Indignation

doors and I couldn’t use my keys to open either and I had to pound on one or the other door to be let in if I came home at night twenty minutes later than he thought I ought to, I believed he had gone crazy.

And he had: crazy with worry that his cherished only child was as unprepared for the hazards of life as anyone else entering manhood, crazy with the frightening discovery that a little boy grows up, grows tall, overshadows his parents, and that you can’t keep him then, that you have to relinquish him to the world.

I left Robert Treat after only one year. I left because suddenly my father had no faith even in my ability to cross the street by myself. I left because my father’s surveillance had become insufferable. The prospect of my independence made this otherwise even-tempered man, who only rarely blew up at anyone, appear as if he were intent on committing violence should I dare to let him down, while I — whose skills as a cool-headed logician had made me the mainstay of the high school debating team — was reduced to howling with frustration in the face of his ignorance and irrationality. I had to get away from him before I killed him — so I wildly told my distraught mother, who now found herself as unexpectedly without influence over him as I was.

One night I got home on the bus from downtown about nine-thirty. I’d been at the main branch of the Newark Public Library, as Robert Treat had no library of its own. I had left the house at eight-thirty that morning and been away attending classes and studying, and the first thing my mother said was “Your father’s out looking for you.” “Why? Where is he looking?” “He went to a pool hall.” “I don’t even know how to shoot pool. What is he thinking about? I was studying, for God’s sake. I was writing a paper. I was reading. What else does he think I do night and day?” “He was talking to Mr. Pearlgreen about Eddie, and it got him all riled up about you.” Eddie Pearlgreen, whose father was our plumber, had graduated from high school with me and gone on to college at Panzer, in East Orange, to learn to become a high school phys-ed teacher. I’d played ball with him since I was a kid. “I’m not Eddie Pearlgreen,” I said, “I’m me.” “But do you know what he did? Without telling anybody, he drove all the way to Pennsylvania, to Scranton, in his father’s car to play pool in some kind of special pool hall there.” “But Eddie’s a pool shark. I’m not surprised he went to Scranton. Eddie can’t brush his teeth in the morning without thinking about pool. I wouldn’t be surprised if he went to the moon to play pool. Eddie pretends with guys who don’t know him that he’s only at their level of skill, and then they play and he beats the pants off them for as much as twenty-five dollars a game.” “He’ll end up stealing cars, Mr. Pearlgreen said.” “Oh, Mother, this is ridiculous. Whatever Eddie does has no bearing on me. Will I end up stealing cars?” “Of course not, darling.” “I don’t like this game Eddie likes, I don’t like the atmosphere he likes. I’m not interested in the low life, Ma. I’m interested in things that matter. I wouldn’t so much as stick my head in a pool hall. Oh, look, this is as far as I go explaining what I am and am not like. I will not explain myself one more time. I will not make an inventory of my attributes for people or mention my goddamn sense of duty. I will not take one more round of his ridiculous, nonsensical crap!” Whereupon, as though following a stage direction, my father entered the house through the back door, still all charged up, reeking of cigarette smoke, and angry now not because he’d found me in a pool hall but because he hadn’t found me there. It wouldn’t have dawned on him to go downtown and look for me at the public library — the reason being that you can’t get cracked over the head with a pool cue at the library for being a pool shark or have someone pull a knife on you because you are sitting there reading a chapter assigned from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as I’d been doing since six that night.

“So there you are,” he announced. “Yeah. Strange, isn’t it? At home. I sleep here. I live here. I am your son, remember?” “Are you? I’ve been everywhere looking for you.” “Why? Why? Somebody, please, tell me why ‘everywhere.’” “Because if anything were to happen to you — if something were ever to happen to you—” “But nothing will happen. Dad, I am not this terror of the earth who plays pool, Eddie Pearlgreen! Nothing is going to happen.” “I know that you’re not him, for God’s sake. I know better than anybody that I’m lucky with my boy.” “Then what is this all about, Dad?” “It’s about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences.” “Oh, Christ, you sound like a fortune cookie.” “Do I? Do I? Not like a concerned father but like a fortune cookie? That’s what I sound like when I’m talking to my son about the future he has ahead of him, which any little thing could destroy, the tiniest thing?” “Oh, the hell with it!” I cried, and ran out of the house, wondering where I could find a car to steal to go to Scranton to play pool and maybe pick up the clap on the side.

