The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  “Your head was peach fuzz,” Jo tells Irving. A smirk. “Part of it, anyway. The rest like an egg.”

  He smiles and nods, as if she’s told a fine joke. “It grew in,” he says, preens a little, tells Celia her hair looks good today. Celia smiles, but Jo glares at him: she’s warned him not to comment on Celia’s hair. You don’t want to jinx anything.

  “Margo’s a little thing, isn’t she?” Jo says.

  “Tiny,” their father says. “You all were tiny. All new babies, tiny.”

  As he forks up his supper, Irving feels himself drift from the table, watching the conversation unfold as if from a neighboring house, or a back row seat at the theater. It’s like this with his family: scene after mundane scene in which he has no part.

  HE STARTS the evening at the dance hall, which tonight is filling with couples, a few single girls chaperoned by their married sisters and brothers-in-law, one slim young brunette who tells him her name is Donna. She looks like a Donna, clear-eyed and graceful, her skin warm through the yellow satin dress. A sweet face but just from the way she moves you can tell she’s proper to the core, the kind who expects a man to escort her to dances and court her and some year kiss her on the lips. Tedious. He should know better, he’s a quick judge of such things, but she’s lovely, this little Donna, and she smells like warm leaves and rosewater. He introduces himself as Thomas West, and she believes in the name, believes in the neatly pressed suit, the Protestant pretense: see the way she looks at him, a man dressed as elegantly as his father, down to the gold cuff links he borrowed from the store. More handsome every day. “My best friends,” he says, “call me Tommy.” After three dances he bows and tells her he hopes to see her there again soon. Then he dances with less lovely, equally proper girls, one dance each, a Lucy and a Harriet and a June. Always, he is Thomas.

  And why shouldn’t he be Thomas? Tying his shoe, how easily he could be another man, the two-toned size ten from the Florsheim on Main easily purchased by another man with size ten. Plenty of men wearing tens move through the city and they have other names, all of them not Irving: other men meeting girls, other men visiting dance halls, other men sipping fast from gin flasks in dark back corridors, or leaving for other venues, the late clubs, a kind of brotherhood leaning down to tie their size ten shoes and in that moment loosened from their given names, each becoming a man with a shoe, call him whatever you want, call him Thomas West.

  Later, the women at the speakeasy smell of perfume and cigarette smoke, they move languorously, smile at him less shyly and more often than any of the Donnas. He prefers the less forward ones though, buys a gin for a quiet girl with a beautiful mouth, a beautiful shape to her, Margaret she says her name is. She says she was born in Canada. “We’ve got a lot in common then,” he says. “I wasn’t born here either.” Which she’s willing to laugh at. He tells her he’s from New York, in town to visit his sister; he’s in business, he travels, he comes here quite a lot. New York City? she says and he asks if she’s been. She hasn’t, and here’s his chance to talk about his life in New York, Thomas West’s life in New York, and the marvelous hotels and the swell of people and the glamour of Broadway—his father is always talking about the glamour of Broadway—once he shook hands with the governor. A fine man, the governor, she would like him, he’s the sort of man you respect. And would she like another gin? She would, that’s generous of him, he’s a generous man. She’s a beautician, she tells him, she does good work, and if she’s lucky she’ll have a beauty parlor of her own someday.

  “I believe in luck,” he says. “Don’t you?”

  And she does, of course she believes in luck, you never know what can happen.

  “For instance,” he says, “I just came by here to get a nightcap and now I’ve met you. That seems lucky to me, if you don’t mind my saying.” And now he touches her hand, lightly touches her forearm and he can feel her warming, opening to him, can feel the gin confidence. He gives her a light kiss on the cheek and waits to see her expression, waits to see if she wants more, and she seems to, she squeezes his hand. “It’s a lovely evening, don’t you think?” he says.

  “Lovely,” she says, “yes it is.”

  He asks if she might like to go somewhere else, and a look of mild confusion crosses her face. “There’s a lounge in the lobby of my hotel,” he says, “not much to drink of course but it’s quiet, elegant, you’d like it there. Or I can get you a taxi home, maybe you’re tired.” It’s a gamble of course, but she smiles and lets him get a taxi for the two of them, and he directs the cabbie to the Statler Hotel.

