Inside, Outside, page 23
“Yes, but I didn’t see the plates.”
“Mr. Langsam, would I lie to you? He did them, and they were fine, take my word for it.”
“Madam, how am I supposed to mark eight plates I never saw?” Mr. Langsam ran both hands through his thick blond hair, staring at Mom with appalled watery eyes.
“Am I asking you to give him A-plus? I’m asking you not to wreck a boy’s whole career, just because some thief stole his briefcase. My son has never failed any subject in his life. Not once.”
Mr. Langsam at last said she’d have to talk to Mr. Hutchison. If Mr. Hutchison wanted to take the responsibility of passing me, that was all right with Mr. Langsam.
Hutchison, head of the art department, was the toughest marker in the school. Mom didn’t know that. She marched me straight across the hall into his office, and went through the whole thing again. Mr. Hutchison, a dour long-jawed man, sat shuffling art plates, chewing on a cold pipe, and shooting me disbelieving looks from under shaggy iron-gray eyebrows.
“Madam, Mr. Langsam is absolutely right. I can’t possibly order him to pass your son,” he growled when she finished. “I never heard of such a thing. He didn’t submit the work, and that’s that.”
“Then who do I talk to?” Mom inquired.
Hutchison’s jaw sagged open, showing big yellow teeth. He stuffed his pipe with tobacco, staring at Mom as though she had horns or tusks.
“Well, it won’t do you the slightest good,” he said, “but you can take it up with Mr. Ballard, if you want to.”
So down we went to the school’s main office, though I well knew we had come to the end of the line, and that it was hopeless. It’s hard to say just what Mr. Ballard’s position was. He wasn’t the director of the school. That was Dr. J. Hampton Hale, a remote presence in an inner office never profaned by student feet. Dr. Hale’s name appeared on school proclamations and on diplomas, but he showed up only at rare assemblies, in the form of a little gray pharaoh-visaged man who did not speak. Mr. Ballard did the speaking at assemblies.
Mr. Ballard was a mountainous fellow with great shoulders and bulging eyes. The students in the school believed that Mr. Ballard regularly copulated with the two school secretaries, Miss Reichman and Miss Jacoby, and also with the librarian, Miss Jamison; and not because he was irresistible—on the contrary, he was a repulsive blubbery hulk, any way you looked at him—but simply because they were frightened of him and had to submit to his horrible advances. Mr. Ballard was the man who sentenced you to the jug, and sneered away your excuses for tardiness or other crimes, and summoned parents to discuss your failings, and, in short, gave the final decisions in all school matters. There was no appeal from Mr. Ballard, and he was a steel wall of total contemptuous negativism. He had heard every possible sob story and alibi a student could produce in every conceivable tight spot, and his invariable replies were two: “No,” or “Jug.”
Well, he couldn’t jug Mama, but he could say “No,” and he did, loud and flat, popping his eyes at her in the terrifying way which dried up students’ excuses and tears, and undoubtedly caused Miss Reichman, Miss Jacoby, and Miss Jamison to yield their poor bodies to him.
But this time he was dealing with Sarah Gitta Goodkind, the big yoxenta, an entirely different breed of female. Mama faced him, waited until his eyes sank back into their sockets, and then asked, “Are you the head of this school?”
The eyes popped out again in amazement, and I believe Mr. Ballard answered before he thought. “No. That’s Dr. Hale.”
“All right,” said Mama, “I’ll talk to Dr. Hale. Where do I find him?”
“No! You can’t talk to Dr. Hale.”
“Why can’t I? My son is a student in his school, isn’t he?”
Mr. Ballard forced out his eyes to their farthest bulge, like a batrachian’s, and he powerfully croaked, “Dr. Hale is a very very busy man, and nobody sees Dr. Hale unless—”
“Is that Dr. Hale’s office?” Mama interrupted, pointed at a polished wooden door with a highly visible sign on it:
DR. J. HAMPTON HALE
DIRECTOR
For once in a long career, Mr. Ballard could not reply either “No” or “Jug,” so he mutely nodded, and Mama made for that inner office. For such a huge and heavy man, Ballard moved with surprising quickness to block her, and in an instant there they stood toe to toe at Dr. Hale’s door.
