The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  In early September, after another of Mother Feldstein’s day-long visits, Sadie tells Bill, “Margo isn’t, you know, your mother’s child. Your mother’s already had her children.”

  Bill eyes her carefully. “I understand that, Sadie.”

  “Does she?”

  “She’s Margo’s grandmother,” Bill says, with his mother’s exact intonation.

  “Exactly,” Sadie says. “Babies need their mothers.”

  Bill, turning red, offers, “It’s an emotional time for you. I understand that.”

  “What?”

  “You’re very touchy. New mothers often are.” Another Mother Feldstein quote.

  “Your mother shouldn’t visit every day. Tell her to stop visiting every day.”

  “Sadie, you need help here.”

  “I have help. I have a visiting nurse, for pity’s sake. I have Rosalie.”

  “You miss your mother, I know.”

  “Don’t bring my mother into this.”

  “You can’t exactly rely on your sisters.”

  Which is true. “I miss my mother, not yours, darling. Well-meaning as she may be.”

  “Careful, Sadie.”

  “Do you see the way she looks at Margo? She wants to eat her up.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “I think so. Tell her to stop coming here so much.”

  “I’ll tell her what I tell her.”

  “I won’t let her in the house.”

  And now Margo is awake and wailing again, and there’s the pang of despair: Sadie hasn’t slept. She’s desperate for sleep. If only she could put a note on the door: No solicitors. No family. Though of course there are milder, easier family members, like Bill’s older brothers and their wives, kind and unobtrusive, the middle brother bossy but quick to defend Sadie, quick to say, “Ma, it’s time to go.”

  Bill himself is not mild or easy; is this why his sympathy for his mother seems boundless? While to Sadie it’s as if a curtain has fallen, hiding Mother Feldstein’s saving graces; Sadie can read only one voracious expression. Was it always this way, Bill defending his mother no matter what, Sadie suspecting every gesture? Mother Feldstein did, for example, inquire what colors Sadie was using for the nursery and made no critical remark. Brought Sadie a bottle of the perfume she prefers, as a baby gift, saying You need something for yourself. And in that moment there seemed a kind of loosening, almost an acknowledgment of difficulty. Mother Feldstein had raised four boys and a girl, after all, her husband working forever to get by and then too early dead. And Sadie finds herself relenting— she should relent, she isn’t heartless, Sadie has compassion—and she decides to simply limit the length of Mother Feldstein’s visits. This seems fair, doesn’t it? Yet in the night—the darker hours of the long blur—Sadie envisions Mother Feldstein’s arms wrapped around Margo, a turning away, just out of reach, the smile at Sadie more triumphal than loving, the gaze unblinking and eerie as Mother takes a step further back, and another, distancing Sadie from the baby.

  In the morning she’s exhausted, and when Rosalie offers to walk Margo around so Sadie can get some rest, Sadie’s more than relieved. Take her, yes, for a while, thank you. This Sadie cannot explain: she would never accept such an offer from Mother Feldstein, even when it seems that Margo will wear Sadie down to nothing. In the moments of greatest and most head-splitting demand, Mother Feldstein and Margo do seem linked: the horrifying thought recurs that Margo is Mother Feldstein’s true heir, all ferocity and limitless need. But Rosalie intercedes, takes the baby and somehow in taking the baby returns her to Sadie.

  When Sadie gets two good hours of sleep and awakens, Margo is her daughter and lovely. Mother Feldstein is simply Bill’s mother, and Sadie sees no signs of conspiracy. Later in the morning, Sadie nurses Margo and rocks her, readies birth announcements and listens to the radio, and Rosalie brings her biscuits and glasses of milk.

  IT’S A SATURDAY afternoon when Sadie’s father drops by to see the baby, bringing Lillian Schumacher with him. He is no less conniving than Mother Feldstein, is he? Certainly if he’d asked to bring Lillian, Sadie would have found perfectly reasonable grounds to refuse him or at least delay the visit, but now Lillian is in Sadie’s living room and so is Mother Feldstein. Sadie’s bleary today, though capable of civility. Lillian offers up a box wrapped in white paper with a pink ribbon, which Sadie opens to find a tiny pink dress with roses embroidered across the skirt. Beautiful.

