Crackpot, page 28
“I promised not to tell,” Shirley explained, guiding his hand. “I didn’t promise not to show.”
It was only that stuff again. “When you were driving, or parked?” he asked suspiciously. Shirley was vague about whether they’d been driving or parked, and thought maybe it was both. “Then who shifted gears?” Pipick had a brief flash of hope. Maybe Mr. Limprig could use someone who would honk the horn and shift gears for him. He had a momentary vision of himself, not taking any room at all, hardly, between them, leaning forward from the edge of the seat, and shifting gears and honking the horn and maybe even helping steer while Mr. Limprig’s hand was busy. It was one of those perfect solutions which Pipick knew, even at the instant when he conceived it, was somehow not likely to come to pass.
“And he said I should never let any boy do it to me,” Shirley said, “and I won’t.”
“All right,” said Pipick.
“Next time,” she added.
At the wheel, Pipick took the curve into the orphanage drive with masterly skill. “Bravo, Prince!” his grandfather cried, as he flipped over and over in the air and landed face up in Pipick’s palm. “Heads I am, tails I am too.” Pipick paused to scrutinize the library window recess, and waved at his friend who waited for him, so well hidden behind the drape that only he who knew she watched for him could tell she was there. He ran to show Mrs. Limprig his earnings. She at least was on his side where car rides were concerned. When he had stood beside her in the recess and watched Mr. Limprig drive by with Shirley smirking beside him, Pipick could feel that his monster friend felt as badly as he did.
All that evening Danile drifted about in a daydream in which Uncle came in person to compliment and to thank them. Hoda, having returned safely from the area of almost superstitious fear, suffered a curious reaction. Several hours after her return she suddenly broke out in a sweat, her heart palpitated violently, and she experienced sensations of acute panic, which were all the more frightening because they were accompanied by the almost irresistible urge to go running out of the house and down the street in the direction of the orphanage. In order to try to resist the impulse, which at moments came over her so strongly that she nearly screamed out against it, she told Daddy that she was tired, and that if anybody called on her to tell them please to call again tomorrow, and shutting herself in her room she undressed and climbed into her bed in the darkness, and lay there trembling and sweating and gritting her teeth against the almost uncontrollable impulses which assaulted her in unremitting waves, to go jumping out of bed and running off into the darkness, naked as she was. When she awoke the next morning the sheets were still damp and she was still desperately clinging to the pillow around which she had wrapped herself, but the fear and the crazy impulses, at least, were gone.
EIGHT
So uncles do relent. But they don’t necessarily consult your convenience in their timing. Don’t expect them to come rushing over to acknowledge your gift right away, for instance, as Daddy did, day by day and hour by hour for weeks. Just forget about him and one day there is a knock on your door and there he stands in his opulence, muttering about the state of the front steps, and Hoda must usher him in to where three of her students lounge. Regretfully, Hoda shoos the boys out. “Take a break, kids. Take a rain check; come back later.” There is a disgruntled mutter, which she quells with furious eyes. “I said later.” An afternoon’s business lost. So what? All the more reason to be gracious to Uncle, who doesn’t know he’s costing her.
Or does he? “Tell them I won’t stay long.” Uncle calls over his shoulder. He has surprised himself by embracing Danile, who has come forward with a little cry, arms outstretched, to his voice. For a moment, remembering that Danile is blind, and the outstretched arms were not necessarily an invitation, Uncle feels a fool. But Danile is weeping. Uncle is reassured, and leads him, unnecessarily, but with a strong, affectionate grip, to a chair. In their subsequent conversation he touches Danile occasionally, pats his knee, seizes his arm, and finds himself surprisingly gratified in his own gestures. Hoda stands watchful, her eyes following Uncle’s eyes, which rove ceaselessly but avoid her own.
All right if he knows. So what? Let him open his mouth, just once. But Uncle sat. Uncle drank tea. Let him look then, he would find nothing remiss, scarcely a speck of dust, only two cups and saucers piled neatly in the sink. These Hoda hastily rinsed out, relaxing as she finished, mistress of her mansion.