It must be clear to all readers of this narrative that my mother by and large has been, down the years, something of a trial to me. My feelings about her are mixed. But as that picture rises in my mind’s eye—Mama, red-cheeked, middle-sized, buxomly pretty, her bright eyes blazing up at that King Kong of a No-sayer; and Mr. Ballard looking down at her with shaken wariness, his eyes shifting at his harem slaves, Miss Reichman and Miss Jacoby, who were taking in with fascination this brave challenge to their insatiable sultan—I have to tell you that I admired her, that I saw she was a mother of the old school, a mother like a mother bear or tigress, a mother with enough fight in her to face down half a dozen Mr. Ballards in order to see a Dr. Hale. What did it matter that she was in the wrong, preposterously in the wrong, that her nerve was incredible, trying to get me a passing mark in Art Diagonal A-4 when I hadn’t turned in any art plates? She was magnificent. She was MAMA.
And Ballard—Ballard gave way before Mama! With an indistinct mutter like, “I’ll have to talk to him first,” he disappeared inside the door. A long wait ensued. Mama stood there at the closed door, I stood beside her, and Miss Reichman and Miss Jacoby pretended to busy themselves with paperwork, while they kept glancing at each other, at Mama, and at the door, clearly thrilled to the bone by this high moment in their sexually harassed lives.
The door opened.
“The answer is NO,” thundered Ballard, appearing in the opening. Under the arm that held the door, I could see Dr. Hale at his desk, head down, writing. “Your son has FAILED in art, madam. That is Dr. Hale’s decision, and it is final.”
Ballard’s mistake was holding the door ajar instead of shutting it behind him. He did not yet realize that he was dealing with a woman who at fifteen had beaten up a stepmother twice her size, who had once taken on a big watchman with a brick, and who, where her jewel was concerned, did not know manners or fear. Mama ducked under his arm, dragging me along. “Just let me explain something to Dr. Hale,” she said, and there we were inside the holy of holies of Townsend Harris Hall. Too late Ballard groaned, “No, madam, you can’t go in there. No!”
The gray head at the desk lifted. The pharaoh visage stared lifelessly and wordlessly at Mama, and then at Ballard. Mama plunged straight into the story of the lost plates. Dr. Hale listened without changing either his expression or his position: an arm on his desk, a pen in his hand, a school director in sandstone. At these close quarters this immobile figure frightened me more than Ballard did. He was Ozymandias, King of Kings. I looked on him and despaired.
Not Mama. With the most cheerful rectitude in the world, she appealed to him to pass me. As she summed it up, the choice was simple: mar an unblemished record, wreck a brilliant career, destroy a possible future President’s life, or pass I. David Goodkind in Art Diagonal A-4.
Dr. Hale’s visage turned slowly to Mr. Ballard, who stood beside the desk in ill-contained fury. “Well, the circumstances are unusual,” he said in a weak, mild, high little voice. “If the boy has never failed anything, it would be a shame to let a mishap mar a perfect record, wouldn’t it? Let us give him a D minus in Art Diagonal A-Four.”
Mr. Ballard’s eyes popped out bloodily. It was awful to behold. He was struck speechless, but Mama wasn’t. She at once interjected, “Is that a passing mark, Dr. Hale?”
“Well, it isn’t failure,” said the director in that same meek small voice, “but it’s nothing to be proud of.”
“You’re a great man,” said Mama, and we left.
So it was that, besides passing Art Diagonal A-4, I learned the dread secret of Townsend Harris Hall. Dr. Hale was not Ozymandias, King of Kings. He was Oz, the great and terrible, actually a softhearted fraud; and that was why he had that bug-eyed raper of secretaries and librarians in his outer office.
***
And so it is that I sit here in an El Al airplane en route to the Holy Land, more than a little swozzled by the three scotches I have downed while scrawling out that scene. The little stewardess with the black eyes either has taken a shine to me, which I find hard to believe, or else she has nothing else to do but spring at me with a fresh drink as soon as I empty my glass.
Who can say how my life would have changed, had I failed that diagonal? I would have spent an extra semester at that school, might never have gotten into Columbia College, let alone the law school; never met Mark Herz, never joined Tau Alpha Epsilon, never worked for Goldhandler, or lived in April House, or met Bobbie Webb. It all turned on Mama’s great moment at Townsend Harris, which happened exactly as I’ve described it; except of course that I don’t know that Mr. Ballard really had his will of those three meager females. Anyway, they are surely gone, all four of them, their rumored orgies over, their dust buried who can say where, their very names forgotten, except in this tale. I’m glad I wrote out the story in drunken haste. I owe it to Mama; swift recovery and long life to her! She has the virtues of her faults, or she could never have overborne Langsam, Hutchison, and Ballard to get at the wonderful wizard of Oz.
