Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

  But that makes it sound easy. It was not.

  “Mother,” Miriam said into the phone, the day after she had called to tell her parents the good news. Already the planning had begun. Esther insisted on having it in Portland.

  “It’s my wedding!” Esther said.

  “But it’s my wedding,” said Miriam.

  “My mother had hers when I married Joseph, and now I’m going to have mine,” Esther said. “In Portland.”

  Miriam could just see it, her urbane friends, David’s erudite family, all riding up to the sticks for her wedding. She’d worked so hard to become a New Yorker, with her empty fridge and her little brooches and never a dinner before eight, and now her mother was practically dragging her to Nova Scotia.

  “Maine is where we’re from,” Esther said.

  “I’m from Boston,” Miriam said.

  “I married your father in Portland, and now you’re going to marry David there as well. It’s part of our tradition.”

  Joseph heard her and shook his head at the horrible memory of Esther’s mother shouting orders at his future wife just moments before the ceremony. Stand up straight, for God’s sake, Sylvia had said. Don’t touch anything. Your gloves. Your gloves! And after the wedding, Joseph now recalled, his mother-in-law had gone to bed and hadn’t risen until he and Esther came back from their honeymoon in the mountains outside Montreal. And when they’d returned, glowing from sun, sex, and mountain air, the first thing Sylvia said was: The flowers were nearly dead. How could you have dead flowers at your wedding? Too bad for you both, now you’ll have a black life.

  Well, it hadn’t been a black life, Joseph thought as he went over to Esther, who was still on the phone with their daughter.

  “No, Miriam,” she said. “Absolutely not.”

  Joseph had to laugh to himself; the only thing he had heard Esther utter during the whole conversation was no. He was about to interrupt her for one moment, perhaps remove her from her state of contrariness, but he let it pass. Joseph would only get in the middle, and that, he knew from experience, had disastrous consequences.

  “‘Dear Maggie’ says it’s where the mother of the bride wants it. And she says there absolutely must be three layers of linens. Three, do you hear me? I just went out and bought Dear Maggie’s Guide to the Perfect Day this morning. It’s tremendously helpful, Miriam. Would you like me to send you a copy?”

  “No, thank you,” she said. Miriam sat in the living room of her Murray Hill apartment and watched her roommate watering the spider plant by the window. Her roommate was humming, which always annoyed Miriam. She would tell her, please stop, but she continued on and on, as if she didn’t know she was doing it. Soon I will be living with my husband, thought Miriam. David Bloom, she thought, trying not to giggle, remembering the boy in college who had pulled that strand of wayward hair from her face. “But, Mother,” she said. “And…”

  It was useless. Miriam flicked open the paper, and there was “Dear Maggie” on page 4: When moving to a new community, always be sure to bring letters of introduction. When the letters are given to the most prominent citizens, you will have an already made position….

  How dated, thought Miriam. She remembered coming home from New York with her mother from getting her nose fixed and how she had cried and cried and then written “Dear Maggie” about the nature of a girl’s beauty. How ridiculous. This anonymous person giving us advice? This stranger’s guidelines are informing my wedding.

  Her mother prattled on. “Chicken, never, never fish. We must have chicken. The fish is never fresh enough, even here in Maine. You just never know. The club does a wonderful chicken Italienne. I also love the cordon bleu. We’ll have to do a tasting. When will you be coming for a tasting? Their stuffed pea pods are marvelous. Remember, we must invite the Cohens, but let’s just pray they don’t bring that son of theirs. A drug addict I hear. Did you know that, Miriam? Did you ever? Are you listening?”

  “Yes, Mother,” Miriam said. She thought she could make out her roommate humming “La Marseillaise.” It was driving her bananas.

  “Does that sound good to you, then, Miriam?” Esther asked. “Because, my darling, I want you to have the wedding of your dreams. It’s your wedding, you know. This is your big day.”

  After the ceremony at the new temple, where, standing beneath the flowering chuppa, David Bloom successfully crushed the glass, whose meaning—virility? the frailty of relationships? the irrevocability of marriage?—he could only speculate upon, both sides of the family went to the Portland Country Club for dinner and dancing.

