Corky's Brother

by Jay Neugeboren

  Finkel showed the professor around the three rooms, pointing out the improvements he had put in, the special items—extra bookcases, a used television set, a large oak rolltop desk. Professor Perlman thanked him and handed him a ten-dollar bill. “For your troubles,” he said.

  “Let me tell you something, Professor,” Finkel said, pocketing the money without comment. They were in the living room now and Finkel sat down in a large easy chair, Sasha at his feet. “You did the right thing. Don’t let anybody tell you no. It is not easy for old men to live alone. When Professor Hafer telephoned me and explained the situation, what with the commuting, the upkeep of a large house—believe me, I know the chores that go into mamtaining even a modest piece of property—I agreed with him that this was the wisest thing you could do. Give it up now.” He cleared his throat. “Sit down please, Professor,” he said. “Rest a little. You’re entitled—you’ve had a long trip, your apartment is in order, what is there for you to do?” The professor sat; Finkel leaned forward, his face suddenly intent. “And before we leave the subject, I hope you will accept my condolences upon the loss of your wife. Although I did not have the good fortune to know her, I understand from Professor Hafer and others that she was a fine woman. And the years. All those years spent together, Professor. Oh, the years, the years—”

  Finkel paused and, not knowing what else to do, Professor Perlman started to thank him. “Please,” Finkel said, putting up his hand. “There is no need to say anything. What are we to do at times like these? When my own wife died—that was three years ago this August—did words console me? Bah! Death is death.” He sat back. “Tell me, Professor, what are your plans?”

  “My plans?”

  “Now that you are alone. Let’s face it, a young man you’re not—how much longer will you teach?” The professor looked at him quizzically. “Come,” Finkel said. “Talk to me. It will do you good—you and me, Professor—two old men like us, despite the difference in our vocations, we have much in common. I can tell. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

  The professor nodded.

  “Tell me, are you a practicing Jew?”

  “No,” the professor said, and as he replied he could hear the antagonism in his own voice. “No, I’m not.”

  Finkel smiled. “The same for me,” he said. “You and me, we are psychological Jews, eh?—Like Freud, if you know what I mean. We hate the religion yet we are proud of our Jewishness. And why not? Why not, Professor Perlman?” His question was loud, belligerent—but before the professor could reply, Finkel was chuckling. “The way he was jealous of his wife before they were married—one day there was no letter in his mailbox and he was half insane! He picked her to pieces. That is Jewish. Martha, she was a good wife to him, very baia-batish, if you know what I mean.” Finkel paused, hoping for a reaction, but there was none. “That means that she was the queen of his household,” he said. “That the home was everything to her, that she was a good Jewish wife.”

  “I know what the word means,” Professor Perlman said sharply. Finkel looked away, smoothing Sasha’s fur. “Freud himself was quite haimisheh, you know,” the professor added quickly, and as Finkel’s face broke into a warm smile the professor wondered what had prompted his comment, the use of Yiddish…

  “Ah—” Finkel said. “You are quite right, of course. The way that man loved his children, his sisters, his wife. I thank God for one thing—that he died before the war. If he had known that he had left his four old sisters behind only to have them all incinerated like Sasha—” He raised both his hands toward the ceiling, his fingers trembling, outstretched. “I thank God for that, Professor Perlman. The man had suffered enough for one lifetime—betrayed by his followers, forced to leave his beloved Vienna, the endless pain and operations! Year after year they hacked and sawed at his mouth and jaw, removing everything. As if the first operation didn’t cause enough pain, eh? For how long, Professor, I ask you, for how many years did he suffer his cancer?”

  “Sixteen, I believe.”