Uncle didn’t stay long that first time, but he stayed a lot longer than he’d intended when he decided, “What the hell, I’m in the district. Why not?” Thoughts of his cast-off kin had been nibbling at the edges of his mind lately, and though it wasn’t a firmly premeditated visit, he’d happened to bring along a copy of the English paper, in case they hadn’t seen it, with his picture and the notice in which he was listed as one of the organizing life members of the new Jewish Country Club.
“They didn’t want to sell it to us,” he growled, “the best golf course in the province; it hurts them Jews should enjoy it. But we matched them, green for green.” Uncle expanded under Danile’s admiration and Hoda’s enthusiastic appreciation, the way things should be, not like with his wife. To her credit Hoda refrained from picking an argument, though she wanted to ask him whether any poor Jews would ever get a stroke at his green. That was conversation for Mr. Polonick. For Daddy’s sake, she was discreet. Of course they already knew about the country club. Uncle had been prominently featured in the Yiddish paper, and in fact she’d already had the conversation about it with Mr. Polonick, but some things bear repeating, especially if you can add something from the personal angle, like the fact that the picture in the papers must have been taken at least twenty years ago.
He stayed, but not long enough to take supper, though Hoda pressed him and he was astonished to discover that she knew the old country style of fixing offal fit for a king. His wife, to keep up with her daughters-in-law, and at his own command, had moved with the culinary times; what the hell, he could afford it. But Uncle felt a pang of nostalgia as Hoda reeled off the half-forgotten names of delicacies sacred to the unrecognized deprivations of childhood, when to have anything to eat at all had been a blessing. He actually promised to stop for a meal sometime, and in parting, he took one of Danile’s hands warmly in both of his, slipped into it a handful of small bills and loose change he’d pulled uncounted from his pocket, and squeezed Danile’s fingers somewhat painfully around them. He departed through blurred eyes, his mind already shaping the inchoate feelings which would inevitably surface when, inevitably, he would drop a hint to his wife that he had seen his kin, and she would try to spoil it for him. “They’re mine, dammit, I don’t give a goddam what you say, they’re mine!” There was unexpected pain in it, but it was true. They were his in a way his sons no longer were. Sons! To get a few appreciative words out of them you had to buy them a golf course. Who else needed a golf course? Oh, he was proud enough of his educated children. They were the ornaments of his golf course, but the golf course was in itself an ornament, not central to his existence. What was central to it Uncle no longer knew, perhaps only the inner end of the lopsided ball of twine into which his years had wound. But he knew that there were hot spots in his world, places where thread ground against thread for whatever reason, producing his multiple irritations, his occasional tenderness, and whatever other discomforts kept the whole rolling from its invisible source.
There is a time for buying golf courses and a time for talking with your own. “I’ve earned it,” growled Uncle with the baffled greed of one whose primary dreams have come true and been found wanting, and who is reduced to riffling through his long cast-off pile of auxiliary gratifications. “I’ve earned I should be able to sit and talk a few minutes with my own. So what if she is what she is? So she makes more sense with her arse than my own son makes with his whole life!” Here Uncle sobered. It would be dangerously close to bait Gusia with her best beloved youngest. The last time he had come down hard on that one Gusia had unexpectedly rolled eyes upward, turned a hideous grey, and pitched forward at his feet. What had followed had been a further shock; the doctors, the consultations, the diagnoses, the confrontation with his sons, the embarrassment of his reluctance to explain exactly what had happened, the mixture of guilt and relief and irritation when Gusia too maintained her silence. Uncle’s mind slid hastily away from the trump card of Gusia’s mortality. “They’re mine”; he clung stubbornly to what he knew.
