And that went for his own flesh and blood as well as the hired help. For example, there was the time (and the son would never forget it—in part it may even account for what goaded him to be “a writer”), there was the time the father caught a glimpse of his little Nathan’s signature across the face of a booklet the child had prepared for school, and nearly blew their house down. The nine-year-old had been feeling self-important and the signature showed it. And the father knew it. “This is the way they teach you to sign your name, Natie? This is supposed to be the signature that somebody on the other end is supposed to read and have respect for? Who the hell can read something that looks like a train wreck! Goddam it, boy, this is your name. Sign it right!” The self-important child of the self-important shoedog bawled in his room for hours afterward, all the while strangling his pillow with his bare hands until it was dead. Nonetheless, when he emerged in his pajamas at bedtime, he was holding by its topmost corners a sheet of white paper with the letters of his name, round and legible, engraved in black ink at the center. He handed it over to the tyrant: “Is this okay?” and in the next instant was lifted aloft into the heaven of his father’s bristly evening stubble. “Ah, now that’s a signature! That’s something you can hold your head up about! This I’m going to tack up over the counter in the store!” And he did just that, and then led the customers (most of whom were Negroes) all the way around behind the register, where they could get a really close look at the little boy’s signature. “What do you think of that!” he would ask, as though the name were in fact appended to the Emancipation Proclamation.

And so it went with this bewildering dynamo of a protector. Once when they were out fishing at the seashore, and Nathan’s Uncle Philly had seen fit to give his nephew a good shake for being careless with his hook, the shoedog had threatened to throw Philly over the side of the boat and into the bay for laying a hand on the child. “The only one who touches him is me, Philly!” “Yeah, that’ll be the day . . .” Philly mumbled. “Touch him again, Philly,” his father said savagely, “and you’ll be talking to the bluefish, I promise you! You’ll be talking to eels!” But then back at the rooming house where the Zuckermans were spending their two-week vacation, Nathan, for the first and only time in his life, was thrashed with a belt for nearly taking his uncle’s eye out while clowning around with that goddam hook. He was astonished that his father’s face, like his own, should be wet with tears when the three-stroke beating was over, and then—more astonishing—he found himself crushed in the man’s embrace. “An eye, Nathan, a person’s eye—do you know what it would be like for a grown man to have to go through life without eyes?”

No, he didn’t; any more than he knew what it would be like to be a small boy without a father, or wanted to know, for all that his ass felt on fire.

Twice his father had gone bankrupt in the years between the wars: Mr. Z.’s men’s wear in the late twenties, Mr. Z.’s kiddies’ wear in the early thirties; and yet never had a child of Z.’s gone without three nourishing meals a day, or without prompt medical attention, or decent clothes, or a clean bed, or a few pennies “allowance” in his pocket. Businesses crumbled, but never the household, because never the head of the house. During those bleak years of scarcity and hardship, little Nathan hadn’t the faintest idea that his family was trembling on the brink of anything but perfect contentment, so convincing was the confidence of that volcanic father.

And the faith of the mother. She certainly didn’t act as though she was married to a businessman who’d been bankrupt and broke two times over. Why, the husband had only to sing a few bars of “The Donkey Serenade” while shaving in the bathroom, for the wife to announce to the children at the breakfast table, “And I thought it was the radio. For a moment I actually thought it was Allan Jones.” If he whistled while washing the car, she praised him over the gifted canaries who whistled popular songs (popular maybe, said Mr. Z., among other canaries) on WEAF Sunday mornings; dancing her across the kitchen linoleum (the waltz spirit oftentimes seized him after dinner) he was “another Fred Astaire”; joking for the children at the dinner table he was, at least to her way of thinking, funnier than anyone on “Can You Top This”—certainly funnier than that Senator Ford. And when he parked the Studebaker—it never failed—she would look out at the distance between the wheels and the curbstone, and announce—it never failed—“Perfect!” as though he had set a sputtering airliner down into a cornfield. Needless to say, never to criticize where you could praise was a principle of hers; as it happened, with Mr. Z. for a husband, she couldn’t have gotten away with anything else had she tried.

Then the just deserts. About the time Sherman, their older son, was coming out of the navy and young Nathan was entering high school, business suddenly began to boom in the Camden store, and by 1949, the year Zuckerman entered college, a brand new “Mr. Z.” shoe store had opened out at the two-million-dollar Country Club Hills Shopping Mall. And then at last the one-family house: ranch style, with a flagstone fireplace, on a one-acre lot—the family dream come true just as the family was falling apart.

Zuckerman’s mother, happy as a birthday child, telephoned Nathan at college the day the deed was signed to ask what “color scheme” he wanted for his room.

