Frog (50 page)

‘Yeah
, I know, I know,' he shouts, ‘but not the others and tell Gerald not to tell.' Carey opens the hole and says ‘Everything all right, Yitzik?' Yitzik waves that everything's fine, puts his hand on her husband's shoulder and says ‘Please don't make a fuss.' ‘Me? A fuss? You hear that, Pauline? This nice guard here thinks I'm going to make a fuss—Not goodtime Simon, sir. Not a chance,' and without looking at her or back at her he goes with the guard through a door. She puts the paper back into a manila envelope, winds the string around the tab in back to close it, goes through her door, is asked if anything was slipped to her by the prisoner and is given her pocketbook back, calls for a cab, leaves the prison, takes the cab to town, goes to a bar near the train station and has two strong drinks, something she only started doing every day once he went to prison and which she has one or two more of and never has supper or lunch the day she visits him.”

“Each of his parents lived home till they were married, then moved to Brooklyn together when they came back from their honeymoon. They'd already furnished the place: a large ground-floor apartment opposite Prospect Park and with a woman working full-time for them from around the second month after they got there. ‘I had a difficult pregnancy from almost day two of my marriage, so the woman always had plenty to do, since half that time I could barely get out of bed.' She was a virgin when she married. His mother was. A story she told a lot was that when she was pregnant the first or second woman to work for them complained of ‘“serious female ailments.”' His mother took her to her own gynecologist and he said she was pregnant and had syphilis and rectal tissue damage and if he were her he'd get rid of the woman right away. ‘Lax morals like that and not too careful, you don't want her taking care of your baby. For one thing, you won't know what she'll drag into the house while you're out. For another, she might develop a fantasy about taking your husband away when you're big and bloated and so not as attractive.' ‘I discharged her on the spot though with two weeks' severance pay and the address of a good a.b. man if she wanted. I felt sorry for her for she said her boyfriend had deserted her and her entire family was in Ireland. I should have known better, having been a medical secretary though for a roentgenologist, but I thought syphilis could spread sometimes just by touching the syphilitic or sitting on things she'd put her bare bottom on or touched. I'd also seen photos of people, though mostly newborns, who had it in the mouth and I winced when I pictured her kissing my baby. Also the “lax morals.” But I knew your father would never fool with her. She was too pimply and pudgy for him and she didn't seem to bathe or brush her teeth enough and she wore a cross. I didn't want to tell him my real reason for discharging her. He wouldn't have given her the severance pay and might have even docked her a week's wages for jeopardizing the health of our unborn baby, or some insincere excuse like that. Anything to save money. For he never expressed any interest in the baby's or my health during the pregnancy. I'd come home from my monthly examination and near the end, from my weekly, and he wouldn't ask a word about it or how things were going or even once think of accompanying me.' But every good woman then was a virgin, she told him. ‘Oh, I played around. Did what we called harmless petting—squeezing fingers, a bit of kissing with our mouths closed, rubbing each other's backs very hard—but no more than that. Now I regret it. To only have experienced one man in your life isn't enough. I should have had more adventures before I married. Gotten madly involved with a couple of men, had an affair that nearly broke my heart before it dissolved, even gotten pregnant by some rotter who didn't want to help me and had an abortion all on my own and at my expense. Maybe not that far, and no venereal diseases. Traveled more. Then I could have drifted into marriage a little more easily. But your father persuaded me. He had a way with words, a wonderful smile and a great sense of humor.' ‘I remember. And you've told me most of this.' ‘So I've told you. So what? It only indicates how true it was. But whenever things turned sour for him he could be as disagreeable as they come.' ‘I know. I saw that too. Over the dinner table. Christ, the battles you had, and all over money. He'd throw your weekly allowance across the table at you and you'd yell you won't be treated like that and throw it back and all of us kids around and he'd yell and you'd scream—' ‘I don't remember that.' ‘It's true. I've mentioned it several times.' ‘I don't remember that too. And Gerald has no recollection of those arguments.' ‘He was out of the house by that time. But let's forget it. Maybe it was wrong of me to bring it up, or at least now.' ‘We argued, and over money sometimes, because he could be tight, as I know I've told you, but not at the table. That's one place it stopped. I didn't want to ruin your meals, send you to bed with bellyaches because of it. But I felt—your father—if I massaged his scalp enough I could bring some of his hair back and make him handsomer. And I put him on a diet and a regimen of exercises from the day we came back from our honeymoon, hoping to make his body less flabby, so more attractive to me, but it never worked. He