He nodded, reached into his pocket for a Camel and his nickel Zippo lighter. “I come here when I want to be alone.”
“What do you do?”
“I read.” He pushed on the door to the shack. Its rusting hinges groaned, then opened. Inside was a tiny room, a simple pine table, an old kitchen chair, a kerosene lamp, a faded rag rug. “I think.” He rubbed his nose with the back of a wide hand. “Sometimes I write.”
Herman waved her in. There wasn’t room for two, so he stood in the open doorway.
“Sit,” he said as if he were speaking to Molly. Emma did as she was told.
She ran her fingers across the top of the table, its unfinished pine worn smooth with use.
“What do you write?”
“Letters.”
“To whom?”
“To Leo and Esther and Mo.”
Emma watched dust motes floating in the golden sunlight. Herman’s eyes were huge behind his thick glasses.
“Do they ever write back?”
“No.” Herman laughed. “I’m not that crazy.” He pulled off his baseball cap and scratched his head. “It just makes me feel closer. I miss them, you know.”
Emma nodded. Herman’s brothers and sister had died in a death camp twenty-odd years ago. Before he told her about it, she had never heard of the Holocaust. It wasn’t something she’d ever been taught at West Cypress High.
He stood there for a moment, staring while faces long dead smiled their turns upon a stage only he could see. Then Emma sneezed. “Come on.” He waved her outside again and brushed aside some leaves. They sat perched above the shack’s little yard on a flat rock.
Emma felt that Herman wanted to change the subject now, but she couldn’t let go yet.
“Do you miss Jennie Lou too?”
He reached over and squeezed her hand. “You know I do.”
“How can you miss someone who never was? I mean, even if she was your daughter, she only lived four days, and that was so long ago.”
Herman nodded. “When Bernie was a year and a half old. She’d be just about your age.”
Emma nodded. She walked with him sometimes across the railroad tracks, then down the road to the tiny churchyard where his baby daughter was buried. His wife Mary Ann had never gone, not once in all those years had she walked the path to the graveyard door. “She can’t,” Herman said. But he could. He placed flowers from their yard, sweet peas, roses, petunias, in a china vase shaped like a baby lamb. And she knew that when he looked at her across that little grave he saw in part the grown Jennie Lou.
“What do you write to them about, to Leo, and Esther, and Mo?”
“My cucumbers. How my scallions are doing.”
Emma slapped at him. “Okay, forget it.”
Then Herman shifted, sat cross-legged in his baggy khakis facing her. His smile faded. “I write them about things I’m worried about. Last week I wrote on the trouble that’s coming now for the Negroes.”
They watched leaves fall for a few minutes. Then she spoke. “I wonder sometimes what it would be like to go to school with a Negro. To have one for a friend. What were they like in the Army, Herman?”
“Like people. Good and bad. Nice and mean. Tall and short.”
“Did you eat with them?”
“Emma,” he laughed, “we ate, talked, played poker, slept, crapped—we did everything together. It was the Army.”
“It’s just hard to imagine. I mean, when you think about it, it’s one thing, but in real life…it’s another.”
Herman picked up a stick and played with it.
“Well, you’ll have your chance to see it all.”
“You think things are going to change here? Will there be trouble?”
“No way around it.” He leaned back and squinted. “Good people are going to die all over the South before this is over. But here? I don’t think so. Probably not.”
“Then what do you mean I’ll see it all?”
Herman looked into her eyes as if in them he could read her future. She stood, waiting with her hands on her hips for his answer.
“Do you think you’re always going to live in West Cypress, kiddo?”
“I hope not.”
“So where are you going?”
Emma shrugged. “New Orleans, maybe. Atlanta. New York. San Francisco. Bernie and I talk about it sometimes, but we never decide.”
“He wants to go where you go.”
“Well…yes,” she answered, not seeing, out of stubbornness, the point Herman was making.
For Herman knew that Emma thought she loved Bernie, and she did, in her own way. But he knew that even if she loved him with her whole heart, his son, his beloved son, was merely going to slow this girl down. It would be years before anyone could lasso Emma. And he felt sorry for any poor bastard who tried. “Why stay so close to home? Why not Paris?”
