The Stories of Bernard Malamud, page 25
At night after Lucille returned from work she prepared supper, and then her father cleaned up the kitchen so she could study or go to her classes. He also thoroughly cleaned the house on Fridays; he washed the windows and mopped the floors. Being twice a widower, used to looking out for himself, he was not bothered by having to do domestic tasks. What most disappointed the retired sexton in his youngest daughter was her lack of ambition. She had wanted to be a secretary after finishing high school and was now, five years later, an assistant bookkeeper. A year ago he had said to her, “You won’t get better wages if you don’t have a college diploma.” “None of my friends go to college any more,” she said. “So how many friends have you got?” “I’m talking about the friends I know who started and stopped,” Lucille said; but Glasser finally persuaded her to register at Hunter College at night, where she took two courses a term. Although she had done that reluctantly, now once in a while she talked of becoming a teacher.
“Someday I will be dead,” the sexton remarked, “and you’ll be better off with a profession.”
Both of them knew he was reminding her she might be an old maid. She seemed not to worry, but later he heard her, through the door, crying in her room.
Once on a hot summer’s day they went together on the subway to Manhattan Beach for a dip in the ocean. Glasser, perspiring, wore his summer caftan and a black felt hat of twenty years. He had on white cotton socks, worn bulbous black shoes, and a white shirt open at the collar. Part of his beard was faintly brown and his complexion was flushed. On the train Lucille wore tight bell-bottom ducks and a lacy blue blouse whose long sleeves could be seen through up to her armpits; she wore clogs and had braided her dark hair to about six inches of pony tail, which she tied off with a green ribbon. Her father was uncomfortable at an inch of bare midriff, her heavy breasts, and the tightness of her pants, but said nothing. One of her troubles was that, however she dressed, she had little to say, and he hoped the college courses would help her. Lucille had gold-flecked grayish eyes, and in a bathing suit showed a plumpish but not bad figure. A Yeshiva bocher, dressed much like her father, stared at her from across the aisle of the train, and though Glasser sensed she was interested, her face self-consciously stiffened. He felt for her an affectionate contempt.
In September Lucille delayed, then would not go to reregister for night college. She had spent the summer mostly alone. The sexton argued kindly and furiously but she could not be moved. After he had shouted for an hour she locked herself in the bathroom and would not come out though he swore he had to urinate. The next day she returned very late from work and he had to boil an egg for supper. It ended the argument; she did not return to her night classes. As though to balance that, the telephone in her room began to ring more often, and she called herself Luci when she picked up the receiver. Luci bought herself new clothes—dresses, miniskirts, leotards, new sandals and shoes, and wore them in combinations and bright colors he had never seen on her before. So let her go, Glasser thought. He watched television and was usually asleep when she got home late from a date.
“So how was your evening?” he asked in the morning.
“That’s my own business,” Luci said.
When he dreamed of her, as he often did, he was upbraiding her for her short dresses; when she bent over he could see her behind. And for the disgusting costume she called hot pants. And the eyeliner and violet eye shadow she now used regularly. And for the way she looked at him when he complained about her.
One day when the sexton was praying in the shul on Canal Street Luci moved out of the house on Second Avenue. She had left a green-ink note on lined paper on the kitchen table, saying she wanted to live her own life but would phone him once in a while. He telephoned the linoleum office the next day and a man there said she had quit her job. Though shaken that she had left the house in this fashion, the sexton felt it might come to some good. If she was living with someone, all he asked was that it be an honest Jew.
Awful dreams invaded his sleep. He woke enraged at her. Sometimes he woke in fright. The old rabbi, the one who had gone to live with his son in Detroit, in one dream shook his fist at him.
On Fourteenth Street, one night on his way home from Helen’s house, he passed a prostitute standing in the street. She was a heavily made-up woman of thirty or so, and at the sight of her he became, without cause, nauseated. The sexton felt a weight of sickness on his heart and was moved to cry out to God but could not. For five minutes, resting his swaying weight on his cane, he was unable to walk. The prostitute had taken a quick look at his face and had run off. If not for a stranger who had held him against a telephone pole until he had flagged down a police car that drove the sexton home, he would have collapsed in the street.
In the house he pounded clasped hands against the wall of Lucille’s room, bare except for her bed and a chair. He wept, wailing. Glasser telephoned his eldest daughter and cried out his terrible fear.
“How can you be so positive about that?”
“I know in my heart. I wish I didn’t know but I know it.”
“So in that case she’s true to her nature,” Helen said. “She can’t be otherwise than she is, I never trusted her.”
He hung up on her and called Fay.
“All I can say,” said Fay, “is I saw it coming, but what can you do about such things? Who could I tell it to?”
“What should I do?”
“Ask for God’s help, what else can you do?”
The sexton hurried to the synagogue and prayed for God’s intervention. When he returned to his flat he felt unrelieved, outraged, miserable. He beat his chest with his fists, blamed himself for not having been stricter with her. He was angered with her for being the kind she was and sought ways to punish her. Really, he wanted to beg her to return home, to be a good daughter, to ease the pain in his heart.