Now for some sleep before we land in Israel and I find out how she is. The airplane windows are growing light. Sandra’s eyes just fluttered, and she muttered in her sleep and turned on her side. That’s right, Sandra. She showed up yesterday morning in dirty jeans, carrying a duffel bag—she’d been attending a summer writing workshop in Idaho—and said she heard I was going to Israel and she wanted to come along. No explanation, and here she is.
Maybe before this short trip is over I’ll find out what Sandra is up to, and then again maybe I won’t. Sandra plays a devious and dirty game with me, which you might call “Sweat Blood, You Old Bastard.” We have an exceedingly tangled relationship, and I love her too much to write another word about it. I suspect she loves me. Consult your local psychoanalyst on why some daughters enjoy breaking their fathers on the wheel. Oddly, reclining there in the next seat in the dawn, Sandra reminds me a lot of The Green Cousin.
PART II
Manhattan
33
Golda
King David Hotel, Jerusalem
August 26, 1973
The Green Cousin met me at the airport. I almost fell down from the shock. The last word had been, after all, that she was lying in an oxygen tent, in an intensive care unit of the Hadassah hospital. There she stood beside a wheelchair, leaning on the arm of her companion, smiling and feebly waving, in the no-admittance area where they stamp passports. She had bulled her way past the Israeli security barriers, an impossible feat except for my mother. So we hugged and kissed, and she explained in weak gasps that putting her in a hospital was all foolishness, she felt fine; while the companion she brought from New York, an infinitely patient Puerto Rican girl who hardly speaks English, shook her head hopelessly at me.
Sandra gave Mom a big hug, and helped her back into her wheelchair. Sandra had a spell of hating Mom for nagging her about finding a nice Jewish boy. Once Mom gave Sandra’s phone number to a friend who had a nice Jewish grandson, and a yeshiva student in a black hat and vestigial earlocks showed up; a warm and witty young fellow, actually, but a jolt to behold. There was a harsh blow-off, we got Sandra a new number, and Mama quit the matchmaking. Now Sandra admires her grandmother in a rueful way, but keeps her distance.
Well, I fetched the bags and we made our way out of the terminal. When I first visited Israel in 1955 Lod Airport was a dusty, disorganized primitive installation: just a few runways, palm trees, and shanty-like buildings. First-timers used to kiss the ground. I’ve seen that only once in recent years, when I watched a group of Jews arrive late at night from the Soviet Union. A couple of the old folks got down and did that.
The glossy new terminal is a big crush: crowds coming, crowds going, joyous crowds greeting the newcomers, tearful crowds seeing off the departing; crowds of bearded Hassidim with their kerchiefed women and swarming children; crowds of sunburned bareheaded Israelis in shorts and sport shirts, or in army uniform; and of course the two-way crowds of Americans, mostly Jews but also many Christian innocents abroad on Holy Land pilgrimages. A few bronzed young Nordics, skin-divers and hikers and such, haul heavy sporting gear off the baggage belts. Nobody is kissing the ground.
Naturally the first order of business was what to do with Mama. The companion was no help, babbling in Spanish. I asked Mom what the doctor’s orders were. She said the doctor was a scoundrel (paskudnak) who charged a fortune for nothing. Mom’s desire was to celebrate my arrival by dining at a kosher Chinese restaurant in Tel Aviv, a very bad idea. My mother can’t eat anything with sodium in it. If she does, an ambulance is on the way within the hour. But in a Chinese restaurant everything is full of sodium, down to the very lychee nuts.
Nevertheless, Mom loves to go to a kosher Chinese restaurant—you find them in Israel, and in New York, too—summon the headwaiter, and work her way down the menu, trying to order a meal with no sodium. Cross-examining him item by item through the entire bill of fare can kill a lively half hour, and meantime she has a couple of gin and orange juices, on which she thrives. Invariably she settles for steamed fish and boiled rice without salt. When these arrive she barely tastes them, says they’re full of salt, and has another gin and orange juice. It’s a favorite treat of Mama’s, this Chinese restaurant routine. It’s only a complicated way to tank up on gin and orange juice, but she does enjoy the long byplay with the headwaiter.
