"I was thinking. I was about to say you're much better than I am at managing money and handling the children and can make decisions like that without asking. You broke my train of thought."
"How can I tell when you're having a train of thought?"
"If in doubt," he said, "always assume I am."
Gold waited in vain for a fractious response, understood there could be no answer at all if she heeded his instructions. If she heeded his instructions he might never hear from her again. Belle revealed no stronger sign of objection than a slight, knowing smile. If all her existence depended on it, he sensed, she would give him no tangible cause for anger. Gold had an uncanny conviction that they could see into each other's minds with altogether too much clarity. They discussed little, yet knew everything. She assaulted him relentlessly with patience and placid silence. This is who I am, her upright bearing seemed to say to him with defiance now. I was not a beauty when you married me, and I couldn't become one if I tried. He could have his divorce any time he wanted it. All he need do was take it by himself. Obedience and acceptance were the cruel weapons with which she persecuted him, total surrender was her strategy of attack, and he was hard put to withstand her. He had Scotch kippers in mind to fly to Andrea the following evening, and maybe slab bacon as well. Or should he withhold the bacon for a subsequent treat? Andrea would never go for herring, he believed, but smoked mackerel would charm her.
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Following the smooth parkway as it curved with the shoreline to the east, he soon saw in the distance on his right the gaunt structure of the defunct Parachute Jump standing on the narrow spit of land across Gravesend Bay and recalled, with some pride in his upbringing, how that Parachute Jump, the hit of the World's Fair in New York in 1939 or '40, was moved to the Steeplechase boardwalk afterward but had never proved adequately perilous for success to an indigenous population trained on the Cyclone and the Thunderbolt and on the Mile Sky Chaser in Luna Park. Now it looked forlorn: no one owned it and no one would take it away. Like those haunted, half-completed luxury apartment houses in Manhattan whose builders had run out of money and whose banks would not supply more, gaping with dismal failure and aging already into blackest decrepitude before they ever shone spanking new. A moment later came the skeletal outline of the giant Wonder Wheel, idled for the year by the chilly season, the only Ferris wheel left in Coney Island now that the Steeplechase, the Funny Place, was bankrupt and gone. Hard times had descended there as in other places. Where Luna Park had last whirred in bright lights on summer evenings over thirty years earlier there now rose a complex of high, honeycombed brick dwellings that looked drabber than ordinary against the lackluster sky. On the overpass spanning Ocean Parkway Gold turned his head for a speeding glimpse of Abraham Lincoln High School and bemoaned for the thousandth time the vile chance that had located him in classes there the same time as Belle and gulled him into a mismanaged destiny of three dependent children and a wife so steadfast. If a man marries young, he reasoned aristocratically in the self-conscious mode of a Lord Chesterfield or a Benjamin Franklin, as Gold himself had been minded to do, it will likely be to someone near him in age; and just about the time he learns really to enjoy living with a young girl and soars into his prime, she will be getting old. He would pass that precious homiletic intelligence on to both sons, if
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he remembered. If only Belle were fickle, mercenary, deceitful. Even her health was good.
He turned off the parkway past Brighton at the exit leading toward Sheepshead Bay and Manhattan Beach. The slender crescent on the southern rim of Brooklyn through which he'd driven was just about the only section of the area with which he was familiar. Almost all of the rest was foreign to him and forbidding. His thoughts went back to a ramshackle street he'd passed minutes before on which stood the same moldering antique police station to which he'd been brought as a small child the day Sid had abandoned him and gone off with his friends. What a heartless thing to have done. Gold must have been numb as he waited in the precinct house. If they asked him his address he might not have known it. The nearest telephone to his house then was in a candy store at the trolley stop on the corner of Railroad Avenue. Just a few years later he was earning two-cent tips for summoning girls from their flats for calls from boys phoning for dates. Brooklyn was a big fucking borough.
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SHORTLY afterward, Gold found himself flushed and overheated on the porch of his father's house. Instead of the cloudburst he'd counted on, there was a bracing surfeit of fragrant sunshine. He unfastened the buttons of his coat. Harriet removed her earmuffs and Sid said, "It's really amazing, isn't it? About vultures, I mean."
And Gold, hearing this, suffered a further plummeting in spirit of a kind that might have resulted from a corresponding loss in blood pressure. He had no inclination for resistance. As always, Sunday for him was a gray spell of inertia to be endured in torpor unless one worked as a professional football player or, like Andrea, had horses to gallop and foxes to hunt. On Monday he would meet with Ralph and sleep with Andrea. Tuesday morning he would prevail in a convocation of luminaries as splendid in individual magnitude, perhaps, as any convening that day in all the land. Here, in the webwork of his origins, he had to listen to Sid smack his lips over the last of his glass of
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beer and continue lackadaisically, "It's really one of the great miracles of nature, isn't it? The way vultures, or gizzards, as they sometimes are called—"
"Buzzards," growled Gold, without looking up.
"What'd I say?"
"Gizzards."
