The Schopenhauer Cure(25)
Julius’s great experiment with reinvention commenced with his family’s move. On that first day of school in Washington, D.C., a balmy Indian summer September day, Julius crunched through the fallen sycamore leaves and strode into the front door of Roosevelt High, searching for a master strategy to make himself over. Noticing the broadsides posted outside the auditorium advertising the candidates for class president, Julius had an inspired thought, and even before he learned the location of the boys’ room he had posted his name for the election.
The election bid was a long shot, beyond long shot—longer odds than betting on the tightfisted Clark Griffith’s inept Washington Senators to climb out of last place. He knew nothing about Roosevelt High and had yet to meet a single classmate. Would the old Julius from the Bronx have run for office? Not in a thousand years. But that was the point; precisely for this reason, the new Julius took the plunge. What was the worst that could happen? His name would be out there, and all would recognize Julius Hertzfeld as a force, a potential leader, a boy to be reckoned with. What’s more, he loved the action.
Of course, his opponents would dismiss him as a bad joke, a gnat, an unknown know-nothing. Expecting such criticism, Julius readied himself and prepared a riff about the ability of a newcomer to see fault lines invisible to those living too close to the corruption. He had the gift of gab, honed by long hours in the bowling alley of wheedling and cajoling suckers into match games. The new Julius had nothing to lose and fearlessly strolled up to clusters of students to announce, “Hi, I’m Julius, the new kid on the block, and I hope you’ll support me in election for class president. I don’t know crap about school politics, but, you know, sometimes a fresh look is the best look. Besides, I’m absolutely independent—don’t belong to any cliques because I don’t know anybody.”
As things turned out, not only did Julius recreate himself, but he damn near won the election. With a football team that had lost eighteen straight games and a basketball team almost as hapless, Roosevelt High was demoralized. The two other candidates were vulnerable: Catherine Shumann, the brainy daughter of the diminutive long-faced minister who led the prayer before each school assembly, was prissy and unpopular, and Richard Heishman, the handsome, red-haired, red-necked football halfback, had a great many enemies. Julius rode the crest of a robust protest vote. In addition, to his great surprise, he immediately was embraced vigorously by virtually all the Jewish students, about 30 percent of the student body, who had heretofore kept a low, apolitical profile. They loved him, the love of the timid, hesitant, make-no-waves Mason-Dixon Yid for the gutsy, brash New York Jew.
That election was the turning point of Julius’s life. So much reinforcement did he receive for his brazenness that he rebuilt his whole identity on the foundation of raw chutzpah. The three Jewish high school fraternities vied for him; he was perceived as having both guts and that ever so elusive holy grail of adolescence, “personality.” Soon he was surrounded by kids at lunch in the cafeteria and was often spotted walking hand in hand after school with the lovely Miriam Kaye, the editor of the school newspaper and the one student smart enough to challenge Catherine Schumann for valedictorian. He and Miriam were soon inseparable. She introduced him to art and aesthetic sensibility; he was never to make her appreciate the high drama of bowling or baseball.
Yes, chutzpah had taken him a long way. He cultivated it, took great pride in it, and, in later life, beamed when he heard himself referred to as an original, a maverick, the therapist who had the guts to take on the cases that had defeated others. But chutzpah had its dark side—grandiosity. More than once Julius had erred by attempting to do more than could be done, by asking patients to make more change than was constitutionally possible for them, by putting patients through a long and, ultimately, unrewarding course of therapy.
So was it compassion or sheer clinical tenacity that led Julius to think he could yet reclaim Philip? Or was it grandiose chutzpah? He truly did not know. As he led Philip to the group therapy room, Julius took a long look at his reluctant patient. With his straight light brown hair combed straight back without a part, his skin stretched tight across his high cheekbones, his eyes wary, his step heavy, Philip looked as though he were being led to his execution.
Julius felt a wave of compassion and, in his softest, most comforting voice, offered solace. “You know, Philip, therapy groups are infinitely complex, but they possess one absolutely predictable feature.”
If Julius expected the natural curious inquiry about the “one absolutely predictable feature,” he gave no sign of disappointment at Philip’s silence. Instead he merely continued speaking as though Philip had expressed appropriate curiosity. “And that feature is that the first meeting of a therapy group is invariably less uncomfortable and more engaging than the new member expects.”
“I have no discomfort, Julius.”
“Well then, simply file what I said. Just in case you run across some.”
Philip stopped in the hallway at the door to the office in which they had met a few days before, but Julius touched his elbow and guided him down the hall to the next door, which opened into a room lined on three sides with ceiling-to-floor bookshelves. Three windows of wood-lined panes on the fourth wall looked out into a Japanese garden graced by several dwarf five-needle pines, two clusters of tiny boulders, and a narrow eight-foot-long pond in which golden carp glided. The furniture in the room was simple and functional, consisting only of a small table next to the door, seven comfortable Rattan chairs arranged in a circle, and two others stored in corners.