Indignation (14 page)

It takes muscle to be a butcher, and my mother had muscles, and I felt them when she took me in her arms while I cried.

W
hen we walked from the solarium back to the room—passing on the way Miss Clement, who, like the saint
she
was, kindly kept her gaze averted—Olivia was there arranging a second bouquet of flowers she’d brought with her on her arrival a few minutes earlier. Her sweater sleeves were pushed up so as not to get them wet with the water she’d put into a second vase she’d found, and so there was her scar, the scar on the wrist of the very hand with which she had driven Miss Clement into silence, the very hand with which we pursued our indecent ends in a hospital room while around us in the other rooms people were behaving according to rules that didn’t even allow for loud talking. Now Olivia’s scar looked to me as prominent as if she had cut herself open only days before.

As a child, I had sometimes been taken by my father to the slaughterhouse on Astor Street in Newark’s Ironbound section. And I had been taken to the chicken market at the far end of Bergen
Street. At the chicken market I saw them killing the chickens. I saw them kill hundreds of chickens according to the kosher laws. First my father would pick out the chickens he wanted. They were in a cage, maybe five tiers high, and he would reach in to pull one out, hold on to its head so it didn’t bite him, and feel the sternum. If it wiggled, the chicken was young and was not going to be tough; if it was rigid, more than likely the chicken was old and tough. He would also blow on its feathers so he could see the skin—he wanted the flesh to be yellow, a little fatty. Whichever ones he picked, he put into one of the boxes that they had, and then the
shochet,
the slaughterer, would ritually slaughter them. He would bend the neck backward—not break it, just arc it back, maybe pull a few of the feathers to get the neck clear so he could see what he was doing—and then with his razor-sharp knife he would cut the throat. For the chicken to be kosher he had to cut the throat in one smooth, deadly stroke. One of the strangest sights I remember from my early youth was the slaughtering of the nonkosher chickens, where they lopped the head right off. Swish! Plop! Whereupon they put the headless chicken down into a funnel. They had
about six or seven funnels in a circle. There the blood could drain from the body into a big barrel. Sometimes the chickens’ legs were still moving, and occasionally a chicken would fall out of the funnel and, as the saying has it, begin running around with its head cut off. Such chickens might bump into a wall but they ran anyway. They put the kosher chickens in the funnels too. The bloodletting, the killing—my father was hardened to these things, but at the beginning I was of course unsettled, much as I tried not to show it. I was a little one, six, seven years old, but this was the business, and soon I accepted that the business was a mess. The same at the slaughterhouse, where to kosher the animal, you have to get the blood out. In a nonkosher slaughterhouse they can shoot the animal, they can knock it unconscious, they can kill it any way they want to kill it. But to be kosher they’ve got to bleed it to death. And in my days as a butcher’s little son, learning what slaughtering was about, they would hang the animal by its foot to bleed it. First a chain is wrapped around the rear leg—they trap it that way. But that chain is also a hoist, and quickly they hoist it up, and it hangs from its heel so that all the blood will run down to the head and the upper
body. Then they’re ready to kill it. Enter
shochet
in skullcap. Sits in a little sort of alcove, at least at the Astor Street slaughterhouse he did, takes the head of the animal, lays it over his knees, takes a pretty big blade, says a
bracha
—a blessing—and he cuts the neck. If he does it in one slice, severs the trachea, the esophagus, and the carotids, and doesn’t touch the backbone, the animal dies instantly and is kosher; if it takes two slices or the animal is sick or disabled or the knife isn’t perfectly sharp or the backbone is merely nicked, the animal is not kosher. The
shochet
slits the throat from ear to ear and then lets the animal hang there until all the blood flows out. It’s as if he took a bucket of blood, as if he took several buckets, and poured them out all at once, because that’s how fast blood gushes from the arteries onto the floor, a concrete floor with a drain in it. He stands there in boots, in blood up to his ankles despite the drain—and I saw all this when I was a boy. I witnessed it many times. My father thought it was important for me to see it—the same man who now was afraid of everything for me and, for whatever reason, afraid for himself.