  Sadie holds it in the air, like a flag strung with pink candies. “Stunning, Miss Schumacher, really. Thank you. You shouldn’t have gone to such trouble,” Sadie says, and makes a point of calling Rosalie to view the dress.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Schumacher.” Rosalie fingers the embroidery. “My. Isn’t that something.”

  “She’ll have to wear a bib with that, Sadie,” Mother Feldstein says.

  “Rosalie,” Sadie says, “shall we have lemonade?”

  And Rosalie disappears to the kitchen, then brings glasses for the women and a plate of shortbread, while the men retreat to Bill’s study to smoke.

  Lillian does not ask to hold the baby, instead knots her hands behind her back and looks into the bassinet, smiles, takes a seat in the reading chair a few steps away. And while Sadie’s attention is still on Lillian’s comfort, Mother Feldstein lifts the sleeping Margo out of the bassinet, makes a slightly choked crooning sound, and walks the baby in circles around the room. It’s as if Sadie’s late-night vision has manifested itself in her living room—and just after she’s gotten Margo to sleep. She swallows a shriek, which continues to bubble in her chest, along with the impulse to steal Margo back and knock Mother to the floor. The wish shocks her, but the shock is clarifying: she’s thrown from the sleep haze into her more assured social self. This is her house, her child: she is Mrs. William Feldstein.

  Mrs. William Feldstein asks Miss Lillian Schumacher how Kaplan’s stationery store is faring.

  “It’s a hard time for everyone,” Lillian says. She admits she’s working fewer hours but it’s a good little business, she thinks Kaplan’s will survive. “The shortbread,” Lillian says, “is delicious.” Lillian’s delicate in her gestures, her fingers plump and silky. In spite of herself, Sadie imagines a majestic swan.

  Mother Feldstein coos more loudly at Margo.

  “Mother, perhaps Miss Schumacher would like to hold the baby,” Sadie says. The words pop out of her mouth unplanned, but they are the right words.

  Lillian’s only sign of surprise is the shortbread held aloft for an extra second before she places it on her plate and dabs her fingers on a napkin and quietly says, “I would be honored.” She is a woman Sadie does not understand, but she knows how to behave.

  Mother Feldstein approaches Lillian’s chair and reluctantly shifts Margo into Lillian’s arms, and Margo does not fuss. Lillian smiles at her and sways just a little and asks about Sadie’s health, and how long the baby sleeps, and if Sadie’s friends have infants too.

  Mother Feldstein paces and takes another piece of shortbread. “Of course it’s a great adjustment,” she says. “For husbands too.”

  “I would imagine,” Lillian says.

  “Of course you’re right,” Sadie says.

  “Men, they’re a different breed,” Mother Feldstein says. “They’re sensitive to changes, more sensitive than you’d think.”

  “Bill’s quite devoted to her,” Sadie says. “Don’t you think?”

  “To Margo. Of course, she’s a beautiful child,” Mother Feldstein says. “It’s just that men sometimes, well, miss their wives. They miss their wives’ attentions.”

  No question about the tone: a needle dipped in honey. But Lillian focuses only on Margo, a tenderness in her face, then on Sadie. She is utterly poised, as if Mother Feldstein is no longer in the room. “Mrs. Feldstein, I’m delighted to hold her,” Lillian says, “but perhaps she needs her mother?”

  “I’ll take her whenever you’re ready, Miss Schumacher,” Sadie says, but Margo looks
peaceful, and Sadie doesn’t rush to take the baby back. “I think I had just a little light hair when I was born.”

  “Bill had thick dark hair. She looks exactly like him, you see?” Mother Feldstein says.

  Mostly Sadie sees glimmers of her father, and of Goldie. “Bill would be happy to hear that.”

  “He seems happy, but I worry for him,” Mother Feldstein says. “You know, a new father. You must be mindful, Sadie. Others could take advantage.”

  And now Sadie focuses only on Lillian and Margo, as if her mother-in-law is a small talking bird. “Miss Schumacher,” Sadie says, “did you see Margo’s feet?” She crosses the three paces to Lillian’s chair, sits beside her on the footstool. “Here,” Sadie says, unwrapping the baby blanket and pulling off a small pink bootie. “So tiny, aren’t they? It’s hard to imagine such smallness.”

  “I think so too,” Lillian says.

