When We Argued All Night (17 page)

—Bren, she said, you know why I cut you from the group, don't you?

—I tried to tell him, Brenda said.

—It simply seems to me, Artie said, in what he knew was a loud voice that seemed to get louder when he tried to modulate it, It simply seems to me that if a pupil has trouble learning, that's the signal for the teacher simply to redouble her efforts. This is your failure, not my daughter's.

—No, Mr. Saltzman, Mrs. Broward said. Sorry to put it this way, but other girls are better. I don't keep anyone in that class for long. It's onto the team or out of the group. Mrs. Broward looked straight at Artie as she spoke, then took a step in his direction, raising one arm and holding it, palm down, just above his own arm, as if she owned the space between them and reserved the right to touch him.

Artie didn't know he was going to do it, and his right arm moved, in response to the movement of her arm, before he spoke. It swung backward as if to meet a good shot with his forehand, and he said, Don't you touch me! and then—to his horror, as rage seemed to course through his body so he felt all his veins and arteries at once—he delivered a blow to Mrs. Broward's white-clad shoulder that knocked her back against the tiled wall. She fell to the floor.

The dean sprang between them and grabbed Artie by the wrists. He struggled, he heard a sound that was Brenda shouting, and then he understood what had happened, and stopped moving, and began to sob.

—I lost my job, he said through sobs, so nobody heard him. I know how to teach, but they took away my job.

Brenda knelt over her teacher, looking like a child after all. She turned and said to her father, I will never speak to you again, and helped Mrs. Broward stand and walk away.

The dean led Artie to his office, where the police interviewed him, then brought him to the station house. Mrs. Broward had said she would press charges. Artie could go to prison. After some hours they sent him home with a summons, which he showed Evelyn. She was too embarrassed and frightened to speak.

For many weeks Artie did not shout. He called Harold, did not tell him what he'd done, but picked a fight with him. Forget the tennis, he said. I can't have a decent time, you're turning into such a snob—telling me how to teach my kid, sounding like a fancy professor.

—That doesn't make sense, Harold said.

—Well, I'm so stupid I don't go to Columbia, so I don't make sense, Artie said, and hung up.

But he wrote Mrs. Broward several letters of apology, and in the end she decided not to press charges. Brenda blamed herself for the whole incident; she shouldn't have loved her teacher.

3

M
yra left her job and became the art director of a glossy women's magazine Harold had seen in supermarkets, but of course never read. Now she was paid so much there was not much reason for him to work. He stopped feeling that he was depriving his children of shirts and raincoats to feed his craving for literature. As a graduate student, he taught composition, and he continued writing reviews and articles: his professors said he had an ideal life. He wasn't ashamed of being a man supported by his wife, and Myra liked having more money than he did—it was always helpful when Myra liked something—but Harold thought his father, who had died recently, would have been ashamed. Sometimes he seemed to catch the old man watching him sorrowfully from a point just beyond Harold's peripheral vision. A few times he turned swiftly, looking for him, and then winced to picture his big blond self whirling.

He missed Artie. Myra had found out from Evelyn that Artie had gotten into real trouble. Of course, he didn't want Harold to know. Harold's life had only improved with the loss of his job. Artie's was harder. Harold waited. He felt clumsy, angry with Artie for his childishness, angry with himself for being unable to help.

D
uring most of the year, Myra didn't read books, only magazines resembling the one where she worked. Harold felt guilty that their life had deprived her of reading, what he believed in most: as if the wife of a divinity student had no time to pray, he told Naomi. Myra insisted she didn't miss books, which made him feel worse. When he'd first known her, she'd read incessantly. Now he closed the bedroom door in the evenings and stretched out on the bed with his notebooks, reading and rereading books he'd loved for years—he had started his dissertation, on Henry James—while Myra watched television. Once a year they spent as many weeks as she could take off from work at the cabin, and then she did nothing but read, looking up dazed at times, not quite recognizing him. The look of her face then—the unplanned simplicity—stopped his heart. She'd sit in a canvas chair at the lake, always with more than one book beside her, in case she got tired of the one she'd begun. Before their trips, she gathered what she called green books—books to be read, apparently, when surrounded by trees—and there would be a pile of books in the trunk when they drove north, mostly new bestsellers, sometimes older books she mysteriously deemed green. She would never read Jane Austen in the mountains, she said, as if anybody could see why, but F. Scott Fitzgerald qualified. The distinction had nothing to do with urban versus rural settings; he thought possibly it had to do with sexual openness, but he didn't ask.

