Good as Gold

  "Sure, I told you the condominium," the old man recalled agreeably. "We'll talk about it at dinner."

  "Dinner?" Gold's voice cracked again. "We're here for lunch."

  "I thought for lunch we'd go to a nice Chinese restaurant nearby for dinner. Sid, you told them on the telephone? I never ate on no chipped china at home, I don't have to take any now from that bunch of lousy chinks. Why's he standing there with that wool like an idiot?" he inquired about Gold.

  "The minute, I think, is up," said Gold's stepmother, and snatched back her wool and bag. "It's mine, you know."

  Tatenyu, thought Gold, and threw himself into a

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  chair. He turned to his father and challenged, "You're just about out of Jewish holidays now, aren't you?" The old man was disturbed by this audacious incursion into a territory of data which heretofore had been monopolistically his own. "You've got nothing more coming up until ..." Gold slid from his pocket a typewritten list and found the entry he sought.

  "Until Hanukkah," interrupted his father, turned partly around to shield himself from observation. "Which doesn't come . . . until the end of December."

  Gold rose without noise and looked over his father's shoulder. His father was consulting a schedule of Jewish holidays similar to his own. With slips of paper in hand, the two confronted each other in joint amusement.

  "Where'd you get that?" demanded Gold.

  "From Taub in Miami," said his father. "Where'd you get yours?"

  "From Epstein in 'Monarchy and Monotheism.' You going back?"

  "We're practically packed." Gold sat down. "But not before the big party," his father reported in a pugilistic resurgence of will, and Gold promptly stood up. "No, sirree. And hurt my children's feelings? Not me."

  Sid was soonest to recover from this newest disclo­sure. "What party?"

  "Our anniversary party," the old man announced with exuberance. "You all forgot? Me and Gussie, we got our tenth anniversary coming up soon. And we don't want to make anybody unhappy by going away before the party you're making."

  "When is it?" challenged Gold. "What day?"

  Julius Gold was stricken with an odd look of discomposure and glanced for succor at his wife. Gussie gave an agitated shake of her head and declined to speak.

  "November fourteenth," said Belle. "On a Friday."

  "Sure," said Julius Gold. "November fourteenth, on

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  a Friday. And we ain't going to miss that party for anything, are we?"

  "Not," said Gussie Gold, "for all the wool in China."

  A guiding star directed Gold to sit mute.

  "Is there much wool in China?" Harriet rushed in acidly with an air of nasty superiority.

  "Oh, yes," said Gussie Gold. "More than anyplace in the world. They import it to clothe the large population. Almost one out of every four people in the world is Chinese, you know, even though many of them might not look it."

  Gold's father grunted at Sid in a touchy undertone. "Emmis?" He was discontented when Sid nodded.

  "This means," Gold's stepmother went on informa­tively, "that of the seven of us here today, almost two of us are Chinese, even though we may not look it."

  This time Sid shook his head and Julius Gold dug his teeth into his cigar and puffed it into a blaze.

  "Who," asked Belle, "is making the party?"

  "I ain't decided yet," said the old man, blowing smoke. "Maybe Rosie because she's near. Maybe Esther because she's all alone and has the time. Maybe Muriel because she knows we don't like her and maybe won't be so jealous if I let her. Maybe Ida and Irv because they got money, even though they don't like to spend it. Maybe Sid and Harriet, because Harriet here always looks so happy when I come to the house to visit, don't she? Where's Ida and Irv and Rose and Max, anyway? I invited them. Why ain't they here?"

  "I told you," said Sid.

  "Irv had a chance to play tennis," Belle explained to him again. "Max went to see his brother."

  "Where's Esther?" he asked with crankiness. He suddenly looked sleepy. "What's she doing in the house so long?"

  "She's setting the table," Gold's stepmother an­swered unselfconsciously. "She asked if she could help set the table for lunch, and I told her she could."

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  Gold's father spoke with puzzlement. "We ain't eating lunch here. We're eating in a Chinese restau­rant."

