Collected Stories Read online

  Having decided to capitulate, he felt a kind of deadly recklessness. He had never been in the air before. But perhaps it was high time to fly. Everyone had lived enough. And anyway, as the cab crept through the summer lunchtime crowds on Twenty-third Street, there seemed plenty of humankind already.

  On the airport bus, he opened his father’s copy of the Psalms. The black Hebrew letters only gaped at him like open mouths with tongues hanging down, pointing upward, flaming but dumb. He tried—forcing. It did no good. The tunnel, the swamps, the auto skeletons, machine entrails, dumps, gulls, sketchy Newark trembling in fiery summer, held his attention minutely. As though he were not Isaac Braun but a man who took pictures. Then in the plane running with concentrated fury to take off—the power to pull away from the magnetic earth, and more: When he saw the ground tilt backward, the machine rising from the runway, he said to himself in clear internal words, “Shema Yisroel,”_ Hear, O Israel, God alone is God! On the right, New York leaned gigantically seaward, and the plane with a jolt of retracted wheels turned toward the river. The Hudson green within green, and rough with tide and wind. Isaac released the breath he had been holding, but sat belted tight. Above the marvelous bridges, over clouds, sailing in atmosphere, you know better than ever that you are no angel.

  The flight was short. From Albany airport, Isaac phoned his bank. He told Spinwall, with whom he did business there, that he needed twenty thousand dollars in cash. “No problem,” said Spinwall. “We have it.”

  Isaac explained to Dr. Braun, “I have passbooks for my savings accounts in my safe-deposit box.”

  Probably in individual accounts of ten thousand dollars, protected by federal deposit insurance. He must have had bundles of these.

  He went through the round entrance of the vault, the mammoth delicate door, circular, like the approaching moon seen by space navigators. A taxi waited as he drew the money and took him, the dollars in his briefcase, to the hospital. Then at the hospital, the hopeless flesh and melancholy festering and drug odors, the splashy flowers and wrinkled garments. In the large cage elevator that could take in whole beds, pulmotors, and laboratory machines, his eyes were fixed on the silent, beautiful Negro woman dreaming at the control as they moved slowly from lobby to mezzanine, from mezzanine to first. The two were alone, and since there was no going faster, he found himself observing her strong, handsome legs, her bust, the gold wire and glitter of her glasses, and the sensual bulge in her throat, just under the chin. In spite of himself, struck by these as he slowly rose to his sister’s deathbed.

  At the elevator, as the gate opened, was his brother Mutt.

  “Isaac!”

  “How is she?”

  “Very bad.”

  “Well, I’m here. With the money.”

  Confused, Mutt did not know how to face him. He seemed frightened. Tina’s power over Mutt had always been great. Though he was three or four years her senior. Isaac somewhat understood what moved him and said, “That’s all right, Mutt, if I have to pay. I’m ready. On her terms.”

  “She may not even know.”

  “Take it. Say I’m here. I want to see my sister, Mutt.”

  Unable to look at Isaac, Mutt received the briefcase and went in to Tina. Isaac moved away from her door without glancing through the slot. Because he could not stand still, he moved down the corridor, hands clasped behind his back. Past the rank of empty wheelchairs. Repelled by these things which were made for weakness. He hated such objects, hated the stink of hospitals. He was sixty years old. He knew the route he, too, must go, and soon. But only knew, did not yet feel it. Death still was at a distance. As for handing over the money, about which Mutt was ashamed, taking part unwillingly in something unjust, grotesque—yes, it was far-fetched, like things women imagined they wanted in pregnancy, hungry for peaches, or beer, or eating plaster from the walls. But as for himself, as soon as he handed over the money, he felt no more concern for it. It was nothing. He was glad to be rid of it. He could hardly understand this about himself. Once the money was given, the torment stopped. Nothing at all. The thing was done to punish, to characterize him, to convict him of something, to put him in a category. But the effect was just the opposite. What category? Where was it? If she thought it made him suffer, it did not. If she thought she understood his soul better than anyone—his poor dying sister; no, she did not.

  And Dr. Braun, feeling with them this work of wit and despair, this last attempt to exchange significance, rose, stood, looking at the shafts of ice, the tatters of vapor in winter blue.

  Then Tina’s private nurse opened the door and beckoned to Isaac. He hurtled in and stopped with a suffocated look. Her upper body was wasted and yellow. Het belly was huge with the growth, and her legs, her ankles were swollen. Her distorted feet had freed themselves from the cover. The soles like clay. The skin was tight on her skull. The hair was white. An intravenous tube was taped to het arm, and other tubes from her body into excretory jars beneath the bed. Mutt had laid the briefcase before her. It had not been unstrapped. Fleshless, hair coarse, and the meaning of her black eyes impossible to understand, she was looking at Isaac.

  “Tina!”

  “I wondered,” she said.

  “It’s all there.”

  But she swept the briefcase from her and in a choked voice said, “No. Take it.” He went to kiss her. Her free arm was lifted and tried to embrace him. She was too feeble, too drugged. He felt the bones of his obese sister. Death. The end. The grave. They were weeping. And Mutt, turning away at the foot of the bed, his mouth twisted open and the tears running from his eyes. Tina’s tears were much thicker and slower.

