My father stopped dead in his tracks. I felt his eyes brush lightly, warmly, over my face and then, suddenly, no one was looking at me any more. He had turned and was walking silently back down the street.
I stayed at the window until my father was just a beloved dot, a known but lost speck in the distance, mingling now with the nearer, unfamiliar dust motes that danced in the thin, clear sunlight angling across our fire escape. Mama didn’t look at me. She walked slowly into he bedroom and closed the door. She stayed in there for a long, long time, and she wasn’t stirring up a new batch of quince jelly. That’s how I know she didn’t mean that about hoping Papa wouldn’t come back. But he never did.
iii
Mama carried on, and in addition to her quince act, she employed still another economic dodge that caused me to suspect that she was descended from Bedouins. It was her famed “locked landlord” gambit. In a strategy worthy of Clausewitz, she would pay the first month’s rent in advance and then repel all future demands for payment with cries of “You shurrup, you crookit landlord! I know all about you!” While the landlord worried over what my mother “knew” about him, we lived rent-free for anywhere from three to six months, depending on how long it took him to make up his mind—and secure the necessary court action—to evict us. Within a period of ten years, we lived at twenty-eight different addresses, and I’m not complaining because it was actually rather broadening—although I never really got used to the chagrin of skipping home from school and finding my silver loving cup leaning crookedly atop a heap of our belongings out on the street. We were famous, in a way, for we were the only nomadic tribe living in Manhattan. There was some talk of our appearing in Ripley’s “Believe It or Not.” and had there been an Ed Sullivan Show in those days I’m sure we would have been on it. But inevitably the landlords in Manhattan wised up and we moved to Brooklyn.
iv
In Brooklyn, once, we were evicted in the record time of five weeks, and though it came as quite a blow to Mama’s professional pride, it really had nothing to do with rent. It had to do with socks.
One of Mama’s friends—and in those days, anyone was a friend who could speak to her without trembling—was a certain Mr. Issah Etmekdjian. Fifty and frayed in his perpetually rumpled, oversized brown tweed suit, he was sitting, on this particular morning, by a window of our fourth floor apartment, listening to Mama sound off on Lebanon. My mother was in the midst of a bellow about Lebanese girls when Etmekdjian unexpectedly kicked off his shoes and took off his socks. He reached into his jacket pocket for a fresh pair, and pulled them over his feet. Wordlessly, then, and still listening to Mama—although she had paused momentarily to witness Etmekdjian’s amazing performance—he threw the old socks out the open window. It was later reported to us that they had landed squarely on the red periwigged dome of our landlady, Mrs. Jelky, who at the time was in a position to determine beyond question that the socks had been worn without change for well over a week.
As the socks fluttered streetward, footless and melancholy, my mother addressed Etmekdjian in an ominously soft tone of voice: “Why you throw out the stockin’s?”
“Is my socks,” retorted Etmekdjian, puffing up his crawny frame like an undernourished, aging Armenian peacock.
“My window,” said my mother tonelessly.
Etmekdjian kept silent, a phenomenon to which he probably owes his life.
“Don’ do it again,” growled Mama. And turning to me, she rumbled, “Creepy Armenian!”
Mrs. Jelky had us evicted within a week for, in her words, “despeakable carryin’s on,” a Jelkyism that didn’t puncture Mama’s sensitiveities one bit, for she was militantly impervious to criticism. She envisioned herself as a dramatic heroine, a New York tenement Scheherazade surrounded by wise camels and idiot landlords. She exulted in her role of “A Mother Alone,” and her favorite book (which she could not read, of course) was I Remember Mama. When she pounced on my brother Mike one day and demanded: “Who write it?” Mike’s moody, distracted reply was “Oedipus Rex,” and my mother would always quote this as the author’s name, although she pronounced it “Eddie Rizik,” which was the name of a Syrian baker on East 17th Street. Naturally, we didn’t see any point in endangering Mike by correcting Mama—or worse, explaining the joke.
v
She was an enigma, my mother. She would do oddly kind things, such as providing free lunches in our kitchen for doddering little old ladies in ratty, forty-year-old fox furpieces, and one of them, her mind grown feeble, apparently thought that our apartment was a Salvation Army outpost, for she would always address my mother as “Major Blatty.” Another time, my mother took in an old opera singer fallen on evil days. Mama had discovered her cringing in the rain one night, leaning on a pile of antique possessions which had been freshly hurled into the street following an eviction order for arrears in rent. Upon sizing up her situation, Mama’s first impulse was to congratulate the weeping old lady, but she was later horrified to learn that up until this calamity the opera singer had been paying her rent regularly for twenty-two years!
