Esther put her finger to the side of her nose. “I can see this,” she said. “I see what you mean.”
“And, Estha,” Joseph said, rubbing his head, “did I not name the entire company after you? For you. I should zhink you vould want to be sure that I sold the product in the best way I could. Zhis is the face of a woman we can all trust. Your face.” He reached out and pinched his wife’s cheek.
She hit his hand away.
“I should zhink, my love, that you would trust me by now to make Essoil even bigger than it already is.”
Esther put her arms around his neck, pulling him toward her and crushing the photograph of Frances. “I’m an idiot,” she told him, smiling. “A real schnook,” she said.
Joseph threw the photograph aside and leaned back from his wife’s embrace to look at her. He pressed her against the counter and kissed her.
“Joe!” Esther tried to push him away. She looked toward the dining room, where beyond, in their bedroom, the girls were watching television.
“Vhat?” he whispered, moving closer. He could hear the girls’ laughter. He lifted up her housedress and slid his hand beneath her underwear.
“Joe,” she whispered into his ear as he slid two callused fingers inside her. He moved them in and out of her—in the kitchen! Where the girls could appear at any moment!—and she came suddenly, with a gasp he assumed was from the pure shock of his brazen behavior.
As Esther smoothed down her dress and cleared her throat and moved toward the roast, on the counter by the sink, ready to be ringed with quartered apples and onions, she turned to Joseph, who was smiling at her with a sly grin, and said, “I think this Frances is a great idea.”
Joseph nodded. “I told you,” he said, smiling.
From then on Esther never voiced a problem with having Frances Gold as the spokesperson for Essoil. And nearly every time Frances came on the television, at least when Esther was not busy with the girls or preoccupied with making lists of all the things she had to do, Joseph received a breathless call, his wife on the line, wondering just when he would be coming home.
“Women of the future will clean the moon with Essoil!”
Miriam sat with her little sister in her parents’ bedroom watching television, leaning on her elbows, her chin in her hands, feet kicking in the air. Miriam cocked her head at the television, watching Frances, an old friend of her father’s, holding his invention on a flattened palm. Behind Frances, a dark backdrop pasted with stars, the moon, hung above her, caught on an invisible string. Miriam, nearly fifteen, looked down at her nine-year-old sister. Women of the future. All Miriam had access to was a past: the family myth of the night her father invented Essoil, when Miriam, as Esther put it, nearly killed herself with the stuff. But you helped, Joseph always told her. Without you, sugar, where would we be?
There was the not-so-distant past, when she and her mother had taken the train to New York. She rubbed her nose as she watched television. In many ways, as she’d stared at the skyline rising before them on their way into the underpass before Pennsylvania Station, Miriam had felt that this, this out there, was the future. Still at night when she was too terrified to sleep, she thought of driving toward that skyline, into the city. The Emerald City, she’d thought. Dorothy. It eased her fears of being old and alone in a dark apartment, television her only communication with the world.
“Mama?” On some nights, after waking with a start from a terrible dream, Miriam would pad into her parents’ room, at that tender hour when she turned from a teenager back into a child. “What if I don’t have anyone when I’m older? What if I’m in an apartment all by myself?” Miriam had become terrified, yet intrigued, by apartments. They seemed to be both where those who could not afford houses lived and also home to chic, single women who tossed on their pearls, grabbed their blue umbrellas, and ran out the doors to greet their lives.
Esther, her voice tired, cracking from the Winstons she smoked on the toilet in the morning while doing her crosswords, didn’t lift her head. “You won’t be alone, Miriam.”
Joseph stirred beside her, and he knew she was trying not to sound exhausted, even though his wife had something the next day. She had become treasurer at the temple, and there was always lots of work to be done for fund-raisers and meetings. Lack of sleep, Joseph knew all too well, triggered her migraines. “You’ll have boyfriends, sweetie. And Daddy and I will be here, even if you don’t live with us anymore. Also Gloria will be all grown up then. Maybe you’ll live near each other. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
The thought of growing up filled Miriam with utter grief as she imagined a life without her parents. Would she have boyfriends? She saw herself hunched over a book. She saw herself studying and walking dreamily through rainy streets with a book under her arm. But she could not see herself at a mixer, curtsying toward a boy who would be hers. She did not see herself as she knew her mother saw her.
