A Long Island Story

by Rick Gekoski

  Ben counter-attacked, it was like a war between them. ‘You can’t run a state on the basis of fine particularities: you need politics, and laws, and a moral creed. You need ideas!’

  Ideas? Phooey. What Addie wanted and needed was not the people, but people: breathing, suffering, in need of succour. The notion of the workers or the proletariat – the masses – only produced a foggy blob in her mind, whereas she could focus perfectly on a pregnant teenager, an alcoholic or drug addict, a family in need, a child who was being abused or neglected. To care about the people, you take care of people.

  While Ben was studying his boring torts (whatever they were), Addie was ensconced in the relentlessly modern, Freudian-based School of Social Work, taking courses that touched her heart, real topics about real people. In Contemporary Love and Marriage, they did a case study on the relationship of D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Von Richthofen, which was a remarkable inclusion in the syllabus, given that he had only died a few years earlier.

  ‘See,’ the students were told, ‘this is what a working, highly passionate relationship can be,’ and by implication should be. Lawrence became a hero to this generation of young women: if only Billy or Joe, or indeed Ben, was burning with such an inward flame! If only Edna or Sheila, or indeed Addie, could respond to that flame, ignite, passionately embrace life in every manner and fashion. Be prompted by the loins, the blood, the bowels – any number of inward bits, the heart even, but not the head! They were bad, heads.

  She read Lawrence’s poetry to Ben, in bed. Her favourite of his books was Look! We Have Come Through, which celebrates Lawrence and Frieda’s first years together. Addie would read with appropriate intensity the opening line of ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’: ‘Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!’

  ‘I feel like that sometimes, after I eat too many beans,’ he said.

  She put down the book and turned her back. Passion was no laughing matter.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, intending to provoke this disciple of the wrong kind of beardy prophet, ‘they may have come through, but I don’t see why I have to look.’

  Yet it had been a wonderful period of a few years, in the sunny climes of passionate engagement. And then the rains came, and everything was washed away. The rains were first called Jacob and then Rebecca, like the names of those hurricanes that sweep up the East Coast, buffeting. The end of sleep, and peace, and happiness. That dopey DHL never knew fatherhood, even second-hand, or he could never have talked such tripe. Ben escaped every morning, he wasn’t an inmate, just a visitor. She thought, Well, that was us, wasn’t it, fellow travellers, and look at us now!

  No social work jobs for the foreseeable future. Poppa Maurice helped send the children to private school – he regularly supplied brown paper bags stuffed with a surprising amount of money, held together with rubber bands, stacked randomly, ones, fives, tens, twenties, even some fifties, as if released from a cash register at the end of a working day, several working days. But it wasn’t enough to pay everyday expenses, it was extra. And so she took a part-time job, when Jake was at school and Becca in nursery, selling The World Book Encyclopaedia door-to-door.

  She was bright and engaging and actually believed in her product, but her desperation was etched in heavy lines; people wanted to get away from her, sales were few.

  ‘If I had a soul,’ she said to Ben after a wasted four hours patrolling the streets of the neighbourhood, ‘this would have killed it.’

  He was sympathetic. He would have hated that job, couldn’t have done it for a second. Please, Missus, may I have just a moment of your time? I have an offer that will transform the lives of you and your children . . .

  ‘Thank God for that,’ he said.

  ‘Not at all, this is worse. What I do have is a self, and it’s killed that instead.’

  It was true. She didn’t remember who she’d been, in those hopeful spirited sexy days, could hardly recognise the person she now was, save for the clear recognition that she didn’t like her.

  And as for her world, she detested it. It was intolerably sylvan in Alexandria, promiscuously treed and bushed, but it was just across the Potomac from DC and the smells wafted across the river. One Sunday, as they were crossing the bridge on the way to an enlightening children’s afternoon at the Smithsonian, Ben had looked down at the brown sluggish waters and remarked how polluted the river was.

  ‘Yeah!’ said Becca. ‘You can even see the pollute!’

