II

My Year In the White House

For Friday evening, there had come an invitation to a dinner for his father and stepmother at his sister Ida's apartment in Brooklyn that his wife, Belle, had accepted in his absence. Gold would have given an excuse.

"All of them?" he asked with foreboding. "Muriel and Ida made up?"

"Apparently."

Gold longed unreasonably for a blast of arctic air to come howling down before the weekend and induce the abrupt departure for Florida of his father and stepmother to the furnished apartment they rented each year, with clandestine financial help, Gold suspected, from Sid, his older brother. A muted effort was afoot to persuade them to buy a condominium, in the hope they would stay later in spring and return there sooner each fall. This year they were especially evasive about their plans for departing. The annual autumnal heat wave known among Jews as the High Holidays, and elsewhere as Indian summer, had already come and gone. His father found other Jewish holidays. Gold hoped Sid might be absent, but guessed he was destined for disappointment on that score as well. Faced by his father and older brother, he had no way to avoid those dreaded moments of acute misery in store. His father would insult and belittle; Sid would bait subtly in skillful ways Gold found impossible to combat. Gold's helplessness had engendered in him over the years a rueful admiration for Sid's guile and crafty capabilities. Sid was sixty-two now, fourteen years older than Gold. His father was eighty-two. Among Gold's childhood memories was the lucid recollection that Sid had lost him deliberately in Coney Island one summer day on Surf Avenue near Steeplechase in order to go running after girls, and that one of his older sisters, Rose, or perhaps Esther or Ida, had come to the police station to bring him back home. Gold's intelligence of that occurrence had never ceased to pain him.

Gold's last class of the week ended after lunch on Friday. Education was one of the several fields of knowledge in which he was considered an expert by people who did not know better. Gold had learned from experience that he himself took no pleasure in going away weekends and that most college students did, and he always scheduled at least one class for Friday afternoon in order to keep enrollment low. Normally it was not until the latter half of a course that Gold lost interest in his subject matter and starting disliking his students. This term it was happening at the outset.

He went by subway from his Brooklyn campus to the small apartment in midtown Manhattan that he called a studio to see if any messages had come from old girl friends or potential new ones. There was a letter from his earliest girl friend saying she might come into the city again for a day next month and hoped to see him for lunch, which was okay with Gold, who would arrange for sandwiches and coffee to be sent up. Whiskey was already there. From the doorman he picked up a manila envelope addressed to Dr. Bruce Gold and knew it was a late written assignment from an apprehensive student. The weight saddened him; the manuscript was thick, and he would have to read it. He telephoned Belle to see what time they were leaving.

They rode by taxi to Brooklyn from their apartment on the West Side of Manhattan in the tail end of the evening rush hour, Belle quiet, Gold bored. A foggy darkness was falling over the river. Belle carried in her lap in a paper shopping bag the heavy potato kugel she had cooked that morning.

"Try not to look like you wish you were somewhere else," she advised without turning her head. "Try not to start any fights with Sid. Try to talk at least a little bit to Victor, Irv, Milt, and Max. Remember to kiss Harriet."

"I always say hello. Sid starts fights with me."

"All he does is talk. He doesn't even talk to you."

"He talks to steam me up."

"I'll try to interrupt."

Gold slid his tongue up into a front portion of his cheek and tried to concentrate all his ill feelings upon the book about Henry Kissinger he had been planning for almost a year. The subject was not sufficiently magnetic, and as the taxi emerged from the tunnel into Brooklyn, his thoughts returned to the dismal tumult that lay ahead.

He felt ghastly.

Everyone else would enjoy it. Family parties had turned for him into grueling and monotonous tests of fealty to which he submitted with sorrow and anxiety whenever he was left with no civilized alternative. There would be nobody there he wanted to see. Conversation, for him, would be impossible. He no longer liked his father or brother, if indeed he ever had. He did occasionally feel some gratitude and pity toward his four older sisters, but the locus and depth of these affections varied with his different memories of which had been kindest to him after the death of their mother and in the years before. All knew he had some fame as a writer and could not figure out why.

Gold's distaste for family dinners, his aversion, in fact, toward all forms of domestic sentiment, stretched back distantly at least until the time of his graduation from high school and his moving into Manhattan to attend Columbia College. He was pleased to be entering so prestigious a university and vastly relieved at escaping a large family of five sisters and one brother in which all his life he had felt both suffocated and unappreciated.

"I was going to quit college and fight in Israel," he had bragged to Belle at the time they were falling in love, "but I had this scholarship to Columbia."

Gold had not once thought of quitting college or fighting in Israel. And he did not go to Columbia on a scholarship but on money provided by his father, most of which, he understood now, must have been channeled through the old man's irresponsible hands from Sid and three of his older sisters. Muriel, the fourth, had never been known to part happily with a dollar for anyone but herself or her two daughters.

Another sister, Joannie, lived in California. Mercifully, she was younger. Joannie had charged away from home in delinquency a long time before in hopes of succeeding as a model or movie actress and was married now to an overbearing Los Angeles businessman who disliked coming East and disdained everybody in the family but Gold. Several times a year she flew to New York alone to see just the ones she wanted to.

Gold had found himself the center of family attention ever since bringing home his first faultless report card, or a composition with an A plus. Muriel, who was closest to him in age and aimed her bad temper these days mostly at Ida, was nasty to him also even then. Ida, officious, was the sister who would impress upon Gold his need to do better in school, although what he did was always perfect. There were times now Gold thought he might go mad from the drenching reverence and affection that still poured over him from Rose and Esther, his two eldest sisters. Whatever expectations he had aroused, he had apparently fulfilled. They shimmered with love whenever they looked at him, and he wished they would stop.

While he was in college, Rose would frequently mail or give him a twenty-dollar bill, he remembered, and so would Esther. Like Sid, both had gone to work after high school as soon as they could find jobs. Ida was able to go to college and become a schoolteacher. Ida handed him fives, always with strict instructions about how the money was to be spent. Rose and Ida still worked, Rose as a legal secretary with the firm that had hired her during the Depression, Ida in the public-school system. Ida was assistant principal now in an elementary school, and she was fighting for her sanity against militant blacks and Hispanics who wanted all Jews gone, and said so in just those words. Esther had been widowed two years before. Much of her hair fell out almost overnight, and the rest turned white. She talked vaguely at times of finding employment again as a bookkeeper. But she was fifty-seven, and too timid to try. Muriel, whose husband, Victor, did well in wholesale beef and veal, was a distinct contrast to the others. She dyed her hair black to camouflage the gray and played poker with friends who also enjoyed outings to the racetrack. A chain smoker with a hoarse voice and a tough manner, Muriel was constantly spilling cigarette ashes that Ida, with her zeal for order, would brush away with scolding, high-minded comments of disparagement, even in Muriel's own house.

Between Sid, the firstborn, therefore, and Gold, the only other male child, stood these four older sisters who often seemed like four hundred and fifty when they flocked around him with their questions, censures, solicitudes, and advice. Ida cautioned him to chew his food slowly. Rose telephoned to warn that it was icy outside. He thought of them all as outdated, naive, and virtually oblivious to the very real proximity of sinfulness and evil. Except for Sid, Gold recalled, and therefore Harriet, his wife. Sid in nimbler years had been discovered one time in San Francisco when he was supposed to be in San Diego on business, in Acapulco one time when he was supposed to be in San Francisco, and on a houseboat in Miami when he was registered at a hotel in Puerto Rico. Once possessed of the means, Sid had learned how to ease his way effortlessly through hotels.

