Collected Stories

wrong in the night, when he was in charge. They built a large business (not my father, who went out on his own and was never connected with any sizable success), and the business expanded until it reached the limits of its era, when it could not adapt itself to the conditions set by supermarkets—refrigerated long-distance shipping, uniformity of product, volume (demands for millions of dozens of kaiser rolls). So the company was liquidated. Nobody was to blame for that.

Life entered a new phase, a wonderful or supposedly wonderful period of retirement—Florida and all that, places where the warm climate favors dreaming, and people, if they haven’t become too restless and distorted, may recover the exaltation of a prior state of being. Out of the question, as we all know. Well, Motty made an earnest effort to be a good American. A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become. In Chicago, Motty went to his downtown club for a daily swim. He was a “character” down there. For a decade he entertained the membership with jokes. These were excellent jokes. I had heard most of them from my father. Many of them required some knowledge of the old country—Hebrew texts, parables, proverbs. Much of it was fossil material, so that if you were unaware that in the shtetl the Orthodox, as they went about their tasks, recited the Psalms to themselves in an undertone, you had to ask for footnotes. Motty wished, and deserved, to be identified as a fine, cheerful old man who had had a distinguished career, perhaps the city’s best baker, rich, magnanimous, a person of known integrity. But when the older members of the club died off, there was nobody to exchange such weighty values with. Motty, approaching ninety, still latched on to people to tell them funny things. These were his gift offerings. He repeated himself. The commodity brokers, politicians, personal-injury lawyers, bagmen and fixers, salesmen and promoters who worked out at the club lost patience with him. He was offensive in the locker room, wrapped in his sheet. Nobody knew what he was talking about. Too much Chinese in his cantos, too much Provencal. The club asked the family to keep him at home.

“Forty years a member,” said Riva.

“Yes, but all his contemporaries are dead. The new people don’t appreciate him.”

I had always thought that Motty with his endless jokes was petitioning for acceptance, pleading his case, and that by entertaining in the locker room he suffered a disfigurement of his nature. He had spoken much less when he was younger. As a young boy at the Russian bath among grown men, I had admired Motty’s size and strength when we squatted in the steam. Naked, he resembled an Indian brave. Crinkly hair grew down the center of his head. His dignity was a given of his nature. Now there was no band of hair down the middle. He had shrunk. His face was reduced. During his decade of cheer when he swam and beamed, pure affection, he was always delighted to see me. He said, “I have reached the shmonim”—eighties—“and I do twenty lengths a day in the pool. Then, “Have you heard this one?”

“I’m sure I haven’t.”

“Listen. A Jew enters a restaurant. Supposed to be good, but it’s filthy”

“Yes.”

“And there isn’t any menu. You order your meal from the tablecloth, which is stained. You point to a spot and say, “What’s this? Tzimmes? Bring me some.’”

“Yes.”

“And the waiter writes no check. The customer goes straight to the cashier. She picks up his necktie and says, ‘You ate tzimmes.’ But then the customer belches and she says, ‘Ah, you had radishes, too.’”

This is no longer a joke but a staple of your mental life. When you’ve heard it a hundred times it becomes mythic, like Raven crawling into his wife’s interior and finding himself in a vast chamber. All jokes, however, have now stopped.

Before we go upstairs, Cousin Riva says, “I see where the FBI has done a Greylord Sting operation on your entire profession and there will be hundreds of indictments.”

No harm intended. Riva is being playful, without real wickedness, simply exercising her faculties. She likes to tease me, well aware that I don’t practice law, don’t play the piano, don’t do any of the things I was famous for (with intramural fame). Then she says, her measured way of speaking unchanged, “We mustn’t allow Motty to lie down, we have to force him to sit up, otherwise the fluid will accumulate in his lungs. The doctor has ordered us to strap him in.”

“He can’t take that well.”

“Poor Motty, he hates it. He’s escaped a couple of times. I feel bad about it. We all do….”

