“Nu, what did he say?” she asked. “Oppenheim?”
“No dice,” he said, hearing the eggs sizzle as they hit the pan. “Said it’s too late, a letter would look suspicious.”
She shook her head. “Your mother said he wouldn’t do it. She never liked him. Maybe we can find someone else.” She bent close to the pan, then scooped up the omelet and flipped it over. Moments later she placed it in front of him, dripping with cheese, and then she sat very close, watching him eat. By the last few bites he felt sick, but still he kept going until the end. Afterward she stood, took the plate in her hand, and felt her way to the sink.
When she was done, Robert followed her into the large bedroom. Clothes were strewn on the bed. The dresser was covered in makeup brushes, powder, perfume, and a few scarves, everything scattered. In the center of the room lay a single shoe. He retrieved it quickly.
“Shoe, Cece,” he said, holding it up in front of her. “Dark blue.” He put it on the dresser. As a child, he’d thought her invincible, preparer of Sunday lunches for thirty, the only person who could order around his mother. Now a stray shoe imperiled her existence.
“Go in the closet. Find a silver shoe box,” she said, sitting down on the bed. “It has English letters on it.” His grandmother could not read or write English, had signed an X on his birthday cards his whole life. He pushed aside mountains of dresses, the dry-cleaning plastic sticking to his arms and face. A person could asphyxiate in such a closet. “Get Barry to help you clean this out!”
There was an overhead lightbulb. He turned it on. “How do you reach your shoes? You’re not climbing on any ladders, are you?”
“The ones I wear are on the back of the door,” she said. “Those are extras.”
He found two silver boxes and brought them to the bed. The first one contained a pair of white sandals. She shook her head. The second he suspected was empty—it had felt that way when he took it down. She smiled and told him to open the lid.
A box full of money.
“You count,” she said. “I’ve been saving since it began. The conscription.”
All dollar bills. He did as she asked, laying the bills out on the bed.
“You take it, sweetheart,” she said. “You find the man.”
“What man?” he asked. “Another doctor?” It looked to be about a hundred dollars. How did you bribe a doctor for a hundred in ones? The doctors he’d heard about cost fifty times that.
She leaned closer, lowered her voice. “Don’t tell nobody you’re going.”
“Going where?”
She paused. “Be very quiet. He’ll put the blanket down so they won’t see your footsteps. That’s important. And make sure your little sister don’t sneeze.”
“Cece?” He put the box down. “Where are you?”
She took his hands and kissed them.
“It’ll be all right,” she said. “Only the old women got seasick.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Revelations
Cece leaned on his arm. He thought of weddings and funerals, the only time anymore that men led women in such a way. He had to walk slowly. His mother came to the front door for the handoff. “Park in the back and bring the chairs up through the basement,” Stacia said.
“Where the hell is my wastrel brother?”
“Upstairs,” his mother said, lifting Cece into the living room. “With her.”
“I assume by ‘her’ you mean Gwendolyn and not, say, Lady Bird Johnson or Marianne Faithfull, or perhaps Mrs. Lepcheck my fourth-grade teacher?”
“Don’t forget to bring in the chairs.”
He parked the car in back then came in through the basement, walking up the steps, through the kitchen, and into the living room. His father was in his usual recliner—that was more like it—watching football, oblivious to his presence. Robert walked back up another set of steps to the second floor. His bedroom door was open, but Gwen wasn’t in there. Then he heard voices coming from behind Barry’s door. It was slightly ajar and he stood in the hall and watched.
His brother sat on the bed, opening a flat white box tied with a large red ribbon. Gwendolyn stood a few feet from the bed, smiling. Barry had never gotten a gift in a box like that, a box that actually fit the gift, not something patched together. He pulled away the paper, held a shirt out in front of him, a white linen shirt, collarless, a more masculine version of the type Gwendolyn favored herself. She shopped at department stores. Retail. There was a name on the box but he couldn’t see it, knew Barry had never held a shirt like that in his hands—sewn with care, a shirt that hung on a person right and fit them. How had she known his size? From the picture he had of the two of them, taped to the mirror?
