Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“My bio page says something about them attempting to convert.”

“To Judaism? Not likely. The Amalekites were godless savages. They only knew camel thieving.”

“What happened to them?”

“What happened to any of them?” he said, resuming running his fingers through his hair. “The Hittites, the Hivites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Edomites, the Jebusites, the Moabites. Did they assimilate into the dominant tribes? Did they evolve into Indo-Europeans? Or did they simply die out?”

“But there are four hundred left at the end of the story,” I said.

“According to this,” he said, indicating the printout. “But this is quite at odds with the biblical account, quite at odds indeed.”

“What’s the biblical account?”

“Those four hundred men are blotted out.”

“Blotted out?”

He smiled at me in a way that suggested pleasure in ancient bloodshed. “Extinguished. Exterminated. At God’s command, of course.”

He swiped his thumb across his wet tongue once more and shuffled again through his King James.

“ ‘And some of them, even of the sons of Simeon,’ ” he recited, “ ‘went to mount Seir… and they smote the rest of the Amalekites.’ ” He sat back. “The first genocide in documented history.”

I called up “my” comment on the Times website and read it to him.

“ ‘A people risen out of the ashes of the exterminated Amalekites,’ ” Sookhart repeated slowly. He stared at me while pensively finger-combing his flossy pets. “Now who’s that supposed to be?”

When I was in love with Sam Santacroce, I took an interest in Catholicism. I learned how the word “popish” became a slander and of all the prejudices Catholics faced when they first came to America. This was not a popish country, and the settlers and revolutionaries, who were almost exclusively of one Protestant stripe or another, openly doubted the patriotism of Catholics, because Catholics were naturally loyal only to Rome. Protestants did everything they could to keep Catholics out, and when that didn’t work, they kept them contained to (if memory serves) the newly formed state of Maryland. I was shocked. I never realized that there was such a violent divide between Christians, whose central figure was found most often (when not hanging dead from a cross) in the company of lambs and children. But in fact the Christians really distrusted and hated one another, and because the Santacroces were Catholic, because they were for me everything honest and good, with their epic egg hunts and shiny foreign sedans and a succession of dead dogs fondly recalled — everything, in other words, that America promised — I sided with the Catholics.

One night, after Sam and I had gotten back together, when I was more prone to finding fault with the Santacroces and yet still smitten with the idea of becoming one myself in flesh and spirit, of transforming myself into pure Santacroce sanctity, I said to Bob Santacroce, while a holiday party raged all around us, “I can’t believe how the Catholics have been treated over the years.” I proceeded to share with him some of the history I had learned when Santacroce mania was at its zenith. I cited the execution of Thomas More, the Whore of Babylon slander against the see of Rome, and the loyalty oaths designed to keep Catholics from holding local office here in America. “Then there was that whole Philadelphia Nativist Riot of 1844,” I said casually. I had yet to mention the unprecedented reassurances that candidate John F. Kennedy had had to offer the country that he would not be beholden to the pope. Bob Santacroce was a big man with dark blond hair and restless blue eyes who called me, with no intent to offend, I was assured, but for reasons I never comprehended, Hillary. “Yes,” he said, his eyes finding me again, there in front of him, which suddenly sparked a thought. “Hey, how’s the apartment working out for you?”

For all intents and purposes, Sam and I lived together, but to ease the complications of explaining to friends and family this scandalous premarital arrangement, the Santacroces offered to pay the rent on an apartment let in my name, which would sit empty but would provide her parents with some much-needed cover. When, however, the Santacroces would come to visit us — or when friends of Sam’s who had parents who were friends with the Santacroces, and who might spread gossip where it was least wanted, came to visit — I would be asked to spend some time at “my” apartment. I might be asked to spend the entire night there if it meant the Santacroces didn’t have to part with us in the evening with me still loitering around “Sam’s” apartment and be forced to reckon with the sinful implications. I agreed to maintain this illusion — me, of all people! — at Sam’s urging and under the passing influence of a sympathy for monstrous distortions. Without monstrous distortions, I was slowly learning, without lies and hypocrisy, one cannot have the idealized American life I so longed for. Perfection was marred only by those corruptions necessary to its enterprise.

“It’s working out fine,” I said to Bob. “It was nice of you guys to buy me the bed.”

“Well,” he said, “we figured you probably didn’t have much money left over after schoolbooks and whatnot.”

“That’s true,” I said. “I’m pretty broke most of the time.”

“And you don’t want to be sleeping on the floor.”

“No,” I said. “That wasn’t fun.”

“Hillary,” he said, “it’s time for me to find a new martini.”

Later on at the party, we listened to him share stories with a pair of old fraternity brothers of all the ways they had cheated on tests and papers during their days at Drexel University.

It was preposterous to expect a man so at ease in the world, so unburdened by its concerns, as Bob Santacroce to worry about wronged Catholics of a bygone era. He didn’t give a good goddamn about anti-Catholicism, which had never hindered him from making friends or acquiring wealth. That I felt these injustices keenly — that I took them personally because I looked at the Santacroces and failed to comprehend how such good people could be the target of anyone’s hate — was a confession of love I could not reasonably expect Bob Santacroce to puzzle out. And obviously I knew nothing about good timing or common sense. He was really just a simpleminded man with a winning personality who grabbed hold of opportunity and rode to fortune with a smile. And he had four martinis in him. If only I had been the kind of person who talked baseball at parties, I might have become his son-in-law.

When I met the Plotzes, I was determined to talk sports, weather, celebrity gossip, new car models, political scandals, the price of gasoline, the right putter, and a thousand other things of perfect inconsequence. I had taken a vow of restraint with Connie, which meant a vow of restraint with her family, which prohibited me from acting like a horse’s ass. And why not? I was thirty-six, an educated man, a successful dentist with a thriving practice. What did I have to prove? Before I came along, Connie had brought around a chigger’s feast of unwashed musicians and poets manqué who, I learned from offhand remarks, plundered the wine and felt up the sofa cushions. At least I drew a salary. All that was required of me to be tolerated at the Plotz family table was to smile and be respectful. In time that might lead to being accepted, even embraced. If I remained faithful to that simple approach, I told myself, they may even one day come to love me.

But the Plotzes were not predisposed to the peanut chatter of a Santacroce cocktail party. At Plotz gatherings, one Plotz talked over a second only to be shot down by a third. No casual approach to life here. They were thick in the politics of the day, both ours and Israel’s, and had opinions. Each opinion was offered more vigorously and with a fuller throat than the last, and each was a matter of life and death. Even trifles like books and movies and recipes and who parked where and why and how much time was put on the meter were matters of life and death. These were people who, their ancestors having worked as peddlers and merchants on the Lower East Side to put the next generation through night school, took nothing they’d earned for granted. They weren’t frivolous. I liked them for that and respected them more than I did the Santacroces. And so while I was disposed, by age and my own success and by lessons learned the hard way, to be more restrained, I was also completely taken by this excitable clan, by their lively talk, and by their solidarity — by my first experience with a family of American Jews.