IV

Nothing Succeeds as Planned

Gold finished his martini, feeling so consumedly braced he was almost offended that the woman with whom he was lunching was his sister.

"Esther told me you're writing a book about Jews," said Joannie. Cold poached salmon would follow for Gold, with cucumber salad and green mayonnaise. They were lunching at the St. Regis and she would pay. She was a tall, suntanned woman with bright clothes, a springy figure, and hair expertly streaked.

"Esther?"

"She calls about every two weeks," said Joannie. "And has nothing to say. Jerry isn't happy about your book."

"Is that why you're in New York?"

She shook her head. "He wants to know why you can't write a book about something else."

"I ain't got that much choice, Joannie."

"Toni," she corrected. "What's he worried about?"

"We spend a lot of time in California trying to get each other to forget we're Jewish. That's one of the reasons his family changed their name."

"To Fink?"

"It used to be Finkleman. Jerry gives a lot to both political parties. He thinks he's got a good chance now of being a judge."

"Jerry's not a lawyer, is he?"

"You don't have to be a lawyer out there to be a judge," Joannie explained. "At least that's what they tell him when they come for money."

"You belong to every temple in lower California," Gold derided.

"That's civic, not religious," she countered. "We make it a point never to pray." She picked without appetite at her small salad. "I saw Pop yesterday." Gold was loath to ask. "How was he?"

"Quiet." Her smile was rueful. "He still thinks it's his fault I left home. He says you're all trying to make him buy a condominium in Florida so he'll stay there all year. I told him to do what Sid says."

"We're seeing him tomorrow," Gold said joylessly. He put his silver down and felt his face turn warm. "Jesus Christ, Joannie—"

"Toni."

"—you don't know what it's like having him around. He thinks we're still a family and he's still the head. He bosses me around like I'm a goddamned kid. I don't have time to go to family dinners three or four times a week and neither does anyone else. We don't like each other that much. We've all got families of our own now and other people we want to see. You ought to have him out in California for a while."

"Jerry can't stand him."

"He knows that," said Gold, in the same tone of protest. "Neither can Gussie's children, so they can't go to Richmond either. He can't just keep telling us whose house he's coming to whenever he wants to and who's going to drive him there and back and who else has to be invited. Christ, I think we've seen more of each other the past few months than when we were all packed together in those five rooms over the tailor shop. Each year he comes up earlier and each year he stays later—this year for the Jewish holidays. Shmini Atzereth. Have you ever heard of it? Neither have 1.1 swear he's making his goddamned Jewish holidays up."

Joannie laughed. "Don't you think that's funny?"

"No. And neither would you if you had to take so much of him and the crazy lady."

"Gussie is cute."

"She's crazy as a loon."

"She's sweet to me. And smart, too."

"She's losing her marbles," Gold sulked. "Both of them. Every time I see them they lose another marble."

"She gave me some good Southern advice," Joannie related. "She told me to get myself a dog. If a married couple has no children, she said, they find themselves with nothing to talk about if they don't have a dog. She also warned me not to sit facing each other when we're eating home alone, and to avoid noisy foods, especially breakfast cereals that snap, crackle, and pop, and meats that require excessive chewing." Her imitation was marvelously exact. "Well," Joannie continued, her mood clouding, "we have no children and we don't have a dog, so we've got nothing to talk about but his real-estate and insurance business and all the people he doesn't like. We sit opposite each other when we eat and are sick of staring into each other's face. And he does make a god-awful lot of noise when he chews, and I do too. If we didn't have a radio or television set blasting away at dinner and breakfast when we eat home alone I think we'd both want to die. Dinners are over in six minutes and seem like an eternity."

Gold was uncomfortable, hedged in suddenly by pity and embarrassment. She was still his kid sister. He bent forward and touched her hand with his index finger.

"Listen, Joannie—"

"Toni,"

"Your name is Joannie."

"I changed it legally when I became an actress."

"Did you ever act?"

"I couldn't. I'd get jobs as a chorus girl sometimes, but I couldn't dance."

"Stay for Rose's birthday party Sunday. Come to the house."

She said no at once. "There's someone in Palm Beach I want to see before I go back. I don't like them in a crowd. I had dinner with Rose and Max and Esther last night, and I'm meeting Ida later. I spoke to Sid. Muriel I can do without, but I telephoned her anyway. I think I slowed down her poker game. Is she any better to Victor?" Gold indicated she was not. "Rose is getting deaf, I think."

Gold was relieved to have his impression confirmed. "And Max's speech is slurred. Did you notice that?"

"He drinks a lot during the day. Rose told me."

"He shouldn't be drinking at all," Gold said with surprise. "She never told me."

"You probably never asked. She says it keeps him calm."

"He was always nice to us," Gold remembered. "He was our first in-law."

"How would you feel," Joannie asked, "if you had to work in a post office for over forty years and then found yourself scared because you would soon have to retire?"

"Not good," admitted Gold. "And I'd be drinking a lot more than I do."

"Lousy. God—neither one of them has ever had another job. That's one of the reasons I got out of Coney Island so fast. I couldn't stand the thought of being poor. My friend Charlotte—the one I ran away with to go into beauty contests—her father was a shoemaker. Imagine having a father who's a shoemaker or a tailor today."

"Did you ever win a beauty contest?"

"I'd come in third or fourth. I wasn't heavy enough."

"Did they mention the kids?"

"Don't you ever ask?"

"That's a subject we avoid."

"Norma's in San Francisco living with a lay psychologist now, doing social work and still finishing her education, if you can believe her, and I don't. They say Allen is a musician somewhere in Spain or North Africa, but you and I both know he's a junkie and probably gay, although they don't. One day soon a letter will come and we'll all find out he's dead. Rose thinks it may be because she went to work. She cried a little. Max too."

"That's why I don't ask," said Gold. "Tell her I said it isn't her fault. The same thing happens to kids whose mothers don't work."

"You ought to see them more," Joannie said.

"I don't have that much to say to them. And Esther makes me nervous, ever since Mendy died. She clings."

"To what?"

"To nothing. She could go live with either one of her kids. They both want her."

"Not like us," said Joannie.

"Not like us. I wish she'd marry that guy Milt."

"He hasn't asked her. She also tells me," Joannie said, "that you might be going to Washington to work in the government."

"That's a long shot, I think. How will Jerry feel about that?"

"It depends." Joannie responded pleasantly to his sarcasm. "If you get in the papers a lot, he'll approve. Otherwise, he'd rather brag about you as a college professor."

"I'll try to oblige," Gold joked. "Tell Jerry not to worry about the book. Very few people read books and almost nobody reads mine. I certainly won't mention him and I'll try not to use anyone like him as an example."

"How about me?"

"Jesus, I don't know, Joannie—"

"Toni."

"I've got five sisters, one brother, three children, a wife, father, stepmother, and more in-laws and nieces and nephews than I can keep track of. It's hard for me to deal with any subject without coming close to some of them. If I do they're embarrassed, if I don't they feel snubbed. My problem is that I've got to write about the Jewish experience in America and I don't even know what the Jewish experience is. Did Mom ever talk to you about sex?"

"I was only nine when she died."

"What'd she die of?"

"It was after an operation."

"Was it cancer?"

"I don't think so. You better ask someone else."

"What about her neck? She wore it bandaged a lot, didn't she?"

Joannie was unsure. "I don't remember that. You'll just have to ask. We were the two babies. If you want to know what my Jewish experience is, I can tell you." Gold felt a chill blow through him. "It's trying not to be. We play golf now, get drunk, take tennis lessons, and have divorces, just like normal Christian Americans. We talk dirty. We screw around, commit adultery, and talk out loud a lot about fucking."

Gold drew back in horror. "I wish you wouldn't talk like that to me," he chided her gently, almost pleading. "It makes me uncomfortable."

"That's part of your Jewish experience," she said.

"Do you screw around a lot?" he asked. "Not since I married Jerry," she replied, and teased, "I do worse. I eat pork."


From the very outset, Julius Gold had been distinctly aloof to the idea of a condominium. Gold wore a topcoat and muffler and put on leather gloves as Sid's car pulled to a stop at the curb in Manhattan Beach. Harriet's winter coat was buttoned to the neck. Her head was covered in a knitted cap pulled down over her ears. Sid carried a light raincoat.

"Brrr—it's cold," said Gold.

"Freezing," said Harriet. "It's turning icy."

"I don't feel it," said Gold's father with a vacancy of expression that was eloquent with disdain. Julius Gold was dressed in a baby-blue cardigan and a thin summer sport shirt. He padded about in velvet slippers of navy blue monogrammed in gold with two interwoven letters on each. "Maybe in the back it's warmer," he said without inflection.

Wordlessly he led the three through the bottom floor of the house to the open sunlit porch. In one direction was a brilliant view of the sea. In the other was Sheepshead Bay, bobbing with moored charter fishing boats. The breeze that occasionally stirred was salutary to the extreme.

"Should I get you some blankets?" offered Gold's stepmother with exquisite kindness, seating herself on a bench. She wore a flat straw hat with colored cotton balls dangling from the wide brim and she looked gaily demented.

Sid lay back in a chaise and turned his face blissfully skyward. It was time to begin.

"The city," said Harriet, clucking in elegy. "It's deteriorating rapidly."

"I haven't noticed," said Julius Gold.

"There's lots of crime."

"Not around here," said the game old man. "I ain't been mugged once."

"In the subways," droned Sid. "In the streets."

