“Want a job?”
“Doing what?”
“Managing my property.”
“I’m not a rent collector.”
“You wouldn’t have to be one. Seventy-five a week to start with and after the first six months I’ll up you to a hundred if you’re satisfactory.”
“I only work for myself. I’m through knocking my brains for other people. If I don’t become my own boss right now, I never will.”
“You won’t make as much working for yourself.”
“Not at first, but if I can’t make a hundred a week after a year then I’ve got no business being my own boss and I’ll know I’m just like everyone else - a strictly no-talent zombie. Have we got a deal on the store?”
“For five and a quarter.”
“Fifty bucks a year won’t make any difference to you.”
“It shouldn’t to you either if you’re going to be such a big man.”
“It’s a question of principles.”
Warner set down the coffee and squinted at Jay.
“What would you know about principles?” he said.
“I’m not talking to you and anyway you’re not exactly an expert yourself.” Fredericks shooed Warner away as he would a fly. “Five hundred, that’s it.”
Fredericks extended his hand, and Jay shook it warmly. He rather admired his calm, easygoing manner, tricky without being obvious. That was the way the successful played at business.
“I’ll send you a lease at the end of the week. Have you got a lawyer?”
“No . . .” It hadn’t occurred to him that he might need one.
“You can use my man. He’ll look out for your interests.”
Jay nodded and smiled.
After he had left the office, Warner tried to make out a strong case against Jay, but Fredericks remained unmoved.
“He’s a bastard, with a real nasty streak,” Warner concluded.
“Probably be a millionaire in ten years. He’s an operator,” Fredericks said, amused. “I think he’ll increase the value of the property.”
Dobrinski, splayfooted, and whispering to himself, stood in his freshly pressed morning suit in front of the schul. It was brisk, and he shivered a bit, as he doffed his top hat to the women who entered. When he saw Myrna, in a green velvet dress, he embraced her warmly and brushed the back of his hands over the exposed part of her bosom.
“It should be you next time, please God. The prettiest maid of honor I’ve seen,” he testified.
Myrna disengaged herself from him.
“He shouldn’t happen to a dog.”
“You shouldn’t say such things.” Dobrinski sighed. His belt was too tight. “God looks after his children.”
“Rhoda’ll need more than God.”
“Why shouldn’t they be happy?” He quoted some percentages he had worked out: women who had gone into marriage pregnant and had happy lives with their husbands, and he showed Myrna some tables he had entered in a little leather notebook that verified this.
“Better show them to Jay,” she said and walked past him.
About fifty people had turned up to witness the spectacle of Jay and Rhoda’s wedding. Finkelstein, about one hundred dollars lighter after his foray into Lakewood’s pinochle league, had, in Rhoda’s honor, kept the store closed to mark the blessed event. Thoroughly discomposed from so much nodding and handshaking, he sat reading a newspaper on one of the back benches. Jay’s two sisters, Sylvia the eldest, a slim woman in her early thirties with a beautifully molded face, sharp brown eyes, a firm jawline and prematurely gray hair, held the hand of her sister Rosalee, six years her junior, whose features did not have the same fineness as Sylvia’s and whose face was dominated by a large nose that hooked slightly and gave it a fugitive hunted aspect. Her hair was also speckled with gray, but it lay hidden under a henna rinse with too much red in it and seemed to belong to the maroon family under direct light.
“It’s hard to believe, little Jay getting married,” Sylvia said.
“Best thing that could happen to him. Poppa’ll be glad to see the back of him. He’s caused him nothing but aggravation,” Rosalee said.
“Two sides to it,” Sylvia replied, a bit tartly. She didn’t like her sister very much.
“I know whose side you take.”
“I don’t take any, but it’s always been obvious that Poppa prefers Al to Jay, and it would make anyone bitter.”
“Look” - Rosalee abruptly pulled her hand away from Sylvia – “let’s not go into it now.” She pointed at the Gold family’s representatives. “They look real dreck.”
“How do you know?”
“I met Rhoda a few times. Jay brought her around.”
“I liked her,” Sylvia said firmly.
“I guess Jay did as well. He knocked her up.”
“Must you be so crude?”
“I’m a crude person.”
“You convinced me of that a long time ago.”
“And you’re a regular lady. You and your husband always so damned snotty.”
“We’ve tried to elevate ourselves. You could do the same thing.”
