son.” “So what’d you do instead?” “I’m a psychiatrist. It’s your father I got my
inspiration from. He was a physician.” “Not exactly. He wore a white coat but he
was a chiropodist.” “Whenever I came with the guys to your house, your mother
always put out a bowl of fruit and your father always said to me, ‘What is your
idea on this subject, Ira? What is your idea on that subject, Ira?’ Peaches.
Plums. Nectarines. Grapes. I never saw an apple in my house. My mother is
ninety-seven. I got her in a home now. She sits there crying in a chair all day
long but I honestly don’t believe she’s any more depressed than she was when I
was a kid. I assume your father is dead.” “Yes. Yours?” “Mine couldn’t wait to
die. Failure went to his head in a really big way.” And still I had no idea who
Ira was or what he was talking about, because, as much as I was remembering that
day of all that had
54
once happened, far more was so beyond recall that it might never have happened,
regardless of how many Ira Posners stood face to face with me attesting
otherwise. As best I could tell, when Ira was in my house being inspired by my
father I could as well not have been born. I had run out of the power to
* * *
remember even faintly my father’s asking Ira what he thought while Ira was
eating a piece of our fruit. It was one of those things that get torn out of you
and thrust into oblivion just because they didn’t matter enough. And yet what I
had missed completely took root in Ira and changed his life.
So you don’t have to look much further than Ira and me to see why we go through
life with a generalized sense that everybody is wrong except us. And since we
don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things
because they matter too much— because each of us remembers and forgets in a
pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less
distinctive than a fingerprint—it’s no wonder that the shards of reality one
person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened
to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a
willful excursion into mythomania. But then nobody really bothers to send in
their fifty bucks for a forty-fifth high school reunion so as to turn up and
stage a protest against the other guy’s sense of the-way-it-was; the truly
important thing, the supreme delight of the afternoon, is simply finding that
you haven’t yet made it onto the “In Memoriam” page.
“How long is your father dead?” Ira asked me. “Nineteen sixty-nine. Twenty-six
years. A long time,” I replied. “To whom? To him? I don’t think so. To the
dead,” said Ira, “it’s a drop in the bucket.” Just then, from directly behind
me, I heard Mendy Gurlik saying to someone, “Whoja jerk off over?” “Lorraine,” a
second man replied. “Sure. Everyone did. Me too. Who else?” said Mendy. “Diane.”
“Right. Diane. Absolutely. Who else?” “Selma.” “Selma? I didn’t realize that,”
Mendy said. “I’m surprised to hear that. No, I never wanted to fuck Selma. Too
short. For me it was always
55
twirlers. Watch ‘em practicing up on the field after school and then go home and
beat off. The pancake makeup. Cocoa-colored pancake makeup. On their legs. Drove
me nuts. You notice something? The guys on the whole don’t look too bad, a lot
of them work out, but the girls, you know … no, a forty-fifth reunion is not
the best place to come looking for ass.” “True, true,” said the other man, who
spoke softly and seemed not to have found in the occasion quite the nostalgic
license that Mendy had, “time has not been kind to the women.” “You know who’s
dead? Bert and Utty,” Mendy said. “Prostate cancer. Went to the spine. Spread.
Ate ‘em up. Both of them. Thank God I get the test. You get the test?” “What
test?” the other fellow asked. “Shit, you don’t get the test?” “Skip,” said
Mendy, pulling me away from Ira, “Meisner doesn’t get the test.”
Now Meisner was Mr. Meisner, Abe Meisner, a short, swarthy, heavyset man with
stooped shoulders and a jutting head, proprietor of Meisner’s Cleaners—”5 Hour
Cleaning Service”—situated on Chancellor between the shoe repair shop, where the
Italian radio station was always playing while you waited on the seat behind the
swinging half-door for Ralph to fix your heels, and the beauty salon, Roline’s,
from which my mother once brought home the copy of Silver Screen where I read an
article that stunned me called “George Raft Is a Lonely Man.” Mrs. Meisner, a
short, indestructible earthling like her husband, worked with him in the store
and one year also sold war bonds and stamps with my mother in a booth right out
on Chancellor Avenue. Alan, their son, had gone through school with me,
beginning with kindergarten, skipping the same grades I did all through grade
school. Alan Meisner and I used to be thrown into a room together by our teacher
and, as though we were George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, told to turn something
out whenever a play was needed at assembly for a national holiday. For a couple
of seasons right after the war Mr. Meisner—through some miracle—got to be the
dry cleaner for the Newark Bears, the Yankees’ Triple A farm team, and one
summer day, and a great day it was, I was enlisted by Alan to help him carry
* * *
the Bears’ freshly dry-cleaned away uniforms, via three buses, to the Ruppert
Stadium clubhouse all the way down on Wilson Avenue.