"We don't go there."

"How are the garbage pickups?" asked Gold.

"Splendid," answered his stepmother, who seemed to have it in only for him. "You may be wondering what it is I am knitting. It may be that I am knitting you an afghan. To keep you warm on frigid days like this."

Gold took off his coat. Harriet unbuttoned hers and removed her hat.

"We wouldn't notice things like garbage," Gold's father elaborated. "We don't have much."

"We eat so little," said Gussie.

"I got sons who take me out to lunch," said Gold's father. "And daughters who want me in their homes for dinner every night."

"Sometimes we're too tired to go."

"Get them something to drink," Gold's father ordered Gussie. "Serve them in the chipped glasses, not me.

Sid asked for beer, Gold for club soda. Harriet would wait for tea.

"Look at my two sons." Julius Gold spoke with distaste. "Fat and skinny." Gold was basking in this compliment when his father added, "Hey, stupid—why don't you put on some weight? You look like a string bean."

Gold, reacquainted with his destiny, heaved a fatalistic sigh. "It's the style now. Ain't you heard?"

"People will think I ain't got what to feed you."

"Ain't there anything I can do to please you?"

"No."

With almost palpable reluctance Sid said, "I heard about this condominium." He rose, wheezing, and chose a chair closer to his father. "It sounds like a good buy."

"In Lauderdale?"

"Hallandale."

"I like Miami Beach."

"There's a good one there too."

"So?" The old man fished in his pocket for a match for his cigar. "Buy it."

"I meant for you."

"For me?" One would have supposed from,his father's pure surprise that the subject had not been broached before. "What are you bothering me with condominiums? Go find me a good apartment to rent. Like always."

"It makes more sense to buy your own home, Pop."

"My own home?" His father's voice was mocking. "How many acres?"

"Thirty-five thousand," said Gold. "Do I have to share?"

"How many do you need? You ain't growing wheat, you know."

"No acres, Pop," Sid resumed. "It's an apartment in a building. But it's yours and Gussie's. You can stay in Florida as long as you want." Sid was perspiring now from more than the heat.

"I stay there now as long as I want. And I've got my money in blue chips. Why don't you buy it?"

"I would," said Sid, "if I lived in Florida."

"1 don't live there," his father replied with asperity. "It's for a vacation I go." In a milder tone, he said, "Well, Professor, what do you think?"

"I would do what Sid says."

"I'll go look.' Julius agreed.

"When?" Harriet wanted to know. "When I go. It's still warm."

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

"Bronchitis."

"It was pneumonia."

"It was flu."

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

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

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

"I got the money?"

"You got the money."

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

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

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

Sid was bewildered.

"What graduation?" asked Gold.

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

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

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

"Not in private school. And this one may not make it that far. Your favorite grandchild ain't exactly no ball of fire in class."

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

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

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

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

"Shabbos Bereishes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sometimes I did."

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

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

"And what's Shabbos Bereishes?"

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

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

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

"Shabbos Bereishes?"

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

"When?" Harriet asked again.

"After next Saturday. Shabbos Bereishes. It's a promise. Let's go eat now.

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

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

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

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

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

"Black," said Gold.

"White," said his father.

"White," said Gold.

"Black," said his father.

"Cold."

"Warm."

"Tall."

"Short."

"Short."

"Tall."

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

"Who says it's a game?"

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

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


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

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

"In a minute."

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

"Why?" asked Victor.

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

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

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

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

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

Sid forged ahead boldly, testing Gold's self- discipline to the maximum. "We would have to drink wine or beer instead," he commented, placing half a hard-boiled egg in his mouth. "You see, wine and beer are made from grapes and hops," he explained. "And we'd probably have plenty of grapes and hops, I bet."

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

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

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

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

"Forty-two."

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

"It's a lucky thing," said Victor, "that we found ourselves on this one."

"I feel sorry for all those people on the othe planets," said Gold in the same wry frame of mind.

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

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


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

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

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

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

"Dinner," said Dina.

"And I brought nothing," Rose lamented.

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

"It was a surprise," scolded Ida.


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

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

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

"Isn't that nice?" Rose applauded too. Belle, catching Gold's eyes, offered a helpless shrug. Dina lingered evilly instead of escaping into her room as prearranged.

"Another screw," explained Gold's stepmother to Gold's father, "has come loose."

And another marble, Gold replied to himself, has rolled out of your fucking skull. Some at the table had already overshot the pages of his article and were engrossed in the sexual help wanted ads at the back.

"And after dinner," said Esther, "he'll autograph all our copies if we ask."

"Please, Esther," Gold begged. "You're embarrassing me."

"And then," Esther went on, finally sitting down, "we'll all have to go home and read it."

"Fat chance," said Harriet.

"Will someone pass me some turkey?" said Gold.

"We'll have to buy another bookcase soon," said Muriel. "Where's an ashtray?"

Ida, shorter, scowled up at her and fanned the air free of cigarette smoke. "At least he's closer to the front this time," she noticed.

"You get more money for that?" asked Irv.

"For what?" Gold's words were clipped.

"For being near the front?"

"No," said Belle.

"He gets paid?" asked Victor.

"Yes," said Belle. "Victor, take some roast beef. Everybody start eating. Please."

"There's plenty of everything at both sides of the table," instructed Ida. She held a platter of newly sliced rye bread with black seeds directly under Gold's nose. "Take some bread, Brucie. It's your favorite kind,"

"I thought you told us to stop calling him Brucie when he turned twenty-one," Muriel corrected Ida.

Gold declined the rye bread with a shake of his head. "he aromatic burnt allure of those black seeds nearly split his heart in two. He would forgo the roast potatoes >o, butter-yellow with charred pan burns and darkly flecked with succulent particles of shriveled, greasy ion embodying now the concentrates of all those piquant seasonings that had blended together with the flavor of prime rare beef. Self-denial, like the self-punishment of jogging, made him feel virtuous and savagely bad-tempered.

"I just don't get it," said Max in thoughtful doubt. "This title, I mean."

"In my opinion," ventured Dina, "it's a big mistake." She was eating off her plate as she stood. Having asserted all week that she would not remain with that family, she now evidently found it impossible to tear herself away.

"Sure," said Milt. "A mistake. What you meant to say, I think, was that nothing succeeds like success. Right?"

"No," said Belle.

"What I meant to say," said Gold, slipping into the plush conversational robes of the pedagogue-prophet, "is that nothing succeeds like failure. If you take the long view, the only outcome we can ever rely upon is failure."

"I can't afford to take a long view," said his father. "I'm a very short person."

"Would you care to elaborate on that, Professor?" asked Sid, his mouth full.

"If you'd take the trouble to read it," Gold began, chewing.

"Oh, Daddy," interrupted Dina, "no one's going to read it."

"Dina, will you get the hell out of here already, if you're going?"

"Nobody's eating Esther's noodle pudding," said Belle, in a diversionary alarm.

Like earth-moving equipment, arms reached forth over the table simultaneously for helpings of Esther's noodle pudding.

"Nobody's settled my hash," said Muriel.

"And I brought nothing," lamented Rose.

"Harriet takes the cake," said Belle.

"And Belle chimes in," Ida said.

And now Dina fled.

"Are you telling me," questioned Irv, holding at a stop the dish of mashed sweet potatoes Gold awaited, "that if I set out to drill a patient's tooth to put a filling in, I haven't succeeded?"

Gold was indulgent. "Irv, you ain't filling teeth because you like to drill holes. If you fill a tooth to make money to buy a car that's going to conk out on you tonight in the tunnel going back to Brooklyn, you haven't really succeeded in what you planned, have you?"

"That's kind of farfetched, Bruce, isn't it?"

"Well, I ain't exactly writing about drilling teeth. Will you pass those sweet potatoes?"

"I think fairness requires," said Ida, "that we all read the article before we form an opinion."

"That will be the day," said Harriet. "And I'll believe he's going to Washington when I see it."

"Harriet, will you please shut up?" Gold pleaded. "For once?"

Harriet said to Sid, "I always told you he was spoiled."

"Not by me," bragged Muriel. This statement was superfluous. Muriel had accepted Victor's proposal of marriage, her first from anyone, after working as a salesgirl in Macy's for eight months, and had not thought of spoiling anyone but herself, since.

"Bruce wasn't spoiled." Ida's celerity in coming to Gold's defense was always sufficient to leave him feeling undermined. "He was given advantages because he showed he would make the most of them. Like I was. There's no need to be ashamed of him just because he writes things nobody understands."

Gold's cheeks were afire with escalating anger. "Irv, will you pass those goddamn sweet potatoes, please?" le speared a slice of roast beef. "Victor, throw some corned-beef hash on my plate, will you? And two of lose roast potatoes, with onion, onion. Ida, give me a couple of slices of that bread."

Victor, pleased to comply, said, "She made the corned-beef hash with filet mignon."

Gold was starving and had no appetite. If I ever marry again, he despaired . . . and was interrupted by his father, who coughed to command attention, leaned toward him angrily, and declared:

"This thing that you did was an insult with this guy to me and the whole family. He was rich?"

Gold was flabbergasted. "What thing?"

"With this guy." His father's face was stern.

First Gold blinked. Then he said, "Which one?"

"You know which one," his father began in a harangue. "Don't ask me which one. I'll give him which one, that idiot. You went to school with him, didn't you?"

"Lieberman?"

