No matter what Joseph said or how he tried to woo her, Esther could not be swayed. Still, he would sometimes catch her watching him from the parlor as he helped Mrs. Steinway bring the groceries in from the cold street, and once he was sure he saw the dark-haired beauty pull the curtains back from the window as he made his way down the street one twilit evening.
Is it me? Joseph wondered, looking closely into the mirror that hung above the bare dresser of his room. How rarely he had truly seen his face. He looked at his long and slender nose, as bumpy as a spine and curved at the widened tip; he ran his hands over his hair, already thinning. Well, Rudolph Valentino I’m not, that’s for sure. Joseph leaned in for a closer look and knocked himself right on the nose.
Whatever it was Joseph Brodsky did to make Esther Weinstein relent and marry him would remain a mystery to him. Eventually she had acquiesced to an afternoon of scones and Devonshire cream at the Parker House Hotel. And on some crisp, still mornings, he had caught Esther, and she had let him guide her over the bridge, fog rising off the Charles as boys cut the still water with their oars, crewing up and down the river. Somehow he had charmed her.
Esther’s mother taunted her, a crackling voice from a dark bedroom, telling her daughter how she was marrying down, yet Esther managed to ignore it. As did Joseph, who heard Sylvia Weinstein scream, Better you should marry a shoemaker! the day they traveled up to Portland so that he could ask Sylvia for her daughter’s hand. Despite this familiar voice of doom that had haunted Esther’s childhood, Esther and Joseph were married on May 21, 1927, the day Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. If only your father could see this! Sylvia screamed out just as soon as Joseph had crushed the glass. Misunderstanding the outburst, the guests looked skyward, into the sun, to see if they could see the Spirit of St. Louis fly by.
Three years after they were married, four years of Joseph’s many days on the road juggling his bottles and boxes, four years of his returning, his hat knocked sideways on his balding head, four years of being met by Esther’s sheer delight in seeing him again, Miriam Weinstein Brodsky was born in Boston.
When Miriam was still in the womb but beginning to rip her mother open like a loaf of hot bread, the doctor said, “There it is! She’s crowning!”
Joseph was in the waiting room when he heard the screaming from his wife. The doctors had warned him off being at the hospital, and yet he had wanted to be there. Joseph looked around and then tiptoed to the delivery room, pressing his ear to the door and imagining Esther closing her eyes against the pain. What must she be thinking? He wondered if his wife was experiencing what he’d heard dying was like—all the images of your life flashing before you. Did Esther think of her father walking through town with her, holding her hand as they wove along the harbor? Did she think of Joseph, bowing to her in the stairwell of their building as he told her, Ladies first?
“Oh my God,” Esther said, clearly contracting. “I feel a nose!” she said.
Joseph took his ear from the door and inserted his index finger in an attempt to clean his ear from whatever would have made him hear something so strange.
“Okay, push!” the doctor said. “There it is,” he said. “A head!”
“Doctor!” Esther pleaded. “What’s her nose like?”
Surely there is more to see than this, Joseph thought nervously. For a moment he imagined his daughter’s body attached not to a head but to an enormous schnoz. He couldn’t help himself, and he cracked open the door just to see what was going on. He was met with a view that was the very reason men stay home on days like this. The obstetrician looked up from between Esther Brodsky’s legs, also seeming to question the new mother’s choice of words and then, thinking he had heard her incorrectly, went back to the labor at hand.
“Doctor!” Esther said again. “Just tell me. Is it very, very big?”
Her head? Her heart? Joseph thought. No, my wife just said nose.
After the umbilical was cut, the infant placed in the safety of Esther’s arms, and Joseph pulled inside the swinging blue doors, he got his first glimpse at his daughter. My daughter! It was remarkable. He wanted to recall something that would help him be a good father to her, but he could remember only boys, a block packed with angry young men trolling the neighborhood with his brother. I will always protect her, Joseph thought, tilting his head to have a better look at Miriam.
When the nurse left the room and it was just the three of them, the young family together for the first time, Esther turned to Joseph with tears in her eyes. “Look what you did!” she told him.
