My Life As A Man

him, especially now that he is the bedridden one, and I live in self-exile thousands of miles from his bed.

When I was the sickly, feverish patient, I felt something more like mystification, as though he were a kind of talking electrical toy come to play with me promptly each evening at six. His idea of amusing me was to teach me to solve the sort of arithmetical puzzles at which he himself was a whiz. “‘Marking Down,’” he would say, not unlike a recitation student announcing the tide of a poem. “A clothing dealer, trying to dispose of an overcoat cut in last year’s style, marked it down from its original price of thirty dollars to twenty-four. Failing to make a sale, he reduced the price still further to nineteen dollars and twenty cents. Again he found no takers, so he tried another price reduction and this time sold it.” Here he would pause; if I wished I might ask him to repeat any or all of the details. If not, he proceeded. “All right, Nathan; what was the selling price, if the last markdown was consistent with the others?” Or: “‘Making a Chain.’ A lumberjack has six sections of chain, each consisting of four links. If the cost of cutting open a link-“ and so on. The next day, while my Mother whistled Gershwin and laundered my father’s shirts, I would daydream in my bed about the clothing dealer and the lumberjack. To whom had the haberdasher finally sold the overcoat? Did the man who bought it realize it was cut in last year’s style? If he wore it to a restaurant, would people laugh? And what did “last year’s style” look like anyway? “ ‘Again he found no takers,’” I would say aloud, finding much to feel melancholy about in that idea. I still remember how charged for me was that word “takers.” Could it have been the lumberjack with the six sections of chain who, in his rustic innocence, had bought the overcoat cut in last year’s style? And why suddenly did he need an overcoat? Invited to a fancy ball? By whom? My mother thought the questions I raised about these puzzles were “cute” and was glad they gave me something to think about when she was occupied with housework and could not take the time to play go fish or checkers; my father, on the other hand, was disheartened to find me intrigued by fantastic and irrelevant details of geography and personality and intention instead of the simple beauty of the arithmetical solution. He did not think that was intelligent of me, and he was right.

I have no nostalgia for that childhood of illness, none at all. In early adolescence, I underwent daily schoolyard humiliation (at the time, it seemed to me there could be none worse) because of my physical timidity and hopelessness at all sports. Also, I was continually enraged by the attention my parents insisted upon paying to my health, even after I had emerged, at the age of sixteen, into a beefy, broad-shouldered boy who, to compensate for his uncoordinated, ludicrous performances in right field or on the foul line, took to shooting craps in the fetid washroom of the corner candy store and rode out on Saturday nights in a car full of “smoking wise guys”-my father’s phrase-to search in vain for that whorehouse that was rumored to be located somewhere in the state of New Jersey. The dread I felt was of course even greater than my parents’: surely I would awaken one morning with a murmuring heart, or gasping for air, or with one of my fevers of a hundred and four… These fears caused my assault upon them to be particularly heartless, even for a teenager, and left them dazed and frightened of me for years thereafter. Had my worst enemy said, “I hope you the, Zuckerman,” I could not have been any more provoked than I was when my well-meaning father asked if I had remembered to take my vitamin capsule, or when my Mother, to see if a cold had made me feverish, did so under the guise of giving my forehead a lingering kiss at the dinner table. How all that tenderness enraged me! I remember that it was actually a relief to me when my sister’s first husband got caught with his fist in the till of his uncle’s heating-oil firm, and Sonia became the focus of their concern. And of my concern. She would sometimes come back to the house to cry on my seventeen-year-old shoulder, after having been to visit Billy in jail where he was serving a year and a day; and how good it felt, how uplifting it was, not to be on the receiving end of the solicitude, as was the case when Sonia and I were children and she would entertain the little shut-in by the hour, and without complaint.

