During the stops, Stern would shuffle his feet and say, "Are you ready?" Sometimes, with his grandmother on his arm, he would pass friends in front of a bowling alley and he would say, "This is my grandmother," as the friends watched the pair creep by. When Stern came home from summer camp one year, he said to his mother, "Where's Granma?" And she said, "She's gone." Stern said, "What do you mean?" And his mother said, "She's not here any more. She went in my arms when you were away." People never died in Stern's family. They were either "gone" or they "went" or they "were taken." Stern said, "I see," and went inside and cried into a pillow, sorry he had laughed at her Hitler curses and wishing he could take her to her flat one more time, giving her long rests on the way. He wondered, too, whether anyone would ever "go" in his arms and, if they were an old person, what it would be like, whether their breath would be bad and whether the air would go out of their long breasts—and then he punched himself in the eyes to rid himself of such thoughts.

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And so Stern loved a bowing grandmother and sat through Seder duels and could race with furious speed through books of ancient Hebrew; but there was little God to his religion. When Stern went to college in Oregon, even the trappings fell away. He told the people he met at school, "I don't care much about being a Jew. There's only one thing: each year I like to go and hear the Shofar blown on Rosh Hashanah. It sort of ties the[Pg 62] years together for me." And it was true that for a while Stern's last concession to his early Jewish days was to stand outside synagogues each year and listen to the ram's horn. It was as though listening to the ancient sound would somehow keep him just the tiniest bit Jewish, in case it turned out someday that a scorecard really was kept on people. One year he didn't go, however, and then he rarely went again, even though he kept using that "ties the years together" line when he met new girls and needed impressive attitudes. Before Stern met his wife at college and lived with the old man of dangling pelvic supports, he stayed in a boardinghouse of Jewish students, where the air was thick with self-consciousness. One of his two room-mates was a tall graceful redheaded boy with a monotonous voice that sounded as though he were in a telephone booth. His personality was limited, and since he seemed to have only one joke (When someone asked him for a match, he would answer, "Sure, my ass and your face"), he became known as "Gordon One-Gag."

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