The Queen of Tuesday

by Darin Strauss

  Even from the beginning, Isidore and I slept on far shores on the bed, my grandmother thinks.

  * * *

  —

  HARRIET TAKES HALF a month in Puerto Rico every January on her husband’s dime. Not-quite-husband. She’s here alone now. Harriet hasn’t seen Isidore in three years and hasn’t lived with him for six. She takes two weeks on this warm island every winter. It’s more or less the only time she sets foot outside—the one sortie flown away from base—and these trips seem, to the rest of the family, not just an anomaly, but inexplicable. A person can un-hermit herself? Just like that? Her “husband” pays for everything—the husband who’s lived with her onetime best friend for more than half a decade. It’s 1977, and Harriet is sixty-something and an alcoholic.

  What she feels when recollecting her marriage is the pushing hand on her back, the tripping foot across her shin. Her outrage doesn’t lessen.

  If she still has friends at home, they’ve slipped her mind. Her best buddy here is the gay man who rents her this hacienda (or rents it to her absent “husband,” for her)—the guy’s name is Reed, and he’s the manager of the U.N. hotel in New York. His brother died four years ago in a plane crash. And so now Reed has this extra hacienda, next to the one that he already owned with his companion, Steve. And every night on this trip she’s seen Reed and Steve for cocktails, and nothing is as it is in Great Neck. Maybe because she’s not chugging beers ashamedly, she can drink with self-control here. “Are they called cocktails because they lead to such raunchy stories?” she, who never before said the word cock in vain, said last night.

  “Hi, Reed,” she calls now—Reed has come out to his porch, greeting the sun with mock-Hestonian enthusiasm, hands raised and arms stretched, Egyptian or Hebrew, I am still Moses! Meanwhile, she is unsteady on her feet. It is four P.M., and Harriet is plastered. She laughs. Forget that self-control stuff. Her tiredness from having swum—a contented fatigue—comes out as a little sigh.

  How often has she laughed since Isidore? Five times a year, each in January, she thinks. Harriet looks at her face in the window. Can people see what she sees in the skin? The fleck of disbelief still there in her expression.

  Abandoned? says her face. Me?

  Ask her when it all went wrong. She’ll say that damn party the Kramers threw for the graduating students of Arthur’s elementary school. Well, you can’t really isolate a thing like this so exactly, she tells herself. But that party was really when it got—

  But why think of that now?

  He would kiss me, and I would let him do more, and that was how we started. (“Isaac, right?” she had said once. “Is it Isaac?” “Isidore,” he’d answered. “It’s Isidore.”)

  * * *

  —

  HER MARRIAGE IS a tall city she’s sailing away from. Harriet can still see the whole skyline, the uptown and the downtown; the faces in the windows. But it shrinks as it gets farther from her. So now her mind—often—reaches back for it.

  A young dark-haired man had come up Brooklyn’s Fifty-third Street, near Avenue D. A Great Depression springtime, early 1930s. The afternoon had started like any other in East Flatbush that April—bleakly uneventful. Brooklyn was green, brown, and gray. That neighborhood’s desperation was obvious, in those sidewalks, in the doors boarded with pinewood. The streets, this far from Prospect Park, had been sealed into the cement of the sky. Young Harriet lived there. Grass like whiskers had nudged up from cracks in the sidewalk.

  On this afternoon, she sat alone out on her stoop, where it was pleasant—to get away from her mother, if you must know.

  “Why, hi there,” the young, dark-haired man said coming up to her. “It’s you?”

  She’s now forgotten how or where, but they’d met once before this.

  “Isaac, right?” she said. “Is it Isaac?”

  “Isidore,” he said, and you couldn’t help but notice his soft lips. And it was no longer a bleak two P.M out in East Flatbush; it was suddenly the smiles and loosened-tie hour.

  “Nice car you’ve got there, Isidore,” she said.

  Isidore hadn’t had a car with him. He was walking a 1932 Schwinn up the sidewalk. (The Depression found its second wind, and you’d often see grown men riding bicycles down the street.) Isidore then was a tall strong thing, early twenties, with a witty look in his long black eyes.

