The Glatstein Chronicles (18 page)

The dentist edged over to the discussion circle and began defending New York against the attacks of the principal, who declared that, this time, he had stopped in the city, before boarding the ship, only long enough to spit on it. “You’re all jealous of New York,” said the dentist, and to the principal in particular, “That’s why you’re so angry. New York is a city of culture. In fact, New York is the only real metropolis in the whole country. It’s a city of freedom and openness.”

“That’s precisely it,” the principal screamed. “That’s what appeals to you, freedom and openness! The freedom of the Constitution isn’t enough for you. You feel you’re being choked by all the repressions of American society. Congress, the Senate, the Supreme Court—aren’t these freedom enough for you? You want still more freedom? Why don’t you come right out and say the word
Bolshevism
. Go ahead. Why don’t you mention Lenin, Marx, Stalin, and all the other saints of materialism?”

The dentist was taken aback. Moreover, his Russian accent wasn’t helping any either. The principal spoke with a western twang, filtered through his crooked, yellowed teeth. Yet when he pronounced the word
Bolshevism,
it was with a mock-Yiddish inflection. Lenin, Marx, and Stalin came out sounding like a band of what he would probably have called “kikes.”

“Roosevelt saved the country from Bolshevism,” the Dane interrupted. “When he was elected, America was on the verge of revolution.”

“Ridiculous,” the principal spat back. “That’s what all you immigrants say. If you knew the real America, you would know that we don’t give a damn about your revolutions. Our revolution is the ballot box. If you don’t like an administration, just take a broom and sweep it out, but make sure that the broom is constitutional. When you New Yorkers export your products to us—Socialism and Communism—we say, ‘To hell with them.’”

From there the discussion led directly to the subject of Hitlerism. Doctor Schwartz, an American-born Christian of German descent from Milwaukee, with whom I had already spoken several times about Fascism and who kept apologizing to me for Hitler, called out suddenly, “To hell with Hitlerism.”

“Young man,” said the principal paternally, “we don’t want and don’t need a Hitler here, but you have to understand Germany. Hitler is a great leader; he united the German people and saved them from Bolshevism.”

A woman with a pious face, who spoke in a nasal voice and who had pushed her way unnoticed into the group, began to berate the principal with all the evils that the Nazis had committed against the Jews, the people who had given the world Jesus and both Testaments, the Old and the New. “It’s simply dreadful,” she said, “how those unfortunate people are being treated. How un-Christian! My God! They’re the people of the Bible!”

“Hold it!” the principal thundered. “There’s no way to compensate the Jews for the Testaments. In any event, my testament is the American Constitution, and there’s nothing in the Constitution that says I can’t hate Jews. But as an American, I draw a line between what I would call passive hating and active hating. I’m against pogroms, but I have the right to hate. Hitler is a fool to be making all that fuss, but Jews, as it so happens, love a fuss and know how to make an even bigger one.”

“No! You have no right to hate, even passively,” Doctor Schwartz exclaimed. “You poison the world with your hate. You already smell of it and it stinks up the world. Hate the Negroes, hate the yellow races, hate the Catholics, the Protestants, the Jews—it’s all right for you, a school principal, to hate passively, but a truck driver may not be so fastidious and his hate can turn active. You speak in high-flown phrases, you use the Constitution as a shield. Okay! But should a Hitler show up in America, you’ll find support for him in the Constitution. He’ll eat your Constitution and shit it out on your head, and all of you will shout, ‘Heil!’ Your hate is worse than syphilis. You’re disgusting.”

All respect for the principal suddenly came crashing and everyone applauded the young doctor, whose cheeks had turned red with excitement. It was obvious that he wasn’t well. His hands shook and his thin, well-formed nostrils quivered. His lips were still twitching from the burning words they had spoken. Indeed, he still seemed to be speaking, but there was no sound. The applause did not let up, and the pious woman wept aloud. The dentist found the courage to speak up. “That is America,” he said. “That’s the real voice of America!”

