And then, after the eight weeks of infantry training followed by eight more at MP school, he was assigned as a clerk-typist to a quartermaster unit at Fort Campbell, in the southwestern corner of Kentucky, sixty miles east of Paducah, eight thousand east of the land mines. Lucky Zuckerman! Beneficiary of one of those administrative errors by which doomed men are suddenly pardoned, and the happy-go-lucky are, overnight, earmarked for death. These things also happen every day.
Zuckerman could type only with his index fingers, and he knew nothing about filing or making out forms, but fortunately for him, the captain in charge of the supply room to which he was assigned was so pleased to have a Jew around to bait-and that too has been known to happen-that he was willing to make do with an inept assistant. He did not-as the inept assistant continuously feared he would-report the error in classification that had sent Zuckerman to Fort Campbell instead of to his bloody demise in the mud behind a brothel in Seoul, nor did he request a replacement for him from personnel. Instead, each afternoon before departing for the links over by the air base, Captain Clark would tune up for his game by driving cotton golf balls out of his office in the direction of the cubicle occupied by the clerk-typist manqué. Zuckerman did his best to look unperturbed when the golf balls glanced off his shirt. “On target, sir,” said he with a smile. “Not kwat,” replied his superior, all concentration, “not kwat…” and would continue to swat them out through the open door of his office until at last he’d found the mark. “Ah, they we go, Zuckuhmun, rat on the nose.”
Sadistic bully! Southern bigot! Zuckerman left the supply room at the end of each day bound for the office of the adjutant general, where he intended to bring charges against Captain Clark (who, for all he knew, held secret membership in the KKK). But since actually Zuckerman was not even supposed to be in Kentucky, but had been allocated for destruction in Korea (and might wind up there yet, if he gave Clark any trouble), he invariably saw fit to suppress his indignation and proceed on over to the mess hall for dinner, and then on to the post library, to continue to read his way through the Bloomsbury group, with time out every hour or so for another look at the day’s bawdy letter from the teenage debauchee he hadn’t been able to bring himself to relinquish quite yet. But, oh Christ, was he mad! His human dignity! His human rights! His religion! Oh, each time a golf ball caromed softly off his flesh, how he seethed with indignation…which isn’t, however (as Private Zuckerman well knew), the same as running with blood. Nor is it what is meant in literature, or even in life for that matter, by suffering or pain.
Though pain would come to Zuckerman in time-in the form of estrangement, mortification, fierce and unremitting opposition, antagonists who were not respectable deans or loving fathers or dimwitted officers in the Army Quartermaster Corps; oh yes, pain would enter his life soon enough, and not entirely without invitation. As the loving father had warned him, looking for trouble, he would find it-and what a surprise that would be. For in severity and duration, in sheer painfulness, it would be like nothing he had known at home, in school, or in the service, nor would it be like anything he had imagined while contemplating the harrowed, soulful face of Virginia Woolf, or while writing his A+ honors paper on the undercurrent of agony in her novels. Only a short time after having been shipped by providential error-his last big dose, as it turned out, of beginner’s luck-to the rural American southland instead of the Korean slaughter, adversity was to catch up with the young conquistador. He would begin to pay…for the vanity and the ignorance, to be sure, but above all for the contradictions: the stinging tongue and the tender hide, the spiritual aspirations and the lewd desires, the softy boyish needs and the manly, the magisterial ambitions. Yes, over the next decade of his life he was to learn all that his father might have wished Dale Carnegie to teach him about humility, and then some. And then some more.
But that is another story, and one whose luridness makes the small-time southern Jew-baiter lofting cotton golf balls toward his nose, makes even seventeen-year-old Sharon Shatzky, performing for him on a gourd like a Pigalle whore at an exhibition, seem as much a part of his idyllic and innocent youth as that afternoon he once spent sipping tea and eating watercress in Caroline Benson’s garden. The story of Zuckerman’s suffering calls for an approach far more serious than that which seems appropriate to the tale of his easeful salad days. To narrate with fidelity the misfortunes of Zuckerman’s twenties would require deeper dredging, a darker sense of irony, a grave and pensive voice to replace the amused, Olympian point of view…or maybe what that story requires is neither gravity nor complexity, but just another author, someone who would see it too for the simple five-thousand-word comedy that it very well may have been. Unfortunately, the author of this story, having himself experienced a similar misfortune at about the same age, does not have it in him, even yet, midway through his thirties, to tell it briefly or to find it funny. “Unfortunate” because he wonders if that isn’t more the measure of the man than of the misfortune.
No, I did not marry for conventional reasons; no one can accuse me of that. It was not for fear of loneliness that I chose my wife, or to have “a helpmate,” or a cook, or a companion in my old age, and it certainly was not out of lust. No matter what they may say about me now, sexual desire had nothing to do with it. To the contrary: though she was a pretty enough woman-square, strong Nordic head; resolute blue eyes that I thought of admiringly as “wintry”; straight wheat-colored hair worn in bangs; a handsome smile; an appealing, openhearted laugh-her short, heavy-legged body struck me as very nearly dwarfish in its proportions and was, from first to last, unremittingly distasteful. Her gait in particular displeased me: mannish, awkward, it took on a kind of rolling quality when she tried to move quickly, and in my mind associated with images of cowhands and merchant seamen. Watching her run to meet me on some Chicago street-after we had become lovers-I would positively recoil, even at a distance, at the prospect of holding that body against me, at the idea that voluntarily I had made her mine.
Lydia Ketterer was a divorced woman, five years my senior, and mother of a ten-year-old girl who lived with Lydia’s former husband and his second wife in a new suburban housing development south of Chicago. During their marriage, whenever Lydia dared to criticize or question her husband’s judgment he would lift her from the floor-a massive man twice her weight and a foot taller-and heave her against the nearest wall; in the months following the divorce he abused her through her child, who was then six and in Lydia’s custody; and when Lydia broke down, Ketterer took the child to live with him, and subsequently, after Lydia had been released from the hospital and was back in her apartment, refused to return the little girl.
He was the second man nearly to destroy her; the first, Lydia’s father, had seduced her when she was twelve. The mother had been bedridden since Lydia’s birth, a victim it would seem of nothing more than lumbago, but perpetually weak unto dying. After the father fled, Lydia had been taken to be raised in the home of two spinster aunts in Skokie; until she ran off with Ketterer at the age of eighteen, she and her mother shared a room at the rear of this haven whose heroes were the aviator Lindbergh, the senator Bilbo, the cleric Coughlin, and the patriot Gerald L. K. Smith. It had been a life of little but punishment, humiliation, betrayal, and defeat, and it was to this that I was drawn, against all my misgivings.