He knew of Redmond by reputation. He was a chaser, and his work came high. He wanted to ask her jokingly if she was pursuing the same policy with the painter as with the painting, but he held back; he knew it would come out harsh and bitter. Besides, she could well afford to buy the painting in the usual way. As a senior editor at Co-ed, she must be making a good salary. So he merely nodded, and focused on the picture while he waited for her to tell him why she had written that she must see him.
"I must see you," the letter had said. "It is of the utmost importance that we discuss Roy's future. I am extremely worried..." for a couple of pages, every sentence containing at least one italicized word. Her speech was a little that way, too, and when they first went together, he had found it strangely attractive, giving a kind of breathless excitement to her discourse. Later he had found it a little trying.
"I got a letter from Roy." she began.
"Oh, he writes you, does he?" And this time the bitterness slipped out. "I haven't heard from him since he went to Israel."
"Perhaps if you wrote him—"
"I wrote him twice. Am I supposed to continue in the hope that he'll break down and answer?"
"Well." she said, "he's unhappy."
"That's nothing new. He was unhappy at college. His whole generation is unhappy."
"He wants to come home." she went on. "So why doesn't he?"
"And lose a. year in his studies? If he comes home now, he won't get any credit for the courses he's taking at the university."
"That doesn't bother these kids nowadays." Stedman said. "They switch from one major to another and from one college to another the way I change my shoes. And when they finish, they're not prepared to do anything, or willing to. What's he unhappy about?" he asked. "Something specific like a girl, or something general like the state of the world?"
Laura nervously lit a cigarette. "I don't see how you can be so flippant about it all when it's your son who's involved."
"My son!" he exploded. "I fathered him. I suppose, but I don't know that I had anything to do with him afterward."
"Daniel Stedman, you know I consulted with you on every step of his career, every school he went to, every—"
"All right, all right." he said. "Let's not get started on that again. What do you want me to do?"
"Well," she said, stubbing out the cigarette, "I think you could write him a strong letter, ordering him to stay until he finishes the year or you will cut his allowance."
"I see, I have to play the heavy."
"Discipline is a father's duty." she said primly.
"And this will make him happy?"
"At least it might keep him from doing something foolish."
"I'll do better than that," he said, getting up from the chair. "I'll go and see him."
"But you can't just pick yourself up and go halfway across the world." Then she saw that he was smiling. "Oh, you were planning to go to Israel?"
He nodded. "That's where I'm doing the book. It's a book on Israeli opinion."
"When are you going?"
"Tomorrow. I’ve got a flight to Zurich by Swissair."
"Not El Al? They say it's safer, that they're more careful."
"It's also a lot more crowded. And it's a long trip, and I like to break it up. This gives me a stopover in Zurich." he said, trying to keep his voice casual.
"Zurich?" She shot him a quick glance. "You're not involved in anything, are you?"
"Involved?" He laughed. "How do you mean involved?"
"I still worry about you. Dan." she said simply.
He shrugged his shoulders in a little gesture of annoyance. "Nothing to it. I go right on to Israel from there."
Chapter Eight
From her office on the fifth floor of the hospital, Gittel Schlossberg of the Social Service Department could see the rooftops of a considerable section of Tel Aviv, each with the black glass panels set at a forty-five-degree angle to catch the heat of the sun to supply warm water for the apartments below. A tall building blocked her view of the sea beyond, but she knew it was there, and sometimes she thought she caught the swish of the surf over the sounds of the traffic in the street below. She enjoyed the view from her window as she enjoyed driving to work through the narrow, crowded streets with their rows of houses in stained and crumbling stucco, not because it was a pretty view, but because it showed increase and growth.
She had lived in the city most of her adult life and could remember when there was space and gardens between the houses, but she preferred it cramped and crowded, with every bit of spare land put to use and pushing toward ever-increasing suburbs. It meant that more and more people were coming, to settle and work and make the city more prosperous and strong. And as she read Miriam's letter, teetering in her swivel chair, she day-dreamed: Her niece was coming with her family; she was coming on a visit, but perhaps she could persuade her to remain.
Some of her colleagues on the staff were inclined to fault Gittel Schlossberg for being unprofessional in her methods. Hers was a purely pragmatic approach. If the problem, for example, was to get a job for a client, she was not above using a little genteel blackmail on a prospective employer to achieve it. And since she herself did not profit from the transaction, her conscience was clear. At the national game of protectsia, or influence, she was a past master. Needless to say, little of this ever appeared in her case records, which were spotty at best since she regarded them as a nuisance which agency directors forced on their subordinates in order to show their authority. Whatever was important about her clients she kept stored in the highly efficient record file of her memory.
All this was highly distasteful to her younger colleagues, who tended to be professionally objective in their approach and as scientific as the discipline permitted. On the other hand, the older members of the staff, those who knew her when she was a member of the Haganah in the days of the British occupation and remembered her numerous successes at wheedling food and medical supplies and even guns and ammunition out of the British soldiery, were devoted to her and ready to forgive her most outrageous breaches of standard operating procedure.
When her husband was killed in the terror that preceded the War of Independence, she was left with an infant on her hands. She could easily have elected to give up her activities with the underground and assume the passive role that her new motherhood justified; instead, she had chosen to bury her grief by throwing herself into the work of defending Jerusalem, where she was living at the time. She had even enlisted her infant son in the battle; many a time she had been able to cross the lines the British had established around the Jewish Quarter, to deliver an important message or even needed medicines, by approaching the guards with her babe in arms. Rather than turn back a mother and child, they had let her pass.
Although not a religious woman, she had a mystical faith in the old Yiddish proverb that for every pot there is a cover, that in every problem the good Lord presented her there was a matching problem which provided the solution to both. There had been plenty of men when she was younger who had offered the problem of their bachelorhood as a matching problem to her widowhood with the idea that marriage would solve both. But this one problem she had refused to solve. She had remained single, faithful to the memory of her husband, and had been both father and mother to her child.
A tiny woman, she was a shade over five feet, with a mass of gray hair not so much combed and set as piled on top of her head, which she would poke at periodically to keep from falling down. She was a dynamo of energy. Characteristically; no sooner had she finished reading Miriam's letter than she reached for the telephone and began calling real estate agencies. It was in accordance with her system of keeping her desk clear of notes and memorandums by doing what had to be done, immediately.