Inside, Outside, page 69
My mind was on Bobbie and Pop. The debate, insofar as it penetrated my inattention, seemed to me mere chatter in a vacuum. I classed the idea of a Jewish state, when I thought about it at all, with such futuristic imaginings as rockets to Mars and world Utopias. These people discussed it like a Czechoslovakia ready to raise its flag. As for the menace of Hitler, I thought it must be greatly exaggerated, probably for the purposes of Jewish fund-raising.
God help me, how I want to strike out those lines! But they are the truth.
I write on my balcony facing the Mediterranean, on a brilliantly sunny morning. The news is as brilliant as the day. The tiny Jewish state, which—thirty-five lightning years ago—I considered a nutty fantasy, has routed the armies of Egypt and Syria, and is on the march to Damascus and Cairo. The Egyptian Third Army is trapped west of the Suez Canal. The Russians are frantically pushing a cease-fire to save that army from annihilation and Sadat’s Egypt from collapse. The American Secretary of State has flown to Moscow to work out the deal.
As for my skepticism about the Nazis, I will die regretting it. So will every Jew of my generation who disbelieved until it was too late; and that is ninety percent of us, including the European Jews themselves, those few who survived. The little dark man and the professor were talking stern reality. It was my head that was in a soundproof vacuum of obsession with a girl, and that part doesn’t bear thinking about.
***
“Have you been with her as man and wife?” Pop quaintly put it, hardly able to get the words out. At the answer he leaned his head on an arm resting on his knee, and covered his eyes. We sat in the chilly lobby of the building, both of us in raincoats.
Pop, in muffled tones: “And you’re sure you want to marry her?”
“I love her, Papa.”
He uncovered his eyes and scanned my face. “Well, then, that settles it. She’ll be a Jewish daughter.”
All this must have been in Yiddish, because I can hear him saying “Yiddishe tokhter” (Jewish daughter) in a warm, even affectionate way, as plainly as I hear this pen scratching. Pop habitually talked Yiddish about serious matters.
“And when do you plan on getting married?”
“That’s what I have to talk to you about.”
87
The Shoot-out
What followed between Pop and me I have long thought of as the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. It took place in Morrie’s flat in April House, and there was no shooting, or even raising of voices. Not with my father. But it was a confrontation that brought a swift denouement, and here is how it went that night.
***
The considerate and mature scheme I had worked out, walking amid sunlit cherry and crabapple blossoms, was to get engaged to Bobbie, but not married. Not straight off, certainly. Rationale: I would have hard adjustments to make, returning to law school. So would Bobbie, what with conversion and all. Marriage now would be a complication. Having proposed marriage, I had to do something about it, and that is what I would do at the moment, get engaged. I told all this to Pop in April House. He sat in the same armchair Bobbie had curled up in the night before, his large brown eyes soberly fixed on me, and heard me out.
“Have you put this plan to the young lady?”
“I wanted to talk to you first.”
“I appreciate that.”
He asked about Bobbie’s family, her religion, her work, her education; and as I answered candidly I began to realize, picturing her through his eyes, that the religion was all but a red herring. Quite aside from that, Yisroelke had himself a pretty girl with no background, limited education, and at best average intelligence; facts that I knew, but that left out the tenderness, beauty, and hard-knotted bond of our love. My hope was that Pop understood that, he was a man.
“Yisroelke, you told me at first it was not serious,” he said at last. “You told me that over and over.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Then you told me it was finished.”
“I know.”
“And now you say you want to marry her.”
“Yes.”
“Hayitokhon?” inquired Pop.
We looked at each other in the eye, and believe it or not, we both sadly laughed.
Hayitokhon is one of those great Yiddish words taken over from Hebrew, into which are packed four thousand years of Jewish experience. You can translate it, “Can it be?” or “Is it possible?” or “Does it make sense?” or “How come?” or “Come on!” or “Gimme a break”; or even—when used as a profane incredulous expletive—“Jesus!” All those are overtones or harmonies of hayitokhon. With that one word, Pop bridged the gap between us in a rueful chuckle.
I did my best to respond. I dwelled on Bobbie’s warmth to me, her practical sense, her devotion to her mother, and the stouthearted way she was supporting both of them in a depression. Given my education, I argued, how could I be preoccupied, as he and Mom were, with being Jewish? And what other education could I have had? Zaideh’s notion of making me into an iluy, an anachronism like himself, had always been doomed. I was an American, making a living in America, and I had fallen in love with a beautiful girl out there. I had tried to break it off and had failed, and here I was. Such was my pitch, more or less, stumbled through incoherently and ending up in the air.
Pop looked puzzled and unsatisfied. “You’ve known her how long now?” he asked when I had talked myself out. “Two years?”
“A little more.”
“You have broken up, you say, and gotten together again?”
“A couple of times.”
“And now what? Have you had a fight? Has she given you an ultimatum?”
“No, nothing like that.”
A silence. Pop was a pacer when he was thinking hard—as I am to this day—and he got up and paced, hands clasped behind him.
