But by the time he’d gotten two doors down, as he approached his own house, his anger had dissipated. Joseph was thinking only about what was in front of him: Esther’s eyes illuminated by candlelight, Gloria’s pudgy fingers, a good meal on the table, and Miriam’s questioning. She’s just a girl, he thought. Perhaps this is the new American way.
That night, while the Brodsky family listened to Baby Snooks on the radio in the living room, Miriam crept downstairs into the basement, where her father spent hours mixing chemicals as he worked to find a cleaner that would work on both oil and water. How much easier to carry one product instead of two. You’ll see, he told his daughters as they watched him formulating late into the night. We’ll be rich!
Miriam hadn’t believed him. She was too young to understand that in America, anyone’s fortune could change, too young to know there was a side to her father that was not content to beg. From the basement she could hear the laughter on the show, the grown lady’s voice lowered and heightened into a baby’s voice as she ran her fingers over the different glass bottles—amber, blue, clear—all corked and lined up perfectly, powders in clear glass jars, slivers of soap in neat piles on the old wooden table. She thought of watching her father from the stairwell that day, his wilting face, all his features collapsed. This, she reasoned, was why fathers went away to work and why their daughters never saw the things they did there. Miriam imagined twilight in their neighborhood, car doors slamming shut, men in hats walking up stairs to their homes, briefcases held tight to their sides.
There were stacks of notebooks, and Miriam opened one to see her father’s scrawl, tiny pencil marks of numbers and foreign names. Below the worktable where her father stood each weekend, struggling for a solution that would change their lives, Miriam spotted the bathtub that had been used to bathe her as an infant. She curled her toes at the sight of the bath, her bare feet cold on the cement of the basement floor. Had she ever been so tiny? As Miriam had watched her father that afternoon, she had felt sure she was covered in a film of dirt. She had felt it on her skin, had rubbed her arms with the palms of her hands, run her hands across her face over and over again, brushing off invisible insects.
“Is there something on me?” she’d asked Janie.
Janie had looked closely into her friend’s face. She had tilted her head. “I think there is,” she’d said. Janie had swiped her finger over Miriam’s face as she squeezed her eyes tight.
Now Miriam lifted the tub, which smelled of disinfectant and alcohol and clay, as if nothing could shame it, out from under the table.
Miriam, only six years old, wanted to be an infant again, a loaf of bread in her father’s arms, wrapped in a blanket and tickled on the chin by her mother. She did not want a brand-new sister. She did not want her mother to tie back her nose and send her out of the house. Miriam wanted to know what now seemed unbearable: where her father went all day. Uncorking bottles on her father’s worktable, she began pouring them into the bath. Crouched down, she spooned out heaps and heaps of powder, combining it with different liquids until the mixture was so thick that she had to add more. Just last week she had made a cake with Esther, and she had mixed in the flour with a wooden spoon. Only this was man’s work. This is what it feels like to make something important, Miriam thought, imagining her intent father, his spectacles slid down to the end of his nose, suspenders hanging lifeless at his sides, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows. She added and poured until the bath was filled with solution.
Fully clothed, Miriam stepped in. As if it were filled with steaming water, she slowly lowered herself into the vat of chemicals. The fluid surrounded her, swishing over the curved rim and running onto the floor. She noticed how it tapered into a thin line, leaving in its wake a trail of white on the cement. Miriam thought of her father scrubbing another family’s floor. Then she curled into a little ball, her body as tight as a fist, and lay down.
Miriam awoke to the startling and all too familiar sound of Esther’s screaming. “What on earth?” Esther placed her hand over her mouth and yelled for her husband. “Joe?” she screamed. “Joe!” Esther yanked Miriam, who had passed out from the fumes, out of the bathtub and rushed her into the workshop bathroom, where she thrust her head under cold water.
Joseph stood breathless at the threshold. “Vhat happened?” He could see Miriam’s arms and feet were bright red. “Sugar?” he said. “Vhat happened, sugar?” he asked Miriam.
