End of the Jews (21 page)

Nonetheless, hostility is Nina's gut reaction to this voice. “Her daughter. Who is
this
?”

“Nina! It's me, Vasek. Good to hear your voice, child!”

“Vasek?” she says like a half-wit, unable to process the notion that her father's friend, her former boss and booster, is on the other end of the line. “How—What are you doing there? Is everything all right?”

The silence stretches past the two seconds it takes her words to travel five thousand miles, and answers Nina's question. She can see him standing in her mother's bedroom with one hand on his hip, puzzling together a reply, a towel wrapped around his waist and his stout belly falling over it.

“Your mother and I have…found each other. Perhaps I'd better give the phone to her. One second. A big hug, Nina.”

“Big hug,” she hears herself repeat. Then Rayna is on the line.

“Nina! Happy birthday, sweetheart. I would have called, but I didn't know where to reach you. We drank a toast to you last night, Vasek and I.”

“You and Vasek, huh? That's…that's great, Mom. Quite a surprise.”

“Isn't it? I can't believe it myself,” Rayna says with an uncharacteristic little giggle that crackles over the line. Nina smiles.

“I did just what you told me to,” her mother goes on. “I said yes to the first man who asked me out to dinner.” In the background, Nina hears a laugh. “And it was Vasek. I only had to sit in his café every day for a week before it occurred to him.

“I've always thought him very handsome, you know,” Rayna says, and Nina realizes she is a tertiary member of this conversation, that Rayna is looking at her lover as she speaks into the phone. “Even when he was aiding and abetting in your delinquency.” Behind Rayna's voice, another laugh.

“This must be brand-new. You didn't say anything in your last letter.”

“It had barely started when I wrote it. Perhaps a week before. So no, I thought I'd better keep it under my hat. In case he jilted me for some silly young thing. But Nina, I am very happy. He's going to move in.”

“That's wonderful, Mom.”

“I'm glad you approve. I wasn't sure you would. I don't know why. And how about you? Are you having a happy birthday? Tell Devon I love his new album, by the way. Thank him for sending it.”

“Listen, Mom, I have to tell you something. It's about Dad.”

“Hold on.” Her mother asks Vasek to put on water for coffee, slice some bread and cheese. When Rayna returns to the phone, her voice is muted, dark.

“You've seen him.”

“Yes.”

“I knew you wouldn't listen to me. So? No, forget it, I don't want to know.” A pause. “Is he all right? What in God's name is he doing?”

“He's okay. He's a librarian. Super-skinny. I couldn't really stand to be around him, to be honest. I couldn't stand how sad he is. Nothing has really worked out for him, Mom. But he's…okay.”

She stops, unsure whether to mention Miklos's girlfriend. Nina is inclined against it, but the portrait of her father's life will be too bleak without her. “He's met someone. A Czech woman. She seems to look after him. He was drinking, and she made him stop.”

“I see.”

Nina waits, but her mother offers nothing more.

“I'm sorry, Mom.”

“It was never fair of me to make you promise. I just wanted to protect you, Nina. And now he's hurt you again.”

“Not really. I was glad to see him. It's better than not knowing. And Mom, he didn't inform on us. There's no way.”

“Of course he didn't. I know that. Of course.”

“Good.”

“I realize you didn't have to tell me that you saw him. Thank you.”

“You're handling it better than I expected.”

“Well, it's been years and years. At some point, we have to move on, right?”

“Sure.”

“He's not coming back here, is he? He could, I suppose. There's no more danger. Not
here,
I mean, but to Prague. If he's doing so badly, perhaps he should come home. A
librarian,
you say? He must be miserable. Here, he could at least teach, if he's still able.”

“I don't know. I doubt it.”

“Not that I ever want to see him again. He's still a bastard, even if he's miserable.”

“I'm almost out of time, Mom. I'm calling from work.”

“When will you come and visit, Nina? Soon? The museum is opening in May.”

“I don't know, Mom. If I can.”

“Happy birthday, dear. I'm sending kisses.”

“Thanks. I love you. Bye.”

“I love you, too. Be safe. Good-bye.”

