Joseph shook his head and watched the aging man in the reflection shake his head back at him. Who was that? “Clean up this kitchen.” That was viable. And he could say it, if he concentrated, without an accent. Joseph knew that he was getting older and that, at the end of the day, he would be only what he had always been: a salesman from Russia. He was going to go on the television and tell housewives to buy from him? He didn’t need the advertising agency he’d hired—with an unheard-of budget of over $50,000—to tell him that he couldn’t even pronounce housewife properly. Housevife, he’d say, every damn time.
But he didn’t want some Veronica Lake, either, though the way her career had been going, Joseph might have had a chance of approaching her. Barbara Stanwyck would be nice, a family matriarch from Brooklyn. But she was too much her own star, and he wanted the spokeswoman for Essoil to be someone real, someone who looked as if she might actually use the product herself. Joseph wanted a recognizable face but not one that went with another place or product.
Someone like Frances Gold, as Frances still insisted on calling herself, thought Joseph. Even after she married Vladimir, she had kept Gold. For my stage name, she’d said, though Joseph hadn’t heard a whole lot about her acting career. A stage name. Joseph laughed to himself just thinking about it. Though he never said it, perhaps for fear of giving himself away, a stage name always reminded him of coming over. The way the officers at Ellis Island looked at you and stamped your name as they saw fit. He could never forget those stern faces, the black uniforms. Had they been black? He would think of those men often, their cruel mustaches twitching like European fascists’. Brodsky had been relatively effortless to say and therefore an easy name to keep. A stage name. It seemed to Joseph to be a way of passing oneself off as someone else. The Terrier. Who was he kidding? Had he not been acting? I’m a tough guy, a wiseguy, you move a muscle, I’ll kill ya. To speak that way is a choice; it’s an act. What had Solomon been thinking when he watched himself run around like that? And his wife? What did that Pauline think as she passed herself off as a rich matron from Westchester? Where on earth had she disappeared to? In a way, Joseph thought, it was criminal, a sin against God to try to be something that one simply was not.
But then again, he thought, passing oneself off as someone else is an actor’s job, is it not? Joseph laughed again to himself. Well, if that were the case, the theater would be a stage filled with immigrants, no actors, no dancers. He imagined the show they would put on: those plucked from Russia or Poland, as he had been, the Germans, the dark Italians, the Irish, all standing in a row, attempting to pass themselves off as family, say, a cast of American characters. Or was it the other way around, perhaps? And people lived their lives like actors. His whole old neighborhood, an ensemble. Life and theater, he thought, the same thing. All of us just standing on this stage of golden streets trying to pass ourselves off as if we belonged.
Joseph thought of Irving Berlin. He loved to think of Irving Berlin, this man who could have been his brother for the way their lives paralleled each other. More so than his own brother. Mr. Berlin couldn’t even speak English until he was twelve years old. First the pogroms, then the Lower East Side. Then the “God Bless America,” then the “White Christmas.” How had he done it? The man was American music, no question. Joseph wondered just who was an outsider and who, exactly, was on the inside. How could anyone tell the difference?
Language, he thought.
And then the thought was gone. He remembered his daughter’s return from New York the year before, her nose practically lopped off her beautiful face. Joseph had tried to conceal his astonishment and quell the memory of all the times he had wiped her runny nose, the many moments he had brought his own nose to hers and wriggled them together. Like Eskimos, he had said to Miriam, and she had squealed with delight.
The night Esther and Miriam came home from New York City was one of the few times Joseph had looked at his wife as if she were a stranger.
“How do you like it, Joe?” She brushed Miriam’s hair back and shoved their daughter forward to show her husband, as if she were asking him whether he would like to keep her.
“It?” he said. “You.” He bent down and kissed Miriam’s head. “You’re gorgeous,” he told her.
Miriam went crying into her bedroom, and Joseph looked up at Esther, a question on his face. He was guilty too, he knew. How could this not be a crime against God? But who had committed it? He had let Esther do whatever made her happy; this had always pleased him. Fine, the stone deck; sure, the Art Deco chandelier; of course, change the entire heating system in the house so as to keep the rugs a seamless blanket, an unbroken expanse that somehow would have been destroyed by oil heat.
“Estha, vhat have you done?” he asked over the muffled sound of his daughter’s crying. Why was she crying? Was she in pain? Did she miss who she had been only days previously?
Esther glared at her husband, flaring her considerable nostrils. “What, you’re my mother?”
“Your mother!”
“My mother!” she said. “With the criticism here, the criticism there. Perhaps you married down! she’d always tell me. Well, I think maybe I did!” she exclaimed, crossing her arms so hard over her stomach she let out a small gasp.
“Esther.” Joseph was cut to the quick. “Can’t I say a word?”
“Maybe it’s like my mother said. Because my father died so young, I have no self-esteem. That’s what Maggie says. She says low self-esteem is a serious problem for today’s women.”
“Who?”
“Maggie! Dear Maggie!”
Joseph looked at his wife. “This has nothing to do with you and your self-esteem.”
