Crackpot, page 26
But her antagonist was not to be robbed of her moment. “You see, you see?” she turned to the spectators. “You see the shameless whore, she has the nerve to face me! I’m not afraid of you fat cow, you sleep with every filth; you stay away from my husband, you hear?”
“Who you calling cow?” bellowed Hoda, and wrenching open the gate, threw her weight forward threateningly, as though she were about to charge, but paused long enough to give her opponent the opportunity to turn and run before she actually took after her. The idea of bumping the old lady and maybe even accidentally knocking her down appalled Hoda, no less than the idea of suffering physical violence at her hands appalled the little grocerywoman, in whose dream of a dramatic confrontation in which she could publicly pour out on the whore some of the bitterness of her own heart, the idea of physical indignity had never occurred. With some trepidation she realized that the whore might have other ideas, and she was torn between the desire to make public capital of this additional affront, and real uneasiness about her own physical safety. She was not an unimaginative little thing, and already, as she retreated hastily down the street, hurling insults over her shoulder, she could see herself crawling, all bleeding and broken up the steps of the grocery and collapsing before her stricken, weeping husband, with a final, “Look, see what your whore has done to me!”
As for Hoda, all she wanted was to get the old lady and the spectators far away from the house before the end of prayers brought Daddy home. So she pursued with threats, “You call me names I’ll kill you, you hear?” all the way down the next two blocks and round the corner and up the street and across the road and down another narrow street, while the woman ran terrified ahead of her, but not too terrified to call to left and right to the heads poking out of doors and windows, “You hear her? You hear her? She wants to kill me! Be my witness! You’re my witness!” all the while she ran, with Hoda heftily clopping along behind her, bawling to left and right, obligingly loudly, to make sure they heard her, if that’s the way the old lady wanted it, “I’ll kill her all right! She comes near my house and calls me names again I’ll kill her all right!”
Hoda had already had to slow down considerably, to let the panting old lady catch her breath, and she felt a real pang of pity when she saw the woman clutch her breast. Soon, she was simply trotting along at the shoulder of her antagonist, every now and then letting out a token bellow as the gasping woman found breath for a half-hearted curse, and once, when her enemy stumbled, Hoda automatically reached out and steadied her on her feet. The woman betrayed, for her part muttered an automatic “thank you,” and only half-heartedly shook off her helping hand, as they slowly continued the motions of the chase.
When they reached the grocery store, the husband over whom all the public fuss had been made made the mistake of poking his head out the screen door, as his wife panted laboriously up the steps, still clutching the somewhat beat-up basket. Hoda, who had come to a halt on the street on the far side of the ditch, recognized her client, and without thinking, said “Oh, hi! Do you live here?”
The grocer stood paralysed while his wife fished for enough air to scream, “You hear that? She knows him! She KNOWS him! The whore knows him!” Winded, stricken anew, the grocer’s wife gasped out brokenly, “You see…I’ve brought her to you…Don’t say I’m not a good wife!…I’ve brought you my shame!” And she flung off his proferred supporting arm so violently that his funny bone cracked painfully against the door jamb. He was whimpering his anguish when, an instant later, she sagged, crying out, as his knees buckled under the unexpected load of her, “Look! Look at your disgrace! Don’t worry about me! Go to her! Go to your shame!”
Hoda was tired of being insulted. She was sorry for the old lady to be so upset, but what a lot of fuss she was making. If she always carried on that way no wonder the poor old guy sneaked off sometimes to find a quiet nooky. The street before her house was probably clear by now, and with luck she would be back home as though nothing had happened before Daddy got back. If only no one would say anything to him. Why did people always have to spoil things and try to make you feel dirty? Hoda didn’t see why that woman had to keep calling her all those names over and over again. Just because that was how she was making a living now didn’t mean that was all she was ever going to be. Did that old dame think that all Hoda wanted to do for the rest of her life was pump old cripplecocks like her husband? Well, she had another think coming. Hoda and her friends had all kinds of ideas they were working on. Someday she’d show them all. And even then, when she was right up there and didn’t have to do it for a living anymore, she wasn’t going to quit just because others wanted her to anyway, only if she felt like it. If she felt like doing some charity work, on the side, she’d do it, like for that poor old guy for instance. With a wife like that he deserved a break sometimes. How was she so much better than Hoda anyway?
