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Because you could do something with the caseload. Very definitely, you could do something with them and what was done mattered. For one thing sex with her seemed to affect them and they were different when, shaking, they came off her. And in the second place, Elizabeth decided, bounding into the subway in an almost unladylike way, in the second place and she was now willing to admit this, she enjoyed what she was doing, found it rewarding and was going to keep on doing it as long as she could, without any need, ever again for the verifying experience.

At the welfare center, coming back in quickly after noon she finds Oved in a silent, ominous mood. He seems almost unaware of her presence. “I see you’re back, Miss Moore,” he says to her at some later point and then, mysteriously, goes off to what he says is an “emergency conference” with the case supervisor. Elizabeth wonders vaguely if it has to do with her and whether he is really going to bring her up on charges but decides that it does not matter. If the worst should happen and she should be denied certification she will merely resign, take all the tests again and start anew in the department, at a different welfare center. They are chronically understaffed, they are desperate for people, let alone dedicated, competent people like Elizabeth Moore. As emergency worker, alone in the case unit, she works her way through the afternoon’s crises almost casually, dealing with a threatened eviction, an aged applicant in Intake who claims that if he does not get emergency relief he will use some safety matches to burn the center down, a phone call from a landlord (not Mandleman) who says that he suspects one of the clients of attempted arson. It has so little to do with the realities of her job that she can almost enjoy it, finding it a relaxing break. She does not have to deal with the painful, interpersonal relationship established in client therapy.

At about four o’clock, with Oved still gone in his emergency conference (maybe it is his own job which is in jeopardy) she receives a call from Schnitzler. He begins to talk the moment she has picked up the phone, before she has even identified herself, and she understands — as she has already suspected of the
chassids
— that their monomania is so great and their view of the outside world so threatening that Schnitzler simply assumes she would be there to take his call when he placed it. “Miss Moore,” he says in a quiet, frantic voice. “There is some trouble.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It is hard to explain. Yet I must explain it. Maybe I will not explain it. But then again I must try. Are you sure you don’t speak Jewish?”

“I don’t.”

“If you spoke Jewish it would be so much easier. I cannot, as you say, express myself properly in English. It is so difficult. But I will try. There is difficulty.”

“What is it?” she says sharply. “What’s wrong?” She tries to put down a thrust of irritation: she reminds herself that their relationship is brand-new, uncemented and that she must expect ambivalence and tension. Still, the
chassids
are all so obscure; that is the basic problem in relating to them, they do not seem to admit connection and turn stupid and shy at the wrong moments. Only at the question of money do they seem to come into focus.

“Is it your check?” she says, “did you lose your check?” It is a foolish question; it is not even checkday — this is the twenty-eighth, checkday is three days from now or looking at it another way, twelve days ago — but she is momentarily at a loss and it has been a difficult afternoon for her. “What
is
it?”

“It has nothing to do with my check. All is fine. Only — ” there is a sickening pause; she hears Schnitzler snuffling and sniffing in the background. “Only I must tell you — ”

“So tell me,” she says. “I’m very busy today, Rabbi Schnitzler.” She does not want to be short with him; there is so much to be accomplished and she badly needs his trust … but the man can be maddening. “If you won’t tell me — ”

“My wife,” Schnitzler says and then begins to talk quickly, disjointedly, “what came between us yesterday was sacrimonial is that your word? and made me feel very good but it also made me feel very bad as well and I could not sleep, the higher consciousness, the law of the sacred texts and the Talmud which regard so much as an abomination — ”

“Guilt,” she says shortly. “We’ve already spoken about guilt. We’ll talk some more. You have no reason — ”

“But I can t talk like that now, Miss Moore!” Schnitzler says with a whine. “It is too late, I feel guilty. Maybe the guilt is not right and what you say is interesting but you do not understand our tradition.
I
do not understand much of our tradition. The guilt was so much that I told my wife — ”

“That,” Elizabeth says tightly, clenching the phone, “that was really not necessary.”

“Well yes. No. Of course. But I tell her — ”

“Our relationship is privileged and exists only between the two of us.”

