Inside, Outside, page 68
The trip to the Azores passed pleasantly in all that cockpit talk. When we were coming down through night clouds the pilot let fall a disconcerting fact. The backbone of the airlift will be the smaller C-141, and a number of them are all loaded and ready to fly. But the recent crosswinds in the Azores were and still are beyond the C-141’s capacity to land. So some Galaxies were loaded up in a hurry, because they can lock their landing gear off-center, and do hairy cross-wind landings. Well, it was a damnably queer sensation, I tell you, sitting in that jump seat and watching the lights of the landing strip coming up at an angle to the plane, instead of straight ahead. “This is what we really get paid to do,” the flight commander said, calmly chewing gum as his titanic machine went crabbing into the ground, smooth as glass, and rolled on the tarmac along the strip of lights at that same acute angle.
“Pretty nifty,” I said, in a shaky voice.
“Just lucky,” he said.
But then, as I’ve mentioned, that Galaxy was grounded by a “crump.” This one came flying in, refueled, and took off, and I thumbed a ride. I had no notion of the risky flight plan, and deserve no credit for intrepidity; though even if I’d known the worst, the President’s letter in my breast pocket would have spurred me to get aboard….
The flight commander has just sent for me. What now?
***
What indeed!
When I came into the cockpit he gestured at the windows. On both sides of the Galaxy, six U.S. Navy planes were flying formation on us; half a dozen silver and blue needle-nosed fighters, flashing along in the sun. He motioned at the empty co-pilot’s seat, and pointed downward. I clambered into the seat, and through the clouds I saw below a carrier and its escort vessels, tiny and gray on the purple sea. I glanced at him and ventured a smile. He smiled back like a barefoot boy, and made a thumbs-up. Next moment his round freckled face froze into its hard cast. So on we go. Three reassured hours to Tel Aviv. However, two hundred miles out, the U.S. fighters will peel off. The Israeli Air Force is supposed to take over and escort us in. There’s the crunch.
I think I’ll be able to take a nap meanwhile. I haven’t slept much in the past two days. Six U.S. Navy fighters are a soothing presence.
85
Sandra Found
Tel Aviv Hilton
October 17, 1973
From that deep peaceful snooze in the rest cabin of a thundering C-5A Galaxy, I was harshly awakened by alarmed shouts up forward: “Fighters! Fighters! Not ours!”
And there they were outside the windows as I came stumbling into the cockpit: four F-4 Phantoms in the red light of a setting sun, with the blue and white Star of David on their fuselages, the six-pointed star that I first saw at the age of three on a paper flag I was given in the Minsker Synagogue, to wave as I marched during the Rejoicing of the Law. I muttered in Hebrew, Blessed are you, Lord Our God, Ruler of the Universe, who have kept us alive, and sustained us, and brought us to this time. Standard blessing on good news. Judging by the cheers of the Galaxy crew, I was saying it for them, too. They were already kidding the copilot about his panicky yell, on spying fighter shapes with unfamiliar markings.
After that, even hearing the Russian airlift pilots talking on the international air control channel was an anticlimax. Those Phantoms stayed with us until the Israeli air controller said, “Shalom, C-5 Galaxy, you are cleared to land.” Then they flipped away into the starlit night. The stupendous flying machine came winging past darkened Tel Aviv, settled toward the lights of the landing strip, and touched down. It was still rolling when work parties and trucks came swarming out to commence unloading. The crew and I were rushed into a VIP lounge, where the prettiest El Al stewardesses I ever saw gave us bouquets of roses, and drinks, and food, and a lot of kisses and hugs, too. I did not rate such a welcome, but I was thoroughly enjoying it, when a young fellow in an open white shirt came sidling through the girls to me. “Doovidel? The car is here.”
***
That was three days ago.
The Israel Defense Force has since crossed the Suez Canal, and is counterattacking on Egyptian territory. Golda announced it in the Knesset. In the north too they have broken the attack, and are grinding forward into Syria. There’s no question any more of premature optimism. We are going to win this war. The Israelis have brought off another military miracle, a recovery and turnabout after a multiple surprise attack that could have ended the Jewish State. For that is the problem of Israel, and perhaps the secret of its military power, too. The slim margin for error compels the fighting capacity the world wonders at, whether with admiration, or with gnashing of teeth. I believe both sentiments are now being felt, here and there around the planet.