The grocerywoman was still raving at her shrivelling old man when Hoda turned away. “Any time you got half a buck!” Hoda called back to him encouragingly, and swung off down the street. For all she cared he could have stayed home in the first place. Who needs bad feelings?
She need not have worried, in any event, that someone might tell Danile about her morning’s encounter. Those who had already tried, in what were considered the early, retrievable steps of her downfall, to warn him of the dangerous course his child was steering, had found him apparently incapable of conceiving her fall, since the days were filled for him with living proof of her goodness and devotion. And even the hardiest old dame, determined that truth must out everywhere and in every instance, so that her life was littered with the unmarked graves of those who had died of truth, liberally administered, found herself hesitating, nevertheless, before the prospect of coming out and telling Danile, to his masked yet vulnerable face, “See here, your daughter’s a whore.” To justify itself, such a statement must somehow be made to fit into the category of good advice, and it was a little late to say, “Tell her it’s not nice,” and “no nice boy will marry her” and anyway, Hoda herself had been told these things to no avail. On the other hand it could be, and often was, said in her favour, that whore or no she was still a good daughter and took care of her father as well as any virgin might. Anyway, he probably knew, though he wouldn’t admit it openly. You cannot tell with these quiet, foolish ones how much they really do know. Silence is the wisdom of fools, no less than of the wise.
A curious divergence of opinion had grown up, over the years, regarding Danile, among his cronies at the synagogue. Some continued to hold that though he was not an utter simpleton, he was simple nevertheless, restricted in his capacity to absorb the facts of existence. Others suggested that the man was perhaps not so simple, that he was not necessarily restricted by nature, but that his blindness made him more delicately selective of those, among the superabundant facts of existence, that were truly significant to man and God. They came close to hinting that there was something perhaps of holiness about him. It had more than once been noted that the questions which he propounded, granted that he was not much help with the answers, but then neither were the wisest, sometimes, were not the questions of a fool. To this there were some, with battered heads dragging graveward, who replied as though they were already tasting dust, that only the greatest fools go on formulating clever, unanswerable questions, making leaking vessels to hold their ignorance. A well-turned question is the highest art of fools, and Danile was a master of the aesthetics of ignorance, and hence, certainly, a fool. The largest group of old men, however, less patient or more practical or less flexible, brushed aside the webmakers and their reasonings and held categorically that the man was an utter idiot, and getting to be even more so of late; witness his maddening habit of telling you the story of his life, over and over again, in the same words, every chance he got, and as if he was proud of it, yet! He was a good enough natured idiot and all that, but say what you liked, when Danile approached, conversation stopped. Whatever you were talking about had to wait; the moment he found an opening, and he could catch you pausing to try to sneak a breath in halfway through a word, he jumped right in, relevant or not, and there you found yourself, ready to exhale, your son’s latest business coup still half-bottled up inside of you, and Danile was already babbling about his graveyard and his wedding and God’s grace in giving him a daughter who could spread her legs and let in the whole wide world.
But irascible though they could be sometimes, even the most irritable of the old men would not go so far as to say that last within hearing of Danile himself. To shame a man so would be a greater sin than whoring. There should be some parity of epithet possible in an argument. There is no glory in stripping a man naked and defenceless before men, no victory in the one truth to which there is no reply. Besides, the old men liked Hoda. She had grown up around the synagogue, had cadged snuff to sneeze when she was still practically a baby, and now that she was grown did not forget the fact that they existed, as some of their own grandchildren, who were preparing to enter more elevated professions, preferred to do. She still hung around and chatted and joked sometimes when she came to pick up her dad. And though most of the hardcore, day-by-day worshippers were regrettably beyond the point, had they so desired it, of being able to make use of her professional ministrations, they still relished the chance to be seen in animated conversation with her, braving alike the arched enquiring brows of friends and the ironic, twitch-mouthed glance of wife, if she happened to be present, to taste for a few instants of the same bittersweet public illusion that women know when they grow publicly younger year by year.
