“I have an appointment with Mr. Goldhandler.”
The black girl in a starchy uniform made way. Before my eyes, beyond a narrow foyer, a scene of opulence opened; a blurred picture of vast spaces and millionaire furnishings, bounded by great windows which looked out past green vistas of Central Park to downtown skyscrapers. In the foyer, on a straight-backed carved settee, a woman in plain black sat, holding nearsightedly to her nose the Modern Library edition of The Brothers Karamazov. She was about eight months pregnant; her stomach humped gigantically on her lap. The book dropped to disclose a long attractive oval face with not a trace of paint on the girlish skin, and unplucked fair eyebrows arching at me over sharp gray-blue eyes. “My husband will be down shortly for his breakfast. Please wait in there.” She put the book back to her nose, and I walked into the living room.
Breakfast at two-thirty in the afternoon? Yes, that sounded like the man Peter worked for. This was a tower penthouse, and the room stretched clear across the whole structure, with windows on three sides. The carpet—well, I have never since seen anything of that size and beauty outside a museum. The antique tables, armchairs, sofas, settees, breakfronts, side tables, and bric-a-brac that crowded the enormous room dazzled even my untutored eyes: possessions of a Gould, furnishings of a lord’s chateau. At an onyx table inlaid with checkered squares, two boys were hunched in polished spindly chairs over red and white ivory chess pieces. One wore a baseball suit, the other a crimson velvet bathrobe.
“Hi,” said the one in the bathrobe. He looked about thirteen, and very much like the woman reading The Brothers Karamazov. “Did you write Pincus Forever?”
“I did.” I came to the table and sized up the board, a close end-game of rooks and pawns.
“I’m starting Columbia in September. I’ll write a Varsity Show one day. I’m Karl. This is my brother, Sigmund.”
Sigmund, smaller and younger, was studying the board with thin-lipped intensity, his eyes in deep sockets bright and hard. “I’m going to City College in September,” he said. He made a rook move that looked like a blunder; on second thought, a wily trap. He glanced at Karl, gnawing a knuckle. Karl drought a moment, took the rook, and in a fireworks exchange of pieces came out a pawn ahead. “It was unsound,” he said. “Resign?” Sigmund shook his head, lips tightened, eyes glaring at the board.
I sat down in a nearby armchair, picking up a copy of the New Masses that lay on it. The lead article, blazoned on the cover in big black letters, was “Roosevelt, Pied Piper of Capitalism,” by John Strachey. Now what was this Communist magazine doing in these baronial surroundings? And were those two chess-playing prodigies pulling my leg about their college plans? Peter Quat, in shirt sleeves and stocking feet, looked into the room and beckoned. I followed him to the foyer. Down a narrow carpeted stairway came a paunchy unshaven man with tousled scanty hair, offering me his hand. His face was deathly pale, his eyes commanding and crafty. “My name is Goldhandler. Come and have coffee.”
I followed him into the dining room. Mrs. Goldhandler came in and sat down at the foot of a long table covered with a lacy cloth. It was Chippendale, I later found out; the entire dining set was pristine Chippendale. There were twelve chairs, twelve settings of fine china and silver, and at every setting a half of Persian melon. Goldhandler put me on his right at the head of the table. All the places filled up. Opposite me were the two boys, a little redheaded girl, and Peter Quat. Alongside me were three young men. Two had to be junior advertising executives: dark suits, pinned shirt collars, narrow ties, neatly barbered hair, Deke faces. The third was a sad balding jowly fellow, shoeless and tieless like Quat. He looked even paler than Goldhandler. “I’m Boyd,” he said, as he sat down beside me. Peter had told me about Boyd and also about Mrs. Goldhandler’s parents, who came shuffling from a back room and took chairs on either side of her.
Harry Goldhandler sat with his head bowed on a hand. Everybody else looked toward him in silence, not touching their melons. I thought, with some surprise, that he was about to say grace. What he did say with a glance at Boyd was, “Did the cocksucker call?”
I think my hair stood on end. I know my scalp tingled. There across from me were those three charming children; down at the other end was the pregnant pretty mother and the sweet-faced old Jewish grandmother. This was 1934, mind you. The revolution in American language had not even begun. In front of ladies, let alone children, one did not even say, “son of a bitch,” and “shit” was utterly unthinkable. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was still contraband. So was Fanny Hill and all the other hot stuff that has since flooded our land, for better or worse, thanks in part to my own legal efforts. But even today, in such company, his words would have startled me.
