by Ed Ifkovic
“I don’t know.”
She sat back down, facing me, her hand pushing her coffee cup away. “See, Edna, I married Ivan. I loved Ivan, sloppy fool that he was. That maybe I was. No one understood us—the quiet laughter, the—” She stopped. “The early days was good—always laughing. We joked about the looks given to me. Ivan was dumpy, always with mismatched buttons on the vest, his hair shaggy. I think it made him proud to have a pretty wife, but a good wife. One who kept a kosher kitchen back then. The proper Shabbas. Always. A good mother to his children. But sometimes I felt like a doll he showed off. That kind of…loving wears off.”
“He changed?”
“He got suspicious, and for no reason. The silence in the house like a blanket thrown over your head. Stupidly, I let that fool Morrie touch me. A moment, and then it stopped, praise God. But Morrie brags about it to the boys in the back room—and to Ivan. By then, they fight all the time in the shop—hate each other.”
I drank the rest of my coffee, and Leah, noticing, moved to the stove. As I started to stand, she held up her hand. “Let me.” She opened the icebox and took out the milk pitcher, placed it on the table. But she didn’t sit back down—as though she desired other tasks to perform. The rhythm of a mother in her kitchen, comfortable, sure, efficient.
I counted a beat. “Tell me about the fight you had that morning.”
Her words low, hesitant. “We never fought like that. Yes, the little spats, yes. It started over Jacob and the way his papa treated him. He hated the softness of my boy. But the screaming, cursing that morning. And him being sick on top of it. He couldn’t stop the yelling. Jacob, yes, but then Morrie, the rumors. All the ugliness of the—the indiscretion with Morrie. It was like someone broke…his doll. I cried and cried.”
“Still, one moment shouldn’t condemn you to a life of…”
She held up her hand. “Edna, I started liking the attentions of the men. I’m—what was I?—I was forty-four then, getting a little chubby, lines in my face, but the men still joked—whistled. Downtown even the goyim, the wolf whistles. How the old bearded men walking from shul yelled at me, accusing, watching, praying at me. I used to think I encouraged it—helpless to stop it, not wanting it to stop. One time Jacob and Ad were there in the back room, young men then, boys really, and someone made a remark. Not bad but…wrong. You don’t mention another man’s wife—or mother. Like that. You don’t. I’d just walked in and overheard it. About me. I didn’t know where to look. Everyone laughed but not Jacob. Of course, not Jacob, my son. But Ad laughed too long, trying to be one of the men. He ribbed Jacob, and Jacob struck out and hit Ad in the face. They didn’t talk for a month. Ad was doing what all the men did, but Jacob wanted something better from his friend. Ad later apologized, I remember. He apologized to me—that was hard for a young boy to do, no? When Ad was a shy little boy, I teased him. How I could make him blush! This was before he got—religious.” She threw back her head and laughed. “That was when he gave Jacob long lectures about such things. Quoting the Talmud. Jacob ran away from him.”
“But Ivan knew you were loyal.”
“Men have doubts. God knows what was said in that awful back room. And then Ivan’s brother, Ezra, moved back from Philadelphia. The college brother, the swanky lawyer, the older brother, widowed now, childless, with gold in his pockets.”
“So what?”
“I courted him first, Edna, when they were young men. The families chose him for me. Back then families told their children who to marry. And he wanted to marry me. He was a slick man, phony, too smooth. Nu. You know, a gantser kener.” A know-it-all. “Ivan was down-to-earth, sweet then. I liked Ivan. Ezra didn’t talk to Ivan for years after I chose Ivan. I fought my parents. Let me marry Ivan. Please. They had no choice, my family. Ezra, furious, missed the wedding. A huge slight back then in the close-knit Jewish family. Brother stopped talking to brother. Then Ezra came back, scooting around in a newfangled automobile, tossing coins at everyone, and Ivan got nervous. No reason to. I don’t like Ezra. He makes my skin crawl. But he comes around then and befriends my Jacob. He sits in my parlor and waits for me to walk through.”
“Lord,” I commented, “the curse of beauty, magnified.”
Leah squinted. “What?” She rustled in her seat. “I have to go.” She half-rose, and her hand hit the coffee cup. It slid to the edge of the table. We both reached for it, and our hands collided. For a second I held her fingers—cold, clammy in the hot kitchen.
