Morningstar Read online

  AS A TEENAGER I READ INDISCRIMINATELY. AT THE library, as I’ve said, I usually chose books by their size—the fatter the better. Although that meant that I discovered Victor Hugo and Tolstoy and Dickens by the time I was fifteen, it also meant that I read—and, I admit, loved—Irving Wallace, Jacqueline Susann, and Harold Robbins with equal fervor. In one week I might read Anna Karenina and Hawaii, the next Les Misérables and Valley of the Dolls. I devoured Evan Hunter’s Paper Lions with as much intensity as I did Great Expectations. Doris Lessing could have been talking about me and my reading habits when she said, “With a library you are free . . . it is the most democratic of institutions because no one—but no one at all—can tell you what to read and when and how.”

  When I look back on the books that shaped me, the ones that taught me how to think and live and dream, a surprising one keeps coming into my mind: A Stone for Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins. The cover screams bodice ripper. A raven-haired beauty half reclines on a bed, wearing a silky black slip and stockings held up by garters. Below, a glistening shirtless Danny Fisher stares down at a man he has just knocked out in a boxing ring. When I began to reread it again a half century later I could hear the advice I give writing students: don’t overuse the action of looking; don’t repeat words; don’t use ellipses; stay in the point of view; avoid sentimentality and melodrama—all of which Robbins employs on every page. The plot revolves around Danny, a young Jewish boy who at eight years old moves with his family to a home he loves in Brooklyn. He acquires a dog and friends in short order and soon even learns that the older teenage girl across the street likes to leave her shades up so he can watch her undress, something that makes him feel filthy. Danny punishes himself by taking showers so cold they hurt.

  There’s lots of sex in A Stone for Danny Fisher, though often I couldn’t tell if he had just kissed someone, actually had sex with her, or just felt her breasts. More than once I had to reread scenes, confused by Danny’s feelings of guilt after being with a girl. But second and even third reads left me just as confused. Perhaps these vague sex scenes were just right for my naïve teenage self—enough to titillate but not enough to terrify me.

  One night, Danny’s parents and sister go to the movies, leaving him home alone. Mimi, the girl who sexually taunts him from across the street, comes to his house and tries to seduce him in one of the strangest seduction scenes I’ve ever read. Of course, as a fifteen-year-old, confused by sex myself, it must have seemed sexually charged and exciting to read. Mimi holds a tumbler of cold water, then puts her cold hands on Danny’s face. He doesn’t move or respond. So she presses her lips against his and bends him backward across the sink, at which point Danny grabs her by the shoulders and squeezes so hard that she gasps in pain, which makes him laugh. “Don’t fight with me, Danny,” Mimi tells him. “I like you. And I can tell you like me!” They hear a car in the driveway and Mimi leaves. So why is Danny racked with guilt? What did they even do that made him feel “soiled and dirty”? Not only does Danny take one of those frigid showers, he also slaps himself so hard that he doubles over in pain. Often these scenes are followed by such cruelty toward the girl that Danny seems almost insane. When Danny sees Mimi again the next day, he stares at her coldly and then tells her, “I hate your guts.”

  Surely, I thought after I read this scene as an adult, I had read this book over and over as pure escapism. Although I didn’t have very discerning taste as a fifteen-year-old, I could see this book for what it was. Even now I like to sometimes indulge in the guilty pleasure of reading a book that literary snobs would never consider reading. And I enjoy them, those paperbacks I don’t mind leaving behind on an airplane. They make long flights pass pleasantly. I don’t have to marvel at the use of language or metaphor or puzzle over how the author pulled off such a mind-bogglingly intricate plot. I just read it and forget it, perhaps a habit I learned back in high school when I read any book I could get my hands on.

  But then why did A Stone for Danny Fisher come to mind immediately when thinking of books that shaped me, right beside The Grapes of Wrath and Rabbit, Run? I cannot say with honesty that when I read it back in 1971 or ’72 that I recognized it as a lesser literary achievement. In fact, I remember loving it, every word. I remember how hard I sobbed when Danny’s dog dies, and when he visits the Brooklyn home his family was forced to leave, when he dies at the end, and at the book’s final line: “To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.” I also remember that after reading it several times, I took out other Harold Robbins books and couldn’t even finish them. I didn’t like them at all. No, this novel spoke to me.

