The Cabin Page 3

  In the cab she told me she liked the matzoh brei.

  I waddled up the stairs to my apartment, the young woman behind me, and was young enough to engage in embraces to which, at that point, neither of us was much inclined.

  That is the story of the bearskin rug, and of my Chelsea apartment. I would sit by the rear window at an oak-and-steel café table, and smoke cigarettes, and look at the row of gardens running between the backs of the houses on Nineteenth and Twentieth streets. They could well have been the gardens that inspired O. Henry’s “The Last Leaf.”

  I had no television and, for the longest time, no telephone. I had a lot of books, and, for the first time in my life, a little money. It was a romantic time.

  P.Q.

  In 1965 I worked for several months at a roadside diner in Trois-Rivières, Province de Quebec, on the autoroute, halfway between Montreal and Quebec City. It was there that I learned to speak a little French. There were no tourists in the city. Just the natives and sailors off of the boats that had come down the St. Lawrence to the paper mills.

  I lived there in the fall. The weather was cold and damp, and, because of the paper mills, the whole town smelled like the inside of a wet cardboard box.

  The diner was right on the highway. My day there ran from 10 A.M., setting up, till 1 A.M., locking up, when I’d head the two miles back down Route 2 into the town proper.

  It was twenty-seven years ago, which either is or is not a long time, but seems the impossibly distant past, when I remember that I would often hitch a ride back into town on what the proprietor, Roger Bellerive, assured me was the last horse-drawn milk truck on the continent. Occasionally, I’d hitch a ride back on the street sweeper.

  I was young and lonely, and I remember a very potent Quebec potion called simply Alcool, a clear spirit of the white lightning variety, which I bought by the shot and the pint bottle; and a poster for the latest Elvis film, L’Amour en quatrième vitesse, which translation I found, ethnocentrist that I was, very dilute in French.

  And there was a waitress co-worker of mine who invited me to cross the river and see her home several times. I was seventeen and she twenty-four. She told me that one had only to sleep with a Quebecoise three times in order to learn the language, but I didn’t go, since she seemed, at twenty-four, vastly too old for me.

  The sailors came in and ordered hamburgers and root beer, and I went home stinking of grease and the Ajax I used to scrub down the griddle.

  That fall I left Trois-Rivières once, to attend Yom Kippur services in Montreal, eighty miles away.

  I hitchhiked down the highway in a vicious snowstorm and found myself stranded some unknown miles short of Montreal, in the middle of the storm, in the middle of the night. There were no cars coming by. I walked to a motel back down the road. The office was locked, but one of the cabins was open, so I let myself in and shivered all night under my thin coat.

  The next morning I made my way into Montreal. My dress-for-temple shoes were dissolving on my feet. I found the temple and was told I couldn’t get in without a ticket, and I think I probably took a bus back to Trois-Rivières. As I write, I remember a phrase from the period: that the Quebecois were a minority in Canada, and that the English were a minority in Quebec, and that the Jews were a minority everywhere. In any case, I didn’t get into the temple, but what would amuse a seventeen-year-old more than a feeling of righteous wrath and misunderstood religious fervor?

  A year from the next summer, several college chums and I went north to find work at Montreal’s Expo ’67. We were told we couldn’t work in Canada without a Canadian Social Security card, and we all bemoaned the nice fat jobs going begging until one day I walked over to the Social Security office and asked them for a card, and they gave me one and, as the Brits have it, “Bob was my Uncle.”

  I auditioned for and got a job as an “acro dancer” with the Tibor Rudas Australian Living Screen.

  Tibor’s company was part of the Maurice Chevalier extravaganza, Toutes voiles dehors!!!, which played the Autostade at Expo ’67.

  The stage was in the middle of that stadium. Behind us was a drive-in—sized movie screen that was slashed vertically at intervals of one foot. A motion picture, a Parisian-street-scene drama, was projected on the screen, and at various points the cinematic characters would run toward the audience out of the movie and through the slits in the screen onto the stage before it.