“No thanks, I prefer us as we are. Herman and me don’t try to make impressions. He’s good enough as he is.”
Sylvia was afraid it might turn into an argument.
“Someday the truth’ll come out about Jay - that’s what Herman says.”
Sylvia turned away from her sister and stared straight ahead of her at the panel where the Torah was kept.
“Herman is a butcher; he ought to keep out of things he doesn’t understand.”
“So it’s out at last, your true feelings,” Rosalee said. “I always knew how you and Harry felt about us, but I’m glad to find out that I hadn’t been imagining it. In my book, the both of you are phonies. And your well-educated husband is more of a shit than anybody else in the family. What is he, after all?”
“A fine, decent man!”
“A two-bit arithmetic teacher, dearie, not Einstein.”
“We’re in schul, don’t you have any respect?”
“Not for you I don’t.”
Sidney Gold watched the two sisters angrily talking, and he was happy that his wife had been unable to come. She’d meet them all at the reception afterwards, and that was, from his point of view, bad enough. He already detested Jay’s family and would be glad once the day was over so that he would be free of them. They were like a pack of wolves who could not find food, so had begun to attack each other. He retired to a little dressing room in the back of the synagogue that was occupied by Rhoda and Myrna.
“Some family!” he groaned. “They heving arguments already and you’re not even married.” He put his arm round Rhoda affectionately. “You’re a good girl. Such a good girl. What am I doing to you?”
“Shush, Poppa, it’ll be okay. Everybody gets nerves,” Rhoda said, trying to calm him.
“Everybody but the bride,” Myrna said. “You should be reassuring her,” she turned on her father angrily.
“I don’t even know if I’m alive . . . such confusion.”
Dobrinski knocked on the door and opened it before waiting for a reply. “The Rabbi’s ready.” He smiled at Rhoda. “Oh, you’re a beauty, mein kind. Five minutes, then you come out. I’ll tell you when.”
He scurried next door to a small, drafty room that was used as a classroom for the Hebrew School.
“Ey, you’re in schul, so put out the cigarette,” he admonished Jay.
Jay made a threatening movement, and Dobrinski ducked his head as if dodging a tomato. “I’m not joking, I’ll make them stop the wedding,” he threatened.
“Respect,” mused Morris, “he doesn’t know what it means.”
Jay killed the cigarette and sat down at a desk.
“He’s excited,” Celia said. “He can’t help himself.”
“I’ll be back in a couple minutes.”
Barney Green strode into the room.
“Geez, Jay, I almost didn’t fi
nd it.”
“You wouldn’t’ve missed much.”
“I never been a best man.”
“Hello, Mrs. Blackman, Mr. Blackman.”
“So he’s got a friend,” Morris said.
“Oh, sure, plenty of them.”
“Like you?”
“Lay off him, Poppa.”
“Whatsa matter he couldn’t heve his brother Al for a best man? What for he needs you? A gengster.”
“Who’s your friend?” Barney said.
Celia began to cry, and Morris held her shoulder.
“See, you’ve made Momma cry.”
“Not a happy day has she had from you,” Jay cried.
The next half hour was a nightmare for Jay. He went through the rituals, repeated the prayers in Hebrew, drank the wine, put the ring on Rhoda’s finger, broke the glass, and at last, and with some reluctance, after three cues, kissed her, thereby sealing the bargain and, he thought grimly, his fate. He had never had a serious illness, but suddenly he felt as though a fever had come over him and was drawing his life away, relentlessly. His mother, tears streaming down her face, moaned like someone bereaved during the entire service, and when he was told to walk down from the small platform, he broke away from Rhoda, dropping her hand the way he would a cigarette in the gutter without thought or interest, and he went to his mother and held her tightly in his arms, shutting his eyes the way he did when he was a child and was trying to imagine what life would be like when he became a man. He had made a mistake, married the wrong woman; he should be leaving the synagogue with his mother by his side - one person now in the eyes of Jews and the law, their destiny recognized, irrevocable. She released her hold on him and pushed him towards Rhoda, who stood stock still where she had been abandoned, waiting hopefully to begin her married life.
Like a man without mind or will, he followed her into the hired car waiting by the curb to drive the four blocks back to her house. His eyes were glazed, and he stared at her without recognition. She held his hands and leaned her head against his chest.
