Herzog (40 page)

    He listened awhile to Taube's account of her cortisone treatments. Her large, luminous, tame eyes, the eyes that had domesticated Father Herzog, were not watching Moses now. They gazed at a point beyond him and left him free to recall those last days of Father Herzog.

    We walked to Montrose together to buy cigarettes.

    It was June, warm like this, the weather bright. Papa wasn't exactly making sense. He said he should have divorced the Widow Kaplitzky ten years ago, that he had hoped to enjoy the last years of his life-his Yiddish became more crabbed and quaint in these conversations-but he had brought his iron to a cold forge.

    A kalte kuzhnya, Moshe. Kein fire.

    Divorce was impossible because he owed her too much money. "But you have money now, don't you?" said Herzog, blunt with him. His father stopped, staring into his face. Herzog was stunned to see in full summer light how much disintegration had already taken place. But the remaining elements, incredibly vivid, had all their old power over Moses-the straight nose, the furrow between the eyes, the brown and green colors in those eyes. "I need my money.

    Who'll provide for me- you? I may bribe the Angel of Death a long time yet." Then he bent his knees a little-Moses read that old signal; he had a lifetime of skill in interpreting his father's gestures: those bent knees meant that something of great subtlety was about to be revealed. "I don't know when I'll be delivered," Father Herzog whispered. He used the old Yiddish term for a woman's confinement- kimpet.

    Moses did not know what to say, and his answering voice was not much above a whisper. "Don't torment yourself, Papa." The horror of this second birth, into the hands of death, made his eyes shine, and his lips silently pressed together. Then Father Herzog said, "I have to sit down, Moshe. The sun is too hot for me." He did, suddenly, appear very flushed, and Moses supported him, eased him down on the cement embankment of a lawn. The old man's look was now one of injured male pride. "Even I feel the heat today," said Moses. He placed himself between his father and the sun.

    "I may go next month to St. Joe for the baths,"

    Taube was saying. "To the Whitcomb. It's a nice place."

    "Not alone?"

    "Ethel and Mordecai want to go."

    "Oh...?" He nodded, to keep her going. "How is Mordecai?"

    "How can he be in his age?" Moses was attentive until she was well started and then he returned to his father. They had had lunch on the back porch that day, and that was where the quarrel began. It had seemed to Moses, perhaps, that he was here as a prodigal son, admitting the worst and asking the old man's mercy, and so Father Herzog saw nothing except a stupid appeal in his son's face-incomprehensible.

    "Idiot!" was what the old man had shouted.

    "Calf!" Then he saw the angry demand underlying Moses' look of patience. "Get out! I leave you nothing! Everything to Willie and Helen! You...?

    Croak in a flophouse." Moses rising, Father Herzog shouted, "G. And don't come to my funeral."

    "All right, maybe I won't."

    Too late, Tante Taube had warned him to keep silent, raising her brows-she had still had brows then. Father Herzog rose, stumbling from the table, his face distorted, and ran to get his pistol.

    "Go, go! Come back later. I'll call you,"

    Taube had whispered to Moses, and he, confused, reluctant, burning, stung because his misery was not recognized in his father's house (this monstrous egotism making its peculiar demands)-he reluctantly got up from the table. "Quick, quick!" Taube tried to get him to the front door, but old Herzog overtook them with the pistol.

    He cried out, "I'll kill you!" And Herzog was startled not so much by this threat, which he did not believe, as by the return of his father's strength. In his rage he recovered it briefly, though it might cost him his life. The strained neck, the grinding of his teeth, his frightening color, even the military Russian strut with which he lifted the gun-these were better, thought Herzog, than his sinking down during a walk to the store. Father Herzog was not made to be pitiful.

    "Go, go," said Tante Taube. Moses was weeping then.

    "Maybe you'll die first," Father Herzog shouted.

    "Papa!"

    Half hearing Tante Taube's slow description of Cousin Mordecai's approaching retirement, Herzog grimly recovered the note of that cry.

    Papa

    - Papa.

    You lout! The old man in his near-demented way was trying to act out the manhood you should have had.

    Coming to his house with that Christianized smirk of the long-suffering son. Might as well have been an outright convert, like Mady. He should have pulled the trigger. Those looks were agony to him. He deserved to be spared, in his old age.