I wasn’t through. Hurried, “Your Jacob looks just like you.”
She laughed. “I know, though a skinnier version these days. His own curse—the playboy of Maxwell Street. A matinee boy from the magazines in his soft slough cap worn at an angle, just so—the brogans, the pressed London coat, the ear-to-ear grin. He hops off the El and the girls bump into one another.”
“I confess, Leah. I had a crush on him way back when.”
“Sooner or later everyone does.”
“A charmer.”
She rolled her tongue into the corner of a cheek. “And look where it got him, Edna. Nowhere. A poet who stopped writing poetry years ago. A drifter. Pennies here, there. For one week sweeping the floor of the barber shop in the Palmer House, then he can’t get out of bed.”
“Ella—or was it Emma?—recited by heart his poem from Poetry.”
She chuckled. “I know about that. They love him to death.” Her face got somber. “Edna, I heard all about your visit there. The twins were thrilled. You, the author of The Girls. I even told Ella to go to the public library to read that short story that meant so much to me, but she can’t understand why it means so much to me. ‘The Homely Heroine.’ Of course, she never did. But Edna, Jacob wasn’t happy with the visit. Your conversation made him a little crazy.” She glanced toward the window and her hand pointed in the direction of her home. “So he comes home and the banging on the walls starts. The nervous pacing on the floor. Slammed doors. He sighs out loud. We don’t discuss that day, Edna.” Now a sliver of a smile, sad. “You’ve become drawn to it, he told me. The reporter. The moth to the flame.”
“Well, I think you’ve been wronged.”
“Jacob and the twins don’t want to think about that day again. It’s too horrible. I’m home. They want to believe that life is normal again. You’re giving Jacob the idea that everybody got everything wrong back then. Everything they were told by the police to believe is false…”
“It is false.”
“Edna, Edna.”
Impatient, I stood up. I moved to the window. The Brenner home was quiet, the shades on the windows pulled down. I swung back to face her. “Leah, don’t you want the truth to come out?”
She refused to look at me. A long silence, then she spoke in a soft, frightened voice. “No.”
“This whole business smells.”
She joined me at the window and grasped my wrist. “Edna, you come out of a different world. Yes, your feet are planted in the same Chicago neighborhoods—we all were—but you were built different from other folks. Your brain buzzing, your feet running up the street. Words humming in your head. What’s out there? Let me see. That’s who you are. You didn’t want this.” Her hand swept around the tidy kitchen. On the counter a red-and-white enamel bowl of rising bread, covered with dishtowels. A jar of ginger snap cookies, never empty. Flowered curtains laundered twice a week, faithfully. A black-and-white tiled floor, scrubbed daily. A pot on the gas stove, diced potatoes in cold water. A similar kitchen up and down Monroe Street. Look in the backyards or on back porches of the apartment houses and you’d spot clotheslines of flapping laundry. A garden bed of mint and chives and parsley surrounded by Sweet William and mignonette. The same. Always the same.
A decent life, but not one I wanted.
“That’s true.”
“Of course, it is. Your picture in the Chicago Tribune. In the Bookman, clipped out by E
lla and tacked to a wall.”
“But I’m still the same little Jewish girl, almost forty, traipsing after a termagant mother who tells me how to behave.”
Leah nodded, her face close to mine. “Some things will never change. Your widowed mother will never set you free, the unmarried daughter.” She glanced over her shoulder. “It’s a Jewish commandment that only women understand. The cord cannot be cut. Don’t even try.”
“I’ll see about that.”
We started to laugh, a little crazily, enjoying the moment. Leah’s eyes got moist and her nose ran. Idly, she removed the dishtowels covering the enamel bowl, peered in at the rising dough. She clicked her tongue. “Esther put the bowl where too much sun hits it.” She ran her fingers under the cold-water faucet, then sprinkled drops onto the rising bread. Her fingers rubbed the surface. Satisfied, smiling to herself, she replaced the stack of dishtowels, but slid the bowl out of the shaft of sunlight. “There,” she said to herself. “All right.”
When we sat back down, she held my eye, dead on. “I don’t want my children hurt, Edna.”
