Boyd came hurrying through the control room of Studio 8H, the biggest in Radio City, with an armful of mimeographed scripts. He still had the cadaverous look which had shocked me on my return from Europe. A liver ailment contracted in Alaska, where he had gone with the boss, had turned him all skinny and yellow. Goldhandler, on the other hand, was glowing with energy and good cheer. The Alaskan trip had evidently been a great success, though I knew no details. Goldhandler was on the phone night and day with Klebanoff, excitedly talking mining, stock deals, and money.
“Friend of yours out there,” Boyd said to me, jerking a thumb at the door. I went outside to the eighth-floor foyer, where technicians were shoving wheeled equipment from studio to studio, and musicians, actors, actresses, and advertising people were hurrying to and fro. There on the couch sat Bobbie, legs crossed, white-gloved hands folded. I had not seen or talked to her in half a year.
“Hello, Bobbie.”
“Why, hello there, Izzy.” She looked very surprised. She said she was waiting to audition for a job, but I thought she might be waylaying me. Her gloves were yellowish from too much cleaning, and one was split along a seam. Her lilac suit was threadbare, she was thinner, and her eyes were dark-ringed.
“How was Europe?”
“Not bad.”
“I’d like to hear about it. Take me to dinner some time.”
“Sure, Bobbie.”
“Let’s see, I’m free this Friday evening,” she said. “But that’s right, you’re always home on Fridays, aren’t you? I haven’t forgotten.”
“I’m living at home now, Bobbie.”
“Are you? Well!” She took it, not wrongly, as a suggestion of her past power over me. Coquettishly she pulled her skirt down over her knees. “My, your parents must be happy about that.”
I said I would call her, and I returned to the studio shaken. She looked so down, so poorly, that I could pity her; but God Almighty, what did it take to pull free of that gravitational field?
A few days passed.
“Hi, Izzy. I thought you were going to take me to dinner.”
Though Mom and Pop were in Florida, Bobbie’s call to our home rattled me, and I stalled.
“Izzy, if you don’t want to see me it’s perfectly all right.”
“Oh, Bobbie, don’t be ridiculous.” I proposed one evening and another. No, no, she was busy. I could call her again sometime, or maybe she would call me. Brief, cool, huffy, she hung up. Okay, Bobbie, I thought, the hell with you, and what a relief!
***
“Do you still love me?”
Bobbie and I are dancing at the cavernous New York version of Don the Beachcomber. She has called me after a week or so, this time all sugar and spice and everything nice, about the deferred dinner date. This is it. We are in each other’s arms for the first time since my return home, a return in more ways than one. I have been reading Yiddish with Pop, seeing Zaideh regularly for Talmud, and working through the Hebrew prophets on my own. The discontinuity between the Inside and the Outside is becoming acute. Yet Bobbie knows, by the way we dance, that she risks little by asking.
“I won’t answer that,” is my stupid response.
“Well, do you still desire me?”
Some question! “The hell with this,” I say, and I lead her back to the table. She laughs and squeezes my hand.
At the doorway of my parents’ apartment she holds back, seeing the mezuza. “I feel funny about this.”
I feel damned funny myself, but I say, “Come on.” I am powerless to do otherwise, or think I am. I open the door and switch on the light. Confronting us, staring straight at us, is the tinted blowup of Zaideh’s passport photograph on the foyer wall.
“Who is that?” Bobbie quavers, at the sight of the lifesize stern bearded patriarch in a black round hat.
“My grandfather.”
We go into the living room, Bobbie hugging herself in her beaver coat as though we are still outside in the zero weather.
“Is that your father? You look like him.”
It is a poor painting, done long ago by an impecunious artist in Pop’s Bronx Zionist chapter; and it too looks straight out at you.
“He’s aged a lot since then.” I gesture at photographs on the piano. “That’s my grandmother. She’s gone. Of course you know my sister Lee.”