“Jay, darling, I love you. I’m so happy . . . I don’t think I’ll ever be this happy again.”
“I’ve signed the lease for the store,” he said, waking from reverie. “This morning, I signed it.”
“Oh, gee, that’s marvelous,” she said after a moment’s hesitation and trying to regain her composure.
“We get possession next week, so that means we’ve got a lot to do.”
She gave him a blank, hopeless look.
“I expect to be open in two weeks.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Why? The painters are starting on Monday as soon as the jeweler’s packed up, and I’ll have to be there and do the buying as well.”
“But we’re going on our honeymoon.”
“Oh? Well, we can’t do both can we? And the store’s more important.”
“Is it?” They were nearing her house, and she dug her teeth violently into the soft flesh in her cheek to restrain herself from screaming.
“What about Mr. Finkelstein? We’ve got to give him decent notice.”
“He can drop dead. You gave him seven years, isn’t that enough?”
“We can’t do things that way, Jay.”
“I don’t want to argue with you, Rhoda.”
“And I don’t want to either.”
“Well, you’ve got me! After all your planning and scheming, you’ve got what you wanted, so goddamnit, you’ll do as I say or you can go to hell.”
He helped her out of the car and smiled at some guests who had arrived before them. She held his hand as they walked up the stone steps, wondering how she could best deal with him; he flared up at everything she said, ignored her point of view, insulted her intelligence, discarded her every suggestion. At that moment, she accepted as fact what before had been a brooding uneasy intuition: that she and Jay were unsuited and that their marriage was doomed. Unsystematically, she considered her reasons for wanting him, for courting the disaster that was obvious to everyone. The child she was carrying, his child, counted for almost nothing; there was no rapport or sympathetic understanding to attract her; the act of merely sleeping with him was not enough to explain it. She never for a moment believed that fate, or forces within herself or the universe, compelled her to pursue him; the urge for self-destruction was latent in her, as in most healthy human beings, but she desired neither forgetfulness nor anguish. There was only one answer that came close to explaining her need for Jay: she loved him and she had chosen him, realizing that life with him would be hopeless, and insufferable; life without him would have been a living death, a valley of ashes almost inconceivable. She had chosen active suffering rather than passive death.
Reluctantly Jay held the door open for her.
“One thing, Rhoda, and remember it. Just because I married you doesn’t mean I’m divorced from the rest of the world.”
“You’re upset . . . nervous, like me,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“That’s just the trouble. I do know.”
It was late, dark and cold when they got to the small furnished apartment that Jay had taken for them in Williamsburg, just across the bridge from the East Side. He was drunk and slept on her shoulder in the train that took them there from her house. They walked three blocks south of the river to get to Roebling Street, and the smell from the river was vile, rank with fog and tug fumes. He breathed heavily, and the odor was a compound of cigarettes and cheap rye; he staggered suddenly into the roadway and grasped a fire hydrant to stop himself from falling.
“Jay, let me help you. It’s only another block, and we’ll be home.”
He moaned softly, and she lifted him up by the shoulders. His eyes were bloodshot, and the lids kept dropping like window shades with a broken spring.
“Agh,” was the sound, deep and guttural that burst forth from his lips, “Agh . . . I’m gonna . . .” He began to vomit into the gutter. He moved his head from side to side, as a nervous cat would, then spewed forth again, on his shoes and trousers. She held his head firmly, and he brought up some more and hit her dress with it.
He tried to say something but was unable to and waved her away.
“It’s all right, get it out of your system.”
“I should have listened to you and eaten,” he said, wiping the tears rolling down his cheeks. “I don’t know what happens to me, Rhoda.” He wanted to apologize, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
“Don’t worry, baby. S’long as you’re feeling better. I’ll make you some lemon tea when we get home.”