However, I couldn’t indulge Mama in that delight this time. She looked wizened and white, and I was scared. Sandra and I bundled her, wheelchair, companion, and all, into a taxicab. Off we sped to the Hadassah hospital, a vast complex outside Jerusalem. When Mom realized that we weren’t heading for Tel Aviv she protested, but not with quite the old fight; and soon subsided, placidly holding my hand clasped in her withered paws, as the car climbed the hills to the Holy City.
It was a while before I tracked down her doctor to his office. When I introduced myself, he gave me a hunted look. He appeared young, but worn out from overwork: a bushy-haired dark little man in a crumpled white coat, with a crumpled white face, a stethoscope dangling from his neck, and a reflector on a band around his head. Clearly the man needed sleep. When I remonstrated with him for turning Mom loose to go to the airport, he said in weary Israeli accents, “Where is your mother now, Mr. Goodkind?”
“Downstairs in a taxicab.”
“What does she want to do?”
“Go to a Chinese restaurant.”
“Take her.”
“What? Doctor, my mother looks awful. She’s barely alive.”
“You should have seen her last week. Your mother is amazing, Mr. Goodkind. I didn’t give her seventy-two hours to live. That’s why we cabled you. When we told her you were coming, her blood pressure dropped to normal, her pulse stabilized at seventy-five, and she sat up and started eating like a horse, complaining that everything was full of sodium. But she ate all she got. Next day she was walking up and down the corridors.”
“Well, I’m not taking her to any Chinese restaurant. That’s madness.”
“It’s up to you.” The doctor shrugged. “Just don’t leave her here. We’re crowded. She kept her hotel room, you know. She didn’t want to come to the hospital at all. Take her back to her hotel, please. She’s a bad patient, she makes the whole staff nervous. She keeps claiming her food’s full of salt, which is preposterous, and calling for the chief administrator, insisting she’s a founder of the hospital. I’ve checked that, by the way, and it’s not so. She’s a patron. Founders give a quarter of a million dollars apiece, Mr. Goodkind. Patrons give a thousand. I told her that, and she said, ‘Patron, founder, why argue? Your food is full of salt.’ She did once raise a lot of money for an electron microscope we needed, and we’re grateful, but she really is a difficult person.”
“Doctor, what about my mother’s health? Her chances?”
“Right now she’s all right. All right, I mean, for a person who medically shouldn’t be alive. It’s all willpower. I’ll keep in close touch.”
So Mom is now down the hall, in her favorite King David room, with a balcony facing the Old City, in fair shape, and there she’ll stay through Yom Kippur. Now that she’s here, she’s decided there’s no way she’ll leave Israel before the High Holy Days.
The puzzle of what Sandra is doing here has cleared up. My notion was that, girl-fashion, she was in undeclared pursuit of Abe Herz. But no, apparently not; or if she is, her technique is a new benchmark in female deviousness. I talked to Abe on the phone today, in his Tel Aviv law office, and he didn’t know Sandra was here. Their windy quarrels back in Washington had extinguished, or so I thought, any spark of that unlikely little attraction, yet he was plainly annoyed that he hadn’t heard from her.
Abe Herz is about seven years older than my daughter, and except when in army uniform with decorations, not especially prepossessing anymore. His hairline is retreating, and he has a hint of a mid-bulge, possibly because of the starchy Israeli diet. His resemblance to his bony father has blurred. But he’s a hardy specimen, scuba-dives in the Red Sea, has even tried hang-gliding, and goes on tough field maneuvers so often that his law practice suffers. The reserve call-ups in Israel fragment everybody’s career, but I suspect there’s some demanding secret aspect to Abe’s reserve status. Not that I would inquire, or that he’d tell me anything.
It was Abe, it turns out, who gave Sandra the idea of coming here. During one of their combative dates in Washington, when she was spouting her valued New Left views on Israel, he stopped her cold by remarking that his uncle, an ex-general of the Israeli air force, held much the same opinions, and lived on a kibbutz where everybody thought that way. Sandra responded, with her accustomed civility, that she didn’t believe a word of it. All the same, she made a few inquiries, and decided to freeload on my trip, so as to see for herself these peace-loving anti-imperialist Zionists. I found that out last week while registering in this hotel. Sandra, at the desk beside me, suddenly said, “Don’t check me in, I’m going to Sde Shalom.”
