VIII

We Are Not a Society or
We Are Not Worth Our
Salt

"I like the first part of the title but not the second." As Gold watched with a look of cold dislike, Lieberman took a pencil in his fist and drew heavy black lines through the offending words as though gouging them from the page with some primitive stone implement. "There, that's much better, isn't it? *We Are Not a Society.'"

"It's hardly a blockbuster that way."

"We can build on it. I'm thinking of wearing polka-dot bow ties. How would I look in them?"

Gold knew he would look just awful. "I think you'd look just fine."

"So do I." Lieberman sat back in his swivel chair with a face too plainly smug and disrespectful. "Now what is all this nonsense about salt? What do you mean 'worth our salt'? What's that supposed to signify anyway?"

Gold considered walking out the door. "It's a play on words," he defended himself. "In addition to any idiomatic value in the metaphor, I feel that salt is one of those basic, shared commodities that give that kind of cohesion to an aggregate of families in a given area that we commonly call a society."

"Well, why don't you just say it as simply as that?" Lieberman instructed with an intolerable air of authority. "Cohesion is better. Salt is too complex."

"Salt?"

"Especially 'worth our salt.' We'll use 'cohesion' instead. Try to remember, Bruce, that we've got a highly educated, very intellectual, politically concerned group of readers who are always very well informed, and they just won't know what you mean when you say 'worth our salt.' What do you mean, anyway? I don't get it. How much is salt worth? And why is it ours? Why not worth our beef?"

"Go on," said Gold.

"We'll call it 'We Are Not a Society or Are We Lacking in Those Basic, Shared Commodities That Give Cohesion to Aggregates of Families in a Given Geographical Area That Enable Us to Call Them a Society?' That just about says it all, doesn't it? 'Cohesion' works like a charm. We can put in plenty of sex now and take out all the salt. Just remember, Bruce, that I'm an experienced editor and you're not," continued Lieberman with a bloated sense of superiority. "Sophie and I had dinner at the White House once, you know. And we got there on my merits, not by sucking up to an anti-Semitt like Ralph."

"You got there," reminded Gold, losing all control as the fury submerged beneath the rather pacific exterior he was striving to maintain finally achieved the upper hand, "by supporting a war with a bunch of other assholes who were too fucking corrupt to tell Johnson and Nixon they were full of shit. If I had a kid hurt in that war I'd cut your head off now. You yellow hypocrite, I never saw you rushing out to enlist. And your kids would have been deferred along with mine, wouldn't they, if they'd been old enough to be drafted? That gives me a good idea for another article."

"Let me see it first." Lieberman rose, wheedling. "You owe me that much."

"You wouldn't use it," Gold taunted with a curled lip. "It's called 'My Meal at the White House,' by Skip and Sophie Lieberman."

"As told to Bruce Gold," said Lieberman with a look of almost livid hatred, "who has never eaten there."

"But keeps trying. Good day, you prick."

"Good day, Bruce." In the instant they stood motionless and glared at each other, perhaps nowhere else on earth were so powerfully contrasted two old friends who liked each other not at all and who were so intractably in contention on almost every issue. "You give some thought to improving the title still more while I rewrite the text. Maybe we should be coauthors."

"You change one more fucking word," Gold warned, "and I'll take it back and sell it to another magazine."

"Bruce, it's marvelous," cried Ralph on his hot line from Washington to Gold in his apartment, where the latter was furtively squirreling together the family bankbooks and other testaments of ownership in anticipation of his flight to another domicile when the hour foreclosing further procrastination was at last at hand. "Everyone here agrees."

"They do?" asked Gold in a soaring resurrection of spirit.

"Even the President. The President wants me to tell you he's crazy about it. He asked if you'd be willing to work as a speechwriter."

"No," said Gold.

"I told him that. You're too important in your own right. And you'd be much more valuable to us as an independent voice in our control."

"It would compromise my moral authority," Gold added with a passing chill.

"I'll point that out. He likes your article so much, Bruce, that he doesn't want you to publish it."

"He doesn't?"

"He wants to introduce it in sections entirely as his own," said Ralph, "in speeches, and press conferences, and in his next State of the Union message. He loves your phrases, Bruce. You've been promoted again."

"To what?"

"We'll have that nailed down definitely before you fly back unless we don't have time. He especially loves that worth his salt. What a stunning gift you have. How in the world did you arrive at an image like that? It boggles the mind."

"That's worth our salt, Ralph," Gold corrected.

"He might want to change it, Bruce," cautioned Ralph.

"It's already been changed," Gold informed him. "It's out of the article. Cut."

"By whom?"

"Lieberman," said Gold. "He doesn't like salt. He wants to take it all out."

"Salt?"

"He's changing it to cohesion. That kind of cohesion—"

"Cohesion?" cried Ralph in a tone of wounded surprise. "What kind of word is cohesion? He's crazy, Bruce. You mustn't let him ruin it."

"He thought salt was too complex."

"He doesn't know what he's doing," said Ralph. "Cohesion's no good. He just isn't worth his salt."

"Will you talk to him about it?"

"I won't talk to Lieberman about anything," said Ralph. "But he won't have dinner at the White House again while I'm around. We'll have you instead. Then we can have the salt, right? You won't be using it anyway."

Here Gold's inherent tactical sense surged to the fore. "There are other places, Ralph," he began his negotiations. "And I've been thinking about it for my book. Pomoroy's very impressed. Worth Our Salt. I'd hate to give that up, Ralph."

"I can see why," said Ralph. "But let the President have it. After all, he's the only President we have."

"It would be worth a lot to him, wouldn't it?" hinted Gold.

"And this President would repay. Maybe that Ambassadorship to the Court of St. James. Or Secretary of State. That one is not bad, Bruce. You travel free and get all the nights out you want. Would you like to be Secretary of State?"

"Let me think about it," said Gold with a sangfroid he'd not known till that moment was an inner resource he could draw upon. "What about that head of the CIA you once mentioned?"

"You could be that too."

"Too? Ralph, is any of this really possible?"

"I don't see why not, if you're worth your salt. Could you handle both jobs at the same time?"

"I don't see why not," said Gold. "I'll take the piece back from Lieberman. Mum's the word, right?"

"Salt," Ralph corrected and laughed. "And remember—the walls have ears."

"I know," said Gold. "I've been talking to them."

"And I'm going in right now and start fighting for you, if I can get an appointment. We'll shoot for Secretary of State, Ambassador to the Court of St. James, head of NATO—"

"I'm not sure I want that one."

"—or Director of the CIA. It's high time you got what you deserved, Bruce, although it may be too soon."

"Thank you, Ralph. You're the salt of the earth."

"Would you say that again, Bruce?"

"Lieberman, I don't like Cohesion."

"I won't take salt."

"Then I'm withdrawing the piece."

"You've made a deal somewhere else."

"May God strike me dead," said Gold, supremely content with the terms of the agreement he was forging with the Deity, "if you ever see that article in print in another magazine."

"I wasn't crazy about it anyway," Lieberman retorted with an ugly petulance, and Gold recalled with considerable mental peace an additional explanation for Lieberman's mood of morose and vindictive frustration. But a fortnight earlier, Lieberman had applied with fanfare for membership in a stodgy, obsolescent conservative organization called Young Americans for Freedom and had been rejected because he was too old. He had on a polka-dot bow tie with matching crumbs and grease stains—another wandering Jew, Gold decreed in disavowing lament, converted to a bow tie. He was wearing a shabby leather jacket and looked like a rough beast with slotted eyes on whom it belonged as a hide. "I've got more important things to busy myself with than you and your salt. I want to do something about China, communism, and the grape growers in California."

"What's wrong with China?"

"There's no political democracy there," said Lieberman grumpily, "and no freedom of the press,"

"No shit," said Gold with feigned amazement. "What did you have in mind?"

"A manifesto, of course, by me, in the form of a petition, with a list of non-negotiable demands, insisting they change. I'll need supporting names."

"Count me in," said Gold.

"And a special issue of my magazine in which you and others express my feelings in two thousand words."

"How much will you pay?"

"Nothing."

"Count me out."

Lieberman retorted with the savage fervor of a maddened fanatic. "You want nine hundred million Chinese to be without political freedom just because you won't give up a few bucks? That's a third of the human race."

"A fourth, you imbecile. What about communism?"

"I want to halt the spread right now on every border in the world. With armed might, if necessary."

"Whose?"

"I haven't been able to figure that out yet," admitted Lieberman. "But I'm willing to make the people of the world an offer they can't refuse—a preferable alternative they will find impossible to resist."

"What's the preferable alternative?"

"I haven't been able to figure that one out yet either."

"What about the grape growers?"

"The workers are on strike. There's been a breakdown of tradition and a loss of respect for the workings of the free marketplace."

"What do you want to do about it?" Lieberman was quick to reply. "Government subsidies."

"To the workers?"

"The growers. To help them beat back the strikers indefinitely and allow them to band together to peg prices at a high level and stabilize the free market."

"I'll pass on that one too."

"That's the thing I dislike most about you," Lieberman rebuked him with a snarl. "What shall I say is wrong with you? You'll find it all spelled out in my newest autobiography. You're always afraid to come down solidly on the side of the status quo. It's the reason you're not getting anywhere."

"Really?" said Gold, and took pleasure in continuing, "I've just been promoted again."

"To what?" Lieberman demanded jealously.

"It must not pass my lips."

"Have you been working in Washington all this time?"

"I've been fucking girls there," Gold answered with a cryptic smile. "I can tell you no more."

"Well, I've been fucking girls too," Lieberman blurted out in challenge. After this, there came a pause from Lieberman, pregnant with the expanding weight of a confidence craving release. "If I tell you a secret," he said with uncommon reticence, "will you tell me one?" He persisted with his confession even after Gold said no. "Will you promise never to tell anyone?"

"It will go with me," said Gold, "to the grave."

"I've been getting girls too," said Lieberman, squirming with uneasiness. "I've been answering those sex help-wanted ads we run in the back of my magazine. I can get an early crack at the best ones before they're even published. I've been surprised at how easy it is and how many of them there are. I never knew women enjoyed sex too. Of course," said Lieberman, and here his voice sank confessionally in a mixture of disappointment and apology, "they're not always the most beautiful girls in the world."

"No shit," said Gold.

"No-oo shit," said Gold in Washington when offered his pick by Ralph of Secretary of State, Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Attorney General of the United States, or Director of the CIA in exchange for his "We Are Not a Society or We Are Not Worth Our Salt."

"I would go for Secretary of State if I were you."

"But I don't know anything," said Gold doubtfully, "and I've got no experience."

"That's never made a difference," said Ralph.

That part seemed plausible. "Ralph, can I really be appointed Secretary of State soon if I decide I want the job?"

"Oh, I can practically guarantee that," said Ralph, "although I can't be sure. That's as much as I can tell you right now."

"Would the Senate confirm me?" asked Gold. "Most of them don't even know who I am."

"That would work strongly to your advantage," said Ralph. "As you state so eloquently in your article, Bruce, the more we know about any candidate for public office the less deserving he is of our support, and the ideal nominee for President is always someone about whom everybody in the country knows absolutely nothing."

"Ralph," Gold cried, "that was a joke, a sarcasm, a piece of satirical whimsy."

"We see it," said Ralph with a look of grave reproof, "as the absolute truth and are already taking it into our calculations for the future. It's a pity you've had your name in the papers, Bruce, or you might have been our next Presidential nominee. Settle for Secretary of State, Bruce, at least for now. It's a foot in the door."

"What would I have to do?" asked Gold.

"Nothing," said Ralph. "And you would have a large staff to help. You would have a Deputy Undersecretary of State with a map showing the capitals of all the countries in the world and another with the names of the people in charge so you wouldn't have to call up the newspapers to find out. Unless you wanted to keep busy, and then there'd be no limit to the affairs in which you could interfere."

"Could I make policy?"

"As much as you want."

"Foreign policy?"

"Domestic too. If you're quick enough."

"Quick enough?"

"Oh, sure," said Ralph. "Bruce, you know the President as well as I do—"

"I've never met him, Ralph," Gold corrected stiffly.

Ralph appeared baffled. "Didn't he go to your big sister's birthday party?"

"I went. He went to China."

"But I took you to see him in the White House after you did so well at the Commission, didn't I?"

"He was taking a nap."

"Well, you will have to meet him at least once before he can announce your appointment," Ralph advised. "I hope you won't mind that."

"I don't think I'll mind."

"Actually, the best time to catch him is when he's feeling sleepy and wants to nap," said Ralph. "That's

when the rush to see him is thickest and you have to be quick. This President is much too busy to spend time on life-and-death responsibilities in which he's lost interest. Although we do suspect," Ralph confided after a fretful glance at the wall, "that he's often off writing another book secretly when he's supposed to be napping. If you approach him with your policy when he's wide awake you might command his attention. Hang in there, if you can, until his eyes turn glassy and he starts to yawn. If you're beside him when he's drifting off, you can get his authorization for just about any policy you want."

"Suppose," said Gold, "it's a bad policy. Suppose I make a mistake."

"In government," Ralph answered, "there's no such thing as a mistake, since nobody really knows what's going to happen. After all, Bruce, nothing succeeds as planned. I wouldn't be worth my salt if I didn't know that."

"Suppose my policy fails."

"Then it fails. Nobody's perfect."

"It fails?"

"And there's no harm done," said Ralph. "It's happened before. But there was no harm done."

"No harm done?"

"We're still here, aren't we?" said Ralph.

The bland insouciance of the reply fell upon Gold with a nasty jar and evoked in him the first faint beginnings of repugnance and an inclination to withdraw. "Ralph," he began after a moment of inhibition, "there's a kind of cynicism and selfishness there that I'm not sure I can be comfortable with."

"I know that feeling of good conscience, Bruce," Ralph answered with a jovial air of patronage, "and I assure you it will fade without a trace when you've been working here a minute or two." Gold breathed more freely. "Just don't delude yourself into thinking you're going to upgrade anything. When your friend Henry Kissinger—"

"He's not my friend, Ralph."

"I'm glad, Bruce, because I was going to say that when that pushy toad Henry Kissinger first came here, he told his friends the war would be over in less than six months, and he was sulking like a spoiled child when the country took it away from him after five years and wouldn't let him have another to play with in Africa. Bruce, please be Secretary of State. If you won't, we might have to give it to someone else of your religion—"

"I have no religion, Ralph."

"To someone else of your faith then who—"

"I have no faith."

"To someone Jewish who might be just like him."

Gold required no further inducement. He yielded assent in a solemn moment in which words would not do. Ralph was greatly relieved by Gold's dignified handshake.

"Now let's see if we can get it for you."

Gold stared at him with a renewed sense of shock. "Ralph, you promised, you guaranteed it."

"But I didn't say I was sure."

"As a matter of fact, you did," Gold said in reprimand, and hoped Ralph caught the injured tone is his voice. "You did say you were sure you could get me appointed Secretary of State."

"Unless I couldn't, Bruce—I always add that in order to avoid misleading people. In your case, I have no hesitation about saying it's a sure thing unless, of course, it isn't. I don't see how you can miss once you're married to Andrea Conover and pass your medical exam, unless you can, but that would be hard, if it isn't easy."

"Ralph," said Gold, with his mind spinning, "I'm not even divorced."

There was something about the reproachful eye Ralph fixed upon him that made Gold blush profusely. "I thought you'd taken care of that, Bruce."

"I'm seeing a lawyer next week."

"And the physical?"

"That same afternoon," said Gold. "Belle hasn't a real suspicion I'm even thinking about it."

"That's always the best way," Ralph said approvingly. "But won't she get a glimmer of some kind when you marry Andrea?"

"She doesn't even seem to understand I've practically moved out," Gold said with perplexity, and with the guilty knowledge that he had not. "Ralph, I should have the appointment quickly, before I do anything. Andrea is in love with me, I know, but she won't marry me until I'm somebody important in government."

"I'm not sure you can have that appointment quickly, Bruce, until she does marry you," Ralph answered frankly. "The Conover connection is crucial."

If the Conover connection was crucial, Gold was bereft of alternative. "I guess I'll just have to move all my shirts and underwear out and bring everything into the open with Belle, won't I?" He and Ralph regarded each other in silence. "In a way I hate to do this to her."

"Don't we always?" caroled Ralph with a sigh. "But your country comes first. If you like, Bruce, I can have the Vice President fly to your apartment in Manhattan and explain the exigencies of the emergency to Belle, or the president pro tern of the Senate, or even the minority or majority whip. Anyone you want, Bruce. Just ask."

Gold answered faintly with a sort of inert fortitude, "I'll just have to do it myself."

"This is noble, Bruce," said Ralph without a hint of guile and rose from his chair to his long legs. "And you'll never regret it. Why, you can become the country's first Jewish Secretary of State. You might even be a credit to your race."

"Kissinger was Jewish," countered Gold sullenly, dipping one shoulder to allow what he felt to be an offensive innuendo to go bouncing past like a glancing blow from a javelin. "Or said he was."

"Then maybe you could be the youngest Jewish Secretary of State. I bet your family would be proud of that too."

Gold scowled. "Kissinger was young," he muttered grudgingly with a note of aggression invading his voice. "But he could have been lying about that too."

"What do you mean?"

Gold knew a notorious idea when he had one and was not about to divulge it.

"He ain't no Jew!" Gold's deranged old father had howled like an ungovernable dybbuk toward the television screen with his hooked finger stabbing pitilessly at the corpulent, comic image of Kissinger descending from his plane with a complacent smile after his devious efforts to blame Israel for the breakdown of Middle East negotiations he had lacked ability to consummate. ("Kissinger," wrote journalist Leslie Gelb in the Times Magazine, "had agreed with the Israelis not to blame anyone for the breakdown of his latest round of shuttle diplomacy. No sooner did he get on his aircraft to return home than he started blaming the Israelis.") "No Jew was ever a cowboy! Ich hub im en d'rerd."

And Gold was prepared to develop the thesis that Kissinger was not a Jew in a book of Kissinger "memoirs" he was positive would excite attention and hoped earn him at least a discernible fraction of the parnusseh Kissinger was raking in from his own memoirs and the other vocational opportunities opening up on all sides that he oozed into naturally like an oleoresinous jelly. Perfect truth was not of determining importance in the exposition of Gold's theory: he felt mutinously that he had as much right to falsehood, bias, and distortion in his memoirs of Kissinger as Kissinger did in his own memoirs of Kissinger and had exercised in public office. In Gold's conservative opinion, Kissinger would not be recalled in history as a Bismarck, Metternich, or Castlereagh but as an odious shlump who made war gladly and did not often exude much of that legendary sympathy for weakness and suffering with which Jews regularly were credited. It was not a shayna Yid who would go down on his knees on a carpet to pray to Yahweh with that shmendrick Nixon, or a haimisha mentsh who would act with such cruelty against the free population of Chile:

I don't see why we need to stand by and

watch a country go Communist due to the

irresponsibility of its own people.

Such a pisk on the pisher to speak with such chutzpah! And then plot, with a sneaky duplicity for which he was to grow scatologically abhorred, for the downfall of that innocent democracy. Under oath he dissembled about his role and his knowledge. Gold could detect with his nose a rancid taint of swaggering fascism in such arrogant deeds that did not fit flatteringly the plump bourgeois figure who committed them and was not in concordance with even the most prejudicial historic depictions of the characteristic Jew. Gold still recoiled from the cold terminology of Kissinger's book of 1957 in which he bravely talked of "the paralyzing fear of weapons" and called precociously for a unique brand of diplomacy:

... to break down the atmosphere of special horror which now surrounds the use of nuclear weapons.

The remedy suggested by the dumb putz was limited nuclear warfare. Zayer klieg, that grubba naar, with his special diplomacies and limited nuclear wars. In Israel there were hostile demonstrations when he visited, and former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was anything but friendly on French television when he spoke of Kissinger's departure from government:

That was a man we had everything to fear from, because he ended up exchanging the security of Israel for the good graces of the oil companies. Kissinger is going and it's a great relief for the Israeli people.

To a malign imagination like Gold's, the specter of oil conjured up a miasma of Rockefeller influence and money that clung to Kissinger like a cloud of corruption and gave to his eyes, cheeks, and lips the glistening look of a shnorrer who has been very well lubricated. Gold shivered anew at the sophomoric lunacy and preposterous intellectual claims of that noisy balaboss. The gaudy militarism of the portly trombenik was more Germanic than Jewish, and at least one newsman had fortuitously spied in Kissinger a puerile compulsion for "Teuton his own horn." There was foul brutality in the flippant remark attributed to him about the Christmas carpet bombing of North Vietnam, an act of warfare unmatched for enormity in modern times which Kissinger, depending on whom the bustling bonditt was trying to finagle, both opposed and approved:

We bombed them into letting us accept their terms.

