The Prince of West End Avenue (14 page)

With fraternal good wishes, Rainer Maria Rilke

"In all these years, you've never told me about it," said Hamburger. "All right, you didn't want to talk about the past, that I could respect, I asked no questions. Some things it's better not to remember. But to say nothing about your poetry! Would it have hurt so much to tell an old friend about that, or to have shown him the letter?"

"How did you get it back? How long have you known it was stolen?"

"I knew nothing before yesterday morning, when you showed me the charades." Hamburger sighed and took a folded piece of paper from his wallet. "Look at this."

My first for some's forbidden food, And, too, a ranting actor rude. My second will in town be found, With golden chain on belly round. My whole's imbued with passion's heat, In many senses good to eat.

"That's me," he said sheepishly. "Ham, burgher. Hamburger."

"Then you've been getting them, too?"

"No, just this one. And there was no mystery. It was handed to me." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "The truth will out. I might as well tell you everything."

And so I learned about Hamburger's weekend in the Hamptons. It had been an idyllic time: a considerate hostess, cultured and congenial company, a sumptuous home, Edenic surroundings. Subsequent events, of course, had cast a retrospective pall, but at the time he had thought himself in heaven. At one point La Perlmutter had shown him her daughter's study. The wall above the couch was adorned with framed autographs: Kipling, Hemingway, James, Sartre, Weill, among others. His eye happened to catch Rilke's signature. "But I thought nothing of that. Why should I? Certainly I didn't stop to read the letter." They had gone into the study to enjoy a moment of privacy. "Hermione stood close; I drank in her perfume. My mind, I assure you, was on topics other than literary."

On Saturday evening, after dinner, La Perlmutter amused the company with charades. She had an extraordinary aptitude, creating them on the spot, viva voce. Each of the guests was gently mocked—"Tastefully, you understand. It was all done in the spirit of fun." Hamburger's name, she pretended, was particularly difficult. She would need time to think about it. The conversation in the drawing room moved on to other sprightly topics.

That night he achieved his heart's desire, reached an ecstasy beyond the power of words to describe. The next morning, at breakfast, she handed him the charade, the one he had just shown me. "For private consumption only," she had said demurely, at once alluding to and redoubling the risque double entendre of the last line.

In the afternoon, during a walk on the grounds, with the brilliant foliage bathed in that extraordinary light I had

observed from my windows at the Emma Lazarus, he had asked her to marry him, and she had accepted.

Hamburger held his head in his hands and rocked from side to side. He made a strong effort to pull himself together. "So now you know," he said, his voice trembling. "She stole your letter, and she sent you the charades."

"Your fiancee?"

"Not anymore. That's all over."

He had gone back with Hermione to the Hamptons to retrieve the letter. This morning he had returned alone.

"But why did she do it?"

"She wouldn't tell me. She cried and cried. "He knows,' she said. My heart was breaking, Otto. 'He knows.' Do you?"

Did I? When a recent widower, I had rejected her advances. Since then our relationship, if that is the proper word, had been—what? cool? inimical? Was that it? A woman scorned? But who could have guessed that my slighting of her would have such calamitous consequences? Obviously I could say none of this to my poor friend. "I know nothing," I said. "Perhaps when she returns—"

"She'll never return."

"Never mind against me, what did she have against Lip-schitz?"

"Who hasn't got something against Lipschitz?"

"Oh, Benno, I'm so sorry."

"It's finished, over and done with, all for the best."

What can one say in the face of such nobility, such grandeur of soul? Witness Hamburger, torn between loyalties, tumbled from felicity to misery, a Hercules at the Crossroads, and like Hercules choosing the heroic path!

The Red Dwarf claims innocence.

Hamburger and I confronted him this afternoon at two

o'clock, the beginning of the siesta hour, a time when the noisy engine of the Emma Lazarus idles at a gentle hum. He opened his door a crack and peered up at us suspiciously. Recognition dawned, and he flung the door wide. "Come in, comrades, come in!" We had got him up from bed: he wore only boxer shorts, voluminous, with blue polka dots on a dingy off-white background. What a hairy little fellow he is! The shades were drawn; the bed was rumpled. His room is appropriately Spartan: an iron bedstead, a small table, hard wooden chairs; on the walls, giant photographs of Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, Marilyn Monroe. "Sit down, sit down," he said. The only object of interest in the place is a copper samovar gleaming on a small chest of drawers.