"Who else, you cartoon? I have to tell him which one." Victor giggled, and Sid was regarding the assault upon Gold with a smiling and benign countenance. "How come—" and here Julius Gold adopted a pose of elegance and bent his head far back for no better purpose, it seemed, than to look horizontally past his knob of a nose—"how come they lived in Coney Island if they were so rich?"

Gold was puzzled. "They weren't rich."

"His father was better than me? What did he do?"

"He candled eggs. He was in the egg business."

"I owned factories," Gold's father maintained. "I built gun turrets in the war for the Bendix people. I was in defense." He slowed, nodding. "They gave me once a small citation for efficiency because I had a small factory. I had a coat business and was in real estate. I had a leather business from which I was able to retire with an income. Ask Sid. Long ago I was in furs, spices ships, import and export." His look grew distant and h< seemed to be maundering. "Once I owned a fin< apartment house in a bad neighborhood, but the bank took it back from me. I owned tailor shops, always the same one, but it was hard to make a go, so I kept getting out. I had a big grocery store on Mermaid Avenue before it closed. I was ahead of my time with my supermarket. Once I owned a store with surgical appliances for people with operations, and I knew how to talk—believe me, I knew what to say to people when it came to selling. 'Have I got an arm for you!' I would say to one. 'Who sold you that eye?' I would ask another. I was the best in the whole world, but I couldn't make a living so I went into finance and was a commission man on Wall Street in the Depression when no one could sell a single share of stock, not even me. I was in building, when no one was building. I was a draftsman before anyone even knew what a draftsman was. A lot of people still don't." His eye fell upon Gold accusingly. "An egg candler is better than me?"

"Did I say that?"

"So how come," said Julius Gold, "you work for him, and he don't work for you?"

Now Gold understood. "I don't work for him. I'm a free-lance writer. He's an editor."

His father appeared ominously pleased. "Did you write this or did he?"

"I did."

"Did he pay you or did you pay him?"

"He paid me."

"That sounds like work to me," said his father with sovereign scorn. "Do you wish you was him, or do you wish you was you?"

"I wish I was me."

"Does he wish he was him, or does he wish he was you?"

"He probably wishes he was me."

"Sid?"

"He may be right, Pop."

"Ah, what do you know?" said the old man, shaking his head at Sid in disgust. "You're just as dumb, sitting there like a dope all these years with your laundry machines. Like American Tel and Tel, still with their telephones. You never had no plan. I told you a hundred times, you got to have a plan." His father found a cigar. "By you, he may be right. By me—" his father struck his match—"money talks. The man who does the paying calls the tune. He's paying, you work for him, he's better, a son of an egg candler yet when I built turrets for the Bendix people, and that's it. Fartig."

"Oh, Pa, I'm forty-eight goddamn years old," Gold started to strike back angrily.

"Don't you swear. I never allowed such language in my house."

"It's my house and I do. I'm a college professor and have a Ph.D. I write books. I go on television. I get paid for making speeches at colleges and conferences. And you still talk to me like I'm a child or some kind of imbecile. All of you! There are people in Washington who want me to go there."

"As what?" responded his father with a jeering laugh.

"As a tourist," joked Max, and Gold felt the fight go out of him. Oh, Max, Gold wailed silently, not you too.

"To see the Washington Monument," chortled Milt, in the loudest utterance anyone there had yet heard from him. He was starting to feel at home as Esther's suitor.

Inwardly Gold was close to tears. Soon, he reflected despondently, I will be making recommendations whether to bomb or not to bomb. Here I am hopeless. "Okay, you're right and I'm wrong," he surrendered abjectly to his father, who nodded. "I wish we were talking about water again."

"Ask Sid," said his father. "If there's one thing Sid knows, it's water."

Esther, obliging, asked, "Sometimes when I look ou my window in winter, I see ice flowing up the river-why is that?"

"That's because ice is lighter than water," answered Sid, "and it's floating up to get to the top of the river."

For an instant Gold was speechless. Blood rushed to his face. "Do you really think," he demanded in a cold fury, "that the ice is flowing up to get to the top of the river?"

"Isn't it?" asked Sid.

"Do you really think that up is up?" Gold blurted out, pointing northward angrily.

"Up isn't up?" said someone.

"Sure, it's up," said someone else.

"What then, it's down?" answered still one more.

"I meant north," Gold corrected himself with a shout. "Do you really think that something is higher just because it's north?"

Sid preserved a tranquil silence while others championed his cause.

"Of course, it's higher. They got the mountains there, don't they?"

"That's why people go in the summer."

"It's cooler."

"North is always higher on the map," Ida pointed out. "I'm not talking about a map."

"That's why the water always flows down to the middle of the map," said his father with belittling arrogance. "Where it's wider. Where there's lots of room."

"And I suppose," Gold sneered at them all, "that if you took a map off the wall and turned it upside down, all the water would run off."

"Oh, no, silly," said his sister-in-law.

"There's no water on the map."

"He thinks there's water on a map."

"A map is only a picture."

"I know it's a picture!" Gold shrieked in fear. "I was being ironic. I was asking a question, not making a statement!"

"But turn the world upside down," suggested Sid with an air of craftiness in the intimidated lull that ensued, "and then see what would happen."

"Nothing!" roared Gold.

"Nothing?" said Sid.

"The North Pole would be the South Pole," said Muriel.

"The Big Dipper would spill."

"We'd go south to get cold."

"Niagara Falls would fall up."

"And he calls that nothing."

"Nothing would happen!" Gold heard himself screaming. "Uphill would still be uphill, God damn it, there is no top or bottom when it comes to planets, and I'm leaving here right now and never coming back— what is it, what is it, what is it, what is it?" he cried with shrill and perfervid impatience at whoever had been thumping him on the shoulder.

"It's for you," said Dina.

"What is?"

"The phone call." Dina rolled her eyes upward in martyrdom. "It's that man in the White House again. You can take it in my room."

The will to live left Gold. The delusion possessed him that Ralph and rulers in all the capital cities of the world had been witness to the disgraceful scene just completed. Television cameras had recorded it. Woodward and Bernstein would write a book. He was ruined.


Dina helped him to his feet. Ida steadied him. He prayed for clemency as he walked through the kitchen to Dina's bedroom.

"Ralph?"

"Just a minute, darling," said a woman's voice a warm and rich as flowing honey.

"Bruce?"

"Ralph?"

"The President of the United States has definite decided that he wants you to work with him," $a Ralph. "He will see you in the White House tomorrow morning at seven-thirty. You will have a chance to f to know each other."

'I can't come to the White House tomorrow morning," Gold croaked. "I've got a ten o'clock class."

"You'll be back in time," said Ralph. "The appointment is only for a minute and a half. If you leave for the airport now you can catch the last shuttle."

"I can't leave now. It's my big sister's birthday party."

"The President would send his own plane but his wife is using it to go shopping. You could charter a private plane."

"I don't know how. Ralph—will the President be angry if I don't come tomorrow?"

"Not angry, Bruce. But very disappointed, although he won't know. I'll simply put somebody else into that minute and a half and he probably will never notice the difference."

"I could come Wednesday," Gold begged.

"He'll be in China."

"Will you please get off the phone?" Gold's daughter hissed from the doorway like the deadliest of adders. "I'm expecting a call."

"Get the fuck out of here," he answered in kind with his hand muffling the phone, "or I'll kill you."

Dina skipped merrily away. "They want him to come to Washington," she sang out.

"But come anyway," Ralph decided, "and we'll talk. Andrea will probably want you for dinner. Stay at an excellent hotel, in case you're recognized. Unless, of course, there's someone here who might want you in his home as a guest."

Gold waited without breath for five full seconds before saying he'd stay at a hotel. In something of a stupor he returned to the dining room.

"Was it really the President?" asked Rose in a whisper.

"And he wants him to come right away," said Esther to Harriet, who was looking chastened.

"An assistant," said Gold.

"The President has lots of assistants," Harriet remarked churlishly.

"Well, this is his best one," Ida informed her.

"I can't wait to visit Bruce in Washington," said Muriel, shaking ashes from the cigarette jutting from her mouth, and Gold was stricken with something more numbing than dismay. "Maybe we can all go together, with the kids."

"That should be nice," said Rose. "Won't it, Max?"

"Maybe he can get me a raise."

"Bruce," Ida reprimanded him sharply, "if you're going to Washington there's something I must tell you. Esther, Rose, Max, Irv, Muriel, Victor, and I all think you're getting too thin."

"He was always too thin," derogated his father. "I told him too thin—but he wouldn't listen. When he wears pajamas it's only one stripe."

"What was it Sid used to tease him about?" asked Emma Bovary.

"Go out for the fencing team," said Echo. "He was so skinny they'd never be able to hit him."

"Remember the time they wouldn't let him sing in school and he came home crying?" asked Natasha Karilova.

"And how funny he looked in eyeglasses?" responded Aurora with equal merriment, and Gold returned from his daze and realized he'd been giving the names Emma Bovary, Echo, Natasha Karilova, and Aurora to his sisters Muriel, Ida, Rose, and Esther. They were just too fucking many of them. With a fork gripped like a dagger, he stabbed brutally for the last remaining end piece of roast beef as Belle and a few of the other women began clearing the table.

"When you going?" demanded his father.

"Wednesday," grumbled Gold, and masticated seriously.

"For how long?"

"He has a class on Friday," said Belle.

"You taking Belle with you?"

"No," said Belle resolutely. "I have to work at the school Wednesday."

