The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  Now does it seem so fanciful of us to have wondered whether Gershom Finkel was stepping out with the most shrinking of the Shrinking Violets solely in order to get at our food?

  This much I can say: from the moment he became Dolly’s beau Gershom never missed a single one of our Sunday morning bagel fress-ups. He’d arrive early, in no matter what weathers, often well before Dolly got to us, often before any of us were awake ourselves (he thought nothing about knocking us up), so as to be absolutely certain he’d be in position when the bagels turned up warm. ‘Have they come yet?’ he’d ask, as though they got there under their own steam. Agitation made him louder and more staccato than usual. He fired off bagel-related interrogations. ‘Is that them?’ ‘Where they coming from today?’ Otherwise he had nothing to say. He wouldn’t even take off his coat and make himself comfortable. He simply sat on the edge of a dining chair, leafing absently through the News of the World and The People, mouth open, like a fledgling waiting to be fed.

  ‘You’d think,’ I remember my father saying, ‘he’d have the decency to get the bagels himself just once in a while.’

  ‘Or at least the smetana and kez,’ my sisters added.

  ‘Or even just the kez,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not as though he’s pink lint exactly,’ my father said.

  ‘Not with three houses,’ my sisters said.

  ‘Four,’ my father corrected them. He’d heard four. All in Didsbury, all divided into flats, and all bringing in nice rents.

  I said nothing. When it came to Gershom Finkel’s property I took a shtum powder. I knew where the original funds had come from. Plock plock, I lose, I win.

  But I shared in the family censoriousness. We didn’t care for landlordism. Nothing we could put our finger on. Just something we’d brought over with us from the Bug. Had we stayed out there we’d have been Marxist-Leninists, or at the very least Bundists.

  Which might have been why, over and above the fact that we wouldn’t have done anything to hurt Dolly, we put up with her admirer. Landlord or not, there was something of the stray dog, even the mad dog, about him. Reason dictated he be put down. But we couldn’t go along with that. There’d been too much putting down. So we took him in. And let him fress our bagels.

  Canoodling? Did I say canoodling? There was none of that on his part. Try as I might, I am unable to remember Gershom Finkel ever showing my poor aunty Dolly a single sign of his affection. The snuggling-up, such as it was, was all on her side. She’d drape herself over him while he was idling through the papers as though she couldn’t bear not to be reading what he was reading, or she’d suddenly make a dart for him, like a wild impulsive girl, and leap up and kiss him plum in the middle of that born-bald, stayed-bald head of his, or she’d talk about ‘we’ in a way that seemed simultaneously to give him satisfaction and cause him pain. ‘We’ weren’t taking milk in our tea any more. ‘We’ had been to hear Perry Como at the Free Trade Hall. ‘We’ didn’t enjoy him as much as ‘we’d’ enjoyed Sammy Davis Jnr the week before. ‘We’ believed that while some of the changes were to be welcomed, the Rent Act still favoured tenants at the expense of landlords.

  ‘He’s snatched her mind,’ I said to my mother.

  She sighed. ‘Well let’s just hope he goes on wanting it,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you think that after a certain age it doesn’t suit a woman to be in love?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘How old is Aunty Dolly?’ I asked.

  There’d always been a degree of reticence around the question of my aunties’ ages. They were so alike in spinsterliness that I’d been inclined to follow my father’s lead, lumping them together as the Shrinking Violets and imagining that they’d shrunk into the world on the same day as one another. Though in the course of cutting them up in the toilet, I must say I’d surprised myself by noticing important differences between them which bore on the athleticism of the poses I was prepared to put them into.

  ‘Not too old,’ she said.

  ‘Then maybe I should rephrase my question,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think it’s possible she’s too young?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  It’s wise to hold fast to the iceberg analogy when judging the depth of feeling between a man and a woman. Most of what there is you don’t see.

