Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  They played at a low teak table, elaborately carved. Like the rest of the furniture, it had originated in Latin America and had accompanied the soprano into exile. The walls were still decorated with photographs of the deceased at various stages in her career. The child sat on the floor next to the table like a third player, following the moves.

  Mrs. Goldfanger worried that the change in Joe’s fortune would alter their relationship. Of course she was happy for him, though she did think … she did think … well, couldn’t the apartment have been left to a family member?

  “There was no family,” Tamar’s grandmother said.

  “And she was of sound mind, I suppose,” Mrs. Goldfanger said, sighing.

  “Thoroughly.”

  In fact very little in the building changed. Though Joe lived in the apartment that had been bequeathed to his wife, he was always available for night duty. Sometimes he made dinner on those evenings, though more often his wife cooked; and the Moroccan children dropped in, and the widower, and sometimes Tamar, and sometimes even Tamar’s grandmother; and when Mrs. Goldfanger came home it was as if a little party were being conducted on her premises. Mr. Goldfanger had always liked a crowd. He became restless only on the brief occasions when Joe left the room; as soon as Joe returned, and their eyes met, he settled into his usual calm vacancy.

  As the treaty was renewed and expanded and a citizenship clause inserted, more of Joe’s countrymen arrived, to take a wider variety of jobs. One, it is said, became a skilled schnorrer. The noun allog entered the accommodating vocabulary. The word became disconnected from the idea of chieftain; but it gained the connotation, at least in Jerusalem, of Resident Indispensable. In heedless Tel Aviv it sometimes refers to the janitor.

  CHANCE

  WHEN OUR SYNAGOGUE was at last selected to become the new home of a Torah from Czechoslovakia—a Torah whose old village had been obliterated—the Committee of the Scroll issued an announcement, green letters on ivory, very dignified. Our presence was requested, the card said, at a Ceremony of Acceptance at two in the afternoon on Sunday the sixteenth of November, nineteen hundred and seventy-five.

  Nothing in the invitation suggested that the Committee of the Scroll had chafed under the dictatorship of its chairwoman, the cantor’s wife. But my parents and I heard all about it from our neighbor Sam, a committee member. Sam said that the cantor’s wife wanted the Ceremony of Acceptance to take place on a Friday night or a Saturday morning—not on the pale Sabbath of the gentiles. The group united against her. Here in America’s heartland Sunday was the proper day for special ceremonies, they said. Also we’d get better attendance—faculty from the university, interested non-Jews, maybe even the mayor. Then the sexton expressed dismay that the Torah would enter the premises three weeks before the date of the ceremony.

  It would lie in the basement—a corpse! he cried—because the Leibovich-Sutton nuptials were scheduled for the first Sunday after its arrival and the Lehrman-Grossman ones for the second.

  But what could anyone do?—weddings must never be postponed. Sam and the sexton cleared out a little room off the social hall directly under the sanctuary, and the rabbi blessed the room; and they fitted its door with a lock. The congregation continued its busy life.

  Lots of activities went on weekly in our synagogue. The Talmud class met on Monday nights. Hebrew for Adults was taught on Tuesdays. Wednesdays belonged to committees. On Thursdays from six to eight a university professor conducted a seminar on Chasidic thought. Friday nights and Saturday mornings were devoted to worship, and on Sundays children straggled into the hateful old school building next to the new sanctuary. Parents had to pay for Sunday school (some also paid their kids); the other courses were free and open to anyone.

  On a Monday morning the Czech Torah arrived by plane. The cantor, the rabbi, the sexton, and Sam laid it reverently in the little cleared-out room. They locked the room, and there it remained, its presence unsuspected by the Talmud class, the Hebrew students, the scholars of Chasidism, and the committees. Perhaps the sexton visited it sometimes. The Torah study group left it entirely alone.

  THE TORAH STUDY GROUP was not open to anyone. It met on Sunday nights, in private homes, usually at our house but sometimes at the cantor’s apartment. His flat had a formal dining room, my father told me: panels and dark wallpaper and a weak chandelier. When the Torah study group assembled at the cantor’s long mahogany table, no one sat at the head or the foot. The men huddled near the center, three to a side. The cantor’s wife insisted on protecting the table with a lace cloth. The complicated geometry of the cloth was distracting, even more distracting than my mother’s habit of dealing in a singsong voice when the Torah study group met at our house.

