The Widow of Wall Street

by Randy Susan Meyers

  “Professor Gardiner.” She huffed out a teary breath before continuing. “I need you in the hall, please.”

  Without a word of apology for the interruption, she left. Gardiner held up his hands, signifying “I don’t know,” followed her out, and the whispering began.

  The girl next to Phoebe put a hand to her chest. “Maybe someone in his family died. Or it could be an emergency for one of us.”

  Chills shot through Phoebe. What if her mother had suffered the heart attack that Mom always worried about? Or Daddy? Hadn’t her mother mentioned that his color seemed off yesterday? Work would drive him to an early grave, her mother always said. As Phoebe imagined her father in a hospital bed, or worse, Professor Gardiner returned, frowning and colorless.

  “We have some bad news.”

  A waiting silence came over the room.

  “I . . .” He stopped and closed his eyes, pressing his fingers to his brow. “President Kennedy has been shot.”

  A collective gasp sounded.

  “He’s dead?” asked a rumpled young man from the back of the classroom.

  “I’m afraid so.” Professor Gardiner walked to the front of his desk and sat on the worn oak. After a moment of quiet, he crossed his arms and spoke. “Mrs. Treisman—she’s our department secretary; such a kind woman—suggested I dismiss everyone. So you can be with your families. But—”

  Competing thoughts swirled. Where were her parents? Deb? Was Jake at the fraternity house? Who had shot the president? Their handsome, brave President Kennedy. Had a war begun in America?

  “—I don’t think you should go, though. Not immediately. Of course you want to be with your loved ones, but rushing to the subway might not be the best idea. Not right away. Certainly, if you need to go, do so. Only you know your family circumstances. But if you can, let’s take a few minutes together. Let this settle in.”

  A few students stood, nodded at the class, and then left, books held tight.

  “Anyone have a transistor radio?” Professor Gardiner asked after the door closed.

  Two students raised their hands.

  “Bring them up front. Let’s tune them to the same station, shall we?”

  One guy, wide and hefty, the other built low to the ground, like a wrestler, carried their small radios to the professor. Phoebe’s nerves buzzed as the group set up the radios on the professor’s desk. Static-filled voices vied for primacy until they both hit the sound of Roger Mudd reporting from Washington.

  With his voice came reality.

  They wept as they listened. Professor Gardiner radiated calm. When Mary Alice Haverstraw actually started sobbing, gulping between ragged breaths, he patted her back, leaning down and whispering secret words.

  She hated Mary Alice. In Phoebe’s family, her nickname would have been Sarah Bernhardt—the name her mother coined for whenever she thought Phoebe became too dramatic. After the hundredth time of being compared with some old actress, Phoebe had learned to hold her tongue. Hey, she’d love to weep like Mary Alice, but being a spectacle was a sin in the Beckett home. Any time that she or Deb whined, their mother reminded them that Daddy listened to people in awful pain all day, and he didn’t need more agony when he got home—as though their father treated leprosy, when, in fact, he injected Novocain the minute a patient opened his or her mouth.

  After wiping away a few escaped tears, Phoebe caught Mr. Gardiner’s eye. Without a hint of her usual reserve, she blurted out her thoughts. “Losing President Kennedy feels like a lifeline slipped away,” she said. “Everything seems dark. Frightening. Who’s Lyndon Johnson, anyway?”

  No one paid the vice president attention—at least no one who grew up in her Brooklyn neighborhood. A Catholic president was as close to a Jewish one as they’d get in their lifetime.

  “President Kennedy represented a bridge to a world where you couldn’t imagine how your relatives might end up in an oven,” Phoebe continued, before realizing she sounded like a Sarah Bernhardt minus tears.

  Professor Gardiner didn’t seem disgusted by Phoebe’s sentiments. He walked over and sat in a blessedly empty seat across from hers, squeezing her shoulder—not as good as getting the slow sympathetic pats Mary Alice got, but welcome. His cool hand comforted Phoebe. His long fingers could have conducted a symphony.

  “You’re right,” he said. “John Fitzgerald Kennedy represents . . . represented a new generation. We will mourn, but the world won’t go backward. The changes the president brought will remain.”