“Pink,” Zuckerman answered, “and white. And a canopy over my bed and a skirt for my vanity table. Mother, what is this ‘your room’ crap?”

“But—but why did Daddy even buy the house, if not for you to have a real boy’s room, a room of your own for you and all your things? This is something you’ve wanted all your life.”

“Gee whiz, could I have pine paneling, Mother?”

“Darling, that’s what I’m telling you—you can have anything.”

“And a college pennant over my bed? And a picture on my dresser of my mom and my girl?”

“Nathan, why are you making fun of me like this? I was so looking forward to this day, and all you have for me when I call with such wonderful news is—sarcasm. College sarcasm!”

“Mother, I’m only trying very gently to break it to you—you just cannot delude yourself into thinking there is something called ‘Nathan’s room’ in your new house. What I wanted at the age of ten for all ‘my things,’ I don’t necessarily want any longer.”

“Then,” she said weakly, “maybe Daddy shouldn’t pay your tuition and send you a check for twenty-five dollars a week, if you’re that independent now. Maybe it works both ways, if that’s the attitude . . .”

He was not much impressed, either by the threat or the tone in which it was delivered. “If you want,” said he in the grave, no-nonsense voice one might adopt to address a child who is not acting his age, “to discontinue paying for my education, that is up to you; that is something you and Dad will have to decide between you.”

“Oh darling, what’s turned you into this cruel person—you, who were always so so sweet and considerate—?”

“Mother,” replied the nineteen-year-old, now a major in English language and literature, “try to be precise. I’m not cruel. Only direct.”

Ah, the distance he had traveled from her since that day in 1942 when Nathan Zuckerman had fallen in love with Betty Zuckerman the way men seemed to fall in love with women in the movies—yes, smitten by her, as though she weren’t his mother but a famous actress who for some incredible reason happened also to cook his meals and keep his room in order. In her capacity as chairwoman of the war bond drive at his school, she had been invited to the assembly hall that morning to address the entire student body on the importance of saving war stamps. She arrived dressed in the clothes she ordinarily wore only when she and her “girl friends” went in to Philadelphia to see the matinee performance of a stage show: her tailored gray suit and a white silk blouse. To top it off, she delivered her talk (without notes) from back of a lectern luxuriantly draped with red, white, and blue bunting. For the rest of Nathan’s life, he was to find himself unduly susceptible to a woman in a gray suit and a white blouse, because of the glamor his slender, respectable, well-mannered mother radiated from the stage that day. Indeed, Mr. Loomis, the principal (who may have been somewhat smitten himself), compared her demeanor as chairwoman of the bond drive and president of the PTA to that of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. And in shyly acknowledging his compliment, Mrs. Zuckerman had conceded from the platform that Madame Chiang was in fact one of her idols. So too, she told the assembled students, were Pearl Buck and Emily Post. True enough. Zuckerman’s mother had a deep belief in what she called “graciousness,” and a reverence, such as is reserved in India for the cow, toward greeting cards and thank you notes. And while they were in love, so did he.

One of the first big surprises of Zuckerman’s life was seeing the way his mother carried on when his brother Sherman entered the navy to serve his two-year hitch in 1945. She might have been some young girl whose fiancé was marching off to die in the front lines, while the fact of the matter was that America had won World War Two in August and Sherman was only a hundred miles away, in boot camp in Maryland. Nathan did everything he could possibly think of to cheer her up: helped with the dishes, offered on Saturdays to carry the groceries home, and talked nonstop, even about a subject that ordinarily embarrassed him, his little girl friends. To his father’s consternation he invited his mother to come and look over his shoulder at his hand when “the two men” played gin rummy on Sunday nights at the bridge table set up in the living room. “Play the game,” his father would warn him, “concentrate on my discards, Natie, and not on your mother. Your mother can take care of herself, but you’re the one who’s going to get schneidered again.” How could the man be so heartless? His mother could not take care of herself—something had to be done. But what?

It was particularly unsettling to Nathan when “Mamselle” was played over the radio, for against this song his mother simply had no defense whatsoever. Along with “The Old Lamplighter,” it had been her favorite number in Sherman’s entire repertoire of semi-classical and popular songs, and there was nothing she liked better than to sit in the living room after dinner and listen to him play and sing (at her request) his “interpretation.” Somehow she could manage with “The Old Lamplighter,” which she had always seemed to love equally well, but now when they began to play “Mamselle” on the radio, she would have to get up and leave the room. Nathan, who was not exactly immune to “Mamselle” himself, would follow after her and listen through the door of her bedroom to the muffled sounds of weeping. It nearly killed him.

