***
Two
Weizman and Morgenstern. It sounds more like a stockbroker partnership than one of those great old-time friendships like Castor and Pollux. Or were those two twins? Anyhow, for seven or so years back in the Forest Hill, Long Island, of the late 1930s and early 40s Harvey Morgenstern and I formed a bizarre inseparable couple. We were as different as night and day. I don’t know who was day and who was night.
Outwardly we contrasted in a way that sometimes made people laugh. They couldn’t suspect our one odd convergence: a heart-murmur that kept us both out of the war. He was small, swarthy, beak-nosed, with fleshy lips constantly tensed in what could be taken for a half-smile or a faint sneer. Somebody once said he looked like a caricature of a racial polluter in the Völkischer Beobachter. I was big and blond and blue-eyed, another caricature.
Often, as a joke, I think, Harvey used to salute me with an outstretched right arm and bark out, “Heil Hitler!” I would return the salute, say “Jawohl,” soundlessly click my sneakered heels and pretend to find it funny.
It wasn’t my fault if I took after my mother. She’d come over from Poland in the early twenties and still spoke English with a faint but unmistakable Yiddish intonation which made up for her blonde hair and blue eyes. Also she was a passionate Zionist. I felt vague shame at the ethnic betrayal of my pale eyes and hair. It was worsened by a profile people called Greek. I had nothing to offset them like accent or faith.
When people – new teachers, for instance – learned my last name they often looked surprised as if there were a mistake somewhere. Some would even say, “Your name’s Weizman?” or worse: “You’re Weizman?” I used Yiddish expressions all the time to compensate. Harvey compensated in the other direction by using vulgar goy expressions.
The contrast between us wasn’t just physical. There was the intellectual imbalance. This was vast. I was the first to acknowledge it. A very late bloomer that way, I knew I was no genius. Everybody knew he was one. He didn’t try to conceal the fact. His intellectual swagger may have been compensation for his physical inferiorities. They aggravated at the critical age. By thirteen my mind was up to the hilt into girls, my body burning to follow and not much later it did. He was a late-bloomer that way. He was able to develop a little anti-climactic face and body hair only at fifteen. It was publicized by spectacular and persistent acne. He went to the hospital regularly for mysterious treatments. My mother spoke vaguely of “glandular troubles”. She always referred to him as “Poor Harvey” and gazed at me with loving admiration.
Maybe his brain monopolized all of his body’s resources. I sometimes wondered if the people who laughed at the sight of us together didn’t see us as I once did in the jubilant trick mirror of the 42nd Street Laugh Movie: me pin-headed and macro-phallic with those elephantine haunches, Harvey like H. G. Wells’ Martian invaders, macrocephalic above a thread of a body.
That didn’t prevent him from using foul pseudo-knowledgeable language and prying for intimate details about the new girlfriends whose photos I carried about in my wallet. He’d stare down at them and with his new unsure tweeting woofing voice use vulgar terms to describe them. He offered me money for accounts of times with those girls.
Gentlemen don’t tell, I’d say and then pocket the money and tell, inventively and in elegant language but a little ill at ease. Verbally I was something of a puritan. I soon lost the money back to him at five hundred rummy. It wasn’t just for the money that I did it. It was my one area of acknowledged superiority.
Sometimes I’d try to inject a little tenderness into the accounts. He wasn’t paying for tenderness.
“Cut the crap. Did you get into her?”
I didn’t like that kind of language. I was longing for a great romantic love experience. I had other photos in a secret compartment of my wallet just beneath the semi-public ones. Even then, I had this weakness for impossible love-objects. There was Judy Garland in the Land of Oz with twin cascades of hair tumbling down past her wonder-lit face. One day I learned she was born Francis Gumm in Grand Rapids. She disappeared beneath a succession of women I judged more exotic. I took Katherine Hepburn for a foreigner with those cheekbones and that passionate sinuous mouth. Also Claudette Colbert and Olivia de Havilland because of their names. Finally Wendy Hiller crowned the other photos. I saw Major Barbara twenty-one times, four times in a single day till I was turned out of the movie-house. Wendy bore an astonishing resemblance to June Keller, my first ex-wife.
One day, coming back from the toilet in the middle of a disastrous card-session, I found Harvey ferreting in my wallet. He’d discovered my impossible stratified loves. It was as though he were ferreting in my brain.