No, Daddy didn’t know; that was one thing she could be sure of, she who knew her daddy better than anybody. He probably didn’t even know such things went on, outside of the Bible. She remembered how once, after she had been telling Daddy, to ease her conscience, how some of the boys who came to see her really weren’t students of hers, but were really kind of boy friends. Danile had told her all about how when he was a young boy he used to stand outside their hut in the old country and listen for the voices and the steps of the girls as they passed, and sometimes he would even bring himself to call out “hello” to them, and sometimes they would answer him, and he would be happy all day after that. It flashed through her mind, did even Daddy think those other thoughts too? But he went on to tell how there was one particular girl he used to think about a lot, because her voice was so nice when she said “hello,” and he carried the feeling of her voice around with him and imagined how beautiful and perfect she must be, and how loving in every way, though she never said anything more to him than “hello” sometimes, yet he always recognized her voice from far away and those were the times when he worked up his courage to say “hello” and to wait and hope that she would say “hello” too, this time.
“And did she, usually?” Hoda asked.
“Sometimes,” said Danile.
“I’ll bet she really loved you too, only she was shy, and maybe she was afraid to show the other girls how much she liked you,” said Hoda.
“No,” said Danile.
“I would have said ‘hello’ every time, Daddy. I wouldn’t ever have passed by without saying hello.”
“I know,” said Danile gently. “You’ll always say hello.”
It wasn’t what he said so much as the way he said it that made her feel, for a moment, desolate, when she really should be feeling glad, shouldn’t she? What was it that lurked behind even the nicest words that you could say to each other? What gave you that uneasy feeling that your tongue was turning around and without even knowing it was making a joke on itself? Word to word, sentence to sentence, whether you knew them to be false or felt them to be true, spun out across an abyss, with you swinging helplessly from them, blindly spinning and patching and crisscrossing the net that was to catch and hold the shape of the darkness in which your life was forming, but instead was itself contained by the chasm. And sometimes, as she scuttled about, weaving her thread and trying to attach an end of it somewhere where it would hold and be secure, Hoda felt a sudden rushing of wind, and didn’t know where her words had gone and where her net was going, where her threads connected and what the meaning was of webs that were attached to her own. What did Daddy think? What did he feel? What did he know? Could it be that Mr. Polonick was right when he said to her that time, “What makes you think your father doesn’t know about you, Hoda? Do you think he would tell you if he knew?” He shouldn’t have said that. It was a thick black thread that didn’t belong, and she didn’t know where it led, but she kept running into it; what if Daddy did know? Why didn’t he say anything then? Was he so ashamed? Or didn’t he have the words to tax her with? And if he spoke what would she say in reply? She was really glad he didn’t speak, wasn’t she? It was all right by her if he didn’t try to interfere. Why did it upset her so to think of it, to wonder whether he knew? But she didn’t really believe he knew. Mostly, from the way Daddy talked, it was as though he had spun his last new thread, and somehow thought he had completed his net to hold his life in, and just kept running back and forth and to and fro over the parts of the pattern he remembered, and what Hoda did to earn their living was a part of the dark abyss which he swung through but could not know. Let it be so.