“I feel surrounded by eyes,” says Bobbie. “Give me a drink.”
“We’ll put you in the Columbia room,” I say. “That’s my lair.”
I am so used to Mama’s picture that I don’t think of it. When I bring the drinks, Bobbie is sitting in my armchair, still bundled in her coat, staring at Mama, who is regarding her with a territorial glare I have not noticed before.
“Eyes, eyes, eyes,” says Bobbie. “You look like her, too. Around the eyes.” Bobbie peers at me. “You have such strange eyes, both of you. Like a Tartar’s.”
“Take off your coat, for crying out loud.”
As we kiss, Bobbie keeps her eyes open like Vyvyan’s secretary, looking past me at The Green Cousin. I understand, I sympathize with the girl, and my kisses are all tenderness and no passion.
“This isn’t going to work, honey,” Bobbie says. “It was a mistake.”
“Okay, Bobbie.”
Still, it has been a whole year, and on the dance floor we were locked in mutual longing. After more kisses she says with pathetic defiance, “Oh, I don’t care about the eyes, come on,” and she honestly tries to throw herself into it. But the effort sputters and dies, and we laugh ruefully, knowing each other well. The long time lapse has melted away to nothing. I take her for a look through the apartment. “It’s so homey,” she says. “Your mother is an excellent housekeeper. You’re better off here than in April House, dear. You must be saving tons of money.”
“There are drawbacks.”
Those huge eyes glisten at me. “Oh well, I guess you’ll have a place of your own again, one of these days.”
Fighting is sometimes useless. I will spare the reader the resolves I make, the oaths I take, in the long days that ensue. I have never been caught in anything like that powerful undertow back to Bobbie Webb. I call her. We do the Golden Horn and the Cellar Door. About three in the morning we get into a cab and I tell the driver, “The Park Central.”
Bobbie tightens a chilly hand on mine and says in a charged whisper, “No. No.”
“Why not?”
“Not a hotel, that’s nothing but lust. I won’t be a party to it.”
The taxi stops at the Park Central. I get out, and hold my hand to Bobbie. She hesitates, then she descends with an angry look. In the elevator she stands silent and grim. “I hate the smell of hotel corridors,” she snaps as we walk to the room. My hand trembles and fumbles with the key. Once inside she lets her fur coat drop to the floor.
“Izzy,” she gasps in my arms, “are you very, very sure you want to do this? I don’t, I truly don’t, it’s a bad idea. I beg you, I implore you not to, unless you’re absolutely sure.”
“Never call me Izzy again,” I say. “My name is David.”
She leans back, and looks into my eyes. “But why, dearest? And if you didn’t like it, why didn’t you say so sooner?”
“Never mind. Those are the orders.”
Her puzzled look metamorphoses into a slow coarse smile. “Yes, David,” she says. “Yes, my lord and master, yes.”
***
We were dining at the Golden Horn not long afterward and she abruptly asked me, “How much money have you got in the bank?”
Caught off guard, I just looked at her.
“Well, are we friends or aren’t we? How much money have you got in the bank?”
“Bobbie, even my father doesn’t know that. Why should I tell you?”
She cocked her head at me wryly. “You’ve learned how to parry a question.”
Her singing act hadn’t gone over, she said, and she had decided to learn shorthand. She needed a steady living, Broadway was uncertain, she hated modelling, and she knew she could be a right-hand woman to an executive. She had to pay the rent while she studied shorthand, and a wonderful opportunity had opened up. Eddie had dropped singing and coaching to raise chickens in New Jersey, and the money was just piling in. Now he needed a partner with capital, so that he could expand. If I would lend her two thousand dollars, she would invest it with Eddie. He would pay her a salary of thirty a week, and when he eventually sold the farm at a profit, she would get half, and she would pay me back the two thousand with ten percent interest.