Miriam looked over at her father, her mouth contorted by her enormous, quivering frown. She shook her head.
“What in the world were you thinking, Miriam?” Esther pulled her daughter’s arms up and slipped the shirt from her head. Under the shirt, the flesh was pristine, and Joseph was sure he could see beneath it to the thumping of his daughter’s tiny blue heart. Esther wet down the hand towels—nice ones, which Joseph knew she would rather not have ruined—and rubbed Miriam’s arms. Her skin looked raw, as if layer upon layer had been peeled away.
Miriam shrugged.
Joseph remembered her looking at him from the stairwell and saw the apology on her skin. He regretted wishing violence on her. “Let’s get you into zhe bath, sugar,” he said.
Joseph picked up his daughter and held her. He smelled the salt on her face from her tears, and the ammonia and glycerin and alcohol. Her own scent had been scrubbed away, stripped by cleansers, covered over by fragrance, and this terrified him. Had she been trying to escape him so soon?
As Joseph carried her up the stairs, Miriam remembered being lifted by her father from the backseat of the car on the many nights they had driven home from visiting her grandparents in New York, or after a day at Old Orchard Beach. He would pick her up out of the dark, walk her slowly upstairs, and place her head gently on her pillow. From her bed she could see out to the backyard, and, as her father put her down, Miriam always wondered what would be out there for her when she was too big to be lifted. What was in that mysterious black world? Joseph would leave the door just enough ajar so that the hallway light was a bright rectangle into which, if she needed, Miriam could rise and disappear.
Tonight Joseph brought his daughter up two flights of stairs from the basement and into the bathroom. She clung to him, her legs wrapped around his waist, her arms gripping his neck. He had to peel her off to set her into the tub.
As Esther washed Miriam, Joseph went downstairs to check on Gloria. Not a month ago, one of Esther’s friends had gone to check on her own daughter and found a snake sleeping in her child’s crib. That was an image that neither Joseph nor Esther could shake, and they often found themselves in Gloria’s room five, seven times an evening, feeling under her warm blankets for reptiles. Tonight, like every night, she seemed fine, her light hair—sure to darken, Esther warned her husband, as all the hirsute Brodskys were wont to do—spread out on her pillow like a sunflower.
Afterward, Joseph went down to the basement. He wanted a moment alone, to clean up Miriam’s mess, to right the thrown-open pages of his notebooks, the uncorked bottles, the powders spread like confectioners’ sugar over his workstation. Joseph did not want to think of his daughter scouring herself in a mess of solvents and chemicals. Instead, he focused on what he always focused on: finding a cleanser miscible in both oil and water. It was his mission, a physical mantra, and now he emptied the bath in the chemical sink, and, after a quick look at the previous day’s notes, he began to mix. He added from a bottle here, some fragrance there, heaped in more powder. Each time was about to be the time it happened, and Joseph made notations as he went.
He tested the concoction on the schmaltz from last night’s dinner. He knocked his pen against his head. He clicked his teeth with his fingernails and then added more soap. He tested it again. And that’s when it happened. In that moment, magic: a synthesizing of solvents which in that exact moment became soluble. Joseph could tell—simply to take the cloth and swipe it over the chicken fat dissolved it. It was what is beautiful and knowable about science, and Joseph was sure he could
see the particles breaking down, little cleansing bubbles rooting out the grease. He imagined them with tiny scrubbing hands, scouring the soiled fabric. Joseph was positive. He’d found his cleanser.
And he was right.
The day Miriam tried to wash herself away was the day that Joseph Brodsky discovered the first two-in-one cleaning product. He would name it for his wife. He had already thought it out—yes, to name some one after a living being, well, this is a horrible curse, but a thing, well, Joseph decided he would not be jeopardizing Esther’s life were he to call his new product Essoil. Joseph would bring Esther into every home, every synagogue, every hospital. Esther. Esther at work, her particles connecting with grime and overpowering it; Esther ensuring that no surface be left impure.
