Collected Stories Page 19

  “But I’m not a medical doctor.”

  “You’re a scientist. You’ll understand it better.”

  Anyone might have understood. She was dying of cancer of the liver. Cobalt radiation was tried. Chemotherapy. Both made her very sick. Dr. Braun told Isaac, “There is no hope.”

  “I know.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “No. I hear from Mutt.”

  Isaac sent word through Mutt that he wanted to come to her bedside.

  Tina refused to see him.

  And Mutt, with his dark sloping face, unhandsome but gentle, dog-eyed, softly urged her, “You should, Tina.”

  But Tina said, “No. Why should I? A Jewish deathbed scene, that’s what he wants. No.”

  “Come, Tina.”

  “No,” she said, even firmer. Then she added, “I hate him.” As though explaining that Mutt should not expect her to give up the support of this feeling. And a little later she added, in a lower voice, as though speaking generally, “I can’t help him.”

  But Isaac phoned Mutt daily, saying, “I have to see my sister.”

  “I can’t get her to do it.”

  “You’ve got to explain it to her. She doesn’t know what’s right.”

  Isaac even telephoned Fenster, though, as everyone was aware, he had a low opinion of Fenster’s intelligence. And Fenster answered, “She says you did us all dirt.”

  “I? She got scared and backed out. I had to go it alone.”

  “You shook us off.”

  Quite simplemindedly, with the directness of the biblical fool (this was how Isaac saw him, and Fenster knew it), he said, “You wanted it all for yourself, Isaac.”

  That they should let him, ungrudgingly, enjoy his great wealth, Isaac told Dr. Braun, was too much to expect. And he admitted that he was very rich. He did not say how much money he had. This was a mystery to the family. The old people said, “He himself don’t know.”

  Isaac confessed to his cousin Dr. Braun, “I never understood her.” He was much moved, even then, a year later.

  Cousin Tina had discovered that one need not be bound by the old rules. That, Isaac’s painful longing to see his sister’s face being denied, everything was put into a different sphere of advanced understanding, painful but truer than the old. From her bed she appeared to be directing this research.

  ‘You ought to let him come,” said Mutt.

  Because I’m dying?”

  Mutt, plain and dark, stared at her, his black eyes momentarily vacant as he chose an answer. “People recover,” he said.

  But she said, with peculiar indifference to the fact, “Not this time.” She had already become gaunt in the face and high in the belly. Her ankles were swelling. She had seen this in others and understood the signs.

  “He calls every day,” said Mutt.

  She had had her nails done. A dark-red, almost maroon color. One of those odd twists of need or desire. The ring she had taken from her mother was now loose on the finger. And, reclining on the raised bed, as if she had found a moment of ease, she folded her arms and said, pressing the lace of the bed jacket with her fingertips, “Then give Isaac my message, Mutt. I’ll see him, yes, but it’ll cost him money.”

  “Money?”

  “If he pays me twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Tina, that’s not right.”

  “Why not! For my daughter. She’ll need it.”

  “No, she doesn’t need that kind of dough.” He knew what Aunt Rose had left. “There’s plenty and you know it.”

  “If he’s got to come, that’s the price of admission,” she said. “Only a fraction of what he did us out of.”

  Mutt said simply, “He never did me out of anything.” Curiously, the shrewdness of the Brauns was in his face, but he never practiced it. This was not because he had been wounded in the Pacific. He had always been like that. He sent Tina’s message to Isaac on a piece of business stationery, BRAUN APPLIANCES, 42 CLINTON. Like a contract bid. No word of comment, not even a signature. For 20 grand cash Tina says yes otherwise no._

  In Dr. Braun’s opinion, his cousin Tina had seized upon the force of death to create a situation of opera, which at the same time was a situation of parody. As he stated it to himself, there was a feedback of mockery. Death the horrid bridegroom, waiting with a consummation life had never offered. Life, accordingly, she devalued, filling up the clear light remaining (which should be reserved for beauty, miracle, nobility) with obese monstrosity, rancor, failure, self-torture.

