Closing Time (36 page)

Forty years after seeing the film, I sought out Wren’s final resting place, in a village a few miles down the road from my wife’s birthplace in the Cotswolds, and deposited a wreath of flowers on his disintegrating, poorly maintained grave. I felt that I owed it to him, for, from the moment I first saw the film inspired by his novel, I had dreamed of living in France, even though none of the action takes place there and even though none of the actors was French, most assuredly not Gary Cooper. Years later I discovered that the French Foreign Legion at the time of
Beau Geste
consisted almost exclusively of lowlife thugs who had taken it on the lam, one step ahead of the coppers, and not dashing English public-school boys on the prowl for a ripping good time. By that point, it did not matter. The spell had been cast.

The spell was certainly not cast by any members of Cardinal Dougherty’s modern-languages department. My first French teacher was a wraithlike Polish American well into his thirties. He was bespectacled, pint-sized, studious, and a bachelor. He was not French Foreign Legion material. Mr. Stan was a perfectly nice fellow who once told me that I resembled Julius Caesar, which seemed like a compliment until I found out that Caesar was a fat, bald, epileptic bisexual. I liked Mr. Stan well enough until the day he began tormenting a Venezuelan boy who showed up in the middle of the year. Spanish was Carlos’s native tongue, but he was incapable of learning French: This enraged Mr. Stan, who insisted that, as the languages were cousins, Carlos had a head start on the rest of us and should be able to speak
sans accent.

It made no difference to him that the new arrival was simultaneously struggling to learn English; that it was difficult for native Spanish speakers to master Italian and French because the very similarities of the languages confused the issue; and that, on top of everything else, Carlos was not especially bright. Carlos’s ineptitude was not a crime in our eyes, but it was to Mr. Stan, who treated him with a disdain and cruelty woefully out of proportion to his failings. Still, in the end, we were no better than our teacher, profiting from his badgering of the cowed Caraquenian because it diverted attention away from our own linguistic deficiencies.

My French teacher during my junior and senior years was a pompous buffoon, a fiftyish cleric who referred to himself in the third person and whose familiarity with Gallic civilization was limited to owning a couple of Maurice Chevalier records and being in firm possession of the fact that Quasimodo was a Paris-based hunchback. He would sit in the front of the class with a papier-mâché model of the cathedral of Notre Dame poised on his desk and proceed to butcher nursery-school words like
la chaise
and
le stylo,
all the while sporting a self-satisfied grin suggesting that he had just edged out Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri de Montherlant, and Simone de Beauvoir for the Prix Goncourt. He knew as much about French as the rest of us knew about bathosphere maintenance.

This did not matter. As I had never before met anyone who had been to Paris, the very sound of words like
baguette
and
gendarme
seemed insanely exotic to my ears, evoking lofty dreams of refinement, elegance, and escape, even when massacred by a halfwit cleric. True, I had grown up around working-class people who spoke Italian, but in my social set Italian was derided as the grubby patois of duplicitous lily-livers who were constantly siding with the Germans in world wars and then thinking better of it. This stereotype prevailed even though all the Italians we knew, including my uncle Sam Mazzarella, had grown up on the banks of the Schuylkill, and quite a few of them had fought valiantly in the Second World War on the American side. But at the time, the Italian tongue had none of the sex appeal it would later acquire; Italian—or, heaven forbid, Spanish or Yiddish—did not evoke the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower or Claude Monet or Napoleon’s electrifying triumph at Austerlitz. It was a peasant lingo spoken by greaseballs from South Philly who sold cheese in disconcertingly large quantities to timorous merchants who had no obvious need for daily dairy deliveries of such magnitude. French, by contrast, conjured up fanciful images of Charlemagne, Charles Martel, the Three Musketeers, the Man in the Iron Mask, the French Foreign Legion, and the old crowd pleaser herself, Joan of Arc.

From this point on, I thought of the French language as my exit visa out of the working class. On one side of the door lay poverty, prejudice, ignorance, gloom. On the other side lay affluence, sophistication, luxury, and perhaps even happiness. In my mind, success and happiness were inexorably intertwined with high culture. Growing up to be rich meant nothing to me, because the newly rich were renowned for their vulgarity, and if you were still vulgar, you were still poor. Anyway, I grew up being taught that the rich proceeded directly to Hell after they died and stayed there for the rest of eternity, and nothing I have learned since then has given me any reason to think otherwise.

