Seventh Avenue

by Norman Bogner

  She and Jay divided their time between New York and Syracuse, where the factory that had begun life as a failure now mushroomed out into an amorphous complex of buildings employing two thousand people, the largest mass-production dress factory in the East. Jay had even begun to use synthetic fibers to cope with the demand, and he had sixty retail outlets that swallowed with a voracious lack of discrimination whatever he produced.

  Jay slipped away from the children and went into his dressing room to make a call on his private line. On the fifth buzz, he was about to slam down the phone, but Eva’s voice came through.

  “Where the hell’ve you been?” he said angrily. “I’ve been calling all afternoon. I asked you to wait for my call.”

  There was silence at the other end.

  “Sorry, Boss. I don’t work on Sundays. It’s in my contract.”

  “Aw cut the crap, Eva.”

  “I waited till two. I got thirsty and lonely.”

  “I couldn’t ring at two because the kids started coming.”

  “We could’ve stayed in Syracuse for the weekend, and you wouldn’t have had this problem.”

  “Don’t be funny. You know it was Neal’s birthday.”

  “Look, if you called up to have an argument, then I can do without it.”

  “Just a minute . . . I’ll see you at six at the apartment.”

  “Well . . . if you must . . .” She hung up, and he stood in the middle of the room, the phone wire coiled round him like a cobra, with a puzzled and distressed look on his face. Things had begun to get out of hand with Eva. He still occupied the central position in their relationship, but she had recently started to assert herself. The door opened abruptly.

  “I wondered where you disappeared to,” Rhoda said.

  “Had to make a call.”

  “She give you a stand-up?”

  “It was business.”

  “The kind of business that gets lipstick on your drawers . . .”

  “Oh, shut up. It’s the kid’s party, so try to behave yourself.”

  “From you, a remark like that sounds so ridiculous that it’s funny.”

  He brushed past her and her head banged against the pine door without hurting her, but she became angry, and stormed after him, her eyes darkening. The children were playing “London Bridge,” and she stopped, rooted in her tracks, when she spied Jay arm in arm with Neal, as though the touch of innocence would somehow redeem him and she would have him again newly born, pristine, her love enhanced by his lack of experience. It was an idle thought, and she let it slip out of her mind. They had been through too much together for her ever to recapture the quality of emotion that he had created and then discarded like a rag. She had no illusions of a renaissance of feeling on his side; she only hoped that he would tire himself out, and then come to her exhausted and bleeding, devoid of pride, and pleading for acceptance. The only avenue of attack, she realized sadly, was through Neal, for the child represented what he had never in his life found time to develop: an inviolable principle that transcended his own megalomania.

  The children, bored with “London Bridge,” started up “Farmer in the Dell,” and Jay did a little square dance with Neal, who reluctantly allowed himself to be spun round. Rhoda wondered whether she ought to ask Al’s advice: of Jay’s family he was the only one she found remotely sympathetic, perhaps because she knew that he had suffered as much as she had. Her sisters-in-law she avoided, except when a family function brought them together, and now that she could not go to Myrna, the void in her life had grown progressively larger with every passing year. Neal might have filled the hole, but he was completely under Jay’s domination - Jay’s personal possession, not a child to be shared and loved by both, but the object of one, the stronger one. She had a curious sensation of estrangement that occasionally became hostility when confronted with those large inquisitorial eyes, that innate droit de seigneur that the child alarmingly revealed in her presence. Even though he was only five, he was hard to manage, and there was a certain unconscious superciliousness about him that she traced directly to Jay’s influence. Jay had won on all fronts, and she was tired of fighting. The only hope she retained, curiously enough, was for Neal; perhaps one day he would see Jay with her eyes, not with antipathy but clearly enough to make his own judgments.

  Al sat in the corner on the sofa, sipping coffee, and Rhoda caught his eye.

  “What can I do for you?” he said, moving over to make room.

  She opened her eyes wide and sat down heavily, next to him.

  “Tell me how to lose twenty pounds!”

  He laughed kindly and put his arm around her.

  “Your weight’s okay by me. I always like a woman to be zoftig.”

