"And he don't even believe in God," Gold's father retaliated by addressing the others with a snort of ridicule. "Hey, dummy, if there's no God, Mr. Smart Guy Politician, how can there be a Bible?"
"You should listen to your father more," counseled Gold's stepmother. "Aiid maybe you can be his favorite son too."
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"How can I listen," said Gold, "when all he does is call me names? He doesn't like me. He never liked me."
"I don't like you either," she informed him with courtesy. "You admire money and you idolize the poeple who have it. You crave success. Wouldn't it be funny," she went on, and cackled at him with a gleam of satanic wickedness in her eye, "if he isn't even your real father and you've been taking all this criticism from him for nothing all these years? Wouldn't it be funny if you aren't even Jewish? You don't even know the language and the holidays, do you?"
Gold chose a strategy of silence.
"Pyrenees," said Sid when it seemed no one else would speak, "is the only known language in the world that has no words for right or left."
After an instant of indignation, Gold discovered himself responding to the asinine statement with his intellect and smiled with the tired awareness that he probably would never again find it within himself to be angry with Sid for anything. It could be Sid was right. It could also be Sid was full of shit. Gold was as conscious as the next fellow of the mountainous area in the border regions joining France with Spain; but possibly there were isolated villages with inhabitants to whom what Sid had just said did apply. There could be people far away in the Pacific or in the Indian Ocean called Pyrenees, or Pirenese—Gold could not be sure even of the spelling—just as there were people and languages elsewhere called Portuguese and Japanese. Let someone else pick up the gauntlet, he decided, reflecting peevishly that people thought more respectfully of him in Washington than they did of him here, where he was at the very nadir of repute.
"How do they know which way to go?" asked Esther after an interval allowing for these discursive speculations.
"They know," said Gold's father.
"How do they give directions?" asked Ida.
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"They give," said Gold dryly in an effort to make himself agreeable, and his father looked at him with greatest surprise and a tint of admiration, as though scarcely expecting such percipience from so unsatisfactory a source.
"They must be very smart," said Ida.
"Very smart," said Milt.
"Then how come they don't have words for right or left if they're so smart," Muriel belittled Ida, a cigarette jutting from her mouth.
"Because," Ida instructed her shrewishly, "they're so smart they don't need them. And there's a lesson to be learned by all of us from the Pyrenees."
"And from the lilies of the field," said Gold.
"And from my first husband," said Gold's stepmother, knitting a few and purling a couple more, "who always loved a good joke too. I'm a Southerner, you know, with connections in Richmond and Charleston, and ours has always been one of the most respected Jewish families in the South—respected, that is, by other Jewish families. In marrying your father, I married very far below my station, and he married very much above his." Pride glowed like a furnace in Julius Gold's face as he nodded in Olympian accord. "We owned slaves and very large plantations. It's the reason we know so much about wool."
"Cotton," said Gold before he could help himself, and came close to banging his head with the heel of his hand for his impetuous stupidity.
"Wool, my child," Gussie Gold took him up at once with a majestic turn of her eye downward. "It was because of the money we made from our cotton that we could afford so much wool. Even as a little girl I was able to do my own flocking."
"Flocking?" said Gold.
"I bet she flocked good too," said Gold's father, "better than you."
Flocking? repeated Gold to himself, and gave way ignominiously before his father's challenge. Flocking
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was a subject of which he had sparse knowledge and ground upon which he was not zealous to contend with people who had more.
"I can remember," said Gold's stepmother, "my husband's favorite joke. 'If you ever forget you're a Jew,' he would say,'a gentile will remind you.' And he would say this over and over again to all of us until the day he died. It's a joke that you, my pet, would do well to remember."
"With a stepmother like you," Gold told her with a set smile, "I won't need a gentile to remind me."
"It's the reason you're having so much trouble with your book," she said, bending close with this new verbal thrust.
"Who's having trouble?"
"You'll never be able to write it without me, you know," she said in ghastly exultation. "How can you write about the Jewish experience when you're not even sure you've ever had one? You're not even sure you're really Jewish, are you? Wait till that gets out. You never even bothered to check, did you?"
"Check where?" Gold demanded. "What are you talking about?"
"The adoption agency," said his stepmother with a hideous laugh. "They have to put that down and tell you now. I read it in the papers."
"What adoption agency? I'm not adopted."
"How do you know?" gloated his stepmother, and Gold did not dare look at her pale face and burning eyes. "You never even went there to check, did you? You can do that now, you know. You can get a lawyer and find out. You're not even sure who your real parents are. Maybe I'm your real mother and he's your stepfather. You don't know much about that at all, do you?"
Gold rose from his seat on the sofa beside her with his brain in a whirl and stepped a safe distance away. "Pop, what's she talking about? I'm not adopted, am I?"
"Get out of here with such foolish questions," his
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father replied without patience. "If we were going to adopt somebody, why would we pick you?"
"You're not even sure that your mother was your iea mother, are you?" his stepmother harried him tirelessly with fiendish glee. "How do you know she isn't a fake? You're wasting your money. Every time you go out to the cemetery to visit her grave—"
"I don't go to no cemetery," Gold shouted in her face, hoping to stanch her garrulous flow, but the woman only laughed the more.
