American Pastoral Read online

  provoked in his father by the shocks “that befell his loved ones.” But even if I

  had thought to bring his letter with me and had rattled it in his face, the

  Swede would have eluded his own writing as effortlessly as he’d shaken off his

  tacklers on that Saturday fifty years before, at City Stadium, against South

  Side, our weakest rival, and set a state record by scoring four times on

  consecutive 1 pass plays. Of course, I thought, of course—my urge to

  discover

  a substratum, my continuing suspicion that more was there than what I was

  looking at, aroused in him the fear that I might go ahead and tell him that he

  wasn’t what he wanted us to believe he was…. But then I thought, Why bestow on

  him all this thinking? Why the i appetite to know this guy? Ravenous

  because once upon a time he

  I

  said to you and to you alone, “Basketball was never like this, Skip”? Why clutch

  at him? What’s the matter with you? There’s nothing here but what you’re looking

  at. He’s all about being looked at. He always was. He is not faking all this

  virginity. You’re craving depths that don’t exist. This guy is the embodiment of

  nothing. I was wrong. Never more mistaken about anyone in my life.

  39

  Let’s remember the energy. Americans were governing not only themselves but some

  two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan. The war-crimes

  trials were cleansing the earth of its devils once and for all. Atomic power was

  ours alone. Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted; in an

  explosion of self-assertion, auto workers, coal workers, transit workers,

  maritime workers, steel workers—laborers by the millions demanded more and went

  on strike for it. And playing Sunday morning softball on the Chancellor Avenue

  field and pickup basketball on the asphalt courts behind the school were all the

  boys who had come back alive, neighbors, cousins, older brothers, their pockets

  full of separation pay, the GI Bill inviting them to break out in ways they

  could not have imagined possible before the war. Our class started high school

  six months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the

  greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history. And the upsurge

  of energy was contagious. Around us nothing was lifeless. Sacrifice and

  constraint were over. The Depression had disappeared. Everything was in motion.

  The lid was off. Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it

  together. If that wasn’t sufficiently inspiring—the miraculous con-

  40

  elusion of this towering event, the clock of history reset and a whole people’s

  aims limited no longer by the past—there was the neighborhood, the communal

  determination that we, the children, should escape poverty, ignorance, disease,

  social injury and intimidation—escape, above all, insignificance. You must not

  come to nothing! Make something of yourselves!

  * * *

  Despite the undercurrent of anxiety—a sense communicated daily that hardship was

  a persistent menace that only persistent diligence could hope to keep at bay;

  despite a generalized mistrust of the Gentile world; despite the fear of being

  battered that clung to many families because of the Depression—ours was not a

  neighborhood steeped in darkness. The place was bright with industriousness.

  There was a big belief in life and we were steered relentlessly in the direction

  of success: a better existence was going to be ours. The goal was to have goals,

  the aim to have aims. This edict came entangled often in hysteria, the embattled

  hysteria of those whom experience had taught how little antagonism it takes to

  wreck a life beyond repair. Yet it was this edict— emotionally overloaded as it

  was by the uncertainty in our elders, by their awareness of all that was in

  league against them—that made the neighborhood a cohesive place. A whole

  community perpetually imploring us not to be immoderate and screw up, imploring

  us to grasp opportunity, exploit our advantages, remember what matters.

  The shift was not slight between the generations and there was plenty to argue

  about: the ideas of the world they wouldn’t give up; the rules they worshiped,

  for us rendered all but toothless by the passage of just a couple of decades of

  American time; those uncertainties that were theirs and not ours. The question

  of how free of them we might dare to be was ongoing, an internal debate,

  ambivalent and exasperated. What was most cramping in their point of view a few

  of us did find the audacity to strain against, but the intergenerational

  conflict never looked like it would twenty

  years later. The neighborhood was never a field of battle strewn with the bodies

  of the misunderstood. There was plenty of haranguing to ensure obedience; the

  adolescent capacity for upheaval was held in check by a thousand requirements,

  stipulations, prohibitions—restraints that proved insuperable. One was our own

  highly realistic appraisal of what was most in our interest, another the

  pervasive rectitude of the era, whose taboos we’d taken between our teeth at

  birth; not least was the enacted ideology of parental self-sacrifice that bled

  us of wanton rebelliousness and sent underground almost every indecent urge.

