by Evergreen
BOOK
All the rivers
RUN INTO THE SEA . . ."
ECCLESIASTES
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They told him it was a slight attack, a mild coronary. "You're better off, in a way, than a man who hasn't had a warning and goes right on doing the wrong things. Why, you'll last for years," they assured him, "as long as you exercise and eat right." But he always had done both of those things. "And don't worry," they said. Hah!
His mind wandered. Came from having nothing to do. He'd gone through the Times twice today and now had climbed upstairs to his round room and spread plans on the table. They were assembling the land for a shopping center in Florida. It ought to be a bonanza with all the building going on, the condominiums and retirement colonies. Now his mind sharpened, narrowed to specifics. As soon as they'd let him out of the house, by the first of the month, they said, he'd have to round up some of the chain stores. They'd want a five-and-ten, certainly; a drugstore; one of those popular shoe outfits and then a few assorted boutiques. They'd need some spectacular landscaping, an alley of royal palms down the middle, perhaps. They could call it Palm Walk.
He moved restlessly around the room. Anna had been right—it was a wonderful little place for him. He liked looking down at tree tops. He liked hearing the sounds of the household two floors below; he could hear just enough to feel he was at home, and still not be disturbed.
He felt well again, and looked well too, even had a lot of hair left without any gray in it. Anna had to dye hers: he insisted. Her
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face was still so firm; why should her hair be old? It was dyed the burnished russet it had been naturally. She looked fifteen years younger. She was still strong, walked gracefully. You could tell a lot by the way a person walked. As for himself, he couldn't believe he was seventy-three, that it was seven years since Eric died— But better not to think of that, or of a lot of other things. Now was now. True, he had a load on his mind, a huge business with a couple of hundred men and their families dependent on him, but he could cope with it. He wanted to cope; that's how you knew you were alive. When you had one problem after the other, you solved one and moved on to the next.
Malone, now, he'd got very old. His lips trembled and his eyes watered. He won't last as long as I will, Joseph thought. Malone had been ready to retire, hadn't been up to the pressure, and fortunately had had enough sense to know it. He was better off out in Arizona. Besides, Malone had sons.
We should have had more children, he protested for the thousandth time. Iris' young boys were the only future: their own future, not their grandfather's. As it should be. But it would be good, all the same, to have one of them take over, one of them who'd care for the work and the name he had made! Land. He'd been right about its being the basis of all wealth. If you managed it correctly. "But Jimmy's going to be a doctor, like his father; you can tell already. He chuckled: last week Iris found a mouse cadaver under his bed. They all say Jimmy's the apple of my eye; well, Philip's the other apple, then. Philip, my joy, my darling. Coming downstairs in his pajamas to hear Theo's quartet, and we thought he'd come for the cake! They laugh at me, but I still say, who can tell? Rubinstein and Horowitz were young once. I think he plays like an angel. We never had anyone like him before in our family. Except that niece of Anna's, that poor girl Liesel. Maybe the music comes through her, some strain way back. Not from my side, goodness knows. So Philip won't want my business either, that's for sure.
And Steve: hah! Set a bomb under it more likely, with all that socialism of his, or anarchism, whatever you want to call it! No, that's not fair. He's only a boy, not sixteen yet, and the times are radical. It's a fad. He's got a long way to go. Still, very troubling.
Thank goodness, Laura's okay. Anna all over again, with that look on her face as if the world had been made brand-new every morning!
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They'll all go their ways without me. Everything will go on. These trees will get taller. People will come and go to school and the office and the supermarket; I won't be here. Kid yourself, if you want, about your energy and your ambition and not looking your age; kid yourself and let other people kid you too—as if a man can't tell when they're soft-soaping him! But the drift is there. Drifting, that's the feeling.
You just don't seem to need much anymore. Sex—forget about that! And food. You don't enjoy it, at least not the way you once did. Even sleep: how sweet it is to sleep all night through! You don't realize it until you start waking up every morning before dawn. It's still dark outside and you lie there with your eyes open, watching the light come through the blinds and hearing winter wind or else birds' first calling, like questions in the darkness, minutes apart. It's the loneliest time. Anna's still asleep. Her shoulder is fragrant; she puts perfume on before she goes to bed. We're separate after all; every human being—separate and alone. You never know that, or maybe don't admit it, until the time comes near to die.
Anna says: "Why don't you take it a little easier? You could leave more to the Malone boys. Just keep a hand in one or two days a week to see how things are going."
No. What would I do here all day? Sit around and listen to my arteries harden? Work is—it's cheerful. When I'm away for more than a couple of days I have a kind of creeping melancholy and it scares me. That's why I never liked to take trips. It's the one way I disappointed Anna, because she'd have gone hiking all over the globe and up every mountain if I'd been willing. Work and the company, Friedman-Malone; they're my life! Anna knows that.
He moved to the television set and switched it on. The voice came first, then a picture flaring gradually into the great blank eye of the screen. It was a replay of the Kennedy funeral the previous week: the dirge, the celebrities walking across the bridge toward Arlington and the horse with the stirrups on backwards. The horse.
