Adler, Warren - Banquet Before Dawn Read online

  The best thing was that he was now free from masturbation, which had become, despite what the sex books were saying, an affliction. Sandra was experienced, which she had insisted on detailing down to the first drops of blood on the panties she threw down the incinerator because her mother knew her "dates" and monitored them as she had her bowel movements when she was a child.

  Her first was a teenage cousin, followed eventually by a grocery delivery boy, a counselor at camp, then the boy at Pratt, and now Aram. She had it all catalogued by occupation, season, and weather conditions, and it soon became too clinical for him to be turned on.

  "He had a long, thin thing with a little wart halfway down the shaft."

  "Oh, Jesus."

  He never showed her that he was really jealous, but sometimes when he was tired, his anxieties were triggered, and he clung to her all night long, afraid she would evaporate, because he loved her by then, needed her around, and secretly yearned for some permanent state, marriage. He dared not broach the subject lest it offend her sense of commitment.

  When Alby would come over, sparks would fly.

  "You're an insufferable snob," she would scream, exasperated. "Stop this bullshit about genetics."

  "You are your genes."

  "Jewish genes are like everybody's."

  "Wrong. They are the genes created by natural selection. Genetic survival…."

  "Bullshit."

  "The first thing you've got to learn, Sandra, is to be unemotional. Emotions are just not thinking."

  "I love my emotions."

  "Don't overindulge them when we're discussing science. They're not compatible."

  It would take her hours to calm down after Alby would leave.

  "He's one fucking challenge, your friend Alby."

  And so months passed.

  He knew that somewhere in the background lurked relatives. A cranky woman's voice was always asking, "Can I speak to Sandra, please?" And Sandra always took the phone with its extra-long wire into the bathroom, speaking in hushed tones and coming out with red eyes.

  "Everybody has their hang-ups. I've got a mother. You know what it means to be an only Jewish child, a daughter yet?"

  "No, I don't."

  "What do Armenians know?" She sniffled and tried to smile.

  "We're good at rugs."

  "But can you make a good knish?"

  He would caress her gently then, knowing that family was the one subject she never explored in depth. He was afraid to pry, afraid he would start down the road to losing her. There was something, after all, to the power of blood.

  "I love you." He had begun to say it frequently now, hoping she would not think it too trite and meaningless. For no visible reason, except what he found in himself, he began to be anxious about losing her. It

  made him deliberately withhold displays of affection, just to gauge her anxieties about him. There were times, like Sunday mornings sitting around on the overstuffed living-room couch, when he would watch her peripherally, his head sunk into the Sunday _Times_ News in Review, wanting to reach out for her in some romantic, poetic, touching way, but holding back instead. After a long silence, she would say,"You okay?"

  "Fine."

  "Sure?"

  She would tumble the papers on the floor and reach out for him, just a touch, and he knew she had passed his test. It was only then, with that fear out of the way, that he could concentrate on the news.

  The news was then all about Vietnam. It created explosions inside her, and soon she was deep inside the movement of movements. The apartment always seemed filled with scruffy, long-haired people with tight faces, easily angered, and the air was filled with slogans and a new kind of slang borrowed from the black cause.

  "Johnson's a pig."

  "Vietnam is genocide, like Auschwitz."

  But Aram, who as a law student was beyond the draft catch, couldn't get exercised, not with the same intensity as Sandra.

  "You're so damned calm about it, Aram," she would splutter at him. "The war is wrong, wrong. People are dying for nothing. Doesn't that matter to you?"

  "Of course it matters," he would say, lifting his head mechanically from a lawbook, wondering why it didn't seem to affect him as much as her.

  "If you were black, it would matter. If you were in it, it would matter."

  "Well, I'm not in it," he said testily.

  "No, you're out of it."

  He could see the visible signs of her exasperation, and he tried to mask his indifference and be tolerant of her passion. After a while he got very good at it, and she seemed to believe that he was becoming interested in her cause.

  One Sunday they slept later than usual. The crack of a closing car door pricked him out of sleep like a needle in his ear. Sandra bounded out of bed, finding more meaning in it than just sound.

  "Mother," she mumbled, rushing for her robe. He couldn't understand how she knew. How unique was the crack of a car door?

  Then there were sounds on the steps and the flavor of a kind of perfume more than a smell, an aura. The knock was positive, demanding. Whoever it was refused to heed the little RING BELL sign. He was out of bed and in jeans and shirt before Sandra opened the door, which she did with a shake of the head, her shoulders held tight and upright as though steeling herself. She cracked the door open and immediately turned and walked to a corner of the living room, to one of the two straight-backed chairs, where she sat, folding her arms over her chest and crossing her legs. He had never seen that expression on her face, perhaps exasperation, even contempt.

