The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  She didn’t know how to find either Amos or Gertrude until she saw the photograph in the Miami newspaper of the Palm Beach charity ball. There she was, identified as Mrs. Gertrude Jewsbury of the Breakers. Rivka would have recognized her anywhere, even if she hadn’t changed back to her distinctive maiden name. There she was, looking very Gertrude, very grand, very haughty, very beautiful. How could her old friend not want to help her?

  The Hotel Eden was completed in 1930 and the Jerusalems came here that year on their honeymoon; they were the first guests to stay in this very room, not having seen it or Florida ever since. Philip wouldn’t listen when, in Masturbov Gardens, she tried to read him the newspaper reports of riots and bad times here. “Then the Hotel Eden will be cheaper” was his answer. He was going to retire there, and that was that. Decisive he seldom was, and impetuous rarely: she never understood why this place had so delighted him. For most of their early years here guests couldn’t even go out at night for fear of street gangs and muggings, and even during the daytime it was necessary to walk to the grocery in a group or take your chances. But now things were changing. Preservationists. The neighborhood and the Hotel Eden and its three-story pink stucco art deco refinements were of great interest to preservationists. Architects and designers and real estate people were always sticking their noses into lobbies and corridors and admiring essentials inhabitants had given up praying would be updated by the landlord.

  As soon as they moved into the Hotel Eden, on February 12, 1970, which was not only Lincoln’s birthday but Philip’s, Philip had a stroke. He became numb in his left leg. The doctor said he was okay and must not let it get him down. Philip rarely left this room again. The Jerusalems’ nineteen-by-nineteen third-floor room had been a tough fit for two. Until his second heart attack he watched the television, sitting in the middle of the sea-green plush sofa, which also had art deco curvatures, and which had developed a sag where he and all his predecessors had sat. The TV had been playing. The Mills Brothers were singing “Be my life’s companion and you’ll never grow old.” Old songs were always being played in Miami Beach.

  For the first time in her marriage she had had a fine night’s sleep. The mattress no longer tilted in his favor.

  * * *

  She set out to find Gertrude Jewsbury. She’d called the Breakers hotel and left a message that she would be arriving and could they meet. She put on her best outfit, which she knew to be unfashionable and no longer flattering. She caught the bus to the north. She realized that she was already enjoying herself.

  The bus was whizzing by so many expensive places to live! Such a proliferating repetition of elaborate high-rise hotels and evocatively themed motels impressed her. She felt she’d not been properly prepared for Eldorado, Versailles, Tiffany, Park Avenue, Monte Carlo, Hollywood, the Riviera, as replicated in oceanfront towers in an unbroken line. So much had certainly been happening in the outside world. She imagined Gertrude would certainly be living so grandly.

  I want to love you.

  Those had been Norman’s words.

  “I want to love you.”

  The rabbi had said them to her at the beginning of the one and only week they were to have together after the embrace in the Miami Beach temple’s library where she volunteered and before his death. (He tripped and fell down the two steps into his sunken living room on Indian Creek Drive, hit his head and had a stroke and died—all on the same day.)

  He was holding her hand under the table, at their first luncheon.

  “I want to love you, but you are not letting me.”

  She said nothing.

  “If I rented a room somewhere, would you come with me?”

  “No!” she said too loudly.

  “Why not?”

  “What could possibly be gained by two such old bodies getting into bed together?”

  “You’re shy.”

  “Of course I’m shy,” she said, accepting his excuse. And leaving him to go back to Philip in the Hotel Eden.

  When she hadn’t accepted his first invitation, the rabbi said to her, “We are just like the Jewish people. Our timing is always a little bit off. At another time, perhaps God will let His daughter out of His house of bondage.”

  She would not think of how she and Rabbi Chesterfield, who did not remember her from her years of teaching at his Washington Jewish Sunday school, spent one night together tenderly cuddling in a secret motel, the night before he had that fall and died. Something else not to let herself think about.