  “I know, I know,” wailed Finkel. “And did anyone ever hear him complain? Not Freud. He was a man, Professor, I’ll tell you that. A human being and a Jew, if you know what I mean. Thirty-three operations he endured. The number is significant, eh, Professor Perlman?” His voice dropped. “But why do you think—why was such suffering brought to him? Why—?” Finkel was leaning forward, excited. “Anyone who has read your books would know the mystery in such a question, Professor. I ask you, did Moses get to enter the Promised Land? Why did Freud love Moses so? Because he too was Jewish, Professor. Moses and Monotheism. Moses the Egyptian, Moses the Gentile—but passionate, suffering, moral.” Finkel stood up, hovering above the professor, shaking his fist. “What does it matter how a man is born? Like you and me, Professor, like the great Freud himself, Moses was a psychological Jew—” He laughed then and, quite suddenly, bent over and shook the professor’s hand. “I must be going,” he said. “Though I have certainly enjoyed our talk. We will continue it—yes? As I said, we have a lot in common, you and me.” At the door he reminded the professor to call him the minute he had need of anything. “For minor electrical repairs I am merely competent,” Finkel said. “But as a plumber I am first-rate—I can assure you of that.” Sasha brushed against Professor Perlman’s leg, and then he was alone.

  He wanted to laugh but found that he couldn’t. Had the conversation really taken place? The professor shook his head, to clear it. He moved around the apartment slowly, purposefully—unpacking, arranging books and clothing, sorting papers—but he tired quickly, and lay down in the bedroom to rest. His right leg was hurting again and he massaged the calf. And now what, Professor Perlman, he wondered. Now what?

  As if in answer to the question, he heard somebody laugh. He sat up. It was a girl’s laugh, and it was followed by giggling, then some words, then more giggling. When the girl screamed, he swung his feet to the floor and listened carefully. The giggling started again, from the bathroom. “Not now, John,” the girl said. “Stop, please…John…Oh you!…” Above the toilet bowl, the professor saw, was a grating about ten inches square, and the sounds came from it. An air shaft, an exhaust?—Finkel could have told him its exact purpose. He closed the toilet and sat on the seat, listening. “I really have to study…John…I mean it…that tickles…Stop!…” Silence, heavy breathing, a low moan. The professor thought of his daughter, Barbara, in her senior year at Barnard. A thump against the wall. “Ow…watch it…that hurt…” Giggling. “I mean it, John, I have a test…” For the first time, words from the man “Okay, I have to go over some stuff for Perlman’s course…” The professor stood up. “Do you still like it?”…“Oh, yeah—he’s not too dynamic…I mean, you have to pay close attention, but he’s good, especially when he forgets his notes and just rambles about things—music or science. You should have heard him the other day, going on about Freud’s idea of the death wish!” Professor Perlman tried to place the voice, but it vanished in a sudden scraping of the wall, an “Ouch!” and furious laughter.

  He walked out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. He telephoned his daughter and asked if she would like to have dinner with him at the faculty club, but she said no, she had a surprise for him, he was to come to her apartment. “Oh,” she said. “I almost forgot. How’s your apartment?”

  “It’s all right. Fine, really.”

  “Good,” she said. “I have to do something now, okay, Daddy? Come over soon. Bye.”

  Downstairs, Finkel was waiting for him. Professor Perlman nodded, smiled weakly, and tried to pass, but Finkel stopped him, gripping his arm above the elbow. Sasha was at his feet, his head on his paws. The fur around his neck was gray; his eyes, the professor noticed, were outlined with a sticky white substance. “Ah, Professor,” Finkel said. “I was hoping you would come by. Have you eaten dinner yet?”

  “No.”

  “Then perhaps you would like to join me in my apartment. Roast leg of lamb!” He kissed his fingertips. “Very fine,
if I must say so myself.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Finkel,” the professor said. “But I already have a dinner engagement.”

  “Ah,” Finkel said. “A dinner engagement.—Is that different from dinner?” He laughed good-naturedly. “Don’t mind an old fool like me. But I mean it—when you are free some evening I will cook for us, all right?” He came closer. “Why not? Two old men like us, living in the same building, why shouldn’t we be friends, companions? We are both Jews, no?”

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” Professor Perlman said, pulling his arm from Finkel’s grip and hurrying from the building. He cut across the Columbia campus, vowing to speak to Fred Hafer in the morning about moving out of the building—but Fred would ask him why, he knew, and if he tried to explain about Finkel, Fred would only suggest again that he needed to relax, that perhaps he should consider taking a leave of absence for the rest of the semester.

