"What minds!" Sid mused now on the patio of his house in Great Neck. "To invent machines. A piece of metal doing one thing that can make another piece of metal do something else. I swear to God if not for those machine guns I never would have thought of that laundry equipment."
"Who helped you, Sid?" reminded Gold's father, in a bid for praise.
"You, Pop. But Sheiky from Neptune Avenue put in the money. And Kopotkin with the ice skates did most of the work. He had his own machine shop after the war."
"You trusted them, you dope?" said Julius Gold. "How'd you know they wouldn't steal from you?"
Sid handled the question with benevolence. "I just didn't think about that. Maybe friends didn't steal from each other then. Pop," Sid finally found nerve enough to suggest in a voice that was delicate and kind, "I think you ought to buy a condominium."
The old man tensed. "I don't stay in Florida that much."
"You could rent it out when you're here, and probably get back all your costs."
The old man took a long puff on his cigar. "You'll explain to me next weekend, when you come to us for (utvch. You come too," he said to Gold.
"It will all work out fine," Sid murmured with a smile, crossing his hands over his middle with a deep sigh and sinking back further in his recliner.
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But Gold wasn't fooled by Sid's air of contentment, and was positive there abided in Sid still, like a hole, the retrospective regret that he had missed out on college. But thoughts of a college education were simply not in the cards for high-school graduates of Sid's time in that place. The most one might reach toward, like Rose's Max, was an excellent score on a Civil Service examination. Max had been second best in the state on a test for the Post Office Department. His picture was in the Brooklyn section of the Sunday News. He had worked in a post office ever since.
The sole exception in the neighborhood was crazy Murshie Weinrock, who plodded away in night classes in college for four, five, six years, until World War II. Then the army moved him to Swarthmore College into one of those opulent training programs for college students for the remainder of his senior year and then to the Harvard Medical School. Again, dumb luck. If not for Adolf Hitler he might still be sweeping trimmings in his uncle's gritty millinery factory. Today he was an internist in Manhattan with a practice growing almost faster than his ability to handle it. Dr. Murray Weinrock always made room for old friends.
Gold had been to him in the middle of the week. Skinny Murshie Weinrock was now an overweight, haggard chain smoker with the troubled look of somebody endlessly overworked. With Gold, he exercised a fitful sense of humor that Gold could only describe as weird, and perhaps depraved.
"You sure look lousy."
Gold, always in low spirits at his yearly checkup, said, "Thanks, Mursh. So do you."
"How do you feel?" asked Mursh Weinrock urgently, in the middle of the examination. "Right now?"
"Awful. You've got that thing up my ass."
"How long you had that cough?"
"Since you stabbed that tongue depressor down on my tongue."
In the room with the electrocardiograph, Lucille, the
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large, handsome, dignified, unsmiling black nurse Gold had known for years, bent toward him with a baleful glare and said, "I know you been fucking the doctor's wife. Lie still, please. How you expect that mother-fucking machine to do what it's s'posed to?" Gold felt all strength drain from him. Lucille was an educated technician with enunciation superior to his own. "Next time I X-ray your chest," she warned, "I'm gonna aim that machine right at your balls. Didn't I ask you to please lie still? Next time you pee in a bottle I'm gonna put poison in without telling anybody and the doctor is going to cut both your kidneys out."
"Uh-oh, this might be serious," Mursh Weinrock said in his office with an ominous start when he studied the waves on the electrocardiogram. "It looks to me like you've been fucking my wife."
"How is Mildred?" Gold asked wryly. "You saw my father last week."
"He told me I was doing everything wrong."
"How's his lungs?"
"Clear as a whistle and as good as gold. He's got the descending bowel of a healthy adolescent. You could eat your food off it."
"I could throw you out the window for a remark like that," said Gold. "Shouldn't he be in a warmer climate?"
"Only when he's cold. The old man is fine. He's got arthritis of the hip and foot and a definite hardening of the arteries, and that will keep him feeling miserable much of the time."
"Why don't you fucks find a cure for that already?" Gold grumbled.
"Biology doesn't want us to. Nature abhors old age."
"He still starts off the day with a herring and baked potato. And some Greek olives."
"So?"
"Is that good for him?"
"When it isn't he'll know it before we do. Look, Bruce, your father's past eighty. How much difference
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will it make if we feed him baby food? Let's get back to you. Venereal disease . . . yet?"
"You're the last one I'd tell."
"Patient denies venereal disease."
"You rig this for me, don't you?" Gold charged.
"Rig what?"
"You know fucking well what I mean. You and Lucille certainly don't handle all those other people out there this way, do you?"
"Which way?"
"You're the perfect anodyne for somebody with tension."
"Tension?"
"I may be changing jobs soon, for a big one in government. That has to remain secret."
"Who cares?"
"Don't coddle me."
