Good as Gold

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  "Indeed I did," Gold responded with eagerness to the unexpected clubby sociability of his host. "The room was a castle and the bed was superb."

  "I'm sorry to hear that," said Conover cheerfully. "Enjoy your breakfast?"

  "Immensely."

  "Too bad," said Conover, and Gold welled with sorrow again. "You miss my daughter, don't you? I can tell by your tears. She's probably out riding. You don't ride, do you? Your kind usually doesn't."

  "My kind?" Gold sucked air deep into his diaphragm and followed Conover inside a small study. "Whom again, sir, do you mean by my kind?"

  "Oh, you know, Goidenrod," said Conover with the same chipper good humor that was not in character with the phobic dislike with which he was now regard­ing Gold and made no serious effort to suppress. "There's a kind of person who rides and a kind of person that doesn't, and those who don't, don't, do they?"

  "Jews? Is that who you mean?"

  "Jews?" Conover repeated, happily cocking his head. "Italians too and Irish Catholics. You keep speaking of Jews as though that's all we have to think about. Is that the only thing you have on your mind?"

  "You give the impression it's very much on yours."

  "Perhaps it is, this weekend," Conover retaliated with the aim of a marksman and the sleek proficiency of a well-bred asp. Dropping all restraints, he now leaned forward with a gloating leer. "Your grandchildren might ride, if you make or marry enough money. But your children don't, because you haven't. Look at how much the Annenbergs and Guggenheims and Roth­schilds have been able to do for their children and how little you can do for yours. How does it feel, Dr. Gold, to know you've already failed your children and probably your grandchildren as well—to realize you've already deprived these innocent descendants of yours of the chance ever to enter good society?"

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  Gold echoed him with disdain. "Good society?"

  "Yes, Shapiro, you know what I mean. I'm in it and you're not. My family is and yours isn't. You have aspirations and regrets and feelings of inferiority and I don't. What are you doing in here with me?" he demanded suddenly with eyes screwed* up into an expression of ferocious surprise and annoyance. "We don't have to talk to each other this much, do we? What the devil do you want from me, anyway?"

  "I want to marry your daughter," said Gold. "I'm here to ask for her hand in marriage."

  "Take it and get out," said Conover. "Go read the Sunday papers or something until Andrea gets back. Do the crossword puzzle."

  "I have your blessing?"

  "If you leave early."

  From the doorway Gold hit back. "I am hopeful, sir, thafin the fullness of time, you will come to love me."

  "Daddy likes you," Andrea said, in her tiny golden sports car, slicing back through the hills to Washington with the speed of sheet lightning, and Gold was bound to the conviction that she was out of her fucking mind. "I can tell. You can't imagine how cold and sarcastic he can be to people he doesn't like."

  "I can imagine," said Gold wanly.

  "And then they never want to see me again. Please don't be angry." She was visibly upset by his sullen demeanor. "I'll do anything you say."

  "Do ninety-five." She braked considerably and the needle of the speedometer came down below a hun­dred. "He was rude and nasty to me, Andrea. Why wasn't he polite? Why wasn't he deferential? Doesn't he know I'm up for a job in government?"

  "He's dying, darling. Isn't that better?"

  "No!" Gold exclaimed guiltily, recalling with aver­sion how inconceivably callous and accepting some of these Christians always had been about their dead. The old Greeks set pyres flaming as soon as they could chop

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  the wood and clean and oil the bodies. The Jews had them in the ground in forty-eight hours. Some of these gentiles remained on such good terms with their deceased that they kept them on display at home for a week, often in back parlors adjacent to kitchens and dining rooms. "For God sakes, Andrea," he added in a more reasoning tone, "what has that got to do with the way he treats me now?"

  "It's true, though, isn't it?" Andrea was eager to explain. "Won't it be much easier for us after he's dead?"

  "But you're not supposed to say it." Andrea was abject and Gold began to enjoy the generous wrath roiling within him. "Goddammit, why wasn't he quail­ing? I'm going to be on the President's staff, and he ought to know what that means."

