Son of a Smaller Hero Read online

  “Heroes.” The Hook shrugged his shoulders and turned to Shloime. “You play me now. Okay, pal?”

  “Sure. But it’s on me, Hook. I’ll pay.”

  “Naw. We’ll play for the fin. But you and me, we’re pals. We got business to talk to you after de game. Me, and the boys.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Shloime washed the chalk off his hands and combed his hair in the toilet. Various comments had been scrawled over the urinals.

  “The next Guy who comes In may be Barefoot!”

  “JEANNE SA 2146.”

  And written in yellow chalk:

  “A MERRY XMAS TO ALL OUR READERS.”

  Shloime hurried back to the table and chalked up his cue joyously. A whole new world seemed to be opening up to him.

  Wolf was always grateful for the night. But in recent years he had spent less and less time in Leah’s bed and he did not know whether that was the usual thing or not. He would have liked to ask his brothers, but he was too ashamed. Nat, he remembered, had tied a cow-bell to the bedsprings on his wedding night. Wolf giggled. He had paid Nat back by placing a huge carrot and two onions between the sheets on his wedding night, arranging the vegetables just where Sarah couldn’t miss them. Remembering, Wolf nearly giggled again. He stopped himself just in time, afraid of waking Leah. Leah had to be watched. She had had a difficult summer. She complained of headaches and pains in her shoulder, insomnia, and shortness of breath. She had had her spectacles changed, but that hadn’t helped. Her brother Harry, the doctor, had put her on a diet. Once, when she had been laid up for a week, Wolf had suggested that he should phone Noah, but she had said no, absolutely no. Wolf hadn’t argued. Why should I look for trouble? he had thought.

  But things weren’t so good, anyway. She didn’t even argue with him, and business wasn’t so hot. Well, the autumn was always slow. What could you expect? Things would pick up during the winter. They always did.

  “Leah. You sleeping?”

  “No.”

  “You want an Aspirin?”

  “No.”

  “It might do you good?”

  “No.”

  “Leah. I want you should listen. I mean not to interrupt. I …”

  “Who’s interrupting?”

  “No. What I mean is you should listen without being angry or stopping me to put in this or that. All right?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I spoke to Paw today. I said to him just like that how I am the oldest boy and it’s not so nice for people that I shouldn’t be a partner. We should be Wolf Adler & Son. With a new sign and everything. Well, he didn’t say no, Leah. He didn’t say yes but he didn’t say no. You know what else? I said Max is younger than me and he lives in Outremont. That’s what. I said to him, Paw. Paw, I said. You should retire and I’ll take care of everything. We could split fifty-fifty. You should see the way he walks around the yard these days, Leah. A regular dreamer. Anyway, Leah, what I mean to say is he didn’t say yes but he didn’t say no. That’s a start, you know. Other times he would walk away as soon as I started to talk. I was thinking, Leah, that after he – well, you know. I’ll sell the business. Don’t think I haven’t got ideas. I read in the Digest last week how a man made a fortune in the gift business. You start a club which costs ten or twenty dollars a year to join. Each member when he joins sends in a list of occasions he mustn’t forget. His wedding anniversary, family birthdays, and so on. A week before each occasion you send him a letter saying next week, for instance, it’s your wife’s birthday. ‘Choose from the following gifts and return form with your choice marked X. We’ll attend to the rest.’ You can make a pile, I’m telling you.”

  “My husband is waiting for his own father to die.”

  “Who said? Don’t talk like …”

  “I’m going to sleep.”

  “Leah.…”

  “I’m going to sleep. I don’t care any longer, Wolf. You’re yes a partner, no a partner, I don’t care. My life is over – finished. For that I have my father to thank. And Noah – Noah … I’m going to sleep, I said.”

  Leah stared at the wall, her eyes wet. If Father were alive, she thought, Noah wouldn’t have left. They would have had a lot to talk about. The old man, the poet, came in and sat down at the kitchen table. Nu, Leah, he said, Nu. She sat down on his lap and laughed. He kissed her and rubbed his beard against her cheek. When Noah came in from school she made tea for both of them, and then sat down and listened to them talk. Noah had won another scholarship, everybody was talking. I am his daughter and his mother. From time to time one or the other of her men turned to her and smiled. Wolf began to snore, and that awakened her.

