The Great Good Thing (8 page)

It was Christmas, in other words; a typical American Christmas. And maybe you'll say I'm describing what needs no description, what every American child has seen and heard for himself, in the movies if not in his own life. But I had not seen or heard it, not anywhere. It was all new to me.

And then, of course, there was the cooking. There was the warm, succulent smell of the cooking. There were Mina and her sister expertly weaving around each other in the kitchen, bickering as they cooked. Which was another thing about Mina's family, by the way. They bickered constantly. They were always nattering at one another over something or nothing, on and on in their cartoonish Old World accents.
You've turned the stove too high now. You're mixing too much sugar
in the batter. If you don't put the oven mittens back where they belong, I can't find them when I need them.
I don't know why, but I found this delightful—vital and loving.

The adults at my house were far more decorous. My parents never squabbled like that at all. There was a sense that hostility was too dangerous, too combustible, to be discharged in playful sparks like that. My mother used to say that if she and my father ever fought—really fought—he would leave her, assuming the marriage was over. My father admitted that this was true. He said that, whenever he saw a couple quarreling, he simply assumed they were going to divorce. Mom and Dad were not cool or controlled with each other—not at all. They were very affectionate. But there was nothing like the unchecked badinage I heard in the kitchen at Mina's house. The meaningless spats dissipating into cackling laughter.
Now lookwhat you've done, you'll burn the whole house down.
To me, it sounded like the chuck and crackle of logs on a hearthfire.

I was given a role to play in all this too: batter to mix, Mina Cookies to lay out on the pan. The mystery of how she made those chocolate and vanilla spirals was revealed to me at last. I got to lick the beater and scrape the batter bowl clean with a spoon, which may have been the single greatest thing that had ever happened to me up to that time. And the beautiful niece, who had been out with friends all evening, came home and petted me and fussed over me and I loved her so. And another record dropped down on the turntable.

I have been re-creating that Christmas all my life. When we first moved in together, my wife was mystified by
the way my normally lofty cultural tastes metamorphosed every December into the predilections of a working-class Yugoslavian immigrant.

“You want to listen to Andy Williams music? Really?”

“I like Andy Williams.”

“Since when?”

“And how come we don't have those paper things that you spray and they make angel shapes on the window?”

“Stencils? You want to stencil frost angels on my windows?”

“Why not? I like them. They're nice.”

This is not to say that I came to believe in Christmas. I didn't believe in it. The trip to Bethlehem, the virgin birth, the shepherds watching their flocks by night, the three kings, the child in the manger, the salvation of the world: nice stories, but I didn't buy into any of it. It was a point of pride with me, in fact, that I didn't. I liked to tease my wife that only a secular Jew like myself could really appreciate the holiday as it deserved. For us, I told her, it was all trees and cookies and colored lights without any of that tiresome religious stuff to worry about. We had no bad memories of childhood Christmases to haunt us. No flashbacks to that time when Dad got drunk and told Uncle Bob what he really thought of him. We came to the day with a clean Jewish slate. We opened our presents. We watched
It's a Wonderful Life
on TV. Then we forgot the whole thing until next year.

But when I came to struggle with the idea of being baptized, when I asked myself how Jesus had first entered my
consciousness, it was Christmas I remembered, that first Christmas at Mina's house.

It happened at the end of the evening. The music was turned off. The lights on the tree went dark. Mina took me upstairs to what would be my bedroom—and that's where Jesus was. It was a small and gloomy room, I remember. The bed, framed in dark-stained wood, nearly filled it corner to corner. On the wall, above the headboard, to my right as I was lying down looking up at it, there was a framed picture of Christ. It was a cheap print of some sentimental painting. It showed a long-haired goy gazing soulfully into the middle distance, his coiffed honey-brown locks surrounded by a golden glow. As an adult, I've always disliked pictures like that. I've always disliked the effeminate piety of them. They have no weight, no tragedy. It's a cotton-candy god to me: sugar and fluff. In the moment, though, the picture frightened me. To my child's eyes, it seemed downright eerie. This Jesus whom people prayed to in their churches: he looked other-worldly, spectral, weird. What was he gazing at like that, off in the distance? And why was he glowing? It was spooky.

I don't know if I'd ever slept away from home alone before. I wasn't scared about it exactly, but I was a little nervous. I was afraid of being afraid. I knew I wouldn't want to call for Mina if I had bad dreams or got anxious in the watches of the night. I wouldn't want to go sniveling for help in a strange household, especially with the pretty niece around to hear me. So then, how horrible it would be to have to lie alone and wide
awake in the alien room with creaks and shadows all around me, and that creepy Jesus hanging over my head.

