by Susan Isaacs
Our host, Mike Mazer, was a second-rate real estate tycoon who had purchased a table—for two thousand dollars—and had given tickets for two of the ten seats to Paterno. Paterno, naturally, could not appear at a dinner honoring a man under heavy federal scrutiny, but by the same token he wanted his presence there, so he sent Jerry. And since Jerry’s eyes and ears and mouth were sufficient for a simple Dollars for Dick dinner, the second ticket went to the person in the office who most wanted to trail after Jerry Morrissey and/or have a free prime ribs dinner.
“Marcia.” Jerry stood about ten feet away, waving, blocking the numbered sign on our table. “Over here.” I waved back and weaved through the crowd of people who had not yet sat down to their scooped-out pineapple half heaped with fruit. As I got closer to him, I saw his coloring was high, bright, indicating he had managed four or five scotches between conversations. He looked loose and happy, his waving hand so relaxed it almost drooped. I smiled at him. I had just finished the final draft of Paterno’s declaration that afternoon and had dropped it on his desk at five thirty, right before Jerry and I left the office to go home and change. That meant LoBello had read the speech probably minutes after we left. Paterno must have called him to tell him the coast was clear—Morrissey had gone.
“Marcia,” Jerry said as I reached the table, reaching out for my hand. “Let me introduce you to everyone.” Like the paterfamilias, he motioned everyone at Table 74 to sit, and they did so. In fact, nearly everyone at Tables 72, 73, 75, and 76 did so also.
“This is Mike Mazer,” he began, nodding toward the mini-mogul. “Of course you’ve heard of him.” I beamed and nodded, as though a day did not pass without someone singing hosannas to Mazer Enterprises. Mazer was small, dark, compact, and wrinkled, like a human cigar. He smiled back. “And his wife, Francine Mazer,” Jerry continued, directing my attention to a woman in her late twenties who was scratching a minute reconstructed nose with a clawlike, dark-painted nail. “Francine manages a belt boutique,” Jerry added, sounding as though he thought it was a marvelous idea. Francine barely glanced at me before returning her bronze-lidded eyes to Jerry, gazing with an intensity bred of a desire to take her dark nails and rake them hard down his back. “And Tom Fitzpatrick,” Jerry continued, as he gave me a tour around the table, remembering each name, reciting everyone’s station as though each were vital to the nation’s peace and security.
“Jerry,” I whispered nervously. Maybe there was no problem. Maybe he had told Paterno to speak with LoBello. Jerry took his maraschino cherry and placed it next to the one on my fruit salad.
“Having a good time, hon?” he asked, giving me a slow glance and a thick-lashed blink and a warm smile—in short, giving me a strong hint that I should be having a delightful evening, just as he was.
“Fine,” I answered. I could hear him exhale gently, in gratitude. I reached for my spoon and shoveled in a few ounces of tart fruit. Jerry rearranged a pineapple chunk, moving it in front of a grape, while he astutely ignored Francine Mazer’s significant looks. “Guess who I saw?” I added.
“Who?”
“Lyle LoBello.”
“No shit. When did he slither into town?” Jerry’s voice contained no concern.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
“Well, I guess I’d better say hello to him at some point, just to show I don’t resent his trying to pull a fast one with Bill. I mean, Jesus, he’s such a two-bit little snake. But so obvious.” He stopped and turned his attention to Mike Mazer’s analysis of the problems of the city’s capital budget structure. He nodded several times, seeming awed at Mazer’s profundity.
“Jerry,” I whispered a few minutes later. Beneath the heavy yellow tablecloth, he took my hand and placed it between his legs and gave it an initiatory push. “Jerry, please listen.”
“Make nice to the man,” he murmured. “Don’t worry. The man will make nice to you later on.” His hands were on top of the table now, one relaxed, one grasping his drink.
“Jerry, Lyle read the draft of my declaration speech. The one I just gave to Bill this afternoon.”
