by Anna Porter
At about 4 he had gone over to Brunswick Avenue to board up Judith’s window while she cleaned her carpet with some evil-smelling acid solution that made his eyes water but expunged the remnants of the biker’s sweat that still clung to his clothes.
“They’re a no-account, irrelevant fringe group, but the RCMP keeps tabs on them anyway. We always know if they’re up to something serious.”
“Sure. That’s how come the Mounties let Keegstra teach anti-Semitism as part of his grades 7 through 12 history classes in Eckville, Alberta, for 15 years, before anybody so much as slapped his wrists.”
“It’s a free country. Can’t interfere with someone else’s beliefs, no matter how crazy, long as they don’t impinge...” He sighed. “He was charged and convicted. What more do you want?”
“I want them to stay away from other people. That’s all. Little enough to want in return for my taxes. You’re sitting there telling me that they can organize themselves into groups, they can march up and down pretending the Holocaust never happened, they can carry flags and swastikas and practice bizarre white supremacist rites and there is not a thing you can do about it till they actually attack someone?” She was spluttering with helpless anger, all the more difficult to contain because she was still trying to whisper.
“That’s right,” David said. He was half pleased that when she’d stopped being frightened, her next emotion was rage. She’d make a most unsuitable victim. “None of those things you just mentioned constitutes breaking the law. We can get them for disseminating hate literature or for causing bodily harm, or breaking and entering...”
“And how would they have known about my Zimmerman story?” In her mind, she had started to list all her friends and acquaintances who would have heard about it from her or from one another.
“In your case,” David went on, “we can charge them under Section 387 of the Criminal Code. I imagine Giannini and Black are working on that right now. They’ve been in contact with the Mounties’ nuts expert in Ottawa, and they’ll know where to look for the guy. They’ll likely have someone in custody by the time you return from Paris.”
“No one I know would be connected with those people,” Judith mused over her third cup of gray American Airlines coffee.
“You’d be surprised,” David said. Now that he was no longer defending the laws he had no hand in creating, only in enforcing, he relaxed enough to feel genuinely sleepy. “They don’t wear horns, don’t carry special ID, they look like the rest of us, relatively normal, together people. Sometimes you pick them out in conversations, the mild, garden-variety bigots. At parties, for example, some charmer will suddenly start in about Jews being too smart for their own good. Or too damn grasping. Or too steadfastly different, or too politically left-wing. Or there’ll be some virulent attack on Israel...so much hatred in a rich and lazy country...” He was drifting off softly to sleep; his head dropped onto Judith’s shoulder.
She let him sleep. There were a few minutes left before landing at LaGuardia and she had some thinking to do. She searched her memory for stray comments she hadn’t noticed at the time, remarks she’d walked away from rather than face some unpleasantness and destroy the spirit of a party. Had anyone joked about Zimmerman’s fast-made fortunes? Was there something more than bug-eyed envy in the disapproving glances that passed among friends at the Press Club?
The pilot tried a couple of wisecracks about light snow and damp runways, took two labored tries at landing, then managed to slam his tires onto the ground and came to a shuddering screeching halt some distance from the terminal. The passengers loosed their knuckles from the metal armrests and clapped enthusiastically.
David jerked upright in his seat and looked at Judith accusingly. “What happened?”
“Fast landing. Why don’t you go and get your cab,” Judith said wearily. “Mrs. Singer will be expecting you, and I have to wait for my luggage. Anyway, Marsha’s meeting me at Benny’s Deli for breakfast. I called her this morning to tell her what happened.”
***
Benny’s was Marsha’s favorite deli for spicy pastrami and dill pickles on bagel, and for the reasonable certainty that Benny wasn’t going to rush you out before the second cup of coffee to make room for another batch of customers.
Judith deposited her suitcase by the counter. Benny looked at it approvingly. “Reminds me of my zeyde,” he said with a conspiratorial grin. “That’s the kind of suitcase he arrived with from the old country. Kept it next to his bed for the rest of his life, in case he had to go again.”
