Good as Gold

  "I'll go look/' Julius agreed.

  "When?" Harriet wanted to know.

  "When I go. It's still warm."

  "Pop, it's turning cold," Sid cajoled. "Two years ago you had pneumonia when you stayed to November."

  "Bronchitis."

  "It was pneumonia."

  "It was flu."

  "And it led to pneumonia. Pop, it's a blue-chip investment, as good as gold." At that moment the teakettle whistled. Harriet followed Gussie inside. "Pop, don't tell Harriet," Sid continued furtively. "But I'll lay out the money. Try it. If you like it, buy it from me. If the price goes up, you get the profit. If the price goes down, I'll take the loss. What do you say?"

  "That sounds fair," was the old man's conclusion. "But I'll have to think it over."

  Gold covered a laugh at Sid's involuntary gasp. "Pop," Sid pleaded, "we've got to find a place for you."

  "I got the money?"

  "You got the money."

  "Then I'll do what you say, Sid," Julius capitulated, with resignation and trust. Gold felt a twinge of compassion at the old man's docility. "But first we gotta go look, don't we? We'll go together?"

  "We'll go together," Sid promised. "When?"

  "Any time you say. When's the graduation?"

  Sid was bewildered.

  "What graduation?" asked Gold.

  "Your daughter's, dummy." The women returned hastily, drawn by this outcry of contempt. "My favorite grandchild. Dina. You remember her? Ain't she gradu­ating soon?"

  "In five years," Gold told him with a steely voice. "If then."

  "Don't they change schools any more when they're thirteen?"

  "Not in private school. And this one may not make it

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  that far. Your favorite grandchild ain't exactly no ball of fire in class."

  "In that case," said his father, "we gotta go look. But I ain't promising to buy. Sid, you name the day. We'll go any time you say, after the holidays." Vay' z mir, Gold grieved. Again the holidays? "No, sirree, me and Gussie—we don't like to get on no plane before the Jewish holidays."

  Gold bolted from his chair. "What holidays?" he demanded. "When is this Shmini Atzereth of yours, anyway?"

  His father's scrutiny was denigrating. "That was, already, you dope. A week ago, before Simchas Torah."

  "Then what holiday? What are you waiting for now?"

  "Shabbos Bereishes."

  "Shabbos Bereishes?" Gold was dumbfounded. Even in his own voice those words sounded unbeliev­able.

  "Sure, you skinny shaygetz" his father began in a modulated tirade. "It's what comes after Simchas Torah, you damned fool. This they want to work in Washington? You did nothing Simchas Torah? You wanted me to get on a plane before Simchas Torah? You want me now to leave my family before Shabbos Bereishes? Some sons I got. Ich hub dem bader in bud."

  "I'm not sure," said Gold's stepmother, "that I understand your local Yiddish."

  "He has us both in the bath," Gold translated tersely, and tried to ignore Sid, who was witnessing his chagrin with enormous mirth. "Pop, you're an atheist," Gold protested. "You wouldn't even let Sid and me be >ar mitzvahed."

  "But a Jew," his father retorted, and held up his humb. "A Jewish atheist."

  "You wouldn't let Momma light candles Friday ight."

  "Sometimes I did."

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  "And now all of a sudden you know all the holidays. What is Simchas Torah? What does Simchas Torah mean to you, anyway?"

  "Simchas Torah," his father answered coolly, "is when they finally finish reading the whole Torah in the temple."

  "And what's Shabbos Bereishes?"

  "Shabbos Bereishes," replied the old man, and drew on his cigar with a smile, "is when they begin again."

  From Gold came a cry from the heart. "For how long?"

  "A year," said his father, flicking the ash from his cigar over the railing. "And when they finish, again comes—"

  "Shabbos Bereishes?"

  "You said it, Goldy boy. But don't you worry," his father added and came to his feet with a jaunty spring. "I ain't gonna ruin your winter. You think I'm gonna spend a year up here in this crummy city when I can buy a condominium in Florida? You want me to invest in real estate? I'll invest in real estate."

  "When?" Harriet asked again.

