That was the code to the cypher, wasn’t it? The cryptogram? Or was it? Ira walked ahead, mechanically. He had sat with hat and coat on listening, feigned he was listening, and yet puzzled. Stella had remained discreetly in the front room — or retired to her bedroom. Anyway. . “What does one understand with the mind of a child?” Zaida said. “I’ll tell you from my own experience.” Was that a thrust under cloak of reminiscence? Now think: did it or didn’t it mean anything? “From my own life experience.” His hand in didactic cusp: “When I was eleven, and I first read in Kedushim”—was that right? Kedushim, whatever that was—“a portion of Talmud: How do you get a wife? How does one acquire a wife?” And Ira with a condom glued fast — it was, wasn’t it? “There are three ways of getting a wife.” Zaida depressed his little finger as if it were a cash-register key: “One is with kessef.”
“Huh?” A few more steps and he’d reach the drugstore.
“Kessef, coin, silver. Seh heist kessef.”
“Oh, yeh. Kessef.” Ira had heard that word before — in Yiddish. “Okay.”
“Another is by shtar.” By written agreement, by bond. (Twinkle, twinkle, little shtar—that was easy to remember.) And the third is by biyah,” said Zaida.
“By beer,” Ira had chortled nervously.
“By biyah. To have intercourse with her. You come upon her, and you have intercourse with her.”
“That’s simple, Zaida.” Ira had maintained his sangfroid with a show of facetiousness: “Kessef, shtar, and biyah. Anybody can remember those.” Holy jumpin’ Jesus! How much more did he need to be told? The old boy was driving the spike right through him. That was it, that was it.
And the way he stared at Ira, out of hard, brown, uncompromising eyes. But then maybe it was just because of the cataracts he had in his eyes: “You say to her, ‘By this act I have made you my wife.’” (Listening, Ira had forgotten his restiveness.) “What did I understand as a child of eleven: ‘By this act’?” Old man with stained vest over paunch speaking, old man in a black yarmulke and with scraggly beard delivering his homily. “But you see how wise the Talmud was to prepare the immature mind for the time when the mature mind would understand?”
“Yeah.” How convulsively he had swallowed the saliva in his mouth. “In about a year or so,” Ira had jested.
“It could take longer,” the old man said seriously. “Who knows how much longer? Each youngster is different. But longer or shorter, before he knew desire, each child knew how God decreed desire should be satisfied: by taking a wife. And how wives were taken.”
It’s nothing, Ira assured himself, halted again in the light of the French pastry shop, open still, just short of the overhead poolroom on 112th Street, sniffed fragrance. It’s nothing with nothing. Look at those brave napoleons and chocolate éclairs. Handsome. If only this wasn’t Friday night, he’d blow fifteen cents on a slice of mocha tart for Mom. How she adored it, how little he ever bought her. What a son, what a sonofabitch he was, except calling himself that insulted Mom, poor Mom, with the scalding tea dripping down her chin. What did Eliot say, Mr. Tse-tse fly: I should have been a pair of ragged claws. You shouldn’t have been at all, period — Ira addressed himself as he rounded the closed millinery store on the corner — tell you something — the mind directed itself to the click of pool balls overhead: do you know that “Prufrock” has more in it than The Waste Land? Of course. But if you told Edith’s highbrow friends that you liked “Prufrock” better than The Waste Land, they’d laugh you out of court. What did that mean? Laugh you out of court. Hee-haw. Oh, just judge. A Daniel come to judgment, Jew. 112th Street, trudging west.
Only the little Puerto Rican grocery store was open and illuminated on the other side of the street; every other gesheft was dark, l’kuvet Shabbes. But the little tienda, as he remembered from high school Spanish, was still open, the same one on whose iron step he had fastened together the laces of his shoes. Long ago. Oh boy, what a fuck that had been! What the hell are you gonna do? How are you gonna make love to a nice woman, an intelligent woman, a refined woman? How’re you gonna say: Ah, you’re beautiful, you’re lovely, exquisite — the way, yes, Larry had sighed about Edith? She was so sweet, so tiny, so fragile. He just wanted to hold her in his arms, protect her. Protect her from what? Protect her from his hard-on. Never mind being lewd about it. Tears of pure worship had come into Larry’s eyes. Yeah, as if she were a statue of a goddess: effigy.
Who the hell was it brought the Pallas Athena from Troy, or the Lares and Penates? Well, how the hell were you gonna do that when you didn’t feel it? You came at twelve riding Minnie. Wham! So much for Dido and Aeneas. There went your romantic love, keyed into a carnal crevice, plugged into a submerged, unromantic socket, sock it, sock it. . shorted, that was it. You were no longer capable of romantic love; you were too late. Then how were you gonna use fancy, high-flown poetic diction, when the street words, the slum words of Harlem, already resounded in your ears, and you already had knowledge of what they were? And not only knowledge: the flesh knew, the body and brain knew: tit, knockers, twat, cunt, pussy, and piece of ass, that was what you’d had. Not delicate terms. You couldn’t use fancy words. They stood right in your way — balked your hard-on.
Yep—
Once to every man and nation comes
the moment to decide:
Something about choosing the good or evil side. But it hadn’t worked out that way for him. The evil side, the line of demarcation, had been Minnie’s pink little ass above the bathtub water line. It had been some sensation. Sensation wasn’t the word for it. A thousand years couldn’t undo its wicked transport.
Apt word, Ira smirked at himself: how buoyantly conveyed. Archimedes never dreamed of that one. Here he was: he had sauntered all that way, yeah, as aimless, as errant as a Western Union messenger boy with a telegram — right to the right address, right to the first of the twin solid blocks of masonry where Mamie lived. Mamie’s house was the first, when approached from the east. Ira stood contemplating the empty, lighted tile foyer; he stepped back on the sidewalk and looked up. Oh, the front-room windows a flight up were lit, all right. The family was home. Once to every man and nation. . for the good or evil side. He could walk past, now that he had been here, past the other, the second stone warren, stroll on to the lights of Lenox Avenue. And around to the north again. Plot your course: to 116th East, around the big ice-cream parlor, back to Fifth and the corner theater, and then east to Madison, and uptown this time following the long shiny reins of the trolley tracks — giddap. He entered the foyer: now’s the time and now’s the hour. See the front o’ battle lour — oh, Rabby Burns, amico fidato—if only I’d been a Scotsman — and began climbing the stone stairs. . came to the landing. . came to the first flight, stood on the wan tiles amid the dark-green-painted apartment house doors, each sticking out the brass tongue of its doorbell in ridicule.