Inside outside, p.14
Inside, Outside, page 14
And the richest irony, maybe, is that our liberal crowd—and my dear wife Jan leading the pack—snatch up the newspapers, gloat over the Watergate headlines, grin and giggle at the television stories, happy as pigs in clover with the whole thing; we, who were so indignant and horrified at the way the media were trumpeting Senator McCarthy’s accusations, hounding his targets with sensational stories, and being so horridly unfair. All over the political spectrum, I guess, human nature is much the same.
I’ve said I’m keeping the Watergate mess out of these pages, and it still goes. That the President and his inner crowd got involved in some very rancid misconduct, indeed subversion, and that he has now been caught lying in his teeth about it, seems evident to me, as it does to the newshounds and their public. Everyone smells blood. Everyone is caught up in the thrilling daily serial melodrama of bringing down a President. Behind it all, it seems to me—though nobody is saying this yet—is the anger over our Vietnam flop. Americans don’t like getting licked. Somebody’s head has to roll, and he’s the President. Three other Presidents backed us into that war, but our crawl-out happened on his watch. The poor fellow poses with the returning prisoners of war, thinking it does him some good in the Watergate mess; and he just paints himself tighter into the corner as the crook who bombed the poor Asiatics and lost the war anyway.
I have got to get to bed, the sun’s shining on my desk. But I have just referred to the President of the United States, the most powerful politician on earth, as a “poor fellow,” and that’s revealing, isn’t it? It may be why I’ll decide to stay on. Here is the original Horatio Alger figure, the American dream incarnate, the nobody who rises by sheer drive and grit out of poverty and obscurity to the Presidency. I don’t think any President since Lincoln has had more lowly beginnings. There he is in the White House; and nobody loves him, and legions hate him, and that has been true ever since he got there. To be forced to resign from the Presidency almost seems to have been his fixed fate, the star he has unknowingly been following, all his days.
Well, I have a front seat at this melodrama. With the rising Watergate sewage, the smell of which seeps through the place, I have nothing to do. Jan would claw me for saying this, but if I could I’d help the bedevilled bastard. I keep trying to do that, in the snippets I contribute to his speeches. Meantime it’s a glorious morning out there, and the magnolias are in bloom. A few hours’ sleep, and then a walk to the White House, my chief pleasure in these dismal and scary days.
Will Egypt really attack?
***
Two weeks have passed since I penned those weary hasty pages. Let me pick up the pieces quick-march. Abe Herz is back. False alarm. Either that, or the Israeli mobilization made the Egyptians think better of it. Stand-down on the Egyptian side of the Canal, anyway, after a massing of troops and equipment that looked like D-day minus one.
First thing Herz did when he returned, practically, was to get into a fight with Sandra. That romance is off for now. Sandra’s views on Israel are strong and negative. The Arab boy friend, I’ve always believed, was an expression of Sandra’s opinion of Israel—and of me, for taking on the UJA—made as explicit and as jarring as possible. Since the Six-Day War I’ve come to believe, like most Jews, that the destiny of our ancient people now turns on the fulcrum of Israel. If my little New Leftist Phi Bete can’t grasp that, okay. I myself once thought Zionism was for the birds. Il faut que la jeunesse se passe, as the wise Frenchies put it.
The Israeli ambassador scared the hell out of me, two weeks ago, by confiding that the Israeli defense line along the Canal is paper-thin. In effect nobody is there, just a handful of troops moving around to give an impression of being ten times as many as they are. How can Israel take this risk? Answer, a damn sobering one: no choice. Israel has a very small standing army. Its military strength lies in its reserves. The whole country can spring to arms in a matter of days, and the reserves are remarkably well trained. The economy can’t stand any other arrangement. Abe Herz says that even the swift brief mobilization from which he has just returned cost Israel twenty to thirty million dollars. Rough, on such a poor and tiny country.
