The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  One night a week, Goldie sells tickets at the ballroom on the pier, to hear the music, she tells herself, though there is a shiny allure to the couples, and from her ticket booth it’s as if she is watching scenes from moving pictures. Occasionally she meets men. And it seems that she has shed her old life, or that the light and salt have burned it away; that her past is no more real than imaginary lives she invented as a girl—a dream life with her mother in Paris or Warsaw or Prague. Here, now, she stays conscious of the board-walk at Venice, the persisting sunlight, the blues and greens and grays that sweep in and every day define the horizon, the sea-rubbed glass on her windowsill, the heat on her skin, and cold gin at night and Jocelyn’s grit-and-honey voice describing her latest infatuation, an actor named Pete.

  In California she can breathe. Still, there is an increasing slippage between the years on the calendar and the years as she feels them, and she’s lost her bearings with the seasons. Summer seems constant and permanent, and chronology fades. Maybe this is why after three years her sisters begin to swim up out of the dark: she does not know. It’s June, she’s in the theater with Marie and Marie’s sister, Paula, shiny Iowa girls in their twenties with wide blue eyes and amber hair, their wish to laugh shot through with longing. They are nothing like her sisters, but in the theater, after the feature has begun and as the screen romance is unfolding, the dark seems to shift for her, the way a room does when one blinks; and there is a rising sense of other places, of other theaters and other women, Sadie, Celia, Jo. For an instant she feels as if she could turn to her left and see not Marie but one of them. The feeling is palpable, the familiarity seductive; there is a comfort in the sensation, along with a startling craving. The silvery light pours through the dust motes in the theater. A wave of sadness rises, and then she turns; Marie is engrossed; it’s California. She forces herself to focus on the picture, but the sensation remains with her. After that night she is aware of her sisters in odd moments on the street and in the earliest waking and late at night, Jo and Sadie and Celia like small spots of color flashing in the air and retreating.

  Irving is not present with her in this way, nor does the image of him bring the same wave of sadness, and this makes him easier to contemplate. He is still in her mind a boy sulking in the high branches of the oak—as if the tree unexpectedly refused to take him farther from the house—but simply a boy, unable to harm her. She and her sisters would coax him down with sweets—and there the memory is more deeply etched, a weariness in Jo’s face, Sadie calling his name, Celia standing at the base of the tree with a slice of cake. None of which should make her nervous now, years later, but it feels as if Sadie is still calling, Celia still standing beneath the tree. The nervousness comes on her several times a week, and sometimes a shortness of breath, and the old feeling of suffocation descends, and she sits on the beach until it passes. Her family has not come for her, no one has come for her, she has nothing to be frightened of, but the pattern repeats itself. To say she misses them would be too simple: there is an old piercing loneliness, but she does not trust them, not Sadie, not Jo. They would not understand her life. Irving might or might not; he is, at least, unlikely to judge her. With Celia it is not a matter of trust, but of worry: if you worry too much about Celia it will crush you.

  Goldie tells herself this and yet it might be raining in Buffalo, a cold spring rain, and Celia might be standing beneath that oak, or beneath another tree somewhere in the city, after walking for hours. Her clothes will be soaked before she’ll climb the front steps and cross the doorway into the foyer, where she’ll become conscious, and then embarrassed, of the rainwater puddling from her dress, and will stay there until you bring her a towel, and tell you of the dogs that frighten her.

  CHAPTER 11

  Irving

  1932

  There is, somewhere beyond Delaware and Lancaster, a turning of chance, the arrival of fortune, and Irving awaits the signs: the approach of the streetcar just as he reaches the stop; a coincidence in numbers—the time, the streetcar number, the building address where he notices a beautiful girl. Tidings. Here is the swell of possibility, forever present, that today will offer good luck, that one day of good luck will lead to others, a string of such days, then a solid floor of them lifting him into a soft brilliance, into a life like Leo Schumacher’s.

