Inside, Outside, page 29
***
It was about this time that, in my depressed and anxious frame of mind, I decided I must be an invert. Homosexuality was then scarcely the commonplace of journalism and entertainment that it has become today, when fallen arches seem more unusual. It was a little understood, scarcely whispered about tendency in a very few, very strange individuals. I first found out about it in a long dismal novel called The Well of Loneliness, written by a lesbian named Radclyffe Hall. The book made a sensation at the time. I got hold of a copy and devoured it on those long trolley rides to the yeshiva. Radclyffe Hall’s invert heroine was big, flat-chested, deep-voiced, and hipless.
Aha! That was my problem, only in reverse. I wasn’t yet sprouting hair on my face, or anywhere else to speak of, except on my scalp. My voice stayed cracked and uncertain. The Talmud contained references to androgynes, twilight creatures not quite man or woman. I spent hours in the yeshiva library, hunting up everything I could find in the rabbinic texts about androgynes. Between these, and the disclosures in The Well of Loneliness, and my smooth body and hairless pubic region, I concluded that the fix was in. That was why Bernice Lavine had preferred Clarence Rubin and his plus fours. That was why the Bronx girls ignored me and ogled Cousin Harold, who shaved, and was a foot or more taller than me, and spoke in a deep voice. That was probably why the one-armed man had put me in Group 4, come to think of it. Radclyffe Hall wrote that the world cruelly rejected inverts, because it didn’t understand them. It might even be the reason Arista had turned me down. Of course! There you had it. I was one of those. Mystery solved.
Uncle Hyman’s family had moved near us, and though things weren’t quite the same between Cousin Harold and me, we still went out together girl-hunting. He had matured in every way; and in what finally mattered as evidence of manhood, I will only say, out of deference to the family trade, ye gods and little fishes! I could scarcely believe my eyes, and it so humiliated me that I confided to him Radclyffe Hall’s reason for my being so different. Harold had never heard of inverts, but he certainly wanted to know more about this aspect of existence, in which he had it all over me. He went out and dug up all the available books he could find on the subject. He became a real authority on inverts, and on offbeat sex in general. He even once lent me Krafft-Ebing, which was no help at all. I just rediagnosed myself as an invert with a garter fetish. It was a sad time in my life and that’s a fact. Cousin Harold, as you know, went on to become a prosperous psychiatrist; and he may not agree, but I think he owes his whole career, all unwittingly, to that book by Radclyffe Hall.
Well, my buddy and I were droning over the last page of How the Foot in the study hall about six weeks later, and I was worrying about the problems of inversion, when I was called to the telephone. It was Mama. Her voice shook. “You’ve been admitted to Columbia.”
I stood in the school office, leaning against a secretary’s desk. Otherwise I think I would have fallen down.
“Davey, do you hear me? The letter came in the mail just now. I had to open it. You’re admitted. Admitted to Columbia!”
I gasped, “Well, Mama, are you glad?”
“Glad! I’m so proud I could bust. I called Papa. We’ll find the money somehow. Oh, Yisroelke! Columbia!”
I did not return to the study hall. I just walked straight out of the building. Steinbach was coming in, and he gave me a puzzled frown. I walked out into the sunshine, into the American open air; strode a few blocks away from the yeshiva to a little park, took off my yarmulka, and threw myself on the grass, in happy shock.
What had done it? My speech on Les Misérables? Or did heaven pay attention, after all, to the prayers of a kid studying the Talmud month after month, at the cost of four hours a day on the trolley? What did it matter now? I WAS A COLUMBIA MAN. Whatever had wrought the miracle, I was in! I was no invert. I was no reject. I was no yeshiva boy. The June sun had never blazed more brightly on me, nor had grass ever smelled sweeter. After a while I put on my skullcap and went back to the study hall, which already had a strange look and sound, to a Columbia man. On an impulse, I went up to the Kotzker Iluy and told him the news.
“Your grandfather will be sad,” he said, “but—ess is nit g’ven bashert (it was not destined).” He offered me his soft paw, gave me his unforgettable gentle smile, and tapped his open Talmud. “You will come back to it.”
