Solomon Gursky Was Here (68 page)

Then, taking Isaac by the hand, she fed him to one guest after another, singing out again and again, “This is the son of my brother, the early warning system.” Earning chuckles and going on to explain that her saintly brother lived in the Arctic, married to an Eskimo, waiting for the world to end. “Out there, he'll be the first to know, wouldn't you say?”

Finally Lucy abandoned Isaac to a group that included a couple of agents, a set designer, and the star of a long-running Broadway play. Isaac had seen the actor on the “Johnny Carson Show”. Determined to make a good impression, he asked, “So, tell me, do you find it like a drag to have to repeat the same lines night after night?”

The actor rolled his eyes and handed Isaac his empty glass. “There you go,” he said.

Backing away, Isaac collided with a pretty young girl wearing a miniskirt and a T-shirt with LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR emblazoned on it. He could make out her nipples. “Sorry, sorry,” he said.

“Hey, you look really neat in that. Did you come straight from the location?”

“What?” he asked, beginning to perspire.

“Didn't you have time to change for the party?”

“These are my clothes.”

“Come off it,” she said. “I just happen to know Mazursky was shooting in the Village today.”

He saw Lucy once more before Henry's death, this time in a building on Broadway, the young man who was her personal assistant ushering him into her office. Lucy, her kaftan hiked up to her applepie knees, her fat legs propped up on a hassock, was shouting into the phone. “Tell that no-talent cunt that the time is long past when she could play an ingénue and a year from now when her tits are hanging round her ankles she'll be grateful for any crumb, not that she will ever work for Lucy Gursky again.” Then she hung up and shoved the huge platter of brownies on her desk toward him. “Oh, shit. Hold it. They're not kosher.”

Though she had failed to return any of his phone calls, she seemed so pleased to see him that she cancelled her reservation for lunch at the Russian Tea Room and had her chauffeur take them to a kosher deli on W. 47th Street. Ordering a second mound of
latkes
—“I shouldn't but this is an occasion, isn't it?”—she regaled him with loving stories about Henry.

“You know, your father suffered from a bad stammer until he picked up with your lot, so the Rebbe can't be all bad.”

Isaac, seizing his opportunity, his words spilling out at such a pace that she had difficulty following him, told her that he had an idea for a movie. It was about the Messiah. Locked in the Arctic ice for centuries, he explodes out of a pingo, his mission to waken the Jewish dead and lead them to
Eretz Yisroel
. He has a weakness, however. If he is fed non-kosher food he loses his magical powers, he goes berserk.

“I love it,” Lucy said, and grasping what a hoot it would be to read aloud at her next party, she added, “You must send me an outline.”

When he next got in touch with her, after he had been expelled from the
yeshiva,
she shrieked at him over the phone, “I'm surprised you even have the nerve to call me, you disgusting little cannibal,” and she hung up on him.

One night only a month later Lucy dismissed her chauffeur, pretending that she was staying home, and then took a taxi to Sammy's Roumanian Paradise, a restaurant she frequented on rare nights when she was alone and so depressed there was nothing else for it, gorging herself on platters of unhatched chicken eggs,
kishka,
and flank steak, and then sliding into a troubled sleep on the drive home. Back at the Dakota, even as her taxi driver lifted her out of the back seat, she saw Isaac emerging from the shadows. “Go away,” she said.

Gone were the sidecurls and black hat. He wore a filthy T-shirt, jeans torn at the knees, and sneakers.

“You can't come up with me. Bugger off. Animal.”

“I haven't had a thing to eat in forty-eight hours.”

She seemed to wobble in place.

“You're supposed to be my aunt,” he said, beginning to sniffle.

Her breath coming short, sweat trickling down her forehead and upper lip, she sighed and said, “I'll give you five minutes.''

But once in her apartment, she retired to her bedroom and didn't come out again until she had changed into a fresh kaftan, promptly sinking into the sofa and lifting her swollen legs on to a hassock.

“Are you willing to listen to my side of the story?” Isaac asked.

“No. I am not. But you'll find my handbag on the dresser in the bedroom,” she said, unwilling to get up again. “I'll give you something this once. Wait. I know exactly how much money is in there.”

