“Yes! Fifi, yes!”
“Certainment. But ’Arry, I have what you call a longing. Is correct? Somezing I want much to do.”
“What is it, Fifi?
“’Arry, is to see ze magnifique French ship, ze Normandie.”
Harry knew the Normandie. Its gallant Captain Thoreux was an exemplary loser. Harry had been tempted to allow him to win one race in gratitude for his besting the German record time for crossing the Atlantic. But in the end, he knew that Thoreux, who had won the Blue Ribband on the ship’s maiden voyage, would understand Harry’s maintaining a perfect record of victories.
“Sure, Fifi,” he said, “I’ll watch the ocean and when I see it coming in or going out, I’ll run to get you and we’ll watch it from the boardwalk.”
“Non, mon cher, I want to be close to it. I want to smell it … smell La France.”
“But how?”
“I have read it yesterday arrive in New York. It carry many Americans running from scare of guerre. Is now in ze dock. Will you go wiz me to see it? I must be wiz someone when I go from Coney Island.”
“Sure, Fifi. I would enjoy that too.”
“Bon.”
She did not move. She scratched her head and hunched her shoulders.
“What’s wrong, Fifi? Did you change your mind?”
She pointed to a pair of black patent leather pumps on the floor beside the couch.
“I cannot put on ze shoes myself. Zere is no one in ze house. I cannot ask of you to do such.”
He grabbed the shoes and knelt.
“For Queen Fifi, anything.”
She rose by executing a series of forward and fall-back thrusts, building momentum which finally pitched her upright. She took his hand.
Gasping and resting frequently, she climbed the flights of stairs at the Stillwell Avenue terminus. She could not fit through the turnstile. The man in the change booth knew her. He told Harry to hold open the exit gate. He did not ask for money.
Their side of the platform was empty. Across the tracks incoming crowds shoved their way to the exits, clearing paths by swinging bags and folding chairs. Some spotted Fifi, pointed, laughed and slapped their cheeks in exaggerated amazement. Harry wished them painful sunburns.
They were alone in the subway car. Fifi sat on a long seat meant for three. The jostling put her flesh in motion. Her dress jumped and jerked as if receiving electric shocks.
At the 55th Street stop in Borough Park, a few Hasidic Jews boarded and sat at the opposite end of the car. They spoke loudly in Yiddish, confident Fifi did not understand their derision. May my father give you sleepless nights, Harry thought in Yiddish.
The subway plunged underground into the land of perpetual night. The naked bulbs created dusk. Overhead fans circulated hot, stifling air. Fifi, silent, was a hillock at twilight.
Round wet spots began to spread on her dress. She dipped a handkerchief into a bottle in her handbag and dabbed her cheeks. The strong perfume made Harry sneeze.
“God bless you, ’Arry. You catch ze cold?”
“No. Just a sneeze.”
“Alors, joost a sneeze. Joost zis and joost zat.”
“What do you mean, Fifi?”
“It is good to be joost. Nozing is so serious. In America zere is much joost, I like zat. In France much is grave. But maybe in America zere is too little grave.”
The Normandie was docked at the foot of West 46th Street. They left the subway at Times Square and walked west on 42nd Street. The movie houses lining both sides of the street were doing a lethargic business, not being air-climatized. The action or horror double features were unlikely companions for the marquee names from another era: Eltinge, Wallack, Sam H. Harris and finally New Amsterdam, which, like a drowning person experiencing flashes of his past, displayed in the lobby photographs of the Ziegfield Follies.
They crossed under the West Side Highway. At river’s edge, the empty dock slips resembled a jigsaw puzzle of varying oblong shapes. He sniffed the water. It was different from Coney: no salt and seaweed. A sharper, irritating odor, like the back of a garbage truck.
Four blocks to his right, he glimpsed out of the corner of his eye the Normandie. It was a dead end, blocking everything beyond.
