False Gods (11 page)

"You don't have the feeling I'm disloyal to my forebears?"

"No!"

"Or a sneaking sense that I've sold out?"

"Look, Dad." He sounded almost exasperated. "You're strong. You don't need anything or anyone in the world but yourself. But other people need all kinds of things: love, patriotism, family, faith, what have you. Mother needs to feel she's socially useful; Uncle Horace that he's good. I guess I need to feel I'm a Jew. It's natural for people to resent your independence. It's envy, really."

I thought this over as we walked on, again in silence. I was interested that he had included Horace among the enviers. Horace had always been very close to his godson, who called him Uncle. Did he consider it a godpaternal duty to counteract what he may have seen as my baleful influence? And then a sickening sense of remorse so overwhelmed me that I suddenly stopped. Had my love of this serious child been simply pride? Had I not essentially left him alone to solve the problems created by my own egotism and splendid—or sordid—isolation? And had he not solved them with the love denied him by both his preoccupied parents?

He had turned and was looking back at me. "You're not going to hold this against Ma, are you?"

"I'm not a grudge bearer. You know that."

"She's not a happy person, I'm afraid. And it's hard for unhappy people not to want to see those around them unhappy, too. Even subconsciously."

"Why do you suppose she's so unhappy?"

"Because everything she's ever cared about—or thinks she's cared about—has turned out to be unworthy of her ideals."

"Even her sacred father?"

"Oh, him especially."

I nodded. Oscar was certainly shrewd. "But of course we both know who the archvillain is. Do you think, even if I tried, I could ever be anything else to her?"

He turned the question. "No one could ever attain Mother's ideals. If he did, she'd simply up the stakes. Give it up, Dad. Be yourself."

And then, ignoring the preoccupied faces of the rapidly striding pedestrians, he flung his arms around my shoulders and hugged me. My emotion was so strong as nearly to choke me. Independent? That was to laugh. I was horribly vulnerable to this wonderfully loving young man. In my triumph over Dorothy in the contest for his affection I now ruefully realized that victory was Pyrrhic. She had never really contested me; Oscar was essentially a tool to be used in her lifelong campaign to prove that Dorothy was always the wronged one. I had Oscar in the end, but he was a dagger that could be seized and stuck into the centre of my heart.

It was not long after the Sunday lunch of Dorothy's emancipation from tact on the subject of my ethnic origin that Horace Aspinwall came to my office to bring it up again. It appeared that he too had had a talk with Oscar. That Oscar should have had such a discussion with him at all was enough to make me quiver with resentment before I even heard what the principal question had been.

What I now heard Horace say, as coolly as if he were talking about a party or a trip that my son was planning, was this: "Oscar has a project he wasn't sure about broaching to you. He has this idea about changing his name back to Ullman. He wanted to know how I thought you'd react."

I rose to walk to the window. I needed time for this one. I had first to digest the disagreeable fact that Oscar's relationship with his godfather was a good deal more intimate than I had suspected. I knew he had spent a weekend recently with the Aspinwalls in Greenwich, and I had even wondered whether he might have been attracted to one of their daughters, though both were as gushing and giggly as Horace's sisters had been at the same age. Still, those sisters had married surprisingly well. But a change of name to Ullman would hardly have been the way for Oscar to ingratiate himself with Horace's bustling little country club wife.

"And what did you tell him?" I demanded.

"I told him I thought you would mind, but that you were too sensible to mind very much. And that the decision in any case had to be his own and no one else's."

"Is that
all
you told him?"

"What do you mean?"

I swung around from the window. "Didn't you tell him you
approved
of the idea?"

"I certainly didn't tell him I disapproved."

"Obviously, you think it's a good move on his part. Why?"

"Because I feel that Oscar should be free to assert his identity as a Jew. I needn't tell you how fine a son you have, Maury. He holds his head too high to be associated with the least taint of misrepresentation."

"Unlike his old man, eh?"

"You've always had your own good reasons for doing the things you've done. I'm not going to start criticizing you at this point in our lives."