Mama cared for the poor old thing until she died, all of which would make you think that my mother was an indiscriminate lover of humanity, and it could be that you’re right, although actually you’re wrong: Mama was scornful of everyone and everything about her, particularly the Greeks, Irishmen, Italians, Swedes, Armenians and “Joosh people” in the neighborhood, all of whom she habitually referred to as “sneaky foreigners.” Her only huzzahs were for Lebanon and things Lebanese.
When it wasn’t Lebanese girls—or quince jelly—it was mountains. “My God, those Lebanon Mountains are beautiful!” my mother would cry, and once, when I was twelve, I took her out to Central Park in a desperate lunge at getting her interested in a few peaks there, but after looking them over she merely spat delicately and said “Dung hills!” Some of the people around us must have heard this, and I would have been embarrassed except that actually my mother said it in Arabic, and the crowd probably didn’t understand her. “Nothing like the mountains in Lebanon,” my mother gloated further and a look of cunning enveloped her berry-brown face as she looked sidewise at me: “You’ll see.”
vi
I saw all too well. Piteous pleas of, “Mama, why can’t I talk American like the other kids?” left her powerfully unmoved, and while my grammar school classmates munched on hamburgers and chutney during lunch periods, I was compelled to pick furtively at a dripping brown paper bag heavy with stuffed squash, eggplant compounded with sesame seed, and an occasional morsel of shish kabab. Snub-nosed third-graders would habitually greet my entrance to the lunchroom with raucous cries of “So your old man’s a sheik, huh? So wotta you, a camel?” and were undaunted by my method of retaliation, which invariably proved to be choked, silent tears that trickled down onto my lunch bag and were quickly swallowed up by the rich, dark stains of the squash drippings.
Other things began to bug me. Like my name. “Blad-dy? Wot kinda A-rab name is Blad-dy?” was the inevitable, sneering demand of upper form aristocrats like Garbagehead Arigo or Banana Legs Scalisi whenever they were in search of sport or in a funk of moody brooding over their low grades in deportment. Invariably I would explain that “blatt” was a Lebanese word meaning tile. Which was all my tormentors needed.
“Tile, huh? Like wot dey got on battroom floors, huh?” And for weeks afterwards, the school rage, when properly executed, was for someone to pop up suddenly in front of me, look deep into my eyes, clap a hand to his forehead and shout in disbelief: “Blad-dy? That ain’t a name—that’s a toilet!”
There’s more. For instance, I became acutely self-conscious about my year-round tan, especially since it was pretty well known that I wasn’t spending my weekends in Florida. And then there was Mama and her concept of what the well-dressed Arab youth should wear to school. She had once seen Freddy Bartholomew in Little Lord Fauntleroy, and his wardrobe in that picture became such an idée fixe with her that she cut up some velvet drapery mate
rial brought over from the “old country,” and made up a few suits for me patterned after Fauntleroy’s. The colors, however, were all her own idea: they were bright Bedouin reds and purples, and it was conceded by several of the older boys at P.S. 189 that I had “a lotta class.”
The only thing that kept me from falling on my scimitar was the frequent, nomadic changes of address, and the resulting quick turnover in schools and schoolmates. But there were problems. I mean, no two schools seemed to maintain identical levels of achievement in their classes, so that while a knowledge of long division won me the rank of genius in some schools, ignorance of fractions disgraced me in others. For years I played a bewildering game of touch-tag between an inferiority complex and megalomania, and more than once I would embarrass myself by giving a recitation in the front of the room and then absent-mindedly returning to a desk position I had occupied in the previous school. Sometimes I would attempt to wrest it away from its current occupant, which usually resulted in a fist-fight, and the word got around that “You can’t trust them A-rabs; they’re sneaky in the night.”
