KALEIDOSCOPE
A Novel

2
      The Restrictive Covenant
     
            On the way home, he passed Saint Joseph the Worker Church. Slaphappy tired, the sight evoked Hemingway’s expression: Hope to Christ. He needed to be ever vigilant to defend against his mother’s sarcasms and his father’s belittling. He kept the offensive expression as an arrow in his wordsmith’s quiver, ready to fire it at just the right time. It would drive his mother nuts, and he’d savor that.
            His Cinderella evening was over and, like the coachman’s transformation at dawn, he had reverted to a dingy, dirt-spotted frog, like his car. The gate to Estate Goldberg was a standard Levitt, flimsy aluminum storm door, monogrammed with an Old English font G, in the center. Unlike Manor Boudreaux, there was no brass plate, no Rococo, no “décor,” no architecture, no mirrors, no foyer, no swans ejaculating, no beheaded goose on their chopping block.
            Turgid with rebuke in her muzzle, she stood in the driveway, smoking, wearing a stained apron with her brunette hair bound by a red, cowboy kerchief; a do-rag. He could see the bulges caused by curlers. “Where the hell have you been?” she yodeled, smacking at him with the morning Levittown Times. “Your father and I have been dying all night. We called everywhere; the police, the hospital.” She cried, and her tears wet her cigarette. Seeing his mashed fingers, she exclaimed, “What did you do?”
            Arthur, his father, the Groundhog was his moniker, scared of his own shadow, far less than a king, poked at his thick, black-framed glasses positioned on his snout. He’d wriggled out of his hole, wearing deep blue, almost violet, Bermuda shorts held aloft over his pot belly by a tattered frayed woven hemp belt with a frayed leather end. A sleeveless t-shirt with black knee-high socks, open-toed, filigreed leather, black, Italian sandals completed his gardening costume. He clutched a handful of fresh-cut gladiolas, held upright. Suffering from the subterranean shock contrast into daylight, he squinted.
            A ribbed, white, sleeveless tee shirt covered his father’s barrel chest, and his sternum was sweat-soaked. Chaim had to laugh. His dad looked like a self-portrait of one of his garden grown eggplants. “Sonofabitch,” he cursed, shaking the gladiolas at him, his forehead veins popping, and then looking away in consternation.
            He viewed his father as a failure. He was a low level government factotum, a clerk at the Veteran’s Administration, a post-war paper-pusher, an ordinary beige disappointment. Chaim compared him to the mastodons at the Club, the capitalistic warriors, and he sought that sort of success, to achieve money, power, and prestige. He wanted an Hispano-Suiza.
            In the eyes of the community, anyone would see Arthur as an ideal father, appearing to be doting, devoted, loving, soft, and gentle, but the truth was different. He was a sad and harsh man. Gardening defined his taciturn soul. He related better to nasturtiums than to his family.
            In summer, he planted. In summer, he snipped here, tied there, and dug gentlemanly holes. In winter, he turned inward, pursuing his true excitement, nurturing orchids, tending his variegated dieffenbachia, pinching his coleus, and then he interred himself in his bedroom with his books.
            He was cruel to his children and withheld affection. He was Ragesaurus Rex, often with explosive fits and tantrums, in which he would almost crap his pants, like a four year-old. These outbursts he blamed on his family. “Look at what you made me do,” he would rant. They would cower in fear.
            “I had to clean up after a party at the Club. Iiiii got ten dollars in tips,” he told them but he couldn’t tell them that he’d gotten drunk and stoned and then lost his virginity by fucking the richest woman in the county, whose husband was Mafiosi…although he wanted to tell them…very much.
            “You did what!” she hollered in her most piercing glissando. “My God, you smell like a god-dammned whorehouse!” She chased him into his bedroom, pounding on him with the folded paper. He nearly escaped. In the struggle, his new kaleidoscope, his precious gift, bounced onto the black-and-white speckled linoleum tile.
            “What’s that?”