  Barbara lived along Morningside Drive with another girl from Barnard, in one of the university-owned buildings, but when he arrived the girl was gone—to a concert, Barbara said—and in her place was a young man named David Shapiro. “I trust I’m not intruding.”

  “Don’t be silly—take your jacket off. David’s been helping me with the surprise. Guess what it is?” He said he didn’t know. “Roast duck!” she exclaimed proudly. “With orange—the way you like it.” She turned to go into the kitchen. “You and David talk while I get things ready. Dave, fix Father a drink—bourbon, straight. You know where everything is.”

  Then she was gone to prepare the dishes she had taken from her mother’s recipes, and he was left with her young man. David seemed very much at home. Too much so? He sat down and lectured himself silently for the thought. Let the girl lead her own life. Don’t judge. Don’t advise. For God’s sake, don’t pressure her! Naomi’s death was no easy thing to adjust to. She was an only child. They had been very close. Then too, hadn’t he and Naomi lived together for two years before marriage? He smiled, remembering. She had been a student of his in a graduate seminar. The boy seemed nice enough. He asked him what he did. “Don’t you remember me?” David asked. “I was in your seminar on Elizabethan poetry last year.”

  “Of course,” he said, laughing. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m a little distracted this evening—what with moving—and—”

  “That’s all right,” David said, and began telling the professor about his graduate courses, his ideas for papers, his projects. Professor Perlman tried to appear attentive. His lecture classes were large, but the seminar had had only twelve students. Why didn’t he remember the boy?

  “Are you retiring this year?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Retiring—I’d heard you might.” “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the boy said. “I know you can retire at sixty-three if you want, that’s why—”

  “No, no—I intend to teach to the end,” he said. “To the end.”

  They ate quietly and the professor enjoyed listening to their gentle teasing, their intense opinions. David asked him if he had ever written about something they had discussed once in the seminar. “Eros, entropy, and the Elizabethans,” David explained to Barbara. “That was the phrase your father used—the affinities between the Elizabethan notion of the love-death relationship and Freud’s. Your father pointed out that just as the seventeenth-century belief in the unity of love and death was related to their belief in the decay of the world, so Freud’s notion of the union of Eros and Thanatos was allied to the modern idea of entropy—” He held a fork in front of him, pieces of duck impaled on its prongs, and talked on. Professor Perlman pretended to listen but found himself annoyed. After dinner, saying he had more unpacking to do, he left. Barbara said she would call him the next day, that she wanted to make curtains for his apartment.

  He walked across the campus and down Broadway to 115th Street, but once he was in the building he could not remember which floor he lived on. His name was not listed on the register above the mailboxes—but on three of the boxes—8A, 8F, and 9C—names were missing, and he assumed one of the three was his. He rode the elevator to the eighth floor and listened at the door of 8A. Voices. He tried 8F. Voices again. He walked up a flight of stairs, found 9C, and, hearing nothing, tried the key in the lock. The door opened and he turned on the light. At his feet, he saw, was an envelope. It had his name typed on it and, relieved to discover that he was in the right apartment, he opened it.

  “Received from Professor Jerold M. Perlman the Sum of Ten Dollars ($10) for Services Rendered.” It was signed, “Hy-man Finkel, Superintendent.”

  In the bathroom, brushing his teeth, he looked at the grating and, as he did, the giggling resumed. “Stop! Jesus, John, I mean it…” Silence, then softly: “Please, John…please…oh…” He rinsed his mouth. At least, he thought, looking at his teeth in the mirror, he didn’t have to use dentures yet. “Honest,” came the boy’s voice. “It’ll help you relax for your test…” He closed the door quickly and made up his bed with clean sheets; he undressed, locked his door, tried to sleep. He thought of Naomi. Naomi and Finkel and then Sasha. In his old age, he recalled, Freud had come to love dogs, had become dreadfully attached to them. When one of them died—a chow, if he remembered correctly—he had written to Jones that he’d felt the loss more deeply than that of most human beings.