  Rivka followed the arrows toward 1012. The Breakers was the most magnificent hotel she’d ever been in. The hallway reminded her of Philip’s descriptions of the hotels he’d visited with his mother on the grand tour of Germany Zilka took him on after his graduation from Yaddah. It had been Philip’s tales of this trip that made her reconsider him as a potential husband. His descriptive powers were so magical then! He wove captivating stories about that trip, and Rivka longed to travel. Today her fingers, like a little girl’s, were trailing along the embossed wallpaper and reaching up toward the height of the chandeliers, and she was trying not to look at her impoverished reflection in the gilt-framed mirrors hanging everywhere. Rivka Wishenwart, for one second in time, was a young woman walking down the hall of some fancy foreign rich hotel Philip Jerusalem hadn’t taken her to at all.

  “Here I am!”

  And there she was, Gertrude Jewsbury, staring at Rivka, waiting for Rivka, standing there regally outside her room. You look so dignified, Rivka thought. You’re not in a wheelchair like so many here and at the Hotel Eden.

  Rivka, who knew she’d been studied from head to toe as well, and found wanting, gallantly kept on her smile. “And here I am.”

  They did not throw themselves into each other’s arms. They did not hug or kiss or embrace. Neither knew yet what to do with the other. So for this moment they did nothing. Then Gertrude stood back and allowed Rivka to enter her suite before her and closed the door behind them. They were in a vestibule, then into the huge room beyond, each hardly breathing, each shyly and slyly looking the other over, these two friends from long ago, wondering what changes time and fate had wrought.

  “Life has been good to you. But then I knew it would be,” Rivka exclaimed. “I am so happy for you.”

  The first time Rivka saw Gertrude Jewsbury was the day Gertrude married Amos Standing. It was in 1924, at the Wardman Park Hotel, and Rivka was relieved that this beautiful woman had come from across the sea to marry the pest so that she wouldn’t have to. It was a very lavish wedding, because Gertrude was one thing Amos wanted to show off big. He was now living in Washington full-time and, judging by the number of guests invited, he knew many people, although there appeared to be no good friend but Philip, his Yaddah roommate and his best man.

  Amos and Gertrude moved into an enormous house near Dupont Circle and Rivka became her best friend. Every day the two women walked, past the big mansions in one neighborhood after another in the Northwest, holding hands like schoolgirls, planning imaginary trips around the world. Gertrude’s car would pick Rivka up in the Northeast, where she and Philip were living with Zilka, over her store, and Rivka would show her a new neighborhood. The chauffeur followed in the car until they got tired. Gertrude had much to learn about America, and Rivka, ever the teacher, was happy to impart whatever she could.

  One day shortly after his wedding, Amos asked Rivka to walk with him around the bleak Northeast neighborhood. He apologized for behaving so shockingly the last time they’d been alone, and since he seemed sad and subdued, Rivka felt sorry for him and agreed to the walk. He told her the story of Gertrude’s past, which was not nearly so fancy as he’d led everyone to believe.

  “She was just a poor girl, like you. She worked in a dress shop in Mayfair. Her parents are dead. She had no one and nothing. I have transformed her. I have given her a new life.”

  Rivka waited for more, but Amos just looked at her, like a petulant child who wants something his mommy won’t give him. She
realized the implications of his words. When would he leave her alone? She ran from him before their walk went any further. But he caught up with her and grabbed her wrist and held on to it tightly. “You are the only woman I ever wanted, and since you won’t have me, you’ll be punished.”

  Within two years Gertrude bore three sons. Each of them died not long after birth. Gertrude became very depressed, and then she became a recluse. Finally, she left Washington and disappeared, without even saying goodbye to Rivka. Once a bolt of delicate lace arrived from Barcelona, with a note, “Until we meet again, my dear friend”—but there was no return address, as there was none on the occasional postcard that arrived from abroad. By then Amos had been transferred somewhere overseas for work.

  “Rivka, do you think fate has sent you to me just at this particular moment as an omen?” Gertrude pulled the collar of her Chanel jacket tight around her neck, as if she were suddenly cold. “You do know, don’t you, that you are the person I’ve known longest in the world? Does someone from the first part arrive at the end? Some attempt at order and structure after all? Save room for dessert at dinner. The desserts are the only good things they do.” They were having tea and biscuits.

