he put up the heavy screens over the windows and switched on the two burglar alarms. Finally, with a brief look around at all the conglomerated stock, lying submerged in the dimness he had brought about, like some ancient remains half buried in the muck of an ocean bottom, he closed the door and locked it.
His mouth widened in a grimace that a passing man took for a smile and returned. He closed his eyes for a moment and leaned against the coarse metal screen that covered the window. The warm evening air played over his blinded face and the mingled homely smells of a poor neighborhood assaulted his nose. He stood there as though dead while the world continued its Babel-like conversation in car motors and boat whistles from the river, in distant shouts, in laughter, in the frayed yet gaudy music from some jukebox. Finally he touched the bridge of his glasses in a habit of adjustment and began walking toward the river, to his car, and ultimately to his cool, immaculate bed.
But there were obstacles between him and his bed.
He parked the dusty Plymouth in the driveway and walked past the stone barbecue, across the flagstone patio with its expensive, yellow-painted garden furniture and the round table with the flowery umbrella in the middle. And suddenly, as he approached the back door of the house, he was burdened with his weight. For a moment he worried about the state of his health, tinkered carefully, but with eyes averted, with that inner mechanism which maintained his equilibrium. Until he opened the screened door and smiled wryly at the creak of it. Maybe it is my menopause, he thought, my change of life come early.
His sister rushed at him as he entered the kitchen.
“Ah, look at him, all worn out. Sol, totinka. Sit, sit. Bertha will get you a nice cool lemonade,” she said with stagy affection, her gray eyes reckoning slyly as always. “You should conserve, not work so hard, Solly.” A heavily built woman in her early fifties, she dressed too youthfully, and her hair was hairdresser-aged, the ends tipped with silver. “Sit. Let Bertha make you comfy with some lemonade.” She prodded him toward a kitchen chair with patting motions of her soft hands.
“I do not want lemonade, Bertha. Stop pushing me to sit! I am dirty—let me wash my hands. Do not concern yourself so much with my comfort all of a sudden,” he said. He saw, in his sister’s generosity, those sticky fingers that came away with more than they gave. “What do you want?” he asked coldly.
“Oh, Solly,” she scolded. Then she shrugged as though resigned to his lack of understanding. “Well, you know how bad the television has been working. So I figured if you start spending money repairing, it doesn’t pay.” She looked at him timidly for a moment. “I put down a little deposit on a new R.C.A. But I can get it back. If you object, I can get the deposit back. I just thought that . . .”
“All right, all right. Buy it,” he said indifferently. “If the others are ready, let us have dinner. Otherwise give me a bite of food now. I’m tired. I would like to go to bed soon.”
“Certainly, I’ll call them right away,” she said. “Selig is resting. His back is bothering him again. Ah, he’s so delicate, my husband.” Bertha spoke with a little smile of pride. “Thank God he has a brain, that he’s a schoolteacher. He’s so delicate, really,” she sighed, pretending wistfulness.
“He has a good appetite with his delicacy,” Sol said with the same unrevealing blandness of tone and expression.
For a moment Bertha’s face revealed her. Her eyes grew hard and her lips drew back slightly; she knew very well the shape and sound of a taunt. But she also knew which side all their bread was buttered on as well as who bought the bread. So, while her dislike of her brother grew a shade bigger, she smiled even more dotingly under her hostile eyes and ventured another intimate touch of his arm.
“Have I got a delicious piece of brisket for you, Solly; nice black roasted like Momma used to make,” she said warmly. “So go, you go wash up and I’ll call them all.”
Her smile didn’t fade when he left the room; it flicked off electrically. “And tell my big artist upstairs that supper is ready,” she called after him. She couldn’t say what she would have liked to her brother; he had them bound in a chain of money. But her son, Morton, was vulnerable to her irritation. In some ways, her son and her brother were two of a kind, both sullen, unattractive creatures who dampened her “Happy American Family” setting. Oh, she supposed it wasn’t Sol’s fault that he had gone through what he had. But it had been a prison, and the degradation and filth had rubbed off on him. God knew what had so soiled Morton!
When they all sat down to dinner, Bertha unhappily compared Morton and Sol with her husband and her daughter. Joan was talking to her father, and the two of them were smiling in a glow of intellectual rapport. You wouldn’t even guess they were Jews, Bertha thought proudly. Joan had thick, straight brown hair and even features. Her clear, shining skin was a testimonial to her mother’s care and feeding, her easy smile an open proof of family love. And Selig—rosy and fair, with the same straight brown hair his daughter had. What a contrast between his clean, pink face and Sol’s leaden grayness! And the dignity and cleverness with which he spoke. Why, he hardly moved his hands at all, and his voice was crisp with a delightfully Midwestern accent; so American!
But her faint smile slipped away when she turned back to her son. Morton ate with his thin face close to his plate, shoveling in the food with quick darts of his fork like a Chinese plying chopsticks. His dark, unattractive face resembled those of the young ghetto scholars she remembered from her childhood, morose, intense, despising appearance. It depressed her just to look at him, made her feel a melancholy guilt which invariably turned to anger. He was not there enjoying the family meal, but, like his uncle, only hurrying toward his own solitude.
Sol ate slowly and deliberately. Eating was something he had to do, and the tastes made no difference to him. Despite Bertha’s cajoling promise about the brisket, he ate only the vegetables, as always. He never ate meat, because it sickened him; it just never seemed important to remind his sister of that distaste.
“. . . and Sid is taking me to that new Japanese film, Daddy.”
Joan liked the aspect of the typically American family, which Bertha tried to develop, in spite of the intellectual pretensions that sometimes obligated her to scorn Americanism. Somewhat more generous and good-natured than her mother, she was even able to include her Uncle Sol in that rosy-tinted picture. She referred to Sol as being an old-fashioned bachelor, a very learned European ex-professor, and intimated to outsiders that his taciturnity was only a guise for a shyly affectionate nature.
“The thing is,” Selig said, “Hollywood is just interested in making money.” His fresh, youthful face was good-natured but not very mobile or expressive, as though too much animation might belie his alleged delicacy. Now he sighed in wan regret. “No, to Hollywood, culture is just a dirty word. Callow, that’s the word for American culture. They have so much to learn from the Europeans.”
“That’s what Sid was saying, Dad, exactly that. He said that we live in a cultural vacuum here.”
“Hey, that’s good—cultural vacuum. Perfect. He sounds like a bright young man, your Sid.” He smiled affectionately at his daughter and patted her arm.
“He is a nice boy,” Bertha interrupted. “But is he serious? I mean I don’t want you to get too . . . intimate,” she said, casting her eyes down in an attitude of daintiness. She knew what she meant, too, how hot in the pants you could get at that age—how well she remembered!