Nina hangs up, recrosses her arms, and walks back toward the club.

Well, good, she thinks. We're all moving on.

CHAPTER
SIX

A
malia leans over her daughter's crib, slides her arms beneath the sleeping child, and starts to lift her, then changes her mind. Better to let Linda nap until the sounds of typing across the hall abate and the trip is officially under way. She's bound to wake up the moment they start the car, and at this time of day that means uninterrupted caterwauling for the whole three-hour trip from New Haven to Cambridge—especially since Amalia can't breast-feed her and drive at the same time, and Tristan, after six years in Connecticut and eight months as a father, can't yet handle a car or comfort a baby.

The calming regularity of a noontime nap is the only tenet of her mother's child-rearing philosophy to which Amalia has adhered. Linda will be raised by her parents, not a procession of nannies hired because their native tongues correspond to the latest culinary trends. Maternal caprice and passing fancy will not determine the course of her education. Unlike Amalia, she will never awaken and find her entire schedule remade: tennis swapped for horseback riding, German supplanted by French, piano lessons replaced by a pair of long-eared rabbits intended to teach her responsibility.

Tristan's study door clicks open, and Amalia straightens and turns, one shushing finger to her lips to remind him of the obvious. He nods, crosses the hall in four long strides, peers down his nose into the crib with the air of a patrolling watchman confirming that all's well. A moment passes, and Tristan extends a hand—haltingly, as if his daughter is an unknown dog equally likely to sniff and wag or growl and lunge. He strokes the baby's cheek with a finger.

“Kiss her,” Amalia whispers, smiling.

Tristan replies with a look that yanks her back ten years, to 1943 and their first months of marriage, when they were still sharing his two-room New York apartment and Tristan was hoarding royalty checks until he felt he had enough money to match her contribution to the purchase of a house, this house: one big enough for both of them to write in. His desk was in the bedroom then, and this is the look Tristan used to turn and give her when she told him,
Honey, come to bed
. It is simultaneously apologetic and indignant—a forlorn plea for her to understand that he cannot comply although he knows he should, cut with resentment toward her for asking and toward himself for being who he is. It is a mute, searching, almost canine look, lengthy enough for Amalia to realize anew that challenges only strengthen her husband's rigidity. It was built on them. He knows it, and he's asking her not to make things worse.

The look dissolves, so fast Amalia wonders if she imagined it this time. Tristan bends forward and kisses his daughter just below the ear. Sometimes he came to bed, too. Even when he didn't, it upset him more than it did Amalia; she'd wind up reassuring him that it was all right, that she understood. For longer than it would have taken them to make love in the first place, sometimes. It's funny now, almost.

“We should go,” she whispers. “Can you take the suitcase? It's by the bed.”

“You packed for me, too?”

“Of course. Here.” She hands over the diaper bag, lifts Linda onto her shoulder. “I'm hoping she'll keep sleeping.”

Miraculously, Linda does. Sporadic, introverted gurgles rise from the backseat as they cut across the maple-shaded neighborhood, but in ten minutes' time, the baby is dozing soundly and the car is quiet.

“You had a good morning, didn't you?” Amalia says, reaching into her purse for a cigarette. The whole atmosphere of the house changes when they're both writing and writing well—and particularly when one of them is coming out of a bad spell, or beginning a project. Then, it's practically electric.

Tristan looks up from the jagged sheaves of paper strewn over his lap, tilted against his chest. He gets carsick when he reads, but he reads anyway.

“The classroom scene is no longer kicking my ass. I finally got the voice down. I'm taking it from the teacher's perspective.”

“Didn't I suggest that two nights ago at dinner? And you shook your head at me and said, ‘No, no, that's impossible'?”

Tristan lays his hand on her thigh. He rubs back and forth, gives her a squeeze, withdraws. “Thank you. I may even be kicking its ass now.”

“So much violence going on in that study of yours. It's a wonder it's not louder.”

He stares at a smattering of dairy cows, scattered idly over a meadow, with a city kid's interest. “What's violent is these talks. You'll see what I mean. Even Christ was crucified only once.”

“To name another controversial Jew. So why do them?”