  As I reread A Stone for Danny Fisher this past summer, slowly I understood. I believe that magically the book we are supposed to read somehow appears in our hands at just the right time. This happened for me when I struggled to manage multiple points of view as I wrote my first novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine. Perhaps out of fear of writing an entire novel, I’d considered the book as interconnected short stories. But here I was, trying to make those stories a novel. Pages covered my living room floor in my Bleecker Street apartment. What was I thinking, trying to use so many points of view? Convinced I would never figure out how to make it work, and that I would have to give back my advance, I decided to take a long walk. I ended up at the Spring Street Bookstore in Soho, where I picked up a book by a writer I’d never heard of before—Anne Tyler. The book was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and it was written in multiple points of view, a detail I didn’t know when I bought it. Back at my apartment, I ignored all the pages on my floor and flopped, dejected, onto the couch. I read that novel straight through—enchanted, yes, but also, I know now, learning from it how to manage the narrative style. Recently I read that Tyler had originally written Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant as interconnected stories too. That book landed in my hands at just the right time. And now I realize so did A Stone for Danny Fisher.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1970, my brother, Skip, brought home a new girlfriend. His high-school girlfriend, Weezie, had been a freckle-faced, big-toothed girl whom I loved. She treated me like a kid sister and happily gave me extra scoops of ice cream when I went to the Newport Creamery at the mall, where she worked. But Weezie broke Skip’s heart, and the summer after his freshman year at college, at his job at Zayre, he met the girl he would eventually marry, the one who appeared in our kitchen one hot, muggy night, wearing torn jeans and moccasins, a type of shoe my mother believed only “bad girls” wore. Where she got such an idea I don’t know, but she also believed—and still does—that “bad girls” drink soda straight out of a bottle instead of using a straw. To this day I have never seen my mother lift a bottle of soda to her lips. She sips from a straw.

  The moccasins were the least of the problem, however. The girl was Jewish, which did not bother my parents (though my Italian grandmother didn’t much like it), but infuriated her parents. So much so that they forbade Skip from dating their daughter or even calling her. That infuriated my mother, who didn’t like anybody who did anything against her kids. Barring Skip from their house was an insult to her, to all of us, and so a kind of war between the two families began. When the girl’s father called my father and insisted my parents keep Skip away from his daughter, my mother took the phone and gave him a piece of her mind. Who the hell did he think he was anyway? I listened, afraid and excited in equal measure. Somehow we were in a feud—the Hatfields and McCoys, the Capulets and Montagues. It all seemed terribly romantic to me.

  Although my family was Catholic, we were not really churchgoers. My father, who had converted from Baptist to Catholic back in 1950 in order to marry my mother, liked the folk masses at Sacred Heart Church and happily went once or twice a month to sing “Day by Day” and “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore” while the young priest strummed the guitar. When he first met my mother, her family didn’t like him—he was a sailor, he wasn’t Catholic, and worst of all, he wasn’t Italian. His Midwestern family viewed my mother as some kind of exotic
creature because she was Italian and Catholic. Their nicknames for her—unbelievable now—were “wop” and “fish eater,” the latter because Catholics didn’t eat meat on Fridays. When she offered to make them spaghetti and meatballs during a visit to Indiana, she was shocked that she couldn’t find some of the ingredients—parmesan cheese, fresh parsley, garlic. Still, even without these key things, they marveled at the meal. They’d never tasted anything like it.

  But all of that was twenty years earlier, and in time my grandmother fell in love with my father. The two of them fried the crispelles and baked the sweet bread at Easter, and cleaned the eel and calamari for the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. Religious differences seemed old-fashioned and trivial by 1970. We knew exactly one Jewish person: Jean Goldstein, a friend of my auntie Emma. She arrived at our house a few times a year, always heavily tanned and shiny with gold and diamond jewelry. Jean Goldstein became an emblem of our family’s openness in this war. “Jean Goldstein sits right at this table and eats sausage and peppers!” my mother would remind us after another call from Phil, the girl’s angry father. “I would never tell Jean Goldstein she wasn’t welcome in my house. Who does he think he is?”

