A Book of Great Worth (13 page)

“You don’t have an idea in your head, do you?” she asked suddenly, surprising herself that the thought had translated itself into words, slipping out of her mouth before she could stop them. Aaron blinked, looked surprised but not particularly displeased, as if her comment had referred to his new jacket, a grey seersucker he had taken off the rack that afternoon.

“I have an idea that I’d like to get to know you better. How’s that?”

Rebeccah smiled despite herself. So it was out, the
overture that, from almost any other man of her ac
quain
tance, likely would have come on the first night, cer
tainly on the second, but from Aaron Greenspun had taken two months. She wondered if he had spoken with her aunt over the weekend, whether something she had said had emboldened him. Well, it didn’t matter. The next step was up to her.

“That would be very nice,” she said. “Yes, I’d like that.”

That was all there was to it. So simple, that small exchange, but now there was an understanding between them, and that night, for the first time, when he had escorted her home, he kissed her good night, and she knew the inexorable journey to their marriage had begun.

The engagement was announced within weeks but the marriage itself didn’t take place until the following spring, after a suitable period of adjustment to the idea and an opportunity for Aaron to purchase and, with Rebeccah’s guidance, furnish a house, in the growing suburb of Shaker Heights, where streets lay like quiet ribbons beneath tall canopies of leaves. The honeymoon was to include an overnight trip on a paddlewheel schooner that plied Lake Erie, taking them from Cleveland to Buffalo, from where they would go by
train to Niagara Falls, there spending several days ad
miring the scenery. It would be aboard the ship, on its first night out, in their stateroom, that their marriage was to be consummated. It was not a fit topic for conversation between betrothed, but Aaron, always a gentleman, did have this observation to make, three weeks
before the wedding, when Rebeccah was still assembling the items for her trousseau: “And as to the rest...what will come afterwards...well, I just want you to have no
concern. I’m not entirely without experience” – here he
offered her his shyest smile, while his eyes blazed
with boldness – “and I can promise you that I’ll be gen
tle. It will be something wonderful, the two of us, don’t you agree?”

Rebeccah awaited that something wonderful with a great deal of concern, in fact, since she was not without some
considerable
experience herself. The subject of virginity was not discussed, but it became clear to her, both from Aaron’s manner and occasional small things he said, that he assumed he would be the first man to share sex with her – although he knew she had many male friends, most of whom he disapproved of – and that it was important to him. Honesty seemed out of the question, and the strategy of deception appeared to be inevitable.

“That will be no trouble at all. Don’t worry your head about it,” her friend Belle told her. She was a woman of indeterminable age but at least beyond forty to judge from the wealth of experience she had crammed into her life, a Romanian who had travelled for several years in France and England on her way to America, a friend, so she said, of Virginia Woolf and Emma Goldman, a painter of note who had benefited Rebeccah with encouragement and gentle criticism, a lesbian, though that was not a term then in vogue, who had buried three husbands already, one in each of the previous countries where she’d lived. “Men are such children, it’s easy to deceive them. Flatter them and they’re only too happy to believe anything, no matter
how unlikely.” She puffed on one of the slim black ci
gars she had developed a taste for in Paris and raised her magnificent eyebrows. “When it comes to sex, it’s all the easier since, in bed, they are so helpless. So
strong
, they think they are, just because blood rushes to one pathetic portion of their anatomy and makes it stiff. At the same time, the rest of them turns to jelly.” She shrugged her shoulders and gestured with a slim, black-gloved hand, as if uncovering some vast expanse. “Men are such children, take it from me, darling Rebeccah. They preen and swagger, they bellow and fight, they spend money like it was water and let compliments flow from their tongues like honey from the rock, they even
marry
you, so desperate are some of them, all to get you in bed, then a little kiss, a little pat, a jiggle, a thrust, another jiggle and it’s all over. They roll over and lie there like exhausted warriors who have single-handedly defeated great armies, a beatific smile playing about their lips like a butterfly among flowers. No, don’t worry your head, darling, it will be easy to deceive your Mr. Spun-From-Gold. We’ll devise a plan.”