Well, then, is the airlift superfluous, now that it’s coming to flood out there at Lod Airport, we believe surpassing the Russian effort? Not on your life. A general about to shoot off his last bullets fights a different battle than one who knows replenishments are on hand or coming. The Israelis crossed the Canal on their own with what they had, but the start of the airlift gave them a terrific shot in the arm. I saw that on Golda’s face. She was not the same woman. She looked half her age, smiling and greeting me, “Nu, Doovidel, did you have a nice time in America?”
The word from the President was that I can stay here until my mother’s condition stabilizes. The doctors at Hadassah hospital say that it is still touch-and-go. “She is an old, old lady,” expostulated the doctor on duty when I pressured him for a glimpse of her. “Anything can happen, at any moment. Don’t disturb her again until she’s out of the oxygen.”
Meanwhile, by sheer chance, I have located Sandra. Israel’s a small place. I went to the Colossus after seeing Golda, and in the lobby I ran bang into, of all people, Earl Eckstein; the lawyer who, you recall, recommended me in my hot adolescence to the understanding woman. His mother is in an old folks’ home outside Tel Aviv. He came to Israel to visit her for the holidays, and got caught like thousands of other tourists.
“What a nice daughter you’ve got,” he said. “My mother loves her.” And it turned out that Sandra is working in that home, and that’s my daughter’s heroic war service, wheelchairs and bedpans for ancient Jewish wrecks. I went to see her.
“My God, you?” was her filial greeting, as she stood there in a dingy corridor in jeans and a sweatshirt, a sloshing basin in hand. She said half the people in that home know my mother, and all agree that Mom’s a ball of fire. Sandra is sure she’ll pull through once again. She wouldn’t agree to come to the Colossus for a meal. “There’s nobody here under seventy-five but me,” she said. “The whole staff had to go to the war. I’m managing the place with a few inmates who can still walk.”
So I picked up my stuff at the Colossus, and moved down here to the almost deserted Hilton. I want to be near Sandra. Her sanatorium is ten minutes away from the hotel by car.
I did not like the way Sandra looked at all. Her hair was in disorder, her face was white, and her eyes were bloodshot. I ventured to ask her about Abe Herz. “He’s back in Tel Hashomer hospital. He was blinded, the day they crossed the Suez Canal. The doctors can’t tell yet how much of his sight he will recover.” She said all this without visible emotion, but I know Sandra, and her look and voice lacerated me almost as much as the news about Abe. The bandages are coming off in two or three days, and then we may know what his chances are. Sandra said Mark has spent much time at his bedside, talking and reading to him, and Abe’s spirits are not bad, considering.
As for the war, my sister Lee tells me that Moshe Lev expects it to last another week, unless the Russians rescue the Arabs from a complete debacle by forcing an earlier cease-fire. Now or never, here in this luxury suite overlooking downtown Tel Aviv and the serene Mediterranean, let me push on and finish April House. One more hasty pile-up of yellow pages, and farewell forever to Bobbie Webb, and to my young days. And, I strongly suspect, farewell to this second bizarre technicolor interlude in the drab black-and-white of a tax lawyer’s career. When the President shook hands with me and said goodbye, there was a final note in his manner. I think instinct told him that my service is done.
***
Bobbie Webb, Bobbie Webb! Gone from my life thirty years and more! Yet the tones of her voice in differing moods, the way she shrugged into and out of that beaver coat, how she lit a cigarette, how she held a pocket mirror and painted her mouth, how she pulled on her stockings, how she flipped her hair out of a coat collar with both hands and shook her head—such things are as present to me as the rippling blue sea below.
Before the computer there was the human brain, with its vast storage capacity, and a merciful shut-off mechanism called forgetting. That shut-off has failed me with Bobbie Webb. All those memory tapes have been spewing out their contents. The rest of April House will be an exercise in flood control; for the story draws to its close, a familiar old tale, after all. Not of a student prince and a barmaid—that was a mere collegiate wisecrack of Mark Herz’s—a simple story of lost innocence and found identity.
What happened then, and what is happening to me now, begin to merge as two sides of one coin.
