Indignation

“But your father is your father. He won’t take an aspirin for a headache. He won’t give in. He won’t even go to see the doctor about the cough. People coddle themselves, in his eyes. ‘It’s smoking,’ he says, and saying that settles it. ‘My father smoked all his life. I’ve been smoking all my life. Shecky, Muzzy, and Artie have smoked all their lives. Messners smoke. I don’t need a doctor to tell me how to cut a shoulder steak, and I don’t need a doctor to tell me about smoking.’ He can’t drive in traffic now without blowing his horn at everybody who comes anywhere near him, and when I tell him there’s no need for the horn, he shouts, ‘There isn’t? With madmen out driving cars on the roads?’ But it’s him — he’s the madman on the roads. And I can’t take anymore.”

Concerned as I was for my mother’s well-being, disturbed as I was to see her so shaken — she who was the anchor and the mainstay of our home, who, behind the counter of the butcher shop, was every bit the artist with a meat cleaver that he was — I remembered from listening to her why I was at Winesburg. Forget chapel, forget Caudwell, forget Dr. Donehower’s sermons and the girls’ convent curfew hours and everything else wrong with this place — endure what is and make it work. Because by leaving home you saved your life. You saved his. Because I would have shot him to shut him up. I could shoot him now for what he was doing to her. Yet what he was doing to himself was worse. And how do you shoot someone whose onset of craziness at the age of fifty wasn’t just disrupting his wife’s life and irreparably altering his son’s life but devastating his own?

“Mom, you’ve got to get him to Dr. Shildkret. He trusts Dr. Shildkret. He swears by Dr. Shildkret. Let’s hear what Dr. Shildkret thinks.” I did not myself have a high regard for Shildkret, least of all for his thinking; he was our doctor only because he’d gone to grade school with my father and grown up penniless on the same Newark slum street. Because Shildkret’s father was “a lazy bastard” and his mother a long-suffering woman who, in my father’s kindly estimation, qualified as “a saint,” their moron of a son was our family doctor. Woe unto us, but I didn’t know who or what else to recommend other than Shildkret.

“He won’t go,” my mother said. “I already suggested it. He refuses to go. There’s nothing wrong with him — it’s the rest of the world that’s in the wrong.”

“Then you see Shildkret. Tell him what’s happening. Hear what he says. Maybe he can send him to a specialist.”

“A specialist in driving around Newark without honking the horn at every car nearby? No. I could not do that to your father.”

“Do what?”

“Embarrass him like that in front of Dr. Shildkret. If he knew I went and talked about this behind his back, it would crush him.”

“So instead he crushes you? Look at you. You’re a wreck. You, as strong as a person can be, and you have become a wreck. The kind of wreck I would have become had I stayed with him in that house another day.”

“Darling”—here she grasped at my hand—“darling, should I? Can I possibly? I came all this way to ask you. You’re the only one I can talk to about this.”

“Could you possibly what? What are you asking?”

“I can’t say the word.”

“What word?” I asked.

“Divorce.” And then, my hand still in hers, she used both of our hands together to cover her mouth. Divorce was unknown in our Jewish neighborhood. I was led to believe it was all but unknown in the Jewish world. Divorce was shameful. Divorce was scandalous. Breaking up a family with a divorce was virtually a criminal act. Growing up, I’d never known of a single household among my friends or my schoolmates or our family’s friends where the parents were divorced or were drunks or, for that matter, owned a dog. I was raised to think all three repugnant. My mother could have stunned me more only if she’d told me she’d gone out and bought a Great Dane.

“Oh, Ma, you’re trembling. You’re in a state of shock.” As was I. Would she? Why not? I’d run off to Winesburg — why shouldn’t she get a divorce? “You’ve been married to him for twenty-five years. You love him.”

Vigorously, she shook her head. “I don’t! I hate him! I sit in the car while he’s driving and screaming to me about how everybody is in the wrong except him, and I hate and I loathe him from the bottom of my heart!”

