Stern Read online

  Also by Bruce Jay Friedman

  NOVELS

  A Mother's Kisses

  The Dick

  About Harry Towns

  Tokyo Woes

  The Current Climate

  A Father's Kisses

  STORIES

  Far from the City of Class

  Black Angels

  Let's Hear It for a Beautiful Guy

  The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman

  PLAYS

  Scuba Duba

  Steam Bath

  Have You Spoken to Any Jews Lately?

  NONFICTION

  The Lonely Guy's Book of Life

  The Slightly Older Guy

  Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos

  To my darling Ginger

  Copyright © 1962 by Bruce Jay Friedman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Friedman, Bruce Jay, 1930–

  Stern: a novel/Bruce Jay Friedman.

  ISBN 9780802197436

  I. Title.

  PS3556.R5S85 1989 88–19357 813′.54—dc19

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  01 02 03 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  I can still remember my reaction to Stern when I first read it over twenty years ago. There was, of course, critical delight, since every page was marked by a sure stylistic touch and packed with fresh comic inventions. There was also the realization—and how rarely this occurs in a lifetime of reading—that Bruce Jay Friedman was an original, a writer whose way of seeing things was wholly his own. Of course, since the publication of Stern we have grown used to novels that twist events and characters into outlandish parodies of everyday life, and most, I fear, have given more real pleasure to their creators than to their readers. A few—the best of Thomas Pynchon and Stanley Elkin—have achieved an artistic balance between their authors' antic visions and the world we inhabit. But none has surpassed Stern in the ease with which the commonplace encounters of life are made both horrible and hilarious.

  However, my main response to Friedman's first novel was simple wonder that it had taken so long before a Jewish point of view of America had been written in the manner of Stern. After all, the use of comedy to deal with our country's darker moods was as old as Huckleberry Finn and as recent as Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man. But Jewish life amid the shams and lunacies of America had been treated either in the heavy-handed, potboiler fashion or in the grim, well-wrought manner of Saul Bellow's The Victim. Even when, in The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow became a bit more rambunctious and declared that he intended to tackle his subject “free style,” the novel's humor betrayed hardly any tension between his hero and the country in which he lived. “I am an American,” says Augie at the beginning of his story with absolute confidence. Stern, under siege in his suburban house, set upon by voracious caterpillars as well as shades of bigotry that range from the genteel snub to the outright antisemitic remark, might have a wry comment to make about Augie's swaggering claim.

  For Stern feels he has been dropped into enemy territory. Having moved from the loose cultural mix and easy anonymity of the city, he sees himself as an alien intruder in a gentile, commuters' world. For a time he believes he has established a truce between himself and his new neighborhood. However, one evening he is informed by his wife that when she took their son to play with a boy a few blocks away, the boy's father had roughly intervened. “No playing here for kikes,” he had said, and in separating the children, had shoved her to the ground. She landed in a way that, since she was underwearless, allowed the man “to see her.” Thus Friedman's hero suffers insult as a man and as a Jew, and he knows at once that he is doomed to avenge this double affront. With masterly procrastination, it takes him the length of the novel to effect the inevitable meeting, and until he does, the reader follows him through ulcers and a nervous breakdown in his effort to steel himself for a violent showdown.

  The route that Friedman takes us on twists often through Stern's past and his constant effort to accommodate the American version of the hero with his heritage as a Jew. Not that Stern is steeped in Talmudic tradition. He confesses that though he made the proper noises when reading Hebrew as a boy, he understood not a word; and though he occasionally frequents synagogues to refuel his ethnic feeling, he is baffled by the legato groaning of the old men around him. Nevertheless, Stern is keenly aware of his Jewishness as something that must be maintained and defended, even though to do so means accepting a burden he could well do without. For in the world of Stern's liberal imagination, everyone would grasp the fact that existence is so filled with pain and pitfalls that, to survive, we must show one another only the deepest sympathy. This admirable desire for human harmony makes Stern wish for qualities in himself that he believes would better fit the standard American mold. In the Air Force, he views his nonflying status as being peculiarly Jewish and envies the fighter pilots' blond, crew cut world of action. Even his body, softening slowly about the hips, seems to him the result of his people's scholarly and sedentary past.

  In short, Stern suffers as much from the nightmare of social stereotypes as does his adversary, “the kike man.” Well before Philip Roth, in Portnoy's Complaint, turned the special predicament of the American Jew into a long psychiatric joke, Friedman had told the original story and gotten the first laugh.

  And it is the laugh, of course, that is of final importance. Everything I have mentioned about Stern is the stuff of which somber novels are made. Indeed, as I indicated, at the time of Stern's appearance, this was the accepted way of handling so delicate a subject. By choosing to do otherwise, Friedman created a hero whom we were supposed neither to admire nor pity, for Stern, lovable as he is, embodies an absurd condition.

