Crackpot, page 43
Live and let live. Hoda no longer nursed futile dreams. She had learned to cherish her freedom. Just because she was nice to that immigrant didn’t mean he had a visa to settle in her life.
“I need to get married like I need a hole in the head,” she told Lazar the mocky the first time he proposed to her. True, it wasn’t a reply to his proposal; she would not have answered so rudely had she been paying attention to what he was saying. It was late, the smudge end of night. She had been working since mid-afternoon; she was tired and would have preferred to go straight to sleep, but that would not have been nice, since the D.P. had played since early evening, and a rotten player he was too, and had dropped a heavy packet, and had waited for her, and had even helped her straighten things out a bit after everyone went home. She had tried before, once or twice, to steer him to the young chippies, with whom she had guaranteed him a good time, and even promised if he didn’t have one she’d make it up to him herself afterwards. But for some reason he was shy of the youngsters, maybe because of his scars, or maybe because they weren’t members of our tribe and he wouldn’t touch them after what their kind had done to him during the war. That wouldn’t have surprised her, though not many deepees she’d run across felt that way. Mostly they just wanted to forget it. But she didn’t. Hoda wasn’t going to forget it and she wasn’t going to let anyone else forget it either. Sons of bitches. The dumb government was bringing them into the country, too. Creeps. Creepy Germans, didn’t even walk like people, strutting in a row down Main Street, cold blue eyes throwing chills. Fooey; she almost wished she were still in her hustling days, so she could tell them where to stick it; in a grinder, that’s where. What bothered her was that she was afraid of them. It wasn’t like getting sore and yelling it out with someone to and fro and that was that. They went on wanting to hurt you. They actually did awful things to people. They meant it for real. Someone ought to give them a taste of their own medicine. But who? To do that you had to be like them, and who wanted to be like that? Fooey to them. Fooey. You had to grow up to be a middle-aged woman practically to find out there really are bogeymen after all. That made it harder to be mean to someone who was a deepee, maybe from a concentration camp, and a good customer, who dropped a lot of dough at the tables. Like everybody said, these deepees did all right once they got over here, but Hoda didn’t grudge them any prosperity, like some people did. They deserved a little luck, and a little fun too, even though you were dead beat and had thigh burn so bad you could hardly walk, and all you wanted to do was get home and drop in your cot and snore. What the hell, what right did she have to complain? What was she doing during the war while he was over these losing his wife and his family and everything?
Usually she understood him well enough, but it was so hard, when she was tired, to concentrate on what he was saying. She thought he was just asking her why she never got married, like guys did sometimes; not that they cared, really, just for conversation or curiosity or something. She had her answer pat. “I am married; I’m a part-time wife to the whole damn world!” she would reply, and steer them into something that was more like their own goddam business. The trouble was her Yiddish was getting a little rusty and she didn’t understand Lazar’s accent very well, especially when she wasn’t paying much attention. She didn’t want to seem to brush off his question, him being a mocky and all, so she didn’t tell him that about being a part-time wife. She just laughed indulgently and threw out the comment, “I need to get married like I need a hole in the head,” as if to imply, “I never wanted to, that’s why.”
Normally, she enjoyed it when Lazar walked her home, as he had been doing regularly of late. Tonight, however, she had actually hoped that he wouldn’t wait around for her. It wasn’t simply tiredness; that didn’t prevent her from taking pleasure in the odorous Indian summer darkness, and in hanging onto the man’s arm, and listening or not particularly listening to his low voice muttering the Yiddish words that he pronounced so oddly and she imitated so well to Daddy’s amusement afterwards. It wasn’t the fact that she had an early funeral tomorrow, either. That happened often enough, and would not normally have interfered with her enjoyment of the crisp balminess of the night and the crunch of leaves underfoot. How should she have known when she gave way this morning to the temptation to take a long walk like she used to, because it was such a lovely day, and had walked all the way back to town from the cemetery, that she would have to be alert to receive a proposal of marriage late in the night, even though her thigh burn was killing her? It would have been all right; she was used to thigh burn, but she didn’t spend so much time off her feet nowadays as before. In fact she’d been on her feet almost without a break since she got to work that afternoon. All day she’d spent on her feet in the busy delicatessen, and half the night on her feet in the kibitzarnia. Rub-rub kiss-kiss chafe-chafe rasp-rasp burn-burn glue-glue her thighs. Towards the end of the night’s work it had got so bad, though she never let on because you have to keep the show on the road, that she had kept imagining the pleasure it would be to be able to waddle home alone, walking with her legs spread as far apart as she could, and the cool air fanning up her raw flesh deliciously. Oh well. At least maybe he wouldn’t notice the odd way she leaned rather heavily against him occasionally, while trying, surreptitiously, to shake one leg loose of the other and fan it in the air. Perhaps, however, it was these extra little apparently affectionate pressures from her which stimulated him to make his proposal at this particular moment. At any rate, quiet man though he was, there was a streak of irritability in him, and he very quickly made it clear that he did not appreciate her facetious reply to his proposal of marriage.
