End of the Jews (13 page)

RISK goes quiet, considering this. “Sorry I couldn't help you out.”

“Shit.” CLOUD laughs. “BRONX looks like he might still be able to whup some ass. Bronx Jews were nothin' nice back in his day, huh?”

RISK stares at his grandfather's back, lulled by the slow, arthritic arcs of his right arm, the soothing
pssht
of the paint. “How do you know he's Jewish?”

“Shit.” It seems to be CLOUD's all-purpose way of opening a sentence. “How do you know I'm black?”

BRONX has finished his outline. It looks like something a third grader might carve into a desk. He turns, walks over. “So now I fill it in?” he asks, sounding embarrassed to be proud. His hands are caked with paint. They look like Smurf gloves.

RISK nods. “I'd go with the white. And don't worry about fucking up the outline. You're gonna go over it again anyway.”

BRONX hands the Bermuda Blue to his grandson, picks up the white, and trudges back to the train. He fills in the
B,
then takes a break to check out MEGA and SCRIPT's car, which is coming alive with color as they apply fills, cuts, and blends to their intricate outlines.

“Amazing,” RISK hears his grandfather exclaim. “How old did you kids say you are?”

RISK shakes the Bermuda Blue, then passes it to CLOUD. “For you,” he says, thinking that this gesture of friendship could just as easily have been one of submission.

“Thanks.”

“Do something dope with it.”

“No doubt.” CLOUD looks at the train. “I can't believe you're not taking flicks.”

In a world of chemical buffing agents, vandal squads, and rival writers playing cross-out, cameras are a writer's best friend, photographs the difference between immortality and empty boasts.

“Aw, fuck. You didn't bring one, did you?”

“Shit, I'm a professional.” CLOUD reaches down and pulls a compact automatic from the cargo pocket of his camouflage pants. “Yo, BRONX,” he calls. The writer turns. “Let me get a shot of you next to your piece.”

BRONX looks indignant. “Well, I've got to finish it first. That's like asking to read a first draft. Take one of my grandson and me instead.”

CLOUD lifts the camera to his eye. “Say ‘Gorgonzola.'” RISK throws his arm around the old man's shoulders as the flash goes off.

BRONX squeezes his grandson's wrist. “Thank you, Tris.”

“Thank you. Now get back over there and finish your fill.”

An hour later, Amalia Farber will pace her foyer, Tristan's note in one hand and a cordless telephone in the other, wondering whether she should call her daughter. When she does, the phone will ring and ring. Linda will already be in her minivan, en route to her parents' house to relieve them of the burden of their grandson, ashamed of her own selfishness in dumping him there. As if her mother needs more crap to deal with.

When Linda arrives, BRONX and RISK will be sitting in a nearby steak house talking graffiti history with CLOUD 9, SCRIPT, and MEGA, the old man having insisted on treating all of them to dinner. The Brodsky men will come home several hours later, to be confronted in the foyer by RISK's mother and grandmother, BRONX's wife and daughter. The women will be holding white mugs of hot peppermint tea, their concern dissolving into anger as the front door opens. The two writers will pocket their paint-crusted hands and insist that they've merely been out to eat, that the note they left behind was nothing but a joke. The empty spray cans rattling in RISK's backpack will put the lie to that.

CHAPTER
FOUR

S
oon, Tristan thinks, staring out the taxi window as the Bronx recedes behind him, the neighborhood would have been right. It might have taken as little as another month or as much as another year, but before long, Tristan Brodsky, fabled scion of Maimonides, dashed hope of the Jews, would truly have lost his mind. Already, just twenty-one, he has been considered a failure for three years. A crackup. “That Brodsky boy, he refuses to take a job,” the matrons whisper in the fetid stairwells, when they aren't fretting over the rumor that every Jew in the German-occupied world is being made to wear a Star of David, or cursing Lindbergh and Coughlin for speechifying that their people are leading America toward war. At the greengrocer's, they shake their bulbous heads. “A college graduate, and for three years he's done nothing, day and night, but sit in his room. Watching the paint peel! A regular meshuggener!”

