7

SAMMY.

Jake imagined once the doctor had pronounced her pregnant beyond doubt, anointing her, so to speak, she would become ethereal, a stranger to lust, and he, attentive, solicitous, not to say self-sacrificing –

“Don’t worry, darling. It will go down by itself.”

– would demonstrate the magnitude of his love by approaching her with tenderness in lieu of passion, taking her as an object of adoration rather than a love vessel.

Fat chance.

Instead of maternal content, Nancy’s swelling belly unleashed the wanton in her. Not so much the Holy Mother as Our Lady of the Orifices. A sexual acrobat. So, heedless of her condition, even as her rock-hard breasts began to yield a sugary substance, making him an even more recalcitrant lover, she, abandoned to pleasure, came clawing after him nightly. With teasing fingers. Breasts that brushed him erect. A tongue that licked him alive. And self-denying Jake, roused beyond any possible concern for the unborn, rode her to a climax, a shared and soaring release, anxious only afterwards for the creature swimming within her.

Some introduction to my son, he’d think, lighting up, asking if she was all right, if he hadn’t been too brutish. Some how-do-you-do, ramming him like a crazed billygoat. He was tormented by a vision of the boy, his kaddish, born with a depression in his skull, bearing into manhood the imprint of Jake’s cockshead in his scalp. An unanswerable reproach. In another nightmare, even as he stooped to lick her nether lips, teasing, biting – lo and behold, a nose protrudes. Hello, hello. Or a tiny, unspeakably delicate hand reaches out to stick him in the eye. Hello, hello. Or the waters break, drowning him. Deservedly, you satyr. Or trembling, quaking to a climax, she actually expels the baby, squirting him across the bedroom in a sea of placenta and blood. And me, he thought, I wouldn’t even know how to tie the cord. I’d fail her, fainting.

Nancy did nothing to alleviate his anxiety when, her passion spent, she would suddenly say, “Give me your hand! ”

“What now?”

“Can you feel the movement?”

Yes, he’d say, snatching it away, scorched.

“He’s some kicker, isn’t he?”

Kicker? The poor bastard is choking on my semen. “Maybe we should lay off, well, until afterwards …”

Nancy was well into her eighth month when Jenny and Doug passed through London on their way to an international conference in Tangiers: Television and the Developing Countries.

“We haven’t seen you since Duddy staged your play in Toronto,” Jake said. “I’m sorry about that. I do think it deserved better notices.”

“I wasn’t the least bit surprised. After all, nothing offends like gravitas. But I will say this for Kravitz, he resisted every commercial pressure, the director’s, Marlene, he wouldn’t let them change a word.”

“He respected your integrity as a writer.”

Doug nodded. Jenny, eager to change the subject, asked Jake if he remembered Jane Watson, a Toronto actress.

“Yes.”

“She had a boy. It was a normal birth –”

“You see,” Jake said to Nancy.

“- and three months later she developed this growth in her womb. When they removed it they found it was a tumor with teeth and a little beard.”

“Charming. And how come,” Jake charged, surfacing nasty, “you’ve never been pregnant, Jenny? Do you take the pill?”

“I don’t take Doug,” she said.

Eventually, Jake was able to have a word alone with Jenny. He told her how he had been mistaken for Joey twice. On arrival in London and when a registered letter from Canada House had come to him in error. “I wonder where he is now?”

“Israel maybe. Or Germany.”

“Germany?”

“Hanna gets postcards from time to time.”

Hanna, who had still to take up Luke’s invitation and come to London.

“What’s the last address you have for him?”

“Joey never sends addresses. But he was in Israel in forty-eight. During the so-called War of Independence. Hanna still gets letters from a woman there who claims to be his wife.”

“What does she say?”

“She asks for money, what do you think? She claims Joey deserted her.”

The next morning Jake read in the Times,

Oh, Nancy. Nancy, my darling.

