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apprehensive student. The weight saddened him; the manuscript was thick, and he would have to read it. He telephoned Belle to see what time they were leaving.
They rode by taxi to Brooklyn from their apartment on the West Side of Manhattan in the tail end of the evening rush hour, Belle quiet, Gold bored. A foggy darkness was falling over the river. Belle carried in her lap in a paper shopping bag the heavy potato kugel she had cooked that morning.
"Try not to look like you wish you were somewhere else," she advised without turning her head. "Try not to start any fights with Sid. Try to talk at least a little bit to Victor, Irv, Milt, and Max. Remember to kiss Harriet."
"I always say hello. Sid starts fights with me."
"All he does is talk. He doesn't even talk to you."
"He talks to steam me up."
"I'll try to interrupt."
Gold slid his tongue up into a front portion of his cheek and tried to concentrate all his ill feelings upon the book about Henry Kissinger he had been planning for almost a year. The subject was not sufficiently magnetic, and as the taxi emerged from the tunnel into Brooklyn, his thoughts returned to the dismal tumult that lay ahead.
He felt ghastly.
Everyone else would enjoy it. Family parties had turned for him into grueling and monotonous tests of fealty to which he submitted with sorrow and anxiety whenever he was left with no civilized alternative. There would be nobody there he wanted to see. Conversation, for him, would be impossible. He no longer liked his father or brother, if indeed he ever had. He did occasionally feel some gratitude and pity toward his four older sisters, but the locus and depth of these affections varied with his different memories of which had been kindest to him after the death of their mother and in the years before. All knew he had some fame as a writer and could not figure out why.
Gold's distaste for family dinners, his aversion, in
15
fact, toward all forms of domestic sentiment, stretched back distantly at least until the time of his graduation from high school and his moving into Manhattan to attend Columbia College. He was pleased to be entering so prestigious a university and vastly relieved at escaping a large family of five sisters and one brother in which all his life he had felt both suffocated and unappreciated.
"I was going to quit college and fight in Israel," he had bragged to Belle at the time they were falling in love, "but I had this scholarship to Columbia."
Gold had not once thought of quitting college or fighting in Israel. And he did not go to Columbia on a scholarship but on money provided by his father, most of which, he understood now, must have been channeled through the old man's irresponsible hands from Sid and three of his older sisters. Muriel, the fourth, had never been known to part happily with a dollar for anyone but herself or her two daughters.
Another sister, Joannie, lived in California. Mercifully, she was younger. Joannie had charged away from home in delinquency a long time before in hopes of succeeding as a model or movie actress and was married now to an overbearing Los Angeles businessman who disliked coming East and disdained everybody in the family but Gold. Several times a year she flew to New York alone to see just the ones she wanted to.
Gold had found himself the center of family attention ever since bringing home his first faultless report card, or a composition with an A plus. Muriel, who was closest to him in age and aimed her bad temper these days mostly at Ida, was nasty to him also even then. Ida, officious, was the sister who would impress upon Gold his need to do better in school, although what he did was always perfect. There were times now Gold thought he might go mad from the drenching reverence and affection that still poured over him from Rose and Esther, his two eldest sisters. Whatever expectations he had aroused, he had apparently fulfilled. They shim-
16
mered with love whenever they looked at him, and he wished they would stop.
While he was in college, Rose would frequently mail or give him a twenty-dollar bill, he remembered, and so would Esther. Like Sid, both had gone to work after high school as soon as they could find jobs. Ida was able to go to college and become a schoolteacher. Ida handed him fives, always with strict instructions about how the money was to be spent. Rose and Ida still worked, Rose as a legal secretary with the firm that had hired her during the Depression, Ida in the public-school system. Ida was assistant principal now in an elementary school, and she was fighting for her sanity against militant blacks and Hispanics who wanted all Jews gone, and said so in just those words. Esther had been widowed two years before. Much of her hair fell out almost overnight, and the rest turned white. She talked vaguely at times of finding employment again as a bookkeeper. But she was fifty-seven, and too timid to try. Muriel, whose husband, Victor, did well in wholesale beef and veal, was a distinct contrast to the others. She dyed her hair black to camouflage the gray and played poker with friends who also enjoyed outings to the racetrack. A chain smoker with a hoarse voice and a tough manner, Muriel was constantly spilling cigarette ashes that Ida, with her zeal for order, would brush away with scolding, high-minded comments of disparagement, even in Muriel's own house.
Between Sid, the firstborn, therefore, and Gold, the only other male child, stood these four older sisters who often seemed like four hundred and fifty when they flocked around him with their questions, censures, solicitudes, and advice. Ida cautioned him to chew his food slowly. Rose telephoned to warn that it was icy outside. He thought of them all as outdated, naive, and virtually oblivious to the very real proximity of sinfulness and evil. Except for Sid, Gold recalled, and therefore Harriet, his wife. Sid in nimbler yeaTs had been discovered one time in San Francisco when he was supposed to be in San Diego on business, in Acapulco
17
one time when he was supposed to be in San Francisco, and on a houseboat in Miami when he was registered at a hotel in Puerto Rico. Once possessed of the means, Sid had learned how to ease his way effortlessly through hotels.
