Through the Children's Gate Read online

  “So you see, Adam, in retrospect …” he went on, and stirred, rose on the sofa, trying to force his full authority on his disobedient frame. “In retrospect, life has many worthwhile aspects,” he concluded quietly, and then we had to stop. He sat looking ahead, and a few minutes later, with a goodbye and a handshake, I left.

  Now I was furious. I was trying to be moved, but I would have liked to be moved by something easier to be moved by. That was all he had to say to me, Life has many worthwhile aspects? For once, that first reaction of disappointment stuck with me for a long time, on the plane all the way to Paris. All these evenings, all that investment, all that humanism, all those Motherwell prints—yes, all that money, my money—for that? Life has many worthwhile aspects? Could there have been a more fatuous and arrhythmic and unmemorable conclusion to what had been, after all, my analysis, my only analysis?

  Now, of course, it is more deeply engraved than any other of his words. In retrospect, life has many worthwhile aspects. Not all or even most aspects. And not beautiful or meaningful or even tolerable. Just worthwhile, with its double burden of labor and reward. Life has worth—value, importance—and it takes a while to get there.

  I came back to New York about a year later and went to see him. A woman with a West Indian accent had answered when I called his number. I knew that I would find him declining, but still, I thought, I would find him himself. We expect our fathers to take as long a time dying as we take growing up. But he was falling away. He was lying on a hospital bed, propped up, his skin as gray as pavement, his body as thin and wasted as a tree on a New York street in winter. The television was on, low, tuned to a game show. He struggled for breath as he spoke.

  He told me, very precisely, about the disease that he had. “The prognosis is most uncertain,” he said. “I could linger indefinitely.” He mentioned something controversial that I had written. “You showed independence of mind.” He turned away, in pain. “And, as always, very poor judgment.”

  In New York again, five months later, I thought, I'll just surprise him, squeeze his hand. I walked by his building and asked the doorman if Dr. Grosskurth was in. He said that Dr. Grosskurth had died three months before. For a moment I thought, Someone should have called me, one of his children. Yet they hardly could have called all his patients. (“But I was special!” the child screams.) Then I stumbled over to Third Avenue and almost automatically into Parma, the restaurant that he had loved. I asked the owner if he knew that Dr. Grosskurth had died, and he said yes, of course: They had had a dinner, with his family and some of his friends, to remember him, and the owner invited me to have dinner, too, and drink to his memory.

  I sat down and began an excellent solitary dinner in honor of my dead psychoanalyst—seafood pasta, a Venetian dish, naturally—and, in his memory, chewed at the squid. (He liked squid.) The waiter brought me my bill, and I paid it. I still think that the owner should at least have bought the wine. Which shows, I suppose, that the treatment was incomplete. (“They should have paid for your wine?” “It would have been a nice gesture, yes. It would have happened in Paris.” “You are hopeless. I died too soon, and you left too early. The analysis was left unfinished.”)

  The transference wasn't completed, I suppose, but something—a sort of implantation—did take place. The point of the analysis was, I see now, to prepare me for fatherhood by supplying a patriarchal model, however odd, and it did. In moments of crisis or panic, I sometimes think that I have his woolen suit draped around my shoulders, even in August. Sometimes in ordinary moments I almost think that I have become him. Though my patience is repeatedly tried by my children, I laugh at their many amusing mistakes in language—I have even been known to repeat these mistakes in social settings. I refer often to the sayings of my wife, that witty, witty woman. On the whole, I would say that my years in analysis had many worthwhile aspects.

  A Purim Story

  I suppose it is a sign of just how inadequate a Jew I am that when I got a letter from the Jewish Museum right after we got home this fall, asking me to be the Purimspieler at its Purim Ball in February, I thought there must be some kind of mistake. I don't mean that I thought there must be some mistake in asking me. I am enough of a ham that I would not be entirely surprised if a Hindu congregation had asked me to come forward and chant choice selections from the Bhagavad Gita. I mean that I was surprised because I thought the Jewish Museum was making a mistake about the date of Purim.

  “Isn't that the one in the fall?” I asked my wife, Martha. “With the hamantaschen? And the little hut in the backyard?”

  “No,” she said. “No, it isn't. They have hamantaschen all year round. Even I know that.”

  “The thing that puzzles me,” I went on, holding up the letter and reading it again, “is how they ever figured out I was Jewish.”

