Back Then (25 page)

In Edward's view, and that of his disciples, he was the Father of Public Relations, a profession I knew nothing about. When I did learn something about it from Edward it was a little like being told there was a secret government. Edward believed that the counsel on public relations (a job title he invented) acted as the guardian of capitalist democracy, a behind-the-scenes philosopher-king and wizard who, supported by opinion and policy experts, told governments, corporations, and societies in general what was good for them. Public relations introduced corporate giants to benevolent, enlightened, and endearing policies, thus maintaining their interests, and the public's as well, in gainful equilibrium as they walked together along a two-way street of “information, persuasion, and adjustment.” Edward was a passionately sincere believer in the social value of public relations, possessed brilliance, flair, and imagination in practicing it, and was extravagantly rewarded for what he did. He insisted that nothing had value unless it was visible and publicly acknowledged. The title alone of one of his books,
The Engineering of Consent
, chilled me to the bone because it treated democratic society like a big child. He refused to consider himself Jewish in any binding or meaningful way, dismissing as “the higher hokum” all religion, however disorganized. We argued about these things, sometimes heatedly, and kept our juices at a healthy boil.

Because of Edward's horror of clergy and of any taint of religious ritual Annie and I were married in the living room of 163 East Sixty-third Street by a New York State judge recruited for the task. My brother was my best man. A hundred people wilted in the late July heat and waited for the bar to open while the judge carried on, inexplicably and at exasperating length, about William Shakespeare. As arranged by Edward and Doris without consultation with either of the principals, this was a full fig wedding, from the policeman stationed on the street outside to the tailcoat that encased the bridegroom and the tossing of the bridal bouquet.

CHAPTER 10

Every week or
so I left our
discovery
office and walked up three blocks to where our parent, Pocket Books, Inc., occupied the entire twenty-seventh floor of 630 Fifth Avenue, posh premises. I was there, in Bob Kotlowitz's office one late fall day in 1953, when I noticed a young man standing in the doorway of Bob's office, peering in at us. The man was wearing a Harris Tweed overcoat and a long green cashmere scarf he had wound once around his neck, leaving most of it hanging gracefully down his back. I was transfixed by the arrangement of scarf and body and wondered, for the briefest moment, whether this display said something I might not want to hear, for instance, that he liked boys better than girls, or that he was hopelessly in love with himself. I hardly bothered to look at the face above the scarf.

“It's cousin Joe,” Bob said. “What are you doing here?”

This Joe said, “You haven't heard?” and went on to explain that Pocket Books and Abrams were collaborating on a series of art books. Cousin Joe, it seemed, was its general editor.

Bob introduced us. “This is Justin Kaplan,” he said. “His friends and relatives call him Joe.” Justin—or Joe—said hello in a surprisingly light and gentle voice. I asked him how he was related to Bob. Bob answered for him: Bob's wife, Billy, was a first cousin of Joe's cousin Jerry's wife, Eleanor. Did that make Bob and Joe cousins? I didn't think so. This answer reminded me of the way my father insisted I was related to James Joyce: “Your mother's brother's first wife's second husband was the son of James Joyce.” The beads were not on the same string, and yet if you were proud of any connection at all, you could, for the sake of the pride, pretend that they were. I had recently met Justin's first cousin Leon; the two men looked so much alike, they could easily have been taken for brothers: both had assertive jaws and noses, dark hair, and emphatically intelligent expressions. The Kaplan genes were evidently powerful.

I stared at the scarf, amazed at its pulsating green-ness, its softness. Its owner seemed shy and not especially forthcoming, but there was something about him that adhered, like the smell of strong perfume on a woman who has left the room.

My current boyfriend, Paul, and I had, without consciously admitting it, come to a fork in the road of life from where he was about to take off one way and I another. The main problem was that I wasn't sure that he wasn't more attached to the bottle than he was to me. We endured a prolonged and painful severing, like pulling a Band-Aid off slowly so it won't hurt so much, and of course it should be done in one swift yank, but we really loved each other and couldn't bear the idea that we might never see each other again. As all this was going on I felt, buried in my brain, a fragment, a pun based on Mr. Kaplan's name, that would not be dislodged: Just-in case—just in case I'm cast on the shore alone again.

