It was the 1st time I ever ate in a restaurant where waiters came and served you! There were red checkered tablecloths on the tables and the waiter and the owner wanted to please Charlie. They asked him about Sol and Charlie told them Sol was fine and would be visiting him soon after his cross country trip. I had to wear a plastic bib when I ate the lobster and Charlie showed me what to do and how to crack the claws with a nutcracker. I saw how expensive lobster was and I asked Charlie if he could afford it.
This was his answer: I save money faster than I can spend it.
I can still taste the lobster now. I never tasted anything so beautiful and tender. I ate every piece I could, even in the thinnest claws!
When we got home and Charlie told Mr. Mittleman where we were this is what he said: A ship in the ocean was caught in a great storm and all the passengers were screaming. The waves were coming overboard and women were tearing their hair out and praying to God to save them. Only a little old Jewish man sat quietly without screaming. Don’t you care what happens to the ship? a fellow passenger asked. Is it my ship? the Jew replied.
Why I hate Mr. Mittleman: because when Charlie was in the bathroom for a minute and we were alone in the office, he smiled at me and said: Tell me—how do you know you’re really Jewish?
He called Charlie crazy for giving up Saturdays and Sundays for sports when those are the big selling days but this is what Charlie said back to him: Living well is the best revenge!
I told Charlie that when it came to lobster he might be wrong about desire. It would be easier to become a Rabbi if you’d never had any at all!
SUNDAY
In the morning we went into the city with Murray and I met their friends from the Home. I met Irving and Louie and Slats and Herman and Stan and Morty and I saw how they still look up to Charlie as a hero. I even played some football with them and caught a pass from Charlie 2 times. Murray and Charlie made up to say I was from the Home and that Murray had me on loan for his school as an exchange student. They asked me things about Dr. Fogel and if certain other teachers were still there and how many of us there are left and things like that.
BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING WAS NOT WHAT HAPPENED WHEN I WAS WITH THEM BUT WHAT HAPPENED AFTER!
When we got home and I was here in our room reading he came in and picked up my real estate book and started reading out loud like a normal reader!
Do you know why I can do it? he asked me.
Because you’re happy, I said.
He told me I wasn’t paying attention. I told you once that I read better when I’m excited, he said, and then he said he was excited not because he had a good time with his friends but because ALL DAY LONG FROM THE TIME THEY FIRST MET IN THE MORNING HE’D BEEN IMAGINING HIMSELF DEAD!
It’s what I do whenever I’m with them, he told me. I try to feel what each of them would feel at different points—when they’d get the news about me, when they’d first see each other, when they’d see me in the coffin, and when they’d shovel earth on top of me.
I’m getting gooseflesh again, hearing his voice in my head saying that! I told him he was trying to scare me and he told me that I couldn’t deny how well he was reading. There’s hope for me too, he said, and he went downstairs to fight with Mr. Mittleman.
I don’t know what to do when he does things like that. He makes me feel very helpless.
LATER
We didn’t talk about Dr. Fogel all day.
The man I liked most from their group was Irving, who’s a Professor. I liked him because he didn’t ask me any questions.
Just before I came up, when Mrs. Mittleman asked about Anita, Mr. Mittleman said: Maybe Murray and Anita are so talented, they’ll give birth to an orphan.
They were watching movies of Mrs. Mittleman and her sister in a boat on the 1000 Islands in Canada. Mr. Mittleman asked him what was the difference between a Rabbi and a prostitute and when Charlie said he didn’t know, Mr. Mittleman said that a Rabbi sends bills.
His voice never changes. I hate him more because he’s a Jew!
I said I had a stomachache and I came up here to write.
Herman kidded me and asked if I was a member of Murray’s Alumni Association and if I had a membership card and I got scared for a minute, thinking he knew I ran away, but from the way they talked I found out that Murray once tried to have a meeting of Alumni from over 50 years and rented a big ballroom but less than 30 men came and they stayed in groups and only talked with people from their own years at the Home who they knew already.