  Isaac, on the day he received Tina’s terms, was scheduled to go out on the river with the governor’s commission on pollution. A boat was sent by the Fish and Game Department to take the five members out on the Hudson. They would go south as far as Germantown, where the river, with mountains on the west, seems a mile wide. And back again to Albany. Isaac would have canceled this inspection, he had so much thinking to do, was so full of things. “Over-thronged” was the odd term Braun chose for it, which seemed to render Isaacs state best. But Isaac could not get out of this official excursion. His wife made him take his Panama hat and wear a light suit. He bent over the side of the boat, hands clasped tight on the dark-red, brass-jointed rail. He breathed through his teeth. At the back of his legs, in his neck, his pulses beating; and in the head an arterial swell through which he was aware, one-sidedly, of the air streaming, and gorgeous water. Two young professors from Rensselaer lectured on the geology and wildlife of the upper Hudson and on the industrial and community problems of the region. The towns were dumping raw sewage into the Mohawk and the Hudson. You could watch the flow from giant pipes. Cloacae, said the professor with his red beard and ruined teeth. Much dark metal in his mouth, pewter ridges instead of bone. And a pipe with which he pointed to the turds yellowing the river. The cities, spilling their filth. How dispose of it? Methods were discussed—treatment plants. Atomic power. And finally he presented an ingenious engineering project for sending all waste into the interior of the earth, far under the crust, thousands of feet into deeper strata. But even if pollution were stopped today, it would take fifty years to restore the river. The fish had persisted but at last abandoned their old spawning grounds. Only a savage scavenger eel dominated the water. The river great and blue in spite of the dung pools and the twisting of the eels.

  One member of the governor’s commission had a face remotely familiar, long and high, the mouth like a latch, cheeks hollow, the bone warped in the nose, and hair fading. Gentle. A thin person. His thoughts on Tina, Isaac had missed his name. But looking at the printed pages prepared by the staff, he saw that it was Ilkington Junior. This quiet, likable man examining him with such meaning from the white bulkhead, long trousers curling in the breeze as he held the metal rail behind him.

  Evidently he knew about the hundred thousand dollars.

  “I think I was acquainted with your father,” Isaac said, his voice very low.

  “You were, indeed,” said Ilkington. He was frail for his height; his skin was pulled tight, glistening on the temples, and a reddish blood lichen spread on his cheekbones. Capillaries. “The old man is well.”

  “Well. I’m glad.”

  “Yes. He’s well. Very feeble. He had a bad time, you know.”

  “I never heard.”

  “Oh, yes, he invested in hotel construction in Nassau and lost his money.”

  “All of it?” said Isaac.

  “All his legitimate money.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “Lucky he had a little something to fall back on.”

  “He did?”

  “He certainly did.”

  “Yes, I see. That was_ lucky.”

  “It’ll last him.”

  Isaac was glad to know and appreciated the kindness of Ilkington’s son in telling him. Also the man knew what the Robbstown Country Club had been worth to him, but did not grudge him, behaved with courtesy. For which Isaac, filled with thankfulness, would have liked to show gratitude. But what you showed, among th
ese people, you showed with silence. Of which, it seemed to Isaac, he was now beginning to appreciate the wisdom. The native, different wisdom of Gentiles, who had much to say but refrained. What was this Ilkington Junior? He looked into the pages again and found a paragraph of biography. Insurance executive. Various government commissions. Probably Isaac could have discussed Tina with such a man. Yes, in heaven. On earth they would never discuss a thing. Silent impressions would have to do. Incommunicable diversities, kindly but silent contact. The more they had in their heads, the less people seemed to know how to tell it.

  “When you write to your father, remember me to him.”

  Communities along the river, said the professor, would not pay for any sort of sewage-treatment plants. The federal government would have to arrange it. Only fair, Isaac considered, since Internal Revenue took away to Washington billions in taxes and left small change for the locals. So they pumped the excrements into the waterways. Isaac, building along the Mohawk, had always taken this for granted. Building squalid settlements of which he was so proud…. Had been proud.

  He stepped onto the dock when the boat tied up. The state game commissioner had taken an eel from the water to show the inspection party. It was writhing toward the river in swift, powerful loops, tearing its skin on the planks, its crest of fin standing. Treph!_ And slimy black, the perishing mouth open.

  The breeze had dropped and the wide water stank. Isaac drove home, turning on the air conditioner of his Cadillac. His wife said, “What was it like?”

  He had no answer to give.

  “What are you doing about Tina?”

  Again, he said nothing.