Uncle Nate came again to see them, not very often, but often enough to establish a pattern of expectation and, in Danile, a pleasant source of anticipation between times. Hoda anticipated too, but with far more jumbled feelings. Whether it was something her friends had said, or some whiff of possibility she had picked up herself during that short hour, or something she merely fancied during those fits of craziness that came upon her, Hoda looked forward to Uncle’s visits with a kind of erotic dread. He knew, it was obvious he knew. Then why did he come? What did he really want? He talked to her all right; she was included in his conversation, but he scarcely looked at her, except only sideways when he thought she wasn’t looking. What did it mean? What should she do if he did something? Where would they hide from Daddy? How could he? Oh, it was wrong of Uncle just to come and sit and not look straight at her so she didn’t know what to think, and had to hold herself in readiness, and didn’t want, and didn’t know what she would do, and kept imagining what he would look like and feel like growling his wrinkled hardness into her in shuddering spite of herself. Had it already happened and is that why she could feel it so strongly, and was she so confused because she was trying so hard to prevent herself from remembering that it happened every time he came? It must have happened. If she just let herself she would remember the details, their every movement, Uncle and Hoda writhing together, though she knew, she simply knew that it had not, that it could not have happened, that it just wasn’t so.
It wasn’t so, and at some time during each subsequent visit she would realize that it wasn’t going to happen this time either, and in her relief would go almost crazy with affection for him, begging him to stay longer and rushing about, concocting delicacies for him and once or twice even bringing him practically to the point of tears, what with the pressure of her warmth and the memories he and the tremulous Danile were conjuring up between them of the saintly sister it seemed to him she more and more, in certain ways, resembled.
Let people talk. When the time came you could buy a girl like this a husband and set them up in a little business and they’d prosper, sure they’d prosper, you could see by the way she went about selling that straw junk he wove, a real little hustler. What was talk compared to the feeling you got when you were in a place, when you felt at home with people? Even that crap he wove endlessly, while his sightless eyes were raised raptly to your face, sure it wasn’t worth much on the market, but you had to marvel at the way his fingers worked, all by themselves. It reminded Uncle of a concert his effete younger son had taken him and Gusia to once, white-tie stuff, a pianist sitting there so close they could almost reach up and touch him from where they sat in the best seats in the house. The music had made Nate sleepy, but that guy’s fingers! And they paid off, those fingers, they raked it in! He had been impressed to hear how well they paid. Not so his nephew’s labours, of course. Well, shlimazel was shlimazel, but there were times when Nate was almost hypnotized by the silent music of those performing fingers. His own hands had been so filled with little excrescences during his childhood and youth that all he had ever wanted to do was keep them hidden away. He still had to remind himself sometimes, even now, that he could put his hands on the table with any man, and snap his fingers, win or lose. But the sight of his nephew’s hands relaxed him. He could sit watching, silently, with only a grunt now and then, during the length of an entire cigar, while Danile worked, his smiling face somewhat mitigated in its blank intensity by the curling smoke. Why couldn’t he relax like this in his own goddam golf club?
Hoda eventually achieved an equilibrium in her feelings toward Uncle. What she dreaded simply never happened, and crazy though she sometimes felt herself to be, and out of control of anything that might happen to her, she was still capable of bringing her weight down on the side of her good luck. She neutralized the obsession finally by having a screaming fit at Hymie and Limpy Letz when they ventured to tease her once too often about what she could get out of the old man if she played her cards right. Ultimately, she even forgot, except in the vaguest way, as one sometimes remembers an irrelevance, that she had ever had dirty thoughts about him. Uncle’s visits had become far too important for her to let any craziness interfere with what she might learn from him.
“Show how she goes again, Uncle. How can anybody be that way?” Hoda laughed, Hoda bellowed while Uncle obligingly did another takeoff on the spastic Mrs. Limprig, shaking and twitching in every part separately as he jerked about the room. Danile sat quietly, turning his head this way and that to follow the sounds of Uncle’s movements, and smiling his uncomprehending appreciation of their mirth. There was discovery in it for Uncle, when he relaxed with his niece, shucking off what he considered his white-tie personality, and playing the card, telling stories, doing takeoffs, acting out how he felt about the world of people. “You’re so funny, Uncle,” Hoda guffawed. “You’re such a clown! You should have been a comedian!”
