VII

Bruce Gold still could not understand how any Jew of right mind and good character would have put himself in the service of Richard Nixon, and he could think of none who had. Those Jews who did work in that administration were possibly the only educated adult witnesses in creation who failed to recognize in Vice President Spiro Agnew's malignant assaults on the press a mischievous campaign of camouflaged anti-Semitism. Or else they did, and affected not to.

"Invite a Jew to the White House (and You Make Him Your Slave)" was the defiant title Gold gave to the invidious diatribe he wrote in the fit of smoldering pique into which he had been plunged by Lieberman's invitation to the White House in return for supporting American combat activities in the war in Vietnam. In a spurt of creative activity motivated as much by hostile emotion as by principle, Gold had completed a powerful first draft at near-record velocity. Unflinchingly he delved back from the present to President Eisenhower and the Rosenberg trial for his earliest models of that docile subservience endemic to the breeds of craven, watchful opportunists he was inspecting at length with such intrepid vindictiveness and excoriating contempt. Gold was no longer keen to publish his "Invite a Jew to the White House (and You Make Him Your Slave)." If he did, he might never again be invited to the White House.

"Would you be interested in something important in the Department of Agriculture if something should open up there first?" asked Ralph when Gold dropped by once more to bid him another disappointed goodbye.

"No."

"I hardly blame you." Ralph slipped into his jacket to stroll partway back with him. "Imagine the absurdity of a social order in which the overproduction of food becomes an economic catastrophe. How much easier things would be if we nationalized all our basic resources. And how lucky we are that most of the country doesn't know that."

"You talk," said Gold with eyes narrowing warily, "almost as though you believed in socialism."

"Oh, I do," said Ralph, "with all my heart. And every day I thank my stars that others don't and allow people like you and me to live in such extraordinary privilege. You've been here before, haven't you?"

Gold glanced across the avenue at the meadow inclining upward to the base of the Washington Monument. "On a peace march," he admitted. "But that was very late, Ralph, when a lot of people had turned against the Vietnam war. You were on one too, I believe."

"I was on all," said Ralph, and Gold had the disquieting feeling he was being probed. He did not believe Ralph for a second. "I hated that war, Bruce," Ralph went on without noticeable change in his breezy spirits, "and just about every one of those government officials under Johnson, Nixon, and Ford who conspired to keep us in or raised no public objection to help get us out. What swine! It may be the one thing in the world I feel serious about, that and marriage. The lies, Bruce, oh, the lies. Forget the horror if you will—fifty thousand Americans killed, hundreds of thousands maimed, a million or more Asians—but who can forget those lies? They're guilty, Bruce, of atrocious war crimes, all of them, and I feel they ought to be hanged by the neck until dead. I certainly don't think they should be forgiven too quickly or that any of their names should be forgotten so soon." Gold maintained his silence stolidly, thanking God it was Ralph, rather than himself, who was voicing these stringent sentiments. "I'm not just talking about Jews like Walt Whitman Rostow and Henry A. Kissinger," Ralph resumed after an interim sufficient for Gold to endorse or dispute these views if he were disposed to do either. "I also mean people with names like Ball, Brown, Bundy, Bunker, Clifford, Eagleburger, Haig, Humphrey, Kleindienst, Laird, Lodge, Lord, Martin, McNamara, Mitchell, Moynihan, Richardson, Rockefeller, Rusk, Valenti, Vance, Warnke, Ziegler, and Javits."

"Javits?" The word erupted from Gold in an expulsive reflex. "Javits was Jewish, Ralph."

"Jack?"

"His real name was Jacob."

"Why wasn't he called Jake?"

"Because that's how some people are."

"A Republican?" A momentary smile flickered quizzically over Ralph's amiable, blameless features, forcing Gold to squirm. "I must say that a Jewish Republican has always seemed to me somewhat tainted and droll." Gold could hardly dissent. In any such galaxy of the incongruous he would also include Jews on ski slopes, tennis courts, and horseback; and those in polka-dot bow ties had always impressed him offensively as specious and profane, and flamboyantly unconvincing as both Christians and Jews. Heavy drinking, adultery, and divorce were other alien cultural peccadilloes he could list, but he preferred leaving himself out of it. "It's another reason I distrusted Kissinger from the start and always found him something of a clown," Ralph continued with a quiet laugh. "You know I'm not anti-Semitic, Bruce. But I must admit I was tickled when I learned that Kissinger had gone down on his knees with Nixon in the Oval Office to pray on the carpet there. Do Jews kneel when they pray, Bruce? I didn't realize that."

Gold was not positive. "I don't think so."

"Maybe that's why they wear those prayer rugs around their shoulders in church—" Ralph pursued the subject unheedingly—"so they can fall to their knees on a moment's notice and pray on a carpet whenever they want to."

"They're shawls, Ralph, not rugs," said Gold with the devout wish they might talk of something else, "they're in temple, not church, and we don't kneel when we pray or use prayer rugs. Arabs do."

"Then why did Kissinger?"

"Because he's Kissinger, that's why," Gold answered with acerbity. "It was probably easier, that's why."

"I must admit I detested him," said Ralph. "I have to confess I always thought of Kissinger as a greasy, vulgar, petulant, obnoxious, contemptible, self-serving, social-climbing Jewish little shit."

Gold, who'd been nodding along as slavishly as a faithful dog to the syllabic tempo of Ralph's adjectives, now came to a rather sudden stop.

"Ralph," he inquired in a most tentative manner, "are you absolutely sure you're not anti-Semitic?"

"Because I hate Kissinger?" Ralph dismissed the preposterous imputation with a good-humored shake of his head. "Oh, no, Bruce. I wouldn't know how to be anti-Semitic if I tried. By the way, Bruce, one word to the wise—people here might get the idea you're clannish if you keep on defending him so loyally."

"I was not defending him!" shouted Gold with ferocity at the fantastic charge he was partial to the person in the universe he probably liked least. "I was merely wondering," he said with strained composure, "whether you say that because he's Kissinger or because he's Jewish."

"Because he's Kissinger, Bruce," Ralph answered artlessly with an ingrained seriousness that would have convinced the most skeptical of the purity of his thoughts. "How could I possibly be anti-Semitic? I'm indebted to you for so much. I used your research to get through graduate school."

"And got better grades," Gold remembered.

"I used your paper on Tristram Shandy."

"And got yours published, without giving me credit."

"I couldn't do that, Burce, without getting us both expelled. I'm even using your hotel room now every time you come to Washington."

"And having more fun, probably, than I am."

"You'll find a telephone message there from Lieberman asking you to talk to me. And another from Belle reminding you of your father's anniversary party Friday. I thought you left Belle."

"I did," said Gold, with some shifty disturbance of mind. "The problem is that I'm not entirely sure she knows I've gone."

There was no way to overstate the look of awe with which Ralph all at once was gaping at him. "Deep, , Bruce, oh, you are deep," he explained in a devoted whisper, tapping his nose excitedly. "My God, if I'd been clever enough for that I might still be playing with all of mine. No, it's better to be free of them before they start getting their backaches and polyps. Please give your father my love, Bruce. And try to convince yourself there's no such thing as anti-Semitism any more. Why, we've even got a Jewish FBI man now. Would you like to meet him?" Gold thought not. "I'm afraid you'll have to, Bruce. He's on your case."

"My case?"

"And handling it brilliantly," said Ralph. "He's the one who uncovered that stunning comment of yours that Harvard and West Point together have afflicted civilization with a greater number of harmful blockheads than all other institutions in the history of the world, combined."

Gold surveyed him with shock. 'That was a joke, Ralph," he exclaimed in frightened protest, and then a feeling of dismay swept over him. "Oh, shit, Ralph— has someone from the FBI been investigating me already?"

"He's one of our best men. We call him Bulldog."

"He should know I wasn't serious. Ralph, I made that remark nearly ten years ago at the University of Oklahoma when I was kidding around in a question-and-answer session."

"It happens," said Ralph, "to be true. And one of our most closely guarded secrets. I know you were thinking mainly of officials, but throw in the whole Yale graduate body and you've got it just about right. You must have known you'd need a security check and a thorough physical exam. Under current guidelines you can use any Jewish specialist or get your checkup free at Walter Reed Memorial."

"I'd rather use Murshie Weinrock."

"The FBI will be in touch. And from now on, let us see anything new you write before you publish it."

"For clearance?"

"For ideas. With so many people doing so much pontificating these days, it's become just about impossible for anyone to say anything new that doesn't immediately sound trite and dishonest. That's where your real contribution to the country can be, Bruce. We'll need something good soon on blight."

"Blight?"

"Urban, not elm."

"Are we for it or against it?"

"Neither," said Ralph. "But we have to make some kind of pretense, and the President will want something fresh."

Gold rose spontaneously to the occasion with that aptitude for the expedient that occasionally was mistaken by others for brilliance. "I may have just the thing," he volunteered. "There's this section of my book I'm preparing for Pomoroy and Lieberman on the decline of Coney Island that uses roller coasters, carousels, and fun houses as metaphors for social cycles. I can easily expand it to embrace all the violence and decay of our inner cities. I can make it funny,"

"That sounds like just the thing," Ralph rejoiced. "Send us a copy. And next, maybe you can give me a hand with the Washington Monument."

Gold found himself peering sideways at Ralph again. "In what way, Ralph?"

"It's been bothering me, Bruce, ever since I got here." Ralph scratched his head mournfully. "It reminds me of something, and I can't for the life of me remember what—not a phallic symbol, but something else."

"An Egyptian obelisk?"

"Oh, Bruce, what a mind you have, what a mind-boggling mind!" cried Ralph, looking absolutely astonished. "You know all you need to know, don't you? It just boggles my mind how you keep boggling my mind. Incidentally, Bruce, what does boggle mean? I've been looking it up everywhere but can't seem to find it in any dictionary in the world, and no one I ask is sure."

Gold said, "There's no such word."

"Really?" Ralph found this curious. "How are we able to use it if it doesn't exist as a word?"

"Because that," said Gold, "is how people are."

The interview took place an hour later in Gold's hotel room. The Jewish FBI man had hair like wrought iron and a neck and face that seemed to have been grown in a foundry.

"Greenspan's the name, Dr. Gold," he began without loss of time, "Lionel Greenspan. May I be frank?"

"Sure, Frank."

"You're a shonda to your race."

"Pardon?" Not in Gold's memory had so ingratiating a pleasantry of his fallen so flat.

"You're a shonda to your race," Greenspan repeated. "I say it more in sorrow than in anger."

"What are you talking about?"

"I have to be frank," said Greenspan grimly. "Dr. Gold, is your wife, Belle, a Communist?"

"No, why?"

"Then how come you're fucking all these other women?"

Gold sat down slowly. He was familiar with practical jokes. This was not one. "I like it." For the next few moments only the sound of their tense breathing could be heard. "And there aren't so many."

Greenspan had recourse to a leather-bound memo pad. "There's this gentile girl you're secretly engaged to, there's this married woman in Westchester who sneaks into the city once a month on a shopping trip, there's this Belgian exchange student in Romance languages at Sarah Lawrence who—"

"That was last year!"

"And then we have Felicity Plum."

"Miss Plum?" Greenspan nodded with a critical look which Gold indignantly returned. "I never fucked Miss Plum."

"She says you did. She tells everyone you're great."

"I'm not. Greenspan, it's a lie. I never even touched her."

"You held her against your member twice."

"Once."

"I have it twice."

"You have it wrong. Greenspan, can't you make her stop? A story like that can ruin me."

"We can only try," said Greenspan solicitously. "We have the duty of guarding your reputation as well as your person. But I want to be frank. Professor Gold, there'll be nothing we can do if she decides to write a book and gets a lucrative contract."

"I'll sue the shit out of her," vowed Professor Gold, "that's what I can do."

"You're reaping the whirlwind," Greenspan philosophized, and then charged at Gold alarmingly with his hands lifted. "Mend your ways, I beg you, before it's too late," he broke out in a quavering voice. "Do it for my sake, if not for your own. Oh, Dr. Gold, if I could only tell you how many times my heart was broken, over and over again, by that momzer Henry Kissinger. Please don't put me through that again. How sick I was when he raised his voice to Golda Meir. How I wept, wept, Dr. Gold, when I found out he went down on the floor—without even a hat on, I betcha—to pray with that shaygetz Nixon." Now Greenspan was brandishing a fist in anguish. "With his own people he don't go to temple, but on his knees he goes down on a carpet to pray with that vontz. Dr. Gold, I suffered. I'm not making a joke. I must be frank."

"Am I cleared or ain't I?" Gold interrupted wearily. "Greenspan, stick to the goddamned point."

"I'm not sure. It's why I say you're a shonda"

"You're going to disqualify me for fucking girls? I'm not the first, am I?"

"Not just for fucking girls, Dr. Gold," Greenspan justified himself decorously. "You're vulnerable to blackmail in the interests of a foreign power by anyone who knows all the facts."

"Who knows all the facts?"

"The FBI knows all the facts."

"Is the FBI likely to blackmail me in the interests of a foreign power?"

"You pass," Greenspan said with reluctance and snapped his pad closed. "Since you're almost a government official, it's almost our duty to protect your life. Call on me for help if you find yourself in danger."

"How can I reach you?"

"Talk to the wall." Greenspan went for his gun at Gold's blistering look of reproach.

"Say that again?" dared Gold.

"You can talk to the wall. Here, I'll show you." Greenspan came zigzagging back with his large, hard head hanging forward and called, "Testing, one, two, three, four. Do you read me?"

"I read you clearly, Bulldog," came a voice from his stomach.

"I've got a bug in my belly button," explained Greenspan. "It looks just like skin. I'll see you very shortly," he concluded in a way Gold found sinister. "Have a good time at Muriel's and I hope when we meet again it will be on a happier occasion."

"Muriel's? What's at Muriel's?"

"Your father's tenth anniversary party. Leah thinks it's nice that you're having a tenth anniversary party for your father and stepmother, when they've only been married six years, five months, and nineteen days. Leah is my wife now for twenty years, four months, and eleven days, and in all that time—in all that time, I'm not boasting, Dr. Gold, but simply stating a true fact—in all that time I never once lusted for another woman. I remember my own dear departed father." That memory detonated in Greenspan a final shot at bathos, and he came blubbering back toward Gold with a face drenched in revolting piety and goodwill. "If you won't do it for me, at least do it for your sweet old father. Give up sex," he entreated with outstretched, shaking arms, "and go back to your wife. Adultery might be all right for them, but not for us."

"Brush up on your Bible, Greenspan," Gold told him. "We found it first. We were even fucking sheep when we couldn't get Canaanites and Philistines."

Greenspan answered coldly, "You're a shonda to your race."

"You're a credit to yours."