“Titless wonders,” was his blanket verdict on them all. But what did he know about the subject? He’d look at girls slyly and quickly away when they looked back. To my knowledge he never came closer to a girl than with those quick sly glances or listening, absorbed, to my paid stories of hot involvement. Once in the street, though, his mother collapsed and I remember how he cried, “Momma! Momma!” and helped her up, her face filled with pain from the sprained ankle and joy at his outcry.
That was the only emotional response to another human being I ever witnessed in him. But maybe he kept it hidden as I did the photo of Wendy.
So I made allowances for his compensation, the way he tended to shove his top-heavy intellectual weight about. When he did it a little too contemptuously I’d do a Lenny on him. I’d seen Of Mice and Men six times. I’d go slack-jawed, glassy-eyed, dangly-armed and say very loudly: “Aw, talk United States, George. I like rabbits, George.” When I did it in a crowded street he’d walk much faster muttering: “Cut it out, you moron,” but I’d lope after him bellowing: “I like to pet rabbits and girls, George. But then they don’t move no more. How come they don’t move no more, George, huh?”
The bond between us was science. We were into science back in the days when pre-teenagers could duplicate most of the great scientific breakthroughs with stuff swiped from hardware stores or picked up from junk-heaps. Even a feeble-minded kid could build an operating radio-set with a crystal of lead-ore (it comes back now: galena, PbS) and a wire (a “cat’s-whisker” it was called). Everything was easier in those days. There were no computers or TV sets to demoralize us, to say nothing of prodigious things like Mark I Particle Detectors.
I remember the Static Electricity Machine he rigged up. Great disks of varnished glass revolved in counter movement. Wires led to big jars lined inside and outside with tin foil. “Leyden-jars,” they were called. The machine was powered by my feet via a stationary bike. My scalp would start crawling as the charge built up. Finally there came a crackle and a miniature bolt of lightning between the brass balls.
With the discharge I would slump panting over the handlebars. It could kill you, he said and it nearly did me, indirectly, each time I manufactured the bolt. I didn’t feel like Zeus. Already at that age he was playing around with death and I was assisting him in a subaltern capacity.
For an easier source of high-potential electricity, we built a Ruhmkorff Coil. The name and the rattlesnake sound of the circuit-breaking vibrator made me think of some dangerous Russian serpent coiled ready to spring with electric-spark fangs. It took four months to construct with miles of fine copper wire intricately wound about a core of iron rods. Hooked up to four big dry cells, this induction coil spat out a two-inch spark and an acrid smell of ozone. We also built motors, condensers and finally a big DC dynamo.
With that dynamo and my leg-muscles we produced hydrogen and chlorine through electrolysis of brine. The bubbles of hydrogen that rose from one of the carbon electrodes made satisfying popping sounds in contact with a lighted match. With the chlorine that bubbled up from the other electrode we killed white mice. It was his idea. But I lent myself to it and possibly enjoyed the mouse’s reaction to the yellow-green gas. He himself didn’t enjoy it. He was too busy measuring the exact dose that proved lethal.
/>
Electrolysis got us on to chemistry. There was enough land about our shack for violent experiments involving gun cotton (easy: cotton dipped in a mixture of sulfuric and nitric acid) and thermit incendiary-bombs of the sort the Luftwaffe would soon be distributing all over London: ferrous oxide I think and aluminum powder. Even the fuse was spectacular: a ribbon of magnesium producing an intense blue-white star hissing down to the bomb.
You couldn’t find magnesium or aluminum powder or delicate specialized glassware in garbage cans. The chemicals and some of our equipment had to come from stores. I operated mainly in winter when I could wear my billowing raglan overcoat. It was fitted out inside with hooks for the bulkier hookable items. In the deep pockets there were quantities of handkerchiefs to serve as clink-muffling buffers between beakers, test-tubes, coils, etc.
The place was out in Long Island City. There’s prescription three times over but I won’t give the name. Harvey supplied diversion by purchasing trifles.
Once I got caught. Harvey calmly paid for his five test tubes and left without giving me a glance. I had to give them my name. I remember my intense shame. Jewish boys didn’t steal. My mother didn’t say this but it was all over her stricken face for days. It was much worse than the belting I got from my father. He cited my friend Harvey as an example of proper conduct.
