The Melting Pot Read online

  Williamsburg, Brownsville, and Borough Park were neighborhoods in Brooklyn which because of my father’s frequent mention of them (“What’s doing in Borough Park?” after my mother telephoned her sister) remain archetypal place names bearing the personalities of my aunts and my grandmother. Now Brooklyn boasts unfamiliar names that sound concocted: Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill. Where are these strange places? I think, and what are their real names? I can see my father’s lips compressing scornfully, rejecting the new fatuities. Greenwich Village, once Manhattan’s Bohemia, he persisted in pronouncing as spelled rather than the correct “Grennich” Village. Far as he was from Bohemia, he must have heard the words spoken; I think he persisted in the literal pronunciation to protest at least one of the area’s many, to him, arty eccentricities.

  He spent his first American years on Cherry Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and forever after spoke the words “Cherry Street” with a tone of disgust and hostility, a tone in which I could feel the textures of deprivation, of all that was disheveled and ungainly. He would have been appalled to know that a movie called Hester Street (near Cherry Street) drew fashionable crowds over fifty years later, that his humiliation was advertised as art. Now on Cherry Street stand tall buildings, low and middle-income housing. Hispanic people, Chinese people, artists live there, not in squalor. But when I hear the words “Cherry Street” I think, squalor, confinement, and I feel the lust to rise up out of them—as if that had not already been done for me.

  In speech and in everything else he liked boldness and swiftness and despised timidity or hesitation, and he promulgated these tastes as absolutes. Fortunately my brother and sister and I came to be loud or swift or bold, most of the time; we picked it up in the atmosphere or had it in the genes or learned it for survival. The faint of heart, the slow, sometimes even the thoughtful, were morally inferior as well as aesthetically displeasing. My father was driving up Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, a steep hill, when an elderly woman, crossing as the light was changing, saw our car approach and stopped mid-street. Then she reconsidered and started to walk again. He slowed down; she stopped. He accelerated; she trotted. Madly working the gearshift, he came to a violent halt and rolled down the window. My innards stiffened at the prospect of what terrible words he would say, how he would mortify her, the epitome of all he scorned. (Rembrandt, too, was reputed to be “a most temperamental man” who tended to “disparage everyone” and make “brusque, ironical remarks.”) As she stood in the middle of the street, thoroughly muddled now, he at last hurled out sternly, resoundingly, “Don’t falter!”

  My mother could be loud and bold and swift when necessary, but in a manner different from the rest of us. Softer, with prettiness and diplomacy. She was what men call “emotional”; her words and judgments arose from feeling and intuition rather than reason, a mode of operation inimical to my father. He would ask her a question, did she want to go here or there at such and such a time, and she would reply with a string of conditional sentences. “Give me a yes or no answer!” he would shout. I admired his quest for clarity and definitiveness; I took it as a categorical imperative. If every question had a yes or no answer there would be fewer problems in the world, no shilly-shallying. Later I learned that this tactic came from a legalistic tradition and was used in the courtroom to interrogate witnesses. So he had not invented it—though it might have been invented expressly for him.

  It wasn’t obscenities that I feared my father would hurl at the faltering woman—I had never heard him use those. “Goddamned” was his adjective in moderate anger, and “Goddamn it to hell” his expletive when he was seriously enraged; he was a man inhabited by rage, who seemed most alive, most recognizably himself, when in a verbal tempest. His furies lashed the stupidity or willfulness of those around him, and in them would blaze forth like lightning the word “moron,” his worst epithet. In our household, “moron” was a word of such immense power and inclusiveness, so thoroughly condemning, that the filthier words I learned later are mild in comparison. “Moron” was the worst epithet because brains were the most precious possession, without which a person was of little or no worth. “There’s no substitute for brains,” he liked to say. Brains were demonstrated by articulate speech, such as his own disquisitions on political and economic topics. He would fix the listener with his glittering brown eyes and address him or her as a hypothetical You. The thesis might be abstract, the workings of the laissez-faire economy or the dynamics of imperialism, but it would usually be illustrated by a concrete example. “Let’s say You have half a million dollars to invest. Now supposing You happen upon an extremely advantageous ... And so on. Then at some point—perhaps You were about to indulge in a shady deal, to act with less than utter probity—he would reassure his listener, “I mean editorial You, of course, you understand.” He never failed to make this explanation about editorial You, an odd scruple in a man who was otherwise quite ready to call people morons.

  He was generally pleased with his three children because he judged them intelligent, but women, to be worthy, had to be pretty as well. Those who were not he called “dogs” and found it painful to be in their presence. “She’s a dog,” he would say with revulsion, but a different kind of revulsion than he used for “Moron!”—a sort of regretful revulsion, as if it were not the woman’s fault that her presence pained him, whereas in the case of “Moron!” the person was held responsible. Among my friends, who were perpetually crowding into the house, he liked the ones who were bright, pretty, and lively; he asked them questions so he could enjoy their replies and tease them a bit, and he addressed lectures on politics to them, using editorial You; the others he avoided.

