Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (10 page)

Mrs. Goldfanger, on the ground floor, loved society. But she crept from her apartment to the mailboxes like a thief. She wanted to be alone when puzzling out the Hebrew on the envelopes, making sure that everything in her box was truly addressed to Mr. Goldfanger or Mrs. Goldfanger or Mr. and Mrs. Goldfanger or the Goldfanger family; and not to the Gilboas, who ten years ago had sold their apartment to the Goldfangers, newly arrived from Cape Town. The Gilboas still received advertisements from tanning salons, which Mrs. Goldfanger felt justified in throwing away. But some morning a legacy might await them in the Goldfanger box. Such things had been known to happen. And then what? She would have to run after the mailman, hoping that he was still crisscrossing Deronda Street like the laces on a corset. If he had completed his route she would have to go to the post office with the misdirected letter, and join the line that backed all the way to the delicatessen; and she would have to explain in her untrustworthy Hebrew that Gilboa, who had just received this letter from a bank in Paris, was away, gone, exiled, and had left no forwarding address.

So Mrs. Goldfanger’s relationship with her mailbox, as with many things, was an anxious one. How strange it was, then, that one August morning, having deciphered the first envelope and also its return address, she gathered up all the others without looking at them—let the Gilboas wait another day for their emeralds. She flew up the stairs, a smile on her pretty face.

Mrs. Goldfanger was eighty-five. Her doctor said she had the heart of a woman of thirty, and though she did not believe this outrageous compliment, it strengthened her physical courage, already considerable. She was not afraid of the labor of tending her husband—she could lift him from bed to wheelchair, from wheelchair to bed; she could help him walk when he wanted to. But her sadness was deepening. To diaper him seemed the height of impropriety, and listening to his unintelligible gabble was someday going to break her thirty-year-old heart. The assistants she hired were often indifferent; if they were kindly they soon got better jobs.

But now … she knocked at the door above her own. Tamar’ grandmother opened it, dressed as usual in slacks and a blouse. No one had ever seen her in a bathrobe.

Mrs. Goldfanger leaped into the apartment like an antelope. “It’s come!”

Tamar’s grandmother examined the official envelope and then handed it to Tamar, who had wandered in from the balcony, where she was breakfasting in her skimpy nightgown.

Tamar, too, examined the envelope. “The hepatoscopist has landed,” she said.

A
YEAR EARLIER
the state of Israel had entered into a treaty with an impoverished Southeast Asian nation. Under the treaty Israeli citizens could purchase the assistance of Southeast Asians for the at-home management of the elderly. The foreigners were not to be hired as nannies, house cleaners, or day care workers—able-bodied Israeli citizens were available for that work, not that they relished it. The Asians’ task was to care for sages who had outlived their sagacity.

The employers undertook the expense of airfare—round-trip airfare: workers were not supposed to hang about when their charges died. Citizenship was no part of the deal. Weren’t these people already citizens someplace else? The Law of Return did not apply to Catholics, which most of them nominally were, nor to hepatoscopists, which some of them were said to be.

As soon as a bureau had been established, Mrs. Goldfanger had applied for an Asian.

“What’s a hepatoscopist?” she asked Tamar’s grandmother now.

Tamar’s grandmother said: “Hepatoscopy is the prediction of the future by an examination of the entrails, specifically the liver, of a mammal. Properly a sheep, more practically a rodent.”

“Oh.”

“All those stray cats,” Tamar murmured. “Useful at last.”

In the weeks following Mrs. Goldfanger’s application, Tamar’s grandmother had accompanied Mrs. Goldfanger to a series of office visits. The younger old woman had helped the older old woman fill out the required forms. Every time a packet of papers arrived in the mail, Mrs. Goldfanger brought them up to Tamar’s grandmother. She settled herself at the table in the dining room. Sunlight slanting through the blind made her rusty hair rustier—more unnatural, Tamar mentioned later. “Henna is a natural substance,” her grandmother reminded her.

And now the Asian was here. Or would be here in three weeks’ time. Mrs. Goldfanger was to go to the bureau at ten o’clock on a morning in September to be introduced to the newcomer and to sign the necessary final papers.

“Shall I come with you?” Tamar’s grandmother said, sighing.

“Oh, not this time.” Mrs. Goldfanger paused. “That there should be no confusion,” she confusedly explained. “But thank you very much, for everything. I just wanted you to know.”

So it was alone, three weeks later, that Mrs. Goldfanger journeyed to the dingy office that she now knew so well. Her hand alone shook the hand of the serious man. Her voice alone welcomed him, in English. His English had a lilt, like the waves that lapped his island country. Mrs. Goldfanger, unassisted, told the bureau official that she understood the necessity for employer and employee to visit the office once every four months (later she wondered briefly whether the visits were to occur four times every one month). Her smile beckoned the man to follow.

His satchel was so small. He wore tan pants and a woven shirt and another shirt, plaid, as a jacket. She hoped that cabs would be numerous at the nearby taxi stand; she wanted him to see immediately that the country was bountiful. Providence smiled on the wish: three cabbies were waiting, and the first promptly started his engine. But before the pair could get into the vehicle a schnorrer approached. Mrs. Goldfanger gave him a coin. Joe felt in his own pocket. Oh dear. “I’ve paid for us both,” she explained.