  And maybe Sadie’s daughter is a sign for Irving after all—Leo toasted him being an uncle, gave him scotch—just a sign requiring more interpretation. Bill is startlingly cheerful—he’s stopped lecturing Irving about gambling—and Irving’s father has gone into a sentimental phase, the hawk-eyed supervision loosening for now. This itself is auspicious. Today, a perfect August Tuesday, there’s leniency when Irving asks for a few hours off to visit Sadie. It’s a relief to be out in the mild air, and he does miss Sadie: she hasn’t taken him to lunch for months. When he arrives at her house, she is wearing a loose pale green dress, and tendrils of hair have fallen out of her barrette, and though she is tired, there’s a pink flush to her cheeks. He can’t stop looking at her. She kisses him on the cheek and offers him a chair in the living room, and when he asks how she is, she recites the minutiae of Margo’s sleeping habits. Sadie’s also concerned with matters of feeding and diapering, the necessary singing, but she can’t talk about these things forever, can she? He’s there only ten minutes before two of Sadie’s neighbors arrive—women with names that vanish after they’re said—and then a nurse brings Margo down from the nursery, and the pretty Colored girl, Rosalie, comes in from the kitchen. Now the room is full of women, all of whom ignore him. The baby, who seems at first calm, is handed among them until she’s howling, a shocked look on her squinchy little face, though she herself is what’s alarming— a strange, incoherent, demanding thing who might just as well have dropped from the sky. When her shock dissipates and the crying stops, he can see Margo’s a good-looking baby, thick dark hair and dark eyes and delicate features, but he’s relieved when she quiets and the nurse takes her back upstairs to her bassinet, and the neighbors leave. Rosalie offers him coffee and cookies, a further relief: she has noticed him, and she’s leading him back to the familiar country where men and women drink coffee. Sadie shows him the tiny knitted hat Celia made, and when she leans in close she smells of milk and sweat and flowery talc. She sighs about her mother-in-law, and finally asks him how he is. As he answers, her head’s tilted toward the stairs, her eyes a little glazed, as if she’s listening beyond him. There in her living room he’s become translucent. An earthworm.

  Irving clears his throat and says he’s thinking of buying a new suit. Sadie nods distractedly.

  “How much do you think I ought to pay for a suit these days?” He waits. “Sadie?”

  “Sorry,” she says. “Margo’s been so fussy today, I thought I heard something.”

  After he repeats the question, he can see her coming into focus, considering. “What does Papa pay? He always looks good.”

  “His suits are expensive, I think.”

  “Mmm,” she says. “More coffee?”

  “Maybe if I get a few more dollars together.”

  She won’t take the bait. “It’s hard times, isn’t it?” she says. But Margo’s healthy and she and Bill are grateful—has Irving seen Bill with Margo? He’s fallen in love again.

  She offers Irving a chocolate from the ribboned box Bill brought her. She’s a master at subject changing, steering talk only where she wants to go and away from Irving’s needs and interruptions. Leo would marvel.

  He’ll have to wait a while. “She’s beautiful, Margo,” he says, and takes a chocolate. “Looks just like her mother.”

  This doesn’t seem to charm Sadie as much as it ought to, which is disconcerting. Why can’t he charm her? He needs money, sure, but there’s another reason he wants her full, unrestrained smile, something connected to the dress and the loose strands of hair. He begins his imitations of movie stars, which usually send her into spasms of laughter, but she gives him the half-smile that mea
ns Again? There is apparently no other subject but the baby. And before he’s found a way to reach her, more visitors arrive, a few Jewish girls like Sadie who’ve married up and started families. Their arms are loaded with casseroles and pink booties and dresses the size of handkerchiefs. They smile broadly at him and say Mazel tov, as if he’s the father. What a lovely surprise it is to see him again, Delia Lefkowitz says, using the bright, flirtatious tone that means her sister is still single.

