The Boy Detective (17 page)

On the other hand, you tend to pay attention to these oddly speaking characters, more than you might if they talked like everyone else. It's like writing, again. What you want to do as a writer, above all, is to find your original language, which, like the detective, allows you your own way to get at the truth. A real writer's language sounds like no one else's. It is as if he sees the world so strangely that he must find an equally strange way to express himself.

 

B
UT WHAT IS
one to make of the Jacobsons? Of Chick Jacobson, né Solomon Jacobson, and his sisters, Ruth and Edie, and his little brother, Dick? I ask only because the Jacobson family was an anomaly in the neighborhood, where almost everyone else was upper-middle-class WASP, or wannabees, or wanna-appears, like my dad. The Jacobsons were evidently, openly, aggressively, very very Jewish. They looked Jewish. They sounded Jewish. They celebrated Jewish holidays, including Purim. They let other people who were Jewish and didn't know it, know it. I am speaking of me and Chick in the park one afternoon, when he informed me emphatically that I was Jewish. I was six, maybe seven, and had no idea what he was talking about. “Oh yeah,” he said. “You're Jewish.” When I went home, I asked my mom, who made a sweet, affirming smile.

So naturally, my dad would have nothing to do with the Jacobsons. Neither with the kids, who were sharp and giving and full of life, nor with the mother, a small, kind, pale, silver-haired woman with a tired face, nor with the father, a gentle, burly guy who owned an antiques shop specializing in monstrosities—outlandish chandeliers and huge carved wooden chairs made for Norse gods. So naturally, I hung out with the Jacobsons. Whole weekends were spent in their apartment at 60 Gramercy, which was crowded with the junk from Mr. Jacobson's shop. Loud and loving. Such a strange family.

Unlike myself or the other kids I played with who lived around the park, Chick went to the local public school and, afterward, to Stuyvesant High School, which at the time was located on the east side of Stuyvesant Park. By then he and I had diverged, as kids do, though for a few years, Chick was my constant friend. I ate dinners at his house two or three times a week. Sloppy dishes of noodles and pummeled meat, consumed noisily while the family quarreled one moment and made extravagant plans the next. Chick didn't know how to pronounce
yacht
. He referred to a “yackt.” He didn't care. He had confidence in himself. All the Jacobsons had confidence in themselves and in one another, which made one happy to be in their presence. They feared nothing, those Jacobsons.

 

S
PEAKING OF
J
EWS
—and who does not?—since my father had refused a bar mitzvah when he was a boy, I insisted on having one. My determination was born of nothing more spiritual than a wish to give him an in-your-face gesture of rebellion—a gesture made more pointless by my father's reaction to it, which was simply to accede. He did not even blink when the synagogue I chose was the Spanish and Portuguese, probably because I remembered the cemetery on Eleventh Street. I had no idea that the temple, which occupied a monumental gray building on Seventieth Street and Central Park West, was one of the oldest Orthodox synagogues in the country. Thus, merely to stick it to my old man, I undertook instruction in the strictest and most demanding branch of Judaism, creating a series of hurdles for myself, such as trying to learn to read Hebrew in less than a year.

In fact, I couldn't do it, so I decided to memorize the part of the Torah I was assigned to present. In the dark afternoons after school, I rode the bus to the synagogue, muttering my Hebrew recitation like an old man in prayer. On my bar mitzvah morning, I stood on an elegant wooden platform at the center of the temple, beside the white-bearded David de Sola Pool and four other solemn rabbis in black, as I pretended to read the Hebrew before me. At one point, I pronounced an important word inaccurately, and the rabbis shook with stifled laughter. No one ever told me what terrible mistake I had made, but it must have been a beaut.

