Streets of Gold (57 page)

DAVINA: Then why can’t he bring her here?

REBECCA: I didn’t say he couldn’t bring her here.

DAVINA: He goes everywhere with her, you know. It’s not as if it’s a great big secret.

REBECCA: No, it’s certainly not a secret. Mama’s dead a little more than a year, and he moves in with a
shvartzeh
file clerk who...

DAVINA: She’s very good for him.

REBECCA: She’s twenty-four years old!

DAVINA: So what? Don’t be such a prude, Rebecca. You want to know something? I think it was going on even when Mama was alive, what do you think of that?

REBECCA: I believe it.

DAVINA: So?

REBECCA: So let him do whatever the fuck he wants, but he’s not bringing her to this house. Not yet, he isn’t.

DAVINA: Then when?

REBECCA: How does eight years sound?

ABE: Donna, you want some more turkey? Rebecca, is there more turkey in the kitchen?

REBECCA: Harriet? Would you bring in the turkey platter, please?

DONNA: The stuffing is delicious, Rebecca.

REBECCA: Thank you. Harriet made it.
Harriet!

HARRIET: Comin’, comin’.

STELLA: Why does Ike have to leave the table right in the middle of dinner?

REBECCA: It’s an important call.

STELLA: What kind of call is so important he has to leave the table on Christmas Day in the middle of dinner?

REBECCA: It’s something about scoring a movie.

JIMMY: Ike’s going to be in another movie?

REBECCA: No, he’s going to score it. Write the music for it.

JIMMY: Yeah? Maybe he can get a part for me in it.

HARRIET: Who wants the turkey, ma’am?

REBECCA: Donna would like some, please.

HARRIET: You the one, miss?

DONNA: Yes, please.

JIMMY: I could do my Charlie Chaplin imitation.

REBECCA: Well, Pop, all he’s doing is writing the music for it.

JIMMY: Maybe he could put one of my poems to music.

STELLA: You and your poems.

ABE: He writes good poems. Didn’t you think that was a good poem, Donna?

DONNA: Yes, it was very good.

STELLA: Thank God he didn’t use “xylophone” again. That’s ’cause I told him about it that time. He’s got some memory, this one.

JIMMY: She takes credit for everything I do.

STELLA: Well,
didn’t
I tell you?

ABE: Did you see that Christmas card from Harry James, Donna? Ike knows Harry James.

DONNA: There’s one there from Count Basie, too.

JIMMY: Those bands are always repeating themselves. Ike never repeats himself. That’s what I like about his band.

STELLA: What bands repeat themselves? What are you talking about?

JIMMY: Like Count Basie’s.

STELLA: Sure, only
your
bands were good.

JIMMY: Did I say anything about my bands? I said
Ike’s
band was good.

DONNA: I love “The Man I Love.”

JIMMY: That was his best record. It was the first one, and it was the best one. I don’t care what anybody says.

HARRIET: Ma’am, if the young lady’s through, I’d like to start clearin’.

It amazes me now that everything remained so predictably constant in our Immigrant America. Aside from statistics — Sophie’s death, Tolerant Abe’s
shvartzeh
, this or that latest event in my all but invisible career — the voices, the cadences, the tonalities were precisely those I had heard in Harlem and Rebecca had heard on the lower East Side during all the days of our separate childhoods. When Rebecca repeated the conversation she’d had in the bedroom with Davina, I could have sworn I was listening to a similar conversation my grandfather once had with Grandma Tess, who’d refused to allow Aunt Bianca to bring her butcher boyfriend into the house. And in contrast to those seemingly endless Sundays we spent with the family, the times we spent with close friends and acquaintances were exhilarating.
They
were Wasp America — even though most of them were the grandchildren of immigrants or slaves. I don’t know when Wasp stopped meaning White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I feel certain that in the new American lexicon, the acronym should more properly read Wealthy And Successful Professional. A Protestant ditchdigger is an Immigrant American, and Paul Newman is a Wasp American, and Camelot (when it existed) was divided between the folk who lived up there in the uppermost chambers of the castle and the folk who squatted in the castle keep below. Forget the fact that John F. Kennedy was the grandson of Irish immigrants, forget that he was a Catholic. Even my mother (who’s American, don’t forget) knows he was a Wasp. She knows it because she is an Immigrant American, whatever else she may tell herself.

