by Rick Gekoski
‘But,’ said Charlie, anxious not to give the impression that he had been unhappy in his garden apartment, ‘we’ll miss it here, it’s very comfortable, nice neighbours, you can walk into town . . .’
‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Addie. ‘Is it the same as Frankie’s?’
‘The same?’
‘You know, same layout, same kitchen, same everything.’
The implication was not lost.
‘Oh no, each apartment is different is some way or another. We first tenants got to choose our own appliances and could modify the floor plan if we got in early enough . . .’
Addie rose from her seat, carefully avoiding the two cartons full of dishware at her feet, pushed under the dining-room table.
‘Can we have a quick look round?’
It didn’t take long, the Silbers anxious at the state of things: pictures removed from the walls left rectangles on the exposed paintwork, piles of blankets and bedding crammed into black garbage bags, the desolate air that makes any soon-to-be-abandoned home dreary and unwelcoming.
Addie walked through quickly, aware of her hosts’ embarrassment, anxious to spend just enough time not to be rude and get out of there. Anyway, it was exactly the same as Frankie’s, same floor plan, two crumby bedrooms, the larger perhaps ten by twelve feet, the other tighter and squarer, adequate for the kids. Small bathroom with bath and shower above, basic kitchen, basic appliances. More or less what she was used to in Alexandria, though preferable: lighter, slightly larger, more attractive yards. Better parking.
She tried to imagine what D.H. Lawrence might have said about it, but even he would have been speechless.
‘That went well, I think.’ Ben guided the car out of its parking place, checked the mirror twice and pulled away smoothly. ‘Yes,’ he added, agreeing with himself. ‘Nice people, pleasant apartment. Nice development. We can be happy here. Buy a house in a couple years, once I get established.’
He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. They drove back to the bungalow in silence. It was hot in the car, baking, he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, transferred the stickiness onto his pants.
Liar! She thought to herself. Goddamn liar. His attempt to be positive infuriated her. He knew as well as she did that it was a disaster, way worse even than Alexandria.
When they pulled up behind the Caddy in the driveway, Addie got out quickly, pausing only to say, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it. I won’t. You’ll have to find some other way.’ She didn’t slam the door, closed it delicately and firmly. Purposefully.
Ben looked at her back as she retreated, went into the porch and closed that door too. Enough with the closing doors! Pretty soon he’d be back in Alexandria, blessedly free of Addie’s balkiness – opening a door not closing one, and receiving a welcome the warmth of which made him tingle in anticipation. It had been a guilty secret for too long, only he wasn’t guilty about it any more. Might as well enjoy it while he still could . . .
They had arrived back East in 1948, when Jake was five and Becca one, when Ben got his job working on the Rural Electrification Projects for the Department of Justice. The young couple looked at apartments in DC, but nothing other than tiny one-bedroom units were affordable, and reluctantly found a halfway decent two-bedroom apartment in Alexandria, from which Ben could commute and in which Addie could fester.
She negotiated an agreement with her anxious-to-placate husband in which they spent Saturdays, when they weren’t all too exhausted or cranky, exploring the new city. Unlike Addie, Ben was unimpressed by the many monuments to America’s glorious slave-owning past and imperial present: the grandeur of American power revolted him. The Pentagon! The White House! The Senate! Lovely architecture, but so what? The glorious playground of hypocrites and bloated capitalists. Addie was happy, on a sunny afternoon, to walk round the Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial with Jake, perhaps go to the Smithsonian, and would allow Ben to go off for an hour or two (with the baby carriage) to his favourite haunt, the Washington Cooperative Bookshop on 17th St NW.
He’d never encountered anything like it before: a shop, an inventory, a programme of events so Left-ward leaning that it was amazing it hadn’t fallen over (two years later it did), with a stock of socialist and Communist books and tracts, plus well-chosen new books on various subjects – all offered at discount prices to members of the Cooperative. Ben was soon on first name terms not merely with the staff but with many of the friendly browsers, believers and fanatics, not one of whom even glanced at his gorgeous baby companion.