"Our race, Dr. Gold, is the same."

"Beat it, Bulldog," ordered Gold and began talking to the wall the second he was alone. "Get me New-some," he burst out angrily. "Tell him it's an emergency." Ralph was on the phone in a minute. "Ralph, that fucking cocksucker Greenspan has been following me everywhere. He knows everything about me."

"Did you pass? What did he say?"

"He wants to be frank. For Christ sakes, you should have given me warning. If I'm going to be subjected to the degradations of public office, I at least want the office. Or you and the President will get shit from me on blight, Ralph, I'm warning you now."

"Please don't quit us," Ralph begged. "Not while the President is having all these terrible problems with inflation, unemployment, disarmament, and Russia."

"I haven't even been hired."

"You've already been promoted."

"To what? Give me a sign, Ralph. Say something public or I might have to start meeting those fucking classes of mine again. I hate teaching. No one knows I'm playing this important role in the Administration. I don't even think Andrea really believes it and she sure as hell won't marry me until she does."

"Would you love a balloon?" asked Ralph.

"I'd adore a lollipop."

"A trial balloon," Ralph explained. "We'll launch one this afternoon and see if it lands in the public eye."

Belle found his name in the newspaper first the following morning and called it to Gold's attention while serving him breakfast. Gold saw no pragmatic need for reaffirming to Belle he'd moved out until he had actually done so; Andrea could not sew or iron and Gold did not have the time. Under "Notes on People," the gossip portion of the Times certain to be seen by more of his cultivated associates than any other section of the news, Gold read of unconfirmed rumors from an unnamed source about his imminent appointment to a high Administration post that a government spokesman refused to comment upon and about which a senior White House official professed to have no knowledge he could reveal. "I just don't know," said the senior White House official, when pressed by journalists for details.

Overnight, Gold had increased in status prodigiously. Royally he extended his hand for the New York Daily News and found:

Everyone is dressing—or trying to. Maggie and Clyde Newhouse have asked the ladies invited to their black-tie party for Nedda and Josh Logan to wear flowers in their hair, preferably fresh ones. And the Cooper-Hewitt Museum is encouraging the male guests at the Regency Ball to wear whiskers and waistcoats.

Imperiously, Gold drew a line. The Newhouses could go fuck themselves, and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum could kiss his ass. Gold wasn't wearing whiskers, and no woman with a flower in her hair was getting anywhere with him.

"When you die," asked Gold's stepmother of Gold's father in a lull toward the end of the dinner party commemorating their sixth-and-a-half wedding anniversary, "where would you like me to put you?"

The aforementioned lull was as nothing compared to the silence that gripped the others now. Even Muriel's vacuous teen-age daughter finally terminated her conceited prattling to wait with dread. At last Julius Gold found the capability to reply.

"What?" he growled incredulously with his eyes straining in their sockets. Every vein in his face seemed swollen to bursting, and Gold was sure it would happen then, apoplexy, right there in Muriel's dining room, instead of a painless demise in Florida, where Sid could close out that whole generation on a single trip with no inconvenience to the others.

"When you die," Gussie Gold repeated to Julius Gold, without lifting her gaze from her knitting, "what do you want me to do with you? Where would you like me to put you?"

It required but an instant longer of calculation for the old man to persuade himself that he could indeed believe his ears. "In the kitchen under the table!" he thundered in reply and, with beetling brow and gigantic, writhing tremor, twisted away from her in his chair as though from the most frightful misfortune ever conjured up to human sight by some foul destiny.

"Julius, I am being serious," said Gold's stepmother. "How would you like me to dispose of your remains?"

"Never mind my remains, you cockeyed lunatic," the old man roared his reply at her with bared teeth. "And just what makes you so sure," he gloated, a note of triumph stealing into his voice, "you're going to live longer than me?"

"I'm younger," she answered securely. "And when I die, I won't have a problem. I have my own burial plot in Richmond, Virginia, and I can always find room, if need be, in the ancestral grounds in the Jewish cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina, although they frequently have moisture there, I'm told—the land is so damp and low, you know—even though air of my relations on the Charleston side of the family have refused to have intercourse with me"—Gold was consoled by some sixth sense that his was not the only countenance that was falling—"since I married your father."

There was an audible halt in all respiration for a moment and then a common resumption of life when she concluded her account with no debauchery more scandalous than the slighting allusion to the low estate in which the old man was held by the Charleston side of her family.

"I got a cemetery plot of my own," Gold's father was already retorting. "I don't need yours."

"I was merely trying to find out, Julius, whether you would rather be laid to rest in your plot or in mine."

"In mine. It's better."

"Have you got room?"

"Sure I got room. I bought for everybody."

Sid bent forward worriedly. "When was that?"

"When I came here and found good work. I bought for the whole family. I bought for Momma and me"—his voice grew faint as his confidence subsided visibly—"and Rosie . . . and you. That was the family"

"That's only four," Ida counted with her flair for the literal. "Mother has one. One from four leaves three."

"It's not enough—we'll have to get more," cried a voice Gold could not place as he sat groaning inwardly with a mental agony no words could describe.

"Don't argue," ordered his father. "I know what I did and I know what I said. I bought for everyone and that's where you're all going whether there's room or not and that's it. Finished. Fartig."

"I've got a family plot of my own now," apologized Sid. "Mine wasn't good enough?"

"I've got my own family now, Pa."

"And we want our children to be buried with us," Harriet added with spiteful determination. "And our grandchildren too. Sid, are you sure we have enough? We didn't count on having four children. And we might have to make room for my mother and my sister."

"You can use some of ours. Max has plenty."

"I don't have one. Mendy went with his family."

"Maybe they're holding a place for you," said Milt. "If not, I'd love to have you come with me."

"She's coming into mine," snarled old Karamazov. "All my children are going with me, and all my grandchildren. That's where I want them."

"Well, we want ours with us," said Lady Chatterley. "And our grandchildren too."

"We might not have room, Harriet," said poor Twemlow in an effort to placate both. "And the kids might have plans of their own."

"They're not adding up," said the venerable Chancellor of the Exchequer with the ostentatious vanity of a swain showing off to Esther his perspicacious powers of leadership. "How many have you?"

Cinderella shrugged.

"We have some to spare," said Irv, smiling amenably until tiny Clytemnestra shot him a nasty look with a legible message: She did not want nonprofessional people like Victor or Max lying in peace with her. "But we don't. I forgot my brother. Now that he's divorced we might have to let him in."

"His wife got custody?"

"He can come into mine."

"No, he can't, Mr. Dummy," said Muriel, and her daughter sniggered behind her hand at this rude disparagement of her father. , "Your own children come before strangers. And it isn't even ours. The family plot is in your brother's name. Everything's in his name, isn't it, even most of the business?" A dark flood of embarrassment swept over Victor's ruddy face, turning him maroon.

"How many have you got?" Quilp demanded of Gold a second time, and turned into Max.

Gold had none.

"I may need one soon for my mother," politely entreated Sophronia, who'd said scarcely anything else all evening and began to bear an uncanny resemblance to Belle. "I'm sure there's room left with my father, but I've forgotten where we put him."

"We've got to get more!" cried someone shrill.

"It's crazy to buy now."

"Real estate can only go up."

"Now ain't the time."

"We can run it like the opposite of a beef and veal inventory," Victor said, recuperating, and tittered ridiculously. "First one out, first one in."

"It makes more sense to buy," persisted Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and somewhere about here it dawned forcibly upon Gold that there was a nice distinction between "incredible" and "unbelievable" which he'd overlooked all his life. That was "incredible" which merely was unexpected or not most obviously foreseen. "Unbelievable" was something that absolutely, even by the most elastic stretch of faith or the imagination, could not be believed. This was unbelievable!

In other families relatives quarreled over cash and bibelots; here they bickered over burial plots. Every instinct instructed him he could never introduce a single one, not even Joannie, to Andrea or the glittering new social circles awaiting him in Georgetown, Bethesda, Alexandria, Chevy Chase, McLean, and the Pugh Biddle Conover hunt country of Virginia. They were not coming to his inauguration—that much was sure. He would lie and say he had no tickets. He would noise it about through Ralph that he was a foundling. The children would understand and explain everything. The children would understand and explain nothing, the carping fucks. All they wanted . . . Gold was shaken from his melancholy ruminations when he perceived his father haranguing the room in a violent outburst, strangling with rage and bellowing in indignation simultaneously with each wheezing gasp for air.

"I don't want no more talk about dying and funerals, you hear?" he shouted with finality, pausing to huff with slack lips, and promptly transgressed his own injunction with his inflamed and mottled face aimed mainly at Sid. "You want to know about dying and funerals? I'll tell you about dying and funerals. In my day—" he sputtered to another halt, pointing a trembling finger in blazing frustration while he battled for breath to continue, and found pushed upon him immediately from all sides plates of cakes and cookies and pitchers of coffee and tea, which he batted away with the backs of both hands, emitting wild and sibilant incoherent objections while his arms flapped—"in my day, we didn't push people away from their children and their grandchildren when they began to be old. They died near their homes and their families. Like your mother did. And your mother's mother, she died in my house, and my own mother, in my brother Meyer's house she died when we brought her here. Today you wouldn't even bring me here, would you? She was almost ninety and she couldn't see, and her hands and face shook like Jell-O, but we kept her till the end. With bundles they came and slept on the floor until someplace else they could find, like we did in my brother Meyer's house. You and Rosie should remember, if you want to, and maybe Esther. Your mother's brothers and sisters I took in too, even when I didn't like them. And when they were sick and dying we didn't send them away to condominiums and nursing homes. We stayed together, even when we couldn't stand each other. Some sons I got. Once I could break your back with my belt buckle or a clothes hanger if I wanted to, and I never did. Now I'm sorry I didn't. Now you try to move me here and there like a dumb baby that don't know what you're doing, but I see what you're doing, I still got something up here. I got money of my own and can stay where I want. Only my daughter Joannie in California treats me with love and respect while I'm still alive. Once a month she calls me, without fail. That's when!" His voice rose suddenly with a hard, vindictive laugh. "When I'm toyt, geshtor-ben! Sure, that's when I'll go back to Florida and you can buy me my condominium, when I'm dead and ready for d'rerd, and that's where I want you to put me when I die, in the kitchen under the table!"

The old man's eyes were spilling over with tears when he stopped, and Gold did not think he had ever seen a sicker group of listeners. Gold defended himself against anything like shame or penitence with the lurking suspicion his father himself had not experienced one spark of the feelings he had stirred in the others, and the proof was not long in coming.

"You always said you wanted to retire to Florida," Sid defended himself feebly.

"Now I don't. Ich fur nisht." The old man surveyed them all defiantly with a look of spleen. "I ain't going back till I'm good and ready, which might be never."

"You promised," reminded Harriet. "You gave us your word."

"So what?" answered Gold's father and cocked his head to the side while exploding in a fit of triumphant laughter which ended quite suddenly, and Gold could not imagine a more crafty or disreputable figure anywhere on earth. "Why must I smoke these cheap cigars?" he complained with whining belligerence. "Why can't you buy me a good one for my anniversary if you really like me? And I don't want no more talk about cemetery plots either, no more. That subject is. closed."

"My father," began Gold's stepmother with queenly dignity, drawing a very deep breath and pursuing her work with her knitting needles as she spoke, "gave me a rather large and very beautiful cemetery plot as part of my wedding present. That was a nice stitch, wasn't it? Isn't this a beautiful stitch? Look, everybody. Everybody look at my beautiful stitch. There was room for eight of us, and I, in my childish innocence, honestly believed it was enough for a lifetime. Oh, how young and inexperienced I was. I once was a virgin, you know. When my first husband died, my real husband, that is, not him, he was buried there, of course, in the place of honor, and I looked forward so to the happiness we would share when I joined him there. Sometimes I could hardly wait. Shortly afterward, my husband's father died, my father-in-law, that is, and simple decency required me to honor my mother-in-law's appeal to put him near his firstborn son when she explained how much it might mean to both, even though they did not get along in life. Well, no sooner was he interred there, it seemed, than she passed away too, and I thought it only suitable that she be placed alongside her husband and my husband. I know I would want that if the situations were reversed. Three of my places were gone in almost the twinkling of an eye, and just as I was catching my breath, dear me, my husband's brother dropped. He was something of a spendthrift and a ne'er-do-well, and since he had neglected to acquire adequate land for himself and his loved ones, and since so much of his family was already there, I thought it a cruelty to turn him away and send him off God knows where to spend the rest of his days with strangers. So I took him in too. Then his wife died, of grief or kidney failure, they say, and next a woman he had been seeing secretly all his life expired of love and loneliness or drink—her physician told us in professional confidence that it is often impossible to tell the difference between the ravages of deep love and cheap whiskey on the vital organs—and had no place else to go. I let her in too, although I'm still not easy in my mind about the propriety of allowing all three to lie in the same bed, so to speak, although it's hardly what we would choose to call a bed of roses, is it? That made six. Well, I can't say how the seventh person got in or find out who he even is, but someone is there—of that there is no doubt—and that leaves room for just one more, Julius, me, which is why I'm trying to find out where you'd like to be. If you do want to come with me rather than with your first wife, I'm sure we can find a lovely spot for you very close by, perhaps even in walking distance, if we begin looking how. I know I would be happy with that, for I'm not sure how comfortable I'll be surrounded by so many in-laws and one person I don't know at all. Please let me know while you still have time to decide. Would one of you sweet children bring me a clean glass of water? I am dry from talking, and I'll need just the tiniest sip if I'm to continue."

The rush to the doors of the dining room would have demolished a house less sturdily constructed. Gold flew past the kitchen and came to a stop at the bar beside Max, who had to squint to see him. Max, with his diabetic condition, ought not to have been drinking at all. The pouches under the sad man's eyes were tinged with blue and he had the listless and cadaverous demeanor of a man who had given up.

"How are things, Max?" Gold inquired squeamishly.

"Fine, fine, Bruce, very good, good," said Max. "Not so good, I guess. Norma broke up with her fellow in San Francisco and thinks she wants to go back to graduate school to get her degree after she takes another half year off. She was down in Los Angeles a week or month ago and had lunch or dinner with Joannie. I think they had a fight or an argument. She says Joannie was mean to her."

"Joannie wouldn't be mean."

"Maybe Norma was a little touchy, I guess." Max shuffled nervously. "We saw your name in the papers again, Bruce. Rose showed it to everyone in her office. Maybe if the postal rates go up we'll get a really big raise, do you think?" asked this sallow, saturnine, ailing man who had once scored second highest in the state on a Civil Service examination for a job in the Post Office Department and was glorified for one day by a paragraph and a picture in the Brooklyn section of the New York Sunday News. "Wouldn't you say that was only fair?" He used to give Gold dimes. "It's a nice party, isn't it?"

