I saw them coming toward us now. There were about a dozen guys, and I could make out faces.
“Are you totally nuts?” I said. “Get inside your damned house. Those guys’U beat shit out of you.”
“If that will satisfy their animal desires, then perhaps—”
“Don’t be an ass—get inside, Izzie. They’ll kill youl”
He didn’t move. I whirled around. The guys were almost to us now—some of them were on the basketball team with me, and the rest were jocks from the football team. I looked back at Izzie. His eyes weren’t shifting. Instead, he had this weird smile on his face, and he just kept puffing away on his cigar, blowing smoke rings.
“You’re the first one here,” Hank Ebel said to me. “That means you got rights to go at him first, Howie.”
“Ah, lay off, huh?” I said. “You’ll just get in trouble if you do anything to him—”
“I need no defenders!” Izzie shouted. His voice was strong. “Let them have their way with me. We are in the arena, Howie!”
“You’re not gonna take up for him, are ya, Howie?” Stan Reiss asked. I looked at the others—Harvey Rosen, Jerry Charyn, Vic Fontani. “No,” I said. “No—but I’m not—I’m not gonna let you guys get yourselves in trouble. Just leave him be.”
“Bullshit.”
One of the guys made a move toward Izzie and I backed up, spreading my arms out to protect him. He screamed. “Let me alone, Howie—I can fight my own battles. Let me alone! Let these boors tear me apart for telling them the truth. Let me alone. Let me alone…”
One of the football players grabbed at me to shove me aside, but I didn’t move.
“Look, Howie,” he said. “We got nothin’ against you—but if you don’t let us get him, we’re gonna have to get you too.”
“Okay,” I said. I meant it—but I knew already that it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to be able to help Izzie. Still, I stood my ground, more tired than defiant. Somebody grabbed at my shoulder and I shook him off. Someone came at me from the other side and I swung. Then they were on me. They didn’t hit me much. Just grabbed me by the legs and arms. I fought and swung but there were too many of them. They dragged me away and a few of them sat on me while the rest took care of Izzie.
It didn’t take them long. I heard him laughing, shouting something—poetry, I guess—and then I heard him scream. He really howled! You could hear windows shding open in all the apartment houses on the block.
The guys let me up a second later and they took off down the street. Izzie was lying next to the lamppost. His lips were moving, producing a strange sound—I couldn’t tell if it was whimpering or laughing. I got him under one arm and helped him into his building and up the stairs. When we got into the apartment and his mother saw him, she nearly fainted. I told her to call a doctor, but she was too paralyzed to do anything. Miriam came out of her room then, and while she got Izzie to a couch in the living room, I telephoned. Izzie’d been pretty well mashed up around his face—and his left arm hung limply. While I held a compress on his eye, Miriam coaxed her mother into the bedroom and got her to lie down. Then she came back in. I looked at her, shrugging to indicate that I was sorry—hoping she’d know I didn’t have any part of it. “When it snows it pours,” she said. “Where’s it all gonna end, is what I want to know. You ever see anything like us?” She seemed in command and I just did what she told me to, getting Mercuro-chrome and Band-Aids from the bathroom. She had a ballpoint pen stuck in her hair right over her ear, and her sweater was loose. “I’m glad we weren’t working tonight, is all. I just don’t know sometimes, Howie, you know what I mean?” Izzie blinked and smiled at us. “You jerk,” Miriam said to him, and he smiled bigger. She talked to me like my own sister. “Like, where’s it all gonna end, Howie?” I shrugged again, and she seemed to take this for a good enough response. Her mother started crying from the other room, chanting in Yiddish about Izzie and Izzie’s father. “See what I mean?” Miriam said, and she left me. It was crazy, in the middle of everything, but I realized that for the last few minutes my eyes had been fastened right on her chest, as if I’d noticed for the first time what an enormous pair of knockers she had.
