Collected Fiction Page 6

  He got up and mumbled, “Excuse me,” and started through the crowded restaurant toward the men’s room. Take hold, he said to himself, take hold. Divorce Laura, live a rigorous, ascetic life, live as he had when he was twenty, just ten years ago, when things were clear and honorable, and when you faced a new year, you weren’t sick with yourself for the one just passed.

  He went down the steps to the men’s room. It would start right here. He’d soak his head with ice-cold water for ten minutes. The pale sweat would be washed off, the flush would die from his cheeks, his hair would be cool and in order on his head, he would look out across the new year with clearer eyes …

  He opened the door to the men’s room, and went to the washbowls and looked at himself with loathing in the mirror, at the slack face, the rumpled, conniving eyes, the weak, indecisive mouth. He remembered how he had looked at twenty. Tough, thin, alive, uncompromising … That face was still there, he felt, buried beneath the unpleasant face reflected in the mirror. He would quarry his old face out from the unsightly outcroppings of the years between.

  He ducked his head and splashed the icy water on his eyelids and cheeks. He dried himself, his skin tingling pleasantly. Refreshed, he walked soberly up the steps to rejoin the others at the big table in the center of the noisy room.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ON THE WESTERN EDGE of America, in the sea-coast town of Santa Monica, among the flat sprawling streets and the shredding palms, the old year was coming to an end in soft, gray fog, rolling in off the oily water, rolling in over the scalloped surf breaking on the wet beaches, rolling in over the hot-dog stands, closed for the winter, and the homes of the movie stars, and the muffled coast road that led to Mexico and Oregon.

  The streets of the town were deserted, left to the fog, as though the new year were a public disaster that all the inhabitants of the place were avoiding by wisely staying in their homes until the danger was past. Here and there a light shone wetly, and on some streets the fog was tinged the garish neon-red which has become the color of night-time city America. The flickering red tubes advertised restaurants, ice-cream parlors, moving-picture theatres, hotels, drive-ins, but their real effect in the soundless, sorrowful night was tragic and foreboding, as though the human race were being given a furtive glimpse, in the mist, of its last home, cavernous and blood-colored through gray, shuffling curtains.

  The electric sign of the Sea View Hotel, from which at no time, even on the clearest days, could any body of water be observed, added its baleful, minor tone to the thin, sifting fog outside Noah’s window. The light filtered into the darkened room and touched the damp plaster walls and the lithograph of Yosemite Falls above the bed. Splinters of red fell on Noah’s father’s sleeping face on the pillow, on the large, fierce nose, the curving, distended nostrils, the rigid, deep eyesockets, on the high, imposing brow, the bushy white hair, courtly moustache and Vandyke beard, like a Kentucky colonel’s in the movies, ludicrous and out of place here, on a dying Jew in the narrow, hired room.

  Noah would have liked to read as he sat there, but he didn’t want to wake his father by putting on the light. He tried to sleep, sitting in the single, hard-upholstered chair, but his father’s heavy breathing, roaring and uneven, kept him awake. The doctor had told Noah that Jacob was dying, as had the woman his father had sent away on Christmas Eve, that widow what was her name … Morton—but Noah didn’t believe them. His father had had Mrs. Morton send him a telegram in Chicago, telling him to come at once. Noah had sold his overcoat and his typewriter and the old wardrobe trunk, to pay the bus fare. He had rushed out, sitting up all the way, and had arrived in Santa Monica light-headed and exhausted, just in time to be present for the big scene.

  Jacob had brushed his hair and combed his beard, and had sat up in bed like Job arguing with God, He had kissed Mrs. Morton who was over fifty years old, and sent her from him, saying in his rolling, actorish voice, “I wish to die in the arms of my son. I wish to die among the Jews. Now we say goodbye.”

  That was the first time Noah had heard that Mrs. Morton wasn’t Jewish. She wept, and the whole scene was like something from the second act of a Yiddish play on Second Avenue in New York. But Jacob had been adamant. Mrs. Morton had gone. Her married daughter had insisted on taking the weeping widow away to the family home in San Francisco. Noah was left alone with his father in the small room with the single bed on the side street a half mile from the winter ocean.

