“Yes, Michael,” Fein said, “I know. Now and then you did me a couple favours. The night the boys got a little rowdy and they took the car and it didn’t show up in the papers. I know. But I am telling you, this one I cannot do. This time you are asking me the impossible, and I can’t do it for you.
“Yes, Michael,” Fein said, “it’s final. It is my last word. Yes. I cannot do it and I’m not even going to try. No, I am not being unreasonable. You are being unreasonable. Well, then, you go ahead and tell the guys, tag my car every time they see it. You go ahead and tell them that, and they will do it, and then the next time I can do something just as nice for you, I will do it, and both of us will have lost an old friend and gained a new enemy. But if that is the way you feel about it, Michael, you go ahead and you do it.” Fein hung up, noisily.
Leo went into Fein’s office. The lawyer sat at the walnut desk, his tie loosened and flung across his left shoulder, his white shirt unbuttoned at the neck, his face flushed under the short black beard. “Leo, Leo, Leo,” Fein said with his chin in both hands, “why didn’t I do like my mother wanted and be a doctor?”
“Should’ve had mine,” Leo said. “Mine wanted me to be a priest.”
“I tell you, Leo,” Fein said, “If I could make a living selling second-hand clothes instead of this, some days, I would do it. Except, I’m not sure I can. It’s the ignorance that gets you at our age, you know? Maybe there is something that’d pay you good enough so you could dress warm and eat and take care of your family, that would not drive you nuts all the time, but maybe there isn’t, too, and the fuckin’ bank comes around every month so you can’t take a year off and find out, I dunno. How you been, Leo? You making an honest dollar, getting enough stuff to eat and like that?”
“I saw Billy,” Leo said.
“Is that good news?” Fein said.
“It is good news,” Leo said.
“Good news,” Fein said, “having to do with money, I hope. That being about the only kind of good news I am in the market for right now. This guy Murray that I owe a lot of money to, which I think he knows? I am at this UJA thing the other night, or maybe it was B’nai B’rith, some time they’re throwing to raise some dough for this politician who’s going to save us all from going straight to hell and everything, only he’ll probably drop out of politics first and forget all about how he loved Israel so much and he hated all those Arabs like poison.
“You know, you guys’re lucky,” Fein said. “You give a little at the church, you go to a dinner or two maybe once a year, every so often the Cardinal gets broke and I got to shag up a couple of guys who haven’t told a clean joke in years and give the guy free entertainment so he can build another parochial school, and on top of that they have to get up new material they can do for nothing. But that’s about it.
“You,” Fein said, “you got your paper drives and your bands that go around making a lot of noise. But being Jewish in this town is like living next door to Tap City except they keep moving the fence closer’n closer to your house. I tell the guy: ‘Murray, Murray, Murray, this is the third time I’ve been hit this week. I had the Hadassah thing. I had the dinner honouring Judge Barf and also the wife at the country club and the food was awful. I’ve been out to Brandeis more nights than I’ve been home. I’m telling you, Murray, I just can’t do it. I’m just a guy. I haven’t got a Cadillac agency. I don’t run a wholesale liquor business, I haven’t got a string of movie theatres or a whole bunch of parking lots or a nice little dry goods business and I never did any business in raw wool, billboards or anything else like that. I am just a poor starving lawyer. I make out if my people make out and I water the soup for the kids when they don’t. You got me two grand for Israel bonds, you got me a thousand for something else, I’m down to the lint in my pockets already and you’re telling me a dinner, five hundred bucks a plate and I got to bring Pauline too? You got to be kidding. I haven’t got it, Murray. I just haven’t got it. You know where it’s going – I’m giving it all away.’
“And Murray says, ‘Holocaust.’ Says it like he was saying Kaddish. You guys don’t know what it’s like, Leo, being Jewish. You’re Jewish and some guy calls up on the phone and he asks you for money. You tell him you haven’t got it and all of a sudden it’s your fault six million people died. The only way you can get free, that you can escape taking all of the blame for it, all at once, and never mind maybe you weren’t even born when it happened, is produce the cash. Or a certified check. You don’t pony up, Hitler was all your fault and you are probably sneaking off at night to meetings with the Palestinians.”
“Let me tell you about the Cardinal’s Stewardship Appeal,” Leo said.
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Fein said. “If I didn’t hear about it already from some priest that’s got oil all over his tongue and wants about three grand worth of free entertainment the evening, it’s because they haven’t got around to planning no free entertainment the evening yet, that I’m going to have to supply. If it happens, it will happen soon enough and I will not like it then. It don’t happen? This is also all right with me. Will you tell me this? Will you tell me why some priest with a name like Mahoney or something thinks he has to come around bothering a poor Jew like me, get him somebody to sing ‘Danny Boy’ for nothing at a dinner for a bishop? Why is that?
“All you micks,” Fein said, “go around singing ‘Danny Boy,’ and doing it for priests, and us Jews have to come up with the guys to do it. Boy, did I have a guy who could sing ‘Danny Boy’ until a couple years ago. Also very good on ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ and ‘Galway Bay’ and he could do an ‘Ave Maria’ that would bring tears to your eyes. My eyes, even. When Jewish eyes are crying. Kid’s name was Pasternak and I booked him as O’Brien for those things. Which was not really what he wanted to do.
“ ‘Tell him you’re black Irish,’ I said to him. See, his father was Jewish but his mother was Italian and he has this dark hair and that sort of thing, but what he wanted to do, really, was magic shows in the Catskills. He was a talented kid. It was just that he didn’t have much talent in magic, and I had a hell of a time with that kid. The jobs he wanted I couldn’t get for him. The jobs I got for him, he didn’t like, and then I would lay one of them communion breakfasts on him for which all I gave him was cab fare, because I’m not collecting anything and I’m not even Catholic, and he would scream bloody murder. He would tell me he was not a Catholic and what was I making him do this stuff for when I couldn’t even get him a job doing magic in the Catskills like he wanted. And I would tell him, if he ever wanted to get any place, he had to pay the dues first and take what he could get.
“I lost that kid,” Fein said. “The little son of a bitch got tied up with this guy named Taglieri that was married to an Irish broad and got roped into going to one of those damned parish nights that I had Pasternak singing at, and the kid tells him what he really wants to do is magic tricks in the Catskills and the guinea son of a bitch gives him a job doing magic tricks with the books at his three restaurants. Because the kid was also trained as an accountant from some courses he took while he was trying to get a ticket to the Catskills.
“The last I see of Pasternak, he’s got the goddamned Jag-u-ar sedan and he’s coming out to look the country club over, think about maybe joining it on account of how Taglieri’s getting old and Pasternak’s running all these goddamned wop restaurants and making about three million dollars a week, and on Sundays he goes into one of them and does magic tricks for the families having the noodles and the veal for Sunday dinner. ‘Very popular with the customers, Jerry,’ he tells me. ‘Like I always told you,’ he says, ‘you could’ve gotten me a break, I would’ve been famous.’ ‘Right,’ I says, ‘and in your whole lifetime you wouldn’t’ve seen as much cash as you now blow by the IRS in a week.’