  "More work?"

  "Less work. Power. Raw power. Brute, illegal power. I'll misuse it to ruin him and make his life miserable. I'll tap his telephones. I'll have the FBI ask insinuating questions about him. I may be a balding little foreigner from New York to him but—"

  "He likes your hair."

  "Not as much as Arturo Toscanini's, does he? Horsepower. I'll plant microphones and secret agents in his stables and catch him gelding. The IRS will question him over every deduction. I'll unplug his wheelchair and leave him out in the sun to poach. I'll be an unnamed source spilling leaks to the press that your old man's syphilitic. Ha! The eminent Dr. Bruce Gold's new father-in-law is not dying of whatever he's sup­posed to be dying of. He's got syphilis and syphilis has got him. How will that sit with all his horsey friends back there once they learn he's got the syph? Your fucking father was insulting to me from beginning to end," he went on, smiling faintly in anticipation of the irony to follow, "and I'm going to have my revenge, if he helps me get my job. He didn't treat me with respect, Andrea. He has no respect for me."

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  "Neither does your own father."

  "My father knows me. Yours doesn't. He isn't coming to our wedding."

  "He said that too."

  "Neither will mine, or my sisters." Gold rested his chin on his fist with a dull laugh. "I think we're going to have a very small wedding, whether we want one or not. If we get married at all."

  Andrea's lovely face trembled. "Don't say that, Bruce," she pleaded, improving his spirits vastly. "I'd be so miserable if you didn't want to marry me just because of my father. I never scrape calluses from my feet any more unless I'm alone."

  "Watch the road!" Gold shrieked as she put both arms on him in a supplicating hold. "You're doing a hundred and eighty again!" Andrea slowed the car to a hundred and thirty-five, and his heartbeat decelerated in ratio. "Andrea, I have to ask you this and I don't think I know how. But didn't you used to be taller?"

  "Taller than what?"

  "Than you are now, I guess. Ralph saw you at a party and he seems to feel you're getting shorter."

  "Than what?"

  "Than you used to be, I imagine."

  "I haven't noticed if I am. Maybe I only looked shorter because you're getting larger."

  "I wasn't there."

  "Would it make much difference if I were?"

  "Not to me." Gold's answer flew from him too readily to leave him altogether secure in its accuracy. "Although Ralph seems to be concerned. But if you are getting shorter, don't you think we ought to know about it before the marriage and try to do something? After all," said Gold, feeling rather expansive, "you wouldn't want to get too short, would you?"

  "On, no. Not too short. I'll look into it if you want me to. I'll measure myself or see a specialist. I'll do anything you want."

  "I'm glad we agree on that," said Gold. "You told your father I have the sexual attitudes of a middle-aged

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  man, didn't you? Why do you have to talk to people about our sleeping together?"

  "I only say very good things about you."

  "That isn't the point, really." He snickered morose­ly. "You told Miss Plum I was great and your father I have the sexual attitudes of a middle-aged man. I guess that makes me a great man with middle-aged sexual attitudes, doesn't it?"

  "I can't help boasting about you," Andrea answered. "Please don't be angry with me. I'll do anything I can to make you happy. I'll be your slave. You can make believe you're my master and tie me up in chairs and beds with ropes and belts and chains."

  "Andrea,
what are you talking about?" cried Gold with instinctive horror, hoisting himself from the low-slung seat as though his ass were on fire and pivoting on his hip to gape at someone so unlike the girl he supposed her to be that it took a larger stretch of imagination than he could command to recognize her.

  Andrea misread the message in his response and continued spiritedly, "Or I can pretend I'm a young Victorian maid from the provinces who's poor and you're my wicked employer in London who can make me do everything perverted you like, with whips and costumes and riding crops. You can bind my buttocks or hands."

  Gold gazed at her in utter stupefaction. "Why would I want to do that?"

  "To have your will with me. I can eat your foot."