Now he went out of town only with Harriet on brief vacations or to visit his father in Florida in the winter. Sid was a large, genial, heavyset man with soft flesh and parted gray hair; he had a pronounced facial likeness to their father, although the latter was short and chubby, with bushy white hair that stood almost straight up like the hair of a figure in a comic strip receiving a powerful charge of electricity. Gold was lean, tense, and dark, with vivid shadows around his eyes in a crabby, nervous face women found dynamic and sexy. Sid was easing compliantly into an antiquated generation, wearing plain gray or blue suits with white shirts and wide blue or maroon suspenders, whereas their demanding, autocratic old four-flusher of a father, the retired tailor Julius Gold, was dressing more and more each year like a debonair Hollywood mogul, favoring cashmere polo shirts and suave blazers. Inexplicably, Sid seemed to be growing more fond of their father. Far back, Gold remembered, Sid had run away from home and stayed away a whole summer to escape the old man's domineering eccentricities and cantankerous boasting.

Gold and Belle were nearly the last to arrive at Ida's apartment on Ocean Parkway; Muriel and Victor entered a minute afterward. Irv, Ida's husband, was convivial in his role as host. He was a dentist with offices above a paint store on Kings Highway. Already, Gold was having difficulty distinguishing one person from the next. It was a way of coping. He shook hands quickly with Irv, Victor, Sid, Milt, Max, and his father, differentiating between them only in the accumulating letdown he felt with each.

Max, Rose's husband, who was slightly diabetic, sipped at a glass of club soda squeamishly. The other men, along with Muriel, drank whiskey, the rest of the women, soft drinks. Belle had vanished into the kitchen to oversee the unpacking of her potato kugel and be of assistance to Ida, who probably was simultaneously shooing her away and giving her things to do, and reprehending her in the same breath for failing to do them swiftly enough. Everybody there, including his father, had at least one child who was a source of heartache.

Gold took bourbon from Irv and began kissing the cheeks of the women. Harriet accepted this greeting without pleasure. His stepmother authorized his approach by bobbing her head above her knitting and inclining her face. Gold bent to her with both forearms at the ready, fearing she might run him through the neck with one of her knitting needles.

Gold's stepmother, who was from an old Southern Jewish family with branches in Richmond and Charleston, habitually made things difficult for him in a variety of peculiar ways. Frequently when he spoke to her she did not answer at all. Other times she said, "Don't talk to me." When he didn't talk to her, his father moved up beside him with a hard nudge and directed, "Go talk to her. You too good?" She was always knitting thick white wool. When he complimented her once on her knitting, she informed him with a flounce that she was crocheting. When he inquired next time how her crocheting was going she answered, "I don't crochet. I knit." Often she called him to her side just to tell him to move away. Sometimes she came up to him and said, "Cackle, cackle."

He had no idea what to reply.

Gold's stepmother was knitting an endless strip of something bulky that was too narrow to be a shawl and too wide and uniformly straight to be anything else. It was around six inches broad and conceivably thousands of miles long, for she had been working on that same strip of knitting even before her marriage to his father many years before. Gold had a swimming vision of that loosely woven strip of material flowing out the bottom of her straw bag to the residence Sid found for his father and her each summer in Brooklyn in Manhattan Beach and from there all the way down the coastline to Florida and into unmeasured regions beyond. She never wanted for wool or for depth inside her straw bag into which the finished product could fall. The yarn came twitching up through one end of the opening in her bag, and the manufactured product, whatever it was, descended, perhaps for eternity, into the other.

"What are you making?" he'd asked her one time out of curiosity that could no longer be borne in silence.

"You'll see," she replied mysteriously.

He consulted his father. "Pa, what's she making?"

"Mind your own business."

"I was only asking."

"Don't ask personal questions."

"Rose, what's she knitting?" he asked his sister.

"Wool," Belle answered.

"Belle, I know that. But what's she doing with it?"

"Knitting," said Esther.

Gold's stepmother was knitting knitting, and she was knitting it endlessly. Now she asked, "Do you like my wool?"

"Pardon?"

"Do you like my wool?"

"Of course," he replied.

"You never say so," she pouted.

"I like your wool," said Gold, retreating in confusion to a leather armchair near the doorway.

"He told me he likes my wool," he heard her relating to his brothers-in-law Irv and Max. "But I think he's trying to pull it over my eyes."

"How was your trip?" his sister Esther asked dotingly.

"Fine."

"Where were you?" said Rose.

"Wilmington."

"Where?" asked Ida, passing with a serving tray.

"Washington," said Rose.

"Wilmington?"

"Wilmington."

"Washington."

"Washington?"

"Wilmington,'' he corrected them all. "In Delaware."

"Oh," said Rose, and looked crestfallen.

"How was your trip?" asked Ida, passing back.

Gold was going mad.

"He said it was fine," answered Esther before Rose could reply, and drifted toward a coffee table on which were platters holding loaves of chopped liver and chopped eggs and onions under attack by small knives spreading each or both onto round crackers or small sections of rye bread or very black pumpernickel.

"Meet any pretty girls there?" Muriel asked. The youngest of the sisters present, Muriel was ever under obligation to be up-to-date.

"Not this time," Gold answered, with the required grin.

Muriel glowed. Irv chuckled and Victor, Muriel's husband, looked embarrassed. Rose stared from face to face intently. Gold suspected that .she had grown hard of hearing, and perhaps did not know. Her husband, Max, a postal worker, was slurring his words of late, and Gold wondered if anyone but himself had noticed.

Esther returned with a plate prepared for him, and a saltshaker aloft in her other hand. "I brought these all for you," she announced in her trembling voice. "And your own saltshaker."

Gold cringed. "Don't spoil him," Muriel joked gruffly, spilling ashes onto her bosom from a cigarette hanging from her mouth.

The women in Gold's family believed he liked his food excessively salted.

"Don't salt it until you taste it," Ida yelled from across the room. "I already seasoned it."

Gold ignored her and continued salting the cracker he was holding. Other people's fingers plucked the remaining pieces from his plate. Esther and Rose each brought him more. Sid watched with amusement. So many fucking faces, Gold thought. So many people. And all of them strange. Even Belle, these days. And especially his stepmother.

He would never forget his first encounter with his stepmother. Sid had flown to Florida for the wedding and returned with her and his father for a reception at his home in Great Neck. There was an uncomfortable silence after the introductions when no one seemed sure what to say next. Gold stepped forward with a gallant try at putting everyone at ease.

"And what," he said in his most courtly manner, "would you like us to call you?"

"I would like you to treat me as my own children do," Gussie Gold replied with graciousness equal to his own. "I would like to think of you all as my very own children. Please call me Mother."

"Very well, Mother," Gold agreed. "Welcome to the family."

"I'm not your mother," she snapped.

Gold was the only one who laughed. Perhaps the others had perceived immediately what he had missed. She was insane.

Gold's stepmother had been brought up never to be seen eating in public, and she entered the dining room as always with her knitting needles and her straw tote bag. Fourteen adults were grouped elbow to elbow at a table designed for ten. Gold knew that his was not the only leg blocked by supporting braces underneath. I have been to more meals like this than I can bear to remember, Gold lamented secretly. Ida's daughter was out for the evening, her son was away at college.