The next morning he woke in the dark and determined to find her. But where do you look for a daughter who has become a whore? He waited a few days for her to call, and when she didn’t, on Helen’s advice he dialed information and asked if there was a new telephone number in the name of Luci Glasser.
“Not for Luci Glasser but for Luci Glass,” said the operator.
“Give me this number.”
The operator, at his impassioned insistence, gave him an address as well, a place on midtown Ninth Avenue. Though it was still September and not cold, the sexton put on his winter coat and took his rubber-tipped heavy cane. He rode, whispering to himself, on the subway to West Fiftieth Street, and walked to Ninth, to a large new orange-brick apartment house.
All day, though it rained intermittently, he waited across the street from the apartment house until his daughter appeared late at night; then he followed her. She walked quickly, lightly, as though without a worry, down the avenue. As he hurried after her she hailed a cab. Glasser shouted at it but no one looked back.
In the morning he telephoned her and she did not answer, as though she knew her father was calling. That evening Glasser went once more to the apartment house and waited across the street. He had considered going in and asking the doorman for her apartment number but was ashamed to.
“Please, give me the number of my daughter, Luci Glasser, the prostitute.”
At eleven that night Luci came out. From the way she was dressed and made up he was positive he had not been mistaken.
She turned on Forty-eighth Street and walked to Eighth Avenue. Luci sauntered calmly along the avenue. The sidewalks were crowded with silent men and showily dressed young women. Traffic was heavy and there were strong lights everywhere, yet the long street looked dark and evil. Some of the stores, in their spotlit windows, showed pictures of men and women in sexual embrace. The sexton groaned. Luci wore a purple silk sweater with red sequins, almost no skirt, and long black net stockings. She paused for a while on a street corner, apart from a group of girls farther up the block. She would speak to the men passing by, and one or two would stop to speak to her, then she waited again. One man spoke quietly for a while as she listened intently. Then Luci went into a drugstore to make a telephone call, and when she came out, her father, half dead, was waiting for her at the door. She walked past him.
Incensed, he called her name and she turned in frightened surprise. Under the makeup, false eyelashes, gaudy mouth, her face had turned ashen, eyes anguished.
“Papa, go home,” she cried in fright.
“What did I do to you that you do this to me?”
“It’s not as bad as people think,” Luci said.
“It’s worse, it’s filthy.”
“Not if you don’t think so. I meet lots of people—some are Jewish.”
“A black year on their heads.”
“You live your life, let me live mine.”
“God will curse you, He will rot your flesh.”
“You’re not God,” Luci cried in sudden rage.
“Cocksucker,” the sexton shouted, waving his cane.
A policeman approached. Luci ran off. The sexton, to the man’s questions, was inarticulate.
When he sought her again Luci had disappeared. He went to the orange apartment house and the doorman said Miss Glass had moved out; he could not say where. Though Glasser returned several times the doorman always said the same thing. When he telephoned her number he got a tape recording of the operator saying the number had been disconnected.
The sexton walked the streets looking for her, though Fay and Helen begged him not to. He said he must. They asked him why. He wept aloud. He sought her among the streetwalkers on Eighth and Ninth Avenues and on Broadway. Sometimes he went into a small cockroachy hotel and uttered her name, but nobody knew her.
Late one October night he saw her on Third Avenue near Twenty-third Street. Luci was standing in midblock near the curb, and though it was a cold night she was not wearing a coat. She had on a heavy white sweater and a mirrored leather miniskirt. A round two-inch mirror in a metal holder was sewn onto the back of the skirt, above her plump thighs, and it bounced on her buttocks as she walked.
Glasser crossed the street and waited in silence through her alarm of recognition.
“Lucille,” he begged her, “come home with your father. We won’t tell anybody. Your room is waiting.”
She laughed angrily. She had gained weight. When he attempted to follow her she called him dirty names. He hobbled across the street and waited in an unlit doorway.
Luci walked along the block and when a man approached she spoke to him. Sometimes the man stopped to speak to her. Then they would go together to a run-down, dark, squat hotel on a side street nearby, and a half hour later she returned to Third Avenue, standing between Twenty-third and -second, or higher up the avenue, near Twenty-sixth.
The sexton follows her and waits on the other side of the street by a bare-branched tree. She knows he is there. He waits. He counts the number of her performances. He punishes by his presence. He calls down God’s wrath on the prostitute and her blind father.
Rembrandt’s Hat
RUBIN, in careless white cloth hat, or visorless soft round cap, however one described it, wandered with unexpressed or inexpressive thoughts up the stairs from his studio in the basement of the New York art school where he made his sculpture, to a workshop on the second floor, where he taught. Arkin, the art historian, a hypertensive bachelor of thirty-four—a man often swept by strong feeling, he thought—about a dozen years younger than the sculptor, observed him through his open office door, wearing his cap amid a crowd of art students and teachers in the hall during a change of classes. In his white hat he stands out and apart, the art historian thought. It illumines a lonely inexpressiveness arrived at after years of experience. Though it was not entirely apt he imagined a lean white animal—hind, stag, goat?—staring steadfastly but despondently through trees of a dense wood. Their gazes momentarily interlocked and parted. Rubin hurried to his workshop class.
