Ill

Every Change Is for the Worse

They had all come together some thirty years earlier at Columbia University in New York, Ralph arriving late with an undergraduate degree from Princeton, Pomoroy departing early without his doctorate after completing his course work and passing his oral examinations. Appraising his talents and wants realistically, Pomoroy had wisely terminated all thought of producing a dissertation on a subject of no authentic appeal, and gone off to find the best job he could. He began as an editorial assistant with a small textbook firm. Now he was executive editor with a larger, general publishing company, where he would likely prosper and remain.

Pomoroy was the editor Lieberman sped to whenever he had still another soiled clump of hastily written pages he felt certain would make an important book, and Pomoroy was the editor who always spurned him first. Lieberman had started one novel, three autobiographies, and several searching studies of current problems he believed indispensable to people charged with solving them. Gold went to Pomoroy only when his chances were better than elsewhere. Pomoroy was no fool.

Harris Rosenblatt, another Jewish acquaintance of the period, was a plodding, unimaginative dumbbell who had come to college from a private school in Manhattan that required students to wear blazers and to have their hair cut and combed trimly and their necks and ears washed. By steadfast drudgery, Harris Rosenblatt had made it through Columbia College with honors and then had fled from graduate work in less than a year before the lengthening threat of unavoidable failure. He married shortly afterward and went to work in some arcane department of an investment house controlled by his wife's family—he himself was incapable of describing what that department did. There he excelled, at work he did not understand and whose meaning he could not apprehend, and he was now a respected adviser to Presidents on national fiscal matters, to whom he always impartially made the same terse recommendation: "Balance the budget." And for these few words, Harris Rosenblatt was regarded in elite business and social circles with something approaching veneration.

Harris Rosenblatt had found, in Pomoroy's acerbic depiction, his ideal habitat, the only one, in Darwinian terms, in which he was fit to survive: three pounds of human brain mass dumped immovably on an area of financial specialization too minute to be defined, in a cranny too obscure to admit any irritating rays of light. It was Harris Rosenblatt, Gold suspected, who had arranged for Lieberman's invitation to the White House at the time of the Vietnam war. Not many people other than the President allowed Lieberman into their homes for dinner. If the White House was going to be so unparticular, Lieberman was not the person to dismiss the opportunity.

"Listen," he had boasted once to Pomoroy and Gold with his crude and exultant laugh, "I got invited to the White House for dinner, just for supporting a war. I would support a war every day in the week if I knew I could eat at the White House again." And then was thrown into confusion as both Pomoroy and Gold shrank from him with looks of undisguised abhorrence. Gold had known Lieberman since childhood and had never liked him. It was an unfading source of pleasure now to be able to say, "You know, truthfully, Maxwell, I never really liked you."

In high school, Lieberman had demanded of everyone that he be called Maxwell. Now that the name had grown unbearable to him, Gold took relish in using it, especially in the company of other people who knew him only by his auctorial identity, M. G. Lieberman, and to whom the name Maxwell came as a source of delight. Not till college had Lieberman adopted the affectation of using just the initials of his given names on everything he wrote, even homework. In conversation and on radio talk shows to which he was occasionally invited he asked to be addressed by his middle name, Gordon, or by the happy-go-lucky sobriquet with which he had festooned himself when he was already past forty-five, the nickname Skip.

"Skip," Pomoroy repeated sourly, as though discovering a wedge of lemon between his teeth. "Why not Curly?"

"My hair isn't really curly."

"And your name isn't Skip," Pomoroy had replied.

"It's my nickname."

"No, it isn't. People don't give themselves nicknames, Lieberman. They inspire them in others. Whatever you are now, Lieberman, or ever hope to be— please don't interrupt me, you baldy, fatheaded buffoon, I have spied your name often at testimonial banquets at which facists and anti-Semites were among the featured speakers—you are not now and never will be a Skip."

"It's what my friends used to call me," Lieberman pouted.

"No, it isn't." Gold did not look up from the turkey sandwich he was eating. "You never had a nickname. I did, but you didn't. They called me Four-Eyes for a while. They called you Fatso, but that was a description. And you didn't have any friends. I didn't have any either. But I had more than you."

"I was your friend."

"I didn't want you. I only used you when nobody better would play with me."

Lieberman and Gold had lived in Coney Island across the street from each other in walk-up apartment houses near Surf Avenue, and Gold had never cared any more for Lieberman than others had cared for Gold.

