“What am I going to do? Suppose there’s more trouble from them.”
“What the hell could they do?”
“You don’t understand. Supposing …”
“Two goddamn black bitches, niggers? What is the law there for, eh? Eh? Your husband is a lawyer. My husband is a lawyer.”
“You don’t understand …”
“ ’Course I understand. And you understand what I mean, too. You have to do something. Something. Soon. This is Forest Hill, Gladys, not the West Indies. Not Spadina Avenue and Dundas!”
“What can I do?”
“Something! And soon. But whatever you do, for God’s sake, keep it from the children. And don’t let anybody else know.”
“What would you suggest? I can’t think about this now, Irene. I haven’t got the strength. I was so glad to be back home, even after what you wrote in your letter … it was redirected, so I just read it before I came over …”
“Get rid of that nig- … get that negro out. But do it nicely. I know I can trust you to do it nicely. Even give her some money when you do it. She doesn’t have to know what’s happening; she doesn’t have to know the truth. In her place, get yourself a nice, middle-aged European Jewish woman. There’s scores of them, refugees and people like that … coming to this country every day.”
“It’s strange! Life’s strange!” And the silence returned to the bedroom. Brigitte was shouting at the children again, in German. Cars were coming home from the office, bringing husbands and daughters; and some daughters and sons were coming home from the university. “I had decided to leave Sam. My mind was made up to leave him. I went to Mexico and I thought about it. I thought about it a lot. I tried to live without getting myself to think about him. And for a time, I succeeded. I even succeeded living there for almost one week without thinking about the children. And it was during that week that I took a lover. A Mexican boy. A beautiful young man. Twenty-eight years old. Christ, Irene, he was a child to me! And after I had him make love to me, and I was laying down there in that goddamn cheap hotel bed, what I saw in his face and his eyes frightened me so much, that I thought he was going to kill me. I actually felt he was going to kill me. I saw such hate in that boy’s face, Irene!” Mrs. Burrmann started to cry again; and she took up her glass and sipped it. “Such deep hate! His eyes told me that in his heart, he was saying, ‘I am going to fuck you, rich woman, I am going to fuck you till thy kingdom come. You exploiter!’ ”
And again, the pause, the silence of new thoughts about to be born, of old thoughts being recollected, being reorganized. All this silent mechanism possessed the bedroom. Irene Gasstein could think of nothing sensible to say to relieve the tension. So she sipped her drink. The children, in some other part of the dungeoned house, were singing. A car with a heavy engine pulled into the driveway. Mrs. Gasstein became visibly tense. “Milt’s here!” Mrs. Burrmann rose, or tried to rise, to go. “Don’t go. That’s all right, Glad. He won’t come in here.” The silence again. And then Mr. Gasstein’s voice teasing the children, and teasing Brigitte, in broken German; and Brigitte cackling like a hen in German and then in English — but saying two different things in two languages; and then, back in the bedroom of thoughts, Mrs. Gasstein, registering something on her face to suggest, though not too strongly, that she disapproved of what she heard through the closed bedroom door, that Mr. Gasstein was the same bastard as Mr. Burrmann.
“You know, Irene, that trip to Mexico … and I’ve gone there many times now … but this last trip was like a new experience. It has taught me so much! I learned so much!”
“All travel teaches you a lot. Mexico is no fucking different, if you’ll pardon the pun!”
“But Mexico is different. In Mexico, people, the people who belong to Mexico are different people from us, from me and from you … that is what I mean when I told you that when I looked into that Mexican boy’s eyes, and I saw what his eyes were telling me, even against his whole body, even when he held my body and said he loved it. Irene you don’t understand … you don’t really understand why everybody hates us Jews. Everybody hates people who are as wealthy as us. Everybody. But why, why, why? Por que? …”
An emptiness, a hollowness. The fast taxicab ride down from Marina Boulevard late that sad afternoon did nothing to make Bernice think she was moving fast enough to get out of Marina Boulevard. At the same time, she was thinking she was travelling again in an airplane punctuated by clouds and air pockets. She was nauseous. The sting of Mrs. Burrmann’s decision took her by the balls of her surprise.
“Mistress Burrmann, I just was thinking that maybe, since Estelle will be coming out of the hos—— … since Estelle will be coming back from a little vacation she took in New York, that maybe you won’t mind, seeing that you didn’ in the first place, if she could stay with me a little more longer,” Bernice had begun, aware of the first slip of the tongue, and aware moreover because of this, that she would have to clothe her request in the most diplomatic and softest of manners. “I know that it isn’ exactly the kind of subject to bring up to you at this moment, seeing as how you have just come back from a trip to Mexico, but …”
Mrs. Burrmann did not let her go farther. It was here that Mrs. Burrmann had stopped her. Not rudely, not so harshly as she sometimes had done, before Mexico and the mecca of her new understanding of the relationship of the poor to the rich Jew. She did not even