"It's too soon for that," said Gold.

"What kind of job you getting?"

"I really can't tell you yet. You wouldn't like it anyway."

"Of course not."

"So let's talk about something else."

"Sure," Sid said. "Let's talk about vultures."

Gold's face froze. "Why?"

"They're like the lilies of the field."

"Sid, you bastard—"

"Apologize!" screamed his father, snapping erect. "Apologize, you bastard, for that filthy word you just said."

Gold walked into the kitchen.

Rose was bawling again. "I can't help it," she explained to Ida. "It's the first party I ever had."

"Rose, what do you mean?" Ida said. "We were always having birthday and Christmas parties."

"Even I had them," Gold recollected.

"I was the one who made them," Rose exclaimed joyously, with another outburst of tears.

Esther nodded. "Poppa was always busy and Momma was always working and sick a lot. So Rose was the one who made the parties."

"And Esther helped," said Rose. "But I never had one for myself."

"I thought it was about time," said Belle, carrying a cup of coffee to Rose. "Happy sixtieth."

Gold had difficulty swallowing. "Rose," he said, clearing his throat, and took coffee for himself. "I'm trying to remember things. Remember the time Sid lost me and you had to come to the police station to get me?"

"Not me. I was selling custard and malteds on the boardwalk. Esther went."

"Boy, was there hollering in the house that night," said Sid, taking, as he entered, a bite-size piece of Danish pastry. "I told them you ran away."

Gold was staggered. "How could you do such a thing?"

"Listen, I was the oldest," laughed Sid. "It wasn't so much fun taking care of all of you. I used to like girls, remember?" He cast a glance backward to assure himself of Harriet's absence.

Ida understood. "I never liked it when I had to take Muriel and Bruce to school."

"I never liked it when I had to take care of Bruce," said Muriel.

And Gold had not enjoyed having to take care of Joannie.

"You know what they did.for her birthday at the office?" Max said grouchily. "Nothing."

"I don't care." Rose nullified his-grievance with a good-natured toss of her hand. "They didn't even know. Listen, I'm so old I'm glad they let me stay."

"That's why I'm afraid to go looking for a job," said Esther, and those nerves in her jaw were quivering again, giving to her meticulously clean chin the look of something easily broken.

"Remember how hard it was when we started?" Rose sipped her coffee. "I guess we had lots of fun even then. It took me two years to find a steady job."

"I found one sooner when I got out of high school," said Esther.

"You were so pretty," said Rose. Esther's eyes misted over. "But I was always big as a horse," Rose went on. "Boy, was it hard. Jobs were scarce then, especially for Jews. A lot of the ads had lines that no Jews should apply."

"I was one of the first Jews in the Post Office," boasted Max dolefully.

"Victor's older brother was one of the first Jewish cops," said Muriel. "The rest were all anti-Semitic. That's why he quit and went into the meat business."

"Every morning," said Rose, "the four of us, me and my friends Gertie, Beatie, and Edna, would go into the city to look. We were only eighteen. We would have to go to the agencies mainly, because they were the ones who had jobs to give, and they took a nice percentage of the pay. It was not an easy time for Jews, what with first the Depression and then Hitler and all those anti-Semites here, and one big agency, I forget the name but they would let us wait around all day so we'd have a place to stay, would every once in a while announce that all Jews could go home, there'd be no work for us that day. All we even wanted was part-time work or a temporary job. So after that whenever I filled an application with an agency I would put down Protestant. I didn't even know what Protestant was but I knew it was good. They all knew I was lying, with my looks, but they didn't really care. At least then they could send me out. At one of the employment agencies I finally got a temporary job for three weeks. Some job. The interviewer at the department store told me she knew I was Jewish. But she gave me the job anyway. Maybe she couldn't get anyone else to take it. The store was all the way in Newark, New Jersey, but it paid five dollars a day. It cost ten cents each way for the trolley and the train to go into the city and maybe a quarter more for lunch and a drink in the afternoon. It cost me an extra nickel each way to go into New Jersey with the Hudson Tubes. I would give my pay to Momma each day but most of the time she wouldn't take it all. She'd put some of it in my drawer for me to save." Rose, Gold reflected, was already ten years older than Momma had lived. "Sid was working at the Brighton Laundry with all those horses he was afraid of. Remember those horses, Sid?"

"I sure do. 'Watch out for those horses.' Mom would tell me every time I left the house."

"She worried all day long," Rose remembered. " 'Where does a Jew come to a horse?' she'd say, and shake her head so miserably. She worried about me too every day until I got home. It took me two hours to get to Newark from Coney Island and I had to stand in the department-store window and display some kind of a brush and mop with wax. It was a real bad day for me from the first one on, because people would stop and look. I didn't like being looked at but that was what I was being paid for. Then I remembered we had relatives in Newark, most of Mamma's family lived in New Jersey, and I was so ashamed that one of them would pass and see me. I worked all day with my heart in my mouth. But five dollars a day was a lot of money then and would pay for a lot of new days of looking for work when that job ended. When I mopped I could do it with my back to the window but with the brush I had to look out at the street. I still don't know if any of them saw me but I was so afraid. I can still remember the lunch all four of us had every day we went into the city to look for work. There was a big cafeteria on West Forty-second Street. I think the name of it was the Pershing. Every day we ordered one order of corned-beef hash and four coffees."

"Was it as good as mine?" asked Muriel.

Rose threw her head back and raised her hands. "It was awful. We hated corned-beef hash, not yours, but it was the only thing that could be divided in four easily and was cheap and filling. We would all chip in for a pack of cigarettes and take five each. Then after lunch we would split up in twos and stand on the employment lines at the department stores or go back to the employment agencies to wait. There was Civil Service, but we didn't think we were smart enough or that they had any jobs we wanted. All we knew was typing and salesgirls. And we didn't want to leave home. In those days people didn't want to move away." Gold remembered her two children with a pang. But Rose, in the momentum of narration, was oblivious to the connection. "So we kept looking and then I got, before the law office, a job in one of the stores on Fourteenth Street, Hearn's. Selling behind the counter, and would probably still be there yet if the head of the floor wasn't a fanny pincher, and this used to kill me and the other girls too. So we made up and stood in a bunch one day and when he came squeezing through with his hands down I stuck a pin in him. He never knew who did it, but I felt he did or would find out and I was so afraid I knew I couldn't stay there so I left when Momma said it was all right and began looking again. We walked miles all over the city every day just to save an extra five cents \n carfare, but we were a happy bunch and had fun, corned-beef hash and all, and I made myself a promise one day that if I ever found a decent steady job I was never going to leave it, so when I found this steno job at the law firm, I stayed, and I've been there all this time. I never wanted to have to go looking for a job again."

"Forty-two years," Max sulked, but with that same touch of muted pride. "And they start new girls out now at almost the same salary she's making."

"I don't care," Rose answered heartily. "They let me leave when I had the babies and let me work part time when I had to. I'm still afraid they're going to make me leave, and I'll have to go looking again."

"Now?" Max scoffed. "Now you wouldn't have to."

"I just hope I can stay until you can retire too. Maybe then we can get a condominium in Florida also, near Poppa and Gussie."

"Are in-laws allowed?" asked Irv, pushing through. "I want some coffee too."

Belle shooed them all outside the kitchen. When Dina, flanked by Esther and Belle, carried in the birthday cake, Gold felt like crying and feared he might run from the room. He was thankful the lights had been darkened for all those flickering candles. An extra one had been added for good luck.

"My Rosie," said Gold's father proudly, as all made ready to depart and she came to kiss him goodbye. "She was always the best one. She never gave me a minute's trouble."

"So fucking much in character," Gold grumbled. "To judge the whole human race by how much trouble we gave him."

She was also the one who had gotten least. Even Esther had fared better: little Mendy, though scrappy and opinionated, had been devoted to Esther and had left money at his death two years earlier, and both her children, one in Boston and the other in Philadelphia, were upset that she still chose to live alone near Rose rather than with one or the other of them.

There were more large presents than Rose and Max could handle. Irv and Victor helped pack them, while Gold went back and forth for shopping bags. To Muriel's gift of a marked-down alligator purse Victor had added a dozen shell steaks and a pickled tongue. The grandest prize in the bunch was a Caribbean cruise, with spending money included. Sid had paid most but all had chipped in and therefore Sid could tell Harriet that the present had come from the family. The Caribbean would be warm, whereas Europe would remind them of their son and California of their daughter. Neither Rose nor Max had ever been out of the country. They had not even been on a plane.

"I sure get a kick," Irv said to Gold, "out of the way you guys kid each other along."

Gold was appalled. Ho-ly shit. Was that the way they saw it?

"You three are a riot," Milt agreed.

By the time they were leaving, with all of the women but his stepmother and Muriel having pitched in, the dining room and kitchen had been cleared and the last pan scrubbed, and the last load of dishes was already groaning in the dishwasher. Gold, when a final worried hush fell, was able to allay their deepest fear and send them away in a mood of jubilation.

"Bruce," Esther found nerve enough to ask at the door, while the others waited with glummest concern, "if you go to Washington, you wouldn't ever do anything to make us ashamed, would you?"

Gold was almost afraid to inquire. "Like what?"

Here Esther's courage failed, and others took over.

"Like ever vote Republican?"

"Never," he answered.

"Or help one get elected?"

"Of course not!"

"Not even if he was Jewish?"

"Especially."

"Thank God," said his stepmother.

