Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Now does it seem so fanciful of us to have wondered whether Gershom Finkel was stepping out with the most shrinking of the Shrinking Violets solely in order to get at our food?

This much I can say: from the moment he became Dolly’s beau Gershom never missed a single one of our Sunday morning bagel fress-ups. He’d arrive early, in no matter what weathers, often well before Dolly got to us, often before any of us were awake ourselves (he thought nothing about knocking us up), so as to be absolutely certain he’d be in position when the bagels turned up warm. ‘Have they come yet?’ he’d ask, as though they got there under their own steam. Agitation made him louder and more staccato than usual. He fired off bagel-related interrogations. ‘Is that them?’ ‘Where they coming from today?’ Otherwise he had nothing to say. He wouldn’t even take off his coat and make himself comfortable. He simply sat on the edge of a dining chair, leafing absently through the News of the World and The People, mouth open, like a fledgling waiting to be fed.

‘You’d think,’ I remember my father saying, ‘he’d have the decency to get the bagels himself just once in a while.’

‘Or at least the smetana and kez,’ my sisters added.

‘Or even just the kez,’ I said.

‘It’s not as though he’s pink lint exactly,’ my father said.

‘Not with three houses,’ my sisters said.

‘Four,’ my father corrected them. He’d heard four. All in Didsbury, all divided into flats, and all bringing in nice rents.

I said nothing. When it came to Gershom Finkel’s property I took a shtum powder. I knew where the original funds had come from. Plock plock, I lose, I win.

But I shared in the family censoriousness. We didn’t care for landlordism. Nothing we could put our finger on. Just something we’d brought over with us from the Bug. Had we stayed out there we’d have been Marxist-Leninists, or at the very least Bundists.

Which might have been why, over and above the fact that we wouldn’t have done anything to hurt Dolly, we put up with her admirer. Landlord or not, there was something of the stray dog, even the mad dog, about him. Reason dictated he be put down. But we couldn’t go along with that. There’d been too much putting down. So we took him in. And let him fress our bagels.

Canoodling? Did I say canoodling? There was none of that on his part. Try as I might, I am unable to remember Gershom Finkel ever showing my poor aunty Dolly a single sign of his affection. The snuggling-up, such as it was, was all on her side. She’d drape herself over him while he was idling through the papers as though she couldn’t bear not to be reading what he was reading, or she’d suddenly make a dart for him, like a wild impulsive girl, and leap up and kiss him plum in the middle of that born-bald, stayed-bald head of his, or she’d talk about ‘we’ in a way that seemed simultaneously to give him satisfaction and cause him pain. ‘We’ weren’t taking milk in our tea any more. ‘We’ had been to hear Perry Como at the Free Trade Hall. ‘We’ didn’t enjoy him as much as ‘we’d’ enjoyed Sammy Davis Jnr the week before. ‘We’ believed that while some of the changes were to be welcomed, the Rent Act still favoured tenants at the expense of landlords.

‘He’s snatched her mind,’ I said to my mother.

She sighed. ‘Well let’s just hope he goes on wanting it,’ she said.

‘Don’t you think that after a certain age it doesn’t suit a woman to be in love?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said.

‘How old is Aunty Dolly?’ I asked.

There’d always been a degree of reticence around the question of my aunties’ ages. They were so alike in spinsterliness that I’d been inclined to follow my father’s lead, lumping them together as the Shrinking Violets and imagining that they’d shrunk into the world on the same day as one another. Though in the course of cutting them up in the toilet, I must say I’d surprised myself by noticing important differences between them which bore on the athleticism of the poses I was prepared to put them into.

‘Not too old,’ she said.

‘Then maybe I should rephrase my question,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think it’s possible she’s too young?’

‘No,’ she said.

It’s wise to hold fast to the iceberg analogy when judging the depth of feeling between a man and a woman. Most of what there is you don’t see.

As a family, that was how we satisfied ourselves that Gershom was giving Dolly the love she needed. We didn’t see it. It was happening somewhere else. In the main, we guessed, it was happening at the Ritz and the Plaza and beneath whichever other spinning ball of slivered mirrors they danced. On the dance floor, at least, Gershom would have to put his hands on her and hold her close.

To the degree that we couldn’t imagine Gershom dancing, dancing humanized him. It was so unlikely that it proved we didn’t know him, and anything we didn’t know about him was bound to be better than anything we did.

As for Dolly, there could be no doubt whatsoever that dancing had made a different woman of her. I myself may not have been a pretty picture, running from the conga eel of romping Walzer women, but my deformity was as nothing compared to Dolly’s when some stranger to a family do blundered into the heat-haze of embarrassment around her and asked her to take the floor with him. I’d know when such a thing was happening even if I was taking cover at the other end of the biggest function room in Broughton. I could smell it. Dolly’s face I knew I would not be able to look at. To the un-shy, who are the lords and masters of their faces, the word discountenance has only metaphorical applications, but for my mother’s side it described transfiguration of the utmost horror. Literally, we were put out of countenance, ousted and exiled from our faces, denied all ascendancy over our features, left helpless as they screwed and twisted and did whatever else they wanted with us. Better to be dead than to be put out of countenance. Dead and done with. Burned. Drowned. Six feet under with the deep snow piled above you. Anything rather than the living death of being buried alive inside your own face and having to look on while it has its way with you. So, no, I couldn’t bear to look at Dolly. The expression in the eyes of the birdbrain who’d asked her for a dance was frightful enough. Teach him to think twice the next time. A better and a wiser man, you can bet your life, he woke the morrow morn. He had seen where hell was, and how asking leave for a dance could get you there.

But that was Dolly then, Dolly BGF, Before Gershom Finkel. Now Dolly twirled and spun in a lightsome world of foxtrots and quicksteps and for all I knew to the contrary mambos and black bottoms and boomps-a-daisies as well. She even taught the stuff! Wasn’t that typical of S for spinster excess — in six months she’d gone from rank beginner to professor. ‘I’m not going to be the one to show you how,’ Gershom had said. ‘It’s like teaching your wife to drive. It can only lead to trouble.’ So they’d taken themselves off to a dancing school above a haberdashery shop — I saw that as symbolic — in Moss Side. And now Dolly was their best teacher!

She even tried to teach me, one Sunday afternoon, pushing the twenty or so people who were gathered at our place for bagels back against the walls as though we were at a high school bop, girls on that side, boys on this, except that there were no boys in our house. She got nowhere with me. It was too embarrassing. Her new vitality sent shivers down my spine. It was as if she’d shed her old skin and still hadn’t grown a replacement. You didn’t dare look for fear of seeing things you shouldn’t see, her gederrim, her liver, her kidneys, her pink pulsing heart. And besides, I wasn’t able to count out rhythm.