The Golem of Hollywood (37 page)

Unfurling the wool, she holds up an astonishingly lifelike model of Rebbe's head.

“It was an experiment, to see how realistic I could make it. You can't use a wheel for something like this, you have to trust your fingers. I don't know about you, but I think it's very good. Is that vain? I meant to destroy it after I was done, but couldn't bring myself to do it. More vanity. I want my creations to live on. I also think—maybe I'm being self-serving—but I think it would be a shame if no one were ever to know what he looked like.” The Rebbetzin grins nervously. “
Nu?
What do you think?”

I think it's perfect.

Perel contemplates the sculpture. “I don't know. Perhaps I've done a sinful thing. But it can't be good, to keep everything buried.” A hand flutters toward the ceiling. “Yudl says God is best reached in a state of joy. I try, Yankele, but then I think about Leah, the sadness of the world overtakes me. I feel sometimes that I am standing in a river of tears. What does one do with that? Me, I have to keep my hands busy.”

Perel rewraps the sculpture, replacing it at the back of the shelf, pinning the cabinet doors shut with a wooden peg.

“I'm glad I showed you, Yankele. I think that you understand what I'm feeling, whether I tell you or not.” The Rebbetzin pauses. She looks abashed. “And I know you're unhappy with the way you are, and that makes my heart ache. You don't have to speak for me to know.”

She nods again.

“I wish I could hear what you're thinking. Being with you is wonderful but it's sometimes like listening to someone chewing in another room and guessing what they're eating.”

Perel shakes her head, looks at her, green glowing eyes. “I'd give much to know what is in your mind—the exact words.”

I love
you.

S
am's voice over the phone was subdued and remote. “It would be better to have this conversation in person.”

Jacob said, “Did you hear me, Abba?”

“You need to come home, Jacob.”

“I'm flying out tomorrow.”

“There's no sooner flight?”

Jacob paced the sidewalk outside Radcliffe Science Library. Exiting students gave him a wide berth. “I'm in the middle of an investigation.”

“You had enough time to call me.”

“Yeah, well,
sorry
, but I'm kind of pretty freaked out.”

“Getting upset is not good for you.”

“I wouldn't be upset if you'd just give me a straight answer.”

“What's the question?”

“Did you know?”

“Every family has stories. Who can say?”

A Talmudic dodge; Jacob wanted to scream. “Why didn't you want me to come to Prague?”

“I explained to you. I'm an old man, I didn't want to be left alone—”

“You told me to visit the cemetery. You didn't tell me to visit the
shul
. Why?”

Sam, softer, sadder, tinged by fear: “Please come home.”

“I'll tell you why: because you
knew
I would see it.”

“How in the world would I know that? Jacob. Listen to yourself. You sound—”

“What. What do I sound. You can say it. Say it.”

“I'm concerned about you,” Sam said.

Jacob laughed, flailing his arm up, nearly whacking a girl wearing a bicycle helmet. “You know what, Abba?
I'm
concerned about me, too.”

“Then come home.”

“Don't, don't, don't do that.”

“Do what?”

“Condescend to me.”

“I'm not—”

“You
are
, when my brain is, like,
throwing up
, and you're sitting there telling me that the remedy is to come home and have a cup of tea with you. I'm
busy
. Okay? I
work
. I have a
job
, all right, and as far as jobs go, it's kind of fucking important, so will you please,
please
stop talking to me like I'm six.”

The tirade left his mouth feeling coppery. He'd never sworn at his father, and the silence stretched, and Jacob felt their relationship splitting open, giving birth to something ugly and muck-covered and irreversible.

Sam said, “Do your job.”

Then it was his turn to do the unprecedented.

He hung up on his only child.

—

O
VERCOME
WITH
REMORSE
, Jacob phoned back to apologize. Sam didn't pick up. Second and third attempts were similarly futile.

Jacob bought a four-pack of Newcastle and sat outside the gate to Balliol to drink them, notepad resting on his knees, finger wedged into the pages, marking the spot where he'd copied the text of the Maharal's letter. Several times he began to read it. He got no further than that first
line before slamming the covers shut, pinching the tip of his finger, feeling that the pain was appropriate.

He arrived at the Friar and Maiden in a state of disarray, worsened by the pub's overhot, overloud atmosphere. Chicago blues roared from an antique PA. Among a sea of blotchy middle-aged faces, Priscilla Norton glowed coolly lunar, canted forward over a pint, talking animatedly to the porter, Jimmy Smiley.

Jacob worked his way toward their booth. “Sorry I'm late. I got caught up.”

“No problem,” Norton said.

Smiley gave a neutral nod. He wore a grandfatherly sweater vest over a ratty T-shirt. His black coat was folded on the bench. A horseshoe-shaped dent in his hair memorialized his missing bowler.

