Drudging in the laundry put Lee into a tailspin. Utterly dispirited, she did not even have a date for New Year’s Eve, because she wanted none.
Peter, Mark, and I were meeting at the Quat apartment, to go down to Times Square and watch the ball drop at midnight. I invited her along, and she at once agreed, obviously hoping to pick up from Mark some news of Moshe Lev. That was the very first time I saw a Christmas tree in a Jewish home; a sure-enough small fir in a corner of the Quat living room, complete with silver tinsel trim and scarlet baubles, crowned with a gilt star. At a grand piano near the tree, Mark Herz was tinkling simple jazz. “Ah, the girl from the Holy Land!” He switched to Hatikvah, ending with a glissando and a standing salute.
Lee got her news, all right. Mark said straight off that he had regards for her from his cousin, who had written from South Africa, asking him to ring Leonore Goodkind and say hello. “Moshe Lev really took to you, I gather,” Mark observed. “He said his wife and the whole family enjoyed your company.” Lev had moved to South Africa on business, wife, kids and all, for a couple of years, Mark reported, staying with Moshe’s wealthy brother, who had a huge house in Cape Town.
I had to admire the way Lee handled it. She made cheery small talk about Moshe’s children, drank a glass of eggnog, and left, saying that she was going on to a party. I knew she was heading home to lick her wounds, but Peter and Mark hadn’t a clue to how crushed she was.
We were debating whether to brave a thick drizzle and proceed to Times Square, when Dr. Quat and his wife showed up. In his courtly way he said, “You will see in the New Year with us,” and he brought out bottles of champagne which a bootlegger patient had pressed on him. So at midnight we stood around the piano, glasses in hand, and sang “Auld Lang Syne.”
“I raise my glass,” Dr. Quat said, “to a happy 1933, to our new President, and to Peter’s gainful employment.”
“It’s a race for life,” Peter said to us when the Quats retired. “Can I sell a story before I hear from Goldhandler? If I do, I’ll tell him to shove it.” His interview with the joke czar had gone well—too well, Peter said—and he might get a call any day, if a staff job opened up.
About one in the morning, Mark and I walked up Central Park West together. The rain had stopped. A misty moon shone through ragged clouds on late revellers, roistering along the wet black street, blowing horns. “How about that Christmas tree?” I said.
“Oh, well.” Mark Herz shrugged. “Peter says his father believes Jewish children shouldn’t grow up feeling deprived. As though Jewish and deprived weren’t two words to describe one thing.”
“Why do you say that? I’ve never felt deprived.”
Mark gave me a sidelong glance in reply.
“What do you think Jews should do, anyway, Mark?”
“About what?”
“About being Jewish.”
“Invent the space ship, and get off the planet while there’s time.”
A conversation stopper. We walked in silence. I had been waiting all evening for him to say something about my Varsity Show script, which early in the week I had given him to read. As we turned into the side street where he lived, I ventured, “I guess you didn’t think To Heil with It! is funny.”
“I don’t think Hitler is funny. If the German situation falls apart and he takes power, I doubt anybody will stay amused for long.” Outside his shabby brownstone boardinghouse, we shook hands. “Your show is full of droll things. I hope it’s chosen. Happy New Year.”
Well, the German situation did fall apart, Hitler got in, and among other grave international consequences, the Columbia Varsity Show judges rejected as out-of-date three competing scripts about funny Hitlers. If no acceptable new script were submitted in two weeks, there would be no show. I began beating my brain for an idea, and I decided to call off my Junior Prom date with Dorsi. The dance fell smack in the middle of those two weeks. First things first.
“David,” said Dorsi over the telephone, “if you break this date, I’ll never go out with you again. I had other invitations, you know. I bought a new dress just for the Prom. I won’t ever forgive you, David.”
Obsessed as I was by Dorsi Sabin, here was one thing that mattered more. “Dorsi, I’m going to write a winning script, and I’ll take you to the opening night.”
“I won’t go with you.” Girlish slam of receiver.
Within the hour, the ringing telephone broke into my slow down-hearted scrawling of notions for another script. Aha! Second thoughts, eh, Dorsi? Not quite ready to discard the juvenile but dazzling Vicomte, what? But it was only Mark Herz.
“Are you giving up on the Varsity Show?”
“I’m going to write a new one.”
“In two weeks?”
“Yes.”
“Any ideas?”
“A few, but I can’t get going.”
“Come over to my lab tomorrow.”