  Perhaps that condition is not so acute today as it was twenty years ago, and perhaps in another hundred years readers will have to be directed to a footnote to decipher the meaning of “kike.” Perhaps. But even if this were to be the case, it would not diminish the real relevance of Stern. The piano-playing real estate broker who consummates a profitable closing with snatches of Chopin; the doctor who demands that Stern muse upon soufflés so that the X-rays of his stomach will not turn out grainy; the Puerto Rican lovely who inhibits passions with her bursts of flowery rhetoric—these and all the other furies that rise from the pages of Friedman's novel pursue Stern past narrow ethnic boundaries into the open territory of Everyman. Barring the extinction of literate readers, the pursuit should last for a long time to come.

  —Jack Richardson

  ONE DAY in early summer it seemed, miraculously, that Stern would not have to sell his house and move away. Some small blossoms had appeared on one of the black and mottled trees of what Stern called his Cancer Garden, and there was talk of a child in the neighborhood for his son, a lonely boy who sat each day in the center of Stern's lawn and sucked on blankets. Stern had found a swift new shortcut across the estate which cut his walking time down ten minutes to and from the train, and the giant gray dogs which whistled nightly across a fence and took his wrists in their mouths had grown bored and preferred t
o hang back and howl coldly at him from a distance. A saintlike man in brown bowler had come to Stern with a plan for a new furnace whose efficient ducts would eliminate the giant froglike oil burner that squatted in Stern's basement, grunting away his dollars and his hopes. On an impulse, Stern had flung deep-blue drapes upon the windows of his cold, carpetless bedroom, frustrating the squadron of voyeurs he imagined clung silently outside from trees to watch him mount his wife. And Stern had begun to play “Billy One-Foot” again, a game in which he pretended his leg was a diabolical criminal. “I'll get that old Billy One-Foot this time,” his son Donald would say, flinging his sucking blanket to the wind and attacking Stern's heavy leg. And Stern, whose leg for months had remained immobile, would lift and twirl it about once again, saying, “Oh no, you don't. No one can ever hope to defeat the powerful Billy One-Foot.”

  It was as though a great eraser had swept across Stern's mind, and he was ready to start fresh again, enjoying finally this strange house so far from the safety of his city.

  After leaving the home-coming train on one of these new nights, Stern, a tall, round-shouldered man with pale, spreading hips, flew happily across the estate, the dogs howling him on, reached his house, and, kissing his fragrant, long-nosed wife deep in her neck, pulled off a panty thread that had been hanging from her shorts. He asked her if anything was new and she said she had taken their son Donald about a mile down the road to see the new boy she'd heard about. When the children ran together, the boy's father had stopped cutting his lawn, pushed her down, and picked up his child, saying, “No playing here for kikes.”

  “What do you mean he pushed you down?” Stern asked.

  “He sort of pushed me. I can't remember. He shoved me and I fell in the gutter.”

  “Did he actually shove you?” asked Stern.

  “I don't know. I don't remember. But he saw me.”

  “What do you mean he saw you?”

  “I was wearing a skirt. I wasn't wearing anything underneath.”

  “And he saw you?”

  “I think he probably did,” Stern's wife said.

  “How long were you down there?”

  “Just a minute. I don't know. I don't want to talk about it any more. What difference does it make?”

  “I didn't know you went around not wearing anything. You did that at college, but I thought you stopped doing that.”

  Stern knew who the man was without asking more about him and was not surprised at what he had said. The first Saturday after they moved in, Stern had driven around the sparsely populated neighborhood, smiling out the window at people and getting a few nods in return. He had then come to this man, who was standing in the middle of the road. The man had taken a long time getting out of the way, and when Stern had smiled at him, he had tilted his head incredulously, put his hands on his hips, and, with his shirt flopping madly in the wind, looked wetly in at Stern.

  Stern had held the smile on his own face as he drove by, letting it get smaller and smaller and sitting very stiffly, as though he expected something to hit him on the back of the head. On one other occasion, Stern had driven by to check the man and had seen him standing on his lawn in a T-shirt, arms heavy and molded inside flapping sleeves, his head tilted once again. And then Stern had stopped driving past the man's house and, through everything that happened afterward, had blacked the man out of his mind. Yet he had waited nonetheless for the day his wife would say this to him.

  There was half an hour of daylight remaining. Stern's son flew to the top of a living-room bookcase and said, “Get me down from this blazing fire,” and Stern climbed after him, throwing imaginary pails of water on the boy, and then swept him down to administer artificial respiration. They saw Popeye together on television, Stern's wife bringing them hamburgers while they watched the set. When he had eaten, Stern said he was going to see the man, and his wife for some reason said, “Be right back.”

  He did not take the car, wanting the walk so he could perhaps stop breathing hard. On the way over, he kept poking his fingers into his great belly, doing it harder and harder, making blotches in his white skin, to see if he could take body punches without losing his wind. He hit himself as hard as he could that way but decided that no matter how hard you did it to yourself, it wasn't the same as someone else. As he hit himself, a small temple of sweetness formed in his middle; he tried to press it aside, as though he could shove it along down to his legs, where it would be out of the way, but it would not move. The man's house was small and immaculately landscaped, but with a type of shrub Stern felt was much too commercial. It might have been considered beautiful at one time. A child's fire wagon stood outside. Stern walked past the house, near to the curb, and then walked on by it, stopping fifty yards or so away in a small wooded glade and ducking down to do some push-ups. He got up to nine, cheated another two, and when he arose, the sweetness was still there. He saw that he had gotten something on his hand, either manure or heavily fertilized earth. He wiped it on his olive-drab summer suit pants and kept wiping it as he walked back to the man's house again, past it, and on down the road to his own.

