I did not hear from Bobbie for about a year.
The first year of law school is less a course of instruction than an ordeal of passage, like adult circumcision among the aborigines. The intent is to cull out the weak. Never have I worked so hard. College by comparison had been kindergarten play. Rusty at the books after such a long layoff, competing against the sharpies who chose Columbia as the high road to Wall Street jobs, I tunnelled through the weeks and months like a mole, blind and deaf to everything but the next assignments and examinations. The Munich crisis came and went, Hitler occupied all of Czechoslovakia, the war talk kept mounting, but it might all have been happening on Pluto. I was holding my own, even beginning to forge forward with some hope of Law Review, and what else mattered? When the summer vacation came, I just studied harder. Attendance in the law library dropped low, but I was there straight through July and August, still making up those lost years.
The day England declared war, Bobbie called me. She wanted to chat about the big news, and to give me her latest address and phone number. She was rehearsing in a new musical, and feeling perky about that. I went to the opening night, and we had a date after the show, and then in the months that followed, a few more. Once again the chronic weakness threatened. To fend it off, I almost married Rosalind Hoppenstein, and here is how that happened.
Pop went into a real decline when France collapsed in May. He had worked himself half to death, gathering those “affidavits” which enabled refugees to come to the States. He signed many himself and got me to sign some too. Pop assured me the Jewish agencies would take care of everyone who came, and so it was. I never even met the people whose lives I saved by scrawling my name on those pieces of paper, not enough by a long shot. The fall of France and the Low Countries meant a clang of iron Nazi doors on thousands of refugees, some of whom held Pop’s affidavits. Shavuos came around, late in May, and Pop asked me to chant Akdamos, he wasn’t up to it. I said a shaygets like myself ought not to do Akdamos. “Never mind,” Pop said. “You’re all right. You know it. Do it.”
So I did. Afterward Rosalind came up to me, shook my hand with her vigorous grip, and invited me to La Traviata the next night, the synagogue opera benefit. That poor betrayed self-sacrificing courtesan, dying of a broken heart to the most gorgeous of Verdi’s melodies, brought Bobbie Webb poignantly to mind. I started calling up Roz again. My attentions were welcomed, and the romance was once more on. My summer job in a law office was a lark compared with the school. We went to shows, and rode horseback, and swam at Jones Beach. I even spent a weekend at a hotel where the Hoppensteins were staying. The rabbi and the fearsome mother were all smiles. Early in the fall they invited me for Sabbath dinner at their home; a rare honor, and a decided signal of encouragement, for they were reserved Europeans.
Now you have to get the historical picture, to believe me when I say I was considering marrying Roz. The Battle of Britain had brilliantly enlivened the summer. For the first time, Hitler was not having things his way. It looked more and more as though we would get into the war. There was talk of a draft. In a burst of patriotism not unmixed with cunning, I went to an Army Air Corps recruiting office. Not for me the mud, the lice, the rat-infested trenches of All Quiet on the Western Front! Me for the wild blue yonder, like those RAF heroes in Spitfires and Hurricanes! I found out that I might get into a reserve officers course when I finished law school, if I could restore a physique worn down by the Goldhandler working hours, Bobbie’s regular recycling of her beloved Izzy through the meat grinder, and the law school ordeal.
So I did three things: I took up boxing, I signed for flying lessons, and I began to think seriously about Rosalind Hoppenstein. Program: I would get myself into martial trim. I would return to the recruiting office not a mere lawyer, but a licensed pilot. I would meantime marry somebody pure, right, lovely, and Jewish, who would cheer my parents while I battled in the skies, and who might even produce a child or two to keep my memory green, were I to go down in flames. Not wholly absent was the dim notion that a wife might keep me out of the draft.
The boxing did harden me up, but the flying was a failure. I never got to solo. My instructor, a lantern-jawed flying fool named Jiggs, couldn’t persuade the owner of the school to turn me loose. I overheard them arguing about it. Jiggs said that the worst I could do was smash the undercarriage. The owner said I might also die, which would hurt business. My depth perception, you see, was off. I would come in for perfect landings, twenty-five feet above the earth. The plane would then pancake straight down, and the owner would come cursing out of the hangar. When I tried to correct the fault, I would fly straight at the ground, and Jiggs would sob through the intercom, “Christ, no, no, I’ve got it,” and would send us zooming. So I gave up the flying idea.