  My family had no understanding of the Jewish religion or of Jewish history. Mama Rose believed the Jews had killed Jesus, so she didn’t trust them. Surely my parents knew about the Holocaust, but to what degree I cannot say. And as terrible as it sounds, religion just didn’t matter to them and therefore they couldn’t accept it as such a big deal—big enough to cause all this trouble. That summer, and into the fall and winter, we got calls that the girl had run off to be with my brother at college; calls insisting that we had to do something, make Skip leave her alone. The calls often came late at night, and I would hear my father’s weary voice say, “The more you try to stop them, the more they’ll want to be together. If you let them see each other, this thing will blow over.”

  It didn’t. Instead, at the tender age of twenty, my brother announced they were getting married. My parents had married at nineteen and twenty-one, so they weren’t bothered that Skip was so young. But he also announced that he was converting to Judaism, which did not go over very well. Mama Rose cried, claiming he was breaking Jesus’s heart and that he wouldn’t be able to get into heaven. “What about Christmas?” my mother said, and she was crying too. Even though we were only nominally Catholic in many ways, my mother held on to certain aspects of the faith. She considered saying something against Catholicism blasphemous. “Jesus cries,” she’d tell us if we questioned a tenet or told a joke that involved a priest. She says her prayers—Hail Mary, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Act of Contrition—every night. She loves the Virgin Mary and all the saints, especially Saint Anthony. How would having a Jewish son fit into this construct of her faith? My father, on the other hand, didn’t really care. “It’s just words,” he said. “What matters is who you are, not what you are.”

  With the announcement of the conversion, the girl’s parents were suddenly our best friends. Phil brought my father cigars and Eileen went shopping for mother-of-the-bride and mother-of-the-groom dresses with my mother. They came over for Christmas Eve, happily eating shrimp cocktail and drinking my father’s special punch: Hawaiian Punch, rum, strawberries, and rainbow sherbet. As the wedding neared, we saw them more than we saw almost anyone else. There were decisions to be made on color schemes and tablecloths and yarmulkes. My isolated world of Catholic immigrants was all at once steeped in Judaism. And at the same time, in that magical way books have, I slid A Stone for Danny Fisher off the library shelf. Attracted by its size—494 pages!—and perhaps by that sexy cover, I inadvertently picked a book at least nominally about Judaism.

  JUST ABOUT EVERYONE in my hometown was Catholic. In second grade the class showed up on the playground one spring morning with our foreheads smudged with ashes. This happened every Ash Wednesday. Before school we went to church and got our ashes. But that year I noticed one girl with a clean, shiny forehead. Her name was Sandra Goldsmith, and I approached her that morning with a great deal of curiosity. Maybe she was going to get her ashes after school, I thought. Ash Wednesday marked the first day of Lent, and the talk on the playground that morning was about what everyone was giving up for Lent—candy, soda, television.

  “What are you giving up for Lent?” I asked Sandra.

  She kicked at the pavement with the toe of her scuffed brown shoe and shrugged.

  “I’m giving up candy,” I offered, already missing the flying saucers filled with tiny beads of sugary candy that I preferred.

  Sandra remained silent.

  I still remember the moment so clearly, remember the bewilderment I felt at her behavior. Even though I went to a public school, playground conversation often involved discussions about Pope Paul VI and when the secrets of Fátima would be revealed. We were kids or grandkids of immigrants, French Canadians and Italians and Portuguese and Polish Catholics who had come to work in the textile mills that still lined the river that cut through town. That there were people in the world who were not Catholic never occurred to me.

  “When are you getting your ashes?” I asked, not meaning to bully.

  Sandra finally looked up, her cheeks red and wet with tears. “I’m not Catholic!” she blurted.

  Before I could ask her what that meant—what were you if not Catholic?—Sandra ran out of the playground gate, down the sidewalk toward home.

