Augusta Played (29 page)

When Augusta stopped writing to her, Esther wanted to telephone, but she had learned from years of being Sid's wife to behave with enough dignity for herself
and
Sid. Inside, she felt undignifiedly hurt. It seemed to her that all her life all she had ever wanted was to do just the things everybody caricatured. She had an almost biological urge to cook chicken soup. She had almost irresistible impulses to take people's temperatures or give them enemas. She thought wistfully of how it would feel if only once, coming home from a hard day's shopping at Abraham and Straus, she could say, “My feet are killing me,” in a loud, dramatic voice, and then add, “I know, I know, to be a wife and mother, it means that you sacrifice your life at the hands of your feet, but who understands this? Another wife and mother, maybe, but children? Your husband? God forbid they should deign to understand!” She never did or said any of these things. She was the daughter of a rabbi and as soon as they were married, Sid, out of pride in his catch and respect for her background, had put her on a pedestal. She was not supposed to think about sex. (Did he think Rita and Norman were virgin births?) She was supposed to be refined and sponsor modern art. Esther thought modern art was sick. It had no life. She had a great hunger to love people, but she was sixty-two years old and shy.

60

W
HEN
Gus finally did telephone her, Esther was overjoyed. Distressed, but overjoyed. “What's wrong?” Esther asked, on the alert. “I can tell, something's wrong,” she said, her heart singing. “For months I haven't heard so much as hello from you or Norman. This is not a good omen!”

“I know,” Gus said. “I was too ashamed to write. It's because Norman is having an affair.”

“He's not! My son? An affair? My God, who with?”

“A woman named Birdie. Birdie Mickle.”

“This I find very hard to accept, Augusta. From the photograph you sent of you and Norman, I can see that you are very pretty. Why would Norman pass that up for somebody named Birdie? As Paul Newman says about his lovely wife Joanne Woodward in the magazine I read under the hair dryer last week, Why go out for hamburger when you can have steak at home?”

“I guess I don't make him happy,” Gus said. “But he must make
her
happy. She gives him money.”

“No!”

“Two thousand dollars,” she said.

This was, if Esther had thought about it, the last thing she had ever expected to hear anyone say about her son the scholar. “You're dreaming,” Esther said. “I know my son. I love my son, but he is not worth two thousand dollars, if you'll pardon my split lip for saying so.”

“What am I going to do, Esther?”

“I don't know, this is terrible,” she said, still delighted that Augusta was consulting her. “It's because Mitzi spoiled him when he was little. But maybe you've got it wrong. Maybe there are mitigating circumstances. I believe there must be such circumstances, Augusta.”

“Esther, I'm staring at two thousand dollars. This boy, Mario, just brought it back. Norman gave it to him so he wouldn't tell the newspapers about what happened on our wedding night. Esther, Norman got this money from Birdie Mickle! There's no other answer!”

“What happened on your wedding night?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I mean, nothing of any importance.”

“Nothing of any importance! Augusta, tell me. Don't be afraid to speak frankly. Have I got a fairy for a son?”

“No,” Gus said. “He sleeps with this woman. He sleeps with me. I don't know if it stops there. For all I know, he sleeps with the entire student body of Barnard.”

“You mean my son is a nymphomaniac? I thought that only happened to women.”

“Men can have something called satyriasis, but I don't think that's the trouble with Norman. I think that may be when you can't get it down.”

“My God,” Esther said, “I never heard such things. Sidney never—Go on.”

“That's all there is to it. Norman's having an affair. I don't know why. I think the trouble must just be me. She gives him money, because she likes him, I guess. I think I'm going to cry.”

“Augusta, you must not cry in the crunch.”

“Okay,” she said, “but what do I do?”

“You got two thousand dollars in front of you, is that what you said?”

“Yes.”

“Spend.”

“What? Esther, I can't do that!”

“Why not? Does Norman know you have this money? Did he ever expect to see it again? What would he use it for if you gave it to him? Would he give it back to this other woman, when you can barely make ends meet and have to cook in a kitchen full of cockroaches?”

“I don't cook very often.”

“My God,” Esther said. “Why didn't you tell me you're starving?”