Arkin was friendly with Rubin though they were not really friends. Not his fault, he felt; the sculptor was a very private person. When they talked, he listened, looking away, as though guarding his impressions. Attentive, apparently, he seemed to be thinking of something else—his sad life no doubt, if saddened eyes, a faded green mistakable for gray, necessarily denote sad life. Sometimes he uttered an opinion, usually a flat statement about the nature of life, or art, never much about himself; and he said absolutely nothing about his work.
“Are you working, Rubin?” Arkin was reduced to.
“Of course I’m working.”
“What are you doing if I may ask?”
“I have a thing going.”
There Arkin let it lie.
Once, in the faculty cafeteria, listening to the art historian discourse on the work of Jackson Pollock, the sculptor’s anger had flared.
“The world of art ain’t necessarily in your eyes.”
“I have to believe that what I see is there,” Arkin had politely responded.
“Have you ever painted?”
“Painting is my life.”
Rubin, with dignity, reverted to silence. That evening, leaving the building, they tipped hats to each other over small smiles.
In recent years, after his wife had left him and costume and headdress became a mode among students, Rubin had taken to wearing various odd hats from time to time, and this white one was the newest, resembling Nehru’s Congress Party cap, but rounded—a cross between a cantor’s hat and a bloated yarmulke; or perhaps like a French judge’s in Rouault, or working doctor’s in a Daumier print. Rubin wore it like a crown. Maybe it kept his head warm under the cold skylight of his large studio.
When the sculptor again passed along the crowded hall on his way down to his studio that day he had first appeared in his white cap, Arkin, who had been reading an article on Giacometti, put it down and went into the hall. He was in an ebullient mood he could not explain to himself, and told Rubin he very much admired his hat.
“I’ll tell you why I like it so much. It looks like Rembrandt’s hat that he wears in one of the middle-aged self-portraits, the really profound ones. May it bring you the best of luck.”
Rubin, who had for a moment looked as though he was struggling to say something extraordinary, fixed Arkin in a strong stare and hurried downstairs. That ended the incident, though it did not diminish the art historian’s pleasure in his observation.
Arkin later remembered that when he had come to the art school via an assistant curator’s job in a museum in St. Louis, seven years ago, Rubin had been working in wood; he now welded triangular pieces of scrap iron to construct his sculptures. Working at one time with a hatchet, later a modified small meat cleaver, he had reshaped driftwood pieces, out of which he had created some arresting forms. Dr. Levis, the director of the art school, had talked the sculptor into giving an exhibition of his altered driftwood objects in one of the downtown galleries. Arkin, in his first term at the school, had gone on the subway to see the show one winter’s day. This man is an original, he thought, maybe his work will be, too. Rubin had refused a gallery vemissage, and on the opening day the place was nearly deserted. The sculptor, as though escaping his hacked forms, had retreated into a storage room at the rear of the gallery and stayed there looking at pictures. Arkin, after reflecting whether he ought to, sought him out to say hello, but seeing Rubin seated on a crate with his back to him, examining a folio of somebody’s prints, silently shut the door and departed. Although in time two notices of the show appeared, one bad, the other mildly favorable, the sculptor seemed unhappy about having exhibited his work, and after that didn’t for years. Nor had there been any sales. Recently, when Arkin had suggested it might be a good idea to show what he was doing with his welded iron triangles, Rubin, after a wildly inexpressive moment, had answered, “Don’t bother playing around with that idea.”
The day after the art historian’s remarks in the hall about Rubin’s white cap, it disappeared from sight—gone totally; for a while he wore on his head nothing but his heavy reddish hair. And a week or two later, though he could momentarily not believe it, it seemed to Arkin that the sculptor was avoiding him. He guessed the man was no longer using the staircase to the right of his office, but was coming up from the basement on the other side of the building, where his corner workshop room was anyway, so he wouldn’t have to pass Arkin’s open door. When he was certain of this Arkin felt uneasy, then experienced moments of anger.
Have I offended him in some way? he asked himself. If so, what did I say that’s so offensive? All I did was remark on the hat in one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and say it looked like the cap he was wearing. How can that be offensive?
He then thought: no offense where none’s intended. All I have is good will to him. He’s shy and may have been embarrassed in some way—maybe my exuberant voice in the presence of students—if that’s so it’s no fault of mine. And if that’s not it, I don’t know what’s the matter except his own nature. Maybe he hasn’t been feeling well, or it’s some momentary mishigas—nowadays there are more ways of insults without meaning to than ever before—so why raise up a sweat over it? I’ll wait it out.
But as weeks, then months went by and Rubin continued to shun the art historian—he saw the sculptor only at faculty meetings when Rubin attended them; and once in a while glimpsed him going up or down the left staircase; or sitting in the Fine Arts secretary’s office poring over inventory lists of supplies for sculpture—Arkin thought maybe the man is having a breakdown. He did not believe it. One day they met in the men’s room and Rubin strode out without a word. Arkin felt for the sculptor surges of hatred. He didn’t like people who didn’t like him. Here I make a sociable, innocent remark to the son of a bitch—at worst it might be called innocuous—and to him it’s an insult. I’ll give him tit for tat. Two can play.