“Vhat, Esther?” he asked, by now used to his wife’s hormones, which he had hoped had managed to slip out of her with the placenta.
Esther pointed at her daughter’s face.
She was beautiful. Had anyone ever been so lovely and so small? “A little loaf of bread,” Joseph said, reaching his finger for her tiny mouth, which was already gathered into a kiss.
“Her nose!” Esther whispered, as if it were an unspeakable disease. “Look at her nose. I knew it,” she screamed. “I knew I should never have married you!”
Though it was true, the nose was not the most delicate feature on his daughter’s face, Joseph was stunned by Esther’s charge and had a flashing memory of her walking ahead of him on a street filled with long, skinny trees, branches like the fingers of the gnarled women he’d grown up watching. He remembered the smooth cobblestones he’d stumbled over to get nearer to her as she walked away from him.
“Esther,” Joseph said, straightening. “Her nose is fine.”
“Fine?” she asked him, beginning to cry. “You’ll see fine,” she said. She pointed to her own face. “Fine like this? Fine like a cabbage?”
Joseph touched his wife’s large nose. “Beautiful like this,” he said.
Esther swatted his hand away. “And I’d like to see you be ripped in half by a nose,” she said. “They’ve had to sew me up from it!”
Joseph rubbed his wife’s arm and pulled the impossibly soft swaddling blanket back to see his daughter’s beautiful eyes, still midnight blue. Who in his family had blue eyes? Never had he seen it. “I’m sorry, my love,” he said, unsure to which girl he was speaking.
“Let me tell you what you’ve done. I should know. I spent my life with my perfect cousin Tillie, a nose like a rosebud on her valentine of a face. Her life was all the easier for it, I tell you,” Esther said. “Everyone loved Tillie.”
“And you,” Joseph told her. “At least I did.”
“All the boys,” she said. “It was because of that nose. Well, and the boobs. And the legs that started right about below her boobs.” She started to laugh.
Joseph watched his wife’s expression cloud over once again.
“Torn in half!” Esther sobbed. “By a nose!” she said, as Joseph placed his lips to his wife’s eyes to try to kiss away her tears.
Miriam’s nose informed her childhood and Esther’s motherhood. Nightly Esther came into her bedroom to measure the growing protrusion in the center of her daughter’s face. From Joseph, Miriam had inherited length, and her nose crept slowly and bumpily down her face. But Essie’s contribution of girth began between her eyes and ended where the nose flowered into a round bulb. Esther tried to outwit her daughter’s nose, challenging its dominance in a manner similar to the Chinese practice of binding girls’ feet.
“You will never feel the way I felt,” Esther would tell her as she pressed the nose down and drew a piece of tape tightly around her daughter’s head. “I promise you, Miriam, you will thank me later.”
I don’t think so, Miriam thought as she was forced to push up at her nostrils with the tips of her fingers in a series of daily exercises in order to stop the way the nose seemed to continue growing, curling in on itself at the bottom. Now breathe! Esther would tell Miriam. Through your teeth!
Nights when he was not on the road selling, Joseph watched as his wife tried to stop the expansion of his daughter’s nose. How was he to explain to his firs
t girl that Esther could not be stopped, that she was driven by childhood? But weren’t we all? Really, Joseph reasoned, this was a gift from mother to daughter, and he convinced himself that one day, when she was old enough to understand what it meant to be beautiful in this country, Miriam would appreciate her mother’s efforts to reduce the size of her nose, thereby increasing the quality of her life.
Joseph Brodsky’s elder daughter’s nose had not stopped growing six years later, when Esther gave birth to another girl, Gloria. Either because her nose was smaller than her sister’s or because Esther was so stretched from Miriam’s nosing her way into the world, this second birth was not as traumatizing. Or perhaps it was because even larger things were causing the Brodskys distress: Joseph’s brother was rotting in jail. In Europe, Germany, now allied with Italy, was assisting the Spanish nationalists. And just this month, Buchenwald had opened to house professional criminals.
