"Listen," he had boasted once to Pomoroy and Gold with his crude and exultant laugh, "I got invited to the
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White House for dinner, just for supporting a war. I would support a war every day in the week if I knew I could eat at the White House again." And then was thrown into confusion as both Pomoroy and Gold shrank from him with looks of undisguised abhorrence. Gold had known Lieberman since childhood and had never liked him. It was an unfading source of pleasure now to be able to say, "You know, truthfully, Maxwell, I never really liked you."
In high school, Lieberman had demanded of everyone that he be called Maxwell. Now that the name had grown unbearable to him, Gold took relish in using it, especially in the company of other people who knew him only by his auctorial identity, M. G. Lieberman, and to whom the name Maxwell came as a source of delight. Not till college had Lieberman adopted the affectation of using just the initials of his given names on everything he wrote, even homework. In conversation and on radio talk shows to which he was occasionally invited he asked to be addressed by his middle name, Gordon, or by the happy-go-lucky sobriquet with which he had festooned himself when he was already past forty-five, the nickname Skip.
"Skip," Pomoroy repeated sourly, as though discovering a wedge of lemon between his teeth. "Why not Curly?"
"My hair isn't really curly."
"And your name isn't Skip," Pomoroy had replied.
"It's my nickname."
"No, it isn't. People don't give themselves nicknames, Lieberman. They inspire them in others. Whatever you are now, Lieberman, or ever hope to be— please don't interrupt me, you baldy, fatheaded buffoon, I have spied your name often at testimonial banquets at which facists and anti-Semites were among the featured speakers—you are not now and never will be a Skip."
"It's what my friends used to call me," Lieberman pouted.
"No, it isn't." Gold did not look up from the turkey
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sandwich he was eating. "You never had a nickname. I did, but you didn't. They called me Four-Eyes for a while. They called you Fatso, but that was a description. And you didn't have any friends. I didn't have any either. But I had more than you."
"I was your friend."
"I didn't want you. I only used you when nobody better would play with me."
Lieberman and Gold had lived in Coney Island across the street from each other in walk-up apartment houses near Surf Avenue, and Gold had never cared any more for Lieberman than others had cared for Gold.
Gold spent much of his childhood on the fringe of exile. When sides were chosen for any kind of game, Gold would not know until the captains came down to the dregs if he would be picked at all; when he was, he was so grateful he could have wept. On Saturday afternoons when everyone went to the movies in groups, he was never confident he would be asked by any. At no single time in the first fifteen years of his life would he have hesitated even one second if given the chance to exchange his precocious intelligence for friendships with such local ne'er-do-wells or social leaders as Spotty Weinrock or Fishy Siegel. Fishy's older brother Sheiky, an illegal beach peddler of ice cream in summer and street vendor of costume jewelry in the winter, was now the owner of millions of dollars in computer and reinsurance stocks and the controller of perhaps many millions more in real-estate syndicates and mutual funds.
Go figure him.
It was mainly because of Rose's or Esther's scrupulous devotion that Gold's myopic astigmatism was discovered early, and Gold was probably the first his age in the neighborhood to wear eyeglasses. Even Sid and Muriel called him Four-Eyes. Perhaps Gold was able to get top grades in elementary school because he was the only one who could see.
Lieberman was more ambitious from the start. By
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the time he was eight, he was already given to chesty boasting.
"When I grow up," he announced to Gold in the third or fourth grade, "I'm gonna be fat. I'll be the fattest guy in the whole world."
That was one of the earliest of Lieberman's goals, to be fat. In every class, he seized command of all positions open, from blackboard and wastebasket monitor to class messenger, and, ultimately, the capstone of this phase of his career, chief of the safety patrol. Lieberman, rolling with a cockier swagger whenever he wore his metal badge, set records for reporting students for jaywalking until Fishy Siegel threatened to break his head if he didn't stop. Spotty Weinrock said he would do the same. Lieberman cried. That afternoon he resigned from the safety patrol.
Lieberman ate and talked unceasingly. By the time he was nine, he never hesitated to dispute socialism, facism, and the labor movement with old European Jews on the Coney Island boardwalk. His characteristic argument was that they did not know what they were talking about.
It probably was not true, as Pomoroy had remarked, that given the option, Lieberman would have elected to be born prematurely just to get a headstart. But it was probably not entirely false. Lieberman still could not keep his hands off food, his own or others', even though he no longer wanted to be fat. He had never held any elective office in school because he could not find anyone to nominate him, second him, or vote for him.
"I don't care," Lieberman proclaimed to Gold in the fifth or sixth grade, holding back tears. "When I grow up, I'll be a fat cabinet officer. I'll be the first Jewish Secretary of State. I bet I'll even get to meet the President."
Then he moved away from Coney Island to the bordering, more elegant neighborhood of Brighton Beach. By the time Gold entered Abraham Lincoln High School, Lieberman was already there as a sopho-
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more, having vaulted ahead one school year somehow, and was making a name for himself as an outstanding student and a putz. He was on the staff of the literary magazine and the school newspaper. By his junior year, Lieberman took uncontested control of both. He was active in political matters and co-captain of the debating team, which always lost.
