Portnoy's Complaint (6 page)

Yes, Mother, imagine: for my little thing.

The potent man in the family—successful in business, tyrannical at home—was my father’s oldest brother, Hymie, the only one of my aunts and uncles to have been born on the other side and to talk with an accent. Uncle Hymie was in the “soda-vater” business, bottler and distributor of a sweet carbonated drink called Squeeze, the
vin ordinaire
of our dinner table. With his neurasthenic wife Clara, his son Harold, and his daughter Marcia, my uncle lived in a densely Jewish section of Newark, on the second floor of a two-family house that he owned, and into whose bottom floor we moved in 1941, when my father transferred to the Essex County office of Boston & Northeastern.

We moved from Jersey City because of the anti-Semitism. Just before the war, when the Bund was feeling its oats, the Nazis used to hold their picnics in a beer garden only blocks from our house. When we drove by in the car on Sundays, my father would curse them, loud enough for me to hear, not quite loud enough for them to hear. Then one night a swastika was painted on the front of our building. Then a swastika was found carved into the desk of one of the Jewish children in Hannah’s class. And Hannah herself was chased home from school one afternoon by a gang of boys, who it was assumed were anti-Semites on a rampage. My parents were beside themselves. But when Uncle Hymie heard the stories, he had to laugh: “This surprises you? Living surrounded on four sides by
goyim
, and this surprises you?” The only place for a Jew to live is among Jews,
especially
, he said with an emphasis whose significance did not entirely escape me, especially when children are growing up with people from the other sex. Uncle Hymie liked to lord it over my father, and took a certain pleasure in pointing out that in Jersey City only the building we lived in was exclusively Jewish, whereas in Newark, where
he
still lived, that was the case with the entire Weequahic neighborhood. In my cousin Marcia’s graduating class from Weequahic High, out of the two hundred and fifty students, there were only eleven
goyim
and one colored. Go beat that, said Uncle Hymie … So my father, after much deliberation, put in for a transfer back to his native village, and although his immediate boss was reluctant to lose such a dedicated worker (and naturally shelved the request), my mother eventually made a long-distance phone call on her own, to the Home Office up in Boston, and following a mix-up that I don’t even want to begin to go into, the request was granted: in 1941 we moved to Newark.

Harold, my cousin, was short and bullish in build—like all the men in our family, except me—and bore a strong resemblance to the actor John Garfield. My mother adored him and was always making him blush (a talent the lady possesses) by saying in his presence, “If a girl had Heshele’s dark lashes, believe me, she’d be in Hollywood with a million-dollar contract.” In a corner of the cellar, across from where Uncle Hymie had cases of Squeeze piled to the ceiling, Heshie kept a set of York weights with which he worked out every afternoon before the opening of the track season. He was one of the stars of the team, and held a city record in the javelin throw; his events were discus, shot, and javelin, though once during a meet at School Stadium, he was put in by the coach to run the low hurdles, as a substitute for a sick teammate, and in a spill at the last jump, fell and broke his wrist. My Aunt Clara at that time—or was it all the time?—was going through one of her “nervous seizures”—in comparison to Aunt Clara, my own vivid momma is a Gary Cooper—and when Heshie came home at the end of the day with his arm in a cast, she dropped in a faint to the kitchen floor. Heshie’s cast was later referred to as “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” whatever that meant.

To me, Heshie was everything—that is, for the little time I knew him. I used to dream that I too would someday be a member of the track team and wear scant white shorts with a slit cut up either side to accommodate the taut and bulging muscles of my thighs.