Marsha sat in a booth by the window on Seventh Avenue. With one hand she was stirring her coffee absentmindedly, with the other she turned the pages of a pile of manuscript she had on her lap. Her head was bent over and soft blond curls had escaped from her tidily sculpted chignon, feathery like baby hair. Her long neck tilted slightly to one side, and there was just the suggestion of a smile on her lips. Some of Judith’s most cherished early memories of Marsha featured her in exactly that pose, with the same expression of delight or amusement on her face. They dated back to Bishop Strachan School, when the two of them studied together in the library. Studying with Marsha made it impossible to remain uninvolved with books. She read passages of Plato to Judith as though she had personally discovered him. It was contagious. For a whole year, both of them had been passionately in love with Petrarch, then Hamlet, finally Heathcliff, the old standby for late-blooming teens.
“New manuscript?” Judith asked, sliding into the seat across from her.
“The best,” Marsha said. She kissed Judith once on each cheek—“Paris style,” she explained. Judith tousled the soft hair back of Marsha’s neck and pulled her head into the hollow of her shoulder—like old times.
“Damn good to see you,” Judith said, feeling a little bit better even about the broken window, and about David’s having taken her at her word and left for Mrs. Singer’s without waiting for her luggage.
“Wow,” Marsha said, settling back to examine her better. “Now that’s full battle gear. New herringbone winter coat with extra shoulder pads, your special-occasion jacket, button-down shirt with long cuffs... You must be expecting a rough day.”
Judith laughed. Marsha had always been able to read her. This morning when she dressed, she hadn’t even been aware of piling on her most protective clothes.
“Scrambled eggs and lox,” Marsha called out to Benny. “You might as well be totally fortified,” she said. “You’re not actually nervous about seeing Arthur, are you?”
“The story’s got me spooked,” Judith admitted. “It’s not Arthur, it’s not even flying to Paris to see Eva, or that some nut tried to warn me off the story last night, it’s everything. When this story began, it was fairly straightforward. Now nothing’s as it seems.”
“In that case,” Marsha said, keeping up the light banter deliberately, “Arthur will be a disappointment. He’s exactly as he seems. Somewhat spoiled early in life, overpraised for his indifferent appearance, too much easy money...”
“You sound like your mother,” Judith remarked.
Marsha shrugged. “I suppose so. But Mother was talking about Paul, who did, after all, make it himself. I’m talking about Arthur, who didn’t. First time I met Arthur he was about ten. It was at one of my parents’ come-with-the-whole-family Thanksgiving lunches that put the fear of death into all the turkeys along the North Shore throughout the month of October. The barbecue was the size of a Ping-Pong table and they stuck five turkeys on the spit at one time. All the kids were wearing jeans and T-shirts, they chased one another in packs, climbed trees, waded out onto the dunes, and dug for clams; they all got wet and grimy, except for Arthur. He wore a suit. He wore a wide tie with blackbirds on it. And black, shiny slip-on shoes with velvet bows on the toes. He stood near his mother, while the grown-ups had refreshments on the lawn—it was the last of the Indian summer. Little Lord Fauntleroy, with a difference. He stood stock still, listening to whatever the grown-ups were talking about. He
kept his hands out of sight—I remember that particularly, because having them behind his back like that gave him a military bearing my cousin George tried to imitate later, waiting for birds to snare in the marsh.”
“He sounds formal, not spoiled,” Judith said.
“Till the grown-ups went inside. Then he joined the kids down by the boat houses. I had been nominated to kid-duty; sat in the boat house pretending to read. But I was fascinated by Arthur. Everybody acted like he wasn’t there for a while, but he waited them out. By the end of the afternoon, Arthur had taken command of the group. He was wilder, more willing to take chances than anybody. He never let a kid off the hook in dare-double-dares. Ginny Simpson almost drowned trying to prove she wasn’t afraid of the water. He made George climb to the top of the red oak back of the summerhouse and hang from a limb thinner than my finger...”
“How come?” Judith asked. “Why did they do what he wanted?”
