The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  “You’ve gone to the doctor, Mama?” Lillian says.

  “Bertha drives me to the doctor.”

  “What does he say?”

  “He’s a fool,” Isabel says, and there’s a warning look from Moshe. “A nice fool, but a fool.”

  WHEN EXACTLY did Isabel become a wren? The last time Lillian saw her, here, in September, Lillian arrived late. Isabel was already seated at the dining room table, and she chastised Lillian, and did not relent: was she wrenlike then? Lillian spent the evening deliberately blind, evading her.

  Moshe seats Lillian across from Isabel and uncorks the Bordeaux, and Bertha dishes up thick slices of lamb. Isabel slowly eats and smiles at Bertha and then at Lillian, her sweetness as peculiar as her tiny body. And here, again, is the hope, appearing and dissolving in the air between them, like some odd reflection from the candles. Stupid hope, fat hope, there and gone and there. And Lillian senses something else in the air, a stickiness despite the dry heat of the dining room, something webby and troublesome and linked to Moshe. Lillian holds out her glass for the Bordeaux. Whatever it is, she thinks, will require more than lamb and wine.

  It’s hard to stay vigilant at Moshe’s table, in this house. The house has always seemed to her a plush and spacious cocoon; she’s wondered what it’s like to stay in the house alone, even for a day, to have as your own the several bedrooms, the living room, study, summer porch, the enclosed garden. Carpets thick enough to sleep on: Lillian studies the pattern in the dining room’s Persian, even as she tells Moshe and Bertha about a Garbo picture, Queen Christina, and Isabel quietly picks at her lamb.

  “You just want to look at her face,” Lillian says. “You could spend a whole day looking.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Moshe says. “No kidding. A real knockout.” Bertha presses her lips together, smoothes the unwrinkled tablecloth.

  Isabel should not be drinking wine, but already the glass Moshe poured her is empty. Though she barely eats the lamb and simply rearranges her potatoes, the wine she’s pleased with; she would like more. “Moshe,” she says, “you can just refill the glass, don’t be stingy. There. Thank you.”

  Even wren-sized, Isabel will have her way: she also has a sweet tooth, and knows that Bertha’s made pudding, chocolate. She doesn’t care that it’s dairy. Isabel would like pudding—forget kosher—and she would like that pudding now. So before the table has been cleared of dinner plates, Bertha retrieves four small white bowls of pudding and a separate bowl of whipped cream.

  And Moshe, subdued for most of the dinner, pours Bertha and Lillian brandies, Scotch for himself.

  Isabel spoons up her pudding, animated now, talking in the old way. “Bertha will teach Lillian how to make this. This is something Lillian can learn.”

  “Sure she can,” Moshe says.

  “Bertha will make it again, won’t you Bertha?” Lillian says.

  “I make it all the time,” Bertha says, but Isabel frowns at Lillian.

  “That’s you,” Isabel says. “I thought so. A lazy cook.”

  “Mama,” Bertha says.

  And Lillian takes a long sip of her brandy and asks Isabel, “Why do you care?”

  It’s as if she’s thrown a switch: Isabel’s face pinches up and you can see her shrink into her seat, into her wrenness, stung. How small she can make herself—awful—but the pinched look reddens, as if she might cry. She drops her spoon to the table and then she is crying, her mouth quivering, tears leaking down her face. She turns to Moshe, addresses him only now, her voice choked: “She’s ungrateful, I told you. Ungrateful. May you never know such a thing from your children.”

  “What’s going on?” Lillian says.

  And her mother turns back to her, still choked but stern. “When you live with me, Lilly, you will have to cook.”

  Lillian swishes the brandy in circles around her glass and breathes it in like sweet ether, and narrows her eyes at Moshe and smiles at Bertha. A gauze veil has fallen between them. She tells her mother, “Mama, no one makes pudding like Bertha.”

  “That’s right,” Isabel says. “You’re right.”

  Why she did not see this coming she does not know. Or does know: it’s unimaginable, to live again with Isabel, even a less virulent Isabel, it is enough to be in the same room for an evening. But she is the daughter, the unmarried one, the one without children, without money, naturally she’d take care of her mother, naturally she’d be grateful, wouldn’t she? Strangers would think so, but Moshe? Yet it’s exactly what he’s thinking, what he implies when he pauses over his pudding and says, “We think it would be better for Mama not to be alone. This I believe is the simplest solution. No more rent for you, Lilly, it will help you both out.”