  A calm and measured cadence—with none of the staccato wise-guy sounds so endemic to Brooklyn boys—colored his words. His voice carried the sound of Manhattan private schools; a man who illuminated the workings of the world. “Your observation captures all our feelings, Phoebe. Thank you.”

  Fear of the future mixed with a shameful shiver of delight at Professor Gardiner’s admiration. The possibility that he might think her wise brought a never-before-experienced satisfaction. By the time Professor Gardiner dismissed them, he and the sainted dead president had merged into one beacon of light.

  • • •

  Three weeks later, Phoebe handed in her last Introduction to Sociology paper before Christmas break, this one on “Corporate Responses to Poverty.”

  “Ready for the holidays?” Mr. Gardiner asked when she approached.

  “Almost.” Phoebe searched for a witty line. Her energy had been spent angling to be last to place her report on his desk. Now, as she faced him, new concerns jumped forward. Her dry mouth might breed anything from bad breath to stuttering.

  He meant Christmas; they’d celebrated Hanukkah over a week ago. Even in New York, non-Jews assumed that everyone spent the days before Christmas wrapping presents and drinking eggnog, when, in fact, her family would be eating a luxury spread from the delicatessen for Christmas Eve dinner: a platter of lox interspersed with silky sable and golden white fish. Chocolate-covered grahams—made even more delicious with the addition of a layer of jelly between the sweet cracker and the thick hard shell of chocolate. Blackout cake from Ebinger’s, the best bakery in Brooklyn. Chopped liver. Egg salad. Rare roast beef sliced thin. Fresh rye for her grandfather. Honey cake for her grandmother. Bialys for Deb.

  Religion didn’t rule her family, but her parents respected the altar of heavy Jewish cuisine, making up for their lack of Christmas festivity with food-packed silver trays.

  “My grandparents are coming over,” Phoebe said.

  “Ah, so you do mark the occasion. Thought I put my foot in my mouth for a moment.”

  “We don’t have presents or a tree,” she said. “Blintzes and bagels—that’s our rejoicing.”

  “I know bagels, but I’m a little vague on the blintzes.”

  “You never ate blintzes?” Maybe she lived in too homogenous a neighborhood, but his unfamiliarity surprised her. “Something delicious is in your future.”

  He leaned back and put his hand behind his head. “Perhaps you’ll introduce me to the custom. Expand my sociological knowledge of cuisine.” His crisp blue shirtsleeves, rolled up two perfect times, revealed golden, fine hair on his arms.

  “How are you still tan?” she asked.

  He laughed, and she blushed at her stupid boldness. “I play tennis until I slip in the snow.”

  She pictured him and his wife batting the ball back and forth, their classic gold wedding bands reflecting the sun—a woman so exquisite that even a drop of cosmetics disturbed her flawlessness. They likely spoke about Proust in bed.

  Jake read Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming.

  “I always thought missing out on the brightness of the holidays must be sad.”

  “We light candles for eight nights,” Phoebe said.

  They remained silent for a moment. Professor Gardiner doubtless pictured a dingy menorah in her shtetl-like home, compared with an evergreen crusted with ropes of lights and shimmering with ornaments placed before a brownstone’s fireplace.

  He grabbed her hand. “I apologize for insinuatin
g that Hanukkah is any less important than Christmas.” His warm skin sent sparks through Phoebe. She wanted to run her fingers over and around his knuckles, caress the light hair on his wrist.

  “Black hair with blue eyes. A stunning combination. You’re magnificent,” he said. “You must hear those words constantly.”

  “Not really.” Why had she lied? Jake complimented her on everything from the sheen of her hair to the curve of her cheek. She strained for memories of Jake’s generosity to offset Professor Gardiner’s charged touch. The gold bracelet he’d bought Deb for her birthday. How he challenged her mother or anyone else who dared to be unkind to her. Distributing her questionnaires to his buddies.

  She forced herself to see a vision of Mrs. Gardiner. “Your wife is lucky,” she said. “Your talent for praise is outstanding.”

