Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [164]
“Tom Mooney will still be in jail tomorrow,” Molly said indignantly.
“Er, how long a story is it?” Leah asked. “The choral society, you know.”
“It meets on Thursday,” Nathan said. “Today is Wednesday.”
“Some of the members need special coaching,” Leah said.
Nathan gave a “humph.”
Leah wanted her husband to realize that she was not a happily married woman and might be doing something about it. She had been leaving a few of her mash notes around, like mouse droppings, to be discovered. Nathan did not nibble at the bait. He’d grown used to the hot meals and pressed shirts, and didn’t want to risk losing those conveniences in warfare over Leah’s petit-bourgeois romances. Moreover, a divorce would send the Central Committee into an uproar. And my God, once out on his own again, he would have to take a pay cut and resort to rooming in the homes of comrades.
Gideon had become clearly disturbed.
“Well ... how long is it?” Leah asked.
“It’s only five pages, Mother,” Molly snapped, “and it will take less than fifteen minutes.”
Leah leaned over and pinched her son’s cheek, “for Momma’s baby.”
“Nu, go ahead already,” Nathan said testily.
Molly was unnerved and read the story too quickly. Nonetheless, it was a simple and beautiful little fantasy of a boy who daydreams about being a great athlete. The hero plays out a complex football game in his mind, naming all the players after his schoolmates and friends. The hero reserves for himself the role of star running back, who always scores three or four times in the final quarter to save the game. It is not until the last paragraph that the reader realizes that the game is a fantasy and the boy is crippled.
Molly ended the reading, as she ended reading all of Gideon’s stories, with tears streaming down her cheeks. It didn’t matter if it was humor, a murder mystery, a tragedy, or a Western, Molly was always brought to tears. “It’s so beautiful.”
“Well, it’s off to the choral society,” Leah said, patting her son’s head. “This is no surprise to me. From the minute you were born, your bubba said you were a genius.”
“Wait!” Nathan said, storming to his feet in a manner that they had seen at a hundred meetings. “I think that this calls for a literary critique by the Soviet Committee on the Arts. To begin with—” He shrugged and gave a gesture of futility. “This story cannot be passed by the committee on the grounds that it lacks social significance.”
“The Norfolk School Board didn’t make social significance a requirement for a sixth-grade writing contest,” Molly said angrily.
“In that case, just what does such a story do for the plight of the masses?” Nathan continued and then informed the poor illiterates around him of his credentials in literature, in untold numbers of languages.
“If I were in the Soviet Union today, I would be the editor of Pravda. Baseball? How can you make from such a hoodlum game a story of lasting value?”
“It’s not about baseball, it’s about football, Dad,” Gideon said.
“Baseball? Football? What’s the difference? It’s played in America not for idealism of sports, as in the Soviet Union, but for money. Now, if the boy had been a coal miner, crippled in a mine because of the treacherous working conditions, then you would have a story.”
“But, Dad, that’s what you would have written,” Gideon said. “This is what I wanted to write.”
“Exactly. You had better start thinking in terms of the proletariat, the class struggle.” Nathan picked up a copy of the day’s Freiheit. “You should start thinking in these terms and someday you will be writing for the Freiheit. They, and they alone, will tell you what you can write and what you can’t write. Such decisions can only come from your leaders, and believe me, they know how to enhance a young man’s career. However! You had better start taking seriously your Yiddish. If you don’t learn Yiddish, Freiheit wouldn’t publish, not a single word.”
“Why should I write in Yiddish? I’m an American. English is my language.”
Nathan’s finger