After school hours, when I wasn’t quincing it was less of a strain just to sit home and read rather than roam the streets in my wild velvets, inviting the usual gibes of the freckle-faced “American” kids in the neighborhood. I was also operating under a vague but promising delusion that if I stayed out of the sun I might lose some of my tan. I became a grammar-school recluse. As a result, I never got out and indulged in sports of any kind, so that to this day, I am incredibly uncoordinated and count myself lucky to be able to catch a grapefruit if given ten seconds warning before it is thrown. On the other hand, I am a whiz at reading movable type and “dream books,” the latter representing an occupation to which my mother put me with an unremitting constancy.
“I dream about automobile,” she would announce in the morning, and in the afternoon, after school, she would lay out several dream-books on the kitchen table for me. Since she couldn’t read English, I would have to look up her dream, and if the reading I gave her from the first dream-book didn’t satisfy her, she had me go to the next, and the next, and so on, until I came up with a satisfactory reading—i.e., one that announced she was to inherit a million dollars. She would then cast aside all books except the one with the “correct” reading, according it the status of “most favored dream-book.”
vii
As for my own dreams, the only one I really harbored in those days was the dream of waking up some morning and finding myself an Irishman. How I envied the Irish boys their snub noses, their pale skins, and their incredible reflexes! I had daydreams in which my name was Miles O’Malley or Fairfax McLaughlin, and I had blond hair and was the champion boxer of Ireland. But then that was before the age of atomic mutations, and I was usually content to look forward to the now-and-then occasions when someone would call me “dago” or “wop,” for at least the Italians were a majority minority. Meanwhile, I would have given a million dollars for just one crummy freckle.
Because of my endless afternoons of isolation and deep reading, I became the teen-age Clifton Fadiman of the Lower East Side and was able to win a scholarship to Brooklyn Prep, a Jesuit school in Brooklyn Heights where I couldn’t have felt more out of place than if I’d brought my own bottle to a Perle Mesta party. For Brooklyn Prep was peopled not by mere Irishmen, but by wealthy Irishmen, and it jarred my mother no little, I can tell you, when she noted that none of them wore pants that looked anything like velvet, much less red velvet drapery material. It jarred me too, I guess, mostly because I was wearing the pants. But one thing I liked: you had to eat the “balanced” luncheons in the school cafeteria, and my brown paper lunch bag got the deep six. After a few meals in the cafeteria, though, I was ready to crawl in after the bag. I mean, I discovered that none of the other boys made noise when they chewed their food. I don’t mean celery or crackers. I mean mashed potatoes. They also didn’t lick their fingers or burp mightily, Bedouin style, to signify a satisfactory meal, and after a week of school, I always had a private table all to myself. It was kind of nice, I guess.
One night at dinner I looked over at my mother and said, “Mama, you make noise when you eat.” She gave me a wild, unexpected look, took my temperature and put me to bed. But the outside world had gotten to me, and I became terribly sensitive about making a noise while chewing or, for that matter, swallowing, and for months I refused to drink water in the presence of others for fear of making gulping sounds. I was a nervous wreck. But I practiced in secret, and today I am the only man alive who can chew celery in the Hollywood Bowl without being heard in the first row, which is probably why I make people uneasy at dinner parties. It’s kind of a spooky talent.
Looking back on it now, I can see that my Arab complex gave me a host of other complexes that were really quite unrelated. The chewing, for instance. And for a while there, I was convinced that nobody else in the world had a stomach that rumbled. Only mine rumbled. I was different. Naturally, since that time I’ve received numerous assurances and testimonials (mostly in crowded elevators) that this was pretty murky thinking on my part. But at the time I thought I was unique.
viii
One thing about me was unique. No one else in history—and I have searched the literature—has ever been singled out for attack by self-powered boiled potatoes.