went, with or without me, to his mother's for dinner two to three times a week. Think of it—they lived off Delancey, we lived in the middle of Brooklyn, but that often. Took the car. All right, traffic wasn't as bad then and you could park where you pleased, and for our first ten years his office was either in her building or right near her, so he could just close it and walk over. And most Sundays and Friday nights some of you children went with him—she loved feeding all of you and her cooking for that kind of food was pretty good—so it gave me some relief. I know I've told you he worshiped her. The very ground, even if it had gook on it sometimes, and worse. One of my greatest fears was that my father-in-law would die and she'd come live with us, even though she had a daughter to go to. But your aunt was poor, living in a space half the size of ours with your cousins running all around and her husband a schlemiel and your father doing most of the supporting for them, so I knew she'd come to us, where we had a maid and he'd let her boss me. As it was, she died first and your grandfather wanted to live alone. I would have taken him in but I doubt your father would have let me—his silence and nebbishness made your father uncomfortable. You know your father phoned her at least once every day when she was married.' ‘You mean
he
. Or possibly
we
' ‘He. But by all rights he should have been married to her, so maybe that's what I really meant. I don't know that much about psychology. I in fact think it's a science, if that's what it is, started by crazy people and kept alive by them—the people who run it—but that part about some mother-son relationships they speak of I believe. If it was possible to marry and have a family by her, he would have. I'm kidding, of course, when it comes to your father. Both of them, though she hated her husband. Dirtied all over him. And phoning her that much as your father did would have been a nice thing to do if she'd been a nicer person. I know I'd appreciate it if you did it every day, or certainly wouldn't mind it—even every other day—if we usually had something interesting or useful to say. Because they spoke—they really spoke. Oh, just hearing from you that often would be nice, forget that it has to be interesting. But you're so silent on the phone most times you'd make me wonder in those calls what I'd done wrong with you the previous times. I know you don't mean it, but that's what it provokes. Anyway, she wasn't a nice person at all. She was a mean wicked bitch who made life hell on earth for me those first ten years. I know I've said this also, but I've never gotten over how much she ruined my life then and how he let her. Your father was a pansy only regarding his mother. Did I ever tell you what my cousin Elsa said about her?' ‘The bit about her being a prostitute on the Lower East Side? Malicious bullshit, only because she thought you wanted to hear it.' ‘No. She was a very hard woman, so I could believe it. Besides, Elsa, who I knew for a long time and trusted—she didn't tell stories or cater to anyone—said friends her parents knew in your grandnother's building swore she was. That they saw men enter her apartment when her husband was out, and heard the goings-on through the walls. The whole neighborhood knew. But she wasn't the kind who walked the streets. She took in a couple of steady men a week—three or four—to make ends meet. When your father, who was the oldest, was very small and your grandfather wasn't doing well, which was mostly always. He drank too much; was a good darner and weaver but couldn't hold a job. Maybe this—her giving it for money and her husband soused in a bar several days a week—was why your father gave so much of his income to her and your Aunt Ida and her family. Because he knew—had seen it—might have been locked in the bathroom when it was going on, or told not to leave it. No, he'd probably be in school, if he got to be that old while she was still doing it, and they had no bathroom—only a public toilet in the building's hallway. Maybe he was put in a closet each time. But anyway, he was ashamed of it—what she did—though we never, Dad and I, talked about it once, so I don't know for sure how he felt. And once he had the money he wanted to make up for what she'd gone through for him and his brothers and sisters and also wanted to prevent Ida from doing what her mother did. That's a possibility, since Ida had few scruples too. Or maybe his mother did it because she enjoyed it, and thought what the hell, she'll make some money out of it. And your grandfather was not only a poor provider but too drunk, or had some other problem, to fulfill her, or after a while to do it even once. He seemed like it. Nice but a weakling. But doesn't it make sense?' ‘What' ‘That your father was scarred by it and that's what made him look down on women so. He felt sorry for her in one way, hated her for having done it, in another way. It's all very complicated—beyond me. Though maybe I should have been a psychologist after all, fake as the field is. But she was so ugly and fat that I think what could a man have seen in her to want to pay for it again and again? She was even ugly and fat in the photograph of her as a child bride. She was always, even at fourteen, an old lady and a sourpuss, which is sad. Though maybe she was extra special in the bed department, knew tricks nobody did, or just extra cheap and every so often