Portnoy’s Complaint

from his pocket an envelope containing five twenty-dollar bills. And dumb, frightened Alice Dembosky took it. Thus proving something that everybody but Heshie (and I) had surmised about the Polack from the beginning: that her plan was to take Heshie for all his father's money, and then ruin his life.

When Heshie was killed in the war, the only thing people could think to say to my Aunt Clara and my Uncle Hymie, to somehow mitigate the horror, to somehow console them in their grief, was, 'At least he didn't leave you with a shikse wife. At least he didn't leave you with goyische children.'

End of Heshie and his story.

Even if I consider myself too much of a big shot to set foot inside a synagogue for fifteen minutes-which is all he is asking-at least I should have respect enough to change into decent clothes for the day and not make a mockery of myself, my family, and my religion.

'I'm sorry,' I mumble, my back (as is usual) all I will offer him to look at while I speak, 'but just because it's your religion doesn't mean it's mine.'

'What did you say? Turn around, mister, I want the courtesy of a reply from your mouth.'

'I don't have a religion,' I say, and obligingly turn in his direction, about a fraction of a degree.

'You don't, eh?'

“I can’t.”

'And why not? You're something special? Look at me! You're somebody too special?'

'I don't believe in God.'

'Get out of those dungarees, Alex, and put on some decent clothes.'

'They're not dungarees, they're Levis.'

'It's Rosh Hashanah, Alex, and to me you're wearing overalls! Get in there and put a tie on and a jacket on and a pair of trousers and a clean shirt, and come out looking like a human being. And shoes, Mister, hard shoes.'

'My shirt is clean-'

'Oh, you're riding for a fall, Mr. Big. You're fourteen years old, and believe me, you don't know everything there is to know. Get out of those moccasins! What the hell are you supposed to be, some kind of Indian?'

'Look, I don't believe in God and I don't believe in the Jewish religion-or in any religion. They're all lies.'

'Oh, they are, are they?'

'I'm not going to act like these holidays mean anything when they don't! And that's all I'm saying!'

'Maybe they don't mean anything because you don't know anything about them, Mr. Big Shot. What do you know about the history of Rosh Hashanah? One fact? Two facts maybe? What do you know about the history the Jewish people, that you have the right to call their religion, that's been good enough for people a lot smarter than you and a lot older than you for two thousand years -that you can call all that suffering and heartache a lie!'

'There is no such thing as God, and there never was, and I'm sorry, but in my vocabulary that's a lie.'

'Then who created the world, Alex?' he asks contemptuously. 'It just happened, I suppose, according to you.'

'Alex,' says my sister, 'all Daddy means is even if you don't want to go with him, if you would just change your clothes-'

'But for what?' I scream. 'For something that never existed? Why don't you tell me to go outside and change my clothes for some alley cat or some tree-because at least they exist!'

'But you haven't answered me, Mr. Educated Wise Guy,”' my father says. 'Don't try to change the issue. Who created the world and the people in it? Nobody?'

'Right! Nobody!'

'Oh, sure,' says my father. 'That's brilliant. I'm glad I didn't get to high school if that's how brilliant it makes you.'

'Alex,' my sister says, and softly-as is her way-softly, because she is already broken a little bit too-'maybe if you just put on a pair of shoes-'

'But you're as bad as he is, Hannah! If there's no God, what do shoes have to do with it!'

'One day a year you ask him to do something for you, and he's too big for it. And that's the whole story, Hannah, of your brother, of his respect and love…'

'Daddy, he's a good boy. He does respect you, he does love you-'

'And what about the Jewish people?' He is shouting now and waving his arms, hoping that this will prevent him from breaking into tears-because the word love has only to be whispered in our house for all eyes immediately to begin to overflow. 'Does he respect them? Just as much as he respects me, just about as much…' Suddenly he is sizzling-he turns on me with another new and brilliant thought. 'Tell me something, do you know Talmud, my educated son? Do you know history? One-two-three you were bar mitzvah, and that for you was the end of your religious education. Do you know men study their whole lives in the Jewish religion, and when they die they still haven't finished? Tell me, now that you are all finished at fourteen being a Tew, do you know a single thing about the wonderful history and heritage of the saga of your people '

But there are already tears on his cheeks, and more are on the way from his eyes. 'A's in school,' he says, 'but in life he's as ignorant as the day he was born.'

Well, it looks as though the time has come at last-so I say it. It's something I've known for a little while now.

'You're the ignorant one! You!'

'Alex!” cries my sister, grabbing for my hand, as though fearful I may actually raise it against him.

'But he is! With all that stupid saga shit!'

'Quiet! Still! Enough!' cries Hannah. 'Go to your room-'

– While my father carries himself to the kitchen table, his head sunk forward and his body doubled over, as though he has just taken a hand grenade in his stomach. Which he has. Which I know. 'You can wear rags for all I care, you can dress like a peddler, you can shame and embarrass me all you want, curse me, Alexander, defy me, hit me, hate me-'

The way it usually works, my mother cries in the kitchen, my father cries in the living room-hiding his eyes behind the Newark News-Hannah cries in the bathroom, and I cry on the run between our house and the pinball machine at the corner. But on this particular Rosh Hashanah everything is disarranged, and why my father is crying in the kitchen instead of my mother-why he sobs without protection of the newspaper, and with such pitiful fury-is because my mother is in a hospital bed recovering from surgery: this indeed accounts for his excrutiating loneliness on this Rosh Hashanah, and his particular need of my affection and obedience. But at this moment in the history of our family, if he needs it, you can safely bet money that he is not going to get it from me. Because my need is not to give it to him! Oh, yes, we'll turn the tables on him, all right, won't we, Alex you little prick! Yes, Alex the little prick finds that his father's ordinary day-to-day vulnerability is somewhat aggravated by the fact that the man's wife (or so they tell me) has very nearly expired, and so Alex the little prick takes the opportunity to drive the dagger of his resentment just a few inches deeper into what is already a bleeding heart. Alexander the Great!

No! There's more here than just adolescent resentment and Oedipal rage-there's my integrity! I will not do what Heshie did! For I go through childhood convinced that had he only wanted to, my powerful cousin Heshie, the third best javelin thrower in all New Jersey (an honor, I would think, rich in symbolism for this growing boy, with visions of jockstraps dancing in his head), could easily have flipped my fifty-year-old uncle over onto his back, and pinned him to the cellar floor. So then (I conclude) he must have lost on purpose. But why? For he knew-I surely knew it, even as a child-that his father had done something dishonorable. Was he then afraid to win? But why, when his own father had acted so vilely, and in Heshie's behalf! Was it cowardice? fear?-or perhaps was it Heshie's wisdom? Whenever the story is told of what my uncle was forced to do to make my dead cousin see the light, or whenever I have cause to reflect upon the event myself, I sense some enigma at its center, a profound moral truth, which if only I could grasp, might save me and my own father from some ultimate, but unimaginable, confrontation.