Loving Liberty Levine

by Colin Falconer

  Libby felt herself blush—Goddammit—taken off guard, hated herself for falling for such a cheap line. “You look a little rumpled,” she said. “Just got off the boat?”

  “You should know I spent half an hour deciding which tie to wear to impress you. Can you get away for lunch?”

  A customer emerged from behind the curtain that hung across the changing cubicle in the corner. She gave Jack a look of stern reproach for being there and brought her purchase to the register. Libby excused herself while she attended to her. When she had finished, Jack was still waiting patiently by the door. She put up the closed sign, waited for the last two customers to leave, then fetched her coat.

  A cold November day. He turned up his collar and put his fists deep in his coat pockets. “Where shall we go?” he said.

  “There’s a really terrible place for coffee over on the corner. There’s crumbs all over the counter, and the coffee tastes like mud. If I remember, it’s the kind of egalitarian place you like.”

  “Sounds perfect,” he said.

  Everyone was walking with their heads down into the wind, and Jack had to keep one hand on his fedora to keep it on his head. They passed an Italian grocery with a picture of Mussolini in the window, frowning from under a feather-topped helmet, beside a color lithograph of the Madonna, her carmine heart luminous through the folds of her blue gown. A customer came out, and as the door to the shop opened, Liberty could smell the damp ripeness of the cheeses on the counter.

  “How long were you in London?” she asked him.

  “Three years.”

  “Has it been that long?” she said, though she knew exactly how long it had been. “How was it?”

  “I couldn’t wait to come home. It’s so grim over there. The newspapers are full of bad news, day after day, and it’s relentless. If it’s not Hitler, it’s Mussolini, and if it’s not them, it’s Franco. Before I left, there was a riot in the East End between the Jews and the Mosleyites. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”

  “All we hear about here is the king and his American girlfriend.”

  “They say he’ll give up the throne to keep her.”

  “What man would give up being king for a woman?”

  “Depends on the woman, I suppose,” he said, which surprised her. They stopped outside a diner on Bleecker Street, and she nodded to him, this was the place.

  When they walked in, a man in a cap and an apron, which would have been white if he ever washed it, gave the counter a perfunctory wipe with a rag. Libby ordered coffee and a sandwich. “Just coffee, thanks,” Jack said.

  “Not up to your usual standard?”

  “Too early to eat,” he said. “Besides, if you can take the food in England, you can eat anywhere.” He eased onto a stool. “So, Libby, your mom’s done okay, then?”

  “In her element. She still makes off-the-rack, but some of Ziegfeld’s girls have had gowns made; plus she has two or three special customers, well heeled, they pay more than one thousand dollars for a single gown. A few months ago Gypsy Rose Lee—can you believe—she was in the Ziegfeld show, and she came to Mama as well. I’m gushing, aren’t I?”

  “A bit, but that’s okay. You were right about your mother, then. She sounds like a woman of many hidden talents.”

  “All our customers have to do is show her something they’ve seen in a fashion magazine, doesn’t matter if it’s a Vionnet or a Lanvin or a Chanel, she can make it. Hand-turned hems, hand-sewn seams, work like hers you can’t get in New York.”

  The mud arrived. Jack picked up the mug and sipped at his; she saw him wince.

  “So long living with the Limeys, I suppose you drink tea now.”

  “I still drink coffee. But this is nothing like coffee.”

  “It was a big surprise to see you this morning.”

  “Well, I kept tabs while I was in London. My old boss at Davidson’s said you were still on his books. I wanted to see for myself how things turned out for you. Seems George got it all wrong about your mother.”

  “We pay our bills.”

  “What about you? Do you have a beau?” He looked at her hands, but they were still hidden in her muff. “A husband?”

  “It’s been three years. I’ve been through two marriages and five engagements. Keep up, Jack.”

  They talked about the fashion business and movies they liked, and before she knew it, they’d been sitting there half an hour. She pulled his arm toward her, looked at his wristwatch: yellow gold with a brown leather strap. Expensive. “I have to go.”