It was a dismal party—Muriel was a despotic hostess, and she and Ida had been clashing all evening—and Gold sought refuge in one of the many small television dens with which the house was appointed. He was grossly disheartened when Muriel's daughter followed him there with the request that he speak at her high school.

"My teacher isn't sure what you do but she says everyone will be interested in hearing you."

"Please tell her I'm not doing any speaking at this time, Cheray," Gold said tactfully.

The older of the two girls, Simone, had dressed up garishly and departed before dinner to watch television with a girl friend across the street with whom she was dieting.

"Do you like this new purse too, Uncle Bruce?" the younger asked him now with her thin, somewhat inane, nervous laugh. "Mommy bought it for me also but she doesn't want Daddy to know, so please don't tell him. Or do you like the other one better with these shoes?"

"Why don't you show it to your Aunt Rose and Aunt Esther?" he replied after a lengthy silence. It was painful to Gold to observe how Muriel had influenced her daughters to disparage their father, and he felt compassion for Victor. Like Muriel, both girls were heavily rouged and wore large rings and many thin bracelets on both arms. "They'll know better than me, and I know they'll be pleased."

"They're both so old." The girl made an unpleasant face. "I'd rather sit here with you and learn things. You're young. Mommy doesn't like Aunt Joannie. We haven't seen her for years."

"You should go talk to them anyway, Cheray," Gold chided soberly, "and to Grandpa too. All of them love you very much. And you really shouldn't make fun of your father, especially to other people. He's really a very generous man."

The girl checked him with another gesture of distaste. "He probably doesn't even notice. Do you like this skirt better with these shoes and blouse or the other blue one, Uncle Bruce? Mommy likes us to look nice when we go out with her and her friends." The girl had the jittery habit of masking her mouth with a hand and giggling before disclosing anything she deemed of unusual interest. "I go out a lot with her and Simone on Saturdays now. I even go with them to the racetrack sometimes, but she doesn't want Daddy to know, so please don't tell him. Mommy knows lots of men and women who are much more fun than Daddy, but she doesn't want him to know, so please don't tell him. Where are you going?"

Gold explained he was rejoining the rest of the family and ambled away with a barren smile and the dreary intuition that the day was fast approaching when, at Victor's tearful bidding, he would have to elucidate for Muriel the distinction between a whore and a cunt and illustrate how it was possible to be one without also being the other. And an uncomprehending Victor would beg him to continue reasoning with her to save his marriage, his children, and his home. Muriel, at fifty-two, Gold saw, was copying Joannie at eighteen, and envy, not disapproval, was at bottom of the unrelenting enmity she still bore the wayward youngest sister.

It was a cheerless prospect that met Gold's eyes in the large family room, where Ida and Muriel were disagreeing heatedly over the Academy Awards while his father sat hunched over the tuning knob of the television set like a thwarted ghoul, sounding barbaric mutterings at the giant screen as he scavenged through one channel after another in futile hunt of old movies with dead entertainers he knew familiarly.

"Where you been?"

The gruffness of the question annoyed Gold very much. "I've got a slight headache."

"Where?"

"That's a good one," exulted Gold's stepmother.

Gold cursed the frail figure of the genteel woman vilely without moving his lips. In another corner of the room a more hazardous development was unfolding, and Gold was spellbound when he overheard Esther, Rose, and Harriet remonstrating with Belle to accompany him to Washington each time he went. Then, and perhaps only for an instant, Gold knew what was meant when a mind boggled and could have defined the term for Ralph with exactitude.

"A woman belongs with her husband always," Esther was saying with a throb in her voice.

"If only to keep an eye on him," Harriet stressed insidiously.

Belle was evasive. "I won't like it there. Washington is a high-crime area."

"So is New York."

"I'm used to our high crime. I don't know anybody there."

"Bruce will introduce you to all his friends." said Rose.

Gold felt the moment had arrived to intervene discreetly. "You really shouldn't force her, if she doesn't want to go."

"You see how much he wants me there?" Belle flashed bitterly in one of her rare manifestations of disagreement. The other women sighed in concert and Belle with embarrassment turned her gaze away from one condoling face after another.

"Besides," said Gold with a fake laugh and a burst of ingenuity, "I have to go to Mexico first. Yes. On a secret cultural mission."

"Mexico?" Scales appeared to fall from Sid's eyes, and he sat up with a keen, tense look. "Mexico City?"

"Acapulco."

"Acapulco?" The word issued from Harriet like a primordial snarl. "What's in Acapulco?"

"Acapulco," answered Gold in a baritone of pedantry, "is rapidly becoming the new cultural center for the entire country. My assignment there is officially secret and I can't talk about it."

"In that case, let's talk about something else," said Sid, as though springing in to help, and Gold felt fervently relieved. "Let's talk about geology. Are vultures blind or aren't they?"

A blow to the groin could not have brought Gold closer to tears. There was little restraint in his reply. "Sid," he began in a flying start nothing in existence could obstruct, "there are only a few holidays left now and we got six families who want to play host to them, so there ain't enough meals to begin with. There's Christmas and Thanksgiving, the two Passover nights, there's Rosh Hashonah and Purim maybe, and sometimes Easter, sometimes New Year's Day, and here and there a birthday Sunday or anniversary, and that's about all, except for weddings and funerals and the very few Bar Mitzvahs left, thank God. You do this every time, don't you? Now, you do this one more time, Sid, one more time, you fat, vegetating, overfed, lazy, smirking son of a bitch—"

"Victor! Kill him! He's ruining my party!"

"—and this family—"

"Leave him alone!" shrieked Belle.

"—and this family, you imbecilic old prick, may never get together for dinner again, you slimy, sneaky, invidious bastard."

"I'll kill him!" decreed his father with patriarchal prerogative, rising too quickly and massaging a hip that buckled. "Two of you run me across to him."

"Muriel, Muriel," pleaded Gold with hands clasped religiously. "I'm sorry to ruin your party, but don't you understand what he's doing? He never liked you either. He's been doing it all my life. He's jealous, that's why. Ida—explain to her," he entreated and annulled the suggestion with a sour face when he recalled that from a diplomatic standpoint, he was selecting the worst of available advocates. "Muriel, it isn't geology and vultures are not blind! Soon he'll be hitting me with three-part statements of misinformation and I'll never be able to catch up." Gold ended with a sob.

"So it isn't geology," said Sid. "I was only trying to change the subject to do a favor for my kid brother."

"And stop babying me, goddammit," Gold exploded and moved in brutally to flay Sid and expose his ignorance to the others once and for all. "Okay, wise guy, we'll see what you know. Morticians!" Gold heard himself exclaim somewhat madly. It was not how he had intended to begin. "Where are they? Why don't we know any? How come we never meet anyone else who knows one? Fish. Do they cook the salmon and tuna before they put it into the can or after? How?"

"It's cooked?" asked his father.

"It's raw?" answered Gold, taking a leaf from his father's book.

"Then you tell us. You're the one we sent to college."

"That's not science," Harriet informed Gold with scorn. "Sure." Gold's father placidly unwrapped a cigar. "Ask him about hot and cold."

"What's heat?" Gold snapped at Sid.

"The absence of cold."

"What's cold?"

"The absence of heat."

"That makes no sense. One's wrong."

"Which one?"

"It makes sense to me," said Irv. There were nods from the others.

"I like to talk topics," said Gold's father, majestically striking a match.

Gold was undeterred. "Why does a match go out when you blow on it?"

Sid said, "You're blowing away the heated gases that keep the temperature up and the match burning."

"Then why does a log burn brighter when you blow on the embers?"

"The heat is in the embers, kid, not in the gases. You're creating the heated gases when you blow the oxygen on."

"Why does water expand when it freezes, while everything else contracts when it gets colder?"

"It doesn't." Sid grinned.

"It doesn't?"

"It doesn't."

"You damn fool," said Gold with contempt. "You've seen ice cubes in a tray, haven't you? The water gets bigger, doesn't it?"

"It isn't water any more, kid. It's ice."

"Why does the ice get bigger?"

"It doesn't. The tray gets smaller. Metal contracts when it freezes. You should know that."

"Why doesn't the water get smaller when it freezes?" Gold's voice was rising to a shout. "Because it's ice."

"Why doesn't the ice get smaller?"

"Smaller than what?"

"Than before."

"It wasn't ice before, Bruce. It was water."

"Oh, you're so full of baloney. Why doesn't the human stomach digest itself?"

"It does," said Sid without missing a beat.

"It does?"

"But once it starts it isn't a whole stomach any more and has to stop until it rebuilds in order to start again."

"Why don't you go fuck yourself?" asked Gold. And then instantly invited Sid to lunch on Monday. "I owe you one."

"Make it Wednesday, pal." Sid had Gold by the arm and was leading him from the others to the bar with a grasp not to be resisted. "I've got a meeting with Joannie Monday."

"That's the last time you'll humiliate me in front of your family," Belle finally broke her silence on the drive back to Manhattan.

"Every time I humiliate you," Gold said with detachment, "you tell me it's the last time. How did I humiliate you?"

"With your filthy language. You know I hate it. And why must you fight with Sid all the time?"

"The cocksucker always starts it, Belle, you know that. You're just sore because I might be moving to Washington, aren't you?"

"You can do what you want about Washington. I couldn't quit my job in the middle of the school year anyway."

Gold was still banking on.that. "I can fly back every weekend. Lots of Senators and Representatives do that. Okay?"

"If it's okay with you it's okay with me," said Belle. "Like everything else."

"Not like everything else," Gold objected. "You like to think I have everything my way, don't you?"

"Not like everything else," Belle yielded with a shrug. "Have it your way."

"You won't even notice when I'm gone."

"And I won't even notice when you're here."

"If that's the mood you're in," said Gold, "I think I better sleep at my studio. Make up a good story for Dina."

"Why must I do that?"

"So she won't think we're fighting and be insecure."

"Dina says you left me weeks ago but are too lazy to move out and too sneaky to say so, and that you're probably already thinking of seeing a lawyer secretly about a divorce."

Gold slept home and weighed the merits of consulting Sid about his trip to Acapulco with Andrea. But first there was the troubling conversation over drinks with Joannie, who admitted she'd been inhospitable to Rose and Max's daughter in Los Angeles. "She's snorting cocaine and dropping pills and is a living sponge when it comes to other people's money. Norma's over thirty now, for Christ's sake, and thinks she has the rights of a teenager. I hate addicts—of any kind. They're always wanting something." And then disclosed, after a distrait and worrisome silence, that she and Jerry were on the verge of separating. "All these years I thought I was doing him a favor—he's such a boring windbag—and now he wants me to go. He won't give me enough money to live well and I can't live any other way."

Gold knew he was not much good at comforting people. It dismayed him that Joannie was no longer beautiful. Although she still had the carriage of a tall and graceful woman, her suntanned skin, suddenly, was sandpaper-dry, her lips were thin, her eyes were restless as his own, and the lines in her face were dark and taut. Gold had another Scotch and Joannie switched to coffee. The friend she would fly to in Palm Beach the following day was an elderly, bedridden man she was fond of who'd been close and very decent to her when she was younger, after she'd run away from home to become a famous beauty queen or movie star. In Key Biscayne was the shoemaker's daughter from Coney Island she'd left with, associated in some way now with a wealthy man with a houseboat on which sybaritic parties of peculiar sorts took place, and Gold began to acknowledge that Joannie might not always have been telling him the whole truth about herself.

"What'd Sid say?"

"Sid promised as much as I need for the best lawyers out there, but I can't really ask him for more than that, can I? What about you?"

"What do you mean?" Gold was taking no risks and looked tremblingly into her face to see what her question might portend.

"How's the book and the job in Washington?" Wryly, she added, "If you get a good one. Jerry might let me stay."

"Both at a standstill," he conceded darkly. Her glamor was perishing before his eyes and he was impregnated with something like disillusionment by the unattractive signs of deterioration in her face and her spirit. "If I get the job, I won't want to write the book. If I don't get the job, I guess I'll have to."

"Do you want to?"

Gold answered with an awkward shake of his shoulders. "I should want to. I could use some stimulating information from someone. God knows I can't come up with any of my own. Did Mom—Momma ever talk to you about sex?" This succeeded in making her laugh. "I mean it. What does a woman from Russia who never even learned English tell her daughters who are growing up here about lust, petting, screwing, morals? What did she say to you?"

"Bruce, I'm younger than you. I hardly remember her. Ask the others."

Now it was Gold who gave a terse laugh. "How could I talk to Rose or Esther about something like that? Or Ida. Muriel's running around a lot as though she's just invented adultery and doesn't seem to care if Victor finds out. I think there'll be trouble."

"Belle sounds depressed," Joannie said neutrally.

"She's worried about her mother," Gold replied without a blush, and skillfully worked his way around that sunken danger. "I can't get over those people, Joannie, Mom and Pop—"

"Toni."

"Cant we stop that shit now?"

She resisted but one more moment and capitulated sadly with a reluctant nod. "Joannie."

"Imagine those old people—"

"They weren't so old."

"—leaving with children from a small town in Russia more than sixty years ago and coming all the way here. How did they do it? They knew they would never go back. I can't go anywhere without hotel reservations and I can't go out of town two days without losing some laundry or luggage or having a plane connection canceled. You travel, don't you? Imagine them."

"Always with credit cards," said Joannie. "And I use Jerry's travel agent."

"I wouldn't move without one," said Gold, somewhat surprised by the ardor of his interest. "But they didn't have any. Who told them? How did they know where to go? Where did they sleep? The trip must have taken longer than Columbus. What did they think and talk about, what did they eat? They were just kids. They had Sid, remember, and Rose was just a baby."

"Ask Pop," urged Joannie.

"Pop," Gold repeated despairingly. "He wouldn't answer me. He couldn't remember if he wanted to and I wouldn't believe him if he did. A native-born American, he was calling himself last week, without even knowing what it means. Soon he'll be claiming he isn't Jewish."

"Not Pop," Joannie stated. "Maybe you and me. But not him."

"I wonder why I never spoke to her more." Curiosity was making him thoughtful and he leaned forward studiously with his head resting in his hand. "I still don't know what she died of, Joannie, and I'm afraid to find out." He felt mawkish but nevertheless went on. "I understand what that means now. I didn't even realize I didn't know until I applied for my first life-insurance policy and they asked. I answered cancer of the thyroid because of that bandage of some kind around her neck, but I've really no idea. The only time I think about it is when I talk to you, and you don't want to find out either."

"Ask Sid," said Joannie. "I bet he remembers a lot."

"Sid," Gold repeated with the grimace of a minute before and stared past her. "Sid won't open up about anything. All he does is make fun of me at dinners. I wish he'd stop. I could kill him."