Well, here for once I was on familiar ground. Shittim wood, lobster tails, New Jersey chickens, same idea. It occurred to me that, living in New Jersey, Eddie could drop in more often on Einstein at Princeton. I refrained from mentioning this. I said I would be glad to give or lend her fifty a week while she studied shorthand.
“Oh, I don’t like that, David,” said Bobbie, disappointed. “You’ll just be my sugar daddy, then. This other is an investment.”
She accepted it, but getting a weekly check from me must have really bothered her. She kept saying she felt like a concubine, and gradually she turned ornery as only a woman can. I pass over a thousand rotten recollections of my months in Morrie Abbott’s April House flat—which I had rented, so I told my parents, as a “studio”—and ask you just to believe me. She became a demanding, difficult, sarcastic teasing harpy. Her sex games were the very worst. She would provoke, refuse, taunt, lie there cold, turn hot when I was tired or had to write, and work and rework all that ancient universal bag of Eve’s tricks. Of those, she showed herself a world virtuoso. Even at this distance of cooling years I cannot figure out exactly what she was up to. At a guess, she too was caught like me, but she had the complication of being broke. That was obviously why she had tracked me down at Radio City, and perhaps she was ashamed of her poverty and her motives. I’ll never really know.
Oh, those long hellish months that followed Bobbie’s recapture of me, to call what had happened by its right name! I remember only a dim montage of torment, up to one snowy night late in January; the night I threw her out of Morrie’s flat and told her to be damned to hell and never to trouble me again. On that night, we ate a royal dinner at the Oak Room of the Plaza, then went to a Kaufman and Hart comedy, and then had a boisterous snowball fight in the park across from April House, ending in our rolling and wrestling in each other’s arms in the snow. Just terrific! We went up to the flat, drank hot buttered rum, and were shedding our clothes when—at the point of discarding her lacy satin underwear—she started up the old concubine nagging, forced a quarrel, and dressed again. That did it. That was when I threw her out. Whether the reader thinks I was a monster, or a poor sap who should have done it sooner, that is how it happened.
Still, I didn’t give up the flat. Goldhandler had hired another gagman, a nimble-witted fellow named Sam something. This Sam was quite a character. He flew his own airplane. He took me up once and stunted around the Statue of Liberty’s spiky head and upraised torch arm, scaring the hell out of me. This same Sam became an Air Force ferry pilot during the war; went to Israel in 1948 to train pilots, and survived a crash, badly burned up; and ended as a prosperous TV writer on the West Coast. Sam Abelson, now that I think of it. Well, I couldn’t work with Sam at home. Mom would make him stay to dinner, and Sam would eat like a horse and fall asleep. At the penthouse we couldn’t write at all. Lawyers came and went, and Klebanoff kept showing up, bringing assayers, investors, and mining engineers. Goldhandler and his wife were altogether in a lather about Alaskan gold, and at Morrie’s flat Sam and I could at least get things done. Otherwise it was a dingy little hole, to be sure, compared to my lost paradise on the eighteenth floor.
***
My sister Lee at this juncture had a baby boy, a joy to Mom and Pop beyond describing; inside name after Pop’s father, Shaya, outside name Sherman. Today Sherman is a successful brain surgeon out in Beverly Hills, where you would think he would starve for lack of anything to operate on; but no, they keep him busy, perhaps with transplants. Sherman was a big beautiful baby. He yelled like anything when he was circumcised; none of your Jewish instinct to endure and be mute, not an American Jew like Sherman. It was the last time the Mishpokha came together in anything like its old numbers. Mom had the bris catered in Lee’s apartment. She was past the time of stuffing forty-foot kishkas, though Bobbeh had helped her stuff my bar-mitzva kishka in her eighties. Different generation. There was no kishka, but plenty of rich kosher food and an open bar, and everybody had fun except Sherman. Maybe he enjoyed the screaming, too, in his inscrutable newborn way.