Mina turned out the light and left me. I lay in the bed beneath the picture. I was afraid to look at it, but I couldn't help myself. Every time I forced my eyes shut, I would sense that eerie presence up above me on the wall. From time to time, I would feel compelled to sneak a peek at him—just to make sure he hadn't moved, to make sure he wasn't suddenly staring down at me with a malevolent grin. I began to be afraid that the fear of him would keep me up all night.

It didn't, though. The Christmas Eve doings had exhausted me. Each time I shut my eyes, they remained closed a little longer. A few more minutes and I was fast asleep. An instant later, so it seemed, the first gray light of Christmas Day was at the window. I had made it to the end of the darkness. I was very relieved.

I had awakened early, earlier than the grown-ups. Though I was eager to go downstairs and see the presents under the tree, I was not comfortable enough in the strange house to get out of bed and go by myself. Instead, I lay there waiting for the adults to stir. As I lay, my eyes returned to the picture on the wall, to Christ.

How strange. He was not frightening anymore. He wasn't eerie or spooky or creepy, not at all. The morning light had dramatically transformed him. He seemed wholly benevolent to me now. Kindly. Powerful. Protective. In fact, though his expression was oh-so-elevated and very, very serious indeed, I thought I now detected a touch of humor at the corners of
his mouth, a secret mirth. It was as if we shared a private joke together. It was as if we were both amused by the childish mistake I had made last night. In the darkness, I had been afraid that he was evil. At dawn, I realized he had been my friend and guardian, watching over me all night long.

More than forty years later, as I drove through the Santa Barbara hills, as I questioned the motives of my conversion, I thought of this Christmas morning again and again. It kept playing in my mind with new variations, like a theme in a fugue. It was so easy to make a psychological backstory out of it. Sensitive child, hostile father, unknowable mother, kindly babysitter, happy Christmas, picture of Christ. Well, no wonder I wanted to be baptized. No wonder I wanted to make that glowing
goyische
face the mask of God. No wonder I wanted to reduce the incomprehensible will of all creation to a magic gentile framed on a fondly remembered wall. It was just a psychological glitch, as it turned out. A nostalgic yearning for a sweet moment from my youth. Understandable enough. But it was no good reason to betray my commitment to reality. No reason to betray my heritage. No reason to dilute my writerly dedication to the hard, cold truth.

On the other hand, every idea comes with its own history, but that doesn't make it false. The genesis of a belief is no disproof of it. The truth remains true no matter how or why we come to find it. If there is a higher, spiritual, supernatural world, it stands to reason that this everyday, material, natural world is only the language in which it speaks to us. So maybe my psychology was just Christ's way of reaching me, his
doorway into my heart. Maybe Mina's loving-kindness was just an image of his. Maybe the beauty of Christmas was just a symbol for his. Maybe that picture on the wall was a story he was telling me: “I, who seem fearsome in the mind's darkness, will reveal myself to be your savior by the light of day.”

In any case, Christmas was a pleasure to me ever after. I have fond memories of many Decembers. I never stayed overnight at Mina's again, but my family would troop over to her house for a Christmas dinner every year, and it was always wonderful.

When I was eight years old, I discovered Charles Dickens's
A Christmas Carol.
There was a cartoon version of it on TV, starring the popular nearsighted character Mr. Magoo as the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge. I loved the story so much I begged my mom to buy me the novel. I was so proud to have read such a grown-up book by myself—and so disappointed when I realized it was an abridgment for children! When I was a year or two older, I watched the film version, the British one from 1951. I loved the spooky atmosphere, the frightening phantoms. I even appreciated the magnificent acting of Alistair Sim. He played Scrooge as a human being who really seemed to believe his own narrow philosophy. I still watch the movie with my family every year.

As for the original, the 1843 Dickens novella, I've come to feel it's one of the greatest works of wisdom literature ever created, up there with Job and Ecclesiastes and the
Tao te Ching
. Jacob Marley's tormented ghost asks Scrooge the one question on which everything depends: “Man of the worldly mind, do
you believe in me or not?” The immortal soul might just be an illusion thrown up by the deceived senses. But if it's truly there, all the rest follows naturally: the justified pangs of conscience; the reality of love; the unity of personality through past, present, and future; the miracle of redemption. “It's all right,” as Scrooge cries out in his joyous reclamation. “It's all true, it all happened.”

