"Isn't that nice?" Rose applauded too. Belle, catcl
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ing Gold's eyes, offered a helpless shrug. Dina lingered evilly instead of escaping into her room as prearranged.
"Another screw," explained Gold's stepmother to Gold's father, "has come loose."
And another marble, Gold replied to himself, has rolled out of your fucking skull. Some at the table had already overshot the pages of his article and were engrossed in the sexual help wanted ads at the back.
"And after dinner," said Esther, "he'll autograph all our copies if we ask."
"Please, Esther," Gold begged. "You're embarrassing me."
"And then," Esther went on, finally sitting down, "we'll all have to go home and read it."
"Fat chance," said Harriet.
"Will someone pass me some turkey?" said Gold.
"We'll have to buy another bookcase soon," said Muriel. "Where's an ashtray?"
Ida, shorter, scowled up at her and fanned the air free of cigarette smoke. "At least he's closer to the front this time," she noticed.
"You get more money for that?" asked Irv.
"For what?" Gold's words were clipped.
"For being near the front?"
"No," said Belle.
"He gets paid?" asked Victor.
"Yes," said Belle. "Victor, take some roast beef. Everybody start eating. Please."
"There's plenty of everything at both sides of the table," instructed Ida. She held a platter of newly sliced rye bread with black seeds directly under Gold's nose. "Take some bread, Brucie. It's your favorite kind,"
"I thought you told us to stop calling him Brucie when he turned twenty-one," Muriel corrected Ida.
Gold declined the rye bread with a shake of his head. "he aromatic burnt allure of those black seeds nearly ilit his heart in two. He would forgo the roast potatoes
>o, butter-yellow with charred pan burns and darkly
tcked with succulent particles of shriveled, greasy
ion embodying now the concentrates of all those
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piquant seasonings that had blended together with the flavor of prime rare beef. Self-denial, like the self-punishment of jogging, made him feel virtuous and savagely bad-tempered.
"I just don't get it," said Max in thoughtful doubt. "This title, I mean."
"In my opinion," ventured Dina, "it's a big mistake." She was eating off her plate as she stood. Having asserted all week that she would not remain with that family, she now evidently found it impossible to tear herself away.
"Sure," said Milt. "A mistake. What you meant to say, I think, was that nothing succeeds like success. Right?"
"No," said Belle.
"What I meant to say," said Gold, slipping into the plush conversational robes of the pedagogue-prophet, "is that nothing succeeds like failure. If you take the long view, the only outcome we can ever rely upon is failure."
"I can't afford to take a long view," said his father. "I'm a very short person."
"Would you care to elaborate on that, Professor?" asked Sid, his mouth full.
"If you'd take the trouble to read it," Gold began, chewing.
"Oh, Daddy," interrupted Dina, "no one's going to read it."
"Dina, will you get the hell out of here already, if you're going?"
"Nobody's eating Esther's noodle pudding," said Belle, in a diversionary alarm.
Like earth-moving equipment, arms reached forth over the table simultaneously for helpings of Esther's noodle pudding.
"Nobody's settled my hash," said Muriel.
"And I brought nothing," lamented Rose.
"Harriet takes the cake," said Belle.
"And Belle chimes in," Ida said.
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And now Dina fled.
"Are you telling me," questioned Irv, holding at a stop the dish of mashed sweet potatoes Gold awaited, "that if I set out to drill a patient's tooth to put a filling in, I haven't succeeded?"
Gold was indulgent. "Irv, you ain't filling teeth because you like to drill holes. If you fill a tooth to make money to buy a car that's going to conk out on you tonight in the tunnel going back to Brooklyn, you haven't really succeeded in what you planned, have you?"
"That's kind of farfetched, Bruce, isn't it?"
"Well, I ain't exactly writing about drilling teeth. Will you pass those sweet potatoes?"
"I think fairness requires," said Ida, "that we all read the article before we form an opinion."
"That will be the day," said Harriet. "And I'll believe he's going to Washington when I see it."
"Harriet, will you please shut up?" Gold pleaded. "For once?"
Harriet said to Sid, "I always told you he was spoiled."
"Not by me," bragged Muriel. This statement was superfluous. Muriel had accepted Victor's proposal of marriage, her first from anyone, after working as a salesgirl in Macy's for eight months, and had not thought of spoiling anyone but herself, since.
"Bruce wasn't spoiled." Ida's celerity in coming to Gold's defense was always sufficient to leave him feeling undermined. "He was given advantages because he showed he would make the most of them. Like I was. There's no need to be ashamed of him just because he writes things nobody understands."
Gold's cheeks were afire with escalating anger. "Irv,
vill you pass those goddamn sweet potatoes, please?"
le speared a slice of roast beef. "Victor, throw some
orned-beef hash on my plate, will you? And two of
lose roast potatoes, with onion, onion. Ida, give me a
>uple of slices of that bread."
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Victor, pleased to comply, said, "She made the corned-beef hash with filet mignon."