For the very life of him Gold could not recall such rakish and jocular contempt for the victims of massive bombardment as ever coming from a Jew, or from many Christians since Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Hjalmar Schacht, and Joachim von Ribbentrop.

So astir was Gold's mind with thoughts of his memoir of Kissinger that from Ralph to home seemed a journey of moments, and he was assiduously engrossed in his files by the glow of the setting sun that same day. Belle brought his dinner on a tray a minute before he was going to yell for it. The pot roast was succulent. The coffee was steaming and strong. Kissinger, that klutz, Gold noted in silent triumph while chewing wolfishly, had boorrrchet and cried real tears like a nebbish in Salzburg when questioned about perjury and had beamed like a clever shaygetz in Washington later when the suspicions appeared well founded. Gold was already restless to begin propounding doggedly and positively that his subject, Henry Kissinger, in all but the most confining definitions of cultural anthropology or bigotry, was no more Jewish, let's say, than Nelson Rockefeller, the prismatic apogee in a succession of patrons Kissinger had always managed to secure at pivotal points in his career. The first, a dynamic and eccentric voluntary German exile named Fritz Kraemer, was attracted by an enterprising letter composed by young Kissinger when he was but an infantry private in Louisiana during World War II, a rank and military specialty in which, biographers Marvin and Bernard Kalb record from a family member, "Henry" was "unhappy" and, in his own words, "acutely sorry" for himself. Gold hoped to use this letter in his book as an example of Kissinger's early attainments as a writer. It was not odd to Gold that this ambitious man of the worst reputation who had lied to the world about so much would tell Nelson Rockefeller and others he was Jewish just to make a good impression.

He lied about peace and lied about war; he lied in Paris when he announced "peace was at hand" just before the Presidential elections and he lied again afterward by blaming North Vietnam for bad faith when all his hondling went mechuleh.

KISSINGER CHARGES UNTRUE, HANOI AIDE IN PARIS SAYS

Hanoi was correct and Kissinger was not.

Q. What concessions did the United States make to get this agreement?

A. What concessions did the United States make? The United States made the concessions that are described in the agreement. There are no secret side agreements of any kind.

There were secret side agreements. (Jews, by reputation, made much better bargains.) The lonesome cowboy was ba-kokt again, and it was his allies in South Vietnam who would not accept the tsedreydt mishmosh of a truce he had ungerpotchket. So, Moisheh Kapoyer, the North was bombed to placate the South and salve the hurt feelings of the mieskeit and his umgliks, and not, as Kissinger falsely indicated, to force new concessions. Authority for this lay again in Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, without fail a more honorable source of information about Kissinger than Kissinger:

The real purpose of the Christmas bombing, we now know, was to persuade South Vietnam to accept the truce. General Alexander Haig, then Mr. Kissinger's assistant, had gone to Saigon and promised to show that the United States was ready, in General Haig's elegant phrase, to "brutalize" the North.

Ai-yi-yi—another metzieh, that General Alexander Haig, with his brain of a golem's, a gantsa k'nocker under Nixon and Kissinger whose goyisha kup divined some "sinister force" behind the erasure of that eighteen and a half minutes from the incriminating Watergate tapes. Kissinger was an ingrate to his benefactors ("Kissinger bad mouths practically everybody he knows, Presidents included") and could funpheh like a gonif when pressed for the truth:

Thus, while the White House regarded him as a wholehearted supporter of the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, he led reporters and legislators—by nods and grimaces, by innuendo against Nixon, and by stressing the human catastrophe of the decision—to believe that he was opposed to it.

Twisting and turning like a worm or a snake, the vontz was nisht aheyn, nisht aher on issues igniting the fiercest controversy. The chuchem hut gezugt:

I have always considered the U.S. involvement in Indochina to have been a disaster.

And er hut gezugt:

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

When confronted head-on by biographers Kalb about discreet hints, spread, as was his wont, by himself, that he disagreed with Nixon's bombing policy, he confessed:

I was in favor of attacking the North. It was an agony for me…

Oh, that shlemiel. To him it was an agony, that Chaim Yankel. He was never altogether comfortable with Congress and was said to prefer a dictatorship without any parliamentary body to restrain him:

"What I've been trying to tell him," said Rep. John Brademas, the deputy majority whip, "is that foreign policy must conform to the law, but I don't think I've been getting through."

No Jew Gold could think of suffered this same handicap of comprehension. Gold saw the strangest contrasts preserved between the ridiculous aura of success and knowledge that surrounded the self-satisfied behayma and the legacy of diplomatic wreckage and tsuris he had left in his wake. For Gold, his vaunted intelligence and brilliance remained as apocryphal and elusive as Nixon's grasp of fundamentals and Spiro Agnew's high IQ: no distinctive sign of any existed. A farzayenisht to his detractors, he was a ceaseless mechaieh to a biographer like Gold. Every Montik and Donershtik the scampering lummox was in the papers again with some new mishegoss like a shmegegge from Chelm. On Monday in the New York Post was a photograph of Kissinger looking like a simpering shlemazel in the sash and star-shaped medal of the Grand Cross First Class of the Order of Merit, one of "West Germany's highest decorations." On Tuesday Gold found this:

NAZI SCANDAL IN BONN ARMY

German army lieutenants staged a symbolic "burning of Jews" at the West German Armed Forces University in Munich. Nazi "Sieg Heil" salutes were exchanged as the young officers set fire to pieces of paper scribbled with the word "Juden" [Jews] and burned them in wastebaskets. Said a spokesman from the Defense Ministry, "The participants did not have a basically anti-Semitic point of view."

Gold wasn't all that sure. A fair man, he understood that even to juxtapose such items in print in this most coincidental relationship was a reprehensible action to be perpetrated only by someone like Gold lacking all decency and compassion for shallow, socialite warmongers like Kissinger. But surely, the dope was at least in part responsible for the close sequence by pushing in front of every camera that bright and thirsting punim that only a gentile machetaynesta could love. And Gold had the headlines to prove that Kissinger had been willing sycophant to anti-Semites in the past:

WOODWARD & BERNSTEIN:

KISSINGER'S VIEW OF NIXON

Gold had many more items of derogatory information but desired to avoid giving to his text even the faintest hue of any personal animus. If his thesis were sustained, he would become the country's first Jewish Secretary of State—if he became Secretary of State. He would even include the one or two complimentary things he'd found. In the Kalb biography, for example, there was praise for Kissinger as a Harvard student by a contemporary who described him as "extraordinarily able":

But what a son of a bitch! A prima donna, self-serving, self-centered. You were either Elliott's protege or Carl Friedrich's. Kissinger managed to be on excellent terms with both.

In Professor William Yandell Elliott, another chuchem at Harvard, Kissinger found, he says, not merely an academic patron but a friend and an inspiration:

On many Sundays we took long walks. He spoke of the power of love, and said that the only truly unforgivable sin is to use people as if they were objects.

Kissinger urged sending B-52's against Cambodia, supported dictatorships in Chile, Greece, and the Philippines, was dedicated to the perpetuation of racist minority rule in Africa, and contributed to the reelection of Richard Nixon. He had been kissed on the face by an Arab who detested Jews and handed a flower by the Chancellor of West Germany. Gold had a title he liked. He would call his book The Little Prussian.

He did not think that Kissinger would mind. As a gentleman with indisputable cravings for money and prominence he could scarcely advocate the suppression of these aspirations in others. And he was known to enjoy a good joke, for he was always trying to make one:

Kissinger, who enjoyed a reputation as a swinger, was asked to explain his often-quoted remark that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."

"Well, that was a joke," he said.

Probably, he was closer to the bull's-eye of humor when asked by reporters how he preferred to be addressed:

"I don't stand on protocol," he answered. "If you will just call me 'Excellency' it will be okay."

There was laughter all around.

"Your Excellency," wrote General Mustafa Barzani, the Kurdish rebel leader, in a final, pathetic message to Henry Kissinger after all aid abruptly was ended for an insurrection against Iraqi rule fomented and financed by the U.S. Government. "Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way with silence from everyone. Our hearts bleed to see the destruction of our defenseless people in an unprecedented manner. We feel, your Excellency, that the United States has a moral and political responsibility towards our people who have committed themselves to your country's policy. Mr. Secretary, we are anxiously awaiting your quick response."

The only response to this betrayal of an ethnic group was a profound silence, although his Excellency, a fellow of sensitive nature who showed he could kvetch and krechtz like a kronkeh bubbeh when his tender feelings were hurt, defended himself more loquaciously in London later against accusations of something squalid and obscene in the usurious passion with which he appeared to be exploiting his former government positions for money:

In his view, said Henry A. Kissinger, it's okay for him to make millions. "I think one has to consider that I was deeply in debt when I left office as a result of my public service."

Oy-oy-oy, crooned Gold to himself disapprovingly, for the words did not smell kosher. From such a meshiach the public needed service like a luch in kup. He very much doubted the koorveh had lived better as a Harvard professor than since. Yet, Gold now found himself in mysterious sympathy with the mercenary longings of the chozzer.

"Make money!" his father had exhorted maniacally throughout his lifetime. "That's the only good thing I ever learned from the Christians!"

Kissinger already had such saychel, as did, according to this paragraph in Newsweek, several of his confederates and nuchshleppers:

A number of his top aides also will be leaving. Several, including Deputy Secretary Charles Robinson, Under Secretary William D. Rogers, and Director of Policy Planning Winston Lord are wealthy men. Other aides, like Deputy Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagle-burger, are looking for a chance to make some money in private industry.

Gold identified with them all, deeply relieved by proof that his was not the only heart in the land roused to a stronger beat by the lovely nearness of money or his the only ears to whom the word itself was as blithesome a sound as could be heard in the language. Gold had good reason for his favorable inclination toward Deputy-Under Eagleburger (Gold could have been a Deputy-Under also had he been willing to settle for so little):

It is reported that Lawrence Eagleburger, one of Kissinger's close associates, has the ability to say, "Henry, you're full of shit."

And Gold was indebted to reporters Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein for acquainting him with William Watts, a Kissinger assistant who quit in protest over the invasion of Cambodia:

Watts then had a show-down talk with General Alexander Haig. "You've just had an order from your Commander in Chief," Haig said. "You can't resign." "Fuck you, Al," Watts said. "I just did."

Gold was entranced.

"Fuck you, Al"?

"Henry, you're full of shit"?

Azoy zugt men to such machers as a General and a Secretary? The boys from Brooklyn could have handled that. With mother's milk they'd imbibed the good sense to think so realistically of such momzehrem in government from Tsar Nikolai in St. Petersburg to the chozzerem in City Hall and the scutzem in the social establishment in Washington, D.C. Gold wondered where in his book to put the letter from young Henry to that impressive German exile Fritz Kraemer, who arrived at the military base in Louisiana in a dazzling blaze of exotic authority to talk to the troops of the need for fighting fascism. The prose in the letter was spare:

I heard you speak yesterday. This is how it should be done. Can I help you somehow? Pvt. Kissinger.

It was Kraemer who helped; and the fleet-footed momzer was elevated from infantryman to German-speaking interpreter for the commanding general. When the division moved overseas in the closing months of the war, he took quite naturally to the many alluring privileges arid responsibilities of military government and was promoted to run the district of Bergstrasse in the state of Hess. His powers were extensive—including the power to arrest without questions.

"When it came to Nazis," Kraemer recalls, "Kissinger showed human understanding."

There is good in the worst of us. Outside of government he continued "Teuton his own horn." Reminded of charges of "duplicity" and "immorality" and even that he was a "war criminal" in Vietnam, he defended himself lamely, and er hut boorrrchet:

"I got the troops and prisoners home."

A nechtiger tog! More credit for that belonged even to Gold, who had at least gone on one peace march. Nor was Henry quick to grab blame for the 20,492 dead Americans or hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who were killed in the years he was fucking around merrily with his diplomatic hijinks and vulgar arriviste playboy partying. He admits to a weakness!

KISSINGER ADMITS TO A WEAKNESS

"It was in the field of international economics that I had my greatest weakness,' Kissinger told a reporter who dined with him in Acapulco recently. "The worst errors the U.S. committed against its North Atlantic allies and against the undeveloped nations were in this field."

Moisheh Pupik was as good as Gold when it came to finance and economics. Bat azoy:

KISSINGER IS JOINING
COMMITTEE AT CHASE

Henry A. Kissinger will join the Chase Manhattan Bank first as vice chairman of its international advisory committee and later as the panel's chairman. The spokesman for Chase declined to say how much he will be paid. David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase, expressed delight that a person of Mr. Kissinger's stature and achievements had agreed to lend his considerable expertise to Chase.

Gold was astounded that a person of Kissinger's low stature and despicable achievements would be allowed into a respectable house, even the White House, but into a house of finance? It was time to put money in mattresses and in Italian banks. Such a geshrei should go up if he ever went near the pishkeh. But nuch a mul:

GOLDMAN, SACHS HIRES KISSINGER
AS INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS ADVISER

Goldman, Sachs & Company, a leading investment banking and brokerage firm, announced that it has retained Henry A. Kissinger as a part-time adviser and consultant. The amount of compensation to be paid Dr. Kissinger was not disclosed.

Und nuch mer:

In the first contract of its kind a former Secretary of State has agreed to serve as adviser and consultant to a television network for five years at a reported price of $1 million.

Und vus nuch? In mit'n d'rinnen the slippery prick was shoyn a Trustee for the Metropolitan Museum of Art because of "his known commitment to the value of cultural exchange." Here Gold had a good joke:

In 1974 when Henry Kissinger visited Mr. Carter in the Georgia governor's office, the then Secretary of State gazed admiringly on a Butler Brown oil painting and said, "I didn't know you collected Andrew Wyeths."

Zayer klieg, that grubba naar, but he was probably making more in undisclosed compensations than Gold earned in salary, even without any under-the-counter shtupping he might still be getting from the Rockefellers. People knew what Kissinger had received from the Rockefellers: cash, sponsorship, jobs, wedding parties, the use of apartments and private planes, of the main swimming pool at the Rockefeller estate for a flop-eared hound named Tyler, and of private vaults in which to conceal government papers from bona fide historians and other competing writers.

KISSINGER'S PHONE TRANSCRIPTS
MOVED FROM ROCKEFELLER ESTATE

The State Department said today that Henry A. Kissinger had stored the transcripts of his telephone conversations at the private New York estate of Vice President Rockefeller. After a reporters' group said it would sue to gain access to the transcripts, Mr. Kissinger changed his mind and included them in the grant to the Library of Congress of his papers and official documents.

According to a State Department press officer, the transcripts were "kept in government-approved storage areas in Pocantico Hills, N.Y." Under questioning by reporters, he acknowledged he meant the Rockefeller estate. Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Rockefeller have close ties.

_________________________
REMEMBER THE NEEDIEST!

But what did the Rockefellers get from Kissinger? Harvard professors could be purchased more easily, but a loser like Nelson might not know that. He stoops for coins in paid advertisements!

Henry Kissinger creates a unique history of American leadership, in precious metal…

PORTRAITS OF GREATNESS

There was a photo of Kissinger in vest and shirtsleeves captioned:

After selection of the subjects by Dr. Kissinger (top), the portraits are meticulously sculptured (left), and the metals are then minted, one by one, in special hand-fed coining presses.

And a coupon stating:

Please enter my subscription for Portraits of Greatness, consisting of fifty finely sculptured portrait medals honoring the great Americans who have guided our nation in its rise to world leadership—as personally chosen by Dr. Henry Kissinger.

No payment is required at this time.

Even Belle thought this contemptible. A society in which such a blithering hypocrite was lionized as a celebrity instead of shunned and despised was a society not worth its salt, and Gold promised he would say so when he outlined to Pomoroy his plans for The Little Prussian. He swore he could not understand why anyone but a book reviewer would want to read the laundered memoirs of a man whose actions of moment were already on the record in glaring condemnation, or why anyone but an obsequious clod would spend a dime to own a copy; while if every tenth person with a distaste for Kissinger bought a copy of Gold's book, he would outsell his rival by millions.

Pomoroy was undecided about the commercial expectations in Gold's presentation but agreed to accept a book on Kissinger in place of one on the Jewish experience in America, since the research was practically complete. When Gold had trouble reconciling himself to the incredible situation of hustling a book while awaiting a call to high office, he remembered that Kissinger was doing exactly the same. In a novel no one would believe it.

"Kissinger will die when he reads it," Pomoroy said, looking no gloomier than ever.

Gold thought that might hurt sales. What pissed Gold off most now about the sly schmuck, apart from his coveted fame, was the plentitude of jobs from which he apparently could feed as hoggishly as he wanted, while Gold, on tenterhooks, still starved for only one.

"Why don't you get Pugh Biddle Conover to use his influence?" Ralph had suggested. "It would make things easier."

"Why can't you get your father to use his influence?" Gold complained to Andrea when he returned to Washington to fuck her again and act on Ralph's advice. "I bet that would make things easier."

Andrea responded keenly. "We'll go see him tomorrow. They must owe him something."

They owed Pugh Biddle Conover, as Gold learned by eventide of the ensuing day, a great deal, for the esteemed career diplomat had lied under oath seventeen times under five consecutive administrations and was venerated by all political factions in Washington for such evenhanded altruism.

"Come in, my lad, come in, come in," Pugh Biddle Conover sang out with phenomenal gusto from his souped-up wheelchair when his eyes fell on Gold. "I'm so sorry to see you. I have been praying almost daily that one or the other of us would be dead before it was necessary to meet again. You are touched by my sentiments. I can tell by your tears."

Sickening presentiments of the mortification that impended clouded Gold's hopes. He looked toward Andrea for inspiration.

"You must be much nicer, Daddy," she said, cupping her father's trim, courtly face in her hands from behind for a moment.

"I'm feeling poorly, my pet," Conover answered with a devilish smile, fairly bursting with vigor and health. "I was feeling fine until he walked in."

"That's the kind of joke, Daddy," said Andrea, "he may not understand."

"Enjoy your ride, my darling, and put your fears to rest. I promise we'll be as sportive as butterflies together while you're gone. By Jupiter, I swear I'll drink his fortune to the lees a hundred times if he fills my medicine cup to the brim and takes a spot himself." Conover dismissed her with a friendly wave.

Gold was glad to see her go. Appearing a foot or two taller with her riding crop, high boots, jodhpurs, scarlet dress coat, and black velvet hard hat, she seemed to embody a curious kind of emasculating sexuality that had set his teeth on edge. He thought of taking a riding crop to her buttocks that very night if her father did not suddenly prove more accommodating. Pouring whiskey from a decanter, Gold allowed his glance to roam past the panes of the French doors to the luxurious space outside and his thoughts to dwell upon himself as master soon of the gardens, driveways, stables, meadows, and woods through an orderly process of dynastic succession. His kids might benefit from the civilizing influence such short visits as he would allow them might have on their character. How the fuck would he meet the taxes and pay so many salaries?

"Enough?" he inquired with a secret smile when the large glass he was holding was filled practically to the top.

"A millimeter or two more and I'll be greatly in your debt," Conover replied politely with an astute look of amusement. "Don't mind if you spill a lot. I have money for more. Your health, you pig!" he shouted when Gold had brought him the glass of straight whiskey. He smacked his lips appreciatively after taking three or four tremendous swallows that had Gold watching as though stunned. "You've saved my life, you skunk. Once more you've given me cause for rejoicing, Goldstein—"

"Gold, sir."

"A thousand pardons for that unintentional slip, my friend. I would not offend you for the world. Today, dear Dr. Gold, it is my sincerest wish to see you thoroughly contented." Conover's trenchant look would have kindled mistrust in someone far more gullible than Gold with far less cause for suspecting the presence of evil intentions. "There is something you want from me today, isn't there?"

"I would not have intruded on you otherwise," said Gold in a manner both entreating and refined.

"Then speak freely, my friend. What is it you wish me to do for you, Sammy?"

Gold sighed heavily as another unavoidabie debacle appeared in the making. "Samuel Adams," he said. "Samuel Clemens, Samuel Morse, Uncle Sam, Samuel Johnson."

"But the earliest known appearance," countered Conover with laughter that was mellifluous and foxy, "is in the Book of Samuel in the Old Testament. And that Samuel was anything but a Johnson, wasn't he?" Conover was seized with a mild fit of coughing. Gold refilled his empty glass. "You've taken a number of our very best names from us," said Conover, "but Sammy is not among them. Sidney, Irving, Harold, Morris, Seymour, Milton, Stanley, Norman—all of them noble, all no longer ours."

"Abraham Lincoln," said Gold, in spirited rebuttal. "Aaron Burr, Joseph Conrad, and Daniel Boone. Isaac Newton, Benjamin Harrison, Jonathan Swift, and Jesse James."

