“Okay!” he said. “Good-bye, Frances.”
“Good-bye, Joe,” she said, putting down the receiver.
Vladimir sat at his desk, and Frances came up behind him and locked her arms around his neck. “Vlad?”
He reached up to touch her wrists with the tips of his fingers. “Hmmm?” he said.
“Joseph sold Essoil,” she whispered in his ear.
Vladimir turned toward her with a grin on his face. “Yes?” he said.
“And I’ve lost the contract.” She kissed his nose.
“Really,” he said, looking up at his wife. When Vladimir found out that he had been poisoned by Essoil-soaked herbs, he had not been amused. That stuff is evil, he had told Frances. Pure evil. He had made a production of taking the bottle from the broom closet and pouring it out in the bathroom sink. Frances had stood watching him, hands on her hips, shaking her head. Vladimir, she’d said. Sweetheart. You know we have four cases in the laundry room. You know, she’d said, that Gladys won’t clean with anything else.
“Yup,” she said now. “All gone.”
Vladimir took Frances in his arms. “That’s great news,” he said and buried his face in his wife’s chest.
“You know what I think?” She tilted her head and ran her fingers through the thick hair on her husband’s chest.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think we should move out to California.”
Vladimir lifted his head and looked at his wife.
“What?” Frances said. “We should!”
“Not again with the California!” he said.
“And why not?” she asked, leaning back. There had always been work and work and more work. But that had changed—Vladimir had done enough work, and now he could decide for himself what he did. The image of a wide street lined with palm trees rose up in her imagination. Frances imagined being brought to a table at the Brown Derby next to Lana Turner or Judy Garland. “Can’t you see us driving down sunny streets and turning toward the ocean?” she asked her husband.
“I never could picture it,” he said. “Could that person in the convertible zipping down the street so grandly be me? It doesn’t really seem possible.”
“Why not?” she said. “It would be a nice life.”
“Why not?” Vladimir shrugged. “Anything’s possible.”
A smile spread across Frances’s face, and the single hair on her chin, which she saved for plucking right before beginning production on a commercial, trembled with happiness. She had expected Vladimir to say no once again. “Well!” she said.
Frances imagined herself on the Paramount lot, walking past sets, some being wheeled away before her eyes. People scurried by on their way to meetings and shoots. She saw the mountains in the distance, covered in a sheer layer of light haze, a waiting promise. We’ll take the train! she thought now, imagining herself next to Vladimir, her head leaning against the window, the whole country whirring by. Lightning over open fields, deep, ridged canyons, mountains ringed with smoke, images she had seen only in the movies. The movies. All the different people of this country bending to lift their bags as they got on and off the train. We’re going all the way west, she’d tell whomever sat across from them. All the way to the Pacific Ocean. They’d invite their new friends to join them in the dining car. We’re going to Hollywood! they’d tell them when the waiter lifted the silver lid to reveal the platter of roast beef and pudding. And then the baked Alaska, the flame flickering with the swaying rhythm of the train.
“Maybe,” Vladimir said, “it would get you out of everyone else’s living room. Perhaps.”
“I’ll get packed right away!” Francis jumped up. “I’m calling my agent this minute,” she said.
“I could have a little studio in the hills, looking out at the sea,” he said. “Invent something useful again. Go back to researching, but for a good cause. Teach even. Perhaps it would be a nice life.” He looked at Frances. “But the movies?” He pinched her waist. “I love this,” he said. “Also this.” Vladimir touched her nose. “A face I can laugh with,” he said. “And you wear your charm like some women wear furs.”
“Yes?” she teased.
“I hope there are still parts to play,” he said. “In the movies.”
“Of course there are, Vladi,” she said.
“I want nothing more than your happiness, Frances,” he said, “but let’s face it, darling, you’re not getting any younger.”
“True,” she said. “True.”
“What parts will you play?” Vladimir asked.
Frances smiled at her husband. “I’m not worried.”
“Really, Fran?”
“Really,” she said. “I am a character actress.”
“You certainly are.” Vladimir tapped her on the behind.