Esther breathed heavily. “I know,” she said. As quickly as her rage had come, it had gone. “The truth is, all the girls are doing it,” she told Joseph. “Miriam will thank us later. She will, Joe, I promise. No one walks around with a nose like that anymore. It’s completely out of fashion.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Esther.” Perhaps, he thought then, it was his own selfishness. Perhaps he was forcing Miriam to stay young, trying to will her to remain a little girl he would always be able to recognize. If this was what all the girls were doing, this was the new fashion, then who was he to stop it?
Joseph remembered his daughters as little girls, and then he remembered Solomon. It was strange the way his brother’s memory wounded him, not the one of the Terrier as a grown man, his ruined face a mug shot in the papers, his name in all the headlines, but the memory of Solomon as a boy, the two of them playing marbles on the broken front stoop. These recollections always pained him. In a similar way, memories of his elder daughter wounded him. It ripped him open to remember raking leaves with Miriam. He’d made huge piles—colors he had never seen until he moved to New England—for her to jump in. Go on, he’d say. Jump! Still he could see her elated face as she leapt into the air and then always, always, his fear as she disappeared, sinking into the pile, lost to him for just an instant, but lost nonetheless. There had been so many Boston winters spent making snow angels in the backyard, the two of them lying parallel, their arms swishing up and down. But those imprints of father and daughter in flight were already evidence of a moment lost to him. With his elder daughter, Joseph’s sentimentality had always overwhelmed him. And now, with Miriam nearly fifteen years old, those early memories stopped him the way his brother’s had, the way loss always would. Watching a daughter grow up, he supposed, was more about grief than joy.
Again he caught his reflection, a face in the window that looked out over the factory floor beneath him, where each worker was attending to his individual task. Joseph tried to focus on his own image. He was nearly bald now. And yet, this was what he’d always looked like, perhaps with a little more hair, and what he would look like, surely, with a little—perhaps a lot—less hair, until he died.
What if things were just as they were, instead of what we thought they should be? What if he found a woman whom America c
ould look in the face and see? That would be the woman to showcase Essoil. Joseph thought again of Frances, whose photograph he had seen in the Times, a review she had sent to him from back when she starred in that musical nearly fifteen years ago. There had been something timeless about the photograph—her dark hair and eyes set against the white, white skin. Joseph had not gone to see Frances in that play, despite the personal invitation she had sent. For some reason he had hidden the invitation from Esther, though now he was not sure why. Perhaps he hid it because his wife would certainly have wanted to go down to New York to see the musical. That was what he had convinced himself at the time, that Esther would have begged and pleaded. Broadway! she would have exclaimed, her head turned to the left as she clipped an earring to her right ear. What a fabulous treat. Perhaps Joseph had not wanted to let her down, because they hadn’t had the money to take such a trip then. But now, he had to admit, he had also hidden it from Esther so she would not question him. Who is this? Why? she would have asked. Why don’t you want to see this old friend Frances?
He couldn’t, that was why. Solomon was attached to that musical, however distantly, and, though Joseph wanted to let go of it, let go of what his brother had become, he was not ready to do so then. That had been 1931—Solomon had been expanding his entire empire, eating fried eggs and corned beef hash as he planned with his gang in rural diners all over the country. It was no longer just New York, and soon, Joseph knew, people in Boston and in Maine would know who his brother was and exactly what he did. Who could have known that Joseph would follow him, that Essoil would now be found in every diner’s broom closet?
When Joseph finally phoned Frances, he willed himself not to think of the time she had called him about investing in television and the terrible way he had raised his voice to her. He was now calling her with a plan he was sure would help her acting career, or at least get her back on television. She had been right, Joseph had to realize now. But so what? He’d done things his way, and it certainly could have turned out worse.
“Frances?” He rang her at home from his office in Boston. “It’s Joseph Brodsky,” he said.
Still her heart skipped to hear his voice. “I know it’s you, Joseph.” Frances shook her head and set the paper down on the couch as she stood up to pull the curtains back from the window. She looked out onto the midtown street where she and Vladimir had moved after the fair.
“How are you, Franny-goil?” he asked.
“Not a girl so much anymore, Joe,” she said. She could see her reflection in the glass, hovering above the people waiting at cross lights and rushing down the avenue. Frances had turned thirty-seven last month. Vladimir had rented out the Rainbow Room and thrown an enormous bash. It had been so unlike her husband. Guests had danced until dawn, as they say, and Frances remembered looking down at Rockefeller Center on that spring night and seeing what had been the skating rink empty, an unmarked palm. At dawn the city had looked like she imagined it would have in 1909, when her parents were still in Russia and she was a tiny fist in her mother’s distressed belly. Had Pauline stood on her tiptoes to talk to her mother’s growing stomach? Or was this an American conceit? Frances didn’t know the difference anymore.
That morning after the champagne, the canapés, the noisemakers, the four-tiered cake, she thought to herself that just this party was more than she had ever wished for. She remembered her mother buzzing around the house cleaning, her father discussing politics with friends in the kitchen, Pauline showing off to herself in the mirror. Back then, Frances and her sister never even knew this part of the city existed—who got all the way to Forty-eighth Street from Williamsburg, Brooklyn? Back then, this glorious Rockefeller Center was only a ditch. Amazing that so much can blossom out of nothing. She thought of this city emerging from the ground, and then she remembered the way her father had been returned to it.