It was a mistake. He was gone too long. So she hoisted herself upright and followed him into the bedroom.

Isaac was staring at the large photograph on the wall of a slender lady in a sexy black cocktail dress, her bra stuffed with Kleenex.

“Who's that?” he demanded, smirking, for he recognized her, even with her clothes on, and was only looking for a confirmation.

“Why that,” she said, curtsying, “is a photograph of your Aunt Lucy in her prime, taken by a rather naughty boy in London in 1972, if memory serves. Or did you think I was born looking like a hippo?”

“No.”

She fished a hundred and seventy dollars out of her handbag and handed it to him. “But, remember, you are not to come here again.”

“Sure thing.”

T
O BE SO RICH
and yet so broke. Denied by his own family. Maddening. Isaac wanted to scream, he longed to break things, it was so unjust.

His apartment stank. He opened the window, but there was no breeze. Not even the cockroaches stirred. In search of solace, he slapped another Captain A. tape into his Sony.

“Wrestled into submission by the rapacious Ravenmen, Captain Cohol has broken loose from the terrible table of death only to be cruelly clouted to the ice once more.”

Toologaq, malevolent master of the Ravensmen, laughed fiendishly. “Brace yourself, space snoop, because this electric current will teach you watt's watt.”

Shit shit shit. Isaac kicked his Sony across the floor. Only fifteen years old, he would have to endure another six years before the money and shares would be his. Groping for his can of spray paint, he treated the Rebbe to a squirt in the nose. Wobbly on his feet, he whirled around and took aim at Marilyn Monroe's coozy.

Then the doorbell rang. Three strangers. A little old man; a taller one, middle-aged; and a bleached blonde, all twinkly, reeking of perfume. “I'm your Cousin Barney,” the middle-aged man said, “this is your great-uncle Morrie, and what we have here,” he added, grabbing the blonde by the buttocks to propel her forward, “is the former runner-up to Miss Conduct. You can look but you can't touch.”

Mr. Morrie sighed and clacked his tongue. “To think that a grandson of Solomon's would have to live like this.”

“The first thing we're going to do,” Barney said, “is buy you some decent threads.”

“I'll bet a motorcycle would be more his life-style.” Darlene crinkled her nose. “Mine too, honeychild. Vroom Vroom!”

“You ever eaten at the ‘21'?” Barney asked.

Their fingernails bearing the talons of an owl,
Isaac remembered, staring at Darlene's fingernails. “What do you want from me?” he asked, retreating.

Barney took the spray paint can out of his hands. He aimed it at the bumper sticker on the wall that read WE WANT THE MOSHIACH NOW and squirted a line through it, crossing it out, as it were. Then he found a blank space and wrote:

WE WANT MCTAVISH NOW.

Mr. Morrie lingered in New York for a week, absolutely refusing to leave until he had established Isaac in a decent apartment, and had provided him with an allowance proper to his brother Solomon's grandson. They ate lunch together every day. “You know,” Isaac said, “you are like the first relative ever to take an interest in me.”

“After what you've been through. What about your Aunt Lucy?”

“Don't even mention that sex-crazed elephant's name to me.”

“Lucy sex-crazed? You've got to be kidding.”

So Isaac showed him his file of photographs.

Tears welled in Mr. Morrie's eyes. “To think that the poor child could have once been so unhappy,” he said, stuffing the photographs into his briefcase. “Now tell me, Isaac, what is it you want to do with your life?”

“I want to make movies.”

“You know what I say? I say why not, once things are settled.”

Six

One night that same summer, the summer of 1976, Sam and Molly Birenbaum went bumping across the Aberdare Salient in a Toyota Land Cruiser. Their guide, a former white hunter, was pursuing a loping, slope-shouldered hyena. Soon they were overlooking a pack of them, their pelts greasy and bellies bloated, hooting and cackling as they fed on a dead hippo lying on its side in a dry riverbed. The hippo hide impenetrable, the hyenas were eating into the animal through the softer anus, emerging from the cavity again and again with dripping chunks of pink meat or gut, thrusting the scavenging jackals aside.

“I've seen all I can bear,” Sam said. “I was raised on Rashi, not Denys Finch Hatton, so let us repair to our tent,
tzatskeleh
.”