  “You’re a sweetie, Al.”

  “What’re you looking so worried about? A new home . . . everything the best that money can buy . . . a successful husband who’s on the way to his second million.”

  “I haven’t got a goddamn thing,” she said with truculence, “and you know it. I haven’t got a marriage, and I hate my life.”

  “Success does that to some people,” he mused.

  “Success hasn’t got anything to do with it . . . he was a bastard when he didn’t have what to eat.”

  “You don’t have to tell me what I already know,” he said in a hushed voice.

  “It isn’t that he’s all rotten . . .”

  “Just most of him. But he’s a good father, so there’s that in his favor, isn’t there?” He was groping, and he didn’t like himself for it, but nevertheless he wanted to learn more about Jay. Hatred had had a singular effect on him: it had made him curious, and he treasured every detail of dirt he could pick up that confirmed his own opinion of Jay. At times he would lie awake at night, going over all the little slights and infamies he had been subjected to by his brother, and he had the recurring dream of confronting Jay in court with a bulging dossier in his hand, listing every act of deceit Jay had ever committed. Like all obsessions this had the effect of draining his energy and producing precisely the opposite effect on his relations with Jay; he performed the exceedingly difficult operation of removing any suspicion of personal jealousy from his remarks on Jay’s character, and his public performance was so deferential, so shamelessly sycophantic, that he came to believe that the performance was a part of a master plan he had evolved with which to bring Jay to his knees.

  “A good father?” Rhoda’s tone was incredulous. “Shall I tell you what he’s doing?”

  Al’s palms sweated, and he waited apprehensively for Rhoda’s testimony.

  “He’s being good to himself.”

  Al put his coffee cup down on the side table and peered around suspiciously to see that no one could overhear them.

  “I don’t follow . . .”

  “He doesn’t think of himself as Neal’s father . . . he sees Neal as himself in miniature, and as he loves himself more than anything in the world, it’s easy to understand why he’s so good to Neal. And he can leave me out in the cold.”

  Al considered the evidence and nodded his head thoughtfully. Another link in the chain of circumstances he would use to entrap his brother. For the moment, he couldn’t think how it related to his case, so he filed it.

  “Typical of him. I hate to say I told you so, but I did, if you remember.”

  “Hah,” she made a sharp, ironic sound, but it wasn’t a laugh.

  “Someday . . . someday, you’ll see,” he said obscurely.

  “I need your help.”

  “Anything,” he said.

  “I caught him on the phone just before. I’m pretty sure it was a woman.”

  Al lifted his hairbrush brows in surprise.

  “With who?”

  “I’d like you to find out.”

  “That’s harder than it sounds.”

  “You work with him.”

  “For him!”

  “I know that he fools around, but I’ve got an idea that this is somebody he’s had for a while
. He must’ve been pretty desperate to take a chance on me catching him on the phone, and right in the middle of the party.”

  “I’ve had my suspicions, but I couldn’t prove a thing,” he said judicially.

  The children in the background were roaring with delight as Neal spun Jay round for “blind man’s buff.” They had joined hands in a circle and were now spreading out. Neal dove between Rhoda’s ankles and tittered, while Jay with hands outstretched ambled to the opposite end of the room where the record player was squalling . . . “Clap your hands till Daddy comes home/For Daddy will bring you a cakie home/One for you and one for me/And one for all of the family . . .”

  “It’s that Eva, isn’t it?”

  “Eva? You must be kidding. She’s Marty’s piece, always has been.”

  “Maybe they take turns.”

  “Jay? Not in a million years. He doesn’t believe in sharing. As if I have to tell you . . . He’d never.”

  “They whore around together.”

  “Not in the office. Maybe he has someone, but I’ve never seen her. For a crude, obvious man, he’s pretty cagy. Keeps secrets well. Half the time I don’t even know what goes on in the business, and I keep the books. Everything he does is legitimate. Doesn’t even try to cheat the government, and believe me he could with no trouble.”

  “What makes you so sure Eva isn’t the one?”

  “For one thing Marty signs a check every month for her rent; he pays every account she’s got at the department stores. They always leave together.”

