The River Beneath the River

by Susan Tabin

  “It’s dumb, they call these garden apartments, there aren’t any gardens here, just some grass,” I complained to my friend Natalie. As the sweet smell of roses wafted across my memory and my senses drifted to a fragrant oasis in the midst of Brooklyn, I explained, “I’ve been to the Botanic Gardens with my father.”

  “You’re lucky, Dar, your dad takes you so many places.”

  “I know. The Bronx Zoo, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty.”

  His dark pompadour rising from his forehead like a tuft of plumes and slicked with pomade, my olive-complexioned father dutifully took me to much of the affordable and free culture New York City had to offer. He was like a different person on those trips. Away from the bleakness of his life at home, just the two of us, he was a real “dad.” He was sweet and caring, teaching me about the rich culture he was so proud of. I didn’t know my family was poor until I repeatedly begged, “Please, please, Daddy can I get a two-wheeler, please?” and ended up with a hot pink, too many times painted over, second-hand bike. It’s shabbiness didn’t diminish my enjoyment and it was the only bicycle I had throughout my childhood.

  Natalie was my best friend since third grade. She had the friendliest round face with rosy cheeks, soft pale flaxen hair, wonderful eyes shiny and black as marbles in a Chinese checkers game, a button nose and delicate lips that curled at the edges into a permanent smile. She was thin as a potato chip and though we were the same age she was three inches shorter than me. Natalie was daring and zany and I loved her.

  Natalie’s father, Guy, a deeply tanned, graying at the temples distinguished looking man, worked nights as a waiter in a Manhattan bar and grill. He came home at two in the mornings, his pockets bulging with appreciation. He was always sound asleep, his head beneath two feather pillows, when Natalie awoke at seven o’clock and pilfered enough of the small change to keep the two us supplied with gum, miniature wax candy bottles filled with syrup, and charms from the penny machines at the candy store.

  Alone at Guy and Jacqueline Palermo’s meager two-bedroom apartment one freezing January afternoon, we decided to wash the kitchen floor.

  “Let’s take our clothes off,” Natalie urged, “so we don’t get them wet.”

  That’s all it took. We quickly stripped out of our leggings, itchy wool sweaters, brown oxford shoes, socks, undershirts and panties. Twice we filled up a bucket with soapy Spic N Span water; poured it all out onto the small kitchen floor. Buck naked and squealing raucously like seagulls we abandoned reality, mermaids riding the waves at Coney Island beach, we slid back and forth along the saturated split pea soup color linoleum.

  “Listen! I hear someone at the door.”

  “Oh my God, my mother’s home,” Natalie moaned as she picked up speed and slid right smack into the nest of hot radiator pipes.

  Mrs. Palermo, with Anthony, her five-year-old son in tow, dropped the shopping bag filled with groceries, stepped out of her high heel shoes, waded into her immaculate kitchen and screamed, “Mary, mother of Jesus, are you two crazy!”

  Natalie couldn’t answer. She was crying hysterically from the blistering burn on her bare behind.

  Her mother’s black eyes grew huge; with her arms lifted to the sides and slightly to the front of her head, her hands were vibrating wildly. She looked as if she might pull her own head off. Her fingernails were painted bright red like ten red crested woodpeckers about to bore holes in me.

  Under my breath I began rapidly repeating, “Darci Beriman, Y–G–T–T ... Natalie Palermo, Y–G–T–T...You’ll–Get– Through–This.”

  She yelled at me, “Get dressed and go home you little wild animal.”

  And I was an animal, not a girl, trapped, skinned alive, humiliated and shamefully aware of my nakedness. I wanted to hug Natalie, but I was scared and I obeyed Mrs. Palermo. I dressed in a flash; without looking directly at her I said in my quietest voice, “I’m sorry Mrs. P.” I was wet, sudsy and sockless as I walked hurriedly outside into the bitter cold second day of 1953.