Christmas became an essential part of my love life too. The winter I was seventeen, my then-girlfriend and I rented a house together in Indiana where she went to college. I smuggled the pieces of a bicycle into the cellar where I secretly assembled them during the day while she was at work. I can still see the look of surprise and delight on her face when the finished machine appeared wrapped in ribbons under our tree.

When I was nineteen, another girlfriend invited me to join her enormous Irish Catholic family for Christmas dinner. I was working as a newsman at a small radio station in Berkeley, California. Like many Jews in round-the-clock occupations, I had volunteered for the Christmas shift so the Christian workers could stay home. It was a miserable way to spend the day. All alone in the studio. No news to report. The only sound bite I could get was from some guy who'd had himself baptized in the campus fountain at the university: “It was cold!” I replayed those three words in every newscast until my boss called me from home and told me to knock it off. But what I remember most is the blast of warmth and good cheer that greeted me when I finally stumbled into my girlfriend's house. The company, the tree, the music, the food. What a relief. What a pleasure.

Later, when I moved in with the girl who would become my wife, and later still, when I married her, we'd spend Christmas at her parents' house. They always made a huge occasion of it, the presents spilling from beneath the tree almost to the opposite wall. I would sit up late with my wife's father, a brilliant professor and author. We would drink whiskey together and talk books and ideas until we could no longer keep our eyes open.

But he was an atheist. So was his wife, my wife's mother. My wife was, too, for that matter. We all were atheists or agnostics, the lot of us. It was Christmas we loved, the bright tradition, not Christ, never Christ. The holiday had simply become my deracinated version of my father's Passover: a celebration emptied of its meaning.

In the end, as I considered my conversion, I thought: No. It wasn't that night at Mina's house that made Jesus Christ central to my thinking. It wasn't that picture on the wall that made his presence pervasive in my imagination. It wasn't even the Christmases through the following years that made him matter to me so much.

It was stories. It was literature. He came to me that way.

I
've always loved tales of adventure. Stories of suspense, action, danger, fear. Superheroes against arch-villains. Cops against killers. Men against monsters. As a boy, I couldn't get enough of monsters. Creatures limping through misty graveyards in the dead of night—they were some of my favorite things. When I was seven, the Aurora company started bringing out plastic monster models from the old Universal movies I loved to watch on TV. They were thirteen-inch-tall figurines that came in pieces that you assembled and glued together, painting them if you liked. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and so on. I got them all, every one. My mother worried I was growing morbid. When I was ten, I had to beg her to let me buy the new
Creepy
magazine. But oh man, I had to have it. A monthly collection of black-and-white comic strip spook stories with macabre twist endings. The vampire
turned out to be the heroine's suitor. The werewolf turned out to be the hero's wife. The last line of dialogue was almost always the same wordless shriek of terror: “Aiiiyeeeeee!”

Alfred Hitchcock, though, he was my Homer. He was a movie director first, of course, but as the “master of suspense,” he also became a brand. That was my brand. I never missed his weekly TV show,
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
. A new tale of murder and mayhem every week. More macabre twist endings. The killer wife feeds her husband's body to the police disguised as a leg of lamb. A wife identifies her rapist and her husband kills him, but the wife has gone mad and is pointing at every man she sees.

Sometimes when the show was on, my best friend and I would build a tent of blankets and chairs in my bedroom to create a spooky inner chamber. We'd roll the wheeled television stand under the canopy and sit on the floor cross-legged, gazing up at the screen. I read Hitchcock-brand short-story anthologies, too, and listened to the record
Alfred Hitchcock's Ghost Stories for Children
until I knew Saki's
Open Window
almost by heart. And of course I subscribed to the monthly
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
. When I was in my early thirties, one of my first suspense stories was published there. It touched me deeply to see my own sentences on those much-beloved, pulpy pages.

As for Hitchcock's movies, they were my favorites, not just of all movies but of all stories anywhere. Innocent men drawn into spy chases and murder plots. Glamorous women caught in traps of suspicion and fear. The weird, sexy tension of
Rear
Window
and
Vertigo
had a special power over me. A housebound man thinks he might have witnessed a murder in the apartment across the way. A broken cop falls in love with a woman who may be possessed by the dead.

