by Evergreen
Joseph had told her to buy what she wanted, and she was doing
315
so, spending far less than he would have spent. She'd furnished the dining room at an estate auction in the neighborhood, with a long, plain pine table and an enormous Welsh dresser. . . . These high rooms needed massive pieces and massive pieces were old; they didn't make them anymore for the cramped spaces of this century. There were flowers all over this house: clustered on the carpet in the library, scattered in blue and white bouquets on the walls of an airy bedroom. Geraniums in wooden tubs stood at the front door. It was beginning to take on the look she had striven for, the look of a family which had lived long in one place and slowly collected its' possessions through the years. (Hadn't she lived once in a house like that? This silver has been in my family since before the Revolution, Paul's mother said.) A false impression? Of course! But so much of life is bound to be false. . . . And middle-class? Oh-so-genteel, so understated, so English-countryside! Such a house for Joseph and Anna, once of Ludlow Street! And why not? If they liked it, and were comfortable with it? And she had done it well. If it didn't look like this when the original owners lived in it, then it ought to have.
The one concession to Joseph, who was far too busy these days to care about anything else, was the hanging of her portrait over the mantel in the living room. No, two concessions: the other was the gilded clock, which was to go under the portrait.
"I just don't like meeting myself every time I walk into that room," Anna objected, to no avail. About the clock she said nothing.
She unpacked the silver candlesticks, clutching them in her fists for a moment, feeling them before putting them on the dining-room table. The places they had seen before this one! The shelf on Washington Heights, because there had been no dining room table there, wrapped in a blanket for the ocean crossing. She could remember her mother saying the blessing over them, but where were they kept during the week? She thought and thought, straining herself to remember, and could not. And before that they had stood in the houses of a grandmother and an unknown great-grandmother. Her own mother had died before Anna had thought to ask about those other women, or had even cared about knowing. So now she would never know.
When everything else was in place, Anna unpacked her books. She took long afternoons arranging them on the shelves in sections according to the subject: art, biography, poetry, fiction. Under
316
317
those headings, she arranged them again in alphabetical order according to author.
Here Iris gave approval. "You really have the makings of a library. I'd no idea we had so many."
"Half of them have been stacked away in barrels and boxes all these years."
Iris looked at her, Anna thought, with curiosity. "You're really happy, aren't you, Ma?"
"Yes, very." (It's a thing you learn and cultivate, this 'happiness.' You count what you have and are grateful for it. And if that sounds pompous, I can't help it.) And, not wanting to ask, yet not able to refrain from asking, "I hope you are too, a little, Iris?" The question came out almost like a plea.
"I'm all right. I'm better off than nine-tenths of the rest of the world."
Quite true. But it was not the answer Anna had wanted.
If only she would make more friends! There had been two or three young women who taught at her school in New York whom she saw regularly. They used to go to theatre and lunch together on weekends. But now even these few were lost to her unless she wanted to go into the city every week. Mostly now she stayed at home playing the piano, reading or correcting papers. No life for a person of twenty-seven.
She didn't stop and talk to people. She'd nod and go walking on; Anna had seen her do it often enough. But you needed to make an effort; people didn't just drop down the chimney and seek you out! On the Broadway block where Anna had done her shopping for all those years she had known everybody; generations of roller-skating kids, the shoe repair man, the butcher. Hadn't the butcher had a nephew just out of Columbia Law School, and asked for Iris' telephone number to give to him? But when Anna had mentioned it Iris had been furious.
She had tried, since moving here, to get her out to some of her own activities. There was a very active group of women at the temple sisterhood, some of them even younger than Iris. But, naturally, they were all married. There were the League of Women Voters and the Hospital Guild, which was right now raising funds for a new wing. Anna liked that sort of thing, had done it often enough in the city. People said she had a talent for making these fund raisers a success, for getting the people to come and finding speakers who could hold their attention. It wasn't hard; you just
put a smile on your face, let people know you were available to work and you could be busy every day. It was almost a challenge to move into a new community and see how quickly you could make a place for yourself!
"You must have won the popularity contest," Iris remarked one afternoon when, on arriving home from school, she found a ladies' meeting just breaking up. The way she said it, and she had said it before, was odd: in part it was an accusation, in part a question. Anna had tried the simple answer often enough: When you're friendly to people they're friendly to you. But it had produced no results, except perhaps irritation on Iris' part. And anyway, it sounded like some scout maxim or else one of those pious declarations that used to be embroidered on samplers or printed and hung over the boss's desk in an office. So she fell back on lame humor. "My red hair, no doubt." And kept it at that. If it hadn't been for all these friends or acquaintances, whatever you wanted to call them, the house would have been unbearably empty. Empty rooms were the hazard of middle age. After the birds have flown the nest, et cetera. And if there had never been a nestful at all?
