Peter Quat never wrote letters, so the invitation to the wedding reception at the Waldorf was a bolt from the blue. When Peter quit, he and Marilyn had long since broken off. He had even stopped talking about, that is, reviling her. A year had gone by, and now this! A scrawled note on Harvard stationery was clipped to it:
How about coming to the ceremony at my father’s apartment before the reception? A small nonsense, it won’t take long. The rabbi wants ten guys. Phone me.
Peter
P.S. I guess I owe you the thousand.
Peter had once jeered, after a lovey-dovey phone talk I had with Bobbie, that I would end up marrying her. I had retorted that I would not, but he would probably marry Marilyn Levy; and he had sworn that the day he married Marilyn Levy he would pay me one thousand dollars. I called him in Boston.
“Congratulations, Peter. My wedding present is a thousand dollars.”
A relieved chuckle at the other end: “Very big of you, Davey. Thanks.”
“And of course I’ll come to the ceremony.”
“Great. I’m asking Goldhandler and Boyd. It’ll be fast and painless. We’d have been married by a judge, but she has this halfway religious grandma.”
“All right if I bring Bobbie to the Waldorf party?”
“Aha!” Sardonic lift in Peter’s voice. “That’s still on, is it?”
“Sort of.”
“Of course, bring Bobbie. Why not? It’ll be a mob…. What’s it up to now, dear, four hundred fifty?”
Marilyn’s voice faintly in the background, “Four hundred seventy-seven.”
“She’s there?” I said. “Let me congratulate her.”
“Sure she’s here. We’re jumping the gun.” Angry female noises, Peter laughing complacently. “I’m kidding, of course, Davey. I still can’t get to second base with her, I assure you.”
Marilyn came on the line, annoyed but giggling. “He’s absolutely impossible.”
“He’s a screwball, Marilyn, but probably a genius.”
“So you’ll bring Bobbie, eh? Will you two be next?”
It was a more complicated question than Marilyn Levy knew. “Not right away, anyhow.”
“Hmm! Well, give her our best.”
***
I had been very cautious about taking up with Bobbie Webb again. It was weeks before I brought her back to April House. We walked in the park, we met for lunches and dinners, we went to shows and concerts. I kept it placid and friendly, or tried to. But the fire was there, just banked, and in a natural course it leaped up. Bobbie kept her word. All the whims, games, changes, moods, wiles, tricks, were gone. Bobbie could not have done it with willpower, or by calculation. She had turned some corner in her inner life, and was another woman. Both of us were older. Both were growing up, in different ways. It remained a fugitive love affair, for in those days “moving in together,” as we now call it, was a thing only very free spirits did. The less free called it “shacking up,” or even living in “sin,” if the reader recognizes the word. Bobbie invariably left Morrie’s flat and went home to sleep, while I returned to my “Columbia room” or slept over at April House. Mrs. Webb must have known what was happening, just as Mom and Pop did, but what was unspoken did not exist, or did not have to be faced. “Mother must never know,” Bobbie said soberly, more than once.
One night she broke down and told me, laughing sheepishly, that Eddie’s poultry venture had gone up in smoke. I had done her a great favor by keeping her out of it. Nobody had cautioned Eddie that because of some ghastly plague in the New Jersey soil, the chickens had to be kept off the ground on wire netting. All his three thousand chickens had died in one night. Shades of Uncle Yehuda! The man who knew Einstein could not even sell the carcasses for fertilizer. He had had to burn them, and the stench had brought in state troopers and health inspectors for fifty miles around. Eddie was ruined, and was back coaching girl singers.
“He has the gift of blarney,” she said. “Eddie can talk the birds down out of the trees. The shorthand was his idea, and I was a fool to listen to him.”
“I met him only that once, in the bar,” I said. “Remember? ‘Don’t you know when you’re done, Izzy? That’s not characteristic of your race.’”
Bobbie cringed and spoke softly. “Did I say that?”
When I told her I was taking her to the wedding reception of Peter and Marilyn, she was excited as a child.
***
The rabbi kept winking and giggling at Peter and Marilyn, telling them that the ceremony wouldn’t take long. He seemed less like a rabbi than a dentist, reassuring the couple that he wasn’t going to hurt them a bit. He had brought a stack of purple skullcaps, and a square of purple velvet on four sticks. Somewhere off in Dr. Quat’s apartment a phonograph struck up a scratchy Lohengrin wedding march, and Peter and Marilyn came arm in arm into the living room in street clothes, smirking. Goldhandler and Boyd, holding up two canopy sticks, looked preposterous in purple skullcaps. I held up a stick, and the fourth was in the hand of Marilyn’s brother, a six-footer with a crew haircut, who played football for Cornell, and appeared much embarrassed by these alien goings-on. The happy pair halted under the velvet, and the rabbi welded them in nothing flat, ripping off the blessings at greased speed. He collected the skullcaps, folded up his canopy and sticks, and whistled out, having several other such jobs in the neighborhood. Sunday, he said, was his busy day. During the week he was the chaplain of a mental hospital.