Each film was aired on television only once or twice when I was a boy.
¹
Then, tangled in legal complications, the movies were not shown for more than twenty years. As a result, they became locked away in my unconscious. They worked on my brain in there, shaping it unseen. When the films were finally re-released, just as I was turning thirty, one of my brothers and I went to the theater to see them. I was stunned to discover how much of my sense of plotting and timing they had formed without my knowing it. “That Alfred Hitchcock,” I remarked to my brother when the show was over, “he stole everything from me!”

In my teens, I discovered the tough-guy writers. My older brother introduced me to the existential adventure tales of Ernest Hemingway, his favorite. I discovered the hardboiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler on my own.

Toughness
was always an ethos in my house. I don't mean physical toughness necessarily, though that played a part. I'm talking about an attitude of mind: being tough, being cynical, unsentimental, sardonic, detached. That was the way a man was, a real man, or so we believed. A real man didn't get taken in by sloppy romantic ideals like Honor or Sacrifice or Faith or Charity. He didn't fall into line behind whatever hypocrite was mouthing rah-rah moral platitudes for the crowd.
Group loyalty was for fools. School spirit? Patriotism? They were sucker games. If we identified as Jews, it was because we wouldn't be pushed around by gentiles, not because we cared all that much about other Jews. If we stood by our family, it was because we knew no one else could be counted on. But we also knew that our family—that all families—were snakepits of envy and hostility. In the end, let's face it, pal, you lived and died alone.

This attitude originated with my father. It was his personality translated into a worldview.

For twenty-five years, my father was one of the most popular radio entertainers on the air. He was never a national star, but his top-rated show was on during “morning drive,” the most important time slot, in New York City, the biggest market there was. Even aside from his talent and success, there was much to admire about the man. He was honest in business. He had integrity in his art. He was decent and fair to the people who worked with him. Most importantly from my perspective, he was always kind and loving and respectful toward my mother.

But he was a comedian, and not just by profession but by nature too. And like every comedian I've ever met, he was angry at his core. His sharp, biting, antic wit bubbled up from an inner cauldron of seething rage. The world was unfair, a conspiracy of big guys against the little guy, namely him. His comedy was a camouflaged hand grenade.
Just kidding: kaboom!
Intellectual sabotage against the machinery of life.

He had a chip on his shoulder, in other words. A whole
stack of chips. About being a Jew in a Gentile universe, about the fact he never finished college, about the fact that serious people never took his ideas seriously. Most of all, he was deeply bitter that he never achieved the wide-ranging fame of other Jewish comics like Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis.

But then, he never had the broad appeal of stars like them. They were sleek, handsome, charming, upbeat, and essentially sentimental. My dad was fat, bald, bespectacled, and barbed. He was not made for the nation as a whole. He was a New Yorker through and through. He loved the frenetic individualism of the city. He loved its million minds and dialects, almost all of which he could imitate to perfection. He loved the chaos, most especially. He didn't even like to see New Yorkers politely standing in line for a bus. Too orderly, he said, too organized, the first small sign of fascism on the march. For a Jew, the city's chaos was safety. Out there—out in the bland, farmer-faced homogeneity of the fruited plains beyond the Hudson—a Jew stood out like a sore thumb and was always in peril. Here, in Bigtown, he could get lost on the pushing, shoving, arguing, watch-where-you're-going-buster streets. If life on those streets sometimes seemed like a Hobbesian war of all against all, it was still better than a Hitlerian war of all against him!

My father had a story he liked to tell about his own father. Grandpa was a Lithuanian immigrant. A tough, domineering, sometimes violent man. He ultimately became a pawnbroker in a run-down, black neighborhood of Baltimore. But before that, for a time he lived in a small town—in Maryland
somewhere or upstate New York, I don't remember. In any case, one night a fire erupted in the town. The flames raged through the buildings of Main Street, leaping store to store. Then they spread to the private houses beyond. As the disaster became unstoppable, the town leaders hurriedly called an emergency meeting—and elected my grandfather fire chief because he was the only Jew around to take the blame!

That story is too good to believe and too funny to check, but it gives you a sense of my dad's perspective. It was a perspective imbued with fear—fear of the Man, of the State, of the Power, fear of the
goyische
streets of Anytown where every gentile was a Cossack Waiting to Happen, if not a Nazi in Disguise. Dad joked about that fear a lot.
Don't make trouble; they'll come and take you away!
But the fear was real, and it kept his mind buzzing like an electric spark between the two poles of anxiety and rage.