“Next it’s zhe Jews,” Joseph told Esther. “I kid you not.”
“Don’t be silly,” Esther said. “Never. Not in a million years.”
Joseph snorted.
He spent more and more time on the road, terrified that one day all that was going on in the world would be cause for everything here to be taken. He cried when he read Guernica was destroyed.
“What is it, my darling?” Esther asked him, one breast flapping, loosed from her brassiere, Gloria wrapped up in her arms. She’d been begging her daughter to nurse. Please, Gloria, she’d said, thrusting her nipple at her. Take it already. Just take it, she’d said, shaking her breast at the infant. That was the moment that Miriam peered in to see what was going on with her new sister, this Gloria, who was getting all the attention that had once been hers. Just as Miriam dipped her head over her sister’s, she was squirted in the face with her mother’s breast milk and ran out of the room, shrieking.
“What’s the matter, Joe?” Esther asked her husband.
“An entire city,” Joseph said. “Destroyed. What will become of us?”
Despite extra time on the road, Joseph wasn’t able to sell much—people were too panicked to buy a thing.
The spring day in 1937 when he went to try to sell next door, to the Silverses’ house, was one of the best days and one of the worst days of Joseph Brodsky’s life.
It began as a particularly bad day on the road. Some schmuck at Chebra Gemilath Chesed Burial Society had even gone so far as to turn Joseph away at the door. “You think I can afford to clean?” the man had asked him. He had not even been wearing a yarmulke.
“But you must clean up after the dead!” Joseph was horrified.
“These are tough times, mister,” he’d said, slamming the door.
Had he been a different man, Joseph might have wedged his foot in and tried to explain that cleaning was a necessity—like food, as important as water, shelter—not at all an extravagance. One must remove the dirt from the graves, he could have told the man. But he was tired tonight. Exhausted.
Joseph knew that the man had been right; these were tough times. When had it been easy? Almost a decade before had been the Panic. No one would buy a thing. Now the war had created such a shortage of soap that the price—four cents a bar—seemed outrageous, even to his most steady clients.
And so, as Joseph got out of the car that night in front of the Roxbury home he had to work so hard to be able to rent, he decided to make one more stop at the neighbors’ to try to unload just a little bit of product.
Evening soaked up the street as Joseph headed to the Silverses’ house, three doors down from where he and Esther and his two girls lived. When he rang, Mrs. Silvers came to the door, untying her apron.
“Hello, Mrs. Silvers,” he said. “Evenink.”
“Mr. Brodsky,” she said, smiling. “Good evening.” She folded her apron in perfect quarters.
Forever plagued by migraines, Esther had sent her daughter over to the Silverses’—For the love of God, Miriam, go to Janie’s house already! she’d said from her bedroom, the curtains pulled closed—and Miriam and Janie sat upstairs playing tea until Joseph rang the doorbell.
Mrs. Silvers turned to get Miriam, but seeing Joseph’s valises, his hat in his hands, she must have sensed that there was something else on his mind.
“Please come in,” she said.
Joseph bowed toward her and picked up his suitcases.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, Joseph saw Miriam leaning over the banister with her friend. He hadn’t known she was there or he would not have made the stop.
“I know you are busy.” Slowly, Joseph bent to open his suitcase. “I see how you work, me too, Mrs. Silvers, but look what I have here. Zhese”—he held up some glass bottles to the light—“zhey will save you so much time.”
Joseph could see his daughter’s disappointed face as he stood to hand Mrs. Silvers the bottles. Why does my daughter look down on me this way? he thought.
Now Mrs. Silvers placed her apron on the stairwell and reached for the bottle he handed her. She slid her glasses down her nose. As she read the embossed, illegible words on the raised glass, Joseph waited, looking around the room.
“Let me show you,” he said. “It vorks like a dream, Mrs. Silvers. Really a dream. First zhis, then zhis, and you have yourself a clean kitchen. My own mother uses zhis process.” He saw his mother, Selma Brodsky, sweeping the front stoop where he grew up, a useless act. Like desert sand and tumbleweed, the city grime built up again within minutes. It broke his heart to think of his mother’s endless sweeping. “Can we try it in zhe kitchen?” Joseph started walking toward the kitchen and out of his daughter’s range of vision.