  Sandra's mother opened the door, tentatively at first as if she were entering a haunted house, then took a step inside, leaving the door open as though for a hasty escape. Incongrous would be too subtle a term. In her tailored pantsuit, raindrop earrings and jingling bracelets, she was a queen from an exotic land who had wandered into some peasant backwater. Her reddish hair was immaculately coiffured, her eyes festooned in long lashes and mascara, her lips delicate in carefully brushed-on pink. Her skin was radiant, light, like Sandra's, and sitting there in the middle of the landscape of her face, the bobbed nose, also like Sandra's. She was a head taller than Sandra and moved with a regal sense of herself.

  You knew she was taking in the whole apartment, sniffing it as one

  would inspect a rabbit warren. She looked at Aram, through him, saw the rumpled bed, the eclectic furniture, books strewn about, unwashed glasses.

  "This is my mother, Aram — Lynn Margolies."

  She acknowledged the introduction with a tiny, almost inadvertent movement of a single finger. At least he assumed it was an acknowledgment. She sat down on the other straight-backed chair, searched for a cigarette in her huge pocketbook, the movements very theatrical. She tapped the cigarette carefully out of the pack, stuck it daintily between her lips, and flicked it lit with a tiny lighter. Then came a deep puff and a huge exhale in a gust, through mouth and both nostrils. A careful but casual peck at the tip of her tongue to remove a crumb of tobacco completed the process. He had never seen such an elaborate puff in his life.

  "I came, Sandra, because you are my daughter, and yesterday I thought I was dying."

  "Oh, Mother, for crying out loud."

  "It started as a fluttering in the middle of the night. I had ouble breathing. I thought it was the end. I said to myself, 'It's stupid to be dying. Sandra won't believe me.'" She turned her gaze to Aram. "I had visions of being laid out in a coffin in the Riverside chapel, all made up in eyelashes, lipstick, earrings, and Sandra saying, 'Lynn.' She calls me Lynn. My pal. My buddy. Sandra saying, 'Lynn, for crying out loud,' just like now. Anyway, Dr. Heller wants me to get a cardiogram tomorrow. Just a checkup. I feel a lot better today."

  "And the point, Lynn?" Sandra said, watching Aram and winking.

  Not being privy to the conflict and feeling terribly uncomfortable, Aram stood numbly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  "The point, my darling daughter," she said, "is that whatever differe
nces we might have had in the past, you are still my flesh and blood and, yes, whether we like it or not, my only child. And being in the mid-forties — God, how I hate that revelation — and scared out of my wits last night, I thought it would be a nice gesture, an act of peace, an olive branch…. Sandra, I think, I hope, that I can meet you on some neutral ground where my upbringing — what is the word you use? — hang- ups … don't conflict with yours."

  "I can't believe it," Sandra said. She was loosening up, wanting to soften. He knew the pose.

  "Believe it."

  "I wish I could."

  "The point is" — she looked vaguer, less defined, as if she were wavering — "the world is changing. It's going too fast for me. It's come to either being a fish out of water or swimming with the crowd."

  He could see her eyes begin to water. She took another elaborate puff of the cigarette, complete with picking at her tongue.

  "In other words, what I'm saying, Sandra, is that I have come to apologize."

  "Oh, shit, Lynn, don't apologize. Just let it go at that."

  "I'm just not built that hard, I'm sentimental and old-fashioned and spoiled rotten, but I do love my daughter, and nothing can change that." She got up from the chair as if to leave, then stopped, tried to be casual.

  "It's quite cozy here."

  "Yes, we like it, Lynn. Aram and I."

  "Aram?"

  "We're living together."

  "Now, really, Sandra. I'm not blind."

  "And he's not Jewish."

  "I said I wasn't blind."

  "And he hasn't got a dime."

  "That figures."

  "See, Aram. You've got to watch her. She gets snotty."

  "You're right. You're right." She held out her hand. "Aram."

  Aram took it, shook it warmly. He could understand how she could be intimidating.

  "Yomarian," he said. "That's my last name. My father was an unreconstructed anti-Semite."

  "They all are."

  "Dumb goys."

  She finally smiled. "He's a comedian." He watched Sandra and knew she was pleased.

  "You want some coffee, Lynn?" Sandra said, getting up.

  "Of course." And in the gesture of finally tossing her large pocketbook on the couch, he knew they had found the neutral ground. She went into the kitchen.

  "How do you like my new eyelashes?"

  But the shock of meeting his future mother-in-law was a minor ripple compared to the revelation of her wealth. Sandra had never let him suspect, had never alluded to money. Mrs. Margolies, through her father's inheritance, owned thirty-four buildings in New York. He dared not contemplate her net worth then. Later he discovered that it was in the thirty-million category and that Sandra, in her own right, was well fixed, although control rested irrevocably with her mother.

