The Other Side of the World by Jay Neugeboren Page A

or two I decided to fill the silence with words by telling a story about my father, though it was a shame, it occurred to me, that I’d already told Seana the one about him and the man in the subway. Still, with Max, I knew, if you used up one story, another usually arrived pretty quickly to take its place.
    â€œYou know who my father’s hero was?” I asked.
    â€œBarney Ross?” Seana said.
    â€œNo,” I said.
    â€œJackie Robinson?”
    â€œNot that kind of hero.”
    â€œPrimo Levi?”
    I shook my head again.
    â€œHenry James?
    â€œOnly until he found out what an anti-Semite James was.”
    â€œI forgot about that,” Seana said. “So I give up. Who was your father’s hero?”
    â€œMy father’s hero,” I said, “was a baggage guy at Bradley Airport. He met him when he and a colleague were going to a convention together. The colleague—his name was Friedman, Wolf Friedman, or maybe it was Freeman without the ‘d’—was a guy who got off on being snide to everybody. He’d published a few books of poems, and wrote about Frank O’Hara and that crowd, and was the kind of New York guy—I think of him as being from New York, though it turned out he came from Omaha, Nebraska, where his father was a kosher butcher—but he was the kind of guy who has to make a joke out of everything. And he used to brag about the critiques he laid on grad students—on their writing—and how under his tutelage —that’s the word I remember Max said he used—he could get them to break down in class and cry.”
    â€œThat was Freeman—without the ‘d’—all right,” Seana said. “A schmuck-with-earlaps, first class. I got him good, though, at least twice. Remember, in Plain Jane , the butcher who gets
castrated by a group of Algerian men for raping one of their daughters? I named him Freeman Woolf. But that was just an old-fashioned novelist’s revenge.”
    â€œAnd in real life?” I asked.
    â€œFreeman was famous among grad students for being a stinker,” Seana said, “and he was after me all semester to meet him for this or for that, so once grades were in—ever the practical young woman, moi —I agreed to meet him in a bar in Holyoke, and we were in a booth, and it was dark, and he was breathing hard. He put a hand on my lap and leaned close, and I blew on his ear and kept my eyes on his crotch. As soon as he was ripe, I reached over and grabbed his teeny-weeny and squeezed until he begged me to stop or to unzip him, and when I let go, I said I was curious about something—that I’d been wondering what his pecker got like when he had a hard-on.”
    â€œThough I doubt my father used a similar tactic,” I said, “he probably said clever things to Freeman too. But Max never bragged to me about ways he put people down.”
    â€œYour father was a man of elegance and discretion,” Seana said. “A mensch of mensches , as we say in Gaelic. He could be playful in unpredictably inventive ways. But he was rarely mean.”
    â€œ Rarely? ” I asked.
    â€œNick could be mean,” Trish said. “Like his father. But Eugenia and I get along well—she comes here when I have my down times, and she’s great with the children. And a lot tougher than she seems. But even so, I want you to know about a decision I made this morning.”
    â€œGo for it,” Seana said.
    â€œAs Charlie knows, my parents are both dead,” Trish began, “and I don’t talk to my brothers and sisters anymore.”
    â€œI have no brothers,” Seana said. “But same story here.”
    â€œThat’s sad, isn’t it?” Trish said.
    â€œNot if you knew my sisters,” Seana said.

    â€œI’m like Nick,” I said. “Neither of us had brothers or sisters to not talk to. Friends like you two were always my