Good as Gold

  "Herbert Lehman?"

  "A hundred years ago. And he was first a Governor and then a Senator, dumbbell, and he was not so hot either. You name me one Jew who ever walked for a President who wasn't a disgrace to the government and a disgrace to the Jews." None came to mind right then. "And all those Christians ain't so hot either, you know. Even that bastard Roosevelt. Ten thousand Jewish babies he wouldn't Jet into the country, they went to the fires instead. A cripple he was. With a limp he walked and didn't want we should know, that liar." An unexpected smile flickered anomalously beneath the old man's expression when he rested for breath, and he uttered a single croupy chuckle. "A cripple," he observed, with a more human note stealing into his yoice, "is always good for a laugh."

  417

  Gold could be confident that his were not the only stabilities upon which these words fell with revolting ;ffect. His own natural propensity for evil was not mknown to him, but he realized now that there were heights and depths of cruelty in thought that stretched outside even his most vengeful fantasies.

  "Oh, Pop, that was awful," he said, shaking his head in grief and bewilderment. "That was really an ugly

  thing to say."

  "And he was so beautiful Roosevelt with those crooked legs?" his father retorted with a renewal of rancor Gold found quite alarming. "It was pretty what he did to those Jews on that boat he wouldn't even let stop in this country, they had to go back to Germany? File and forget, he wrote on the letter, and he wouldn't even let them bomb the railroad tracks taking the people to the death camps. I know all this from my friends in Florida, and I believe them before you. And now you go showing off with a man like Conov- " Nazi, an anti-Semitt. Like Lindbergh, he ,r' ,ery ^ Gold went on. "Maybe worse tha^ T' v^as," Julius "Well, he's not that wav ^^^f^^fenry Ford "

  moment of

  indecisioa^^w»M Gold lied without a

  n.wA.v ~---------- _^r% xiiijiga nave Ullifllgeu. 1 Ve gOt

  an important frieSd in Washington who tells me there's no more anti-Semitism left. I think we're being accept­ed now, without any prejudice, and we're being assimilated."

  "Yeah?" scoffed his father. "Who's doing the ac­cepting and who's doing the assimilating? Not me. A goy bleibt a goy, the way I see it, and without Israel we got no one to protect us, because we don't know how to fight any more and they do. You assimilate. I tell you one thing—you ever bring any of your Conovers here and it's goodbye, Charlie. I'm going back to Florida for good."

  "Give him a call," said Harriet to Gold. Her words, so blunt in import, were deafening in result.

  "Find me a place, Sid," the old man said sorrowfully in a hoarse whisper after a long, loathing glance at

  418

  moodily wrp*i*.

  "It's an answeft***^^

  "There are two sides*t^ ^ directly to Gold, talking dowJN^ , «r-

  "To everything?" Gold, with i i _ mi i|1TThii of exultation, knew he finally had him. "This orange?"

  "Of course," said Sid.

  "Where are the two sides to this orange?"

  "A top and a bottom," said Sid. "There are two sides to everything."

  "A triangle?"

  "An inside and an outside."

  Gold announced then that he was leaving Sid's house and that he was never in his life attending another family dinner. Like Joannie, he would see them one at a time—maybe.

  Politely he congratulated Esther and Milt again on their approaching nuptials.

  He decided without a wrench to leave Belle the next day. Andrea would make good the loss. He had no

  419

  _^nng
  ^j the incomprehen-.-. itie dire presentiments of ^— ^.^tg through Gold's mind began to

  occit!^^, ii>l^ ^ ^flfflw^nt forms.

  "When was the last time," the long-faced young physician inquired just when Gold felt he could endure the portentous atmosphere not one instant longer, "you had a bath?"

  Gold rose from the undignified position he had been instructed to assume on his hands and knees, pulled up his underpants, dismounted from the examining table, slid into his trousers, and strode without knocking into the capacious, dark private office of Dr. Murray Weinrock.

  "Did you tell him to ask me that?"

  "What?"

  "When was the last time I had a bath."

  "That was pretty good." Weinrock laughed without noise, as though husbanding energy for more construc-

  420

  Harriet, and hobbled with an effort to a chair. "Get me a condominium if you think I should have one." There was a terrible finality in the way he was drawing to his close. "And find me some different topic to talk. I'm tired of his twisted brain."

  "I think," said Gold's stepmother, "that another screw has come loose."

  The sight of his stepmother with her knitting needles awoke in Gold's mind a vague perplexity of association that glimmered elusively for an instant just a hairs-breadth away from recognition and then disappeared for all time when Sid said:

  "I see by the papers today that they've discovered some language ability in the right side of the brain."

  "The brain has two sides?" asked one of the sisters.

  "Of course," said Sid with a superior benevolence that rubbed Gold the wrong way. "There are two sides to every question."

  ^e brain is not a question," Gold pointed out ;thout looking up.