  “You understand, Moshe, I’m not asking for help,” Lillian says.

  “So proud,” Isabel says. “Too proud to ask.”

  “No,” Moshe says. “I’m asking.”

  There’s a slight catch in his voice, and she feels the catch in her own throat, a welling dismay at the specter of herself: if she were a better woman, she would say yes. If she were a better woman she’d embrace Isabel, ferry her mother to the doctor, bathe her, keep watch at night, stock the house with Bertha’s pudding. If Lillian were a better woman, she would have known months ago of her mother’s decline.

  And look, her tiny mother droops in the dining room chair, smaller than a mother ought to be, even a mother like Isabel, whose diminishment Lillian has wished for. And Moshe, for whom she would pledge almost anything, Moshe without whom Lillian would have done herself in long ago, really she would have, the loneliness unbearable. Her eyes fill from the thought of Moshe’s kindness, and from the brandy and the wine and the gin. Yes, she wants to help him, how can she not help him, her older brother, her truest friend? He’s middle-aged now and so big, you can’t see his eyes as well as you once could, those beautiful eyes. But it’s impossible, what he’s asking, the plan he’s designed, and he knows this, and he asks nonetheless, and in that way she wonders what hidden desperation he must suffer.

  “There is no greater mitzvah,” Moshe says, but the catch has gone, he speaks in his attorney’s voice, and Lillian blinks. He is smooth and distant, not desperate at all. For an instant she can’t breathe. The word mitzvah hangs above the table, hollow promise of redemption, though even the gossips will know better: instead Lillian will have her comeuppance. The good is only that Moshe will rest easy. Look at him, big and smug and drunk, pushing the bitter little mother into her lap.

  Lillian feels a heat move from her belly to her face, a sweat, a passing desire to break the glassware, and then a calm comes over her. She turns to Bertha. “But we’ll have to find another arrangement,” she says. “I’m engaged to Abe Cohen.”

  “Abe Cohen?” Isabel says. “He’ll never marry you.”

  “We’re engaged,” Lillian repeats.

  “Congratulations, Lilly.” Bertha smiles and glances at Moshe and does not change her expression.

  “I was not aware,” Moshe says.

  “You’re a fool,” Isabel says to Lillian. “Abe Cohen.”

  “Why would you want to live with a fool?” Lillian says.

  “You know what that man thinks of you,” Isabel says. “I am your mother.”

  “He loves me,” Lillian says.

  “I am your mother,” Isabel repeats and the tears begin again, she’s frail enough that the whole of her trembles. Moshe shakes his head at Lillian, he’s trying for his disapproving stare but there’s a waver in that too: what choice has he given her?

  “Mama,” he says. “We should be happy for Lilly.”

  “I will not live with Abe Cohen,” Isabel says. “I will not.”

  Lillian feels her eyes widening, feels the desire for more air, any air, the cold blue of Delaware Park.

  “Of course you mustn’t,” Bertha says. She’s cooing now, she’s moved to Isabel’s side, she’s holding Isabel’s right hand. She is too kind for this family, Lillian thinks. She’ll be suckered by all of
us, eaten alive. Moshe holds a hand over his eyes; he knows what’s coming next.

  “You must stay with us,” Bertha says. “That lovely room with the camellias on the walls?”

  It takes a moment for Isabel to hear: she’s lost in her pique, still trembling, a few loose tears dropping from her chin.

  “I know you love this house,” Bertha says. “There’s more than enough room,” she says, and enumerates—the guest rooms, the bathrooms, the housekeeper who can mend anything. “Would you like to see it again? The camellias?”

  Moshe sighs in defeat. “Mama, why don’t you take a look?”

  And the weeping subsides, and Isabel allows Bertha to help her out of the chair—pausing to wipe pudding from her lips—and lead her down the hallway, footsteps quieting as they retreat to a second hall, and the room with the camellias and the adjoining bathroom with the white claw-foot tub.

  “You could quit your job,” Moshe says to Lillian. “I would pay you.”

  “I don’t want to quit my job.”

  “Harry Kaplan’s going under, Lilly. You must see that.”

