Three Balconies (2 page)

Years later, Jacob would learn of Chekhov's dictum: if a gun is introduced in the first act, it must go off by the third. The Plotkin gun in Jacob's life went off, but in other directions. In the school cafeteria, a baby-faced boy punched Jacob in the face. Days later, he was injured in a game of “Rocks.” It called for a boy to stand alone in a circle. Rocks were thrown at him, his only protection the lid of a garbage can. When it was Jacob's turn, he covered his face and forgot his knee. He was carried unconscious to Morrisania Hospital. Years later, the Bronx would be remembered as an idyllic place, where everyone lived together in harmony. In truth, it was
dangerous; even Jacob's father had a scar on his lip, the result of a subway fight with a shoe salesman.

Slowly, Jacob became less obsessed with Plotkin. He transferred to a distant high school. By the time he got back from his classes each day, the drugstore was closed. At the school newspaper, he was chosen to write a gossip column. He took a busty girl he'd met at summer camp to a production of “Arsenic and Old Lace.” Unaware that he was nearsighted, he played some senior basketball. Wearing the handsome team jacket, flushed with academic success, he paraded past the drugstore on a Saturday and saw Plotkin. There were no other boys there. Plotkin stood alone, like a rejected lover.

“How's school, Herbie?” asked Jacob, knowing that Plotkin at best was enrolled at a vocational institute. Plotkin had no answer. His eyes were barren as he looked away. Instantly Jacob was sickened by his own meanness. Then Jacob went off to college in the Far West. The next time he visited the drugstore, he was in Air Force blue – though he was a supply officer and didn't fly. He asked about Plotkin and was told he'd moved away.

Jacob thought he saw Plotkin on the subway, wearing white socks with black shoes, a
Daily News
rolled up in his overcoat. Just what I always expected, Jacob thought, he's got some shitty job in a stockroom. And now he hated himself for his smugness. He took a closer look at the man. It wasn't even Plotkin.

Jacob became a professor of history and philosophy at a community college. He gave a lecture on causation one night, which drew a surprisingly hefty crowd of almost a hundred. Lacking confidence as a speaker, he took a blood pressure pill and was on his game. After the question and answer period, two men approached. He recognized them as being from his old neighborhood. They were a few years younger than Jacob. One had become a dentist, the other a nurse. They talked about the old days.

“What ever happened to Plotkin?” Jacob asked, shaking his head in almost wistful approval. “He was something.”

“
He
was something,” said the nurse in disbelief.

“What about you?” asked the dentist.

“Me?” said Jacob, touching a hand to his chest. “What are you suggesting?”

The two men looked at Jacob with wounded eyes.

He was stung by their silent accusation. Were they suggesting that he was as bad as Plotkin? How was that possible? Before he could gather himself to respond, he was tapped on the shoulder by a woman who had been in the audience and demanded his attention. The two men disappeared.

Later, as he took the subway to his apartment in Queens, Jacob thought about his encounter with the two men and what they had implied. It's true he'd once had a habit of lowering his head and ramming it into the stomach of his sister's girlfriend. And on occasion, he would jump on the back of a timid schoolmate and ride the unwilling child around the neighborhood as if he were a horse. Perhaps more seriously, he had punched a landlord's son for the crime of being rich and having a room full of expensive toys. For quite some time he'd practiced a wrestler's trick of wrapping his arms around a schoolmate, digging his chin into the boy's chest and forcing him backward to the ground. Come to think of it, he'd once discovered a secret in his chemistry set – by combining two chemicals and jamming them into a gelatin capsule, he could produce a small bomb. He'd tossed such missiles from a rooftop and terrified groups of housewives. Once, he'd emptied the balcony of a theatre by exploding one of his bombs during a Warner Brothers movie. He would have continued creating havoc if he hadn't burned off his eyebrows while mixing up the deadly brew.

As a junior counselor at summer camp, he had awakened small boys at midnight and told them their parents had been executed by Nazis. But to compare these youthful and prankish transgressions to those of Plotkin who had terrorized him for seven long years. This was not only ridiculous, it was a blood libel.

“THE JEWS KILLED CHRIST.”

