The Queen of Tuesday

by Darin Strauss

  —

  ISIDORE’S FATHER IN a short-sleeve button-down had pretty much commanded him: “Walk with me to the bedroom to speak to your flesh and blood.”

  This had been before that Havana-Madrid evening—a couple Thanksgivings ago, in fact, at Jacob’s house in Boro Park. (At this point, Isidore thought he’d never get to do with Lucille the things they would later do in that dressing room.)

  A second time—“Isidore, come!”—Jacob pretty much decreed that Isidore excuse himself from his wife and children in the living room and join him for a confab. “Let’s go.”

  1949–50: That autumn had been full, lies had been told there. Jacob had seen Isidore at Trump’s party—had seen Isidore the first time he’d kissed Lucille.

  “Me and you?” Isidore said. “Now?”

  “Somebody better? Come to my bedroom.”

  Once alone with his father, Isidore began the chat by talking work, even though he kind of knew his father wanted to discuss something else.

  “Okay, I called up that shadkhen from Moses’s office,” Isidore was saying.

  (Yiddish he spoke only when in the presence of his father, whose own English had remained unleavened.)

  Robert Moses, city construction coordinator, planned to get insurance companies to invest, without interest, in moderate-rental housing. Jacob believed there was no way this would happen. Isidore believed differently—and that’s why he and Norman had been constructing affordable homes for G.I. Bill grads.

  “Numbers, though?”

  “Yes,” Isidore said.

  “Yes? What yes? You want maybe to share them?” Jacob said.

  “Almost thirty-seven hundred families, the guy said,” Isidore told his father. “Also, they may have Liberty National.”

  Jacob sounded his astonishment with a whistle. He sat on his bed, snaking a thick red tie through his collar.

  There was also something called the Mitchell-Lama bill, another plan to goose moderate-income building: the city loaning up to ninety-five percent of project costs to a few lucky housing companies, the state handing out big tax-abatements, the feds ponying up government-subsidized land.

  “Probably won’t happen till next election, though.”

  “Ah, okay, you see.” Jacob wasn’t able to keep satisfaction from his voice. “I knew it wouldn’t go perfect. I’m sorry,” he gloated.

  White chest hair squiggled through the open buttons of the old man’s shirt.

  The overall feeling you got from Jacob’s big new house (or, his second wife’s big new house): A polite hush is better than a conversation, and family is to be slipcovered against.

  “And, Dad, the state—”

  “Enough.” Jacob held up a hand. “Governor Dewey is not what I asked you in to talk. Months I’ve held my tongue. Months. You know what I’m going to say, correct?”

  “No,” Isidore lied. He felt, at almost thirty-nine, sixteen again.

  “Come on, Mr. Smart Head,” Jacob said. “Mr. Brain.”

  The hush of two men who knew each other intensely—and intensely didn’t. Jacob was doing his cuff links.

  Maybe you only reach adulthood when your parents turn over the keys to their maturity. When they say, after their lessons and advice, their little road tests: Take it out of the garage; it’s yours now. I can’t drive it anymore. But once you come back, they frown over the nicks in the fender, the dinged panels, the passage of time and accident.

  “It’s a shandeh,” Jacob said at last: a sin. “Stay at home. You won’t wear out your shoes. You follow me?”

  Isidore was going to say, You think I haven’t thought about sin? A mere kiss—is that a sin? Isidore wondered. Is it? It’s not as if I’ll ever get to do more with her….

  “Dad,” he found himself whispering. “My wife is in the living room. My children. My mother-in-law. Okay?”

  Jacob was small but forceful, intimidating. But it takes just tiny changes—earlobe hair, a wavy forehead vein—to dim some of the power of a man’s face.

  “Would you think I was in the wrong,” Jacob said, “if I tell Harriet what I saw?”

