The feeling today, if anyone troubles himself to articulate it, is that the Breavmans are in a decline. “Be careful,” Lawrence Breavman warns his executive cousins, “or your children will speak with accents.”
Ten years ago Breavman compiled the Code of Breavman:
We are Victorian gentlemen of Hebraic persuasion.
We cannot be positive, but we are fairly certain that any other Jews with money got it on the black market.
We do not wish to join Christian clubs or weaken our blood through inter-marriage. We wish to be regarded as peers, united by class, education, power, differentiated by home rituals.
We refuse to pass the circumcision line.
We were civilized first and drink less, you lousy bunch of bloodthirsty drunks.
6
A rat is more alive than a turtle.
A turtle is slow, cold, mechanical, nearly a toy, a shell with legs. Their deaths didn’t count. But a white rat is quick and warm in its envelope of skin.
Krantz kept his in an empty radio. Breavman kept his in a deep honey tin. Krantz went away for the holidays and asked Breavman to take care of his. Breavman dropped it in with his.
Feeding rats is work. You have to go down to the basement. He forgot for a while. Soon he didn’t want to think about the honey tin and avoided the basement stairs.
He went down at last and there was an awful smell coming from the tin. He wished it were still full of honey. He looked inside and one rat had eaten most of the stomach of the other rat. He didn’t care which was his. The alive rat jumped at him and then he knew it was crazy.
He held the tin way in front because of the stink and filled it with water. The dead one floated on top with the hole between its ribs and hind legs showing. The alive one scratched the side.
He was called for lunch which began with marrow. His father tapped it out of a bone. It came from inside an animal.
When he went down again both were floating. He emptied the can in the driveway and covered it with snow. He vomited and covered that with snow.
Krantz was mad. He wanted to have a funeral at least, but they couldn’t find the bodies because of some heavy snowfalls.
When Spring began they attacked islands of dirty snow in the driveway. Nothing. Krantz said that seeing things were as they were Breavman owed him money for a white rat. He’d lent his and got nothing back, not even a skeleton. Breavman said that a hospital doesn’t pay anything when someone dies there. Krantz said that when you lend somebody something and that person loses it he has to pay for it. Breavman said that when it’s alive it isn’t a thing and besides he was doing him a favour when he took care of his. Krantz said that killing a rat was some favour and they fought it out on the wet gravel. Then they went downtown and bought new ones.
Breavman’s escaped and lived in a closet under the stairs. He saw its eyes with a flashlight. For a few mornings he put out Puffed Wheat in front of the door and it was nibbled, but soon he didn’t bother.
When summer came and the shutters and screens were being taken out one of the men discovered a little skeleton. It had patches of hair stuck to it. He dropped it in a garbage can.
Breavman fished it out when the man was gone and ran to Krantz’s. He said it was the skeleton of the first rat and Krantz could have a funeral if he wanted. Krantz said he didn’t need a stinky old skeleton, he had a live one. Breavman said that was fine but he had to admit they were quits. Krantz admitted.
Breavman buried it under the pansies, one of which his father took each morning for his buttonhole. Breavman took new interest in smelling them.
7
Come back, stern Bertha, come back and lure me up the torture tree. Remove me from the bedrooms of easy women. Extract the full due. The girl I had last night betrays the man who pays her rent.
That is how Breavman invoked the spirit of Bertha many mornings of his twenties.
Then his bones return to chicken-width. His nose retreats from impressive Semitic prominence to a childhood Gentile obscurity. Body hair blows away with the years like an ill-fated oasis. He is light enough for handbars and apple branches. The Japs and Germans are wrong.
“Play it now, Bertha?”
He has followed her to precarious parts of the tree.
“Higher!” she demands.
Even the apples are trembling. The sun catches her flute, turns the polished wood to a moment of chrome.
“Now?”
“First you have to say something about God.”
“God is a jerk.”
“Oh, that’s nothing. I won’t play for that.”
The sky is blue and the clouds are moving. There is rotting fruit on the ground some miles below.
“Fug God.”
“Something terribly, horribly dirty, scaredy-cat. The real word.”
“Fuck God!”
He waits for the fiery wind to lift him out of his perch and leave him dismembered on the grass.
“Fuck GOD!”
Breavman sights Krantz who is lying beside a coiled hose and unravelling a baseball.
“Hey, Krantz, listen to this. FUCK GOD!”
Breavman never heard his own voice so pure. The air is a microphone.
Bertha alters her fragile position to strike his cheek with her flute.
“Dirty tongue!”
“It was your idea.”
She strikes again for piety and tears off apples as she crashes past the limbs. Nothing of her voice as she falls.
Krantz and Breavman survey her for one second twisted into a position she could never achieve in gym. Her bland Saxon face is further anesthetized by uncracked steel-rimmed glasses. A sharp bone of the arm has escaped the skin.
After the ambulance Breavman whispered.
“Krantz, there’s something special about my voice.”
“No, there isn’t.”
“There is so. I can make things happen.”
“You’re a nut.”
“Want to hear