  When I turned the familiar corner to Liberty, the avenue I lived on, a Christmas tree glistening with the remnants of silver tinsel caught my eye. I forgot the cold and sprinted toward it, assured that it had been put there for that very moment in my life. Without hesitation I lifted the trunk and dragged the dead tree out of the gutter and up two flights of stairs to my family’s one-bedroom flat, leaving a trail of pine needles and tinsel in the narrow stairwell.

  When she heard me come in through the door, which was usually unlocked during the day, my mother peeked out from the tiny kitchen. Her eyes widened, then she shook her head.

  “Darci Ann Beriman, I can’t keep up with you!”

  “Mom, it’s free, it was outside. Isn’t it beautiful? Can we put lights on it?”

  “What am I gonna do with you, look at this mess,” my mother said, half-laughing, half-crying. “We can’t keep this! Jews don’t have Christmas trees!” she said.

  “But, Mom, if we fix it up maybe Santa’ll come to our house,” I argued.

  “Darci, you know Santa Claus isn’t a real person. Remember we went to Macy’s, you saw a Santa outside, then you saw another inside?”

  My eyes puddled up with tears. “Of course I know he isn’t a real person, he’s a magic person.”

  My mother let out a sigh, “Darci, Santa Claus is a figment of the Christian imagination. Like Jesus. They’re not real.”

  I wrinkled my nose, did a pouty kind of thing with my lips, raised my eyes heavenward and thought about what my mother had just told me.

  “But imagination is good, Mom, that’s where everything lives inside of me.”

  We could hear my father’s slow heavy-footed climb up the steps and we turned when he came in the door. He was dirty from his construction job and obviously tired and cold. With the tree and the three of us, the small walk-through living room, which doubled as my parent’s bedroom, was overflowing. From where I was standing I could see into every room in our flat, the narrow kitchen to the left, the bathroom and my bedroom to the rear. Except for the bathroom with its dingy white tile small as sugar cubes, the floor throughout the rest of the apartment was covered in green linoleum embellished with rows of green leafy globular shapes. It seemed to me as if we lived in a half-furnished cabbage patch. My father kissed my mother on the cheek, poked at my belly lovingly, shook his head.

  “What’s goin’ on here, we converting?” he asked.

  “Your daughter wants to have Christmas,” my mother answered.

  My father roared with laughter, shaking the apartment. Then quieting into exhaustion, with a grin still on his face, he said, “Next year maybe we can have a Chanukah bush.”

  I never knew what to expect from my father. One minute he was angry and gruff; the next minute kind and concerned. The only thing I was sure of was that my father always seemed to be motivated by having to be right. The promise of a tree a year away, the mere possibility had me crossing my fingers behind my back and hoping this wasn’t some temporary whim. I stretched my eyes wide open; my pouted lips turned into a toothy grin. My father looked at me for a long time. I have his green almond eyes with the same dark lashes and long narrow straight Beriman nose. My skin is olive oil-smooth like his Greek mother’s. I’m willowy and tall like Papa. I have my mother’s long neck, her high apple cheeks. My clothing and my religion are also hand-me-downs. My thoughts are my own.

  “Darci, I’m gonna put the tree back in the street. Help your mother clean up.”

  I nodded, “I will, Daddy.”

  But first I bent down, picked up three strands of shiny tinsel, a broken pine branch, and put them in the Buster Brown shoe box anointing my collection of Coney Island shells, rocks, baby teeth, two Long Island duck feathers and one very dead yellow and black zebra heliconian butterfly, its wings fully outspread, with the contraband perfume of Christmas.

  Four

  Natalie’s encounter with the hot radiator and her mother’s scalding reprimand didn’t d
eter us from mischievous and sublime adventures over the next year that we both lived in the gardenless garden apartments.

  In April, her behind well healed, she asked, “You wanna go to church with me?”

  “Yeah, do they have those powdered sugar doughy things?”

  “You mean the zeppoles?”

  “Yeah, the zeppoles.” My mouth watered remembering the taste of the deep fried confections that were sold at the church festival.

  “Nuh, there’s no food at Saint Catherine’s, well, unless you count the bread at Holy Communion.”

