Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (47 page)

If the Orloffs had been Chasidic they would have become part of a tribe wearing queer puppet costumes; they’d have attended the Chasidic day school. Or if the Orloffs had been Orthodox they’d have worn yarmulkes and attended the Orthodox school. But they were not Chasidic, not Orthodox, not even particularly observant; they were merely dark, scrawny, and embarrassing. Their lunch boxes were crammed with hard-boiled eggs and pickles. Feivel laughed at his own jokes. Some students made friends with him—he could be helpful with Latin homework, and in those days Harvard still required proficiency in an ancient tongue. Jay, all A’s anyway, ignored him.

But he couldn’t ignore Yamamoto. Jay meant to conquer the Japanese language; Yamamoto’s territory was in his battle plan. And there was a similar determination in Jay’s classmates—there were only four others now. It was as if they were attending not the decorous language center but the night school to which his grandfather had dragged himself a century earlier, even after ten hours of work, because on English his whole future depended.

Three of the others had been with Jay since the beginning—two businessmen and a programmer—and the fourth was a new pupil, a young woman who’d begun her Japanese studies in college. She was now living with a doctor from Kobe. Jay wondered what their offspring would look like—the young woman was pale and freckled, with parched hair and transparent eyelashes. Jay’s new great-grandchild, according to the pictures on the Web, was an untroubled blend of both families: he had, in charming miniature, his mother’s chin and hair and eyes, his father’s curly mouth, and Jay’s own father’s noble schnozz. In one of the pictures Mika’s grandmother held the baby on her lap. She was wearing glasses, her expression unreadable.

Yamamoto was an expert drillmaster. He made the class repeat verb conjugations and honorific forms and onomatopoeic words until Jay became
mukamuka
,
kurakura
,
gennari
… nauseated, dizzy, and exhausted. But Yamamoto was not entirely to blame; Jay’s disease was at last on the offensive. Well, it was his fate, wasn’t it; his
unmei
. Yamamoto stood during the drills, breathing noisily, waving his arms, almost shouting through his noxious giggles. He was like a soldier … like a Japanese soldier … like a Japanese soldier in the war films of Jay’s boyhood. He was dressed in salaryman’s clothing—utterly black suit, utterly white shirt, dark red tie—but he might as well have been wearing green tanker coveralls with drawstrings at waist and ankles. His mouth was always slightly open; his short white teeth grazed his plump lower lip. He liked to slice the air with his hand. Chop. Chop.

Drills were only part of the weekly class. There was also the humbling return of corrected homework, and kanji tests, and videotapes in which overwrought actors enacted workplace dramas—someone has to make an emergency presentation, someone else almost doesn’t land a contract. What a perilous life Woody must be leading. The students conducted general conversations initiated by Yamamoto.

Sheila-san, what did you do last weekend?

Cooked shabu-shabu, did tennnis, worked in the garden, did Japanese study.

Did you, now. Ralph-san?

Grilled beef, did golf, saw a movie, did Japanese study.

Sensei, what did
you
do? somebody usually inquired. There followed a sentence didactically employing modifiers, idioms, and contractions. Yamamoto hopefully attended a Red Sox game, but the pitiable Sox surrendered six runs. At a concert a skillful quartet performed a composition written just for them. A dog was struck on the street and ended up in trouble: dead. During these narrations the incisor-notable mouth, framed at the corners with saliva, was open in its customary smirk, a replica of Feivel Ostroff ’s anxious smile.

In high school Feivel had put on enough weight to become merely thin. He had learned to giggle less. By the time he and Jay were freshmen together across the river (Feivel’s uncle paid for room and board as well as tuition) he was calling himself Phil. He majored in classics; he wrote his senior thesis on Ovid. In Jay’s eyes, Feivel-Phil retained the feverish eagerness of a greenhorn, but now he was one man among ten thousand, less odd than many—less bizarre than a couple of Inuits, less exotic than the Ismaili prince, less greasy than the Brooklyn smart alecks shuttling between class and lab, preparing themselves for distinguished scientific careers and, it turned out, a couple of Nobels.