  She executed what I believe our fathers would have called a spit take. “That is the most ridiculous question I've ever heard. There's your name, for one thing, and then the way you use Jewish words in writing.”

  “What Jewish words have I ever used in writing?”

  She thought for a moment. “Well, ‘shvitz.’ And ‘inchoate.’ ”

  “ ‘Inchoate’ is not a Jewish word.”

  “It is the way you use it. You've got ‘Jew’ written all over you. It's obvious.”

  “It's obvious,” my six-year-old son, Luke, echoed, looking up from his plate. “It's obvious.” I was startled, though not entirely. We lived in Paris for the first five years of his life, and ethnic awareness is one of the first things he's been exposed to on coming home to New York. The lame and the halt, the meaning of Kwanzaa and the nights of Hanukkah—all the varieties of oppressed ethnic experience have become the material of his education. He sees the world in groups, or is beginning to. His best friend, Jacob Kogan, has a sister who was asked by her grandparents what she wanted for Hanukkah. “A Christmas tree,” she said. Luke reported that with pleasure. He and Jacob have developed a nice line in old Henny Youngman–style jokes, which apparently circulate permanently in the lower grades of New York schools, like Mercury space-program debris circulating in outer space, getting lower and lower in its orbit each year: “Waiter, what's this fly doing in my soup!” “The backstroke.”

  I gave Luke a look. His birth was the occasion of my realizing just how poor a Jew I am. When he was born, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, almost every other baby in the nursery had Lubavitcher parents, and in the isolette they had proudly placed a little framed photograph of the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, so that the first thing the baby saw was the thin Russian eyes and the great Rembrandt beard of the rebbe. The Hasidic fathers clustered around the glass of the nursery, and I felt at once drawn to them and inadequate to their dark-suited, ringleted assurance. They looked wonderful, and I, another—if lost, or at least mislaid—member of the tribe, wanted, at least provisionally, to attach myself to them.

  “He's crying from the circumcision,” I explained to the father on my left, significantly.

  He stared at me. With the hat and fringe, he looked at first very old and then, as my eye saw past the costume, very young. “He's been circumcised already?” he said. I hadn't known you were supposed to wait. Still, he grasped the gesture toward commonality. “What's his name?”

  “Luke,” I said proudly. “Luke Auden.”

  He backed away from me, really backed away, like a Japanese extra in a Godzilla movie when the monster comes into view, looming up above the power pylons.

  I returned to the letter. It was a very nice, warm letter from the director of the museum, explaining that the “event takes the form of a masked ball in celebration of the Purim holiday, with approximately seven hundred guests gathered for a black-tie dinner-dance at the Waldorf-Astoria.” The “highlight” was a “10–15-minute original Purimspiel—a humorous retelling of the story of Purim, Queen Esther's rescue of the Jews in ancient Persia.” In a postscript, the director promised “to send some background information
on the Biblical story of Purim.”

  Looking at the letter again, I began to realize that the Purimspieler barrel must have been thoroughly scraped before the museum people got to me, and also that, getting to me, they knew what they were getting. They had been able to deduce that, though Jewish, I was sufficiently ignorant about Jewishness to need “some background information on the Biblical story of Purim.” If they had been asking me to talk on life in France, I doubted that they would have thought to send me a map of Paris.

  “Daddy, did I tell you the new version?” Luke said suddenly.

  “Which new version?”

  “Man goes into a restaurant, he says, ‘Waiter, waiter.’ ”

  “No,” I corrected him. “He should just say, ‘Waiter!’ It's the guy who goes to see a doctor who says it twice: ‘Doctor, Doctor!’ Just ‘Waiter!’ ” What a thing, to be a pedant of one-liners.

  “Oh. He says, ‘Waiter, what's this fly doing in my soup?,’ and the waiter, then the waiter says, ‘There was no room left in the potato salad.’ ”

  I laughed. “Of course I'm going to do it,” I added.

  “Is this going to be one of those things where you end up still skeptical but strangely exhilarated by the faith of your fathers?” Martha said. “Because if it is, I don't want you to do it. It's hard enough having you around morose all the time. It would be even worse if you were strangely exhilarated.”