And yet, the bris was kind of a sad affair under the jollity. You could see the Mishpokha coming apart. There had been deaths. Relatives had moved all over the map—Florida, California, Canada, Texas—and we were diluted by Bernie’s family. Of the uncles and aunts who still hung on, some of their children had scattered, and the rest who came were for the most part grown-up strangers; they hardly knew the old family songs, and tended to cluster apart, making New Yorkish talk and jokes. Cousin Harold was there with his wife, a nice Jewish nurse, and in that crowd he stood out as real family. He even seemed strongly Jewish, which gives you an idea, maybe. If not for the indomitable Aunt Faiga, the party might have died. But she got the singing going despite all, and Mom and Pop—who had the spirit but lacked her energy—and Cousin Harold and I backed her up, and after a while the young crowd thawed, forgot what cool cats they were, and put on a passable performance as Jews.
What didn’t work was Zaideh’s effort to introduce a note of religion. He tried to make a speech, but his weak voice didn’t carry. So he told me to expound a patch of Talmud we had just learned, on the circumcision of Isaac. For his sake, I spoke in Yiddish. Half of them didn’t understand me, and of those who did, few could follow Talmud logic or wanted to. But I didn’t care, I bulled through, ignoring the inattentive chatter. It saved the day for Zaideh. While I talked his face shone.
As I was typing away at a draft that night, Pop came into my room. “Your Yiddish is improving,” he said. “That was a good vertel.” The word denotes a short learned talk with an elegant point.
“I’ve had good teachers.”
“Tell me, Yisroelke, why that hotel room, that studio? What for?” He gestured at my typewriter, and the papers piled on my desk. “You write here.”
Happily, I could look him in the eye and explain about working with Sam.
“And the girl?”
It was his first reference to Bobbie since the bon voyage party. “It’s over, Papa.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Not after Europe, it wasn’t?”
“Well, no, not entirely.”
“She won’t make a life for herself, you know, as long as she has any hope.”
“It’s over, Pop. Truly it is.”
“I was proud of you at the bris.” He gave me a brief squeeze on the shoulder and walked out.
***
Weeks passed. The snow was gone, and the forsythia was bursting out in the park in golden splashes.
“Sorry, Bobbie, I’ve got a script to turn out today. Thanks, some other time.”
She was calling to invite me to lunch. “Oh, come on, David. You have to eat, don’t you? Meet me at the Palm Court of the Plaza. It’s just across the street from where I’m working, Bonwit’s. So I can’t stay long. And I’m buying. Please, David.”
Since she was back at modelling, which she so detested, I could expect a lunch nasty, brutish, and short, but her “Please, David” had a pathetic note.
“Okay, Bobbie, but you’re not buying me lunch.”
Of all my mental pictures of her—and the photo album is endless—the way she looked that day walking into the Palm Court, remains the quintessential Bobbie Webb. She wore a tailored outfit as usual, this tall slender brunette with a petal-white, delicately rouged face, striding in with her trained queenly walk, making heads turn. This was the Bobbie Webb I had fallen in love with, the sort of woman that men will break their lives and fortunes to possess, and still not really possess. All she wanted to tell me was that she was sorry; that she had been driven by “her devils,” a mean streak stirred up by the hated shorthand course and her worries over money. Now she had a fine job. She loathed garment-center modelling, but working at Bonwit’s was prestigious and fun, and she was all set.
“I don’t know if you’ll ever take me back, but I wish you would think about it, David. I’m asking only to be with you, as long as you want me, and absolutely nothing more. I know how badly I behaved. It’s over. If you give me a chance, you’ll find out that I mean it. What we’ve had, what we can still have, is too beautiful to give up, just because it can’t be forever.” Not her exact words, but that was the idea.
She did pay for the lunch, too, which we hardly touched; snatched the check, made a little joke about it, and paid. Bobbie had never acted more calm and under control. She jumped up gaily, said she felt twenty years younger, and had better get back to work. And she was gone, leaving a stunned student prince sitting there over the uneaten salads and the cold tea.