Nancy’s water broke at three a.m., on a Thursday morning, and the baby was delivered without mishap. Sammy had no dent in his head and appeared, on first count, to have the prescribed number of everything. Reassuringly, he wore a bracelet with his name on it, but all the same Jake committed distinguishing features to memory. After all, this was his kaddish.

Luke, in spite of everything, was invited to become Sammy’s godfather. “Why, if you hadn’t leaped at the chance of getting me to pay for your dinners at Chez Luba, Nancy and I might never have gotten together in the first place.”

“What do you think of her now?” Luke asked.

“Not much. You?”

Once having married, letting herself go, such was Nancy’s bliss, her pleasure in Jake, the baby, looking for a house, that she could not understand why she had hesitated. But she soon grasped that her husband was not all of a piece, as she had hoped. On the contrary. Jake was charged with contradictions. Ostensibly consumed by overweening ambition, he was, on black days, filled with self-hatred and debilitating doubts, largely because he took himself to be an impostor and his work, given its fragile nature, a con. She began to wonder why he had chosen to become a director in the first place and feared, in agonizingly lucid moments, that if he did not rise as far as he hoped, he might yet diminish into bitterness.

Swaying gently as she nursed Sammy in the kitchen at three in the morning, she searched for a way of assuring him that he did not have to become famous for her sake. Or Sammy’s. But such was his drive, there seemed no way she could say as much without wounding him and, rather than that, she said nothing.

If, on rare occasions, he eked some satisfaction out of his work, he was, for the most part, laden with contempt for his peers, too many of whom, he felt, presented with a script, knew instinctively what would play well, and that’s all. Almost everybody in television was a lightweight, he complained to her, and a cliché monger. Such was his scorn for actors that, watching him on the set one day, she wondered why they endured him. For, unlike the others, he would not flatter and cajole those he needed, arousing them to surpassing performances. Instead he mocked, he teased, he laid low with pointed jokes. He flayed them for their vanity. Even he could not understand why they tolerated him. “When I directed my first play in Toronto,” he once said to her, “telling the writer what had to be rewritten again and again, not that a hack could ever get it right, and keeping the actors late and making them go through a scene for the umpteenth time, I had to retreat to the toilet more than once, overcome by giggles – incredulous – because they had listened.”

He seldom took one of his leading actors to dinner, he never sent flowers to a leading lady. The only companions he sought out on any production, those he fooled and played poker with, were the cameramen, the grips, the stagehands, and that company of failed actors, the bit players of whom no wrong could be uttered, who were jokingly referred to as Jacob Hersh’s Continuing Rep. Largely drunks, has beens, never beens, itinerant wrestlers, wretched drag queens, superannuated variety artists, decrepit Yiddish actors, befuddled old prize fighters, and more than one junkie, all of whom not only counted on Jake for work and handouts but, in a suicidal mood or awakened in a hospital after a bender, could summon him in the middle of the night.

All of this, however endearing, would only have been acceptable, Nancy felt, had Jake been blessed with a talent of the first order, but, she sadly allowed, this was not the case, and so she was fearful for his sake. Fearful, touched, and apprehensive. For it made her heartsick to see how ferociously he threw himself into each play he did, however ephemeral, often going sleepless for nights while he blocked it, and afterwards, drained and becalmed, waiting for the telephone that didn’t ring with the offer of a film. Then besieging his agent’s office, quarreling with him, demanding to know how he got lesser directors film assignments.

Adding to his troubles, Jake had begun to insult the writers available to him in television. Those he longed to work with were either not the type to accept a commission or, though they liked him personally, were chary of committing a screenplay to a director unproven in film.

The less satisfaction his work gave him, even as he drifted on the crest of the television plateau, having done everything he could there and beginning to repeat himself, the more he began to talk about his cousin Joey, speculating about his whereabouts, wondering what he was really like, oddly convinced that somehow Joey had answers for him.

Once, there was a telephone call.

“May I speak with Joseph Hersh, please?” a man asked.