  Isidore snapped to, felt the crisis of the moment and his father’s heavy gaze on him. Oh, Dad! Jacob Strauss, born Stromolofsky, had been the only Jew in Yustingrad—to hear the old man tell it, maybe the only Jew in Russia—to have broken horses for the Cossacks. That’s the kind of rider, the kind of brave young boy. Ramshackle stables at the edge of a Russian tableland. A long stretch of green and straw—and at dinnertime, six or seven Cossacks sitting on hay bales, looking up at some surprise. What surprise? A little Jew, ten, eleven tops, chin pitched high, shoulders back. I’ll show you Russians how to ride this fucking horse. The Cossacks jostled to their feet—Ha!—wiping supper grease on their pants. Go home, little Yid. Make tracks. This horse will break your Semitic ass. Nearby: an untamed reddish-brown Arabian trotter, its hooves stamping dirt, its terrible glorious nostrils. Just looking at the stallion’s flanks seemed to press a bruise on Jacob’s scrawny legs. One of you godforsaken pricks lift my Semitic ass onto this horse already. And the men looked at one another. The origins of the first warrior Cossacks are uncertain. The People of the Prairies: self-governing and Jew-hating Tartars, loyal only to the czar. This was happening at the foot of the bluish Ural Mountains, on the Great Steppe. The horse’s large black eyes were lighted purple by the sunset. Here and there, you could see smoke from the prairie catch like cotton in the trees.

  Three years later, a friend among these Cossacks would warn Jacob about the imminent pogrom—the Jew slaughter they were planning. My brothers-in-arms will smear the dirt with your people. From there, it was the same old immigrant tale. Jacob’s parents (Oh, Jakeleh, how we love you, our youngest son; take care of yourself) fled Yustingrad, walking down the Siemiatycze-Bialystok Road and right out of this story. Jacob, at fourteen, didn’t follow. He sailed alone to New York. Illusions lifted him in their fist and carried him to America. And then they let go.

  He had no English or money. And the older brother who had already been living in Brooklyn, the one who was supposed to meet him—Nathan, called Nitsky—got the date wrong. So the young, impoverished infidel had to find his own way, illiterate in Christian America, to the Migrant Relief Organization. Then to a swarming collective apartment, a job in a hat factory; to owning, after twelve years, a rival hat factory; then to employing that deadbeat brother of his (Nitsky, who had known, it turned out, the correct date of his brother’s arrival). Finally, during the Depression, enterprising Jacob became a giltbal halwwá, a lender, no shame in that; in impossibly short order, Jacob splashed his money all over. On foreclosed buildings in Brooklyn mostly, some steals in Manhattan, 554 Broadway, 126 Joralemon, then a few office towers. He had left all the madness behind. The crazy pervasive Hasidim and the crazy forgotten Mitnaggedim, all the blood hatreds of old Naberezhnaya Street. And the questions of theodicy that vanish in that new place when God is either so good or no good to you. Point A, as they said here, to Point B. That seventeenth-century stable on the Polish border—with the horse whose eye looked like sunset—to Jacob’s seventeen-story cash cow in Tin Pan Alley. He returned to religion, as so many Jews do, in old age. That ancient hedge, the old stories, the papyrus dreams of an enduring people. How else can a proud man with a big chest deal with the fact of his own dwindling? Either he’d persist or his people would.

  And still, years later, in this house fragrant with Thanksgiving, it was Jacob’s son Isidore who hoped that the old macher might actually tell him something hopeful now, something that perched in the soul and sang the tune. But Jacob’s advice was his own life. Which couldn’t be lived now anyway, because of all the things the whole generation of men like the old man had done.

  “Dad, I don’t know. I’m sad, but I don’t regret it. Anyway, you wouldn’t tell Harriet. Not really.”

  The old man t
apped his forehead with his finger. “If I let her know what I saw,” Jacob said, a stern kindness, “maybe you would stop your dreaming, finally. You might in your life open your eyes.”

  Isidore’s hands whipped upward.

  “Jesus, are you…I mean, even discussing it now is, is—”

  Jacob mocked: “ ‘Jesus,’ he says. Jesus? Who’s he?” Jacob attracted the eye; when he lowered his face, it was a silencing rebuke. Even the old man’s baldness seemed the result of powerful thought: the hair having slipped down the sides of the head, the brain pushing up on the skull like a fist stretching a balloon.

