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Bulge in ’44. I thought my chances for survival would be far better if I entered the army as an officer, especially if, on the basis of my college grades and my class standing—I was determined to become valedictorian—I was able to get transferred out of transportation (where I could wind up serving in a combat zone) and into army intelligence once I was in the service.
    I wanted to do everything right. If I did everything right, I could justify to my father the expense of my being at college in Ohio rather than in Newark. I could justify to my mother her having to work full time in the store again. At the heart of my ambition was the desire to be free of a strong, stolid father suddenly stricken with uncontrollable fearfor a grown-up son’s well-being. Though I was enrolled in a pre-law program, I did not really care about becoming a lawyer. I hardly knew what a lawyer did. I wanted to get A’s, get my sleep, and not fight with the father I loved, whose wielding of the long, razor-sharp knives and the hefty meat cleaver had made him my first fascinating hero as a little boy. I envisioned my father’s knives and cleavers whenever I read about the bayonet combat against the Chinese in Korea. I knew how murderously sharp sharp could be. And I knew what blood looked like, encrusted around the necks of the chickens where they had been ritually slaughtered, dripping out of the beef onto my hands when I was cutting a rib steak along the bone, seeping through the brown paper bags despite the wax paper wrappings within, settling into the grooves crosshatched into the chopping block by the force of the cleaver crashing down. My father wore an apron that tied around the neck and around the back and it was always bloody, a fresh apron always smeared with blood within an hour after the store opened. My mother too was covered in blood. One day while slicing a piece of liver—which can slide or wiggle under your hand if you don’t hold it down firmlyenough—she cut her palm and had to be rushed to the hospital for twelve painful stitches. And, careful and attentive as I tried to be, I had nicked myself dozens of times and had to be bandaged up, and then my father would upbraid me for letting my mind wander while I was working with the knife. I grew up with blood—with blood and grease and knife sharpeners and slicing machines and amputated fingers or missing parts of fingers on the hands of my three uncles as well as my father—and I never got used to it and I never liked it. My father’s father, dead before I was born, had been a kosher butcher (he was the Marcus I was named for, and he, because of his hazardous occupation, was missing half of one thumb), as were my father’s three brothers, Uncle Muzzy, Uncle Shecky, and Uncle Artie, each of whom had a shop like ours in a different part of Newark. Blood on the slotted, raised wooden flooring back of the refrigerated porcelain-and-glass showcases, on the weighing scales, on the sharpeners, fringing the edge of the roll of wax paper, on the nozzle of the hose we used to wash down the refrigerator floor—the smell of blood the first thing that would hit me whenever I visited my uncles and aunts in their stores.That smell of carcass after it’s slaughtered and before it’s been cooked would hit me every time. Then Abe, Muzzy’s son and heir apparent, was killed at Anzio, and Dave, Shecky’s son and heir apparent, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Messners who lived on were steeped in their blood.
    All I knew about becoming a lawyer was that it was as far as you could get from spending your working life in a stinking apron covered with blood —blood, grease, bits of entrails, everything was on your apron from constantly wiping your hands on it. I had gladly accepted working for my father when it was expected of me, and I had obediently learned everything about butchering that he could teach me. But he never could teach me to like the blood or even to be