The Kiss of the Prison Dancer Page 5

  After dinner Arthur excused himself and left the house. Georgia cleared the table while Max made himself comfortable in the living room. He was almost asleep when Georgia came in.

  “How’s your job, Max?” she asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “It’s all right.”

  “You have a lot of responsibility, don’t you? I mean, the fate of all those people is practically in your hands.”

  Over the years Max had exaggerated his job, adding duties as Morris and Georgia demanded to know how he was getting on. “Responsibility is a good thing,” he said. “It makes a person feel useful.”

  “I saw a television program about a social worker the other night.” She told him all about the program. When he interrupted to tell her he was not a social worker she said, “No, but this man in the television program was, you see.”

  “That sounds like a good program,” Max said when she was finished.

  After a while, Georgia began to hum. She had once taken voice lessons. Her voice was not bad and she told Max that she was going to be another Jeanette MacDonald. Max did not know who Jeanette MacDonald was. “That’s very nice,” he said. He stretched all the muscles in his body he could to stay awake, the way a cat does when she uncoils from sleep.

  A little after nine the door chimes rang. “That’s Morris,” Georgia said, hurrying to the door. Max stood up and straightened his suit.

  Morris stepped into the house and kissed Georgia on the cheek. “Have you had a good day, dear?” he asked, putting his briefcase down and picking up the evening paper.

  “Come on, you phony,” Georgia said. “Did you do it?”

  Morris examined the newspaper until a smile broke his face. He nodded, throwing the paper away and embracing Georgia. “They’ll have to confirm it tomorrow, but it’s a sure thing. Fifty beds, Georgia, and all the nightstands and bedpans that go with it.”

  “My hero!” Georgia kissed him, then pushed him off, saying, “Your cousin Max is here.”

  Morris came to Max and they shook hands. “Hello, Max. You look wonderful.” They stepped back to examine each other.

  Morris was beginning to surrender to overweight; all the angles of his face had softened and his stomach bulged pregnantly. His thick, wavy hair was still black on top but feathered out to a soft white around the fringe and thick glasses gave his eyes a startled look. He had gone to Hollywood as an actor in 1939 and it was in that same year that Max was told by his mother that he had a cousin named Morris Glick in Los Angeles, U.S.A. Max remembered that all through the war.

  “Congratulations, Morris,” Max said, shaking his hand again. “You must be some salesman.”

  “Thank you, Max.”

  Georgia said she would make some coffee. “Then you have to tell us just how you made the sale.”

  “Listen, honey, we really ought to celebrate. How about a big party Friday night?”

  “Wonderful,” Georgia said, but her face darkened and after she went into the kitchen she called Morris in to help her. Max heard their voices getting louder. He thought they would want to be alone to talk about the big sale and he was unable to stretch away his tiredness so he started for the kitchen to tell Georgia he didn’t want any coffee, but he heard his name and he stood outside the door and listened. “What about Max?” Morris was asking.

  “Won’t he be out of place?”

  “He’ll be all right. If it gets too late for him he’ll just go to sleep.”

  “Go to sleep? How will he be able to sleep with a party going on?”

  “Listen,” Morris whispered, “he slept through a war, didn’t he?”

  Max hurried back to the living room. When Georgia and Morris came in with the coffee, Max mentioned the picture.

  “Do you like it?” Morris asked. He passed a little tray with sugar and cream on it to Max. “We used to have a mirror there but someone got drunk at a party one night and broke it. Threw her shoe right at it. I think she saw herself in the mirror and thought someone was wearing the same dress she was wearing.” Morris and Georgia both laughed. Max, pouring cream into his coffee, imagined the scene and smiled. “We picked it out ourselves,” Morris said, and Georgia added, “It matches the rug.” Then Morris began to tell about the sale.