"He thinks it's funny," said Joannie. "He thinks you enjoy it too."

"Tell him it's not funny and we're both too old for it now."

"Sid's really proud of you, Bruce," Joannie said. "He still kind of takes care of us, doesn't he, even though it kills Harriet now to see him spend anything? He feels very close to us. They all do."

"We don't feel close to them."

"That's the funny part of it," said Joannie with a look of inscrutable melancholy. "They think we're a very close family. They'd be so hurt if they heard us talking this way. Not even you and I feel close to each other any more, do we? Oh, shit, Bruce, what am I going to do? I just know I'm never going to find another husband, and I don't ever want to have to live without one. It's better to have Jerry to fight with than no one, isn't it? I don't want to be another one of those clumsy middle-aged people taking up tennis because I've got nothing else to do." Her eyes narrowed guardedly and she fell silent, swallowing. Gold made no effort to console her. "God," she exclaimed with a cynical amusement when she was able to continue, "I can just see myself. You can add that to my Jewish experience. I just know I'll wind up living with some kid with a motorcycle who plays the banjo and wants to be an actor. Oh, Christ, I'll be smoking dope with nitwits again, won't I?"

Gold, meanwhile, had stealthily withdrawn into the citadel of noninterference he automatically chose whenever threatened by the encroaching personal problems of others. Let Sid handle it, he decided as he parted from his favorite sister with a cursory kiss. A formidable constraint lay between them. Sid could handle them all—Joannie, Muriel and Victor, his father's dying and funeral arrangements. But wouldn't it be awful if Sid died first and all of it landed on him? The ramifications latent in that unthought-of state of affairs were too many to be contemplated by Gold now with anything like equanimity. A thumping vertigo possessed him instead. He leaned a moment against a mailbox to clear his head completely of all traces of that horrendous possibility before continuing along the sidewalk to his studio to check his recording machine for telephone calls.

He felt anything but good about himself and knew it would be in vain to hope for a better nature to assert itself. When Esther was left a widow by Mendy's death two years before, Gold's apathy toward her as an older sister was transmogrified at once into a bristling mood of vigilant suspicion and dislike. He sensed a danger that in one way or another he was going to be stuck. That didn't happen. Remorse took him in its grip shortly afterward when he beheld in Harriet a similar change from the sisterly feeling of more than thirty years to a temperament of miserly reserve that expanded to pervade her relationship with all the members of Sid's family. She too was afraid she was going to be stuck and was taking measures to cut her losses.

Mendy's burial services were the last Gold had attended. Only a small portion of the people filling the Jewish chapel in Brooklyn made the trip out to Long Island for the interment. Gold knew as he stood in the field of carved headstones and allowed his thoughts to roam that even fewer people would come to the cemetery for his funeral. Then he remembered that he had left instructions in his will for cremation without any ceremony or memorial service. Next he remembered that he had also left instructions for the donation of all his organs and tissues for medical use and research. He made a mental note at Mendy's funeral to correct his will. Now he remembered he had forgotten. And he also remembered it would make no difference. Part of the Jewish experience would be to get him into the ground so fucking fast there would be no time to find and read his will.

Sid was already at the bar and hailed Gold's arrival with the rosy generosity of mild intoxication. "This is quite a restaurant, kid. I think I've already seen a couple of television actors and a newsman. And what girls."

All Gold saw was Pomoroy and Lieberman leaving. Pomoroy passed in tactful acquiescence when Gold turned away to talk to Sid. But Lieberman veered like a bulvon and with his elbows clubbed his way between them to the bar, knocking an ashtray to the floor and blindly plopping a stubby paw smack into the center of a bowl of dried nuts with the atavistic luck of something Neanderthal and hungry.

"I've been getting flak." Lieberman sprayed chewed nuts from his mouth when he spoke and stuffed whole ones in when he stopped. "About that article of yours. I thought it was conventional, safe, intelligent, orthodox neoconservatism. But some people tell me it's nihilistic and negative."

Gold put an open hand on Lieberman's face and firmly pushed him back from the bar. "My brother Sid. This is Maxwell Lieberman. You may remember each other from Coney Island."

"Call me Skip. Are you really saying that nothing anybody does, even us, succeeds as planned?"

"Sure," Sid said good-naturedly while Gold was forming an educated reply.

"Well, I can't see why anyone is making such a fuss about it," said Lieberman. "Is it liberal or conservative?"

"Both," said Sid.

"Sid," said Gold, "why don't you let me talk?"

"Because you never could make up your mind, kid," Sid answered playfully. "Even when he was a child I used to make every decision for him."

"Are you saying," Lieberman demanded of them both in a manner of niggardly disgruntlement, "that every attempt at political and social improvement has been a failure?"

"Nope," said Sid.

"Sid!"

"He didn't say that," continued Sid in satirical high spirits. "He said they didn't succeed."

"Industrialization? The labor movement? Integration? The Constitution? Democracy, communism, fascism? Public education? Free enterprise?" Lieberman was arguing now only with Sid. "Are you saying none of that succeeded?"

"As planned," specified Sid.

"In any way?"

"Ask him." Sid jerked a thumb toward Gold. "He wrote it."

"You read it, didn't you?"

"No," said Sid. "Leave me out of it."

"Well, what about it?" Lieberman demanded in a way that challenged opposition. "Do you really maintain that every action anyone takes to improve anything is doomed to fail?"

"I didn't quite say that."

"He said it wouldn't succeed."

"Sid!"

"What's the difference?"

"A world," said Sid.

"A world?"

"Of difference."

Gold remembered then that he disliked Lieberman and was suddenly delighted by the ease with which his big brother was handling him. In Pomoroy's eyes was that familiar look of careworn pessimism and Gold asked with sympathy, "How you doing?"

"I'm prospering," Pomoroy confessed funereally, as though revealing he was the victim of a malignant tumor of the heart.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Gold commiserated. "It could be worse, I suppose."

"It could be fatal," said Gold. "You might be president of the company some day and have to stay there the rest of your life."

"Bite your tongue."

"Where else would you rather be?"

"Bite it all the way off."

"I can tell you one thing," Sid announced with authority, paying the bar bill before Gold could get back. "Every action toward social improvement in one direction produces a reaction of equal force in the opposite direction. Right, kid?" Lieberman was frozen in place by this proclamation and appeared, incredibly, at a loss for words. "Let's go eat. So you're going to Acapulco, huh?" were the words with which Sid began at the table after Gold ordered another round of drinks.

"I don't want to talk about that," Gold answered brusquely to close off that line of discussion. "What are we going to do about the old man?"

"I find I get a kind of kick out of him now," Sid said softly.

"I can see that. Harriet doesn't want him around either."

"I don't pay too much attention to what Harriet wants any more," Sid confided gently. "I kind of like him, Bruce, and we're not going to have him much longer."

"How can you like him?" Gold asked. "He's such a pain in the ass. He was mean to you. The two of you were always fighting."

"He was never mean to me," Sid disagreed almost in a whisper. "We didn't fight."

"Sid, the two of you used to fight all the time. Once he drove you away for a whole summer. You ran away from home and went all the way to California."

"That's not why."

"It is, Sid," Gold persisted. "Rose and Esther say so, and so does Ida. Even he likes to brag to people how he drove you away."

"That wasn't really the way it was," said Sid. He avoided looking at Gold. "It was a chance to see the country. He was never mean to me."

"Sid, you ran away," Gold reminded him gently. He wanted to touch his hand. "How old were you?"

"About fourteen or fifteen, maybe sixteen. I know I was still in high school."

"Why don't you ever talk about it?" Gold asked with wonder. "That must have been pretty exciting."

"Yeah, it was, I guess."

"And dangerous."

Sid thought a moment. "No, I don't think it was dangerous."

"You had no money, did you?"

"I had a few dollars. A lot of people were on the road then. I hung around with hoboes for a while and they helped. I worked. A rancher in Arizona offered me a regular job if I wanted to stay. A farmer in California offered me another. I saw Hollywood. But I was glad to be able to make it back when the summer was over. I didn't want to miss school." Sid's eyes were moist and he did not seem to know how close he was to crying. At the same time, his fleshy face was wearing a weird and dull and distant smile, as though his mind were lost in thought.

"You had a fight, Sid," Gold prodded. "That's why you went. And Mom was worried."

"I wrote her twice a week. I sent her postcards. She knew I was okay. Poppa was a very kind and gentle man and was never mean to anyone. He had troubles, you know." Sid's eyes were filling with tears again. His smile broadened and he paused a moment. "There were all us kids and the Depression, and Momma was sick so much, and he was worried a lot and I guess that's why he was so mean."

"You said he wasn't mean."

"He wasn't really mean. Can I have another drink?"

"No, Sid, I don't think so," determined Gold. "You must have all made a lot of sacrifices for me, you and Rose and Esther, didn't you?"

Sid pondered a while and shook his head. "No, kid, it really wasn't that way. We would have had to do pretty much the same thing, even if you weren't there."

"It was a pity you had to miss college," said Gold, trying to catch and hold his gaze. "Didn't you mind that?"

"I wasn't really smart enough for college," answered Sid. "I think that was decided before you were even born."

"But you couldn't have gone even if you wanted to, could you?"

"I wasn't really smart enough."

"You had to give up the football team in high school to go to work in the laundry, didn't you?"

"No, kid, it wasn't really that way. I was only on the freshman team one year. I wasn't big enough for football. I was a lot safer with those horses at the laundry than I was on the football field. Can't we have another drink?"

"Maybe a glass of wine."

"I don't like wine."

Gold ordered wine for himself and another bourbon for Sid. "How old were you when you came here and how much do you remember?"

"About six, Bruce, I think, and I remember a great deal, I guess. I remember—" here Sid interrupted himself to laugh with his eyes half shut, and he choked a moment as though to clear his throat of a rising sob—"I remember one time Pop moved us to the Christian section of Bensonhurst by mistake. He was always making mistakes like that. I think we were just about the only Jewish family there and none of us spoke English."

"Oh, Sid," Gold exclaimed. "It must have been awful."

"It wasn't so bad," Sid answered faintly after considering. "They called me Jewboy most of the time, but they let me play with them, the other kids. They were mainly Irish and Norwegian. Every once in a while they would gang up on me and make me lie down on the ground. They would make me open my fly and show my penis, and they would all spit on it, but if I did what they told me and didn't cry or tell anybody, they would let me play with them again, so I guess maybe it didn't really bother me too much then."

"Oh, Sid, how terrible," cried Gold.

"We only lived there a year," said Sid, "so it didn't happen too many times. I guess Mom and Pop had to put up with a lot worse, there and later, and often from our own kind. A lot of people who got here first didn't want us to come at all. I remember that every year we'd move into a different apartment, everybody did. The new landlord would paint the apartment and give us the first month without rent. I don't know why the old landlords didn't offer the same deal to us every year, because they gave it to whoever came in after us, but they didn't, and at the end of the year we moved again and were back in a Jewish neighborhood and I was going to school. I think I spoke English with a very funny accent, but I was too dumb to realize that until the other boys and girls started imitating me. Even then I didn't understand right away that it was me they were making fun of. I only knew they would start talking funny when they were around me, and then I would try to talk funny like them in the same way, imitating them as they were imitating me."

Gold's pity deepened and he felt moisture fill his own eyes. "Oh, Sid, didn't you feel terrible when you found out? When you understood?"

"No, I don't think so," said Sid. "A lot of us talked funny, it seems to me. I remember I had a tough time figuring out at first how the lunch hour worked at school. Mom would give me a sandwich and an apple in a paper bag, but somehow I got the idea I had to go home for lunch, like at the first school. I didn't know where I was supposed to eat it, and this time we lived too far away. So every day at the recess I would hurry out like I was going home for lunch, and then I would walk a few blocks and hide in some fields nearby and eat my lunch near the subway tracks and watch the subway trains go back and forth from Coney Island to Manhattan."

"Alone? Couldn't you ask your friends? Didn't anyone tell you?"

"I didn't have any friends," Sid said. "I never really had any friends until we finally moved to Coney Island and stayed. And then one day, it must have been snowing or raining pretty hard, I guess, and I couldn't go out, I realized that all the other children had been eating their lunch at the school or in the schoolyard all that time and then playing together in the yard or gymnasium for the rest of the hour."

Gold's heart bled. "Oh, how terrible, Sid. How lonely you must have been."

"I wasn't lonely."

"But you must have been so miserable and embarrassed when you found out."

"I wasn't miserable and embarrassed," Sid said obstinately, and then searched his memory as though weighing the denial that had sprung from his lips. "No, I don't think I was lonely, kid. Everything was kind of new and interesting. I didn't know what was good or bad. I kind of liked it both ways. I liked playing in school and watching the other kids and I liked going into the fields with my sandwich and watching the subway trains. I can tell you a funny thing that happened to me on the boat coming over. It was a crowded boat and pretty dirty and noisy and most of the time I was scared. The first couple of days the waiters brought around oranges with the meals. Well, we had never seen an orange before, I don't think they had them in the villages we'd been in, and I didn't even want to touch it."

"Never seen an orange?" Gold broke in.

"Not in the places we'd lived. Well, one day Mom made me taste a piece and I loved it and wanted more. But the next time we had a meal, the oranges were all gone, and I couldn't get another one."

"All gone?" Gold echoed dolefully. "Oh, Sid, you poor, unlucky kid. You couldn't get another one? You'd never seen an orange before?"

"Where would we see them?" Sid replied. "None of us had. Or a banana or pineapple or anything like that either."

Gold could not quite bring himself to believe him yet. "What's the Jewish word for orange?"

"In Yiddish? Ahrange."

"Pineapple?"

"Pine-epple."

"Banana?"

"Benena. We had no words for them, Bruce. Don't you understand? Those all come from the tropics. Poor Mom had to come all the way to New York to taste a tangerine. She loved them so."

"About Pop—there's another question I want to ask you."

"I know what it is," said Sid, meeting his eyes. "But I wouldn't want you to write about that."

"Pop wanted to be a singer. He decided he was a singer, right?"

"Yeah. Overnight." Nodding heavily as though still drained by the ordeal, Sid went on with an amused sigh. "I think that nearly killed Mom. It was the only time I ever heard her argue with him. He wanted to go all over Brooklyn and sing at weddings and amateur nights. Suddenly he was a professional singer. He sang all day long. For everybody. He began to tell the whole world he was a famous singer."

"In his tailor shop?"

"In his tailor shop."

"And was he really a draftsman and a junk dealer and an importer and a Wall Street commissions man?"

"Pop did a lot of things," Sid said elusively, rubbing his ear. "He may have been a draftsman and an importer. I just don't remember that. But he was bread and dresses and coffee beans and furs before he fell into that machine shop and the leather business. Pop was good at leather."