  “So soon?”

  “It was good seeing you again. I never got a chance to thank you for what you did for us. So . . . thank you.”

  A casual smile and a shrug. He reached into his pocket and slapped some coins on the counter. “Whatever he charges you for the coffee, it’s too much.”

  “Good-bye,” she said. So this was all there would ever be, after all.

  “Come to dinner with me tomorrow night.”

  She tried to hide her surprise, pretended to think it over.

  “I’ll pick you up.”

  “You’re asking me out?”

  “It sounds that way.”

  “Tell me, is that the real reason you came by the shop?”

  “Well, it wasn’t to drink this guy’s coffee.”

  “Three years it takes you to ask a girl to dinner?”

  “It’s only dinner. I’m not writing you into my will.”

  “Don’t pick me up, I’ll meet you.”

  “Okay.” He reached into his pocket, took out a business card, and scribbled an address on the back of it with his pen, which was also gold, she noticed, to match the tie and the watch. “Seven-thirty,” he said.

  She watched him button up his overcoat on the sidewalk, replace his fedora, and head back toward Broadway with his collar turned up against the wind. What to make of him? Always so serious, but he loved the Marx Brothers; his father was her mother’s greatest detractor, yet Jack had risked his censure to afford her credit; he was rich and good-looking, could have the arm of any deb he wanted, yet he came down to the Village to ask a girl he hardly knew to come with him to a—she looked at the back of his card—a Chinese restaurant on Doyers Street.

  Well, better not let Mama find out.

  48

  Sarah took a deep breath, got herself ready. Here she was again at the kissing post, where Micha had come to get her, how long ago was it? Twenty-three years. Just a slip of a girl then. She was not a young woman anymore, but not a poor one either, in her fox fur and gauntlet gloves and blackberry beret, a proper businesswoman, and she had done it all herself.

  Never was a woman so proud of what she had done, she thought, and so ashamed.

  Through the window she saw the green goddess of the Liberty statue, her arm raised, looking out at the sea and all those shtetls on the other side of the ocean. Waiting, waiting for the rest to come, like she waited for me.

  She looked up the stairs, and there they were, her family, these strangers she could barely remember.

  A big smile she put on. Hugged and cried, shouted out how good it was to see them, ten times, a hundred times. Like a good Jewish sister, crying and kissing. And all the time thinking: What are they wearing? How old and plain they look. This cannot be my sister, cannot be my little niece whose life I saved!

  And what about these boys, I have seen better-dressed creatures playing in the gutter on Orchard Street!

  What a bad sister I am to have such thoughts. What is wrong with me that I could think such a way?

  Yaakov was still handsome, but his beard and the wings of his long hair that stuck out from under his fox fur hat were gray now. And Etta, her beautiful sister, Sarah did not recognize her, so plump now, and chalk-white from sea sickness. And this one, this must be Bessie. The last time she had seen her, she was a babe in arms, pink and soft and hardly any hair on her tiny little head. Now look at her: dark pigtails and sad eyes and almost as wide as she was long in her
heavy black coat and shapeless brown boots.

  “This is Ruben,” Etta was saying. “And this is Aron.” She pushed forward the two surly-looking boys. They peered up at her from under their dark eyebrows, thin and gangly in their teenage bodies, like marionettes they looked.

  This was how I looked when I first came, she thought, when I didn’t know how to speak American, knew nothing of the schvartzes and skyscrapers and hamburgers and subways and Checker cabs.

  They will survive like I did. We all survive, mostly.

  But there was this dread in her. Suddenly she had these people from the alte heim watching her. In that moment, it was like she had a conscience again, like her vati and Elohim had arrived to take an accounting from her.

  And next, they would have to all meet her Libby.

  The children’s eyes were like soup plates as they rode in the cab heading back from Battery Park. The two boys huddled in their seats not saying a thing. Yaakov was pointing and shouting in Yiddish. Bessie was shrunken up inside her coat, like a tortoise going into its shell.