If Boyd could have turned paler, he would have, but he looked ghastly enough: eyes popping, lips trembling. “Not yet.”
“He is a rat,” said Goldhandler. “He is cowering in his hole.” He cut into his melon, whereupon we all did, too. I had never eaten a melon so rich, so sweet, and so large. “He even looks like a rat,” said Goldhandler. “Why, his nose twitches like a rat’s.” Here he did a vivid rodentlike nose twitch. “He has little pointy hands like a rat.” He dropped his spoon to hold up both hands like rodent paws. “Pointy hands, for thieving. Tiny pointy hands.”
“He sleeps late, you know,” quavered Boyd.
“He won’t call,” said Mrs. Goldhandler. “I warned you against Eddie Conn the day you hired him.”
“So you did,” said Goldhandler, devouring his melon. “You didn’t mention the pointy hands, though. That was your mistake.”
“He has gone to work for Holtz,” she said. “Holtz would never have let you quit, otherwise. He hopes Eddie will steal everything. He’ll learn better. Henny Holtz will be off the radio in a year. Without you, he’s a ventriloquist’s dummy that can’t talk.”
Goldhandler ate the last large spoonful of melon with relish. “Little pointy hands,” he said. “I should have paid more attention to those tiny pointy hands.” He turned on me abruptly. “So you’re going to law school.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Better do that,” said Goldhandler. “This is work.”
“I can work,” was my instant stung response.
Goldhandler addressed the advertising men. “When is that frog-voiced cunt coming?”
Nobody turned a hair; not the mother, not the children, not the grandparents, not the two black maids who were smilingly bringing in silver trays of food. Obviously I was the only one at the table jarred by Goldhandler’s language.
“In fifteen minutes,” said one of the men.
“She insisted,” said the other. “Sorry, Harry. She has to cut a recording at four.”
“She’ll have to wait,” said Goldhandler, “while I have my morning shit. Doesn’t she ever shit? Maybe she doesn’t, at that. Maybe that’s where she gets that frog sound of hers. Like a damned fool I thought it was her voice. I never thought it might be backed-up farts.”
I burst out laughing at the sheer outrageousness. I couldn’t help it. Goldhandler crookedly grinned at me. The maid put before him, so help me, a heaping dish of fried matzoh ringed by pork sausages. “This is the most terrific dish in America,” he said. “Have some.”
“Ah, no, thank you, sir.”
Like Peter and most of the others, I was served a thick rare filet mignon and a glass of milk. Mrs. Goldhandler, her parents, and the little girl had fried matzoh and pork sausages.
“What was your major at Columbia?” Goldhandler asked, forking up a sausage and some matzoh.
“Literature,” I said.
“What is the funniest work in all literature?”
I glanced down the table at Peter Quat. He was busily cutting into his filet mignon, a faint sarcastic smile wrinkling his mouth.
“Don Quixote?” I ventured.
“One joke,” he said. “An old lunatic getting his bones broken because he thinks he’s a knight, for a thousand pages. Great, but tiresome.”
“Gargantua and Pantagruel?”
“A museum piece.”
“I think Tristram Shandy is the funniest work in all literature,” spoke up the boy in the baseball suit.
Goldhandler turned on him, growling, “You do? How much Molière have you read?”
“You mean in French, Father?”
“What else, you little shit? In Sanskrit?”
“In French, only Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Le Misanthrope,” Sigmund replied, turning pink. “I’ve read most of the rest in English.”
“You’ll read every play of Molière in French this summer, and report to me after each play.”
Sigmund glared straight ahead. “Yes, Father.”
“Who is the funniest character in Shakespeare?” Goldhandler shot at me.
Across the table from me, Karl’s mouth silently formed “Falstaff.” I was going to say that anyway, so I did.
“Falstaff? Why, what the hell is funny about Falstaff?” Goldhandler demanded, with an amused sidewise glance out of those puffy deepset eyes. “What is Falstaff but a lazy fat old purse-snatcher and coward? A liar, a glutton, a drunk, a layabout, a whoremaster, a braggart, a bully, a cheat, a corrupter of the young? Is there a vice he doesn’t have? Is there a virtue he does have? What is Falstaff but a useless, worthless, contemptible, repulsive nobody? What’s funny about Falstaff?”
I had the sense to keep quiet. All the others were looking expectantly not at me, but at Goldhandler. Clearly this was how he enjoyed his meals, playing to his private audience.
