Mitla Pass (49 page)

“When people have been reduced to slaves, it takes a long time to mount the rage needed to rebel. They accept their misfortune passively. It’s a lot easier than fitting oneself for a noose. Perhaps their children will rebel.”

“Well, that’s something I’m going to do as a writer, make people angry. I’m going to stir them up.”

She stared at the boy for ever so long. He was so small, so meaningless in the grand scheme of things. A billion or so other young men had frothed in anger before him and they were never heard from again. Yet there was something about this child. He was already accepting the pain of other people. Of course, the cheapest commodity in the world was unfulfilled genius. He craved recognition as a unique human being. What kind of bloody curse was he putting on himself? Or can the poor little fellow even help himself? In her ten years as a teacher, she had searched for, longed to find that kind of wild spark in one of her pupils. Good Lord, he was it. She knew. There was something about the way he looked into her eyes ... no, there was something haunting about this boy.

“Tell me, Gideon. Do you want to have, or do you want to be?”

“I’m going to be,” he answered without hesitation.

She hefted the composition book. “This is a very good story,” she said. “I don’t think Hemingway wrote it much better.”

Gideon turned his eyes away in shame. “You, uh, read
A Farewell to Arms,
then?”

“Yep, partner, I read it.”

“Yeah, I should have known. Well, maybe I did use a few of his ideas.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that. We all start out following our hero and then, somewhere along the line, we start to put our own stamp and style on things. There was an awful lot of Mozart in Beethoven, until Beethoven found his own way to say it.”

“I’m glad you told me. I always felt I was cheating.”

“When you’re telling your stories to the class, I have detected a lot of Jack London, as well as Eugene O’Neill.”

“To be honest and absolutely truthful, Miss Abigail, I’ve fooled a lot of other teachers.”

“I’ll bet you did. Why did you set this story in Mexico?”

“My sister Molly and I just finished reading
Tortilla Flat
together. John Steinbeck is going to be my favorite writer.”

“I don’t believe I know him.”

“He’s new. He’ll be the greatest of them all.
Tortilla Flat
is about the Mexicans ... the Chicanos in Monterey. Boy, does he stand up for those people.”

“We mentioned Eugene O’Neill. Have you actually read him?”

“Yes, ma’am, everything he’s written so far.”

Holy Christ, she thought, holy Christ! She handed him the composition book.

“Got any more of these filled up?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am, seventy-two of them, to be exact. I should have known you’d figure out where I got my plots and characters.”

“You’re too much!” She laughed. “All right, how about you whipping up a little play for me. Nothing too serious. It’s for the kids. A fun play. And I’ll steal a few tunes from my favorite composers—not Stephen Foster—and you can do the lyrics with me and I think the drama club might just like to put it on.”

Gideon’s mouth was agape. “Oh boy!” he shouted and ran up to her and threw his arms about her neck and kissed her on the cheek. Then, realizing his transgression, he nearly fainted with fright. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Forget it, partner.”

He turned and started to go, then walked back to her bravely. “Miss Abigail, I went to the meeting to hear James Ford at the Zion-Afro Church in North Carolina. I ... I ... I saw you there. I saw everything that happened.”

It was her turn to show fright.

“The secret is safe with me. My father is a Party organizer.”

“The young man you saw was a soldier working in the Army, recruiting other soldiers into the Party. He was so good that it was arranged for him to go to Moscow to study. We waited until a Russian ship was in port for him to desert.”

“I swear to you, Miss Abigail, that I’ll never tell another person. Not even Molly.”

“I know, Gideon.”

T
HE BALANCE OF
the school year was the happiest Gideon had ever known. He was not absent because of illness for a single day. He wanted time to stand still, because when the semester ended, he would leave J. E. B. Stuart and go on to junior high school.

To Leah’s horror and Nathan’s disgust, Gideon made a sandlot baseball team, the feisty little player who made up in gall and guts what he lacked in size and talent. Joining his list of writer heroes came baseball heroes, Jimmie Foxx and Lefty Grove.

There was a lot of forbidding and scolding at home when Gideon came in scuffed-up, but he and Molly noticed that if they made a stand against their parents together, both Leah and Nathan gave in quietly.