  As a family, that was how we satisfied ourselves that Gershom was giving Dolly the love she needed. We didn’t see it. It was happening somewhere else. In the main, we guessed, it was happening at the Ritz and the Plaza and beneath whichever other spinning ball of slivered mirrors they danced. On the dance floor, at least, Gershom would have to put his hands on her and hold her close.

  To the degree that we couldn’t imagine Gershom dancing, dancing humanized him. It was so unlikely that it proved we didn’t know him, and anything we didn’t know about him was bound to be better than anything we did.

  As for Dolly, there could be no doubt whatsoever that dancing had made a different woman of her. I myself may not have been a pretty picture, running from the conga eel of romping Walzer women, but my deformity was as nothing compared to Dolly’s when some stranger to a family do blundered into the heat-haze of embarrassment around her and asked her to take the floor with him. I’d know when such a thing was happening even if I was taking cover at the other end of the biggest function room in Broughton. I could smell it. Dolly’s face I knew I would not be able to look at. To the un-shy, who are the lords and masters of their faces, the word discountenance has only metaphorical applications, but for my mother’s side it described transfiguration of the utmost horror. Literally, we were put out of countenance, ousted and exiled from our faces, denied all ascendancy over our features, left helpless as they screwed and twisted and did whatever else they wanted with us. Better to be dead than to be put out of countenance. Dead and done with. Burned. Drowned. Six feet under with the deep snow piled above you. Anything rather than the living death of being buried alive inside your own face and having to look on while it has its way with you. So, no, I couldn’t bear to look at Dolly. The expression in the eyes of the birdbrain who’d asked her for a dance was frightful enough. Teach him to think twice the next time. A better and a wiser man, you can bet your life, he woke the morrow morn. He had seen where hell was, and how asking leave for a dance could get you there.

  But that was Dolly then, Dolly BGF, Before Gershom Finkel. Now Dolly twirled and spun in a lightsome world of foxtrots and quicksteps and for all I knew to the contrary mambos and black bottoms and boomps-a-daisies as well. She even taught the stuff! Wasn’t that typical of S for spinster excess — in six months she’d gone from rank beginner to professor. ‘I’m not going to be the one to show you how,’ Gershom had said. ‘It’s like teaching your wife to drive. It can only lead to trouble.’ So they’d taken themselves off to a dancing school above a haberdashery shop — I saw that as symbolic – in Moss Side. And now Dolly was their best teacher!

  She even tried to teach me, one Sunday afternoon, pushing the twenty or so people who were gathered at our place for bagels back against the walls as though we were at a high school bop, girls on that side, boys on this, except that there were no boys in our house. She got nowhere with me. It was too embarrassing. Her new vitality sent shivers down my spine. It was as if she’d shed her old skin and still hadn’t grown a replacement. You didn’t dare look for fear of seeing things you shouldn’t see, her gederrim, her liver, her kidneys, her pink pulsing heart. And besides, I wasn’t able to count out rhythm.

  ‘It’s natural,’ she said.

  Nothing was less likely to reconcile me to nature than the word natural on the lips of one of my aunties.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  She should have had fellow-feeling for my discomfiture, but have I not said that the shy are tyrants of self-engrossment, that they burn alone, leaving their fellow sufferers to be consumed in their own flames? And the ex-shy are more callous still.

  ‘Just find it in yourself,’ she said, ste
ering me into the middle of the room. ‘One, two, three, and … one, two, three …’

  No use. The only thing in nature One, two, three reminded me of was bumping the Copestakes’ van out on to London Road in Liverpool.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ Dolly said, ‘you must have rhythm for table tennis.’

  ‘He hasn’t,’ Gershom Finkel answered for me.

  She had more success with Dora.

  But then so did Gershom.