  "Don't do me no favors!" Gold objected with frightened vehemence, and repented at once that he had spoken so resolutely. In afterthought, her ideas did not seem altogether that degenerate, and he began to pay attention to the visions conjured up by her words. Andrea as a slave or bound-up Victorian maid was not half bad.

  "I was only trying to make you happy," she defended herself. "When I was going with this economist at Georgetown University—"

  "I don't want to hear it," Gold interrupted with a

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  bedraggled wave of his hands. "Andrea, why must you tell me things like that?"

  "I've always believed in the truth."

  "Well, stop, for God sakes," he ordered. "What's so special about truth?"

  "Do you love me?" she asked.

  "With all my heart," he lied.

  "Then let me do something to please you. There must be something you'd like."

  Gold concentrated with a pout. "I'd like to eat out for a change," he decided. "I'm getting tired of cooking every night."

  Andrea left the car with the doorman of the restau­rant.

  "Good evening, Miss Conover." The towering cap­tain of waiters spoke directly to Andrea over Gold's head. "Would you like to be seen? Or would you prefer someplace secluded where you can do whatever you want to with each other?"

  "Both," said Gold.

  They were seated in a booth against the rear wall with phallic sconces illuminating only their brows and eyes. Gold was seized with a clammy terror when Harris Rosenblatt joined them almost immediately and looked from one to the other with piercing inference.

  "This is Andrea Conover," said Gold. "She and I were at the Senator Russell B. Long Foundation together and we happened to run into each other here in Washington."

  "I believe I know your father well," said Harris Rosenblatt even before Gold had finished. "How is Pugh?"

  "Just about the same," answered Andrea.

  "I'm sorry to hear that." Harris Rosenblatt's voice came down in register a bit with condolence, but he continued in the same workaday manner, as though all three were about to run out of time, "Were there many people out this weekend?"

  "Almost none."

  "Promise him I'll try to drive out to see him the next

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  time I'm in Washington. What is it that's wrong with him, anyway?"

  "No one can find out."

  Gold's confusion and chagrin on discovering Harris Rosenblatt on such, knowledgeable terms with Pugh Biddle Conover were beyond description. He had experienced the contradictory sensations of recognizing Harris on sight and requiring several instants to place him. Despite Ralph's disconcerted observations, Gold was unprepared for the physical changes in his former schoolmate that he would have thought biologically incredible. Harris Rosenblatt had grown lean with rectitude and tall and ramrod-straight with probity and that manifest puritanical social self-righteousness that is by no means rare in the financial world. He had grown a high forehead somehow. He had a Norwegian nose. Dark, vertical clefts scored his face from eyebrows to chin and the gaunt muscles of his cheeks held any inclination to smile or laugh imprisoned in a vise of solemnity. His words were to the point and his eyes had the look of a person with a propensity for uncovering people who did not measure up to standards. Before retreating from graduate school under the pressure of impending failure, Harris Rosenblatt had been a rather obese and epicene figure of smaller than average stature with a rotund and fleshy face and a shapeless pelvis and a puffed-out chest. Finance changes a man that way. Humor would be wasted upon him and Gold guessed he'd be even drearier and thicker than before.

  "How's Belle?" Rosenblatt boomed at once, affirm­ing the veracity of this analysis.

  "Okay," said Gold and dropped the subject like a live coal. "You're looking wonderful, Harris. You've grown so thin and tall. You must be on a fine diet. You've lost much weight, haven't you?"

  "Oh, no, I haven't lost weight."

  "You haven't been on a diet?"

  "No. Not on a diet."

  Gold's wonder was increasing. "Have you grown taller?"

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  "Oh, yes, much taller." Here Rosenblatt somehow let it be known he was pleased. "I've grown a lot since the last time we met. I'm a much bigger person now than I have ever been. I've learned a great deal and I'm much better in many ways."

  "What have you learned?" Gold was curious.