  “What does that prove?”

  “Nothing, I guess. But when you add all the little bits together, the picture you get is Marty and Eva. When a man’s having an affair with a woman, he treats her in a special way; Jay looks at Eva as one thing only: a business asset. If they have one bad season, she’ll be out.”

  Rhoda persisted although she sensed that her surmise was weightless.

  “Don’t they go to the factory together?”

  “Don’t be stubborn. He might have somebody up in Syracuse, but it ain’t Eva.” He held her hand affectionately. “Rhoda, would it do any good if you found out that he had somebody? Would you divorce him?”

  She bit her nails anxiously and sighed.

  “I might if I met the right man, but I don’t think he wants a divorce. It would mean breaking up the home, and he couldn’t see Neal all the time. He wouldn’t do it, although Christ I’ve thought enough about it.”

  She pursed her lips tightly and wondered if Al realized that she had lied; she had only thought of a divorce at that moment. She had been eased over the precipice of good sense by Al’s need to confirm her suspicions. She had difficulty acquiring confidantes of either sex - the function had been part of Myrna’s attraction - and she was caught in a crosscurrent. Al fed her hunger for details of Jay’s activities, and she was also conscious of the subtle disguises and rationalizations that betrayal assumed. But hadn’t Jay betrayed her any number of times? Were there any rules in this kind of game? What happened if her suspicion turned out to be true? Would she divorce him? The word had such an ugly, debased ring to it that she banished both it and the action it prescribed from her mind.

  The children were tired and rolled on the floor away from pursuing parents. Tears and a fight commenced in the foyer, and Rhoda lifted herself out of the deep sofa. An odd wave of depression, not unlike nausea, came over her, and she knew she had forgotten to take her afternoon pill, without which she sank into a morass of lethargy and indifference. She slipped into the bathroom, found the pills in a bottle labelled “saccharine” and swallowed a whole one without water. She broke another one into quarters and chewed a bit. When she got back to her guests, she had the slight dizzy sensation that always preceded the elation Benzedrine brought with it. The lights twinkled mysteriously at her and as she looked at the tired, dirty faces of the children a great warmth came over her and she loved them all. She saw Jay picking up the railway tracks and cars assembled in the living room that he had demonstrated to the children earlier in the afternoon. It was still light outside, and she had a strong desire to go for a long walk in the park with Jay and hear the rustle of dried leaves caught in the early evening wind. The impossibility of this hope became apparent to her when she saw Jay put on his coat, help his mother with hers, and go towards the door. Her sister-in-law Sylvia led the way.

  “Momma’s staying over with Sylvia,” Jay said as he cautiously moved past her, a brace of children pushing behind him.

  “So why’re you going?”

  He glared at her.

  “I have to drive her, that’s why.”

  “I thought Harry was coming for them.”

  “Harry hasn’t got a car, remember?”

  “What time’ll you be back?”

  “I’ll write you a letter.” His mouth twisted in a snarl, and she became conscious of Sylvia’s sickeningly sweet voice.

  “. . . It was such fun, Rhoda. I can’t get over the apartment . . . the most beautiful one I ever saw in my whole life. Lucky girl.” Sylvia gave her a sister-in-lawly embrace, a compound of commiseration and envy: nobody had it easy, she wanted to say. Rosalee followed her, paid her obeisance, and trotted out after Jay.