A few years later, when I was away at Rutgers, Billy did my parents the favor of hanging himself by a cord from the drapery rod in their bedroom. I doubt that he expected it would hold him; knowing Billy, I guess he wanted the rod to give under his weight so that he might be found, still breathing, in a heap on the floor when my parents came back from their shopping. The sight of a son-in-law with a sprained ankle and a rope around his neck was supposed to move my father to volunteer to pay Billy’s five-thousand-dollar debt to his bookie. But the rod turned out to be stronger than Billy had thought, and he was strangled to death. Good riddance, one would think. But no; the next year Sunny married (in my father’s phrase) “another one.” Same wavy black hair, same “manly” cleft in his chin, same repellent background. Johnny’s weakness was not horses but hookers. The marriage has flourished, nonetheless. Each time my brother-in-law gets caught, he falls to his knees and begs Sunny’s forgiveness; this gesture seems to go a long way with my sister-not so with our father: “Kisses her shoes,” he would say, closing his eyes in disgust; “actually kisses shoes, as though that were a sign of love, of respect-of anything!” There are four handsome wavy-haired children, or were when last I saw them all in 1962: Donna, Louis, John Jr., and Marie (that name the unkindest cut of all). John Sr. builds swimming pools and brings in enough each week to be able to spend a hundred dollars on a New York call girl without feeling a thing, financially speaking. When last I saw it, their summer house in the Italian Catskills had even more pink “harem” pillows in the living room than the one in Scotch Plains, and an even grander pepper mill; in both “homes,” the silver, the linens, and the towels are monogrammed SZR, my sister’s initials.

How come? I used to be plagued by that question. How could it be that the sister of mine who had rehearsed for hours on end in our living room, over and over again singing to me the songs from Song of Norway and The Student Prince until I wished I were Norwegian or nobility; the sister who took “voice” from Dr. Bresslenstein in his studio in North Philadelphia and at fifteen was already singing “Because” for money at weddings; a sister who had the voluptuous, haughty airs of a prima donna when the other little girls were still fretting over boys and acne -how could she wind up in a house with a harem “motif,” mothering children taught by nuns, and playing “Jerry Vale Sings Italian Hits” on the stereo to entertain our silent parents when they come for a Sunday visit? How? Why?

I used to wonder, when Sonia married for the second time, if perhaps she were involved in a secret and mysterious religious rite: if she had not deliberately set out to mortify herself, so as to sound to the depths her spiritual being. I would imagine her in bed at night (yes, in bed), her pretty-boy slob of a husband asleep beside her, and Sonia exultant in the dark with the knowledge that unbeknownst to everyone-everyone being the bewildered parents and incredulous college-boy brother-she continued to be the very same person who used to enchant us from the stage of the Y with what Bresslenstein (a poor refugee from Palestine, but according to himself formerly the famous impresario of Munich) described to my mother as “a beautiful beautiful coloratura quality-the beginnings of another Lily Pons.” I could imagine her one evening at dinnertime knocking on the back door to our apartment, her black hair to her shoulders again, and wearing the same long embroidered dress in which she had appeared in The Student Prince-my graceful and vivacious sister, whose appearance on a stage would cause tears of pride to spring to my eyes, our Lily Pons, our Galli-Curci, returning to us, as bewitching as ever and uncorrupted: “1 had to do it,” she explains, when we three rush as one to embrace her, “otherwise it meant nothing.”

In brief: I could not easily make peace with the fact that I had a sister in the suburbs, whose pastimes and adornments-vulgar to a snobbish college sophomore, an elitist already reading Allen Tate on the sublime and Dr. Leavis on Matthew Arnold with his breakfast cereal-more or less resembled those of millions upon millions of American families. Instead I imagined Sonia Zuckerman Ruggieri in Purgatorio.

Lydia Jorgenson Ketterer I imagined in Hell. But who wouldn’t have, to hear those stories out of her lurid past? Beside hers, my own childhood, frailty, fevers, and all, seemed a version of paradise; for where I had been the child served, she had been the child servant, the child slave, round-the-clock nurse to a hypochondriacal mother and fair game to a benighted father.

The story of incest, as Lydia told it, was simple enough, so simple that it staggered me. It was simply inconceivable to me at the time that an act I associated wholly with a great work of classical drama could actually have taken place, without messengers and choruses and oracles, between a Chicago milkman in his Bloomfield Farms coveralls and his sleepy little blue-eyed daughter before she went off to school. Yet it had. “Once upon a time,” as Lydia liked to begin the story, early on a winter morning, as he was about to set off to fetch his delivery truck, her father came into her room and lay down beside her in the bed, dressed for work. He was trembling and in tears. “You’re all I have, Lydia, you’re all Daddy has. I’m married to a corpse.” Then he lowered his coveralls to his ankles, all because he was married to a corpse. “Simple as that,” said Lydia. Lydia the child, like Lydia the adult, did not scream out, nor did she reach up and sink her teeth into his neck once he was over her. The thought of biting into his Adam’s apple occurred to her, but she was afraid that his screams would awaken her mother, who needed her sleep. She was afraid that his screams would awaken her mother. And, moreover,