Inside, Outside, page 33
Dorothy Sabin, Psychology 304
Great balls of fire! Delphine Dowling was Dorsi Sabin! A bizarre case of mistaken identity! Then she was Jewish, and all I had to do, to hold this black-haired angel in my arms, was go to a tea dance! It was a breathtaking surprise. As for the real Delphine Dowling, I never found out what she looked like. From that moment I was a poleaxed man, waiting for Thursday.
***
“So! You’re the Vicomte de Brag,” said Dorsi Sabin with an arch upward look, as we danced.
“Uh, yes. How do you know?”
“Oh, I know. I knew the first day of music class. Somebody pointed you out.”
Dorsi was a bit hard to lead, perhaps because of the distance between us. In those days, my idea of hot sex was a snuggle on the dance floor; but a small pony could have trotted between me and Dorsi without upsetting us. She stood away from me, in her reserved way, and I stood away from her, to show how different I was from all those coarse kissers and snugglers and thorax feelers. I was steering Dorsi Sabin at stiff arm’s length, like a nervous student driver.
“How do you think up all those things you write?” That voice again, Scarlatti on harp strings. “They’re so clever. Especially the poems.”
Anybody could please me by praising the Vicomte de Brag. But to have this homage from the most beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on, the girl I’d been worshipping for weeks as Delphine Dowling! I blurted, “There’ll be a poem to you in my next column.”
She blushed. That rise of pink in her face, and a blastingly sweet look from her wide eyes, made my poor womanizing head swim. “To me? But you don’t know me.”
“Dorsi, let me take you home.”
A slow careful blink up at me. A slow careful smile. “All… right.”
It began as it went on to the last: with a long subway ride to the Grand Concourse in the West Bronx, and then a lonely ride back home. We stood hanging to straps in the roaring train until the crowd thinned, then we sat down side by side. Later on, when I got to know Dorsi better, we would shout in each other’s ears, but this first time we were quiet. In fact, Dorsi tranquilly opened her psychology textbook and did some homework. Was I annoyed or put down? Not in the least. Just to be near that girl was perfect joy.
For a month or so our dates were magical. Unless I was out of my mind, the unmeltable Dorsi Sabin was warming to the Vicomte de Brag! Poem after poem to “D.S.” was coming out in “Off-hour.” When I would arrive at the music class on such mornings, Dorsi’s eyes would gleam at me, and she would give me a secret little smile which, in my fevered state, was sheer pillow talk. When we were out on a date she bubbled. When I called her up her voice lifted. She never refused a date.
I can’t imagine what we talked about in our hours together, for Dorsi was a plodding, studious sort, inside that blinding envelope of Venus flesh. I only know that there were never enough of those golden hours for me. I lived a whole other life of campus activity. I worked hard at my writing and my courses. I kept revising To Heil with It! I saw quite a bit of Herz and Quat, who had graduated, but all that was like sleepwalking, compared to the hours I spent with Dorsi Sabin.
Then we crashed into a stone wall—and of all places, at April House.
***
Ah, Dorsi! “Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair,” the poet promises, and so it is. Though the shards of memory have lain buried under the detritus of forty years, when I dig them out and glue the pieces together, behold, there the two of us are again—Dorsi eternally in coy flight, just out of reach, and I everlastingly in pursuit of her, across the thousand cracks in the Grecian urn. In prosy fact, of course, Dorsi Sabin aged into the well-preserved old Mrs. Morris Pell in the white hat and chiffon scarf whom you have just seen. But in my mind’s eye she is forever young, forever fair, and forever Delphine Dowling—damn her soul.
45
General Lev
September 1973
Now General Moshe Lev is here, and I have just taken him to the White House mess. That’s the juicy part of the privilege, getting to bring guests there. Lev telephoned me from the Israeli embassy, and said he wanted to talk to me about Sandra, so I invited him to lunch. Lev was not as bowled over as the Pells. He found himself elbow to elbow with the Vice President at the next table, and he murmured to me, with a narrow side-glance, “That’s him?”
“That’s him.”