  He’s got two sisters, Rhoda reflected sadly, whom he never bothers with except when it suits him . . . two sisters who resent me because he’s successful; and the only friend I have, the only one who could help me, is where I can’t reach her, locked in a nightmare world. She made a solemn pledge to herself to visit Myrna the following week. If Jay could chauffeur his mother around there was no reason why he couldn’t drive her up to Peekskill to see Myrna. She couldn’t, however, in her heart, find fault with Jay’s treatment of her sister, for it was he who paid for the treatment, ungrudgingly, and with absolute magnificence. The bill ran to something over three thousand a year, and the whole Gold family knew that if not for Jay, Myrna would be doomed to a state institution. What made his position virtually unassailable was that he never mentioned the cost, nor asked for thanks. As a consequence, Rhoda could never complain to her family about him, for in the ever-changing hierarchy of familial affection Jay had now become a savior to both her parents, and to Howard he was God incarnate. His manner, long held to be insolent and unpleasant, had become “his way, and you can’t hate him for it,” in her mother’s reassessment. Everyone’s life was more secure and happier because of Jay, and Rhoda’s attempts to belittle him boomeranged. It seemed to her an extraordinary fact of life that money bought not only respectability and loyalty but also love. Jay had given both her father and Howard what amounted to sinecures; the old man earned twice as much money doing half as much work, as an invoice checker in one of J-R’s depots, and Howard, after a six-month stint as a clerk, was put in charge of an inventory-control system that Jay had devised to prevent staff pilfering . . . nice, pleasant work at twice what he was worth. The only ally she could count on was Al, and she sensed that despite his unscrupulousness, and his intent to damage Jay, Jay was several steps ahead of him. Still, when one is friendless in a hostile world, one can’t be too fussy about the credentials of an ally, and one can’t insist that he be motivated by altruism.

  Maggie, the colored maid who lived with them, was busy sweeping in the kitchen. Jay had given her a dress for her birthday and two salary raises, and she would not hear a bad word about him. Rhoda, completely stymied, stared at her.

  “I’ll put Neal to bed,” Rhoda said. “You want to go to the movies, don’t you?”

  “Thanks, Mrs. B. I’ll vacuum first.”

  “Don’t bother, Maggie. You can do it in the morning. It was very nice of you to give up your day off.”

  Maggie smiled and waved her hand graciously.

  “Mr. B. asted me to, and I can’t say no to anything he wants. I think if he asted me to walk off a cliff I’d do it.”

  Rhoda gave her a wan smile. She would have liked to cut her own throat. Maybe Howard had been right when he intimated that she had a persecution
complex. She went into Neal’s room and saw him grinding the wheels of a locomotive against the wall. She pulled the train away from him, and he snarled at her.

  “Where’s Daddy?” he demanded.

  “With his whore somewhere,” she snapped.

  The child smirked at her. There was something evil and knowledgeable in the smile, and she lashed out, striking him across the face. He rubbed his face with the back of his hand, and she saw her fingermarks, like a tattoo on his cheek. Then he began to cry, not out of fear or pain, but in outrage, she thought. She undressed him and soothed him, asking for forgiveness, and chiding herself for wanting his approval. Neal averted his eyes, and when she pulled his face roughly around, instead of the expected tears he was sneering at her brazenly.

  “I don’t know what you expect from me,” Jay said. “I should be with my mother.”

  Eva threw back her head and laughed.

  “If you could only see yourself . . . I have to be with my mommy.” She mimicked him unmercifully whenever she had been drinking, and he had begun to resent it.

  “I can’t stand you when you drink. Lushes make me sick to my stomach.”

  “You don’t do so bad yourself.”

  He slammed his drink down guiltily on a mosaic-topped table and stormed across the room. He always had difficulty working himself up into a rage when he was in their apartment because the moment he entered it he dropped his usually formidable defenses. He loved the room, everything about it. Eva had selected every piece with loving care, from the white Adam fireplace to the lilac drapes. The room virtually forced him to be a gentleman and even though he moved about with a proprietary air, there was in his attitude and indeed in his mien a curiously naive sense of awe and respect for something beautiful. His whole past and the net of deceits he had woven were swept away by the room. Although Eva was its principal constituent, she was not necessary for him to enjoy the room, and occasionally he would slip away from the office during the day, when he knew she wouldn’t be there, just to go back to the apartment, have a quiet drink and enjoy the view of Fifth Avenue and Washington Square Park. They had been happy for more than four years in the apartment, and the whole place not only exuded a quality of warmth, love, and comfort, but also of pure living joy. It had cost him a fortune and was still not completed, because Eva took her time picking out every object in it. He had waited a year for her to find the right shaped ottoman, six months for the hairy Scandinavian rug. He disliked having to think when he was there, and Eva was making him think.