samo068
• 7/12/2010 - Acting the role of herself, without rage, without...
| Acting the role of herself, without rage, without even a reaction, dignified, silent, she turned and left the room
"What can be done for her?" he was growling, and all the while, down on his knees, carefully gathering together the shattered fragments of the glass and dumping them into Dawn's wastebasket"What can be done for her? What can be done for anyone? Nothing can be doneSixteen years old and completely crazyShe blew up a buildingYou had no right to let her go!"
Without its glass, the picture of the immovable Count he hung again over the desk, and then, as though listening to people unabatedly chattering on about something or other were the task assigned him by the forces of destiny, he returned from the savagery of where he'd been to the solid and orderly ludicrousness of a dinner partyThat's what was left to hold him together--a dinner partyAll there was for him to cling to as the entire enterprise of his life continued careering toward destruction--a dinner party
To the candlelit terrace he duteously returned, while bearing within him everything that he could not understand
Dishes had been cleared, the salad eaten, and dessert served, fresh louis vuitton taschen strawberry-rhubarb pie from McPherson'sThe Swede saw that the guests had rearranged themselves for the last courseOrcutt, hiding still the vicious shit that he was behind the Hawaiian shirt and the raspberry trousers, had moved across the table and sat talking with the Umanoffs, all of them amiable and laughing together now that Deep Throat was off the agendaDeep Throat had never been the real subject anywayBoiling away beneath Deep Throat was the far more disgusting and transgressive subject of Merry, of Sheila, of Shelly, of Orcutt and Dawn, of wantonness and betrayal and deception, of treachery and disunity among neighbors and friends, the subject of crueltyThe mockery of human integrity, every ethical obligation destroyed--that was the subject here tonight!
The Swede's mother had come around to sit beside Dawn, who was talking with the Salzmans, and his father and Jessie were nowhere to be seen
Dawn asked, "Important?"
"The Czech guyThe information I wantedWhere's my dad?"
He waited for her to say "Dead," but after she looked around she mouthed only "Don't know" and turned back to Shelly and Sheila
"Daddy left with MrsOrcutt," his mother whispered"They went somewhere motorcycle balenciaga together
Orcutt came up to himThey were the same size, both big men, but the Swede had always been the stronger, going back to their twenties, to when Merry was born and the Levovs moved out to Old Rimrock from their apartment on Elizabeth Avenue in Newark and the newcomer had showed up for the Saturday morning touch-football games back of Orcutt's houseOut there just for the fun of it, to enjoy the fresh air and the feel of the ball and the camaraderie, to make some new friends, the Swede had not the slightest inclination to appear showy or superior, except when he simply had no choice: when Orcutt, who off the field had never been other than kind and considerate, began to use his hands more recklessly than the Swede considered sportsmanlike--in a way that the Swede considered cheap and irritating, for a pickup game the worst sort of behavior even if Orcutt's team did happen to have fallen behindAfter it had occurred for two weeks in a row, he decided the third week to do what he of course could have done at any time--to dump himAnd so, near the end of the game, with a single, swift maneuver--employing the other person's weight to do the damage--he managed at once to prada borse catch a long pass from Bucky Robinson and to make sure Orcutt was sprawled in the grass at his feet, before he pranced away to pile on the scorePranced away and thought, of all things, "I don't like being looked down on," the words that Dawn had used to decline joining The Orcutt Family Cemetery TourHe had not realized, not till he was speeding alone toward the goal line, how much Dawn's assailability had gotten to him nor how unsettled he was by the remotest likelihood (a likelihood that, to her face, he had dismissed) of his wife's being ridiculed out here for growing up in Elizabeth the daughter of an Irish plumberWhen, after scoring, he turned around and saw Orcutt still on the ground, he thought, "Two hundred years of Morris County history, flat on its ass--that'll teach you to look down on Dawn LevovNext time you'll play the whole game on your ass," before trotting back up the field to see if Orcutt was all right
The Swede knew that once he got him on the floor of the terrace he would have no difficulty in slamming Orcutt's head against the flagstones as many times as might be required to get him into that cemetery with his distinguished clanYes, something is sac chloe wrong with this guy, there always was, and the Swede had known it all along--knew it from those terrible paintings, knew it from the reckless use of his hands in a backyard pickup game, knew it even at the cemetery, when for one solid hour Orcutt got to goyishly regale a Jewish sightseerYes, big dissatisfaction there right from the startDawn said it was art, modern art, when all the time, baldly displayed on their living room wall, was William Orcutt's dissatisfactionBut now he has my wifeInstead of that misfortune Jessie, he's got revamped and revitalized Miss New Jersey of 1949Got it made, got it all now, the greedy, thieving son of a bitch
"Your father's a good man," Orcutt said"Jessie doesn't usually get all this attention when she goes outIt's why she doesn't go outHe's a very generous manHe doesn't hold anything back, does he? Nothing left undisclosedYou get the whole personAn amazing person, reallyComing from where I do, you have to envy all that
Oh, I'll bet you do, you son of a bitchLaugh at us, you fucker
"Where are they?" the Swede asked
"He told her there's only one way to eat a fresh piece of pieThat's sitting at a kitchen table with a nice cold glass of logo dolce |
Permanent Link
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• 7/12/2010 - Acting the role of herself, without rage, without...
| Acting the role of herself, without rage, without even a reaction, dignified, silent, she turned and left the room
"What can be done for her?" he was growling, and all the while, down on his knees, carefully gathering together the shattered fragments of the glass and dumping them into Dawn's wastebasket"What can be done for her? What can be done for anyone? Nothing can be doneSixteen years old and completely crazyShe blew up a buildingYou had no right to let her go!"
Without its glass, the picture of the immovable Count he hung again over the desk, and then, as though listening to people unabatedly chattering on about something or other were the task assigned him by the forces of destiny, he returned from the savagery of where he'd been to the solid and orderly ludicrousness of a dinner partyThat's what was left to hold him together--a dinner partyAll there was for him to cling to as the entire enterprise of his life continued careering toward destruction--a dinner party
To the candlelit terrace he duteously returned, while bearing within him everything that he could not understand
Dishes had been cleared, the salad eaten, and dessert served, fresh louis vuitton taschen strawberry-rhubarb pie from McPherson'sThe Swede saw that the guests had rearranged themselves for the last courseOrcutt, hiding still the vicious shit that he was behind the Hawaiian shirt and the raspberry trousers, had moved across the table and sat talking with the Umanoffs, all of them amiable and laughing together now that Deep Throat was off the agendaDeep Throat had never been the real subject anywayBoiling away beneath Deep Throat was the far more disgusting and transgressive subject of Merry, of Sheila, of Shelly, of Orcutt and Dawn, of wantonness and betrayal and deception, of treachery and disunity among neighbors and friends, the subject of crueltyThe mockery of human integrity, every ethical obligation destroyed--that was the subject here tonight!
The Swede's mother had come around to sit beside Dawn, who was talking with the Salzmans, and his father and Jessie were nowhere to be seen
Dawn asked, "Important?"
"The Czech guyThe information I wantedWhere's my dad?"
He waited for her to say "Dead," but after she looked around she mouthed only "Don't know" and turned back to Shelly and Sheila
"Daddy left with MrsOrcutt," his mother whispered"They went somewhere motorcycle balenciaga together
Orcutt came up to himThey were the same size, both big men, but the Swede had always been the stronger, going back to their twenties, to when Merry was born and the Levovs moved out to Old Rimrock from their apartment on Elizabeth Avenue in Newark and the newcomer had showed up for the Saturday morning touch-football games back of Orcutt's houseOut there just for the fun of it, to enjoy the fresh air and the feel of the ball and the camaraderie, to make some new friends, the Swede had not the slightest inclination to appear showy or superior, except when he simply had no choice: when Orcutt, who off the field had never been other than kind and considerate, began to use his hands more recklessly than the Swede considered sportsmanlike--in a way that the Swede considered cheap and irritating, for a pickup game the worst sort of behavior even if Orcutt's team did happen to have fallen behindAfter it had occurred for two weeks in a row, he decided the third week to do what he of course could have done at any time--to dump himAnd so, near the end of the game, with a single, swift maneuver--employing the other person's weight to do the damage--he managed at once to prada borse catch a long pass from Bucky Robinson and to make sure Orcutt was sprawled in the grass at his feet, before he pranced away to pile on the scorePranced away and thought, of all things, "I don't like being looked down on," the words that Dawn had used to decline joining The Orcutt Family Cemetery TourHe had not realized, not till he was speeding alone toward the goal line, how much Dawn's assailability had gotten to him nor how unsettled he was by the remotest likelihood (a likelihood that, to her face, he had dismissed) of his wife's being ridiculed out here for growing up in Elizabeth the daughter of an Irish plumberWhen, after scoring, he turned around and saw Orcutt still on the ground, he thought, "Two hundred years of Morris County history, flat on its ass--that'll teach you to look down on Dawn LevovNext time you'll play the whole game on your ass," before trotting back up the field to see if Orcutt was all right
The Swede knew that once he got him on the floor of the terrace he would have no difficulty in slamming Orcutt's head against the flagstones as many times as might be required to get him into that cemetery with his distinguished clanYes, something is sac chloe wrong with this guy, there always was, and the Swede had known it all along--knew it from those terrible paintings, knew it from the reckless use of his hands in a backyard pickup game, knew it even at the cemetery, when for one solid hour Orcutt got to goyishly regale a Jewish sightseerYes, big dissatisfaction there right from the startDawn said it was art, modern art, when all the time, baldly displayed on their living room wall, was William Orcutt's dissatisfactionBut now he has my wifeInstead of that misfortune Jessie, he's got revamped and revitalized Miss New Jersey of 1949Got it made, got it all now, the greedy, thieving son of a bitch
"Your father's a good man," Orcutt said"Jessie doesn't usually get all this attention when she goes outIt's why she doesn't go outHe's a very generous manHe doesn't hold anything back, does he? Nothing left undisclosedYou get the whole personAn amazing person, reallyComing from where I do, you have to envy all that
Oh, I'll bet you do, you son of a bitchLaugh at us, you fucker
"Where are they?" the Swede asked
"He told her there's only one way to eat a fresh piece of pieThat's sitting at a kitchen table with a nice cold glass of logo dolce |
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• 7/10/2010 - "I see where I have to be a father again," he...
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"I see where I have to be a father again," he said to her softly, and she could say nothing, she could only weep and let herself be rocked by the Swede's father, whom, on the one other occasion she had met him in her life--when, some fifteen years back, they had gone to picnic on the Orcutts' lawn for Fourth of July--she had tried to interest in skeet shooting, yet another of those diversions that had long defied Lou Levov's Jewish comprehensionFor "fun" pulling a trigger and shooting with a gun
That was the day when, on the way back home, they'd passed a handmade sign on the road by the Congregational church that said "Tent Sale" and Merry had begged the Swede, in her fervent way, to stop and buy one for her
If Jessie could cry on his father's shoulder over waving good-bye to her family at the age of thirteen, about being shipped off alone at thirteen with nothing but a horse, why shouldn't that memory of his--"Daddy, stop, they're selling t-t-t-tents!"--bring the Swede to the edge of tears about his daughter the Jain when she was six?
