Collected Stories Page 17

  Aunt Rose was Dr. Braun’s godmother, held him at his circumcision. Bearded, nearsighted old Krieger, fingers stained with chicken slaughter, cut away the foreskin.

  Aunt Rose, Braun felt, was the original dura mater—the primal hard mother. She was not a big woman. She had a large bust, wide hips, and old-fashioned thighs of those corrupted shapes that now belong to history. Which hampered her walk. Together with poor feet, broken by the excessive female weight she carried. Her face was red, her black hair powerful. She had a straight sharp nose. To cut through mercy like a cotton thread. In the light of her eyes Braun recognized the joy she took in her hardness—hardness of reckoning, hardness of tactics, hardness of dealing and of speech. She was building a kingdom with the labor of Uncle Braun and the strength of her obedient sons. The Brauns had their shop, they had real estate. They had a hideous synagogue of such red brick as seemed to grow in upstate New York by the will of the demon spirit charged with maintaining the ugliness of America in that epoch—which saw to it that a particular comic ugliness should influence the soul of man. In Schenectady, in Troy, in Gloversville, Mechanicville, as far west as Buffalo. There was a sour-paper mustiness in this synagogue. Uncle Braun not only had money, he also had some learning and he was respected. But it was a quarrelsome congregation. Every question was disputed. There were rivalries and rages; slaps were given, families stopped speaking. Pariahs, thought Braun, with the dignity of princes among themselves.

  Silent, with silent eyes crossing and recrossing the red water tank bound by twisted cables, from which ragged icicles hung down and white vapor rose, Dr. Braun extracted a moment four decades gone in which Cousin Isaac had said, with one of those archaic looks he had, that the Brauns were descended from the tribe of Naphtali.

  “How do we know?”

  ” People—families—_know.__ “

  Dr. Braun was reluctant, even at the age of ten, to believe such things. But Isaac, who was almost old enough to be Braun’s uncle, said: “You’d better not forget it.”

  As a rule, Isaac was gay with young Braun. Laughing against the tension of the scar that forced his mouth to one side. His eyes, black, soft, but also skeptical. His breath had a bitter fragrance that translated itself to Braun as masculine earnestness and gloom. All the sons in the family had the same sort of laugh. They sat on the open porch, Sundays, laughing, while Uncle Braun read aloud the Yiddish matrimonial advertisements. “Attractive widow, thirty-five, with dark charms, owning her own dry-goods business in Hudson, excellent cook, Orthodox, well-bred, refined. Plays the piano. Two intelligent, well-behaved children, eight and six.”

  All but Tina, the obese sister, took part in this satirical Sunday pleasure. Behind the screen door, she stood in the kitchen. Below was the yard, where crude flowers grew—zinnias, plantain lilies, trumpet vine on the chicken shed.

  Now the country cottage appeared to Braun, in the Adirondacks. A stream. So beautiful! Trees, full of great strength. Wild strawberries, but you must be careful about the poison ivy. In the drainage ditches, polliwogs. Braun slept in the attic with Cousin Mutt. Mutt danced in his undershirt in the morning, naked beneath, and sang an obscene song: “I stuck my nose up a nanny goat’s ass And the smell was enough to blind me. “_

  He was leaping on bare feet, and his thing bounded from thigh to thigh. Going into saloons to collect empty bottles, he had learned this. A ditty from the stokehold. Origin, Liverpool or Tyneside. Art of the laboring class in the machine age.

  An old mill. A pasture with clover flowers. Braun, seven years old, tried to make a clover wreath, pinching out a hole in the stems for other stems to pass through. He meant the wreath for fat Tina. To put it on her thick savory head, her smoky black harsh hair. Then in the pasture, little Braun overturned a rotten stump with his foot. Hornets pursued and stung him. He screamed. He had painful crimson lumps all over his body. Aunt Rose put him to bed and Tina came huge into the attic to console him. An angry fat face, black eyes, and the dilated nose breathing at him. Little Braun, stung and burning. She lifted her dress and petticoat to cool him with her body. The belly and thighs swelled be-fore him. Braun felt too small and frail for this ecstasy. By the bedside was a chair, and she sat. Under the dizzy heat of the shingled roof, she rested her legs upon him, spread them wider, wider. He saw the barbarous and coaly hair. He saw the red within. She parted the folds with her fingers. Parting, her dark nostrils opened, the eyes looked white in her head. She motioned that he should press his child’s genital against her fat-flattened thighs. Which, with agonies of incapacity and pleasure, he did. All was silent. Summer silence. Her sexual odor. The flies and gnats stimulated by delicious heat or the fragrance. He heard a mass of flies tear themselves from the windowpane. A sound of detached adhesive. Tina did not kiss, did not embrace. Her face was menacing. She was defying. She was drawing him—taking him somewhere with her. But she promised nothing, told him nothing.