For a moment he didn’t move. Jerry was a total politician. He knew he had been betrayed. He could read the signs and knew they forecast evil days for him. Then he stood and, clutching his glass very tight, beamed down at the table and said, “Would you people excuse me for a minute? I’m just going to get a refill.”
Six
Jerry and I were raised by widows, neither of them merry. But at least he had a pocketful of glad Daddy memories, stories he could whip out, family snapshots. There’s handsome Jim Morrissey, bouncing Jerry and brother Denny on his knees, singing, for some reason, “Nothing Could Be Finer Than to Be in Carolina” in an off-key but obviously endearing baritone. Or Jim at the Bronx Zoo, roaring, terrifying the lion that frightened baby Annie. Once again, broad-shouldered and serious in his policeman’s uniform, the day the whole family turned out to see him sworn in as sergeant. Even in his last year, age thirty-three, as he lay in bed weak from the leukemia that was killing him, he kept his eight-year-old son enthralled for hours, reading Tarzan stories. Every half hour or so, Jerry would let his father close his eyes for a few minutes. Then the tales would continue.
I had two years more. A month after my tenth birthday, my father walked into a Glickman Pillow Company truck that was rumbling down Avenue M in Brooklyn.
“Well, what was he like?” Jerry would ask. We’d study our history on weekends as we hiked for miles through Central Park or the Lower East Side or across the Brooklyn Bridge into the Heights.
“I really don’t remember him,” I’d answer, generally a little breathless from keeping up with Jerry’s longer strides.
“Oh, come on. He didn’t die till you were ten.”
“Really, I hardly have any memories.” Victor Green certainly never sang “Nothing Could Be Finer Than to Be in Carolina.” I’d try to look Jerry straight in the eye, and he’d peer back, skeptical. “He must have been quiet,” I’d try to explain.
He must have been. His footsteps are certainly not etched in my memory, but perhaps that’s because he glided through the house in his socks. Thin white socks, sagging around his slender, pale ankles. Our conversations were somewhat terse.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hello, little girl.”
He’d pat me on the head. He wasn’t being condescending. Patting heads was simply an acceptable adult-to-child gesture. He had probably seen it in a Shirley Temple movie.
My mother and my Aunt Estelle would often recount, with sad little smiles and sighs and nods of the head, tales of my papa, who left his little sweetheart half an orphan. “Remember, Marcia, how he taught you long division when you were only in second grade?” Actually I didn’t.
“Remember when you dislocated your thumb, Marcia? You were about six, and for weeks he’d cut your meat for you. Remember?” I do remember the splinted thumb. I can even recall the adhesive tape that turned a sooty gray and curled up at the edges. But I cannot—although I wish I could—recall any role my father had in my thumb crisis.
I sensed that he loved me, but he must have thought it inappropriate to tell me so, although occasionally he tried to show me. In a burst of fellowship, he once tried to teach me pinochle, but I didn’t catch on; he said we’d wait a few years and try again. He seemed annoyed when I cried to watch “Captain Video” instead of a kinescope of the day’s McCarthy harangue and patiently explained why the senator was more important than the captain. But although I agreed to watch the politician, I remained unconvinced, and I knew he realized it. Each bedtime he kissed me good night, but his kisses were dry and pecky. And a couple of times he called me his little towhead, but as I assumed he was calling me a toe-head, my response probably wasn’t encouraging.
“That’s it?” Jerry demanded, raising a doubting eyebrow.
“Honestly, that’s all.” I recall feeling that my father was the pleasanter parent and assumed we could share a father-daughter relationship
like Nancy and Mr. Drew as we both grew older and less shy.
I don’t remember hearing about his death, but a few days afterward I overheard some of the details. My mother had sent me outside our apartment building to play, but since it was January I was bundled in a storm coat, gloves, muffler, and pom-pom hat and therefore not easily recognizable. Coming inside after five minutes of solitary fresh air, I waited, wrapped in wool, for the elevator. Two neighbors waited also.
“You heard?” The fatter one asked.
“Horrible,” her companion answered.