That Mr. Polonick, why did he have to say things like that just because he wanted to win his argument and get his way? Why wasn’t he content just to make his revolution and save the world and leave her in peace? Why did he have to mix in her private affairs too? He was always telling her how bad it was, what she was doing, but could he give her an alternative for right here and now? She kept telling him she wasn’t going to be doing this for a living all her life. Just as soon as she had enough money to try to do something else with, of course she would quit. Did he think it was always such a pleasure, having to, whether you felt like it or not? She herself had thought it would be at first, but you learn different. Did he think she liked being pointed at and called names? Not that she cared, but still, what did he want her to do? She was hardly managing to keep them going as it was. But at least they were independent. They didn’t need any uncle to boss them around. Hoda always brought in her uncle when she talked to Mr. Polonick, on purpose to sidetrack him away from the lectures on her personal morals. She liked to hear again how she and Daddy were victims of capitalist brutalization and greed, how in a world where money was god even family feeling was destroyed and only money and power counted, and a man like Uncle would not think twice about abandoning his own relatives to poverty and starvation.
“Yeh,” Hoda agreed, “Uncle’s a rat.”
But Danile usually had something to say in defence of Uncle, if the subject came up when Mr. Polonick was paying them a social visit, as he often did nowadays; and then, oddly enough, Mr. Polonick taxed him with clinging to outmoded bourgeois values and loyalties. Since the time when Hoda had, he was convinced, saved his life, they had become close friends, and Mr. Polonick often dropped in to talk or called to take her to meetings. Hoda had mixed feelings for this man who claimed he owed his life to her. It was all very well for him to be grateful but he didn’t have to act as though she owed it to him to let him save her in return. She knew that it was all for her own good that he kept at her that way; “Where are you going, Hoda? For heaven’s sake, comrade, do you know where you’re going?” They called each other “comrade,” and Hoda liked that, but why did he have to keep asking her things like that? He was old already and he lived alone and he wasn’t married or anything, not anything at all as far as she knew. Sometimes she felt like asking him in her turn, “Well, where aren’t you going, comrade Mr. Polonick?” But she had too much respect; she was younger after all, and anyway she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But she wished he wouldn’t ask her questions like that. They made her uneasy. She didn’t even know where she’d been yet, and she knew that someday she would have to maybe sit down and think about it, if somehow something else didn’t turn up that would illuminate the way as she wanted to know it, in a total vision, where she had been and where she was going and how to make everything all right. He needn’t think that she wasn’t concerned enough about it without his prodding. But punitive though his gratitude seemed to be at times, she was glad he was their friend, especially for Daddy’s sake. At least he listened to what Daddy had to say and showed respect, even if he didn’t agree and called Daddy a victim of outmoded ideas that prevented him from rising up and breaking all his mental chains.
Hoda enjoyed going to meetings, and she particularly liked it when she got something to do afterwards, like passing out leaflets. She didn’t mind helping out, and she liked the conversations and arguments she got into with people, when she pointed out how wrong they were, though they would never admit it. The comrades were a good bunch of guys and at least they were trying to do something for the good of the world, not just hanging around and gambling and dreaming about the breaks like Hymie and Limpy Letz and Popowicki. A person should think of someone else besides himself. And some of them were more practical idealists than Mr. Polonick, more like Hoda herself, who readily admitted what Mr. Polonick deplored, that she didn’t have what he called a militant mind yet. It was true. One or two of the comrades had become her customers and they sometimes even joked about the revolution together. It was a good thing Mr. Polonick wasn’t there to hear them then.
“When the revolution comes, first thing I’m going to do is liberate you, Hoda, free you from this capitalist treadmill. No more slave labour. No more tied to the buck. Free love for all. I’m only pretending to go along with the system now because I know you’re a worker just like I am. But after the revolution we’re going to put the fun and freedom back in fucking!”
“What will I do for a living, comrade?”
“You’ll get an honest job, that’s what you’ll do. No more of this hideous degradation. You’ll hold your head high, that’s what you’ll do. And when you fornicate it will be only for pleasure, with dignity, for fulfillment of the highest functions of womanhood. Your days will be spent in building the public paradise and your nights will be spent in building the private paradise!”