Joseph, half asleep next to Esther, was also momentarily jarred by what his wife had told their daughter. Because, after all, they wouldn’t be there forever, would they? Who, he wondered morbidly, would go first? He hoped it would be him, because he knew that Esther could live without him. She had all her things: her teas and her committees. She had her town, where soon, he had promised, they would move. What did Joseph have? He had a house of bottles filled with liquid to clean floors.
Watching television with her sister, Miriam wondered: Who was alone in a city like that? What kind of a person? Was she that kind of person? Miriam rubbed her nose again, a habit she never gave up, and watched Frances smiling on television. “Women of the future will clean the moon.”
Though Miriam was a thinker, she was not a dreamer. But what if she’d let herself want? What would her wants be? She did want to be married, to spend her life with a companion. And yet she knew this was not truly a dream of her future. Esther had always told her that her new face—well, her new nose, which gave her a new face—opened up so many possibilities for her.
The future. Clean the moon. Now she walked to school with her friends; they went to fairs and baseball games. Summers they spent on the lake in Maine, waterskiing, eating lobster, and munching on candy cigarettes and lipstick. Perhaps here, here was where she would like always to be, but was that a dream?
“What are you thinking about, Gloria?” Miriam said, leaning into her sister. She always wanted to be nicer to her sister. Just last week she had been supposed to take Gloria to the spring festival at school. Gloria was sick with the flu, so Joseph had gone with Miriam. In an attempt to be kind, she’d gotten two red balloons, one for her, one for her sister. Over the course of the afternoon, Miriam had accidentally let go of one of the balloons, and she and Joseph had watched it rise away above the throng of people busy winning goldfish and stuffed bears. There goes Gloria’s balloon! Miriam, who had not even cared to have a balloon, had said to her father. He had looked down at her in disbelief. How do you know that one was Gloria’s? he’d asked her. Miriam had answered, Didn’t you see it? There it is! And they had both turned to watch the balloon, a tiny dot still rising into the sky.
Gloria looked up at Miriam. “I’m thinking that there is Frances, but also, Frances was on the phone earlier. And she’s also in New York. How can she be in all these places at one time?” Gloria asked.
“She’s really only in one place,” Miriam said. “She’s really just wherever she is—this was taped earlier, and she called from wherever she just was.”
Gloria nodded, but Miriam could tell that she hadn’t given a good explanation. What would she be good at? she wondered. Miriam hoped that, like Frances, like her father, she would be so good at something, whatever it was, that she could one day effortlessly say this thing she had become was exactly what she had always dreamed she’d be.
Two hundred miles south of the Brodskys, in New York City’s Upper East Side, David Bloom, home from prep school for the Thanksgiving holiday and waiting for Seymour’s company car to come take him to Brooklyn, he
ard a scream from his mother’s bedroom. When he ran in to see what the matter was, David saw Sarah was throwing silk pillows at the television, which was playing an advertisement with that short, squat lady he had met at the World’s Fair. The sleeves of Sarah’s robe, embroidered with green dragonflies, were twisting like black ribbons caught in the wind.
Women of the future! The woman in the advertisement beamed. Now the lady from the World’s Fair held out her hand to the invisible audience. The moon!
Mary arrived just as Sarah screeched again. After Sarah was done with the pillows, she began throwing pens and paperweights at the television until the housekeeper had to hold her down.
“Please, Mrs. Bloom,” Mary told her employer. “Not in front of the boy.”
Sarah kicked and flailed.
“You have to stop.” But Sarah’s rigid body would not give way to Mary’s strong touch.
David watched his mother’s fiery rant turn slowly to quiet sobbing as she held Sarah, her head in Mary’s lap. She stroked her damp, blond hair. “There, there,” Mary said.
“Are you all right, Mum?” David went and peered over at his mother.
She nodded from the generous pillow of Mary’s lap. “Yes, dear,” she said.