  Max spent most of the week trying to stay out of everyone’s way. Once he went to the beach. He did not go swimming, but he lay on the beach in a borrowed bathing suit and watched the young men showing off their muscles and the children building castles of wet sand. One little girl was naked and Max thought of Mann’s “Mario and the Magician” and the commotion caused by the naked little girl on the beach in Italy. No one here was upset. When he looked around he saw several more children with nothing on, and the women hardly wore more. Max did not approve of nudity, but he did not complain. We can stand to be more like children, he thought. And he remembered that it was the adults who chased the little girl in Mann’s story who were soon making war. He wanted to talk about this to Morris or Georgia, but the moment never seemed right and on Friday, while Georgia cleaned the house and set out glasses and whiskey bottles on the portable bar, Max took a nap, determined to stay awake as long as the party lasted.

  The guests began arriving at eight o’clock and by ten the living room was forested with people. Max met a baby photographer and his wife, several salesmen from the company Morris worked for, a high school teacher and her husband, and a man who played bit parts in movies before Morris and Georgia gave up introducing him to people as they came in. Max stayed near the door for a while, nodding to unfamiliar faces and waiting for someone to speak to him. Once he answered the door when no one else seemed to hear the chimes and a tall thin man with white hair and a deep voice said, “Good evening,” and handed Max his coat.

  No one else came. Max wandered through the living room, stopping by different clusters of people to listen in on the conversation and see if anyone would talk to him. The baby photographer said, “Hey, you’re not drinking anything,” so Max went into the kitchen and got a glass of water which he took back into the living room to drink, using the empty glass to make himself less conspicuous, but when he passed the bar a fat man Max did not remember meeting took the glass from him and replaced it with a scotch and soda. Max carried it around for the next hour, nodding to people and holding his highball up. For a while he got into a conversation with a man who had just moved to Los Angeles from the Bay Area. “San Francisco is very pretty when you can see it,” the man said, “but who can live in all that fog? Down here the sun comes out and brings me to life. Heat, that’s what man needs. More heat.”

  Max wanted to say something about the smog, but Morris put the phonograph on very loud and Max just nodded. A tall woman balancing a martini in one hand was arguing with Georgia. The tall woman wanted to roll the rug back so they could dance, but Georgia finally got her to agree to dance on the patio and several couples headed that way. “I better keep an eye on my wife,” the man who had recently moved to Los Angeles said, and he left Max and caught up with the tall woman at the door to the patio. Max stationed himself by the canapé tray and nibbled crackers spread with chopped liver. He sipped at his drink and watched the crowd pair off to dance. Someone hit his arm in passing and some of the whiskey sloshed out of the glass and onto his pant leg. He was wiping it off with his handkerchief when a large woman with bleached blond hair appeared and helped him, wiping the whiskey with her own little handkerchief. “There!” she said, as if her handkerchief had succeeded where his had failed.

  “Thank you,” Max said.

  She bulged in her dress in odd places as if she had been shoveled into it. “Would you care to dance?” she asked.

  “No, thank you,” Max said, flattered that she would ask.

  “You’re not being bashful now, are you?” she said.

  “I really don’t know how to dance. Tell you the truth, I don’t like it.” He saw her looking around and afraid she was searching for another partner he added quickly, “It’s very nice out ther
e on the patio, though.”

  “I was just looking for the bar. Would you get me a martini?”

  Max found the bar again and stared at the bottles. He looked about for Morris but found the fat man instead. “Fill her up?” the man said, pouring some more scotch into Max’s glass. Max asked him if he could make a martini. “Well, it’s better not to mix your drinks,” the fat man said.

  “It’s not for me.”

  The fat man winked and made the martini and then Max took it back and found the blond sitting on the couch.

  “Thank you.” She sipped the drink. “My name is Verna Finchley. You’re Morris’s cousin, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Max Friedman.”

  They talked about Los Angeles. Then she said, “I understand you were in a concentration camp, you poor man.”

  Max silently cursed his cousin. “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, you needn’t worry about me. I’m not going to ask you for the gory details.” She laughed, and then, laying her hand on his shoulder, “I know you don’t want to be reminded of it.”

