by Philip Roth
“Barnegat,” Epstein grumbled, retreating from the table.
“What did you say?” Sheila demanded.
“Barnegat.” And he decided to leave the house before any further questions were asked.
At the comer luncheonette he bought his own paper and sat alone, drinking coffee and looking out the window beyond which the people walked to church. A pretty young shiksa walked by, holding her white round hat in her hand; she bent over to remove her shoe and shake a pebble from it. Epstein watched her bend, and he spilled some coffee on his shirt front. The girl’s small behind was round as an apple beneath the close-fitting dress. He looked, and then as though he were praying, he struck himself on the chest with his fist, again and again. “What have I done! Oh, God!”
When he finished his coffee, he took his paper and started up the street. To home? What home? Across the street in her backyard he saw Ida Kaufman, who was wearing shorts and a halter, and was hanging her daughter’s underwear on the clothesline. Epstein looked around and saw only the Gentiles walking to church. Ida saw him and smiled. Growing angry, he stepped off the curb and, passionately, began to jaywalk.
At noon in the Epstein house those present heard a siren go off. Sheila looked up from the Post and listened; she looked at her watch. “Noon? I’m fifteen minutes slow. This lousy watch, my father’s present.”
Goldie Epstein was leafing through the ads in the travel section of the New York Times, which Marvin had gone out to buy for her. She looked at her watch. “I’m fourteen minutes slow. Also,” she said to her daughter, “a watch from him…”
The wail grew louder. “God,” Sheila said, “it sounds like the end of the world.”
And Marvin, who had been polishing his guitar with his red handkerchief, immediately broke into song, a high-pitched, shut-eyed Negro tune about the end of the world.
“Quiet!” Sheila said. She cocked her ear. “But it’s Sunday. The sirens are Saturday—”
Goldie shot off the couch. “It’s a real air raid? Oy, that’s all we need!”
“It’s the police,” Sheila said, and fiery-eyed she raced to the front door, for she was politically opposed to police. “It’s coming up the street—an ambulance!”
She raced out the door, followed by Marvin, whose guitar still hung around his neck. Goldie trailed behind, her feet slapping against her slippers. On the street she suddenly turned back to the house to make sure the door was shut against daytime burglars, bugs, and dust. When she turned again she had not far to run. The ambulance had pulled up across the street in Kaufman’s driveway.
Already a crowd had gathered, neighbors in bathrobes, housecoats, carrying the comic sections with them; and too, churchgoers, shiksas in white hats. Goldie could not make her way to the front where her daughter and Marvin stood, but even from the rear of the crowd she could see a young doctor leap from the ambulance and race up to the porch, his stethoscope wiggling in his back pocket as he took two steps at a time.
Mrs. Katz arrived. A squat red-faced woman whose stomach seemed to start at her knees, she tugged at Goldie’s arm. “Goldie, more trouble here?”
“I don’t know, Pearl. All that racket. It sounded like an atomic bomb.”
“When it’s that, you’ll know,” Pearl Katz said. She surveyed the crowd, then looked at the house. “Poor woman,” she said, remembering that only three months before, on a windy March morning an ambulance had arrived to take Mrs. Kaufman’s husband to the nursing home, from which he never returned.
“Troubles, troubles…” Mrs. Katz was shaking her head, a pot of sympathy. “Everybody has their little bundle, believe me. I’ll bet she had a nervous breakdown. That’s not a good thing. Gallstones, you have them out and they’re out. But a nervous breakdown, it’s very bad … You think maybe it’s the daughter who’s sick?”
“The daughter isn’t home,” Goldie said. “She’s away with my nephew, Michael.”
Mrs. Katz saw that no one had emerged from the house yet; she had time to gather a little information. “He’s who, Goldie? The son of the brother-in-law that Lou doesn’t talk to? That’s his father?”
“Yes, Sol in Detroit—”
But she broke off, for the front door had opened, though still no one could be seen. A voice at the front of the crowd was commanding. “A little room here. Please! A little room, damn it!” It was Sheila. “A little room! Marvin, help me!”