My point is this: that is what Olivia had tried to
do, to kill herself according to kosher specifications by emptying her body of blood. Had she been successful, had she expertly completed the job with a single perfect slice of the blade, she would have rendered herself kosher in accordance with rabbinical law. Olivia’s telltale scar came from attempting to perform her own ritual slaughter.

I
t was from my mother that I got my height. She was a big, heavyset woman, only one inch under six feet, towering not just over my father but over every mother in the neighborhood. With her dark bushy eyebrows and coarse gray hair (and, at the store, with her coarse gray clothes beneath a bloody white apron), she embodied the role of the laborer as convincingly as any Soviet woman in the propaganda posters about America’s overseas allies that hung in the halls of our grade school during the years of World War Two. Olivia was slender and fair, and even at five-seven or -eight seemed diminutive beside my mother, so when the woman who was used to working in a bloody white apron wielding long knives as sharp as swords and opening and shutting the heavy refrigerator door gave Olivia her
hand to shake, I saw not only what Olivia must have looked like as a small child but also what little protection she had against confusion when it came at her full force. Her delicate hand wasn’t just clasped like a baby lamb chop in the big, bearish paw of my mother; she herself was still in the grip of whatever had driven her, only a few years beyond childhood, first to drink and then to the edge of destruction. She was yielding and fragile to the marrow of her bones, a
wounded
small child, and I finally grasped that only because my mother, even under assault from my father and prepared to go so far as to divorce him, which would be tantamount to killing him—yes, I now saw him dead too—was anything but fragile and yielding. That my father could have gotten my mother to go on her own to see a lawyer about a divorce was a measure not of her weakness but of the crushing power of his inexplicable transformation, of his all at once having been turned inside out by unrelenting intimations of catastrophe.

My mother called Olivia “Miss Hutton” throughout the twenty minutes they were together with me in my hospital room. Otherwise her behavior was impeccable, as was Olivia’s. She asked Olivia no
embarrassing questions, did not pry into her background or into what her arranging my flowers might signify about our acquaintance—
she
practiced tact. I introduced Olivia as the fellow student who was bringing my homework out to me and who was carrying back with her the written assignments I completed in order to keep abreast of my classes. I didn’t once catch her looking at Olivia’s wrists, nor did she register suspicion or disapproval of her in any way. If my mother hadn’t married my father, she could, without difficulty, have held down any number of jobs far more demanding of the skills of diplomacy and the functioning of intelligence than what was required for work in a butcher shop. Her formidable figure belied the finesse she could marshal when circumstances required an astuteness in the ways of life of which my father was ignorant.

Olivia, as I said, didn’t let me down either. She did not even wince at finding herself repeatedly being called Miss Hutton, though I did, each time. What was the something about her that necessitated such formality? It couldn’t be because she wasn’t Jewish. Though my mother was a Newark
Jewish provincial of her class and time and background, she wasn’t a stupid provincial, and she knew very well that by his living in the heart of the American Midwest in the middle of the twentieth century, her son was more than likely going to seek out the company of girls born into the predominant, ubiquitous, all but official American faith. Was it Olivia’s appearance that put her off then, the look of privilege that she had, as though she’d never known a single hardship? Was it the slender young female body? Was my mother unprepared for that supple physical delicacy crowned by the auburn abundance of that hair? Why again and again “Miss Hutton” to a mannerly girl of nineteen who had done nothing as far as she knew except to help her recuperating son while he was a postoperative hospital patient? What had affronted her? What had alarmed her? It couldn’t have been the flowers, though they didn’t help. It could only be a quick glimpse of the scar that had made unspeakable and unsayable Olivia’s given name. It was the scar
together
with the flowers.

The scar had taken possession of my mother, and Olivia knew it, and so did I. We all knew it, which made nearly unendurable listening to whatever
words were spoken about anything else. Olivia’s having lasted in the room with my mother for twenty minutes was a heartbreaking feat of gallantry and strength.

A
s soon as Olivia had left to take the bus back to Winesburg, my mother went into my bathroom, not to wash up but to clean out the sink, the tub, and the toilet bowl with soap and paper towels.

