Good as Gold

  "I wrote her twice a week. I sent her postcards. She knew I was okay. Poppa was a very kind and gentle man and was never mean to anyone. He had troubles, you know." Sid's eyes were filling with tears again. His smile broadened and he paused a moment. "There were all us kids and the Depression, and Momma was sick so much, and he was worried a lot and I guess that's why he was so mean."

  "You said he wasn't mean."

  "He wasn't really mean. Can I have another drink?"

  "No, Sid, I don't think so," determined Gold. "You must have all made a lot of sacrifices for me, you and Rose and Esther, didn't you?"

  Sid pondered a while and shook his head. "No, kid, it really wasn't that way. We would have had to do pretty much the same thing, even if you weren't there."

  "It was a pity you had to miss college," said Gold, trying to catch and hold his gaze. "Didn't you mind that?"

  "I wasn't really smart enough for college," answered Sid. "I think that was decided before you were even born."

  "But you couldn't have gone even if you wanted to, could you?"

  "I wasn't really smart enough."

  "You had to give up the football team in high school to go to work in the laundry, didn't you?"

  "No, kid, it wasn't really that way. I was only on the freshman team one year. I wasn't big enough for football. I was a lot safer with those horses at the laundry than I was on the football field. Can't we have another drink?"

  "Maybe a glass of wine."

  "I don't like wine."

  Gold ordered wine for himself and another bourbon for Sid. "How old were you when you came here and how much do you remember?"

  320

  "About six, Bruce, I think, and I remember a great deal, I guess. I remember—" here Sid interrupted himself to laugh with his eyes half shut, and he choked a moment as though to clear his throat of a rising sob—"I remember one time Pop moved us to the Christian section of Bensonhurst by mistake. He was always making mistakes like that. I think we were just about the only Jewish family there and none of us spoke English."

  "Oh, Sid," Gold exclaimed. "It must have been awful."

  "It wasn't so bad," Sid answered faintly after consid­ering. "They called me Jewboy most of the time, but they let me play with them, the other kids. They were mainly Irish and Norwegian. Every once in a while they would gang up on me and make me lie down on the ground. They would make me open my fly and show my penis, and they would all spit on it, but if I did what they told me and didn't cry or tell anybody, they would let me play with them again, so I guess maybe it didn't really bother me too much then."

  "Oh, Sid, how terrible," cried Gold.

  "We only lived there a year," said Sid, "so it didn't happen too many times. I guess Mom and Pop had to put up with a lot worse, there and later, and often from our own kind. A lot of people who got here first didn't want us to come at all. I remember that every year we'd move into a different apartment, everybody did. The new landlord would paint the apartment and give us the first month without rent. I don't know why the old landlords didn't offer the same deal to us every year, because they gave it to whoever came in after us, but they didn't, and at the end of the year we moved again and were back in a Jewish neighborhood and I was going to school. I think I spoke English with a very funny accent, but I was too dumb to realize that until the other boys and girls started imitating me. Even then I didn't understand right away that it was me they were making fun of. I only knew they would start talking

  321

  funny when they were around me, and then I would try to talk funny like them in the same way, imitating them as they were imitating me."

  Gold's pity deepened and he felt moisture fill his own eyes. "Oh, Sid, didn't you feel terrible when you found out? When you understood?"

  "No, I don't think so," said Sid. "A lot of us talked funny, it seems to me. I remember I had a tough time figuring out at first how the lunch hour worked at school. Mom would give me a sandwich and an apple in a paper bag, but somehow I got the idea I had to go home for lunch, like at the first school. I didn't know where I was supposed to eat it, and this time we lived too far away. So every day at the recess I would hurry out like I was going home for lunch, and then I would walk a few blocks and hide in some fields nearby and eat my lunch near the subway tracks and watch the subway trains go back and forth from Coney Island to Manhattan."

  "Alone? Couldn't you ask your friends? Didn't anyone tell you?"

