7

I shall never forget the heat and mugginess of that afternoon we drove into New York. It was four days after the day she’d called Margaret Sanger—she put it off and put it off, but finally on Friday, three days before Ron’s wedding and four before her departure, we were heading through the Lincoln Tunnel, which seemed longer and fumier than ever, like Hell with tiled walls. Finally we were in New York and smothered again by the thick day. I pulled around the policeman who directed traffic in his shirt sleeves and up onto the Port Authority roof to park the car.

“Do you have cab fare?” I said.

“Aren’t you going to come with me?”

“I thought I’d wait in the bar. Here, downstairs.”

“You can wait in Central Park. His office is right across the street.”

“Bren, what’s the diff—” But when I saw the look that invaded her eyes I gave up the air-conditioned bar to accompany her across the city. There was a sudden shower while our cab went crosstown, and when the rain stopped the streets were sticky and shiny, and below the pavement was the rumble of the subways, and in all it was like entering the ear of a lion.

The doctor’s office was in the Squibb Building, which is across from Bergdorf Goodman’s and so was a perfect place for Brenda to add to her wardrobe. For some reason we had never once considered her going to a doctor in Newark, perhaps because it was too close to home and might allow for possibilities of discovery. When Brenda got to the revolving door she looked back at me; her eyes were very watery, even with her glasses, and I did not say a word, afraid what a word, any word, might do. I kissed her hair and motioned that I would be across the street by the Plaza fountain, and then I watched her revolve through the doors. Out on the street the traffic moved slowly as though the humidity were a wall holding everything back. Even the fountain seemed to be bubbling boiling water on the people who sat at its edge, and in an instant I decided against crossing the street, and turned south on Fifth and began to walk the steaming pavement towards St. Patrick’s. On the north steps a crowd was gathered; everyone was watching a model being photographed. She was wearing a lemon-colored dress and had her feet pointed like a ballerina, and as I passed into the church I heard some lady say, “If I ate cottage cheese ten times a day, I couldn’t be that skinny.”

It wasn’t much cooler inside the church, though the stillness and the flicker of the candles made me think it was. I took a seat at the rear and while I couldn’t bring myself to kneel, I did lean forward onto the back of the bench before me, and held my hands together and closed my eyes. I wondered if I looked like a Catholic, and in my wonderment I began to make a little speech to myself. Can I call the self-conscious words I spoke prayer? At any rate, I called my audience God. God, I said, I am twenty-three years old I want to make the best of things. Now the doctor is about to wed Brenda to me, and I am not entirely certain this is all for the best. What is it I love, Lord? Why have I chosen? Who is Brenda? The race is to the swift. Should I have stopped to think?

I was getting no answers, but I went on. If we meet You at all, God, it’s that we’re carnal, and acquisitive, and thereby partake of You. I am carnal, and I know You approve, I just know it. But how carnal can I get? I am acquisitive. Where do I turn now in my acquisitiveness? Where do we meet? Which prize is You?

It was an ingenious meditation, and suddenly I felt ashamed. I got up and walked outside, and the noise of Fifth Avenue met me with an answer:

Which prize do you think, schmuck? Gold dinnerware, sporting-goods trees, nectarines, garbage disposals, bumpless noses, Patimkin Sink, Bonwit Teller—

But damn it, God, that is You!

And God only laughed, that clown.

On the steps around the fountain I sat in a small arc of a rainbow that the sun had shot through the spray of the water. And then I saw Brenda coming out of the Squibb Building. She carried nothing with her, like a woman who’s only been window shopping, and for a moment I was glad that in the end she had disobeyed my desire.

As she crossed the street, though, that little levity passed, and then I was myself again.

She walked up before me and looked down at where I sat; when she inhaled she filled her entire body, and then let her breath out with a “Whew!”

“Where is it?” I said.

My answer, at first, was merely that victorious look of hers, the one she’d given Simp the night she’d beaten her, the one I’d gotten the morning I finished the third lap alone. At last she said, “I’m wearing it.”

“Oh, Bren.”

“He said shall I wrap it or will you take it with you?”

“Oh Brenda, I love you.”

