Shylock Is My Name

TEN

“She’s in residence in a manner of speaking,” Strulovitch said. “Certainly she officially resides here. But where she’s living in her head or in her heart…Look, to be brief with you, I’d say we’re heading for a showdown.”

“Your doing,” Shylock wanted to know, “or hers?”

“I’m not sure we’re separate enough for me to be able to answer that. We seem to want to bring things to a head, and then step back again, at exactly the same time. It’s what’s kept her here so far…it’s what’s kept us together.”

“Your simultaneity of rage?”

“I couldn’t have put it better. But it’s an equally simultaneous fear of that rage too. We both, I think, dread the final collision. Somewhere I believe she is sorry for me.”

“Sorry for you?”

“Yes, since Kay took ill at least. Before that she thought I was out of my mind. Now she thinks I’m still out of my mind but doing my best for a father without aptitude or assistance.”

Shylock appeared on the point of saying something, but before their conversation could proceed further, Beatrice herself appeared, a little the worse for wear, in an indigo Stella McCartney robe which Strulovitch had bought her for her last birthday, and a towel around her head. A couple of strands of wet hair fell about her face giving her, to Strulovitch, for all the indolent, burnt butteriness of her skin and the laconic way she moved her limbs, a bewitching mermaid look. She could have come in straight from swimming with the ornamental fish. It pained him, how lovely to his eyes she was.

“Talk of the devil,” he said.

“Thanks, Daddy.”

He hesitated over the introduction, but it had to be done. “My daughter Beatrice, Shylock.”

“Yeah, right,” Strulovitch thought she said, that’s if she said anything. She was a mumbler, otherwise uninquisitive in the not quite impolite style of a preoccupied teenage girl, asking Shylock if he was an old friend of Daddy’s, pretending to listen to the answer, wondering if the men had plans for the day. Globally indifferent.

Did she know who she was talking to?

“We haven’t discussed what we’re going to do,” Shylock said. “Your father might be busy. I’d be quite happy to sit here and read the papers or listen to some music if that wouldn’t inconvenience you. Do you have any Bach, or George Formby?”

Beatrice looked at her father. She didn’t know who George Formby was. Hers was the first generation, Strulovitch thought, that came into the world without memory.

Strulovitch helped her out. “ ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows.’ ”

“That’s not Bach,” Beatrice guessed.

“No he’s funnier than Bach.”

“I am never amused,” Beatrice said, “when I hear facetious music.”

“My own Formby favourite,” Shylock said, “is ‘Happy Go Lucky Me.’ ”

Is he poking fun at himself, Strulovitch wondered. Or is he making fun of her? If so, to what end? Is he flirting with my daughter?

Beatrice seemed neither to notice nor to care. She loosened the towel around her head and shook her hair, sprinkling with the lightest spray Shylock’s fine woollen trousers.

Unless that was her way of flirting back.

“What about Al Jolson?” Shylock asked.

Beatrice shook her head again. The Dark Ages, Strulovitch thought. For all her precocious brilliance, she lives bubbled in an electronic ignorance that makes the seventh century appear a carnival of enlightened knowledge. He was ashamed of her for having heard of so little that happened in the hours before she was born. But he was also worried that this suddenly light-spirited, not to say skittish Shylock might think of helping her out in the matter of Al Jolson’s identity by singing “Mammy” complete with jazz hands. Beatrice knew nothing of what he knew at her age but she knew what was and was not culturally allowable and she knew a white man wasn’t permitted to black up as a minstrel.

“The CDs are on that shelf,” Beatrice said. “Just help yourself. They aren’t mine. And you needn’t worry about disturbing me. I’m off in a few minutes. I have to be at college for a twelve o’clock.” She stuck her chin out at her father — see: contrary to what he supposed, she was taking her coursework seriously.

“What are you studying?” Shylock asked, lowering his voice as though to exclude Strulovitch. The question was almost a caress.

“Oh, it’s a general arts course, pretty basic, but I want to concentrate on performance art,” Beatrice replied. Rather coyly, it struck Strulovitch, as though hearing what she described as “studying” was a novel experience for her.

Strulovitch felt a rush of shame. Performance art! Why didn’t they just call it showing off? He wondered if Shylock had ever encountered the genre or knew it was just another word for shedding your inhibitions in public. Given what he thought of Carnival, he didn’t see Shylock much caring for performance art. (But then you never knew: who would ever have picked him as a fan of George Formby?) Jessica had been trouble enough, but at least she hadn’t told her father she was hoping to explore the empty parameters of audience — performer relations. “Not an occupation for a Jewish girl,” he’d have told her, shutting the windows. That was pretty much Strulovitch’s position too, even though most of the performance artists he’d heard of were Jewish girls.