“I know. I know. Nevertheless this tormenting feel of guilt, need. I have lived with my wife so many years. Also thirteen children. Also she is, you know, pregnant with the fourteenth? You know? I should have told you. So I felt that I had to tell her but the woman did not understand — ”

“Why should she understand?” Elizabeth says. She wills herself toward a social worker’s calm. The Schnitzler problem is a family rather than an agency issue. It will have to be resolved on those grounds. Part of the ensuing familial conflict would be cathartic, she supposes. It is not, in any event, her immediate responsibility. “We will talk more about this Rabbi Schnitzler,” Elizabeth says. “I’m due out there for a visit next month anyway. But we can make it earlier. Perhaps I will be out there next week. We will try to resolve some of the tensions — ”

“Tensions!” Schnitzler says sobbing, “tensions! My wife, she went to the Lubavitcher congregation. She went there with all thirteen of the children, two of them in arms, one of which she is still suckling. Thirteen children and my wife on the streets, leaving my house! Now she is in the congregation itself, in one of the emergency rooms. She told them everything.”

“She — ”

“Tension, Miss Moore! It is too late to talk of tension! Do you understand? She has told them everything and this very day there is a meeting being held right at this moment to discuss my fate and the fate of my family. I cannot bear this! This is not my fault.”

“You should not have told her.”

“I should not have told her but I did tell her. I appeal to you, Miss Moore,” Schnitzler says out of the depths of his dependency. “I am frantic. Come down. Come down here at once and the two of us will go to the congregation and you will meet before the elders. You will explain what has happened. You will tell my side of the story.”

“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth says. Behind her she notes that Oved has at last returned, he is carrying a pencil in his grip as if it were a suitcase and seems filled with purpose. “That is impossible. You do not understand the functioning of the agency.”

“Of course I do not understand!” Schnitzler says frantically, “I am a stupid man and now I am the shame of the community. Who is to say what the congregation will do to me? Who is to say what may happen if this reaches the level of the rabbi himself? I may be exiled in disgrace. You must tell them, Miss Moore! Tell them!”

“Tell them what?”

“You better get off that phone,” Oved says to her quietly. “Trouble brewing in Intake.”

“That it was an affair of madness. That you, what is your word,
verfluehren — ”

“
Ver
what?”

“That you how I can put this, that you enticed me against my will, that it was you who caused — ”

“Big things brewing in Intake,” Oved says cheerfully. “Off that phone, emergency worker.” He seems to be a man at peace, an Oved reconstituted, but Elizabeth is under so much pressure that she is unable to become involved with it as she might have otherwise. “Come on, have a heart — ”

“You must,” Schnitzler says feebly. His tones have dropped an octave; some conviction of disaster seems already present. “You won’t. I know you won’t. But the congregation — ”

“I’m sorry, Rabbi Schnitzler,” Elizabeth says. “The workings of the department, the relationship between an investigator and the client are confidential and I couldn’t get involved. I couldn’t possibly get involved.”

“This is so easy to say!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Criminal! You are a criminal, Miss Moore!” Schnitzler ways weakly and then hangs on the phone. She can tell that he wants to hang it up on her but some frail, mad thread of hope still holds him on. “Please,” he gasps, “please.”

“We’ll discuss this later,” she says and puts the phone down, feeling some consternation — this is, after all, the second time that her relationships’ confidentiality has been broken and it has been done so, it would seem, in bad circumstances. She turns, sees Oved smiling at her and feels an insane blush coming over her cheeks. She wonders what Oved would say if he got wind of the doings at the Lubavitcher congregation.

“Big problems in Intake,” Oved says once again, benignly. “Got a lady down there who has been evicted and about seventeen kids. Not your case but that’s life. We’ll be working here until eleven o’clock to get that bitch resettled. Just the two of us and case consultation hand in hand.” Oved winks, his features relax further, he beams at her as Elizabeth, trembling, backs from the desk holding her fieldbook. “It’s tough, real tough,” Oved says, “but it looks like one way or the other you’ll be spending the evening with the black man, huh?” And winks and winks and winks at her, cheerful and confident, Oved transmogrified then, and nothing for Elizabeth to do but to stumble downstairs, thinking abstract thoughts of the doings at the Lubavitcher congregation, and take the case.

