I loved the play. How could I not? Indeed, it is an indication of my mother’s intelligence that she knew provoking me to read it would continue and extend her influence despite being held prisoner in the sanitarium. Think of it from her paranoid point of view: Hamlet has been separated from his noble father — a warrior king — by an evil and powerful uncle who has robbed Hamlet of his mother’s love, his father’s life, and his own claim to the throne of Denmark. There is, additionally, especially when read during the Freudian literary atmosphere of the early sixties, the incestuousness of Hamlet’s relationship to his mother combined with a political rebel’s philosophy, born of alienation. Hamlet is keenly aware of the world’s hypocrisies and corruption: he is the disenfranchised child of a social system in the hands of the cowardly and murderous uncle. And this analogous predicament is delivered with poetic genius, its despair and rage sung so beautifully that the most painful moments also inspire delight in the sheer elegance of Hamlet’s mind. Indeed, I found the Prince’s situation — including his death — enviable. What to the normal adult mind is a tragedy seemed almost a triumph to nine-year-old Rafe.
My love affair with Hamlet caused trouble for me with Uncle Bernie’s son, Aaron. It happened during a family brunch held shortly after his graduation from college, about a month after my visit to the sanitarium. Sadie’s and Harry’s clans were all there. It was a bon voyage meaclass="underline" Aaron would be living on a kibbutz for the summer. After he returned, it would be decided whether he would go for his MBA, as his father wished, or try his hand as a painter, as he wanted. (I doubt my uncle believed there was anything to settle. But Aunt Charlotte, who was on the board of two museums, who frequented art galleries and bought Impressionist paintings, was a wavering ally for her son’s artistic ambition.) His sister, Helen, was upstairs, supposedly suffering from a stomach virus, one of the convenient illnesses she contracted to avoid family occasions. My near calamity developed when Uncle bragged one time too many about me, in particular when he bragged about my reading Hamlet. He knew I had because the same day I visited my mother at Hillside, I asked permission to take the two-volume Shakespeare set into my room. I made the request both to read Hamlet and to make the point that I was doing so. (My pleasure in the play was real; so was my vanity.) So far, Aaron had suffered silently through itemizations of my brilliance on his visits home. He had already been tortured last night with my various school accomplishments. When Uncle remarked over brunch that I knew Hamlet so well I could quote long passages from memory, Aaron gave up his stoicism.
“So what?” Aaron snorted. “He’s nine.”
“That’s what makes it remarkable!” Uncle dropped his forkful of Nova, en route to a bagel. The heavy silver tines struck the equally heavy silver serving dish and resulted in a vibrating chord that harmonized with his remark.
“Enough!” Aunt Charlotte shouted. “We all admire Rafael, but enough is enough!” She pushed a stiff hair-sprayed lock off her brow. Its unloosed presence on her forehead was a novelty, caused by her exceptionally vehement movement. She managed her emotions carefully: that outburst was unmanaged and unique.
Bernie ignored her, nevertheless. He pressed Aaron. “How can you say he’s nine as though that makes it nothing?”
“I mean …” Aaron was understandably aggrieved. His eyes stayed down, staring at the linen and his Limoges plate. His tone, although whiny, was not loud. “All I mean is — what difference does it make if he memorizes it? He can’t understand it. He’s memorizing the way a monkey memorizes.”
This time Julie, my old defender, didn’t speak up. She sighed loudly, a habit she has to this day when confronted with a situation that she wishes were different but that she has given up trying to change. At the time I gave her no credit; I concluded she was reacting with a girl’s cowardice and hypocrisy. (My new understanding of male-female relations came from Hamlet’s scenes with Ophelia. I had gloomily ignored Julie during brunch, ready to send her packing to a nunnery — that seemed an especially harsh punishment for a Jewish girl — if she dared to bring up the subject of my earlier rash declaration of love.) Despite my newfound contempt for the ways of women (“You jig, you amble and you lisp. You nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance.”), I spoke up for myself mostly to impress Julie. “I know what it means!” I shrieked in outrage.
“Oh yeah, right,” Aaron said.
“Ask me any line in the play!”
“All right, all right,” Uncle said. Other adults were groaning or mumbling to Aaron or to each other. They were sick and tired of this punishing dance Bernie made me and his children perform. I thought their disgust and unhappiness was directed solely at me. I believed they envied me. I didn’t understand that besides Aaron, whose envy was merely a reflex triggered by his father, the others mostly felt pity for me — I was a sad little boy whose mother was crazy and whose father was worse, a Communist.
But I thought I was the noble Dane. I got to my feet, towering over the table at my height of four feet eleven inches, and brandished an elaborate silver spoon. “Go ahead. Ask me. What do you want to know? You want to know what quietus means? You want to know what bodkin means? Or fardels? Do you know what it means when Hamlet says to Horatio, ‘If he but blanch, I’ll tent him to the quick?’”
Someone, I think it was Uncle Harry, laughed. I must have made quite a sight. Some of my relatives were staring at me, open-mouthed. I didn’t look at Julie, the real object of the performance, but I was sure she must be impressed. I stayed on Aaron, who was not shocked or amused. He was humiliated. His cheeks were red and his eyes were downcast.
“Well, wiseguy,” Uncle Bernie asked him. “You started it. Do you know what it means?”
I was huffing from the exertion of my outrage, but I maintained my pose of challenge and contempt.
Aaron raised his eyes to me. There was hate in his look; the cornered kind, the hatred of a wounded animal for its tormentor. “No. But I know what ‘the incestuous pleasure of his bed’ means. Do you?”
It was an accident, of course. Aaron was attacking my presumed ignorance of sex. However, I had looked up incest in the dictionary, along with all those other words, and I understood very well what it meant. Indeed, I didn’t have knowledge; I had experience without knowledge. For a ghastly moment I thought Aaron wasn’t merely challenging my vocabulary, I thought he was exposing my secret. It took no more than a second for me to realize he couldn’t be. Then my vanity was tormented. It longed for me to shout out that I not only knew what was meant by “the incestuous pleasure of his bed,” I had lived it — though not as a pleasure. I was a merciless competitor in those days. I didn’t shy from delivering the final killing stroke and that certainly would have been a coup de grace. Don’t misunderstand. I didn’t come close to a confession about the incest. But I was transfixed by the prospect, at how it would be a perfect victory. I suppose I could have said I knew what incest meant; that wouldn’t have been considered suspicious. And yet I felt merely saying the word was an admission I understood its meaning in an immoral way.