“Look, why don’t you fire me, Sam? I completely disagree with you on practically everything that matters. I’ll go on recommending the Smoke over Etna kind of book till hell freezes over, because I believe in it, and nothing you say—”
Rothmore jabbed him in the chest with two fingers. “Now listen to me, junior. I was trying to talk the front office into Smoke over Etna books when you were wetting your diapers. There’s room for both kinds of pictures, that’s the whole truth of this matter. If you keep the budget low, and spot your releases in the right big-city spots, you can come out all right on a small-audience movie, and we’ve done it, and we do it. But that’s a very small part of our business in life.” He pounded the table. “We’ve got to supply the neighborhood houses and small towns with three hundred movies a year, will you ever grasp that? That’s our job. What country ever produced three hundred good books a year, or three hundred good plays, or three hundred good anything? God damn it, your job as a story editor is to find grist for the mill, usable entertainment, usable trash, if you want to be sniffy about it! Do I need you to tell me that Smoke over Etna is a good book? Don’t you think I can read? When you grasp this elementary point, maybe you can start fitting into the organization. Maybe you’ll wind up producing art pictures. What the hell do I care what you do? But you’ve got to understand what business you’re in first.”
Noel answered acidly, “Getting me into this business was your idea, Sam, not mine, and you still have to prove it was a good one. You’re not going to make me over in your image. If I’m useful to you on my own terms, that’s a different matter.”
Rothmore said to Marjorie, “D’you see? This is it. You run into some kind of neurotic stone wall with this boy at a certain point. All his intellect blanks out, and you—”
“Naturally, disagreeing with you constitutes a neurosis,” Noel said.
“Why do you bother with him?” Marjorie said. “I’m in love with him. I’m stuck with him.”
Rothmore puffed on his cigar, his lids heavy, staring at Marjorie. “Margie, there’s damn little talent in the world, and when you see it, you want something to come of it, that’s all. I’ve seen a lot of young men come and go. Noel’s got something, and he’s a charming low-life somehow, and if he could be straightened out, why, he’d be an asset to Paramount, and to me. But at the present rate—”
“You see the picture, I trust,” Noel said to Marjorie. “Sam’s joined the Save-Noel-from-Himself Club.”
Rothmore looked at Noel, shook his head, and signalled for the check. “Sometimes I wonder,” he muttered.
He tried to persuade them to come into his limousine, saying that they could have the car and chauffeur for the evening after dropping him at his home. But Noel wouldn’t hear of it. The old man lumbered into the long black car. Just as the chauffeur was about to close the door Rothmore jammed his cigar in his teeth, leaned forward, and said to Noel, “Your report on the Redbook serial was all right. I phoned it out to the Coast. They’ve put in a bid. Twelve thousand.”
Noel’s rather glum look vanished in an eager grin. “Why didn’t you say so a little sooner, you old sadist?”
“Your other two reports weren’t bad, but those I want to think about a bit more. You’re learning slowly, slowly.” He glanced from Marjorie to Noel, and the tough downward lines around his mouth softened in a smile of grudging approval. “Maybe you’ll be all right. Good night. Good night, Margie.”
Chapter 27. THE SEDER
When Mrs. Morgenstern first suggested inviting Noel and his parents to the family’s Passover dinner, the seder, Marjorie thought it was an appalling idea. On reflection, however, she decided that there was some hard good sense in it.
With Noel doing well at Paramount, with their relationship becoming each week more intimate and hopeful, it did seem to her that the time had come for his parents and her own to confront each other. She also thought Noel had better see the Family and glimpse her religious background. At fourteen and fifteen she had hated seders, bar-mitzvas, and all the rest, and she had taken pleasure in shocking her parents with atheistic talk. In recent years, however, she had found the seder oddly appealing, and she wanted to see how he would react. The complex rituals and symbols of the Passover feast—the matzo, the horseradish, the four cups of wine, the pounded nuts and apples, the hard-boiled eggs in salt water, the great goblet of wine for Elijah—these things, with the old family songs and the annual jokes at the same points in the Hebrew service, had attractive bitter-sweet nostalgia for her. It was fun in a way, too, to see the Family once a year, and find out which of the cousins had married, and see the new babies, and marvel at the rapid growth of the old babies. There was a risk, of course, that Noel and his parents would be dismayed and put off by the seder; but she didn’t think it was much of a risk, and anyway she was prepared to take it.