Knocking softly, he asked, “Mom . . . you all right? You want anything?”

“No, darling, no.”

“Do you want me to read you my book report?”

“No, sweetheart.”

“Do you want me to turn off the radio? I’m finished listening, really.”

“Let it play, Nathan dear, it’ll be over in a minute.”

How awful her suffering was—also, how odd. After all, for him to miss Sherman was one thing—Sherman happened to be his only older brother. As a small boy Nathan’s attachment to Sherman had been so pronounced and so obvious that the other kids used to make jokes about it—they used to say that if Sherman Zuckerman ever stopped short, his kid brother’s nose would go straight up Sherm’s ass. Little Nathan could indeed be seen following behind his older brother to school in the morning, to Hebrew school in the afternoon, and to his Boy Scout meetings at night; and when Sherman’s five-piece high-school band used to go off to make music for bar mitzvahs and wedding parties, Nathan would travel with them as “a mascot” and sit up in a chair at the corner of the stage and knock two sticks together during the rumbas. That he should feel bereft of his brother and in their room at night grow teary at the sight of the empty twin bed to his right, that was to be expected. But what was his mother carrying on like this about? How could she miss Sherman so, when he was still around—and being nicer, really, than ever. Nathan was thirteen by this time and already an honor student at the high school, but for all his intelligence and maturity he could not figure that one out.

When Sherman came home on his first liberty after boot camp, he had with him a ditty bag full of dirty photographs to show to Nathan as they walked together around the old neighborhood; he also had a pea jacket and a sailor cap for his younger brother, and stories to tell about whores who sat on his lap in the bars around Bainbridge and let him stick his hand right up their dresses. And for nothing. Whores fifty and sixty years old. Sherman was eighteen then and wanted to be a jazz musician a la Lenny Tristano; he had already been assigned to Special Services because of his musical talent, and was going to be MCing shows at the base, as well as helping the chief petty officer organize the entertainment program. He was also that rarity in show business, a marvelous comic tap dancer, and could give an impression of Bojangles Robinson that would cause his younger brother to double over with laughter. Zuckerman, at thirteen, expected great things from a brother who could do all this. Sherman told him about pro kits and VD films and let him read the mimeographed stories that the sailors circulated among themselves during the nights they stood guard duty. Staggering. It seemed to the adolescent boy that his older brother had found access to a daring and manly life.

And when, upon being discharged, Sherman made directly for New York and found a job playing piano in a bar in Greenwich Village, young Zuckerman was ecstatic; not so, the rest of the family. Sherman told them that his ambition was to play with the Stan Kenton band, and his father, if he had had a gun, would probably have pulled it out and shot him. Nathan, in the meantime, confided to his high-school friends stories about his brother’s life “in the Village.” They asked (those bumpkins), “What village?” He explained, scornfully; he told them about the San Remo bar on MacDougal Street, which he himself had never seen, but could imagine. Then one night Sherman went to a party after work (which was four in the morning) and met June Christie, Kenton’s blonde vocalist. June Christie. That opened up a fantasy or two in the younger brother’s head. Yes, it began to sound as though the possibilities for someone as game and adventurous as Sherman Zuckerman (or Sonny Zachary, as he called himself in the cocktail lounge) were going to be just about endless.

And then Sherman was going to Temple University, taking predent. And then he was married, not to June Christie but to some girl, some skinny Jewish girl from Bala-Cynwyd who talked in baby talk and worked as a dental technician somewhere. Nathan couldn’t believe it. Say it ain’t so, Sherm! He remembered those cantaloupes hanging from the leering women in the dirty pictures Sherman had brought home from the navy, and then he thought of flat-chested Sheila, the dental technician with whom Sherman would now be going to bed every night for the rest of his life, and he couldn’t figure the thing out. What had happened to his glamorous brother? “He saw the light, that’s what,” Mr. Z. explained to relatives and friends, but particularly to young Nathan, “he saw the handwriting on the wall and came to his goddam senses.”