  When he recovered from his stings, playing once more in the yard, Braun saw Isaac with his fiancщe, Clara Sternberg, walking among the trees, embracing very sweetly. Braun tried to go with them, but Cousin Isaac sent him away. When he still followed, Cousin Isaac turned him roughly toward the cottage. Little Braun then tried to kill his cousin. He wanted with all his heart to club Isaac with a piece of wood. He was still struck by the incomparable happiness, the luxury of that pure murderousness. Rushing toward Isaac, who took him by the back of the neck, twisted his head, held him under the pump. He then decreed that little Sam Braun must go home, to Albany. He was far too wild. Must be taught a lesson. Cousin Tina said in private, “Good for you,_ Sam. I hate him, too.” She took Braun with her dimpled, inept hand and walked down the road with him in the Adirondack dust. Her gingham-fitted bulk. Her shoulders curved, banked, like the earth of the hill-cut road. Together, they hampered her walk. The excessive weight of her body was too much for her feet.

  Later she dieted. Became for a while thinner, more civilized. Everyone was more civilized. Little Braun became a docile, bookish child. Did very well at school.

  All clear? Quite clear to the adult Braun, considering his fate no more than the fate of others. Before his tranquil look, the facts arranged themselves—rose, took a new arrangement. Remained awhile in the settled state and then changed again. We were getting somewhere.

  Uncle Braun died angry with Aunt Rose. He turned his face to the wall with his last breath to rebuke her hardness. All the men, his sons, burst out weeping. The tears of the women were different. Later, too, their passion took other forms. They bargained for more property. And Aunt Rose defied Uncle Braun’s will. She collected rents in the slums of Albany and Schenectady from properties he had left to his sons. She dressed herself in the old fashion, calling on black tenants or the Jewish rabble of tailors and cobblers. To her, the old Jewish words for these trades—_Schneider, Schuster__—were terms of contempt. Rents belonging mainly to Isaac she banked in her own name. Riding ancient streetcars in the factory slums, she did not need to buy widow’s clothes. She had always worn suits, and they had always been black. Her hat was three-cornered, like the town crier’s. She let the black braid hang behind, as though she were in her own kitchen. She had trouble with bladder and arteries, but ailments did not keep her at home and she had no use for doctoring and drugs. She blamed Uncle Braun’s death on Bromo-Seltzer, which, she said, had enlarged his heart.

  Isaac did not marry Clara Sternberg. Though he was a manufacturer, her father turned out on inquiry to have started as a cutter and her mother had been a housemaid. Aunt Rose would not tolerate such a connection. She took long trips to make genealogical inquiries. And she vetoed all the young women, her judgments severe without limit. “A false dog.”

  “Candied poison.”

  “An open ditch. A sewer. A born whore!”

  The woman Isaac eventually married was pleasant, mild, round, respectable, the daughter of a Jewish farmer.

  Aunt Rose said, “Ignorant. A common man.”

  “He’s honest,
a hard worker on the land,” said Isaac. “He recites the Psalms even when he’s driving. He keeps them under his wagon seat.”

  “I don’t believe it. A son of Ham like that. A cattle dealer. He stinks of manure.” And she said to the bride in Yiddish, “Be so good as to wash thy father before bringing him to the synagogue. Get a bucket of scalding water, and 20 Mule Team Borax and ammonia, and a horse brush. The filth is ingrained. Be sure to scrub his hands.”

