Displaced Persons (13 page)

July 1960

I
N THE SUMMERTIME
F
ELA
took her children to the municipal pool in Jackson Heights. When the New York afternoons became painfully hot, she brought them on Saturdays too. Their father did not like them to swim on the Sabbath. But on occasion, in winter, he himself went to work after synagogue. If he could work in December, why, in July, should the children be smothered by the heat? What else was she to do with them?

In the front seat of the Buick, Larry unrolled his window all the way. Fela clucked at him—only a kerchief protected her freshly done hair. Larry gave a loud sigh, rolled the window almost closed again, leaving a sliver of space for air. Helen leaned her head against the warm glass for the short drive. She kicked the back of Larry’s seat, and Larry turned around and grabbed her ankle until she squealed.

“
Kindlech
!” cried Fela.

It made her even more nervous to drive with them making noise.
She slowed down more as they reached Queens Boulevard, with its milk trucks and postal wagons looming, making their own car, so substantial on their home street, seem small and weak.

“Not to fight when I drive!” she said. She used English when she wanted them to be sure to listen. The extra effort should make her children more attentive to her words. “Larry, please. Please.”

“She started it!”

“Please,
mein kind
, please.”

They fought terribly at home too, cramped in their little bedroom, and there was nothing for Fela to do but to get them outside, give them the opportunity to spend their energy, tire themselves out. And Fela needed an escape too. Pavel and she had fought a silent battle earlier this morning. It made her burn, his stiff face as she took out the bathing suits for the children and packed her straw bag with towels. She seemed to remember him as more flexible when the children were infants, but perhaps that was the result of her shaky memory. No, the change was real: he had become angry at her recently for fixing Friday night dinner late, her customer at the beauty salon having kept her, and she had been stunned, even awed, by his fury. Pavel did not criticize anything she did in the home, not her cooking—even the one or two times she had experimented—and not her housekeeping. The home was her domain. He respected it. But that night he had come home, face aflame from the vodka he had begun drinking at work, and shut the door hard behind him.

He had entered the kitchen with his jaw set. You are still cooking!

His voice was quiet, restrained even, but she had answered, Why do you scream so?

The Sabbath has begun! How will our children learn if their mother lights a fire on the Sabbath?

You light a fire on the Sabbath, Fela murmured, shocked. You smoke, more than I do. Mrs. Fineman was late for her manicure, and then the butcher himself was late with my chicken, what can I tell you?

She turned away from him. Why should she look at his face in this state? She had seen him in his rages before, of course she had—but not so much at her. She did not think the children had noticed. They ate, as usual, and fought, as usual. And what was there to notice? More silence from their father? Nothing so new. He concentrated on his food and on his drink. His anger seemed to have no effect on his appetite: when Helen didn’t finish her portion he scraped the remains of her meal onto his plate, Helen watching.

But now they were on their way to swim. At the red light on Thirty-seventh Avenue, Fela looked back at her daughter. Sweat formed on Helen’s brow and a tiny drop curled past her ear. Such a hot day! How could Pavel be so stubborn? When he had started going to synagogue on the Sabbath, he had actually driven! But when Fela drove the car, then it was a sin. Such a heat as this none of them had known in childhood. Did God demand that the children be deprived of a little cool water and exercise? Besides, in public places Larry and Helen seemed to behave better with each other. The arguments they had at home, Larry taunting his sister, Helen fighting back with her teeth and fists until Larry grabbed her wrists to keep her still, those fights ceased when Fela took them outside. Outside, at holiday dinners with their aunt and uncle, at school, in the park, Larry was an angel, a ten-year-old protector. It gave Fela a rest to have them there.

No, Pavel had not been so rigid when the children were tiny. She could even say that he had been happy. Happier. Now that he spent his free mornings going so much to synagogue, looking at his books, trying to concentrate on the circles within circles of words, he did not look happy. He was forty-four, and he looked angry. Worse, he looked like he was trying to keep in his anger, pressing himself down, presenting a full and serious front, the way he did when he posed for photographs, as if he were doing hard physical labor, moving the prayers and solemn songs with the bones of his body.