His little headshake expressed eloquently how military men feel about most politicians. The Vice President was chatting cheerily, now and then laughing out loud, blithe as a skylark. A short week or two ago this man was a heartbeat away, as the newspapers love to put it, from the most powerful political office on earth, and from command of the world’s most awesome air force, armed with enough hydrogen bombs to wipe out the human race; and there he sat, skidding out of office for taking petty bribes, with every prospect of landing in the penitentiary. His color was good, his laugh genuine, his bearing altogether jocund. The President looks much worse. Maybe once things are hopeless a man can laugh again; it is clinging to an eroding hope that sickens the soul.
It’s quite a perquisite, at that, the use of the White House mess. The navy runs it, so it’s a smart and tidy eating place. Its main function, however, is to feed not stomachs but egos. The White House staff can be divided roughly into those who have mess privileges and those who don’t. Those who don’t are employees, menials, ciphers, who keep their egos inflated to working pressure by casually telling people, “Give me a ring at the White House.” Those who have access to the mess may be nobodies too, like me; but the excluded nobodies make us feel like somebodies.
***
The mess privilege was granted to me a few days after I got back from Israel, a spin-off of my surprising new intimacy with the President. I do very little honest work here otherwise these days. Arts-and-culture liaison has been languishing, since artists and cultured folks are avoiding the Executive Mansion like a cancer ward; and he makes few speeches, as he hunkers down to try to survive the typhoon howling over his head. At the moment, besides the nasty exposé of the Vice President, he is sweating out the wait for a court decision on the tapes. I am not writing about Watergate here, I am keeping that historic insanity out of these pages with great exertions of willpower. I am simply placing in time the strange development that has made me a confidant of the President.
This new status began, as I say, with my return from Israel, and it caused a bit of marital infelicity for a while. Jan and I jogtrot along in harness amiably through the days and nights, but lately I’ve been getting an acerb needle whenever I venture an affectionate pass at her; thus, “Are you sure, dear, that you won’t be hearing from the President?” The night I got back, you see, she welcomed me with unusual demonstrativeness, for her; we opened a bottle of champagne, and a warm connubial reunion was in clear appetizing sight, when the telephone rang. President’s secretary: if I wasn’t feeling too jet-lagged, could he see me right away? Well, off I went, leaving Jan in her lacy negligee with half a bottle of champagne. When I came home hours later she was fast asleep, or giving a brilliant imitation of it. I clattered and thumped around, hoping to rouse her and collect that sweet reunion. No soap.
The President was impatient for Golda Meir’s reply. “Amazing woman,” he said, nodding gravely at the verbal message. “More balls than most men around here.” He asked how my mother was. My description of our meeting at the airport really tickled him. “Sounds like my own mom,” he said. “They don’t come like that any more. Real moxie.” He was sitting in a small air-conditioned room, with a fire going in the fireplace. That’s one of his many peculiarities. He loves to sit and think by a fire in all seasons. If it’s too warm for a fire—and it was above eighty outside, a heavy Washington summer night—he just refrigerates the place and has his fire anyway.
He began to reminisce about his mother. The inevitable clipboard with the yellow legal pad, on which he marshals his ideas, was turned down on his lap. He seemed to be warding off with chitchat the reality that glared from those yellow pages. He talked and talked, and we had a few drinks. Color returned to his wan face. His filmy eyes took on life, and he rambled all over the place, loosening up as the time passed. About two o’clock he came around to the subject of Israel again. Between jet lag and the booze I was getting droopy, but he shocked me awake with some secret and disturbing things he said, about the way Eisenhower and Johnson behaved during Israel’s wars. I can’t go into any of that, but I have to note one paradox. Not only have the Jews never liked this man, never trusted him, never voted for him; throughout his career they have shown solid hostility to him, led by the journalists, the academics, and the famous writers and performers. This is one President who owes the Jews nothing. Yet unless I am more wrong than I have ever been on any subject, he is a friend such as we have not had in the White House since Truman.
