"We thought there must be many, many people in government for whom you've done things, Daddy," Andrea cajoled seductively, fondling her father's hand and brushing her cheek across his neck. "Aren't there people who owe you something?"
Mere mention of that supposition mellowed Conover like a charm. They owed him, as he recounted, a great deal.
"Ah, yes indeed, at least seventeen times that I can remember I lied in public under oath," he repeated languidly, shaping the vowels in his honeyed accents and rolling the words around on his tongue like a connoisseur tasting a fine cigar. "And that's not just an old man's boasting. I'll take my oath on it. I can show you the evidence—scrolls, plaques, certificates, wreaths, sashes, and medals, all commending me for public service and my valorous, unselfish attitude. I lied to the public to protect the President and I lied to the President to protect myself and my colleagues, and I
405
lied to the Congress four times a year just to keep from growing rusty, and do you know something? I never lost even a modicum of respect among my peers for doing so or a single friend. The difference between crime and public service, my good Goodgold, is often mainly more a matter of station than substance. Yes, they do owe me much. Four cabinet positions, in two different administrations, of course. Ambassadorships? One European ambassadorship, four Latin American, sixteen Asian, and four hundred and thirty-three African. They owe me six judicial appointments to lower courts anywhere in the South or Chicago, and the right to six trial balloons each for any eight people I choose as serious candidates for the Vice Presidential nomination, but in four successive elections. I suppose I'll be long gone before I've time to use them all, and I've forgotten whether or not I'm allowed to pass them on with my estate. I'll have to check with my Jew law firm—my Christian ones are not much good at law. You can look into it for me, Abie, if you want to, but spare my Irish Rose, hey, hey. 'Black bottom, the niggers got 'em.' They don't write songs like that any more, do they? Frankly, I don't much care about these appointments or even what happens to the country, as long as my capital is safe. I've been able to sell off two of the serious-Vice Presidential-candidacy-considerations recently, one of them, I believe, to a wide receiver for the Houston Oilers, whatever that is. Would you like to have yourself mentioned six times as a prospect for the Vice Presidential nomination in the next Presidential election campaign, Rappaport, as a going-away present, if only you'll go away? As God is my witness, I pray you will not let being a little sheeny inhibit you, you kike. I hear they're giving mentions now to coons, Greeks, dagos, spies, and women. Would you go in public like a beggar with your hat in your hand merely to appear to be under consideration for the Vice Presidential nomination with a long line of other humble mendicants, or for a Cabinet job you'll be leaving in disgrace or disgust in two years? I refused. I
406
don't lower myself to people I feel superior to. I liked your Abe Ribicoff for that, but not for anything else. Would you like to be mentioned for Vice President text time? I'll let you have it free. If nothing else, it will bring you invitations to homes in which your attendance will be cause for greater rejoicing than your presence is here. Be a good fellow, Felix Mendelssohn, and fill up my medicine cup one more time. God, how sick I am by now of all those Guggenheims and Annenbergs and Salomon brothers. When you've met one Schlesinger you've met them all. Faster, can't you? Jump, dammit. I've got darkies from the delta that move faster than you do. 'Oh, darling, how my heart grows weary.' Aaaah, thank you, my savior. They say that Jesus was a Jew, but frankly I have my doubts. May your life follow an everlasting circle of success, and be like driven snow. Be careful how you tread it, for every mark will show. Your health, Brendan." "My name," said Gold, "is Bruce." "An old Gaelic name, if I am not mistaken." "You are mistaken," Gold corrected. "But there are people who argue that the Gaels are one of the lost tribes of Israel."
"But not very convincingly," scored the venomous old man neatly. "I won't come to your wedding, you know, although I suppose some prenuptial amenities are in order. I will want the members of your family to dine here first, including your wife, of course. She'd be most welcome. And I, in turn, I suppose, will have to journey for a dinner with your family somewhere in Brooklyn, I fear. I've never in my whole life been in Brooklyn. One time I could have been the candidate for Vice President, but it was understood I would have to go into Brooklyn with Nelson Rockefeller during the campaign to some place called Coney Island and eat a hot dog while news photographers took pictures. I wouldn't go anywhere to eat with Nelson Rockefeller. He made loans to people who never paid him back. If his brother David did that I wouldn't keep any money in his bank. He gave fifty thousand dollars secretly to
407
Henry Kissinger. Imagine—for fifty thousand dollars then you might have bought a small Klee or Bonnard or a large Jackson Pollock, and all he got for his money was a medium-sized Kissinger. You know the type? Of course you do—look who I ask. A noisy, babbling fellow who was always trying too hard to be entertaining and made war like a Nazi."
Here even Gold's sense of fair play was affronted. "Sir!" he could not forbear from objecting. "A number of his relatives, I believe, were destroyed by the Nazis."
"But he wasn't, was he?" Conover answered serenely with acid in his voice. "And neither were you. How far do you think he would have gone in the world as a history student in Germany if Hitler had allowed him to remain? You wish to champion him, Silver? For shame!"
