Goodbye, Columbus (24 page)

“You son of a bitch!”

I sat down at my desk, and while he glared at me, I began to make the necessary alterations in the duty roster.

“What do you have against me?” he cried. “Against my family? Would it kill you for me to be near my father, God knows how many months he has left to him?”

“Why so?”

“His heart,” Grossbart said. “He hasn’t had enough troubles in a lifetime, you’ve got to add to them. I curse the day I ever met you, Marx! Shulman told me what happened over there. There’s no limit to your anti-Semitism, is there? The damage you’ve done here isn’t enough. You have to make a special phone call! You really want me dead!”

I made the last few notations in the duty roster and got up to leave. “Good night, Grossbart.”

“You owe me an explanation!” He stood in my path.

“Sheldon, you’re the one who owes explanations.”

He scowled. “To you?”

“To me, I think so—yes. Mostly to Fishbein and Halpern.”

“That’s right, twist things around. I owe nobody nothing, I’ve done all I could do for them. Now I think I’ve got the right to watch out for myself.”

“For each other we have to learn to watch out, Sheldon. You told me yourself.”

“You call this watching out for me—what you did?”

“No. For all of us.”

I pushed him aside and started for the door. I heard his furious breathing behind me, and it sounded like steam rushing from an engine of terrible strength.

“
You’ll
be all right,” I said from the door. And, I thought, so would Fishbein and Halpern be all right, even in the Pacific, if only Grossbart continued to see—in the obsequiousness of the one, the soft spirituality of the other—some profit for himself.

I stood outside the orderly room, and I heard Grossbart weeping behind me. Over in the barracks, in the lighted windows, I could see the boys in their T shirts sitting on their bunks talking about their orders, as they’d been doing for the past two days. With a kind of quiet nervousness, they polished shoes, shined belt buckles, squared away underwear, trying as best they could to accept their fate. Behind me, Grossbart swallowed hard, accepting his. And then, resisting with all my will an impulse to turn and seek pardon for my vindictiveness, I accepted my own.

M
ICHAEL
, the weekend guest, was to spend the night in one of the twin beds in Herbie’s old room, where the baseball pictures still hung on the wall. Lou Epstein lay with his wife in the room with the bed pushed eater-corner. His daughter Sheila’s bedroom was empty; she was at a meeting with her fiance, the folk singer. In the comer of her room a childhood teddy bear balanced on its bottom, a Vote Socialist button pinned to its left ear; on her bookshelves, where volumes of Louisa May Alcott once gathered dust, were now collected the works of Howard Fast. The house was quiet. The only light burning was downstairs in the dining room where the
shabus
can dies flickered in their tall golden holders and Herbie’s
jahrzeit
candle trembled in its glass.

Epstein looked at the dark ceiling of his bedroom and let his head that had been bang-banging all day go blank for a moment. His wife Goldie breathed thickly beside him, as though she suffered from eternal bronchitis. Ten minutes before she had undressed and he had watched as she dropped her white nightdress over her head, over the breasts which had funneled down to her middle, over the behind like a bellows, the thighs and calves veined blue like a roadmap. What once could be pinched, what once was small and tight, now could be poked and pulled. Everything hung. He had shut his eyes while she had dressed for sleep and had tried to remember the Goldie of 1927, the Lou Epstein of 1927. Now he rolled his stomach against her backside, remembering, and reached around to hold her breasts. The nipples were dragged down like a cow’s, long as his little finger. He rolled back to his own side.

A key turned in the front door—there was whispering, then the door gently shut. He tensed and waited for the noises—it didn’t take those Socialists long. At night the noise from the zipping and the unzipping was enough to keep a man awake. “What are they doing down there?” he had screamed at his wife one Friday night, “trying on clothes?” Now, once again, he waited. It wasn’t that he was against their playing. He was no puritan, he believed in young people enjoying themselves. Hadn’t he been a young man himself? But in 1927 he and his wife were handsome people. Lou Epstein had never resembled that chinless, lazy smart aleck whose living was earned singing folk songs in a saloon, and who once had asked Epstein if it hadn’t been “thrilling” to have lived through “a period of great social upheava!” like the thirties.

