A Week as Andrea Benstock

by Lawrence Block

  She said, “Jack? It’s Andrea Kleinman.”

  “It is? Well, I’m damned. Hang on a minute, I want to get a cigarette.” He was gone for a few moments, and she pictured him rubbing sleep out of his eyes and puffing desperately at the day’s first cigarette. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes and drank unblended Scotch, and the two vices combined to produce a voice that could scratch glass. It had been the first thing about him that attracted her.

  Now he said, “Andrea. Christ, I thought the earth swallowed you. Where in hell are you?”

  “I’m in Buffalo.”

  “Buffalo. Why, for Christ’s sake?”

  “I’ve been here since August.”

  “So that’s where you went to. I haven’t seen you in what, almost a year. But why Buffalo?”

  “It’s where I’m from. I was born here.”

  “I know a woman who was born in Buchenwald. She’s never felt the slightest compulsion to return. When are you coming back to the city, kid?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Oh, that’s what they all say.”

  “I’m getting married, Jack.”

  There was just the slightest pause, as though the information had to take its time crossing the state.

  Then he said, “No kidding. I think that’s terrific, Andrea.”

  “You do?”

  “I really do. Christ, it’s good to hear from you. I didn’t know what happened to you, nobody seemed to know anything except that you weren’t around any more.”

  “Well, that’s what happened. I wasn’t around any more.”

  “Must be a year since I saw you.”

  “Something like that. I was in New York for a while after I saw you last, and then one morning I packed my suitcase.”

  “Problems?”

  “No, not really.” She drew closer to the phone, as if afraid of what she might see out of the corners of her eyes. She began remembering the last weeks in New York, the hectic pace, the ragged breathlessness, the bits and pieces chopped out of memory and lost. “It stopped being fun,” she said.

  “And you were trying so hard to have fun.”

  “I don’t know if I like the way that sounds. Anyway, I came back home because I didn’t know where else to go, and it turned out to be right for me.”

  “I’m glad for you. Who’s the guy? Childhood sweetheart?”

  “Not really. He was four years ahead of me in school so I never knew him. I knew his sister vaguely.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Oh, he’s a sweet guy, Jack. Really. He’s a lawyer, he’s doing pretty well at it and he’s really involved in it.”

  “That’s great. When’s the wedding? I’ll send you a present.”

  “It’s in about an hour, as a matter of fact.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. And don’t send a present. You’re sweet, but don’t.”

  “The past is past, that means.”

  “That is just what it means.”

  “Fair enough. Andrea?”

  “What?”

  “Why the phone call?”

  “I don’t know. I had this urge.”

  “That certainly explains it.”

  “No, let me finish, because I’ve been asking myself the same question. I wanted to tell someone from New York. I wanted, I just wanted someone to know. I don’t know why.”

  “Well, I think I’m flattered.”

  “Well,” she said.

  “The last time I saw you, you weren’t that good at being friendly.”

  “I was probably pretty drunk.”

  “You probably were. You told me to fuck off, as a matter of fact.”

  Well, why don’t you? she thought. This call had been a mistake, and she was no closer than before to guessing why she had made it.

  “How have you been, Jack? What have you been working on?”

  “The usual. Something for the Voice now and then. And we’ve got a primary coming up soon, as you probably know. Or as you probably don’t know, come to think of it. Way up there in Eskimo country.”

  “We get the Times every Sunday. The dog team brings it right to the igloo.” The operator cut in to say that her three minutes were up. She said, “I’ve got to go now, Jack.”

  “Well, I’m damned glad you called. Happy Wedding.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll see you.”

  No, she thought. You won’t.

  She was at the car before she remembered she hadn’t bought anything. She went back inside and picked out a stainless steel identification bracelet. They had been very much in demand when she was in high school. You had your name engraved on it, and when you were going steady you traded bracelets with the boy. She paid for the bracelet and drove home.

  The marriage ceremony was performed by Rabbi Morton Farber in his study in Temple Beth Sholom. The temple was an imposing building downtown on Delaware Avenue. For much of her youth it had been if the focal point of her social life. Her Girl Scout troop met there on Wednesday afternoons. Her dancing classes were held there Saturday nights. For seven years she attended classes at the temple every Sunday morning, and for the last two of those years she was frequently present at services on Saturday mornings if a boy she knew was having his Bar Mitzvah. It was not until she had gone away to college that she was able to appreciate just how thoroughly Jews in Buffalo isolated themselves from their neighbors. The student body of her high school had been almost exactly half Jewish, and the social segregation had been virtually complete. There was no friction between the two groups; rather, it was as if neither was much aware of the other’s existence. Of course she never dated a non-Jewish boy in high school. Outside of the classroom, she scarcely knew any.

  At the time, it had never occurred to her to question this social structure. And afterward it was incomprehensible to her that things had been as they were, and that she had regarded them as normal and natural.

  While Rabbi Farber’s study was not a large room, it accommodated the wedding party with ease. Besides the bridal couple and their parents, there were only Andrea’s grandmother, Mark’s brother Phil, his sister Linda, and Linda’s husband Jeff. Phil served as best man, Linda as maid of honor.