She was rather afraid to bring the subject up with Noel. But to her astonishment he agreed very readily to come. He knew nothing whatever about seders, except that matzo was eaten; but when she described the ceremonies to him he said, “Why, it sounds very colorful and alive. My father will undoubtedly make a bloody ass of himself, as usual, but that might prove amusing, too.”
“I should warn you that all the relatives from miles around get together at this thing, and the children, and the grandchildren, and it’s a pretty noisy mess.”
“Oh.” Noel looked thoughtful, then he brightened. “Well, don’t you think that may be a good thing? I may well go unnoticed in the crush. Of course, all your relatives will gossip about us, but if you don’t mind I don’t.”
“Honestly, Noel, you’re a chameleon. If there was ever anything I dreaded, it was mentioning this thing to you. And here you are, being just as nice as pie about it.”
“Darling, you really do me an injustice. I have a heart of gold. My only faults are that I’m totally selfish and immoral. Tell your mother it’s okay—my folks and all.”
He arrived late. The seder guests were already crowded in the smoky living room, with children darting between their legs and around the furniture, laughing and squealing. Four babies in baskets and portable cribs were howling in Marjorie’s bedroom, and their young mothers, wild-haired and with blouses coming out of their skirts, were rushing to and fro through the foyer, brandishing bottles, diapers, pots, and rattles. Noel grinned at Marjorie, cocking his ear to the noise, as he slipped out of his coat. She said, “Well, didn’t I warn you?”
“Why, it sounds very exuberant. My father here?”
“Yes, and your mother, and they’re both in evening clothes. They go from here to a Democratic banquet.”
The doorbell rang, and Marjorie’s cousins, Morris and Mildred Sapersteen, came in with their son, Neville. Marjorie was amazed to see how the child had grown. She remembered him as a particularly loud-bawling blond infant, but he was now a large redheaded boy. “Gosh, how old is Neville, anyway?” she said to the father, who was carrying a black suitcase. Neville’s mother began taking off his coat, which was no simple thing to do, since he was rearing and tearing to get at the children in the living room, shouting, “Hi, Suzy Capoozy! Hi, Walter Capalter!”
“He’s five, just turned five,” Morris Sapersteen said. He was Uncle Shmulka’s oldest son, a writer of advertising copy, a sad-faced young man not much bigger than his father. He set down the suitcase with a sigh. “Gosh, you’d never believe how heavy those things can be.”
“What have you got there?” Marjorie said.
“Airplanes.”
“Airplanes?”
“Forty-seven airplanes. Neville won’t go anywhere without them.”
Neville, disentangling his arms from the sleeves of his coat, was off into the living room like a rocket. Marjorie introduced Noel to the Sapersteens. Morris’s wife, Mildred, a thin freckled girl with very large front teeth, and black straight hair cut like an inverted bowl, was a piano teacher of sorts, and sometimes played at family gatherings. She looked very tired.
Mo
rris opened the suitcase. It was really crammed to the top with toy airplanes of every shape, color, and size, all tumbled in a tangle of wheels and wings. “Where can I put this, Margie? Just so he can get at them when he feels the need for them. I don’t want it to be in the way—”
Marjorie indicated a corner in the hallway. “It’s a nuisance,” Mildred Sapersteen said, “but we’ve tried taking him places without them, and it sets up all kinds of traumas. The planes have become a sort of security symbol for him.”
Noel said gravely, “A substitute for the father image, would you say?”
“Well possibly,” Mildred said, “but we think it’s a compensatory mechanism for a rather small sex organ. It’s well within the normal range, but—Morris, leave the lid up, he goes into a frenzy if he sees it down—”
“I’m leaving it up, I’m leaving it up,” Morris said. “I say it’s a surrogate for masturbation, myself, but whatever it is, he won’t go anywhere without these damn planes, that’s for sure. Whew! There we are.” He stood and peered into the clamorous living room. “Well, I see the panic is on. Let’s go, Mildred. Where is he, anyway?”