"How strange," said Sid in an imitation of surprise. "I meant buzzards, of course—how vultures are able to locate dying animals from five or ten miles away—even though all of them, from the moment they're born, are always totally blind."
Now Gold's head came up with an involuntary flip, and he stared at Sid as though through a mist. "Says who?" he snarled, without wanting to speak at all.
"Aren't they blind?" asked Sid.
"No."
"What makes you think they aren't?"
"I would know if they were," said Gold.
"From where?" scoffed his father. "From his college?"
"Sid knows more about science than he does," sulked Harriet.
"Sure," said his father. "Sid invented things. I was in business. Now I'm retired."
"I'd like another beer," Sid said. Esther rose with upsetting alacrity to serve him, making everyone feel unbearably sorry for her. "How would you know?" Sid asked Gold.
"I'd have heard," Gold insisted moodily. "Like I know about termites and moles. Termites and moles are blind. Vultures aren't."
"He isn't talking about termites and moles." Harriet addressed her annoyance with Gold to the others. "He always has to correct him."
"Moles make hills." Gold's stepmother delivered herself of this wisdom while knitting and purling her wool as usual with her long needles that almost never were idle. Today, a pinprick of a scarlet pimple glowed like blood against the very pale skin on the side of her nose. Her freshly washed gray hair was slightly askew,
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and she looked to Gold like that demented figure in the painting of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. "And some people," she added, with a glance at Gold laying to rest any doubt whom she meant, "take those molehills and make mountains of them."
"Even the Bible says so," Sid announced as Gold silently gnashed his teeth.
"The Bible?" Gold grew alert as a leopard. He had given university courses in the Bible, although he had never succeeded in reading either of the Testaments wholly and had found incomprehensible much that he had read. The value of the celebrated Book of Job remained a mystery to him, the text overblown and the knowledge colloquial, and that of the Song of Solomon hardly less confounding. "Where in the Bible does it say that?"
"Three things have no answer for me," Sid sang out resonantly as a cantor. "The way of a bird with its prey, the way of a corn on its cob,
and the way of a man with a maid. Right?" The cropped interrogation was submitted to the others in a simplehearted appeal to reason.
Gold could believe his ears well enough but not much else. "Oh, horseshit," he grumbled and then spoke louder. "You're misquoting."
Sid affected innocence. "Nobody's perfect, kid," he said with a throb of contrition.
"And where does that say anything about vultures being blind?"
"Oh, kid." Sid set his glass down and began drying his hands one upon the other. "You went to college, didn't you? Use your head. What would be so special about it if vultures could see? Would that be worth a mention in the Bible?"
"Of course not," said his father.
"Bruce isn't really fighting," Esther apologized for him with more than the usual flutter in her voice.
"He's only making conversation," said Belle.
My origins were humble, said Gold to himself in a dogged autobiographical obsession as though he were dictating his, or Henry Kissinger's, memoirs. My family
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was impoverished and I had no advantages. Actually, we were not impoverished and I had plenty of advantages but not as many as I subsequently demonstrated I deserved. Performance was delayed by early hardship. My light was eclipsed by a bushel. Everything I received I earned for myself, except what I got from my father, my mother, and my brother, and from all four of my older sisters. I had nothing going for me but my brains, which I believe I inherited from people other than those persons purporting to be my parents. There is ground for supposing that I am of nobler lineage than first strikes the eye and that I have been lost among these honest, but poor, working folk as the ill-fated victim of sundry circumstantial misunderstandings too tangled for unraveling. My older brother, Sid, with whom Fve been acquainted all my life, is the eldest of seven children, a solid business success with a layman's interest in nature and mechanics who is liberal with his funds and compassionate and easygoing in his dealings with others and is also a fucking nitwit imbecile who treats me like shit and makes me talk about vultures.
In contrast to her belligerent, dark temper now, Harriet had greeted him earlier with an effusion of conspiratorial warmth. Taking him aside for a confidence, she had said, "Esther thinks Milt might ask her to marry him soon. You have to help. She asked Rose to ask Ida to find out from Sid if there would have to be any sex."
Gold curled up inwardly. "Where do I shine in?"
"You can find out things like that," she informed him in peremptory explanation. "You're an English professor. Sid knows about science."
"Come outside," his father called to them then with unconcealed ill will. "It's nice now on the porch."
This reassuring news of the weather seemed a death knell to their chances for the day, and Gold felt in the veins of his extremities the wet coldness of slush.
"I warned Sid," Harriet revealed, hardening her
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expression in hostile preparation for the conflict ahead. "If they don't leave for Florida by the end of this week, I will, with my daughters and my grandchildren."