  The rigid madness of the Orthodox. Their haughty, spinning, crazy spirit. Tina did not bring her young man from New York to be examined by Aunt Rose. Anyway, he was neither young, nor handsome, nor rich. Aunt Rose said he was a minor hoodlum, a slugger. She had gone to Coney Island to inspect his_ family—a father who sold pretzels and chestnuts from a cart, a mother who cooked for banquets. And the groom himself—so thick, so bald, so grim, she said, his hands so common and his back and chest like fur, a fell. He was a beast, she told young Sammy Braun. Braun was a student then at Rensselaer Polytechnic and came to see his aunt in her old kitchen—the great black-and-nickel stove that stood there, the round table on its oak pedestal, the dark-blue-and-white check of the oilcloth, a still life of peaches and cherries salvaged from the secondhand shop. And Aunt Rose, more feminine with her corset off and a gaudy wrapper over her thick Victorian undervests, camisoles, bloomers. Her stockings were gartered below the knee and the wide upper portions, fashioned for thighs, drooped down, flimsy, nearly to her slippers.

  Tina was then handsome, if not pretty. In high school she took off eighty pounds. Then she went to New York City without getting her diploma. What did she_ care for such things! said Rose. And how did she get to Coney Island by herself? Because she was perverse. Her instinct was for freaks. And there she met this beast. This hired killer, this second Lepke of Murder, Inc. Upstate, the old woman read the melodramas of the Yiddish press, which she embroidered with her own ideas of wickedness.

  But when Tina brought her husband to Schenectady, installing him in her father’s secondhand shop, he turned out to be a big innocent man. If he had ever had guile, he lost it with his hair. His baldness was total, like a purge. He had a sentimental, dependent look. Tina protected him. Here Dr. Braun had sexual thoughts, about himself as a child and about her childish bridegroom. And scowling, smoldering Tina, her angry tenderness in the Adirondacks, and how she was beneath, how hard she breathed in the attic, and the violent strength and obstinacy of her crinkled, sooty hair.

  Nobody could sway Tina. That, thought Braun, was probably the secret of it. She had consulted her own will, kept her own counsel for so long, that she could accept no other guidance. Anyone who listened to others seemed to her weak.

  When Aunt Rose lay dead, Tina took from her hand the ring Isaac had given her many years ago. Braun did not remember the entire history of that ring, only that Isaac had loaned money to an immigrant who disappeared, leaving this jewel, which was assumed to be worthless but turned out to be valuable. Braun could not recall whether it was ruby or emerald; nor the setting. But it was the one feminine adornment Aunt Rose wore. And it was supposed to go to Isaac’s wife, Sylvia, who wanted it badly. Tina took it from the corpse and put it on her own finger.

  “Tina, give that ring to me. Give it here,” said Isaac.

  “No. It was hers. Now it’s mine.”

  “It was not Mama’s. You know that. Give it back.”

  She outfaced him over the body of Aunt Rose. She knew he would not quarrel at the deathbed. Sylvia was enraged. She did what she could. That is, she whispered, “Make_ her!” But it was no use. He knew he could not recover it. Besides, there were too many other property disputes. His rents were deposited in Aunt Rose’s savings account.

  But only Isaac became a millionaire. The others simply hoarded, old-immigrant style. He never sat waiting for his legacy. By the time Aunt Rose died, Isaac was already worth a great deal of money. He had put up an ugly apartment building in Albany. To him, an achievement. He was out with his men at dawn. Having prayed aloud while his wife, in curlers, pretty but puffy with sleepiness, sleepy but obedient, was in the kitchen fixing breakfast. Isaac’s Orthodoxy only increased with his wealth. He soon became an old-fashioned Jewish paterfamilias. With his family he spoke a Yiddish unusually thick in old Slavic and Hebrew expressions. Instead of “important people, leading citizens,” he said “Anshe ha-ir,” Men_ of the City. He, too, kept the Psalms near. As active, worldly Jews for centuries had done. One copy lay in the glove compartment of his Cadillac. To which his great gloomy sister referred with a twist of the face—she had become obese again, wider and taller, since those Adirondack days. She said, “He reads the Tehillim aloud in his air-conditioned Caddy when there’s a long freight train at the crossing. That crook! He’d pick God’s pocket!”

  One could not help thinking what fertility of metaphor there was in all of these Brauns. Dr. Braun himself was no exception. And what the explanation might be, despite twenty-five years of specialization in the chemistry of heredity, he couldn’t say. How a protein molecule originating in an invisible ferment might carry such propensities of ingenuity, and creative malice and negative power, be capable of printing a talent or a vice upon a billion hearts. No wonder Isaac Braun cried out to his God when he sat sealed in his great black car and the freights rumbled in the polluted shimmering of this once-beautiful valley Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness._

  “But what do you think?” said Tina. “Does he remember his brothers when there is a deal going? Does he give his only sister a chance to come in?”