"That Aunt Rose," said Dina, sitting cross-legged on Belle's bed. "I never saw her so happy. Did you ever hear her laugh and talk so much?"

"I'm glad I made the party," Belle said.

So was Gold. Belle was a good wife, and Gold guessed he might miss her if he ever decided he wanted one.


Everything in Ralph Newsome's office in Washington had a bright shine but the seat of his pants. Gold had been greeted at the elevators by a young girl with a pretty face who turned him over to a stunning woman near thirty with straight black hair and a sheer, very expensive dress that clung bewitchingly to her incredibly supple figure, who conducted him at length to Ralph's secretary, a sunny, flirtatious woman of arresting sensual warmth who won his heart instantly with her seductive cordiality and caressing handshake. Everything in view gleamed with a polished intensity that made electric lighting, on these premises, seem superfluous.

Ralph had aged hardly at all. He was tall and straight, with languid movements, freckles, and reddish-brown hair parted on the side. What Gold remembered most clearly about Ralph was that he never needed a haircut or ever looked as though he'd had one. He wore a tapered, monogrammed shirt and his trousers looked freshly pressed. He was still somehow, the only graduate of Pinceton University Gold—or anyone Gold knew—had ever met.

"I hope you had fun last night," Ralph opened innocently. "This town is just bursting with good-looking women who will do almost anything for a good time."

Gold curtly answered, "I was tired when I got in. I wanted a rest."

This was a lie. Rather, he had spent the evening roaming dismally from one public room of his hotel to another, hoping in vain that someone might recognize him and take him somewhere else to girls as lovely as any one of the three who'd just welcomed him.

"Gosh , Bruce, I'm happy to see you again," Ralph said. "It's just like old times again, isn't it?" Gold was silent. It was not at all like old times. "The President will be pleased I'm seeing you today, if he ever finds out. You sure do boggle his mind. He has a framed copy of your review of his My Year in the White House under the glass top of his desk in the Oval Office so he can reread it all day during vital conversations on agriculture, housing, money, starvation, health, education, and welfare, and other matters in which he has no interest." Ralph was in earnest. "I'm told he already has a blowup of your proverb "Nothing Succeeds as Planned" on a wall of his breakfast room right beside a quotation from Pliny. It's a daily reminder not to attempt to do too much."

Gold was guarded in his reply. "I'm glad," he said and hesitated. "There's still much about his book I don't understand."

"That's one of the things he likes best about your review. He was afraid you might see through him."

"See through him?" Gold shifted his feet uneasily.

"Well, we all knew he really didn't have much to write about his one year in the White House, especially since he was so busy writing about it. He probably wants you here as soon as you can make the necessary arrangements, although he probably doesn't want you making any yet. That much is definite."

"Working as what?" asked Gold.

"As anything you want, Bruce. You can have your choice of anything that's open that we're willing to let you have. At the moment, there's nothing."

"Ralph, you aren't really telling me anything. Realistically, how far can I go?"

"To the top," answered Ralph. "You might even start there. Sometimes we have openings at the top and none at the bottom. I think we can bypass spokesman and senior official and start you higher, unless we can't. You're much too famous to be used anonymously, although not many people know who you are. Got anything else in the works?"

"I'm doing a book for Pomoroy and Lieberman and there's a short piece on education I have in mind."

"How I envy you," Ralph murmured. Gold eyed him with hostility. "What's the book about?"

The question gripped Gold by the throat. "About people in America, Ralph, about Jewish people."

"I gather you're in favor. I would rush that one out while there's still time."

"Still time for what?"

"Still time to risk it. The article on education should help. We'll be organizing another Presidential Commission on education soon and you'll be appointed." Ralph buzzed his intercom. "Dusty, darling, bring in our file on Dr Gold, will you?"

"Sure thing, honey." The beautiful woman gave Ralph a folder containing a pad on which was written absolutely nothing. "Here you are, sweetheart."

"Thanks, love."

"She's gorgeous," said Gold, when she left. "And Dusty is an exciting nickname."

"That's her real name. Her nickname is Sweets."

"You didn't call her Sweets."

"In a government office?" Ralph chided benevolently. "Now, let's see where we are." Ralph addressed himself to the blank pad and wrote spokesman, source, and senior official. "We considered beginning you as a press aide, but one of the first things the boys from the press would want to know would be where does someone like you come off being a press aide. Would you like to work as a secretary?"

"It's a far cry from what I had in mind," said Gold stiffly. "I can't type."

"Oh, not that kind of secretary," Ralph laughed. "I mean—" he groped—"what do you call it? The Cabinet. You wouldn't have to type or take shorthand. You'd have girls like Dusty and Rusty and Misty to do that for you. Would you like to be in the Cabinet?"

Gold was more than mollified. "Ralph, is that really possible?"

"I don't see why not," was Ralph's reply. "Although you might have to start as an under."

"An under is a little bit over a deputy and assistant, I think, but not yet an associate. Unless it's the other way around. Nobody seems sure any more."

"Could I really begin as an undersecretary?"

"In Washington, Bruce, you rise quickly and can't fall very far. How would you like to be Secretary of Labor?"

Gold, on firmer ground now, hesitated deliberately before evincing repugnance. "I think not."

"I can't say I blame you. How about Secretary of the Interior?"

"That sound rather dark."

"I believe they work with coal mines. Transportation?"

Gold made a face. "That smacks of labor."

"Commerce?"

"It sounds a little bit like peddling."

"You're showing excellent judgment. What about Ambassador to the U.N.?"

"Don't make me laugh."

"What do you think about Secretary of the Treasury?"

Gold pricked up his ears. "What do you think?"

"It has more tone."

"What would I have to do?"

"I think I could find out. Harris Rosenblatt would know. Most of them are very rich and seem to care about money."

"I care about money."

"But they know about it."

Gold declined with regret. "I'm not sure I'd be comfortable. I'm supposed to be something of a pacifist and a radical reformer."

"But a conservative radical reformer, Bruce," Ralph reminded.

"That's true."

"Imagine what a blessing it might be to have you in the Department of Defense."

Gold had an inspiration. "How about Secretary of Defense?"

"That's good, Bruce. Especially for a pacifist."

"But I'm only a pacifist in times of peace."

"We'll put it down." Ralph added to his list. "And then there's head of the FBI or CIA to consider."

"Would I have to carry a gun?"

Ralph didn't believe so and wrote those down too. "These are all good, Bruce. Someone with your flair for publicity could probably get your name in the newspapers almost as often as the Secretary of State."

"What about Secretary of State?" asked Gold.

"That's a thought," said Ralph.

"Wouldn't I have to know anything?"

"Absolutely not," Ralph answered, and appeared astounded that Gold even should ask. "In government, Bruce, experience doesn't count and knowledge isn't important. If there's one lesson of value to be learned from the past, Bruce, it's to grab what you want when the chance comes to get it."

Gold asked with distress, "Is that good for the world?"

"Nothing's good for the world, Bruce. I thought you knew that. You've more or less said the same in that last piece of yours. Now, Bruce," Ralph continued awkwardly, "I have to be honest. You might have to get a better wife."

"Than Belle?" Gold was elated.

"I'm sorry." Ralph was solemn. "Belle would be okay for Labor or Agriculture. But not for Secretary of State or Defense."

"Belle and I have not been close," Gold confided. "In that case I'm happy," said Ralph. 'Try someone tall this time Bruce. You're rather short, you know. It would add to your stature if you had a tall wife."

"Wouldn't a tail, wife make me look smaller?" inquired Gold.

"No," said Ralph. "You would make her look taller. And that would add more to your stature and make her look smaller. Andrea Conover would be perfect."

"I'm seeing her tonight. Is she tall enough?"

"Oh, easily. And her father is a dying career diplomat with tons of money and the best connections. Propose."

"Tonight?" Gold demurred with a laugh. "I haven't seen her for seven years."

"So what?" Ralph laughed back in encouragement. "You can always get a divorce. Andrea's doing a great job with the Oversight Committee on Government Expenditures. She's the reason we can't make personal phone calls any more. You know, Bruce—" Gold rose when Ralph did—"these are really our golden years, that period when men like us are appealing to all classes of women between sixteen and sixty-five. I hope you're making the most of them. A lot of them go for your kind."

"My kind?" Whatever currents of euphoria had been coursing through Gold's veins congealed.

"Yes," said Ralph. "What do you mean by my kind?" Gold asked Ralph.

"The kind of person you are, Bruce. Why?"

"As opposed to what other kinds, Ralph?"

"The kinds of person you aren't, Bruce. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, never mind," said Gold and then decided to take the inky plunge. "Lieberman thinks you're anti-Semitic."

Ralph was stunned. "Me?" His voice was hurt and astonished. "Bruce, I would feel just awful if I thought I ever did or said a single thing to give you that impression."

Ralph was sincere and Gold was contrite. "You haven't, Ralph. I'm sorry I brought it up."

"Thank you, Bruce." Ralph was placated and his handsome face fairly shone with grace when he grinned. "Why, I copied your papers at Columbia. You practically put me through graduate school. It's just that I really don't feel Lieberman is an especially nice person."

"He isn't." Gold laughed. "And I've known him all my life."

The strain gone, Ralph said, "Let me take these notes to Dusty and have her type them up. We've really covered a lot of ground today, haven't we?"