Were the parameters they were testing those that existed between Jewish girls and their fathers?

Was the ecosexual exhibitionist Annie Sprinkle, born Ellen Steinberg, what came of teaching modesty?

Whatever Shylock understood of this, he inclined his head with Old World politeness. Beatrice might have been telling him she was studying to be a seamstress.

Then suddenly he asked her, “What does that entail?”

He’s doing this to discomfit me, Strulovitch thought. He means to keep Beatrice here all morning, leading her on, catching her out, plucking at my nerves.

Beatrice smiled at him. “Being a performance artist?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll tell you when I have more time,” she said, bewitchingly.

Strulovitch wondered again if she knew whom she was bewitching.

But something inviting in her smile made him apprehensive. Was she thinking about asking Shylock to accompany her to college. He saw her introducing him to her friends. “Hey guys, this is Shylock. Ring a bell? No, me neither. But he’s cool.” And maybe taking him along to one of her performance classes. He saw Shylock engaging in bitter dispute with Beatrice’s teachers, not moderating himself as a modern Jew knew he had to, not knowing what a bear pit the place was. But that fear was quickly overtaken by a further — what if Shylock had designs of some sort on his daughter, not erotic, surely not erotic, but possessive-paternal, and who knew where possessive-paternal stopped and erotic began? Was he looking at her greedily? A performance artist, eh? Strulovitch knew from the inside how a man, without moving a muscle on his face, can comprehensively take in a woman. And why wouldn’t he take in Beatrice who was luscious in the older style of young women, plumper and more contoured than was the fashion, not pared down like a half-gnawed carrot but full and rubicund, a Song of Solomon beauty. Like Leah, perhaps. Another Jessica. Yes, without doubt, Shylock saw and appreciated her. An appreciation that Beatrice noted — how could she not? — and appreciated in return. “And you let this man into your home,” he heard his mother say. “Don’t you have concerns enough with that girl?” All too impossibly Mephistophelean to imagine Shylock on an errand of this sort, Shylock here with the express purpose of replacing Jessica — no, surely not — but it is deranging to lose a daughter as he had lost his and who’s to say what derangement won’t bring about?

An eye for an eye, a daughter for a daughter.

Why should Strulovitch have a daughter and he not!

He felt the ignominy of his suspicions when Beatrice, having dashed down a piece of cold toast, told Shylock it had been a pleasure to meet him, and Shylock, again inclining his head formally, said, without irony or knowingness, “Likewise — good luck with your studies.”

Strulovitch was ashamed of himself. There’s something not right somewhere, he thought, when a father can’t see his daughter in the company of another man without envisioning foul play. Let’s not beat about the bush: there’s something not right with me. Beatrice didn’t need to buy herself a lubricious monkey to suggest a world without moral bearings. The lubricious monkey was him.

Did Shylock see that? Did Shylock mean Strulovitch to see he saw it?

Before she left the room she asked Strulovitch if he’d checked his diary yet.

“I will,” he said. “I promise.”

“You promised last time.”

“This time I really will. I’ll leave a time under your door.”

“Just text it.”

They listened in silence to the girl banging about the house. Their eyes met in a way Strulovitch found intrusive. They shouldn’t have been listening to her together. They were not bonded in his daughter.

The noise she made collecting her things and throwing books around — it sounded like throwing books around, though Strulovitch doubted she had any books — as a rule irritated Strulovitch. It seemed such an unnecessary insistence on her independence. But today he had no choice but to listen with the ears of Shylock. He thought how much he’d miss her if she went.

When she went.

The silence roared in his ears.

—

“She’s a beautiful girl,” Shylock said after they heard the front door slam. “Lovely.”

“Beautiful, yes,” Strulovitch said. He was still angry with his guest. Still felt intruded on. And Shylock seemed to know and enjoy it. “Lovely I’m not so sure about.”

“I can only speak for her appearance. For the impression she gives.”

“Yes. And what’s not lovely about her is what’s not lovely about all of them. She has natural discernment but it’s not strong enough to overcome the culture she’s been born into.”

“You are in danger of sounding like an old man.”

“Weren’t you? Isn’t a father by definition an old man? You locked your doors on yours.”

“I had to. I’d lost one woman. I didn’t want to lose a second.”

“That’s called being an old man.”

“I knew the danger she was in.”

