Crackpot, page 10
Good feelings arose in response to expressions of good feeling and finally the guests hurried away, bubbling with dreadful things to talk about. By this time Hoda was simply ravenous. Perhaps it was a good thing that she was never to know that she had succeeded in talking herself out of a new culinary experience. For the ladies no longer thought in terms of food hampers. Instead, the guild decided to concentrate on the succouring of two starved souls, and shortly afterwards, the first of the mysterious evangelical pamphlets began to arrive, which were to plague Hoda and her father for years, and were particularly irritating since Danile never found a letter in the mailbox without hoping that it might contain some news from the old country, and sometimes, before he learned to recognize the feel of the paper, he waited for hours for Hoda to come home, only to hear at last that it was just some more of that Jesus stuff. Hoda came to look on the religious tracts as hostile acts, perpetrated by an unknown and vindictive enemy that she swore she would someday publicly unmask. For a long time her suspicions were centred on some gentile neighbours down the street, who kept to themselves, she felt, in a guiltily secretive way. Accordingly, she never failed to seize the opportunity, if she thought any member of this family was within earshot, to express her conviction, as loudly as she could, that in God’s eyes it was preferable to be a Jew above everything else, and that she and her daddy wouldn’t dream of being anything else but Jews, and it was a pity some other people didn’t know anything about being Jewish. These neighbours finally moved out of the neighbourhood, an action which Hoda saw as variously indicative of guilt and, perhaps more accurately, of defeat. When the tracts continued to arrive, even after the removal of the putative perpetrators, Hoda more than once darkly remarked that they were lucky she didn’t know where they’d moved to, or they’d get a piece of her mind all right.
Had she known that the tracts were substitutes for real food, particularly at that tight and chancy time in their existence, and were the direct result of her own hospitality, she probably would have considered them even more bafflingly punitive. For she would never have dreamed of offending her guests. She would have died, for instance, rather than say “fuck” or “shit” in their hearing, at least at that time in her life. She had too much respect. One thing Rahel could rest in peace about, as Danile told himself that triumphant evening as they sat down finally to their meal. She had brought up their daughter well.
If only Uncle had been able to see that this was so. If only he had paid some attention to what they said, had tried to listen and to understand how they felt instead of right away getting mad and saying things like that in front of the child and getting her started that way. You can’t frighten a child and expect her to act like an adult. It was true that he had been half expecting Uncle Nate, as the child had been too, though not because they needed help from him; Danile never allowed himself to think that he expected Uncle for this reason, although he knew that when Nate came, help or some form of concrete advice might also be forthcoming. The fact was that Danile had not, as yet, paid much direct attention to the practical implications of their situation. He was still unable to drag his thoughts away from his bereavement, tormented, as he was, by the conviction that he had not comprehended it fully, as yet, and would be sinning against God and his dead to turn away from her prematurely, without having found something in her death to understand.
But he had had a premonition, on that afternoon when Uncle arrived at last, an uneasy tugging at the heart, he didn’t know why. Uncle was so pleased with himself, you could feel it in his footsteps. He simply knocked loudly on the door and walked right into the house where Danile sat twisting some straw in a desultory way and quietly conning his inner conundrum, and Hoda clattered about with pots and pans.
“Well Danile,” he said, seating himself and sighing a perfunctory sigh. “The question is what to do now, eh?” Uncle sighed again, a pitying sigh which at once accused, forgave, and embraced these inadequates who didn’t know. “Well, I’ve solved your problem,” he continued, with such authority that Danile, for a moment, believed that even this might be within the scope of Uncle’s mastery. But the feeling which responded to Uncle’s words was unaccountably one of dread. It was as though his heart already imagined then what his mind could not conceive. Who would have believed that Uncle, with all his busyness and all his importance, could find room in his heart to hate them so?
For Uncle’s plan, which he revealed to them as already set into triumphant motion, was to send Danile to the Jewish Old People’s Home, where they also took care of a few cripples, and Hoda to the Jewish Children’s Orphanage. They would be better taken care of than they could possibly care for themselves. Uncle could guarantee it himself; they would practically be waited on hand and foot. Hadn’t he already personally promised those institutions the largest donations he had ever made in his life?
The last thing Nate had expected was resistance. Perhaps, because he was so taken aback, he was cruder than he might have been at first in brushing aside their misgivings, and later, with all the bull rage of his anger and frustration, in trying to break them down. His fury at their refusal to accept his plans would have been disproportionate, normally, which was perhaps what gave Hoda and her father the impression that he hated them so. Even when, in his rage, he revealed to them how he had overreached himself, because they understood so little the value of large sums of money, they were slow to grasp the enormity of what they were doing by refusing point blank to allow him to separate them. Uncle could not bring himself to tell them that the reason he was so upset was that he had been so carried away by his vision of himself in the role of pure philanthropist, that he had not taken the precaution to make his donations contingent on the entry of his relatives into the relevant institutions. He had made his offer of a gift as a free and generous act to each, motivated, as far as anyone knew, only by the goodness of his heart. If, after all this, these two…these two…he didn’t know what to call them, this freakish pair, his curse, his unmerited punishment from a God who knew he deserved better; if after all this they refused to go, he would have no excuse to renege on his pledge.