Seventeen years then of family life and love such as he imagined everyone enjoyed, more or less—and then his four years at Bass College, according to Zuckerman an educational institution distinguished largely for its lovely pastoral setting in a valley in western Vermont. The sense of superiority that his father had hoped to temper in his son with Dale Carnegie’s book on winning friends and influencing people flourished in the Vermont countryside like a jungle fungus. The apple-cheeked students in their white buck shoes, the Bastion pleading weekly in its editorial column for “more school spirit,” the compulsory Wednesday morning chapel sermons with visiting clergy from around the state, and the Monday evening dormitory “bull sessions” with notables like the dean of men—the ivy on the library walls, the dean told the new freshmen boys, could be heard on certain moonlit nights to whisper the word “tradition”—none of this did much to convince Zuckerman that he ought to become more of a pal to his fellow man. On the other hand, it was the pictures in the Bass catalogue of the apple-cheeked boys in white bucks crossing the sunlit New England quadrangle in the company of the apple-cheeked girls in white bucks that had in part drawn Zuckerman to Bass in the first place. To him, and to his parents, beautiful Bass seemed to partake of everything with which the word “collegiate” is so richly resonant for those who have not been beyond the twelfth grade. Moreover, when the family rode up in the spring, his mother found the dean of men—who three years later was to tell Zuckerman that he ought to be driven from the campus with a pitchfork for the so-called parody he had written in his literary magazine about the homecoming queen, a girl who happened to be an orphan from Rutland—this same dean of men, with briar pipe and football shoulders swathed in tweed, had seemed to Mrs. Zuckerman “a perfectly gracious man,” and that about sewed things up—that and the fact that there was, according to the dean, “a top-drawer Jewish fraternity” on the campus, as well as a sorority for the college’s thirty “outstanding” Jewish girls, or “gals,” as the dean called them.

Who knew, who in the Zuckerman family knew, that the very month he was to leave for his freshman year of college, Nathan would read a book called Of Time and the River that was to change not only his attitude toward Bass, but toward Life Itself?

After Bass he was drafted. Had he continued into advanced ROTC he would have entered the service as a second lieutenant in the Transportation Corps, but almost alone among the Bass undergraduates, he disapproved of the skills of warfare being taught and practiced at a private educational institution, and so after two compulsory years of marching around the quadrangle once a week with a rifle on his shoulder, he had declined an invitation from the colonel in charge to proceed further with his military training. This decision had infuriated his father, particularly as there was another war on. Once again, in the cause of democracy, American young men were leaving this world for oblivion, this time at a rate of one every sixty minutes, and twice as many each hour were losing parts of themselves in the snowdrifts and mud-fields of Korea. “Are you crazy, are you nuts to turn your back on a deal in the Transportation Corps that could mean life or death? You want to get your ass shot off in the infantry, instead? Oh, you are looking for trouble, my son, and you are going to find it, too! The shit is going to hit the fan, buddy, and you ain’t going to like it one bit! Especially if you are dead!” But nothing the elder Zuckerman could think to shout at him could change his stubborn son’s mind on this matter of principle. With somewhat less intensity (but no less befuddlement) Mr. Zuckerman had responded to his son’s announcement in his freshman year that he intended to drop out of the Jewish fraternity to which he had begun to pledge only the month before. “Tell me, Nathan, how do you quit something you don’t even belong to yet? How can you be so goddam superior to something when you don’t even know what it’s like to belong to the thing yet? Is this what I’ve got for a son all of a sudden—a quitter?”

“Of some things, yes,” was the undergraduate’s reply, spoken in that tone of cool condescension that entered into his father’s nervous system like an iron spike. Sometimes when his father began to seethe, Zuckerman would hold the telephone out at arm’s distance and just look at it with a poker face, a tactic he had seen people resort to, of course, only in the movies and for comic effect. Having counted to fifty, he would then try again to address the entrepreneur: “It’s beneath my dignity, yes, that’s correct.” Or: “No, I am not against things to be against them, I am against them on matters of principle.” “In other words,” said—seethed—Mr. Zuckerman, “you are right, if I’m getting the idea, and the rest of the world is wrong. Is that it, Nathan, you are the new god around here, and the rest of the world can just go to hell!” Coolly, coolly, so coolly that the most sensitive seismograph hooked into their long-distance connection would not have recorded the tiniest quaver in his voice: “Dad, you so broaden the terms of our discussion with a statement like that—” and so on, temperate, logical, eminently “reasonable,” just what it took to bring on the volcano in New Jersey.

“Darling,” his mother would plead softly into the phone, “did you talk to Sherman? At least did you think to talk this over with him first?”

“Why should I want to talk it over with ‘him’?”

“Because he’s your brother!” his father reminded him.

“And he loves you,” his mother said. “He watched over you like a piece of precious china, darling, you remember that—he brought you that pea jacket that you wore till it was rags you loved it so, oh Nathan, please, your father is right, if you won’t listen to us, listen to him, because, when he came out of the navy, Sherman went through an independent stage exactly like the one you’re going through now. To the T.”

“Well, it didn’t do him very much good, Mother, did it?”