  He was up at eight the next morning. To his surprise, he felt good—vigorous, fresh—and he busied himself with notes for the day’s classes. At half past ten he left the apartment. Finkel was in the lobby, repairing a light fixture. He climbed down from his ladder.

  “Ah, Professor,” he said, stopping Perlman. “I was hoping I would catch you this morning. As you see, I am alone. Sasha is not feeling well—he spent a restless night. Very restless.”

  “I really must be going,” Professor Perlman said, walking away. “I have a class.”

  Finkel caught up with him at the door. “Please. It will only be a minute—and quite useful to you, you will see. Quite useful.” Finkel stopped and looked back into the lobby, to be sure they were not overheard. Professor Perlman found him particularly repulsive; he noticed the yellow teeth, long hairs protruding from the nostrils, a mole. Finkel wiped some mucus away with the back of his hand and spoke. “I meant to ask you this yesterday, when we were talking about your wife, but for some reason it slipped my mind. A slip of the mind—that is significant, no?” He laughed and came closer. “I am very curious about something, if it is not too personal, Professor. Tell me—your wife, how was she disposed of?”

  Perlman pushed him away and jerked the door open. Finkel clasped his hand on the back of Perlman’s and pushed on it, closing the door. “Of course, if this is very personal to you, I will respect your privacy. Let me be direct, Professor. What I am after is this—was she buried or was she cremated?”

  “Buried.”

  “Ts, ts, ts,” Finkel said. “Very bad. But,” he added, shrugging, “that may have been her wish. What I am most interested in, really—what I can be of service to you for, is this—here is why I stopped you: what are your plans for yourself?”

  “Mr. Finkel, if you don’t mind, I must hurry to class.” The professor tried to get away but Finkel barred the door with his body.

  “I ask only this of an important thinker like yourself, Professor Perlman. That you give the idea of cremation your serious consideration. I have some literature in my apartment which I will leave for you in your mailbox—but is there really need for it? Bah! Did not Freud himself specify his own cremation? And do not his ashes now he collected in one of his favorite Grecian urns?” Finkel opened the door and the professor welcomed the fresh air. “Go to your class, Professor. But I beg of you—give the matter your consideration. Death is no insignificant thing. It is something to think about.”

  When Professor Perlman returned from class that afternoon the literature was, as Finkel had promised, in his mailbox. He tore it to shreds without looking at it, and tri
ed to figure out what to do. It was a convenience, living near the campus, true, near Barbara—and he did not relish returning to the empty house Naomi and he had spent the last twenty years in. Even if he did, the agent said he already had a buyer.

  He had, though, to avoid Finkel. For the next few days he was successful. If, when he left the building, Finkel was in the lobby, he would go down to the basement and exit through the cellar; if he saw Finkel in front of the building when he returned home, he would go back to his office and work there. Such games made him feel ludicrous but he felt he had no choice. For perhaps a week he evaded Finkel, and Finkel, for his part, did not seem to pursue him. He felt better. One afternoon, however, he returned home to discover that he had locked himself out and forgotten the key. Such forgetfulness, he knew, was no mere accident. He sighed, went into the basement, and roused Finkel from his apartment. “Ah, Professor,” Finkel said as they rode up in the elevator, Sasha nuzzling against Perl-man’s leg. “Have you considered the literature I gave to you? I have been so busy since the last time we spoke that I did not have a chance to get back to our discussions—first the oil burner went crazy, then there was a fire in Mrs. Gottbaum’s gas range. When things begin, they do not stop, I’ll tell you that.” When Finkel had opened the door, he walked into the apartment and sat down. “So,” he said. “What is your decision?” Perlman told him that he hadn’t given the matter much thought. “All right, all right,” Finkel said, wagging his finger at Perlman, “but don’t say I didn’t give you a chance! Time is time, Professor. It goes.” Then suddenly he was on his feet, inspecting the bookcases. “A fine library,” he said. “Let me ask you something—what is your opinion of the relation of art to death?”