“No,” he said, “nor that. Not as such.”
I said, “Then what did you talk about?”
“Integrity,” he said. “He questioned the integrity of our galleries.”
Our galleries! They were my galleries. And my stepbrother wasn't meant to be questioning anything. He was meant to be providing answers in exchange for lunch.
Murray said, “I never ate a thing. They had chicken parts that belong in a trash can not in an eatery. Also, I suspect that sodomite was making love to me.”
“By the way,” I said, “I'd hate for you to have the wrong idea. Humpy is my employee. Those galleries are all mine.”
“So much the worse for you,” he said. “They're not the kind of thing I'd brag about, personally.”
I said, “How short your memory is. Didn't you promise to cease criticizing my life?”
“I did,” he said. “But I find it's deteriorated further in my absence so I'm releasing myself from my promise. I don't understand why you do it. It's not as though you need the money. And you're not exhibiting a damned thing that isn't an insult to intelligence. You've got a list full of hoaxers, Poppy.”
I said, “You're behind the times. My galleries have redefined the avant-garde.”
“Bunch of phoneys,” he said. “Bella Yaff! I was getting paintings better than that from Alan Mordecai when he was no more than four years old!”
It was hard to be good-humored in the face of such ignorance. I had heard it all a hundred times before and I wasn't sure I had the patience to explain, yet again, how Yaff's work liberated us from the fallacy of perspective.
He said, “Well, I see you're set on being famous. I know I'm not going to persuade you against that. But couldn't you be celebrated for something decent? What about those fine originations you used to create? Or at least sell paintings that would grace a person's home.”
I said, “Murray, you have been too long out of circulation to understand any of this. Gracing homes is old hat. The frontiers of art are on the move and wherever they're heading I arrive first.”
But Murray returned to his shingle garden without ever seeing the point of Brunnenbaum's grids or Wagy's rubber extrusions.
By 1960 I had reorganized my galleries and dispensed with Humphrey Choate. As so often happens, he grew resentful of his subordinate position. We had cross words once too often and he returned to England and set up on his own, in a very small way, of course.
He opened with a charmingly passé little stable. Hoche, who did portraits in oil, Lamb, who did small bronzes, and that fool Oca, still flogging his pianola roll jokes after all those years. I suppose it was the only idea he ever had. Choate and Oca were welcome to each other.
I moved a few doors along Leonard Street to a larger building and turned Tenth Street over to Sapphire. The whole world had opinions about what should be done about Sapphire. Murray said she needed motherly love. Em said she needed a good shaking. Honey said she needed Jesus. But I was the one who threw her the lifesaver.
She renamed my old gallery Witness, had the walls covered with black felt, and showed a permanent collection of gloomy photographs with occasional special exhibits. Pictures of dejected types traveling with bundles. Grimy street vendors. Whole families of unfortunates huddled under greasy coverlets. There was never anything gay or witty. It was no wonder to me that some days she simply couldn't face opening up.
Leonard Street couldn't have been more different. I named it The Place and I was there all the time. I loved to see people stopped in their tracks by the vastness of it. In my first year I showed a divine set of ballpoint drawings by Rommer, an installation of basalt trou-vé by Erik Boe, and Kenny Porter's painted absences. I could sell Kenny Porters faster than he could paint them and he could paint them fast.
I must also confess, Humphrey Choate wasn't the only one to try his hand with a has-been. Hannelore Ettl walked into The Place one morning, as cool as you like and asked me for a show.
I said, “I don't do macaroni.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “Haven't done in more than thirty years. I do hair.”
First thing she showed me was a noose woven out of horsehair. The next thing she showed me was a collage of human hair. The private kind.
I said, “I'm surprised you have any to spare at your time of life.”
“Poppy,” she said, “does this have to be personal? Are you still sore about Gil leaving you for me?”
I said, “As I recall, it was me who left him. And you must have nearly fallen over my luggage, on your way in. I'll bet you never even bothered having the sheets changed.”