He shrugs. “They want me to come. They pay me. How can I refuse?”

“Just say no. We don't need the money.” Amalia scrutinizes the road, memorizes the next hundred yards, then chances a quick glance at her husband, hoping her declaration has not soured him. Tristan doesn't like to be reminded of his security. “You're funny. You won't take a day off to relax, but you'll miss two to drive to another state and have the same fight you've been having for two years. What do you think will happen if you say no?”

“They'll stop calling.”

“I doubt it. But what if they did?”

“I don't know. How would it look if I refused to account for myself?”

“Busy. Above the fray.”

“I'd feel like a coward.”

“Life is not a battle, sweetheart. Not unless you make it one. It's an adventure.”

“Tell that to Darwin.”

Amalia lifts herself off the seat for a better angle and flicks her eyes at Linda in the rearview mirror. She's beginning to stir. “You've already passed your genes down. Darwin's done with you. Now stop being such a curmudgeon. You're lecturing at Harvard, Tristan. I've published books, too. Nobody's asked me to lecture at Harvard. Where's the joy?”

“It's just Peter showing off. Probably bucking for tenure already.”

“Tristan.”

“Hmm?”

“Where's the joy?”

Linda screams.

         

The lecture hall is cool and dark, like the inside of a cave. Eighty Harvard men and thirty Radcliffe women half-fill the room. “Good turnout for a Tuesday night,” Pendergast assures Tristan. The two of them stand onstage, indulging in various preshow conceits: that the audience does not exist, that their own outsized glad-handing, the thrown-back laughing heads and backslapping, are not demonstrative but pseudoprivate, glimpses at the thrilling lives of whatever the hell they are supposed to be.

Tristan's eyes fall to the empty front-row seats, cushioned and burgundy and probably more comfortable than the hard wooden one sitting onstage before a battered table supporting a microphone, a pitcher of water, a glass bearing the school insignia. He's supposed to sit there during Peter's introduction, then cross the stage and give his talk from behind a small and equally shopworn podium. The gig is scheduled to begin now, at 7:00, but Pendergast insists that they hold off. Of the thirty-five undergraduates enrolled in his two seminars, he counts only twenty-three present, and refuses to believe the rest of them are not sprinting heroically through Harvard Yard right now, mortified at the myriad personal crises that have delayed them.

At 7:15, with twenty-five Pendergastians accounted for, Peter kicks things off. Tristan zones out, absents himself in mind and spirit not just from Peter's opening remarks but also from his own twenty-minute reading. He'd planned to debut a section from his book-in-progress, as a means of engaging himself and culling some reactions, seeing if real people—well, Harvard kids—would laugh in the places they're supposed to. Somewhere en route, he chickened out, decided the new stuff wasn't ready and also that as long as he was in for another evening of defending and explaining
Manacles
—his most recent novel, the saga of a Jewish slave ship's voyage to America, published in 1951 to a cacophonous, knee-jerk chorus of antipathy and disbelief—then he might as well give them a piece of it.

He reads the same chapter as always: a passage in which the ship's captain realizes that sharks are following the boat, gorging themselves on the bodies the crew tosses overboard when the slaves-to-be, three hundred Africans shackled leg-to-leg in a hold intended to transport rum and molasses, die of starvation or dysentery. The words travel a well-trod path from page to brain to mouth, the usual memorized half sentences granting Tristan the usual chances to look up from the page, into the crowd. It's all preamble. The moment he closes the book and asks if there are any questions is when the gig begins.

In the foremost occupied row, an arm shoots up. Tristan pretends not to see it. If he's learned anything, it's that the first raised hand is always attached to a troublemaker or a crackpot, somebody eager to monopolize the spotlight with a caustic question or a lengthy rant containing no question at all. That goes double if the interlocutor is sitting in the extreme front or the far back. The arm sways and Tristan bides his time, locking his elbows and leaning on the lectern as if he'd like to push the thing into the ground. Just as his gambit begins to teeter on the brink of farce, another hand breaches the air.

Tristan recovers his eyesight. “Yes?”

