Fabulous Small Jews Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Felix Emeritus

  Artie Glick in a Family Way

  The Third Mrs. Kessler

  Moe

  Love and The Guinness Book of Records

  Family Values

  The Executor

  Saturday Afternoon at the Zoo with Dad

  Freddy Duchamp in Action

  Don Juan Zimmerman

  Dubinsky on the Loose

  Coming In with Their Hands Up

  The Master’s Ring

  Howie’s Gift

  A Loss for Words

  My Little Marjie

  Postcards

  Uncle Jack

  About the Author

  Also by Joseph Epstein

  To Neal Kozodoy

  the best in the business

  First Mariner Books edition 2004

  Copyright © 2003 by Joseph Epstein

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  ISBN-10: 0-395-94402-3 ISBN-13: 978-0-395-94402-8

  ISBN-10: 0-618-44658-3 (pbk.) ISBN-13: 978-0-618-44658-2 (pbk.)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Epstein, Joseph, 1937–

  Fabulous small Jews : stories / Joseph Epstein.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-395-94402-3

  ISBN 0-618-44658-3 (pbk.)

  1. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Jews—United States—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3555.P6527 F33 2003

  813’.54—dc21 2002027621

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book design by Robert Overholtzer

  QUM 10 987654321

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Commentary and the Hudson Review, where many of these stories first appeared.

  This is the Oxford of all sicknesses.

  Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews And actresses whose legs were always news.

  —KARL SHAPIRO, "Hospital"

  Felix Emeritus

  FELIX ARNSTEIN was dismantling his library. It would, he decided, have to be reduced by at least three-fourths, possibly more. At the Northwood Apartments, the old-age home (no euphemisms for Felix, thank you all the same) into which, after much thought, he had resignedly decided he must now move, there was scarcely room to accommodate even a fourth of his books. Felix could have done nicely without the Northwood Apartments altogether, but the standard symptoms of old age had begun to show up in him with too great insistency. Clearly, there was now nothing for it but to make the move.

  Still, Felix might have fought off this move if his various illnesses hadn't conspired to cause him to require so much medical attention. Along with his angina attacks, Felix had colitis, and now, in his late seventies, diabetes had shown up. If his mind seemed to be closing down on him at a considerately slow pace, his body was closing in much more relentlessly. These days he seemed to spend more time in doctors' offices and in hospitals than out of them. At the Northwood Apartments there was a physician on the premises and nursing care when needed. He would get, in addition, all his meals, maid service, his laundry done, haircuts, a bedroom, bath, and small sitting room—all this for $1,700 a month. Between his income from his pension from the university, his Social Security checks, and the small royalties that his books still brought in, he could afford it easily.

  The last time Felix had given a little dinner party, he had begun to run water to wash the dinner dishes in the kitchen sink while serving the dessert, napoleons bought at the Tag Bakery on Central Street. Half an hour or so later, a phone call from the occupants of the apartment downstairs informed him that water was coming through their kitchen ceiling. The leaking water, of course, was caused by Felix's neglecting to turn off his kitchen faucet. This was the third time it had happened.

  Constanze, Felix's sister, worrying about his having further angina attacks, insisted that he buy a cellular telephone, so that should he have another attack or even fall in his apartment, he would have the phone ready at all times to call her or at least to dial 911. This all sounded reasonable enough, except that Felix kept misplacing the new phone; being portable, it was also misplaceable. Then there was the morning he woke to find that all the electricity had gone off in the apartment, only to discover, on calling Commonwealth Edison, that he had neglected to pay his electric bill for the past four months.

  No, Felix had to admit that, approaching eighty, he was losing—if not, thank God, his taste for and interest in things of the mind—his ability to concentrate on the quotidian details of life. These had never, true enough, been his strong suit. Until now, though, they had never threatened to sink him. He was able to get by, to make do, but, little as he liked to own up to it, apparently no longer. Who was it said that a man is likely to hang himself on the loose threads of his life? Felix couldn't remember.