“Wow,” Barry said. His eyes were wide, staring at the shirt, staring at Gwendolyn, then back to the shirt. But he could not keep his eyes off her long. Vishniak was right. The boy saw only one part of a woman, but did not seem to know a thing about actually talking to the opposite sex. Sure, he knew what sex was. Barry, too, had been schooled on Stacia’s artwork, his father’s basement Playboy collection. But when it came to talking to women, winning them, he was lost. Why hadn’t he come to Robert? Why had they never talked about this?
“There’s no secret, really,” Gwendolyn said. “With girls, I mean. You just have to act like they don’t matter to you and then they’ll come running.” She paused. “You might try taking an extra shower or two. A little of that lovely green soap they sell here. The manly stuff advertised on television. You know, the fellow chopping trees? Robert uses it. They make a deodorant, too.”
She said these things so delicately, without judgment. Whereas another person, Robert or his parents for instance, might have said that Barry stank. Gwendolyn would never say that.
She put her hand on his shoulder. “You have your own qualities that Robert doesn’t have. You have something, too, that’s very attractive. That’s just yours.” She leaned over, kissed him on the forehead. “Soon you’ll be going to university. The girls are better in university. Trust me.”
“Okay,” he breathed. In her hands, he was docile, pliable, drugged by lust. “I trust you, Gwendolyn.”
“I’m going to take a shower now,” Gwendolyn continued. “Your mother said to go while the hot water’s not in use. Robert washes so much, he’s practically antiseptic.”
Barry laughed. Either she had won him over or else he was thinking of her in the shower, her white skin against the pale yellow tiles, and was too preoccupied to speak.
“I’ll see you later.” She got up to go.
Robert ducked into his room and waited for her. Inside his bedroom, the light seeped through the window blinds. It was the graying afternoon light of his childhood, a specific light that happened at around four o’clock in a neighborhood of row homes, the endless blocks where the sun never seemed to shine directly on furniture or floors, not like the glare in single homes or high-rise apartments. The light made him think of enforced naps, of homework and retreating to his room in the agonies of adolescence, made him think of his whole life in this house. When Gwendolyn entered in a sexless blue terry-cloth bathrobe that she’d bought for the trip, he put his arms around her, kissed her, and started to undo the belt at the middle, but she would have none of it. She had to talk to him about his family, she said, it was terribly important.
He braced himself.
“You have it all wrong, Robbie,” she said. “About them. All wrong.”
Then she told him how they really were. Stacia wasn’t cheap; no, his mother was a brilliant home economist, able to make enormous meals on little money and stretch what needed to be stretched. She should run the government! And his father, reading for hours on his day off—in the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom. And so many interesting stories. Vishniak was so terribly imaginative, so literary. Sad that he never got a formal education, was always looking after his brothers. And Barry, such a sweet boy. Such big shoes for him to fill, being behind Robert, and Barry was competiti
ve by nature, more than Robert realized, but he’d be fine, she said, the two brothers were more alike than different.
She remade them all, seeing only what was admirable, shining a light, retelling the story for him.
That night, they were all on best behavior, trying to fulfill her expectations. They knew somehow that she’d remade them, and they liked seeing themselves in her eyes. The extended family all kissed her and clawed at her and asked her about England, and the children made her say things over and over again, just to hear the accent. A Vishniak brother asked her to say, “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.” She did as he asked, smiling in her slim royal blue wool dress and pumps, pearl earrings; she had dressed for them, and they appreciated such niceties. They would talk for weeks about her perfume—what was it?
“Chanel Number Nine,” she said.
They nodded solemnly, as if in prayer.
“Don’t you think,” he heard one female cousin say to another, “that she looks just a little bit like Jacqueline Kennedy?”
“Oh, what we once had in her!” proclaimed Aunt Lolly.