"I can see on the table," Sid announced with such generalized amiability that Gold's muscles all bunched reflexively in anticipation of some barbed danger nearby, "Belle's potato kugel, Esther's noodle pudding, Muriel's potato salad, and Rose's ..." He faltered.

"I made the matzoh balls," Rose said, blushing.

"Rose's matzoh balls."

"And my wool," said Gold's stepmother.

"And your wool."

"Do you like my wool?" She seemed coquettishly dependent on Sid's good opinion.

"It's the tastiest wool in the whole world, I bet."

"He doesn't like it," she said with a glance at Gold. "I like it," Gold apologized weakly. "He never tells me he likes it."

"I like your wool."

"I was not talking to you," she said.

Victor laughed more loudly than the others. Victor was convinced that Gold and Irv both looked down upon him. This was true, but Gold bore him no unkind feelings. Victor, red of face and sturdy as a bull, was sweet to Muriel*and liked Belle, and could always be relied on to send one of his meat trucks and some laborers when anything heavy was to be transported. His posture was so nearly perfect both sitting and standing that he seemed to be holding himself erect at enormous physical cost. Gold was positive he would be the first among them to be felled by a heart attack.

"I made a honey cake," Harriet put in poutingly. "I'm sure I ruined it. I was going to make a Jell-O mold but I know you all must be sick of it."

"And Harriet's honey cake."

"Much starch," said Max, who, in addition to having diabetes, was susceptible to certain circulatory imbalances. Wearing a worried frown, Max declined everything but some chicken wings, a slice of pot roast, from which he separated the fat, and string beans.

Esther was served by Milt, a suitor courting her in almost wordless patience. She waited stiffly without looking at him. Milt, the older brother of her deceased husband's business partner, was a careful, respectful man who talked little in the presence of the family. Milt was past sixty-five, older than Sid, and had never been married. With a movement that approached vivacity, he flicked a second spoonful of Esther's noodle pudding onto her plate, and then a spoonful onto his own. Esther thanked him with a nervous smile.

There were platters of meatballs and stuffed derma on the table, too, and a deep, wide bowl of potatoes mashed with chicken fat and fried onions that Gold could have eaten up all by himself.

Ida asked Gold, "What's new?"

"Nothing."

"He's writing a book," said Belle.

"Really?" said Rose.

"Another book?" scoffed his father.

"That's nice," said Esther.

"Yes," said Belle.

"What's it about?" Muriel asked Gold.

"It's about the Jewish experience," said Belle.

"That's nice," said Ida.

"About what?" demanded his father.

"About the Jewish experience," answered Sid, and then called across the table to Gold. "Whose?"

"Whose what?" said Gold warily.

"Whose Jewish experience?"

"I haven't decided yet."

"He's writing some articles too," said Belle.

"Most of it is going to be very general," Gold added with perceptible reluctance.

"What's it mean?" Gold's father wanted to be told right then.

"It's a book about being Jewish," said Belle.

Gold's father snorted. "What does he know about being Jewish?" he roared. "He wasn't even born in Europe."

"It's about being Jewish in America," said Belle.

Gold's father was fazed only a second. "He don't know so much about that either. I been Jewish in America longer than him too."

"They're paying him money," Belle argued persistently. Gold wished she would stop.

"How much you getting?" demanded Gold's father.

"A lot," said Belle.

"How much? A lot to him maybe ain't so much to others. Right, Sid?"

"You said it, Pop."

"How much you getting?"

"Twenty thousand dollars," said Belle.

The amount, Gold could see, made a stunning impact, especially on his father, who looked unaffectedly disappointed. Gold himself would have deferred naming a figure. It must seem a fortune to Max and Rose and Esther, and even, perhaps, to Victor and Irv. They would see only a windfall, and forget the work.

"That is nice," said Rose.

"That ain't so much," Gold's father grumbled dejectedly. "I made more than that in my time."

And lost more too, Gold thought.

"Some people write books for the movies and make much more," Harriet observed in a disheartened way, while Sid chuckled softly.

Gold opened his mouth to retaliate when Belle said, "Well, that's only a start. And five thousand of that is for research. It isn't even charged against the guarantee."

"That's nice," said Esther quickly, eager to come to Gold's support. "I bet that's very nice."

"What does that mean?" asked Sid seriously.

"It's hard to explain," said Belle.

"No, it isn't."

"That's what you told me."

"You wouldn't listen when I tried."

"Don't fight," Harriet flittered in quickly with malice. "It means," Gold said, addressing himself mainly to Sid and Irv, "that five thousand is charged off as a publishing expense instead of to me, even if I don't spend it. I can make that much more in royalties from book sales."

"Isn't that what I said?" said Belle.

"That sounds like a very good provision," Esther's elderly beau, Milt, observed ever so diffidently, and Gold remembered he was an accountant and would understand too.

"Bruce," Irv ventured, putting a thumb and forefinger to his chin. Since his dental practice had ceased growing, Irv had developed a tic in his right cheek that often gave him the appearance of smiling inexplicably. "You aren't going to write about any of us, are you?"

"No, of course not," Gold responded. "Why would I do anything like that?"

A wave of relief went around the table. Then all faces fell.

"Why not?" demanded his father. "Ain't we good enough?"

Gold's voice still tended to weaken in argument with the old man. "It's not that kind of book."

"No?" bellowed his father, rearing up an inch or so and stabbing at Gold an index finger that curved like a talon. "Well, I've got news for you, smart guy. You ain't gonna do it so hot without me. It's what I told you then, and what I told you now. It's what I told you from the beginning. You ain't the man for the job." He changed in a second from choleric belligerence to serene self-confidence and sat back with his head cocked to the side. "Good, Sid?" he asked, turning and looking up.

"You said it, Pop."

Julius Gold allowed his eyelids to lower in a look of narcissistic contentment.

Those two bastards, Gold told himself, reaching with misplaced hostility for the bowl of mashed potatoes and onions to ladle himself out another large helping. And they never even liked each other.

"Did you ever hear from the White House again?" asked his sister Rose, beaming.

"No," said Belle, before Gold could reply, and Harriet looked pleased.

"But he heard from them twice," said Esther. "He got two phone calls."

"It wasn't really the White House," Gold corrected. "It was from a friend I went through graduate school with who works in the White House."

"That's the same thing," said Ida. "He's in the White House, isn't he?"

"I don't know where he was when he made the phone call." Gold's tone was faintly sarcastic.

"In the White House," said Belle, with no change of expression. "Ralph Newsome."

"Thanks," said Gold. "There was some chance I might forget his name."

"I never heard of him," said Harriet.

"Well, he's on the President's staff," said Muriel, and turned to Gold. "Isn't he?"

Gold plunged his face into his plate and was silent.

"I went past the White House once when I was a sweet and very pretty little girl up from Richmond," Gold's stepmother recalled. "It looked dirty."

"But he said he liked your book, didn't he?" Esther recalled.

"Not my book," Gold explained uncomfortably.

"His review of the President's book," said Belle.

"I'll bet the President liked it too," said Rose.

"He did," said Belle. "They offered him a job."

"The President?" asked Ida.

"They did not," said Gold irately. "Not the President. I was only asked if I'd ever given any thought to working in Washington. That's all."