“Well, hell, Herman, why not Katmandu?”
“Why not?”
Emma thought for a minute. This was her way into what she’d been thinking about for days. This was her opening.
“When you left Poland, wasn’t it lonesome to leave behind everybody you ever knew?”
“Sure, but sometimes you don’t have a choice.”
“If I go away, I’ll miss you.”
“Me too, sweetheart.”
Emma stood up, stretched, swung her arms in a big circle.
“What’s on your mind?” Herman asked.
“You know what you were talking about earlier, about missing people who are dead, who you never knew really, like Jennie Lou?”
“Yep.”
“I miss people I don’t know, too,” she said.
Herman looked up at her, waiting.
“I miss all the relatives on my daddy’s side I never met. And the others I know but never see.” You’re getting warm, Emma, but you’re not there yet. Do it.
“Well, everybody does that,” Herman said. “Families don’t live together like they used to. Back in the old country they were all around you forever. Their noses in your business till you were sick of them, feh!”
This is it, she thought. Don’t back away. Don’t laugh at Herman’s joke. Say it now.
“I miss my mother, Herman.”
Herman laughed, “What do you mean, you miss your mother? She probably misses you, too. You’re always here or off with Bernie. As much as I love you, you know you ought to go home every once in a while, Emmale.”
“I mean my real mother.”
“Mein teiere Emmale, what the hell are you talking about?”
She opened her mouth and the words tumbled out. “My cousin, I mean I guess he’s my step-cousin, J.D., told me something a couple of weeks ago that I’ve always known—or anyway suspected.” She took a deep breath. “Rosalie’s not my mother, Herman.”
Herman stared at her. “You’ve had too much schnapps.”
“No, really. I’ve been looking for proof for years, when they were out, and finally, in a little suitcase at the back of the hall closet, I found it.”
“What?”
“My birth certificate.”
Herman’s eyes grew wide. “All kids think they’re adopted…but you’re not joking, are you?”
“No.” And then Emma’s heart thundered in her chest as she said the words aloud for the very first time. “Her name is Helen, Herman. It says my real mother’s name is Helen Kaplan.”
Herman picked up another stick and drew a circle in the soft blanket of leaves. What the hell was he going to say to her now? “Have you talked with them about it?”
“No.” Emma’s voice faltered. She was close to tears. “I don’t know what to do.”
Herman reached over and gathered her into a hug. The tears began in earnest then, rolling down her cheeks, her nose running, but she struggled through. “You know, I overheard little things they’d say now and then when I was growing up, and I’d ask them questions. They’d pretend they didn’t hear me. Or change the subject. They’d never talk about
the past, not like you do, it was like there was something awful there, something dirty.”
“Emma.” He hugged her closer, as if he could squeeze away her pain.
“So I’d try to trick them. I used to do things like, in the middle of supper, I’d say, ‘Daddy, could you pass the peas, please, and how did you and Momma meet?’” She smiled at the memory, laughed a little. “Like if I did it fast enough, they wouldn’t notice and would answer before they thought. And then once, I called Daddy from school, when we had to fill out some form with our mother’s maiden name. As if asking on the phone would make a difference.”
“What did he say?”
“He said ‘Norris.’”
Herman struggled for an explanation, but he didn’t understand these people. Why would they do this? But Emma was looking for an answer. “They have a reason for this, Emma. I’m sure they thought they were doing the right thing.”
“Do you think that was the right thing? To lie to me all these years? To hide that from me like it was something awful? What could be so awful, Herman?”
He shrugged. “You never know what people think. People have pain, Emma, that you don’t know about.”
“What about my pain, Herman? All that whispering and lying? It made me crazy—to wonder who I really was…am. It’s weird to know you can’t trust your parents…if they’re your parents!”
“You’re not crazy, sweetie. You’re one of the sanest people I know. Now, what are we going to do about this?”
“I don’t know. I want to talk to them.”
“And you should. But you must be very careful, Emma. Very careful. They had good reasons for what they did. They’re not bad people. Have you talked with Bernie about this?”