“That’s the weird thing,” Marsha said with a mouthful of pastrami sandwich. “He somehow intimidated all of them. He was tough. No question he was going to be obeyed. He assumed he was the leader—just out-talked, outwitted, out-argued everyone. Ego that large must have had some home fertilization.”
Judith had finished half her lox and eggs. She made patterns on her plate with the rest. “He’s gay,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“Everyone knows that,” Marsha said. “He’s been living with an aging art dealer who’s into S and M with young men and was even charged once for something-or-other when a boy was severely beaten.”
“What happened?”
“Nobody knows. The boy dropped the charges.”
“Do you remember Eva, too?”
“Barely. That day she wore a broad-brimmed beige hat with feathers. That’s about all I recall. My mother remarked that she was beautiful.” Marsha chuckled. “Back then that was a sign of disapproval. My mother thought Eva was too foreign.”
“Wasn’t Paul?”
“I think Eva had more trouble with English.”
“When they divorced, it was Paul your parents chose to stay friends with.”
“Friends?” Marsha snorted derisively. “They didn’t stay friends with either of them. Paul remained socially acceptable because he had the money, that’s all. Large dollops of money could, even then, buy you acceptability. Being Jewish, of course, it took more money than for a Christian. Not that anyone ever asked Paul Zimmerman for his articles of faith, that would have been in bad taste. But he was rather proud of being Jewish. He often said so. That sort of relieved everyone else of pointing out the fact.” Marsha stared at the pickles on her plate. “It took years before I realized a lot of them thought he shouldn’t have made it across the Atlantic. Some were as bad as the Nazis, just never had the chance.”
“What do you mean?”
“Racists, like your night visitor. It’s just a matter of degree, and opportunity for doing harm.” Marsha pulled on her soft leather gloves and coat. “Come on, I’ll drive you there.”
On the way they talked about James and the kids and how Judith wasn’t to worry about his finding a way to their innocent hearts. “What irks me most,” Judith said, “is the stupid phoniness of it. His ululations about his own banal feelings. He’s using them as tools.”
“True, but that’s not it,” Marsha pronounced as she pulled up in front of Arthur’s house on Riverside Drive. “What gets to you is you’re jealous of him. You’re the one that puts in all the hard time to raise them and he’s a distant romantic figure they might fall for because he never had to tell them to brush their teeth.”
“And will they?”
“Fall for him? No. They’re too smart.”
They both looked up at the high, narrow, redbrick house across the street. It had thin, arched windows with leaded panes, a stone porch with iron railings and a lantern, and a white door with a circular window at about eye level.
“Call me when you’re through,” said Marsha. “If you come down to my office, we’ll go around the corner to New York, New York, and try a bottle of Pomerol ’78. It’ll set you up for Paris.”
Judith watched her drive down the street a little too quickly. The white Chevy fishtailed at the corner, then regained its poise. As it turned the corner, Marsha gave her a thumbs-up sign. Judith thought fondly of her old Renault, which rarely got up enough steam for a fishtail.
She pressed the button to the left of the iron lantern. The door opened almost immediately. “At last,” Arthur said with exaggerated forbearance. “I thought you were going to spend the rest of the day in that car, waiting for me to come out and visit with you.” He ushered her into the glaring white entrance. “Who’s your friend? She seemed familiar.”
“Marsha Hillier.”
For a moment he searched his memory, his eyes turned toward the bas-relief angels that decorated the ceiling, his yellow eyebrows knitted, a puzzled frown across the fragile, white forehead. To add to the theatrical effect, he touched the back of his forefinger to his brow, his elbow lifted high. “Oh yes,” he said. “The colonel’s lovely daughter, with the deep-set blue eyes, who fancied herself so utterly composed till...” A little smile flashed across the thin face. “But never mind, Mrs. Hayes, I won’t waste your time with idle chatter. Come in, come in.”
His hair had only a touch of mousse today. It was cut even shorter than on the night of the party, and was a lot limper. What his clothes lacked in exuberance, they made up for in a show of affluence. The beige jacket was low-key Pierre Cardin, the darker pants narrow, tailored silk and wool, with a glow all their own. His shirt, a modest blue, was pure silk, as was his neatly tied cravat. Blue with white spots.