Gold was starving and had no appetite. If I ever marry again, he despaired . . . and was interrupted by his father, who coughed to command attention, leaned toward him angrily, and declared:
"This thing that you did was an insult with this guy to me and the whole family. He was rich?" Gold was flabbergasted. "What thing?" "With this guy." His father's face was stern. First Gold blinked. Then he said, "Which one?" "You know which one," his father began in a harangue. "Don't ask me which one. I'll give him which one, that idiot. You went to school with him, didn't you?" "Lieberman?"
"Who else, you cartoon? I have to tell him which one." Victor giggled, and Sid was regarding the assault upon Gold with a smiling and benign countenance. "How come—" and here Julius Gold adopted a pose of elegance and bent his head far back for no better purpose, it seemed, than to look horizontally past his knob of a nose—"how come they lived in Coney Island if they were so rich?" Gold was puzzled. "They weren't rich." "His father was better than me? What did he do?" "He candled eggs. He was in the egg business." "I owned factories," Gold's father maintained. "I built gun turrets in the war for the Bendix people. I was in defense." He slowed, nodding. "They gave me once a small citation for efficiency because I had a small factory. I had a coat business and was in real estate. I had a leather business from which I was able to retire with an income. Ask Sid. Long ago I was in furs, spices ships, import and export." His look grew distant and h
106
getting out. I had a big grocery store on Mermaid Avenue before it closed. I was ahead of my time with my supermarket. Once I owned a store with surgical appliances for people with operations, and I knew how to talk—believe me, I knew what to say to people when it came to selling. 'Have I got an arm for you!' I would say to one. 'Who sold you that eye?' I would ask another. I was the best in the whole world, but I couldn't make a living so I went into finance and was a commission man on Wall Street in the Depression when no one could sell a single share of stock, not even me. I was in building, when no one was building. I was a draftsman before anyone even knew what a draftsman was. A lot of people s
till don't." His eye fell upon Gold accusingly. "An egg candler is better than me?"
"Did I say that?"
"So how come," said Julius Gold, "you work for him, and he don't work for you?"
Now Gold understood. "I don't work for him. I'm a free-lance writer. He's an editor."
His father appeared ominously pleased. "Did you write this or did he?"
"I did."
"Did he pay you or did you pay him?"
"He paid me."
"That sounds like work to me," said his father with sovereign scorn. "Do you wish you was him, or do you wish you was you?"
"I wish I was me."
"Does he wish he was him, or does he wish he was you?"
"He probably wishes he was me."
"Sid?"
"He may be right, Pop."
"Ah, what do you know?" said the old man, shaking lis head at Sid in disgust. "You're just as dumb, sitting lere like a dope all these years with your laundry
lachines. Like American Tel and Tel, still with their
lephones. You never had no plan. I told you a
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hundred times, you got to have a plan." His father found a cigar. "By you, he may be right. By me—" his father struck his match—"money talks. The man who does the paying calls the tune. He's paying, you work for him, he's better, a son of an egg candler yet when I built turrets for the Bendix people, and that's it. Fartig."
"Oh, Pa, I'm forty-eight goddamn years old," Gold started to strike back angrily.
"Don't you swear. I never allowed such language in my house."
"It's my house and I do. I'm a college professor and have a Ph.D. I write books. I go on television. I get paid for making speeches at colleges and conferences. And you still talk to me like I'm a child or some kind of imbecile. All of you! There are people in Washington who want me to go there."
"As what?" responded his father with a jeering laugh.
"As a tourist," joked Max, and Gold felt the fight go out of him. Oh, Max, Gold wailed silently, not you too.
"To see the Washington Monument," chortled Milt, in the loudest utterance anyone there had yet heard from him. He was starting to feel at home as Esther's suitor.
Inwardly Gold was close to tears. Soon, he reflected despondently, I will be making recommendations whether to bomb or not to bomb. Here I am hopeless. "Okay, you're right and I'm wrong," he surrendered abjectly to his father, who nodded. "I wish we were talking about water again."
"Ask Sid," said his father. "If there's one thing Sid knows, it's water."
Esther, obliging, asked, "Sometimes when I look ou my window in winter, I see ice flowing up the river-why is that?"
"That's because ice is lighter than water," answere Sid, "and it's floating up to get to the top of th river."
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For an instant Gold was speechless. Blood rushed to his face. "Do you really think," he demanded in a cold fury, "that the ice is flowing up to get to the top of the river?"
"Isn't it?" asked Sid.
"Do you really think that up is up?" Gold blurted out, pointing northward angrily.
"Up isn't up?" said someone.
"Sure, it's up," said someone else.
"What then, it's down?" answered still one more.
"I meant north," Gold corrected himself with a shout. "Do you really think that something is higher just because it's north?"
Sid preserved a tranquil silence while others championed his cause.
"Of course, it's higher. They got the mountains there, don't they?"
"That's why people go in the summer."
"It's cooler."
"North is always higher on the map," Ida pointed out.
"I'm not talking about a map."
"That's why the water always flows down to the middle of the map," said his father with belittling arrogance. "Where it's wider. Where there's lots of room."