  "I didn't have any friends," Sid said. "I never really had any friends until we finally moved to Coney Island and stayed. And then one day, it must have been snowing or raining pretty hard, I guess, and I couldn't go out, I realized that all the other children had been eating their lunch at the school or in the schoolyard all that time and then playing together in the yard or gymnasium for the rest of the hour."

  Gold's heart bled. "Oh, how terrible, Sid. How lonely you must have been."

  "I wasn't lonely."

  "But you must have been so miserable and embar­rassed when you found out."

  "I wasn't miserable and embarrassed," Sid said obstinately, and then searched his memory as though weighing the denial that had sprung from his lips. "No, I don't think I was lonely, kid. Everything was kind of new and interesting. I didn't know what was good or bad. I kind of liked it both ways. I liked playing in

  322

  school and watching the other kids and I liked going into the fields with my sandwich and watching the subway trains. I can tell you a funny thing that happened to me on the boat coming over. It was a crowded boat and pretty dirty and noisy and most of the time I was scared. The first couple of days the waiters brought around oranges with the meals. Well, we had never seen an orange before, I don't think they had them in the villages we'd been in, and I didn't even want to touch it."

  "Never seen an orange?" Gold broke in.

  "Not in the places we'd lived. Well, one day Mom made me taste a piece and I loved it and wanted more. But the next time we had a meal, the oranges were all gone, and I couldn't get another one."

  "All gone?" Gold echoed dolefully. "Oh, Sid, you poor, unlucky kid. You couldn't get another one? You'd never seen an orange before?"

  "Where would we see them?" Sid replied. "None of us had. Or a banana or pineapple or anything like that either."

  Gold could not quite bring himself to believe him yet. "What's the Jewish word for orange?"

  "In Yiddish? Arrange."

  "Pineapple?"

  "Pine-epple."

  "Banana?"

  "Benena. We had no words for them, Bruce. Don't you understand? Those all come from the tropics. Poor Mom had to come all the way to New York to taste a tangerine. She loved them so."

  "About Pop—there's another question I want to ask you."

  "I know what it is," said Sid, meeting his eyes. "But I wouldn't want you to write about that."

  "Pop wanted to be a singer. He decided he was a singer, right?"

  "Yeah. Overnight." Nodding heavily as though still drained by the ordeal, Sid went on with an amused sigh. "I think that nearly killed Mom. It was the only

  323

  time I ever heard her argue with him. He wanted to go all over Brooklyn and sing at weddings and amateur nights. Suddenly he was a professional singer. He sang all day long. For everybody. He began to tell the whole world he was a famous singer."

  "In his tailor shop?"

  "In his tailor shop."

  "And was he really a draftsman and a junk dealer and an importer and a Wall Street commissions man?"

  "Pop did a lot of things," Sid said elusively, rubbing his ear. "He may have been a draftsman and an importer. I just don't remember that. But he was bread and dresses and coffee beans and furs before he fell into that machine shop and the leather business. Pop was good at leather."

  "You had to bail him out, though, didn't you?"

  The question added to Sid's uneasiness. "No, kid, it wasn't really just that way. He was good at leather but lousy at business. I ju
st sort of helped him organize things."

  "Bullshit, Sid. You paid for everything, didn't you?"

  "No, kid, I swear it. His business was worth a lot. I just sort of pulled his assets together and found somebody to buy them, and then I advised him to put most of the money into an annuity so he'd always have a decent income and never be dependent on any of us."

  "And the singing?" asked Gold.

