Illywhacker

"What fellow?" she asked, not really thinking about the question, but seeing the abnormality of her family and shuddering mentally to feel herself free of it.

"Badgery, this fellow you have been in business with. You are through with him?"

"Oh no, Wysbraum. No, I very much doubt it."

"But", said Wysbraum, tucking his table napkin into his collar and picking up the menu, "you are returning to your husband, so your father said, who has been in trouble with the police. His photograph was in the paper. A nice-looking boy," he said. "Your father has been very worried for you."

"Wysbraum, Wysbraum," said Sid Goldstein. "Leah, don't listen to him. She writes to me every week, sometimes three times," he told Wysbraum, tugging at the menu to make him listen. "She writes to me. She tells me everything."

"You showed me the letter," said Wysbraum. "Very nice," he told Leah. "Very brainy."

"I showed him one," Sid told Leah apologetically, polishing his glasses with his handkerchief and leaving his big eyelids as soft and vulnerable as a creature without its natural shell. "How is your husband? He will have no use of either leg?"

The Brandy Cruster arrived at this moment. Leah looked at it doubtfully. She shook her head to her father's question while Wysbraum made some fuss about the Scotch. Her father would not ask, she knew, the extent of the injury; it would be something they could write about.

"Where is Mother?"

"At home," he said, again embarrassed. "She sends her love, and Grace and Nadia also. Nadia is doing very well in her secretarial course."

"You told me," Leah said. "Why didn't they come?"

"It is my fault," Wysbraum said. "Tonight is the night, Tuesday; every Tuesday your father and I have a meal in the city."

"So why couldn't Mother come?"

"It is Tuesday," said Wysbraum firmly and Leah saw her father's uncomfortable look, the way he cleaned between the tines of the fork with his napkin, a boarding-house habit he still exhibited when nervous or agitated. It was Wysbraum's night, just as it had been Wysbraum's suit, and it could no more be taken from him than the suit could.

"You have all this," Wysbraum would have said. "Monday, Wednesday, all the days. I, I only have Tuesday."

"So tell me," her father said. "How is Mr Schick and what will happen to Mr Badgery now that he cannot perform with you?"

And she managed, in spite of her irritation, to construct a story for him, not in the form of conversation, but as a letter. Sid waited silently, patiently, his hands in his lap while his daughter answered the question and even Wysbraum tried not to interrupt, although there was the fuss about oysters, and then the discussion about pork, which Wysbraum ordered very ostentatiously, so loudly that the group at the next table, a large flowery lady of sixty and two younger gentlemen in suits, all giggled and began – Leah heard them – to tell a joke involving Jews and pork.

"Ah," said Wysbraum, "I like a good piece of crackling," which sent their neighbours off into fresh peals of laughter.

"In any case," Leah said, "I would like to talk to Mother, on the telephone."

She pushed her Brandy Cruster away from her, as if the thing was now too expensive, too frivolous, something she had merely imagined she wanted, like a spoiled child crying for sample bags at the Easter Show. She rose from her seat awkwardly. "Please," she told the men. "Excuse me a moment." And when she saw her father begin to stand: "Telephone, that's all."

But having descended the grand stairs to the front foyer where she intended to telephone, she found her father, his napkin still clutched anxiously in his hand, right behind her.

"Please," he said. "Please, no."

The foyer was a large open space whose floor was chequered with squares of black and white marble. They stood next to each other, like pieces opposing each other on a chess board, oblivious of the interest of the ageing porter with the Lord Kitchener moustache and the Harris-tweed squatter who sat in tall uncomfortable chairs in the shadow of the grand stairs.

"She does not know," Sid whispered.

"Does not know what?"

"How could I tell her? Imagine the trouble I would have." He tried, unsuccessfully, to hide the table napkin in his trouser pocket. The pocket was too small or the napkin too big; he withdrew it.

"What trouble? How?" demanded imperious Leah beneath Nathan Schick's Panama; she took the napkin from her father and folded it carefully.

"It is Wysbraum's night. I told you already. Come over here, we are in the road. Here, Leah. Wysbraum is a poor lonely man. There is nothing else in his life. You cannot take away his Tuesday. He would not permit it."

"Here." She gave him back his napkin, tightly folded. He took it absently.

"Leah, you will see your mother again, soon. We will visit. I promise."

"Why can't he have his night, and Mother be here too, and Nadia?"

Her father could not meet her eyes. He was ashamed but also not ashamed. "Leah, they are all listening."