  The next morning, a Saturday, I took down the Book of Esther from the shelf—or, more precisely, I took down the old King James Bible, the only one I owned. It has all the words of Jesus picked out in red, as though highlighted by an earnest Galilean undergraduate. I was in charge of the kids, but I felt sure that I would have time to read. Luke was shut in the bedroom, watching Saturday-morning cartoons, struggling desperately to understand; I knew he would interrupt only occasionally, seeking clarification on some cartoon convention. Because of his time in Paris, he missed a lot of cartoon watching, and now he is frantically trying to catch up. He gets a worried look on his face as he runs into the room and asks about what he has just seen: “Why, when people go through walls in a cartoon, do they leave holes exactly the same shape as them?” “Why, when someone touches electricity in a cartoon, do you see his whole skeleton? But only for a second?” The rules of an alternate universe, what there is to laugh at and what is just part of life, remain mysterious.

  Meanwhile, the baby, Olivia, was happily occupied at the window, dog-spotting. “Dog! Dog!” came the occasional shout. Breakfast and dinner, she will not stay in her high chair but insists on scanning the skies, or streets, like a scientist in a fifties sci-fi movie, searching for life forms she has identified as alien. She is endlessly excited, then wildly agitated whenever she spots one, which, given the density of dogs on Upper East Side streets, she does, predictably, twice a minute.

  “Good girl,” I said absently, and went back to my Bible. The story of Purim, I learned, takes place in Persia, mostly in the court of King Ahasuerus. Ahasuerus, who reigned over 127 provinces from India to Ethiopia, has a wife, Vashti, who hosts a “banquet for the women” and then refuses to come when the king commands. The king overreacts, and his advisers tell him to divorce the queen and hold a beauty contest to choose a new one, which he does. He chooses a Jewish girl named Esther. Esther's cousin, an ambitious fellow named Mordecai, then saves the king's life by exposing a plot against him, though the king doesn't know that Mordecai has done it. But the king gets bored with Esther, and meanwhile, his chief councillor, Haman, decides to start a pogrom against the Jews, for all the usual reasons: They are tight and clannish and obey only themselves. He gets the king's approval, and Mordecai, hearing of the plan, goes out in sackcloth and ashes to protest. He tells Esther that she ought to protest, too, and she says, “Well, what can I do?” “Do something,” he tells her. She gets dressed up in her best clothes and goes to the king, who, thinking she looks nifty, listens to her. He suddenly learns how Mordecai saved his life, and orders Haman to be hanged on the scaffold he had prepared for Mordecai. The Jews, about to be pogromed, massacre Haman's followers, including all ten of Haman's sons, who are hanged or, depending on the translation, impaled on stakes. Then everybody celebrates.

  I stopped reading. Send this up? I couldn't even grasp it. I knew that the thing to get was Esther's rescue of the Jews, but that seemed almost incidental to this general story of competitive massacre and counter-massacre and bride shopping. The trouble, I realized, was not that I did not know how to read in the text but that I did not know, had never been taught, how to read past it. Like Luke with the electrified cat, I did not know what was significant and what was merely conventional—I did not know what were the impaling practices of ancient Near East culture, and what was, so to speak, the specifically Jewish point. Although all our official school training in reading is in reading in—in reading deeply, penetrating the superficial and the apparent to get to the obscure and hidden—a lot of the skill in reading classics actually lies in reading past them. The obsession with genetic legitimacy and virginity in Shakespeare, the acceptance of torture in Dante—these are not subjects to be absorbed but things you glide by on your way to the poetry. You have to feel confident saying, “Oh, that's just then,” with the crucial parallel understanding that now will be then, too, that our progeny will have to learn to read past sentences like “After the peace demonstration, they stopped at Joe's for veal scallopini,” or perhaps “In their joy, they conceived their fifth child,” or even “They immunized the children.” Obviously, it was necessary to read past the impaling of Haman's sons, the ethnic pogroms, to some larger purpose—otherwise, there would not be Purimspiels and happy Purim balls—but I did not know how to do it. I saw impaled Iranians where I needed to see a fly doing the backstroke in the soup.

  I walked over to the baby at the window seat. Out the window, in the near distance, we could see a synagogue. Even now, I thought, people were being taught in there to read past the scaffold. “Dog, dog!” the baby cried, as a dog walker came up the street, six or seven dogs on leashes held in one hand. Olivia began to cry out in delight. So many dogs! I closed the book and hoped glumly that a spiel, that whole leashfuls of them, would come before Purim did.