"That sounds like a job to me," said Irv.

"You see?" said Belle.

"What'd you say?" asked Max eagerly.

"He said he would think about it," said Belle.

"I told you not to tell them."

"I don't care," Belle answered. "They're your family. You said you'd probably take it if the job was a good one."

"You said you wouldn't go," said Gold.

"I won't," said Belle.

"Twenty thousand?" Gold's father suddenly exclaimed with a gargantuan guffaw. "Me they would give a million!"

Ashes, Gold grieved wildly, chewing away at his mouthful of mashed potatoes and bread more vigorously than he realized. The food! In my mouth to ashes the food is turning! It has been this way with my father almost all my life.

From the beginning, Gold ruminated now. When I said I was thinking of going into business, he told me to stay in school. When I decided to stay in school, he told me to go into business. "Dope. Why waste time? It's not what you know. It's who you know." Some father! If I said wet, he'd say dry. When I said dry, he said wet. If I said black, he said white. If I said white, he said . . . niggers, they're ruining the neighborhood, one and all, and that's it. Fartig. That was when he was in real estate. Far back, that peremptory cry of Fartig would instantly create an obedient silence that everybody in the family would be in horror of breaking, including Gold's mother.

It was no secret to anyone that his father considered Gold a schmuck. It would be unfair to say his father was disappointed in him, for he had always considered Gold a schmuck.

"From the beginning," his father showed off again with inverted familial pride, as though Gold was elsewhere, "I knew he would never amount to much. And was I right? It's a good thing his mother never lived to see the day he was born."

"Pop," Sid corrected him tactfully. "Bruce was already in high school when Mom died."

"And a finer woman never lived," responded Gold's father, nodding for a moment in bewitched recollection, then glaring at Gold vindictively as though her death at forty-nine had been his fault. "Or died," he added faintly.

Once when Gold was visiting in Florida, his father drew him across a street just to meet some friends and introduced him by saying, "This is my son's brother. The one that never amounted to much."

His father's lasting appraisal of Gold—as of almost every other human in the world, including Sid—was that he lacked business sense. Despite his father's unbroken record of failure in more occupations and business ventures than Gold knew about, he judged himself a model of splendid achievements and rare acumen, and he never shrank from presenting himself is a shrewd observer of everyone else's affairs, including those of Sid and General Motors. One of his more penetrating entrepreneurial judgments this year about American Telephone and Telegraph was that "they got no talent in the front office."

"They're big, all right," said Julius Gold, "but they don't know what to do. If I owned all those telephones, oh boy—no business would run without me."

His visit to New York this year, ostensibly for dental work, had commenced in May. A staunchly irreligious man, he now seemed oddly determined to remain through all the Jewish holidays, and he kept disclosing new ones of which the others had not heard.

"He must be reading the fucking Talmud," Gold had grumbled to Belle when his father cited Shmini Atzereth. Belle pretended not to hear. "Or else he's making them up."

In Harriet, Gold found a kindred antipathy that surpassed his own. "What's the matter?" she had muttered snidely the week of her father-in-law's arrival. "They have no dentists in Miami?"

It was a fragile and temporary alliance, Gold knew, for Harriet had been methodically putting distance between herself and the family for some time, as though in thrifty preparation for some clear and farsighted eventuality. Harriet had a widowed mother and an older unmarried sister to help support.

Gold's father was five feet two and subject to unexpected attacks of wisdom. "Make money!" he might shout suddenly, apropos of nothing, and his stepmother would add liturgically, "You should all listen to your father."

"Make money!" he shouted suddenly now, as though sprung from a trance with a burning revelation. "That's the only good thing I ever learned from the Christians," he continued with the same volatile fervor. "Roast beef is better than boiled beef, that's another good thing. And sirloin steak is better than shoulder steak. Lobsters are dirty. They ain't got scales and crawl. They can't even swim. And that's it. Fartig."

"You should listen to your father more." It was on Gold that the reprimanding gaze of his stepmother rested last, longest, and most severely.

"And what does he want me to do?"

"Whatever he does," answered his father, "is wrong. One thing," he said, "one thing I always taught my children," he went on, as though addressing somebody else's, "was not the value of a dollar, but the value of a thousand dollars, ten thousand. And all of them— except one"—in fantastic disregard of the facts and to the visible embarrassment of the others, he paused to look with murderous disgust at Gold—"have learned that lesson and now got plenty, especially Sid here, and little Joannie." His eyes misted over at mention of his youngest daughter, who had bolted from the fold so early. "I always knew how to advise. The upshot is, that when I get old"—Gold could no longer believe his ears as he heard this preposterous braggart of eighty-two declaiming—"when I get old, nobody will ever have to support me but you children."

Gold, his temper rising, felt no compunction about lashing back.

"Well, I don't like to boast," he replied roughly, "but when I was with the Foundation seven years ago—"

"You ain't with them any more!" his father cut him short.

Gold surrendered with a shudder and pretended to search his plate as Rose, Muriel, and all the brothers-in-law clapped in delight and Esther and Ida rocked with laughter. Gold had the terrible presentiment that some might leap onto their chairs and hurl hats into the air. His father again sat back slowly with that smile of self-enchantment and let his eyes fall closed. Gold was constrained to smile. He would not want anyone to guess how truly crushed he felt. And then, Sid spoke.

"Behold a child," Sid intoned rabbinically without warning, as though musing aloud upon a slice of Esther's stuffed intestine held on a fork halfway between his plate and his mouth, and Gold felt his spirits sink further, "by nature's kindly law, pleased by a rattle, tickled by a straw."

Gold saw in a flash that he was totally ruined. It was check, mate, match, and defeat from the opening move. He was caught, whether he took the bait or declined, and he could only marvel in dejection as the rest of the stratagem unfolded around him as symmetrically and harmoniously as ripples of water.

The others were struck with wonder by Sid's eloquence and pantheistic wisdom.

"That sounds okay to me," Victor murmured.

"Me too," said Max. "It's nice," said Esther. "Isn't it?"

"Yes," Rose agreed. "Beautiful."

"See how smart my first son is?" said Gold's father.

"You should listen to your older brother more," said "- Gold's stepmother, and aimed the point of her knitting needle at Gold's eyes.

"It really is beautiful," Ida assented reverently. Ida, the shrewish schoolteacher, was considered the intelligent one; Gold, the college professor, was a novelty. Ida looked Gold fully in the face. "Isn't it, Bruce?"

There was no escape.

"Yes," said Belle. Gold was trapped two, three, four, maybe five or six ways. If he mentioned Alexander Pope, he would be parading his knowledge. If he didn't, Sid would, unmasking him as an ignoramus. If he corrected the prepositional errors, he would appear pedantic, quarrelsome, jealous. If he gave no answer at all, he would be insulting to Ida, who, with the others, was awaiting some reply. It was no fair way, he sulked, to treat a middle-aged, Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude graduate of Columbia who was a doctor of philosophy and had recently been honored with praise from the White House and the promise of consideration for a high-level position. Oh, Sid, you fucking cocksucker, lamented the doctor of philosophy and prospective governmental appointee. You nailed me again.

"Pope," he decided at length to mumble unwillingly, keeping his face steadfastly down toward his portion of Ida's meatballs.

"What?" snapped his father.

"He said Tope,'" Sid informed him congenially. "What's it mean?"