  This last had been a happy inspiration. Andrea had been unable to think of anyone to stand up with her, and had begun to consider the propriety of asking her mother to act in that capacity. The one logical choice for the role, the inevitable selection a year or two ago, would have been Andrea’s closest friend at college, a girl named Winifred Welles. She had been close to Winkie as she had been close to no one before or since.

  But after graduation they had let go of one another. They’d both gone to New York and it would have been easy to keep in touch, but somehow it was easier to lose contact, to let the past slip into the past. It was still hard to imagine going through a wedding without Winkie, but when she tried to picture Winkie beside her in the rabbi’s study or at the country club she could not manage it.

  And there was no one in Buffalo to whom she felt similarly close. Then she learned that Linda and Jeff were timing their annual trip east to coincide with the wedding. She had known Linda in high school, and had been friendly if not intimate with her. And, although she had no secondary purpose in choosing Linda, the effect was not lost on Mrs. Benstock. “You picked up a lot of points with her,” Mark said. “Not that it makes any difference what she thinks.”

  But it did make a difference, and she knew it. She would not be in the happy position of Jeff Gould, who had cleverly put three thousand miles between himself and his in-laws. And Mark, whether or not he took his parents seriously, was nevertheless close to them. Thus it seemed to her that being a good daughter-in-law was part of being a good wife.

  The ceremony itself went off as smoothly as it had in rehearsal. They sipped wine from a goblet, which was then wrapped in a napkin and placed on the floor before them. Mark, grinning, stomped on it with authority, and the wedding party greeted this act with
the spontaneous applause which had characterized every Jewish wedding she had ever attended.

  The glass-breaking ritual was on a par with heaving glasses into a fireplace after drinking a significant toast. But Andrea had always regarded it as a metaphor for the rupture of the maidenhead. He stepped on the glass, she thought, and found it had already been broken.

  They exchanged plain yellow gold bands, and despite the traditional jokes beforehand, neither ring was lost or dropped and both fit perfectly. It had surprised her at first that he had wanted to wear a wedding ring. The double ring ceremony had been his idea, and one that would never have occurred to her. But now she liked it, and as she placed the ring on his finger she came closer to crying than at any other stage in the ceremony.

  Of course Rabbi Farber had a few words to say. No one paid much attention to what he said, and yet if he had omitted this obligatory rabbinical material the omission would have been noted and commented upon. “You would think Rabbi Mort might have said a few words. Everybody does it, it’s the custom.” So Rabbi Mort did indeed say a few words, touching upon the joy of exchanging nuptial vows in the presence of one’s family, and the importance in the modern world of affirming one’s heritage through a truly Jewish marriage ritual, and the role of religion as a third partner in a successful marriage. A cynic might have reflected that these remarks were perhaps more a commercial than a benediction. But no cynic was present.

  “I now pronounce you man and wife.” “You may kiss the bride.” “Aren’t they an attractive couple?” “How I waited for this day, David.” “Andrea, you look beautiful, I love your dress.” “Well, you went and you did it, kid.”

  Married.

  The wedding reception was held at the Northlawn Country Club. The club was situated a dozen miles north and east of the city of Buffalo, and when it was founded in 1947 there was not a Jew residing within eight miles of the club grounds. There were, in fact, precious few people of any persuasion in the area; during the war years, sheep had grazed on what was to become the Northlawn golf course. The course, first laid out in 1948 and enlarged to eighteen holes three years later, had been designed by Daniel Johns Gregory. It was acknowledged to be one of the three best courses in western New York.

  David Kleinman had not been a founding member of Northlawn. He had joined late in 1948, having waited a year to make sure that the club would get off the ground. There had been an attempt before the war to get a Jewish country club organized. It had failed for lack of support, and several of the sponsors had lost money. After a little over a year he judged the club to be a sound operation which filled a genuine community need. And the public golf courses were getting impossibly overcrowded. He’d played at Delaware and Grover Cleveland during the war, but now there were constant waiting lines at both courses, and the maintenance was not what it had been. So he had joined, thinking of the club as an organization worthy of his support and a place to play golf on Wednesdays and Saturdays. That it would turn out to be a focal point of his social life had surely never occurred to him. Twice the nominating committee had sounded him out for the club presidency and on both occasions he pleaded the pressure of work. “I don’t need the aggravation,” he told his wife. “Let the operators have it. They want me because I’m not an operator, and that’s just why I don’t want it.”

  Harry Benstock was not a member of the Northlawn, and because of this Bea Kleinman had suggested that it might be diplomatic to hold the reception elsewhere. “Now I can’t see that at all,” her husband said. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “I was thinking that they might resent it.”

  “I don’t agree, but suppose they did? We do our entertaining at the club. We’re going to have to entertain Harry and Ruth a certain amount of the time.”

  “Not too often, I hope.”

  “Not too often, no, but from time to time. So we might as well get everything out in the open at the beginning. Besides, what makes you think Harry doesn’t like to go to the club? Since she started going with Mark I made a point of noticing, and Harry’s out there whenever somebody invites him.”

  “But he doesn’t belong.”

  “He doesn’t and he won’t. His name was put up in, I don’t know, say 1950. And he was voted down.”