“You are still sore,” she said. “How infantile.”
And she would have been on her way, only Jerry Sacks arrived. He had quit being Jerome sometime before.
I saw his eyes light up when he saw Ettl's stuff, and Sacks's eyes were always worth watching. I recognized in an instant that hair was going to be big. Especially private hair. By the spring of 1961 there can't have been a dinner table in the world where the audacity of my gallery wasn't being discussed.
Emerald took up a position, of course.
“And you wonder why we never drop by?” she said.
I said, “Emerald, it's only hair.”
“It is only hair,” she agreed. “It certainly doesn't belong in an art gallery. But I'm not going to debate it with you. I'm just glad I changed my name to Boon. If you want to see us you'll have to come to Brooklyn. Do you remember where that is?”
Of course, I was always compared unfavorably with Miriam Boon, no matter that I did go to Brooklyn, as often as my schedule allowed. I sat with those kids a whole afternoon one time, stringing cranberries for their Sukkot party. Some party. Drafts and insects. Dinner in a homemade shed.
I said, “At least let me buy them a top quality playhouse.”
Em said, “It's not a playhouse, Mom. It's a tabernacle. And homemade is the point of it.”
Nothing I did was right. I was a household name, I had kept an amazingly youthful line through self-control and submission to the beauty doctor's knife, and I was fun.
But it was Mrs. Boon who picked up the bouquets, baking cookies, churning out her shapeless handknits, driving them home from Talmud Torah.
As I remarked to Murray, a less fulfilled and resourceful person than myself would have become embittered.
“And thank goodness too for your humility,” he wrote.
But enough of your problems. I am being compulsorily purchased by the government. They're expanding the Banana River Proving Grounds so they can send a man into outer space and they say they need my backyard.
Xenia claims she already knew. She might have told me before I made my asparagus bed.
Yours
Murray
PS: What is private hair?
56
In 1962 a most annoying thing occurred. Irish Nellie became a television star.
I was in Daytona Beach, Florida, supervising the convalescence of my stepbrother Murray from a compound fracture of the thigh bone, sustained while he was resisting eviction from his hovel, and so had time to watch the shows ordinary people depended on to bring excitement and variety into their lives.
A special program had been got up to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the loss of the Titanic, and certain parties had been invited to tell their version of things. No one had thought to invite me.
They gave her name as Helen Gorman and her face was as wrinkled as an old paper bag, but I knew who she was even before she'd opened her mouth and started her bunch of lies.
“I lost my fiancé,” she said. “We were coming home to be married.”
I telephoned Honey from Murray's bedside.
I said, “Just look at her! I'm writing it all down. Every lying word. I'm going to sue.”
“Good governor, Poppy!” Honey said. “What does it matter? She's an old woman. We're old women.”
I said, “I'm not an old woman. And that Irish is besmirching our pa's name
. We shouldn't take that lying down. You were always way too meek.”
My sister had grown to resemble one of those pale milch cows with the dark eyes and upturned nose. She rarely moved, except to amble between the couch and the feeding trough. Mainly she just sat around, reaching for candies and chewing over her scriptural pamphlets.
She was well cared for. When Coretta had commenced having visions of six-winged many-eyed seraphs and had had to go home to Jamaica, a niece was sent in her place. Coretta II. Emerald always called by on Wednesdays, which was Coretta II's day off. And Sherman Ulysses was a most attentive son. He had had a handrail fitted alongside her bath, for the prevention of falls, and devised a special box for her medicaments, with a compartment for each day of the week, which he refilled on Sundays, doling out the next seven doses and reviewing the past week's improvements and reversals. He had become an avid reader of those small-print advisory notes that come with a jar of pills. I sometimes feel he has been a loss to the medical profession.
Irish Nellie was saying, “I never did marry. After Abe, there could never be another for me…I still dream about him. I still see him disappearing into the crowd. He went to fetch my muff, you see. It was so cold that night.”