The deception was remarkably simple, consisting of an easily mixed douche of water, vinegar and alum, guaranteed, Belle promised, to give Rebeccah the rasping friction of a thirteen-year-old girl, and a small quantity of chicken blood, concealed in a pink balloon, the sort that children blow up at birthday parties. The rest, Belle explained, was merely a sleight of hand, a bit of acting and, she said, “that famous guile we women are supposed to have in such abundance. Let’s see if it’s true.” And, on the couch in Belle’s studio, not far from Rebeccah’s own loft, they practiced the weary motions, with Belle taking Aaron’s part.

“Ah, my darling, my sweet
cheri
, don’t be frightened, I weeell be gentle,” she sing-songed in English rich with French resonance, and the two of them burst into schoolgirl giggles, rolling together on the sofa like young athletes, though it went no further than that. “Ah, my darling,” Belle gasped, breathless with laughter, “you are so, how they say? Wonderfully...tight.”

Rebeccah herself went to the pharmacist for the alum, and prepared the mixture as to Belle’s instructions, starting its use two days before the wedding, to be sure. “I feel like the inside of a pickled egg,” she reported.

“Ah, how wonderfully tasty,” Belle retorted, arching her brows.

But Belle, on the day of the wedding itself, so it would be fresh, attended to the blood, visiting at the slaughterhouse a
kosher
rabbi she was acquainted with, who provided what she needed, no questions asked.

The wedding was small, by the standards of the community, with only family, from Akron as well as Cleveland, and a few of Rebeccah’s and Aaron’s closest friends attending. Rebeccah had doubted most of her
café friends would be interested, or would approve; be
sides, she had found herself, in recent months, drifting away from them, with the exception of Belle and a couple of other women. Uncle Meyer, as head of the family, and the wealthiest, hosted the party at his home in the Heights, though Uncle Avrom, as the favourite uncle, played the part of the surrogate father, standing up to give the bride away. Aaron broke the muffled glass with one determined stomp, there was dizzying music, crowded tables of food that all seemed to be flavoured with honey and glasses of sweet wine that couldn’t be emptied. Then, as her head spun, Rebeccah was led by
the hand to a waiting motorcar by Aaron, her husband –
her husband
– and they were off to the docks.

Her head was still filled with spinning wafts of wool when they were shown to their cabin, and as soon as the porter was gone, Aaron had her in his arms, covering her mouth, nose, ears and neck with moist, indistinct kisses. She extricated herself, took her overnight bag and locked herself in the small bathroom where she made one final application of the douche before putting on her nightgown. Then, with the balloon cupped in her palm, she made her entrance.

“You look wonderful, darling,” Aaron said in English, his yellow eyes seeming to dance in the soft glow of the kerosene lamp. “You get into bed. I’ll just be a minute.”

She did as he said and, as soon as the door softly shut behind him, slipped the balloon under her pillow. Then, with her eyes gradually slipping into a sharp focus on what was either a stain or a shadow on the ceiling, she waited, her breath ragged, her heart pounding, just as if she really were a virgin.

Afterwards, as Aaron slept, Rebeccah put a robe over her gown, slid her feet into slippers and crept from the cabin to walk along the deserted deck. The night was thick and dark, like an old woollen cloak, and cold. She stood against the rail, shivering and clutching her arms, staring down at where, from the choppy roll of the deck beneath her feet, she could tell the foaming waves of the lake were splattering against the ship’s hull. But she could see nothing and even the sound of the waves was absent, drowned out by the whining of the engines, which must have been close by where she stood. She could have just as easily been aboard one of Jules Verne’s fantastic ships, sailing through the darkness of space, as on the paddlewheeler
Albany
, somewhere in the middle of Lake Erie, suspended between two countries and two worlds. The deception had been so simple, so absurdly successful, just as Belle had promised. Aaron had been still a little drunk, his shining eyes excited but only half open as he slipped into bed and turned to her, and he’d been hasty, clumsy, needing, despite her pretense of innocence, her discreet hand to guide him. The alum had done its job almost too well, and there’d been pain, for him as well as her, and then it was over, almost before it had begun, leaving her barely enough time to reach back beneath the pillow for the balloon, sliding it down along her sweaty side, before he rolled away. She clenched it tightly in her palm, pricking it with the nail of her index finger, and smeared the tepid blood along her thighs and into the dripping wet hair covering her aching vulva. She had lain there for a moment, feeling like the victim of some bizarre religious ritual, waiting for him to lift the sheet, seeking the evidence for himself, but as it happened he was already drifting off to sleep, one hand tossed lightly across her breast like a statement of trust and possession, and he never did look.

