smile, as if she had been musing on the fact that shebelonged to the first generation of Jewish mothers to be categorically discredited by their sons. In the current issue of
Partisan Review
there was a story about a Jewish mother, another widow, who had thrown herself across the door of her apartment, defying her son to return to his tenement in Manhattan without the bag of food she had prepared for him. In his desperation, driven wild by love and rage, the son had beaten her about the head and shoulders with a rolled copy of
The New York Times
. Everybody in the Village was talking about the story, which was by a writer we had never heard of. What a stroke! they were saying—to beat his mother with the
Times
.
Of course Saul’s illness, whose exact nature was still unknown to me, put a great strain on his mother. She had taken a position toward it and developed a defensive strategy. Saul would be all right, she said, if he would only let himself relax. She believed that his illness was caused by tension, or even by attention, because, like those Jewish boys in P.S. 44, Saul always paid attention. He never relaxes, she said to me. He thinks too much; he takes the world on his shoulders. She watched him constantly to see whether he was thinking. She had a plan to keep him from thinking, and it was clear that she regarded me as a threat to that plan.
I had blundered into an old debate and it was a relief when Saul suggested that we go for a walk. We hadn’t taken a walk together in what was for us a long time. His mother immediately objected that it would tire him but then she saw in his face that she tired him more. Still, as we put on our coats there was an appeal in her eyes. She was asking me not to take him on an intellectual bender, not to make him think. “You can go toProspect Park,” she said, grasping at the straw that there was less incentive to think in a park.
The day was sunny and cold, as if Brooklyn had been preserved in a refrigerator for us. Saul was silent for the first few minutes, digesting his mother’s absence, adjusting his breathing. He wore a navy blue knitted cap she had insisted on and a heavy, dark, timeless-looking overcoat, like a chesterfield. I had never seen the coat before—it must have been his father’s. It was too big for him and muffled his gestures.
Poor thing, he said, still going back to his mother, it’s hard on her. She’s an intelligent person, yet all her impulses are maternal and stereotypical. She feels the falseness of her position, but she can’t help it. She struggles against the stereotype like a woman in labor, but nothing new comes forth.
At the entrance to the park a vendor was selling kosher frankfurters and knishes. The knishes smelled good, but under the circumstances—under what circumstances?—I didn’t think it was the right time to eat a knish. With the sun buttering it up, the park was warmer than the street. Though most of the trees were bare, there were enough evergreens scattered around to keep the landscape from looking stripped or naked. Children raced by on skates and bikes, like leaves blowing. People walked dogs and there were squirrels and pigeons along the path.
She keeps running baths for me, Saul said. She tries to drown my thoughts, like kittens.
I was studying him out of the corner of my eye, trying to gauge how sick he was. I didn’t feel that I could ask him—his sickness had become a part of his secretiveness, his Jewishness, which was even morepronounced now that he was back in Brooklyn at his mother’s house. He didn’t look sick, yet there was something in his voice—a remote hilarity—that hadn’t been there before. Also—and this was a detail I would notice—his sentence rhythms were different.
Though I hadn’t been in Prospect Park for more than ten years, I knew it well. When I was eight or nine I was a great reader of Tarzan books and Prospect Park was later to become my jungle, my Africa. With the odd
Partisan Review
there was a story about a Jewish mother, another widow, who had thrown herself across the door of her apartment, defying her son to return to his tenement in Manhattan without the bag of food she had prepared for him. In his desperation, driven wild by love and rage, the son had beaten her about the head and shoulders with a rolled copy of
The New York Times
. Everybody in the Village was talking about the story, which was by a writer we had never heard of. What a stroke! they were saying—to beat his mother with the
Times
.
Of course Saul’s illness, whose exact nature was still unknown to me, put a great strain on his mother. She had taken a position toward it and developed a defensive strategy. Saul would be all right, she said, if he would only let himself relax. She believed that his illness was caused by tension, or even by attention, because, like those Jewish boys in P.S. 44, Saul always paid attention. He never relaxes, she said to me. He thinks too much; he takes the world on his shoulders. She watched him constantly to see whether he was thinking. She had a plan to keep him from thinking, and it was clear that she regarded me as a threat to that plan.
I had blundered into an old debate and it was a relief when Saul suggested that we go for a walk. We hadn’t taken a walk together in what was for us a long time. His mother immediately objected that it would tire him but then she saw in his face that she tired him more. Still, as we put on our coats there was an appeal in her eyes. She was asking me not to take him on an intellectual bender, not to make him think. “You can go toProspect Park,” she said, grasping at the straw that there was less incentive to think in a park.
The day was sunny and cold, as if Brooklyn had been preserved in a refrigerator for us. Saul was silent for the first few minutes, digesting his mother’s absence, adjusting his breathing. He wore a navy blue knitted cap she had insisted on and a heavy, dark, timeless-looking overcoat, like a chesterfield. I had never seen the coat before—it must have been his father’s. It was too big for him and muffled his gestures.
Poor thing, he said, still going back to his mother, it’s hard on her. She’s an intelligent person, yet all her impulses are maternal and stereotypical. She feels the falseness of her position, but she can’t help it. She struggles against the stereotype like a woman in labor, but nothing new comes forth.
At the entrance to the park a vendor was selling kosher frankfurters and knishes. The knishes smelled good, but under the circumstances—under what circumstances?—I didn’t think it was the right time to eat a knish. With the sun buttering it up, the park was warmer than the street. Though most of the trees were bare, there were enough evergreens scattered around to keep the landscape from looking stripped or naked. Children raced by on skates and bikes, like leaves blowing. People walked dogs and there were squirrels and pigeons along the path.
She keeps running baths for me, Saul said. She tries to drown my thoughts, like kittens.
I was studying him out of the corner of my eye, trying to gauge how sick he was. I didn’t feel that I could ask him—his sickness had become a part of his secretiveness, his Jewishness, which was even morepronounced now that he was back in Brooklyn at his mother’s house. He didn’t look sick, yet there was something in his voice—a remote hilarity—that hadn’t been there before. Also—and this was a detail I would notice—his sentence rhythms were different.
Though I hadn’t been in Prospect Park for more than ten years, I knew it well. When I was eight or nine I was a great reader of Tarzan books and Prospect Park was later to become my jungle, my Africa. With the odd
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