Cocksure (14 page)

Once the play was done, the children skipped off to the dining hall, where choc-ices, a conjurer, and a Popeye cartoon show awaited them. The adults remained in the auditorium, where they were served vin rosé and cheese squares. Dr. Booker, Yasha Krashinsky, and finally Miss Lilian Tanner, mounted the stage to shouts of “Bravo,” and the meeting was called to order. Mortimer was immensely encouraged to discover that he was not alone in being rather put off by the Beatrice Webb House production of
Philosophy in the Bedroom
. He was in a minority, a reactionary minority, but he was not alone. As the meeting progressed beyond niceties, Mortimer was heartened to see other parents come to the boil. The play was not the issue. It was, however, symptomatic of what some parents felt had come to ail the school.

Francis Wharton, the enlightened
TV
producer, began by saying he had always voted Socialist; he deplored censorship in any shape or form, on either side of the so-called Iron Curtain; Victorian double standards were anathema to him; but all the same he thought it a bit much that just because his thirteen-year-old daughter was the only girl in the fifth form to stop at petting –

“Shame,” somebody called out.

–
heavy
petting –

The objector shrugged, unimpressed.

– was no reason for her to come home with a scarlet
T
for “tease” painted on her bosom.

This brought Lady Gillian Horsham, the Oxfam organizer, to her feet. Lady Horsham wished for more colored neighbors in Lowndes Square. She had, she said, found the play on the twee side here and there, but, on balance, most imaginative.

“Yes, yes,” Dr. Booker interrupted bitingly, “but?”

Lady Horsham explained that her daughter, also in the fifth form, but not so cripplingly inhibited as the previous speaker’s child –

“Hear! Hear!”

– had already been to the London Clinic to be fitted with a diaphragm.

“That’s the stuff!” “Good girl!”

But, she continued, but, wasn’t it all rather premature? Not, mind you, that she was a prude. But, as they were all socialists, it seemed to her irresponsible that while their sisters in Africa and India were in such desperate need of diaphragms –

“Not germane,” somebody hollered.

Yes, it was germane, Lady Horsham continued. But look at it another way, if you must. Parents were already overburdened with spiraling fees, the cost of summer and winter uniforms, hockey sticks, cricket bats, and what not. Was it fair that they should now also have to fork out for new diaphragms each term as, let’s face it, these were growing girls? Couldn’t the girls of the fifth form, without psychological damage –

“Your question, please?”

– without risk, practice
coitus interruptus?
“Spoilsport!”

“Reactionary!”

Dr. Booker beamed at his people, gesturing for silence. “If I may make a positive point, there is no reason why the tuck shop co-op, which already sells uniforms the girls have outgrown to younger students, could not also dispose of diaphragms that have begun to
pinch,
so long as the transaction was not tarnished by the profit motive.”

Next to speak up, Tony Latham, the outspoken Labour backbencher, explained that while it certainly did not trouble him personally that his boy masturbated daily, immediately following the Little Fibber Bra commercials on
ITV
,
it was quite another matter when his parents, up from the country, were visiting. Latham’s parents, it was necessary to understand, were the product of a more inhibited, censorious age: it distressed them, rather, to see their only grandchild playing with himself on the carpet, while they were taking tea.

“Your question, Mr. Latham?”

Could it be put to Yasha Krashinsky, overworked as he is, that he keep the boys for five minutes after Expressive Movement class, and have them masturbate before they come home?

“But I do,” Yasha put in touchily. “I do, my dear chap.”

Other, more uncompromisingly radical parents now demanded their say. There could be no backsliding at Beatrice Webb House. “You begin,” a lady said, “by forbidding masturbation in certain rooms or outside prescribed hours and next thing you know the children, our children, are driven back into locked toilets to seek their pleasure, and still worse have developed a sense of guilt about auto-stimulation.”

“Or,” another mother said, looking directly at Lady Horsham, “you allow one greedy-guts in the fourth form to hold on to her precious little hymen and next thing out goes fucking in the afternoon.”