  “Busted cylinder head on my Packard,” he told her. “So all week I’ve got this two-wheeled hot rod”—he kicked his tire in affectionate derision.

  “A Packard, huh?”

  The rest is all elusive. Isidore wore a broad-shouldered sport jacket, was Gable-haired and -browed; in fact, his eyes looked ringed by eyeliner. He was in the neighborhood doing a work errand for his father, he said—looking for a building they might buy. She felt her polite smile loosen into something authentic.

  They’d been introduced—it comes back now, so many years later—weeks before at a Lionel Hampton show and had chatted. He’d been there with Mabel Schwartz. Harriet had known Mabel from Kutsher’s, kind of a motormouth girl, not the kind of person she would’ve thought Isidore would like. Not that she knew him at all yet. But with his shy charm he’d seemed—

  Friday night? Friday night would be, gosh, Friday night would be swell.

  Isidore stood admiring her slim, elegant figure, the rigid shoulders, the thin, pale wrists, the eyes that were the sad part of her.

  “Great,” he said. “We can recapture the times we haven’t quite had yet.”

  * * *

  —

  AND THEN IT was that giddy, appointed night; she let him take her to the Roseland Ballroom, where they heard Jerry Wall and His Famous Orchestra. Oh, just a club soda, thanks—I get tipsy. And then two hours of restrained swing. And next, Sunday afternoon—protocol be damned—just two days after the Roseland, she joined Isidore and his five-year-old brother, Phil, at the Prospect Park Carousel, the parade grounds elated with sunlight. Five-cent rides; laughs. 1932, ’33, something like that. An old-world polka blaring as the horses spun. Harriet feeling every 1930s unmarried woman’s urgencies around a single man. Yet she wasn’t shy with this one. At some point the sky clouded and stormed. She felt nervous and glad. As it thundered she moved close to Isidore, under a canopy and the heavy wing of attraction. Standing intimately. Fists of rain punching the slate roof. The bodily awareness of his hand almost touching hers. Isidore giving her the sort of aimed look that demands a response. And the rain ended, just when she wished it would. That almost hushed park, that sparkly grass, that dreamy complicit winking world.

  Little Philip rode the wooden horse, and she and Isidore disappeared behind a column. “Oh, now?” Harriet said, after Isidore told her it was getting late. “You want to—end the afternoon?”

  She felt her cheeks go warm and herself about to do something. This wasn’t like her. She took Isidore’s jaw in her thin fingers. As if surprised by her actions she swallowed, then raised her parted lips voluptuously.

  The snips of her teeth hinted against his mouth. She kept her eyes open the whole kiss.

  “How do you like them apples?” she said after. It sounded fake, a foreign idiom she’d picked up. What am I doing? she thought. This isn’t me. But she could see her forwardness intrigued him. Isidore looked in her eyes, squeezed her close to him. She opened her mouth to his, again.

  Harriet had gone out with other men, been romanced. The telephone at Neergaard Pharmacy on Fifty-third Street (her family didn’t have a phone) often would ring for her. The cry would toll down the block: “Harriet! Another caller!” But there was something about this Isidore Strauss fellow—sure, he had money, and maybe that was part of it, a class thing that looked like loftiness—but mostly it was the intelligence, the gravity, the decency. She didn’t find that in other Brooklyn boys. It made her feel relaxed around another person, maybe for the first time.

  She w
as not a complete innocent about getting boys; no woman in that prelapsarian era could be. Harriet held a wide expertise—what women then had instead of men’s baseball stats and carburetor fluency. How best to use light to accent shadow. That was something she knew. How posture could play up what you had to play up and just where, in relation to the door, a woman might stand to catch a man’s eye. How lipstick can draw attention from the nose. Applied cosmetics, instilled behavior. But with him, she was bold. Back at that Lionel Hampton show, for example, Harriet had noticed Mabel Schwartz sitting beside this handsome man who filled out his well-cut sport coat. Well, hi, Mabel. Hello. And then what choice did Mabel have but, grimly, to say: Isidore Strauss, this is Harriet Joseph.