The Red Dwarf executed a little jig. "So, comrades, we've won the revolution without striking a single blow."

"Lipschitz says he was pushed," said Hamburger.

"Typical Zionist mystification. First they make the boo-boo, then they look around for someone to blame."

"A broken hip is more than a boo-boo," I said.

"Better a broken hip than a broken head."

"He may die, Poliakov," said Hamburger.

The Red Dwarf shrugged and held his hands apart in the manner of Michelangelo's Pieta. "And the rest of us?" he said.

The interrogation was not going the way we had expected. I tried another tack. "What was it you meant the other day? You told me it would be better if we weren't seen together for a while?"

He grinned, his gold tooth winking. From the pocket of a denim jacket hanging on the door, he took a key and held it triumphantly aloft. "The key to the costume closet! Poliakov reporting to the Central Committee: mission accomplished! But in the light of later developments, Comrade Director, it seems we had no need to liberate it." I suppose I blushed. "No need for modesty. You're the people's candidate."

"We'll see," I said dismissively.

"But what was Lipschitz doing in the stairwell?" Hamburger was not yet satisfied.

"That's easy," said the Red Dwarf. "He goes out there to pass wind. On this floor we all know it. Believe me, with that stink, no one could get near him. He must've blown himself off the landing, a self-propelled rocket."

Hamburger laughed. Such talk was, so to speak, right up his alley.

"Fundamentally," said the Red Dwarf, "he couldn't help himself."

"Not bad, Poliakov," said Hamburger. "Not bad. In such matters there is no motive: it was a case of fart for fart's sake."

I MUST SAY I miss Goldstein's. The brouhaha last week has rendered us all personae non gratae. One focus of the day has blurred. Hamburger agrees with me. It's not just a matter of the food, the denial of which is bad enough, it's also the absence of the total ambience, which offered some indefinable something that has all but disappeared from the Upper West Side. The smells, the sights, the very faces and accents were all deeply familiar, a goodfellowship that cannot be replaced. And Goldstein himself, his sensitive, florid mien, his portly, impeccably clad exterior, even his wretched jokes—all these I miss. Who sought this feud? Not I, not any of us. This morning, on my walk down Broadway, I happened to see through the glass Goldstein scratching his back against the central pillar in his customary fashion and Joe shuffling past on his poor bunions, a cup of coffee in his hand. Without even thinking, I waved. Goldstein turned away; Joe shrugged and shook his head.

Is there nothing to be done? Hamburger thinks not. "There you have an essential fact of life," he said. "Didn't you know? Can you have forgotten it? Good things come to an end, that's all there is to it. Best forget about it. Shit stinks; flush it away."

"After more than twenty years?"

"For me, longer."

Probably he's right. Even if we were admitted once again as customers, something would be different. What's happened has happened. Who knows better than I that the past cannot be changed?

"He maketh me to lie down in green pastures?" offered Hamburger.

Could that be it? "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . ," I went on, marveling.

Tosca Dawidowicz let out an anguished wail. Lipschitz licked his lips.

"Better take her out of here," Hamburger suggested to La Grabscheidt. "She's going to upset him."

"Come, Tosca, come, there's nothing more we can do. You'll make yourself—God forbid—ill!" And she helped her to her feet.

At the door La Dawidowicz flung aside Lottie's supportive arm, turned to face the bed, and struck that attitude from act 3, scene 1, that I well remember poor Sinsheimer coaching her in, her right leg bent, left leg trailing, the back of her left hand lightly touching the forehead of her upturned face:

"And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, That sucked the honey of his music vows, Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh."

She flung a kiss at the recumbent form, murmured "Good night, sweet prince!" then turned, distraught, and made her exit, followed by La Grabscheidt.

Hamburger, in spite of himself, applauded.

We turned back to the bed.

Lipschitz opened his eyes. "Are they gone?" he hissed.

I nodded.

"Thank God!" He was grinning.

The transformation was remarkable. But for the traction apparatus that kept his legs immobile, he was his former self. We congratulated him on his recovery.

"I'm finished with old women," Lipschitz said.

Hamburger winced.

