Indignation (12 page)

And this was her reward for ever so tenderly wip
ing my ass. And mine? For that one quick stroke of Olivia’s hand, my reward would be Korea. Miss Clement must already be on the phone to Dean Caudwell, who’d himself be on the phone to my father following that. And easily enough I could envision my father, after receiving the news, swinging the meat cleaver with such force as to split wide open the four-foot-thick freestanding butcher block on which he ordinarily cracked open the carcasses of cows.

“Excuse me,” murmured Miss Clement and, pulling the door closed, disappeared. Quickly Olivia went into my bathroom and returned with hand towels, one for the bed linens, another for me.

Struggling to feign a manly calm, I asked Olivia, “What’s she going to do now? What’s going to happen next?”

“Nothing,” Olivia replied.

“You’re awfully poised about this. Is it all the practice you’ve had?”

Her voice was husky when she replied. “It wasn’t necessary to say that.”

“I apologize. I’m sorry. But this is all new to me.”

“You don’t think it’s new to
me?
”

“What about Sonny Cottler?”

“I don’t see where that’s your business,” she shot back.

“Isn’t it?”

“
No.
”

“You’re awfully poised about
everything,
” I said. “How do you know the nurse is going to do nothing?”

“She’s too embarrassed to.”

“Look, how did you get like this?”

“Like what?” asked Olivia, in anger now.

“So—expert.”

“Oh, yes, Olivia the expert,” she said sourly. “That’s what they called me at the Menninger Clinic.”

“But you are. You’re so under control.”

“You really think so, do you? I, who have eight thousand moods a minute, whose every emotion is a tornado, who can be thrown by a
word,
by a
syllable,
am ‘under control’? God, you
are
blind,” she said and went back to the bathroom with the towels.

Olivia came by bus to the hospital the next day—a fifty-minute bus ride in either direction—and in my room the same delightful business transpired, after which she cleaned up and, while in the bath
room disposing of the towels, changed the water in the vase to keep the flowers fresh.

Miss Clement now tended to me without speaking. Despite Olivia’s reassurance, I couldn’t believe that she hadn’t told someone, and that the payoff would come when I left the hospital and was back at school. I was as sure as my own father would have been that as a result of my having been caught having sexual contact with Olivia in my hospital room, full-scale disaster would shortly ensue.

O
livia was fascinated by my being a butcher’s son. It seemed far more interesting to her that I should be a butcher’s son than what was of no little interest to me, that she should be a doctor’s daughter. I’d never before dated a doctor’s daughter. Mostly the girls I’d known were girls whose fathers owned a neighborhood store, like my father did, or were salesmen who sold neckties or aluminum siding or life insurance, or were tradesmen—electricians, plumbers, and so forth. At the hospital, after I’d had my orgasm, she almost immediately began asking me about the store, and very quickly I got the idea: I was to her something on the order of the child of a snake charmer or of a circus performer
raised in the big top. “Tell me more,” she said. “I want to hear more.” “Why?” I asked. “Because I know nothing about such things and because I like you so much. I want to learn everything about you. I want to know what made you you, Marcus.”

“Well, the store made me me, if anything did, though what exactly was made I can’t say I entirely know anymore. I’ve been in a very confused state of mind since I hit this place.”

“It made you hardworking. It made you honest. It gave you integrity.”

“Oh, did it?” I said. “The butcher shop?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, let me tell you about the fat man, then,” I said. “Let me tell you what he gave me in the way of integrity. We’ll start with him.”

“Goodie. Story time. The fat man and how he gave Marcus integrity.” She laughed in anticipation. The laugh of a child being tickled. Nothing exceptional, and still it enchanted me as much as everything else.

“Well, a fat man used to come every Friday and pick up all the fat. It’s possible he had a name, though it’s equally possible that he didn’t. He was just the fat man. He would come in once a week,
announce, ‘Fat man here,’ weigh all the fat, pay my father for it, and take it away. The fat was in a garbage pail, a regular fifty-five-gallon pail about this high, and while we were cutting we were tossing the fat into the pail there. Before the big Jewish holidays, when people loaded up with meat, there could be a couple of pailfuls waiting for him. It couldn’t have been a lot of money that the fat man paid. A couple of bucks a week, no more than that. Well, our store was right near the corner where the bus to downtown stopped, the number eight Lyons Avenue bus. And on Fridays, after the fat man picked up the fat, he left behind the garbage cans, and I had the job of washing them out. I remember once one of the pretty girls from my class saying to me, ‘Oh, when I stopped at the bus stop in front of your father’s store, I saw you there cleaning out the garbage cans.’ So I went to my father and said, ‘This is ruining my social life. I can’t clean these garbage cans anymore.’ ”

“You cleaned them in front of the store?” Olivia asked. “Right out on the street?”

