American Pastoral Read online

  apprehensive-ness of death. “A mere taste,” Proust writes, and “the word ‘death’

  … [has] … no meaning for him.” So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, refusing

  to curtail for a moment this wolfish intake of saturated fat but, in the end,

  having nothing like Marcel’s luck.

  Let’s speak further of death and of the desire—understandably in the aging a

  desperate desire—to forestall death, to resist it, to resort to whatever means

  are necessary to see death with anything, anything, anything but clarity:

  One of the boys up from Florida—according to the reunion booklet we each

  received at the door, twenty-six out of a graduating class of a hundred and

  seventy-six were now living in Florida … a good sign, meant we still had more

  people in Florida (six more) than we had who were dead; and all afternoon, by

  the way, it was not in my mind alone that the men were tagged the boys and the

  women the girls—told me that on the way to Livingston from Newark Airport, where

  his plane had landed and he’d rented a car, he’d twice had to pull up at service

  stations and get the key to the restroom, so wracked was he by trepidation. This

  was Mendy Gur-lik, in 1950 voted the handsomest boy in the class, in 1950 a

  broad-shouldered, long-lashed beauty, our most important jitterbugger, who loved

  to go around saying to people, “Solid, Jackson!” Having once been invited by his

  older brother to a colored whorehouse on Augusta Street, where the pimps hung

  out, virtually around the corner from his father’s Branford Place liquor store—a

  whorehouse where, he eventually confessed, he’d sat fully clothed, waiting

  47

  in an outer hallway, flipping through a Mechanix Illustrated that he’d found on

  a table there, while his brother was the one who “did it”—Mendy was the closest

  the class had to a delinquent. It was Mendy Gurlik (now Garr) who’d taken me

  with him to the Adams Theater to hear Illinois Jacquet, Buddy Johnson, and

  “Newark’s own” Sarah Vaughan; who’d got the tickets and taken me with him to

  hear Mr. B., Billy Eckstine, in concert at the Mosque; who, in ‘49, had got

  tickets for us to the Miss Sepia America Beauty Contest at Laurel Garden. It was

  Mendy who, some three or four times, took me to watch, broadcasting in the

  flesh, Bill Cook, the smooth late-night Negro disc jockey of the Jersey station

  WAAT. Musical Caravan, Bill Cook’s show, I ordinarily listened to in my darkened

  bedroom on Saturday nights. The opening theme was Ellington’s “Caravan,” very

  exotic, very sophisticated, Afro-Oriental rhythms, a belly-dancing beat—just by

  itself it was worth tuning in for; “Caravan,” in the Duke’s very own rendition,

  * * *

  made me feel nicely illicit even while tucked up between my mother’s freshly

  laundered sheets. First the tom-tom opening, then winding curvaceously up out of

  the casbah that great smoky trombone, and then the insinuating, snake-charming

  flute. Mendy called it “boner music.”

  To get to WAAT, and Bill Cook’s studio, we took the 14 bus downtown, and only

  minutes after we’d settled quietly like churchgoers in the row of chairs outside

  his glass-enclosed booth, Bill Cook would come out from behind the microphone to

  greet us. With a “race record” spinning on the turntable—for listeners still

  unadventurously at home—Cookie would cordially shake the hands of the two tall,

  skinny white sharpies, all done up in their one-button-roll suits from the

  American Shop and their shirts from the Custom Shoppe, with the spread collars.

  (The clothes on my back were on loan from Mendy for the night.) “And what might

  I play for you gentlemen?” Cookie graciously inquired of us in a voice whose

  mellow resonance Mendy would imitate whenever we talked on the phone. I asked

  for the melodious stuff, “Miss” Dinah Washington, “Miss” Savannah Churchill—and

  how arresting that was back then, the salacious chivalry of the dj’s “Miss”—

  while

  · 48 ·

  Mendy’s taste, spicier, racially far more authoritative, was for musicians like

  the lowdown saloon piano player Roosevelt Sykes, for Ivory Joe Hunter (“When …

  I lost my bay-bee … I aahll… most lost my mind”), and for a quartet that

  Mendy seemed to me to take excessive pride in calling “the Ray-O-Vics”

  emphasizing the first syllable exactly as did the black kid from South Side,

  Melvyn Smith, who delivered for Mendy’s father’s store after school. (Mendy and

  his brother did the Saturday deliveries.) Mendy boldly accompanied Melvyn Smith

  one night to hear live bebop at the lounge over the bowling alley on Beacon

  Street, Lloyd’s Manor, a place to which few whites other than a musician’s

  reckless Desdemona would venture. It was Mendy Gurlik who first took me down to

  the Radio Record Shack on Market Street, where we picked out bargains from the

  19-cent bin and could listen to the record in a booth before we bought it.