“From shallow foppery and drumbeats? How great a danger was that, really? Don’t we create the thing we fear by hyperbolising it? You kept a sober house, but a sober house is no place for a young girl.”

“And are you telling me you let yours run wild?”

“I can’t stop her.”

“But you try.”

“I try. I have a sacred obligation to try.”

“That was all I was doing.”

“And we both failed,”

“You haven’t failed yet.”

Strulovitch looked long into his guest’s fierce, melancholy eyes. His own were undistinguished, a pearly, uncertain grey, the colour of the North Sea on a blustery day. Shylock’s were deep ponds of pitted umber, like old oil paint that had somehow — not by restoration, more by inadvertent rubbing — regained its sheen. They were dark with that Rembrandtian darkness that holds light. Ironic that when Strulovitch looked into them he felt as though he were in the crypt of a church. We are not the slightest bit alike, he thought, except in what we feel for our daughters. So what was it Gentiles saw that told them they were both Jews?

Shylock knew, from the intensity of Strulovitch’s scrutiny, what he was thinking. “No we aren’t remotely alike,” he said. “Not in appearance nor in the manner we have lived our lives. You don’t keep a kosher house, you don’t attend synagogue and I’m prepared to wager you don’t speak a word of Hebrew. So what does it mean to say we are both Jewish?”

“I’m more interested in what it means to them. What do they see that unites us?”

“Something older than themselves,” he said.

“In you, maybe…I don’t intend that unkindly.”

“I know how you intend it. But in you too. It isn’t wear and tear. It’s an inability to be indifferent. You might think you don’t believe but you’re still listening to ancient injunction.”

“That makes me no different from a Muslim or a Christian.”

“Yes it does. Christians are so anxious to accommodate to the modern they have stopped listening. They sing carols and call it faith. Before long there will be none of them left, the long interregnum will have come to an end and we’ll be back with just pagans and Jews.”

“And Muslims.”

“Yes, and Muslims, but they are out on their own, in an argument with everybody but themselves. Look at you — you are riven. Islam does not encourage the schizophrenia you live by. When a Muslim listens to ancient injunction he attends with the whole of himself and finds a sort of peace in it.”

“Peace? Iraq! Syria! Afghanistan!”

“Stop! You don’t have to name every failed country in the Middle East. I’m talking about an inner conviction of peace, however we judge the political consequences. We Jews are more self-suspicious, always wondering if it’s time to defect but knowing there’s nothing we could finally bear to defect to.”

“Not true of my daughter. She is the soul of defection.”

Shylock understood this was his cue to invite intimacy. “So this is the showdown you said you were heading for…”

For answer, Strulovitch made more coffee. He had hoped to be complimented on it but Shylock was not free with compliments. “She wants me,” Strulovitch finally confided, “to give her a date when she can bring her new boyfriend round for me to vet.”

“To vet? You get to examine him like a dog?”

“I don’t think that’s on offer. She didn’t in fact say ‘vet,’ she said ‘meet.’ I’m putting the best interpretation on it. If she wants me to meet him it means she’s serious. I’ve been fearing this hour.”

“You’re lucky she values your opinion.”

“Lucky! She’s sixteen for Christ’s sake! My opinion, as you call it, should be law.”

“She’s old enough to question law. It’s not every daughter who cares what her father thinks.”

“She doesn’t. It’s her mother she’s feeling guilty about. She believes that so long as she doesn’t alienate me she is honouring her.”

Shylock cleared his throat. “Why then are you so anxious?”

Strulovitch showed him all his ten fingers. If he were to count the reasons for his anxiety they would both be here till Judgement Day.

But he had to begin somewhere. “Here’s the ridiculous thing,” he said. “The last time she brought someone round I was expecting an uncombed boy in trainers and nose rings and the politics of…well, an uncombed boy in trainers and nose rings. He turned out to be a tutor whose politics were no better but at least he was clean.”

“And ‘not’…?”

“Of course ‘not,’ Beatrice only does ‘nots.’ I say he was clean. I should have said he was too clean. When he called me Mr. Strulovitch he gargled the word. It was as though he were washing his mouth out. The joke is that while I’m plotting ways to put Beatrice off him, she gets rid of him herself…”

“…and finds someone worse…”

“Far worse. Here I’ve been, steeling myself against the next over-principled, money-hating, ISIS-backing Judaeo-phobe with an MA in fine art she’s going to bring back from college and she hits on someone who’s probably never opened a book and certainly never heard of Noam Chomsky — a hyper-possessive uneducated uber-goy from round the corner. I’ve no idea how or where she met him. At a wrestling match, is my guess, or on the dodgems. But it’s my doing. I was looking for danger in the wrong place. If I hadn’t frightened her off Jewish boys by telling her she had to find one she might have met a nice quiet embroiderer of skullcaps.”

