Rider: The Rider Quintet, vol. 1

6

What is this about losing respect? Do I have to talk about it? He said he feared what I might write about him when he was gone, and I told him not to worry. He worried about the "streak of morbidity" in your work. He was a man of God, not of imagination. And it wasn't his fault if he got the shakes. It was a familial tremor, not nerves. And it first happened at agravesite. Near where Brigham Young did his number—"this is the place. He called him Friggin Young. Well, during his bleak tenure in Greenville, his congregants would tell nigger jokes and he would force a smile—afraid now to rock the boat— a mere exercise in stretching the corners of his lips— a fake grin he would have noted on another face—false faces being one of the things we loved to laugh about when together we observed congregants' idiosyncracies, their ruses, their guises, like one temple president, the son of the "richest Jew in Salt Lake" who, seated in the pulpit's other red velvet wing chair, would expose the holes in the soles of his shoes while he batted his eyelashes to wake himself up— 29 6 (though I owe him one: "Rosencavalier" didn't turn me in for copying the wrong answers from Marty Weinstein on our "final exam" in Sunday school prior to confirmation. He was ashamed for me, young Rosencavalier. He could hardly disguise the curled lips and downcast eyes of his contempt for this lawless "Rabbi's son" whether or not my name was Strome or Rudman, but where teaching Judaism was concerned his plodding methodical reading to keep up each week was a pathetic substitution for Sidney's well-wrought, impromptu riffs. So there!) Marty was ashamed of me. I left town. As night was falling? In Utah you can drive at fifteen so by age fourteen a lot of our talk was hard core car talk and somehow the word Volkswagen came up after confirmation class 30 (it was no GTO but you could drive so far on so little gas . . .) and Marty's father—a redhead like his son— made his way up the driveway's ice, smoke billowing from the exhaust of whatever sleek black foreign car he drove. Pulling on his elegant pigskin gloves he announced he'd "never buy a Kraut car." I was bewildered (what, hold against a country now something that happened so long ago?) and he held my gaze and I shivered inside the shiver I felt from the cold I thought he would transmogrify into a southern sheriff and ask "what kind of Jew are you boy" but he didn't have to say another word In other words you were ready to leave town. I'd had it with Utah. But you wanted to stay in the west, againstyour father's wishes? Yes. Unequivocally? Yes. Yes. Yes. But you did submit topsychiatrists and interviews with the heads of schools during your sojourn in the east that summer? 3i This was around the time, was it not, that a certain "Penny, "from Los Angeles, afamily friend of your grandfather's, came to dinner in Salt Lake City . . . She was a small woman, slightly hunchbacked, who spoke in a low voice. She was one of my mother's major confidantes. My mother had a great respect for her because she was the buyer for I. Magnin's. When the subject of my father came up, as it always did, Penny, fueled by several Scotches, seemed to retract her head into her chest and when it reemerged she spat out this sentence about Charles: "Why he'd stick his prick into anything!" I blanched. My features stiffened with rage. Sensual and tormented man that he was, whatever he was, what right did they have to tear him down in front of me! She put her leathered multi-braceleted hand on my hand and said, "It's all right, dahlink." I said, "I've never seen him do anything like that." And they continued. "Well he used to screw the maid," my mother threw in wearily. How did they know so much about him, this shadow, this spectre? Everyone knew. There she was, this tiny hunchback, almost a dwarf—this was how she conceived of loyalty to my mother. In reality, it was another patronizing blow, as if my...