Until I stumbled upon the splendors of the French language, religion had been the dominant element in my life. Now the Book of Revelations and the Holy Bible were supplanted by
Madame Bovary
and
Père Goriot.
This transformation was something I tried to keep under my hat. Len would have felt betrayed by such prissiness; Uncle Jerry would have been horrified; Glenn would have been baffled as to why a thrill-seeking young boy would start obsessing about Paris, France, when he could simply buy himself a train ticket and mosey eighty-five miles up the track to New York, New York. This was yet another instance where I simply held my tongue, deeming discretion the better part of valor.

Although my seduction by French civilization was genuine, spontaneous, and irreversible, quickly evolving into a passion that would last a lifetime, the original motivation for my francophilia was somewhat less than pure. From the outset, I viewed speaking French as a skill I could easily master and then throw back into my father’s face. In retrospect, it is amazing how circumscribed my world was by my attempts to belittle my father in retaliation for his belittling me. But this was war, and the wedge between us widened every day: Every book I read, every movie I watched, every idea I assimilated furnished yet another tool to aid me in my flight from my father’s economic class, a class I sought not only to exit but to disown. The ironic part was that my father, endowed with a sophistication and a curiosity about the world that were not commonly associated with the proletariat, had in some way prepared all of us to secede from the class he had been born into.

Because he was not a dunce, because he valued books and film and music, he had, without realizing it, armed his children with the skills they would need to escape from a class in which he himself was trapped for life. It was a class from which, had the opportunity ever arisen, he would have joyously taken flight as well. But because he could not escape—hamstrung by the dishonorable discharge, the shabby work record, the addiction to alcohol—he resented anyone who could. Though he did not really want us to grow up to be like him, warning us to avoid the mistakes he had made—dropping out of school, going AWOL, emptying every whiskey bottle in the Delaware Valley in the hopes of eventually finding the one whose contents would bring him happiness—he begrudged us every step we took away from him. Nothing sickened him more than the thought that his children might get the life that he wanted. He was a true child of his tribe: If you were in, he was out; if you were up, he was down.

 

When I began studying French history, no one impressed me more than Joan of Arc. I had quite a crush on the Maid of Orléans throughout high school; she seemed to be the apotheosis of teen chutzpah. By a strange coincidence, at the same time that I was daydreaming about Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret—Joan of Arc’s unexpected confidants—wondering if there was any possibility whatsoever that one of them might put in a late-twentieth-century appearance, however brief, in my neighborhood, my father actually did begin hearing voices. Shortly after John Kennedy was assassinated, a tragedy that seemed to affect our family even more than it affected JFK’s, my father got into the habit of staying up all night, first talking to himself, then weeping, then conversing with a series of incorporeal interlocutors whose ranks ranged from Saint Peter to the recently deceased Pope John XXIII to Jesus Christ Himself. Hidden away upstairs, self-mummified in our sheets, we could hear snippets of these conversations, which always reached the critical moment when my father would come right out and ask the Son of God precisely how he fit into His divine plan and what specific duties he was expected to fulfill between now and the hour of his death.

A pioneer in the field of extraterrestrial badinage, my father had convinced himself that even though he was but a lowly security guard and an alcoholic, the Lamb of God should be expected to have his personal file right there at his fingertips and be more than ready to drop everything and supply him with a few pointers on how he might upgrade his performance as a Christian. The notion that Christ had nothing better to do with his time than to mentor delusional alkies was the height of arrogance, illustrating that come-as-you-are chumminess that has now become a staple of American religion. Christ the Savior never answered any of my father’s questions, preferring to maintain the distance for which He is famous. This did not prevent paterfamilias from keeping up a one-sided dialogue with the Messiah throughout my high school years and well into college.

