A Sense of an Ending

Arthur Goldhammer

To have given his name to the wing of the hospital in which he lay dying did not bring Morris Isaiah Jacobsen all the consolation he had anticipated. To be sure, marks of honor attached to the eminent status of Benefactor. The hospital director, a Dr. Higginbotham, burnished to an angelic bronze by the wintry sun of far-off Colorado slopes, came every morning to look in on his very important patient. Such homage from so celebrated and busy a personage once would have pleased the dying man no end, but under the circumstances Morris, though at heart generous and forbearing, found grounds for annoyance in every detail. The earliness of the hour, for one: no man called on another at 6:30 A.M. for the pleasure of his company. And then there was the doctor's unfailing fluency: Morris, who at eighty-two had attended at any number of deathbeds, would have been flattered by terrified silence or an awkward stutter, but honeyed glibness roused him to impotent ire.

Death stalked the room, but Dr. Higginbotham faced it as forthrightly and confidently as he would have dealt with any other visitor: "PO₂ a bit low I see. Let's have a look there." He lifted Morris Jacobsen's hand--as yellow, Morris thought, as old Telex paper, but no one uses Telex any more, Telex is done for, Telex is dead--and with a ballpoint pen, a clear plastic Bic that sold for twenty-nine cents in the hospital gift shop, tapped the oxygen sensor growing wartlike out of the end of Morris's ring finger. All the while he looked not at Morris but at the rows of numbers appearing along the righthand edge of a cathode-ray tube on which a moving finger traced in blue the systole and diastole of Morris's existence. Why should ye be stricken any more? ... The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. The incriminated numerals responded instantly to the doctor's insistent tap-tap-tapping. His freshly shaven face broke into a smile. The medical man's wry professional satisfaction at having outwitted his mendacious instrument occasioned in Morris the grim reflection that he was not dead yet, and that thought in turn called to mind a television set that had once occupied a place of honor in his living room, a vintage Emerson housed in a console made to look like mahogany and equipped with doors that locked, as if sealing access to something precious. When the picture suddenly and mysteriously failed, when the prognathic Ed Sullivan was swallowed up by a milling herd of zebra, he, Morris Jacobsen, who had never even graduated high school, had the knack nevertheless to tap, tap, like the doctor but not quite so gently on the console directly above the tuner, snatching Ed back from the very jaws of oblivion. For yet a very little while, and the indignation shall cease, and mine anger in their destruction.

It embarrassed Morris to have the doctor hold his hand. All his life Morris Jacobsen had been a vain man, first, when young and still handsome, vain beyond his means, and later, when old and rich, vain in the manner of the man who is, as they say, able to take care of himself well enough to conceal, even from his own scrutiny, that whatever he might have become, he no longer was what he once had been. In the first flush of success he had lavished particular attention on the very hands and wrists that now, encased in the doctor's smooth, plump mitt, seemed so sere and fragile. After turning his first real-estate deal, he had bought himself a manicure, the full treatment, at a place on Houston Street. In those days his hands were still coarse from all the shingles he had nailed. Even today there probably were calluses though there was no longer flesh, calluses inside that no one could see, on the right side of his left index finger and under the pad of his left thumb, from all the miles of galvanized nail that had been squeezed between. Hard labor is a lousy sculptor. Take Morris's father. Even in his best suit, laid out at the undertaker's, he had remained the working man, his actual prosperity masquerading as misshapen meagerness and desiccation. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores.

He was proud of the pair of soft hands he had bought himself, proud of his nicely trimmed cuticles and pared nails. To show them off he bought a double-vented charcoal suit, a handmade shirt with fine French cuffs that laundries back then knew how to boil and starch, and mother-of-pearl inlaid cufflinks as big as a half-dollar and gilt-rimmed, and a fat gold ring with an onyx stone stuck in it the size of a pullet egg. Before surgery they had taken this ring—for safekeeping, they said—and placed it in the hospital safe, a good place for it now that Morris's fingers were sticks, twigs, that could no more hold that first prize than a pencil can hold up a garter. For years now his fine suits had hung on his dwindling frame like goods on a rack. Sadie, his wife, called him "decrepit." Dr. Higginbotham had given him a better word, cachexia, and Morris at times muttered it to himself under his breath. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses. When he died, Higginbotham would get the gold ring. Morris had established trusts for Sadie and the children; the hospital got the rest. This, Morris could almost hear Herman's voice telling him, might not be such a good deal. The hospital he was paying to keep him alive stood to reap a windfall if he died. In a business deal the two-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyers would call that kind of arrangement a conflict of interest. But when the lawyers left, Herman would have turned to him and said, "Morris, you didn't get where you got listening to lawyers. Go with your gut." Herman was the one man who understood him. Not that understanding him took a rare kind of genius, just a knack for seeing things from a certain angle. But who else saw things from such an angle any more? Not enough, Morris calculated, to make a minyan.

