From the public telephone she calls Bill and then Rosalie, who will meet the girls after school. She tries to telephone Lancaster, tries to telephone the store, but the phones ring emptily, and she hangs up and replaces the coin and dials again. The numbers distract her, as does the circular movement of her fingers over the heavy dial: after four or five attempts, she’s lost in a light trance, almost forgetting her purpose.
In the waiting room, it seems Irving cannot get hold of himself. The bobbing of his right knee sends tremors into the floor and her own chair, and he seems to be chewing his lips—she’s afraid he’ll start bleeding, the way he’s working them. It’s as if he has been drinking coffee, pots of it, rather than whiskey from his flask. She sets her hand on top of his, the way she might to calm one of her daughters, but she only feels the tremor more profoundly. This will not do. “I’ll stay here,” Sadie says. “Why don’t you find yourself something to eat?”
“Yes?” He seems to rise into himself then, his face a shade closer to the Irving she prefers.
SADIE’S ALONE when a doctor named Grafton calls her from the waiting room to offer the absurd explanation that Celia has had a stroke.
“She’s too young for that,” Sadie says.
“It’s uncommon,” he says. “But it happens. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe she’s anemic,” Sadie says.
“She might be,” he says. “But that would be a separate problem.”
Where is Bill? Because he could speak to Dr. Grafton more easily, more scientifically: Anemia is just as scientific as stroke, isn’t it? Why not anemia? Why not simple exhaustion? She was tired, she collapsed.
There is the peculiar drift of not-knowing: she watches herself speak to Dr. Grafton, hears herself say, “Can you test her for that?”
Dr. Grafton says, “Yes, but there’s the primary problem. Right now it’s hard to tell what the damage is.”
She nods. When might he know more? When might she see Celia? The light in the room seems stark and cool. Her blue suit is the one she put on this morning, her blue pumps the ones she bought with Anna. She asks Dr. Grafton what might have caused this. He does not know. When he leaves her, she returns to the public telephone, dials and lets the phone ring at Lancaster. She pictures Celia at home, the real Celia approaching the phone, as if it’s some other Celia here in the hospital.
After two hours Sadie is allowed, briefly, into Celia’s room. Irving has not returned. There are tubes attached to Celia’s arms, but Celia is asleep, and she seems simply like Celia on a bed. Her mouth is oddly curved, but her breathing is not so very different from ordinary sleep breathing, and her forehead is an ordinary temperature. Celia seems peaceful asleep, though it is not clear what sort of peace this is.
“Celia?” Sadie says. “How are you feeling? You took a fall on the bus.”
Celia sleeps, breathes. What does she know? If she dreams, does she dream the same way she did last week? There’s a slight movement—the flickering of an eyelid or the movement of Sadie’s own shadow, Sadie cannot tell.
IN THE LATE afternoon Sadie finds Jo at Lancaster, housecleaning: she is dusting the dining room. She’s come from the store, she says. She is busy. She does not have time for conversation with Sadie.
“I’ll give you a hand,” Sadie says.
“Thanks, no,” Jo says. She hums tunelessly to herself.
“Listen, Jo,” Sadie says. “Celia had a stroke. I know you got the call from the hospital.”
Jo pushes her dustrag over the dining room table in hard circles, and the sharp smell of linseed oil rises. She does not look Sadie in the eye.
“The doctor thinks it was severe,” Sadie says, and the rag continues its circles, the table shines, the humming persists. “It’s very upsetting. I know.”
“What do you know?” Jo steps away and turns to the china cabinet.
AND WHAT, Dr. Grafton asks, does Sadie want? She sits in his office with Bill, and this is not a question Bill can answer, only Sadie can answer, because Jo will not visit the hospital or speak to the doctor. Five days have passed and Irving has still not returned to see Celia, who is awake in her room. No one knows what awake means, however: her eyes seem unfocused, and she’s unable to speak. She’s lost movement on the left side of her body.
Now Sadie must determine what is best for Celia, after years of Celia resisting her judgment. She couldn’t get Celia to a doctor, or convince her to wash: now Celia has a doctor, now she is clean, now there is a strange and horrifying ease in her presence. And now Celia will require round-the-clock care, Dr. Grafton says. He mentions live-in nurses. He mentions a nursing home. “She can’t stay here much longer,” Dr. Grafton says. “Mrs. Feldstein, what do you want?”