There followed a long and heated discussion on the play, its larger meanings within meanings, and then a debate on Beatrice Webb House finances, co-op shares, and needs and plans for the future, if – as Dr. Booker put it, winding up to a standing ovation – LBJ was going to allow us a future. Some compromises were grudgingly agreed to. Diaphragms, for instance, would be made optional until a girl reached the sixth form. On the other hand, Dr. Booker absolutely refused to stream girls into classes of those who did and
those who didn’t. It would be heartless, he said feelingly, to stamp a girl of twelve frigid for the rest of her life. Some, if not all, late developers might grow up to surpass seemingly more avid girls in sexual appetite. “Thursday’s heavy petter, properly encouraged,” he said, “might develop into Friday’s nympho.”

Mortimer, and three other hard-core reactionaries managed to take over the interview-and-appointments committee. There were, at the moment, two teaching vacancies, one in the second form, Doug’s form.

“That’s for me,” Miss Ryerson said.

England needs me
. “Oh, my God, no, Miss Ryerson. I couldn’t.”

“You must.”

“But –”

“Don’t you worry about Agnes Laura Ryerson. I’ll show them a thing or two.”

“Yes, Miss Ryerson.”

19

D
INO TOMASSO, SOMEWHAT SUBDUED, WEARING A
patch over his left eye, came out of the London Clinic and returned to work in time to gloat over the success of the first title in the Our Living History series, already gone into a second printing.

More luck than brains, Mortimer thought grudgingly, but he let it pass. He had a more pressing matter to cope with. For, beginning with his next “Reading for Pleasure” lecture, Jacob Shalinsky contrived to make life a misery for him.

“Ah, Mr. Griffin, I may have misinterpreted you, of course, but it seems to me you place T. S. Eliot among the great writers of our age. Do you think it possible, Mr. Griffin, that anti-Semitism goes hand in hand with literary greatness? Answer me that.”

Shalinsky brought I. M. Sinclair with him.

“Griffin, it is a historical fact that when Sholom Aleichem came to New York, Mark Twain was among the first to greet him. ‘I want to meet you,’ he said, ‘because I understand I am an American Sholom Aleichem.’ ”

“Your question, please, Dr. Sinclair.”

“How come, then, that we have been asked to read
Huckleberry Finn
, but not
The Adventures of Mottel?”

I. M. Sinclair brought Daniels, who came with Katansky. Katansky took his brother-in-law Shapiro along with him. Shapiro
opened his
Daily Mail
, licked a pencil, and filled in the time doing the crossword puzzles.

Another newcomer, a man called Michaelson, sat alone in a corner. He was incredibly pale, an emaciated man of fifty or so, with large staring eyes and a thin mouth; he twitched. Beside him there sat two more of Shalinsky’s people, possibly father and son, who were given to whispering together conspiratorially. The younger of the two, still in his twenties, wore a dirty windbreaker. He needed a haircut badly and was constantly jerking his head back to get the hair out of his eyes. The older man wore a shiny gray suit. Whenever Mortimer paused in his lecture, riffling through his notes, he smiled contemptuously, nudging the younger man. And the younger man, responding to the prod, would begin to laugh, but between his teeth, making a small noise that sounded
tssst-tssst-tssst
.

Fumbling, in a foul temper, Mortimer would hurtle onward, skipping whole pages of carefully prepared notes. Even so, he was clearly never finished with his lecture before the dreaded question-and-answer period began.

“And now, Griffin,” I. M. Sinclair would demand, shooting up from his seat, “how about a little give and take?”

“Well, I –”

“Speak Hebrew,” the pale emaciated man called out, his head lowered, the face hidden behind trembling hands. “Say it in our own language.”

Next Katansky demanded to be heard. Slowly he shed his glasses, dropped them into his breast pocket, and wiped his eyes. “First of all, Griffin,” he said, “let me say your lecture tonight was A-I –
and I’m a hard man to please
. In your command of the English language, Griffin, you are a field marshal while I am a mere corporal. Of course it’s true I speak many other languages,” he added, shrugging his shoulders, “but … anyway my question runs as follows. My son, Griffin, is studying at Leeds University and he wishes to become a novelist. What – I would like to know – must he do to join the old
boy’s network and how much can he expect to earn after five years?”

Shalinsky sprung to his feet. “Katansky, that is hardly germane to the –”

“Did I ask you or the professor?”

“Katansky’s got a point,” I. M. Sinclair called out sharply. “If Griffin wishes to answer his mundane question …”

“Well, Mr. Katansky, a lot would depend on your son’s ability and –”

“Of my son’s ability there is no question.”

