“Any of them would have done exactly what I did,” he shouted at Nialie, slamming the door to his room, and collapsing on the bed that had the letters of the Hebrew alphabet painted on the head-board. A deadly “gimel” flying out of the raven’s beak. Nialie brought him a bowl of soup.
“And if one more person tells me what a saint he was,” Isaac hollered, “I’ll punch him out! There was another side to him! Only I know!”
“Know what?”
He pitied his mother too much to tell. “Never mind.”
Eventually the yeshiva principal found out about the marijuana and the Puerto Rican maid.
“It is written,” Isaac argued, quoting Melachim, “that a king may take wives and concubines up to the number eighteen, and I am descended from the House of David.”
Once Nialie discovered that her son had been expelled from the yeshiva, she stopped his allowance. An infuriated Isaac went to the McTavish building on Fifth Avenue.
“I want to see Lionel Gursky.”
“Have you an appointment?” the receptionist asked.
“I’m his cousin.”
A stocky teenager in a black leather motorcycle jacket, stovepipe jeans, and cowboy boots. Sleek black hair, hot slanty eyes, brown skin. “Sure,” she said, amused.
Even as a security guard approached, Isaac slapped his passport on the counter. The guard snorted, incredulous, but put in a call to Lionel’s office all the same. There was a pause, then he said, “Take the elevator to the fifty-second floor. Mr. Lionel’s secretary will meet you there, kid.”
Isaac trailed behind the young lady who led him to Lionel’s office, his eyes on her legs.
“Mr. Lionel is already late for a board meeting. He can give you ten minutes.”
She had to buzz him into Lionel’s outer office, monitored by a TV eye and attended by an armed guard. Behind the guard, rising over a Ming dynasty vase laden with gladioli, there loomed a portrait of Mr. Bernard.
Another set of doors, seemingly solid oak but actually lined with steel, slid open. Lionel’s corner office was the largest Isaac had ever seen. Antique desk. Leather sofas. Matching wastepaper baskets fashioned of elephant’s feet. Thick creamy carpet. Silken walls. A framed Forbes magazine cover of Lionel. A painting of cod fishermen in the Gaspé. Photographs of Lionel shaking hands with President Nixon, bussing Golda, embracing Frank Sinatra, dancing with Elizabeth Taylor, presenting a trophy to Jack Nicklaus.
“Your father was a saint and a role model for the rest of us poor sinners,” Lionel said. “Please accept my belated condolences.”
Isaac, his smile ambivalent, explained that he had left the yeshiva following a religious dispute, and now wished to enroll in a secular school, continuing his education in New York, but there were problems. When he was twenty-one he would inherit millions as well as a nice bundle of McTavish stock. Meanwhile, his mother controlled everything. She was determined that he return to the Arctic.
Lionel’s secretary intruded.
“Thank you, Miss Mosley. I’ll take that call in the library, but you stay here and keep my cousin company, will you?”
Isaac began to prowl about the office. He drifted behind the antique desk, sat down in Lionel’s chair, and spun around.
“I don’t think you should do that.”
“Now I have to piss,” he said, leaping up.
“There’s a men’s room down the hall,” Miss Mosley said, tugging at her skirt. “First right and second left. Security will give you a key.”
“Isn’t there a can right here?”
“It’s Mr. Lionel’s.”
“I promise to lift the seat.”
At first glance, the medicine cabinet yielded nothing of interest, but a tray on the glass table was filled with cuff-links: pearl, jade, gold. Isaac pocketed a pair and plucked the most promising bottle of pills out of the cabinet.
Lionel’s secretary had gone, displaced by the guard from the outer office.
“Hey, what happened to my baby-sitter, man?”
“You just sit there like a good lad and wait for Mr. Lionel.”
But Lionel didn’t return. Instead he sent a short man, plump and pink, with a full head of curly ginger hair. “Your father was a wonderful human being,” Harvey said. “I say that from the heart. Mr. Lionel sympathizes with your situation and admires your ambition. He has instructed me to put you on an allowance of two hundred dollars a week, which we will credit to your bank once you fill me in on the details. Later there will be some papers for you to sign.”
“When do I come back for them?”
“They will be mailed to you. Meanwhile, this envelope contains a thousand dollars in cash.”
“Where’s my fucken cousin?” Isaac asked, snatching the envelope.