It was in Brooklyn, during my high school years. We were living on Pacific Street that week, and whenever my mother sent me to the roof to retrieve or hang out laundry, I was attacked instanter by scores of freshly boiled potatoes that came at me from all directions, and yet from no direction at all. They were just there.
So long as we lived at that address, and as often as I went up to the roof, the potatoes came flying at me. As you might well suppose, I’ve thought about it a number of times since then, and I still can’t imagine—on the off-chance that some human agency might have been responsible—how anyone could go to such lengths to prove that Arabs were vulnerable to boiled potatoes. I mean, how could they always be lying in wait? Where did they get the time? Didn’t they have to work? Or go to school? And how come the potatoes were always freshly boiled, spattery and steaming as they whooshed through the Brooklyn air at me?
It might have been an Idaho poltergeist at work, but I’m really not sure. Which is not to say that I didn’t have a theory while it was happening: I was positive it had something to do with my being an Arab.
3. Who Shakespeare?
THE POTATO barrages ended when we moved to another apartment, which wasn’t long in coming, you may be sure, for my mother’s nomadic rental tactics continued through my Prep years. The only part of her act that varied was its effect on me: the older and more Americanized I grew, the more humiliating it became. Understand, Smerdyakov, I’m not griping about the minor inconveniences such as never having my address listed correctly in the school directory, or getting my mail a month late because it had to be forwarded eighteen times. But I am still frazzled about the boyhood nightmares in which I imagined myself being evicted from an apartment in full view of a prep school classmate who would then tell all the other kids. I’m even more frazzled about the fact that the nightmare eventually came true.
I was a sophomore at the Prep, then, and on the eve of a monster oratorical contest in which I had been entered, I came running home from school and stumbled over my silver loving cup. It was sitting out on the sidewalk in front of our building along with all our other furnishings and possessions and there was my mother, raising hell with the “crookit landlord.” She was feeling pretty perky about it, actually, since we’d squeezed an extra month or two out of that bewildered man of property, and her angry shouting was merely the symptom of a massive gloat. She also felt morally obligated to give the landlord some measure of satisfaction by pretending to be miserable.
“Will-yam, my Baby Jesus!” my mother roared as I approached her, and after an enormous, confidential wink, she fell upon me, sobbing with a wild abandon, and that’s when I looked across th
e street and recognized a Brooklyn Prep senior named Reilly who was taking in the scene with what you might describe as aggressive incredulity. I looked away and turned up my coat collar. But I knew I’d had it: he was bound to “tell all the other kids.”
That night we stayed at the Pierrepont Hotel near Borough Hall and at four-thirty the following morning, “Baby Jesus” was locked in the bathroom desperately memorizing a speech about Thomas Jefferson. You might say that I was battling several psychological blocks. And when you put them all together they spelled M-O-T-H-E-R. A rather compelling orator in her own right, Mama had for years been bombarding my eardrums with a speech that she had learned as a little girl in Lebanon, a speech of welcome—in French—for a bishop visiting her grammar school. She would recite it with great gusto at various but maddeningly frequent moments, such as while waiting for her squash to cook, in the cashier’s line at supermarkets, and at bus stops. The thing about it that sort of grabbed me was that at the time of her original delivery my mother had stepped on stage, taken one look at the bishop and turned to speechless, stupefied jelly, until finally the little Lebanese nuns had to come scurrying out of the wings and carry her off.… Now I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
At about 6 A.M., Mama opened one eye and rumbled, “I gonna go with you.” She went with me. At the Prep, when I finally rose to speak, I took one look at my mother standing at the rear of the auditorium, opened my mouth to say “Thomas Jefferson,” and instead blurted out five or six words in French. Then I went utterly and totally to black. A rather wild minute of silence followed in which I was incapable of uttering a word, although I think I might have managed a piercing scream, and then, as the assembled student body shifted around noisily in their collapsible metal chairs, my mother took command of the Forum in a manner that would have made Mark Antony’s liver melt with envy.