86
A Tribute of Tears
Harry Goldhandler lay in a richly polished silver-handled walnut coffin, overflowing with plushy pink linings and banked about with flowers. We Orthodox Jews wrap our dead in white shrouds and, where the local laws allow, put them into the earth that way, dust to dust. If there has to be a box, we use as plain and rough a box as we can get, and the very pious bore holes in it to make a way for the dust to return to the dust it came from. Such is the old tradition. Not all Jews do that nowadays, of course.
From my place on the long queue shuffling past the bier, only his pale face was visible. When my turn came to peer down into the coffin, I saw that he was in black tie; in fact, in the same old double-breasted tuxedo he had worn at opening nights. Eyes closed, face still sunken with fatigue, he looked much as he had, stretched out on the long office couch, snatching an hour’s sleep at three or four in the morning; except for the clean shave, that is, and the formal attire. Almost, I could imagine my shaking him, and the dead man opening one eye and hoarsely pleading, “Wake me in another fifteen minutes, Liebowitz.” But Harry Goldhandler had to plead for sleep no more. For the first time since he struck it rich writing jokes, he was going to get enough rest.
There was no rabbi. There were no prayers, no hymns, no music. A well-known publisher, who had frequented the penthouse to guffaw at Goldhandler’s routines, gave the eulogy: fine family man, amusing friend, brilliant wit, etc. “Harry would not want to exact from us the tribute of our tears,” he concluded, and indeed no tears were shed that I noticed. Many star comedians, wearing incongruous solemn expressions, were there: Bert Lahr, Jimmy Durante, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, also a lot of smaller fry like Nicholas Panilas and Morrie Abbott. Henny Holtz came, too; Mrs. Goldhandler later complained angrily about that. Skip Lasser sat near me, and I saw Billy Rose and the Gershwins amid a knot of Broadway people; and what with friends and relatives of the Goldhandlers, and a large turnout of the broadcasting trade, there was standing room only at the farewell to the gag czar.
Wearing the only skullcap in the place, and not wanting to flaunt it, I sat in the back row. As Mrs. Goldhandler, veiled in black, walked out escorted by her sons, I was whispering a kaddish for Goldhandler. Once the family left, the hushed crowd strolled out in a buzz of greetings, handshaking, chatter, and laughter. Boyd remained by the open coffin, making notes on a pad. When the place had emptied, leaving just Boyd and me, a soft-walking attendant in black closed the coffin, and wheeled it briskly out through a side door; possibly straight to the flames, for Goldhandler was being cremated. Boyd followed his dead boss out, wiping his eyes; the eulogy notwithstanding, giving Goldhandler the tribute of his tears. A different attendant wheeled in another fancy coffin, containing a heavily rouged old lady in an evening gown, and I left.
As it happened, I was scheduled to speak at Pop’s synagogue that Friday night, when Rabbi Hoppenstein ran his after-dinner cultural forum. I told Bobbie that I would talk about Goldhandler, and she asked diffidently if it would be wrong for her to come and hear me. “Not at all, do come,” I said. I saw her walk out on the balcony and sit down in a rear pew. Thereafter only her tilted green hat was visible, behind the solid rows of hatted ladies.
It was a sizable audience. The Goodkinds’ raffish gagman son had a certain notoriety in the Orthodox crowd, for I had gone out with several of their daughters; and there had been that romance with the conspicuous Rosalind Hoppenstein. My talk promised to be a light interlude between lectures on substantial topics like Maimonides and Moses Mendelssohn. No doubt I startled the audience by saying that my boss, the gag czar. Harry Goldhandler, had just died; that my time as a joke-writer was over, and what I had to say was a hesped, a eulogy of a man I admired. Anyway, there was not much dozing off.
It is thirty-five years since I gave that speech, but I remember that I started with some heavyish Friday forum talk about the sense of humor, calling it God’s comfort to mankind for the tragic human predicament. So far as that goes, I still hold to the notion. It is why I represent and defend Peter Quat; whatever his ignorant neurotic hangups about being Jewish, he has transmuted them to redeeming laughter. The world’s best-loved authors, I pointed out—Mark Twain, Molière, Dickens, Cervantes, and our own Sholem Aleichem—were writers who made people laugh. Harry Goldhandler was under no delusions, I said, about gagwriting; he was a man of exceptional gifts, but he had been content to coin them into fleeting amusement. “Our fathers came to the Goldena Medina believing you could pick up gold in the streets,” I recall saying at the end. “My boss found out that it was true, but he wore himself out picking up too much too fast. Millions of people laughed at famous radio comedians, and never knew the name of the man who actually made them laugh. If they had known Harry Goldhandler, they might have loved him the way I loved him, may he rest in peace.”