“We have hotdogs. Also creamed herring, Grape-Nuts, root beer, Coca-Cola, and eggnog.”

“Alcoholic?”

“No,” Gus said.

“That's good, but my God.”

“It's awful, isn't it? Sometimes I think Norman never really loved me. He married me just to strike a blow at his father.”

“If so, I'm the one it hit. My own son, my own husband, not speaking to each other. It's unnatural. I told Sid again and again, It's unnatural, but he said his constituency expected it. Sid has devoted all his life to his constituency. I can't ask him to turn his back on it now. He's not a bad man, Augusta. He has his reasons.”

“I guess Norman does too, but I can't figure out what they are. I think maybe I don't please him. You know.”

“In bed? What
did
happen on your wedding night?”

“He beat up somebody, that's all.”

“In your room, he beat up somebody? My God,” she said, “what is the world coming to! Three in a room, my God!”

61

T
HE
FOLLOWING
TUESDAY
Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States. Sidney swallowed so much Alka-Seltzer he began to feel he might effervesce internally, but nothing helped. “Ruin, ruin, ruin,” he moaned, listening to the returns on the radio in Birdie's apartment on Madison Avenue. She blew on his white fringe, but even that didn't help. “Tragic, tragic,” he kept saying, under his breath. In a single night of disaster, it was sunk, lost, gone, wiped out and smashed all to hell—his dream.

He waited—what was the rush?—until his regular weekly dinner with Norman to tell him that there was no longer any
quid pro quo
for continuing with the blackmail.

“I realize that,” Norman said.

“I'm sorry,” Sid said.

“It's not your fault,” Norman said.

“If only we'd won! It was a sure thing, almost. Amato, Leibowitz, and Sidney Wallechinsky Gold. If Bobby Kennedy—”

“Yeah, I know. It must be hard on Leibowitz.”

“And Amato.”

“Well, Pop, I guess we won't be seeing each other anymore. This is good-bye, as they say.
Sayonara
, and so forth.”

“What will you do now?”

“I don't know. I had been planning, if you had won, to hit you up for another two thou at one blow. Gus's concert is coming up and there's still the hall to pay for. You wouldn't want to pay for it even in your present mood, by any chance?”

“It's not a question of mood, Norman. It's a matter of principle. You should never have married a
shiksa.”

“What's done is done,” Norman said.

“What's done is that you are disinherited. I can't change that.”

“Sure you could. Anyway, I'm only asking for two thousand. The other four hundred and ninety-eight you can keep.”

“No,” Sidney said, taking a fifty from his wallet. “Here's this week's, never say I welched on a deal, but that's the last of it. How can I back down now? I don't even want to back down. For the pleasure of your company I was glad to pay you fifty bucks a week when there was a legitimate business reason, namely blackmail, but I cannot support a girl that I don't think even my own son has the right to be supporting.”

“If it helps you to feel better morally, I don't support her very well.” Norman put the money into his wallet.

“You could get a job.”

“I have thought about it,” Norman said, “but it gives me the cold shivers. Being at somebody else's beck and call. After all, it's not so long until the dissertation is done.”

“Well,” Sidney said, “I can't say I blame you. I've always taken pride in being able to say my son the scholar. You take after your mother's father. You smoke too much, though. You should switch to cigars. Try one of these.”

“Not bad,” Norman said, leaning across the plates of abandoned chicken livers to reach his father's match.

“Cuba,” Sidney said. “Havana.”

“Havana?”

“My old connections still come through for me now and then.”

“There's nothing like a good cigar,” Norman said, as a way of telling his father that he loved him.

“No,” Sidney agreed. “Nothing.”

62

I
HAVE
TO
TALK
with you had been content to.”

Norman was addressing Augusta in their apartment on West Eighty-eighth Street. It was a gray day outside; the sky looked soft, like a down quilt. It looked as if, were you to poke it in one place, it would bunch up in another. There might be snowfeathers instead of snowflakes. Norman felt as if he had a boa constrictor wrapped around his chest.

Gus thought he wanted to tell her about Birdie. “I'm on my way out,” she said.

“This is important,” he said. “I'm afraid it's going to make you unhappy.”

