Til the Real Thing Comes Along (28 page)

Then the newsman came on, and he looked really sad, too, when he said, “Anyone with any information regarding six-year-old
David Malcolm can call…” And then he gave some telephone number, and then there was some more music and a beer commercial.
Davey sat staring at the television, not hearing the sound. Not even hearing the office door as it slowly opened, and then
the dark-skinned man with the black moustache grabbed him.

Rand Malcolm knew the kidnappers wouldn’t get anywhere near his home. The entire neighborhood was swarming with police and
had been for days, though he’d begged them to leave, make themselves inconspicuous, help him to make it look to the kidnappers
as if he were accessible so that maybe they would approach him with their request for ransom. And of course, with the police
around, the press had closed in, and now he was feeling overwhelmed by his powerlessness. Finally he decided, since there
was no way to work against the press, he would work with them. Maybe it was a way to get through to the kidnappers. He hadn’t
slept in days, always sat near the special telephone with the number he had given out on television. They could call at any
time, day or night—probably night, so he had to be alert. He meant what he said. No demand was too great. That helpless little
boy. Spirited away in the middle of the night. If only the bastards who did the deed would… Dear God, please let them bring
him home.

“Boss,” Fred Samuels said, coming into Rand Malcolm’s den. “You have to get some sleep. Let me sit by the phone for you. Just
for a few hours.”

“Not until my boy’s home,” Malcolm said. Samuels knew there was no point in arguing with this man, so he started for the door.

“Freddy,” Rand Malcolm said. It made Samuels turn. Mal hadn’t called him that name since they were in college together. Malcolm
was drawing circles on the green blotter with a black fountain pen that was leaking on his fingers. “He has to be alive,”
he said.

Then he raised his head from his drawing. The two old friends looked into each other’s eyes for a long time in silence. When
the phone rang, the noise startled them. Rand Malcolm looked at the black phone, and his usually stern, strong-jawed face
was soft with pain.

“No,” he said, putting his hand on the phone. “I don’t think I can…”

Fred Samuels picked up the telephone receiver.

“Yes,” he said, then listened. “Thank God,” he said, and put an arm around Rand Malcolm. “He’s safe and well. Rudy the janitor
found him in your office. He ran away and he’s been hiding there. They’re on their way here right now.”

Rand Malcolm pushed his lips together hard until they were white.

Then he said, “Excuse me, Fred.” And Fred Samuels, understanding, closed the door and left the room. As soon as the door was
closed, Rand Malcolm wept. Sobbing the way he never had in his life, even when his beloved Lily died in his arms. He had just
dried his eyes when his son, his boy, his only blood relative, his heir, quietly opened the door and closed it behind him
and looked with his big blue eyes at his father. He was rumpled and tired and afraid.

“‘Why did you run away?” the father asked.

Davey couldn’t look at him. Instead he looked down at the dark wood floor.

“‘Cause…”

“Because,” his father corrected.

“Because… I don’t want to go to boarding school.”

“You should have said so.”

“I was ascared.”

“Afraid. Of what?”

“If I said I didn’t want to go. the only other thing to do was you ending up being stuck with me.”

“So you ran away instead.”

Davey nodded and then he couldn’t hold his tears in any longer. They filled his eyes and nose and he stood there, not making
a sound, just letting them come.

“Just like your old lady,” he heard his father say, and he extended his hand toward his son, who walked over and extended
his own to shake. But before his father could object, the boy threw his arms around the man’s neck and embraced him. He couldn’t
see his father’s face trembling as he struggled to hold back the tears of relief and of joy.

1960

F
rancie Goldman had a big bust and a bad reputation. The first was the cause of the second, because in the tenth grade, boys
weren’t sure exactly what to do about big busts. And even if they had been, it wouldn’t matter, because in 1960 most girls
who had big busts wouldn’t let them do anything anyway. So the boys in the tenth grade at Taylor Allderdice High School had
fantasies about Francie Goldman and were embarrassed by the fantasies, which made them uncomfortable. And that’s why they
made up stories about her and gave her a bad reputation. But the truth of the matter was that Francie had reached the age
of sixteen and not one boy had ever touched her big bust. Even over her clothes. In fact she had never had a date.

