The Great Husband Hunt (37 page)

51

So the very Minkel money Gil had turned against paid for his admission to a cemetery in Flushing, and as soon as that was done Sapphire commenced to make a life's project of building him into a giant and a hero. She gathered up a few paltry things from his room on the Bowery and took a low-rent apartment on Second Avenue, to be nearer Ukrainians and bohemians and others she described as “my daddy's kind of people.” After that she only ventured north of Gramercy Park to see her mind doctor, and her regular coolness with me turned into an arctic freeze.

Baby Alan learned to walk and talk, Vera graduated cum laude and immediately began another course of study, and Ma gave up all pretense of a social life. She adored the television, once Mortie had convinced her that the people on the screen could not see her the way she could see them, and the acquisition of a new help named Coretta completed her happiness. Coretta loved television, too, and was most willing to serve Ma's evening slop on a tray and then sit with her through
Hopalong Cassidy
and the
Colgate Comedy Hour.
I believe Coretta became a kind of friend to her. She was certainly the person who introduced Ma to Shirley Temple cocktails.

Then the time came around for the setting of Oscar's headstone, and the marking of his anniversary. His name was to be added to his mother's on a bronze plaque in Temple Emanu-El.

I said, “How come Judah's name isn't up there yet?”

Ma said, “Because he'll share a plaque with me. And if my aching bones are anything to go by, he won't have long to wait.”

Emerald said, I don't suppose you'll be gracing us with your presence on Saturday morning?” But I did go. Once in a while I liked to hear those squiggly back-to-front words.

The Landau cousin came up from St. Louis, wearing old-fashioned eyeglasses, probably the same ones he'd worn to the Seder, and Judah Jacoby's friends from the Men's Club and the Temple Youth Committee. You can't just say kaddish. You have to have a certain number present, otherwise I guess God can't hear you, and for a person who had chosen to live like a hermit Oscar managed to pull in quite a crowd.

Ma came with Emerald and Mortie, leaning unnecessarily on Mortie's arm I thought, and Coretta came, too, although she was a Baptist Total Abstainer, and I stood slightly apart, needing to get away punctually for lunch with Humpy and an important collector from London, England.

I was wearing a divine boxy jacket and long-line pencil skirt in cranberry silk with a witty velour toreador hat.

Someone came in late, when the ordinary praying was almost finished, and stood behind me, quite close. I could smell the breath of a person whose mouth is too dry.

Mortie was to be chief mourner. He had never met Oscar in his life, but it had to be a man, and Sherman Ulysses didn't go to temples and think irrational thoughts. If there was one thing we were short of in our family it was Jewish men.

“Yisgadal va yiskadash,” Mortie began, and when it came to the “y'hay shm'ay,” where everyone joins in, I heard a voice I thought I knew.

“Y'hay shm'ay raboh m'vorah…” May His great name be blessed.

I turned around. It was my stepbrother Murray. But changed into an old man, with sunken cheeks and no teeth and thin, colorless hair.

He didn't look at me, though, until after he'd said, “Omayn.” That's how you know the praying is finished. “Omayn.”

Then he just took one look at my hat and said, “Olé.”

We went right out, before anyone else made a move, and stood under the temple awning till an empty cab came along. My head felt like one of those little shake-and-view snowstorms.

I said, “I have a lunch.”

“OK,” he said.

I said, “Ride with me, while I think.”

“OK,” he said.

I pushed him into the cab.

I said, “I thought you were dead, of course.” And he grabbed my arm with his bony old hand.

“I'm sorry.” That was all he'd say. “I'm sorry.”

I didn't know what the hell to do. I couldn't take a refugee to lunch with James Foliat. Murray wasn't even wearing a collar and tie. Besides which, I wasn't sure I'd be able to master my emotions if I had him sitting there before me. He was a sorry sight indeed.

He said, “You can drop me at 44th Street.”

I said, “Are you staying at the Algonquin?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “But I could see you there, later.”

The cab pulled over.

I said, “Swear to me you'll be there.”

“I swear,” he said.

I said, “Swear properly. Put your hand on your heart.”

“Lady,” the driver said. “This is a cab not a court of law. You want Dominique's Grill or don't you?”