When the ceremony was over, I stood outside with my family and their friends, and with my own friends, including Chick. I received warm wishes and congratulations and kisses, as I nodded and chatted and felt like the fraud I was. Except for weddings and bar mitzvahs and bat mizvahs of the children of our friends today, that morning at the Spanish and Portuguese was the last time I ever set foot in a synagogue. What is worse, I knew it would be when the inspiration of a bar mitzvah had first occurred to me. I gained nothing by it. My father . . . I see him standing before the three stone columns of the synagogue, wearing his derby hat and black winter coat with the Chesterfield collar. My father smiled knowingly. That night, I buried myself in the couch, wolfed down a BLT, and watched Claude Rains in
The Invisible Man
on TV.

 

H
OW
I
WISH
I felt the affection for my neighborhood that Alfred Kazin felt for his, in Brooklyn, in
A Walker in the City
. Much of Kazin's love of place came from streets like Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, teeming with people and surprises. More was due to the Jewishness of the area. Though he described his intimacy with his synagogue as “loveless,” still it gave him a feeling of belonging, of occupying a niche in a tradition. Not long ago, I asked Leon Wieseltier about the core of his own passion for Judaism. He said his love for it is profound, because it allows him to explore spiritual and metaphysical questions, issues of meaning. So his Judaism is not solely collective, it is idiosyncratically individuated. His joy derives from the poetry and the philosophy as much as from the people. Judaism is both his religion and civilization, he told me. I am happy for him, but such a passion never could have been mine. My father saw to that. So did Gramercy Park, which for all its insistent bourgeoisie dignity remained joyless even at Christmas, when the tree blazed in the park with its familiar set of lights and the accordionist from Calvary Church led residents in the routinized singing of carols.

I was literary editor of the
New Republic
in the mid 1970s, and in that time I had dealings with Alfred Kazin, which was akin to waltzing with a learned Jewish polar bear: equally impressive, cute, and dangerous. Alfred wrote several book reviews for the magazine, all perfect. Then one morning, he phoned to ask if he could review Lillian Hellman's latest autobiography. Being in my early thirties, and having not a clue as to any of the internecine wars waged by the older literary set—and not a whiff of suspicion that Kazin hated Hellman as he alone could hate—I said sure. The review arrived still smoking. It was a raging personal attack from the first sentence on, rarely stooping to discuss the contents of the book. I told Alfred I couldn't run it. He told me I was depriving him of his rights of free expression. I told him, bullshit.

During the following months, whenever I ran into anyone in journalism or publishing, that person would report, “You know, Alfred Kazin says you deprived him of his rights of free expression.” Then Alfred called again, and said he was coming to Washington, where our family lived at the time and where the
New Republic
was located. Would I have lunch with him? We had not been seated ten seconds when he said, “You deprived me of my rights of free expression.” This time I said, “Alfred. I probably have a longer life ahead of me than you do. Tell me. Are you ever going to get over this?” He laughed good-naturedly, giving every indication that the matter was closed. Later in the week, I got a call from an editor at the
New York Times
Sunday Arts section. “Alfred Kazin says you deprived him of his rights of free expression. Do you have any comment?”

Like many crazy writers, Kazin was a lot easier to read than to live with. In his prose, I still hear his high-pitched smoky voice relating his walk in the city, glorying in a Brooklyn summer day and in the “indescribable joy” he felt being himself in his neighborhood, which wrapped around him like a mother's arms. That I did envy.

 

T
HE SNOW WAS
blinding, but I had to get there. You understand. I had lost the formula. So I plowed into the blizzard wearing bandages covering my body and my face, my whole head, and the obvious garish wig and my outer-space sunglasses. At the inn I demanded a room and pored over my notes from the lab, muttering, “There must be a way back.” But then the bobbies burst in and offered me sushi. O tempura. O mores. In daylight you cannot see me, but in a blizzard I appear a bubble. “There must be a way back.” Stop me before I sleep again, because as I've said before, an invisible man can rule the world. And vice versa. Definitely vice versa.

 

E
VERY SO OFTEN
one reads of a man or a woman who takes a walk across the country, or the continent, or even someone who walks around the world, over the Poles. Feats of endurance and stamina, to be sure, but not real walks, as I understand them. The man who walks around the world must be conscious, all the time, of just how far he has traveled, and of how far he has to go. He measures his heartbeats, monitors his pulse. Such thoughts do not occur to the wanderer, the one who has no interest in setting world records or in drawing attention to himself. He occasionally may be aware of how tired he has grown, but he is no more self-conscious than that. He looks away from himself. He wonders.