  His wife was scrubbing some badly laid tile on the floor of the den, pretending the deep crevasses didn't exist. She was a long-nosed woman of twenty-nine with flaring buttocks and great eyes that seemed always on the edge of tears.

  “Can you remember whether he actually shoved you down?” he asked her. “Whether there was physical contact?”

  “I don't remember. Maybe he didn't.”

  “Because if there was physical contact, that's one thing. If he just said something, well, a man can say something. I just wish you had something on under there. I didn't know you go around that way. Don't do it any more.”

  “Did you see him?” his wife asked.

  “No,” said Stern.

  “It doesn't make any difference,” she said, continuing on the tile.

  IT WAS a lovely house, seated in the middle of what once had been a pear orchard, and yet it had seemed way out on a limb, a giddy place to live, so far from the protection of Stern's city. Mr. Iavone, the real-estate agent who had taken Stern and his wife to the house, said, “If you like this one, it's going to be a matter of kesh. Tell me how much kesh you can raise and I'll see what I can do.” Mr. Iavone was a grim, short-tempered man who had been showing them selections all day, and when they finally drove up to this one, Stern felt under obligation to buy some house, any house, since Mr. Iavone had spent so much time with them. Golden children began to spill out of it, and the one that caught Stern's attention was a blinking woman-child with sunny face and plump body tumbling out of tight clothes. Stern, had his life depended on it, would not have been able to tell whether she was a woman or a child. Iavone, in an aside to Stern, told him that the girl-woman was the reason the Spensers were selling the house, that she had taken to doing uncontrollable things in cars with high-school boys, bringing shame to Mr. Spenser, her father, who was in data systems.

  The house had many rooms, a dizzying number to Stern, for whom the number of rooms was all-important. As a child he had graded the wealth of people by the number of rooms in which they lived. He himself had been brought up in three in the city and fancied people who lived in four were so much more splendid than himself.

  But now he was considering a house with a wild and guilty number of rooms, enough to put a triumphant and emphatic end to his three-room status. Perhaps, Stern thought, one should do this more gradually. A three-room fellow should ease up to six, then eight, and, only at that point, up to the unlimited class. Perhaps when a three-roomer moved suddenly into an unlimited affair he would each day faint with delirium.

  While Stern examined the house, Mr. Iavone sat at the piano and played selections from Chopin, gracefully swaying back and forth on the stool, his fingers, which had seemed to be real-estate ones, now suddenly full of stubby culture. (Later, Stern heard that Mr. Iavone always went to the piano for prospective buyers to show he did not drive a hard bargain. Actually, his
favorite relaxation was boccie.)

  Mr. Spenser, a man with purple lips and stiff neck, who seemed to Stern as though he belonged to a company that offered many benefits, walked around the house with Stern, clearing his throat a lot and talking about escrow. Stern listened, with a dignified look on his face, but did not really hear Mr. Spenser. Escrow was something that other people knew about, like stocks and bonds. “I don't want to hear about stocks,” Stern's mother had once said. “It's not for our kind. Not with the way your father makes a living. There's blood on every dollar.” Stern was sure now that if he stopped everything and took a fourteen-year course in escrow, he would still be unable to get the hang of it because it wasn't for his kind. Still, he felt very dignified walking around a house with a data systems man and talking about escrow. Mrs. Spenser invited Stern and his wife and child into the kitchen and brought out a jar of jam.

  “Did you make that in this house?” Stern asked.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Spenser, a skeletal woman Stern imagined had been worn down by her husband's dignified but fetishistic lovemaking requests.

  “This is quite a house,” said Stern.

  The price was $27,000. Someone had told Stern always to bid $5,000 under the asking price, and, adding on $1,000 to be nice, he said, “How about $23,000?” Mr. Spenser muttered something about expediting the escrow and then said OK. Stern's heart sank. He had been willing to go to $25,000, and his face got numb, and then he began to tingle the way he once had after taking a one-penny sharpener from the five-and-ten and then waiting by the counter, unable to move, to get his Dutch Rubbing from the store owner. Getting the house as low as he had, he felt a great tenderness for Mr. Spenser; he wanted to throw his arms around the stiff-necked man, who probably knew nothing of Broadway plays with Cyril Ritchard, and say, “You fool. I just got two thousand dollars from you. How much could you get paid by your company, which probably gives you plenty of benefits but only meek Protestant salaries? Don't you know that just because a man says one price doesn't mean that's all he'll pay? You've got to hold on to those two thousands, because even though you're a churchgoer you've got a glandular daughter who'll always be doing things in cars and forcing you to move to other neighborhoods, pretending you're moving because of oil burners or escrow.”