In July of 1970, like all men who suddenly find themselves to be not only forty, but almost four years past it already, I began questioning everything — my success, my marriage, my family,
and
America. I had a lot of time to do a lot of soul-searching, navel-contemplating, and nitty-gritty investigation. This is what I decided. I decided everything was hunky-dory.

My success had lasted longer than anyone might have reasonably expected. I had enjoyed ten long years of popularity, and people still knew my name wherever I went; in fact, the house band would invariably break into the Dwight Jamison version of “The Man I Love” whenever I walked into a club. I’d already scored one movie, and Mark was certain he could get me other movie gigs. Every now and then he’d line up a weekend in a posh spot on the Coast or in Miami, and that was enough to keep my hand in. Alone in my studio, I would sometimes spend long hours listening to my jazz collection, and in truth I rather enjoyed the serenity of what could only be called semiretirement.

As for my marriage, I considered it quite carefully, and decided it was no worse and perhaps a lot better than most of the marriages around us. I no longer had the freedom I’d become accustomed to on the road, but I discovered there were a great many... well. . . “restless” women in the town of Talmadge, Connecticut, and that they were eager to exorcise their demons in various motels and country inns to which they were kind enough to drive me in their station wagons. I lied relentlessly and recklessly to Rebecca. Our chauffeur would drop me off at a record shop in Stamford, and I’d tell him I wouldn’t be needing him till four o’clock, to pick me up in front of Bloomingdale’s at that time, and then the transfer to this or that station wagon would take place, one or another willing matron transporting me first vehicularly and later physically. They all had different station wagons and different in-bed specialties, the most bizarre of which perhaps was... but I digress again. I would be standing in front of Bloomingdale’s at the appointed hour, having first wandered into the record shop to buy two dozen albums at random, and when I got home that afternoon I would tell Rebecca I’d had a marvelous time record-hunting, not to mention a delightful Chinese lunch. Rebecca bought it. (I
thought
she was buying it.) And meanwhile I figured this was what marriage in America was all about. I mean, if such and such a respected Talmadge matron was cheating on her husband with
me
, then it was reasonable to assume
he
was cheating on
her
with a respected matron somewhere in New York City, where he took his three-hour lunches. In a way, my explorations into suburban sex were more satisfying than the liaisons on the road had been. My fame had passed, you see; The Beast no longer claimed morsels from the table.

I told myself, too, that those euphemistic record-hunting expeditions, or shopping trips, or dental appointments, or fittings at the tailor’s, or simply long walks alone in the Talmadge Reservation were helpful to the sex life Rebecca and I shared together. I had long ago decided that I simply
needed
more sex than she did (does that sound familiar, Mr. and Mrs. Phil Anderer?) and that she was getting no more and no less (well, perhaps a
teeny
bit less) than she desired. I remained convinced, too, that Rebecca was faithful to me, that whereas she immediately triggered desire in any man who mistakenly read her smoldering look, she would just as quickly turn on her green death ray and
zotz!
— a smoking pile of ashes from which could be heard the echoing traces of an advertising man’s voice oozing, “Do you ever get into the city?” I told myself that what I was doing was not only American, it was probably international or maybe universal as well. If I’d been a successful (albeit fading) jazz musician in Italy, I’d have had a steady mistress with whom I would spend weekdays in Porto Santo Stefano,
shtupping
her before her own hubby came down from Milano for the weekend. (During the week,
he
was up at Lake Como, putting it to a Genoese lady whose husband was in Portofino sticking a lady from Naples.) There were a lot of Little Orphan Annies in Talmadge, and I found at least a few of them, and we used each other to satisfy our separate needs, whatever we told ourselves they were. Actually, I had no needs. Everything was hunky-dory.