  The ring she had taken from Aunt Rose was tied to Tina’s wasted finger with dental floss. She held out her hand to the nurse. It was all prearranged. The nurse cut the thread. Tina said to Isaac, “Not the money. I don’t want it. You take Mama’s ring.”

  And Dr. Braun, bitterly moved, tried to grasp what emotions were. What good were they! What were they for! And no one wanted them now. Perhaps the cold eye was better. On life, on death. But, again, the cold of the eye would be proportional to the degree of heat within. But once humankind had grasped its own idea, that it was human and human through such passions, it began to exploit, to play, to disturb for the sake of exciting disturbance, to make an uproar, a crude circus of feelings. So the Brauns wept for Tina’s death. Isaac held his mother’s ring in his hand. Dr. Braun, too, had tears in his eyes. Oh, these Jews—these Jews! Their feelings, their hearts! Dr. Braun often wanted nothing more than to stop all this. For what came of it? One after another you gave over your dying. One by one they went. You went. Childhood, family, friendship, love were stifled in the grave. And these tears! When you wept them from the heart, you felt you justified something, understood something. But what did you understand? Again, nothing!_ It was only an intimation of understanding. A promise that mankind might—_might,__ mind you—eventually, through its gift which might—_might__ again!—be a divine gift, comprehend why it lived. Why life, why death.

  And again, why these particular forms—these Isaacs and these Tinas? When Dr. Braun closed his eyes, he saw, red on black, something like molecular processes—the only true heraldry of being. As later, in the close black darkness when the short day ended, he went to the dark kitchen window to have a look at stars. These things cast outward by a great begetting spasm billions of years ago.

  A THEFT

  CLARA VELDE, to begin with what was conspicuous about her, had short blond hair, fashionably cut, growing upon a head unusually big. In a person of an inert character a head of such size might have seemed a deformity; in Clara, because she had so much personal force, it came across as ruggedly handsome. She needed that head; a mind like hers demanded space. She was big-boned; her shoulders were not broad but high. Her blue eyes, exceptionally large, grew prominent when she brooded. The nose was small—ancestrally a North Sea nose. The mouth was very good but stretched extremely wide when she grinned, when she wept. Her foreh
ead was powerful. When she came to the threshold of middle age, the lines of her naive charm deepened; they would be permanent now. Really, everything about her was conspicuous, not only the size and shape of her head. She must have decided long ago that for the likes of her there could be no cover-up; she couldn’t divert energy into disguises. So there she was, a rawboned American woman. She had very good legs—who knows what you would have seen if pioneer women had worn shorter skirts. She bought her clothes in the best shops and was knowledgeable about cosmetics. Nevertheless the backcountry look never left her. She came from the sticks; there could be no mistake about that. Her people? Indiana and Illinois farmers and small-town businessmen who were very religious. Clara was brought up on the Bible: prayers at breakfast, grace at every meal, psalms learned by heart, the Gospels, chapter and verse—old-time religion. Her father owned small department stores in southern Indiana. The children were sent to good schools. Clara had studied Greek at Bloomington and Elizabethan-Jacobean literature at Wellesley. A disappointing love affair in Cambridge led to a suicide attempt. The family decided not to bring her back to Indiana. When she threatened to swallow more sleeping pills they allowed her to attend Columbia University, and she lived in New York under close supervision—the regimen organized by her parents. She, however, found ways to do exactly as she pleased. She feared hellfire but she did it just the same.

  After a year at Columbia she went to work at Reuters, then she taught in a private school and later wrote American feature articles for British and Australian papers. By the age of forty she had formed a company of her own—a journalistic agency specializing in high fashion for women—and eventually she sold this company to an international publishing group and became one of its executives. In the boardroom she was referred to by some as “a good corporate person,” by others as “the czarina of fashion writing.” By now she was also the attentive mother of three small girls. The first of these was conceived with some difficulty (the professional assistance of gynecologists made it possible). The father of these children was Clara’s fourth husband.

  Three of the four had been no more than that—men who fell into the husband class. Only one, the third, had been something like the real thing. That was Spontini the oil tycoon, a close friend of the billionaire leftist and terrorist Giangiacomo F., who blew himself up in the seventies. (Some Italians said, predictably, that the government had set him up to explode.) Mike Spontini was not political, but then he wasn’t born rich, like Giangiacomo, whose role model had been Fidel Castro. Spontini made his own fortune. His looks, his town houses and chтteaus and yachts, would have qualified him for a role in La Dolce Vita._ Scores of women were in pursuit. Clara had won the fight to marry him but lost the fight to keep him. Recognizing at last that he was getting rid of her, she didn’t oppose this difficult, arbitrary man and surrendered all property rights in the settlement—a nonsettlement really. He took away the terrific gifts he had made her, down to the last bracelet. No sooner had the divorce come through than Mike was bombed out by two strokes. He was half paralyzed now and couldn’t form his words. An Italian Sairey Gamp type took care of him in Venice, where Clara occasionally went to see him. Her ex-husband would give her an animal growl, one glare of rage, and then resume his look of imbecility. He would rather be an imbecile on the Grand Canal than a husband on Fifth Avenue.