Gold spent much of his childhood on the fringe of exile. When sides were chosen for any kind of game, Gold would not know until the captains came down to the dregs if he would be picked at all; when he was, he was so grateful he could have wept. On Saturday afternoons when everyone went to the movies in groups, he was never confident he would be asked by any. At no single time in the first fifteen years of his life would he have hesitated even one second if given the chance to exchange his precocious intelligence for friendships with such local ne'er-do-wells or social leaders as Spotty Weinrock or Fishy Siegel. Fishy's older brother Sheiky, an illegal beach peddler of ice cream in summer and street vendor of costume jewelry in the winter, was now the owner of millions of dollars in computer and reinsurance stocks and the controller of perhaps many millions more in real-estate syndicates and mutual funds.

Go figure him.

It was mainly because of Rose's or Esther's scrupulous devotion that Gold's myopic astigmatism was discovered early, and Gold was probably the first his age in the neighborhood to wear eyeglasses. Even Sid and Muriel called him Four-Eyes. Perhaps Gold was able to get top grades in elementary school because he was the only one who could see.

Lieberman was more ambitious from the start. By the time he was eight, he was already given to chesty boasting.

"When I grow up," he announced to Gold in the third or fourth grade, "I'm gonna be fat. I'll be the fattest guy in the whole world."

That was one of the earliest of Lieberman's goals, to be fat. In every class, he seized command of all positions open, from blackboard and wastebasket monitor to class messenger, and, ultimately, the capstone of this phase of his career, chief of the safety patrol. Lieberman, rolling with a cockier swagger whenever he wore his metal badge, set records for reporting students for jaywalking until Fishy Siegel threatened to break his head if he didn't stop. Spotty Weinrock said he would do the same. Lieberman cried. That afternoon he resigned from the safety patrol.

Lieberman ate and talked unceasingly. By the time he was nine, he never hesitated to dispute socialism, facism, and the labor movement with old European Jews on the Coney Island boardwalk. His characteristic argument was that they did not know what they were talking about.

It probably was not true, as Pomoroy had remarked, that given the option, Lieberman would have elected to be born prematurely just to get a headstart. But it was probably not entirely false. Lieberman still could not keep his hands off food, his own or others', even though he no longer wanted to be fat. He had never held any elective office in school because he could not find anyone to nominate him, second him, or vote for him.

"I don't care," Lieberman proclaimed to Gold in the fifth or sixth grade, holding back tears. "When I grow up, I'll be a fat cabinet officer. I'll be the first Jewish Secretary of State. I bet I'll even get to meet the President."

Then he moved away from Coney Island to the bordering, more elegant neighborhood of Brighton Beach. By the time Gold entered Abraham Lincoln High School, Lieberman was already there as a sophomore, having vaulted ahead one school year somehow, and was making a name for himself as an outstanding student and a putz. He was on the staff of the literary magazine and the school newspaper. By his junior year, Lieberman took uncontested control of both. He was active in political matters and co-captain of the debating team, which always lost.

Gold avoided him. Shunning the literary magazine in high school because of Lieberman, Gold mailed ten of his short poems to The Saturday Review of Literature. Six came back with rejection slips and four were accepted, at a price of ten dollars each. Lieberman turned blue. He swore he would never forgive Gold for acting alone instead of sharing his initiative. To teach Gold his place, Lieberman mailed twenty-five of his poems to The Saturday Review of Literature. Thirty-nine came back.

"What do I care?" Lieberman sneered. "When I grow up I'm gonna be rich. I'll be more famous than anyone. I'm gonna marry a rich and famous heiress. I'll never lose my hair. I'll wear lots of rings. I'll go into politics and win. I'll be a mayor, a senator, and the governor of all New York. I'll be a big millionaire. When I grow up," he vowed, "I'm gonna fuck a girl."

Instead, he went to college.

He was still fat. His hair was no longer thick. Everything he ate he still ate with both fists. He gorged himself from other people's plates.

Pomoroy was there from a college-educated family in Massachusetts, and Harris Rosenblatt from his private school in Manhattan and a strict, proud German-Jewish family on Riverside Drive. In graduate school Ralph Newsome, from a wealthy family in Michigan, joined the group by way of Princeton University.