“Mr. Langsam, would I lie to you? He did them, and they were fine, take my word for it.”
“Madam, how am I supposed to mark eight plates I never saw?” Mr. Langsam ran both hands through his thick blond hair, staring at Mom with appalled watery eyes.
“Am I asking you to give him A-plus? I’m asking you not to wreck a boy’s whole career, just because some thief stole his briefcase. My son has never failed any subject in his life. Not once.”
Mr. Langsam at last said she’d have to talk to Mr. Hutchison. If Mr. Hutchison wanted to take the responsibility of passing me, that was all right with Mr. Langsam.
Hutchison, head of the art department, was the toughest marker in the school. Mom didn’t know that. She marched me straight across the hall into his office, and went through the whole thing again. Mr. Hutchison, a dour long-jawed man, sat shuffling art plates, chewing on a cold pipe, and shooting me disbelieving looks from under shaggy iron-gray eyebrows.
“Madam, Mr. Langsam is absolutely right. I can’t possibly order him to pass your son,” he growled when she finished. “I never heard of such a thing. He didn’t submit the work, and that’s that.”
“Then who do I talk to?” Mom inquired.
Hutchison’s jaw sagged open, showing big yellow teeth. He stuffed his pipe with tobacco, staring at Mom as though she had horns or tusks.
“Well, it won’t do you the slightest good,” he said, “but you can take it up with Mr. Ballard, if you want to.”
So down we went to the school’s main office, though I well knew we had come to the end of the line, and that it was hopeless. It’s hard to say just what Mr. Ballard’s position was. He wasn’t the director of the school. That was Dr. J. Hampton Hale, a remote presence in an inner office never profaned by student feet. Dr. Hale’s name appeared on school proclamations and on diplomas, but he showed up only at rare assemblies, in the form of a little gray pharaoh-visaged man who did not speak. Mr. Ballard did the speaking at assemblies.
Mr. Ballard was a mountainous fellow with great shoulders and bulging eyes. The students in the school believed that Mr. Ballard regularly copulated with the two school secretaries, Miss Reichman and Miss Jacoby, and also with the librarian, Miss Jamison; and not because he was irresistible—on the contrary, he was a repulsive blubbery hulk, any way you looked at him—but simply because they were frightened of him and had to submit to his horrible advances. Mr. Ballard was the man who sentenced you to the jug, and sneered away your excuses for tardiness or other crimes, and summoned parents to discuss your failings, and, in short, gave the final decisions in all school matters. There was no appeal from Mr. Ballard, and he was a steel wall of total contemptuous negativism. He had heard every possible sob story and alibi a student could produce in every conceivable tight spot, and his invariable replies were two: “No,” or “Jug.”
Well, he couldn’t jug Mama, but he could say “No,” and he did, loud and flat, popping his eyes at her in the terrifying way which dried up students’ excuses and tears, and undoubtedly caused Miss Reichman, Miss Jacoby, and Miss Jamison to yield their poor bodies to him.
But this time he was dealing with Sarah Gitta Goodkind, the big yoxenta, an entirely different breed of female. Mama faced him, waited until his eyes sank back into their sockets, and then asked, “Are you the head of this school?”
The eyes popped out again in amazement, and I believe Mr. Ballard answered before he thought. “No. That’s Dr. Hale.”
“All right,” said Mama, “I’ll talk to Dr. Hale. Where do I find him?”
“No! You can’t talk to Dr. Hale.”
“Why can’t I? My son is a student in his school, isn’t he?”
Mr. Ballard forced out his eyes to their farthest bulge, like a batrachian’s, and he powerfully croaked, “Dr. Hale is a very very busy man, and nobody sees Dr. Hale unless—”
“Is that Dr. Hale’s office?” Mama interrupted, pointed at a polished wooden door with a highly visible sign on it:
DR. J. HAMPTON HALE
DIRECTOR
For once in a long career, Mr. Ballard could not reply either “No” or “Jug,” so he mutely nodded, and Mama made for that inner office. For such a huge and heavy man, Ballard moved with surprising quickness to block her, and in an instant there they stood toe to toe at Dr. Hale’s door.