*  *  *  *  *

We slept together that night, and so nervous were we about our new toy that we performed like kindergartners, or (in the language of that country) like a lousy double-play combination. And then the next day we hardly saw one another at all, for with the last-minute wedding preparations came scurrying, telegramming, shouting, crying, rushing—in short, lunacy. Even the meals lost their Patimkin fullness, and were tortured out of Kraft cheese, stale onion rolls, dry salami, a little chopped liver, and fruit cocktail. It was hectic all weekend, and I tried as best I could to keep clear of the storm, at whose eye, Ron, clumsy and smiling, and Harriet, flittering and courteous, were being pulled closer and closer together. By Sunday night fatigue had arrested hysteria and all of the Patimkins, Brenda included, had gone off to an early sleep. When Ron went into the bathroom to brush his teeth I decided to go in and brush mine. While I stood over the sink he checked his supports for dampness; then he hung them on the shower knobs and asked me if I would like to listen to his records for a while. It was not out of boredom and loneliness that I accepted; rather a brief spark of locker-room comradery had been struck there among the soap and the water and the tile, and I thought that perhaps Ron’s invitation was prompted by a desire to spend his last moments as a Single Man with another Single Man. If I was right, then it was the first real attestation he’d given to my masculinity. How could I refuse?

I sat on the unused twin bed.

“You want to hear Mantovani?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Who do you like better, him or Kostelanetz?”

“It’s a toss-up.”

Ron went to his cabinet. “Hey, how about the Columbus record? Brenda ever play it for you?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

He extracted a record from its case, and like a giant with a sea shell, placed it gingerly on the phonograph. Then he smiled at me and leaned back onto his bed. His arms were behind his head and his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “They give this to all the seniors. With the yearbook—” but he hushed as soon as the sound began. I watched Ron and listened to the record.

At first there was just a roll of drums, then silence, then another drum roll—and then softly, a marching song, the melody of which was very familiar. When the song ended, I heard the bells, soft, loud, then soft again. And finally there came a Voice, bowel-deep and historic, the kind one associates with documentaries about the rise of Fascism.

“The year, 1956. The season, fall. The place, Ohio State University…”

Blitzkrieg! Judgment Day! The Lord had lowered his baton, and the Ohio State Glee Club were lining out the Alma Mater as if their souls depended on it. After one desperate chorus, they fell, still screaming, into bottomless oblivion, and the Voice resumed:

“The leaves had begun to turn and redden on the trees. Smoky fires line Fraternity Row, as pledges rake the leaves and turn them to a misty haze. Old faces greet new ones, new faces meet old, and another year has begun…”

Music. Glee Club in great comeback. Then the Voice: “The place, the banks of the Olentangy. The event, Homecoming Game, 1956. The opponent, the ever dangerous Illini…”

Roar of crowd. New voice—Bill Stern: “Illini over the ball. The snap. Linday fading to pass, he finds a receiver, he passes long long down field—and it’s intercepted by number 43, Herb Clark of Ohio State! Clark evades one tackler, he evades another as he comes up to midfield. Now he’s picking up blockers, he’s down to the 45, the 40, the 35—”

And as Bill Stern egged on Clark, and Clark, Bill Stern, Ron, on his bed, with just a little body-english, eased Herb Clark over the goal.

“And it’s the Buckeyes ahead now, 21 to 19. What a game!”

The Voice of History baritoned in again: “But the season was up and down, and by the time the first snow had covered the turf, it was the sound of dribbling and the cry Up and In! that echoed through the fieldhouse…”

Ron closed his eyes.

“The Minnesota game,” a new, high voice announced, “and for some of our seniors, their last game for the red and white … The players are ready to come out on the floor and into the spotlight. There’ll be a big hand of appreciation from this capacity crowd for some of the boys who won’t be back next year. Here comes Larry Gardner, big Number 7, out onto the floor, Big Larry from Akron. Ohio…”

“Larry—” announced the P.A. system; “Larry,” the crowd roared back.

“And here comes Ron Patimkin dribbling out. Ron, Number 11, from Short Hills, New Jersey. Big Ron’s last game, and it’ll be some time before Buckeye fans forget him…”

Big Ron tightened on his bed as the loudspeaker called his name; his ovation must have set the nets to trembling. Then the rest of the players were announced, and then basketball season was over, and it was Religious Emphasis Week, the Senior Prom (Billy May blaring at the gymnasium roof), Fraternity Skit Night, E. E. Cummings reading to students (verse, silence, applause); and then, finally, commencement:

“The campus is hushed this day of days. For several thousand young men and women it is a joyous yet a solemn occasion. And for their parents a day of laughter and a day of tears. It is a bright green day, it is June the seventh of the year one thousand nine hundred and fifty-seven and for these young Americans the most stirring day of their lives. For many this will be their last glimpse of the campus, of Columbus, for many many years. Life calls us, and anxiously if not nervously we walk out into the world and away from the pleasures of these ivied walls. But not from its memories. They will be the concomitant, if not the fundament, of our lives. We shall choose husbands and wives, we shall choose jobs and homes, we shall sire children and grandchildren, but we will not forget you, Ohio State. In the years ahead we will carry with us always memories of thee, Ohio State…”

Slowly, softly, the OSU band begins the Alma Mater, and then the bells chime that last hour. Soft, very soft, for it is spring.

There was goose flesh on Ron’s veiny arms as the Voice continued. “We offer ourselves to you then, world, and come at you in search of Life. And to you, Ohio State, to you Columbus, we say thank you, thank you and goodbye. We will miss you, in the fall, in the winter, in the spring, but some day we shall return. Till then, goodbye, Ohio State, goodbye, red and white, goodbye, Columbus … goodbye, Columbus … goodbye…”

Ron’s eyes were closed. The band was upending its last truckload of nostalgia, and I tiptoed from the room, in step with the 2163 members of the Class of ’57.

I closed my door, but then opened it and looked back at Ron: he was still humming on his bed. Thee! I thought, my brother-in-law!

*  *  *  *  *

The wedding.

Let me begin with the relatives.

There was Mrs. Patimkin’s side of the family: her sister Molly, a tiny buxom hen whose ankles swelled and ringed her shoes, and who would remember Ron’s wedding if for no other reason than she’d martyred her feet in three-inch heels, and Molly’s husband, the butter and egg man, Harry Grossbart, who had earned his fortune with barley and corn in the days of Prohibition. Now he was active in the Temple and whenever he saw Brenda he swatted her on the can; it was a kind of physical bootlegging that passed, I guess, for familial affection. Then there was Mrs. Patimkin’s brother, Marty Kreiger, the Kosher Hot-Dog King, an immense man, as many stomachs as he had chins, and already, at fifty-five, with as many heart attacks as chins and stomachs combined. He had just come back from a health cure in the Catskills, where he said he’d eaten nothing but All-Bran and had won $1500 at gin rummy. When the photographer came by to take pictures, Marty put his hand on his wife’s pancake breasts and said, “Hey, how about a picture of this!” His wife, Sylvia, was a frail, spindly woman with bones like a bird’s. She had cried throughout the ceremony, and sobbed openly, in fact, when the rabbi had pronounced Ron and Harriet “man and wife in the eyes of God and the State of New Jersey.” Later, at dinner, she had hardened enough to slap her husband’s hand as it reached out for a cigar. However, when he reached across to hold her breast she just looked aghast and said nothing.

Also there were Mrs. Patimkin’s twin sisters, Rose and Pearl, who both had white hair, the color of Lincoln convertibles, and nasal voices, and husbands who followed after them but talked only to each other, as though, in fact, sister had married sister, and husband had married husband. The husbands, named Earl Klein and Manny Kartzman, sat next to each other during the ceremony, then at dinner, and once, in fact, while the band was playing between courses, they rose, Klein and Kartzman, as though to dance, but instead walked to the far end of the hall where together they paced off the width of the floor. Earl, I learned later, was in the carpet business, and apparently he was trying to figure how much money he would make if the Hotel Pierre favored him with a sale.

On Mr. Patimkin’s side there was only Leo, his half-brother. Leo was married to a woman named Bea whom nobody seemed to talk to. Bea kept hopping up and down during the meal and running over to the kiddie table to see if her little girl, Sharon, was being taken care of. “I told her not to take the kid. Get a baby-sitter, I said.” Leo told me this while Brenda danced with Ron’s best man, Ferrari. “She says what are we, millionaires? No, for Christ sake, but my brother’s kids gets married, I can have a little celebration. No, we gotta shlep the kid with us. Aah, it gives her something to do!…” He looked around the hall. Up on the stage Harry Winters (né Weinberg) was leading his band in a medley from My Fair Lady; on the floor, all ages, all sizes, all shapes were dancing. Mr. Patimkin was dancing with Julie, whose dress had slipped down from her shoulders to reveal her soft small back, and long neck, like Brenda’s. He danced in little squares and was making considerable effort not to step on Julie’s toes. Harriet, who was, as everyone said, a beautiful bride, was dancing with her father. Ron danced with Harriet’s mother, Brenda with Ferrari, and I had sat down for a while in the empty chair beside Leo so as not to get maneuvered into dancing with Mrs. Patimkin, which seemed to be the direction towards which things were moving.