"You had to bail him out, though, didn't you?"

The question added to Sid's uneasiness. "No, kid, it wasn't really just that way. He was good at leather but lousy at business. I just sort of helped him organize things."

"Bullshit, Sid. You paid for everything, didn't you?"

"No, kid, I swear it. His business was worth a lot. I just sort of pulled his assets together and found somebody to buy them, and then I advised him to put most of the money into an annuity so he'd always have a decent income and never be dependent on any of us."

"And the singing?" asked Gold.

"There it was, Bruce." Sid bobbed his head again several times with a nostalgic air. "All at once. No warning. No working his way up. Suddenly he was there, Mr. Enrico Caruso. He even walked around like one, with his head back and his chest out and his hand on his heart. He wanted to go up on the stage of the movie houses in Coney Island and sing in the vaudeville acts. And all he knew from beginning to end was a couple of Yiddish songs. He'd write away to every radio station and try to get on the amateur hours and even to the Metropolitan Opera House try outs. He wanted to go there in person. Then he tried to get on the air on the Mr. Anthony show with a problem and hoped he'd be allowed to sing. He'd make up problems and send them in. It's kind of funny talking about it now, but it wasn't so funny then. We were afraid. We thought he might really be crazy, and we wouldn't know what to do. We had to hold him back and hide his carfare and tear up his mail. Mom and the girls were frantic. He told all the relatives in New Jersey and Washington Heights and all the people on the block that he was a very famous singer and he gave recitals all day long to anyone who would listen. He wanted to come and sing at my school. You must remember some of this. Maybe it was all that steam from the pressing machine that cooked his brains for a while. I don't know how it passed, but it did, I think maybe the war came along. World War II, and he found himself in that machine shop and forgot all about it. You notice, he never mentions it now. You know, it's nice talking to you this way, Bruce. We haven't had lunch or talked to each other in a long time, have we?"

"That isn't all my fault, Sid," said Gold. "You usually don't like to talk much. You must have hated me pretty bad at times, didn't you?"

"Hated you?" Sid looked up quickly with a sharp intake of breath. His face paled. "Why would I do that? Oh, no, Bruce. I never hated you. I was always very proud of you."

"You lost me once, didn't you, you bastard?" Gold recalled for him with a laugh. "How could you lose a little kid like me?"

Sid flushed sheepishly. "I knew you'd be found. I left you near a cop and told you to go up to him. Then I went to the cop and told him you looked lost. You know, you really ought to try to come out and visit Esther more. She's taking things hard, although she doesn't complain."

"I try," Gold said hypocritically. "Sid, you must have resented me a lot back then, didn't you?"

"Oh, no, Bruce," Sid said. "Why would I do that? I was always very proud of you."

"I had such an easy time of it after you had such a hard one. I got those good marks at school and was able to go to college."

"I'm glad we were able to send you," said Sid. "No, I didn't mind that."

"Didn't you mind having to take care of me?" Gold asked softly. "I was the youngest boy and the family made such a fuss over me. Sid, it's okay to say yes. People in a family often dislike each other for much less than that."

"No, I didn't mind." Sid spoke with his face partially averted from Gold's fascinated gaze.

"Aren't you jealous of me now, Sid? Ever? Sometimes?"

"I'm very proud of you."

Gold eased off. "How'd you make it up with Pop when you finally got back from California?"

"I remember that clearly," Sid replied with a kind of wistful pleasure in the recollection, and his eyes grew cloudy again. "I came down the street from the trolley on Railroad Avenue. You remember, they used to have the Norton's Point trolley there. No one was expecting me that day, but Mom was looking out the window watching you and Pop outside and saw me first. Pa was outside the house with you, playing with a new toy he had bought for you, a windup airplane, I think, that really flew. He looked at me. I said hello. I was pretty grimy, I guess. He told me to go upstairs and take a bath, and that was pretty much it."

"No handshake?" asked Gold with a pang. "No kiss? No hug?"

"No hugs or kisses." Sid shook his head. "For years after, Mom would make a joke. 'When you come from California,' she'd say, 'you've got to take a bath.'" Sid chuckled introspectively. "She was so glad to have me back."

But Gold had fastened with astonishment upon a different detail. "He bought me a toy?" he exclaimed. "He was outside playing with me?"

"Oh, sure," Sid said without hesitation. He cleared his throat quietly. "Pop was crazy about you when you were small. We were the ones he was mean to. We were the ones who couldn't stand you."

"Then you did dislike me." Gold pursued the point doggedly. "You just admitted you couldn't stand me."

"Oh, no," said Sid softly. "I never disliked you. I was always very proud of you."

Pity cast a shadow of restraint over Gold, and he ceased trying to untangle the hazy conflicts in Sid's repeated evasions. He felt fifteen years distant from his older brother, and a thousand years wiser. And perhaps, for the moment, equally repressed. There was more to Sid indeed, very much more, but whatever lay secret in him would remain occluded forever beneath the shield of denials Gold would not again make the effort to penetrate.

"Sid, what'd Mom die of?"

"Poor surgery," said Sid with that heartbreaking, incongruous smile that seemed to have no place in a countenance otherwise flooded with the memory of a poignant old remorse. "It had nothing to do with her goiter. She died in Coney Island Hospital. It was a simple gallbladder operation. But the stitches inside opened during the night and she was dead from bleeding in the morning."

"Why can't I remember any of that?" said Gold. "There must have been lots of crying and shrieking in the house when you were sitting shivah. We had so many aunts and uncles and so many neighbors."

"You weren't there," Sid told him. "She made us promise before she went in for the operation that if anything went wrong we would send you and Joannie away until everything was over. She didn't want any of the young children around. She thought it would scare you. Mom was like that, you know."

"Was I at the funeral? I can't remember."

"I can't remember."

"Do you ever go to the cemetery?" asked Gold. "To visit her grave? I never thought of doing that."

"Nah, we don't do things like that any more," said Sid with a guilty look flitting across his face. His fingers toyed with his empty whiskey glass. "We used to do it, on Mother's Day, at least, but I can't remember the last time. I couldn't get Harriet to go now, or any of the kids, even if I wanted to. I couldn't even get Pop. I used to try. There's a custom, you know. You're supposed to leave a pebble on the grave when you visit as a sign that somebody's been there and you still remember. Poor Mom hasn't had a pebble on her grave in thirty, thirty-five years. Will you come to dinner at Esther's house this Friday? It means a lot to her when you show up."

"I'll try. Sure, we'll come. Will you try not to pick on me?"

"How?" Sid registered surprise. "I don't pick on you." Gold smiled tolerantly as though at someone harmlessly incorrigible. "Just don't talk science or nature once or make any philosophical statements. Okay?"

"Okay," Sid agreed. "I didn't know that really bothered you. Sometimes I can't think of anything else to say so I kid around. Did I embarrass you before with that editor? I'm sorry if I embarrassed you."

"Lieberman? He doesn't count."

"I'm sorry if I did."

"You didn't," said Gold. "You were pretty good. The other one knew you were kidding around and probably enjoyed it."

"I forget sometimes that you're an important person and I shouldn't act undignified when you're with people you know."

Gold laughed with affection. "It's okay, Sid. And I'm not so important."

"Yes, you are. We see your name in the paper. You're the most important person we know. This was nice, kid."

"It was, Sid, and let's repeat it soon," said Gold, feeling absolutely certain they would never have lunch together again.

"Will I see you at Esther's Friday?" Sid asked as they rose. It seemed important to him.

"If you promise not to tease or pick on me. Do you promise?"

"I won't tease. I promise I won't. I swear."

"Then I'll come."

"The lilies," said Sid at Esther's to Gold alone.

"What lilies?"

"Of the field."

"What about them?"

"They toil not, neither do they spin."

"So what?"

"Consider," Sid boomed suddenly out to all the others in the commanding ululations of an Elijah, after inciting in Gold a sense of onrushing crisis by the rather brooding manner in which he had first brought the subject to his ear. "The lilies of the field." Gold's mind was reeling. "They don't toil and they don't spin. Yet nature, or God, sees to it that they have enough to eat and grow every year, and every year they bloom."

"Sid, you promised, you swore to me," cried Gold. Not until then, he felt, had he ever truly known human nature could sink so far.

"It's just a thought," Sid whined deceitfully with the apologetic meekness of someone defenseless who had just been set upon unfairly.

"A very nice thought," rejoiced Gold's father. "From my favorite son."

"And the Bible too," Gold muttered viciously. "And it's wrong."

"How can it be wrong if it's from the Bible?"

"Sid's wrong, not the Bible."

"And he don't even believe in God," Gold's father retaliated by addressing the others with a snort of ridicule. "Hey, dummy, if there's no God, Mr. Smart Guy Politician, how can there be a Bible?"

"You should listen to your father more," counseled Gold's stepmother. "And maybe you can be his favorite son too."

"How can I listen," said Gold, "when all he does is call me names? He doesn't like me. He never liked me."

"I don't like you either," she informed him with courtesy. "You admire money and you idolize the people who have it. You crave success. Wouldn't it be funny," she went on, and cackled at him with a gleam of satanic wickedness in her eye, "if he isn't even your real father and you've been taking all this criticism from him for nothing all these years? Wouldn't it be funny if you aren't even Jewish? You don't even know the language and the holidays, do you?"

Gold chose a strategy of silence.

"Pyrenees," said Sid when it seemed no one else would speak, "is the only known language in the world that has no words for right or left."

After an instant of indignation, Gold discovered himself responding to the asinine statement with his intellect and smiled with the tired awareness that he probably would never again find it within himself to be angry with Sid for anything. It could be Sid was right. It could also be Sid was full of shit. Gold was as conscious as the next fellow of the mountainous area in the border regions joining France with Spain; but possibly there were isolated villages with inhabitants to whom what Sid had just said did apply. There could be people far away in the Pacific or in the Indian Ocean called Pyrenees, or Pirenese—Gold could not be sure even of the spelling—just as there were people and languages elsewhere called Portuguese and Japanese. Let someone else pick up the gauntlet, he decided, reflecting peevishly that people thought more respectfully of him in Washington than they did of him here, where he was at the very nadir of repute.

"How do they know which way to go?" asked Esther after an interval allowing for these discursive speculations.

"They know," said Gold's father.

"How do they give directions?" asked Ida.

"They give," said Gold dryly in an effort to make himself agreeable, and his father looked at him with greatest surprise and a tint of admiration, as though scarcely expecting such percipience from so unsatisfactory a source.

"They must be very smart," said Ida.

"Very smart," said Milt.

"Then how come they don't have words for right or left if they're so smart," Muriel belittled Ida, a cigarette jutting from her mouth.

"Because," Ida instructed her shrewishly, "they're so smart they don't need them. And there's a lesson to be learned by all of us from the Pyrenees."

"And from the lilies of the field," said Gold.

"And from my first husband," said Gold's stepmother, knitting a few and purling a couple more, "who always loved a good joke too. I'm a Southerner, you know, with connections in Richmond and Charleston, and ours has always been one of the most respected Jewish families in the South—respected, that is, by other Jewish families. In marrying your father, I married very far below my station, and he married very much above his." Pride glowed like a furnace in Julius Gold's face as he nodded in Olympian accord. "We owned slaves and very large plantations. It's the reason we know so much about wool."

"Cotton," said Gold before he could help himself, and came close to banging his head with the heel of his hand for his impetuous stupidity.

"Wool, my child," Gussie Gold took him up at once with a majestic turn of her eye downward. "It was because of the money we made from our cotton that we could afford so much wool. Even as a little girl I was able to do my own flocking."

"Flocking?" said Gold.

"I bet she flocked good too," said Gold's father, "better than you."

Flocking? repeated Gold to himself, and gave way ignominiously before his father's challenge. Flocking was a subject of which he had sparse knowledge and ground upon which he was not zealous to contend with people who had more.

"I can remember," said Gold's stepmother, "my husband's favorite joke. 'If you ever forget you're a Jew,' he would say,'a gentile will remind you.' And he would say this over and over again to all of us until the day he died. It's a joke that you, my pet, would do well to remember."

"With a stepmother like you," Gold told her with a set smile, "I won't need a gentile to remind me."

"It's the reason you're having so much trouble with your book," she said, bending close with this new verbal thrust.

"Who's having trouble?"

"You'll never be able to write it without me, you know," she said in ghastly exultation. "How can you write about the Jewish experience when you're not even sure you've ever had one? You're not even sure you're really Jewish, are you? Wait till that gets out. You never even bothered to check, did you?"

"Check where?" Gold demanded. "What are you talking about?"

"The adoption agency," said his stepmother with a hideous laugh. "They have to put that down and tell you now. I read it in the papers."

"What adoption agency? I'm not adopted."

"How do you know?" gloated his stepmother, and Gold did not dare look at her pale face and burning eyes. "You never even went there to check, did you? You can do that now, you know. You can get a lawyer and find out. You're not even sure who your real parents are. Maybe I'm your real mother and he's your stepfather. You don't know much about that at all, do you?"

Gold rose from his seat on the sofa beside her with his brain in a whirl and stepped a safe distance away. "Pop, what's she talking about? I'm not adopted, am I?"

"Get out of here with such foolish questions," his father replied without patience. "If we were going to adopt somebody, why would we pick you?"

"You're not even sure that your mother was your iea\ mother, are you?" his stepmother harried him tirelessly with fiendish glee. "How do you know she isn't a fake? You're wasting your money. Every time you go out to the cemetery to visit her grave—"

"I don't go to no cemetery," Gold shouted in her face, hoping to stanch her garrulous flow, but the woman only laughed the more.

"—it isn't even her grave. You're preserving the wrong landscaping and putting your flowers on the grave of a stranger."

"Gevaltr cried Julius Gold, once more the man of unpredictable wrath. "Again the cemeteries? This is worse than my anniversary. I don't want no talk about cemeteries and I don't want no one forgetting my anniversary party next year."

"Your tenth," Gold said savagely.

"And I won't have any more anniversaries," Esther said and began to cry again. Gold nearly groaned with exasperation.

Rose led Esther into the bathroom and Milt rose slowly to his feet like the man of methodical habits he was and asked:

"Can I get anything for anyone?"

Esther was composed on her return and began telling of Mendy's death with but a hint of the perpetual flutter of excitement that had become as natural a trait of her appearance as her pure white hair and brimming eyes. It was an affecting story but Gold did not want to hear it repeated. He was thinking hard about his mother's grave with a feeling of odium spreading through his system at the knowledge he had never been there. Reason told him it was only a stone he would find.

