Inside, Outside, page 1
Inside, Outside
Herman Wouk
Inside, Outside
Copyright © 1985, 2014 by Herman Wouk
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
“First Fig” from Collected Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., copyright 1922, 1950 by Edna St. Vincent Millay), reprinted by permission.
Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan / Ter33Design
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795344190
Contents
Part I: The Green Cousin
1: Introducing Myself
2: The Ploika
3: The Steamship Ticket
4: Uncle Hyman
5: The Ice Cake
6: The Porush
7: My Name
8: The Partners
9: The Green Cousin
10: Paul Frankenthal
11: The Glories of Starving
12: The Tribe
13: The Outside—or, What the Big Guys Did in the Lots
14: The Haskalist
15: Rosalind Katz and the Coo Coo Clan
16: The Clambake
17: Izzy
18: Hollooeen
19: Alienation
20: The Sauerkraut Crocks
21: The War Alarm
22: The Sauerkraut Crisis
23: Mr. Winston and the Big Yoxenta
24: Peter Quat
25: The Five Medals
26: Money Troubles
27: Morris Elfenbein and the Purple Suit
28: Biberman
29: The Bar Mitzva
30: The Newspaper Story
31: The Arista Meeting
32: The Art Plates
Part II: Manhattan
33: Golda
34: Bernice Lavine
35: Sde Shalom
36: Zaideh
37: Boss Goodkind
38: The Yeshiva
39: The Little Blue Books
40: Columbia!
41: I Grow
42: Quandary
43: I Rebel
44: Dorsi Sabin
45: General Lev
46: West End Avenue
47: Holy Joe Geiger
48: Peter Quat at Home
49: Dorsi in April House
50: Holy Joe’s Temple
51: Aunt Faiga’s Wedding
52: “You Shall Have It”
53: Opening Night
54: Pincus Forever
55: Quat’s Phone Call
56: Goldhandler
Part III: April House
57: Jazz Jacobson
58: Mort Oshins
59: Digging Jokes
60: The Pirate King
61: An Understanding Woman
62: Goldhandler in Hollywood
63: Sandra’s Letter
64: Johnny, Drop Your Gun
65: Backstage at Minsky’s
66: Grade A Showgirls
67: Double Trouble
68: “Apiece?”
69: I Arrive
70: She Arrives
71: Consummation
72: The Hemingway Pillow
73: Lee’s Wedding
74: Such Sweet Sorrow
75: War!
76: Bobbie’s Teeth
77: New Girl in Town
78: A Moment of Truth
79: Bobbie’s Second Thoughts
80: Quat Quits
81: I Flee
82: The Recapture
83: Quat’s Wedding
84: Airlift!
85: Sandra Found
86: A Tribute of Tears
87: The Shoot-out
88: The End
89: The Beginning
90: He Will Make Peace
About the Author
Endnote
To my sister Irene
with love
Rejoice, young man in your youth, and let your heart pleasure you in the days of your young manhood; and walk in the ways of your heart, and the sight of your eyes; but know that for all these God will bring you into judgment. So remove trouble from your heart and put away wrongdoing from your flesh, for boyhood and youth are a breath.
ECCLESIASTES 11:9–10
PART I
The Green Cousin
1
Introducing Myself
All hell has been breaking loose around here, and my peaceful retreat in the Executive Office Building may be coming to a sudden rude end.
I suppose it was too good to last. It has been a curious hiatus, unimaginable to me a few months ago—first of all, my becoming a Special Assistant to the President, especially to this President; second, and even more surprising, my finding it no big deal, but rather an oasis of quiet escape from corporate tax law. I’ve at last pieced together the mysterious background of my appointment. The haphazardness of it will appear absurd, but the longer I’m in Washington the more I realize that most people in this town tend to act with the calm forethought of a beheaded chicken. It gives me the cold shudders.
Fortunately for my peace of mind, the bookcase in this large gloomy room contains, amid rows and rows of dusty government publications, the seven volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman’s George Washington: A Biography, and Churchill’s six volumes on the Second World War. I dip into these now and then to reassure myself that things were not very different in the days of those great men. Churchill calls the Versailles Treaty, the product of the combined wisdom and long labor of all the top politicians of Europe, “a sad and complicated idiocy.” From what I see here, this description can be extended to almost all politics. No wonder the world is in such a god-awful mess, and has been, it appears, since Hammurabi ordered his cuneiform scribes to start scratching his great deeds on clay tablets.
Let me describe the jolt I got the other day, to give you my feel of things at this world hub. When I first flew down from New York and briefly met with the President in the Oval Office—the one time I saw him until this recent jolt—I explained that if I did take the job I wouldn’t work on Saturdays, and would make up the time Sundays or nights, if required. The President looked baffled, and then calculating. He pushed out his lips, widened his eyes, raised those thick eyebrows, and nodded gravely and repeatedly. “That’s splendid,” was his judicious comment. “I’m impressed, Mr. Goodkind.” (He pronounced it right, with a long i.) “May I say that I’ve had numerous Jewish associates, but you’re the first one who’s made that stipulation, and I’m impressed. Very impressed. That’s impressive.”