  "There it was, Bruce." Sid bobbed his head again several times with a nostalgic air. "All at once. No warning. No working his way up. Suddenly he was there, Mr. Enrico Caruso. He even walked around like one, with his head back and his chest out and his hand on his heart. He wanted to go up on the stage of the movie houses in Coney Island and sing in the vaudeville acts. And all he knew from beginning to end was a couple of Yiddish songs. He'd write away to every radio station and try to get on the amateur hours and even to the Metropolitan Opera House try outs. He wanted to go there in person. Then he tried to get on the air on the Mr. Anthony show with a problem and

  324

  hoped he'd be allowed to sing. He'd make up problems and send them in. It's kind of funny talking about it now, but it wasn't so funny then. We were afraid. We Ihought he might really be crazy, and we wouldn't know what to do. We had to hold him back and hide his carfare and tear up his mail. Mom and the girls were frantic. He told all the relatives in New Jersey and Washington Heights and all the people on the block that he was a very famous singer and he gave recitals all day long to anyone who would listen. He wanted to come and sing at my school. You must remember some of this. Maybe it was all that steam from the pressing machine that cooked his brains for a while. I don't know how it passed, but it did, I think maybe the war came along. World War II, and he found himself in that machine shop and forgot all about it. You notice, he never mentions it now. You know, it's nice talking to you this way, Bruce. We haven't had lunch or talked to each other in a long time, have we?"

  "That isn't all my fault, Sid," said Gold. "You usually don't like to talk much. You must have hated me pretty bad at times, didn't you?"

  "Hated you?" Sid looked up quickly with a sharp intake of breath. His face paled. "Why would I do that? Oh, no, Bruce. I never hated you. I was always very proud of you."

  "You lost me once, didn't you, you bastard?" Gold recalled for him with a laugh. "How could you lose a little kid like me?"

  Sid flushed sheepishly. "I knew you'd be found. I left you near a cop and told you to go up to him. Then I went to the cop and told him you looked lost. You know, you really ought to try to come out and visit Esther more. She's taking things hard, although she doesn't complain."

  "I try," Gold said hypocritically. "Sid, you must have resented me a lot back then, didn't you?"

  "Oh, no, Bruce," Sid said. "Why would I do that? I was always very proud of you."

  "I had such an easy time of it after you had such a

  325

  hard one. I got those good marks at school and was able to go to college."

  "I'm glad we were able to send you," said Sid. "No, I didn't mind that."

  "Didn't you mind having to take care of me?" Gold asked softly. "I was the youngest boy and the family made such a fuss over me. Sid, it's okay to say yes. People in a family often dislike each other for much less than that."

  "No, I didn't mind." Sid spoke with his face partially averted from Gold's fascinated gaze.

  "Aren't you jealous of me now, Sid? Ever? Some­times?"

  "I'm very proud of you."

  Gold eased off. "How'd you make it up with Pop when you finally got back from California?"

  "I remember that clearly," Sid replied with a kind of wistful pleasure in the recollection, and his eyes grew cloudy again. "I came down the street from the trolley on Railroad Avenue. You remember, they used to have the Norton's Point trolley there. No one was expecting me that day, but Mom was looking out the window watching you and Pop outside and saw me first. Pa was outside the house with you, playing with a new toy he had bought for you, a windup airplane, I think, that really flew. He looked at me. I said hello. I was pretty grimy, I guess. He told me to go upstairs and take a bath, and that was pretty much it."

  "No handshake?" asked Gold with a pang. "No kiss? No hug?"

  "No hugs or kisses." Sid shook his head. "For years after, Mom would make a joke. 'When you come from California,' she'd say, 'you've got to take a bath.'" Sid chuckled introspectively. "She was so glad to have me back."

  But Gold had fastened with astonishment upon a different detail. "He bought me a toy?" he exclaimed. "He was outside playing with me?"

  "Oh, sure," Sid said without hesitation. He cleared

  326

  his throat quietly. "Pop was crazy about you when you were small. We were the ones he was mean to. We were the ones who couldn't stand you."

  "Then you did dislike me." Gold pursued the point doggedly. "You just admitted you couldn't stand me."

  "Oh, no," said Sid softly. "I never disliked you. I was always very proud of you."

  Pity cast a shadow of restraint over Gold, and he ceased trying to untangle the hazy conflicts in Sid's repeated evasions. He felt fifteen years distant from his older brother, and a thousand years wiser. And perhaps, for the moment, equally repressed. There was more to Sid indeed, very much more, but whatever lay secret in him would remain occluded forever beneath the shield of denials Gold would not again make the effort to penetrate.