"You're not?" I stared into those usually gentle eyes, astonished to sense the sudden dislike in them. "I suggest you already have. If you had to pick a son of Dorothy's to make up to you for having none of your own, why couldn't it have been Edgar? Why couldn't you leave me out of it?"

Horace was too shocked at first to answer this. Of course I was being absurd. I was surprised at the violence of my own temper. Edgar would never have had any truck with the likes of poor Horace. He was a languid, indolent homosexual, a frequenter of the highest society, a collector of Greek and Roman sculptures of nude young men. Now Horace tried to reason with a lunatic.

"There was no idea of 'picking' a son of yours, Maurice. Isn't it permissible for a man to be fond of his godson and to want to help him? There are some things that Oscar has found it hard to discuss with either you or Dorothy. She has such pronounced views, and you aren't the easiest person in the world to discuss delicate matters with."

"Why am I not?"

"Just because you can stand there the way you're standing and ask that question the way you're asking it. But let's get back to the point, for heaven's sake.
Would you.
really mind so terribly if Oscar became Oscar Ullman?"

"Yes! Because it would hurt him!"

"You mean in the eyes of the world? Why should it? Everyone knows it's his real name. That's the penalty of your fame, Maurice."

"No, I don't mean in the eyes of the world. I don't give a damn about the eyes of the world. I've gotten everything I need from the world." My heart was beating painfully now. "You talk about his real name. What I chose for him is his real name. If he changes it, he will be repudiating his father. He will have created the ridiculous image of a father and son with different family names. And when he sees what he has done, he will suffer what may be a terrible remorse, for he is a very sensitive soul."

"But suppose you change your name, too?"

"Ah, now we have it! Now you're smoked out, Horace! Let the Jew call himself what he is! That's your revenge at last, isn't it, for my muscling in on your unrequited Browning-esque love for Dorothy and taking her for myself? You could never forgive my trying to shake you out of that masturbating passion of yours and showing you how to win the woman you never really wanted!"

"Maury, Maury, you've gone crazy!" Horace shook his head sadly as he slowly rose to his feet. "Let us put a stop to this terrible conversation. You're going to be sorry enough for what you've already said."

"Of course, I don't mean it was all conscious on your part," I said lamely.

"At least we have decided one thing." He turned back from the door. "There can be no further question of Oscar's changing his name. Certainly not in
your
lifetime."

So he had the last word, after all. I guess I have always underrated Horace.

The outbreak of war in Europe effected a curious change in my former best friend. Horace became the most concerned and vocal of interventionists. I wondered whether Armageddon didn't seem to offer him a possible escape from the long littleness of his life. I suppose this was true of many men. We had both been in Officers Candidate School in 1918 when the war had ended, depriving us of our chance for combat in France, as much to my relief as to Horace's chagrin. I had been eager only to get on with my career. But now, in 1940, Horace was always plaguing me with his plans to take a leave of absence and go to England in any assisting capacity. As the United Kingdom had no urgent need of American males in their fifties, except to promote war feeling and military aid in their own country, he spent his days in interventionist committee meetings, organizing huge rallies in halls draped with the banners of the occupied nations. Dorothy joined him with the exaltation born of finding a cause worthy of all her shattered ideals. So they were together at last in a union that even Horace's disgruntled little wife could not openly object to. They could both exclaim, like the dying Henry James, "At last, the distinguished thing!"

The war had an equally strong but less heady effect on Oscar. He was a lawyer now and still living at home, but not working, for he had planned a year's trip around the world which Hitler's invasion of Poland had interrupted. He became almost sombre and much less communicative. He spent his days largely in his own rooms, reading or listening to records of his beloved Bach, and his nights in bars with unmarried friends who worked in the day. As he didn't drink, his need for discussion with his contemporaries had to be compelling.

The crisis that was clearly pending broke one morning when he appeared in my office, solemn of mien.

"I'm going to Canada, Dad. I want to enlist in the RAF or the RCAF, whichever will take me."

The razor that had been encased in my heart ever since Oscar had started taking flying lessons now turned over.