Every woman wanted to sit next to Gwendolyn, every child wanted to crawl onto her lap, every man congratulated Robert for having found such a girl. By the time the first course was served, they had decided unequivocally on the question that had puzzled them on the way over—of course Gwendolyn was Jewish. That much was obvious now. Stacia passed around gefilte fish, big heaping balls of carp covered in drahlis, the thick, runny fish jelly that Vishniak pronounced as looking “oh so much like dog shit,” and Gwendolyn didn’t even flinch. Not so much as a shiver as she picked up her fork. Oh, she was a Jew, all right.
They passed her the rest of the food: The soup with matzo balls because the Vishniaks never met a holiday, American or otherwise, that did not like a matzo ball, big as a baby’s head, floating in a river of chicken soup; two kinds of kugel—sweet and vegetable; and kasha in pastry. Then green beans with almonds, carrots with pineapple—in their family, all vegetables had to be adorned—and the three main courses, including the duck in orange sauce, then the chicken for those who didn’t like duck, and the brisket. The passing went on forever, and Gwendolyn laughed and laughed as uncles and cousins heaped more and more food on her plate.
“Robbie,” she whispered, “I’ll never eat all this.”
“Just try,” he said. “They only want to see you trying. And whatever you don’t eat, pass over to him.” He gestured to the enormous Victor Lampshade, whose plate was piled so high that someone had just given him a second dish to contain it all.
Where had that girl gone, the one curled up, crying, on the floor? Clearly, he had misjudged. She was not fragile. She was strong, stronger than he was, with a well of inner resources and a gift of seeing people as they wanted to be seen. She filled in the middle where others saw only outlines.
Gwendolyn ate delicately, as Tracey had, cutting the meat into small pieces, nodding at the others’ conversation with her mouth closed. She ignored the food that shot across the table, or dropped from people’s tongues, the food visible as it was chewed, his family digesting great hunks of meat then crunching on the bones, sucking out the marrow, devouring as if eating were work. Vishniak started to do the spoon trick, something he did every year involving an olive, a spoon, and a glass of seltzer, and, inevitably, dropping his pants. But he glanced at Gwendolyn and told the children to eat their vegetables. He would show it to them another time.
Instead of Pilgrims and Indians, John Smith and Pocahontas, they talked of Richard Nixon. Once they got started, they were on fire.
“A friend of Joseph McCarthy, that’s what he is.”
“A friend of Roy Cohn, that traitor, that shandah fur die goyim.”
“Where were the young people? All their marching and yelling for the vote.”
“Don’t go blaming the young,” said Aunt Lolly, as she leaned over and wiped a glob of potato from Uncle Fred’s shirt. “They have enough to worry about.”
“The war,” whispered one of the children. She said it like a hiss. “The war.”
“What will you do?” Uncle Frank asked Robert. “I read how more died there now than in Korea.”
Robert nodded, unsure what to reply. But Gwendolyn put her hand on his leg, leaned across him and said, “Robert and I are going into the Peace Corps.”
“We are?” he whispered.
“The Peace Corps?” Stacia asked. “What’s he going to do there?”
“It’s the perfect solution!” Gwendolyn yelled, for now she was raising her voice to compete. “He won’t have to carry a gun, and we can help the poor.”
“Robert help the poor?” Barry yelped. Vishniak, too, and several of his brothers joined in, laughing and snorting. “My brother?” Barry asked, chomping on a sour pickle, the juice running down his chin. “Don’t you know, Gwendolyn? Robert is his own favorite charity.”
Robert looked over at Gwendolyn. He expected her to fall apart, hearing them all laugh at her idea. But she was unchanged. Her eyes blazed with vision. They were going into the Peace Corps, she whispered to him again, and he’d finally be safe.
That night, after the others had gone, she lay next to him, so certain, so convinced. She could remake the war, the killing, now, as she’d remade his family. “If we went into the Peace Corps, we could make good out of bad, we could be together,” she whispered, “and travel.”