He knew the Normandie’s dimensions, as he did of all his adversaries: 1,029 feet long, 80,000 tons, eleven decks, three soaring funnels that receded in height like graceful fingers. However, even the enormity of those statistics had not prepared him for that which loomed. He beheld a place, a part of the world to be inscribed on a map: the black hull, dotted like Swiss cheese by gold-rimmed portholes; shinning white decks; black funnels that gave way to a red crest; the red, white and blue French flags fore and aft, falling and stiffening in a capricious breeze; and, at the water line, the top of the red keel. He was stunned, as if suddenly coming upon the lost continent of Atlantis.
Fifi tugged at his hand and quickened her pace to a speed of which Harry had not thought her capable. Her breath exploded like gas released by shaking a warm soda pop bottle. They reached the ship’s bow. Sailors clad in white uniforms and white berets pinned with blue ribbon and crowned with red pom-poms waved from the decks to Fifi, who saluted while shouting an avalanche of French.
“You see, ’Arry, how magnifique! I come see her in nineteen and thirty-five, her first time arrived. Zere are zousands people here. Little boats make fountains in air. One little boat pull a big balloon of Mickey Mouse. Oo la la, is drôle. From Le Normandie zey play Le Marsellaise. I sing. Many more too.”
She began to sing Le Marsellaise. Her voice was delicate, wavering. Like that of the little girl in the photo, Harry thought. The sailors joined in. Strollers stopped, cheered and applauded. Fifi bowed, tipping only slightly forward.
The trip back to Coney was catastrophic. The subway, filled with food- and beach-chair–laden families, was a rush hour with marauding children. Fifi had to stand. Her whitened knuckles gripped a stanchion. Her odor, wafted by the fans, circulated through the car. Those crushed against her pointedly held their noses. At stops and starts she lurched, sending a wave of bodies grabbing for equilibrium. When the train pulled into Stillwell, the passengers stampeded. Those nearest her stepped on her shoes, kicked her shins and dug fists into her flesh.
On the platform she walked behind him, resting her hands on his shoulders to steady her collapsing legs. It was like his often-dreamt nightmare of needing to run from danger but managing only tiny steps.
Luckily, when they arrived at her house Otto was leaving. He half-carried her up the steps, sat her on the couch, gave her a glass of wine and then informed them that he must rush to a secret mission for the German American Bund.
“Otto is crazy but no mean,” Fifi said, “but sometime crazy make mean.”
Her breathing was back to normal but her dress was soaked. Harry refilled her glass. She gulped down the wine.
“’Arry, will you make for me ze promise?”
“What, Fifi?”
“No, ’Arry, I want you say oui before I ask.”
“Oui.”
She formed a delicate kiss.
“’Arry, you come my funeral.”
“Oh, Fifi …”
“’Arry, I must know zat you come. Zat it will not be only ze freaks and ze people to look how big is my coffin. I wish a friend, a copain.”
“Fifi, you said yourself, doctors make mistakes.”
“Not zis time. I feel it, like ze worm zat does not stop eating.”
“Nah, Fifi.”
“Mais oui. I must know zere is plain person zere, who, who, I love, and who, who …”
“I love you, Fifi.”
She cried. Her body shook. She raised her right hand, motioning for Harry to leave. He remained seated. Between sobs, she managed a strangled word:
“Please.”
Walking aimlessly, he suddenly thought of his shock and sadness when, as an infant, he had realized that his mother would not always be with him. But now, for the first time, he also remembered
the rage at abandonment. Aba, and now Fifi, were abandoning him. For a moment that ancient hate attached to them. He shook his head, wondering at his inhumanity.
He yearned to plunge into the mind-cleansing Atlantic, but he was late for work. Surprisingly, Morey did not reprimand him.
“Gee, kid, I’m glad you made it. I thought you was sick or something, like me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Got the aches and the trots. I don’t know if I can last.”
“So, we’ll close?”
“Never close in season,” Morey said gravely. “Once you close in season they think of you different. Like you lied to them.”
“Oh.”
“If I can’t make it, you can handle it alone, kid. You’re good. Best I ever had.”
Hoo hah, Aba said, but it did not lift his sadness.