  Felix decided that he must give up his volumes of Fontane. He would retain his Karl Kraus, his Thomas Mann, his Robert Musil. The 143 volumes of his great Weimar edition of Goethe would have to go, of course. Also the many volumes of von Hofmannsthal; a lovely man, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, but, truth to tell, not a writer of the first class. Werfel and Zweig, out; so, too, his volumes of Zuckmayer, though he would retain the autobiography, a lovely, cleanly written book. His Ernst Jünger volumes, out also; a Nazi, Jünger, but a real writer nevertheless. Ah, the mysterious contradictions of art. Out, too, the books of Joseph Roth.

  A bachelor, Felix had tried to keep himself free of too many possessions. He enjoyed travel, spent many of his summers in Tuscany. On three different occasions he had lived for an entire academic year at other universities—at Harvard, at Oxford, at Stanford—residing in other people's houses and apartments. He thought of himself as traveling light through life, unencumbered, disentangled, a free man. Yet he now saw that he had nonetheless managed to accumulate a great deal. He must have nearly two thousand books in this small apartment. Then there was the furniture: simple Scandinavian things mostly, bought in the 1950s, meant more for utility than for comfort—how different from the richly ornate furniture he had grown up with as a boy and young man in Vienna—but now pretty well worn out. Most of this would not go with him. He would take his reading chair to the Northwood Apartments and his desk and a small couch and chest of drawers. The rest would be dealt with by the Salvation Army people, called in by his sister.

  Dear Connie was helping him with this move. She, his only surviving relative, and her husband, Moritz, who worked as a chemist at Abbott Laboratories, were all that remained of Felix's family. The rest had been murdered by the Nazis. Felix, Connie, and Moritz had been in America for more than forty years, yet all three retained their Viennese accents, their old-world ways. Felix could remember to this day the terror that he felt, departing the ship upon his arrival in London in 1946, when he realized that he would have to wrestle with and conquer the English language. Conquer it he had never quite succeeded in doing, at least not as a speaker. But all his books had been written in English, and over the years more than one reviewer remarked on his mastery of English prose style—a source of pride to Felix. He was nearly thirty when he had left Vienna, and while he had left it for good—having returned only once, and then with the most complicated of feelings—its accent had never left him, and also, in many respects, its way of looking at things.

  Felix's fate had been that of permanent exile. Much about America he loved.
The country had been good to him. By all accounts his had been a successful, even distinguished career. He had published six books of criticism, was the Haverling Distinguished Professor of European Literature at his university, had been a major contributor on his subject to the Times Literary Supplement in London—he was highly regarded in England, which, as a bit of an Anglophile, much pleased him. Yale had offered him a professorship and so, too, had the University of California at Berkeley, but he could not bear to move far from his sister and her husband, who gave his life such ballast as it had.

  For Felix was in reality a double exile, or so he had long thought himself. Along with his living away from the country of his birth—Arnsteins had lived in Vienna since early in the eighteenth century—Felix's secondary exile had to do with his homosexuality. It was something with which he had long ago learned to live. But well before that he recognized that it had put him outside what he thought of as regular life. A card that life had dealt him, such was how he had taken his homosexuality when he first recognized it in his late adolescence, and he had since come to learn that the pack of life was full of such jokers. His homosexuality gave him freedom from certain kinds of responsibility—from women, from children—but it also cut him off, sometimes he felt in fundamental ways, from the simple everyday pleasures of life. It made him realize that he had, in a way that men with children had not, only one life to lead.

  His age and his bad health had in any case caused Felix for some years to be beyond sexual activity. He alternated in his view of homosexuality as a mixed blessing, rather like the bow of Philoctetes in the Greek myth, and as an all but unbearable complication. Although Felix had his arguments with Freud, and especially with the Freudians' peculiar way of twisting literature to make their master's points, he nonetheless believed Freud when of homosexuality he wrote that it could not be changed by therapy because, essentially, you could not persuade anyone to give up something that gave him intense pleasure. Felix was what he was—though, he reflected, his illnesses long ago having rendered him sexually hors de combat, he was perhaps no longer even quite that. He was, he supposed, if an exact category were wanted, a former homosexual.