            “I…I…fffound it…ssss…someone lllleft it at the Club.”
            “When you fanfa, you’re lying. Where did you get that?” she challenged, so antagonistic. She pinched her lips together tightly, and a nimbus cloud formed on her mustachioed upper lip.
            “Ssss….someone left it,” he hissed, realizing that he was within a praying mantis whisker’s width from blurting out a full confession. With all the booze and dope, he was about to puke, too.
            Gears grinding in confusion, he whirled, slamming the door, partially sealing her yowling on the other side, but she huffed and puffed and forced the door open and came at him. “What happened to your hand, your fingers?”
            “I…I…a horse stepped on it.”
            She sniffed. “Have you been smoking?”
            “No, no, of course not.”
            “Take off your clothes, and I’ll wash them. You stink.” She stood there. “Give me your clothes,” she decreed, meaning then and there. “I’m your mother. Give them to me.”
            He rose from his bed, shed his clothes. “Underpants!”
            He complied. She gazed at him and, seeing his pubic matted hair, sneered, “Hmmm…I guess you have grown up.” After Karen, this ignominy was too much, and tears scalding his sunburned cheeks. The wound was as deep as Karen Phillippo’s humiliation, as severe as that gash in the oak tree.
            Wanting to keep Nedda’s aroma, he vowed he’d never shower again or wipe his face, but that promise changed quickly. His chest burned. The acid taste was awful, so he scurried to the toilet, puked his guts out a few times and died, waking some hours later that morning, still captivated by Nedda’s odor and scents, but extremely nauseous.
            Cold water. He needed cool, clear, water.
            What were the names of those perfumes? L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain. Un Jardin Sur le Nile by Hermes, “my other favorite” she’d said, and then 24 Faubourg by Hermes.
            Face in the toilet, he felt as if he were being turned inside out when the barf wave heaved again. He felt as if he’d yakked out his sneakers, it was that violent, and some vomitus cauterized his nose. From a cabinet above the toilet he saw red…a red rubber pouch of some sort, a bag connected to a long red rubber tube culminating in a black nozzle, which looked like that goose’s nose on Nedda’s kitchen counter. Another powerful green torrent left him, and then a few moments passed, and after a glass of chilled seltzer water from the fridge, his stomach settled down.
            He loved and hated his bedroom. On the other side of his bedroom was a single bed, a steel-framed, rollaway, where Jeffrey, his cousin from his mother’s side, coerced him to suck his dick. He’d been only eight. That was the part he hated.
            Idly, he peered through the kaleidoscope, turning it, focusing, imagining his past, present, and future. Then he held out his right index finger, closed an eye, and noticed the viewpoint shift. He’d seen that on Mr. Wizard. It was called parallax.
            Nedda was recreation, but what he wanted was a girlfriend, someone his age, someone to watch over him, to love him, like the words in the Gershwin song…and then he fell asleep. An hour later, he showered, despite his vow, and when he returned from the bathroom, he saw than an envelope lay on his desk. It was from the Philadelphia Symphony. Herr Knauss, the Hungarian principal trumpet, had accepted him as a student. He slid the letter beneath his desk blotter, a naches ace to be played later.
            She intercepted him. “Where do you think you’re going? What was in that letter? Your father wants you to cut the lawn!” screamed Chlorine, dragging on her Raleigh while ambushing him at the bathroom. He zipped quickly. “I made mamaligga for you!” Her exhaled acrid smoke swirled through her nostrils into the morning light in the kitchen.
            “You should work for the Katzenellenbogens at the dry cleaners. They’re Jews at least.”
            “Mom. It’s a job.” She annoyed him so, trying to control every aspect of his life. “I’m leaving for college in a year!” he retorted. “I’d rather die than work in that concentration camp, Chlorine.” He slipped!
            Glowering, “What did you call me?”
            “Nnnothing…I…”
            She cut him off. “You have no idea what a concentration camp is like.”