  That night he had undressed in front of her. She had wanted not to look but the very revulsion she felt for his body had compelled her to, and so she had watched, surreptitiously but fascinated. She had watched him scratch his back and then slump down on the edge of his bed and pick his toes. He had seemed deeply satisfied but, as the light was bad, she had not been able to tell if he had actually been smiling. She had seen him scratch under his armpits and then smell his hand. That’s when she had turned to the wall. Turned quickly, repudiating him.

  Wolf snored. He dreamed that his father was dead. A mysterious woman handed him a key. He didn’t ask her what it was for. He knew without asking.

  The next morning, Friday, Melech Adler did not come into the office, so when people rang up and asked for “Mr. Adler” Wolf said “Speaking” instead of “Hold on a sec.” It was a grey, cold day. Wolf stood by the window watching his workers. He and the men played pranks on each other. One day, for instance, Wolf fixed a wire to Paquette’s lunch pail and attached the wire to an electric switch. When Paquette reached for his pail he got an electric shock. The next day Armand blew up a prophylactic and secured it to the tail of Wolf’s jacket. But they had to watch out for old Mr. Adler: he seldom approved of their antics. Wolf walked into the inner office and sat down at his father’s desk. Leaning back in the swivel chair, he stared at the wall safe. That’s where the money is, he thought. The building was really something of a shack. The outer, and larger, office was filthy. Bits of scrap were strewn in corners and worn tires leaned against the walls, sacks of rags were piled in the rafters. There was a long counter, and behind that a desk for Wolf. Wolf had taken photographs of the workers, the derrick, and the truck, and had arranged them on the wall to form the letters “W.A.” There was a larger, more imposing desk in the inner office. Wolf had painted these walls in two colours: blue for the first six feet and white the rest of the way up. An Israeli flag hung behind the desk. There was also a portrait of Weizmann, and a framed certificate which proclaimed that “Melech Adler & Family” had paid for the planting of forty orange trees in Israel. Wolf twirled around in his chair. Afterwards, he thought, I’ll paint the outer office too. After Wolf had finished his lunch he went out into the yard. That afternoon they were going to clear the yard of a year’s accumulation of scrap. Wolf was the only one who could work the derrick properly. There were to be four loadings at intervals of an hour each, which was the amount of time it took the Ford to get to the C.N.R. sidings and back. The second loading finished, Wolf came back into the office and stood by the radiator blowing on his hands. Suddenly he noticed his father’s coat hanging on the wall. The door to the inner office was ajar. Walking over to his desk, Wolf peeked briefly in the door. The safe was opened. The strong-box was on the desk. Also opened. The desk was littered with papers. His father was writing. There was a strange and peaceful expression on his father’s face, a look – almost beautiful – that Wolf failed to recognize. Melech seemed a stranger. Wolf sat down and rubbed his jaw: It’s his will, he thought. But how come the office door isn’t locked? Wolf fumbled with the papers on his desk. Now or never, he thought. He got up, knocked, and entered the inner office. Melech gathered up his papers swiftly and clamped the box shut. He was trembling. “What do you want?”

  “I didn’t know, Paw.…” Wolf passed hi
s hand through his mass of hair, looked at his hand, and passed it through his hair again. “I wanted to talk. Leah is not so good. She’s in bed again.”

  “So.”

  “It means doctors.”

  “You don’t have a doctor?”

  Wolf continued to stare at the box. I am locked out of everything, he thought. Everything. “Doctors cost money. I …” Wolf wiggled his ears and made his glasses go up and down on his nose. “What would happen if you gave me a raise, Paw?” Wolf laughed. “I mean, you know, Paquette earns nearly as much as I do – your own son. The oldest. I’m just asking, though … I mean you don’t have to do it.…”

  Melech Adler banged his fist down on the table. “Everything I did I did it for your sake. You see Moore outside? I had to make monkey-business with him. Why? Why? I’ll tell you why. For you and the others. Me, the son from a scribe. I could have been a scholar too. Haven’t I got de brains? No, I worked for my children. So what do I get? Max I get. Your Noah for a grandson. Paquette is a truck driver, you are a truck driver. But you get paid more money. Finished.”