"—it isn't even her grave. You're preserving the wrong landscaping and putting your flowers on the grave of a stranger."
"Gevaltr cried Julius Gold, once more the man of unpredictable wrath. "Again the cemeteries? This is worse than my anniversary. I don't want no talk about cemeteries and I don't want no one forgetting my anniversary party next year."
"Your tenth," Gold said savagely.
"And I w6n't have any more anniversaries," Esther said and began to cry again. Gold nearly groaned with exasperation.
Rose led Esther into the bathroom and Milt rose slowly to his feet like the man of methodical habits he was and asked:
"Can I get anything for anyone?"
Esther was composed on her return and began telling of Mendy's death with but a hint of the perpetual flutter of excitement that had become as natural a trait of her appearance as her pure white hair and brimming eyes. It was an affecting story but Gold did not want to hear it repeated. He was thinking hard about his mother's grave with a feeling of odium spreading through his system at the knowledge he had never been there. Reason told him it was only a stone he would find.
"He was so healthy and busy and could still work as hard as any of the men at the warehouse or on the trucks," Esther was relating about the short, rambunctious, excitable man with the sloping forehead and massive inferiority complex whose presence only Max
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and Rose had been able to tolerate without aching stress. "He really did love you, Bruce," Esther went out of her way to maintain with a noticeable absence of vim. "It's just that he always felt uncomfortable because you went to college and he thought you were so smart."
"I don't think he's so smart," cracked Muriel in her tough arid abrasive voi
ce, and blew a polluting cloud of cigarette smoke into the room. "If he's so smart, how come he teaches college? I bet even Victor makes more than he does."
Such was the riposte that sprangiirst to Gold's mind that Victor would have pounded him to death had he made it.
Mendy Moscowitz had been an opinionated, uninformed man who drank beer with his meals and still played handball aggressively at Brighton Beach when the weather was mild. He woke from an afterdinner nap one evening feeling lousy and went back to bed for the night. In the morning he was listless. All day at work he didn't feel right. A week later he was in the hospital with leukemia. He read his medical charts and made certain clamorously that everything prescribed was given him on time. He had books brought and pried free enough information to learn he was fated to die.
"Let it happen," he decided in tears one day. "I don't want to fight."
Esther's hair turned white. He wanted no comforts or treatments not covered by medical insurance.
"I want to leave money," said Mendy. "Let it happen at home. If you don't want me in the house I'll rent a furnished room."
It happened at home. He left the hsopital in the first remission and refused to go back with the reappearance of the symptoms of debilitation. When the day came that he was too faint to stand, he stood. Esther phoned Sid. Gold cut classes in Brooklyn. Only Esther held Mendy's arm as the four descended in the elevator. He had dressed in a suit and tie and his overcoat was
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buttoned to the collar. There was not one word more of conversation. They rode to the hospital in Sid's Cadillac. Mendy would have been proud to know he lasted there only a day and a half. Sid and Esther cried in the car.
"It was such a sunny day," Esther remembered now. "Everything looked so beautiful out."
"Can I get anything for anyone?" asked Milt.
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o NCE again Gold found himself preparing to lunch with someone—Spotty Weinrock—and the thought arose that he was spending an awful lot of time in this book eating and talking. There was not much else to be done with him. I was putting him into bed a lot with Andrea and keeping his wife and children conveniently in the background. For Acapulco, I contemplated fabricating a hectic mixup which would include a sensual Mexican television actress and a daring attempt to escape in the nude through a stuck second-story bedroom window, while a jealous lover crazed on American drugs was beating down the door with his fists and Belle or packs of barking wild dogs were waiting below. Certainly he would soon meet a schoolteacher with four children with whom he would fall madly in love, and I would shortly hold out to him the tantalizing promise of becoming the country's first Jewish Secretary of State, a promise I did not intend to keep. He would see Andrea's father, Pugh Biddle
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Conover, one more time before his tale was concluded, and Harris Rosenblatt twice.
His phone call to Spotty Weinrock for all or part of the money owed him had been received with more warmth than he expected. "All you want," Weinrock repeated in his showroom, gazing fully at Gold with a look of amusement and his chuckling undertone of detested indulgence and familiarity. "What do I owe you, fifteen hundred?"
"Eleven hundred."
"Make it two thousand," said Spotty Weinrock generously. "I like to work with round numbers. How do you like the place?"
The curving walls of the showroom guided visitors naturally into a reception area of spare elegance affording a view through glass of an orange room with four modern hand looms at which attractive female designers sat weaving the new patterns of wool his factory in Rhode Island would manufacture. Gold was impressed.
"How's business? Good?"
"Great," answered Weinrock. "If I had a better cash flow I could probably pull out now with over a million bucks clear."
"What does that mean?" asked Gold, who had no head for business.
