The Complete Stories (80 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Complete Stories
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Ida called her daughter a nasty name, and Amy, rising, her face
grim, quickly left the room. Ida felt like chasing after her with a stick, or fainting. She went to her room, her head aching, and lay on the double bed. For a while she wept.
She lay there, at length wanting to forget their quarrel. Ida rose and looked in an old photograph album to try to forget how bad she felt. Here was a picture of Martin as a young father, with a black mustache, tossing Amy as a baby in the air. Here she was as a pudgy girl of twelve, never out of jeans. Yet not till she was eighteen had she wanted her long hair cut.
Among these photographs Ida found a picture of her own mother, Mrs. Feitelson, surely no more than forty then, in her horsehair sheitel. The wig looked like a round loaf of dark bread lying on her head. Once a man had tried to mug her on the street. In the scuffle he had pulled her wig off and, when he saw her fuzzy skull, had run off without her purse. They wore those wigs, the Orthodox women, once they were married, not to attract, or distract, men other than their husbands. Sometimes they had trouble attracting their husbands.
Oh, Mama, Ida thought, did I know you? Did you know me?
What am I afraid of? she asked herself, and she thought, I am a widow and losing my looks. I am afraid of the future.
After a while she went barefoot to Amy’s room and knocked on her door. I will tell her that my hair has made me very nervous. When there was no answer she opened the door a crack and said she would like to apologize. Though Amy did not respond, the light was on and Ida entered the room.
Her daughter, a slender woman in long green pajamas, lay in bed reading in the light of the wall lamp. Ida wanted to sit on the bed but felt she had no right to.
“Good night, dear Amy.”
Amy did not lower her book. Ida, standing by the bedside looking at Amy, saw something she long ago had put out of her mind: that the girl’s hair on top of her head was thinning and a fairly large circle of cobwebbed scalp was visible.
Amy turned a page and went on reading.
Ida, although tormented by the sight of Amy’s thinning hair, did not speak of it. In the morning she left the house early and bought herself an attractive wig.
1980
E
arly one morning Ephraim Elihu rang up the Art Students League and asked them how he could locate an experienced female model he could paint nude. He told the woman speaking to him on the phone that he wanted someone of about thirty. “Could you possibly help me?”
“I don’t recognize your name,” said the woman on the telephone. “Have you ever dealt with us before? Some of our students will work as models but usually only for painters we know.” Mr. Elihu said he hadn’t. He wanted it understood he was an amateur painter who had once studied at the League.
“Do you have a studio?”
“It’s a large living room with lots of light.
“I’m no youngster,” he went on, “but after many years I’ve begun painting again and I’d like to do some nude studies to get back my feeling for form. I’m not a professional painter you understand but I’m serious about painting. If you want any references as to my character, I can supply them.” He asked her what the going rate for models was, and the woman, after a pause, said, “Six fifty the hour.” Mr. Elihu said that was satisfactory. He seemed to want to talk longer but she did not encourage him. She wrote down his name and address and said she thought she could have someone for him the day after tomorrow. He thanked her for her consideration.
That was on Wednesday. The model appeared on Friday morning. She had telephoned the night before and they settled on a time
for her to come. She rang his bell shortly after 9 a.m. and Mr. Elihu went at once to the door. He was a gray-haired man of seventy who lived in a brownstone house near Ninth Avenue, and he was excited by the prospect of painting this young woman.
The model was a plain-looking woman of twenty-seven or so, and the old painter decided her best feature was her eyes. She was wearing a blue raincoat on a clear spring day. The old painter liked her face but kept that to himself. She barely glanced at him as she walked firmly into the room.
“Good day,” he said, and she answered, “Good day.”
“It’s like spring,” said the old man. “The foliage is starting up again.”
“Where do you want me to change?” asked the model.
Mr. Elihu asked her name and she responded, “Ms. Perry.”
“You can change in the bathroom, I would say, Miss Perry, or if you like, my own room—down the hall—is empty and you can change there also. It’s warmer than the bathroom.”
The model said it made no difference to her but she thought she would rather change in the bathroom.
“That is as you wish,” said the elderly man.
“Is your wife around?” she then asked, glancing into the room.
“I happen to be a widower.”
He said he had had a daughter once but she had died in an accident.
The model said she was sorry. “I’ll change and be out in a few fast minutes.”
