The wrath exploded that night, he was certain it would, and it did. He did not at the time connect any of his mother's explosions with sex — if you had asked anyone on the Lower East Side who Sigmund Freud was, they'd have recalled the man who peddled used china from a pushcart on Hester Street and whose name was Siggie Freid — but in later years it seemed to him that the justice she so avidly sought was somehow connected with events that invariably concerned sex, and he began wondering what could possibly have happened to his mother back in Europe. But no, he never really consciously thought that, no one ever consciously thinks that about his own mother, it only came to him on the gray folds of semirecognition — the wino had said, "You've got some tits there, lady," the Irish boys had taken down Sidney's pants, the sewing machine salesman had asked if he could step into the parlor for a moment, the argument with Hannah Berkowitz had involved the use of too much rouge, the girl his mother found him with on the roof was Adele Rosenberg who was sixteen years old and wore no bloomers in the summer, but everybody knew that, not only Sidney, and besides they weren't even doing anything. All these events returned to him grayly, darkly, as though on a swelling ocean crest that dissipated and dissolved before it quite reached the shore, leaving behind only vanishing bubbles of foam absorbed by the sand. The black and towering fact remained his mother's anger, which was to him inexplicable at the time. It was simply there. Uncontrollable, raging, murderous. He would dream of bureau drawers full of women's hair, brown and tangled. He would dream of hags sitting next to him in movie theaters, opening their mouths to expose rotten teeth and foul breath. He would dream of running through castles where dead bodies were stacked end upon end, decomposing as he raced through them, filling his nostrils with suffocating dust.
He feared his mother, and he pitied his mother, and he despised his mother. And he loved her as well.
Because of her, he never lied about being a Jew. A lot of the kids in the neighborhood and on the block were lying in order to get jobs, this was 1934, 1935, the NRA had already come in, the blue eagles clutching lightning were showing in all the shop windows all over the city, things were a little better, but it was still difficult to get a job, especially a part-time job, and especially if you were a Jew. He never lied about being a Jew, and he never told himself that the reason he didn't get the job was because he was Jewish. He blamed his inability to find work on a lot of things — his looks, his height, the stammer he had somehow developed and which always seemed to crop up when he was being interviewed for a position, the somewhat high whininess of his adolescent voice, all of these things — but never his Jewishness. His Jewishness was something separate and apart, something of which he could be uncommonly proud, the old rabbi quietly studying the Holy Book in the sunset of his mother's town, the townspeople standing apart and waiting for him to dispense justice.
He was able to enter Harvard only because Uncle Heshie from Red Bank died and left his favorite nephew a small sum of money, sizable enough in those days, certainly enough to pay for Sidney's undergraduate education. He left for Boston in the fall of 1936. He was eighteen years old, and five feet eight inches tall (he assumed he had grown to his full height, and he was correct). He had black hair parted close to the middle and combed into a flamboyant pompadour that scarcely compensated for the cowlick at the back of his head. He came directly from Townsend Harris High School, where his grades had averaged 91 per cent, and from which he had graduated with honors.
At Harvard, in his freshman year, they called him Lard Ass, and he once drank fourteen bottles of beer and passed out cold. At Harvard, in his sophomore year, he joined the Dramatic Club and became reasonably famous for his clubhouse imitation of Eddie Cantor singing "If You Knew Susie." At Harvard, in September of 1939, when the Germans were overrunning the Polish town where his mother had been born and perhaps putting to death forever the image of the village rabbi studying the Holy Book by the light of the setting sun, Sidney met a student nurse named Rebecca Strauss — "Watch out for those nurses, Sid," his roommate told him. "They can give it a flick with their finger, and whap! it'll go right down, quick as that" — and began dating her regularly. Rebecca lived in West Newton and worked at Massachusetts General where her father was a resident surgeon. She had dark green eyes and masses of brown hair, and she was the most beautiful girl Sidney had ever met in his life, prettier even than Adele Rosenberg who wore no bloomers in the summer. He grew a mustache for Rebecca because he always felt he looked silly and immature beside her, even though he was two months her senior. She said she loved the mustache and that it didn't tickle at all when they kissed. When he finally told her in confidence about his mother's raging fits — he had by that time begun to think of them as "fits," similar to epileptic seizures or paranoid delusions — she said they did seem very much like hysterical symptoms, collaborating his own feelings that something dreadful had happened to his mother when she was still a girl in Poland.
"She may have been raped or something," Rebecca said.
"Do you think so?"
They were lying in the grass bordering the Charles, she was in his arms. It was the spring of 1940, he could hear crickets chirping in the night, and the gentle flow of the river, and in the distance the highway traffic.
"Yes," Rebecca said. "Sometimes a man can't control himself, you know. And he'll do things. To a girl."
"Maybe," Sidney said, thinking of the time with the sewing machine salesman, had the man been unable to control himself?
"And sometimes a girl can even want a man to. Do things, you know."
"I g-g-guess you're right," Sidney said. Had his mother wanted the salesman to do things?
"Do you ever feel…" Rebecca moved closer in his arms. He could smell her hair, the crickets seemed suddenly louder.
"What?" he said.
"That you can't control yourself?"
"I'm always afraid of that," he said.
"Of not being able to control yourself?"
"Of losing my temper. Of g-g-getting angry the way my m-m-mother does."
"I meant…"
She was silent again. Her hand resting on the side of his face, she was curled in his arms, he could feel the swell of her breasts against him, the crisp starched white of her nurse's uniform.
"What I meant," Rebecca said, and again fell silent.
"I know, you mean people sometimes…"
"Yes," she said, nodding.
"Sure, which is…"
"That it's understandable," she said, nodding. "If a man and a woman."
"Yes, it's possible," nodding.
"Yes."
"If they're close to each other."
"Yes."
She moved. Her starched skirt edged back over one knee and she took her hand from his face to lower the skirt again, long legs sheathed in white stockings, she moved closer.
"I myself, I know," Rebecca said.
"Sure," Sidney said.
"Get hot sometimes," she said, and quickly added, "I've never told this to anyone in my life."