  I, as one of the acro dancers, portrayed a Parisian apache thug. On cue, I ran between the strips and onto the stage, where my confreres and I performed a rollicking dance, and, on cue, ran back into the screen, where our filmic doppelgängers continued the action.

  At the end of the show, all of the extravaganza, which included the Barbadian Esso Triple-E Steel Band, and that’s as far as my memory goes, joined Maurice Chevalier onstage and sang something or other.

  I particularly remember the Esso, as they stayed in the Autostade night after night and drank Barbadian rum and partied, and on a few of those nights I was privileged to stay with them.

  Expo was a treat if one worked there. The employee’s pass got one straight into any of the exhibits without a wait; and, better, allowed one to stay on in the park after it had officially closed to the populace and metamorphosed into one big party.

  I remember friends who, by the luck of the draw, got hired by the fair and assigned to sell programs at the main entrance of the brand-new metro—I was there on the metro’s inaugural day, and stood in line and rode it. I think that is the only historical event in which I have participated. I once chatted with Howard Hughes, but I do not think that counts as “of historical significance,” since it is, arguably, not important, and also since no one believes me.

  In any case, friends were assigned, I say, to sell these programs at the entrance to the fair. The programs went for a buck, my friends got a 10 percent rake-off, and they were pulling down one thousand dollars, Canadian, a day. In 1967. I occasionally wonder what I would have done had I had that money at that age. I would, in my fantasies, have saved every cent and established my young self as a this or that. I would, perhaps, have bought a small business of some description and stayed in Canada. Who can say?

  Well, I can say.

  If I’d had that money as a nineteen-year-old, I’d have bought a car and a guitar and some clothes and partied myself into a liver condition. But I digress.

  It seems that I was making three hundred or so a week at the Autostade, and was augmenting this with my stipend for work as Johannes Gutenberg.

  Yes, if you went to Expo ’67, the odds are good you saw me in the West German pavilion, dressed in a leather apron and running a replica of Gutenberg’s press. There I churned out printed black-letter facsimiles of Gutenberg’s fifteen-something-or-other Bible, and shrugged distractedly in response to questions in many tongues.

  I lived in a hovel on Ste. Catherine Street with my fellow collegians, and we plotted the formation of a new Canadian theater company. Which company almost came into existence.

  I think we did some few readings in our Ste. Catherine Street apartment. I cannot remember what we may have done, but it was probably something by Beckett or Pinter, the only two writers we deemed worthy of the name in 1967.

  While wandering the fairgrounds early one morning before the starting bell, I met a Japanese man. He was lost, and in some pidgin amalgam, I found out where he wanted to go and took him there. He gave me a card that explained he was the manager-director of the next world’s fair, which was to be in Osaka, and he indicated that I should come work for him.

  That’s the prologue to my Horatio Alger story, except that as the 1970 Osaka fair approached, I was poor and friendless in Chicago or some sodding where, and could not find the magic card. And to this day …

  In 1969 I was back living in Montreal, acting in a theater company at McGill University and cheerfully starving. There was a workingmen’s café over near Simpson’s department store that served a fresh fried trout and a short beer f
or one dollar, and I ate there every day, and hung around, and salted my beer to bring the foam back to it; and there was a famous and romantic bistro over on Mountain Street, the name of which I have forgotten.

  I was terrible as Lenny in The Homecoming, and perhaps passable as the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland. The theater company fell apart, I moved back to Chicago, where I wandered around looking for work, and never got to Japan.

  I like the French Canadians. They have an indigenous culture and they’re happy with it, they showed La Salle the way to Chicago, thus saving a million lawyers the ignominy of working on a Street with No Name, and they have always treated me more than fair.

  The Watch

  The Chicago in which I wanted to participate was a workers’ town. It was, and, in my memory, is, the various districts and the jobs that I did there: factories out in Cicero or down in Blue Island—the Inland Steel plant in East Chicago; Yellow Cab Unit Thirteen on Halsted.