  The doctor came for a few moments every morning. Aside from him, Noah didn’t see anyone. He didn’t know anyone else in the town. His father insisted that he stay at his side day and night, and Noah slept on the floor near the window, on a lumpy mattress that the hotel manager had grudgingly given him.

  Noah listened to the heavy, tragic breathing, filling the medicine-smelling air. For a moment he was sure his father was awake and purposely breathing that way, labored and harsh, not because he had to, but because he felt that if a man lay dying, his every breath should announce that fact. Noah stared closely at his father’s handsome patriarchal head on the dark pillow next to the dimly glinting array of medicine bottles. Once more Noah couldn’t help feeling annoyed at the soaring, bushy, untrimmed eyebrows, the wavy, theatrical, coarse mane of hair, which Noah was sure his father secretly bleached white, the spectacular white beard on the lean, ascetic jaws. Why, Noah thought, irritably, why does he insist on looking like a Hebrew King, on an embassy to California? It would be different if he had lived that way … But with all the women he’d gone through in his long, riotous life, all the bankruptcies, all the money borrowed and never returned, all the creditors that stretched from Odessa to Honolulu, it was a sour joke on the world for his father to look like Moses coming down from Sinai with the stone tablets in his hands.

  “Make haste,” Jacob said, opening his eyes, “make haste, O God, to deliver me. Make haste to help me, O Lord.”

  That was another habit that had always infuriated Noah. Jacob knew the Bible by heart, both in Hebrew and English, although he was absolutely irreligious, and salted his speech with long, impressive quotations at all times.

  “Deliver me, O my God, out of the hand of the wicked, out of the hand of the unrighteous and cruel man.” Jacob rolled his head, facing the wall, and closed his eyes once more. Noah got up from his chair and went over to the bed and pulled the blankets up closer around his father’s throat. But there was no sign from Jacob that he noticed any of this. Noah stared down at him for a moment, listening to the bitter breathing. Then he turned and went to the window. He opened the window and sniffed at the dank, rolling mist, freighted with the heavy smell of the sea. A car sped dangerously down the street between the straggling palms, and there was the sound of a horn blown in celebration, lost in the mist.

  What a place, Noah thought irrelevantly, what a place to celebrate New Year’s Eve! He shivered a little in the influx of cold air, but he kept the window open. He had been working in a mail-order house in Chicago as a filing clerk, and, being honest with himself, the excuse to come to California, even if it was to watch his father die, had been a welcome one. The sunny coast, the warm beaches, he had thought, the orchards tossing their leaves in the sun, the pretty girls … He grinned sourly as he looked around him. It had rained for a week. And his father was prolonging his death-scene interminably. Noah was down to his last seven dollars and he had found out that creditors had a lien on his father’s photographic studio. Even under the best of circumstances, even if everything were sold at high prices, they could only hope to recover thirty cents on the dollar. Noah had gone down to the shabby little studio near the ocean and had peered in through the locked plate-glass door. His father had specialized in very artistic, very terrible retouched portraits of young women. A hundred heavy-lidded local beauties draped in black velvet, with startling high lights and slumbrous eyes had peered back at him through the dusty neglected glass. It was the sort of business his father had had again and again, from one end of the country to another, the sort
of business that had driven Noah’s mother to an early death, the sort of business that appears and disappears in down-at-the-heel buildings for a season, makes a ragged little flourish for a few months then vanishes, leaving behind it only some inconclusive, tattered books, a smattering of debts, a stock of aging photographs and advertising signs that are finally burned in a back alley when the next tenant arrives.