The reception was different. The reader has been at big wedding receptions, and if you picture as fancy a one as you ever saw, you’ve got it. It was not the usual sort of lavish kosher family festivity, of course. There were hams and lobsters in the buffet, and white-gloved waiters passed around shrimp and crab claws. The champagne was Veuve Clicquot, four musicians played Schubert and Beethoven, and the flowers were banked solid and high on all the walls. There wasn’t an Aunt Faiga in the place, and nobody sang or danced. Bobbie attracted many glances of the men there, and she kept remarking how nice the reception was, and how much at ease she felt, after dreading to come to her first Jewish affair. Well, this wasn’t Sherman’s circumcision, exactly. She was just one more non-Jew among many, and the Jews at the party were not caftaned Hassidim.
“Hello, Bobbie, lovely of you to come,” said Marilyn as we moved past the couple on the receiving line. The polite words dropped a glass curtain between her and Bobbie, but if Bobbie sensed it she said nothing. Peter gave her that faintly lewd grin of his, and waggled his eyebrows at her like Groucho Marx. To me he said, “What a zoo, hey?” We landed at a table with Boyd and the Goldhandlers, who kept talking about Klebanoff’s mine with animated absorption, paying no attention to us. Bobbie and I left early.
“You’re the one who should be getting married, David,” said Bobbie, as we sat in the April House bar drinking stingers. “You’re a family man. Peter isn’t. I’ll bet it doesn’t last.”
She was talking straightforwardly, like a friend, not in the least like a mistress seeking to improve her status. She looked me in the eye and added, “Why don’t you go out with some Jewish girls? I have other friends, you know.”
“I do, Bobbie, now and then. It’s meaningless.”
Brushing her fingers across my mouth, she said, “Honey, that’s my problem.”
It happened to be the first of April, so I had made a dinner reservation at the Golden Horn, ordering a special meal and special wine. I made the mistake of telling the muddled Armenian headwaiter that it was “sort of an occasion.” After the meal he came marching up to our table with a spotlighted cake inscribed in pink icing:
Mr. and Mrs. David Goodkind
Happy Anniversary
He offered Bobbie the knife to cut it, while the people in the place applauded. “Oh, David,” Bobbie laughed. “You’re really being cornered, poor dear, aren’t you?”
***
“I tell you what, Liebowitz,” said Goldhandler, “stick around for dinner and we’ll discuss it.”
I had not eaten at the penthouse since Mark’s unfortunate “pass the shit” lunch. Only Boyd still kept up the feudal custom of eating at the master’s table. When Sardinia passed around a large brown clove-studded ham, I regretted agreeing to stay. It was Shavuos, and that morning I had gone to the synagogue to hear Pop chant Akdamos, a cabalistic Aramaic poem in the liturgy. Having learned the subtle chant from his shammas father, he did it every year; it was much admired, and for me it wakened poignant childhood echoes. Zaideh’s “My child, never eat forbidden food” had by now sunk in. Amid the tortures I had endured over Bobbie, there had been heavy soul-searchings about religion and identity, which I trust the reader can imagine. I was no longer ordering the prohibited creatures in restaurants, and I waved off Sardinia.
“What’s with you, Liebowitz?” growled Goldhandler, busy devouring a thick red slice of pig’s rear with much of his old gusto.
I said I had had a big late lunch.
“This sneaky fucker is getting religion, that’s what,” Goldhandler said. “Any time now he may stop jerking off. I mean, of course, on Saturdays.”
“He was Professor Finkel’s pet,” said Karl, who now had a bass voice and dark shaved jowls, and was looking more and more like Goldhandler. “There’s no way he can be getting religion.”
I ate some salad. After putting away a large meal, Goldhandler demanded a cigar.
“Harry,” said his wife, in a tone both pleading and warning.
“While I live,” declared Goldhandler, as Boyd brought him the box, “my motto is, fuck ’em. And after I die, surely fuck ’em.” He lit the cigar with a torch of three wooden matches, and puffed with immense satisfaction. “Sweet as sugar,” he said defiantly.
Later we sat in the office, just the two of us. Beyond the windows I could see the APRIL HOUSE sign, haloed by the misty night.
“So, what’s going to be next year, Finkelstein?” Goldhandler rocked in his big swivel chair, chewing on the cigar. “Game to fumble along with us for another year?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Things will be different in the fall, me boy. We’re going to take it easier and make more money. All of us.”