As I came out of the synagogue to a sidewalk crowded by the departing audience, Mom pounced on me. “You were wonderful! Come on home, we’ve invited a lot of people. Papa will read some Sholem Aleichem in Goldhandler’s memory.”
“Maybe he has something else to do,” Pop said, catching my momentary glance across the street, where Bobbie stood in the shadows. It was the only time he ever laid eyes on her.
I said I might come home after a while, and I hurried to catch up with Bobbie, who was starting to walk off. “Oh, hi,” she said. “Don’t you want to go with your mother and father?” For answer I took her arm. “It’s a shame Mrs. Goldhandler and her children weren’t there. It was a lovely talk, what I got of it. Of course you kept losing me, with all those Hebrew expressions.”
“What? I only used one or two, Bobbie.”
She stopped short, freeing her arm, and looked at me. “Are you serious? David, you kept throwing them in all the time. Your audience understood you, but I sure didn’t.”
I thought back over my speech, and realized I had been free with Yiddish interjections, which in that setting I hardly thought of as another language. Bobbie of course could not tell Yiddish from Hebrew. “Did you hear well?”
“Oh, sure. The ladies were very quiet. You’re much admired up there in the gallery, dear. I heard some nice compliments. Also I got some funny looks. Or maybe I was just self-conscious.”
In Morrie’s flat Bobbie kicked off her shoes and curled up in an armchair. We talked quietly over drinks, far into the night. I told her about Goldhandler’s total rewrite of Johnny, Drop Your Gun in a few days in Florida. It was news to her. The word around the show, she said, was that Goldhandler had kept trying to put in crude stale jokes, and Lasser had cut them all out. She had no idea that the hospital scene, which had saved the show, was Goldhandler’s work.
That got us going on Skip Lasser; and so, on reminiscences of the start of our love affair. Bobbie remarked a shade sadly that she missed Peeping Tom. Morrie’s flat was an unromantic rendezvous, to be sure; one room with a double bed, a desk, and two chairs. As we talked of our good and bad times up on the eighteenth floor, and I remembered the Paramount clock, the grand view of the skyscrapers and the river, the Hemingway pillow, and the gardenias, I was overwhelmed with yearning for that lost time, and with desperate affection for this outsider of outsiders in the green hat and stocking feet, to whom I had again proposed marriage. Neither of us said a word about that. There was no chill between us, but an odd constraint. She went home about two in the morning, with a tranquil goodbye kiss at the elevator, and I sat down at the typewriter to dredge a Jimmy Durante script from a void and distracted brain.
Next night when the Sabbath ended I telephoned Pop and said I had to talk to him. I caught him on the way out to a Zionist meeting. He was the chairman, he said, and couldn’t miss it. If I would come there, he would turn over the chair to someone else as soon as possible. It had to be a night of lashing rain and high winds, naturally. I had hoped to take a slow walk with Pop, and break the news gently. All Saturday I had walked and walked around the Central Park reservoir, racking my brains for the best way to handle the thing. The day had been glorious, and I had hit on an approach which, in the sunshine amid the blooming cherry and crabapple trees, had seemed considerate and mature. In that wet windy night misgivings whipped at me, and I taxied to Pop’s meeting, not knowing what the hell to do or say.
***
“Not one dunam!”
A short swarthy man was addressing about eighty men and women on folding chairs, in a bleak meeting room thick with smoke. Pop sat up front at a table with a gray-haired man.
“Not one dunam, and if we have to fight, we fight!”
I am not stopping my story for an excursion into Zionist history in 1938, but in a word, the topic was a British plan to partition Palestine. A “dunam” is about a quarter of an acre. I did not know then what it was, nor had I heard of the Peel Commission, which the speaker berated at length. The gray-haired man, a professor from some seminary, then spoke in favor of accepting partition. The little dark man bitterly argued that the British had already partitioned the Jewish homeland once, reneging on the Balfour Declaration and awarding the Palestine Arabs the entire huge Transjordan. To partition again the remaining fragment of Palestine west of the Jordan would leave no Jewish area that could survive Arab assaults. Any Jewish state, however tiny, the gray professor persisted, where European Jews would have a haven from the menace of Hitler, was better than no state at all. The dark man retorted that the European Jews were not worried enough about Hitler to be arriving in Palestine in any numbers, though they were free to do so.
