“Sure. Is that you, Mr. Banana?”
Hearing Bessie in the hall he reluctantly discontinued this scintillating barrage of wit. There was another ring.
“I wouldn’t answer it,” advised Bessie, coming downstairs with Ruthie all slicked up for school.
A wicked smile illumined Irving’s countenance. “You’re right. Leave them ring. After a while, when they had enough, they’ll stop.”
As a prophet Irving was a great success. After a while when they had enough they did stop.
* * * *
“Where would you like to go tonight, kid?” he asked when Bessie met him at Opper’s for supper.
Bessie wondered what could have induced this reckless mood. She did not know how the recollection of scintillant bits of the morning’s repartee coming to him at odd moments had kept his spirits soaring all day. Maybe he was rotten, huh? Maybe you could impose on him, what? A coupla more times the same treatments and maybe after a while Mrs. Fisch puts in her own telephone. How mad that feller got! He had to chuckle every time he thought of it. The only hard luck was he had no one to tell such a joke to. Even Bessie wasn’t just the right one.
“Let’s go to the opera.” Bessie smiled at him across the table. “Caruso’s singing tonight.” He gave her a quick look, but seeing no trace of pernicious earnestness behind her jesting he replied in kind:
“Sure, kid, we’ll take a box. By the way, what’s the matter with your friend Mrs. Fisch? I thought her brother the fluter was going to give her tickets for the opera and she was going to take us sometimes?”
“Oh, she will.”
“Sure! You believe everybody. She only says that so she could use our telephone!”
Bessie frowned. “I admit it’s a nuisance having to call her to the phone. I almost wish I knew of a way to stop it.”
For some unaccountable reason her husband suddenly began to laugh.
When he came home the next night, Bessie was waiting for him at the door.
“You see, Irving”—she could scarcely wait to kiss him to tell him the good news—“Mrs. Fisch wasn’t bluffing about those opera tickets!”
“What do you mean—she really is going to take us?”
“Well, she would have, only yesterday morning when her brother phoned to offer her tickets for last night—well, you know how rotten the telephone service is nowadays? Well, a couple of times he got a wrong number and then one of those idiots that like to kid over the telephone got on his line—one of the boys from the vegetable market or somebody—and began to—Why, Irving, what are you doing?”
“Doing? Me? What should I be doing?”
“Why you threw your foot backward so hard I thought you were trying to kick yourself.”
“Listen! Can’t a man even have his foot go to sleep and try to wake it up without his wife right away thinking he’s kicking himself? Kicking myself! Such a idea!”
Bessie thought him unnecessarily snippy, but then, you can’t tell what a man’s been through to irritate him, and it doesn’t pay to be too particular.
* * * *
The only thing Sophie Garlic ever did that met with Irving’s entire approval was when she moved away from Flatbush. The fact that she named her firstborn after him didn’t make her cousin love her any more. To have your relations name after you such a loafer like Oivy Garlic is osser a compliment.
“And you had to begin with such people again,” he grumbled. “Such spongers—such—”
Bessie spoke through a mouthful of invisibles with which she was pinning on her net.
“They’re your family, dearie.”
“You don’t need to get personal, darling,” replied Irving, selecting a tie. “I was only inquiring what you needed to begin with her again?”
“I didn’t begin. Sophie phoned and asked if we were going to be home Sunday.”
“And you had to say right away yes.”
“Well, if I said no, they’d make it next Sunday. You know how Sophie is.”
“Do I know? And I suppose she’s gonna bring along that wild Indian—that street loafer—that—”
“Irvy? Of course. What else can she do with him?”
“Believe me, I could advise her. That fresser. Remember the last time how he et up the whole box of matzoth cookies my mother sent over extra for me? Sure. Laugh. By you it’s nothing. Everyone could walk on you!”
“I can’t help laughing. You got so mad. But cheer up, there are no matzoth cookies in the house.”
“Never mind, he’ll find something else. He’s the worst I ever seen. Remember what he done to the piano bench with the driller? And the hall paper? Don’t invite them overnight.”
