The Best Revenge (10 page)

“I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to tell me, Pop.”

“The truth is, Ben, people take hostages. Sometimes the hostage they take is themselves.”

8

Louie

Of course I'm a wanderer! Moses wandered, Columbus wandered, should I have rotted in the old country? Should I have stayed in my
shtetl,
a subject not only of the czar but of every Cossack who wanted a Jew to beat? You don't need to be an Einstein to know that nothing plus nothing equals nothing. I got out because in Russia the future is for others. If I'd stayed, would I have met a woman like Zipporah from a big city like Kiev? Would this woman and I have produced an impresario like Ben?

Any time in the past four thousand years you ask a Jew what he wants, he says a son, by which he means a future for his name. But—pinch your nose—the Lord God Almighty Who blessed our people with a certain amount of brains and the
chutzpah
to use them, be careful of Him. If He offers you a chair, look before you sit down. God is the world's most experienced practical joker. Don't take my word for it, visit the sideshow of a circus and you'll see how God plays tricks on human beings. He's been playing Red Sea games since the beginning of time, which is a warning to our enemies. Better watch out because we've played with the Best and we're still here!

On me personally God played two dirty tricks. In 1914 when I finally managed my escape from the czar's army and got by crook and hook to Windsor in Canada, and then over the border to Detroit, I learned that my brother Mendel, who sneaked into America before me, changed our name from Razelson to Riller. Who Riller? What Riller? What am I to do, go around with a name different from my own brother? And so even before I have a son, I have lost my name.

Dirty trick two is that in the Golden Land I met a woman who was a queen compared to most of the women in this world, a lady named Zipporah, educated, tall, a beauty among beauties, and she says yes to me. Crazy! Who said a man five-feet-two can't reach up into heaven and pluck himself a star? Did God try to stop me? No, He encouraged me, part of His game! Harold was a son I couldn't have hoped for in my dreams, a blond like his mother, at six months his arms and thighs begin to be strong like a Cossack's yet he has the brains of Maimonides, what more could a Jew want? To make a living, not to have to borrow money, to bring up a family in peace, to be let alone by the Dirty Tricks Department. When God struck Egypt with the plagues, the worst was of course taking their firstborn. Dear God, I am not an Egyptian, can't You tell? Though I am something of a social democrat, I still believe in You. With Your help, I wanted in this country to be a small winner, and what did You do? You snatched away my firstborn like Hauptmann took the Lindbergh baby! When Harold was three, anyone could see he might become a Nobel Prize winner. You, Creator of the World, didn't You have enough Death that you needed my three-year-old?

Comment by Zipporah

Louie, you're running away with yourself as you did all your life long. You're inventing more than God did.

If you'd had an education, you'd have learned to respect facts. You changed your name for a very practical reason. You didn't want any more than your brother Mendel did to be picked up by the Immigration Service and sent back to Russia. The name Razelson never meant anything to anyone in the old country. Nothing was taken away from you. And Harold was lost not because of some spiteful trick of the Almighty but because doctors had not yet invented a cure for nephritis. Louie, if you had a tenth of an ounce of science in you, you'd know God doesn't have time to pay attention to you. You talk to yourself. Be glad it isn't the Middle Ages anymore, you'd have been stoned as a lunatic! You had from me Ben, a son who lived, who is recognized in restaurants, who knows all the big stars, who became the biggest man on Broadway since Ziegfeld. Count your blessings, Louie, count your blessings.

Louie

I am not going to get involved in an exchange with that woman. Something has to come either from books or from life. Books were her department. Life was mine. To me, born poorest of the poor, food is a feast. To her it is a meal to prepare. To me the sun is the warmth of the universe. To her it is something that gives you freckles. Even the one thing on which I thought Zipporah and I agreed best, making love to each other, is to me heaven on earth and to her something to do quietly so the children shouldn't hear.

Zipporah won a gold medal for scholarship from the same czar who would have spit on me. A woman of breeding who at twenty-two was Superintendent of Evening Schools in Kiev. A royal woman, admired not only by her relatives but by mine, too. A woman who, if you listen to her, made only one mistake, marrying down.

Meaning me, who was born in a small village in Russia called Zhitomir in the year 1892. When I was eight years old, my father slipped on a muddy street in front of an oxcart and was so badly trampled that all the Jews of the village except his children prayed that God would relieve him of his pain and accept him in heaven. Those days God was not so accepting when it came to Russian Jews, and my father lingered for a month until He finally paid attention to a special promise made by the Rabbi.

As soon as the period of mourning was over, my mother, whose womb had been strong enough to produce eight children but whose lungs were weak, told me that I, like all but my youngest sister, would have to leave school and take whatever work the good people of the village found for us. And so as an eight-year-old I was apprenticed to Schmerl the carpenter, who put a bowl of food in front of me twice a day and tossed me an occasional kopeck.

Schmerl's place of work was a converted barn. In the loft, he stored the finished pieces of his work, mainly chairs—for Schmerl was beyond doubt the best maker of chairs within the distance that a man and his cart, pulled by a horse, could travel to buy four chairs from Schmerl and return to his home the same day.

You who sit on chairs all the time, how often do you think that someone actually made out of wood the piece of furniture that cradles your bottom? Schmerl taught me to respect a chair as you would a painting, to really
see
it. Mind you, Schmerl's were not chairs of the sort you'd find in a fancy department store. They were made of rough wood, smoothed so they would be without splinters, and stuck together at the joints not with fancy dowels but with a wood glue of Schmerl's own formula that held the pieces together like Samson. People would notice one of those chairs and say, “I see you have a Schmerl” and not, “I see you have a chair.”