Later I learned from my mother the full circumstances of that day, about how Mr. Pearlgreen had come to see about the toilet at the back of the store that morning and left my father brooding over their conversation from then until closing time. He must have smoked three packs of cigarettes, she told me, he was so upset. “You don’t know how proud of you he is,” my mother said. “Everybody who comes into the store—‘My son, all A’s. Never lets us down. Doesn’t even have to look at his books — automatically, A’s.’ Darling, when you’re not present you are the focus of all his praise. You must believe that. He boasts about you all the time.” “And when I am present I’m the focus of these crazy new fears, and I’m sick and tired of it, Ma.” My mother said, “But I heard him, Markie. He told Mr. Pearlgreen, ‘Thank God I don’t have to worry about these things with my boy.’ I was there with him in the store when Mr. Pearlgreen came because of the leak. That’s exactly what he said when Mr. Pearlgreen was telling him about Eddie. Those were his words: ‘I don’t have to worry about these things with my boy.’ But what does Mr. Pearlgreen say back to him — and this is what started him off — he says, ‘Listen to me, Messner. I like you, Messner, you were good to us, you took care of my wife during the war with meat, listen to somebody who knows from it happening to him. Eddie is a college boy too, but that doesn’t mean he knows enough to stay away from the pool hall. How did we lose Eddie? He’s not a bad boy. And what about his younger brother — what kind of example is he to his younger brother? What did we do wrong that the next thing we know he’s in a pool hall in Scranton, three hours from home! With my car! Where does he get the money for the gas? From playing pool! Pool! Pool! Mark my words, Messner: the world is waiting, it’s licking its chops, to take your boy away.’ ” “And my father believes him,” I said. “My father believes not what he sees with his eyes for an entire lifetime, instead he believes what he’s told by the plumber on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!” I couldn’t stop. He’d been driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber! “Yeah, Ma,” I finally said, storming off to my room, “the tiniest, littlest things do have tragic consequences. He proves it!”

I had to get away but I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know one college from another. Auburn. Wake Forest. Ball State. SMU. Vanderbilt. Muhlenberg. They were nothing but the names of football teams to me. Every fall I eagerly listened to the results of the college games on Bill Stern’s Saturday evening sports roundup, but I had little idea of the academic differences between the contending schools. Louisiana State 35, Rice 20; Cornell 21, Lafayette 7; Northwestern 14, Illinois 13. That was the difference I knew about: the point spread. A college was a college — that you attended one and eventually earned a degree was all that mattered to a family as unworldly as mine. I was going to the one downtown because it was close to home and we could afford it.

And that was fine with me. At the outset of my mature life, before everything suddenly became so difficult, I had a great talent for being satisfied. I’d had it all through childhood, and in my freshman year at Robert Treat it was in my repertoire still. I was thrilled to be there. I’d quickly come to idolize my professors and to make friends, most of them from working families like my own and with little, if any, more education than my own. Some were Jewish and from my high school, but most were not, and it at first excited me to have lunch with them because they were Irish or Italian and to me a new category, not only of Newarker but of human being. And I was excited to be taking college courses; though they were rudimentary, something was beginning to happen to my brain akin to what had happened when I first laid eyes on the alphabet. And, too — after the coach had gotten me to choke up a few inches on the bat and to punch the ball over the infield and into the outfield instead of my mightily swinging as blindly as I had in high school — I had gained a first-string position on the tiny college’s freshman baseball team that spring and was playing second base alongside a shortstop named Angelo Spinelli.

But primarily I was learning, discovering something new every hour of the school day, which was why I even enjoyed Robert Treat’s being so small and unobtrusive, more like a neighborhood club than a college. Robert Treat was tucked away at the northern end of the city’s busy downtown of office buildings, department stores, and family-owned specialty shops, squeezed between a triangular little Revolutionary War park where the bedraggled bums hung out (most of whom we knew by name) and the muddy Passaic. The college consisted of two undistinguished buildings: an old abandoned smoke-stained brick brewery down near the industrial riverfront that had been converted into classrooms and science labs and where I took my biology course and, several blocks away, across from the city’s major thoroughfare and facing the little park that was what we had instead of a campus — and where we sat at noontime to eat the sandwiches we’d packed at dawn while the bums down the bench passed the muscatel bottle — a small four-story neoclassical stone building with a pillared entrance that from the outside