Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Joseph was amazed. It was the same surge of overwhelming feeling he’d had when they had switched on the Empire State Building, nearly a decade before. He squeezed his daughter’s shoulders and thought of the day she was born. Unimaginable, he had thought then, just as he thought now.

  Joseph looked down at his daughter. “Vell?” he said. “Sure is something, huh?” He wished she’d sung an Irving Berlin song: “Blue Skies,” perhaps. “Always.”

  Miriam continued sucking on the tips of her fingers. She had seen The Wizard of Oz just two weeks before and had been so terrified of the Wicked Witch that Esther had had to leave the theater with her. Her mother had led her up the aisle, and on the way out into the violent sunlight Esther had yelled at the young ticket taker, pointing a finger in his face. This is not for children, she had screamed. Miriam had felt embarrassed because it was for children, she knew, but not for one as terrified as she was. Now Miriam waited for the image of that horrible hook-nosed woman to come on the screen and reach her green hands out to strangle her.

  Though he had no regrets about not becoming involved with the project, Joseph’s mind was turning and turning: See how they love it! He watched the crowd, everyone looking straight at this Lucite box. Could a thing and not a person be a star? he wondered. Essoil should be on television! thought Joseph, picturing his little bottle of cleanser perched on a stool, taking a bow. Whatever it was in there, it didn’t matter, people would watch it. What would it record? All the madness in Europe? Will we all sit in our living rooms and watch such horrors? Joseph shook the thought away. Even Esther agreed, nothing good was to come from over there. Over there, Joseph repeated to himself. Not here, on this side of the rainbow, not by this tremendous pot of gold.

  Not a hundred yards away, Seymour was beside himself. “Isn’t it terrific?” He leaned down to David, who was more mesmerized by Judy Garland’s voice than by the sight of her. It reminded him of his mother. “And the dreams that you dare to dream…” David was wondering about his own dreams. He thought of his mother at the top of the stairs, singing and dancing, calling down to him: “And I seem to find the happiness I seek, when we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.” Those were wonderful times, and he thought he might like to do what his mother had wanted to do. Could he be an actor? He remembered the way his mother had slapped him when he’d told her of his encounter with Mae West. Suddenly this dream seemed both viable and dangerous.

  David didn’t want to tell his father that what had really captivated him was the time capsule they had passed on the way in. While Seymour chatted with one of his colleagues, David had watched as two women added fountain pens, alphabet blocks, and an alarm clock to the gunmetal capsule on display.

  Miriam too had been mesmerized by the time capsule and the board next to it, which displayed the contents to be buried beneath the fair for the next five thousand years. She looked at the Lilly Dache hat, the Woolworth’s clip, the swatches of cotton, rayon, and asbestos. She had wanted a hat like that, but Esther had warned Miriam that her nose was far too big for hats. Not with that nose, you don’t, Esther had told her, wagging her finger.

  The time capsule was to be opened in 6939. Miriam could not begin to fathom how far away that was. Would she be married by then? To whom? Or perhaps, as she had already grown to fear at her eight years of age, she would be somewhere in the dark, alone.

  Frances ran up to Joseph. “Joooooe!” she screamed. She grabbed his arm. “And hello, you!” She bent down to Miriam. “I told you, Joe, isn’t it grand?” she said, straightening.

  Joseph shook his head. “You ver right, Fran. Truly. It’s amazing.”

  Frances wagged her finger. “Shoulda coulda woulda!”

  “Perhaps.” Joseph nodded his head. “Perhaps, but only God knows.” He looked up at the sky.

  “Any news of Solomon?” Frances asked, immediately realizing her mistake.

  Joseph grimaced and brought his fingers to his lips. He looked at Frances sternly, while pointing at Miriam. “Pardon me?” he said.

  Just then Frances felt a tap on her shoulder. “Oh, Seymour!” she said. “How are you?”

  “Terrific!” he practically screamed. “Isn’t this fantastic?” he said, breathing heavily. Seymour was elated. It was just like watching your own production receive a thundering standing ovation.

