In the summer, you could walk and walk and walk all the way to the Museum of Natural History. You had read in the 6A Current Events news-sheet that several large meteorites that fell from out of the sky now rested in front of the museum doors. You didn’t have to go inside — maybe they wouldn’t let you — but it didn’t matter, because it was the meteorites you wanted to see, and they were outside. You wanted to see them, because it said in small print down at the bottom of the Book of Norse Mythology that the reason why Siegfried’s sword was so sharp might have been that it was made from a meteorite, and meteorites often contained special steel, so hard that after the sword was forged and sharpened, it could be dipped in a brook, and would shear tiny bits of lint and fleece floating against it. Imagine how sharp that was! Something to marvel at while walking and walking along the paved paths inside Central Park in the green, green of summer — past stylish people sporting silver-headed canes, past the nursemaids and the fancy baby carriages, fancier even than Mrs. Biolov’s, the fanciest on the block — until the long, long walk brought you to the immense museum building whose entrance was at the bottom of a short flight of stairs. And down the stairs you went timidly, to stand in awe before the stark, pitted boulders: those were meteorites fallen from heaven to earth.
“Siz a manseh mit a bear,” Mom twitted him fondly, when he had trudged home at last, and told her what he had discovered.
“It’s not a manseh mit a bear!” he flared up. “It’s about the Norse gods: Odin and Thor and Loki. And about Siegfried and Brunhild. You don’t know what a wonderful sword he had.”
“Azoy?” she placated. “My clever son. A bulkie and fresh farmer’s cheese would go well after such a long journey, no?”
Stories with a bear, Mom called them. But he liked them much better than he did those by Horatio Alger, the kind of stories that Davey Baer liked: Tom the Bootblack or Pluck and Luck, the kind the other kids liked: Tom Swift and his motorcycle, and how resourcefully he could fix it with a piece of fence wire; or the Rover Boys who were so honest, and played baseball so well; or Young Wild West in fringed buckskin fighting treacherous “Injuns,” though Ira couldn’t tell why. And some of the fairy tales, and stories about witches and hobgoblins scared him so, he was afraid of the dark, afraid to go down into the cellar alone and fetch a pail of coal out of the padlocked crib; fearful even when he had to take the garbage can down to the big trash cans in front of the house at night — how he shirked, how he fought doing that chore! The closed cellar door at the foot of the feebly lit stairs before he turned to enter the hallway to the street filled him with panic.
Still, those were the stories he prized above all others, stories he loved: of enchantment and delicacy, of princelings and fair princesses. So often the princesses were not only fair, but they were the fairest in Christendom. You couldn’t help that. Maybe they wouldn’t mind if he was Jewish. And King Arthur’s knights, they sought the Holy Grail, the radiant vessel like a loving cup out of which Jesus had drunk wine. So everything beautiful was Christian, wasn’t it? All that was flawless and pure and bold and courtly and chivalric was goyish. He didn’t know what to feel some times: sadness; he was left out; it was a relief when Jews weren’t mentioned; he was thankfuclass="underline" he could fight the Saracens with Roland. Or he could appreciate seeing Mr. Toil everywhere, when the boy in the Grimm fairy tale ran away from his teacher, Mr. Toil, even leading the band of musicians — as long as he wasn’t Jewish. .
XIII
M came into his study. She had two skeins of wool she wanted to show him, one jet-black, one oxford-gray. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of weaving the worn places in the chaleco again,” she said.
“The one on your back?” he asked: M was wearing the salt-and-pepper woven chaleco she had bought in Mexico — where was it? Not Tlaqui-paqui, or however it was spelled, where the young weaver worked in dim light at a loom (and Ira also bought a chaleco). That was in the late ‘60s.
“Yes. It’s true it doesn’t owe me anything,” she said. “But I like it.”
“And where will you get such a rarity again,” he agreed.
Such a rarity again — he thought afterward, after she left for the piano in the living room. My love, it would take a Taj Mahal in belles lettres to do you justice, tall, spare woman grown old, your once tawny hair, gray. Wrinkled, your lovely countenance, but still noble. Where did the millions of moments go, the million millions of moments spent together? She had just returned from shopping, and she said: “Do you think the cold weather kept the shoppers away? They were out in droves today. Of course the last two days weren’t very conducive for shopping. No one wanted to brave the cold.”
“No, that’s right.”
“And I brought you a present for your birthday: a turkey pastrami loaf.” She displayed it, a small brick of meat, tightly sealed in plastic.
He thought of an electric slicer, of getting one, but she wouldn’t approve: One more thing in the house, she would say in her equable, sensible fashion. He settled for, “Oh, great! Thanks.”
“I guess we’ll have to throw away those two coupons for Hardee’s two-for-the-price-of-one roast beef sandwiches. Tomorrow is the last day, and we’re having Margaret for company.”
“Do you know McDonald’s is now advertising a thirty-nine-cent hamburger?”
“The competition must be fierce.”
“There’s another thirty-nine-cent hamburger chain that’s just opened in town. You saw it with me the other day.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I wonder what a thirty-nine-cent hamburger looks like?”
“Let’s buy a half-dozen—” he suggested. “Since the McDonald’s place is so near.”
“I’ll probably put all three meat patties in one bun.”
That was why she remained so thin and distinguished in figure: three patties in one bun. And he, plebeian: “Oh, I like my tissue-paper buns. I’m used to eating that way.”
And all this, he reflected — after she was well launched rehearsing a piece at the piano, a familiar piece whose name he would be ashamed to admit he didn’t know — he would find out another time — all this, because he had asked her if she knew where one of his short stories was kept, or stored: She was so methodical, so efficient, all the enviable things he wasn’t. She knew, and faithfully brought him the carton, requiring only that she would have to sit down while she rummaged for the one he wanted: It was a sketch he had done for The New Yorker, and been lucky enough to have it accepted. Done in 1940, and what would he think of it now; would it fit into what he was doing, fit into the structure, or the mood? Forty-five years ago, forty-five years closer to the self-involved, self-indulgent, ill-at-ease, lonesome, moody, aimless scapegrace he was then. . tailored, to be sure, for The New Yorker. Would the piece still contain enough truth in it, fidelity to something he once was, to warrant the work of retyping, of inclusion here?