Gold was not certain, but never in his lifetime had he felt more sanguine about his prospects. He glanced out the window at official Washington and caught a glimpse of heaven. Through the doorway, the view of the open office space was a soothing pastoral, with vistas of modular desks dozing tranquilly under indirect fluorescent lighting that never flickered; there were shoulder-high partitions of translucent glass, other offices across the way as imposing as Ralph's, and the dreamlike stirrings of contented people at work who were in every respect impeccable. The women all were sunny and chic—not a single one was overweight—the men wore jackets and ties, and every trouser leg was properly creased. If there was a worm at the core in this Garden of Eden, it escaped the cynical inspection of Gold, who could find detritus and incipient decay everywhere. Gold could look through a grapefruit and tell if it was pink.

"You'll like it here, won't you?" said Ralph, reading his mind.

"Is it always like this?"

"Oh, yes," Ralph assured him. "It's always like this when it's this way."

Gold succeeded in speaking without sarcasm. "How is it when it isn't?"

"Isn't what, Bruce?"

"This way."

"Different."

"In what way, Ralph?"

"In different ways Bruce, unless they're the same, in which case it's this way."

"Ralph," Gold had to ask, "don't people here laugh or smile when you talk that way?"

"What way, Bruce?"

"You seem to qualify or contradict all your statements."

"Do I?" Ralph considered the matter intently. "Maybe I do seem a bit oxymoronic at times. I think everyone here talks that way. Maybe we're all oxymoronic. One time, though, at a high-level meeting, I did say something everyone thought was funny. 'Let's build some death camps,' I said. And everyone laughed. I still can't figure out why. I was being serious."

"I think it's time for me to go," said Gold.

"I'm afraid it is. I'd give just about anything to lunch with you, Bruce, but I can't pass up the chance to eat alone. It's a pity you can't stay through the weekend, although I can't see how that would make any difference. Alma would love to have you out to see her terrarium, but Ellie would be upset."

"Alma?"

"My wife."

"What happened to Kelly?"

"I think you mean Ellie."

"Yes?"

"She got a year older, Bruce. And there was that thin scar from her Caesarean. Ellie would prefer that Alma and I don't start entertaining as a married couple until people first find out I've been divorced." To the blond woman outside his office Ralph said, "Dusty, please tell Rusty and Misty I'll be showing Dr. Gold to the elevator myself. Ask Christy to step inside my office. Tell her I'm horny."

"Sure, love. Bye, sweetheart."

"Who's Christy?" Gold asked.

"The nice-looking one. I don't think you've seen her."

"And what's all this Dr. Gold shit?"

Ralph lowered his voice. "It makes a better impression. Everyone knows professors don't make much money and doctors do. Ooooops—there goes one. Did you see that beautiful ass? Bruce, give my love to Andrea. You might find her a trifle prudish, but she's really as good as gold. It wasn't easy being the only child of Pugh Biddle Conover with all those riches and horses. They ride them, you know." Ralph pronounced this last detail as though describing a tasteless and unhealthy practice. "And give my love to Belle too. How are the children?"

"Fine. One is still at home."

"That's too bad," said Ralph. "Let me give you some good advice, Bruce, from an unofficial opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was seven to one, with the other member abstaining because he was under heavy anesthesia. When you get your divorce, don't fight for custody of the children, or even visitation rights. Make them all ask to come to you. Otherwise they'll think they're doing you a favor by letting you spend time with them, which you will quickly discover they are not."

Nearing the elevators, Gold could contain his curiosity no longer. "Ralph," he said, his fingers clenching nervously, "what do you do here?"

"Work, Bruce. Why?"

"I need some assurance, Ralph, don't I? Before I start making changes, don't you think I ought to find out a few things?"

"I don't see why not."

"What kind of job do you have?"

"A good one, Bruce."

"What do you do?"

"What I'm supposed to."

"Well, what's your position exactly?"

"I'm in the inner circle, Bruce. "

"Does that mean you can't talk about it?"

"Oh, no. I can tell you you everything. What would you like to know?"

"Well, who do you work for?"

"My superiors."

"Do you have any authority?"

"Oh,yes. A great deal."

"Over who?"

"My subordinates. I can do whatever I want once I get permission from my superiors. I'm my own boss. After all, I'm not really my own boss."

"Well," said Gold, "what are my chances?"

"As good as they ought to be."

"No better?" Gold inquired facetiously.

"Not at this time."

"When should I get in touch with you?"

"When I call you," said Ralph. "Pugh Biddle Conover can help while he's alive," Ralph shouted into the elevator car as the doors were closing.

Gold's mind was shimmering with fantasies of approaching eminence as the car descended. Secretary of State? Head of the CIA? A voice inside cautioned, Zei nisht naarish. Where does someone like you come off being Secretary of State? What's so crazy? he answered it brashly. It's happened to bigger schmucks than me.

By the time he was outside, only one disquieting thought survived. He'd been fawning.


Seven years back, when Gold had his fellowship at the Senator Russell B. Long Foundation and she was a research assistant doing advanced work in home economics, Andrea Conover had been too old for him. Now, nearing thirty-five, she was just right. Gold was no longer attracted to very young girls. With everybody doing everything to each other now, Gold had only his middle age and his large reputation as a minor intellectual to recommend him as a lover. It was all he wanted. He had never really liked going down.

Andrea was taller than he remembered. Or he had grown shorter. She paid for the drinks and dinner with a credit card, shyly confiding she would charge the expense to the Oversight Committee on Government Expenditures. Gold wondered what in the world she saw in him. She was easily the most beautiful woman he had ever been with, the richest, his first society girl. Her hair was blond. She had blue eyes, a small, straight nose, a broad forehead. Her complexion was light, her skin unmarred. To Gold, who was still shepherding the last of three children through orthodontia, her splendid teeth were of transcending symbolic importance. Her posture and muscle tone were good.

"You must learn to think more of yourself," he told her at one point during dinner, and took her hand lightly for a few seconds. "After all, if you are not for yourself, who else shall be for you?" A self-conscious prudence deterred him from attributing the paraphrase to Rabbi Hillel.

Andrea was timid and deferential, and he was not certain how to proceed with a woman of such quality. In the taxi outside her condominium he asked if he might come up for a drink. She consented with evident relief, grateful, it seemed, for his preemptive move. The apartment was large for a single person, even for one so tall, and the unexpected good order suggested the daily ministrations of an efficient cleaning woman. The furniture was ghastly, the pieces outsized.

"It was left this way when I bought it," he was pleased to hear her explain.

Gold took it as propitious that she seated herself on the sofa near him after bringing him his cognac.

"All that year together at the Senator Russell B. Long Foundation," she said with some bashfulness, sipping her vodka, "I thought you didn't like me."

"Really?" said Gold. "I always liked you. I thought you didn't like me."

"I always liked you."

"You should have said something."

"I thought you hated me. I never thought you even noticed me."

"Oh, come on."

"Really, Dr. Gold—"

"Call me Bruce," he interrupted.

She blushed. "I'm not sure I can."

"Try."

"Bruce."

"You see?" he laughed. "You're so much fun."

"Why did you think I hated you?"

"Because you knew I liked you," she answered.

"I didn't know you liked me," he said. "I thought you hated me." She was moderately overwrought, as though charged with something heinous. "Why would I hate you?"

"I don't know," said Gold, and noticed his hands moving about restlessly. "I had so little to offer a singly girl like you who was so sensitive and intelligent and even had her own Ph.D."

"I wouldn't have cared," she said in soulful apology "I was so impressed with you. Everyone was. You were always so quick and domineering and sexy."

"Sexy?" Gold was astounded.

"Of course. All the girls there thought so."

"Do you still," asked Gold, "think I'm sexy?"

"Oh, yes." She blushed again.

Gold wondered what to do next. He laughed loudly and punched her lightly on the arm, as one good fellow to another, and then brushed the back of his fingers against her cheek as though in unpremeditated extension of his jocular disbelief. Her reaction surprised him. Instead of stiffening or withdrawing, as he more or less expected her to do, she leaned into his hand and continued bringing herself toward him on the sofa. In a moment they were kissing. Brandy splashed on his knees as he blindly divested himself of his glass and took her in his arms. Her fingers were clasping the back of his head. Again, he was at a loss to proceed with a girl like her. He moved his lips about her ears and neck as though in thirsting search of an erogenous zone. A waste of time, he knew from experience. Erogenous zones were either everywhere or nowhere, and he meant to write about that someday, too, when neither Belle nor his daughter would be scandalized by his knowledge. With a guilty start he realized his mind had been wandering, and refocused his attention upon Andrea. He clutched her all the harder to compensate for moments lost in digression and feigned a gasping shortness of breath. Moaning softly, he kissed her eyes and waited for something to happen. Andrea dropped her hand into his lap and took hold of his penis. Then he knew he had it made.

Gold woke up in love and a believer in miracles Andrea did not seem to mind his scrawny chest and sinewy, hairy legs and arms. He showered and, after breakfast with Just a yellow towel knotted faddishly about his waist began to dress lazily. Gold had made the coffee while Andrea sliced overripe bananas into breakfast cereal. At his suggestion, she added raisins. On his next trip, he would bring her a coffee grinder, a pound of his favorite blend of coffee beans, and a French drip coffeepot of ceramic. Gold could cook when he had to. He would introduce her to Irish oatmeal.

"Will you want to see me again?" she asked from her dressing table.

"Of course," said Gold. "Lots of men don't."

"Lots of men?" Gold, sitting on the edge of her bed, paused with a sock halfway up his ankle.