The laboratory was a big bleak evil-smelling tiled room full of sinks, pipes, crooked glass tubes, and the like. No place, I thought, to try to be comical. It was odd to see Mark Herz in a stained laboratory coat, at home in these Dr. Frankenstein surroundings. I felt science and humor did not go together, and considered science altogether a grim dangerous nuisance. In required high school courses my attempts at experiments had produced only sparks, stinks, boilings-over, and explosions. I had faked the numbers callously to make the reports come out right. The Man in the Iron Mask was a paradox; at least by rumor something of a physics genius, yet undeniably a funny man.
Mark liked my notion of parodying Anthony Adverse, a big best-seller of the day. In a couple of meetings we cooked up a plot about a ham-handed aide of George Washington, who got all the orders wrong and accidentally won the Revolution. I went to work around the clock like a madman, and wrote Oliver Obverse in ten days and ten nights. In the doing, the characters seemed real, the comedy sidesplitting, the romance so beautiful and tender that I choked up on reading it over. I called the heroine Dorothea. And I missed the Prom. Dorsi was the most popular girl there, could hardly dance twenty steps without being cut in on, and altogether had a swimming evening of it. So Biberman reported. He knew from Puss Puss about my fight with Dorsi, and was full of sympathy, rather like Dr. Shiner’s.
1933 VARSITY SHOW ON!
GOODKIND SCRIPT CHOSEN
It was a three-column story in Monday’s Spectator. On Tuesday I found on my desk at home a neat blue envelope. Here was the entire communication:
February 25, 1933
Congratulations, David, on your Varsity Show.
Sincerely,
Dorsi
So lovesick was I, this low-voltage billet-doux electrified me. Dorsi was sweetly magnanimous over the telephone. “You’ve apologized enough, David. Of course I’ll go with you to your opening night.”
So the romance of the century was on again, and I had to get myself a driver’s license at once. My eighteenth birthday fell in March and the Varsity Show in April. I meant to take Dorsi to my opening night in rented white tie and tails, at the wheel of the twelve-cylinder Cadillac, which was then still in our possession. And if Dorsi Sabin could resist such 24-karat gold wooing then she was not an iceberg but a golem, a weird figure of animated stone, and I would have nothing more to do with her.
Pop was outside the laundry, squinting at me in the sunshine, when I first took the wheel of a dilapidated old two-seater Ford the business owned. Beside me was Felix Brodofsky, two years older than I, fatter than ever, a laundry marker-and-assorter now and a married man. He had the use of this car, so he was going to teach me to drive. I grinned with nervous pride at Pop and called, “Well, at last!” Tolerantly smiling, Pop called back, “Not this should be the ambition of David Goodkind.” And so we chugged off.
I would have learned faster and better if not for Felix Brodofsky’s conversation. Felix thought I was unlucky to be going to college. He was already earning money, he pointed out, and also “getting it regular.” He inquired whether possibly, I, too, was getting it regular from one of them coeds, who he understood were hot stuff. I said no, I wasn’t getting it regular from a hot coed. Next he inquired if I had ever gotten it. Concentrating on my shifting, clutching, and braking, I was too busy to manage reticence, and I said well, no, I had never gotten it.
That was my mistake. By God, Felix Brodofsky had me there. I might be the son of the usurper of the Fairy Laundry presidency, I might live on West End Avenue, I might be a Columbia smartass, but not only wasn’t I getting it regular, I had never gotten it. As I drove around amid the vacant lots near the Bronx River, he kept regaling me with word pictures of what I was missing. Revelling in these X-rated descriptions of his marital joys, he brushed off the one really sticky maneuver, starting uphill. In those old cars, you had to engage the gear, let in the clutch, let out the brake, and step on the gas all at once, almost. Otherwise you rolled backward and were in trouble. Felix taught this trick to me on a gentle grade, let me start uphill a couple of times, and pronounced me ready for the test.
My driving skill, or lack of it, he then disclosed, wouldn’t matter a damn. All I had to do was put ten dollars in the pocket of the door upholstery, and whisper to the inspector, “There’s something for you in the door.” That was all. Unless I drove the car into the Bronx River and drowned us both, I would get my license. But he recommended against telling my father. All Bronx drivers knew this, but my father would disapprove. Felix Brodofsky was letting me in on the secret, I daresay, for old times’ sake; also out of sympathy with me for never having gotten it, the fat fuck.