Figuring that Orcutt ought to know what was happening to Jessie and needing time to collect himself, feeling suddenly the full weight of the situation he was so strenuously working to obliterate from his thinking at least until the guests went home--the situation he was in as the father of a daughter who had killed not just one person more or less accidentally but, in the name of truth and justice, three more people quite indifferently, a daughter who, having repudiated everything she had ever chanel quilted replica learned from him and her mother, had now gone on to disown virtually the whole of civilized existence, beginning with cleanliness and ending with reason--the Swede left his father temporarily to tend alone to Jessie and went around, by way of the back of the house, to the rear kitchen door to get OrcuttThrough the door's glass panes he could see a stack of papers on the table, a new batch of Orcutt's drawings, probably of the troublesome link, and then, by the sink, he saw Orcutt himself
Orcutt had on his raspberry-colored linen pants and, hanging clear of the pants, a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt decorated with a colorful array of tropical flora best described in a word favored by Sylvia Levov for everything distasteful to her in wearing apparel: "loud Dawn maintained that the outfit was just part of that superconfident Orcutt facade by which, as a young newcomer to Old Rimrock, she had once been so ridiculously intimidatedAccording to Dawn's interpretation--which, when she told it to him, struck the Swede as not without a tinge still of the old resentment--the message of the Hawaiian summer shirts was simply this: I am William Orcutt III and I can wear what other people around here wouldn't dare to wear"The grander you believe you are in the great world of Morris County," said Dawn, "the more flamboyant you think you can beThe Hawaiian shirt," she said, smiling her mocking smile, "is Wasp extremism--Wasp motleyThat's what I've learned living out here--even the William Orcutt the Thirds have their little pale moments of louis vuitton wien exuberance
Just the year before, the Swede's father had made a similar observation"I've noticed this about the rich goyim in the summertimeComes the summer, and these reserved, correct people wear the most incredible costumes The Swede had laughed"It's a form of privilege," he said, repeating Dawn's line"Is it?" asked Lou Levov, laughing along with him"Maybe it is," Lou concluded"Still, I got to hand it to this goy: you have to have guts to wear those pants and those shirts
Certainly, seeing Orcutt dressed like that down in the village, a burly guy, big and substantial-looking, you would not have imagined--if you were the Swede--his paintings having that rubbed-out look as their distinctive featureA person as unsophisticated about abstract art as the Swede was said to be by Dawn might easily have imagined the guy who went everywhere in those shirts as painting pictures like the famous one of Firpo knocking Dempsey out of the ring in the second round at the old Polo GroundsBut then artistic creation obviously was not achieved in any way or for any of the reasons Swede Levov could understandAccording to the Swede's interpretation, all of the guy's effervescence seemed rather to go into wearing those shirts--all his flamboyance, his boldness, his defiance, and perhaps, too, his disappointment and his despair
Well, perhaps not all, the Swede discovered as he stood peering in through the kitchen door from the big granite step outsideWhy he hadn't just opened the door and gone straight ahead into his own kitchen to say that Jessie was in serious balenciaga handbags motorcycle need of her husband was because of the way that Orcutt was leaning over Dawn while Dawn was leaning over the sink, shucking the cornIn the first instant it looked to the Swede--despite the fact that Dawn needed no such instruction--as though Orcutt were showing Dawn how to shuck corn, bending over her from behind and, with his hands on hers, helping her get the knack of cleanly removing the husk and the silkBut if he was only helping her learn to shuck corn, why, beneath the florid expanse of Hawaiian shirt, were his hips and his buttocks moving like that? Why was his cheek pressed against hers like that? And why was Dawn saying--if the Swede was correctly reading her lips--"Not here, not here? Why not shuck the corn here? The kitchen was as good a place as anyNo, it took a moment to figure out that, one, they were not merely shucking corn together and, two, not all of the effervescence, flamboyance, boldness, defiance, disappointment, and despair nibbling at the edges of the old-line durability was necessarily sated by wearing those shirts
So this was why she was always losing her patience with Orcutt--to put me off the track! Making cracks about his bloodlessness, his breeding, his empty warmth, putting him down like that whenever we are about to get into bedSure she talks that way--she has to, she's in love with himThe unfaithfulness to the house was never unfaithfulness to the house--it was unfaithfulness"The poor wife doesn't drink for no reasonAlways holding everything backSo busy being so polite," Dawn said, "so Princeton," omega watch orange Dawn said, "so unerringHe works so hard to be one-dimensionalLiving completely off what they once wereThe man is simply not there half the time
Well, Orcutt was there now, right thereWhat the Swede believed he'd seen, before quickly turning back to the terrace and the steak on the fire, was Orcutt putting himself exactly where he intended to be, while telling Dawn exactly where he was"There! There! There! There!" And he did not appear to be holding anything back
At dinner--outdoors, on the back terrace, with darkness coming on so gradually that the evening seemed to the Swede stalled, stopped, suspended, provoking in him a distressing sense of nothing more to follow, of nothing ever to happen again, of having entered a coffin carved out of time from which he would never be extricated--there were also the Umanoffs, Marcia and Barry, and the Salzmans, Sheila and ShellyOnly a few hours had passed since the Swede learned that it was Sheila Salzman, the speech therapist, who had hidden Merry after the bombingThe Salzmans had not told himAnd if only they had--called when she showed up there, done their duty to him thenHe could not complete the thoughtIf he were to contemplate head-on all that would not have happened had Merry never been permitted to become a fugitive from justiceCouldn't complete that thought eitherHe sat at dinner, eternally inert--immobilized, ineffectual, inert, estranged from those expansive blessings of openness and vigor conferred on him by his hyperoptimismA lifetime's agility as a businessman, as an athlete, as big black bag a |
Permanent Link
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• 7/10/2010 - "I see where I have to be a father again," he...
|
"I see where I have to be a father again," he said to her softly, and she could say nothing, she could only weep and let herself be rocked by the Swede's father, whom, on the one other occasion she had met him in her life--when, some fifteen years back, they had gone to picnic on the Orcutts' lawn for Fourth of July--she had tried to interest in skeet shooting, yet another of those diversions that had long defied Lou Levov's Jewish comprehensionFor "fun" pulling a trigger and shooting with a gun
That was the day when, on the way back home, they'd passed a handmade sign on the road by the Congregational church that said "Tent Sale" and Merry had begged the Swede, in her fervent way, to stop and buy one for her
If Jessie could cry on his father's shoulder over waving good-bye to her family at the age of thirteen, about being shipped off alone at thirteen with nothing but a horse, why shouldn't that memory of his--"Daddy, stop, they're selling t-t-t-tents!"--bring the Swede to the edge of tears about his daughter the Jain when she was six?
Figuring that Orcutt ought to know what was happening to Jessie and needing time to collect himself, feeling suddenly the full weight of the situation he was so strenuously working to obliterate from his thinking at least until the guests went home--the situation he was in as the father of a daughter who had killed not just one person more or less accidentally but, in the name of truth and justice, three more people quite indifferently, a daughter who, having repudiated everything she had ever chanel quilted replica learned from him and her mother, had now gone on to disown virtually the whole of civilized existence, beginning with cleanliness and ending with reason--the Swede left his father temporarily to tend alone to Jessie and went around, by way of the back of the house, to the rear kitchen door to get OrcuttThrough the door's glass panes he could see a stack of papers on the table, a new batch of Orcutt's drawings, probably of the troublesome link, and then, by the sink, he saw Orcutt himself
Orcutt had on his raspberry-colored linen pants and, hanging clear of the pants, a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt decorated with a colorful array of tropical flora best described in a word favored by Sylvia Levov for everything distasteful to her in wearing apparel: "loud Dawn maintained that the outfit was just part of that superconfident Orcutt facade by which, as a young newcomer to Old Rimrock, she had once been so ridiculously intimidatedAccording to Dawn's interpretation--which, when she told it to him, struck the Swede as not without a tinge still of the old resentment--the message of the Hawaiian summer shirts was simply this: I am William Orcutt III and I can wear what other people around here wouldn't dare to wear"The grander you believe you are in the great world of Morris County," said Dawn, "the more flamboyant you think you can beThe Hawaiian shirt," she said, smiling her mocking smile, "is Wasp extremism--Wasp motleyThat's what I've learned living out here--even the William Orcutt the Thirds have their little pale moments of louis vuitton wien exuberance
Just the year before, the Swede's father had made a similar observation"I've noticed this about the rich goyim in the summertimeComes the summer, and these reserved, correct people wear the most incredible costumes The Swede had laughed"It's a form of privilege," he said, repeating Dawn's line"Is it?" asked Lou Levov, laughing along with him"Maybe it is," Lou concluded"Still, I got to hand it to this goy: you have to have guts to wear those pants and those shirts
Certainly, seeing Orcutt dressed like that down in the village, a burly guy, big and substantial-looking, you would not have imagined--if you were the Swede--his paintings having that rubbed-out look as their distinctive featureA person as unsophisticated about abstract art as the Swede was said to be by Dawn might easily have imagined the guy who went everywhere in those shirts as painting pictures like the famous one of Firpo knocking Dempsey out of the ring in the second round at the old Polo GroundsBut then artistic creation obviously was not achieved in any way or for any of the reasons Swede Levov could understandAccording to the Swede's interpretation, all of the guy's effervescence seemed rather to go into wearing those shirts--all his flamboyance, his boldness, his defiance, and perhaps, too, his disappointment and his despair
Well, perhaps not all, the Swede discovered as he stood peering in through the kitchen door from the big granite step outsideWhy he hadn't just opened the door and gone straight ahead into his own kitchen to say that Jessie was in serious balenciaga handbags motorcycle need of her husband was because of the way that Orcutt was leaning over Dawn while Dawn was leaning over the sink, shucking the cornIn the first instant it looked to the Swede--despite the fact that Dawn needed no such instruction--as though Orcutt were showing Dawn how to shuck corn, bending over her from behind and, with his hands on hers, helping her get the knack of cleanly removing the husk and the silkBut if he was only helping her learn to shuck corn, why, beneath the florid expanse of Hawaiian shirt, were his hips and his buttocks moving like that? Why was his cheek pressed against hers like that? And why was Dawn saying--if the Swede was correctly reading her lips--"Not here, not here? Why not shuck the corn here? The kitchen was as good a place as anyNo, it took a moment to figure out that, one, they were not merely shucking corn together and, two, not all of the effervescence, flamboyance, boldness, defiance, disappointment, and despair nibbling at the edges of the old-line durability was necessarily sated by wearing those shirts
So this was why she was always losing her patience with Orcutt--to put me off the track! Making cracks about his bloodlessness, his breeding, his empty warmth, putting him down like that whenever we are about to get into bedSure she talks that way--she has to, she's in love with himThe unfaithfulness to the house was never unfaithfulness to the house--it was unfaithfulness"The poor wife doesn't drink for no reasonAlways holding everything backSo busy being so polite," Dawn said, "so Princeton," omega watch orange Dawn said, "so unerringHe works so hard to be one-dimensionalLiving completely off what they once wereThe man is simply not there half the time
Well, Orcutt was there now, right thereWhat the Swede believed he'd seen, before quickly turning back to the terrace and the steak on the fire, was Orcutt putting himself exactly where he intended to be, while telling Dawn exactly where he was"There! There! There! There!" And he did not appear to be holding anything back
At dinner--outdoors, on the back terrace, with darkness coming on so gradually that the evening seemed to the Swede stalled, stopped, suspended, provoking in him a distressing sense of nothing more to follow, of nothing ever to happen again, of having entered a coffin carved out of time from which he would never be extricated--there were also the Umanoffs, Marcia and Barry, and the Salzmans, Sheila and ShellyOnly a few hours had passed since the Swede learned that it was Sheila Salzman, the speech therapist, who had hidden Merry after the bombingThe Salzmans had not told himAnd if only they had--called when she showed up there, done their duty to him thenHe could not complete the thoughtIf he were to contemplate head-on all that would not have happened had Merry never been permitted to become a fugitive from justiceCouldn't complete that thought eitherHe sat at dinner, eternally inert--immobilized, ineffectual, inert, estranged from those expansive blessings of openness and vigor conferred on him by his hyperoptimismA lifetime's agility as a businessman, as an athlete, as big black bag a |
Permanent Link
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• 7/8/2010 - It invariably happened in the same wayJulius...
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It invariably happened in the same wayJulius Beaufort, on the night of her annual ball, never failed to appear at the Opera; indeed, she always gave her ball on an Opera night in order to emphasise her complete superiority to household cares, and her possession of a staff of servants competent to organise every detail of the entertainment in her absence
The Beauforts' house was one of the few in New York that possessed a ball-room (it antedated even MrsManson Mingott's and the Headly Chiverses'); and at a time when it was beginning to be thought "provincial" to put a "crash" over the drawing-room floor and move the furniture upstairs, the possession of a ball-room that was used for no other purpose, and left for three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the year to shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner and its chandelier in a bag; this undoubted superiority was felt to compensate for whatever was regrettable in the Beaufort pastArcher, who was fond of coining her social philosophy into axioms, had once said: "We all have our pet common people?" and though the phrase was a daring one, its truth was secretly admitted in many an exclusive bosomBut the Beauforts were not exactly common; some people said they were even worseBeaufort belonged indeed to one of America's most honoured families; she had been the lovely Regina Dallas (of the South Carolina branch), a penniless beauty introduced to New York society by her cousin, the imprudent Medora Manson, who was always doing the wrong thing from the right motiveWhen one was related to the Mansons and the Rushworths one had a "droit de cite" (as MrSillerton Jackson, who had frequented the Tuileries, called it) in New York society; but did one not forfeit it in marrying Julius Beaufort?
The question was: who was Beaufort? He passed for an omega watch orange Englishman, was agreeable, handsome, ill-tempered, hospitable and wittyHe had come to America with letters of recommendation from old MrsManson Mingott's English son-in-law, the banker, and had speedily made himself an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents were mysterious; and when Medora Manson announced her cousin's engagement to him it was felt to be one more act of folly in poor Medora's long record of imprudences
But folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom, and two years after young MrsBeaufort's marriage it was admitted that she had the most distinguished house in New YorkNo one knew exactly how the miracle was accomplishedShe was indolent, passive, the caustic even called her dull; but dressed like an idol, hung with pearls, growing younger and blonder and more beautiful each year, she throned in MrBeaufort's heavy brown-stone palace, and drew all the world there without lifting her jewelled little fingerThe knowing people said it was Beaufort himself who trained the servants, taught the chef new dishes, told the gardeners what hot-house flowers to grow for the dinner-table and the drawing-rooms, selected the guests, brewed the after-dinner punch and dictated the little notes his wife wrote to her friendsIf he did, these domestic activities were privately performed, and he presented to the world the appearance of a careless and hospitable millionaire strolling into his own drawing-room with the detachment of an invited guest, and saying: "My wife's gloxinias are a marvel, aren't they? I believe she gets them out from KewBeaufort's secret, people were agreed, was the way he carried things offIt was all very well to whisper that he had been "helped" to leave England by the international banking-house in which he had prada borse been employed; he carried off that rumour as easily as the rest?though New York's business conscience was no less sensitive than its moral standard?he carried everything before him, and all New York into his drawing-rooms, and for over twenty years now people had said they were "going to the Beauforts'" with the same tone of security as if they had said they were going to MrsManson Mingott's, and with the added satisfaction of knowing they would get hot canvas-back ducks and vintage wines, instead of tepid Veuve Clicquot without a year and warmed-up croquettes from PhiladelphiaBeaufort, then, had as usual appeared in her box just before the Jewel Song; and when, again as usual, she rose at the end of the third act, drew her opera cloak about her lovely shoulders, and disappeared, New York knew that meant that half an hour later the ball would begin
The Beaufort house was one that New Yorkers were proud to show to foreigners, especially on the night of the annual ballThe Beauforts had been among the first people in New York to own their own red velvet carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own footmen, under their own awning, instead of hiring it with the supper and the ball-room chairsThey had also inaugurated the custom of letting the ladies take their cloaks off in the hall, instead of shuffling up to the hostess's bedroom and recurling their hair with the aid of the gas-burner; Beaufort was understood to have said that he supposed all his wife's friends had maids who saw to it that they were properly coiffees when they left home
Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing fendi big from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo
Newland Archer, as became a young man of his position, strolled in somewhat lateHe had left his overcoat with the silk-stockinged footmen (the stockings were one of Beaufort's few fatuities), had dawdled a while in the library hung with Spanish leather and furnished with Buhl and malachite, where a few men were chatting and putting on their dancing-gloves, and had finally joined the line of guests whom MrsBeaufort was receiving on the threshold of the crimson drawing-room
Archer was distinctly nervousHe had not gone back to his club after the Opera (as the young bloods usually did), but, the night being fine, had walked for some distance up Fifth Avenue before turning back in the direction of the Beauforts' houseHe was definitely afraid that the Mingotts might be going too far; that, in fact, they might have Granny Mingott's orders to bring the Countess Olenska to the ball
From the tone of the club box he had perceived how grave a mistake that would be; and, though he was more than ever determined to "see the thing through," he felt less chivalrously eager to champion his betrothed's cousin than before their brief talk at the Opera
Wandering on to the bouton d'or drawing-room (where Beaufort had had the audacity to hang "Love Victorious," the much-discussed nude of Bouguereau) Archer found MrsWelland and her daughter standing near the ball-room doorCouples were already gliding over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women's coiffures, and on dior china the glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glace gloves
Miss Welland, evidently about to join the dancers, hung on the threshold, her lilies-of-the-valley in her hand (she carried no other bouquet), her face a little pale, her eyes burning with a candid excitementA group of young men and girls were gathered about her, and there was much hand-clasping, laughing and pleasantry on which MrsWelland, standing slightly apart, shed the beam of a qualified approvalIt was evident that Miss Welland was in the act of announcing her engagement, while her mother affected the air of parental reluctance considered suitable to the occasion
Archer paused a momentIt was at his express wish that the announcement had been made, and yet it was not thus that he would have wished to have his happiness knownTo proclaim it in the heat and noise of a crowded ball-room was to rob it of the fine bloom of privacy which should belong to things nearest the heartHis joy was so deep that this blurring of the surface left its essence untouched; but he would have liked to keep the surface pure tooIt was something of a satisfaction to find that May Welland shared this feelingHer eyes fled to his beseechingly, and their look said: "Remember, we're doing this because it's right
No appeal could have found a more immediate response in Archer's breast; but he wished that the necessity of their action had been represented by some ideal reason, and not simply by poor Ellen OlenskaThe group about Miss Welland made way for him with significant smiles, and after taking his share of the felicitations he drew his betrothed into the middle of the ball-room floor and put his arm about her waist
"Now we shan't have to talk," he said, smiling into her candid eyes, as they floated away on the soft waves of the Blue Danube
She made no gucci clearance answer |
Permanent Link
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• 7/8/2010 - It invariably happened in the same wayJulius...