  Frances smiled. She hadn’t seen Seymour in quite a while but knew that he had begun producing some shows and that he’d had a hand in The Boys from Syracuse last year. What was the point in holding a grudge? Vladimir couldn’t stand him, she knew—that man and his entitlement, he’d say—but perhaps Seymour would give her another chance.

  In front of them, hoards of people milled around, each one trying to get closer to the new machine.

  “Hello, little mister.” Frances leaned down to David.

  David looked at the ground. There had been so many things they’d put in the time capsule: a Holy Bible, a dollar in change.

  “Joseph Brodsky, this is Seymour Bloom.” Frances turned the two men toward each other. “Joseph is Solomon’s brother,” she said hesitantly.

  Seymour looked at Joseph and then looked blankly at Frances.

  “The Terrier,” she said directly to him, as softly as she could speak, which was not too softly, given the bustling crowd and her very nature.

  Joseph lifted his chin and placed his hands squarely on Miriam’s shoulders.

  “Joseph invented Essoil—just over there.” Frances pointed toward the Transportation Zone and Ford’s Road of Tomorrow, with its spiral ramps, a future superhighway, which seemed a huge distance away.

  “Fantastic!” Seymour said. “I had no idea the Terrier had a brother who was an inventor!”

  Joseph nodded. He supposed he was.

  “Essoil. Amazing. That stuff is amazing. Our housekeeper insists on it. And now, she has so much less work to do, I’m considering cutting her pay!”

  Joseph smiled.

  “And Seymour has backed Vladi’s television for a decade,” she said. “I told you, Joseph. It would pay off.”

  “Ve’ll see,” Joseph said. “Won’t ve?”

  “Nothing to worry about on that end,” Seymour said. He took David’s hand. “This is my son, David. And you are?” He looked down at Miriam.

  Miriam stepped behind her father. He brought her out from behind his leg. “Zhis is my elder daughter, Miriam,” he said.

  Miriam looked at David and smiled sideways. She remembered the pack of Camels attached to the plywood behind the capsule that displayed the dry goods placed inside. What would she put in a time capsule? She thought of Essoil. She’d like to put that into the capsule so everyone would know what her father had made. She had been proud of him because Esther had been proud. Aspirin. Aspirin tablets were important so people would know how to get rid of those headaches that always plagued her mother.

  David smiled back at her, also preoccupied with the time capsule. He had watched them add apple seeds, and he had wondered what if they just grow and grow, pushing their way out before it’s time to dig it up? He would put in seeds as well—he liked the possibility of them. Roses. Watermelon. He’d put in lavender oil from his grandmother’s bathroom, and the Hair Net she sprayed on all her clients until their hair stood on its own.

  “Nice to meet you,” Miriam said. Joseph was already pulling her away, much to Frances’s consternation.

  “Joe!” she said. “Do you remember Vladimir from back home? Don’t you want to see him? After all these years?”

  “Not now,” Joseph said. Just how that man Bloom knew Solomon, he didn’t want to know. “He’s busy, and I have to get back to zhe booth.”

  “Yes, Frances.” Seymour had such a mix of love and anger toward this woman, he never knew how to speak to her or just what to do with his face when he did. “We should go as well. I’ll see Vladimir when it’s less crowded. Please congratulate him for me. I will be sending you both a case of champagne!”

  She hit him on the s
houlder. “Not necessary, Seymour,” Frances said. She knew Vladimir would take one sip, and, already swooning, he would tell her he was too high to drink another drop. “Bye, David!” Frances waved to him, already headed out of the lobby with his father.

  She went back to find her husband in the midst of the chaos. She could see him from across the lobby, alone, staring out the window. Getting to the front of the throng of fascinated people proved quite difficult, so Frances was forced to watch Vladimir daydream his big day away from a distance. She knew he was thinking about Albert Einstein, who had given a speech earlier that day, in the rain. Vladimir had been weighing whether science and art weren’t more connected than science and faith.