"It's by Alexander Pope," Gold asserted loudly. "Not by Sid."

"See how smart our kid brother is?" Sid announced, chewing contentedly.

"He didn't say it was by him," Harriet pointed out nicely in defense of her husband. "Did he?"

"Isn't it just as beautiful anyway?" Ida reasoned with him pedagogically.

"Yes," said Belle.

"Is it any less beautiful because it's by Alexander Pope and not by Sid?" asked Irv.

Belle shook her head firmly, as did Victor, Milt, and Max.

Gold found them all abhorrent. "The implication was there," he exclaimed sullenly. "And the prepositions are wrong."

"Brucie, Brucie, Brucie," entreated Sid generously, the essence of tolerance and reasonableness. "Are you going to be sore at me just because of a couple of prepositions?" There was a murmurous shaking of heads. "We'll make them right if you're going to be so finicky."

"Sid, you're fucking me over again!" Gold shouted. "Aren't you?"

The next few moments were exciting. The women averted their eyes, and Victor, who did not like bad language ever in front of women, reddened further, as though keeping his temper in check, and straightened menacingly. Then Gold's father jumped to his feet with an incredulous shriek. "He said fuck?" His voice ascended to such shrillness that he sounded like a chicken in a frenzy. "Fuck, he said? I'll kill him! I'll break his bones! Someone walk me over to him."

"All of you leave Bruce alone," Ida ordered sternly, restoring order. "This is my house, and I won't permit any fighting."

"That's right," entreated Rose, a large, kindly woman with a saddle of freckles across her nose. "Bruce is probably still very tired."

"From his trip to Washington," said Esther.

"Wilmington," said Belle.

Sid, licking his lips with a look of triumph, reached with his fingers for a second piece of Harriet's honey cake.

In the cab going home, Gold had heartburn and a headache. He could remember meals far back when his father reigned like the absolute tyrant he was, pointing the lethal scepter of his finger at whatever he wanted passed to him, and everyone else would hasten to ferry everything in that area to him. "Not that! That!" he would roar. He would not lower himself to specify, and the challenge was further complicated by the fact that he was mildly cross-eyed. Gold's father would toss cups, saucers, plates, and serving bowls, empty or full, from the table to the floor if he spied a chip or a hairline crack in any of the porcelain. "I don't eat from broken china," he would proclaim like an affronted monarch. Gold could remember his mother and sisters inspecting all the dishes beforehand to segregate those defective ones that must never come before his scrutiny.

"The thing is," Gold recalled in a manner quietly morose, "they used to hate each other. Sid ran away from home once because he couldn't take him any more. He was still in high school and stayed away a whole summer."

"I can't believe Sid hated him."

"I'll have to ask Rose. Now Sid coddles him like they've always been pals. You interrupt me a lot, don't you?" Gold accused, slouching in a corner of the taxi with his face drooping on his hand.

"I don't interrupt you at all." There was a stubbornness in Belle's manner, never defiance, but a stolid, homespun refusal to give more ground, regardless of cost. "You told me you don't like to be interrupted, so I never interrupt you."

"Then you disagree with me."

"How can I disagree with you," Belle wondered evenly, "if I'm the one who says it first?"

"You answer questions for me."

"What's the difference who gives the answer?"

"Sometimes your answers contradict mine."

"Can't I contradict you?" Belle asked. "No."

"Never?"

"No." Gold spoke austerely, leaving no room for misunderstanding.

Belle responded with a shrug.

"And I'm not going to see them all at dinner again, maybe forever."

"For three weeks," said Belle. "They're coming to our house. I invited them. You said you'd be home."

"Call it off," he directed.

"Don't come," she answered. "It's Rose's birthday. And I'm making her a surprise party."

"At sixty?" His stress of surprise was edged with ridicule.

If Belle answered he didn't hear. There was distance between them now that neither made attempt to deny. He was thankful she did not force him to talk about it. Belle was a pudgy woman nearly his own age, and she seemed smaller and rounder as she sat hugging on her lap the paper shopping bag with the empty Pyrex kugel pan inside, her head up straight in a matter-of-fact way that seemed to be saying, "I know also that I'm getting old and never was a beauty, and that I don't know how to make you happy any more. I don't like it either. Do what you want."

Gold stared across the river at the house lights in New Jersey and was glad he had never had to live there. Soon, he reflected peacefully, he might be free of Belle, for he had learned something more from Ralph that could improve his own situation: it was not mandatory that a husband wait until the youngest child moved off to college before he left his wife.

Buoyed by the encouraging prospect of an early separation from Belle, he allowed his imagination to float in joyous expectance to the secret project he had no intention of mentioning this early to Pomoroy or Lieberman. Another book. Now that he had finally abandoned his novel, he would be that much quicker to start.

Kissinger.

How he loved and resented that hissing name.

Even apart from his jealousy, which was formidable, Gold had hated Henry Kissinger from the moment of his emergence as a public figure and hated him still, a mental and emotional judgment not so original as to guarantee in itself a Nobel Prize for peace or a Pulitzer Prize for investigative disclosure. However, Gold had an angle for a book on Kissinger he believed might do both. Gold had file drawers filled with all Kissinger's writings and public statements and with newspaper and magazine clippings of everything said about him. He collected clippings also of the writings and public statements of David Eisenhower.

Sometimes he thought of mixing the two collections up. Sometimes he found it difficult to keep them apart.

It was a cause of prolonged vexation to Gold that almost no one he knew read any of the publications in which his work was likely to appear. Let Gold's name surface for a single mention in Playboy or Ladies' Home Journal, however, and the whole world took cognizance at the same moment. Even Lieberman. Even Pomoroy. Even his father and stepmother, who read only the Times and Daily News in New York and nothing at all in Florida. They preferred watching news broadcasts and old movies on television, taking bizarre delight in identifying dead actors and actresses and recounting the circumstances of their demise.

"Hey, bigshot," his father would bellow on the telephone, and Gold would wilt at once. "I see you got your name in Playboy again. That guy didn't think so much of you, did he?"

"Why?" Gold was rankled. "He paid me a very nice compliment."

"Sure, that's what he wrote," said his father. "But I could read between the lines."

Encouraged and accompanied by Gussie, Gold's father would move after dinner to the television set in whatever home he had decided to be driven to that evening and begin watching old movies with the energetic vigilance of a custodian of dead souls. The movies themselves made no difference. The responsibility for keeping score was only his.

"That one's gone," he would shout elatedly like the grim reaper himself, as though collaring another trophy for his collection. "A hundred years ago. Old age did him in. Remember that lawyer for the defense? Geshtorben. Heart attack. Gone in an instant. Look at that big guy there pushing everyone around. You know where he is today?"

"Dead?" inquired Gold's stepmother delicately, glancing up from her wool. In such moments, she recalled to Gold's mind the image of Madame Defarge knitting at the foot of the guillotine.

"You bet, baby," answered Gold's father. "In d'rerd. Now he ain't pushing around people. He's pushing up daisies. A suicide. They tried to hush it up, but they couldn't fool me."

"I do believe," said Gold's stepmother, "that old governess has passed away too."

"Sure, she did," Gold's father agreed. "Cancer. It ate her up. See that taxi driver, the funny one? Toyt. Like a doornail. A stroke. Maybe twenty years ago. Lingered a few weeks, then good-bye Charlie. That crooked cop? Bagruben. In d'rerd also. In a fire, I think. Whiskey had something to do with it too. That one was a faygeleh!"

