Refiner's Fire by Mark Helprin Page B

Some day that child ride on this train all the way to Chicago, an’ I’ll be his friend.”
    The train started down the straight silver-cindered tracks, ticking off the joints in the steel. Livingston was left in the forest with the sickly child in his arms, surrounded by cattails, enormous boulders, pines, oak, and beech. He set out on the darkening paths to the house. In the distance the Twentieth Century sounded its whistle as it rounded the Oscawana Bend.
4
    M ARSHALL HAD need of a protector, and Livingston was just the man. First, his name was not really Livingston, but Lischinsky. He had changed his name not because he was an opportunist, and certainly not because he was ashamed of it, since he was neither. Rather, he felt confident in his identity and strongly attached to his history, and it mattered little to him if his name were Russian, Yiddish, German, or English. He rationalized, and perhaps correctly, that the original name of his family must have been some sort of right-to-left Semitic hieroglyph. He did have a Hebrew name given to him at birth, and to that he would hold at the price of his life. As for Lischinsky, he reasoned, the family name had been changed
to
it, so why not change
from
it? He asked his father, a farmer and storekeeper, and his father told him that as long as he remained a Jew he could do anything he wanted—grow a mustache, wear a hat, change his name, invest in porkbellies, speak with a Chinese accent, whatever. He had altered the name for one reason only.
    When the family got back to Newark from ten years on a reservation of Spanish-speaking Apaches in Arizona, young Lischinsky was eighteen and wanted to go to Harvard. After all, T.R. had gone there. But there was a quota. He knew that if he took his exams and did even extremely well they might still weed him out because of his blood. So he went to a judge and changed Lischinsky to Livingston, intending to change it back some time, but the new name fit well and he kept it.
    He visited a girl he had met in a beer garden in Coney Island. She was a nice girl, who had a splendid body because she belonged to an athletic society and was a championess with the Indian clubs. Either Swedish or German, she had definitely beautiful hair and eyes, and an awesome complexion. He might well have gone to see her anyway, but he was spurred on by her magnificent breasts and by her address, a round even number on Park Avenue. There, she was one of the indentured maids. He asked her to tell the postman that mail addressed to a Mr. Livingston would be received by her. Thus when he applied to Harvard he was not Lischinsky from a Jewish ghetto in Newark but, solely by manipulation of paper, Livingston from Park Avenue. He did so well on the test that he feared drawing attention to himself, and to the amazement of relatives and friends he was admitted. Through a combination of work started on the day he received the miraculous letter, loans, and his father’s help, he experienced Harvard as a Livingston might, except that each Friday night he went to synagogue in a poor neighborhood near the South End, where he was able to remember who he was and from where he had come. One of the principles of his life, and of his father’s life, and later of Marshall’s, was that a man must be free to go wherever he wishes. No place was off limits, and fences, whether of wire or paper or the mind, were for milk cows and chickens.
    When Livingston was a boy his family had moved from the country in New Jersey near the Pennsylvania line to Newark, where the father opened a dairy business which sold the products of all the Jewish dairy farms in the Bucks County-Princeton area; and there were many, including his own, which he consolidated with those of his brothers. But in Newark Mrs. Lischinsky contracted consumption. Chances were that she would die—a lot of people did. A man other than Lischinsky might have seen too many difficulties and been unable