“During the time you broke up, she had other men friends?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
A direct stab to a deep abscess: the man who knew Einstein. “No… it doesn’t.”
“Would she really want to become Jewish?” Pop asked.
A deeper probe.
Bobbie’s green hat in the ladies’ balcony; Bobbie baffled by the Yiddish in my talk; Bobbie in the shadows, across the street from the synagogue; Bobbie and I in April House afterward, constrained and sitting apart.
“She would do it.”
Papa paced, then halted and spoke deliberately. “I’ll tell you what, Yisroelke. I have never been in England, but Disraeli once said, ‘The only truth is race. There is no other.’ He said that out of experience, and he was the Prime Minister of England. You must be sure to understand exactly how the young lady feels. Not about you. She loves you. We know that. But about being Jewish. You’re talking about the rest of her life.”
How much deeper will Pop cut?
“I’m going to learn how to make gefilte fish, and I’m going to marry you.”
“Don’t you know when you’re done, Izzy? That’s not characteristic of your race!”
“Whose Izzy Izzy, Izzy yours or Izzy mine?”
“Hollooeen!”
“Clip cock! Clip cock!”
“That doesn’t worry me.”
“All right.” Papa’s tone changed to that harsh straight business voice of his. “Now I want you to tell me, what made you ask her to marry you just at this time? And no bluffing, Yisroelke, out with it! What has happened?”
I told him. I described the visit to Lee’s house, Bobbie’s weeping at the sight of the baby, the intimate yet awkward dinner, the unbearably distressing moment when Bobbie held the baby in her arms. I tried to explain how I had felt at that sight.
“I see,” Pop said, “and now I think I understand you.”
He took a long pause, pacing and pacing. Then he sat down in the armchair. I see him now before me, and I realize—it seems, for the first time—that the Minsker Godol’s follies may have aged him and worn him out as much as all his other burdens together.
“Yisroelke, you have treated this girl very badly,” he said with slow melancholy, in his clear rich Yiddish. “You have done her a great wrong. She’s older than you, and she’s a worldly person, but that makes no difference. Because you’re a mentsch you hate feeling so guilty. That much is all right. Still, to get married so as not to feel guilty, just to apologize for doing a woman wrong, is not good. Not for her, and not for you. It’s not a basis for a life together. It’s a mistake. Now is that your main reason, or isn’t it?”
A moment for truth.
“That’s my main reason.”
“What is her name?”
If I did not remember his asking this, I wouldn’t mention it, it seems so unbelievable. But for two years and more, Bobbie had been “the girl” or “the young lady.”
“Violet,” I said, and I’ll never know why I didn’t say “Bobbie.”
“Violet? All right.” He switched to English. “I think maybe you should say, ‘My dear Violet, I asked you to marry me, and I meant it. And since I said it, I will do it. But the more I think about it, with all the problems, I’m afraid it might be a mistake for both of us. We should talk about it, and if after all you agree, then I want to give you money. It’s the best thing I can do. That way you can be free to make a life for yourself, and you won’t be hard-pressed in the meantime.’ You should consider saying something like that, Yisroelke.”
“Buy her off, you mean,” I snapped.
“Don’t twist my words,” said my father, shaking his head at me. “I think she won’t be offended, Yisroelke, and she won’t accuse you of buying her off. She sounds like a down-to-earth person, and if she is, she’ll be sad but also relieved. Becoming a Jew isn’t such a bargain nowadays, believe me.”
We talked a lot more, we talked until the windows turned gray in the dawn, but that was in essence what happened in the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.
***
I picked Bobbie up at Bonwit’s. As we walked arm in arm across to the Plaza for lunch, I said, “You know, I asked you to marry me.”
“Yes, so I seem to remember.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about it.”
She slowed in her walk. Her arm tightened on mine. It was the only emotion she showed at the disclosure, in the words and in my tone, that it was over.
“Yes, David?”
“We’ll talk inside,” I all but shouted. We were crossing Fifty-eighth Street in a traffic jam, and the auto-horn cacophony was horrendous.
Well, in brief, Pop was right on all points. Bobbie released me with a note of relief, sad though she was. At first she said she didn’t want the money; we had been happy together, and I owed her nothing. But I pressed her, and in the end she accepted my offer. It was about half of what I had saved in the Goldhandler years. “The truth is, honey, your faith scares me,” she confessed, with a regretful smile, “because you take it so seriously! You and your whole family. All those eyes. I do love you. There’s never been anything like this for me before. Maybe for both of us, there never will be again. But it’s best this way.” She put both her hands over mine, and looked at me with the same shining eyes that had astounded and thrilled me when she said, “You fiend! As though you ever doubted it. From the first minute!” We were at one of the conspicuous middle tables of the Oak Room, but we might have been alone on a bench in the park. “Anyway, I’ll never forget that you asked me.” A mischievous little grin twitched that lovely mouth. “Twice.”
***
The penthouse was gutted. Boyd wandered the vacant spaces like a ghost, except that his footfalls made noise; but no ghost ever haunted a more desolate ruin. Mrs. Fesser had showed up with two vans and a squad of moving men, Boyd said, and had cleaned the place out. How could she do that? Well, on Goldhandler’s death she had demanded immediate payment of the balances due, an option in the small print of her invoices. Of course Mrs. Goldhandler couldn’t pay, and so La Fesser had descended and repossessed all those bargains.