“Ma, don’t,” I called in to her. “You just got off a train. Everything is clean enough.”

“I’m here, it needs it, I’ll do it,” she said.

“It
doesn’t
need it. They did it this morning first thing.”

But she needed it more than the bathroom needed it. Work—certain people yearn for work, any work, harsh or unsavory as it may be, to drain the harshness from their lives and drive from their minds the killing thoughts. By the time she came out, she was my mother again, scrubbing and scouring having restored the womanly warmth she’d always had at her disposal to give me. I remembered that when I was a child in school,
Ma at work
would always come to my mind whenever I
thought of my mother,
Ma at work,
but not because work was her burden. To me her maternal grandeur stemmed from her being no less a powerhouse of a butcher than my father.

“So tell me about your studies,” she said, settling into the chair in the corner of the room while I propped myself up against the pillows in my bed. “Tell me about what you’re learning here.”

“American History to 1865. From the first settlements in Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay to the end of the Civil War.”

“And you like that?”

“I like it, Mom, yes.”

“What else do you study?”

“The Principles of American Government.”

“What is that about?”

“How the government works. Its foundations. Its laws. The Constitution. The separation of powers. The three branches. I had civics in high school, but never the government stuff this thoroughly. It’s a good course. We read documents. We read some of the famous Supreme Court cases.”

“That’s wonderful for you. That’s right up your alley. And the teachers?”

“They’re all right. They’re not geniuses, but
they’re good enough. They’re not what’s uppermost anyway. I’ve got the books to study, I’ve got the library to use—I’ve got everything a brain requires for an education.”

“And you’re happier away from home?”

“I’m better off, Ma,” I said, and better off, I thought, because you’re not.

“Read me something, darling. Read me something from one of your school books. I want to hear what you’re learning.”

I took the first volume of
The Growth of the American Republic
that Olivia had brought me from my room and, opening it at random, hit upon the beginning of a chapter I’d already studied, “Jefferson’s Administration,” subtitled “1. The ‘Revolution of 1800.’ ” “ ‘Thomas Jefferson,’ ” I began, “‘ruminating years later on the events of a crowded lifetime, thought that his election to the Presidency marked as real a revolution as that of 1776. He had saved the country from monarchy and militarism, and brought it back to republican simplicity. But there never had been any danger of monarchy; it was John Adams who saved the country from militarism; and a little simplicity cannot be deemed revolutionary.’ ”

I read further: “ ‘Fisher Ames predicted that, with a “Jacobin” President, America would be in for a real reign of terror. Yet the four years that followed were one of the most tranquil of the Republican Olympiads, marked not by radical reforms or popular tumults …’ ” And when I looked up, midway through that sentence, I saw that my mother had fallen half asleep in her chair. There was a smile on her face. Her son was reading aloud to her what he was studying in college. It was worth the train ride and the bus ride and maybe even the sight of Miss Hutton’s scar. For the first time in months, she was happy.

To keep her that way, I kept going. “ ‘ … but by the peaceful acquisition of territory as large again as the United States. The election of 1800–1801 brought a change of men more than of measures, and a transfer of federal power from the latitude of Massachusetts to that of Virginia …’ ” Now she was fully asleep, but I did not stop. Madison. Monroe. J. Q. Adams. I’d read right on through to Harry Truman if that was what it took to ease the woes of my having left her behind alone with a husband now out of control.

S
he spent the night in a hotel not far from the hospital and came again to visit me the next morning, Monday, before she left by bus for the train to take her home. I was to leave the hospital myself after lunch that day. Sonny Cottler had phoned me the night before. He had only just heard about my appendectomy, and despite the unpleasantness of our last meeting out on the quad—to which neither of us alluded—he insisted on coming out in his car to drive me from the hospital back to school, where arrangements had already been made by Dean Caudwell’s office for me to spend the next week sleeping in a bed in the small infirmary adjacent to the Student Health Office. I could rest there when I needed to during the day and resume attending all my classes other than gym. I should be ready after that to climb the three flights to my room at the top of Neil Hall. And a couple of weeks after that to return to my job at the inn.