Abe says—and at lunch yesterday the ambassador, now much less tense, made the same point—that the Israeli victory in 1967 so overawed the Arabs that a skeleton force of a couple of thousand along the Canal can face down the whole Egyptian army, unless it masses at the Canal on a full war footing. I hope that’s right. When I visited the Israeli installations along the Canal a few years ago, they seemed damned meager to me, but I told myself, “What the hell do I know about land warfare?” Sizable Egyptian formations moved in plain sight on the other side of that broad ditch. The handful of Israeli soldiers facing them seemed cheerful and self-confident, though pretty lonesome out there in the sand, the blazing sun, and the flies, living on field rations and anxious to get relieved; tanned brawny kids in green fatigues, nearly all of them younger than my own two sons.
***
Brezhnev’s due here, so the media are momentarily letting up on the President. The howling storm that burst over him after his “clarifying statement,” a revelation of some long-hidden White House misdeeds, is starting to die down. The statement was forced on him, obviously, because someone on the inside was about to squeal and seek immunity. It’ll all be in the history books one day, this shocking Presidential confession of surreptitious crimes, committed by goons in his secret employ, to get evidence on people he considered male-factors. No wonder the cartoonists now show the White House collapsing, as in an earthquake; or the President on a ship in a typhoon, rolling two steel balls; or else he’s standing on a sandspit labelled Presidency, that’s awash and melting in a tidal wave; or he’s cowering in a fierce beam of light, stripped to his jockstrap. All sorts of jolly representations of our Head of State fill our press, as he prepares to meet the boss of the Soviet Union.
I was in the thick of that “clarifying” bombshell. I couldn’t contribute too much, not knowing exactly what was going on. But the startling thing I’m beginning to perceive is, nobody may know the whole truth about Watergate, not even the President. The affair is so complicated, and it was so secretive to begin with, and so many people are now lying, and everybody’s motives are so desperate and so suspect, and there’s so much buck-passing, that it’s all becoming a hall of mirrors; a hundred images and half-images bouncing around and receding into an infinity of prismatic shadows, until you can’t tell where you are, or what’s an image and what’s real. The President may even be groping among the mirrors himself. Still, he knows more than he’s letting on to the public. He once said to me, very soberly and earnestly, “David, it’s too bad national security precludes our going the hangout route, because that would be the easy way.” In advertising-man patois—the chief legacy around here of the departed German shepherds—“going the hangout route” means telling the truth.
He said that at the time he found me studying the Talmud. Somehow the glimpse of that exotic tome got to him. He sat down and talked about his parents, especially his mother, whom he reveres; and about his Quaker upbringing, and his unchanged fundamental belief in a Supreme Being, and his practice of praying for guidance in difficult hours, and his respect for the tenacity and brilliance of the Jewish people. “I know something about tenacity,” he said with a far-off look from under those heavy cartoon eyebrows; and he added wearily, with a twisted little smile, “also, about being disliked.” I’ve been glancing again at the description I wrote down of that strange chat, and I can now understand why Jan saw red. He does come out sort of sympathetic, and to her he is a loathsome tricky knave who must fall. Nothing else. She doesn’t want to be confused with light and shade, or with multiple mirror images.
When the “clarifying statement” reached its final form, word went down to “run it past Dave Goodkind for the ethical angle.” You can believe that or not, but it happened. What with my yarmulka and my Talmud, I was evidently counted on to detect and correct ethical sour notes to which he and his staff might be tone-deaf. In fact, I did suggest changing a few phrases and sentences; and they were changed, and I got from him a scribble of praise and thanks.
Around this White House nothing seems to be in itself right or wrong, you see, moral or immoral, law-abiding or criminal. There’s only one standard: things either work or they don’t work. Vaguely sensing the limits of that viewpoint, they run the statement past me for “the ethical angle.” It all has an Alice in Wonderland sound, but even Lewis Carroll couldn’t have thought up the fantasy of running a speech past me—I. David Goodkind, tax lawyer, artful dodger and wriggler for hire—for the ethical angle! Well, the White House staff tried to laugh off Watergate as a caper, and now one by one they’re capering over a precipice. The boss man seems about to caper off into the void himself, and free-fall. If so, I’ll help him with the ethical angle till he hits. I don’t know exactly why, but I want to. A hell of a way for a President to face Brezhnev, stripped to his jockstrap.