Norton slid a brimming glass at Jacob. “Hope you like Murphy's.”

He liked anything.

The brew was rich and dark, like running through a barley field with an open mouth; he chugged half of it and set it down to impressed stares.

“Thirsty,” he said.

“Evidently,” Norton said. “Well, shall we get started? Jimmy, tell him what you told me.”

Smiley licked his thin lips. “Mr. Mitchell, he wasn't pulling your leg. He wouldn't know them boys, he wasn't around when they was.”

“You were.”

“Sure, I knew 'em. The whole rotten lot. There was a scout, see. No older'n you, Pip. We were friendly, and one time—eighty-five, I believe it was, because I was three years a full porter—this scout, Wendy was her name, she was on her hands and knees, scrubbing a toilet or some such, when he sneaks up behind and lifts her skirt.”

“We're talking about Reggie Heap,” Jacob said.

“Not him, no, his friend, the one in your picture.”

Jacob tugged out the drawing of Head. “Him.”

“That's the one. Now, she—”

“What's his name?”

“Hold your bloody horses, I'm not done.” Smiley licked his lips again, settling back into raconteur mode. “Where was I? Right, so, Wendy, she feels a hand on her arse and up she jumps—‘What's that now, what you doing.' He grabbed her, you know what he meant to do, but she was a spirited lass, Wendy was. She bit him”—he tapped himself on the chin—“and he let go. Thank her lucky stars he slipped on the tile or else who knows what he might've done.”

Jacob held up a finger to pause him, pointing to Mr. Head's identifying scar.

Smiley nodded. “Could be. Could be.”

Under the table, Norton squeezed Jacob's thigh. “Go on, Jim.”

“Well, after it happened, she came to see me all ajumble. Cause Wendy and me was a bit friendly, you see. Nothing out of order, but I liked her. I says, ‘Don't wrinkle your pretty little brow,' and up I went to speak with Mr. Dwight. He was the head porter in those days, good man, God rest him. He says, ‘Okay, Jimmy boy, we'll sort it out.'

“The next day I go looking for Wendy, to find out how she's getting on, and I hear the other ladies gossiping about she quit. Back again I went to Mr. Dwight, to get the skinny.

“I never seen him so rattled. He didn't want to talk to me. ‘There's nothing can be done, Jim. Do us a favor and shut your mouth.' He did his best, I know that now, but I didn't like it, see? ‘What's Wendy done to deserve that? She didn't do nothing.' I kept on him about it until he said, ‘Jimmy, you don't shut it, I'll punt you out my own self.' Well, I told him—”

Abruptly he devolved into a goofy grin. “Hallo, Ned,” he said. “All right?”

A tubby man with a five-o'clock shadow saluted as he stumbled past, en route to the restroom. Smiley waited for the man to move out of earshot to continue.

“I went round the place where Wendy lived with her nan. I was feeling bad about it, see, because I was thinking about how I promised to help her out, and now she's out of a job.

“She was none too happy to see me. ‘They sacked me,' she says. ‘What you mean sacked you, they said you quit.' ‘They had me say I was leaving of my own free will. Tell me how it's my own free will when they're the ones made me do it?'

“I told her I couldn't believe Mr. Dwight would stoop so low. Wendy said it wasn't Mr. Dwight, it was Dr. Partridge, the junior censor. He had her up to his office and who should be sitting there but the little bastard himself, plasters stuck all over his precious boat like he been in a bloody knife fight, along with your lad Heap, who swears he saw Wendy grab this other bloke and try to kiss him, which's pure rubbish. Dr. Partridge won't hear her side of it. He delivers her a talking-to about he's disappointed in her, the way she threw herself at that young man. ‘Can't tolerate that type of behavior, you understand.' Wendy being Wendy, she says, ‘I ain't going to apologize to him, he's a bleeding liar, they both are.' Dr. Partridge says, ‘That's a shame, I'm afraid I won't be able to recommend you to a future employer.' Wendy, she didn't even know she was being sacked until then. She thought maybe they'd dock her or assign her a crap duty. Not send her packing. She begun to apologize, but the boys, they was having none of it. ‘She called me a liar. My father this, my father that.' Dr. Partridge, he said, ‘Come on, now, Wendy, let's be dignified about it.'

“Now, that had me ripe to bang down the censor's door. But my wife said, ‘It's terrible what happened to that poor girl. But Jimmy, use your loaf, you're not going to get her her job back. And say somehow you do, what's to stop the young fellow from putting his hands on her again, and this time maybe she won't be so lucky. A blessing in disguise, is what it is. Let her find someplace else where nobody's going to bother her.' See, I hadn't thought of it that way. The last thing I wanted was to
bring more trouble on her. On me neither. I had three mouths of my own to feed.”