  Cutting up my aunties was an act of love. When I want to bring them back to the front of my memory today, it’s to my box of mutilated photographs I go first. My memory of my box of mutilated photographs. (The box itself I no longer have. I took it to Cambridge with me, years later, and threw it in a bin behind the cricket pavilion on Parker’s Piece, where I calculated that anyone finding it would not know what it was, or at least who they were.) In the box I was able to distinguish them more keenly. I paid them greater attention. The reason I am able to recall now that Dora only ever turned her eyes towards you in order to let you know that you were wrong, and that she had a slyer way of smiling than Dolly, as though there was an understanding as to truth which she’d reached only with herself, and that she was more coquettish than Dolly in the quiet as a nun style, and had a slighter and less lumpy bust — not unlumpy just less lumpy — is that I had to make allowances for these things when choosing which prefab kid’s mother’s body to attach her to. Art — art gets you there every time.

  Whether Gershom made similar observations in the course of taking both sisters out dancing I have never been able to decide. It may be that Dora’s sly interior smile bears on Gershom’s preference only in that it helps explain how come she went along with it, or worse still, encouraged it. ‘If you have a choice of two, always go for the quieter one,’ Sheeny Waxman once advised me. Among those of us who frequented Laps’ it was common knowledge — even I knew it and I knew nothing — that the quiet ones were the best ones, that they asked the least, gave the most, and screamed the loudest. But Sheeny’s point was subtler than that. If you have a choice, go for the quieter - the quieter. In other words, where there is competition between two — and when isn’t there competition between two? — the less socially confident will be the one to deliver because she is the one who has a score to settle. The mistress is almost always more timid than the wife, but where the mistress is the wife’s best friend (let alone her sister) there is no almost about it, she is invariably the more timid. Invariably.

  Boo to the goose.

  Boo.

  Boo.

  Boo.

  Poor Dolly, having to lose to the only person less confident than her on the planet.

  Poor Dora, having to destroy her own sister in order to find some self-worth.

  Poor Gershom — No. We could have been wrong, my mother, my father, my sisters, Fay, me, but our sympathies didn’t extend that far. Gershom’s heart was not engaged. Not in either direction. If his heart had ever been engaged to Dolly, however fleetingly, he would not have been able to drop her off in Lower Broughton after a Wednesday night swirling at the Ritz, mention it to her, as a sort of afterthought, while she was getting out of the car, that he believed Dora made a better partner for him — nothing personal, just a compatibility thing — and then drive away. And if his heart had been engaged to Dora he would not have encouraged her, or allowed her to encourage him to encourage her, to make a stranger of her sister. No. There was no reason to poor-Gershom Gershom. He had nothing much to do with his life, that was all. I knew why but couldn’t say, for fear I’d be castigated for not saying earlier. He had nothing much to do with his life because he’d bet against his own gifts when he was young. Plock plock, I lose. He’d fouled his own nest. Serve him right.

  But what about when it came to fouling ours? My father was afraid that now he’d got a taste for it he wouldn’t stop. Next it would be my mother he’d try. Then Fay. Then my sisters. Because wherever he looked in my family there were sisters, and he specialized in sisters.

  My mother made a sound like a death-rattle. ‘I think you’ll find,’ she said, ‘that he’ll have the brains to stay away from here in the future.’

  ‘What, and miss the bagels?’

  It was a black joke. What wasn’t black at the moment? The last thing we really expected on the very first Sunday after Black Wednesday was a visit from Gershom Finkel. Dolly had been put to bed in our house. She was given my sisters’ room, my sisters moved in with my mother, and my father moved in with me. We crept about, not speaking. Neuralgia had spun its web among us, a black spider that hung where we could see it, but which we didn’t dare disturb for fear of its venom. All our heads ached. Nothing and no one was in the right place; every pattern was dislocated, as they are when you take in the dying. Dora remained at home, in an excitable and heightened state, according to Fay, who ferried herself and my grandmother between the two. Fay feared as much for Dora’s health as for Dolly’s. There was a strange light around her. And she had started to make small talk with my grandfather, which no one had done for years. ‘Seeing the man’s point of view suddenly,’ was my mother’s reading of that. My father had a more practical interpretation. ‘She’s just softening him up,’ he reckoned. ‘Trying to get him on side for when Gershom moves in.’ Fay pulled a face. ‘In that event we’ll all have to come here,’ she said. It was naturally assumed that ‘here’ would be safe, and that Gershom would move the centre of his operations to Lower Broughton, however poky it was. So, no, we most definitely did not expect him to turn up for bagels as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  But turn up he did!