“No hurry at all,” said Mr. Elihu, glad he was about to paint her.
Ms. Perry entered the bathroom, undressed there, and returned quickly. She slipped off her terry-cloth robe. Her head and shoulders were slender and well formed. She asked the old man how he would like her to pose. He was standing by an enamel-top kitchen table in a living room with a large window. On the tabletop he had squeezed out, and was mixing together, the contents of two small tubes of paint. There were three other tubes he did not touch. The model, taking a last drag of a cigarette, pressed it out against a coffee can lid on the kitchen table.
“I hope you don’t mind if I take a puff once in a while?”
“I don’t mind, if you do it when we take a break.”
“That’s all I meant.”
She was watching him as he slowly mixed his colors.
Mr. Elihu did not immediately look at her nude body but said he would like her to sit in the chair by the window. They were facing a back yard with an ailanthus tree whose leaves had just come out.
“How would you like me to sit, legs crossed or not crossed?”
“However you prefer that. Crossed or uncrossed doesn’t make much of a difference to me. Whatever makes you feel comfortable.”
The model seemed surprised at that, but she sat down in the yellow chair by the window and crossed one leg over the other. Her figure was good.
“Is this okay for you?”
Mr. Elihu nodded. “Fine,” he said. “Very fine.”
He dipped the brush into the paint he had mixed on the tabletop and, after glancing at the model’s nude body, began to paint. He would look at her, then look quickly away, as if he was afraid of affronting her. But his expression was objective. He painted apparently casually, from time to time gazing up at the model. He did not often look at her. She seemed not to be aware of him. Once, she turned to observe the ailanthus tree and he studied her momentarily to see what she might have seen in it.
Then she began to watch the painter with interest. She watched his eyes and she watched his hands. He wondered if he was doing something wrong. At the end of about an hour she rose impatiently from the yellow chair.
“Tired?” he asked.
“It isn’t that,” she said, “but I would like to know what in the name of Christ you think you are doing? I frankly don’t think you know the first thing about painting.”
She had astonished him. He quickly covered the canvas with a towel.
After a long moment, Mr. Elihu, breathing shallowly, wet his dry lips and said he was making no claims for himself as a painter. He said he had tried to make that absolutely clear to the woman he had talked to at the art school when he had called.
Then he said, “I might have made a mistake in asking you to come to this house today. I think I should have tested myself a while longer, just so I wouldn’t be wasting anybody’s time. I guess I am not ready to do what I would like to do.”
“I don’t care how long you have tested yourself,” said Ms. Perry. “I honestly don’t think you have painted me at all. In fact, I felt you weren’t interested in painting me. I think you’re interested in letting your eyes go over my naked body for certain reasons of your own. I
don’t know what your personal needs are but I’m damn well sure that most of them are not about painting.”
“I guess I have made a mistake.”
“I guess you have,” said the model. She had her robe on now, the belt pulled tight.
“I’m a painter,” she said, “and I model because I am broke but I know a fake when I see one.”
“I wouldn’t feel so bad,” said Mr. Elihu, “if I hadn’t gone out of my way to explain the situation to that lady at the Art Students League.
“I’m sorry this happened,” Mr. Elihu said hoarsely. “I should have thought it through but didn’t. I’m seventy years of age. I have always loved women and felt a sad loss that I have no particular women friends at this time of my life. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to paint again, though I make no claims that I was ever greatly talented. Also, I guess I didn’t realize how much about painting I have forgotten. Not only that, but about the female body. I didn’t realize I would be so moved by yours, and, on reflection, about the way my life has gone. I hoped painting again would refresh my feeling for life. I regret that I have inconvenienced and disturbed you.”
“I’ll be paid for my inconvenience,” Ms. Perry said, “but what you can’t pay me for is the insult of coming here and submitting myself to your eyes crawling on my body.”
“I didn’t mean it as an insult.”
“That’s what it feels like to me.”
She then asked Mr. Elihu to disrobe.
“I?” he said, surprised. “What for?”
“I want to sketch you. Take your pants and shirt off.”
He said he had barely got rid of his winter underwear but she did not smile.
Mr. Elihu disrobed, ashamed of how he must look to her.
With quick strokes she sketched his form. He was not a bad-looking man but felt bad. When she had the sketch she dipped his brush into a blob of black pigment she had squeezed out of a tube and smeared his features, leaving a black mess.