  Ten years later, I had a Jewish brother.

  DURING SKIP’S CONVERSION I learned about the Jewish High Holy Days, the stories of Passover and Chanukah; I learned what it meant to keep kosher and what a family did on the Sabbath; I learned that some Jews wouldn’t use elevators or turn off lights from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday. To me, it sounded mysterious and exotic. Then I read A Stone for Danny Fisher and, coincidentally, was cast as Tzeitel in my high school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof.

  I had learned how to live through reading a lot of books, with a smattering of pop culture thrown in. And that year I learned about the pogroms in Russia, why Jews covered their heads and wore prayer shawls, and the importance of keeping their faith—all through a Broadway musical. With kerchiefs on our heads and aprons over our dresses, we sang “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” and we danced with brooms and clasped our hands together as we twirled to “Tradition.” During my marriage to the tailor Motel Kamzoil, the cast picked me up as I sat on a chair and danced, holding me aloft. Two months later I watched this happen at my brother’s wedding, shortly after he and his bride took their vows to “Sunrise, Sunset.”

  A Stone for Danny Fisher opens at Mount Zion Cemetery a week before the High Holy Days. “For this is the week that Lord God Jehovah calls His angels about Him and opens before them the Book of Life. And your name is inscribed on one of those pages. Written on that page will be your fate for the coming days,” it begins, and then continues to explain that the book remains open for six days, during which you devote yourself to acts of charity, such as visiting the dead. To make sure you get credit for your visit, “you will pick up a small stone from the earth beneath your feet and place it on the monument so the Recording Angel will see it when he comes through the cemetery each night.”

  Although much of the novel deviates from an exploration of Judaism, Danny’s Jewishness is established from the start. In the first chapter, two boys corner Danny in his new neighborhood and demand to know which church he will attend. When he tells them, “I’m a Jew and I go to shul,” one of the boys snarls, “Why did you kill Christ?” Reading this, surely I remembered my own interrogation of Sandra Goldsmith on the playground and my grandmother telling Skip that the Jews killed Christ. In the next chapter, Danny has his bar mitzvah, the scene rich with details of the synagogue and the ceremony. After school I was watching the boys in the cast of Fiddler practice singing “To Life” and in my bed at night I was reading about Danny’s parents shouting it to him at his bar mitzvah. Robbins describes the white silk tallith emblazoned with
a blue Star of David and the white silk yarmulke that Danny wears; a few months later I sat in a synagogue at my brother’s wedding looking out at a sea of men wearing yellow yarmulkes to match the couple’s color theme.

  I don’t remember the confluence of these events—my brother’s conversion and marriage, reading A Stone for Danny Fisher, and performing in Fiddler on the Roof—striking me then as important. But from the distance of years I see how a bestselling book and a popular musical helped me navigate the changes in my family, how they showed me through songs and stories a glimpse into a world I had been, until then, unaware of.

  In all the years that have followed, I have visited dozens of countries and witnessed countless traditions and cultures. I’ve attended a voodoo ceremony in Brazil and visited a witch doctor in Uganda. I’ve been splattered with paint during the festival of Holi in India and heard the muezzin call Muslims to prayer in Egypt; I’ve seen single women wear their hair in braids by law in Turkmenistan and pilgrims approach temples on their knees in Tibet. All of these things, and so many more, I’ve watched with curiosity and an open heart. Thanks in no small part to Harold Robbins, Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick, who showed me a glimpse of a world and a belief different from my own.

  Lesson 8: How to Have Sex

  • The Harrad Experiment BY ROBERT H. RIMMER •

  I HAD EXACTLY TWO LESSONS IN SEX EDUCATION. THE first came from my ninth-grade, gray-haired, bespectacled home economics teacher. Mrs. Follett taught the cooking half of home ec, but one day she led all of us girls (the boys were busy building bookends in shop class in the basement) to the gym and showed us an antiquated-looking film on menstruation. We sat on the bleachers, horrified at the dancing cartoon ovaries and fallopian tubes and giggling as the bobby-soxed girls asked an offscreen interviewer why they suffered with pimples, cramps, and moodiness.