On the noticeboard was a copy of the in-house publication, The Bookshopper, advertising the annual picnic in Rock Creek Park. In July, as always. It was supposed to be great fun. The Cooperative cultivated a family feel, had events and special areas for children, concerts, lectures. The members and their families were more congenial, more his types than anyone in Justice. He could go to a lecture or two, perhaps a concert. He’d smiled at the very thought and resolved to say nothing.
He’d heard the rumours, of course. Since 1941, when the membership list of the bookshop had been seized by Federal agents, there had been constant surveillance. At last year’s picnic an inappropriately chic woman, claiming to be a journalist, was taking pictures of many of the revellers, then asking their names and jobs. None had been willing to divulge much, but it had rather spoiled the atmosphere. A number of families left early.
As he’d leafed through the magazines, Ben was being watched, quite openly stared at, by a casually well-dressed man in his thirties, clean-shaven, slim and bright eyed – not one of the regulars! – who met his eye and gave the briefest of nods, as if to say ‘We know who you are. If I were you I’d put that down.’ Ben had, frightened not so much by the cool hostility of the glance as by its apparent knowingness. It was directed at him. At Ben Grossman. He’d tried not to let his shiver of apprehension show. He had nothing to fear from the Senator himself, who didn’t squash vermin personally, but the nice-looking young man could make Ben’s life more than miserable.
There was regular surveillance of the bookshop’s premises, after all it was a hotbed of Reds, a meeting place for Commies anxious to subvert democracy, Christianity and the American way. Nobody could read that much propaganda and come out unsullied; in fact, they went in sullied and came out filthy.
The spies in disguise were easy enough to spot. No G-Men shiny suits, no hats, no ties. They’d been told to wear slacks and sweaters to blend in, look round the inventory in an interested fashion, make a note of who was there and what was said. So they donned their pressed and pleated trousers, button-down white cotton shirts with V-neck wool sweaters, put on their shiny black shoes and lurked. The rest of the clientele, dressed in baggy flannels, loose fitting casual shirts, with long hair, often bearded, unselfconsciously scruffy, looked with amused disdain on their preppy interlopers, teased them, made speeches in favour of revolution: made themselves and their fellow travellers as easy to pick off, and to dispatch, as apples on a tree.
In the midst of this dangerous hothouse, Ben would avoid political discourse – after all he was a member of both devils’ parties – and devote himself to choosing his reading matter for the weeks to come. He made it a point to come most weekends; if Eleanor Roosevelt could lecture there, surely he could buy some books?
It was at the Cooperative Bookshop that Ben first encountered George Orwell’s unprepossessing little book of fiction – hardly a novel, more an extended fairy tale or allegory – entitled Animal Farm. There was a small pile of them on the table. The book had aroused more – and more heated – debate and discussion than any novel since the war. The hardliners deplored its anti-Stalinism, its all too easy rejection of a mis-described autocracy, branded its author a bourgeois, worse than a bourgeois, an aristocrat who went to Eton, encore les barricades, they intoned gleefully. But for leftists like Ben, who knew Stalinism to be as brutal, arbitrary and cruel as Nazism, Orwell’s finger was pointed in the correct directio
n.
From this time, Ben re-described himself as a socialist and in the 1948 election had refused to choose between one meretricious candidate (Dewey) and a slightly less unappealing one (Truman). Instead he voted for Norman Thomas of the American Socialist Party and felt himself richer, fuller, more upright for having done so. It was a romantic gesture, and a futile one according to Addie, who was scornful and dismissive. Why waste a vote on a loser?
Hadn’t they both supported FDR? And if FDR was a fancy pants, spoiled and privileged, no one was going to offer America a better palliative than the New Deal, and they (Communists though they may have been) were sensible enough to support it. The New Deal was the only deal for the poor, the disenfranchised and the downtrodden, though that category, in the early 1930s, included a great many people who, if they could be called workers, were workers in the banks and markets, in big (or mostly small) businesses.