  "Sid, what'd Mom die of?"

  "Poor surgery," said Sid with that heartbreaking, incongruous smile that seemed to have no place in a countenance otherwise flooded with the memory of a poignant old remorse. "It had nothing to do with her goiter. She died in Coney Island Hospital. It was a simple gallbladder operation. But the stitches inside opened during the night and she was dead from bleeding in the morning."

  "Why can't I remember any of that?" said Gold. "There must have been lots of crying and shrieking in the house when you were sitting shivah. We had so many aunts and uncles and so many neighbors."

  "You weren't there," Sid told him. "She made us promise before she went in for the operation that if anything went wrong we would send you and Joannie away until everything was over. She didn't want any of the young children around. She thought it would scare you. Mom was like that, you know."

  "Was I at the funeral? I can't remember."

  "I can't remember."

  "Do you ever go to the cemetery?" asked Gold. "To visit her grave? I never thought of doing that."

  327

  "Nah, we don't do things like that any more," said Sid with a guilty look flitting across his face. His fingers toyed with his empty whiskey glass. "We used to do it, on Mother's Day, at least, but I can't remember the last time. I couldn't get Harriet to go now, or any of the kids, even if I wanted to. I couldn't even get Pop. I used to try. There's a custom, you know. You're supposed to leave a pebble on the grave when you visit as a sign that somebody's been there and you still remember. Poor Mom hasn't had a pebble on her grave in thirty, thirty-five years. Will you come to dinner at Esther's house this Friday? It means a lot to her when you show up."

  "I'D try. Sure, we'll come. Will you try not to pick on me?"

  "How?" Sid registered surprise. "I don't pick on you."

  Gold smiled tolerantly as though at someone harm­lessly incorrigible. "Just don't talk science or nature once or make any philosophical statements. Okay?"

  "Okay," Sid agreed. "I didn't know that really bothered you. Sometimes I can't think of anything else to say so I kid around. Did I embarrass you before with that editor? I'm sorry if I embarrassed you."

  "Lieberman? He doesn't count."

  "I'm sorry if I did."

  "You didn't," said Gold. "You were pretty good. The other one knew you were kidding around and probably enjoyed it."

  "I forget sometimes that you're an important person and I shouldn't act undignified when you're with people you know."

  Gold laughed with affection. "It's okay, Sid. And I'm not
so important."

  "Yes, you are. We see your name in the paper. You're the most important person we know. This was nice, kid."

  "It was, Sid, and let's repeat it soon," said Gold, feeling absolutely certain they would never have lunch together again.

  328

  "Will I see you at Esther's Friday?" Sid asked as they rose. It seemed important to him.

  "If you promise not to tease or pick on me. Do you promise?"

  "I won't tease. I promise I won't. I swear."

  "Then I'll come."

  "The lilies," said Sid at Esther's to Gold alone.

  "What lilies?"

  "Of the field."

  "What about them?"

  "They toil not, neither do they spin."

  "So what?"

  "Consider," Sid boomed suddenly out to all the others in the commanding ululations of an Elijah, after inciting in Gold a sense of onrushing crisis by the rather brooding manner in which he had first brought the subject to his ear. "The lilies of the field." Gold's mind was reeling. "They don't toil and they don't spin. Yet nature, or God, sees to it that they have enough to eat and grow every year, and every year they bloom."

  "Sid, you promised, you swore to me," cried Gold. Not until then, he felt, had he ever truly known human nature could sink so far.

  "It's just a thought," Sid whined deceitfully with the apologetic meekness of someone defenseless who had just been set upon unfairly.

  "A very nice thought," rejoiced Gold's father. "From my favorite son."

  "And the Bible too," Gold muttered viciously. "And it's wrong."

  "How can it be wrong if it's from the Bible?"

  "Sid's wrong, not the Bible."