The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  “Nana doesn’t look so good,” Leo says. “She sits in Ma’s living room with the radio loud. Hours. Size of a chicken, Nana.”

  Wren. “I know.” Lillian packages the ledger and portfolio and hands them to Leo, who says “thank you” and stands at the counter, waiting, at ease, like his father. The store refills with quiet, and Harry retreats to the office, and still Leo waits.

  “What else can I get you, Leo?” Lillian says.

  “It’s peaceful here,” Leo says.

  “Um-hmm.”

  “I could just stay all afternoon.”

  “You could.”

  “You want to see her today, I’ll go with you,” Leo says. “Aunt Lilly?”

  “Don’t get mixed up with Moshe’s plans,” Lillian says. “I can’t do what he wants.”

  “I know.”

  “Leo?”

  “Aunt Lilly, I know.”

  He assures her that Moshe is in court, Moshe whose calls she will not answer, whose invitations deserve no reply. Leo is, it seems, Bertha’s emissary.

  The snow in Delaware Park is crisscrossed with footprints, snowbanks along Delaware and Nottingham collecting dirt. Lillian enters the house to the sound of a symphony pouring from the radio. Isabel’s dwarfed by the blue chair again. She’s wearing a green wool dress and sweater, a blanket pads her lap, and the bulk of the wool exaggerates her smallness. No glaring, no crying, no spite. A young uniformed nurse sits straight-backed on the sofa and reads the Saturday Evening Post. When Lillian gives Isabel a kiss on the cheek, Isabel says, “Lilly,” and offers her the newspaper. Isabel doesn’t seem to want conversation: she too is retreating into silence, or at least music, Lillian thinks, and how strange that she and Lillian should do anything alike. Leo brings cups of tea and more of Bertha’s cakes, and they sit together with the radio symphony and the newspaper, and Leo holds Isabel’s hand. There is no apparent bitterness in Isabel’s face. Don’t be fooled, Lillian thinks, and her own body is tense, as if to deflect a blow, but her mother is merely a tired woman in a chair.

  The orchestra completes one movement and begins another; the paper reports snow in Cleveland, in Chicago, in Canada; Leo finishes the cakes. “Today,” the nurse says, “isn’t one of her better days,” but it’s peaceful with Isabel in the living room, the bad day oddly good. And Lillian stays a bit longer watching the park beyond the windows, women in heavy coats walking, flying bits of snow.

  THE LATEST ISABEL is a paradox, in the face of which Lillian is disarmed and melancholy and strangely tender. On other weekday afternoons, she returns to Bertha’s living room, to the radio and small cakes, to the day nurse and to Isabel in her chair—occasionally dozing, often gazing out the windows while the radio orchestra plays another movement. Sometimes Leo stops by, sometimes Bertha is home, and Lillian finds the same peculiar peace. There will be more nurses, Bertha says, a second bed in the room with the camellias. Beside Isabel, Bertha herself seems a large pink blossom. She offers Lillian a drink, drops olives and ice into her gin.

  They do not discuss the men, or how it is that Lillian can visit during work hours (as is, Harry can barely pay her; at least she can choose her own schedule). At the store, Lillian treats Harry gingerly: he too sits in a chair for hours, listening, but to some inner music—maybe a requiem, maybe an anxious march. It’s good, isn’t it, that her father can’t witness these disassemblings? Yet more than ever she misses him. Her father would be appalled at Moshe. Her father would insist Abe treat her with more care.

  But the fury and insistence are hers, must be. She will not see either Moshe or Abe, despite their constant messages and notes. Moshe has declared himself not-family. Abe has made a similar declaration. If she were younger, her rage would drive her to other men, but who needs another man? More trouble, more demands, more humiliating ways of being pinned down. Though in her bed she is too much alone; and the separateness of days exacerbates the loneliness, which is increasingly stark: craving mixed with exile. Each night in the bath, Lillian reminds herself, Don’t give in, don’t give in, it will only lead to greater unhappiness.

  But she is running out of money. In March she searches for another job, though there is little; and she scans the classifieds for efficiencies and decent rooming houses—they can’t all be grim, can they? She is losing weight, and it occurs to her that she and Isabel are more and more alike, silent, shrinking women, though Lillian can speak and by April Isabel cannot.

