"I will teach you."
Andrea pressed his hand to her lips rapturously. Gold wondered if she was crazy. "Sometime soon," she said, "if you still want to see me again—"
"I will want to see you again."
"Would you like to come out for a weekend to visit Daddy before he dies? It's really a lovely estate."
"What is your father ill with?"
135
9£l
"Yes," said Gold. "That's quite good."
"I was such a ninny as a child, the only child of Pugh
Biddle Conover," Andrea went on. "I didn't know
anything until I left home. I had to go to two finishing
schools before I was ready for college, and then to
v*ee colleges. At Smith the other girls would talk
sex all the time, and I didn't understand. I
er I never could figure out why anybody would
^ a rooster."
^mobilized. In less than two days in "^s learning to har^i- - • ■
"He won't say. Six years ago he bought an electric wheelchair, and he's been confined to it ever since. Every weekend he has mobs of people out to ride and shoot."
"Shoot?"
"Quail and pheasant. Sometimes rabbit and deer v
"No people?"
"Not yet. I think you'll enjoy meeting my "
"I shall spare you," said Gold, "from ^ mine."
l^O one in our family," observed Gold's father that evening from the most comfortable chair in Gold's living room, "has ever had a divorce."
"Why not?" asked Dina.
"I don't allow them, that's why," the old man said. "Golds don't get divorces. We have death sometimes, but no divorces."
"Are you and Mommy ever going to get a divorce?" Dina inquired of Gold.
"Over my dead body," answered Gold's father.
"We'd rather have death," Gold added dryly, staring through bloodshot eyes from one speaker to the next.
In a day that had opened in glory for Gold and gone downhill steadily, the low point had been touched with his finding company for dinner. Rose and Max had traveled into the city because of a growth in her breast that had proved upon examination, thank God, to be an easily aspirated cyst. Belle, who accompanied them to the cancer specialist recommended by Murshie Weinrock, had invited them back to the apartment. Irv
137
drove in later with the others. Gold's nerves were ragged. He had work he wanted to continue.
"When you starting in Washington?" his father asked.
"I have to go back next week. To find out."
"That's what I thought," jeered Julius Gold in satisfaction. "What kind of a job would they give to a Jew like you?"
"Admiral."
"Then me they would make a commodore," the old man shot back, "with all the sailing you done."
"How much you done?"
"I came by boat from Antwerp all the way from Russia with Sid and Rose from that Tsar Nikolai. You?"
"Okay, Commodore," Gold sighed with a strained smile. "We're all tired. Can you be a little quiet tonight?"
"He'll be quiet a long time," said Gold's stepmother.
Gold's father elevated himself half out of his armchair and screwed his face up into almost a point. "What's that mean?" he demanded.
"Well, in my family in Richmond," answered Gold's stepmother, concentrating on her knitting and looking weirder than usual in the large pink gingham bonnet she had worn all through the meal, "whenever a child would tell a parent to be quiet or still, the parent, usually the mother, would reply, Til be quiet a long time.' Meaning, of course, that she would soon be dead and would do no more talking."
A moment of shocked silence passed before his father growled, "Well, I ain't no mother. And I ain't doing no dying so soon. So please be quiet."
"She'll be quiet a long time," said Dina.
"Thank you, child."
Gold's father turned away from his second wife with an expression of profound disgust and told Gold, "You'll come to the house Sunday for lunch. Sid too."
"Not this weekend." Gold shook his head. "I've got papers to correct and an article to finish."
138
"Another article?"
"Another screw," said his stepmother, "seems to be coming loose."
Gold wanted to kill her.
Irv grinned with the rest. "What's this one on?"
"Education."
"Are you for or against?" asked his father.
"Against."
"It's about time you got smart. It ain't done you so much good. Then you'll come next Sunday. I got questions about going back to Florida." He glanced about the room irritably and demanded, "Why ain't Sid here?"
"Maybe he wasn't invited."
"Why wasn't he invited?"
"Maybe you didn't ask us to."
"I have to ask?"
"I asked," said Belle. "They had someplace else to
go."
The old man absorbed this information desolately. Rose was yawning and Max murmured that it was time to leave.
"Not so fast," objected the old man. "I got a couple of dead faygelehs I want to watch on television tonight."
Irv swore he would get him back to his own house in time.
Gold shot into his study before the last had gone and began separating his school work from his personal work while bluntly measuring the impact of the divorce he was considering. Belle could take care of herself. His father would be hurt, Sid wouldn't mind, his sisters would grieve. His stepmother could hang herself. His children could go fuck themselves—let their therapists worry about them. The boys were not bad, now that they were both out of the house. Dina was hell, one affiliction he might reasonably have been spared, he felt, as his twelve-year-old daughter strolled in and said:
"Mom's really pissed, ain't she?"
139
"I haven't noticed." Gold did not look up.
"Don't shit me," said Dina. "She don't want you to go to Washington, does she?"
"I'll let you know when I find out."
"Balls, Dad. Listen, you better be goddamned careful what you put in any more articles you write. That crap on child rearing you had in the Ladies' Home Journal last year didn't do me no good."
"That was intended as a joke."
"Nobody got it."
"They'll get this one."
"What's it called?"
" 'Education and Truth or Truth in Education.'"
"I don't get it."
"Take a walk."
"How come I got to go to school if you don't believe in education?"
"It gets you out of the house."
"I'd really like to get out of this house. Living with you and she ain't no bed of roses, you know."
"Get good marks for a year," Gold urged. "And I'll sneak you into boarding school on a scholarship. Let me write your papers for you."
She shook her head. "Not a chance. I ain't ready for all that teen-age sex yet. I saw what you did to my brothers as soon as they went away. You turned their bedrooms into a study and a library."
"There's always room when they come home."
"On the floor. You ain't getting rid of me that fast. I told Lieberman's kid you're going to work in Washington."
Gold smiled in anticipation. "What'd you say?"
"I told him the President was giving you a job as a mayor or governor."
Gold flung down a pencil. "Oh, Jesus Christ. Don't they teach you nothing in that fucking school I send you to?"
"They try," Dina granted philosophically. "But I'm too smart for them. Listen, Dad, I'm warning you. You
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Joseph Heller, Good as Gold
(Series: # )
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