  You could see it in DC, too. The city landscape was polluted. Shit steamed in the streets. Shits walked the streets (they were called Republicans) and the faecal current swept across America, over the cities and the plains, polluted the rivers and the lakes, crossed the Rockies, stinking and malign. Everyone breathed it, everyone was infected. It was almost impossible to escape.

  Ben had a variety of car activities for diverting the children, to get their minds off their struggle for dominance. There was the licence plate game, a singsong, the alphabet game, I spy, tongue-twisters, various simple riddles, though the kids had heard them all by now. Chickens crossing the road? Boring! He amused himself inventing new ones that left him belly-wobbling, giggling like a schoolboy.

  ‘What’s the difference between a duck?’ he asked.

  There was a pause while the children waited for him to continue.

  ‘Do you have any questions?’ he asked disingenuously, already beginning to giggle. Addie stared out the window.

  Jake was first to respond.

  ‘That’s stupid. You can’t answer that . . .’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You didn’t say, the difference between a duck and a . . . what!’

  Ben allowed a little time to coagulate in the smoky air. Becca leaned forwards: That was really smart of Jake!

  He half-turned from the driver’s seat and looked at each of the children, wisely.

  ‘I’m not giving any hints,’ he said, and burst into laughter so protracted that the car began to drift across the lane. Drivers honked furiously. He pulled himself together, straightened their trajectory, wiped his eyes, laughed some more. From the back, you could see his shoulders shaking.

  ‘That’s not fair!’ said Becca.

  ‘That’s not funny!’ said Jake.

  ‘Grossman slays Grossman!’ said Ben, proudly.

  ‘Again!’ said Addie. Ben was unusually animated; it didn’t ring true, all this fun. What the hell was there to have fun about? She looked at him sharply. Something was up, he looked shifty and evasive.

  ‘I spy with my little eye,’ she said tersely, as the kids began to scan the unfolding countryside, the orange and yellow and brown cars, two-tones, with their chrome and white-walls, the billboards on the side of the road pimping boisterously for Nabisco Oreo Cookies and CANvenient 7Up. More intelligence and wit went into them than into the governance of the whole nation.

  ‘Something beginning with A.’

  Jake, reflexively competitive and four years older, looked round the car. Unwilling to miss out, but only just competent, Becca looked wherever he did, in the vain hope that he might miss an A and then she could name it.

  ‘An arm!’ he shouted.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘An ankle!’

  Becca scanned her body anxiously.

  ‘Not that either.’

  Unwilling to be drawn further into this dangerous body parts inventory, guessing all too easily which one Addie had in mind, Ben joined in.

  ‘There,’ he shouted, pointing across the road. ‘Amattababy!’

  There was a snort of derision from the rear.

  ‘Ben, you can’t just make things up!’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘Did so! What’s a mattababy?’

  His shoulders started to shake.

  ‘Nothin’, baby. What’s a matta with you?’

  It was a brocheh, Perle reminded herself, such a blessing to have Addie and the children coming, and that Frankie and Michelle and their little ones had sett
led in Huntington after the war.

  ‘It’s a brocheh,’ she said firmly.

  Maurice put down his coffee cup, paused to light his filter-tipped Kent cigarette and place it in the ashtray on the dining table, let enough time go by to suggest unexpressed disagreement, as if he needed to consider whether it was such a blessing after all. You could get brochehed half to death during a hot summer with a tiny house full of needy, squabbling, overheated and over-entitled family.

  He could hardly have admitted it to his wife, nor entirely to himself, but he was anxious about their imminent arrival, the invasion of a home hardly big enough for the two of them, stuffed for the summer with Addie and her kids, Frankie and Michelle with an uncertain number of babies popping in as fast as they popped out, Die Schwarze moping in the tiny maid’s room next to the bathroom. The children would be put into the guest room, and Addie – and later in the month Ben, when he joined them in a couple of weeks – would sleep in the back area, which had screens separating it from the porch, and a glass door that could be closed at night, a curtain drawn across. Hardly private, hardly comfortable. A thin partition wall separating the cramped space from the parents’ bedroom. He wondered how they ever managed to do it; they gave rare sign of having done so. No noises in the night, no sly smiles in the morning.