“Heaven forbid! I couldn’t stand him more than a day myself. And poor Ruthie—”
Irving’s face grew purple. “If he lays a finger on that child I—”
Bessie patted his arm soothingly. “Maybe he’s not as bad as he used to be.”
“Sure.” Her husband pinched her under the chin to convey that he did not hold her entirely responsible. “Sure, maybe he’s worse.”
And he was right. If Oivy at five was the worst child Irving had ever seen it was only because he had never been privileged to behold Oivy at six. And you think the parents bothered their heads about him? Yo! Otto Garlic, the fat, was incased in a lethargy which nothing but the sight of food seemed to penetrate. And Sophie Garlic, the terror of the family, could never bring herself to say anything more scathing to her young hopeful than “Oivy dolling!” in response to which he was apt to consign her to a place to which nice little boys do not usually consign their parents—at least not out loud.
Dinner was a howling success—if you put the accent on the adjective. The only way Irving, at the head of the table, could eat at all was by turning halfway round in his chair so his eyes could not behold the depravity beside him. But nothing could keep his ears from hearing the lusty and almost continuous serenade Oivy’s feet beat against the mahogany table.
“Sophie!” he had to plead once or twice. “Please! Tell the boy he shouldn’t knock with his feet on the table. It makes a mark.”
Whereupon Sophie, with a look which did not conceal her opinion of people who thought more of mahogany tables than of little boys, would deliver her futile “Oivy dolling!” and all went merrily as before.
Irving began to fray all along his nerves. And when a forkful of spinach plus hard-boiled egg so far failed of its original destination as to land on the Chinese blue rug, even Bessie was shaken somewhat from her position of perfect hostess and uttered an aggrieved “Oh!”
As for Annie, from the moment the contents of a tilted soup plate profaned the virgin whiteness of her clean cloth and centerpiece she had never been the same. Only Otto Garlic, napkin under chin, continued placidly to consume food, unmoved by the atmospheric disturbances about him.
It was Ruthie, however, who suffered most. Her instinct, inheritance, training—her most sacred feelings and traditions were outraged. Her mutely questioning eyes traveled continually from the persistently averted glance of her mother to the breath-destroying spectacle opposite, and so great was her horror that she almost forgot to eat her ice cream.
“Mamma!” was wrung at length from her well-ordered, six-year-old little soul when the prodigy picked up his almost empty plate and, applying it like a plaster to his face, proceeded to eradicate the final traces of ice cream. “Mamma! Ain’t he a goop!”
The pent-up suffering in Irving exploded. “Ha, ha! Ho, ho, ho! Haw—”
“Ruthie! Irving!” began Bessie, but the young iconoclast needed none of her championing.
“I ain’t a goop, you—” he retorted, at the same time propelling his now superfluous plate in the direction of his youthful critic.
It was only after the two youngsters had been sent upstairs to play that apparent harmony was restore
d with the coffee. And even then it was not so apparent as to be palpable. Sophie Garlic still bore on her face traces of her opinion of a cousin who could be so rough and shake a little feller that was only mischievous, but didn’t have a bad bone in his body. Irving, still ravaged by the rage in which he had risen to the defense of his own, sulked at the recollection of how he had been called off before he had shaken more than half the life out of that young loafer that smashed one of the best ice-cream plates and nilly—very nilly, mind you—did so on the countenance of Irving’s only child! Even Bessie’s fingers itched with the desire to shake somebody, were it only her own husband for being such a boor! Only Otto Garlic, raising his watery eyes one moment to the carnage, found no difficulty in regaining his accustomed poise, and you could hear how he really enjoyed his third cup of coffee after he had poured it into his saucer.