  "She didn't ask me that," said Gold's stepmother, "so I didn't tell her."

  At this reply, Gold's father peered with disfavor at his second wife as though scrutinizing a kink in an otherwise normal chain of events. "Go tell her to stop," he said with uncommon quietness, and con­versed with himself indistinctly until she had gone into the house, when he observed wistfully to his sons, "Your real mother was better than her. She was sick a lot, but she never stopped working."

  To so touching an ecomium a reply seemed a sacrilege. Sid changed the* subject.

  "Pa, I want to go to Florida this week and find a good place for you to live after your anniversary party."

  "I might want to stay longer here."

  "You can't stay here longer," Harriet said with more severity than she likely had intended. "We haven't the money."

  "Why can't I use my own?"

  "We've got the money," Sid retorted sharply to Harriet. "So please don't say that again."

  Harriet bit her lip. "Now you're starting fights," she accused the old man.

  "I?" said Julius Gold with a hand to his heart. "I'm starting fights?" Indignation was prominent on every feature. "Not me. I don't start fights. You got the last person in the world. It ain't my fault your daughter's marriage is breaking up, is it? Don't blame me no one ever told her how to be a good wife. I'm not the one who told her to marry that noisy nobody in Pennsylva­nia just because his family has department stores. Did I tell Esther to marry that crazy Mendy?" he said as Esther reappeared then, lucklessly, and was brought to a standstill, her pitiful smile petrified upon her lips. "I knew he wouldn't live long, with that temper of his. Always blowing up at me, over nothing. It ain't my fault she's a widow now and I have to be embarrassed

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  with my friends because my daughter got no husband. So ugly he was with a face like a monkey—they had better in Barnum and Bailey. What are you crying about?" he reproached Esther with surprise. "Go back inside if you want to make noise like a baby. Here, take these dirty glasses, while you're going. One of them's cracked. You didn't even invite me up to the funeral, she thinks I don't remember, don't she, but I know more than she thinks. You thought I'd never say anything about it, didn't you?" he gloated. The mask was off! Gold was gaping at him with incredulity. The raw cruelty of the mad tailor of Coney Island had not lessened. The man had merely aged. A monster, Gold breathed furiously to himself, first with a vicious look toward Belle and next with a savage glower at Sid, a fucking monster! "Gussie, get my topcoat," his father requested with disinterest and fatigue in a steep alteration of temperament that was inconceivably abnormal in a person not wholly insane. "We'll soon go eat. And straighten your hair or something. Your head looks crooked." He struck a note about halfway between a groan and a cry and held it on pitch in a low hum until she had left, when his voice flowed into words without a break from the long, distressful drone. "Am I wrong? Or does she sometimes talk like she's crazy?" No one there would argue he was wrong. "If Jews got divorces," he philosophized, "I sometimes think I might want one."

  "Jews get divorces," said Belle, the only woman present he had not yet insulted.

  "Not real Jews. Not Golds. Not this Gold." For one moment longer the old man was sanctimonious and serene. Then he opened fire again. "Maybe someone like their spoiled daughter comes home to her parents with her children to get a divorce. Or maybe someone like your college-educated husband here got something like that in mind when he goes off to Washington on a fishy job and leaves his wife behind and maybe don't even ask her to come. But not me. What's the matter?" he asked in surprise with that same phenom
enal

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  resilience of personality of someone unregenerately self-centered. "Why's everybody look so angry? It's a party, ain't it?"

  Sid answered cautiously. "You've been saying some pretty awful things, Pa."

  "I? I say awful things?" The old man's hand covered his heart once more as he dismissed the accusation with a fixed smile and a dogmatic shake of his head. "Not me. I'm not the one who says things. Do I ever say anything about Ida and the way she bosses around that puppy dog of a husband or what Muriel does to that dummy Victor?" He was panting with displeasure and his eyes were hot and glaring. "Did I ever once say anything about how you used to sneak away to Mexico with those skinny dress models so often even your smart wife here would know, or how my younger son here keeps downtown an apartment for his who-ers he calls a studio and never once invites me to sleep there but makes me ride all the way home at night into Brooklyn?"