  During the war, when, to keep up morale on the home front, there’d be dances one

  night a week during July and August at the Chancellor Avenue playground, Mendy

  used to scramble through the high-spirited crowd—neighborhood parents and

  schoolkids and little kids up late who ran gleefully round and round the painted

  white bases where we played our perpetual summer softball game—dispensing for

  whoever cared to listen a less conventional brand of musical pleasure than the

  Glenn Miller-Tommy Dorsey-inspired arrangements that most everybody else liked

  dancing to beneath the dim floodlights back of the school. Regardless of the

  dance tune the band up on the flag-festooned bandstand happened to be playing,

  Mendy would race around most of the evening singing, “CaWonia, Caldoma, what

  makes your big head so hard? Rocks!” He sang it, as he blissfully proclaimed,

  “free of charge,” just as nuttily as Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five did on

  the record he obliged all the Daredevils to listen to whenever, for whatever

  refractory purpose (to play dollar-limit seven-card stud, to examine for the

  millionth time the drawings in his Tillie the Toiler “hot book,” on rare

  occasions to hold a circle jerk), we entered his nefarious bedroom when nobody

  else was home.

  49

  And here now was Mendy in 1995, the Weequahic boy with the biggest talent for

  being less than a dignified model child, a personality halfway between mildly

  repellent shallowness and audacious, enviable deviance, flirting back then with

  indignity in a way that hovered continuously between the alluring and the

  offensive. Here was Dapper, Dirty, Daffy Mendy Gurlik, not in prison (where I

  was certain he’d wind up when he’d urge us to sit in a circle on the floor of

  * * *

  his bedroom, some four or five Daredevils with our pants pulled down, competing

  to win the couple of bucks in the pot by being the one to “shoot” first), not in

  hell (where I was sure he’d be consigned after being stabbed to death at Lloyd’s

  Manor by a colored guy “high on reefer”—whatever that meant), but simply a

  retired restaurateur—owner of three steakhouses called Garr’s Grill in suburban

  Long Island—at no place more disreputable than his h
igh school class’s forty-

  fifth reunion.

  “You shouldn’t worry, Mend—you still got your build, your looks. You’re amazing.

  You look great.”

  He did, too: well tanned, slender, a tall narrow-faced jogger wearing black

  alligator boots and a black silk shirt beneath a green cashmere jacket. Only the

  head of brimming silver-white hair looked suspiciously not quite his own but as

  though it had had an earlier life as the end of a skunk.

  “I take care of myself—that isn’t my point. I called Mutty”— Marty “Mutty”

  Sheffer, star sidearm pitcher of the Daredevils, the team we three played on in

  the playground softball league, and, according to the biographical listing in

  the reunion booklet, a “Financial Consultant” and, too (unlikely as it seemed

  when I remembered that, paralyzingly shy of girls, babyfaced Mutty had made

  pitching pennies his major adolescent diversion), progenitor of “Children

  36,34,31. Grandchildren 2,1”—”I told Mutty,” Mendy said, “that if he didn’t sit

  next to me I wasn’t coming. I had to deal with the real goons in my business.

  Dealt with the fucking Mob. But this I could not deal with from day one. Not

  twice, Skip, three times I had to stop the car to take a crap.”

  “Well,” I said, “after years and years of painting ourselves opaque, this

  carries us straight back to when we were sure we were transparent.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Maybe. Who knows.”

  “Twenty kids dead in our class.” He showed me at the back of the booklet the

  page headed “In Memoriam.” “Eleven of the guys dead,” Mendy said. ” Two from the

  Daredevils. Bert Bergman. Utty Orenstein.” Utty was Mutty’s battery mate, Bert

  played second base. “Prostate cancer. The both of them. And both in the last

  three years. I get the blood test. I get it every six months since I heard about

  Utty. You get the test?”

  “I get it.” Of course, I didn’t any longer because I no longer had a prostate.

  “How often?”

  “Every year.”

  “Not enough,” he told me. “Every six months.”

  “Okay. I’ll do that.”

  “You been all right though?” he asked, taking hold of me by the shoulders.

  “I’m in good shape,” I said.

  “Hey, I taught you to jerk off, you know that?”

  “That you did, Mendel. Anywhere from ninety to a hundred twenty days before I

  would have happened upon it myself. You’re the one who got me going.”

  * * *

  “I’m the guy,” he said, laughing loudly, “who taught Skip Zuck-erman to jerk

  off. My claim to fame,” and we embraced, the bald first baseman and white-haired

  left fielder of the dwindling Daredevil Athletic Club. The torso I could feel

  through his clothes attested to just how well he did take care of himself.

  “I’m still at it,” Mendy said happily. “Fifty years later. A Daredevil record.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” I said. “Check with Mutty.”

  “I heard you had a heart attack,” he said.

  “No, just a bypass. Years ago.”

  “The fucking bypass. They stick that tube down your throat, don’t they?”

  “They do.”

  “I saw my brother-in-law with the tube down his throat. That’s all I need,”

  Mendy said. “I didn’t want to be here in the worst fucking way, but Mutty keeps

  calling and saying, ‘You’re not going to live forever,’ and I keep telling him,

  ‘I am, Mutt. I have to!’ Then I’m schmuck enough to come, and the first thing I

  see when I open up this booklet is obituaries.”