That night, after both Miriam and Esther were asleep and Joseph had washed up and checked Gloria’s crib for snakes a third time, he crawled into his bed, parallel to his wife’s. He had met a man on the road years ago who told him: Young man, get off the road before the sand settles permanently in your shoes. What exactly had that meant?
Joseph had met him before the Panic—who could have known how desperate everyone would be to sell something? Anything. How many towns did Joseph have to drive through before coming home to Esther? In winter, his hands cracked; in summer, they sweated. Already he had the hard touch of an old man. Joseph had nodded at the man and thought to himself: Getting off the road is an easy thing to say, yes, but not so easy a thing to do. When he let himself think about it, he could see that perhaps getting off the road was a dream, one that was even more important to him than the dream of his family.
Joseph could not have known what the birth of Essoil would bring him. But he was excited by his creation and couldn’t sleep. He got out of bed and tiptoed down the hallway to the study he shared with Esther. Their two desks faced each other, and often, as Esther paid the household bills and Joseph kept track of his commissions, they would look up and find themselves staring at each other. Try as he might, Joseph could never keep a straight face. The sight of Esther, hair pulled into a net, her long nose nearly connected to the red lips set against her tanned skin, always made him smile. Hello, my love, he’d say to her.
Esther would wave his words away with a flick of her wrist and a roll of her large brown eyes, but one side of her mouth could not help but reveal the smile always there beneath her surface.
Now Joseph took out a slip of writing paper and sat back in his chair. He clicked a fountain pen against his teeth as he thought of what he would like to say to his brother:
April 26, 1937
Solomon,
I will not call you by that name you call your self. It has been many years, Sol. You were my big brother. Remember the way I followed you around on the streets. You could not get rid of me. But now I am a man. Maybe I became a salesman, perhaps you would spit on a man like me but what you did was not right. I think perhaps you have suffered now enough. All these years, I say to myself: I have no brother. I am alone in this world but for the family I have chosen. Sometimes I think I started with the cleaning products to clean up the filth you leave behind you. Even just to think of it gives me a taste of grit in my mouth. And then I remember when we came here, and before even, back in Russia, how you were my hero.
This has become much longer than I had wished. This is just to say you will always be my brother, my older brother. You will always be Solomon to me. Please do not forget who you once were.
Stay well.
Joseph Brodsky
Joseph put down his pen and looked out over Esther’s desk to the lighted street. He remembered the day Solomon had come for that neighborhood girl, Pauline, and how he had whisked her away. Joseph had felt terrible for her little sister, Frances, and for the way the whole neighborhood turned on the Verdonik family because their elder girl had run away with a gangster. He could see Frances as a little girl, a short, squat thing, hairy as a monkey. Everywhere he turned she was behind him, and he had wanted to tell her: Go away! You with your dirty sister! But of course he had felt pity for her. It was his brother too; and so Joseph would buy her candies and pat her head when he saw her playing in the street.
He folded the letter to Solomon now and put it in the bottom drawer of his desk. Where would he send it, after all? Rikers? It was ridiculous. He’d read in the Herald that the Nazis ordered all works of Marc Chagall to be taken down from German museums, and here his brother was doing time in Rikers. No matter what Esther convinced herself of, Jews were dying. Joseph could see it then, as clear as the streetlamp outside his window: He was at the start of his life. Everything that had happened to him—meeting Esther, the births of his daughters—had made Joseph feel as if his life were beginning just at that moment. It was his way. But Solomon, he knew, always saw his world as if it were on the cusp of ending.
Joseph rubbed his rough, cracked hands together and rose from the chair. He would again go check on Gloria and then head upstairs, slip into Esther’s bed, curl up against her, rest his head against her back, feel her heart thumping, pumping blood through and through her. Here, there would be safety. He would lift up her nightgown and wrap himself around her, taking in his wife’s skin, the scent of wax, all kinds of flowers. Tonight he would kiss her neck and trace the outline of her breasts and hips, the backs of her thighs with his hands, and tomorrow he would begin the empire that would bear her beloved name.