“Well, well, Howie my friend,” Izzie began. His voice cracked. “I—I suppose I cannot say Et tu, Brute—”
In the other room I could hear Miriam. “Shush, shush—you worked hard today, Momma—you take it easy. It’s okay, Momma. I’ll take care of everything. It’s okay…”
I kept thinking that Izzie’s mother was really his grandmother. His bottom hp was already swollen to twice its size and both his eyes were starting to close. I got more ice from the kitchen. When I came back, the door to Mrs. Cohen’s room was closed and Miriam was washing up some blood from the couch. She shook her head, and drew in deeply on a cigarette. I kept my eyes off her chest. “There are real idiots in this world, aren’t there, Howie? I mean—”
The doctor came in a little while and I was glad. He examined all of Izzie’s cuts and swellings, put his arm in a sling, and told him to come to the office the next day for X-rays. When he left, Izzie and I went into his room together and Miriam left us alone. The whole time the doctor had been there, Izzie had seemed cocky. As soon as he got into his room, though, he collapsed, just sort of folding and dropping to the floor. I lifted him to his chair and he opened his eyes halfway. He was shivering and I threw a blanket over his shoulders.
“Should I call the doctor again?” I asked. “Or get Miriam?”
He shook his head from side to side. He seemed totally sober now and he gave me a long look, as if he were trying to tell me he couldn’t figure out why it had turned out this way either. I got him to lay down on his bed, under the covers, and then I left. “You try to sleep,” I said. “Maybe I’ll stop by in a few days.”
Mr. Goldstein was on critical for a week, and then he began to improve. He didn’t come back to school, though. I got a Graduation card from him that June. Izzie returned to classes about a week and a half later and, to my surprise, nobody paid much attention to him. We were all too busy worrying about the playoffs and which colleges we would be going to—events passed pretty quickly in those days. Izzie got a state scholarship and was supposed to go to Columbia the next fall, but when I was home for Thanksgiving during my first year at college my mother told me that he’d dropped out of school and was living at home.
The next time I saw him was at the end of my first year of college. I’d driven home with some guys who were on the freshman team with me and I took them over to the P.S. 92 schoolyard to show them around. I’d improved during my first year of college and I didn’t have much trouble with the Erasmus players. There were some other guys at the schoolyard who played college ball, and I could hold my own with them too. I’d developed a good outside shot and it surprised a lot of the guys who’d known me at Erasmus. My friends and I played a few games and then we started to leave.
“Hey, Howie—you see your friend Izzie lately?” one of the Erasmus players asked.
“No.”
“There he is. Didn’t you notice? He’s a real star now.”
The guy laughed and I looked where he’d pointed. On the other side of the wire fence, at the far end of the playground, I could see a bunch of grade-school kids playing basketball. I had to squint at first. Then I recognized him. He was playing with a group of little kids. Some of them were already taller than he was. I turned away quickly.
“One thing you gotta admit—he’s got the best set-shot of all of ’em!”
Everybody laughed.
The Child
THE CHILD had not been wanted. He said they couldn’t afford it yet; she said they hadn’t done all the things they had planned to do. They thought, during the second month, of giving up the child, but decided against it. They agreed that she would continue to teach until the seventh month, and they told each other that they would love the child anyway, that somehow things would work out.
As the months went by and the child beg
an to grow inside her, Helen changed; not only did she begin to forget about the many things they had hoped to do while still not “burdened” with children, but she found that she was beginning to look forward to becoming a mother. “Maybe it was best this way, honey,” Gary would say at night when they lay in bed together. “Maybe we were only kidding ourselves, maybe we would have just let the years slip by, inventing excuses, if this hadn’t happened to us.” After spending an evening with their friends they would take pleasure, almost secretly, it seemed, from comparing themselves to those married couples who were still without children, from noting how the child was drawing them closer to one another.
She wrote to her family and to his, and they received long letters of congratulations and sizable checks from both sets of parents. They were amazed, they told each other, at how easily they could accept the gifts, without feelings of guilt, of obligation. Helen delighted in her third-grade children as she had never done before, and he became more optimistic about their financial situation. Several times a week he would sit down on the living-room couch with her and he would go over the figures—showing her, with pencil and paper, that even if she didn’t return to teaching for three years, everything would be all right. She praised him for his ability to arrange things, to foresee possibilities she would never have thought of.
What pleased them most, though, was feeling the baby, listening to it. He would lie with his ear pressed gently to her stomach, and every time he heard a sound they would experience a thrill which seemed magical. “I think I’m falling in love with you all over again,” she said to him. “It’s so strange.”