“Mr. Lionel says you must come to see him again soon.”
Isaac rented a one-room apartment on W. 46th Street near the corner of Tenth Avenue, supplementing his meagre allowance by picking up jobs here and there that didn’t require a green card. Bussing tables at Joe Allen’s. Washing dishes at Roy Rogers on Broadway. Passing out cards on the street for DIAL 976-SEXY.
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, fifteen years old now, he stared at his ceiling, unshaven, his back adhering to his futon. The summer heat of his one-room apartment a torment, he reached for his tiger-striped jockey shorts on the floor and wiped the sweat from his neck and face. Then he rolled a joint and groped blindly for a tape, slamming it into his Sony. No sooner did he hear the gale-force winds raging across the barrens than he giggled fondly. There was the distant howl of a wolf, electronic music, the sounds of human struggle, and then the narrator faded in:
“The Ravenmen, man-shaped creatures from the ancient spirit world are attacking the good people of Fish Fiord; their fingers bearing the talons of an owl; their noses formed like the beak of a hawk; their great arms feathered and winged. Many of the villagers run in fear, but others fight on against fearful odds. In the forefront is Captain Cohol, pitting his prowess against the pitiless pillagers, fighting like ten men in a gleaming circle of death …”
Posters and bumper stickers were plastered to the walls of Isaac’s apartment. Posters of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger. Sandwiched between Black Sabbath and Deep Purple was a garishly coloured picture of the Rebbe who reigned over 770 Eastern Parkway. A nude Marilyn Monroe, sprawling on a white rug, smiled at the Rebbe from the opposite wall. Glued to the poster was the crest Isaac used to wear on the breast pocket of his jacket, certifying that he was a foot soldier in the ARMY OF HASHEM. A car bumper sticker pasted on another wall read WE WANT THE MOSHIACH NOW.
Those days, Isaac thought, inhaling deeply. Yeshiva days. Waking in the wintry dark to say his Modeh Ani, the Prayer of Thanks Upon Rising:
Modeh ani lefaneha, melekh hai v’kayam.
I offer thanks to Thee, O Everlasting King.
Sheh hehezarta bi nishmati b’hemla.
Who hast mercifully restored my soul within me.
Fuck the yeshiva. And flick the Gurskys too. Some family. Lionel, that scum-bag, had never agreed to see him again. Mind you, he was only a cousin. Lucy, his aunt, his only aunt, had treated him even worse. Not to begin with. No sir. To begin with she had thought he was the cutest thing since sliced bread. He had first gone to visit Lucy in her apartment in the Dakota while he was still studying at the yeshiva. He rang the bell clutching a beribboned box of Magen David Glatt Kosher chocolates, unaware that he was intruding on a cocktail party. A little Filipino in a white jacket answered the door and then an out-of-breath lady wearing a tent-like kaftan chugged down the hall to greet him. She was immense, bloated, heavily made-up, her glittering black eyes outlined with something silvery, her chins jiggly. Lucy grasped a retreating Isaac and held him at arm’s length, bracelets of hammered gold jangling. Isaac, who still wore sidecurls, a wispy moustache and just a hint of beard, black hat, long black jacket, thick white woollen socks. “Oh my shattered nerves,” she called out in a voice loud enough to command attention. “Lo
ok, everybody, it’s my nephew. Isn’t he super!”
Then, taking Isaac by the hand, she fed him to one guest after another, singing out again and again, “This is the son of my brother, the early warning system.” Earning chuckles and going on to explain that her saintly brother lived in the Arctic, married to an Eskimo, waiting for the world to end. “Out there, he’ll be the first to know, wouldn’t you say?”
Finally Lucy abandoned Isaac to a group that included a couple of agents, a set designer, and the star of a long-running Broadway play. Isaac had seen the actor on the “Johnny Carson Show”. Determined to make a good impression, he asked, “So, tell me, do you find it like a drag to have to repeat the same lines night after night?”
The actor rolled his eyes and handed Isaac his empty glass. “There you go,” he said.
Backing away, Isaac collided with a pretty young girl wearing a miniskirt and a T-shirt with LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR emblazoned on it. He could make out her nipples. “Sorry, sorry,” he said.
“Hey, you look really neat in that. Did you come straight from the location?”
“What?” he asked, beginning to perspire.