However, it has often been stated with undeniable logic and truth that all things come to an end in this world, and so did dinner and the afternoon and even the supper, less hectic but quite as uncomfortable as dinner, with Ruthie tearful and Oivy truculent, and everyone’s nerves on edge—that is, everyone who had nerves—and the ghosts of the dinner’s unpleasantness hovering in the air. Right after supper Bessie propelled in the direction of her room her outraged daughter, smarting for the first time in her young career under contact with the injustice of a world wherein so much wickedness could go unscathed—a world wherein the good and pure were sent to bed at seven o’clock while monsters of evil who called out bad names and broke dishes and kicked with their feet and hit their mothers back were permitted to stay up, apparently, ad lib.
At last the Garlics decided to go, and Bessie called Irving, who had disappeared upstairs. Otto opened the front door.
“It’s raining,” he remarked, making a discovery which Irving had made somewhat earlier. Sophie pushed Otto aside as though his opinion were utterly worthless on so weighty and subtle a matter.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “so it is! You’ll have to loan me an umbrella, Bessie.”
Bessie glanced at her husband, who remained strangely passive.
“Of course we’ll let you have an umbrella.”
“I don’t think,” casually remarked Irving, absorbed in the intricate problem of blowing air through a faulty pipestem, “that we got a umbrella in the house.”
“Not—”
“No. You see”—he turned confidentially to his guests—“she’s always loaning them away, and you know how it is with umbrellas.”
“But, Irving—”
By that time Bessie had opened the closet. Diogenes himself would not have undertaken to find an umbrella in Apfel’s hall closet!
Bessie, her head a mortified red, sent her husband a long look, which he, unfortunately, failed to receive because of his great preoccupation with his pipe.
He did not deem it necessary, furthermore, to reply to her next remark, to the effect that she could have sworn she put three umbrellas in that closet. But Mrs. Garlic vouchsafed bitterly that her hat would be ruined without an umbrella.
“Irving!” Irving with a look of unimpeachable innocence met her gaze: “Look upstairs and see if you can’t find an umbrella anywhere.”
“There’s none here,” he called down later in a voice which fairly vibrated with distress.
A few moments passed and then he heard the front door bang. A weak, shuddering sigh escaped him.
“Bessie!” He couldn’t wait to come downstairs. “Bessie!” he called. “You’ll die laughing when you hear how I fooled them son of a guns—” There was a moment’s heavy silence. Then: “Come down and tell us all,” said Bessie evenly. “The folks are staying overnight.”
Irving stood there—turned to stone—the ghastly mask of a laugh frozen on his features. At last, still in a daze, he descended the stairs.
“Fooled who?” inquired Sophie Garlic.
Heaven knows what he would have said if not for his Bessie!
“You mean the time you fooled the Marian Feather Company? You told me about that this morning.”
“Oh!” said Irving.
“Oh!” said Sophie.
“I’ll tell the folks, while you go next door and ask the Yittelmans if you can use their spare room. The folks are going to sleep in our bed.”
Still somewhat dazed, he started to do her bidding. A need for steadying himself made him pause in the kitchen.
“Hate to put you out,” he heard Otto say.
“Well, we couldn’t very well go home in the rain.” From Sophie.
“You’re not putting us out,” Bessie replied. “Irving doesn’t mind asking the Yittelmans. We always exchange favors with the neighbors.”
Irving did not go to the Yittelmans’.
After having prepared for herself the narrow couch in the card room Bessie came downstairs in her kimono and slippers and tried to reason with him:
“Why don’t you go and sleep at Yittelman’s, dear?”
“I don’t want to. I rather sleep here. This couch is very comf’table.”
“But you’ll get all cramped. It’s too short for you.”
“Well, I got to get used to a little inconvenience if I got a wife that invites spongers to stay overnight in my bed.”
“I didn’t invite them, darling. Sophie managed to invite herself. But why are you so obstinate? Mrs. Yittelman won’t mind doing us a favor.”
“No! I don’t want no favors.”
“Oh!” said Bessie suddenly; and she started to add something, but thought better of it and refrained.
