Herzog Read Online Free PDF Page B

remembered how much pleasure it gave Madeleine to try on clothes in shops and how much heart and pride there was in her when she looked at herself, touching, adjusting, her face glowing but severe, too, with the great blue eyes, the vivid bangs, the medallion profile.
        The satisfaction she took in herself was positively plural.-imperial. And she had told Moses during one of their crises that she had had a new look at herself nude before the bathroom mirror.
        "Still young," she said, taking inventory, "young, beautiful, full of life. Why should I waste it all on you?"
        Why, God forbid! Herzog looked for something to write a note with, having left paper and pencil in the dressing room. He jotted on the back of the salesman's pad, A bitch in time breeds contempt.
        Looking through piles of beachwear, now silently laughing at himself as if his heart were swimming upward, Herzog bought a pair of trunks for the Vineyard, and then a rack of old-fashioned straw hats caught his attention and he decided to have one of those too.
        And was he getting all these things, he asked, because old Emmerich had prescribed a rest? Or was he preparing for new shenanigans-did he anticipate another entanglement at the Vineyard? With whom?
        How should he know with whom? Women were plentiful everywhere.
        At home, he tried on his purchases. The bathing trunks were a little tight. But the oval straw hat pleased him, floating on the hair which still grew thickly at the sides. In it he looked like his father's cousin Elias Herzog, the flour salesman who had covered the northern Indiana territory for General Mills back in the twenties. Elias with his earnest Americanized clean-shaven face ate hard-boiled eggs and drank prohibition beer-home-brewed Polish piva. He gave the eggs a neat rap on the rail of the porch and peeled them scrupulously. He wore colorful sleeve garters and a skimmer like this one, set on this same head of hair shared also by his father, Rabbi Sandor-Alexander Herzog, who wore a beautiful beard as well, a radiant, broad-strung beard that hid the outline of his chin and also the velvet collar of his frock coat.
        Herzog's mother had had a weakness for Jews with handsome beards. In her family, too, all the elders had beards that were thick and rich, full of religion.
        She wanted Moses to become a rabbi and he seemed to himself gruesomely unlike a rabbi now in the trunks and straw hat, his face charged with heavy sadness, foolish utter longing of which a religious life might have purged him. That mouth!- heavy with desire and irreconcilable anger, the straight nose sometimes grim, the dark eyes! And his figure!-the long veins winding in the arms and filling in the hanging hands, an ancient system, of greater antiquity than the Jews themselves. The flat-topped hat, a crust of straw, had a red and white band, matching the coat. He removed the tissue paper from the sleeves and put it on, swelling out the stripes. Bare-legged, he looked like a Hindu.
        Consider the lilies of the field, he remembered, they toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed...
        He had been eight years old, in the children's ward of the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, when he learned those words. A Christian lady came once a week and had him read aloud from the Bible. He read, Give and it shall be given unto you: good measure, pressed down and shaken together and running over shall men give unto your bosom.
        From the hospital roof hung icicles like the teeth of fish, clear drops burning at their tips. Beside his bed, the goyische lady sat in her long skirts and button shoes. The hatpin projected from the back of her head like a trolley rod. A paste odor came from her clothing. And then she had him read, Suffer the little children to come unto me.
        She seemed to him a good woman. Her face, however, was strained and grim.
        "Where