“It may not be for long. You never know when everything will be swept away overnight.” “But meantime…” Mrs Harkavy interrupted. “Daniel, you’re just being sensational. I don’t like to hear such talk from you.” “Mamma, what I say is perfectly true. There have been big organizations before and people who thought they would last forever.” “You mean Insull?” said the man on his left. “I mean Rome, Persia, the great Chinese empires!”
Mr Benjamin shrugged his shoulders. “We have to live today,” he said. “If you had a son, Harkavy, you’d want him to have a college education. Who’s going to wait for the Messiah? They tell a story about a little town in the old country. It was out of the way, in a valley, so the Jews were afraid the Messiah would come and miss them, and they built a high tower and hired one of the town beggars to sit in it all day long. A friend of his meets this beggar and he says, ‘How do you like your job, Baruch?’ So he says, ‘It doesn’t pay much, but I think it’s steady work.’“ There was an uproar at the table. “There’s a moral, for you!” cried Benjamin in a suddenly strengthened voice. Leventhal felt himself beginning to smile. “It is!” shouted Mr Kaplan, laying his hand on Benjamin’s shoulder. Mrs Harkavy, flushing, raised her delighted brows and covered her mouth with her handkerchief.
“Anyway, I don’t think it’s right,” said Harkavy, “to go frightening people the way you do.” “Oh? What now?” Harkavy knitted his brows. “I know how you insurance gentlemen work,” he said. “You go in to see a prospect. There he is, behind his desk or his counter, still in pretty fair shape, you may say. He has his aches and his troubles, but in general everything is satisfactory. Suddenly you’re there to say, ‘Have you considered your family’s future?’ Well and good, every man dies, but you’re playing it unfair and hitting where you know it hurts. He thinks about these things alone at night. Most of us do. But now you’re undermining him in the daytime. When you’ve frightened him good he says, ‘What’ll I do?’ And you’re ready with the contract and the fountain pen.” “Now, Dan,” said Goldstone restrainingly. Benjamin glanced at him with his yellow and black eyes as though to say that he needed no defender. “So what,” he said. “I do them a favor. Shouldn’t they be prepared?”
“Oh, Death!” someone quoted at the far end of the table. “Thou comest when I had thee least in mind.” “Yes, that’s the thing,” Benjamin said lifting himself with a scuff of his heel and pointing. “That’s it.” “My heavens,” said Mrs Harkavy. “What a morbid thing for a birthday party. With all this food on the table. Can’t we find something lighter to talk about?” “The funeral baked meats did furnish forth the marriage feast.” “Where the blazes is this poetry coming from?” said Goldstone. “It’s Brimberg. His father died and he was able to go to college.” Goldstone smiled. “Be serious, down there,” he said. “Cousins of mine,” he explained to Leventhal, happening to catch his glance. “My mother sewed her own shroud,” said Kaplan, raising his distorted shining blue eyes to them. “That’s right, it was the custom,” said Benjamin. “All the old people used to do it. And a good custom, too, don’t you think so, Mr Schlossberg?” “There’s a lot to say for it,” Schlossberg replied. “At least they knew where they stood and who they were, in those days. Now they don’t know who they are but they don’t want to give themselves up. The last funeral I went to, they had paper grass in the grave to cover up the dirt.” “So you’re on Benjamin’s side?” said Harkavy. “No, not exactly,” said the old man. “Sure, Benjamin’s business is to scare people.” “So you’re on my side, then?” Mr Schlossberg looked impatient. “It’s not a question of people’s feelings,” he said. “You don’t have to remind them of anything. They don’t forget. But they’re too busy and too smart to die. It’s easy to understand. Here I’m sitting here, and my mind can go around the world. Is there any limit to what I can think? But in another minute I can be dead, on this spot. There’s a limit to me. But I have to be myself in full. Which is somebody who dies, isn’t it? That’s what I was from the beginning. I’m not three people, four people. I was born once and I will die once. You want to be two people? More than human? Maybe it’s because you don’t know how to be one. Everybody is busy. Every man turns himself into a whole corporation to handle the business. So one stockholder is riding in the elevator, and another one is on the roof looking through a telescope, one is eating candy, and one is in the movies looking at a pretty face. Who is left? And how can a corporation die? One stockholder dies. The corporation lives and goes on eating and riding in the elevator and looking at the pretty face. But it stands to reason, paper grass in the grave makes all the grass paper…” “There’s always something new with Schlossberg,” said Kaplan. He strangely altered his squint by raising his brows. “What’s on his lung is on his tongue.”
“Really,” Julia broke in. “Mamma is right. What kind of talk is this for a birthday?”
“Never out of place,” said Benjamin.
“Out of place?” said Brimberg at the foot of the table. “It depends on your taste. I heard about a French lady of easy virtue who dressed in a bridal veil for her clients.”
“Sammy!” came Mrs Harkavy’s scolding scream. And there was more laughter and a hubbub out of which grew a new conversation to which Leventhal, however, did not listen. Harkavy was not watching and he poured himself another glass of wine.
22
BEFORE he was fully awake, Leventhal, on Harkavy’s couch where he had spent the night, realized that his head was aching, and, when he opened his eyes, even the gray light of the overcast day was too strong for him and he turned his face to the cushions and hitched the quilt over his shoulder. He was in his undershirt and his feet were bare but he had not taken off his trousers. His belt was tight and he loosened it, and brought his hand out, pressing and kneading the skin of his forehead. Over the arm of the couch he gazed at the period furniture, the ferns, the looped and gathered silk of the un-modish lamps, and the dragons, flowers, and eyes of the rug. He knew the rug. Old Harkavy had gotten it from the estate of a broker who committed suicide on Black Friday.
Occasionally the windows were slammed by a high wind, and when this occurred the curtained French doors shook a little. Steam hissed in the pipes and there was a fall smell of heating radiators. Leventhal’s nose was dry. The mohair was rough against his cheek. He did not change his position. Shutting his eyes, he tried to doze away the oppressiveness of his headache.
At a stir behind the French doors he said loudly, “Come!” No one entered, however, and he pushed away the covers. The strap of his watch was loose and it had worked round to the wrong side of his wrist. The lateness of the hour made him frown — it was nearly half-past one. He sat up and leaned forward, his undershirt hanging shapeless over his fat chest. He was about to reach for his shoes and stockings, but his hands remained on his knees and he was suddenly powerless to move and fearfully hampered in his breathing. He had the strange feeling that there was not a single part of him on which the whole world did not press with full weight, on his body, on his soul, pushing upward in his breast and downward in his bowels. He concentrated, moving his lips like someone about to speak, and blew a tormented breath through his nose. What he meanwhile sensed was that this interruption of the customary motions he went through unthinkingly on rising, despite the pain it was causing, was a disguised opportunity to discover something of great importance. He tried to seize the opportunity. He put out all his strength to collect himself, beginning with the primary certainty that the world pressed on him and passed through him. Beyond this he could not go, hard though he drove himself. He was bewilderingly moved. He sat in the same posture, massively, his murky face trained on the ferns standing softly against the gray glass. His nostrils twitched. It came into his head that he was like a man in a mine who could smell smoke and feel heat but never see the flames. And then the cramp and the enigmatic opportunity ended together. His legs quivered as he worked his feet back and forth on the carpet. He walked over to the window and he heard the loud crack of the wind. It was pumping the trees in the small wedge of park six stories below, tearing at the wires on rooftops, fanning the smoke out under the clouds, scattering it like soot on paraffin.