Molly was delighted to see him in such high spirits. Only three months earlier, in Washington, he looked pasty and was growing increasingly sour. Obviously he had had his fill of hurrying to airports, flying hundreds of miles only to come back with another thirty-second sound bite from a politician or a film clip trivializing a disaster. “Judging by our commercials,” he told her one night, “outside the beltway, the only people who watch our newscasts suffer from loose dentures, insomnia, heartburn, flatulence and, put plainly, they don't shit regular.”

So, on the night of his birthday, Molly took him to La Maison Blanche for dinner and told him, “Enough.” Lapsing into Yiddish because she knew it gave him pleasure, reminding him of Friday nights at L.B.'s, the men holding forth at the table with the crocheted cloth, he and Moses in the kitchen, overcome with awe as Shloime Bishinsky combed nickels out of their hair. She told him that when
she had married him, a cub reporter on the
Gazette,
cultivating a moustache to make him look older, she had never dreamed that one day he would provide in such style for her and the children. But now the boys were grown, and Sam had more than enough money socked away, so the time had come for him to put in for early retirement. He could take a year off, maybe two, nobody was counting, and then he could decide whether to teach or write or join PBS or National Public Radio, both of which had made offers.

“Yeah, but what would I do for a year, never mind two?”

“We're going away,” she said, presenting him with his birthday present, a safari for two in Kenya.

It worked wonderfully well for the first few days. Then, the morning after they had seen the hyenas feeding on the dead hippo, they stopped at the Aberdare Country Club for lunch, and Sam caught up with the news.

Air France Flight 139, originating in Tel Aviv on Sunday, June 27, bound from Athens to Paris, had been hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The airbus had refuelled in Libya and was now on the ground at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where His Excellency al-Hajji Field Marshall Dr. Idi Amin Dada, holder of the British Victoria Cross, DSO, MC, appointed by God Almighty to be saviour of his people, announced that he would negotiate between the terrorists and the Israelis.

“They'll fly out that no-nothing kid, Sanders, to cover for us.”

“It's no longer any of your business, Sam.”

The next morning they crossed into the Rift Valley, hot and sticky, the dung-coloured hills yielding to soaring purplish walls on both sides. Then they took a motorboat across the crocodile-infested waters of Lake Baringo to Jonathan Leakey's Island Camp. The camp overlooking the lake was hewn right out of the cliffside, embedded with cacti and desert roses and acacias. Sam made directly for the radio in the bar.

Wednesday, June 30. The hijackers demanded the release of fifty-three convicted terrorists, five held in Kenya, eight in Europe, and the remaining forty in Israel. If there was no Israeli response by three
P.M.
, Thursday, they threatened to kill the hostages and blow up the
airbus. Another report, this one out of Paris, revealed that forty-seven of the two hundred and fifty-six hostages and twelve crew members had been freed and flown to Charles de Gaulle airport. They said that the Jews had been separated from the others under guard in the old terminal building at Entebbe, this segregation imposed by the two young Germans who appeared to be in charge of the operation. Yet another report stated that Chaim Herzog, Israeli ambassador to the UN, had appealed for help from Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.

Sam asked to use the office telephone. After endless delays, he finally got through to the network in New York, and then he stumbled out of the office ashen-faced, searching for Molly. He found her by the poolside. “Kornfeld, that coke-head, put me on hold. I hung up on him.”

The next day they continued on to Lake Begoria. Sam, to Molly's chagrin, only feigning interest in the herds of antelope and gazelles and zebras they passed. Then, fortunately for Sam, there was to be a four-day break in Nairobi before they moved on to the Masai Mara. They no sooner checked into the Norfolk Hotel than Sam bought every newspaper available and drifted out to the terrace to join Molly for a drink. He was not altogether surprised to find that the terrace, usually thinly populated in the early afternoon, was now crowded with Israelis. A sudden infusion of tourists. Obviously military men and women in mufti. They talked in whispers, occasionally rising from their tables to chat with an old man who sat alone, a bottle of Loch Edmond's Mist before him. He was a short man, wiry, his hands clasped together over the handle of a malacca cane, his chin resting on his hands.