With Herman in the room the doctor could slip out quietly. A brief, whispered conference with a nurse ensued in the hall just outside. In the first days of his hospitalization, Morris had strained his ears to catch a word of these exchanges, as if he could read in the argot of the specialists a sign of his fate. But as life's shores receded, fate needed no interpreter. The antics of the living had ceased to amuse him. He let his eyes focus on Herman instead. Herman had not receded with the others. Herman had stayed with him, somehow, accompanied him, as he had accompanied him everywhere, even into the antechamber of death. A man in Morris's position quickly got used to the constant presence of a man in Herman's. This made Herman indispensable. Every morning at the office, he had appeared at Morris's desk with the Wall Street Journal and coffee (cream, no sugar) in thick cafeteria mugs, the kind that don't break when dropped on tiled floors. The place was spartan: bare linoleum, oak furniture scarfed up from Navy surplus at postwar firesale prices, behemoth Monroe mechanical calculators that, until they became too expensive to repair, had survived even the all-conquering microchip. Morris had no use for men with mahogany desks so polished they could see themselves. When he wanted to admire who he was, he went to the bathroom. His desk was for work, the place where he got to be the fellow he saw when he looked in the mirror. It was a tool, and he had learned from his father not to spend any more on tools than was strictly necessary.

Like the office furniture, Herman was a serviceable relic who would have looked as out of place amidst the teak of your up-to-date executive suite as Morris's sunburned oak. The office would have been impossibly bleak without his wisecracking presence. And so what if he didn't look like much? He got the job done. As the office became more and more the museum in which Morris preserved the prime of his manhood, Herman's value soared. He was the old master, the family heirloom, the heart of the collection, the corroboration of Morris's existence.

It got so Morris couldn't enjoy vacations, because Herman wasn't there. But still he went where Sadie took him. In his private arrangements he had always been a passive man. And Sadie, like a contented cat, liked to lie in the sun with others of her kind. Herman therefore found himself spending more and more time away from the office, exposed to all the bewildering novelty of an alien civilization in which no one worked or feared going the next day without bread: "semi-retired" was the euphemism Sadie applied to this predicament. Morris's only relief was to pick up the phone to call Jersey and order Herman to call his broker. This allowed him to report to Herman on the conditions of his bizarre imprisonment. "The windows don't open. You have to leave the air conditioner on all the time or fungus grows on the walls. Yesterday the police came for an alligator in the swimming pool."

Once, when Morris looked disconsolate, an uncomprehending Sadie leapt at his throat: "You mope, Morris. You have everything a man could want, and yet you mope. Look at you. It's disgraceful. See a doctor."

It was then that Morris committed one of the few great errors of his life. He confided in his wife. "I miss Herman," he had said. Sadie had laughed at him.