  The lobby of the Statler seems like velvet, thick carpets and fine chairs and divans in groupings, the light bright but soft. It’s as if he’s passed through the doorway into a world of warmth and light, leaving the other rooms of his life completely. He seats her on a plush green sofa and excuses himself for a moment, strolls to the desk. Luckily, the clerk is easy with him, and unerringly polite: there’s a nice room on the fourth floor. He signs the register Thomas J. West II, opens his wallet, pulls out the twenty, and pays for a night, overtipping the clerk.

  The elevator operator wishes them a good evening and they rise in the gold-trimmed elevator, which seems to lighten him, he can feel the lift in his belly. Then they are in Room 420, with the bed and the brocade wallpaper and thick curtains and dark wood furniture. Room 420, its own velvet-lined box. Room 420, where he is quick to put on a safety, where he kisses Margaret, undresses Margaret, who is beautiful, completely beautiful, her skin almost glowing in the light from the bedside table, breasts high and round, sweet hips and desire, you can feel her wanting. Thomas, she says, Tommy, sighing and pulling him to her. There’s a slight burn in his throat, Thomas’s throat, and in his body, his bones themselves a kind of hot syrup, he’s touching her breasts and she calls the name again, Thomas, and in that moment he is no one but Thomas, with the velvet life, with the velvet Margaret, and then he is inside her and the moment shifts to a greater forgetting, the loss of names, as when the sky and lake merge into one silver blue plate. And you can call it neither sky nor lake nor not-sky, not-lake. The purest luck of all.

  For a time they sleep in the jewel-box room, and he wakes now and then to see bits of city light patterning the window sheers, the room a deep dream, Margaret a deep dream, one slim arm flung over her head, a swath of auburn hair fallen over her cheek, the sheets pulled tight against her body. This is where he ought to stay, this hotel room on this night, which seems somehow his true home. He is spent from sex, happy, the yearnings quiet, and he pulls Margaret to him and presses his face to her hair and returns to sleep. And when he wakes again, early light is leaking through the sheers and Margaret is stirring; she kisses him on the cheek. Then she’s gone from the bed, quickly dressing, he can see she’s drawing into herself, moving away from desire, plain practicality in her gestures. There’s the day to face, but she still whispers. Thomas, I have to go now.

  I wish you didn’t, he says.

  Me too. She hurriedly washes and applies lipstick, and then the divide feels certain and solid: he’s still in the bed, undressed, the hotel room his for hours to come, and she is a departing visitor. Not unlike a customer at the jewelry store, he thinks. He remembers to offer her cab fare. “Thank you, Tommy,” she says. She takes the fare and kisses him with her lipsticked mouth, and leaves, and the room in her absence declares a budding impermanence he’ll need to stave off.

  He bathes and orders coffee delivered to the room. It’s a delicate business, putting on his suit, the same one he donned yesterday at the Lancaster house, but he concentrates on the elevator ride and the moments in the lobby and the speakeasy, the Thomas-ness of it. And when he checks out of the hotel he finds a barbershop to get a shave, as if he were an out-of-towner, and a coffee shop near the hotel he’s never been to. The day’s a patchwork of cloud and blue, and there is still the sense of possibility he always feels downtown. He does not think about his name. The waitress brings his breakfast, eggs and toast a
nd the bacon he orders only when he is alone. It’s Saturday. Saturday, and his father will be expecting Irving at the store—those Saturday hours a necessity now—and with this thought he is Irving. He is Irving and his sisters Jo and Celia will be visiting his sister Sadie and her baby. He is Irving and his sister Goldie is alive, and maybe now the world will right itself. He doesn’t quite have the money he had yesterday but still plenty, enough to stake him nicely at Leo Schumacher’s Saturday night poker game. And perhaps the fact of Margaret stakes him too, marking the change in his luck, the night at the Statler a secret charm. The spending is worth it: You have to invest to earn, Leo says. It’s the kind of thing Thomas would quote.

  And when he leaves the coffee shop the air already seems thicker, and the streetcars harshly ordinary. He buys the Courier and reads the sports news while the car lurches west and north, the passengers all seemingly washed out and dull, even in the loveliness of late summer and the promise of baseball home games. It’s inevitable, this trip to the house, he has to change his clothes, the shirt and undergarments but also the suit, which is wrinkled and smells of smoke. And as he walks up the steps to the house, Celia’s there in the doorway, blue dress and matching shoes, pretty, pushing the screen door open. He could tell her about Goldie now, while she’s alone—I have a secret, Ceil, don’t say a word—but she starts waving him toward the staircase, mild warning on her face. He touches her shoulder and passes her quickly, and he’s halfway to the second floor when he hears Jo’s hard steps down the front hall, Jo calling, “What you been doing? Tomcatting? Papa’s waiting at the store, opened without you.”