One afternoon, while he was in law school, Ben had treated himself to a modest lunch in Horn and Hardart’s Automat on Chestnut Street. He loved the banks of little shuttered windows that raised up when you inserted the correct change to reveal a piece of pie, some French fries, a grilled fish. It was like a playground, and every time he put his nickels and dimes or quarters in, and that window popped open, he gave a sigh of delight. Like a kid, really, all kids loved the Automat, everyone did. If you looked around it was hard to locate, even in those straitened times, anyone who didn’t grin when his window popped up.
As he began eating his chicken pot pie and mashed potato, an impoverished man sat next to him, his clothes soiled, smelling of days and nights on the streets. It was winter, but he had no coat, his nose was red and runny, his hair unkempt, veins lined what had once been rather a handsome face. As Ben watched, he went to a window and put in a nickel to buy a plate of rolls, then took the bottle of ketchup on the table and poured it all over the bread, getting his vegetables for the day, filling himself up as best he could. Ben watched him. When he finished he leant over to the poor fellow, who was mopping up some extra ketchup with the last piece of bread, and said, ‘I wonder if I might give you this?’, offering a quarter.
The man nodded, both yes and thank you, and put out his hand. Ben put the quarter in it gently and left quickly, no sense protracting such a painful scene.
He rarely told the story, which he feared would sound self-aggrandising, as if it were about him, his virtuousness. It wasn’t, it was about the poor man. A quarter was a decent amount of money, those days: he knew the man would divide it into nickels, to get himself through the next couple of days.
Becca came running up the path, grabbed her hand, pulled.
‘Addie! Come see! We made a fort!’
‘What sort of fort?’ She was glad of the diversion, pleased to be tugged away to examine this happy new structure.
‘A fort, a fort! In the back. Jake and I made it, it took all morning. And we filled it with . . .’ She thought for a second. ‘You know, food and candy and drinks and stuff . . . providers.’
‘Provisions?’
‘We can sit in there and nobody can see us because we keep the fort door open away from the house, so it’s a hideout!’
‘Well,’ said Addie, ‘a hideout is just what I’m looking for. Lead the way!’
They had draped a blanket from the cedar chest between the two hydrangea bushes, and placed two chairs on opposite sides to widen the internal space, draped another blanket between those. Inside, Jake was reading a comic and eating a peach, the juice slopping down his T-shirt.
‘Addie!’ he said. ‘Come in, you’re allowed. I’m the General, so I give you permission.’
‘The General, eh? And what is Becca?’
He paused.
‘She’s the Not General.’
‘Yeah,’ said Becca proudly. Being the Not General was almost as good as being the General. It was a title, unexalted perhaps, but not, to her ear, nothing. It was to her mother’s.
‘Surely you can do better than that? Maybe Becca can be the Sergeant? That’s a good job, it means she is in your army too.’
‘Army?’ said Jake. ‘What army?’
Addie pulled the edge of the blanket aside, leant over and came in. It was surprisingly roomy, enough space to sit comfortably, almost to lie down. They’d even brought their pillows in from the bedroom. She folded one, lay on her side, sighed.
‘It’s lovely in here. Aren’t you smart? Can I be in the army too?’
Becca gave a shriek of delight.
‘YES! Please! You can be Sergeant as well!’ She paused for a moment and rummaged around in the gloom.
‘Do you want some potato chips?’ she asked.
In the kitchen Perle was making lunch, dusting something with flour which made the front of her apron almost as powdered as her face. She looked like a plump, square apparition; Ben almost expected her to begin hoo-ing and flapping her arms as he entered the room. In spite of her domesticity, which she wore like a disguise, there was something incipiently frightening about Perle, unexplained, latent, dangerous. The powdering suited her, she looked just right as a ghost, spooky.
‘How did it go?’ she asked, still kneading a ball of dough.
He looked round the room, helped himself to a nectarine from the bowl on the kitchen counter.
‘It was OK. We had coffee and cake with Michelle and Frankie, then we had it again with the Silbers. Nice folks. Then we looked at their apartment.’
‘And? How is it?’
‘Just what we expected. Same as all of them, I guess. Perfectly adequate. We’ll be just fine there.’
‘I hope so,’ said Perle, trying to sound convinced. ‘I do hope so. Where’s Addie?’
‘I dunno, she disappeared round the back. I looked but I couldn’t see her.’