What could she say? Now was not the time to talk about thigh burn, even in her own defence. Hoda apologized. She had misheard. She had misunderstood. It was his accent. Instinctively she seized the one factor which she could turn to playfully aggressive use in extricating herself from the embarrassment of giving him cause to accuse her of not knowing the proper spirit with which to reply to a proposal of marriage, particularly from a man like him, who had suffered enough to deserve being treated with the kind of respect he didn’t often get from the slobs around the kibitzarnia. “How do you expect me to know what you’re saying in Galician?” she wailed. “You call that Yiddish? I’d understand you better in Chinese or Scandihoovian!” She embroidered it extravagantly, hanging tightly onto his arm to emphasize the friendly nature of her teasing, and refraining from fanning her leg out.
He was not one to dwell on his grievance, but allowed himself to be quickly mollified, and returned, encouraged, to the question in hand. It was the reality of this question which Hoda had been trying to assimilate even as she coaxed him back into temper. Almost with panic she heard it reiterated, and found herself biting back the hysterical impulse to reply once more: “I need to get married like I need a hole in the head!”
“What do you need me for?” she blurted instead. “I mean,” she added lamely, “you know what I am. I mean,” she amended quickly, “I’m not ashamed of what I am, but I don’t want anybody trying to tell me afterwards that he took me off the streets and made a mentch of me. I live my life and I know what I’m doing and I’m doing all right.” Somehow, now it was Hoda who was upset and aggrieved, and Lazar doing his best to soothe her. She didn’t know how she had got onto the subject but suddenly she found herself bawling him out for being such a rotten poker player. She didn’t much like playing herself, but she had been around the sharks long enough to know that you couldn’t be as indifferent and absent-minded about your game as this one was unless you didn’t mind laying your hard-earned eggs in other people’s pockets. Hadn’t he lost enough in his lifetime?
But he had a one-track mind, and he somehow managed to bring everything she said back to his subject. Now it turned out he didn’t even care for poker in the first place. He had come to the kibitzarnia originally because he was a stranger and alone, and he was not of an age to be drawn to dancehalls. It wasn’t easy to find friends. In a place like Limpy’s, as long as you were willing to spend a few dollars you could find temporary friends and company for an evening. What else did he have to do with his few dollars? Gradually, he had found one or two people from his own home district in the old country, had picked up an acquaintance here and there, but still he was drawn to Limpy’s. If he still threw out his money now it was Hoda’s fault. She was the only reason he came.
“My fault. My fault. Now everything’s my fault. Everything’s always my fault!” She couldn’t help laughing a little, nervously, though she tried to put the usual vehemence into her voice, and now she fanned her leg out quite boldly, with an added little jerk. So what if he noticed? But he paid no attention, just gave her arm firm support for a man who was so thin and reedy. Well, he was a gentleman, that was obvious. “What do you mean, my fault?” She challenged him to spell it out. “What business is it of mine if you come or not?” But she continued quickly, lest he accept the challenge. “And anyway, even if you want to come, do you have to throw your money away?” If he didn’t really like gambling why should he have had to go to such lengths just to find a little human company in the first place? After all he’d been through? Shame, while the rest of them had sat on their fat in this very selfsame kibitzarnia throughout the war, he had been living through whatever he had been living through. Actually, she didn’t know exactly what he had lived through, only that he had lost his wife and children, and that he was relieved that first time when she was not visibly repelled by his scars. Hell, expect an old pro like herself to show what she felt about things like that, after what she’d seen in her lifetime? What could she feel, after all this time, except a spasm of pity, “Oh God, something else,” when yet another revealed to her his private source of anguish and shame. Sometimes they were indeed horrible deformities of the human vessel, and only her overwhelming awareness of suffering and need had prevented her repulsion. But the strange thing was, so often they were such little things, such minor cracks and chips and variations in the human design on which her clients concentrated as much unhappiness as did the real possessors of the grossest deformities. In the minutest flaw men divined perfection withheld, and saw themselves cast down. At first Hoda had tried to point out to them that they weren’t nearly as badly off as she was. Look how fat she was and she’d been that way all her life and she couldn’t help it, and people laughing at her, and them being poor, and her mother dying, and her daddy being blind; but that was not what they wanted. They knew all that, and they didn’t come to hear her troubles. So she had gradually learned never to draw attention while she was paying attention, never to demand comfort while she was giving comfort. And from the early pain of realization that nobody really wanted to know her, had grown her pride that nobody did know her, not really, not who she was, underneath, not nearly as well as she knew them, even though they talked about her and laughed at her and looked down on her. She wouldn’t give them away, either. She didn’t have to live off their weaknesses. If they wanted to do it to her, well okay, it had always been good publicity for her business, and she had even played up to it sometimes, on purpose, doing and saying things she knew they would use against her, that really had nothing to do with what she was like inside at all. There had been times when she had wanted desperately for some particular person to cross over her no man’s land, to give her some sign that he would like to come closer, so that she could draw him to her heart. But it never led to anything in the end, though the guy was always glad to get it for free, and besides it was always bad for business when word got round she was playing favourites. Her old steadies resented it; well, they made cracks.