When they were out of sight Noel collapsed against the closet door, shaking with laughter. “That’s right,” Marjorie muttered, “laugh at my crazy cousins—”
“Crazy!” Noel gasped. “Honey, nearly every young married couple I know talks that way. I bait them for hours sometimes, and they never tumble. Morris, leave the lid up, or he’ll get a trauma—” He choked, his shoulders quivering. “Now you know why I won’t get married…. Forty-seven airplanes—”
Mrs. Morgenstern, flushed, and with an apron over a fine new purple dress, poked her head into the foyer. “What are you two billing and cooing about in a corner? We’re starting the seder. Come in.”
The flower-festooned glittering table, extended with all its leaves and eked out with a card table, stretched from the windows to the far wall of the long narrow dining room, under a blaze of bright white electric bulbs. An auxiliary table had been improvised in the living room, visible through the opened French doors, and the children were shepherded out there by Mildred Sapersteen, who volunteered to stay with them, so as to keep an eye on Neville. The children objected raucously to being steered away from the adults’ table, and Neville, in the course of his objections, put his foot through a pane in the French doors. But the glass was cleared away, the children pacified with a round of Pepsi-Cola; and against a background of rich lively noise, mingled with the quarrelsome chattering of the children and the muffled but powerful howls of the babies in the bedrooms, the seder began.
The liveliness did not extend to the table of the adults. Here, as the ceremonies proceeded, there gradually fell a strained queer quiet, unlike the atmosphere of other years. The little people of the Family, old gray tailors, candy-store keepers, mechanics, and their wives, were terrorized by the presence of a judge and his lady; and their grown-up sons and daughters, usually a joking and irreverent band of ordinary young Americans, wore awkward company airs. The fact that the Ehrmanns were in evening clothes did not help matters. Tiny Uncle Shmulka, the laundry sorter, jammed in his cheap frayed brown suit against the resplendent judge, kept trying in vain to shrink away, and not contaminate the great man with the rub of poverty. Seth, too, sat clumsy and glum beside Mr. Morgenstern, supporting his father’s opening chants over the wine and the matzo with his uncertain baritone voice, and shooting occasional suspicious looks at Noel.
Noel, though his behavior was faultless, seemed to make the Family even more uneasy than his parents did. A chill radiated from him, causing much of the lameness of the singing, the stumbling of the Hebrew responses, and the embarrassed side glances among the relatives. The skullcap perched on his thick blond hair somehow looked as incongruous as it would have on an animal’s head. His bearing was sober, his comments courteous; Marjorie could not accuse him of deliberately trying to appear out of place and trapped. Nor was there anything intentionally offensive in the way he kept looking around. But the effect was to make the Family, including Marjorie, feel increasingly like painted Africans performing a voodoo rite. Mrs. Morgenstern didn’t improve things by trying to explain the ceremonies to Noel. She would get all tangled up in theology, and dead silence would drop over the table while she painfully bumbled her way through; and Noel all the while would nod brightly, saying that it was really terribly interesting. This happened over and over.
Worst of all, however, was the absence of the Uncle.
Until this year, Marjorie had not realized how central Samson-Aaron had been to the seder. Her father always had sat at the head of the table, as he sat now, conducting the service out of the beautifully illustrated Hagada printed in England. Samson-Aaron had seemed merely the funmaker, the heckler, of the feast. Now Marjorie saw that he had been nothing less than the soul of it; and he was gone. He had warmed the air. Single-handed, he had dispelled the stiffness of a year’s separation, and the frost of all the permanent quarrels, of all the sad unchangeable differences in income. His bubbling jokes, his bellowing of the songs, his pounding of the rhythms with fist and foot, his cavorting, his fabulous eating and drinking, had gradually wakened the spirits of the Family, brought the old ties of blood to life, and welded the scattered estranged group, at least for the evening, into something like the close-knit tribal Family of the old country. Without him, the seder was but a moribund semblance; and it was enacted with less and less heart as the evening went on, under the fixed smiles of Judge and Mrs. Ehrmann, and the cool observant eyes of their son.