  As Frances tried to nudge her way toward her brilliant husband, Miriam and David separated, both with small hands slipped into their fathers’. No one knew then that, in the end, not enough people would attend the fair, and that, when it had been open less than half a year, war would break out in Europe. The billing would no longer be the World of Tomorrow; it would become Freedom and Liberty. The Russia House would become vacant until new fair organizers replaced it with American shows. The amusement aspect of the fair would be expanded—more mermaids underwater, their breasts sprung from their suits, more fat ladies fighting, lines of gorgeous girls walking the boardwalk at Coney Island—to appeal to the people who had not attended, believing the fair too high-minded.

  The World of Tomorrow was upon them, and people needed fun. No one had documented Miriam and David’s encounter—there was no photograph snapped with the brand-new color film, no footage shot. No pin that marked it: “I have seen the future!” Neither Miriam nor David would remember the first time they met. Both of their fathers held their children’s hands on opposite sides of the perfect, shining Perisphere filled with a desperate hope and overwhelmed by what the unknown future was to bring.

  Chapter 14

  Taken: David Bloom and

  Miriam Brodsky, 1945

  WHEN HE WAS OLD ENOUGH to learn just who Mae West actually was, David Bloom read his encounter with her in his grandmother’s apartment building as a sign of his destiny. As he grew up, especially after his father used the money from television to reinvest in Broadway and could get house seats to almost any production in town, David spent most of his free time at the theater. Nothing thrilled him more than seeing for himself the mechanisms creating a production—the lighting, the costumes, the makeup, the sets, the women leaning in to one another, waiting for their turns onstage. It was like being inside the television, as if he were the very electron beam magnetically deflecting and striking the back of the phosphor coating inside the Kinescope. It was in the chaos of backstage, just at the moment before the performer went on—the greatest moment of potential and possibility—that David Bloom was exactly who he was meant to be. And he knew this then—at eight and at ten and at twelve—that here was the place where his heart both stopped and started.

  When he followed his sister to prep school at twelve, the first thing he did was take up with the Drama Department. Though he had inherited from his father a large, athletic frame that made him seem older than his years, the better roles were reserved for the older students, which left David to play bit parts. This didn’t faze him, though, as simply to remain in the presence of actors was enough. Just to have been involved—to paint the luxury liner for the Anything Goes set his first year, or to have tied Hannah Brown’s (and at the same time Sherry Longfellow’s!) bonnet in Easter Parade was more than enough for him.

  In the tenth grade, David finally got his dream role. He was to play Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, a show that he had seen eight times when it played that year on Broadway in the Forty-sixth Street Theater. How he studied for that part. He practiced shuffling cards, throwing dice, and stacking chips—he studied himself in the mirror for the paradox of disaffection and warmth that was the center of his Nathan Detroit. When he made faces in the mirror, adjusting his eyeglasses—David was nearly blind by fifteen—placing his leg up on a chair, and leaning his elbow on his knee, his fingers propping up his chin, he would think, I could be this person. I could be cool.

  But he ached for the love of his mother. The nights he came in from Brooklyn to find her passed out in the parlor, on the couch beneath the potted palm, were torture to him, and he longed for some means to make his way through the watery ocean that was his mother drunk and the thick fog that was her hungover. There were moments when David and his mother were quite close. No one had more fun than they did as they made their way through the brownstone walking like Charlie Chaplin or reciting Shakespeare, he on top of the winding staircase, she below, looking up to her son.

  David never understood his mother’s disgust for the theater. There had been a time, his father had told him, when she had gone to the theater each week. She had known who all the stars were and had kept Playbills in her closet, stacked as high as her boxes of special-ordered shoes. But now, each time Seymour left for an opening night, she laughed at him. Go off to your silly shows, she told him. The theater, she would often scream after him, is for homosexuals.

  David thought his good news would be a gift to his mother: He thought he had found something she had lost.

  “Guess what, Mum?” he called from the hallway of his dormitory. “I was just cast as the lead in Guys and Dolls! The lead!” David announced.

  There was that sound again: silence. Was she reading the paper?