I was short for my age and Schmerl sometimes needled me. “I wonder if you, little
pupik,
have the strength to saw a piece of wood in two?”

I bent my arm to show the muscle. “My father, God rest his soul,” I said, “let me chop wood.”

Schmerl thought I was exaggerating, that my father probably had let me
watch
him striking a log with an ax, but never mind. Schmerl showed me how to saw through wood at the place he had marked with a crayon.

I cut my first piece of wood exactly along the mark. Schmerl, though he believed sentiment interfered with discipline, allowed himself to muss my hair in recognition.

As the days went by, Schmerl had to notice that I did what I was told in less time and with a better eye for the marked line than one would expect of an apprentice, but he also noticed, God help me, that between pieces of wood, my attention would drift.

“Are you daydreaming, boy?”

“Oh, Schmerl,” I answered, “please forgive me. My mind flew to heaven, where I was showing my father the work I did today.”

Well, what could Schmerl say? His voice, usually harsh, was like an embarrassed whisper. “Get on with it, there's a lot of wood to saw.” He must have thought that my father had deserted me at too young an age.

“Schmerl,” I said, trying to comfort him, “when I have a son, I'm going to wait until he's grown up before I die.”

“That's God's business, not yours,” Schmerl said, but I noticed that after turning back to his work, he wiped the corners of his eyes with his sleeve.

Of course Schmerl had done my family a great favor in taking me in as an apprentice. And so I felt guilty that when I had sawed three or four lengths of wood to the right size, I would sometimes without thinking lift the saw with my right hand and run it back and forth an inch or so above the crook of my left arm as if it were a violin. How could I explain to Schmerl that my ambition to be a poet was impossible now that I no longer went to school, but perhaps one day I could realize my other ambition of playing the violin.

In time I hoped that I could have people come to hear me play the violin the way people came from many
viorsts
away to buy chairs from Schmerl. Though the few kopecks Schmerl gave me went to my mother and not to violin lessons, I did not give up hope.

I don't want sympathy. What happened when I was eight was my father's tragedy, he was the one robbed of life. I may not have had some of the
chatchkes
that other boys had, but in my heart burned a blacksmith's fire and what went on in my head made me richer than the czarevitch in Petrograd. Two years' schooling is not enough for getting along in the modern world, but I had learned the secret! Much of the world is hidden in books. At night I read by an oil lamp, living through every experience as if it was mine. Also, I noticed most people let their brains rest behind their eyes, but I watched carefully how people said things so I could learn why they said them. With such knowledge, I felt, I didn't need to remain an orphan in Zhitomir, I could go anywhere in this world, to Europe, to China, to the top of Mount Ararat, even to America.

Comment by Zipporah

I used to tell Louie that when we met everybody must have been sitting down because it was only when he came to call on me the first time did I realize how short he was. It was my responsibility as an educated woman to pretend that a man's height wasn't important, just his mind.

I was sharing a small apartment in Chicago with two other young women who had already gone out for Saturday evening. I invited Louie to sit in the living room and offered him tea.

“I'm taking two courses at Loyola,” I told him.

“I envy you,” he said. “My school was Schmerl and life.”

How do you talk to a man who hasn't been to a high school much less a university? “Why don't we go to a movie?” I said. The movies in 1922 were pretty terrible, but what should I discuss with him, that I wanted to see O'Neill's
Anna Christie
when the touring company came to Chicago?

“I'll make a movie for you right here,” he said, sitting down next to me on the couch. “Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon?”

I shrugged. Why should I admit to him I'd never been out of Chicago since I'd arrived in America a year earlier? I hadn't met a single Jew from the old country who had seen the Grand Canyon.

“The Grand Canyon,” Louie said, “is an improvement on the rainbow. The orange is burned brown by the sun. The rock is so many layers of gray it is like a gray rainbow. The whole canyon is like a great big
V
sliced out of the earth by the side of God's hand. And at the bottom is this river, wilder than anything I ever saw in Russia. Close your eyes. Imagine we are on a raft at the bottom of the canyon. The water is as cold as a Siberian winter, the rocks are like Cossacks waiting to kill you.”

I could take care of myself. I closed my eyes.

“I have to steer the raft away from the giant rocks, can you see them? Don't open your eyes!”

For his sake I saw them with my eyes closed. Usually men took me to a museum or a concert.

“The sun,” he said, “is turning red because its skin is on fire. It begins to sink behind the cliffs.”

I could feel his weight getting up from the couch.

“Don't open your eyes,” he warned.

I could tell he had turned off one of the lights. “We must reach the shore before it gets dark,” he said. “You'll have to paddle just as I am. Are you paddling, Zipporah?”

What should I say to this man? “Yes, I'm paddling.”

“With all your strength?”

“With all my strength.” Crazy?

“Oh my God,” he said, “the sun is gone. We must reach the shore!”

I felt a moment's alarm. He had turned off the last light. I could feel his weight on the couch beside me again. I opened my eyes. The room was in darkness.

“We made it,” he said. “You're a good paddler.”

I said, “Don't tell me you've been to the Grand Canyon.”

“Never,” Louie said, “but it was as good as the movies, wasn't it?”

This unschooled young man, I had to admit, had managed at the
beginning of our first date to get us sitting in the dark on a couch. And that wasn't everything.

“Would you mind if I kissed your ankle?” he asked.

“My ankle?”

“That's what I said.”

“Why would you want to do that?” I said.

“I didn't say I'd do that, I just wanted to know if you'd mind. Would you?”

“I don't think you should be kissing my ankle,” I said.

“On moral grounds or sanitary grounds?”

“My ankle is as clean as the rest of me,” I said quickly.

“Would you mind if I kissed your back just below the left shoulder blade?”

“Through the dress?” Crazy, yes?