“Pretty nifty,” I said, in a shaky voice.
“Just lucky,” he said.
But then, as I’ve mentioned, that Galaxy was grounded by a “crump.” This one came flying in, refueled, and took off, and I thumbed a ride. I had no notion of the risky flight plan, and deserve no credit for intrepidity; though even if I’d known the worst, the President’s letter in my breast pocket would have spurred me to get aboard….
The flight commander has just sent for me. What now?
***
What indeed!
When I came into the cockpit he gestured at the windows. On both sides of the Galaxy, six U.S. Navy planes were flying formation on us; half a dozen silver and blue needle-nosed fighters, flashing along in the sun. He motioned at the empty co-pilot’s seat, and pointed downward. I clambered into the seat, and through the clouds I saw below a carrier and its escort vessels, tiny and gray on the purple sea. I glanced at him and ventured a smile. He smiled back like a barefoot boy, and made a thumbs-up. Next moment his round freckled face froze into its hard cast. So on we go. Three reassured hours to Tel Aviv. However, two hundred miles out, the U.S. fighters will peel off. The Israeli Air Force is supposed to take over and escort us in. There’s the crunch.
I think I’ll be able to take a nap meanwhile. I haven’t slept much in the past two days. Six U.S. Navy fighters are a soothing presence.
85
Sandra Found
Tel Aviv Hilton
October 17, 1973
From that deep peaceful snooze in the rest cabin of a thundering C-5A Galaxy, I was harshly awakened by alarmed shouts up forward: “Fighters! Fighters! Not ours!”
And there they were outside the windows as I came stumbling into the cockpit: four F-4 Phantoms in the red light of a setting sun, with the blue and white Star of David on their fuselages, the six-pointed star that I first saw at the age of three on a paper flag I was given in the Minsker Synagogue, to wave as I marched during the Rejoicing of the Law. I muttered in Hebrew, Blessed are you, Lord Our God, Ruler of the Universe, who have kept us alive, and sustained us, and brought us to this time. Standard blessing on good news. Judging by the cheers of the Galaxy crew, I was saying it for them, too. They were already kidding the copilot about his panicky yell, on spying fighter shapes with unfamiliar markings.
After that, even hearing the Russian airlift pilots talking on the international air control channel was an anticlimax. Those Phantoms stayed with us until the Israeli air controller said, “Shalom, C-5 Galaxy, you are cleared to land.” Then they flipped away into the starlit night. The stupendous flying machine came winging past darkened Tel Aviv, settled toward the lights of the landing strip, and touched down. It was still rolling when work parties and trucks came swarming out to commence unloading. The crew and I were rushed into a VIP lounge, where the prettiest El Al stewardesses I ever saw gave us bouquets of roses, and drinks, and food, and a lot of kisses and hugs, too. I did not rate such a welcome, but I was thoroughly enjoying it, when a young fellow in an open white shirt came sidling through the girls to me. “Doovidel? The car is here.”
***
That was three days ago.
The Israel Defense Force has since crossed the Suez Canal, and is counterattacking on Egyptian territory. Golda announced it in the Knesset. In the north too they have broken the attack, and are grinding forward into Syria. There’s no question any more of premature optimism. We are going to win this war. The Israelis have brought off another military miracle, a recovery and turnabout after a multiple surprise attack that could have ended the Jewish State. For that is the problem of Israel, and perhaps the secret of its military power, too. The slim margin for error compels the fighting capacity the world wonders at, whether with admiration, or with gnashing of teeth. I believe both sentiments are now being felt, here and there around the planet.
Well, then, is the airlift superfluous, now that it’s coming to flood out there at Lod Airport, we believe surpassing the Russian effort? Not on your life. A general about to shoot off his last bullets fights a different battle than one who knows replenishments are on hand or coming. The Israelis crossed the Canal on their own with what they had, but the start of the airlift gave them a terrific shot in the arm. I saw that on Golda’s face. She was not the same woman. She looked half her age, smiling and greeting me, “Nu, Doovidel, did you have a nice time in America?”