Bobby Marcus had seen the hateful declaration scribbled on the walls of tenement buildings in the Bronx, but never before had he heard it spoken aloud. The accusation had been flung at him from the cherry-red lips of a neighborhood Catholic boy, Timmy Flanagan, also seven. Fleet as the wind, Timmy, who rarely walked, only ran, shot down the street, his head thrown back, howling all the way. Bobby did not understand the precise nature of the charge, nor was he prepared to take personal responsibility for the ancient libel. But he knew he was a Jew. Slower than Timmy, he caught up with him later in the day at the corner candy store, standing still for a change and testing chocolates; one with a white center entitled the purchaser to a prize. Bobby easily pinned his adversary to the ground. But Timmy, sensing that Bobby had no violence in him, only shook his head from side to side, convulsed with laughter.

“Don't ever say that again,” said Bobby, getting to his feet as if he had accomplished his goal, which was far from clear.

“We'll see about that,” said Timmy, as he calmly fluffed up his hair and returned to the counter to fish for prize-winners.

In a vacant lot, months later, the two scuffled once again, their inconclusive struggle broken up by a passing salesman. And in the years that followed, the boys circled each other warily, at a discreet distance, as if probing for a soft spot in the enemy lines. Working as a waiter one summer, Bobby filled out his slender frame and returned from the Jersey shore, anxious to display, if not actually flaunt his newly muscled body in the neighborhood. He headed immediately for the playground; alarmingly, there stood Timmy,
calmly dribbling a basketball, towering over every boy in sight, including Bobby.

And thus they traded physical advantage, Bobby nosing ahead several summers later, Timmy drawing even the next – until both went off to college, Bobby to nearby Hofstra, Timmy, with the aid of a divorced father, to far-off Claremont Men's. Then came the Korean War for both young men. Returning home on a brief leave, Bobby proudly strolled the neighborhood streets as an Air Force lieutenant. Coming toward him suddenly was Timmy, a Navy ensign. Both men were flustered and lowered their eyes. Then, if such a thing were possible, they glared at each other shyly. Suddenly, with no words being spoken, they fell into each other's arms in a communion of tears and an undeclared promise of everlasting friendship.

They spent the afternoon together, speaking of failed romance and future glory.

“I never meant that remark I directed at you,” said Timmy at one point. “It was just something I heard around the house.”

“I gathered that,” said Bobby, who hadn't.

No sooner had the friendship been established than Timmy, after his discharge, moved to the West coast, where he studied medicine at Stanford. He became wealthy, not in private practice but as owner and administrator of a thriving group of emergency clinics. Along the way, he married a prominent Jewish oncologist. As a testament to his love for Rebecca Glassman (and as a condition of the marriage) Timmy had completed an arduous eighteenmonth conversion to Judaism. (Both bride and groom had retained their names – Glassman and Flanagan.)

Bobby, in the meanwhile, had remained close to home. A high school teacher of Social Studies, he had married a woman who taught the same subject, barely noticing that she was Catholic. He loved her virtually on sight. That was enough. As for his own connection to the Jews, he had never, since his bar mitzvah, set foot in a Synagogue. When pressed to the wall, he would describe himself, obnoxiously, as a “bagel and lox Jew.” Slightly aware that he
was being a renegade, he took occasional positions that were contrary to the best interests of Israel. On a brief trip to Jerusalem, he and his guide, also secular, posed wearing t'filn at the Western Wall, but only, to the best of his knowledge, as a lark.

The two friends called one another from time to time – and always, sentimentally, on New Year's Eve. They concentrated on major developments, Bobby's knee operation, the birth of Timmy and Rebecca's son. Thus the friendship, slender but unwavering, was kept alive.

The years flashed by – and then one day, Kate and Bobby received a handsomely engraved invitation to the bar mitzvah of Samuel Benjamin Flanagan, son of Timothy Aloysius Flanagan and Rebecca Sylvia Glassman. Timmy enclosed a handwritten note saying that a hotel room had been reserved in Bobby's name.

“I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that you can see your way clear to make it.”