“Young man,” the principal, now somewhat chastened, spoke to the doctor, “you’re entitled to your opinion, but —”

Doctor Schwartz couldn’t calm down. He walked off quickly, stopped at the railing, and bending over it, nervously tossed into the water scraps of paper he had torn from a letter. One by one, the group began to wander off. The principal, realizing that he was beaten, took a softer tone with the last remaining member of the group—the Dane—whom he tried to prevent from defecting with the rest. But the Dane also laced into the principal with a stream of accusations. “The trouble with you,” he shouted, “is that you never received a radical education.”

The principal undertook to restate his views. “It all has to do with a war of ideas,” he said, “America versus New York. New York, at the threshold of Ellis Island, smacks of foreignness. It’s alien to the rest of the country, which lives by good American values.”

“But you’re disregarding economics,” the Dane shot back. “Since you didn’t have the benefit of a radical education, you should read Bebel.”

“To hell with Bebel. Jefferson is good enough for me,” the principal retorted, and was the first to bolt when the gong sounded for lunch.

Lunch was greasy, spicy, salty, and sweet. The various fish and meat dishes, even after cooking, tasted of the ice in which they had lain in their raw state to keep them fresh. When the serving platters were brought into the dining room and the metal covers removed, all those fried and roasted concoctions made heads spin with seasickness. The English pudding swam in a red, blue, or green puddle of sweetness. It required a postprandial walk on deck to relieve some of the heaviness, and after several turns we had burped away all that greasiness, spiciness, and saltiness. The warm breeze gently slapped our faces, ruffled our hair, tickled the forehead, and slowly brought us back to life, as if from a near-faint.

“The best complement to a meal is a brandy,” said the tall piano player when he saw me standing at the rail, catching the breeze that blew in from the heaving waves, rejoicing in each splash of spray that hit my face. From the look of him, it appeared that he had already taken his own advice more than once. We hadn’t spoken before. Indeed, throughout the entire trip he had been avoiding me, and not me alone, but everyone.

By day he walked the deck holding a book, always with a finger inserted to keep his place, but no one had ever caught him reading. He strolled incessantly. At night, in the salon, while others socialized, wrote letters, read, played bridge or chess, he sat at the piano and played Chopin, only Chopin. When he first sat down, people assumed that he must be some kind of prankster—but only for that moment. It soon became evident that we were in the presence of a virtuoso. Some women even recalled his name and that he had performed in New York. He was tall, with a proud bearing, but at the piano he sat hunched low, his head almost touching the keys, as though searching for something. It seemed as if he wanted to curl himself into a corner and play for himself alone. A group of women always gathered around him at these nightly concerts, staring rapturously at his hands. At the conclusion of the performance, he stood up to his full height, made his way silently to the bar, where he sat by himself, again hunched low, this time, with his head in a glass.

Ordinarily, he would have been pacing the deck restlessly, but now he seemed more relaxed, as if he had just gotten up from a nap. He even smiled at me. “Journey’s end!” he said, repeating the phrase several times more, to make sure that I didn’t miss the reference to the famous play of the same name, the play about the Great War. But no sooner had he raised the specter of the war than his smile vanished.

“You Americans,” he said, “saw the war only on stage or at the movies. By the time you joined in, the war was practically over. The Hun was already done for, and you were just being toyed with when you were told to fire the last bullets to finish him off. You convinced yourselves that you were the ones who brought down the kaiser. But we’re the ones who lived through the whole bloody war. It’ll take us years to get rid of the blood-soaked stench in our skins.”

He gesticulated with his big, well-formed hands, which were somewhat too hairy for his almost girlish face. Even his fingers were covered with tufts of golden-blond hair. His face was flushed from all the liquor he had poured into it, but for all that, he remained in control of his feet, walking steadily beside me. I learned that he was an Englishman who had immigrated to America only five or six years before, and in several New York concerts had made quite a stir with his Chopin interpretations, becoming a welcome guest in the best houses.

In New York he led a restricted life and saw nobody, except for music-loving women, crazy, hysterical creatures. “Heavens,” he said, “how did New York come to be filled with so many middle-aged women!” They clamored for his attention day and night, and he did nothing to protect himself from their advances. “Well, maybe a little,” he conceded, “but it was passive resistance, sort of like Gandhi.” The houses of the rich in New York were always stuffy, the windows shut, the heavy curtains drawn, the rooms filled with the smoke of the women’s cigarettes, mixed with the sweetish aroma of cosmetics and sweat, a swirl of bellies and backs confined by straps, laces, and corsets about to burst their bounds. He was fondled by so many motherly women, that he began to feel like Oedipus, playing the hapless role every day.