"He was so healthy and busy and could still work as hard as any of the men at the warehouse or on the trucks," Esther was relating about the short, rambunctious, excitable man with the sloping forehead and massive inferiority complex whose presence only Max and Rose had been able to tolerate without aching stress. "He really did love you, Bruce," Esther went out of her way to maintain with a noticeable absence of vim. "It's just that he always felt uncomfortable because you went to college and he thought you were so smart."

"I don't think he's so smart," cracked Muriel in her tough arid abrasive voice, and blew a polluting cloud of cigarette smoke into the room. "If he's so smart, how come he teaches college? I bet even Victor makes more than he does."

Such was the riposte that sprang first to Gold's mind that Victor would have pounded him to death had he made it.

Mendy Moscowitz had been an opinionated, uninformed man who drank beer with his meals and still played handball aggressively at Brighton Beach when the weather was mild. He woke from an afterdinner nap one evening feeling lousy and went back to bed for the night. In the morning he was listless. All day at work he didn't feel right. A week later he was in the hospital with leukemia. He read his medical charts and made certain clamorously that everything prescribed was given him on time. He had books brought and pried free enough information to learn he was fated to die.

"Let it happen," he decided in tears one day. "I don't want to fight."

Esther's hair turned white. He wanted no comforts or treatments not covered by medical insurance.

"I want to leave money," said Mendy. "Let it happen at home. If you don't want me in the house I'll rent a furnished room."

It happened at home. He left the hospital in the first remission and refused to go back with the reappearance of the symptoms of debilitation. When the day came that he was too faint to stand, he stood. Esther phoned Sid. Gold cut classes in Brooklyn. Only Esther held Mendy's arm as the four descended in the elevator. He had dressed in a suit and tie and his overcoat was buttoned to the collar. There was not one word more of conversation. They rode to the hospital in Sid's Cadillac. Mendy would have been proud to know he lasted there only a day and a half. Sid and Esther cried in the car.

"It was such a sunny day," Esther remembered now. "Everything looked so beautiful out."

"Can I get anything for anyone?" asked Milt.

Once again Gold found himself preparing to lunch with someone—Spotty Weinrock—and the thought arose that he was spending an awful lot of time in this book eating and talking. There was not much else to be done with him. I was putting him into bed a lot with Andrea and keeping his wife and children conveniently in the background. For Acapulco, I contemplated fabricating a hectic mixup which would include a sensual Mexican television actress and a daring attempt to escape in the nude through a stuck second-story bedroom window, while a jealous lover crazed on American drugs was beating down the door with his fists and Belle or packs of barking wild dogs were waiting below. Certainly he would soon meet a schoolteacher with four children with whom he would fall madly in love, and I would shortly hold out to him the tantalizing promise of becoming the country's first Jewish Secretary of State, a promise I did not intend to keep. He would see Andrea's father, Pugh Biddle Conover, one more time before his tale was concluded, and Harris Rosenblatt twice.

His phone call to Spotty Weinrock for all or part of the money owed him had been received with more warmth than he expected. "All you want," Weinrock repeated in his showroom, gazing fully at Gold with a look of amusement and his chuckling undertone of detested indulgence and familiarity. "What do I owe you, fifteen hundred?"

"Eleven hundred."

"Make it two thousand," said Spotty Weinrock generously. "I like to work with round numbers. How do you like the place?"

The curving walls of the showroom guided visitors naturally into a reception area of spare elegance affording a view through glass of an orange room with four modern hand looms at which attractive female designers sat weaving the new patterns of wool his factory in Rhode Island would manufacture. Gold was impressed.

"How's business? Good?"

"Great," answered Weinrock. "If I had a better cash flow I could probably pull out now with over a million bucks clear."

"What does that mean?" asked Gold, who had no head for business.

"I'm in terrible trouble," said Weinrock. "I've got short-term obligations I have to meet, and I never in my whole life knew what an obligation was. I may have to take in more partners or sell out cheap. I could use a thousand for some new winter clothes, but none of that concerns you. I can pay you back all the money you want. What income-tax bracket are you in?"

"What's it your business?" There awoke in Gold at that mysterious question the first ugly writhings of suspicion that he was destined for disappointment.

"I have to know how much to put you down for in the company books." Weinrock's amiable spirits were unaffected. "We can make it as much as you want if you can use more dough."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm turning myself into a bad debt," said Weinrock, "just for you. And doing a lot of my old friends a favor at the same time. Claim me. For as much as you want. I'm going into bankruptcy. A thousand? Ten thousand? A million? Ten million? Say the word. I'll be as generous as you want."

"Spotty, what are you talking about?"

"You still asking that? I'll explain at lunch, but only if you let me pay. There's a dairy restaurant around the corner that's sometimes pretty good. Let me start," he said to the stocky old waitress who gave them menus, "with a glass of sour milk."

"We got no sour milk," the waitress said. "Everything here is fresh."

"Get me Lupewitz."

"It's not his station."

"Yankel," Weinrock called loudly to a lean, limp-looking waiter resting against the wall on the other side of the room with a rather sepulchral expression. "She won't give me sour milk. It ain't on the menu."

"Sure, the menu," said Yankel Lupewitz with the defeated air of a discontented philosopher of the Schopenhauer school. "I told them the menu, but that's how they are. I'll bring your milk."

"And let me have," shouted Spotty Weinrock, "a glass of strained borscht, the big fruit salad and cottage cheese with a prune, but only if it's fresh Oregon." The waiter shook his head. "Then tell them to put a fresh fig on top instead. And bring me black bread with lots of end pieces. I'm going bankrupt and turning you into a creditor," he explained in a normal voice to Gold. "If you're in the thirty percent bracket I can put you down for a five thousand loss and you'd break about even. If you want to make it more, we'll make it more. You want a million, we'll make it a million. But our figures ought to agree for your tax deduction."

Gold chewed gravely on his herring. "It sounds spotty, Spotty."

"It is."

"How does it work?"

"I'll give you some back-dated promissory notes. Fill them in for what-ever you want. When the government auditors ask you why you loaned me the million in cash instead of by check, tell them your wife doesn't like me and you didn't want her to know you were helping me out. If they ask you where you got the cash, tell them you always like to store some in a mattress or safe-deposit box in case the banks fail again."

"A million dollars?"

"It's your money."

"Where did I get it?"

"Be evasive. It doesn't have to be that much. I've done this before. It's one of the ways I maintain my good credit in the industry. By going bankrupt regularly."

"And what happens if they don't believe me?"

"You go to jail."

"I go to jail."

"That's the downside risk," Weinrock answered with a sanguine smile, lavishly buttering an end slice of pumpernickel. "The upside gain is what you get back from the government next April from your income-tax return."

"Next April?" Gold cried with a convulsive lurch. "Spotty, I need that money now for a trip to Mexico."

"I could use some money for a trip to Mexico myself," Weinrock said. "I could also use new winter clothes. Will you let me have another thousand for a good coat and suit?"

"Spotty, are you really going bankrupt?"

"I have to," said Weinrock, grinning again in a way that left Gold chafing at the thought he was being laughed at irreverently by someone of lower station, "if I'm going to pay you back that eleven hundred dollars."

Gold took umbrage at the insinuation and retorted, "Am I your only creditor?"

"You're the only one who's pressing me."

"Pressing you?" Gold exclaimed indignantly. "You fuck—I phone you once in three years. You call that pressing you?"

"You never phone to buy goods, do you?" joked Spotty.

"Weinrock," droned the lugubrious waiter. "Please tell the gentleman we don't allow such language here."

"He don't know, Yankel," Weinrock lamented. "He's going to work in Washington as a bigshot and he thinks it's modern. The fig was good, Yankel. But the bread ..." Weinrock shook his head accusingly with a tragic frown.

"Sure, the bread," promptly apologized Yankel Lupewitz guiltily. "I told them the bread, but that's how they are."

"Spotty, I'm not going to put you into bankruptcy," Gold relented. "I can get it from Sid. If you ain't got, you ain't got."

"I can get nothing from Mursh," said Spotty. "These fucking doctors all turn into conservatives."

"I have to see him soon for an examination," said Gold.

"Tell him to send cash," said Spotty Weinrock airily. "All I've got left is my clothes, my business, my car, my apartment, my beach house, and my girl friends. After that, I'm just about bankrupt."

Gold said, "You don't look like a bankrupt."

"I can't afford to," said Spotty. "If things were good I could look like you."

Gold's eyes opened wider. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Seedy and thin. Like a bum. A guy with a pushcart. Old jacket, old turtleneck, old pants that don't match. That may be good enough for your classroom but it ain't good enough for the garment district. No bankrupt could afford to dress that way. You shouldn't have worn those rags into the garment center or into a good dairy restaurant."

"I'm sorry," said Gold coldly, "if I embarrass you."

"What then?" answered Weinrock. "Before you shame me in front of my salesmen, here you shame me in front of my creditors. I will have to make apologies for you."

"You filthy prick," said Gold quietly, losing all patience. "I changed my mind. Give me my fucking money and let me get the hell out of here. I don't even want to finish eating with you."

"Sit, sit," said Weinrock with tranquility, his face wreathing in jocund crinkles, and Gold guessed just then that the healthy tan on his face was the product of the sun lamp at the gym. "I want to treat you to lunch if you'll lay out the money and lend me another five hundred for a good fur-lined raincoat."

"I'll lend you shit."

It was clear Weinrock was going to reproach him. "Filthy prick? Shit? Is that how they taught you to speak at Oxford on your Rhodes Scholarship? You never learned no language like that in Coney Island."

"I never had no Rhodes Scholarship either," Gold mimicked him in a friendlier manner. "I was in Cambridge, and only for a summer. They weren't giving Rhodes Scholarships away to many Jews then. And I wasn't an athlete."

"Like that other one, on the Supreme Court? What's the name of that prick on the Supreme Court?"

"Rehnquist?"

"The other one."

"Burger?"

"Whizzer."

"Whizzer?"

"White." Weinrock's large, soft, slumping body shook with lazy laughter. "Imagine growing up with a nickname like Whizzer and liking it. A judge yet they make of a naar named Whizzer."

"Not like Spot."

"What's wrong with Spot?" asked Weinrock with honest ingenuousness.

"It's spotty, Spot." Gold was reveling in the momentary turn-about in advantage.

"I earned it, didn't I? I took out spots in your father's tailor shop for a whole week. Then he fired me."

"You were too slow," Gold taunted. "He still says you're no good."

"My mother says about you," said Weinrock, "that you can take a cow around the world—and you'll still have a cow. Tell me, who whizzes? Show me one man in the world who ever whizzed. If I was ever big enough to be a football player and someone called me Whizzer, I would put my fist through his brain. So now you want the money again, huh?"

"Oh, forget the money—it ain't worth the trouble collecting it from you." Gold glowered darkly for several seconds. "I guess I'll have to write my book. Give me some help and I'll pay for the lunch. I'm doing a book, a serious one." Gold did his best to ignore Weinrock's wondering smile and obnoxious chortling. "In a way it's a big chance for me. It can be a killer if I grind it out right, an abstract autobiography."

"What's that?"

"I don't know yet. But I will by the time I finish. It will be about how much fun it was to grow up in Coney Island."

"Fun?" Weinrock planted upon Gold an expression in which it would have been impossible to choose whether derision or disbelief was the ruling sentiment. "For you? Four-Eyes?"

Gold winced slightly at the derogatory reminder. "That's one of my problems. I didn't do much. I'm supposed to write about the Jewish experience and I'm not sure I ever had one. I have to make up a lot. That's why I need you and some of the other guys, to give me information. Where were you going all those times when you wouldn't let me come along?"

"Sometimes noplace."

"Noplace? Then why wouldn't you let me come?"

"We didn't want you."

Gold swallowed this piece of information like a bitter pill. "That's the kind of thing I need to know, I guess. All I've got is my own memory and experience to work with and it ain't enough. I may be able to knock the whole country on its ass with a big best seller if I get the right kind of help. What was it like for other people in the neighborhood? Like you and Fishy Siegel and Sheiky from Neptune Avenue. You still see Fishy. I don't remember their father or mother. What did his father do?"

"He rode a bike."

"Rode a bike?"

"Sure. With a white beard and a funny hat with buttons and with holes cut out. Like Sharkey's father. Just as crazy."

"Cheez!" Gold was quivering with serendipitious excitement. "See? I forgot all about Sharkey and his father."

Spotty laughed. "Don't you remember the time Sharkey's father disappeared on his bike? The whole neighborhood was looking for him. They had the police. Somebody told him New Jersey was just over the bridge, so he took off on his bike to see his brother in Metuchen there. He made it across the Manhattan Bridge and then started back into Brooklyn on the Williamsburg Bridge and thought he was heading for New Jersey. Halfway across he ran out of steam and went to sleep there with a Jewish newspaper over his face to keep off the sun. When the police called, Sharkey had to get him with Sheiky in the car Beansie had bought from Smokey the Fighter and Scarface Louis without knowing it was stolen, and neither one of them even had a driver's license when they ran out of gas right in front of the station house."

The genial reminiscence was just the spark needed to precipitate in Gold an explosion of loyal and merry attachment to the past such as he had not experienced in years. "Spotty, you bastard, I need you," he burst out. "I forgot all about those older guys. Listen, the next time you go back to Brooklyn to see Fishy or any of the other guys, I want you to bring me. It will be great getting together again."

"Great?" Again Spotty Weinrock scrutinized him closely. "It was never so great for you before. We do a lot of drinking now. In an Italian bar."

"I do a lot of drinking now too," said Gold.

"Lend me five hundred for some clothes for a little while," said Spotty Weinrock, "or I may not have the time."

"Will you pay this back? I may need it in two weeks."

"The minute you want," vowed Weinrock. "I'll go into bankruptcy this very afternoon if you say the word."

"Oh, never mind that," said Gold. "Now tell me. What was I like as a kid? What did you all really think of me and why?"

"Bruce." Weinrock stopped as he was about to fold Gold's check into his wallet. "You wouldn't stop payment on this if you didn't like my answer, would you?"

Gold was insulted. "Of course not. I don't want flattery. I want information I can use. Tell me truthfully. What was it like growing up with me?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, Bruce," said Spotty Weinrock with his manner of lazy and presumptuous mirth, "we didn't really look at it that way."

"When we were kids together," persisted Gold, feeling he was not getting his general idea across, "when we were growing up in Coney Island, did you and the other guys resent it because I was so much smarter than the rest of you?"

"Frankly," came the congenial reply with an unhesitant chuckle underscoring the words like the accompaniment of a basso ostinato, "we didn't think of you as smarter."

"You didn't?" Gold could scarcely believe he had heard him correctly.

"We thought you were a schmuck" The buoyancy in Gold took a sudden drop. "And now?"

