“Me? I’d be glad to help. But I told you all I was any good at was proofreading. That’s in part because I’m fairly good at spelling.”
“That’s very important, too. Proofreading this kind of work is very important. But there are a hundred other things you can do, tiresome chores, if you wish, that I resent very much, but devilishly necessary in preparing an anthology — as I said before: writing poets or publishers for permissions, making sure of acknowledgments, checking bibliographies — oh, hundreds of things. Even helping me edit my own writing. I tend to be too hasty these days.” She smiled at last. “And discussing ideas with me.”
“Yeah? Ideas? You worry me.”
“Oh, no. Please, Ira. You have as good a mind as anyone.” She sipped cautiously from her teaspoon. “The tea is just right, thanks. I conceive of the book, for whatever worth it will have, as reflecting the realities of city life, and the moods they generate in the poet. And what I badly need, or mainly need, is someone like yourself born and brought up in the city—”
“I was born in Galitzia,” Ira groused in demurral. “And I’m not a poet. I’m scared, Edith. Honest.”
“Oh, fiddlesticks. You spent your entire life in the city,” Edith persisted. “You’ve already shown your grasp of the city mind in that piece of yours that appeared in your college magazine. You’re the ideal person to provide an antidote to the saccharine romanticism of people like myself brought up in the West. I suppose I’m a little better now than I was,” she qualified.
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, now, Ira. The city means so much more to you than it does to me. More in nuance, more in evocation, in metaphor. Do you understand? Especially because you’re still a student, don’t you see? An intelligent and sensitive student.”
The first tinge of liveliness heightened her olive skin, gray and lusterless until this moment. “You’re not a student in some out-of-the-way, self-contained campus, with its dormitories and fraternities and sororities and small-town stores and meeting places. You’re a student in the city, and that’s exactly the kind of student I have in my classes at NYU. Jewish mostly. So you can see how useful you could be — because those are the ones the anthology would be addressing: those living within city blocks, not in the country, not under open sky—”
“Yeah, but you got to have taste, you got to have—” He began rotating his shoulder against a sudden itch. “I mean — what do I mean? — discrimination in poetry, modern poetry. The kind of thing you have when you review somebody’s book of poems for the Times or The Nation. You’ve got that kind of certainty.”
“Oh, I’ll choose the poems, if that’s what’s worrying you. Between the textbook publishers and Dr. Watt, they’re going to want to get out the anthology on a shoestring. It’s only a scheme to put money into their pockets anyway. The anthology, so called, will be required reading in my modern poetry courses.”
“I’ll be glad to help with the — with the, with the mechanics—”
“No, I’d like your opinion about the poems too—”
“Listen, Edith, I don’t have opinions. I like or I don’t like. I’m still just the same as a kid. Sure, I can tell you I like Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ way ahead of his ‘Ulysses,’ but that’s a hundred years ago, and who cares? I like some of Vachel Lindsey, I like Conrad Aiken’s Senlin, I like some of Robert Frost. But what’s the difference? Everybody knows they’re good poems. I learned those from Larry’s Untermeyer anthology. But what I’m trying to say is I would never have known Eliot was a great poet except for you, reading him right here: ‘Prufrock,’ The Waste Land—”
“That’s more than Larry ever learned.”
“Yeah, but Larry’s got ideas. He can tell you why he’s got his opinion of a poem. I couldn’t. You got to have ideas why it’s good, why it’s bad.” Ira raised his voice. “I don’t. Gee whiz.”
“Well, you do have ideas, of course you do! Far better than his ever were!”
“I don’t!”
“Oh, rubbish, Ira. Will you stop that!”
“Parakutskie, that’s the way I should be drinking,” he grumbled.
“What, dear? I’m sorry.”
“Well, if I had a lump of sugar, the way they used to break them off a loaf that came wrapped in blue paper on Passover, on the East Side, I could pour the tea in a saucer and suck it through the sugar. That’s parakutskie. Maybe I wouldn’t get a chance to holler so much — at a sick woman.”
“I’m not really sick.”
“No?”
“No, I intend to go on living.”
“That’s good. I’m really happy. Honest, Edith, I am.”
“I’m much happier too. Will you take my umbrella with you when you go home?”
“Oh, no, my socks must be bone-dry by now. I’ll duck in between the raindrops. I don’t want an umbrella, Edith, I’ll lose it.”
“Then you’ll have to take five dollars. I want you to call me Saturday. And have dinner with me.”
“It costs only a nickel to call, and you’ve had a great expense already.”
“But your call is easily worth five dollars.”
“Oh, yeh? Your five dollars, and my Aunt Mamie’s dollar, I’m gonna get rich.”
“Silly.”
“More tea? There’s more.”
“No, thanks. I’d appreciate it if you took my cup.”
“Oh, yeh, sure.”
“Thanks. It distresses me, Ira, to hear you run yourself down so.”
“Well, I’m just comparing myself with others.”
“And I am too, child.”
IV
Hollow. .
Why he wanted to start the section with that particular word he wasn’t quite sure, nor whether it was appropriate. Probably only roughly appropriate. Jess had flown in Thursday evening from a geophysics conference he had attended in Dallas — and stayed until Sunday morning at the Monterey.
Jess had been with his parents from Thursday night until Sunday morning (actually, Saturday night, for he had arranged to take the shuttle bus from the motel to the airport so early Sunday morning they didn’t see him off). They had had the pleasure of his company Thursday night, and two whole days. And a pleasure it had been indeed. Their son with them, rangy, charming, distinguished in mind and in person, and graying, graying, alas — their little boy was now forty-five — no matter what had happened before, no matter Jess’s now ingrained silences. Perhaps Ira’s son no longer knew how to communicate over the entire spectrum of his rich personality — a cause for sorrow rather than animus: who knew how badly hurt he had been by that first ill-fated marriage of his? Anyway, Ira felt himself doting on his son again, as he had when the grown man had been a child.
Ira had never been allowed to be a child, nor had Ira the father allowed his son. Too late in life Ira had tried to redress the situation, do incompetent penance for blame. He and M had gone shopping one day, and he had bought his eldest son, Jess, a gift, remarking when he presented it how damned few times he had bought his children presents (with which M concurred later, when Ira repeated the remark): a combination digital clock and auto compass, marked down from three dollars to two. (And Ira had received a gift in return, bought at the Albuquerque Museum, which Jess and M visited: a book entitled Pioneer Jews, by Harriet and Fred Rochlin, about the role and career of Jews in the West and Southwest, full of archival photos and interesting accounts of all sorts of prosaic, mercenary, and picturesque Jewish characters, including even a major general, but mainly of resourceful merchant Jews from Germany who emigrated to America in the latter half of the nineteenth century, amassed fortunes there, and often attained high political office, including, in several cases, governorships of the states or territories they had settled in.)