If anyone promised to save the seder as an institution, it was Neville Sapersteen. He was giving the occasion what liveliness it had. The children’s table was a vortex of noise and motion, all of it churning around Neville. Snatching the other children’s Pepsi-Cola, breaking matzos over their heads, drinking off the salt water, throwing plates, forks, pepper, flowers, hard-boiled eggs, Neville was exhibiting enough vivacity for ten children. His mother stayed one step behind him, as it were, catching the plates before they broke, putting back the flowers, wiping up the wine, comforting the other children while Neville drank their Pepsi-Cola, and persuading them not to break matzos over Neville’s head, on the grounds that revenge was an unworthy motive. Marjorie’s back was to the living room, so that she missed much of the byplay; but at every sudden burst of noise she would look around fearfully, to make sure that nothing jagged or wet was sailing her way.
Matters broke out of control very suddenly in the living room, just as Mr. Morgenstern was putting down the three wrapped matzos after reciting This bread of affliction. There was an explosion of laughter and yammering, with Neville’s voice rising in infuriated soprano shrieks over the din. His mother yelled, “Morris, Morris, come quick! The airplanes! They’re into the airplanes!” While Morris struggled frantically to get out of the seat where he was wedged between two fat aunts, half a dozen children came giggling and shrieking into the dining room, swooping toy airplanes in their hands and making noises like airplane motors—”Braah! Braah!” After them charged Neville, his face dark purple, waving his fists and uttering hideous choked sounds. The children dived under the table and under chairs; they flew between the legs of their pursuing parents, in and out of the clutching arms of Mildred and Morris Sapersteen, into the bedrooms and round and round the living room, all the time roaring “Braah! Braah!” Neville did a remarkable simulation of running in fourteen directions at once, whimpering, screeching, and snapping his teeth. The seder stopped dead for ten minutes, while all the parents joined the chase. The airplanes were at last rounded up, and the children herded back to their chairs; it was a difficult business, because they kept snatching new airplanes from the suitcase after being deprived of the ones they had, and galloping around again.
Morris Sapersteen stood at bay in the middle of the living room, clutching the suitcase, while Mildred attempted to quiet Neville, who was lying on his back, kicking the floor with both heels, and yelling. Morris said, “I??
?ll just have to lock the lid, I guess.”
“No, no,” Neville screamed. “I want the box open!”
His mother said, “There’s only one answer. These kids are impossible. You’ll have to hold the suitcase open on your lap.”
“Gosh, Millie, how will I eat?”
“Look, Morris, it wasn’t my idea to come to this thing, it was yours. I warned you.” She led Neville off, and Morris stumbled back into his chair, and sat with the suitcase on his lap.
Peace ensued; but not for long.
The next part of the seder was the reciting of the Four Questions. Essentially the seder was a sort of pageant, or religious drama, performed at home. The youngest child who could memorize Hebrew delivered four queries about the table symbols: the horseradish, the matzo, the salt water, and so forth: and the adults in reply chanted the tale of the Exodus from Egypt, explaining the symbols as the story unfolded. Marjorie had scored great triumphs with the Four Questions from her fourth to her eighth year. The Family had all said even then that she was a born little actress.
This year the Questions were admirably performed in a sweet piping voice, in flawless parroted Hebrew, by Susan Morgenstern, a chubby six-year-old from the Newark branch of the family. She retired to the children’s table, after curtsying to the applause. The adults had hardly begun the concerted chant of the response when the most horrible imaginable scream rang out from the living room, and Neville’s mother was heard exclaiming, “Neville, that was cruel! You’re not supposed to be cruel!”
Neville, it developed, had sneaked up in back of Susan Morgenstern and bitten her with all his might on the behind.
Again the seder stopped while the four parents hurriedly unscrambled the children; for Susan was rolling with Neville on the floor, trying to strangle him, and making fair headway.
It happened that there was bad blood anyway between the Newark branch and the Far Rockaway branch, which was Neville’s, and a nasty argument sprang up when Neville’s father tried to say that the bite had actually been a good thing. He said that Neville had gotten rid of the hostility naturally created by Susan’s spell in the limelight, and so in reality the bite had drawn the cousins closer. “Holy cow, Morris!” exclaimed the father of Susan, a heavy good-natured young butcher named Harry. “If he bit her he bit her. But I’ll be goddamned if I’ll let you say it was a good thing, too. Why, for crying out loud, suppose all the other kids had—what’d you call it?—gotten rid of their goddamn hostility like him? My girl would have been chewed to death.”