"Gold, sir, and for God sakes—please don't put me in the position of defending the one person on earth I disapprove of most."
"What do you suppose Rockefeller saw in him, Brass?" Conover asked in a musing way. "We know about Nixon and that chimpanzee Ford. But I thought Nelson had some brains at one time. He went to Brown, didn't he?"
"Dartmouth."
"Oh. I wasn't given that Vice Presidential nomination, by the way, and neither was Nelson Rockefeller. It went, if I recall, to Henry Cabot Lodge, who did travel to Coney Island to eat a hot dog but lost anyway. Henry Cabot Lodge was never very successful at anything, and neither were the Ellsworth Bunkers in Vietnam, or the Graham Martins. If you want good advice, my lad, you'll stay out of the diplomatic corps and the foreign service community. It's an undergraduate society for backward students who crave honors. If you ever call me Dad or Father even once, Golddust, I warn you now—I'll put a ball between your eyes."
"You're babbling, Daddy," Andrea said.
"I'm sick, darling. It's not every day I have to put up
408
^^-Jgu^^vrtJFp^ Bam no/
had to face it. Her family thought themselves too good for me I wept when we parted, I shed tears. And you see I haven't forgotten her. Ah, crazy, sweet Gussie Goldsmith. With her wool and her knitting needle^ A our last meeting I begged her to write something tender for me that I promised to cherish always, and I remember those last words from her as clearly as if they we"e written yesterday. 'There is a word ui> ever^ language, in every heart so dear. In English it s forget me not in French /« souvenir.' I see her knitting still. I wonder what became of her." flowed
Gold was irritated in the awkward lull that followed the revelation of these tedious sentimental recollections and counted on Andrea to return the conversation to its
^Cc^Tndrea began after a fitting interval of
decorum. -Bruce," Conover snorted. „
"—is getting a government appointment, *nrv^ persevered. "Perhaps in the State Depart*-^ We want you to expedite it if you cancan ^fae sure it's a good one so that we canjw£f$rm gOOCj fashion and be treated well afterwafd^l know you want me to be happy."
"I will comply with dispatch," Conover assented agreeably, "if it will take him out of my life. But you must promise me one thing in return. You must promise that if you ever have children and they look anything like him, they will not be brought up in the Christian faith. Elope and I'll add ten million to your wedding present. Wait, I have a better idea. Don't elope. Gold, my so
n, you must send me the names and addresses of all in your family so that I can contact them by mail." He laughed with huge delight. "I can just imagine what some of those names will turn out to be." Had Gold a bread knife at hand he might have plunged it into the chest of the gloating old villain. Instead, Conover slipped another stiletto into his. "I think I'll have Sambo here call out their names as, arm in arm, they approach my staircase."
410
So graphically did this depicted scene burn its upon ^Gold's imagination—"Mr. and Mrs. Juli Gold." "Dr. and Mrs. Irving Sugarman." "Mr Emanuel Moscowitz.,, "Mr. and Mrs. Victor Vogel —that he knew immediately it could never be enacted He paid almost no attention to the rest of Pugh Biddh Conover's words.
"Stay for dinner, Andrea, and let him drive back alone. We can geld some colts for breakfast tomorrow. I've got some beauties. Let him take the Volkswagen. Or maybe he'd prefer a camel."
Gold chose the Volkswagen over the camel and headed toward Washington in a dazed state of moral collapse. How much lower woukthe crawl to rise to the top? he asked himself with wretched self-reproach. Much, much lower, he answered in improving spirit, and felt purged of hypocrisy by the time he was ready for dinner.
/* sallied forth into the Hotel Madison after shower-He . * -ssing, saw the price of the snails forestiere, a«d?»K^H. was out of place and understood with rxrtent^science that he always would be. Amidst all the people-filling the crowded, bustling dining room he was "solitary as an oyster in that unique simile of Charles Dickens, a long winded novelist, in Gold's estimation, whose ponderous works were always too long and always flawed by a procession of eccentric, one-sided characters too large in number to keep track of, and an excessive abundance ot extravagant coincidences and other unlikely events. Gold had still not recovered fully from the strain to which he had been subjected, and took but spiritless notice when perhaps the longest shadow in the universe crept across his table almost a full minute and a half before the figure casting it arrived and halted. For a «cond, Gold had the impression that Harris Rosen->latt had grown into the tallest, straightest, strictest uman being walking the face of the earth. His omplexion now was Saxon white. The expression saring down on Gold in silent greeting was perman-
411
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you want to. The government will have to try balance the budget or it will rue the day."
Gold was adrift. "How can I use that for my persona advantage?"
"I don't know."
"Harris, you're in bonds. We had a Secretary of the Treasury not long ago, William E. Simon, who earned somewhere between two and three million dollars a year working in municipal bonds before he came into government. What in the world can a person do in municipal bonds that makes him worth two or three million a year?"
"I really don't know."
"What do you make?"
"Two or three million a year." Harris Rosenblatt stood up. "I must go now. How is Lieberman these days?"