“I can’t put down my guitar—I can’t find a place—”
“Get them back!” Sheila said. “But my instrument—”
The doctor and his helper were now wiggling and tilting the stretcher through the front door. Behind them stood Mrs. Kaufman, a man’s white shirt tucked into her shorts. Her eyes peered out of two red holes; she wore no make-up, Mrs. Katz noted.
“It must be the girl,” said Pearl Katz, up on her toes. “Goldie, can you see, who is it—it’s the girl?”
“The girl’s away—”
“Stay back!” Sheila commanded. “Marvin, for crying out loud, help!”
The young doctor and his attendant held the stretcher steady as they walked sideways down the front steps.
Mrs. Katz jumped up and down. “Who is it?”
“I can’t see,” Goldie said. “I can’t—” She pushed up on her toes, out of her slippers. “I—oh God! My God!” And she was racing forward, screaming, “Lou! Lou!”
“Mamma, stay back.” Sheila found herself fighting off her mother. The stretcher was sliding into the ambulance now.
“Sheila, let me go, it’s your father!” She pointed to the ambulance, whose red eye spun slowly on top. For a moment Goldie looked back to the steps. Ida Kaufman stood there yet, her fingers fidgeting at the buttons of the shirt. Then Goldie broke for the ambulance, her daughter beside her, propelling her by her elbows.
“Who are you?” the doctor said. He took a step towards them to stop their forward motion, for it seemed as if they intended to dive right into the ambulance on top of his patient.
“The wife—” Sheila shouted.
The doctor pointed to the porch. “Look, lady—”
“I’m the wife,” Goldie cried. “Me!”
The doctor looked at her. “Get in.”
Goldie wheezed as Sheila and the doctor helped her into the ambulance, and she let out a gigantic gasp when she saw the white face sticking up from the gray blanket; his eyes were closed, his skin grayer than his hair. The doctor pushed Sheila aside, climbed in, and then the ambulance was moving, the siren screaming. Sheila ran after the ambulance a moment, hammering on the door, but then she turned the other way and was headed back through the crowd and up the stairs to Ida Kaufman’s house.
Goldie turned to the doctor. “He’s dead?”
“No, he had a heart attack.”
She smacked her face.
“He’ll be all right,” the doctor said.
“But a heart attack. Never in his life.”
“A man sixty, sixty-five, it happens.” The doctor snapped the answers back while he held Epstein’s wrist.
“He’s only fifty-nine.”
“Some only,” the doctor said.
The ambulance zoomed through a red light and made a sharp right turn that threw Goldie to the floor. She sat there and spoke. “But how does a healthy man—”
“Lady, don’t ask questions. A grown man can’t act like a boy.”
She put her hands over her eyes as Epstein opened his.
“He’s awake now,” the doctor said. “Maybe he wants to hold your hand or something.”
Goldie crawled to his side and looked at him. “Lou, you’re all right? Does anything hurt?”
He did not answer. “He knows it’s me?”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Tell him.”
“It’s me, Lou.”
“It’s your wife, Lou,” the doctor said. Epstein blinked his eyes. “He knows,” the doctor said. “He’ll be all right. AH he’s got to do is live a normal life, normal for sixty.”
&
nbsp; “You hear the doctor, Lou. All you got to do is live a normal life.”
Epstein opened his mouth. His tongue hung over his teeth like a dead snake.
“Don’t you talk,” his wife said. “Don’t you worry about anything. Not even the business. That’ll work out. Our Sheila will marry Marvin and that’ll be that. You won’t have to sell, Lou, it’ll be in the family. You can retire, rest, and Marvin can take over. He’s a smart boy, Marvin, a mensch.”
Lou rolled his eyes in his head.
“Don’t try to talk. I’ll take care. You’ll be better soon and we can go someplace. We can go to Saratoga, to the mineral baths, if you want. We’ll just go, you and me—” Suddenly she gripped his hand. “Lou, you’ll live normal, won’t you? Won’t you?” She was crying. “‘Cause what’ll happen, Lou, is you’ll kill yourself! You’ll keep this up and that’ll be the end—”
“All right,” the young doctor said, “you take it easy now. We don’t want two patients on our hands.”