Humpy and James Foliat were late. Bella Yaff had been told to expect them but Bella Yaff had failed to remember and they had had to wait for her to roll out of her bed and throw on her stinking coveralls. I had once given her a tablet of Roger et Gallet Muguet soap but the hint had passed her by, and I instructed Humpy to retrieve it next time he was in her neighborhood, which he did. She made slovenliness her trademark, and it worked very well. Better to be famous for one's unwashed hair than to be an unknown.

Foliat, though, turned out to be a fastidious little man. Yaff's domestic arrangements were making him think twice about buying, so Humpy was in a bad humor.

“Take over, would you?” he whispered. “I'd rather like to skip lunch.”

“Me too,” I whispered back. “My stepbrother just rose from the dead and I don't know whether I'm coming or going.”

“Murray?” he said. “How extraordinary! Well then. Let's order a little something and press on, shall we? I think I might have an egg salad? I never eat much at this time of day.”

But James Foliat had a very serious attitude to lunch. Shrimp Appetizers were required, followed by Broiled Squab, Nesselrode Pudding, and after a bottle of Beaujolais wine the damage done by Bella Yaff was repaired. It was three-thirty before I raced into the Algonquin, searching for Murray's face.

He was in the back lobby, sipping a glass of milk and pretending to read a book. I sat opposite him, the better to look at him.

“I suppose I've been very, very bad,” he observed.

I said, “Where have you been?”

“Is Auntsie dead?” he asked. And that was how it was. Every question was answered with another question.

“Did you know Angelica's not your wife anymore?”

“Have you been back from England long?”

“I searched for you in Paris.”

“How are Sapphy and Em?”

“You look terrible. What happened to your teeth?”

“Would you care for a cocktail? Or we could go to Hegeman's for old times' sake.”

We stayed put.

I said, “You saw Emerald this morning. In the Prince of Wales check? She has a baby now, and Sabbath candles and a husband. The whole thing. She's old before her time. Sherman Ulysses the same. He's gone gray. Your pa's gone. But if you know about Oscar, I guess you know that. Do you know all this already? Have you been hiding out down here spying on us all these years? Do you intend showing your face at 69th Street?”

“Well,” he said, “I think I'll visit Auntsie first.”

But that required no great courage. Yetta Landau wouldn't have known if President Eisenhower himself had paid her a call.

I said, “Is there anything you'd like me to say to Ma? Anything to prepare the way?”

“Yes. No,” he said. “Well, no hurry. There's no one left who'll have missed me very much.”

I said, “I've missed you very much.”

“Tinkety Tonk,” he said, and a teardrop rolled down his cheek and into his fresh glass of milk.

“Tonkety Tink,” I replied. Manhattans always did make me cry.

He wouldn't entertain coming home with me to 49th Street. Hotels suited him, he said, when he was between gardens, and he was between gardens just then. The best I could manage was to remove him from the Tenth Avenue fleapit he was staying in to the Algonquin. I went to the desk and arranged it right away.

“I'm really quite all right where I am,” he said. “Isn't this place a bit steep?”

I said, “You're worth it. Shall we call up Em? We could drive across to Brooklyn, then get a late supper. I have to look in at the Blue Angel for five minutes. Pookie Callan's giving a party for one of our unfortunates. But no more than five minutes, I promise. And then we can talk. Oh boy!”

“Poppy,” he said, “I take my evening meal early these days. I hope you'll understand. A light supper and early to bed.”

I said, “Are you sick?”

“No,” he said. “Just old.”

But I was older. He would never catch up to me.

I saw Murray installed into his suite. He looked like he just hatched from an egg, sitting on the edge of the bed gazing around him.

I said, “And don't try running away again. I'm having you watched.”

I felt on top of the world. After the Blue Angel I went onto the Stork Club with Orfie and Jerome and stayed up till three. It was when I put my hand in my pocket to pay the coat-check girl that I found the scrap of paper Murray had written on.

MISSING

Missed you. Wished I were

Nearer. Now I am does that

Make me a near miss?

52

Ma received the news about Murray calmly. Old age and the watching of amusing television programs had brought her a new serenity.