But about that fatal Sabbath dinner with the Hoppensteins. It all went merrily as a marriage bell—in fact, very much like a marriage bell altogether—until the dessert, a pink pudding made by Mrs. Hoppenstein. Rosalind had cooked the rest of the meal (the day before the Sabbath, of course, and kept warm in an oven), and it was excellent, and well advertised as her handiwork. The rabbi forked up some pink pudding as he chatted with me about a fine point in the Sabbath Scripture reading.
“Rabbi,” said his wife sharply, interrupting his discourse, “use the spoon.” Her Germanic origin was evident in the pronunciation. She said shpoon.
He smiled at me, and at her, and observed that it really didn’t matter, did it, what utensil he ate it with? It was a gentle reproof of the interruption of scholarly talk, with a touch of Gallic irony at the ways of women.
Well, her response! The turrets of that woman’s main battery trained at the rabbi, and the salvo rattled windows all over mid-Manhattan. “Yes, it does matter,” she roared, with a great belch of flame, “because I made it, and I want you to use the SHPOON!”
As she said SHPOON, she struck the table with three earthshaking fingers. I glanced at Rosalind and suddenly noticed how much she looked like her mother; noticed too that Rosalind took this exchange quite for granted, normal byplay in a happy household. The rabbi laid down the fork, took up the spoon with another ironic smile at me, and ate the dessert. That SHPOON rings in my ear as I write. I might or might not have married Roz anyway—I admired her, she was a sweet and accomplished girl, although we were never in love—but that was the moment when I knew that I wouldn’t.
***
“David, I don’t know who else to turn to.” Bobbie again, calling after nearly a year when I hadn’t seen or spoken to her. “I’m pregnant.”
“Good God, Bobbie!”
“Don’t take on, dear. It’s not the end of the world, truly it isn’t, but I do want to talk to you.”
Bobbie waded through the standard dinner at Lou Siegel’s with vast enjoyment: chopped chicken liver, fricassee of chicken wings, matzoh-ball soup, sweet and sour tongue, and a garlic steak, with unlimited pickles and rye bread. She was quite cheerful, though decidedly plumper. About the baby’s father she would say scornfully only that he was an animal, she had been a terrible fool, and she would have nothing to do with him. “This is an excellent steak,” she observed. “I didn’t know kosher food could be this good. May I have another beer? What will you do in the Air Corps, David? You won’t get kosher food.”
We had been catching up on each other’s news. I had been accepted for a reserve officers’ course, starting after I graduated from law school.
I said, “I’ll survive. You’re sure you want this baby, Bobbie?”
“Of course. Abortion is wrong, dear. It’s a sin, and anyway, you know how I’ve yearned for a baby, for years and years. That’s my decision, and I won’t change it. Mother has been a brick. She completely agrees with me.”
“When are you due?”
“Mid-October.”
Rapid mental arithmetic: this was late March, so she was finishing her third month, the outside safe point for an abortion. Probably she had just made the decision, and as a first order of business was acquiring a protector. That would be old Izzy, and fair enough.
“If ever I can help, Bobbie, call me.”
Her eyes glistened. “I’m fine, honey, but I appreciate that.”
When I returned her to her small apartment in the Village, Mrs. Webb’s warm greeting, and then the cynical, faintly salacious smile with which she quickly withdrew to a back room, wrung my heart. A woman with another man’s baby growing inside her was nobody I cared to make a pass at, but as far as Mrs. Webb was concerned, the protector was entitled to whatever he wanted of Bobbie. True, the façade of propriety had fallen in ruins. Still, who could say? Perhaps under the gray ashes lay a live coal somewhere!
***
Not until after I graduated did I tell my parents about the Air Reserve course. Sufficient unto the day, I thought. Mama’s reaction was to exclaim, “Air Corps! Good boy!” and go sailing around the room making airplane noises, holding out her arms like wings. “B-R-R-R! V-R-OO-M! Another Lindbergh!” My father just looked at me, and whatever color was in his face fled, leaving him greenish as a dead man. To reassure him, I said I couldn’t qualify as a pilot, and probably would end up in an Air Corps legal office, but meantime I was signed up for a navigator course.
“Why the Air Corps?” Papa asked hoarsely. “It’s the most dangerous service.”
“It beats washing army barracks floors, Pop.” More than once Papa had said he would do that if we got into the war, or anything else he was fit for.
A bleak smile lightened his face. “I see. Well, leave washing the floors to me. Just take good care of our son.”