"Of all the things to miss," she said, "you would pick Herman." And she turned back to her magazine. Sadie most definitely did not miss Herman. Herman was not a man to impress a woman like Sadie, who had definite notions about her station in life. Herman was her husband's factotum, not even his crony. He smoked cigars and left butts in the bottom of coffee cups. Frequently he failed to zip his fly all the way to the top. He referred to women as "broads" and once, when the rabbi with unpriestly zeal pressed Morris to subscribe to Israel bonds paying only 6.9, had rashly called Sadie's soft-spoken purveyor of spiritual consolation a "gangster shill." And this was only the beginning of her bill of particulars. That a proper appreciation of Herman might require a certain gift for forgiveness Morris was willing to concede, and Sadie as a rule forgave nothing. So why had he confided in her? It had been a momentary weakness, a kind of exalted faiblesse brought on, no doubt, by the vertiginous sensations of the tropics, the scent of orange in the air, the magnificent ocean vistas, the relentless sunshine. The very robustness of nature mocked the cushy frailty of the elderly among whom he had settled. It was as if only dupes drank from Florida's fabled Fountain of Youth, whose waters actually added to rather than subtracted from their years. Even the birds were strange, long-legged flamingos tranquilly sipping algal juleps from slack pools as evening erupted into a Broadway of neon. It was confusing, disorienting, disconcerting, this drunken luxury liner on which his wife had booked him passage. Here they would toss in the lap of lavishness until one by one they slipped overboard and were forgotten. From here to eternity the world was to sail around them—and for this people envied him, this they told him was the American dream. Morris's stomach threatened rebellion at the thought—he had never been a good sailor—but still he should never have confided in his wife. Within a week of marrying her he had learned better than to confide in Sadie Bronstein. There was no percentage in it. Sadie had her merits, but when it came to reading Morris's dreams she was no Moses. Only Herman knew how complicated a man Morris Jacobsen was. "In the Old Country you might have been a yeshiva bucher," Herman told him. A scholar. Alone of Morris's circle Herman appreciated his employer's finer qualities. Herman looked upon Morris as a kind of genius. Too many saw only the gold cufflinks and the big car. In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats. For that Morris loved him.

Herman's extravagant bulk strained the flimsy chair the hospital provided. The Morris Isaiah Jacobsen Wing of the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital should have more substantial furniture than this, the sag of Herman's body seemed to say. In the old days—or even the not-so-old days, just a few weeks ago, any time before this unfortunate occlusion of an inaccessible artery, a five-cent piece of hose, had sealed Morris's doom—no sooner would Morris have framed his thought than Herman would have noted it down in his ubiquitous vestpocket notepad, and it would have been done. Herman saw to these things. God should have been as well served by his angels. Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own sight.

And who but Herman knew what dragons Morris had slain, what sharp operators he had outwitted, what phoney-as-three-dollar-bill smiles he had wiped off goyische poker-faces when in a flourish of immigrant understatement he laid his cards on the table? Those moments of triumph no one could take back. "Nottingham Plaza, Herman! You remember Nottingham Plaza. The mayor's boy, what's his name, McCallister, McCulloghan, whatever, up to his neck in plot options, bought 'em all up because he knew where Highway 22 was going, knew it, which of the old man's cronies spilled the beans makes no difference, because I knew he knew. I had my spies. You never knew who it was, did you Herman? His caddy at the Country Club was who, a schvarze name of Johnson, his father worked for my father. That's right, that's right: my father died in old Johnson's arms. Worked on his crew. Loyalty, Herman. Loyalty's a fine thing. I always valued that in you, Herman. I couldn't have done half what I did without you. Such diligence. Hours down at the courthouse, tracking those options. Good work. What did I give you? An Olds? No? An Impala. Forgive me, Herman, forgive me. I should have been more generous. You know what gets in the way of generosity, Herman? Fear. Believe it or not. Even then, already on the way up, plenty in the bank, I was still afraid of losing it all, of winding up with nothing. If I hadn't been afraid, Herman, I'd have given you a Cadillac. But you understand, Herman. With you I have nothing to explain. In my place you too would have been afraid of being left with nothing. Between us these things need no explanation."

It had been a complex deal. The kid had forgotten drainage. An oversight. Wet behind the ears, anybody could make these elementary kinds of mistakes. Starting small, fighting your way up, you learn, you don't repeat them. Starting at the top, you fall harder. Morris could have ruined the boy, but instead he took him in as a partner, the philandering lush. It was criminal the way he treated that wife of his, the beauty queen, Miss Monmouth '52: Morris could still see her, perched up there on the rear deck of an Oldsmobile convertible, satin-gloved forearms raised and glistening in the Saturday morning sun as the high school marching band stumbled off-key through "Hold That Tiger." Morris surveyed the festive scene from a lofty perch. He had been invited to join the mayor on the reviewing stand. I will punish the fruit of the stout heart of the king of Assyria, and the glory of his high looks. For lifting his foot off the boy's neck this was his reward: immigrant's son to court Jew in just four decades. Thereafter the sky was the limit. It was Herman who had counseled him not to rub the boy's face in the dust. "What would you think of a man who did that to your boy?" And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord. And shall make him of quick understanding ... and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears, but with righteousenss shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.