“You’re Brenda’s boy friend? Huh?” Leo said.

I nodded—earlier in the evening I’d stopped giving blushing explanations. “You gotta deal there, boy,” Leo said, “you don’t louse it up.”

“She’s very beautiful,” I said.

Leo poured himself a glass of champagne, and then waited as though he expected a head to form on it; when one didn’t, he filled the glass to the brim.

“Beautiful, not beautiful, what’s the difference. I’m a practical man. I’m on the bottom, so I gotta be. You’re Aly Khan you worry about marrying movie stars. I wasn’t born yesterday … You know how old I was when I got married? Thirty-five years old. I don’t know what the hell kind of hurry I was in.” He drained his glass and refilled it. “I’ll tell you something, one good thing happened to me in my whole life. Two maybe. Before I came back from overseas I got a letter from my wife—she wasn’t my wife then. My mother-in-law found an apartment for us in Queens. Sixty-two fifty a month it cost. That’s the last good thing that happened.”

“What was the first?”

“What first?”

“You said two things,” I said.

“I don’t remember. I say two because my wife tells me I’m sarcastic and a cynic. That way maybe she won’t think I’m such a wise guy.”

I saw Brenda and Ferrari separate, and so excused myself and started for Brenda, but just then Mr. Patimkin separated from Julie and it looked as though the two men were going to switch partners. Instead the four of them stood on the dance floor and when I reached them they were laughing and Julie was saying, “What’s so funny!” Ferrari said “Hi” to me and whisked Julie away, which sent her into peals of laughter.

Mr. Patimkin had one hand on Brenda’s back and suddenly the other one was on mine. “You kids having a good time?” he said.

We were sort of swaying, the three of us, to “Get Me to the Church on Time.”

Brenda kissed her father. “Yes,” she said. “I’m so drunk my head doesn’t even need my neck.”

“It’s a fine wedding, Mr. Patimkin.”

“You want anything just ask me…” he said, a little drunken himself. “You’re two good kids … How do you like that brother of yours getting married?…Huh?…Is that a girl or is that a girl?”

Brenda smiled, and though she apparently thought her father had spoken of her, I was sure he’d been referring to Harriet.

“You like weddings, Daddy?” Brenda said.

“I like my kids’ weddings…” He slapped me on the back. “You two kids, you want anything? Go have a good time. Remember,” he said to Brenda, “you’re my honey…” Then he looked at me. “Whatever my Buck wants is good enough for me. There’s no business too big it can’t use another head.”

I smiled, though not directly at him, and beyond I could see Leo sopping up champagne and watching the three of us; when he caught my eye he made a sign with his hand, a circle with his thumb and forefinger, indicating, “That a boy, that a boy!”

After Mr. Patimkin departed, Brenda and I danced closely, and we only sat down when the waiters began to circulate with the main course. The head table was noisy, particularly at our end where the men were almost all teammates of Ron’s, in one sport or another; they ate a fantastic number of rolls. Tank Feldman, Ron’s roommate who had flown in from Toledo, kept sending the waiter back for rolls, for celery, for olives, and always to the squealing delight of Gloria Feldman, his wife, a nervous, undernourished girl who continually looked down the front of her gown as though there was some sort of construction project going on under her clothes. Gloria and Tank, in fact, seemed to be self-appointed precinct captains at our end. They proposed toasts, burst into wild song, and continually referred to Brenda and me as “love birds.” Brenda smiled at this with her eyeteeth and I brought up a cheery look from some fraudulent auricle of my heart.

And the night continued: we ate, we drank, we danced—Rose and Pearl did the Charleston with one another (while their husbands examined woodwork and chandeliers), and then I did the Charleston with none other than Gloria Feldman, who made coy, hideous faces at me all the time we danced. Near the end of the evening, Brenda, who’d been drinking champagne like her Uncle Leo, did a Rita Hayworth tango with herself, and Julie fell asleep on some ferns she’d whisked off the head table and made into a mattress at the far end of the hall. I felt a numbness creep into my hard palate, and by three o’clock people were dancing in their coats, shoeless ladies were wrapping hunks of wedding cake in napkins for their children’s lunch, and finally Gloria Feldman made her way over to our end of the table and said freshly “Well our little Radcliffe smarty, what have you been doing all summer?”