“Didn’t you have time to change for the party?”
“These are my clothes.”
“Come off it,” she said. “I just happen to know Mazursky was shooting in the Village today.”
He saw Lucy once more before Henry’s death, this time in a building on Broadway, the young man who was her personal assistant ushering him into her office. Lucy, her kaftan hiked up to her applepie knees, her fat legs propped up on a hassock, was shouting into the phone. “Tell that no-talent cunt that the time is long past when she could play an ingénue and a year from now when her tits are hanging round her ankles she’ll be grateful for any crumb, not that she will ever work for Lucy Gursky again.” Then she hung up and shoved the huge platter of brownies on her desk toward him. “Oh, shit. Hold it. They’re not kosher.”
Though she had failed to return any of his phone calls, she seemed so pleased to see him that she cancelled her reservation for lunch at the Russian Tea Room and had her chauffeur take them to a kosher deli on W. 47th Street. Ordering a second mound of latkes—“I shouldn’t but this is an occasion, isn’t it?”—she regaled him with loving stories about Henry.
“You know, your father suffered from a bad stammer until he picked up with your lot, so the Rebbe can’t be all bad.”
Isaac, seizing his opportunity, his words spilling out at such a pace that she had difficulty following him, told her that he had an idea for a movie. It was about the Messiah. Locked in the Arctic ice for centuries, he explodes out of a pingo, his mission to waken the Jewish dead and lead them to Eretz Yisroel. He has a weakness, however. If he is fed non-kosher food he loses his magical powers, he goes berserk.
“I love it,” Lucy said, and grasping what a hoot it would be to read aloud at her next party, she added, “You must send me an outline.”
When he next got in touch with her, after he had been expelled from the yeshiva, she shrieked at him over the phone, “I’m surprised you even have the nerve to call me, you disgusting little cannibal,” and she hung up on him.
One night only a month later Lucy dismissed her chauffeur, pretending that she was staying home, and then took a taxi to Sammy’s Roumanian Paradise, a restaurant she frequented on rare nights when she was alone and so depressed there was nothing else for it, gorging herself on platters of unhatched chicken eggs, kishka, and flank steak, and then sliding into a troubled sleep on the drive home. Back at the Dakota, even as her taxi driver lifted her out of the back seat, she saw Isaac emerging from the shadows. “Go away,” she said.
Gone were the sidecurls and black hat. He wore a filthy T-shirt, jeans torn at the knees, and sneakers.
“You can’t come up with me. Bugger off. Animal.”
“I haven’t had a thing to eat in forty-eight hours.”
She seemed to wobble in place.
“You’re supposed to be my aunt,” he said, beginning to sniffle.
Her breath coming short, sweat trickling down her forehead and upper lip, she sighed and said, “I’ll give you five minutes.’’
But once in her apartment, she retired to her bedroom and didn’t come out again until she had changed into a fresh kaftan, promptly sinking into the sofa and lifting her swollen legs on to a hassock.
“Are you willing to listen to my side of the story?” Isaac asked.
“No. I am not. But you’ll find my handbag on the dresser in the bedroom,” she said, unwilling to get up again. “I’ll give you something this once. Wait. I know exactly how much money is in there.”
It was a mistake. He was gone too long. So she hoisted herself upright and followed him into the bedroom.
Isaac was staring at the large photograph on the wall of a slender lady in a sexy black cocktail dress, her bra stuffed with Kleenex.
“Who’s that?” he demanded, smirking, for he recognized her, even with her clothes on, and was only looking for a confirmation.
“Why that,” she said, curtsying, “is a photograph of your Aunt Lucy in her prime, taken by a rather naughty boy in London in 1972, if memory serves. Or did you think I was born looking like a hippo?”
“No.”
She fished a hundred and seventy dollars out of her handbag and handed it to him. “But, remember, you are not to come here again.”
“Sure thing.”
TO BE SO RICH and yet so broke. Denied by his own family. Maddening. Isaac wanted to scream, he longed to break things, it was so unjust.
His apartment stank. He opened the window, but there was no breeze. Not even the cockroaches stirred. In search of solace, he slapped another Captain A. tape into his Sony.
“Wrestled into submission by the rapacious Ravenmen, Captain Cohol has broken loose from the terrible table of death only to be cruelly clouted to the ice once more.”
