“You sound like an anti-Semite,” Robert said. “And what was I supposed to say to you? You adapt. You try to give people a chance, and you adapt.”
“I don’t look like you,” Barry said, placing the last of the bacon on a paper towel to drain off the grease. “Or I don’t look like you used to look, before you became Casper the Hairy Ghost. People don’t line up to be my friend like they do to be yours.”
“You always had more friends than I did.”
“Yeah, but you had quality friends.” Barry began taking the food to the table. “I always admired that about you. I had to offer people incentives.”
“What did you ever offer Victor Lampshade?”
“I’m talking women. The first girl who slept with me, it was for the weed, I’m sure. Look at the first girl you brought home. Perfect. I never saw another one like that, not before or since.”
Robert looked away, and Barry bowed his head. “Sorry,” he said. “Eat your eggs. That was insensitive of me.”
The bacon burned his fingers. As soon as they were old enough, the brothers had snuck off to Mayfair, to a diner where they feasted on salty, crunchy bacon and ham and every other food their mother didn’t let in the house. Their kitchen was not kosher, but she would only go so far, and pork was too far. Which was more forbidden to them—eating bacon or paying for a meal? He hadn’t known, but he’d loved both.
They ate their breakfast now on newly acquired plastic dishes in bright, children’s-birthday-party colors. Where had Barry gotten these?
“I was up at City College yesterday. So much energy. And everybody works and goes to school. It’s a place to regroup and prepare for my big moment.”
“Your big moment?”
“When I show up everyone and become a huge success,” Barry said. “On my own terms. I got some ideas, and I do have one big advantage over you, you know. People underestimate me.”
“Yeah, clearly my reputation for competency has paved the way for all this,” Robert said, gesturing around the room.
“Anyway, this was the right move. Manhattan is my place. Filthy, broke, corrupt, yes, but does anyplace reward elbow grease and a little ingenuity more than this one?” Barry asked. “And somebody has to look after you. I swear, Robert, you scare small children.” He cut Robert another piece of cake. “Another piece won’t hurt you.” He scooped out the cake with a spatula, holding it out for Robert to take. Barry’s large brown eyes pleaded with his brother to eat. “Think about how good life can be sometimes,” he said. “It can be, you know? It really can be.” And Robert took the sticky piece of cake in his hand and placed it on his plate.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Nixon
Barry diligently attended City College, and got As in everything; he’d always been effortlessly, frustratingly smart. But he couldn’t settle into a major because everything interested and excited him. While Robert had spent college searching for the singular passion that would carry him into a career, Barry was as passionate about Biology as he was about Nineteenth-Century Romantic Poetry or Economics or History of Art.
“When I die,” Barry told Robert, “I want my tombstone to say, ‘Here lies Barry Vishniak. He knew what was good.’ And how am I going to know what’s good if I don’t try everything?”
“You can’t try everything.”
“Says who?” he asked. There weren’t many jobs, anyway, and no particular urgency to his degree. He enjoyed school while making a tidy living in the one business that was inflation proof. The apartment had been abuzz since his brother moved in—doorbell and phone ringing while endless varieties of people paced the halls, clutching their cash. One day Barry came home with a large machine that took over the table where the phone stood. “The Phone-Mate,” he said. “It answers the telephone for you and takes a message. How about that?”
“No one calls me.”
“Well, people call me,” Barry said. “And it’s important that I know about it. Anyway, it wouldn’t kill you to extend yourself a bit. There’s a whole city of people out there.”
“I’ve seen them. They stand in our hallway and shake,” Robert said. “And no thank you.”
After that, the small red light on the machine seemed always to be blinking: Janice, Rashid, Allison, Chester. Endless first names, no message. Barry would have to call them back.
“Why not major in business?” Robert asked. “You seem good at that, in your way.”
“Maybe I will,” Barry said. “But that shouldn’t stop me from taking anthropology if I feel like it. Or physics, for that matter. This system is flawed. A college education is too narrow.”