  “Why do they have bread instead of zeppoles?”

  Natalie giggled, and rolled her eyes. “The bread is the body of Jesus, and the wine we drink is his blood.”

  “Yuck, drinking blood.” I squinched my nose and closed my almond eyes to mere slivers.

  Natalie slid her arm around my waist and I wrapped my arm around hers. We walked toward Saint Catherine’s and into a collective remembrance of the festival when the narrow Brooklyn streets lined with makeshift booths came alive, like a constellation of stars against the dark, with strings of lights and the aroma of the best Italian food East New York had to offer. Plump sausages with lush green peppers and sweet onions sautéed in golden olive oil; fried eggs and peppers on fresh baked crusty Italian bread, and thin moist spaghetti strands that we sucked up right out of the thick red tomato sauce.

  “What was your favorite booth at the festival?” I asked Nat.

  “Coin toss—of course.”

  I laughed, “Yeah, that was so fun when we licked the nickels, they stuck to the glass dishes.”

  “Yeah, the nickels didn’t bounce out. I won the goldfish, you got the turtle,” Natalie remembered.

  That little olive turtle no bigger than a quarter, with the bright yellow rose painted on its shell. Myrtle the turtle died after a few weeks, probably from lead poisoning my father thought. He took me to the library. I learned that all turtles hatch from eggs and never know their parents. I identified with turtles. I didn’t really know my parents with their secret lives, my father with his hushed marriage and hidden child.

  I pulled Natalie closer to me. “Nat, sea turtles lay their eggs together on beaches. When we have babies let’s have them together.”

  “Sure, but not on the beach.” She batted her eyelashes, and her black marble eyes laughed at me.

  That was my first visit to Saint Catherine’s. I’d never been in a church before. I didn’t know what to expect. We pushed on the massive wood doors. Natalie stopped, dipped the three middle fingers of her slender right hand into a bowl.

  “What’s that?”

  “Holy water. Do like me, cross yourself with it.”

  “It’s cold,” I said surprised and followed her moves.

  The church was dark, lit only by the flames of votive candles reaching out of small red glass holders, and shafts of dim light coming through stained glass windows.

  “This is neat,” I whispered and breathed in the smell of melting wax.

  We knelt before the altar. “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” Natalie kissed the little gold cross she wore around her neck, and I kissed the small silver and blue Jewish star my grandparents had given me for Chanukah. For a split second I thought about kissing the metal dog tag that hung just below my Star of David. I fiddled with it, running the fingers of my right hand over the raised letters of my name.

  We were the children of Red Paranoia in a Cold War that could heat up and thaw as easily as a defrosting steak, made to wear dog tags on chains around our necks to identify our maimed, mutilated, mangled, bombed, blown-up bodies. We were in an arms race with the Communists and always hanging in the air was the threat of nuclear weather.

  Last year we set off our first H-bomb.

  Two years ago Mrs. Campbell, my plump, red-haired, red-faced, third grade teacher who looked like a tomato, told us over and over in a voice that sounded like she had a clothespin on her nose, “These safety procedures might save your lives if we’re bombed, so don’t be afraid boys and girls. Say your first and last name and the letters Y–G–T–T. TJohn Wilkinson, Y–G–T–T. Natalie Palermo, Y–G–T–T. Darci Beriman, Y–G–T–T...You’ll–Get–Through–This.”

  We cowered under our desks, huddled in our fears. And we were always instructed to face away from the risky classroom windows during the dismal air raid drills that stained our childhood calendar.

  “Nat, it feels safe here. I don’t think anything bad’ll happen to us. The windows are great.”

  “Dar, that’s Jesus up there,” she said, pointing to the man of many colors set in fragments of stained glass and bathed in the waning light coming through the tinted window panel behind the altar.

  “He looks sad. Do you have to marry him one day?”

  “No silly, why do you ask?”

  “Remember when you wore that white dress and veil, you looked just like a little bride practicing for a wedding.”

  “That was my first Holy Communion, when I got this gold cross.” She lifted the gold chain to her lips and ran the little man

  on the crucifix over her smile.