  “Thank you, madam.”

  She took another sip of her martini and Max drank a bit from his scotch and soda.

  “Besides,” she said suddenly, her voice cheerful again, “I’ve seen plenty of it in the movies and Lord knows they don’t spare you any of the details, do they? Did you see Judgement At Nuremberg on TV?”

  “No.” He almost saw it. The Thompsons called him down. He watched until the first break and then he said he wasn’t feeling well and excused himself. He heard Mr. Thompson say, “I hope they show the atrocities.”

  Verna Finchley finished her drink and said, “It’s all about this American army captain who goes to Nuremberg to be a judge at the trial of some Nazi war criminals.”

  “Yes,” Max said, getting up.

  “He meets Marlene Dietrich,” she said, but Max interrupted. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I just saw someone I have to speak to,” and without looking back he went out on the patio to laugh at himself and at Verna Finchley and at his cousins Morris and Georgia. The night air was good, but he entered another mark on the debit side.

  A few couples danced to the music that drifted out from the phonograph and the conversation and laughter in the living room came with it, like bubbles at Max’s back. Someone came running out on the patio chasing an ice cube and the dancers jumped about and whooped and giggled until he caught it and dropped it in his drink to the cheers of people inside and out. “The Dodgers could use you,” the baby photographer yelled in a surprising bullhorn voice. Max moved away from the laughter and leaned against the wall where it was dark. He spilled the rest of his drink into a bush and then he tried to locate through the clouds and haze of city lights the north star and the next thing he knew he was in a chair at the edge of the patio just rising from sleep. The party was still going on, though only one couple danced now. By his watch it was one o’clock, but he didn’t know how long he had slept. It was the drink, he decided, and he looked around for the glass he knew he had been holding. It was not by the chair; he looked by the door and by the wall where he had been standing, but he could not find it so he shrugged his shoulders and, hoping no one had stepped on it, he went inside to see if he could go to his room without Morris or Georgia seeing him.

  There was an argument going on in the living room. A man Max had been introduced to earlier, a dentist named La Vine, was backed against the wall by a young man who kept poking him in the chest as he spoke.

  “It’s none of your damn business,” the dentist said.

  “He’s drunk,” a man said, reaching out of the surrounding crowd to pull the young man away. He could not get a grip on the young man’s shoulder and no one helped him.

  Max asked the woman next to him what was happening. She told him that La Vine had been a witness to a recent incident in which a man was beaten up on a downtown street. Along with other onlookers, he had done nothing to stop it. The young man recognized him from a picture in the paper and started the argument.

  “Why should I get involved?” the dentist said, appealing to the crowd.

  Max started to go to his room, but he saw Morris and Georgia conferring by the hallway and he decided to stay and listen.

  “Where’s your pride?” the young man shouted, “your sense of responsibility? You live in a world with other people, not by yourself.” He indicated the people around him.

  “If you were there you would understand,” the dentist said. “I didn’t know either of the men. It wasn’t any of my business and it’s none of yours either.”

  “I ask you,” the young man said, turning to the crowd, “would you want this man for a neighbor?”

  Some people laughed; the baby photographer cried, “Why not?” and someone said, “You’re drunk,” and tried to reach for him again. Max saw Morris and Georgia coming over and he slipped away on the other side of the crowd and went to his room.

  The argument was over but the party continued and the noise drifted into Max’s room. The phonograph started again and the music seemed to carry the noise away, but as Max slept it carried back again and in his dreams Max heard Das geht mich nichts an. Das geht mich nichts an.

  When he awoke, Max listened to the stillness of the house. He dressed quietly and went to look at the living room. Everyone had disappeared, leaving behind glasses and bottles and brimming ashtrays. Where the two men had argued only an empty bottle stood on the floor. Going by Morris and Georgia’s bedroom, Max heard Morris snoring. He went hack to his own room, got his coat, and went out for a walk.