  “Don’t get in a mood before we see the baby,” Celia tells her.

  “You’re one to talk,” Jo says, but then they both fall silent.

  Irving hurries into his room, with its white walls and dark wood and white chenille bedspread, neckties hanging off the bed-stead, the framed oval mirror in which he is always quizzical. Soiled shirts piled at the foot of the bed; two clean ones in the closet with his second summer suit, clean underclothes and socks in the bureau.

  He changes quickly, flinging the wrinkled suit on his bed, and finally steps back into the two-tone shoes, taking the laces in his hands, pausing and closing his eyes, as if to feel himself back at the Statler, the same hands tying the same shoe, a small bubble of Thomas rising.

  He remembers the gold cuff links, his watch, stuffs his wallet and carfare in his pocket and hurries down the hall and front stairs, out the door, before Jo starts in on him again. Really she could use a night at the Statler herself. From the lawn he waves back at the parlor windows, where Celia often sits.

  “I STAYED at Leo’s and overslept,” he tells his father. “I’m sorry, Papa. It won’t happen again.”

  “You make sure,” his father says. “Irving? You understand me?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “No foolishness.”

  “No. I understand,” Irving says.

  His father sighs and gestures toward the storefront, and from the storage closet Irving takes the push broom to sweep the front walk, and a bucket and rags, water and ammonia to clean the front windows, a work apron to cover his suit.

  The afternoon seems beaten down but surprisingly busy, filled with sailors, men his age who started out somewhere else and for a few minutes find themselves in the jewelry store, musing over lockets and heart-shaped brooches, charm bracelets, occasionally the gems. A couple of men remind him of himself—the ones who go straight to the sapphires and diamond-studded cuff links, despite the sailor’s uniform. And why not? Why shouldn’t they too have luxury? His father tries to steer them to more likely buys, but Irving goes with their enthusiasms and sometimes it works, sometimes a man will spend a month’s pay. Isn’t it worth it? Just before closing Irving sells a sailor ruby earrings for his girl.

  His father doesn’t comment, doesn’t praise, but as he locks up the store for the night, he tells Irving, “You want to stay at Leo’s, you stay on Saturday night,” the closest he’ll come to relenting.

  ON SATURDAY NIGHTS he is always free of his family: his father goes to Lillian’s and doesn’t ask Irving’s plans. Tonight Irving stays downtown, buys himself dinner at Laube’s Old Spain, as if he were again a traveler, the man who stayed at the Statler. He pours gin from his flask into a water glass and lets the warm flush of it take him as he eats the meal and contemplates the well-dressed women, the men in good suits. By the time he leaves, the sense of well-being has returned, and he takes the streetcar north to Leo’s flat, to the poker game, still with plenty to stake him, the fine luck of Margaret, his array of smaller charms.

  Leo deals him in. On the first and second hands he wins a little, on the third a little more. The cards are solid, not dramatic but good. And then luck shifts to Bernie, and then to Max, eroding Irving’s gains. Leo takes a hand, and then Irving again, twice—he was right, there were signs, though the pot is not large. “You’ve got something going,” Leo says, and in that instant he feels perfect. At the end of the night he comes out ahead by five dollars, a very nice gain, though he owes Leo two for staking him last week. And Max asks for a dollar loan, he’s miserable, he played with household money and now he’s stuck, he’s covered Irving before. So Irving leaves two dollars ahead, still good, he doesn’t owe Murray the bookie (thanks to Bill, who could have spared the lectures), and Max will pay him back. It’s an auspicious night. He leaves Leo’s flat with six dollars in his wallet, a fine amount, more than he’ll need for the week, money for next week’s game and maybe a bet or two on the horses.