She hears him clearly, but the question seems patently wrong, not at all in keeping with matters of desire; nor, if rephrased, the sort of question Sadie ought to answer, that anyone but Celia should answer.
“Dear?” Bill’s voice is a mix of tenderness and warning, a reminder of their life.
What choice can she make, without Jo, who will not visit the hospital, who will not even speak of Celia’s stroke? Jo who will not tolerate nurses, and cannot possibly care for Celia alone. Nor can Sadie, with or without Jo.
“Mrs. Feldstein?”
Yes. She is Mrs. Feldstein. Mrs. William Feldstein. A woman in command of herself. She meets Dr. Grafton’s gaze, and he holds out a sheet of paper, which she takes.
“There’s nothing available in a Jewish home,” Dr. Grafton says.
She’s holding a list of nursing homes. She reads it carefully, as a woman in command of herself would.
“Shall we try the Sisters of Mercy? I can look at it tomorrow,” she says. The sureness in her tone surprises her, but here is the decision, here is what they will live with. “Shall we move her there next week?”
SHE DOES NOT know what it will take to prevent Celia from feeling lost, to explain this to Jo, to make the Sisters of Mercy acceptable. It’s all a matter of effort, isn’t it? Bill kisses her in the hospital parking lot and drives back to his office, where his patients are waiting. Snow clouds have thickened over the lake, vast toy animals herded onto a bed. Then the wind shifts, and there’s a piercing loneliness, and Sadie finds her car. She starts the ignition, the radio plays big-band and she eases into traffic, driving toward what she thinks of as her life: this seems to have a border on Upper Main. The snow begins to fall, the traffic slows, and the big band changes to a jingle for coffee. Then she is north of the border. Here is Hertel Avenue, and she continues on. Here is her own street, her calm red brick house. Rosalie has cleaned the living room and dining room. On the coffee table there’s a vase of pink roses from Bill, today’s mail: the electric bill, the Jewish Review, an invitation to a baby shower, an invitation to a temple dance. This afternoon she’ll market and pick up the dry cleaning and drive Elaine to her piano lessons. Later she and Bill will take the girls to dinner at the Towne Casino, a separate world of white tablecloths, attentive waiters, elegant men and women sipping amber drinks. An oasis of good fortune, Sadie thinks, and for the evening that oasis will be her world. Anything Goes has been a success, and Margo is wholly Margo again. It’s Margo’s chance to celebrate, and this is what she wants.
CHAPTER 26
Goldie
1950
Until now she’s continued to picture Celia as a woman permanently in her twenties, dark hair bobbed and windblown, lipstick red, uneven, eyes hazel: pinpoints of intensity. An image from the time of their mother’s death? Probably earlier, because of the vibrancy and motion. Irving and Jo also seem static to her, Irving hardly more than a boy (nothing he has done truly contradicts this), Jo slim, sharp, but prone to quiet mooning. Goldie thinks of her father as a man who died in the prime of his life, hearty in his rectitude, though he had of course become old. They all seem to her fixed in the place that she left them. Only Sadie has altered with time: the monthly news of Sadie’s daughters and husband, the photographs, the descript
ions of evenings at concerts and theater—worlds not belonging to Lancaster—have revealed an older, sturdier, more elaborate Sadie.
This is not the first time she’s detected bewilderment in Sadie’s letters, but now the statement is more direct, a rawer admission. We are all shocked about Celia. Every day I am shocked. And maybe it’s this, the directness, bringing the bewilderment alive in Venice: Celia is no longer Celia, and the family has altered irrevocably. An uneasy, swimming sensation rises at the thought of Lancaster, though the sensation doesn’t last. That house is part of someone else’s life, and her own life in Venice she does not question: there is a weight to her small history, the daily conversations with her friend Emily, her sometimes-lover Ted, talk with vendors at the fruit market and the bakery, the postman, the librarian, the other waitresses, the neighbors on her block. She isn’t so much rooted as held by the web of conversation and the accumulating knowledge of the shore. And although the beach shifts, the town seems solid enough, unlikely to disappear. If she travels, Venice will remain itself: what ever made her believe otherwise?