The ambulance was pulling down and around into the side entrance of the hospital and the doctor knelt at the back door.
“I don’t know why I’m crying.” Goldie wiped her eyes. “He’ll be all right? You say so, I believe you, you’re a doctor.” And as the young man swung open the door with the big red cross painted on the back, she asked, softly, “Doctor, you have something that will cure what else he’s got—this rash?” She pointed.
The doctor looked at her. Then he lifted for a moment the blanket that covered Epstein’s nakedness.
“Doctor, it’s bad?”
Goldie’s eyes and nose were running.
“An irritation,” the doctor said.
She grabbed his wrist. “You can clean it up?”
“So it’ll never come back,” the doctor said, and hopped out of the ambulance.
YOU CAN’T TELL A MAN BY THE SONG HE SINGS
IT WAS in a freshman high school class called “Occupations” that, fifteen years ago, I first met the ex-con, Alberto Pelagutti. The first week my new classmates and I were given “a battery of tests” designed to reveal our skills, deficiencies, tendencies, and psyches. At the end of the week, Mr. Russo, the Occupations teacher, would add the skills, subtract the deficiencies, and tell us what jobs best suited our talents; it was all mysterious but scientific. I remember we first took a “Preference Test”: “Which would you prefer to do, this, that, or the other thing…” Albie Pelagutti sat one seat behind me and to my left, and while this first day of high school I strolled happily through the test, examining ancient fossils here, defending criminals there, Albie, like the inside of Vesuvius, rose, fell, pitched, tossed, and swelled in his chair. When he finally made a decision, he made it. You could hear his pencil drive the x into the column opposite the activity in which he thought it wisest to prefer to engage. His agony reinforced the legend that had preceded him: he was seventeen; had just left Jamesburg Reformatory; this was his third high school, his third freshman year; but now—I heard another x driven home—he had decided “to go straight.”
Halfway through the hour Mr. Russo left the room. “I’m going for a drink,” he said. Russo was forever at pains to let us know what a square-shooter he was and that, unlike other teachers we might have had, he would not go out the front door of the classroom to sneak around to the back door and observe how responsible we were. And sure enough, when he returned after going for a drink, his lips were wet; when he came back from the men’s room, you could smell the soap on his hands. “Take your time, boys,” he said, and the door swung shut behind him.
His black wingtipped shoes beat down the marble corridor and five thick fingers dug into my shoulder. I turned around; it was Pelagutti. “What?” I said. “Number twenty-six,” Pelagutti said, “What’s the answer?” I gave him the truth: “Anything.” Pelagutti rose halfway over his desk and glared at me. He was a hippopotamus, big, black, and smelly; his short sleeves squeezed tight around his monstrous arms as though they were taking his own blood pressure—which at that moment was sky-bound: “What’s the answer!” Menaced, I flipped back three pages in my question booklet and reread number twenty-six. “Which would you prefer to do: (1) Attend a World Trade Convention. (2) Pick cherries. (3) Stay with and read to a sick friend. (4) Tinker with automobile engines.” I looked blank-faced back to Albie, and shrugged my shoulders. “It doesn’t matter—there’s no right answer. Anything.” He almost rocketed out of his seat. “Don’t give me that crap! What’s the answer!” Strange heads popped up all over the room—thin-eyed glances, hissing lips, shaming grins—and I realized that any minute Russo, wet-lipped, might come back and my first day in high school I would be caught cheating. I looked again at number twenty-six; then back to Albie; and then propelled—as I always was towards him—by anger, pity, fear, love, vengeance, and an instinct for irony that was at the time delicate as a mallet, I whispered, “Stay and read to a sick friend.” The volcano subsided, and Albie and I had met.