  “I was just asking, anyway,” Wolf said, looking at the floor. “But is that a way to talk?”

  “Liss’n here, Wolf. You got no head. If not for me you’d be out on the street without a job. You tell me who would hire you for a manager? Be grateful for what you got. Don’t tell me no stories from raises. Who’s the boss in your family – Leah? Go. Finished.”

  Wolf staggered out. He swayed, then collapsed in his chair in the outer office. He held his head in his hands.

  Melech followed him. “You don’t feel good?” he asked softly.

  “I feel good.”

  “You can have twenty-five dollars for a bonus this week,” Melech said. He looked down at his son contemptuously, but with sadness and some tenderness too. “You mustn’t come in the office when I’m with the box. Understand.”

  Wolf walked out into the yard. Okay, he thought. At least I know where I stand. You, and your box full of money. Okay, he thought. He walked over to the derrick and sat down in the cab to wait for the truck. I won’t go to his funeral. What does he mean talking about Leah that way? His eyes clouded and his heart beat quickly. Rain began to fall. Maybe I’ll catch pneumonia, he thought. Then they’ll be sorry. The cab roof leaked. Drops plunked down on his leather cap. That wild world of his, which was filled with enemies and the anger of strangers, that world, which was a plot against him, began, for the first time, to assume a definite design in his mind. All his years the enemy, unknown, had been waiting to leap up at him out of the convenient dark, but today he recognized his persecutor. The truck backed into the yard. Automatically Wolf started up the motor and began to work the pedals. The boom creaked. Two tons of twisted scrap scraped against the dirt then came free of the earth, swaying this way and that. When Wolf had lifted the load higher than ten feet his father appeared under the boom. Wolf’s eyes ached and his heart beat quicker. Sweat loosened him. He stared dumbly at the gear, which, once released, would send the whole load tumbling downwards. He began to sob. It’s not my fault, he thought. He shouldn’t have talked to me that way. A big raindrop plunked down on his cap and Wolf jumped. His mouth was dry. I didn’t want to do it, he thought. Melech Adler knelt down to pick up a hunk of brass and the load swayed over his head. Paquette started towards the cab. He wants to know why I don’t clear the load, Wolf thought. He stared at the necessary gear. He shut his eyes. Swaying dizzily, he reached for the gear. Paquette saw Wolf lurch toward the window. He leaped up into the cab and pushed him clear of the gears.

  “Mr. Adler. Quick! Come quick! Wolf has fainted!”

  Wolf slumped forward in the cab seat, his face contorted and his eyes squeezed shut. He waited. Waited for the crash and the scream. Waited, mumbling to himself.

  Paquette couldn’t make out what Wolf was saying.

  “It was an accident,” Wolf said. Said again. “It was an accid … Not my fault.”

  His father, all the world, was bleeding. Paquette shook him and Wolf passed out gratefully.

  IV

  A week after he had moved in with the Halls, Noah was sorry about the whole thing. He gave up his job as a taxi driver, and worked in the college library and corrected papers for the English department. He meant to visit his parents, but he kept putting it off. Time dragged. Noah had renounced a world with which he had at least been familiar and no new world had as yet replaced it. He was hungering for an anger or a community or a tradition to which he could relate his experience. He began to understand that God had been created by man out of necessity. No God, no ethic: no ethic – freedom. Freedom was too much for man. I was wrong to worry about God, he thought. I don’t believe in Him so He doesn’t exist. My grandfather believes in Him so He does exist. Theo is an atheist. But belief or non-belief amounts to the same thing in the end. Non-believers are only fugitives from God. He is still a factor in their thinking. Worse still, he becomes a reason. In order to be liberated from God one must forget him. But can one forget?

