My Life As A Man

Needless to say, never to criticize where you could praise was a principle of hers; as it happened, with Mr. Z. for a husband, she couldn’t have gotten away with anything else had she tried.

Then the just deserts. About the time Sherman, their older son, was coming out of the navy and young Nathan was entering high school, business suddenly began to boom in the Camden store, and by 1949, the year Zuckerman entered college, a brand new “Mr. Z.” shoe store had opened out at the two-million-dollar Country Club Hills Shopping Mall. And then at last the one-family house: ranch style, with a flagstone fireplace, on a one-acre lot-the family dream come true just as the family was falling apart.

Zuckerman’s mother, happy as a birthday child, telephoned Nathan at college the day the deed was signed to ask what “color scheme” he wanted for his room.

“Pink,” Zuckerman answered, “and white. And a canopy over my bed and a skirt for my vanity table. Mother, what is this ‘your room’ crap?”

“But-but why did Daddy even buy the house, if not for you to have a real boy’s room, a room of your own for you and all your things? This is something you’ve wanted all your life.”

“Gee whiz, could I have pine paneling, Mother?”

“Darling, that’s what I’m telling you-you can have anything.”

“And a college pennant over my bed? And a picture on my dresser of my mom and my girl?”

“Nathan, why are you making fun of me like this? I was so looking forward to this day, and all you have for me when I call with such wonderful news is-sarcasm. College sarcasm!”

“Mother, I’m only trying very gently to break it to you-you just cannot delude yourself into thinking there is something called ‘Nathan’s room’ in your new house. What I wanted at the age of ten for all ‘my things,’ I don’t necessarily want any longer.”

“Then,” she said weakly, “maybe Daddy shouldn’t pay your tuition and send you a check for twenty-five dollars a week, if you’re that independent now. Maybe it works both ways, if that’s the attitude…”

He was not much impressed, either by the threat or the tone in which it was delivered. “If you want,” said he in the grave, no-nonsense voice one might adopt to address a child who is not acting his age, “to discontinue paying for my education, that is up to you; that is something you and Dad will have to decide between you.”

“Oh darling, what’s turned you into this cruel person-you, who were always so so sweet and considerate-?”

“Mother,” replied the nineteen-year-old, now a major in English language and literature, “try to be precise. I’m not cruel. Only direct.”

Ah, the distance he had traveled from her since that day in 1942 when Nathan Zuckerman had fallen in love with Betty Zuckerman the way men seemed to fall in love with women in the movies-yes, smitten by her, as though she weren’t his mother but a famous actress who for some incredible reason happened also to cook his meals and keep his room in order. In her capacity as chairwoman of the war bond drive at his school, she had been invited to the assembly hall that morning to address the entire student body on the importance of saving war stamps. She arrived dressed in the clothes she ordinarily wore only when she and her “girl friends” went in to Philadelphia to see the matinee performance of a stage show: her tailored gray suit and a white silk blouse. To top it off, she delivered her talk (without notes) from back of a lectern luxuriantly draped with red, white, and blue bunting. For the rest of Nathan’s life, he was to find himself unduly susceptible to a woman in a gray suit and a white blouse, because of the glamor his slender, respectable, well-mannered mother rathated from the stage that day. Indeed, Mr. Loomis, the principal (who may have been somewhat smitten himself), compared her demeanor as chairwoman of the bond drive and president of the PTA to that of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. And in shyly acknowledging his compliment, Mrs. Zuckerman had conceded from the platform that Madame Chiang was in fact one of her idols. So too, she told the assembled students, were Pearl Buck and Emily Post. True enough. Zuckerman’s mother had a deep belief in what she called “graciousness,” and a reverence, such as is reserved in India for the cow, toward greeting cards and thank you notes. And while they were in love, so did he. One of the first big surprises of Zuckerman’s life was seeing the way his mother carried on when his brother Sherman entered the navy to serve his two-year hitch in 1945. She might have been some young girl whose fiance was marching off to the in the front lines, while the fact of the matter was that America had won World War Two in August and Sherman was only a hundred miles away, in boot camp in Maryland. Nathan did everything he could possibly think of to cheer her up: helped with the dishes, offered on Saturdays to carry the groceries home, and talked nonstop, even about a subject that ordinarily embarrassed him, his little girl friends. To his father’s consternation he invited his mother to come and look over his shoulder at his hand when “the two men” played gin rummy on Sunday nights at the bridge table set up in the living room. “Play the game,” his father would warn him, “concentrate on my discards, Natie, and not on your mother. Your mother can take care of herself, but you’re the one who’s going to get schneidered again.” How could the man be so heartless? His mother could not take care of herself- something had to be done. But what?

