“You shook us off.”
Quite simplemindedly, with the directness of the biblical fool (this was how Isaac saw him, and Fenster knew it), he said, “You wanted it all for yourself, Isaac.”
That they should let him, ungrudgingly, enjoy his great wealth, Isaac told Dr. Braun, was too much to expect. And he admitted that he was very rich. He did not say how much money he had. This was a mystery to the family. The old people said, “He himself don’t know.”
Isaac confessed to his cousin Dr. Braun, “I never understood her.” He was much moved, even then, a year later.
Cousin Tina had discovered that one need not be bound by the old rules. That, Isaac’s painful longing to see his sister’s face being denied, everything was put into a different sphere of advanced understanding, painful but truer than the old. From her bed she appeared to be directing this research.
‘You ought to let him come,” said Mutt.
Because I’m dying?”
Mutt, plain and dark, stared at her, his black eyes momentarily vacant as he chose an answer. “People recover,” he said.
But she said, with peculiar indifference to the fact, “Not this time.” She had already become gaunt in the face and high in the belly. Her ankles were swelling. She had seen this in others and understood the signs.
“He calls every day,” said Mutt.
She had had her nails done. A dark-red, almost maroon color. One of those odd twists of need or desire. The ring she had taken from her mother was now loose on the finger. And, reclining on the raised bed, as if she had found a moment of ease, she folded her arms and said, pressing the lace of the bed jacket with her fingertips, “Then give Isaac my message, Mutt. I’ll see him, yes, but it’ll cost him money.”
“Money?”
“If he pays me twenty thousand dollars.”
“Tina, that’s not right.”
“Why not! For my daughter. She’ll need it.”
“No, she doesn’t need that kind of dough.” He knew what Aunt Rose had left. “There’s plenty and you know it.”
“If he’s got to come, that’s the price of admission,” she said. “Only a fraction of what he did us out of.”
Mutt said simply, “He never did me out of anything.” Curiously, the shrewdness of the Brauns was in his face, but he never practiced it. This was not because he had been wounded in the Pacific. He had always been like that. He sent Tina’s message to Isaac on a piece of business stationery, BRAUN APPLIANCES, 42 CLINTON. Like a contract bid. No word of comment, not even a signature.
In Dr. Braun’s opinion, his cousin Tina had seized upon the force of death to create a situation of opera, which at the same time was a situation of parody. As he stated it to himself, there was a feedback of mockery. Death the horrid bridegroom, waiting with a consummation life had never offered. Life, accordingly, she devalued, filling up the clear light remaining (which should be reserved for beauty, miracle, nobility) with obese monstrosity, rancor, failure, self-torture.
Isaac, on the day he received Tina’s terms, was scheduled to go out on the river with the governor’s commission on pollution. A boat was sent by the Fish and Game Department to take the five members out on the Hudson. They would go south as far as Germantown, where the river, with mountains on the west, seems a mile wide. And back again to Albany. Isaac would have canceled this inspection, he had so much thinking to do, was so full of things. “Over-thronged” was the odd term Braun chose for it, which seemed to render Isaacs state best. But Isaac could not get out of this official excursion. His wife made him take his Panama hat and wear a light suit. He bent over the side of the boat, hands clasped tight on the dark-red, brass-jointed rail. He breathed through his teeth. At the back of his legs, in his neck, his pulses beating; and in the head an arterial swell through which he was aware, one-sidedly, of the air streaming, and gorgeous water. Two young professors from Rensselaer lectured on the geology and wildlife of the upper Hudson and on the industrial and community problems of the region. The towns were dumping raw sewage into the Mohawk and the Hudson. You could watch the flow from giant pipes. Cloacae, said the professor with his red beard and ruined teeth. Much dark metal in his mouth, pewter ridges instead of bone. And a pipe with which he pointed to the turds yellowing the river. The cities, spilling their filth. How dispose of it? Methods were discussed—treatment plants. Atomic power. And finally he presented an ingenious engineering project for sending all waste into the interior of the earth, far under the crust, thousands of feet into deeper strata. But even if pollution were stopped today, it would take fifty years to restore the river. The fish had persisted but at last abandoned their old spawning grounds. Only a savage scavenger eel dominated the water. The river great and blue in spite of the dung pools and the twisting of the eels.
One member of the governor’s commission had a face remotely familiar, long and high, the mouth like a latch, cheeks hollow, the bone warped in the nose, and hair fading. Gentle. A thin person. His thoughts on Tina, Isaac had missed his name. But looking at the printed pages prepared by the staff, he saw that it was Ilkington Junior. This quiet, likable man examining him with such meaning from the white bulkhead, long trousers curling in the breeze as he held the metal rail behind him.
Evidently he knew about the hundred thousand dollars.
“I think I was acquainted with your father,” Isaac said, his voice very low.
“You were, indeed,” said Ilkington. He was frail for his height; his skin was pulled tight, glistening on the temples, and a reddish blood lichen spread on his cheekbones. Capillaries. “The old man is well.”
“Well. I’m glad.”
“Yes. He’s well. Very feeble. He had a bad time, you know.”
“I never heard.”
“Oh, yes, he invested in hotel construction in Nassau and lost his money.”
“All of it?” said Isaac.
“All his legitimate money.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Lucky he had a little something to fall back on.”
“He did?”
“He certainly did.”
“Yes, I see. That
“It’ll last him.”
Isaac was glad to know and appreciated the kindness of Ilkington’s son in telling him. Also the man knew what the Robbstown Country Club had been worth to him, but did not grudge him, behaved with courtesy. For which Isaac, filled with thankfulness, would have liked to show gratitude. But what you showed, among these people, you showed with silence. Of which, it seemed to Isaac, he was now beginning to appreciate the wisdom. The native, different wisdom of Gentiles, who had much to say but refrained. What was this Ilkington Junior? He looked into the pages again and found a paragraph of biography. Insurance executive. Various government commissions. Probably Isaac could have discussed Tina with such a man. Yes, in heaven. On earth they would never discuss a thing. Silent impressions would have to do. Incommunicable diversities, kindly but silent contact. The more they had in their heads, the less people seemed to know how to tell it.
“When you write to your father, remember me to him.”
Communities along the river, said the professor, would not pay for any sort of sewage-treatment plants. The federal government would have to arrange it. Only fair, Isaac considered, since Internal Revenue took away to Washington billions in taxes and left small change for the locals. So they pumped the excrements into the waterways. Isaac, building along the Mohawk, had always taken this for granted. Building squalid settlements of which he was so proud…. Had been proud.
He stepped onto the dock when the boat tied up. The state game commissioner had taken an eel from the water to show the inspection party. It was writhing toward the river in swift, powerful loops, tearing its skin on the planks, its crest of fin standing.
The breeze had dropped and the wide water stank. Isaac drove home, turning on the air conditioner of his Cadillac. His wife said, “What was it like?”
He had no answer to give.