I think Anita’s jealous of the time Murray and Charlie spend together and of all the years they had together before she met them!
MONDAY
I have to be ready to go shopping with him in 5 minutes because he says I have no winter clothes. Does this mean he’s going to let me stay with him all through the cold and the snow? Even though it’s been harder living with him since our visit to Dr. Fogel I don’t want to leave. I’d rather live with him worried than any other man relaxed!
When I woke this morning I found him looking at my Tephillin but I didn’t let him know I saw.
At school he and Murray made jokes about cultivating Murray’s garden. Murray said he was fertilizing his lawn with chicken fat and Charlie asked Murray if he could plant him a TSURIS TREE.
They joked about sitting under it together and letting their worries seep into the ground and feed the tree.
I have to hurry. When we do things he won’t let me use any of my own money. He gives me some money for errands I do for him and for writing things down for him, but I keep that money separate. I think he pays Mrs. Mittleman for my meals.
I need to save my money because later I’ll need it to buy a new suit for my Bar Mitzvah.
A girl sat next to me in the school library and asked me if I was the boy who was living with Mr. Sapistein and she said that Murray spoke about me to her class and told them how much I accomplished in my life even though I never stayed in a real school.
She didn’t interest me. I told her I was busy with things to study and she went away.
I read in a book about Zionism and I read about the Fernald Tracing Method against dyslexia and I studied for Mr. Mittleman’s test.
It’s true about Theodor Herzl wanting to let Jewish children be baptized, but he changed his opinion later on. When he was young and for his whole life he really only loved blond and blue-eyed little girls! Also: He was once in favor of intermarriage so Jews would be better looking! This is what he wanted written on his gravestone: HE HAD TOO GOOD AN OPINION OF THE JEWS.
What else I discovered: The King Frederick who locked all the children in the room without words crowned himself King of Jerusalem in 1229.
The best thing that happened today: I found this saying in PIRKAY AVOS and wrote it out in Hebrew and in English for Charlie:
“LET A MAN DEVOTE HIMSELF TO THE STUDY OF TORAH AND TO THE COMMANDMENTS EVEN FOR AN ULTERIOR PURPOSE, BECAUSE FROM AN ULTERIOR PURPOSE HE WILL EVENTUALLY ARRIVE AT THE REAL PURPOSE.”
He thought about that for a while and then he said: I was right then, wasn’t I? What do you make of that?
He said he would try to memorize it and he put it on his list: Memorize Danny’s Saying.
TUESDAY
He came up and stopped me from writing any more last night. It’s morning time now and I’m up before he is. When we got home last night there was a message from Murray saying he got a postcard from Uncle Sol.
After we finished shopping last night we went to a beautiful white house with a long circular driveway. It was past 10 o’clock when we got there and a tall woman came to the door and spoke with an accent. Her husband came to meet us in a red silk bathrobe.
Charlie introduced me to them. Their names are Mr. and Mrs. Szondi. Mr. Szondi is Charlie’s stockbroker. They escaped from Hungary in 1956. Charlie didn’t waste any time. Before they sat down he was yelling at Mr. Szondi and asking him why he paid him good money. Mr. Szondi told him he expected the market to
turn and Charlie said he didn’t depend on miracles, that there was as much money to be made in bad markets as good. Mrs. Szondi sat very stiffly in a high velvet chair and her eyes seemed to burn. I couldn’t tell how old she was.
The room was beautiful with lamps and teacups everywhere. The walls were made of wallpaper like velvet with curlicues in reds and pinks. Mr. Szondi tried to explain things to Charlie but Charlie wouldn’t listen. He said he paid Mr. Szondi to do his thinking for him. Mr. Szondi told Charlie he knew about a merger and pension funds that would buy into the new company. The pension funds have been staying away from the market recently. Mr. Szondi said that if things went well Charlie could buy and sell within 60 days for a good profit but that would mean taxes.