"Henry," returned Conover, "was the name of English kings. William was a conqueror and Harold the king he vanquished at Hastings. Now every Ikey, Abe, and Sammy goes around called Henry, Bill, and Bernard. We had a saint named Bernard. Now it's a name for dogs. I worked a while with your Henry Morgenthau and your Bernard Baruch. Your Bernie Baruch was an adviser to Presidents, but none of them listened. I've met many like that from all walks of life over a long period, and I've found that not one was as good a person as I was, or thought so either. If I were you, Goldilocks, instead of trying to ape me I would make it a point always to present myself as Jewish since you'll never get by as anything else."

Gold felt the blood rush to his face. "I don't have to take this from you, you know," he said with quiet rage, drawing himself up ostentatiously.

"Yes, yes, you do," said Pugh Biddle Conover, "if you want to get anything from me today, even food for lunch. I may even take the Porsche away from Andrea and make you walk back. I often wonder, Neiman Marcus, why anyone with brains and self-respect wants to be as shallow and unproductive as someone like me. Why should it trouble you for a second if I find you detestable? But I am boring you. I can see it in your eyes."

"Not at all," Gold answered very weakly. "It bothers me only," he lied, "because I'm going to marry your daughter. And because you have the influence, perhaps, to be of service to us with my career in government."

His host nodded affably, his shrewd eyes sparkling. "The first makes no difference to me. I am beyond prejudice, as you've surely noticed. You will never be invited here, and I hope I may always feel free never to come to your house. The help I would give you anyway, just to minimize the blot on my family tradition once you become part of it. It's not merely because you're Jewish that I don't like you, Kaminsky. I don't like you because you're human. Mankind stinks, Hymie, and Western mankind stinks no less foully than all the rest. You are not among the individuals, it pains me to note, whom I would judge among the exceptions. I can think of a number of gifted Jews I've admired, but I've never met any of them, which is all to their credit. It's the people who come seeking me out I can't stand, because I know they want something. Although I must confess, my dear Manishevitz, that I've never met anyone I've liked but a rich Protestant."

"Harris Rosenblatt?" suggested Gold with confidence.

"That Jew?"

Gold was pushed off stride. "He thinks he's a German."

"What's the difference?"

"It made a huge and very tragic difference not too many years ago," said Gold with sincerity.

"It makes none to me now," answered Conover. "Harris Rosenblatt is a stuffy fool." With a pleased smile playing about his face, Conover lowered his pink lids a moment and chuckled in a way that rankled, as though nourishing his spirit on a ruthless and invigorating recollection. "He's bringing his daughter up to be a Protestant, giving her riding lessons and other things like that, which he mistakenly believes will elevate her in class and add to her physical attractiveness. He's thinking of changing her name. To Blatt." He paused again, seized with a fit of choking laughter, and held his glass out for more. Conover drank deeply until his hilarity had subsided and his voice was restored. "I told him—I told him I'd be honored if he changed her name to mine, and he promised he would. That idiot. Does he really think I'd be honored if he named that little Jewgirl after me? But I pray you—don't misunderstand. I wish him luck. I wish him joy. I wish he fathers a baby boy."

Gold started as though stuck. His tone was icy. "I am pleased to see, sir, that your memory and taste for juvenile doggerel and inscription have not grown smaller since our last meeting."

Conover looked up at Gold from his wheelchair with complete surprise. "What are you talking about, young man?"

"You were speaking in rhymed verse."

"When?"

"Just now." There began to creep over Gold the feeling that he was an unwilling participant in an ominous hallucination.

Conover obviously was no longer entertained. "Have you gone mad?"

Gold floundered defensively. "A minute ago," he sputtered. "You do it all the time. Don't you realize?"

"I do no such thing, sir," Conover informed him. "I was discussing our acquaintance in common, Harris Rosenblatt, and expressing the hope that he fathers a boy. And when his boy has grown some curls, I hope he has a pair of girls. He shot a dog of mine last week, you know," Conover recalled with a flush of pleasure.

"He shot a dog?" Gold inquired numbly.

"Yes, he did." Conover was quaking again with a wheezing laughter, almost doubling over. "One of my favorite hounds, a gorgeous animal. I told him it was the custom after a good hunt to pick out the dog who had performed best and kill it. As an act of humility. And then I gave him his choice."

Gold gazed at him in fascinated horror. There had been times in the past when he'd found himself considering human beings he believed he could, in clearest conscience, put to death on the spot with his bare hands—the first ten fashion designers, for example, whose names appeared in the newspapers, or the next six interior decorators—but never in memory had he found himself within arm's reach of someone toward whom that temptation for homicide had been restrained by so frail a doubt.

"And he shot it?"

Conover nodded merrily. "In the head. Blew it to pieces with his shotgun. That fatuous fool. He can look thirty years ahead with his municipal bonds but not six inches in front of his face when it comes to caste. It will take at least three generations and much genetic good fortune for any of his descendants to pass. What does his wife look like?" Conover cocked his head with a cruel light filtering into his face. "Anything like a Hebress?"

"There's no such fucking word," Gold responded quietly, deciding there was nothing to forfeit by reacting with anything less than true emotion to the persistent goading of his skilled tormentor. "She does look Jewish, if that's what you mean."

"Then it will take at least four. You know, Dr. Gold—may I call you Doctor? Your co-religionist Henry Kissinger didn't seem to mind, but he was a German too, wasn't he?—but I digress. I was brought up to consider myself superior to most people, and nothing in life I've experienced has caused me to question that premise. So tell me, Lehman Brothers, why should I have to pretend I enjoy someone like you when I don't?"

Gold saw they were quite alone. "To save your life," he answered, putting both hands around the old man's neck and squeezing.

"That's the only good reason I've ever been given," said Pugh Biddle Conover in a much huskier voice after Gold had released him, gently rubbing his flesh where he had been hurt. "Tell me, my good friend, do you like niggers? I have three or four hundred working for me here and I don't care to learn the name of a single one. How many blackamoors do you number among your closest friends?"

The answer was none. "But that doesn't mean I feel they should be discriminated against."

"Nor do I feel that I should be discriminated against," said Conover. "If you want the right to avoid the close association of Negroes, why should I not have the right to keep myself distantly removed from people like you, if I choose to find you just as inferior and distasteful as you find them? And I do choose, Goldman, Sachs, Bache, Halsey, Stuart, and all the rest. The fact is that I want nothing to do with any Jews but my doctor, lawyer, dentist, accountant, bookkeeper, secretary, broker, butcher, travel agent, tailor, business partner, realtor, banker, financial manager, best friend, and spiritual adviser. One thing I like about all you Jews but Kissinger is that you've kept out of foreign policy because we wouldn't let you in. Did he really get down on his knees and pray with that Nixon? What a ludicrous picture, Kissinger on his knees with his head bowed and his hands pressed together devotionally. We laughed here for months. Do Jews always kneel when they pray? I thought they merely whimpered."

"I wouldn't know," Gold said tersely. "I don't pray."

"You're praying today, though, aren't you?" Con-over retorted in mockery. "What position in government are you praying for?"

"Secretary of State," said Gold.

"Oh, I could get that one for you easily," Conover laughed softly. "But I'm not sure I will. Let's think about it seriously during lunch. Lunch should be stimulating. I always eat alone."

Gold ate by himself in a stupor. This time the pickings were slim: a pastrami and lettuce sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise and salt butter and a container of milk served with a straw. There was not a grain of doubt in Gold's mind that it was a diabolic intelligence of infinite capabilities that was toying with him.

The infamous repast concluded, Gold hid with his face in his hands in a corner of the garden until Andrea had returned from her ride and, after showering, was again attired in the dress and shoes in which she was once more feminine, familiar, gorgeous, and dull. She little suspected that her riding days were numbered. Gold was determined to put a stop to that recreational activity the day they married and did not question his ability to crush her spirit if need be and have her driveling in psychotherapy in a matter of months. Andrea often moved gracelessly, bumping into the corners of furniture with her unthinking lurches, and her knees were usually black and blue.

"I'm a Sagittarius," she explained.

Gold's response to this information had been saintly: he pretended he was deaf as a post. She had a habit of leaving things behind forgetfully that was no longer nourishing to his sense of virility and maturity and soon might grow maddening.

She could tell in a glance that his mood was embittered.

"He doesn't like me, Andrea. He just won't approve of me because I'm Jewish."

"How did he find out?"

"Someone must have spilled the beans," said Gold in a voice that had never been drier.

"We'll tackle him together," said Andrea. "He'll be like an angel if he's had lots of wine."

If color of flesh were proof, Conover had steeped himself in casks, for his face and forehead were ruddier than ever when, with deafening blares from his Klaxon, he came careening around through the doorway of the drawing room in his motorized wheelchair and braked to a halt in a squealing stop that left rubber skid marks on the parquet floor. His manner was jaunty and his eyes fairly bubbled with excellent and insane spirits. Gold noted enviously that the accomplished epicure had changed from fitted tweed to a brown velvet blazer and had doffed his knotted neckerchief for a blue silk foulard that absolutely gleamed. Gold could not conceal from himself the dream that someday he might look and dress exactly that way.

"Ahoy, my children, halloo, halloo, halloo," he was hailing heartily even before he zoomed into view, balancing an emptied brandy snifter in one palm precariously. "How I long for the sight of my dear ones. Zounds and by thunder, what a pity they're not here. Andrea sweet, you must never, never again leave me alone with this sweating mute. I believe he comprehends. I can tell by his sagging jaw. I swear, it's a day's work to extract a syllable from him. And he wouldn't give me any medicine." Here Conover's tone of buoyant admonition gave way to one of feeble complaint, and Gold could see he was in for another difficult time.

Andrea was not taking him seriously. "I'll get some."

"Let Schwartz do it. He wants to make a good impression. Tell me again what brings you here and what you want me to do."

"We're waiting for a government appointment," said Andrea, twisting flirtatiously a strand of her father's hair. "And Bruce thought—"

"Bruce," laughed Conover.

"Bruce thought," Andrea pushed on gamely, "you might know people with influence who could speed things up."

"It was clever of you to sense that, Mr. Wise," said Conover as Gold approached.

"The name is Gold, sir. Bruce Gold. Whether you approve of that or not. And I'd be oh so grateful if you would make some effort to keep that in mind. After all, at least a minimum of civility is prescribed even between people who dislike each other."

Conover rested his gaze upon Gold for a minute as though seriously considering the application of those words and said:

"There are gold ships and there are silver ships, but the best ship is friendship. Your health, you frog. Let us both thank God we'll never sail together. Ah, now my mean spirits are banished. Ask anything, my lad, and I could not find it in my bountiful heart to refuse. Please continue, honest Abe."

Gold was suddenly too stubbornly proud to say a word.

"We thought there must be many, many people in government for whom you've done things, Daddy," Andrea cajoled seductively, fondling her father's hand and brushing her cheek across his neck. "Aren't there people who owe you something?"

Mere mention of that supposition mellowed Conover like a charm. They owed him, as he recounted, a great deal.

"Ah, yes indeed, at least seventeen times that I can remember I lied in public under oath," he repeated languidly, shaping the vowels in his honeyed accents and rolling the words around on his tongue like a connoisseur tasting a fine cigar. "And that's not just an old man's boasting. I'll take my oath on it. I can show you the evidence—scrolls, plaques, certificates, wreaths, sashes, and medals, all commending me for public service and my valorous, unselfish attitude. I lied to the public to protect the President and I lied to the President to protect myself and my colleagues, and I lied to the Congress four times a year just to keep from growing rusty, and do you know something? I never lost even a modicum of respect among my peers for doing so or a single friend. The difference between crime and public service, my good Goodgold, is often mainly more a matter of station than substance. Yes, they do owe me much. Four cabinet positions, in two different administrations, of course. Ambassadorships? One European ambassadorship, four Latin American, sixteen Asian, and four hundred and thirty-three African. They owe me six judicial appointments to lower courts anywhere in the South or Chicago, and the right to six trial balloons each for any eight people I choose as serious candidates for the Vice Presidential nomination, but in four successive elections. I suppose I'll be long gone before I've time to use them all, and I've forgotten whether or not I'm allowed to pass them on with my estate. I'll have to check with my Jew law firm—my Christian ones are not much good at law. You can look into it for me, Abie, if you want to, but spare my Irish Rose, hey, hey. 'Black bottom, the niggers got 'em.' They don't write songs like that any more, do they? Frankly, I don't much care about these appointments or even what happens to the country, as long as my capital is safe. I've been able to sell off two of the serious-Vice Presidential-candidacy-considerations recently, one of them, I believe, to a wide receiver for the Houston Oilers, whatever that is. Would you like to have yourself mentioned six times as a prospect for the Vice Presidential nomination in the next Presidential election campaign, Rappaport, as a going-away present, if only you'll go away? As God is my witness, I pray you will not let being a little sheeny inhibit you, you kike. I hear they're giving mentions now to coons, Greeks, dagos, spies, and women. Would you go in public like a beggar with your hat in your hand merely to appear to be under consideration for the Vice Presidential nomination with a long line of other humble mendicants, or for a Cabinet job you'll be leaving in disgrace or disgust in two years? I refused. I don't lower myself to people I feel superior to. I liked your Abe Ribicoff for that, but not for anything else. Would you like to be mentioned for Vice President t\ext time? I'll let you have it free. If nothing else, it will bring you invitations to homes in which your attendance will be cause for greater rejoicing than your presence is here. Be a good fellow, Felix Mendelssohn, and fill up my medicine cup one more time. God, how sick I am by now of all those Guggenheims and Annenbergs and Salomon brothers. When you've met one Schlesinger you've met them all. Faster, can't you? Jump, dammit. I've got darkies from the delta that move faster than you do. 'Oh, darling, how my heart grows weary.' Aaaah, thank you, my savior. They say that Jesus was a Jew, but frankly I have my doubts. May your life follow an everlasting circle of success, and be like driven snow. Be careful how you tread it, for every mark will show. Your health, Brendan."

"My name," said Gold, "is Bruce."

"An old Gaelic name, if I am not mistaken."

"You are mistaken," Gold corrected. "But there are people who argue that the Gaels are one of the lost tribes of Israel."

"But not very convincingly," scored the venomous old man neatly. "I won't come to your wedding, you know, although I suppose some prenuptial amenities are in order. I will want the members of your family to dine here first, including your wife, of course. She'd be most welcome. And I, in turn, I suppose, will have to journey for a dinner with your family somewhere in Brooklyn, I fear. I've never in my whole life been in Brooklyn. One time I could have been the candidate for Vice President, but it was understood I would have to go into Brooklyn with Nelson Rockefeller during the campaign to some place called Coney Island and eat a hot dog while news photographers took pictures. I wouldn't go anywhere to eat with Nelson Rockefeller. He made loans to people who never paid him back. If his brother David did that I wouldn't keep any money in his bank. He gave fifty thousand dollars secretly to Henry Kissinger. Imagine—for fifty thousand dollars then you might have bought a small Klee or Bonnard or a large Jackson Pollock, and all he got for his money was a medium-sized Kissinger. You know the type? Of course you do—look who I ask. A noisy, babbling fellow who was always trying too hard to be entertaining and made war like a Nazi."

Here even Gold's sense of fair play was affronted. "Sir!" he could not forbear from objecting. "A number of his relatives, I believe, were destroyed by the Nazis."

"But he wasn't, was he?" Conover answered serenely with acid in his voice. "And neither were you. How far do you think he would have gone in the world as a history student in Germany if Hitler had allowed him to remain? You wish to champion him, Silver? For shame!"

"Gold, sir, and for God sakes—please don't put me in the position of defending the one person on earth I disapprove of most."

"What do you suppose Rockefeller saw in him, Brass?" Conover asked in a musing way. "We know about Nixon and that chimpanzee Ford. But I thought Nelson had some brains at one time. He went to Brown, didn't he?"

"Dartmouth."

"Oh. I wasn't given that Vice Presidential nomination, by the way, and neither was Nelson Rockefeller. It went, if I recall, to Henry Cabot Lodge, who did travel to Coney Island to eat a hot dog but lost anyway. Henry Cabot Lodge was never very successful at anything, and neither were the Ellsworth Bunkers in Vietnam, or the Graham Martins. If you want good advice, my lad, you'll stay out of the diplomatic corps and the foreign service community. It's an undergraduate society for backward students who crave honors. If you ever call me Dad or Father even once, Golddust, I warn you now—I'll put a ball between your eyes."

"You're babbling, Daddy," Andrea said.

"I'm sick, darling. It's not every day I have to put up with someone like him. My boy, if ever you are lost at sea, drop right in and think of me."

"We're going to be married, Daddy," Andrea told him with seriousness of purpose that filled Gold with admiration, "whether you like the idea or not."

"And change your name to Gold? I'll drain my glass to that, my lad, and give you what expert advice I can. You must never call me Dad, Father, Governor, Squire, or m'Lord. And learn this again, my boy, before you grow old, that learning is better than silver and goldsmith. By thunder, that was her name—Gussie Goldsmith! My first love." The most extraordinary change came over Conover's face with this exclamation of surprise, and he continued as though in the loveliest of reveries. "Fill my cup, my son. My heart wells with emotion. My eyes brim with tears. I am flooded with sweet memories. A Jewish girl she was, a rather pretty Jewish girl from an old Southern family in Richmond, Virginia, with strong family connections in Charleston, South Carolina. Ah, Gussie Goldsmith. A little odd as a person, I realized even then, but I was smitten. We were both so very young. She loved to knit and sew."

Gold could hardly believe his ears when he heard the conversation going off on such a tangent. "That would hardly apply to Andrea and me, sir," he said. "I think it safe to say that both of us are mature enough to know what we are doing."

"I cannot say she cared for me at all," said Conover. "But I was so deeply infatuated, more deeply in love than I've ever been with any woman since, including your mother, my dear. I was ready to give up all, despite her constant knitting and sewing and an unusually morbid fascination she took in funerals and burial plots. How I dreaded the day that I would have to face my family with the news that the girl I had resolved to marry was Jewish. I did not know if I had mettle enough to handle it."

"It must have been an exceedingly severe test for you," said Gold.

Pugh Biddle Conover chuckled regretfully. "I never had to face it. Her family thought themselves too good for me. I wept when we parted. I shed tears. And you see, I haven't forgotten her. Ah, crazy, sweet Gussie Goldsmith. With her wool and her knitting needles. At our last meeting I begged her to write something tender for me that I promised to cherish always, and I remember those last words from her as clearly as if they were written yesterday. "There is a word in every language, in every heart so dear. In English it's forget me not, in French la souvenir." I see her knitting still. I wonder what became of her."

Gold was irritated in the awkward lull that followed the revelation of these tedious sentimental recollections and counted on Andrea to return the conversation to its original purpose.

"Bruce—" Andrea began after a fitting interval of decorum.

"Bruce," Conover snorted.

"—is getting a government appointment, Andrea persevered. "Perhaps in the State Depart. We want you to expedite it if you can and make sure it's a good one so that we can marry in good fashion and be treated well afterward. know you want me to be happy."

"I will comply with dispatch," Conover assented agreeably, "if it will take him out of my life. But you must promise me one thing in return. You must promise that if you ever have children and they look anything like him, they will not be brought up in the Christian faith. Elope and I'll add ten million to your wedding present. Wait, I have a better idea. Don't elope. Gold, my son, you must send me the names and addresses of all in your family so that I can contact them by mail." He laughed with huge delight. "I can just imagine what some of those names will turn out to be." Had Gold a bread knife at hand he might have plunged it into the chest of the gloating old villain. Instead, Conover slipped another stiletto into his. "I think I'll have Sambo here call out their names as, arm in arm, they approach my staircase."

So graphically did this depicted scene burn itself upon Gold's imagination—"Mr. and Mrs. Julius Gold." "Dr. and Mrs. Irving Sugarman." "Mr Emanuel Moscowitz." "Mr. and Mrs. Victor Vogel —that he knew immediately it could never be enacted. He paid almost no attention to the rest of Pugh Biddle Conover's words.

"Stay for dinner, Andrea, and let him drive back alone. We can geld some colts for breakfast tomorrow. I've got some beauties. Let him take the Volkswagen. Or maybe he'd prefer a camel."

Gold chose the Volkswagen over the camel and headed toward Washington in a dazed state of moral collapse. How much lower would they crawl to rise to the top? he asked himself with wretched self-reproach. Much, much lower, he answered in improving spirit, and felt purged of hypocrisy by the time he was ready for dinner.