By such vehemence we were both astonished. “That is not true,” I said. “Even if it seems true now, it’s not a permanent condition. It’s only because I’m gone and you’re all on your own with him and you don’t know what to do with him. Please go see Dr. Shildkret. At least as a start. Ask his advice.” Meanwhile, I was afraid of Shildkret’s saying, “He’s right. People don’t know how to drive anymore. I’ve noticed this myself. You get into your car these days, you take your life into your hands.” Shildkret was a dope and a lousy doctor, and it was my good luck that I had come down with appendicitis nowhere in his vicinity. He would have prescribed an enema and killed me.

Killed me. I’d caught it from my father. All I could think about were the ways I could be killed. You are odd, you know. Very odd. Odder than I think you realize. And Olivia should know how to spot oddness, should she not?

“I’m seeing a lawyer,” my mother then told me.

“No.”

“Yes. I’ve already seen him. I have an attorney,” she said, the helpless way one would say, “I’ve gone bankrupt” or “I’m going in for a lobotomy.” “I went on my own,” she said. “I can’t live any longer with your father in that house. I cannot work with him in the store. I cannot drive with him in the car. I cannot sleep beside him in the bed anymore. I don’t want him near me like that — he’s too angry a person to lie next to. It frightens me. That’s what I came to tell you.” Now she was no longer crying. Now suddenly she was herself, ready and able to do battle, and I was the one at the edge of tears, knowing that none of this would be happening had I remained at home.

It takes muscle to be a butcher, and my mother had muscles, and I felt them when she took me in her arms while I cried.

When we walked from the solarium back to the room — passing on the way Miss Clement, who, like the saint she was, kindly kept her gaze averted — Olivia was there arranging a second bouquet of flowers she’d brought with her on her arrival a few minutes earlier. Her sweater sleeves were pushed up so as not to get them wet with the water she’d put into a second vase she’d found, and so there was her scar, the scar on the wrist of the very hand with which she had driven Miss Clement into silence, the very hand with which we pursued our indecent ends in a hospital room while around us in the other rooms people were behaving according to rules that didn’t even allow for loud talking. Now Olivia’s scar looked to me as prominent as if she had cut herself open only days before.

As a child, I had sometimes been taken by my father to the slaughterhouse on Astor Street in Newark’s Ironbound section. And I had been taken to the chicken market at the far end of Bergen Street. At the chicken market I saw them killing the chickens. I saw them kill hundreds of chickens according to the kosher laws. First my father would pick out the chickens he wanted. They were in a cage, maybe five tiers high, and he would reach in to pull one out, hold on to its head so it didn’t bite him, and feel the sternum. If it wiggled, the chicken was young and was not going to be tough; if it was rigid, more than likely the chicken was old and tough. He would also blow on its feathers so he could see the skin — he wanted the flesh to be yellow, a little fatty. Whichever ones he picked, he put into one of the boxes that they had, and then the shochet, the slaughterer, would ritually slaughter them. He would bend the neck backward — not break it, just arc it back, maybe pull a few of the feathers to get the neck clear so he could see what he was doing — and then with his razor-sharp knife he would cut the throat. For the chicken to be kosher he had to cut the throat in one smooth, deadly stroke. One of the strangest sights I remember from my early youth was the slaughtering of the nonkosher chickens, where they lopped the head right off. Swish! Plop! Whereupon they put the headless chicken down into a funnel. They had about six or seven funnels in a circle. There the blood could drain from the body into a big barrel. Sometimes the chickens’ legs were still moving, and occasionally a chicken would fall out of the funnel and, as the saying has it, begin running around with its head cut off. Such chickens might bump into a wall but they ran anyway. They put the kosher chickens in the funnels too. The bloodletting, the killing — my father was hardened to these things, but at the beginning I was of course unsettled, much as I tried not to show it. I was a little one, six, seven years old, but this was the business, and soon I accepted that the business was a mess. The same at the slaughterhouse, where to kosher the animal, you have to get the blood out. In a nonkosher slaughterhouse they can shoot the animal, they can knock it unconscious, they can kill it any way they want to kill it. But to be kosher they’ve got to bleed it to