  He’s right, Harry Kaplan is going under, she would not have phrased it that way, going under, but Harry’s already living below the waterline. You go under and likely do not come up, at least not in this life. How much resilience can one expect from a man in his seventies, the scrupulous and increasingly sad Harry? Harry will not fire her, but he’s whittling down her hours and soon the money won’t cover her rent. Her job will last for a few more months, perhaps. Harry will not say.

  And when the stationer’s goes under completely she’ll have to find another job, though there’s not much to be had. What could she tolerate? Moshe’s law firm? Even if Moshe offered her a job— and he won’t, not now—how could she work with Jo Cohen or the unlovely Gert? Just the thought of that office depletes the oxygen in Moshe’s dining room: the water is already rising. No, Harry Kaplan is going under and Moshe is making use of this, Moshe who will defend Lillian to the world but feed her to their mother.

  “I’ll find something else,” Lillian says.

  “You think Abe can support you?”

  “That isn’t your concern.”

  “I see,” Moshe says. “Well I suppose not. Though we’ll be happy to host your wedding reception. You just tell me when.”

  She cannot look at him. Allowing his mean streak to surface, trumping the lie: this is his worst mistake. Smug Moshe, Moshe with his law practice and side deals, the expensive house, the devotion of Bertha, the cadre of sons, Moshe with his string of mistresses and his beautiful suits in ever-increasing sizes, Moshe fat in every way. Moshe whom Lillian has revered and defended and loved, truly loved, though he is not a lovable man. You just tell me when. A coldness comes over her. She would have done herself in without him? That would have made her a fool. But she is not a fool (not a whore, not fat) and there is good brandy here and she will drink it. She will not clear the dishes for Bertha, she will not rush out the door, and she will not converse with Moshe. She will have her brandy, and a bit more of that pudding. Perhaps she will turn on the radio. Perhaps she will sit in silence, and consider the color of the brandy. Moshe can do what he likes.

  From the hallway leading to the guest room, Lillian can hear Bertha murmuring, a bubbling sound reverberating off the main hall chandelier. Does anyone really need a hall chandelier? The bubbling is a kind of talk Bertha used with her children, who are now too old for it, but it seems to come in handy with Isabel and perhaps, in the bedroom, with Moshe. There are other sounds: sniffling, a brief mutter, perhaps about Lillian, but then the note shifts to a major key, a “Bertha, dear,” a quiet “Oh.” They have apparently found the camellias: picture them, Isabel and Bertha, bubbling, murmuring, holding hands within walls raining pink and white blossoms. It is a picture Lillian cannot enter: she does not belong, and Isabel has left her, which was what Lillian wanted, wasn’t it? This separateness? But it feels like blank space, and for a moment the blankness seems ominous, perhaps fatal. Lillian feels the urge to call back her mother— Wait, don’t go—even as she knows the calling will do nothing, will at best reopen a door to a room not of camellias but of old unhappiness. Bertha’s guest room will never contain what Lillian has been missing. Just as Lillian could not call her father back from death, though she’d been possessed by the wish—Wait here, in this world, with me.

  And so as Isabel fails, it is not Lillian but Bertha holding Isabel’s hand in the hallway, Bertha leading Isabel to the room with the camellias, Bertha soothing and making puddings and preparing to share her house with her mother-in-law. Bertha’s voice echoing off that chandelier, “It’s the best tub.” The white bathtub is beautiful, though four or five Isabels would fit in it now, a nest of wrens.

  Apparently Bertha loves Isabel in spite of Isabel, loves Moshe in spite of Moshe, scheming, boorish, unkind Moshe. Perhaps it’s just the gesture of loving that Bertha’s after, Lillian thinks. Maybe Isabel has become a substitute: Bertha’s first devotion is to her own mother, her aunts, her Warsaw grandmother, Polish wrens. The beloved dead. Yet here in Buffalo there’s only shrunken Isabel, hard-hearted but still of this world, still a mother. Moshe’s mother. Bertha has devoted herself to Moshe and so by extension to Isabel, because that is how Bertha loves. And because when you lose someone from the deep of your life, and you find an echo in another—a stranger, a relative—you give to the other what you’d give to the lost one. Just to hear the echo.