tossed one in for free, but I don't want to think of it.' He died two months to the day before his grandmother was born. He means—They were still living in Brooklyn then. Said that. Three boys, Vera on the way. His father kept his office on Stanton and Cannon, he thinks it was, till his mother died. His father's mother, and maybe he should check a map. His own mother got pregnant the first time she had sex with his father. People thought, she said, they'd slept together before their marriage because his oldest brother, Gerald, was born three months premature and was conceived the first night. ‘I let everyone who wanted to, believe it. It made me into a more interesting person and it's what I, or maybe I'm only thinking this in retrospect, wanted to do, but not so much with your father. Let's face it: almost not at all. Gerald had croup because of his undeveloped digestive tract. Life was misery for us because of it. I'm sure for him too, but they say babies that age don't really suffer that much pain. At his briss—a mangled job, but not a peep. Maybe it was the wine smeared on his lips and the moyl's spit as an anesthetic around his prepuce just before he was clipped. But he cried day and night for half a year from his croup. Your father was hardly home then. His mother, cronies, and he worked all the time, even on Sundays. Not Saturdays though. He was still orthodox on Shabbas except for carrying money and driving a car. He stopped right after his mother died and we moved to Manhattan. I still have his tefillin, bag and boxes and straps, if you ever want it. Just as a keepsake, and it's very old and in good condition so may be worth something one day. Gerald thinks it's the ugliest thing existing and won't have it in his house. It does at times look like some dark crouched-up creature ready to pounce out of the drawer at me. Your father's father lived for about six years after his wife died. You remember him.' Doesn't. ‘You should. Because you were named after her, he played with you more than with anyone when he was here.' Her mother died a few years after he was born. ‘You remember her?' No recollection. ‘It was horrible. She could have lived another twenty years. The doctors operated on the wrong problem and killed her on the table. I don't know why I wanted to become one when I distrusted them so much. But that happened years after I gave up my goal of becoming a doctor. My dad lived several years after that. Of any of your grandparents, I'm sure you remember him.' Nothing. ‘But he read you stories, fed you dinner, took you to the park and to your first movie and merry-go-round, taught you whole sentences in German and was the first adult to understand what you were saying in English. He used to love telling all you kids about when he was in the Polish calvary and his white horses. No, that was my Uncle Leibush; my father fled the country because they wanted to put him in the army. And Leibush wasn't really my uncle. We called him that because he was so close to us. I know you remember him, since he lived till you were around ten and visited us once a week.' ‘He's the only one of those people I remember, and even something about the calvary. Full white hair, bushy gray mustache, lanky and statuesque, always in a suit and vest even in warm weather, and he walked with a walking stick or cane. A cane.' ‘That's nothing like him. He was short and stocky, had no walking problem nor affected one, and didn't have a single hair on his skin. He had some condition. You've seen people with it. That's another reason I thought you might remember him, though he almost always wore a sea captain's cap, which was supposed to resemble his Polish calvary cap, outdoors and in. He came to America after my father, was only going to stay with us till he got on his feet. Landsmen of my father—whole families of them—were always doing that with him. He was that kindhearted—he even paid the way over for some of them—but Leibush ended up living with us most of his adult life. He was in love with my mother—that's why he never left. Gentle and outgoing, compared to my father's gruffness and reserve—you could see why she'd be attracted to him too. Go ask my father why he put up with it. Probably financial. Leibush opened the bar and grill for him at five or six every morning while my father slept till noon. Then he finished his work at the bar around midafternoon and my father, except for coming up for dinner most nights, never got home till 2 or 3 a.m. They even say Aunt Rose was Leibush's daughter through my mother. Look at her next time and then at one of the photographs I have of Leibush and see whom she resembles.' ‘Mom, Mom—' ‘I'm not joking. Everybody's said Rose looks like no one in the family. Taller than all the girls by about four inches, those googly eyes and thick lips, she even got sicknesses none of us did and escaped some that all of us got at the same time. Don't mention anything about it around Rose. The secret's been kept from her all this time, even if by now she must suspect. But Rose is dead—last year, or the one before—so what am I talking about?' ‘I'm sorry.' ‘Still, don't ever tell Uncle Gil. During her first few years of marriage she probably thought she could be disinherited; after my father died, I don't know what. But I'm sure she thought for something like these reasons or others he might leave her if he found out she was momma's love child, so she never said.'”