It must be clear to all readers of this narrative that my mother by and large has been, down the years, something of a trial to me. My feelings about her are mixed. But as that picture rises in my mind’s eye—Mama, red-cheeked, middle-sized, buxomly pretty, her bright eyes blazing up at that King Kong of a No-sayer; and Mr. Ballard looking down at her with shaken wariness, his eyes shifting at his harem slaves, Miss Reichman and Miss Jacoby, who were taking in with fascination this brave challenge to their insatiable sultan—I have to tell you that I admired her, that I saw she was a mother of the old school, a mother like a mother bear or tigress, a mother with enough fight in her to face down half a dozen Mr. Ballards in order to see a Dr. Hale. What did it matter that she was in the wrong, preposterously in the wrong, that her nerve was incredible, trying to get me a passing mark in Art Diagonal A-4 when I hadn’t turned in any art plates? She was magnificent. She was MAMA.
And Ballard—Ballard gave way before Mama! With an indistinct mutter like, “I’ll have to talk to him first,” he disappeared inside the door. A long wait ensued. Mama stood there at the closed door, I stood beside her, and Miss Reichman and Miss Jacoby pretended to busy themselves with paperwork, while they kept glancing at each other, at Mama, and at the door, clearly thrilled to the bone by this high moment in their sexually harassed lives.
The door opened.
“The answer is NO,” thundered Ballard, appearing in the opening. Under the arm that held the door, I could see Dr. Hale at his desk, head down, writing. “Your son has FAILED in art, madam. That is Dr. Hale’s decision, and it is final.”
Ballard’s mistake was holding the door ajar instead of shutting it behind him. He did not yet realize that he was dealing with a woman who at fifteen had beaten up a stepmother twice her size, who had once taken on a big watchman with a brick, and who, where her jewel was concerned, did not know manners or fear. Mama ducked under his arm, dragging me along. “Just let me explain something to Dr. Hale,” she said, and there we were inside the holy of holies of Townsend Harris Hall. Too late Ballard groaned, “No, madam, you can’t go in there. No!”
The gray head at the desk lifted. The pharaoh visage stared lifelessly and wordlessly at Mama, and then at Ballard. Mama plunged straight into the story of the lost plates. Dr. Hale listened without changing either his expression or his position: an arm on his desk, a pen in his hand, a school director in sandstone. At these close quarters this immobile figure frightened me more than Ballard did. He was Ozymandias, King of Kings. I looked on him and despaired.
Not Mama. With the most cheerful rectitude in the world, she appealed to him to pass me. As she summed it up, the choice was simple: mar an unblemished record, wreck a brilliant career, destroy a possible future President’s life, or pass I. David Goodkind in Art Diagonal A-4.
Dr. Hale’s visage turned slowly to Mr. Ballard, who stood beside the desk in ill-contained fury. “Well, the circumstances are unusual,” he said in a weak, mild, high little voice. “If the boy has never failed anything, it would be a shame to let a mishap mar a perfect record, wouldn’t it? Let us give him a D minus in Art Diagonal A-Four.”
Mr. Ballard’s eyes popped out bloodily. It was awful to behold. He was struck speechless, but Mama wasn’t. She at once interjected, “Is that a passing mark, Dr. Hale?”
“Well, it isn’t failure,” said the director in that same meek small voice, “but it’s nothing to be proud of.”
“You’re a great man,” said Mama, and we left.
So it was that, besides passing Art Diagonal A-4, I learned the dread secret of Townsend Harris Hall. Dr. Hale was not Ozymandias, King of Kings. He was Oz, the great and terrible, actually a softhearted fraud; and that was why he had that bug-eyed raper of secretaries and librarians in his outer office.
***
And so it is that I sit here in an El Al airplane en route to the Holy Land, more than a little swozzled by the three scotches I have downed while scrawling out that scene. The little stewardess with the black eyes either has taken a shine to me, which I find hard to believe, or else she has nothing else to do but spring at me with a fresh drink as soon as I empty my glass.
Who can say how my life would have changed, had I failed that diagonal? I would have spent an extra semester at that school, might never have gotten into Columbia College, let alone the law school; never met Mark Herz, never joined Tau Alpha Epsilon, never worked for Goldhandler, or lived in April House, or met Bobbie Webb. It all turned on Mama’s great moment at Townsend Harris, which happened exactly as I’ve described it; except of course that I don’t know that Mr. Ballard really had his will of those three meager females. Anyway, they are surely gone, all four of them, their rumored orgies over, their dust buried who can say where, their very names forgotten, except in this tale. I’m glad I wrote out the story in drunken haste. I owe it to Mama; swift recovery and long life to her! She has the virtues of her faults, or she could never have overborne Langsam, Hutchison, and Ballard to get at the wonderful wizard of Oz.