Rosie Jane knew that and she didn’t care what the boys said. She knew the real Francie. The girl who made her laugh with her
imitation of how Milton Berle twitched his lips and how Sid Caesar said “Whoa boy,” and best of all did imitations of Victor
Borge on her baby grand piano, which took up the entire living room of the Goldmans’ tiny house. The piano was a Steinway.
It had been a gift from Francie’s grandfather, who called it a “Steinberg.” Rosie loved to sit and listen to Francie play
anything on the piano, even her exercises. And when Rosie was there, after Francie finished playing the classical pieces she
was working on, she would play popular songs and show tunes, and she and Rosie would sing every Judy Garland song from
A
Star Is Born
and
Meet Me in Saint Louis
until they were both hoarse.

“R.J.,” Francie would say, calling Rosie by the nickname she had given her, “I think Garland can sleep well tonight. Her career
is safe.”

When Francie was asked to join the drama club because they needed someone to play the piano for their productions, she begged
R.J., whose other options were Entre Nous, the French Club, and the home ec cooking club, to join with her. The two girls
had some funny ideas for the Follies, the show the Drama Club put on every year to poke fun at the school, and when they told
the ideas to Mrs. Joseph, the drama teacher, she asked them to write them down. By the time the Follies was assembled in the
spring, most of it had been written by Rabinowitz and Goldman.

“The famous team of…” Francie called them that morning when she flopped herself down on her bed, her big bust bouncing up
and down under her baby doll pajamas, one pink rubber curler falling out of her short silky hair onto the bed.

“Shit,” she said, feeling the piece of hair from which the curler had fallen. “Straight as a stick.” One at a time she pulled
out the other curlers she’d stoically slept on all night. Her hope had been that the discomfort of the little clothespin devices
would pay off in a glamorous hairdo. But they hadn’t. “Shit,” she repeated, and ran a hand through her slightly bent straight
hair. “Now that I’m famous, I really ought to start looking better. I mean, we may even have to take a bow for the audience
on opening night of the Follies.” She rubbed her cheeks hard with a towel. “I need rouge. I need outfits. I need to start
being a woman. I’ve had my periods for two years already. I could have babies and be a mother now. Except for one crucial
element. No one even asks me out.” Then she grinned that big Francie grin she always grinned before she said something she
thought was funny and said, “I’ve discovered a new form of birth control. It’s called unpopularity.”

Both girls laughed.

“Francie, I know any minute you’re going to meet somebody,” R.J. said.

“That’s what you said when we went to New York,” Francie told her, rifling through a box filled with various
makeup containers she’d bought for herself at Kresge’s five-and-ten, used one time, and then thrown, disappointed in their
results, into the box. The month before, when Frande’s brother Marshall was scheduled to play a recital at Juilliard, Francie’s
parents had offered to take R.J. along to New York to see Marshall’s performance and share Francie’s room in a hotel. R.J.
had been out of Pittsburgh only once, to go to Atlantic City with her parents. In New York the Goldmans and R.J. would stay
at the Commodore Hotel. Francie and R.J. would have their own room with a bathroom. R.J. was dying to go to New York. Francie,
who hated her virtuoso violinist brother, was hoping to get out of it.

“Maybe you’ll meet someone at Juilliard,” R.J. had urged, hoping to get Francie excited, “A musician, so you’ll have something
in common. Francie had made a face. As it turned out, Marshall had the flu and after they arrived in New York and just missed
being in a car pileup with three taxis, they got to Juilliard to find out that the recital was canceled. So the Goldmans bought
theater tickets from a scalper for themselves and the girls, and on Friday night they saw
Gypsy
and on Saturday night they saw
West Side Story.
Francie and R.J. were first wide-eyed and then in tears over both shows, and all the way back to Pittsburgh in Sam Goldman’s
new Ford, they sang the songs over and over again.

“Do you know,” Francie said, now at the big round mirror over the dresser, penciling dark eyebrows over her blond ones with
a red Maybelline pencil, “the only time I’ve ever even seen a man’s thing was one time when I was, get this, on my way home
from Hebrew school. I was waiting for the Squirrel Hill bus, and I looked into my purse and I realized that—”

“There was a man’s thing in it?” R.J. asked.