It took me and Paul several months to pull the Band-Aid all the way off, and when it was done, a stinging raw spot was left underneath. Melancholy, I asked Bob if he could arrange a lunch date for him, me, and cousin Joe. I couldn't figure out any other way of seeing him again without looking desperate and aggressive; a girl could wait until she turned into Miss Havisham.

The lunch date was swiftly accomplished. On the day and time agreed upon, Bob and I walked over to the Golden Horn, on the northern border of Rockefeller Center, where Joe was waiting inside the door. This was one of the first upscale Middle Eastern restaurants in New York, a cavernous room entirely fitted in white: white curtains, tablecloths, napkins. The waiters wore knee-length white aprons. It seemed as if the air was white with a kind of dry mist. There were only a few other customers in the place, one a man by himself, reading a book. We had plenty to talk about. A week or so earlier two young men, Dennis Wepman and Harlow Fraden, had dispatched Fraden's parents by forcing them to drink an arsenic-laced daiquiri. The two boys had taken what money there was lying around, booked a room in the Essex House, and holed up there until serious bickering began and Wepman tried to stave in Fraden's head with a telephone he'd ripped from the wall. Wepman had worked briefly in Pocket Books' mail room and Bob knew him—Bob had actually talked to a cold-blooded murderer. Their story kept the three of us afloat through my sudden and Joe's seemingly permanent reticence.

Halfway through the meal, the ambient sense of drama abruptly escalated when a waiter, serving the book-reading diner, upturned a large platter of gummy white soup into the man's lap. It was like a silent movie: Man rises to his feet, looks down in disbelief as the stuff dribbles over his front while waiter tries to brush soup from man's pants with napkin. Man angrily pushes waiter's arm away. Headwaiter rushes over, points to kitchen door, banishing waiter. Soup victim stalks out of restaurant without paying. It seemed as if the episode had been performed solely for the three of us, although its message was unclear.

There was no way to top this incident; we finished our exotic meal, somewhat unnerved but sated, not so much on the food—
baba ghanoush
, salad with chopped mint, spiced lamb—as on the tableau of the overturned soup plate.

“What kind of soup was that?” I said to Bob as we walked back to our office. “It looked like library paste.”

“It must have been tapioca soup,” he said. “Good thing it was cold.”

“Do you think he's going to call me?”

“Who, Joe? You must be kidding,” he said. “Cousin Joe is smitten.”

“What makes you think so?” I said.

“Enough,” Bob said. “Just wait and see.”

Cousin
Joe called me less than a week after the Soup Lunch and asked me to meet him the following day. I usually ate lunch with one of my friends, Francine or Marian, or alone at a hamburger place or, if he was free, with my boss, Vance Bourjaily, at a cafeteria on Forty-seventh Street west of Fifth that Vance called the Tel Aviv Café for its almost exclusively Hasidic clientele. Once a week or so, Bob Kotlowitz and I walked around the corner to the American Bar and Grill on Sixth Avenue, where I had convinced our favorite waitress that Bob was Glenn Ford, the movie star, whom he eerily resembled. But a lunch date with a prospective boyfriend put things at a different depth. It meant dressing up. It meant being careful of what you said and what you revealed about yourself. Joe asked me to meet him at Maison A. deWinter, a French place, on the southern border of Rockefeller Center, our hub. The restaurant was on the second floor, in what had once been the front parlor of a milk-chocolate-colored brownstone house, very subdued. I was nervous; cousin Joe was perspiring and ashen. He focused on the menu. “The calf's brains are very good here; they're cooked in black butter and served with capers,” Joe said. “Would you like to try them?”

Unaware until that moment that I was weighing him in as a possible mate, I decided right then that I could never marry a man who ate brains for lunch—or, as far as that went, for any other meal.

“I think I'll have the salade niçoise,” I said.

Like a car with transmission problems, we had trouble keeping a conversation moving forward. Question, followed by answer, followed by silence. I did manage to learn that Joe's mother had died when he was six, his father when he was thirteen, both of cancer, and that he had been raised by his aunt Frances, his older brother, Howard, and Georgia Edwards, a woman from St. Kitts who had come to work for the family Kaplan when Joe was an infant and was still working for Howard.

When the brains arrived—via a dumbwaiter—I had to admit that they looked almost edible, something like sweetbreads or pale scrambled eggs. Cousin Joe dug in.

