"It can be very sustaining in a Gentile town,"...
"It can be very sustaining in a Gentile town," Bucky told the Swede, "to know you have Jewish friends nearby Though not enormous, Morristown's was an established Jewish community, went back to before the Civil War, and included quite a few of the town's influential people, among them a trustee at Morristown Memorial Hospital--through whose insistence the first Jewish doctors had, two years back, finally been invited to join the hospital staff--and the owner of the town's best department storeSuccessful Jewish families had been living in the big stucco houses on Western Avenue for fifty years now, though on the whole this wasn't an area known to be terribly friendly toward JewsAs a child Bucky had been taken by his family up to MtFreedom, the resort town in the nearby hills, where they would stay for a week each summer at Lieberman's Hotel and where Bucky first fell in love with the beauty and serenity of the Morris countrysideFreedom, needless to say, it was great for Jews: ten, eleven large hotels that were all Jewish, a summer turnover in the tens of thousands that was entirely Jewish--the vacationers themselves jokingly referred to the place as "Mt If you lived in an apartment in Newark or Passaic or montre cartier tank Jersey City, a week in MtAnd as for Morristown, although solidly Gentile, it was nonetheless a cosmopolitan community of lawyers, doctors, and stockbrokers where Bucky and his wife loved going to the movies at the Community, loved the shops, which were excellent, loved the beautiful old buildings and where there were the Jewish shopkeepers with their neon signs up and down Speedwell AvenueBut did the Swede know that before the war there'd been a swastika scrawled on the golf-course sign at the edge of MtFreedom? Did he know that the Klan held meetings in Boonton and Dover, rural people, working-class people, members of the Klan? Did he know that crosses were burned on people's lawns not five miles from the Morristown green?
From that day on, Bucky kept trying to land the Swede, who would have been a considerable catch, and to haul him in for the Morristown Jewish community, to get him, if not to join the temple outright, at least to play evening basketball in the Interchurch League for the team the temple fieldedRobinson's mission irritated the Swede in just the way his mother had when, some months after Dawn became pregnant, she'd astonished him by asking if Dawn was going to convert before the baby fake cartier watches was born"A man to whom practicing Judaism means nothing, Mother, doesn't ask his wife to convert He had never been so stern with her in his life, and, to his dismay, she had walked away near tears, and it had taken numerous hugs throughout the day to get her to understand that he wasn't "angry" with her--he had only been making clear that he was a grown man with the prerogatives of a grown manNow with Dawn he talked about Robinson--talked a lot about him as they lay in bed at night"I didn't come out here for that stuffI never got that stuff anywayI used to go on the High Holidays with my father, and I just never understood what they were getting atEven seeing my father there never made senseIt wasn't him, it wasn't like him--he was bending to something that he didn't have to, something he didn't even understandHe was just bending to this because of my grandfatherI never understood what any of that stuff had to do with his being a manWhat the glove factory had to do with his being a man anybody could understand--just about everythingMy father knew what he was talking about when he was talking about glovesBut when he started about that stuff? You should have heard himIf he'd known as little about leather knock off tiffany jewelry as he knew about God, the family would have wound up in the poor-, L house
"Oh, but Bucky Robinson isn't talking about God, SeymourHe wants to be your friend," she said, "that's allBut I never was interested in that stuff, Dawnie, back for as long as I can rememberI never understood itDoes anybody? I don't know what they're talking aboutI go into those synagogues and it's all foreign to meWhen I had to go to Hebrew school as a kid, all the time I was in that room I couldn't wait to get out on the ball fieldI used to think, 'If I sit in this room any longer, I'm going to get sick' There was something unhealthy about those placesAnywhere near any of those places and I knew it wasn't where I wanted to beThe factory was a place I wanted to be from the time I was a boyThe ball field was a place I wanted to be from the time I started kindergartenThat this is a place where I want to be I knew the moment I laid eyes on itWhy shouldn't I be where I want to be? Why shouldn't I be with who I want to be? Isn't that what this country's all about? I want to be where I want to be and I don't want to be where I don't want to beThat's what being an American is--isn't it? I'm with you, I'm with the baby, I'm at the black fendi spy bag factory during the day, the rest of the time I'm out here, and that's everywhere in this world I ever want to beWe own a piece of America, DawnI couldn't be happier if I triedI did it, darling, I did it--I did what I set out to do!"
For a while, the Swede stopped showing up at the touch-football games just to avoid having to deflect Bucky Robinson on the subject of his templeWith Robinson he did not feel like his father--he felt like Orcutt___
No, noYou know whom he really felt like? Not during the hour or two a week he happened to be on the receiving end of a Bucky Robinson pass, but whom he felt like all the rest of the time? He couldn't tell anybody, of course: he was twenty-six and a new father and people would have laughed at the childishness of itHe laughed at it himselfIt was one of those kid things you keep in your mind no matter how old you get, but whom he felt like out in Old Rimrock was Johnny AppleseedWho cares about Bill Orcutt? Woodrow Wilson knew Orcutt's grandfather? Thomas Jefferson knew his grandfather's uncle? Good for Bill OrcuttJohnny Apple-seed, that's the man for meWasn't a Jew, wasn't an Irish Catholic, wasn't a Protestant Christian--nope, Johnny Appleseed was just a happy chanel white j12 watch American
