Augusta Played by Kelly Cherry Read Free Book Online

decorating. From movies she had learned the importance of plushness. She had plush carpeting, plush drapes, plush cushions, and in negligees she favored floor-length silk over the baby doll look, although she was barely five feet tall. She compensated with spike-heeled mules and hairdos-with-height. Sidney had showered her with gown-and-peignoir sets, and she was grateful. Sidney was a generous man. However, the fact that she accepted his presents did not necessarily mean anything. Not necessarily.
    Because Birdie was not, repeat definitely not, and if you forgot it you could get your block knocked off by her purse, a whore. She had turned a trick now and then but she was not about to let anybody jump to conclusions. That was what a whore was, somebody who let other people jump to conclusions, and you didn’t have to be a woman to be a whore, either. The world was full of respectable male whores, many of them politicians. Sid was an exception, and so, for that matter, was she. It was one of the things that they had in common. And like Sidney, Birdie always stated her arguments very clearly so there could be no misunderstanding. She liked having things out in the open. But if it made a man feel good to buy her a fox fur, she wasn’t going to stand in his way. You start demurring and saying you can’t and he shouldn’t, and all you do is saddle the poor fellow with a lot of guilt which is not what anybody wants. Guilt a man can always get at home. A woman too, for that matter. Her father had laid just a whole lot of it, if you want to know the truth, on her, and look where it got her: forty years old and in love with Sidney Gold. She giggled. On the other hand, could guilt be all bad, if it led to this?
    Sid, being deep, understood all this. If things broke for him, he might be sitting on the Supreme Court, but that didn’t alter his inward self, and his inward self was a lot like hers. The hard shell and the slick surface were accreted, like hers. It was a kind of chitin, but they were piteous within, which was a quote from Time magazine. So Sid didn’t laugh at her, and she didn’t laugh at him, but they laughed with each other more than either of them had ever done with anybody else.
    9
    N ORMAN WHIPPED the fox fur from Birdie’s bosom and threw it to the floor. The Honorable Sidney Wallechinsky Gold watched his son stamping out the sparks. How much had he paid for that fur? It didn’t matter—what did he care about money? Norman could think he was closefisted, let him. It wasn’t that he loved money but that money was love. If Norman did not think that money was love, let him try living without it. The lack of it stunted your growth. Little children grew up warped in mind and body for the lack of it. As for himself, from being poor he had got rich, and to what end if not to shower his wealth on certain persons whom he loved dearly and wished to see thrive, like American Beauty rose bushes? And why should he pay to see weeds grow, would somebody please tell him that? God did not make the rain to fall everywhere in the world at the same time, indiscriminately.
    Sidney Gold was liberal with the B’nai B’rith and the United Jewish Appeal, and he had staked Israel from the beginning. Eretz Yisrael . He had done his part to make aliyah , the return to the homeland, possible. He was goddamned if he’d support a shiksa in his old age. You could lose votes with a mixed marriage in your immediate family. True, he was not running for anything, but it was the same principle. People didn’t like this sort of thing. It went deep. Hell, it went back to all those pogroms and camps and exiles and diasporas. Where was the point in surviving all those things as Jews if you were going to let yourself be assimilated into nonexistence? To the dead, it was disrespectful. Did they die relinquishing their unique souls so their grandsons could ridicule their beliefs? True, he was not