You know what you're going to find once you know...
You know what you're going to find once you know them? That they are just other people who want to get alongLet's be intelligent about all this
As it worked out, he never had to make a case as thorough as this to get Dawn to lay off about Orcutt, since Orcutt was never much in their lives after the sightseeing trip that Dawn kept referring to as "The Orcutt Family Cemetery Tour Nothing like a social life developed back then between the Orcutts and the Levovs, not even a casual friendship, though the Swede did show up Saturday mornings at the pasture back of Orcutt's house for the weekly touch-football game with Orcutt's local friends and some other fellows like the Swede, ex-GIs from around Essex County trickling out with new families to the wide-open spaces
Among them was an optician named Bucky Robinson, a short, muscular, pigeon-toed guy with a round angelic face, who'd been second-string quarterback for Hillside High, Weequahic's traditional Thanksgiving Day rival, when Swede was finishing high schoolThe first week Bucky showed up, the Swede overheard him telling Orcutt about Swede Levov's senior year, enumerating on his fingers, "all-city end in football; all-city, all-county center in basketball; all-city, all-county, all-state first baseman in baseball Though ordinarily the Swede would have found this awe of him, so nakedly demonstrated, not at all to his liking in an environment where he only wished to inspire neighborly goodwill, where replica santos cartier being just another of the guys who showed up to play ball was fine with him, he seemed not to mind that Orcutt was the one standing there enduring the excess of Bucky's enthusiasmHe had no quarrel with Orcutt and no reason to have any, yet seeing everything he would ordinarily prefer to hide behind a modest demeanor being revealed so passionately to Orcutt by Bucky was more pleasurable than he might have imagined, almost like the satisfaction of a desire he personally knew nothing about--a desire for revenge
When, for several weeks running, Bucky and the Swede wound up together on the same team, the newcomer couldn't believe his good fortune: while to everybody else the new neighbor was Seymour, Bucky at every opportunity called him SwedeIt did not matter who else might be in the clear, wildly waving his arms in the air--the Swede was the receiver Bucky saw"Big Swede, way to go!" he'd shout whenever the Swede came back to the huddle having gathered in yet another Robinson pass--Big Swede, which nobody but Jerry had called him since high schoolAnd with Jerry it was always sardonic
One day Bucky hitched a ride with the Swede to a local garage where his car was being repaired and, as they were driving along, announced surprisingly that he was Jewish too and that he and his wife had recently become members of a Morristown templeOut here, he said, they were more and more involving themselves with the Morristown Jewish community"It can be very chanel classic bags 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 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 chanel cc logo earrings 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 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 prada logos 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 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 louis vuitton taschen b