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It invariably happened in the same wayJulius Beaufort, on the night of her annual ball, never failed to appear at the Opera; indeed, she always gave her ball on an Opera night in order to emphasise her complete superiority to household cares, and her possession of a staff of servants competent to organise every detail of the entertainment in her absence
The Beauforts' house was one of the few in New York that possessed a ball-room (it antedated even MrsManson Mingott's and the Headly Chiverses'); and at a time when it was beginning to be thought "provincial" to put a "crash" over the drawing-room floor and move the furniture upstairs, the possession of a ball-room that was used for no other purpose, and left for three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the year to shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner and its chandelier in a bag; this undoubted superiority was felt to compensate for whatever was regrettable in the Beaufort pastArcher, who was fond of coining her social philosophy into axioms, had once said: "We all have our pet common people?" and though the phrase was a daring one, its truth was secretly admitted in many an exclusive bosomBut the Beauforts were not exactly common; some people said they were even worseBeaufort belonged indeed to one of America's most honoured families; she had been the lovely Regina Dallas (of the South Carolina branch), a penniless beauty introduced to New York society by her cousin, the imprudent Medora Manson, who was always doing the wrong thing from the right motiveWhen one was related to the Mansons and the Rushworths one had a "droit de cite" (as MrSillerton Jackson, who had frequented the Tuileries, called it) in New York society; but did one not forfeit it in marrying Julius Beaufort?
The question was: who was Beaufort? He passed for an omega watch orange Englishman, was agreeable, handsome, ill-tempered, hospitable and wittyHe had come to America with letters of recommendation from old MrsManson Mingott's English son-in-law, the banker, and had speedily made himself an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents were mysterious; and when Medora Manson announced her cousin's engagement to him it was felt to be one more act of folly in poor Medora's long record of imprudences
But folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom, and two years after young MrsBeaufort's marriage it was admitted that she had the most distinguished house in New YorkNo one knew exactly how the miracle was accomplishedShe was indolent, passive, the caustic even called her dull; but dressed like an idol, hung with pearls, growing younger and blonder and more beautiful each year, she throned in MrBeaufort's heavy brown-stone palace, and drew all the world there without lifting her jewelled little fingerThe knowing people said it was Beaufort himself who trained the servants, taught the chef new dishes, told the gardeners what hot-house flowers to grow for the dinner-table and the drawing-rooms, selected the guests, brewed the after-dinner punch and dictated the little notes his wife wrote to her friendsIf he did, these domestic activities were privately performed, and he presented to the world the appearance of a careless and hospitable millionaire strolling into his own drawing-room with the detachment of an invited guest, and saying: "My wife's gloxinias are a marvel, aren't they? I believe she gets them out from KewBeaufort's secret, people were agreed, was the way he carried things offIt was all very well to whisper that he had been "helped" to leave England by the international banking-house in which he had prada borse been employed; he carried off that rumour as easily as the rest?though New York's business conscience was no less sensitive than its moral standard?he carried everything before him, and all New York into his drawing-rooms, and for over twenty years now people had said they were "going to the Beauforts'" with the same tone of security as if they had said they were going to MrsManson Mingott's, and with the added satisfaction of knowing they would get hot canvas-back ducks and vintage wines, instead of tepid Veuve Clicquot without a year and warmed-up croquettes from PhiladelphiaBeaufort, then, had as usual appeared in her box just before the Jewel Song; and when, again as usual, she rose at the end of the third act, drew her opera cloak about her lovely shoulders, and disappeared, New York knew that meant that half an hour later the ball would begin
The Beaufort house was one that New Yorkers were proud to show to foreigners, especially on the night of the annual ballThe Beauforts had been among the first people in New York to own their own red velvet carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own footmen, under their own awning, instead of hiring it with the supper and the ball-room chairsThey had also inaugurated the custom of letting the ladies take their cloaks off in the hall, instead of shuffling up to the hostess's bedroom and recurling their hair with the aid of the gas-burner; Beaufort was understood to have said that he supposed all his wife's friends had maids who saw to it that they were properly coiffees when they left home
Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing fendi big from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo
Newland Archer, as became a young man of his position, strolled in somewhat lateHe had left his overcoat with the silk-stockinged footmen (the stockings were one of Beaufort's few fatuities), had dawdled a while in the library hung with Spanish leather and furnished with Buhl and malachite, where a few men were chatting and putting on their dancing-gloves, and had finally joined the line of guests whom MrsBeaufort was receiving on the threshold of the crimson drawing-room
Archer was distinctly nervousHe had not gone back to his club after the Opera (as the young bloods usually did), but, the night being fine, had walked for some distance up Fifth Avenue before turning back in the direction of the Beauforts' houseHe was definitely afraid that the Mingotts might be going too far; that, in fact, they might have Granny Mingott's orders to bring the Countess Olenska to the ball
From the tone of the club box he had perceived how grave a mistake that would be; and, though he was more than ever determined to "see the thing through," he felt less chivalrously eager to champion his betrothed's cousin than before their brief talk at the Opera
Wandering on to the bouton d'or drawing-room (where Beaufort had had the audacity to hang "Love Victorious," the much-discussed nude of Bouguereau) Archer found MrsWelland and her daughter standing near the ball-room doorCouples were already gliding over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women's coiffures, and on dior china the glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glace gloves
Miss Welland, evidently about to join the dancers, hung on the threshold, her lilies-of-the-valley in her hand (she carried no other bouquet), her face a little pale, her eyes burning with a candid excitementA group of young men and girls were gathered about her, and there was much hand-clasping, laughing and pleasantry on which MrsWelland, standing slightly apart, shed the beam of a qualified approvalIt was evident that Miss Welland was in the act of announcing her engagement, while her mother affected the air of parental reluctance considered suitable to the occasion
Archer paused a momentIt was at his express wish that the announcement had been made, and yet it was not thus that he would have wished to have his happiness knownTo proclaim it in the heat and noise of a crowded ball-room was to rob it of the fine bloom of privacy which should belong to things nearest the heartHis joy was so deep that this blurring of the surface left its essence untouched; but he would have liked to keep the surface pure tooIt was something of a satisfaction to find that May Welland shared this feelingHer eyes fled to his beseechingly, and their look said: "Remember, we're doing this because it's right
No appeal could have found a more immediate response in Archer's breast; but he wished that the necessity of their action had been represented by some ideal reason, and not simply by poor Ellen OlenskaThe group about Miss Welland made way for him with significant smiles, and after taking his share of the felicitations he drew his betrothed into the middle of the ball-room floor and put his arm about her waist
"Now we shan't have to talk," he said, smiling into her candid eyes, as they floated away on the soft waves of the Blue Danube
She made no gucci clearance answer |
Permanent Link
|
• 7/7/2010 - aradise Remembered
The SwedeDuring the war...
| aradise Remembered
The SwedeDuring the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city's old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athleteThe name was magical; so was the anomalous faceOf the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov
The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first baseman in baseballOnly the basketball team was ever any good--twice winning the city championship while he was its leading scorer--but as long as the Swede excelled, the fate of our sports teams didn't matter much to a student body whose elders, largely undereducated and overburdened, venerated academic achievement above all elsePhysical aggression, even camouflaged by athletic uniforms and official rules and intended to do no harm to Jews, was not a traditional source of pleasure in our community--advanced degrees wereNonetheless, through the Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopesPrimarily, they could forget the war
The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears that it fosteredWith the Swede indomitable on the playing field, the meaningless surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance, the happy release into a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of never seeing their sons or their brothers or their husbands again
And how did this affect him--the omega watch orange glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the left-field line? Is this what made him that staid and stone-faced boy? Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love? The high school cheerleaders had a cheer for the SwedeUnlike the other cheers, meant to inspire the whole team or to galvanize the spectators, this was a rhythmic, foot-stomping tribute to the Swede alone, enthusiasm for his perfection undiluted and unabashedThe cheer rocked the gym at basketball games every time he took a rebound or scored a point, swept through our side of City Stadium at football games any time he gained a yard or intercepted a passEven at the sparsely attended home baseball games up at Irvington Park, where there was no cheerleading squad eagerly kneeling at the sidelines, you could hear it thinly chanted by the handful of Weequahic stalwarts in the wooden stands not only when the Swede came up to bat but when he made no more than a routine putout at first baseIt was a cheer that consisted of eight syllables, three of them his name, and it went, Bah bah-bah! Bah bah bahbah-fraW and the tempo, at football games particularly, accelerated with each repetition until, at the peak of frenzied adoration, an explosion of skirt-billowing cartwheels was ecstatically discharged and the orange gym bloom- ers of ten sturdy little cheerleaders flickered like fireworks before our marveling eyesand not for love of you or me but of the wonderful Swede"Swede Levov! It rhymes withSwede Levov! It rhymes withSwede Levov! It rhymes with'The Love'!"