  “Amos has taken good care of you.” Rivka was looking at the far end of her room, where there was an entire window banked with fresh flowers.

  “Amos? Amos does not take care of me.”

  Rivka was uncertain she had heard correctly. “He doesn’t?” She was feeling more uncomfortable than she’d bargained for. Was she on the wrong track? “Why … why did you change your name back? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Mrs. Jewsbury shocks the pants off everybody. Which amuses me.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  “It’s a very common Yorkshire name. Jewsbury. Dewsbury. It can be spelled half a dozen ways. And it was what I was born with. I did not want to carry any more traces of him.”

  “I read somewhere there’s a Jewtown, Georgia. Isn’t that awful?”

  “Why? Why is it? It’s not dissimilar to Jewsbury, Yorkshire.”

  “It’s not the same at all! It’s much more … hateful.”

  “We Yorkshire people are filled with a great deal of common sense,” Gertrude was continuing. “Not religion. Just common sense. Religion does so get in the way of common sense.”

  “Philip told me Amos was worth over fifty million dollars and would take care of me after Philip died.”

  “My goodness! Why do you think Philip said that?” Gertrude was looking at her very attentively, and Rivka felt her hands beginning to shake. She let her words come tumbling out. “Because Amos wanted me to marry him and I wouldn’t. I thought you knew all this. He told me he told you. When I turned him down he went on that trip to London and that’s where he met you working in a shop and he brought you to America and just before the ceremony he asked me again and I said no again and he married you. And after he married you he … came back again. And before I married Philip he tried one last time. And when I got married he said he would never let me forget him.” She’d wanted the words to come out in a calmer, more orderly fashion, and instead they’d rushed out, as in some child’s game, ready or not, here I come.

  “Why didn’t you marry him?”

  “I … I don’t know. His breath always smelled. Why did you? For his money? He made you very rich.”

  “Yes, his breath always smelled.”

  “Did you feel guilty you married him for his money?”

  “He discarded me! I must tell you something, Rivka. His entire settlement upon me amounted to one hundred thousand dollars. Twenty-five thousand dollars for each dead son, he said. I am worth far, far more than that, but not because of Amos.”

  Questions were coming to Rivka too quickly. She did not like asking questions. “That’s all he gave you? Did you know Philip would always be poor?”

  “Of course.”

  “How did you know?”

  “One senses these things.”

  “You could have told me. We were best friends.”

  “Well, I only … surmised.”

  “I surmised too.”

  Then she said everything out loud that she’d said to herself in the Hotel Eden in Miami Beach.

  “If I had married Amos you wouldn’t be here and now I don’t have anything and Philip said Amos would always take care of me after he died, Philip died, and I don’t know how to get in touch with Amos and I thought you could tell him Philip’s dead and could he please take care of me now.” There were tears in her eyes. “I’m ready now.”

  “Amos is dead.”

  “Amos is dead?”

  “He died a number of years ago. He took his own life. Or someone murdered him. I have never known which. He was involved in some top-secret work for your government. His obituary called him a ‘diplomat.’ I remember laughing and thinking, Oh, is that what he was.”

  There was a long silence before Gertrude spoke again.

  “Amos was not in love with you. Nor was he in love with me. He was in love with Philip. I found them in bed with each other several times. When I confronted him, he made no secret of it. That is why he purchased me in Mayfair. Because my circumstances, which were not dissimilar to yours at present, necessitated that I be for sale. These things—all of these things—happen.”

  Rivka wanted to cover her ears forever. “He badgered me to marry him! Over and over and over! He wouldn’t leave me alone!” Falteringly, trying to speak words she was not accustomed to speaking, much less thinking, she told Gertrude about the awful experience, the sight of Amos waving his erect penis in her face, crying out, “Take me! Mine is much bigger!”

  Gertrude’s eyes closed momentarily, and her hands became small fists. “It sounds a most desperate act,” she finally said.