  “The children cannot speak any of this English,” Etta was saying. “Only Yaakov can. He is learning for three years in Tallinn.”

  Another shout. Yaakov, mouth open, was pointing to the sky, peering up through the cab window at the high buildings, the Chrysler and the Empire State Buildings. It made her smile. For herself, she never looked up anymore. New York was New York.

  Yaakov was like a little child. She remembered how once he had seemed so big and so manly, such love she had for him once. Now he was just another greenhorn.

  “How are things at home?” Sarah said.

  “It is so good there now, you wouldn’t recognize,” Etta said. “No one calls us dirty names in the street like they did when Vati was alive. Ruben and Aron can go to school with the other children.”

  “But how long will it last?” Yaakov said. “This meshuggener Hitler making trouble. Stalin is worse!”

  Ruben shook his brother’s arm and pointed. They gasped when they saw the Elevated thunder overhead, the winter sun and shadow flickering on the street like the end of a newsreel as the train went through the station. Etta shook her head at seeing so many people, all the men in fedoras and the women in gray and brown calf-length coats and suits, clicking along the sidewalks in high heels, everyone hurrying, everyone with somewhere to go.

  “It is so crazy big here,” she said, her nose pressed against the glass window. “However will we live?”

  The apartment above the shop had just two bedrooms. They had the sewing machines for their three seamstresses in the living room at the front because it had better light, and their dinner table in the kitchen. After their walk-up on Cornelia Street, it had seemed impossibly big; now it would be too tiny and cramped for all of them.

  Sarah told Yaakov and Etta they could have her bedroom, and she put mattresses for the boys and for Bessie in Libby’s room. There were two more mattresses for Libby and for her; they would put them on the living room floor after the girls had finished work for the day. Only for a short time, Sarah told Etta. Soon she would have enough money for a lease on a new apartment. She and Liberty would move out, and Etta and her family could stay above the shop until Yaakov found a job.

  Later, she took them all out to show them the city. Nothing would do but riding the Elevated up to Times Square, where they all stood around gaping at the billboards and the lights: Coca-Cola, Camel, Lucky Strike, Kool—“Even if you cough like crazy, Kools still taste fresh as a daisy.” Etta could not drag the boys away from the fifteen-foot-high penguin in a top hat and a bow tie.

  The boys pointed at the things Sarah no longer even thought about, like the little Mercury statues on all the traffic lights on Fifth. “What are they, Aunt Sarah?” “Why are they there?” But what could she tell them? They were just there, who knew why?

  Bessie and the boys could have stood on the corner of Fifth and West Forty-Second all day, watching the streetcars rattling on their brass rails across the intersections, the live wires buzzing overhead; Ruben wanted only to go down into the subway and listen to the clatter of the turnstiles and gaze around at this subterranean wonder with its noise and its people and its advertising. “Chew Gum!” “Drink Beer!”

  Another miracle: put a nickel in a slot for a slice of pie at the Horn and Hardart Automat. Who could imagine? Hot coffee spouting from the mouths of silver dolphins. Everywhere some new wonder for them. Towers taller than the tallest castles so that you could not even see the sky; caves that went on underneath the city forever; trains that flew in the sky; everywhere polished steel and mirrored glass and shining car hoods and clanging buses and tooting, impatient taxicabs, and people, so many people.

  The boys loved it all, but it was winter now, and the afternoon was over before it started. By the time they got back to the Village, it was almost dark. They all huddled by the stove in the kitchen, and Sarah showed Etta the samovar. “Do you remember this, Etta?” she said. “This and a mattress and the menorah, all I brought with me from the alte heim. I have had them with me through thick and thin all this time.”

  She made some black tea, and they talked about when they were all young and Tallinn was part of Russia. The winters back there, everything frozen, you could boil the potatoes all day and still find ice in the middle of them.

  “Is it cold here in winter?” Yaakov asked her.

  Sarah nodded. “But somehow it seems warmer because of all the lights and the people. And because there is always hope here.”