“Now, I’ve never quite figured out why he was a colonel, when the old buzzard never made it to any war I know of. Would you like to come into the living room, or the study?” A courtly gesture of the hand, first left, then right. “Perhaps a tour of the house would provide appropriate color for your piece? A throw-away for those House and Garden aficionados?” When she told him she’d rather he made the choice, he led her into the living room, which had the color scheme of a Ron Bloore painting—all white. It was glaring even in the gray light of the dismal snowy day. A long, soft couch covered in velvet, leather chairs, wall-to-wall carpet, shaggy goatskin rugs, a thick white and cream wall hanging above the couch, white lacquer fireplace with black interior, rough-textured walls, and black-and-white prints in stark thin black frames. In the center a long white marble table; to one side of the fireplace a white china cat, its back curved, ears back, tail high, as if about to pounce. On the other side, a small replica of Michelangelo’s David, on a tall white pedestal.
“Welcome to the palace of the Ice Queen,” Arthur said in a high falsetto voice. In the bright light, his face was even more pallid than she’d noticed earlier. There were soft pouches under his eyes. It was hard to believe he was only 26. “In some countries, as you no doubt know, white is considered the color of mourning. China, for example.” He motioned her to one of the white leather chairs. “We may as well start here, don’t you think?”
“I do appreciate your seeing me,” Judith said. As she sat down, the chair made a restrained whooshing sound of escaping air. “So soon after your father’s death.” Safe to start with the formalities.
“Oh. Oh. Oh.” Arthur laughed, a forced, high-pitched laugh with little choking sounds. For added effect, he threw himself onto the couch, his arms and legs spread out as if convulsed by laughter. “You thought I was mourning for my father, didn’t you. Now, don’t deny it, you did, right? You thought that’s why all this white?”
She didn’t deny it.
“Wrong!” he said, composing himself at last. “I wouldn’t mourn him if he was the last man on earth and I was facing total loneliness for the rest of my life. The only kind thing that old bastard has done for me in recent years, my dear Miss Hayes, is to die.” He said “dear” as “deah,” his personal version, she remembered, of a British accent.
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“I’m sorry,” Judith mumbled. “I had assumed, because I last met you at his party, that you were...friendly,” for lack of a more appropriate word.
“You assumed wrong,” Arthur said flatly. He extracted a long, brown cigarette from a china box on the table, tapped it, filter end down, on the top of the box, and lit it with a gold Ronson lighter he’d pulled from his pants pocket. “Fortunately, not inexcusably wrong, as I was at that party and you might easily have confused me with the adoring throng surrounding the now late financial wizard.”
“If you hated him so much, why did you go to his party?”
“I went because I was summoned. This humble abode, you see, as well as some other less visible joys of my life here, are rather dependent on a meager allowance he’d been generous enough to dole out for me. Since I’ve come of age, of course, he was no longer obligated to continue supporting me, but, alas, I’d become rather accustomed to not having to make a living. Work, I rather think, is greatly overrated in American society. Don’t you agree?” He gazed around the bright room with apparent enjoyment. His whole demeanor was theatrical, every gesture pushed beyond its natural content to become a satire of itself.
“I’ve never had time to consider work as anything but a necessity,” Judith admitted, rather prudishly. “Why were you summoned?”
“That little secret, I’m afraid, went with him to his just rewards.” He gestured downward with the index finger of the hand holding the cigarette. He had long thin fingers, pale and dry as his complexion. They were wrinkled at the tips as though he had spent too much time underwater. There was a long, purple mark on his wrist that stretched back under the elegant cuffs. It stood out luridly against the whiteness of his skin. “When he called, he warbled on about some special occasion he had planned that he wanted to include me in. Whatever it was, I’m sure we were spared a nasty surprise. I can’t imagine his planning anything pleasant that would include me.” He blew smoke at the ceiling, exposing his thin blue-veined throat with prominent Adam’s apple.