She had never seemed more beautiful to him, and he had never loved her more. They had never, he felt, been this close. Still, as the months went by, he became increasingly uneasy. In particular, he was afraid of what would happen to her were something to go wrong. He called her doctor and the doctor told him not to worry. He did, anyway. Helen didn’t, he saw, and this worried him even more. While she was making supper one evening he leafed through a copy of Life magazine and found an article about Thalidomide babies who were being rehabilitated through the use of artificial limbs. Had Helen seen the article? If, as he hoped, she had not seen it, what was he to do? If he threw the magazine away without telling her, and if she found out, she would think that he was treating her like a child, overprotecting her. “Have you finished with all the magazines in the rack?” he called to her. “It’s getting stuffed.” “I’m finished with them,” she called back.
At the office, his friends told him that she would begin feeling ugly and neglected, that her eyes would turn inward, that she would begin neglecting him—he waited, but none of these things happened. Still, he was afraid for her, for the baby. He went to see their doctor, and the doctor smiled at his fears. Gary considered, and then told the doctor about the time, before they were married, when Helen had been ill. The doctor nodded; Helen had told him all about it. There was nothing to worry about. If anything, giving birth to a healthy child would, he said, serve to close the door even more securely on that period of her life. What if the child wasn’t healthy, he asked. The doctor replied that something could always go wrong, of course—there were never guarantees; as things stood, though, Helen was coming along beautifully and he didn’t see any cause for worry: there was more chance of a safe falling on Gary while he walked in the street, he laughed, than of something being wrong with the child.
Without telling Helen, Gary telephoned her mother and urged her to come and stay with them, but Helen’s mother said that she wasn’t needed yet. She thought she would come to New York after the baby was born, when she could be more helpful. Gary said all right. When it came time to give up their own pleasures, he became wary again, he waited for something to happen, but she neither neglected him nor felt neglected; if anything, she became more affectionate than she had been before, and at night her only concern was that he might go to sleep unsatisfied.
One evening he tested her by opening the middle drawer of the living-room secretary and taking out the European travel folders they had collected. She smiled. “We’ll go some day,” he said. “You’ll see.” “We’ll go some day,” she agreed, her hand touching his cheek. The radiance in her own cheeks disturbed him. On weekends they saw their friends, and when he would mention her “strangeness,” nobody seemed to understand him. Everybody said that she was beautiful in pregnancy and would make a beautiful mother. His friends teased him about being “put off,” and afterwards she would console him, more soft, more kind than ever.
Then he seized on something definitely amiss: she had not sensed his worry. There it was, he told himself. She was too placid, too understanding, much too free of all anxiety. He telephoned the doctor again and explained; wasn’t it unnatural for her to have no worries whatsoever and not to sense the fact that he was worried? The doctor laughed. “Do me a favor, Gary,” he said. “Tell her what you’ve told me and see what happens.”
He did. “Oh, you’re sweet,” she said, cuddling to him in bed. “Of course I know you’ve been worried. You’ve been so dear—”
“You knew?”
“Of course.” She laughed again. “Everybody knows. You’re not very good at hiding things. But don’t be glum, dear one. I like you this way. Somebody has to do the worrying for the three of us.”
Three weeks before she was due, she told him that she had invited Mrs. Hart to have dinner with them. Mrs. Hart had been their landlady before they were married. “Won’t she be surprised!” she exclaimed. He didn’t answer. She snuggled up to him. “I just thought she would get a kick out of seeing us together—you know, as a married couple. Remember the way she used to wink at me whenever she’d see us going in and out of your apartment?” He remembered. They had not seen Mrs. Hart for over two years. She giggled: “I liked living in sin with you. Do you know that?” He tried to smile. “You don’t mind if she comes, do you? When I told her I was Mrs. FogeL she said, ‘Gary’s mother?’ Then I said, ‘No, I’m Helen Fogel, Mrs. Hart,’ and she congratulated me and said that she’d seen the announcement in the Times. Do you mind if she comes?”