The word from the President was that I can stay here until my mother’s condition stabilizes. The doctors at Hadassah hospital say that it is still touch-and-go. “She is an old, old lady,” expostulated the doctor on duty when I pressured him for a glimpse of her. “Anything can happen, at any moment. Don’t disturb her again until she’s out of the oxygen.”
Meanwhile, by sheer chance, I have located Sandra. Israel’s a small place. I went to the Colossus after seeing Golda, and in the lobby I ran bang into, of all people, Earl Eckstein; the lawyer who, you recall, recommended me in my hot adolescence to the understanding woman. His mother is in an old folks’ home outside Tel Aviv. He came to Israel to visit her for the holidays, and got caught like thousands of other tourists.
“What a nice daughter you’ve got,” he said. “My mother loves her.” And it turned out that Sandra is working in that home, and that’s my daughter’s heroic war service, wheelchairs and bedpans for ancient Jewish wrecks. I went to see her.
“My God, you?” was her filial greeting, as she stood there in a dingy corridor in jeans and a sweatshirt, a sloshing basin in hand. She said half the people in that home know my mother, and all agree that Mom’s a ball of fire. Sandra is sure she’ll pull through once again. She wouldn’t agree to come to the Colossus for a meal. “There’s nobody here under seventy-five but me,” she said. “The whole staff had to go to the war. I’m managing the place with a few inmates who can still walk.”
So I picked up my stuff at the Colossus, and moved down here to the almost deserted Hilton. I want to be near Sandra. Her sanatorium is ten minutes away from the hotel by car.
I did not like the way Sandra looked at all. Her hair was in disorder, her face was white, and her eyes were bloodshot. I ventured to ask her about Abe Herz. “He’s back in Tel Hashomer hospital. He was blinded, the day they crossed the Suez Canal. The doctors can’t tell yet how much of his sight he will recover.” She said all this without visible emotion, but I know Sandra, and her look and voice lacerated me almost as much as the news about Abe. The bandages are coming off in two or three days, and then we may know what his chances are. Sandra said Mark has spent much time at his bedside, talking and reading to him, and Abe’s spirits are not bad, considering.
As for the war, my sister Lee tells me that Moshe Lev expects it to last another week, unless the Russians rescue the Arabs from a complete debacle by forcing an earlier cease-fire. Now or never, here in this luxury suite overlooking downtown Tel Aviv and the serene Mediterranean, let me push on and finish April House. One more hasty pile-up of yellow pages, and farewell forever to Bobbie Webb, and to my young days. And, I strongly suspect, farewell to this second bizarre technicolor interlude in the drab black-and-white of a tax lawyer’s career. When the President shook hands with me and said goodbye, there was a final note in his manner. I think instinct told him that my service is done.
***
Bobbie Webb, Bobbie Webb! Gone from my life thirty years and more! Yet the tones of her voice in differing moods, the way she shrugged into and out of that beaver coat, how she lit a cigarette, how she held a pocket mirror and painted her mouth, how she pulled on her stockings, how she flipped her hair out of a coat collar with both hands and shook her head—such things are as present to me as the rippling blue sea below.
Before the computer there was the human brain, with its vast storage capacity, and a merciful shut-off mechanism called forgetting. That shut-off has failed me with Bobbie Webb. All those memory tapes have been spewing out their contents. The rest of April House will be an exercise in flood control; for the story draws to its close, a familiar old tale, after all. Not of a student prince and a barmaid—that was a mere collegiate wisecrack of Mark Herz’s—a simple story of lost innocence and found identity.
What happened then, and what is happening to me now, begin to merge as two sides of one coin.
86
A Tribute of Tears
Harry Goldhandler lay in a richly polished silver-handled walnut coffin, overflowing with plushy pink linings and banked about with flowers. We Orthodox Jews wrap our dead in white shrouds and, where the local laws allow, put them into the earth that way, dust to dust. If there has to be a box, we use as plain and rough a box as we can get, and the very pious bore holes in it to make a way for the dust to return to the dust it came from. Such is the old tradition. Not all Jews do that nowadays, of course.