“Well, it’s one of the great topics of Shakespearean criticism, and of course you’re right,” he said. “To begin with, Falstaff is a man of powerful, elemental appetites. Of zest?” He struck the table with a fist. “Fat, old, worthless, on the brink of the grave, he loves life. And we love him, because we recognize ourselves in him. We love life as he does. We only wish we had the honesty to live it as he does. If we only dared to be truly ourselves—as he does—we’d all be gluttons, layabouts, drunks, cheats, screwing whores and not paying them, running away from fights and lying about winning them. Falstaff is earthy human nature, far more than Sancho Panza. He is us. And it hurts so much to see ourselves in that bulging fun-house mirror, distorted and yet our true secret selves, that we laugh so as not to cry.”
While delivering this harangue, he finished the matzoh and sausages. I was nervously nibbling the filet mignon. I had little appetite. Nobody said a word in Goldhandler’s pauses to eat. Boyd leaped to a sideboard when Goldhandler finished his food, and brought him a box of enormous cigars. As he carefully selected one, smelled it, and rolled it at his ear, he went on, “Now in writing radio comedy for the masses, you have to reach for just such elemental values, for those few things the entire American public, coast to coast, will understand, and recognize in themselves. There are therefore only three proper topics for radio comedy. They are pissing, shitting, and fucking.”
With that, he struck three wooden matches at once, from a box Boyd offered him, and lit the cigar like a torch, in bursts of yellow flame and blue smoke.
“You write a joke on any other subject when you work for me, and I’ll throw you out of a window. But of course, I forgot, you’re going to law school, aren’t you?”
He glared at me, as Sigmund had glared after his reproof. All the others were now laughing. I was so flustered that I drank milk by way of stalling. It may have been the first time I ever drank milk with meat. Though I had gotten careless about the food rules, milk and meat together still put me off, and in fact through all the free April House years I never did indulge in that specific abomination.
Goldhandler pushed himself out of his chair, “Boyd, show him around the place. Peter, come with me. That Penner script needs jokes.”
***
I followed Boyd up the stairs. “Boys’ bedroom. Liza’s room. Master bedroom,” he said on the first landing, like a tour guide. Through the half-open door of the master bedroom I saw a marble fireplace and a four-poster bed with blue silk curtains. The office on the next floor also stretched across the tower. The largest desk I had ever seen stood in one corner, an antique topped in green leather. There were steel filing cabinets all along the walls, two other desks, two typewriters on stands, a switchboard, and a very long green sofa.
“Stinks in here,” said Boyd. It did, mainly of the dead cigars jammed into Perrier bottles on the big desk. “We worked all night, then kept going and quit about two hours ago. Well, there’s one more floor.” We climbed a steep winding stairway to a square unfurnished room with three sides of tall glass windows, one of rough masonry, and an arched, rough-plastered ceiling. The floor, carpeted wall to wall in thick soft white, was littered with old books and bundles of magazines. “They haven’t decided just what to do with this room,” said Boyd, over the wind roar. It was gusting strongly, and one casement window, not quite fastened shut, was wailing, Waa—oo! Whoo!
The solid wall blocked off uptown. Through the glass one looked out at the park, at downtown Manhattan with its skyscrapers, bridges, and wharfs, at the East River and Brooklyn, at the Hudson River, and the blue glittery New York Bay; and beyond the Palisades, New Jersey stretching green to a far hazy horizon. Close by, much closer than I had ever seen it, and just about at eye level, was the APRIL HOUSE sign, big neon tubes in metal casings on a massive rusty frame. “They’ll probably make a kind of music room and library out of it,” Boyd yelled, “a quiet retreat where he can think. But they’ll have to do something about the wind.”
Back in the office, he rolled open drawer after drawer of file cards. “The jokes,” he said, waving at the entire wall. Ye gods, I thought, they have thousands and thousands! Along another wall he pulled out drawers crammed with mimeographed scripts. “The Henny Holtz show. The Joe Penner show. The Russ Columbo show. Every show he has ever written. I’m supposed to be indexing them. They accumulate faster than I can index.”
“What would my job here be?”
“Digging jokes.” He threw open a closet door. Old comic magazines were stacked inside waist-high: Judge, Life, College Humor, Screen Gems, Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang; also paper-covered joke books, hundreds of them, piled up and tied with string. “You dig through these, and the stuff upstairs. Any joke that looks usable, you type on a card, classify it, and file it.”
“How, classify?”