He sallied forth into the Hotel Madison after showering and dressing, saw the price of the snails forestier, and felt as small as one. He was out of place and understood with potent prescience that he always would be. Amidst all the people filling the crowded, bustling dining room he was "solitary as an oyster in that unique simile of Charles Dickens, a long winded novelist, in Gold's estimation, whose ponderous works were always too long and always flawed by a procession of eccentric, one-sided characters too large in number to keep track of, and an excessive abundance of extravagant coincidences and other unlikely events. Gold had still not recovered fully from the strain to which he had been subjected, and took but spiritless notice when perhaps the longest shadow in the universe crept across his table almost a full minute and a half before the figure casting it arrived and halted. For a second, Gold had the impression that Harris Rosenblatt had grown into the tallest, straightest, strictest human being walking the face of the earth. His complexion now was Saxon white. The expression staring down on Gold in silent greeting was permanently mapped by hard and rigid lines, and the voice that spoke was edged with flint.

"I have time for only a quick drink," Harris Rosenblatt sternly said with an efficiencey of manner that left God feeling he was the one who had intruded, and then, frowning attentively before he seated himself, scoured the room darkly with the look of someone incessantly watchful who knows in his bones that fearful things are abroad. "People were saying very good things about you in the Treasury Department today, Bruce, very good things about your report on the work of the Presidential Commission."

"They like my report?"

"I like it too, though I haven't read it. You're to be congratulated. Everyone speaks well of it."

"Harris, never wrote a report," said Gold.

"That's the kind of report I like best," said Harris Rosenblatt. "No waste."

"Even thought I said nothing?"

"As a result, nobody's criticizing you. If you said nothing, you said it well, and that speaks well of you."

"Harris, I've just got back from Pugh Biddle Conover's. Did you really shoot a dog last weekend?"

"Indeed I did." Harris Rosenblatt grinned proudly as he made the admission. "It is an old custom among us horsemen and hunters to shoot your favorite dog after a successful outing. It's a discipline against pride and trains us to attach less importance to our material possessions."

"How does it do that?" inquired Gold.

"Harris Rosenblatt gave thoughtful consideration to the question before replying. "I don't know."

"Harris, know any way I can make a lot of money quickly without doing any work for it?"

"It would be unethical for me to say."

"Unethical to tell me or unethical to say you know any? Which is it?"

Harris Rosenblatt said, "I don't know. But I have inside news that you can use for your personal profit if you want to. The government will have to try balance the budget or it will rue the day."

Gold was adrift. "How can I use that for my personal advantage?"

"I don't know."

"Harris, you're in bonds. We had a Secretary of the Treasury not long ago, William E. Simon, who earned somewhere between two and three million dollars a year working in municipal bonds before he came into government. What in the world can a person do in municipal bonds that makes him worth two or three million a year?"

"I really don't know."

"What do you make?"

"Two or three million a year." Harris Rosenblatt stood up. "I must go now. How is Lieberman these days?"

"Still a grubba, still a zshlub."

"I don't understand Yiddish," Harris Rosenblatt told Gold at once, "and any words I may have known as a child I have forgotten. Although," Harris Rosenblatt continued in a softer tone with a kind of confiding geniality, "I used to be Jewish, you know."

"I used to be a hunchback."

"Isn't it amazing," exclaimed Harris Rosenblatt in a glad cry, "how we've both been able to change!"

Gold was feeling solitary as oyster again at the family dinner he swore would be the last he was ever going to attend, even before Sid entangled him in Isaac Newton with a simple restatement of the innocuous proposition:

"A force exerted in one direction produces a reaction of equal force in the opposite direction."

"Says who?"

"Sir Isaac Newton," Sid answered blandly.

"Sure," said Victor.

"It's one of his laws of motion," said Ida.

"His third," said Belle.

"Even I know that," said Muriel.

Gold's thoughts had been concentrated on the looming dissolution of his marriage and he was quit( unaware until he found himself in the middle of this circle of derision that his was the voice that had take Sid's gambit.

"Wait a minute." Gold was mildly flustered. "What was it you said, Sid? Now don't change it. Just repeat it."

"A force exerted in one direction produces a reaction of equal force in the opposite direction. My, oh my, Harriet—is this chopped liver good. Its the besty you ever made."

"I went back to the old butcher." f

Gold evaluated Sid's words carefully and was profoundly dejected. "Is that what you said before? Sid, you didn't change anything?"

"Why should I change Sir Isaac Newton?" Sid's was a look of unspotted honesty as he mopped his dish with a piece of bread, "It's as clear as E equals MC square."

Gold gave up inelegantly. "I'd rather not hear any more about Sir Isaac Newton."

"That was Albert Einstein." Sid could not keep from laughing.

"Sure," said Victor.

Gold was thankful his father was not yet there. He was in a quandary about Belle: he had not the knack for facing her with his decision, and decided to have his lawyer break the news he was going after he'd gone. Next came his mission with Milt, who wanted Esther to marry him. Gold, drawing Milt aside, plumbed his mind in a minute or two and sent back assurances through Harriet by way of Ida that Milt was pure of salacious expectations and owned a modesty of person as great as her own.

"I'll soon be seventy, Bruce," Milt said, stammering. "And I've always been a bachelor. I just don't want to live alone any more. I don't think Esther wants to be alone, either."

Then his father arrived with Gussie and loaded the atmosphere like a charge of electricity. He was still in the week-old depression about which Gold had heard. His fuming sulk had been provoked by Gold, the egocentric old battler quickly disclosed—"It's him, what then?" his father snarled curtly when asked how he felt—and exacerbated by the boredom and spreading physical pains that were arriving with the coldness of encroaching winter. Twice already on successive days he had groused to Sid in the waning bad temper of defeat about the lack of a suitable home for him in Florida. In a way, Gold was sorry to see the lunging old bull coming to an end. Gold cracked his knuckles in suspense as he waited for whatever tempestuous grievances were steaming in the old man's emotions to come bursting forth.

For one thing, Julius Gold, like Pugh Biddle Conover, did not take kindly to the notion of Jews in public office. "Why should it be a Jew that's blamed when they're caught or make their mistakes?" For another, he was irate with the knowledge of Gold's visit to Conover's estate. "A fascist he was, and anti-Israel, always. Name one." Clambering to his feet in anger, Gold's father warmed rapidly to the attack and was as fiery as a burning coal. "Go ahead, Mr. Smart Guy. I dare you."

"One what?" pleaded Gold.

"One millionaire who ever amounted to anything, you tell me when."

"When what?"

"Don't what me—I'll give you what, you dummy. You tell me when the name Rockefeller even became respectable. Or Morgan even, that J. P. Morgan with the purple nose on his lap was a midget. I remember when people would spit and turn away at such names. Even Senators from the West. And now you go riding on horses with someone like Conover. Hey, Jew—where do you come to horses? Since when does a Jew ride a horse? When did you learn how to ride with a horse?"

"I didn't ride."

"Who got you there?"

"I was invited," said Gold in a contrite tone, his own resentful wrath failing him disastrously each time it was his turn to reply. "By someone who knows him. He can be of help to me."

"With what?" cried Julius Gold, his cheeks blowing and contracting. "Just remember, sonny boy. You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas."

"If you ever forget you're a Jew," said Gussie Gold in a tone of stately rebuke, "you can rest assured that a gentile like Conover will remind you."

"They know it, for God sakes," Gold replied to her, "and they accept me there for what I am."

"Yeah?" said his father. "And what are you? You going into government with them? As what?"

"As Secretary," said Gold, in a voice falling lower with embarrassment, "of State."

The old man wound his face up into an expression of disgust and asked, "What kind of job is that for a Jewish boy? Sid here worked with the horses at the laundry when he had to, but he stopped when he could. He didn't ride them. You tell me what business a Jew has in government here. You name me one Jew who ever went into government who was any good."

Gold's memory went into a state of temporary paralysis when challenged by this difficult question. "Brandeis and Cardozo," were the best he could produce. "And Felix Frankfurter."

"They were forty years ago," his father jeered. "And those were judges, I mean in government."

"Herbert Lehman?"

"A hundred years ago. And he was first a Governor and then a Senator, dumbbell, and he was not so hot either. You name me one Jew who ever walked for a President who wasn't a disgrace to the government and a disgrace to the Jews." None came to mind right then. "And all those Christians ain't so hot either, you know. Even that bastard Roosevelt. Ten thousand Jewish babies he wouldn't Jet into the country, they went to the fires instead. A cripple he was. With a limp he walked and didn't want we should know, that liar." An unexpected smile flickered anomalously beneath the old man's expression when he rested for breath, and he uttered a single croupy chuckle. "A cripple," he observed, with a more human note stealing into his voice, "is always good for a laugh."

Gold could be confident that his were not the only sensibilities upon which these words fell with revolting effect. His own natural propensity for evil was not unknown to him, but he realized now that there were heights and depths of cruelty in thought that stretched outside even his most vengeful fantasies.

"Oh, Pop, that was awful," he said, shaking his head in grief and bewilderment. "That was really an ugly thing to say."

"And he was so beautiful Roosevelt with those crooked legs?" his father retorted with a renewal of rancor Gold found quite alarming. "It was pretty what he did to those Jews on that boat he wouldn't even let stop in this country, they had to go back to Germany? File and forget, he wrote on the letter, and he wouldn't even let them bomb the railroad tracks taking the people to the death camps. I know all this from my friends in Florida, and I believe them before you. And now you go showing off with a man like Conover?" A Nazi, an anti-Semitt. Like Lindbergh, he was, "Julius Gold went on. Maybe worse than Henry Ford "

"Well, he's not like that now," Gold lied without a moment of indecision. Things have changed. I've got important friend in Washington who tells me there's no more anti-Semitism left. I think we're being accepted now, without any prejudice, and we're being assimilated."

"Yeah?" scoffed his father. "Who's doing the accepting and who's doing the assimilating? Not me. A goy bleibt a goy, the way I see it, and without Israel we got no one to protect us, because we don't know how to fight any more and they do. You assimilate. I tell you one thing—you ever bring any of your Conovers here and it's goodbye, Charlie. I'm going back to Florida for good."

"Give him a call," said Harriet to Gold. Her words, so blunt in import, were deafening in result.

"Find me a place, Sid," the old man said sorrowfully in a hoarse whisper after a long, loathing glance at Harriet, and hobbled with an effort to a chair. "Get me a condominium if you think I should have one." There was a terrible finality in the way he was drawing to his close." And find me some different top to talk. I'm tired of his twisted brain."

"I think," said Gold's stepmother, "that another screw has come loose."

The sight of his stepmother with her knitting needles awoke in Gold's mind a vague perplexity of association that glimmered elusively for an instant just a hairsbreadth away from recognition and then disappeared for all time when Sid said:

"I see by the papers today that they've discovered some language ability in the right side of the brain."

"The brain has two sides?" asked one of the sisters.

"Of course," said Sid with a superior benevolence that rubbed Gold the wrong way. "There are two sides to every question."

"The brain is not a question," Gold pointed out moodily without looking up.

"It's an answer?" said his father.

"There are two sides to everything," Sid explained directly to Gold, talking down.

"To everything?" Gold, with a delicious quiver of exultation, he knew he finally had him. "This orange?"

"Of course," said Sid.

"Where are the two sides to this orange?"

"A top and a bottom," said Sid. "There are two sides to everything."

A triangle?"

"An inside and an outside."

Gold announced then that he was leaving Sid's house and that he was never in his life attending another family dinner. Like Joannie, he would see them one at a time—maybe.

Politely he congratulated Esther and Milt again on their approaching nuptials.

He decided without a wrench to leave Belle the next day. Andrea would make good the loss. He had no doubt he would be disowned by his father, brother, and sisters and rejected by his children. The future looked bright.

In the morning he conferred with his lawyer. "How much of your money do you want her to have?"

"None."

"I'm in favor of that."

"On the other hand, I want her and the children to have everything they're accustomed to and never have to worry."

"I may have to look for a loophole."

In the afternoon he went for his medical examination. Mursh Weinrock, smoking cigarettes like a smoldering mattress and waxing fatter and rounder even as the witnessing eye beheld him, consigned him to the inspection of the assistant now sharing his practice, a very serious, humorless young man who maintain the gravest silence for the longest time, Riveting Gold in terror with implications of tragedy by the incomprehensible sobriety of his manner. The dire presentiments of fatal diagnosis spreading through Gold's mind began to assume a hundred different forms.

"When was the last time," the long-faced young physician inquired just when Gold felt he could endure the portentous atmosphere not one instant longer, "you had a bath?"

Gold rose from the undignified position he had been instructed to assume on his hands and knees, pulled up his underpants, dismounted from the examining table, slid into his trousers, and strode without knocking into the capacious, dark private office of Dr Murray Weinrock.

"Did you tell him to ask me that?"

"What?"

"When was the last time I had a bath."

"That was pretty good." Weinrock laughed without noise, as though husbanding energy for more constructive employment elsewhere. "I knew he was a bright one."

"For Christ sakes, Murshie," Gold pleaded. "When the fuck do you find time to rig up these practical jokes? Can't we get on with it?"

Weinrock sent him next to Lucille for tests. The handsome black woman seemed out of temper.

"You been chasing around after the doctor's wife again, ain't you?" she muttered with a murderous scowl.

Before Gold could utter a denial, a young girl popped her head in to announce, "The sugar in his urine is very high.

"As Gold stared over her shoulder, Lucille wrote: Sugar, Low normal. "The lab says you got high cholesterol in your blood." On her clipboard she wrote: Cholesterol. Low normal. She rose chuckling with a sidelong glance of deadly malevolence. "Well," she said I think I just killed me another one."

"Another what?"

"Another Jew. Get over there for cardiogram. Take off that shirt before I cut it off. Get up on the table and lie down before I put you up there and knock you down. I mean, lay down."

"You meant lie down, Lucille. You talk better English than I do."

"Don't sass me. You been fucking the doctor s wife again, ain't you?" She was fastening the electrical connections as she spoke. "I knows you has, so don't lie."

"Oh, come on, Lucille, stop it. You're an educated woman, not a mugger."

"White motherfucker, don't shit me. I seen your urine filled up with all those dirty hormones. Lie still and relax or I'll put a knife in your chest. Uh-oh. There it goes. Ever had a heart attack?"

"No," said Gold, with a start.

"Bullshit. You had a heart attack and went to another doctor, didn't you?"

"I did not."

"You sure?"

"Why?"

"Lie back, bastard. Lie back and be calm, or I'll cut your throat. Ever had a stroke? You've had a stroke, then, haven't you? And went to another doctor, didn't you?"

"What the hell are you talking about?" shouted Gold.

"Look at those goddamned lines," Dr. Weinrock's nurse shouted back in a voice just as tumultuous. "You mean to tell me you never had a heart attack? Or a stroke?"

Murshie Weinrock looked in, alarmed. "What's going on?"

"He won't lie back. He keeps jumping up to look at the lines. He's worried about having a heart attack or a stroke."

"Weinrock's bedside manner was a blend of petulance and cajolery. "Come on, Brucie, stop acting like a child. Let's finish the examination and see what's wrong. Now that you're becoming such an important man, I want to make sure you're healthy."

"What were you doing all those years before I became an important man?" Gold took him to task when he was fully dressed and back in the private office. "Weren't you making sure?"

"I really don't have time. You see how busy I am."

"Suppose I was really sick?"

"I wouldn't take you, Bruce," Dr. Weinrock answered with frankness. "Oh, I would never take on a patient who really needed help. I don't enjoy being around sick people. Now, let's see." He fell silent while intently perusing the data on Gold. "Much as I hate to admit it, I have to agree with the medical opinion of my lazy kid brother. Spotty says you're a prick."

"He tells me that about you."

"With me he's referring only to my narrow-minded, reactionary politics."

"Will I be able to—"

"You will be able to endure the anguish of power and the agony of power and to shoulder handily the burdens of office. Your cholesterol and uric acid are up, but not dangerously. Your blood nitrogen is high, but I don't worry about that, mainly because it's your blood nitrogen and not mine. The growth on your lung still doesn't show up in the X-ray. Your prostate is slightly enlarged, but so is mine. And, I see by the electrocardiogram—" he glanced up reprovingly— "that you're still fucking my wife."

"I can't keep away from her, Doctor."

"In short, you're falling apart rapidly at a healthy, normal rate. How are things at home?"

"Fine." Gold was relieved. "Belle's okay and I'm getting along pretty well with my kid Noah now and—"

"Noah?" Mursh Weinrock asked in a startled way.

"Yes. He's my oldest, and—"

"That's a terrible name to give a kid, Bruce."

"What?" Gold, pricking up his ears, could not believe he heard heard him accurately.

"Really terrible."

Gold looked steadily at the large, owlish head of his physician before replying. We don't think so. He was named after my wife's father."

"It's not even Jewish."

"It's not?"

"Of course not. Noah came before Abraham, and Abraham was the first. Noah was a drunkard. Why'd you ever name your kid after a gentile drunk?"

"He doesn't mind," Gold said tartly. "Why don't you mind your own business?"

"Yes, he does."

"How do you know?"

"How do you know?"

"Mursh," Gold entreated urgently, on the spur of the moment, "maybe you can help me on this. Is there something about me, something in my makeup perhaps, that causes people to want to make fun of me? Is there something that inspires humor in others, am I of a type that encourages sport?"

Weinrock, leaning back with interlaced fingers on his belly, lowered his eyelids and looked wise. "Yes, Bruce, I'm afraid there is."

"What?"

"I don't know."

The moment for parting had come. Belle turned ashen for an instant when he reentered the apartment with the dazed air of a man who had lately experienced some indescribable tragedy.

"I'm okay," he reassured her faintly. "I just have to be very careful about what I eat. What's for dinner?"

"Calf's liver and bacon, with mushrooms, mashed potatoes, and sautéed onions."

"That sounds fine," said Gold. "No, not calf s liver. I have to watch my cholesterol."

"Is there cholesterol in bacon?"

"There's fat. I have to watch my weight too. And I don't think I can have mushrooms. I have to watch uric acid."

"Are you sick?" Belle studied him with veiled concern.

"No, I'm in perfect health, I have to watch my blood pressure too."

"How do you do that?"

''He didn't say. Cut down on my salt, I guess."

"It seems to me," said Belle, "that you'd be better off if you were sick. You wouldn't have so much watching to do."

Gold did not like the sound of that but put back the bankbooks anyway and decided to live with her a little while longer.

Gold found himself with an immense unwillingness to admit that the closer he drew to marrying Andrea and serving as a Secretary of State, the deeper he fell into doubt that he wanted to do either. Andrea never helped with the dishes. She was not proving as malleable to his influence as he had formerly hoped, and there were salients of character that were going to prove resistant to even his most apostolic attempts at modification. He could tell from watching her with her father that she was a person who never did anything she didn't want to and always succeeded in doing everything she did. Thus far she was ever agreeable and obliging, albeit wit an impassive emotional futility and tedium. Sex with Belle for him by now had become largely a matter routine. Sex with Andrea was also now a matter of routine, although the spectrum of experimentation was infinitely wider. In that area Andrea spoke with an experience and natural candor that were often quite shocking to Gold and assented to proposals suggested by him in a bantering vein which he had not the weakest wish to carry through.

"You and your father," he said to her, "Certainly seem to do a lot of touching, don't you?"

"Me more than him," she answered with no uneasiness, "I discovered when I was still a little girl that if I sat on men's laps and squirmed a lot, I would always get more attention. So I've been doing it ever since."

"Yes, like this." She was already sitting on his lap, and Gold marveled at her lack of emotion as she demonstrated. "Ever since I was a child, I guess, I've loved just about anyone with a prick, because I could see that's where all the power and action was. So I was always trying to hang around boys, and squirming and touching was a way the would let me."

Somehow Gold was able to rise and drift away from her without showing the extent to which he was once again affected by ideas that could not strike him as anything but warped and peculiar. "Andrea, you must not say things like that to people," he cautioned with overcompensating kindness that disguised only thinly the disapproval she had evoked.

"Not even to you?"

"Well, maybe," he relented, not unmindful that he might be discarding a refreshing source of titillation, "just to me."

"I don't know things like that," she confessed gratefully. "I'm a Sarah Lawrence girl, even though I didn't finish there, and they always told me to speak the truth as I saw it. At Bennington, you know, we had this professor of art we used to keep score with. Three hundred and twenty-four of us fucked him in the two years he was there. I guess you fuck a lot of your students, don't you?"

"No," Gold contradicted her emphatically. "I do not."

"Never?"

"Graduate or undergraduate?"

"Either."

"Sometimes," he admitted. "Not for a long time. Hardly ever."

"At Smith," she added calmly, "we used to go after our fathers."

Gold had to swallow first. "Your fathers?"

"And that was much more fun."

