Augusta Played (31 page)

“It's not like you think, Mrs. Gold,” Birdie said. “Sidney is the twin of my soul but that's as far as we go, usually.” Birdie was feeling very bad; this woman was not at all the way she imagined her: she was vague- and sad-looking, shapeless and kind-eyed; she looked like a mother. Because Birdie had never been a mother, she was easily touched by mothers and somewhat in awe of them, although the reason she had not been one herself was that she had never wanted to be one. Birdie remembered her own mother with an affection that caused her to choke up whenever she thought about her.

“I thought you knew my son,” Esther said, “not Sid.”

“Oh,” Birdie said, “I know Norman too.”

“My God.”

“But that's not like you think either!” Birdie said, frantic not to be thought ill of by someone who was, like her own mother, a mother. “Why are people always jumping to conclusions about me? Even other women do it.”

“It could be your bustline,” Esther said, trying to help.

“Listen,” Birdie said, “I think you should make Sidney see a doctor.”

“Doctors, schmoctors,” Sidney said. “What do they know, besides to overcharge? This is some coincidence, Esther,” he added.

“To tell the truth, Sidney, I didn't expect to find you here.”

“What brings you?” he asked.

“Her,” she said, pointing at Birdie.

“She's a good girl, Esther. She didn't mean any harm.”

“Then what I'd like to know is, why does our son, who is supposed to be dead legally speaking but whom I saw this afternoon so take that Sid, why he thinks his wife is using your place, Miss Mickle, to meet illicitly for immoral purposes with someone named Richard Hacking. And why does our daughter-in-law, which she is no matter what you say Sid so don't say it, why she thinks Norman is having an affair with Miss Mickle herself.”

Birdie gasped. Unpremeditatedly.

“Now one thing is plain to me,” Esther said. “If they were both right, they would have run into each other sooner or later. In this room.”

“I never even met Norman's wife,” Birdie said. “I only met Norman once. I
told
Elaine to tell Norman that his wife was not having an affair with Richard. I am. Was.”

“Elaine? Who is Elaine?”

“Richard's wife.”

“Then if you weren't paying Norman for his services, excuse me but it's what Augusta thought, who gave Norman the two thousand dollars that he gave to Mario which Mario returned to Augusta so she could pay for her Town Hall concert with the result that Norman thinks Richard gave it to her?”

“I did,” Sidney said.

68

I
T
MAY
BE
, in fact it almost surely was although the unconscious is not to be treated too familiarly but with a certain respect, that one reason Sidney had never divorced Esther was that in the back of his mind he knew this moment would come; and while Esther would not have wished for it, she felt as if her natural talents at last had found a mode of expression. They turned to each other almost with an air of elation, though it was muted by Sidney's dark side, the profound pessimism that always underlay his manic temporizing, and by Esther's unsureness, the habit of self-doubt that came from years of living in a social world foreign to her inner temperament, altering her personality to fit the world when it was the garment of world that was too large, cut unsuitably, like her mink coat. Nevertheless, it was as if Sidney and Esther discovered in their old age the reason they had married each other forty-two years before, in 1926, on a day when it seemed to Esther the whole line of her forefathers must have been ranged invisibly along the walls, smiling behind their invisible beards, and the sun had been shining and the trash-cans gleamed as if they were made of silver and flashed like diamonds and even what the horses left in the streets gleamed like ebony, and in the distance a radio played “All Alone by the Telephone,” and later Sidney kept trying to talk to her father about the Scopes trial, which the day was the anniversary of although it was also their wedding day; and this discovery was a cause of jubilation, however modified it might be for the sake of appropriateness and to the eyes of outsiders. In fact, the only visible sign of it was a heightened flush in Esther's age-soft cheeks, a sharpened modesty in her pale green eyes as if she were newly aware of her husband's affection for her; and in Sidney, the yearning in his glance as he pushed himself up from the sofa and the Désirée pillows in Birdie's apartment and clasped Esther's hand in his. For if Birdie was the twin of his soul, what Sidney needed now was someone to minister to the needs of his body, needs that Birdie could not yet fully understand, and, Sidney felt, ought not, because she was only forty-one or -two, and although Birdie was beginning to think that was old, she was, so far as Sidney was concerned, only a baby yet—too young to be told the facts of death. After all, she had not even gone through menopause yet. And Sidney remembered Esther's hot flashes and erratic depressions with an immediate welling of sentiment. He had fought McCarthyism by day, contending with Esther's change of life at night, and while both had left him frazzled in 1953, the absurdity of the relation now endeared Esther to him tremendously, as if it were a wholly new event and not one which he had just relived in retrospect in the space of a few seconds.