“Do you know what poverty really is?” he asked. “English poverty? If you’ve ever read Arthur Morrison’s
Tales of Mean Streets,
you’d have some idea. English poverty means wallowing in garbage, in hopelessness, human beings reduced to their basest condition—bellies swollen from hunger, filth, and squalor. I had to trick my father and mother into giving me a piece of bread. I learned to get up early, before my father did, so I could gobble the soured, leftover pigs’ feet. Of course, I knew that my father would later beat me up for this.

“I was too young to go to war, but nevertheless, I carried the war on my back. I even wore a torn, lice-ridden greatcoat—a shirt was out of the question. I slept in barracks, I heard the frenzied rejoicing on the evening before the soldiers left for the front, I saw the half-crazed Tommies returning home on leave, the truckloads of the wounded, the crippled, and the glass-eyed blind, I heard the macabre music that sounded the prelude to slaughter, I crouched in cellars to be safe from enemy planes.

“I got drunk and, a mere squirt, began to consort with low women in return for a hot meal. I stole, yes, stole. I went barefoot on sharp stones. I became like a dog, always on the lookout to snatch a bite. This is how I lived, until one day a major’s widow took pity on me. We came across each other in a pub. She was more than twenty years older than I. Her husband and only son had both been killed in the slaughter, and I was to replace them. By this time my own parents and brothers and sisters had become like something in a bad dream. She was a good woman, though a bit on the hysterical side. When she got drunk, she would drive me from the house, calling me a liar, screaming at me that I wasn’t her husband, that I wasn’t her son, and that she would shoot me like a dog. But when she was sober, she was a tender, loving soul, and believe me, that was a time when I needed a bit of tender loving. She hired tutors for me. In her house, my limbs began to thaw, like after a frost, and my mind grew clearer. She nursed me until she had weaned a milord. To see me now, you’d find no trace of my louse-ridden origins. She even changed my name.

“What’s the use of pretending? I’ll tell you plain and simple, I’ve been a whore all my life, and it was only after I came to New York and fell in among the music-loving women that the whole business began to disgust me. My God! They pampered me and praised me to the skies, but I knew I was a burned-out case, and not just I, but my whole postwar generation. We’ll never amount to anything. How can we offer the world beauty, even artistic ugliness, when we ourselves are so thoroughly worm-eaten? Our greatest artist is possibly James Joyce. He grabbed hold of Ireland, dressed it in top hat and tails, and then dropped its trousers. But Joyce is older than us. At the time of the war he was already old enough to be an observer, but we were smack in the center of that damned maelstrom, and saw nothing and heard nothing. The war cast up the dead and the not-quite-dead. Those New York women, as well as the critics, tried to convince me that I was a genius, but I know what it really means to play the piano. Did you ever hear Józef Hofmann?

“I escaped to Delaware. I now teach music at a rich all-girls’ college. Only females! That seems to be my fate. But these females are different. They’re young girls who usually get a crush on a teacher and send him anonymous mash notes, with quotations from Keats and Shelley. It’s a small town and the loveliest thing about it are the woodland paths, where I enjoy going horseback riding. Even when there’s a girl riding beside me, prattling about Dreiser, Shaw, or Mencken—they still swear by Mencken in Delaware—it doesn’t disturb me and doesn’t keep me from gazing up at the brilliant sky.”

The Wisconsin teacher came by, but even before she had time to greet us, the pianist excused himself and walked away abruptly. She stopped short and let out a high burst of laughter. “Why is he always running away?” she asked. “I’ve been chasing him for days. I’d really like to get together with him for a talk, but he won’t allow it. You’re a connoisseur, you see how handsome he is, but he’s a hollow man, without heart or lungs—a marvelous robot, a zombie.”

“So, why do you chase him?”

“He’s intriguing, and it would be wonderful to draw him out, like warming your ears after coming in from the cold.”