Everyone knows where Judah Leavis is. But where is the Kotzker Iluy? My guess is that he heads one of the tiny obscure yeshivas in Jerusalem, where the flame burns on.
When I told Zaideh about Columbia, he shrugged and managed a smile. “Ess is nit g’ven bashert,” he said. “If only you could have made friends with the Kotzker Iluy! But I came too late.”
No, Zaideh, no. Just in time.
***
“I want you to go downtown and talk to Mr. John Worthington,” Pop said to me when I came home rejoicing. “Tomorrow afternoon. You have an appointment.”
“What on earth for?”
“Never mind. Do it.”
John Worthington was the first Christian I ever talked to man to man, so to speak. I was then just turned fifteen. His wood-panelled office on Wall Street was like a movie set to me, and he was like a movie actor: portly, white-headed, beautifully tailored, scarily dignified, speaking fine downtown English. After throwing some severe questions at me, he suddenly laughed. “You remind me of Elya,” he said. “You’ll do well at Columbia.” His use of Pop’s Yiddish name astonished me, for Pop was always called Alex in business. He handed me a typewritten note. “Your father wanted you to see this.”
Columbia University
Office of the President
Dear Jack:
Responding to your inquiry, Israel David Goodkind has been admitted to the college.
Sincerely…
Worthington went on to talk at length of my father; said he admired Elya Goodkind, Elya was a man, and he’d back him in anything he tried. I can hear him saying “Elya,” in that faintly condescending yet affectionate Christian way. About the letter, he said not another word.
“For the first time in I don’t know when, I asked a gentile for a favor,” Pop said to me in Yiddish that night, “because I heard there was a Jewish quota at Columbia. Now, Yisroelke, make them look silly for putting you in Group Four.”
40
Columbia!
September 1973
Sandra telephoned this morning at nine A.M. Israel time. I guess she forgot that she would be startling us awake at three in the morning. I heard her voice as in an echo chamber, “Hello, hello—it’s me, Sandra!” Then the line went dead.
Jan and I sat up in bed, pretending we weren’t shaken, waiting for another ring. The Palestinian terrorists are on a rampage lately, blowing up Israeli buses, tossing grenades into marketplaces, and the like. They took over a school, too, recently, and killed some kids before the army got in, rescued the rest of the kids, and finished off the terrorists. And there our daughter sits in the Fields of Peace, right at the corner of the Gaza Strip and Sinai.
It was a damned long ten minutes before the phone rang again. Jan pounced on it. No problem. Sandra is fine. She has simply decided to postpone her graduate work for a year, and stay on there. She has talked to her department head at Johns Hopkins and has his okay. She hasn’t changed her mind about Israel one whit, she assured us, but the material for the thesis keeps opening up. She is on to something, and doesn’t want to scamp it.
I spoke to her and asked what she thought of the terror raid on the school. She hesitated, then said that most of the deaths were the army’s fault, they botched it; and that anyhow, no such things would happen if Israel would give back the territories. I didn’t argue, though before Israel won the territories, such things happened much more often. Sandra was then entering her teens, and falling in and out of love once or twice a month, which absorbed her attention. She has since mastered world affairs, and has nothing but contempt for my opinions. As for my working for the President, she has now and then hinted that I may be criminally insane. I thanked her for keeping us informed and asked her to give Abe Herz my regards. With an indistinct hostile mutter, she rang off.
There’s nothing we can do about Sandra. At twenty-one she is off on her own steam. Nor, indeed, have we had much to say about her doings since she was seventeen. The power of our purse over her is nil. We tried that once. She merely went and got herself a job as a nighttime receptionist in a Boston restaurant. When we visited the place and saw all the horrible leers she was getting in her tight low-cut yellow dress—in my view the place was patronized entirely by rapists, sadists, voyeurs, and other assorted male sickies—Jan and I caved in and restored her allowance. No, let Sandra do as she pleases.
