“Mary? No, I didn’t know this.”
“I thought you did.”
“Nothing bad?”
“I don’t know. Frankie wrote and told me a few weeks ago. She was good to you, wasn’t she, her mama?”
“Yes. A good woman.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“I don’t remember. It’s been a while. It’s hard to stay in touch.”
“She still lives on Cannon Street. It’s only downtown. It’s not Wisconsin.”
“Things are different now.”
“Sure they are, Mama.” And then, under her breath: “She doesn’t know how to play mah-jongg.”
34
“You’re up early, young lady,” Dewey said.
Eyes in the back of his head, that man, Libby thought. She went into the conservatory, where he was drinking his morning cup of coffee and reading the financial pages, ignoring the view over Central Park.
“I’m going out.”
“With?”
“Some fast boy I met at a speakeasy. He has a red roadster and buys me champagne and cigarettes.”
“Well, that’s good. As long as you’re not getting into any trouble.”
“I’m meeting an old friend of mine downtown.”
“I’ll tell Nelson. He’ll drop you off.”
She kissed him on the top of his head. He had grown a bald patch the last couple of years, and it made him only all the more endearing. “Thanks, Dewey.”
“Your mother says you’ve been talking back at her.”
“Did she tell you to give me a dressing down?”
“I wouldn’t dream of dressing you down, young lady. They don’t pay me enough to take those kinds of risks.”
“She’s always telling me what to do.”
“She’s your mother, what do you expect?” He put down his coffee cup and folded the Times in his lap. He took her hand. “Take it easy on her, Libs. She means the best for you.”
“I’ll do my best,” Liberty said, and slipped away into the bathroom before he could persuade her to apologize to her mother.
She didn’t take up the offer of having Nelson drive her. Instead, she slipped out after Sarah had gone to the Plaza, and went down to Columbus Circle and took the Elevated instead. She didn’t want them checking up on her; and besides, she liked to do things for herself.
The station was a riot of billboards, advertisements for Scotch tape, Welch’s grape juice, Listerine mouthwash, Schick electric razors. God how she hated New York. Everything was buy, buy, buy.
She had written to Frankie before leaving school, had arranged to meet her outside the station on Grand Street. It was strange being back there after so long, after the washed-clean of Westover and the Upper West Side, being buffeted by the people crammed in the streets, the pushcart hawkers yelling so loud, the Jewish wives in their wigs, shoving her with their baskets. They were all still here: the men with side curls and white collars and shiny black suits; the Bolsheviks sitting in dark coffee shops, looking out at the world with their red eyes and fierce little beards.
She searched the faces, wondered if Frankie got her letter, if she would be there. Libby had worn her plainest dress, but she suddenly felt out of place. Hard to believe these were the same streets where she grew up.
She heard someone shout: “Hey, Miss Rockefeller!”
It was Frankie. Libby waved and pushed her way through the crowd to the other side of the street.
“Frankie!”
“Lib!”
They hugged each other. A whole term since they had seen each other, and it felt like a hundred years. Frankie never changed much; she wore the same five-and-dime blouse she had on the last time they met, a pleated skirt, her hair a tangled mess. Liberty felt awkward, as she always did, in her Bergdorf frock, even though it was an old one, and with her new Dutch bob.
“Look at you,” Frankie said, mussing her hair. “If it isn’t the It girl. You’re a sight to behold on Delancey Street. Don’t get your new pumps muddy now.”
“You stop that, Frankie. I can still give you a good hiding. Now where are we going?”
“Well, that depends. You’re not too fancy for Coney Island, are you?”
The people on the train were from the Lower East Side, most of them; the men worked down at the docks and the women in the sweatshops for pauper wages, like her mama had done. They came to Coney Island to escape the heat and squalor of the tenements, even though they most likely had just a few nickels in their pockets to spend. They couldn’t afford the fifty cents for the bathhouses or a dime for a hot dog, so they wore their bathing suits under their clothes and brought their own food with them in big wicker baskets.
Liberty bought two hot dogs from a man in a greasy apron, and she and Frankie walked arm in arm along the boardwalk, past the groynes and dirty brown beach, the thrown-off clothes from Macy’s basement or Klein’s lying around in the sand or fluttering from the jetties. The tide was on its way in, the wavelets breaking over the sandcastles kids had built along the shore.
“How’s school?” Frankie said. “Still hate it?”
“All the girls ever want to talk about is riding horses and whether they’re going to Paris or Italy for the summer holidays. I feel like a duck in a henhouse in that place.”
“Well, you’ve only another year till you finish.”
“Then there’s college. They’re going to send me to Bryn Mawr.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s in Philadelphia.”
“Thank God, I thought it was China.”
“Dewey wants me to do history and philosophy.”
“Why does he want you to do all that?”
“I’ve no idea. Mama just wants me to dress well and marry rich, but I don’t know if there’s a degree in that.”
They went down one of the honky-tonk alleys, past the penny arcades and food stands. Such a din, Libby thought. All the mechanical pianos and girls screaming on the rides, the slam of bumper cars, and the barkers yelling in the shooting galleries or grabbing at the young men who tried to show off for their girls at the high strikers, two wallops for a nickel, five for a dime.
