The Laws of Our Fathers Read online

  Against the counsel of an inner voice, I asked what he meant.

  'The American thing, man. White men have been destroying people of color around the globe since the sixteenth century, taking their countries, killing them, or making them slaves. The war in Vietnam and the war on the US plains, man - same damn thing. You think it's just coincidental that those grunts in Nam call NLF territory "Indian Country"? Think it's an accident we dropped the A-bomb on the yellow folks in Japan and not the whites in Germany? And now, man, if one planet ain't enough, now you-all gonna colonize the fucking moon.' These imperialist designs, Hobie said, were betrayed everywhere, not merely in the gross manifestations, as in Vietnam, but in the seemingly innocuous items of daily life. Hobie was now convinced that refined sugar was the product of a ruthless oligopoly, the subjugators of Cuba and Hawaii, who had purified their product in order to addict children, while appealing to the basic racist subtext of American life by turning a brown commodity white. The same was true of cocaine. 'White,' said Hobie. 'Purity, propriety, cleanliness, and stature. This country's got white-is-right on the brain. Look at all those dudes going to work every day in white shirts, washing their hands in Ivory soap. Think about it, man,' he demanded. 'Think about it.'

  I studied him for quite some time, then told him he was mouthing Black Panther bullshit. He became incredibly provoked.

  'They are powerful black men!' he shouted. 'Can't you dig? The Panthers are exactly what America has not wanted to see for four hundred years, man. They are African males, with their great big guns, not runnin, not hidin, sayin, Stick 'em up, motherfucker, I want what's mine.'

  'You're fucked,' I said. 'You're out of your gourd.'

  'Man,' Hobie told me, 'you can't even see me anymore. If I'm not just some cute Negro with a bunch of amusing things to say, you can't cope. Let's go,' he told Lucy and stalked out.

  I sat there an instant, unhappy with myself. I briefly looked to Sonny and Lucy for consolation, but I finally followed him out. On the crowded street of low dun-colored buildings, Hobie stood on the walk, observing the streaming traffic mounting the hills of Van Ness. One of the aboriginal fern bars was down on the corner.

  'If I've been talking down to what you believe, then I'm really sorry,' I told him. 'I've got my own thing right at the moment. But I get it. You know. I'm with you. I've always been with you.'

  'You won't be there forever, man. Nobody white's gonna be there forever.'

  'How's that?'

  'This country's for you, man. It's for you.'

  'It is, huh? That's why I have to run away from it?'

  'Oh, you know. Time passes.'

  I couldn't believe it. I swore at him.

  'Okay,' he said. 'I'm just saying how it is. I know you're against things right now. Cause right now they're gonna draft your ass.'

  'Right and you're a disinterested philosopher. You care about the oppression of people of color because you're a Negro - or black, or whatever word it is this week.'

  'But here it is, man.' He pounded on his palm. 'Twenty years from now, you'll be rich and fat and white - and I'll still be a Negro, or whatever it is that week.'

  'And I'll be a fucking Canadian.'

  I understood all right. It was clear now. We had been through college, we had been through everything. We had been children, we had played intense boy-games, football on cold afternoons, wrestling where he always was pinning me, sitting on my throat or bloodying my nose. We'd done junior high school who-loves-who, showed each other our pubic hair when it started to grow in. In high school we'd made friends with Weird John Savio, who took us driving on the frontage road behind the highway in his mother's three-speed Fairlane, which he ran at no miles per hour until the engine smoked. In college, we stayed up all night at least twice a week, drawing anyone we liked into our discussions about

  Occam's razor and various proofs for the existence of God, pondering the implications if it turned out that it was actually life on Earth that was really Hell. We secretly knew we were the instigators of Easton's legendary freshman-sophomore water fight. We'd done heavy doses of cannabis and Benzedrine hoping to bend our minds about what Einstein had meant when he postulated that matter equaled time. We had been through everything. But we were not going to get through this.

  I turned into a nag, worrying at Sonny: Come with. In my anxiety, she glimmered like a treasured object. I needed love's comfort, a body to hold, her to believe in. If she would come, I could go.

