Broadway Baby (14 page)

Scene XVII

Sam was sixteen when he came home from school one day wearing a cap, a tweed cap, the kind Irish cabdrivers wear. It was three sizes too big.

“Where’d you get that?” Miriam asked.

In a stage Irish brogue, he said, “An old weasel and a young weasel are sitting in a bar; the old weasel says to the young weasel, ‘I slept with your mother.’ And the young weasel says, ‘Dad, you’re drunk. Let’s go home.’ ”

“
Th
e hat,” she repeated. “Where’d you get it?”

“I bought it,” he said.

“Bought it? With what? And why? It doesn’t fit you.”

“With money I saved from running Grandma’s errands. And I’m not gonna wear it, Ma, I got it ’cause I like the look of it.”

“It’s your money,” she said. “You want to waste it, waste it. But why?”

He answered with a stupid jingle: “As with my hat upon my head / I walkd along the Strand. / I there did meet another man / With his hat in his hand.”

When Curly saw the hat, he shook his head. “My son, the
chemist,” he said. “
Th
e only person I know who can turn money into shit.”

Every day after that it seemed Sam came home with another hat—he had a special fondness for those Irish touring caps, but he also brought home berets, fedoras, an occasional porkpie hat, a Stetson, a bowler—it didn’t matter what style, or even what size, whether they were too big or too small, since he never wore them; he only nailed them to the walls in his room. Why? He couldn’t say; he just liked the look of them. By the middle of his junior year his room looked like a haberdashery or like a bat cave with hats hanging on the walls instead of bats.

Finally, Curly had had enough of the hats. He didn’t care if Sam bought them with his own money; he said the hat buying had to stop. He couldn’t stand to see his son waste hard-earned cash. Sam had just learned to drive, and Curly said, you buy one more hat—you hear me—one more, and you’ll never use the car again. Never.

I
T WAS TEN
o’clock on a Saturday night in early summer. Sam had taken a girl out on a date. Curly had given him the car. Miriam was in bed reading when the phone rang; she could hear Curly yelling from the den: “You’re where? You what? Didn’t you lock it? You didn’t what? Are you kidding? What are you laughing for, you, you, for Christ’s sake!” He threw down the phone and called her to come talk to her idiot son.

“What happened, Sam? Why’s your father so upset?”

“Ma,” he said, “we went to Harvard Square, see, and well I parked the car and Martha and I, you know, we walked around for a while and then we came back and the car was gone.”

“Gone,” she asked, “as in stolen?”

“I think so.”

“Well, didn’t you lock it?”

“I did,” he said, “I mean, I think I did.”

“You think you did?”

“No,” he said, “I mean I know I did. I just . . .”

“Just what?”

“I just think I might not have rolled up the window.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “Where are you now?

“We’re at the police station. But Ma,” and now he’s giggling.

“What are you giggling for?”

“Well, you see, there’s something else.”

“What? What’s so funny?”

“Well,” he said, “if you think Dad’s angry about the car, wait’ll he sees the hat I bought.”

A
T THE END
of Sam’s junior year, on the Friday night of the big school dance, Miriam opened the door and screamed: “Oh my God, what happened?” Sam was leaning against the doorjamb, eyes swollen and his nose plastered to the side of his face. “Your eyes, your beautiful nose, who did this?”

“Don’t get hysterical,” Curly said behind her. “It’s just a kid fight, right, Sam? No big deal. I hope you gave as good as you got.”

“No big deal?” she said. “Look at him, will you? He could have been killed.”

“I was dancing,” Sam said groggily.

“Dancing?
Th
is happened dancing?” Miriam asked, stroking his cheek, leading him inside to the bathroom to clean him up.

“I was dancing with someone’s date, might have even been his girlfriend and . . .”

“Did you know she was with someone else?” Curly asked.

“What difference does that make?” Miriam said.

“I did, yeah,” Sam said, “when the guy pushed me.”

“Serves you right, Sam, when you go after another guy’s girl.”

“Curly!” Miriam yelled. “You can’t be serious.”

“Did you push him back?”

“Curly!” Miriam yelled again.

“He’s got to stand up for himself, for Christ’s sake, even if he is in the wrong. Otherwise he’ll become a punching bag for every thug and bully in the school.”