Eighteen years since that other president had died. ... He remembered the stores on Madison Avenue displaying the black-bordered portrait. Eighteen years! And this was worse: the young man with his head shot away. He turned the television off.
Death and violence. Violence and death. When your heart gives out it can't be helped, but deaths like this one! Kennedy's and
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Maury's, the smashed-up, bloody deaths. And Benjie Baumgar-ten's drowned face. What had made him think of that now? Then Eric. All unnecessary.
Oh, Maury, oh, my son, if I could have you back again I wouldn't care what you did. If I'd made it easier for you and that young girl, taken the pressure off, then maybe— Almost twenty-five years ago. And your son. I tried to make up to you through him, as if perhaps you could know I was loving and being good to your boy. But he didn't want it, not what I had to give. He didn't know what he wanted, Maury. He didn't know where he wanted to belong. Maybe in a world where everybody was the same. (Hah! When was there ever, when will there ever, be a world like that?) When he was with one kind he felt guilty about turning his back on the other. He never told us, but we knew. Your mother was the one; she figured it out, and she was right. He felt more guilty about turning his back on our side because we're the sufferers, the weak ones. Yet he was tempted toward the sunny side, the Gentile way. Who can blame him? And then he felt guilty all over again. He had no roots. That's one of the overdone words of our day but I don't know another that fits as well.
Still, Eric wasn't the only person in his position. Perhaps he made too much of it? Should just have put it in the back of his head and lived? But he was sensitive; he minded more, about everything. It seems we're a family like that, too soft, thinking too much about ourselves and everyone around us. (Not me; I'm tough, I'm the only one not like that.)
Even my father and mother. They had nothing, they knew nothing. But my mother wanted me to be a doctor. We stood on the tenement roof. I carried the basket of clothes up for her to hang. Her eyes came straight out of history, deep eyes of Rachel and Sarah. She was younger than I am now, and she seemed so old. Their hard, hard lives. Sleeping in the dark cubby back of the st
ore. Worried about what they'd have to put on the table: water in the child's milk again? Oh, God, to live like that!
And yet, how simple! Only one worry: money. They wouldn't believe it, if they could come back to see what people worry about now. Iris and all that child psychology, sibling rivalries, permissive schools, progressive camps. What poppycock, nothing to worry about at all.
A good thing she's gone back to teaching. I didn't think so at first, don't believe a woman should work if she doesn't have to.
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Seemed to me it might look as if Theo couldn't support his family. But it's really worked out all right. Iris looks as if she's doing what she wants to do. She acts more—important. Even wants to go on for a master's in special education. Guess she got restless with the usual suburban business, P.T.A., scouts, dentist, dancing classes. Always was a bright girl, Iris. "You want me, Celeste?"
"I've brought these." Another pot of chrysanthemums. "Here's the' card."
"Where're we going to put them all? There's no room for them here." Besides, the damned room looked like a funeral parlor with the flowers and potted plants, and those piles of get-well cards to be acknowledged! He'd gotten so much stuff, books and brandy and letters, even a letter from Ruth. Well over eighty now, she was. Her crabbed hand, the letters sliding downward off the page: "Dear Old Friend, We all love you."
She loves me. But I didn't help Solly. I let him die. . . . Celeste was waiting. "I'll take it downstairs and let Mrs. Friedman put it someplace. You're feeling all right, Mr. Friedman?"
Always looked so scared, Celeste did, opening the door by inches as if she expected to find him lying dead on the floor. . . . Made you cranky, a scared face like that. And then ashamed of himself, he said heartily, "I ought to be sick more often, I get so much attention!"
"Oh, don't do that. We'll take good care of you without your being sick."
"I know you will, Celeste, I know you will." "Would you like a cup of tea or anything?" "Thanks, I'll take my tea when my wife comes home." "She'll be back soon. Want the door closed?" "You can leave it open, thanks."
Good to hear the sounds of the house, Celeste talking to the day worker downstairs. Good woman, Celeste. Member of the family. Steve ought to talk to her, ask her what she thinks! She'd tell him she had it pretty good! Beautiful room. TV set to herself. Paid vacation. The best food, all she wanted to eat. Steve ought.
Anna should be here soon. He'd made her go to the luncheon of the Hospital Guild. She hadn't wanted to leave him but she hadn't been out of the house in weeks now, since his attack. Do her good. Looked fine when she left. She dressed well, Anna did, and it wasn't just the expense; you had to know what you were doing.
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Some of the richest men's wives looked awful. "Clothes, where are you going with the woman?" That's the way they looked, with their hair puffed out like watermelons and all the dangling bracelets. Gaudy and vulgar, they were. Anna's taste had taught him that.
She had taught him many, many things. Everything good in his life had come from her, all charm and fragrance, all gentleness and joy. Maury and Eric had come from her. And Iris-He frowned, winced. That ugly, insane flash of thought again! He was so certain he had wiped it from his mind, but here it was back, like a stain that can't be got rid of.