  Sonny continued to toy with the idea. I could tell she wanted to think of herself as valiant and right-thinking. But she took a job waiting tables at Robson's, a ham-and-egger on Campus Boul, and proceeded with her Peace Corps application. As time grew short, I insisted on personalizing things. The real issue, I told her again and again, was her commitment to me. She'd sit in the living room with her eyes closed, trying to endure my stupidity.

  ' Seth, it's not how I feel about you that matters. I'm twenty-two. If I was thirty-two, if I was forty-two and we were together, that would be one thing. But I want a life. My own life. I've never lied to you. Or led you on. Have I?'

  'Sonny, I don't have any choices now.'

  ‘I know, baby, and that's what makes it hard. Because what you're doing is important. And I support it. But thinking it through, I've spent hours, days - And look, how is this any different than if you were doing something else that was important - if you got into grad school somewhere or found a great job someplace? Suppose somebody offered you a job in Hollywood, writing movies? You'd go. Right? Would you expect me to jump up and follow you?'

  Most of these discussions ended up as fights - bitter, accusatory. Without Hobie, I felt bereft, especially as my parents grew more frantic. One night late in March, Sonny and I arrived home from

  a movie on campus to hear the second phone ringing in our apartment. It was my mother, no doubt hoping to twist my innards. She was beleaguering me, calling almost daily, either to implore me to come home to visit them or to see if magically I had divined some alternative to going to Canada. 'Oh man.' I was in no mood.

  'Call them back,' Sonny suggested. But I went to the phone. It was, instead, my father. There were few pleasantries. He got to the point.

  'Your mother has informed me that if you carry through with this plan to emigrate, she feels we have no choice but to follow you wherever you settle.'

  For quite some time neither of us said anything further. It seemed preposterous. My parents never vacationed, never left Kindle County, travel for them long before having lost any association with pleasure.

  'You're kidding.'

  'Deadly serious,' he said.

  'She's crazy,' I finally managed.

  'We share an opinion,' my father replied. My mother, no doubt, was standing nearby, a hand poised dubiously near her mouth as she listened.

  'Have you tried to talk her out of this?'

  'Repeatedly.'

  'You're not coming, are you?'

  'Me? My business, as you know, is here. At my age the possibility of starting again in another city - let alone another country-is unthinkable.' Retirement was unmentionable. Without an income stream, my father would feel cut off from his vital source.

  'So?'

  'Your mother is determined.'

  'She wouldn't go without you. Who would take care of her?' My father did not answer at first. ‘I do not know precisely what she envisions. Her son, of course, will be nearby.'

  A sound of pure agony escaped me. 'Will she talk to me?'

  He spoke to her momentarily, then informed me sternly, 'No. There are no discussions. This is, you see, a decided matter. PUrikt'

  I was reeling, but crawling through me was the unlikely sensation of some sympathy for my father. He sounded collected, almost cheerfully so, but if she left, I knew he would sink into the clutches of his own peculiarities, afraid to venture beyond home, spooked by wrath and paranoia.

  'Seth, I hope this goes to illustrate-' My father could not continue. His voice shook, wi
th either rage or the humiliation of having to prevail upon me. But eventually he forced himself to finish. 'I hope you will reconsider.'

  I waited quite some time, but told him at last what I always did: I had no choice.

  'This is not a plan,' he cried. 'This is madness. You have no concept of what you are doing. How will you support yourself?' my father asked, always to him the foremost question. 'You cannot provide for yourself, let alone two people.'

  'She's not coming,' I said. 'You know she's not coming.'

  'On the contrary,' he said. 'Can you not see what is happening?' Of course, gradually, I could. For more than thirty years my mother had accepted my father's stiff personality, his thousand rules, as the price of his assurance he would safeguard her and me. Now, if he could not honor that compact, she considered herself the victim of a fraud. There was no use talking to her about the damage in her own life, because that was beside the point. She had long since agreed to an existence where she had ceased craving satisfaction in her own right, as if that only invited further terror. Her credo was simple: My child is my country. My duty. My life. She had survived solely so as not to abandon the future. No matter how ghastly it seemed, I knew she would follow me. While that reality crept over me, my father went on with his denunciations.