At the cabin—which Artie no longer rented for a few weeks each summer—Harold and the boys swam or put together jigsaw puzzles, or they drove into Schroon Lake. Myra looked up and waved when they drove off. It was 1961, the summer when Nelson at fifteen grew taller than his mother, and he finally stopped mashing himself into her body when she'd let him. Harold didn't notice until weeks had passed and he realized he had stopped hearing Myra tell Nelson to leave her alone. Harold was always trying to make friends with his older son, as if Nelson was somebody else's child he thought he should know better.

Paul, at ten, was easier—blunt, critical, funny, not polite, but so confident it seemed his rudeness was not that of an impertinent child but of an adult caught in a child's body, unfairly expected to suppress adult opinions. Harold needed to look away when Paul scoffed at Nelson, who was so much taller—a thin, rangy kid with hesitant gestures, looking down at Paul and then away when Paul spoke, rarely answering. Nelson was afraid of insects. He took hours—literally hours—to work up the nerve to walk into the water and get wet, yet he wouldn't stop trying, standing all afternoon in water up to his ankles. Nelson liked small objects—toys when he was small, little trucks and plastic animals and things he found in the house: a cap of a lost pen, rubber bands, boxes that had held matches. The inside slid into the outside. Now his toys claimed to be functional, but he still fiddled with small objects: a souvenir key ring, combs and scissors that folded into themselves, in case you ever needed a comb or a scissors.

One hot August morning that summer, Harold made his way down to the dock early, with his coffee and James's
The Golden Bowl
. Eating in the cabin was easier these days, now that it had a real kitchen. Myra's father, who liked to fish, had done most of the work himself. He and Gus seemed to be friends, and Harold wondered what they knew about Myra that he himself didn't know. His father-in-law felt proprietary about the cabin, and Harold, who had contributed little money, couldn't object to his plans. Now the old man had said he was going to cover the rough pine walls of the main room with what he always spoke of as decent paneling, as if the present boards, which Harold loved, were obscene. The old bedroom had become an open hallway that contained a rickety red table with a phone on it and had three doors. Two led to dark but cool bedrooms, the other to the bathroom.

Harold's father-in-law had bought the lots on either side of the house when a developer subdivided them, and Harold was grateful. Now ten or a dozen houses stood on the lake, fishermen used boats with outboard motors, and occasionally children played wild games in the evening, rowing into the lake and shouting. Once or twice, Paul joined them. But often the other houses were empty. This morning the lake was still, and he saw nobody. The evergreens that ringed the lake—he'd never found out just what kind of trees they were—were so dark their green was almost blue.

Harold had explained the topic of his dissertation to Artie as
What are Jews for in Henry James?

—
For?
What are Jews ever
for
? Artie said cheerfully. Many people think Jews are no use at all. He'd had nothing to do with Harold for two years. Then he had phoned and suggested they meet to play tennis. Harold understood that he was supposed to act as if this was nothing special, and he immediately agreed. After a few weeks of tennis dates, Evelyn had suggested that the two of them take Paul and Carol—who were still willing to go—to a museum or the zoo, and they went to the Hayden Planetarium. Walking to the subway that afternoon, Artie had asked, So what ridiculous topic did you pick to write about? and that was what led to his comment on the use of Jews. It was winter and the wind was blowing into their faces. Harold, who still wore a fedora, was clutching it. Artie was bareheaded.