“And if you had an estate, an income, and an inherited seat in the House of Lords, then your argument would have merit. But Renaissance men went out of fashion in —”
“—the fucking Renaissance?” Barry asked, cutting him off.
Who was he to lecture? With the gas crunch taking a bite out of his profits and Barry prompting him endlessly to live a little, to try to put his sorrow behind him, he was no longer satisfied driving all night and getting nowhere; but he wasn’t ready to change, either. Meanwhile, Barry received a beat-up used car in a barter and the two brothers drove home to see their parents.
NIXON WAS SCHEDULED TO make a television address on the Paris Peace Accords. Their mother was in the kitchen cleaning up from dinner. Robert and Barry, having helped their father into his old recliner by the door, sat on the couch. Barry egged Vishniak on, ranting about how he couldn’t believe it would be this asshole and the turncoat Kissinger who’d get the credit for ending the war, and then he went upstairs to use the bathroom before the broadcast. Vishniak turned toward Robert and said in a low voice: “This cabdriving, Robert. It’s gone on too long.”
“What do you mean, Pop?” Robert asked. It was a strange non sequitur from talk of the president, usually a foolproof topic.
“You driving a cab, it’s too close to home. Do I have to spell it out for you?”
Robert stared at his father’s face, illuminated by the table lamp. Barry looked more like Vishniak, with his pudgy cheeks and smaller nose, but both sons had their mother’s brown-black eyes, whereas Vishniak’s eyes were a washed-out blue. He was back at the PO now, working part-time at a desk job, and he looked tired again, though not as tired as he’d looked when Robert was a child.
“Don’t be a failure like your father, Robert,” he said. “You think I wanted to end up working at the post office?”
“You’re not a failure, Pop,” Robert said, patting his father’s shoulder.
“A monkey could do my job.”
“Jesus, Pop, have a little mercy!” Robert pleaded. Then Barry returned—Barry, who, according to their parents, was a full-time student, though a slow one. No questions would be asked of Barry unless he requested money, which he wouldn’t. Only Robert, the oldest child, had to shoulder their hopes and expectations. Stacia came in then and turned on the television. There was black-and-white static at first, and then slowly the president’s face came into focus, his receding hairline forming a dark point in the center of his forehead. Robert stared at the screen, stricken by what his father had said.
BACK IN NEW YORK, there was talk of another taxi strike, and his uncle took him out for a beer and announced that he was getting out of the business, would be going to school part-time to get a teaching degree. Robert could now have the cab more during the day, and during rush hour. That spring, he spent more time in the world of the daytime people—well-dressed, educated, mostly sweet-smelling professionals trying to escape the filthy subway cars covered in the endless hieroglyphics of the poor. Even in a recession, Robert delivered them to upscale restaurants where well-dressed couples sat by the windows toasting each other. For the first time in years, Robert thought of Tracey. He’d done this to himself, placed himself on the outside looking in, when his degree should have put affluence and ease more within his reach than ever.
And then his uncle would want the car again for a r
andom day, and he’d be thrust back into the late-night crowd—women fleeing bad dates; parents with a sick child, unable to get an ambulance to come to their neighborhoods; men, and they were mostly men, who did their business under cover of darkness. So many of them desperate, hopeless, lost. And Robert heard the voice again in his head, the one that had been silent for so long—get out of here, save yourself, make money, make money, make money.
He heard the voice and realized how, after two years, he was so tired of fingers permanently black with ink from handling cash, of crazy hours and cleaning crusted bodily fluids off vinyl. He wanted to work when other people worked, go out to dinner at restaurants that proclaimed their names in fancy gold script above the entrance and used starched white tablecloths and heavy silverware; he wanted to go to the theater and he wanted to ride in cabs as a passenger. Most of all he wanted to go to bed when it was actually dark outside, and make love to a beautiful woman, more than one even, who wouldn’t put up with a man that arrived at seven in the morning and slept until one.