“Then don't tell me,” she said.

“I have to. It affects what you're doing right now.”

She was getting ready to go up to Juilliard to use the practice room.

“I don't have the money for your hall. You'll have to cancel the concert.”

Gus didn't say anything.

“Jesus Christ, Gus, say something.” He was hating himself. “I'm sorry! I thought I was going to have the money, but I don't.”

“It doesn't matter,” she said. “I already paid for the hall.”

“You did what?”

“Paid for the hall.”

“But where did you get the money?” he said, despairing.

“Where do you think!” she shouted, and slammed the door behind her as she left.

63

N
ORMAN
SAT
DOWN
at the desk, blindly. He had to feel his way into the chair. It took several minutes before the red in front of his eyes dissolved and he could focus on objects. He felt not only angry, so angry that he believed he would never recover from it, but forsaken, as if, because he did not have two thousand dollars, he was no use to anyone. He lacked the wherewithal to run around providing concert halls for flutists. He was minus managers and money. As for Hacking—What could Norman do about him (that wasn't illegal)? It would be fatal to himself, if not to Hacking, to let jealousy take control of him. And as he thought this, releas ing slowly, word by thought word, the possibility of beating the fucking shit out of the bastard, Norman felt a deep desire, so deep that it seemed to spring from the wellsource of his being. It was a desire to lay his head in his mother's lap.

He turned over the books and papers on the desk until he found the Beethoven book. Then he held it upside down by its spine, letting the pages part, rustling like a fan. There it was—the letter from his mother to Gus, hitting the desk with a gentle whack that reverberated in Norman's blood-filled head like the entire percussion section of an orchestra. There must be some sort of statute of limitations on letters, a point after which you could open a letter addressed to somebody else without being tried and condemned by the omnipresent judge who held court at the back of your brain to death by unerring lightning bolt. It was, after all,
his
mother, not Gus's.

The glue had dried up anyway, and the flap came open almost of its own accord when he prised it up.

What did he think he would find? A check for two thousand dollars? An incriminating document? He hoped, most of all, that there might be some clue to how Gus felt about him, but he had taught her, too well, not to reveal their lives on paper to anyone else. But his mother must have sensed that she was not getting the full story from Gus. “Anytime you feel like a chat,” she had written, “you just let me know. I can come into the city. Sid doesn't need to know.”

Norman felt obscurely cheated not to have found anything more exciting going on between his mother and his wife. Had they ever met, or had the lost letter prevented them from ever getting together for their koffee klatch? On the days when he was secretly eating dinner with his father, was his wife secretly eating dinner with his mother? For a moment, Norman's spirits climbed: maybe Gus had gotten money from his mother, just as he had gotten it from his fa ther. Then they dipped and sank again: his father had never permitted his mother to have her own checking account. She had no money to speak of.

He let the letter drift back down to the table, but then he picked it up again. “Sometimes it does a person good to talk things over,” his mother had written.

It did; it did. And if she was willing to listen to his wife, wouldn't she listen to him? The story would be the same whichever of them told it to her, and maybe she could help. God knows, he needed help. But the mere possibility that his mother might be able to provide it filled him with such glad anticipation that he was out the door and on his way to Brooklyn before he had altogether made up his mind to go there.

64

E
AT
,” Esther said. “For once in your life you've come to me for advice, so for once I'm giving it. Eat.” She had cooked him a steak and a side dish of buttered spaghetti, just the way Mitzi used to. “I know how you kids live on thin air, and to tell the truth, Norman, it worries me. I lie awake at night wondering what can I do, but I know I'm not supposed to mix in. Who wants a nosy mother-in-law? Sid says, They don't exist, your son and his
shiksa
wife, they're nogoodniks; and I say, Okay, Sid, whatever you say. Because all my life I've said, Okay, Sid, whatever you say. Only, at night I have dreams. My son, who my husband says is effectively speaking dead, comes back to haunt me. And he's as thin as a skeleton. No flesh on his bones. How can I sleep? Would you sleep if you were a mother and your son who is alive and well and living on West Eighty-eighth Street is practically starving already, and you shouldn't lift a finger to help?”