Time Travail (3 page)

As Harvey had pointed out in his letter I
could always try it out for a month. At the worst I’d have two
thousand dollars. I’d be able to settle my debts with both my
ex-wife and my landlady, simultaneously. It seemed more elegant
that way than settling with just one, immediately, to the detriment
of the other.

I left early the next day. I forgot that
Marianne dropped in at four after her last class.

As I boarded the plane I remembered that I’d
have to reset my watch. For a moment I couldn’t recall whether it
was a later or an earlier time zone.

***

Two

Weizman and Morgenstern. It sounds more like
a stockbroker partnership than one of those great old-time
friendships like Castor and Pollux. Or were those two twins?
Anyhow, for seven or so years back in the Forest Hill, Long Island,
of the late 1930s and early 40s Harvey Morgenstern and I formed a
bizarre inseparable couple. We were as different as night and day.
I don’t know who was day and who was night.

Outwardly we contrasted in a way that
sometimes made people laugh. They couldn’t suspect our one odd
convergence: a heart-murmur that kept us both out of the war. He
was small, swarthy, beak-nosed, with fleshy lips constantly tensed
in what could be taken for a half-smile or a faint sneer. Somebody
once said he looked like a caricature of a racial polluter in
the
Völkischer Beobachter
. I was big and blond and blue-eyed, another
caricature.

Often, as a joke, I think, Harvey used to
salute me with an outstretched right arm and bark out,
“
Heil
Hitler!
” I would return
the salute, say “
Jawohl
,”
soundlessly click my sneakered heels and pretend to find it
funny.

It wasn’t my fault if I took after my mother.
She’d come over from Poland in the early twenties and still spoke
English with a faint but unmistakable Yiddish intonation which made
up for her blonde hair and blue eyes. Also she was a passionate
Zionist. I felt vague shame at the ethnic betrayal of my pale eyes
and hair. It was worsened by a profile people called Greek. I had
nothing to offset them like accent or faith.

When people – new teachers, for instance –
learned my last name they often looked surprised as if there were a
mistake somewhere. Some would even say, “Your name’s
Weizman
?” or
worse: “
You’re
Weizman?”
I used Yiddish expressions all the time to compensate. Harvey
compensated in the other direction by using vulgar goy
expressions.

The contrast between us wasn’t just physical.
There was the intellectual imbalance. This was vast. I was the
first to acknowledge it. A very late bloomer that way, I knew I was
no genius. Everybody knew he was one. He didn’t try to conceal the
fact. His intellectual swagger may have been compensation for his
physical inferiorities. They aggravated at the critical age. By
thirteen my mind was up to the hilt into girls, my body burning to
follow and not much later it did. He was a late-bloomer that way.
He was able to develop a little anti-climactic face and body hair
only at fifteen. It was publicized by spectacular and persistent
acne. He went to the hospital regularly for mysterious treatments.
My mother spoke vaguely of “glandular troubles”. She always
referred to him as “Poor Harvey” and gazed at me with loving
admiration.

Maybe his brain monopolized all of his
body’s resources. I sometimes wondered if the people who laughed at
the sight of us together didn’t see us as I once did in the
jubilant trick mirror of the 42nd
Street
Laugh Movie
: me pin-headed and macro-phallic with those elephantine
haunches, Harvey like H. G. Wells’ Martian invaders, macrocephalic
above a thread of a body.

That didn’t prevent him from using foul
pseudo-knowledgeable language and prying for intimate details about
the new girlfriends whose photos I carried about in my wallet. He’d
stare down at them and with his new unsure tweeting woofing voice
use vulgar terms to describe them. He offered me money for accounts
of times with those girls.

Gentlemen don’t tell, I’d say and then pocket
the money and tell, inventively and in elegant language but a
little ill at ease. Verbally I was something of a puritan. I soon
lost the money back to him at five hundred rummy. It wasn’t just
for the money that I did it. It was my one area of acknowledged
superiority.

Sometimes I’d try to inject a little
tenderness into the accounts. He wasn’t paying for tenderness.

“Cut the crap. Did you get into her?”