“Growing a penis.”

Gloria smiled and left as quickly as she’d come, and Brenda without another word headed shakily away for the ladies’ room and the rewards of overindulgence. No sooner had she left than Leo was beside me, a glass in one hand, a new bottle of champagne in the other.

“No sign of the bride and groom?” he said, leering. He’d lost most of his consonants by this time and was doing the best he could with long, wet vowels. “Well, you’re next, kid, I see it in the cards … You’re nobody’s sucker…” And he stabbed me in the side with the top of the bottle, spilling champagne onto the side of my rented tux. He straightened up, poured more onto his hand and glass, but then suddenly he stopped. He was looking into the lights which were hidden beneath a long bank of flowers that adorned the front of the table. He shook the bottle in his hand as though to make it fizz. “The son of a bitch who invented the fluorescent bulb should drop dead!” He set the bottle down and drank.

Up on the stage Harry Winters brought his musicians to a halt. The drummer stood up, stretched, and they all began to open up cases and put their instruments away. On the floor, relatives, friends, associates, were holding each other around the waists and the shoulders, and small children huddled around their parents’ legs. A couple of kids ran in and out of the crowd, screaming at tag, until one was grabbed by an adult and slapped soundly on the behind. He began to cry, and couple by couple the floor emptied. Our table was a tangle of squashed everything: napkins, fruits, flowers; there were empty whiskey bottles, droopy ferns, and dishes puddled with unfinished cherry jubilee, gone sticky with the hours. At the end of the table Mr. Patimkin was sitting next to his wife, holding her hand. Opposite them, on two bridge chairs that had been nulled up sat Mr and Mrs Ehrlich They spoke quietly and evenly as though they had known each other for years and years. Everything had slowed down now and from time to time people would come up to the Patimkins and Ehrlichs wish them mazel tov and then drag themselves and their families out into the September night, which was cool and windy, someone said, and reminded me that soon would come winter and snow.

“They never wear out, those things, you know that.” Leo was pointing to the fluorescent lights that shone through the flowers. “They last for years. They could make a car like that if they wanted, that could never wear out. It would run on water in the summer and snow in the winter. But they wouldn’t do it, the big boys … Look at me,” Leo said, splashing his suit front with champagne, “I sell a good bulb. You can’t get the kind of bulb I sell in the drugstores. It’s a quality bulb. But I’m the little guy. I don’t even own a car. His brother, and I don’t even own an automobile. I take a train wherever I go. I’m the only guy I know who wears out three pairs of rubbers every winter. Most guys get new ones when they lose the old ones. I wear them out, like shoes. Look,” he said, leaning into me “I could sell a crappy bulb it wouldn’t break my heart. But it’s not good business.” ‘

The Ehrlichs and Patimkins scraped back their chairs and headed away, all except Mr. Patimkin who came down the table towards Leo and me.

He slapped Leo on the back. “Well, how you doing, shtarke?”

“All right, Ben. All right…”

“You have a good time?”

“You had a nice affair, Ben, it must’ve cost a pretty penny, believe me…”

Mr. Patimkin laughed. “When I make out my income tax I go to see Leo. He knows just how much money I spent … You need a ride home?” he asked me.

“No, thanks. I’m waiting for Brenda. We have my car.”

“Good night,” Mr. Patimkin said.

I watched him step down off the platform that held the head table, and then start towards the exit. Now the only people in the hall—the shambles of a hall—were myself, Leo, and his wife and child who slept, both of them, with their heads pillowed on a crumpled tablecloth at a table down on the floor before us. Brenda still wasn’t around.