  “Did you hear me? The lead!” David said again.

  “No, David,” she said. “The theater is for fruits. You don’t want an actor’s life, my dear. And besides, I want grandchildren!”

  “What?” David asked. Hadn’t it been she who’d put on the record and belted out “Oklahoma!”? He remembered her, jumping on the couch and singing to him and Dulcy: “I’m just a girl who can’t say no, I’m in a terrible fix.” She was tall and proud then as she jumped off the couch and ran over to pinch the cheeks of her adoring children, who were in that moment thrilled to have a mother like her. Even though the theater had been his father’s livelihood, the seed of that love came from his mother. “What?” he said again.

  “I won’t have it,” Sarah said. “You spend entirely too much time with drama. You had enough of that in New York. You are missing opportunities. Now be a man, son. Go out for football or swimming.”

  “But I’m to be Nathan Detroit, Mother,” he said.

  “No, dear,” she said. “You’re not. I’ll have you pulled from school,” she said. “I will.” If Sarah was shocked by how easy it was to be so firm with her son, she did not let on. “Swimming is good for a boy. You’re very athletic, David. Go be a swimmer. I can see it now,” she told him, “the star of the sea.”

  David pictured a mermaid. He was speechless—this was the first time he saw his dreams slipping from his grasp. No longer could he picture himself holding Adelaide’s hand, the beautiful senior Ella Mark-son’s hand, in his. He no longer ran to the front of the stage to bow, the other, lesser players behind them. Perhaps he would have taken a bow alone, the sound of applause, the scattering of roses all for him. Whoosh, his mother had instantly dashed these fantasies.

  This is what sets humans apart from the beasts we really are: the need for love and the stupid things we’ll do to get it. David assented, though he did bargain his mother down and took a bit part as one of the nameless gamblers in a pin-striped suit, an anonymous sinner in the mission, pretending to be saved. Still, he was able to prop up his leg and lean in on his elbow when playing craps. But no lines to speak of. No private bow. He didn’t have to attend many rehearsals, which gave him time to go out for swimming as his mother had wished, and the following year David was made captain of the team.

  That was it for the acting. David no longer had time to spend in the prop room, marking off the items on the hanging clipboard as he gathered them in his arms. No more hours behind the sets, watching the painters on the top rungs of ladders, clouds emerging from beneath their horsehair bru
shes. No more rehearsal time, legs dangling from the stage as the actors waited for the director to open the door to the auditorium and emerge from the square of light. It had been a place where David had been as much a part of the scenery as he was at his grandmother’s beauty salon, a rush of cold air blowing his hair from his face when any lady from the neighborhood came inside.

  Just that single conversation with his mother and David was no longer an actor. He would return to the theater as a businessman, working with his father each day. Seymour had bought four Broadway theaters and was producing shows in all of them, or leasing them out to other producers if he wasn’t fortunate enough to have a show of his own.

  “It will be only the Blooms and the Shuberts running all of Broadway,” he told David, knowing, after all, that there was no getting rid of the Shuberts. “The Broadway Blooms,” he said.

  David would do what Seymour did: Seymour had an office on Forty-fourth and Broadway, and each day he drove into town in his Maybach. After handing the keys to the valet, he’d hop the elevator to the fifteenth floor, to an office where everyone greeted him with good cheer. “Good morning, sir!” they all sang. One of the girls always took his hat and coat. And each day Seymour breathed a deep, appreciative breath and carried on, a little stunned by his incredible good fortune, always grateful. He’d think of his mother, coming home from the hair salon, her hands burning with dye. It pleased Seymour that Inez had seen her son make money, and that now, though she would never set foot in the theater after the humiliation she had endured during the opening night of The Joint, his mother could see him make a name for himself. A name, Seymour often told himself, was invaluable.

  Priceless, he’d tell his son.

  But Sarah claimed that Seymour had become a landlord: just leasing his spaces to the real artists. What did producing have to do with theater anyway? David had to agree. He was in favor of selling the buildings. After all, there were far more dependable ways to make a buck than in show business.