What troubles me about that phone call, beyond the chronic Sandra puzzle, is the thought of the terrific changes that have engulfed the world since my Columbia days. That was when Lee went to Palestine. By boat and train, it took her a month. Today you get on an El Al plane, have your dinner, read a book, grab a snooze, and there you are in Tel Aviv. We chat with our daughter, over there in the Holy Land, as though she were in her Wellesley dorm. Mark Twain described the land as a plague-ridden stony waste of ruins, and now it’s as full of cars roaring on highways through lush green orange groves, farmlands, and vineyards, as Southern California; which indeed it is getting to resemble far too much. Of what interest, I’m wondering, can all that pile of pages about Columbia, the Columbia of forty eternal years ago, possibly be?
Columbia still looks almost the same. They’ve plugged up one side of South Field with a big new library, and stuffed in yet another building where the tennis courts were. That’s about all. The whole mise-en-scène of my childhood has vanished—Aldus Street, Camp Eagle Wing, the Fairy Laundry, the Minsker Synagogue, Townsend Harris Hall—all gone, gone with the wind, gone like Twain’s Mississippi of steamboats and slaves. But Columbia stands, and Mark Herz and Peter Quat are still part of my life. Last year I went to the Columbia commencement, because Mark got an honorary degree and spoke at Class Day. There was Alma Mater still holding out those gilded arms, and I sat in a back row on South Field, feeling like a character out of The Time Machine; especially when an occasional youth in a yarmulka ambled by.
Well, let’s come to a decision here. I’ll cut the Columbia stuff to ribbons, just give you a glimpse of my college years and race on. I can’t entirely skip Columbia. Not possible. For what was our Yisroelke doing, living in a Central Park South hotel suite on his own at twenty-one, and squiring around an enchanting showgirl? Answer: he became a gagman. And how did the Minsker Godol undergo such a bizarre metamorphosis? Answer: through working for Harry Goldhandler, the gag czar. And how on earth did that come to pass? Answer: through my encountering Peter Quat and Mark Herz at Columbia.
***
Time, September 1930, just before the college year starts. Scene, the Columbia gymnasium, where some four hundred freshmen are crowding into rows of wooden seats to take placement tests. Behind me, an amazed and displeased baritone bellow: “Iggy! What are you doing here?” I turn.
Towering over me, looking down at me with distaste—rather like Gulliver at a sassy Lilliputian on his palm—is Monroe Biberman. He looks taller and more pimply than Cousin Harold. He has the bluish jaws of one who shaves twice a day; indeed, he was already shaving his upper lip when we were collaborators. At all points he is dressed like a college-movie extra: obligatory contrasting jacket and slacks, woolen blue-and-red tie, dirty white shoes. I am only dimly aware of dress as yet, but I can recognize the fashion-plate effect, though I have no idea where one buys such clothes; certainly not at Michaels’.
“Hi, Monny.” After all, we are now Columbia men together, aren’t we? Formerly I called him Monroe, but he was always “Monny” to those Arista fellows.
“So! It is you. I’d know that suit anywhere.”
The purple suit, of course. I take no offense. In this sea of giant strangers, I’m delighted to find an old acquaintance, though he too is now so huge. Happily I blurt the first thing that comes to mind. “I thought you were going to Harvard.”
A black look crosses Biberman’s face. He takes this as a riposte for the remark about the purple suit, for his next words—I remember this snatch of dialogue all too well—are uncalled for. “How the hell did they let you in here?”
And I in my obtuse innocence accept this as joshing, and adopt his vein. “God knows. I was in Group Four. Somebody sent me the wrong letter by mistake, I guess. What happened, Monny, didn’t you get into Harvard? I thought it was all set.”
“Decided I’d rather stay in New York,” Biberman snarls down at me. “I was in Group One.”
“I suppose your brother’s pretty disappointed,” I say—again, I swear, meaning no offense. Biberman’s brother goes to Harvard. Monny had an early interview there, and afterward spread the word around school that he was in. Biberman’s expression changes, suggesting Frankenthal’s old Dracula look. He turns on his heel, goes off, and sits down. I think of following him and silting beside him—after all, us Townsend Harris guys should stick together—but where he puts himself there is no room for me.