  The three grandmothers—Seymour’s mother, Inez Bloom; Esther’s mother, Sylvia Weinstein; and Joseph’s mother, Selma Brodsky—stood around the buffet. Inez hovered over the caviar, lemon, and onion, and David knew she was trying to make sure the women didn’t gobble it all up and leave none for the other guests. Inez was very sensitive to the people there—and, David was happy to note, they did have some fine guests. The man who invented television and his wife, the woman in all those commercials for Essoil. Betty Comden. Vincent Sardi, Jr. Agnes Moorehead. And Inez had invited Mae West.

  She pulled David aside.

  “Just look at her!” she said, offering up the chopped liver and pickle as she watched Miss West, surrounded by three old men. “Like a leetle whore. I won’t speak to her!” she told David, who had several other things on his mind. “I won’t!”

  David looked over to see Mae West, one hand gripping a glass of champagne, the other moving animatedly, her huge breasts bouncing, her large thighs dimpled with cellulite and careening beneath her satin dress as she moved.

  “I don’t care who she is,” she hissed at David. “It’s insulting! One needs a structured fabric—organza or taffeta—at her age.”

  “You’re nuts,” David said. He remembered the first time he had met Mae West, the way she had rocked her hips. Her body was threatening and inviting at the same time, and these two antithetical emotions had merged in David, creating a reaction in him that he now thought of as chemical.

  “Is that so?” Inez said. “Nuts? I’ll tell you who’s nuts, mister. Just look who you’re marrying! A Pole!” she said, leaning in. “You could have had anyone. Anyone!”

  “Stop it,” David said. “Please,” he said. He rubbed his temples. “Anyway, the Brodskys are from Russia.” All the pressure of the planning was culminating in the terrible pressure of the actual day. Plus, David was supposed to toast his wife. It’s what you do, Seymour had said. And now he was getting a bit of stage fright.

  That Mae West had set him up. He had thought it would be that thrilling with all the girls he would encounter. There had been quite a few, and now, would he be giving them up? David saw all the women he had had then as a long chain of carbons, each beautiful, voluptuous, and interchangeable, only he had never once seen a woman shake her body that way again. His wife was built more like his mother—when Miriam rocked her hips she seemed to be mocking David and not herself.

  Inez raised her nose. “Where the Brodskys hail from? Believe me, it once was Poland,” she said. “Anyway, so be it,” she said. Inez patted him on the cheek, though it felt, looked, and sounded more like three successive slaps. “At least you didn’t marry into the theater.” She looked both ways. “Not like your father.” Inez shook her head and turned back to the buffet so Selma Brodsky would not be left alone with the caviar. “Have you ever seen a villager alone with a dish of beluga? Not pretty. Anyway, Davey, thank God you didn’t marry an actress,” she said to her grandson and returned to the buffet to protect it from the peasants.

  Esther milled around the room, greeting the guests, who gushed over the flowers, the food, even the lighting, which had been placed strategically to eliminate all shadows. Now she munched on smoked salmon and capers, and explained to Joseph about the one thing that had gone seriously wrong.

  “I still can’t get over that they weren’t married by Rabbi Skye. He married us! It’s part of our tradition, don’t you
think?”

  “Vell,” Joseph said. “It was a beautiful ceremony, Esther. I don’t know so much from tradition. You’re starting to sound like your mother.”

  “I am not, Joe,” she said. “So what he wasn’t the temple rabbi any longer?” she continued. “Does this place remember just how big our checks are each August? And I am the secretary, you know. How could they insist on Rabbi Bernstein? Miriam has no history with him, none at all. It all makes me just a little sad is all.” Esther stood up straight. “Otherwise, it was just perfect.” She popped a cucumber and cream cheese coin into her mouth. “Don’t just stand there, Joe, we need to go mingle with our guests!”

  As his wife said this, Joseph looked across the room and saw that Irving Berlin had just arrived. Here! Joseph watched him pat Seymour on the back. Why, it was just like looking in the mirror, though Berlin was at least a decade older. Do lives lived parallel make you look the same? thought Joseph. Or does what we look like inform our parallel lives?

  He broke away from Esther and introduced himself, holding out his hand.