  Not that there was any great need. Cousin Mutt, after he was wounded at Iwo Jima, returned to the appliance business. Cousin Aaron was a CPA. Tina’s husband, bald Fenster, branched into housewares in his secondhand shop. Tina was back ofthat, of course. No one was poor. What irritated Tina was that Isaac would not carry the family into realestate deals, where the tax advantages were greatest. The big depreciation allowances, which she understood as legally sanctioned graft. She had her money in savings accounts at a disgraceful two and a half percent, taxed at the full rate. She did not trust the stock market.

  Isaac had tried, in fact, to include the Brauns when he built the shopping center at Robbstown. At a risky moment, they abandoned him. A desperate moment, when the law had to be broken. At a family meeting, each of the Brauns had agreed to put up twenty-five thousand dollars, the entire amount to be given under the table to Ilkington. Old Ilkington headed the board of directors of the Robbstown Country Club. Surrounded by factories, the club was moving farther into the country. Isaac had learned this from the old caddie master when he gave him a lift, one morning of fog. Mutt Braun had caddied at Robbstown in the early twenties, had carried Ilkington’s clubs. Isaac knew Ilkington, too, and had a private talk with him. The old goy, now seventy, retiring to the British West Indies, had said to Isaac, “Off the record. One hundred thousand. And I don’t want to bother about Internal Revenue.” He was a long, austere man with a marbled face. Cornell 1910 or so. Cold but plain. And, in Isaac’s opinion, fair.

  Developed as a shopping center, properly planned, the Robbstown golf course was worth half a million apiece to the Brauns. The city in the postwar boom was spreading fast. Isaac had a friend on the zoning board who would clear everything for five grand. As for the contracting, he offered to do it all on his own. Tina insisted that a separate corporation be formed by the Brauns to make sure the building profits were shared equally. To this Isaac agreed. As head of the family, he took the burden upon himself. He would have to organize it all. Only Aaron the CPA could help him, setting up the books. The meeting, in Aaron’s office, lasted from noon to three P. M. All the difficult problems were examined. Four players, specialists in the harsh music of money, studying a score. In the end, they agreed to perform.

  But when the time came, ten A. M. on a Friday, Aaron balked. He would not do it. And Tina and Mutt also reneged. Isaac told Dr. Braun the story. As arranged, he came to Aaron’s office carrying the twenty-five
thousand dollars for Ilkington in an old briefcase. Aaron, now forty, smooth, shrewd, and dark, had the habit of writing tiny neat numbers on his memo pad as he spoke to you. Dark fingers quickly consulting the latest tax publications. He dropped his voice very low to the secretary on the intercom. He wore white-on-white shirts and silk-brocade ties, signed “Countess Mara.” Of them all, he looked most like Uncle Braun. But without the beard, without the kingly pariah derby, without the gold thread in his brown eye. In many externals, thought scientific Braun, Aaron and Uncle Braun were drawn from the same genetic pool. Chemically, he was the younger brother of his father. The differences within were due possibly to heredity. Or perhaps to the influence of business America.

  “Well?” said Isaac, standing in the carpeted office. The grandiose desk was superbly clean.

  “How do you know Ilkington can be trusted?”

  “I think he can.”

  “You_ think. He could take the money and say he never heard of you in all his life.”

  “Yes, he might. But we talked that over. We have to gamble.”

  Probably on his instructions, Aaron’s secretary buzzed him. He bent over the instrument and out of the corner of his mouth he spoke to her very deliberately and low.

  “Well, Aaron,” said Isaac. “You want me to guarantee your investment? Well? Speak up.”

  Aaron had long ago subdued his thin tones and spoke in the gruff style of a man always sure of himself. But the sharp breaks, mastered twenty-five years ago, were still there. He stood up with both fists on the glass of his desk, trying to control his voice.

  He said through clenched teeth, “I haven’t slept!”

  “Where is rhe money?”

  “I don’r have rhar kind of cash.”

  “No?”

  “You know damn well. I’m licensed. I’m a certified accounrant. I’m in no position…”