  "Will you shut up?" screamed Gold.

  "I wouldn't lay my head down on one of your filthy mattresses!"

  "Can't you please shut up?" screamed Gold again with an urge to take him in his hands and tear him apart like a turkey.

  "I? I should shut up? What am I saying that's so terrible? To a father you say shut up? Sid was big as a football player when he was young, but I still gave him plenty all his life. Once I even chased you away for a whole summer, didn't I?" he remembered, chuckling.

  "You sure did," said Sid.

  "Look how warm it gets when the wind stops. Why's everybody so quiet? I don't like to go eat with a bunch of sourpusses. Gussie, make somebody laugh," he ordered as she reappeared with his topcoat.

  Gussie tried. Her shiny skin paling almost to translu-cence, she approached Gold with her tote bag closed and proffered the tip of a fabric protruding from the opening.

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  "It's yours. I finished. Take it, my son."

  "What is it?" Instinctively Gold put his hands behind his back.

  "A sock."

  "One sock? You knit me one sock?"

  "I only have two hands. Last May I saw a hole in your sock. If I'd seen a hole in both socks I would have knitted you two."

  "What'll I do with one sock?"

  "Maybe you'll lose a foot," said the old man and clucked appreciatively. "Take it, go on, bigshot, take it."

  Gold, overmastering caution, took hold of the corner of cloth and pulled—and pulled—and felt he might have continued pulling until the earth stood still, for out of the straw bag waggled a serpentine section of that knitted band of wool she had been diligently spinning like a spider for all the years she had been his stepmother. It was not a sock, it was a practical joke, and there was simpering.

  Gold forced a smile, cursing her horrendously in silence, and said, "Oh, Mother, Mother, that is a hot one. You really are funny."

  "I'm not your mother," was the swift retort.

  "She got him again," cheered his father, rising.

  "It's your fucking fault," Gold bristled at Sid as the group milled from the house toward the two automo­biles at the curb. "Next year move them into my neighborhood with all those niggers, nuts, and welfare kooks and then see how long they stay. Listen, I want some advice," he whispered, drawing Sid farther aside. "I need some help and I think you can give it."

  "You name it. Anything you want, kid."

  "You could begin by not calling me kid."

  Sid was moderately abashed. "I didn't know that bothered you." He rubbed his knuckles across his chin in a movement of meek self-mockery. "I guess I'll always think of you as my kid brother, no matter how old we get. I promise I'll never do it again, kid. What else?"

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  Gold tolerated the unpremeditated lapse with resig­nation. "I may need this for my book." He circled Sid as though by inadvertence to hide his face from the others. "A Jewish guy goes out of town for a while, to Washington, let's say, and wants to stay with another woman. Is there any way he can protect himself against calls from his wife?"

  Sid was on the mark. "Check into a hotel," he answered with joyous affinity. "Telephone the switch­board every evening to hold all calls. Telephone again the next morning to see if there've been any. Return all calls from your hotel room."

  "I think I'd be afraid."

  "Oh, no, kid, don't ever be afraid. That's the worst. You got a nice girl there?"

  "It ain't for me."

  "Too bad. The worst thing ever is to be afraid." Sid's eyes were glittering in spirited recall, and he ambled casually around Gold to turn his own back to the others. "I used to spend weeks in Acapulco when I was supposed to be in Detroit and Minneapolis. Once I spent four nights right here in Manhattan when she thought I was in Seattle."

  "You got caught once in Acapulco, didn't you?"

  Sid nodded with a soft bronchial laugh. "Her uncle was in Mexico at a druggists' convention. But it didn't matter, and I wasn't afraid. When she ordered me out of the house, I went back to Acapulco. When she moved out with the kids to her mother, I moved into a hotel suite in New York and had parties with Sheiky, and Kopotkin the machinist, and Murshie Weinrock. Mursh was an intern then and brought nurses. When Harriet smashed an ashtray, I broke a dish. She pushed over a chair, I pushed over a whole breakfront full of china. Once she saw I was never going to be afraid, it turned out to be a pretty good marriage, I think."