"See my lazy kid brother much?" Gold shook his head in reply to this question about Spotty Weinrock. "I don't think Spotty's done one minute's hard work in his whole life."
"Nah, Mursh," Gold reminded. "Remember how he got his nickname, working for my loony father—for just about a day and a half, now that you mention it—taking stains out of clothes in the old man's tailor shop."
"His nickname was Speed at home, and he got it from my mother as a sarcasm. It was the first word of English she learned. 'Spit' is what she used to call him. Goddamn it. Even when he was sixteen he still pretended he didn't know how to put his socks on. One or the other of us would have to rush in and finish dressing him so he could go to high school. Then—" Dr. Murray Weinrock waved a forefinger in the air with the apocalyptic vengeance of a Biblical prophet—"then I knew how Cain must have felt about Abel, and my sympathies shifted. If I had the thighbone of a bullock handy, I would have walloped him dead a hundred times. I hate sloth. Let's get serious now. Your weight
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is good and your heart and blood pressure are fine. Sid could lose some weight and use some exercise, but so could I."
"What about my fatigue?"
"Too much sex life. I want you to stop fucking my wife."
"There are nights I can't resist."
"Get yourself a cute young girl instead."
Gold's differing view was that most women did not even learn to begin enjoying sex until they were almost thirty, but this was another valuable finding he could not publish while he was still teaching, while he was still married, and while his twelve-year-old daughter was still under thirty.
Even without a business education, Sid understood merger better than Gold ever would. With hardly a pause for breath, Sid had taken the old man's final business enterprise, a wobbling leather-products factory on the brink of collapse, submerged it forever in an overlapping mist of other business entities, and conjured up magically an asset sufficiently grand to enable their father to retire with a fixed yearly income and a blazing self-respect that was inflated and inimitable. He displayed like an aura the lordly demeanor of a man who not only had dined on success throughout his lifetime but also had been born into it. Sid fed extra money to him, as did most of the others. Gold had chipped in for the good used car in which Gussie drove them about in Florida. To Sid, Julius gave
all credit.
"Sid fixed it so I would first get my unemployment insurance, then my Social Security."
"If he'd worked a little bit harder," Gold quipped meanly, "he could have had you on welfare."
When Gold was a child, Sid was already working summers, weekends, and weekday afternoons. When Gold was in high school, Sid was overseas in the army* And the year Gold entered college, Sid was discharged from the service, eligible for higher education under the G.I. Bill of Rights, but already thirty-one. Conceiv-
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ably they might have begun as freshmen together, and Gold could have cut him to ribbons in the hectic rivalry of classroom exhibitionism. Gold was alert to incongruities: Sid, who had sacrificed, was exempt from complaints, while Gold, the beneficiary, teemed with them. Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better character, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed.
And Gold knew something else: he was in a predicament, confronted, so to speak, with a crisis of conscience that could not much longer be concealed. All his words had a starkly humanitarian cast; yet he no longer liked people.
He was losing his taste for mankind. There was not much he did like. He liked goods, money, honors. He missed capital punishment, but did not feel he could say so. Gold had a growing list of principles, causes, methods, and ideals in which he no longer believed; and near the top it contained a swelling subdivision of freedoms that included such sacrosanct issues as academic freedom, sexual freedom, and even political freedom. Alternatives were hellish. By no stretch of the imagination could he feel that this was what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Either Gold had grown more conservative or civilization had grown progressively worse.
Or both.
Certainly, nothing proceeded according to desire. In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental. Good intentions had miscarried, and bad ones had not improved.
The American economic system was barbarous, resulting, naturally, in barbarianism and entrenched imbecility on all levels of the culture. Technology and finance mass-produced poverty at increasing speed, the sole manufactured item in the whole industrial inventory that had not once suffered a slackening in rate of
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growth in the last fifty-five years, not in acreage or in populations. Communism was a drab, gray, wintry prison at the end of a cul-de-sac from which no turning back was imaginable. And this was with a revolution that had succeeded. What else was there? Imperialism, that faithful ogre? The receding of colonial imperialism had not brought peace, riches, or liberty to the emancipated peoples; instead, there were oppressions, corruption, and warfare, and a truculent majority in the United Nations that was now not only anti-American, but anti-Americans like GqW. Vus nuch?
Medicaid?
Gold had another list.
A symbiotic system of new criminal classes; and medical science had created something infinitely worse, a long life span, with a larger and larger number of old people who were unneeded by society, had nothing to do, and were not revered. How much longer would grown children hope their parents going into surgery would come out alive? What would Gold himself really feel next time his father had an operation? He knew about Sid and Rose and Esther, but he would not bet on himself or vouch for Muriel, or even Ida. Or Joannie, an alien mystery to him now, a distant cipher whom he understood best and knew least.