Molly had come to an age when she was interested in boys and boys in her, and she established her right to have dates.

Leah was spending less and less time with Gideon. It came down to going to the odd concert with him or taking him for a doctor’s visit. She was immersed in Party activities and whatever else she did later at night, after the choral society rehearsals, when Nathan was out of town.

Nathan had even less to do with his family. Except when he took them to Party functions, Nathan Zadok engaged in no activities with his son and stepdaughter. He never set foot on a playground, in a restaurant, at a movie, the theater, a sporting event, the beach, a department store, school. Nor did he listen to a radio program, or read a book, or newspaper except the
Freiheit,
or help with homework, or take a walk around the block, or go to an amusement park, or a museum, or fish, or net crabs, or see a parade, except for May Day.

“S
O, WHAT’S THE
big surprise?” Nathan asked.

“Your son ... fanfare ... Gideon Zadok, aged twelve ... has won the Alice B. Merriweather prize for the best short story by a sixth-grade student in the entire Nawfalk, Virginia, district! Ta da! This story will go on to the state finals. I have here a check for ten dollars as the winning prize.” Molly finished by holding the check and story aloft.

“I’ll take care of that,” Leah said, snatching the money deftly.

“Aw, nothing, folks, really nothing,” Gideon said, “just another ordinary day in the life of Gideon Zadok, red-blooded American boy and future writer of renown.”

“I think that’s just marvelous,” Leah said. “Here, let Momma give you a kiss.”

“Now, folks, if you will relax,” Molly continued, “I will read you the winning story by your son and my baby brother.”

“I have an important meeting for the Free Tom Mooney Committee,” Nathan said, in reference to the jailed labor leader and martyr. “But go on anyhow, I’ll be a few minutes late.”

“Tom Mooney will still be in jail tomorrow,” Molly said indignantly.

“Er, how long a story is it?” Leah asked. “The choral society, you know.”

“It meets on Thursday,” Nathan said. “Today is Wednesday.”

“Some of the members need special coaching,” Leah said.

Nathan gave a “humph.”

Leah wanted her husband to realize that she was not a happily married woman and might be doing something about it. She had been leaving a few of her mash notes around, like mouse droppings, to be discovered. Nathan did not nibble at the bait. He’d grown used to the hot meals and pressed shirts, and didn’t want to risk losing those conveniences in warfare over Leah’s petit-bourgeois romances. Moreover, a divorce would send the Central Committee into an uproar. And my God, once out on his own again, he would have to take a pay cut and resort to rooming in the homes of comrades.

Gideon had become clearly disturbed.

“Well ... how long is it?” Leah asked.

“It’s only five pages, Mother,” Molly snapped, “and it will take less than fifteen minutes.”

Leah leaned over and pinched her son’s cheek, “for Momma’s baby.”

“Nu,
go ahead already,” Nathan said testily.

Molly was unnerved and read the story too quickly. Nonetheless, it was a simple and beautiful little fantasy of a boy who daydreams about being a great athlete. The hero plays out a complex football game in his mind, naming all the players after his schoolmates and friends. The hero reserves for himself the role of star running back, who always scores three or four times in the final quarter to save the game. It is not until the last paragraph that the reader realizes that the game is a fantasy and the boy is crippled.

Molly ended the reading, as she ended reading all of Gideon’s stories, with tears streaming down her cheeks. It didn’t matter if it was humor, a murder mystery, a tragedy, or a Western, Molly was always brought to tears. “It’s so beautiful.”

“Well, it’s off to the choral society,” Leah said, patting her son’s head. “This is no surprise to me. From the minute you were born, your bubba said you were a genius.”

“Wait!” Nathan said, storming to his feet in a manner that they had seen at a hundred meetings. “I think that this calls for a literary critique by the Soviet Committee on the Arts. To begin with—” He shrugged and gave a gesture of futility. “This story cannot be passed by the committee on the grounds that it lacks social significance.”

“The Norfolk School Board didn’t make social significance a requirement for a sixth-grade writing contest,” Molly said angrily.

“In that case, just what does such a story do for the plight of the masses?” Nathan continued and then informed the poor illiterates around him of his credentials in literature, in untold numbers of languages.