“He doesn’t live here. This is Jacob Hersh’s house. Why do you want to speak to him?”

“Do you know where I can reach him tonight? It’s important.”

“No, but –”

“Are you a relation, then?”

“Yes.”

“Tell him Hannon called. I know everything. If he comes within a mile of here again, I’ll kill him.”

“Why?”

“You just give him the message; he’ll understand.”

Another time, a bill that wasn’t theirs was stapled to their monthly statement from Harrod’s. It was for cigars and brandy, some thirty-five pounds, and it was signed “J. Hersh.”

“Why should he do this to me?” Jake protested. “If he needs money, why doesn’t he come to me? Why doesn’t he come to see us anyway? I don’t understand.”

He told Nancy how Hanna used to advertise for Joey in the Personal column of the Louisville Courier during Kentucky Derby Week. Maybe, he joked, he should run an ad in the Times now that the Grand National was coming up. Then there was Ascot. He also told her that in the days when he had shared a flat with Luke, he sometimes rushed home from wherever he was, convinced the Horseman was waiting at his door. When he had lived alone there had been nights when he had held imaginary dialogues with his cousin, saying it was the family, not Jake, who had betrayed him and allowed Baruch to die in squalor. Offering to put things right, however he could. “He’s got a commercial pilot’s license, you know. He’s played pro baseball. Once, he was in the movies. He actually rode with Randolph Scott.”

Jake was not entirely without film offers. Again and again he was sent scripts to mull over and asked to consider the sort of production that required an instant decision. Either the subjects were deplorable or the deal he celebrated on Monday, yielding to euphoria, dissolved on Wednesday. After the second film Luke had written won a prize at Cannes, the three of them went to dinner at Chez Luba, but it didn’t work. Luke asked Jake to read his latest work, an original screenplay.

“I’d be glad to read it and give you an opinion,” Jake said, “but if you’re looking for a director, why not try Tim Nash? He’s gone into films now, you know.”

Out of necessity, Jake met most often with fringe producers, inept dreamers whose fantasies he submitted to after lunch.

It was after one such engagement that he came home to discover Nancy was pregnant again. He ought to have guessed, because only a month earlier, Nancy was suddenly inclined to drift off to sleep, a book in her hand, after lunch, and she was, come nightfall, uncommonly lecherous in bed.

Molly, born in May, came easily. Nancy had only been home for a month when Herky and Rifka descended on them breathlessly, having already done Copenhagen, Paris, Rome, and Venice. Their first European tour.

“Did you enjoy Venice?” Jake asked.

“It was really something.”

“What was Copenhagen like?”

“Very, very clean.”

“And Paris?”

“It was a real experience.”

Herky and Rifka had not come without a tribute for the first-born Hersh, but Nancy, unwrapping the gift, a tangle of wires and pads, was obviously baffled.

“You see, Rifka, I told you. They haven’t even seen it here yet. It’s an anti-bedwetting device. Early Warning System.”

“Just what we wanted,” Jake said.

You lay it into his crib, Herky explained, plug it in, and no sooner does he pee than, whamo! he gets an electric shock. “It’s sure-fire. We’re doing very well with it.”

Jake hastily removed them from the bedroom, taking his sister and brother-in-law to a Jewish restaurant in Soho. Riding two whiskies, Herky began to enthuse about his grand tour.