He watched her hating him but said nothing.
Ms. Perry tossed the brush into a wastebasket and returned to the bathroom for her clothing.
The old man wrote out a check for her for the sum they had agreed on. He was ashamed to sign his name but he signed it and
handed it to her. Ms. Perry slipped the check into her large purse and left.
He thought that in her way she was not a bad-looking woman though she lacked grace. The old man then asked himself, “Is there nothing more to my life than it is now? Is this all that is left to me?”
The answer seemed yes and he wept at how old he had so quickly become.
Afterwards he removed the towel over his canvas and tried to fill in her face, but he had already forgotten it.
1983
H
echt was a born late bloomer.
One night he woke hearing rain on his windows and thought of his young wife in her wet grave. This was something new, because he hadn’t thought of her in too many years to be comfortable about. He saw her in her uncovered grave, rivulets of water streaming in every direction, and Celia, whom he had married when they were of unequal ages, lying alone in the deepening wet. Not so much as a flower grew on her grave, though he could have sworn he had arranged perpetual care.
He stepped into his thoughts perhaps to cover her with a plastic sheet, and though he searched in the cemetery under dripping trees and among many wet plots, he was unable to locate her. The dream he was into offered no tombstone name, row, or plot number, and though he searched for hours, he had nothing to show for it but his wet self. The grave had taken off. How can you cover a woman who isn’t where she is supposed to be? That’s Celia.
The next morning, Hecht eventually got himself out of bed and into a subway train to Jamaica to see where she was buried. He hadn’t been to the cemetery in many years, no particular surprise to anybody considering past circumstances. Life with Celia wasn’t exactly predictable. Yet things change in a lifetime, or seem to. Hecht had lately been remembering his life more vividly, for whatever reason. After you hit sixty-five, some things that have two distinguishable sides seem to pick up another that complicates the picture as you look or count. Hecht counted.
Now, though Hecht had been more or less in business all his life, he kept few personal papers, and though he had riffled through a small pile of them that morning, he had found nothing to help him establish Celia’s present whereabouts; and after a random looking at gravestones for an hour he felt the need to call it off and spend another hour with a young secretary in the main office, who fruitlessly tapped his name and Celia’s into a computer and came up with a scramble of interment dates, grave plots and counterplots, that exasperated him.
“Look, my dear,” Hecht said to the flustered young secretary, “if that’s how far you can go on this machine, we have to find another way to go further, or I will run out of patience. This grave is lost territory as far as I am concerned, and we have to do something practical to find it.”
“What do you think I’m doing, if I might ask?”
“Whatever you are doing doesn’t seem to be much help. This computer is supposed to have a good mechanical memory, but it’s either out of order or rusty in its parts. I admit I didn’t bring any papers with me, but so far the only thing your computer has informed us is that it has nothing much to inform us.”
“It has informed us it is having trouble locating the information you want.”
“Which adds up to zero minus zero,” Hecht said. “I wish to remind you that a lost grave isn’t a missing wedding ring we are talking about. It is a lost cemetery plot of the lady who was once my wife that I wish to recover.”
The pretty young woman he was dealing with had a tight-lipped conversation with an unknown person, then the buzzer on her desk sounded and Hecht was given permission to go into the director’s office.
“Mr. Goodman will now see you.”
He resisted “Good for Mr. Goodman.” Hecht only nodded, and followed the young woman to an inner office. She knocked once and disappeared, as a friendly voice talked through the door.
“Come in, come in.”
“Why should I worry if it’s not my fault?” Hecht told himself.
Mr. Goodman pointed to a chair in front of his desk and Hecht was soon seated, watching him pour orange juice from a quart container into a small green glass.
“Will you join me in a sweet mouthful?” he asked, nodding at the container. “I usually take refreshment this time of the morning. It keeps me balanced.”
“Thanks,” said Hecht, meaning he had more serious problems. “Why I am here is that I am looking for my wife’s grave, so far with no success.” He cleared his throat, surprised at the emotion that had gathered there.
Mr. Goodman observed Hecht with interest.
“Your outside secretary couldn’t find it,” Hecht went on, regretting he hadn’t found the necessary documents that would identify the grave site. “Your young lady tried her computer in every combination but couldn’t produce anything. What was lost is still lost, in other words, a woman’s grave.”
