For a while Alma seemed to have adapted to her aunt and uncle, her cousins, and the Sea Cliff mansion, but at puberty she once again became the sullen child she had been when she reached California. She was an early developer, and the first hormonal onslaught coincided with Ichimei’s indefinite absence. She was ten when they were separated, promising to stay together in their thoughts and by writing; eleven when his letters started drying up; and twelve when the distance between them became insuperable and she resigned herself to losing Ichimei. She fulfilled her obligations without protesting at a school she detested and behaved in the way her adopted family expected, trying to remain invisible so as to avoid questions about her feelings that would have unleashed the torment of rebellion and anguish she kept bottled up inside. Nathaniel was the only one she couldn’t fool with her irreproachable behavior. He had a sixth sense for detecting when his cousin was shut in the wardrobe and tiptoed there often to persuade her to come out of her hiding place, speaking in whispers in order not to wake his father, who had sharp ears and was a light sleeper. He would tuck her up in bed and lie next to her until she fell asleep. He too was going through life walking on eggshells but with a storm raging inside him. He was counting the months he had left at school before going to Harvard to study law, because it had never occurred to him to go against his father’s wishes. His mother wanted him to go to law school in San Francisco instead of vanishing to the other side of the continent, but Isaac insisted the boy needed to get far away, as he himself had done at that age. His son had to become a responsible, upstanding man, a mensch.
Alma took Nathaniel’s decision to go to Harvard as a personal affront and added her cousin to the list of those who had abandoned her: first her brother and her parents, then Ichimei, and now him. She concluded it was her destiny to lose everyone she loved most. She was still as attached to Nathaniel as on that first day at the quayside in San Francisco.
“I’ll write to you,” Nathaniel assured her.
“That’s what Ichimei said,” she replied angrily.
“Ichimei is in an internment camp, Alma. I’ll be in Harvard.”
“That’s even further away. Isn’t it in Boston?”
“I’ll come and spend all my vacations with you, I promise.”
While he was preparing for his departure, Alma followed him around the house like a shadow, inventing excuses for him not to go, and when that didn’t work, inventing reasons for loving him less. When she was eight she had fallen in love with Ichimei with all the intensity of childhood passions; with Nathaniel it was the calm love of later years. The two of them fulfilled different roles in her heart, but they were equally indispensable: she was sure that without Ichimei and Nathaniel she wouldn’t survive. She had loved the former vehemently; she needed to see him all the time, to run off with him to the Sea Cliff garden, which was full of tremendous hiding places where they could discover the infallible language of caresses. After Ichimei was sent to Topaz, Alma was nourished by her memories of the garden and the pages of her diary, filled to the margins with all her sighs and regrets written in tiny handwriting. Even at this age she gave signs of her fanatical tenacity for love. With Nathaniel on the other hand, it would never have occurred to her to go and hide in the garden. She loved him devotedly and thought she knew him better than anyone else. In the nights he had rescued her from the wardrobe, they slept together holding hands; he was her confidant, her closest friend. The first time she discovered dark stains in her underpants she waited trembling for Nathaniel to come back from school so she could drag him off to the bathroom to show him the evidence that she was bleeding down below. Nathaniel had a vague idea of the reason, but not of the practical steps to take, and so he was the one who had to ask his mother, as Alma didn’t have the courage to do so. He knew everything she was going through. She had given him copies of the keys to her diaries but he had no need to read them to know how she felt.
* * *
Alma finished secondary school a year before Ichimei. By then they had lost all contact, but she regarded him as still being with her, because in the uninterrupted monologue of her diary she was writing to him, more out of a habit of loyalty than any sense of nostalgia. She had resigned herself to never seeing him again, but as she had no other friends she fed a tragic heroine’s love with the memory of their secret games in the garden. While he was working from sunup to sundown as a laborer in a beet field, she reluctantly consented to the debutante balls her aunt Lillian insisted she attend. There were dances at the Sea Cliff mansion, and others in the interior courtyard of the Palace Hotel, with its half century of history, its fabulous glass roof, enormous crystal chandeliers, and tropical palms in Portuguese ceramic pots. Lillian had assumed the responsibility of making sure she married well, convinced it would be easier than it had been to marry off her own rather plain daughters, yet she found that Alma sabotaged all her best-laid plans. Isaac did not like getting involved in the lives of the women of the family, but in this instance he could not remain silent.
“This hunt for a husband is not worthy of you, Lillian!”
“How innocent you are, Isaac! Do you think you’d be married to me if my mother hadn’t lassoed you?”
“Alma is still a child. There ought to be a law against getting married before you are twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five! At that age she’ll never find a good match, Isaac. Everyone will be taken,” said Lillian.
Her niece wanted to go and study far away, and Lillian eventually gave in. A couple of years’ higher education won’t do her any harm, she thought. They finally agreed that Alma should go to a girls’ college in Boston, where Nathaniel was still studying. He could protect her from the city’s dangers and temptations. So Lillian gave up presenting her with potential husbands and instead began to prepare her wardrobe with frilly skirts and outfits of fashionable pastel-colored angora tops and sweaters, even though they did little for a big-boned young woman with strong features like Alma.