People were not to be trusted. They were envious, hostile—all of them. This is another trait I've seen in many comedians. They all seem to feel that someone's cheated them out of something. My father likewise. He knew the secret reason why everyone was out to thwart him. If he couldn't sell a screenplay he'd written, it was because the producer was jealous of people who were multitalented. If an editor wouldn't publish his book, it was because he was too stuck-up to believe a mere funnyman might have something interesting to say. And, of course, like every artist who's ever been rejected, Dad knew the hidden truth about every publisher and movie studio and television producer alive:
It's just about money to them. All they want is to
sell mediocre garbage to the lowest common denominator!
But you couldn't say that too loudly, or they would come and take you away.

Even if someone hadn't committed a transgression against him personally, Dad could still always spot a member of a transgressive class. Intrusive executives. Fascist Republicans. Stormtrooper cops. Intellectuals were especially suspect. College professors: pretentious snobs, the lot of them; thought they were better than you were. Teachers in general: they were just people who couldn't make it in the “real world.” Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. If an English teacher so much as criticized one of his sons' papers, Dad would say it was only because he or she was a frustrated writer, jealous of our talent.

No one simply had an opinion in Dad's world. No one was trying to do his best with the best of wills. Everyone had an angle, or a personal failing—fear, greed, guilt—that caused him to work against you, to get in the way of your success. And, of course, anyone who belonged to any group of any kind that hadn't come to the aid of the Jews during the Holocaust—Germans, Frenchmen, Poles, gentiles—oh, why mince words, everyone, including the Jews themselves!—was obviously not going to be on your side when the danger waters rose.

Some part of this attitude, I think, was the expression of a ferociously competitive man in an insanely competitive business. I don't know how it is today, but back then, the average length of a New York DJ's career was about as long as a finger-snap. They came and went, fanfare followed hard by taps. The radio guys I met were all terrified of being fired. I remember
one of Dad's colleagues at the station where he worked—call him Bob, not his real name. Bob would call the house almost daily to ask if his job was in danger. Finally, my father stopped taking his calls and told us kids to tell Bob he wasn't at home. I remember I answered the phone once, and it was Bob.

Hey, spunky, it's Bob! Is your dad there?

He's not home.

Listen, I just have to ask him one thing.

He's not home, Bob.

Really?

Yeah.

You sure?

Yeah, positive. He's not home.

Okay. Well, listen . . . have
you
heard anything about me getting fired?

Bob, I'm ten years old!

Tough business, show business. You couldn't blame the old man for being on watch. Everyone was a rival. Those who were beneath you were looking for their chance to climb over you. Those who were above you couldn't possibly deserve it and so had clearly cheated you. My dad never even praised his sons without disparaging the competition. I was never just good in the school play; I was always better than everybody else. That's why I didn't get the starring role. They were all envious of me. Tough business, those school plays. Everyone out for himself.

My father was not just the head of our household, he was its center. A big, vociferous personality, he had a show-biz narcissist's gift for drawing others into his mental scenarios.
We were all partisans in his war against the Great Thwart-You Machine. His hostile and paranoid mind-set surrounded us like mist. We breathed it in. We saw the landscape through it. It became the hue of our environment.

For me, though, my father's inner world was not a pleasant place to be. From early on, I did not want to live there. He knew it, and it made him mad.

There were four of us, four boys. The eldest was three years older than me. The youngest, fraternal twins, were three years younger. Toward me, the middle child, my father conceived a special animosity.

Maybe it was because I was stubborn in my opinions. Maybe it was because I was a dreamer off in a world of my own. I don't know. There was just something about me he could not abide. From my youngest years, he hit me, ridiculed me, and browbeat me in a way he did not my brothers. My older brother once told me that Dad was so unkind to me it actually frightened
him
. As a result, though I admired his scrappy integrity as a man, and though I would one day emulate his loving-kindness as a husband, I neither liked nor trusted him as a father—never did, never came to.

When I was in my twenties, my father told me I had always seemed to him a “stern presence.” I suppose he felt I judged him harshly. I suppose I did. I remember thinking as a very young person, maybe only eleven or twelve:
This man is not on my side. He is not out to help me but to hurt me.
I consciously set out to develop a coldness at my deep center to protect myself from his sarcasm and abuse. I consciously set a perimeter around
my point of view. I did not think the world was what he said it was and I would not change my mind to suit him, no matter how he screamed at me or laughed at me. My independence only inflamed his hostility toward me even more. Through my teens and even into my late twenties, our relationship was one long, furious firefight. He wanted me to see the world as he saw it. I refused. He wanted my piece of protected inner territory for his own. I would not give it to him.