  Then Margo’s restlessness begins, a small cry. “Here,” Sadie says, “why don’t I take her?” and lifts the baby and stands rocking her beside Lillian’s chair, while her mother-in-law stands pressing her hands together, half-turned toward the dining room and the hall to Bill’s study.

  “Papa and Bill can’t smoke forever,” Sadie says. “If you don’t mind, Mother, would you see what’s keeping them?”

  And for an instant Mother Feldstein seems stung, her eyes a little too shiny, a momentary frailty in her stance.

  Lillian rises from the reading chair, and there it is again— swan—though Sadie does not want to think swan. Sadie does not want to think anything.

  “We won’t stay long,” Lillian says. “You must be exhausted.”

  “It’s surprising how tiring this time can be,” Sadie says. Her mother-in-law retreats down the hallway to the study, and Margo begins to cry in earnest. “Rosalie?” Sadie calls. “Would you mind getting more lemonade for Miss Schumacher, and anything else she wants? I’m taking the baby upstairs.”

  “I’m fine,” Lillian says. “Mrs. Feldstein, do you need help?”

  Ordinarily, no; Sadie would automatically say no, simply because Lillian is Lillian. But her arms and legs feel rubbery, peculiar, and the fuzziness of late nights is resurfacing: what she wants more than anything else is quiet and sleep. “If you wouldn’t mind,” Sadie says, “tell Bill I’ll need time alone with the baby?”

  “Of course,” Lillian says.

  Sadie can hear Bill and her father approach from the study, Bill’s response to the crying, “Oh, Margo,” and more quietly, “good lungs.”

  “Thank you for the dress,” Sadie says, and whisks Margo upstairs to the nursery. She closes the door and finds the rocker, Margo wailing until they’re both settled into the chair and Margo’s begun nursing—that quiet, insistent tug. Sadie doesn’t lock the nursery door: with a baby in the house, one mustn’t lock certain doors. It seems fewer and fewer doors even exist, fewer walls; her house has been thrown open, Sadie herself thrown open. From downstairs she can hear conversation, Lillian giving her message to Bill. There is more, Lillian talking to Abe now, telling him Sadie of course wants to see him soon, and he should telephone her. And what occurs next, Sadie never would predict: she hears Lillian’s voice, firm and clear, suggesting they give the senior Mrs. Feldstein a ride home.

  “It would be no trouble at all,” Lillian says.

  There is the murmur of Mother Feldstein’s objection.

  “I insist,” Lillian says. “It would be our pleasure.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Jo

  1933

  Lucia Mazzano is a loaf of bread. Black hair pinned into a tight rosette, black lashes, olive neck, olive fingers, tapered, small, her dress a long flute, yellow of forsythia, yellow of butter. The young lawyers fawn and loiter at her desk, the older ones wink, Moshe Schumacher grins: fat Moshe, fat boss, herring breath and stench of cigars.

  “Good morning,” Lucia says, and returns to her filing, while Moshe Schumacher lights up and watches her legs. She’s young, at the job a month, Catholic in a firm that hires Jewish.

  From her own desk, Jo watches the men parade, pretends she’s alone in another building, concentrates on typing, in such instance, the injured party shall be granted no less and no more than one-third the proceeds, carbon paper the indigo sky after dusk.

  And when Schumacher finally leaves, Lucia crosses the office from her desk to Jo’s and holds out her hands. Bread, Jo thinks.

  “Take a look.” Lucia holds a pile of buttons, shiny black geometric hills. Her palms are pink. “For the jacket I’m making. Aren’t they smart?”

  Smart? Yet Jo reaches over, takes one, and there’s a tightening low in her belly when she runs her finger over the ridges and polished planes.

  “Sophisticated,” Jo says.

  Lucia’s teeth: white against her carmine lipstick.

  BREAD. A hard thing to refuse, if you are Jo, if you picture your life as filament tracking back and forth between your father’s house and the lawyer’s typewriter, between men obsessed with order: brown suits, black ledgers, tobacco clouds. Weekday hours partitioned by documents: wills, contracts, letters, motions, pleadings, orders of the court filed alphabetically by client, daily and chronologically so the story unfolds backward as you read from the top. Evening: dinner at the appointed hour, fish and potatoes, eggs and noodles, chicken for Friday night. A pot of tea at eight and the dishes washed, the dining table cleared and rubbed with linseed oil. Then pipe smoke seeps up from the parlor, the evenings her father stays in.