Although her aunt was desperate to find someone she could trust to accompany her east, Alma insisted on going on her own. She flew to New York, intending to take the train from there to Boston. When she disembarked, she found Nathaniel waiting at the airport. His parents had sent him a telegram, and he had decided to come and meet her so that they could travel together by train. The two cousins embraced with all the pent-up emotion of the seven months since Nathaniel had last been in San Francisco, and hurriedly brought each other up to date with family news as a uniformed black porter loaded all her luggage onto a cart to follow them to the taxi. Nathaniel counted the suitcases and hatboxes and asked his cousin if she was bringing clothes to sell.
“You’re not one to criticize, you’ve always been a dandy,” she retorted.
“What are your plans, Alma?”
“What I told you in my letter, cousin. You know I adore your parents, but I’m suffocating in that house. I have to make myself independent.”
“So I see. With my father’s money?”
Alma had not noticed that particular detail. Her first step toward independence was to obtain a diploma of some kind or other. Her vocation was yet to be defined.
“Your mama is determined to find me a husband. I don’t have the courage to tell her I’m going to marry Ichimei.”
“Why don’t you wake up, Alma? It’s been ten years since Ichimei disappeared from your life.”
“Eight, not ten.”
“Get him out of your head. Even in the unlikely event that he should reappear and still be interested in you, you know very well you can’t marry him.”
“Why not?”
“Why not! Because he’s from another race, another social class, another culture, another religion, another economic level. Do you need any more reasons?”
“Well then, I’ll be an old maid. What about you, do you have a girlfriend, Nat?”
“No, but if I do, you’ll be the first to know.”
“That’s good. We could pretend we’re a couple.”
“Why?”
“To put off any idiot who comes near me.”
His cousin had changed a lot in recent months. She was no longer a schoolgirl in white socks, but although her new clothes made her look like an elegant grown-up woman, Nathaniel knew her too well to be taken in by the cigarettes, the navy-blue suit, or the hat, gloves, and cherry-colored shoes. Alma was still the spoiled little child who clung to him, frightened by the crowds and the noise in New York, and only let go once they had reached her hotel room. “Stay and sleep with me, Nat,” she begged him, with that terrified look she used to have in the wardrobe of sorrows, but he had lost his innocence and sleeping with her now meant something different. The following day they caught the train to Boston, hauling her mound of luggage with them.
Alma imagined that the Boston college would be like a freer version of her secondary schooling, which she had completed with ease. She was eager to show off her new wardrobe, lead a bohemian existence in the city cafés and bars with Nathaniel, and attend a few classes in her spare time so as not to disappoint her aunt and uncle. She soon discovered that nobody looked at her, that there were hundreds of girls more sophisticated than she was, that her cousin always came up with an excuse not to meet, and that she was poorly prepared for her studies. She found herself sharing a room with a plump girl from Virginia, who whenever the occasion arose presented her proof from the Bible that the white race was superior. Blacks, Orientals, and redskins descended from monkeys; Adam and Eve were white; Jesus might have been American, although she wasn’t sure about that. While she didn’t approve of the way Hitler had behaved, she said, one had to admit he wasn’t wrong when it came to the Jews: they were a condemned race, because they had killed Jesus. Alma asked to be moved. This took two weeks to arrange, and her new roommate turned out to suffer from a whole host of manias and phobias but at least wasn’t anti-Semitic.
For the first three months, Alma felt lost, incapable of organizing even the simplest things in her life such as food, laundry, transportation, or her college schedule; previously it had been her governesses and then her selfless aunt Lillian who had seen to that kind of thing. She had never made her bed or ironed a blouse: that was what the domestic staff was for; nor had she ever had to keep within a budget, since in the Belasco home it was rude to talk about money. She was taken aback when Nathaniel explained her allowance did not include restaurants, tearooms, manicures, hairdressers, or masseuses. Once a week he appeared, notebook and pencil in hand, to teach her to keep a record of what she had spent. She always promised him she would improve, but the next week she was always in debt again. She felt foreign in this stuck-up, proud city; her fellow college students shunned her, and boys ignored her, but she never mentioned any of this in letters to her aunt and uncle, and whenever Nathaniel suggested she return home she would insist that anything was better than having to face the humiliation of returning to Sea Cliff with her tail between her legs. Just as she had once done in the wardrobe, she would shut herself in the bathroom and turn on the shower so that the noise would cover the swear words she shouted to curse her misfortune.
In November the whole weight of winter fell on Boston. Alma had spent the first seven years of her life in Warsaw but did not remember its climate; nothing had prepared her for what she had to endure over the following months. Lashed by hail, blizzards, and snow, the city lost all color; the light faded, and everything became gray and white. Life went on indoors, with people shivering as close as possible to the radiators. However many clothes Alma put on, the cold chapped her skin and got into her bones whenever she set foot outside. Her hands and feet swelled with chilblains; her coughs and colds seemed never ending. She had to summon all her willpower to get out of bed in the morning, wrap herself up like an Inuit, and face the freezing weather to cross from one college building to the next, hugging the walls so that the wind would not bowl her over, dragging her feet across the ice. The streets became impassable; most mornings the cars were covered with a mountain of snow that their owners had to attack with picks and shovels; everybody went around buried in wool and furs; and the children, pets, and birds all disappeared.
