“Izzy, are you all right?”
That voice, that unforgettable voice—that voice I can hear in my mind now, thirty-six years later, as plainly as I’ve just heard a patrolling jet fighter break the sound barrier out over the Mediterranean—that voice was on the telephone again after a long terrible month and more, sounding rushed and shaken. I had jumped from my typewriter to the phone, not expecting to hear from her, yet still in that state of excruciating tension when every telephone ring was like a gunshot.
“Hello, there, Bobbie. I’m fine, why?”
“I had the most horrible dream about you last night. I couldn’t stand it, I had to find out how you were. You really are all right?”
“Perfectly okay. How are you?”
“Oh, not bad.”
Long pause. Then Bobbie, in a different sheepish tone, “It sounds sort of obvious, dear, my calling like this, but I did have this truly awful dream about you.”
Overwhelmingly sweet as it was to hear that light crystalline voice again, the pain at least equalled the sweetness, and through my tumbling emotional murk a single idea shone through, an Eleventh Commandment booming at me out of fire and cloud, HAVE NOTHING MORE TO DO WITH HER.
“Well, it’s nice of you, Bobbie, but I am quite okay.”
“I’m so glad. How is Mr. Goldhandler?”
“Pretty well recovered. I see your show’s still running.”
“Oh, sure.” Another awkward pause. Then, gaily and a bit shyly: “Are you doing any horseback riding?”
And there it was. The dream ploy was feeble enough, but this was as close as a girl like Bobbie Webb could ever come to backtracking.
In our magic springtime, one of the many things we had done was ride together in Central Park. I had bought her a fetching riding habit, and we had trotted, or rather plodded, around the reservoir now and then on placid old hired nags. Now here was the olive branch. I had only to say the word. It was late March, the park was greening, and the riders were out.
“Well, I’ve been sort of busy, Bobbie. A lot of work.”
“I see. I hope I haven’t interrupted you.”
“Not at all. It’s nice to hear from you.”
“Nice to talk to you.” Slight pause, and she added cheerily: “Well, goodbye, then.”
“Bye, Bobbie.”
Between that famous encounter in the bar, with the man who knew Einstein as witness, and this call, exactly four ghastly weeks and five ghastly days and nights had elapsed. It was by chance that I was in April House when Bobbie called. I had been living at home in Lee’s old room, and coming to the suite for a few hours to work with Peter. I couldn’t sleep a wink in April House, couldn’t endure looking out at Peeping Tom, seeing the Paramount clock at night and that whole downtown panorama. Peter Quat surmised my trouble, more or less, when I temporarily moved out. “I’m not paying the whole rent,” was all he said, and when I assured him I would go on paying my share, that was that.
But Mama asked so many questions when I came home with a suitcase that I was inclined to give up the idea, until Pop snapped at her in Yiddish, “What’s the matter with you? The boy comes home, and you ask questions? Don’t ask. The boy came home, and finished.” That silenced Mama.
I had read somewhere that one slept best in a cold room, and it was a bitter winter, so I took to turning off the radiators in Lee’s room, opening the windows wide, piling on the blankets, and downing stiff slugs of neat whiskey. I still didn’t sleep much, but there was something primally comforting about air icy in the lungs, booze warm in the stomach, and a heavy swaddling of blankets. Mama did some muttering when she came in some mornings and found snowdrifts on the floor, but she made no trouble about it. She did bother me a lot, however, about a large sign I pasted in my bathroom, the day after my date with Vyvyan Finkel’s secretary.
Seeking relief from my agonies over Bobbie, you see, I went up to Columbia to talk to Vyvyan in his office. Vyvyan was delighted. He put his arms around me, gave me several damp friendly kisses, and offered me sherry from a bottle lying on a shelf behind the collected works of George Santayana. I kept pouring out my heart as he poured the sherry. He was most sympathetic about Bobbie, assuring me that all this would be grist for the mill, once I entered on my true calling as a pewet.
“I seem to be the fool of the world,” I said. “Maybe I should start my education over again.”
“You have.” He recommended several books, including—I remember—The Education of Henry Adams and The Memoirs of Casanova. “Just to get the range,” he smiled, and he invited me to come to a concert with him, as in the old days.
Well, on my way out, there sat at a desk in an outer room this big blonde girl in tweed, busy with papers and books. Any port in a storm! I introduced myself, and was surprised by a friendly smile, a warm large-boned handshake, and the disclosure that she had seen my Varsity Shows, and read my Vicomte de Brag columns while at Barnard. I took her to the theatre. The date cheered me up more than my talk with Vyvyan had. Here was a girl with a brain, a Columbia education, and a Phi Bete key; catch her falling for a chorus boy who knew Einstein! I was enchanted, and tried necking with her in the taxicab afterward. That was not so hot. She had a way of staring wide-eyed at me as I kissed her, and she smelled soapy.
Still, when I got home from that date I was a new man, or thought I was. I printed in crimson crayon on a piece of cardboard, IT WAS THE LUCKIEST THING THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED—referring, of course, to my rejection in the bar—and propped it in my bathroom, so that when I got up and went to bed, this consoling thought would confront me. I forgot that Mom would see the sign. She pestered me about it. “What was the luckiest thing that could have happened? Tell me. Tell me what was so lucky! Why can’t you tell your own mother?” Et cetera. Papa had to intervene again and order her to leave the boy alone, if something lucky had happened to the boy she should thank God, and finished.