  I grew up on Dreiser and Frank Norris and Sherwood Anderson, and I felt, following what I took to be their lead, that the bourgeoisie was not the fit subject of literature.

  So the various jobs paid my rent, and showed me something of life, and they were irrefutable evidence of my escape from the literarily unworthy middle class. For not only was I a son of the middle class, I was, and perhaps I still am, the ne plus ultra of that breed: a Nice Jewish Boy. And, as that Nice Jewish Boy, I went to college.

  I went to college in the East, at a countercultural institution, a year-round camp, really, where I and those of my class griped about the war and took ourselves quite seriously.

  The college was in the very lovely midst of nowhere in New England. It was ten miles from the nearest town; those who did not possess either an auto or a good friend with an auto were under a de facto house arrest on the college grounds.

  I did not have an auto. My father was the child of immigrants, born right off the boat. He had sent his firstborn son, in effect, to finishing school, and it never would have occurred to him to compound this enormity by supplying that son with the sybaritic indulgence of a car.

  Neither would it have occurred to me to expect the same. However, I had been told, from what seems to me to’ve been my earliest youth, that, on my graduation from college, I’d be given a convertible.

  It was not any car that I’d receive, it was the convertible. How this notion got started, I don’t know. But my grandmother said it, and my father said it, and I looked forward to it as a fixed point in my life.

  Was it a bribe, was it to be a reward? I don’t know. It was an out-of-character assurance on my father’s part; for he was capable of generosity, and, indeed, on occasion, of real lavishness, but both, in my memory, were much more likely to stem from impulse than from a thought-out plan. However, he had promised it, and not only had the family heard it, but we joked about it and it became, it seemed, part of our family phrase book; e.g., “Study hard, or you won’t get into college, and then you know what you aren’t going to get.”

  So much that I forgot about it. It was nothing to long for, or even, truly, to anticipate. The one event would bring about the other, as retirement, the agreed-upon pension—not a subject for anticipation, or, even, on receipt, for gratitude, but the correct conclusion of an agreement.

  It was my final year at college. Graduation was to come in May, and in the preceding November I would turn twenty-one. In three and a half years at college I had learned not a damned thing. I had no skills, nor demonstrable talents. Upon graduation I would be out in the world with no money, nor prospects, nor plan. Not only did I not care, I had given it no thought at all; and I believe I assumed that some happy force would intervene and allow me to spend the rest of my life in school.

  Just before the Thanksgiving break my father called. He told me he was looking forward to my return to Chicago for the holiday. Now, this was news to me, as we had not discussed my coming to Chicago, and I’d made plans to spend the long weekend with friends in the East. But, no, he said, the holiday fell two days from my birthday, and it was important for him that I be back home.

  I tried to beg off, and he persevered. He pressed me to come home, and told me that it was essential, as he had something for me. He was sending me a ticket, and I had to come.

  Well. There I was. It was the convertible, and my father had remembered his promise, and was calling to tell me that he was about to make good on his pledge.

  I left the phone booth smiling, and quite touched. I told my friends I would be flying to Chicago, but I would be driving back. I flew to O’Hare and took a bus downtown, and took a city bus to the North Side.

  On the plane and on the buses I rehearsed both my gratitude and my surprise. Surprise, I knew, was difficult to counterfeit, and this troubled me. I would hate to disappoint my father, or to give him less than what he might consider his just due for the award of a magnificent gift.

  But no, I thought, no. The moment boded well to sweep us up in sentiment free of hypocrisy on either of our parts. For was he not the child of immigrants? And was he not raised in poverty, in the Depression, by his mother, my beloved grandmother, and had we not heard countless times, my sister and I, of their poverty, and our ingratitude? And here before us was a ceremony of abundance … a ceremony, finally, of manhood. It was my twenty-first birthday; I was graduating from college.

  I got off the Broadway bus, and walked down the side street, rehearsing all the while, and there, across from his building, was the car.