  When he felt insufficiently appreciated or when my mother disagreed with his views, he would say with rueful conviction, “A man is never a prophet in his own home town,” and till I was grown I mistook the key word for “profit,” possibly because he was a businessman as well as a lawyer and often spoke of “the profit motive,” for example, as the real reason for the United States’ hostility to communism (“Markets! Markets! It’s all economics! The profit motive!”). Strangely enough, I attributed almost the right meaning to the adage anyway, though I was puzzled by its semantic awkwardness. Then at some point I realized it was “prophet” he had been uttering all those years. So it was not respect and credit and glory that he sought, but spiritual allegiance. Disciples. In a less exalted sense, company.

  He loved company, especially on errands or trips to the doctor and dentist. He cajoled me into watching him get haircuts and have his shoes shined, and on a few Saturdays even took me along to see a client upstate, to have company for the drive. He would present me with aplomb to the barber or client, try to get me to say something clever, then proceed with business. I always brought a book. I, who loved the idea of going places alone and thought it the pinnacle of adulthood, would suspect that, like our government in its hostility to communism, he had an ulterior motive—to get me out of the house or tell me a secret—but he didn’t. He truly wanted company.

  In turn he would offer to drive us—his children—and our friends to places, and given the way he loved to drive, he would want to drive us to places we preferred to walk to, and would feel slighted when his offers were declined. He had little understanding of walking for pleasure, of allowing time to flow unorganized, of not wishing to “make good time.” He took walks, as far as I was aware, only during the summers, in the country, when he would often ask me along for company. We would set out down the dirt road and he would commence beating the bushes on either side for a good walking stick. He couldn’t amble along without a purpose, so the purpose became finding the walking stick. I would find a few candidates, but they generally didn’t meet his standards, which were unclear. At last he would find just the right one—thick, sturdy, a good height; he would rip the twigs and leaves from it and, holding it in his right hand and stomping it on the ground, walk still more purposefully, trying it out. We went along, talking; he ex
plained things to me, not about the natural surroundings we were in, of which he knew nothing, but political and social things; sometimes I even had the pleasure of being editorial You and having my responses solicited in a Socratic way. Before I was ever satisfied with our walk, he would turn around. It seemed the thrill of the walk was over once he had found the stick and tested it. At the end of the walk he would usually toss it back into the woods, and when the next walk came around he regretted it. “I had such a good walking stick last week—what ever happened to it?” He had a nostalgic turn of mind. Nothing today was as good as it had been yesterday, and nothing was ever as good as it could be.

  The world in general showed an offensive, needless disorder. At the refusal of people and events in the world of our household to arrange themselves as he wished and knew to be best, he often called, in alarming tones, for “discipline.” He was forever “putting his foot down.” “Discipline! Discipline!” and when I was quite young it would frighten me to think of what terrible rules might be forthcoming. But it was only the word. The foot never came down. After such scenes my mother, who was intimidated neither by his pronouncements and threats nor by their volume, would tell me that his father, “the old man,” had been a stern disciplinarian, and that while his sons forever resented him for it, they kept the notion that it was the way to be a father. I am hard put to remember any rule he actually laid down. No comic books and no reading at the dinner table are all that come to mind, and the latter we—my sister and I, the offenders—often ignored. This is not to say that his bark was worse than his bite. His bark was his bite. To know him meant to have been exposed to his fierceness, fiercely articulate. But even then what did you know, really? Only that he had an immense vat of boiling fury inside, in precarious balance, waiting to be tipped over.

  Certain times when his anger was provoked, or when he wished to give the impression that it was, he would stand quite still and say he was “counting to ten.” He would press his lips into a hard thin line and I would imagine, pounding inside his head, “One, two, three ... Then he would speak quietly, in a tight voice. He took pride in these moments of tantrums controlled notwithstanding great provocation, and even seemed to expect admiration from us, his near victims. But no one congratulated him, for we understood he was only pretending: the provocation lacked the mysterious extra grain that rubbed the equally mysterious sore place in his soul and caused the explosive, intolerable pain, sweeping him past the gates of civilized restraint to a far and savage, solitary place. Then there was no counting to ten. Then he would call volcanically for “peace and quiet.” “Will you let me have some peace and quiet!”—holding his head as if it might erupt. At the apogee of the tantrum he would yell at my mother, “You make my life miserable!” and would flee, slamming the front door so the house shook. I would hear the engine starting up in the driveway, sputtering as violently as he, then the whiz of the car escaping down the street. I was sure he would never be back. The next hour or two, alone in my room with the door closed, I would try to decide whom to live with after the divorce, and conjure the scene of myself being consulted in the judge’s chambers, a dark room with dark drapes and green carpets and oak furniture, the judge in black robes and gray hair, with a somber countenance, feeling sorry for me in my plight—the whole scene something like a Rembrandt painting, murky, a spiritual murk, redolent of profundity and pain. It was a difficult decision; there were significant pros and cons on either side, but I knew how to give a yes or no answer, and most of the time (not always—not when I was too repelled by his noise) I would decide to go with my father, never doubting that he would request me of the judge: he was easier to live with, his arbitrariness congruent with my own; he set fewer rules and left me more to myself. I felt a temperamental affinity, I understood him, or so I believed. And the absence of my mother would not really be an absence, I felt obscurely. A mother is so close, you can carry her around inside wherever you go. But a father can escape. And then who would talk to me? His presence, like that of all men, was exotic. When he came home at night I would ask what he had done out in the world, and he would tell me. I would have a glimpse of what awaited me.