From my place on the long queue shuffling past the bier, only his pale face was visible. When my turn came to peer down into the coffin, I saw that he was in black tie; in fact, in the same old double-breasted tuxedo he had worn at opening nights. Eyes closed, face still sunken with fatigue, he looked much as he had, stretched out on the long office couch, snatching an hour’s sleep at three or four in the morning; except for the clean shave, that is, and the formal attire. Almost, I could imagine my shaking him, and the dead man opening one eye and hoarsely pleading, “Wake me in another fifteen minutes, Liebowitz.” But Harry Goldhandler had to plead for sleep no more. For the first time since he struck it rich writing jokes, he was going to get enough rest.
There was no rabbi. There were no prayers, no hymns, no music. A well-known publisher, who had frequented the penthouse to guffaw at Goldhandler’s routines, gave the eulogy: fine family man, amusing friend, brilliant wit, etc. “Harry would not want to exact from us the tribute of our tears,” he concluded, and indeed no tears were shed that I noticed. Many star comedians, wearing incongruous solemn expressions, were there: Bert Lahr, Jimmy Durante, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, also a lot of smaller fry like Nicholas Panilas and Morrie Abbott. Henny Holtz came, too; Mrs. Goldhandler later complained angrily about that. Skip Lasser sat near me, and I saw Billy Rose and the Gershwins amid a knot of Broadway people; and what with friends and relatives of the Goldhandlers, and a large turnout of the broadcasting trade, there was standing room only at the farewell to the gag czar.
Wearing the only skullcap in the place, and not wanting to flaunt it, I sat in the back row. As Mrs. Goldhandler, veiled in black, walked out escorted by her sons, I was whispering a kaddish for Goldhandler. Once the family left, the hushed crowd strolled out in a buzz of greetings, handshaking, chatter, and laughter. Boyd remained by the open coffin, making notes on a pad. When the place had emptied, leaving just Boyd and me, a soft-walking attendant in black closed the coffin, and wheeled it briskly out through a side door; possibly straight to the flames, for Goldhandler was being cremated. Boyd followed his dead boss out, wiping his eyes; the eulogy notwithstanding, giving Goldhandler the tribute of his tears. A different attendant wheeled in another fancy coffin, containing a heavily rouged old lady in an evening gown, and I left.
As it happened, I was scheduled to speak at Pop’s synagogue that Friday night, when Rabbi Hoppenstein ran his after-dinner cultural forum. I told Bobbie that I would talk about Goldhandler, and she asked diffidently if it would be wrong for her to come and hear me. “Not at all, do come,” I said. I saw her walk out on the balcony and sit down in a rear pew. Thereafter only her tilted green hat was visible, behind the solid rows of hatted ladies.
It was a sizable audience. The Goodkinds’ raffish gagman son had a certain notoriety in the Orthodox crowd, for I had gone out with several of their daughters; and there had been that romance with the conspicuous Rosalind Hoppenstein. My talk promised to be a light interlude between lectures on substantial topics like Maimonides and Moses Mendelssohn. No doubt I startled the audience by saying that my boss, the gag czar. Harry Goldhandler, had just died; that my time as a joke-writer was over, and what I had to say was a hesped, a eulogy of a man I admired. Anyway, there was not much dozing off.
It is thirty-five years since I gave that speech, but I remember that I started with some heavyish Friday forum talk about the sense of humor, calling it God’s comfort to mankind for the tragic human predicament. So far as that goes, I still hold to the notion. It is why I represent and defend Peter Quat; whatever his ignorant neurotic hangups about being Jewish, he has transmuted them to redeeming laughter. The world’s best-loved authors, I pointed out—Mark Twain, Molière, Dickens, Cervantes, and our own Sholem Aleichem—were writers who made people laugh. Harry Goldhandler was under no delusions, I said, about gagwriting; he was a man of exceptional gifts, but he had been content to coin them into fleeting amusement. “Our fathers came to the Goldena Medina believing you could pick up gold in the streets,” I recall saying at the end. “My boss found out that it was true, but he wore himself out picking up too much too fast. Millions of people laughed at famous radio comedians, and never knew the name of the man who actually made them laugh. If they had known Harry Goldhandler, they might have loved him the way I loved him, may he rest in peace.”