“When you got it,” Leo said, rubbing his fingers together, “you can afford to talk like a big shot. Who needs a guy like me any more. Salesmen, you spit on them. You can go to the supermarket and buy anything. Where my wife shops you can buy sheets and pillowcases. Imagine, a grocery store! Me, I sell to gas stations, factories, small businesses, all up and down the east coast. Sure, you can sell a guy in a gas station a crappy bulb that’ll burn out in a week. For inside the pumps I’m talking, it takes a certain kind of bulb. A utility bulb. All right, so you sell him a crappy bulb, and then a week later he puts in a new one, and while he’s screwing it in he still remembers your name. Not me. I sell a quality bulb. It lasts a month, five weeks, before it even flickers, then it gives you another couple days, dim maybe, but so you shouldn’t go blind. It hangs on, it’s a quality bulb. Before it even burns out you notice it’s getting darker, so you put a new one in. What people don’t like is when one minute it’s sunlight and the next dark. Let it glimmer a few days and they don’t feel so bad. Nobody ever throws out my bulb—they figure they’ll save them, can always use them in a pinch. Sometimes I say to a guy, you ever throw out a bulb you bought from Leo Patimkin? You gotta use psychology. That’s why I’m sending my kid to college. You don’t know a little psychology these days, you’re licked…”

He lifted an arm and pointed out to his wife; then he slumped down in his seat. “Aaach!” he said, and drank off half a glass of champagne. “I’ll tell you, I go as far as New London, Connecticut. That’s as far as I’ll go, and when I come home at night I stop first for a couple drinks. Martinis. Two I have, sometimes three. That seems fair, don’t it? But to her a little sip or a bathtubful, it smells the same. She says it’s bad for the kid if I come home smelling. The kid’s a baby for God’s sake, she thinks that’s the way I’m supposed to smell. A forty-eight-year-old man with a three-year-old kid! She’ll give me a thrombosis that kid. My wife, she wants me to come home early and play with the kid before she goes to bed. Come home, she says, and I’ll make you a drink. Hah! I spend all day sniffing gas, leaning under hoods with grimy poilishehs in New London, trying to force a lousy bulb into a socket—I’ll screw it in myself, I tell them—and she thinks I want to come home and drink a martini from a jelly glass! How long are you going to stay in bars she says. Till a Jewish girl is Miss Rheingold!

“Look,” he went on after another drink, “I love my kid like Ben loves his Brenda. It’s not that I don’t want to play with her. But if I play with the kid and then at night get into bed with my wife, then she can’t expect fancy things from me. It’s one or the other. I’m no movie star.”

Leo looked at his empty glass and put it on the table; he tilted the bottle up and drank the champagne like soda water. “How much do you think I make a week?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Take a guess.”

“A hundred dollars.”

“Sure, and tomorrow they’re gonna let the lions out of the cage in Central Park. What do you think I make?”

“I can’t tell.”

“A cabdriver makes more than me. That’s a fact. My wife’s brother is a cabdriver, he lives in Kew Gardens. And he don’t take no crap, no sir, not those cabbies. Last week it was raining one night and I said the hell with it, I’m taking a cab. I’d been all day in Newton, Mass. I don’t usually go so far, but on the train in the morning I said to myself, stay on, go further, it’ll be a change. And I know all the time I’m kidding myself. I wouldn’t even make up the extra fare it cost me. But I stay on. And at night I still had a couple boxes with me, so when the guy pulls up at Grand Central there’s like a genie inside me says get in. I even threw the bulbs in, not even caring if they broke. And this cabbie says, Whatya want to do, buddy, rip the leather? Those are brand new seats I got. No, I said. Jesus Christ, he says, some goddam people. I get in and give him a Queens address which ought to shut him up, but no, all the way up the Drive he was Jesus Christing me. It’s hot in the cab, so I open a window and then he turns around and says, Whatya want to do, give me a cold in the neck? I just got over a goddam cold…” Leo looked at me, bleary-eyed. “This city is crazy! If I had a little money I’d get out of here in a minute. I’d go to California. They don’t need bulbs out there it’s so light. I went to New Guinea during the war from San Francisco. There” he burst, “there is the other good thing that happened to me, that night in San Francisco with this Hannah Schreiber. That’s the both of them, you asked me I’m telling you—the apartment my mother-in-law got us, and this Hannah Schreiber. One night was all. I went to a B’nai Brith dance for servicemen in the basement of some big temple, and I met her. I wasn’t married then, so don’t make faces.”

“I’m not.”

“She had a nice little room by herself. She was going to school to be a teacher. Already I knew something was up because she let me feel inside her slip in the cab. Listen to me, I sound like I’m always in cabs. Maybe two other times in my life. To tell the truth I don’t even enjoy it. All the time I’m riding I’m watching the meter. Even the pleasures I can’t enjoy!”

“What about Hannah Schreiber?”