  Enough. He kisses Sadie’s cheek and makes his way to the Hertel streetcar and transfers to a downtown line. It’s three o’clock, a mild breeze coming in from the west, and he counts the car stops. Exactly what sort of luck is the baby? Margo Rebecca, MR. M being the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, R the eighteenth; he’s superstitious about 13, but combined the initials make 31, or 13 reversed—which ought to mean luck. He detours to a pharmacy on the East Side and finds his bookie, Murray, bets on the Saratoga fourth race for a horse with number 31 named Lightning Bolt and also in the sixth, on a long shot named Red Molly.

  MARGO’S ARRIVAL has translated to a mix of dreaminess and deliberation in Celia: she bathes and dresses every day as if for temple, though Sadie lets her visit only once or twice a week. Come over with Jo, Sadie tells her. Wait until Jo’s free. What about Saturday? And in her most respectable, Sadie-pleasing dress, Celia shows up at the store instead, her handbag stuffed with crocheting projects and bright rattles for the baby. Mind your sister, his father says, leaving Irving to entertain her—which is not hard, she likes the attention, likes to laugh—and he sets her up in the office reading chair, giving her tea, and cajoling her into crocheting and listening to the radio while he helps customers. If she’s too restless, Irving takes change from the till and walks with her up Main Street, well beyond the Palace Burlesque, to the department stores. “Why not get Margo a bib?” he says. “Don’t babies need bibs?” Pacifiers? Toy animals? He gives her the till change for a streetcar home and a small treat for herself, and says good-bye to her in the doorway of Adam, Meldrum and Anderson’s, and hopes she does not wander.

  Today he’s missed Celia and his father only asks, “How is my granddaughter?”

  “She’s a beauty,” Irving says.

  THAT FRIDAY there’s a touch of Schumacher luck, Lillian stopping by for his father, Lillian with her rich curves and seductive laugh. His father isn’t a fool. And it would be fine to take up with a girl like her, younger but with her spark and taste for nightlife and frank sex appeal—and Jewish, yet not the Jewish of Sadie’s crowd.

  Stay away from the shiksas, Irving’s father says, but Buffalo is a city of Gentile girls. All sorts. The Palace Burlesque’s only two blocks from the store and the girls there are nothing like the temple’s prim coterie of Idas and Mauras and Ruths, even less like his sisters. He’ll take a flask and find a seat close to the stage, watch the new fan dancer and the girl named Hula Lulu—sweet skin of her thighs, sweetheart bottom and sweetheart tits with the tasseled pasties any minute ready to drop from the nipples and scatter beyond the lights, and there you are waiting: any second her sweet-cream body might offer itself into your hands. You swoon for those girls and for that moment leave your life.

  “How are you?” Lillian says. She reaches over the counter and straightens his collar, and his face flushes warm. “More handsome every day, aren’t you?”

  And then Irving’s father appears with the bank deposit bag tucked under his arm, and Lillian moves to greet him with a kiss, which he allows. “Irving,” he says, “the first drawer is off, twenty cents. You look. See if you dropped something.”

  But Lillian smiles at Irving, as if to say It’s nothing, don’t worry, then leans against his father, his father now smiling too, and they leave the store.

  IRVING HAS a way with women, the proper Jewish girls and the winking burlesque girls, the girls in the speakeasies, even the ones at the dance hall on Main, where the Gentile girls are higher-class. They wear shimmery summer dresses and let you hold them firmly and spin them on the ballroom floor, and sometimes give you a little extra. He introduces himself as Thomas West. A name for a rich adventurer, the nickname, Tommy, conjuring up jazz horns. And maybe one of those blue-eyed brunettes or blondes could be his stroke of luck. You never know. Not for steady, not like Leo’s girl Sofia, just a single stroke of luck that changes the days ahead. One encounter that alters the staleness of ordinary days, of returning the twenty cents he lifted from the drawer; the staleness of leaving Sadie’s house, having failed again to capture her attention or to comprehend her life; the staleness of being Irving.