Much later when the old relationship between us was dead, this one aspect survived. He’d ring me up and dictate the titles of expensive specialized books that I procured for him in the same way from university bookstores. He was one of my customers. Like the others he paid half price for the books.
But most of our equipment was salvaged, not swiped. Dangerously situated on the other side of the tracks was the most gigantic junk-heap I’ve ever seen in my life. They don’t make junk-heaps like that any more. I can see all those desirable objects now: ancient electric motors with their precious intact armatures, big-bellied jugs with bubbles frozen in the thick warped green glass, battered five-gallon cans, old roller-skates, mines of ball bearings.
I’ve got to get out of it. But wait, just this: there, very clearly, as though produced by the screen, I can see the broken Singer sewing machine with the floral pattern of the cast-iron foot-pedal and there, the quaint refrigerator of the 30’s crowned by the honey-comb cooler, lying next to those two rusty bicycle-frames.
I’ve got to stop, get out of it. Details can overwhelm you. It can be dangerous.
Anyhow, Harvey would step carefully in the chaos, inspect, step back to safety and tell me what to worry and pry and wrench free. I came with a crowbar and an assortment of screwdrivers, hammers, chisels and hacksaws. I became expert at it. To transport the stuff we’d built a big wooden wagon with old bicycle-wheels. We had our own junk-heap on Mr Morgenstern’s lot, next to our shack.
Harvey’s father owned a big lot close to his old house. He always hoped the real-estate market would improve but it wasn’t desirable property because of the nearby railroad tracks. Already Harvey’s father was tempted with the idea of building a bigger and better house for his family on it, which is what he finally did in circumstances I won’t be able to avoid recalling. In the meantime he let us build a shack on it for our experiments. Harvey drew up the plans and I did the sawing and nailing.
The trouble was, the big junk-heap was located in enemy territory on the other side of the tracks, a shantytown inhabited by Poles and Irish and Litvaks. From our shack you could see them in their anti-Semitic patched jackets and woollen stocking caps with battered pails picking up chunks of coal that fell out of the freight cars. Nowadays that expression “live on the other side of the tracks” doesn’t mean anything. It did then. Chaplin, great comic embittered man, caught it all in certain of his short silent films.
The other side of the tracks everything was lopsided and violent. There were slapped-together wooden houses with sagging porches, ash-heaps, barrels of tadpole-infested stagnant rainwater. I can see gray tattered wash flapping from lines over poverty-stricken vegetables like cabbage and carrots. Also yellowish dogs scouring among turds and broken bottles.
I could go on forever. Not I but the things. They could go on forever. They want to take control. I have to stop and select. The only way you can master it all is through selection and when selection goes (as it’s been doing, alarmingly, more and more often these last weeks) then you’re in real trouble.
What I have to select for what I’m doing now are the packs of dirty, ragged, wiry, hard-fisted, stinking, expertly spitting kids, thirsting for Jewish blood that they were quick to sniff out in the junk-heap.
Once they burst in on us knocking apart a brass bed. Harvey fled. He was awful at all sports but he could run fast. It must have been atavistic. They caught me and pushed me around, but not too hard. I expected them to beat me bloody.
“Tell your clipcock pal we’ll beat the shit out of him next time.”
They implicitly placed me outside the circumcised.
“He ain’t no pal of mine,” I said in great fear, purposefully imitating their grammar as my hair and eyes involuntarily imitated theirs and their grandfathers’, those drunken joyous participants in the pogroms my mother used to tell me about, sparing me no details.
Harvey was afraid of them but didn’t hate them the way I did. He would dismiss them, echoing his father, as “human garbage”. I can still hear their favorite expression: “clip-cocked Christ-killers”: a throatful of phonetic ugliness, like a choking with hatred, like preliminaries to spitting.
Again I should stop because what you get going back this way is not just the objects and people with the original sharpness of vision but also the sharpness – sometimes like a knife-blade – of the original emotion they aroused.
One last thing about them. Periodically they sallied forth across the tracks and ravaged our shack and also used it as a mass latrine and left excremental misspelled anti-Semitic slogans on the walls.