  'Do you know what it is to be a penniless immigrant with no means in a country that is not your own? I have some idea. War is not the only thing in life that is intensely unpleasant, Seth. I will say to you what I have said to your mother: If you choose this course, if you cross this border, do not expect to receive aid from me.'

  'I know better than that, Dad. Believe me.'

  'You know better about everything, Seth.'

  'I will never ask you for money.' We had now reached the absolute core of what was between us. 'Underline: never. Do you hear me?' He did not. He had already hung up.

  Someone said that money is the root of all evil. For my father it was far more than that. Originally a professor of economics at the U., he eventually became a consultant to banks and brokerage houses, one of the first of the nation's money supply experts. As a result, I heard the theoretical justifications throughout my life: How money is the medium through which everybody competes for what they want - the more you want something, the more you'll pay. It's emotion made tangible, or comparable at least, a sort of river Ganges of life into which all desires somehow pour. A perfect theory, I suppose, ignoring things like how much everybody has to start with, or what the songwriter had in mind when he declared that the best things in life are free. But at least it recognizes that if you want money, you really want something else. What my father wanted, though, was never clear to me.

  His name was Bernhard and thus he was frequently confused with Bernard Weissman, a Kindle County developer of vast wealth who owned the Morgan Towers in DuSable and several of the largest shopping malls in the country. 'No, I am the poor Weissman,' my father would always say, in a tone which, given his modulated manner, struck me as ridiculously abject. I knew that he was doing well - this came from the comments of his business acquaintances whom we met on the street - but he made no admission of the fact and seemed to die inside any time he had to spend a dollar.

  In college, a group of us in the dorm used to conduct Legendary

  Cheap Contests, exploring a strange common ground in which we matched, competitively, the miserliness of our parents. My main rivals were other ethnic sons, Slavs and Greeks, although there was one Yankee who was usually in the race. But I always won. My father took the cake. Our dormmates roared as I told the stories: How my father, rather than replace the evergreens in front of our simple hip-roofed bungalow, colored them with green spray paint after they died one particularly harsh winter. How my father would return merchandise to stores, two or three years after purchase, when a button broke, a collar frayed, and haggle for some partial refund of the original price. How my father would keep important clients, bankers, waiting, so he could go buy a case of toilet tissue on sale. How my father late at night could be found refolding the brown lunch bags that I brought home from school, per his instructions, balled in my coat pocket. How my father put a timer on the bathroom light because as a little boy I often forgot to turn it out, with the result that I was frequently left terrified, still sitting on the can as the room went black.

  Yet it wasn't the lack of possessions but the atmosphere that mattered most. My father wasn't motivated by a spiritual disdain for material things; he felt none of the pleasure of people of little means, who enjoy the few things they can afford. There was a tight-fisted compulsive quality to my father's refusal to spend, a kind of death grip he held on the household against which I always chafed, and which had led to our most wrenching prior dispute at Christmas time in 1963.

  In my household, there was never really a holiday season, at any point in the year. In Vienna, my father had been raised as a freethinker. He identified himself as a Jew and was ever on alert for anti-Semitism, which he found pervasive, but even after his wartime experiences - perhaps because of them - he disdained all form of religious practice. That was not true of my mother. Having lost everyone who mattered in the camps, having seen everything precious destroyed, she clung fervently to the customs, albeit in a fairly unobtrusive way, since she preferred no disputes with my father. She bought kosher meats, did not mix meat and dairy, and lit candles on Friday nights. On holidays, she celebrated in muted fashion - a polite Pesach Seder and a Yom Kippur fast. My father went to work. For her sake, I was given a religious education at Temple Beth Shalom, where professors from the U. sent their kids.

  At Hanukkah, we lit the menorah, and my father and she gave gelt - not the foil-wrapped chocolate coins but real money. In my father's eyes this was a gift with meaning. The closest we came to any other form of seasonal celebration was driving down the snowy streets on Christmas Eve to admire the lighted decorations of our gentile neighbors. My father, of course, approved of any form of entertainment which did not require spending money, and the lights always thrilled me: the brightness, the festivity, the whole season of free-spending and openhanded generosity.