“I mean, about what happened after. The truck stopped so fast the back opened up and the pillows fell out. It was a pillow truck. A truck from a pillow company.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, well, better you shouldn’t know from such things.” The blubbery lady’s voice grew softer, not because she realized I was there but out of awe of her terrible insider’s knowledge. “I heard,” she murmured, “the body went flying and when it fell, the head”—she paused—“landed on a pillow.”
“Oy.”
Indeed. Inside the elevator, I pressed 4 and slowly unwrapped my muffler from my face.
Jerry asked, “You don’t even remember the funeral?”
“No. They didn’t take me. They thought it would be traumatic.”
Jerry, naturally, could recall the entire requiem mass, enumerate the number of tears shed both inside the church and at the cemetery, and how his sister Ann had peed in the limousine after the burial.
I do remember my Aunt Estelle whispering to Uncle Julius, “Nothing’s wrong with Marcia. The whole world doesn’t have to cry and carry on the way your family does. She’s in a state of shock.”
But I wasn’t in shock, merely a little frightened about living alone with my mother. I knew she found me an onerous obligation even when my father was alive. But the week of shiva went by quite pleasantly, with lots of neighbors and relatives dropping in, bringing pecan coffee cake and chocolate cookies and prune danish. Mr. Fingerhut, my father’s boss, actually sent over a turkey, carved and put back on the skeleton—the frame, as the caterer called it—the meat held in place with judiciously placed wooden toothpicks.
“The cheap momser,” Aunt Estelle commented to my mother, as she transferred the remaining shreds of turkey onto a small plate and covered it with two layers of waxed paper. “He couldn’t break down and send a roast beef after all those years Victor practically killed himself for him. How much more would a roast beef have cost him?”
A few months later, she sat across our kitchen table from my mother, her rosy index fingernail picking at a chip in the white enamel. “Why are you worrying about a few extra dollars, Hilda?” she demanded.
“Because I don’t have a few extra dollars,” my mother replied. There were no tears in her eyes; even then, she was too dried out to cry. Her sister, opposite her, was fuller and plumper and juicier even than the catered turkey had been. Compared with her, my mother looked dehydrated. Look, the ad would proclaim, a fresh morsel of woman, showing a picture of Aunt Estelle. And beside it, the unappetizing freeze-dried variety. But their features were the same: small noses with oddly rounded nostrils, slightly receding chins, milky brown eyes. But Aunt Estelle’s face was a soft white with pudgy pink-rouged cheeks; my mother’s had yellowed and cracked.
“You have to live somewhere,” Aunt Estelle countered. “And in Queens, you’d be much closer to us, and Marcia would have a much better class of friends. I mean it, Hilda, look at Barbara’s friends. A lovely bunch of girls. And almost all their fathers are professionals.”
I wanted to point out, from the foyer in which I was lurking, eavesdropping, that my father was a professional, an accountant, albeit a dead one, whereas Julius Lindenbaum was a furrier with a mere two years of high school, a man who said “erl” for “oil,” a man who always smelled a little like a fox pelt. My mother must have known that too, but she merely sighed. She could never summon the energy to confront her sister.
“And before you know it,” Estelle continued, “she’ll be ready for college. Right? Look, I don’t have to tell you what her I.Q. is.”
“I know,” my mother breathed.
“And do you think boys from the fine families will want to hear she’s from Brooklyn?” Hardly. “Hilda, look at your face. Don’t worry. Would Julius and I let anything happen to you?”
Of course not. So we moved to Queens, to a dank rent-controlled apartment in Forest Hills. “Very good schools,” Aunt Estelle noted, and my mother gratefully bent her head, as though about to receive a pat or a benediction. The apartment had one small bedroom which my mother let me have, while she slept on a couch in the living room. This arrangement suited me, although when I got older, her snoring often disconcerted my dates when they brought me to the door to say good night.
“What’s that?” they would whisper, their eyes darting about the hallway, as they heard my mother’s regular, chesty snores, interrupted occasionally by a moan or frightened dream whimper.