He put his arm round her neck and leaned on her as they walked down the block. Roebling Street, where the apartment house was located, was a gray, dreary street, treeless and almost totally characterless. A few food shops and a delicatessen were spotted like mud patches amid the large number of apartment houses that lined the street on both sides: mausoleums for the homeless. In contrast to Borough Park, which was predominantly residential, Williamsburg seemed to Rhoda to combine all of the despicable features of the East Side with none of its vibrant life: a fine place to die in, but one hardly propitious to begin a new life in. The ugliness of this Gravesend area was so nondescript, so passive in its function of providing quarters for people who had been pushed to the edge of Brooklyn, that Rhoda’s spirit - geared to withstand most of life’s adversities and come back with a smile and a quiet shrug of the shoulders - fought against it. Somebody had been cooking fish in the building. A forty-watt bulb, flickering, and amber, provided what light the entrance had. Jay went ahead of her - her suggestion lest he fall backwards - up the three flights of stairs to their apartment. She had seen it only twice and for a total of twenty minutes; she had been too excited during these furtive visits to take it in, to compose a picture of the way it would look once the right type of furnishings were brought in. Jay toyed with the key and lock for some minutes until Rhoda took the key away from him and with the help of a match opened the
door. A gust of damp air escaped, as though from a cylinder, and hit her in the face. Jay stumbled in over the threshold and she behind. He switched on a light and flopped onto a sofa, and she saw what the apartment was really like. It wasn’t quite a flophouse, but it appeared to be worse because it pretended to be more - a home! What set her against it was the realization that additional furniture, colorful drapes, would only serve to heighten the inhuman quality of the surroundings and that the landlord who had sparsely furnished the apartment with remnants from fire sales and bankruptcies had done all that could be done with the place. There were three rooms and a bathroom, free from cockroaches - at least she did not see any; she examined the bath, which was shaped like a cauldron and would only accommodate the full body of someone under three feet; the enamel had eroded and a dull metal sheen appeared from underneath; the faucets leaked and the sink had rust stains. The bedroom contained a fair-sized double bed with a sagging mattress from which feathers were escaping and a wooden headboard machine-carved in a design of some kind, intended to draw attention away from the quality of the wood which, if rubbed, would reward the rubber with splinters. She examined a series of regular marks on it; something with teeth, not necessarily biped, had used it to sharpen its fangs. She got out clean sheets and made the bed, then went into the living room, where Jay lay snoring on the sofa. She shook him gently. Stirring and blinking his eyes, he rose with her assistance and staggered the few feet into the bedroom. The bed moaned under his weight; methodically she undressed him. There were no hangers in the closet so she opened the top drawer of the dresser and forced the cuffs of his trousers in, then closed the drawer so that they would hang straight. His eyes opened and there was a flicker of recognition in them, and then they sank into oblivion. In the kitchen, she boiled some water and made them cups of tea and put some saltine crackers on a cracked plate. He was already under the blankets, his head hanging off the edge of the bed as though waiting for decapitation. She had never seen him so helpless, so lacking in aggression, and she discovered, when she cradled his head in her arms and fed him tea in a saucer, that when she assumed a maternal role the state of war that existed between them was suspended and a truce filled with affection, warmth, mutual appreciation, if not love, drew them closer together than they had ever been. His gratitude was real, and his reliance on her strength had become not the admission of weakness, but recognition of a function he had delegated to her that would permit them an uneasy peace. Secondhand and vicarious, it was hardly the form of love she wanted, but it was a state in which she could feel some security and dominance. He had stopped competing and was allowing her to love him, and indeed loving her in return. She changed in the bathroom into a nightgown that Myrna had bought her for the occasion and studied her reflection in the tarnished cracked mirror attached to the back of the bathroom door. Her hair had a faint glow and a reddish tint and fell down to her waist; her face was fuller and she had begun to bulge all over, but she thought that she was prettier than she had ever believed possible. Men stared and smiled at her, and she knew she was desirable. When she and Jay made love she never held back, giving everything that it was possible to give, doing whatever he asked of her and making the act itself something beautiful, transcendent, an act of homage to an ideal state of existence. Her eyes, green and luminous even in the poor light, revealed as nothing else did how far away she was from any ideal state and how unhappy the last few months with Jay had really been. Like a file, he had worn away the edges of her personality so that what lay underneath was raw and sensitive to every emotional prick. She cried more easily, worried about what people thought, had dirtied herself forever by abetting him in robbing the defenseless Finkelstein who, had she wanted, could have been her prey for the seven years she had been in his employ. She didn’t need Jay to tell her that he was a sucker and like all suckers dependent upon human decency. At the same time, she did not harbor any genuine grievances against Jay for forcing her to conspire against him, to bleed him, for it seemed the natural, the obvious, way for them to improve their position. Her principles had not suffered as a result, but her mind and body had, she thought, because she could not undo the act of deceit without further dirtying herself, and destroying any hope of happiness she and Jay just might have.
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