Mary Malone was distressed about her son Mickey, who'd been in Hawaii during the war and had gone back there to live. But she still had the rest of them nearby, not to speak of the grandchildren already born and yet to come! While I, while we—
More than once Anna had thought of getting into the car with Joseph, driving up to that town and knocking at the door: "We've come to see our grandson," they'd say. And then what? No, it couldn't be done in the face of those people's refusal. The child would be the one to suffer. It couldn't be done. Someday, when he is older, people said, someday he'll want to see you. Yes, after all the lovely years of his childhood were past, he might, perhaps, come to them. A stranger, come out of curiosity or God knows why else.
On days like that Anna would need to be active, to work with her hands. She would go down into the kitchen and help Celeste with the cooking. Celeste had represented herself as a 'good plain cook,' but had turned out to be more plain than good. Anna was just as glad that the cooking hadn't been taken out of her own hands. . . .
She hadn't wanted anyone living in the house in the first place. With three adults, two of them gone all day, they could have done
i
318
very well with a woman to come in once or twice a week to clean.
But Joseph had been firm about it. "This enormous house? No, you're to get someone and without delay. I insist," he'd said.
And so Celeste had come to them. She was a large, dark brown woman whose presence was marked by a loud voice that laughed whenever it wasn't singing sorrowful hymns. She had come north from Georgia for no reason that she ever disclosed, leaving behind here a vague family: children? Husband? She never told them and, after one unsuccessful attempt, they never asked her.
She was to live in their house as long as they did and know them perhaps better than they knew themselves.
During their second autumn, before full dark, Joseph came driving home from the railroad station and was startled by something at the side of the road not far from his house. He backed the car up to look again.
It was a small dog, lying in tall grass. He leaned out of the car. The dog raised its head an inch or two and fell back. Its chest and one of its legs were soaked in blood.
He'd never been very useful around blood or pain and he knew it. Maybe he ought to leave the dog and telephone the police when he got home. But in the meantime some other car might come along and kill it or just mangle it some more. He shuddered and looked again. It was a little white dog with a sheep's face, the Lovejoys' dog. He knew nothing about dogs and really didn't like them. But he remembered this one because when they had seen it on the Lovejoys' lawn Anna had exclaimed over the sheep. Then Iris had looked in a book—leave it to Iris to look things up—and told them it was a dog, a Bedlington terrier.
Would it bite if he were to pick it up? He couldn't leave it there like that. It raised its head again, or tried to, and he heard its whimper. No, he couldn't leave it there like that. He got out of the car. There was no cloth, nothing to lay it on. He took his coat off. If the spots didn't come out it couldn't be helped. The dog whimpered again when he picked it up, feeling clumsy and sick with pity for it.
He drove up the hill and turned into the double driveway of the Lovejoy house. A maid answered the bell, and in the hallway behind her he heard a woman's voice.
"Who is it, Carrie?"
"It's Tippy, Mrs. Lovejoy. He's been hurt."
319
"I found him on the side of the road," Joseph said. "I'm Friedman, your neighbor."
Mrs. Lovejoy gave a little scream. "Oh, my God!"
Joseph held out his arms and she took the little bundle of dog and coat. "Carrie, tell Bob to get the car and call Dr. Chase, tell him we're on our way." She whirled back to Joseph. "How did this happen?"
"I don't-know," he said, and, suddenly understanding, added, "I didn't do it. I found him on the road."
She turned away. He saw that she didn't believe him. "My coat, please. May I have my coat?"
And when it was dropped upon the floor he picked up his bloodied coat and let himself out the door.
At dinner, having said nothing about the incident to Anna, he heard himself asking her quite suddenly, "Tell me, do you ever think this house is too far from your friends?"
She looked surprised. "Well, everyone does seem to live twenty minutes or so away, but I don't really mind. What makes you ask?"
"Just wondering. We've been here awhile and I wondered whether you liked it as much as you thought you would. We can always sell and get another place."
"Oh, but I love it here! You must know I do."
Yes, true. The way she stands in the doorway after we've been out, and walks around touching things. At night when it's warm she sits on the steps, watching the stars. She used to do that when she was a child in Poland, she says.
The doorbell rang and after a moment Celeste came in. "There's a gentleman to see you in the hall."
Just inside the door was Mr. Lovejoy. He stood somewhat uncertainly.
"I came over to thank you. My wife was terribly upset about the dog. She realized afterward that she hadn't thanked you." "No, she hadn't. But that's all right."