There was a pause.
‘I’m making a nice going away lunch for you,’ Perle said. ‘Chicken noodle soup with matzo balls, and some chopped liver and rye bread.’
‘And pickles?’
‘Of course pickles!’ She paused for a moment. ‘If I can find them, they seem to have disappeared.’
Of course nothing disappears, things just shift about, and the jar of pickles had migrated to a corner of the fort, which was slightly odd, because neither of the children liked them. But you could never tell which guest might arrive, and not everyone was as indifferent to pickles as they were.
Addie loved them. She would cut them into bite-sized pieces and mix them with sour cream, as an accompaniment to lunch, sometimes just as a sustaining snack. The kids hadn’t, thank God, absconded with the sour cream, but she was quite happy, lying there on her side, to unscrew the jar and help herself to a pickle. Two pickles, she put one in her left hand and ate the first with her right. Screwed the lid on firmly.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘what else could anyone want? It’s perfect here! Shall we have a little rest?’
Addie lay on her side on the uneven scrubby grass, her hip uncomfortable against a protruding knob of earth; the heat was intense in the enclosed space – it was eighty-three outside already – stifling, the air almost unbreathable. In front of her a tiny grasshopper hopped and leapt in the scorched grass; she closed her eyes, lest he jump into one of them. The sweat rolled down her back, soaking her blouse. She laughed to herself, what a sight she’d be when they re-emerged.
The kids lay down beside her and pretended to sleep, just like they did with Poppa.
‘Do we get a quarter if we’re quiet?’
‘No.’
‘That’s unfair,’ said Becca. ‘Poppa gives us a quarter.’
‘I know, but I won’t . . . I’ll give you a dollar.’
There was a considered pause before Becca giggled and came up with the line.
‘A dollar is junk!’
Their cousin Deborah, a few years older than Becca, had disgraced herself with this sentiment at a Seder at the Greenbergs’, when the children were offered a dollar to find the afikomen, and little Debs had scorned it, showin
g off in front of her cousins. Everyone was shocked, not so much at the naked greedy outspokenness as by the fact that Deb, a withdrawn little girl, immature for her age, rather inclined to hold on to her mother’s skirts, should have said anything at all. It wasn’t entirely clear why she’d made a fuss, but it was rather a good one: she put her hands on her hips, raised her voice, surprised and then embarrassed her parents, who quickly shushed her up, though without raising the stakes.
A dollar certainly wasn’t junk to Becca, nor indeed to the more affluent Jake, who hunted round the living and dining rooms assiduously, hoping to find the hidden piece of matzo. When she didn’t think it would be noticed, Bernice Greenberg caught Becca’s eye and gestured downwards towards the sofa. Becca knelt and looked underneath. There it was!
‘I get the dollar! I get it!’ said Becca, proudly delivering the matzo to her aunt.
‘You see,’ said Bernice to her pouting daughter as she handed over the bill, ‘a dollar isn’t junk at all! Look how happy Becca is!’
She’d be happy to get another dollar just now, in the darkness of the fort, so settled down and closed her eyes, trying to think of what to think of. How to spend the dollar! They could go to Woolworth’s. You could get a lot of neat stuff there. Cute bracelets with coloured jewels, rings with real diamonds, sets of pick-up-sticks, all kinds of candy.
‘Do we get one each?’ asked Jake. ‘It’s not fair!’
‘Life isn’t. But you get one too, OK? Now shut up, won’t you?’
He rolled over on his side and thought about baseball cards. For a dollar he could buy twenty packs!
‘Addie?’ It was Becca’s littlest voice. ‘Can you tell us a story, like sometimes when we go to bed? Then I won’t fidget, and I’ll get sleepy and when I wake up I’ll get a dollar.’
‘Once upon a time . . .’
‘Can it be a scary one?’ asked Jake.
‘Not too scary!’
‘OK, just scary enough. Once upon a time there was an ogre, who was horrible and ugly, with a hairy face, and he was roaming the land, frightening people. Sometimes he made them join his army, but sometimes they ran away, if they were brave. Well, there was this family, a mother and her two children . . .’