It should have come as no surprise to any of us that he was engaging in these fruitless colloquies with the Son of God, because nobody else in the house was going to speak to him unless coerced. If we were very quiet and he was not especially drunk, he would stay out of our rooms and leave us alone. To help things along, we would make sure to go to the bathroom before bedtime, ensuring that our bladders were empty, and take special care to not allow the bedsprings to rustle beneath us. But if he detected even the slightest sounds of movement in our rooms, he would stumble to the foot of the stairs and ask one of us—usually me—to come down and talk to him. This was not in the way of an invitation; it was a command performance. The subject of our witching-hour confabs was usually subversive Negroes or the war in Vietnam, conversations that always ended in arguments, as my father viewed all of us as being in league with Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Fidel Castro, Bob Dylan. We feuded without end during those late-night summit conferences, though the arguments never came to blows, because I always backed off when I saw him get that unmistakable look in his eye that presaged violence. Night after night, he would sit there, smiling, perhaps recounting an amusing story about something that had happened at work—like the man who took umbrage when told that he could not make love to his wife in a semiprivate room at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital because it contravened hospital rules—and then I would go off to get myself a glass of water or use the bathroom or tie my shoe, and when I turned back to face him, I would find Hyde in the seat so recently occupied by Jekyll. Then the gloves would come off and the high-octane goading would start: “I see that your old friend H. Rap Brown is back in town . . . ,” “I see that your pal Martin Luther King is stirring up trouble in Georgia . . . ,” “I see those instigators are trying to bust up a block out in Folcroft.” To the extent that it was possible, I would try to avoid taking the bait, having considerably less interest in Martin Luther King’s career than my father thought. Then, when he started to turn vicious, I would mentally catalogue all the misfortunes he had suffered, taking due note of the bullet wound he had once absorbed, and remind myself that I was still giving away fifty pounds. At which point, I would decide not to push it. Not yet, anyway. All in good time.

When he was extremely drunk, and extremely upset at what Martin Luther King had done to his old neighborhood, both of which made him desperate for company, he would barrel into our rooms and kiss us in a nauseating simulation of paternal affection. This was even worse than listening to him. Yet, no matter how bad things got, I honestly believed that time was on our side, that sooner or later we would all escape from this Quaker City concentration camp. I spent most of my childhood dreaming about adulthood; there was no mileage in being a kid. No longer being young had been my driving ambition since I was nine; the only thing I wanted out of my childhood was an end to it.

To the extent that it was possible, I avoided my father. We all did. We took jobs or joined clubs or feigned illnesses or manufactured excuses for sleepovers. This worked for a while. Then one night when I was sixteen years old, he asked if I was still giving my $13.10 in earnings to my mother every week. It was suppertime; the whole family was seated at the dining room table, eating food we did not especially care for. He was drunk when he asked the question, spoiling for a fight.

“When I was your age, my mother didn’t have to ask me for my pay when I came home from work,” he noted, launching into one of his favorite spiels, once again conjuring up the reliably unverifiable mythology of the Great Depression. I do not remember the exact words I used in response to this latest tirade, but it was something to the effect that I needed the money to pay the $15 fees for the college applications I was filling out. This was not what he wanted to hear.

“You don’t have to worry about that,” he snapped. “Haven’t we always taken care of you?”

I thought about that for a second, then threw caution to the wind. “Actually, you’ve never taken care of me,” I replied, emboldened by a temerity that had not existed five seconds earlier. “So I’m taking care of it myself.”

Life changed in the next fifteen seconds, both his and mine. Livid, not quite believing his ears, he half leaped, half lurched out of his chair and circled around the table. I jumped out of my chair and bolted into the living room. He followed me, closing in, ready to charge. I could see that he planned to punch me. I had other plans. I punched him. I’d punched people before, so it wasn’t terra incognita. I cocked my right fist, aimed, took a short, healthy swing, smacked his forehead, swatted him away.
Use your jab, use your jab,
as Len used to say. It wasn’t a hard punch, certainly not a haymaker, but it was solid enough for him to know he’d been hit. Then and there, the topography of our lives shifted. From the moment he came barreling into the living room, he was a different person in my eyes. What I saw was no longer a dangerous man armed with his fists and a belt. What I saw before me was a paunchy, middle-aged drunk who couldn’t take me in a fair fight. What I saw was a bully getting a taste of his own medicine.