“Alan. Jesus,” I said, “you are your old man.” “Who else’s old man should I be?”
he replied, and, taking my face between his hands, gave me a kiss. “Al,” Mendy
said, “tell Skippy what you heard Schrimmer telling his wife. Schrimmer’s got a
new wife, Skip. Six feet tall. Three years ago he went to a psychiatrist. He was
depressed. The psychiatrist said to him, ‘What do you think when I ask you to
imagine your wife’s body.’ ‘I think I should slit my throat,’ Schrim said. So he
divorces her and marries the shiksa secretary. Six feet tall. Thirty-five. Legs
to the ceiling. Al, tell Skip what she said, the longer loksh.” “She said to
Schrim,” said Alan, the two of us grinning as we clutched each other’s
diminished biceps, “she said, ‘Why are they all Mutty and Utty and Dutty and
Tutty? If his name is Charles, why is he called Tutty?’ ‘I shouldn’t have
brought you,’ Schrim said to her. ‘I knew I shouldn’t. I can’t explain it,’
Schrim said to her, ‘nobody can. It’s beyond explanation. It just is.”’
And what was Alan now? Raised by a dry cleaner, worked after school for a dry
cleaner, himself a dead ringer for a dry cleaner, he was a superior court judge
in Pasadena. In his father’s pocket-sized dry-cleaning shop there had been a
rotogravure picture of FDR framed on the wall above the pressing machine, beside
an autographed photo of Mayor Meyer Ellenstein. I remembered these photographs
when Alan told me that he had twice been a member of Republican delegations to
the presidential convention. When Mendy asked if Alan could get him
tickets to
the Rose Bowl, Alan Meisner, with whom I used to travel to Brooklyn to see
Dodger Sunday doubleheaders the year that Robinson broke in, with whom I’d start
out at eight a.m. on a bus from our corner, take it downtown to Penn Station,
switch to the tubes to New York, in New York switch to the subway to Brooklyn,
all to get to Ebbets Field and eat our sandwiches from our lunch bags before
batting practice began—Alan Meisner, who, once the ballgame got under way, drove
everybody around us crazy with his vocally unmodulated play-by-
· 57 ·
play of both ends of the doubleheader—this same Alan Meisner took a pocket diary
out of his jacket and carefully inscribed a note to himself. I saw what he’d
written from over his shoulder: “R.B. tix for Mendy G.”
Meaningless? Unspectacular? Nothing very enormous going on there? Well, what you
make of it would depend on where you grew up and how life got opened up to you.
Alan Meisner could not be said to have risen out of nothing; however,
remembering him as a little hick obliviously yapping away nonstop in his seat at
Ebbets Field, remembering him delivering the dry cleaning through our streets
late on a winter afternoon, hatless and in a snow-laden pea jacket, one could
easily imagine him destined for something less than the Tournament of Roses.
Only after strudel and coffee had capped off a chicken dinner that, what with
barely anyone able to stay seated very long in one place to eat it, had required
nearly all afternoon to get through; after the kids from Maple got up on the
bandstand and sang the Maple Avenue School song; after classmate upon classmate
had taken the microphone to say “It’s been a great life” or “I’m proud of all of
you”; after people had just about finished tapping one another on the shoulder
and falling into one another’s arms; after the ten-member reunion committee
stood on the dance floor and held hands while the one-man band played Bob Hope’s
theme song, “Thanks for the Memory,” and we applauded in appreciation of all
their hard work; after Marvin Lieb, whose father sold my father our Pontiac and
offered each of us kids a big cigar to smoke whenever we came to get Marvin from
the house, told me about his alimony miseries—”A guy takes a leak with more
forethought than I gave to my two marriages”—and Julius Pincus, who’d always
been the kindest kid and who now, because of tremors resulting from taking the
* * *
cyclosporin essential to the long-term survival of his transplant, had had to
give up his optometry practice, told me ruefully how he’d come by his new
kidney—”If a little fourteen-year-old girl didn’t die of a brain hemorrhage last
October, I would be dead today”—and after Schrimmer’s tall young wife had said
to me,
“You’re the class writer, maybe you can explain it. Why are they all called
Utty, Dutty, Mutty, and Tutty?”; only after I had shocked Shelly Minskoff,
another Daredevil, with a nod of the head when he asked, “Is it true what you
said at the mike, you don’t have kids or anything like that?,” only after Shelly
had taken my hand in his and said, “Poor Skip,” only then did I discover that
Jerry Levov, having arrived late, was among us.