“It the calm before the storm,” Coretta predicted. “You see. She be having a breathing hattack any minute now.”

Sapphire wept. She said Murray had to be hiding some terrible tragedy that had kept him from us and robbed him of his health. The family curse had struck again.

I said, “What family curse? Murray's not blood.”

“Any family connected with you,” she said.

Honey said he'd feel better the moment he found the kingdom of heaven within, and sent him some pamphlets.

Emerald just screamed for joy.

“I knew it!” she kept saying. “I knew he'd turn up. Mortie, you're going to love him. Bring him today. Bring him here right now.”

But he wasn't quite fit for company.

I said, “Murray, about your appearance. We're going to have to get you some dentures. And a shirt that fits. You look like a death's head on a stick.”

“I have dentures,” he said. “I just can't get along with them.”

I said, “Well, you can't go visiting looking like that. You'll terrify Baby Alan.”

So he put in his dentures, but they seemed like they didn't really belong to him. They crowded out his mouth and shone unnaturally and because they pinched you were lucky to get a civil word out of him while he was wearing them. In the end he developed the habit of commencing a visit with his teeth in his mouth and ending it with them in his pocket.

I said, “As long as you only do it in front of family. If you ever do that in the Zanzibar Club, I'll kill you.”

“Don't worry,” he said. “If I ever find myself in the Zanzibar Club I'll save you the trouble.”

Murray's removable teeth seemed to endear him to Baby Alan, who smiled at him incessantly whereas he only ever peeped at me anxiously.

I said, “Why does that child always look so worried?”

Em said, “Because you make the room spin. Plus, your hair's a different color every time he sees you.”

It was most annoying to see how she fussed over Murray. Apparently a person can go away and leave his responsibilities for others to shoulder and then return, as cool as you like, and be found fascinating and adorable. I always took fabulous gifts when I visited my grandson, and yet when Murray turned up with nothing but a package of sunflower seeds and one of his stupid haiku verses you'd have thought he had bought every goddamned toy in Schwartz's window.

“PROGRESS,” he had written.

It seems like only

Yesterday I was a mere

Uncle. Now I'm great.

Ma came right to the point.

“You realize you killed your father?” was how she greeted him, but that was as bad as things got.

Sapphire broke her rule about never crossing my threshold and came to visit him at 49th Street, where I was endeavoring to wean him off milk dinners and persuade him to move in.

“I'm only here on account of Uncle Murray,” she said. “So don't get any big ideas.”

Sapphire was never one to let go of a grudge.

I suppose Murray had grown accustomed to people being shocked by the change in his appearance. Now it was his turn to be surprised. Sapphire had the tired, gray look of a person who attracts misfortune and never gets a facial.

“Uncle Murray, Uncle Murray!” she said, squeezing his hands. “I want you to tell me everything. Absolutely everything.”

“Everything?” he said, most alarmed.

“About the camps,” she said. “You'll feel better if you talk.”

He looked to me for help.

I said, “Murray, were you in camps?”

“No,” he said. “No.”

“It's OK,” Sapphy said, starting the hand-squeezing routine again. “It doesn't have to be now. Whenever you feel strong enough. I lost someone, you see. That's why it's so important you tell your story. You're our witness.”

“Sapphy,” he said, “I'm so sorry you lost someone. That's a terrible thing. But I don't have a story, you know? I've just been…roaming around. That's all. But why don't you tell me your story? I'd like that.”

“He's very sick, you know?” she whispered to me over the drinks tray. “It could take years.”

“She's crazy, of course,” he said to me, after she had gone.

I said, “You're both crazy. She has roaches. You own one pair of pants. As far as I can see neither of you has done a damned thing with your lives except ruin your looks and live like unfortunates.”

He was quiet.

I said, “And just give me one good reason why you won't move in here. It's the best address in town. It's the best view in town. Or let me buy you the Pearlsteins' duplex, then at least we'll be neighbors.”

He said, “I'm going to live somewhere I can make a garden. That's what I'd like. A garden by the sea.”

I said, “If you live here I can introduce you to people who'd adore to have one of your gardens. The best people. I know everyone who's anyone in this town. You'll be the talk of the Hamptons.”