Now for some sleep before we land in Israel and I find out how she is. The airplane windows are growing light. Sandra’s eyes just fluttered, and she muttered in her sleep and turned on her side. That’s right, Sandra. She showed up yesterday morning in dirty jeans, carrying a duffel bag—she’d been attending a summer writing workshop in Idaho—and said she heard I was going to Israel and she wanted to come along. No explanation, and here she is.
Maybe before this short trip is over I’ll find out what Sandra is up to, and then again maybe I won’t. Sandra plays a devious and dirty game with me, which you might call “Sweat Blood, You Old Bastard.” We have an exceedingly tangled relationship, and I love her too much to write another word about it. I suspect she loves me. Consult your local psychoanalyst on why some daughters enjoy breaking their fathers on the wheel. Oddly, reclining there in the next seat in the dawn, Sandra reminds me a lot of The Green Cousin.
PART II
Manhattan
33
Golda
King David Hotel, Jerusalem
August 26, 1973
The Green Cousin met me at the airport. I almost fell down from the shock. The last word had been, after all, that she was lying in an oxygen tent, in an intensive care unit of the Hadassah hospital. There she stood beside a wheelchair, leaning on the arm of her companion, smiling and feebly waving, in the no-admittance area where they stamp passports. She had bulled her way past the Israeli security barriers, an impossible feat except for my mother. So we hugged and kissed, and she explained in weak gasps that putting her in a hospital was all foolishness, she felt fine; while the companion she brought from New York, an infinitely patient Puerto Rican girl who hardly speaks English, shook her head hopelessly at me.
Sandra gave Mom a big hug, and helped her back into her wheelchair. Sandra had a spell of hating Mom for nagging her about finding a nice Jewish boy. Once Mom gave Sandra’s phone number to a friend who had a nice Jewish grandson, and a yeshiva student in a black hat and vestigial earlocks showed up; a warm and witty young fellow, actually, but a jolt to behold. There was a harsh blow-off, we got Sandra a new number, and Mama quit the matchmaking. Now Sandra admires her grandmother in a rueful way, but keeps her distance.
Well, I fetched the bags and we made our way out of the terminal. When I first visited Israel in 1955 Lod Airport was a dusty, disorganized primitive installation: just a few runways, palm trees, and shanty-like buildings. First-timers used to kiss the ground. I’ve seen that only once in recent years, when I watched a group of Jews arrive late at night from the Soviet Union. A couple of the old folks got down and did that.
The glossy new terminal is a big crush: crowds coming, crowds going, joyous crowds greeting the newcomers, tearful crowds seeing off the departing; crowds of bearded Hassidim with their kerchiefed women and swarming children; crowds of sunburned bareheaded Israelis in shorts and sport shirts, or in army uniform; and of course the two-way crowds of Americans, mostly Jews but also many Christian innocents abroad on Holy Land pilgrimages. A few bronzed young Nordics, skin-divers and hikers and such, haul heavy sporting gear off the baggage belts. Nobody is kissing the ground.
Naturally the first order of business was what to do with Mama. The companion was no help, babbling in Spanish. I asked Mom what the doctor’s orders were. She said the doctor was a scoundrel (paskudnak) who charged a fortune for nothing. Mom’s desire was to celebrate my arrival by dining at a kosher Chinese restaurant in Tel Aviv, a very bad idea. My mother can’t eat anything with sodium in it. If she does, an ambulance is on the way within the hour. But in a Chinese restaurant everything is full of sodium, down to the very lychee nuts.
Nevertheless, Mom loves to go to a kosher Chinese restaurant—you find them in Israel, and in New York, too—summon the headwaiter, and work her way down the menu, trying to order a meal with no sodium. Cross-examining him item by item through the entire bill of fare can kill a lively half hour, and meantime she has a couple of gin and orange juices, on which she thrives. Invariably she settles for steamed fish and boiled rice without salt. When these arrive she barely tastes them, says they’re full of salt, and has another gin and orange juice. It’s a favorite treat of Mama’s, this Chinese restaurant routine. It’s only a complicated way to tank up on gin and orange juice, but she does enjoy the long byplay with the headwaiter.