They work together until past nine in the evening: the evicted mother is monstrously fat (she has been receiving a supplementary grant for special stockings and varicose veins for several years) and the children nasty and whining, the air in the welfare center after the power has been cut and all but one of the superintendent staff have gone home, becomes oppressively foul and Elizabeth, staggering from telephone to Intake to Oved to typewriter to give Case Consultation the maddening additional information it says it needs before it can authorize a hotel (“don’t worry about that shit,” Oved tells her happily, “them bastards put the approval on their desks and went home at five o’clock but left order that it ain’t going to be released until they make you dance for four hours and that’s the way it going to be; I got no plans for this evening and neither do you I hope so that’s that”) feels at odd intervals that she might faint but she forces herself through these neurasthenic moments, finding herself at last in a high, hard arena of sensation where everything is very distant and easy and she is able to accomplish what she has to do without thought. “You got nice legs, honey,” the evicted mother tells her at one point, “real nice legs, I sure would like to have legs like that or even get a feel of them” and Elizabeth realizes that there is probably a lesbian undertone to this but this does not bother her. She has never gone to bed with a female welfare client and she will never do so; the therapeutic relationship has its definite limits and this is one for her. “I just feel so bad, so guilty about everything,” the evictee had told her later, “it makes me feel that I’m worthless,” and Elizabeth, who at a different moment would have tried a casework approach, shown the woman that what she felt was not guilt but hostility, the desire to strike out at the world by being evicted, found that she had no impulse to say any of it. The woman would have to take care of herself. Casework, like everything else, had its limits. At nine o’clock the approval came through and the check which the Head Clerk had left sealed in his desk all the time was released on phoned instructions from the clerk as to its whereabouts. “Somebody have to take those fools up to the hotel,” Oved says musing, tapping the envelope in his hands. “The money has to be turned over to the manager by procedure. Actually I’d rather give it to the bitch and let her find it on her own. Maybe we’d never see her again. The trouble is that the cunt would probably drop off the kiddies in the nearest subway station and bug out of everybody’s life forever so we’d still be stuck with them.”

“I’m the caseworker,” Elizabeth says. “I’ll go with them and turn over the check.”

“Well that’s not strictly fair,” Oved says, “you’re a young girl and that upper west side turns out to be kind of a mean section this time of night. What I think I’ll do is that the two of us will go together.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Oh come on, Miss Moore,” Oved says with a contented little laugh. “You and the black man can take the subway uptown with these bastards and drop them off. I got an appointment in that neighborhood anyway. I have given up on you. I have no more interest in you. I am not trying to put any make on you ever again and you got nothing to worry about in that direction. You ain’t even that pretty if you want to know the truth or at least I don’t consider you pretty. The black man has had better than you in his time, just remember that.”

“Please stop it, Mr. Oved,” Elizabeth says, “it isn’t prejudice — ”

“Of course it isn’t prejudice honey; it’s common sense. We got nothing good to come out of us, I do accept that,” Oved says. “Come on,” he adds, reaching for his coat which has been at the ready for three hours, slung over his clerk’s chair, “let’s get going; we’ll get out of here. I’d do it myself, carry the check and all but that wouldn’t strictly speaking be right. It’s the worker’s responsibility but being the supervisor as I am, I’ll share it.”

There is nothing that Elizabeth can do; the situation is cast and Oved, remarkably, seems to be in control. She makes one effort saying, “Well, if you’re going up that way anyway, if you have an appointment then couldn’t
you
assume the whole responsibility?” but this new Oved merely laughs lightly, says that this would be completely beside the fact of procedures since the worker herself must be responsible for delivery of the check and case consultation would be in a fury the next morning, a complete fury, if they found that Elizabeth had dropped her responsibilities. “Them sons of bitches got lines into everywhere, they in contact with all the hotel managers and they’ll check,” Oved says to her cheerfully and so they go, all of them go: the evictee and her children and Oved and Elizabeth silently ride the empty subway to the upper west side and there Elizabeth takes the envelope from her pocket in the hotel lobby and hands it to the manager who, he says, has been waiting there for just this for several hours. “Ordinarily I go home at five, Miss Moore,” the manager says, “but we were very concerned about this family, very concerned indeed. And so I made a special point of staying late. Thank you,” he says, taking the check, “what I’ll do is to cash this and return the food money to them after we’ve deducted our week’s rent,” and with a graceful bow and wink he leaves Elizabeth’s life forever along with the evictee and children. The evictee clutches her and Oved’s hands, thanks them for everything that they have done despite her irresponsibility, her ignorance, her poor care of her children. Tomorrow morning at nine A.M. her case will be transferred far from them and to the Amsterdam Welfare Center; it will be their problem.