    And then there was Moses with puffy weeping eyes, in the street, waiting for his cab, while Father Herzog hastily walked up and back before these windows, staring at him in agony of spirit-yes, you got that out of him.

    Walking quickly there, back and forth in his hasty style, dropping his weight on the one heel. The pistol thrown down. Who knows whether Moses shortened his life by the grief he gave him. Perhaps the stimulus of anger lengthened it. He could not die and leave this half-made Moses yet.

    They were reconciled the following year. And then more of the same. And then... death.

    "Should I make a cup of tea?" said Tante Taube.

    "Yes, please, I'd like that if you feel up to it.

    And I also want to look in Papa's desk."

    "Pa's desk? It's locked. You want to look in the desk? Everything belongs to you children. You could take the desk when I die."

    "No, no!" he said, "I don't need the desk itself, but I was passing from the airport and thought I'd see how you were. And now that I'm here, I'd like to have a look in the desk. I know you don't mind."

    "You want something, Moshe? You took your Mama's silver coin case the last time,"

    He had given it to Madeleine.

    "Is Papa's watch chain still in there?"

    "I think Willie took it."

    He frowned with concentration. "Then what about the rubles?" he asked. "I'd like them for Marco."

    "Rubles?"

    "My grandfather Isaac bought Czarist rubles during the Revolution, and they've always been in the desk."

    "In the desk? I surely never seen them."

    "I'd like to look, while you make a cup of tea, Tante Taube. Give me the key."

    "The key...?" Questioning him before, she had spoken more quickly, but now she receded again into slowness, raising a mountain of dilatory will in his way.

    "Where do you keep it?"

    "Where? Where did I put it? Is it in Pa's dresser? Or somewheres else? Let me remember.

    That's how I am now, it's hard to remember...."

    "I know where it is," he said, suddenly rising.

    "You know where it is? So where is it?"

    "In the music box, where you always used to keep it."

    "In the music...? Pa took it from there. He locked up my social-security checks when they came. He said all the money he should have...."

    Moses knew he had guessed right. "Don't bother, I'll get it," he said. "If you'll put the kettle on. I'm very thirsty. It's been a hot, long day."

    He helped her to rise, holding her flaccid arm.

    He was having his way-a poor sort of victory and filled with dangerous consequences. Going forward without her, he entered the bedroom. His father's bed had been removed. Hers stood alone with its ugly bedspread-some material that reminded him of a coated tongue. He breathed the old spice, the dark, heavy air, and lifted the lid of the music box. In this house he had only to consult his memory to find what he wanted. The mechanism released its little notes as the cylinder turned within, the small spines picking out the notes from Figaro.

    Moses was able to supply the words: Nel momenta Delia mia cerimonia Io rideva di me Senza saperlo.

    His fingers recognized the key.

    Old Taube in the dark outside the bedroom said, "Did you found it?"

    He answered, "It's here," and spoke in a low, mild voice, not to make matters worse. The house was hers, after all. It was rude to invade it.

    He was not ashamed of this, he only recognized with full objectivity that it was not right. But it had to be done.

    "Do you want me to put the kettle on?"

    "No, a cup of tea I can still make."

    He heard her slow steps in the passage. She was going to the kitchen. Herzog quickly made for the small sitting room. The drapes were drawn. He turned on the lamp beside the desk. In seeking the switch he tore the ancient silk of the shade releasing a fine dust. The name of this color was old rose-he felt certain of it. He opened the cherry-wood secretary, braced the wide leaf on its runners, drawing them out from either side. Then he went back and shut the door, first making sure Taube had reached the kitchen. In the drawers he recognized each article- leather, paper, gold. Swift and tense, veins standing out on his head, and tendons on his hands, he groped, and found what he was looking for-Father Herzog's pistol. An old pistol, the barrel nickel-plated. Papa had bought it to keep on Cherry Street, in the railroad yards. Moses nipped the gun open. There were two bullets. This was it, then. He rapidly clicked it shut and put it in his pocket. There it made too large a bulge.

    He took out his wallet and replaced it with the gun.

    The wallet he buttoned in his hip pocket.

