He began getting into his coat. “It’s just that I — you know. I’m a—” He swayed for lack of adequate words. “No good, that’s all.”
“Oh, fiddlesticks! Would you have been a better person not to have tried to take care of it, to have run away from it all? You’ve had the courage to take the responsibility for the whole thing — which in some ways is more than Lewlyn did.”
“I don’t know.” He hung his head. “I–I better go tell her.”
She pushed his chin up with dainty finger. “You’re not to go to pieces and you’re to keep in touch with me.”
“I won’t go to pieces, you know why? It isn’t as bad as it might be.”
She regarded him curiously. He felt as if he were switching all he had in mind to another track. “It isn’t as bad as it might be because of you.”
“I’m happy you feel that way, my dear. And I will take care of everything possible at this end.”
“Thanks, Edith.”
“And please stop being so downcast.”
“It’s hard not to. My type of guy.”
“And wait a minute — before you go.”
“Oh, no. Edith!”
“Oh, yes. God knows all this might have been avoided if you had some money.”
“I did have some money. I thought I was playing it safe — that’s what gets my goat. I can’t remember.”
“Even with Lucerol or a pessary one can’t always be sure either. Not that—” she extracted the expected greenback from her purse while she spoke—“in the circumstances you could possibly use them. Please take this with you. It’s for carfare, phone calls. Anything. Taxi, if you need it.”
“Thanks. If one could only say — you know.” He rubbed the folded five-dollar bill against itself. “There’s nothing. It would take words made out of bronze.”
“Don’t try. But do keep in touch with me.” She patted the back of his hand. “And do keep up your courage.”
XIII
Drab and disconsolate, the stairs he climbed, informed with his own state of mind — and dim too, dingy, dim, with the landing between ground and first flight starved for light by the even taller tenement to the east. It had always been such a pleasant revelation when he was a youngster to climb up a flight or two, and especially to the top floor, where the window at the landing rang with daylight. But that was long ago, fifth grade long ago. First-landing window, ten-thousand-fold familiar, gave on a narrow slot of adjacent tenement, backyard and fence, drab scene to be climbed. . upward to the obscure first flight, of a house that seemed quieter than usual, because of the cold, traced with fewer sounds and odors. First flight, “first floor,” where the dumb waiter, now retired, was nailed shut. .
There were three flats per floor. The one on the left, Mrs. Shapiro’s, was tsevorfen, scattered, the two on the right, separated by a gloomy hallway, were railroad flats. Mrs. Shapiro’s flat was “in the back,” all her rooms looked out on the backyard; the railroad flats were in the front: each had a front room with two windows overlooking the street, and the long, obscure hallway between railroad flats borrowed a little illumination from the frosted glass of the front-room doors at the very end of the hallway. They were permanently locked. No one ever used them — except that one time at Ira’s wintry Bar Mitzvah, when his parents’ bed was dismantled and taken through the front-room door to be stored out of the way. Still, if the family had a boarder, and the Stigmans had had one once, a young woman, during the Great War, so long ago and so briefly, Ira remembered only that she, like Minnie, had red hair, if the boarder was given the front room, she (or he) could go to the hall toilet without having to disturb the family.
During evening hours, unless it was very late and everyone had gone to bed, Ira could always tell whether anyone was home or not, by merely glancing up at the paint-spattered transom over the door: whether friendly light shone through. But not during daylight hours: speckled glass was all that met the eye, and only voices in the kitchen told him it was occupied. Automatically, Ira reached into his pocket for the key, realized that he hadn’t transferred Edith’s five-dollar bill to his wallet; the banknote lay together with what was left of the quarter Minnie had loaned him. Better get the bill safely stored away now, or reaching in and out like that, he would lose it. Goddamn him and his lousy predicaments, his sordid little crises that swelled up like monstrous balloons and preempted the sane, the lissome world. Minnie’s delay of a couple of days had produced terror, twisted him out of shape forever; and now that dumb bunny Stella. . immune to his pleas, his begging: all she would agree to was a hot bath — she liked hot baths anyway. But castor oil? Ira, castor oil! What are you talking about! Hannah and two or three of her girlfriends had been there too, so his importuning and haranguing had to be done in whispers, to no avail against her vapid optimism. If she didn’t have her period by Friday, she’d go with him to his professor-lady. That was as much as she would concede, the klutz, too silly-sanguine to know the danger she was in — screw her — Ira tried the doorknob before inserting the key — somebody else gave her the big belly: Zeus, the Juice, the golden rain, Zeus, the Bull, the Gander, no, the Holy Goose. The door opened.
Alone, the Yiddish newspaper spread open wide in front of him on the green oilcloth of the kitchen table, Pop sat reading, Der Vorwärts. He was still wearing his vest, though he had removed the starched collar from his shirt, leaving only the brass stud protruding through the open neckband. Cigarette smoke was in the air, and Pop was smoking, evidently one of the Lucky Strikes from the several midget packs of cigarettes strewn on the table, revealed when Pop shifted the newspaper, complimentary little open packages of Lucky Strikes he must have salvaged from the banquet where he had been an “extra” this afternoon. He had a round-lipped way of smoking, unaggressively sipping smoke, with mouth softly shaped into an oval around the tip of the cigarette.
“Hi, Pop.”
“Hi, hi. Noo?” Pop lifted brown eyes behind their gold-rimmed glasses, in habitual acknowledgment of Ira’s presence: due and without affection. How differently they lighted up when Minnie appeared; they beamed. But with Ira they appraised.
And this time, apparently, they were none too pleased by what they saw, for Pop looked away more quickly than usual. Was it his imagination baiting him? Ira wondered as he removed hat and coat; he had a sense of being furtively scrutinized. Still, what could Pop guess about the fix his son was in?
He returned from the bedroom to the kitchen again — and to the tension he always felt when alone with Pop. The days had long passed when he needed Mom’s protection against his father, her amelioration of their antagonism. Still. . if there wasn’t the old fear, there was the same lack of affinity, and still the same need for token concealment of their estrangement. So what? He was twenty-one years old, and bigger than the little guy. And there was Edith. . There, that made him feel a little more secure, almost patronizing — like a shield against Madame Curie’s radioactive speck of guilt: “Well, how did the banquet go, Pop?”
Pop went through his elaborate evolution of deprecation. “May it please them that kind of death,” he said. “A fruit cup, a half chicken with vegetables, a devil’s food cake and coffee. Nothing fancy. One plate, und shoyn. No stairs.”
“Yeah?”
“May it never be worse.”
“Well.”
“I shared three tables with an Irishman. They say Yidlekh. Were the Jewish waiters half the man he was. Strong. And with his laugh. They make the jop a nothing. Shoulders. He could have served me on his tray. ‘Hey, Charley,’ he called me. ‘Hey, Charley.’”