"Still a grubba, still a zshlub."
,"T don't understand Yiddish," Harris Rosenblatt told * ^nce, "and any words I may have known as a
Sid i hav^m^Althou^'' "aTs ,RoseSatt
continued in a softefleflewith a kind of confiding geniality, "I used to be Jewish, you know.
"1 used to be a hunchback."
"Isn't it amazing," exclaimed Harris Rosenblatt in a glad cry, "how we've both been able to change!"
413
Gold was feeling solitary as ^tfygter again at the family dinner he swore w^fcfbe the last he was ever going to attend, even before Sid entangled him in Isaac Newton with a simple restatement of the innocuous proposition:
"A force exerted in one direction produces a reaction of equal force in the opposite direction."
"Says who?"
"Sir Isaac Newton," Sid answered blandly.
"Sure," said Victor.
"It's one of his laws of motion," said Ida.
"His third," said Belle.
"Even I know that," said Muriel.
Gold's thoughts had been concentrated on the looming dissolution of his marriage and he was quit( unaware until he found himself in the middle of thi circle of derision that his was the voice that had take Sid's gambit.
"Wait a minute." Gold was mildly flustered. "Wh
414
JW ,. you said, Sid? Now don", change i,. Jusl reps
Harriet—is this chopped liver onnH if* *u L J
ever made." 8 " s the best yQ1
"I went back to the old butcher."
foSy dlfec^d'?ftShrdHS CarefU"y ^ W3S P-you didyn'techa„egde £$£*!*" ^ "dd before? Sid> a lo^f Sh°U,d ' Change Sir Isaac Newton?" Sid's was
™tesa„ ?< ^ « kr»„y
hagEST* Albert Einstti"'; sid «»" »o, keep bom
"Sure," said Victor. 6 >U was thankful his father was not yet there He
was in a qu^Z^* Bel,e: he had not«« knack for facing her witlTfl^®csl°n» and decided to have his lawyer break the news tC was going after he'd gone. Next came his mission with Miit, who wanted Esther to marry him. Gold, drawing Milt aside, plumbed his mind in a minute or two and sent back assurances through Harriet by way of Ida that Milt was pure of salacious expectations and owned a modesty of person as great as her own.
"I'll soon be seventy, Bruce," Milt said, stammering. "And I've always been a bachelor. I just don't want to live alone any more. I don't think Esther wants to be alone, either."
Then his father arrived with Gussie and loaded the atmosphere like a charge of electricity. He was still in the week-old depression about which Gold had heard. His fuming sulk had been provoked by Gold, the egocentric old battler quickly disclosed—"It's him, what then?" his father snarled curtly when asked how le felt—and exacerbated by the boredom and spread-
415
ig physical pains that were arriving with the coldness >f encroaching winter. Twice already on successive iays he had groused to Sid in the waning bad temper of defeat about the lack of a suitable home for him in Florida. In a way, Gold was sorry to see the lunging old bull coming to an end. Gold cracked his knuckles in suspense as he waited for whatever tempestuous grievances were steaming in the old man's emotions to come bursting forth.
For one thing, Julius Gold, like Pugh Biddle Con-over, did not take kindly to the notion of Jews in public office. "Why should it be a Jew that's blamed when they're caught or make their mistakes?" For another, he was irate with the knowledge of Gold's visit to Conover's estate. "A fascist he was, and anti-Israel, always. Name one." Clambering to his feet in anger, Gold's father warmed rapidly to the attack and was as fiery as a burning coal. "Go ahead, Mr. Smart Guy. * dare you." >*■•**
"One what?" pleaded Gold. ^^^^
"One millionaire who ever ^^m^A^ You tell me when." ,fmWed to any*hing.
"When what?"
"Don't what me—I'll mVe win ■*/>*«*
Even Senators from the West. And nL yougoSTn£ on horses w,th someone like Conover. Hey Jew-ride" ££? whTn ™horses;Since when d-s a" w
horee?" y°U ,eam how to ride w'th a
"I didn't ride." "Who got you there?"
JZn^ inVit!d/- S3id Go,d in a contrite tone, his own
St™ oTr
^ h™ diSaStr°US,y each time * ™
£5 help Ke." y SOme°ne Wh° kn°WS him- He c-
"With what?" cried Julius Gold, his cheeks blowin;
416
with embarrassment, "of State " * **** fa"ing ,ower
The old man wound hi« f Jfagust and asked, "w£f^J "*° a* e*Pressionof Jewish boy? Sid here wnrV w do,f job is that for a laundry when he had to but he J^ ^ horses « the He didn't ride them You 451°^ uhen he could-has in government here You Sf *' business a Jew ^er went into governmenT who ^ ** °ne Jew "*° -W*^ memory weT^n aSanygood•,,
paralysis wile. ^0/0 >> ^ ^is difficult question. "Brandeis and O&tfc^ Vfl ?re,,the best he could produce. "And Felix Franki*ner-
'They were forty years ago," hi? father jeered. "And those were judges. I mean in goverriffi£Ht."