  “Why is the cantor’s wife so stern?” I asked my parents.

  “She’s from Brussels,” was my father’s reply.

  “They have no children,” my mother explained.

  “Or maybe Antwerp,” said my father, sighing. “The chips snag on that goddamn lace.”

  The round Formica table in the breakfast area of our kitchen didn’t require a cloth. It seated eight easily. At my fourteenth birthday party, in September, some dozen girls had squeezed around it to eat pizza and make voodoo gourds under the supervision of Azinta, a sophomore at the university, our then live-in.

  For the Torah study group, our table was usually adorned with a single bowl of pretzels. But on the Sunday evening after the Lehrman-Grossman wedding it wore a centerpiece of Persian lilies and freesia. My parents had attended the wedding and its luncheon, where my mother found a paper daisy under her plate, signifying that she had won the flowers.

  I was fiddling with the blossoms. “Dede o savalou!” I sang. I was still partial to voodoo despite Azinta’s having left us.

  “Oh, shut up,” my mother said, though agreeably. “Help me with this food.”

  I joined her at the counter that separated the kitchen from the breakfast area. Halloween had passed. Outside the window our backyard was covered with leaves. A pumpkin was softly decaying on the windowsill.

  My mother sliced the beef to be served later to the group. She sliced the cheese and the tomatoes and the rye. I arranged the food in horizontal rows on a long platter. I laid pickles here and there, vertically, like notes. She slid the platter into the refrigerator.

  I turned on the hanging lamp over the table. Its brilliant cone would soon illuminate not only the Lehrman-Grossman flowers but seven glasses of beer or cider. (The cantor’s wife provided only ginger ale.) Later in the evening the light would fall upon the sandwich materials. (The cantor’s wife left a plate of hard pastries on the sideboard.) In the hours of play the lamp would light up the faces of the six learned men and the one woman.

  It was seven thirty. My father emerged from his study, and stretched. The doorbell rang.

  The cantor and the rabbi came in, one immediately after the other. These two spent a lot of time as a pair. They got together not only to conduct services and prepare bat mitzvahs and report to the officers; they also went skating in winter and took bicycle rides out to the farm area in spring. I had seen them on their bikes. The cantor’s buttocks lapped over his seat like mail pouches. The rabbi’s curls stuck up on either side of his cap like the horns of a ram. Sometimes the cantor’s wife went biking, too. She maintained her strict posture even on a ten-speed.

  “Hello, hello,” the cantor said to us all, remembering not to pinch my cheek.

  “Hi,” the rabbi said to my father and me.

  My friend Margie’s father arrived next, along with her grandfather. Margie’s father was treasurer of the synagogue. Also he ran a successful finance business. Margie referred to him as “the usurer.” After his wife’s death he had invited his own father to live with him and Margie. Margie called him “the patriarch.” The patriarch’s moist mouth protruded from a ruche of a beard. His son kept him supplied with white silk shirts embossed with further white, and shawl-collared sweaters.

  The usurer’s
walk had a dancer’s grace. He greeted my mother with a friendly hug and me with an imperfect kiss, lips not quite touching my skin. The patriarch raised his hand in a general blessing.

  Sam, who had to trot over only from next door, came last. I let him in. The others were already seated at the round table in the kitchen. My mother had transferred the Lehrman-Grossman flowers to the counter.

  Sam barely reached my shoulder. He was in his fifties, and worn out. “Hello, darling,” he said glumly.

  I followed him into the kitchen and he took the empty seat next to my mother. I placed my own chair at a little remove, behind my mother’s right shoulder. But I didn’t plan to remain seated. I would soon stand and begin to move around the group, pausing above one person and then another, looking at the fan of cards each held. I was allowed this freedom on the promise of silence and impassivity. The tiniest flare of a nostril, my father warned, might reveal to some other player the nature of the hand I was peeking at. So I kept my face wooden. Eventually I’d settle on a high stool next to the counter, and hook my heels on the stool’s upper rungs, and let my clasped hands slide between my denimed thighs. Hunched like that, I’d watch the rest of the game.