He smiled, flashing some gold in his mouth. “How do you like that name? She was only a girl, but she had an old lady’s name. In the room she says to me she believes in oral love. I can still hear her: Leo Patimkin, I believe in oral love. I don’t know what the hell she means. I figure she was one of those Christian Scientists or some cult or something. So I said, But what about for soldiers, guys going overseas who may get killed, God forbid.” He shrugged his shoulders. “The smartest guy in the world I wasn’t. But that’s twenty years almost, I was still wet behind the ears. I’ll tell you, every once in a while my wife—you know, she does for me what Hannah Schreiber did. I don’t like to force her, she works hard. That to her is like a cab to me. I wouldn’t force her. I can remember every time, I’ll bet. Once after a Seder, my mother was still living, she should rest in peace. My wife was up to here with Mogen David. In fact, twice after Seders. Aachhh! Everything good in my life I can count on my fingers! God forbid someone should leave me a million dollars, I wouldn’t even have to take off my shoes. I got a whole other hand yet.”

He pointed to the fluorescent bulbs with the nearly empty champagne bottle. “You call that a light? That’s a light to read by? It’s purple, for God’s sake! Half the blind men in the world ruined themselves by those damn things. You know who’s behind them? The optometrists! I’ll tell you, if I could get a couple hundred for all my stock and the territory, I’d sell tomorrow. That’s right, Leo A. Patimkin, one semester accounting, City College nights, will sell equipment, territory, good name. I’ll buy two inches in the Times. The territory is from here to everywhere. I go where I want, my own boss, no one tells me what to do. You know the Bible? ‘Let there be light—and there’s Leo Patimkin!’ That’s my trademark, I’ll sell that too. I tell them that slogan, the poilishehs, they think I’m making it up. What good is it to be smart unless you’re in on the ground floor! I got more brains in my pinky than Ben got in his whole head. Why is it he’s on top and I’m on the bottom! Why! Believe me, if you’re born lucky, you’re lucky!” And then he exploded into silence.

I had the feeling that he was going to cry, so I leaned over and whispered to him, “You better go home.” He agreed, but I had to raise him out of his seat and steer him by one arm down to his wife and child. The little girl could not be awakened, and Leo and Bea asked me to watch her while they went out into the lobby to get their coats. When they returned, Leo seemed to have dragged himself back to the level of human communication. He shook my hand with real feeling. I was very touched.

“You’ll go far,” he said to me. “You’re a smart boy, you’ll play it safe. Don’t louse things up.”

“I won’t.”

“Next time we see you it’ll be your wedding,” and he winked at me. Bea stood alongside, muttering goodbye all the while he spoke. He shook my hand again and then picked the child out of her seat, and they turned towards the door. From the back, round-shouldered, burdened, child-carrying, they looked like people fleeing a captured city.

Brenda, I discovered, was asleep on a couch in the lobby. It was almost four o’clock and the two of us and the desk clerk were the only ones in the hotel lobby. At first I did not waken Brenda, for she was pale and wilted and I knew she had been sick. I sat beside her, smoothing her hair back off her ears. How would I ever come to know her, I wondered, for as she slept I felt I knew no more of her than what I could see in a photograph. I stirred her gently and in a half-sleep she walked beside me out to the car.

It was almost dawn when we came out of the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel. I switched down to my parking lights, and drove on to the Turnpike, and there out before me I could see the swampy meadows that spread for miles and miles, watery, blotchy, smelly, like an oversight of God. I thought of that other oversight, Leo Patimkin, half-brother to Ben. In a few hours he would be on a train heading north, and as he passed Scarsdale and White Plains, he would belch and taste champagne and let the flavor linger in his mouth. Alongside him on the seat, like another passenger, would be cartons of bulbs. He would get off at New London, or maybe, inspired by the sight of his half-brother, he would stay on again, hoping for some new luck further north. For the world was Leo’s territory, every city, every swamp, every road and highway. He could go on to Newfoundland if he wanted, Hudson Bay, and on up to Thule, and then slide down the other side of the globe and rap on frosted windows on the Russian steppes, if he wanted. But he wouldn’t. Leo was forty-eight years old and he had learned. He pursued discomfort and sorrow, all right, but if you had a heartful by the time you reached New London, what new awfulness could you look forward to in Vladivostok?

The next day the wind was blowing the fall in and the branches of the weeping willow were fingering at the Patimkin front lawn. I drove Brenda to the train at noon, and she left me.