It was inevitable that Lieberman would make a shambles of each class. He interrupted with contrary views and overblown objections and shouted answers to every question asked. Students and faculty learned to yield him a wide berth rather than contend with him. Experienced professors blanched when he signed up for their courses, and mature students, including tough marines from Iwo Jima and army veterans of the Battle of the Bulge, calmly rearranged their programs when they found him in class on the first day of term. Many switched to other fields of study. For many of the most illustrious scholars and teachers on the faculty, Lieber-man was precisely the factor needed to bring them to decisions perhaps long in the balance—divorce, murder, mental breakdown, early retirement, or changes to different occupations or new teaching positions at other universities. And finally, when Lieberman, with Gold and Ralph Newsome, had completed all the requirements for his doctorate, he surveyed with disgruntlement the campus from the steps of Low Library and complained, "You know, this isn't such a first-rate university any more, is it? We should have gone to Yale."

He chose to forget that all had been rejected by Yale. All but Ralph, who had been accepted everywhere. Ralph had chosen Columbia because he wanted to live in New York for a while, and because he had guessed that he would be able to find someone like Gold who would make his work there easier.

"The truth is," Pomoroy had observed in customary melancholy the last time the three had lunch together, "that none of us have really accomplished very much."

And Lieberman, vowing he would never forgive him for saying that, began another autobiography.

The pity lay, Gold reflected on the indoor track at the Y after completing the first of his nine sets of eight laps without dropping dead, in their having wanted to achieve some kind of glorious success almost from the moment of birth. Goals, he muttered as he pounded along steadily on the short oval course while the pain departed from his chest and settled and throbbed in his dangling kidneys, we ain't got any real ones. Still, it's better to have shit to shoot at than nothing. Gold held to the superstitious belief that if he could survive the first eight laps without some fatal bursting of the blood, he would make it to the end with the Angel of Death still behind, a loser again. The track was almost empty, which pleased him. It was there on the track while running his grueling three miles several days a week that many of Gold's best thoughts came to him, and there also that he discharged, for a time, the stewing hostility and mordant self-pity that pooled like poison almost daily in his soul. Envy would dissolve with exertion into euphoria by the time he had showered and dressed and was limping away. There is no disappointment so numbing, he brooded as he entered the last lap of his first mile and felt the muscles of his calves cramp, as someone no better than you achieving more. Forty-eight laps to go. There would be no heartburn today. Soon the muscles of his calves would feel fine, as his kidneys now did, and the tendons of both ankles would whine with each footfall. He could look forward next to a strain in his left groin and then to a vertical shaft of pain on his right side that was rooted in his appendix and rose through his liver, chest, and shoulder blade to his collarbone and neck. Each wound in the sequence could register only singly. Another thought that returned often when he jogged was that it was a fucking boring way to spend time. Gold had discovered, since starting to exercise strenuously several years before, that he was able to make love with greater vitality, stamina,-and self-control than formerly, and with much less pleasure. He also found he had less time for it and was often in too much physical torture and debilitation afterward to want to. He lusted more desirously for a nap. Gold no longer suffered from early-morning lower backache. Now he had it all day long.

For Gold, Lieberman, and Pomoroy, there had been sound reason for their expectations. But the real stars had sprung from other quarters, and before they knew it, they had been left behind. All had gotten what they wanted, and felt dissatisfied. Lieberman had wanted to edit a small intellectual publication, and he did. Gold hoped to obtain a decent teaching post in New York and gain some stature as a writer, and he had. Pomoroy wanted to be a book editor, and he was. All were successful, and felt like failures.

Gold no longer pretended to understand the nature of success. Instead, he pretended not to. He knew the components that were necessary:

None.

Or maybe one:

Dumb luck.

Harris Rosenblatt, with his inanimate powers of concentration and no ability at thought, was now a name to be reckoned with; he was a member of Protestant clubs that admitted no Jews, and a trustee of Jewish clubs that admitted only Germans. "Balance the budget," appeared to be the longest, and perhaps only, recommendation he could put together. While Sheiky from Neptune Avenue, truant, high-school dropout, and raffish summer ice-cream peddler, had millions and had jousted with Nelson Rockefeller at a formal dinner for fat cats when the latter was campaigning for governor of New York.

"Hiya, fella," said Nelson Rockefeller to Sheiky from Neptune Avenue. "I will be grateful for your support."