  Whenever Theo went out to evening lectures Miriam and Noah were left alone in the apartment. Noah would retreat into his own room, pretending that he had work to do – but he wouldn’t work. He would lie down on his cot and listen to her movements in the living-room. She wasn’t beautiful. But there was something about her. Something human, warm, something that astonished him and something that he cherished. He felt a great need of her. And that need was physical and logical, and also transcended both these things. He began to go over his memories as if they had been shared with her. Or, other times, he remembered what had happened to him only as a story that he would have to tell her one day. There was a quality of suffering about her, a kind of beauty truer than her acquired poise, that touched him deeply. He wanted a share of it. He longed to touch her. To feel her hair or hold her hand. The idea of love-making had not yet occurred to him. When he heard her in the living-room he would leap up and come in himself, under one pretence or another, hoping to see her in passing. She seldom looked up. But he would return to his room, his longing briefly nourished, and he would lie down aching with a fresh and tender image of her all his own to manipulate in his mind. Oh, she was lovely. He would have liked to do things that would amaze her. Once he came out and surprised her darning his socks. His first impulse had been to rip them away from her. He had not wanted this kind of contact – the kind that he had had with his mother.

  “You can’t walk around with holes in your socks.”

  “Oh. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  On such nights he hoped fervently that Theo would not come home until after ten, for at ten she invited him into the living-room and they sat down together and drank tea.

  Their tea talk was always jerky.

  “Do you like it here, Noah?”

  “Yeah, Yes. Very much.”

  “I’m glad. Because Theo is very fond of you.”

  Or another evening.

  “Why don’t you bring any of your girlfriends around?”

  “Oh, I …”

  “Surely you have one.”

  “Sure. What do you mean?”

  “Are you very fond of her?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Then bring her around one night. I’d like to meet her.”

  When Theo came home they would both greet him effusively and with embarrassment. She would kiss him in a way that he was not used to and Noah would slap him on the back and grin stupidly. Theo did not understand these sudden outbursts, but it pleased him immensely.

  The nights were a terror to Noah. The study, his room, was right next to their bedroom. When she laughed that throaty laugh of hers he would clench his fists or grip the head of his cot. He would get up and walk up and down the room shivering and cursing and not knowing what to do with himself. Remembering, maybe, that wild but stricken light in her eyes – the fullness, the yet unspoken child, of her lips; or remembering the imprint of her bare feet on the bathroom floor; that night when she had slippe
d in the snow and had grabbed his arm, falling against him so that their cheeks touched. Christ, he thought. Doesn’t she understand? I need you.

  He was in a frenzy. But Miriam did not have an easy time of it either.

  Whenever they were left to themselves in the apartment she meant to do this and she meant to do that. Usually she meant to go out. But she could seldom give up being alone with him. Each time they were forced together like that she meant to make the first gesture that she knew would have to be hers. She did not doubt that she loved him but she was afraid because she had never loved before and she did not love easy and the young, she thought, are callous. She had no plans. But she was tender with Theo. She seemed to be saying to him: “I can’t help what is coming. But afterwards when you are hating me I want you to remember that I was kind first.” She was kind to Theo and cruel to Noah. But this cruelty, she thought, did not matter much. I love him, she thought. I can be cruel to him if I want to. But she was already dependent on him. None of his remarks eluded her. She waited for him impatiently to come home from lectures or the library, and once he did come home they did not talk much but felt each other’s presence in the room and could not concentrate on anything. When he left her alone to go out to a movie, she was furious but she doubted whether she would have gone with him had he asked her. She dressed and talked and cooked for him. She was thinking of having a party because she wanted him to know how well she was liked and that her friends were people of quality, artists and intellectuals. She also wanted him to bring his girl around because she knew that the girl would not be much, really, and that she would appear fine in comparison. All that remained was for her to touch him. That, and the talk that comes after passion.

  There were times, however, when she resented and feared him. And at such times she hoped that she could get him out of her system quickly. She, who had striven so hard to build a world that was proof against fire and storm, was not going to let Noah destroy it. So she did not think that she would leave Theo. She did not dare think that. But at night in bed she no longer minded his passivity. She sobbed quietly and had many dreams. Theo, if he appeared in them, was a man to pity.