The Paper Dragon (10 page)

Those were not happy times. The war had ended long ago, but the Depression was on its way, and there would come a day when even Bowery bums no longer cared whether or not they were wearing almost-new shoes, or
any
shoes for that matter, when the best defense against a nation sliding steadily downhill was indeed a bottle of hair tonic in a dim hallway stinking of piss. He came to look upon those Bowery ghosts as a symbol of what America had become, and he dreaded growing up, becoming a man in a world where there were no jobs, and no justice, especially for Jews. He was very conscious of his Jewishness, not because anyone called him Jewboy — hardly anyone ever did since he hung around mostly with other Jewish kids, and since all of his relatives were Jews, and every function he attended was either a Jewish wedding or a bar mitzvah or a funeral, well, yes, there was that one incident, but even that was not so terribly bad, his mother's anger afterwards had been worse than the actual attack — he was conscious of his Jewishness mostly in a religious way, strange for a young boy, almost a holy way, everybody in the family said that Sidney would grow up to be a rabbi; In fact, his Uncle Heshie from Red Bank used to jokingly call him Red Shiloach, and this always pleased him enormously because he thought of the town rabbi, the old rabbi in the Polish town from which his mother and father had come, as a very learned man who dispensed justice, who read from the Holy Book and dispensed justice to Jews, the one thing that had somehow been denied his mother only because she
was
Jewish. He sometimes visualized himself in the role of the Talmudic scholar, searching for the holy word that would put an end to his mother's anger, "Look, Mama," he would say, "it is written here thus and so, so do not be angry." And all the while, he feared the anger was buried deep within himself as well. He had seen murder in his mother's eyes, he had heard hatred in her voice, had the seed really fallen too terribly far from the tree? Was it not possible that he too could explode, click, the switch would be thrown in his head, click, and being a man he would kill someone? Later, when it happened with the Irish kids, when they surrounded him that day and pulled down his pants and beat him with Hallowe'en sticks and he did not fight back, he wondered whether he was really a person in whom there lay this secret terrible wrath, or whether he was simply a coward. He only knew for certain there had been no justice for him that day, that he had done nothing to warrant such terrible punishment, such embarrassment, the girls standing around and looking at his naked smarting behind, and later crossing their fingers as he walked home, "Shame, shame, we saw Sidney's
tushe
, shame, shame," chanting it all the way home like a litany, there was no justice that day, but neither had they called him Jewboy. Maybe they just wanted to take down my pants, Sidney reasoned later, who the hell knows?

The wrath exploded that night, he was certain it would, and it did. He did not at the time connect any of his mother's explosions with sex — if you had asked anyone on the Lower East Side who Sigmund Freud was, they'd have recalled the man who peddled used china from a pushcart on Hester Street and whose name was Siggie Freid — but in later years it seemed to him that the justice she so avidly sought was somehow connected with events that invariably concerned sex, and he began wondering what could possibly have happened to his mother back in Europe. But no, he never really consciously thought that, no one ever consciously thinks that about his own mother, it only came to him on the gray folds of semirecognition — the wino had said, "You've got some tits there, lady," the Irish boys had taken down Sidney's pants, the sewing machine salesman had asked if he could step into the parlor for a moment, the argument with Hannah Berkowitz had involved the use of too much rouge, the girl his mother found him with on the roof was Adele Rosenberg who was sixteen years old and wore no bloomers in the summer, but
everybody
knew that, not only Sidney, and besides they weren't even
doing
anything. All these events returned to him grayly, darkly, as though on a swelling ocean crest that dissipated and dissolved before it quite reached the shore, leaving behind only vanishing bubbles of foam absorbed by the sand. The black and towering fact remained his mother's anger, which was to him inexplicable at the time. It was simply
there
. Uncontrollable, raging, murderous. He would dream of bureau drawers full of women's hair, brown and tangled. He would dream of hags sitting next to him in movie theaters, opening their mouths to expose rotten teeth and foul breath. He would dream of running through castles where dead bodies were stacked end upon end, decomposing as he raced through them, filling his nostrils with suffocating dust.

He feared his mother, and he pitied his mother, and he despised his mother. And he loved her as well.

Because of her, he never lied about being a Jew. A lot of the kids in the neighborhood and on the block were lying in order to get jobs, this was 1934, 1935, the NRA had already come in, the blue eagles clutching lightning were showing in all the shop windows all over the city, things were a little better, but it was still difficult to get a job, especially a part-time job, and especially if you were a Jew. He never lied about being a Jew, and he never told himself that the reason he didn't get the job was because he was Jewish. He blamed his inability to find work on a lot of things — his looks, his height, the stammer he had somehow developed and which always seemed to crop up when he was being interviewed for a position, the somewhat high whininess of his adolescent voice, all of these things — but never his Jewishness. His Jewishness was something separate and apart, something of which he could be uncommonly proud, the old rabbi quietly studying the Holy Book in the sunset of his mother's town, the townspeople standing apart and waiting for him to dispense justice.