  -*>" said his father.

  doubt he would be disowned by his father, brother, and sisters and rejected by his children. The future looked bright.

  In the morning he conferred with his lawyer.

  "How much of your money do you want her to have?"

  "None."

  "I'm in favor of that."

  "On the other hand, I want her and the children to have everything they're accustomed to and never have to worry."

  "I may have to look for a loophole."

  In the afternoon he went for his medical examina­tion. Mursh Weinrock, smoking cigarettes like a smol­dering mattress and waxing fatter and rounder even as the witnessing eye beheld him, consigned him to the inspection of the assistant now sharing his practice, b very serious, humorless young man who maintain " gravest silence for the longest time, rive** terror with implications of tragedv Hv

  tive employment elsewhere. "I knew he was a bright one."

  "For Christ sakes, Murshie," Gold pleaded. "When the fuck do you find time to rig up these practical jokes? Can't we get on with it?"

  Weinrock sent him next to Lucille for tests. The handsome black woman seemed out of temper.

  "You been chasing around after the doctor's wife again, ain't you?" she muttered with a murderous scowl.

  Before Gold could utter a denial, a young girl popped her head in to announce, "The sugar in his urine is very high."

  As Gold stared over her shoulder, Lucille wrote:

  Sugar, Low normal. "The lab says you got high

  cholesterol in your blood." On her clipboard she wrote:

  Cholesterol. Low normal. She rose chuckling with a

  ^Helong glance of deadly malevolence. "Well," she

  !!^h "I^Wnk 1 just killed me another one." saia, i *-^,. --ViotO" "Another w^1^

  "Another Jew. G6l-°ver there for the cardiogram. Take off that shirt before i cut it off. Get up on the table and lie down before I putfQU up there and knock you down. 1 mean, lay down."

  "You meant lie down, Lucille. You talk better English than I do."

  "Don't sass me. You been fucking the doctor s wife again, ain't you?" She was fastening the electrical connections as she spoke. "I knows you has, so don't

  lie."

  "Oh, come on, Lucille, stop it. You're an educated

  woman, not a mugger."

  "White motherfucker, don't shit me. I seen your urine filled up with all those dirty hormones. Lie still and relax or I'll put a knife in your chest. Uh-oh. There it goes. Ever had a heart attack?"

  "No," said Gold, with a start.

  "Bullshit. You had a heart attack an
d went to another doctor, didn't you?"

  421

  "I did not."

  "You sure?"

  "Why?"

  "Lie back, bastard. Lie back and be calm, or I'll cut your throat. Ever had a stroke? You've had a stroke, then, haven't you? And went to another doctor, didn't you?"

  "What the hell are you talking about?" shouted Gold.

  "Look at those goddamned lines," Dr. Weinrock's nurse shouted back in a voice just as tumultuous. "You mean to tell me you never had a heart attack? Or a stroke?"

  Murshie Weinrock looked in, alarmed. "What's going on?"

  "He won't lie back. He keeps jumping up to look at the lines. He's worried about having a heart attack or a stroke." ^i*0*

  Weinrock's bedside manner was a blend of ^tuIance and cajolery. "Come on, Brucie, st^^ting Hke a child. Let's finish the examjjasfaon and see what>s wrong. Now that you're^coming such an important man, I want to make-Sure you're healthy."

  "What were you doing all those years before I became an important man?" Gold took him to task when he was fully dressed and back in the private office. "Weren't you making sure?"

  "I really don't have time. You see how busy I am."

  "Suppose I was really sick?"

  "I wouldn't take you, Bruce," Dr. Weinrock an­swered with frankness. "Oh, I would never take on a patient who really needed help. I don't enjoy being around sick people. Now, let's see." He fell silent while intently perusing the data on Gold. "Much as I hate to admit it, I have to agree with the medical opinion of my lazy kid brother. Spotty says you're a prick."

  "He tells me that about you."

  "With me he's referring only to my narrow-minded, reactionary politics."

  "Will I be able to—"

  422

  "You will be able to endure the anguish of power and the agony of power and to shoulder handily the burdens of office. Your cholesterol and uric acid are up, but not dangerously. Your blood nitrogen is high, but I don't worry about that, mainly because it's your blood nitrogen and not mine. The growth on your lung still doesn't show up in the X-ray. Your prostate is slightly enlarged, but so is mine. And, I see by the electrocardiogram—" he glanced up reprovingly— "that you're still fucking my wife."

  "I can't keep away from her, Doctor."

  "In short, you're falling apart rapidly at a healthy, normal rate. How are things at home?"

  "Fine." Gold was relieved. "Belle's okay and I'm getting along pretty well with my kid Noah now and—"

  "Noah?" Mursh Weinrock asked in a startled way.

  "Yes. He's my oldest, and—"

  "That's a terrible name to give a kid, Bruce."