"Now?" said Weinrock with a long vowel. "Ho, ho, now? Now, of course, we're all very proud of you every time we read your name in the paper. But we still think you're a schmuck"

"Really?" Gold proceeded with strong resentment. "Well, would you like to know what we used to say about you?"

"I don't even know who you mean by 'we,'" was Weinrock's nonchalant reply. "Who is this 'we' you're talking about?"

"Me and the fellows," said Gold. "The gang."

"Bruce," said Spotty Weinrock. "I was the fellows. I was the gang. You weren't."

"I wasn't popular?"

"You know that."

"Not even a little?" Gold's voice was husky.

"Not at all. You were an outsider, don't you remember? That's probably why you got so smart in school. You couldn't play ball and you had no personality."

"I didn't?"

"None at all," said Spotty Weinrock. "You did a lot of boasting and sometimes you'd go out of your way to make yourself a pain in the ass."

Very soon, said Gold to himself with a tristesse presaging a cafard, I will be the most renowned figure ever to come out of Coney Island. I am already a somebody and soon I will be somebody more. And I wasn't popular as a child and had no personality. "Was I as bad," he asked meekly, "as Lieberman?"

Here Weinrock was reassuring. "Lieberman was the worst. Lieberman was a real zshlub. I'll bet not even Henry Kissinger was as bad as Lieberman. Hey—" Weinrock paused a moment and turned red with laughter—"imagine how long a Yid like Kissinger would have lasted with the gang at the poolroom on Mermaid Avenue."

"Kissinger," Gold was constrained by fairness to mention, "made a lot of money."

"Not," said Weinrock, "by impressing Jews. He's lucky he found all those gentiles to help him." Gold, with his kleptomania for ideas, was already inscribing a mental note: Kraemer, Elliott, Rockefeller, Nixon, Ford—not a one of these sponsors and patrons of Kissinger was Jewish. "You even," Weinrock continued, "wore glasses."

"Glasses? Everyone wears glasses. Look at you."

"But then?" Weinrock sternly shook his head. "I couldn't see."

"What kind of excuse is that?"

"I couldn't see the blackboard in the classroom and I couldn't see a ball coming at me without eyeglasses when you let me play."

"You couldn't catch it when you did."

"Sometimes I caught it."

"I bet," laughed Spotty Weinrock, "that if your family had dough, they would even have put braces on your teeth. You even started losing hair before everyone else. All the rest of us are still thick and wavy and curly. Gosh, Brucie, you really were a fucking misfit, weren't you? It's a lucky thing you're getting famous. Otherwise, you wouldn't have a thing going for you."

"You're doing very, very much to cheer me up now," said Gold. "Listen, I want to meet you the next time you go into Coney Island to see Fishy Siegel or anyone else."

"You can meet us Wednesday after dinner."

"I was going back to Washington Wednesday. I've got a meeting with a very important Presidential aide and a date with a very beautiful tall girl."

"That's up to you."

Gold chose Coney Island and squeezed his way politely through a jammed, dark Italian bar on Mermaid Avenue to Spotty Weinrock, Fishy Siegel, and Fishy's son, Eugene, a clear-eyed, curious boy of twenty-four with an engaging, constant smile. Fishy was surprised to see him.

"Didn't you tell him I was coming?"

"I forgot," said Spotty Weinrock.

Fishy Siegel's response to Gold was that same challenging look of insolent reserve that had been the infuriating bane of schoolteachers and other supervising adults since the day he walked. Emulating a mannerism of his older brother Sheiky, who'd set him up profitably in a number of illegally interlocking suburban automobile dealerships, he sank both hands into the pockets of his trousers rather than extend one in greeting. Clearly the evening was not going to be remarkable for nostalgia.

"Sid says hello to your brother Sheiky," Gold lied with aplomb to bring about a thaw. "How'd Sheiky ever learn to make all that money, anyway?"

"My name is Wheeler, not Squealer."

Eugene blushed richly. "My mother goes nuts when he does that home."

"I'm not prying," retreated Gold. "I was just wondering how a guy who never finished high school learns about things like mergers, reinsurance, accelerated depreciation, subordinated debentures, and all that other shit."

"Your name is Goose, not Bruce," said Fishy Siegel. "You must be crazy if you think I'm going to tell anything to some scumbag who's going to work for the government."

"Scumbag?" echoed Gold, feeling disemboweled.

"Scumbag," repeated Fishy Siegel with a confidence that dared inquiry. "Can you think of a better word? My name is Tucker, not Sucker."

"Oh, shit," said Gold in a long sigh of fatigue. "I'm getting sick and tired of people who are always running down the government."

"I'm not," chirped Spotty Weinrock.

"Me neither," said Fishy Siegel. "Hey, Eugene, you getting tired? What's it like in Washington, Goldy? I'll buy a round. But no bullshit."

"My name is Meyer, not Liar," said Gold, and waited for the fresh drinks to arrive. These were not people with whom he could be circumspect. "Frankly, I don't know, Fishy. I'm having trouble figuring it out. They say things in Washington that I don't hear anywhere else. They say something funny and nobody laughs. I say something serious and they think I'm joking. I say something funny and they think I'm serious. They don't find anything strange."

"They know they're crooked?"

"They don't know that's strange."

"Neither do the muggers and rapists we got running all over now," said Fishy Siegel vengefully. A few of the Italians close by were muttering affirmatively. A woman in another corner of the room was inveighing against looters and burglars. It seemed to Gold that he and the boy Eugene were the only ones not smoking. "Don't shut me up, Eugene. We got muggers and rapists and murderers running around now like we never had before and they're going to keep running around whether I talk about it or not. Hey, Goldy, do you think I feel like a crook when I juggle my books? Why should they? Did you think we were criminals when we used to steal school supplies and had to work in the storeroom? Remember the time the box of penpoints fell out from underneath your sweater right in front of Mrs. Prosan? What a klutz you were." Fishy finally smiled.

"What are penpoints?" asked Eugene.

"Those are those small metal things that used to go into the bottoms of those wooden pens we'd chew on. You'd dip them into inkwells on your desk when you wanted to write."

"What are inkwells?"

"Things sure have changed if Eugene doesn't even know what an inkwell is," said Spotty Weinrock.

"Don't go by him," said Fishy of his son Eugene with insult and boundless love present in the same breath. "He's dumb. He got married when he was twenty-two."

"You didn't want me to live with her, either," said Eugene. "You wouldn't give us the money for a house until we got married."

"I had warts one year," Gold remembered. "All over my fingers, about seventeen of them. I started putting ink on them every day in school and they went away."

"It's changed," said Spotty Weinrock. "All those stores boarded up closed. Where do the people shop?"

"Sure, it's changed," Fishy Siegel grumbled with the impertinent surliness of someone middle-aged who was not used to giving an inch. "When we were kids the Italians used to try to beat us up. Now we have to hide in an Italian bar when we come here if we want to feel safe. When the Italians move away we'll have nothing. Raymie Rubin's mother was one of the old people killed last year."

"We had this one Christian kid on our block," said Gold, "and his father used to get us free admission passes to Steeplechase, and then we'd go up to old people and ask for the rides on their tickets they were too scared to go on themselves."

"Jimmy Heinlein," Fishy Siegel recalled. "His family had chickens. He had a joke. First it was Coney Island, he told me, now it's Cohen's Island, next it will be Coon's Island. He could have thrown in the spies too, they're getting just as bad, but we didn't know about them then. I told him I'd bust his head open if he ever told that joke to anyone again, and I must have scared him pretty good because he never did."

"He told it to me," said Gold.

"Maybe I didn't scare him."

"What's Steeplechase?" asked Eugene.

"It was a big famous amusement park around the Parachute Jump, Eugene," answered Spotty Weinrock. "Steeplechase, the Funny Place. We had another famous one that was even better, Luna Park. It had the Shoot the Chutes and the Mile Sky Chaser, maybe the highest roller coaster in the world. You know something, Fishy. I could have picked up that Parachute Jump in guaranteed working condition for just a few thousand dollars. I think maybe I could have bought all of Steeplechase for just a little bit more."

"Why didn't you?"

"I forgot."

"You know something about Steeplechase?" asked Gold in a tone of significant meditation.

"It wasn't such a funny place."

"Luna Park was better."

"The depths of the Great Depression," Gold announced with profundity, and knew already, with a collector's instinct for everything usable, that he would include the proposition in his book whether it proved viable or not. "That was the best time of our lives, wasn't it?"

"Not for me," said Spotty Weinrock in sprightly rebuttal. "The older I get the more fun I seem to have."

"Me too," said Fishy Siegel. "Kids don't know how to enjoy themselves."

"I'm enjoying myself," said Eugene.

"What do you know?" answered his father. "You're just a kid. Why'd you get married, you dope? Nobody gets married any more."

"Pop, that was two years ago." Eugene smiled.

"What will you do with the baby when you get your divorce?"

"We got no baby. Who's getting a divorce?"

"Everybody, you dumb kid, that's what I'm trying to tell you. Everybody gets divorced now. You hold on to that baby for us, you hear? Or I'll throw you out of the business and won't give you a fucking penny. Let her have the house and car and all the other shit she wants, but you keep that baby for us."

"Hey, guys." Smokey the Fighter, near sixty now, pushed through the people behind and poked in a face with a grizzled stubble of beard, the tip of his nose missing from a historic knife fight in his teens with local gangsters. He couldn't place Gold. "I know I'm getting old now," he related to the others in his deep, gravelly voice. His eyes twinkled and his cheeks were shining. "I feel like nineteen until I look in the mirror, and then I'm surprised. Last summer I was peddling ice cream on the beach and this Italian kid in his twenties tells me to keep out of his territory if I know what's good for me. I couldn't believe it. 'Hey, kid, take care of yourself,' I tried to warn him. 'You know who you're talking to?' I'm still pretty quick with my fists. We moved under the boardwalk and had a fight and he beat the shit out of me—so easily." Smokey put his head back and basked in the memory. "I didn't see a single punch coming. Then I knew I was getting old. And I'm the guy who used to beat up all the other peddlers."

"Not my brother Sheiky," Fishy Siegel contradicted him tersely.

"You couldn't beat him up."

"I could beat him up if I caught him," said Smokey. "He was always running."

"But you never caught him, did you?"

"All you guys are doing pretty good, ain't you?"

Fishy wouldn't buy him a drink, so Gold did. Smokey still couldn't place him. Weinrock gave him a cigar.

A pasty, small, sharp-featured man a few places down said, "They're even dumping those welfare families into Sea Gate now, in those big houses there. I guess there are just too many of them and they don't know what to do about it."

"I know what to do," growled a hugely obese man on the seat next to Gold in a harsh, deep voice that seemed to emanate from his stomach and move to his lips without vibrating a single vocal cord. Hip flesh overflowed the bar stool on both sides. "Concentration camps. I mean for them" he explained with dainty politeness and a delicate change of tone to Gold and his group.

The bartender reached forward. "Be a good boy, Ant'ony, and don't make trouble."

"Ant'ony, you prick," said the large man's thin friend, "they're white. That's what I'm trying to tell you. They got lots of little kids in those welfare families too, and they don't know what's happening to them."

"Let's get out of here," Fishy Siegel decided abruptly with an air still starkly devoid of friendship or civility, and Gold was impressed by the consistency and sustaining power of that unsociable personality: never in his life had Fishy Siegel evinced human feeling for anyone outside his family. "I want to go home."

"Can I pay?" said Gold quickly. "If you don't mind."

"My name is Mort, not Sport."

Gold was halted a moment by the bleak, charged darkness when he stepped outside alone. The smell of old fires was thick as fog. He had nearly half a block to catch up with the others at the cars. Four springy, dark-skinned bloods in sneakers were coming his way, and he knew in a paralyzing flash of intuition that it was ending for him right then and there, with a knife puncture in the heart. He visualized the newspaper clipping someone else might be interested enough to collect:

They passed without bothering him, deciding to let him live. His time had not yet come. Where was progress? he wondered. When he was young, there were lots of poor people and the rich were his enemy. The rich were still there and now the poor were his enemy too.

Gold had noted earlier all the boarded-up, ruined shops on the three major lateral avenues of Coney Island and wondered where all the people went now to buy food, have their suits and dresses mended and dry cleaned, their shoes and radios fixed, and their medical prescriptions filled. In his rented car, he drove alone one more time the desolate length of Mermaid Avenue to the high chain-link fence of the private residential area of Sea Gate, where owners of the larger houses were now accepting welfare families, turned left toward the beach and boardwalk, and made his way back slowly along Surf Avenue. He did not see a drugstore. Behind the guarded barriers of Sea Gate, which once grandly sported a yacht club and was restricted to well-off Christians, younger Jewish families now congregated for safety and sent their children to whatever private schools they could. Elderly men and women, as always, probably still crept forth from secret places each morning and prowled the streets and boardwalk for patches of warming sunshine, conversing in Yiddish, and Raymie Rubin's mother had been killed one day on her return. Gold did not pass a single Jewish delicatessen. There was no longer a movie house operating in Coney Island: drugs, violence, and vandalism had closed both garish, overtowering theaters years before. The brick apartment house in which he had spent his whole childhood and nearly all his adolescence had been razed; on the site stood something newer and uglier that did not seem a nourishing improvement for the Puerto Rican families there now.

Gold remembered the summer the city widened the beach and trucks loaded with sand rolled past the house on Surf Avenue all day long from early spring on. In summer on scalding days his mother cautioned each child in her fused vocabulary: "It brent a fire in street." Each fall she had a fervent admonition she repeated: They must always go to temple on Yom Kippur no matter where they were in later life; otherwise, people would think they were a "Comminist." She would sit at the window exchanging nods with women at windows across the street and watch for dirigibles, and she told of a time not far back when whole families ran down into the street for sight of an airplane in the sky. She could sing the start of two of the first songs she had learned in America, "Don't Go in the Park After Dark" and "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier." Both were timelier now. The frail, mothering woman with the bandage around her neck never learned to read or understand much English, but she could identify arias from Carmen, Tosca, Faust, Aida, and Madame Butterfly on the big old Atwater-Kent radio in the living room—bought for her by Sid, Gold remembered now, with money he'd saved secretly from his afternoon work in the laundry and his weekend work Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons at the catering halls. Now how the fuck was she able to learn that?

With the first fragrant, balmy days of March or April, the peddlers would come with their trucks of fruits and vegetables and continue hawking their freshest, ripest produce all through summer. Long Island potatoes were twenty-five pounds for a quarter. The peddlers, all brawny, browned Italians, many with Gypsy sweat-bands tied to brows and neck, would fill the air with a special din of raucous shouts among which one of singular mockery always predominated in the echoing aftermath:

If you've got money, come out and buy.
Got no money, stay home and cry.