Yes, everywhere he looked, people were in love with himThe candy store owners we boys pestered called the rest of us "Hey-you-no!" or "Kid-cut-it-out!"; him they called, respectfully, "Swede Parents smiled and benignly addressed him as "Seymour The chattering girls he passed on the street would gucci indy bag ostentatiously swoon, and the bravest would holler after him, "Come back, come back, Levov of my life!" And he let it happen, walked about the neighborhood in possession of all that love, looking as though he didn't feel a thingContrary to whatever daydreams the rest of us may have had about the enhancing effect on ourselves of total, uncritical, idolatrous adulation, the love thrust upon the Swede seemed actually to deprive him of feelingIn this boy embraced as a symbol of hope by so many--as the embodiment of the strength, the resolve, the emboldened valor that would prevail to return our high school's servicemen home unscathed from Midway, Salerno, Cherbourg, the Solomons, the Aleutians, Tarawa--there appeared to be not a drop of wit or irony to interfere with his golden gift for responsibility
But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being a human consolation and beside the point if you're getting your way as a godEither there was a whole side to his personality that he was suppressing or that was as yet asleep or, more likely, there wasn'tHis aloofness, his seeming passivity as the desired object of all this asexual lovemaking, made him appear, if not divine, a distinguished cut above the more primordial humanity of just about everybody else at the schoolHe was fettered to history, an instrument of history, esteemed with a passion that might never have been if he'd broken the Weequahic basketball record--by scoring twenty-seven points against Barringer--on a day other than the sad, sad day in 1943 when fifty-eight Flying Fortresses were shot down by Luftwaffe fighter planes, two fell victim to flak, and five more crashed after crossing the English coast on their way back from bombing Germany
The Swede's younger brother was my classmate, Jerry Levov, a scrawny, small-headed, oddly overflexible boy built along the lines of a licorice stick, something of a mathematical wizard, and the January 1950 valedictorianThough Jerry never really had a friendship with anyone, in his imperious, irascible quilted chanel bags way, he took an interest in me over the years, and that was how I wound up, from the age of ten, regularly getting beaten by him at Ping-Pong in the finished basement of the Levovs' one-family house, on the corner of Wynd-moor and Keer--the word "finished" indicating that it was paneled in knotty pine, domesticated, and not, as Jerry seemed to think, that the basement was the perfect place for finishing off another kid
The explosiveness of Jerry's aggression at a Ping-Pong table exceeded his brother's in any sportA Ping-Pong ball is, brilliantly, sized and shaped so that it cannot take out your eyeI would not otherwise have played in Jerry Levov's basementIf it weren't for the opportunity to tell people that I knew my way around Swede Levov's house, nobody could have got me down into that basement, defenseless but for a small wooden paddleNothing that weighs as little as a Ping-Pong ball can be lethal, yet when Jerry whacked that thing murder couldn't have been far from his mindIt never occurred to me that this violent display might have something to do with what it was like for him to be the kid brother of Swede LevovSince I couldn't imagine anything better than being the Swede's brother--short of being the Swede himself--I failed to understand that for Jerry it might be difficult to imagine anything worse
The Swede's bedroom--which I never dared enter but would pause to gaze into when I used the toilet outside Jerry's room--was tucked under the eaves at the back of the houseWith its slanted ceiling and dormer windows and Weequahic pennants on the walls, it looked like what I thought of as a real boy's roomFrom the two windows that opened out over the back lawn you could see the roof of the Levovs' garage, where the Swede as a grade school kid practiced hitting in the wintertime by swinging at a baseball taped to a cord hung from a rafter--an idea he might have got from a baseball novel by John RTunis called The Kid from TomkinsvilleI came to that book and to other of Tunis's baseball books--Iron Duke, The Duke Decides, saddle christian dior Champion's Choice, Keystone Kids, Rookie of the Year--by spotting them on the built-in shelf beside the Swede's bed, all lined up alphabetically between two solid bronze bookends that had been a bar mitzvah gift, miniaturized replicas of Rodin's "The Thinker Immediately I went to the library to borrow all the Tunis books I could find and started with The Kid from Tomkinsville, a grim, gripping book to a boy, simply written, stiff in places but direct and dignified, about the Kid, Roy Tucker, a clean-cut young pitcher from the rural Connecticut hills whose father dies when he is four and whose mother dies when he is sixteen and who helps his grandmother make ends meet by working the family farm during the day and working at night in town at "MacKenzie's drugstore on the corner of South Main
The book, published in 1940, had black-and-white drawings that, with just a little expressionistic distortion and just enough anatomical skill, cannily pictorialize the hardness of the Kid's life, back before the game of baseball was illuminated with a million statistics, back when it was about the mysteries of earthly fate, when major leaguers looked less like big healthy kids and more like lean and hungry workingmenThe drawings seemed conceived out of the dark austerities of Depression AmericaEvery ten pages or so, to succinctly depict a dramatic physical moment in the story--"He was able to put a little steam in it,"
"It was over the fence,"
"Razzle limped to the dugout"--there is a blackish, ink-heavy rendering of a scrawny, shadow-faced ballplayer starkly silhouetted on a blank page, isolated, like the world's most lonesome soul, from both nature and man, or set in a stippled simulation of ballpark grass, dragging beneath him the skinny statuette of a wormlike shadowHe is unglamorous even in a baseball uniform; if he is the pitcher, his gloved hand looks like a paw; and what image after image makes graphically clear is that playing up in the majors, heroic though it may seem, is yet another form of backbreaking, unremu-nerative chanel reporter bag labo |
Permanent Link
|
• 7/7/2010 - aradise Remembered
The SwedeDuring the war...
| aradise Remembered
The SwedeDuring the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city's old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athleteThe name was magical; so was the anomalous faceOf the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov
The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first baseman in baseballOnly the basketball team was ever any good--twice winning the city championship while he was its leading scorer--but as long as the Swede excelled, the fate of our sports teams didn't matter much to a student body whose elders, largely undereducated and overburdened, venerated academic achievement above all elsePhysical aggression, even camouflaged by athletic uniforms and official rules and intended to do no harm to Jews, was not a traditional source of pleasure in our community--advanced degrees wereNonetheless, through the Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopesPrimarily, they could forget the war
The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears that it fosteredWith the Swede indomitable on the playing field, the meaningless surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance, the happy release into a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of never seeing their sons or their brothers or their husbands again
And how did this affect him--the omega watch orange glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the left-field line? Is this what made him that staid and stone-faced boy? Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love? The high school cheerleaders had a cheer for the SwedeUnlike the other cheers, meant to inspire the whole team or to galvanize the spectators, this was a rhythmic, foot-stomping tribute to the Swede alone, enthusiasm for his perfection undiluted and unabashedThe cheer rocked the gym at basketball games every time he took a rebound or scored a point, swept through our side of City Stadium at football games any time he gained a yard or intercepted a passEven at the sparsely attended home baseball games up at Irvington Park, where there was no cheerleading squad eagerly kneeling at the sidelines, you could hear it thinly chanted by the handful of Weequahic stalwarts in the wooden stands not only when the Swede came up to bat but when he made no more than a routine putout at first baseIt was a cheer that consisted of eight syllables, three of them his name, and it went, Bah bah-bah! Bah bah bahbah-fraW and the tempo, at football games particularly, accelerated with each repetition until, at the peak of frenzied adoration, an explosion of skirt-billowing cartwheels was ecstatically discharged and the orange gym bloom- ers of ten sturdy little cheerleaders flickered like fireworks before our marveling eyesand not for love of you or me but of the wonderful Swede"Swede Levov! It rhymes withSwede Levov! It rhymes withSwede Levov! It rhymes with'The Love'!"
Yes, everywhere he looked, people were in love with himThe candy store owners we boys pestered called the rest of us "Hey-you-no!" or "Kid-cut-it-out!"; him they called, respectfully, "Swede Parents smiled and benignly addressed him as "Seymour The chattering girls he passed on the street would gucci indy bag ostentatiously swoon, and the bravest would holler after him, "Come back, come back, Levov of my life!" And he let it happen, walked about the neighborhood in possession of all that love, looking as though he didn't feel a thingContrary to whatever daydreams the rest of us may have had about the enhancing effect on ourselves of total, uncritical, idolatrous adulation, the love thrust upon the Swede seemed actually to deprive him of feelingIn this boy embraced as a symbol of hope by so many--as the embodiment of the strength, the resolve, the emboldened valor that would prevail to return our high school's servicemen home unscathed from Midway, Salerno, Cherbourg, the Solomons, the Aleutians, Tarawa--there appeared to be not a drop of wit or irony to interfere with his golden gift for responsibility
But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being a human consolation and beside the point if you're getting your way as a godEither there was a whole side to his personality that he was suppressing or that was as yet asleep or, more likely, there wasn'tHis aloofness, his seeming passivity as the desired object of all this asexual lovemaking, made him appear, if not divine, a distinguished cut above the more primordial humanity of just about everybody else at the schoolHe was fettered to history, an instrument of history, esteemed with a passion that might never have been if he'd broken the Weequahic basketball record--by scoring twenty-seven points against Barringer--on a day other than the sad, sad day in 1943 when fifty-eight Flying Fortresses were shot down by Luftwaffe fighter planes, two fell victim to flak, and five more crashed after crossing the English coast on their way back from bombing Germany
The Swede's younger brother was my classmate, Jerry Levov, a scrawny, small-headed, oddly overflexible boy built along the lines of a licorice stick, something of a mathematical wizard, and the January 1950 valedictorianThough Jerry never really had a friendship with anyone, in his imperious, irascible quilted chanel bags way, he took an interest in me over the years, and that was how I wound up, from the age of ten, regularly getting beaten by him at Ping-Pong in the finished basement of the Levovs' one-family house, on the corner of Wynd-moor and Keer--the word "finished" indicating that it was paneled in knotty pine, domesticated, and not, as Jerry seemed to think, that the basement was the perfect place for finishing off another kid
The explosiveness of Jerry's aggression at a Ping-Pong table exceeded his brother's in any sportA Ping-Pong ball is, brilliantly, sized and shaped so that it cannot take out your eyeI would not otherwise have played in Jerry Levov's basementIf it weren't for the opportunity to tell people that I knew my way around Swede Levov's house, nobody could have got me down into that basement, defenseless but for a small wooden paddleNothing that weighs as little as a Ping-Pong ball can be lethal, yet when Jerry whacked that thing murder couldn't have been far from his mindIt never occurred to me that this violent display might have something to do with what it was like for him to be the kid brother of Swede LevovSince I couldn't imagine anything better than being the Swede's brother--short of being the Swede himself--I failed to understand that for Jerry it might be difficult to imagine anything worse
The Swede's bedroom--which I never dared enter but would pause to gaze into when I used the toilet outside Jerry's room--was tucked under the eaves at the back of the houseWith its slanted ceiling and dormer windows and Weequahic pennants on the walls, it looked like what I thought of as a real boy's roomFrom the two windows that opened out over the back lawn you could see the roof of the Levovs' garage, where the Swede as a grade school kid practiced hitting in the wintertime by swinging at a baseball taped to a cord hung from a rafter--an idea he might have got from a baseball novel by John RTunis called The Kid from TomkinsvilleI came to that book and to other of Tunis's baseball books--Iron Duke, The Duke Decides, saddle christian dior Champion's Choice, Keystone Kids, Rookie of the Year--by spotting them on the built-in shelf beside the Swede's bed, all lined up alphabetically between two solid bronze bookends that had been a bar mitzvah gift, miniaturized replicas of Rodin's "The Thinker Immediately I went to the library to borrow all the Tunis books I could find and started with The Kid from Tomkinsville, a grim, gripping book to a boy, simply written, stiff in places but direct and dignified, about the Kid, Roy Tucker, a clean-cut young pitcher from the rural Connecticut hills whose father dies when he is four and whose mother dies when he is sixteen and who helps his grandmother make ends meet by working the family farm during the day and working at night in town at "MacKenzie's drugstore on the corner of South Main
The book, published in 1940, had black-and-white drawings that, with just a little expressionistic distortion and just enough anatomical skill, cannily pictorialize the hardness of the Kid's life, back before the game of baseball was illuminated with a million statistics, back when it was about the mysteries of earthly fate, when major leaguers looked less like big healthy kids and more like lean and hungry workingmenThe drawings seemed conceived out of the dark austerities of Depression AmericaEvery ten pages or so, to succinctly depict a dramatic physical moment in the story--"He was able to put a little steam in it,"
"It was over the fence,"
"Razzle limped to the dugout"--there is a blackish, ink-heavy rendering of a scrawny, shadow-faced ballplayer starkly silhouetted on a blank page, isolated, like the world's most lonesome soul, from both nature and man, or set in a stippled simulation of ballpark grass, dragging beneath him the skinny statuette of a wormlike shadowHe is unglamorous even in a baseball uniform; if he is the pitcher, his gloved hand looks like a paw; and what image after image makes graphically clear is that playing up in the majors, heroic though it may seem, is yet another form of backbreaking, unremu-nerative chanel reporter bag labo |
Permanent Link
|
• 7/6/2010 - It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York...
|
It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions: conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding ageThere was always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally she) had surrendered the keys, what was the use of pretending that it was impregnable? Once people had tasted of MrsStruthers's easy Sunday hospitality they were not likely to sit at home remembering that her champagne was transmuted Shoe-Polish
"I know, dear, I know," Mrs"Such things have to be, I suppose, as long as AMUSEMENT is what people go out for; but I've never quite forgiven your cousin Madame Olenska for being the first person to countenance Mrs
A sudden blush rose to young MrsArcher's face; it surprised her husband as much as the other guests about the table"Oh, ELLEN?" she murmured, much in the same accusing and yet deprecating tone in which her parents might have said: "Oh, THE BLENKERS?
It was the note which the family had taken to sounding on the mention of the Countess Olenska's name, since she had surprised and inconvenienced them by remaining obdurate to her husband's advances; but on May's chanel classic bags lips it gave food for thought, and Archer looked at her with the sense of strangeness that sometimes came over him when she was most in the tone of her environment
His mother, with less than her usual sensitiveness to atmosphere, still insisted: "I've always thought that people like the Countess Olenska, who have lived in aristocratic societies, ought to help us to keep up our social distinctions, instead of ignoring them
May's blush remained permanently vivid: it seemed to have a significance beyond that implied by the recognition of Madame Olenska's social bad faith
"I've no doubt we all seem alike to foreigners," said Miss Jackson tartly
"I don't think Ellen cares for society; but nobody knows exactly what she does care for," May continued, as if she had been groping for something noncommittal
Everybody knew that the Countess Olenska was no longer in the good graces of her familyEven her devoted champion, old MrsManson Mingott, had been unable to defend her refusal to return to her husbandThe Mingotts had not proclaimed their disapproval aloud: their sense of solidarity was too strongThey had simply, as MrsWelland said, "let poor Ellen find her own level"?and that, mortifyingly and chanel white watch incomprehensibly, was in the dim depths where the Blenkers prevailed, and "people who wrote" celebrated their untidy ritesIt was incredible, but it was a fact, that Ellen, in spite of all her opportunities and her privileges, had become simply "Bohemian The fact enforced the contention that she had made a fatal mistake in not returning to Count OlenskiAfter all, a young woman's place was under her husband's roof, especially when she had left it in circumstances that if one had cared to look into them
"Madame Olenska is a great favourite with the gentlemen," said Miss Sophy, with her air of wishing to put forth something conciliatory when she knew that she was planting a dart
"Ah, that's the danger that a young woman like Madame Olenska is always exposed to," MrsArcher mournfully agreed; and the ladies, on this conclusion, gathered up their trains to seek the carcel globes of the drawing-room, while Archer and MrSillerton Jackson withdrew to the Gothic library
Once established before the grate, and consoling himself for the inadequacy of the dinner by the perfection of his cigar, MrJackson became portentous and communicable
"If the Beaufort smash comes," he announced, "there are going bolsas louis to be disclosures
Archer raised his head quickly: he could never hear the name without the sharp vision of Beaufort's heavy figure, opulently furred and shod, advancing through the snow at Skuytercliff
"There's bound to be," MrJackson continued, "the nastiest kind of a cleaning upHe hasn't spent all his money on Regina
"Oh, well?that's discounted, isn't it? My belief is he'll pull out yet," said the young man, wanting to change the subjectI know he was to see some of the influential people todayJackson reluctantly conceded, "it's to be hoped they can tide him over?this time anyhowI shouldn't like to think of poor Regina's spending the rest of her life in some shabby foreign watering-place for bankrupts
Archer said nothingIt seemed to him so natural?however tragic?that money ill-gotten should be cruelly expiated, that his mind, hardly lingering over MrsBeaufort's doom, wandered back to closer questionsWhat was the meaning of May's blush when the Countess Olenska had been mentioned?