Charlie said he never worried about taxes. That was his accountant’s department. Mr. Szondi asked who I was and Charlie said I was a smart Jewish boy.
When we were leaving he asked Mrs. Szondi how she liked living in their house.
This is what she said: The hills are very beautiful but they are not mine.
Charlie made me promise to study a book on the stock market after finishing the real estate one. He said he played dumber than he was and I said he didn’t have to tell me that. He seemed happy after we left and he said that Murray followed the daily ups and downs of things too much. Charlie called that death.
He explained to me what an overlay is and he said that’s what he always invests in. An overlay is if a horse is a 2 to 1 favorite in the morning but the crowd makes him 5 to 1. An overlay in land is when it can be developed in 5 years when everybody else thinks 10. If you only bet on overlays you can’t go wrong!
I took a chance when he seemed in a better mood. I said this: If you don’t let me help you learn to read I’ll leave you.
And go where? he asked.
Lots of people could use a smart Jewish boy, I said.
I’ll think about it, he said.
You’re afraid, I said.
You’re right, he said, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it.
I told him I could wait a little longer. The saying I gave him about an ulterior purpose is a good start.
He’s waking up now. He always seems happiest to me when he’s just coming out of his sleep.
Four
In the car, leaning halfway across the back of the front seat while Murray drove, Charlie tried to reassure Danny—that he was, despite what Mr. Mittleman had said, Jewish—and even as he was trying to comfort the boy, he wondered: how much of me shows?
Danny was pale, his head resting against the line that separated the back seat from the door, and Charlie, trying still to find a way to snap the boy to, told a joke Mr. Mittleman had once told him. A Jewish boy, going to a whorehouse for the first time, meets his father in the waiting room. The boy is speechless. The father shrugs and says, in Yiddish, “For fifty cents, why should I bother Momma?”
When neither Danny nor Murray laughed, Charlie turned and looked out the front window. If either of them had been clients, he knew, he could have made them laugh. Where was the difference? He wasn’t, like Max, a joke teller, and yet, in his work, he made people laugh and Max never did.
He trusted his instincts and they told him that it was his desire to have money which brought the money. But where, he wondered, was that desire now, when he seemed to be, except for his sneakers and sweatshirt, the same man he had been the day before when he’d been selling houses. The difference fascinated him, and it reassured him; in fifteen months, when he reached forty, he would surprise everybody and turn his joke into reality. He would never work again.
At the George Washington Bridge, handing the girl in the booth the toll money, Murray stopped talking about Anita’s moods and spoke instead of King David and the Angel of Death. “Last night,” he said, “just before I went to sleep, I was reading that on the day when King David was destined to die, the Angel of Death stood before him, but could not prevail….”
Charlie tried to see himself as a boy, in a sweatshirt and sneakers, playing football in the Home’s courtyard. Looking back, he wondered, could people see that the boy he was then would have become the man he was now? Except with Murray, he remembered himself as having been an exceptionally quiet boy. The reason seemed clear enough: with the adulation of the others he’d never had need for words. His athletic abilities and good looks had done all his work for him. But when there had been no words issuing from him, what, he wanted to know, had been going on inside?
“The rabbis ask why the Angel of Death could not prevail, and they answer that it was because learning did not cease from David’s mouth.” Murray licked his lips. “Finally, the Angel went outside and climbed the trees in the garden that surrounded the royal palace and began to beat the boughs all about. When David heard the noise it disturbed him from his studies so that he went out into the garden to discover the cause. As he was climbing a ladder to find out what was happening in the topmost branches, the ladder collapsed and it was in this way that he died—do you see?”
Charlie’s nose itched, and when he rubbed it he remembered how he and Lillian had touched the first time in the candy store. He’d thought of stopping to see her after the game—he wanted Danny to meet her and Sandy—but he was fearful: he didn’t want Murray explaining his motives to him all the way back to New Jersey.