Finally they were bested by Jewish cunning. Even Hitler acknowledged this characteristic. His side had nobility and courage but was a little short on brains. Harvey hooked up wires from the Ruhmkorff coil to the brass doorknob. Twisting the knob made the interrupter vibrate. It was set for five seconds. Longer would have killed you. I know because one day I forgot and tried to open the door. The amperage was low but it delivered about 40,000 volts. As I jigged about Harvey observed me with interest until the five seconds were up and I was free although still jerking like a spastic.
One of them must have gotten the same treatment. They didn’t try to break in any more. Instead, they would stand at a safe distance and heave rocks like Neanderthals at that shack of enlightenment. Eventually we gave up the shack and fitted up the cellar of Harvey’s house as a serious lab. By this time Harvey’s father was beginning to take seriously the things his son’s teachers were saying about him.
We didn’t limit ourselves to electricity and chemistry. We’d sneak out after eleven when there was less parasitic light in the sky from the town and scrutinize stars and planets with a homemade Newton reflecting telescope made out of a big cardboard shipping-tube. Harvey ground the four-inch mirror. We split double stars and saw the four known moons of Jupiter.
The rings of Saturn were a marvel.
Venus was a big disappointment even at that age: lovely at a distance but just a blank disk close up. I was forewarned.
Mars wasn’t much either: a rusty blur. We couldn’t see the canals or the polar caps. Andromeda was another disappointment. Even at X 200 it resolved into nothing more spectacular than a faint smear of light.
I remember what Harvey said as, teeth chattering in the January cold (the seeing was best in winter), we took turns peering at that nearest galaxy to ours. We were looking at time past, he said, back at the galaxy as it had been 2.2 million years ago. He said that there were billions of stars in that galaxy, some probably suns to planets, and you could imagine a super-evolved race equipped with telescopes able to view the earth. Right now the
y would see the earth as it was before the appearance of man. In 2.2 million years they would see the two of us as we had been, now, talking about them.
It sometimes happened that I guided Harvey to new fields of study in unorthodox ways. The starting-point was the preposterously bogus ads I came across in SF pulp-mags (Amazing and Astounding Stories) and answered. Not the miracle cures for piles, eczema and impotence or correspondence courses for would-be detectives but the promised exercise of marvelous powers. Even after prolonged contact with Harvey’s brilliant rational mind I remained a sucker for the marvelous.
There was the “magic X-ray tube.” The incompetent illustration showed a cloth-capped young man gazing through it at his hand. The bones of his hand were visible. Another cloth-capped young man – maybe the same one – was shown peering through it at a young woman. There was a crude (artistically speaking) hint of a petticoat beneath her long dress. You could guess the apparatus penetrated to more essential things that couldn’t be shown in the magazine-ad. At only thirteen my mind was already turned that way.
The magic X-ray tube set me back $2.50. It turned out to be a tube with a feather pasted to a celluloid disk inside. When you looked through it the feather vaguely broke up the object. My hand and girls were broken up but remained opaque.
Harvey whooped and jeered. He tried to explain the principles of X-rays to me but he must have been dissatisfied with his explanation because he started studying the phenomenon. He decided that we would construct a Roentgen apparatus.
The tube was expensive. To get the money I mowed lawns till I was dizzy and swiped coins from newsstands. Finally it was set up, the Coolidge tube and the screen coated with zinc sulfate (ZnSO4). “OK, here we go,” he said, not moving. He expected me to stick an experimental hand in the ray. I had the rare sense to refuse.
So he did it himself. He saw his own bones on the screen. I was scared to. Even then I was afraid of revelation. Harvey wanted to go further. It was his basic and fatal characteristic. He wanted to see his own skull. He did. After, he suffered fits of dizziness, vomited and an ugly red rash appeared and spread on his right temple.
A couple of months later I came across an ad for hypnotism in the SF pulp. Again the same old theme. The crude drawing showed a strong-chinned man with rays streaming from his eyes fixing a girl meant by the artist to be pretty and subjugated. I sent the $1.75. Again I got stung. The seven-page booklet was full of anecdotes. The last three paragraphs dealt in general terms with operational techniques: magnetic passes, masterful gazes, soothing invitations to slumber.
I tried it on Harvey, both of us seated facing each other.
“You’re feeling sleepy, sleeepee sleeepeee …”
I said that over and over again and woke up frightened in my chair I didn’t know how much later. Harvey was still in his chair but now reading a popularization of the theory of relativity and taking notes. He wasn’t paying any attention to me. I hammed it up. I got up goggle-eyed with my arms stuck out like a sleepwalker and barged into him. He ended up believing that it had all been an act. But it hadn’t been and I was scared.