    Now he began to search for those rubles. Those he found in a small compartment with old passports, ribbons sealed in wax, like gobs of dried blood.

    La bourgeoise Sarah Herzog avec ses enfants, Alexandre huh ans, Helene neuf arts et Guillaume trois ans, signed by Count Adlerberg Gouverneur de St. Petersbourg.

    The rubles were in a large billfold-his playthings of forty years ago. Peter the Great in a rich coat of armor, and a splendid imperial Catherine. Lamplight revealed the watermarks.

    Recalling how he and Willie used to play casino for these stakes, Herzog uttered one of his short laughs, then made a nest of these large bills in his pocket for the pistol. He thought it must be less conspicuous now.

    "You got what you want?" Taube asked him in the kitchen.

    "Yes." He put the key on the enameled metal table.

    He knew it was not proper that he should think her expression sheep-like. This figurative habit of his mind crippled his judgment, and was likely to ruin him some day. Perhaps the day was near; perhaps this night his soul would be required of him. The gun weighed on his chest. But the protuberant lips, great eyes, and pleated mouth were sheep-like, and they warned him he was taking too many chances with destruction. Taube, a veteran survivor, to be heeded, had fought the grave to a standstill, balking death itself by her slowness. All had decayed but her shrewdness and her incredible patience; and in Moses she saw Father Herzog again, nervy and hasty, impulsive, suffering. His eye twitched as he bent toward her in the kitchen. She muttered, "You got a lot of trouble? Don't make it worser, Moshe."

    "There's no trouble, Tante. I have business to take care of.... I don't think I can wait for tea, after all."

    "I put out Pa's cup for you."

    Moses drank tap water from his father's teacup.

    "Good-by, Tante Taube, keep well." He kissed her forehead.

    "Remember I helped you?" she said. "You shouldn't forget. Take care, Moshe."

    He left by the back door; it made departure simpler. Honeysuckle grew along the rainspout, as in his father's time, and fragrant in the evening-almost too rich. Could any heart become quite petrified?

    He gunned his motor at the stoplight, trying to decide which was the faster route to Harper Avenue.

    The new Ryan Expressway was very quick but it would land him in the thick of the Negro traffic on West 51st Street, where people promenaded, or cruised in their cars. There was Garfield Boulevard, much better; however, he was not sure he could find his way through Washington Park after dark. He decided to follow Eden's to Congress Street and Congress to the Outer Drive. Yes, that would be fastest. What he would do when he got to Harper Avenue he hadn't yet decided. Madeleine had threatened him with arrest if he so much as showed his face near the house. The police had his picture, but that was sheer bunk, bunk and paranoia, the imperiousness of imaginary powers that had once impressed him. But there was now a real matter between him and Madeleine, a child, a reality-June. Out of cowardice, sickness, fraud, by a bungling father out of a plotting bitch, something genuine! This little daughter of his! He cried out to himself as he raced up the ramp of the Expressway that nobody would harm her.

    He accelerated, moving in his lane with the rest of the traffic. The thread of life was stretched tight in him. It quivered crazily. He did not fear its breaking so much as his failing to do what he should. The little Falcon was storming. He thought his speed was terrible until a huge trailer truck passed him on the right, when he realized that this was not the time to risk a traffic ticket-not with a pistol in his pocket-and lifted his foot from the pedal. Peering left and right, he recognized that the new Expressway had been cut through old streets, streets he knew. He saw the vast gas tanks, crowned with lights, from a new perspective, and the rear of a Polish church with a Christ in brocades exhibited in a lighted window, like a showcase. The long curve eastbound passed over the freight yards, burning with sunset dust, rails streaking westward; next, the tunnel: under the mammoth post office; next, the State Street honky-tonks. From the last slope of Congress Street the distortions of dusk raised up the lake like a mild wall crossed by bands, amethyst, murky blue, irregular silver, and a slate color at the horizon, boats hanging rocking inside the breakwater, and helicopters and small aircraft whose lights teetered overhead.

    The familiar odor of the fresh water, bland but also raw, reached him as he sped south. It did not seem illogical that he should claim the privilege of insanity, violence, having been made to carry the rest of it-name-calling and gossip, railroading, pain, even exile in Ludeyville. That property was to have been his madhouse. Finally, his mausoleum.