  The next day I decided to return to the only Jewish tradition with which I was at all confident: having smoked fish at eleven o'clock on Sunday mornings. Every Sunday morning throughout my childhood, my grandfather would arrive with the spread—salty lox and unctuous sable and dry whitefish and sweet pickled salmon. Sometimes he took me with him to shop; he always had a pained, resigned look as he ordered: “Yeah, I guess … give me some of the whitefish.” But when he got home, he would be pleased. (“He has very nice stuff, Irving,” he would say to my father.) For Purimspiel purposes, I thought, I had better get into Jew training and eat as my fathers had.

  Every Sunday morning for the next few weeks, Luke and I went together to Sable's, the extraordinary smoked-fish and appetizer store at Second Avenue and Seventy-eighth Street. Sable's is the only place in my neighborhood where my grandfather would have been entirely comfortable—with the hand-lettered signs and the Dr. Brown's and the mingled smell of pickles and herring—and yet it is owned and staffed by Asians who once worked as nova slicers at Zabar's, on the West Side, and who walked out to claim their freedom. (I imagined them wandering, in their aprons, through Central Park for years before arriving at the promised land.) They sell Jewish food, and with the same bullying, ironic Jewish manner that I recalled from my childhood trips with my grandfather, but they do it as a thing learned.

  “They got nice stuff, anyway, Irving,” I said to Luke as we walked over.

  “Why are you calling me Irving?” he asked.

  “My grandfather always called me Irving when he took me shopping for smoked fish. He had me confused with Grandpop, I guess.”

  “Oh. Is Grandpop's name Irving?”

  “No,” I said. “His name isn't actually Irving, either. But your great-grandfather could n
ever remember what his name really was, so he called him Irving. I think he thought all small Jewish boys should be called Irving.”

  Luke wasn't interested. “Oh,” he said. I could see he was looking inward. Then, in a rush: “Why in cartoons, when someone touches electricity, after you see their whole skeleton for a second, do they go all stiff and straight up in the air and then their whole body turns black and then it turns into dust and then it crumbles while they still look out and smile as if they were feeling sick? Why?”

  I said it was just a convention, just the way cartoons are, and was meant to be funny.

  “Why is it funny?” he asked.

  We walked on in silence.

  Later that day I sat down with a piece of paper. I had one mildly derivative comic idea, which was to adapt the Purim story to contemporary New York. Ahasuerus was Donald Trump: dumb as an ox, rich, lecherous, easily put out, and living in a gaudy apartment. So Vashti must be Ivana—that was easy—and Esther was a Russian Jewish model who had immigrated from Odessa, a beauty, but hardly aware that she was Jewish save for the convenience of immigration. Haman—what if you said that Haman … But I couldn't focus. How was it, I wondered, that I could know nothing of all this? For the truth is that “Jew” is written all over me. If, on my father's side, they were in wholesale food, on my mother's side, they were dark-skinned Sephardim who had stayed in Palestine—so busy squabbling that they actually missed the bus for the Diaspora. One of my maternal great grandfathers, family lore has it, was the rabbi sent from Hebron to Lisbon at the end of the nineteenth century to call the Jews out of hiding and back into the synagogue.

  And yet, when I think about my own upbringing, the best I can say is that the most entirely Jewish thing about us was the intensity with which we celebrated Christmas: passionately, excessively, with the tallest tree and the most elaborately wrapped presents. Coming of age in the fifties, my parents, like so many young intellectuals of their generation, distanced themselves from the past as an act of deliberate emancipation. My parents were not so much in rebellion against their own past as they were in love with the idea of using the values unconsciously taken from that culture to conquer another—they went from Jewish high school to Ivy League college and fell in love with English literature. Like so many others, they ended in that queer, thriving country of the Jewish-American possessor of the Christian literary heritage: They became Zionists of eighteenth-century literature, kibbutzniks of metaphysical poetry. The only Bible-related book I can recall from my childhood was in my father's office, an academic volume called The Bible to Be Read as Living Literature; the joke was, of course, that in those precincts it was literature that was to be read as the Bible. (We didn't have a Christian Christmas; we had a Dickensian Christmas.) The eradication left an imprint stronger than indoctrination could have. We had “Jew” written all over us in the form of marks from the eraser.