None of this involvement with applied science helped me at school. I was disastrously bad at math. Physics was a closed book to me. Even in chemistry I got no more than C+ because of the arithmetic involved in the reaction formulas. I longed for a scientific career but basically I didn’t have a scientific bent of mind. I couldn’t get beneath the surface of phenomena.
With me it was superficial aesthetic pleasure: those light-blue crackling sparks, the swaying pearl-necklaces of hydrogen bubbles arising from an electrode, the pulsing green glow of white phosphorus. I remember the bulb Harvey hooked up to the induction coil and the transfiguration of dull daylight minerals into glowing violet jewels. I wanted to see them that way over and over.
He humored me but what interested him was what underlay fluorescence: excited electrons, wavelength and amplitude, photons, Planck’s constant. I never tired of the rings of Saturn, a self-sufficient midnight spectacle. Harvey didn’t bother looking any more. He was beyond or rather beneath spectacle: into orbital mathematics, gravitation and centrifugal force, ultimate reality.
Harvey was a straight-A+ student except for English where he couldn’t do better than a shameful B+. Even though he shone in grammar (he was great at anything structured) his compositions had no imagination and Shakespeare and George Eliot bored him. In math and sciences he was a genius.
For a while we were in the same math class. He witnessed my unending humiliation but the spin-off benefit for me was that I sat next to him and he would sometimes let me copy during tests. It depended on his mood.
Harvey’s presence disrupted the class even though he never opened his mouth. He fascinated the teacher, an old German refugee stiff as a Prussian officer. It sometimes happened that Mr Weintraub deliberately stumped us with an impossibly advanced problem and invited Harvey to the board.
“No,” he would say, “no,” as Harvey began the calculation in what must have been an unorthodox way and at some point the “noes” would stop and then a dubious “yeess” would begin and then become a dogmatic excited “yes!”
At the end of a few weeks Harvey disappeared from our class, a blow because now I had to confront tests on my own. He was promoted in fast motion to junior and then senior science and math classes and soon left the students there far behind. He could have graduated from high school at fifteen but they reined him back and he got his diploma only at sixteen. He went to CCNY with the other prodigies.
By this time we’d begun to drift apart. The bond of science had loosened.
We didn’t move in the same circuit, he once said when I delivered his order of technical books at half price.
I remember one of the last of our astronomical sessions. There was a winter sky above us snapping with stars. We were studying Jupiter with the Newton and at about midnight Rachel joined us. I invited her to view one of Jupiter’s mythological love-partners, Io or maybe it was Europa. Harvey stood apart watching me adjusting the ocular for her. I wanted to tell her, confidentially, that I was going to show her the heavens.
“Jetzt ich zeige dich der Sternen,” I say in my awful German.
“Jetzt zeig’ ich dir die Sterne,” she corrects automatically. She breathes O when she looks. I credit myself with indirect authorship of that little spontaneous cry, so unlike her. She doesn’t retreat from the clandestine growing proximity of my body to hers because she’s millions of miles away in outer space.
That must have been the winter of 1943, Harvey’s second year in college. I was still desperately trying to graduate high school. It was in the summer of the year before that Rachel Rosen had come over to live with the Morgensterns. The families were vaguely related on his father’s side.
She was from Vienna originally and in 1938 she and her parents got out in time and took up residence in France, then she was sent to Lisbon in 1940 in time and then later to the States. Her parents were caught in France and eventually went up in smoke. They must have got last-minute consolation at the thought that their beloved daughter had been spared the same fate. It goes to show you.
She was nineteen at the end but looked younger. She had a cat called Mitzi, a photograph of her parents, a mathematics textbook her father had written and two dolls which she placed against her pillow.
I’ll stop there. I won’t let myself get caught this time as I almost did a while ago with the junk-heap and the Polacks. I have to go faster. You can’t linger. I’ve learned that time past is like quicksand. If you run fast over it you’re safe. But if you linger it starts eating you, foot, ankle and calf. You get sucked under. It fills your mouth and then your lungs. Then you’re quicksand yourself and if somebody thinks of you in the special way Harvey and I did, much later, about our dead then I guess you suck them down too the way you were sucked down. It’s something like vampires or zombies.
***