He said he didn’t mind; he couldn’t help but feel, though, that something stupid—something terrible—would happen if Mrs. Hart came. He thought, he waited. Then the day before Mrs. Hart was supposed to come, he telephoned their doctor and told him everything. The important thing was Helen and the baby, he told himself. He had been foolish to wait this long. The doctor didn’t see anything particularly wrong, or antic, in what Helen was doing, but he suggested that Gary see a psychiatrist if Gary thought that would help. “I’ll go,” Gary said. The psychiatrist listened to Gary and agreed with him that it was natural for an expectant father to worry, but he didn’t seem to find anything fearful in what had happened. Still, until the baby was born, Gary could come for sessions twice a week if he liked. Gary felt uncomfortable, silly, and said that he supposed he was just a typical nervous father-to-be; he left before the time was up.
That night Helen told him that she had telephoned Mrs. Hart and canceled the dinner arrangements. “It would have made you uncomfortable, wouldn’t it?” she said. “Anyway, it was a silly idea in the first place.”
Two and a half weeks later, three days ahead of schedule, she went to the hospital. She called him at his office, and by the time he arrived she was in the delivery room. When he was allowed into her room afterward, she was sleepy, but happier than ever. “I saw the whole thing,” she said. “It was beautiful.”
She came home from the hospital three days later, and her mother flew in from Cleveland and stayed with them for two weeks. The girl had weighed seven pounds four ounces at birth, and everyone agreed that she looked just like Helen. Gary’s parents drove in from Boston, stayed for a week, and then left. As the doctor had predicted, his anxiety was gone as suddenly as it had come. The two of them spent endless, timeless hours watching their child; the hands and feet—the fingernails, the soft wrinkles at the knuckles, the tines acro
ss the palm, under the toes—they fascinated him most: so delicate, so perfect, so miniature. Proudly, he told all their friends that whenever the baby started crying, all he had to do was lift it and she would stop. Once in a while, out of habit, he supposed, he would find himself observing Helen, noting her behavior, but she gave him no cause for worry now, and he was pleased. He had been a bit concerned at first that she had experienced no pain whatever during labor, but the doctor assured him that her experience was not abnormal. “It happens,” he said.
At night they took the baby into their bed with them and watched her, talked to her. Then they would return her to the crib and talk for hours about how glad they were that they had not given her up. “I’ve never loved you so much,” he said. “Soon,” she said. “Soon.” He studied their finances, showed her the results of his calculations, and they agreed that they would have to be careful. They checked with their doctor after the first month and then put up a calendar next to their bed with the probable “evil days” circled in red.
Two days later the baby broke out in a rash that covered her arms and neck. They went to the doctor, and he told them not to be alarmed. He prescribed a skin cream and said that the rash would probably disappear in a week or less. “It’s summer, though,” he said, “and the heat will tend to aggravate it. But don’t worry. It’s nothing.” They asked him the other question, and he smiled and said that it was all right. Hadn’t he told them so the other day? They went home, happy, relieved. The baby started crying in the car, stopped, then started again when they were in the apartment. “Poor little thing,” Helen said as she smoothed the cream onto her daughter. Gary watched and felt helpless. The baby stopped, then started again a half hour later. They stayed in the bedroom, and he held her. When he offered her to Helen, she said to let her cry. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “You heard the doctor.” “But the rash is worse than before,” he said. “It’s spreading to her chest.” “There’s nothing to worry about,” she repeated. “Come to bed.” He rocked the baby gently against his shoulder, and she howled even more. “Come to bed,” Helen said, undressing. He put the baby in its crib, and she cried in a way that terrified him; she seemed to be gagging. “Please look at her,” he said. Helen got up, trailing her underclothes, letting them drop to the floor; she looked at the baby and the baby stopped crying. “See?” she said, touching his arm with her forefinger. “Now come to bed.” He went with her. “I’m so tired,” he said when she’d put the light out. They touched each other gently, saying that the baby would be all right in a few days, and then he kissed her and told her to get a good night’s sleep. “I hope the baby sleeps until morning,” he said, but just as he spoke the baby started crying again. He turned on the night lamp and got out of bed. There were large red splotches on her face. “Shouldn’t we call the doctor?” he asked. “Come to bed,” she said. The baby kept crying. He held his child for a while and tried to soothe her by rubbing more salve on the red spots. The baby’s skin seemed red-hot to him. Gradually, the crying stopped. When he put her back in the crib, she whimpered.
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