  When Mendy went off to get a drink and find Mutty, I looked for his name in the

  booklet: “Retired Restaurateur. Children 36, 33, 28. Grandchildren 14, 12, 9, 5,

  5, 3.” I wondered if the six grandchildren, including what appeared to be a set

  of twins, were what made Mendy so fearful of death or if there were other

  reasons, like reveling still in whores and sharp clothes. I should have asked

  him.

  I should have asked people a lot of things that afternoon. But later, though

  regretting that I hadn’t, I understood that to have gotten answers to any of my

  questions beginning “Whatever happened to …” would not have told me why I

  had the uncanny sense that what goes on behind what we see is what I was seeing.

  It didn’t take more than one of the girls’ saying to the photographer, the

  instant before he snapped the class photo, “Be sure and leave the wrinkles out,”

  didn’t take more than laughing along with everyone else at the nicely timed

  wisecrack, to feel that Destiny, the most ancient enigma of the civilized world—

  and our first composition topic in freshman Greek and Roman Mythology, where I

  wrote “the Fates are three goddesses, called the Moerae, Clotho who spins,

  Lachesis who determines its length, and Atropos who cuts the thread of life”—

  Destiny had become perfectly understandable while everything unenigmatic, such

  as standing for the photograph in the third row back, with my one arm on the

  shoulder of Marshall Goldstein (“Children 39,37. Grandchildren 8, 6”) and my

  other on

  the shoulder of Stanley Wernikoff (“Children 39,38. Grandchildren 5, 2, 8 mo.”),

  had become inexplicable.

  A young NYU film student named Jordan Wasser, the grandson of fullback Milton

  Wasserberger, had come along with Milt to make a documentary of our reunion for

  one of his classes; from time to time, as I floated around the room documenting

  the event in my own outdated way, I overheard Jordan interviewing somebody on

  camera. “It was like no other school,” sixty-three-year-old Marilyn Koplik was

  telling him. “The kids were great, we had good teachers, the worst crime we

  could commit was chewing gum… .” “Best school around,” said sixty-three-

  year-old George Kirschenbaum, “best teachers, best kids… .” “Mind for mind,”

  said sixty-three-year-old Leon Gutman, “this is the smartest group of people

  I’ve ever worked with… .” “School was just different in those days,” said

  * * *

  sixty-three-year-old Rona Siegler, and to the next question Rona replied with a

  laugh—a laugh without much delight in it— “Nineteen fifty? It was just a couple

  of years ago, Jordan.”

  “I always tell people,” somebody was saying to me, “when they ask if I went to

  school with you, how you wrote that paper for me in Wallach’s class. On Red

  Badge of Courage.” “But I didn’t.” “You did.” “What could I know about Red Badge

  of Courage? I didn’t even read it till college.” “No. You wrote a paper for me

  on Red Badge of Courage. I got an A plus. I handed it in a week late and Wallach

  said to me, ‘It was worth waiting for.’”

  The person telling me this, a small, dour man with a dose-clipped white beard, a

  brutal scar beneath one eye, and two hearing aids, was one of the few I saw that

  afternoon on whom time had done a job and then some; on him time had worked

  overtime. He walked with a limp and spoke to me leaning on a cane. His breathing

  was heavy. I did not recognize him, not when I looked squarely at him from six

  inches away and not even after I read on his name tag that he was Ira Posner.

  Who was Ira P
osner? And why would I have done him that favor, especially when I

  couldn’t have? Did I write the paper for Ira without bothering to read the book?

  “Your father meant a lot to me,” Ira said. “Did he?” I asked. “In the few

  53

  moments I spent with him in my life I felt better about myself than the entire

  life I spent with my own father.” “I didn’t know that.” “My own father was a

  very marginal person in my life.” “What did he do? Remind me.” “He scraped

  floors for a living. Spent his whole life scraping floors. Your father was

  always pushing you to get the best grades. My father’s idea of setting me up in

  business was buying me a shoeshine kit so I could give quarter shines at a

  newsstand. That’s what he got me for graduation. Dumb fuck. I really suffered in

  that family. A really benighted family. I lived in a dark place with those

  people. You get shunted aside by your father, Nathan, you wind up a touchy

  fellow. I had a brother we had to put in an institution. You didn’t know that.

  Nobody did. We weren’t allowed even to mention his name. Eddie. Four years older

  than me. He would go into wild rages and bite his hands until they would bleed.

  He would scream like a coyote until my parents quieted him down. At school they

  asked if I had brothers or sisters and I wrote ‘None.’ While I was at college,

  my parents signed some permission form for the nuthouse and they gave Eddie a

  lobotomy and he went into a coma and died. Can you imagine? Tells me to shine

  shoes on Market Street outside the courthouse—that is a father’s advice to a