We became friends. He remained at my elbow throughout the testing, then throughout lunch, then after school. I learned that Albie, as a youth, had done all the things I, under direction, had not: he had eaten hamburgers in strange diners; he had gone out after cold showers, wet-haired, into winter weather; he had been cruel to animals; he had trafficked with whores; he had stolen, he had been caught, and he had paid. But now he told me, as I unwrapped my lunch in the candy store across from school, “Now, I’m through crappin’ around. I’m gettin’ an education. I’m gonna—” and I think he picked up the figure from a movie musical he had seen the previous afternoon while the rest of us were in English class—”I’m gonna put my best foot forward.” The following week when Russo read the results of the testing it appeared that Albie’s feet were not only moving forward but finding strange, wonderful paths. Russo sat at his desk, piles of tests stacked before him like ammunition, charts and diagrams mounted huge on either side, and delivered our destinies. Albie and I were going to be lawyers.
Of all that Albie confessed to me that first week, one fact in particular fastened on my brain: I soon forgot the town in Sicily where he was born; the occupation of his father (he either made ice or delivered it); the year and model of the cars he had stolen. I did not forget though that Albie had apparently been the star of the Jamesburg Reformatory baseball team. When I was selected by the gym teacher, Mr. Hopper, to captain one of my gym class’s Softball teams (we played softball until the World Series was over, then switched to touch football), I knew that I had to get Pelagutti on my side. With those arms he could hit the ball a mile.
The day teams were to be selected Albie shuffled back and forth at my side, while in the lockerroom I changed into my gym uniform—jockstrap, khaki-colored shorts, T-shirt, sweat socks, and sneakers. Albie had already changed: beneath his khaki gym shorts he did not wear a support but retained his lavender undershorts; they hung down three inches below the outer shorts and looked like a long fancy hem. Instead of a T-shirt he wore a sleeveless undershirt; and beneath his high, tar-black sneakers he wore thin black silk socks with slender arrows embroidered up the sides. Naked he might, like some centuries-dead ancestor, have tossed lions to their death in the Colosseum; the outfit, though I didn’t tell him, detracted from his dignity.
As we left the lockerroom and padded through the dark basement corridor and up onto the sunny September playing field, he talked continually, “I didn’t play sports when I was a kid, but I played at Jamesburg and baseball came to me like nothing.” I nodded my head. “What you think of Pete Reiser?” he asked. “He’s a pretty good man,” I said. “What you think of Tommy Henrich?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, “he’s dependable, I guess.” As a Dodger fan I preferred Reiser to the Yankees’ Henrich; and besides, my tastes have always been a bit baroque, and Reiser, who repeatedly bounced off outfield walls to save the day for Brooklyn, had won a special trophy in the Cooperstown of my heart. “Yeh,” Albie said, “I like all them Yankees.”
I didn’t have a chance to ask Albie what he meant by that, for Mr. Hopper, bronzed, smiling, erect, was flipping a coin; I looked up, saw the glint in the sun, and I was calling “heads.” It landed tails and the other captain had first choice. My heart flopped over when he looked at Albie’s arms, but calmed when he passed on and chose first a tall, lean, first-baseman type. Immediately I said, “I’ll take Pelagutti.” You don’t very often see smiles like the one that crossed Albie Pelagutti’s face that moment: you would think I had paroled him from a life sentence.
The game began. I played shortstop—left-handed—and batted second; Albie was in center field and, at his wish, batted fourth. Their first man grounded out, me to the first baseman. The next batter hit a high, lofty fly ball to center field. The moment I saw Albie move after it I knew Tommy Henrich and Pete Reiser were only names to him; all he knew about baseball he’d boned up on the night before. While the ball hung in the air, Albie Jumped up and down beneath it, his arms raised upward directly above his head; his wrists were glued together, and his two hands flapped open and closed like a butterfly’s wings, begging the ball toward them.
“C’mon,” he was screaming to the sky, “c’mon you bastard…” And his legs bicycle-pumped up and down, up and down. I hope the moment of my death does not take as long as it did for that damn ball to drop. It hung, it hung, Albie cavorting beneath like a Holy Roller. And then it landed, smack into Albie’s chest. The runner was rounding second and heading for third while Albie twirled all around, looking, his arms down now, stretched out, as though he were playing ring-around-a-rosy with two invisible children. “Behind you, Pelagutti!” I screamed. He stopped moving. “What?” he called back to me. I ran halfway out to center field. “Behind you—relay it!” And then, as the runner rounded third, I had to stand there defining “relay” to him.