That Iris may not be mine! My darling, my dear! It—it chokes me. ... I think of how unforeseen she was: five years between births, and I'd been so troubled then, I hadn't been near Anna very much. Yes, and I think—crazy thought—I've even thought that Iris looked a little like that Werner fellow. Crazy, crazy thought that I've got to drive out! That I will drive out! I ought to be ashamed of myself.
Yet there was something between the two of them, if not that. Some thing. I don't know how far it went, but I know. Before our marriage or after?
When? Perhaps that day when I sent her to borrow the money? If it was, I have only myself to blame. I should never have made her go, never put her in a position where she— Alone in that house. All those dark stairs, dark wood banisters going up and up; a tall mirror at the end of the first flight to the room where the piano stood. Anna showed me once, and I never forgot the first time I had been inside a rich man's house.
Or perhaps a meeting on some dusky winter afternoon? In an ornate hotel, the traffic marching down Fifth Avenue ten floors below. Glasses and bottles twinkling on a table: champagne, for Anna drinks no whiskey. Yes, a table. And a bed.
He closed his eyes, pressing them shut.
As for me, there could have been women. It's so easy, especially when a man can buy things. Girls in the office. A lady lawyer at a closing once: tall, black hair coiled over a white collar. So easy. But there was never much time, I climbed so fast. Not enough time for that sort of thing. And I never really wanted it enough or I would have found the time, wouldn't I? Never really wanted it enough. Anna.
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I didn't think, when I asked her to marry me, that she would consent. There'd been nothing between us, no look, no slightest touch of the flesh to make me think I had any chance at all. Yet I asked and she said yes. In a way I knew that wasn't how it usually happens between a man and a woman. In a way I knew even then that there was something.
She was so young. Naive, not of the world. And still is, to a certain extent, though she would be annoyed to be told so. Never let her guess, never let her sutler because of my darkest thoughts. Understanding. Forbearance. Whatever you want to call it. For I have had so much, that she has given me. And we have had such a life together, she and I. Anna, my love. My love.
There was the car now. He looked at his watch. She'd come home early, not wanting to leave him so long. He heard the garage door go down, then her steps on the gravel drive. Another car came, and a door slammed. More steps. Whose?
Then Theo's and Anna's voices, coming upstairs, the voices of Jimmy and Steve below them.
"Good afternoon." Theo's mock-professor voice. "How is the patient today?" And in his normal voice, "We drew up to the stop light at the same time and the boys and I got the idea of coming along to see you."
"You're always a sight for sore eyes, you people. How's everything, Theo?"
His long-established greeting. It meant: How are you doing at the office? Busy enough but not overworked, I hope. Paying your bills with something left over after taxes. It meant: Is everything smooth at home? No troubles with the kids?
Theo's long-established answers reassured him. Yes, yes, everything was fine and there was nice news: Jimmy had made the tennis team.
"Well, congratulations!" Joseph said. "And you, Steve? You upset about something?" For Steve was frowning, with what Anna called his 'buttoned-up' expression. "No."
"Go ahead," Theo said. "You can tell Grandpa." And, since Steve stayed silent, he went on, "Steve was at my office just now to do some papers on the copying machine. And he happened to overhear a conversation with a patient, a girl who's going to have surgery because she doesn't like the shape of her nose. Steve's
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disgusted, not just with her, but with me! He thinks I should have booted the girl down the stairs along with her nose."
Steve spoke up. "I said, with all the wounded and suffering people in the world you should be ashamed to waste your work on a spoiled bourgeoise."
"Suffering is a matter of degree," Theo said. "If her nose makes her miserable, even though that may seem ridiculous to you, it really isn't ridiculous at all."
"I don't go for that argument. The fact is, you treat people like her because you make money doing it and that's the only reason. The profit system again."
"What's wrong with the profit system?" Joseph demanded.
"What's wrong? The profit system is wrecking the environment and destroying the human spirit. That's all."
The stance of the boy, his slight figure leaning against the wall, the proud lift of his head, angered his grandfather.
"Destroying the environment! What the devil do they teach these kids in school, anyway?"<
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"School!" Steve was scornful. "I do my own thinking! School doesn't teach anything, except cramming for high marks."
Joseph threw up his hands. "Bah! Socialist poppycock! It all comes down to one thing, this sort of talk. Envy. All this leveling business, pass-fail grades and that stuff; it's the people who gets Cs and Ds who want it. They may give you all sorts of high-flown moral reasons, but the plain fact is they envy the people who get As."
"That doesn't apply to me," Steve said stiffly and accurately, for he had always been an A student. "I'm not envious of anybody or anything. What I am much more is guilty, and you all should be too."
Jimmy swung his tennis racket. "Aw, come on, Steve, lay off, will ya?"
But Joseph had been goaded and wanted to pursue the subject. "Guilty about what?"
"About living the way we do. You ought to be guilty about living in a house like this while millions of human beings live in shanties!"
"It took brains and hard labor to earn this house! Don't you think a man deserves some rewards for his brains and labor?"