“Oh, that. It’s my mother. She sleeps in the living room.”
Aunt Estelle and Uncle Julius took care of us. They invited us to their house for dinner every Wednesday night. Often, there would be enough food left over for my mother to take home, a packet of brisket or chicken. And, living in Queens, it was only a ten-minute subway ride back to our apartment, so the meat was often still warm by the time we’d return home. Wordlessly, we would wolf it down in our kitchenette.
I received the cream of my cousin Barbara’s wardrobe: camel’s-hair coats and lamb’s-wool sweater sets and ruffled blouses only one year out of style and three sizes too large. And each Chanukah, there would be a box of white handkerchiefs with pastel “M’s” for me and a stiff new hundred-dollar bill for my mother.
“Look, Hilda, I took care of the funeral, didn’t I?” Uncle Julius demanded when my mother finally came to him, seeking more help. “But I don’t want you to be dependent on us. It would affect our relationship, wouldn’t it? I mean, you and Estelle are sisters, and it wouldn’t be healthy.”
“What did your mother say to him?” Jerry demanded. We were walking through the Central Park Zoo, past the yak with its mangy brown fur—not the sort of line my Uncle Julius would carry.
“What could she say?”
“She could tell him to go fuck himself. She could tell him that they were the hotshots, the ones who got her to uproot you and move to Queens, so they goddamn better get up some of the rent money.”
“Right. Sure.” It was a warm afternoon and the air was full of rank animal odors. “And then what would have happened?” Jerry moved his jaw, began to reply, but at these conversations I was much quicker. “I’ll tell you. She would have been left alone. She would have had no one, nobody, zilch.”
“Wrong, Marcia. They would have respected her.”
“You’re wrong. She had no money, no friends, no power. If they couldn’t pity her, they didn’t need her.”
Jerry wiped the back of his neck with his hand. “I don’t know,” he said slowly.
“Well, I know,” I snapped. His demands for fresh confidences made me edgy; I had to balance my ravenous need for understanding with a vague sense of obligation to protect my family’s good name.
As usual, Jerry allowed time out for crankiness but then persisted toward his goal of knowing all there was to know. He took my hand, kissed it lightly, and demanded, “Did your mother ever have any boyfriends?”
“No.” After my father died, she showed no interest in men. Her manner never changed when a man came into a room. She never flirted, never reached up to stroke her hair, never even smiled. Men did not interest her. Actually, I don’t think they interested her before my father died. I don’t recall my parents ever touching, kissing, whispering, or even exchanging knowing looks.
“Any women friends?”
“Not really. She’d say hello to a few ladies in the building, but I think she lost touch with all her old acquaintances
once we moved to Queens. So there was just my aunt. And a few cousins, but she only spoke to them about once a month. Most of them lived in New Jersey, and it was too expensive for her to call.”
“But didn’t she try to meet people? Join a club or—”
“No. She was more interested in what was going on in a book than in what was going on around her—unless she was at her sister’s. But in our apartment she’d sit in this old, lumpy green chair in a corner of the living room with just one small light focused on whatever she was reading.” It was as if it were a spotlight. The book was the real show, the action; everything else was shadowy. I knew I was. I’d wander into the living room and ask her a question and she’d startle, as though I’d shocked her by demonstrating there was another world besides the one on the page she was reading. “Sometimes I’d walk in after school, and even before I had a chance to close the door she’d say ‘shhh’ instead of ‘hello,’ like she was irritated that I insisted on breaking into her perfect world.” Jerry shrugged. “It’s true. Books were her only passion.”
“Didn’t she play Mah-Jongg?”
I began to laugh. “That’s not funny.”
“Of course it’s not funny,” Jerry concurred. “Four or five little old Jewish ladies sitting around a table is serious business.”
“Don’t little old Irish ladies play Mah-Jongg?”
“If you had any idea how absurd that idea is, Marcia—”
“What do they do with themselves? I mean, once you’re finished with mass, you have a whole day in front of you.”
