Sol Stein - Other people

Please don't misconstrue my intent; Thomassy has as many surface flaws as good leather. He doesn't pay attention to his clothes. A glen plaid suit for everyday wear, a dark blue suit for special occasions, a knit tie that shows up two or three times a week, cordovan wing-tip shoes that are rarely polished. I have observed him at dinner parties. He does not keep his left hand in his lap. He sometimes begins eating a moment before everyone else. If someone bores him, Thomassy does not dissemble. You'd think that the son of an immigrant would pay more attention to the tenuous signs of class, but Thomassy seems to lack interest in passing into the Wasp superstructure of lawyerdom. Yet there is about him none of that reserve from which some lawyers look down at humankind in trouble. He maintains the aspect of a calm observer, but one knows that sinew binds the bones of his lank frame, that he is a jungle fighter of Orde Wingate's class, a puma among the cats of criminal law.

Thomassy claims he was born on January 1, 1931, at 12:01 A.M. in Oswego, New York. The circumstances were suspicious. The Oswego Herald had offered, in that depression year, a $500 prize for the first child born in the new year, and it is said that the doctor attending Thomassy's mother took a potentially dangerous step in keeping the child's head from emerging for a full five minutes in order that his parents might win the award. Nineteen thirty-one was interesting for other reasons than Thomassy's slightly delayed birth. That year Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law was a smash on Broadway. Across the ocean, Oswald Mosley formed a fascist party in Britain; Pierre Laval, of similar predilections, was elected Premier of France; German millionaires Hugenberg, Kirdorf, Thyssen, and Schroder undertook to support the Nazi Party; and Pius XI issued his encyclical on the new social order. In innocent America, Jane Addams and Nicholas Murray Butler shared the Nobel Peace Prize, and Jehovah's Witnesses greatly expanded their organization in anticipation of the apocalypse.

My name is Archibald Widmer, and I will always remember the lunch with Thomassy that changed the course of his life.

I talk to you the truth. I don't want to call the boy George. My wife Marya, may she rest in peace, herself named after the mother of Jesus, we are in this new country only four years, she gives birth to a son, and calls him George, an American name used by everybody, especially Greeks. He is son of successful horse dealer who owes money to nobody. He should have been christened Haig after me, or Armen after his grandfather. For me, George sounds like a foreigner.

Look you, my hands are rough from work but my head is full of Armenian truth from centuries. Greeks call themselves what, the cradle of civilization, assfuckers! Armenians took civilization out of the cradle! Smart Jews, America is full of them, they learn from suffering, eh? When George was a boy, millions of Jews killed in Europe, smart ones, dumb ones. When I meet a Jew I tell him before this century began, 200,000 Armenians in Turkey, massacred! In Constantinople, 7,000 killed like pigs. In 1909, in Cilicia and Syria, 20,000 more Armenians butchered. During the Great War, the Turks — may their women die in childbirth — tried to force our women and children to take Islam, to make Moslems out of the first nation to be Christian in the world!

In 1920,I have a good memory, this Woodrow Wilson, President of America, refuses to lift a finger to protect Armenia. My father says if America will not come to us, we go to America.

Armenians are the greatest horse breeders in the world. What is a man without a horse? As soon as we earn some extra dollars, I give to my son, who must carry on this holy tradition, a pony. I go out with him Saturday, Sunday, ride, ride, ride, and what Georgie says? He is bored by horses. Sick! I show him how I always sell right horse to right people, how, if hurt horse is brought to Haig Thomassian, I make horse well, not shoot. I never give up. I take Georgie to cowboy movies. I show him wagon trains. I tell George who do you think pulled them, Jews? Horses made America. America needs horsemen. I tell George a man on a horse is a man not to be conquered. The kid's face looks up at me with pretend respect but his eyes say bullshit. I shout at him a horse means freedom, he looks away. His eyes are already on college, the city, somewhere else.

I knew he would leave, but could I even in an old-country nightmare imagine he would change his name to Thomassy, an act of treason against his own father! He can blah-blah-blah in court, but what is he? An Armenian who cannot ride a horse is like a Jew. The cossacks slaughtered the Jews. Whoever saw a Jew master a horse?

In 1969 my wife dies. George Big Shot comes to Oswego, at the funeral tells the story of Marya, her whole life from a little girl, and I ask him where does he know so much, not from me. He shakes my hand as if I am the boy. I tell him now is the time to move back, we have plenty crime in Oswego, good business for lawyers. He refuses me. I tell you, in his soul my son is a Turk.

Sure, on my birthdays the telephone rings, his secretary says "George Thomassy calling," and I yell at her, "Thomassian, Thomassian!" Then I hear George's voice. I feel he wants to talk, ask questions about what I do, how I feel, but I give him the least words, "yes" or "no," until he gives up. Even if he becomes the biggest lawyer in the whole United States, to me, as an Armenian, he is nothing.

Dudley's was a six-minute drive from Thomassy's office, an oddball restaurant on Rockledge Avenue in Ossining, wedged between houses that had seen better days. Around the corner from Dudley's was Liberty Street, which led to Sing Sing, and the caged vehicles carrying prisoners often passed Dudley's front door.

Inside, you stepped into another universe, thick purple carpeting, antique signs on the walls, and cascades of living plants under a bank of plant lights artfully concealed in the skylight. On Fridays, in the old days, you were likely to find John Cheever at a table with friends, the folk singer Tom Glazer, editors wooing authors, middle-class women with a fondness for Dudley's very large lunchtime cocktails, and the oversize carafes of wine. The menu was eccentric — wildflower omelets in season, superb soups, a cheesecake that rivaled that of Lindy's in its heyday. Dudley's had imperfections: the washrooms were sometimes cleaned so casually experienced customers would do their washing up elsewhere; the bench seats sometimes gathered enough breadcrumbs to satisfy a pigeon. The young waitresses, as lovely as the cascading plants, sometimes served the host before serving his guest, but one didn't mind. It was an ambience that made Thomassy comfortable.

Thomassy looked as if a make-up man had dusted shadows under his eyes. He had always seemed younger than his age, but now, despite his admirable energy, he looked forty-four. No longer the boy wonder.

"How've you been?" I asked him.

"I put on a blue sock and a black sock this morning. My secretary noticed."

"You ought to get yourself a wife."

"Thanks," he said and shut me off.

I hadn't meant it as an intrusion into his private life. I suppose we were all aware of the succession of attractive women he squired about on occasion. One couldn't help wondering why Thomassy avoided anything resembling a permanent relationship. It was as if his women were cases also, occupying his attention for a time, then put out of mind.

"Who's the analyst who suggested your daughter see a lawyer?"

"Remember you gave me a reprint of an article on the three types of human personality?"

"I gave a lot of those away. What was the name of the psychiatrist?"

"Gunther Koch," I said.