At the Louisiana airfield where they gave the navigator course I was something of a freak: a New York Jew, a lawyer, a former gagman, in with ROTC types and assorted volunteers, mainly deep Southerners. It was my first total immersion in non-Jews. I suppose these prewar volunteers were for the most part screwballs like me, and at all events I got along. There were a few “clip-cock” types, but I had no truck with them, and that was that. The navigation was a challenge, we flew a lot, and the peacetime Air Corps was far from an intolerable grind, especially after law school.
In August, when I flew home for my first leave, I was shocked at the change in my father: the feebleness of his motions, the way the skin of his face hung in folds, the baggy looseness of his clothing. Yet he was so glad to see me, so full of eager inquiries about the Air Corps, and so quick with his old Yiddish joking—moreover, he clearly was so proud of me—that I buried my uneasiness. Mama insisted that he was all right. If I could only persuade him to take a two-week vacation he would come back a new man. I went straight to him and told him to do it.
“Is that a military order?” Pop inquired.
“Right,” I said. “Failure to comply will result in washing barracks floors for thirty days.”
Pop laughed and agreed to go.
I did not see Bobbie, but we talked on the telephone. Her obstetrician was worrying her about the baby’s position and heartbeat. She wanted to go to another doctor. Everything was costing more than she had expected, and her savings were running low, but her mother was working in a tea room, and they would be all right. When I returned to the base I sent her a check, anyway. Bobbie wrote back a strangely articulate and moving letter about our relationship, going back to our first days in April House. I tore up that letter, with a pile of other mementos, the night before I married Jan.
The call came on October 15. “It’s a girl, darling.” Bobbie’s voice was high and muffled, as when she was tired or sleepy. “You’re the first to know. Mother went home at four A.M., all worn out.”
“That’s great news, Bobbie. Congratulations! Are you okay?”
“Well, dopey from the anesthetic, I guess, but sure, fine, very happy. I had a rough time, but she’s just perfect, she’s adorable. And so big! Nine pounds! I just saw her for a little while, then they took her away, screaming bloody murder.”
The telephone at the gunnery school hung on the wall in the lobby of the officers’ quarters; not much privacy, with the fellows trampling past me on the way to breakfast. “Is there anything I can do, Bobbie?”
“Just come and see us next time you’re in town.” Bobbie wearily chuckled. “She’s something, honestly.”
“Of course I’ll come.”
But I never did see Bobbie’s baby, and I did not see Bobbie again until after Pop died.
***
“It’s about your father.”
The duty officer shook me awake at three in the morning. I stumbled to the telephone. Lee told me shakily that Pop was in the hospital, and the doctors thought he might make it, but they had advised her to summon me. I put on my second lieutenant’s uniform, thinking it might facilitate travel. An Air Corps plane was leaving the base at dawn for a field outside Washington, so I caught a ride on it and flew on to New York from there. The uniform did help, especially when I told the ticket salesman at the air terminal why I was travelling. I got aboard a sold-out plane.
Mama was sitting on a couch in the hospital corridor near his room. “You can’t see him for very long,” she said, “but he knows you’re coming, and he’s waiting for you.”
“How is he?”
Mama shrugged, and smiled in that tough way of hers under stress. “They give him a fifty-fifty chance.”
I had never seen oxygen apparatus before. Papa sat propped up on pillows, with a tube from his nose to a plastic bag hanging over his head, which collapsed and inflated with each breath. He turned his head to me. At the sight of the uniform his face lit up, and he murmured, “Ut is Yisroelke, der Amerikaner offizier.”
“Papa, hayitokhon?”
That brought a ghostly little laugh. Beside him lay a pad and pencil, and a pile of scribbled notes. His secretary came from the laundry every day to collect these and report on business. He wrote those notes until he died.
In Yiddish he whispered, “What do you think, Yisroelke? Will I be a laydig-gayer?” The word means idle-goer, do-nothing, loafer; a heavy term of Yiddish opprobrium.
“Not you, Pop. Never.”
He nodded, and lay his head back on the pillow with a weary smile. He held out a hand, barely lifting it from the coverlet, to gesture at the uniform.
“Nu, mein offizier, zye a mentsch.” (Well, my officer, be a man.)
“I’m trying, Pop.”
Again he nodded, and he shut his eyes. Mama and I left. I did not see him again alive. The doctors said he was doing well, and told us to go home and get some rest. We were awakened after midnight by a call from the floor nurse, who said to me, “It looks very bad.” When we got there he lay with his head to one side. I took his hand, still warm and sweaty, and recited the final confession for him, not knowing whether he had managed to say it, for he died alone.