Gold began wondering again to what kind of girl he was planning to be married. "I'm not sure I heard you correctly, dear. Your fathers?"

"Yes."

"Oh, my God," he said and put a hand to his head. "Who started that?"

"I was one of the first," she answered. "I almost got the senior achievement award for thinking it up."

"And your father?"

"He was one of the first. And always one of the best." Andrea read his mind suddenly with a gleeful cry. "Not our own fathers, stupid," she chided boisterously with a high-pitched laugh that was another one of the traits he no longer found as endurable as formerly. "That would be just awful."

"I was feeling something like that, "Gold said wryly.

"We did it with each other;s," she explained with condescending gaiety. "We played switch, Brucie. My father was always one of the easiest and always had the most fun. "All I had to do was bring a friend home for the night and whisper to him that she thought he was sexy. After that he was a pushover. They all agreed he was an A fuck. I bet he still is. Don't your daughter's friends try to get down with you?"

"No," cried Gold.

"Oh, come on. I bet they do and you don't even know it."

"My daughter's friends, Andrea," he informed her with asperity, "are twelve and a half years old. There are certain areas, my dear, in which a minimum amount of reticence is normally desirable, and I think you are pouring your secrets out recklessly in one of them now."

"I disagree, Bruce," she told him easily with that inexorable strength of purpose he was coming to recognize and fear. "I know we're both going to do a lot of screwing around after we're married—"

"We are?" His astonishment clearly denoted he did not like that idea at all.

"What kind of marriage will it be if we don't?" she inquired.

"What kind of marriage will it be if we do?"

"An open, truthful marriage," she replied with a rapt earnestness, as though picturing for him the rosiest and most fulfilling of relationships. "And we'll have such interesting, funny stories to tell each other."

The mere idea of such an open, truthful marriage filled with daily conversations about what did you do to whom today was revolting to him, but he replied with what he felt was exemplary tact. "We'll have more to say about that before the wedding, darling."

"No secrets, Bruce, and nothing held back. I will tell you everything and I want you to tell me everything."

"I will tell you everything," he replied, taking her in his arms. "And if you want me to be honest, I will tell you now that I don't want to be told everything."

But it was the kitchen, rather than the bedroom, in which the forerunners of ineluctable incompatibility seemed most prolific, Gold could forgive a frigid woman, almost as readily as he could forgive a passionate one, but how long could he suffer with an excellent grace a woman who in the kitchen was essentially obvious? In time there would be cooks and maids, but who would oversee them? With each passing week the dreadful thought was gathering in his head like a low-hanging cloud that she was not perhaps merely slothful and uninterested in certain areas of domestic responsibility but also stupid. Three times he'd been forced to expound on slab bacon for her enchanted edification—once when frying thick slices for eggs, once for French toast, and once while dicing pieces with shrimp and scallions for inclusion in the Chinese fried rice he served with the clams in black bean sauce he succeeded in cooking for her to absolute perfection—and she was absorbed hypnotically in each repetition as though he had not dilated on the subject of slab bacon to her before. By the third time he was irascible, not tickled, at the oddity in circumstance that found him, a Jew, dissertating to her on the esoteric virtues of slab bacon. She did not help clear the dishes after that meal either, and he did not deign to ask.

But it was the episode of the Estonian black bread that nearly took all the heart out of him.

"Darling, where's that big Estonian black bread I brought down last time? I've searched everywhere."

"I threw it out," she told him in innocence.

Into Gold's eyes there crept a look of alarm. "You threw it out?"

"It was getting hard."

"It was getting hard?" He listened in a sort of trance and gave a hollow laugh. "Darling it's supposed to get hard. That was just the outside slice that got hard."

"The crust was hard too."

"Darling, the crust is always hard."

"I didn't know that, darling."

"The bake such large loaves with a thick crust so they'll stay fresh for weeks, darling. Did you think we would eat a five-pound Estonian black bread in a day?"

"I'm sorry, darling," Andrea truly was penitent. "You know how weak I am on Eastern European home economics."

Stoically deciding to make the best of things, Gold reached for a packaged white bread and then unwittingly posed the question that gave the death blow to all blissful hopes for the future and transformed the character of their approaching marriage from one of love into one of convenience.

"Darling, have you any Tiptree Little Scarlet Strawberry Preserves?"

All Andrea could offer was a jar of jam with a supermarket label. Gold was aghast. I bring her Black Forest ham with Pommery mustard and the juiciest baked salmon, and she gives me shit. What the fuck was the matter these people? Didn't they care about anything but riding horses and owning money? They ate California oranges when they could get Florida and did not seem to know the Comice pears were better than Seckels and Anjous. Hopelessness enveloped him like an enervating fog at the mere idea of trying to convince her that the difference between an ordinary supermarket jam and Tiptree Little Scarlet Strawberry Preserves lay at the essence of their chances for a happy union.

This was something Belle understood. "He's a gourmet and doesn't know it," Belle said with laughter many months back when they were still able to joke with each other. "He thinks he's just particular. I'd like to see one of these young girls please him for more than a week. It would take her ten years just to learn how. I'd like to see him ever get one to try. When he asks for two-minute eggs he means three minutes. He wants his underwear ironed and thinks he doesn't. When we go out he takes longer to dress than I do. "I'd like to see one of his college students figure out when he asks for rye bread with seeds whether he means caraway seeds or black seeds. When he asks for liver he wants to eat out. God help you if you ever give him a California grapefruit. I feel sorry for any young girl who steals him away."

Gold remembered Belle's speech with a smile. The only flaw he could find in her summation of him was her ingenuous belief that he was most likely to be captivated by the artifices of someone young. His friend in the suburbs, like Belle, was approximately his own age. Andrea already asleep beside him, was past thirty-five, and he doubted he could ever be intrigued again by anyone younger. Belle had a faint mustache now, he recalled, and he smiled at this too.

Gold lay awake for an hour bemoaning his plight. His blessings were one with his tribulations: he was about to effectuate a painful divorce from Belle; he was about to enter into a painful marriage with Andrea, a woman at once submissive and weirdly independent, who both frightened and bored him; and he was about to embark on a vulnerable new career in government and politics whose fate, at least initially, would be largely dependent on the patronage and goodwill of an inhumanely selfish and malicious father-in-law who disliked him intensely and sadistically. And as though his life with all that were not sufficiently complicated, he tumbled head over heels into love the very next day with another woman almost his own age who was separated from a mountainous husband with a brutal temper and had four children: the eldest old and tall enough to beat Gold to a bloody pulp with his fists should that notion possess him, the next in age a girl worldly and pretty enough to seduce him should she choose tender enough in years for the tantrums, fevers, and digestive upsets and messes of early childhood that turn parenthood into an uncivilized nightmare.

The first in the series of events transporting him to this pass was a phone call from New York from Belle, who ought at least to have tried to cope with the crisis herself. Gold was stunned when he awoke in Andrea's bed an learned in routinely calling his hotel that there was an urgent message from Belle. His daughter Dina had been expelled from her school. The vixen had bitten him deep in the fleshy part of his leg, and at a most inopportune time.

Gold was in a rage when he stormed into the office of the principal with newspaper clippings attesting to his probable emergence as a person of vast political influence. He pulled no punches because the reigning official was both a woman and a black.

"Your words," he began with a sputter and picked up velocity as he went along. "You'll have to change them. Don't you read the newspapers? I can't have a daughter of mine in trouble in school at this time. Either take her out of trouble or redefine your words so she's not in trouble, and that's it. Fartig! I'll ruin you. I'll cut off financial aid. I'll let the whole world know you're running a segregated, selective private school while pretending to be integrated and impartial."

The poor woman was shaken by his vehemence,"But Dr Gold, that isn't true. We're known as segregated and selective, although we secretly are integrated."

"Then I'll let the parents know you're integrated and drive all the whites away. You're after headlines, aren't you? That's the reason you're doing this, isn't it?"

"She's refusing to do homework. We can't very well lower our standards, can we?"

"That's progressive education," countered Gold. "And you can so lower your standards without harming or helping a single student. Read my piece called 'Education and Truth or Truth in Education.'"

Dr Gold,!" the woman tried futilely to explain, "if we keep her in and fail her, she'll be held back and you'll waste a full year's tuition. If she leaves there'll be nothing derogatory on her record and you'll receive a refund."

"How large a refund?"

"A fraction of the total."

"Keep her in."

"Dr Gold, I'm sure you wouldn't want us to overlook our rules just to make an exception of your child."

"Why not?"

The woman could hardly have looked more surprised. "You would?"

"Yes, She is exceptional, isn't she?"

"In a recalcitrant unproductive way."

"Good," said Gold. "Make an exception of her for that and treat it as experimental education. I'll do the homework for her if you attach that much importance to it."

They came to terms on that. In the anteroom outside the open door there awaited him with parted lips a pretty woman with ash-blonde fluffed-up hair who hurried after him breathlessly and caught at his arm when he had gained the corridor.

"Dr Gold, please," she said after bringing him to a stop. "I think it's so unfair. Your daughter is not an exception. And I think it's unjust for you and the administration to label her an exception."

"Who the fuck are you?" asked Gold.

"Linda Book," said the woman, "I'm one of Dina's teachers.

"You the one who's complaining?"

"Oh no Dr. Gold. I'm her favorite. We're very close friends and it hurts me to see her stigmatized as an exception. She's really so exceptional."

Gold looked into her sensitive gray eyes with the knowing interest of someone watching a new fish swim into his ken. He gave the softest gasp of appreciation when he realized that hers was probably the most beautiful face of a woman of his own approximate generation that he had ever seen. Her blouse and skirt were a bit on the shiny bright side, which was all to his taste, and she had good-sized breasts in a soft brassiere. A second later he knew he was on the very verge of falling in love with her, and he glanced at his watch to see if he had time.

"Ride downtown to my studio with me, he requested. "I want to talk longer with you."

"I have a class in five minutes."

"Cut it."

She appeared a bit flustered by his air of command. "At least," she said, "let me freshen up."

He waited downstairs in a cab for her and they fell immediately into an orgy of lubricious kissing that soared in ardour and noise until they arrived at his building He was almost certain afterward that for a period of about a minute during the ride she had one foot on his shoulder. They were as formal and correct as rigid, weaving drunks in the lobby and elevator. As soon as his key turned in the lock she came at him again with the same famished voracity, and they resumed as passionately and calisthenically as before, with a lustful grinding of bellies and pelvic bones and a bruising banging of thighs and knees. He held her ass. She pulled his hair. He remembered to shut the door.

"I can't ball you today," she told him the moment they were inside, "But I give good head."

Actually, her head was only so-so, but Gold did not criticize and Gold did not care. Before the sun set that same day he learned that Linda Book was the easiest person to give his heart to that he'd ever met. Gold had this penchant for falling in love. Whenever he was at leisure he fell in love. Sometimes he fell in love for as long as four months; most often, though, for six or eight weeks. Once or twice he had fallen in love for a minute. Confident that this new attachment had no better chance of surviving than the others, he yielded himself to it completely. In the throes of romantic discovery, he told her all about Andrea, and much about Belle. In the freshness and exhilarating sweep of adventurous new feeling, he asked her to come with him secretly to Acapulco on his trip with Andrea, scheduled during her Christmas vacation, and she quickly agreed.

"I may have to bring two children."

"That's out of the question,"

"I'll leave them with my husband."

"We may be followed," he thought it prudent to advise her, thinking of Greenspan.

"My husband wouldn't go that far," said Linda Book, "although he's desperate for a reconciliation. He hates being separated from me."

"Smart fellow," said Gold. "He'd be a fool to give you up."

Linda blossomed like a rose. "You know how to make a woman happy. But I must warn you now. I'll never want to marry you."

Gold could not find the right words for a moment. "The mold!" he cried at last. "They broke it! They broke the mold when they created you!"

In the cold light of morning he lingered over breakfast with his head in both hands, wondering what the fuck he had done.

Sid gave Gold a check for thirty-five hundred dollars. Gold put the check in his pocket.

"I'll also need some advice, Sid, about Acapulco. I'm not really going for the government, and there'll be two of us."

Sid pursed his lips in consternation. "I'm not sure the places I mentioned are right for Belle."

"Not Belle, Sid. Belle and I are finished. We're not really together any more."

If Sid was distraught he hid it well. "How come I haven't heard?" he asked with only mild surprise. "The girls still talk to her, don't they?"

"I'm not sure she knows." This was growing to be an awkward confession to have to keep making. "I'm sort of hoping she'll catch on. There's this girl in Washington I'm engaged to secretly and want to marry."

"You're really in love, huh, kid?"

"Yeah, Sid, I am. But that's with a different one."

"You mean there are three?" Now Sid sat straight up and a look of keenest joy brightened his face.

Gold nodded sheepishly. "And there's also a Jewish FBI man named Greenspan who might still be checking me out for good character."

"Tell me something," Sid said after asking the waiter for another round of drinks. "Why aren't you marrying the one you're in love with?"

"Her husband wouldn't let me," said Gold. "He doesn't even like the idea of being separated. He's a big violent man with a savage temper and I mustn't let him find out."

"That's funny."

"She's got four kids."

"That's funnier." Sid was chuckling heartily. "Is she having her teeth capped?"

Gold answered with amazement. "How did you know?"

Sid merely smiled in a paternal way. Then he explained, "Every time I fell for a girl she decided she had to have her teeth capped."

"Linda's having just a couple. I offered to pay."

"Don't commit yourself for more."

Gold was again embarrassed. "Two of her kids need orthodontia," he confessed, "and I told Linda I'd help there too."

"Why are you marrying the one in Washington?"

"She's a lovely girl, Sid," Gold answered with persuasive feeling, "really nice, and her father can help me with his influence. There's money there and that might make it easier for me to help Linda with those dental bills."

"How's her teeth?"

"Good, Sid, good."

"Is she tall?"

"Very. With long legs and very strong bones. Healthy, and really quite a beauty."

"Then take her to Acapulco," Sid urged genially. "It sounds like you might have some fun."

"I'm going to, Sid," said Gold, "but there's the problem. I don't like to be away from Linda and I want to sneak her along too."

"What's the problem?" Sid asked.

"Is it possible?" asked Gold. "Can I really do something like that without getting caught?"

"Sure, it's possible," Sid assured him with zest and called for two more drinks. "I've got this friend in Houston I do business with who goes with this Mexican television actress who goes with this airline pilot who's married to this woman with the Mexican Tourist Bureau who can help with travel and hotel reservations."

"She may have to bring two of her kids."

"The more the merrier," Sid chortled, "if you can afford it. And a maid or baby sitter to take care of them so she's free nights."

"I hadn't thought of that. Sid, how can I hide so many people? Two hotels? Three?"

"One," answered Sid concisely.

"One?"

"Sure, one. It accounts for your being wherever you're seen and you don't waste time shooting back and forth. Please don't take offense, Bruce, but I think that maybe for the first time in my life I'm finally proud of my kid brother."

"And all this while," reminded Gold, thrilling a moment with the compliment, "there's this FBI man who might find out and ruin everything. By the way, what's she like?"

"Who?"

"That Mexican television actress," said Gold.

"Not bad, I hear, if you like them short, dark, shapely, and passionate. She goes off like a string of firecrackers, I'm told. And I always thought you were kind of stuffy. I never thought you had nerve for something like this."

"Sid, I don't," Gold decided, wilting. "I'm going to call it off."

"Over my dead body," Sid told him in an affronted voice that commanded the attention of others in the small restaurant. "I haven't had this much fun in fifteen years. What could go wrong? Boy, oh, boy—I wish I could go along, but I don't think my heart or Harriet would stand it. Listen—we'll book you into the Villa Vera in two private cottages back to back. You'll have your own kitchen and private swimming pool with each and can avoid the public areas. I'll work out the right room numbers. The way I see it you won't even have to worry about this Greenspan or the FBI."

"Forgive me for intruding," said Greenspan of the FBI, "but I'd like to make a suggestion. He'll need a third room for himself to make and receive private phone calls from each of the ladies. He can use secret business with Washington as a justification. I recommend three connecting suites, with his own in the middle."

"You seem to know an awful lot about this," Sid said appreciatively after Gold introduced them.

"I've worked for Presidents," was Greenspan's understated reply. "Your place—it's a pigsty," he said of Gold's studio when they entered. "I say that more in sorrow than anger. I've been meaning to tell you for weeks."

"Greenspan, don't butt in," said Gold with a look plainly indicating he was both worried and irked. "I don't want Belle to know anything about this."

"She knows, she knows," said Greenspan in a soughing litany. "Everything but the names. Since when has Belle ever been guilty of stupidity?"

"Then why hasn't she said anything?"

"What can she say?" answered Greenspan with an expression of absolute grief stealing over him. "If you only knew how my heart bleeds for her every time I hear her talking to her mother or trying to pretend that nothing's wrong when she speaks to your sisters. What a woman she is, what a wonderful wife and mother she—"

"Greenspan, stop, for Christ sakes."

"Why should she be the one to say something and make it easier for you?" asked Greenspan. "If you won't complain, why should she do it for you? Sure, she'll give you a divorce, but first ask. Why should she be the one to say you want a divorce, if you won't do it? Oh, Gold, Gold—I must know something, for my own information. It's off the record, I swear. This schoolteacher, this Linda Book."

"What about her?"

"You sure come a lot with her, don't you?"

"What's it your business?" Gold answered icily.

"You hardly ever come at all with the one you're going to marry."

"So?"

With a saddened, meaningful look, Greenspan replaced his hat. "You're a shonda to your race."

"And you, Greenspan, are a credit to yours. Will you be in Acapulco? What should I do if I get in trouble?"

"You can talk to the wall."

Gold fell into a mood of melancholy introspection the moment he was alone. For a prudent man he was reckless. For a sane one he was mad. Gold needed no inner voice to tell him he was courting trouble. All his life he had hated trouble. All his life he had been afraid of failing. Now, it seemed, he was distressed he might succeed.

What could go wrong? asked Sid. Gold could easily foretell as he left the elevator at the gym and turned toward the locker room. To begin with, there was that electrifying flash of lecherous attraction between him and the Mexican television actress that erupted on first sight on the tarmac of the airfield in Mexico City when they were waiting with Andrea for the connecting flight bearing Linda from Houston, and which burned in plain view like phosphorous with a fragrant, steaming brilliant heat that everybody nearby could scent and feel. The raw, magnetic force of their reciprocated animal desire could not be withstood and barely brooked delay. With a native quickness for which he could never be sufficiently grateful, she agreed in a throaty murmur to steal away to Acapulco the following day for a clandestine tryst with him in the empty chamber between the others, while the swarthy pilot who was her lover surveyed him evilly with baleful yellow eyes and muttered something sinister that Gold heard as though in a coma and politely requested he repeat.

"The Angel of Death is in the gym today," said Karp the chiropodist a second time from his oracle's perch on his low wooden stool in the aisle of lockers into which Gold had turned.

Gold came to a stop, blinking. "What are you talking about?"

"There's a man having a heart attack in the main gym upstairs. They're waiting for the ambulance now."

Grimly Gold continued to his locker, determining, as usual, to breast the cryptic tides of destiny and confront the morbid omens. Statistically, he solaced himself, the odds against two men dropping dead of heart attacks in the same gym on the same day were weighted heavily in his favor. Empirically, the harsh truth dawned, the chances were no different than ever if one of the men already had, and the transportation arrangements were filled with complications that neither Sid nor he could have foreseen. Because Linda did have to bring the two younger children, she traveled directly to Acapulco from New York and arrived at the hotel four hours before Gold and Andrea, who departed from Washington with stops at Houston and Mexico City. Or, because she did not have to bring the children, she insisted capriciously that she go on the same plane, and Gold found himself in transit with her too. That neither was impelled to recognize the other did little to ease the strain. Or, having cemented arrangements for traveling by herself on that same flight, she then arrived, as a consequence of a late-hour stance of perverse noncooperation by her bellicose husband, accompanied by the two children, who fell into a disagreeable funk immediately their eyes, with shattering disappointment, alighted on Gold. In seconds he was unmanned by the degrading need for treating the encounter as circumstantial, their previous acquaintanceship as slight and entirely professional, and the independent selection by both vacationing parties of the same plane for the same distant hotel as indeed a most extraordinary occurrence. With failing courage he watched Andrea's incisive doubt grow more manifest with every word exchanged. Another grueling test awaited him at the registration desk in Mexico, where all rooms, through some staff oversight, he shakily surmised, were reserved in his name, and just as this delicate contretemps was almost successfully untangled, Spotty Weinrock, of all people in the world, was standing there before him in a luminous golden cotton sweatsuit, irreversibly intent on going jogging with him on the small oval track two floors above.

"We can have a nice long talk while I'm learning how."