Four months had passed since the midsummer day that he and Madame Olenska had spent together; and since then he had not seen herHe knew that she had returned to Washington, to the little house which she borse gucci and Medora Manson had taken there: he had written to her once?a few words, asking when they were to meet again?and she had even more briefly replied: "Not yet
Since then there had been no farther communication between them, and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longingsLittle by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visionsOutside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own roomAbsent?that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there
He became aware that MrJackson was clearing his throat preparatory to farther revelations
"I don't know, of course, how far your wife's family are aware of what people say about?well, about Madame Olenska's refusal to accept her husband's latest torebki louis vuitton o |
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• 7/6/2010 - It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York...
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It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions: conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding ageThere was always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally she) had surrendered the keys, what was the use of pretending that it was impregnable? Once people had tasted of MrsStruthers's easy Sunday hospitality they were not likely to sit at home remembering that her champagne was transmuted Shoe-Polish
"I know, dear, I know," Mrs"Such things have to be, I suppose, as long as AMUSEMENT is what people go out for; but I've never quite forgiven your cousin Madame Olenska for being the first person to countenance Mrs
A sudden blush rose to young MrsArcher's face; it surprised her husband as much as the other guests about the table"Oh, ELLEN?" she murmured, much in the same accusing and yet deprecating tone in which her parents might have said: "Oh, THE BLENKERS?
It was the note which the family had taken to sounding on the mention of the Countess Olenska's name, since she had surprised and inconvenienced them by remaining obdurate to her husband's advances; but on May's chanel classic bags lips it gave food for thought, and Archer looked at her with the sense of strangeness that sometimes came over him when she was most in the tone of her environment
His mother, with less than her usual sensitiveness to atmosphere, still insisted: "I've always thought that people like the Countess Olenska, who have lived in aristocratic societies, ought to help us to keep up our social distinctions, instead of ignoring them
May's blush remained permanently vivid: it seemed to have a significance beyond that implied by the recognition of Madame Olenska's social bad faith
"I've no doubt we all seem alike to foreigners," said Miss Jackson tartly
"I don't think Ellen cares for society; but nobody knows exactly what she does care for," May continued, as if she had been groping for something noncommittal
Everybody knew that the Countess Olenska was no longer in the good graces of her familyEven her devoted champion, old MrsManson Mingott, had been unable to defend her refusal to return to her husbandThe Mingotts had not proclaimed their disapproval aloud: their sense of solidarity was too strongThey had simply, as MrsWelland said, "let poor Ellen find her own level"?and that, mortifyingly and chanel white watch incomprehensibly, was in the dim depths where the Blenkers prevailed, and "people who wrote" celebrated their untidy ritesIt was incredible, but it was a fact, that Ellen, in spite of all her opportunities and her privileges, had become simply "Bohemian The fact enforced the contention that she had made a fatal mistake in not returning to Count OlenskiAfter all, a young woman's place was under her husband's roof, especially when she had left it in circumstances that if one had cared to look into them
"Madame Olenska is a great favourite with the gentlemen," said Miss Sophy, with her air of wishing to put forth something conciliatory when she knew that she was planting a dart
"Ah, that's the danger that a young woman like Madame Olenska is always exposed to," MrsArcher mournfully agreed; and the ladies, on this conclusion, gathered up their trains to seek the carcel globes of the drawing-room, while Archer and MrSillerton Jackson withdrew to the Gothic library
Once established before the grate, and consoling himself for the inadequacy of the dinner by the perfection of his cigar, MrJackson became portentous and communicable
"If the Beaufort smash comes," he announced, "there are going bolsas louis to be disclosures
Archer raised his head quickly: he could never hear the name without the sharp vision of Beaufort's heavy figure, opulently furred and shod, advancing through the snow at Skuytercliff
"There's bound to be," MrJackson continued, "the nastiest kind of a cleaning upHe hasn't spent all his money on Regina
"Oh, well?that's discounted, isn't it? My belief is he'll pull out yet," said the young man, wanting to change the subjectI know he was to see some of the influential people todayJackson reluctantly conceded, "it's to be hoped they can tide him over?this time anyhowI shouldn't like to think of poor Regina's spending the rest of her life in some shabby foreign watering-place for bankrupts
Archer said nothingIt seemed to him so natural?however tragic?that money ill-gotten should be cruelly expiated, that his mind, hardly lingering over MrsBeaufort's doom, wandered back to closer questionsWhat was the meaning of May's blush when the Countess Olenska had been mentioned?
Four months had passed since the midsummer day that he and Madame Olenska had spent together; and since then he had not seen herHe knew that she had returned to Washington, to the little house which she borse gucci and Medora Manson had taken there: he had written to her once?a few words, asking when they were to meet again?and she had even more briefly replied: "Not yet
Since then there had been no farther communication between them, and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longingsLittle by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visionsOutside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own roomAbsent?that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there
He became aware that MrJackson was clearing his throat preparatory to farther revelations
"I don't know, of course, how far your wife's family are aware of what people say about?well, about Madame Olenska's refusal to accept her husband's latest torebki louis vuitton o |
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• 7/5/2010 - ' Then he told me about his father and the tall...
| ' Then he told me about his father and the tall man from Barnum and BaileyRemember, Harry?" Harry nodded"When the Barnum and Bailey circus came to Newarkthis is 1917, 1918?" Harry nodded again without stopping his work"Well, they came to town and they had a tall man, approaching nine feet or so, and Harry's father saw him one day in the street, walking along the street, at Broad and Market, and he got so excited he ran over to the tall man and he took his shoelace off his own shoe, measured the guy's hand right out there on the street, and he went home and made up a perfect size-seventeen pair of glovesHarry's father cut it and his mom sewed it, and they went over to the circus and gave the gloves to the tall man, and the whole family got free seats, and a big story about Harry's dad ran in the Newark News the next day
Harry corrected him
"Right, before it merged with the Ledger
"Wonderful," the girl said, laughing"Your father must have been very skilled
"Couldn't speak a word black chanel quilted of English," Harry told her
"He couldn't? Well, that just goes to show, you don't have to know English," she said, "to cut a perfect pair of gloves for a man nine feet tall
Harry didn't laugh but the Swede did, laughed and put his arm around herWe're going to make her a dress glove, size fourBlack or brown, honey?"
"Brown?"
From a wrapped-up bundle of hides dampening beside Harry, he picked one out in a pale shade of brown"This is a tough color to get," the Swede told herYou can see, there's all sorts of variation in the color--see how light it is there, how dark it is down there? OkayWhat you saw in my office was pickledBut you can still see the animalIf you were to look at the animal," he said, "here it is--the head, the butt, the front legs, the hind legs, and here's the back, where the leather is harder and thicker, as it is over our own backbonesHe began calling her honey up in the cutting room and he could not stop, and this even before he understood that by standing beside prada logos her he was as close to Merry as he had been since the general store blew up and his honey disappearedThis is a French ruler, it's about an inch longer than an American rulerThis is called a spud knife, dull, beveled to an edge but not sharpNow he's pulling the trank down like that, to the length again--Harry likes to bet you that he'll pull it right down to the pattern without even touching the pattern, but I don't bet him because I don't like losingThis is called a fourchetteSee, all meticulously doneHe's going to cut yours and give it to me so we can take it down to the making departmentThis is called the slitter, honeyOnly mechanical process in the whole thingA press and a die, and the slitter will take about four tranks at a time___
"WowThis is an elaborate process," said RitaHard really to make money in the glove business because it's so labor-intensive--a time-consuming process, many operations to be coordinatedMost of the glove businesses have been family businessesVery chanel white watch traditional businessA product is a product to most manufacturersThe guy who makes them doesn't know anything about themThe glove business isn't like thatThis business has a long, long history
"Do other people feel the romance of the glove business the way you do, MrLevov? You really are mad for this place and all the processesI guess that's what makes you a happy man
"Am I?" he asked, and felt as though he were going to be dissected, cut into by a knife, opened up and all his misery revealed
"Are you the last of the Mohicans?"
"No, most of them, I believe, in this business have that same feeling for the tradition, that same loveBecause it does require a love and a legacy to motivate somebody to stay in a business like thisYou have to have strong ties to it to be able to stick it outCome on," he said, having managed momentarily to quash everything that was shadowing him and menacing him, succeeded still to be able to speak with great precision despite her telling him he was a happy fendi spy bag replica man"Let's go back to the making room
This is the silking, that's a story in itself, but this is what she's going to do firstThis is called a pique machine, it sews the finest stitch, called pique, requires far more skill than the other stitchesThis is called a polishing machine and that is called a stretcher and you are called honey and I am called Daddy and this is called living and the other is called dying and this is called madness and this is called mourning and this is called hell, pure hell, and you have to have strong ties to be able to stick it out, this is called trying-to-go-on-as-though-nothing-has-happened and this is called paying-the-full-price-but-in-God's-name-for-what, this is called wanting-to-be-dead-and-wanting-to-nnd-her-and-to-kill-her-and-to-save-her-from-whatever-she-is-going-through-wherever-on-earth-she-may-be-at-this-moment, this unbridled outpouring is called blotting-out-everything and it does not work, I am half insane, the shattering force of that bomb is too sac chloe gr |
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• 7/5/2010 - ' Then he told me about his father and the tall...
| ' Then he told me about his father and the tall man from Barnum and BaileyRemember, Harry?" Harry nodded"When the Barnum and Bailey circus came to Newarkthis is 1917, 1918?" Harry nodded again without stopping his work"Well, they came to town and they had a tall man, approaching nine feet or so, and Harry's father saw him one day in the street, walking along the street, at Broad and Market, and he got so excited he ran over to the tall man and he took his shoelace off his own shoe, measured the guy's hand right out there on the street, and he went home and made up a perfect size-seventeen pair of glovesHarry's father cut it and his mom sewed it, and they went over to the circus and gave the gloves to the tall man, and the whole family got free seats, and a big story about Harry's dad ran in the Newark News the next day
Harry corrected him
"Right, before it merged with the Ledger
"Wonderful," the girl said, laughing"Your father must have been very skilled
"Couldn't speak a word black chanel quilted of English," Harry told her
"He couldn't? Well, that just goes to show, you don't have to know English," she said, "to cut a perfect pair of gloves for a man nine feet tall
Harry didn't laugh but the Swede did, laughed and put his arm around herWe're going to make her a dress glove, size fourBlack or brown, honey?"
"Brown?"
From a wrapped-up bundle of hides dampening beside Harry, he picked one out in a pale shade of brown"This is a tough color to get," the Swede told herYou can see, there's all sorts of variation in the color--see how light it is there, how dark it is down there? OkayWhat you saw in my office was pickledBut you can still see the animalIf you were to look at the animal," he said, "here it is--the head, the butt, the front legs, the hind legs, and here's the back, where the leather is harder and thicker, as it is over our own backbonesHe began calling her honey up in the cutting room and he could not stop, and this even before he understood that by standing beside prada logos her he was as close to Merry as he had been since the general store blew up and his honey disappearedThis is a French ruler, it's about an inch longer than an American rulerThis is called a spud knife, dull, beveled to an edge but not sharpNow he's pulling the trank down like that, to the length again--Harry likes to bet you that he'll pull it right down to the pattern without even touching the pattern, but I don't bet him because I don't like losingThis is called a fourchetteSee, all meticulously doneHe's going to cut yours and give it to me so we can take it down to the making departmentThis is called the slitter, honeyOnly mechanical process in the whole thingA press and a die, and the slitter will take about four tranks at a time___
"WowThis is an elaborate process," said RitaHard really to make money in the glove business because it's so labor-intensive--a time-consuming process, many operations to be coordinatedMost of the glove businesses have been family businessesVery chanel white watch traditional businessA product is a product to most manufacturersThe guy who makes them doesn't know anything about themThe glove business isn't like thatThis business has a long, long history
"Do other people feel the romance of the glove business the way you do, MrLevov? You really are mad for this place and all the processesI guess that's what makes you a happy man
"Am I?" he asked, and felt as though he were going to be dissected, cut into by a knife, opened up and all his misery revealed
"Are you the last of the Mohicans?"
"No, most of them, I believe, in this business have that same feeling for the tradition, that same loveBecause it does require a love and a legacy to motivate somebody to stay in a business like thisYou have to have strong ties to it to be able to stick it outCome on," he said, having managed momentarily to quash everything that was shadowing him and menacing him, succeeded still to be able to speak with great precision despite her telling him he was a happy fendi spy bag replica man"Let's go back to the making room
This is the silking, that's a story in itself, but this is what she's going to do firstThis is called a pique machine, it sews the finest stitch, called pique, requires far more skill than the other stitchesThis is called a polishing machine and that is called a stretcher and you are called honey and I am called Daddy and this is called living and the other is called dying and this is called madness and this is called mourning and this is called hell, pure hell, and you have to have strong ties to be able to stick it out, this is called trying-to-go-on-as-though-nothing-has-happened and this is called paying-the-full-price-but-in-God's-name-for-what, this is called wanting-to-be-dead-and-wanting-to-nnd-her-and-to-kill-her-and-to-save-her-from-whatever-she-is-going-through-wherever-on-earth-she-may-be-at-this-moment, this unbridled outpouring is called blotting-out-everything and it does not work, I am half insane, the shattering force of that bomb is too sac chloe gr |
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• 7/4/2010 - You should have seen themThe two of them all...
| You should have seen themThe two of them all smiles on their outward trip into the USAShe's post-Catholic, he's post-Jewish, together they're going to go out there to Old Rimrock to raise little post-toastiesInstead they get that fucking kid
"What was wrong with Miss Dwyer?"
