Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [64]
I am icy with fear. Of the girl and her syph! of the father and his friends! of the brother and his fists! (even though Smolka has tried to get me to believe what strikes me as wholly incredible, even for goyim: that both brother and father know, and neither cares, that Bubbles is a “hoor”). And fear, too, that beneath the kitchen window, which I plan to leap out of if I should hear so much as a footstep on the stairway, is an iron picket fence upon which I will be impaled. Of course, the fence I am thinking of surrounds the Catholic orphanage on Lyons Avenue, but I am by now halfway between hallucination and coma, and somewhat woozy, as though I’ve gone too long without food. I see the photograph in the Newark News, of the fence and the dark puddle of my blood on the sidewalk, and the caption from which my family will never recover: INSURANCE MAN’S SON LEAPS TO DEATH.
While I sit freezing in my igloo, Mandel is basting in his own perspiration—and smells it. The body odor of Negroes fills me with compassion, with “prose-poetry”—Mandel I am less indulgent of: “he nauseates me” (as my mother says of him), which isn’t to suggest that he is any less hypnotic a creature to me than Smolka is. Sixteen and Jewish just like me, but there all resemblance ends: he wears his hair in a duck’s ass, has sideburns down to his jawbone, and sports one-button roll suits and pointy black shoes, and Billy Eckstine collars bigger than Billy Eckstine’s! But Jewish. Incredible! A moralistic teacher has leaked to us that Arnold Mandel has the I.Q. of a genius yet prefers instead to take rides in stolen cars, smoke cigarettes, and get sick on bottles of beer. Can you believe it? A Jewish boy? He is also a participant in the circle-jerks held with the shades pulled down in Smolka’s living room after school, while both elder Smolkas are slaving away in the tailor shop. I have heard the stories, but still (despite my own onanism, exhibitionism, and voyeurism—not to mention fetishism) I can’t and won’t believe it: four or five guys sit around in a circle on the floor, and at Smolka’s signal, each begins to pull off—and the first one to come gets the pot, a buck a head.
What pigs.
The only explanation I have for Mandel’s behavior is that his father died when Mandel was only ten. And this of course is what mesmerizes me most of all: a boy without a father.
How do I account for Smolka and his daring? He has a mother who works. Mine, remember, patrols the six rooms of our apartment the way a guerilla army moves across its own countryside—there’s not a single closet or drawer of mine whose contents she hasn’t a photographic sense of. Smolka’s mother, on the other hand, sits all day by a little light in a little chair in the corner of his father’s store, taking seams in and out, and by the time she gets home at night, hasn’t the strength to get out her Geiger counter and start in hunting for her child’s hair-raising collection of French ticklers. The Smolkas, you must understand, are not so rich as we—and therein lies the final difference. A mother who works and no Venetian blinds … yes, this sufficiently explains everything to me—how come he swims at Olympic Park as well as why he is always grabbing at everybody else’s putz. He lives on Hostess cupcakes and his own wits. I get a hot lunch and all the inhibitions thereof. But don’t get me wrong (as though that were possible): during a winter snowstorm what is more thrilling, while stamping off the slush on the back landing at lunchtime, than to hear “Aunt Jenny” coming over the kitchen radio, and to smell cream of tomato soup heating up on the stove? What beats freshly laundered and ironed pajamas any season of the year, and a bedroom fragrant with furniture polish? How would I like my underwear all gray and jumbled up in my drawer, as Smolka’s always is? I wouldn