Gold avoided him. Shunning the literary magazine in high school because of Lieberman, Gold mailed ten of his short poems to The Saturday Review of Literature. Six came back with rejection slips and four were accepted, at a price of ten dollars each. Lieberman turned blue. He swore he would never forgive Gold for acting alone instead of sharing his initiative. To teach Gold his place, Lieberman mailed twenty-five of his poems to The Saturday Review of Literature. Thirty-nine came back.
"What do I care?" Lieberman sneered. "When I grow up I'm gonna be rich. I'll be more famous than anyone. I'm gonna marry a rich and famous heiress. I'll never lose my hair. I'll wear lots of rings. I'll go into politics and win. I'll be a mayor, a senator, and the governor of all New York. I'll be a big millionaire. When I grow up," he vowed, "I'm gonna fuck a girl."
Instead, he went to college.
He was still fat. His hair was no longer thick. Everything he ate he still ate with both fists. He gorged himself from other people's plates.
Pomoroy was there from a college-educated family in Massachusetts, and Harris Rosenblatt from his private school in Manhattan and a strict, proud German-Jewish family on Riverside Drive. In graduate school Ralph Newsome, from a wealthy family in Michigan, joined the group by way of Princeton University.
It was inevitable that Lieberman would make a shambles of each class. He interrupted with contrary views and overblown objections and shouted answers to every question asked. Students and faculty learned to yield him a wide berth rather than contend with him. Experienced professors blanched when he signed up for
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their courses, and mature students, including tough marines from Iwo Jima and army veterans of the Battle of the Bulge, calmly rearranged their programs when they found him in class on the first day of term. Many switched to other fields of study. For many of the most illustrious scholars and teachers on the faculty, Lieber-man was precisely the factor needed to bring them to decisions perhaps long in the balance—divorce, murder, mental breakdown, early retirement, or changes to different occupations or
new teaching positions at other universities. And finally, when Lieberman, with Gold and Ralph Newsome, had completed all the requirements for his doctorate, he surveyed with disgruntle-ment the campus from the steps of Low Library and complained, "You know, this isn't such a first-rate university any more, is it? We should have gone to Yale."
He chose to forget that all had been rejected by Yale. All but Ralph, who had been accepted everywhere. Ralph had chosen Columbia because he wanted to live in New York for a while, and because he had guessed that he would be able to find someone like Gold who would make his work there easier.
"The truth is," Pomoroy had observed in customary melancholy the last time the three had lunch together, "that none of us have really accomplished very much."
And Lieberman, vowing he would never forgive him for saying that, began another autobiography.
The pity lay, Gold reflected on the indoor track at the Y after completing the first of his nine sets of eight laps without dropping dead, in their having wanted to achieve some kind of glorious success almost from the moment of birth. Goals, he muttered as he pounded along steadily on the short oval course while the pain departed from his chest and settled and throbbed in his dangling kidneys, we ain't got any real ones. Still, it's better to have shit to shoot at than nothing. Gold held to the superstitious belief that if he could survive the first eight laps without some fatal bursting of the blood,
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he would make it to the end with the Angel of Death still behind, a loser again. The track was almost empty, which pleased him. It was there on the track while running his grueling three miles several days a week that many of Gold's best thoughts came to him, and there also that he discharged, for a time, the stewing hostility and mordant self-pity that pooled like poison almost daily in his soul. Envy would dissolve with exertion into euphoria by the time he had showered and dressed and was limping away. There is no disappointment so numbing, he brooded as he entered the last lap of his first mile and felt the muscles of his calves cramp, as someone no better than you achieving more. Forty-eight laps to go. There would be no heartburn today. Soon the muscles of his calves would feel fine, as his kidneys now did, and the tendons of both ankles would whine with each footfall. He could look forward next to a strain in his left groin and then to a vertical shaft of pain on his right side that was rooted in his appendix and rose through his liver, chest, and shoulder blade to his collarbone and neck. Each wound in the sequence could register only singly. Another thought that returned often when he jogged was that it was a fucking boring way to spend time. Gold had discovered, since starting to exercise strenuously several years before, that he was able to make love with greater vitality, stamina,-and self-control than formerly, and with much less pleasure. He also found he had less time for it and was often in too much physical torture and debilitation afterward to want to. He lusted more desirously for a nap. Gold no longer suffered from early-morning lower backache. Now he had it all day long.
For Gold, Lieberman, and Pomoroy, there had been sound reason for their expectations. But the real stars had sprung from other quarters, and before they knew it, they had been left behind. All had gotten what they wanted, and felt dissatisfied. Lieberman had wanted to edit a small intellectual publication, and he did. Gold hoped to obtain a decent teaching post in New York
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and gain some stature as a writer, and he had. Pomoroy wanted to be a book editor, and he was. All were successful, and felt like failures.
Gold no longer pretended to understand the nature of success. Instead, he pretended not to. He knew the components that were necessary:
None.
Or maybe one:
Dumb luck.