"No house they lived in was rightNo amount of money in the bank was enoughHe set her up in the cattle businessHe set her up in the nursery tree businessHe took her to Switzerland for the world's best face-liftNot even into her fifties, still in her forties, but that's what the woman wants, so they schlep to Geneva for a face-lift from the guy who did Princess GraceHe would have been better off spending his life in Double A ballHe would have been better off knocking up some waitress down there in Phoenix and playing first base for the Mud-hensThat fucking kid! She stuttered, you knowSo to pay everybody back for her stuttering, she set off the bombHe took her to speech therapistsHe took her to clinics, to psychiatristsThere wasn't enough chanel cc logo earrings he could do for herAnd the reward? Boom! Why does this girl hate her father? This great father, this truly great fatherGood-looking, kind, providing, thinks about nothing really but them, his family-- why does she take off after him? That our own ridiculous father should have produced such a brilliant father--and that he should then produce her? Somebody tell me what caused itThe genetic need to separate? For that she has to run from Seymour Levov to Che Guevara? No, noWhat is the poison that caused it, that caused this poor guy to be placed outside his life for the rest of his life? He kept peering in from outside at his own lifeThe struggle of his life was to bury this thingBut could he? How? How could a big, sweet, agreeable putz like my brother be expected to deal with this bomb? One day life started laughing at him and it never let up
That was as far as we got, as much of an earful as I was to hear from Jerry--anything more I wanted to know, I'd have to make up--because just then a small, gray-haired chanel white watch woman in a brown pantsuit came up to introduce herself, and Jerry, not a man equipped by nature to stand around more than five seconds while someone else was getting a third party's attention, shot me a mock salute and disappeared, and when I went looking for him later, I heard that he'd had to leave, to catch a Newark plane back to Miami
After I'd already written about his brother--which is what I would do in the months to come: think about the Swede for six, eight, sometimes ten hours at a stretch, exchange my solitude for his, inhabit this person least like myself, disappear into him, day and night try to take the measure of a person of apparent blankness and innocence and simplicity, chart his collapse, make of him, as time wore on, the most important figure of my life--just before I set about to alter names and disguise the most glaring marks of identification, I had the amateur's impulse to send Jerry a copy of the manuscript to ask what he thoughtIt was an impulse I quashed: I hadn't been writing and chanel j12 white watch publishing for nearly forty years not to know by now to quash it"That's not my brother," he'd tell me, "not in any wayYou've misrepresented himMy brother couldn't think like that, didn't talk like that," etc
Yes, by this time Jerry might well have recovered the objectivity that had deserted him directly after the funeral, and with it the old resentment that helped make him the doctor at the hospital every-74 I body was afraid to talk to because he was never wrongAlso, unlike most people whose dear one winds up as a model for the life-drawing class, Jerry Levov would probably be amused rather than outraged by my failure to grasp the Swede's tragedy the way he didA strong possibility: Jerry's flipping derisively through my pages and giving me, item by item, the bad news"The wife was nothing like this, the kid was nothing like this--got even my father wrongI won't talk about what you do with meBut missing my father, man, that's missing the side of a barnLou Levov was a brute, manThis guy is a pushoverNo, we had replica santos cartier something over us light-years away from thatDad on the rampage--laid down the law and that was itNo, nothing bears the slightest resemblance tohere, for instance, giving my brother a mind, awarenessThis guy responds with consciousness to his lossBut my brother is a guy who had cognitive problems--this is nowhere like the mind he hadThis is the mind he didn't haveChrist, you even give him a mistressPerfectly misjudged, ZuckHow could a big man like you fuck up like this?"
Well, Jerry wouldn't have gotten much of an argument from me had that turned out to be his reactionI had gone out to Newark and located the abandoned Newark Maid factory on a barren stretch of lower Central AvenueI went out to the Weequa-hic section to look at their house, now in disrepair, and to look at Keer Avenue, a street where it didn't seem like a good idea to get out of the car and walk up the driveway to the garage where the Swede used to practice his swing in the wintertimeThree black kids were sitting on the front steps eyeing me in the logo dolce |
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• 7/4/2010 - You should have seen themThe two of them all...
| You should have seen themThe two of them all smiles on their outward trip into the USAShe's post-Catholic, he's post-Jewish, together they're going to go out there to Old Rimrock to raise little post-toastiesInstead they get that fucking kid
"What was wrong with Miss Dwyer?"
"No house they lived in was rightNo amount of money in the bank was enoughHe set her up in the cattle businessHe set her up in the nursery tree businessHe took her to Switzerland for the world's best face-liftNot even into her fifties, still in her forties, but that's what the woman wants, so they schlep to Geneva for a face-lift from the guy who did Princess GraceHe would have been better off spending his life in Double A ballHe would have been better off knocking up some waitress down there in Phoenix and playing first base for the Mud-hensThat fucking kid! She stuttered, you knowSo to pay everybody back for her stuttering, she set off the bombHe took her to speech therapistsHe took her to clinics, to psychiatristsThere wasn't enough chanel cc logo earrings he could do for herAnd the reward? Boom! Why does this girl hate her father? This great father, this truly great fatherGood-looking, kind, providing, thinks about nothing really but them, his family-- why does she take off after him? That our own ridiculous father should have produced such a brilliant father--and that he should then produce her? Somebody tell me what caused itThe genetic need to separate? For that she has to run from Seymour Levov to Che Guevara? No, noWhat is the poison that caused it, that caused this poor guy to be placed outside his life for the rest of his life? He kept peering in from outside at his own lifeThe struggle of his life was to bury this thingBut could he? How? How could a big, sweet, agreeable putz like my brother be expected to deal with this bomb? One day life started laughing at him and it never let up
That was as far as we got, as much of an earful as I was to hear from Jerry--anything more I wanted to know, I'd have to make up--because just then a small, gray-haired chanel white watch woman in a brown pantsuit came up to introduce herself, and Jerry, not a man equipped by nature to stand around more than five seconds while someone else was getting a third party's attention, shot me a mock salute and disappeared, and when I went looking for him later, I heard that he'd had to leave, to catch a Newark plane back to Miami
After I'd already written about his brother--which is what I would do in the months to come: think about the Swede for six, eight, sometimes ten hours at a stretch, exchange my solitude for his, inhabit this person least like myself, disappear into him, day and night try to take the measure of a person of apparent blankness and innocence and simplicity, chart his collapse, make of him, as time wore on, the most important figure of my life--just before I set about to alter names and disguise the most glaring marks of identification, I had the amateur's impulse to send Jerry a copy of the manuscript to ask what he thoughtIt was an impulse I quashed: I hadn't been writing and chanel j12 white watch publishing for nearly forty years not to know by now to quash it"That's not my brother," he'd tell me, "not in any wayYou've misrepresented himMy brother couldn't think like that, didn't talk like that," etc
Yes, by this time Jerry might well have recovered the objectivity that had deserted him directly after the funeral, and with it the old resentment that helped make him the doctor at the hospital every-74 I body was afraid to talk to because he was never wrongAlso, unlike most people whose dear one winds up as a model for the life-drawing class, Jerry Levov would probably be amused rather than outraged by my failure to grasp the Swede's tragedy the way he didA strong possibility: Jerry's flipping derisively through my pages and giving me, item by item, the bad news"The wife was nothing like this, the kid was nothing like this--got even my father wrongI won't talk about what you do with meBut missing my father, man, that's missing the side of a barnLou Levov was a brute, manThis guy is a pushoverNo, we had replica santos cartier something over us light-years away from thatDad on the rampage--laid down the law and that was itNo, nothing bears the slightest resemblance tohere, for instance, giving my brother a mind, awarenessThis guy responds with consciousness to his lossBut my brother is a guy who had cognitive problems--this is nowhere like the mind he hadThis is the mind he didn't haveChrist, you even give him a mistressPerfectly misjudged, ZuckHow could a big man like you fuck up like this?"
Well, Jerry wouldn't have gotten much of an argument from me had that turned out to be his reactionI had gone out to Newark and located the abandoned Newark Maid factory on a barren stretch of lower Central AvenueI went out to the Weequa-hic section to look at their house, now in disrepair, and to look at Keer Avenue, a street where it didn't seem like a good idea to get out of the car and walk up the driveway to the garage where the Swede used to practice his swing in the wintertimeThree black kids were sitting on the front steps eyeing me in the logo dolce |
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• 7/3/2010 - Attractive, responsible, hardworking guyA couple...
| Attractive, responsible, hardworking guyA couple of unpleasant strikes in the sixties, a lot of tensionBut his employees are out on the picket line and they see him pull up in the car and the women who sew the gloves start falling all over themselves apologizing for not being at the machinesThey were more loyal to my brother than they were to their unionEverybody loved him, a perfectly decent person who could have escaped stupid guilt foreverNo reason for him to know anything about anything except glovesInstead he is plagued with shame and uncertainty and pain for the rest of his lifeThe incessant questioning of a conscious adulthood was never something that obstructed my see by chloe bag brotherHe got the meaning for his life some other wayI don't mean he was simpleSome people thought he was simple because all his life he was so kindBut Seymour was never that simpleSimple is never that simpleStill, the self-questioning did take some time to reach himAnd if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too lateHis life was blown up by that bombThe real victim of that bombing was him
"What bomb?"
"Little Merry's darling bomb
"I don't know what 'Merry's darling bomb' isThe 'Rimrock Bomber' was Seymour's daughterThe high school kid who blew up the post office and killed the doctorThe kid who stopped the war in gucci women's watches Vietnam by blowing up somebody out mailing a letter at five aA doctor on his way to the hospitalCharming child," he said in a voice that was all contempt and still didn't seem to contain the load of contempt and hatred that he felt"Brought the war home to Lyndon Johnson by blowing up the post office in the general storePlace is so small the post office is in the general store--just a window at the back of the general store and a couple rows of those boxes with the locks, and that's the whole post officeGet your stamps right in there with the Rinso and the Lifebuoy and the LuxSeymour was into quaint AmericanaHe took the kid out of real time and she put him right back inMy brother fairy bag prada thought he could take his family out of human confusion and into Old Rimrock, and she put them right back in
Somehow she plants a bomb back behind the post office window, and when it goes off it takes out the general store tooAnd takes out the guy, this doctor, who's just stopping by the collection box to drop off his mailGood-bye, Americana; hello, real time
"This passed me by
"That was '68, back when the wild behavior was still newPeople suddenly forced to make sense of madnessAll that public displayThe dropping of inhibitionsIntimidating everybodyThe adults don't know what to make of it, they don't know what to doIs this an act? Is the 'revolution' real? Is it a game? Is it gucci paolo watches cops and robbers? What's going on here? Kids turning the country upside down and so the adults start going crazy tooBut Seymour wasn't one of themHe was one of the people who knew his wayHe understood that something was going wrong, but he was no Ho-Chi-Minhite like his darling fat girlJust a liberal sweetheart of a fatherThe philosopher-king of ordinary lifeBrought her up with all the modern ideas of being rational with your childrenEverything permissible, everything forgivable, and she hated itPeople don't like to admit how much they resent other people's children, but this kid made it easy for youShe was miserable, self-righteous--little shit was no good from the time she was chanel earings b |
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• 7/3/2010 - Attractive, responsible, hardworking guyA couple...
| Attractive, responsible, hardworking guyA couple of unpleasant strikes in the sixties, a lot of tensionBut his employees are out on the picket line and they see him pull up in the car and the women who sew the gloves start falling all over themselves apologizing for not being at the machinesThey were more loyal to my brother than they were to their unionEverybody loved him, a perfectly decent person who could have escaped stupid guilt foreverNo reason for him to know anything about anything except glovesInstead he is plagued with shame and uncertainty and pain for the rest of his lifeThe incessant questioning of a conscious adulthood was never something that obstructed my see by chloe bag brotherHe got the meaning for his life some other wayI don't mean he was simpleSome people thought he was simple because all his life he was so kindBut Seymour was never that simpleSimple is never that simpleStill, the self-questioning did take some time to reach himAnd if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too lateHis life was blown up by that bombThe real victim of that bombing was him
"What bomb?"
