Goodbye, Columbus (26 page)

Michael shrugged his shoulder.

“Eh! How can you understand?” Epstein grumbled. “What do you know? Twenty years old…”

Michael shrugged again. “Twenty-two,” he said softly.

There were more stories Epstein could tell, but he wondered if any of them would bring him closer to what it was he had on his mind but could not find the words for. He got out of bed and walked to the bedroom door. He opened it and stood there listening. On the downstairs sofa he could hear the folk singer snoring. Some night for guests! He shut the door and came back into the room, scratching his thigh. “Believe me,
she’s
not losing any sleep … She doesn’t deserve me. What, she cooks? That’s a big deal? She cleans? That deserves a medal? One day I should come home and the house should be a
mess.
I should be able to write my initials in the dust, somewhere, in the basement at least. Michael, after all these years that would be a pleasure!” He grabbed at his gray hair. “How did this happen? My Goldie, that such a woman should become a cleaning machine. Impossible.” He walked to the far wall and stared into Herbie’s baseball pictures, the long jaw-muscled faces, faded technicolor now, with’signatures at the bottom: Charlie Keller Lou Gehrig Red Ruffing … A long time. How Herbie had loved his Yankees.

“One night,” Epstein started again, “it was before the Depression even … you know what we did, Goldie and me?” He was staring at Red Ruffing now, through him. “You didn’t know my Goldie, what a beautiful beautiful woman she was. And that night we took pictures, photos. I set up the camera—it was in the old house—and we took pictures, in the bedroom.” He stopped, remembered. “I wanted a picture of my wife naked, to carry with me. I admit it. The next morning I woke up and there was Goldie tearing up the negatives. She said God forbid I should get in an accident one day and the police would take out my wallet for identification, and then oy-oy-oy!” He smiled. “You know, a woman, she worries … But at least we took the pictures, even if we didn’t develop them. How many people even do that?” He wondered, and then turned away from Red Ruffing to Michael, who was, faintly, at at the comers of his mouth, smiling.

“What, the photos?”

Michael started to giggle.

“Huh?” Epstein smiled. “What, you never had that kind of idea? I admit it. Maybe to someone else it would seem wrong, a sin or something, but who’s to say—”

Michael stiffened, at last his father’s son. “Somebody’s got to say. Some things just aren’t right.”

Epstein was willing to admit a youthful lapse. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe she was even right to tear—”

Michael shook his head vehemently. “No! Some things aren’t right. They’re just not!”

And Epstein saw the finger pointing not at Uncle Lou the Photographer, but at Uncle Lou the Adulterer. Suddenly he was shouting. “Right, wrong! From you and your father that’s all I ever hear. Who are you, what are you, King Solomon!” He gripped the bedposts. “Should I tell you what else happened the night we took pictures? That my Herbie was started that night, I’m sure of it. Over a year we tried and tried till I was
oysgamitched,
and that was the night. After the pictures, because of the pictures. Who knows!”

“But—”

“But what! But
this?
” He was pointing at his crotch. “You’re a boy, you don’t understand. When they start taking things away from you, you reach out, you
grab
—maybe like a pig even, but you grab. And right, wrong, who knows! With tears in your eyes, who can even see the difference!” His voice dropped now, but in a minor key the scolding grew more fierce. “Don’t call
me
names. I didn’t see you with Ida’s girl, there’s not a name for that? For
you
it’s right?”

Michael was kneeling in his bed now. “You—saw?”

“I saw!”

“But it’s different—”

“Different?” Epstein shouted.

“To be married is different!”

“What’s different you don’t know about. To have a wife, to be a father, twice a father—and then they start taking things away—” and he fell weak-kneed across Michael’s bed. Michael leaned back and looked at his uncle, but he did not know what to do or how to chastise, for he had never seen anybody over fifteen years old cry before.