“She was never going to satisfy you. What if your embroiderer of skullcaps had been a woman?”

“I wouldn’t have minded. I don’t hanker for grandchildren.”

“You would have found something not quite right about her.”

“Maybe. But there’s something not quite right and then there’s something in every way wrong.”

“How serious is it?”

“Very, or she wouldn’t be bringing him over. She wants my blessing. That’s serious.”

“So they’ve known each other a long time.”

“She hasn’t been alive a long time. But too long for comfort. She might be sixteen now, but how old was she when she met him? And how far has it gone?”

“You could ask her.”

“She wouldn’t tell me.”

“I assume you’ve looked on her phone.”

“And on her computer. But it isn’t easy. She is guarded with more passwords than a bank vault. And I daren’t leave any trace I’ve been there. Otherwise”—he made as though to cut his throat—“I’m a dead man.”

“It could be that she isn’t hiding anything. You might find you like him.”

“It doesn’t matter whether or not I like him. He’s beyond the pale for all the obvious reasons. And then for several more.”

“So you’ve already met him?”

“Met him, no. Know of him, yes. Everyone round here knows of him. He’s a roué of repute and plays football for Stockport County.”

“And that’s bad?”

“From a football fan’s point of view it’s very bad. Stockport County isn’t even a League club. Though as a local personality he enjoys a modicum of fame. In the north anyway. He behaves badly on the field of the play, appears on television quizzes in the company of comedians, laughs like a ninny at their jokes, makes none of his own, and advertises underwear and trainers. Can you imagine having a man who advertises underwear for a son-in-law? Only on local buses, I grant you, but that somehow makes it worse. On top of everything else he has going against him he’s provincial.”

“You would prefer your daughter’s suitor to be metropolitanly unsuitable?”

“Don’t worry. He’s that too. He makes it into the gossip columns and has had I don’t know how many wives. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s married to at least one of them still. Not all that long ago he was slapped with a seven-match suspension — itself suspended — for giving a Nazi salute after scoring a goal. Apparently it was his first in two seasons.”

“His first Nazi salute?”

“His first goal.”

Shylock took a moment to digest all he’d heard. Then he asked, “Have you decided what you are going to say to him?”

“I will ask him what a Nazi’s doing with a Jewish girl?”

“I can tell you what he’ll answer. He’ll say he’s saving her from the stain of having a Jewish father.”

“Times have changed. He’ll be both too stupid and too smart to say that. He has already publicly apologised for the salute which he puts down to a moment of excitement. He says he only intended to punch the air. He says he doesn’t know where the Nazi bit came from. And he’s promised he will never do it again. What if he sees Beatrice as a way of making amends?”

“He could be genuine.”

“Genuinely what?”

Shylock looked out towards Alderley Edge, as though the word he needed could be out there. “Penitential?”

“It’s not a term I associate with him, I have to say.”

“You could be wrong.”

“And how will I ever know that?”

“There are ways of finding out.”

“What? By putting the question to him directly? Are you penitent, Mr. Howsome? He’ll think that’s a fancy way of asking him to take a penalty. Score and you get to sleep with my daughter.”

“Which isn’t all that wide of the mark. You could tell him if he really wants your blessing there’ll be a price. He will have to make himself suitable.”

“Suitable? What — divorce his other wives? Take elocution lessons?”

Shylock didn’t bother to reply. There was mischief, Strulovitch thought, in his silence. A make-believe malevolence.

Strulovitch raised an eyebrow. “You’re not saying he should convert?”

“Begin the process at least. Show willing.”

Strulovitch laughed. “There are a few more obstacles in the way of his converting than there were in the way of yours.”

“There was only one obstacle in the way of my converting — my invincible hostility to Christianity. Your future son-in-love has a soft spot for Jewish women, you say, which is likely to make him more malleable. And his not reading is also to your advantage. It helps to be theologically illiterate.”

“This isn’t only about what he might find acceptable.”

“No indeed, there are the father-in-law’s wishes to be taken into consideration also. I don’t minimise the difficulties. But they are not insuperable.”

And with that he made a scissors motion with his furred fingers that caused Strulovitch to think first about Matisse, and then the red-legged scissor-man in Struwwelpeter, and finally the Jew of the fevered medieval imagination who kidnapped Christian children and castrated them.

“God fucking Almighty!” he said.