It had not been so with her own father, strict as he had been. There had been a little enjoyment, she thought, in all his observance. But, of course, then everyone had been pious, one didn’t think or make choices about how to spend a Friday or a Saturday, and it did not happen that a kosher butcher was late with a chicken. A family had a sense of sameness about the little events of every day. One got up in the morning, washed, dressed, and ate. On the Sabbath one worshipped instead of worked. Or at least the men did. For a woman, Sabbath was just a different form of work from the rest of the week.

Fela turned the car onto Broadway and crossed under the elevated train tracks. It gave her a little shudder to drive under the elevated, so rickety, so easy to have it fall just as one’s children were passing under it—but a moment, and it was over.

F
ELA LOOKED UP FROM
her magazine and pushed down her sunglasses so she could see Larry and Helen more clearly. They were in the near corner of the pool, turning somersaults underwater, then coming up to gasp for air.

They had survived their swimming lessons with the lifeguard, lessons Pavel had insisted they take as he watched, fully dressed to cover up his crippled leg. Fela could not watch. But once they knew how to swim, first Larry at age seven, then Helen two years later—Fela allowed her daughter to start younger, at age five—Fela could stretch out on the slatted chair with the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, glancing up every two or three minutes as the two of them splashed and tickled, making up games. They had no friends at the pool, though at school, separated, the two of them got on well enough with other children. In the water they preferred to be just with each other.

They played a game she hated: rescue. Helen would dive into the water—Fela had stopped gasping when she saw her daughter’s head
moving downward, disappearing—and she was good at it, very good at it, the lifeguard had assured her. Look at the shape her five-year-old body took when she curled off the child’s diving board! Fela would force herself to watch the dive—she should keep an eye on the dive in order to scream faster if something were to happen. And Helen did dive gracefully. She would stay under, emerge, wave at her brother, then pretend to cough, sink under again, slowly, her arm outstretched, only her wrist above water, then just the upper half of her palm, then her two fingers sticking up in a V. Fela would count the seconds until she saw the two fingers, because at that moment Larry would bound over from wherever he was, pretending not to see, then leap under water, lift his sister out into the air, her body light and thin, her small arms around his neck.

Fela had watched them do it many times and for reasons she could not explain even to herself, had not forbidden the game. Stop, stop! she could hear her own voice whispering inside her mind. Stop, children, stop! But if she said it aloud, then what? Larry would ask why. Helen would imitate him too. Why, Ma, why?

Because I said so, Fela imagined herself answering, the way she had once heard another mother saying at the pool. Because I am the mother. But the words would not come out naturally to her, and Larry would laugh at her falseness—better to remain silent.

Fela looked at her watch. It was almost two o’clock. She wanted to pick up from Stanley the repaired toaster, before Sunday breakfast. One errand every Saturday—a small break from the pool, a moment to herself.

“Children!” she called. “Children!” They wanted her to use English in public. Even on a Saturday, when so many of their friends would not be at the pool. Larry and Helen were far off, silver water pushing off their pale backs.

“Children, please!” Even this word seemed false to her, empty. She had not adapted easily to English. The rules seemed always to be
changing. To make a plural, one added an
s.
But to make a plural for a verb, one dropped the
s.
Larry had explained it many times.
Feed
for plural,
feeds
for singular. And then there were the exceptions:
mice
for two mouses,
sheep
for the plural as well as the singular. Well, these words did not matter too much for everyday life. Fela could not imagine why her son bothered to make her memorize them. She supposed it was good to keep hearing the words, in case one day she had to make use of them. But in Queens, sheep? she had joked with Larry. He had looked hurt. He liked his little role as guide in the new world of Jackson Heights. Even Pavel laughed from time to time about it.