But what, exactly, would get him from where he was to where he wanted to be? In the end, the person most helpful in guiding him to his future was someone who, over the years, Robert, Barry, and their mother had come to know almost as a family member: Richard Nixon. The end of 1973 brought Watergate, the hearings, the articles, the public knowledge of what the two young journalists, men not so much older than Robert, had uncovered.
Robert had been stuck in rush-hour traffic with a mother and her screaming toddler when news came over the radio that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had resigned, and even the child had gone silent, sensing that something unusual was happening. Driving an elderly couple to one of the big apartment buildings on Fordham Road, he’d listened to John Dean III tell Samuel Dash about the official enemies list, could picture the committee leaning forward, trying not to breathe into their microphones. And when Nixon gave his “I am not a crook” speech, Robert had just cashed out for the night, but continued driving with his cab light off so he could hear the words for himself, the bathos of them, the insistence.
Nixon had been a litigator, and most of them were lawyers—Dean, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Mitchell. Robert’s customers aimed their anger and betrayal at the profession, telling endless lawyer jokes: “Did you hear the tragedy about the bus full of lawyers that went over a cliff? There was an empty seat.” “What’s five hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A start.”
Robert would always laugh, because you laughed at customers’ jokes, but he found himself strangely uplifted by the questions of the Senate Watergate Committee and their chief counsels. As 1973 turned to 1974, and Nixon still would not turn over the tapes, it was the Supreme Court that stepped in, insisting. And the House Judiciary Committee—again, lawyers—passed the articles of impeachment. The checks and balances had gotten the nation somewhere. The president announced he would resign, the Plumbers were in jail, and America was still intact. The scandal hadn’t culminated in a revolution, only a television broadcast.
* * *
THEY COULD HEAR THE NOISE halfway up the walk. Robert and Barry found the screen door unlocked and, entering the house, were not greeted by the usual kisses and enthusiasm but rather by grunted hellos as the crowd stayed in their seats, focused on the screen. The children had lined up Indian style on the floor. His mother passed around buttered popcorn and glasses of seltzer and black cherry soda. Uncle Frank continued adjusting the large V of the antennae, and Aunt Lolly and Uncle Fred moved over to make room for Robert on the couch. Barry sat on the floor with the children. When the man himself appeared, Vishniak, from his recliner, announced proudly that with this new television, they could see every pore on his nose.
“That’s the Japanese for you,” Uncle Frank interjected, and was immediately shushed.
In the end, the speaker was subdued as he met the eyes of the nation. He spoke in a calm, unreadable monotone and the audience on Disston Street, waiting for something ironic or angry or apologetic to react to, began, slowly, to deflate.
“—as president, I must put the interest of America first,” he said, and now, tired of waiting, the children threw popcorn at the screen. The president told the nation that leaving was abhorrent to every instinct in his body. The adults fidgeted, wanting him to say the words, already, that he was in fact a crook and that he was sorry. They wanted him to cry and beg forgiveness. Instead, he talked about his accomplishments, about China and the Middle East and the Soviet Union, and about having brought the troops back from Vietnam. Finally, just when they were ready to give up, he said that he was resigning, that he hoped to speed the process of healing, and ended with “may God’s grace be with you in all the days ahead.”
When the scene abruptly changed to Gerald Ford standing in front of a large suburban mansion in Virginia, they all looked at each other as if unsure what had just happened.
“He barely admitted to doing anything,” Uncle Fred announced.
“He was angrier when he lost to Kennedy,” Stacia said. “At least then he had spunk.”
“Don’t you see?” Robert asked, and all eyes turned to him. If the pronouncements of a cabdriver were little regarded outside these walls, here, as the only person in the room with a college degree, his opinion still meant something. “He’s beaten down like a dog. They’ve taken everything from him. Now he’ll go home and cry with his wife.”
“And a lot of comfort she’ll be,” Aunt Lolly remarked.
His analysis cheered them a bit, and halfway through Ford’s speech the men turned the volume down while the women went into the kitchen to get more cake. The handful of children danced around the table, waiting as if at a birthday party.
