“What!” old Mr. Gumbeiner shouted. “Close your mouth, you!” He darted from his chair and struck the stranger with the flat of his hand. The stranger’s head struck against the porch pillar and bounced back.
“When you talk to my wife, talk respectable, you hear?”
Old Mrs. Gumbeiner, cheeks very pink, pushed her husband back in his chair. Then she leaned forward and examined the stranger’s head. She clicked her tongue as she pulled aside the flap of gray, skin-like material.
“Gumbeiner, look! He’s all springs-and wires inside!”
“I told you he was a golem, but no, you wouldn’t listen,” the old man said.
“You said he walked like a golem.”
“How could he walk like a golem unless he was one?”
“All right, all right...You broke him, so now fix him.”
“My grandfather, his light shines from Paradise, told me that when MoHaRaL—Moreynu Ha-Rav Löw—his memory for a blessing, made the golem in Prague, three hundred? four hundred years ago? he wrote on his forehead the Holy Name.”
Smiling reminiscently, the old woman continued, “And the golem cut the rabbi’s wood and brought his water and guarded the ghetto.”
“And one time only he disobeyed the Rabbi Low, and Rabbi Löw erased the Shem Ha-Mephorash from the golem’s forehead and the golem fell down like a dead one. And they put him up in the attic of the shule and he’s still there today if the Communisten haven’t sent him to Moscow. . . . This is not just a story,” he said.
“Avadda not!” said the old woman.
“I myself have seen both the shule and the rabbi’s grave,” her husband said, conclusively.
“But I think this must be a different kind golem, Gumbeiner. See, on his forehead: nothing written.”
“What’s the matter, there’s a law I can’t write something there? Where is that lump clay Bud brought us from his class?”
The old man washed his hands, adjusted his little black skullcap, and slowly and carefully wrote four Hebrew letters on the gray forehead.
“Ezra the Scribe himself couldn’t do better,” the old woman said, admiringly. “Nothing happens,” she observed, looking at the lifeless figure sprawled in the chair.
“Well, after all, am I Rabbi Low?” her husband asked, deprecatingly. “No,” he answered. He leaned over and examined the exposed mechanism. “This spring goes here . . . this wire comes with this one . . .” The figure moved. “But this one goes where? And this one?”
“Let be,” said his wife. The figure sat up slowly and rolled its eyes loosely.
“Listen, Reb Golem” the old man said, wagging his finger. “Pay attention to what I say—you understand?”
“Understand...”
“If you want to stay here, you got to do like Mr. Gumbeiner says.”
“Do-like-Mr.-Gumbeiner-says . . .”
“That’s the way I like to hear a golem talk. Malka, give here the mirror from the pocketbook. Look, you see your face? You see on the forehead, what’s written? If you don’t do like Mr. Gumbeiner says, he’ll wipe out what’s written and you’ll be no more alive.”
“No-more-alive . ..”
“That’s right. Now, listen. Under the porch you’ll find a lawnmower. Take it. And cut the lawn. Then come back. Go.”
“Go...” The figure shambled down the stairs. Presently the sound of the lawnmower whirred through the quiet air in the street just like the street where Jackie Cooper shed huge tears on Wallace Beery’s shirt and Chester Conklin rolled his eyes at Marie Dressier.
“So what will you write to Tillie?” old Mr. Gumbeiner asked.
“What should I write?” old Mrs. Gumbeiner shrugged. “I’ll write that the weather is lovely out here and that we are both, Blessed be the Name, in good health.”
The old man nodded his head slowly, and they sat together on the front porch in the warm afternoon sun.
JUNIOR
by Robert Abernathy
Abernathy is a problem. He doesn’t write enough, because he has another serious hobby—photography— and spends most of his spare time—nine to five daily—working in classified research for the U.S. Government. Perhaps it is just as well that he doesn’t turn out more fiction; he’s enough of an irritation now—if you happen to be an editor collecting the “best of the year”—because almost everything he does write belongs in that category.
Most notable this year was a short sharp piece called “Single Combat” (very different indeed from the bubbling good humor of “Junior”). It is listed with its source in the back of this book, in the Honorable Mentions, along with a number of other stories we could not include in a single volume, but which you may wish to find and read for yourself.
“Junior!” bellowed Pater.
“Junior!” squeaked Mater, a quavering echo.
“Strayed off again—the young idiot! If he’s playing in the shallows, with this tide going out…” Pater let the sentence hang blackly. He leaned upslope as far as he could stretch, angrily scanning the shoreward reaches where light filtered more brightly down through the murky water, where the sea-surface glinted like bits of broken mirror.
No sign of Junior.
Mater was peering fearfully in the other direction, toward where, as daylight faded, the slope of the coastal shelf was fast losing itself in green profundity. Out there, beyond sight at this hour, the reef that loomed sheltering above them fell away in an abrupt cliffhead, and the abyss began.
“Oh, oh,” sobbed Mater. “He’s lost. He’s swum into the abyss and been eaten by a sea monster.” Her slender stem rippled and swayed on its base, and her delicate crown of pinkish tentacles trailed disheveled in the pull of the ebbtide.
“Pish, my dear!” said Pater. “There are no sea monsters. At worst,” he consoled her stoutly, “Junior may have been trapped in a tidepool.”
“Oh, oh,” gulped Mater. “He’ll be eaten by a land monster.”
“There ARE no land monsters!” snorted Pater. He straightened his stalk so abruptly that the stone to which he and Mater were conjugally attached creaked under them. “How often must I assure you, my dear, that WE are the highest form of life?” (And, for his world and geologic epoch, he was quite right.)
“Oh, oh,” gasped Mater.
Her spouse gave her up. “JUNIOR!” he roared in a voice that loosened the coral along the reef.
Round about, the couple’s bereavement had begun attracting attention. In the thickening dusk tentacles paused from winnowing the sea for their owners’ suppers, stalked heads turned curiously here and there in the colony. Not far away a threesome of maiden aunts, rooted en brosse to a single substantial boulder, twittered condolences and watched Mater avidly.
“Discipline!” growled Pater. “That’s what he needs! Just wait till I—”
“Now, dear—” began Mater shakily.
“Hi, folks!” piped Junior from overhead.
His parents swiveled as if on a single stalk. Their offspring was floating a few fathoms above them, paddling lazily against the ebb; plainly he had just swum from some crevice in the reef nearby. In one pair of dangling tentacles he absently hugged a roundish stone, worn sensuously smooth by pounding surf.
“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?”
“Nowhere,” said Junior innocently. “Just playing hide-and-go-sink with the squids.”