Even the waiters stop and watch. The cigarette girls, hair peeking out from their caps, cover their trays and wait. The man of the hour astaires up the steps. He stands at a little dais near the doorway—someone showing brisk resolve in a boring suit.
Meanwhile, Desi is coming quick. He has seen Lucille, the closeness, the man’s fingers on her.
Fred Trump, beginning his speech, raises a brick.
“Gentlemen!” he says, and the fat microphone crackles. He is ignoring the light rain. “Thank you for coming. And ladies. Can’t forget them, they’re too expensive.” General laughter, except for Lucille. No, that’s what we are, she thinks, in this year of our grace 1949: expensive adornments, investments, showpieces. Forming the thought even as she orders herself to smile. Because men are where you sink your youth and hopes—with all their sturdiness, caution, their slowness to engage. They’re hard to motivate. Oxen. She’d like to broadcast something that gets this across. But also funny. How to make a man do what you want—and even when he sees your stratagem, and even if you give him the consolation prize of thinking you’re a fool, you’ve still got what you want.
“We are here for an occasion,” Fred Trump says. After twenty-five years in construction, he has taken on the right-angled solidity of buildings. He has that air of self-reliance: a fifty-year-old structure, small with the sun on the façade, that would be surprisingly tough to knock down.
“Let’s hear it for this wonderful beach,” he’s saying, “and the workingman’s sanctuary that it will become!” Thin applause.
Trump is no magician of talk. Unlike his aide-de-camp, Joe Herzfeld, who can take any topic and hocus-pocus it so the listener smiles and even oohs his amazement. When a plainspoken guy like Fred Trump reaches in the hat, no entertainment comes out twitching its whiskers.
Isidore, meanwhile, edges even nearer to Lucille. What would it be like to feel her hands on my body? And she is wondering the same.
“Lucille!” This is Desi’s yelling voice. “Lucille!” A seeable muscle jolts in Desi’s neck.
Trump’s saying, “I must thank Mayor O’Dwyer”—tapping the brick at his hip—“Governor Dewey, Senator Wagner, Councilor Lieuvain…”
Trump is looking around for his man Joe. As Vespasian had Josephus in Rome, as Pharaoh had Joseph in Canaan, Fred Trump has Joe Herzfeld in Brooklyn. This is how Jews (men like Isidore’s father) got ahead in real estate: the trust that an at-hand Israelite might transfer a bit of those ancient desert smarts.
“Who’s your friend, Lucille?” Desi cries now—he has come up very close. His sealskin-black eyebrows are twinkled with rain.
Lucille in astonishment turns to him, appealing. “Dez.”
“Who’s your friend who has his hand on your elbow?”
“Shh!” Lucille says, meaning it’s obviously nothing. But of course this is why you don’t leave the side of your wife to flirt with another woman.
The noise has gotten a few people to turn, but not many: It so happens Fred Trump is finding his voice.
“To build new things, you have to break with old things,” Trump says, and fingers at his pencil mustache. “And building a new thing is why we are here. For tonight’s wonderf—”
“You’re not going to make one of your scenes, Desi.”
Desi stares with hot eyes at Lucille. Isidore, he won’t acknowledge. Desi is bouncing with excitement.
“You seem like an actor, mister”—he addresses Isidore at last, still not troubling himself to move eyes from his wife. “Are you? I don’t know you, see.”
“People claim I lack a feeling of artistic taste—recently said to be uncouth by the quote ‘newspaperman’ Meyer Berger,” Fred Trump says.
“Not in show business,” Isidore tells Desi sotto voce. His throat feels two sizes smaller. He swallows. “Real estate.”
“A bricklayer, too, eh?” says Desi. “A Property Man?” He chin-gestures at Trump. “You lay bricks and call it art. Like him.”
“Nope. Wrong. I’m not like him.”
Desi rounds his thick shoulders to Isidore; the taunt is in his face. “What are you like, then?”
Fred Trump senses a slight commotion and speaks louder:
“Meyer Berger has never built anything himself. And so he does not understand great places never come easy, never. Let’s say, for one famous example, that vital building project, the pyramids of Egypt—at least we never exploited the sweat of men against their will for our important projects.”
“Stop! Not tonight, Dez!” Lucille says and sends a hand to her husband’s wrist.
But Desi is bull-rushing at Isidore. “I’ll chin you right now!”
“Shh!”
Isidore—nose-to-nose with Desi—feels the sweat ride down his back. Which wakes him deliciously up. Here, the only two men in the world.
* * *
—
THE REST OF the assemblage have lifted their bricks on cue. “Okay,” Trump’s saying, looking at his pocket watch. “At the stroke of the hour!”
“What do you suppose will happen,” Isidore says, “if you come any closer?”
“I say two birds of a feather all smell the same,” Desi says. “You are just talk and a second-rate suit like all these real estate clowns.”
“All right, guests!” Trump’s saying, just as Desi moves into Isidore, chest-first. “It’s nearly midnight!”
Isidore has braced his whole body in opposition to Desi. Their bodies wrench and twang as they collide and collide.
Trump: “Bricks ready!”
Lucille pokes her own body between them. This should be on television, too. The sudden changes in mood, and now her absurd—if you stepped back from it—slapstick move. It is not easy to perform such a poke with nonchalance (fingers, wrist, elbow sandwiched amid jackets and hot breath). But with one turn, you could make it comedy, that sunny feel of no-one-can-really-get-hurt.
“Plan,” Lucille says through her teeth. “The plan, Dez.”
Immediately, Desi backs away. His demeanor suddenly is nonplussed. “Okay, Lucille. Have it your way.” Even his hair is nonplussed. For him, sociability is only that which interrupts periods of brawling.
Isidore just stands there, breathing hard. He doesn’t know this man—not the way you would know a character on a program. How could he?
“Ten,” Trump’s saying. “Nine.”