And his daughter, why couldn’t she have grown up to be like—like the girl across the street whom Michael had the date with, the one whose father had died. Now there was a pretty girl. But not his Sheila. What happened, he wondered, what happened to that little pink-skinned baby? What year, what month did those skinny ankles grow thick as logs, the peaches-and-cream turn to pimples? That lovely child was now a twenty-three-year-old woman with “a social conscience”! Some conscience, he thought. She hunts all day for a picket line to march in so that at night she can come home and eat like a horse … For her and that guitar plucker to touch each other’s unmentionables seemed worse than sinful—it was disgusting. When Epstein tossed in bed and heard their panting and the zipping it sounded in his ears like thunder.

Zip!

They were at it. He would ignore them, think of his other problems. The business … here he was a year away from the retirement he had planned but with no heir to Epstein Paper Bag Company. He had built the business from the ground, suffered and bled during the Depression and Roosevelt, only, finally, with the war and Eisenhower to see it succeed. The thought of a stranger taking it over made him sick. But what could be done? Herbie, who would have been twenty-eight, had died of polio, age eleven. And Sheila, his last hope, had chosen as her intended a lazy man. What could he do? Does a man of fifty-nine all of a sudden start producing heirs?

Zip! Pant-pant-pant! Ahh!

He shut his ears and mind, tighter. He tried to recollect things and drown himself in them. For instance, dinner…

He had been startled when he arrived home from the shop to find the soldier sitting at his dinner table. Surprised because the boy, whom he had not seen for ten or twelve years, had grown up with the Epstein face, as his son would have, the small bump in the nose, the strong chin, dark skin, and shock of shiny black hair that, one day, would turn gray as clouds.

“Look who’s here,” his wife shouted at him the moment he entered the door, the day’s dirt still under his fingernails. “Sol’s boy.”

The soldier popped up from his chair and extended his hand. “How do you do, Uncle Louis?”

“A Gregory Peck,” Epstein’s wife said, “a Monty Clift your brother has. He’s been here only three hours already he has a date. And a regular gentleman…”

Epstein did not answer.

The soldier stood at attention, square, as though he’d learned courtesy long before the Army. “I hope you don’t mind my barging in, Uncle Louis. I was shipped to Monmouth last week and Dad said I should stop off to see you people. I’ve got the weekend off and Aunt Goldie said I should stay—” He waited.

“Look at him,” Goldie was saying, “a Prince!”

“Of course,” Epstein said at last, “stay. How is your father?” Epstein had not spoken to his brother Sol since 1945 when he had bought Sol’s share of the business and his brother had moved to Detroit, with words.

“Dad’s fine,” Michael said. “He sends his regards.”

“Sure, I send mine too. You’ll tell him.”

Michael sat down, and Epstein knew that the boy must think just as his father did: that Lou Epstein was a coarse man whose heart beat faster only when he was thinking of Epstein Paper Bag.

When Sheila came home they all sat down to eat, four, as in the old days. Goldie Epstein jumped up and down, up and down, slipping each course under their noses the instant they had finished the one before. “Michael,” she said historically, “Michael, as a child you were a very poor eater. Your sister Ruthie, God bless her, was a nice eater. Not a good eater, but a nice eater.”

For the first time Epstein remembered his little niece Ruthie, a little dark-haired beauty, a Bible Ruth. He looked at his own daughter and heard his wife go on, and on. “No, Ruthie wasn’t such a good eater. But she wasn’t a picky eater. Our Herbie, he should rest in peace, was a picky eater…” Goldie looked towards her husband as though he would remember precisely what category of eater his beloved son had been; he stared into his pot roast.

“But,” Goldie Epstein resumed, “You should live and be well, Michael, you turned out to be a good eater…”

Ahhh! Ahhh!

The noises snapped Epstein’s recollection in two.

Aaahhhh!

Enough was enough. He got out of bed, made certain that he was tucked into his pajamas, and started down to the living room. He would give them a piece of his mind. He would tell them that—that 1927 was not 1957! No, that was what they would tell him.

