"Probably one of Daddy's jokes. You know how funny he can be. How long will it take to get your divorce?"
"Ralph says it can be done in an hour in Haiti once we reach an agreement."
"I wish we were already married and you didn't have to go back."
441 wish I had that government job already and I wouldn't have to go back," Gold declared in a voice charged with bitterness. "I was hoping your father
274
would offer to do more." Andrea looked hurt and Gold was stricken with self-reproach. "I wish the two of us could sneak away from everyone now on a secret honeymoon. I'd like a vacation with you more than anything but I don't think I can afford it."
"We can use my money," Andrea promptly offered.
"I won't allow that," Gold heard himself state even quicker. His spontaneous avowal of principle sounded much more final than he expected it would, and disgruntlement followed hard on its footsteps. "Dammit, why doesn't somebody rich invite us to Acapulco? I'll bet Kissinger didn't pay."
"You have to be important before you get those," Andrea explained with a laugh. "I'm happy you even thought of it. Much of the time I'm afraid you won't want to see me again, even after we're married."
"Why would I marry you," asked Gold, "if I didn't want to see you again?"
"To help you get the government appointment," she answered. "That's why I want to wait until after you have it before we decide. I don't think we could be happy if you were only the Secretary of Agriculture or a speechwriter, could we? But I love the thought, if only you could afford it." She squeezed his hand in both her own. His hand was in his lap.
"I can raise the money," he decided recklessly with a surge of joy, recalling the money owed him by Spotty Weinrock and all the rest he could borrow from Sid. "We'll sneak off to Acapulco together and tell nobody. It will be dangerous, but what the hell—that will make it more exciting."
"You're so much fun."
"I'll start making plans. We'll leave as soon as I get my father back to Florida."
Gold had trouble sleeping. Andrea would not lose a wink in a cataclysm. With envious petulance he listened to her breathe, deploring the defect in his character
275
that left him destitute of that flatness of viewpoint and narrowness of mind without which it is impossible for any strong ideological belief to flourish. That a dunce like Harris Rosenblatt should find adherents in Washington raised questions about the sanctity and durability of government and American society that no amount of patriotic reasoning could subdue. Andrea sighed in her slumber with a stirring that did not cease until she had backed into contact with him again. They both slept nude. Her tawny flesh, fuzzed with silken, yellow hairs, was gorgeous in the rippling overlaps of muted light and shadows. It dawned upon him then that she could not really know in her deep and tranquil repose it was he who was there beside her. Sadness overcame him and he lost contact with the present. Sid had spurned him. Stinting in conversation with everyone at home, what fraternal comments he had for Gold as a child seemed mainly criticism and belittlement. So much older in years, Sid was like a second father, and both these elders were disgraced by his early need for eyeglasses. No matter how brightly he excelled in elementary school, Ida was always exhorting him to do better, dumbfounding their immigrant mother, who could not believe he was as habitually delinquent as the reprimands signified. Even when his grades were perfect her praise was a rebuke. No, he's very good, Gold could still hear Ida trying to impose her dictum on the hapless, uncomprehending woman, but there's no reason he shouldn't be perfect, instead of like Muriel.
4'Hey, kid, you ought to put on some weight or you'll never make a team," Sid would say to him often. For one year Sid had been on the high-school football team as a substitute. Then he gave it up to work in the laundry. "Go out for fencing when you get to high school. You're so skinny they'll never be able to hit you. I bet you could stand under a shower without getting wet."
In music class he was converted into a listener and not permitted to sing. The teacher staggered back with
276
a look of nausea the first time she massed the children for song at the front of the classroom and some sound of unbelievable ugliness landed without pity on her sensitive and unsuspecting ears. She flew into a frenzy of action as though confronted with a dire emergency. By a rapid process of plucking and grouping, she narrowed the source of the offending voice down to eight students, then four, then three. The accusing finger fell at last upon him. "And you, Bruce/' she announced with what little breath remained to her, "can be a listener. We need listeners too, don't we, class?" Her bosom heaved with enormous relief.
Thereafter, he would sit and listen two or three hours a week while the others stood and rehearsed for the performance they would give one Friday at the weekly assembly. Once, Miss Lamb, the teacher, after commending the singers at the conclusion of a session, thoughtfully had all of them turn and clap their hands at him for being so faithful and true a listener, and this became a ritual at each of the music classes. Gold was dumb as a log at every music session, and his head felt as heavy. Even fucking Lieberman was a bass.
And then his fucking crackpot of a father, Gold recalled with a surge of nostalgic grief that oozed from his heart to form a lump in his throat, at last was proud of him and bragged outrageously to customers in his tailor shop and to neighbors up and down the street. "In that whole class, there is just one listener," he would announce to Gold's speechless mortification, exhibiting one finger high in the air, "and that listener is my son." With no warning his father would then soar melodically into the five most celebrated notes from / Pagliacci and terminate abruptly. "See how good he listens?"
"Me and Fishy Siegel are altos in our class," Spotty Weinrock stopped him once to say, approaching in a limping walk with one foot on the sidewalk curb and the other in the gutter. "What are you?"