It was their favorite recreation, even in Gold's apartment. Gold would sit with gritted teeth for as long as he could and then excuse himself with the explanation he had work to prepare. Belle, to her credit, remained, with the same hospitable consideration she showed to her own widowed mother.

"He ain't no Jew!" Gold's father had decided in Gold's living room one evening as he watched another newscast of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger smiling still one more time into the press cameras as he descended from still one more airplane. Gold's father turned to Gold as though daring opposition. "No, siree. He said he was a cowboy, didn't he? A lonesome cowboy riding into town to get the bad guys, didn't he? All by himself. Well, no cowboy was ever a Jew."

"Not," said Gold's stepmother, "on your life."

"Show me one," challenged Gold's father. "Shepherds, maybe. No cowboys."

And Gold wondered if the Creator, in the giving of His laws to Moses on that cloud-covered mountain, had not also in His wisdom and mercy imparted a time limit on at least one of His Commandments that had somehow been lost in translation after the tired old Patriarch made his way back down on a day that had been for him more than usually distracting. How was it possible to honor a father who was so abrasive and married now to such a fucking wack?

Yet it was shortly after this visit from his father that Gold opened his dossier on Henry Kissinger and began outlining his strategy in closest secrecy. His file thickened rapidly. He began collecting clippings on David Eisenhower because he could not resist. From David Eisenhower he read:

One improvement in the Nixon administration, due to Watergate, is that Mr. Nixon is no longer considered an unqualified goody-goody. I never liked that idea. The image of the Nixon administration is part of my heritage as well, and I don't think I'm a goody-goody either. I am a contentious person in a lot of ways. I'm glad that to a certain extent this ministerial cloak can be lifted from my shoulders. I'm not just a goody-goody.

For the first time in his life, possibly, Gold's mind boggled. David Eisenhower, after all, was probably the outstanding Amherst alumnus of his generation. Gold was thankful he'd clipped that interview. Someday, in respite from work that he knew was largely undistinguished and, in every nuance of the adverb, abominably intellectual, he might want to write comedy.

Often since, Gold was amazed by things he found in newspapers and magazines.

Many such groups of heckling, young hoodlums roamed at will among the crowd of 125,000 gathered at the Washington Monument for Human Kindness Day, robbing or beating 600 people.

He clipped them all. They boggled his mind.

Gold was the author of six nonfiction books, one of which, his first, was genuine, and that one an expansion of his doctoral dissertation. Four collections of his shorter work had been published. Two of these collections each contained four or five fairly perceptive pieces in which he had been able to say something original effectively; and a third included a long essay on the symbiotic relationship between cultural advance and social decay that had been reprinted widely and was still made reference to by commentators on both sides of the matter—those in favor of social decay and those opposed. The remaining collection, his latest, was worthless. Gold thought much less of his work than even his fussiest detractors, for he knew far better than they the diverse sources of most of his information and even of much of his language. Gold's current scheme for a new collection was a volume of pieces from his previous collections.

His short stories were mannered and trite, and he was content that they were published in far-flung quarterly magazines of very small circulation. His poems, he sensed, were atrocious, and these he submitted to obscure literary magazines in Pretoria and the Isle of Wight and to English-language university publications in Beirut, Spain, and Teheran. He felt safer talking about his poetry with people who had never read any. A problem with his stories and poems, Gold knew, was that they tended to be derivative, and mainly derivative, unfortunately, of works of his own. His novel, a work he had wrestled with, on and off, for almost three years, he had finally abandoned after one page. The novel was derivative of a poem Gold had written seven years before that was itself derived from a brilliant exegesis by a young Englishman of the works of Samuel Beckett that Gold wished he'd written himself.

Although it was taken for granted by now that no one in Gold's family was obliged to read anything he wrote, he nevertheless was held in some kind of baffled awe by everyone but his stepmother, who was fond of remarking that she thought he had a screw loose.

Collections of his books and the periodicals in which reviews and articles by him had appeared were maintained in each of the households. Esther and Rose kept scrapbooks. Ida, the practical schoolteacher, combined literature with painting by hanging copies of his book jackets in art frames in her foyer and living room. Belle's mother pasted his titles on each piece of her luggage. Even Harriet and Sid showed his work off prominently in their large home in Great Neck on a polished sideboard facing the entrance to the house almost dead-on. But that was it. Beyond the title and opening sentences, he could have written fuck-all anywhere and the words would not have come to their attention. None of them, not even Belle or his two older sons or his unambitious twelve-year-old daughter, were caught up irresistibly by his speculations on the fallacies of truth, his concepts for an ideal university, or his theories of cultural phylogeny and ultimate universal doom. It was usually after the publication of something new by Gold that his stepmother was prone to mention that his brains, in her opinion, were twisted, or that he had a screw loose.

Gold, for his part, believed that she, in pace with his father, was losing her marbles, and that neither had many left.

Only Joannie in California and her husband, Jerry, seemed to understand who he really was and appreciate the high regard in which he was generally held by people who had never met him. Jerry gave parties whenever Gold came to California and relayed invitations for Gold to speak at temples and churches and before various adult civic and professional groups in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, invitations Gold always declined. Jerry, the boorish overachiever, was too wealthy the community figure to suggest that Gold be paid a fee, and Gold was too successful the scholar to convey that he never spoke without one.

If anything, his relatives had long ceased struggling to figure out what he was writing about or why. Their beliefs were simple. They liked education, the larger the amount, the better the effects. Gold could have demolished this simple faith in a pulverizing thunderclap had he wished. They voted piously in every election, even Julius, his father, as though their doing so made a difference, but had no interest in government. Gold had no interest in government either, but pretended he did, for politics and governmental operations were among his most rewarding areas of discussion. Gold no longer even voted; he could not, in fact, find any beneficial role for popular elections in the democratic process, but that was something else he could not disclose publicly without bringing blemish to the image he had constructed for himself as a radical moderate.

Gold was a moderate now in just about everything, advocating, in Pomoroy's description, fiery caution and crusading inertia. Inwardly he simmered often with envy, frustration, indignation, and confusion. Gold was opposed to segregation and equally opposed to integration. Certainly he did not believe that women, or homosexuals, should suffer persecution or discrimination. On the other hand, he was privately opposed to all equal rights amendments, for he certainly did not want members of either group associating with him on levels of equality or familiarity. And for the soundest reasons: his reasons were emotional, and emotions, he was concluding, particularly his own, could constitute the highest form of rationality. Problems were increasing in all areas to which he could no longer find uncomplicated solutions, but he kept these embarrassing dilemmas to himself and continued to manifest in public an aspect of cordial poise and balanced judgment that made him acceptable to almost everyone.

Gold could speak with aplomb now on politics, diplomacy, economics, education, war, sociology, ecology, social psychology, pop culture, fiction, and drama—and on any combinations of these in infinite permutations, for he had an inventive ability to relate anything to anything else.

Gold was flexible and unopinionated now and able—with just a few minor adjustments in emphasis—to deliver essentially the same speech to an elderly reactionary religious group that he had given the day before with equal success to a congress of teen-aged Maoists. Gold could produce newspaper evidence that a former governor of Texas had not been brought to trial on all the counts for which he had been indicted, and he had used this information one evening to confirm the suspicions of an audience of millionaires that the federal government had it in for all rich Texans and to insinuate convincingly the next afternoon to an assembly of college students just thirty miles away that justice, in the presence of rich politicians, was not blind but merely looking the other way. The college students paid him seven hundred dollars for this talk. The millionaires gave him shit.