Columbia College must have been as thoroughly ruined for poor Biberman when he spotted my purple suit as Longfellow Avenue was for Mama when the men showed up with Bobbeh’s sauerkraut. I daresay I embodied his rejection from Harvard. Monny had been president of Arista, and managing editor of the yearbook and the Stadium. He lived on Park Avenue, below Ninety-sixth Street. Why didn’t he make it into Harvard? Peculiar place, Harvard. Cousin Harold’s son Kris just got admitted to Harvard. Kris has bright wavy red hair down to his shoulders, he does a lot of sky-diving, and he stands on his head two hours a day. There is nothing he hasn’t smoked, except possibly tobacco. He intends to practice child psychiatry, and—but I wander. No time for that.
Waiting in the wings are Peter Quat and Mark Herz.
***
“Iggy!”
Biberman again. Two months later. Same displeased tone. I have seen very little of him. No doubt he is having trouble, as I am, adjusting to the staggering load of work. We are in the Varsity Show rehearsal room on the fourth floor of John Jay Hall, where all student activities are centered. Freshman aspirants for the daily newspaper, the Spectator, are crowding into the big barren cork-floored room. Biting on a big new black pipe, Biberman sends up a column of blue smoke and red sparks, and growls at me through the conflagration, “What are you doing here? The call is for guys with previous experience.”
“I edited the Camp Maccabee Menorah,” I reply.
Biberman casts his eyes up to the ceiling, in despair at my imbecility.
Yet we are both accepted. Everybody is. We soon learn why. Freshmen serve as printer’s devils, carrying the day’s copy downtown to the plant on the Bowery, and then staying up all night, amid the rattling linotype machines and the thumping presses, to help a senior editor get the paper out. It is rough going. The freshman candidates dwindle in a month to about ten. Biberman hangs on. So do I.
It is easier for Biberman. He can ride the subway from his home to the printing plant in twenty minutes. I have to forgo my dinner, stay downtown, and subsist on tuna fish or peanut butter sandwiches, for I am still eating by the rules; or else I must travel to the North Bronx for a hot meal, and return all the way downtown to the press, and at dawn ride back to Pelham for a few hours’ sleep.
Why, then, do I stick it out? Well, for one thing, the night work turns out to be fun. I smell printer’s ink. I begin to smoke cigarettes. I come to know the deepest fatigue, and the wonderful surge of second wind that comes with coffee at two A.M. in an all-night diner, and a slice of greasy pie. (Made with lard? Oh, probably not.) Dawn turns the dirty windows gray. The Spectator comes off the press, with headlines I’ve improvised, pages I’ve helped the night editor to dummy up; and a line on the masthead, in boldface, Associate Night Editor for this issue: I. David Goodkind. Reward enough!
Jan persuaded me years ago to give up cigarettes. But if I light one now and jet smoke through my nostrils the way I did when I was fifteen—thinking that it made me look thirty—the sting in my nasal passages will instantly bring back the smell of the printer’s ink, the taste of the coffee, the greasiness of that pie (probably made with lard, I can concede now); and the exaltation of seeing my name, freshly printed and still damp, above the editorial column of the Columbia Spectator.
But the main reason for hanging on is none of that. It is the “Off-hour,” the daily humor column, a mix of wisecracks and light verse, alternately signed by two pen names: The Man in the Iron Mask, and PDQ. Very early on, Peter Quat’s name on the masthead catches my eye. There can’t be two fellows named Peter Quat. So that odd fish from Camp Eagle Wing is now a contributing editor of the Spectator! He must be PDQ, and I’m hoping this literary giant will remember me and be friendly.
I first catch sight of the great PDQ crouching in a blue overcoat at a corner typewriter reserved for contributing editors. I barely recognize him. The gaunt Bunk Eight misfit has become a young man. His face has lengthened, and the bones stand out. His head rests on his hand, and his forehead is clutched in two spread fingers, in creative agony. He sits up, pecks a few quick lines with index fingers, then falls back into the crouch. A showy performance, not unexpected from Peter Quat. His curly black hair falls down on his forehead when he crouches, yet two receding bays in his hairline already show.
I do not dare to interrupt the artist at work, but I am at the copy desk when he hands in his column. “Hi,” I venture with a humble smile, taking the yellow pages, “I’m Davey Goodkind.”
Peter Quat glowers blankly at me as though I have said something intolerably impudent, idiotic, and revolting; buttons up his overcoat and walks out. It seems my name has not rung a bell.