"And I suppose," Gold sneered at them all, "that if /ou took a map off the wall and turned it upside down, ill the water would run off."
"Oh, no, silly," said his sister-in-law.
"There's no water on the map."
"He thinks there's water on a map."
"A map is only a picture."
"I know it's a picture!" Gold shrieked in fear. "I was
ing irojiic. I was asking a question, not making a
itement!"
"But turn the world upside down," suggested Sid h an air of craftiness in the intimidated lull that ued, "and then see what would happen."
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"Nothing!" roared Gold.
"Nothing?" said Sid.
"The North Pole would be the South Pole," said Muriel.
"The Big Dipper would spill."
"We'd go south to get cold."
"Niagara Falls would fall up."
"And he calls that nothing."
"Nothing would happen!" Gold heard himself screaming. "Uphill would still be uphill, God damn it, there is no top or bottom when it comes to planets, and I'm leaving here right now and never coming back— what is it, what is it, what is it, what is it?" he cried with shrill and perfervid impatience at whoever had been thumping him on the shoulder.
"It's for you," said Dina.
"What is?"
"The phone call." Dina rolled her eyes upward in martyrdom. "It's that man in the White House again. You can take it in my room."
The will to live left Gold. The delusion possessed him that Ralph and rulers in all the capital cities of the world had been witness to the disgraceful scene just completed. Television cameras had recorded it. Woodward and Bernstein would write a book. He was ruined.
Dina helped him to his feet. Ida steadied him. He prayed for clemency as he walked through the kitchen to Dina's bedroom.
"Ralph?"
"Just a minute, darling," said a woman's voice a warm and rich as flowing honey.
"Bruce?"
"Ralph?"
"The President of the United States has definite decided that he wants you to work with him," $a Ralph. "He will see you in the White House tomorrc morning at seven-thirty. You will have a chance to f to know each other."
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'I can't come to the White House tomorrow morning," Gold croaked. "I've got a ten o'clock class."
"You'll be back in time," said Ralph. "The appointment is only for a minute and a half. If you leave for the airport now you can catch the last shuttle."
"I can't leave now. It's my big sister's birthday party." ^w "The President would send his own plane but his wife ig^ing it to go shopping. You could charter a private plane."
"I dorr J know how. Ralph—will the President be angry if I don't come tomorrow?"
"Not angry, Bruce. But very disappointed, although he won't know. I'll simply put somebody else into that minute and a half and he probably will never notice the difference."
"I could come Wednesday," Gold begged.
"He'll be in China."
"Will you please get off the phone?" Gold's daughter hissed from the doorway like the deadliest of adders. "I'm expecting a call."
"Get the fuck out of here," he answered in kind with his hand muffling the phone, "or I'll kill you."
Dina skipped merrily away. "They want him to come to Washington," she sang out.
"But come anyway," Ralph decided, "and we'll talk. Andrea will probably want you for dinner. Stay at an excellent hotel, in case you're recognized. Unless, of course, there's someone here who might want you in his home as a guest."
Gold waited without breath for five full seconds before saying he'd stay at a hotel. In something of a stupor he returned to the dining room.
"Was it really the President?" asked Rose in a whisper.
"And he wants him to come right away," said Esther to Harriet, who was looking chastened.
"An assistant," said Gold.
"The President has lots of assistants," Harriet remarked churlishly.
Ill
"Well, this is his best one," Ida informed he
r.
"I can't wait to visit Bruce in Washington," said Muriel, shaking ashes from the cigarette jutting from her mouth, and Gold was stricken with something more numbing than dismay. "Maybe we can all go together, with the kids."
"That should be nice," said Rose. "Won't it, Max?"
"Maybe he can get me a raise."
"Bruce," Ida reprimanded him sharply, "if yoii^ going to Washington there's something I must tell you. Esther, Rose, Max, Irv, Muriel, Victor, and I all think you're getting too thin."
"He was always too thin," derogated his father. "I told him too thin—but he wouldn't listen. When he wears pajamas it's only one stripe."
"What was it Sid used to tease him about?" asked Emma Bovary.
"Go out for the fencing team," said Echo. "He was so skinny they'd never be able to hit him."
"Remember the time they wouldn't let him sing in school and he came home crying?" asked Natasha Karilova.
"And how funny he looked in eyeglasses?" responded Aurora with equal merriment, and Gold returned from his daze and realized he'd been giving the names Emma Bovary, Echo, Natasha Karilova, and Aurora to his sisters Muriel, Ida, Rose, and Esther. They were just too fucking many of them. With a fork gripped like a dagger, he stabbed brutally for the last remaining end piece of roast beef as Belle and a few of the other women began clearing the table.
"When you going?" demanded his father.
"Wednesday," grumbled Gold, and masticated seriously.
"For how long?"
"He has a class on Friday," said Belle.
"You taking Belle with you?"
"No," said Belle resolutely. "I have to work at the school Wednesday."
"It's too soon for that," said Gold.