Uncle had made his terrible mistake because the thought of generosity, per se, was so attractive to him. The thought of the man who gave, rising up from some dim dream memory of an impoverished childhood was, to him, as the thought of some powerful creature transcending his humanity through the most difficult gesture of all, an act of pure generosity. And Uncle allowed himself, because he was momentarily fuddled by his dream of generosity, a fantasy bad for a man of business, as no one normally had to tell him, though his wife often did, to commit a grave tactical error. A need for purity of motive had survived in him somewhere, and even thrown forth a stunted shoot in the darkness where it had lodged through most of his adult life. Now, choosing this moment, masquerading as vanity, or perhaps it was vanity masquerading as purism, or perhaps it was the offshoot of both that showed itself in him now, it sent him forth, inspired, not to one but to both institutions, first to see the Director of the Home for the Jewish Aged, and then to see the Supervisor of the Jewish Children’s Home, to shake hands and sit large and imposing, and to say, after a pause long enough for the trimming of a cigar, portentously, to each in turn, “I’ve been thinking seriously about this place. I think you’re doing good work.” And then, containing himself, and allowing himself to be led and shown and told about the good work, hardly hearing, hardly seeing, but waiting for the right moment, savouring the instants till the time came irresistible, and tore from him, untrembling, the words, “I want to make a donation,” and, watching for the gladness in his listener’s eyes and judging it insufficient, to elaborate, with succinct eloquence, “I mean a real donation,” and to remain silent, demanding, drawing forth from the other’s riveted eyes the first dawning gleams of recognition, of real respect, signs of a certain flinging of the very soul of the man to his knees, where it would remain, doubly and triply humbled by the power of the sum, the life-giving sum before the manifest glory of which no director or supervisor of a charitable institution could help but fall down and weep, figuratively speaking if not in crude, physical reality, while counting off in dazzled gratitude the palpable benefactions this vibrant wad of energies represented to the lesser beings, his unfortunate charges, the unwanted old or the unclaimed young.
It was this purity of response to his gesture that Uncle wanted to preserve as long as possible, the purity of assumption that he was to do all this simply out of the pure and simple generosity of his own naked soul, for nothing, as one side of his nature suggested to him sardonically. They want me to give away my hard-earned cash for nothing, just like that, as if I owe it to them, while at the same time something in him expanded too, and glowed at the enormity of such a transgression against all that he had worked and schemed and clutched and grasped for. What the hell! Something in him actually, some fugitive impulse actually took joy, briefly and vaguely, in the idea of feeling contempt for what he was bound, by a whole lifetime’s dedication, to adore. But he knew too much. Sure, give it away, give way once and entirely to that extravagant impulse to free himself of that self’s way of looking at the world, and what would happen? He could see ahead. Here he would stand, in this same place, destitute, without a cigar even, begging this same little hand-rubber to give him shelter too. Whose soul would be forced to its knees then? Let those who didn’t have it adore it, and adore, too, him who had it to give away and had the sense to be judicious in the giving.
But the sensation of abandoned giving was sweet, and Uncle found himself, for the time being, incapable of reducing the effect he felt he was producing, by explaining that he intended his donation to be contingent on the acceptance of his destitute nephew and grandniece, each into the relevant institution. His donations, looked at from this vantage point, would not, indeed, appear to be such extravagantly munificent acts, though no doubt perfectly acceptable nevertheless. But Uncle was too hungry, as he rushed, from one institution to another in a single afternoon, fit of the poet on him, for yet another glimpse of himself perfected, to do more than meet effusive gratitude with the cryptic remark, “We’ll go into the details later.”
But it was the details which proved intractable, hollering and pleading and weeping and deaf to the fact that they were either going to force him to make a fool of himself and renege on a solemn pledge made voluntarily and with large gesture, or give away, lose right down the drain, a lot of money for absolutely nothing.
“I don’t want to!” yelled Hoda. “You can’t make me leave my daddy!”
–Grotesque, he raged internally, fighting the impulse to do violence to all this blubber, grotesque offspring of that cunning little hunchback whose eyes still defied him from the grave in these grey living eyes. But Uncle’s rage wavered slightly before the yammering of this four-square creature. There was something of his own in her, something of the largeness of mother and sister, dimly remembered worlds of another self. Nor was the face ugly, and the skin, so much of it there must be to cover all that bulk, what he could see of it was fresh, the face tear-runnelled but glowing.