My immediate family was as hunky-dory as any of the families surrounding us, or any of the families we knew in New York City, fifty miles to the south, or New Haven, approximately the same distance away to the north and the east. My youngest son, David, was attending a private school in New Canaan, intent on getting into Princeton — sixty percent of the kids who were graduated from his school found themselves in Princeton afterward. He was a bright kid who maintained a straight-B average, and who (like every other kid in the world) was a member of a rock group; his instrument was bass guitar. He played it as well as did any of the bass guitarists in any of the successful rock groups; he was lousy. I once told him all I had to do was pull out the plug and rock music would go away. He told me I was old-fashioned. Actually, he called me an
alteh kahker
; not for nothing was he half Jewish. My middle son, Michael, had been accepted at Columbia University, and was living in a rat-infested apartment on 119th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. He shared the apartment with a girl two years older than he was. She had not told her parents she was living with a boy. She referred to Michael only as “my roommate” whenever she spoke to Brighton, Massachusetts, on the telephone her parents were paying for. If Michael ever chanced to answer the phone when they called, he used one of a dozen different names and told them he was the superintendent come to fix the pipes (I suppose he
was,
in a way), or the
faygeleh
poet who lived down the hall, or the boyfriend of a girl who was visiting the girl he lived with — his inventions were varied and imaginatively deceitful; not for nothing was he half Italian. My
farblondjeteh
son, Andrew, was at the moment in India, having dropped out of three colleges in succession, and having discovered that his father was nothing but a nine-to-fiver in disguise, a money-grubbing, materialistic fink — “Who needs money?” he asked. “I can get along on pennies a day. Pennies!” (Yes, son, but they’re
my
pennies; I busted my ass to earn them.) He had not written for three months, but many of our friends had wandering children, too, and we were all convinced this would pass, eventually they would settle down. In the meantime, Andrew was safe from the draft (he’d had cartilage removed from his knee after a skiing accident), and we figured if he had already survived the war in Vietnam, he might one day survive the war raging within himself. My immediate family, then, was what any of us successful Americans might have expected of our immediate families in the year 1970, by which time one president, one assassin, one separatist, one neo-Fascist, one civil rights leader, and one presidential hopeful had been murdered.

My Immigrant family was in pretty good shape as well — with the possible exception of my Uncle Luke, who had disappeared from the face of the earth right after my grandfather confronted him on the Bowery. Honest Abe had remarried — not his little
shvartzeh
, but a nize Jush lady from Miami. He was living down there with her and helping to run the gift shop she owned on Collins Avenue. My parents, though they seemed to be going to doctors and to funerals more and more often, were nonetheless happy in their apartment house on the Grand Concourse. Each time my father came for one of the family get-togethers, he brought one of his poems. Seth and Davina were still happily married, still childless, still living in the same building on Central Park West, though they had moved to an apartment four stories higher, overlooking a magnificent view of the park. My grandmother had died of a stroke the year before, and at the age of eighty-nine, my grandfather had finally been convinced to leave Harlem and to move in with my Aunt Cristie out in Massapequa. I saw him perhaps once a month, usually at my mother’s house.

And my Wasp family was in fine shape, too, consisting as it did of successful American like myself, wealthy self-made men who were ready to swap ethnic jokes, and tell this or that intimate anecdote about one or another Broadway production or Hollywood film or celebrity more or less famous than ourselves, and exchange Christmas gifts, and do favors for each other, and embrace each other (an old-world affectation) whenever we came into or left each other’s company. One or two of us were also fucking each other’s wives (though not my Rebecca!
never
my Rebecca!) and looking the other way while we swigged the booze and danced the wild
Tarantella
and greeted the sun or bayed at the moon. We were one great big Wasp American family, and we realized that nowhere but in the United States could we have scaled such dizzying and spectacular heights while managing simultaneously to cling to our spectacles, testicles, wallets, and watches.