  ABE AND MOSHE, Moshe and Abe: she has never known what transpires in the closed sanctuary of their friendship. The business of men. And it will do her no good to speculate. But in April, after Lillian has interviewed for a part-time job at Berman’s Shoes, Harry Kaplan surprises her. He’s alert, smiling, almost the man she remembers from childhood. He’s sold the store, and at a fair price, a generous price, at a time when there are no buyers. “Today,” he says, “I signed the papers.” The new owner is Moshe, who wants her to manage the store.

  A bribe? An offering? How can she know? She kisses Harry on the cheek. “That’s wonderful,” she says. She promises—what else can she do?—that she’ll go through the details with Moshe.

  And it is only a matter of days before Abe again appears at Kaplan’s, somber, formal, though he carries a bouquet of daffodils. The sight of him brings an instant rogue wave of desire speckled with grief. “Lillian,” he says. “Would you care to join me for lunch?”

  Do not give in. “What you said about marriage?” she says.

  “You think that would make you happy?” Abe shakes his head. “You are wrong.” He sets the daffodils on the counter, but beside them his hands seem uncertain. “May I take you to lunch?”

  How she has missed touching him. The scent of him in an ordinary room, the burnished depths of his voice. Her life is better with him than without him, isn’t it? Though there was the hope, that sweet, dumb hope. It is not so easy.

  “Abe,” she says. “Abraham.” She thanks him for the flowers. The room is a spill of yellow and olive and pearl gray. She tells him, “Please ask me again next week.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Goldie

  1935

  And the day begins bright and cool, the sky overhead determining itself and uncoupling from the stars. Tuesday. Today she visits her friend Emily and Emily’s two small sons: they will all paint pictures, and during between-time snippets Emily will teach Goldie about line and form and shadow. These are mornings Goldie looks forward to, when it seems she’s a part of a larger life and what counts the most are colors and shapes, small games and snacks. She dresses; she thinks about the color orange; and she remembers a moment in a room painted dark cream, looking out over the span of yards behind the house, the trees dense with color. There seemed no end to the intensity of color, or the wish for such intensity: she’d wanted to press her face into the leaves. The air held a touch of chill, the wild reds and oranges and the still-green grass darkened and brightened with the movement of clouds in a variegated sky, blue patches, white and blue-gray clouds clumped in patterns difficult to discern; still, she searched out half-formed arrangements, emerging signs. And there was a tremulous quality to the day, the possibility of bursting into tears at the orange blaze of maple or the house cat in the window across the street, a slight calico who seemed somehow on the other side of the world. She’d needed to untie everything that bound her to that life, and did. Yet here years later is that moment’s imprint, an image hovering, permanently, just out of reach.

  Now the world trembles less. October arrives as a warm fair month, that other October out of view. The days of being on the second floor of an old house seem distilled into a remembered moment, the ache for that moment unanswerable, even if she were again to find the room, an identical October day. This is the trick of memory. She has not heard from her sisters; there are rare scribbled postcards from Irving but nothing from her sisters, not even Celia. It’s shocking, really, that she would hear nothing. She cannot know the intricacies of this silence but it seems her
sisters have chosen; to ask them directly would be humiliating. Every few months she still writes to Irving, the notes and occasional dollars at first like pennies dropped in a fountain, though she is beginning to see that this will soothe her conscience and no more. Outside the trolley clangs, the gulls call, the breeze carries the scent of brine and old fish and sweets from the pier. She brews herself a cup of coffee and opens the box of sugar. And then she knows: the darkened cream room was a bedroom in Daniel’s father’s house, where one day she rested while Daniel played the piano. She could hear the music and she went to the window to watch the leaves, her body languorous after sex. For the briefest instant she’d imagined her life might always feel this way, raw and delicate at once: exquisitely perched at the edge of such color; and then there was the merest shift in perception—was it the patterning of clouds? A change in Daniel’s playing?—the day becoming rare and finite.