That sign was all very well, but one more date with Vyvyan’s secretary, and I gave up. No soap. Or rather, soap, yes, brains, yes; but ah for black hair, huge eyes, and dopey gullibility about Kahlil Gibran! The ordeal of icy sleepless nights went on. I was keeping my sanity by concert-going with Vyvyan Finkel, burying myself in work for Goldhandler, and seeing more and more of Zaideh—as Vyvyan put it, to get the range. Bobbie’s ineradicable words, “That’s not characteristic of your race,” had thrown me back a long way. During those insomniac whiskeyed-up nights they reechoed and reverberated in my mind. Naturally I told Zaideh nothing of all this. Nor did he ask questions, except, as I would be leaving, “When will I see you again?” We studied Talmud, and he told me about old times in Russia, and he also talked a lot about Uncle Velvel’s latest quagmire, a matter of peanuts.
***
Last and maddest of the Velvel stories, true as sunrise. Briefly, a cousin of Velvel’s worked on a kibbutz that grew peanuts and shipped the raw product abroad. Velvel had some money, though the shittim-wood scheme was finished, because his wife had finally divorced him, and his father-in-law had given Uncle Velvel a nice lump sum to get lost, permanently. Uncle Velvel invested in machines that salted and packaged peanuts, and built a small processing plant near that kibbutz. The markup from peanuts off the vine to the packaged article was of course enormous, and Uncle Velvel saw his ship coming in, after a lifetime of thwarted visions.
The ship might well have made port, what’s more, except for the unforeseen problem of vibration. The floor of the processing plant had been poorly set down, so it vibrated. The whole plant vibrated. In fact the entire kibbutz vibrated, or so the kibbutzniks claimed. In a nearby kibbutz machine shop, the ceiling fell down, knocking cold some idealistic Americans working there. The kibbutz council blamed Velvet’s peanut plant, and there was hell to pay.
That was bad enough, but the main problem was with the product. The vibration threw the salting process out of whack. A large shipment of heavily oversalted peanuts went to France—though it was news to me that Frenchmen ate anything as normal as salted peanuts—and set fire to a lot of Gallic insides and caused no end of trouble. Most of the shipment came back. The French importer was suing Uncle Velvel. Velvel was suing the contractor who had built the processing plant. The council that ran the kibbutz, fearful of getting involved, had given up on Velvel and resumed shipping peanuts abroad.
So Uncle Velvel was left high and dry with a peanut-processing plant that vibrated, and no peanuts. Far from taking this lying down, he was importing peanuts from Liberia, and suing the kibbutz council for not supplying him with peanuts. He had nothing on paper, so he was suing in a rabbinic court, where an oath of a pious man, and Uncle Velvel was visibly pious, would have weight. It was a Marxist kibbutz, not pious at all, so the council was countersuing Uncle Velvel in a secular court for trespassing, since the vibrating plant was on their land and they wanted it off. The council claimed that Uncle Velvel had built the plant too close to their dairy barns, and the vibration was making the cows nervous, drying them up and causing them to fight like bulls. I am summarizing a mess that went on for years. Zaideh would read me Uncle Velvel’s letters, naively rejoicing over his son’s reports of triumphant turns in the lawsuits, which always concluded with pleas for more money to pay his lawyers.
It was a study in contradiction in one man’s personality; Zaideh’s sword-sharp mind for Talmudic profundities, and his uncritical swallowing of Uncle Velvel’s reports. Zaideh lived on air, or so it seemed, and sent Velvel every dollar that came his way, whether through fees for weddings or divorces, or gifts by younger rabbis who studied with him, or money Pop would give him to buy new clothes and better food. Zaideh’s ruling principle, which I guess overrode his penetrative intellect, was family affection. There are worse weaknesses.
***
The night after Bobbie telephoned me I slept nine uninterrupted hours. My first thought on opening my eyes was sheer astonishment that it was broad day. Then the pain flooded back in, from the void in my life torn by the loss of Bobbie. It was as sharp as ever, and yet I had slept. Why? I understood nothing then. I just stumbled along, day by day and week by week, in the dark even at noonday. But now it seems simple. Most of my insomniac anguish was over the loss of a beautiful girl, but the rest was stabbed ego. Bobbie’s one hint about horseback riding closed that stab wound as by a miracle at a shrine. Night after night I slept, though the loss still hurt so much. I moved back to April House, and there too I could sleep.
Peter said to me, one afternoon when I returned in boots and jodhpurs from a ride in the park, “Wasn’t your birthday in March?”
“Yes, why?”
“Bobbie called, and said to wish you a happy birthday.”
It was April first. I knew what she meant. By the gargoyle face Quat made, I gather that he did, too. A few days later, a book came for me in the mail: Second April, poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay; inscription, For IDG, happy birthday, with best regards to P. Tom, from BVW. I thought it would be churlish to ignore this. After writing and tearing up half a dozen attempts at a noncommittal note of thanks, I telephoned Bobbie. Not for months had I heard those elevator whines and door crashes and footsteps. The pain came on strongly.
“Hello, who is it?”
She sounded muffled and weak, and went into a coughing fit.
“What’s the matter, Bobbie?”
“Oh, it’s you. Hi, there.” Cough, cough. “Excuse me. I’ve had pneumonia.”
“My God, Bobbie.”
“I’m getting better now. I hope to be back in the show next week. I guess you wish I’d died of it.”
The bitterness of her tone! I did not believe I could feel any worse about Bobbie Webb, but this made me feel worse, and yet in a crazy way a little relieved. Whatever her present attitude toward me, it was still intense, still, like mine, running with heart’s blood.
“Darling,” I said, using the endearment deliberately—and rustily, for it had been a long time, “thanks for the book.”
“Oh, that. Don’t mention it.” More bad coughing. “Look, Izzy, there’s an awful draft in this hall, I’d better go back upstairs or I’ll have a relapse.”
“Bobbie, will you call me when you’re better? Let’s have dinner at the Golden Horn.”
“That’ll be fine.” Through harsh coughs she said goodbye and hung up.