As I came out of the synagogue to a sidewalk crowded by the departing audience, Mom pounced on me. “You were wonderful! Come on home, we’ve invited a lot of people. Papa will read some Sholem Aleichem in Goldhandler’s memory.”
“Maybe he has something else to do,” Pop said, catching my momentary glance across the street, where Bobbie stood in the shadows. It was the only time he ever laid eyes on her.
I said I might come home after a while, and I hurried to catch up with Bobbie, who was starting to walk off. “Oh, hi,” she said. “Don’t you want to go with your mother and father?” For answer I took her arm. “It’s a shame Mrs. Goldhandler and her children weren’t there. It was a lovely talk, what I got of it. Of course you kept losing me, with all those Hebrew expressions.”
“What? I only used one or two, Bobbie.”
She stopped short, freeing her arm, and looked at me. “Are you serious? David, you kept throwing them in all the time. Your audience understood you, but I sure didn’t.”
I thought back over my speech, and realized I had been free with Yiddish interjections, which in that setting I hardly thought of as another language. Bobbie of course could not tell Yiddish from Hebrew. “Did you hear well?”
“Oh, sure. The ladies were very quiet. You’re much admired up there in the gallery, dear. I heard some nice compliments. Also I got some funny looks. Or maybe I was just self-conscious.”
In Morrie’s flat Bobbie kicked off her shoes and curled up in an armchair. We talked quietly over drinks, far into the night. I told her about Goldhandler’s total rewrite of Johnny, Drop Your Gun in a few days in Florida. It was news to her. The word around the show, she said, was that Goldhandler had kept trying to put in crude stale jokes, and Lasser had cut them all out. She had no idea that the hospital scene, which had saved the show, was Goldhandler’s work.
That got us going on Skip Lasser; and so, on reminiscences of the start of our love affair. Bobbie remarked a shade sadly that she missed Peeping Tom. Morrie’s flat was an unromantic rendezvous, to be sure; one room with a double bed, a desk, and two chairs. As we talked of our good and bad times up on the eighteenth floor, and I remembered the Paramount clock, the grand view of the skyscrapers and the river, the Hemingway pillow, and the gardenias, I was overwhelmed with yearning for that lost time, and with desperate affection for this outsider of outsiders in the green hat and stocking feet, to whom I had again proposed marriage. Neither of us said a word about that. There was no chill between us, but an odd constraint. She went home about two in the morning, with a tranquil goodbye kiss at the elevator, and I sat down at the typewriter to dredge a Jimmy Durante script from a void and distracted brain.
Next night when the Sabbath ended I telephoned Pop and said I had to talk to him. I caught him on the way out to a Zionist meeting. He was the chairman, he said, and couldn’t miss it. If I would come there, he would turn over the chair to someone else as soon as possible. It had to be a night of lashing rain and high winds, naturally. I had hoped to take a slow walk with Pop, and break the news gently. All Saturday I had walked and walked around the Central Park reservoir, racking my brains for the best way to handle the thing. The day had been glorious, and I had hit on an approach which, in the sunshine amid the blooming cherry and crabapple trees, had seemed considerate and mature. In that wet windy night misgivings whipped at me, and I taxied to Pop’s meeting, not knowing what the hell to do or say.
***
“Not one dunam!”
A short swarthy man was addressing about eighty men and women on folding chairs, in a bleak meeting room thick with smoke. Pop sat up front at a table with a gray-haired man.
“Not one dunam, and if we have to fight, we fight!”
I am not stopping my story for an excursion into Zionist history in 1938, but in a word, the topic was a British plan to partition Palestine. A “dunam” is about a quarter of an acre. I did not know then what it was, nor had I heard of the Peel Commission, which the speaker berated at length. The gray-haired man, a professor from some seminary, then spoke in favor of accepting partition. The little dark man bitterly argued that the British had already partitioned the Jewish homeland once, reneging on the Balfour Declaration and awarding the Palestine Arabs the entire huge Transjordan. To partition again the remaining fragment of Palestine west of the Jordan would leave no Jewish area that could survive Arab assaults. Any Jewish state, however tiny, the gray professor persisted, where European Jews would have a haven from the menace of Hitler, was better than no state at all. The dark man retorted that the European Jews were not worried enough about Hitler to be arriving in Palestine in any numbers, though they were free to do so.