  “A lovely girl,” Mr. Berlin said, smiling in Miriam’s direction. “I’m so sorry to have missed the ceremony. We got up here terribly late. We’ve rented a house in Bar Harbor for the week. Such a happy coincidence. Seymour is a good friend.”

  Joseph smiled, his heart soaring. “I’m Joseph Brodsky,” he said. “Father of zhe bride,” he said. He couldn’t deviate from his plan, even though he had an idea that Mr. Berlin was aware of who he was.

  “She’s just charming.” He smiled sympathetically. “I’ve known David for quite a while. They make a beautiful couple.”

  “Father of zhe bride! A-rah-tah-tah.” Joseph did a quick two-step and socked Mr. Berlin on the back. “How’s that for a musical?”

  Irving Berlin laughed. He looked down at his shoes.

  “You vant it?” Joseph asked. “Go ahead. Please take it. It’s yours,” he said.

  Irving Berlin smiled. “How much you want for it?” he asked. He took out his wallet and pretended to pull out a twenty.

  Joseph threw back his head and laughed. “A gift!” he said, pushing away the money with both hands. Twenty bucks. For a title. How many bottles of cleanser would he have once had to sell to make twenty dollars? Still he thought of it in terms of product sold. It was a joke now—his company sold millions upon millions of bottles of Essoil a year. Joseph was thankful for this and for Irving Berlin, who stood before him now, at his elder daughter’s wedding. “For you,” he said, with his best salesman voice, one he had used for years and years, a pleading he no longer needed. “For you, free,” he said.

  “Why, thank you,” Mr. Berlin said, saluting Joseph and then bowing. “It’s a pleasure to be here.” He turned to make his way into the crowd.

  Joseph watched Frances Gold running after Mr. Berlin, her husband in tow. “Excuse me!” he could hear her scream. “Mr. Berlin!” Joseph had to laugh. He hoped she’d catch him.

  “You can’t catch a man with a gun!” Esther screamed behind them. Then she looked side to side as she clamped her hand over her mouth in disbelief that she had actually said it out loud.

  When the meal was finished, the tinkling of silverware fading as people began to think of dancing, David Bloom readied himself to make his toast. He had planned this for weeks now, how he would rise from the table and recite his ode to his new wife for all the guests.

  Just as he stood, holding up his champagne glass high in the air, he heard the sound of his mother’s voice make its way through the microphone.

  “How could he?” the voice said.

  David looked from side to side. Where was she? He looked up at the ceiling. At first he thought he was dreaming, as he had on many occasions he’d rather have forgotten.

  Perhaps I am the only one hearing this, David thought. He squeezed his eyes tight as he had when he was a boy, hiding in the school yard, believing if he could see no one, then no one could see him. As when he watched his mother crying, pacing her enormous bedroom, her silk robe billowing out behind her as she manically recited Shakespeare.

  “Better he should marry a gentile than a Polish Jew!” the voice said now.

  Opening his eyes, David looked out to see the astounded faces of all the guests as his mother, oblivious to her audience, whispered in his father’s ear, and directly into the mike.

  Seymour sat up straight and, though no one could see this because of the linen—Esther had gotten her three layers—that draped over the table and skimmed the floor, he kicked Sarah in the shin, hard.

  “Ouch!” Sarah screamed, again into the microphone.

  In this very moment, David realized that Sarah Bloom was unconquerable. David recognized his mother would always win the public war that had been waged for so many years between them.

  How many years? thought Seymour. How many years of this?

  Joseph was furious. Why, it was as if she were calling his family a bunch of filthy kikes. He stood up and scanned the room, smiling despite himself at table 3, where Irving Berlin sat, his arm hooked behind the chair of a woman, his wife, Joseph paused to assume. He saw Frances look down at her plate, elbows on the table, hands over her ears.

  Then Joseph looked down the long head table at the woman who had caused the grave affront. And he spotted Seymour Bloom, seated next to her.

  “You dirty mobster! You gangster!” Joseph screamed. His finger pointed straight at his new in-laws.

  Seymour had had quite enough himself. If David loved this woman, fine, but that she was related to the Terrier, he could never really get over it. Was his son trying to spite him? For the first time in his life, Seymour lost control.