" That one. can suck a man dry. I had to insist, she wants to see me, she's got to bring with her a chaperone. Otherwise, give her five minutes, she'd be here in bed with me. A nympho, take my word for it."

Hamburger was anxious to change the subject ("Is there anything you need, something I can pick up from the library, a book, magazines?"), but Lipschitz was not yet finished.

"My own mother ran off with a presser from Bayonne. She was sixty-three, can you believe it? They used to call her the Belle of Pitkin Avenue. You can imagine why, so you know I'm not bragging. How d'you think it feels to have for a father a schlemiel? The life she'd led him, I told him he was better off without her. I myself was a laughingstock. 'What can she find in Bayonne,' he said, 'she couldn't find better on Pitkin?' This he said over and over again to whoever would listen to him. He never got over it, the old shmuck, may he rest in peace. So when I tell you, watch out for old women, I know what I'm talking."

"There've been rumors, Nahum, about your accident," said Hamburger.

"What rumors?" He looked at us sharply.

"Some people say you were pushed," I said.

"What people?"

"No one in particular. It's in the air. You know how it is around here. Did someone push you?"

"Maybe yes, maybe no. My lips are sealed. The truth's in here." He tapped his skull. "But this much I'll tell you, between me, you, and the lamppost. Not a word outside this room. This morning the Kommandant came to see me, and with him Rifkind, the shyster: How'm I feeling? I'm looking good. They taking care of me? He tells me he flew in from Jerusalem as soon as he heard the news. For Nahum Lipschitz, nothing but the best. He wanted personally to oversee my treatment.

"Meanwhile, I notice Rifkind taking some papers out of his briefcase. A formality, nothing to worry. All I had to do was

sign a couple forms. The Kommandant was already unscrewing his fountain pen. Rifkind points with his finger, here and here. A detail, nothing: only I should sign I don't hold the Kommandant and the Emma Lazarus responsible for what happened." Lipschitz gave a dry chuckle. "Was I born yesterday? First, I told him, get rid of Rifkind, then we can talk. I had him by the balls, and he knew it. So the shyster puts back his papers in the briefcase and goes, a cholera should only catch him. A long story short, what it boils down to is this: on my part, I say nothing more about the accident; on his part, when Tuvye Bialkin dies, I have inside track to the penthouse. No papers, no signatures: a gentlemen's agreement."

Tuvye Bialkin is our second-oldest resident, a native of Odessa who made a fortune in Canada during Prohibition. The penthouse rooms are the plums of the Emma Lazarus, spacious, magnificent views of the Hudson, kitchenettes en suite.

"Is Tuvye ill?" Hamburger asked.

"He should only live to be a hundred and twenty," said Lipschitz piously, "but the Kommandant estimates about a week. Pleurisy, with complications." He licked his lips. "So everyone comes out a winner. You, Korner, you get to be Hamlet. Also the director."

"That isn't decided yet," I said.

"Yes, I've already given instructions. The Kommandant knows, also Tosca. But watch out, could be the production's jinxed. First Sinsheimer, then me."

Jinxed? I almost laughed out loud. What could a Lipschitz know about Purpose? "You'll be up and around yourself in no time," I said.

"Don't worry, it's yours in any case. You can do it, Korner. A piece of cake." And here he quoted the words that Hamlet, stoic in the face of death, utters to Horatio a little before his fatal duel: "The readiness is all."

Meanwhile, Lipschitz still held center stage. "To tell you

the truth, I did think for a while of reworking the play, making a few changes—Elsinore a veterans' hospital near Washington, for example. Then Hamlet could be a young lieutenant in a wheelchair, a World War Two hero, the Battle of the Bulge. And he'd have to find out who murdered his father, General Hamlet, also wounded, also a hero, but years before, maybe in Flanders, and also hospitalized. Ophelia could be a nurse; Claudius, chief medical officer at the hospital, the general's brother, now married to Gertrude, the murdered man's wife, and so on. Not bad, right? It has possibilities. Even burying Ophelia in Arlington: naturally the authorities would complain, and 'but that great command o'ersways the order, she should in ground unsanctified been lodg'd.' But the fact is, I've lost interest. And that you. can blame on Tosca Dawidowicz." He licked his lips. "A Lilith, a succuba."