  In his day Jacob had also sold cemetery lots, contraceptive devices, real estate, sacramental wine, advertising space, second-hand furniture, bridal clothing, and had even once, improbably, set himself up in a ship chandler’s store in Baltimore, Maryland. And at no one of these professions had he ever made a living. And in all of them, with his deft, rolling tongue, his archaic rhetoric, loaded with Biblical quotations, with his intense, handsome face and vital, broad-handed movements, he had always found women who made up for him the difference in what he secured by his own efforts from the economic battlefield around him and what it took to keep him alive. Noah was his only child, and Noah’s life had been wandering and disordered. Often he had been deserted, often left for long periods with vague, distant relatives, or, lonely and persecuted, in shabby military schools.

  “They are burning my brother Israel in the furnace of the heathen.”

  Noah sighed and closed the window. Jacob was lying rigid now, staring up at the ceiling, his eyes wide open. Noah put on the single light which he had shaded with pink paper that was a little singed now in spots and added its small smell to the general sick-room atmosphere when the light was on.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, Father?” Noah asked.

  “I can see the flames,” Jacob said. “I can smell the burning flesh. I can see my brother’s bones crumbling in the fire. I deserted him and he is dying tonight among the foreigners.”

  Noah couldn’t help being annoyed with his father. Jacob hadn’t seen his brother in thirty-five years, had, in fact, left him in Russia to support their mother and father when Jacob had made his way to America. From everything that Noah had heard, Jacob had despised his brother, and they had parted enemies. But two years before, somehow, a letter from his brother had reached him from Hamburg, where Jacob’s brother had gone in 1919. The letter had been desperate and pleading. Noah had to admit that Jacob had done everything he could—had written countless letters to the Immigration Bureau, had gone to Washington and haunted the corridors of the State Department buildings, an improbable, bearded, anachronistic, holy vision, half rabbi, half river-gambler, among the soft-spoken, impervious young men from Princeton and Harvard who shuffled the papers vaguely and disdainfully on their polished desks. But nothing had come of it, and after the single, wild cry for help, there had been the dreadful silence of official Germany, and Jacob had returned to his sun and his photographic studio and his plump, widowed Mrs. Morton in Santa Monica and had said no more about it. But tonight, with the red-tinted fog sighing at the window, and the new year standing at the gate, and death, according to the doctor, a matter of hours, the deserted brother, caught in the welter of Europe, cried piercingly through the clouding brain.

  “Flesh,” Jacob said, his voice still rolling and deep, even on his last pillow, “flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, you are being punished for the sins of my body and the sins of my soul.”

  O God, Noah thought, looking down at his father, why must he always speak like a blank-verse shepherd giving dictation to a secretary on a hill in Judea?

  “Don’t smile.” Jacob peered sharply at him, his eyes surprisingly bright and knowing in the dark hollows of his face. “Don’t smile, my son, my brother is burning for you.”

  “I’m not smiling, Father.” Noah touched Jacob’s forehead soothingly. The skin was hot and sandy and Noah could feel a small, twitching revulsion in his fingertips.

  Jacob’s face was contorted in oratorical scorn. “You stand there in your cheap American clothes and you think, ‘What has he to do with me? He is a stranger to me. I have never seen him and if he dies, in the furnaces in Europe, what of it, people die every minute all over the world.’ He is not a stranger to you. He is a Jew and the world is hunting him, and you are a Jew and the world is hunting you.”

  He closed his eyes in cold exhaustion and Noah thought, if he only talked in simple, honest language; you would be moved, affected. After all, a father dying, obsessed with the thought of a murdered brother five thousand miles away, a single man at his loneliest moment, feeling the ghost insecure and fleeting in his throat, mourning for the fate of his people all over the world, was a touching and tragic thing. And while it was true that to him, Noah, there was no sense of immediacy or personal tragedy in what was happening in Europe, intellectually and rationally he could feel the somber weight of it. But long years of his father’s rhetoric, his father’s stagy gesturing for effect, had robbed Noah of all ability to be moved by him. All he could think of as he stood there looking at the gray face, listening to the heaving breath, was, Good God, the old man is going to keep it up to the end.