"Can't you wait until we get in?"

"But
will
we?"

"If your mother and godfather have anything to do with it, we will." I had seen them as pathetic, even a bit ridiculous; now I saw them as menacing.

"Ma and Uncle Horace have an awful lot of isolationists to fight. And maybe the isolationists have a point. Maybe it's not their war. All I know is it's mine."

"You mean it's a Jew's war."

"I'm not trying to convert anyone. It's a war for
me
as a Jew. The little man with the moustache is doing his best to exterminate us."

"Does your mother know your plan?"

"Yes, and she's being very Roman about it. Uncle Horace tells me I'm doing what he'd do if he were my age. He says he envies me."

"I wish to hell he
was
your age!" I almost shouted. "What the hell are they trying to do? Ship you off to your death before I can stop you?"

"Now, Dad, calm down. They're both very much concerned as to how you'll take it."

"And well they might be!" We argued, I heatedly and he coolly, for the rest of the morning and through lunch. The only thing I was able to obtain was a delay until September. It was now June, and France had fallen. My clinching argument was that if we were suddenly dragged into the war, our air force would desperately need pilots. I did
not
tell him that I feared Britain would now go under and that my requested delay in his plans might spare his going under with her.

"And what shall I do in the meantime?" he asked sullenly.

"Come and work in the firm for the summer. I'll see you get something interesting to do."

But he didn't want to work for me; he preferred, he said, to be on his own. Was it because he begrudged me his concession? Our most important decisions are based on trivia. He consulted Horace, and Horace suggested he apply to his firm. Had I known of this, I would have raised heaven and earth to stop him. I learned of it, however, only when Oscar again presented himself in my office, this time flashy-eyed and tightlipped. He had been refused a job by the hiring partner of Gurdon and Horace's firm.

"I suppose they give summer jobs only to second-year law students," I suggested in a voice that concealed my desperation.

"That was what Mr. Otis said. But that was not the real reason." Of course it wasn't. Oscar had stood in the first ten of his class in law school and had been an editor of the review.

"Why should you doubt him?"

"Because on my way out I dropped in to see a classmate who's been working there a year. He's a pal and put it to me straight. Otis had shown him my application and asked him about me. He said he was thinking of recommending to the firm that they make an exception in their no-Jews policy. My friend and I could only assume that Otis had been overruled by the hiring committee."

"Have you told this to Horace?"

"Yes. Just now. He was frightfully upset. He said he'd talked to his cousin Gurdon, and that Gurdon had assured him it would be all right. Uncle Horace thought I would be proud to be the first to make them lift the bar. But I guess Gurdon, like Otis, couldn't swing it."

"Assuming he even tried! Assuming this wasn't his way of humiliating me, getting back at me for old scores! Goddamm Gurdon Aspinwall! And goddamn your godfather, too!"

"Dad, I'm sure Uncle Horace, at least, meant well. But do you see what this means? One of the most distinguished firms in the country turns down a qualified candidate—and the son, too, of a man who could help them, or even hurt them—simply to preserve unblotted their perfect record of never taking a Jew! Dad, I'm off to Canada tomorrow!"

***

And that is how I lost my son. In Canada he was found a capable enough aviator to be sent directly to England, where he was commissioned in the RAF and killed in an air battle over London, his second of time in Britain's finest hour.

For a while I didn't care what happened to me. I went through my days at the office, spending more and more time there, performing my tasks automatically, though enough like my old self for my partners to think I was a stoic, if indeed they did not rather suspect I was simply hardhearted. Dorothy was afflicted, but much less than I; I doubt she had ever really loved anyone since Guy Thorp's betrayal.

Besides, she found exaltation in the role of a dead hero's mother; it dramatized and elevated her sale of war bonds. But I will admit that she seemed to sense my agony with an uncharacteristic compassion. She may have felt, not that she had helped to drive Oscar to his death, but that I might believe she had. Oddly enough, she may have preferred a hating Maurice to an indifferent one. But then she was always an exception to her own rules.