I’m hardly a super-pious type, I hasten to acknowledge. What I do Saturdays, besides the usual praying, is mostly lie around and read, or walk a few miles along the tow path with my black Labrador, Scrooge. I wouldn’t give up this inviolate chunk of peace in my week for anything. It has kept me sane at my Wall Street office down the years, this day of sealed-off Sabbath release from the squirrel cage of tax law.
But that’s not the point of the story. The point is that for much of my life I’ve been a Talmud addict. I don’t spend day and night over its many volumes as my grandfather did, but even at the Goodkind and Curtis office I used to arrive early and, with four or five cups of strong coffee, study for an hour or more every morning. I won’t go deeply into this. Just take my word for it, under the opaque Aramaic surface the Talmud is a magnificent structure of subtle legal brilliancies, all interwoven with legend, mysticism, the color of ancient times, and the cut-and-thrust of powerful minds in sharp clash. I can’t get enough of it, and I’ve been at it for decades.
Once I’d settled into this office and realized that I’d fallen down a peculiar well of solitude, I saw no reason not to bring the Talmud here and resume my usual routine. So there I was, day before yesterday, sitting at my desk with a huge tome open, puzzling my skullcapped head over the validity of a bill of divorcement brought from Spain to Babylon, when the door opened, and without ado in walks the President of the United States.
Startled embarrassment on both sides.
Up I jump, snatching off the skullcap and slamming shut the volume. Sheer reflex. The President says, “Oh! Sorry. Did I interrupt something? Your secretary seems to have stepped out, and—”
Awkward pause while I collect myself. “Mr. President, you’re not interrupting anything. I’m highly honored, and ah—”
We look at each other in silence. I’m telling this ridiculous and unlikely little scene just the way it was: a goy walking in on a Jew studying the Talmud in the White House, and suitably apologetic. I knew the President had a hideaway office on the first floor of this building, but his barging in like that was a stunner. Well, the moment passed. In his deep Presidential voice, one of several he produces like a ventriloquist, except that all the characters talk out of the same face, he asked, “Ah, just what is that large book, Mr. Good-kind?”
“It’s the Talmud, Mr. President.”
“Ah, the Talmud. Very impressive.”
He asked to look into it. I showed him the text, told him the dates and nationalities of the commentators, the printing history of the Talmud and so forth, my standard quick tour for outsiders. It’s not a dull tour. On one page of the Talmud you encounter authorities from many lands, from the time of Jesus and even earlier down through the ages to the nineteenth century, all discussing or annotating a single point of law. I know of nothing else like it in the wo
“Well, I scratch the surface, Mr. President. I come from a rabbinic family.”
He nodded. The momentary relaxation faded from his face, leaving deep-carved lines of concern. The man looks ten years older than he did when we met two months ago.
Presidential voice: “I’d like to talk to you, ah, David. This impressive background of yours is very relevant. Let’s chat right here for a bit. It’s quiet.”
That it was, to be sure. Sepulchral. He sat down, and so I did. The upshot of this exceedingly strange “chat” was that I wrote a TV speech for him about Watergate; a decidedly unlooked-for turn in the life of I. David Goodkind, counsellor-at-law and lifelong Democrat, though no more bizarre than the way I got here.
But rest assured, this Watergate business is going to take up no space in these pages. If it dies off, as I expect it soon will—that’s certainly what he’s hoping and trying for—well, that’ll be that. Just one more sad and complicated idiocy scratched on the clay tablets. Somehow it’s beginning to remind me, the whole Watergate caper, of the first time Bobbie Webb and I broke up; when I rebounded to a brief affair with a screwy but goodhearted dish named Sonia Feld.
As the affair began to cool down, Sonia knitted me a sweater, a loose ill-fitting thing. With it came a sentimental note that did the trick, warmed me up to her again, intravenous glucose for a terminally ill liaison. Well, Sonia left one long loose thread hanging from the sweater, which I cut off with a scissors, but the same thread would work loose as I wore the thing, and I’d cut it off again. Once when I was drunk for some reason—I think, after a snide telephone call from Bobbie Webb, an art form at which she was peerless—I saw that damned thread still dangling loose. I began to pull on it. I pulled and pulled, and poor Sonia’s work began to unravel. That infuriated me. I pulled in alcoholic obstinacy, until I was left with a mess of white wriggly wool over the floor, and no sweater. It was gone.
The President was reelected not long ago with the biggest majority ever. There’s only this one dangling Watergate thread, and he can’t seem to cut it or tie it off. But I daresay he will. He is a tough and resourceful bird, and the Presidency is a mighty close-knit sweater.
***
Two things happened a while ago to create the hole in the White House entourage which I have filled. A speechwriter who specialized in quips resigned, and Israel sent over a new ambassador. The President and the previous man, a blunt ex-general, had gotten on almost too well; the ambassador actually came out for his reelection. At a cabinet meeting, the President said he wished there was someone on the staff who knew the incoming diplomat well enough to talk to him with the gloves off, until he himself could feel at home with the man. The Secretary of Defense brought up my name. Some time ago this same diplomat had spoken at a United Jewish Appeal banquet where I got the Secretary to come as a guest of honor, and SecDef remembered that the speaker and I had hugged each other. Nothing unusual, the general counsel for the UJA naturally gets to know and hug all the Israeli star speakers. SecDef described my background to the President, who had never heard of me (so much for newspaper notoriety, breath on a windowpane). The President said, “Sounds okay, let’s contact him,” and so it happened. Just like that.