  It would have taken a lot more courage—or foolishness— than most of us could

  muster to disappoint their passionate, unflagging illusions about our

  perfectibility and roam very far from the permissible. Their reasons for asking

  us to be both law-abiding and superior were not reasons we could find the

  conscience to discount, and so control that was close to absolute was ceded to

  adults who were striving and improving themselves through us. Mild forms of

  scarring may have resulted from this arrangement but few cases of psychosis were

  reported, at least at the time. The weight of all that expectation was not

  necessarily killing, thank God. Of course there were families where it might

  have helped if the parents had eased up a little on the brake, but mostly the

  friction between generations was just sufficient to give us purchase to move

  forward.

  Am I wrong to think that we delighted in living there? No delusions are more

  familiar than those inspired in the elderly by nostalgia, but am I completely

  mistaken to think that living as well-born children in Renaissance Florence

  could not have held a candle to growing up within aromatic range of Tabachnik’s

  pickle barrels? Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid

  present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent?

  Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the

  immensity of the detail, the force of the detail,

  the weight of the detail—the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your

  young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re

  dead.

  * * *

  Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously

  gives undivided attention; that’s the unfiltered way meaning comes to children,

  just flowing off the surface of things. Nonetheless, fifty years later, I a
sk

  you: has the immersion ever again been so complete as it was in those streets,

  where every block, every backyard, every house, every floor of every house—the

  walls, ceilings, doors, and windows of every last friend’s family apartment—came

  to be so absolutely individualized? Were we ever again to be such keen recording

  instruments of the microscopic surface of things close at hand, of the minutest

  gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrzeit

  candles and cooking smells, by Ronson table lighters and Venetian blinds? About

  one another, we knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who

  ordered what on his hot dog at Syd’s; we knew one another’s every physical

  attribute— who walked pigeon-toed and who had breasts, who smelled of hair oil

  and who oversalivated when he spoke; we knew who among us was belligerent and

  who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb; we knew whose mother had the

  accent and whose father had the mustache, whose mother worked and whose father

  was dead; somehow we even dimly grasped how every family’s different set of

  circumstances set each family a distinctive difficult human problem.

  And, of course, there was the mandatory turbulence

  born of need, appetite, fantasy, longing, and the fear of

  disgrace. With only adolescent introspection to light the

  way, each of us, hopelessly pubescent, alone and in secret,

  attempted to regulate it—and in an era when chastity

  was still ascendant, a national cause to be embraced by the

  young like freedom and democracy.

  43

  It’s astonishing that everything so immediately visible in our lives as

  classmates we still remember so precisely. The intensity of feeling that we have

  seeing one another today is also astonishing. But most astonishing is that we

  are near-ing the age that our grandparents were when we first went off to be

  freshmen at the annex on February 1,1946. What is astonishing is that we, who

  had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened.

  That the results are in for the class of January 1950—the unanswerable questions

  answered, the future revealed—is that not astonishing? To have lived—and in this

  country, and in our time, and as who we were. Astonishing.

  This is the speech I didn’t give at my forty-fifth high school reunion, a speech

  to myself masked as a speech to them. I began to compose it only after the

  reunion, in the dark, in bed, groping to understand what had hit me. The tone—

  too ruminative for a country club ballroom and the sort of good time people were

  looking for there—didn’t seem at all ill-conceived between three and six a.m.,

  as I tried, in my overstimulated state, to comprehend the union underlying the

  reunion, the common experience that had joined us as kids. Despite gradations of

  privation and privilege, despite the array of anxieties fostered by an

  impressively nuanced miscellany of family quarrels—quarrels that, fortunately,

  promised more unhappiness than they always delivered—something powerful united

  us. And united us not merely in where we came from but in where we were going

  and how we would get there. We had new means and new ends, new allegiances and

  new aims, new innards— a new ease, somewhat less agitation in facing down the

  exclusions the goyim still wished to preserve. And out of what context did these

  transformations arise—out of what historical drama, acted unsuspectingly by its

  little protagonists, played out in classrooms and kitchens looking nothing at

  all like the great theater of life? Just what collided with what to produce the

  spark in us?

