which exploited the traits familiarly associated with … the Irish, Germans, French, Swedes, and … [that] burlesque concoction, the stage Negro. The Jew figured as an ethnic among ethnics,” and was therefore seen by audiences (including Jews) as not quite “white.” In fact, Jewish entertainers performed, with remarkable frequency, in blackface, a mask that let them be in on the jokes along with mainstream America but also marked them as the
butt
of the jokes.

Heller laughed as loudly as anyone on Saturday nights—tickled by Shirley Held's charming presence—but he couldn't help but be aware that he was living a vaudeville skit: Back in Coney, his military costume made him terribly self-conscious, fearful of casting himself as someone he was not, a war hero; here at Grossinger's, the smart dress gave him freedom to play the hero to the hilt among happy strangers, and to win the heart of a girl (after all, this
particular
skit was a comedy).

And he was determined for it to reach its happy ending. In his spare moments, he worked hard on understanding story conventions, and getting them right. By the time “I returned to the city [Shirley and I] were already going steady,” he wrote. “I had great expectations.”

Shirley's family occupied a multiroom apartment at 50 Riverside Drive, an elegant sixteen-story structure built in 1930 of light beige brick, overlooking the Hudson. The apartment had wooden floors and French doors. Dottie's taste was spare and immaculate, and she would pass her flair for interior decorating on to Shirley.

For the next several days, Heller spent more time in the city, courting Shirley, meeting her friends, and enjoying meals at her family's home, than he did in Coney Island. And then he was assigned to go to Texas.

*   *   *

SIGNS IN THE WINDOWS
of the jewelry stores in downtown San Angelo advertised specials on engagement rings. Heller passed by them, fear and skepticism bumping up against his great expectations. Just what
was
this “sugar and tinsel dream of life” he seemed to be rushing toward with all these other boys? It had been easier to imagine the dream, weeks earlier, at Grossinger's, surrounded by laughter, food, and pretty girls. Here on a military base, amid dust and howling wind, with planes lurching unsafely all around him, the dream appeared to be so much hoopla, nothing more than a stage performance.

What do you want? the wife asked the husband in the short story he kept tinkering with. “A pitcher of beer,” the husband replied flatly. Beyond that, he didn't want to think.

In his memoir, Heller says he corresponded regularly with Shirley while stationed in Texas. These letters seem to be lost.

One afternoon, almost as a lark, he slipped the pages of the latest draft of “I Don't Love You Any More” into an envelope, which he addressed to Whit Burnett at
Story
magazine. He had read in some newspaper or army publication that
Story
was looking for fiction by returning servicemen for a special issue. Heller had never seen a copy of
Story,
but he thought he remembered an old pal from Coney Island, Danny Rosoff, talking about the magazine. At school, Rosoff used to drop the names of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, though Heller suspected his buddy had only heard of these writers but not read them.

Story
had a circulation of about twenty thousand and boasted work by William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Mann, and one of Heller's favorites, William Saroyan. Burnett had started the magazine in the early 1930s with his then wife, Martha Foley, who went on to edit the annual series
Best American Short Stories.
In March 1940, the magazine published the first piece by an unknown author named J. D. Salinger, who had taken a writing course at Columbia with Burnett (showing very little promise in the beginning, according to the teacher).

Heller had no idea how long it would take to hear back from the editor. He tried to forget about the story, but on his rides into town, his eyes would stray to the magazine racks in the drugstores.
Story
was never among the colorful publications—instead, there were
Time, Look,
and
Life,
exhibiting in their full-page ads a schizophrenia similar to what he had witnessed in vaudeville shows at Grossinger's. Everyone knew money was tight and that many products had been rationed during the war, such as tires, bicycles, gasoline, fuel oil, stoves, sugar, coffee, and shoes. And yet the magazines displayed an endless bounty of goods, a frenzy of consumer pleasure. What was being masked here? (In 1942, for both economic and patriotic reasons, the IRS issued a ruling that gave companies a business discount on any ad that featured a wartime theme; as a result, magazine advertising increased more than 60 percent during the war years, despite widespread product rationing.)

Heller left the magazines on the racks and returned to the base to read Stephen Crane.

