Small Defeats

MY FATHER SITS IN THE DARK (521 pp.) --Jerome Weidman--Random House ($5.95).

Jerome Weidman comes close to being a really good short story writer; his ear is accurate, and he presents the nubs of his stories, neatly wrapped, for his readers to carry away. The trouble is that while there is always something in the packages, there is never much. One smiles wryly at a character's small defeat (or more rarely, small victory) and then passes on untroubled to another story equally expert and forgettable.

As he did in his novels (I Can Get It For You Wholesale, The Enemy Camp), Weidman writes about unpleasant parents, nasty children, World War II (his civilians feel guilty about not seeing combat), Manhattan's Lower East Side, marriage, and the sort of women who, 25 years ago, wore silver fox capes. He treats these subjects seriously and rarely comes close to humor. He is too meticulous to tolerate really gross cliches (although a hotel room can "command" a view), and he is too circumspect to attempt beauty. He is, as he explains in a soberly appreciative preface, a professional.

A look at The Explorers, one of the book's more successful stories, shows that he is right. Three young hoods with time to kill wander to the edge of the Central Park boat pond and try mockingly to talk with a girl there. When she ignores them, they torment a small Negro boy until she protests. Then, abruptly, they drop the game; it is time for an ominous appointment. Curtain. Weidman delivers his grim moment expertly, but the reader's admiration is mixed. There is something safe and synthetic about the story. One feels that if Hemingway had done it, risking more, it would have been better, or a good deal worse--and that either change would be welcome.

Weidman never takes risks. Within sight of shore, however, he can be impressive, and the best story in this large collection is very good indeed. An Easy One tells of a boy and his mother traveling in a train. The boy is bright, and prattles loudly the names of the states and their capitals; the mother is slightly cheap and not interested. A businessman moves in and buys the mother a drink. The boy fights back by sulking. The man counters by asking him another state capital. The boy says he does not know, and is silent when his mother, quite gay now, urges him to recite. He glares at her, and petulantly she asks the porter to put him to bed. The porter chides him: "A smaht boy lahk you not knowing the capital of Alabama." The boy scowls, trying not to cry. Then: " 'Sure I know,' he said in a listless, uneven voice that was almost a whisper. 'It's Montgomery.' "

Eventually, of course, even this lonely boy drifts out of memory--but haunted readers are the reward of the artist, not the journeyman.

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