ambition was to play with the Stan Kenton band, and his father, if he had had a gun, would probably have pulled it out and shot him. Nathan, in the meantime, confided to his high-school friends stories about his brother’s life “in the Village.” They asked (those bumpkins), “What village?” He explained, scornfully; he told them about the San Remo bar on MacDougal Street, which he himself had never seen, but could imagine. Then one night Sherman went to a party after work (which was four in the morning) and met June Christie, Kenton’s blonde vocalist. June Christie. That opened up a fantasy or two in the younger brother’s head. Yes, it began to sound as though the possibilities for someone as game and adventurous as Sherman Zuckerman (or Sonny Zachary, as he called himself in the cocktail lounge) were going to be just about endless.
And then Sherman was going to Temple University, taking pre-dent. And then he was married, not to June Christie but to some girl, some skinny Jewish girl from Bala-Cynwyd who talked in baby talk and worked as a dental technician somewhere. Nathan couldn’t believe it. Say it ain’t so, Sherm! He remembered those cantaloupes hanging from the leering women in the dirty pictures Sherman had brought home from the navy, and then he thought of flat-chested Sheila, the dental technician with whom Sherman would now be going to bed every night for the rest of his life, and he couldn’t figure the thing out. What had happened to his glamorous brother? “He saw the light, that’s what,” Mr. Z. explained to relatives and friends, but particularly to young Nathan, “he saw the handwriting on the wall and came to his goddam senses.”
Seventeen years then of family life and love such as he imagined everyone enjoyed, more or less-and then his four years at Bass College, according to Zuckerman an educational institution distinguished largely for its lovely pastoral setting in a valley in western Vermont. The sense of superiority that his father had hoped to temper in his son with Dale Carnegie’s book on winning friends and influencing people flourished in the Vermont countryside like a jungle fungus. The apple-cheeked students in their white buck shoes, the Bastion pleading weekly in its editorial column for “more school spirit,” the compulsory Wednesday morning chapel sermons with visiting clergy from around the state, and the Monday evening dormitory “bull sessions” with notables like the dean of men-the ivy on the library walls, the dean told the new freshmen boys, could be heard on certain moonlit nights to whisper the word “tradition”-none of this did much to convince Zuckerman that he ought to become more of a pal to his fellow man. On the other hand, it was the pictures in the Bass catalogue of the apple- cheeked boys in white bucks crossing the sunlit New England quadrangle in the company of the apple-cheeked girls in white bucks that had in part drawn Zuckerman to Bass in the first place. To him, and to his parents, beautiful Bass seemed to partake of everything with which the word “collegiate” is so richly resonant for those who have not been beyond the twelfth grade. Moreover, when the family rode up in the spring, his mother found the dean of men-who three years later was to tell Zuckerman that he ought to be driven from the campus with a pitchfork for the so-called parody he had written in his literary magazine about the homecoming queen, a girl who happened to be an orphan from Rutland-this same dean of men, with briar pipe and football shoulders swathed in tweed, had seemed to Mrs. Zuckerman “a perfectly gracious man,” and that about sewed things up-that and the fact that there was, according to the dean, “a top-drawer Jewish fraternity” on the campus, as well as a sorority for the college’s dirty “outstanding” Jewish girls, or “gals,” as the dean called them.
Who knew, who in the Zuckerman family knew, that the very month he was to leave for his freshman year of college, Nathan would read a book called Of Time and the River that was to change not only his attitude toward Bass, but toward Life Itself?