Gold was not altogether easy in league with this cranky, thrifty woman past sixty with whom he had been at odds in one way or another for more than thirty years. In contrast to the fit and virile image he had of himself, Harriet appeared at least a generation beyond her years, closer in age to his father than to him. He noticed how pinched and weary she looked about her narrow eyes and mouth, how the pores of her face had enlarged, and how her artificially brown hair had thinned. Recalling the libertine escapades of Sid and his friends in the past, Gold wondered how Sid felt about Harriet now. He knew she had troubles. Her gallbladder had been removed, a younger brother of hers had died of cancer just a few years before, a daughter was back from Pennsylvania on another visit, with her children, and there were inescapable signs of serious discord in the marriage. Sid volunteered nothing. Sid rarely talked of his children, and when he did it was almost always with unconscious overtones of criticism and disappointment. All his life he had been closemouthed with the family, perhaps in wounded reaction to the continual early strife with their father, who was as raucous in petty displeasure as in volcanic wrath, and as overwhelming in both as in his chronic flights into passionate humming or unrestrained outbursts of singing. His songs extended from simple Yiddish ditties to hearty imitations of American operetta and Gilbert and Sullivan learned from the family radio and to tearful renditions of ballads of fractured love affairs that were the newest contenders for the top of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade. "Ipana for the smile of beauty" became an intolerable, embarrassing utterance he gave in repetitious salute to neighbors and to patrons of his tailor shop or made aloud to himself; "Sal Hepatica for the smile of health." "When Nature forgets, remember Ex-Lax," was another.
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Julius Gold adjusted his eyeglasses now, the frames colorless in these recent years of suave refinement to blend with the wiry and wavy curls of his thick white hair, and blew smoke from his cigar as he heJd the door to the porch open. Sid already was entombed in a posture of relaxation too slumbrous for combat.
Harriet began militantly. "So how did you enjoy your stay in New York this year?" she asked with pointed civility.
'Til let you know," he answered, "when it's over."
Harriet's offensive buckled right then. Gold's father was wearing a turtleneck shirt of navy blue and a neutral cashmere sport jacket that Gold appraised as costing easily above two hundred dollars. A corolla of a dotted navy-blue handkerchief blossomed from his breast pocket. The son of a bitch looks better than I do, Gold moped. In ten years he'll be wearing cowboy suede with fringed yoke and sleeves, and I'll be drab as Sid. A far cry indeed from the era of the dingy tailor shop in which the old man would go dashing about insanely in vest and flapping shirtsleeves with pins sticking from his mouth, a tape measure flying from his shoulders, and a plaque of marking chalk in his hand.
Gold faked a shiver. "The paper said something about snow."
"Not mine," said his father.
"In North Dakota," said his stepmother.
"Two people we know," said his father, "dropped dead from the heat last week in Miami."
Grimly, Harriet prodded Sid. "Wasn't there something you wanted to talk about?"
"Crime?" guessed Sid.
"It's really bad," said Belle.
"Bail doesn't work," said Gold, expatiating. "If you make it low, habitual offenders are right back on the streets. If you make it high they're punished without having been found guilty. The concept is archaic when crime is a commonplace and the presumption of innocence no longer rests on safe probability."
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His father's fingers were drumming. "We got just as good now in Florida," he said as though Gold had not spoken at all.
"Prices?" tried Gold, as a shot in the dark.
"They're so high in New York," said Harriet.
"We can afford them," said his father.
"We don't need charity," said his stepmother.
"Just what we get from you and Sid," said his father impudently to Harriet, "and from the rest of my children. Even my daughter in California sends me money. Joannie."
"It's to die," said Harriet, giving up again.
"In other words," asked Sid with a grin, "you and Mother here can't find anything wrong with New York City?"
"It gets a little cold sometimes," his father conceded after a pause, "around February or March, but otherwise it's okay. It's the Empire State."
Gevalt! grieved Gold. "You can't stay here that long," he blurted out. "Two years ago you and Mother—"
"I'm not your mother," Gussie reminded him tartly.
"Sid?" said Gold.
"Pop, it's really starting to get too cold for you and Mother and much too damp."
"Not here," said Julius Gold.
"What are you talking about?" Gold's voice was shrill. "You're surrounded by water. You've got the bay in back of you and the whole ocean in front."
"We like," said his stepmother, "the briny smell of the sea."
"It's a dry cold we get here," said his father.
"And a very dry damp."
"Why is it," Gold demanded, "that he can call you Mother and I can't?"
"Because I like him," answered his stepmother with no change of expression.
"That's a good one," laughed his father.
Gussie was aglow with triumph. "Hold this for a
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minute," she said and held her knitting needles and band of wool toward Gold. He had to stand to accommodate her, and he clasped them all tightly in mortal fear something might fall. "I want your help. As you can see," she said with her slightly musical cackle, "you've left me holding the bag, haven't you?" She wedged her straw tote bag up beneath his elbows. "There."
"What should I do with it?" asked Gold.
"The minute isn't up yet," she said.
"That's another good one!" said his father.
Momenyu, Gold cursed his fate, and would have flung something heavy at someone, had he not felt hogtied by the responsibility of holding her wool. He spoke to his father threateningly. "I won't have much time for you from now on, you know. I'll be busy in Washington. And I've got my teaching job to look after and my books to write."
"And Sid and I," Harriet joined in, "will probably be going away on a long vacation. Maybe even to Florida."
"Stay in my place."
Sid covered a smile. "Pop, you don't have a place. That's why you got us here, to talk about buying a condominium."