Now he went out of town only with Harriet on brief vacations or to visit his father in Florida in the winter. Sid was a large, genial, heavyset man with soft flesh and parted gray hair; he had a pronounced facial likeness to their father, although the latter was short and chubby, with bushy white hair that stood almost straight up like the hair of a figure in a comic strip receiving a powerful charge of electricity. Gold was lean, tense, and dark, with vivid shadows around his eyes in a crabby, nervous face women found dynamic and sexy. Sid was easing compliantly into an antiquated generation, wearing plain gray or blue suits with white shirts and wide blue or maroon suspenders, whereas their demanding, autocratic old four-flusher of a father, the retired tailor Julius Gold, was dressing more and more each year like a debonair Hollywood mogul, favoring cashmere polo shirts and suave blazers. Inexplicably, Sid seemed to be growing more fond of their father. Far back, Gold remembered, Sid had run away from home and stayed away a whole summer to escape the old man's domineering eccentricities and cantankerous boasting.
Gold and Belle were nearly the last to arrive at Ida's apartment on Ocean Parkway; Muriel and Victor entered a minute afterward. Irv, Ida's husband, was convivial in his role as host. He was a dentist with offices above a paint store on Kings Highway. Already, Gold was having difficulty distinguishing one person from the next. It was a way of coping. He shook hands quickly with Irv, Victor, Sid, Milt, Max, and his father, differentiating between them only in the accumulating letdown he felt with each.
Max, Rose's husband, who was slightly diabetic, sipped at a glass of club soda squeamishly. The other men, along with Muriel, drank whiskey, the rest of the women, soft drinks. Belle had vanished into the kitchen
18
to oversee the unpacking of her potato kugel and be of assistance to Ida, who probably was simultaneously shooing her away and giving her things to do, and reprehending her in the same breath for failing to do them swiftly enough. Everybody there, including his father, had at least one child who w
as a source of heartache.
Gold took bourbon froni Irv and began kissing the cheeks of the women. Harriet accepted this greeting without pleasure. His stepmother authorized his approach by bobbing her head above her knitting and inclining her face. Gold bent to her with both forearms at the ready, fearing she might run him through the neck with one of her knitting needles.
Gold's stepmother, who was from an old Southern Jewish family with branches in Richmond and Charleston, habitually made things difficult for him in a variety of peculiar ways. Frequently when he spoke to her she did not answer at all. Other times she said, "Don't talk to me." When he didn't talk to her, his father moved up beside him with a hard nudge and directed, "Go talk to her. You too good?" She was always knitting thick white wool. When he complimented her once on her knitting, she informed him with a flounce that she was crocheting. When he inquired next time how her crocheting was going she answered, "I don't crochet. I knit." Often she called him to her side just to tell him to move away. Sometimes she came up to him and said, "Cackle, cackle."
He had no idea what to reply.
Gold's stepmother was knitting an endless strip of something bulky that was too narrow to be a shawl and too wide and uniformly straight to be anything else. It was around six inches broad and conceivably thousands of miles long, for she had been working on that same strip of knitting even before her marriage to his father many years before. Gold had a swimming vision of that loosely woven strip of material flowing out the bottom of her straw bag to the residence Sid found for his father and her each summer in Brooklyn in Manhattan
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Beach and from there all the way down the coastline to Florida and into unmeasured regions beyond. She never wanted for wool or for depth inside her straw bag into which the finished product could fall. The yarn came twitching up through one end of the opening in her bag, and the manufactured product, whatever it was, descended, perhaps for eternity, into the other.
"What are you making?" he'd asked her one time out of curiosity that could no longer be borne in silence.
"You'll see," she replied mysteriously.
He consulted his father. "Pa, what's she making?"
"Mind your own business."
"I was only asking."
"Don't ask personal questions."
"Rose, what's she knitting?" he asked his sister.
"Wool," Belle answered.
"Belle, I know that. But what's she doing with it?"
"Knitting," said Esther.
Gold's stepmother was knitting knitting, and she was knitting it endlessly. Now she asked, "Do you like my wool?"
"Pardon?"
"Do you like my wool?"
"Of course," he replied.
"You never say so," she pouted.
"I like your wool," said Gold, retreating in confusion to a leather armchair near the doorway.
"He told me he likes my wool," he heard her relating to his brothers-in-law Irv and Max. "But I think he's trying to pull it over my eyes."
"How was your trip?" his sister Esther asked doting-
iy.
"Fine."
"Where were you?" said Rose.
"Wilmington."
"Where?" asked Ida, passing with a serving tray.
"Washington," said Rose.
"Wilmington?"
"Wilmington."
"Washington."