A hush falls over the craps game, even, when Tristan strides toward it—something he's seldom done of late and never will again, now—as if the fellows expect Tristan to gibber like an ape, or throttle them. Instead, he takes his turn and takes their money and takes his leave, deposits the bills on the kitchen table for his mother to find and returns to his room. He has hated the room more each day, but at the same time he has noticed it less; he looks either at the page before him in the typewriter or else out at the street. When the wash hanging across the block is hauled back in, it is lunchtime. He eats the sandwich waiting for him in the icebox, guzzles a glass of tap water, goes back to work. His neighbors black out their windows, obliterating themselves out of dunderheaded fear that German warplanes will materialize above the Bronx. Tristan blacks out the world, replaces it with what's inside his head.

Being labeled an eccentric has its perks. Not even his family bothers him with questions anymore except for Benjamin, a college man himself now and still loyal to his brother. He is the only person with whom Tristan speaks of his writing, and only because Benjamin has the good sense merely to listen; he limits his responses to quotations, like the old men arguing the Talmud. He remembers everything Tristan has told him about the novel in the past, and thus he can remind his brother of old insights, things Tristan himself may have forgotten.

It was Benjamin who watched him drink and listened to his perplexity crest into rage two years ago when the first reply from a publisher came in the mail—a man to whom Pendergast had spoken on Tristan's behalf:

21 September 1939

Dear Mr. Brodsky,

There is no doubt that you possess gifts as a writer. But as we have recently published Mordecai Kaplan's superb
Judaism as a Civilization
, I regret to inform that we have decided to pass on your novel. Best of luck.

Norman Jameson
Frontier Press

That was the day the neighborhood chatter intensified. Enough people saw and heard Tristan on his treks to and from the liquor store, finishing a bottle on his way there and beginning another on his way home, to elevate the fallen prodigy to the status of juiciest morsel on the winding shtetl grapevine.

There are other publishers,
Benjamin counseled, accepting the bottle when Tristan passed it, rarely drinking from it but holding on until his brother beckoned for the booze again.

Sure
, Tristan replied,
but none of them is any different.
He looked out at the street, imagined hurling his typewriter from the window and watching it explode against the pavement, vowels and consonants embedding themselves in the flesh of gossiping passersby like bits of shrapnel.

Let them talk now, he thinks. Let them stir their words into their bland, greasy soups and slurp them down by the bowlful. Tristan has sold not one but two novels today—both written in that gerbil cage of a room, over the sounds of kvetching from all sides, in the sweltering heat of the Bronx summer and the hand-numbing winter cold—and he does not intend to be seen in these parts again. He could linger to see his success transform his mother's demonstrative disapproval and his father's halting diplomacy into pride, but Tristan has no desire to do so. Their contribution has been to leave him alone—out of deference and befuddlement, never faith. He will repay them in kind.

Everything he owns is in this taxi: the suit he wore down to Times Square this morning to meet with his new editor and publisher, the rest of his clothes, heaped into the trunk by the armful, still on their hangers, a box of books mostly borrowed from the New York Public Library, and his typewriter. Plus enough money—on loan from Pendergast, whom he visited after signing the deal, with the purpose of securing an advance against his forthcoming advance—to install himself in a For Rent apartment he passed on his way from the subway to Peter's writing studio.

“That was fast,” the building's superintendent says, emerging from a basement bulkhead a few minutes after Tristan pays the taxi fare and rings his bell. He glances at the small mound of belongings by the young man's feet. “What line of work you say you're in?”

Tristan takes a deep, exhilarating breath. “I'm an author.”

“No kidding. Ever do a Western?”

“Suppose I'd have to get out west first.”