  "After next Saturday. Shabbos Bereishes. It's a promise. Let's go eat now. Gussie, get my shoes. Change your hat."

  Gussie returned in a creased felt hat with a broken turkey feather and she looked like Robin Hood. To Gold, the smell of the sea at Sheepshead Bay was a powerful call to clams on the half shell, shrimp, lobster or broiled flounder or bass.

  "Let's go to Lundy's," he suggested. "It's right here. We'll have a good piece of fish."

  "What's so good about it?" said his father.

  "So"—Gold declined to argue—"it won't be so good."

  "Why you getting me fish that's no good?"

  "Black," said Gold.

  "White," said his father.

  "White," said Gold.

  "Black," said his father.

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  "Cold."

  "Warm."

  "Tall."

  "Short."

  "Short."

  "Tall."

  "I'm glad," said Gold, "you remember your game."

  "Who says it's a game?"

  Gold was almost sorry he laughed, for Harriet stabbed him with a venomous look. She glared at Sid, who was chuckling. Sid ignored Harriet and winked at Gold companionably.

  "Sid," Julius Gold said worriedly, walking with small, shuffling steps, as they neared the car, "you'll tell the waiter, won't you? Give him a big tip before. Let him know we're important. Tell him all my life, even when I was poor, I never liked eating off no broken china."

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  G OLD was tense as a wound spring the evening of Rose's party, waiting for the last of his guests to leave before the first had even arrived.

  "I'd like to make a toast," said Gold's father jovially. "To my host and youngest son. Sid said it ain't nice to insult you in front of your wife and daughter, so I won't say nothing." Everybody laughed but Gold. "You'll really give up teaching?"

  "In a minute."

  "That feeling, I bet, is mutual." His father leaned his head to the side in fascinated admiration of his own riposte and began to hum.

  "I'm glad I'm not in his class," Harriet said cattily.

  "He flunks students," Dina told her in awe.

  "Not any more," said Gold. "It's easier to pass them along and never have to see them again."

  Gold congratulated himself on having set the bar uj in the foyer. He tarried alone as long as he respectabl could, then filled almost to the top a short, wide glass c bourbon and let fall inside it a single cube of ice.

  %

  "Isn't it lucky," mused Sid, as Gold strolled into the living room, "that we found ourselves on a planet where there's water?"

  Gold felt his chest turn to stone and watched the luscious slice of bronze-rimmed lake sturgeon on his plate alter for an instant into something as unappealing as a raw sardine.

  "Why?" asked Victor.

  "Listen to Sid when he talks about water," directed Gold's father drowsily. "If there's one thing Sid knows, it's water."

  Gold glanced at his father but found no evidence of complicity. He shifted his fork from the sturgeon to a mound of red caviar. He was confident he could count on Ida, even Irv, to trap Sid on this one, to argue that we did not "happen" to find ourselves on a planet with water but would not have evolved as a species had there been none.

  "Otherwise," Sid answered Victor, savoring first the smell and then the taste of a smoked-salmon appetizer on a rounded wedge of soft brown pumpernickel, "we would all be very thirsty." He looked toward Gold with a challenging smile and continued with disarming ease. "After a big meal of turkey, or steak, or roast beef, or lobster, not only wouldn't we have water to drink, we wouldn't even have soda. Or tea or coffee. Because they're all made from water
."

  And where, Gold wondered, would the turkeys and steak and roast beef come from, you shithead? And the lobsters, with no water? He waited for Ida to eviscerate Sid.

  But Ida, he saw with a shock, was listening as raptly is Milt, Max, and the rest. Those black militants in her chool district had a point, Gold decided: Get her the uck out.

  Sid forged ahead boldly, testing Gold's self-

  iscipline to the maximum. "We would have to drink

  ine or beer instead," he commented, placing half a

  ird-boiled egg in his mouth. "You see, wine and beer

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  are made from grapes and hops," he explained. "And we'd probably have plenty of grapes and hops, I bet."