He is like Freddie, Margie's boyfriend on the TV show
My Little Margie.
Margie's father had no use for Freddie, because Freddie didn't have a job. He spent his days watching people work at construction sites, and he was completely happy.

Praise to those who walk around the world. Praise to those who measure their meters and miles. But the highest praise to that fellow here on Sixteenth and Union Square East, in the green parka and the yellow boots, who wanders past, looking at me looking at him. And, it goes without saying, praise to Freddie.

 

B
UT WHAT'S WRONG
with
him,
who seems intentionally to have driven his shoulder into mine on his path straight to hell? I don't want to know. I don't want to hear about his overbearing boss, or his idiot brother-in-law, or his ungrateful children or his lover who has unrequited him for the umpteenth time this week. I want nothing to do with him and his furious life, or to listen to him as he collars me and shouts, “What do
you
know of suffering or want or the dry hunger I have felt for her all this time—she who feels fire only for other men? I could kill her. I could kill
you
.” And if I were foolish enough to give him the time of day, I would then ask, “Why me?” And he would say, “Because you deserve to die.” Yeah yeah.

On the ice-pocked plain of Fifteenth Street between Second and Third, there is much to be angry about. The man in the too-long camel's hair coat is angry about his great aunt, of all people. The man in the white-tooled cowboy boots is angry about his insurance company, which has cancelled his coverage after the fender bender. The woman at his side is angry at him for the fender bender. And both are angry at me because I am not going anywhere and thus appear at peace. And the one who crashed into my shoulder may be angry at me for the same reason. But I still don't want to hear about it. This aimlessness, I find, drives some people up the wall. Good.

A murdered boy is buried in the foundation of the Greek Orthodox church near Twenty-second Street and Third. How would I have detected that without my illimitable walk, I ask you?

 

A
BOUT HATRED AND
ANGER.
They have no effect on their objects. They are real and virulent enough to you. But no one else feels them very long, and certainly not as long or as deeply as you do. All you have done by generating such weapons is to add to the vast hatred and anger of the world, which indirectly ends in the deaths of millions. Do you really want to commit second-degree mass murder all your life? This message is brought to you by the society for preventive detection.

Once there was a boy who walked and walked. And where he walked the streets curled skyward and the trees went flat as dishes. Birds roared, beetles went about their business, and the tulips conversed with poets. All this occurred, and more, where the boy walked.

 

F
OUR THEORIES ABOUT
the nature of a perfect crime. The first has it that the perfect crime is one in which you get away with murder. You did it, all right, but you don't get caught. Say, you had an airtight alibi. Or better, that you had no motive for the act, like Leopold and Loeb, who did not know their little boy victim personally but simply wanted to commit the perfect crime. They might have got away with it, if not for their egotistical personalities. They were too intent on having others appreciate their brilliance—a very bad move for criminals seeking perfection.

The second theory is that the perfect crime is one in which someone else is caught and punished for what you did. That way, everyone thinks the crime has been solved, case closed—everyone but you and the patsy you set up to take the fall. There's a nice neatness to this sort of crime, especially if the real murderer confronts the falsely convicted with no one else present, on death row, for example, moments before the execution. At this point, it would be lovely to see the innocent man strangle the guilty so that divine justice might be served. Alas, in the realm of terrestrial justice, no one would know that the guilty party got his. All anyone would think is that the wronged man killed twice.

Which brings us to the third theory—that the perfect crime is one in which the murderer dies without anyone knowing that he did it. Agatha Christie's
Ten Little Indians,
its title cleaned up from the original
Ten Little Niggers,
shows us a vengeful judge who knocks off ten victims, including himself. If the murderer dies without anyone knowing he did it, the crime may be seen as perfect, if somewhat unsatisfying for the mastermind. Go to the trouble of committing the perfect crime and you deserve to see the fruits of your labor.