Phil Ostroff paid court to a dowdy Radcliffe girl named Dorothea, also a classicist, whose parents were professors in some college on the prairie. Phil and Dorothea, both summa cum laude, were married right after graduation by a justice of the peace. They went off to graduate school in Chicago, where the university paid them handsome stipends for the honor of their presence.

D
URING THE SPRING
semester of Japanese III, Passover began on the Saturday night before Easter. This weekend I will attend a religious banquet, Jay said. Bread may not be eaten. Using my dear wife’s recipe, my dear daughter will make soup. We will eat chicken, sweet potatoes, fruit, crackers, special fish.

Matzoh, amplified Yamamoto. As for
gefilte
, there is no Japanese equivalent.

Sheila would prepare the traditional Easter meal: ham, sweet potatoes, fruit. One businessman was going to the game and the other would be visiting family in New York and the programmer planned to organize his collection of compact discs. He would arrange them by century first, he said; within century by composer; within composer by …

Yamamoto’s lower lip stretched under his awning of teeth. Next week we will enjoy hearing about your system. Tonight’s class is over.

As for this weekend, Jay insisted. Sensei wa?

The teeth flared at him. I will attend a seder.

A guest at the feast, Jay thought: the stranger in your midst … But the teacher went on. My wife will prepare the meal. I will conduct the service.

“In Hebrew?” the startled Jay inquired, in English.

Yamamoto turned his head away from this impertinence. “Hebrew is a difficult tongue,” Jay should have said—that would have been a respectful way not to ask the question. But respect be damned—the question and its companions begged for answers.

I
F YOU HAVE LIVED
in Godolphin all of your seventy-seven years except the four in Cambridge, you can find out anything; you know who to ask.

“He’s married to a dentist from Worcester,” Carol Glickman told Jay. It was June; Jay had lain in wait for her at the library; he knew she went to the senior movies there. “One of those young women who can do it all.”

Jay thought of Mika, pregnant again, continuing her career from her home computer, which no doubt converted itself into a changing table after the market closed. “Mrs. Yamamoto … Dr. Yamamoto … she’s Jewish?”

“Yes, whatever we mean by that these days. Some of her family have baal-teshuvaed, become sort-o-dox.” Carol laughed. Jay would have laughed in return, but he knew his breath stank from the noxious pills he was now obliged to swallow. Carol paused, went on. “Some of them are probably Quakers or Zennists or whatever. Did you know that Feivel Ostroff ’s daughter is an Episcopal priest?”

“Feivel wasn’t at my reunion,” Jay belatedly remembered.

“He died last year. Best-loved teacher at Dartmouth, or was it Williams. Made Latin popular, and Greek too.” She paused again. Was he supposed to express condolences?

“How are you, Jay?” she said at last, in a light voice. Her husband, a judge, had served on the Anti-Defamation League with Jay. She was widowed now, like Mika’s grandmother. Her hair was dyed, again like Mika’s grandmother: the same shade of bark … How was he? She could see how he was: yellow and shrunken. She could probably figure the likelihood of his living another year. Jay the actuary had already figured it: zero.

“I’m not long for this world,” he said, unmischievously, turning his head to exhale. She opened her mouth, ready to give comfort. “Another time,” he begged, and fled.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER HE WENT
to High Holy Day services for the first time in years. His grandfather’s tallith lent a semblance of flesh to his frame. He sat at the end of the pew, contemplating a quick getaway. The rabbi wore dramatic white robes. She carried the Torah down the aisle, followed by some shuffling elders: his contemporaries, he supposed. She paused at Jay’s row, and he managed one of his old playful smiles. His teeth were still good. She waited with her burden, half smiling herself, and he remembered to touch the scroll with his prayer book and bring the book back to his lips, though it grew heavy on the return journey, as if it had acquired the weight of Numbers.