D
URING JOE’S FIRST AFTERNOON
at the Goldfangers’, he spent several hours on the balcony fixing the wheelchair. Because he was on hands and knees he could not be seen above the iron railing, wound about with ivy; but on the glass table, in plain view, lay an open toolbox and an amputated wheel. Coming home from school, Tamar paused under the eucalyptus, squinted through the ivy with a practiced eye, and saw the wheelchair lying on its side, the kneeling figure operating on it. Whatever he was doing was precise, or at least small; it required no noticeable movement on his part. He maintained his respectful position for many minutes. Tamar, under the tree, maintained her erect one. Finally his bare arm reached upward—blindly it seemed, but in fact purposefully—and the hand, without wandering, grasped a screwdriver. The girl went into the building.

In the succeeding days there were signs of further industry at the Goldfangers’ apartment. The rap of hammering mixed with the mortar fire of drilling. The soprano noticed the new servant standing in front of the Goldfangers’ fuse box in the shared hall, his fingers curling around his chin. Soon the stereo equipment rose from its grave; remastered swing orchestras that Mrs. Goldfanger had not been able to listen to for months issued from the open doors of the balcony into the autumn warmth.

“Joe is a wonder,” Mrs. Goldfanger said to Tamar and her grandmother. “He’s descended from the angels.”

Tamar’s grandmother narrowed her eyes. The indentured were often industrious. A good disposition was natural to people born in the temperate zone. Sympathy flourished in mild climates; it withered in torrid ones; and in
this
country, amid five million wound-up souls, it was as rare as a lotus. People here had mislaid civility a century ago.

Mrs. Goldfanger gushed on about Joe; Tamar’s grandmother kept her knowledge of human nature to herself. “My husband is lucky,” Mrs. Goldfanger said.

Mr. Goldfanger’s decline had been gradual, though Tamar and her grandmother remembered that he had moved in already trembling. The children in the ground-floor apartment opposite the Goldfangers’ had never known him as other than a speechless gremlin. Those funny pointed ears, hair sprouted right out of them, and he always looked as if he were going to speak, but he never did, not one word. They had been warned not to mock him.

This family, referred to as Moroccan by everybody in the building, had all been born in Israel—father, mother, three children. The epithet derived from the previous generation and would no doubt abide for several hundred years. The Moroccan mother got vigorously tarted up for the holidays and for nights out, but at other times she hung around in an unclean satin robe. She had apricot hair and freckles and a mischievous smile. Her children were always underfoot—under her feet, under everybody else’s. Her husband ran a successful tile business; some of the most praised kitchens in Rehavia owed their gloss to him.

He was artistic—or at least he had an artistic eye—but he was not handy. The entire family, in fact, was all thumbs. All ears and all eyes, too; they couldn’t help but be aware of the cleverness of the Goldfangers’ new aide. Such fingers! And so, every ten days or so, when one of their appliances would break down: “Joe! Joe!” they’d call. “That damned toaster!” And Joe, leaving the Goldfangers’ door open in case his patient needed him, would walk across the hall and diagnose and maybe repair the thing, and softly return.

“We must be careful not to take advantage of Joe,” the mother said one morning. The father eyed her with pleasure. Her comments tickled him, as did her languid behavior, so different from the energy of the women who bought his tiles. She was indolent and forgetful, but she didn’t crave much; she’d been wearing that red schmatte since their honeymoon. She loved the children in an offhand way—sometimes she called the older boy by the name of the younger, sometimes the daughter by the name of her own sister. “Take advantage of Joe?” he said. “What do you mean?”

But as usual she couldn’t or wouldn’t say what she meant, just sat smiling at him across the disarray of their dining table. So he got up, kissed her good-bye, and left the apartment. Across the hall he could hear Joe’s calm voice. What do we need with these people? he wondered in a brief spasm of irritation. Didn’t the country have enough trouble? Next time he’d take the toaster to the Bulgarian fixer. Then the mood passed, and he thought maybe Joe could use that flecked jacket he hadn’t worn for years—a bit too vivid for his own complexion; perfect for a yellow man.

The soprano had friends and acquaintances in the Spanish-speaking community and in the musical one, and she went to a lot of recitals. However, she spent most of her time writing and revising letters to the home she’d left.

In fact her tours had been flops. In Latin America, trains to the provinces were just strings of dusty cars. Their windows were either stuck open or stuck closed. The soprano traveled with her accompanist—a plain young woman glowering behind spectacles—and the pair were untroubled by admiration or even recognition. But the singer had imagined throngs of fans so often that the vision in her mind’s eye had the clarity of remembrance. She saw a donkey draped with garlands. Her hand was kissed by the oily mayor of a town whose cinema doubled as a concert hall. The mayor’s wife was home preparing a banquet. Many people came to the concert and still more to the banquet, and the floor of the mayor’s rickety mansion rocked with stomping and the room rocked with cheers.

The soprano scratched her letters by hand, sitting on her balcony. She spent a week composing each one. For whose sake were those literary efforts? Tamar’s grandmother inquired. Ah, to entertain her best friend back home, the soprano said, adjusting a soft shawl. She owned its replica in several shades—the gray of dawn, the violet of dusk, the lavender of a bruise.

“Of course I no longer perform,” she’d told Joe.

“Your speaking voice is music,” he’d said, or something like that.

She imagined him mixing powders crushed from roots. He told her that in some of the villages of his country the pharmacist had to behave as a doctor. “Aided by American Police Corps,” he said.

“Peace Corps, surely.”

On the afternoons that she dropped in at the Goldfangers’, she and Joe exchanged tales about high-minded Americans. Then, when she indicated by a tiny droop that the visit was over, he escorted her upstairs to her door.