Usually Sunday morning went like this: at nine-thirty Goldie started the coffee and Epstein walked to the comer for the lox and the Sunday
News.
When the lox was on the table, the bagels in the oven, the rotogravure section of the
News
two inches from Goldie’s nose, then Sheila would descend the stairs, yawning, in her toe-length housecoat. They would sit down to eat, Sheila cursing her father for buying the
News
and “putting money in a Fascist’s pocket.” Outside, the Gentiles would be walking to church. It had always been the same, except, of course that over the years the News had come closer to Goldie’s nose and further from Sheila’s heart; she had the
Post
delivered.

This Sunday, when he awoke, Epstein smelled coffee bubbling in the kitchen. When he sneaked down the stairs, past the kitchen—he had been ordered to use the basement bathroom until he’d seen a doctor—he could smell lox. And, at last, when he entered the kitchen, shaved and dressed, he heard newspapers rattling. It was as if another Epstein, his ghost, had risen an hour earlier and performed his Sunday duties. Beneath the clock, around the table, sat Sheila, the folk singer, and Goldie. Bagels toasted in the oven, while the folk singer, sitting backwards in a chair, strummed his guitar and sang—

I’ve been down so long
It look like up to me
…

Epstein clapped his hands and rubbed them together, preparatory to eating. “Sheila, you went out for this?” He gestured towards the paper and the lox. “Thank you.”

The folk singer looked up, and in the same tune, improvised—

I
went out for the lox
…

and grinned, a regular clown.

“Shut up!” Sheila told him.

He echoed her words, plunk! plunk!

“Thank you, then, young man,” Epstein said.

“His name is Marvin,” Sheila said, “for your information.”

“Thank you, Martin.”

“Marvin,” the young man said.

“I don’t hear so good.”

Goldie Epstein looked up from the paper. “Syphilis softens the brain.”

“What!”

“Syphilis softens the brain…”

Epstein stood up, raging. “Did you tell her that?” he shouted at his daughter. “Who told her that?”

The folk singer stopped plucking his guitar. Nobody answered; a conspiracy. He grabbed his daughter by the shoulders. “You respect your father, you understand!”

She jerked her shoulder away. “You’re not
my
father!”

And the words hurled him back—to the joke Ida Kaufman had made in the car, to her tan dress, the spring sky … He leaned across the table to his wife. “Goldie, Goldie, look at me! Look at
me,
Lou!”

She stared back into the newspaper, though she held it far enough from her nose for Epstein to know she could not see the print; with everything else, the optometrist said the muscles in her eyes had loosened. “Goldie,” he said, “Goldie, I did the worst thing in the world? Look me in the eyes, Goldie. Tell me, since when do Jewish people get a divorce? Since when?”

She looked up at him, and then at Sheila. “Syphilis makes soft brains. I can’t live with a pig!”

“We’ll work it out. We’ll go to the rabbi—”

“He wouldn’t recognize you—”

“But the children, what about the children?”

“What children?”

Herbie was dead and Sheila a stranger; she was right.

“A grown-up child can take care of herself,” Goldie said. “If she wants, she can come to Florida with me. I’m thinking I’ll move to Miami Beach.”

“Goldie!”

“Stop shouting,” Sheila said, anxious to enter the brawl. “You’ll wake Michael.”

Painfully polite, Goldie addressed her daughter. “Michael left early this morning. He took his Linda to the beach for the day, to their place in Belmar.”

“Barnegat,” Epstein grumbled, retreating from the table.

“What did you say?” Sheila demanded.

“Barnegat.” And he decided to leave the house before any further questions were asked.

At the comer luncheonette he bought his own paper and sat alone, drinking coffee and looking out the window beyond which the people walked to church. A pretty young
shiksa
walked by, holding her white round hat in her hand; she bent over to remove her shoe and shake a pebble from it. Epstein watched her bend, and he spilled some coffee on his shirt front. The girl’s small behind was round as an apple beneath the close-fitting dress. He looked, and then as though he were praying, he struck himself on the chest with his fist, again and again. “What have I done! Oh, God!”