  “Lionel Hampton fan, are you, Miss Joseph?”

  And she’d responded, “Not many people enjoy the vibraphone, and I think it’s perfectly worthwhile as an instrument—expressive, if the right person is playing.”

  And Isidore noticed.

  “Oh, well thanks, but they’re just my opinions.” A blush. Then she added, “I play the piano. A little.”

  Then she’d caught Mabel trying not to frown. I’m usually so shy! Harriet thought. Finally, a man who makes me feel myself!

  Her first boyfriend—a kiss, a hand sweaty on her breast—was one of her father’s Irish friends’ sons. Danny Baker wouldn’t marry a Jew (and who thought about marrying him?). He was so intent on never drinking that he’d been no fun to go steady with, anyway. Harriet could seem serious at times, but she loved to dance, loved wearing big quirky hats.

  She lived with her grandfather, her siblings (seventeen-year-old Lottie and seven-year-old Melvy), and her parents. “Not true, Mother,” she said. “I am looking for a husband. Tell me where to look.”

  Her father was a nonreligious man who had ears like handles on a loving-cup trophy—old-world ears; Franz Kafka ears—and he often got called a chronic dawdler. He looked for real work. He did! But was he to take something beneath what he thought a Joseph was worth? Eventually his wife gave up smiling, even at her husband’s best tries. Also, he was having trouble breathing—emphysema. He finally got a job as a janitor, “the ambitionless dummy’s trade,” he called it. That’s when his father, flat broke too, moved in. And Harriet, the oldest child, got her first job. And her father’s breathing grew worse. And Harriet’s love life became the family avocation.

  After Danny Baker, Harriet had gone with Saul Renman, her milkman beau, whom her family often confused with David Shondman, her beau of the month before, who’d been a postman. The two mans with their -man jobs. She didn’t know how precisely to define husband material, per se. But she did know that Saul Renman and David Shondman were men, or mans, whose lives she’d skim across at the edges, or who would skim across hers. A kiss. An inconsequential walk through the unchaperoned park.

  The 1930s in middle-class Brooklyn was a time of negligible intimacy between daters. Not just sexual intimacy. Intimacy of any sort was rare. A few clever statements or even a single revealing discussion pushed lovers to the altar. It seemed enough; birds made their homes out of straw and twigs.

  Other callers were still ringing Harriet on the Neergaard drugstore phone when she and Isidore planned their third date. “You have some tomato or something under your lip,” she said, pointing at schmutz. “Not tomato. Blood,” he said, smiling. “I helped my father negotiate today and we took no prisoners.”

  There was something about this Isidore fellow. He had a handsome chest and even if he was shy sometimes, his dark brown eyes told the whole story. (It had been tomato on his chin, not blood.)

  Harriet’s personality could arch its back and toss its hair for him. “I think Hemingway,” Harriet said, “is better in his short stories”—having brought up books, a subject she knew he liked. It was a point of pride for her to appear more thoughtful than other neighborhood girls—not that she didn’t know at least some other thoughtful girls; but unlike them, Harriet allowed herself to come off as thoughtful—and she could tell this meant something to Isidore.

  Without great talent or extreme beauty, she had to be strategic like an admiral facing a blockade, looking for a way in.

  “I think so about Hemingway too,” Isidore said. “I’m not even a fan of Hemingway, you want the truth.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Who then do you like?”

  Still, it wasn’t merely that she enjoyed being smart around him; she began to enjoy being smart, period. Like putting aside a little extra food for yourself. The world in that era and her family gave her little practice and opportunity to act smart. Still, Isidore and she had some real things to say to each other.

  She shared her enthusiasms: Sinatra and Goodman and the mourned Bix Beiderbecke. Once, in a taxi, they talked about the social atmosphere—Jewish, middle class—in which they both felt constrained. On this narrow pole of confidence they raised the courtship a bit higher.

  Almost midnight, Saturday at the soda counter: “Harun Omar and Master Hafiz, keep your dead beautiful ladies. Mine is a little lovelier than any of your ladies were,” Isidore recited, softly, with a little self-conscious look over his shoulder. He didn’t know any more by heart. It had been enough. She hadn’t thought for that second about where she was, the grime on the counter, the shadows out the late window.