When Charlie wanted to think of Lillian he always thought of the way she’d held his hand that first time. He saw her face, looking down at the table, as if ashamed. Her cheeks were flushed. He had to exhale, remembering. Oh how soft she was then! He had seen her hand on the seat next to him in the booth, and he’d let her think his own hand had fallen next to hers accidentally. He saw the hands only now, as if a camera had moved in on them silently, and he saw his small finger rest slightly against hers….
He rolled his window down, to get air. “The moral,” Murray was saying, “is not that the ladder was to blame, but that the brief break in his studies was. That’s what we Jews believe man is made for, that’s why our Sabbath is a day of rest and of study, so that—”
“Enough already,” Charlie said. “Christ! What do we need stories about death for? Can’t you see how upset the kid is?”
Danny was sitting forward on the seat, stiffly, his eyes fixed on the back of Murray’s head, and Charlie reached back and touched his forehead. “You’re Jewish, Danny,” he said. “Believe me, okay? How could you be so smart if you weren’t?”
“There are stupid Jews,” Danny said.
Murray laughed. “But not so many,” he said. “Ask Sol when he gets here.”
“The Home is full of them now,” Danny said, flatly. “And I’ve seen others sent away to mental hospitals and prisons and homes for retards who were all Jews.”
“What made us smarter, historically speaking,” Murray said, “were several things. First, the fact that every Jewish boy, in order to become Bar Mitzvah, had to know how to read so he could be called to the Torah. That’s why—”
“I said to leave us be,” Charlie said, but his voice was not insistent. “Okay?”
“I’m sorry,” Murray said. “I just thought you’d be interested in the way things work out sometimes—how I read that story before sleep and then woke up in the middle of the night with a nightmare. That’s the part I thought you’d be interested in—since you were the one who predicted it.” The car held a curve that took it down a ramp and onto the West Side Highway, heading south. “In the dream I was mowing my lawn and trying to wave to somebody when I realized I was going over the edge of the swimming pool,” Murray continued. “Then—you know the way it happens sometimes that things are happening to you and you’re watching them happen at the same time—? I was watching the mower go to the bottom and there was only a black yamulka floating on top.”
“I never dream that way,” Charlie said.
“What I woke up thinking about this morning, though,” Murray went on, “was about Anita’s death. It was crazy—I told her while we were
still in bed that what I worried about most if she died was not knowing the names of her flowers and what to do for them at what times of year.”
“You could hire a gardener,” Charlie said. “Money takes care of things.”
Danny laughed and Murray looked at him coldly. “You’re right,” he said. “I suppose I could get Fred, from the school, if he had the time….”
Charlie saw Lillian’s finger trace a line along the contour of his hand, from the tip of his thumb and down along the webbing that stretched to his first finger, and then up and over and down—it went so slowly and her pressure was so light that he could never be sure of how long it had all lasted. It had been Sunday night, and they had won a football game that afternoon against the Colored Orphan Asylum and he had scored four touchdowns.
What he believed, even then, was that she had somehow wanted to drink the silence out of him. He had noticed that, of all the girls who hung out in the store, she had been the quietest, and, because she had also been the prettiest, the one the guys had left for him. When she moved her hand across the back of his she touched only the hairs, raising them the way the wind could, so that it had been almost unbearable and he’d wanted to smash the table with his other hand.
What, really, had they ever spoken about before their marriage? Was the quality that made him decide to marry related to the quality that made him decide to buy and sell? And if there was a connection, would anyone who knew him then and now be able to sense what that connection was?
He wondered why Sol had encouraged the marriage, and he wondered if Murray suspected that he asked himself questions like these. But why then was he reluctant to show this part of himself to Murray? There was no one in the world he felt closer to.…
“Don’t mind me today,” he said aloud. “I was looking forward to seeing you, and the guys—but then this morning Max started in on Danny and it turned me.”
“He gave me a test,” Danny said, “and I answered all his questions.”
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