  I was still awake and all stirred up, formulating these questions

  * * *

  44

  and their answers in my bed—blurry, insomniac shadows of these questions and

  their answers—some eight hours after I’d driven back from New Jersey, where, on

  a sunny Sunday late in October, at a country club in a Jewish suburb far from

  the futility prevailing in the streets of our crime-ridden, drug-infested

  childhood home, the reunion that began at eleven in the morning went ebulliently

  on all afternoon long. It was held in a ballroom just at the edge of the country

  club’s golf course for a group of elderly adults who, as Weequahic kids of the

  thirties and forties, would have thought a niblick (which was what in those days

  they called the nine iron) was a hunk of schmaltz herring. Now I couldn’t sleep—

  the last thing I could remember was the parking valet bringing my car around to

  the steps of the portico, and the reunion’s commander in chief, Selma Bresloff,

  kindly asking if I’d had a good time, and my telling her, “It’s like going out

  to your old outfit after Iwo Jima.”

  Around three a.m., I left my bed and went to my desk, my head vibrant with the

  static of unelaborated thought. I wound up working there until six, by which

  time I had got the reunion speech to read as it appears above. Only after I had

  built to the emotional peroration culminating in the word “astonishing” was I at

  last sufficiently unastonished by the force of my feelings to be able to put

  together a couple of hours of sleep—or something resembling sleep, for, even

  half out of it, I was a biography in perpetual motion, memory to the marrow of

  my bones.

  Yes, even from as benign a celebration as a high school reunion it’s not so

  simple to instantaneously resume existence back behind the blindfold of

  continuity and routine. Perhaps if I were thirty or forty, the reunion would

  have faded sweetly away in the three hours it took me to drive home. But there

  is no easy mastery of such events at sixty-two, and only a year beyond cancer

  surgery. Instead of recapturing time past, I’d been captured by it in the

  present, so that passing seemingly out of the world of time I was, in fact,

  rocketing through to its secret core.

  For the hours we were all together, doing nothing more than hugging, kissing,

  kibitzing, laughing, hovering over one another

  · 45

  recollecting the dilemmas and disasters that hadn’t in the long run made a damn

  bit of difference, crying out, “Look who’s here!” and “Oh, it’s been a long

  time” and “You remember me? I remember you,” asking each other, “Didn’t we once

  …” “Were you the kid who … ,” commanding one another—with those three

  poignant words I heard people repeat all afternoon as they were drawn and tugged

  into numerous conversations at once—”Don’t go away!” … and, of course,

  dancing, cheek-to-cheek dancing our outdated dance steps to a “one-man band,” a

  bearded boy in a tuxedo, his brow encircled with a red bandanna (a boy born at

  least two full decades after we’d marched together out of the school auditorium

  to the rousing recessional tempo of Iolanthe), accompanying himself on a

  synthesizer as he imitated Nat “King” Cole, Frankie Laine, and Sinatra—for those

  few hours time, the chain of time, the whole damn drift of everything called

  time, had seemed as easy to understand as the dimensions of the doughnut you

  effortlessly down with your morning coffee. The one-man band in the band
anna

  played “Mule Train” while I thought, The Angel of Time is passing over us and

  breathing with each breath all that we’ve lived through—the Angel of Time

  unmistakably as present in the ballroom of the Cedar Hill Country Club as that

  kid doing “Mule Train” like Frankie Laine. Sometimes I found myself looking at

  everyone as though it were still 1950, as though “1995” were merely the

  futuristic theme of a senior prom that we’d all come to in humorous papier-mache

  * * *

  masks of ourselves as we might look at the close of the twentieth century. That

  afternoon time had been invented for the mystification of no one but us.

  Inside the commemorative mug presented by Selma to each of us as we were

  departing were half a dozen little rugelach in an orange tissue-paper sack,

  neatly enclosed in orange cellophane and tied shut with striped curling ribbon

  of orange and brown, the school colors. The rugelach, as fresh as any I’d ever

  snacked on at home after school—back then baked by the recipe broker of her

  mahjongg club, my mother—were a gift from one of our class members, a Teaneck

  baker. Within five minutes of leaving the reun-

  46

  ion, I’d undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of

  sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinammon-lined chambers microscopically studded

  with midget raisins and chopped walnuts. By rapidly devouring mouthful after

  mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness—blended of butter and sour cream

  and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar—I’d loved since childhood,

  perhaps I’d find vanishing from Nathan what, according to Proust, vanished from

  Marcel the instant he recognized “the savour of the little madeleine”: the