Chapter 3
Prospects: Seymour Bloom,
1925–1937
JOSEPH BRODSKY’S OPPOSITION to the marriage of his daughter and David Bloom was unbeknownst to Seymour Bloom. He couldn’t have cared one way or the other who his son was marrying, as long as David was happy. And compared with the kinds of girls—more like bear cats—David had been going with before, Seymour knew he should consider himself lucky he’d ended up with as decent a girl as Miriam Brodsky.
“As I’ve always told you, son, you must follow your heart,” Seymour said to him when David telephoned with the news. He had thought that perhaps David would come uptown, with Miriam, and they would have announced their engagement together, not this casual phoning his father up one evening and just telling him the news, as simple as buying a carton of milk. Marriage was not a simple proposition, after all.
“You’ve never told me that,” David said. He drummed his fingers on the kitchen table and looked outside to the tree-lined street.
How different was the West Village, a place filled with artists, and music, and the smells of an entire world—a whole other country than the Upper East, David thought. Just now he remembered all those nights he had waited in the dark in the kitchen for his father to come home, how he had watched his father as he quietly slipped into the house without seeing his son. He remembered his smell on those nights—of the outside, of petrol—and how so often his pockets were stuffed with bits of rope and rolls of duct tape, items that even as he saw his father remove them from his pockets, David thought were saved for boys.
“That’s not true.” Seymour cleared his throat. “That’s not true at all. I’ve always told you to pursue all your dreams.”
Hadn’t he? That had been something Seymour had always meant to tell his son, meant to show him, but, now that he thought about it, perhaps he had not. Had his own life not been evidence? It distressed Seymour that he had neglected to teach his son such a simple tenet. It had taken him an entire life to learn this, a life he had lived in the hope of being able to pass this lesson on to his son. A lifetime, and now it turned out his son might not be the kind of man who would follow his heart. That he had not managed to pass this down, or that his son had not been able to learn this, depressed Seymour.
When he hung up the phone, he thought about the prospect of his son marrying. And he tried for a moment to summon the passion he’d once had for his own wife. When did he have passion for his wife? It was such a sad state of affairs, really. He rarely thought back. What was the point of it? Now, as if he were recalling it for the first time, he rememb
ered the day he’d met Sarah Rosen.
It had been on the Duck Pond in Central Park—Sarah’s blades cut the ice in a perfect figure eight as she looked over to her smiling father and crashed head-on into Seymour. Seymour, who had never been skating before, thought the accident had been his fault, and after apologizing profusely, insisted on buying them both hot cocoa.
What wonderful hair, Seymour thought, looking at Sarah’s blond, shoulder-length corkscrews escaping beneath her wool cap. Seymour and his little brother had come to New York from Paris with his mother, Inez Bloom, just a decade earlier, in 1915. It was Inez who had always instilled in her son the belief that the first thing to look for in a woman was her hair. She got this theory from experience. Banking on the presumption that when nobody has any cents, still they come for their hairs, she had recently signed a ninety-nine-year lease on a small beauty shop in Brooklyn, right near her apartment, where she lived down the hall from Mae West.
Ultimately it was Sarah’s hair, falling in ringlets, that made the handsome Seymour pursue her. He imagined telling his mother of the curls, coiled as if wrapped around an invisible finger, and their light brown sheen—Almost blond, Mama! he would say.
What Seymour, who was just beginning his career in sales—everything from adding machines and encyclopedias to bootlegged liquor—lacked in formal schooling he had managed to make up for in pure physical grace and charm. He was tall and broad, and his dark looks—black hair, olive skin—were in ideal contrast to his WASPy features, from the sweet curve of his nose to his heart-shaped face. Though he was not an educated man, Seymour managed to maintain an air of sophistication.
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