Gold had been hearing that same peddler's cry daily ever since from financial firms, manufacturers, and governments.

If you've got money, come out and buy..
Got no money, stay home and cry.

His mind was a ferment of heresies as he turned from the Island and headed home, heresies he knew would not find the light of expression in print or speech from him, and his brain was pumping with fragments of ideas he thought he might use for a lively article on blight or rubbish. Nationalize Rockefellers and extirpate all Houses of Morgan. Rubbish. Rubbish was accumulating along byways throughout the country, and all but demented eccentrics dropped litter anywhere with utmost peace of mind. The Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island was a skyscraping nursing home now, and enterprising teenagers were murdering old people casually in the normal course of their youthful depredations. Gold had the clippings to prove it. The nation had nothing better to do with its forsaken aged or unenraptured young. Gold knew something no one else did, but was not going to reveal it: he knew there was no longer anything legal to be done under the American system of government to discourage crime, decrease poverty, improve the economy, or nullify the influences of neglect, and when he got to Washington he would not even try. Why should he be the exception? And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his "Every Change Is for the Worse" should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.

Office buildings rose as spectacles where there was no lack of office space, and organizations with Brobdingnagian names were sprouting like unmanageable vines and spreading like mold with sinecures and conferments for people of limited mentality and unconvincing motive. Gold knew several by heart from pieces he had clipped:

Irving Kristol is Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

Sidney Hook, professor emeritus of philosophy at New York University, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution, and Peace.

Colleagues report that Senator-elect S. I. Hayakawa, the former head of San Francisco State College, has been sleeping through seminars cosponsored by the Harvard Institute of Politics and Library of Congress Research Division.

Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger has agreed to be consultant at the University of Southern California's new Center for the Study of the American Experience. His salary was not disclosed.

Every good place has always been deteriorating, and everything bad was getting worse. Neighborhoods, parks, beaches, streets, schools were falling deeper into ruin and whole cities sinking into rot. They were putting Coney Island welfare families into Sea Gate now. There were just too many people. Italians, Jews, Blacks, Puerto Ricans—it was not unlike the great Caucasian migrations, except there was no place left to go. Assimilation was impossible, upward mobility a fantasy. Multitudes witnessed the avalanching decline. Gold's spirits were improving tremendously as this vocabulary of degeneration and decay coursed through his head. It was the Shoot the Chutes into darkness and dissolution, the plunging roller coaster into disintegration and squalor. Someone should do something. Nobody could. No society worth its salt would watch itself perishing without some serious attempt to avert its own destruction. Therefore, Gold concluded, we are not a society. Or we are not worth our salt. Or both.

Gold had his article.

By nightfall the next day he was secluded in his study at the apartment with his notepaper and typewriter and his folders of newspaper and magazine clippings that might prove apposite.

The liar Richard Helms, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had finally been brought to justice for alleged acts of the felony of perjury and was permitted to plead "no contest" to trivial misdemeanors instead. In a departure from long tradition, no notice of the hearing was given to the press. The Attorney General of the United States angrily denied there had been any agreement between the Justice Department and Mr. Helms's lawyers to conceal the courtroom proceeding from reporters.

"It is my understanding that there is to be no jail sentence, that I will be able to get my pension from the U.S. Government, and there will be no further prosecution," the transcript reflects Mr. Helms as telling the judge.

"This court does not feel itself bound by any Justice Department agreement with Mr. Helms," said Federal District Judge Barrington D. Parker at a court session attended only by Mr. Helms, his lawyers, Justice Department officials, and court officers.

And then fined Helms only two thousand dollars for lying under oath about the CIA's secret contributions to the undermining of the democratic constitutional government in Chile. Justice was done.

Federal District Judge Barrington D. Parker told Mr. Helms before sentencing, "You dishonored your oath and you now stand before this court in disgrace and shame."

"I don't feel disgraced at all," Mr. Helms later told reporters outside the courtroom after the sentencing.

His lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, gave exemplary display throughout of that special probity and that commitment to justice and light for which the members of his profession have historically been famed:

In the courtroom, Mr. Williams had told Judge Parker that Mr. Helms would "bear the scar of a conviction for the rest of his life." Outside, however, he told reporters that contrary to what Judge Parker had said, Mr. Helms would "wear his conviction like a badge of honor."

A political columnist for the New York Daily News called the disposition of the case "an establishment fix, pure and simple." The Attorney General of the United States was understandably sensitive to the charge he was party to a fix and replied as best he was able: it was not credible to Gold that there should appear in his lifetime still one more U.S. Attorney General with the stultified brain of an ox and the psychology of a corkscrew, but the evidence now before his eyes was lamentably persuasive.

Attorney General Griffin Bell angrily denied yesterday that the Justice Department had used a "double standard" in handling the case of former CIA Director Richard M. Helms, Bell insisted that the Justice Department recommendation that Helms spend no time in prison and be allowed to keep his government pension was "fair and just." He denied any double standard of prosecuting rich and poor. "Only the well-to-do go to prison," he said.

This was news to Gold. It was news from which he recoiled in disgust to absorb more about this establishment public servant who had kept his government pension and magically escaped the discriminatory incarcerations systematically meted out in the criminal courts to other members of the well-to-do.

Richard McGarrah Helms (he prefers not to use his middle name) was almost the epitome of the establishment figure. His father was a corporate executive and his maternal grandfather, Gates McGarrah, was an international banker. He spent two high school years in Switzerland and Germany, where he learned French and German as well as the social graces.

Gold would almost rather be a Jew.

He brushed Richard McGarrah Helms aside for what use he could make of him later in his book on Kissinger or the Jewish experience and turned to the task at hand with a concentration that was diluted almost at the start by the regretful wish that he were already writing his book. David Eisenhower was writing a book:

David Eisenhower is writing an intimate character study of his grandfather. "I will include the impressions I had of him," Mr. Eisenhower said, "but the more I leave myself out of the book the better."

The timing of the book is just right for him, Mr. Eisenhower explained. "I just got out of law school, and I've always been ambitious in the writing field. The idea sort of occurred to me."

John Ehrlichman, Spiro Agnew, and H. R. Halde-man had written books. Gerald Ford was writing a book:

TALENT SCOUT

He still has 17 days in office, but President Ford has quietly signed up with the William Morris talent agency to represent him when he returns to private life. He will have the same agent who represented Olympic swim champ Mark Spitz and the racehorse Secretariat.

William Morris will get 10 percent on any books the President may write, any lectures he may give, any television deals he makes.

If Gerald Ford could write a book, was there any reason Secretariat could not? An engaging screenwriter named Nancy Dowd was not writing a book:

Although a Smith College classmate once predicted that Nancy Dowd would be "our generation's James Joyce," Miss Dowd seems quite content writing screenplays in Hollywood. "I wouldn't mind writing a novel," she said. "But the way you can show behavior in films is so exciting."

Gold warmed to Miss Dowd and thought of sending a fan letter because she was not writing a novel.

Richard Nixon had written a book.

The President of the United States had written a book about his one year in the White House and might secretly be writing another about his second.

A popular fashion model named Cheryl Tiegs had overcome considerable misgivings and decided to write a book:

In addition, Tiegs just negotiated a deal with Simon & Schuster giving her $70,000 plus royalties to collaborate on a book. "The problem with writing," she sighed, "is that there's not much money in it."

Even that fat little fuck Henry Kissinger was writing a book! He was writing his memoirs, after Gold had done most of the work, and, according to separate stories in The New York Times, had negotiated for the publication rights with the same frantic subtlety and intrigue of which he had given such striking illustration in public office. Said the first of these stories in the Times:

A NEW SHUTTLE FOR KISSINGER,
TO PUBLISHERS WITH MEMOIRS

Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger is about to embark on one of his most challenging diplomatic journeys—the selling of his memoirs. How skillfully he maneuvers for the rights to his life story could mean the difference between merely a large advance and the biggest advance in book publishing history. The figures being totted up range from $1 million to $3 million, plus extras.

Mr. Kissinger, who negotiated his own contracts in the past, has never used a literary agent and, according to a well-known knowledgeable source at the State Department, probably will not employ one.

Said the second:

KISSINGER RETAINS LITERARY AGENT

To enhance the value of his memoirs in the marketplace, Secretary of State Kissinger has retained a powerful literary agency to represent him. The agency is International Creative Management.

I.C.M.'s clients include Barbra Streisand, Steve McQueen, Isaac Stern, Peter Benchley, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Harry Reasoner, Joseph Heller, and Sir Laurence Olivier.

$2 Million to $3 Million Mentioned

According to publishing informants, the "extras" being sought include a lifetime consultancy as an editor, magazine and newspaper columns, television adviser-ships or appearances, unlimited staff, chauffeured limousines, and other things.

Gold presumed that "other things" included the two shifts of three bodyguards he was later reported hiring at his own expense.

Gold perused the dollar amounts again with a vitriolic misanthropy greatly exceeding that natural jealousy to be found in every man. His own original plans for a book of Kissinger's memoirs were aborted. Deftly he had rearranged his information for a more combustible line of attack, considering he would easily obtain the Kissinger manuscript as soon as photocopies were made for book club and paperback deals. Six months ahead of publication Gold could rebut assertions and positions before they were proclaimed, in a fusillade of debunking articles that would diminish the commercial value of Kissinger's book while enhancing that of his own. Let the shuttling little bastard publish first if he dared! Each of Gold's articles, of course, would find a place in his book. But the big bucks, unfortunately, still would go to the surreptitious former Harvard professor and Secretary of State who was now, as well as a number of other things, consultant to the University of Southern California's Center for the Study of the American Experience, instead of a primary topic of investigation.

It was disgraceful and so discouraging to Gold that this base figure charged with infamies too horrendous to measure and too numerous for listing should be gadding about gaily in chauffeured cars, instead of walking at Spandau with Rudolf Hess, while Gold had to drive rented ones.

Gold who'd collected everything by and about Kissinger ever published, could certainly do a better job than Kissinger on a book about Kissinger. For one thing, he had an objective antipathy toward his subject possibly lacking, or weaker, in Kissinger himself. Gold strongly doubted that the sneaky man who'd treacherously monitored his telephone calls for eight years and cooperated in the illegal tapping of the family lines of journalists and aides would have the humorous conviviality and that largeness and flexibility of nature to view himself in the comic light of ridicule and loathing he inspired in so many others. Or that he could be anything but oblivious to the despicable character of his small actions and the bloody catastrophies resulting from his large ones. There was the judgment of Anthony C. Lewis in The New York Times:

His agony was at arm's length; there is no sign that the human torment of Vietnam affected him inside, as it did so many others.

There was also a deficiency in imagination likely to circumscribe the value of any study of Kissinger by Kissinger. Asked about his role in the Cambodian war, in which an estimated five hundred thousand people died, he'd said:

I may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see the moral issue involved.

Whereas another State Department official, William C. Sullivan, had testified:

The justification for the war is the reelection of the President.

Not once that Gold knew of had Kissinger raised a voice in protest against the fascistic use of police power to quell public opposition to the war in Southeast Asia. How honestly would he deal with unfriendly assessments of himself Gold had found: (1) of himself as someone "as shabby as the certified scoundrels in the Nixon administration"; (2) of his policies and record as "marked by ignorance and ineptitude" and likely to be viewed by history as "thin in diplomatic achievement and shameful in human terms"; and (3) of his major achievement, peace in Vietnam, that "Kissinger brought peace to Vietnam the same way Napoleon brought peace to Europe: by losing," and that "If he had his way we would be bombing Vietnam still." Or with that exultant peroration by an editorial writer for The New Republic who, responding to the report that Kissinger might soon be working in television and not in government, gave thanks to God that now "he can devote his conjuring talents to television land, where they won't do any harm"? Had Kissinger, as alleged, really longed for "a brutal episode of battle" that would result in a convincing Israeli military defeat? Had he really tried to delay arms shipments to that country during the Yom Kippur war? Were his hopes truly depressed when Israel rallied by fording the Suez Canal and encircling the Egyptian armies on the farther side? Gold had ample documentation of the plain silliness of the prick:

KISSINGER CALLS NIXON "UNPLEASANT"

"Power is a great aphrodisiac," this man of vaunted brilliance and wit had said more than once with an arrogance and naiveté, in Gold's estimation, that merited contempt. Gold knew from experience that women were a better one. Only a lamebrain, Gold thought, would state to an interviewer in wartime after his own efforts at peacemaking had been failing wretchedly for almost four years, "When I'm talking to Le Duc Tho, I know how to behave with Le Duc Tho, and when I'm with a girl, I know how to behave with a girl." It did not seem to Gold that Kissinger knew anything at ill about behaving with Oriana Fallaci, the woman conducting the interview:

"No, I don't want to engage in polemics on this subject."

"Enough, I don't want to talk of Vietnam any more."

"Oh! No, I shan't answer him. I shan't respond to his invitation."

"Don't ask me that."

"That's a question I can't answer."

"I can't, I can't ... I don't want to answer that question."

"And don't make me talk of Vietnam any more, please."

"But that's really enough about Vietnam now. Let's talk of Machiavelli, Cicero anything except Vietnam."

"No, I have never been against the war in Vietnam."

"But are we still talking of Vietnam?"

"Power as an instrument in its own right has no fascination for me."

"What counts is to what extent women are part of my life, a central preoccupation. Well, they aren't that at all. To me women are no more than a pastime, a hobby. Nobody devotes too much time to a hobby. Moreover, my engagement book is there to show I only devote a limited portion of my time to them."

"... I've always acted alone. Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy leading the caravan alone astride his horse, the cowboy entering a village or city alone on his horse."

"This romantic, surprising character suits me, because being alone has always been part of my style, or of my technique if you prefer. Independence too. Yes, that's very important to me and in me. And, finally, conviction. I am always convinced of the necessity of whatever I'm doing. And people feel that, believe in it. And I attach great importance to being believed."

"I'm not asking for popularity, I'm not seeking it. In fact, if you really want to know, I care nothing for popularity. I can afford to say what I think. I am referring to what is genuine in me. Take actors, for instance, the really good ones don't rely on mere technique. They also follow their feelings when they play a part. Like me, they are genuine."

"Oh, he's so full of shit, that self-seeking schmuck" Gold said aloud.

"Why I agreed to it," Mr. Kissinger later commented about the interview, "I'll never know."

Said Mr. Lewis of the Times:

[His] jokes have about them the air of the grave. That we honor a person who has done such things in our name is a comment on us.

The transition from Kissinger to blight, rubbish, rot, and moral defilement was a natural one, and Gold was not distracted from his article when his daughter entered.

"You want dinner?"

Gold waved her away without looking up from the work in which he was immersed. In an hour he settled on a title:

It was a title that sang. The divine fires were burning.