“Where else?” I said. “I had a scrub brush, Ajax, threw a little water in with the Ajax, and I’d scrub the inside of it. If you didn’t get it clean, it would
start to smell. Become rancid. But you don’t want to hear this stuff.”

“I do. I do.”

“I had you down for a great woman of the world, but in many ways you’re a child, aren’t you?”

“But of course. Isn’t it a triumph at my age? Would you have it any other way? Continue. Washing the garbage cans after the fat man left.”

“Well, you’d get a pail of water, pour it in, swish it around, and empty it into the gutter, and from there it would flow down along the curbstone, carrying with it all the street-side debris, and then drain into the sewer grate at the corner. Then you’d do the whole thing a second time, and that would get the can clean.”

“And so,” said Olivia, laughing—no, not laughing, nibbling rather at the bait of a laugh—“you figured you weren’t going to pick up a lot of girls like that.”

“No, I wasn’t. That’s why I said to the boss—I always referred to my father as the boss in the store—I said, ‘Boss, I cannot do these garbage cans anymore. These girls from school are coming by, they stop in front of the store because of the bus, they see me cleaning garbage cans, and the next
day I’m supposed to ask them to go out to a Saturday night movie with me? Boss, I can’t do it.’ And he said to me, ‘You’re ashamed? Why? What are you ashamed of? The only thing you have to be ashamed of is stealing. Nothing else. You clean the garbage cans.’ ”

“How terrific,” she said, and captivated me now with a different laugh entirely, a laugh that was laden with the love of life for all its unexpected charms. At that moment you would have thought the whole of Olivia lay in her laughter, when in fact it lay in her scar.

It was also “terrific” and amused her greatly when I told her about Big Mendelson, who worked for my father when I was a little kid. “Big Mendelson had a nasty mouth on him,” I said. “He really belonged in the back, in the refrigerator, and not in front waiting on customers. But I was seven or eight, and because he had this nasty kind of humor and because they called him Big Mendelson, I thought he was the funniest man on earth. Finally my father had to get rid of him.”

“What did Big Mendelson do that he had to get rid of him?”

“Well, on Thursday mornings,” I told her, “my
father would come back from the chicken market and he would dump all the chickens in a pile and people would pick whatever chicken they wanted for the weekend. Dumped them on a table. Anyway, one woman, a Mrs. Sklon, she used to pick up a chicken and smell the mouth and then smell the rear end. Then she’d pick up another chicken, and again she’d smell the mouth and then smell the rear end. She did the same thing every week, and she did it so many times every week that Big Mendelson couldn’t contain himself, and one day he said, ‘Mrs. Sklon, can
you
pass that inspection?’ She got so mad at him, she picked up a knife from the counter and said, ‘If you ever talk to me that way again, I’ll stab you.’ ”

“And that’s why your father let him go?”

“Had to. By then he’d said lots of things like that. But about Mrs. Sklon Big Mendelson was right. Mrs. Sklon was no picnic even for me, and I was the nicest boy in the world.”

“I never doubted that,” Olivia said.

“Well, for good or bad, that’s what I was.”

“Am. Are.”

“Mrs. Sklon was the only one of the customers who didn’t want to fix me up with their daughters.
I couldn’t trick Mrs. Sklon,” I said. “No one could. I would deliver to her. And every time I delivered she would take the order apart. And it was always a big order. And she would take it out of the bag and undo the wax paper and take everything out and weigh everything to make sure the weight was correct. I had to stand there and watch this show. I was always in a rush because I was always looking to deliver the orders as fast as I could and then get back to the schoolyard to play ball. So at a certain point I’d bring her order around to the back door, plop it down on the top step, knock on the door once, and run like hell. And she would catch me. Every time. ‘Messner! Marcus Messner! The butcher’s son! Come back here!’ I always felt, when I was with Mrs. Sklon, that I was at the heart of things. I felt that with Big Mendelson. I mean what I’m saying, Olivia. I felt that with people in the butcher shop. I got enjoyment out of that butcher shop.” But only before, I thought, before his thoughts made my father defenseless.