Sometimes in the evenings, the sky grew dark and green over Goodfellow Field as thunderstorms and the threat of tornadoes moved across the plains. Chilly pockets filled the dusky air, floating about unpredictably like invisible flak. Heller listened to big-band music on his radio, wrote letters to Shirley, and thanked his luck that he still had two good feet and his feet were on the ground. Only his words would take flight now, on planes winging their way to Shirley or to Whit Burnett, in streams of wind made heavy with the murmuring of dust, the lowing of sheep.

 

2.
A Coney Island of the Mind

AS HE LAY
in his bunk at Goodfellow, listening to sand scratch the window screens and animals stir in rugged fields, Heller recalled, with what he knew was nostalgia (for hadn't he just tasted a bleak eastern winter right before going to Grossinger's?), the breath of surf along the boardwalk. The following afternoon, as his buddies opened their mail, he wondered when, or even if, he would hear about his short story. Then he thought again of Danny Rosoff muttering, “Hemingway … Faulkner.” Proudly, he remembered the grand ambitions of his motley old pals. Nostalgia, yes. His recent glimpse of Coney Island—deserted, dark—had convinced him he could never live there again. We speak of haunted places, but can a place haunt itself? Heller thought Coney was spooky that way. It was past its prime before it ever came into its own. It was a series of fleeting images unattached to any reality and overlaid on one another year after year.

But was he wrong to remember his childhood as pretty damn wonderful—not just his experiences but the place, too?
Wasn't
everything better then? Already, as a young man, he was beginning to suspect that, on a public scale at least, every change was for the worse.

*   *   *

JOSEPH HELLER
had been born into the bright carnival that was Coney Island on May 1, 1923, the same year the Riegelmann Boardwalk went up to handle the larger crowds made possible by laws granting greater public access to the beach, and by the completion of the subway line from Manhattan (in forty-five minutes, and for just five cents, a passenger could get from Times Square to the Stillman Avenue stop). The boardwalk was also intended to halt what some saw as Coney's decline. Many of the old Victorian-style hotels that had once drawn to the shore an opulent clientele had fallen to ruin, failures brought about by antibetting laws and Prohibition or devastating fires. Dreamland, where tourists could visit Africa, Asia, or Hell (garishly painted and elaborately staged) had, perhaps fittingly, burned. Tides had eroded the beach, turning it into a poorly tended narrow strip of sand. But entrepreneurs such as Edward Riegelmann saw opportunities, with inexpensive transportation and new land-use ordinances, to lure different kinds of crowds, poorer but eager for excitement, to the oceanside playground. “At Coney Island … the abiding talent is for the exaggerated and the superlative,” wrote Edo McCullough, nephew of the man who had founded the Pavilion of Fun. Each time crisis spawns a change, the alterations have been “so violent as to obliterate … the memory of what was there before.”

Riegelmann's boardwalk, eighty feet wide and running half the length of Coney Island, quickly became the area's new icon. New and cheaper amusement rides cropped up beside it. Contractors were hired to pump in sand, adding 2,500,000 square feet of new beach open free to the public (in the entrepreneurial spirit of the place, the contractors skimped on expenses by sluicing sand from the wrong source, and the “improved” beach looked slightly jaundiced).

“One must go to Coney Island,” remarked Édouard Herriot, France's prime minister, thrilled after a visit to Riegelmann's promenade. There, one sees an “inexhaustible human river flow[ing] … past … Italian or Greek rotisseries, which turn out an uninterrupted sausage called hot dogs, past the naïvely pretentious astrologers' booths, the tattoo artists and hideous four-legged woman. One is carried along into the torrent with all the languages and all the races of the globe.” Coney's excitement could also be chaos, its marvels mere decadence: the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, visiting not long after the French prime minister, noted the boardwalk's “vomiting multitudes.”

In 1923, 40 percent of Coney Island's year-round residents were foreign-born. In addition to the Italians and Greeks, thousands of refugees from Scandinavia, Poland, and Russia had settled there. On any given day, along the boardwalk, one witnessed Hasidic Jews strolling in serious conversation, young girls chomping gyros, and old men arguing the merits of socialism. Before the turn of the century, when large sections of Coney Island were given over to gambling, drinking, and other vices, the place was known as “Sodom by the Sea.” Nowadays, as the amusement park king, George C. Tilyou, had once proclaimed, “If France is Paris, then Coney Island … is the world.”