  I felt sorry for my mother for the impending loss of us both (and how baffled she would be at my choice!), but after all, she had provoked him, hadn’t she? Yet why did his reaction have to be so violent—why the words so torrentially bitter? Why remove a splinter with pliers? The answer was a mystery known as the family temper, spoken of by my aunts and uncles by marriage with a resignation they might have employed for the genealogical shape of a chin or a hand. No one sought its origin, mired in the bogs of history and the tangle of chromosomes. No one had ever gotten anywhere trying to reform it; you lived with it and navigated your way around it, like a neighbor’s savage watchdog.

  I don’t think my father knew what he was so angry about either. He was not introspective by nature and the habit of introspection had not yet suffused the middle class so that one undertook it as a duty whether or not so inclined. He too must have felt his terrible temper as a hereditary burden no more eradicable than his inherited and tireless heart, which kept cruelly beating when every other organ had failed and when he tried to yank from his chest the patches hooking him to the heart monitoring machine, mistaking them for life-sustaining equipment. And because he was not introspective and his words were spontaneously borne on currents of logic or enthusiasm or impulse or rage, we were not a family who ever “talked things over.” When I hear nowadays the psychological language urging family members to settle differences by calm discussion, to reveal their feelings, be “open,” when I see snatches of television families “working things through,” I get a sense of comic unreality. I try it so that my children do not become thralls to verbal fire and brimstone, but I have a sense of rubbing against the grain, of participating in some faddish, newfangled ritual. I feel like shouting out what I want and hearing others shout back, and slugging it out with ever more pungent insults. ...

  While I drifted in fantasies of our life together, in which I would know instinctively how not to provoke him, the car would pull into the driveway, the door would open and close with a temperate sound. Relief and disappointment: no dramatic change now, no exotic twosome. I never gave a thought to where he might have been during that hour or two. Probably just driving, counting to ten, till the wild sea-green vein in his right temple stopped pulsing.

  After these outbursts, my mother could remain cool for days (“belligerent,” he would call her; “Why do you walk around with a chip on your shoulder?”), but she sensibly refused to believe she made his life miserable. I, who took all words literally, especially those spoken with passion, still thought it logical and inevitable that one of them should leave. The concept of leaving was not in my mother’s repertoire of possibilities, and besides, she regarded the words as no more meaningful than steam or lava. She preferred to give credence to other of his remarks, such as when in company, if she referred to her size—she was a very large woman—and he had had a drink or two, he would say gaily, “I love every inch of it,” though most of the time, quite unlike her, he was reserved to the point of prudery about sexual matters. I saw him twist my mother’s arm with the playful sadism that was his sign of physical affection, but I never saw a real embrace or a real kiss.

  She said too that when they were alone he was another way entirely; he merely had to “show off” in front of others. She was instinctively right about matters of the heart; it was probably this very lightness, those relentless instincts, amiably presented, unsupported by any rational structure, that my father found so exasperating. Also, despite her conventional moral judgments, she had endless sympathy and excuses for wrongdoers. Public Defender, he called her, and this too, I realized only later, was a legal term with a very specific meaning. He might be ready with money, words, car rides, and devotion, but he could not, or would not, comprehend moral ambivalence or extend sympathy for emotional confusion. Once, when I was in my twenties, I tried ta
lking to him about some painful dilemma, which took nerve—we all talked a lot, constantly, but we did not “have talks.” As I started to cry he walked out of the room. When he saw it was something no money or car ride could help, that I was not editorial You this time, he was confounded, as confounded as the woman crossing the street.

  I never saw but one tear of his: at the funeral of my mother’s mother he delicately flicked at his lower lid with his pinkie, smiling cavalierly, pretending it was a speck. My grandmother, she of Williamsburg, was a woman of the sort he loved: feisty, clever, pretty, bold, swift, decisive, and opinionated, and years earlier he had taught her, in Yiddish, to play gin rummy, in which all those qualities could be brought to bear, and had pronounced her an excellent player, which was very unusual, because most of the people he played cards with, including my mother and the five men in his weekly pinochle game, he called morons.