"What's in it for me?" asked Sheiky. He kept his hands in the pockets of his pants. Never in his life would Sheiky from Neptune Avenue offer an unguarded greeting to anyone or shake the hand of a person who might want something from him.

Rockefeller drew back in bewilderment.

"Good government," an eager aide with a florid face interjected quickly.

"Who needs it?" Sheiky said, grinning amiably. "I'm doing just fine with the kind we've got."

Sid, who related that episode often, was another anomaly in the freakish catalogue of success. Silent and complicated in the home when young, low-keyed in ambition, and of only average attainments in school, Sid had somehow managed to acquire and improve certain patents for commercial laundry equipment after returning from the army in 1945. Ideas for other machines followed, then a company for processing fabrics. Now he had plenty of money and dispensed it more liberally than Harriet liked.

Earlier he had worked harder, half days after school and full time in summer as a laborer at the Brighton Laundry when the red vans were still drawn by horses. Sid was afraid of the horses. After graduating from high school he stayed as an assistant to a supervisor of some kind, preferring anything to working in the tailor shop his father owned off and on in those hazardous years following 1929. Mixed in somewhere in his history was the summer he had run away from home. Sundays, when he could, and even Saturday nights, he worked in the checkroom at catered affairs at a banquet hall. He did not like these weekend jobs or the rented tuxedo he had to wear, but this was the Great Depression. His father's income was uncertain, his occupations erratic. Rose and Esther sought work in Woolworth's after school as soon as each was old enough, and at the hot-dog and custard stands on the boardwalk in summer. All were pressed into duty to deliver the suits and dresses and obtain payment in cash. No one's credit was good.

Julius Gold was always selling and returning to the same tailor shop, on the sidewalk level of the apartment house in which they lived. They had an Atwater-Kent radio in the living room, and they were one of the first families on the block with a telephone—in the store. They were also the only family with as many as seven children. With unerring intuition, he always sold to incompetents or invalids, and the shop was always available to him for just the rent whenever his newest escapade into the fashionable world of trade and manufacturing had again gone bust. Gold's mother was a good dressmaker and seamstress and would work downstairs in the store when she was not shopping for meals or tending the house. The tailor shop was a bustling extension of the apartment upstairs; sandwiches would be devoured with milk by Rose, Esther, Ida, and Muriel during the lunch recess at school or with giant bottles of flavored soda pop from the candy store across the street. Gold could remember whole mornings and afternoons idled away on the bathroom-tiled floor, with his sister Joannie just outside the plateglass window in a baby carriage for as long as the sunlight fell there, his mother whizzing away at the Singer sewing machine or stitching by hand with a thimbled finger, while his father hummed or sang bouncy dance tunes as he darted about in disorder or shouted horrible imprecations at the presser. Gold had hazy remembrances of a catastrophic spell long before World War II when his father abruptly divined himself a singer of extraordinary talents and sought to enter singing contests and perform on radio amateur hours. The older members of the family seemed in panic and shock. They were stunned and mortified again by another family disgrace after the war, this time Gold too, when they discovered that Joannie, with a friend, was working in a sleazy purple nightgown at one of the stalls in the amusement area near the train stop, lying in bed doing nothing while patrons threw baseballs at a bull's-eye that would tumble her out. There was a sickly silence in the house for weeks. She was just eighteen. And then she was gone with the friend, to enter beauty pageants, work for entertainment directors at resort hotels, and then to Florida, California, and even Cuba, in search of a Hollywood career as an actress, or as a dancer or model. By then, his mother too was gone. By the time of the war, in 1942, she had been ailing for several years, and the tailor shop was closed. His father, with partners, was doing subcontracted defense work in a small loft on Canal Street, drilling holes through templets for small parts of Bendix airplane turrets that Sid, an enlisted man in the Army Air Force, was helping maintain in turrets—"What do we need them for?"—and was quarreling ferociously with his partners. Rose was married to Max, and she and Esther had real jobs, Rose the job she never would change. Ida was in college and Muriel and Gold in high school. Gold's father, Gold judged sourly later, was probably the only person in the country doing defense work and losing money.

Sid made sergeant as an armorer, loading bombs and belted ammunition into planes, servicing weapons. He was fascinated with this first contact with cams, springs, sears, solenoid switches, and hydraulics. He was inspired by the technology of the .50-caliber machine guns. From the machine gun had come his reposeful laundry machines.