Each according to his trade. American neophyte painters coming over for the first time hasten to the Tate, Jeu de Paume, the Uffizi, the Prado. Beginning writers seek out Dr. Johnson’s chambers, Oxford, Cambridge, Jane Austen’s Bath, and in Paris hope for a glimpse of Sartre at Les Deux Magots and take a meal where James Joyce did, not forgetting the Ritz bar, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Too many times to count, Jake had taken sentimental visitors to Marx’s grave and past old Sig Freud’s flat, he had pointed out the Café Royal, Bloomsbury, the bookshop in Hampstead where Orwell had served, and other sanctified places, forever ours. But Herky Soloway was a special case. In London, above all, he wished to pay obeisances at the shrine of the incomparable Thomas Crapper, repository of stools immortal, where the Cascade had first been successfully flushed and the Niagara had been invented. Herky, warming to his subject, told Jake of the sparkling enamel toilets of Copenhagen, each bowl a joy to behold, and how he had bought a bidet (a fun thing for his showroom) in Rome, and descended into the sewers of Paris, winding through the very bowels of the city, and in a smelly café in Montmartre actually squatted on the craziest thing, no seat, only imprints for your feet, and a light switch that went on and off as you locked or unlocked the door. What misers, eh? But a good precaution against the syph. In St. Germain and Étoile he had tried the pissoirs. Amazing, right out there on the streets, stinking to high heaven, and he had read in Henry Miller, there’s a hot writer for you, that perverts left bread there in the morning to eat at night after everyone had peed on it. Europe, oy veh iz mir. But c’est la vie, n’est-ce pas? And in Versailles, you’ve heard of it, I suppose, would you believe that they used to do it in corners and the tapestries – excuse me, Rifka, I know you haven’t finished your dessert yet, but I must tell him – were for wiping themselves. The nobility yet.

Once Rifka had been dropped off at the Dorchester, Herky rubbed his hands together, he clapped Jake on the back (Now we can have us a ball, Yankel), and Jake took Herky out to savor the delights of London, swinging London, after dark. Beginning with the fabled cottages of Hyde Park Corner.

“Now, Herky, before we go down, let me tell you they have blinkers on all the urinals and for a good reason. Don’t start up conversations or stick your nose in everywhere. Provocateurs are not uncommon in there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Cops looking for importuning fags, if you must have it spelled out.”

“Listen here, my pockets are full of credit cards. I’ve got a personal letter of recommendation from my bank manager.”

“Do me a favor, Herky. In and out.”

They also took in the public conveniences of Piccadilly at its finest hour, shortly after midnight, when the acid and shitheads and pushers joined together to turn the place into a junkies’ bazaar. Herky pushed open a door to discover a young man sprawled on the floor, mainlining it. Herky retreated, whistling. “Thank God we haven’t got any national health plan in Canada.”

Finally, they returned to Herky’s suite, and Jake’s brother-in-law, in an expansive mood commingled with gratitude, poured them each large brandies. “I don’t know about you, Yankel, but I had a ball. We didn’t do the tourist bit, did we? Not many people see the London I’m seeing.”

Jake agreed, and the next afternoon, by arrangement, he took Herky to Raymond’s Revue Bar and then to shop for gifts, while Rifka went to a matinée of The Sound of Music. Harnessed with photographic equipment, including a movie camera, Herky tramped happily through Hamley’s and Liberty’s, he had Jake shoot some film of him feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, grinning and blowing kisses on the steps of Canada House, and then continued to Harrod’s, where he immediately asked for the toilets.

Oh, Harrods, her toilets perceived.

In all of his grand tour, Herky had seen nothing to rival the Gentlemen’s Toilet adjoining the men’s hairdressing salon on the lower ground floor of Harrod’s. Bug-eyed, he exclaimed, “This is quality, Yankel. This I call class.” The floors were marble. So were the sinks. The door to each closet was oak. “This is something. This is really something. Damn it, you could eat off the floor here.”

Overriding Jake’s protests, he began to take photographs. Endless snaps of the fabulous appointments. A gentleman, emerging from a closet, stared at Herky, dumbfounded. “Good heavens!”

Somebody else heatedly demanded Herky’s film. Harsh words were spoken.

“Buggers,” another man shouted, banging his cane. “Filthy buggers!”

Barbers descended on the toilet. Somebody seized Herky’s camera. “It’s insured,” Herky assured Jake, just before he was driven against the wall, sweaty and stammering, desperately dealing out business cards. A store detective appeared, taking charge. Which led to their being marched to an office on the fourth floor, where Jake, biting back his laughter, began to explain.