I gasped. “I have no intention…”
“My son, Herman, called from across town. Jacob spoke to him about your visit to Ella and Emma’s. He’s a…fussy man, a little pompous, my Herman, he likes the gold coins in his pocket, jingling them. Lord, he should have been Uncle Ezra’s son.” That thought made her smile. “Which probably explains why they hate each other. Anyway, he wanted to know what was going on. What you’re up to. ‘I couldn’t make much sense of Jacob’s rambling talk,’ he says to me. ‘What is this reporter up to? Why doesn’t she stay at the Newmanns’ where she belongs?’” Leah chuckled. “Finally, the last solution we all run to. ‘Do we have to have the rabbi talk to her?’”
“What?” I stormed, indignant, my shoulders hunched.
“I know, I know. I told him, ‘I don’t think that would work, Herman. Rabbi Kurtz ain’t no match for Edna Ferber. Edna is her own woman.’ He grumbled and hung up the phone, but not before he mumbled something about a call to you from him.”
I rolled my eyes. “Ah, something to look forward to.”
Leah’s eyes clouded. “But I don’t want my children hurt, Edna. They’ve been through enough.”
“I promise you.”
“I can’t believe you, Edna. I like you—very much—but I don’t know if I can trust you.”
“You can trust me to do the right thing.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” She watched me out of the corner of her eye. “The right thing ain’t always the right thing.”
The kitchen door swung open and my mother walked in, her arms filled with packages. She was glancing behind her at Esther and Molly as she complained about the need to haggle with a boorish peddler over some wilted cabbages. “You’d think he was offering gold leaf to…to Michelangelo, such treasures…”
She stopped short, and Esther, also loaded down with packages, collided into her back. Molly, still standing on the top step, grunted, “Am I expected to stand here with the sun beating down on me?”
Then, standing in a straight line, shoulders touching, backs against the kitchen counter, the three women stared from me to Leah, who’d jumped up so quickly she’d knocked her coffee cup to the floor. It smashed into little pieces and, confused, she bent to pick up the shards, then changed her mind.
“We’re having coffee,” I announced calmly.
Esther stepped forward, dropping her purchases on the table. “No matter, Leah. It’s…it’s an old cup.” She smiled thinly. “It’s nothing at all. I mean, really.” She glanced nervously at Molly, frozen against the counter, with her cane suspended in the air, pointing. Bravely Esther extended her hand. Hesitantly, shyly, Leah took it, and Esther gripped the other woman’s fingers. “Leah, welcome.”
It was, I thought, as exquisite and touching a gesture as I’d ever seen—so quiet and…so right.
But that moment was shattered by my mother’s consumptive rasp and her storming out of the room, bumping into a chair and toppling it over. Molly, bent and dependent on her cane, maneuvered her treacherous way around the broken cup and toppled chair. Tap tap tap. She paused in the doorway and eyed Esther.
“Esther, you need to clean up this mess. You never were the best housekeeper.” With that, she turned and disappeared into the hallway. Angry whispers drifted back into the kitchen, punctuated by that infernal tap tap tap. Then silence.
Leah’s face drained of color, sagging, drawn. She kept nodding at me and then at Esther, like a mechanical toy, though I noticed her look lingered on Esther, who was trembling. The two women stared at each other, and I marveled at the sudden and awesome transformation. Because, in that lightning-brief exchange, in that immaculate kitchen, Esther was the distraught woman, the shunned woman—and Leah, starting to move toward the door, was calm and sure, her hand gently touching Esther’s quivering cheek. Her voice sweet and sure. “All right. It’s all right.”
Chapter Eight
Herman Brenner was inordinately proud of his new automobile. A knaker, he was, a big shot, happy to be one. Parked in front of the Newmann home, a deliberate act of defiance, he stood by the passenger door, his hand resting on the gleaming latch, waiting as I stepped from the porch. He spat into a handkerchief, and with the attention of a mother powdering a newborn, painstakingly rubbed off a spot on the ice-blue glossy surface.
When I approached, he stopped, half-bowed, very Prussian, greeting me. “Two days old, this masterpiece. A top-notch Roamer Auto made by Barley Motor Cars, built right here in Illinois, over to Streator. An exquisite auto, I must say.” He bowed to it. It was glittery, long and spiffy, with sparking aquamarine paint, spitfire black tires, and monstrous headlights, its top down, grandly. A chariot of the gods—for one who saw himself as deserving of God’s bounty.
