H.
J.
Kaplan
A MINOR SCANDAL IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Trouble, trouble, trouble. I lie on my back in bed, holding
the telegram up to catch the light. My father, dead in Texas, is being
r eturned to New J ersey for burial. He is dead in the crisis of my thirtieth
year and our dialogue- precisely when I was preparing to say the de–
cisive things-ha:s now come to an end. My mother needs me at home,
bereft and lonely darling. But I can't go home. I am in the process of
working out something which looms immense in my mind, and my most
dreadful anxiety is that I shall lose it. I shall certainly lose it
if,
having
left Beirut only yesterday, I find myself in New Jersey tomorrow, whirled
in the felt exigencies and confusions of this funeral. Above all, I am not
ready to bury my father: he is involved in my scandal and his strength
must live one moment longer to sustain me in it. What in the world
shall I do?
I push aside the breakfast tray and look about for my robe. My
bags have not yet been unpacked, a circumstance which suddenly and
absurdly infuriates me. Finally, I go downstairs in my pajamas and call
the air-terminal. Yes; there is an empty seat in the plane leaving tonight,
but I must pick up my ticket before two o'clock this afternoon. I hang
up and book a call to New Jersey. Then I go to my briefcase and litter
the room with speeches, documents, resolutions, until I find the notes I
made yesterday, as we were flying northward over the Mediterranean.
I read them with distaste and growing absorption, and my father-at
last!-is alive again, putting forth like Dante's aged Ulysses on the open
sea, a powerful, gnarled man, ' haranguing that small company which
followed him still, to devote the "brief remaining vigil of their senses"
to one more perilous journey.
So. While he went westward, through "that narrow pass, where
Hercules assigned his landmarks," I had gone back, first to his point of
departure, the continent of Europe, and then even further east, to
the land of his ancestors. He could never understand, he once told me,
why his son should return to his vomit.... My wife puts her head