“I did try out a little Jewdo on him, Dad.”

“Since when do you know judo?” Curly asked.

“Not the J.U.D.O. kind, but the J.E.W.D.O. kind,” Sam said with a pained smile. “
Th
e ancient art of Jewish self-defense.”

“And what is that, exactly?” Curly asked.

“I tried to talk my way out of it.”

“Jeez,” Curly said, shaking his head. “It’s a wonder you’re still alive.”

“I did get in a few good jabs,” Sam added, “but they went over his head.”

B
Y HIS SENIOR
year in high school, Sam, too, was hardly ever at home, and when he was, he hardly ventured from his room. He spent hours with the door closed, listening to “music,” to Bob Dylan, in particular, to one song, which he played over and over until Miriam couldn’t get the screwball lyrics out of her head, something about a kid named Johnny in a basement mixing up medicine, while someone else was on the pavement thinking about the government. Lyrics were No
ë
l Coward, Stephen Sondheim, Gershwin, Lerner and Loewe, but this, what in the world was this? And you call this singing—singing?
Th
is was the sound of cats fighting in a Dumpster. And anyway, what did it mean? She would ask him, and he would shrug and say whatever you want it to and close his door.

He was taking creative writing at school, he was studying poetry, of all things. Poetry! Mrs. Pinkerton’s revenge! Mrs. Pinkerton, the widow, the walking calendar. Miriam could practically hear her old teacher saying, “Enunciate, girls, enunciate! Expectorate the spuds!” Why did this not surprise her? To make matters worse, he called his teacher, Dallas Alderman, by his first name, Dallas. Since when did that happen?
Th
e teacher was barely older than Sam, and with his long hair, work shirt, and bell-bottoms, he was easily mistaken for another student. Sam used to play basketball, but now when Curly asked him why he had stopped, Sam said that organized sports, like organized anything, was too repressive: “Dallas says it’s just a dress rehearsal for the military.” Curly exploded, “I don’t give a shit what Dallas says. Just don’t you go and get involved in any politics—you do and I’ll disown you like I did your sister. You hear me?” Sam never answered. Closing his door, he’d mumble, “Get dressed, get blessed, try and be a suck-cess . . .”

One day she found a scrap of paper in a pocket of his jeans, which she was taking from the dryer.
Th
ere was writing on it, but the ink had mostly faded in the wash. Someone whose name began with “M” (the other letters were illegible) was “floating face down in the ego swamp . . .” She found another scrap in the pocket of a shirt. On that, all she could make out was the word “marriage,” and, under that, one fragmentary line: “cold shoulder, cold shower, cold storage.” On the other side of the paper, something or other, she couldn’t make out what, was “like a foreign movie without subtitles.” She didn’t know what any of it meant (a foreign movie without subtitles indeed!), but she didn’t like it, not one bit.

R
ABBI
A
LTER CALLED.
Did they realize that their son Sam was applying for conscientious objector status and that he’d asked the rabbi for a letter in support of his application? Had they read the application? No, they hadn’t. Well, they should.

Sam had made an appointment with the rabbi for early next week.
Th
e rabbi suggested that Miriam and Curly come to the synagogue before Sam, so they could sit in the library off the rabbi’s study and listen in on the interview.

Rabbi Alter was not your stereotypical rabbi. He wasn’t ancient, bearded, and otherworldly. He wasn’t stooped with sorrow. He looked like Paul Newman. A dapper dresser with a vaguely patrician affect to his speech (vaguely goyishe, Miriam thought)—everything about him projected worldly success and secular enjoyment. His office, too, was bright, modern, and neat, more like the office of a divorce attorney than a holy man. He ushered them into the library and left the door ajar. While they waited for Sam, they read his CO statement.