They lost themselves in the midway, everything smelled rich down there, like potato latkes and fried meat, or sweet, like popcorn and cotton candy. They went past the tattoo artists and the freak shows, women screaming as their skirts were blown right over their heads in the Blowhole Theatre, everything a shrieking commotion of mirrors and blinking lights and loud clanging music. Frankie kept offering to pay for the rides; but every time, Liberty said, “You get the next one,” knowing Frankie didn’t have the two bits to waste on the shooting gallery or fifteen cents to ride the Cyclone roller coaster.
But Liberty did, so finally they found themselves in two carriage seats on the Wonder Wheel, high above the holiday crowds and the deck chairs and the turrets and columns and mechanical scaffolding of the amusement parks. Down below they could see long lines of people queueing on Surf Avenue for the Cyclone. The wheel lurched to a halt, and they swung side by side, so high up, above everything. All the jangling and screaming and crashing was muted by the wind, so it was almost peaceful.
“How’s your ma?” Liberty said.
“Still in the hospital. She can’t work anymore. She’s lost her job.”
“How are you managing?”
“Didn’t you know? Your mother sends us checks.”
“Well, so she should.”
“No ‘should’ about it. She doesn’t owe us anything. She’s a good heart, is what she has.”
“Has she come to visit?”
“She doesn’t have to do that.”
“Your mama used to be her best friend.”
“Well, bringing grapes to the hospital doesn’t pay the bills. Don’t know what we’d do without the money she sends us.”
Libby stared out at the sea. The air smelled of salt and, faintly, even up here, of sugar and fried onions. “Still, she should make time
for her.”
“She’s a busy woman.”
“She’s not busy, she’s embarrassed.”
“Well, that’s no mind to me, Lib. She’s done more for us than anyone else ever did. You go too hard on her.”
“I can’t help it, Frankie. She makes me so mad. Ever since she became Mrs. Sarah Dewey, it’s like she’s been someone she’s not. And she’s trying to make me someone I’m not too.”
“What do you want from her?”
Liberty shrugged.
“You can’t blame her for wanting a better life for you.”
The Ferris wheel started up again, the carriages lurched, and Frankie laughed and Liberty screamed.
“Should we go and see the Swiss Cheese Man?” Frankie said. “They say he goes right up to the roof of the tent with hooks in him.”
“No, I think it’s sad.”
They were in the Bowery, the long and crowded alley that wound through the heart of Coney Island from the Steeplechase to Feltman’s Arcade. A wooden wall on one side rattled and shook when the roller-coaster ride went past.
“What about the Tunnel of Love?”
“With you?”
“I’ll be the boy if you like and try and kiss you, and you can try and fend me off.”
“I’ve never had a boy try and kiss me, so I wouldn’t know how.”
“It’s easy,” Frankie said, “you just turn your head away and pretend like you’re not interested. It makes them try harder.”
“When have you had a boy try and kiss you?”
“I’ve had my share. Haven’t you?”
“Not at Westover. They’re all girls.”
“Just as well. Boys are no good for anything anyway; they only get you in the family way, like my sister. For the love of God, she’s not much older than me.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“I’ll not spend the rest of my life making shirtwaists for a few nickels an hour, that’s for sure. I’m planning to go back to school.”
“Can you afford it?”
“Thanks to your ma, I can. I want to make something of myself, or at least, if I can’t do that, I’ll do something useful. Thinking of being a nurse, me.”
“A nurse?”
“Well, it’s not the most glamorous thing, I guess, but I’m no Jean Harlow, and I’m not clever enough to be a teacher. It means going to night school, and that’ll be hard after I’ve been working all day. But it’s that or end up like my ma.”
They went to see Professor Bernard, Magician Extraordinary, and his star act, Bonita and her Fighting Lions. To finish, they went on the Thunderbolt because the lines for the Cyclone still stretched halfway around the block.
On the train back into the city, they sat side by side on the hard wooden benches as the train rattled back through Brooklyn, and Frankie put her head on Liberty’s shoulder. “Do you ever wonder,” she said, “what would happen if you were born to another family?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I think about what I’d be like if my da had been one of those millionaire fellas. If I’d be different.”
“I don’t know, Frankie. I think we all make our own way. If we’re strong enough, we find our own level in the end.”
“It’s nice to think so,” Frankie said.
35
Dewey rolled away from her and onto his back, breathing hard. Sarah rolled with him, curled under his arm, ran a hand along the smooth skin of his chest, felt his heart beating against his ribs. “That was nice,” she said.
She said it so soft, perhaps he didn’t hear her. Was a woman supposed to like this? Some of the wives at the Plaza said they did, but they weren’t good Jewish girls from the shtetl. He wasn’t like Micha, her Dewey, not mister couple of minutes to do your business, then lie there snoring. So gentle, Dewey was.
When they were first married, he even asked her if she minded; and if she said she was tired, he wouldn’t do anything, like she could have a say in such things. Her Dewey, such a character he was.
She felt him reach for her hand under the bedclothes. “I love you,” he whispered into the dark.
