Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  Though she was not always the same. He sometimes sensed a change. The exhausted staff shrugged. “Not growth,” one of the doctors warned, his English infirm. “Not expect growth, no.” Okay, but once in a while her unforgiving expression softened a little, or her vague look of recognition slid into an equally vague one of welcome. If she could only talk. Perhaps she understood, a little. When they were alone—when Mary had left for one of her desperate walks around the fenced-in pond—he told Teddie that he loved her. He held her fat fingers. He kissed her fat cheek.

  “HOYLE!”

  Joss took his place at the table with Happy and the Brigadier and the writers. They revised, argued, laughed. Every so often Joss dropped his hand into his pocket and fingered this week’s letter from the Lady in Green. He knew it by heart—he memorized each one now, like a script, easy as breathing.

  Happy Bloom’s loud good humor—I guess the public wants it.

  Happy and the writers avoided the raw subject of the recent war. But the Europe exposed by the war had inspired many of Happy’s inventions—the British dowager, for instance; the French floor-walker; even the milkmaid who yodeled first and then warbled in Yiddish.

  But you—the silent consort—are what the public needs.

  The public needed the dowager’s meek husband? The floor-walker’s intimidated customer? The milkmaid’s goat—a horned, garlanded, Joss-faced goat who raised itself on two hooves and executed a double flap and a shuffle?

  I absolutely adore the dancing goat.

  Happy and Joss would be wallpaper hangers this Thursday. Costumed in overalls, they would lift a protesting clerk, chair and all, out of an office. They would heedlessly paper over bookcases, radiators, paintings. The rolls of wallpaper wouldn’t match. Happy would disappear into a doorless closet to decorate its inner walls. Joss would paper over the recess. There’d be shouts from the imprisoned Happy, in a variety of accents. He’d sing a few bars of “Alone”; he’d sing “Someday I’ll Find Me.” At last his head would burst through the paper, that round lovable head: the teeth, slightly buck anyway, goofily enlarged; a multitude of curls spilling over the brow; the eyebrows darkened and the eyes kohled. While Happy mugged to applause, Joss’s back would be turned to the audience—the silent consort, papering a window.

  “THE SHOW WAS FUNNY,” Mary acknowledged on the train that Friday. “You were funny.” Her smile turned downward as it had in her young womanhood—but it was a smile; it was.

  Teddie, sitting, looked away when they came, and banged her forehead against the hip of an attendant. After a while she stopped banging. The weather was mild for January; they sat on metal chairs in the brown garden. The paint on his chair was chipping. At these prices, you’d think … It was better not to think.

  YOU KNOW SOMETHING? He depends on you! Maybe you depend on each other.

  And maybe she too endured a mutual dependence, a marriage of convenience, a spousal alliance like his with Happy. Poor Happy—overbearing mother, two greedy ex-wives, years on the circuit, years in radio, and then, at last, seized by the new men of the New Medium.

  Joss was doing third lead in a musical at that time, playing a father-in-law. The thing was holding on. Demobilized servicemen liked it. People were traveling again: out-of-towners liked it. It gave him a chance to hoof a little.

  Happy called him. “The Happy Bloom Hour needs you!”

  “My face on a screen?” Joss said. “I can’t see that. I was a flop in Movieland …”

  “It’s not the same, kid. This screen is just a postcard. People aren’t looking for handsome on it. They’re looking for uncular.”

  “What?”

  “Like an uncle,” screamed Happy.

  “Avuncular.”

  “Sure, what you say. That turkey you’re in, Joss … how long can it last? Television: it’ll be forever. Us together.” Joss said he’d think about it. “Yeah, think. I’ve got your shtick worked out already. You’ll be mute, won’t even have to smile.”