***
Meantime I turn back to April House, as I’ve decided to call my book. It’s becoming my refuge and my fun. I’ve never wholly buried the urge to write, that’s becoming obvious. Maybe I just envy Peter Quat. Law was my game, regret is vain, and I’ve done good things in the law, whatever Abe Herz thinks. (He, by the way, when he’s not abroad for special training or out on reserve maneuvers and call-ups, now practices tax law in Tel Aviv. Not the first fire-eater to turn shit-eater, I daresay.) But I’m still happiest writing, preferably to make people laugh.
And why not? It was always my bent. My high school and college yearbooks both show, in the senior class vote, “Wittiest—Goodkind.” More to the point, it was the way I earned my first dollar. It was the vocation of Molière and Twain, so who can knock it? I believe I’d rather write about my Uncle Velvel, and amuse a few people in these gruesome times, than be a Supreme Court justice. That doesn’t mean in the least that jokes are better than law; it simply defines me as a frustrated funny man.
A propos of old Peter, I have at last read a typescript of his new book. Whew! Words fail me! Then there’s a letter from Mark Herz. About the time his son Abe got called back on the war scare, Mark was invited to lecture in Israel this summer and he may go, just for the money; it’s one of those endowed things. Maybe he’ll meet his son again in Israel, after long cold estranged years. In all the time Abe’s been here, they haven’t even spoken on the phone.
Herz, Quat, and Goodkind! The three comic musketeers of Columbia in the 1930’s; you’ll read all about us soon. Meantime, here we go with Bobbeh’s sauerkraut.
22
The Sauerkraut Crisis
First, can I say a quick kind word about Reuben Brodofsky? I’ve been bad-mouthing the man right along. He did shorten Pop’s life, and he was a small, small person, a midget in mind and soul, shrivelled and soured by jealousy; truly a statutory idiot. I take back none of that.
But there was another side to Reuben Brodofsky. To this day, when I happen to eat kosher delicatessen—pastrami, corned beef, rolled beef, salami, especially with coleslaw and sour pickles, and a certain kind of lumpy white Bronx-style potato salad—I think of Brodofsky and his family. I’ve told you about his beefy wife, the magazine-clipper. I’ve skipped over his kids, but in them lay his redeeming side, the obverse of his hate of my father: his love for those three boys and one girl.
Why delicatessen? Well, the partners and their families used to come together on Sunday nights in the shut-down Fairy Laundry for a supper of cold cuts from paper plates. The adults would talk business, and of course Brodofsky talked the most. As his strident Yiddish accents reverberated through the darkened place, we kids would climb over the cold canvas-hooded machinery, play hide-and-seek in the soapy-smelling gloom amid the stacks of laundry, even descend to the black scary boiler room and slosh through the greasy puddles.
Felix Brodofsky was my special chum in these gambols. Once Felix and I, poking around with a flashlight in a storeroom, came on some piled-up dusty boxes under wood trash; and when we opened them, behold, they were full of glittering gold and silver! Having just read Tom Sawyer, I thought we had found treasure and were rich for life. We rushed our find back to our parents, who said they were worthless old tin spangles left by the Woolworth tenant; and they went on talking business and eating cold cuts and potato salad. A hundred Sunday nights like this impregnated kosher delicatessen for me with an everlasting echo of Reuben Brodofsky’s voice.
Felix was the youngest Brodofsky boy, about my age, with a wall eye; stout like his mother, and easygoing by nature. We were pretty good friends until once, in Hebrew school during recess, he made fun of me for botching a translation from the Book of Samuel. I’m afraid I overreacted a bit and called him a “fat fuck.” This was surely in questionable taste, but Felix made it worse. Like other fatties, when he got mad, he really got mad. He chased me all over the benches in the classroom, out in the hallway, up and down the stairs, threatening murder, throwing off the restraining arms of students and teachers alike, yelling as we ran, “He ain’t gonna call me no fat fuck! Ain’t nobody calls me no fat fuck!” He sounded very much like his father, objecting to the shedding of Sam Bender’s blood. He kept shouting about fat fucks in just the same unnecessary repetitious way. The school was an old wooden house, and Felix’s galloping after me made a thunderous racket. The whole place was in an uproar.