“Can I get you anything from downstairs?” he asked her. “A sandwich or something?”
“Is your voice turning?” Sarah asked him sharply.
David looked at his mother blankly. “Turning?”
Sarah began to cry again, softly, like a little girl. “We’re all getting older, aren’t we, Mary?” She wrenched her arm away from the housekeeper and sat up. “Women of the future…how ridiculous. You don’t know how lucky you are to be a boy, David,” she said.
Sarah looked as if she were struggling to remember something.
“Everything okay?” Mary asked.
“I was just thinking of my mother,” Sarah said. “And then I was thinking about our house, on Long Island, but now I can’t remember the name of the street. I lived on that street for sixteen years and I can’t remember the name! What was the name of the bloody street?” For the second time in the last half hour, she threw herself back onto the bed and began to weep.
“I don’t know,” Mary said. “You’ll remember it soon.”
“David, darling, what was the name of the street?”
“I don’t know either,” he said.
“Think!” Sarah said. She looked her son in the eye. “I’m losing my mind,” she said calmly. “Don’t let me lose my mind, David.”
“I’m hungry,” he said. He did not know how to answer his mother.
“Do you promise?” Sarah asked.
“Okay,” David said. “Do you want a sandwich?”
“A sandwich? No, David,” she said. “A sandwich. Women of the future eat sandwiches?”
Possibly, David thought. Why wouldn’t they? He turned to head downstairs, leaving Sarah in Mary’s lap. He was tiring of his mother’s theatrics. What was so awful about the present? His mother, he knew, was a woman filled with regret. David opened the icebox and took out roast beef and pastrami, Swiss and provolone, Jersey tomatoes, lettuce, French mustard. He slapped down a piece of rye bread and piled the sandwich high. To the moon! David laughed, topping the sandwich with another piece of bread. He thought of his grandmother waiting for him in that pink shop, the sound of hair dryers drowning out the roar of the highway. That shop was what she had wanted, more than anything. While his mother cried upstairs, David Bloom ate the sandwich in under five minutes, wiped his hands of crumbs, and went outside on the silent stoop to wait for the car to bring him to Brooklyn.
Not twenty blocks away from the now calmed Sarah Bloom, Frances Gold had the television on in the living room while she read the paper. She read “Dear Maggie,” which was becoming truly horrid, if you asked Frances. All those intimate letters that this Maggie had once responded to with empathy were turning into issues of etiquette. Just last week, when a woman’s letter had reached a fevered pitch about feeling like a terrible mother, Dear Maggie had ended her response: A truly well-mannered woman exerts her good manners most upon her husband and children, and a gracious nature through daily example is, of course, the finest influence for good that there is in the world. It seemed that she—and just who was this woman anyhow?—was going to help all the troubled women of the world act appropriately.
Well, there were certainly enough new aids—refrigerators, Westinghouse washing machines with punch card controls, electric dryers—to help with domestic life nowadays. How much easier would her own mother’s life have been had these luxuries been around—not that they could have afforded them—when Frances was young? And perhaps, thought Frances, being outwardly acceptable, her house and children sparkly and clean, a woman can be more inwardly acceptable. To herself, thought Frances. Acceptable to herself. She thought of Etta, narrowing her eyes at the men whose letters she wrote to all the people in the old country. Etta did not alter her letters: she wrote whatever polished stories and lies she was told to and sent them to the families back home. Dear Maggie’s job was to respond to her writers, to offer them hope and, by proxy, to offer hope to an entire readership. She seemed to be saying that acceptable acts of outward expression would change an unstable or unhappy inner life, if only her simple guidelines were correctly followed. Who was more of a liar, Frances couldn’t say.
Today’s column was a response to a poor woman who had written that she felt ugly and untouchable. Maggie wrote: Why not try wearing gloves! Gloves are worn during the cocktail hour, and at least the right glove is removed entirely while dining, then worn again for the remainder of the evening.
Phooey! thought Frances, about to revise her generous opinion and hurl the paper across the room, when she heard her own voice on the television.