"What minds!" Sid mused now on the patio of his house in Great Neck. "To invent machines. A piece of metal doing one thing that can make another piece of metal do something else. I swear to God if not for those machine guns I never would have thought of that laundry equipment."

"Who helped you, Sid?" reminded Gold's father, in a bid for praise.

"You, Pop. But Sheiky from Neptune Avenue put in the money. And Kopotkin with the ice skates did most of the work. He had his own machine shop after the war."

"You trusted them, you dope?" said Julius Gold. "How'd you know they wouldn't steal from you?"

Sid handled the question with benevolence. "I just didn't think about that. Maybe friends didn't steal from each other then. Pop," Sid finally found nerve enough to suggest in a voice that was delicate and kind, "I think you ought to buy a condominium."

The old man tensed. "I don't stay in Florida that much."

"You could rent it out when you're here, and probably get back all your costs."

The old man took a long puff on his cigar. "You'll explain to me next weekend, when you come to us for lunch. You come too," he said to Gold.

"It will all work out fine," Sid murmured with a smile, crossing his hands over his middle with a deep sigh and sinking back further in his recliner.

But Gold wasn't fooled by Sid's air of contentment, and was positive there abided in Sid still, like a hole, the retrospective regret that he had missed out on college. But thoughts of a college education were simply not in the cards for high-school graduates of Sid's time in that place. The most one might reach toward, like Rose's Max, was an excellent score on a Civil Service examination. Max had been second best in the state on a test for the Post Office Department. His picture was in the Brooklyn section of the Sunday News. He had worked in a post office ever since.

The sole exception in the neighborhood was crazy Murshie Weinrock, who plodded away in night classes in college for four, five, six years, until World War II. Then the army moved him to Swarthmore College into one of those opulent training programs for college students for the remainder of his senior year and then to the Harvard Medical School. Again, dumb luck. If not for Adolf Hitler he might still be sweeping trimmings in his uncle's gritty millinery factory. Today he was an internist in Manhattan with a practice growing almost faster than his ability to handle it. Dr. Murray Weinrock always made room for old friends.

Gold had been to him in the middle of the week. Skinny Murshie Weinrock was now an overweight, haggard chain smoker with the troubled look of somebody endlessly overworked. With Gold, he exercised a fitful sense of humor that Gold could only describe as weird, and perhaps depraved.

"You sure look lousy."

Gold, always in low spirits at his yearly checkup, said, "Thanks, Mursh. So do you."

"How do you feel?" asked Mursh Weinrock urgently, in the middle of the examination. "Right now?"

"Awful. You've got that thing up my ass."

"How long you had that cough?"

"Since you stabbed that tongue depressor down on my tongue."

In the room with the electrocardiograph, Lucille, the large, handsome, dignified, unsmiling black nurse Gold had known for years, bent toward him with a baleful glare and said, "I know you been fucking the doctor's wife. Lie still, please. How you expect that mother-fucking machine to do what it's s'posed to?" Gold felt all strength drain from him. Lucille was an educated technician with enunciation superior to his own. "Next time I X-ray your chest," she warned, "I'm gonna aim that machine right at your balls. Didn't I ask you to please lie still? Next time you pee in a bottle I'm gonna put poison in without telling anybody and the doctor is going to cut both your kidneys out."

"Uh-oh, this might be serious," Mursh Weinrock said in his office with an ominous start when he studied the waves on the electrocardiogram. "It looks to me like you've been fucking my wife."

"How is Mildred?" Gold asked wryly. "You saw my father last week."

"He told me I was doing everything wrong."

"How's his lungs?"

"Clear as a whistle and as good as gold. He's got the descending bowel of a healthy adolescent. You could eat your food off it."

"I could throw you out the window for a remark like that," said Gold. "Shouldn't he be in a warmer climate?"

"Only when he's cold. The old man is fine. He's got arthritis of the hip and foot and a definite hardening of the arteries, and that will keep him feeling miserable much of the time."

"Why don't you fucks find a cure for that already?" Gold grumbled. "Biology doesn't want us to. Nature abhors old age."

"He still starts off the day with a herring and baked potato. And some Greek olives."

"So?"

"Is that good for him?"

"When it isn't he'll know it before we do. Look, Bruce, your father's past eighty. How much difference will it make if we feed him baby food? Let's get back to you. Venereal disease . . . yet?"