  “But when your mother was alive,” Jacob said, “do you think I ever would kiss—”

  “No. No.”

  Jacob didn’t look up at his son, until he did.

  “I owned, as you know, a factory by the time I was twenty-six. And you,” he said. “You’re given a nice career with your father, it’s not enough. You get a nice family—not enough.”

  Isidore now had his turn to point his head floorward: the pose of contrition. Even this was about Isidore not having wanted to be a builder.

  Contrition was something he knew his father required and that he himself maybe even felt.

  “The past year, I—” Isidore began.

  He wanted to be sorry. But the beach birds swinging around overhead, the brick that felt heavy in the palm, and Trump’s shattering cathedral of glass: It was all, still, so vivid! His chosen picture of himself.

  He let in a silence. Or, more specifically, he was asking, in silence, with silence, for help. This wasn’t apology. It was solicitation. Please, Dad. What do I do?

  The old man had wanted to be asked for guidance. That was why he’d summoned his son to this room. But Jacob—having been asked, more or less—now just said, “Fine, fine.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Isidore, you’ve got this Maimonides streak, only it’s all cockeyed. A person is allowed to enjoy and not feel guilty about everything.” The old man glanced with longing at the slipcover on the sofa. “For, okay, one example, it’s all right for a man to enjoy his money. A good livelihood is a cure for lots of ills.”

  “Oh?” Isidore said. He hadn’t expected to laugh. “A bunch of great men say no: Gandhi, et cetera. Your friend Jesus.”

  “Not my friend,” Jacob said. “So in this example, you’re Jesus? You’re Gandhi?” He snorted. “You do something wrong, enjoy it, move on. You don’t want to do it again, don’t. After the wedding, it’s late to have regrets.”

  “That’s it?” Isidore said. “That’s the advice?”

  “I’m trying to be a father here, Mr. Jesus.”

  “This is trying?”

  “This,” Jacob said, “is me trying.”

  * * *

  —

  LATER, AT THE Thanksgiving table, Isidore thought that he’d spent his adult life as a hill that asked to be leveled. But now I want to be a mountain.

  Harriet was making some nice dinner conversation about Great Neck—sweet of her; she hated Great Neck. “It’s like Manhattan,” she often said when they were alone, “but without the tall buildings and wit.” This in somebody else would’ve been resentment, or comedy, but from Harriet, the words came in a sort of a baffled quiet. He felt both gratitude and dissatisfied. Don’t blame her. If love goes, there’s an uncertainty, and if you weren’t careful, dislike tumbled into it.

  Isidore made a show of leaning to peck her cheek, which was an absorbent little place, a parched acre thirsty for the watering of his kiss.

  Isidore’s father had invited Harriet’s mother tonight. And here his mother-in-law was, slighting Isidore, slyly, by bragging about her own son Melvy. And to Isidore’s left, his young brother Phil just talked baseball. Finished off by the Yanks in four. Shame the Whiz Kids put up such little fight! Isidore didn’t want to talk baseball, didn’t want his emotion for Lucille merely to fizzle.

  “Phil,” he said, as if waking. “I was remembering that party. You remember the one?”

  And Phil turned. The smile, the thrilled eyes—he remembered; the arrow had struck him severely, too. “And now look at her!” Phil said, as if it’d been on his mind, too. “The biggest star in the world!”

  * * *

  —

  NOW, ISIDORE’S LUCILLE has for months been the biggest star (His Lucille? Ha!), and he allows himself to think of running off with her only once a week, as a kind of gift—a reward for making it six days without giving serious consideration to leaving his world. A gift to replace the gift he really wanted, the gift he’d never open.

  Ah, Hold-on, Lucille had said, if you were to try, I’d like it. And my hat on her head, and nothing on her body.

  Yet he rarely has time to wallow. His brother and business partner Norman won’t let him.

  “Hey,” Norman says, “you never told me, all right?” Doubt sharpening his voice: Enough of this shit. We have work to focus on. And so Isidore invented a reason to focus on work.

  NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE

  JANUARY 30, 1952, REAL ESTATE SECTION

  BUILDERS MAKE

  HEADWAY

  IN L.I. PROJECT

  Harry L. Osias, builder, started construction on the Meridian, an apartment building for seventy-eight families…

  [Fifth paragraph of fourteen:]

  …Successes in other Westbury developments were announced. Isidore and Norman Strauss report selling ninety-one dwellings in the past month….

  At first, Isidore tries to find satisfaction in making something real, something that would help people and would leave a mark in the world. Whatever other craziness gunks up his life, that would be tangible, and good.

  But it didn’t feel like enough.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  MARCH 11, 1952, REAL ESTATE SECTION

  TRACTS IN GREAT NECK, L.I. CHOSEN

  BY BUILDERS FOR NEW HOME GROUPS

  [Fourth paragraph of twelve:]

  …Other developers, Isidore and Norman Strauss, builders of University Gardens, L.I., reported the completion and sale of twenty dwellings this weekend….

  By federally insuring mortgages, early fifties legislation—along with the interest-free loans—called Property Men like a siren to empty suburban fields. This encouraged builders to slap together single-family homes, tract houses with low-shingled brows. (In Levittown, in Roslyn, in the rudely named Hicksville.) So maybe Isidore can be bold and make something epic of himself here. Building Long Island. The way Lucille built television. There must be famous builders, glamorous Property Men. Look at Fred Trump. Or maybe don’t.

  The government’s intention—“to secure a homeowning workforce in affordable housing accessible to major centers of employment”—was actually, if unintentionally, pretty much an uppercut thrown right at the brittle chin of “urban renewal.” It urged the middle class of New York City to abandon middle-class New York City. Isidore saw this. But he also saw, in his imagination, and more than once, some stoic war veteran, his eyes shimmering, closing on a new, affordable house; coming from the train to the comfort of a lighted window upstairs.

  LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY

  MARCH 27, 1952

  L.I. CONSTRUCTION CONTINUES BRISK

  AS BUILDERS PLAN MORE HOMES

  IN L.I. PROJECT

  [Third paragraph of twelve:]

  Builders Isidore and Norman Strauss have purchased for development fifty-four acres of farmland….

  A working man’s quarter-acre can seem immense, if only to him. Sitting on grass—his grass—with his kids, a warm night, the stars overhead also his to contemplate. Pretending, at least subconsciously, that his ancestors had not arrived from a ghetto in the Pale but were the proud issue of some never-existed America/Ashkenaz amalgam. Clipped lawns and barbecue and kinky hair. There was so much that Isidore used to feel were among li
fe’s most solemn, fullest rewards. And now? Had Technicolor love screened its Hollywood footage for him just long enough to keep day-to-day life from ever again seeming tolerable?

  * * *

  —

  HARRY TRUMAN’S FAIR DEAL—everyone has a chance to live a better life! Especially in New York, where Mayor Impellitteri and even Governor Dewey promise homes for anyone. It’s hard to say whether principles of fairness have actually been advanced. This troubles Isidore. That predominantly black areas are blocked off from predominantly white areas, that New York is a drivable chessboard, light squares, dark squares. He is troubled. In theory. But what does he do about it?

  I will stand against Norman and sell to a black family—after we really get established, he tells himself, with just about believable conviction.

  At night, he reads history and hopes to do something more creative and comes across a squib about the 38th United States Colored Infantry Regiment and thinks, if someone were to tell this patriotic story, the brave black soldier’s life, it might help things. And be glamorous enough to be worthy of her.

  NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE

  APRIL 6, 1952, REAL ESTATE SECTION

  LUXURY-TYPE HOUSES ON L.I.

  Strauss Concern Starts Construction of

  Final Thirty Dwellings in 175-Family

  Development at University Gardens

  Thirty dwellings will be erected in the 106-acre village of University Gardens in Great Neck, L.I., to complete a 175-family community, it was announced yesterday by Isidore and Norman Strauss, builders.

  LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY

  JULY 13, 1952

  L.I.ERS FIND