I didn’t like that kind of language. I was
longing for a great romantic love experience. I had other photos in
a secret compartment of my wallet just beneath the semi-public
ones. Even then, I had this weakness for impossible love-objects.
There was Judy Garland in the Land of Oz with twin cascades of hair
tumbling down past her wonder-lit face. One day I learned she was
born Francis Gumm in Grand Rapids. She disappeared beneath a
succession of women I judged more exotic. I took Katherine Hepburn
for a foreigner with those cheekbones and that passionate sinuous
mouth. Also Claudette Colbert and Olivia de Havilland because of
their names. Finally Wendy Hiller crowned the other photos. I
saw
Major
Barbara
twenty-one
times, four times in a single day till I was turned out of the
movie-house. Wendy bore an astonishing resemblance to June Keller,
my first ex-wife.

One day, coming back from the toilet in the
middle of a disastrous card-session, I found Harvey ferreting in my
wallet. He’d discovered my impossible stratified loves. It was as
though he were ferreting in my brain.

“Titless wonders,” was his blanket verdict on
them all. But what did he know about the subject? He’d look at
girls slyly and quickly away when they looked back. To my knowledge
he never came closer to a girl than with those quick sly glances or
listening, absorbed, to my paid stories of hot involvement. Once in
the street, though, his mother collapsed and I remember how he
cried, “Momma! Momma!” and helped her up, her face filled with pain
from the sprained ankle and joy at his outcry.

That was the only emotional response to
another human being I ever witnessed in him. But maybe he kept it
hidden as I did the photo of Wendy.

So I made allowances for his compensation,
the way he tended to shove his top-heavy intellectual weight about.
When he did it a little too contemptuously I’d do a Lenny on him.
I’d seen
Of
Mice and Men
six times.
I’d go slack-jawed, glassy-eyed, dangly-armed and say very loudly:
“Aw, talk United States, George. I like rabbits, George.” When I
did it in a crowded street he’d walk much faster muttering: “Cut it
out, you moron,” but I’d lope after him bellowing: “I like to pet
rabbits and girls, George. But then they don’t move no more. How
come they don’t move no more, George, huh?”

The bond between us was science. We were into
science back in the days when pre-teenagers could duplicate most of
the great scientific breakthroughs with stuff swiped from hardware
stores or picked up from junk-heaps. Even a feeble-minded kid could
build an operating radio-set with a crystal of lead-ore (it comes
back now: galena, PbS) and a wire (a “cat’s-whisker” it was
called). Everything was easier in those days. There were no
computers or TV sets to demoralize us, to say nothing of prodigious
things like Mark I Particle Detectors.

I remember the Static Electricity Machine he
rigged up. Great disks of varnished glass revolved in counter
movement. Wires led to big jars lined inside and outside with tin
foil. “Leyden-jars,” they were called. The machine was powered by
my feet via a stationary bike. My scalp would start crawling as the
charge built up. Finally there came a crackle and a miniature bolt
of lightning between the brass balls.

With the discharge I would slump panting over
the handlebars. It could kill you, he said and it nearly did me,
indirectly, each time I manufactured the bolt. I didn’t feel like
Zeus. Already at that age he was playing around with death and I
was assisting him in a subaltern capacity.

For an easier source of high-potential
electricity, we built a Ruhmkorff Coil. The name and the
rattlesnake sound of the circuit-breaking vibrator made me think of
some dangerous Russian serpent coiled ready to spring with
electric-spark fangs. It took four months to construct with miles
of fine copper wire intricately wound about a core of iron rods.
Hooked up to four big dry cells, this induction coil spat out a
two-inch spark and an acrid smell of ozone. We also built motors,
condensers and finally a big DC dynamo.

With that dynamo and my leg-muscles we
produced hydrogen and chlorine through electrolysis of brine. The
bubbles of hydrogen that rose from one of the carbon electrodes
made satisfying popping sounds in contact with a lighted match.
With the chlorine that bubbled up from the other electrode we
killed white mice. It was his idea. But I lent myself to it and
possibly enjoyed the mouse’s reaction to the yellow-green gas. He
himself didn’t enjoy it. He was too busy measuring the exact dose
that proved lethal.