  At any rate, the year before I turned sixteen, I took the $10 bill my father had given me for Hanukkah and on impulse bought a four-foot aluminum Christmas tree. I made the purchase at a local five-and-dime and had the tree set up on its green wood base before either of my parents saw it. In shock, my mother stood before the tree, which was mounted on a small end table in my bedroom, a bit like an altar, and remonstrated with me in each of the four languages she spoke.

  Consciously, I had persuaded myself that because he was not observant, my father would not mind the tree. Of course, he was in my room within instants of arriving home. He was a person of medium size - my height comes from my mother's people, and I think that neither of us could get used to the fact that I was already two or three inches taller than he was. He was one of those bald-headed men who lets the hair on one side grow long and pastes it across his scalp. He wore metal-framed glasses and a heavy woolen suit, three pieces. He rocked on his toes.

  ‘I see,' my father said, in his heavy accent. With his talent for the most prosaic, he added, 'This is how you spend the money we give to you?'

  'I thought it was a gift.' I was lying on my bed reading. 'A gift means a person buys what he likes.'

  'No,' said my father staring up at the Christmas tree. He shook his head ponderously. 'No gifts for this.'

  The next day when I returned from school, the Christmas tree was gone. Neither of them ever offered an explanation. And my father never willingly gave me another dollar. The idea, I suppose, was that I was first required to make some amends. But that I refused to do. I know, in retrospect, how they saw what I'd done. Not simply a rejection. But an act of emotional vandalism. I ignored their pain, no doubt. But I took no pleasure in it. My concern was myself. I wanted to break out of the lightlessness, the dead air, the suffering and silence of my parents' home. I wanted to stake my claim to a life where every moment
is not shrouded by the memory of the most terrible deeds and to ask them, I suppose, to recognize that desire in me, to give me their blessing to be different from them in that fundamental respect. But this was not a destiny either of them had ever envisioned for me, and such permission, as it turned out, was never to be granted.

  After that, I had board and shelter in my parents' home. Otherwise, I provided for myself. I had a collection of odd jobs after school and over the summers: hardware-store clerk, busboy, fry cook. My mother was always tucking $20 in my pocket when my father was not around, but she did not dare confront him. In college, I financed my tuition with a federally subsidized loan. To embarrass my father, I went to his bank, where they knew how wealthy he was, and when I'd saved enough money for a car, I bought a Volkswagen, the Hitler-mobile, knowing it would drive him wild. But in time, I realized that given impossible choices, I had lost anyway. I had indulged my father in his fundamental selfishness. And I never removed the restraint of their expectations. My mother never lifted her prayerful gaze from me, never stopped fussing over me or begging me in a million silent ways to redeem her life. I was never free. And the weight of all of that fell over me again now in the wake of my father's call.

  As Sonny watched, I replaced the phone. I sat first, then lay down fully on the rug. My hands were over my face.

  'Oh, kidnap me,' I cried, 'kidnap me, kidnap me. Somebody kidnap me.'

  When I opened my eyes, Eddgar was across the living room on the threshold of the open front door. Ironically, he held money - a few bills - rolled in his hand. He had come down to pay me for the week. Unspeaking, he watched me lying there in agony, his perfect, mad eyes unblinking, intent.

  'What did you mean?' Eddgar asked me the next night. 'Kidnap you?' June and he had just returned from another long evening with their lawyers. A number of attorneys from the ACLU and Damon Law School had come forward to mount Eddgar's defense, joining the old standbys, renowned lefties, who'd been defending the Panthers for years. I had the sense there were sharp divisions in the legal team over tactics, about whether the forthcoming hearing should be conducted to make a political statement or to save Eddgar's job. Arriving home, the Eddgars often appeared wrung out and at odds with each other. Scrutinizing me now, Eddgar already looked exhausted, so dark beneath the eyes he might have been bruised.