“WHAT!” Mr. Zuckerman, flabbergasted yet again. “What kind of way is that to talk about your brother, damn it? Who aren’t you better than—please just tell me one name, for the record book at least. Mahatma Gandhi maybe? Yehudi? Oh, do you need some humility knocked into you! Do you need a good stiff course in Dale Carnegie! Your brother happens to be a practicing orthodontist with a wonderful practice and also he is your brother.”

“Dad, brothers can have mixed feelings about one another. I believe you have mixed feelings about your own.”

“But the issue is not my brothers, the issue is yours, don’t confuse the issue, which is your KNOW-IT-ALL ARROGANCE ABOUT LIFE THAT DOESN’T KNOW A GODDAM THING!”

Then Fort Dix: midnights on the firing range, sit-ups in the rain, mounds of mashed potatoes and Del Monte fruit cup for “dinner”—and again, with powdered eggs, at dawn—and before even four of the eight weeks of basic infantry training were over, a graduate of Seton Hall College in his regiment dead of meningitis. Could his father have been right? Had his position on ROTC been nothing short of insane, given the realities of army life and the fact of the Korean War? Could he, a summa cum laude, have made such a ghastly and irreversible mistake? Oh God, suppose he were to come down now with spinal meningitis from having to defecate each morning with a mob of fifty! What a price to pay for having principles about ROTC! Suppose he were to contract the disease while scrubbing out the company’s hundred stinking garbage cans—the job that seemed always to fall to him on his marathon stints of KP. ROTC (as his father had prophesied) would get on very nice without him, ROTC would flourish, but what about the man of principle, would he keel over in a garbage pail, dead before he’d even reached the front lines?

But like Dilsey (of whom Zuckerman alone knew, in his platoon of Puerto Ricans), he endured. Basic training was no small trial, however, particularly coming as quickly as it did upon that last triumphant year at Bass, when his only course but one, taken for nine hours’ credit, was the English honors seminar conducted by Caroline Benson. Along with Bass’s two other most displaced Jews, Zuckerman was the intellectual powerhouse of “The Seminar,” which assembled every Wednesday from three in the afternoon until after six—dusk in the autumn and spring, nightfall in the winter—on Queen Anne dining chairs pulled around the worn Oriental rug in the living room of Miss Benson’s cozy house of books and fireplaces. The seven Christian critics in The Seminar would hardly dare to speak when the three dark Jews (all refugees from the top-drawer Jewish fraternity and founders together of Bass’s first literary magazine since—ah, how he loved to say it—the end of the nineteenth century), when these three Jews got to shouting and gesticulating at one another over Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A spinster (who, unlike his mother, happened not to look half her age), Caroline Benson had been born, like all her American forebears, over in Manchester, then educated at Wellesley and “in England.” As he would learn midway through his college career, “Caroline Benson and her New York Jew” was very much a local tradition, as much a part of Bass as the “hello spirit” the dean of men was so high on, or the football rivalry with the University of Vermont that annually brought the ordinarily respectable campus to a pitch of religious intensity only rarely to be seen in this century beyond the Australian bush. The wittier New Englanders on the faculty spoke of “Caroline’s day-vah Jew experience, it always feels like something that’s happened to her in a previous semester . . .” Yes, he was, as it turned out, one of a line—and didn’t care. Who was Nathan Zuckerman of Camden, New Jersey, to turn his untutored back on the wisdom of a Caroline Benson, educated in England? Why, she had taught him, within the very first hour she had found him in her freshman literature class, to pronounce the g in “length”; by Christmas vacation he had learned to aspirate the h in “whale”; and before the year was out he had put the word “guy” out of his vocabulary for good. Rather she had. Simple to do, too.

“There are no ‘guys,’ Mr. Zuckerman, in Pride and Prejudice.”

Well, he was glad to learn that, delighted to, in fact. She could singe him to scarlet with a line like that, delivered in that clipped Vermont way of hers, but vain as he was he took it without so much as a whimper—every criticism and correction, no matter how minute, he took unto himself with the exaltation of a martyred saint.

“I think I should learn to get along better with people,” he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fraternity pledge pin (wearing it on the chest of the new V-neck pullover in which his mother said he looked so collegiate). Miss Benson’s response to his proposed scheme for self-improvement was at once so profound and so simply put that Zuckerman went around for days repeating the simple interrogative sentence to himself; like Of Time and the River, it verified something he had known in his bones all along, but in which he could not place his faith until it had been articulated by someone of indisputable moral prestige and purity: “Why,” Caroline Benson asked the seventeen-year-old boy, “should you want to learn a thing like that?”

