Swear by the Slain of War (fiction)
Martin, Jack
SWEAR BY SLAIN OF WAR JACK MARTIN I am, among other things, a Jew. Not militantly or professionally but genetically and for all practical purposes. Not quite as Jewish as my wife...
...Have you forgotten already...
...They talk in music and the words must scramble to catch up...
...However, I could not expect in the brief time allotted to solve the portage problems from Boston to home and return...
...Anything else...
...Who makes up for six million Jews—the Jews...
...Which one did you decide on...
...My parents were equally indifferent to the symbiosis, closing their eyes and shrugging but pointedly not informing my grandparents until M-Day...
...she said, dancing away on those enchanted feet and pressing her back against the wall...
...Sheila thinks she and Michael are geniuses...
...If a Volkswagen or any other German car is brought into this house, I will leave it...
...We have to remember...
...Get some more rest," I said quickly as I listened to Sheila two rooms away taking a deep, therapeutic breath...
...If you listen carefully, you can hear in the background of an Irishman's syntax the heroic chords of Beethoven, the diableries of Paganini, the complexities of Liszt and the marzipan of Victor Herbert, sometimes all together...
...before the aggiornamento of that saintly fat man, Pope John XXIII, in the rectory of her church...
...There's such a thing as not being Jewish enough...
...What do you want me to say...
...Sheila and I were married...
...I did not inherit the Jewish hunger for scholarship...
...Though the savage breast is soothed by such charms, the civilized mind is not always satisfied by the lyrics...
...There's such a thing as being more Jewish than Moses...
...It's the best buy, dollar for dollar...
...Sheila took her degree in English Lit at Georgian Court, a posh Catholic girl's college in New Jersey and her Master's at Fordham University...
...Sheila explained that her bones were and would remain forever Roman Catholic and that she had no doubt mine were as staunchly Jewish...
...Right on," Claire said...
...I consulted the Consumer Reports and, as the piece de resistance, talked it over with Michael, who at twelve is an expert on cars, women, life, the New York Nets, Mets and Jets...
...Maybe a secondhand compact," I said, hand thus forced...
...Right," I said, "and you know how fine their craftsmanship is...
...She had carefully explained at the beginning of our courtship that were she to marry in a synagogue, chapel, fellowship, meeting hall or mosque of another faith, she would be excommunicated by Rome and consigned to outer darkness for an unspecified number of millennia but surely not less than two...
...There's a statute of limitations on abominations...
...I do and you should...
...A car...
...My parents, in resignation at my inability to immerse myself, hip and thigh, in academe, had dropped me off on the doorstep of the Pennsylvania State College of Optometry because they were determined to have some kind of doctor in the family...
...She didn't really mean that...
...You little halfbreed...
...Jews have no one powerful or interested enough to toss them out for such indelicacies (they have, proportionately, few enough adherents as it is to chance losing any) so there was no problem for me...
...My daughter's voice sounded about as normal as that of any eighteen year old, unfocused, desultory, not having as yet any personal timbre of its own...
...She always said...
...Sheila, there is absolutely, positively nothing wrong with Claire...
...Never Again...
...That's a German car...
...There have been murmurings about Michael, in another year, undergoing his bar mitzvah...
...Look down and swear by the slain of the war that you'll never forget...
...I said, "Right on...
...Let the goyim rationalize, let the goyim forget, let the goyim buy Volkswagens...
...Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau revisited as others would thumb through picture postcards from Atlantic City, The Catskills, Miami Beach...
...I've been studying like a fiend all week for my midterms...
...The word "hitchhike" was the agitprop that incited the whole megillah and threatened to unravel the fabric of two carefully braided faiths...
...We have to be practical, right...
...We can use the money saved on phone calls for gasoline...
...SWEAR BY SLAIN OF WAR JACK MARTIN I am, among other things, a Jew...
...The impetus toward our children's doctorates is, therefore, more Jesuitic than Talmudic...
...There are lowlead gasoline and rack and pinion steering to be considered and, in the case of a used car, whether the little old lady who had previously owned it had used it solely for driving to church on Sundays or had turned it over to her scruffy grandson who never went near a church...
...I'm all right...
...Would you like that...
...What do you know...
...Jack Martin is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in various publications including the Saturday Evening Post, Family Circle, Four Quarters and Carolina Quarterly...