“Children!” She was standing above them, on the edge of the pool, letting them know she was going for her toaster, that they were not to dive while she was gone. They stopped and looked up. Children. It had taken her a long time to stop herself from saying “childrens.” And even now, when she was nervous, it slipped out wrong. Childrens. The truth was that “children” did not feel right to her without an
s,
as if the word properly spoken in English did not account for everyone.

S
HE PULLED THE CAR
out of the parking lot and drove down Queens Boulevard to shop. She did it every Saturday, and she did it with the same fear that by turning her eyes away from them in the pool, they would do something dangerous, hurt themselves. It was silly, to believe there was some kind of luck or magic or power in her eyes, but she really believed that if she watched over them, nothing could happen.

She believed it even though she could not swim. If she saw something happen there was nothing she could do to stop it—nothing to do but scream! Was that not worse? No, a scream could help. Still, she had to let them feel alone, feel independence. Everyone did it. Pavel could do it. Pavel could let go, at least a little.

Pavel had taught both children how to ride a bicycle. Larry was more fearless. He went fast. Helen never learned how to go fast. Fela would watch her husband from the window, his hands on the back of Helen’s bike rack, dragging his lame leg in a half-gallop after her as she pushed slowly on her training wheels. “I have you,” he would call out. “I have you.”

But Helen always sensed the moment when her father let go of the rack, and she would stop pedaling and turn around. Larry would speed off, even faster than Pavel had planned, and go veering down the sidewalk. Pavel would have to stop following after a few steps.

It isn’t like teaching you to ride, he had said one evening.

Hmm? Fela had answered.

I taught you—don’t you remember? How I would run after you, faster than you could pedal the wheels?

Pavel made sure they had what the other children in the neighborhood had, short blue frames for Larry, long wide seats for Helen. He let them ride around the block, on the sidewalk, until Helen ran into the legs of an elderly woman while concentrating on something that had rolled off the curb. After that he took the car and drove them, their bicycles protruding from the trunk, to the park in Fresh Meadows, and occasionally to Central Park, where they cycled in the closed road while he sat on a bench, listening to his pocket radio.

Fela used the time to be alone in the house. Sunday time. She was glad she did not have to observe the small mishaps, falls, flat tires, and stories of pain the children came home recounting. Larry was supposed to ride behind Helen, so that he could keep an eye on her. He would let her get far ahead of him so he could then catch up, pedaling at a sudden, high rate. Once he waited too long. She took a fork in the road, and Larry couldn’t find her. He had come back to his father, and they had called the police, who had already picked up a tearful girl and had placed her in between them in the police car, her low pink bicycle protruding from the trunk. They had planned not
to tell Fela at all, but even if Helen had not walked through the door and grabbed her mother at the waist, Fela would have guessed something had happened, a near miss, an almost accident. A mother knew! And the children were unable to eat their dinner, because Pavel had bought them ice-cream cones on the way home, something he usually refused to do.

She did not like to leave them alone at the pool. But how could she bring them with her? She could not have them trailing behind if she wandered from Stanley’s shop to the grocery or stopped by the beauty parlor to chat with the Hungarian women who took the morning shift on Saturdays. It was summer. They were children. A lifeguard stood watch at the pool.

Besides, Larry was responsible. If Fela asked him not to do something dangerous, he agreed, he complied. He understood something about it, Fela thought, he saw that her worries mattered, they were important, more important perhaps than other rules: go to sleep early, don’t fight with your sister, take your clothes off the floor, don’t shout so in the house. He was not obedient, but he was sensitive. Certain things he understood.

So when she had told him, “Larry, watch your sister, not to let her to dive into the pool when I’m not here,” he had answered, “All right.”

And it was all right, it was all right. He was a good boy. The Italians in the hardware store still asked about him. When he was smaller and they were greener he would speak for both her and Pavel. He was their guide, the third parent, the American parent, translating for them when he himself registered for school. Thank God that cheat of a landlord spoke Yiddish. Larry had never had to be an intermediary there.