She nodded, turning faintly pink. "I don't mean lots in here. But lots of men take me out and say they'll call me and then they never do."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. Do you really want to see me again? I'll understand if you don't."

"'I'd like to come back next week."

"You could stay here with me in the apartment," she said. "I won't be in the way."

"I was hoping you would ask." She was pleased. He was mystified. "I'm so glad you liked me," she told him. "Was I all right?"

"Andrea, you must never ask that," he instructed. As a matter of fact, she had not been all right, but Gold was far too astute to delve into that can of worms now. "And I think I'm in love with you."

Gold was struck afresh by the number of stunning tall women who fell in love with shorter men like himself who were rapacious, egotistical, and calculating. Surely, though, she must suspect he was shorter. The explanations that came most readily to the fore were anything but complimentary to either of them. Was it possible that someone so self-assessing as himself had qualities of attraction he was not aware of? It was possible, for Andrea in the nude was as gorgeous as he'd imagined, and she seemed to adore him.

In morning light her eyes were lavender. Her legs were long and straight, her hips small, her grip strong, and all her fair flesh was imbued with golden tinge that contrasted beautifully, he thought, with his own swarthier pigmentation. She loved his darker color. She was charmed by the hair on his chest. He watched with the possessive air of someone special as she slipped a tasteful print dress over her head and shook out her hair. That she was rich added an extra dimension of vitality and eroticism to the quixotic passion he felt for her. Nothing equals the foot for ugliness, Gold remembered Ernest Becker had written in The Denial of Death, but hers, both bare and shod, were as unremarkable to him as his own.

"When I was young," she ruminated aloud, adjusting a thin gold necklace, "I wanted to be a model. I guess I still do. Not a fashion model. A sex model." She applied makeup sparingly to her lips and eyes. "I wanted to be a cheesecake model or pose in the nude. Then when all these obscene newspapers and magazines began coming out, I wanted to be a pornographic model or act in dirty movies. I used to sit in front of a mirror for hours and practice sucking dicks. For the camera, I mean. Like those models in cosmetic ads. I got to be quite good at it, I think. Would you like to see?"

"I have to go back to New York," he replied in the steadiest voice.

"It's just a small motion of the mouth."

"I have a one o'clock class."

"It only takes a second, silly," said Andrea, and made a small motion of her mouth above her cylinder of pale lipstick. "Isn't that good?"

"Yes," said Gold. "That's quite good."


"I was such a ninny as a child, the only child of Pugh Biddle Conover," Andrea went on. "I didn't know anything until I left home. I had to go to two finishing schools before I was ready for college, and then to three colleges. At Smith the other girls would talk sex all the time, and I didn't understand. I remember I never could figure out why anybody would want to suck a rooster."


"Gold was immobilized. In less than two days in Washington he was learning to handle with numb amazement the many bizarre surprises to which he perceived he was going to be increasingly subjected. "I can see," he said, "how that might be confusing to someone who did not understand." He straightened his other sock and put on his shoes.

"Once I found out, of course," said Andrea, "I took to it all like a duck to water. Last summer I was at the swimming pool at Daddy's estate with this new beau, and he did the strangest thing. I was scraping a callus off the bottom of my foot with a callus scraper. He stood up suddenly and said he never wanted to see me again, and he drove away without packing his things or even saying goodbye to Daddy. Do you know why?"

Gold came up behind her and stroked her shoulders. "Were you near each other when you were scraping off the callus?"

"We were together at the pool."

"Does it make a noise?"

"Like sandpaper."

"I might have done the same thing."

"I don't know things like that."

"I will teach you."

Andrea pressed his hand to her lips rapturously. Gold wondered if she was crazy. "Sometime soon," she said, "if you still want to see me again—"

"I will want to see you again."

"Would you like to come out for a weekend to visit Daddy before he dies? It's really a lovely estate."

"What is your father ill with?"

"He won't say. Six years ago he bought an electric wheelchair, and he's been confined to it ever since. Every weekend he has mobs of people out to ride and shoot."

"Shoot?"

"Quail and pheasant. Sometimes rabbit and deer."

"No people?"

"Not yet. I think you'll enjoy meeting my "

"I shall spare you," said Gold, "from ever meeting mine."


"No one in our family," observed Gold's father that evening from the most comfortable chair in Gold's living room, "has ever had a divorce."

"Why not?" asked Dina.

"I don't allow them, that's why," the old man said. "Golds don't get divorces. We have death sometimes, but no divorces."

"Are you and Mommy ever going to get a divorce?" Dina inquired of Gold.

"Over my dead body," answered Gold's father.

"We'd rather have death," Gold added dryly, staring through bloodshot eyes from one speaker to the next.

In a day that had opened in glory for Gold and gone downhill steadily, the low point had been touched with his finding company for dinner. Rose and Max had traveled into the city because of a growth in her breast that had proved upon examination, thank God, to be an easily aspirated cyst. Belle, who accompanied them to the cancer specialist recommended by Murshie Weinrock, had invited them back to the apartment. Irv drove in later with the others. Gold's nerves were ragged. He had work he wanted to continue.

"When you starting in Washington?" his father asked.

"I have to go back next week. To find out."

"That's what I thought," jeered Julius Gold in satisfaction. "What kind of a job would they give to a Jew like you?"

"Admiral."

"Then me they would make a commodore," the old man shot back, "with all the sailing you done."

"How much you done?"

"I came by boat from Antwerp all the way from Russia with Sid and Rose from that Tsar Nikolai. You?"

"Okay, Commodore," Gold sighed with a strained smile. "We're all tired. Can you be a little quiet tonight?"

"He'll be quiet a long time," said Gold's stepmother.

Gold's father elevated himself half out of his armchair and screwed his face up into almost a point. "What's that mean?" he demanded.

"Well, in my family in Richmond," answered Gold's stepmother, concentrating on her knitting and looking weirder than usual in the large pink gingham bonnet she had worn all through the meal, "whenever a child would tell a parent to be quiet or still, the parent, usually the mother, would reply, Til be quiet a long time.' Meaning, of course, that she would soon be dead and would do no more talking."

A moment of shocked silence passed before his father growled, "Well, I ain't no mother. And I ain't doing no dying so soon. So please be quiet."

"She'll be quiet a long time," said Dina.

"Thank you, child."

Gold's father turned away from his second wife with an expression of profound disgust and told Gold, "You'll come to the house Sunday for lunch. Sid too."

"Not this weekend." Gold shook his head. "I've got papers to correct and an article to finish."

"Another article?"

"Another screw," said his stepmother, "seems to be coming loose."

Gold wanted to kill her. Irv grinned with the rest. "What's this one on?"

"Education."

"Are you for or against?" asked his father.

"Against."

"It's about time you got smart. It ain't done you so much good. Then you'll come next Sunday. I got questions about going back to Florida." He glanced about the room irritably and demanded, "Why ain't Sid here?"

"Maybe he wasn't invited."

"Why wasn't he invited?"

"Maybe you didn't ask us to."

"I have to ask?"

"I asked," said Belle. "They had someplace else to go."

The old man absorbed this information desolately. Rose was yawning and Max murmured that it was time to leave.

"Not so fast," objected the old man. "I got a couple of dead faygelehs I want to watch on television tonight."

Irv swore he would get him back to his own house in time.

Gold shot into his study before the last had gone and began separating his school work from his personal work while bluntly measuring the impact of the divorce he was considering. Belle could take care of herself. His father would be hurt, Sid wouldn't mind, his sisters would grieve. His stepmother could hang herself. His children could go fuck themselves—let their therapists worry about them. The boys were not bad, now that they were both out of the house. Dina was hell, one affliction he might reasonably have been spared, he felt, as his twelve-year-old daughter strolled in and said:

"Mom's really pissed, ain't she?"

"I haven't noticed." Gold did not look up.

"Don't shit me," said Dina. "She don't want you to go to Washington, does she?"

"I'll let you know when I find out."

"Balls, Dad. Listen, you better be goddamned careful what you put in any more articles you write. That crap on child rearing you had in the Ladies' Home Journal last year didn't do me no good."

"That was intended as a joke."

"Nobody got it."

"They'll get this one."

"What's it called?"

" 'Education and Truth or Truth in Education.'"

"I don't get it."

"Take a walk."

"How come I got to go to school if you don't believe in education?"

"It gets you out of the house."

"I'd really like to get out of this house. Living with you and she ain't no bed of roses, you know."

"Get good marks for a year," Gold urged. "And I'll sneak you into boarding school on a scholarship. Let me write your papers for you."

She shook her head. "Not a chance. I ain't ready for all that teen-age sex yet. I saw what you did to my brothers as soon as they went away. You turned their bedrooms into a study and a library."

"There's always room when they come home."

"On the floor. You ain't getting rid of me that fast. I told Lieberman's kid you're going to work in Washington."

Gold smiled in anticipation. "What'd you say?"

"I told him the President was giving you a job as a mayor or governor."

Gold flung down a pencil. "Oh, Jesus Christ. Don't they teach you nothing in that fucking school I send you to?"

"They try," Dina granted philosophically. "But I'm too smart for them. Listen, Dad, I'm warning you. You write anything about me in an article again and it'll be your ass."


