Asher had begun life a genius, having begun to play Mozart at just about the same age Mozart had begun to play Mozart. At sixteen he had received free tuition to pose life models at the Art Students League; he was allowed to touch and arrange their bare limbs, so advanced for his years was his sense of grace. When he brought home his charcoal drawings they were tacked up in the living room. “You don’t even think dirty when you look at such pictures,” Asher’s mother had reassured the neighbors. “Look how artistic he makes those fat girls.” A piano was brought into the house for Asher; later a violin and a cello. He spent a summer in the Louvre, copying; he did his first commissioned portrait at eighteen — the captain of the Mauritania! But that captain was long dead, and other captains had come and gone, and in the meantime no girl had married Asher. Didn’t he know girls were soft? asked Paul’s father. Didn’t he know they were nice to hold? Had he never kissed one? Was he a— Absolutely not! He wasn’t a good mixer, that’s all. He was just a little scholarly.
What his sister and brother-in-law decided was that it was necessary to put a young lady in Asher’s path. They invited him to dinner, and they invited a secretary from Mr. Herz’s office; they invited school teachers, colleagues of Mrs. Herz. Once they tried a distant cousin who was in town, and once even — for who knows what goes on in the head of an artist — once they even tried (all the dead should rest in peace!) a shikse, but a girl who hung around with Jews. They turned on the radio but Asher wouldn’t dance. They brought out the cards but Asher wouldn’t play. How could you put a girl in this fellow’s path — he had no path! Though it brought tears to his sister’s eyes and even a kind of tsk-tsk compassion to his brother-in-law’s tongue, Asher’s ruination was nevertheless of his own doing.
The other flop was Uncle Jerry. He had married, but only for twenty-five years. A quarter of a century with a woman and then he divorces her. So who could feel sorry for him? A beautiful twelve-room house in Mt. Kisco with grass all around and a pine-paneled basement; four beautiful daughters with beautiful builds — one married, two in college, and the fourth, Claire, the little shaifele, still in high school; and for a wife, a wonderful woman, a princess, a queen. What if she weighed 180 pounds? Did he expect that to change? Could he roll her out twenty-five years after the wedding night because she was still making the same dent in the mattress now as then? Who could feel any sorrow for him! Why, why did he do it? Did he have some tootsie on the side? No, no — it was his what-do-you-call-it, his psychonanalysis! His psychoanalyst made him do it. That son of a bitch. What did that guy think life was, easy? A bowl of cherries? You love your wife, you don’t love her; you fondle her, you can’t stand to touch her — that happens! Does that mean you destroy a family? When a father dies it’s a catastrophe. Here’s a man who walks out!
Two years after he had walked out, Jerry married a twenty-seven-year-old, just the type everybody had been looking for for Asher for years. “What’s he doing? Another big woman — what’s the matter with him? A twenty-seven-year-old — what’s he thinking about? When she’s forty, when she’s thirty-five even … What kind of business is this!”
“Then call him, Leonard. Stop getting upset and call him. Talk to him. He’s your brother.”
“It’s his life. Let him ruin it. Would he call me? If I had a seizure tomorrow, would he so much as lift the phone off the hook?”
“Your heart is perfectly all right. The doctor listened to it. He checked everything. They have graphs, Leonard, that show. You’ve got a nice even line. Don’t get overexcited because you’ll give yourself trouble.”
“I’m not overexcited. I’m practically lying down. He could marry a ten-year-old and I wouldn’t turn a pinky. I told him when he married Selma, didn’t I? Jerry, you’re wet behind the ears. Jerry, you never even had a woman yet. Jerry, give yourself a chance. Jerry this, Jerry that, Jerry, she’s a very big girl, Jerry — is that what you want? And now this one, also a horse. Why doesn’t he at least call me, ask my advice. Say to me, Lenny, what do you think — Lenny, does this seem to you like I’m doing a sensible thing? No, him, he’s smarter than the rest of the world.”
Three weeks later (“to the day” as it later came to be reported) the girl telephoned. “He left! Your brother left! He walked out! What did I do? What will I do? All this new silverware,” she cried. “Please come somebody. Help me!”
“Leonard, where are you going in your slippers?”
“I’m going! What — is he crazy? Is he a crackpot?”
“Leonard, don’t get involved now.”
“I am involved. The telephone rings, this girl is hysterical, I’m involved. She’s a baby — she’ll do something insane. How do I know?”
When Mr. Herz went out the door his wife grew hysterical herself. She knelt beside the BarcaLounger and wept into the still-warm leather. Who knew best whether a man’s heart is weak, the doctor or the man himself? How could a machine tell a man he didn’t have pains? In the night he couldn’t even roll over, his ribs were so sore. And one morning she would wake up and he wouldn’t. Oh God! God! He would get overexcited, involved, wrought up — and die! She wept and wept and finally she pulled herself to the telephone and looked up the analyst’s name. She dialed, and when she had him on the phone, she cried, “You son of a bitch! My sister-in-law, you ruined her life, you son of a bitch! She had everything and you ruined it! What kind of ideas do you put in people’s heads? What is he — a boy? A man fifty-two years old and he marries girls, children! You quack, you fraud—”
Yet when their son came down one Christmas from Cornell to drop the name Libby DeWitt into their lap, it was to Asher and Jerry that they referred him. Tears flowed from his parents for two reasons: there was grief over his marital decision, and grief too at their own impotence. They had somehow reared a boy whom they could not bludgeon or make hysterical. By way of ruination, selfishness and stupidity, Jerry and Asher seemed better equipped than themselves to deal with the disaster. There even seemed to the parents to be some affinity between the boy and his uncles, which was yet a third reason for tears. “I let him down,” wept the father in bed, both hands over his ribs. “He won’t listen to me. In my own house my voice don’t carry from the kitchen to the toilet. All his life the boy has been filling in applications. You lift up a piece of paper in this house and underneath’s an application. When did I ever see him? When did he learn to listen to a father? He was always running out to get somebody to recommend him for something. A waiter in the mountains, a stock boy, a scholarship student. Once he should listen to me. Just once.”