The afternoon in May of his senior year when he was invited—not Osterwald who had been invited, not Fischbach, but Zuckerman, the chosen of the Chosen—to take tea with Caroline Benson in the “English” garden back of her house, had been, without question, the most civilized four hours of his life. He had been directed by Miss Benson to bring along with him the senior honors paper he had just completed, and there in a jacket and tie, amid the hundreds of varieties of flowers, none of whose names he knew (except for the rose), sipping as little tea as he could politely get away with (he was unable as yet to dissociate hot tea with lemon from the childhood sickbed) and munching on watercress sandwiches (which he had never even heard of before that afternoon—and wouldn’t miss, if he didn’t hear of them again), he read aloud to Miss Benson his thirty-page paper entitled, “Subdued Hysteria: A Study of the Undercurrent of Agony in Some Novels of Virginia Woolf.” The paper was replete with all those words that now held such fascination for him, but which he had hardly, if ever, uttered back in the living room in Camden: “irony” and “values” and “fate,” “will” and “vision” and “authenticity,” and, of course, “human,” for which he had a particular addiction. He had to be cautioned repeatedly in marginal notes about his relentless use of that word, “Unnecessary,” Miss Benson would write. “Redundant.” “Mannered.” Well, maybe unnecessary to her, but not to the novice himself: human character, human possibility, human error, human anguish, human tragedy. Suffering and failure, the theme of so many of the novels that “moved” him, were “human conditions” about which he could speak with an astonishing lucidity and even gravity by the time he was a senior honors student—astonishing in that he was, after all, someone whose own sufferings had by and large been confined up till then to the dentist’s chair.

They discussed first the paper, then the future. Miss Benson expected him after the army to continue his literary studies at either Oxford or Cambridge. She thought it would be a good idea for Nathan to spend a summer bicycling around England to see the great cathedrals. That sounded all right to him. They did not embrace at the end of that perfect afternoon, but only because of Miss Benson’s age, position, and character. Zuckerman had been ready and willing, the urge in him to embrace and be embraced all but overpowering.

His eight unhappy weeks of basic infantry training were followed by eight equally unhappy weeks of military police training with a herd of city roughnecks and southern hillbillies under the equatorial sun at Fort Benning, Georgia. In Georgia he learned to direct traffic so that it flowed “through the hips” (as the handbook had it) and to break a man’s larynx, if he should wish to, with a swat of the billy club. Zuckerman was as alert and attentive at these army schools as he had been earning his summa cum laude degree from Bass. He did not like the environment, his comrades, or “the system,” but he did not wish to die in Asia either, and so applied himself to every detail of his training as if his life depended upon it—as it would. He did not pretend, as did some of the other college graduates in his training company, to be offended or amused by the bayonet drill. One thing to be contemptuous of soldierly skills while an undergraduate at Bass, another when you were a member of an army at war. “KILL!” he screamed, “KILL!” just as “aggressively” as he was instructed to, and drove the bayonet deep into the bowels of the sandbag; he would have spat upon the dying dummy too if he had been told that that was standing operating procedure. He knew when to be superior and when not to be—or was beginning at least to find out. “What are you?” Sergeant Vinnie Bono snarled at them from the instructor’s platform (a jockey before Korea, Sergeant Bono was reputed to have slain a whole North Korean platoon with nothing but an entrenching tool)—“What are you with your stiff steel pricks, you troopers—pussy-cats or lions?” “LIONS!” roared Zuckerman, because he did not wish to die in Asia, or anywhere for that matter, ever.