“And she had a scale in the kitchen, Mrs. Sklon—was that it?” Olivia asked me.

“In the kitchen, yes. But it was not an accurate scale. It was a baby scale. Besides, she never found
that there was anything wrong. But she always weighed the meat, and she always caught me when I tried to run away. I could never escape this woman. She used to give me a quarter tip. A quarter was a good tip. Most were nickels and dimes.”

“You had humble origins. Like Abe Lincoln. Honest Marcus.”

“Insatiate Olivia.”

“What about the war, when meat was rationed? What about the black market? Was your father in the black market?”

“Did he bribe the owner of the slaughterhouse? He did. But his customers didn’t have ration stamps sometimes, and they were having company, they were having family over, and he wanted them to have meat, so he would give the slaughterhouse owner some cash each week, and he was able to get more meat. It wasn’t a big deal. It was as easy as that. But otherwise my father was a man who never broke the law. I think that was the only law he ever broke in his life, and in those days everyone broke that one, more or less. You know kosher meat has to be washed every three days. My father would take a whisk broom with a bucket of water and wash
all the meat down. But sometimes you had a Jewish holiday, and though we ourselves weren’t strictly observant, we were Jews in a Jewish neighborhood, and what’s more, kosher butchers, and so the store was closed. And one Jewish holiday, my father told me, he forgot. Say the Passover Seder was going to be on a Monday and a Tuesday, and he washed the meat on the previous Friday. He would have to come back on Monday or Tuesday to do it again, and this one time he forgot. Well, nobody knew he’d forgotten, but he knew, and he would not sell that meat to anyone. He took it all and sold it at a loss to Mueller, who had a nonkosher butcher store on Bergen Street. Sid Mueller. But he would not sell it to his customers. He took the loss instead.”

“So you did learn to be honest from him in the store.”

“Probably. I certainly can’t say I ever learned anything bad from him. That would have been impossible.”

“Lucky Marcus.”

“You think so?”

“I know so,” Olivia said.

“Tell me about being a doctor’s daughter.”

All color passed out of her face when she replied, “There’s nothing to tell.”

“You—”

She let me get no further. “Practice
tact,
” she said coldly, and with that, as though a switch had been thrown or a plug pulled—as though gloom had swept through her like a storm—her face simply shut down. For the first time in my presence, so too did the beauty. Gone. The play and the luster suddenly gone, the fun of the butcher shop stories gone, and replaced by a terrible, sick-looking pallor the instant I wanted to know more about her.

I feigned indifference but I was shocked, so shocked that I blotted out the moment almost immediately. It was as if I’d been spun round and round till I was giddy and needed first to regain my balance, before I could reply, “Tact it is, then, and tact it shall be.” But I wasn’t happy, and earlier I’d been
so
happy, not just because of my raising Olivia’s laughter but because of my remembering my father as he’d once been—as he’d always been—back in those unimperiled, unchanging days when everybody felt safe and settled in his place. I’d been remembering my father as if that’s the way he still was and our lives had never taken this freakish
turn. I’d been remembering him when he was anything but defenseless—when he was, without dispute, untyrannically, reassuringly, matter-of-factly boss, and I, his child and beneficiary, had felt so astonishingly free.

Why wouldn’t she answer me when I asked what it was like to be a doctor’s daughter? At first I blotted out that moment, but later it returned and wouldn’t go away. Was it the divorce she didn’t want to talk about? Or was it something worse? “Practice tact.” Why? What did that mean?

O
n Sunday, in the late morning, my mother arrived and we went to speak alone together in the solarium at the end of the corridor. I wanted to show her how steady I was on my feet and how far I could walk and how well I felt altogether. I was thrilled to see her here, away from New Jersey, in a part of the country unknown to her—nothing like that had ever happened before—but knew that when Olivia came I would have to introduce the two of them and that my mother, who missed nothing, would see the scar on Olivia’s wrist and ask me what I was doing with a girl who had tried to commit suicide, a question whose answer I didn’t yet
know. Rarely an hour went by when I didn’t ask it of myself.