  He stood and pointed back at Joseph. “It was your brother who sucked me into that business in the first place!” he screamed.

  Sarah threw her head back, finishing her drink. “Mob?” she said, her hand mockingly poised at her breast. “Where?”

  Esther dropped a fork and leaned down to retrieve it. Joseph saw her disappear and wished he could crawl under the table with her, just the two of them again, alone beneath a linen-covered bell jar. Two fireflies, he thought, remembering Miriam handing him a jar to punch air holes in. He imagined him and Esther cross-legged beneath the table, speaking to each other silently, through a code of blinking lights.

  A collective hush fell over the club, a communal sucking in of breath.

  Joseph looked away from his wife and her dropped flatware, and trembled with rage. This was his daughter’s wedding. Had he not worked his whole life to give her this day? He looked over at Miriam now, her face a pricked balloon, its artificially tiny features deflated. Let’s set them free, she had said, when the fireflies had stopped their flashing. I think they’re dying, Miriam had said, and they had unscrewed the lid and set the insects free. Even Joseph had been shocked by how slowly they had crawled out of the jar before realizing they could fly. Had he not gone door-to-door for fifteen years so that he would never have to see his daughter look this way? He would be calm, Joseph told himself.

  Esther slowly climbed back up to her seat, polishing the fork with her napkin.

  I will remain calm for my daughter, Joseph thought, lifting his head toward the band.

  But it was David Bloom who really saved the day by doing the only thing he knew to do, which was to rise above it, as if the wedding party table were a stage. He pulled out his chair and stood on it, holding up his glass.

  “To my beautiful wife,” he said. He looked over at Miriam with adoration. “The woman who completes me.” That would be it. He would not get to recite his monologue, not tonight anyway.

  Miriam looked decorously down at her plate. It’s like it never happened, she thought, as the band began to play—You must remember this. A kiss is still a kiss. Esther had insisted on “As Time Goes By,” and Miriam had demurred because sometimes her mother was right; after all, it was a beautiful song.

  Climbing down from his perch, the groom bowed to his new bride, and sh
e stood to take his hand. David twirled her around the room, and, as they danced, Miriam slowly rose above the dance floor, her legs kicking out from beneath her. She was as light as air, and David’s fingers reached up to touch the tips of his bride’s. For one tiny moment, not even Inez could take her eyes from the couple as they circled the room, defying gravity. Soon other couples followed suit, and the entire country club was a swoop of hemlines, a flash of white gloves and yellow boutonnieres, a rush of gentle wind.

  Joseph had forgotten all about Irving Berlin. In this moment, he could see only his daughter. “Just like helium,” he said, leaning in to his wife.

  Esther picked up a chocolate truffle, one of a plate that had been placed on the table on bone china rimmed with gold, and popped it into her mouth. She smiled toward the couple, cocoa stuck in her teeth. “Weightless,” she said, reaching for another.

  How long would she be aboveground that way? thought Joseph. He remembered the fireflies flying into the night, blinking now, he knew, with happiness. No, with relief. How long before Miriam flew up and away from him? Joseph had thought then. He thought it now. He turned away from the couple, resisting the urge to tell his daughter, good-bye.

  Chapter 17

  Honeymoons, 1957

  THE NEWLYWEDS WERE scheduled for a honeymoon in the Greek Islands, and Sarah and Seymour Bloom had arranged to stay with Esther and Joseph Brodsky at Sebago Lake. To get to know one another, Esther had said when she phoned Sarah up to invite them. Joseph had watched her, the phone in the crook of her neck as she shined the dining room table. After all, we’re to be family, Esther had said, looking happily at the dirt on the cloth.

  Miriam had spent nearly every summer at the lake, walking along the country road, past the mailboxes, large as dollhouses, to the little red house where she could buy candy cigarettes and lipstick. And then, as she grew older, she’d go into Naples for soft serve with the Johnson boy. One time a young male friend of hers from Boston had come up, and the two had gotten so drunk on Singapore slings that Miriam had gotten the car stuck in a ditch on the way out of town. And her father had come for her. He had not scolded her at all as they watched the tow truck pull the Oldsmobile out of the dirt while the young man leaned over a bush to vomit.