What is this about losing respect?

by Mark Rudman

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 a gravesite.

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—

(though I owe him one: “Rosencavalier”

didn’t turn me in for copying

the wrong answers from Mary 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

(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, against your father’s wishes?

Yes.

Unequivocally?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

But you did submit to psychiatrists and interviews with the heads of schools

during your sojourn in the east that summer?

Yes. I didn’t say I wasn’t ambivalent and/or confused.

Nothing more, your honor.

*

This was around the time, was it not, that a certain “Penny,” from Los

Angeles, a family 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 any-

thing 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 mother had to hear the worst in order not to feel that the

failure of the marriage might have been her failure.

And while they sat there tearing him down the phone rang and it was—

guess who. Your mother handed the phone over to Sidney who, geared for

battle, bourbon happy, quarreled with your father about the precise details

as to where you should go when you “left town.” They had come to an

impasse in the conversation when it seems your father said something like

“you can’t talk to Charles K. Rudman that way” and Sidney said—because

this you overheard—“what does the ‘K’ stand for”—and your father said—

according to Sidney—“cocksucker.”

And Sidney howled. He would rag him till the end of his days. “Is this

Charles K. Rudman?”

I didn’t call you a cocksucker, Sidney said,

but since you said it i

heard you were a cocksucker.

I didn’t say it!

"I am,” your father was rumored to have said, probably (possibly?) not

meaning it literally, but more within the vernacular of street language,

curse-words meaning “sonofabitch,” not someone who literally “sucked

cocks.”

I think so.

Your heart went out to your poor father at that moment, didn’t it? Sidney

had a way of miscalculating the effect of these shots on you. You knew your

father was writhing in an agony of frustration.

Yes.

But Sidney was running with it, relishing Charles’ self-hatred, his masoch

-ism which erupted at that moment out of frustration...And for years he

loved to tell the story of how Charles “called himself a cocksucker,” always

underscoring the anecdote by absolving himself, by making it clear that it

wasn’t he who first used the word.

He really rubbed it in.

Can you forgive him?

*

Only now that he’s dead can I let myself feel

how good we were at leaving each other alone.