"I come at this hour to be alone." Gold should have remembered he had no chance ever of staring this otiose, imperturbable childhood friend out of countenance. "You shouldn't jog, not without a doctor's examination and a stress test. It's dangerous. Okay then, but don't try to keep up with me or run as long. You're overweight and out of condition and I'm not. I mean it—you wouldn't be the first one to drop dead."

"There's a guy with a heart attack upstairs in the gym now."

"I don't care about him!"

"Is this what you call fun?" asked Spotty Weinrock with a hateful smile, pulling alongside Gold and running with him easily midway through the second lap.

"Slow down, you fuck, or you'll soon have to stop," Gold warned. "I don't want to talk. You're not allowed to run side by side. Just fall back behind me and take your time."

"Is this how slow you always go?" asked Spotty from in back.

The effect upon Gold was excruciating. "I don't want to talk!" he yelped in a squeezed-out scream through a neck in which every vein and muscle was stretched in fury. His heart was beating with a louder noise than his pounding feet were making against the track. The grotesque ordeal was afflicting him rapidly with an enervating anemia of the will, and he sat down to rest in a cushioning armchair as soon as he was alone in the center suite after each of the women had been installed in rooms on either side without further conflict. Both thought he was transacting confidential official business with Washington. Linda's children were no longer there. His composure restored, he was able to have a banana daiquiri from room service with Linda, a banana daiquiri alone, and a banana daiquiri with Andrea when he'd completed another lap and again was with her. He fucked Andrea first to get that out of the way and was unable to perform with Linda when she rang him for that purpose on the telephone in the middle room.

"Fag!" cried Spotty Weinrock cheerily and went flitting ahead of Gold like a sunbeam in his golden track suit, as though Gold were standing still.

Gold was flabbergasted by this blinding display of speed but held morosely to his own dogged pace with something scarcely human in his contorted visage. The pain that always rose in his chest at the beginning was intensifying, rather than subsiding, and he lost count of the number of laps he had run and was forced to start all over just when, with a violent start of tremendous surprise, he heard the phone in his room again.

"It's the White House," he lied with a leap out of bed.

It was Andrea, with whom he then had a light lunch in the patio dining room. Then he had a heavy second lunch with Linda in the bedroom, which he consumed without appetite. The waistband of his walking shorts was turning sharp as an iron file. In less than two hours he had nurtured a cumbersome paunch that bounced when he moved and made jogging this afternoon an arduous chore instead of the strenuous and salutary regimen he normally found it. His breathing was more labored than usual and his pulse rate felt swifter than he knew was good for him.

"Fag!" sang out Spotty Weinrock playfully and sailed by him again.

Gold kept his eyes down and pretended not to notice that Linda was restless and growing insurgently fractious at being kept under wraps. Andrea too was tired of being kept under wraps and already was phoning about the area to people she knew with vacation homes. Linda wanted to carouse at the pool and Andrea wanted a drive into town. In a backward glance as the car pulled away, Gold took a mental snapshot of Linda at poolside in close conversation with a slender, tall, lithe, insultingly good-looking Mexican youth with gleaming teeth, and he experienced, to his chagrin, that jealous debilitating pang that is recognized universally as heartache.

"Fag!" denounced Weinrock and passed him again, as airily and blithely as a spirit with feet skimming on air.

Gold's own legs felt leaden, and he forced his gaze further downward into a dejected mode of inflexible concentration as Spotty ran from view while he had dinner with Linda and dropped her at a discotheque and had a second dinner with Andrea before driving with her to a party at a home near Kissinger's owned by friends of her father. Both women were complaining at the amount of time he was spending on the telephone with Washington.

"Fag!" called Weinrock and flew by him again.

"You'll drop!" Gold yelled reluctantly, but was too late to be heeded, so he stole unhappily from the party to look in on Linda at the discotheque. Linda was encircled now by four handsome dancing young men, all courting her rhythmically with the seductive, possessive allure that is the exclusive property of the self-assured scions of very rich Latin American millionaires. It was not necessary, all let him know, to trouble himself with the problem of getting her back to the hotel.

"Fag!"

And when Gold drove at breakneck speed to return to the party, he was dismayed to find Andrea surrounded by several loud and drunken burly men from the Southwest who were trying to solicit her participation in a group-sex supper dance together with a number of stunning models with whom they'd arrived while Gold was absent.

"I'm here with my fiancé," Andrea was trying civilly to refuse as Gold came up vengefully behind her, "and I'm not sure he'd approve."

"Oh, don't worry about him," said the largest and most muscular, sliding his arm around Andrea's shoulders with the lewd self-assurance of the impervious extrovert. "We'll take care of him."

"How?" said Gold curtly with his hands bunching into fists. "How will you take care of me?"

"Any way we want to, little man," said another of the group in a husky outburst of laughter. "You think you can stop us?"

"That's an awful lot of woman there for a little fella like you."

A brawl would be futile and he took Andrea's arm and backed away.

"Fag!" cried Spotty, and it was just about midnight when Linda Book returned to her room and sent Manolito away without even a peck on the cheek when she saw Gold stewing there in a raw humor. They made love then with results that were mutually sublime. Spotty slid through the bedrooms sideways with another provoking reiteration of that homosexual epithet as Gold trudged back to bed with Andrea. As he dreaded most, Andrea now was baking at a sensual temperature. A soft groan broke from his lips at her advances. He was not lying when he spoke briefly of a splitting headache and nausea and of an overall fatigue. At three in the morning he was awakened in agony from a troubled sleep by the telephone ringing again in the middle room.

"It's the goddamned White House again."

Still grumbling, he limped through the rooms to explain to Linda in a haggard voice that he had to spend every night with Andrea because they were engaged to be married.

"Fag!" called out Spotty Weinrock and this time skipped by in the springy, floating gait of the male ballet dancer in black leotards who was also on the track. A mustached fuck was running backwards, infuriating Gold; every eccentric distraction on the track always infuriated him. The basketball players on the courts below were screaming at each other in brutal argument again.

Gold held adamantly to a determination to ignore them all the next morning when he sank down to rest in darkest spirits in his own room after breakfasting twice. His ankles were hurting terribly and he was sweating profusely. His future had never looked worse. Then the passionate Mexican television actress arrived, as did shortly afterward her hot-blooded Mexican airline pilot, who prowled the grounds for Gold to avenge his honor in the most primitive and unspeakable ways imaginable. Just as the Mexican television actress was ready to go off like a string of firecrackers, the jealous lover learned Gold's room number and came charging up the stairs. When Gold rushed to the window to escape, he was horrified by the curious sight of a taxi arriving with Belle, who'd journeyed all the way after him with the thought they might still patch things up if they were off together. The crazed lover was banging both fists on the door. Notoriety would be disastrous to him. He berated himself mercilessly for his indefensible folly. What was he going to do?

"What am I going to do?" he helplessly wailed to the four walls.

"Go to the temple and say prayers," directed Greenspan coolly, materializing from one of the side rooms attired in Acapulco sports clothes.

"I'll do no such thing."

"Then go past the temple to the airfield," continued Greenspan, "and take the first plane out for anywhere. Get back to Washington however you can. I will tell them about your urgent business one at a time and send them out without meeting each other. Oh, Gold, Gold, you're such a shonda."

"And you, Greenspan, are such a credit." Gold clasped him gratefully to his breast in the Russian manner and hugged him about the shoulders with strong feeling.

"Fag!" chirped Spotty and breezed by him once more.

That fuck! cried Gold inwardly with the fiercest scowl as commonsense reality exposed itself to him suddenly with the force and flashing illumination almost of a bolt of lightning. Spotty had been doing two laps to his one, sometimes three, sometimes four. Oh, that base cocksucker—no human on earth could run that fast!

Gritting his teeth and breathing wrathfully through his nose as he maintained his even pace, he watched stealthily with murder growing in his heart. There were four landings in each corner of the room where the track curved, and on each landing was exercise equipment or a stairwell. Spotty ran off the track to a landing and hid until Gold went by, then came down in back to pass him again. The maleficent motherfucker had been hiding, resting, and waiting on the landings all along in the cruelest, most insensitive prank Gold could conceive of.

"Fag!"

Gold mistimed the lunge he made for Spotty Weinrock's throat with his left hand, broke stride, and stumbled. Anguish exploded in his chest then with an immense, cramping, darkening pain. The room began spinning, the lights dimmed. The ground rose to meet him with sways and undulations as he felt his legs wobble and give way, and, like a wounded warrior plucky to the last, he ran almost fifteen more yards on his knees before toppling to the track and lying still as a stone with his eyes staring, as though he had been brought to his doom by a mortal fright.

"Are you all right?" someone said.

His hearing was unimpaired.

"Give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation," suggested the ballet dancer.

"I will not. That's disgusting."

"Boy, are you lucky," Spotty said in his golden uniform. "The ambulance just came for that other guy."

His vision remained also.

"Doctor, can he be moved now?" a strange voice complained. "The rest of us want to jog."

"Put him in a private room," said Spotty Weinrock. "He's a very important person."

Gold felt his heartbeat falter critically again. "I'm not! Spotty, tell not a soul."

He could speak too, and he screamed blue murder the next morning in Roosevelt Hospital when he saw he was still not in an oxygen tent.

"Doctors say you don't need one," explained the phlegmatic black male orderly who brought him his breakfast.

Gold was appalled by what he saw on the tray: scrambled eggs that glistened, bacon that dripped, four pats of butter—enough cholesterol to lay waste a generation of marines. "It's a mistake, I tell you. I'm not going to eat it."

The orderly smacked his lips when he'd finished it all. When a woman came for information Gold would not give even his name. He was wary with the doctors and requested permission to call his own physician. The pay phone was in the hall.

"Can I get out of bed by myself and walk there?"

"It's up to you."

He needed a dime. They gave him a dollar. Mursh Weinrock was there at noon and conferred with the medical men in undertones while preparations were made for Gold's transfer to a private room.

"What do you want an oxygen tent for?" said Weinrock when they were alone. "It's cheaper this way. Did you trip and fall or did you collapse? What'd you feel?"

"I felt like murdering him, Mursh, with my bare hands. I kept getting madder until I couldn't stand it and then this thing went off in my head and my chest. I was scared. Then I got weak suddenly and everything went black. I didn't trip. It was your fucking brother Spotty. I'm going to kill that bastard someday."

Weinrock was nodding. "He breaks my mother's heart a thousand times a week. There's no sign of cardiac damage. It sounds more like anxiety, but we can't be sure. I've had many a patient drop dead right after showing a perfect electrocardiogram. It's a reason I don't like to take on sick people." He recommended a ten-day stay for observation. Few visitors, few phone calls. "No one will know you're here unless you tell them."

No visitors, no telephone calls, no letters, no flowers, no greeting cards, no bananas in baskets of fruit—the ten days that followed were the most forlorn of Gold's life. How many people wondered where he was? He pondered also, with bewildering compunction, the moral mystery originating in his final words to Spotty Weinrock at the gym: "Tell not a soul." A heartbeat away from death and his dominant concern was not life, but that corrupting illusion of triumph, public success.

And so it was still.

Gold contacted nobody until about to be discharged in health that was certifiably excellent. He called Belle first.

"What hospital?"

"I've been sick, Belle. I'm getting out tomorrow."

"With what?"

"Nothing. Where did you think I was? I've been away for almost two weeks."

"You told me you had to go off somewhere to straighten yourself out," said Belle. "So I thought you were probably straightening yourself out."

"I'm okay," he quickly assured Andrea. "The doctors are positive it was nothing."

"What doctors? Where are you?"

"In the hospital, darling. In New York. Didn't you even miss me?"

"With what?"

"With nothing, darling. I just told you. It was just a checkup."

"Why didn't you tell me, darling?"

"I wasn't allowed any calls or visitors."

"With nothing?"

"Where did you think I was, Andrea? It's been ten days. Didn't you notice I was gone?"

"I knew you had to go back to your wife one more time to work out the divorce," said Andrea. "I thought you were working out the divorce."

His call to Ralph was crucial. "Something personal came up and I had to go away for a while. I'm sorry I haven't been able to be in touch with you."

"About what?" asked Ralph.

"About everything. You told me things were starting to happen."

"And they are, Bruce," said Ralph. "Conover is pushing strongly in your behalf. The President asked to meet you."

"I can come tomorrow."

"I think he's busy tomorrow. The Embassy Ball would be a good place to meet."

"The Embassy Ball?"

"I hope you'll come if you're invited. I told the President that you were writing some important position papers. So try to draw up a few."

"On what?"

"On any positions you choose. I don't think anyone's going to want to read them. Where are you now?"

"At my studio," lied Gold. "Ralph, didn't you miss me? Didn't you notice we were out of touch?"

"I missed your hotel room," said Ralph. "I can tell you that. Sleeping with just my wife and Misty, Candy, Christie, and Tandy for almost two weeks hasn't been easy. You ought to try it some time and see. You and I have to get together very soon to talk about the Embassy Ball and what you should say to him there if you're invited."

"Tomorrow?" asked Gold.

"I'm busy too," said Ralph.

"How can I get invited to that Embassy Ball?"

"It's practically impossible."

"Fuck him," said Gold for the first time as he crossly dialed another number. Neglect, moped Gold, abounding everywhere, closing me in like a poisonous tide, drowning me, closing over my head, filling my nose with fetid—

"Spot Modes," greeted the girl on the telephone brightly. "May I help you?"

"Mr. Weinrock, please. Bruce Gold calling."

"Mr. Weinrock is in the market."

"What the fuck does that mean?"

The girl hung up. Gold reached him at the gym.

"Spotty, you bastard, nobody knows I'm even in the hospital. I told you not to tell anyone, so you didn't, huh? Not my wife, not a single soul, did you?"

"I can keep a secret," said Spotty Weinrock.

"Not a person in this whole world knows what I went through. Was there anything in the newspapers?"

"I don't read the newspapers."

"It shows how people care. I could drop dead tomorrow and no one would even notice."

"I can follow instructions when I have to."

"Did you have to, you prick? And you didn't even come to visit, did you? Suppose I died, you son of a bitch? Would you have told anyone then? My wallet was still at the gym with all my clothes and they wouldn't even know who I was. You can keep a secret, all right. How in heaven's name can you keep such a secret?"

"To tell you the truth," said Spotty Weinrock, "I forgot."

"You forgot?" The painful words were still sinking in.

"I got kind of busy, Bruce, and I forgot you even had a heart attack."

"It was not a heart attack!"

"I was pretty scared, anyway," said Spotty Weinrock. "I couldn't stop worrying about you."

"Till when?" scoffed Gold with a bitter laugh.

"Till I forgot."

Gold thrust his face toward the telephone as though it were the enraging incarnation of the person he was addressing. "You forgot?" he repeated through tightened jaws in a voice quivering with a black storming anger that sifted through his entire system and caused every muscle to tremble. "Money, Weinrock, money, you cocksucker. How much do you owe me now?"

"About two thousand."

"Pay up, you lousy bastard."

"Okay."

"This minute, you fuck. Or I'll put you in prison. I'll get liens. I'll serve papers. Spotty, Spotty," said Gold with a catch in his throat as his voice cracked and he tried without succeeding to fight back the tears rolling from his eyes, "how could you be so insensitive? Why didn't you at least come to visit, just to see for yourself I was alive?"

"I tried, Bruce. Three times I was going to visit and made up my mind that nothing was going to keep me away."

"And what happened?"

"I forgot."

"Do you know what it feels like?" said Gold with a sob. "Do you know what it feels like to have to lie in a hospital day after day without visitors or phone calls, with what might have been a fatal heart attack, and have nobody care? It feels like shit. Suppose I died?"

"I cared," said Spotty. "You forgot."

"Somebody would have reminded me."

"Nobody else knew," Gold reproached him further. "I would have been buried in a pauper's grave. Even I would have been more thoughtful than that."

"I have to go jogging now. I belong to this group."

Gold washed and dried his face before telephoning next the one person he thought of who might have missed him most.

"I called you at your studio only yesterday," she said. "I left a message on your machine."

"Only yesterday? Where'd you think I was until then? It's been ten days."

"I thought you were busy with your wife and with your fiancée."

"Is Dina back in school?"

"And doing beautifully," said Linda Book. "I've been doing her homework for her. Tell me what hospital you're in. I have this dental bill I want to mail you."

"I'll be getting out tomorrow," said Gold. "I want to see you first."

In a fevered ecstasy of abandonment and slavish indiscretion, he could now easily picture all his carefully laid plans flying asunder into a bohemian muddle of debauchery and irresponsible disgrace, and he did not care. He wanted her in his arms, wanted her body beneath him, covered by his own. What would Conover say when he found out? How many people who ever read about him would truly believe that a thinking adult like him would endanger his marriage—nay, two marriages—and a brilliant budding political career for a lascivious fling with a married woman with four children with whom, as was also true of Andrea, he could never become in any other way intimate? That didn't seem to matter.

"I love you very, very deeply, darling, and I wish so much that I didn't." Gold could safely afford the luxury of such lavish words and sentiments because he knew that the emotion in which they had their birth was not going to last. He did not dream, however, that the demise of this tender feeling lay as near as the dental bill she handed him. He calmly mixed a gin and tonic for each. By then his agitation had lessened. "How come your husband isn't paying for any of these? I thought he was such a good provider."

"He isn't going to pay for anything any more since he found out we're together."

Several questions rose simultaneously in Gold's mind and broke into pieces against each other in the burbling struggle to get out. "Together? Found out? How? How together? Are? What do you mean found out? What do you mean together? How are we together?"

"Like this. He knows all about us."

"Knows all about us? How did he find out?"

"From the children."

"From the children? How do the children know?"

"I told them."

Gold looked at her steadily with a troubled eye. "You told them? You told your children? What did you tell your children?"

"That we're lovers."

"Lovers?"

"You keep repeating everything I say."

Gold was lacking the necessary equilibrium for timely repartee. "Is that what we are, lovers?" he asked credulously.

"Of course, darling," answered Linda with a smile. "I'm your lover and you're mine. What did you think we were?"

Gold did not hesitate long to give the answer that first sprang to mind. "Fuckers."

"Lover is so much sweeter," said Linda Book with the ethereal sensitivity of a poetess, "so much richer in meaning and value, don't you think?"

"Don't you have to be very seriously in love to be a lover?" asked Gold.

"Oh, no," she corrected him. "All you have to be is a fucker."

Gold had never looked at himself as a lover before and was not altogether convinced he liked the idea now. "So that's what I am, huh? A lover."

"Of course you are, you fucker," said Linda Book. "And a darling too. I rate you an A minus." Gold was stung only superficially by this backhanded tribute, for there was the impact of catastrophe in the words that followed. "And I'm so proud that someone as intelligent as you finds me sexy and attractive. Even my husband is impressed."

"Good God!" Gold hurtled to his feet. "He knows my name?"

"Gold is a very nice name," she said. "And I wouldn't be ashamed to have it as my own."

"Jesus Christ, Linda, that's not the point." Gold lifted a pillow from the bed for the sole purpose of having something in both hands he could slam down. "Where the hell are your brains? I'm a very distinguished man. Next week I may even be invited to the Embassy Ball. Why the fuck did you have to tell anybody about me at all?"

"Because I believe in the truth."

"Why?" he insisted on knowing.

"Why?"

"Why in this case couldn't you believe in a lie? Why in the world did you have to tell your children anything?"

"Because in our family," retorted Linda Book without any trace of concession, "we don't believe in keeping things from each other."

"Do they understand what being lovers means?" Gold demanded scornfully. "I didn't."

"Oh, yes. The older two did."

"What did they say?"

"My son said he would kill you," she said. "My daughter wanted to know if you were any good. I told her you were an A minus who would probably graduate to an A if you could last. The younger two were more accepting."

"Oh, were they?" said Gold with a rather wild shake of his head. "I'd like to know how you explained to them what lovers are."

Linda Book met the challenge with unconcern. "Oh, we have this illustrated German sex book for children. It shows a little boy with his penis erect and a little girl with her vagina exposed and it explains in simple language any child can understand that he shoves it in."

"Shoves it in?" Gold's voice nearly failed him.

"Yes. And I explained to them that you and I do the same thing with our penee and that's why we're lovers."

"They understood?"

"Immediately. They said we were fucking."

Gold stared at her with bulging eyes for a moment and then went plunging about the room in shocked silence for several seconds. "Linda, you're a schoolteacher?" he addressed her with his jaws knotted and with his mouth drawn back as far as a human mouth could go, and all at once he looked as though he were congenitally snaggletoothed. "You went to college, got your degrees? You completed education courses? You got your license, a nice shiny diploma?"

"Oh, yes," said Linda with the same collected smile. "I communicate very well with children. Your daughter will vouch for that."