“Not yet, I—”
“Don’t, not yet.”
“Talk with me about what?” Bernie struggled into the clearing then, having heard his name as he came through the bushes.
“About what to get you for Christmas.” Emma quickly wiped her nose and gave Herman a look. He was right. She wasn’t ready yet. And then, as always, her tongue covered up her feelings. “A jock strap or a nose guard? Which should I get him, Herman? Which do you think, Herman? Which is bigger?”
Herman laughed at his son’s blushing. Then, behind him, Molly rushed up, her speckled tongue lolling. She ran over to Emma and snuffled in her crotch.
“Get away, you pervert!” Emma managed a laugh.
“Well?” asked Herman.
“It was a chipmunk,” Bernie snorted. “She led me over half the parish and treed a chipmunk.”
“Ha!” Herman crowed. “I told you that dog was stupid.” He stood then, brushed off the seat of his pants. “Let’s head back. Your mother will have supper waiting.”
But as they headed out together, Bernie’s arm around Emma’s shoulder, Herman and Molly trailing behind, Emma turned and saw Herman slip Molly a meal bone. He looked up at her, winked, and waggled a warning finger.
Okay, Herman, she thought, I’ll talk to you about it again. I won’t go home screaming. I’ve held it in all this time. I’ll hold it a little longer.
* * *
Supper was early in the Graubart house, even earlier as the days grew shorter. At the back door Emma could already smell Mary Ann’s pan-fried steaks. On the table were three kinds of vegetables and a bowl of Herman’s cucumbers, sour cream and onions.
“You going to stay?” Mary Ann called from the kitchen. “You know you’re welcome.”
Mary Ann Graubart wasn’t the warmest of women. In some ways she reminded Emma of Rosalie, afraid of things Emma couldn’t see. But she was nice because of Bernie, so Emma was nice to her in return.
“Thanks,” she said.
Herman warned, “Call your mother.”
Emma shot him a look.
“Hello?” Rosalie answered on the fourth ring, her voice filled with alarm. She was always sure that a nighttime call meant Emma was dead on the road.
“I’m not going to be home for supper.”
“We’re having chicken spaghetti.”
“Thanks, no. Bernie and I have some studying to do.”
“Drive—”
“I’ll drive carefully. And I won’t be too late.”
Rosalie sighed and returned to the stove. She knew that neither of the things Emma had just told her was true.
She’d be late, as always, and drive like a house afire to make up for it. As Rosalie poked at the chicken, steam fogged her glasses, hiding her hurt feelings. Jake, reading the paper at the table, slowly devouring every word, didn’t notice. Only when Rosalie placed his full plate before him did he look up.
He blinked then as if he had come inside after sitting out in the dark.
“Emma?”
“At the Graubarts’.”
Jake frowned, lifted the food to his mouth and chewed, but it was tasteless. He never saw Emma anymore. And when she was home, she was behind her closed door, studying. Not that he minded that. But he was afraid that soon he was going to lose her forever. She’d get married and move away. Or she’d go off to graduate school. He knew that if she left West Cypress, she’d never come back. He wouldn’t. Maybe she’d go to California; he’d visit her—oh, to stand on the edge of the Pacific again and look at all that blue.
“I said are you finished?” Rosalie was leaning over him, waiting to take his plate. He looked up at the kitchen clock. He couldn’t have been daydreaming more than ten or twelve minutes. Their meals never lasted longer than that.
Ahead of them stretched the long hours of darkness.
“Do you want some more coffee?” Rosalie asked.
“No, thanks.”
Jake moved to an easy chair and picked up a Carter Brown mystery he didn’t think he’d read before. Neither he nor Rosalie would say another word until ten o’clock when Emma came racing in the side door.
Rosalie pulled a bright lamp up to the kitchen table, wiped off the plastic tablecloth, and laid out her sketch pad and her pencils. Propped beside the gooseneck lamp was the first photograph she had ever seen of Emma as a baby, the one Jake had sent her from New York.