  “There you go.” Words floating down the hall, Bertha’s voice. Presumably Isabel is on the guest room bed, having had too much wine, having cried twice at dinner—something Isabel herself abhors—in need of such a bed. Lillian takes her brandy to the living room and Moshe follows. There again, the expanse of snow in the dark, which she wishes she could dissolve into. She returns to the blue chair and closes her eyes and sips at the brandy, which is warming. She’ll need the warmth. The blueness outside has shifted to a dark blurry gray, falling snow slanting east. There’s a match strike, the sound of inhalation, pipe smoke wafting from the direction of the sofa. Moshe will meet her silence with silence: he has a gift for waiting. That is not her gift, but when she must she can vanish from a room into herself even as she leans against the thick upholstery of a chair and sips at her drink. And so she vanishes, and the snow falls, and Bertha’s murmuring becomes indistinguishable from the sounds of the house, and pipe smoke drifts. And after ten minutes, when her brandy is gone and she has finished vanishing, Lillian sets her glass on the coffee table and silently passes the damask sofa and Moshe and his pipe, collects her coat and laces up her heavy boots. If she stays quiet enough, the cold will not disturb her.

  “Let me drive you home, Lilly,” Moshe says. He taps his pipe against an ashtray and pushes himself up from the sofa.

  “Thank you, no,” Lillian says. “Please thank Bertha for the dinner.”

  “Don’t be stubborn,” Moshe says.

  And the snow keeps falling. Flakes the size of camellias, she thinks. She does not kiss her brother, or say good-bye; she’s careful to close the door softly, because her mother might be sleeping, because Lillian needs silence. She walks along the park to Delaware and catches a bus, and transfers, resisting the pull of the downtown nightspots. She’s oddly sober for all she’s had to drink tonight.

  Once in her flat, Lillian craves only more quiet, as the city beyond, even in snowfall, seems now a roaring, the voices of her family and even Abe a roaring. She fills her bathtub and takes a second hot bath of the day. The flat fills with steam. She’s warm again, wrapped in her robe when the telephone begins to ring: perhaps Moshe, perhaps Abe. She does not answer. Before she turns off the light, Lillian brushes her hair, smoothes skin cream on her forearms and hands.

  IN A DAY, when the roaring subsides, this much is clear: the lie itself is more bitter than she’d known. It’s been years since Abe hinted at marriage, and stopped hinting at marriage, years since Lillian turned her mind from the question. Yet here, re
surfacing, is the old hope, still raw: there seems no end to her own naïveté. Except now she is tired, and the baths and the gin do not restore her. Her brother is not her brother. Isabel’s a wren, and the vitriol has worn her down.

  Lillian cultivates silence. For a week she ignores the telephone, and then emissaries begin to arrive at Kaplan’s Stationers. The first is a courier from Moshe’s office, delivering another lunch invitation, which she glances at and returns. The second is Abe himself, arriving during a midmorning lull: when he enters the store there is always the echo of the first time he approached her, it’s unavoidable, but Tuesday morning she is strangely unmoved. It is as if she’s wearing gloves; as if her entire body is gloved.

  “Why don’t we have dinner at your flat?” Abe says.

  “No,” she tells him. “I think I’m getting a cold.”

  Abe does not want her to be tired or ill, or perhaps he doesn’t believe her. Her answer seems to agitate him; he paces in front of the counter, and suggests he visit her flat anyway, though he rarely looks after her during illness.

  “Better not,” she says.

  Finally he stops pacing and leans in close. “Your brother, he came to my store,” he says. His eyebrows lift as he says this, and he gazes at her as if she’s a child in need of correction.

  “Yes?”

  “Lillian, I would like to speak with you privately.”

  “Not now,” she says.

  He scans the empty store. Huffs. “You know we will not marry,” he says.

  And she is glad then for the gloved feeling, the sense that her body is not her body; the lie she told at dinner becomes ephemeral, a dead leaf swept into a dustbin. “Please go now.”

  “Lillian.”

  “You should go.”

  ON WEDNESDAY, Lillian’s nephew Leo stops by the store in his beautiful overcoat and calfskin gloves, kisses Lillian on the cheek and delivers gin and small cakes from Bertha. His voice is deep and smooth, and he smells of barbershop aftershave and sweet tobacco. He hugs Harry Kaplan—“Uncle Harry, how are you?”— says he’s just in the neighborhood and needs a few things. He chooses expensive items—a hand-stitched ledger and a leather portfolio—and while Lillian rings them up, he mentions that Bertha and her housekeeper are cleaning Isabel’s house.