Vocabulary

the fate of our sports teams didn't matter much to a student body whose elders, largely undereducated and overburdened, venerated academic achievement above all else.

you could hear it thinly chanted by the handful of Weequahic stalwarts in the wooden stands not only when the Swede came up to bat but when he made no more than a routine putout at first base

The chattering girls he passed on the street would ostentatiously swoon

Razzle limped to the dugout"--there is a blackish, ink-heavy rendering of a scrawny

rookie record that no pitcher in either league has ever exceeded--he's accidentally knocked off his feet in the shower by boisterous teammates who are horsing around after the great victory

The word "inert" terrified me. Was the Kid killed by the last catch of the year?

Mr. Levov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons

where the vast vat rooms were dark as caves and flooded with swill

Several months before the Swede's discharge, his own father made a trip to Parris Island, stayed for a full week, near the base at the hotel in Beaufort, and departed only when the engagement to Miss Dunleavy had been broken off

Before competing at Atlantic City for the 1949 Miss America title, she had been Miss Union County, and before that Spring Queen at Upsala. From Elizabeth. A shiksa. Dawn Dwyer. He'd done it.

Most everybody thought of my father as indestructible, a thick-skinned man on a short fuse

I'm over sixty, not exactly someone with the outlook on life that he'd had as a boy, and yet the boy's beguilement has never wholly evaporated

Where were the wayward temptations

and I understood right off that I wasn't going to get anywhere near the substratum

casting an upward, remonstrative glance at the darkening fall sky

this munificence not only overwhelmed me and wafted through me because it had come wrapped in my nickname but became fixed in my mind as an embodiment of something grander even than his talent for sports

Conflicting Jewish desires awakened by the sight of him were simultaneously becalmed by him;

There had to have been consciousness and there had to have been blight

beneath the promontory of cheekbones, a little more hollowing out than classic standards of ruggedness required.

out of duty to long-standing employees, most of whom were black

That's another reason we left. Four, five kids drooping out the windows, eighty miles an hour-- right on Central Avenue.

One wound up impotent," I said. "The other's impotent and incontinent

I replied amiably enough, thinking that this big jeroboam of self-contentment really was in possession of all he ever had wanted

the letter grew out of Swede Levov's belated discovery of what it means to be not healthy but sick,

He finagled next to find out the girl's height, he designed a pattern

back in Newark in 1949 nobody knew dick about what great art was and Jerry and I racked our brains trying to figure out what he could do to get the coat into the box

But then I thought, Why bestow on him all this thinking? Why the appetite to know this guy?

What was most cramping in their point of view a few of us did find the audacity to strain against

but am I completely mistaken to think that living as well-born children in Renaissance Florence could not have held a candle to growing up within aromatic range of Tabachnik's pickle barrels?

perhaps I'd find vanishing from Nathan what, according to Proust, vanished from Marcel the instant he recognized "the savour of the little madeleine"

the apprehensive-ness of death

he'd twice had to pull up at service stations and get the key to the restroom, so wracked was he by trepidation

First the tom-tom opening, then winding curvaceously up out of the casbah that great smoky trombone, and then the insinuating, snake-charming flute.

Cookie graciously inquired of us in a voice whose mellow resonance Mendy would imitate whenever we talked on the phone

The person telling me this, a small, dour man with a dose-clipped white beard

A really benighted family

Mr. Roscoe, our stout, red-nosed Spanish teacher who on the mornings when Joy came to school in a sweater was always asking her to stand at her desk to recite her homework

You find me taking a very uncharitable view toward her

What was starting to unsettle him, to frighten him, was the idea that Merry was less horrified now than curious, and soon he himself became obsessed, though not, like her, by the self-immolators in Vietnam but by the change of demeanor in his eleven-year-old.

whatever it was, out of the canister and over himself and drenched the asphalt around him

the monk setting the air on fire while no harm at all befell him

No screaming, no writhing, just his calmness at the heart of the flames--no pain registering on anyone on camera, only on Merry and the Swede and Dawn, horrified together in their living room

according to a CBS Sunday morning show, assassinated by the USA, by the CIA, who had propped him up in power in the first place)

by lodging a protest in the only way America understands