“
Lost
is premature,” Goodman offered. “
Displaced
might be better. In my twenty-eight years in my present capacity, I don’t believe we have lost a single grave.”
The director tapped lightly on the keys of his desk computer, studied the screen with a squint, and shrugged. “I am afraid that we now draw a blank. The letter
H
volume of our ledgers that we used before we were computerized seems to be missing. I assure you this can’t be more than a temporary condition.”
“That’s what your young lady already informed me.”
“She’s not my young lady, she’s my secretarial assistant.”
“I stand corrected,” Hecht said. “This meant no offense.”
“Likewise,” said Goodman. “But we will go on looking. Could you kindly tell me, if you don’t mind, what was the status of your relationship to your wife at the time of her death?” He peered over half-moon glasses to check the computer reading.
“There was no status. We were separated. What has that got to do with her burial plot?”
“The reason I inquire is, I thought it might refresh your memory. For example, is this the correct cemetery, the one you are looking in—Mount Jereboam? Some people confuse us with Mount Hebron.”
“I guarantee you it was Mount Jereboam.”
Hecht, after a hesitant moment, gave these facts: “My wife wasn’t the most stable woman. She left me twice and disappeared for months. Although I took her back twice, we weren’t together at the time of her death. Once she threatened to take her life, though eventually she didn’t. In the end she died of a normal sickness, not cancer. This was years later, when we weren’t living together anymore, but I carried out her burial, to the best of my knowledge, in this exact cemetery. I also heard she had lived for a short time with some guy she met somewhere, but when she died, I was the one who buried her. Now I am sixty-five and lately I have had this urge to visit the
grave of someone who lived with me when I was a young man. This is a grave which everybody now tells me they can’t locate.”
Goodman rose at his desk, a short man, five feet tall. “I will institute a careful research.”
“The quicker, the better,” Hecht replied. “I am still curious what happened to her grave.”
Goodman almost guffawed, but caught himself and thrust out his hand. “I will keep you well informed, don’t worry.”
Hecht left, irritated. On the train back to the city he thought of Celia and her various unhappinesses. He wished he had told Goodman she had spoiled his life.
That night it rained. To his surprise he found a wet spot on his pillow.
The next day Hecht again went to the graveyard. “What did I forget that I ought to remember?” he asked himself. Obviously the grave plot, row, and number. Though he sought it diligently he could not find it. Who can remember something he has once and for all put out of his mind? It’s like trying to grow beans out of a bag of birdseed.
“But I must be patient and I will find out. As time goes by I am bound to recall. When my memory says yes I won’t argue no.”
But weeks passed and Hecht still could not remember what he was trying to. “Maybe I have reached a dead end?”
Another month went by and at last the cemetery called him. It was Mr. Goodman, clearing his throat. Hecht pictured him at his desk sipping orange juice.
“Mr. Hecht?”
“The same.”
“This is Mr. Goodman. A happy Rosh Hashanah.”
“A happy Rosh Hashanah to you.”
“Mr. Hecht, I wish to report progress. Are you prepared for an insight?”
“You name it,” Hecht said.
“So let me use a better word. We have tracked your wife and it turns out she isn’t in the grave there where the computer couldn’t find her. To be frank, we found her in a grave with another gentleman.”
“What kind of gentleman? Who in God’s name is he? I am her legal husband.”
“This one, if you will pardon me, is the man who lived with your wife after she left you. They lived together on and off, so don’t
blame yourself too much. After she died he got a court order, and they removed her to a different grave, where we also laid him after his death. The judge gave him the court order because he convinced him that he had loved her for many years.”
Hecht was embarrassed. “What are you talking about? How could he transfer her grave anywhere if it wasn’t his legal property? Her grave belonged to me. I paid cash for it.”
“That grave is still there,” Goodman explained, “but the names were mixed up. His name was Kaplan but the workmen buried her under Caplan. Your grave is still in the cemetery, though we had it under Kaplan and not Hecht. I apologize to you for this inconvenience but I think we now have got the mystery cleared up.”
“So thanks,” said Hecht. He felt he had lost a wife but was no longer a widower.
“Also,” Goodman reminded him, “don’t forget you gained an empty grave for future use. Nobody is there and you own the plot.”
Hecht said that was obviously true.
The story had astounded him. Yet whenever he thought of telling it to someone he knew, or had just met, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
1984

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