Collected Stories

“True. However, Harry could identify him, check his credentials, and naturally would want to hear that he’s turned up alive. He may have been on the dead list. Are you only a house-sitter? You sound like a friend of the family.”

“I see we’re going to have a talk. Hold a minute while I find my bandanna. It’s starting to be allergy time, and my whole head is raw…. Which relative are you?”

“I run an institute in Philadelphia.”

“Oh, the memory man. I’ve heard of you. You go back to the time of Billy Rose— that flake. Harry disliked talking about it, but Sorella and Gilbert often did…. Can you hold on till I locate the handkerchief? Wiping my beard with Kleenex leaves crumbs of paper.”

When he laid down the phone, I used the pause to place him plausibly. I formed an image of a heavy young man—a thick head of hair, a beer paunch, a T-shirt with a logo or slogan. Act Up was now a popular one. I pictured a representative member of the youth population seen on every street in every section of the country and even in the smallest of towns. Rough boots, stone-washed jeans, bristly cheeks— something like Leadville or Silverado miners of the last century, except that these young people were not laboring, never would labor with picks. It must have diverted him to chat me up. An old gent in Philadelphia, moderately famous and worth lots of money. He couldn’t have imagined the mansion, the splendid room where I sat holding the French phone, expensively rewired, an instrument once the property of a descendant of the Merovingian nobility. (I wouldn’t give up on the Baron Charlus.)

The young man was not a hang-loose, hippie handyman untroubled by intelligence, whatever else. I was certain of that. He had much to tell me. Whether he was malicious I had no way of saying. He was manipulative, however, and he had already succeeded in setting the tone of our exchange. Finally, he had information about the Fonsteins, and it was information I wanted.

“I do go back a long way,” I said. “I’ve been out of touch with the Fonsteins for too many years. How have they arranged their retirement? Do they divide their year between New Jersey and a warm climate? Somehow I fancy them in Sarasota.”

“You need a new astrologer.”

He wasn’t being satirical—protective rather. He now treated me like a senior citizen. He gentled me.

“I was surprised lately when I reckoned up the dates and realized the Fonsteins and I last met about thirty years ago, in Jerusalem. But emotionally I was in contact—that does happen.” I tried to persuade him, and I felt in reality that it was true.

Curiously, he agreed. “It would make a dissertation subject,” he said. “Out of sight isn’t necessarily out of mind. People withdraw into themselves, and then they work up imaginary affections. It’s a common American condition.”

“Because of the continental U.S.A.—the terrific distances?”

“Pennsylvania and New Jersey are neighboring states.”

“I do seem to have closed out New Jersey mentally,” I admitted. “You sound as though you have studied…?”

“Gilbert and I were at school together.”

“Didn’t he do physics at Cal Tech?”

“He switched to mathematics—probability theory.”

“There I’m totally ignorant.”

“That makes two of us,” he said, adding, “I find you kind of interesting to talk to.”

“One is always looking for someone to have a real exchange with.”

He seemed to agree. He said, “I’m inclined to make the time for it, whenever possible.”

He had described himself as a house-sitter, without mentioning another occupation. In a sense I was a house-sitter myself, notwithstanding that I owned the property. My son and his wife may also have seen me in such a light. A nice corollary was that my soul played the role of sitter in my body.

It did in fact cross my mind that the young man wasn’t altogether disinterested. That I was undergoing an examination or evaluation. So far, he had told me nothing about the Fonsteins except that they didn’t winter in Sarasota and that Gilbert had studied mathematics. He didn’t say that he himself had attended Cal Tech. And when he said that out of sight wasn’t invariably out of mind, I thought his dissertation, if he had written one, might have been in the field of psychology or sociology.

I recognized that I was half afraid of asking direct questions about the Fonsteins. By neglecting them, I had compromised my right to ask freely. There were things I did and did not want to hear. The house-sitter sensed this, it amused him, and he led me on. He was light and made sporty talk, but I began to feel there was a grim side to him.

I decided that it was time to speak up, and I said, “Where can I reach Harry and Sorella, or is there a reason you can’t give out their number?”

“I haven’t got one.”

“Please don’t talk riddles.”

“They can’t be reached.”

“What are you telling me! Did I put it off too long?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“They’re dead, then.”

I was shocked. Something essential in me caved in, broke down. At my age, a man is well prepared to hear news of death. What I felt most sharply and immediately was that I had abandoned two extraordinary people whom I had always said I valued and held dear. I found myself making a list of names: Billy is dead; Mrs. Hamet, dead; Sorella, dead; Harry, dead. All the principals, dead. “Were they sick? Did Sorella have cancer?”

“They died about six months ago, on the Jersey Turnpike. The way it’s told, a truck and trailer went out of control. But I wish I didn’t have to tell you this, sir. As a relative, you’ll take it hard. They were killed instantly. And thank God, because their car folded on them and it took welders to cut the bodies free—This must be hard for somebody who knew them well.”

He was, incidentally, giving me the business. To some extent, I had it coming. But at any moment during these thirty years, any of us might have died in an instant. I too might have. And he was wrong to assume that I was a Jew of the old type, bound to react sentimentally to such news as this.

“You are a senior citizen, you said. You’d have to be, given the numbers.” My voice was low. I said I was one. “Where were the Fonsteins going?”

“They were driving from New York, bound for Atlantic City.” I saw the bloodstained bodies delivered from the car and stretched out on the grass slope—the police flares, the crush of diverted traffic and the wavering of the dark, gassed atmosphere, the sucking shrieks of the ambulance, the paramedics and their body bags. Last summer’s heat was tormenting. You might say the dead sweated blood.

If you’re deciding which is the gloomiest expressway in the country, the Jersey Pike is certainly a front- runner. This was no place for Sorella, who loved Europe, to be killed. Harry’s forty American years of compensation for the destruction of his family in Poland suddenly were up. “Why were they going to Atlantic City?”

“Their son was there, having trouble.”

“Was he gambling?”

“It was pretty widely known, so I’m able to say. After all, he wrote a mathematical study on winning at blackjack. Math mavens say it’s quite a piece of work. On the real-life side, he’s gotten into trouble over this.”

They were rushing to the aid of their American son when they were killed.

“It must be very dreary to hear this,” the young man said.

“I looked forward to seeing them again. I’d been promising myself to resume contact.”

“I don’t suppose death is the worst…,” he said.

I wasn’t about to go into eschatology with this kid on the telephone and start delineating the various grades of evil. Although, God knows, the phone may encourage many forms of disclosure, and you may hear as much if not more from the soul by long distance as face to face.

“Which one was driving?”

“Mrs. Fonstein was, and maybe being reckless.”

“I see—an emergency, and a mother in a terrible hurry. Was she still huge?”

“The same for years, and right up against the wheel. But there weren’t many people like Sorella Fonstein.