Toologaq, malevolent master of the Ravensmen, laughed fiendishly. “Brace yourself, space snoop, because this electric current will teach you watt’s watt.”
Shit shit shit. Isaac kicked his Sony across the floor. Only fifteen years old, he would have to endure another six years before the money and shares would be his. Groping for his can of spray paint, he treated the Rebbe to a squirt in the nose. Wobbly on his feet, he whirled around and took aim at Marilyn Monroe’s coozy.
Then the doorbell rang. Three strangers. A little old man; a taller one, middle-aged; and a bleached blonde, all twinkly, reeking of perfume. “I’m your Cousin Barney,” the middle-aged man said, “this is your great-uncle Morrie, and what we have here,” he added, grabbing the blonde by the buttocks to propel her forward, “is the former runner-up to Miss Conduct. You can look but you can’t touch.”
Mr. Morrie sighed and clacked his tongue. “To think that a grandson of Solomon’s would have to live like this.”
“The first thing we’re going to do,” Barney said, “is buy you some decent threads.”
“I’ll bet a motorcycle would be more his life-style.” Darlene crinkled her nose. “Mine too, honeychild. Vroom Vroom!”
“You ever eaten at the ‘21’?” Barney asked.
Their fingernails bearing the talons of an owl, Isaac remembered, staring at Darlene’s fingernails. “What do you want from me?” he asked, retreating.
Barney took the spray paint can out of his hands. He aimed it at the bumper sticker on the wall that read WE WANT THE MOSHIACH NOW and squirted a line through it, crossing it out, as it were. Then he found a blank space and wrote:
WE WANT MCTAVISH NOW.
Mr. Morrie lingered in New York for a week, absolutely refusing to leave until he had established Isaac in a decent apartment, and had provided him with an allowance proper to his brother Solomon’s grandson. They ate lunch together every day. “You know,” Isaac said, “you are like the first relative ever to take an interest in me.”
“After what you’ve been through. What about your Aunt Lucy?”
“Lucy sex-crazed? You’ve got to be kidding.”
So Isaac showed him his file of photographs.
Tears welled in Mr. Morrie’s eyes. “To think that the poor child could have once been so unhappy,” he said, stuffing the photographs into his briefcase. “Now tell me, Isaac, what is it you want to do with your life?”
“I want to make movies.”
“You know what I say? I say why not, once things are settled.”
Six
One night that same summer, the summer of 1976, Sam and Molly Birenbaum went bumping across the Aberdare Salient in a Toyota Land Cruiser. Their guide, a former white hunter, was pursuing a loping, slope-shouldered hyena. Soon they were overlooking a pack of them, their pelts greasy and bellies bloated, hooting and cackling as they fed on a dead hippo lying on its side in a dry riverbed. The hippo hide impenetrable, the hyenas were eating into the animal through the softer anus, emerging from the cavity again and again with dripping chunks of pink meat or gut, thrusting the scavenging jackals aside.
“I’ve seen all I can bear,” Sam said. “I was raised on Rashi, not Denys Finch Hatton, so let us repair to our tent, tzatskeleh.”
Molly was delighted to see him in such high spirits. Only three months earlier, in Washington, he looked pasty and was growing increasingly sour. Obviously he had had his fill of hurrying to airports, flying hundreds of miles only to come back with another thirty-second sound bite from a politician or a film clip trivializing a disaster. “Judging by our commercials,” he told her one night, “outside the beltway, the only people who watch our newscasts suffer from loose dentures, insomnia, heartburn, flatulence and, put plainly, they don’t shit regular.”
So, on the night of his birthday, Molly took him to La Maison Blanche for dinner and told him, “Enough.” Lapsing into Yiddish because she knew it gave him pleasure, reminding him of Friday nights at L.B.’s, the men holding forth at the table with the crocheted cloth, he and Moses in the kitchen, overcome with awe as Shloime Bishinsky combed nickels out of their hair. She told him that when she had married him, a cub reporter on the Gazette, cultivating a moustache to make him look older, she had never dreamed that one day he would provide in such style for her and the children. But now the boys were grown, and Sam had more than enough money socked away, so the time had come for him to put in for early retirement. He could take a year off, maybe two, nobody was counting, and then he could decide whether to teach or write or join PBS or National Public Radio, both of which had made offers.
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