Oh, yes, he can toss off phrases like “All those eastern Jews and intellectuals,” which can jar you. He is a friend none the less. He thinks Israel and the Jews have “moxie.” I’m not saying that he likes us, or that if realism dictated it, he wouldn’t let Israel go down the drain. He is a wholly cold customer. Acts are what count, and his acts so far have been helpful. Jewish history, if not the chic Jewish set, judges rulers by what they do about Jews.
Since that night he has taken to summoning me at odd hours, just to sit around and talk. This must be the way he relaxes with those bizarre millionaire cronies who ride around with him on the Presidential yacht. And I’m handier. I’m right here in the White House, at his beck and call. He does not ask my advice on his crushing problems. In fact, we scarcely talk politics; I say “we,” but he does the talking. I am a congenial, and he thinks a trustworthy, ear. “You can wear that, uh, yarmulka of yours,” he once said to me as I was pouring refills for both of us, “if you feel more comfortable with it on.” He was plainly pleased with himself for knowing the word.
My study of the Talmud really is what got to him. He as much as said so. He feels he has struck in me some kind of exotic paragon of integrity, probity, and discretion. Of course it is absolute hogwash, but there you are. I am just another Wall Street tax lawyer, as devious, scheming, and self-seeking as the rest. He is far too impressed by a Talmud volume and a skullcap. I have known Talmud experts who gossiped like washerwomen, and whom I wouldn’t trust with my telephone number.
I’ve read that Hitler used to blither for hours every night to his entourage at Berchtesgaden, until they were collapsing from boredom. The President doesn’t bore me, at least not yet. He has had an interesting life. He does get a bit soppy about his family, especially his mother and his daughters, but I am a family man myself. I can put up with that. If by chance, just by sitting and listening to him ramble, I relieve this strange, isolated, very withdrawn person of some of the pressure that’s destroying him, well and good.
I feel no shred of affection for him. He does not invite affection, being so utterly knotted up and shut in on himself. Yet I more and more discern, as he opens up, a keen pragmatic intelligence, which only makes his ham-handed Watergate blundering all the more incredible. What fatal flaw nullified all the “moxie” which raised a penniless loner to the White House? So I often wonder, as he sits there by the fire in a refrigerated room, bending my ear for no earthly reason but to get his mind off the Philistine temple he has pulled down on himself, now falling, falling, falling in on top of him, in agonizing slow motion.
***
But about General Lev. He is a little man. He looks shorter than my sister Lee. To my knowledge they have not met since their romance forty years ago. Still, I can understand her taking to him.
The Herz family tree has branches in America, Israel, and South Africa. The Germans got the grandfather, his wife, and all of their children—there were eleven—except for three sons who emigrated, much against their father’s will, back in the early twenties: one to Tel Aviv, one to Cape Town, and the third to New York. To that extent the family survives. Grandfather Herz had strongly objected to his sons’ leaving Poland, fearing they might become less religious.
Like Mark, Moshe has a thatch of thick hair, but his is white, not grizzled. They don’t look much alike. Tall as Mark is, and hale and wiry as he has kept himself, I suspect Lev could break him in half. Past sixty, Moshe Lev looks poured out of pig iron. His manners are abrupt, like most Israeli army men’s. He is mild in conversation unless it turns to military matters. Then you get clipped sentences of hard authority.
He told me a lot about himself in such clipped words. I knew he was one of the most rabid doves in Israel, advocating returning the Sinai to Egypt, and setting up a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. I didn’t know much of his background. He was a fighter pilot in the 1948 War of Independence; far too old, but they weren’t fussy then. He was a sport flyer when Lee knew him. During World War II he went to Rhodesia, volunteered for Britain’s Royal Air Force, and flew in combat against the Germans. He walks with a slight limp, because in 1948 he had a leg maimed in the crash of a Spitfire. The machine was assembled from pieces of scrapped planes the British left behind in Palestine, and it wasn’t very good. When the ever-trustworthy French suddenly stopped selling Mirage fighter planes to Israel—slapped on an embargo, just when the Egyptian dictator, Nasser, mobilized and announced he would annihilate the Jewish State—the Israelis decided they had better build their own fighter plane, the celebrated Kfir, the “Young Lion.” Lev was in on designing and producing the Kfir. And that is a quick rundown on General Moshe Lev.