...Your studies aren't giving you any problems...
...Physically...
...Samuel Wechter, Sophie Kleiner, Benjamin Dorfman," she said...
...The Rabbit, as Michael claimed, came out on top by any standard of measure...
...she said in the humming contralto of the truly dedicated...
...What have death camps got to do with a car for Claire...
...We'll be at Newark Airport to meet you...
...I hear you, Mother...
...The debate, if that's what it was, ended at that point...
...Look up," she said, closing her eyes, "and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget...
...We were the victims...
...You'll have it to drive back to Boston...
...We're not made of money...
...You're a typical Irish father," she said...
...Wrong," Sheila said...
...I know different...
...Sheila is barely five feet with a feathery cap of black hair and eyes that are too blue to be real...
...Oh, wow...
...Sheila apparently detected something insidious in the glottal stops...
...Why should we forget...
...Sheila left the room, head high, sweeping her train behind her...
...She is pretty but sometimes, when she descends upon me, feet shifting psychedelically, she reminds me of Willie Pep, that fabulous featherweight champion of the forties who could fox trot an opponent to death...
...I've decided," I said...
...No problems...
...Your mother thinks the Volkswagen is a Nazi staff car," I said with a certain amount of grace...
...I remembered them from somewhere out of my school days but I had no idea of their source...
...Another thing about youth...
...Her words turned into bumper stickers and cardboard signs held by pickets...
...She really should have her own car...
...I'm just a little tired, that's all," Claire said...
...They were relatives on my mother's side of the family...
...She winds you around her little finger...
...A great deal of silence...
...They aren't...
...What have you done for me lately...
...Okay," I said...
...I remained firm in the right for one more day...
...Swear by the slain of the war that you'll never forget," I said...
...We always said nothing must interfere with their getting their educations under the best possible conditions, right up through graduate school...
...She's tired from studying...
...I have unbounded faith in the Boston subway system and in the capability of young legs to travel reasonable distances under their own locomotion...
...It has been more than thirty years," I said...
...Remember what...
...She went on indicting me with those Lakes-o'-Killarney eyes, now shimmering with mist, as though I had decided after much thought that Hitler had been ill-mannered...
...I wish Claire hadn't said "tired...
...Dad...
...I am youth...
...She keeps saying there's nothing wrong with her...
...A Volkswagen...
...A Volkswagen," she said again, settling for hands pressed against her breasts because she had run out of ballroom...
...My chromosomes, entailed by Abraham even to his epigoni, must have been empathic...
...Not all, Daughter of Kings, not all...
...This counterpoint, antiphony or Breughlian canvas of Bavarian dancers in lederhosen exchanging gleeful slaps—choose your own metaphor—is at worst piquant, at best it may take some hard bargaining between the Pope and the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem to straighten out...
...Six million Jews," she said, "dehumanized, turned into soap, their skins used for lampshades, their teeth for gold bullion, their faith in God almost shattered and you want to buy a Volkswagen...
...To Sheila that means leukemia...
...Okay, call her and tell her not to hitchhike," I said...
...Except for the visible contradictions of the hard liners on both sides in Belfast, I would agree...
...I held up a hand to keep Michael from enfilading us with his wisdom...
...Claire," she said, getting right to the point, "you are to fly home during your spring break...
...Youth views things from a vast network of duck blinds and their parents are usually the ducks they view...
...I would not sleep a wink," Sheila said, "knowing she was the target of every pervert and sex maniac from here to Boston...
...Michael walked into the room, gauged the atmosphere and, instead of behaving like the genius his mother knew he was and splitting, said, "You two having a fight or something...
...Tears hung on her cheeks like condensation on a plastic candy wrapper someone had tossed aside...
...That's not logical," my logical son said...
...Those last words came out like a curtain line...
...I spent some time at used car dealers checking through the available Novas, Pintos, Darts and Vegas, ranging in age from two to six years and in price from preposterous to outrageous...
...Will you please tell Mother that there is absolutely, positively nothing wrong with me...
...I depart from custom at this point only to cadge, a priori, a little understanding, a bisel sympathy for my failure to act on principle even when the principle was not mine, was mistakenly thought to be mine, should have been mine or could positively be identified as a principle in the first place...
...A Volkswagen Rabbit...
...I spend my life staring into other people's myopia but I am reasonably content...