“Well,” Oved says, when they are back on West 95th Street, “it’s been a long day, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, it has. I want to go home.”

“Well you can surely go home,” Oved says. “Might I buy you some dinner first, though? We get a food allowance you know; you don’t have to pay for dinner.”

“Mr. Oved,” Elizabeth says, “I appreciate what you’re saying and what you’ve done but I just don’t want to have dinner with you. I’m very tired and think I’ll do better just to go home.”

“To Henry Street? You don’t want to go to Henry Street,” Oved says with a chuckle. “Look, you got the wrong idea about me. You think that I trying to put the make on you still and again and you don’t understand that I wouldn’t touch you now for anything. I have absolutely no desire for you, Elizabeth Moore, because you are a racist.”

“I’m not a racist,” Elizabeth says, clutching her hands furiously as two enormous trucks go by making Broadway shake, as old people, stumbling with canes down Broadway seem to be blown like leaves in the truck exhaust. “That is not the situation at all. You have no right — ”

“Of course you’re a racist,” Oved says happily, “and besides that, I’m not going to have to worry about you much more. Things are being worked through, things will come to their conclusion. I had a good meeting about you with the Case Supervisor, Miss Moore, and you will no longer be in my case unit. Effective very soon. Are you surprised to hear me say that?”

“I have to stay in the unit. I’m entitled to a hearing. I have clients — ”

“Clients all over the city, suffering and needing. Maybe you find some others. No, Miss Moore, we have arranged a transfer for you. You are not being discharged because I have seen the error of my vengeful ways. Instead I feel that you can make some other supervisor’s life miserable but I wouldn’t do it to anybody I know in this welfare center. So effective next week you are moving uptown. Way uptown. You are going to the Fordham Welfare Center in the Bronx where you will be a home economics advisor.”

“You can’t do this to me. You can’t — ”

“Oh yes I can,” Oved says beaming under a movie marquee; his face taking on the hues of red and green, lights dancing across it and here they pause while he grips her hands dramatically. “I may make only six thousand and fifty dollars a year with increments and have to jump to every case consultation clerk in Manhattan but I have a few prerogatives as a unit supervisor and I have used them. I have indeed used them. You are leaving the field, Miss Moore and going to a welfare center which is short a good home economics advisor. You can figure out a sweater allowance for the little bastards and special diets for their mamas. And furthermore, Miss Moore — ” Oved says, starting to walk again and ironically it is now Elizabeth who has to pursue him to hear what he is saying, “furthermore, there is no way that you can protest because you are merely a provisional worker and are covered by none of the rights and privileges of the civil service. You will obtain your certification at Fordham and be able to make waves then for some other people but as far as I am concerned you are going to go. Of course,” Oved says, “you can always quit. If you don’t find the transfer to your liking, nobody is making you stay.”

“That’s not fair,” Elizabeth says. She is crying. Fatigue, hunger, dismay, the interview with Schnitzler have all unsettled her, otherwise she would never show emotion. “I have responsibilities to my clients. I have a caseload. I have established certain relationships — ”

“You’ve fouled up everything, you dirty little Jewish cunt,” Oved says, all of the good humor suddenly fleeing from him, his face threatening, his eyes tortured, “you’ve fucked up your whole caseload with your social worker bullshit and you’ve treated me like a dog and now you are getting yours,” and in mid-sentence he has already left her. He has darted into a subway kiosk and still talking, apparently to himself, is moving rapidly down the stairs. He passes out of eye view and there is nothing Elizabeth can see but slush in the pavements, pedestrians staring at her, a filthy newspaper with men’s magazines hanging by clothespins to wire draped above.

“I can’t stand it anymore,” Elizabeth says and thinks she might cry but this would not be professional, it would be terribly undignified — and in any event, the welfare institute reminded you to be on your best behavior at all times; you could never tell when you might be in the presence of a client or a client’s friend who would talk about you — and she would not give Oved the satisfaction. She walks, instead, down ten blocks of Broadway, blinking her eyes and keeping a rein on herself; at 96th Street she goes into the subway herself and waits for a long time for the local to come in, the local that will take her back to Henry Street, the local that will leave her at the door shattered and yet, somehow, she must manage to carry on.

Things seem to be closing in on her and yet she cannot get over the unfairness of it all: what she was trying to do was her job in accordance with the policies and procedures of the welfare training institute. Still, things seem to be closing in. To be closing in. Closing. In.