The labor movement had come to its end in garbage strikes and gigantic pension funds invested by banks for profit. There seemed no plausible connection between cause and effect, or ends and means. History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent fight bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage someday that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil.
Results attained were unrelated to objectives envisioned.
Once, ten or fifteen years earlier, Gold had given testimony in defense of novels by Henry Miller and
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William Burroughs against charges of obscenity; now there were massage parlors and pornographic movies everywhere and newspapers and magazines on display that were obscene. The health club in the basement of the apartment house in which he had his studio had converted gradually into an elegant massage parlor; and his annual membership had been rudely terminated.
And when he'd marched in Selma, Alabama, with Martin Luther King and campaigned so loyally against all forms of racial segregation, the thought never once crossed his mind that a day might come when his own neighborhood would alter for the worse and his own children be sent to costly private schools to evade the physical dangers of busing and integration and the decay in the quality of education offered by the public ones. They were not accustomed to being a white minority.
Gold never doubted that racial discrimination was atrocious, unjust, and despicably cruel and degrading. But he knew in his heart that he much preferred it the old way, when he was safer. Things were much better for him when they had been much worse. It was a fact, one that did not touch on the virtue of the situation, but a fact nonetheless, that many people like himself who had worked and argued for the annihilation of Jim Crow were those who would be least incovenienced when they succeeded. Gold himself lived in a building with a doorman, and Negroes were not numerous in places he went to for the summer. Had they been, he would have sought new ones. When he came to realize this, he realized also that he was not just a liar but a hypocrite. A liar he knew he had been.
Ida's sixteen-year-old daughter was threatened with busing to a high school in a dangerous neighborhood in which she would be hated, where she could form no friendships, and in which she would be foolish to linger or wander, and only Ida's sneaking influence wthua the Board of Education might save her: but only by the
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substitution of somebody else's child. Gold was helpless to advise: but he did feel that no law should force this upon anyone. To the clear-cut issue of equality had been added the discordant elements of violence, crime, enmity, insurgence, and negation. With so much to be said on all sides of the questions, he was sorry there was such a question. Solutions did not appear so readily as before, and things were not so clear as they once seemed. Things were just not working out as planned. Nothing ran smoothly. Nothing was succeeding as planned. ,
"Nothing Succeeds as Planned" was the title of Gold's article, and he was not surprised that Lieberman published it immediately after Gold had extracted the rest of the payment from him.
Ralph called him at home the day after Gold mailed him four copies.
"What did he say?" Gold demanded hungrily.
"Dina took the call," said Belle, just returned from her afternoon job as psychological counselor at a public elementary school.
"He was calling from the White House," Dina said.
"And he sounded so nice. I wanted to keep talking with him but he said he had something to do."
"Must I break your head? What did Ralph Newsome say?"
"He'll call back tonight. You can take it in my room if you like."
Gold took the call in his study with the door closed.
"God, Bruce," Ralph began, "I can't tell you how you're boggling our minds. If nothing succeeds as planned—and you really present such a strong argument—then the President has just the excuse he needs for not doing anything."
Gold, though surprised, was nonetheless pleased. "I hadn't looked at it in just that light," he confessed.
"We're having photocopies made. We want everyone in government to read it, although we've stamped
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it secret so nobody can. It would have been better, I suppose—" here Ralph's voice dropped in gentle reproach—"if you had shown it to us first and the President could have introduced the proposition as his own. But it might prove ev
en more convincing now that he can cite you as an authority. Don't be surprised, Bruce, if he makes reference to it tomorrow. That should boggle minds."
"Has the President read it?" Gold, with boggling mind, could not restrain himself from inquiring.
"Oh, I'm positive he has," Ralph answered in his equable unhurried manner, "although I can't be sure."
"I would have shown it to him first, Ralph, but I didn't think anyone there but you would be interested."
"Bruce, I can't emphasize too strongly how high you rate with us. Especially after this. Nothing succeeds as planned—my God, what a concept. All of us want you working with us as soon as possible after the people above us decide whether they want you working here at all. Will you come?"
"As what?" said Gold, who knew already the answer was ardently yes.
"Oh, I don't know," said Ralph. "We probably could start you right in as a spokesman."
"A spokesman?" Gold was abruptly doubtful. It sounded like something athletic. "What's a spokesman?"
"Oh, Bruce, you must know. That's what I've been when I haven't been doing something else. A goverment spokesman, an unnamed spokesman, an administrative spokesman—it's a little bit like a source. Haven't you been reading about me at all?"
"Oh," said Gold quickly, defensively. "Now I know."
"I do get into the papers often. That's one of the nice things about being an unnamed spokesman. In a month or two, we can move you up."
"To what?"
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"Well, if nothing else, to a senior official. As a senior official, you'd be free to hold background briefings any time you want, every time we schedule them. There's no limit to how high you will go. Bruce, this administration is made up almost entirely of people who pushed their way in."