"I'm in terrible trouble," said Weinrock. "I've got short-term obligations I have to meet, and I never in my whole life knew what an obligation was. I may have to take in more partners or sell out cheap. I could use a thousand for some new winter clothes, but none of that concerns you. I can pay you back all the money you want. What income-tax bracket are you in?"
"What's it your business?" There awoke in Gold at that mysterious question the first ugly writhings of suspicion that he was destined for disappointment.
"I have to know how much to put you down for in the company books." Weinrock's amiable spirits were unaffected. "We can make it as much as you want if you can use more dough."
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"What are you talking about?"
"I'm turning myself into a bad debt," said Weinrock, "just for you. And doing a lot of my old friends a favor at the same time. Claim me. For as much as you want. I'm going into bankruptcy. A thousand? Ten thousand? A million? Ten million? Say the word. I'll be as generous as you want."
"Spotty, what are you talking about?"
"You still asking that? I'll explain at lunch, but only if you let me pay. There's a dairy restaurant around the corner that's sometimes pretty good. Let me start," he said to the stocky old waitress who gave them menus, "with a glass of sour milk."
"We got no sour milk," the waitress said. "Everything here is fresh."
"Get me Lupewitz."
"It's not his station."
"Yankel," Weinrock called loudly to a lean, limp-looking waiter resting against the wall on the other side of the room with a rather sepulchral expression. "She won't give me sour milk. It ain't on the menu."
"Sure, the menu," said Yankel Lupewitz with the defeated air of a discontented philosopher of the Schopenhauer school. "I told them the menu, but that's how they are. I'll bring your milk."
"And let me have," shouted Spotty Weinrock, "a glass of strained borscht, the big fruit salad and cottage cheese with a prune, but only if it's fresh Oregon." The waiter shook his head. "Then tell them to put a fresh fig on top instead. And bring me black bread with lots of end pieces. I'm going bankrupt and turning you into a creditor," he explained in a normal voice to Gold. "If you're in the thirty percent bracket I can put you down for a five thousand loss and you'd break about even. If you want to make it more, we'll make it more. You want a million, we'll make it a million. But our figures ought to agree for your tax deduction."
Gold chewed gravely on his herring. "It sounds spotty, Spotty."
"It is."
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"How does it work?"
"I'll give you some back-dated promissory notes. Fill them in for what-ever you want. When the government auditors ask you why you loaned me the million in cash instead of by check, tell them your wife doesn't like me and you didn't want her to know you were helping me out. If they ask you where you got the cash, tell them you always like to store some in a mattress or safe-deposit box in case the banks fail again."
"A million dollars?"
"It's your money."
"Where did I get it?"
"Be evasive. It doesn't have to be that much. I've done this before. It's one of the ways I maintain my good credit in the industry. By going bankrupt regularly."
"And what happens if they don't believe me?"
"You go to jail."
"I go to jail."
"That's the downside risk," Weinrock answered with a sanguine smile, lavishly buttering an end slice of pumpernickel. "The upside gain is what you get back from the government next April from your income-tax return."
"Next April?" Gold cried with a convulsive lurch. "Spotty, I need that money now for a trip to Mexico."
"I could use some money for a trip to Mexico myself," Weinrock said. "I could also use new winter clothes. Will you let me have another thousand for a good coat and suit?"
"Spotty, are you really going bankrupt?"
"I have to," said Weinrock, grinning again in a way that left Gold chafing at the thought he was being laughed at irreverently by someone of lower station, "if I'm going to pay you back that eleven hundred dollars."
Gold took
umbrage at the insinuation and retorted, "Am I your only creditor?"
"You're the only one who's pressing me."
"Pressing you?" Gold exclaimed indignantly. "You
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fuck—I phone you once in three years. You call that pressing you?"
"You never phone to buy goods, do you?" joked Spotty.
"Weinrock," droned the lugubrious waiter. "Please tell the gentleman we don't allow such language here."
"He don't know, Yankel," Weinrock lamented. "He's going to work in Washington as a bigshot and he thinks it's modern. The fig was good, Yankel. But the bread ..." Weinrock shook his head accusingly with a tragic frown.
"Sure, the bread," promptly apologized Yankel Lupewitz guiltily. "I told them the bread, but that's how they are."
"Spotty, I'm not going to put you into bankruptcy," Gold relented. "I can get it from Sid. If you ain't got, you ain't got."
"I can get nothing from Mursh," said Spotty. "These fucking doctors all turn into conservatives."
"I have to see him soon for an examination," said Gold.
"Tell him to send cash," said Spotty Weinrock airily. "All I've got left is my clothes, my business, my car, my apartment, my beach house, and my girl friends. After that, I'm just about bankrupt."
Gold said, "You don't look like a bankrupt."
"I can't afford to," said Spotty. "If things were good I could look like you."
Gold's eyes opened wider. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Seedy and thin. Like a bum. A guy with a pushcart. Old jacket, old turtleneck, old pants that don't match. That may be good enough for your classroom but it ain't good enough for the garment district. No bankrupt could afford to dress that way. You shouldn't have worn those rags into the garment center or into a good dairy restaurant."
Good as Gold Page 29