He was able to enter Harvard only because Uncle Heshie from Red Bank died and left his favorite nephew a small sum of money, sizable enough in those days, certainly enough to pay for Sidney's undergraduate education. He left for Boston in the fall of 1936. He was eighteen years old, and five feet eight inches tall (he assumed he had grown to his full height, and he was correct). He had black hair parted close to the middle and combed into a flamboyant pompadour that scarcely compensated for the cowlick at the back of his head. He came directly from Townsend Harris High School, where his grades had averaged 91 per cent, and from which he had graduated with honors.

At Harvard, in his freshman year, they called him Lard Ass, and he once drank fourteen bottles of beer and passed out cold. At Harvard, in his sophomore year, he joined the Dramatic Club and became reasonably famous for his clubhouse imitation of Eddie Cantor singing "If You Knew Susie." At Harvard, in September of 1939, when the Germans were overrunning the Polish town where his mother had been born and perhaps putting to death forever the image of the village rabbi studying the Holy Book by the light of the setting sun, Sidney met a student nurse named Rebecca Strauss — "Watch out for those nurses, Sid," his roommate told him. "They can give it a flick with their finger, and whap! it'll go right down, quick as that" — and began dating her regularly. Rebecca lived in West Newton and worked at Massachusetts General where her father was a resident surgeon. She had dark green eyes and masses of brown hair, and she was the most beautiful girl Sidney had ever met in his life, prettier even than Adele Rosenberg who wore no bloomers in the summer. He grew a mustache for Rebecca because he always felt he looked silly and immature beside her, even though he was two months her senior. She said she loved the mustache and that it didn't tickle at all when they kissed. When he finally told her in confidence about his mother's raging fits — he had by that time begun to think of them as "fits," similar to epileptic seizures or paranoid delusions — she said they did seem very much like hysterical symptoms, collaborating his own feelings that something dreadful had happened to his mother when she was still a girl in Poland.

"She may have been raped or something," Rebecca said.

"Do you think so?"

They were lying in the grass bordering the Charles, she was in his arms. It was the spring of 1940, he could hear crickets chirping in the night, and the gentle flow of the river, and in the distance the highway traffic.

"Yes," Rebecca said. "Sometimes a man can't control himself, you know. And he'll do things. To a girl."

"Maybe," Sidney said, thinking of the time with the sewing machine salesman, had the man been unable to control himself?

"And sometimes a girl can even
want
a man to. Do things, you know."

"I g-g-guess you're right," Sidney said. Had his mother
wanted
the salesman to do things?

"Do you ever feel…" Rebecca moved closer in his arms. He could smell her hair, the crickets seemed suddenly louder.

"What?" he said.

"That you can't control yourself?"

"I'm always afraid of that," he said.

"Of not being able to control yourself?"

"Of losing my temper. Of g-g-getting angry the way my m-m-mother does."

"I meant…"

She was silent again. Her hand resting on the side of his face, she was curled in his arms, he could feel the swell of her breasts against him, the crisp starched white of her nurse's uniform.

"What I meant," Rebecca said, and again fell silent.

"I know, you mean people sometimes…"

"Yes," she said, nodding.

"Sure, which is…"

"That it's understandable," she said, nodding. "If a man and a woman."

"Yes, it's possible," nodding.

"Yes."

"If they're close to each other."

"Yes."

She moved. Her starched skirt edged back over one knee and she took her hand from his face to lower the skirt again, long legs sheathed in white stockings, she moved closer.

"I myself, I know," Rebecca said.

"Sure," Sidney said.

"Get hot sometimes," she said, and quickly added, "I've never told this to anyone in my life."

"Reb-b-becca…"

"So hot I can't stand it," Rebecca said. "I've never talked this way to anyone in my life."

"You… you ought to be careful," he said, "t-t-talk-ing that way."

"I know, I know," she said, moaning the words. In the silence, she moved again. The stretched uniform made tiny crisp sounds as she adjusted her body to the length of his, moving minutely in against him, her arms tight around his neck, trembling.

"Do
you
get hot?" she whispered.

"Yes."

"So hot you can't
stand
it?"

"Yes."

"Are you now?" Her voice so small.

"Yes."

"I can feel you." A whisper.

"Are…
you
?" he asked.