A clock tolled three. A child was crying. Scores of
277
memories of that melancholy nature flowed through Gold's mind as he lay in bed with Andrea and forgot she was there, and Bruce Gold, Doctor of Philosophy and Professor of English and related disciplines, Presidential appointee-designate, near the half century of his life, sought refuge at night in the fantasy of his childhood that he was not really Bruce Gold and that his family was not really his family, his background was not his background, and his station in life was not his station, that he was of better heritage than anyone but himself had yet supposed, and had been unfortunately misplaced all his life as the result of some incomprehensible series of errors and misunderstandings that were on the brink of correction. A computer was already deciphering them. Justice would be done. Everything was destined for improvement. Men and women of beautiful and most noble lineaments would appear in sandals and silken robes to claim and redeem him. The land would rejoice. A child had been found. He might even be a prince. The people who attended him with such devotion and bliss were all multimillionaires.
"You are not Bruce Gold," they assured him soothingly. "These people are not your people and these relatives and friends are not your true relatives and friends. You are Van Cleef and Arpels," they said. "You are a stunning, sparkling jewelry store on Fifth Avenue, and it's all yours. The wealthiest people come from everywhere to shop in you." Gold held fast to his dream, and his trust in the inevitability of this outcome for him had lessened only slightly over the decades of maturity. "Please come in, Mr. Van Cleef and Arpels," they cooed, "and be at home, for it all belongs to you. You are a group of dazzling and distinguished jewelry stores with branches in Beverly Hills, Palm Beach, Paris, and other lovely cities and have secret contacts in Antwerp. People of what little royal blood survives come in homage on soft footsteps and pay you money. The finest, most beautiful persons in all the world are
278
your subjects and your suitors. You are not a listener any more," they whispered. "You are not," they lullabied, "even a Jew."
Gold moved his lips to reply but no words came. He was asleep.
279
VII
Invite a Jew to the White
House (and You Make
Him Your Slave)
«H*MMrv*-~ -
JJrUCE Gold still could not understand how any Jew of right mind and good character would have put himself in the service of Richard Nixon, and he could think of none who had. Those Jews who did work in that administration were possibly the only educated adult witnesses in creation who failed to recognize in Vice President Spiro Agnew's malignant assaults on the press a mischievous campaign of camouflaged anti-Semitism. Or else they did, and affected not to.
"Invite a Jew to the White House (and You Make Him Your Slave)" was the defiant title Gold gave to the invidious diatribe he wrote in the fit of smoldering pique into which he had been plunged by Lieberman's invitation to the White House in return for supporting American combat activities in the war in Vietnam. In a spurt of creative activity motivated as much by hostile emotion as by principle, Gold had completed a powerful first draft at near-record velocity. Unflinchingly he delved back from the present to President Eisenhower
283
and the Rosenberg trial for his earliest models of that docile subservience endemic to the breeds of craven, watchful opportunists he was inspecting at length with such intrepid vindictiveness and excoriating contempt. Gold was no longer keen to publish his "Invite a Jew to the White House (and You Make Him Your Slave)." If he did, he might never again be invited to the White House.
"Would you be interested in something important in the Department of Agriculture if something should open up there first?" asked Ralph when Gold dropped by once more to bid him another disappointed goodbye.
"No."
"I hardly blame you." Ralph slipped into his jacket to stroll partway back with him. "Imagine the absurdity of a social order in which the overproduction of food becomes an economic catastrophe. How much easier things would be if we nationalized all our basic resources. And how lucky we are that most of the country doesn't know that."
"You talk," said Gold with eyes narrowing warily, "almost as though you believed in socialism."
"Oh, I do," said Ralph, "with all my heart. And every day I thank my stars that others don't and allow people like you and me to live in such extraordinary privilege. You've been here before, haven't you?"
Gold glanced across the avenue at the meadow inclining upward to the base of the Washington Monument. "On a peace march," he admitted. "But that was very late, Ralph, when a lot of people had turned against the Vietnam war. You were on one too, I believe."
"I was on all," said Ralph, and Gold had the disquieting feeling he was being probed. He did not believe Ralph for a second. "I hated that war, Bruce," Ralph went on without noticeable change in his breezy spirits, "and just about every one of those government officials under Johnson, Nixon, and Ford who conspired to keep us in or raised no public objection to
284
help get us out. What swine! It may be the one thing in the world I feel serious about, that and marriage. The lies, Bruce, oh, the lies. Forget the horror if you will—fifty thousand Americans killed, hundreds of thousands maimed, a million or more Asians—but who can forget those lies? They're guilty, Bruce, of atrocious war crimes, all of them, and I feel they ought to be hanged by the neck until dead. I certainly don't think they should be forgiven too quickly or that any of their names should be forgotten so soon." Gold maintained his silence stolidly, thanking God it was Ralph, rather than himself, who was voicing these stringent sentiments. "I'm not just talking about Jews like Walt Whitman Rostow and Henry A. Kissinger," Ralph resumed after an interim sufficient for Gold to endorse or dispute these views if he were disposed to do either. "I also mean people with names like Ball, Brown, Bundy, Bunker, Clifford, Eagleburger, Haig, Humphrey, Kleindienst, Laird, Lodge, Lord, Martin, McNamara, Mitchell, Moynihan, Richardson, Rockefeller, Rusk, Valenti, Vance, Warnke, Ziegler, and Javits."
