Cheat and Charmer (75 page)

T
he next day Jake took Dinah and the kids on a tour of Rogers Park, where his grandparents had eventually moved after becoming prosperous. She drove while he issued directions. The children had never known their great-grandparents and were not greatly interested in them, but he was full of memories of himself as a child, and they listened to those.

He pointed to a storefront with a large sign in plain red letters:
ACME BARGAIN CENTER
. “I’m sure of it. That’s the saloon. I mean, that’s where it used to be.” The children dutifully looked at the storefront, straining to see what he was trying to conjure with words. Their faces, however, showed nothing but blankness. “You’d go in that door, and there’d be tables by the window, little candles on the tables, and fancy white tablecloths that Grandma Lasker had ironed herself. And there was a cousin—her name was Manya, I remember, and she worked the cash register, and her boobies were so big they interfered with the keys.…”

He stopped in front of other buildings, telling stories out loud that delighted him but were lost on his children. It was hot and they wanted to go back to Highland Park, where they had been promised an afternoon of swimming in Lake Michigan. Nevertheless, Jake was determined to complete the tour. Dinah could feel his delight in the generosity of the day, giving him back the world of his childhood at just the point when he could make use of it. Oddly, for her the one detail that stuck had to do with a Dutch door he described to her in a building he had lived in at the age of four: “One day a man came to the door and was talking to my mother, and I remember being so frustrated because I wasn’t tall enough to see through the window, too.” The thought of him as a little boy wanting to be bigger
moved her. She tried to imagine him at that age, with skinny little legs, standing on tiptoe.

“Strange, isn’t it,” he said, “how you remember things. I thought I’d remembered everything in my analysis, but I don’t think I even mentioned that one.”

At the university, he pointed out his old fraternity house, and then the apartment in Blackstone Mansions that he had shared with Izzie Morocco before Izzie went out to Hollywood. Izzie summoned Jake some ten months later, after the up-and-coming radio comedian George Joy had accepted the batch of two dozen jokes plus a guest spot for Groucho Marx that Izzie, who worked for Joy, had gotten Jake to write and had then submitted for him.

Jake instructed Dinah to drive further, and then he stuck his arm out the window and said in a tour guide’s voice, “And right over there, ladies and gentlemen, is where they first split the atom—right here at the University of Chicago. The most important scientific development of the modern world happened right over there.”

“Did you see it?” Peter asked.

“No,” he answered. “I didn’t even know it was happening. That was one of the worst times in my life. I could barely make it through my accounting class. It was the middle of the Depression, and every week in class I was putting together and dissolving multimillion-dollar corporations when I didn’t know if I was going to have enough money to pay for school. That was the only class I ever took that I passed by cheating. Now, don’t ever go and do this,” he said sternly, “but I had some of the answers written down on my wrist and palm. I swear I would never have gotten through that course without it.”

“A useful lesson to pass on to the kids,” said Dinah drily. Then under her breath she said, “Where’s the apartment where your friends helped to c-c-c-carry you after your first—”

“We passed it. Two slums back,” he answered, knowing exactly what she was referring to. He had told her, long ago, that his high school friends believed the loss of body fluids through ejaculation drained one of physical strength. So after Benny Kravitz arranged for him to lose his virginity to his cousin Irene Moskowitz, Jake made sure Benny and two other friends, Ed Cole and Phil Weinberger, were waiting outside on the stoop to carry him home.

“Ah,” said Dinah. “Too bad there isn’t a historical plaque to commemorate the event.”

He noticed something hard and biting in her tone, and looked at her, surprised and a little hurt, and at a loss for a quick retort.

“Let’s go over this again,” he said later that day when they were supposedly taking a nap in their room before going to a dinner dance at Hubie and Betty’s country club. “You told her
not
to testify?”

“What I said was that I wished
I
hadn’t done it and that
she
shouldn’t do it.”

I thought this might happen, he said to himself. Humor her. Don’t oppose her.

“Jake,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done it. It’s wrong.”

“Well, of course it’s ‘wrong,’ darling. I thought we went over that. We never told each other it was ‘right.’ We never kidded each other about that. It was a dreadful thing, to be asked to do what you did. And God knows, darling, I didn’t want you to do it. You made the choice, darling—and I’ll always be grateful. Always. My God, you made the ultimate sacri—”

“I wish I hadn’t, Jake.”

She had said it, finally.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “You’re entitled to think that.”

They looked at each other in silence for a while.

“But we’re not talking about me,” she said. “This is about Veevi. She’s doing it because she thinks Mike will come back to her. I did it for you and us and the kids, and I have you and us and the kids. But she thinks Mike will see how much she loves him and come back for good, and he’s just not going to do that. He’s sleeping with her, lying to her, deceiving her, just leading her on.”

“How do you know he doesn’t mean it?”

“I just
do
,” she said. “He’s just taking advantage of her—anyone can see that. Help me, Jake. Call her and tell her not to do it. You’ve got to. I will be like a gh-gh-gh-ghost walking the earth for the rest of my life if you don’t do this.”

He had never seen such a look of anguish on her face. It made her skin waxen and yellowish. She smoked fiercely, sucking down and pulling hard
on her cigarette, while she chewed the inside of her cheek and stared at the carpeted floor with her haunted brown eyes.