A detail of my background much in my favor was my radio experience. Long, long ago, before the war—as I sometimes feel, before Noah’s flood—the Secretary of Defense and I romanced these two girls in the chorus of a Winter Garden musical, Johnny, Drop Your Gun. I was then a gagwriter of twenty-one, and my girl was Bobbie Webb. SecDef was a lawyer a few years older; very married, and having a final boyish fling. I was discreet, and he appreciated it. We’ve been friendly ever since, as he too is a Wall Street attorney, though at the moment he’s every inch the good gray statesman, a straight arrow with five kids and a house in McLean. Only last week my wife Jan and I had dinner at SecDef’s house, and he made clumsy jokes about the time we hung around the stage door together. Mrs. SecDef gaily laughed; mainly with her mouth muscles, I thought, and her eyes kind of looked like glass marbles.
Anyhow, at the cabinet meeting SecDef mentioned my jokewriting past, and the President perked up at that. All politicians are desperate for jokes. Very few can deliver them, and he is not one of those, but he keeps trying. I have fed him a number of jokes since coming here, but the way he delivers them, they just lie where they fall, plop, like dropped jellyfish.
SecDef also told the President about the obscenity trials. That gave him pause. Like most red-blooded American males, the President is a horseshit and asshole man from way back. His packaged flat image, however, is entirely that other face of American manhood: dear old Mom and grand old flag and heck and golly and shoot, pretty much like an astronaut. He said that he’d never even heard of Peter Quat and Deflowering Sarah, or of Henry Miller and Tropic of Cancer—the President is not big on modernist literature—so he doubted that many people had. Anyway, he allowed that a bit of liberal input might be useful around his White House, at that. So I was in.
And I think I’ve already been of some use. Not that I’ve helped him feel at home with the ambassador. This President is never really “at home” with anybody, possibly not even with his wife and daughters. He dwells in a dark hole somewhere deep inside himself, and all the world ever sees of the real man, if anything, is the faint gleam of phosphorescent worried eyes peering from that hole. I did ease the first meetings of SecDef and the President’s chief of staff with the ambassador. Since then I’ve become a sort of cushion for carom shots on touchy Israel matters too small to engage our superstar National Security Adviser. I’ll get an idea or a position thrown at me by the ambassador or the administration, quietly and casually, and nobody’s committed, and there’s no body contact; and I bounce it along, and the play either continues or stops. I’ve furthered several minor matters in that way.
My official handle is “Special Assistant to the President for Cultural and Educational Liaison.” In this political rose garden, Special Assistants and Assistants to the President are thick as Japanese beetles. I’m just one more of them. The job is a real one, of sorts. I’m on the board of the National Endowment for the Arts. Also I meet with delegations of teachers and artists who descend on Washington; I listen to their problems, and get them passes for special White House tours, and so forth. And I shepherd around foreign visitors, like a group of Soviet professors of American literature, who showed up last week, and greatly embarrassed me by insisting on being taken at once to a topless bar, and then to a dirty movie. I may be the noted defender of artistic freedom, but that was the first porn film I’d ever seen. Jan won’t hear of paying money to pornmongers, and I won’t go by myself. Suppose I had a fatal heart attack right there in the theatre? Jan would have to bury a husband carried out feet first from The Devil in Miss Jones. Nothing doing.
Well, escorting the Soviet professors made it all right for me to see a thing called Hot Dormitories, but it was disappointing. I was bored out of my mind, and mainly felt sorry for the poor actresses. The Russkis ate it up, however, and wanted to go to another dirty movie right away. I took them to the National Gallery instead, and they gave me the impression that they were displeased by that. Indeed, they were decidedly snotty about the National Gallery. They said they didn’t have to come to America to see paintings, the Hermitage in Leningrad made the National Gallery look sick, and what about another dirty movie? I fobbed them off on a pallid State Department man, Soviet section, who displayed warm interest in showing the Russian professors, at government expense, all the examples of American artistic freedom now playing in the sleazy dumps on F Street.
Then there was this committee of authors who came here recently to pester Congress and the Treasury for relief from an adverse IRS ruling, something about authors’ research expenses. Whenever an IRS mole has an idle hour, he whets his tearing fangs and has a go at actors, athletes, and authors. The few big ones make a packet, you see, and get hoggish and try to dodge taxes with slick contrivances which the IRS loves to dismember. Out come these adverse rulings, which play hell with the small earners. Well, that’s my field, so I took charge, and actually got Internal Revenue to back down. The authors went in a body to thank the President; and as I saw them off on the Eastern shuttle for New York, they were remarking in wonderment at his approximately humanoid appearance. The cartoons do give a peculiar picture of the man.