  Now, though, I sat behind my mother’s silk shoulder. She was wearing the same ruby-colored dress she’d worn to the wedding. I could see just the tip of her impudent nose. My mother was a devoted convert, but she could not convert her transcendental profile. Even in the harsh glow of the lamp, she was, in the words of my nasty great-aunt Hannah, a thing of beauty and a goy forever.

  Two of the men—the slate-haired cantor and the young rabbi—were also handsome enough to withstand the spotlight. The patriarch was elderly enough to be ennobled by it.

  The usurer had a reputation for handsomeness. Margie told me he was pursued by women, not all of them single. At the table he warmly accepted the cards dealt him as if his love for each was infinite. When he folded—turned cards down, withdrawing from a game—he did it with an air of fatherly regret. The overhead lamp greased his hair and darkened his lips.

  Our neighbor Sam was less than handsome. His small curved nose was embellished with a few hideous hairs. His upper lip often rose above his yellow teeth, and sometimes stayed there, on the ledge of his gum, twitching. His upper body twitched a lot, too. “Maybe he a duppy,” Azinta had suggested one September day, looking through our broad kitchen window at Sam raking leaves in the next backyard. “Cannot lie properly in he grave. Tormented by need to venge self.”

  Azinta—christened Ann—was the daughter of two Detroit dentists who were extremely irritated by her adoption of island speech. They became even more irritated when she left us in October to share quarters with Ives Nielson, the owner of a natural food shop called, more or less eponymously, the Red Beard. My mother spent a long evening on the telephone with Azinta’s mother, trying to reassure her. I eavesdropped on the extension in my bedroom.

  “A phase, I’m certain,” my mother said. “Azinta—Ann, I mean—wasn’t happy with the philosophy department.”

  “She could have switched to premed instead of to that Swede.”

  “A short-lived rebellion,” my mother predicted. “Like yours?” the dentist said.

  Duppy or not, Sam was suffering from all his tics tonight. His shoulders moved up and down in defeated shrugs.

  My father was not handsome, either. I had recently and suddenly become aware of his lack of looks, as if a snake had hissed the secret in my ear. I was ashamed of my awareness. His bald head shone grossly back at the lamp. His big pocky nose gleamed, too. His cigar glowed. Only his voice revealed his soul—the velvet voice of a scholar. He was a professor of political theory. His smile was broad, and there was a space between his two front teeth. He used that space to good effect at the lake in the summer. Lying on his back in the water, he could spout like a whale.

  WHATEVER I KNOW ABOUT POKER I learned from watching the Torah study group. I learned that a royal straight flush was the best possible hand. This made sense—what could be grander than king, queen, and offspring, with a ten as steward, all under the tepee of an ace? Four cards of the same denomination were next best, and extremely likely to win the pot; then three of one value and two of another—that was called a full house; then five of the same suit, a flush; and so on down to a pair. Sometimes nobody had a pair, and the highest card won all the money.

  I learned that whoever was dealing chose the form of the game. The deal passed from player to player in a clockwise direction. Betting within each round followed the same clockwise rule. Some games were called Draw; in those each player held his cards in his hand, not revealing them to anyone. He had to guess other players’ holdings from their behavior and their betting and how many cards they drew. Other games were Stud; each player’s cards lay overlapping on the table, forming a wiggly spoke toward the center, some cards faceup and some facedown. The down cards were called “the hole.” A player could look in his own hole but not in anybody else’s.

  During my twenties I kept brief company with a fellow who played in a big-money weekly, and I discovered from him that my parents’ pastime had been poker in name only. “Two winners?” he said, laughing. (In my parents’ Stud games the best hand usually divided the money with the worst.) “What’s Chicago?” he wondered. The lowest spade in the hole split the pot with the high hand, I diffidently told him. “Racist nomenclature, wouldn’t you say?” he remarked.

  “Oh dear.”