When he finished his coffee, he took his paper and started up the street. To home? What home? Across the street in her backyard he saw Ida Kaufman, who was wearing shorts and a halter, and was hanging her daughter’s underwear on the clothesline. Epstein looked around and saw only the Gentiles walking to church. Ida saw him and smiled. Growing angry, he stepped off the curb and, passionately, began to jaywalk.

At noon in the Epstein house those present heard a siren go off. Sheila looked up from the
Post
and listened; she looked at her watch. “Noon? I’m fifteen minutes slow. This lousy watch, my father’s present.”

Goldie Epstein was leafing through the ads in the travel section of the
New York Times,
which Marvin had gone out to buy for her. She looked at her watch. “I’m fourteen minutes slow. Also,” she said to her daughter, “a watch from him…”

The wail grew louder. “God,” Sheila said, “it sounds like the end of the world.”

And Marvin, who had been polishing his guitar with his red handkerchief, immediately broke into song, a high-pitched, shut-eyed Negro tune about the end of the world.

“Quiet!” Sheila said. She cocked her ear. “But it’s Sunday. The sirens are Saturday—”

Goldie shot off the couch. “It’s a real air raid? Oy, that’s all we need!”

“It’s the police,” Sheila said, and fiery-eyed she raced to the front door, for she was politically opposed to police. “It’s coming up the street—an ambulance!”

She raced out the door, followed by Marvin, whose guitar still hung around his neck. Goldie trailed behind, her feet slapping against her slippers. On the street she suddenly turned back to the house to make sure the door was shut against daytime burglars, bugs, and dust. When she turned again she had not far to run. The ambulance had pulled up across the street in Kaufman’s driveway.

Already a crowd had gathered, neighbors in bathrobes, housecoats, carrying the comic sections with them; and too, churchgoers,
shiksas
in white hats. Goldie could not make her way to the front where her daughter and Marvin stood, but even from the rear of the crowd she could see a young doctor leap from the ambulance and race up to the porch, his stethoscope wiggling in his back pocket as he took two steps at a time.

Mrs. Katz arrived. A squat red-faced woman whose stomach seemed to start at her knees, she tugged at Goldie’s arm. “Goldie, more trouble here?”

“I don’t know, Pearl. All that racket. It sounded like an atomic bomb.”

“When it’s that, you’ll know,” Pearl Katz said. She surveyed the crowd, then looked at the house. “Poor woman,” she said, remembering that only three months before, on a windy March morning an ambulance had arrived to take Mrs. Kaufman’s husband to the nursing home, from which he never returned.

“Troubles, troubles…” Mrs. Katz was shaking her head, a pot of sympathy. “Everybody has their little bundle, believe me. I’ll bet she had a nervous breakdown. That’s not a good thing. Gallstones, you have them out and they’re out. But a nervous breakdown, it’s very bad … You think maybe it’s the daughter who’s sick?”

“The daughter isn’t home,” Goldie said. “She’s away with my nephew, Michael.”

Mrs. Katz saw that no one had emerged from the house yet; she had time to gather a little information. “He’s who, Goldie? The son of the brother-in-law that Lou doesn’t talk to? That’s his father?”

“Yes, Sol in Detroit—”

But she broke off, for the front door had opened, though still no one could be seen. A voice at the front of the crowd was commanding. “A little room here. Please! A little room, damn it!” It was Sheila. “A little room! Marvin, help me!”

“I can’t put down my guitar—I can’t find a place—”

“Get them back!” Sheila said. “But my instrument—”

The doctor and his helper were now wiggling and tilting the stretcher through the front door. Behind them stood Mrs. Kaufman, a man’s white shirt tucked into her shorts. Her eyes peered out of two red holes; she wore no make-up, Mrs. Katz noted.

“It must be the girl,” said Pearl Katz, up on her toes. “Goldie, can you see, who is it—it’s the girl?”

“The girl’s
away
—”

“Stay back!” Sheila commanded. “Marvin, for crying out loud, help!”

The young doctor and his attendant held the stretcher steady as they walked sideways down the front steps.