Collected Stories

you and leave you naked. That fucking old Hamet broad, whom he kept out of charity—as if her eyes weren’t kooky enough, she put on those giant crooked round goggles. She hunted up those girls who swore he had the sexual development of a ten-year-old boy. It didn’t matter for shit, because he was humiliated all his life long and you couldn’t do more than was done already. There was relief in having no more to cover up. He didn’t care what Hamet had written down, that bitch-eye mummy, spitting blood and saving the last glob for the man she hated most. As for me, I was a heap of fat filth!”

“You don’t have to repeat it all, Sorella.”

“Then I won’t. But I did lose my temper. My dignity fell apart.”

“Do you mean that you wanted to hit him?”

“I threw the document at him. I said, ‘I don’t want my husband to talk to the likes of you. You’re not fit…’ I aimed Deborah’s packet at him. But I’m not much good at throwing, and it went through the open window.”

“What a moment! What did Billy do then?”

“All the rage was wiped out instantly. He picked up the phone and got the desk. He said, A very important document was dropped from my window. I want it brought up right now. You understand? Immediately. This minute.’ I went to the door. I don’t suppose I wanted to make a gesture, but I am a Newark girl at bottom. I said, ‘You’re the filth. I want no part of you.’ And I made the Italian gesture people used to make in a street fight, the edge of the palm on the middle of my arm.”

Inconspicuously, and laughing as she did it, she made a small fist and drew the edge of her other hand across her biceps.

“A very American conclusion.”

“Oh,” she said, “from start to finish it was a one hundred percent American event, of our own generation. It’ll be different for our children, A kid like our Gilbert, at his mathematics summer camp? Let him for the rest of his life do nothing but mathematics. Nothing could be more different from either East Side tenements or the backstreets of Newark.”

All this had happened toward the end of the Fonsteins’ visit, and I’m sorry now that I didn’t cancel a few Jerusalem appointments for their sake—take them to dinner at Dagim Benny, a good fish restaurant. It would have been easy enough for me to clear the decks. What, to spend more time in Jerusalem with a couple from New Jersey named Fonstein? Yes is the answer. Today it’s a matter of regret. The more I think of Sorella, the more charm she has for me.

I remember saying to her, “I’m sorry you didn’t hit Billy with that packet.”

My thought, then and later, was that she was too much hampered by fat under the arms to make an accurate throw.

She said, “As soon as the envelope left my hands I realized that I longed to get rid of it, and of everything connected with it. Poor Deborah—Mrs. Horsecollar, as you like to call her. I see that I was wrong to identify myself with her cause, her tragic life. It makes you think about the high and the low in people. Love is supposed to be high, but imagine falling for a creature like Billy. I didn’t want a single thing that man could give Harry and me. Deborah recruited me, so I would continue her campaign against him, keep the heat on from the grave. He was right about that.”

This was our very last conversation. Beside the King David driveway, she and I were waiting for Fonstein to come down. The luggage had been stowed in the Mercedes—at that time, every other cab in Jerusalem was a Mercedes-Benz. Sorella said to me, “How do you see the whole Billy business?”

In those days I still had the Villager’s weakness for theorizing—the profundity game so popular with middle- class boys and girls in their bohemian salad days. Ring anybody’s bell, and he’d open the window and empty a basin full of thoughts on your head.

“Billy views everything as show biz,” I said. “Nothing is real that isn’t a show. And he wouldn’t perform in your show because he’s a producer, and producers don’t perform.”

To Sorella, this was not a significant statement, so I tried harder. “Maybe the most interesting thing about Billy is that he wouldn’t meet with Harry,” I said. ‘He wasn’t able to be the counterexample in a case like Harry’s. Couldn’t begin to measure up.”

Sorella said, “That may be a little more like it. But if you want my basic view, here it is: The Jews could survive everything that Europe threw at them. I mean the lucky remnant. But now comes the next test—America. Can they hold their ground, or will the U. S. A. be too much for them?”