Frances was already having a mental conversation with her agent. She was picturing herself in a flowered dress and a straw hat, with sandals the color of her tanned skin. She was looking out to sea. A school of dolphins were far in the distance, and she could see them when she shielded her eyes from the bright sun, their fins arcing against the horizon.
The movies, she thought. A chance to be a mother. Don’t fill up on sweets, she warns in a little kitchen with a checkered tablecloth. Two smiling faces dotted with freckles look up at her. Frances puts an arm on the back of each chair and kisses their noses. Take three, Mrs. Gold. Already the director was calling to her as Frances turned to leave Vladimir’s studio.
Chapter 21
Skin: The Ensemble, 1962
THREE MONTHS AFTER signing Essoil away, Joseph Brodsky was sitting on the back balcony watching the tide come in when he felt a pain in his chest. Esther came out with a liverwurst sandwich only to see her husband looking blankly out at the bay.
“Joe?” she asked tentatively. “Are you okay?”
“I’m not feeling so vell.” He scrunched up his nose. When they’d first moved to this house, he would stand out on the balcony all afternoon to watch the Sunfish moving along the water. The first time he saw them, bright-colored sails heading into the sun, he had screamed inside. Look, Es. Sailboats small enough for one person!
Now Esther put her hand on his shoulder. “Why don’t you eat something?” she said, handing him half the sandwich. “Rye bread.” When he refused, Esther grew concerned.
“What?” she said.
“I just don’t feel like myself,” he told her.
Not fifteen minutes later, Joseph was bundled up against the spring cold and taken to the Portland hospital.
Miriam was not prepared for the news that her father was to have surgery when her mother called to tell her.
“It’s just exploratory,” Esther said. “The doctor said it’s a matter of fortification.”
“Exploring what?” Miriam asked. “Fortifying who?”
“His heart,” Esther said. “Dr. Benton said there’s really nothing to worry about.”
Miriam rolled her eyes. Getting her mother to question anything any doctor told her, especially if he was handsome—forget it if he had the clear blue eyes that Dr. Benton had—was nearly impossible. “Maybe he should go to Boston,” Miriam said. “There’s better care there.”
“There is no one better than Dr. Benton,” Esther said. “We have a very fine hospital here, Miriam. And anyway, this is only exploratory.”
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” Miriam said, hanging up before her mother could tell her that it wouldn’t be necessary and that perhaps her energy would be better spent with a few turns around the house with a vacuum. Or taking some of those lovely French cooking classes like Esther’s friend Myrtle was taking up at the Y. It wouldn’t hurt you, Esther always told her, to learn how to make a proper savory soufflé.
Esther and Miriam went to the hospital the next night to visit Joseph. Esther pleaded with her daughter not to make a fuss.
“You’ll just make everyone more nervous than is necessary,” she said in the car on the way over. “Gloria li
stened to reason and stayed home with her children. There’s really no sense in all this. Now just go in and kiss him good night. Quick, quick. Don’t make a production. Please, Miriam, no drama.”
So, Miriam had a brief visit with her father. She told Joseph about work, the United Nations conference where she was to be the head translator, David’s upcoming production of All American, the new mahogany cabinet that they had gotten for all their wedding china. “We can finally unpack,” she told him.
“Good night, sugar,” Joseph said when she got up to leave.
Lying in that hospital bed in his white gown, her father looked so small.
And Joseph felt small, dwarfed by the world, and by his place in it. He had always felt this way, really. He remembered how he had made everyone wear surgical masks when Miriam was born. He had been so terrified that the world would hurt her.
Now he saw his daughter in that single moment as all the ages she had ever been: a loaf of bread in his trembling arms, a pudgy girl on roller skates, a young woman turning the tassel of her graduation cap, the veiled bride he had walked down the aisle and handed over to David Bloom.
“It will be fine,” he told his daughter, patting her hand.