The lunch dragged on, my mind adrift. Although Joe was undeniably sweet, smart, and sexy, he seemed too private and covered to divulge anything a woman could use to build on. As we said good-bye at the bottom of the brownstone's stoop, cousin Joe's pallor had deepened and sweat poured down both cheeks.

“You're not feeling well, are you?” I said.

“Not really,” he said. “I think I'll just go home and go to bed.”

When I got back to
discovery
's office, Vance asked me how it had gone. I told him that cousin Joe was a mute. Also, there appeared to be something wrong with him. Malaria? Something more dire?

When Joe called me a few days later he said that he'd gone straight home after the Brains Lunch, taken his temperature, which turned out to be 103, and lay in his bed with the flu, shivering and spiking a fever for the next three days.

I asked him why he'd kept our lunch date when he was so sick. “I couldn't bear to break it,” he said.

The
next time I saw Cousin Joe was at the apartment he'd been living in for a year or so on Thirty-seventh Street off First Avenue, near the East Side Airlines Terminal. I'd never been that far east before except to leave the city. The apartment was in a pale brick postwar building devoid of any architectural character whatsoever, hastily put up, aesthetically careless. Joe had invited me to a small dinner party in his home, number 303. About to push the buzzer, I was abruptly reminded of a recent
New Yorker
cartoon: a leering older guy opens the door to a ripe young thing and says “Party? Why, my dear,
we're
the party!” I took a deep breath and pushed anyway. Cousin Joe answered. I looked past him into the living room. It was a space so small it could have fit into my house's downstairs foyer, with room left over. I thought it was adorable. Two couples were already there when I arrived, a TV director, Fielder Cook, and his wife and an art historian, Sam Hunter, and girlfriend, to whom I was carefully introduced by Joe, who said my name in a way that had it dripping with honey. The director's wife, Sally Chamberlain, was a soap opera actress, delicately pretty. The historian's girlfriend, Edys Merrill, was an energetic painter, larger than her husband. There was a woman in the kitchen, cooking, I supposed, our dinner. Joe introduced us: “This is Georgia Edwards,” he said. “She's the woman who raised me.” Georgia administered a psychic X ray, unsmiling.

For most of the evening I listened. A good deal of the talk was about people I didn't know and had never heard of. Edys told a story about how her mother, snooping, had found her diaphragm in a suitcase and, apparently never having seen one before, asked Edys what it was, and Edys told her mother it was a paint strainer and her mother believed it. We all laughed like crazy. Every so often Joe would fill in a missing piece of exposition. He smiled at me as if he couldn't quite believe I was there. We ate shrimp creole with rice and a sweet dessert. Then there was coffee in Arzberg cups of porcelain. This was, I figured, cousin Joe's nod to ordinary middle-class props.

Just-in case was slowly becoming Just-in time. Playing with the words this way made marriage seem more a game than what I recognized as an appalling decision. I knew myself well enough to recognize that, when it came to most men—with a couple of notable exceptions—I was a regular firefly, never staying still long enough to adhere. I fell in love at least once a month, desperately in love. After a few weeks of infatuation, the sting of love would start to wear off. What, if anything, distinguished Justin from the others? Why shouldn't I tire of him just as quickly? I hesitated. He was too quiet, too baffled by reticence. But he was adorable—sweet, a little sad, greatly humorous, generous, and blessed with what teachers call “character,” and Jews call
Menschlichkeit.

I told my mother I had met someone I liked, telling her his name, saying it in a tone that would signal he was not like my other boyfriends. My mother immediately asked me about what she called his background, without having to explain that she wanted to know what sort of Jew he was—the acceptable German kind or the unsuitable others. She was playing solitaire in my parents' bedroom while my father slept, a scene so familiar as to seem ordinary. I told her Joe's father had landed on Ellis Island, via steerage from Hamburg, and that his people were originally from Russia. How I enjoyed presenting her with this unsavory morsel. She frowned at it. “By the way,” I said, “what's the difference between a Galitzianer and a Litwak?” two words I had learned only recently. She said, “They're both bad.” I told her Joe had been orphaned very early. This didn't seem to please her either. “When do I get to meet this Joe Kaplan?” she asked.