“Well, you know, alphabetically. Animal jokes, baby jokes, cheap jokes, doctor jokes, and so on. About forty categories. Kissing jokes, insult jokes, undertaker jokes. Any funny topic.”
I stared at the heaped-up magazines. The closet smelled of old disintegrating paper. “Wouldn’t I do any writing?”
“Oh, sure. Peter dug jokes for a while. Now he writes drafts.” Boyd smiled at me in a soft wistful way. I had never met such a soft-seeming man—soft white jowls, soft white hands, soft gestures, a soft slumped posture. “The boss will give you a quick two-week trial. Fifteen dollars a week.”
“When would I start?”
“Boyd, I have a job. It won’t end until September first.”
“Then, I’ll have to telephone somebody else.”
“Let me think about it.”
“Take your time.”
He left me alone. I stood at a window, staring out at the April House sign. Two weeks, thirty dollars, and my summer salary would go down the drain. “Digging jokes” out of the piled rubbish in the closet was a stupid prospect. Still, I had never been in an apartment like this, or met a man like Goldhandler, or such a family. I had been figuring I had nothing to lose. Now I stood to lose two hundred dollars.
Well, then, what to do? My fit over the Pelkowitz news had been mostly chagrin at the Bibermans’ pleasure in my decapitation. Dorsi was gone. The Vicomte de Brag was dead. Dorsi had to marry some man, and why not Morris, the banker’s son? To change my life’s direction in a spasm of petulance would be childish. I had no deep-down impulse to write radio jokes.
Peter Quat now rushed into the room, exclaiming, “Shit.” He went riffling through the gag files, snatching out a card here and a card there. I said, “Peter, this job is not for me.”
“Of course it is. You made a great impression on him.” He pushed a chair and a typewriter beside the green desk, spread out the jokes, and rolled paper into the typewriter. “You only got a taste of the Falstaff routine. He can go on for an hour about Falstaff. And Molière. And Shaw. And Freud. And Marx. Karl and Sigmund are named after Freud and Marx, I guess you spotted that.” (I had not.) “He’s an extraordinary bastard.”
“Why does he do this crap?”
“Ever hear of money?” Peter began typing frantically with two fingers.
I went downstairs to decline the job and exit from this seductive phantasmagoria. It would take me three months of work here just to make up my loss; even assuming that I wanted to give up law school to “dig jokes,” which I did not.
I heard uproarious laughter in the living room. From the stairway I could see Goldhandler sitting in a suit and tie, shaved and well groomed, reading from a script. He noticed me, and waved to me to come in. “Here’s a young fellow who’s trying to decide whether to be a lawyer or a writer,” he said.
Two people, a mustached man and a woman with beautiful crossed legs, sat opposite him on a sofa, still laughing. “Maybe you can help him,” he added to the man with a grin.
My knees knocked and my mouth went dry. The man was Ernest Hemingway, and the “frog-voiced cunt” was Marlene Dietrich. The two ad men sat at some distance, frozen with awe.
“Do you think you can write?” Ernest Hemingway asked me.
“Not like you,” I gasped. “Never like you.”
“You have to find that out,” he said gently. “Hammering out a style takes work.”
Marlene Dietrich said to Goldhandler, in a voice that seemed to be issuing from a cinema screen, so moviesque and Dietrich-esque did it sound, “It’s an awfully amusing skit, Mr. Goldhandler.” She turned to Hemingway. “Don’t you think so?”
“Perfect for you,” replied Hemingway.
“Well, I’ll do it,” she said to Goldhandler.
The two ad men jumped up and ran to Goldhandler, stammering congratulations. Nobody paid me any further attention. I walked out and went back up the stairs. Karl and Sigmund came gambolling out of their room stark naked, snapping towels at each other. “Oh, hi there,” said Sigmund. As I slipped by them they went right on with their towel fight, snap snap snap, raising red welts on each other’s bodies. In the office Peter was typing away, and Boyd lay on the sofa, a cigarette drooping from his mouth.
“I guess I’ll try it,” I said.
Peter shot me a smile, not pausing in his work. Boyd waved a languid hand at the closet. “Start digging. We need fresh jokes.”
I hung my jacket and tie on a hook in the closet, took off my shoes—since that seemed to be the custom—and dragged out a bundle of College Humor. I was not sure I could do any work. I was still numb, and not only from the encounter with Hemingway and Dietrich. Coming on the two Goldhandler boys naked had shaken me up almost as much. They were the only uncircumcised Jews I had ever seen.