After Bass he was drafted. Had he continued into advanced ROTC he would have entered the service as a second lieutenant in the Transportation Corps, but almost alone among the Bass undergraduates, he disapproved of the skills of warfare being taught and practiced at a private educational institution, and so after two compulsory years of marching around the quadrangle once a week with a rifle on his shoulder, he had declined an invitation from the colonel in charge to proceed further with his military training. This decision had infuriated his father, particularly as there was another war on. Once again, in the cause of democracy, American young men were leaving this world for oblivion, this time at a rate of one every sixty minutes, and twice as many each hour were losing parts of themselves in the snowdrifts and mud-fields of Korea. “Are you crazy, are you nuts to turn your back on a deal in the Transportation Corps that could mean life or death? You want to get your ass shot off in the infantry, instead? Oh, you are looking for trouble, my son, and you are going to find it, too! The shit is going to hit the fan, buddy, and you ain’t going to like it one bit! Especially if you are dead!” But nothing the elder Zuckerman could think to shout at him could change his stubborn son’s mind on this matter of principle. With somewhat less intensity (but no less befuddlement) Mr. Zuckerman had responded to his son’s announcement in his freshman year that he intended to drop out of the Jewish fraternity to which he had begun to pledge only the month before. “Tell me, Nathan, how do you quit something you don’t even belong to yet? How can you be so goddam superior to something when you don’t even know what it’s like to belong to the thing yet? Is this what I’ve got for a son all of a sudden-a quitter?”
“Of some things, yes,” was the undergraduate’s reply, spoken in that tone of cool condescension that entered into his father’s nervous system like an iron spike. Sometimes when his father began to seethe, Zuckerman would hold the telephone out at arm’s distance and just look at it with a poker face, a tactic he had seen people resort to, of course, only in the movies and for comic effect. Having counted to fifty, he would then try again to address the entrepreneur: “It’s beneath my dignity, yes, that’s correct.” Or: “No, I am not against things to be against them, I am against them on matters of principle.” “In other words,” said -seethed-Mr. Zuckerman, “you are right, if I’m getting the idea, and the rest of the world is wrong. Is that it, Nathan, you are the new god around here, and the rest of the world can just go to hell!” Coolly, coolly, so coolly that the most sensitive seismograph hooked into their long-distance connection would not have recorded the tiniest quaver in his voice: “Dad, you so broaden the terms of our discussion with a statement like that-“ and so on, temperate, logical, eminently “reasonable,” just what it took to bring on the volcano in New Jersey.
“Darling,” his mother would plead softly into the phone, “did you talk to Sherman? At least did you think to talk this over with him first?”
“Why should I want to talk it over with ‘him’?” “Because he’s your brother!” his father reminded him. “And he loves you,” his mother said. “He watched over you like a piece of precious china, darling, you remember that-he brought you that pea jacket that you wore till it was rags you loved it so, oh Nathan, please, your father is right, if you won’t listen to us, listen to him, because, when he came out of the navy, Sherman went through an independent stage exactly like the one you’re going through now. To the T.”
“Well, it didn’t do him very much good, Mother, did it?”
“WHAT!” Mr. Zuckerman, flabbergasted yet again. “What kind of way is that to talk about your brother, damn it? Who aren’t you better than-please just tell me one name, for the record book at least. Mahatma Gandhi maybe? Yehudi? Oh, do you need some humility knocked into you! Do you need a good stiff course in Dale Carnegie! Your brother happens to be a practicing orthodontist with a wonderful practice and also he is your brother.”
“Dad, brothers can have mixed feelings about one another. I believe you have mixed feelings about your own.”
“But the issue is not my brothers, the issue is yours, don’t confuse the issue, which is your KNOW-IT-ALL ARROGANCE ABOUT LIFE THAT DOESN’T KNOW A GODDAM THING!”
Then Fort Dix: midnights on the firing range, sit-ups in the rain, mounds of mashed potatoes and Del Monte fruit cup for “dinner”-and again, with powdered eggs, at dawn-and before even four of the eight weeks of basic infantry training were over, a graduate of Seton Hall College in his regiment dead of meningitis. Could his father have been right? Had his position on ROTC been nothing short of insane, given the realities of army life and the fact of the Korean War? Could he, a summa cum laude, have made such a ghastly and irreversible mistake? Oh God, suppose he were to come down now with spinal meningitis from having to defecate each morning with a mob of fifty! What a price to pay for having principles about ROTC! Suppose he were to contract the disease while scrubbing out the company’s hundred stinking garbage cans-the job that seemed always to fall to him on his marathon stints of KP. ROTC (as his father had prophesied) would get on very nice without him, ROTC would flourish, but what about the man of principle, would he keel over in a garbage pail, dead before he’d even reached the front lines?
But like Dilsey (of whom Zuckerman alone knew, in his platoon of Puerto Ricans), he endured. Basic training