He preferred the millionaires.

In the last Presidential election, Gold had allowed his name to be listed among the sponsors of separate full-page newspaper advertisements supporting the candidates of both political parties. For the advertisement supporting the candidates of the Democratic Party, Gold was asked to pay twenty-five dollars. Fot the other, the Republican Party met the whole cost in secrecy. From this Gold concluded that the Republican Party was the more humane and philanthropic, and he eased himself one stage farther toward the political right, and called it the center. Although he did not go so far as Lieberman, who was all for a totalitarian plutocracy, backed by repressive police actions when necessary—as long as the men on top were good to Jews like himself and let him have a little—and called it neoconservatism. Lieberman, whose name had appeared fraudulently as a contributing sponsor only in the ad deceitfully paid for by the Republican Party, was incensed that Gold, for only twenty-five dollars more, had his name in the newspaper twice.

Gold, like Lieberman, loved getting his name in the papers, and his strongest surviving political sentiment lay in his wish for the good government position Ralph hinted might be found for him. Gold had neither illusions nor misgivings about the burdens of public office: the only great weight of public office he could see was staying in, and he was in a quandary only a moment when the opportunity came to review the President's book.

There had been no advance word that such a manuscript even was in preparation. He was surprised, of course, by the oddity of a President who had chosen to write about his experiences in office after being there so short a time. But Gold had managed to cast even this unusual circumstance in a favorable light in the thoughtful appraisal he wrote of My Year in the White House, paying respectful tribute to a chief executive willing to open communications from the start with what Gold luckily described as his "contemporary universal constituency." The term proved more felicitous than Gold could have imagined. The President himself repeated it twice daily on a whirlwind goodwill tour he made to parts of the world in which he was despised. Journalists felt conscience bound to credit Gold with the phrase whenever they reported it. Gold had no idea what it meant.

Even more surprising had been the telephone call from Ralph Newsome to thank him on behalf of the White House.

"Where do you shine in?" Gold inquired. Ralph still sounded truthful. They had lost touch with each other since their fellowships at the Senator Russell B. Long Foundation seven years back.

"I'm at the White House now," Ralph answered. "I'm on the staff."

Gold was impressed. "How come I haven't read about you?"

"You probably have but didn't realize it," said Ralph. "I do a lot of work as a source. An unnamed source."

"Seriously?"

"Yes. You see, Bruce, I'm in the inner circle and very little of what I do gets outside. It really boosted my stock here when they found out I knew you," Ralph continued. "The President was very pleased with what you had to say."

"Tell him," said Gold, "I'm glad. Tell him I tried very hard to be fair."

"You were," said Ralph, "and he knows that. Very fair. We got lots of gushy reviews, like Lieberman's, but most of those were from people who wanted something. I can't think of any that was more pertinent and balanced than yours."

"I hope," said Gold, "that I wasn't too unsparing."

"You were just unsparing enough," Ralph reassured him. "This President welcomes criticism, Bruce, and he found your suggestions helpful. Particularly those about his sentence structure and paragraph organization. You seemed to understand him better than anyone else."

"Well, Ralph, there were a few things that did puzzle me."

"What were they, Bruce?"

"Well, frankly, Ralph—"

"Be frank, Bruce."

"Most Presidents wait until their terms are over before they write their memoirs. This one seems to have started right in the day he took office."

Ralph assented with a modest laugh. "That was my idea," he admitted. "This way he had a crack at more than just one best seller. He might do one every year. That boosted my stock way up with him too."

"There was one more thing. But I decided not to go into it."

"What was that, Bruce?"

"Well, Ralph, he must have spent an awful lot of time his first year in office writing this book about his first year. Yet, nowhere in the book does he say anything about being busy writing the book."

Ralph cleared his throat softly. "That's a point I think we overlooked. I'm glad you didn't go into it."

"Where did he find the time?"

"We all pitched in and helped," Ralph replied. "Not with the writing, you understand, but with most of the other junk a President has to attend to. Every word was his own."

Gold said he understood.

"This President really knows how to delegate responsibility, Bruce. Otherwise, he never would have gotten it done. It would be a lot like Tristram Shandy trying to write down the story of his life. Bruce, remember Tristram Shandy and that paper I copied from you?"

"I certainly do," said Gold with a touch of pique. "You got a better grade than I did and even had the paper published."

"I got a better grade on all the papers I copied from you, didn't I?" Ralph reminded him. "Bruce, this President is a very busy man. He has to keep doing so many things a lot faster than he's able to write about them, even when he's doing nothing more than writing about all the things he's supposed to be doing. That's why he needs all the help he can get. Bruce, have you ever thought of working in government?"

Gold learned in that instant what a heart felt like when it skipped a beat. "No," he answered steadily. "Should I?"

"It's fun, Bruce. There are lots of parties and you get lots of girls. Even actresses."

"What kind of job would I have?"

"That's difficult to say now. I'll have to ask around. But you've got the right educational background and a gift for punchy phrases I think we can use. I can't promise anything this second. But I'm sure it would be something very, very big, if you'll say you'd consider it."

"I would consider it," Gold disclosed, after a breathless pause.

"Then I'll sound out sentiment diplomatically. I'm sure it will be favorable. I keep running into Andrea Biddle Conover down here. Remember her?"

"Of course," Gold replied.

"I thought you would. She had a crush on you that year at the Foundation."

"She didn't."

"Sure, she did. Still does. I always felt there might be something between you."

"There wasn't," Gold insisted, with regret. "She never said anything."

"She was too shy."

"I always liked her."

"She always asks about you."

"How is she?"

"As nice as ever. Tall, pretty, cheerful, smart. And very, very rich, with those fine, strong, beautiful teeth."

Gold pursed his lips and whistled silently. "Give her," he said, "my best. Tell her I asked about her."

"I will," said Ralph. "Are you still married to Belle?"

"Of course."

"In that case, give her my love."

"I will. And you say hello to Sally."

Ralph said, "Sally who?"

"Your wife," said Gold. "Aren't you married to Sally?"

"Oh, heavens, no," Ralph replied. "I've been married to Ellie ever since my divorce from Kelly. There was that legal problem over my annulment from Norah, but Nellie, thank the Lord—"

"Ralph, wait, for Chrissakes!" It was in self-defense that Gold protested. "You're boggling my mind."

"What was that?" Ralph asked in surprise.

"You're boggling my mind."

"Bruce, that's a good phrase," Ralph cried crisply. "Damned good. I don't think I've ever heard boggle used with an animate subject before. I'll bet all of us down here can start getting mileage out of that one right away. That is, of course, if you don't mind letting us have it."

"Ralph—"

"Excuse me a minute, Bruce. I want to get it down exactly the way you said it. How did it go?"

"You're boggling my mind."

"I preferred it the first way."

"That was the first way."

"I guess it's good enough." Ralph sounded disappointed. "Now what was it you wanted to say to me?"

"Ralph, you're boggling my mind."

"That's the way!" Ralph exclaimed.

"It's the same way!" Gold retorted.

"You're right, Bruce. I'm glad we didn't lose it. How, Bruce? How am I boggling your mind?"