I heard Murray sniff.
I said, “I hope that's me you're weeping for? That's my father's good reputation she's sullying.”
He said, “I didn't hear any sullying. She makes him sound kind and considerate.”
I said, “It's not her place to make him sound anything. She was just an Irish. He was my pa. They should have asked me.”
“Well,” he said, “how about if I ask you? You never told me about your pa.”
I said, “You're not the television.”
He said, “What's so important about television? It's only a noise in the corner of the room.”
I said, “It's important because everybody sees it.”
“Oh, stop whining,” he said, “and tell me about your pa.”
It's very easy for a person to say “Tell me.” I didn't know quite where to begin.
Murray said, “When you think of him, what do you remember?”
I remembered a dark gray three-button suit. And cigars he smoked somewhere else. And cologne.
Murray wanted to know what kind.
I said, “I don't know. I was only fourteen. And gradually it faded away.”
“Poland water probably,” he said. “Do you look like him? You don't look like your ma.”
Sometimes Murray knew the right thing to say.
I said, “Pa was so handsome. He could have had any showgirl. Why would he choose a stupid Irish? She had crooked teeth.”
“She looks all right to me,” he said. “Anyway. If it was love…If it was passion.”
Then again, sometimes he could just open his mouth and ruin everything.
I said, “Pa was forty-nine. That's what Sherman Ulysses is now. Forty-nines don't do passion.”
“You're mistaken, Poppy,” he said. “Passion is like being able to waggle your ears. Either you can or you can't, and if you can, you never lose it. Doesn't matter how old you get.”
Murray had always been oddly proud of this party trick.
Nellie had disappeared from the television screen. They were showing a photograph of two old marrieds who had perished. She was offered a seat in a boat, they said, but she wouldn't leave her husband's side. Not like some. Running to save their lying Irish neck.
I said, “That would have been me. I'd have stayed with Reggie and drowned, if we'd been there.”
Murray was quiet for a while, gazing at those jerky old pictures. Men moving about like clockwork soldiers, milling outside the White Star offices. If I had paid closer attention maybe I'd have spotted my uncle Israel or that fool Harry Glaser. But I was still trying to conjure up the smell of Pa's cologne.
“Of course,” he said eventually, “a person never knows, until it's asked of them. They might imagine they have a fund of courage, till they come to draw on it. Then they find they'll do pretty much anything to save their own miserable hide. Best not to make too many noble plans.”
I said, “Nothing would have parted me from Reggie. I don't expect you to understand.”
He patted my hand. I hated it when he did that.
I said, “You don't know anything about passion. You wouldn't even romp with your own wife.”
He blushed.
“No,” he said. “But I can waggle my ears.”
The doctors at Brewer Memorial said Murray was a man who had neglected himself. They said it was a pity he didn't have family to watch over him.
I said, “I'm putting him in a brand-new, ocean view apartment, windows floor to ceiling, entrance security, real air-conditioning, not just one of those old ceiling fans. What more can I do? Strictly speaking he isn't even family.”
They said he had the body of an older man.
I said to Emerald, “I'll never understand why. He's never done much to wear it out.”
“Would he come to us do you think?” she said. “We have room. Let me talk to him.”
But Murray wouldn't hear of leaving Florida. I took him to see the apartment and he shuffled around on his stick, looking for a latch to open the window, complaining about the smell of the rug.
I said, “I've arranged for a help, to keep you clean and tidy and bring in food.”
“What kind of food?” he said.
I believe he'd have turned it all down if it hadn't been for the terrace.
“I could have a lemon tree up here,” he said. “And hibiscus.”
Emerald said, “I shall still worry about him.”
I said, “Well, don't. A creaking door hangs long.”
57
Alan was a cute kid. Being around him sometimes made me wish I'd had a boy myself. I believe I'd have taken better to a boy. Maxine was OK. She was never going to win any beauty contests, having inherited the oriental features of the Boons, but she was a southpaw, like me, and she loved to sew. She was full of divine ideas for originations for her dolls.