  The boy and the Nazi and the murdered girl had all crept back into his mind while he slept. He walked faster as if to escape them and soon he found himself in an unfamiliar neighborhood. The gable roofed houses where his cousin lived, each on a separate carpet of grass, had yielded to smaller houses; the grass became strips between them, and now the grass was gone and apartment houses lined the street with only an apron of pavement before them. Max looked at his watch, but it had stopped. It could not be too early: women with shopping carts were out and children were playing in the street. On the next block Max stopped, astonished to see a synagogue. He stared at the familiar six-pointed star and the tablets with the Hebrew inscription. The doors were open, some people were still going in. Max had not been to synagogue since he came to America: Cautiously he crossed the street to read the bulletin hoard posted by the doors. A shammis, coming to close the doors, hesitated. Max turned to go. He heard the doors close and then, struck by a longing for exactly the same feeling that had kept him away all these years, the past, his past, that he knew was lurking behind doors like these, he turned again, bounded up the stairs, and slipped inside.

  “Gut Shabbos,” the shammis greeted him. Max nodded. Quickly he picked a paper yarmulke out of the box and seated himself on a rear bench.

  He did not remember the prayers very well, but he could still read Hebrew and he stumbled along half a line or so behind the congregation. When he was bar mitzvahed he read a speech he had composed himself. He could still recall parts of it. Something about the law being a thing that lived in books while justice lived in the heart. Or perhaps his father had helped him with it; he couldn’t remember. He seldom went to synagogue after that: when his mother died, when his nephew was bar mitzvahed, once or twice on the high holidays until his religion wore out like an old coat. His memory of Saturday mornings before he was thirteen was largely a memory of his grandfather and though they went together to the synagogue it was not the synagogue he remembered at all but Grandfather Mordecai in his caftan and broad brimmed hat. We’re among civilized people now, the family would say to him. Why don’t you take off that outfit already? And Grandfather Mordecai, catching at his beard and sucking in his breath in mock surprise, but still managing to wink at Max, would say, You mean you want me to walk around naked?

  Grandfather Mordecai smelled of sweet wine and rich egg bread. He owned a tailor shop in which he worked long after he was to
o old for such work. Sometimes after supper Max went down to work in the shop to let Mordecai rest. It was only a matter of taking in the garments the customers brought and giving them the ones that were mended. Mordecai could sew at home. Max was supposed to be at the shop the night Mordecai was killed, but he said he had too much homework to do. They found Mordecai lying dead in the shop, his thick beard caked with blood and purple bruises covering his face, and on the window of the shop a Star of David crudely drawn with soap. “Thank God it wasn’t the boy,” Max heard his father say.

  Max looked up. Around him the old men rocked in time to their prayers. In their silken shawls they looked as if they could be one of the ten tribes crossing the desert into oblivion and he remembered that Mordecai told him the Indians in America were definitely the lost tribes, though he could not decide now whether Mordecai had been serious or not. This synagogue was like the one he had known in Berlin until his father switched to the reform temple. Painted on the windows were the decalogue and the insignia of the twelve tribes and overhead was the balcony where the women sat. The synagogue in Berlin was bigger, but even now Max could almost hear outside, above the singing of the cantor, the marching boots of the SS.

  He was several pages behind in the prayers. By the time he found the place the Torah was being carried around the room. Max edged his way to the end of the row where he could reach it as it went by. He touched it and then kissed his fingers as the others did, some with the tassels on their prayer shawls. That’s right, he remembered, we don’t kiss the book, it kisses us. Later, when it was time to remember the dead, he said a special prayer for Mordecai.

  The service over, Max stumbled down the steps with his eyes squinted shut against the bright sun, as if he would open them on a revelation, but there was just a street full of people wishing each other a good day and beginning to talk about the weather and politics and baseball. He started to look for a bus, but then he decided to walk because it was such a nice day and it was, after all, the Sabbath.