  “You never told me why.”

  “I didn’t vote against him, so I suppose I don’t know why. Except that I do know why. Harry made his money during the war, which is no crime, but he made it because Harry was the one guy who could get you a car when nobody else could. He had a Pontiac agency like a dozen other people, but if you wanted a ’42 Pontiac when nobody had them, you could get it through Harry. You paid him cash and you didn’t pick up the car at his lot. It was delivered to you at your home. And you paid a lot more than list price, and it was all tax free, and that was how Harry made his money. And in 1950 it was enough to keep him out of Northlawn.”

  “I heard something about that but I never paid close attention.”

  “Well, other people did. There were enough founding members who bought cars from Harry, paying him under the table, and it’s my guess that they were the ones who voted against him. The funny thing is if Harry applied now he would get in with no trouble whatsoever. There was one man who said Harry Benstock would get in over his dead body, but he died two and a half years ago, so it would be over his dead body after all. I won’t mention a name.”

  “I know who you mean.”

  “Of course you do. Anyway, Harry could get in. But his name was put up the once and he never had it submitted a second time. He says he doesn’t play golf so what does he need with it, but how many members do you know who don’t play golf? Harry would want to be a member except for getting rejected once. Not to mince words, he’s a climber. He was a member of B’nai Zion for how many years, and then he switched to Beth Sholom just so his kids could be confirmed there. Not that he was the only one to do that little thing.”

  “I think that was Adele more than it was Harry.”

  “You could be right. But the point is that Harry would love to belong to Northlawn, and he could get in now and knows he could get in, but he was blackballed once and he won’t apply again. And that’s pride, and for that I have to give the man credit. I wouldn’t want him in the club, I wouldn’t care to play golf with him or have drinks with him, but I give him credit.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “What?”

  “You wouldn’t want him in the club but your daughter is marrying his son and you approve.”

  “And that’s funny? I don’t think it is. For one thing, she’s not marrying Harry. She’s marrying Mark, and Mark will be a member. I happen to know he plans to join, and there won’t be a vote against him.”

  “He’d join a club that wouldn’t have his father?”

  “Oh, please. My own father couldn’t have joined Northlawn. Not that it was around at the time, or that he would have been interested, but he couldn’t have joined it. Did that keep me out? And is there any reason it should have?”

  Andrea and Mark spent a little over two hours at the reception. She was kissed by a great number of men. Some of them she knew, some she recognized, and some she could not recall ever having seen in her life. She danced with Mark, with her father, with her father-in-law, with Phil Benstock, and with Jeff Gould. She cut the first piece of wedding cake, with Mark’s large hand over hers to guide the knife. She was complimented on her dress, her hair, her figure, and her general radiance. She was treated to an endless barrage of marriage jokes, none of which amused her and most of which struck her as in appalling taste. She ate two bites of wedding cake, drank a whiskey sour and two scotch-and-waters, and sipped a cup of very bitter coffee. There was a generous cold buffet but she did not have anything from it. She had no appetite at all, and thought that it had been good her mother had coaxed her into eating breakfast.

  When Linda signaled her she excused herself from a conversation with an unidentified aunt of Mark’s and slipped away to a room
upstairs. She changed her clothes while Linda smoked cigarettes and told her how good it was to be married. “Jeff and I have our bad times, sure. It’s not easy, and don’t let anyone tell you that it’s easy. Of course we have the advantage that we’re away from the family. We have to work things out for ourselves. Oh, I’m so happy for you, Andrea. I wish we had known each other better years ago, but Arizona isn’t that far, you know, and the planes fly in both directions. Mark’s a wonderful guy and he’s getting a wonderful girl and I’m so happy.”

  “Oh, Linda.”

  “And you were so sweet to ask me to stand up for you. I’ll never forget it, I swear I won’t.”

  She went down a back staircase and outside to the parking lot. Mark was waiting for her. Their bags were already loaded in his brother’s car. Phil drove them to the airport and waited with them until their New York flight was called. “Well,” he said. “Don’t do anything I haven’t done, huh?” He shook hands with Phil, and Andrea threw her arms around him and kissed him. “Wow,” he said.

  “That’s because I always wanted a little brother.”

  “Well, I’ve already got a big sister, but she never kissed me like that. Jesus, get a move on, you’ll miss your flight.”

  They boarded their plane. An hour and a quarter later they were on the ground at Idlewild. They checked in at the Pan Am counter and went to a lounge for coffee.

  He said, “Mrs. Benstock.”

  “The blushing bride herself. Do you mind if I don’t blush?”

  “Not a bit. It went well, I’d say.”

  “I think it did. I was in a daze.”

  “So was I. Hey.”

  “What?”

  “Any regrets?”

  “God, no,” she said.

  She had flown from New York to Buffalo in the middle of August. It was early October when Mark first called her. Until then her life had been closely confined. She spent most of her time in and around the house on Admiral Road. Once or twice a week her parents went out to dinner, usually at Northlawn, occasionally at a restaurant. About half the time she would join them. Now and then she drove one of the two family cars downtown and saw a movie, but most evenings passed in front of the television set or in her room with a book.