  "I'm not sure," Harris Rosenblatt replied. "But I used to be a very proud person. I'm not any more. I've learned what it is to be humble, and I'm very proud of that." In the silence that came in the wake of this, he again shifted his glance restively between Andrea and Gold. "Someone told me you and Belle aren't together any more."

  "There's not a word of truth in that," said Gold.

  "I was very disappointed when I heard that. I believe I got that information about you and Belle from a reliable unnamed source."

  "I've been doing a lot of work here as an unnamed source," Gold answered with nervousness and haste, "so it may have come from me. No truth to it at all."

  "I'm pleased to hear that about you and Belle. There's much too much of that sort of thing going on now to suit me. It isn't good for the family, it isn't good for the children, and it isn't good for the country. It may be good for the economy but it just doesn't suit me for the short term or the long term and it certainly is not good for the budget. I'm happy to hear that you and Belle will be staying together, and Selma will be happy too."

  "What's new in money, Harris?" Gold inquired as soon as he found himself with the chance. "Are we going to revaluate or devaluate and what will that mean to income and purchasing power?"

  "I have no idea. We have other people in our firm who deal with matters like that. I specialize in munici­pal bonds and government budgeting."

  "Well, what's going to happen there?"

  "I don't know," said Harris Rosenblatt smartly as though delivering an apt recitation, and bestowed upon

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  Gold a look of approval that clearly was to be appreciated as a rarity. "That's a remarkable phrase you coined there, Bruce, remarkable, and I'm sure that everyone in business and government is grateful to you. It boggles the mind how minds like mine used to boggle at mind-boggling questions like that before you gave us those three marvelous little words, / don't know. I can see why the President wants you. I hear good things about your report."

  Gold veiled his surprise. "It's still in a preliminary stage."

  "Good news leaks out. When will it be ready? I look forward to reading it."

  Gold decided to have a crack at it. "I don't know."

  "Good," came the plaudit from Harris Rosenblatt. "I must go now. I have early appointments tomorrow with the Treasury Department, the Office of Manage­ment and Budget, and the Federal Reserve Board. I can tell you what I'll tell them tomorrow and what I told them at the White House yesterday and today. It's the soundest advice I can prescribe for the country and the soundest advice I can give to any individual." Harris Rosenblatt made his pronouncement while rising, and stood as upright and rigid as the column of a temple. "Balance your budget or you will rue the day. If you want to dance you have to pay the piper, and the man who pays the fiddler is the one that calls the tune."

  "Harris," s
aid Gold, holding on to the edge of the table as though for dear life, "you really say that to people?"

  "In just those words." Pride rang triumphantly in Harris Rosenblatt's voice, and his enunciation too, Gold noted now from the hardened r, had taken on the meticulous polish of a tenth-generation Midwesterner. "And they listen wisely. I can confide this much to you. I think every effort will be made to balance the federal budget and I think there's a very good chance we'll succeed."

  "What will that mean?"

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  "What do you mean?" Gold's question evoked in Harris Rosenblatt an expression of stark incomprehen­sion.

  "What will it mean to things like prices, taxes, income, and unemployment? What effect will a bal­anced budget have on the economy and social wel­fare?"

  "I don't know." Harris Rosenblatt was pleased with his response and paused with pride a moment to allow it to sink in. "We have other departments in our firm with knowledge like that. I just specialize in budget balancing. Good evening, Miss Conover. Give my best to Pugh Biddle and tell him I'm looking forward to coming out again soon and hunting the fox, eh? Remind him I'll want that dog he promised me. He said he would give me a good one to shoot. Bruce, now that you're becoming well known, why don't Selma and I get together again for dinner with you and Belle? We used to have such good times together with you and Belle. Be sure to give my love to Belle," he clanged as loudly as the old Coney Island trolley car and trundled away in an aftermath of echoes.

  "Who's Belle?"

  Gold was already at the starting block. "My ex-wife," he said and sprinted ahead nimbly. "We still have some details to talk over before the divorce becomes final. What did Rosenblatt mean when he said your father would give him a good dog to shoot?"