A Lonely Voice

Under the pear tree, he’s thinking about a matchmaker.

It’s late evening, mid-summer, 1953. The sun has dipped behind an oak in his neighbor’s yard, the sky lit up a crazy orange-pink. The moon, nearly full, rises a few inches above the jagged horizon like a pockmarked peach. His year-old daughter has finally fallen asleep, and his son, five, has gone up for his bath. From where he stands, beneath the knobby, moss-covered branches of the old pear, he can hear the boy through the open window, splashing and talking to imaginary sailors on his toy boat. From closer comes the clatter of dishes as his wife clears the kitchen table. He has come back outside to water the roses, or so he has told her, but after turning on the sprinkler, he makes no move toward the door.

He is Bernard Malamud, thirty-nine years old, living, of all places, in Corvallis, Oregon, where he teaches composition at the state agricultural college. His first novel, a baseball story with mythological underpinnings—called by the Times “a brilliant and unusual book”—was published the year before, and he is now composing a set of stories that feels closer to home.

But home is a slippery concept, one he has been wrestling with in recent months. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever grasp it. What’s certain is that he can’t claim it in Oregon, though the landscape awes him: the fields, smelling of cow manure, that surround the college campus; the dark ridge of foothills beyond, covered in colossal fir trees that from a distance appear bristly as quills on the backs of dozing beasts; the snow-capped peak that appears when the clouds finally break in July. But after four years he is still an alien here and knows he will be always. He speaks the same language as his colleagues and students—with the exception of a few Yiddish phrases that find their way into his sentences without his even realizing—but their intonations are so different, he often thinks they’d be better off communicating with hand gestures. When he opens his mouth, most people lean away, as if his breath comes out too forcefully, blowing them back on their heels.

But he felt no more at home when he last returned to New York, where old friends and relatives clamored around him, congratulating him on his book, asking how he likes living in a forest, how many trees he’s cut down since disappearing into the wilds. The sound of their voices so loud and unrelenting he could hardly reply, much less hear his own thoughts. Despite the cheer of the occasion, he found himself too conscious of his father’s absence, of his mother’s desolate widowhood; he was too aware still of their disapproval of his marriage, though his mother has since come to accept his Italian Catholic wife in her silent way, treating Ann to the affectionate hostility she would have shown her own daughter, if she’d had one.

Only when he’s far away does Brooklyn feel like the place to which he’s connected more intimately than any other. With three thousand miles of mountains and plains and prairie between them, he can remember the magic of its crowded streets, the dignified if chaotic lives of the people who walk them. He can recall the unexpected beauty of his parents’ broken English, the struggle of their daily lives, their capacity to love despite constant hardship. He can be with them so long as he is nowhere nearby.

He is most at home, then, in these quiet moments of evening, underneath the pear tree, when he can let his imagination roam across those mountains and plains, back to the crowded streets in which it was born. There it lingers with the people he has abandoned—out of necessity, he tells himself, though not without a measure of remorse.

So: a matchmaker. And a rabbinical student. The latter’s life dictated by tradition and piety, the former by love and faith.

It is...