At the time, Harold had ignored what Artie said, but now he realized that the usefulness of Jews was exactly what he was writing about, though he didn't think he could call his dissertation—or the book he was already imagining—What Is the Use of Jews?

The Golden Bowl
was one of several James novels in which lovers can't afford to marry and do harm to naïve rich people so as to get money. He was fond of this pair, the Italian Prince Amerigo and the American Charlotte Stant. Without revealing that they are in love with each other or are even more than just acquaintances, the prince marries Charlotte's best friend, an heiress, and later Charlotte marries this woman's father. And then the old lovers must deal with constant proximity—they don't plan to cheat. Harold, sitting on the dock with his feet in the water, opened
The Golden Bowl
to the page where Charlotte and the prince have a moment alone, and Harold found words he loved:
they could breathe so near to each other that the interval was almost engulfed in it and the intensity both of the union and the caution became a workable substitute for contact.

The Golden Bowl
was a green book, most definitely. He looked up at the lake. Once, he and Naomi had met by chance in the street. They spoke without touching, and then she turned her head in the direction she was going. A few hairs that had come loose from her ponytail curled against the back of her neck, and he raised his hand, which just grazed the side of her ear.

But not touching—and not speaking and not knowing exactly what's going on—can take characters only so far, and that was when Jews became useful in Henry James, if not in real life, or so it seemed to Harold. In the book, several Jewish characters—or people who look Jewish—take small actions that set the plot in motion. (James wrote of these Jews with faint distaste, and that horrified but fascinated Harold.) And when the young heiress outgrows her stupidity and finally figures out what's going on, she learns about her friend and her husband's past from a Jew, a dealer in antiques.

Where would the plot be without Jews, and where would James be without Jewish biographers and critics? But would the Columbia English department, with its sole Jew, consider Harold's question worth asking? He believed that in James, Jews were good for saying what nobody else would say, but then what, then what?

The screen door behind him slammed. He turned his head, one finger in the book, to watch Myra step firmly in his direction. She carried two hardcover books with colorful jackets. Halfway to the lake, she detoured to loop onto her arm the back of her canvas chair, which she moved each night to a spot that got sun in the morning, so dew or rain would dry by the time she came out. She came more awkwardly after she picked up the chair, the faded yellow canvas slung on her left arm, the books held in her right. She wore a black bathing suit with a white terrycloth jacket, and her red hair, roots showing a little since she bothered to look her best only when she was working, fell in waves around her head. When the sun grew warmer, she'd return to the cabin for a big straw hat. She came to the edge of the water and put the books on the dock while she set up the chair. They were
Lady Chatterley's Lover
—only recently legal—and
Justine
, the first volume of
The Alexandria Quartet
. She set up the chair, wiggling it to make sure the legs were evenly set into the ground. Then she retrieved her books and sat down. She didn't open them, and Harold didn't speak.

Myra drummed the heels of her hands on
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, as if imitating a fanfare, and laughed a little, perhaps at her gesture. Harold, she said, I'm in love with someone.

4

B
renda twisted her knee stepping from a train onto a subway platform on her way to work in 1961, the summer she was twenty and had just finished her sophomore year at Hunter College. She went down on all fours, a little too close to the edge of the platform, as the train moved out behind her, and a man reached to steady her. Careful, he said, supporting her arm with a firm hand as she stood. He was maybe in his thirties and wore a jacket and white shirt but no tie, and he somehow resembled her father's friend Harold Abrams, though this man looked Chinese. It was the slope of his shoulders that recalled Harold, a combination of claiming quite a lot and modestly denying it, built into the shape of his body. She didn't think this clearly until later.

Brenda went to Hunter College because it was free. It felt like a continuation of high school with no men, but she liked having a reason to come into the city every day. She was majoring in math, but it was too hard. The summer job gave her a different reason to come into Manhattan. She liked the anonymity among people, the warm, gritty breeze off the Hudson.