"You're the last one I'd tell."

"Patient denies venereal disease."

"You rig this for me, don't you?" Gold charged.

"Rig what?"

"You know fucking well what I mean. You and Lucille certainly don't handle all those other people out there this way, do you?"

"Which way?"

"You're the perfect anodyne for somebody with tension."

"Tension?"

"I may be changing jobs soon, for a big one in government. That has to remain secret."

"Who cares?"

"Don't coddle me."

"See my lazy kid brother much?" Gold shook his head in reply to this question about Spotty Weinrock. "I don't think Spotty's done one minute's hard work in his whole life."

"Nah, Mursh," Gold reminded. "Remember how he got his nickname, working for my loony father—for just about a day and a half, now that you mention it—taking stains out of clothes in the old man's tailor shop."

"His nickname was Speed at home, and he got it from my mother as a sarcasm. It was the first word of English she learned. 'Spit' is what she used to call him. Goddamn it. Even when he was sixteen he still pretended he didn't know how to put his socks on. One or the other of us would have to rush in and finish dressing him so he could go to high school. Then—" Dr. Murray Weinrock waved a forefinger in the air with the apocalyptic vengeance of a Biblical prophet—"then I knew how Cain must have felt about Abel, and my sympathies shifted. If I had the thighbone of a bullock handy, I would have walloped him dead a hundred times. I hate sloth. Let's get serious now. Your weight is good and your heart and blood pressure are fine. Sid could lose some weight and use some exercise, but so could I."

"What about my fatigue?"

"Too much sex life. I want you to stop fucking my wife."

"There are nights I can't resist."

"Get yourself a cute young girl instead."

Gold's differing view was that most women did not even learn to begin enjoying sex until they were almost thirty, but this was another valuable finding he could not publish while he was still teaching, while he was still married, and while his twelve-year-old daughter was still under thirty.

Even without a business education, Sid understood merger better than Gold ever would. With hardly a pause for breath, Sid had taken the old man's final business enterprise, a wobbling leather-products factory on the brink of collapse, submerged it forever in an overlapping mist of other business entities, and conjured up magically an asset sufficiently grand to enable their father to retire with a fixed yearly income and a blazing self-respect that was inflated and inimitable. He displayed like an aura the lordly demeanor of a man who not only had dined on success throughout his lifetime but also had been born into it. Sid fed extra money to him, as did most of the others. Gold had chipped in for the good used car in which Gussie drove them about in Florida. To Sid, Julius gave all credit.

"Sid fixed it so I would first get my unemployment insurance, then my Social Security."

"If he'd worked a little bit harder," Gold quipped meanly, "he could have had you on welfare."

When Gold was a child, Sid was already working summers, weekends, and weekday afternoons. When Gold was in high school, Sid was overseas in the army* And the year Gold entered college, Sid was discharged from the service, eligible for higher education under the G.I. Bill of Rights, but already thirty-one. Conceivably they might have begun as freshmen together, and Gold could have cut him to ribbons in the hectic rivalry of classroom exhibitionism. Gold was alert to incongruities: Sid, who had sacrificed, was exempt from complaints, while Gold, the beneficiary, teemed with them. Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better character, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed.

And Gold knew something else: he was in a predicament, confronted, so to speak, with a crisis of conscience that could not much longer be concealed. All his words had a starkly humanitarian cast; yet he no longer liked people.

He was losing his taste for mankind. There was not much he did like. He liked goods, money, honors. He missed capital punishment, but did not feel he could say so. Gold had a growing list of principles, causes, methods, and ideals in which he no longer believed; and near the top it contained a swelling subdivision of freedoms that included such sacrosanct issues as academic freedom, sexual freedom, and even political freedom. Alternatives were hellish. By no stretch of the imagination could he feel that this was what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Either Gold had grown more conservative or civilization had grown progressively worse.

Or both.

Certainly, nothing proceeded according to desire. In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental. Good intentions had miscarried, and bad ones had not improved.