I do not mean to dwell on sad things, but that much is part of my story. I have described the graveyard scene, and the partner Brodofsky leaping to pile the first shovelful of earth on Pop’s rough wooden coffin. I will remember that till I die. Nor will I write here a eulogy of my father. I have written it already, such as I could.
***
We were sitting shiva, the seven days of mourning, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. That Sunday, December 7, was the last full day of our shiva. I called the navigation school and talked to the deputy commanding officer. He said I should complete my mourning and get back as soon as possible. When I mentioned that I had a seven-day growth of beard, and that my tradition required me to let it grow thirty days from my father’s death, he hesitated and then said, “Well, come on back, Lieutenant, and we’ll see about that.” In the event the school let me grow the beard.
So there we were on Monday morning, terminating the shiva. The members of Pop’s synagogue who had come every day to the apartment for services, so that Lee and I could say kaddish without leaving home, had all had their coffee and cake and departed. Mom was taking down the sheets that had swathed the mirrors; I was stacking the prayer books, and Lee was collecting the low mourning stools, when the phone rang.
“It’s Bobbie Webb,” Lee whispered to me, with a side-glance at Mom.
I closed the door of my bedroom and picked up the phone. Bobbie said she had called me at the school to talk about how our getting into the war might affect me. They had told her where I was.
“Can I see you before you go?” she asked gaily. “Heaven only knows when we’ll meet again, flyboy, you’re off to the wars, aren’t you? You’re entitled to a going-away present. I’m in April House, Room 729.”
“What? April House?” I spoke slowly and stupidly, not able to handle this alien note striking into my changed life.
“I couldn’t get Suite 1800, dear,” she said. “I asked, but Peeping Tom is booked up.” I said nothing. Her tone altered. “David, is everything all right? You sound odd. If I’m disturbing you, or embarrassing you—”
“No, no, Bobbie. Room 729? I can’t stay long, I’m on my way back to base.”
“Oh, it shouldn’t take long, honey.” Her voice lifted again into arch flirtation. “You might have let me and Angela know you were on leave, and dropped in to see us.”
“Who was that?” Mom asked when I came out of my room. They don’t come more alert than my mother, and to this hour, nearly blind and deaf as she is, that is still true.
“Somebody I knew when I was a boy, Mom.”
When Bobbie opened the door of the hotel room and saw my face, and the growth of beard, she knew.
“It’s your father, David.”
“Yes. He died a week ago.”
It was a small room, smaller even than Morrie’s, with a rather dingy hotel bed, a couch, and some nondescript chairs. Bobby and I had had many a tryst in such rooms, but not in April House. A bottle of champagne stood in a cooler on the bed table, with two glasses.
“I’m awfully sorry. I’ve been sitting here thinking it must be your father. Ever since I heard your voice on the telephone.” She touched the beard. “For how long?”
“A month, if the Air Corps will let me.”
“Gray hairs, David. Have you noticed? Just two or three.”
“I noticed. How is Angela?”
“Unbelievably cute. Sleeps straight through the night, a sheer joy. Wait till you have a child of your own, David. Life starts over again, truly it does.” She glanced at the wine doubtfully and said, “I don’t know. Want some?”
“Why not? This is thoughtful of you.”
“Well, dear, I didn’t know about your father. Why didn’t they tell me? They just gave me the phone number.”
I opened the wine, and we drank, Bobbie sitting on the couch, I on a chair facing her. We talked of the war, naturally. She was solicitous about Lee and my mother. I told her something about our mourning practices, and how my father had died.
“I only saw him across the street that once, outside the synagogue, and then the painting in your home. I wish I could have known him.”
“He knew about you, Bobbie, and always wished you well.”
We had been drinking the wine rather fast, in this awkward conversation, and I poured the last of it in our two glasses.
“May I drink to his memory?”
“Of course.”
We raised our glasses and drank. Bobby crossed her legs. She could do that casually, as women do all the time without thinking, or she could do it as an offer of love. This was an offer. My eyes went from the legs to her face. Seeing what she saw in my eyes, she pulled her skirt over her knees, and that was the end.
She left first, with a gentle goodbye kiss. I had to make phone calls, and I said I would pay the bill. When I walked out of April House for the last time, it was starting to snow.