"Yes, oh yes."

It all happened, it was too, he didn't plan, hands under starched, and her white thighs, she turned, white stockings, and it happened and he, she moved beneath him, silk, all opening, the slip and, in a tangle of, and white garters, hands under, wet, and she said, oh she said, oh she said, wide, and was all, he didn't, held and clawed and, legs spread, and he was, she moaned, wet and garters, wet and, oh she said, oh love she moaned, oh, her head was, she was, he could feel, tossing, it happened, it was happening, he was, baby, he was, honey, lips and wet and hard and hard, I love you, I love you, I love you.

Ahhh me, he thought back with a sigh, it has never been like that again, not the way it was with Rebecca in Boston, two dumb young kids discovering what humping was all about, and going at it with a secret eagerness that, God we couldn't wait to see each other each time. Three, four times a week, sometimes more, going at it with a secret soaring joy that shouted to the world,
we
knew what it was all about,
we
had discovered it,
we
had patented it, we were the only two people humping in Boston — by the river, and in the back seat of the '36 Plymouth I bought, and in a Providence hotel one weekend, and once in Dr. Strauss's Oldsmobile parked behind the hospital, and then day and night in the apartment I took on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, when I entered law school. Day and night, it's a wonder I learned any law at all, the only law I knew was whatever sweetly called to me from between Rebecca's legs. And then, I don't know, I don't know what happens, war happens, I guess. You get put into 1-A when you're in your second year of law school, and I guess you figure you'd better get into the Navy where the beds are always clean, so the legend goes, and there're always three square meals a day, so the legend goes, before they draft you into the infantry and you get your ass blown off invading the fortress of Europe. And besides, by that time Rebecca had met a young captain who was stationed at the Air Corps base on Jeffries Point. It was wartime — I saw him once, he was very tall and blond, he had blue eyes, he looked a little like Terry in
Terry and the Pirates
which Papa brought home every Sunday when he bought bagels on Rivington Street — it was wartime, so who could blame anyone? Who could blame the captain for succumbing to Rebecca's Law, and who could blame Rebecca, blossoming wild and willful Rebecca, young, sweet Rebecca, for wanting to go to bed with Terry, or even Pat Ryan, for that matter? I'd certainly have done it with the Dragon Lady if she had come along. Or Burma.

My ship was commissioned in Boston, I guess it was 1943, and I called Rebecca Strauss, or at least I called her number in West Newton, and her father got on the phone. Dr. Strauss, and he said, "Hello, there, Sidney, how have you been, fellow?" sounding like a goy, I could visualize him in Bermuda shorts, holding a five iron. I told him I'd been down to fire control school in Fort Lauderdale — "Oh, learning how to put out fires, huh, Sidney?" — (I didn't bother to correct him) — and that I'd been assigned to a destroyer and we were here in Boston before heading down to Gitmo (I used the Navy slang for Guantanamo just to show him how salty I was, and also to imply to him somehow that I had been humping his daughter for three years, put
that
in your scalpel case, Dr. Strauss) on shakedown cruise and I was wondering if I could talk to Rebecca, say hello and all that. Well, gee, Sidney, Dr. Strauss said, sounding more and more like the president of the local Grange, I'd be very happy to let you talk to Rebecca, but she doesn't live here anymore. You see, Sidney, she was married in October, perhaps you know the fellow (
fellow
again), perhaps you know him, a very nice fellow from Detroit, Michigan, his name is Lonnie Scott, S-C-O-T-T-. No, I said, I'm sorry, Dr. Strauss, I don't think I ever met any friend of Rebecca's named Lonnie Scott, S-C-O-T-T. Oh, he's a
very
nice fellow, Dr. Strauss said, very very nice, they're living in California now, he's stationed out there, he's a major in the Air Corps, a very
nice
fellow, Sidney. Well, Dr. Strauss, I said, if you should have the opportempt to write to Becks (I used this pet name in an attempt once more to inform Dr. Strauss that his daughter
Becks
and I had been intimate for three years, get it, Dr. Strauss? Intimate. I-N-T-I-M-A-T-E) if you should happen to write to old Becks, why you just tell her Sidney called on his way through Boston to say hello and remind her of old times (in your Oldsmobile behind the hospital, for instance, Dr. Strauss, which I thought but didn't say). Why, sure, Sidney, Dr. Strauss said, sounding more and more like an Ohio preacher every minute, sure, fellow, I'll tell her you called — and say, good luck with that fire fighting, it's a dangerous business especially aboard ship. It sure is, I told him (do you get hot, Sidney, so hot you can't stand it?). Goodbye, Dr. Strauss.