After they had left, Birdie tidied up the apartment and then she fixed herself a stiff drink of Hawaiian Punch. She was still jealous of Esther, even if she was a sweet old lady. It was the way they had left, Sidney not even turning around to look back, Esther taking Sidney by the elbow like a Girl Scout. Arm in arm, as if they had come that way—not to Birdie's apartment but into the world, two people united by society and time, which, it seemed to Birdie, were clearly a stronger cincture, nexus and bond than even the deepest spiritual comradeship. She blew her nose and went to bed, curling up between the satin sheets the way she used to when she was a child, except that because of her chest she couldn't draw her knees up very high. And because of this, which seemed to her the bitterest fact of all, Birdie began to cry again, just a little. After a while, she fell asleep.

69

S
OME
DAYS
LATER
Norman telephoned Birdie's apartment, hoping to reach his father.

Norman did not know that his father was now and for as long as remained to him safely back in the house on Ocean Parkway. Why had Esther failed to tell Norman this? For one thing, she figured he and Augusta at least now knew that neither was breaking the marriage vows with anyone else. For another, her first concern was with Sid. For
another
, she couldn't help being just a little bit hurt that for nearly two years her husband and her son had been seeing each other behind her back, when she was supposed to be trying to believe that her son's was a name not to be mentioned among the living and the decent.

There was a fourth but not final reason. (The final reason was that Esther was planning on having a big reunion at the holiday season, very ecumenical so nobody should feel left out, with everyone coming together and being a family again. It would be her triumph, the moment of her
raison d'être
realized, compensation for all those years of not mixing in.)

Number Four was that if Esther told Norman how she went to Birdie's apartment and brought Sid home, Sid would be mortified. It was not good to embarrass a father in front of his son, this much she knew from being a wife and mother. Better to let Norman think Sid was still seeing that woman!

Which is what Norman thought, and why he telephoned Birdie's apartment, hoping to reach his father. He had tried the office, and Jocelyn said he wasn't in. Birdie wasn't in either.

Richard Hacking was.

This time Norman didn't hang up. “Hacking,” he said.

“I believe you have the advantage of me, sir,” Richard said, chortling into the telephone. It was a line he had always wanted to use.

“This is Gold,” Norman said. “Norman Gold. You know my wife, I believe.”

Richard came to a full stop, braking with a kind of internal screech. “Uh, yes,” he said. Had Sidney sicked Gussie's husband on him too? Oh fuck, he thought; oh bloody fuck. What was he going to
dol
He hadn't been able to find out the first thing about how to give Birdie what she wanted. Who did they think he was? He was only a conductor, for crying out loud! A lousy, dumb, well-meaning conductor! Did Seiji Ozawa get into fixes like this? Did Georg Solti find himself having to set up interpretative dance concerts for platinum blondes? Of course, it was the sort of thing Zubin might know something about. Richard wondered if he should give Zubin a ring in California but he wasn't sure what time it would be there now.

“Relax,” Norman said, in his most mellifluously sarcastic voice, the one he reserved for times of high stress, when he wished to remove himself from the immediate situation without being seen to turn tail. It was a voice that said: I feel suchcontempt for you that I cannot even be bothered to express the contempt I feel. He had melded this voice from elements of fear, self-loathing, ambition, and narcissistic play, the usual adolescent mix, but with his special intensity, it had come together rather effectively, and Richard, at any rate, was devastated. When Norman said, “Relax,” Richard was ecstatically adrenalinized, intoxicated by tension, thrilled and transported. He nearly went through the roof.

“What's up?” Richard asked. “Is anything wrong? Birdie isn't here.” Then another thought jolted him. “You haven't been talking with my wife again, have you?”