  But knowing Isaac, seeing how agitated he was, she predicted that he would go down to New York City for advice. She told this later to Dr. Braun, and he saw no reason to doubt it. Clever wives can foretell. A fortunate husband will be forgiven his predictability.

  Isaac had a rabbi in Williamsburg. He was Orthodox enough for that. And he did not fly. He took a compartment on the Twentieth Century_ when it left Albany just before daybreak. With just enough light through the dripping gray to see the river. But not the west shore. A tanker covered by smoke and cloud divided the bituminous water. Presently the mountains emerged.

  They wanted to take the old crack train out of service. The carpets were filthy, the toilets stank. Slovenly waiters in the dining car. Isaac took toast and coffee, rejecting the odors of ham and bacon by expelling breath. Eating with his hat on. Racially distinct, as Dr. Braun well knew. A blood group characteristically eastern Mediterranean. The very fingerprints belonging to a distinctive family of patterns. The nose, the eyes long and full, the skin dark, slashed near the mouth by a Russian doctor in the old days. And looking out as they rushed past Rhinecliff, Isaac saw, with the familiarity of hundreds of journeys, the grand water, the thick trees—illuminated space. In the compartment, in captive leisure, shut up with the foul upholstery, the rattling door. The old arsenal, Bannerman’s Island, the playful castle, yellow-green willows around it, and the water sparkling, as green as he remembered it in 1910—one of the forty million foreigners coming to America. The steel rails, as they were then, the twisting currents and the mountain round at the top, the wall of rock curving steeply into the expanding river.

  From Grand Central, carrying a briefcase with all he needed in it, Isaac took the subway to his appointment. He waited in the anteroom, where the rabbi’s bearded followers went in and out in long coats. Dressed in business clothes, Isaac, however, seemed no less archaic than the rest. A bare floor. Wooden seats, white stippled walls. But the windows were smeared, as though the outside did not matter. Of these people, many were survivors of the German Holocaust. The rabbi himself had been through it as a boy. After the war, he had lived in Holland and Belgium and studied sciences in France. At Montpellier. Biochemistry. But he had been called—summoned—to these spiritual duties in New York; Isaac was not certain how this had happened. And now he wore the full beard. In his office, sitting at a little table with a green blotting pad, and a pen and note paper. The conversation was in the jargon_—in Yiddish.

  “Rabbi, my name is Isaac Braun.”

  “From Albany. Yes, I remember.”

  “I am the eldest of four—my sister, the youngest, the muzinka,_ is dying.”

  “Are you sure of this?”

  “Of cancer of the liver, and with a lot of pain.”

  “Then she is. Yes, she is dying.” From the very white, full face, the rabbi’s beard grew straight and thick in rich bristles. He was a strong, youthful man, his stout body buttoned tightly, straining in the shiny black cloth.

  “A certain thing happened soon after the war. An opportunity to buy a valuable piece of land for building. I invited my brothers and my sister to invest with me, Rabbi. But on the day…”

  The rabbi listened, his white face lifted toward a corner of the ceiling, but fully attentive, his hands pressed to the ribs, above the waist.

  “I understand. You tried to reach them that day. And you felt abandoned.” They deserted me, Rabbi, yes.”

  But that was also your good luck. They turned their faces from you, and this made you rich. You didn’t have to share.”

  Isaac admitted this but added, “If it hadn’t been one deal, it would have been another.”

  “You were destined to be rich?” I was sure to be. And there were so many opportunities.” Your sister, poor thing, is very harsh. She is wrong. She has no ground for complaint against you.”

  “I am glad to hear that,” said Isaac. “Glad,” however, was only a word, for he was suffering.

  “She is not a poor woman, your sister?”

  “No, she inherited property. And her husband does pretty well. Though 1 suppose the long sickness costs.”

  “Yes, a wasting disease. But the living can only will to live. I am speaking of Jews. They wanted to annihilate us. To give our consent would have been to turn from God. But about your problem: Have you thought of your brother Aaron? He advised the others not to take the risk.”

  “I know.”

  “It was to his interest that she should be angry with you, and not with him.”

  “I realize that.”

  “He is guilty. He is sinning against you. Your other brother is a good man.”

  “Mutt? Yes, I know. He is decent. He barely survived the war. He was shot in the head.”