  Then she continued. “Amos was a tortured man. He scared me to death too, many times.” Then she stopped, and she took both of Rivka’s hands. “Philip rejected Amos. Philip told him he would marry you. Amos then convinced himself that capturing you was the only way that he could have Philip. Do you understand any of this? He used me to make Philip jealous. That did not work. He had brought me back to parade before his entire town. Philip would still not go away with him or live with him.”

  “So Philip did not love him!” She was about to say, Because he loved me!

  “Love? You lived with him. Do you think Philip Jerusalem was capable of love? He married you to hide what he was.”

  “But Amos could have taken care of him on the grandest scale … What am I saying?” She understood none of this. A man taking care of a man? A man caring for another man as would a wife? Tending and cooking and mending and shopping and buying the fruit from the cheapest market?

  “Jewish boys did not run off with other boys and have sex with each other in those days! My dear Rivka, he married you to escape these feelings, and to hope for the best.”

  There was another silence before Gertrude spoke again. “I must also tell you that yes, I know if you had not been so unavailable, I would not have been purchased and we would not be here.”

  Rivka said softly, “I don’t want to know any more.”

  “But there is more.”

  “I have heard too much already.”

  “It was not over between them, even after both of our marriages. They continued to meet here and there. Amos would call Philip at his office and they would meet somewhere, and yes, Philip would call Amos. I would hold my hand over the receiver and listen. ‘I need to see you right away,’ I would hear Philip say. It was like he was in some sort of pain and Amos was the doctor with the medicine to make him feel better.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this! We were like sisters!”

  “How could I tell you any of this? It is hard for me to tell you even now, so many years later! ‘My husband is sleeping with your husband.’ How could I tell you this when we and the world both seemed so young? I was a poor girl who’d been given some outlandish opportunity to come t
o a new country and earn money for her future. What if there were strings attached? There are always strings attached!”

  “Did Philip push me into finding you—to discover all of this? What a very vengeful man I married. Why didn’t Amos leave some of his money to Philip?”

  Gertrude suddenly grabbed Rivka’s hand and took her out on her balcony with its magnificent view of the ocean.

  “I want to make you understand something and I don’t know how to do it. I hope my words will lead toward some safe harbor.

  “Amos located me before he killed himself. I was living in Paris. He said he had had enough of pain and disappointment and loneliness. He said there were events in his past that he was now too ashamed to bear. I thought this was Amos the actor again, playing out another drama to get sympathy. He told me he wished to leave his estate to Philip’s son David, and that if I could find David, he would reward me as well. I located David in San Francisco, rather down on his luck. As was I. My money had run out. I had traveled too far and too wide and too long. Amos did leave David several million dollars, and he appointed me the executor of them. We all had misguided notions of how wealthy he ever really was. David and I traveled at first. He was a shy young man, with little knowledge of the world beyond its pain. I don’t believe you know the full story of what he had endured, and I shall not be the one to tell you. He felt exceedingly unloved, and I believe I was able somehow to help him rise above self-pity. We made each other laugh. For myself—well, I discovered I had a great deal of pent-up motherhood within me, just waiting for release. In Paris, he convinced me we should take Amos’s money and buy an old hotel on the Left Bank that required extensive renovation. It became popular, and profitable, quite swiftly. He had much imagination. So we went on from there. We bought a much larger one in Rome. We performed the same renovation and achieved the same rewards. I was, to my surprise, quite good at business. We rescued ten old buildings, each one larger and grander than the one before. We became, and I hesitate to say this, millionaires many times over ourselves. I wanted to locate you, to share some of our good fortune. But … he forbade me. He is sick now, from a disease no one can identify or cure, and he has disappeared. Amos took his own life when Philip had his stroke. Did you know that? Amos came to Miami Beach to see Philip, and Philip would not talk to him. David and I pieced all this together. Amos left him some papers and diaries. Philip wrote Amos love letters full of tantalizing ardor he could not deliver in real life. Indeed, he wrote one from Miami Beach. I have been wanting you to know all this, Rivka! Please believe that. Each day I wake up and play out scenes in my head of how I would come to Miami and tell you. David only disappeared quite recently. I should have told you. But how could I tell you! How could I tell you all of this?”