  Bitterest of bitter ironies, the one time in his life that Felix did not feel in exile was during the three years he spent at Buchenwald. Hateful dark years, monstrous in every way, and yet now, in retrospect, Felix sometimes viewed them as a period when he lived without the weight of introspection, lived chiefly with survival on his mind, lived truly in a community, however degraded and humiliated a community the one shared with his fellow captives might have been. It was not something he had ever spoken about, not even to Connie or Moritz, both of whom were able to elude the Nazis in their successful flight to America. Nor did he ever advertise himself as a survivor of the Nazi camps; he even avoided short-sleeve shirts lest the still unfaded tattooed number on his forearm show. He did not want his years at Buchenwald to define his life, thus giving Hitler, or so he thought, the ultimate victory over him.

  Felix had met many people who did, who thought and spoke of little else but the camps, for whom the subject swallowed up their entire lives. It was not difficult to understand why. At least once a month, sometimes more, Felix himself would dream about those dreadful days at Buchenwald; these dreams were of course nightmarish, as the days there had been. But, hideous though they were, at Buchenwald Felix, for the only time in his life, did not feel himself somehow separate and alone, an exile. Many were the oddities of life—many more, he had come to realize, than he would have time to contemplate.

  All this was fine with Felix, who, after being freed, had determined as best he could to enjoy and be amused by life. This seemed to him more sensible than to be perpetually tragic and endlessly shocked by it. Men were capable of enormous beastliness; he had been witness to that. Imperfectability was the lot of mankind; this, too, could scarcely go without notice. But men could also be immensely kind and goodhearted, full of unexpected generosity and sweetness. Also pathetic in their pretensions. Of pathetic pretensions Felix had seen more than his fill as a university teacher, where he daily noticed scores of little snobberies as he watched his colleagues skate perilously across the fragile ice of their thin status. Perhaps they sensed his amusement at this spectacle, for in his own department, that of comparative literature, he had no close friends. He was able to succeed not through academic politics—after Buchenwald, taking academic politics seriously was not possible for him—but because he had a reasonably high standing in the world of international culture.

  Perhaps it was owing to his priding himself on the absence of snobbery that Felix had decided to move into the Northwood Apartments rather than one of two other retirement homes in the neighborhood: Hamilton House, which had no Jews that he knew of, and the Walter Roebuck Home, which was all male. Northwood Apartments was all Jewish, chiefly Ostjuden as far as he could tell, and lived in by both men and women, mostly widows and widowers. Its advantages included its being less expensive than Hamilton House, closer to the home of Connie and Moritz, and, as it seemed to him on his two inspection visits before moving in, livelier. It was bad enough being elderly and ill, Felix thought; one didn't have to be stuffy and dull into the bargain.

  But no sooner had Felix moved into the Northwood than he began to wonder if he hadn't perhaps made a serious mistake. Part of the problem was living so exclusively among the old. Would he ever grow used to it? So many osteoporotic women, humped and bent forward; one woman, in a crueler trick of nature, was bent backward, each of her steps seeming perilous, as if she were permanently backing away from the edge of a cliff. Every second person at Northwood seemed to wear a hearing aid, and some wore two—Felix's own hearing was not so good, though thus far he had resisted getting such a device—with the result that people seemed not to talk but to yell at one another. Because of bad hearing, too, few people answered to knocking on their doors. Metal canes with thick rubber bottoms were everywhere. One man, who Felix learned had had three strokes, trudged about on a walker, a piece of hideous aluminum scaffolding the mere sight of which never failed to lower Felix's spirits. No shortage of toupees among the men, nor wigs among the women. Eyesight everywhere was damnably dim, and it was common to see people reading the newspaper or letters with their heads two or three inches from the paper. Conversation, at least much of it that Felix overheard, seemed to be chiefly about health, when it was not about death and the dead. The old women complained about the present, Felix noted, while the old men tended to lie about the past. Such—as Felix recalled hearing Miss Iris Godkin, the social director of Northwood, often call them—were “the golden years.”