  Once, early days, they had a near disaster on camera. A guest came on drunk; he flubbed, froze, fell over the cables, passed out. And one of the girls had a hemorrhage backstage and was rushed to the hospital. The props were in the wrong places because they had not yet found the Brigadier. They had to improvise an entire number. Happy wriggled into his tuxedo and pulled on a pageboy wig, blond. Joss grabbed a tweed jacket from the assistant producer. He came on slowly, the love-struck, ruined professor. He sat down heavily at the stage upright piano and played “Falling in Love Again.” The orchestra kept still. Happy leaned against the piano and sang the song with a Marlene Dietrich accent, nice, Ws and Rs pursed just as Joss would have done them, corners of the mouth compressed. The wheeled camera came close and Joss saw that it was focusing on his own face and he squeezed out some water. The papers made a lot of them that week, Mr. Bloom and Mr. Hoyle, bringing sensitivity to burlesque, melding tragedy with comedy, mixing tears and laughter, all that stuff.

  Dear Mr. Hoyle,

  What an article, that one in the Post, telling secrets, all about Happy Bloom’s writers, and the people who have quit, and the ones who have stayed. And the rehearsals in the Hotel Pamona. Fans will be hanging around the Pamona all day now, won’t they?

  The rehearsal site had been known for months. Fans already hung around. But unwigged and un-made-up and bespectacled, Happy Bloom was as anonymous in a New York hotel as he was in his Brooklyn house of worship. At five o’clock he whisked unnoticed through the side door, a revolving one.

  I myself will be in the lobby of the Pamona next Monday, April 13th, at noon.

  The Lady in Green

  ON SATURDAY:

  “Lunch? Monday? Out?” screamed Happy.

  “Can’t be helped,” Joss said. “You fellows work on the patter number—I’m not in it.”

  And then Happy, in one of his turnarounds, said, “My dentist is threatening me like the gestapo, all my gums are falling out. Okay, everybody goes out to lunch on Monday. Paolo will kill himself when he doesn’t find us. Don’t bother to come back until Tuesday morning. My dentist will bless you, Hoyle … But we start at eight on Monday, not nine,” he yelled.

  Monday they did start at eight, and at quarter of twelve the gang skedaddled, kids on holiday. Only Joss was left.

  He straightened his tie and adjusted his blazer in front of the big mirror. First position, second, third … He grasped the barre and raised his right leg, high. It might be a good bit: mournful male balletomane. Would it be funnier in whiteface? Suppose he played a bum trying to play Ghiselle? A church bell rang. He was so sallow. Still on one foot, he let go of the barre and pinched his cheeks; he had seen Mary do that twenty years ago. He resumed his normal stance, left the room, shut the door and locked it.

  He rode the elevator to the lobby.

  The elevator doors parted. He stepped out.

  On a chair beside a palm, facing not the elevators but the registration desk, sat a female in glasses. The forest green of her jacket and pleated skirt hinted more at uniform than suit. Her legs were bare. Her ankles were warmed by bobby socks. She looked about fourteen years old.

  Joss walked slowly forward. She had a bony nose with a little bump. Her dark hair was curly and thin. She was probably Jewish or one of those hybrids. He looked at the feet again. One laced shoe had a thickened sole and heel.

  Her age had angered him, and now her defect turned anger into fury. It was a familiar tumble. Whenever one of his brothers showed up at the door—just a loan, Joss, something to tide me over—he was only vexed. But: I have kids, Joss—when he heard that he wanted to kill the jerk, and then he wanted the jerk to kill him.

  He paused, waiting for his rage to peak and subside. Meanwhile the girl took off her glasses. He walked forward again. He slipped behind her chair and placed his hands over her eyes. Unstartled—she had perhaps sensed his approach—she placed her hands over his. For a few moments they maintained this playful pose. Then he slid his avuncular hands from beneath her
s. He glided around to the front of the chair and stood looking down at his correspondent.

  “I am Jocelyn Hoyle,” he said.

  “I am Mamie Winn.” Her gaze didn’t falter. Her small round eyes were a flat brown. She put on her glasses again.

  “You haven’t had lunch, I hope,” he said. “Tell me you haven’t had lunch.”

  “OTTO BELIEVES that young people should be introduced to alcohol early,” Mamie said to Joss across the booth, and then she said to the waiter who was inquiring about drinks, “Kir, please.”

  “What?”

  “White wine with a splash of cassis.”