Th
ey couldn’t believe their eyes. Sam presented himself as a pacifist, a pacifism derived from his Jewish heritage, which was laughable given how “religiously” he had avoided stepping foot inside a temple since the day of his bar mitzvah. He refused to go even on the High Holidays.
Th
ey knew he hated organized religion; organized anything was, in his book, “fascistic.” He hated absolutes of any kind (except his own). When they would argue about religion, he would tell them that he regarded God the way Bob Dylan did, as a hypocritical sanction for the basest human impulses, for nationalism, greed, and hatred. Yet here he was fabricating a bullshit religious justification for refusing to fight based on the biblical injunction to treat others as you would have them treat you. What shocked them most of all were the two “conversion” experiences he described, what he called the “turning points” of his spiritual development: when his father decked the drunk before Julie’s graduation and when his classmate decked him at the high school dance. But in his version of the events, both Sam and the drunk were portrayed as victims of unprovoked attacks. Not only that, he actually compared his father to “warmongering” America and the stranger to the innocent and noble North Vietnamese. Bad enough that he would lie about what happened, but to malign his father’s character like this, to describe him to the rabbi, of all people (and to the government!), as a “short-tempered man who lived by a dangerous code of preemptive justice, a man who swung first and asked questions later, a man whose eye-for-an-eye ethic could only foster conflict, not resolve it,” and to do all this in the name of saving his own skin—well, they were speechless with rage and embarrassment.

When Sam entered and sat down before the rabbi’s massive desk, it was all Miriam could do to keep Curly from running out and spanking his “spiritual” ass right there.

“So, Mr. Gold,” the rabbi said, holding up a copy of Sam’s statement, “you’re a pacifist, is that right?”

“Yes, I am,” Sam answered confidently.

“And you say here,” he said, flipping through the pages, “let me see if I can find the sentence, yes, here it is, that your pacifism ‘comes from my religious training and my study of the bible . . .’ ”

“Right,” Sam said, not quite so confidently.

“Mr. Gold,” he asked, “how many years were you in Hebrew school here at Kehilleth Israel?”

“I don’t know,” Sam answered, “maybe six years?”

“It’s seven,” he said. “
Th
e exact number is seven. And when you got your bar mitzvah, you were in what grade?”

“Of Hebrew school?”

“Yes.”

“I was in third grade.”

“So,” the rabbi continued, “that means, does it not—correct me if I’m wrong—that you were kept back four years in a row?”

“Um, well, I was never very good at math, but I guess that’s right.”

“And why,” he asked, twirling his glasses, “do you suppose you were kept back four years in a row?”

“Incompetent teachers?” Sam offered with a nervous laugh.

“You know, Mr. Gold, we’ve never had another student stay back four years in a row, did you know that?”

“No, sir,” Sam said. “I didn’t.”

“Yes,” the rabbi went on, “you’re something of a legend in these venerable halls. Your accomplishments have not been forgotten.” He got up from his desk and took a Hebrew Bible down from the bookshelf. He laid it open in front of the boy.

“Read,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Sam asked.

“Read,” he repeated. “Read. I want you to read to me, if you’d be so kind.”

“But it’s in Hebrew,” Sam said. “I can’t read Hebrew.”

“Remind me, then,” the rabbi said, “how you managed to read the haftorah during your bar mitzvah service.”

“Well,” he said, “I listened to a recording of the part I had to read. I memorized it.”

“So,” the rabbi said, “you went through seven years of school here, stayed back four years in a row, never opened a book in all that time, so that you couldn’t read a single word of Hebrew at your own bar mitzvah service, and since that day you haven’t stepped foot in temple, have you?”

“No, sir, I haven’t.”

“And yet,” the rabbi continued, “in this document you claim to be a student of the Bible. You quote one line that actually isn’t in the Hebrew Bible at all—it’s in the Christian Bible—and then you expect me to believe that this so-called pacifism of yours derives from your religious training. Isn’t that the phrase you use, ‘religious training’?”

Sam scratched his head. “I guess it is.”

“Would it be unfair of me to say you have about as much training in the tenets of Judaism as Adolf Hitler? Would it, Mr. Gold?”

“But I consider myself Jewish.”

“You’re Jewish,” the rabbi said, “the way my tie is reddish.”

“My sense of humor, Rabbi,” the boy pleaded, “my sense of right and wrong, my connection to family, doesn’t all that come from my Jewishness?”

“Dear boy,” the Rabbi answered, “it isn’t enough just to feel good about being Jewish.”

“Who said anything about feeling good?”

“Speaking of Hitler, Mr. Gold, what would you have done if the Nazis had rounded up your family like they did mine and shipped them off to Auschwitz? Would you have fought against the Nazis to protect your family?”

“Yes,” he said, “I would, but Vietnam isn’t Germany, and Ho Chi Minh isn’t Hitler.”