“If I were in the Soviet Union today, I would be the editor of Pravda. Baseball? How can you make from such a hoodlum game a story of lasting value?”

“It’s not about baseball, it’s about football, Dad,” Gideon said.

“Baseball? Football? What’s the difference? It’s played in America not for idealism of sports, as in the Soviet Union, but for money. Now, if the boy had been a coal miner, crippled in a mine because of the treacherous working conditions, then you would have a story.”

“But, Dad, that’s what you would have written,” Gideon said. “This is what I wanted to write.”

“Exactly. You had better start thinking in terms of the proletariat, the class struggle.” Nathan picked up a copy of the day’s
Freiheit.
“You should start thinking in these terms and someday you will be writing for the
Freiheit.
They, and they alone, will tell you what you can write and what you can’t write. Such decisions can only come from your leaders, and believe me, they know how to enhance a young man’s career. However! You had better start taking seriously your Yiddish. If you don’t learn Yiddish,
Freiheit
wouldn’t publish, not a single word.”

“Why should I write in Yiddish? I’m an American. English is my language.”

Nathan’s finger leaped skyward and waved furiously. The good wrath was in him now. “Don’t ever, ever let me hear such bunk baloney again. What do you want to write? For Hearst? For the yellow press?”

“Well, I must go, toodle-oo, darlings,” Leah said, folding the check and plunking it into her purse. “It’s a very nice story, no matter what the grim reaper says. When was the last time you went to an opera, a play, Mr. Know-it-all? These children would be culturally starved without their mother. Good night. Oh, Molly, fix Gideon something from the icebox. There’s American cheese and baloney. But no peanut butter. He’s allergic.”

Nathan did not skip a beat as his wife left. “Someday you will realize that with Yiddish, which is an international language, you can express real emotions, not like this hotsy-totsy English. Yiddish, mind you, is becoming the most important international language in the world.”

“For immigrants,” Gideon mumbled inaudibly.

“It’s a crying pity that a boy going on twelve years can’t yet read the
Freiheit.
Look, J. J. Frumer, the poet laureate of the Yiddish language. Now, he is an important writer!”

When Mother and Father had departed for their respective meetings, Molly comforted her brother.

“I don’t understand why Dad can’t understand,” Gideon said. “I think most kids of my age play out make-believe baseball and football games. It’s fun because you can do anything in fantasy. I honestly feel that a lot of grown men play sports games out in their heads, in which they are always a superhero. That’s the only way they can accomplish what they can’t do in real life. Fantasy is very important for a writer.”

“I understand the story very clearly, honey,” Molly said. “You just keep on thinking inside other people’s heads. That will help make you a writer.”

“I am already a writer,” he answered, taking the story from her. “Only I’m not renowned yet.”

Danny Shapiro, who was fast becoming Molly’s steady beau, knocked and entered with the grin on his face that he always wore when he set eyes on her. Danny saw their bitter mood. Molly winked quickly. “Danny promised me he’d buy you a chocolate banana split if you won a prize in the contest. Didn’t you, Danny?”

Danny, who was not very fast with a buck, gulped, then nodded in agreement. “Yeah, and I’m a guy who pays off his debts.” What the hell, he thought, twenty cents would win another round in the battle for Molly’s heart. He forked over two bits to Gideon, hiding his pain.

“Thanks anyhow,” Gideon said; “I’m allergic to chocolate, bananas, nuts, cherries, and whipped cream.”

T
HE DREADED DAY
had arrived. The school term was over. Gideon helped Miss Abigail pack up her personal books and clean her desk. She went to the bookshelf behind her desk and took down a half-dozen volumes.

“These should take care of some of your summer reading,” she said. Gideon beamed. “What else do you plan to do?”

“I’ve got a gang of guys I’m starting to hang out with. We’re going to do a lot of stuff. I also plan to write a three-act musical play about the fall of Ethiopia to the fascists.”

“I’ll be keen to see it,” she said. “Before we call it quits, I’ve a little surprise for you. I’d like to take you flying with me.”

“Jeeze.”

“Get a note giving permission from one of your parents.”