He tugged his lower lip ruefully.

“Most of the kids I've known are decent, mind. I wouldn't've stayed if I didn't think so. Most of them are good. But, you're eating peanuts and you bite down on a rock, it's that you're liable to remember, not the rest of the bowl.”

Norton asked what had become of Wendy.

Smiley shook his head. “Can't rightly say.”

Jacob said, “What was the name of the guy who assaulted her?”

The porter hesitated.

“It's all right,” Norton said. “You can tell us.”

“Not you I'm worried about, love.”

Smiley inclined his head toward the dartboards, and Jacob saw the man who had earlier passed their table. He was laughing with a group of drinkers cut from similar cloth—fellow porters, Jacob assumed.

He said, “We can go elsewhere.” Impatience strained his voice.

Smiley said, “They'll clear out soon enough. Ned's wife skins him if he's late, and them geezers follow him like ducklings. Make yourself useful and stand us a round.”

When Jacob returned, the mood in the booth had lightened a degree, Smiley chortling while Norton said, “Not if I can help it, y'poncy bastard.”

The porter beamed. “She's a gem, this one.”

“A diamond,” Jacob said.

“I think of her as my own.”

“Aw, you're sweet, Jim.”

“Sweet nothing,” Smiley said, corralling his pint. He jabbed a finger at Jacob. “You be polite to her.”

Priscilla said, “I can take care of myself, thank you, Mr. Smiley.”

“I know you can, I want him to know it, too.” Smiley winked. “She might hurt you otherwise.”

—

A
S
PREDICTED
, N
ED
WAS
the first to depart; the other three wandered out a few minutes later, each one in turn stopping by the booth to clap Smiley on the shoulder.

“Good night, boys.”

“G'night, Jimmy.”

Once they were gone, Smiley reached under his folded coat and brought out a weighty leather-bound book with an elaborate coat of arms stamped into the cover.

Ædes Christi

Anno MCMLXXXV

“Had to smuggle it out, I did,” he said, propping the book against the wall. “Mr. Mitchell wouldn't be pleased.”

The frontispiece clarified, somewhat:
being the annual pictorial chronicle of The Dean, Chapter and Students of the Cathedral Church of Christ in Oxford of the Foundation of King Henry the Eighth
.

Smiley ran his finger down the table of contents, pausing twice, then flipped to page 134.

Rows of students.

The photo of Heap was the same one Jacob had seen at the house.

Reginald Heap

History of Art

“Him you know.” The porter paged ahead to the third-year students. “And
that's
the git who grabbed Wendy.”

Having referred to Mr. Head as Mr. Head for so long, Jacob wasn't sure he'd be able to start using his real name.

Terrence Florack

Fine Art

Snub nose. Beetle brows. Scarred chin.

Perry-Bernie.

Terry? Could MacIldowney have been mistaken?

Jacob said, “Was he American, this Florack?”

“No, that was the other one,” Smiley said.

“What other one?” Norton said.

Smiley turned more pages, his palsied hands fumbling. “Quite a threesome, they made.” Finally, he reached his goal, a section headed
CLUBS AND ACTIVITIES
.

Yearly summaries, assorted group portraits: the Music Society, the Boat Club, the Chess Club, and, not last and certainly not least—

The Christ Church chapter of the Undergraduate Art Society had an exciting year. Two exhibitions of new work were put forth. It would not be inaccurate to call these unqualified successes. Here's to more! Ladies, from left: Misses L Bird, K Standard, V Ghosh, S Knight (sec), H Yarmouth, J Rowland. Gentlemen, from left: Messrs D Bowdoin, E Thompson III (pres), R Heap, T Florack, T Foster.

“That's him, that's the one,” Smiley said, placing his finger on a sinewy man with a penetrating stare, set off from the students. “Like a big brother, he was.”

Graduate student advisor: Mr R Pernath.

“Quite the charmer,” said Smiley. “You can see why all the lasses fancied him.”

It wasn't so much that Pernath was handsome. His smile was a touch lopsided, his nose too small for his face. A well-moussed shelf of hair, drastically cantilevered over his brow, cast a shadow over his eyes. They were the eyes of Rasputin, or Charles Manson, or the Reverend Jim Jones. Hard dark gems in a polished preppy setting. Even in grainy
black-and-white, a quarter century later, they exerted a queer hypnotic power, and Jacob had to force himself to look away.

He said, “I need to make a copy of this.”

Without hesitation Smiley folded the page at the binding and tore it out.

Norton said, “You're not going to get in trouble for that?”

Smiley slid the page to Jacob. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”