  In California, the first man she brought home was a trumpet player named Albert she met while selling tickets at the Sunset Ballroom. He was in Venice for one week and she learned then that she could take pleasure without love but also without wonder, a diminished pleasure circumscribed by harsh shadowy forgetting. Still, his vocabulary altered her own: he’s long since disappeared but she finds herself holding one corner of a sugar cube to her coffee and watching the coffee run upward into the cube, defying gravity it seems, until the cube is coffee-soaked. As Albert taught her.

  PART THREE

  Winter Stars

  1943–45

  CHAPTER 16

  Sadie

  1943

  Early mornings remain tender for Sadie: in the bluish light Bill kisses her good-bye, and the neighborhood is still, her daughters’ movements dream-inflected. At this hour the girls rarely fight: they are quiet and affectionate, staying close to Sadie in the kitchen. Both girls are dark-haired, dark-eyed, curious—Elaine more skittish, Margo headstrong—their presences solid and irrevocable. They can’t imagine the world existing before their consciousness of it, and sometimes Sadie can’t either. Her own girlhood seems simultaneously closer and farther, but isn’t it easier to begin history with them? She pours milk, cooks oatmeal with fruit, and Margo and Elaine slowly come awake at the table. Sadie would like to think the morning closeness has nothing to do with the war’s inescapable anxiety, though it well might.

  She would like to replace history with oatmeal and fruit, saving only the best bits, starting again: Poland would mean Chopin, pastry with cinnamon, the ivory tablecloth Delia Lefkowitz inherited. But there are whole centuries to manage, and even her daughters’ brief lifetimes: when war broke out, Elaine was mastering socks and shoes. It had been a relief to discuss socks, shoes after socks, the matching up of shoes and feet, finessing knots and bows. To teach the rudiments of footwear and take her daughter to the park. For a time, Sadie tried to acknowledge Europe only after the girls were asleep, but even the attempt seemed absurd. There were temple meetings, committees for fund-raising, committees for refugees; and the weekly arrival of worsening news she learned to hold in her mind, silently, while drawing the alphabet in huge blue letters and slicing apples to demonstrate fractions.

  She’s better at balancing the extremes now, and the city is strangely vibrant, infused with money and unified purpose. The early mornings help, but after the girls have left for school, the phone begins to ring, and Sadie must snap into her more worldly self. She dreads the telephone but cannot ignore its sharp insistence—like a mischievous child pressing the doorbell. And often the call is a prank, or nearly: Jo with her usual litany of complaints. But it could be Bill, or Sadie’s friend Anna—she loves talking to Anna— or the plumber who needs to check the basement pipes. And a true emergency could be wedged in among Jo’s gratuitous calls. With the war, emergencies are rampant.

  When Sadie isn’t in and sometimes when she’s home, Rosalie will answer and then there’s a long interlude before the next call. A kind of respite. If it seemed proper to have Rosalie answer all calls, Sadie would, but Jo does not like Rosalie, and when it comes to Coloreds Jo veers fast to insult. So Sadie tries to pick up first, to Jo’s Sadie, when you going to bring those kids over here? Or the occasional, ugly Sadie, that schvartze still in your house? It isn’t just mornings, of course, Jo will call randomly through the day, her timing never good: she’ll call when Sadie is serving lunch to her card club and complain about the neighbor Ruby Berman. Fat Ruby, she says (though Sadie pictures the average-sized Ruby who would joke with their mother on the porch, and lately Jo herself is stout). Cats fighting in the yard upset Celia today—Jo herself pays no attention, but Celia. Who seems to have adopted yet another kitten, but forgets to look after it from time to time, that’s the way she is you know, it’s all kitty kitty kitty, and then for days silence. It’s a good thing Jo’s taken to those cats, a good thing Jo will feed them, but you know cats bring other cats. You know what all that howling in the yard is about, don’t you? You know about the howling, Sadie, course you do, you’ve got kids. When are you going to bring those kids over here?

  Jo doesn’t call much when she’s working at the jewelry store, or when their father is home at Lancaster, but that doesn’t rule out some nights, or occasional early mornings. In the evenings Bill answers and the call ends before Sadie picks up, and sometimes her daughters answer and stand listening to God knows what before Sadie gets to the receiver.