  Gold was not altogether certain what, anatomically, a gorge was, but he knew that his was rising. He had waited too long. He knew from experience the arsenal of retaliations Sid held ready for any contradictions from him. Delivered with an unctuous humility that could kill, they might range from a hurt and affecting "So I made a small mistake," to a proud "See what a college education can do?" The others would not find credible for a second the charge that all Sid's errors were diabolically intentional. Gold feigned insouci­ance. Having taken a vow of silence, he kept it.

  And Sid settled back with an air of victory, finished the last hors d'oeuvre on his plate, and began cracking walnuts from one of the heaping bowls set out by Belle for adornment now and nibbling later.

  The crisis past, Gold, having resisted the temptations of Sid, now succumbed precipitously to the attraction of chopped liver, and spooned smoked oysters and more red caviar onto his plate as well, then added a slice of cheese and another slice of sturgeon and some cold shrimp. He went to the bar for more bourbon. Max, his drooping cheeks red, was drinking Scotch for ,the occasion, while abstemiously avoiding everything else so far except some sliced carrots and a few buds of raw cauliflower.

  When Gold returned to the living room, Sid said, "It's really a miracle, isn't it, when you think of it. So many planets—six or seven or eight—how many plan­ets are there now, Bruce?"

  "Forty-two."

  "Forty-two planets," Sid continued with no change of expression. "And this is the only one with water."

  "It's a lucky thing," said Victor, "that we foun
  "I feel sorry for all those people on the othe planets," said Gold in the same wry frame of mind.

  "Are there people on other planets?" asked Ida.

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  "If there are," said Sid, "I'll bet they sure are thirsty."

  Rose had been flabbergasted when she'd arrived with Max and Esther and found the others present for her party. Immediately she began to cry. She was laughing as well and trying to talk above her own uproar in a voice that quickly grew hoarse. "Oh, Belle! Belle!" Again and again she flung herself upon the shorter woman in a grateful and crushing embrace. Max was beaming, his care-worn face reflecting greater happi­ness than Gold could associate with him since the days of his engagement and marriage. Gold was dumb­founded by Rose's reaction and stirred with a tender­ness foreign to him. Rose was a large, wide woman. He could not remember her laughing, crying, or talking so freely. At the death and funeral of Mendy, Esther's husband, she had wept noiselessly, and was still doing all she could to bolster Esther in her widowhood. Her broad, darkly freckled face, awash now in rejoicing, was all at once the face of an aging woman. Esther looked still older. Sid looked younger than both, and all three were starting to resemble each other eerily, their dissimilar faces collapsing into old age along the same predestined patterns of decline. Someday he would look like them too.

  All but Joannie were present, even Muriel, who had set aside still another grudge against Ida and sacrificed a poker evening with her South Shore Long Island friends. Muriel had always been embittered and self-centered—the farbisseneh one, his mother would say, an observation made more in woe than reprimand. Gold guessed she'd been quarreling with Victor again on the drive into Manhattan. Gold harbored supposi­tions about Muriel that he preferred not to enlarge ipon. Gold had lain with too many married women to »e blind to all signs.

  The main courses were turkey and roast beef. Had la or Harriet been hostess, there would have been a

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  ham as well. Two large sections of prime rib had arrived unexpectedly from Victor at the beginning of the week as a spontaneous gift. Everyone agreed that Belle and Harriet cooked the best roast prime rib of beef in all creation. Not for them the bland juices of the Anglo-Saxons. They knew what to do with garlic, paprika, salt, and onions. Harriet came with two deep dishes of the mashed sweet potatoes and marshmallows that Gold adored, two crumb coffeecakes, a cranberry mold, and one bottle of sparkling domestic wine. Always at family gatherings now, the women, except­ing Gold's stepmother, vied or cooperated in the preparation of certain foods they made—or thought they made—uniquely well, and were encouraged—or presumed they were encouraged—to bring to the brunches, lunches, and dinners served at the homes of the others. With so many women at work, friction was inevitable and hurt feelings the rule.