“And what if it works out for her and Mike? Suppose that happens? You want to stand in the way of that?”

“It’s not going to happen. He’s going to leave her again. I just know it. He’s playing with her, Jake. I can feel it. And when it’s over, and she realizes she testified for him and it didn’t make any difference, she’s going to fall apart and it’s going to be bad. I know her, darling. Believe it or not she’s got a conscience, and she won’t forgive herself for giving in to the Committee.”

“Wrong, baby. You’re the one with the conscience. You’ve got so much conscience you could bottle it and sell it. Here’s her chance to start over with Mike, and you want to fuck it up with conscience. What right have you got to stand in the way of her happiness? Anyway, you wait and see. If she testifies, she and Mike and all their friends will tell themselves it was different. It won’t be like yours. They’re always the exception. And they’ll sneer at people like you and me and never think they’ve given in.”

“That’s not true of Veevi. She’s not like that.”

Oh, if only you knew
, Jake wished he could say. “Look, darling, I understand what you’re feeling. But this is her chance to start over, with or without him.”

“I’m so sure of it,” she went on, “that I told her … about … about seeing him with Jill Trevor. I know you told me not to, but she’s in d-d-d-danger, Jake.”

“You didn’t! Ah, honey. You shouldn’t have.”

“I had to, Jake. I had to make her see she’s kidding herself. It didn’t make any difference. She thinks she’s going home with him to Paris and it’s all going to be just like it used to be.”

“Listen, darling,” he said, leaning forward and grabbing her wrists so hard that it hurt. “Don’t ever, ever do that again. Do you understand? So he was with a broad. So what? It has nothing to do with anything. If he’s coming back he’s coming back, and whether he sees a broad or not means nothing.”

“How can you say that?” she said, pulling away from him. “And let go of me. You’re hurting me!”

They argued back and forth, going over and over what it meant for Mike to have been with another woman, for Dinah to have seen it, and for her to
have told Veevi about it. Jake kept scolding her, and she was so angry she wanted to find a hairbrush or a magazine and thwack him with it to make him stop browbeating her. “Besides,” he said, “what makes you think I have any influence with her? She knows I was glad you testified. You know, I think the safest thing to do with a small talent is to find a cause that makes you the helpless victim of people who won’t let you use it. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the story with ninety-nine percent of those martyrs.”

“I’m only interested in Veevi’s case, nobody else’s. I don’t give a good goddamn about the others—the heroes or the finks. Including me.”

“What you’re forgetting is that your sister isn’t going to listen to you, because she doesn’t like you.”

“I don’t c-c-c-care. Just call her for me. Just tell her she doesn’t have to do it. Help me out, Jake.”

“Did it ever occur to you that you’re so jealous of your sister—of her beauty and the life she’s led—that you’re unconsciously trying to hurt her? That you’re doing everything you can to undermine her chance of happiness?”

“That’s a l-l-l-l-lousy, mean, stupid thing for you to say.” She felt herself ready to explode, the way she had in Palm Springs. But they were guests in someone else’s house, and they had to go to a fancy party with a lot of “civilians”—doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, manufacturers, Hubie’s advertising friends—and she was paralyzed.

“But think about it. Lots of couples go through rough times and break up and think it’s over forever and then find their way back to each other. It’s happening with Mike and Veevi. It’s a damn good thing. Let them alone.”

“I trust my instincts, honey, and my instincts tell me that Mike Albrecht doesn’t give a good goddamn anymore whether Veevi lives or dies as long as he, that great, pure, incorruptible artist, gets paid to make his masterpiece of postwar fiction into a Hollywood movie produced by Willie Weil, who, according to Veevi, likes to have girls pee on him, and worse. Just go and call her. Tell her she doesn’t have to do it. You don’t have to say ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ You don’t have to lecture her. Just tell her she doesn’t have to do it.”

“What makes you think she gives a good goddamn what we think? You and I don’t count. She calls us ‘idiots’ to other people.”

“How do you know that?”

“She calls everybody else an idiot. What makes you think she spares us?”

“That doesn’t matter. Just tell her she doesn’t have to do it. I told her; now you tell her. She likes you, and she listens to you. You’re her brother-in-law.”

He said nothing, but let her continue. He was hoping she’d run out of steam.

“Jake, it’s not just that I feel certain he’s going to leave her faster than you can say Jack Robinson. There’s something else. I don’t want her waking up the next day telling herself she didn’t have to do it, that she could have made it, that you survive these things and you don’t give in.”

“Is that how you feel?”

“S-S-S-Sometimes.” She looked at him. “Yes.”

She put her cigarette out and leaned back against the wall and put her arms around her drawn-up knees. “We could have made it, that’s all. We would have been okay.”

He waited for a while. “Maybe you’re right,” he said.

She dropped her head onto her knees. “I don’t want to argue with you, Jake. I don’t care about j-j-j-j-justifying what I did or comp-p-p-paring it with what she’s going to do. I just don’t want Veevi to fall apart. I don’t want her to die. Please. Go downstairs and call her.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it. But first I’m gonna take a shower and get something to eat. I’m starving!”

At about six o’clock, while Dinah was sitting in the kitchen with Gussie and Betty and both sets of Lasker kids, Jake took his cousin aside and asked him if he could use the phone in his study.

“Sure, sure,” Hubie said.