Just before he screwed his face closer into the pillow and fell asleep, as quickly and firmly as a stone being dropped into water, he half opened his eyes and murmured: “That was wonderful, darling, don’t you agree?”

She hadn’t said anything, just watched, in the flickering light of the lamp, as he fell asleep. She’d insisted he leave the lamp burning, so she could see him, those brilliant cat’s eyes, so he could see her, because he was so beautiful and she wanted to feel beautiful. But after they started, he had closed his eyes, and it had seemed to her he could have been anyone. Just the same, there had been a moment, as he slid into her, a moment above the pain as her nerve endings and skin responded on their own, when they had moved together as one, when her passion had risen with the alacrity all those months of courtship seemed to have been foreshadowing and their breaths had merged into one fierce, staccato rhythm. She thought about that moment as she stood along the railing, her teeth chattering with cold, her eyes streaming with tears as they stared blankly into the darkness below. There had been that moment, that was all. There had even been one moment when, allowing her imagination to run wild, she had believed she might love him. But it had just been that one moment, and then it was gone.

• • •

A Romantic Secret

A few years after his return to New York from out west, but before the introduction to my mother that would change his life, my father met and became friendly with a man to whom he would always refer, usually accompanied by a wink, as “the notorious Leon Arrow.”

Years later, when I was a teenager, I met this Arrow myself, but whatever appeal he had had for my father was lost on me. My father’s stories of his friend’s past – notorious indeed – and the reality of the man I met were so much in conflict that I was immediately confused.

At that time, he was working as a middle-level functionary in the Bronx offices of the Plumbers, Pipefitters and Joiners Union, a job more involved with bookkeeping and paper shuffling than organizing or negotiating. To me, it seemed a fairly humdrum occupation, totally lacking in any of the drama or glamour I knew – from reading Steinbeck and Dos Passos and from hearing my father’s tales of the old days – some work in the labour movement possessed. Moreover, he was a nondescript, dishevelled man inhabiting what was to me still the mysterious upper middle ages of life: short, slump-shouldered, pot-bellied and lame, a combination that produced a slightly comical imbalance in his posture and walk; balding, with a rim of mouse-coloured hair above his ears and running behind his skull, as if he were wearing ill-fitting earmuffs; and wearing wire-rimmed glasses that failed to conceal the hangdog, always moist brown eyes behind them. He
looked, in short, like a lot of the men who were my fa
ther’s friends or colleagues, whom I would sometimes meet on the rare occasions when I visited him at the newspaper office, and who to me – twelve and thirteen and fourteen at the time – were of very little interest. Notorious? My father’s adjective seemed misplaced.

But I did have some interest in this Arrow, not because of his appearance or occupation but because of
what my father had told me of his past. He was a re
formed Communist who had renounced not only his former beliefs but his former comrades and so lived in a sort of social netherworld, distrusted by both his former friends and his new colleagues, not really liked by anyone, with the exception of my father, who, though wary, was loyal to a fault. He was a husband and father long separated from his family, having left them somewhere in the Midwest – Minnesota, my father thought – to pursue single-mindedly his political goals. And now, those goals unrealized, the beliefs that fuelled them turned to ashes, he found himself alone, guilty and bereft. He had been injured – the cause of his limp – and arrested in the improbably named city of Winnipeg somewhere in the heart of Canada, during a brawl that climaxed what my father described to me as the infamous General Strike of 1919, when the flooding of the job market by thousands of returning soldiers
further inflamed the labour movement of that backwater
city, and he had spent several years in a Canadian prison before being deported. And he’d served another term in prison later on for a crime about which my father was vague. But even more fascinating than all that to me was this: he was a man, my father had told me,
“with a romantic secret.” What that secret was, my fa
ther wouldn’t say.