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"Washington?"
"Wilmington,'' he corrected them all. "In Delaware."
"Oh," said Rose, and looked crestfallen.
"How was your trip?" asked Ida, passing back.
Gold was going mad.
"He said it was fine," answered Esther before Rose could reply, and drifted toward a coffee table on which were platters holding loaves of chopped liver and chopped eggs and onions under attack by small knives spreading each or both onto round crackers or small sections of rye bread or very black pumpernickel.
. "Meet any pretty girls there?" Muriel asked. The youngest of the sisters present, Muriel was ever under obligation to be up-to-date.
"Not this time," Gold answered, with the required grin.
Muriel glowed. Irv chuckled and Victor, Muriel's husband, looked embarrassed. Rose stared from face to face intently. Gold suspected that .she had grown hard of hearing, and perhaps did not know. He» husband, Max, a postal worker, was slurring his words of late, and Gold wondered if anyone but himself had noticed.
Esther returned with a plate prepared for him, and a saltshaker aloft in her other hand. "I brought these all for you," she announced in her trembling voice. "And your own saltshaker."
Gold cringed.
"Don't spoil him," Muriel joked gruffly, spilling ashes onto her bosom from a cigarette hanging from her mouth.
The women in Gold's family believed he liked his food excessively salted.
"Don't salt it until you taste it," Ida yelled from across the room. "I already seasoned it."
Gold ignored her and continued salting the cracker he was holding. Other people's fingers plucked the remaining pieces from his plate. Esther and Rose each brought him more. Sid watched with amusement. So
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many fucking faces, Gold thought. So many people. And all of them strange. Even Belle, these days. And especially his stepmother.
He would never forget his first encounter with his stepmother. Sid had flown to Florida for the wedding and returned with her and his father for a reception at his home in Great Neck. There was an uncomfortable silence after the introductions when no one seemed sure what to say next. Gold stepped forward with a gallant try at putting everyone at ease.
"And what," he said in his most courtly manner, "would you like us to call you?"
"I would like you to treat me as my own children do," Gussie Gold replied with graciousness equal to his own. "I would like to think of you all as my very own children. Please call me Mother."
"Very well, Mother," Gold agreed. "Welcome to the family."
"I'm not your mother," she snapped.
Gold was the only one who laughed. Perhaps the others had perceived immediately what he had missed. She was insane.
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VTOLD'S stepmother had been brought up never to be seen eating in public, and she entered the dining room as always with her knitting needles and her straw tote bag. Fourteen adults were grouped elbow to elbow at a table designed for ten. Gold knew that his was not the only leg blocked by supporting braces underneath. I have been to more meals like this than I can bear to remember, Gold lamented secretly. Ida's daughter was out for the evening, her son was away at college.
"I can see on the table," Sid announced with such generalized amiability that Gold's muscles all bunched reflexively in anticipation of some barbed danger nearby, "Belle's potato kugel, Esther's noodle pudding, Muriel's potato salad, and Rose's ..." He faltered.
"I made the matzoh balls," Rose said, blushing.
"Rose's matzoh balls."
"And my wool," said Gold's stepmother.
"And your wool."
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"Do you like my wool?" She seemed coquettishly dependent on Sid's good opinion.
"It's the tastiest wool in the whole world, I bet."
"He doesn't like it," she said with a glance at Gold.
"I like it," Gold apologized weakly.
"He never tells me he likes it."
"I like your wool."
"I was not talking to you," she said.
Victor laughed more loudly than the others. Victor was convinced that Gold and Irv both looked down upon him. This was true, but Gold bore him no unkind feelings. Victor, red of face and sturdy as a bull, was sweet to Muriel*and liked Belle, and could always be relied on to send one of his meat trucks and some laborers when anything heavy was to be transported. His posture was so nearly perfect both sitting and standing that he seemed to be holding himself erect at enormous physical cost. Gold was positive he would be the first among them to be felled by a heart attack.
"I made a honey cake," Harriet put in poutingly. "I'm sure I ruined it. I was going to make a Jell-O mold but I know you all must be sick of it."
"And Harriet's honey cake."
"Much starch," said Max, who, in addition to having diabetes, was susceptible to certain circulatory imbalances. Wearing a worried frown, Max declined everything but some chicken wings, a slice of pot roast, from which he separated the fat, and string beans.
Esther was served by Milt, a suitor courting her in almost wordless patience. She waited stiffly without looking at him. Milt, the older brother of her deceased husband's business partner, was a careful, respectful man who talked little in the presence of the family. Milt was past sixty-five, older than Sid, and had never been married. With a movement that approached vivacity, he flicked a second spoonful of Esther's noodle pudding onto her plate, and then a spoonful onto his own. Esther thanked him with a nervous smile.
There were platters of meatballs and stuffed derma on the table, too, and a deep, wide bowl of potatoes
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mashed with chicken fat and fried onions that Gold could have eaten up all by himself.