"Little Merry's darling bomb
"I don't know what 'Merry's darling bomb' isThe 'Rimrock Bomber' was Seymour's daughterThe high school kid who blew up the post office and killed the doctorThe kid who stopped the war in gucci women's watches Vietnam by blowing up somebody out mailing a letter at five aA doctor on his way to the hospitalCharming child," he said in a voice that was all contempt and still didn't seem to contain the load of contempt and hatred that he felt"Brought the war home to Lyndon Johnson by blowing up the post office in the general storePlace is so small the post office is in the general store--just a window at the back of the general store and a couple rows of those boxes with the locks, and that's the whole post officeGet your stamps right in there with the Rinso and the Lifebuoy and the LuxSeymour was into quaint AmericanaHe took the kid out of real time and she put him right back inMy brother fairy bag prada thought he could take his family out of human confusion and into Old Rimrock, and she put them right back in
Somehow she plants a bomb back behind the post office window, and when it goes off it takes out the general store tooAnd takes out the guy, this doctor, who's just stopping by the collection box to drop off his mailGood-bye, Americana; hello, real time
"This passed me by
"That was '68, back when the wild behavior was still newPeople suddenly forced to make sense of madnessAll that public displayThe dropping of inhibitionsIntimidating everybodyThe adults don't know what to make of it, they don't know what to doIs this an act? Is the 'revolution' real? Is it a game? Is it gucci paolo watches cops and robbers? What's going on here? Kids turning the country upside down and so the adults start going crazy tooBut Seymour wasn't one of themHe was one of the people who knew his wayHe understood that something was going wrong, but he was no Ho-Chi-Minhite like his darling fat girlJust a liberal sweetheart of a fatherThe philosopher-king of ordinary lifeBrought her up with all the modern ideas of being rational with your childrenEverything permissible, everything forgivable, and she hated itPeople don't like to admit how much they resent other people's children, but this kid made it easy for youShe was miserable, self-righteous--little shit was no good from the time she was chanel earings b |
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• 7/2/2010 - Twelve hours of surgery, four months in a...
| Twelve hours of surgery, four months in a hospitalHead injuries, internal injuries, broken pelvis, broken shoulder, fractured spineA high-speed chase, crazy kid in a stolen car and the cops are chasing him, and the kid plows right into him, crushes the driver's-side door, and that's it for ClarkEighty miles an hour down Central AvenueThe car thief is twelve years oldTo see over the wheel he has to roll up the floor mats to sit onSix months in Jamesburg and he's back behind the wheel of another stolen carNo, that was it for me, tooMy car's robbed at gunpoint, they cripple Clark, the woman gets killed--that week did itewark Maid manufactured now exclusively in Puerto RicoFor a while, after leaving Newark, he'd contracted with the Communist government in Czechoslovakia and divided the work between his own factory in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and a Czech glove factory in BrnoHowever, when a plant that suited him went up for sale in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, over near Mayagiiez, he'd bailed out on the Czechs, whose bureaucracy had been irritating from the start, and unified his manufacturing operation by purchasing a second Puerto Rico facility, another good-sized factory, moved in the machinery, started a training program, and hired an chanel watch j12 white additional three hundred peopleBy the eighties, though, even Puerto Rico began to grow expensive and about everybody but Newark Maid fled to wherever in the Far East the labor force was abundant and cheap, to the Philippines first, then Korea and Taiwan, and now to China
Even baseball gloves, the most American glove of all, which used to be made by friends of his father's, the Denkerts up in Johnstown, New York, for a long time now had been manufactured in KoreaWhen the first guy left Gloversville, New York, in '52 or '53 and went to the Philippines to make gloves, they laughed at him, as though he were going to the moonBut when he died, around 1978, he had a factory there with four thousand workers and the whole industry had gone essentially from Gloversville to the PhilippinesUp in Gloversville, when the Second World War began, there must have been ninety glove factories, big and smallToday there isn't a one--all of them out of business or importers from abroad, "people who don't know a fourchette from a thumb," the Swede said"They're business people, they know if they need a hundred thousand pair of this and two hundred thousand pair of that in so many colors and so many sizes, but they don't know the details on how to get it rolex watches ladies done
"What's a fourchette?" I asked"The part of the glove between the fingersThose small oblong pieces between the fingers, they're die-cut along with the thumbs--those are the fourchettesToday you've got a lot of underqualified people, probably don't know half what I knew when I was five, and they're making some pretty big decisionsA guy buying deerskin, which can run up to maybe three dollars and fifty cents a foot for a garment grade, he's buying this fine garment-grade deerskin to cut a little palm patch to go on a pair of ski glovesI talked to him just the other dayA novelty part, runs about five inches by one inch, and he pays three fifty a foot where he could have paid a dollar fifty a foot and come out a long, long ways aheadYou multiply this over a large order, you're talking a hundred-thousand-dollar mistake, and he never knew itHe could have put a hundred grand in his pocket
The Swede found himself hanging on in P he explained, the way he had hung on in Newark, in large part because he had trained a lot of good people to do the intricate work of making a glove carefully and meticulously, people who could give him what Newark Maid had demanded in quality going back to his father's days; but also, he had to admit, omega pocket watches staying on because his family so much enjoyed the vacation home he'd built some fifteen years ago on the Caribbean coast, not very far from the Ponce plantThe life the kids lived there they just lovedand off he went again, Kent, Chris, Steve, water-skiing, sailing, scuba diving, catamaraningand though it was clear from all he had just been telling me that this guy could be engaging if he wanted to be, he didn't appear to have any judgment at all as to what was and wasn't interesting about his worldOr, for reasons I couldn't understand, he didn't want his world to be interestingI would have given anything to get him back to Kiler, Fortgang, Lasky, Robbins, and Honig, back to the fourchettes and the details of how to get a good glove done, even back to the guy who'd paid three fifty a foot for the wrong grade of deerskin for a novelty part, but once he was off and running there was no civil way I could find to shift his focus for a second time from the achievements of his boys on land and sea
While we waited for dessert, the Swede let pass that he was indulging himself in a fattening zabaglione on top of the ziti only because, after having had his prostate removed a couple of months back, he was still some ten pounds underweight
"The gucci clearance operation went okay?"
"Just fine," he replied
"A couple friends of mine," I said, "didn't emerge from that surgery as they'd hoped toThat operation can be a real catastrophe for a man, even if they get the cancer out
"Yes, that happens, I know
"One wound up impotent," I said"The other's impotent and incontinentIt's been rough for themIt can leave you in diapers
The person I had referred to as "the other" was meI'd had the surgery in Boston, and--except for confiding in a Boston friend who had helped me through the ordeal till I was back on my feet--when I returned to the house where I live alone, two and a half hours west of Boston, in the Berkshires, I had thought it best to keep to myself both the fact that I'd had cancer and the ways it had left me impaired
"Well," said the Swede, "I got off easy, I guess
"I'd say you did," I replied amiably enough, thinking that this big jeroboam of self-contentment really was in possession of all he ever had wantedTo respect everything one is supposed to respect; to protest nothing; never to be inconvenienced by self-distrust; never to be enmeshed in obsession, tortured by incapacity, poisoned by resentment, driven by angerlife just unraveling for the Swede like a fluffy ball of tiffany heart tag necklace y |
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• 7/2/2010 - Twelve hours of surgery, four months in a...
| Twelve hours of surgery, four months in a hospitalHead injuries, internal injuries, broken pelvis, broken shoulder, fractured spineA high-speed chase, crazy kid in a stolen car and the cops are chasing him, and the kid plows right into him, crushes the driver's-side door, and that's it for ClarkEighty miles an hour down Central AvenueThe car thief is twelve years oldTo see over the wheel he has to roll up the floor mats to sit onSix months in Jamesburg and he's back behind the wheel of another stolen carNo, that was it for me, tooMy car's robbed at gunpoint, they cripple Clark, the woman gets killed--that week did itewark Maid manufactured now exclusively in Puerto RicoFor a while, after leaving Newark, he'd contracted with the Communist government in Czechoslovakia and divided the work between his own factory in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and a Czech glove factory in BrnoHowever, when a plant that suited him went up for sale in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, over near Mayagiiez, he'd bailed out on the Czechs, whose bureaucracy had been irritating from the start, and unified his manufacturing operation by purchasing a second Puerto Rico facility, another good-sized factory, moved in the machinery, started a training program, and hired an chanel watch j12 white additional three hundred peopleBy the eighties, though, even Puerto Rico began to grow expensive and about everybody but Newark Maid fled to wherever in the Far East the labor force was abundant and cheap, to the Philippines first, then Korea and Taiwan, and now to China
Even baseball gloves, the most American glove of all, which used to be made by friends of his father's, the Denkerts up in Johnstown, New York, for a long time now had been manufactured in KoreaWhen the first guy left Gloversville, New York, in '52 or '53 and went to the Philippines to make gloves, they laughed at him, as though he were going to the moonBut when he died, around 1978, he had a factory there with four thousand workers and the whole industry had gone essentially from Gloversville to the PhilippinesUp in Gloversville, when the Second World War began, there must have been ninety glove factories, big and smallToday there isn't a one--all of them out of business or importers from abroad, "people who don't know a fourchette from a thumb," the Swede said"They're business people, they know if they need a hundred thousand pair of this and two hundred thousand pair of that in so many colors and so many sizes, but they don't know the details on how to get it rolex watches ladies done
"What's a fourchette?" I asked"The part of the glove between the fingersThose small oblong pieces between the fingers, they're die-cut along with the thumbs--those are the fourchettesToday you've got a lot of underqualified people, probably don't know half what I knew when I was five, and they're making some pretty big decisionsA guy buying deerskin, which can run up to maybe three dollars and fifty cents a foot for a garment grade, he's buying this fine garment-grade deerskin to cut a little palm patch to go on a pair of ski glovesI talked to him just the other dayA novelty part, runs about five inches by one inch, and he pays three fifty a foot where he could have paid a dollar fifty a foot and come out a long, long ways aheadYou multiply this over a large order, you're talking a hundred-thousand-dollar mistake, and he never knew itHe could have put a hundred grand in his pocket
The Swede found himself hanging on in P he explained, the way he had hung on in Newark, in large part because he had trained a lot of good people to do the intricate work of making a glove carefully and meticulously, people who could give him what Newark Maid had demanded in quality going back to his father's days; but also, he had to admit, omega pocket watches staying on because his family so much enjoyed the vacation home he'd built some fifteen years ago on the Caribbean coast, not very far from the Ponce plantThe life the kids lived there they just lovedand off he went again, Kent, Chris, Steve, water-skiing, sailing, scuba diving, catamaraningand though it was clear from all he had just been telling me that this guy could be engaging if he wanted to be, he didn't appear to have any judgment at all as to what was and wasn't interesting about his worldOr, for reasons I couldn't understand, he didn't want his world to be interestingI would have given anything to get him back to Kiler, Fortgang, Lasky, Robbins, and Honig, back to the fourchettes and the details of how to get a good glove done, even back to the guy who'd paid three fifty a foot for the wrong grade of deerskin for a novelty part, but once he was off and running there was no civil way I could find to shift his focus for a second time from the achievements of his boys on land and sea
While we waited for dessert, the Swede let pass that he was indulging himself in a fattening zabaglione on top of the ziti only because, after having had his prostate removed a couple of months back, he was still some ten pounds underweight
"The gucci clearance operation went okay?"
"Just fine," he replied
"A couple friends of mine," I said, "didn't emerge from that surgery as they'd hoped toThat operation can be a real catastrophe for a man, even if they get the cancer out
"Yes, that happens, I know
"One wound up impotent," I said"The other's impotent and incontinentIt's been rough for themIt can leave you in diapers
The person I had referred to as "the other" was meI'd had the surgery in Boston, and--except for confiding in a Boston friend who had helped me through the ordeal till I was back on my feet--when I returned to the house where I live alone, two and a half hours west of Boston, in the Berkshires, I had thought it best to keep to myself both the fact that I'd had cancer and the ways it had left me impaired
"Well," said the Swede, "I got off easy, I guess
"I'd say you did," I replied amiably enough, thinking that this big jeroboam of self-contentment really was in possession of all he ever had wantedTo respect everything one is supposed to respect; to protest nothing; never to be inconvenienced by self-distrust; never to be enmeshed in obsession, tortured by incapacity, poisoned by resentment, driven by angerlife just unraveling for the Swede like a fluffy ball of tiffany heart tag necklace y |
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• 7/1/2010 - The father was no more than five seven or...