One successful Broadway farce, he pointed out, could earn more than all the money he had ever made as a radio writer. We could certainly turn out amusing plays, he and I. He smiled at me, and the missing teeth made me warm to him, perhaps because Pop too had lost the same teeth. I was a funny flick, he said. Radio was a treadmill on which he could run in place till he dropped. He had gotten on it through Henny Holtz, and had never since been able to pause and catch his breath to do better things. But his situation had now radically changed. Next year money would be no problem. He might take on one or two radio shows just to keep the business going, but Sam and Boyd could draft those, while we wrote a play. It would be a collaboration. There would be a raise for me, and I would share in the royalties.
I did believe that Harry Goldhandler could write successful plays, or movies, or books, if he could ever break free of the life-consuming radio rubbish. Obviously he was counting on the income of the Klebanoff mine, though he did not speak of it. And I could help him write plays, I thought, by being someone to talk to. If I was a “funny fuck,” it was on a plateau of competence due to his training. Increasingly, in this gaudy Goldhandler circus, I was feeling like a misplaced colorless lawyer. I was no longer the wide-eyed Vicomte de Brag, I was three years older, and I was ready to get back to my studies, more than ready. But Bobbie was right, I loved the man, and to work on a Broadway play with Harry Goldhandler—well, I walked to the desk and offered him my hand. “I’ll think about it, boss, and it’s terrific that you want me.”
“We’ll kill ’em, Liebowitz!” Laying aside the cigar, he clasped my hand with both his fat paws, laughing as Pop had done when I said I was moving home, and he roared, “We’ll kill ’em, and we’ll both make a cocksucking fortune!”
***
I pass over the charm of the second April Bobbie and I had, and ask you to take my word for that, too. Everything that we did together was right—horseback riding, dancing in Harlem, driving to the ocean for walks along the deserted beach, a day in Coney Island taking all the scary rides, a trip in a Goodyear blimp—whatever we did was fun. There always seemed to be more things we wanted to do. It was another fair spring, after all; the second time around, and therefore less thrilling and brilliant, maybe. On the other hand, we weren’t confused, groping, out of our heads. We knew each other. We knew our situation.
“Could I see your sister’s baby?” she asked one day.
“Sherman?” I hesitated only for a second. “Why not? Any time.”
“I don’t want to intrude. I just want to see him. Does he look like you?”
So I had to disclose to Lee and Bernie that I was still seeing Bobbie. It was no shattering news to them, and Lee invited us to dinner. When we came to the apartment, Lee led us straight into the nursery, where Sherman lay all swaddled in blue, gurgling at a toy monkey hung over him. Bobbie started to cry. Lee put her arm around her.
“He’s just so beautiful,” Bobbie said, wiping her eyes. “Sorry about this.”
“He doesn’t look so beautiful,” said Lee, looking proud enough to explode, “when he gets you up at three in the morning.”
“I wouldn’t care if he never let me sleep.”
It was a pleasant, even intimate meal, though Lee and Bernie hadn’t seen Bobbie for two years. When Sherman’s feeding time came, while Lee warmed the bottle she let Bobbie hold him, to quiet his shrieking for instant service. Though the whole evening was an embarrassment, indeed an agony, for me, the sight of Bobbie with the baby in her arms cut me up more than anything else. April was ending. I had reapplied to the law school. An era in my life seemed to be slipping away, the era of Goldhandler and Bobbie Webb. But I found myself wanting to cling to both of them. Why not? Why not? Bobbie Webb was a quiet pretty woman, I loved her, and I knew her as I knew myself. All the bad times were dimming from mind. She was behaving. The Goldhandler money would enable me to live well even with a wife, if I wanted that. Not smart or educated enough? Not Jewish? That man who knew Einstein? Why not, despite all?
The weather was mild and warm when we left Lee’s apartment. We walked downtown through Central Park in the darkness. One could do that then. At the lake we sat down on a bench, under a lamp. The night was so quiet that the April House sign was reflected upside down in the black water.
“Maybe we should get married,” I said.
She took a long time to answer, looking at me with enormous eyes glistening in the lamp light. “What about your faith?”
“Couldn’t you learn it?”
“Is this something you want, David?”
“I think maybe so, Bobbie.”
“My, you’re sweeping me off my feet.” She kissed me lightly and said, “It’s wonderful that you’ve asked. I won’t hold you to it, just because you’ve said the words. Let’s give it some time. There’s no panic.”
Next morning, when the telephone woke me in the Columbia room, my first sleepy thought was that by God I had proposed to Bobbie again, incredible as that was, and I had better talk right away to Pop. As I reached for the phone, my head was in a whirl. How could I put it? How would he take it?
It was Boyd calling. “Goldhandler died,” he said.