In October he went across the river to a boring lecture on the Japanese economy. In November he went to the Game in the rain, and left at the half. The following week he visited Widener Library on his alumnus pass, fifty dollars a year. The library stacks had recently been strengthened but not reconfigured. Between steel shelves the aisles were as narrow as ever. Standing on Level 3, his feet on the old stone floor, his body brushed by books as gentle as Kyoto schoolchildren, he felt like a boy again. But there was not one volume he cared to read.

He hadn’t cared to enroll in Japanese IV, either. He was too weary. But what he’d accomplished gladdened him. He could make his way through children’s picture books. He could speak to the
shaineh maideleh
at the Japanese tchotchke shop. He could recognize several hundred kanji; and at night, floating in his bath, he could still draw a few of them on his wasted thigh. At his favorite sushi bar he listened to words flying from one sashimi master to another. Occasionally he fearlessly asked the meaning of an expression. His hematologist, a tiny Indian, urged him to eat and drink anything that agreed with him. Not much agreed with him, but Japanese beer and raw salmon were no worse than oatmeal and applesauce.

Chicken soup did lie lightly on his stomach—Jews were right about that. Wulf ’s, the only kosher market left in town (there had been half a dozen during his childhood), cooked up a batch every few days and put it in jars. Jay bought a jar on Sunday, ate what he could during the week, threw out the rest. Sunday after Sunday the bearded man at the cash register looked at Jay without recognition. His mind was on higher things, maybe his inventory.

Jay’s clothes had grown roomy. On one of his rare good days he bought two pairs of chinos, apparently back in style, at the local Gap. And a navy blazer, size what?—small, God help him. His daughter dropped in every day to say hello and straighten the apartment. They were both silently waiting for the doctor to mention hospice. Meanwhile he could still make his weekly trek to Wulf ’s.

And it was at Wulf ’s, on a Sunday morning, that he saw Yamamoto again, and the Yamamoto family, four children in total. Jay stepped behind a rack of spices. From this hiding place he inspected the dentist-wife. She was surprisingly pretty, and slender despite many pregnancies. She was wearing a felt hat with an upturned brim. Fetching. He recognized it as the substitution made by modern Orthodox for the matron’s wig. Rich brown hair curled below the hat. She was pushing a cart in which a two-year-old lorded over groceries. Yamamoto walked behind her, wearing an infant in a sling. Two little boys marched in the space between their mother and father, and talked in light voices—English, he noted. The children, even the infant, had the straight black hair of Woody’s little son; they had similar dark eyes, too, angled more gently than if their blood were pure. The boys wore yarmulkes. Likewise Yamamotosan, their Yiddische chichi.

So this was the current trajectory of an immigrant’s career—this leap from one ill-favored group into another. What had happened to those necessary decades—generations, even—spent dissembling among the Yankees? Jay the commissioner, Glickman the judge, Fessel the surgeon—how delicately they’d mingled with the favored. And bold Feivel Ostroff, applying himself to pagan texts, had managed a complete metamorphosis. Somewhere a bishopric was no doubt waiting for his daughter the priest … And here, where shelves of canned mackerel faced shelves of boxed kasha, the Yamamoto children, crossbred progeny of two outcast clans, confidently trotted. Assimilation had become as passé as the jitterbug.

Forgetting to conceal himself behind the spices, Jay stood up as straight as his pain allowed. He was still what he was born to be—an Anti-Defamation Jew; a citizen of Godolphin, Mass; a loyal Harvard man. Papa Yamamoto was perhaps immune to the lure of the Houses across the river. But in this new world of interchangeable gods, and of females dressed up in priestly robes like drag queens … in this world where nations who’d tried to obliterate each other ended up in the same bed, and where your offspring hurled themselves across the planet and forgot to return … in such a world the enduring things, really, were bricks and bell towers, a library and a stadium. They remained, they steadied you until the end—flow’rs in your wilderness, stars in your night. He’d reveal this truth to the rabbi when she made her dutiful visit to the almost dead.