Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“Why is the cantor’s wife so stern?” I asked my parents.

“She’s from Brussels,” was my father’s reply.

“They have no children,” my mother explained.

“Or maybe Antwerp,” said my father, sighing. “The chips snag on that goddamn lace.”

The round Formica table in the breakfast area of our kitchen didn’t require a cloth. It seated eight easily. At my fourteenth birthday party, in September, some dozen girls had squeezed around it to eat pizza and make voodoo gourds under the supervision of Azinta, a sophomore at the university, our then live-in.

For the Torah study group, our table was usually adorned with a single bowl of pretzels. But on the Sunday evening after the Lehrman-Grossman wedding it wore a centerpiece of Persian lilies and freesia. My parents had attended the wedding and its luncheon, where my mother found a paper daisy under her plate, signifying that she had won the flowers.

I was fiddling with the blossoms. “Dede o savalou!” I sang. I was still partial to voodoo despite Azinta’s having left us.

“Oh, shut up,” my mother said, though agreeably. “Help me with this food.”

I joined her at the counter that separated the kitchen from the breakfast area. Halloween had passed. Outside the window our backyard was covered with leaves. A pumpkin was softly decaying on the windowsill.

My mother sliced the beef to be served later to the group. She sliced the cheese and the tomatoes and the rye. I arranged the food in horizontal rows on a long platter. I laid pickles here and there, vertically, like notes. She slid the platter into the refrigerator.

I turned on the hanging lamp over the table. Its brilliant cone would soon illuminate not only the Lehrman-Grossman flowers but seven glasses of beer or cider. (The cantor’s wife provided only ginger ale.) Later in the evening the light would fall upon the sandwich materials. (The cantor’s wife left a plate of hard pastries on the sideboard.) In the hours of play the lamp would light up the faces of the six learned men and the one woman.

It was seven thirty. My father emerged from his study, and stretched. The doorbell rang.

The cantor and the rabbi came in, one immediately after the other. These two spent a lot of time as a pair. They got together not only to conduct services and prepare bat mitzvahs and report to the officers; they also went skating in winter and took bicycle rides out to the farm area in spring. I had seen them on their bikes. The cantor’s buttocks lapped over his seat like mail pouches. The rabbi’s curls stuck up on either side of his cap like the horns of a ram. Sometimes the cantor’s wife went biking, too. She maintained her strict posture even on a ten-speed.

“Hello, hello,” the cantor said to us all, remembering not to pinch my cheek.

“Hi,” the rabbi said to my father and me.

My friend Margie’s father arrived next, along with her grandfather. Margie’s father was treasurer of the synagogue. Also he ran a successful finance business. Margie referred to him as “the usurer.” After his wife’s death he had invited his own father to live with him and Margie. Margie called him “the patriarch.” The patriarch’s moist mouth protruded from a ruche of a beard. His son kept him supplied with white silk shirts embossed with further white, and shawl-collared sweaters.

The usurer’s walk had a dancer’s grace. He greeted my mother with a friendly hug and me with an imperfect kiss, lips not quite touching my skin. The patriarch raised his hand in a general blessing.

Sam, who had to trot over only from next door, came last. I let him in. The others were already seated at the round table in the kitchen. My mother had transferred the Lehrman-Grossman flowers to the counter.

Sam barely reached my shoulder. He was in his fifties, and worn out. “Hello, darling,” he said glumly.

I followed him into the kitchen and he took the empty seat next to my mother. I placed my own chair at a little remove, behind my mother’s right shoulder. But I didn’t plan to remain seated. I would soon stand and begin to move around the group, pausing above one person and then another, looking at the fan of cards each held. I was allowed this freedom on the promise of silence and impassivity. The tiniest flare of a nostril, my father warned, might reveal to some other player the nature of the hand I was peeking at. So I kept my face wooden. Eventually I’d settle on a high stool next to the counter, and hook my heels on the stool’s upper rungs, and let my clasped hands slide between my denimed thighs. Hunched like that, I’d watch the rest of the game.

Now, though, I sat behind my mother’s silk shoulder. She was wearing the same ruby-colored dress she’d worn to the wedding. I could see just the tip of her impudent nose. My mother was a devoted convert, but she could not convert her transcendental profile. Even in the harsh glow of the lamp, she was, in the words of my nasty great-aunt Hannah, a thing of beauty and a goy forever.

Two of the men — the slate-haired cantor and the young rabbi — were also handsome enough to withstand the spotlight. The patriarch was elderly enough to be ennobled by it.

The usurer had a reputation for handsomeness. Margie told me he was pursued by women, not all of them single. At the table he warmly accepted the cards dealt him as if his love for each was infinite. When he folded — turned cards down, withdrawing from a game — he did it with an air of fatherly regret. The overhead lamp greased his hair and darkened his lips.

Our neighbor Sam was less than handsome. His small curved nose was embellished with a few hideous hairs. His upper lip often rose above his yellow teeth, and sometimes stayed there, on the ledge of his gum, twitching. His upper body twitched a lot, too. “Maybe he a duppy,” Azinta had suggested one September day, looking through our broad kitchen window at Sam raking leaves in the next backyard. “Cannot lie properly in he grave. Tormented by need to venge self.”

Azinta — christened Ann — was the daughter of two Detroit dentists who were extremely irritated by her adoption of island speech. They became even more irritated when she left us in October to share quarters with Ives Nielson, the owner of a natural food shop called, more or less eponymously, the Red Beard. My mother spent a long evening on the telephone with Azinta’s mother, trying to reassure her. I eavesdropped on the extension in my bedroom.

“A phase, I’m certain,” my mother said. “Azinta — Ann, I mean — wasn’t happy with the philosophy department.”

“She could have switched to premed instead of to that Swede.”

“A short-lived rebellion,” my mother predicted. “Like yours?” the dentist said.

Duppy or not, Sam was suffering from all his tics tonight. His shoulders moved up and down in defeated shrugs.

My father was not handsome, either. I had recently and suddenly become aware of his lack of looks, as if a snake had hissed the secret in my ear. I was ashamed of my awareness. His bald head shone grossly back at the lamp. His big pocky nose gleamed, too. His cigar glowed. Only his voice revealed his soul — the velvet voice of a scholar. He was a professor of political theory. His smile was broad, and there was a space between his two front teeth. He used that space to good effect at the lake in the summer. Lying on his back in the water, he could spout like a whale.

WHATEVER I KNOW ABOUT POKER I learned from watching the Torah study group. I learned that a royal straight flush was the best possible hand. This made sense — what could be grander than king, queen, and offspring, with a ten as steward, all under the tepee of an ace? Four cards of the same denomination were next best, and extremely likely to win the pot; then three of one value and two of another — that was called a full house; then five of the same suit, a flush; and so on down to a pair. Sometimes nobody had a pair, and the highest card won all the money.