The skin on Joseph’s hands, still chapped, had grown looser with age, and Miriam resisted mentally skinning her father, peeling back his slack flesh to see beneath to muscle and blood and bone, his very structure. What was her father made of? As he touched her hand, she remembered something that she had not thought about since she was a girl but that now seemed never to have left her imagination for a moment. It was a night she had gone to kiss her father good night. She had walked into their bedroom and seen Joseph distractedly picking at his hands, peeling the rough skin from the insides of his palms. Miriam had watched as he picked at his raw fingers and placed the bits of skin in a tiny silver bowl. The next day, when he was at work, she went to her father’s bed and looked into the smooth silver bowl on his night table. The skin was still there, dry and crisp, yellow and semitransparent, and Miriam dropped some of the pieces into her smooth, open palm.
Now she shook away the memory of holding these bits and pieces of her father’s hands.
“Good night, Daddy,” she said, rising from the chair by her father’s bed. She kissed his cheek and left the room.
Esther went in to talk to Joseph, and Miriam waited for her in the hallway.
His wife told him, “Joe, don’t you leave me alone in this world.”
“I won’t, Es,” he said. “Don’t you vorry.”
“Well, all right then,” she said. There was a pause—a kiss? the touch of hands? Miriam wondered—and then Esther clicked out of the room.
No one knew that Joseph Brodsky’s heart was breaking, that the next morning, when the surgeon cracked him open, his aorta would disintegrate in his hands.
“How could that be?” Esther said. Miriam came out of the guest bedroom upon hearing her mother on the phone. “But it was only exploratory.” Esther’s hand covered her mouth. “I see,” she said. “Thank you, Dr. Benton,” she said.
You always know, don’t you? thought Miriam. Unless you don’t.
She watched her mother, in her pink and black Pucci housecoat that zipped up the front, straighten and place her hands on the kitchen table.
“Mom,” Miriam said. She knelt down beside her mother, a hand on her shoulder. The nylon of her robe felt cold to her touch.
Esther nodded. “Call your sister,” she said.
“Okay,” Miriam said. “Of course.” She didn’t move.
Esther looked around the kitchen. “This place is such a mess,” she said. She put her head in her hands.
“It really isn’t,” Miriam said. “But I’ll call Melinda to come in and clean tomorrow if you want,” she said.
Esther got up slowly and went to the broom closet. She took out the mop and the bucket and the bottle of Essoil. “No,” she said. “I’d rather do it myself.”
Miriam stood up. “Let me help you, Mom,” she said. She took the bottle from her mother, who gripped it tightly with two hands. She unscrewed the top and put her nose over the opening.
For the first time in fifteen years, Miriam could smell. One whiff: her father, freshness, everything clean and good and lovely, her entire childhood.
“Mom, smell,” she said, holding out the open bottle. Miriam willed herself not to cry, so worried was she that it would stop her ability to smell.
Esther shook her head. “No,” she said. She took a balled-up tissue from under the sleeve of her housecoat and blew her nose. “I’m going to bed,” she said and turned to leave the room.
While she waited for her sister and her husband to come and help with the arrangements, Miriam, in her nightgown and bare feet, cleaned. She could hear her mother weeping through the closed door of her bedroom as she mopped all the tile and Formica floors, and washed every counter and mirror and bath in her parents’ house. With each dip of the mop, every wringing out of the rag, Miriam remembered her father’s long nose, the way he hung his hat before walking in the door, his shiny bald head, his sweet laugh, his voice, the way it felt to walk away from him, to dance with him, to put her hand in her pocket instead of to hold his hand, the way he held his head while shaving, the way he opened his valise, the way he pushed her on the swing, high, higher, highest, the fireflies he helped her capture and then set free, the way he piled leaves around her so he could pretend she had disappeared. The afternoon was a gift from her father, Miriam knew. For her only. And inhaling grandly in the kitchen when all her cleaning was finished, she was overwhelmed with the grief of being met with what followed: nothing. By the time she had capped the bottle and placed it back in the pantry, her ability to smell had disappeared.
That night, Miriam had a dream. In it, she was a little girl holding a red balloon in her tight, clammy fist. Joseph stood next to her, walking with her from booth to booth at an old-time fair, his hands on her back as he guided her through the crowd toward the Ferris wheel. The balloon slowly began to slip out of her fingers, and Miriam tried to hang on to it. When she turned to tell her father that she couldn’t hold on anymore, he started to disappear before her eyes. There goes Gloria’s balloon, Miriam told herself in the dream as she watched her father slip away, a genie emerging from a bottle, spiraling high above her head and into the atmosphere.