Since no mention was made of airline tickets, Bobby assumed he would be expected to pay for them – his friend no doubt taking it for granted that Bobby had prospered over the years – just as Timmy had with the Flanagan Clinics. This was not the case. Despite their combined Board of Education salaries, Bobby and Kate barely kept their heads above water in financially punishing Manhattan.

Bobby and Kate discussed the dent a trip would make in their frail bank account.

“Still and all,” said Bobby, “I'd like to go.”

“Then it's case closed,” said Kate, who had no history of denying Bobby the smallest pleasure. (Bobby, it should be noted, did what he could to hold up his end.)

“And besides,” she added, “I've never been to a bar mitzvah.”

When Timmy and his wife came out to meet Bobby and Kate at the Sacramento Airport, Bobby was struck by the dramatic change in his friend's appearance. He had expected him to have aged, of course; but Timmy's shoulders were now stooped, he had on rimless glasses, and he had a full head of gray curls, worn much
in the style of the noted attorney Alan Dershowitz. To Bobby's way of thinking, Timmy, whose face had once resembled the much remarked upon Map of Ireland, now looked Jewish. Rebecca was a petite, dark-haired woman whose features indicated that she had once been a beauty. But her face now seemed sallow and disappointed. Bobby chalked this up to the strains of preparing for a major religious event. Or perhaps it was the nature and rigors of her medical specialty. Both men took turns introducing their wives, Timmy and Kate exchanging a complex look, an ex-Catholic meeting a casual if not a lapsed one.

As they prepared to leave the terminal, Timmy dropped all formality and embraced Bobby with undisguised emotion.

“To come all the way out here for my kid's bar mitzvah is above and beyond. You have no idea how much this means to me and Becky.”

Though he was still unsettled by the steep price of the roundtrip tickets, Bobby replied: “I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”

A small dinner was held for friends and immediate family that night at Timmy and Rebecca's home, several miles from the city. Timmy mixed cocktails for Bobby and Kate. He said they had bought the spacious Colonial from a Vegas entertainer whose career was on the downslide.

“Frankly, when we first took a look at the place, it was tacky as all get-out. But then Becky here took over,” he said, with a fond gesture in his wife's direction, “and voila.”

“I did use a decorator,” put in the oncologist, modestly.

“Never mind,” said Timmy sharply. Then he turned to the visitors. “Trust me . . . it was her eye all the way.”

The interior was indeed warm in feeling and tastefully decorated. There were several Chagalls on the walls, originals, for all Bobby knew, and handsome items of Judaica on the various tables and mantelpieces.

Timmy caught Bobby staring at an exquisitely carved Menorah.

“In case you're wondering,” said the host, “we picked that baby up in the port of Haifa.”

Bobby was seated between Timmy's in-laws. Benjamin Glassman, a retired CPA, barely spoke. When he asked for the salt, it was in a whisper. Mrs. Glassman, a formidable, full-bosomed woman, had the same aggrieved look as her daughter. She brightened only when she learned that Bobby was to be her seatmate. Bobby, no doubt with some presumption, felt he could read her thoughts: “How come my daughter couldn't have met a nice Jewish boy like you?”

After the Hispanic couple – hired for the evening – had served dessert and coffee, Timmy took Bobby aside and asked him what his name was in Hebrew.

Bobby, who could not recall what he had done three nights before, surprised himself by replying instantly.

“Yitzchak.”

“Great,” said Timmy, scribbling down the name . . . and not even asking how it was spelled.

He then said that Bobby, as a dear friend, would have the honor of reading a section of the torah at the bar mitzvah ceremony. He handed Bobby a sheet of paper with the passage printed in Hebrew; after a quick glance, Bobby was surprised once again. Though it had been years since he had looked at a passage of Hebrew text, he remembered how to pronounce the words, though not their meaning. Then Timmy handed him a tape cassette.

“Listen to this,” he said. “It will instruct you on how to chant your passage.”

Bobby recalled his own bar mitzvah and his disastrous rendition of the Haftarah. Influenced by the popular baritones of the day – Sinatra, Perry Como, Vic Damone – he had been accused by the Rabbi of “crooning” the section assigned to him; as a punishment, the Rabbi rapped his knuckles in front of the congregation.