But he would, and, he feared, sooner rather than later. At those Georgia reveille formations, the captain, a difficult man to please, would be giving the troopers their first dressing down of the long day—“I guaranfuckintee you gentlemen, not one swingin’ dick will be leavin’ this fiddlefuckin’ area to so much as chew on a nanny goat’s tittie—” and Zuckerman, ordinarily a cheery, a dynamic morning riser, would suddenly have a vision of himself falling beneath the weight of some drunken redneck in an alley back of a whorehouse in Seoul. He would expertly crack the offending soldier in the larynx, in the groin, on the patella, in all the places where he had crippled the dummy in the drill, but the man face-down in the mud would be Zuckerman, crushed beneath the drunken lawbreaker’s brute strength—and then from nowhere, his end would come, by way of the knife or the razor blade. Schools and dummies were one thing—the world and the flesh something else: How would Zuckerman find the wherewithal to crack his club against a real human patella, when he had never been able to do so much as punch somebody’s face with his fist in a schoolyard fight? And yet he had his father’s short fuse, didn’t he? And the seething self-righteousness to go with it. Nor was he wholly without physical courage. After all, as a boy he had never been much more than skin and bones beneath his shoulder pads and helmet, and yet in the sandlot football games he played in weekly every fall, he had not flinched or cried aloud when the stampede had come sweeping around his end of the line; he was fast, he was shifty—“wiry” was the word with which he preferred to describe himself at that time, “Wiry Nate Zuckerman”—and he was “smart,” and could fake and twist and fight his way through a pack of thirteen-year-old boys built like hippos, for all that he was a boy built like a giraffe. He had in fact been pretty fearless on the football field, so long as everybody played according to the rules and within the spirit of the game. But when (to his surprise) that era of good fellowship came to an end, Wiry Nate Zuckerman retired. To be smashed to the ground because he was the left end streaking for the goal line with the ball had always been all right with him; indeed he rather liked the precarious drama of plucking a spiral from the air one moment, and then in the next, tasting dirt, as the pounds piled up above him. However, on a Saturday morning in the fall of 1947, when one of the Irish kids on the Mount Holly Hurricanes came flying onto the pileup (at the bottom of which lay Zuckerman, with the ball) screaming, “Cream that Yid!” he knew that his football career was over. Henceforth football was no longer to be a game played by the rules, but a battle in which each of the combatants would try to get away with as much as he could, for whatever “reasons” he had. And Zuckerman could get away with nothing—he could not even hit back when attacked. He could use what strength he had to try to restrain somebody else from going at him, he would struggle like hell to prevent damage or disfigurement to himself, but when it came to bringing his own knuckles or knees into violent contact with another, he just could not make it happen. Had never been up to it on the neighborhood playground, would be paralyzed for sure on the mainland of Asia. An attentive and highly motivated student, he had earned the esteem of a trained killer for the manner in which he disemboweled the sandbag in basic training—“That’s it, Slim,” Sergeant Bono would megaphone down to his favorite college graduate, “that’s grabbin’ that gook by his gizzard, that’s cuttin’ off the Commie bastard’s cock!”—but face to face with a real live enemy, he might just as well be carrying a parasol and wearing a bustle for all the good his training as a warrior was going to do himself or the Free World.

So, it looked as though he would not be taking that pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral after all, nor would he get to see the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, or the churches where John Donne had preached, or the Lake District, or Bath, the setting of Persuasion (Miss Benson’s favorite novel), or the Abbey Theatre, or the River Liffey, nor would he live to be a professor of literature some day, with a D. Litt. from Oxford or Cambridge and a house of his own cozy with fireplaces and walled with books; he would never see Miss Benson again, or her garden, or those fortunate 4Fs, Fischbach and Osterwald—and worse, no one, ever again, would see him.

It was enough to make him cry; so he did, invariably after being heroically lighthearted on the telephone with his worried mother and father in New Jersey. Yes, outside the phone booth, within hearing distance of the PX jukebox—“Oh, the red we want is the red we got in th’ old red, white, and blue”—he would find himself at the age of twenty-one as tearful and panic-stricken as he had been at four when he had finally had to learn to sleep with all the lights off in his room. And no less desperate for his mommy’s arms and the feel of his daddy’s unshaven cheek.

Telephoning Sharon, being brave with her, would also reduce him to tears afterward. He could hold up all right during the conversations, while she cried, but when it came time to give up the phone to the soldier standing next in the line, when he left the phone booth where he had been so good at cheering her up and started back through the dark across that alien post—“Yes, the red we want is the red we got in th’ old red, white, and blue”—he had all he could do not to scream out against the horrible injustice of his impending doom. No more Sharon. No more Sharon! NO MORE SHARON! What proportions the loss of Sharon Shatzky assumed in young Zuckerman’s mind. And who was she? Who was Sharon Shatzky that the thought of leaving her forever would cause him to clap a hand over his mouth to prevent himself from howling at the moon?