CHAPTER
33
AT SEVEN THE NEXT MORNING, VELIA CATZKER LAY ALONE IN HER BED daring the nausea to turn her stomach. Throwing up would be an admission of pregnancy. She was not. She was ill. Her swelling belly was a trick of her mother’s evil eye. She saw her mother’s cynical expression, her head nodding in knowing disgust:
“Again, like a whore. And this time a momzer.”
She lifted a pillow above her head and plunged it against her face. That’s how mothers kill infants, she thought. It’s not painful. You must know about death to be afraid of it. To a baby, it’s just going to sleep.
She threw the pillow to the floor and held close to her face a long-stemmed, silver-leaf oval mirror in which she saw the lie of pregnancy: worn gray skin, dead eyes She pulled at her hair. A few strands came out. She held them up to the mirror. Her face was captured in a spider’s web.
The misery that is my life, she told the mirror, is too calculated to be haphazard. This face was meant to be worshipped by wealthy, gallant men. But instead …
The nausea passed. The lie exposed, she could think about what she would think if she were pregnant. An abortion, of course. Fat chance. Moishe would want the child, even if he realized it wasn’t his. The father was unapproachable. Protected by a gangster. Aba, the only one who could help, had disappeared into Poland.
From her son’s room screeching trumpets and God knows what other noise pierced her door. Another calculated misery: She, who loved Mozart and Bach, delivered of an admirer of noise.
A minuet played in her head. She wore a sequined white gown. Her tightly pulled bodice boldly lifted her breasts. She glided beneath gaslit chandeliers, held lightly by a smitten prince of … of … of … Countries competed—Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France. She must be careful in her choice. Visions affected life.
She wished to be appreciated as a statue. To be admired and judged as a creation unto itself, unmodified by partnerships or appendages. She snorted, remembering the horror Mane Rosen had sculpted. He called her voluptuous. A fancy word for fat. She had tried unsuccessfully to smash it. Any day now, the sculpture of her as an obese creature would appear in some gallery. She would say that when she sat for it, she had been pregnant with Harry
The front door opened violently. Catzker came barreling through. His face was the color of dough. Ignoring Freud, he raced into the bedroom, where his wife feigned sleep. He shook her. She swatted away his hand, and turned her back to him.
“Velia, please wake up, I must talk to you,” he said, smoothing her hair.
“Later,” she mumbled into the pillow.
“Velia, the car. I must speak …”
“Well,” she said, turning toward him, “did you finally kill someone?”
“No. Thank God, no. But what an experience! I don’t know if I will ever drive again.”
“Good.”
He sat beside her.
“Please listen,” he said.
She nodded, closing her eyes to indicate anticipated boredom.
“It rained hard this morning. There were many deep puddles. Of course I drove through them. What can a puddle do to something as powerful as a car? Well, after I went through a particularly deep one, I pressed the brake to stop at a corner. The pedal went down and down. It hit the floor. The car did not slow. Luckily, there were no cars or people at the intersection. Finally, when the street began to slant upward, the car stopped. I got out and found a gas station and asked for repairs. The mechanic said I didn’t need any. He explained that when a car goes through a deep puddle sometimes the brakes get wet and do not work. He told me to go back and keep pumping the brake peddle to dry out the brakes. Eventually I would feel the peddle rise and I would have working brakes again. He was right. But I cannot forget how I pressed harder and harder and the car just glided along as if it had free will! I was behind the wheel of an uncontrollable car, made so by an inconsequential puddle. Velia, it was like one of those slow-motion nightmares that do not end until you wake with a scream and a pounding heart. I could hear my heart!”
“Maybe if you hit someone, you would stop this foolishness.”
“Velia, don’t you see how shaken I am?”
“Yes, yes. So terrible. One moment of an uncontrollable car. My whole life is an uncontrollable car.”
“Velia, this is not human. What is becoming of us?”
She flared her nostrils.
“Not becoming. We have become.”
“What?”
“Little people. Tiny people, who are stepped on as a matter of habit. Sentenced to a life of misery.”
“Why do you exaggerate? We have to eat. We have a fine son. We have each—”
“Other,” she cut him off. “What does that mean? I’m sure I don’t know.”