“– and, um, the content of your son’s novel. You see –”

“Shmutz,”
Daniels shouted at Katansky.

“Pardon?”

“Filth. Today nothing sells like filth.”

Shalinsky asked Mortimer which ten books he would take to a desert island. Grudgingly, Mortimer made up a list for him.

“Three of them are by Jewish authors,” Shalinsky said, turning to the others. “That’s
something
, anyway.”

Katansky wanted to know if Mortimer approved of book clubs. I. M. Sinclair, if he thought art could survive under capitalism. Daniels asked in a shy whisper if, speaking as a Gentile, he thought the novel was dead.

“What is the name of a river in France with five letters?”

“Are you trying to be funny, Shapiro?”

“The Seine.”

Tssst-tsst-tssst
.

“It doesn’t fit.”

“Try the Loire.”

I. M. Sinclair sprang to his feet. “If one were to take your feeble word for it, Griffin, then Graham Greene is one of the leading novelists of our age.”

Tssst
.

“What does Graham Greene say to make himself such a paragon? He says the banks are run by Jews and that the sons of these Jewish bankers rape Irish virgins –”

“Irish
and a virgin
. Find me one!”

Tssst-tssst
.

“– and, furthermore, among the Gentiles there is sin and suicide. This is profound? This I can verify on any street corner.”

“Now wait a minute,” Mortimer began. “Hold on –”

Michaelson cupped his hands to his mouth.
“Hebrew is the most beautiful tongue known to man. Speak it!”

“He’s only a goy, for Christ’s sake! How can he speak it?”

Shalinsky rose to his full height, cigarette ashes dribbling onto his jacket.
“He is not a goy.”

20

T
ELEGRAM:

THE POOR ARE ALWAYS WITH US. ZIGGY COMES BUT ONCE A SEASON. ARRIVING THE 20TH. SPICEHANDLER
.

Ziggy Spicehandler’s second coming called for preparations both intricate and varied. Fifteen minutes after Ziggy’s telegram arrived, Mortimer set to rearranging his books haphazardly on the shelves. He didn’t want Ziggy, his grin taunting, to say yet again, “So that’s the kind of cat you’ve become? All the French novels on one shelf and the Americana in a special bookcase. How tidy!” Then Mortimer went through his books one by one, erasing his name from any volume he had written it into. Settling back weary but happy, at 2
A.M.
, to consider his labors, he lit a cigarette and, wincing inwardly, practiced flicking ashes on the carpet. Oh well, he thought, at least it’s going to be worse for Joyce. Liberated Joyce, hygienic Joyce, who would be outraged by each and every one of Ziggy’s personal habits. Beer and belches for breakfast, cigarettes squashed into the uncongealed bacon fat on his plate. Coca-Cola tins opened with a spurt and then abandoned anywhere, making rims on the dining room table, leaving sticky spots on the sideboard. Old friends, sometimes strange girls, brought home unannounced for lunch. Afternoon naps,
Spicehandler’s daily ziz, on the living room sofa. Ziggy flapping barefoot through the house, picking his toes as he watched television. Migod, Mortimer thought, exhilarated by the effect this was bound to have on Joyce, Ziggy drinking or smoking pot in bed, a fire hazard, would be sufficient to make her grind her teeth.

The magazines!

Mortimer caught a glimpse of
The New Yorker
on the hassock. Must remember to drop it and
Time
, he thought, and in their place order
Playboy
and
Evergreen
. Mortimer, rising to conceal his back file of
Which
, cursed himself for having so recently put his small garden in bourgeois, suburban order. This coming Sunday he would have to undo a month’s systematic labor; strewing junk (a slap in the face to his neat conformist neighbors) about the garden. Doug’s pissy old mattress heaved on the grass would be a nice touch. The car needs washing, Mortimer thought. Good. The dented boot was especially lucky; it would surely demonstrate to Ziggy a healthy indifference to possessions.

Ziggy, good old Ziggy, there would be so much to talk about. He would tell him about his troubles with that lunatic Shalinsky, who thought he was Jewish, and how Rachel Coleman, not to brag, had the hots for him. They would speculate about the legendary, undying Star Maker, Dino Tomasso, and the altogether baffling Polly Morgan. To Ziggy, a bottle of brandy between them, Mortimer might even confess his anxieties about the size of his cock.