The super waves a grubby hand. “Nothing out there you can't imagine. Just throw in a coupla gunfights, bandito or two. Some hard-drinkin' lawmen. A pretty dame.” He laughs. “Hell, I could probably write one myself. Beats shoveling coal into the furnace. Here, let me help you with your things.”

Three flights up, the super unlocks the door. “There's no kitchen, you know,” he says as he leads Tristan inside. “That's why it's advertised so cheap.”

There is nothing in the place save a naked mattress lying on a boxspring, a telephone parked on a desk, and one chair. The emptiness cues in Tristan a great flush of happiness. Half the objects in the universe are crammed into his parents' home: bolts of fabric and mounds of cutlery and stacks of magazines, all so permanent, his mother cleans by dusting them.

He saunters around the two large, airy rooms. Light slopes in through a floor-to-ceiling window in the front, and the shadow of the fire escape pulses darker and fainter against the floor as clouds move across the sun.

Two hours later, Tristan is in his suit and out the door, feeling as sharp of wits and dress as ever he has. The shul grants manhood at thirteen, the street upon the authentic or well-fabricated loss of virginity. Those milestones lie well behind him, thanks to a long-forgotten haftarah portion and the feminine wiles of Leah Krasner, but only now is Tristan certain that he is no longer a boy, and that he hasn't been for years.

He stands at the windswept corner of Seventy-first and Madison, reaches into his pocket and closes his fist around the gold pen he received at his bar mitzvah—a durable instrument, its elegance uncompromised by either the years of Hebrew school he had to suffer through to get it or the fact that everyone else got one, too. He'd bet the pen in a craps game with Sammy Fischer an hour after the ceremony, won, and made Fischer beg for a week before allowing him to buy his own pen back.

“You look like the cat who swallowed the canary, kid.” Tristan turns, to find a grinning Loren Leonard, hand jutting at a right angle to his body. Tristan shakes it, smiling into the editor's hypnotic, flecked-gray eyes. Their precise shade is echoed in his suit and hat, and it is one of many to be found in the spectrum of the editor's thick mustache. Loren is a creature of deceptive age. Tristan guessed that he was fortyish and prematurely bald, but Pendergast corrected him by twenty years, adding that during the considerable span of their acquaintance, Loren had hardly aged a day.

“I feel like him,” Tristan says as they walk east, toward the party.

“Well, you sure as shit should.” The editor is a small man, spry and keen, possessed of a deeply embedded dignity. Tristan has not yet been able to determine whether his constant vulgarity has been calibrated to counterweight that dignity or emphasize its fixity. To be colorful is a common appetite among these Mayflower types. They are so accustomed to fitting in that now they seek to stand out, and thus they strive for a bit of coarseness, act the way they guess the lower classes might. The lower classes, meanwhile, are busy trying to behave as if they'd shared a stateroom with these schlemiels on the way over from merry old England.

“Now listen,” Loren goes on, “I want you to think of tonight as part of your job. At this moment, you're a writer, and a hell of a fucking talent. But we've got to make you into an
author.
Get you schmoozing, know what I mean?” Tristan nods, wondering whether Loren only trots out the Yiddish when he's speaking to a Son of Zion.

They cross onto Fifth Ave., walk south beneath awnings that cover the entire breadth of the sidewalk. Jacob once had a line on a doorman job down here. His accent ruined his prospects.

“A lot of my authors, they've got their heads up their asses about this shit. They think the artiste is just supposed to sit in his study, sniffing the mildew wafting from his leather-bound editions of Milton and Shelley and dipping the pen in the fucking inkwell. If that was how it worked, I'd be a crap-happy bastard, Tristan. I'd be at home poring over Shelley right now myself. But publishing is a business like any other, and if you want to get a leg up, you have to learn to play the goddamn game.”

“I'm all ears,” says Tristan, thinking that these writers unwilling to engage the literary world must be incredible pricks, or wealthy enough not to care, or else they've figured out a way to write that's far healthier and less consuming than his. He imagines them puffing on their pipes as the words fill the pages, tousling the hair of the kids underfoot as they pour themselves a late-afternoon brandy, nestling against the bed-warm bodies of their wives and sighing in contentment as they drift easily to sleep.