  She told him it reminded her of Walt Whitman, is it “I Wandered Like a Cloud”? Some Whitman poem, anyway.

  “Who’re you calling a cloud?” he said. That Strauss mix of shy and blabbing.

  There were men whom (unbeknownst to the men themselves) she’d lined up behind Isidore in a notional chain. Very quickly now the chain was cut, and these men fell away. Bye, Saul Renman. Marriage in the 1930s had to be—six dates into a courtship—seriously considered. Bye, David Shondman. It was the golden age of the insouciant cigarette, and many women just as casually plucked a fiancé out of the pack.

  Also, why wouldn’t Harriet feel discontent? That little apartment; father’s throat of woofs and howls; mother’s anger; those sad, short curtains. She had the feeling that everything in her life was kind of cramped.

  “I heard he’s rich,” Harriet’s cousin Esther said at Rosh Hashanah dinner. The family had a complicated attitude about money. The proud Josephs, progeny of scholars, thought cash would sprout in their pockets because they were beyond digging for it.

  “A rich boyfriend?” said another of Harriet’s cousins. “Tell.”

  Harriet’s mother, from the far side of the table—her hearing was only good when her daughter was being discussed—cut in. “Money doesn’t care who has it.”

  “I suppose Isidore is rich,” Harriet said.

  “Who?” Esther said. “We still on Harriet’s beau?”

  And a hail of coughs came from her parents’ bedroom, repeated bronchospasms, heaves, roars.

  “Oh, she supposes he’s rich,” said the other cousin.

  “I’ll go check on Pop,” said Harriet.

  She did like, in an abstract way, that Isidore’s family had money. But that was beside the point. He was tall and handsome, and even when you left him, his dark eyes held your hand all the way down the street.

  That’s why I’m not shy around him, she thought—and only him.

  Her friends and cousins were all either looking for a man or had just been discarded by a man, and this gave her romance the texture of something fated—an arbitrary happenstance she rendered as It’s meant to be.

  “He’s already taking you to his parents, my word,” said Esther on Yom Kippur.

  She kissed Isidore later that night with gratefulness. Isidore said, “What I want is, if I could take you to my family’s house for dinner every week.” He smiled. “I like to see them seeing how nice you are.”

  “And then later in the week, we can see a movie?” she asked.

  “And maybe this time”—his fingertips touched her face�
��“we actually watch the movie?”

  With this, she’d blushed, said in a whisper, “I hope not.”

  “I’ll sign up for a double feature of not watching,” he said. And it had been like there were windows in her mind, and every one of them had gotten thrown open all at once.

  He will kiss me, and I will let him go on without stopping him, she’d thought.

  * * *

  —

  HARRIET HAS TO stop remembering these moments from her youth. It makes her feel slathered in embarrassment.

  Isidore had asked her to marry him at Coney Island. The sun, the whoops and screams, the salt air. I do.

  In the beginning of her marriage, Harriet found that—entering that invisible structure, the airy beams and girders of matrimony—everything was sunlit and warm. “How about the Copa this evening, Harriet?” “That’s just what I was going to suggest, Iz.” She was aware of this invisible structure without thinking much about it, as you’re aware of the sun even when you don’t see the light it casts. There also came the knowledge that what you were doing—even the prison-break sensation of leaving your mother; even the sex—was somehow not wicked but endorsed by society. (The first laundry she did as a housewife involved cleaning the blood-dotted sheet on which she’d lost her virginity.) She’d passed on details to her sister after the honeymoon, a blushed half-story—a kitchen secret, over dishwater bubbles.

  “That was, wow, that was nice,” Isidore’d said, a few grains from the sand of sleep having already entered his voice.

  What should I say? she’d thought. It was nice? The fan purred and kneaded the warm air. I never knew I’d enjoy it so much? This was late on a Friday night. That I feel wicked and virtuous when I’m naked with you? “Thank you,” she said.