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The father was no more than five seven or eight--a spidery man even more agitated than the father whose anxieties were shaping my ownLevov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, collegeeducated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn't as easy to escape from as he seemsLimited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everythingAnd we were their sonsIt was our job to love them
The way it fell out, my father was a chiropodist whose office was for years our living room and who made enough money for our family to get by on but no more, while MrLevov got rich manufacturing ladies' glovesHis own father--Swede Levov's grandfather--had come to Newark from the old country in the 1890s and found work fleshing sheepskins fresh from the lime vat, the lone Jew alongside the roughest of Newark's Slav, Irish, and Italian immigrants in the Nuttman Street tannery of the patent-leather tycoon THowell, then the name in the city's oldest and biggest industry, the tanning and manufacture of leather goodsThe most important thing in making leather is water--skins spinning in big drums of water, drums spewing out befouled water, pipes gushing with cool and hot water, hundreds of thousands of gallons of waterIf there's soft water, good water, you can make beer and you can make leather, and Newark made both--big breweries, big tanneries, and, for the immigrant, lots of wet, smelly, crushing work
The son Lou--Swede Levov's father--went to work in the tannery after leaving school at fourteen to help support the family of nine and became adept not only at dyeing buckskin by laying on the clay dye with a flat, stiff brush but also at sorting omega replica watches and grading skinsThe tannery that stank of both the slaughterhouse and the chemical plant from the soaking of flesh and the cooking of flesh and the dehairing and pickling and degreasing of hides, where round the clock in the summertime the blowers drying the thousands and thousands of hanging skins raised the temperature in the low-ceilinged dry room to a hundred and twenty degrees, where the vast vat rooms were dark as caves and flooded with swill, where brutish workingmen, heavily aproned, armed with hooks and staves, dragging and pushing overloaded wagons, wringing and hanging waterlogged skins, were driven like animals through the laborious storm that was a twelve-hour shift--a filthy, stinking place awash with water dyed red and black and blue and green, with hunks of skin all over the floor, everywhere pits of grease, hills of salt, barrels of solvent--this was Lou Levov's high school and collegeWhat was amazing was not how tough he turned outWhat was amazing was how civil he could sometimes still manage to behe graduated in his early twenties to found, with two of his brothers, a small handbag outfit specializing in alligator skins contracted from RSalomon, Newark's king of cordovan leather and leader in the tanning of alligator; for a time the business looked as if it might flourish, but after the crash the company went under, bankrupting the three hustling, audacious LevovsNewark Maid Leatherware started up a few years later, with Lou Levov, now on his own, buying seconds in leather goods--imperfect handbags, gloves, and belts--and selling them out of a pushcart on weekends and door-to-door at nightDown Neck--the semi-peninsular protuberance that is easternmost Newark, where each fresh wave of immigrants first settled, the lowlands bounded to the north and east by the Passaic River and to the south by the salt marshes--there were Italians who'd been glovers in the old country and they began doing piecework for him in their homesOut of the skins he supplied they cut and sewed ladies' gloves that he chanel pearls peddled around the stateBy the time the war broke out, he had a collective of Italian families cutting and stitching kid gloves in a small loft on West Market StreetIt was a marginal business, no real money, until, in 1942, the bonanza: a black, lined sheepskin dress glove, ordered by the Women's Army CorpsHe leased the old umbrella factory, a smoke-darkened brick pile fifty years old and four stories high on Central Avenue and 2nd Street, and very shortly purchased it outright, leasing the top floor to a zipper companyNewark Maid began pumping out gloves, and every two or three days the truck backed up and took them away
A cause for jubilation even greater than the government contract was the Bamberger accountNewark Maid cracked Bamber-ger's, and then became the major manufacturer of their fine ladies' gloves, because of an unlikely encounter between Lou Levov and Louis BambergerAt a ceremonial dinner for Meyer Ellenstein, a city commissioner since 1933 and the only Jew ever to be mayor of Newark, some higher-up from Barn's, hearing that Swede Levov's father was present, came over to congratulate him on his boy's selection by the Newark News as an all-county center in basketballAlert to the opportunity of a lifetime--the opportunity to cut through all obstructions and go right to the top--Lou Levov brazenly talked his way into an introduction, right there at the Ellenstein dinner, to the legendary LBamberger himself, founder of Newark's most prestigious department store and the philanthropist who'd given the city its museum, a powerful personage as meaningful to local Jews as Bernard Baruch was meaningful to Jews around the country for his close association with FDRAccording to the gossip that permeated the neighborhood, although Bamberger barely did more than shake Lou Levov's hand and quiz him (about the Swede) for a couple of minutes at most, Lou Levov had dared to say to his face, "MrBamberger, we've got the quality, we've got the price--why can't we sell you people gloves?" And before the month roxanne mulberry was out, Barn's had placed an order with Newark Maid, its first, for five hundred dozen pairs
By the end of the warNewark Maid had established itself--in no small part because of Swede Levov's athletic achievement--as one of the most respected names in ladies' gloves south of Gloversville, New York, the center of the glove trade, where Lou Levov shipped his hides by rail, through Fultonville, to be tanned by the best glove tannery in the businessLittle more than a decade later, with the opening of a factory in Puerto Rico in 1958, the Swede would himself become the young president of the company, commuting every morning down to Central Avenue from his home some thirty-odd miles west of Newark, out past the suburbs--a short-range pioneer living on a hundred-acre farm on a back road in the sparsely habitated hills beyond Morristown, in wealthy, rural Old Rimrock, New Jersey, a long way from the tannery floor where Grandfather Levov had begun in America, paring away from the true skin the rubbery flesh that had ghoulishly swelled to twice its thickness in the great lime vats
The day after graduating Weequahic in June '45, the Swede had joined the Marine Corps, eager to be in on the fighting that ended the warIt was rumored that his parents were beside themselves and did everything to talk him out of the marines and get him into the navyEven if he surmounted the notorious Marine Corps anti-Semitism, did he imagine himself surviving the invasion of Japan? But the Swede would not be dissuaded from meeting the manly, patriotic challenge--secretly set for himself just after Pearl Harbor--of going off to fight as one of the toughest of the tough should the country still be at war when he graduated high schoolHe was just finishing up his boot training at Parris Island, South Carolina--where the scuttlebutt was that the marines were to hit the Japanese beaches on March 1, 1946--when the atomic bomb was dropped on HiroshimaAs a result, the Swede got to spend the rest of his hitch as a "recreation specialist" right chloe dior there on Parris IslandHe ran the calisthenic drill for his battalion for half an hour before breakfast every morning, arranged for the boxing smokers to entertain the recruits a couple of nights a week, and the bulk of the time played for the base team against armed forces teams throughout the South, basketball all winter long, baseball all summer longHe was stationed down in South Carolina about a year when he became engaged to an Irish Catholic girl whose father, a marine major and a one-time Purdue football coach, had procured him the cushy job as drill instructor in order to keep him at Parris Island to play ballSeveral months before the Swede's discharge, his own father made a trip to Parris Island, stayed for a full week, near the base at the hotel in Beaufort, and departed only when the engagement to Miss Dunleavy had been broken offThe Swede returned home in '47 to enroll at Upsala College, in East Orange, at twenty unencumbered by a Gentile wife and all the more glamorously heroic for having made his mark as a Jewish marine--a drill instructor no less, and at arguably the crudest military training camp anywhere in the worldMarines are made at boot camp, and Seymour Irving Levov had helped to make them
We knew all this because the mystique of the Swede lived on in the corridors and classrooms of the high school, where I was by then a studentI remember two or three times one spring trekking out with friends to Viking Field in East Orange to watch the Upsala baseball team play a Saturday home gameTheir star cleanup hitter and first baseman was the SwedeThree home runs one day against MuhlenbergWhenever we saw a man in the stands wearing a suit and a hat we would whisper to one another, "A scout, a scout!" I was away at college when I heard from a schoolyard pal still living in the neighborhood that the Swede had been offered a contract with a Double A Giant farm club but had turned it down to join his father's company insteadLater I learned through my parents about the Swede's marriage to Miss New balenciaga twiggy Jer |
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• 7/1/2010 - The father was no more than five seven or...
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The father was no more than five seven or eight--a spidery man even more agitated than the father whose anxieties were shaping my ownLevov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, collegeeducated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn't as easy to escape from as he seemsLimited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everythingAnd we were their sonsIt was our job to love them
The way it fell out, my father was a chiropodist whose office was for years our living room and who made enough money for our family to get by on but no more, while MrLevov got rich manufacturing ladies' glovesHis own father--Swede Levov's grandfather--had come to Newark from the old country in the 1890s and found work fleshing sheepskins fresh from the lime vat, the lone Jew alongside the roughest of Newark's Slav, Irish, and Italian immigrants in the Nuttman Street tannery of the patent-leather tycoon THowell, then the name in the city's oldest and biggest industry, the tanning and manufacture of leather goodsThe most important thing in making leather is water--skins spinning in big drums of water, drums spewing out befouled water, pipes gushing with cool and hot water, hundreds of thousands of gallons of waterIf there's soft water, good water, you can make beer and you can make leather, and Newark made both--big breweries, big tanneries, and, for the immigrant, lots of wet, smelly, crushing work
The son Lou--Swede Levov's father--went to work in the tannery after leaving school at fourteen to help support the family of nine and became adept not only at dyeing buckskin by laying on the clay dye with a flat, stiff brush but also at sorting omega replica watches and grading skinsThe tannery that stank of both the slaughterhouse and the chemical plant from the soaking of flesh and the cooking of flesh and the dehairing and pickling and degreasing of hides, where round the clock in the summertime the blowers drying the thousands and thousands of hanging skins raised the temperature in the low-ceilinged dry room to a hundred and twenty degrees, where the vast vat rooms were dark as caves and flooded with swill, where brutish workingmen, heavily aproned, armed with hooks and staves, dragging and pushing overloaded wagons, wringing and hanging waterlogged skins, were driven like animals through the laborious storm that was a twelve-hour shift--a filthy, stinking place awash with water dyed red and black and blue and green, with hunks of skin all over the floor, everywhere pits of grease, hills of salt, barrels of solvent--this was Lou Levov's high school and collegeWhat was amazing was not how tough he turned outWhat was amazing was how civil he could sometimes still manage to behe graduated in his early twenties to found, with two of his brothers, a small handbag outfit specializing in alligator skins contracted from RSalomon, Newark's king of cordovan leather and leader in the tanning of alligator; for a time the business looked as if it might flourish, but after the crash the company went under, bankrupting the three hustling, audacious LevovsNewark Maid Leatherware started up a few years later, with Lou Levov, now on his own, buying seconds in leather goods--imperfect handbags, gloves, and belts--and selling them out of a pushcart on weekends and door-to-door at nightDown Neck--the semi-peninsular protuberance that is easternmost Newark, where each fresh wave of immigrants first settled, the lowlands bounded to the north and east by the Passaic River and to the south by the salt marshes--there were Italians who'd been glovers in the old country and they began doing piecework for him in their homesOut of the skins he supplied they cut and sewed ladies' gloves that he chanel pearls peddled around the stateBy the time the war broke out, he had a collective of Italian families cutting and stitching kid gloves in a small loft on West Market StreetIt was a marginal business, no real money, until, in 1942, the bonanza: a black, lined sheepskin dress glove, ordered by the Women's Army CorpsHe leased the old umbrella factory, a smoke-darkened brick pile fifty years old and four stories high on Central Avenue and 2nd Street, and very shortly purchased it outright, leasing the top floor to a zipper companyNewark Maid began pumping out gloves, and every two or three days the truck backed up and took them away
A cause for jubilation even greater than the government contract was the Bamberger accountNewark Maid cracked Bamber-ger's, and then became the major manufacturer of their fine ladies' gloves, because of an unlikely encounter between Lou Levov and Louis BambergerAt a ceremonial dinner for Meyer Ellenstein, a city commissioner since 1933 and the only Jew ever to be mayor of Newark, some higher-up from Barn's, hearing that Swede Levov's father was present, came over to congratulate him on his boy's selection by the Newark News as an all-county center in basketballAlert to the opportunity of a lifetime--the opportunity to cut through all obstructions and go right to the top--Lou Levov brazenly talked his way into an introduction, right there at the Ellenstein dinner, to the legendary LBamberger himself, founder of Newark's most prestigious department store and the philanthropist who'd given the city its museum, a powerful personage as meaningful to local Jews as Bernard Baruch was meaningful to Jews around the country for his close association with FDRAccording to the gossip that permeated the neighborhood, although Bamberger barely did more than shake Lou Levov's hand and quiz him (about the Swede) for a couple of minutes at most, Lou Levov had dared to say to his face, "MrBamberger, we've got the quality, we've got the price--why can't we sell you people gloves?" And before the month roxanne mulberry was out, Barn's had placed an order with Newark Maid, its first, for five hundred dozen pairs
By the end of the warNewark Maid had established itself--in no small part because of Swede Levov's athletic achievement--as one of the most respected names in ladies' gloves south of Gloversville, New York, the center of the glove trade, where Lou Levov shipped his hides by rail, through Fultonville, to be tanned by the best glove tannery in the businessLittle more than a decade later, with the opening of a factory in Puerto Rico in 1958, the Swede would himself become the young president of the company, commuting every morning down to Central Avenue from his home some thirty-odd miles west of Newark, out past the suburbs--a short-range pioneer living on a hundred-acre farm on a back road in the sparsely habitated hills beyond Morristown, in wealthy, rural Old Rimrock, New Jersey, a long way from the tannery floor where Grandfather Levov had begun in America, paring away from the true skin the rubbery flesh that had ghoulishly swelled to twice its thickness in the great lime vats
The day after graduating Weequahic in June '45, the Swede had joined the Marine Corps, eager to be in on the fighting that ended the warIt was rumored that his parents were beside themselves and did everything to talk him out of the marines and get him into the navyEven if he surmounted the notorious Marine Corps anti-Semitism, did he imagine himself surviving the invasion of Japan? But the Swede would not be dissuaded from meeting the manly, patriotic challenge--secretly set for himself just after Pearl Harbor--of going off to fight as one of the toughest of the tough should the country still be at war when he graduated high schoolHe was just finishing up his boot training at Parris Island, South Carolina--where the scuttlebutt was that the marines were to hit the Japanese beaches on March 1, 1946--when the atomic bomb was dropped on HiroshimaAs a result, the Swede got to spend the rest of his hitch as a "recreation specialist" right chloe dior there on Parris IslandHe ran the calisthenic drill for his battalion for half an hour before breakfast every morning, arranged for the boxing smokers to entertain the recruits a couple of nights a week, and the bulk of the time played for the base team against armed forces teams throughout the South, basketball all winter long, baseball all summer longHe was stationed down in South Carolina about a year when he became engaged to an Irish Catholic girl whose father, a marine major and a one-time Purdue football coach, had procured him the cushy job as drill instructor in order to keep him at Parris Island to play ballSeveral months before the Swede's discharge, his own father made a trip to Parris Island, stayed for a full week, near the base at the hotel in Beaufort, and departed only when the engagement to Miss Dunleavy had been broken offThe Swede returned home in '47 to enroll at Upsala College, in East Orange, at twenty unencumbered by a Gentile wife and all the more glamorously heroic for having made his mark as a Jewish marine--a drill instructor no less, and at arguably the crudest military training camp anywhere in the worldMarines are made at boot camp, and Seymour Irving Levov had helped to make them
We knew all this because the mystique of the Swede lived on in the corridors and classrooms of the high school, where I was by then a studentI remember two or three times one spring trekking out with friends to Viking Field in East Orange to watch the Upsala baseball team play a Saturday home gameTheir star cleanup hitter and first baseman was the SwedeThree home runs one day against MuhlenbergWhenever we saw a man in the stands wearing a suit and a hat we would whisper to one another, "A scout, a scout!" I was away at college when I heard from a schoolyard pal still living in the neighborhood that the Swede had been offered a contract with a Double A Giant farm club but had turned it down to join his father's company insteadLater I learned through my parents about the Swede's marriage to Miss New balenciaga twiggy Jer |
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