  “Forget the cassis, Mamie,” Joss said. “Draft for me,” he said to the waiter. Perhaps Cassidy’s had been a mistake. He wondered if he could be arrested for plying a minor. He didn’t know her age exactly; that would be his defense. He did know she was in tenth grade, the prosecution would point out. The waiter served the drinks.

  “Otto?” Joss inquired.

  “He lives in the next apartment. From Vienna. The University of Chicago is the only true American university, Otto says. All the others imitate European ones. So I want to go to Chicago.” She sipped her wine, leaving lipstick on the glass. She had much to learn about cosmetics. “Is your daughter in college?” she asked.

  “Thanks,” Joss said to the waiter, who had brought their specials, both plates on one forearm. “She’s in boarding school,” he said to Mamie: the practiced lie. “Your penmanship is excellent.”

  “Oh, cursive. I practiced a lot when I was young.”

  “And your writing, too.”

  “I go to a private day school”—and she named it. “On scholarship. We are required to wear a uniform.” She fingered her pleated skirt.

  “Ladies in green.”

  “Rich bitches.” A bold smile. “So ignorant! National Velvet is their idea of a masterpiece.”

  Mamie came from a large, loose, wisecracking family. “Happy Bloom could be one of my uncles,” she said. The men were sales representatives, the women salesladies, an optimistic crowd tolerating in its midst members who were chess players and members who were racetrack habitués and members who were fat and thin and good-natured and morose and peculiar—“My great-aunt walks the length of Manhattan every day”—and even Republican. She loved movies and gin rummy and novels. She had a very high IQ—“That just means I’m good at IQ tests,” she said with offhand sincerity—and because of her intelligence she’d been sent to the green school. “The uniform—it’s equalizing, that’s good; it’s a costume, that’s good too …”

  “Mamie,” he said. Enough babble, he meant. He leaned across his corned beef. “Why these letters. Why to me.”

  She reddened. It was not beautifying.

  “A bit of fun?” he asked, helpfully.

  “At first. I thought, hey, he’ll answer …”

  “There was no return address.”

  “Answer another way, get Happy Bloom to mention ladies, or green. Some trick. But then, I don’t know, I didn’t need an answer anymore. I just wanted you to read the words, to wonder. When you look out of the screen with that face, it’s like a carving, you’re looking for me, you’re looking at me …”

  “Yes,” he soothed, thinking of the camera’s red bulb, the thing they had to look at.

  “At school, they all have boyfriends.” She was all at once lonely and forty, and nothing had ever happened to her and nothing would. “I love your silence,” she said after a while.

  “My silence—it’s imposed.”

  “Everybody at home talks all the time. I love the way you dance.”

  “The silent character—Bloom made it for me.”

  “I love the way you fall down.”

  He had mastered the technique young, while still at the Jesuits’. He had gone to every circus, every vaudeville show. He studied clowns and acrobats. And in the first troupe and then the second he spent seasons watching, imitating, getting it right. He practiced on the wire, he practiced with the tumblers. Never broke a bone. Learned how not to take the impact on the back of the head or the base of the spine or the elbows or the knees. Knew which muscles to tighten, which to relax …

  She said: “You make me want to fall, but with my, you know, I can’t.” She paused. “I have fallen,” she confessed. She took off her glasses. Her little eyes softened. Would she ever be pretty? “Actually, I have fallen in love,” she said. “With you,” she added, in case he’d missed her drift.

  There were several things he could do at this juncture, and he considered each one of them. He could award her an intent, sorrowful look, he knew which one to use; and from this and her flustered response there would develop, during future meetings, a kind of affection. Stranger romances had flourished. When she turned twenty he would be … Or he could talk smart: prattle tediously about the Irish in America, his hard boyhood, the Jesuit fathers, the early jobs, the indifference of the public, the disappointing trajectory of his life. Bore her to fidgets, push her calf love out the swinging doors … Or he could offer to introduce her to Paolo, what a pair … Or he could pretend to get drunk and stumble out of Cassidy’s leaving her to pay their bill. She probably had a couple of fives tucked into that orthopedic shoe.

  He did none of those things. Instead he reached his hand across the table and gently pulled the nose, the nose with the little bump.