Gold had written the opening paragraph of his article on education on the plane ride back from Washington and had completed most of the first draft in his classroom that afternoon instead of teaching. He had stacks of student blue books that would eventually have to be read. Dyspeptic and much put upon is how Gold would have described himself to a biographer if ever one should appear. Arriving at the college from the airport by cab late that morning, he was exactly in that physical and mental state. Already his remembrance of having made love to Andrea appeared to belong to an unrecoverable past.

He was unshaven and unprepared. He threw nearly all of his mail away. He acknowledged with a surly nod the greetings of colleagues, who were astonished to see him.

Gold never spent more time on campus than he had to and never went to faculty meetings. He posted a liberal schedule of office hours but did not keep them. Student conferences were by appointment only, and he never made any. Gold's favorites were those who dropped his courses before the term started. He disliked most the ones whose attendance was regular and whose assignments were completed on time. He was no more interested in their schoolwork than in his own. He arrived in the classroom five minutes late and, to the consternation of all, distributed examination booklets.

"Today," he began right in, "we're going to have one of those surprise examinations I may have mentioned. Write an essay in answer to a question that would lead you to discuss the high points of the work we've covered so far."

"What's the question?" asked a girl in front.

"Make one up. You'll be judged on the merit of your question as well as the quality of your answer. Begin."

Gold emptied his attaché case. There, still in a rubber band, was a bundle of blue books from his other undergraduate class, essays, he remembered with a sinking heart, on the psychology of sociology in contemporary American literature and on the sociology of psychology in English novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They had been written for a course devised by him with no better intent than to lure people into literature from psychology and sociology on the mistaken assumption they would be mastering all three disciplines simultaneously with no greater expenditure of labor or time. Soon, he perceived, he would have this new set of blue books to lug around like a millstone. Lacking anything better to do, he reread the opening paragraph he had written on a yellow pad on the airplane, was tickled by his felicity of thought and word, and took up a pen enthusiastically. His progress was rapid. He was about to move into the concluding section of his piece on education and truth when he was brought to a halt by the first of his students to finish, a pale, gangling young man wearing a woven skullcap of patterned circles.

"Mr. Epstein?" he called softly as the boy tiptoed past.

"Sir?"

"What high school did you go to?" They spoke in undertones.

"The Herzliah Yeshiva."

"Oh, yes. I know it well. That's in Brighton, isn't it?"

"No, sir. Borough Park."

"Have you ever heard of a holiday called Shmini Atzereth?"

"Yes, sir. It comes right after Yom Kippur."

Gold clicked his tongue in disappointment. "How about Shabbos Bereishes?"

"Last week. That's a calendar day, though, Professor Gold, rather than a holiday."

"Do something for me, Mr. Epstein. Give me a list of all the Jewish holidays and calendar days this year. And maybe in some way I'll be able to repay the favor soon."

"Yes, Professor Gold, I'll be glad to. I hope you won't mind if I tell you I'm very disappointed in the course."

Gold sighed sympathetically. "So am I. What's your complaint?"

"It's called 'Monarchy and Monotheism in Literature from the Medieval to the Modern.'"

"Yes?"

"But it seems to be a course in Shakespeare's history plays," said Mr. Epstein.

"We'll be moving on to the major tragedies soon," Gold answered breezily. "All but Othello and the Roman plays. In Othello, unfortunately, there is no monarch, and the Romans were not monotheistic."

"The course description in the college catalogue isn't accurate," Epstein complained.

"I know," said Gold. "I wrote it."

"Was that fair?"

"No. But maybe it was intelligent. We feel that anyone interested in literature ought to study Shakespeare and we know that few students will do so unless we call it something else."

"But I'm not interested in literature. I'm interested in God. I became an English major because the English Department seems to be offering so many courses in theology and religious visionary experiences."

"You were misled," said Gold. "If I were your adviser I would have forewarned you."

"You are my adviser," said the boy, "and you're never in your office."

Gold averted his eyes. "I'm always in class, though. If you'd like, I'll allow you to drop the course."

"Should I switch to the Department of Religion?"

"No, don't go there. You'll be reading Milton and Homer. Try Psychology if you're interested in God. I believe they've latched on to religion now."

"Where are the psychology courses?"

"In Anthropology. Soon everything is going to be in Urban Studies anyway, so you might as well major in that. But do it soon. Otherwise you might find me there in a year or two and have to read Shakespeare's history plays all over again."

Gold was praying hard that Epstein would drop his course before he had to read his essay.

Gold prayed also for an endowed chair in the Urban Studies Program that would double his salary while halving his course load. Gold had little doubt he would succeed in Washington if once given the chance, for he was a master at diplomacy and palace intrigue. He was the department's deadliest strategist in the conflict now raging to attract students to subjects in liberal arts from other divisions of the college and to subjects in English from other departments in liberal arts. Gold wrote the most enticing titles and descriptions for the college catalogue, and no one was more successful at originating popular new courses. Gold was the architect of an illicit and secret policy of détente that permitted members of the German Department to give courses in remedial English to Hispanic and Oriental students in exchange for votes on critical issues at faculty council meetings. Italy and Spain were reeling as a result, Classics was deserted, and France had been isolated. Russia was in decline, along with History, Economics, and Philosophy. China was reduced to a flash in the pan: only the courses in Chinese cooking enjoyed flourishing enrollments. In the most successful maneuver of all, Comparative Literature had been walled off from texts in translation, while Gold and his English Department were free to pillage the continent at will for such triumphant creations of his as "Dante, Hell, Fire, and Faulkner"; "Through Hell and High Water with Hemingway, Hesse, Hume, Hobbes, Hinduism and Others: A Shortcut to India"; "Blake, Spinoza, and Contemporary American Pornography in Film and Literature"; "Sex in World and American Literature"; and "The Role of Women, Blacks, and Drugs in Sex and Religion in World and American Film and Literature." It was now possible, in fact, thanks to the enterprise of Gold, for a student to graduate as an English major after spending all four years of academic study watching foreign motion pictures in a darkened classroom without being exposed for even one moment to any other light but that of a movie projector. As a result of these progressive innovations, the English Department was one of the few on campus with swelling registrations and a demonstrable need for a larger faculty, a need filled in part by professors of German teaching remedial English to natives of Hong Kong and Puerto Rico. Gold had made peace with the Hun and enjoyed the high regard of his superiors.

Gold himself was saturnine and subdued in the misanthropic pleasure he obtained from these accomplishments. His job was secure. He was esteemed by his colleagues and did not like that. He soon would be given tenure and didn't want it. He would rather feel at liberty. Gold possessed an advantage at the college similar to one he enjoyed with his family; if he did not talk, his relatives assumed he was thinking; if he did not go to faculty meetings, it was taken for granted he was engaged in more important matters. Like a Paramecium feeding blindly and incessantly, the English Department, under Gold's initiative and supervision, had stealthily been subsuming more and more areas of the Urban Studies Program through a schedule of courses he'd invented called "Recent American Realistic Problem Literature,of the City."

Gold had no clear idea yet what Urban Studies was about. But he knew he could do that shit as well as anybody else.


Gold who adamantly repelled conversational overtures on planes from everybody but attractive women, had plunged into his New York Times that morning with hawklike predacity as soon as he was seated on the shuttle returning him to New York. He had called Andrea from the airport in Washington and knew he would phone again from LaGuardia to say he missed her still. He quickly found himself at one of the important sections of the newspaper that interested him the most, the social page. Life in the city had gone spinning on without him. He read:

"It's to die" bubbled Jan Chipman jammed on a banquette with her sister Buffy Cafritz, the Carleton Varneys and the Harold Reeds. "I wouldn't believe that my husband would sit on a floor to watch a fashion show."

Gold could believe it. With fingernails curving like claws, he separated the paragraph from the page and placed the ragged clipping between the leaves of his memorandum pad as frugally as a European bus conductor making change. He would use it, perhaps in his book on Jews. A fragment of political news on the front page kicked over in his memory, and he turned back to read:

In Indianapolis this morning, the President defended himself against a charge that he was a weak President who allowed himself to be "pushed around." "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," he retorted at a news conference.

Gold tore it out. Undoubtedly his President needed him. Business conditions were the same, he saw in the financial section, the verities of the free marketplace eternally unchanged, although he had to read the key sentence a second time to be sure:

Now, however, some analysts believe that the Federal Reserve Bank has stiffened its credit posture because of the growing danger of an economic recovery.

In education, the paper recorded a 55 percent increase in crimes in schools:

The number of reported acts of crime and violence in the city's schools, including assaults on teachers, has risen sharply this fall. This improvement followed a sharp upward trend in crime during the school year ended last June.

Gold was filled with inspiration suddenly for a brilliant opening to his "Education and Truth or Truth in Education." He wrote:

Education is the third greatest cause of human misery in the world. The first, of course, is life.

Here he had to pause. He had no idea of the second. Death was tempting. Death after life was either very good or very bad. It was glib, and might be mistaken for wit. He decided to chance it. He was on his way with another telling piece that might bring him to the attention of an admiring multitude larger than he had yet enjoyed. He closed his eyes and smiled. Gold was never invited to fashion shows. Soon he would be. He wondered if Mr. Chipman had enjoyed sitting on the floor the evening earlier and if he was eager to do so again. He was saddened that any reply by Buffy Cafritz to her sister had gone unreported and was probably lost for all time. Gold was good at daydreaming and gave himself up to the contemplation of what it would be like to work with Ralph for the President, marry Andrea, share her apartment in Washington, fuck her richer and even more attractive friends, serve on a Presidential Commission on education, and be an overpaid professor of Urban Studies. It was to die.