Harris Rosenblatt, with his inanimate powers of concentration and no ability at thought, was now a name to be reckoned with; he was a member of Protestant clubs that admitted no Jews, and a trustee of Jewish clubs that admitted only Germans. "Balance the budget," appeared to be the longest, and perhaps only, recommendation he could put together. While Sheiky from Neptune Avenue, truant, high-school dropout, and raffish summer ice-cream peddler, had millions and had jousted with Nelson Rockefeller at a formal dinner for fat cats when the latter was campaigning for governor of New York.
"Hiya, fella," said Nelson Rockefeller to Sheiky from Neptune Avenue. "I will be grateful for your support."
"What's in it for me?" asked Sheiky. He kept his hands in the pockets of his pants. Never in his life would Sheiky from Neptune Avenue offer an unguarded greeting to anyone or shake the hand of a person who might want something from him.
Rockefeller drew back in bewilderment.
"Good government," an eager aide with a florid face interjected quickly.
"Who needs it?" Sheiky said, grinning amiably. "I'm doing just fine with the kind we've got."
Sid, who related that episode often, was another anomaly in the freakish catalogue of success. Silent and complicated in the home when young, low-keyed in ambition, and of only average attainments in school, Sid had somehow managed to acquire and improve certain patents for commercial laundry equipment after
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returning from the army in 1945. Ideas for other machines followed, then a company for processing fabrics. Now he had plenty of money and dispensed it more liberally than Harriet liked.
Earlier he had worked harder, half days after school and full time in summer as a laborer at the Brighton Laundry when the red vans were still drawn by horses. Sid was afraid of the horses. After graduating from high school he stayed as an assistant to a supervisor of some kind, preferring anything to working in the tailor shop his father owned off and on in those hazardous years following 1929. Mixed in somewhere in his history was the summer he had run away from home. Sundays, when he could, and even Saturday nights, he worked in the checkroom at catered affairs at a banquet hall. He did not like these weekend jobs or the rented tuxedo he had to wear, but this was the Great Depression. His father's income was uncertain, his occupations erratic. Rose and Esther sought work in Woolworth's after school as soon as each was old enough, and at the hot-dog and custard stands on the boardwalk in summer. All were pressed into duty to deliver the suits and dresses and obtain payment in cash. No one's credit was good.
Julius Gold was always selling and returning to the same tailor shop, on the sidewalk level of the apartment house in which they lived. They had an Atwater-Kent radio in the living room, and they were one of the first families on the block with a telephone—in the store. They were also the only family with as many as seven children. With unerring intuition, he always sold to incompetents or invalids, and the shop was always available to him for just the rent whenever his newest escapade into the fashionable world of trade and manufacturing had again gone bust. Gold's mother was a good dressmaker and seamstress and would work downstairs in the store when she was not shopping for meals or tending the house. The tailor shop was a bustling extension of the apartment upstairs; sandwiches would be devoured with milk by Rose, Esther,
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Ida, and Muriel during the lunch recess at school or with giant bottles of flavored soda pop from the candy store across the street. Gold could remember whole mornings and afternoons idled away on the bathroom-tiled floor, with his sister Joannie just outside the plateglass window in a baby carriage for as long as the sunlight fell there, his mother whizzing away at the Singer sewing machine or stitching by hand with a thimbled finger, while his father hummed or sang bouncy dance tunes as he darted about in disorder or shouted horrible imprecations at the presser. Gold had hazy remembrances of a catastrophic spell long before World War II when his father abruptly divined himself a singer of extraordinary talents and sought to enter singing contests and perform on radio amateur hours. The older members of the family seemed in panic and shock. They were stunned and mortified again by another family disgrace after the war, this time Gold too, when they discovered that Joannie, with a friend, was working in a sleazy purple nightgown at one of the stalls
in the amusement area near the train stop, lying in bed doing nothing while patrons threw baseballs at a bull's-eye that would tumble her out. There was a sickly silence in the house for weeks. She was just eighteen. And then she was gone with the friend, to enter beauty pageants, work for entertainment directors at resort hotels, and then to Florida, California, and even Cuba, in search of a Hollywood career as an actress, or as a dancer or model. By then, his mother too was gone. By the time of the war, in 1942, she had been ailing for several years, and the tailor shop was closed. His father, with partners, was doing subcontracted defense work in a small loft on Canal Street, drilling holes through templets for small parts of Bendix airplane turrets that Sid, an enlisted man in the Army Air Force, was helping maintain in turrets—"What do we need them for?"—and was quarreling ferociously with his partners. Rose was married to Max, and she and Esther had real jobs, Rose the job she never would change. Ida was in college and Muriel and Gold in high school.
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Gold's father, Gold judged sourly later, was probably the only person in the country doing defense work and losing money.
Sid made sergeant as an armorer, loading bombs and belted ammunition into planes, servicing weapons. He was fascinated with this first contact with cams, springs, sears, solenoid switches, and hydraulics. He was inspired by the technology of the .50-caliber machine guns. From the machine gun had come his reposeful laundry machines.