  No guest ever leaves too early. A month, no, seven weeks this year, of Addie and the kids! They’d be arriving in a few hours, and he was already apprehensive. She was spiky and difficult, had been since her childhood, or at least from those early days when she was supplanted by the arrival of baby Frankie. Perle had adored her son since he first peeked into the world and her recalcitrant displaced daughter had never recovered.

  He would make himself scarce. Go into the garage to his workbench, find things to make, or to fix. The fence round the back of the house needed new slats, do the undercoat and painting, put them up next week. There was always something to do at the bungalow. He quite liked Harbor Heights Park, the trip from the city on Grand Central Parkway and Northern State, the slow retreat from his beloved concrete to the occasional pleasures of grass and trees, the mildly alarming rural peacefulness. No horns honking, no traffic, no crowds. It was fine with him, so long as it didn’t last too long.

  A post-First World War development of summer homes for New Yorkers, the simple bungalows formed a self-enclosed community just ten minutes’ walk from Huntington Harbor. It was a promising wooded site, bounded by roads on three sides, unimaginatively divided into lettered lanes. By 1925 seventy units had been sold to city lawyers, engineers, architects, professors, civil servants, builders and small businessmen, anxious to get away from the oppressive heat of the city, to enjoy days on the local beach with their children. Brown’s Beach, it was called locally, and brown it certainly was.

  Only a few years later, the residents, who had not been warned of the menace of the local waters, signed a petition for an immediate amelioration of their parlous state, complaining of ‘a polluted harbor, constituting a menace to health and life . . . with sewage and other disease-breeding material continuously distributed into the waters of the harbor, including the effluvia from cesspools and toilets, making the harbor unfit for bathing purposes or for the cultivation of shellfish’.

  Not many of the residents, most of whom kept kosher homes, gave a hoot about shellfish, but the pollution was disgusting, the smell at low tide noxious. The waters were only negotiable at high tide, and grandparents warned of the dangers of getting your head in the water. The children went on frolicking, splashing and ducking. None of them died. The adults donned their swimsuits and paddled. Now and again one of them, swimming in the deeper waters, would encounter an itinerant floating turd, like an organic grenade. Ben called it Perle Harbor.

  Becca fought for territory in the back seat, was bored quickly and kvetched, got carsick if she read or ate too much junk. She worried incessantly that they would get lost, particularly if Ben turned off the highway for one reason or another.

  ‘How will we find our way back?’ asked the little one, increasingly anxious. ‘Is it on the map?’ She had a lot of faith in maps, but only Ben could read them. If Addie started unfolding, peering and muttering, tracing various lines with her finger, Becca knew there was going to be trouble and they would end up in fairyland.

  ‘Ben!’ she ordered. ‘Stop the car! Then you can look at the map.’

  ‘I am looking at it just fine,’ said Addie, peering down intently, trying to get the damn map to hold still.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’

  Addie pointed randomly. ‘Here!’ she said. ‘And we are going – there!’ She pointed at a place higher up. ‘Towards the North!’

  Becca looked outside, at the unwinding landscape of the highway. The North was uphill, like mountains. But the road was flat. They were lost.

  The bungalow was at the top of the unpaved Lane L, which had three other houses on it, off Cedar Valley Lane. It was a simple, unheated wooden structure, thrown up by a developer who could hardly produce them fast enough to meet the demand. When Maurice bought theirs for $2,000, in 1939, they were already considered good investments, though Perle worried about the cost.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said breezily. ‘I’ll pay it off.’ He would never have said ‘we’. She acceded with her own version of good grace: silence, a shrug, acquiescence. Paying wasn’t her problem. Morrie would provide, he always did, almost always.