“It means love.”
“Love! Then love is a slum. Love is more than two hours a day on a stinking, crowded subway. Love is to try and blind myself to tomorrow, to the rest of my life.”
“Don’t you feel my love for you? Heshele’s?”
“You sound like one of your miserable romanen. I’ll tell you what love is. The love of a king who would give up his throne for me. That is the kind of love due me.”
He swallowed hard. During the past five months he had increasingly feared for her mental state. She always had courted fantasy, but ever since her transfer out of Barbetta’s office—the affair with Barbetta had obviously soured—the border between dreams and reality had been crumbling.
She boasted of many identities even to people who knew her background. People who had known her parents! She had been born in St. Petersburg to the Romanovs, into the Prague branch of the Hapsburgs, in Warsaw to the Chopins, Each lineage spawned its own story, but with common threads: heiress to glory and splendor; adulation of her beauty which led to many brokenhearted suicides; then a cruel twist of fate (usually a peasant uprising) that forced her to run for her life and be thrown up on the shores of poverty and vulgarity in Coney Island.
Catzker could not imagine that she expected to be believed. Eventually he came to a more frightening conclusion: at any given time she believed the persona presented.
She was a fanatic moviegoer and excellent mimic. Even alone with him, she began to present a parade of royalty: Marlene Dietrich as The Scarlet Empress, Norma Shearer as Marie Antoinette, Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra, Greta Garbo as Queen Christina.
Three weeks ago, he had come home to find her blind drunk, admiring herself in a mirror. Although it was a mild summer night, she wore her Winter Palace costume: a black seal coat and matching fur hat. Tips of blond hair peeked out from beneath the hat, forming a semihalo on her forehead.
“Hello your majesty,” she had said, rotating her head to show him her profile, which many had told her was indistinguishable from that of Renée Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc.
He had said nothing.
“Why so quiet, little tsar?” she said, removing her hat and shaking her hair like a wet dog. “Let us have some of that, how you say, champagne, with the tiny bubbles in it.”
He recognized Garbo in Ninotchka. Velia also claimed the Romanov cro
wn jewels.
She dropped her coat at her feet, like a stripper beginning her act, revealing a contour-hugging black ankle-length dress. A string of white pearls encircled her breasts like a geographic marker. She gyrated toward him. Jean Harlow.
She had stopped just short of him, squinting, puzzling his identity, then twisted her face in haughty disgust.
“You are not my tsar. You are a peasant. I will have you shot,” she had slurred, before passing out at his feet.
Catzker reached across the bed to take her hand. She pulled it away.
“Velia, it is good to dream, but …”
She cut him off.
“Sure, I talk nonsense. I’m just a stupid woman. You and your genius cronies, you know everything. We must do this … and we must do that. Everything but we must work, make money and live like human beings.”
“Velia, you are in one of your moods. It will pass.”
Nausea rose from her stomach and stank in her mouth.
“Not just a mood. Permanent. You want to know what will become of us? Soon there will be no more us. There will be you, who will remain as you are for the rest of your life. And there will be me, finally me, the me that was meant to be. Someone will save me.”
“Velia, don’t talk like a crazy woman.”
“And why shouldn’t I talk like a crazy woman? Would a sane woman live like this! When I ran from you thirteen years ago, I was sane. No, still crazy because I took him”—she pointed to Harry’s room—“with me. What has happened during those years? Exactly nothing. We walk arm in arm. People say: What a beautiful couple. Beyond that there is nothing. The beautiful couple disgusts each other. At least one half does. I should have left the two of you to stink up rooms with your feet together.”
He sighed.
“Velia, we must get away. Refresh ourselves.”
“Sure. We must again. We have enough money to ride the subway. It doesn’t go to Tahiti.”
“Listen, in Pennsylvania is a Baron de Hirsch farm, where boys are trained to become farmers in Palestine. The paper wants me to write an article on it. The three of us could go. It would cost nothing. We could spend a weekend walking in the country, refreshing ourselves, getting back to what we were. Heshele said he would like to try farming.”
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