Just before he was drafted into the Army in 1943, Heshie decided to become engaged to a girl named Alice Dembosky, the head drum majorette of the high school band. It was Alice’s genius to be able to twirl not just one but two silver batons simultaneously—to pass them over her shoulders, glide them snakily between her legs, and then toss them fifteen and twenty feet into the air, catching one, then the other, behind her back. Only rarely did she drop a baton to the turf, and then she had a habit of shaking her head petulantly and crying out in a little voice, “Oh, Alice!” that only could have made Heshie love her the more; it surely had that effect upon me. Oh-Alice, with that long blond hair leaping up her back and about her face! cavorting with such exuberance half the length of the playing field! Oh-Alice, in her tiny white skirt with the white satin bloomers, and the white boots that come midway up the muscle of her lean, strong calves! Oh Jesus, “Legs” Dembosky, in all her dumb, blond
goyische
beauty! Another icon!

That Alice was so blatantly a
shikse
caused no end of grief in Heshie’s household, and even in my own; as for the community at large, I believe there was actually a kind of civic pride taken in the fact that a gentile could have assumed a position of such high visibility in our high school, whose faculty and student body were about ninety-five percent Jewish. On the other hand, when Alice performed what the loudspeaker described as her “piece de resistance”—twirling a baton that had been wrapped at either end in oil-soaked rags and then set afire—despite all the solemn applause delivered by the Weequahic fans in tribute to the girl’s daring and concentration, despite the grave
boom boom boom
of our bass drum and the gasps and shrieks that went up when she seemed about to set ablaze her two adorable breasts—despite this genuine display of admiration and concern, I think there was still a certain comic detachment experienced on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a
goy
would think to develop in the first place.

Which was more or less the prevailing attitude toward athletics in general, and football in particular, among the parents in the neighborhood: it was for the
goyim
. Let them knock their heads together for “glory,” for victory in a ball game! As my Aunt Clara put it, in that taut, violin-string voice of hers, “Heshie! Please! I do not need
goyische naches!
” Didn’t need, didn’t want such ridiculous pleasures and satisfactions as made the gentiles happy … At football our Jewish high school was notoriously hopeless (though the band, may I say, was always winning prizes and commendations); our pathetic record was of course a disappointment to the young, no matter what the parents might feel, and yet even as a child one was able to understand that for us to lose at football was not exactly the ultimate catastrophe. Here, in fact, was a cheer that my cousin and his buddies used to send up from the stands at the end of a game in which Weequahic had once again met with seeming disaster. I used to chant it with them.

So what if we had lost? It turned out we had other things to be proud of. We ate no ham. We kept matzohs in our lockers. Not really, of course, but if we wanted to
we could, and we weren’t ashamed to say that we actually did!
We were Jews—and we weren’t ashamed to say it! We were Jews—and not only were we not inferior to the
goyim
who beat us at football, but the chances were that because we could not commit our hearts to victory in such a thuggish game, we were superior! We were Jews—
and we were superior!

Another cheer I learned from Cousin Hesh, four more lines of poetry to deepen my understanding of the injustices we suffered … The outrage, the disgust inspired in my parents by the gentiles, was beginning to make some sense: the
goyim
pretended to be something special, while
we
were actually
their
moral superiors. And what made us superior was precisely the hatred and the disrespect they lavished so willingly upon us!

Only what about the hatred we lavished upon them?

And what about Heshie and Alice? What did
that
mean?

When all else failed, Rabbi Warshaw was asked to join with the family one Sunday afternoon, to urge our Heshie not to take his young life and turn it over to his own worst enemy. I watched from behind a shade in the living room, as the rabbi strode impressively up the front stoop in his big black coat. He had given Heshie his bar mitzvah lessons, and I trembled to think that one day he would give me mine. He remained in consultation with the defiant boy and the blighted family for over an hour. “Over an hour of his time,” they all said later, as though that alone should have changed Heshie’s mind. But no sooner did the rabbi depart than the flakes of plaster began falling once again from the ceiling overhead. A door flew open—and I ran for the back of the house, to crouch down behind the shade in my parents’ bedroom. There was Heshie into the yard, pulling at his own black hair. Then came bald Uncle Hymie, one fist shaking violently in the air—like Lenin he looked! And then the mob of aunts and uncles and elder cousins, swarming between the two so as to keep them from grinding one another into a little heap of Jewish dust.