But in the living room it was not Sheila and the folk singer. Epstein felt the cold from the floor rush up the loose legs of his pajamas and chill his crotch, raising goose flesh on his thighs. They did not see him. He retreated a step, back behind the archway to the dining room. His eyes, however, remained fixed on the living room floor, on Sol’s boy and the girl from across the street.

The girl had been wearing shorts and a sweater. Now they were thrown over the arm of the sofa. The light from the candles was enough for Epstein to see that she was naked. Michael lay beside her, squirming and potent, wearing only his army shoes and khaki socks. The girl’s breasts were like two small white cups. Michael kissed them, and more. Epstein tingled; he did not dare move, he did not want to move, until the two, like cars in a railroad yard, slammed fiercely together, coupled, shook. In their noise Epstein tiptoed, trembling, up the stairs and back to his wife’s bed.

He could not force himself to sleep for what seemed like hours, not until the door had opened downstairs and the two young people had left. When, a minute or so later, he heard another key turn in the lock he did not know whether it was Michael returning to go to sleep, or—

Zip!

Now it was Sheila and the folk singer! The whole world, he thought, the whole young world, the ugly ones and the pretty ones, the fat and the skinny ones, zipping and unzippingl He grabbed his great shock of gray hair and pulled it till his scalp hurt. His wife shuffled, mumbled a noise. “Brrr … brrrrr…” She captured the blankets and pulled them over her. “Brrr…”

Butter! She’s dreaming about butter. Recipes she dreams while the world zips. He closed his eyes and pounded himself down down into an old man’s sleep.

How far back must you go to discover the beginning of trouble? Later, when Epstein had more time he would ask himself this question. When did it begin? That night he’d seen those two on the floor? Or the summer night seventeen years before when he had pushed the doctor away from the bed and put his lips to his Herbie’s? Or, Epstein wondered, was it that night fifteen years ago when instead of smelling a woman between his sheets he smelled Bab-o? Or the time when his daughter had first called him “capitalist” as though it were a dirty name, as though it were a crime to be successful? Or was it none of these times? Maybe to look for a beginning was only to look for an excuse. Hadn’t the trouble, the big trouble, begun simply when it appeared to, the morning he saw Ida Kaufman waiting for the bus?

And about Ida Kaufman, why in God’s name was it a stranger, nobody he loved or ever could love, who had finally changed his life?—she, who had lived across the street for less than a year, and who (it was revealed by Mrs. Katz, the neighborhood Winchell) would probably sell her house now that Mr. Kaufman was dead and move all-year-round into their summer cottage at Barnegat? Until that morning Epstein had not more than noticed the woman: dark, good-looking, a big chest. She hardly spoke to the other housewives, but spent every moment, until a month ago, caring for her cancer-eaten husband. Once or twice Epstein had tipped his hat to her, but even then he had been more absorbed in the fate of Epstein Paper Bag than in the civility he was practicing. Actually then, on that Monday morning it would not have been unlikely for him to have driven right past the bus stop. It was a warm April day, certainly not a bad day to be waiting for a bus. Birds fussed and sang in the elm trees, and the sun glinted in the sky like a young athlete’s trophy. But the woman at the bus stop wore a thin dress and no coat, and Epstein saw her waiting, and beneath the dress, the stockings, the imagined underthings he saw the body of the girl on his living room rug, for Ida Kaufman was the mother of Linda Kaufman, the girl Michael had befriended. So Epstein pulled slowly to the curb and, stopping for the daughter, picked up the mother.

“Thank you, Mr. Epstein,” she said. “This is kind of you.”

“It’s nothing,” Epstein said. “I’m going to Market Street.”

“Market Street will be fine.”

He pressed down too hard on the accelerator and the big Chrysler leaped away, noisy as a hot-rodder’s Ford. Ida Kaufman rolled down her window and let the breeze waft in; she lit a cigarette. After a while she asked, “That was your nephew, wasn’t it, that took Linda out Saturday night?”