  His smile disappeared. “Presently, she’s not appreciating many of my talents.” He dropped her hand. “We’re apart at the moment.”

  At the moment. What did he mean? A week of breathing space? A few steps from a divorce attorney? How old was he? Thirty, at the most? She could almost touch her eighteenth birthday.

  “You should try blintzes sometime,” Phoebe said. “I think you’d like them.”

  “Yes. I think I would.”

  • • •

  In February 1964 Rob Gardiner tasted his first blintzes at Katz’s Deli. Running into anyone Phoebe knew seemed unlikely in this no-frills room, crowded with yellow-topped Formica and chrome tables. People from Brooklyn didn’t trek to Manhattan—not even to the Lower East Side, which was just across the Williamsburg Bridge—for food that was already available around the corner.

  Between bites, they exchanged life stories as though gifting each other rubies and gold. Now Phoebe knew that Rob had married without thinking—caught up with, as he said, “the will of the crowd.” She bent her interpretation of his hazy words to meet her wont: Professor and Mrs. Gardiner, an ill-matched couple, joined in haste, ecstatic at separating.

  Over the next few months Rob and Phoebe moved from Rob tasting his first blintz at Katz’s to him introducing her to Chinese-Cuban restaurants, along with the hushed Cloisters in Upper Manhattan. The Cloisters’ stained glass, sculpture, and medieval manuscripts in the midst of acres of greenery seemed impossibly exotic just an hour’s drive from her house. That the subway traveled there—a place so quiet, so not related to Brooklyn—astonished her.

  They first kissed in the shadow of a worn tapestry hanging on a wall. Elation at being in Rob’s arms swirled with overwhelming guilt toward Jake. Wrong, so wrong, what they were doing, but true love had arrived.

  She and Rob should marry in the Cloisters, surrounded by the hush of cool walls covered by ornate fabric. Phoebe conjured up a June ceremony, her body draped in yards of white eyelet with a form-fitted top. Tiny pearl earrings would be her only adornment until Rob placed a burnished gold wedding band on her finger.

  Now, two months later, with breaths of warming April air drifting through the open window, she sat on the edge of Rob’s desk in his small office. Dusk obscured the campus; they’d only allowed themselves the luxury of meeting at school in darkness.

  “Can you sneak out for dinner?” Rob ran a finger down the nylons covering her leg—the Hollywood gesture turning her inside out. “What say you?”

  “My parents will go crazy if I don’t get home soon.” She tamped down thoughts of Jake, coming at eight to take her to see the new Stanley Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Not her choice, but when she suggested seeing a Black Orpheus rerun down in the West Village, Jake said, “Why stop there? Let’s go see Shakespeare, m’ lady,” as though seeing a Brazilian foreign film was a joke.

  Each weekend, Phoebe meant to break up with Jake, but she couldn’t find the courage to destroy him. And, she knew she’d miss him. Spending time with Rob brought shivers of excitement and fireworks under her breastbone. If sensations were made visible, sparkles would emanate from her head. From her skin to her soul, her sensitivity grew until being touched had become exquisitely painful.

  Weekends with Jake provided a welcome calm, where she could sit back and let the world wash over her.

  “I can’t say good night yet,” Rob said.

  She swung out her leg from the edge of the desk where she sat. Electricity ignited, but they couldn’t touch, since Mary Alice or any hungry coed might appear in an evening burst of need. “Me either.”

  Rob spun the air between them with his finger. “Do you feel the energy?”

  She nodded, unable to speak.

  “Ripening air.” He gazed up as though reading the wall. “ ‘This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.’ ”

  “Shakespeare.” Phoebe imbued her guess with authority. “Romeo and Juliet?”

  “Brooklyn turns out quite learned girls.”

  “You’d be surprised what Erasmus can teach.”

  “The priest?”

  “The school.” She didn’t admit her ignorance of Erasmus High being named for a priest. Keeping up with Rob took work.

  He traced her hand resting on his desk, running his index finger over each of her nails. “Winsome,” he said of her pale polish. “Opalescent.”