  But emergencies exist. And with Irving in the army and her father frailer, slowly unraveling, really, and the war seeping into the smallest corners of life, you can’t ignore the phone. True, for now Irving’s safe in Georgia—an uncouth wilderness, she thinks, but at least an American one—though who knows where he’ll be sent, to the bloody mess of Europe (a continent alternately glamorous and murderous) or the incomprehensible Pacific. She sends Irving care packages to the base. She volunteers at the Red Cross. She can hardly bring herself to read the Jewish Review, the reports inconceivable; now and then Bill hides it from her. The radio seems to broadcast from Mars. On bad days she worries about the anti-Semites in Buffalo, who are of course everywhere and include children who sometimes yell slurs at her daughters on their way home from school. Though it’s been a few months. What good will it do to dwell, unless the yelling starts again, or someone soaps the store windows?

  It’s a January Wednesday, the girls are at school, Sadie’s hands are wet, and the phone is ringing again. Rosalie answers, “Feldstein residence,” and says, “I’ll surely tell her, Miss Cohen. I’ll surely tell her right away. Yes ma’am, Miss Cohen.” There’s silence, and in a harder voice Rosalie says, “Miss Cohen, I will relay your message. Good day.” And when Sadie enters the living room Rosalie is taking a deep breath.

  “Miss Cohen called,” Rosalie says. “She said to tell you it’s important. She said to tell you to please call her immediately.”

  “Thank you,” Sadie says.

  Rosalie returns to the kitchen and begins to scrub down the stovetop, humming one of her church songs. Her fixed concentration on burned gravy barely hints at how far Jo’s gone this time. Sadie ought to call back; there’s likely to be an hour of quiet now, perhaps an uninterrupted hour to read—but she ought to call back. If nothing else, Jo will blame Rosalie for not conveying the message fast enough. But now the telephone is ringing again, and Rosalie hums a little more fervently, and Sadie picks up to Jo saying, “You’ve got to come over here, Sadie.” An urgency in her voice, but also a wavering, as if the sentence itself is pushing through radio static. “Celia is fine,” she says. “Celia’s at the Red Cross. You’ve got to come here, Sadie.”

  “I can’t bring the girls to visit,” Sadie says.

  “Not them,” Jo says. “Just you come. I’ve got something here.”

  Sadie drives down Hertel and over to Delaware, Lancaster, the bare trees partitioning a gray mottled sky. Perhaps she should ask Rosalie not to bother with the telephone at all. They should both pretend no one is home, muffle the thing with a blanket. It’s tempting.
But of course a mother should not do that. A wife should not do that. You cannot ignore your life because your sister has bad habits.

  For example, the front walk at Lancaster is in need of shoveling: Sadie would not change her daily routine because of Jo’s failure to clear the walk. The house itself needs a coat of paint, and when she enters it, a threadbare patch gleams up from the foyer carpet. “Jo?”

  “Parlor,” Jo says, and there Sadie finds a pot of tea and teacups set out and a little tray with cigarettes, and beside them an envelope. Jo’s in their father’s reading chair, his carved walnut pipe in her hand. She’s dressed for the store, matronly in a dark wool skirt suit. “There’s tea,” Jo says. “I found cigarettes.”

  “What do you need, Jo?”

  Jo shrugs and hands her the envelope. Lights her father’s pipe.

  The handwriting is vaguely like Sadie’s but looser, addressed to Irving at the store (what sort of debt now?). A cold wave runs through her, and in its wake the parlor seems less solid and familiar. The letter itself is just a note, dated a week ago, tucked around a ten-dollar bill.

  Dear I,

  All fine here. Does Celia need boots? Deposit the rest.

  G

  The postmark Los Angeles, last Monday, but no return address. What is this, what? She examines the handwriting again. Unmistakable. There’s a quick wash of confusion, as if the day has dropped away to reveal behind it another, more densely constructed, blinding day. G. The whole of her: just these lines and the letter G. Sadie squints. This should be a relief, shouldn’t it? But instead there’s a hard slam, as if Goldie’s just gone missing again, a raw, new grief.