  “Is that when you drank the pretend blood?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not married.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked nearing the stone woman.

  Without so much as a breath in between, Natalie said, “Saint Catherine of Sienna she had twenty-four brothers and sisters when she was a girl Jesus appeared to her once he came with his blessed mother he put a ring on Catherine’s finger and she was his bride.”

  It was April but I could feel winter under my turtleneck shirt as a chill that had nothing to do with the weather ran up my spine; when it reached the nape of my neck my head pirouetted in a tight, quick counterclockwise stir.

  “Nat, I think Jesus is gonna visit me someday,” I blurted out in an awed whisper.

  “Dar, we’ll both see Jesus one day,” she assured me, “when we’re in heaven.”

  Two nuns sweeping the floor with their long black habits approached us while we admired the white marble statue. The taller nun with the thick glasses said, “Hello Natalie. You know, girls, Saint Catherine always kept Jesus in her heart.”

  “Thank-you, Sister Mary Catherine,” Natalie said as she elbowed me to leave.

  Outside, the sky was low and dark gray like a wooly blanket under which Brooklyn would sleep that night. We ran the seven blocks home. When I reached Liberty Avenue I could see my father. He was wearing his brown suit. His rough construction worker hands were clasped tightly behind his back. He was pacing a small patch of sidewalk, to and fro, like a pendulum. My father stared at me, with his teeth clenched, and raised his thick hand. I flinched because I thought he was going to hit me. Instead he pointed in the direction of our second floor apartment. I knew as surely as if he had spoken that I was to go upstairs immediately.

  My mother was waiting in the doorway, wearing her size-twelve beige, knit ribbed skirt and matching top with sheer, clingy stockings and beige heels. It was one of only two dress outfits she owned. She usually wore cotton housedresses. Under her knit skirt she was wearing a girdle with garters to hold up her seamed stockings. The girdle was like a tube, open at the waist and the bottom. She didn’t wear underpants and a girdle at the same time. I envisioned her fine strawberry blond pubic hair coming from the bottom of the girdle like a fancy lace fringe. I’d seen my mother getting dressed many times.

  My mother had a sour look on her face. “I told you to be home before it got dark,” she said angrily. “Now we’re late for Papa’s.” She abruptly raised my arms above my head, tugged the white turtleneck top off, pulled me into our musty windowless bathroom and quickly scrubbed my face and hands with a washcloth that was stiff from being sun dried on a clothesline in the alley. It left my face red and stinging. She put a clean white cotton blouse on me and tucked it into the green, pleated skirt I was wearing. Then my mother sat down on the closed toilet seat and yanked the rubber band
from my hair. I stifled a yelp and winced in discomfort. She clumsily redid my ponytail with her stiff knobby knuckled fingers, pressed the brush hard against my forehead to unglue my sweaty bangs and rushed me down the narrow stairwell.

  My father was in the driver’s seat of his new two-tone blue Chevrolet Bellaire. It wasn’t exactly new—five years old. But it was his new car and he had wanted his family to see it while it was still light outside. Obviously that wasn’t going to happen. My mother sat up front with my father and I climbed into the back seat. My father’s silent green eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. No one spoke; the only noise was the windshield wipers whacking away the rain during the five-minute drive to Milford Street.

  Five

  My father’s two long-nosed, olive-complexioned brothers, their wives, his pasty-skinned sister, her nervous twitching husband and my seven cousins were all seated at the Passover table, which under the starched white cloths were actually Papa’s sawhorses with wide planks of wood on top.

  Grandma’s eyes narrowed. She looked directly at my mother. “We’re all waiting for you, it’s the first seder night and you hold Papa up. What’s the matter with you?”

  My mother’s long swan-neck began to turn red and blotchy. She bit her lower lip; her hazel eyes looked to the floor. “I’m sorry Riva, it’s just that Darci—”

  “Oh, don’t give me any baloney about Darci,” my grandmother said as she heaved her great round bosom and pushed the air with her hands.