Robert felt celebratory, too. For the first time in almost four years, he had plans. He would tell his parents after everyone left: he was applying to law school. What else could a boy do who had ambition but no specific passion, intelligence but no concrete skills? Where could he use a liberal-arts degree and a tendency to see the worst in every situation? How had he not realized this before? Journalism degrees were fashionable that year, inspired by the profession’s finest hour, but Robert still didn’t want to save the world. He only wanted to save himself.
The Vishniaks and Kupferbergs might have been disappointed at the tenor of the speech, but within moments they’d bounced back, and the room was filled with laughter. Robert’s father moved slowly, using a cane—he was wearing the prosthesis, so that to the careful observer his pants fit oddly, the material strangely looser on the synthetic leg—but he managed, with surprising deftness, to pour cherry brandy into shot glasses, which then made their way around the room. He was not supposed to drink it, but he snuck in thimblefuls. No one was going to stop him.
“How do they drink that cheap shit?” Barry said to Robert, refusing a glass that came to him. “Hey, Pop!” he yelled out over the din. “You got any slivovitz?”
A roar of approval went up from the crowd.
Robert watched them with a strange sense that all, for once, was as it should be. They were a family built for the 1970s. His parents and their siblings, alumni of the Great Depression, understood recession, unemployment, and high gas prices. They mostly held government jobs for low but secure salaries—drove public buses, delivered mail, read meters. Stacia, calling them into the dining room to eat, was, Robert noted, as close to cheerful as he’d ever seen her. She hadn’t voted for the bum either time, nor had anyone in her family. She didn’t own a car! Even her stove was electric! It was as if she had always known.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Law school
The air conditioner trilled loudly in the shop on Sixth Avenue just off Twelfth Street, as the elderly man with a twirled mustache, in a shirt and bow tie, cut Robert’s facial hair with a scissors, getting it short enough to shave. The shaving cream he used smelled of lime. Robert enjoyed being shaved and washed and taken care of more than he’d expected—for the last three years, he had wanted just the opposite, but now he
remembered how people lived, could live.
In a few weeks, he would start law school at New York University. He’d chosen it over Columbia because it was cheaper but still highly rated, and the class hours would allow him to catch a few nights driving the cab for extra money, if needed; the three thousand dollars he’d saved from driving would not get him through three years of school, and he still had undergraduate loans. He associated Columbia University and the Upper West Side with the last few years, and though he would continue to live there—his rent was too cheap to pass up, especially with Barry as his roommate—he was ready now to invest his hopes in a new neighborhood, a new identity, a new slice of Manhattan.
When the barber was done, he dusted the back of Robert’s neck with powder, tickling his skin with a horsehair brush. Robert’s face tingled, and he felt the coolness from the air-conditioning on his neck. In the mirror, he saw a version of his face that had not been visible for almost four years: a dramatic face with a strong jaw and neatly trimmed eyebrows arching over dark eyes that stared back at him with even more determination than he remembered. There were a few lines in the corners of his eyes that had not been there before, and a few gray hairs, too. In short, this was the face of a full-grown man, and the small touches of age, the hollows of his longer, more angular face, suited him. “There you go,” the barber said. “From Sasquatch to Cary Grant in under an hour. What a transformation.” Then the barber went to a drawer, took out a boxy Polaroid camera, and snapped Robert’s picture. While waiting for it to develop, the barber undercharged him—the longhair fad was killing business and Robert would be a good advertisement, he said, to the younger people. “Tell your friends,” he added, as Robert stumbled out into the hot summer street, shorn and vulnerable. A woman came toward him, her clogs making an odd clomping on the sidewalk; she was an attractive blonde in jean shorts and a red tank top, and she asked him if he had the time. He told her it was 3:00 p.m., and she lingered for a moment, as if expecting something, then she pointed to the barber’s window. “Hey, you know, that guy’s putting your picture up in his window.”
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