It was particularly unsettling to Nathan when “Mamselle” was played over the radio, for against this song his mother simply had no defense whatsoever. Along with “The Old Lamplighter,” it had been her favorite number in Sherman’s entire repertoire of semiclassical and popular songs, and there was nothing she liked better than to sit in the living room after dinner and listen to him play and sing (at her request) his “interpretation.” Somehow she could manage with “The Old Lamplighter,” which she had always seemed to love equally well, but now when they began to play “Mamselle” on the radio, she would have to get up and leave the room. Nathan, who was not exactly immune to “Mamselle” himself, would follow after her and listen through the door of her bedroom to the muffled sounds of weeping. It nearly killed him.

Knocking softly, he asked, “Mom…you all right? You want anything?”

“No, darling, no.”

“Do you want me to read you my book report?”

“No, sweetheart.”

“Do you want me to turn off the radio? I’m finished listening, really.”

“Let it play, Nathan dear, it’ll be over in a minute.”

How awful her suffering was-also, how odd. After all, for him to miss Sherman was one thing-Sherman happened to be his only older brother. As a small boy Nathan’s attachment to Sherman had been so pronounced and so obvious that the other kids used to make jokes about it- they used to say that if Sherman Zuckerman ever stopped short, his kid brother’s nose would go straight up Sherm’s ass. Little Nathan could indeed be seen following behind his older brother to school in the morning, to Hebrew school in the afternoon, and to his Boy Scout meetings at night; and when Sherman’s five-piece high-school band used to go off to make music for bar mitzvahs and wedding parties, Nathan would travel with them as “a mascot” and sit up in a chair at the corner of the stage and knock two sticks together during the rumbas. That he should feel bereft of his bother and in their room at night grow teary at the sight of the empty twin bed to his right, that was to be expected. But what was his mother carrying on like this about? How could she miss Sherman so, when he was still around-and being nicer, really, than ever. Nathan was thirteen by this time and already an honor student at the high school, but for all his intelligence and maturity he could not figure that one out.

When Sherman came home on his first liberty after boot camp, he had with him a ditty bag full of dirty photographs to show to Nathan as they walked together around the old neighborhood; he also had a pea jacket and a sailor cap for his younger brother, and stories to tell about whores who sat on his lap in the bars around Bainbridge and let him stick his hand right up their dresses. And for nothing. Whores fifty and sixty years old. Sherman was eighteen then and wanted to be a jazz musician a la Lenny Tristano; he had already been assigned to Special Services because of his musical talent, and was going to be MCing shows at the base, as well as helping the chief petty officer organize the entertainment program. He was also that rarity in show business, a marvelous comic tap dancer, and could give an impression of Bojangles Robinson that would cause his younger brother to double over with laughter. Zuckerman, at thirteen, expected great things from a brother who could do all this. Sherman told him about pro kits and VD films and let him read the mimeographed stories that the sailors circulated among themselves during the nights they stood guard duty. Staggering. It seemed to the adolescent boy that his older brother had found access to a daring and manly life.

And when, upon being discharged, Sherman made directly for New York and found a job playing piano in a bar in Greenwich Village, young Zuckerman was ecstatic; not so, the rest of the family. Sherman told them that his