"He had cut himself on a broken bottle. The vet said he would have bled to death in a short while if you hadn't picked him up." "I don't like to see anything suffer. Not animals or human beings, either."
Anna had come into the hall. "What's this all about, Joseph? You didn't tell me!"
"There was nothing to tell," he answered shortly.
320
"Your husband was very kind. The dog means a lot to us, like one of the family."
"Then I'm glad he could help," Anna said. "Won't you come in for a minute?"
"Thank you, I'd better be getting back. You've made some changes in the house," he added, addressing Anna. "I'd hardly recognize it."
"Anytime you want to see it you're welcome."
"Thank you again." Mr. Lovejoy bowed and the door closed behind him.
"Well! You weren't very gracious to that man, Joseph. I've never seen you so rude."
"What did you want me to do? Kiss him?"
"Joseph! I don't know what's got into you! Such a nice man, too."
"What was nice about him? What could you tell in half a minute? Sometimes, Anna, you talk like a child!"
"And you talk like a nasty, insulting crank! I don't mind, but I should think you'd want to be nice to the neighbors. We might get to be friends, for all you know."
"Sure! They're waiting for us!"
"Well, we're friends with the Wilmots down the street, aren't we?"
"Okay, okay, have it your way." He patted her on the back.
Friends? Hardly. But something human had come through, all the same. He stood a moment looking through the door down the length of the living room where the fire sparked under the mantel and Anna's portrait hung above it. No, he wouldn't sell, wouldn't leave this house. It was his house. It was—home.
29
At the last minute her parents remembered that they had been invited out to dinner and Iris would have to be hostess alone to Theo Stern. It was a clumsy trick. They might have thought of something more clever.
As if it would make any difference! It was just one more humiliation and this one worse than most, because Theo was so un-or-dinary and would see right through it. They were always praising his brilliance, so how could they think he would be stupid enough not to know what they were doing?
She was afraid. What to say to him during the long meal and the longer evening, knowing he would be wishing himself away and back in New York? He came to their house to see Joseph and Anna, not her. She had really never been alone with him, unless one could count four or five polite invitations to theatre by way of repaying her parents' hospitality. And one time at the beach with two of the Malone sons and their wives.
Celeste was coming upstairs, humming. Did she know she was constantly singing, or was it by now an unconscious habit? Iris came out of her room.
"Celeste, there'll only be two at dinner."
"Your ma told me. What I wanted to know was, shall I make a pie? There's time enough."
"Good heavens, anything. I don't care. This dinner tonight is the last thing I wanted."
Celeste looked sly. Sly and merry. "You shouldn't oughta say
322
that. He's a real nice man, Dr. Stern. I taken a liking to him the first time I opened the door and him standing there asking if this was the Friedman house. I knowed right away I liked him."
"I like him, too. That's no reason why I have to entertain him, is it?"
"He likes you, I see that."
"Of course he does! He likes all of us. You, too."
"Then I'm going to make the pie. And biscuits with the chicken. He ate four biscuits last time we had them."
Even Celeste was captivated by his Viennese charm! But it wasn't fair to be sardonic about that: there was so much else beneath the courtesy and wit, including one's awareness of what the world—the Nazi fury—had done to Theo Stern.
He had traced them down last year upon arriving in New York. The last they had heard before then was a letter written from England just after the United States had entered the war. Mama's eyes had run with fresh tears, reading all over again about the Uncle Eli family, all destroyed: the old people and the young, Theo Stern's wife Liesel and their baby—all annihilated. Horrible, horrible! Like one of those ghoulish fairy tales in which ogres devour children and people are thrown into furnaces. But this had really happened. You looked at Theo and, remembering, were so moved—you wanted to put your hand on his, you wanted to say I know, I know. Except that you didn't know: how could you, unless you had been there?
He never spoke of himself directly. His story had been drawn out of him in short sentences, answers to questions tactfully and obliquely put.
He'd had friends in England, made in the years he'd spent at Cambridge, and these had taken him in, had given him a base from which to reconstruct himself. When he enlisted in the British army it was not as a doctor. He had wanted to fight, to be used in a less passive way than healing wounds. He had wanted, he said, to work 'vengefully,' and that's how they had put him to use. As a child Theo had l
ived four years in France while his father opened a branch of his business there. Because of that he spoke colloquial French, slang and all. So he had been enlisted to work with the underground, and had been parachuted into France, complete with a French identity. He was supposed to have been born in a provincial town, son of a teacher; to have gone to school and church there and prepared for the university; all this was in case of cap-
323
ture by the Nazi occupying forces. He had seen, Iris reflected, seen in the flesh all the things that made you shudder and turn away when you saw mere bits of them in the newsreels. Theo had lived through them.