“I'm trying to get a message to my father.” Norman couldn't call his mother with the message without giving away the fact that he had been seeing his father without her knowledge. “As you know, my father and Birdie are”—Norman paused delicately—“friends.”

“He's not here either,” Richard said.

“You hang around in Birdie's apartment because you like the view from the window?”

“The view from the window? I don't know,” Richard said, puzzled, “I'm not sure which window you mean. The living room looks out on a fire escape.”

“For Christ's sake,” Norman said, “what do I want to know about the view from the living room for? Are you really as dense as you would appear to be?”

“You don't have to be offensive. I mean, fuck it. Why do I have to hang on and listen to you being offensive? You asked about the view!”

“I asked what you were doing there.”

“Nothing,” Richard said, “I'm doing nothing. If it's any of your business, I'm trying to decide between killing myself and going fishing.” He was collecting certain items to take back home, now that he had been found out and was dedicating himself to Elaine again—his electric razor and Fabergé.

“Where do you go fishing in Manhattan?”

“Talk about being dense! Not here—in Florida! Oh, no. Oh,” he moaned, foreseeing possible dire consequences of a Mafian nature, “wait a minute. Do me a favor, huh? Don't tell your father I said that. I wouldn't want Mr. Gold to think I was thinking of skipping town.”

“This may come as a shock to you, Hacking,” Norman said, “but I couldn't care less what you do. I don't see why my father should care one whit more than I do. Do you suppose you could manage to take a message?”

Richard reached for the memo pad and little gold-plated ballpoint beside the French telephone. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Okay, this is it: my wife's concert is at Town Hall on Friday night. That's so he should know that she's giving it with his money, ironically for him, and he's welcome to come if he can bring himself to stop acting like a medieval ass. I trust Gus has already invited you, against my better judgment, you understand. Incidentally, it might amuse you to know that for a while I thought it was your money that was paying for this.”

As Norman spoke, Richard wrote carefully, printing in block letters: CONCERT. TOWN HALL. FRIDAY. MEDIEVAL ASS. BALAAM'S? “What do you mean, my money? Of course I'll be there. In spite of your gratuitous insults. Gussie is an old and dear friend,” Richard added, filling with righteousness. “I knew her first, you forget that. And what do you mean, my money? I never
paid
anybody, the way you're insinuating. Except my wife, if that counts. Elaine shops a lot.” Richard thought, and then went on: “I never
took
any money either. / don't go around blackmailing
my
father.” But he wanted to be fair. “Of course, my father is dead. He died when he was only fifty-two. The old ticker. I am not a nervous wreck without foundation, but I expect to be a very relaxed and unflappable fifty-three.”

“Have it your way,” Norman said, “but it wasn't blackmail. It was atonement money. Your type always thinks atonement comes cheap. It probably never occurred to you that you have to ransom your soul if you plan to live even as long as your old man.” Warming to his subject, Norman remembered the mallet called Life. “It's not just heart attacks that you have to watch out for. There is also plague, the black death of the soul. Retribution by a vengeful Jehovah. Fragmentation and alienation, spiritual separation.” And in a fit of inspiration, Norman asked, “Do you know how Lully died?”

“Lully? I don't think so,” Richard said. This reference to a seventeenth-century conductor, it seemed to Richard, was not exactly relevant.

“It seems that during a rehearsal Lully dropped his baton on his foot. Not long afterward he died of gangrene of the big toe.”

“No kidding!” Richard said, impressed.

“Yeah,” Norman said, in his best threatening tone. “So watch out.”

70

R
ICHARD
WASTED
NO
TIME
getting out of Birdie's apartment after Norman's call. With his wife and his mistress's ex-Big Daddy and his ex-girl friend's husband, or, to put it another way, the son of his ex-girl friend's father-in-law, or, to put it another way, the husband of the daughter-in-law of his current girl friend's ex-lover, or, to put it another way… At any rate, Richard figured more people were gunning for him than was healthful for a conductor in his hyperstrung condition, and he felt the time had come to get the hell out. He would call Birdie later, and he would go to Gussie's debut recital—Richard always did the gentlemanly thing—but he was damned if he was going to sit around and let a lot of megalomaniac Tammany Hall types and culture vultures take potshots at him with rusty bullets. Richard was not that big a fool.