  “When I left him,” his father said, without opening his eyes, “when I left Odessa in 1903, Israel gave me eighteen rubles and he said to me, ‘You’re no good. Congratulations. Take my advice. Stick to women. America can’t be that different from the rest of the world. Women will be idiots there too. They will support you.’ We didn’t shake hands, and I left. He should have shaken my hand, no matter what, don’t you think, Noah?” Suddenly his father’s voice was changed. It was small and without timbre and it did not remind Noah of a stage performance.

  “Noah …”

  “Yes, Father?”

  “Don’t you think he should have shaken my hand?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Noah …”

  “Yes, Father.…”

  “Shake my hand, Noah.”

  After a moment, Noah leaned over and picked up his father’s dry, broad hand. The skin was flaked, and the nails, usually exquisitely cared for, pared and polished, were long and jagged and had crescents of dirt under them. They shook hands. Noah could feel the thin, restless, uneven pressure of the fingers.

  “All right, all right …” Jacob said, suddenly peevish, and pulled his hand away, caught in some inexplicable vision of his own. “All right, enough.” He sighed, stared up at the ceiling.

  “Noah …”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you a pencil and paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Write this down …”

  Noah went over to the table and sat down. He picked up a pencil and took out a sheet of flimsy white paper with an engraving of the Sea View Hotel on it, large, surrounded by sweeping lawns and tall trees, without basis of real life, but convincing and holiday-like on the stationery.

  “To Israel Ackerman,” Jacob said in a plain, business-like voice, “29 Kloster Strasse, Hamburg, Germany.”

  “But, Father,” Noah began.

  “Write it in Hebrew,” Jacob said, “if you can’t write German. He’s not very well educated, but he’ll manage to understand.”

  “Yes, Father.” Noah couldn’t write Hebrew or German, but he didn’t see any sense in telling his father.

  “My dear brother … Have you got that?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “I am ashamed of myself for not having written sooner,” Jacob began, “but you can well imagine how busy I’ve been. Soon after coming to America … Have you got that, Noah?”

  “Yes,” Noah said, making aimless little scratches on the paper. “I have it.”

  “Soon after coming to America …” Jacob’s voice rolled on, low and full of effort in the damp room, “I went into a large business. I worked hard, although I know you will not believe it, and I was promoted from one important position to another. In eighteen months I became the most valuable member of the firm. I was made a partner and I married the daughter of the owner of the business, a Mr. von Kramer, an old American family. I know you will be glad to know that we have a family of five sons and two daughters who
are a joy and pride to their parents in our old age, and we have retired to an exclusive suburb of Los Angeles, a large city on the Pacific Ocean where it is sunny all the time. We have a fourteen-room house and I do not rise till nine-thirty every morning and I go to my club and play golf every afternoon. I know you will be interested in this information at this time …”

  Noah felt a clot of emotion jammed in his throat. He had the wild notion that if he opened his mouth he would laugh, and that his father would die on peal after peal of his son’s laughter.

  “Noah,” Jacob asked querulously, “are you writing this down?”

  “Yes, Father.” Somehow Noah managed to say it.

  “It is true,” Jacob went on in his calm, dictating voice, “that you are the oldest son and you were constantly giving advice. But now, oldest and youngest do not have the same meaning. I have traveled considerably, and I think maybe you can profit from some advice from me. It is important to remember how to behave as a Jew. There are many people in the world, and they are becoming more numerous, who are full of envy. They look at a Jew and say, ‘Look at his table manners,’ or ‘The diamonds on his wife are really paste,’ or ‘See how much noise he makes in a theatre,’ or ‘His scales are crooked. You will not get your money’s worth in his shop.’ The times are getting more difficult and a Jew must behave as though the life of every other Jew in the world depended on every action of his. So he must eat quietly, using his knife and fork delicately. He must not put diamonds on his wife, especially paste ones. His scales must be the most honest in the city. He must walk in a dignified and self-respecting manner. “No,” Jacob cried, “cross all that out. It will only make him angry.”