Both girls laughed. Francie’s laugh always began with a shriek, then became a cackle. R.J. loved it.

“Francie, tell the truth. Where did you buy that purse?” R.J. asked.

“No,” Francie managed finally. “When I looked into my purse I realized that I didn’t have the right change for the bus. I
think I had a dime and a quarter and I needed a nickel and a quarter, so I said to this guy who was standing there waiting
for the bus too—”

“Excuse me, sir, can I see your thing?” R.J. said, and Francie laughed again.

“R.J., shut up,” she said. “So I said to this guy who was standing there in the snow—by the way, it was snowing—I said, ‘Excuse
me, do you have two nickels for a dime?’ We were all alone on that corner there, and he turns and opens his coat and there’s
his thing sticking out at me. Right outside the Hebrew school.”

“France, I don’t want to hear the rest of the story if the punch line is that the guy was the rabbi.”

“R.J., have you ever seen a man’s thing?” Francie asked, eyes wide. R.J. hadn’t.

“They’re big. They’re extremely big. At least this guy’s was. I gotta tell ya. I was scared.”

“My God, that isn’t funny,” R.J. said, seeing the fear in Francie’s eyes. But then Francie started to laugh, and R.J. laughed
with her.

“Anyway, I was so scared, I dropped my Hebrew books on the ground and I ran. A few minutes later, while I was still running,
the Squirrel Hill bus passed me. You know. The bus I’d been standing there waiting for, for twenty minutes before the guy
showed me his thing. And when the bus went by me, there was the guy sitting in the back of the bus as if nothing had happened:
just sitting there reading—”

“Not your Hebrew books?”

“The newspaper,” Francie said, slapping R.J.’s arm. “Arj,” she confessed, getting suddenly serious, “I haven’t told that story
to anybody because I’m embarrassed about it, and I think it’s kind of why I’ve been staying away from boys a lot, and don’t
ever talk to them. I worry so much every time I look at a boy that he has a thing like that man’s hidden in his pants that
I can’t say a word. Maybe that’s why even though I have the boobs that ate Chicago I don’t ever get asked out.”

Before R.J. could say anything, Francie had thrown her chenille robe over her baby doll pajamas and was tugging at R.J.’s
arm. “Let’s go sit down at Steinberg and make up some more songs.”

It was a few days after Francie told that story about the flasher that she met Avery Willis. He was a senior who was on the
stage crew for the Follies. At night he worked in a gas station. Every day at rehearsal, Avery and Francie would kid around.
Francie seemed comfortable with him, and
seemed to be over her fear of men’s things. Avery wore Aqua Velva aftershave, and Francie went and bought some in the drugstore,
and when she was home alone, she opened it and took a whiff because it reminded her of Avery. When he asked her on a date,
something she’d been praying for, she had to say no, because Avery Willis was a
sheygets,
not Jewish, and she would never dream of asking her mother, who was president of her B’nai Brith chapter, or her father,
who went to synagogue every Saturday morning, if she was allowed to go. She just told Avery no, then came to R.J.’s parents’
apartment over the grocery store, and when R.J. came up from work, Francie sat on the bed that used to be Bubbe’s bed and
cried.

“I love him, Arj,” she said through her tears and trembling lips. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and when her face was this
bright red, her eyebrows disappeared completely.

“France, he’s the first boy in your life,” R.J. reminded her. Thank God, she thought. Thank God this isn’t me. My parents
would kill me. Louie and Rifke had made it very clear to her that the only acceptable boys to bring home were Jewish boys.
And even when she was a tiny girl, Bubbe had told her again and again: Stick with your own kind. No matter what. In Russia
they had had a saying for it that Bubbe repeated again and again.
“Besser der eygener bedder vi der fremder Rov.”
Better your own bathhouse attendant than somebody else’s rabbi. Goyishe men drank too much and beat their wives. And some
day, even though they might pretend to love you in the beginning, someday they would call you a dirty Jew. And now Francie,
her best friend, was saying she loved a boy who was a candidate for that kind of manhood.

“You’ll get over it,” R.J. said, thinking how much she sounded like her own mother when she did. “Your mother told me she
had a friend who might pay us to make up some songs for her. Let’s think about that.”