His parents had a house on Cape Cod and the man and his mother were driving home one day on the back road. “This used to be the anti-Semitic area,” she said.
“Yes I remember, you told me. These are the great old estates.”
The road made sweeping curves and there were glimpses of the sea. Ancient locusts with deeply grooved bark leaned over formal gates with great capstones of dressed granite. You couldn’t see the houses. They were tucked back amid the deep forested ravines.
“When we first moved up here, your grandfather said, Why are you going there? Cape Cod is full of anti-Semites. ‘Far Rockaway isn’t good enough for you?'”
They came to the low formal stone walls of the National Academy of Sciences.
The son said, “Up here is that guy Marcus, right? From Cincinnati.”
“No,” his mother said, “Washington. He’s chairman of the symphony.”
Marcus had gotten an estate with a spectacular view of the bay. A new modern box was built out over a ledge. Alongside this house, the forest was scraped away, and there were Johnny-on-the-spots and construction walls and an even moderner house going up on stilts on a cliff. The man’s mother told a story about Marcus’s son building in town but not liking it, and now putting in a new house for himself there.
“You know what happened to our friends the Goldbergs?” she said.
“No tell me.”
“Well they wanted a big house that came up for sale on Penzance. There had never been Jews on Penzance, and the gentiles tried to get together to buy the house so they wouldn’t get it. But they couldn’t pull it off, and so a woman went to the Goldbergs and appealed to them not to buy. Her name was Evans.”
“Did they buy?”
“Oh they bought. They loved that house.”
The son remembered that one of the Goldbergs was dead, or both. “When was this?”
“Forty years ago. And the funny thing, that woman Evans, her son married a Jew and her grandchildren had bar mitzvahs.”
“So what conclusion do you draw from that story?” the man asked.
“There was a lot of anti-Semitism here.”
Real names changed in this story to protect privacy.