Electrolysis got us on to chemistry. There
was enough land about our shack for violent experiments involving
gun cotton (easy: cotton dipped in a mixture of sulfuric and nitric
acid) and thermit incendiary-bombs of the sort the
Luftwaffe
would soon be distributing all
over London: ferrous oxide I think and aluminum powder. Even the
fuse was spectacular: a ribbon of magnesium producing an intense
blue-white star hissing down to the bomb.

You couldn’t find magnesium or aluminum
powder or delicate specialized glassware in garbage cans. The
chemicals and some of our equipment had to come from stores. I
operated mainly in winter when I could wear my billowing raglan
overcoat. It was fitted out inside with hooks for the bulkier
hookable items. In the deep pockets there were quantities of
handkerchiefs to serve as clink-muffling buffers between beakers,
test-tubes, coils, etc.

The place was out in Long Island City.
There’s prescription three times over but I won’t give the name.
Harvey supplied diversion by purchasing trifles.

Once I got caught. Harvey calmly paid for his
five test tubes and left without giving me a glance. I had to give
them my name. I remember my intense shame. Jewish boys didn’t
steal. My mother didn’t say this but it was all over her stricken
face for days. It was much worse than the belting I got from my
father. He cited my friend Harvey as an example of proper
conduct.

Much later when the old relationship between
us was dead, this one aspect survived. He’d ring me up and dictate
the titles of expensive specialized books that I procured for him
in the same way from university bookstores. He was one of my
customers. Like the others he paid half price for the books.

But most of our equipment was salvaged, not
swiped. Dangerously situated on the other side of the tracks was
the most gigantic junk-heap I’ve ever seen in my life. They don’t
make junk-heaps like that any more. I can see all those desirable
objects now: ancient electric motors with their precious intact
armatures, big-bellied jugs with bubbles frozen in the thick warped
green glass, battered five-gallon cans, old roller-skates, mines of
ball bearings.

I’ve got to get out of it. But wait, just
this: there, very clearly, as though produced by the screen, I can
see the broken Singer sewing machine with the floral pattern of the
cast-iron foot-pedal and there, the quaint refrigerator of the 30’s
crowned by the honey-comb cooler, lying next to those two rusty
bicycle-frames.

I’ve got to stop, get out of it. Details can
overwhelm you. It can be dangerous.

Anyhow, Harvey would step carefully in the
chaos, inspect, step back to safety and tell me what to worry and
pry and wrench free. I came with a crowbar and an assortment of
screwdrivers, hammers, chisels and hacksaws. I became expert at it.
To transport the stuff we’d built a big wooden wagon with old
bicycle-wheels. We had our own junk-heap on Mr Morgenstern’s lot,
next to our shack.

Harvey’s father owned a big lot close to his
old house. He always hoped the real-estate market would improve but
it wasn’t desirable property because of the nearby railroad tracks.
Already Harvey’s father was tempted with the idea of building a
bigger and better house for his family on it, which is what he
finally did in circumstances I won’t be able to avoid recalling. In
the meantime he let us build a shack on it for our experiments.
Harvey drew up the plans and I did the sawing and nailing.

The trouble was, the big junk-heap was
located in enemy territory on the other side of the tracks, a
shantytown inhabited by Poles and Irish and Litvaks. From our shack
you could see them in their anti-Semitic patched jackets and
woollen stocking caps with battered pails picking up chunks of coal
that fell out of the freight cars. Nowadays that expression “live
on the other side of the tracks” doesn’t mean anything. It did
then. Chaplin, great comic embittered man, caught it all in certain
of his short silent films.

The other side of the tracks everything was
lopsided and violent. There were slapped-together wooden houses
with sagging porches, ash-heaps, barrels of tadpole-infested
stagnant rainwater. I can see gray tattered wash flapping from
lines over poverty-stricken vegetables like cabbage and carrots.
Also yellowish dogs scouring among turds and broken bottles.