Who is that? She looked up from the paper and watched herself looking out at herself. Women of the future will clean the moon! Is that what I look like? Frances thought, still holding the paper. With Essoil!
Frances sighed. She was no different. Not only in what she was saying but how she said it. In an advertisement. If you buy this, you will feel better. She’d had such different plans: theater and maybe, maybe, if only she’d let herself think it, the movies. Frances willed herself not to remember her turn on Seymour’s stage. How is it, she thought, that what we want just gets pushed back and pushed back until here we are, approaching forty. Every night, still, she couldn’t help herself: “Vladi, I want to be in the movies. Let’s move to Hollywood and live in the canyons with an enormous blue pool in our own backyard. Vladi, let’s move to Los Angeles and live by the beach. Let’s take the train out and watch the world fly by as we go west. I want to be in pictures! Vladi, are you listening?”
“I want to go!” she’d say. “It will get me off of TV,” she teased.
But there was no leaving New York City for Vladimir. His focus was on the here and now, on further developing his Kinescope. Who was disappointing whom? Frances wondered now as she watched herself smile into the living room. Could she give this up? she wondered, give up the way that wherever she went women recognized her? Don’t I know you from somewhere? they’d ask, tilting their heads, pushing their glasses down their noses, and leaning in for a closer look. What’s your maiden name? Frances always nearly laughed. What was it about being on television that made people think they knew you from somewhere long ago and far away? I don’t think so, she would say. No, I’m afraid not, she’d tell them.
Essoil advertisements spurred other product advertisements, which in turn spurred even more, which created an entire industry. There was no mistaking Joseph’s achievement in both the Essoil campaign and the world of advertising. Journalists lined up at his home and at the factory to talk to him. Janie Silvers, who had bought those bottles from him nine years before, told Television Magazine, “Joseph Brodsky never gave up. He deserves all his good fortune because he never stopped trying.”
Joseph began to consider moving to Maine and making E
sther’s dream come true.
When Miriam entered college, over six million bottles of Essoil were sold each year. And by the time she graduated, in 1952, one would have been hard-pressed to find an American home that did not have a bottle nestled in the broom closet between mop and pail, quietly waiting for the opportunity to clean up each and every American mess.
Chapter 16
Charmed: Miriam and David,
1948–1957
IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR Miriam’s childhood friend Betsy Randolph, Miriam and David may never have met again. Betsy lived in the house next to Miriam’s parents’ summer home at Sebago Lake in Maine. On the other side of the Brodsky house was Mrs. Gifford, a deaf lady with a turned-over canoe on her front porch, who gave the girls a magnet in the shape of a horseshoe that separated the different kinds of sand. Sebago Lake was ringed by special purple sand, nearly black, and by July, Miriam and Betsy had filled countless jam jars with it. Along with the empty yahrtzeits Esther filled with tiny, broken seashells, the jars of layered sand lined the sills of the kitchen and the screened-in front porch.
When Betsy, two years older than Miriam, went off to Smith, Miriam insisted she would never follow her there. Not in a million years, thought Miriam. Another four years of Betsy Randolph: Betsy, who always got the catcalls as the two girls walked to the country store for candy lipstick and sugar cigarettes. Betsy, with her little white shorts and halter top, her long, stringy hair highlighted white from the sun. Her bare, tanned feet, toenails with chipped pink polish. Joseph would never have let either of his daughters go without shoes in the street. The dirt, he’d cry, holding his heart, as if bits of dried mud and granules of sand were actually cracking open his chest. The filth.
Miriam had always known she would go to college at one of the Seven Sisters—it was how she was raised, along with ballroom dancing instruction and never cutting her hair above her shoulders—Esther had insisted on it. But when it came time to look at colleges, Miriam could not decide between Smith and Wellesley. She felt that Wellesley had the lovelier campus, but it was awfully close to home. As much as she loved Boston—the different neighborhoods: Italian, Jewish, Irish, Black; the walk over the Charles into Cambridge—she thought it far better to get out from under her mother for a spell. Live independently, she said to the mirror, holding her head up high and looking down at herself looking down.
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