  After lunch and his father’s return, a few merchant sailors walk up from the docks to buy presents for their girlfriends, friendly, this group, trusting him to steer them right. The sky’s a resonant blue, and when they’ve left, Irving takes the push broom outside to sweep the walk, the August air mild. He watches for more signs, this time finding a nickel on the street, a ticket stub from the Hippodrome, a cloud in the shape of a lion.

  Later, when the mail arrives, his father glances through it and gives him the pile to sort. There’s a typed business envelope addressed to him, the return Leo Schumacher. He pockets it and groups the bills and payments and his father’s personal correspondence, delivering it to his father’s office desk. And when his father is busy at the bench, he opens the letter, finding two folded sheets, the first a typed note:

  Dear Irving,

  I hope this finds you well. I am in good health and sufficiently content. I hope you understand. Here’s something for Celia. I hope she’s all right.

  Your sister, Goldie

  The second sheet’s a blank, folded around a twenty-dollar bill.

  And at first he feels his own blankness: he rereads the typed note, examines the twenty, real enough, magnificent, but what does Leo have to do with Goldie? A prank? Irving does not understand, and then he does: Goldie’s signature’s as real as the twenty, the postmark on the envelope blurry but legible—Los Angeles, California. And now he is flushed, tingling: she ran off, just as he thought, she’s not dead at all. That in itself is the luckiest of signs—Goldie not dead—and a twenty-dollar bill as if to prove it, as if to multiply the luck. In that instant he nearly calls his father, to tell him she’s alive, no need to think of dead bodies, or to keep yourself from thinking of dead bodies, she’s alive. Healthy, she says, sufficiently content. But of course she wouldn’t pretend to be Leo if she wanted their father to know, would she? And she’s right, the shivah was no invitation home.

  She’s a smart one, Goldie, you have to give her that. Very smart. He slips the bill into his wallet and tucks the letter in his inside suit pocket. It’s true that Celia’s situation is not promising, you have to admit that, even a fine stroke of luck—and isn’t this a fine stroke of luck?—won’t change her life the way it ought to. But she isn’t so bad lately, summer is always her best season, what with all her gardening, and now Sadie’s baby, a niece, you see the way Celia tries. But these things come and go. Goldie has a point. Goldie who is healthy and sufficiently content and clever enough to pretend to be Leo Schumacher. Clever enough to find her way, to find money, clever enough not to be dead, and good for her, he thinks. In Los Angeles or wherever. Though she might have said where a little more exactly. She might have wondered about Irving’s prospects, which are brighter than Celia’s of course but no sure thing. Does she wonder about him? She did choose him to write to. Chose him over Sadie. She always was fond of him, wasn’t she?

  The news melds into the late afternoon light, the high clouds streaked with pink, and Irving walks up several streetcar stops before deciding to ride. There’s a rush of well-being, he’s the one Goldie chose—more handsome every day. This is how fortune arrives, when you don’t expect it, just as you don’t expect the lawns on Lancaster to turn emerald green, but they have. And house after house the roses are blooming, even at his family’s house, like floating bowls of red silk. Hadn’t he noticed? Tonight, he decides, will be a dance hall nigh
t.

  The foyer smells of cooked meat, and before he’s hung up his jacket, his father calls, “Irving? Good. Come to the table.”

  The dining room is set for Sabbath—white tablecloth, the fancy china, the once-a-week wineglasses. Jo carries in plates of meat and vegetables, wiping her hands on her apron and only nodding hello: Celia’s already seated next to her father, hands in her lap, eyes closed. Jo removes the apron and lights the Sabbath candles and Celia opens her eyes. Celia herself appears brighter than usual, like the lawn, like the underlit clouds, a little dreamy, a little like a girl in love. Did she hear from Goldie too? Not likely—he got the twenty. Is it simply that she’ll see the baby tomorrow? Women are mysteries in this way. Their father says the Kiddush, the Hamotzi, still in his own cloud of sentiment, smiling at Celia tonight, happy to talk with her about the baby the baby the baby. Who looks like Sadie, don’t you think? More like Sadie than like Bill? And all that dark hair, so much lovely hair for a baby. A lot of them are bald.