  Phoebe closed her eyes against the blood rushing up her legs. He worked his way to her forearm with the softest of touches.

  “I want to be alone with you.” He held out his hand and drew Phoebe from her chair. Before opening the office door, he peeked out and checked in both directions. After a moment, he nodded. She tipped her head forward as though the CIA spied on them.

  He left the room first. A few moments later, she followed, ten paces behind. Paintings of horses lined the hall. Rob slipped into a door at the end of the corridor and began climbing the staircase, Phoebe following.

  When they reached the uppermost floor Rob’s patrician fingers touched her shoulder and turned her left. He reached around to open a door, slipped past, pulled her inside and latched the lock behind them. In the dimness, she made out a broad conference table, oak chairs with wide arms, and a worn brown couch.

  “Where are we?”

  “Wait,” he said. He led her through another door to a wrought iron staircase that coiled up to another floor. She climbed the steps behind him. Cold curlicues along the railing bit into her palms. At the top, he pushed hard against a heavy door that opened to a steeple. Wooden beams crossed the ceiling, circling a huge brass bell. The walls surrounding them were chest high. The campus sprawled before them.

  “I give you the tower.” He swept out his arms as though offering her a palace.

  “We’re allowed up here?” She tiptoed to the edge and surveyed the paths filled with people.

  He came from behind and enclosed her, covering her hands with his. “We’re invisible.”

  “What if somebody comes up?” Flashes of want overwhelmed her.

  “I locked the door below.”

  “What if someone wants to come in?”

  Rob ignored the question and pressed his lips to the back of her neck. She arched back, catching the scent of Muguet des Bois perfume rising from her heated throat. He touched her breasts, first with tenderness and then with ownership.

  “So small to be enclosed in an iron circle.”

  “Cotton.”

  “Cotton like iron.”

  “Small?”

  “Small as in wonderful. Small as in bijou, delicious and perfect.” He spun her and teased open a button on her blouse. She began to stay his hands and then stopped. Rob was no high school boy, no college kid, not a member of the Church Avenue softball team. First, second, third base—you didn’t play those games with professors.

  “I adore you.” He held his hand inside her bra, the not-so-iron barrier, and ran his hand over a now-bare breast. “You are the satin of youth, and I must possess you. We are in the very wrath of love.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Phoebe<
br />
  May 1964

  “Again?”

  Her mother’s question followed her from the kitchen as Phoebe raced into the downstairs bathroom. She fell before the toilet, raised the seat, and vomited. Tears leaked as she pressed the heels of her hands against her forehead. She’d thrown up every morning for the past week. Waiting for her period had become her constant occupation.

  She washed her face with cold water, careful not to splash her blouse, and dabbed her skin dry before turning to go back to the breakfast table. Her mother stood outside, arms crossed, blocking Phoebe’s path as she tried to leave the bathroom.

  “Again?” her mother repeated. “Still you’re going to tell me you caught a bug? Whose bug is it?”

  “I just don’t feel well, Mom.”

  “Do I look stupid? You don’t feel well at exactly eight o’clock every morning? You’re lucky your father leaves early for work.”

  Lucky why? Her mother conjured her father for anything related to the body or emotional state of her daughters, using him as a cudgel to crack them open.

  “You’d better tell me how much weight you gained at camp, Deb,” she’d say, “or I’ll ask your father.” As though her father’s dentist eyes could weigh Deb with one glance. And yet her threat often worked. Neither sister wanted Daddy drawn into their battles with Mom.

  “The cafeteria food is awful. Maybe I have food poisoning.”

  “And last month the food tasted perfect, right? Now, voila, you’re a delicate flower?”

  Phoebe erased all expression until her face became a blank slate. “It’s the cafeteria.”

  As she walked away, her mother threw out more words. “You better pray that’s the case. And if it’s not, you make sure to talk to me first.”

  Phoebe kept walking.

  Her mother caught up with her and grabbed her shoulder with a mobster’s grip, forcing Phoebe to turn and face her. “I mean it. You’re barely eighteen years old. The smoke from your birthday candles still hangs in the kitchen. You need me, daughter of mine.”