“Good man. Now, first things first: can you hold your liquor?”

“I can hold it in my hand.”

Loren nods. “Right. Do that, then. Midget sips. Build the tolerance. Nothing worse than a soused writer. Second: when you go to a party with me, assume that I am singing your praises to everyone who matters. You don't strike me as a braggart, but I'll tell you anyway: don't walk in the fucking place and start yammering about yourself. Wait for me to work the room. Pretend not to notice if people glance over at you. When they sidle up and start asking questions, act surprised but be prepared to charm the piss out of them.

“You have to understand, these people have the highest respect for literature, and high enough opinions of themselves that they expect to be presented with writers on a regular basis. Nothing makes a man who's earned his fortune in, say, coal feel grander than chewing the fat with an honest-to-shit writer. These fellows think like investors—they want to get in on the ground floor. They love to feel that they're playing some role in your success. And they are. They'll buy your book the day it hits the shelves, then call me up begging to throw a publication party.”

“They actually read, then?”

“Some of them. The women more so than the men. They have more time for it.” Loren stops before a corner high rise, and Tristan throws his head back and stares up at it—rather pointlessly, he thinks, and stops. “The host and hostess are Maurice and Natalie Farber. He's in textiles, import-export, real estate. That sort of thing. Also philanthropy. She's very active in it, too. Exceedingly smart lady.”

“They're Jewish.”

“Yes, of course. You're not anti-Semitic, are you?”

“I—”

“Look. The publishers don't realize it yet, but these high-society Jews are the new tastemakers. And they're going to love you, Tristan, because you're telling them what's going on back in the old neighborhood. You know why
Angel
is beautiful? Because it's dick-in-the-dirt honest. These people don't know it yet, but they want that.”

As the arrow above the elevator door sweeps from L to PH, Tristan wonders if they do—these people, or anybody else.
The Angel of the Shtetl
is populated with dressmakers, cockroaches, petty thugs, butchers, crapshooters. Talmudic scholars whose immigrant families are starving because learning is the greatest thing in life and they refuse to sideline the pursuit of knowledge and find work. Tristan has written of the shapeless dresses and mild charms of their homely, aspiring daughters and the pinched mouths of their bitter wives, about the way their timid sons push their spectacles up the bridges of their sweaty noses and doggedly pursue elusive New World manhood. Narrating the tale, and meddling ineffectively in the lives of its characters, is a haggard, pork chop–obsessed angel named Lew, the least-favored emissary of an overworked, bureaucratic God saddled with unmanageable debt and alternately furious and resigned about having chosen the Jews, of all the world's people, to be His.

What does writing such a book make Tristan?
An author
seems suddenly a naïve answer, an evasion, but he cannot allow the mantle of Jewish Writer to be draped over his shoulders. Whether it is brave or cowardly or impossible to refuse to let heritage and ideology define and obscure him like a Halloween mask while the Jews of Europe are being herded into ghettos, stripped of rights, Tristan does not know. But he can't let his life be one long run through the gauntlet of the City College cafeteria, lined on all sides with competing factions slamming their fists against tabletops and shouting for allegiance. The world is the Bronx, and the Bronx is the world. They can't banish him back to his parents' apartment for insisting he speaks for no one, claiming the right to tell the stories that compel him and to be compelled by anything at all. Can they?

The lift's doors do not open onto a hallway, unlike those of every other Tristan has ever ridden. Instead, they slide away to reveal the Farbers' living room—an enormous hexagon, cathedral-ceilinged, full of rising smoke and voices. Everyone has turned, mid-conversation, to witness the latest arrivals, and Tristan is pleased to see more than a few faces register recognition at the sight of his editor. The young writer falls into step behind him, smiling in a general kind of way as he moves through the crowded room toward the statuesque dark-haired woman speaking Loren's name.