One Saturday early in May, after competing all day in a statewide track meet in New Brunswick, Heshie got back to the high school around dusk, and went immediately across to the local hangout to telephone Alice and tell her that he had placed third in the state in the javelin throw. She told him that she could never see him again as long as he lived, and hung up.

At home Uncle Hymie was ready and waiting: what he had done, he said, Heshie had forced him to do; what his father had had to do that day, Harold had brought down himself upon his own stubborn, stupid head. It was as though a blockbuster had finally fallen upon Newark, so terrifying was the sound that broke on the stairway: Hesh came charging out of his parents’ apartment, down the stairs, past our door, and into the cellar, and one long
boom
rolled after him. We saw later that he had ripped the cellar door from its topmost hinge with the force of a shoulder that surely seemed from that piece of evidence to be
at least
the third most powerful shoulder in the state. Beneath our floorboards the breaking of glass began almost immediately, as he hurled bottle after bottle of Squeeze from one dark end of the whitewashed cellar to the other.

When my uncle appeared at the top of the cellar steps, Heshie raised a bottle over his head and threatened to throw it in his father’s face if he advanced so much as a step down the stairway. Uncle Hymie ignored the warning and started after him. Heshie now began to race in and out between the furnaces, to circle and circle the washing machines—still wielding the bottle of Squeeze. But my uncle stalked him into a corner, wrestled him to the floor, and held him there until Heshie had screamed his last obscenity—held him there (so Portnoy legend has it)
fifteen minutes
, until the tears of surrender at last appeared on his Heshie’s long dark Hollywood lashes. We are not a family that takes defection lightly.

That morning Uncle Hymie had telephoned Alice Dembosky (in the basement flat of an apartment building on Goldsmith Avenue, where her father was the janitor) and told her that he wanted to meet her by the lake in Weequahic Park at noon; it was a very urgent matter involving Harold’s health—he could not talk at length on the phone, as even Mrs. Portnoy didn’t know all the facts. At the park, he drew the skinny blonde wearing the babushka into the front seat of the car, and with the windows rolled up, told her that his son had an incurable blood disease, a disease about which the poor boy himself did not even know. That was his story, bad blood, make of it what you will … It was the doctor’s orders that he should not marry anyone, ever. How much longer Harold had to live no one really knew, but as far as Mr. Portnoy was concerned, he did not want to inflict the suffering that was to come, upon an innocent young person like herself. To soften the blow he wanted to offer the girl a gift, a little something that she could use however she wished, maybe even to help her find somebody new. He drew from his pocket an envelope containing five twenty-dollar bills. And dumb, frightened Alice Dembosky took it. Thus proving something that everybody but Heshie (and I) had surmised about the Polack from the beginning: that her plan was to take Heshie for all his father’s money, and then ruin his life.

When Heshie was killed in the war, the only thing people could think to say to my Aunt Clara and my Uncle Hymie, to somehow mitigate the horror, to somehow console them in their grief, was, “At least he didn’t leave you with a
shikse
wife. At least he didn’t leave you with
goyische
children.”

End of Heshie and his story.

Even if I consider myself too much of a big shot to set foot inside a synagogue for fifteen minutes—which is all he is asking—at least I should have respect enough to change into decent clothes for the day and not make a mockery of myself, my family, and my religion.

“I’m sorry,” I mumble, my back (as is usual) all I will offer him to look at while I speak, “but just because it’s your religion doesn’t mean it’s mine.”

“What did you say? Turn around, mister, I want the courtesy of a reply from your mouth.”

“I don’t have a religion,” I say, and obligingly turn in his direction, about a fraction of a degree.

“You don’t, eh?”

“I can’t.”

“And why not? You’re something special? Look at me! You’re somebody too special?”

“I don’t believe in God.”

“Get out of those dungarees, Alex, and put on some decent clothes.”