  The other husbands—one married in a full-dress church wedding, the others routine City Hall jobs—were… well, to be plain about it, gesture-husbands. Velde was big and handsome, indolent, defiantly incompetent. He worked on the average no longer than six months at any job. By then everybody in the organization wanted to kill him.

  His excuse for being in and out of work was that his true talent was for campaign strategies. Elections brought out the best in him: getting media attention for his candidate, who never, ever, won in the primaries. But then, he disliked being away from home, and an election is a traveling show. “Very sweet” went one of Clara’s summaries to Laura Wong, the Chinese American dress designer who was her confidante. “An affectionate father as long as the kids don’t bother him, what Wilder mostly does is sit reading paperbacks—thrillers, science fiction, and pop biographies. I think he feels that all will be well as long as he keeps sitting there on his cushions. To him inertia is the same as stability. Meantime I run the house single-handed: mortgage, maintenance, housemaids, au pair girls from France or Scandinavia—Austrian the latest. I dream up projects for the children, I do the school bit, do the dentist and the pediatrician, plus playmates, outings, psychological tests, doll dressing, cutting and pasting valentines. What else…? Work with their secret worries, sort out their quarrels, encourage their minds, wipe tears. Love them. Wilder just goes on reading P. D. James, or whoever, till I’m ready to snatch the book and throw it in the street.”

  One Sunday afternoon she did exactly that—opened the window first and skimmed his paperback into Park Avenue.

  “Was he astonished?” asked Ms. Wong.

  “Not absolutely. He sees how provoking he is. What he doesn’t allow is that I have reason to be provoked. He’s there,_ isn’t he? What else do I want? In all the turbulence, he’s the point of calm. And for all the wild times and miseries I had in the love game—about which he has full information—he’s the answer. A sexy woman who couldn’t find the place to put her emotionality, and appealing to brilliant men who couldn’t do what she really wanted done.”

  “And he does_ do?”

  “He’s the overweening overlord, and for no other reason than sexual performance. It’s stud power that makes him so confident. He’s not the type to think it out. / have to do that. A sexy woman may delude herself about the gratification of a mental life. But what really settles everything, according to him, is masculine bulk. As close as he comes to spelling it out, his view is that I wasted time on Jaguar nonstarters. Lucky for me I came across a genuine Rolls-Royce. But he’s got the wrong car,” she said, crossing the kitchen with efficient haste to take the kettle off the boil. Her stride was powerful, her awkward, shapely legs going too quickly for the heels to keep pace. “Maybe a Lincoln Continental would be more like it. Anyway, no woman wants her bedroom to be a garage, and least of all for a boring car.”

  What was a civilized lady like Laura Wong making of such confidences? The raised Chinese cheek with the Chinese eye let into it, the tiny degree of heaviness of the epicanthic fold all the whiter over the black of the eye, and the light of that eye, so foreign to see and at the same time superfamiliar in its sense… What could be more human than the recognition of this familiar sense? And yet Laura Wong was very much a New York lady in her general understanding of things. She did not confide in Clara as fully as Clara confided in her. But then who did, who could_ make a clean breast so totally? What Ms. Wong’s rich eyes suggested, Clara in her awkwardness tried in fact to say. To do.

  “Yes, the books,” said Laura. “You can’t miss that.” She had also seen Wilder Velde pedaling his Exercycle while the TV ran at full volume.

  “He can’t understand what’s wrong, since what I make looks like enough for us. But I don’t earn all_ that much, with three kids in private schools. So family money has to be spent. That involves my old parents—sweet old Bible Hoosiers. I can’t make him see that I can’t afford an unemployed husband, and there isn’t a headhunter in New York who’ll talk to Wilder after one look at his curriculum vitae and his job record. Three months here, five months there. Because it’s upsetting me, and for my_ sake, my bosses are trying to place him somewhere. I’m important enough to the corporation for that. If he loves elections so much, maybe he should run for office. He looks_ congressional, and what do I care if he screws up in the House of Representatives. I’ve been with congressmen, I even married one, and he’s no dumber than they are. But he won’t admit that anything is wrong; he’s got that kind of confidence in himself—so much that he can even take a friendly interest in the men I’ve been involved with. They’re like failed competitors to the gu
y who won the silver trophy. He’s proud to claim a connection with the famous ones, and when I went to visit poor Mike in Venice, he flew with me.”

  “So he isn’t jealous,” said Laura Wong.

  “The opposite. The people I’ve been intimate with, to him are like the folks in a history book. And suppose Richard III or Metternich had gotten into your_ wife’s pants when she was a girl? Wilder is a name-dropper, and the names he most enjoys dropping are the ones he came into by becoming my husband. Especially the headliners…”

  Laura Wong was of course aware that it was not for her to mention the most significant name of all, the name that haunted all of Clara’s confidences. That was for Clara herself to bring up. Whether it was appropriate, whether she could summon the strength to deal with the most persistent of her preoccupations, whether she would call on Laura to bear with her one more time… these were choices you had to trust her to make tactfully.