Well, you have no idea how that jarred me. My first encounter with the majesty of the law, with admittance to adult society, came down to a bribe; here was a loss of innocence! I worried and worried about that bribe, and when it came to the test, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The inspector, a stout grayish man with a disgruntled face, said, “Go ahead, drive.” It was then only two weeks before the Varsity Show opening night. The stakes were high, the pressure on me heavy. I had actually put the ten-dollar bill in the door pocket, but my nerve failed me, and I said nothing to him. I just drove. I did well enough until he abruptly ordered me to stop, halfway up a steep deserted hill. I pulled the emergency brake tight. It held, barely.
“Okay. Start.”
Start? With the hood pointed at the sky? Damn Brodofsky, and his rhapsodies on getting it regular! Why had he never trained me on a real hill?
“Well, what are you waiting for? Start!”
“There’s something for you in the door,” I hoarsely whispered. I threw in the clutch, shifted into gear, let out the brake, and stepped on the gas. At least I thought I did all that, but it came out wrong. The gears screeched, the motor roared, the car trembled, and we began travelling backward.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the inspector barked.
“There’s something for you in the door,” I repeated louder.
“What? I can’t hear you. Stop the goddamned car!”
I fussed with brake, clutch, gear, and accelerator in panic, producing grinds and roars and nothing else, while we gathered velocity in reverse.
“Stop this car, for Christ’s sake!”
“THERE’S SOMETHING FOR YOU IN THE DOOR!” I screamed, as we backed down that grade at about thirty miles an hour, picking up dizzy speed by the second.
“You’re a goddamned maniac! You’ll kill us both! Out of my goddamned way!” The inspector thrust me aside, grabbed at the emergency brake and yanked it with all his might. The Ford slowly squealed and shuddered to a halt. Sudden silence, there among the weedy lots. The inspector stared at me, panting, speechless.
“Something for you in the door,” I sobbed.
“I’ll take that wheel.”
He drove back to the Fairy Laundry, got into his own car, and departed without another word. When I felt in the pocket of the door, the ten-dollar bill was gone. A few days later, an envelope came from the Motor Vehicle Bureau in the Bronx, informing me that I had failed—so I assumed; until I opened it. It contained my driver’s license.
So scorn not the humble tax man, reader, and his beagle nose for loopholes in the law. It is the way of the world, and I learned it early. Tax avoidance is not bribery, of course; it seeks out permitted dodges, and everybody does it. But I will say this. No Internal Revenue agent has ever found, at the Goodkind legal offices, something for him in the door. I learned disgust for that early, too.
And now for the Cadillac, I thought rejoicing! Impulsively I took the subway to the Bronx, and went galloping up the broad metal stairs of the Fairy Laundry to Pop’s office, to show him my driver’s license, and line up the twelve-cylinder white elephant, which was rusting away on blocks. I was sure Pop would get it down and running for the Varsity Show author. He was so proud…
All at once the recollection comes upon me in an overpowering wave—I smell the steamy soap-and-chlorine air of the laundry, and hear the machines clattering and rumbling, and see the sweaty women in white smocks out on the main floor, working the presses and feeding the mangles. Gone, all gone! The New England Thruway obliterated that Bronx neighborhood. The Fairy Laundry is as lost as Atlantis. And to think that that building was my father’s life; that that was all he ever did with his mind and his gifts! Well, on his bent back I mounted and became a prosperous tax man in the Goldena Medina, and even a Presidential Assistant. Back to the Fairy Laundry, then, back forty years…
My sister Lee was at a desk in the outer office. The office looked much smaller, like the rest of the place. I could remember how grandiose the building had once seemed, with its smokestack reaching to the clouds, and its vast interior vistas of awe-inspiring machinery. Now it had the seedy sooty look of a common factory going full blast, and the spaces had shrunk. My sister looked seedy, too, in a brown skirt and brown blouse, shuffling stacks of frayed file cards. Pop’s office door opened as I talked with Lee, and he came striding out, papers in hand, countenance stern, movements brisk, speech terse to the clerks. The Boss. The faces at the desks sobered, and all bent over their work, even Lee. But when he noticed me, his tough aspect softened. “Yisroelke! Come inside.” His office was half the size I remembered.
“Well, congratulations,” Pop said, nodding over my license and handing it back. “What can I do for you?”
Clear implication, without malice: Yisroelke doesn’t travel up to the Bronx and visit Pop in the laundry, unless he wants something. The request for the twelve-cylinder Cadillac all but stuck in my throat. How dreary the laundry was, and how unhealthy! I was thinking that this was where my father made his money, after all; this was what kept us on West End Avenue; this was how I was being supported at Columbia, while Felix Brodofsky already supported a wife. Still, I got the words out.
“I see. When would you need it?”
I told him. He thought a moment, and then managed a smile.
“You shall have it.”