The house was filled with Rosalie’s watercolors and pencil sketches. Hers was a small talent, she knew, but when the ladies in her Bible group visited and fussed over her work, she was always pleased.
Sometimes she prettied up other pictures, adding snow to branches, smoke to chimneys. Recently she’d done a watercolor of her old home place that she liked a lot. But her best were her pencil sketches, renderings from photos of her mother, Emma and Jake. Emma was the hardest. She couldn’t get her eyes right or her mouth. Something always eluded her.
But this photograph of Emma when she was a baby with a big toothless grin, this was her favorite. She did it over and over again. She held the photo up now at arm’s length. What a sweet little thing Emma had been—so helpless. All she could do at that age was creep and crow and gurgle. She’d held on to Rosalie’s arm, her hair, her skirttails so tightly, as if Rosalie were the only person in the world. Those had been the best days of Rosalie’s life, before Emma got big enough to let go.
Rosalie glanced over at Jake, still reading. She sighed. This was all he ever did, it seemed, and all he wanted to do when he came home from his job butchering at the supermarket. It was better, in a way, though, since their store had closed. At least he got out of the house a little.
Jake sat turning the pages of a National Geographic. He stopped at a story on East Africa. In one of the pictures beautiful bare-breasted black women were pulling little pieces of meat out of a pot. He thought for a minute about the meat he smelled cooking when he walked home from the Ritz Bar through the Quarters, about the low laughter he heard from their porches, the soft voices every once in a while that called, “Hello, Mr. Jake.” And then, as if Rosalie could see that thought and would ask him what on earth he was doing walking those dirt streets of the colored ghetto, he pulled his mind back to the magazine and turned the page. The next story was about Sing
apore. People were eating there too, nibbling things off little sticks.
Then he closed his eyes and could see himself handing a hot dog to Helen. She loved to eat outdoors. One afternoon he’d taken her to Coney Island, and she’d eaten three Nathan’s franks without stopping and laughed and laughed when he warned that she might get sick.
Helen would have loved Singapore. In his mind he took her hand, and they turned the corner, right there off the page, around that corner where the photograph couldn’t see. They ran down the sidewalk together, but not too far. He slowed her then, and they stopped. She tipped back the brown straw hat she was wearing, grinned, and then she gave him a kiss.
Rosalie paused at the door and looked at Jake leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed. Why, she wondered, was he smiling?
7
San Francisco
1962
Jesse Tree had spent the whole morning at Oakland’s Jack London Station waiting for a train. The day was a brilliant blue, the blue of Van Gogh’s Provence.
Clifton, his art teacher from his childhood days in Watts, was on that train, coming to teach drawing at the university in Berkeley.
“Hell,” Clifton had said to him on the phone. “I reckon if a young twerp like you can find fame and fortune in Baghdad-by-the-Bay, why not me too?”
Things had gone well for Jesse Tree, once he had left behind charcoal, acrylic, oils, and had found himself to be a sculptor in wood.
He’d taken the advice of Clifton, who’d warned him that the life of an artist was a tough row to hoe. “’Less you like starving, boy, you better find some way to make your art pay. Fine art’s fine, but so’s eatin’.”
And Jesse had. He’d studied sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute, but he’d learned woodworking, carpentry, furniture making too. He supported himself building cabinets, at first journeyman work, but now he was on his own, carving woodwork for Pacific Heights mansions in cherry, oak, price be damned, ebony wood. He’d begun to make tables and desks on commission for these castle dwellers, and those were indeed works of art, a fact that Jesse had just begun to recognize.
Maybe he wasn’t waiting until he could do his art. Maybe he was doing it now at twenty-four.
In the library he found the work of 1920s furniture designer Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, discovered that in eighteenth-century France there was no more exalted title than Cabinetmaker to the King. With that inspiration, he stretched, he dared, he soared. He inlaid hundreds of ebony valentines in a hall stand of purple heartwood. He experimented with silver and gold leaf. “Craft furniture,” they called it in his first group exhibition. Now a small gallery out on Sacramento Street had called, to talk about a one-man show.
Keeping Secrets Page 13