  “But is he still himself?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “Sometimes it takes something like that. A bullet through the head.” The rabbi paused and turned his round face, the black quill beard bent on the folds of shiny cloth. And then, as Isaac told him how he went to Tina before the High Holidays, he looked impatient, moving his head forward, but his eyes turning sideward. “Yes. Yes.” He was certain that Isaac had done the right things. “Yes. You have the money. She grudged you. Unreasonable. But that’s how it seems to her. You are a man. She is only a woman. You are a rich man.”

  “But, Rabbi,” said Isaac, “now she is on her deathbed, and I have asked to see her.”

  “Yes? Well?”

  “She wants money for it.”

  “Ah? Does she? Money?”

  “Twenty thousand dollars. So that I can be let into the room.”

  The burly rabbi was motionless, white fingers on the armrests of the wooden chair. “She knows she is dying, I suppose?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes. Our Jews love deathbed jokes. I know many. Well. America has not changed everything, has it? People assume that God has a sense of humor. Such jokes made by the dying in anguish show a strong and brave soul, but skeptical. What sort of woman is your sister?”

  “Stout. Large.”

  “I see. A fat woman. A chunk of flesh with two eyes, as they used to say. Staring at the lucky ones. Like an animal in a cage, perhaps. Separated. By sensual greed and despair. A fat child like that—people sometimes behave as though they were alone when such a child is present. So those little monster
souls have a strange fate. They see people as people are when no one is looking. A gloomy vision of mankind.”

  Isaac respected the rabbi. Revered him, thought Dr. Braun. But perhaps he was not old-fashioned enough for him, notwithstanding the hat and beard and gabardine. He had the old tones, the manner, the burly poise, the universal calm judgment of the Jewish moral genius. Enough to satisfy anyone. But there was also something foreign about him. That is, contemporary. Now and then there was a sign of the science student, the biochemist from the south of France, from Montpellier. He would probably have spoken English with a French accent, whereas Cousin Isaac spoke like anyone else from upstate. In Yiddish they had the same dialect—White Russian. The Minsk region. The Pripet Marshes, thought Dr. Braun. And then returned to the fish hawk on the brown and chalky sycamore beside the Mohawk. Yes. Perhaps. Among these recent birds, finches, thrushes, there was Cousin Isaac with more scale than feather in his wings. A more antique type. The ruddy brown eye, the tough muscles of the jaw working under the skin. Even the scar was precious to Dr. Braun. He knew the man. Or rather, he had the longing of having known. For these people were dead. A useless love.

  “You can afford the money?” the rabbi asked. And when Isaac hesitated, he said, “I don’t ask you for the figure of your fortune. It is not my concern. But could you give her the twenty thousand?”

  And Isaac, looking greatly tried, said, “If I had to.”

  “It wouldn’t make a great difference in your fortune?”

  “No.”

  “In that case, why shouldn’t you pay?”

  “You think I should?”

  “It’s not for me to tell you to give away so much money. But you gave—you gambled—you trusted the man, the goy.”

  “Ilkington? That was a business risk. But Tina? So you believe I should pay?”

  “Give in. I would say, judging the sister by the brother, there is no other way.”

  Then Isaac thanked him for his time and his opinion. He went out into the broad daylight of the street, which smelied of muck. The tedious mortar of tenements, settled out of line, the buildings swaybacked, with grime on grime, as if built of cast-off shoes, not brick. The contractor observing. The ferment of sugar and roasting coffee was strong, but the summer air moved quickly in the damp under the huge machine-trampled bridge. Looking about for the subway entrance, Isaac saw instead a yellow cab with a yellow light on the crest. He first told the driver, “Grand Central,” but changed his mind at the first corner and said, “Take me to the West Side Air Terminal.” There was no fast train to Albany before late afternoon. He could not wait on Forty-second Street. Not today. He must have known all along that he would have to pay the money. He had come to get strength by consulting the rabbi. Old laws and wisdom on his side. But Tina from the deathbed had made too strong a move. If he refused to come across, no one could blame him. But he would feel greatly damaged. How would he live with himself? Because he made these sums easily now. Buying and selling a few city lots. Had the price been fifty thousand dollars, Tina would have been saying that he would never see her again. But twenty thousand—the figure was a shrewd choice. And Orthodoxy had no remedy. It was entirely up to him.