A young man stands. In his hand, he holds a sheet of paper rolled into a telescope. He taps it against his thigh, looks to his left and right, then squares his shoulders to the stage.

“Mr. Brodsky, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?”

The audience titters. The joker bows and takes his seat. Tristan glances over at Pendergast, who's sitting in the wings on a folding metal chair. Peter waves a finger back and forth beneath his chin and mouths the words
Not one of mine.

Tristan pretends to mull the question over. “Hmm. That's an interesting proposition, Senator. Will there be booze at this party?” He listens closely to the laugh that follows, hoping it is louder than the joker's. It is. Round one, Brodsky. Before the sound dies down, two more hands go up—the front-row kid again, and then a woman farther back, with glasses and dark hair. Tristan lifts his chin toward her. “Yes. In the middle.”

This one doesn't stand. Instead, she slouches in her chair, one knee wedged against the back of the seat in front of her, and reads from a small notepad balanced on her thigh. Written questions always annoy Tristan. Too full of flourish, portent. He sips his water, rocks back on his heels.

“Mr. Brodsky, in an essay published in the
Partisan Review,
Lionel Abel contests that modernist culture and radical politics can no longer be presumed central. The critic Harold Rosenberg responds that the historical crisis that spawned modernism is so constant that, and I quote, ‘there is no place for art to go but forward.' My question, Mr. Brodsky, is this: what might come after modernist culture and radical politics, given both the subversion Mr. Abel suggests and the impact that the existentialism of Camus and Sartre is beginning to make?”

Tristan clears his throat, feels his face hardening, tries to smile. “I couldn't possibly care less. I'm sorry. I'm sure it's a fascinating question, and it certainly sounds smart, but I can't make heads or tails of it. I like that bit about art moving forward, or whatever you said. And I think
The Stranger
is a fine novel—made me want to run right out and kill myself, which is a real mark of excellence. I can also add that Harry Rosenberg, if you're able to distract him from the topic of modern art, has some marvelous stories about getting drunk with Joe DiMaggio.”

He senses a barometric shift, and pauses. There's something unnerving in the tonal quality of the room's silence, its sudden airlessness. Are they disgusted, shocked? Is it pity playing on their faces, his own obsolescence looming in the mirrors of their eyes? Is he giving them a fight, when it was an adventure they came for?

“Where's the joy?” he hears himself ask. “If literature is just a ring for ideologies to box in, why bother? Why not nail broadsheets to walls, or vandalize buildings with slogans? I don't write because I believe in something; I write because I believe in writing. Novels are not illustrations of ideas. At least, mine aren't. They're novels because they can't be any shorter. Does that make sense?”

The dark-haired girl raises her hand again. “I have a follow-up question, Mr. Brodsky.”

“Since I so eloquently answered your first.”

The briefest flicker of a smile as she bends over her notepad, flips a page. “Irving Howe, reviewing
Manacles
in
The Nation,
wrote that ‘it is nearly inconceivable that in the immediate aftermath of the greatest tragedy in Jewish memory, a writer as gifted as Tristan Brodsky could strike a note so utterly wrong, so aggressively out of step with what the morality of these times demands.'”

She looks up, pushing her glasses against the bridge of her nose.

“Right,” says Tristan. “I remember.”

“Would you care to comment on the review?”

Tristan sighs. “It hurt me deeply. But if Irving Howe—whose parents named him Irving Horenstein, incidentally, and who taught me the breaststroke at the City College pool in 1938, so I could pass the swim test and graduate on time—if Irving finds
Manacles
inconceivable, that's Irving's problem. He wasn't very kind to Ralph Ellison's book, either, so at least I'm in good company.”

“How could you do it?” It's the front-row kid—standing, shouting, arms raised to his shoulders. His accent is unmistakable. The Bronx is in the house. Out of the corner of his eye, Tristan sees Pendergast stand up, ready for action.

“What gives you the right, Mr. Brodsky? Do you hate yourself so much? Do you—”

“Stop right there.” Tristan gives his interrogator a straight arm, an open palm, feels his own heart rate spike and his adrenal glands kick into action. Finally, some outright antagonism. The borough of his birth delivers.