From California it’s hard to imagine the kind of winter she grew up with: she can picture snow, but papery snow contained by a frame, like a stage imitation. It’s now winter in Buffalo, the most forbidding time, yet visiting seems possible. She has the means to go, a week’s vacation. There will be wind off the lake, ice, and the snow, which she’s never missed. She has missed the hush of it, how snow empties the city; then there is space for you to walk and think without noise and the interruption of passing voices. This is something Celia seemed to understand—what it meant to walk on uncrowded streets. It is not clear what Celia understands now, Sadie says, and so far she does not walk, but it’s hard to say she is unhappy. One can only guess. Goldie can’t begin to picture her: Celia-in-her-twenties has been replaced with haze.
SHE BOARDS a plane. She has never before boarded a plane, and air travel proves to be stranger and less strange than she imagined: the enclosed cabin makes her uneasy, as does the odd, perky formality of the stewardess, but the speed and noise and tilting ascent impress her, the sky is very blue, and Los Angeles becomes a tiny model town, miniaturized like places from the past. The stewardess brings trays of food and pours coffee, and then Goldie dozes off to the droning engines. It’s a long trip, requiring a change of planes, and when she lands in Chicago she feels as if she has in fact reached another country. There’s a chapped paleness to the landscape, and in the airport a preponderance of fur coats. Her own is a heavy cotton—not even wool—though it seemed warm enough when she packed. She chose her clothing with care, but what she’s wearing now—cotton blouse, loose cardigan, slacks, closed-toed shoes—is too flimsy. She has in fact forgotten winter.
A smaller plane continues to Buffalo, the flight noisier still, taking on roller-coaster qualities around the lakes. Out the window she can see only gray fog, then deep red and purple reflections on a bed of clouds, then gray fog going darker. When the plane descends into Buffalo it’s evening, though an evening brightened by airport lights and snow and a ceiling of cloud. The snow is not falling when she arrives but several inches cover the fields near the airport, still white and uncrusted. The terminal itself seems spare and muted, and in its spareness Sadie appears anomalous: a petite, porcelain-skinned woman in a fur-trimmed coat, a fur-trimmed hat, the dark fur setting off blue eyes and the pale skin and rose-colored lipstick. Her eyes are wet but there’s a certainty in her quick stride and almost deft way of hugging Goldie, kissing her on the cheek—a softness, a flowery perfume—then separating from her again, drawing the precise lines of her affection.
“It’s good to see you,” she says, her voice the one Goldie remembers, but more dense.
Maybe good is the right word. Goldie does not know: the moment seems to her sliced open, geologic layers revealing themselves, delicate in the chilly air. Is good the same as immediate? “How are you?” Goldie says. “There’s new snow, isn’t there?”
Sadie offers her a coat, camel wool, insisting she put it on right away, and as Goldie slides her arms into it, a man steps up beside her and lifts the coat onto her shoulders. Bill, now balding and serious. He waits for her hands to pop through the sleeves, extends his own cool hand for her to shake.
“How are you, Goldie?” he says. “Good to see you.” Then he picks up her small bag and steers her and Sadie in the direction of the luggage claim. His rounder, older appearance does not surprise her—she’s seen photographs—but his manner is that of somebody’s father. As if in the intervening years he has not only aged but leaped generations.
Bill pulls the car up to the airport entrance, and as Goldie opens the passenger door there is along with the dry stillness, a rush of sound from the radio—jazzy piano, swishing drums. Then they drive through light snow, past blank flat fields near the airport and then more houses, clusters of them, and eventually neighborhoods that seem almost familiar but in fact are not. It’s the trees Goldie remembers, silhouetted maples and oaks; and the preponderance of chimneys, like periscopes above the rooftops, peering through the snow at the swollen sky and the passing traffic. The houses—their windows squares of yellow light—are still somehow eclipsed by the snow, and the streets seem narrower. Sadie talks over the band music, she is telling Goldie about a house, not her own—Lancaster. Something about matters to sort out. Something about a need for time. “Of course that’s your house too,” Sadie says. “But for now, it might be simpler to stay at our place.”