“Not a girl at all,” Frances said to Joseph rather sadly. Now she thought that perhaps it was not love, as in romantic love, that made her heart beat so wildly at the sound of Joseph’s voice but the fact that he was her only conduit to the past. Unlike Joseph, Frances liked to open the locked gates of her childhood. She welcomed the way, when she entered a deli on Second Avenue, she was instantly home again.
“I suppose not,” Joseph said. But he could not help seeing Frances as the girl looking out the window, waiting for her sister to come home.
She was still looking out the window, but now it was at the other buildings—at an apartment five flights below in a building across the way; the curtains blowing back in the breeze, and a woman crying into her hands at the kitchen table. Such a huge, lonely city. Perhaps, Frances thought, she was waiting for someone to come back.
Waiting. Frances would always be waiting, she thought. But for what? Her big break?
Let’s face it, thought Frances, The Joint was not the vehicle I had hoped it would be. And then, thanks to Vladimir, she hardly needed to work at all, though she had been in several off-Broadway productions, and she lent her voice to plenty of radio stories. But Vladimir would never let her move to California. And that was where she’d have to go in order to have a career in the movies. California. Sometimes Frances went mad for dreaming of that place. Los Angeles. Hollywood. It was practically a shtetl out there the way the Jews kept moving west and west, always wanting more from this enormous country than it was ever ready to hand over. Some nights, as Vladimir climbed on top of her, she would mouth the word just to have it in the air: Hollywood. Hollywood. But try as she might to keep Hollywood in their Manhattan apartment, Frances could not help but move with her husband, always cut off from her fantasies of California by the reality of being beneath Vladimir, a different fantasy she could not help but respond to.
Or maybe Frances was waiting for something else. Maybe it was the children that, despite their tireless efforts, she and Vladimir could never conceive.
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” she asked her old friend. The last time she had seen Joseph Brodsky had been at the World’s Fair, the day her husband had shown the world his television.
“Vell,” Joseph said. “I’ll get to zhe point then. I have a proposition for you, one that vill be difficult for you to turn down, I think.”
“Really,” she said, breathing.
“Truly,” Joseph said.
Two months later, Frances put her Hollywood dreams on hold as she closed her eyes to the makeup girl and stepped in front of bright, white lights, gripping a bottle of Essoil in her clammy hands.
In many ways, becoming the face of Essoil was a dream come true for Frances. She was back on television, the way she had been at the New Amsterdam in 1929, when Vladimir had merely flicked a switch and she had bloomed onto the screen, waving to the world the way she and Pauline had always thought Pauline would wave. That was her favorite image of herself—no facial hair or moles to speak of, no panning down to her still-burgeoning thighs, only the contrast of her white skin and her dark features. Television captured her, completely. Her dark eyes catching the light, her personality wrapped up in a box, waiting for anyone to turn the switch, to untie a ribbon and reveal her.
Working again was nice, though Vladimir increasingly opposed it.
Frances didn’t think it was her acting that bothered him. Actually, her husband seemed to like to see her recognized on the street, or at dinner, a photographer crowding them and their guests at El Morocco, the flash and snap of the blinding light.
It was the advertising.
“I worked so hard for this? This is not science, these advertisements. My father, he is turning and turning,” Vladimir would tell her. He told her he couldn’t bear to watch her anymore. “Selling another man’s wares,” he said. “Frances. We don’t need the money, you know. It’s all a bit preposterous.”
All those nights she pictured her husband working well into the daylight hours, the sun rising over the city, the spread of pink and blue and orange outlining each new building and bringing it into the third dimension. D
id he think, For what have I worked? Did he think of his father when he saw Frances smiling at him in between programs, her hand a table for Joseph Brodsky’s growing empire? Frances knew that once Vladimir had thought a life of science, with its research and experimentation, its hours and hours of solitary study, paralleled a religious life. He had not counted on marrying a salesperson, which was in fact, Frances thought now, what she had become. Please, she’d say into the camera. Buy this! From me.
Television had been her husband’s baby. He had conceived it and nurtured it and watched it grow. Into what?
Aside from the tension Essoil brought into life with her husband, Frances loved being close to Joseph again. It was an all-over love, one that was charged with the familiarity of each knowing exactly where the other came from. Frances imagined Joseph’s old stoop, his mother’s unshakable trance, a look that glazed past Frances and at the kids playing stickball on the street, until the sun went down, the cicadas screaming, mothers calling out to their children finally to come home.
At first, Esther wasn’t mad for the idea of Frances doing the commercials. “You might as well have me up there then,” she told Joseph suspiciously.
Esther had been making dinner when Joseph came into the kitchen to show his wife a photograph of Frances.
“Hmmm,” she said. “Wouldn’t people rather have a nice leggy blonde with big boobs?” she asked. “This one doesn’t look so different than I do.”
“Did you ever zhink, my dear,” Joseph said, rubbing his eyes with one hand and holding the photo in the other, “that I chose her precisely because she looks like you?”
Golden Country Page 23