"My daughter!" Gold's voice was a hysterical cry. "Holy shit! She's friends with your kids. She sleeps at your house. Dina. Do you think they told her too?"

"I should hope they did," said Linda. "Our children are all very open with each other about sex."

Gold moaned and shivered in terror. "I didn't want her to know!"

"It will bring you closer together."

"It will put us at sword's point at each other's throat. Goddammit, she'll tell my wife."

"It will bring you and her closer together too."

"I'm leaving my wife to marry Andrea. Is there no way you can get word to her as well? Listen, Linda, marriage for us is out of the question, definitely out."

"Oh, we agreed on that," said Linda without taking offense. "I could never afford to give up my support or my alimony."

"Which you are now not getting," said Gold with an uncordial gleam of triumph, pacing. "Because you believe so much in the truth. What is this horrifying obsession with the truth that all you women seem to be in the grip of these days? Where does it come from? Goddammit—I may be Secretary of State soon. Do you think it's helpful for a thirteen-year-old child to know that the Secretary of State is fucking her schoolteacher? Can't you imagine what will happen to my home life and divorce if my wife does find out?"

"It will clear the air," said Linda. "When my husband found out it certainly cleared a lot of air."

"And he stopped giving you money. How do you think my wife is going to feel about all these dentist's bills when she finds out they're for you and your kids?"

At last the seriousness of the matter impressed itself upon her. "Do you think we shouldn't have told him?"

"What did your husband say when you told him?" asked Gold.

"He said he was going to kill you."

"You shouldn't have told him. Greenspan, you fuck," he shouted in violent anxiety as soon as he found himself alone with a wall he could talk to. "Where the hell are you?"

"I know, I know," said Greenspan when Gold began relating his troubles. "It's why I say you're a shonda."

"Her husband wants to kill me."

"It's a federal offense to kill a public official, but you're not a public official yet."

"Tell him I'm about to become one," Gold begged. "Go see him for me. Bring a gun."

"He says you're fucking his wife," Greenspan reported back.

"Tell him I'll stop if he promises not to assassinate me.

"He wants you to marry her and take full financial responsibility for her and all four children," Greenspan reported back.

"He's out of his fucking head," said Gold. "I thought he was madly in love with her and would never let her go."

"He'll let her go, he'll let her go," said Greenspan.

"It's out of the question," said Gold. "I'm already married to one woman and about to marry another, and we Jews don't take our marriages lightly."

"I told him that."

"Tell him I'll go for the dental work for all of them until it's completed, but that's all."

"He says it's a deal," Greenspan reported back. "I had to threaten to shoot him." He declined without words the drink Gold offered in celebration. "Now, Dr. Gold, what about you? Do you really think you have the right character to be Secretary of State or any other high government official?"

Gold considered the matter. "What do you think?"

"Are you really going to stop fucking his wife?"

"No."

Greenspan surveyed him with a look holding generations of disappointment. "You're no worse than the rest," he decided, "but certainly no better. He doesn't think you will, either."

"Greenspan, we can drive a better bargain. Tell him I'll really stop if he picks up all the dental bills."

"Now, it's a deal," Greenspan reported back. "Just a little wine, please. L'chaim."

"L'chaim," Gold toasted him in return.

"But what I said still goes," Greenspan stressed at the door.

"What's that?"

"I forget. Let me think. Oh, yes. You're a shonda."

"You're a credit."

The way was clear now, Gold saw, for his triumphant return to Washington.

"With Conover promising to champion you after you marry Andrea," said Ralph, dressed in another monogrammed shirt that caught Gold's discriminating eye, "there is nothing in the world that can block your appointment, unless something gets in the way. I say that with as much assurance as I've ever been able to give you in the past."

"And Andrea won't marry me until I already have the appointment," grumbled Gold. "The two of them are playing games with each other. Can't I meet the President now? I'm sure I can convince him if I had just one meeting with him."

Ralph had been shaking his head even before the request was concluded. "At the Embassy Ball, if you can get invited. I think he's still busy with Russia. The President worries a lot about Russia. He wants to meet you at the Embassy Ball, in front of photographers. Try to come if you're invited."

"If the President wants to meet me there," said Gold, "it seems to me I'm important enough to be invited."

"If you aren't important enough to be invited," countered Ralph, "he won't want to meet you there."

"What's so special about that Embassy Ball?" Gold argued. "Ain't I as good as some of the other people who'll be going?"

"Better," said Ralph. "But this is the social world, Bruce, where competence doesn't count. You aren't wealthy and you don't yet hold the right position. Try to remember who you are. Let's face it, Bruce—Jews don't really make it in America. They never did. I hope you're not offended by my frankness."

"True honesty never necessitates an apology," said Gold, recovering by feeble degrees from the downturn in spirit he had suffered. "Is what you say true, Ralph?"

"I think so, Bruce. Not unless you're very, very rich and remain a European. Jews can't really go far in this country socially, and none have. Christians find it difficult enough, but for Jews it's just about impossible. I can think of no exception."

Gold was drawn into a deeper exploration of the subject with a kind of unaccountable fascination. "Kissinger?"

"Oh, no," snickered Ralph. "He goes to sporting events and accepts too many invitations to parties with entertainers. He's just another writer now scrounging about for royalties and publicity. I hope that doesn't sound snobbish, Bruce."

"Not at all, Ralph," said Gold. "Walter Annenberg and Lillian Farkas? They were ambassadors."

"Under Nixon?" Ralph's sniggering headshake made additional refutation superfluous. "Annenberg was succeeded as ambassador to England by Elliot Richardson. And there's a man of low character I can't stand and would not trust for a moment. He was willing to ride with Nixon but unwilling to do the dirty work. What did he think they needed him for—his special abilities and his fine New England background?" Ralph was still smiling with his jeering expression as he hitched up his trousers at the knee before carefully crossing his legs. "He wanted credit for virtue for refusing to fire the Watergate prosecutor. Can you imagine how much longer he would have lasted in public life if he had fired him? Elliot Richardson will be at the Embassy Ball, Bruce, but you won't. It's unjust, but it would be hypocrisy for me to say I really care."

"Will you be at the Embassy Ball?"

"I'm always invited to the Embassy Ball."

"What about the Guggenheims?" Gold pursued. Ralph was indicating the negative. "The Warburgs, the Schiffs, the Belmonts, the Kahns?"

"No, Bruce. I can't think of a single one who was ever accepted into good society," said Ralph, "except for some daughters, perhaps, who married upward into a better class and were absorbed without telltale clues. And certainly not the ones with genius or talent. Those are anathema regardless of birth, although we don't produce many. American democracy is the most rigid aristocracy on earth, Bruce, and every social climber needs at least one unscrupulous marriage to succeed."

"What about Eisenhower and Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Gerald Ford?"

"Presidents?" Ralph sniffed. "Presidents never make it into good society. They're helpful but gauche. And when they're no longer helpful they're merely gauche. Just look who their closest companions are while in office and after."

"Kennedy?" asked Gold.

"Oh, no," said Ralph in gentle admonition. "The Kennedys were always déclassé. That was part of their charm and much of their pleasure. No Irish Catholic male can ever do it on his own, Bruce. Not here. The Irish can't make it and neither can native-born Italians, although wealthy Arabs may if they mind their manners, so you see, it's not just Jews who are ostracized and excluded. As I believe I've told you, Bruce, there is no anti-Semitism any more. I'm glad I can speak so freely, because I believe you know exactly how I feel."

"I'm not sure I know exactly how you feel, Ralph," Gold replied with a bit of tension, deciding to relieve himself at last of a somber distrust that had been preying recurrently upon his mind. "I notice you never have me to your house."

The response to this was mild. "You never have me to yours, Bruce."

"You don't come to New York, Ralph. But I'm in Washington often."

"I come to New York a lot, Bruce."

"You didn't tell me that."

"You haven't asked me, Bruce," Ralph laughed amicably. Gold was at a loss to reply. "We shouldn't quibble over this, should we? Bruce, would you really want me to visit you in your apartment on Manhattan's West Side? It's not as though you own a suite at the Pierre or the Ritz Towers, is it?"

Gold could not gainsay even to himself that he would not want Ralph to visit him at his apartment on Manhattan's West Side. "I suppose you're right, Ralph. The important thing is not our social worlds but our friendship. There's a definition of a friend I once heard expressed by my Swedish publisher. He's Jewish, Ralph, and he lived in Germany under Hitler as a child until his family escaped. He has only one test of a friend now, he told me. 'Would he hide me?' is the question he asks. It's pretty much my test of a friend too, when I come down to it. Ralph, if Hitler returns, would you hide me?"

The question threw Ralph into a flurry and he clambered to his feet, his fair skin turning pink. "Oh, gosh, Bruce," he exclaimed hastily, "we're not friends. I thought you knew that."

Gold was equally confused. "We're not?"

"Oh, no, Bruce," stressed Ralph in embarrassed apology. "And I'd feel just awful if I thought I've ever said or done anything to give you the impression we are."

Gold felt this more than he wished to show. "You used my work at school, Ralph. We were pretty close then."

"That was college, Bruce," said Ralph, "and it was important that I get my degree. But this is only government. People in government don't have friends, Bruce, just interests and ambitions. Don't look so dismayed. Would you hide me and take any risk?" Gold's impassive silence denoted he would not. "If you did, Lieberman would inform on both of us and call himself a patriot."

"Ralph," said Gold, "I think by now Lieberman really believes all that repressive, elitist, racist, neoconservative bullshit and is not just sucking around you people for money and invitations."

"That's just the thing I dislike about him most," said Ralph. "He has no right to our beliefs. He hasn't even made much money. Let him at least go out and make a fortune before he begins pretending he's one of us."

"Ralph, there's one thing I simply must know," said Gold. "In college I worked harder than you and was a better student and more intelligent. Yet, you got higher grades and even had my paper on Tristram Shandy published. How were you able to do that?"

"I was smarter, Bruce."

"You were smarter?"

"You were doing my work for me, weren't you?"

Ralph delivered these answers with unassuming candor, and Gold, after shifting them around awhile, found himself haunted again by the mysteries of Ralph's head and Ralph's pants. Ralph still never needed a haircut or showed signs of ever having one. His trousers always were sharply creased and meticulously bare of wrinkles, and Gold wondered if he wore each suit only once.

"Less than once," Ralph obliged him with a frank reply. He flung open the bifold doors of a closet containing dozens of suits fastidiously hung. "I change for every appointment. I've been getting by on pressed pants when my college degrees and inherited riches weren't enough."

"How can you wear a suit less than once?" asked Gold.

"What a concise and profound intelligence you have!" cried Ralph. "And they thought Kissinger was brilliant! Little do they know. Oh, Bruce, if only you'd come up with a cure for inflation and unemployment. Nobody else even tries."

"You'd steal it," said Gold.

"I wouldn't have to any more," said Ralph. "It's enough you're my protégé. Or devise a plan for decreasing this eternal conflict with Russia. You ought to be able to do that. You were probably a Communist once, weren't you?"

"I was never a Communist," Gold averred forcefully.

"But can't you think of something anyway?"

Gold was not inclined to try. "The curious thing about Russia," he joked lightly, putting, in imitation of Ralph, both shoes up on the polished, unscarred coffee table between the facing leather chairs, "is that it's a good place for people who are poor and a terrible one for those who are well off, while this country is just the reverse. Why don't we simply exchange?"

The effect of this upon Ralph was stupendous. First the coffee cup fell from his hand and he gaped at Gold as though thunderstruck. Next a lamp went over with another shattering crash as he bolted to his long legs with a look of amazement as stark as any that had ever alighted on human face before.

"It's yours!" he cried suddenly in an outburst of devotion that caused Gold to shrink back instinctively with alarm. "The credit! It will all go to you! I swear it!" Dashing to the glistening red phone on his desk and hammering on a buzzer there furiously, Ralph continued ranting disconnectedly in a delirious expulsion of emotion Gold had never seen spout from him. "You'll be rich, rich! The Nobel Prize—it's tax free! The President, the President!" he bellowed into the phone. "It cannot wait! Oh, why, oh, why couldn't I think of that—or anyone else? Oh, shit! He's locked himself in his study again. I'll run this over to him myself. This is too hot for the hot line." Ralph bounded back across the office to his closet for a fresh change of trousers. "I promise you—I will not trust this to anyone else. My God, what a plan, what a brilliant idea! They can ship us all their professionals, profiteers, and high-level bureaucrats and we can send them all our poor and homeless and wretched and miserable. Let them be the land of the free for a while. We'll be Monaco, St. Moritz, and Palm Beach. It's a perfect solution for both countries and there can never be strife between us again." Ralph donned a matching jacket and studied himself in a full-length mirror. "You're in, Bruce, I guarantee it. You won't even need Conover or anyone else from now on. I'll be so proud to have you as a friend someday."

Gold was roused by these final words to a kind of frenzy of his own. "Are you saying that I don't have to marry Andrea?"

"Not even for a month," said Ralph. "If you don't want to marry Andrea, don't. You want to stay married to Belle? Stay married to her."

"I didn't say that."

"Although Conover," cautioned Ralph, "would be an implacable foe if you disappointed him. There'd be stormy confirmation hearings, ugly rumors, waves of anti-Semitism. But you'll ride it through. This will be bigger than Kissinger's détente and Monroe's Doctrine. Keep near a telephone. Now you'll certainly be invited to the Embassy Ball. I'll stake my life on that."

By the time Ralph telephoned to inform him sadly that it was impossible to obtain an invitation for him to the Embassy Ball, Gold already had secured one through a lucky, and forbidding, encounter in the lobby of his hotel with the former governor of Texas with whom he had served on the Presidential Commission not long before. There are men who place their hand on the shoulder of another in friendly greeting. There are others who do so to assert possession over whoever or whatever comes within their grasp. On instant of contact Gold recognized the unmistakable intent of one of the latter, and he turned with a tremor to discover who was claiming him captive. The Governor, handsome, large, and dominating as earlier with silver hair, piercing blue eyes, and clefted, strong jaw, gazed down at Gold possessively with a smile of cold command.

"What you planning for lunch, Gold?"

"I was thinking of having something light later with my fiancée.''

"You're eating with us now at the Hay-Adams. You'll have steak and eggs with home-fried potatoes. The steak will be cooked to a crisp. Pass that damned chili sauce, Homer. Give some to him too. I liked your report, Gold. I recommended it highly."

"I never wrote it."

"It's what I liked most about it. Doing anything new?"

"I'm thinking of writing a book about Henry Kissinger."

"Why waste time? Nobody's interested any more. Do one on me. Gold, I like you. You remind me a lot of this famous country singer from Texas I'm crazy about, a fellow calls himself Kinky Friedman, the Original Texas Jewboy. Kinky's smarter, but I like you more. I feared for you a while back there that you might be inclined to say something personal in your determination to fart around with the inevitable."

"I've resisted the determination ever since, sir," said Gold in dutiful homage. "I followed your advice, Governor, and I never force anything mechanical or kick anything inanimate."

The Governor pressed his napkin to his lips and sat back. "What are you doing in Washington, Goldy? Anybody who comes here more than once is after something."

Gold was asking for help when he replied. "I've been promised a Cabinet appointment, Governor. But I've not been able to meet the President."

"Shoot," said the Governor, "you can meet him tonight at the Embassy Ball."

"I can't get an invitation."

"Homer, give Gold an invitation to the Embassy Ball," said the Governor. "And call the committee and tell them he's coming." Homer had bunches of invitations to the Embassy Ball stuffed in most of his pockets. Gold felt the massive hand of the Governor taking hold of his shoulder again. "Gold, every Jew should have a big gentile for a friend, and every successful American should own a Jew. I'm big, Gold, and I'm willing to be your friend."

"I will support you, Governor," said Gold, "in any cause to which you choose to commit yourself."

"That's fine," said the Governor. "You people learn fast. I had a run-in some time ago with that other member of your faith."

"I have no faith," said Gold.

"That Henry Kissinger," the Governor went on, unmindful of Gold's defensive protestation. "Funny-looking fellow with that nose of his and bumblebee mouth. Had hair like Kinky's, but Kinky is smarter. Had a reputation for backbiting and slanderous remarks about others." The Governor interrupted himself for a deep, ruminating chuckle before drawling on, "He's the one who got down on his knees with Nixon to pray to God on that rug. Laughed my head off when I heard about that and gave a barbecue on my ranch for seventeen thousand people to celebrate. Make war, said Nixon, and he made war. Pray to God, said Nixon, and he prayed to God. Seems to me his God was Nixon. Gold, do Jews always—?"

"No, sir. They do not."

"Didn't think so," said the Governor. "Only Jew I ever saw kneeling was a girl giving blow jobs in our fraternity house because that's the only way we'd let her in. Then he complained about those two nice young men who wrote about it. Homer, what was it he said?"

"Said they were lacking in decency and compassion, Governor," said Homer.

"Complained those nice young men Woodward and Bernstein were lacking in decency and compassion, after he was the likely one to spread the story. Had my showdown with him when he made the mistake of telling the press he sometimes thought of himself as a lonely cowboy riding into town to set things in order. Well, as you can imagine, the cowboys in my state did not take kindly to that. Half my constituents wanted to go up after him with a lariat. I called him on that at a National Security Council meeting. I was Secretary of something or other then, and I said to him, 'Gold—'"

"I'm Gold, sir," pointed out Gold.

"It don't make that much difference—you fellows all look pretty much alike to me. I told him he didn't know sparrow's shit about cowboys if he ever imagined he felt like one. Cowboys ain't short, ain't chubby, and don't talk with no Jewish accent, I told him. And he said, 'It isn't Chewish, sir. It's Cherman.'"

Gold tried desperately to control his excitement. "He said that, Governor? He said it wasn't Jewish?"

"And I told him that if he ever came riding into my state as a cowboy he'd be very lonely indeed, because there'd be plenty of real ones who'd be happy to teach him the difference. And he said, 'I'm terribly sorry, Governor, and I promise never, never to do it again.'" The Governor laughed once more, savoring the recollection. "I told him if, however, he ever wanted to present himself in Texas as a real horse's ass, none of us would dispute him. We were eyeball to eyeball, and he blinked. And from that time on I knew I had his pecker in my pocket."

Gold was silent only for the instant needed to draw breath. "Was it circumcised?" he asked with a beating heart.

"I don't know," said the Governor. "All peckers look the same once they're in my pocket. Come to the Ball tonight, Gold. When the President arrives, right after they finish 'Hail to the Chief and that damn 'Ruffles and Flourishes,' you push right on up to him and state your request. Anyone tries to interfere, you just tell him you're mine and I said it's okay."

"The President won't object?"

"He's in my pocket." The Governor's lake-blue eyes were glinting. "You rent your clothes tonight from this place. Homer, give him our business card. We get kickbacks."

Gold looked pretty good in his white tie, top hat and tails: lean, penetrating, dynamic, and sensual. Gold felt he looked pretty good until he arrived at the Ball in the only taxicab amid a gathering swarm of chauffeured maroon, black, and silver limousines. Ralph was nervously on the lookout for him inside the entrance, wearing an expression that was vividly disturbed. There was a long-distance call for Gold he could take in a private waiting room.

"It's Sid," said Ida, weeping. "He's had a heart attack."

"It looks pretty serious, Bruce," stuttered Max, taking the phone. "I think he's very sick."

"He's dead," said Belle.

"Oh, shit," said Gold with stinging tears spurting into his eyes. He does this to me every time. He'll ruin my whole day, my whole weekend. "Anything wrong?" asked Ralph.

"It's my brother. He's dead."

"I'm sorry," said Ralph. "You'll want to leave immediately, won't you?"

That thought had not entered Gold's head until Ralph put it there, and he could think of no way of expelling it without risking the opinion that he was not worth his salt or as good as gold.

"It's terrible," he said, "terrible."

"I know just how you feel," said Ralph. "I'll get you a limousine."

In seconds secret servicemen were bearing him outside to a waiting automobile. As Gold pulled away he saw the President's car arriving. Everything, he lamented, happens to me. And he learned once again what he'd known all along and intended to write about soon, that every change was for the worse.

There was as much bitterness at Sid's funeral as there had been at his wedding. Mourners connected most closely by blood to one of the two contending families divided themselves into separate camps. Gold was a reluctant link between. Harriet was devastated, at first by a grief that was pure only briefly, and then contaminated by a vengeful rebellion against the general knowledge that Sid's affections for her had dwindled over the years into a bored and complying acceptance. Her senses were in shambles, with the meanest among them foremost. Much of her frightened awareness of loneliness and loss seemed to pour itself into a fanatic concern with possessions and almost all of the energies of grief were converted into safeguarding them with a savage vigilance against the pilferage and impending rapacious onslaughts she imagined. More and more openly she sniped with sharper nastiness at the other Golds for the amounts of money Sid had dissipated among them. None had volition to reply.