...Something is bothering you...
...Sheila went to the phone, motioning me to pick up the extension in our bedroom...
...Sheila, hang up...
...Naturally I'll take you along to kick the tires...
...Both our children, Claire and Michael, were baptised (Michael was also ritually circumcised because, as Sheila pointed out, Jesus had been) and received the sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation...
...Do you hear me, Claire...
...You feel that strongly...
...Nine blocks, one subway station, a piece of cake...
...Never...
...Sheila, all the Nazis may have been Germans but all the Germans weren't Nazis," I said, the apothegm sounding even in my ears like the droppings of pigeons on marble shoulders...
...It's the best car for the money," he said, wriggling his toes in the troubled waters without first taking off his socks...
...Eventually I remembered the source of the line Sheila had used in her allocution...
...Earlier this month, Claire, a sophomore majoring in speech pathology at Boston University, had written that she was coming home for the spring break and would fly, take the train or hitchhike, depending upon our financial circumstances or her current whim...
...She drew herself up and hauled in a breath that shrilled like a pennywhistle...
...I don't know whether he was Jewish...
...I said...
...I studied the catalogs of all the companies manufacturing compacts and sub-compacts, both domestic and imported, conducted cost/efficiency surveys and discounted by half the hyperbole and self-serving claims...
...Remember The Maine...
...Blue tattoo marks on grey skin...
...And don't spend too much on a car," she said...
...The Volkswagen Rabbit," he said imperiously...
...She has simply become more catholic...
...I prefer not to discuss religion, politics or the existence of the vaginal orgasm because too frequently the discussions fulminate into savage arguments...
...Do you know how far it is from that apartment she shares to the University...
...Claire, are you all right...
...You are a Jew...
...Just because she's in college is no reason for you to be impressed by everything she says...
...The world limps on...
...If they can't, the hell with 'em...
...Michael said, being a generation and a half behind the Apocalypse and seeing it as a TV special with an improbable script...
...Claire is a 3.5 student...
...She'll want to carry back some summer clothing when she returns to Boston...
...What's the problem...
...It's emotional...
...They also built the finest crematoriums and the most efficient death camps in the world...
...Sheila wanted to know how I was coming with the car...
...All right" Sheila finally said in a voice like an out-of-tune oboe...
...What did she say besides 'Oh, wow...
...Is it important...
...Two plus two equals four and don't play music while it is counting...
...Siegfried Sassoon, writing about the horror of the First World War...
...For those who like to sniff out apostasies from or to whatever faith, Sheila's Catholicism has not been diluted by marriage to me...
...Desert a few thousand square feet of suzerainty...
...Michael is very much his mother, same Delft blue eyes, same raven hair, same (alas) stature and the same quality of artlessness that sometimes persuades you that they are listening on tiptoe at the edge of a mountain to the music of distant flutes...
...She can take the train—it's only five hours—or she can fly...
...I'm fine, Mother...
...Not at the moment...
...America— Love It or Leave It...
...That's enough yakking...
...Never...
...Can you imagine her on a train or a plane with all those clothes and her record albums...
...Heinrich Heine, a nice Jewish boy...
...Not militantly or professionally but genetically and for all practical purposes...
...Your father has decided to buy you a car," Sheila said...
...Michael sneered at me...
...I said...
...I could tell by the cadence of her footsteps that she was about to accost me for some lese majesty or other...
...The buying of a car in these days of energy crises and inflation requires as much acumen as the choice of a good wine...
...Our generation...
...Mary Mother," she said...
...A car for use within Boston seemed to me an extravagance...
...Yes, baby...
...Not quite as Jewish as my wife (whose maiden name was McCarthy) but certainly more so than Barry Goldwater who, after just two generations, has been tapped for High Church...
...She sat down on the edge of the bed, eyes somewhere in the region of irresistible faith against immovable mountains...
...Sheila's parents accepted me with no more reservations than they would a lefthanded shortstop...
...The spring break was only a few weeks off, remember...
...Of course, she's tired...
...No other choice...
...I mean, when do we stop...
...The following day I picked up a nice little four-year-old Camaro with low mileage and a decent price...
...I remember but I do not want to...
...Remember...
...I mentioned that amusing quality once to Sheila who said flatly, "All the Irish are fey...
Vol. 3 • September 1978 • No. 9