Mrs. Silvers bought a bottle and a jar from Joseph that night, and he knew it was not out of sympathy but because she could see from his demonstration how much she needed those products and how much they would help her with her work, which, when it came right down to it, no one really appreciated. Certainly not Mr. Silvers. She’d told Joseph how he’d come in from outside and stomp through the house in his muddy rubbers. Joseph Brodsky had really conveyed his passion for getting a surface clean.
Joseph pretended he had not seen his daughter, opened the door, and walked out into the night alone. It was late April and the air was a bit brisk, an evening filled with hope. Soon Miriam would be catching fireflies in Franklin Park, just across the street. He remembered last year: he and his daughter capturing the lightning bugs in their cupped hands, the small whisper of those wings, a concession to their palms. Joseph would help Miriam put them in jam jars, the tops pounded with holes for air, and the fireflies would blink like crazy, a halo of light around the jar created out of their fear. It almost made Joseph forget the way he saw his daughter look at him tonight.
She had not run to greet him, and he had seen her looking down at him from her friend’s stairwell. He thought of when his daughter was born, how he and Esther took Miriam to see his parents in Brooklyn and Joseph had looked north to see the lights clicking on in the Chrysler Building. That year they opened the Empire State, and he always associated the magnificence of that building with Miriam: the year his daughter was born was the year the tallest building in the world was built. The following year the Empire State would also be filled with light. Maybe I’m in the wrong business, Joseph would think. And he thought that now.
When had he not known Miriam’s presence? From infancy there was a smell to her that connected to his very cells. His cells were joined with her cells, and whenever they were near each other, in every room of the house, Joseph could sense his daughter. As she grew into a girl—little worms to fingers, rings of fat to skinny legs: ankles, knees, and thighs—his sense of her also grew. He felt her watching him, and already he knew that gaze was beginning to change. What would it turn into as she grew into a teenager?
Joseph wanted to ask his daughter something: Why you look so ashamed? he wanted to scream up to her. It was the only time in his life he had ever thought of violence. His parents barely spoke English. They were forced out of
Russia, and they believed they were going to a place where gold lined the streets, where gold was in the trees, as easy to pick—for anyone!—as apples. Such lies. Nothing is easy, even the simplest of things: this job as a salesman had once been difficult to attain. And with what had Herbert and Selma Brodsky ended up? A tenement in Williamsburg beneath the Elevated. They practically lived under a bridge, like that troll in the Brothers Grimm. His older brother had become a regular thug. I have shelter and a family, he had thought as he knocked at the Silverses’ door.
Joseph had not known it could be much better than those days, though he could have done without the sore feet and so much time on the road. How he missed Esther. He only wanted to hear her scream his name in exasperation. He wanted to pull into the driveway and see his daughter playing in the yard with the other children of the neighborhood. Irish, Catholics—even though as a child he had once fought with these brutes, he liked that there were different kinds of people in Roxbury and that his daughter would not be raised in the narrow manner in which he had been, his mother’s face gone vacant over Friday’s candles, his father with his leather tefillin wrapped around his bicep, shaking him into prayer. In the old way, his family would not be able to worship together, and often Joseph would think of the idea of Esther and his girls so far away from him on the holiest of days.
There was a set of swings in Franklin Park, and, walking home that evening, Joseph thought of Miriam’s little-girl legs reaching out, pumping at the air to carry her upward. This was all he had wanted. You don’t know shame. He had looked up the staircase and wanted to slap her.
This, Daddy, this, she had said to him on many evenings as she climbed into his lap. Her tiny fingers pulled his tongue from its red cave. Say it right! she would tell him, and her voice stunned him with its demand and its confidence. And he had thought of Solomon then, how his brother had traded in his Russian accent for the absurd language of American gangsters as soon as he’d left Brooklyn. Who was kidding whom? Joseph wondered.
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