  "Apparently she was a Gould — the branch of the family that stayed Jewish," Alby told him. "Little Sandra, friend Aram, comes from a fantastically wealthy family. You should marry into it, Aram. It could make one hell of a lot a difference."

  He did, of course, and as Alby had predicted, it made one hell of a lot of difference.

  ———— *8* A HANDFUL of guests lingered, the good booze sloshing around inside them. They became vocally expaive in the huge living room with its Wyeth and its glass panorama of Manhattan lights. Sandra sat in a corner, effusive and loquacious, gesticulating — the center of interest.

  Inside the library Aram opened the door, watched her briefly, then returned to Alby and to Norman, who was tying a rubber band around the checks and cash; he had written the amount on a piece of paper on top of the pile, five thousand dollars.

  "I somehow expected more," Norman said.

  "It's the broadness of the base that really counts," Alby said. He turned to Aram. "They might have been inhibited by the surroundings."

  "We talked about eight thou," Norman pointed out. "We did something wrong."

  "Our goals were wrong," Alby said. "We set too high a standard. Besides, it's all show anyway. It's not that we need the money."

  "My only concern is that we exceed the limit on what Sandra and my mother-in-law can give. To fall below that would be an embarrassment."

  "We've already exceeded it," Alby said.

  He let it pass, not wanting to know how much. Besides, he knew Alby would work it out, protect them.

  "Where in hell," Norman asked, "do you think we can raise one hundred fifty thousand dollars? To Mrs. Margolies and Sandra that's peanuts. Besides, they get their money's worth…. The important thing is to win. The rest will take care of itself."

  Aram stretched and eased out of his shoes.

  "Sullivan's research is most reassuring," Norman whispered, searching Aram's face for a reaction. Aram had begun to notice this habit of Norman's, this watching of his face, studying it, lingering on the eyes and slowly downward toward the mouth, learning what every blink and curl might mean.

  "Are you going to tell me how you got it?" Aram asked, trying to be indifferent but feeling the apprehension crawl inside him. A reluctant whore, he had called himself, but only to himself. Intelligence, they

  had insisted, was essential to the operation. "Operation" was Alby's term for the campaign. He had mapped it out as an equation with all factors having identity and weight.

  "The candidate need not know," Norman said. "Only the information is important."

  "The erosion of Sully's support is more than we suspected," Alby said, "although the research could be suspect. I understand it was one hell of a job to take the sampling."

  "It could have been worse," Norman said, immaculate, smiling thinly, sardonically.

  Aram knew what he meant. That, too, was one of the things you could not dwell on. Not the candidate. It was all different somehow on paper, when Alby had brought him the idea, backed up by data. He had readouts from the computer company he had founded and still had access to although he had sold out for a substantial sum.

  "Making money is a learned science," he had said long ago in the little room on the second floor. But he had always been turned on to other things as well. It was always, to Alby, an experiment, an exercise, an operation. He was evolving to pure mind, Aram thought, but dehumanizing himself in the process. But the memory of that sexual afternoon in Mrs. Winters' house reassured him as to Alby's flesh-and bloodness. He had been married once, divorced, and now lived in a large town house in the East Seventies with a two-story library on the lower floors.

  "Before, you were just Merlin, now you're Machiavelli," Aram had kidded, for beneath the awe there was affection and the bond of their youth.

  "The point is that the man is vulnerable," Alby had argued. "Sullivan's district is beyond gerrymandering, and the demographics have radically changed. I know you want to be in it, have been searching for a way. It's a perfect age. Money is no problem. You've become wonderfully glib, articulate. You make a sincere, pleasant appearance. You've learned to fit in anywhere. Besides, you can learn as you go along."

  "I want it, Alby. You know I want it." He was, of course, greedy for it, wide-eyed, like a kid in front of theakery window. Hadn't he always fantasized that the Dallas bullet was really meant for him?

  "Hell, you could choose the local scene. But that's really small potatoes, hack stuff, no springboard. This is the first box in the game."

  Alby knew there was no sell involved. The question had always been when and in what district. He never dreamed it could be his own. Sullivan seemed so entrenched, important.

  "Vulnerable doesn't mean it will be easy," Alby had lectured. He was given to velvet smoking jackets now, although he didn't smoke, and in his library, with its shiny Tiffany lamps and heavy polished tables, there was a touch of the Victorian. It was a big hop from Flatbush.

  "How about putting it in more concrete terms, Alby?" It was a kind of shorthand that passed between them.

  "Dollarwise, probably between one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand, mostly for storefronts and organization. People
shuffling. Propaganda in this district is word of mouth. The area is more than half black. Also a large percentage Puerto Rican, run-down, hopeless really. We'll have to get the registered Democrats to the polls by hook or crook. That means we've got to organize a cadre and buy them in. Of course, there is always the possibility that confronted with the realities, Sully will resign."

  "Resign? The man's on his twelfth term."