Off to the moon. Esther came up from behind and grabbed hold of the balloon. It’s time for a new permanent wave, young lady, she declared.
At the cemetery in Portland, a cantor sang and Esther pulled on Miriam’s sleeve. She whispered into her hair, “He was in the camps.” The cantor’s voice sounded to Miriam as if it were breaking.
As he threw the dirt, David tried to picture the coffin the way it had been at the service, Joseph prone below the bema, inside a casket draped in a dark cloth, a white Star of David shining from the fabric. Now there was the terrible thud of gravel hitting wood.
Then Frances Gold.
Then Seymour Bloom.
Then Vladimir Zworykin.
Then Gloria and her husband together.
Then Miriam, a trembling little girl with a shovelful of dirt.
Miriam nudged her mother toward the coffin, but Esther wouldn’t budge. “Not a chance,” she said.
Miriam did stop a moment to wonder how her father would have taken it. Covered in dirt. By his own family.
She fingered the ripped ribbon the rabbi had given her to wear at the funeral, like the ones he had given them all. She stuck two fingers in her mouth.
“Such a dirty habit!” Esther slapped her daughter’s hand from her mouth. “Pull yourself together!” she said. “People are watching us.”
Were prayer and memory the same? As Reb Skye, the rabbi Esther had wanted so desperately for Miriam’s wedding, said Yizkor, Miriam looked over at her mother, and there was Joseph in the threshold of Janie Silvers’s door at nightfall, his hat in his hands.
As the driver helped Esther out of the limousi
ne, Miriam watched her pause a moment in the circular driveway.
What would her father have said? All these years and not once had he been driven in a limousine. Even the few times he’d needed a driver to take him from Portland back to Boston when his own car was in the shop, he’d insisted on a town car. Nozhing fancy, he had told his secretary. As Miriam walked into her parents’ house, she went to look in the den—two leather La-Z-Boys facing the television—so she could tell him all about looking out the darkened windows as she, her sister, and her mother rode through town like royalty without him.
Miriam had told her mother that people would bring food, but Esther had insisted on a caterer. When they got to the house, the tuna, egg, and whitefish salad were laid out in her smooth Steuben crystal bowls, the bagels and nova arranged on a silver platter.
“The kugel isn’t browned enough,” Esther said the moment she saw it cut into small squares and stacked like bricks on her Lenox plate.
For the shiva, Miriam and Gloria stood flanking their seated mother like two soldiers. Esther kept on her dark glasses as a whir of people came and went. Miriam nodded thank you as the mourners leaned down to her mother’s arm or the hem of her navy blue suit skirt, kissed her cheek or patted her shoulder.
“Did you have the chance to say good-bye?” Nelly Barowsky, whose husband had practiced law with Esther’s father, asked.
Miriam looked down at her mother. She pictured the surgeon’s hands reaching over themselves to stop the blood.
“I did,” Esther said. She touched her dark glasses.
Miriam gripped her shoulder and searched the room for David. When she spotted him, for the first time in what seemed like years, her stomach jumped and fluttered just as it had in college. Still he is as beautiful as Orson Welles, she thought as she nodded her head to the mourner. I have a little secret, Miriam thought, catching her husband’s eye across the room. Willing herself not to think of the man who grew poisonous herbs, the same man who sat beside his mother and offered to help her die, Miriam rubbed her belly. The memory of her wedding, of looking across that crowded room and seeing her husband, a stranger, was beginning to fade. Her marriage felt unexpectedly different: something precious, something breakable that she suddenly wanted to keep pristine. How much damage had been wrought, Miriam couldn’t tell, but she imagined tiny hairline fractures, hardly noticeable if, from now on, they were careful. She looked down at her mother, whose eyes were closed tightly beneath her sunglasses, and knew that Esther was hoping to hell that no one spilled on her cream-colored carpet.
Golden Country Page 34