The cold seems to deepen as they drive on smaller streets, and it occurs to Goldie to say thank you.
“Don’t be silly.” Sadie twists around and peers over the top of her seat, her face ringed by fur. “Stay with us anytime.”
“You’re more than welcome,” Bill says.
“We should talk tomorrow.” Sadie squints at Goldie. “You must be exhausted.”
Goldie is tired, enough that she could sleep in the car: the fact of falling snow and the lake air seem both strange and utterly ordinary, and already she has to close her eyes to imagine the warm seawater smell and the strong light through her apartment windows, and there is for a moment a mix of place, as if bright snow is falling through the windows onto her apartment floor.
Bill and Sadie’s house is set back from the street, a red brick three-story with a wide lawn and a driveway curving past a large oak. Bill parks and holds open the car doors for Sadie and Goldie and collects the luggage, and they enter the house through a side door leading to a short hall, where they shake off snow, remove their coats and shoes. Beyond, there’s a white-and-blue kitchen and girls drinking from mugs. Young women, really, the older one more mature than Goldie expected. They are dark-haired and dark-eyed, more Bill’s complexion than Sadie’s, but they are at a glance Sadie’s girls. Margo’s nose and cheeks, the shape of Elaine’s face, yes, but something else, the way they hold themselves, the way they say hello and their own names. Margo’s more poised, Elaine a little dreamier: they are like that in the photographs Sadie’s sent, but despite the photographs, the girls seem to have dropped from the sky fully grown. The substance of them shocks Goldie, their smooth skin and knowing expressions, their soapy girl scent mixing with the kitchen’s sweet bakery smell. Why was she thinking of children? They are likely too old for the shells she brought them from the beach; the Mexican bracelets might be all right.
The girls drink hot chocolate, and Sadie offers Goldie a cup: on snowy evenings, girls drink hot chocolate. She’d forgotten. And she would like to drink hot chocolate; she would like to be a girl drinking hot chocolate, a girl like one of Sadie’s, rather than the girl she once was. There is something irresistible about falling into a chair, receiving the hot sweet drink. But in the warm kitchen her drowsiness is deepening again, and time seems to have stretched. There is talk of California, postcard California—Hollywood, palm trees, sun-washed beaches—but she’s having trouble keeping up with conversation.
“How about this?” Sadie says. “We’ll bring your
chocolate to the guest room.”
SHE IS NOT used to sleeping and waking in a family household, and in the morning she’s startled to hear footsteps in the hall, the water tap, murmuring voices close by; and then the sounds seem a kind of protective shield. They comfort her but already she remembers the intensities of family routines, the way one’s attention is pulled and refocused and pulled again. You must defer the moment of reentering that world if you can. Goldie keeps her door closed until she’s heard the sounds of Bill going to work, and soon after the sounds of Margo and Elaine leaving for school. Then in the bathroom down the hall she washes; returning, she finds on her bed a wool skirt and a fine-knit sweater and a pair of stockings, which more or less fit. Downstairs, in the kitchen, there’s a table setting laid out, coffee and muffins, and then Sadie herself appears, today in a slate blue suit, asking if Goldie would like scrambled eggs.
SADIE HAS befriended the nuns. She’s two steps through the door of the Sisters of Mercy, and already greeting them: Sister Mary Catherine, hello, how are you? Sister Agnes, hello. Hello, Sister Bernadette. The nuns are not at all spectral or stern: they move quietly, without rushing. There is something appealing in their nun-ness, Goldie thinks. Mrs. Feldstein, good morning, they say. Nice to meet you, Miss Cohen. Celia is a little more alert today, they say, she finished her breakfast; and thank you for that box of chocolates.
At the Sisters of Mercy the light green linoleum shines; the walls have been recently painted, and there’s a strong smell of bleach. It doesn’t quite cover the odor of urine and illness, which hits Goldie in waves. Her eyes sting, and her head seems buzzy and light, her quickening pulse a sharpness below the skin. It isn’t only the Sisters of Mercy she’s frightened of: the odors are a trapdoor to other sickrooms, other years, the echo of being there with Sadie. And she is afraid of Celia—was she always? Yes. Of course, yes. Though mainly of what Celia would require, not Celia as herself.
The First Desire Page 31