59
I
I
hadn’t even thought to look for him. I knew from the Swede that Jerry lived in
Florida, but even more to the point, he’d always been such an isolated kid, so
little engaged by anything other than his own abstruse interests, that it didn’t
seem likely he’d have any more desire now than he’d had then to endure the
wisdom of his classmates. But only minutes after Shelly Minskoff had bid me
good-bye, Jerry came bounding over, a big man in a double-breasted blue blazer
like my own, but with a chest like a large birdcage, and bald except for a
ropelike strand of white hair draped across the crown of his skull. His body had
really achieved a strange form: despite the majestic upper torso that had
replaced the rolling-pin chest of the gawky boy, he locomoted himself on the
same ladderlike legs that had made his the silliest gait in the school, legs no
heavier or any shapelier than Olive Oyl’s in the Popeye comic strip. The face I
recognized immediately, from those afternoons when my own face was target for
its focused animosity, when I used to see it weaving wildly above the Ping-Pong
table, crimson with belligerence and lethal intention—yes, the core of that face
I could never forget, long-limbed Jerry’s knotted little face, the determined
mask of the prowling beast that won’t let you be until you’re driven from your
lair, the ferret face that declares, “Don’t talk to me about compromise! I know
nothing of compromise!” Now in that face
60
was the obstinacy of a lifetime of smashing the ball back at the other guy’s
gullet. I could imagine that Jerry had made himself important to people by means
different from his brother’s.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Jerry said.
“I wouldn’t have thought this was a big enough stage for you,” he said,
laughing. “I was sure you’d find the sentimentality repellent.”
“Exactly what I was thinking about you.”
“You’re somebody who has banished all superfluous sentiments from his life. No
asinine longings to be home again. No patience for the nonessential. Only time
for what’s indispensable. After all, what they sit around calling the ‘past’ at
these things isn’t a fragment of a fragment of the past. It’s the past
* * *
undetonated—nothing is really brought back, nothing. It’s nostalgia. It’s
bullshit.”
These few sentences telling me what I was, what everything was, would have
accounted not merely for four wives but for eight, ten, sixteen of them.
Everyone’s narcissism is strong at a reunion, but this was an outpouring of
another magnitude. Jerry’s body may have been divided between the skinny kid and
the large man but not the character—he had the character of one big unified
thing, coldly accustomed to being listened to. What an evolution this was, the
eccentric boy elaborated into a savagely sure-of-himself man. The original
unwieldy impulses appeared to have been brought into a crude harmony with the
enormous intelligence and willfulness; the effect was not only of somebody who
called the shots and would never dream of doing what he was told but of somebody
you could count on to churn things up. It seemed truer even than it had been
when we were boys that if Jerry got an idea in his head, however improbable,
something big would come of it. I could see why I had been infatuated with him
as a kid, understood for the first time that my fascination had been not solely
with his being the Swede’s brother but with the Swede’s brother’s being so
decisively odd, his masculinity so imperfectly socialized compared with the
masculinity of the three-letterman.
“Why did you come?” Jerry asked.
· 61 ·
About the cancer scare of the year before, and the impact on urogenital function
&nb
sp; of the ensuing prostate surgery, I said nothing directly. Or rather, said
everything that was necessary—and perhaps not merely for myself—when I replied,
“Because I’m sixty-two. I figured that of all the forms of bullshit-nostalgia
available, this was the one least likely to be without unsettling surprises.”
He enjoyed that. “You like unsettling surprises.”
“Might as well. Why did you come?”
“I happened to be up here. At the end of the week I had to be up here, so I
came.” Smiling at me, he said, “I don’t think they were expecting their writer
to be so laconic. I don’t think they were expecting quite so much modesty.”
Keeping in mind what I took to be the spirit of the occasion, when I’d been
called up to the microphone near the end of the meal by the MC (Erwin Levine,
Children 43> 41. 38, 31. Grandchildren 9, 8, 3,1, 6 weeks), I’d said only, “I’m
Nathan Zuckerman. I was vice president of our class in 4B and a member of the
prom committee. I have neither child nor grandchild but I did, ten years ago,
have a quintuple bypass operation of which I am proud. Thank you.” That was the
history I gave them, as much as was called for, medical or otherwise—enough to
be a little amusing and sit down.
“What were you expecting?” I asked Jerry.
“That. Exactly that. Unassuming. The Weequahic Everyman. What else? Always
behave contrary to their expectations. You even as a kid. Always found a
practical method to guarantee your freedom.”
“I’d say that was a better description of you, Jer.”
“No, no. I found the impractical method. Rashness personified, Little Sir