Camille broke in. “What difference is that supposed to make? Night-shift maintenance personnel are automatically retarded?”
“Let me finish. Maintenance figures this is antigay vandalism. ‘We better get rid of it before daylight.’ What’s so hard to believe about that? These guys—it’s the middle of the night, and how are they supposed to know this is the Lesbian and Gay Fist striking a blow for gay freedom? So they spend the rest of the night scrubbing it all off, and in the morning there’s nothing left but chalk smears, and they think they’ve done the right thing. I can get down with that, but the Fist goes postal. Whattaya think happened—a buncha guys got together at three a.m. and had a public relations meeting about Parents Weekend?”
Greg’s right, thought Adam, and Camille’s a skank, but Greg’s right from the wrong motive. Greg, like every Daily Wave editor in chief, was supposed to be a fiercely independent journalist who pulled no punches. Greg was not alone in Wave history in his inclination to pull lots of punches, since the administration, and fellow undergraduates, had an infinite number of ways—moral, social, and substantive—to make life miserable for any editor who took his charter of independence at face value. Nevertheless, it was important, not only for Greg’s public face but also for his private soul, for him to believe that he was one tough journalist who would rake the muck whenever it needed raking. In fact, the chances of Fearless Greg Fiore denouncing the administration for not proudly upholding the right of the Fist to write anal sex exotica all over the sidewalks for Parents Weekend never existed in the first place.
Of course, Adam, as he himself realized, was not altogether objective when it came to Greg Fiore. It went without saying that he, Adam, was the senior who should at this moment be sitting in that rickety chair looking down his nose at staffers from his eminence as editor in chief. He couldn’t blame Greg for the situation, but he found it in his heart to resent him all the same. No, at bottom it was his parents who were to blame, most specifically his father, who had left him and his mother in the shabby circumstances that made it necessary for him to work two jobs in order to get through college. Editing a daily like the Wave was a full-time commitment that left no time for things like delivering pizza and filling in for Jojo Johanssen’s brain. Adam couldn’t have accepted the job of editor if they had come on their knees begging him. Jews without money. Adam’s father was the grandson of some Jews without money—Jews Without Money was a 1930s “proletarian” novel that Adam had read just because of the title—who had immigrated from Poland to the United States in the 1920s and wound up in Boston, where they remained Jews without money. His father, Nat Gellin, had been the first Gellin, or Gellininsky—Adam’s great-grandfather had given the name a little trim—to go to college. Strapped for money, he had been forced to drop out of Boston University after two years, at which point he considered himself lucky when he got a job as a waiter at Egan’s, a big, popular, glossy downtown restaurant that attracted the sort of businessmen who liked to dine breathing the same air as bigger businessmen, flashy politicians, TV anchors, journalists from the Globe and the Herald, and the odd visiting show-business celebrity. In sum, Egan’s was irresistible to that creature of the big city, he who must be “where things are happening.” Nat Gellin had the three qualities essential for success in such an establishment: punctiliousness, tact, and charm; and in just under ten years he had worked his way up from waiter to captain to maître d’ to manager. Adam barely remembered him, but his father must have had the gift of glib bonhomie, too, because Egan’s, historically, was Irish through and through. The joint had a bar trade that by six o’clock in the evening fairly roared with the boisterous conversations of people who knew they were drinking in the right place. The bar featured massive swaths of oak with polished brass accoutrements, inch-thick glass shelves bearing ranks of liquor bottles lit from below as if they were onstage—and Nat Gellin in a gray unfinished-worsted suit, a freshly starched shirt, and a navy tie with white pin dots, a look he had picked up from the team of official greeters at “21” in New York City. He greeted one and all at Egan’s with a smile set between a pair of rubicund round cheeks. He had the knack of never forgetting a name, not even if the fellow came in only once in a blue moon. It was while he was a mere waiter and college dropout that he met pretty, cute, bouncy little Frances “Frankie” Horowitz, a high school graduate who had a job routing customer accident and theft calls for Allstate Insurance.
Adam’s mother idolized the incomparable restaurateur Nat Gellin. Even years later, in the midst of monologues of pure old-fashioned hate, she would come out with something like “There isn’t another Jew in Boston who coulda done what your father did with that Irish restaurant.” What Adam took away from all that was the idea that a successful Jew was one who was a hit with the goyim.
Nat Gellin of Egan’s was a hit with the goyim, all right. Two years before Adam was born, Nat charmed an old-line Brahmin bank, First City National, into a prodigious loan and bought a half interest in Egan’s from the original Michael F. X. Egan’s five children, who were happy to get some cash out of the place in the here and now. Then he bought a house in Brookline to go with it, even though it meant he was now leveraged over the moon. Adam spent the first five years of his life in what he would recognize years later was a big, elegant Georgian house in Brookline, built about 1910 on a small lot, after the urban fashion of the day, in what was no doubt the right section back then and wasn’t bad now. Nat’s hubris was leveraged up to the ultimate, too. His ascension from salaried manager to profit-sharing full partner made him feel that he had risen to a higher social and, one might say, romantic level. One night, while wafting bonhomie in his restaurant, he met a blond twenty-three-year-old recently graduated from Wellesley, a WASP with all sorts of Ivy League and Beacon Hill connections, and in due course he began having to stay later and later at night to wrap up all the loose ends in his establishment, the operation of which was a matter of infinite complexity, after which, nevertheless, came the inevitable drive back to Brookline and to Frankie.
Frankie. He had grown, and she hadn’t grown with him. She had grown older, however, and no longer looked pretty, cute, and bouncy as much as she did chunky, prematurely middle-aged, and not much different from any other uneducated American mom putting on weight and growing more and more remote from where things were happening, as she cooed and cooed in Brookline over her baby, Adam.
It was one Sunday, while Nat was in just such a gloomy yet hubristic mood, and she was in the sunroom watering some Lollipop Stamen lilies, that he decided he had to tell her straight out. He actually used those words: “I know it’s not your fault, Frankie, but I’ve grown, and you haven’t grown with me.”
He couldn’t have worded it in a worse way. He was not only telling her he was leaving her, he was also informing her that it was because she was an unsophisticated dimwit, an embarrassing zhlub. Adam was so young when it all happened that his memory contained nothing more than a single snapshot of his father—specifically, of his porky belly and his genitals emerging naked from the bathroom. He also had a snapshot of the moment his mother informed him Daddy was moving out, although he couldn’t remember how she put it. He was old enough a couple of years later to be quite aware that they were moving from the grand house in Brookline to the second floor of a not-so-great house in the West Roxbury section of Boston, although he was still too young to have any more than a vague idea of the status implications. His own personal status was fabulous. He was His Majesty the Only Child. His mother put him on that throne, sang his praises, worshiped him, strewed petals of adulation upon his every path. Inasmuch as his teachers also made a fuss over him, it never occurred to him that the elementary school he attended, along with a lot of unruly Irish, black, Italian, Chinese, Canuck, and Ukrainian children, might be somewhere toward the soggy bottom of the Boston public school system. He was royalty in the school building, too; His Majesty the Prodigy. It was only after he was thirteen and had a scholarship to Roxbury Latin, a famous and prestigious old private school, that he realized what a free fall it had been from Brookline to West Roxbury—and learned how it happened.