The burdens of responsibility for the numerous roles to be filled fell increasingly upon Gold and, surprisingly, old Milt, who embraced eagerly the opportunity to render competent service. Harriet's two sons were officious and proud, and of hardly any use with the practical arrangements of the funeral and the ceremonial ones of ritual and courtesy. One son-in-law had separated from her daughter and did not come at all. The other appeared bored and drifted up and down the carpeted floor at the mortuary as though interviewing for a boon companion with whom to trade disrespectful wisecracks in a corner of the chapel.

Sheiky from Neptune Avenue paid a condolence call at the chapel the evening before the burial services, red-cheeked and bald in a plain dark suit with baggy pants. He kept his hands in his pockets until the occasion for extending one in greeting had passed. Then he gave Gold an envelope containing three checks for five thousand dollars each.

"We won't need money, Sheiky."

"Keep them and see. Tear them up if you don't. Or give it to Israel. I don't mind seeing my money go to Israel."

"Sheiky, how'd you make your money?" asked Gold in that familiar state of perplexity that arose whenever he remembered Sheiky and his fortune. "From peddling ice cream and costume jewelry to getting rich in computers, real estate, shopping centers, and reinsurance—when did you learn those things?"

Sheiky from Neptune Avenue studied Gold steadily with his old look of impudence a long time before granting a reply. "I never thought of it as computers or real estate," he answered with the same flippant look of childhood that asserted itself also in the rude independence of his younger brother, Fishy. "Angles and loopholes—that's about the only business I've ever been in, like everyone else who makes it big. And I could always move pretty fast. That your father over there? Will he remember me?"

"Pa, this is Sid's friend, Sheiky from Neptune Avenue. The one with the millions."

Julius Gold was sitting upright in a small upholstered chair as though he could neither rise nor sag. Recognition dawned slowly in bleary eyes so blank as to appear almost sightless, and he was sluggish in finding the thought he wished to express.

"Sid always told me you were smarter. I wouldn't believe him. You smarter?"

Sheiky from Neptune Avenue answered with a sympathetic smile. "Yeah, Mr. Gold. I think I was."

Julius Gold nodded a second. "No, you're not," he retorted listlessly. "He was smarter. What did he know, that dummy?"

Someone in back of Gold was weeping. Harriet had sent word that she did not want Gussie at the funeral or in her home. Harriet sent word now that she wanted just Gold to walk with her to the farthest wall of the room for another look at Sid in his coffin. Harriet had ordered the open coffin. She held Gold's arm with both her hands. Gold averted his gaze from the lifeless face in the coffin with a feeling of nauseated pain. Harriet moaned quietly.

"Why did he have to do this to me? He knew how I hated to be alone. That's why he stopped taking those trips."

Gold felt her nails through the sleeve of his suit and realized he'd never fully understood till then how thoroughly he detested her. Then he broke and screamed:

"Sid, you fuck—why did you have to die? Who will take care of us now?"

But no one heard. His words were smothered in sobs.

They sat shivah in Harriet's house, a location greatly inconvenient for those living in Brooklyn. There were vacant bedrooms but none were offered. By evening prayer of the first day, the day of the funeral, they knew they would need the money from Sheiky to pay for an apartment and furniture and living expenses in Florida for the old man and Gussie. All he owned was the spending money from his annuity and Social Security. Sid had been paying for just about everything else. And Sid left everything to Harriet. Even the annuity had come from Sid: the consolidation and sale of the old man's leather business was a fiction contrived to surround the old man with the illusion he was a person of sufficient means to retire prosperously. Now Gold's father was a burden to be shared only by those willing to assume it.

The worried creases in Irv's forehead darkened as Ida instructed Gold to establish beyond doubt that Julius Gold would not be able to continue living so well in the future. Esther and Rose, with Max consenting, offered everything but did not have much. The two sisters had been weeping copiously—at times neither could walk without assistance—and desisted now and then as if only to avoid the appearance of attempting to overshadow Harriet and her mother. Victor stole to Gold's side to volunteer monthly payments if Muriel were never informed. Muriel wanted Joannie to pay for everything.

"She's got the most money now, hasn't she? And she couldn't even tear herself away for the funeral, could she?"

Only Gold knew that Joannie's marriage was ending in a way that might leave her without money and that it would have been practically impossible for her to fly in from California any sooner than the following evening. When the time came to unfold the news of his financial plight to Julius Gold on the second day, he was not much surprised.

"I raised him from a baby," said Julius Gold distantly, as though Gold, Milt, and Belle were strangers. Milt was in the room with Gold to supply financial explanations. Belle was a steadying influence. "My son Sid. And now he's dead. He was like a father to me. You don't know."

"I know," said Gold.

"He took care of me better than anyone. Always he let me be what I wanted."

"I know," said Gold. "Sid was a wonderful person."

"You don't know," said the old man. "Not like you."

"Pop, why do you pick on me?" His father shook off with revulsion the hand Gold reached out to touch him. "Just because I had to wear eyeglasses and got good marks in school?"

"Sure," said Julius Gold. "That's why."

"Didn't you ever like me?"

"Sure—when you were small I liked you. But that's all." In the melancholy silence that followed, the old man's swollen eyes were further filled with tears. "I don't like it she tells me Gussie can't come here and can't go there." He looked fully at Gold suddenly with a remarkable kind of curiosity. "You got children?"

Gold sank down until his face was level with his father's and peered at him closely. A chill spread through his veins. "Sure, Pop. Three. Don't you remember? Dina, your favorite grandchild. She's our daughter. Don't you remember?"

Paying no attention to the question, the old man began talking as though Gold had not spoken. "You got children, don't let them send you to Florida. The old shouldn't be with just the old. The old should be with the young, but they don't want us no more. My wife was sick in my house, I never put her out till she went to the hospital and died there. My mother died in my brother Meyer's house, and I stayed with her and talked, even when she couldn't hear. You can ask Sid, but Sid ain't here no more and that's it, fartig. It's warm there and it's for old people."

"Pop." Gold paused in a tremulous hush, chastened beyond measure by the fearful proximity in which he found himself to the very frangible boundaries of amnesia and senile rambling of mind. "You're old."

"When you were young," said his father without physical flourishes and barely any modulations of emotion, "I remember I never hit you. I didn't have to. All I had to do was look and yell, and you turned into a scared child. I made you behave. Once I made Sid run away for the whole summer just by looking and yelling. Now I'm the child. You talk to me like I don't understand. Don't talk like I'm a baby. If I get cranky it's because I can't always sleep when I'm tired and my hip hurts. Not because I'm dumb. Now she tells me through my grandchild she don't want me to smoke cigars in her house. It's Sid's house, not hers. He's my son, not hers. I know what I'm saying."

"Not all the time, Pa," said Gold tenderly with the apprehensive feeling he was communing with a mind that might not be altogether whole.

"Then that's the time to baby me," said the old man almost without spirit in a cranky and pathetic whine. "Not now, when I make sense. Tell me something. A riddle. Tell me, how is it that a father can take care of seven children, and seven children, now six, can't take care of one father?"

Gold, with patience wearing thin, did not enumerate for him that the wise Yiddish folk proverb traditionally made reference to a mother rather than a father, that the posturing, melodramatic old fuck had never been able to provide for anything close to seven children at one time, and that his children had been supporting him. "Pop, we are going to take care of you," he said in a voice kept low. "That's why we're talking."

"Don't make me go back to Florida."

"Not until you want to, I promise. Gussie wants to go now."

"I don't care about Gussie."

"You can stay in New York."

"I want to be with my friends," he complained.

"How can you be in both places? You can fly down to Florida to your friends whenever you miss them."

"Where can I stay here?"

"Wherever you want."

"I want to live with my children."

"You can live with your children," Gold assured him from the bottom of his heart. "You can even move right in with us if you want."

"No, he can't," Belle told him decisively when they left the room. "He can't live with us."

"I know he can't," said Gold, grumbling. "I'm glad to see you're not perfect."

"What will you do if he says he wants to?"

"I'll tell him he can't," said Gold. "That's the time to let him know he has to do what we want." Gold sat down tiredly. "Unregenerate." Marveling, Gold fetched a long breath of inexpressible weariness and went pale with incredulity. "And without any redeeming social value. Once long ago he bought me a toy. Now I'll have to help carry him."

"I wouldn't mind that," said Bell. "You've always been good with me about my mother."

Then there came the first of Ralph's phone calls. Ralph began with radiant messages of sympathy from Alma, Amy, Honey, Misty, Christy, and the President. With Belle watching, Gold listened a minute more and said he could not consider a government appointment then and might not want to in the future. Ralph responded with a kind of immune, fatherly indulgence that terrified Gold very much.

"You have to, Bruce. You can't say no to the President."

"Why not?"

"Because nobody does. You have to say yes when your President asks."

"Who does?"

"Everybody, Bruce. You can't say no when your President asks."

"Ralph, I feel shitty tonight. My brother's dead and my father's old."

"I understand," Ralph said with solicitude. "I'll call you back after you've had time to recover."

Gold was fidgeting when he faced Belle. "I'm not really comfortable with rich people," he explained. "I never have been."

Belle's nod was noncommittal. "We'll have to do something about Harriet. We'll never be able to last here a whole week."

Mursh Weinrock arrived as one of* the visitors, without jokes, his teeth stained with nicotine, with fingertips and complexion to match. Gold realized there'd be distant relatives and old family acquaintances of whose existence he had not thought in decades and a goodly number of whom he would have traveled seven leagues out of his way to escape meeting.

It was problematic which had the stronger title to bereavement, his father or Harriet, but all the tactical advantages in weaponry resided with the latter. Her paranoid distrust and vindictiveness were contagious and bred a palpable atmosphere of one-sided hostility which neither she nor her children, mother, and sister took pains to conceal.

"Help me up," Gold's father at length said to him. "I want to go home. She don't want us here and I don't want to stay." Clinging heavily to Gold's arm, he moved from the house without even a perfunctory farewell to anyone in his dead son's family. "I never wanted to bury a child," he murmured mournfully as they crossed the sidewalk to the car. "Not even you."

After a moment of astonishment, Gold allowed those words to find their place amidst the various other corrosive recollections of recent origin that were seething in his brain with such depressing and infuriating effect: Ralph would not hide him, Conover would taunt him, the ex-Governor of Texas owned him. Who would teach him to defend himself? When Ralph phoned an hour later, he decided that he did not want the government appointment.

His season in the White House was over.

By the morning of the third day Gold had organized his family to complete sitting shivah for Sid in Esther's house, with Rose and Ida helping with the cooking and refreshments and neighboring families in the apartment building furnishing the male adults needed to comprise the minyan of ten for the prayers at morning and sundown. The men assembled after breakfast before leaving for work and returned in the early evening before darkness had fallen. Gold spoke to the secretary at the college about reconvening his classes for regular meetings the week following. As he was leaving Esther's that third day for a trip back into the city the downstairs bell rang with someone wishing to speak to him. Gold could not for the life of him guess who it was.

"It's Greenspan, Dr. Gold," rasped the voice on the intercom. "Lionel."

"Bulldog, what do you want?" asked Gold impatiently. "We're all through."

"The White House wants you to change your mind."

"I'm not going to call them."

"They'll call you. What's your sister's phone number? Will you open the door and let me up?"

"No," said Gold. "The number's in the phone book, goddamn it. And please stop bothering me."

"Under what name?" entreated Greenspan.

Gold gave the grilled aperture into which he was speaking a pitying look. "Bulldog, what is the name on the bell you just pressed?"

Greenspan took nearly half a minute to reply. "Moscowitz."

"That's her name, Lionel. How do you think you reached me just now?" The phone rang even as Gold was turning the doorknob.

"I'm sorry to bother you again," said Ralph. "But I think we're ready to offer you an appointment in the State Department right up near the top."

"Ralph, I don't want it," said Gold.

"Sure you do, Bruce," said Ralph, sounding entirely convinced. "Your President needs you. He often says you're the only person in the country with whom he feels completely comfortable. Is it because you feel you aren't good enough?"

This nettled Gold. "I'm good enough."

"Because you're Jewish?"

"Not because I'm Jewish."

"It's because I said I wouldn't hide you, isn't it?" guessed Ralph with surprising astuteness. "I'll say I'll hide you, if you want me to."

"Goodbye, Ralph," said Gold and was nearly knocked over when he collided with Harris Rosenblatt striding out of the Harvard Club onto West 44th Street in the city. "Harris, what were you doing in there?"

Perhaps Harris Rosenblatt only looked a hand or two taller and a tone or two whiter because he had grown a stone or two leaner. "I belong," he announced with exalted self-confidence, rubbing his perfectly straight sides as though congratulating himself on lacking a paunch. "I'm a member."

"How can you be a member of the Harvard Club," asked Gold in frank naiveté, "when you went to Columbia with me and dropped out of graduate school because you knew you were going to fail?"

"I'm a millionaire, Bruce," Harris Rosenblatt enlightened him, "and every millionaire is a Harvard man. Although not every Harvard man, of course, is a millionaire. There's really only one outstanding university in the country, Bruce, and I'll never regret that I went to the Harvard Club for lunch today." They paused at the corner before parting. "We must have dinner soon with you and Belle when you've taken your position on the President's staff."

"I'm turning it down," said Gold, looking rather shamefaced.

"Then we must not have dinner," Harris Rosenblatt gruffly decided. "What will you do instead?"

"Something of very great importance," said Gold. "I'm writing a biography of Henry Kissinger."

"Of who?" asked Harris Rosenblatt.

"Henry Kissinger."

"Who?"

"Henry Kissinger. He used to be Secretary of State. He's the one who wanted to go down in history like Metternich and Castlereagh."

"Like who?"

Gold abandoned the project and ascertained at the apartment that Dina was safe and could manage on her own till evening when he drove back with Belle. With Kissinger gone, he was stuck only with the book on the Jewish experience in America he owed Pomoroy and Lieberman.

On the fourth day he succeeded in alleviating one of Joannie's problems by reassuring her that a messy divorce would not compromise his career in the least. Joannie returned from a condolence call to Harriet with news that Harriet would like to see Esther and Rose again soon to talk about old times with Sid. Muriel's crude rejection of every attempt at conciliation with Joannie rankled Gold until Greenspan rang up again from the downstairs vestibule to report that the White House was trying to reach him by phone and getting a busy signal.

"Bruce, he wants me to ask you again," said Ralph. "This time he may actually be offering you the position of Secretary of State."

"Ralph, I don't want it," said Gold.

"Was it anything we did at the U.N.? Is it something we're going to do to Israel?"

"No."

"Bruce, the President is going to be very disappointed. He's counting on you to help with his punctuation."

"Nothing doing."

"What about that piece you gave him? 'We Are Not a Society or We Are Not Worth Our Salt.'"

"He can keep it," said Gold.

"Reprint rights too? Can we publish it under his own name?"

"If you'll leave me alone," Gold pleaded with fatigue. "Ralph, please stop bothering me. And call off that Greenspan."

"I'll try," said Ralph. "But it's like talking to the wall."

"Greenspan, go away," Gold shouted across the street on the fifth day at the surreptitious, unshaven figure in back of the telephone pole as he left for the messages and fucking student papers accumulating for him at the college. When he returned at twilight, Greenspan was upstairs in Esther's apartment wearing a prayer shawl and a yarmulka.

"We needed one more for the minyan," said Victor, "and I found him downstairs in a car."

Rose had another swelling in her breast and this time would go into a hospital for a biopsy. There was a waiting period of twelve days for a room.

"Yiskadal v'yiskadish," Gold began the prayer for the dead, reading the Hebrew works phonetically from an English text after Greenspan had started the evening prayers.

Greenspan was the only one there who could read the language in the original. Greenspan still had not shaved. Gold was embarrassed that all the men in the family had, in violation of the ban against shaving during the seven-day period of mourning. Greenspan was invited to stay for dinner and encouraged to invite his wife.

"Greenspan, please leave," Gold whispered.

"And will you need us tomorrow night too?" Greenspan hinted. "My wife bakes beautifully."

"Shame, shame, Greenspan. You're a shonda."

"Am I supposed to spend my whole life in coffee shops and cafeterias?" Greenspan wanted to know. "How often do you think I get a chance to eat like this in my line of work?"

"But you're taping all this, aren't you?" Gold accused.

"My bug is sealed."

"Why is he holding his hands on his belly?" Julius Gold demanded with a scowl, raising his voice in interest and irritation for the first time in almost a week.

"He's got a bug in his pupik," said Gold to his father. "Keep it covered, Greenspan. Here comes my stepmother with some words of wisdom you must never forget."

"Cackle, cackle," said Gussie Gold.

The number of visitors was diminishing nightly. Muriel turned civil to Joannie finally with a curiosity almost baldly salacious and she and Ida began bickering with each other as of old. Joannie was leaving early that evening, to prepare for her flight back to California the next morning. She said to Gold, at the elevator, "How are things with you and Belle now?"

"As good as ever."

"Does she know that?"

Gold kissed her goodbye with genuine feeling and decided to patch things up firmly with Belle if he could.

"Belle," he began in a roundabout way on the sixth day, almost faltering at the start. "How is your mother? Does she know we're together again?"

Belle nodded before speaking. "She knows."

"She knows?" said Gold. "How did you tell her?"

"I didn't tell her."

Gold spoke with puzzlement. "How does your mother know we're together again if you didn't tell her?"

"I never told her you were leaving," Belle said with a smile. Then she requested a favor for the children. "I had calls from the boys. They'd like to come home for the weekend."

"Aaaaah, let them," said Gold as Belle turned to answer another phone call from Ralph.

"I don't want to talk to him."

"What should I say?" asked Belle.

"Tell him to kiss my ass."

"I'll tell him no such thing."

"Ralph," Gold began.

"I have to, Bruce," Ralph said in apology. "When the President tells me to try, I have to at least make the call, don't I? It's not about Secretary of State this time."

"What is it then?"

"He's written a screenplay."

"So have I."

"So have I," said Ralph.

"I have no connections for screenplays," said Gold. "Tell him to get a good agent and try to close a deal for an option."

"He likes to keep his options open," said Ralph. "Was that Belle on the phone before? If it was, please give her my love."

"And you give mine to Alma."

"Alma who?" said Ralph.

Gold gave a grimace of annoyance. "Alma your wife and Alma your fiancée. Isn't Alma the name of the girl you're married to and the girl you're engaged to?"

"Oh, gosh, Bruce, they're both over," said Ralph with surpassing affability. "I'm certainly glad you haven't found out about Andrea yet. And I hope you won't be angry when you do."

"Andrea?" Gold was glued in place with a speechless expression for a moment. He had forgotten entirely that he was still engaged to Andrea. "Found out what?"

"That we're together," said Ralph. "She and I."

"Together?" said Gold. "How together? What do you mean together? In what way are you together?"

"As lovers."

"You mean you're fucking?"

"Oh, we've been doing that for years," said Ralph.

"Even while she and I were engaged?"

"But we were never friendly," Ralph put in quickly. "Then we found ourselves together one evening and really got close. She paid us a compliment, Bruce, you and me, I think, although I'm not sure which one, or even if it really is a compliment. She said I was as good as gold."

Gold felt like a big schmuck when he finally found his mother's grave after the final prayers on the last day and saw that every character on the headstone was in Hebrew. He recognized not a one. The earth had no message for him. He put his arm around the weather-beaten stone monument for a moment in a strange kind of hug and that felt a little bit closer and warmer. He left a pebble on her grave.

Returning for Belle by way of Coney Island Avenue, he came upon a softball game in a schoolyard played by boys wearing yarmulkas, and he left the car to watch. Athletes in skullcaps? The school was a religious one, a yeshiva. Some of the teenagers had sidelocks, and some of the sidelocks were blond. Gold smiled. God was right—a stiff-necked, contrary people. Moisheh Kapoyer, here it was winter and they were playing baseball, while everyone else played football and basketball.

And a stubborn dispute was in progress. The boy at first base had his back to the others, in a pose of limp exasperation. The pitcher was sulking and refused to throw the ball. The batter was waiting in a squat with his elbows on his knees, his head resting with disinterest on one hand. As Gold watched, the catcher, a muscular, redheaded youth with freckles and sidelocks and a face as Irish or Scottish or Polish as any Gold had ever laid eyes upon, moved wrathfully toward the pitcher with words Gold for a minute had trouble believing.

"Varf!" shouted the catcher. ''Varf it, already! Varf the fucking ball!"

Gold continued to Esther's for Belle and drove home. He owed Pomoroy a book. Where could he begin?

THE END

~~O~~