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 psycho analyst 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.”
Paul’s mother was crying too, but at least — to her credit — she tried to change the subject. “A scholarship is an honor,” she sobbed, touching her husband’s wet face. “We should be proud—”
“It’s an honor for the son, not for me. Just once, once … Five years later and frozen foods was already a craze. This man Birdseye is coining it, and my son, my son … A Catholic the girl is, practically an invalid, nineteen years old and she ain’t had a healthy day in her life—”
“My baby,” his mother wept. “He could read the mileage off the speedometer before other kids could even talk. What’s happening to my baby?”

When Asher called to invite Paul for a walk, Paul saw no need to be rude to someone essentially an outsider in the whole affair. He went with Asher because he knew his parents had asked Asher to phone; he went to make it easier on Asher, who like himself must have felt obliged to comply with whatever sad maneuverings these two helpless people could devise; he went for the sake of everybody’s dignity. It happened also that he knew that Asher would be sympathetic, or at the least noncommittal. The values of a man who had studied art in New York, in Chicago, in Europe, who had composed music, who chose to live in a loft over a Third Avenue bar — these were not the values of a washed-out bourgeois and his wife. Asher was a free man; an eccentric perhaps, but free.
The day they met was windless and cold. They walked side by side, two scrawny bareheaded men, one bald, the other with kinky black ridges beginning only two fingers above his eyebrows. One rounded his shoulders to stay warm; the other had had round shoulders for years. Though this posture gave Asher a thoughtful mien, the drop that formed and reformed at the end of his spiritless nose was not nearly so pensive-looking; it had the air of an oversight, as had his clothes and his features. His misshapen lobes, for example, made his ears look like accidents; on top of that, hair grew out of them. Asher did not seem to believe that outside the skin there were things to be taken care of. A full day of barbers, tailors, shoemakers, cleaners, and opticians would just about begin to put him in order. His spectacles were a little storage bin of paper clips and Scotch tape.
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