Motty is belted into an armchair. The buckles are behind him. My first impulse is to release him, despite doctor’s orders. Doctors prolong life, but how Motty feels about the rules they impose cannot be known. He acknowledges our visit with a curt sign, slighter than a nod, then turns his head away. It is humiliating to be seen like this. It occurs to me that in the letter to Judge Eiler it had crossed my mind that Tanky in his high chair had struggled in silence, determined to tear free from his straps.

Motty is not ready to talk—not able. So nothing at all is said. It is a visit and we stand visiting. What do I want with Motty anyway, and why have I made a trip from the Loop to molest him? His face is even smaller than when I saw him ‘ast—genio and figura making their last appearance, the components about to get lost. He is down to nature now, and reckons directly with death. It’s no great kindness to come to witness this.

In my first recollections, Eunice stood low, sucking her thumb. Now Eunice is standing high, and it’s Riva who is low. Cousin Riva’s look is contracted. No way of guessing what she thinks. The TV is switched off. Its bulging glass is like the forehead of an intrusive somebody who has withdrawn into his evil secret, inside the cokey (brittle gray) cells of the polished screen. Behind the drawn drapes is North Richmond Street, static and empty like all other nice residential streets, all the human interest in them siphoned off by bigger forces, by the main action. Whatever is not plugged into the main action withers and is devoured by death. Motty became the patriarch-comedian when his business was liquidated. Now there are no forms left for life to assume.

Something has to be said at last, and Eunice calls upon her strengths, which are scientific and advisory. She seems, moreover, to be prompted by a kind of comic instinct. She says, “You ought to have physiotherapy for Uncle Motty’s hand, otherwise he’ll lose the use of it. I’m very surprised that this has been neglected.”

Cousin Riva is furious at this. She already blames herself for the accident, she had been warned not to drive, and also for the strapped chair, but she will not allow Cousin Eunice to take such a critical tone. “I think I can be relied upon to look after my husband,” she says, and leaves the room. Eunice follows her, and I can hear her making a fuller explanation to the “layman,” persisting. The cure of her stutter fifty years ago sold her forever on professional help. “Send for the best” is her slogan.

To sit on the bed, I move aside Riva’s books and magazines. It comes back to me that she used to like Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Once at Lake Zurich, Illinois, she let me read her copy of The Circular Staircase. With this came all of the minute particulars, unnecessarily circumstantial. The family drove out one summer day in three cars and on the way out of town Cousin Motty stopped at a hardware store on Milwaukee Avenue and bought a clothesline to secure the picnic baskets on the roof of the Dodge. He stood on the bumpers and on the running board and lashed the baskets every-which way, crisscross.

Like the dish in which you clean watercolor brushes, Lake Zurich is yellow-green, the ooze is deep, the reeds are thick, the air is close, and the grove smells not of nature but of sandwiches and summer bananas. At the picnic table there is a poker game presided over by Riva’s mother, who has drawn down the veil of her big hat to keep off the mosquitoes and perhaps also to conceal her looks from the other players. Tanky, about two years old, escapes naked from his mother and the mashed potatoes she cries after him to eat. Shana’s brothers, Motty and Shimon, walk in the picnic grounds, discussing bakery matters. Mountainous Shimon has a hump, but it is a hump of strength, not a disfigurement. Huge hands hang from his sleeves. He cares nothing for the seersucker jacket that covers his bulging back. He bought it, he owns it, but by the way he wears it he turns it against itself. It becomes some sort of anti-American joke. His powerful step destroys small vegetation. He is deadly shrewd and your adolescent secrets burn up in the blue fire of his negating gaze. Shimon didn’t like me. My neck was too long, my eyes were too alien. I was studious. I held up a false standard, untrue to real life. Cousin Motty defended me. I can’t say that he was entirely in the right. Cousin Shana used to say of me, “The boy has an open head.” What she meant was that book learning was easy for me. As far as they went, Cousin Shimon’s intuitions were more accurate. On the shore of Lake Zurich I should have been screaming in the ooze with the other kids, not reading a