  So many little Jewish women, Felix thought when he came down to his first dinner at Northwood; they seemed, on the average, to be about four foot ten. But then Felix had long before noticed the propensity of age to shrink the small and make the tall blurry. He was one of the tall, six foot one, and before his illnesses he had weighed 210 pounds. He assumed that he had himself become somewhat blurry, as if someone had fiddled with the contrast dial on his face, though, perhaps mercifully, his eyesight was not good enough to know for certain. When checks came to him in restaurants, he could not always make out their sums, even with his glasses on. Still, Felix stood out among his fellow residents at Northwood as a veritable giant. The only one in the place taller than he was Miss Godkin, blond and buxom, a real Wagnerian heroine, Felix thought, remembering that he never felt any regard for Wagner, no matter how much so intelligent a man as Thomas Mann may have struggled to come to terms with him. Wagner represented for Felix the worst of Teutonic culture: heavy, vastly overstated, grossly overdone, bloated, tinged all over with anti-Semitism.

  Miss Godkin, walking about with a walkie-talkie of some sort in her hand, bright capped teeth always flashing, was unrelentingly, almost brutally cheerful. Miss Godkin felt it her duty to enforce a spirit of happiness among the denizens of Northwood Apartments. She would have smiled through an earthquake, Felix thought, perhaps planned on
her deathbed to say to whoever it was who gathered around her, as her last words, what she said to everyone she encountered at Northwood: “Have a wonderful day!” It took considerable restraint on Felix's part not to respond to one of Miss Godkin's “Have a wonderful day”s by saying, as it often occurred to him to say, "An uneventful one will be sufficient, thank you all the same, madam."

  But Miss Godkin was only one of the obstacles at Northwood. There was also Morris Manzelman, at whose regular table Felix had sat at lunch his second day at Northwood. The first time they met, this Manzelman, a short man with white hair and a carefully groomed white mustache, held out a small, manicured hand. “Morry Manzelman,” he announced, “used to be Arrow Transport.”

  Felix did not at first pick up that Arrow Transport was the name of the trucking company Manzelman had begun and worked at his entire life. His two sons, Arnold and Irwin, ran the company now. When Manzelman learned that Felix had taught in a university, he ever afterward referred to him as Professor. Manzelman had a taste for jokes, but regrettably it didn't usually match Felix's taste in jokes. At breakfast, the third full day that Felix spent at Northwood, Manzelman, over a meal of bran flakes, stewed prunes, prune juice, and hot chocolate, announced that he heard a good one the other day from a friend, Al Bergman, used to be a union agent, now retired in Florida.

  “It seems, Professor, this fella, a widower, maybe he's sixty-five, moves into a retirement home. Pretty soon he sees that he's one of only three guys in the joint, the others being in their nineties and a bit gaga, if you know what I mean, and all the rest is women. A man who uses his kop, he sees there's a chance for a bit of extra cash in a situation like this. So he puts up a sign on his door, 'Sex for Sale.'”

  Manzelman paused for a long draught of prune juice.

  “Pretty soon a little old broad knocks on his door. 'I saw your sign,' she tells him, 'and I wonder how much you charge.' The fellow hadn't really thought about it before, so he says, on the spur of the moment, you know, he says, ‘Well, five dollars for on the floor, ten dollars for on the couch over there, and twenty dollars for on the bed.' The lady opens a small change purse and takes out from it a twenty, which she hands to him. 'You want to do it on the bed, then?' the fella asks. ‘No,' she says, ‘four times on the floor.'”