But then, just when Alma had finally accepted defeat and had admitted to Nathaniel that she was ready to call her aunt and uncle and beg them to rescue her from this freezer, she met Vera Neumann. Vera was an artist and businesswoman who had made her art accessible to ordinary people in the form of scarves, sheets, tablecloths, tableware, clothing—anything that could be painted or printed on. She had registered her brand name in 1942, and within a few years had created a market. Alma vaguely recalled that her aunt Lillian competed with her friends to be the first each season to show off Vera’s new designs for scarves and dresses, but she knew nothing about the artist herself. She went to her talk on impulse, to escape the cold between two classes, and found herself at the back of a packed room whose walls were lined with painted fabrics. All the colors that had fled the Boston winter were captured there—bold, whimsical, fantastic.
The audience greeted the speaker with a standing ovation that reminded Alma yet again of how ignorant she was. She had no idea that the woman who designed her aunt Lillian’s scarves was a celebrity. Vera Neumann was not an imposing figure—she was barely five feet tall, and very shy, hiding behind a pair of enormous glasses with dark frames that covered half her face—but as soon as she opened her mouth no one could doubt she was a giant. Alma could barely see her up on the platform, but she felt her stomach flutter when the artist spoke and knew with complete certainty that this was a decisive moment for her. In an hour and a quarter this eccentric, tiny woman roused her audience with stories from her tireless journeying to source her various collections: India, China, Guatemala, Iceland, Italy, and seemingly everywhere else on the planet. A feminist, she spoke of her philosophy, of the techniques she employed, of selling and marketing her products, of the obstacles she had encountered along the way.
That same night, Alma called Nathaniel to announce her future in great gusts of enthusiasm: she was going to follow in Vera’s footsteps.
“Whose footsteps?”
“The woman who designed your parents’ sheets and tablecloths, Nat. I’ve no intention of going on with classes that are of no use to me. I’ve decided to study design and painting at the university. I’m going to attend Vera’s workshops and then travel the world the way she has.”
A few months later, Nathaniel completed his law studies and returned to California. In spite of pressure from her aunt Lillian, Alma refused to go back to California with him. She endured four winters in Boston without complaining ever again about the climate, spending her whole time drawing and painting. Not having Ichimei’s facility for sketching or Vera’s boldness with color, she set herself to supplement talent with good taste. She already had a clear idea of the direction she wanted to take. Her designs would be more refined than Vera’s, because she did not intend to satisfy popular taste and create a brand, but to create for pleasure. The possibility of earning a living never occurred to her. She wasn’t interested in scarves for ten dollars, or sheets and napkins sold wholesale; she would only design and print certain items of clothing, all of them in top-quality silk, and would add her signature to each one. Her work would be so exclusive and expensive that her aunt Lillian’s friends would kill to have it. During those four years she overcame the paralysis that this imposing city had produced in her; she learned to get around, to drink cocktails without completely losing her head, and to make friends. She came to feel like such a Bostonian that whenever she vacationed in California it seemed to her as if she were in a backward country on some other continent. She also won admirers on the dance floor, where the frantic practicing she had done with Ichimei in her childhood served her well. She had her first unceremonious sexual encounter, behind some bushes at a picnic, which served to satisfy her curiosity as well as her complex at still being a virgin over the age of twenty. Later on she had two or three similarly unremarkable experiences with
different young men, which confirmed her decision to wait for Ichimei.
THE RESURRECTION
Two weeks before she graduated, Alma called Nathaniel in San Francisco to organize the details of the Belascos’ trip to Boston. She was the first woman in the family to obtain a university degree, and the fact that it was in the relatively obscure disciplines of design and art history did not detract from its merit. Even Martha and Sarah were planning to attend the ceremony, partly because they were counting on going on to New York on a shopping spree, but her uncle Isaac would be absent, as his cardiologist had forbidden him to fly. Isaac was ready to disobey him, as Alma was more deeply rooted in his affections than his own daughters, but Lillian would not hear of it. In her conversation with Nathaniel, Alma commented in passing that for several days she’d had the impression she was being spied on. She said she was sure it wasn’t important, that it was merely her hyperactive imagination because she was nervous about her finals, but Nathaniel insisted on hearing the details. A couple of anonymous phone calls when somebody—a masculine voice with a foreign accent—asked if she was there and then hung up; the awkward feeling that she was being watched and followed; a man had been making inquiries about her among her friends, and from the description they gave, it seemed he was the same person she had seen several times in recent days in class, in corridors, in the street. With his suspicious legal mind, Nathaniel advised her to write to the college security office as a precaution: if anything happened, there would be evidence of her concern. He also told her not to go out alone at night. Alma paid him no attention.
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