Em always said, “I can't help you Maxine. I never saw anyone so awkward looking with a pair of scissors. You'll have to ask Grandma Poppy.”
I always warmed to another southpaw. The way people squawked and mocked us you'd have thought we sewed with our feet.
A few months before Alan was bar mitzvahed he had his adenoids fixed and then they all went to Florida for his recuperation.
“Uncle Murray has a parrot,” Maxine told me. “Her name's Grizel and she can say nearly a whole beruka. She poops everywhere.”
I said, “Emerald, is he becoming a health hazard?”
“No,” she said. “He cleans up. He's all right. He uses a separate cloth.”
I said, “And is he making the big trek north? Is he coming to the party?”
“How many times do I have to tell you?” she said. “It's not a party. Alan's being called to the Torah.”
As far as I'm concerned a seated rib roast for forty and a cake with a marzipan tallit amount to a party.
I said, “Whatever. Is your uncle Murray coming?”
Sometimes I missed the old nuisance.
“No,” she said. “It's too far. His leg pains him where they pinned the bone.”
I said, “Did he give you a check for the boy? How much did he give you?”
“Mom!” she said. “He's having trees planted for Alan. In Israel. Isn't that nice?”
Trees for Israel. Parrots pooping on the rug. There was a crazy streak in those Jacoby boys, and in their father, too. Judah may have looked like a rock, but he did foolish things. Gave away his money. Married Ma.
I instructed Sapphire and Honey not to be cheap with their bar-mitzvah gifts.
I said, “Those Boons give Timex wristwatches and to hear them talk you'd think they bought out Tiffany's. You'll see what I mean.”
For once Sapphy listened to me. She bought Alan a good camera, which is how he started on the path to fame and fortun
e. Honey gave him a stamp collector's album, but she never did pay attention to a word I said. Sherman and Vera gave a book on first aid, proving that the Boons weren't the only ones who were cheap and the Jacobys weren't the only ones who were crazy.
Sherman always asked if Alan had joined the Boy Scouts and he always got the same answer. “Not yet.”
“You should join,” he said to Alan. “Every boy should learn to take care of himself. Every boy should know how to mend his own pants and be a good American.”
Vera had a prior engagement that Saturday.
“It's a symposium,” I heard Sherman telling Honey. “On the oppression of women.”
“Oh dear,” she said.
Oh dear, indeed.
The approach of the Williamsburg Bridge was so backed up, Alan Mordecai had already started his chanting by the time we reached Union Temple. I don't know what he was chanting about, but he sounded word perfect to me, and he hardly missed a beat when he saw me wheeling his new bicycle up to the front.
Mortie stared at me and then commenced burying his head in his hands. Em made a big frowning face, gesturing to me to take the bike away.
I said, “Leave it outside? In this neighborhood? Are you nuts?”
Then I took out Grandpa Minkel's little silk cap and handed it up to Alan.
I said, “Put it on.”
He shot a look across to his father, checking it was all right to change hats halfway through, but Mortie was still studying the floor.
I said, “This was your great-great-grandpa's, on the Minkel side. And now it's yours.”
Em nodded at him. Gave him the go-ahead. I left the bike propped up near the bimah. I wasn't going to wheel it away again and make an exhibition of myself.
As it was I could hear a good deal of gasping and tsking.
Sherman whispered, “I guess it's the first time they saw a bike in here.”
The first time any of those Boons had seen an eight-speed Schwinn with chrome fenders, that's for sure.
“Aunt Poppy,” Sherman said, “I hope you got a free puncture repair kit with that?”
“Mom,” Emerald said to me, while everyone was scrumming for the cold hors d'oeuvres, “the only thing saved you from death was that old kippah. Mortie was ready to murder you, I swear, temple or no.”
The Great Husband Hunt Page 31