  They watched the dusk fall and the lights of the neighboring tenements blink on one by one, and Sarah felt the fear tighten in her, like a knot in her belly, someone pulling the ends tighter and tighter. She would be home soon, her Liberty, her beautiful daughter with the red hair and green eyes that you could never see in a photograph. One photograph she had sent them, when Liberty was ten years old. What would they say when they saw her?

  Sarah reached over the table and nudged Bessie’s arm. “And how are you, little skinny bones?”

  “I’m not skinny,” Bessie said, without a smile. “I’m fat.”

  “You’re not fat,” Etta said, and the two boys giggled and nudged each other.

  “Did your mother ever tell you the story of when you were born?” Sarah asked her.

  “All the time,” Bessie said, and raised her eyes to the ceiling.

  “Bessie, don’t talk to your aunt Sura in such a way! You put a knife through your poor mother’s heart when you do that!”

  “Let her be,” Yaakov said. “It is her first day. She’s missing her cousins.”

  “Zara and Bluma,” Etta said to Sarah. “Inseparable, the three of them, since they were all little. Weren’t you, Bessie?”

  “I don’t want you to talk about them,” Bessie said.

  “They are Zlota’s girls?” Sarah said.

  “She has three boys also, all grown up now.”

  “And Gutta’s family?”

  “We don’t see them so much,” Yaakov said. “They moved away.”

  “They came to Vati’s funeral,” Etta said. “Nice boys. One of them is married now.”

  “So sad he is gone. I cannot believe.”

  “Vati was so sick, for such a long time. It was a blessing. And Mutti so soon after.”

  “I wish she had never died,” Bessie said, “then we wouldn’t have to come here.”

  There was a hush then. Well, it was true enough, Sarah supposed. She poured more tea, added a little lemon. Yaakov drank it the old way, with a sugar cube clenched between his front teeth. The heat from the stove steamed the windows. One of the boys wrote his name on the glass.

  And then she heard Liberty on the stairs.

  The door flung open, and she was standing there, beautiful in her burgundy hat and her wool coat with the fur collar. There was a hush in the room when she took off her hat and they all saw her red hair.

  “Libby, look, they are finally here!” Sarah said, jumping to her feet. I will
be gay and enthusiastic, she thought, and this difficult moment, it will be gone.

  Libby beamed and held out her arms, and waited for them to come to her.

  “Oh mein Gott,” Etta said, and put a hand to her mouth.

  Silence.

  “Is this our cousin?” Ruben said, finally. “She looks like a goy!”

  49

  Doyers Street, Chinatown

  “Did you know,” Jack said, “that corner outside has seen more people die than any other street in America? It was a favorite place for the local Chinese tongs to ambush each other. They used hatchets in those days.”

  “You take me to all the nicest places.”

  “Thought I’d show you a little local color.”

  In fact, Libby was secretly delighted he had brought her here. Chinoiserie was in vogue. Elegant New York had discovered somewhere other than Harlem to slum it at night.

  She looked around the dining room; half the Upper East Side were there. The only Chinese were the waiters, none of them much bigger than the two huge porcelain vases that stood on either side of the doors. A crimson screen with snarling golden dragons hid the patrons from the street, and the street from the patrons; so they didn’t have to watch the blood running along the gutters during the next tong war, she supposed.

  Tiny golden Buddhas, with joss sticks burning beside them, nestled in niches in the walls. The owner patrolled the room in a tuxedo, snapping at any of the waiters who weren’t servile enough.

  “So, before you tried to impress me with your knowledge of the Oriental underworld, you were telling me about Harvard.”

  “Not much more to tell. It’s a stuffy place full of overprivileged brats like myself, but that’s as good a preparation as any for the business world and for England, of course.”

  “Are you being groomed to take over from Pops?”

  “Take over what?”

  “Your father’s business empire.”

  “It’s not really an empire.”

  “It’s not a kosher deli on the corner.”

  “I guess not. I was always being groomed, I guess. I’m his sole heir, the blue-eyed boy.”