160
PARTISAN REVIEW
of me relieved instantly the embarrassment I felt at what I thought
to be the spectacle my father was making of himself by standing like
that in the middle of the block. He couldn't see, as I did, that people
were laughing, as they passed, at the idea of a man taking a sun bath
in the middle of a city block. But I could, and it made me squeamish
and uneasy, and made me want to take my father and drag him away.
But I dared not. Not so much because he would have been angry
had I protested, as he might well have been. But because I had a
queer feeling that even if he had been aware that people were laugh–
ing at him, he wouldn't have cared.
I positively could not understand this attitude of indifference. It
made me think that maybe my father wasn't a man of such strong
feeling. Or, what seemed even more frightening, he was a man of
great feeling, but of great strength too. The kind of strength that lets
you not care what other people think or say about what you do and
look like. Oh, to be so strong that you didn't care. Or at least not to
worry whether people were laughing at you or talking about you
when they passed you on the street.
If
only I could be sure that
people didn't pay any attention to me. But I was never sure of that.
And here was my father. Not only did he not care whether people
paid attention to him,
b~t
even if they had, he wouldn't have cared·
what they were thinking.
For a minute I was jolly. I relaxed. I was happy. I let go of my
father's hand, imitated his stance as best I could, breathed deeply.
I even had a thought that came only terribly infrequently in those
days, a thought that runs through my mind now like the one Yiddish
folk song I still remember, a thought that makes me swell and fill
with pride. In short, I thought for a moment tlJ.at I was really my
father's son.
I felt the sun beating on my already darkened skin, felt it seeping
through my thin clothes, felt it warming the
lobe~
of my ear, felt it
nestle among the hairs on my head. But best of
all,
I felt it wrap
my father and me in the same blanket of light. Wrap us in the same
blanket, fill out our backs with the same warm bed, bring us together
more than the mere holding of hands ever could. Bring us together
and make me feel as if I were inside of him, just as I felt when I
would crawl into bed while he was napping of a Saturday afternoon,
wriggle close to him, so that the rhythm of
his
expanding and subsid–
ing stomach would be even with mine, and the two of us, breathing
together, in the same rhythm, breathed the world around us, made
the world but one world, made us one. Then I was not afraid.