That’s the way it had been, and by now, that’s the way she liked it. Who did these refugees think they were, coming in and thinking they could take over wherever they felt like it? What kind of man was he anyway? He wouldn’t have taken her for his first wife, she could bet on that. He probably figured that now he was all beaten and scarred up nobody else would have him. What made him think she was going to take everybody’s chewed up leftovers? Maybe she’d been a whore all her life but it was a free country and in this country even whores could have standards, when it came to actually getting married.
“If you like, I’ll quit gambling altogether,” he offered.
What awful things she’d been thinking! It was like feeling he wasn’t good enough for her just because he was a deepee and had suffered and lost everything. Where did she get off looking down on him? For all the sympathy she thought she had for everyone, did she even know, after all these months of friendship, what had happened to him, except in the vaguest way? “It’s not what I like,” she assured him firmly. “It’s what’s right. Why should you have to play if you don’t like to play, just for the privilege of sitting with human beings once in a while?” On the other hand what kind of man was he if he didn’t even confide in the woman he wanted to marry? What did she really know about him?
“I can’t just come and sit,” said Lazar. “It’s a business. Limpy’s got to make a living. You’ve got to make a living. If I came and just sat, after a while Limpy would say, ‘What’s this? A deepee shnorrer I don’t need sitting around here, taking up a chair where a customer could be laying eggs.”
A deepee shnorrer! How did he know? “If I want a friend of mine to just come and sit Limpy won’t say a word against it, you can take it from me!” She was so irate she nearly woke up the block. A bird gave a startled peep from a nearby tree, and Hoda went on somewhat more softly. “If you want company you come up to the joint any time you feel like it, and I’ll answer for it. Limpy and everyone else will treat you all right, like a real friend.” It was simply appalling that someone had to go to such lengths to relieve his loneliness, that he had sat for night after night with people whom he thought would call him a deepee shnorrer. “And it’s not up to Limpy to tell you where to lay your eggs either,” she added firmly.
“I’ll lay my eggs wherever you like,” he assured her.
Hoda giggled involuntarily into the tart night air. She hadn’t noticed before that he had such a good sense of humour.
“But if I come,” he persisted, “and I don’t play I won’t be able to walk you home if somebody else happens to lose heavy or happens to ask you. And it’s the only reason I’d come, so what’s the use?”
“Don’t worry,” she replied, touched more than she dared acknowledge. “You can walk me home.”
“But I don’t want anyone else around when I walk you home,” said Lazar.
The sly mocky! “There you are, you see? Are you trying to make a nice girl of me already?” she challenged with quick truculence.
He was silent. She glanced round at him with unexpected fear. He was walking with lowered head. “Anyway, who said anything about anyone else?” She tried to laugh out of a suddenly tight throat.
Lazar did not reply, but he did not reject the extra pressure that she put tentatively on his arm, and allowed himself to smile into the darkness.
He was a gentleman all right. He didn’t just come and sit. He made himself useful. Sometimes he took over someone’s hand briefly, and showed himself to be a better player in his caretaker role than when he had played simply and indifferently for himself. Sometimes he brought a bottle and treated the whole company, and sometimes he ordered sandwiches and drinks from the delicatessen for everyone there, at his own expense. Hoda had even, at times, to put a curb on his generosity. What the hell, why should he go and throw out his hard-earned cash for the benefit of every shnorrer who happened to come around? Oh they’d take all right; people would go on taking as long as you had an ounce of strength to go on giving. And if he was hanging around here just for her like he said, then she had some responsibility to make sure that nobody else took advantage of him. What was he after, anyway? Why did he have to keep hanging around? What did he want to keep on proposing for, when she kept on putting him off, night after night? Who did he think he was, Rudolph Valentino? Get married. Get married. What did she know about getting married?