  Even her body seems reduced to wire: sealed, unerring, monochrome. So unlike Sadie, spawning in her neighborhood off Hertel, or Celia, who will never keep her thoughts straight, who starts for the department store and ends up at the soup kitchen or the burlesque. A half-step from vagrancy. Celia would spawn if she could, try to keep her from rutting in alleys. Not the kind of thing you say aloud.

  Goldie’s stubbornly gone, now just air and trembling, it seems. Irving comes and goes as he pleases, and leaves his dirty clothes at the top of the stairs.

  Pour the tea at eight, precisely; five minutes past and her father will begin to sniff and glance about, ten minutes and in an irritated tone he’ll call her name. Pour tea and then he works in silence on his store ledgers. Celia listens to the radio. Jo reads the newspaper and bathes and retires early, so she can wake before dawn, when the others are asleep: then it’s as if the house is hers. Nothing encroaches and she can fill the emptiness as she chooses. Lately she’s allowed herself to pretend the rest of her family has vanished and the sleep belongs to someone else. A woman, young, with black lashes, her yellow dress hanging over a chair. Lucia Mazzano in the predawn light, asleep in the next room while the tea steeps and Jo considers breakfast. Jo curls into the sofa and drifts and does not rise. The furnace blows and ticks. Wet breeze against the house: the lake ice is almost melted. Late April, and the dampness has its own weight.

  The light arrives. Her father stirs. He’ll be downstairs soon, waiting for breakfast, and Irving will follow, and then Celia, loud and clinging.

  And the house is again an alien thing.

  IN THE FIFTH WEEK of Lucia Mazzano, Jo is called away from the office. It’s Tuesday, early afternoon, she hasn’t yet taken lunch. Celia again. This time, a coffee shop. It’s Minnie Greenglass who calls, Minnie Greenglass from Hadassah, Minnie who even in high school didn’t say much to Jo, she was mousy then, her last name Rabinowitz, but now she’s married and plump and in the habit of hiring maids. When Jo steps through the doorway of Schroeder’s Coffee & Lunch, Minnie’s in a lush burgundy suit and new heels and pearls, talking with her hands. Celia really is a lovely woman, Minnie tells the owner, but she has troubles, has some terrible days and this is one. “We all know about troubles,” Minnie says.

  Celia is docile, sitting on a counter stool next to Minnie Greenglass and the skeptical owner, neck bent, lipstick reddening the corners of her mouth, purple jam on her fingertips. The counter in front of her is strewn with broken pie. At a nea
rby table a man thumbs a paper and glares at Jo. He’s blue-eyed, German-handsome, slightly dissolute. Blotches of purple mar the right panel of his shirt.

  Schroeder the owner sizes up Jo. His forehead is wide and meaty, his mouth a thin slit. “The lovely woman disturbed my customers,” he tells Jo. “And wouldn’t pay.”

  “Please accept our apologies,” Jo says. She tries to be small, innocuous, but Schroeder frowns.

  “Minnie, thank you,” she says. Lays a hand on Celia’s shoulder. “How much is the bill?”

  “Mrs. Greenglass has taken care of it,” Schroeder says.

  “Minnie, what do I owe you?”

  “It’s nothing,” Minnie says.

  “No, really.”

  “I’m happy to help,” Minnie says. “Celia and I go back a long way.”

  “That’s kind of you,” Jo says. Schroeder and Minnie Greenglass lean close together, a unified smugness, and Jo urges Celia by the elbow. “Very kind,” Jo says.

  “Very kind,” Celia repeats, and after a pause, “Sorry. Thank you. Sorry.”

  The streetcar, the walk down Lancaster, the white frame house rising into pastel green—bursting elm buds, frilly maples. Celia doesn’t explain. Won’t. And Jo is left to puzzle out the incident using Minnie Greenglass’s summary and the raw evidence: pie stains, the averted eyes of the female customers, the raised eyebrows of the men. Celia slumps and in the hazy light seems frailer than usual. Her hands are small and bony and she doesn’t know what to do with them, and finally tucks them into her coat pockets. At the house, she heads directly to her bedroom, coat on, and lies down on the bed. Jo offers to help her with her shoes, which she allows.