Captured at last by two male teachers, we were hauled up before the principal, a very solemn Hebrew scholar named Mr. Abramson. With his wall eye, Felix stared off to one side of the principal and bellowed at vacancy, “Ain’t nobody calls me no fat fuck!” Mr. Abramson’s thick glasses fell off. He picked them up, and silently waved us out of the office. Neither of us was punished. I guess Mr. Abramson was too numbed to take action. As you can see, Felix was rather a statutory idiot himself, though not a bad guy. In that school he was known thereafter, unfortunately, as that fat fuck. I suspect even Mr. Abramson thought of him as a fat fuck. The alliteration tended to stick in one’s mind.
Anyway, the Brodofskys were a clan, a very close Mishpokha all to themselves. As the kids grew up I attended several Brodofsky weddings. The three boys and their sister all married young, and those weddings were incandescent with family affection. They weren’t big costly affairs, nor even especially religious in tone. But when those young Brodofskys hugged and kissed each other, and kissed their mother, tubby in pink lace and gardenias, and kissed their grizzled father, all weeping and red-eyed with joy, you were in the presence of the real thing, the hot ties of blood. Brodofsky was a good father, or he couldn’t have had such a family.
The old-country friendship, and the immutable truth that Brodofsky had taken Pop into the laundry, were factors, but it was Brodofsky the family man that Pop couldn’t throw off his back. I don’t know whether to admire Pop for that or to regret it. Either way, it’s thirty years too late.
***
Well, now, about the sauerkraut. Bobbeh’s mulish resolve to make it overlapped our move to Longfellow Avenue, otherwise there might never have been such a disaster. A woman on moving day is a dragon. Two women in a move, especially when one is the other’s mother-in-law, are virtually the secret of the fusion bomb. Add the fact that Bobbeh, knowing that we were moving because she was cramping Mom’s style, had turned deep blue again; and add what I’m about to tell you about the process of making sauerkraut, at least as Bobbeh did it; and you can begin to understand the blowup.
Even piled in the living room, those cabbages ripened fast. Maybe it was because they were stacked against a steam radiator. I only know that when Pop first brought them in they had a pleasant farmland smell; but the very next day, when I came home from school and walked into Apartment 5-D, I was struck with the silly notion that a horse had died there. The Bronx had quite a few dead horses scattered about its streets. The overworked old beasts would collapse, and the wagon drivers would unhitch and drag off their vehicles, leaving the stiffening flyblown carcasses for the municipal authorities to worry about. Dead cats and dogs also abounded, and they had their individual fragrances, but it was the dead horses that you had to hurry past, exhaling all the way.
Well, what I smelled was the cabbages, though Bobbeh hadn’t even gone to work on them. The following day, she chopped them up into an amazing quantity of shreds. When I returned from school, heaps of shredded cabbage filled the hallway and the kitchen, and there was a pile in the parlor. I don’t know how we ate supper that night, and I can’t imagine how Lee and I slept, unless we bedded down on chopped cabbage. But at least the shredding had aerated the stuff, and the smell had calmed down. Also, Mom had opened all the windows. It was very cold in the apartment, except right up against the hissing and whistling radiators, but the air was passable.
A day or two later when I got back from school all the cabbage was gone. So was the smell. This was a big surprise. Somehow Bobbeh, with her old-country magic, had managed to stuff those heaps into the crocks, and to seal the crocks. They were big crocks, but still that was a feat. The flat was clean and normal; not a shred in sight, and no odor. Bobbeh had no doubt mixed in traditional additives which had reduced the vegetation in some drastic way. At any rate, it was all gone.
I think it was I who first noticed the noise. It woke me in the middle of the night; a low grumbling bubbling sound. In itself it wasn’t frightening or even obtrusive. It was just strange and new. I got up, wandered through the apartment, trying to locate it, and finally traced it to the crocks. They were still sealed, still odorless, but no longer inert. Things were going on inside the crocks. They were sort of alive. Mystery solved, I went back to sleep. I knew that peculiar things happened with Bobbeh’s crocks. The wine had never grumbled, or indeed made any sound, but the crocks had foamed like mad dogs, and had smelled odd. I figured that we could settle happily for a little grumbling from the sauerkraut; not too unlike, actually, the noise Bobbeh made when she walked around in a blue spell.