“So pleased to meet you, Herman,” I said in my friendliest voice.
He pursed his brow. “Have we met before? Jacob said you were here….” He was puzzled.
“Oh, no, I’d remember. I don’t think we ever spoke. But I do recall seeing you walk by on the sidewalk.”
“We didn’t talk?”
“No reason to.” I stepped toward the car.
That baffled him, but he opened the door and I slid onto the coffee-colored leather seat. So many gadgets on the dashboard—this was some Jules Verne futuristic vehicle, inherently dangerous. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s better mousetrap.
Herman Brenner had called last night after supper. Esther handed me the telephone, her face a mixture of question and horror. He’d been speaking to Jacob, he told me. And Jacob had a lot to say about me. That lad did talk quite a bit, I concluded—Jacob as some kind of Semite town crier, indeed. Herman also understood his mother was fashioning a friendship with me. “Although,” he went on, “I understand you’ll be leaving shortly.” I could detect relief in that last remark.
“A short visit, yes, as Jacob probably told you. My mother is an old friend of Esther and…”
He’d cut me off. “Suddenly you have taken on our family business.”
“Meaning?”
A curt tone: “Edna, perhaps dinner tomorrow night with me and my wife. You’ll like her. You’ll meet the children.”
I’d waited for an invitation for my mother, which was proper, but none was forthcoming. I’d nudged him. “My mother and I have obligations here.” I’d repeated, “My mother…she…”
He would have none of it. “We need to discuss my mother’s situation—and what you’re up to.”
“Up to?” I’d echoed.
“I’m not a fool, Edna.”
“I never thought you were.”
“I’ll pick you up at six-thirty. In front of the Newmanns’.” Click. The sound of a dial tone. I’d hung on the line, stupidly, until the operator came on and peevishly told me to end the call.
W
hich was why, at precisely six-thirty, I was gliding through the city streets, heading to the west side of town, to Lawndale, where Herman and his family lived. We drove past the railroad tracks, past the soot-blackened factories, until we came upon the smart-looking two-flat brick-and-stone homes surrounded by leafy parks. “Chicago Jerusalem,” Herman told me, pointing proudly. Across Roosevelt, down Douglas. The automobile knew the way.
Instinctively, I’d dressed for a formal summer supper: a navy blue linen dress with a spray of red paper roses on the bodice, a pale rose-colored wrap over my shoulders. A tiny box hat, trimmed with lace. Annoyingly, I now realized that I’d inadvertently dressed in a way that seemed to accent the automobile—I was a Florodora girl in a back-page glossy advertisement in Collier’s. “An automobile for the girl in your life.”
Herman drove like a man expecting a bearded Russian anarchist, lit bomb at the ready, to step suddenly into his path. His gloved hands gripped the steering wheel, his face was grim, his body hunched forward, spine rigid. An automobile pulled in front of us, and he slammed on the brakes, hurling me to the dashboard. “A brokh tsu dir!” he screamed, A curse on you! Then, in English, “Damnation!” Again the slammed brakes as my body banged against the door. There was no apology.
This burly man was portly, pot-bellied, pompous, with a wide pancake face, iron-gray smallish eyes too far apart so that he seemed vacant, a little dumb, with large black spectacles shielding those pebble eyes, making the face almost clown-like. Yet despite that vacuous look I saw a flinty hardness in the eyes, and a stare that would not break. The round fleshy face, a simpleton’s glance, was forgotten when his mouth moved—one moment a wide grin, all teeth, almost feral; the next moment a razor-thin line of disapproval. Despite the oppressive summer heat, even at that hour, he was dressed in a severe black broadcloth vested suit, with gold watch fob, a Rotary Club pin on a lapel, and a sensible black derby atop his slicked-back hair. A formidable man, this Herman Brenner, who, unlike his brother, had inherited none of his mother’s delicate and wonderful beauty. No, it was as though, born with a physiognomy so distancing, he chose power and fierceness as traits to be cultivated. Frankly, he scared me, this man who oozed authority that I sensed he’d won by utter determination—paying a price for such victory.