  Harriet excelled at baking and was forever miffed upon arriving with two or three of her cheesecakes, moist chocolate cakes, or coffeecakes to find a deep-dish fruit pie, cookies, and a high whipped cream or chocolate layer cake already purchased or, at Muriel's or Ida's, two specially ordered gateaux St. Honors, alongside which all other efforts necessarily paled. Esther specialized in stuffed derma and noodle pud­dings; living alone now, she was expanding into potato and cheese blintzes and experimenting with dishes other than derma, unaware that with chopped liver and stuffed cabbage she was encroaching upon Ida's tradi­tional territories and that with chopped herring she was transgressing against Rose, who was unmatched in the family with all edible things from the sea, as well as with soups, matzoh balls, and other varieties of dump­lings. Rose suffered the unintended affront in silence, Ida chafed vocally, Esther shuddered in repentance. No one would contend with Belle at icebox cake Nothing was more humiliating to one than to telephon
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  assignment had been delegated to another. Muriel, the youngest of the sisters still in the East, concentrated on gourmet variations of standard, sometimes canned, American foods—tuna fish, either in a crepe, a grilled pizza crust, or a blistering casserole; chicken salad with capers and fragrant herbs; salmon mousse; and a specialty of hers nobody had quite taken to yet, Jewish corned-beef hash made with almost no potatoes and with hamburger meat and tomatoes rather than corned beef, which looked, even before the ketchup she insisted be added, like a monstrous scarlet meatloaf. Muriel often added minced anchovies to coleslaw and salads she bought. Ida hated anchovies and staunchly maintained they made her want to vomit. Muriel would tell her to go ahead. Muriel frequently wondered aloud whether Ida's and Irv's combined incomes totaled more than Victor's, assumed her question was its own proof, and took it for granted that Ida was therefore lording it over her. Ida's children were college-oriented. Mu­riel's daughters were not; instead they were prodigies of inside knowledge about designer-labeled dresses, shoes, pocketbooks, and luggage. It was Ida, typically, who first detected that all Muriel's dishes for her family were built on basic ingredients that were cheap in the marketplace or, because of Victor, free. To the ever­lasting glory of all, Gold felt, not one had ever attempted to serve him stuffed breast of veal. There was unofficial agreement in the family that Rose was the best-natured, Esther the slowest-minded, Harriet the least sociable now, Ida the pickiest, Belle the most dependable, and Muriel the most selfish. Joannie was best-looking, although this rarely was mentioned. Muriel, who wore large bracelets and rings, had arrived at the party with yet another of her scarlet meat loaves of corned-beef hash to add to the turkeys and standing ibs of beef already there. And all but Gold's stepmoth­er would have to eat some with cries of ecstasy or risk iciting Muriel to sniffs of disparagement for Esther's oodle pudding or Ida's Swedish meatball
s, and to the

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  reiterated charge that others in the family had always plotted against her. With Ida born just ahead, and Gold just behind, Muriel, sandwiched between these two achievement-powered phenomena, had not experi­enced the privileges of youngest child long enough to know there were any.

  "Dinner," said Dina.

  "And I brought nothing," Rose lamented.

  "The party's for you," Max consoled her.

  "It was a surprise," scolded Ida.

  Gold was in for another blow in the dining room, for Belle had given to Esther copies of Lieberman's magazine, and Esther had just finished laying one out at every second plate, the pages open to the title page of "Nothing Succeeds as Planned" with the repulsive dark portrait Lieberman always used because he had purchased it years before from some scrounging, alcoholic illustrator for only twelve dollars and eighty-five cents. When Gold beheld the magazines, he knew what it was to wish, literally, to fall through a floor. His head reeled and he clasped with both hands the back of his chair as he felt his knees biickle. Oh, Esther, you poor benighted fool, he mourned in pity and forgive­ness. He dropped his eyes from her blissful face and snow-white hair as a troubled murmuring rose about his ears.

  "It's another story by Bruce," Esther repeated to all who grunted inquisitively.

  The ovation, to the extent that one occurred, was a standing ovation only because Esther was standing while she clapped her hands. Her mouth was trembling with an uncommon palsy that seemed to shake her lower jaw now and again and that gave to her chalky face an appearance of heightened shyness. Many of her lower teeth were part of a bridge. It was with £ discerning air of protectiveness that old Milt glancec from Gold to Esther and took a loyal position besid