Sharon was the seventeen-year-old daughter of Al “the Zipper King” Shatzky. With her family she had recently moved into Country Club Hills, the development of expensive ranch-type houses where his own parents now lived, on the outskirts of Camden, in a landscape as flat and treeless as the Dakota badlands. Zuckerman had met her in the four weeks between his graduation from Bass and his induction into the army in July. Before their meeting his mother had described Sharon as “a perfect little lady,” and his father had said she was “a lovely lovely child,” with the result that Zuckerman was not at all prepared for the rangy Amazon, red-headed and green-eyed, who arrived in short shorts that night, trailing sullenly behind Al and Minna. All four parents present fell over themselves treating her like a baby, as though that might convince the college graduate to keep his eyes from the powerful curve of haunch beneath the girl’s skimpy summer outfit. Mrs. Shatzky had just that day taken Sharon shopping in Philadelphia for her “college wardrobe.” “Mother, please,” Sharon said, when Minna began to describe how “adorable” Sharon looked in each of her new outfits. Al said (proudly) that Sharon Shatzky here now owned more pairs of shoes than he owned undershorts. “Daddy,” moaned Sharon, closing her jungle eyes in exasperation. Zuckerman’s father said that if Sharon had any questions about college life she should ask his son, who had been editor up at Bass of “the school paper.” It had been the literary magazine that Zuckerman had edited, but he was by now accustomed to the inaccuracies that accompanied his parents’ public celebration of his achievements. Indeed, of late, his tolerance for their failings was growing by leaps and bounds. Where only the year before he might have been incensed by some line of his mother’s that he knew came straight out of McCall’s (or by the fact that she did not know what an “objective correlative” was or in what century Dryden had lived), now he was hardly perturbed. He had also given up trying to educate his father about the ins and outs of the syllogism; to be sure, the man simply could not get it through his head that an argument in which the middle term was not distributed at least once was invalid—but what difference did that make to Zuckerman any more? He could afford to be generous to parents who loved him the way they did (illogical and uneducated though they were). Besides, if the truth be known, in the past four years he had become more Miss Benson’s student than their offspring . . . So he was kind and charitable to all that night, albeit “amused” by much of what he saw and heard; he answered the Shatzkys’ questions about “college life” without a trace of sarcasm or snobbishness (none, at any rate, that he could hear), and all the while (without success) tried to keep his eyes from their daughter’s perky breasts beneath her shrunken polo shirt, and the tempting cage of her torso rising from that slender, mobile waist, and the panthery way she moved across the wall-to-wall carpet on the balls of her bare feet . . . After all: what business did a student of English letters who had taken tea and watercress sandwiches only a few weeks earlier in the garden of Caroline Benson have with the pampered middle-class daughter of Al “the Zipper King” Shatzky?

By the time Zuckerman was about to graduate (third in his class, same rank as at Bass) from MP school, Sharon was a freshman at Juliana Junior College, near Providence. Every night she wrote him scandalous letters on the monogrammed pink stationery with the scalloped edges that Zuckerman’s mother had given the perfect young lady for a going-away present: “dearest dearest all i could think about while playing tennis in gym class was getting down on my hands and knees and crawling across the room toward your prick and then pressing your prick against my face i love it with your prick in my face just pressing your prick against my cheeks my lips my tongue my nose my eyes my ears wrapping your gorgeous prick in my hair—” and so on. The word, which (among others) he had taught her and encouraged her to use during the sex act and also, for titillation’s sake, on the phone and through the mails—had a strong hold over the young girl locked up in the dormitory room in Rhode Island: “every time the ball came over the net,” wrote Sharon, “i saw your wonderful prick on top of it.” This last, of course, he didn’t believe. If Sharon had a fault as a student of carnality, it was a tendency to try a little too hard, with the result that her prose (to which Zuckerman, trained by Miss Benson in her brand of the New Criticism, was particularly attuned) often offended him by a too facile hyperbole. Instead of acting upon him as an aphrodisiac, her style frequently jarred him by its banal insistence, reminding him less of Lawrence than of those mimeographed stories his brother used to smuggle home to him from the navy. In particular her use of “cunt” (modified by “hot”) and “prick” (modified by “big” or “gorgeous” or both) could be as mannered and incantatory, in a word, as sentimental, as his own use, or misuse, in college of the adjective “human.” Nor was he pleased by her refusal to abide by the simple rules of grammar; the absence of punctuation and capitalization in her obscene letters was not exactly an original gesture of defiance (or an interesting one either, to Zuckerman’s mind, whether the iconoclast was Shatzky or cummings), and as a device to communicate the unbridled flow of passion, it seemed to him, a votary not only of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, but also of Madame Bovary and The Ambassadors (he really could not read Thomas Wolfe any more), to have been conceived at a rather primitive level of imagination.

However, as for the passion itself, he had no criticism to make.

Practically overnight (correction: overnight), the virgin whose blood had stained his thighs and matted his pubic hair when he had laid her on a blanket in the back seat of his father’s new Cadillac, had developed into the most licentious creature he’d ever known. Nobody like Sharon had been in attendance at Bass, at least nobody he had ever undressed, and he had traveled with the college’s half dozen bohemians. Even Barbara Cudney, leading lady of the Bass Drama Society and Zuckerman’s companion during his final year of success and celebrity at college, a girl who had thrown herself all over the stage in Medeaalludehinthe