Mitzvah Man

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Adam Friedman wasn’t always the Mitzvah Man. He was once a personal success. Shouldn’t victory, success, be climax to a story, resolution of a pattern? So this story begins where a story should end. Of course the victory is merely in his own eyes—and in the mental snapshots he’s clicking to bring his wife. Oh, will Shira laugh! This victory, how did it come about? In January 2005, Adam Friedman received in the mail an invitation from the Chase Day School in New York to a twenty-fifth reunion of his prep school class. How did they get his address? For years their alumni office would call him for donations, but that was before he moved to Boston. Well, it was their job to find him; his, to ignore their calls, their letters. And when that didn’t work, he’d told the development guy on the phone: “Look, friend, when I think about Chase, all I remember is pain and humiliation. It’s become a decent school—so I hear, and so you say. In my day, mid-seventies, it was at its nadir—a school for rich, vulgar brats. I was physically tortured at Chase; worse, I was bored. The headmaster was a frightened lush, the teachers were shockingly ignorant. None of that’s your fault—you’re just doing your job. But please don’t ask me for support.” You’d think that would do it. But beginning January 2005, letters from the class twenty-fifth reunion committee. A parade of letters,|1| names of the men who’d signed up. Deadheads, all—except for his old friend Ben Licht. His mother hadn’t wanted him to go to a public school where he’d face tough boys, anti-Semites, God knows what. She was full of fantasies . My son, she drawled in her fancy fake-Brit accent, attends one of the finest preparatory schools in the country. Some finest. He went to Chase because, unlike Horace Mann, Chase gave him a full scholarship. His father made bupkus as a salesman; his rich uncle refused to help. He was poor boy in a rich boy’s school. The other kids, also Jewish, came from families in the dress business or on the stock exchange. They somehow got wind of his scholarship, laughed at his hand-medown wingtip shoes, his father’s old shirts, collars frayed. This was just after the end of the war in Vietnam, but you’d think the student revolt had never happened. It was one of the last all-boys schools in New York. Politics, music, art were not cool at Chase; foreign movies, not cool; near-shoulder-length hair, not cool. Even being active as a Jew, taking it seriously, not cool. What was cool? Jocks were cool, guys who got laid were cool. It was cool to have season box seats at Yankee Stadium. Then there were the uncool—like Adam, like Ben Licht. Which turned out to be a blessing, though not experienced as a blessing, for it’s what led Adam and Ben to music and art. It let them feel contempt for “the animals .” They wrote stories, they attended concerts mostly as demonstrations of a different way to be. Later, literature, music, became a real part of their lives. Together, after school, talking, talking, talking, Adam and Ben walked across Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum or sat crosslegged on the floor of Ben’s living room while Adrienne Licht, Ben’s mother, played Chopin on the seven-foot grand or put on records of violinists—first Menuhin, say, then Stern—playing the same passages. Adam remembers mooning over Ben’s mom. He loved her eyes. He loved it that she’d get him a ticket to High Holiday services so Ben would have someone to sit with. He loved going to the Metropolitan Museum with them. Was art worth getting tortured over? He would have been better off John J. Clayton 4 | in a school full of gang kids. It was okay if he got pushed around. Snapped with towels? Bearable if not pleasant. But this one guy, Phil Cole, six-three, well over two hundred pounds, waited for him on the stairs between classes. If you ignored him, he’d say, “Adam, Adam, I’m insulted. Aren’t you going to say hello?” If you said, “Hello, Phil,” he’d...