“Yes, and your dropout always your best bet, battered children from broken homes and alcoholism in the bloodlines like a thoroughbred’s juices. Bringing on line entire generations of those who live with expectations lowered like the barometric pressure, who neither read the fortune cookie nor spell out even their own horoscopes in the funny papers. Can you imagine such indifference? Not despair, not even resignation finally, just conditioning so complete you’d think bad luck was a congenital defect or a post-hypnotic suggestion. Yes, and the statistical incidence of failure Euclidean, pandemic. These are the people I work with, who work for me, these are my partners, the world’s put-upon, its A.W.O.L.’d and Article 15’d and Captain’s Masted, its chain-ganged and undesirably discharged, all God’s plea-bargained, all His sharecropper’d migratory-worked losers, His scummy, heavily tail-finned Chevrolet’d laid-off. Last hired, first fired. This is company picnic we’re talking, Softball, bratwurst, chug-a-lug’d beer. The common-law husbands of all high-beehived, blond-dyed, wiry waitresses and check-out girls.
“And I as fairy godfather to them as Julius to me. Having to talk them into it. Having to talk them into even talking to me, talk them into listening to my propositions, who think at first I’m just some queer — and that itself working to my advantage, because they think I’ll buy them beers and they’ll pretend to go along with me, thinking: Afterward, when he makes his move, I’ll hit him on the head, roll him in the alley — looking for action, rough trade, God knows what. And using even that, their low opinion of me — always kept to themselves, always suppressed and even, in an odd way, polite, not ever, you understand, condescending, simply because I’m well dressed and well spoken and outrank them good-luckwise, which they mistakenly take for a sort of talisman or voucher, Good Housekeeping’s Seal of Approval, the earnest money of my faggot-or-no-faggot superior humanity — confronting them with it, hitting the nail smack bang dab on the head like the palmist or astrologer they don’t go to, not because they’re not superstitious — they’re superstitious: Catholic saints on their fundamentalist Protestant dashboards, rabbits’ feet, dice adding up to seven whichever way they’re turned — but because they don’t believe they have a fate, and behind that, the bottom line of that, not really believing that they even have a life — such patient people, such humble ones — laying it all out for them, their plans to rob me, to knock my head even as they maintain a genuine respect, for me, for the clothes I wear, so that afterward what they’ll remember of the knockabout won’t be the body contact but the feel of my wool suit and silk shirt and rep tie and felt hat and the soft leather of my shoes. Second-guessing their plans and conspiracies, an armchair quarterback of my own muggings and beatings. And all that just to get their attention!
“And only then, when I have it, hitting them with what even they can see is just good business, no scheme, no wild-ass proposition, no sky-high pipedream, but a plan. Plain as the cauliflower on their ear, true as a calendar.
“That who was there better in this world to bet on than guys who have nothing? References? I don’t want references. If anything the reverse. Records let them show me. Strange, unexplained lacunae in their curriculum vitae. Bad write-ups from Truancy, Credit, Alimony Court. Then convincing them that they can do the job, a lead-pipe cinch for persons like themselves who had, some of them, actually used lead pipes, or anyway pickaxes, handles, the tough truncheons of the strikebreakers, the ditch digger’s hardware, who’d horsed the unskilled laborer’s load, and done the thousand shit details, all the infinite cruddy combinations. ‘Putz,’ I’ve said, “you’ve hauled hod and worked by smells in the dark the wing nuts of grease traps. What, you’re afraid of a pencil?’ ‘I never got past the fifth grade,’ they’d say. ‘Terrific,’ I tell them, ‘then you know your multiplication tables. Long division you can do. Calculus there’s no call for in the Shell-station trade.’ ‘But I ain’t no mechanic,’ they object. ‘Who? You? No mechanic? A guy who jumps wires and picks locks? You’re fucking Mandrake. Look, look at the hands on you. Layers of dirt under the nails like shavings from the archaeologist’s digs. Enough grease and oil in the troughs of your knuckles to burn signal fires for a day and a night. You? No mechanic? You got a feel for leverage like Archimedes. Don’t crap me, pal. Don’t wear my patience. You’re a bum, you know character. You can hire trained mechanics from the Matchbook Schools of Repair. I’m making you Boss, you can sit back and interview guys who take jet engines apart.’ ‘But why me? I’m a nobody. Why would you give me this chance?’ ‘Because you’re a nobody. I raise your expectations like a hard-on. Where else can I buy the loyalty and devotion I’m looking for if not from a nobody like you?’
“And this way with all of them — the fast-food franchises, the goods and services, the Roto-Rooter and Burger King. This my edge as much as the prime rate: that if you want somebody who’ll work like a dog you get a dog. And no one in the business with better employee relations, no one with as good an efficiency record. Because we’re talking business, you see, small shopkeep and the bourgeois heart. Certainly. Yes.”
“Yes,” Gus-Ira said.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s late. I’m wearing you out. I’ve worn myself out. We’ll talk more in the morning.”
But Gertrude died. Even with some of the Finsbergs gone, dead, or returned to their homes in other parts of the country, the Riverdale house was still quite fulclass="underline" the twins’ and triplets’ wives and husbands and their small children crowding the huge home. Ben offered to stay in a motel, but the others wouldn’t hear of it. They doubled up, rented cots from Abbey Rents. Ben himself sleeping with his godcousins’ small sons and daughters in Julius’s and Estelle’s old room, the big bedroom lined with Porta-cribs and rented cots and looking oddly like some specially outfitted casualty ward.
One of the wives said she’d heard Gertrude say she felt sort of grotty and that she thought she’d take a shower, but the bathrooms were occupied, all but the maid’s, which had a deep tub but no shower. They found her in the morning. She had drowned. From her position — her belly to the bottom of the tub — and from a discrete kneecap-shaped dent in the Cashmere Bouquet, they determined that she had evidently dropped the soap and was searching for it on her hands and knees in the cloudy water. Apparently she’d struck the bar with her knee, slipped, and gone under. With her heavy marrowless bones she’d been unable to raise herself.
“She couldn’t swim of course,” Cole said.
“Well, she had wonderful form, but she couldn’t float,” Ethel said.
“She never took baths,” Irving said.
“Doctor’s orders,” Lorenz said.
“Just sponged herself off in the shower,” said LaVerne.
“Why couldn’t she wait till a shower was free?”
“She was always impatient.”
“She was a damned fool,” Cole said. “You know, you have an affliction like that, a frame like the Petrified Forest, you take a bath you’re just asking for it.”
“She died,” Ethel said, “a gangster’s death.”
“A gangster’s death? Oh no, darling, she was just a little careless is all. Don’t say she died a gangster’s death,” Ben said.
“A gangster’s death, yes,” Ethel said, “like some hoodlum in a cement kimono, a lead coffin, steel galoshes. Oh no,” she sobbed, “it’s awful, it’s so grotesque.”