Friedman - A Mothers Kisses

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1964 by Bruce Jay Friedman

Cover design by Mauricio Daz

978-1-5040-1954-5

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

For Josh, Drew, and Kipp

Book One

O nce, when he was five, a Negro woman had been assigned to watch him through the summer, allowing him to wander only twenty paces in each direction. Each time he reached the edge of a building and tried to go around it she would rein him back to her side. He spent the summer a lidless city pavement animal, tied to a chain, wheeling drugged and lazy in the sun. Now, twelve years later, it seemed to Joseph that he was chained again and that there was nothing to do but stand in front of his apartment house and stretch and try to breathe and wait for the days to pass. There did not seem to be any way for him to get off by himself around some corner. He had finished high school and sent out applications to two colleges for the fall, Columbia and Bates, the latter because he liked the name. Once, at a summer resort, he had watched a short scrappy fellow with heavy thighs play basketball, staying all over his man, hollering out catcalls, giving his opponent no quarter. The fellow said he went to Bates and Joseph had come to think of the school as a scrappy little heavy-thighed college full of fast little fellows who pressed their opponents. He chose Columbia in case the out-of-town school rejected him for not being scrappy enough.

Although Joseph did very well in high school, he did not get very much in the way of college guidance. All such assistance came under the direction of a folksy old hygiene teacher named Pop Frebble who walked with a cane; when Joseph approached him in the hall one day about colleges, he winced and held his side as though the question had slashed at his hip. It was understood that each term Pop Frebble took only two boys under his wing for guidance, the one with the best grades in the eight-hundred-man graduating class and the fellow with the keenest sense of union arbitration problems, since Frebble had excellent connections with an upstate labor school and could slip any man he wanted to into its freshman ranks. It was generally felt that two careers were about as many as you could expect a folksy old man with a hip condition to oversee; all other graduates knew that they were to fend for themselves. When Joseph asked his mother about college, she said, The money will be there.

I dont mean that. I dont know which ones to send off to.

Dont worry about the money, she said. Well get it somehow. Itll be there.

And so Joseph stood pat with his original two college ideas. One day a letter arrived from Bates, slightly astonished that he should want to go to it and informing him that the freshman quota was full. Joseph consoled himself with the thought that there was nothing really substantial behind all those scrappy hollering fellows out at Bates and that scrappiness would be of little use off the basketball court, in a room, for example, when you were trying to read or talk. He settled back, waiting to hear from Columbia. Of his ten neighborhood friends, eight or nine had already been accepted by various out-of-town schools and had lit out for summer resorts to work as waiters and earn money for their tuitions; only two people he knew remained behind in the city, one a boy named Himber who was going to be a doctor and had decided to get a head start by putting in a summer learning facts.

Ill have you a contest on names of Cabinet members, Wilson to Roosevelts second term, he said to Joseph in the street. Up in my room this afternoon.

What good are they going to do you? asked Joseph.

I just want to know them, as many as I can learn. Whats the capital of Ecuador? Southern Rhodesia?

Joseph brushed off Himber, but had a premonition one day that the boy might be right and spent an evening memorizing names of hydroelectric projects.

The other neighborhood person remaining in the city was a girl named Eileen Fastner who had matured early and was nicknamed Fasty; in junior high school she was always being brought home drooling by hygiene teachers after having been violated by rowdies in the school clothing closet. In recent years, however, she had straightened out and was now a comely brunette with shiny hair and a sophisticated manner, one semester of Syracuse already tucked beneath her belt. Joseph whiled away some of his days sunbathing on the roof of his apartment building; she would take a chair next to him, lowering her halter straps sophisticatedly and giving him leads on what to expect in the way of freshman Beowulf lectures. But she was still Fasty to him and he could not erase the picture of those post-clothing-closet marches at the side of hygiene teachers.

Joseph was a tall and scattered-looking boy with an Indian nose; sometimes, as he sat on the burning tar of the apartment building roof, he wondered whether he should be sending off applications to other colleges, ones whose catalogue names had a good ring to them. Wouldnt Duke, for example, be a fine-sounding, masculine kind of place to tell people you were going to. And Bowdoin, which was right next to Bates in the catalogue and might turn out to be just as scrappy, only in a quiet, more scholarly way. Why not get one off to Colgate, a scrubbed and beaming, crew-cut place, and Bucknell, too, brash, white-sneakered and cocky as a pup. How about more contemplative-sounding ones, Brown, for example, a leafy poetic place, good for taking nostalgic walks through low-hanging leaf arbors. It seemed to him that almost any of those fine-sounding places would do very nicely; but since he had told Bates that he had wanted to go to it ever since he was a child (Why do you want to go to Bates?), he could not bring himself to inform Ithaca and Carnegie Tech he had been thirsting to attend them, too. Besides, his one turndown had been wounding; he felt certain that something in the tone of his applications would tip off Kent State and Oberlin that he was a Bates reject. Perhaps Bates had gotten out a circular on all its castoffs, mailing it to the other scrappy schools in its hustling little conference.

And so he waited for Columbia, bored and stifled, unable to find a place to put himself, the Bensonhurst sun gnawing a warm circle on top of his head. Sometimes, when the hot roof cinders filled his nose, he would take long oppressive walks to a track inside an abandoned stadium and jog around it until a stitching pain, like loose glass in his ribs, forced him to stop and sit alone in the ruined box seats. Or he would stroll for miles in the patched shade of an el, trains screaming above his head, hoping to wind up somewhere lovely, perhaps on the rolling scented lawns of Rollins College or in Hamiltons cool tradition-haunted halls. Other days he would stand opposite an endless railroad yard, listening to the squawk and clatter of nearby power generators, feeling a little bad he did not really know what all the machinery was for; people who did were ushered warmly into Bates and Antioch and Purdue. All he seemed to be good at was feeling flat and lonely standing next to such things; he knew how to smell them and get their carbon flakes in his mouth. Sometimes he would wind up the afternoons sitting on a giant stone courthouse lion; when he was a child, leaps from its neck to the pavement had seemed courageous death-defying plunges, but now his feet dangled over, almost touching the concrete paws. The lion, the railroad yard, the abandoned trackall were boyhood relics; he seemed to have them laid out like infield bases, running around them, stepping on them one last time as though he could then gather up the lot in a bag and present them as an admission ticket to the gates of one of those wondrous, faraway places such as Tufts or Coe or S.M.U.