"With your Nellies and your Kellys and your Norahs and your Ellies. I thought you and Sally were so right for each other."

"We were," Ralph answered, sounding puzzled.

"Wasn't the marriage working?"

"Oh, yes." Ralph was emphatic. "We had a perfect marriage."

"Then why did you get a divorce?"

"Well, Bruce, to put it plainly, I couldn't see much point in tying myself down to a middle-aged woman with four children, even though the woman was my wife and the children were my own. Can you?"

Seldom had Gold come to a conclusion so swiftly.

"Be sure to tell Andrea Conover I was thrilled to hear about her," he said. "And that I hope we'll bump into each other soon."

"I'll get back to you quickly."

"Please."

Gold's pulse raced with excitement. He had visions. He knew he was ten times more intelligent than Ralph and could go one thousand times farther in government if ever he got a foot in. And if Ralph could get married to Ellie after his divorce from Kelly after that trouble over the annulment from Norah or Nellie, there was no reason in the world he must stay married to Belle.

Gold had just captured this point in his deliberations when his telephone rang again.

"It looks good, Bruce," Ralph declared happily. Not more than five minutes had passed, and Gold could picture Ralph sounding out sentiment diplomatically with a shout down a corridor. Except that Ralph was too well-bred to shout. "You're really boggling my mind the way you're boggling everyone's mind with those phrases of yours. First 'contemporary universal constituency' and now this 'you're boggling my mind.' I tried it out on a couple of people and it boggled their minds. We all feel it would be a good idea to start using you here as quickly as possible if we decide we want to use you at all."

"What kind of job would I have?"

"Any one you want," Ralph replied, "depending on what's open at the time we take you on. We have lots of turnover."

"Oh, come on, Ralph," Gold disagreed pleasantly. "You can't mean that?"

Ralph seemed faintly puzzled again. "Why not?"

"A Senator?"

"That's elective."

"An ambassador?"

"Not right away. At the start, we'll want you in Washington. You see, Bruce, we have a very big need for college professors, and we can't go back to Harvard after all they've done. The country wouldn't stand for it."

"How's Columbia?"

"Still clean. I don't think anyone here associates Columbia with anything intellectual. And Brooklyn, of course, is perfect."

"What would I have to do?"

"Anything you want, as long as it's everything we tell you to say and do in support of our policies, whether you agree with them or not. You'll have complete freedom."

Gold was confused. He said delicately, "I can't be bought, Ralph."

"We wouldn't want you if you could be, Bruce," Ralph responded. "This President doesn't want yes-men. What we want are independent men of integrity who will agree with all our decisions after we make them. You'll be entirely on your own."

"I think I might fit in," Gold decided.

"I'm glad. Gosh, it will be good being together again, Bruce, won't it? Remember all those great times we used to have?" Gold could remember no great times with Ralph. "We'll want to move ahead with this as speedily as possible, although we'll have to go slowly. At the moment, there's nothing to be done."

"I'll need some time anyway," Gold volunteered obligingly. "I'll have to prepare for a leave of absence."

"Of course. But don't say anything about it yet. We'll want to build this up into an important public announcement, although we'll have to be completely secret." Gold listened for some signal of jocularity in Ralph's voice. He listened in vain. "If the appointment we give you is unpopular," Ralph went on in the same informative way, "we'll start getting criticism about it even before we announce it. If the appointment is popular, we'll run right into tremendous opposition from the other party and from our own left, right, and center. That's why it's good you're a Jew."

That word Jew fell with a crash upon Gold's senses. "Why, Ralph?" he managed to say. "Why is it good to have someone . . . who is Jewish?"

"That will make it easier at both ends, Bruce," Ralph explained with no change of tone. "Jews are popular now and people don't like to object to them. And a Jew is always good to get rid of whenever the right wing wants us to."

Gold said nonchalantly, "You're being rather blunt about that, Ralph, aren't you?"

"Well, Bruce, it's better than adopting their policies, isn't it?" Ralph breezed on innocently, missing the point of Gold's objection. "And that's the time we can make you an ambassador, if there's a good European country open that needs one. Or we can make you head of NATO if you'd like."

"Ralph, are you serious? Could I really be head of NATO?"

"I don't see why not."

"I have no military experience."

"I really don't think that matters, Bruce. Don't forget, there are other countries in NATO. I'm sure they have people who know about things like that."

Gold saw no profit in disagreement. "I think I'd rather be an ambassador," he decided.

"Whatever you choose. But that's looking far ahead. I'll get back to you immediately, Bruce, although it might take time. Just try not to think about it. Don't phone me here. They don't like personal calls."

Five days passed during which Gold found it impossible to think of anything else. At the start of the second week, an evil thought entered Gold's mind and refused to depart, a perversive blot of caustic wisdom first obtained by him as a sullen insult from a student to whom he had given a failing grade the semester before.

"Don't trust Whitey."

The more Gold speculated on his conversation with Ralph, the more he inclined toward the ambassadorship in preference to command of NATO. Military life did not appeal to him: he was not comfortable near explosives. And military prestige was of little weight outside the camping grounds. Neither position, he was forced to remind himself, was a probability. Ralph had guaranteed nothing. Belle had declared stoutly that she would not move to Washington with him if he took a job there, and he was relying on her to keep her word.

An ambassadorship, though, would be lovely, he fancied in periods of luxurious reverie that reappeared between his longer spells of uneventful disappointment. He could easily imagine himself in extravagant quarters in Kensington, Mayfair, or Belgravia, married now not to Belle but to some languorous, exquisite, young blond Englishwoman of noblest birth. She was a floating seraph of ageless and ethereal beauty who brought him tea with sugar cubes on a tray. She was tall and gracefully round-shouldered, had thin limbs, pale, pearly skin, and narrow violet-blue eyes of fascinating depth and brightness, and she adored him. He, for his part, could take her or leave her alone. She never spoke. She wasn't Jewish. They had separate bedrooms with many sitting rooms and dressing rooms in between. He wore elegant silk dressing gowns all day long. His breakfast was brought to him in bed.

When a second week went by without word from Ralph, Gold got to work on the book he owed Pomoroy and the digest of that book he owed Lieberman. He wondered which to do first.

His mother was dead and he could write about her: a young woman, a girl, really, with Sid, who was just a child, and Rose, who was even younger, emigrating from an inhospitable Russian countryside with that young cockalorum of a husband—good God, was he that way even then?—to live in this alien land and die before she was fifty. He had forgotten that Rose was born in Europe too. His mother had never learned English well enough to read it or to understand much when the children were talking to each other. He recalled that long period when her neck was swaddled in odorous bandages—was it goiter? He would have to ask. And he was ashamed to be seen with her in the street. Now, people were emigrating north from Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Blacks had moved down from Harlem and were overflowing into groups interloping from the South and West, and Gold felt besieged and invaded, his safety eroding, his position marginal and impermanent.

His marriage to Belle was just about dead, and he could abstract from that—if he ever learned what those words meant. He did not know what was intended when people complained their marriage was dead or that it was no longer a real marriage. Were marriages ever different? Or was it that people and their surroundings had changed, and that every change had been for the worse? Gold had a thought for another article. On a slip of paper he printed:

He pinned the slip to the bulletin board above the desk in his studio and began making notes for that work too while he waited to hear from Ralph.