In spite of his avowal that the couch was very comf’table Irving found it rather difficult to find a position that would accommodate his legs and at the same time do justice to his neck. He began to ponder whether, after all, it wouldn’t have been better to have loaned them an umbrella, and considered it the price of getting rid of them. And cheap at the price. Why, what they’d eat for breakfast alone was worth the cost of an umbrella, especially the busted cotton one he loaned from his mother’s once. Why didn’t he think of that busted cotton one of his mother’s?
But no—what’s right is right. It’s the principle of the thing! He was glad he had not been weak enough to ask the Yittelmans the favor of a bed. Rather stick to his principles even if his neck wasn’t exactly so comf’table.
At last he fell asleep. So right away Tootsie (who some way had found out it was he who had refused her the milk) comes and grabs his right leg in her teeth, and she don’t want to let go at all. And while he has his hands—not to mention his right leg—full with her, who should come along but young Oivy, and commences to call him names and at the same time begins to klopp him in the neck with a busted cotton umbrella that he found.
Irving awoke. His right leg was in genuine pain and his neck was very stiff. But it was not that which caused his heart to contract and a feeling of nausea to creep like an insidious wave over his entire body. No. It was a terrible thought, driving like a knife into the farthest tortured recesses of his soul—a thought the taste of which was as gall and wormwood on his tongue. The thought that if the Garlics should—and he could see no reason why they shouldn’t—by chance happen to move the pillows of their bed they could not fail to be edified by the spectacle that would greet their eyes. For bungler, idiot, schlemiehl that he was, he had forgotten, s’allen schlemazel, to remove certain things which in a moment of inspiration he had placed under those pillows for safekeeping. Certain things which the Garlics, unless they were suddenly stricken with total blindness and malignant amnesia, could not fail to recognize as umbrellas—two silk and one busted cotton. The three umbrellas, in short, that Bessie could have sworn she had put in the hall closet!
Is it a wonder Irving couldn’t sleep so very well that night?
* * * *
In April, all means of checking Ruthie’s cough having failed, Doctor Stone recomme
nded a change of air. So Irving had to commute to Myrtle Arbor, a farm owned by some friends out in Jersey. The reason the Danzigers had named their farm Moitle Harbor was probably because there was no sign of either myrtle or arbor on the place—on the same principle as those riddles wherein something always barks like a dog to make it harder to guess.
One Sunday afternoon the Yittelmans drove up in their car with Tootsie. Irving could grad have lived without them, but if it made Ruthie happy, schon, schon, let them come. Even Tootsie. Ruthie certainly had a gedille with Tootsie. She didn’t want to let them take her away at all. She wanted them to leave her up there. Did you ever hear such a nonsense? Irving was reasoning with her out on the porch, when Bessie joined him.
“Irving”—she spoke under her breath—“it’s blowing up cold. Don’t you want to lend Mr. Yittelman your gray sweater?”
“What? My new gray sweater that I just got?”
“It’s the only one we have to offer him.”
“And you know why.”
“It’s not Mr. Yittelman’s fault that your brother Miltie took the red one on his vacation and lost it.”
“I suppose it’s mine? No, Bessie, you know my feelings about this.”
“He might get pneumonia.”
Irving had no chance to reply, for at that moment Mr. Yittelman appeared.
“Well,” said that gentleman, his benignant smile breaking through his stubby gray beard, “oil we go. Thank you for a pleasant day and I wish Ruthie soon better—she don’t look so good today. Here, Toots!” he called, raising his voice. And Tootsie obediently left Ruthie’s side and waddled over.
Ruthie’s eyes, a trifle heavy all day, grew dangerously moist.
“Let Tootsie stay. Please! Don’t take Tootsie away.”
“Oh, Ruthie!” Bessie’s voice had the proper reproachful inflection. “Tootsie has to go home.”
Irving chimed in. “Mrs. Yittelman will bring her again sometime.”
“Sure,” agreed Mrs. Yittelman. “I bring her again sometime.”
“I don’t want her sometime. I want her now.”
“But, darling!” Bessie was the mortified parent. “You couldn’t take Tootsie to bed with you, could you?”
The Viola Brothers Shore Mystery Page 28