  He did. He did. And what is more he came early!

  It was my mother who opened the door to him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Dolly is here.’

  ‘Oh, is she?’ He didn’t give the slightest sign that seeing her would at all inconvenience him. He made as if to come into the house.

  (‘He was looking over my shoulder,’ my mother told us afterwards. ‘He was actually trying to look past me to see whether the bagels had come.’)

  ‘No,’ she said again, ‘you can’t come in.’

  (‘I actually had to bar his way,’ she told us. ‘I thought he was going to walk over me.’)

  He started to laugh. The same broken, rat-a-tat-tat laugh he used when he was pretending to admire my medals and cups, turning them upside down and examining them for price stickers. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’ve taken sides. Fair enough. I thought as Dora’s sister that you’d have stuck by her. But fair enough.’

  (‘I could have hit him,’ she told us. ‘I don’t know what stopped me.’)

  He turned and walked back down the path, airless and loping as when he circumnavigated the ping-pong table at the Akiva, a man not among friends.

  My father called him before he got to the gate. ‘Gershom, I’d like a word.’

  ‘No, Joel,’ I heard my mother say.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to touch him. I just want a word.’ He had his coat on. And was jiggling his van keys. ‘Let’s go for a spin, Gershom,’ he said.

  ‘I’m frightened of what he’s going to do to him,’ my mother said. ‘You know your father. He forgets his own strength.’

  It’s exciting for a boy to have a father who doesn’t know his own strength, or at least it is when that strength isn’t getting to know itself on him. But my sisters too were stimulated. Boy or girl, we all want a father who will put a bit of justice back into the world. We tried to imagine what he might be doing to Gershom now, twenty, thirty, forty minutes after he’d requested a word. ‘That’s a hell of a long time for a word,’ I said.

  ‘Not if the word’s “Die, you bastard”,’ my sisters said.

  ‘That’s three words.’

  ‘Well, you know how Dad always exaggerates.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll kill him,’ I said. ‘I think he’s driving him to Miles Platting and is going to dump him there.’

  ‘Why Miles Platting
?’

  ‘Because Miles Platting is a good place to dump people who won’t collaborate.’

  ‘Isn’t the problem that Gershom has been collaborating only too well?’

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ my mother said. ‘How long is it now?’

  I looked at my watch. ‘An hour and ten minutes. Maybe he’s gone to get the bagels.’

  ‘Maybe he’s gone to make Gershom get the bagels,’ my sisters said.

  We all agreed that was the start of the perfect punishment. But only if he was going to get Gershom to buy the bagels every week. And all the extras. None of which Gershom would ever be allowed to eat. He’d have to sit, Sunday after Sunday, tied to a chair with his mouth open, and watch while we wolfed the lot. In Gershom hell.

  ‘Naked,’ I said.

  But my sisters drew the line at that.

  Two hours later my father returned. Carrying the bagels. But otherwise alone. And wet.

  ‘Where have you been?’ my mother asked.

  ‘Get the plates out first,’ he said. ‘And get me a fork for the smetana and kez.’

  Only when he’d mixed the cream with the cream, not too much of the one, with not too much of the other, did he tell us where he’d been.

  ‘The lake,’ he said. ‘Heaton Park Lake.’

  ‘Oh, Joel, you haven’t,’ my mother said.

  He trowelled smetana and kez on to half a bagel, smoothing the surface, taking out all the lumps and bubbles, leaving us to imagine the worst for half a minute more. He was dangerously pleased with himself. I pictured Gershom’s sarcastic head bobbing on the water, in the scummy froth around the island, exactly where I’d found that first ping-pong ball which it wasn’t too fantastical — was it? — to blame for all this. No doubt my mother pictured something far less cheerful.