  And when he arrives at the house, only the hall lights are on. It’s late, the doors to his sisters’ rooms closed, his father’s open and empty. And he can carry the flush of the night with him when it’s like this, the deep quiet, no one calling his name or chastising him for the drinks—he’s had plenty tonight, he knows he smells of it, though he can’t smell it himself. In his room he turns on the bedside lamp, which spreads a circle over the clean bed and thick rug, onto the wood floor. His wrinkled suit is hanging on the standing rack, neckties evenly distributed over the bedpost, no other soiled clothes: his sisters must have picked up the laundry.

  He falls asleep immediately, content, sleep like a silver blur that carries him far into the morning. A thick, irrefutable sleep, broken by church bells and the clang of pans and the muted voices of his sisters. He did all right last night, didn’t he? On the bureau top: his watch and housekey, over a dollar in change, his wallet holding five one-dollar bills. Not bad. But there’s still the wrinkled suit hanging on the rack, like a half-man, waiting for him. He checks the inside pocket and finds the letter tucked away as he left it—exactly as he left it, isn’t it?—the typed note and the blank page.

  Goldie’s worried about Celia but Celia looked good in her blue dress, didn’t she? She did. And five dollars is enough to give her, it isn’t twenty, but five is fine, substantial. Only if he hands it over this week, he’ll be broke. He should wait at least until next week’s game, add his next winnings. Of course he can’t show the letter without the money: right away, Jo would ask for it, and even if he handed the five dollars over, they’d guess he’d been spending. Sadie would know, and then she’d shut him off for good. No. Next week is much better. He’ll tell them about Goldie and show them the letter: he’ll hand over, say, ten dollars for Celia then. They’re wrapped up in the baby now, anyway. Goldie is just fine. After three years, a week will not matter.

  For now, he slips the letter under his mattress and returns to bed.

  It’s lonely, the way he touches himself.

  CHAPTER 12

  Sadie

  1932

  Six weeks after she’s brought the baby home, the world still has not become real in the old way. It’s as if the days themselves have been attenuated and merged, the hours and minutes reconstituted into a pale blur of tired wakefulness and brief light sleep. She likes it best when Margo is quiet after nursing; and just as Margo slips into deeper drowsiness
then falls asleep on Sadie’s shoulder. The fact of Margo herself—the small, bewildered face and miniature fists, the full breathing weight of her, the way sleep overtakes her—remains astonishing. She is beautiful, Sadie thinks, and that Sadie herself has borne such a child stuns her. This is something she does not say aloud to anyone but Bill, a feeling so rare and private she cannot bear for others to intrude upon it.

  But in the recent haziness and loosening order, Sadie’s fears spike: intrusions seem especially dangerous. She knows new mothers can be a little demented—witness Delia Lefkowitz—but Delia has always been as flighty, her baby especially difficult. Margo is not colicky, you can tell what she needs, and Sadie’s gradually more confident taking care of her. But Sadie’s relatives still frighten her: she can’t stop imagining little nightmarish scenes. Even in her mind, her sisters keep appalling her. She pictures Celia pushing a stroller down a too-busy thoroughfare, giving Margo costume jewelry she can easily choke on. Or trying to feed her solid food— herring, Sadie pictures herring. The actual Celia does nothing of the sort: she’s quiet, shy when she visits, talks softly the way she does to kittens, lets Sadie supervise every gesture. And while Jo has never in her life seemed drawn to babies, her gaze is unnerving— the gaze one might find on a kidnapper. Jo might just lock the baby up at Lancaster, like Rapunzel. A herring-fed Rapunzel.

  At least they don’t visit without asking, unlike her mother-in-law, who, if she could, might nurse the baby herself. That alone seems shocking, worse to remember that Mother Feldstein has in her life nursed several children—five—including Sadie’s husband. This is the sort of thing one should not think about. In truth, Mother Feldstein probably does not want to nurse the baby: rather she gazes at Margo as if she wants to eat her. Or take her home and give her to Nora, as she might give a doll to a toddler to cheer her up. Stop, Sadie thinks, but since the baby was born, runaway thoughts are harder to stop. And some of Mother Feldstein’s comments do smack of possessiveness, don’t they? I’m her grandmother in a way that sounds more important—well, grander—than ordinary mother, mere changer of diapers, mere wet nurse. And look at Bill, stunned by the baby, a little in love with Margo, a little annoyed by her, utterly pleased to be pleasing his mother—just look! he’s made a grandchild! not quite a grandson, but a grandchild, good enough! A Feldstein baby.