  No. I had doubted. I realized that as I saw the car. No, I would admit it. To my shame. I’d doubted him. How could I have doubted? What other reason would he have had for his insistence, his almost pleading that I come back home? Of course it was the car; and I was ashamed I had doubted him. I looked at the car from across the street.

  It was a Volkswagen convertible. It was a tricked-out model called the Super Beetle. It had outsized bubble skirts and wheels, and it was painted with broad racing stripes. I seem to remember a metallic black, with stripes of yellow and orange. I chuckled. I’m not sure what sort of a vehicle I’d expected—perhaps I’d thought he’d take me shopping, down on Western Avenue, and we’d be buyers together, at the horse fair. I don’t know what I expected from him, but when I saw that Beetle, I was moved. It was, I thought, a choice both touching and naïve. It seemed that he had tried to put himself in the place of his son. It was as if he’d thought, What sort of car would the youth of today desire? And there was his answer, across the street.

  I thought, No, that’s not my style, and then reproached myself. And I was worthy of reproach. For the gift was magnificent, and, with the gift, his effort to understand me—that was the gift, the magnificent gift. Rather than insist that I be like him, he’d tried to make himself like me. And if my chums thought that the car was somewhat obvious, well, they could go to hell. For I was not some kid in the schoolyard who could be embarrassed by his parents; I was a man, and the owner of a valuable possession. The car could take me to work, it could take me from one city to the next, and finally, my father’d given it to me.

  As I walked close to it I saw the error of my momentary reluctance to appreciate its decoration. It was truly beautiful. That such a car would not have been my first choice spoke to the defects not of the car, but of my taste.

  I remember the new car sticker on the window, and I remember thinking that my dad must have expected me to come into the building by the other door, or he wouldn’t have left the gift out here so prominently. Or did he mean me to see it? That was my question, as I rode the elevator up.

  He met me at the door. There was the table, laid out for a party in the living room beyond. Did he look wary? No. I wondered whether to say which route I had taken home, but, no, if he’d wanted to test me, he would ask. No. It was clear that I wasn’t supposed to’ve seen the car.

  But why would he have chanced my spotting it? Well, I thought, it’s obvious. They’d delivered the car from the showroom, and he’d, carefully, as he did
all things, instructed them on where it should be parked, and the car salesman had failed him. I saw that this could present a problem: if we came out of the building on the side opposite from where the car was parked—if we began what he would, doubtless, refer to as a simple walk, and could not find the car (which, after all, would not be parked where he’d directed it should be), would it be my place to reveal I’d seen it?

  No. For he’d be angry then, at the car salesman. It would be wiser to be ignorant, and not be part of that confluence which spoiled his surprise. I could steer our progress back into the building by the other door. Aha. Yes. That is what I’d do.

  There was another possibility: that we would leave the building by the door near the car, and that he’d come across it in the unexpected place, and be off-guard. But that need not be feared, as, if I stayed oblivious to his confusion for the scantest second, he would realize that my surprise would in no way be mitigated by the car’s location. He would improvise, and say, “Look here!” That he’d surely have words with the car dealership later was not my responsibility.

  We sat down to dinner. My father, my stepmother, my half-siblings, and several aunts. After the meal my father made a speech about my becoming a man. He told the table how he’d, in effect, demanded my return as he had something to give me. Then he reached in the lapel pocket of his jacket, draped over the back of his chair, and brought out a small case. Yes, I thought, this is as it should be. There’s the key.

  Some further words were said. I took the case, and fought down an impulse to confess that I knew what it contained, et cetera, thus finessing the question of whether or not to feign surprise. I thanked him and opened the case, inside of which there was a pocket watch.

  I looked at the watch, and at the case beneath the watch, where the key would be found. There was no key. I understood that this gift would be in two parts, that this was the element of the trip that was the surprise. I’d underestimated my father. How could I have thought that he would let an opportunity for patriarchal drama drift by unexploited.