"Javits?" The word erupted from Gold in an expulsive reflex. "Javits was Jewish, Ralph." "Jack?"
"His real name was Jacob." "Why wasn't he called Jake?" "Because that's how some people are." "A Republican?" A momentary smile flickered quizzically over Ralph's amiable, blameless features, forcing Gold to squirm. "I must say that a Jewish Republican has always seemed to me somewhat tainted and droll." Gold could hardly dissent. In any such galaxy of the incongruous he would also include Jews on ski slopes, tennis courts, and horseback; and those in polka-dot bow ties had always impressed him offensively as specious and profane, and flamboyantly unconvincing as both Christians and Jews. Heavy drinking, adultery, and divorce were other alien cultural peccadilloes he could list, but he preferred leaving
285
himself out of it. "It's another reason I distrusted Kissinger from the start and always found him something of a clown," Ralph continued with a quiet laugh. "You know I'm not anti-Semitic, Bruce. But I must admit I was tickled when I learned that Kissinger had gone down on his knees with Nixon in the Oval Office to pray on the carpet there. Do Jews kneel when they pray, Bruce? I didn't realize that."
Gold was not positive. "I don't think so."
"Maybe that's why they wear those prayer rugs around their shoulders in church—" Ralph pursued the subject unheedingly—"so they can fall to their knees on a moment's notice and pray on a carpet whenever they want to."
"They're shawls, Ralph, not rugs," said Gold with the devout wish they might talk of something else, "they're in temple, not church, and we don't kneel when we pray or use prayer rugs. Arabs do."
"Then why did Kissinger?"
"Because he's Kissinger, that's why," Gold answered with acerbity. "It was probably easier, that's why."
"I must admit I detested him," said Ralph. "I have to confess I always thought of Kissinger as a greasy, vulgar, petulant, obnoxious, contemptible, self-serving, social-climbing Jewish little shit."
Gold, who'd been nodding along as slavishly as a faithful dog to the syllabic tempo of Ralph's adjectives, now came to a rather sudden stop.
"Ralph," he inquired in a most tentative manner, "are you absolutely sure you're not anti-Semitic?"
"Because I hate Kissinger?" Ralph dismissed the preposterous imputation with a good-humored shake of his head. "Oh, no, Bruce. I wouldn't know how to be anti-Semitic if I tried. By the way, Bruce, one word to the wise—people here might get the idea you're clannish if you keep on defending him so loyally."
"I was not defending him!" shouted Gold with ferocity at the fantastic charge he was partial to the person in the universe he probably liked least. "I was merely wondering," he said with strained composure,
286
"whether you say that because he's Kissinger or because he's Jewish."
"Because he's Kissinger, Bruce," Ralph answered artlessly with an ingrained seriousness that would have convinced the most skeptical of the purity of his thoughts. "How could I possibly be anti-Semitic? I'm indebted to you for so much. I used your research to get through graduate school."
"And got better grades," Gold remembered.
"I used your paper on Tristram Shandy."
"And got yours published, without giving me credit."
"I couldn't do that, Burce, without getting us both expelled. I'm even using your hotel room now every time you come to Washington."
"And having more fun, probably, than I am."
"You'll find a telephone message there from Lieber-man asking you to talk to me. And another from Belle reminding you of your father's anniversary party Friday. I thought you left Belle."
"I did," said Gold, with some shifty disturbance of mind. "The problem is that I'm not entirely sure she knows I've gone."
There was no way to overstate the look of awe with which Ralph all at once was gaping at him. "Deep, , Bruce, oh, you are deep," he explained in a devoted whisper, tapping his nose excitedly. "My God, if I'd been clever enough for that I might still be playing with
all of mine. No, it's better to be free of them before they start getting their backaches and polyps. Please give your father my love, Bruce. And try to convince yourself there's no such thing as anti-Semitism any more. Why, we've even got a Jewish FBI man now. Would you like to meet him?" Gold thought not. "I'm afraid you'll have to, Bruce. He's on your case."
"My case?"
"And handling it brilliantly," said Ralph. "He's the one who uncovered that stunning comment of yours that Harvard and West Point together have afflicted civilization with a greater number of harmful block-
287
heads than all other institutions in the history of the world, combined."
Gold surveyed him with shock. 'That was a joke, Ralph," he exclaimed in frightened protest, and then a feeling of dismay swept over him. "Oh, shit, Ralph— has someone from the FBI been investigating me already?"
"He's one of our best men. We call him Bulldog."
"He should know I wasn't serious. Ralph, I made that remark nearly ten years ago at the University of Oklahoma when I was kidding around in a question-and-answer session."
"It happens," said Ralph, "to be true. And one of our most closely guarded secrets. I know you were thinking mainly of officials, but throw in the whole Yale graduate body and you've got it just about right. You must have known you'd need a security check and a thorough physical exam. Under current guidelines you can use any Jewish specialist or get your checkup free at Walter Reed Memorial."
Good as Gold Page 24