“You’d never get in,” he said. “You’re not an American citizen.”
“I would be,” she said, “if we got married.” She began to kiss his cheek, and then moved down his neck. She held herself over him, arms taut, her tongue licking down his chest to his stomach, her long hair hanging over his body, softly stroking his skin. His thighs ached.
“Think about it, Robbie,” she whispered. “Think about it.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Graduation
Even at 7:00 a.m., they could see the haze, the air thick with humidity. KYW News Radio predicted record-breaking temperatures, and Uncle Frank’s car—the black Pontiac with the black bench seats—had no air-conditioning. Six of them had to squeeze into that car—Cece, Lolly, Stacia, and Vishniak, Frank at the wheel, and his wife, Lillian. Only Barry was absent, home studying for the SAT, and Uncle Fred had to work. The women wore stockings and hats and dresses with jackets; the men were in dark wool suits, the same ones used for funerals and weddings, not exactly appropriate to the season. Right from the start they all took their jackets off and laid them carefully in the trunk.
Cece, being the smallest, sandwiched herself in between the men in the front seat. In the back, Stacia and Lillian, both thin, were bookends to the heavier Aunt Lolly. They tried not to touch each other, their skin already sticky. Lolly made waves in the air with a stiff Chinese paper fan Fred had once brought her from a gas station. It was trimmed in red and featured a single, drooping branch covered in blossoms. At noon they pulled into a rest stop to eat the bagels spread with cream cheese and jelly that Stacia had prepared that morning, washing them down with iced tea from a large thermos.
Despite starting out at dawn, and giving themselves over an hour to spare, they got lost on the New York Thruway and went round and round for hours until they could get back on track. They arrived just as the ceremony was starting, slid into the back row, tired, sweating, the men thirsty and the women in need of the bathroom, but full of anticipation.
For years now, they’d been waiting for this, the first college graduation of their lives. A distant music started and the students walked in two at a time carrying flowers instead of programs. A few girls were barefoot, some were barefoot but wearing a cap and gown, and others appeared to be wrapped in bedsheets. A few of the boys wore T-shirts and torn jeans. “Where are the rest of the caps and gowns?” Lolly whispered to Stacia. “Did they run out?”
The students settled down in their seats and immediately began to boo various members of the administration, and then the guest speaker. The reason was never qu
ite clear to the Vishniak party. The class valedictorian, a woman, spoke of how colleges kept students politically ignorant, and students needed to kick big business out of the academe. Stacia and Vishniak, like the other parents, stared down into their laps.
Afterward, overheated, disappointed, they found Robert and Gwendolyn and asked only for the use of the closest bathrooms and then a fast campus tour. Their favorite part was the library, with its rows and rows of thick books, the echoing halls, the ancient desks. And air-conditioning. They breathed in the quiet and the cold, cold air and were back to the parking lot within three hours of arrival. Cece dabbed at her eyes, saying that she was glad to live to see the first college graduate in the family. “You did graduate, right? That was it?”
“Yeah, Cece, it’s over,” Robert said and collected his five-dollar bills from each of them. His parents handed him a wrapped box. He unwrapped it and stuffed the paper in his pocket.
“It’s waterproof,” his father announced.
“It was on sale,” his mother added.
His parents had bought him a Timex watch. He thanked them with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. By the time Gwendolyn hugged them good-bye, he couldn’t wait for them to drive away.
GWENDOLYN DID NOT GIVE UP on her desire to enter the Peace Corps. A recent Peace Corps alumnus named Jerry Stiles showed up at the bookstore. He had just returned from the Peruvian Andes, and each time he came to browse, Bruno and Gwendolyn treated him like a celebrity. Gwendolyn set up a meeting so that she and Robert could ask Stiles questions about his experience. They were to meet in a café in Harvard Square, a place where Gwendolyn and Robert went when it was warm because they could sit outside together on the small patio and watch the parade of Cambridge humanity, most of it under age twenty-five.
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