Who's to say? Maybe he'd been an instrument. I will send him against an hypocritical nation, and against the people of my wrath will I give him a charge, to take the spoil, and to take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets. This was Herman's view. "You've been put on this earth to do good, Morris, and for chrissake with a couple of million you can frankly do a hell of a lot." A couple of million? Herman mistook him. But he had given for the hospital anyway, what he could, more than he should. And in the proper spirit, to do good, not for the quid pro quo. Had Herman ever said anything about quid pro quo? A miracle followed this gratuitous act of goodness. Between the groundbreaking and the dedication the mayor became governor. He came and cut the ribbon. At the banquet table he leaned across to whisper something in Morris's ear—Maurie, the governor called him. "Call me Stu." Expertly the politician as if backhanding a lazy scoop to his left on one of his private clay courts shielded the microphone with his curved palm so none in the hall could hear. His breath smelled vaguely like DDT. The drinker who maladroitly covered his sin by mixing mouthwash with his single malt ended smelling like the pesticided farmstead Morris's hospital had displaced. So shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptians prisoners, and the Ethiopians captives, young and old, naked and barefoot, even with their buttocks uncovered, to the shame of Egypt. "We've come a long way together, Maurie." Morris nodded. Sitting so close, he could see the face-paint the governor used to hide the shaving nicks, to dull the ruby shine and tangled veins of his toper's nose. Even as the governor whispered in his ear, Morris felt a blast of cold wind rush through the abyss between them. Morris measured history in eons—in survival, not success. The father had nailed asphalt to the roof of the governor's father's house. The son had lent the governor—a favor, interest-free—what he needed to plow his father's house back into the ground and raise in its stead a sprawling ranch-style Shangri La with kidney pool and underground fallout shelter. And I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians, and they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbor, city against city, and kingdom against kingdom. And the spirit of Egypt shall fall in the midst thereof, and I will destroy the counsel thereof, and they shall seek to the idols, and to the charmers, and to them that have familiar spirits, and to the wizards.

Because only Herman guessed that for Morris the world was as nothing, Morris had loved him as a brother, and so now, in the end, his reward was that Herman came to him. Herman, not his children: where were they, those serpent's teeth he had sown Cadmus-like in thankless pine barrens? All Jersey flourished with his creations, malls, atria, shopping plazas from Paramus to Cape May, but his own increase had flung themselves to the ends of the earth as though shunning what their progenitor had wrought. Still, he couldn't complain. Compared to him, old Governor McCulloghan or McCallister—whatever he called himself after being cashiered for drunkenness from a prodigiously bibulous U. S. Senate, no mean feat—was Job: Junior dead at thirty-eight of cirrhosis in the very Cedars that Morris's money had built, the prom queen run off with a gambler. These things happen. And yet they say Einstein refused to believe that God played at dice with the universe. Such a smart guy, he must have been living in a different universe. Improbably, Morris's own boy eked out a living playing cello for the local orchestra in Toulouse, France. Once—once was enough—Sadie had dragged him over there. Alan took them to a restaurant where you paid thirty-five bucks a head to sit on the sidewalk and eat franks and beans out of a bowl. A regional specialty, the boy told him. So he told the boy he could have the Old Country, and Alan shot back that this wasn't the Old Country, it was France. "France, Schmance. Vichy sold out the Jews. Don't try to tell me otherwise." Sadie looked about to faint in the flowery dress she'd picked up in Paris for a fancy price. She was hissing at him in that screaming whisper of hers, reminding him he'd promised not to provoke the boy. And to offend the child's slim, pug-nosed, lithe ballerina of a French wife was unconscionable. Who but a Hitlerian brute would propagate a blood libel? Enraged but humbled by Sadie's onslaught, Morris had ended the attack on his son by turning it harmlessly on his impregnable wife: Ein feste Burg ist meine Frau. For two hundred bucks, he blurted, she could have for God's sake bought a dress that didn't pull across the bubbelahs. To which Sadie's unmeditated reply was, "French women are naturally small-breasted," and the French wife turned as red as the poppies on the table. But Alan filled their glasses with wine, an offering of peace, and they all had a good laugh and finished the franks and beans to Alan's narration of Julius Caesar's shenanigans in that particular neighborhood of his adopted France. French, Romans: Alan had a weakness, Morris put it to Herman, for anything not-Morris. "And German music too, he's fond of." The Lord of hosts hath purposed it, to stain the pride of all glory, and to bring into contempt all the honorable of the earth.