  “I’m sure the gatherings were pleasant,” he quickly added.

  White chips stood for nickels, red for dimes, blue for quarters. My mother was forbidden to deal her frivolous inventions like Mittelschmerz, where the most middling hand won, and Servitude, where you had to match the pot if you wanted to fold. The ante was a dime in Draw and a nickel in Stud. You couldn’t bet a dime in Stud until a pair was showing, and the amount of the raise could be no greater than the initial bet, and there were only three raises each round. In short: very small sums were redistributed among these friends. Even between them my parents rarely recovered the price of the sandwiches.

  And yet everybody—or at least every man—played with ardor, as if something of great value were at stake: a fortune, a reputation, a king’s daughter.

  THE PATRIARCH DEALT FIRST that evening. “Five-card Draw,” he announced. “Ante a dime.”

  He dealt five cards to everybody. From my chair I could see only Sam’s cards and my mother’s. Sam had a jack/ten and I knew he’d draw to it. My mother had a low pair and I knew she, too, would draw.

  The patriarch turned to his left. “If you please.”

  “Ten cents,” the cantor responded, and tossed in a red chip.

  “Raise,” the rabbi said. Two red chips. He was sitting to the left of the cantor and to the right of Sam. I couldn’t see Sam’s face, only his crummy cards. Of the rabbi I could see only a portion of his curls.

  “Call,” Sam said, matching the rabbi’s bet. He put in two red chips.

  “Raise,” my mother said, on her silly pair of fives.

  The usurer smiled and called. Dad passed a hand over his brow and called. The patriarch folded. Everybody else called.

  The draw began. The cantor drew one card, the rabbi two, Sam three. My mother drew two. She picked up the five of clubs and a queen. The usurer drew one, and seemed to welcome the newcomer. My father drew one, and frowned, but that message, too, could have been false.

  The next round of betting began with my mother. She bet ten cents. The usurer folded. Dad folded. The cantor folded. The rabbi tossed in a red chip. Sam folded, his shoulder shuddering.

  The rabbi and my mother laid their cards on the table. He had three nines to her three fives.

  Did it happen exactly that way? A deck of cards has fifty-two factorial permutations—fifty-three factorial times two if you use jokers. (The Torah study group didn’t play with jokers, though my mother had made a plea for their inclusion.) Fifty-two factorial is an enormous number. Roughly that many angels da
nce on any pin. Furthermore, two decades have passed since the night the rabbi’s three nines (missing the spade) beat my mother’s three fives (missing the diamond) in the first game of the weekly group. I would be wise to distrust my memory.

  Yet I can see the moment as if it were happening now. The two of them inspect each other’s cards. My mother then smiles at the rabbi, looking up at his eyes. The rabbi smiles at my mother, looking down at the pile of chips.

  “I was dealt two pairs,” says my father’s thrilling voice. “But I didn’t improve.

  “I was dealt one pair,” my mother says.

  “You raised on a pair?” my father says. “God help me.”

  “I improved!”

  “Insufficiently,” the usurer says, and smiles.

  The rabbi leans forward and sweeps the pile of chips toward him. A white one rolls onto the floor. I pick it up, and idly stow it in the front pocket of my jeans.

  At the Torah study group I learned the politesse of dealing, at least as it was practiced there. In Stud games, though everyone could see all the up cards, it was the custom for the dealer to name them as they appeared. Also he commented on the developing hands. “Another heart, flushing,” the cantor might have said in the second game, dealing to the rabbi. “Possible straight,” he said, as a nine followed an eight in front of Sam. “Good low,” as a four followed a six in my mother’s display. “No visible help,” he sympathized when the usurer’s jack of diamonds took on an eight of spades like a bad debt. “Who knows?” he would shrug sooner or later; and then, reverting to the Yiddish of his ancestors, “Vehr vaist?” Vehr vaist? was the standard interpretation of some unpaired, unstraightening, unflushing medium-value hodgepodge. If the player behind this mess didn’t fold when he received yet another unworthy card, the dealer’s “Vehr vaist?” became ominous, reminding us that there were cards we couldn’t see, things we couldn’t know.