This was our final meeting. I never saw Harry and Sorella again. In the sixties, Harry telephoned once to discuss Cal Tech with me. Sorella didn’t want Gilbert to study so far from home. An only child, and all ofthat. Harry was full of the boys perfect test scores. My heart doesn’t warm to the parents of prodigies. I react badly. They’re riding for a fall. I don’t like parental boasting. So I was unable to be cordial toward Fonstein. My time just then was unusually valuable. Horribly valuable, as I now judge it. Not one of the attractive periods in the development (gestation) of a success.

I can’t say that communication with the Fonsteins ceased. Except in Jerusalem, we hadn’t had any. I expected, for thirty years, to see them again. They were excellent people. I admired Harry. A solid man, Harry, and very brave. As for Sorella, she was a woman with great powers of intelligence, and in these democratic times, whether you are conscious of it or not, you are continually in quest of higher types. I don’t have to draw you maps and pictures. Everybody knows what standard products and interchangeable parts signify, understands the operation of the glaciers on the social landscape, planing off the hills, scrubbing away the irregularities. I’m not going to be tedious about this. Sorella was outstanding (or as one of my grandchildren says, “standing out”). So of course I meant to see more of her. But I saw nothing. She was in the warehouse of intentions. I was going to get around to the Fonsteins—write, telephone, have them for Thanksgiving, for Christmas. Perhaps for Passover. But that’s what the Passover phenomenon is now—it never comes to pass.

Maybe the power of memory was to blame. Remembering them so well, did I need actually to see them? To keep them in a mental suspension was enough. They were a part of the permanent cast of characters, in absentia permanently. There wasn’t a thing for them to do.

The next in this series of events occurred last March, when winter, with a grunt, gave up its grip on Philadelphia and began to go out in trickles of grimy slush. Then it was the turn of spring to thrive on the dirt of the city. The season at least produced crocuses, snowdrops, and new buds in my millionaire’s private back garden. I pushed around my library ladder and brought down the poems of George Herbert, looking for the one that runs “… how clean, how pure are Thy returns,” or words to that effect; and on my desk, fit for a Wasp of great wealth, the phone started to ring as I was climbing down. The following Jewish conversation began: “This is Rabbi X [or Y]. My ministry”—what a Protestant term: he must be Reform, or Conservative at best; no Orthodox rabbi would say “ministry”—“is in Jerusalem. I have been approached by a party whose name is Fonstein….”

“Not Harry,” I said.

“No. I was calling to ask you about locating Harry. The Jerusalem Fonstein says that he is Harry’s uncle. This man is Polish by birth, and he is in a mental institution. He is a very difficult eccentric and lives in a world of fantasy. Much of the time he hallucinates. His habits are dirty—filthy, even. He’s totally without resources and well known as a beggar and local character who makes prophetic speeches on the sidewalk.”

“I get the picture. Like one of our own homeless,” I said.

“Precisely,” said Rabbi X or Y, in that humane tone of voice one has to put up with.

“Can we come to the point?” I asked.

“Our Jerusalem Fonstein swears he is related to Harry, who is very rich….”

“I’ve never seen Harry’s financial statement.”

“But in a position to help.”

I went on, “That’s just an opinion. At a hazard…” One does get pompous. A solitary, occupying a mansion, living up to his surroundings. I changed my tune; I dropped the “hazard” and said, “It’s been years since Harry and I were in touch. You can’t locate him?”

“I’ve tried. I’m on a two-week visit. Right now I’m in New York. But L. A. is my destination. Addressing…” (He gave an unfamiliar acronym.) Then he went on to say that the Jerusalem Fonstein needed help. Poor man, absolutely bananas, but under all the tatters, physical and mental (I paraphrase), humanly so worthy. Abused out of his head by persecution, loss, death, and brutal history; beside himself, crying out for aid—human and supernatural,