Her lips felt all stretched out of shape and tired, but she didn’t want to stop laughing because then he’d stop doing the orphanage people. You had to encourage Uncle all the time, show him you appreciated, or he’d try something else, and then she’d have to spend a lot of time being fascinated while he talked about all kinds of other things and imitated people she wasn’t personally concerned with at all. Even when his attitude was kind of mean, and the imitations themselves clumsy and made him look silly, and had nothing to do with anybody she was secretly connected to, she had to encourage him.
“You’re a genius, Uncle. Oh you give me a pain in the side. Don’t stop! It’s from laughing.”
“I always wanted,” gasped Uncle, puffing and wiping his perspiring face. “I always felt I had it in me. But what can you do? They crowd around you all your life, ‘Am am am, hum hum!” Uncle acted out the hands that clutched him all over, the hungry mouths demanding “I want, I want,” the multiple responsibilities that had crowded him into the upholstered corner of his life.
Persistently, adroitly, Hoda went after details, any and all details; like some nocturnal animal gathering scraps to weave a nest she wheedled the clues which kept her secretly in touch with her other world, and with the strange, glamorous special ones who inhabited the forbidden region. There must be something in what Daddy said after all, that nothing is accidental. It couldn’t be an accident that Daddy had an uncle so conveniently placed to her need. When she felt one of those panic fits coming on she could say to herself, over and over again, Uncle’s coming soon, Uncle’s coming soon, Uncle’s coming, and hold it at bay so that it didn’t slop over uncontrollably into her real life, at least during working hours, when she could least afford it. Sometimes she could even stave it off altogether, with the repeated promise that Uncle was coming soon with news.
Uncle seldom mentioned the foundling, though, having dismissed all that princely crap from the start. “What kind of prince?” Like Limprig, Uncle saw no royalty in the woodpile. His brief speculations on the subject were enough to make Hoda uneasy, so close did they skim the truth. “A snotty little kid like any snotty little kid gets dumped in a home,” and Uncle did an imitation of a snotty little kid with this tongue snaking up to his nostril. Hoda’s hilarity was out of all proportion. She actually shed tears. Henceforth, when she dared, she’d ask, “How’s the snotty little dumpling, Uncle?” But he usually didn’t know what she was talking about, and when she did make the question more explicit he generally shrugged it off irritably. Sometimes, Uncle realized, this niece of his was a bit of a cow; childish still, with no conception of the appropriate concerns of a board member.
In a way Hoda was relieved to be able to circle around her subject without getting to know much about him directly. It was not that she didn’t care, but she could not afford to get too interested at this time. Although she had no intention of abandoning her responsibilities, she could not let herself get caught up and sucked into something that might tempt her to give herself away. For the time being she had enough to cope with in her real life. As she often quipped to the boys, “I may be screwing my arse off but I keep my head screwed on tight.” Wasn’t her friendship with Uncle Nate plenty proof of that?
Nate, of course, could not know that he was being manipulated by this big, clumsy-looking girl. She never asked for money, did she? Sometimes he tried, half deliberately, to give them the impression that if they wanted or needed anything, they had but to ask; he was curious to see their greed. The lack of response in terms he could understand puzzled him. They admired; they oh-ed and ah-ed his financial exploits as they did his social successes. But they never asked for anything, and God knows, looking around him, Uncle could see that it was not because they were not in need. Nate had in mind that someday he would have to do something solid about their situation. He would have to think through what would be best. He still remembered another time when he had tried to help, and he honestly preferred gratitude as a response to his magnanimity. So far, this time, though they had not shown any excess of greed, they had not turned down his bounty either. Hoda’s hearty, matter-of-fact “thank you, Uncle Nate,” and Danile’s profuse Yiddish and Hebrew quotations, which, with the heavenly energy generated by his own generosity, cranked him up the celestial barber chair toward beatification, did not pretend false pride. Still, Gusia could in no way be justified in her conviction that they were trying to bleed him. On the contrary, Hoda even sometimes said, “You didn’t have to, Uncle,” like the summer when he had a whole season’s ice delivered to their icebox, twice weekly. “But it sure is nice,” she added as she served him up a big glassful of iced tea, with mint from their own garden, as she called the surrounding jungle.