And meanwhile his daughter Sheila, the apple of his eye, had just moved with her two kids into a trailer in, where was it, Flagstaff, Arizona? The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. Herman had wired the money for the security deposit. Never had earthly sound been contrived to try a father's heart as did Sheila's plangent voice sobbing in the phone to the accompaniment of a country-and-western band fronted by one of those full-throated buckskin-and-sequin-clad cowgirl altos. "He hit me, Daddy," was all she managed to say. The operator had been of the utmost assistance. Morris had thanked her with the elaborate courtesy he could muster when the spectacle of humankind left him aghast, as displays of altruism generally did. "Think nothing of it, mister. I got a daughter been in a tight spot or two myself." He had felt, briefly, the warm glow of human brotherhood after a lapse of twenty or thirty years. The next day his artery failed. Say to them, that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompense; he will come and save you.

Three weeks of intensive care: God had had his vengeance, now Morris was awaiting his recompense. Herman took his hand. "Herman, you old thief, now I know why I put up with you all these years. To have somebody with me at the end of the line. Somebody who knows where I come from. How I got where I got. What kind of man goes where nobody's waiting on the platform? A drummer with a sample case under his arm, a traveling salesman. The poor schmuck. So tell me, Herman, where were we headed? What time is it? What's that sound, for God's sake? Turn it down, will you, Herman? Please, turn it down."

11

The sound was the cardiac monitor. Morris's heart had stopped. At the foot of the bed Sheila sobbed, jiggling the tassels on her jacket. Alan stretched his arm around his sister's shoulder to comfort her. The blue of his Harris tweed stood out against her pale sheepskin with its wine-dark blotch where someone had once spilled a bottle. Both children were grateful for the wail of the monitor that marked their father's passing. Without it they might not have known the end had come. In the two hours since the respirator had been removed he had made no sign. Occasionally an odd sound had emanated from the region of his mouth. His lip had curled in an inadvertent sneer or had twitched rapidly like the nose of a dog, only drier. The nurse came in to shut off the alarm. "We won't be needing this any longer," she said. "If there's anything I can do." Her voice, though professional, faltered appropriately. Death in its first moments retains the power to awe even the inured. "If you'd like me to call your mother," the nurse resumed. But no, there was no need to wake her. It was four in the morning. The news could wait. She was fully prepared.

In the hospital coffee shop Alan tried to start a conversation with his sister. "After so many years in Europe, I doubt I'll ever get used to American coffee again."

"You always were prissy, Alan. Fact is, you can get used to anything. Why, I'll bet you could even get used to living in a trailer park."

"I don't intend to try."

"No, I don't suppose you do."

"Funny thing about what the nurse said."

"What's that?"

"About how Dad asked for Herman just before he blanked out."

"Yeah."

"How long's Herman been dead, anyway?"

"I don't know. Ten, fifteen years. It was before I went off to Europe for sure. Before I finished college I think."

"Funny guy, that Herman."

"Mama never trusted him. She used to say Daddy kept him around to do the dirty work."

"What dirty work was that?"

"Oh, you know, doing the kind of business he did, there must've been people to pay off, things like that."

"I'll tell you something, Alan. I didn't like Herman either, but it wasn't because he did dirty work."

"Why didn't you like him then?"

"Because he was the only one Daddy really loved."

"Come off it, Sheila. You always did have an imagination."

"Oh yeah? I thought you were the sensitive one. The artiste."

Dr. Higginbotham arrived then, all aflutter. The hospital, he wanted Morris's children to know, had just lost its most important benefactor. The whole Cedars of Lebanon community grieved with the Jacobsen family. He particularly wanted them to convey his personal condolences to their lovely mother.

Why, Alan wondered, doesn't God strike him dead on the spot? Oh, yes, Alan was his father's son, indelibly. Hear ye this, O house of Jacob, which are called by the name of Israel, and are come forth out of the waters of Judah, which swear by the name of the Lord, and make mention of the God of Israel, but not in truth, nor righteousness. ... Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans, with a voice of singing declare ye, tell this, utter it even to the end of the earth: say ye, The Lord hath redeemed his servant Jacob.

Yes, he was his father's son, indelibly: just another wandering Jew.

[end]