  M M?" Gold, pricking up his ears, could not

  "^ftu, £ i heard him accurately. believe he hac

  -Really terrible his

  Gold looked 85^^rtp^. "We don't think physician a long time betore ret y & „ so. He was named after my wife s lather.

  "It's not even Jewish."

  "Sf course not. Noah came before Abraham, and Abraham was the first. Noah was a nm^rd-Why d vou ever name your kid after a gentile drunk? y "He doesn't mind," Gold said tartly. "Why dont you mind your own business?" "Yes, he does." "How do you know?"

  "How do you know?" ,

  "Mursh "Gold entreated urgently, on the spur of the moment, "maybe you can help me on th.s. sthere something about me, something in my jta?P» haps, that causes people to want to make fun of me? Is there something that inspires humor m others, am I of a type that encourages sport?"

  423

  Weinrock, leaning back with interlaced fingers on his belly, lowered his eyelids and looked wise. "Yes, Bruce, I'm afraid there is."

  "What?"

  "I don't know."

  The moment for parting had come. Belle turned ashen for an instant when he reentered the apartment with the dazed air of a man who had lately experienced some indescribable tragedy.

  "I'm okay," he reassured her faintly. "I just have to be very careful about what I eat. What's for dinner?"

  "Calf s liver and bacon, with mushrooms, mashed potatoes, and saut6ed onions."

  "That sounds fine," said Gold. "No, not calf s liver. I have to watch my cholesterol."

  "Is there cholesterol in bacon?"

  "There's fat. I have to watch my weight too. And I don't think I can have mushrooms. I have to watch r"*r uric acid." ^t**"***?

  "Are you sick?" Belle studied hir^^r^ concern. ^^TWith veiled

  "No, I'm in perfect health, V jT,T pressure too." ^ ' * haVe t0 watch ™Y Wood

  "How do you do that?"

  ''He didn't say. Cut down on my salt, I suess " It seems to me," said Belle, "that you'd Abetter

  h/l?* dJd n0t like the sound of ^at but put back the

  txgszr*and decided
  424

  VXOLD found hirrfcv. to admit that the closertte^

  and serving as Secretary of Stated ...^

  doubt that he wanted to do eitlfe^^-^fCanever helped with the dishes. She was not proving as mallea­ble to his influence as he had formerly hoped, and there were salients of character that were going to prove resistant to even his most apostolic attempts at modifi­cation. He could tell from watching her with her father that she was a person who never did anything she didn't want to and always succeeded in doing everything she did. Thus far she was ever agreeable and obliging, albeit with an impassive emotional restraint that fre­quently evoked a stultifying spirit of futility and tedium. Sex with Belle for him by now had become largely a matter of routine. Sex with Andrea was also now a matter of routine, although the spectrum of experimentation was infinitely wider. In that area Andrea spoke with an experience and natural candor that were often quite shocking to Gold, and assented to

  425

  ^s^that disguised only thinly me ... .ad evoked.

  "NofSv^.. .....,ou?"

  "Well, maybe," he relented, not unmindful that he might be discarding a refreshing source of titillation, "just to me."

  "I don't know things like that," she confessed gratefully. "I'm a Sarah Lawrence girl, even though I didn't finish there, and they always told me to speak the truth as I saw it. At Bennington, you know, we had this professor of art we used to keep score with. Three hundred and twenty-four of us fucked him in the two years he was there. I guess you fuck a lot of your students, don't you?"

  "No," Gold contradicted her emphatically. "I do not."

  "Never?"

  "Graduate or undergraduate?"

  "Either."

  426

  WJ.imji^

  proposals suggested by him in a bantering vein which he had not the weakest wish to carry through.

  "You and your father," he said to her, "certainly seem to do a lot of touching, don't you?"

  "Me more than him," she answered with no uneasi­ness. "I discovered when I was still a little girl that if I sat on men's laps and squirmed a lot, I would always get more attention. So I've been doing it ever since."

  "You've been doing it ever since?"

  "Yes, like this." She was already sitting on his lap, and Gold marveled at her lack of emotion as she demonstrated. "Ever since I was a child, I guess, I've always loved just about anyone with a prick, because I could see that's where all thfc power and action was. So I was always trying to hang around boys, and squirming and touching was a way they would let me."

  Somehow Gold was able to rise and drift away from her without showing the extent to which he was or*'" again affected by ideas that could not strik^ anvthing but warped and peculiar. "A^1

  "Har

  he admitted. "Not for a long time.

  At Smith/' she added calmly, "we used to go after fathers."

  our

  Gold had to swallow first. "Your fathers?"

  "And that was much more fun."

  G

  was

  ld began wondering again to what kind of girl he

  planning to be married. "I'm not sure I heard vou

  correctly, dear. Your fathers?


  Yes "

  "££ & S3id ^ PUt a hand t0 his ^ad.

  thrLWaS 0n