  They lingered over their lunch and then walked the length of Fifth Avenue. Walking, she hardly limped at all.

  “I don’t do sports,” she told him. “Steps are sometimes difficult,” she added mildly.

  They discussed, oh, the Empire State Building and the dock strike and hizzoner: the idle conversation of two friends who have met after a long silence, and who may or may not meet again. At the subway entrance on Eighth Street they paused. He took both her hands and swung them, first side to side, then overhead. London Bridge is falling down. Then he let them go.

  “This afternoon has been …, ” she began.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She clumped down the stairs. He stood at the top, watching her grow smaller. Soon she would turn. He’d watch until then … “Pardon,” said a woman in a hat, edging past him, rushing downward, blocking his last view of the girl.

  THAT THURSDAY THEY did a takeoff of On the Town—they couldn’t make fun of the war, but dancing sailors were fair game. A movie tapster danced with them, another guy on his way down. But the spoof was too short. Three minutes to go before the good-night monologue, signaled the Brigadier. So Happy said “Sweet Georgia,” under his breath—they’d done that number together on the circuit a dozen years earlier, feet don’t forget. It was a Nicholas Brothers routine. So what?—they’d never claimed originality, Happy stole most of his jokes. The Brigadier said “Georgia” to the orchestra, and then she hooked the Hollywood fellow off the stage, and there they were, Joss and Happy, dancing, just dancing. Happy flapped into the wings thirty seconds before the finish, to get out of the sailor suit and into the tux. Joss kept cramp-rolling. He felt Mamie’s eyes on him and his on hers. He double-timed into a leap, why not, and he kicked midair, heels meeting, and dropped onto his feet and then slid down slantwise, perfect, thigh taking the weight, and now he was horizontal. The camera’s lens lowered, smoothly following him; those guys were getting better. Elbow on floor and chin on palm and body stretched out and one leg raised, foot amiably twitching, Joss grinned. Yes: grinned.

  “What made you smile? They’ll get rid of you,” Mary griped an hour later.

  He touched her hair. So dry, you’d think one of her cigarettes would set it on fire. “I was smiling at you,” he said.

  THE STORY

  “PREDICTABLE,” said Judith da Costa.

  “Oh … hopeful,” said her husband, Justin, in his determinedly tolerant way.

  “Neither,” said Harry Savitsky, not looking for trouble exactly; looking for engagement perhaps; really looking for the door, but the evening had just begun.

  Harry’s wif
e, Lucienne, uncharacteristically said nothing. She was listening to the tune: a mournful bit from Liszt.

  What these four diners were evaluating was a violinist, partly his performance, partly his presence. The new restaurant—Harry and Lucienne had suggested it—called itself the Hussar, and presented piroshki and goulash in a Gypsy atmosphere. The chef was rumored to be twenty-six years old. The Hussar was taking a big chance on the chef, on the fiddler, on the location, and apparently on the help; one busboy had already dropped a pitcher of water.

  “It’s tense here, in the dining room,” Judith remarked.

  “In the kitchen—don’t ask,” Harry said.

  In some accommodating neighborhood in Paris, a restaurant like the Hussar might catch on. In Paris … but this was not Paris. It was Godolphin, a town that was really a western wedge of Boston; Godolphin, home to Harry and Lucienne Savitsky, retired high school teachers; Godolphin, not so much out of fashion as beyond its reach.

  One might say the same of Harry. His preferred haberdashery was the army/navy surplus store downtown. Lucienne, however, was genuinely Parisian (she had spent the first four years of her life there, never mind that the city was occupied, never mind that she was hardly ever taken out of the apartment) and she had a French-woman’s flair for color and line. As a schoolgirl in Buenos Aires, as a young working woman in 1950s Boston, she had been known for dressing well on very little money, and she and her brother had managed to support their widowed mother, too. But Lucienne was well over sixty now, and perhaps this turquoise dress she’d bought for a friend’s grandson’s bar mitzvah was too bright for the present company. Perhaps it was also too tight for what Lucienne called her few extra pounds and what Harry called her blessed corpulence. He was a fatty himself.