The American economic system was barbarous, resulting, naturally, in barbarianism and entrenched imbecility on all levels of the culture. Technology and finance mass-produced poverty at increasing speed, the sole manufactured item in the whole industrial inventory that had not once suffered a slackening in rate of growth in the last fifty-five years, not in acreage or in populations. Communism was a drab, gray, wintry prison at the end of a cul-de-sac from which no turning back was imaginable. And this was with a revolution that had succeeded. What else was there? Imperialism, that faithful ogre? The receding of colonial imperialism had not brought peace, riches, or liberty to the emancipated peoples; instead, there were oppressions, corruption, and warfare, and a truculent majority in the United Nations that was now not only anti-American, but anti-Americans like Gold. Vus nuch?

Medicaid?

Gold had another list.

A symbiotic system of new criminal classes; and medical science had created something infinitely worse, a long life span, with a larger and larger number of old people who were unneeded by society, had nothing to do, and were not revered. How much longer would grown children hope their parents going into surgery would come out alive? What would Gold himself really feel next time his father had an operation? He knew about Sid and Rose and Esther, but he would not bet on himself or vouch for Muriel, or even Ida. Or Joannie, an alien mystery to him now, a distant cipher whom he understood best and knew least.

The labor movement had come to its end in garbage strikes and gigantic pension funds invested by banks for profit. There seemed no plausible connection between cause and effect, or ends and means. History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent fight bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage someday that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil.

Results attained were unrelated to objectives envisioned.

Once, ten or fifteen years earlier, Gold had given testimony in defense of novels by Henry Miller and William Burroughs against charges of obscenity; now there were massage parlors and pornographic movies everywhere and newspapers and magazines on display that were obscene. The health club in the basement of the apartment house in which he had his studio had converted gradually into an elegant massage parlor; and his annual membership had been rudely terminated.

And when he'd marched in Selma, Alabama, with Martin Luther King and campaigned so loyally against all forms of racial segregation, the thought never once crossed his mind that a day might come when his own neighborhood would alter for the worse and his own children be sent to costly private schools to evade the physical dangers of busing and integration and the decay in the quality of education offered by the public ones. They were not accustomed to being a white minority.

Gold never doubted that racial discrimination was atrocious, unjust, and despicably cruel and degrading. But he knew in his heart that he much preferred it the old way, when he was safer. Things were much better for him when they had been much worse. It was a fact, one that did not touch on the virtue of the situation, but a fact nonetheless, that many people like himself who had worked and argued for the annihilation of Jim Crow were those who would be least incovenienced when they succeeded. Gold himself lived in a building with a doorman, and Negroes were not numerous in places he went to for the summer. Had they been, he would have sought new ones. When he came to realize this, he realized also that he was not just a liar but a hypocrite. A liar he knew he had been.

Ida's sixteen-year-old daughter was threatened with busing to a high school in a dangerous neighborhood in which she would be hated, where she could form no friendships, and in which she would be foolish to linger or wander, and only Ida's sneaking influence within the Board of Education might save her: but only by the substitution of somebody else's child. Gold was helpless to advise: but he did feel that no law should force this upon anyone. To the clear-cut issue of equality had been added the discordant elements of violence, crime, enmity, insurgence, and negation. With so much to be said on all sides of the questions, he was sorry there was such a question. Solutions did not appear so readily as before, and things were not so clear as they once seemed. Things were just not working out as planned. Nothing ran smoothly. Nothing was succeeding as planned. ,

"Nothing Succeeds as Planned" was the title of Gold's article, and he was not surprised that Lieberman published it immediately after Gold had extracted the rest of the payment from him.

Ralph called him at home the day after Gold mailed him four copies.

"What did he say?" Gold demanded hungrily.

"Dina took the call," said Belle, just returned from her afternoon job as psychological counselor at a public elementary school.

"He was calling from the White House," Dina said.

"And he sounded so nice. I wanted to keep talking with him but he said he had something to do."

"Must I break your head? What did Ralph Newsome say?"

"He'll call back tonight. You can take it in my room if you like."

Gold took the call in his study with the door closed.

"God, Bruce," Ralph began, "I can't tell you how you're boggling our minds. If nothing succeeds as planned—and you really present such a strong argument—then the President has just the excuse he needs for not doing anything."

Gold, though surprised, was nonetheless pleased. "I hadn't looked at it in just that light," he confessed.

"We're having photocopies made. We want everyone in government to read it, although we've stamped it secret so nobody can. It would have been better, I suppose—" here Ralph's voice dropped in gentle reproach—"if you had shown it to us first and the President could have introduced the proposition as his own. But it might prove even more convincing now that he can cite you as an authority. Don't be surprised, Bruce, if he makes reference to it tomorrow. That should boggle minds."

