Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [82]
“Everything did.”
He took another, smaller puff, and let it rattle around inside of him for a minute. He looked up at the house Irv Warshaw had built, at the rope of honeysuckle coming unbraided along its front porch, at the shapes of people moving back and forth across its bright windows.
“I guess I’m pretty happy,” he said, so flatly and as if to himself that I didn’t even bother to reply.
AS A JEW, EMILY was never more than sporadically observant, and in the course of our marriage my view, as a gentile observer, of the annual transit of Jewish holidays across their queer lunar calendar, with all their byzantine statutes and elusive significance, had come to resemble my view, as a baseball fan, of the great test matches of the cricket schedule. But I’d always had a soft spot for Passover. I liked the fakery and slyness that went into preparing the food, the way the ubiquitous “bread of affliction” was magically transformed in the Passover repertoire into something manifold and rich—matzoh cakes, matzoh stuffing, matzoh pudding and noodles—like some humble, abundant mammal cherished by Indians for its flesh, hide, bones, organs, and fat. I liked the way the Jewish religion seemed, on the whole, to have devoted so much energy and art to finding loopholes in its crazy laws; I liked what this seemed to me to imply about its attitude toward God, that dictatorial and arbitrary old fuck with his curses and his fiats and his yen for the smell of burnt shoulder meat. In addition to all of this, I’d noticed over the years that I got a strong feeling of satisfaction from sitting down to eat a mad meal of parsley, bones, hard-boiled eggs, crackers, and salt water with a bunch of Jews, three of them Korean. It reassured me that, if nothing else in life, at least I’d fulfilled my earliest ambition simply to wander far afield, in spirit if not in space, from the place of my birth.
In our town, when I was growing up, there were only seven Jews. There were the five Glucksbringers: the ancient Mr. Louis P., who by the time I was a boy had long since retired to the Stamps and Coins department of the store on Pickman Street he’d founded fifty years before; his son, Maurice; Maurice’s wife, whose name I have forgotten; and their children, David and Leona. There was Mr. Kaplan, who bought Weaver’s Drugs when I was in junior high, and a pretty redheaded woman, married to one of the professors at Coxley, who attended the Episcopal church, and celebrated Christmas, but was known to be a Kaufmann from Pittsburgh. Then my father killed David Glucksbringer, leaving six. It often occurred to me to wonder if I had married into the Warshaw family in part as a way to atone for that terrible subtraction. The Warshaws, too, had lost a son; and the first year I joined them at the Seder table (Irv, Irene, Deborah, Emily, Phil, and Uncle Harry, Irv’s brother, who died the next year of prostate cancer) I took the seventh chair.
This year there were eight of us, requiring two leaves in the dinner table, so that through an architectural miscalculation of Irv’s, which Irene never let him forget, the dining room was too small to hold us all. Irene had to push back the easy chairs, coffee tables, and floor lamps, and squeeze us all into the living room, which took up the entire front half of the house, from the cracked and blackened fieldstone fireplace to the steep, cockeyed set of stairs that led up to the bedrooms. They’d brought all their belongings with them when they moved from the house on Inverness, and now they spent half their time rearranging the furniture and irritably tripping over footstools. They’d gone in for Danish modern in a big way during its heyday and everything was glass and black leather and abstract expanses of teak and mahogany, while the interior of the house itself was all fir flooring and knotty pine walls, yellow and splintery. Irene was always threatening to sell their old things and buy more appropriate furnishings, but they’d been here for five years now and