I did not ask him what he was doing in Washington. He volunteered not a word. We talked a bit about Watergate, which, like most Israelis, he finds a puzzling tempest in a teapot. My prediction that the President would fall saddened him. “Who knows what kind of guy you’ll get next?” he said, with another quick glance at the jolly man at his elbow. “He has been very good on your foreign policy, you know. Very shrewd.”
“Invading Cambodia to capture rice bags?” I said, in suitable low tones. “Bombing civilians in Hanoi and Haiphong? Shrewd?”
“How do you stop a war you didn’t start,” inquired Moshe Lev, “when your people decide they’re sick of it? And your enemy knows they’ve lost the will to fight? And you have half a million men to get safely off a continent ten thousand miles away? And thousands of prisoners to recover? And an ally right there on the ground who won’t fight? It was a mess. He hadn’t made the mess, but it needed drastic action, and he acted.”
“I thought you were a dove,” I said.
Moshe gave me a quizzical look. “That’s a stupid newspaper expression.”
“Maybe you should meet him,” I said. “He can use a kind word.”
“Him?” Lev shrugged. “Not him. He’s a tough guy. Your daughter’s not for him, you know. Mention his name, and she hisses and spits. If she had fur, it would stand up.”
“Sandra holds nothing but strong opinions.”
“Naturally. She’s very Jewish.”
An odd thing for him to say, I thought, considering Sandra’s attitude toward Israel, her refusal to go to Hebrew school or to have a bat mitzva, and her bypassing of all the rules at home as soon as she was too big to be spanked. To give you an idea: for years Sandra has been eating on Yom Kippur. Says she won’t be a hypocrite. Shades of Yisroelke rolling his sleeves up and down! Jan and I talked that out long ago and decided to do nothing about it; a sapient conclusion, since there was nothing we could do but lock the girl in a closet all Yom Kippur, or clamp a dog muzzle on her.
Moshe Lev seems fond of Sandra. His tone about her is amused and warm. When I met him at the kibbutz he remarked that at first sight Sandra had shocked him, she looked so much like my sister Lee. He did not refer to Lee again, but that one time there was a wistfully wicked glint in his eye. I will never know, of course, what went on forty years ago, but it must have been something.
“I tell you, though,” he now said, turning somber, “if there’s anything you can do about it, make her come home. And if you can’t do that tell her to go to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.”
“She seems to like it at Fields of Peace.”
“She has no combat training,” Lev said. “These American volunteers are good for kitchen work and sorting oranges. That sort of thing. If there’s trouble, they’re in the way.”
“Are you expecting trouble?”
He looked at me without words.
“Israel is sitting pretty,” I went on uneasily. “At least that’s my informed belief.”
“It’s the informed belief in Israel,” said Moshe Lev very abruptly, “up to and including the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense. Well, now I can tell my grandchildren I’ve eaten in the White House. Thank you. I have to get back to the embassy. By the way, where did you say your sister lives?”
“Port Chester,” I said.
“Port Chester. That’s New York, isn’t it?”
“New York, yes.”
“Does she have grandchildren?”
“Three.”
“I have four. Well, give her my best.”
Oh, Lee, poor Lee! The glimmering glint in old General Lev’s eye!
***
Yes, poor old widowed Lee! All knotted up with arthritis, all gray, smoking three or four packs a day of unfiltered Camels, living alone in that big house in Port Chester, except when Mom “drops in” for a few weeks or months, or her married sons turn up with their wives and their runabout progeny. God in heaven, how beautiful she was when she first met Moshe Lev! But oh, that series of catastrophic boy friends before that, all of whom I remember: how they looked, the way they danced, the way they held their cigarettes or pipes, the times I came on them smooching with her in a hallway, or on a sofa, or—well, never mind, never mind, it was all so goddamned long ago. Most of them must be dead. What a parade of schleppers, though; what a wringer Lee put herself through! But the master schlepper of all was Frank Feitelson. If not for Feitelson, Lee would not have met Moshe Lev, and we might never have made the grand and fateful move to Manhattan.