In the office the cigar smell was still spookily strong. The boss’s big desk and swivel chair were gone; but the joke files, the steel cabinets of old scripts, the typewriters, the carpeting, and the switchboard had survived the Fesser raid. Boyd and I had undertaken to get the files moved to a new apartment the widow had rented. She considered those files a treasure, but without Goldhandler’s crafty ingenuity and wit, the treasure was worked-out waste paper. For her sake Boyd tried to keep the business going, but we lost the programs, one by one, writing in Morrie’s flat, or Sam’s apartment, or the new place. When the work dwindled to nothing, Sam flew off in his airplane, I gave up the April House room and dove into my law books, and Boyd went on to another job, writing and directing a soap opera.
Let me finish up about Boyd. He lived only a year or so after that. He was doing well at his job, but then he up and died of something called an embolism. I found this out by running into Karl in a theatre lobby. Boyd’s sister notified the Goldhandlers, but for one reason and another none of them could go to the funeral. When Karl told me about it, Boyd had been dead a good while. Boyd couldn’t have been more than thirty when he died. Maybe grieving dogs die of an embolism.
It was Boyd who gave me some inside facts about Goldhandler’s sudden death, as we tried afterward to cope with the collapse of the joke factory. Goldhandler had died in the tub, taking his morning bath. The Alaskan mine entanglement had brought on the fatal heart attack; that was Boyd’s bitter certainty. The Goldhandlers had plunged in way over their heads when, according to Klebanoff, the gold began coming through in Klondike quantities. Goldhandler had gone on the board of directors, and he had countersigned with Klebanoff guarantees for large capital outlays which a syndicate was supposed to provide. The venture had suddenly turned sour. There was no syndicate. Klebanoff was facing an indictment for fraud, he was missing, and a warrant was out for him. An investors’ committee had formed to sue Goldhandler; and on the morning he died he was scheduled to meet that committee in his lawyers’ office, to explain how he proposed to pay off a quarter of a million dollars in guarantees.
The last time I ever saw Boyd we talked about Goldhandler’s career, which in retrospect began to seem the falling flash of a brilliant meteor. Boyd said the clue to it all was that the Henny Holtz show had been Goldhandler’s base for his rich living, and he had lost it too soon after occupying the penthouse. All the mad doings thereafter had been clutches at straws to arrest his fall, and keep up that dream aerie overlooking Central Park. “Maybe they loved each other too much,” Boyd said about Goldhandler and his wife. “They wanted each other to have the moon, and by God they had it.”
Thus Boyd. Maybe there is something in that. But the truth is, I think Goldhandler was ready for his long rest, even without the failing programs and the Klebanoff disaster. The boss had a great heart but he had broken it, trying too hard to make the Goldena Medina laugh, for money.
***
The apartment the family moved to was on the ground floor rear of an old building near Columbia, dark and dowdy, but commodious. I visited the Goldhandlers often during my law school years. The first time I came to dinner, Mrs. Goldhandler in deference to me baked a salmon. She had noticed at the funeral that I was praying for Goldhandler. “Harry never missed a trick,” she said. “You are getting religion, aren’t you? I don’t believe in it, of course, but I appreciated your sentiment.”
Mrs. Goldhandler is still alive, over seventy but full of zip, doing administrative work in a Tucson hospital. She never remarried. She was a very handsome widow, but what man could follow Goldhandler? Sigmund became a physicist, and Karl, after some strange shadowy doings in international currencies, is now, of all things, an eminent scholar on Byzantium. He attends an annual conference in New York of Byzantians, or whatever you call such rare birds, so I see him and get the family news.
A son of Karl’s, a rock musician, aged twenty, passed through Washington not long ago and called on me, seeking advice about going to Israel to work on a kibbutz. He said he was interested in exploring his origins. He had never been inside a synagogue or a temple, knew no Hebrew, not even the alphabet. He did not know that Hebrew was what Israelis spoke. It gave me a turn to see how much—except for his shoulder-length hair—he resembled the book-jacket picture of the slim, aesthetic short-story writer, Harry Goldhandler.
88
The End
I did not hear from Bobbie for about a year.
The first year of law school is less a course of instruction than an ordeal of passage, like adult circumcision among the aborigines. The intent is to cull out the weak. Never have I worked so hard. College by comparison had been kindergarten play. Rusty at the books after such a long layoff, competing against the sharpies who chose Columbia as the high road to Wall Street jobs, I tunnelled through the weeks and months like a mole, blind and deaf to everything but the next assignments and examinations. The Munich crisis came and went, Hitler occupied all of Czechoslovakia, the war talk kept mounting, but it might all have been happening on Pluto. I was holding my own, even beginning to forge forward with some hope of Law Review, and what else mattered? When the summer vacation came, I just studied harder. Attendance in the law library dropped low, but I was there straight through July and August, still making up those lost years.