“Wipe your nose!” he yelled, out of an obscure impulse to protect that skin. But the impulse was momentary. Hoda, frightened by the shout, responded by throwing a temper tantrum, yelling and screaming and howling so that Uncle himself was amazed and taken aback both by the passion of her feeling and the bad language of the natives which she, mere child though she was, had amassed, through which to express it.
“Shame on you!” he roared back indignantly, infuriated by the fact that he was fighting, concretely, not his nephew so much as this yelling, swearing, fat adolescent with the ghost of his mother and sister in her flesh who reduced his firmly based decisions to a mutual temper tantrum of threats and insults in which he finally made a move toward her, to prove he would carry out his threat to thrash her for her insolence if she didn’t shut her mouth this instant and she, screaming, flung herself to her knees before her father, wrapped her arms around his waist, and threatened incoherently into his lap, that she would kill Uncle Nate if he took her away from her pa, while Danile stroked her head and murmured distractedly and smelled apprehensively toward the whiffs of cigar smoke that puffed at him from all directions while Uncle raged to and fro, glaring at the great mass heaving and blubbering on the floor, with her head in her father’s lap, and beginning to foresee, in unbelieving astonishment, his own defeat.
“Please Uncle,” Danile begged.
“Please Uncle,” Hoda echoed from his lap, in her still childish bass, thoroughly frightened now at what he would do because of her outburst. For the two of them thought that if Uncle really wished he could make them go; if he insisted on carrying through this proof of the terrible enmity he had now revealed to them, he would really be able to separate them, because he would have everybody on his side because he was rich and one of the indispensable members of the grain exchange on which the whole country rested tall and proud like prairie elevators. Oh, what had she found to boast about there? Why couldn’t he have been someone else’s uncle? One thing he couldn’t do, anyway, and she had told him so when he had threatened to, which was what made him even madder. He couldn’t send them back to Russia. “Oh no, you can’t!” she had yelled. “There’s a war on! That’s why!” But they’d all be on his side; for the first time Hoda began to understand that feeling she had felt in people during the mourning, when Uncle was around. It was all a lie, all those other things people said; her mother had known it. All you had to be was rich, and Uncle knew it; he could make the police and the government and everybody come and punish her and her daddy because they were poor and drag them apart and take away Daddy and put her in an orphanage and put him in an old folk’s home when he wasn’t even old and they wouldn’t even know how to walk with him in the way he liked so he could know where to go himself because he hated being led. And Hoda, who was so afraid, knew one thing for sure, that she hated them all.
“Please Uncle,” she heard herself choking out once again, begging, and knew she hated herself too.
Uncle didn’t give up easily. He kept on trying, but nothing he could say or yell or threaten would convince them that he was not trying to separate them through enmity but for their own good. Finally, Danile, weeping, cried out that he was glad that his mother was dead so she would never have to know that her beloved little brother had, among strangers, contracted the strangers’ disease of inhumanity. Uncle was nonplussed and insulted and yelled and threatened some more, and kept talking of all the money they were going to cost him for nothing, and Hoda, raising her swollen, stained face from her father’s lap, asked him why he didn’t just give the money to them, to which Danile said sternly, for him, “Hush, child, you don’t know what you’re talking about. We don’t need it. We don’t want anything.” And all the while he spoke Danile was conscious of his terror. All he said sounded false, false his arguments, false his assurances that they would get along, false and puny arguments to pit against Uncle’s large and angry conviction that they had no business to make an inconvenience of themselves to others in the world, and at the same time to demand to have their own way.
And finally Uncle said, “All right. You don’t need help from me. I promised them that money and nobody’s going to laugh in my face. When you get some sense in your heads we can talk about it then. You’ll come to me yet with another song on your lips, and you’ll see if I’ll turn you away then, even though you have to learn I’m right the hard way. You’ll see if I’m your enemy then.” This last was said in an aggrieved tone and aimed at Danile, whose reference to his sister stung. And besides, though Nate could see that starving them to submission was the only thing to do now, he wanted to leave them an opening for a reconciliation soon. They could whine all they liked about how they didn’t need or want any help, but who would be blamed by the world if word got around that they weren’t getting any?
The fact that he left them finally still weeping in each other’s arms was of minor comfort to Uncle in his frustration. For months after, every time he thought of that scene, he nearly had a fit. At first he determined not to tell his wife what he had done. He tried at first simply to keep quiet about it and yell at her about everything else that now irritated him more acutely, but it was too hard. He needed her disapproval of what he’d done to yell against, just as he needed the release of making his confession. When he told her, finally, Auntie Gusia went into a shock of mourning, and ran to tell her married children that their father had fallen into his second childhood and was squandering their inheritance. She consulted frantically with them and with the light of her eye, her bachelor son, whether it was legally possible to put restraints on him. Her reaction, and the effect which his gratuitous generosity began to have in enhancing his name in the community, were, however, ultimately so gratifying, that Uncle gradually began to recover his confidence in the uniquely favourable fate which sponsored even the apparent errors through which his virtues were at last to be made manifest to himself and to the world.