  Sid never had said so much about himself or ever appeared so merry and animated. Gold heard him with fascination. Science, machinery, fearsome dray horses

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  at the Brighton Laundry, now marital infidelities with farcical catastrophies at home—the only subjects on which he'd ever heard his older brother dilate. There had to be more underneath such disciplined reticence.

  In an access of powerful fresh feelings, Gold pro­posed, "Sid, let's have lunch together when I get back from Washington. I'll take you to a good uptown restaurant where we can see some writers and theater people."

  "I'd like that," Sid exclaimed with such shocking modesty that Gold could do nothing but stare. "We've only done that once, I think, when you got out of college. We're all very proud of you, kid, you know," he disclosed, to Gold's added surprise. "Not every­body's got a college professor in the family."

  "You sure as shit don't show it," Gold said with a smile. Harriet was honking the horn from her seat in Sid's Cadillac. "Sid, why'd you stop running around? Old age? Health?"

  Sid argued he was only sixty-two. With a blush, he confessed, "I began to be afraid."

  In Gold's car Esther started crying again. "It wasn't that we didn't want him at the funeral," she explained, while Gold tried paying no attention. "We were trying to save him the trouble."

  "How come," Gold asked Belle, "you remember their anniversary date and they don't?"

  Belle smiled. "I made it up. I picked a Friday so they could pack on Saturday and leave on Sunday."

  Gold approved. Both women alighted at the Chinese restaurant on Kings Highway and Gold accepted like a godsend the solitude in which he found himself for the quarter hour needed to park and walk back.

  "Nobody," said Sid without warning as Gold was lowering himself to his chair, "knows the mouth of the Nile." He had ordered a family dinner for twelve.

  "The source,"said Gold and finished sitting down.

  "What did I say?"

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  "The mouth."

  "How droll," said Sid, his face in flower with trickery and delight. "I'm not myself today."

  "Yes, you are, you rotten fuck."

  "He said please pass some soup and duck," screeched Belle with admirable presence of mind.

  "And everybody knows the source of the Nile," muttered Gold, eyes focused rigidly on the food already there.

  "Everybody?"

  "I don't know it," disagreed his father.

  "I don't believe I know the source of the Nile," said his stepmother.

  "I don't know it," said Esther.

  "Everybody who wants to take the trouble to find out."

>   "Do you know it?" teased Sid.

  "Yes," said Gold. "Which one? There are two Niles."

  "Two Niles?" The women spoke as though with one voice. Gold was unwary. "Yes. A Blue and a White."

  He looked up with concern at the sinister stillness that fell and perceived from the ineffable Solemnity on the faces pondering him that he had blundered into another disastrous pit. Commiseration mingled with anxiety in the gazes of the women, and tears of pity were mounting anew on the lids of Esther's eyes. Oh, Sid, Sid, you treacherous, malicious, infantile motherfuck-ing bastard, he chanted to himself in a litany of misery. You have bushwhacked your baby brother again.

  "Two Niles?" his father was already growling irately, spilling hot tea onto his lap from his trembling cup. "A Blue and a White one? What in the hell's the matter with him?"

  "Can't you tell when he's joking?" Belle interceded with not too much faith.

  "Is anything wrong?" asked the tall, well-muscled manager with menacing inscrutability, arriving to in­sure that nothing in his restaurant ever would go amiss. A second contender for the world karate championship

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  glided noiselessly up alongside in formidable alle­giance.

  "Not at all," Sid hailed them both jovially. "We'd like a couple of more orders of pork. The soup is superb."

  Gold, face to face with futility, used the intermission to escape his predicament. "Never mind my Niles," he put it bluntly. "What about your condominium?"

  His father was taken off guard. His jaw dropped and his cheeks quivered.

  "Yes," said Sid, joining forces with Gold.

  "Why can't I stay here?" asked Gold's father, and added winningly, "I'm no trouble."