  A screened-in front room led into the kitchen, through which was a modest living room, three bedrooms and two simple bathrooms. At the back was a porch, with a gate that led to a small lawn, and a couple of mature crab apple trees between which Poppa could hang the orange striped hammock. The children had to be taught that a gate was not also a swing, except that it was if you wanted it to be. One day the hinges broke and Becca fell over and skinned her knee. She didn’t do that again.

  From the very first day, Perle adored the heavenly expanse after the cramped two-room apartment on the fourth floor of the Hotel Brewster, kitchen, dining room and living room together as you came through the door, with a double bedroom and bath. And in Huntington, six rooms! A porch, a yard! She loved furnishing it, choosing fabrics and furniture from the current Sears Catalog, a bedroom suite for only $37.75. That was very reasonable! A red lacquered rocking chair, a few throw carpets, a sofa, some occasional tables: only another $32.40, for them all. She had a few bits and pieces she could spare from the apartment – it was too cluttered anyway – and from the local goodwill shop she bought a dining table and six chairs – eight bucks! – and three sets of used curtains at fifty cents a pair. The empty space soon became a home, if only for the summers. She loved it! A summer was a long time, you could stretch it at both ends as the developers recommended. Residents went to Harbor Heights in the early spring and didn’t leave until after Labor Day (for those with children at city schools) or October (for those fortunate enough to stay on for the beautiful fall).

  It was a happy period, the two of them in unusual harmony, proud of what they were creating, Perle on the inside, Maurice, the out, members of a professional community of gregarious city residents. They made friends quickly: Momshe and Popshe Livermore (he was the boss of a fancy department store), further up the road Sam and Martha Lowry, and across from them the Cohens (he was named Edwin, but she seemed only to be called Honey). The women became friends, which was a brocheh, because it left the men to their baseball, cigarettes and beer, their pinochle games in the evening, while the women schmoozed in the living room.

  Maurice had no idea what they talked about. The children, obviously. Clothes, recipes, matters of housekeeping? TV programmes? Who cared, as long as they were happy, and quiet? He would have been surprised by the range of their conversations, would have forgotten to add the topic ‘husbands’, about whom they were sometimes amused and frequently exasperated. But to a woman they were loyal, occasionally indiscreet, but anxious never to overstep that unspoken line that would make them emot
ionally unfaithful. They all knew about men, what they were like. No need to say everything, was there?

  Sometimes, when the right four could be arranged (which was surprisingly difficult), they would play canasta. Perle was a student of the game, as adept as Maurice at his, but her aggression was not channelled into bonhomie, teasing and patronising instruction. No, hers was the untrammelled thing: she played to win, and when she snapped down her melds, taking the cards from her hand and twisting her wrist as ferociously as if she were trying to remove the recalcitrant lid of a jar of pickles, you could hear the snap as they hit the table, which wobbled under the impact. As did the other players. It was daunting, imperious. No one wished to play with her, no fun in that. Better to schmooze – safer, more relaxing.

  And while they talked, they knitted. It was a skill required of the girls of their generation, and during the war they had formed a local group, knitting socks, sweaters and mufflers for the poor freezing soldiers. Afterwards Perle carried on knitting and (a new passion) crocheting, revelling in the freedom to choose her own patterns and colours, to brighten things up with oranges and greens, make sweaters less bulky, socks for more delicate feet, ladies’ mufflers to look smart on a winter’s night. She knitted at such a rate that the family were swathed in warming garments, begging for less.

  The overflow was placed in the cedar chest in the front room, opposite the freezer, which was Becca’s favourite spot in the bungalow. When she arrived she’d run up the steps, pull back the lid, put her head right in and take a deep smell. It was heavenly; she couldn’t get enough of it, would return several times a day and sniff away happily, like some sort of juvenile junky. Opposite her, Jake would make several trips to the freezer to sneak a Good Humor ice cream. Becca liked them, too. Sometimes he’d share. But he thought the cedar chest was stupid.