"Has the President read it?" Gold, with boggling mind, could not restrain himself from inquiring.

"Oh, I'm positive he has," Ralph answered in his equable unhurried manner, "although I can't be sure."

"I would have shown it to him first, Ralph, but I didn't think anyone there but you would be interested."

"Bruce, I can't emphasize too strongly how high you rate with us. Especially after this. Nothing succeeds as planned—my God, what a concept. All of us want you working with us as soon as possible after the people above us decide whether they want you working here at all. Will you come?"

"As what?" said Gold, who knew already the answer was ardently yes.

"Oh, I don't know," said Ralph. "We probably could start you right in as a spokesman."

"A spokesman?" Gold was abruptly doubtful. It sounded like something athletic. "What's a spokesman?"

"Oh, Bruce, you must know. That's what I've been when I haven't been doing something else. A government spokesman, an unnamed spokesman, an administrative spokesman—it's a little bit like a source. Haven't you been reading about me at all?"

"Oh," said Gold quickly, defensively. "Now I know."

"I do get into the papers often. That's one of the nice things about being an unnamed spokesman. In a month or two, we can move you up."

"To what?"

"Well, if nothing else, to a senior official. As a senior official, you'd be free to hold background briefings any time you want, every time we schedule them. There's no limit to how high you will go. Bruce, this administration is made up almost entirely of people who pushed their way in."

Gold sensed an innuendo at which he perhaps ought to take offense. "I'm not very pushy, Ralph," he said softly.

"That will be a big plus for you, Bruce, that you're not pushy. Like so many others."

"So many other what, Ralph?"

"So many others who are pushy," Ralph went on with such uninterrupted affability that Gold concluded he had been unfairly sensitive. "Could you start immediately?"

"How much money would I make?"

"As much as you want, Bruce. No one comes to Washington to lose money."

Gold's next question carried a twinge of pathos. "Would I have to be unnamed?"

"Just at the start. After all, if we want to use you as an unnamed spokesman, it wouldn't do if everyone knew who you were, would it?"

"I guess not."

"Next week, why don't you come up here for a day to talk the whole thing over?"

"Up?" said Gold, feeling a bit disoriented.

"Oh, I'm sorry." Ralph laughed quietly. "I mean down. I've been talking to so many legislators from the South I can't help feeling that they are the bottom of the world, and we're the top."

"Say, Ralph, that's pretty good," Gold told him. "I'd like to use it in a piece, if you don't mind."

Ralph was flattered. "Of course not, Bruce. But don't use my name. You can imagine the trouble I'd be in if I were quoted."

"Don't worry," Gold reassured him. "I'd much rather present it as my own."

"On the other hand," said Ralph, sounding touchy, "I would like some credit for it. After all, I did think it up."

"But how could I do that?" Gold was confused. "How could I give you credit for it in print if you don't want your name mentioned?"

The answer arrived in a second. "Couldn't you say it came from a spokesman?"

"Sure. I could do that."

"Fine, Bruce. That will make all my families very proud. Andrea Conover blushed like a schoolgirl when I gave her your regards. She'd love to see you again."

"When should I come?" asked Gold.

"I'll phone you on Monday or Tuesday, or Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. You know, Bruce," Ralph pointed out, "the only daughter of Pugh Biddle Conover is no one to sneeze at."

Gold had no intention of sneezing at her.

"Well?" Belle studied him closely when he returned to the kitchen to finish his dinner. Dina watched him too.

"I may have to go to Washington next week. They want my opinion about something."

Belle was no dope. "Is it about a job?"

"That was supposed to be secret," he admonished her again.

Belle shrugged. "Who will I tell? Your family?"

Dina's face glowed. "I would tell Leo Lieberman. I bet that would make his father jealous."

"Suppose it falls through," Gold asked, "and I get nothing?"

"I would tell them," said Belle, "that you turned it down."

"That I refused to compromise my integrity?"

"Sure," said Belle.

"Me too," vowed Dina.

"Yes," he admitted. "It's about a government job." Later that evening in their own room he said to Belle, "I thought you didn't want me to take a job in Washington. You said you wouldn't go."

Belle answered, "I'm not going."

"You won't change your mind?"

"Absolutely not."

They slept in separate beds, with a night table in between. He moved into hers.