They both loved her, her husbands, and she hadn’t felt like she was enough for either of them. She wanted to say, I love you back, but she never could. Instead she said, “Wish I could give you a baby.”
“Well, that’s no one’s fault.”
“A good wife, she will give you a baby.”
“It’s God that decides these things, sweetheart.”
“You sound like my vati,” she said.
Maybe he was right, God decides. But her and Micha, they had tricked God, and now it looked like they would get away with it after all. Or at least, she would get away with it. How would anyone ever find out her secret now?
Well, there was still one way.
After the wedding, Dewey and George hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Dewey knew how his friend felt about his new wife. Besides, George came to New York only two or three times a year, and when he did, Dewey kept him away from her, had lunch with him in his office or on Wall.
But she couldn’t keep from seeing him forever. Seven years she had spent now—how did people say it in English? Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It seemed to her as if every day she was waiting only for everything to come crashing down. How could she ever be happy, living in such a way? That was what you got from playing sneaky with God. Her vati had tried to warn her, hadn’t he, before she left Haapvinni. “Not for you to decide, Sarah. Is for God to decide.”
She closed her eyes, and she was ten years old again. She was lined up with her sisters in their yard in the shtetl. She could not even remember what it was they had done. Her vati stood in front of them. She could smell his moldy gabardine coat, saw his gray side curls hanging by his cheeks as he wagged his long and crooked index finger in all their faces.
“Now tell me the truth. Not how you would like it to be, but how it is.”
How many times had she thought: I must tell Dewey how it is. But then she thought: What good is it for Libby now, knowing the truth? It made her feel sick. How could Libby ever be happy, knowing how her mother had lied to her all these years?
So much damage it would do.
No, her job now was to make things right for Libby.
Sarah waited until Dewey’s soft, even breathing let her know he was asleep, and then she slipped out of bed and padded through the apartment to her study, turned on the lamp. The yellow light threw a pool of shadows over her writing desk. There was a secret drawer in one of the panels, and she slid it out. Inside was Micha’s biscuit box.
She pulled off the lid. The newspaper cutting was thin as tissue now.
Her mother, Mrs. Clare Seabrook, was identified among the deceased, but no trace of the baby was found.
Burn it, she thought. Burn it, and it will be like it never happened.
Because I can’t tell anyone now, she thought, not after all this time. I couldn’t bear to lose my daughter now. I just couldn’t.
She put the box back in the desk, snapped off the light, and went back to bed. Lay there in the dark for hours and never slept at all.
Another sweltering New York summer’s day. George Seabrook looked out the window of Bill Dewey’s office on Wall and watched the crowds milling in the street with the sort of detached wonderment he felt when he looked at the animals in a zoo. On the radio that morning, they said the people were flooding into New York from all over America: Okies and hillbillies and crackers from the Deep South, all milling about on Nassau and Broad and outside the National City Bank headquarters.
A line of messenger boys shuffled through the crowds, carrying locked metal boxes filled with securities, each boy holding with one hand the handle of the box ahead and with the other the handle of the box behind. Armed guards were positioned front and rear. For all the world they reminded him of a prison chain gang he had seen as a boy down in Georgia. The crowds parted for them, staring in almost rev
erential silence, as if they were carrying holy relics.
“What the hell are all those people waiting for?” he said to Dewey.
Dewey shrugged. “Damned if I know, George. It’s like being at a carnival, isn’t it?”
“More like a racetrack,” George said. “End of the day, there’s going to be tears and a litter of torn-up betting slips.”
“Not this meet,” Dewey said.
“We’ll see. Doesn’t it scare you?”
“Scare me?”
“There are guys down there selling hot dogs and peanuts. It’s not business, Bill, not real business. I heard on Friday, General Electric dropped twenty points in two hours. No one has control of this, Bill. It may not frighten you, but it sure scares the hell out of me.”
“It’s prosperity, George. It’s the American dream.”
“Is it? Only it looks more like hysteria to me. My hotel is full. There is not a room to be had. I heard someone has sublet the VIP suite. On the way here I saw people sleeping in the graveyard of the Trinity Church.”
“Well, it’s the biggest bull market in history, George. You can’t blame them. Everyone wants a piece of it. Everyone wins.”
“The way I’ve always understood things, where there’s winners, there’s always losers.”
“Not this time. If you’re smart, it’s the chance to make a fortune. Don’t you want to be a part of it?”
“Absolutely not. Some of these so-called securities people are buying aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. It’s snake oil.”
“I’ll not deny the market has attracted some undesirables, but that always happens when there’s money to be made. The market is fundamentally sound.”
“Nothing can go on forever.”
Dewey’s face was thrown half in shadow by the shaded lamp on his desk. George’s gaze was drawn to the vase of white lilies on the carved mahogany table in the middle of the office. Weren’t they the kind of flowers you brought out at a funeral? Dewey flipped open the humidor on the desk and offered George a cigar. “From Cuba,” he said. “Hand rolled.”
George took one and lit it. He leaned back and watched the smoke curl toward the gold filigree on the ceiling. “You’re not badly exposed yourself, are you, Bill?”
Loving Liberty Levine Page 19