However, I couldn’t indulge Mama in that delight this time. She looked wizened and white, and I was scared. Sandra and I bundled her, wheelchair, companion, and all, into a taxicab. Off we sped to the Hadassah hospital, a vast complex outside Jerusalem. When Mom realized that we weren’t heading for Tel Aviv she protested, but not with quite the old fight; and soon subsided, placidly holding my hand clasped in her withered paws, as the car climbed the hills to the Holy City.
It was a while before I tracked down her doctor to his office. When I introduced myself, he gave me a hunted look. He appeared young, but worn out from overwork: a bushy-haired dark little man in a crumpled white coat, with a crumpled white face, a stethoscope dangling from his neck, and a reflector on a band around his head. Clearly the man needed sleep. When I remonstrated with him for turning Mom loose to go to the airport, he said in weary Israeli accents, “Where is your mother now, Mr. Goodkind?”
“Downstairs in a taxicab.”
“What does she want to do?”
“Go to a Chinese restaurant.”
“Take her.”
“What? Doctor, my mother looks awful. She’s barely alive.”
“You should have seen her last week. Your mother is amazing, Mr. Goodkind. I didn’t give her seventy-two hours to live. That’s why we cabled you. When we told her you were coming, her blood pressure dropped to normal, her pulse stabilized at seventy-five, and she sat up and started eating like a horse, complaining that everything was full of sodium. But she ate all she got. Next day she was walking up and down the corridors.”
“Well, I’m not taking her to any Chinese restaurant. That’s madness.”
“It’s up to you.” The doctor shrugged. “Just don’t leave her here. We’re crowded. She kept her hotel room, you know. She didn’t want to come to the hospital at all. Take her back to her hotel, please. She’s a bad patient, she makes the whole staff nervous. She keeps claiming her food’s full of salt, which is preposterous, and calling for the chief administrator, insisting she’s a founder of the hospital. I’ve checked that, by the way, and it’s not so. She’s a patron. Founders give a quarter of a million dollars apiece, Mr. Goodkind. Patrons give a thousand. I told her that, and she said, ‘Patron, founder, why argue? Your food is full of salt.’ She did once raise a lot of money for an electron microscope we needed, and we’re grateful, but she really is a difficult person.”
“Doctor, what about my mother’s health? Her chances?”
“Right now she’s all right. All right, I mean, for a person who medically shouldn’t be alive. It’s all willpower. I’ll keep in close touch.”
So Mom is now down the hall, in her favorite King David room, with a balcony facing the Old City, in fair shape, and there she’ll stay through Yom Kippur. Now that she’s here, she’s decided there’s no way she’ll leave Israel before the High Holy Days.
The puzzle of what Sandra is doing here has cleared up. My notion was that, girl-fashion, she was in undeclared pursuit of Abe Herz. But no, apparently not; or if she is, her technique is a new benchmark in female deviousness. I talked to Abe on the phone today, in his Tel Aviv law office, and he didn’t know Sandra was here. Their windy quarrels back in Washington had extinguished, or so I thought, any spark of that unlikely little attraction, yet he was plainly annoyed that he hadn’t heard from her.
Abe Herz is about seven years older than my daughter, and except when in army uniform with decorations, not especially prepossessing anymore. His hairline is retreating, and he has a hint of a mid-bulge, possibly because of the starchy Israeli diet. His resemblance to his bony father has blurred. But he’s a hardy specimen, scuba-dives in the Red Sea, has even tried hang-gliding, and goes on tough field maneuvers so often that his law practice suffers. The reserve call-ups in Israel fragment everybody’s career, but I suspect there’s some demanding secret aspect to Abe’s reserve status. Not that I would inquire, or that he’d tell me anything.
It was Abe, it turns out, who gave Sandra the idea of coming here. During one of their combative dates in Washington, when she was spouting her valued New Left views on Israel, he stopped her cold by remarking that his uncle, an ex-general of the Israeli air force, held much the same opinions, and lived on a kibbutz where everybody thought that way. Sandra responded, with her accustomed civility, that she didn’t believe a word of it. All the same, she made a few inquiries, and decided to freeload on my trip, so as to see for herself these peace-loving anti-imperialist Zionists. I found that out last week while registering in this hotel. Sandra, at the desk beside me, suddenly said, “Don’t check me in, I’m going to Sde Shalom.”
